Sara Paretsky - Deadlock

The chief and the other man were totally absorbed in their inspection of a valve in a pipe running at eye level in front of them. They didn’t turn when I came up but continued their work.

The younger man unscrewed the bottom part of a pipe which came up from the floor at right angles to the overhead valve and then joined it. He stuck a stainless steel tube into the opening, checked his watch, and pulled the tube out again. It was covered with oil, which seemed to satisfy both of them. They tightened up the pipes again and wiped their hands on their grimy boiler suits.

At that point they realized I was there, or perhaps just realized I wasn’t a regular member of the team. Sheridan put his hands to my head to bellow an inquiry at me. I bellowed back at him. It was obvious that no one could conduct a conversation over the roar of the engines. I yelled in his ear that I would talk to him at dinner; I wasn’t sure he heard me but I turned and climbed back up onto the main deck.

Once outside I breathed in the late afternoon air thankfully. We were well away from the shore and it was quite cold. I remembered my bag resting among the coils of rope behind the pilothouse and went back there to take out my heavy sweater and put it on. I dug out a tam and pulled it down over my ears.

The engines clattered at my feet, less loudly but still noticeably. Turbulent water lifted the stern periodically, giving the Lucella a choppy, lurching ride.

In search of quiet I walked down to the bow. No one else was outside. As I walked the length of the ship, nearly a quarter mile, the noise gradually abated. By the time I reached the stern, the frontmost tip of the vessel, I couldn’t hear a sound except the water breaking against the bow. The sun setting behind us cast a long shadow of the bridge onto the deck.

No guardrail separated the deck from the water. Two thick parallel cables, about two feet apart, were strung around the edge of the ship, attached to poles protruding every six feet or so. It would be quite easy to slip between them into the water.

A little bench had been screwed into the stem. You could sit on it and lean against a small toolshed and look into the water. The surface was greeny black, but where the ship cut through it the water turned over in a sheen of colors from lavender-white to blue-green to green to black-like dropping black ink onto wet paper and watching it separate into its individual hues.

A change in the light behind me made me brace myself. I reached for the Smith & Wesson as Bledsoe came up beside me.

“It would be easy to push you in, you know, and claim that you fell.”

“Is that a threat or an observation?” I pulled the gun out and released the safety.

He looked startled. “Put that damned thing away. I came out here to talk to you.”

I put the safety on and returned the gun to its holster. It wouldn’t do me much good at close quarters, anyway-I’d brought it out mainly for show.

Bledsoe was wearing a thick tweed jacket over a pale blue cashmere sweater. He looked nautical and comfortable. I was feeling the chill in my left shoulder-it had started to ache as I sat staring into the water.

“I blow up too fast,” he said abruptly. “But you don’t need a gun to keep me at bay, for Christ’s sake.”

“Fine.” I kept my feet braced, ready to spring to one side.

“Don’t make things so fucking difficult,” he snapped.

I didn’t move, but I didn’t relax either. He debated some point with himself-to stomp off offended or say what was on his mind. The second party won.

“It was Grafalk who told you about my youthful misadventure?”

“Yes.”

He nodded to himself. “I don’t think there’s another person who knows-or still cares… I was eighteen years old. I’d grown up in a waterfront slum. When he pulled me into the Cleveland office I ended up handling a lot of cash transactions. His mistake-he should never have put anyone that age in front of so much money. I didn’t steal it. That is, of course I stole it. What I mean is, I wasn’t thinking of stashing away loot and escaping to Argentina. I just wanted to live in a grand style. I bought myself a car.” He smiled reminiscently. “A red Packard roadster. Cars were hard to get in those days, right after the war, and I thought I was the slickest thing on the waterfront.”

The smile left his face. “Anyway, I was young and foolish and I spent the stuff blatantly, begging to be caught, really. Niels saw me through it, rehired me right out of Cantonville. He never mentioned it in twenty years. But he took it very personally when I set up Pole Star back in ’74. And he started throwing it in my face-that he knew I was a criminal at heart, that I’d stayed with him just to learn the secrets of his organization and then left.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I’d wanted to run my own show for years. My wife was sick, had Hodgkins disease, and we never had any children. I guess I turned all my energy to shipping. Besides, after Niels refused to build any thousand-footers, I wanted to have a ship like this one.” He patted the guy ropes affectionately. “This is a beautiful ship. It took four years to build. Took me three years to put the financing together. But it’s worth it. These things run at about a third the cost of the old five-hundred-footers. The cargo space goes up almost as the square of the length-I can carry seven times the load of a five-hundred-foot vessel… Anyway, I wanted one very badly and I had to start my own company to get it.”

How badly? I wondered to myself. Badly enough to run a more sophisticated scam than he’d thought of thirty years ago and come up with the necessary capital? “What does a ship like this cost to build?”

“The Lucella ran just a hair under fifty million.”

“You float stock or bonds or what?”

“We did some of everything. Sheridan and Bemis coughed up their savings. I put mine in. The Fort Dearborn Trust owns the biggest chunk of this and we finally got them to arrange a series of loans with about ten other banks. Other people put in personal money. It’s a tremendous investment, and I want to make sure it carries a cargo every day between March 28 and January 1 so we can pay off the debt.”

He sat down next to me on the small bench and looked at me, his gray eyes probing. “But that isn’t what I came out here to say to you. I want to know why Niels brought up the story of my past. Not even Bemis and Sheridan know it, and if the tale had gotten around three years ago, I could never have built this beauty. If Niels wanted to hurt me, he could have done it then. So why did he tell you now?”

It was a good question. I stared into the churning water, trying to recall my conversation with Grafalk. Maybe he wanted to ventilate some of his pent-up bitterness against Bledsoe. It couldn’t have been from a desire to protect Phillips-he’d raised questions about Phillips, too.

“What do you know about the relationship between Grafalk and Clayton Phillips.”

“Phillips? Not much. Niels took him up as a protegé about the time I started Pole Star-a year or two later, maybe. Since he and I didn’t part too amicably, I didn’t see much of him. I don’t know what the deal was. Niels likes to patronize young men-I was probably the first one and he took up a number of others over the years.” He wrinkled his forehead. “Usually they seemed to have better abilities than Phillips. I don’t know how he manages to keep that office in the black.”

I looked at him intently. “What do you mean?”

Bledsoe shrugged. “He’s too-too finicky. Not the right word. He’s got brains but he gets in their way all the time. He has sales reps who are supposed to handle all the shipping contracts but he can’t leave ’em to it. He’s always getting involved in the negotiations. Since he doesn’t have day-to-day knowledge of the markets, he often screws up good deals and saddles Eudora with expensive contracts. I noticed that when I was Niels’s dispatcher ten years ago and I see it now with my own business.”