Warren Murphy - Ship Of Death

This time, Sir Ramsey demanded deposits and bonds and assets in trust. This time, Sir Ramsey said, he wanted to protect himself. And protect himself he did.

But only until delivery, when he read in the London Times that Skouratis was not going to accept delivery. The stock plunged to slightly more than a pound a share. Creditors in sudden panic descended on the old and reputable firm like crazed sailors reaching for lifeboats. All the assets in trust for the atomic engines could not delay the onslaught. And then Sir Ramsey discovered, when the stock hit bottom, that Skouratis had bought it and owned a majority share of the company. With a bit of deft juggling, he then sold the assets in trust back to himself, sold the giant ship to himself at the original scandalously low price, collected Attington because he was the banker behind the loan, sold Frawl yards to a dummy company that declared public bankruptcy and, for an added kick, picked up Frawl stock for mere shillings and turned it over to the luckless people who had bought it from him when he sold short at 150 pounds a share.

It was a maneuver that could make a toad gloat.

It left Sir Ramsey with three choices: kill himself with a gun, kill himself with a rope, or kill himself with a chemical. He wanted a private leaving of the world, something near his ancestors. So one chilly October day, five years after the Greek shipping magnate had offered him that splendid opportunity to test Frawl shipbuilding skills, he drove up to Attington for the last time in a dark Rolls-Royce. He said good-bye to his chauffeur and apologized for not being able to give him the security of retirement, which had been implicit in his hiring, and gave the man a gold watch fob that was somewhat recent, having been in the family for only 210 years.

"Feel free to sell this," said Sir Ramsey.

"Sir, I will not sell it," said the driver. "I have worked twenty-two years for a gentleman—a real gentleman. No one can take that away from me. Not all the Greek money in the world. This is no more for sale than the twenty-two good years of my life, sir."

A thousand years of breeding in the cold British clime enabled Sir Ramsey not to cry. Death would be an easy thing after this.

"Thank you," said Sir Ramsey. "They were twenty-two good years."

"Will you be needing the car tonight, sir?"

"No. I don't think so. Thank you very much."

"Good afternoon then, sir. And good-bye."

"Good-bye," said Sir Ramsey, realizing that life was always harder than death.

The furniture was covered for storage as it had been for the last year. He went to the room where he was born and then to the room where he was raised and, finally, in the grand banquet hall with its majestic fireplaces that he could not now even afford to fill with wood, he strolled the gallery of family portraits.

And in the sense that comes to dying people, he understood. He understood that the baronetcy had not begun in grandeur but probably very much like that wretch Skouratis—with lying, robbing, stealing, deceiving. That was how fortunes began, and to preside over the ending of one was perhaps more moral than to preside over its beginning. Sir Ramsey would oversee the end of the Frawl fortune with grace. That was the least he could do.

The low purr of a Jaguar engine came into the quiet peace of the great banquet hall of Attington.

It was Skouratis. Sir Ramsey could tell by his desperate pudgy run. Skouratis jiggled several locks until he found an open door and, finally, sucking great inadequate lungfuls of air and wiping his forehead of greasy sweat, he stumbled into the great banquet hall of Attington that he now owned.

"Sir Ramsey, I'm so glad I got here in time."

"Really? Why?" asked Frawl coolly.

"When my people told me about your despondency and when I discovered you had come here with a pistol, I rushed here right away. I am so glad I got here in time, that you have not shot yourself already."

"You are going to try to stop me?"

"Oh, no. I just didn't want to miss your suicide. Go right ahead."

"What makes you think I won't shoot you? Just curiosity, mind you."

"To survive, one must know people. That is not you, Sir Ramsey."

"It has just occurred to me," said Sir Ramsey Frawl, "that you might have selected me to build my own disaster for other than business reasons."

"As a matter of fact, yes. But business is always first."

"Have I done something to offend you in any special way?"

"Yes. But it was not out of malice. It was something you said to the newspapers."

"What, if I may ask?"

"It was a small thing," Skouratis said.

"Obviously not that small to you, Mr. Skouratis."

"No. Not to me. You, as president of Frawl, had said that Aristotle Thebos was the foremost shipping man in the world."

"He once was. Before the great ship."

"And I am now, correct?"

"Yes. But my comment was so long ago. So very long ago."

"Nevertheless, you said it."

"And that was enough?"

"No. I told you it was business."

"I think there is something more, Mr. Skouratis."

"No, no. Just business. And, of course, Aristotle Thebos. What you had said."

"And that was enough to make you want to ruin me?"

"Certainly."

"And now you want to watch me finish the job?"

"Yes. Sort of a grand finale to all we have accomplished."

Sir Ramsey smiled. "It's too bad that you haven't read the newspapers this morning. You may have accomplished nothing at all. You may have become the biggest dinosaur since the Ice Age, Mr. Skouratis. The Jews call today Yom Kippur. It's their Day of Atonement. Your day of atonement is yet to come."

"What are you talking about?"

"A little war that started today in the Middle East."

"I know about that. I knew about it before the newspapers."

"Have you ever thought what you're going to do with the largest tanker in the world, when oil becomes too expensive? Your tanker, sir, was built to carry cheap oil. Cheap, plentiful oil."

Sir Ramsey turned his face from the grunt of the man in the ill-fitting suit to gaze upon a more graceful sight, the chair where his father had sat during so many formal dinners and the chair that he had used, and had been used so many times before when the British Empire was the empire of the world. And he pulled the trigger of the small gun, whose barrel he had stuck in his mouth, and it was so very easy. So much easier than life.

Skouratis watched the far side of Sir Ramsey's head pop out like a burst of tiny red spit. There were, of course, the proper witnesses coming into the room now, none of whom would remember Demosthenes Skouratis ever having been there. Actually, there had been no need for him to be there. He had known Sir Ramsey was a doomed man from the first time they shook hands on the deal to build the great ship.

Sir Ramsey had not been the first death connected to the great ship. There were eighteen others but, to Skouratis, that was just the average number of people killed or maimed in a large project. The real tragedy was the oil embargo. There wasn't enough oil to move because now there were too many ships ready to move too little. The price quadrupled and, like any other commodity, the more the price went up, the less it was used.

The great ship lay moored in its Norwegian berth and to just keep the engines running enough and the ship from rusting into an island of waste, it cost Demosthenes Skouratis seventy-two thousand dollars a week. It was like financing an empty city and he might have scrapped the great ship called only Number 242, except for the party that Aristotle Thebos had thrown for him in the shipyard when the ship was completed. Kings were there, socialites were there, the press was there, and every picture showed the great hulk with two hundred and forty thousand dollars' worth of tarpaulin, acres of it, covering the great pumps and fixtures.