Alistair MacLean: The Golden Rendezvous

“Translation would be superfluous,” I said, drily. “I’ll take over. Old man wants you to go ashore.”

“Ashore?” his face lit up; in two short years the Second’s shore-going exploits had already passed into the realms of legend. “Let no man ever say that Wilson ignored duty’s call. Twenty minutes for a shower, shave and shake out the number ones.” “The agent’s offices are just beyond the dock gates,” I interrupted. “You can go as you are. Find out what’s happened to our latest passengers. Captain’s beginning to worry about them; if they’re not here by five o’clock he’s sailing without them. Way he’s feeling now, he’d just as soon do that. If the agent doesn’t know, tell him to find out. Fast.” Wilson left.

The sun started westering, but the heat stayed as it was. Thanks to Macdonald’s competence and uninhibited command of the Spanish language, the cargo on the quayside steadily and rapidly diminished.

Wilson returned to report no sign of our passengers. “Their baggage had arrived two days previously and, although only for five people, was enough”, Wilson said, “to fill a couple of railroad trucks.” About the passengers, the agent had been very nervous indeed. They were very important people, senor, very, very important. One of them was the most important man in the whole province of Camafuegos. A jeep had already been dispatched westwards along the coast road to look for them. It sometimes happened, the senor understood, that a car spring would go or a shock absorber snap. When Wilson had innocently inquired if this was because the revolutionary government had no money left to pay for the filling in of the enormous potholes in the roads, the agent had become even more nervous and said indignantly that it was entirely the fault of the inferior metal those perfidious Americanos used in the construction of their vehicles. Wilson said he had left with the impression that Detroit had a special assembly line exclusively devoted to turning out deliberately inferior cars destined solely for this particular corner of the Caribbean. Wilson went away.

The cargo continued to move steadily into number four hold. About four o’clock in the afternoon I heard the sound of the clashing of gears and the asthmatic wheezing of what sounded like a very elderly engine indeed. This, I thought, would be the passengers at last, but no; what clanked into view round the corner of the dock gate was a dilapidated truck with hardly a shred of paint left on the body work, white canvas showing on the tyres, and the engine hood removed to reveal what looked, from my elevation, like a solid block of rust. One of the special Detroit jobs probably. On its cracked and splintered platform it carried three medium-sized crates, freshly boxed and metal-banded. Wrapped in a blue haze from the staccato backfiring of its exhaust, vibrating like a broken tuning fork and rattling in every bolt in its superannuated chassis, the truck trundled heavily across the cobbles and pulled up not five paces from where Macdonald was standing.

A little man in white ducks and peaked cap jumped out through the space where the door ought to have been, stood still for a couple of seconds until he got the hang of terra firma again, and then scuttled off in the direction of our gangway. I recognised him as our Carracio agent, the one with the low opinion of Detroit, and wondered what fresh trouble he was bringing with him. I found out in three minutes flat when Captain Bullen appeared on deck, an anxious-looking agent scurrying along behind him. The captain’s blue eyes were snapping; the red complexion was overlaid with puce, but he had the safety valve screwed right down.

“Coffins, Mister,” he said tightly. “Coffins, no less.” I suppose there is a quick and clever answer to a conversational gambit like that, but I couldn’t find it, so I said politely, “coffins, sir?”

“Coffins, Mister. Not empty, either. For shipment to New York.” He flourished some papers. “Authorizations, shipping notes, everything in order. Including a sealed request signed by no less than the ambassador. Three of them. Two British, one American subject. Killed in the hunger riots.”

“The crew won’t like it, sir,” I said. “Especially the Goanese stewards. You know their superstitions and how…”

“It will be all right, senor,” the little man in white broke in hurriedly.

Wilson had been right about the nervousness, but there was more to it than that; there was a strange overlay of anxiety that came close to despair. “We have arranged…”

“Shut up!” Captain Bullen said shortly.

“No need for the crew to know, Mister. Or the passengers.”

You could see they were just a careless afterthought.

“Coffins are boxed that’s them on the truck there.”

“Yes, sir. Killed in the riots. Last week.”

I paused and went on delicately, “In this heat…”

“Lead-lined,” he says. “So they can go in the hold. Some separate corner, Mister. One of the — um — deceased is a relative of one of the passengers boarding here. Wouldn’t do to stack the coffins among the dynamos, I suppose.” he sighed heavily.

“On top of everything else, we’re now in the funeral-undertaking business. Life, First, can hold no more.”

“You are accepting this — ah — cargo, sir?”

“But of course, but of course,” the little man interrupted again.

“One of them is a cousin of senor Carreras, who sails with you. Senor Miguel Carreras. Senor Carreras, he is what you say, heartbroken. Senor Carreras is the most important man”

“Be quiet,” Captain Bullen said wearily. He made a gesture with the papers. “Yes, I’m accepting. Note from the ambassador. More pressure. I’ve had enough of cables flying across the Atlantic. Too much grief. Just an old beaten man, First, just an old beaten man.” He stood there for a moment, hands outspread on the guardrail, doing his best to look like an old beaten man and making a singularly unsuccessful job of it, then straightened abruptly as a procession of vehicles turned in through the dock gates and made for the Campari. “A pound to a penny, Mister, here comes still more grief.”

“Praise be to God,” the little agent murmured. The tone, no less than the words, was a prayer of thanksgiving. “Senor Carreras himself! Your passengers at last, captain.”

“That’s what I said,” Bullen growled. “More grief.” The little man looked at him in puzzlement, as well as might anyone who didn’t understand Bullen’s attitude towards the passengers, then turned and hurried off towards the gangway. My attention was diverted for a few moments by another crate swinging aboard, then I heard Captain Bullen saying softly and feelingly, “Like I said, Mister, more grief.”

The procession, two big, chauffeur-driven pre-war Packards, one towed by a jeep, had just pulled up by the gangway and the passengers were climbing out. Those who could, that was — or very obviously there was one who could not. One of the chauffeurs, dressed in green tropical drills and a bush hat, had opened the boot of his car, pulled out a collapsible hand-propelled wheel chair, and, with the smooth efficiency of experience, had it assembled in ten seconds flat, while the other chauffeur, with the aid of a tall, thin nurse clad in over-all white from her smartly starched cap to the skirt that reached close down to her ankles, tenderly lifted a bent old man from the back seat of the second Packard and set him gently in the wheel chair. The old boy — even at that distance I could see the face creased and trenched with the lines of age, the snowy whiteness of the still plentiful hair did his best to help them, but his best wasn’t very much.

Captain Bullen looked at me. I looked at Captain Bullen. There didn’t seem to be any reason to say anything. Nobody in a crew likes having permanent invalids aboard ship: they cause trouble to the ship’s doctor who has to look after their health, to the cabin stewards who have to clean their quarters, to the dining-room stewards who have to feed them, and to those members of the deck crew detailed for the duty of moving them around. And when the invalids are elderly and very infirm and if this one wasn’t — I sadly missed my guess — there was always the chance of a death at sea, the one thing sailors hate above all else. It was also very bad for the passenger trade. But as long as the illness was of neither a contagious nor infectious nature and that a certificate could be produced from the invalid’s own doctor to the effect that the invalid was fit for the proposed voyage, there was nothing that could be done about it.