“Where’s the captain’s dining room?” I asked.
Winstein took me there, a small, formal room on the starboard side of the main deck. Flowered curtains hung at the portholes and an enormous photo of the Lucella’s launching decorated the forward wall. The crew’s mess was next door to it. The same galley served both, but the captain was waited on at table by the cooks whereas the crew served themselves cafeteria style. The cooks would serve dinner between five-thirty and seven-thirty, Winstein told me. I could get breakfast there between six and eight in the morning.
Winstein left me to go back to the bridge. I waited until he was out of sight and then descended into the engine room. I vaguely remembered my way from the previous visit, going through a utility room with a washer and dryer in it, then climbing down a flight of linoleum-covered stairs to the engine-room entrance.
Winstein was right about the noise. It was appalling. It filled every inch of my body and left my teeth shaking. A young man in greasy overalls was in the control booth that made up the entrance to the engines. I roared at him over the noise; after several tries he understood my query and told me I would find the chief engineer on level two inspecting the port journal bearings. Apparently only an idiot would not know about port journal bearings. Declining further assistance, I swung myself down a metal ladder to the level below.
The engines take up a good amount of space and I wandered around quite a bit before I saw anyone. I finally spotted a couple of hard-hatted figures behind a mass of pipes and made my way over to them. One was the chief engineer, Sheridan. The other was a young fellow whom I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed not to find Bledsoe with Sheridan—it would have given a more solid direction to my inchoate searching to see them in cahoots.
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.