there.”
“But you described it very well: You are there for formal reasons, and the less you disturb, the better. The other part of the crew did not quite understand this demand, including any here standing member.”
Captain Caspersen brought this impolite remark without offering a glance on Luciano, who simply ignored any protest. The captain continued his welcome-address to me: “Consider this a cruise with view to the waves from the best position on the ship – from the bridge. How many cruise passengers could dream of that?” He was interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Jensen and went to open the door of his car.
“Even Tom barked too much,” Luciano murmured in a low tune so that the captain did not hear him. Then it was his time to disappear, because now Jensen and Caspersen approached.
“The loading of the ship is proceeding well and the oil will be delivered tomorrow morning at seven, where after the ship can finally depart,” Jensen said.
It would be good if you can be here at seven a.m., too,” Captain Caspersen told me. “Would you like to inspect your cabin?”
“Yes, but just one question. Do you have 220 Volt aboard the ship? I would like to bring my notebook along.”
“Yes, we have 220 Volt aboard, but in bad weather there is a risk of salt water even on the bridge. Just remember that. Konstantin, show Mr. Gusto his cabin. Number 7 it is.” A young bearded man onboard the ship yelled back that he was occupied with loading it and had no time.
Luciano was at the Quae and offered his help, which was first rejected by the captain but then accepted with reference to the absence of alternatives.
The ship was painted blue, with a white build-up behind in the ship in three decks, the main deck painted dark red. Luciano explained me the function of the ship. “Roughly speaking this aft part includes all essential parts of the ship. Below deck you find the oil-tanks and machinery. The first deck includes some rooms of deposit and devices, with which you are not going to deal. The second deck is split by two short corridors. On the portside you find six cabins with view to the side of the ship, numbers 4 to 9 and yours is number seven. In the middle is the mass, our leisure and eating room when we don’t work or sleep. Behind is the galley, Liu’s domain. On backboards side are the three cabins of the officers, each double as big as those for us proletarians. Sad for you that you are assigned to our category.”
“Ii should be over in less than two weeks,” I comforted myself.
The cabin itself was rapidly inspected – there was indeed not much to see. Everything appeared condensed. I tested that the bed was long enough. There was even a small sink, which was easily covered with a plate, yielding a microscopic desk. There were two small cupboards, which would hardly suffice for the content of one suitcase.
Luciano must have read my thoughts: “And don’t bring any suitcases. There is no room for it.”
“Yes, I must dress appropriately. Will there be any need for a tie for eating at the captain’s table?” I asked ironical.
“No, certainly not. The captain eats alone, and it is good so. And should the notion appear for you to hang yourself, we can offer you a rope of excellent quality. And when we are speaking about feeling miserable, never use the sink if you are going to vomit. It is easily obliterated and it is a hell of a work to get it cleaned off afterwards. I shall set in a plastic bucket in your cabin.”
“Where is toilet and bathing facilities?”
“Oh, I forgot. There are two enclosures behind the kitchen. The first is for Barbara, the second for us men, except the officers, they have a bath unit each integrated in their cabin.”
“I presume the rest of the ship is for the cargo?”
Luciano confirmed with a nod. “And the ballast tanks. A coaster has a rather flat bottom, so for ocean voyages it is essential that it does not lie too high in the water. Come, Eric, I’ll show you the bridge, or the upper deck of this ‘house.’ There I shall leave you; I have work to do.”
He introduced me at the commanding bridge, as they officially called it when the captain was in hearing distance. There, four persons were present. They were all dressed in a light-blue uniform with short sleeves and golden stripes on the shoulders, perhaps in order to impress each other, perhaps simply as an indication of the captain’s formally correct regime. All wore a dark-blue tie. The captain was an old, never smiling person with silver hair and a short-cut moustache, probably more than sixty years-old. He was slim, therefore with a face characterized by frowns in a bronze-coloured skin. “This is Mr. Gusto, who shall watch over us while we watch over the ship. And these are my assistants, 1st Officer Johan Krueger, and 2nd Officer Igor Kreschov. Then there is Miss Anders, who is responsible for the radio. In earlier days, that would imply the telegraph, but young people don’t even know the Morse alphabet, so they now use other tricks ...”
The lady interrupted him. “I know it very well, but nobody uses it anymore.” She was perhaps thirty years-old, slim as the rest of the crew except Luciano, and she had slightly reddish half-long blond hair. Contrary to the three men she wore no cap.
The captain responded, “And thereby Miss Anders could demonstrate how she always interrupts me. In this way, we shall reach the North Pole before Dakar. Mr. Gusto, I expect you here on the bridge at seven tomorrow morning!”
I conformed with a military “Yes Sir!” and profited from being employed by an authoritarian personality in not raising further questions. Assuming I could expect ample time, I decided not to waste any time here in the harbour. Besides, I now had some questions to be solved here in Copenhagen before I left.
Mr. Jensen was gone when I returned. Konstantin was still working in the storage room and Luciano was nowhere to be seen. In the hostile climate onboard the Frozen Gulf, I decided not to spend another minute. If I hurried up – that is, wasted money for a taxi paid by myself, - I could reach the lunch by Mr. Smith in Hellerup.
“A Danish lunch is normally a gesture of survival during engulfment of nutrition during the shortest possible time,” Mr. Smith once proclaimed. It is not fair, I participated in many a luxurious ‘frokost’ in Denmark, but it explains perhaps how he became so fat. Immediately, I called Juanita to tell her to expect me, too. I hired a taxi and arrived precisely at half past twelve in the house in Hellerup.
Mr. Smith has a rule never to discuss earthly subjects, related to current work, during the divine meals. That may partly explain how he became so fat. Concerning eating and sleeping, he was so precise that you could set your watch after him – indeed, that is what somebody claimed what happened to the radio clock in Frankfurt. In this sense, he disappeared from the table at a quarter past one, and I knew that I would have less than two hours to find the information I was missing about Frozen Line and their ship, which I was going to join. So I went to my office to surf the Internet and make some phone calls.
Mr. Smith slept an hour – not shabby 59 or luxurious 61 minutes – but getting the walrus in bed and, in particular, out of it with Juanita’s aid took some time, so it was three a.m. when he returned to his inner temple, the windowless office, where Juanita already had prepared coffee for both of us. This time, there was an extra cup.
“Are we expecting someone this afternoon?” I asked.
“Your replacement during your sudden holiday, he said.
I knew he was teasing me and tried to stay calm, but thought it wise to protest after all. “You are probably referring to the dangerous mission 24 hours a day, which my employer suddenly ordered, unfortunately without agreeing on an appropriate risk- bonus for this fight against the mafia, as defined in the union of private detectives files.” The only way, I could pay him back was in not asking who would come; I played uninterested, although I knew the third cup could not have been served by mistake. Anyhow, I had a suspicion.
Instead, I referred my day, ending with the recent recognitions: “The ship does not fit with the profile of ‘Frozen Line.’ As the name indicates, it is specialized for arctic sailing and 7 of its shi
ps are strengthened for sailing in the icy north – that is the whole fleet, except their recent acquisition, an old coaster which was renamed ‘Frozen Gulf,’ using two contradictory words, since the Gulf ...”
“The Gulfstream brings heat to us, yes they told us at school,” he interrupted.
“So you are awake? I was not sure, so I thought I’d better make it simple. The last owner used the ship for shuttling between the Baltic countries and Scandinavia, for which the special flattened bottom of the coaster is ideal. Many harbours here can only accommodate comparative small vessels with relatively small draft. However, even a coaster is adapt to modern forms of transport, which could involve container transport for easy handling between ship, train and truck and short harbour calls.”
“I have read about it,” he said, thus permitting me to touch my cup. I was silent for a minute, permitting my boss to recapture what he might else know about this topic, which was perhaps only new to me. Then my boss suddenly started thinking loud. “Mr. Cordone told me that the crew was unchanged for nearly a year. They had been granted a holiday recently while the ship was painted and repaired in Bremen. They had only had one trip from Kiel with a small cargo, making up a fraction of the loading capacity. Then a sailor had died and various circumstances, close to a mutiny, had forced the captain to search harbour in Copenhagen. The deceased sailor had discovered that part of the load was toxic waste, bound for Africa. The captain had given him a seaman’s burial, thus preventing an autopsy, and then given the crew order of keeping a respectful distance to the cargo in front of the ship. He had promoted his dog to be the eighth crew member – did you see the dog, by the way?”
“No, but it might have been in his cabin. Luciano – I mean Mr. Cordone gave the impression that it was the only living person he talked to in a friendly way. Concerning the cargo, when I was there, the front room was closed and exclusively the other rooms were used. I noted with a certain satisfaction how the cargo was secured with vertical and longitudinal intersections, in order to prevent it from moving from one side to the other.”
“Why is that important?” Finally some basic knowledge of sailing that he had missed in his previous eventful life.
“In the ocean, big waves may let the ship capsize – hardly a problem in our shallow waters. But our ship is not at all built for oceanic sailing.”
“How about insurance?” he wanted to know.
“I did not manage to penetrate the silence of Lloyd’s in London concerning the sum, but it seems to be insured there.”
Now the doorbell rang. Juanita opened the main entrance and then appeared with the new guest. As I had expected, Mr. Smith had managed to persuade Fred at least to step in for me part of the time, while I should sail away. Fred was the only one among the living who had replaced me for longer periods of time, and obviously Mr. Smith did not want any newcomer to learn about his many peculiarities. Therefore, we got straight to the case. Mr. Smith condensed our knowledge into a few sentences.
Fred was perhaps a couple of years older than Mr. Smith, who was in turn looking much older than his age. Fred was today wearing a tie, the first time I saw him with one and it absolutely failed to make him seem more elegant. He was not just slim but even meagre and his bald head let him look as chronically undernourished, quite opposite our boss.
“There is only one thing I do not understand,” Fred began, copying Mr. Smith’s habit to avoid abbreviations like ‘don’t’ in his language. “Why are you at all dealing with such a strange case?”
“Mr. Gusto suggested that we should. Apparently he needed work,