THE GOLDEN RENDEZVOUS
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Chapter 1
[Tuesday noon-5 P.M.]
My shirt was no longer a shirt but just a limp and sticky rag
soaked with sweat. My feet ached from the fierce heat of the steel deck
plates. My forehead, under the peaked white cap, ached from the
ever-increasing constriction of the leather band that made scalping only
a matter of time. My eyes ached from the steely glitter of reflected
sunlight from metal, water, and whitewashed harbour buildings. And my
throat ached, from pure thirst. I was acutely unhappy. I was unhappy.
The crew was unhappy. The passengers were unhappy. Captain Bullen was
unhappy and this last made me doubly unhappy, not because of any
tenderness of feeling that I entertained towards the captain, but
because when things went wrong with captain Bullen he invariably took it
out of his chief officer. I was his chief officer. I was bending over
the rail, listening to the creak of wire and wood and watching our after
jumbo derrick take the strain as it lifted a particularly large crate
from the quayside, when a hand touched my arm. Captain Bullen again, I
thought drearily; it had been at least half an hour since he’d been
around last to talk to me about my shortcomings, and then I realised
that, whatever the captain’s caprices, wearing Chanel no. He wasn’t one
of them. This would be Miss Beresford. And it was. In addition to the
Chanel she was wearing a white silk dress and that quizzical,
half-amused smile that made most of the other officers turn mental
cartwheels and handsprings but served only to irritate me. I have my
weaknesses, but tall, cool, sophisticated, and worldly young women with
a slightly malicious sense of humour is not one of them. “Good
afternoon, Mr. First Officer,” she said sweetly. She had a soft,
musical voice with hardly a hint of superiority or condescension when
talking to the lower orders like myself, just enough to show that she
had been to the best school and college in the east and I hadn’t.
“We’ve been wondering where you were. You are not usually an absentee
at aperitif time.”
“I know, Miss Beresford. I’m sorry.” what she said was true
enough; what she didn’t know was that I turned up for aperitifs with the
passengers more or less at the point of a gun. Standing company orders
stated that it was as much a part of the ship’s officers’ duties to
entertain the passengers as to sail the ship, and as captain Bullen
loathed all passengers with a fierce and total loathing, he saw to it
that most of the entertaining fell to me. I nodded at the big crate now
hovering over the hatchway of number four hold, then at the piled-up
crates at the quayside. “I’m afraid I have work to do. Four or five
hours at least. Can’t even manage lunch to-day, far less an aperitif.”
“Not Miss Beresford. Susan.” it was as if she had heard only my
first few words. “How often do I have to ask you?” until we reach New
York, I said to myself, and even then it will be no use. Aloud I said,
smiling, “you mustn’t make things difficult for me. Regulations require
that we treat all passengers with courtesy, consideration, and respect.”
and self-respect made me resent the young and unmarried female
passengers who regarded me as a source of idle amusement for their all
too many idle hours; particularly was this true with rich young idle
females -and it was common knowledge that Julius A. Beresford required
the full-time services of a whole corps of accountants just to tot up
his annual profits. “Especially with respect, Miss Beresford,” I
finished. “You’re hopeless.” she laughed. I was too tiny a pebble to
cause even a ripple in her smiling pool of complacency. “And no lunch,
you poor man. I thought you were looking pretty glum as I came along.”
she glanced at the winch driver, then at the seamen manhandling the
suspended crate into position on the floor of the hold. “Your men don’t
seem too pleased at the prospect either. They are a morose looking
lot.” I eyed them briefly. They were a morose-looking lot. “Oh,
they’ll be spelled for food all right. It’s just that they have their
own private worries. It must be about a hundred and ten down in that
hold there, and it’s an almost unwritten law that white crews should not
work in the afternoons m the tropics. Besides, they’re all still
brooding darkly over the losses they’ve suffered. Don’t forget that
it’s less than seventy-two hours since they had that brush with the
customs down in Jamaica.” brush, I thought, was good: in what might
very accurately be described as one fell swoop the customs had
confiscated from about forty crew members no fewer than twenty-five
thousand cigarettes and over two hundred bottles of hard liquor that
should have been placed on the ship’s bond before arrival in Jamaican
waters. That the liquor had not been placed in bond was understandable
enough as the crew were expressly forbidden to have any in their
quarters in the first place; that not even the cigarettes had been
placed in bond had been due to the crew’s intention of following their
customary practice of smuggling both liquor and tobacco ashore and
disposing of them at a handsome profit to Jamaicans more than willing to
pay a high price for the luxury of duty-free Kentucky bourbon and
American cigarettes. But then, the crew had not been to know that, for
the first time in its five years’ service on the west indian run, the
S.S. Campari was to be searched from stem to stern with a thorough
ruthlessness that spared nothing that came in its path, a high and
searching wind that swept the ship clean as a whistle. It had been a
black day. And so was this. Even as Miss Beresford was patting me
consolingly on the arm and murmuring a few farewell words of sympathy
which didn’t go any too well with the twinkle in her eyes, I caught
sight of captain Bullen perched on top of the companionway leading down
from the main deck. “Glowering” would probably be the most apt term to
describe the expression on his face. As he came down the companionway
and passed Miss Beresford he made a heroic effort to twist his features
into the semblance of a smile and managed to hold it for all of two
seconds until he had passed her by, then got back to his glowering
again. For a man who is dressed in gleaming whites from top to toe to
give the impression of a black approaching thundercloud is no small
feat, but captain Bullen managed it without any trouble. He was a big
man, six feet two and very heavily built, with sandy hair and eyebrows,
a smooth red face that no amount of sun could ever tan, and a clear blue
eye that- no amount of whisky could ever dim. He looked at the
quayside, the hold, and then at me, all with the same impartial
disfavour. “Well, Mister,” he said heavily. “How’s it going? Miss
Beresford giving you a hand, eh?” when he was in a bad mood, it was
invariably “Mister”; in a neutral mood, it was “First”; and when in a
good temper-which, to be fair, was most of the time it was always
“Johnny-me-boy.” but to-day it was “Mister.” I took my guard
accordingly and ignored the implied reproof of time-wasting. He would
be gruffly apologetic the next day. He always was. “Not too bad, sir.
Bit slow on the dockside.” I nodded to where a group of men, some
bearded, all wearing denim trousers and vaguely military-looking shirts,
were struggling to attach chain slings to a crate that must have been at
least eighteen feet in length by six square. “I don’t think the
Carracio stevedores are accustomed to handling such heavy lifts.” he
took a good look. “They couldn’t handle a damned wheelbarrow,” he
snapped eventually. “Never seen such fumble-handed incompetence in my
blasted life. First time in this stinking flea-ridden hellhole –
Carracio was actually one of the cleanest and most picturesquely
beautiful ports in the caribbean”and I hope to heaven it’s the last.
Can you manage it by six, Mister?” six o’clock was an hour past the top
of the tide, and we had to clear the harbour -entrance sand bar by then
or wait another ten hours. “I think so, sir,” and then, to take his
mind off his troubles, and also because I was curious, I asked, “what
are in those crates? motorcars?”
“Motorcars? are you mad?” his cold blue eye swept over the
whitewashed jumble of the little town and the dark green of the steeply