Deadlock

17 Deadlock

Bledsoe and I joined the chief engineer in the captain’s dining room, where he was eating roast beef and mashed potatoes. Bemis was still up on the bridge-Bledsoe explained that the captain would stay up there until the ship was out of a tricky channel and well into the middle of Lake Superior. We three were the only ones in the dining room-the other officers ate with the crew. Handwritten menus at our plates offered a choice of two entrees, vegetables, and dessert. Over baked chicken and broccoli I talked to Sheridan about my accident.

The chief agreed that he had cutting torches of different sizes on board, as well as every possible variety of wrench. “But if you’re asking me to tell you if any of them were used last Thursday, I couldn’t. We don’t keep the tools under lock and key-it’d be too time-consuming to get at them.” He buttered a roll and ate a chunk of it. “We have eight people on engine-room duty when the ship’s at sea and all of them need to get at the tools. We’ve never had any problems and as long as we don’t I plan to keep free access to them.”

No liquor was allowed on the ship, so I was drinking coffee with dinner. The coffee was thin and I poured a lot of cream into it to give it some flavor.

“Could someone have come onto the ship, taken some tools, and brought them back without anyone noticing?”

Sheridan thought about it. “I suppose so,” he said reluctantly. “This isn’t like the navy where someone is always on watch. No one has to stay on board when we’re in port, and people come and go without anyone paying attention. Theoretically someone could go to the engine room without being caught, assuming he knew where the tools were. He’d have to be lucky, too, and not have anyone come on him by surprise… At any rate, I’d rather believe that than that one of my own men was involved.”

“Could one of your own men have done it?”

Again, it was possible, but why? I suggested that someone-perhaps Phillips, for example-had hired one of the crew to do his dirty work. Bledsoe and Sheridan discussed that energetically. They were both convinced that they’d gotten rid of their lone bad apple when they fired the man who put water in the holds last month.

Sheridan felt great confidence in the men under him. “I know my judgment could be wrong, but I can’t imagine any one of those guys deliberately sabotaging somebody’s car.”

We went on talking long after one of the junior cooks had cleared away the table and cleaned up the galley. Finally the chief engineer excused himself to go back to the engine room. He said I could question the other engineers and the four boilermen, but he didn’t think it would do me any good.

As he walked through the doorway, I said casually, “Were you in the engine room that night?”

He turned and looked me straight in the eye. “Yes, I was. And Yalmouth-my first engineer-was with me. We were going over the hydraulics preparatory to starting up the engines the next day.”

“Not out of each other’s sight all evening?”

“Not long enough to monkey with a car.”

He went on out the door. Bledsoe said, “Satisfied, Vic? Is Pole Star clean in your eyes?”

I shrugged in irritation. “I suppose so. Short of launching a full-scale investigation into everyone’s movements last Thursday night there’s not much else I can do to check up on you guys.” Something occurred to me. “You had a security force on board that night, didn’t you? Maybe Bemis can give me their names-they’d know if anyone had been climbing around with tools.” My villain might have persuaded a guard that he belonged on board: that probably wouldn’t be too difficult. But a guard would surely remember someone leaving the ship with a blowtorch and a ratchet wrench. Of course, if Bledsoe was behind the whole business, he might have paid off the guards, anyway.

I drank some cold coffee, looking at Bledsoe over the rim of the cup. “The whole thing turns on money, lots of money. It’s in the Eudora Grain contracts, but that’s not the only place.”

“True,” Bledsoe agreed. “There’s also a great deal in the freighter business itself, and there’s the amount I had to raise to pay for the Lucella. Maybe I embezzled it from Niels to pay for my flagship just before I left Grafalk Steamship.”

“Yes, and if he suspected that but couldn’t prove it, he might want to alert me to the possibility.”

Bledsoe smiled genially. “I can see that. You should definitely look into my finances as well as Phillips’s. I’ll tell my secretary to give you access to my files when we get back to Chicago.”

I thanked him politely. All that offer meant was, if he had something to hide, he had it concealed someplace other than in Pole Star’s books.

We spent the rest of the evening talking about opera. They’d had a collection of librettos in the Cantonville prison library and he’d read all of them. After he got out of prison he started attending the Cleveland Opera.

“Now I fly to New York five, six times a year for the Met and get season tickets to the Lyric… It gives me a queer feeling to talk about Cantonville with someone. My wife was the only person who knew about it-except Niels, of course. And neither of them ever mentioned it. It makes me feel almost guilty when I bring it up now.”

Around ten-thirty, two of the crew members came in with a cot and some blankets. They set the narrow bed up under the portholes in the starboard wall, bracing it to the side so it wouldn’t slide around with the rocking of the ship.

After they left, Bledsoe stood fiddling the change in his pockets with the awkwardness of a man who wants to make a pass but isn’t sure how it will be received. I didn’t try to help him out. I liked the way he kissed. But I’m not the kind of detective who hops nonchalantly from bed to bed: if someone’s been trying to kill me, it cools my enthusiasm. And I still didn’t have total trust in Bledsoe’s purity.

“Time for me to turn in,” I said briskly. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

He hesitated for a few seconds longer, scanning my face for encouragement, then turned and went upstairs to the stateroom. I put the Smith & Wesson under the little pillow and climbed under the blankets in my jeans and shirt. Despite the noise of the engines and the lurching of the ship, I went to sleep almost immediately and slept soundly through the night.

The cooks woke me the next morning before six as they started clattering around in the galley next to the captain’s dining room. I tried pulling the bedding up over my ears but the disturbance was too persistent. Finally I got up and stumbled up to the next floor where the bathroom was. I changed my underwear and shirt and brushed my teeth.

It was too early for me to feel like eating, even though breakfast was ready, so I went out on deck to look at the day. The sun had just come up, a ball of liquid orange low in the eastern sky. A purple shoreline lay a mile or so to our left. We were going past some more of the small clumps of islands which had dotted the channel as we left Thunder Bay.

At breakfast Captain Bemis, the chief engineer, and Bledsoe were all in affable moods. Perhaps the fact I was leaving soon cheered them up. At any rate, even the captain was gracious, explaining our course to me. We were coming down the southeast coast of Lake Superior leading into the St. Mary’s Channel. “This is where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in 1975,” he said. “It’s the best approach to the St. Mary’s, but it’s still a very shallow route, only thirty feet deep in places.”

“What happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald?”

“Everyone has his own theory. I don’t suppose they’ll ever know for certain. When they dove down to look at her, they found she’d been cut neatly in three pieces. Sank immediately. I’ve always blamed the Coast Guard for not keeping the channel markings in proper order. The waves were thirty feet high out here that night-one of them must have pushed the Fitzgerald into a trough and caused her to scrape against the bottom and snap. If they’d marked the channel properly, Captain McSorley would have avoided the shallowest spots.”

“The thing is,” the chief engineer added, “these lakers don’t have much support through the middle. They’re floating cargo holds. If they put a lot of beams through the holds they’d take up too much valuable cargo space. So you get these twenty- or thirty-foot waves out here, and they pick up a ship like this on either end. The middle doesn’t have any support and it just snaps. You go down very quickly.”

The head cook, a thick Polish woman in her mid-fifties, was pouring the captain’s coffee. As the chief spoke, she dropped the cup on the floor. “You should not talk like that, Chief Engineer. It is very bad luck.” She called to her underlings to come in and clean up the mess.

Sheridan shrugged. “It’s all the men do talk about when there’s a storm brewing. Ship disasters are like cancer-the other guy is always the one who’s going to get it, anyway.” All the same, he apologized to the cook and changed the subject.

Bemis told me we’d be getting into the Soo locks around three o’clock. He suggested that I watch from the bridge so I could see the approach and the way the ship was steered into the channel. After lunch I packed up my little canvas bag for a quick departure: Bledsoe told me we’d have about two minutes to climb over the side of the Lucella onto shore before they opened the lock gates and she went on through to Lake Huron.

I checked that my credit cards and cash were in my front jeans pocket and put the Smith & Wesson into the bag. There didn’t seem much point in lugging it around in the shoulder holster while I was on board. I stowed the bag next to the pilothouse while I went up on the bridge to watch the Lucella slide into the lock. We were now well into the channel of the St. Mary’s River, following a slow-moving procession.

“Your position into the locks is determined by your position when you arrive at the mouth of the channel,” Bemis explained. “So there’s a lot of racing to get into the channel first. We passed a couple of five-hundred-footers earlier this morning. I can’t stand tying up here-enforced boredom and everyone gets restless.”

“It’s expensive to tie up,” Bledsoe said sharply. “This ship costs ten thousand dollars a day to operate. She has to make every second count.”

I raised my eyebrows, trying to calculate costs in my head. Bledsoe looked at me angrily. “Yes, it’s another financial motive, Vic.”

I shrugged and walked over to where the helmsman, Red, was turning the wheel. Two inches of cigar stuck out of his pudgy face. He steered off various landmarks without glancing at the tiller. The huge ship moved easily under his hands.

As we drew nearer to the locks, the U.S. Coast Guard started talking to Bemis on the radio. The captain gave them his ship’s name, length, and weight. Of the four locks closing the twenty-four-foot drop between Lake Superior and Lake Huron, only the Poe was big enough to handle the thousand-foot freighters. We would be the second ship into the Poe, following an upbound vessel.

Bemis slowed the diesels to their lowest possible speed. He called down to the engine room and ordered them to put the engines into neutral. Behind us I could see three or four other freighters sitting in the channel. Those farther back tied up at the bank while they waited.

Below us the deck stretched magnificently away. We watched the first mate, Winstein, talking with a group of seamen who would climb down ladders to the sides of the lock and tie up the ship. Theirs was a demanding job physically-they had to keep up tension on the cables as the ship sank and the ropes became slack. Then, just before the gates opened into Lake Huron they would untie the ropes and leap back on board.

We waited about half a mile from the locks themselves. The sun glinted off the water and dressed up the dingy skylines of the twin cities. Canada’s Sault Ste. Marie lay to our left, dominated by the giant Algoma Steelworks on the shoreline. In fact, coming up to our current resting place, the captain had steered using different parts of the Algoma plant-off the second smokestack, off the first coal heap, and so on.

After a forty-minute wait the Coast Guard told Bemis he could proceed. As the engines increased their revolutions slightly, a giant freighter passed us upbound, giving one long hoot on its whistle. Bemis pushed a button and the Lucella responded with an equally long blast and began to move forward. A few minutes later we were nosing into the lock.

The Poe Lock is only 110 feet wide; the Lucella, 105. That gave Red two and a half feet on either side-not much room for error. Slowly we glided forward, bisecting the distance and coming to a halt about twenty feet from the southern gate. Red never once looked at the wheel.

The gates were mammoth wooden structures reinforced with thick steel struts. I turned to watch them swing shut behind us, guided electrically from the bank.

As soon as the gates closed, our crew lowered ladders and scrambled down to the bank. I thanked Bemis for the use of his ship and the chance to talk to some of his crew and turned to go with Bledsoe down to the deck.

Most of the crew came on deck for the passage through the Soo. I shook hands with the head cook, Anna, thanking her in my few words of stumbling Polish for her cooking. Delighted, she unleashed a torrent of smiling Polish on me, which I ducked from as gracefully as I could.

It only takes about fifteen minutes for the lock to empty its two million-plus gallons of water into Lake Huron. We sank rapidly while the men alongside us tightened the cables. As soon as the Lucella was level with the lock, Bledsoe and I would hop across the two-foot gap to land. We’d have about thirty seconds before the forward gates opened.

An observation tower on the American side allows tourists to watch the ships as they rise and fall between the two lakes. The May day was still quite chilly and few people were out. I looked at them idly across the intervening MacArthur Lock and then squinted a second time at a man on the lower level. He had a thatch of bright red hair unusual for an adult. The hair reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t place him, especially not at a distance of thirty or forty yards. As I peered across the water, he picked up an outsize set of binoculars and focused on us. I shrugged and looked down through the gap between the side of the Lucella and the side of the lock where the fetid water was rushing away. The deck was almost level now with the top of the lock. Bledsoe touched me on the arm and I walked back toward the pilothouse to pick up my bag.

I was almost there when I was thrown to the ground. I landed with a thud on the deck, the wind knocked out of me. I thought at first I’d been hit and looked around defensively as I gasped for breath. But when I tried to stand up, I realized the deck was shuddering underneath me. Almost everyone else had been flung from their feet as well by some gigantic shock.

The head cook was teetering at the edge of the rocking ship, groping for the steel cables. I wanted to go to her to help, but the deck was too unstable; I tried to move to her and was thrown to the ground again. I watched in horror as she lost her balance and fell over the side. Her screams were drowned in a roaring that blocked out all other sound.

We were rising again. We didn’t have the buoyancy of a ship in water, but rocked as if balanced on the air itself. Sheridan’s comment at breakfast came back to me: the Fitzgerald being held in the air and snapped in two. I didn’t understand what was happening, why were we rising, why there was no water pushing up, but I felt vilely sick.

Bledsoe was standing near me, his face gray. I clung to the self-unloader for support and pulled myself up for the second time. The crew were crawling away from the open sides of the ship toward the pilothouse, but we could not help one another. The ship was too unstable.

As we rose, sheets of water rushed up like giant geysers between the sides of the ship and the lock. They towered skyward in a thick curtain cutting us off from the land, and then from the sky. A hundred feet above us the water rushed before falling in a pounding torrent onto the deck, knocking me over again, knocking everyone over. I could hear some of the men near me screaming.

I peered stupidly at the curtain of water, trying to see through it to the men at the sides with their cables. They couldn’t be holding them, couldn’t be restraining the ship as she rose lurchingly upward, lashing forward and backward in her concrete confines.

Holding the self-unloader, I struggled to my knees. A wall of water was pounding the forward gate, ripping panels from it. Great logs spewed into the air and disappeared through the sheets of water which still rose on either side of the ship.

I wanted to shut my eyes, shut out the disaster, but I couldn’t stop staring, horror-stricken. It was like watching through a marijuana high. Pieces of the lock broke off in slow motion. I could see each one, each separate fragment, each drop of water spraying loose, knowing all the time that the scene was moving very quickly.

Just when it seemed that nothing could keep us from diving forward and smashing against the rocks in the rapids below us, a great cry sounded above the roaring, the cry of a million women weeping in anguish, an unearthly screaming. The deck cracked in front of me.

People were trying to shout at each other to hold on, but no one could be heard over those screams as the beams wrenched and tore and the ship broke in two. The geysers of water rising above us shut off abruptly. We fell again into the lock, falling forward and down at a great jolting speed, ramming the forward gates and the bottom with a bone-jarring impact. A hatch cover popped free and knocked over one of the crewmen. Wet barley poured out, covering everyone in the middle of the ship with pale gold mud. The deck slanted sharply down toward the crack and I grabbed the self-unloader to keep from being hurled into the center. The broken giant lay still.