Hungry as the Sea (37 page)

“Son of a gun,” said Bernard. “You would not think six million was an easy sum of money to get rid of, would you?”

“You don’t even have to try,” Nick agreed. “It just spends itself.”

Then with a scowl, “What’s this?”

“They’ve invoked the escalation clause again, another 3.106 %. Sea Witch’s builders had included a clause that related the contract price to the index cost of steel and the Union labour rates. They had avoided the threatened dockyard strike by capitulating to Union demands, and now the figures came back to Nicholas. They were big fat ugly figures. The clause was a festering canker to Nicholas draining his strength and money.

They worked on through the afternoon, paying, paying and paying. Bunkers and the other running costs of Warlock, interest and capital repayments on the debts of Ocean Salvage, lawyers fees, agents fees, the six million whittled away. One of the few payments that gave Nicholas any pleasure was the 12½% salvage money to the crew of Warlock. David Allen’s share was almost thirty thousand dollars, Beauty Baker another twenty-five thousand. Nick included a note with that cheque, “Have a Bundaberg on me!”

“Is that all the payments?” Nicholas asked at last.

“Isn’t it enough?” It

“‘s enough.” Nick felt groggy with jet-lag and from juggling with figures. “What’s next?”

“Good news, next.” Bernard picked up the second file. I think I’ve squared Esso. They hate you, they have threatened never to use your tugs again, but they are not going to sue.

Nicholas had breached contract when he deserted the Esso tow and ran south for
Golden Adventurer
; the breach of contract suit had been hanging since then, It was a relief to have it aside. Bernard Wackie was worth every penny of his hire. Okay. Next? It went on for another six unbroken hours, piled on top of the jet-lag that Nicholas had accumulated across the Atlantic.

“You okay?” Bernard asked at last. Nicholas nodded though his eyes felt like hard-boiled eggs, and his chin was dark and raspy with beard. “You want something to eat?” Bernard asked, and then Nick shook his head and realized that it was dark outside.

“Drink? You’ll need one for what comes next.”

“Scotch,” Nicholas agreed, and the secretary brought the tray through, and poured the drinks in another respectful hush.

“That will be all, Mr. Wackie?”

“For now, honey,” Bernard watched her go, and then saluted Nicholas with his glass.

“I give you the Golden Prince!” And when Nicholas scowled, he went on swiftly, “No, Nicholas, I’m not shafting you. It’s for real. You’ve done it again, The Sheikhs are fixing to make you an offer. They want to buy you out, take over the whole show, liabilities, everything. Of course, they’ll want you to run it for them – two years, while you train one of their own men. A hell of a salary,” he went on crisply, and Nicholas stared at him.

“How much?”

“Two hundred grand, plus 2½% profits.”

“Not the salary,” Nicholas told him.” How much are they offering for the company?”

“They are Arabs, the first offer is just to stir the pot a little.”

“How much?” Nicholas asked impatiently.

“The sum of five was delicately mentioned.”

“What do you think they’ll go to?”

“Seven, seven and half – eight, perhaps.”

Through the fuzz of fatigue, far off like a lantern in the window on a winter’s night, Nicholas saw the vision of a new life, a life such as Samantha had shown him. A life uncluttered, uncomplicated, shorn of all but joy and purpose.

“Eight million dollars clear?” Nicholas voice was husky, and he tried to wipe away the fatigue from his stinging eyelids with thumb and forefinger.

“Maybe only seven,” Bernard demurred, “but I’d try for eight.”

“I’ll have another drink,” Nicholas said.

“That’s a splendid idea,” Bernard agreed, and rang for his secretary with an anticipatory sparkle in his eyes.

Chapter 24

Samantha wore her hair in twin braids down her back, and hacked-off denim pants which left her long brown legs bare and exposed a pale sliver of tight round buttock at each step as she walked away. She had sandals on her feet and sun-glasses pushed up on top of her head.

“I thought you were never coming,” she challenged Nick as he stepped through the barrier at Miami International, He dropped his bag and fielded her rush against his chest. She clung to him and he had forgotten the clean, sun-drenched smell of her hair.

She was trembling with a suppressed eagerness like a puppy, and it was only when a small quivering sob shook her shoulders that he realized she was weeping.

“Hey now!” He lifted her chin, and her eyes were flooded.

She snuffled once loudly.

“What’s the trouble, little one?”

“I’m just so happy,” Samantha told him, and deeply Nicholas envied the ability to live so near the surface. To be able to cry with joy seemed to him at that moment to be the supreme human accomplishment, He kissed her and she tasted salty with tears. With surprise he felt a choke deep in his own throat.

The jaded airport crowds had to open and trickle around the two of them like water around a rock, and they were oblivious to it all. Even when they came out of the building into the Florida sunlight, she had both arms around his waist, hampering his stride, as she led him to her vehicle.

“Good God!” exclaimed Nicholas, and he shied when he saw it. It was a chevy van, but its paintwork had been restyled. “What’s that?”

“It’s a masterpiece,” she laughed. “Isn’t it?” It was rainbowed, in layers of vibrant colour and panels of fantastic landscapes and seascapes.

“You did that?” Nick asked, and he took his dark glasses . from his breast pocket, and inspected the seagulls and palm trees and flowers through them.

“It’s not that bad,” she protested. “I was bored and depressed without you. I needed something to brighten my life.”

One of the panels depicted the translucent green of a curling wave, and on the face of the wave a pair of human figures on Hawaii boards and a graceful dolphin shape flew in formation together. Nick leaned closer and barely recognized the male figure as himself each detail of the features had been rendered with loving attention, and he came out of it looking something between Clark Gable and Superman – only a little more glamorous.

“From memory,” she said proudly.

“It’s tremendous,” he told her. “But I’ve got bigger biceps, and I’m more beautiful.” Despite the wild choice of colour and the romantic style, he realized she had real talent. “You don’t expect me to ride in that – what if one of my creditors saw me!”

“Get your mind out of its stiff collar and blue suit, mister. You have just signed on for the voyage to never-never land by way of the moon.” Before she started the engine she looked at him seriously out of those great shining green eyes.

“How long,” Nicholas? she asked. “How long have we got together this time?”

“Ten days,” he told her. “Sorry, but I must be back in London by the 25th. There is a big one coming up, the big one. I’ll tell you about it.”

“No.” She covered her ears with both hands. “I don’t want to hear about it, not yet.” She drove the Chevy with careless unforced skill, very fast and efficiently, acknowledging the homage of other male drivers with a grin and a shake of her braids.

When she slipped off highway 95 and parked in the lot of a supermarket, Nicholas raised an eyebrow.

“Food,” she explained, and then with a lascivious roll of her eyes, “I reckon to get mighty hungry later.” She chose steaks, a bag full of groceries and a jug of California Riesling, and would not let him pay. “In this town, you are my guest.” Then she paid the toll and took the rickenbacker causeway across the water to Virginia Key.

“That’s the marine division of the University of Miami and that’s my lab at the top of the jetty, just beyond that white fishing boat – see it?” The low buildings were crowded into a corner of the island, between the sea-quarium and the wharves and jetties of the University’s town lie the harbour.

“We aren’t stopping,” Nicholas observed.

“Are you kidding?” she laughed at him, “I don’t need a controlled scientific environment for the experiment I am about to conduct.” And with no diminution of speed, the Chevy flew across the long bridge between Virginia Key and Key Biscayne, and three miles on she turned off sharply left on a narrow dirt track that twisted through a lush tropical maritime forest of banyan and palmetta and palm, and ended at a clapboard shack just above the water.

“I live close to the shop,” Samantha explained, as she clattered up on to the screened porch, her arms full of groceries.

“This is yours?” Nicholas asked. He could just make out the tops of big blocks of condominiums on each side; they were incompletely screened by the palms.

“Pa left it to me. He bought it the year I was born,” Samantha explained proudly. “My ground stretches from there to there.” A few hundred yards, but Nicholas realized the value of it. Everybody in the world wants to live on the water, and those condominiums were pressing in closely.

“It must be worth a million.”

“There is no price on it,” she said firmly. “That’s what I tell those awful sweaty little men with their big cigars. Pa left it to me and it’s not for sale.” She had the door open now, bumping it with her denim-clad backside.

“Don’t just stand there, Nicholas,” she implored him. “We’ve only got ten days.”

He followed her into the kitchen as she dumped her load into the sink, and whirled back to him.

“Welcome by my house, Nicholas,” and then as she slid her arms around his waist, jerked his shirt tails out of his belt and slid her hands up his bare back, “You’ll never know just how welcome. Come, let me show you around this is the living-room.” It had spartan furniture, with Indian rugs and pottery, and Samantha’s chopped-off denims were discarded in the centre of the floor along with Nicholas shirt. “And this - surprise! surprise – is the bed-room.” She dragged him by one hand, and under the short tee-shirt her bottom reminded him of a chipmunk with its cheeks stuffed with nuts, chewing vigorously.

The tiny bedroom overlooked the beach. The sea breeze fluffed out the curtains and the sound of the low surf breathed like a sleeping giant, a deep regular hiss and sigh that filled the air around them. The bed was too big for the room, all ornate antique brass, with a cloudy soft mattress and an old-fashioned patchwork quilt in a hundred coloured and patterned squares.

“I don’t think I could have lived another day without you,” she said, and unwound the thick plaits of her hair. “You came like the cavalry, in the very nick of time.”

He reached up and took the golden tresses of hair, winding them thickly around his wrist, twining them in his fingers, and he pulled her gently down beside him.

Suddenly Nick’s life was uncluttered and simple again. Suddenly he was young and utterly carefree again. The petty strivings, the subterfuge, the lies and the cheating did not exist in this little universe that encompassed a tiny wooden shack on the edge of the ocean, and a huge brass bed that clanged and rattled and banged and squeaked wholesale, the completely abandoned happiness that was the special miracle called Samantha Silver.

Samantha’s laboratory was a square room, built on piles over the water, and the soft hum of the electric pumps blended with the slap of the wavelets below and the burble and blurp of the tanks. This is my kingdom, she told him. And these are my subjects. There were almost a hundred tanks, like the small glass-sided aquaria for goldfish, and suspended over each of them was a complicated arrangement of coils and bottles and electric wiring.

Nick sauntered across to the nearest of the tanks and peered into it. It contained a single large salt-water clam; the animal was feeding with the double shells agape, the pink soft flesh and frilly gills rippling and undulating in the gentle flow of pumped and filtered sea water. To each half of the shell, thin copper wires were attached with blobs of polyurethane cement.

Samantha came to stand beside him, touching, and he asked her “What’s happening?” She touched a switch and immediately the cylindrical scroll above the tank began to revolve slowly and a stylus, after a few preliminary jerks and quivers, began to trace out a regular pattern on the paper scroll, a trough and double peak, the second a fraction lower than the first, and then the trough again.

She said, “He’s wired and bugged.”

“You’re a member of the CIA,” he accused.

And she laughed. “His heart-beat. I’m passing an electric impulse through the heart – the heart is only a millimetre across – but each spasm changes the resistance and moves the stylus. She studied the curve for a moment. This fellow is one very healthy cheerful Spisula solidissima.”

“Is that his name?” Nick asked. “I thought he was a clam.”

“One of fifteen thousand bivalves who use that common generic,” she corrected.

“I had to pick an egghead,” said Nicholas ruefully. “But what’s so interesting about his heart?”

“It’s the closest and cheapest thing to a pollution metre that we have discovered so far – or rather,” she corrected herself without false modesty, t”hat I have discovered.” She took his hand and led him down the long rows of tanks. They are sensitive, incredibly sensitive to any contamination of their environment, and the heart-beat will register almost immediately any foreign element or chemical, organic or otherwise, in such low concentrate that it would take a highly trained specialist with a spectroscope to detect otherwise. Nicholas felt his mild attention changing and growing into real interest as Samantha began to prepare samples of common pollutants on the single bench against the fore-wall of the cluttered little laboratory.

“Here,” she held up one test tube, “aromatic carbons, the more poisonous elements of crude petroleum – and here” she indicated the next tube, “mercury in a concentration of 100 parts to the million. Did you see the photographs of the human vegetables and the Japanese children with the flesh falling off their bones at Kiojo? That was mercury.”

“Lovely stuff.”

She picked up another tube. “PCB, a by-product of the electrical industry, the Hudson River is thick with it. And these, tetrahydrofurane, cyclohexane, methylbenzene – all industrial by-products but don’t let the fancy names throw you. One day they will come back to haunt us , in newspaper headlines, as THF or CMB - one day there will be other human cabbages and babies born without arms or legs.”