Jack Du Brul - Vulcan's forge

By quarter of seven, his coffee cold in the cup, Mercer impatiently folded the newspapers and slid them down the length of the bar. Behind the bar, between a bottle of Remy Martin and one of Glenfiddich, lay a one-foot section of railroad track. Half of it was rust-colored and pitted, the other burnished to an almost mirror finish.

Mercer retrieved the heavy rail and set it on a towel on the bar. Beside it he placed a shoe box containing a metal polishing kit, usually stored next to the antique fridge. He began polishing the rail with a remarkable amount of concentration, as if when the steel was beneath his fingers, nothing else in the world mattered. As the rust and grime slowly dissolved under the chemical and physical onslaught, he silently thanked Winston Churchill for giving him the idea for such a meditative device. When the British prime minister found himself under even greater stress than his legendary constitution could handle, he would build brick walls in the courtyard behind Number 10 Downing Street. The repetitive act of mortaring, setting, and pointing allowed his mind to disengage from the frantic pace of the Second World War and focus on one particular problem. When a solution was thrashed out in this fashion, an aide would tear down the wall, chip the mortar from the bricks, and stack them neatly for the next crisis.

Emulating this idea, but adapting it for apartment life, Mercer had begun polishing railroad track while attending the Colorado School of Mines. He would polish a section for an hour or so before a big exam, clearing his mind and focusing his energy on the upcoming challenge. He graduated eleventh in his class and swore that this ritual was the key.

Of course, he chuckled as he worked on the rail, a near photographic memory didn’t hurt. Since school, Mercer estimated that he’d polished nearly sixty yards of track.

He was still polishing when Tish entered the rec room a little past nine.

“Good morning,” she said.

Mercer laid his polish-soaked rag in the shoe box, feeling no need to explain his actions. “Good morning to you. I see they fit.”

Tish pirouetted in front of him, the thin black skirt twirling around her beautiful calves. Her top was a simple white T-shirt from Armani. Mercer had bought the clothes for her at a local mall while she had slept through the previous afternoon.

“I assumed that you’re not a transvestite and these were for me.” Tish grinned, smoothing the skirt against her thighs.

“No, I gave up drag years ago. Are the sizes all right?”

“Right down to the 34C cup, thank you for noticing.” She threw him another saucy grin. “Is that coffee I smell?”

“Yes, but let me make a new pot, this is my own blend, brewed especially to wake the dead.”

“Sounds fine to me.” She took a tentative sip and winced. Mercer started a fresh pot. “Why didn’t you wake me last night for dinner?”

“I figured you needed sleep more than you needed my cooking.”

“I’ve found that most bachelors are excellent chefs.”

“Not this one, I’m afraid. I travel so much that I never took the time to learn how to cook. I live by the principle that if it can’t be nuked, it can’t be edible.”

Mercer saw Tish’s eyes dart to the map behind the bar. “I’ve only been on a few field trips. Most of my time is spent in a lab in San Diego. It must be exciting, all that travel, I mean.”

“At first it was, now it’s cramped airline seats, cardboard food, and dull meetings.”

Tish scoffed but didn’t press. “Do you have any new clues as to what’s going on?”

Before answering, Mercer glanced at his watch. It was well past his personal cutoff limit of 9:30. He strode around the bar and pulled a beer from the fridge. “I placed some calls yesterday, after you went to bed. We should be hearing something soon. Until then, I think it best that you stay here. Is there anyone you need to contact? Boyfriend, anything like that?”

“No.”

“Good. I hope by this afternoon we’ll know something that will lead us in a direction. But right now, all we can do is wait.”

“Don’t you have to go to work?”

Mercer laughed. “I’m consulting for the USGS. They expect me to be irresponsible.”

They talked for the next hour or so, Mercer deftly turning the conversation away from himself so that Tish spoke most of the time. She had an infectious laugh and, Mercer noticed, several charming freckles high on her cheeks. She had never been married, just engaged once, when she was younger. She was a Democrat and a conservationist, but she didn’t trust her party’s candidates or the mainstream environmental groups. She never knew her mother, which Mercer already knew, and idolized her late father, which he’d guessed. She enjoyed her work for NOAA and wasn’t ready to settle down into a teaching job just yet. Her last serious relationship had ended seven months before so right now the only thing she needed to worry about were several house plants that her neighbor promised to look after when she had gone away to Hawaii.

Around eleven, a phone rang in Mercer’s office. He made no move to answer it. A few seconds later, the fax machine attached to that phone line began to whirr. When it finally stopped, Mercer excused himself and retrieved the dozen sheets from the tray.

He walked slowly back to the bar, eyes glued to the first page. As he finished each page, he handed it to Tish. They read for twenty minutes; occasionally Mercer would grunt at some piece of information, or Tish would gasp.

“I don’t understand that question at the end of the report.”

“It’s a trivia challenge between Dave and me. Goes back years. I have to admit he has me stumped.”

Tish read the question aloud. “ ‘Who was the captain of the Amoco Cadizo ?’ I’ve never even heard of that ship.”

“She was a fully loaded supertanker that ran aground in the English Channel in March of ’78. I’ll be damned if I can remember her captain’s name.”

Tish regarded him strangely, but changed the subject. “What do you make of this information?”

“I’m not too sure yet.” Mercer opened another beer.

Ocean Freight and Cargo, the company whose ship rescued Tish, was headquartered in New York City but the corporate money came from a Finnish consortium headed by a company once suspected of being a KGB front. “Slicker than Air America,” was David Saulman’s assessment. Their ships sailed mostly in the Pacific, running fairly standard cargos to established ports of call. Saulman did find that OF amp;C had a “Weasel Clause” — his words — written into all of their contracts concerning the August Rose . The clause allowed the five-hundred-foot refrigerator ship to break contract with only twelve hours’ notice, provided that cargo had not already been onloaded. In all of Saulman’s years of maritime law, he had never seen such a stipulation and couldn’t even guess its purpose. Since 1989, OF amp;C had evoked this clause several times, refusing to load cargo onto the August Rose in the States. The clause was odd, Saulman concluded, but certainly not nefarious.

Her present position was north of Hawaii, hove-to because of engine difficulties. Saulman’s sources said that she would be under way within fifteen hours and that the company had not requested outside help for their idle ship. Her cargo of beef, scheduled to be picked up in Seattle, was currently being loaded onto a Lykes Brothers’ vessel.

Mercer’s request for information about vessels sunk in the same waters as the NOAA ship Ocean Seeker had opened quite a Pandora’s box. No less than forty ships had sunk in that area in the past fifty years, although sinkings had been less frequent since the 1970s. Mercer assumed this was because of new weather-tracking technology. He noted that most of the vessels lost were charter fishing boats, pleasure craft, or day sailors. He checked off the notable exceptions with a black Waterman fountain pen.