In High Places

Chapter 1

On the Canadian West coast – 2,300 miles from Ottawa as the jets fly – the Motor Vessel Vastervik docked, between showers, on December 23rd.

The wind in Vancouver harbour was wintry and gusting. The harbour pilot, who had boarded the ship half an hour earlier, had ordered out three shackles of anchor chain and now the Vastervik was berthing gently, its big hook dragging like a brake on the silt-layered, rock-free bottom. The tug ahead of the ship gave one short blast and a heaving line snaked shoreward, others following.

Ten minutes later, at 3 PM local time, the ship was secure and its anchor recovered.

La Pointe Pier, at which the ship had moored, was one of several projecting, fingerlike, from the busy, building-crowded shore line. Around the new arrival, and at adjoining piers, other ships were loading or discharging freight. Cargo slings rose swiftly and were lowered. Box cars shunted fussily on dockside rail spurs while lift trucks squirrelled back and forth from ships to warehouses. From a berth nearby a squat freighter eased out towards open water, a tug and line boat fore and aft.

A group of three men approached the Vastervik purposefully. They walked in step, competently skirting obstacles and working parties. Two of the men wore uniforms. One was a customs officer, the other from the Canadian Immigration. The third man was in civilian clothes.

'Damn!' the customs man said. 'It's raining again.'

'Come aboard our ship,' said the civilian, grinning. He was the shipping-company agent. 'It'll be drier there.'

'I wouldn't count on it,' the immigration officer said. He had a stern face and spoke unsmilingly. 'Some of these tubs of yours are wetter inside than out. How you keep them floating is a mystery to me.'

A rusty iron gangway was being lowered from the Vastervik.

Looking up at the ship's side, the company agent said, 'Sometimes I wonder myself. Oh well, I suppose it'll hold three more.' He swung himself on to the gangway, me others following.

Chapter 2

In his cabin immediately beneath the bridge. Captain Sigurd Jaabeck, big-boned, stolid, and with a weathered seaman's face, shuffled papers he would need for port clearance of his cargo and crew. Before docking the captain had changed from his usual sweater and dungarees to a double-breasted suit, but still had on the old-fashioned carpet slippers he wore most of the time on board.

It was good. Captain Jaabeck thought, that they had berthed in daylight and tonight could eat ashore. It would be a relief to escape the fertilizer smell. The captain wrinkled his nose distastefully at the all-pervading odour, suggestive of a combination of wet sulphur and decaying cabbage. For days it had been seeping up from the cargo in number three hold, to be circulated impartially through the ship by the hot-air blowers. It was heartening, he thought, that the Vastervik's next cargo would be Canadian lumber, sawmill fresh.

Now, the documents in his hand, he moved out on to the upper deck.

In the crew's living quarters aft. Stubby Gates, able-bodied seaman, ambled across the small square mess hall which also served as a day rest-room. He joined another figure standing silently, gazing through a porthole.

Gates was a London Cockney. He had the scarred, disarranged face of a fighter, stocky build and long dangling arms which made him apish. He was the strongest man on the ship and also, unless provoked, the gentlest.

The other man was young and small of stature. He had a round, strong-featured countenance, deep-set eyes and black hair grown over-long. In appearance he looked little more than a boy.

Stubby Gates asked, 'Wotcher thinkin' about, Henri?'

For a moment the other continued to look out as if he had not heard. His expression held a strange wistfulness, his eyes seeming fixed on the city skyline, with its tall, clean buildings, visible beyond the dockside. The sound of traffic carried clearly across the water and through the open port. Then, abruptly, the young man shrugged and turned.

'I think of nothing.' He spoke with a thick, throaty – though not unpleasing – accent. English came hard to him.

'We'll be in port for a week,' Stubby Gates said. 'Ever bin to Vancouver before?'

The young man, whose name was Henri Duval, shook his head.

'I bin 'ere three times,' Gates said. 'There's better places to get orf a ship. But the grub's good an' you can always pick up a woman quick.' He glanced sideways at Duval. 'Think they'll let you go ashore this time, matey?'

The young man answered moodily, dejection in his voice. The words were hard to understand but Stubby Gates was able to make them out. 'Sometime,' Henri Duval said, 'I think I never get ashore again.'

Chapter 3

Captain Jaabeck met the three men as they came aboard. He shook hands with the company agent, who introduced the customs and immigration officers. The two officials – all business now – nodded politely to the captain but did not shake hands.

'Is your crew mustered. Captain?' the immigration man asked.

Captain Jaabeck nodded. 'Follow me, please.' The routine was familiar and no instructions had been needed to bring the crew to the officers' dining-room amidships. They were lining up outside while the ship's officers waited within the room.

Stubby Gates nudged Henri Duval as the group, led by the captain, passed by. 'Those are the government blokes,' Gates murmured. 'They'll say if you can go ashore.'

Henri Duval turned to the older man. 'I make good try,' he said softly. There was a boyish enthusiasm in his heavily accented voice, the earlier depression banished. 'I try to work. Maybe get stay.'

'That's the stuff, Henri,' Stubby Gates said cheerfully. 'Never say die!'

Inside the dining-room a table and chair had been set up for the immigration officer. He sat at it, inspecting the typewritten crew list which the captain had handed him. Across the room the customs man leafed through a cargo manifest.

'Thirty officers and crew, and one stowaway,' the immigration man announced. 'Is that correct. Captain?'

'Yes.' Captain Jaabeck nodded.

'Where did you pick up the stowaway?'

'In Beirut. His name is Duval,' the captain said. 'He has been with us a long time. Too long.'

The immigration man's expression did not change.

'I'll take the officers first.' He beckoned the first officer who came forward, offering a Swedish passport.

After the officers, the crew filed in from outside. Each examination was brief. Name, nationality, place of birth, a few perfunctory questions. Afterwards, each man moved across for questioning by Customs.

Duval was last. For him the immigration man's questions were less perfunctory. He answered them carefully, with an earnestness, in halting English. Some of the seamen. Stubby Gates among them, had hung back, listening.

Yes, his name was Henri Duval. Yes, he was a stowaway on the ship. Yes, he had boarded at Beirut, Lebanon. No, he was not a citizen of Lebanon. No, he had no passport. He had never had a passport. Nor a certificate of birth. Nor any document. Yes, he knew his birthplace. It was French Somaliland. His mother had been French, his father English. His mother was dead, his father he had never known. No, he had no means to prove that what he said was true. Yes, he had been refused entry to French Somaliland. No, officials there had not believed his story. Yes, he had been refused a landing at other ports. There were many ports. He could not remember them all. Yes, he was sure he had no papers. Of any kind-It was a repetition of other questioning in other places. As it continued the hope which had dawned briefly on the young man's face faded into despondency. But at the end he tried once more.

'I work,' he pleaded, the eyes searching the immigration man's face for a glimmer of response. 'Please – I work good. Work in Canada.' He pronounced the last name awkwardly, as if he had learned it, but not well enough.

The immigration man shook his head negatively. 'Not here, you won't.' He addressed Captain Jaabeck. 'I'll issue a detaining order against this stowaway. Captain. It will be your responsibility that he doesn't go ashore.'

'We'll take care of that,' the shipping agent said.

The immigration man nodded. 'The rest of the crew are clear.'

Those who remained had begun to leave when Stubby Gates spoke up.

'Can I 'ave a word wi' you, guv?'

Surprised, the immigration man said, 'Yes.'

There was a pause at the doorway and one or two men edged back inside.

'It's abaht young Henri 'ere.'

'What about him?' There was an edge to the immigration man's voice.

'Well, seein' as it's Christmas in a couple o' days, an' we'll be in port, some of us thought maybe we could take Henri ashore, jist for one night.'

The immigration man said sharply, 'I just got through saying he has to stay on the ship.'

Stubby Gates' voice rose. 'I know all about that. But jist for five bleeding minutes couldn't you forget your bloody red tape?' He had not intended to become heated but he had a sailor's contempt for shorebound officialdom.

'That'll be enough of that!' The immigration officer spoke harshly, his eyes glowering.

Captain Jaabeck moved forward. The seamen in the room tensed.

'It may be enough for you, you stuck-up sod,' Stubby Gates said belligerently. 'But when a bloke 'asn't bin orf a ship in near two years, and it's bloody Christmas…'

'Gates,' the captain said quietly. 'That will be all.'

There was a silence. The immigration man had gone red-faced and then subsided. Now he was looking doubtfully at Stubby Gates. 'Are you trying to tell me,' he said, 'that this man Duval hasn't been ashore in two years?'

'It is not quite two years,' Captain Jaabeck interjected quietly. He spoke English clearly with only a trace of his native Norwegian tongue. 'Since this young man boarded my ship as a stowaway twenty months ago, no country has permitted him to land. In every port, everywhere, I am told the same thing: He has no passport, no papers. Therefore he cannot leave us. He is ours.' The captain raised his big seaman's hands, fingers outspread, in a gesture of interrogation. 'What am I to do – feed his body to the fishes because no country will have him?'

The tension had gone. Stubby Gates had moved back, silent, in deference to the captain.

The immigration man – no sharpness now – said doubtfully, 'He claims to be French – born in French Somaliland.'

'This is true,' the captain agreed. 'Unfortunately the French, too, demand papers and this man has none. He swears to me he has never had papers and I believe it's so. He is truthful and a good worker. This much one learns in twenty months.'

Henri Duval had followed the exchange, his eyes moving hopefully from one face to the next. Now they returned to the immigration officer.

'I'm sorry. He can't land in Canada.' The immigration man seemed troubled. Despite the outward sternness, he was not a harsh man and sometimes wished the regulations of his job were less exact. Half apologetically, he added, 'I'm afraid there's nothing I can do, Captain.'

'Not even one night ashore?' It was Stubby Gates, still trying with Cockney persistence.

'Not even one night.' The answer had a quiet finality. 'I'll make out the detaining order now.'

It was an hour since docking and, outside the ship, dusk was closing in.

Chapter 4

A few minutes after 11.00 PM Vancouver time, some two hours after the Prime Minister had retired to bed in Ottawa, a taxi drew up, in pouring rain, at the dark deserted entry to La Pointe Pier.

Two men got out of the cab. One was a reporter, the other a photographer from the Vancouver Post.

The reporter, Dan Orliffe, a comfortable bulky man in his late thirties, had a ruddy, broad-cheeked face and a relaxed manner which made him seem, sometimes, more like an amiable farmer than a successful and occasionally ruthless newsman. In contrast, the photographer, Wally de Vere, was a lean six-footer who moved with quick nervous movements and affected a veneer of perpetual pessimism.

As the cab backed away, Dan Orliffe looked around him, holding his coat collar tightly closed as token protection from the wind and rain. At first the sudden withdrawal of the taxi's headlights had made it hard to see. Surrounding where they stood were dim, wraithlike shapes and patches of deeper blackness with, ahead, a gleam of water. Silent, deserted buildings loomed vaguely, their outlines blurring into gloom. Then slowly, eyes adjusting to the darkness, nearer shadows crept into focus and he could see they were standing on a wide cement ramp built parallel with the shoreline.

Behind, the way the cab had brought them, were the towering cylinders of a grain elevator and darkened dockside sheds. Nearby, piles of ship's cargo, tarpaulin-covered, dotted the ramp and, from the ramp, two docks extended outward, armlike above the water. On both sides of each dock, ships were moored and a few lights, dimly burning, showed that altogether there were five. But nowhere was there any sign of people or movement.

De Vere had shouldered his camera and equipment. Now he motioned in the direction of the ships. 'Which one is it?' he asked.

Dan Orliffe used a pocket flashlight to consult a note which the night city editor had handed him half an hour earlier following a phoned-in tip. 'We want the Vastervik,' he said. 'Could be any of these, I guess.' He turned to the right and the photographer followed. Already in the minute or two since leaving the cab their raincoats were streaming wet. Dan could feel his trouser legs becoming sodden and a trickle of water flowed uncomfortably beneath his collar.

'What they need here,' De Vere complained, 'is a doll in an information booth.' They picked their way cautiously through a litter of broken packing cases and oil drums. 'Who is this character we're looking for, anyway?'

'Name's Henri Duval,' Dan said. 'According to the desk, he's a man without a country and nobody'll let him off the ship.'

The photographer nodded sagely. 'Sob story, eh? I get it -Christmas Eve and no-room-at-the-inn stuff.'

'It's an angle,' Dan acknowledged. 'Maybe you should write it.'

'Not me,' De Vere said. 'When we get through here I'm getting in the dryer with the prints. Besides, I'll lay you ten against five the guy's a phoney.'

Dan shook his head. 'Nothing doing. You might win.'

They were halfway along the right-hand dock now, stepping carefully beside a line of railway freight cars. Fifty feet below, in blackness, water glistened and the rain splashed audibly on a sullen harbour swell.

At the first ship they craned upward to read the name. It was in Russian.

'Come on,' Dan said. 'Not here.'

'It'll be the last one,' me photographer predicted. 'It always is.'

But it was the next. The name Vastervik stood out on the flared bow high above. And below it, rusted, rotting plates.

'Does this bucket of bolts really float?' De Vere's voice was incredulous. 'Or is somebody kidding?'

They had clambered up a ramshackle gangway and were standing on what appeared to be the vessel's main deck.

Viewed from the dockside, even in darkness, the Vastervik had seemed a haggard ship. Now, at close quarters, the signs of age and accumulated neglect were even more startling. Faded paintwork had great patches of rust extending over superstructure, doors, and bulkheads. Elsewhere the last remnants of painting hung down in peeled strips. From a solitary light bulb above the gangway a layer of grime was visible on the deck under their feet and nearby were several open boxes of what appeared to be garbage. A short distance forward a steel ventilator had corroded and broken from its housing. Probably unrepairable, it had been lashed uselessly to the deck.

Dan sniffed.

'Yeah,' the photographer said. 'I'm receiving too.'

The fertilizer stench was drifting out from the ship's interior.

'Let's try in here,' Dan said. He opened a steel door directly ahead and moved down a narrow passageway.

After a few yards there was a fork two ways. To the right was a series of cabin doors – obviously officers' quarters. Dan turned left, heading for a doorway a short distance along, from which light was streaming. It turned out to be a galley.

Stubby Gates, wearing greasy coveralls, was seated at a table reading a girlie magazine.

'Ullo, matey,' he said,' 'Oo are you?'

'I'm from the Vancouver Pos(,' Dan told him. 'I'm looking for a man called Henri Duval.'

Opening his mouth in a wide grin, the seaman exposed a row of darkly stained teeth. 'Young Henri was 'ere earlier on, but 'e retired to 'is private cabin.'

'Do you think we could wake him?' Dan said. 'Or maybe we should see the captain.'

Gates shook his head. 'Best leave the skipper alone. 'E's touchy about bein' woke up in port. But I reckon I can roust out Henri for you.' He glanced towards De Vere. ' 'Oo's this bloke?'

'He's going to take pictures.'

The seaman stood up, stuffing the girlie magazine into his coveralls. 'All right, gents,' he said. 'Follow me.'

They went down two companionways and forward in the ship. In a gloomy passageway, lighted by a solitary low-power bulb. Stubby Gates banged on a door, turned a key, and opened it. Reaching inside he switched on a light.

'Show a leg, Henri,' he announced.' 'Ere's a couple of gents to see yer.' He stood back, beckoning Dan.

Moving to the doorway Dan saw a small figure sitting up sleepily in a metal bunk. Then he looked at the scene behind.

My God! he thought. Does a man live here?

It was a metal box – a cube approximately six feet square. Long ago the walls had been painted a drab ochre but now much of the paint had gone, with rust replacing it. Both paint and rust were covered with a film of moisture, disturbed only where heavier water droplets coursed downward. Occupying the length of one wall and most of the width inside was the single metal bunk. Above it was a small shelf about a foot long and six inches wide. Below the bunk was an iron pail. And that was all.

There was no window or porthole, only a vent of sorts near the top of one wall.

And the air was foul.

Henri Duval rubbed his eyes and peered at the group outside. Dan Orliffe was surprised how young the stowaway seemed. He had a round, not unpleasing, face, well-proportioned features, and dark deep-set eyes. He was wearing a singlet, a flannel shirt, unbuttoned, and rough denim pants. Beneath the clothing his body seemed sturdy.

'Bon soir. Monsieur Duval,' Dan said. 'Excusez-nous de troubler votre sommeil, mais nous venons de la presse et nous savons que vous avez une histoire interessante a nous raconter

The stowaway shook his head slowly.

'It won't do no good talking French,' Stubby Gates interjected. 'Henri don't understand it. Seems like 'e got 'is languages mixed up when 'e was a nipper. Best try 'im in English, but take it slow.'

'All right.' Turning back to the stowaway, Dan said carefully, 'I am from the Vancouver Post. A newspaper. We would like to know about you. Do you understand?'

There was a pause. Dan tried again. 'I want to talk with you. Then I will write about you.'

'Why you write?' The words – the first Duval had spoken -held a mixture of surprise and suspicion.

Dan said patiently, 'Perhaps I can help you. You want to get off this ship?'

'You help me leave ship? Get job? Live Canada?' The words were mouthed awkwardly, but with unmistakable eagerness.

Dan shook his head. 'No, I can't do that. But many people will read what I write. Perhaps someone who will read can help you.'

Stubby Gates put in: 'Wotcher got ter lose, Henri? It can't do no 'arm; might even do yer a bit o' good.'

Henri Duval appeared to be considering.

Watching him closely, it occurred to Dan that whatever his background, the young stowaway possessed an instinctive, unobtrusive dignity.

Now he nodded. 'Hokay,' he said simply.

'Tell you what, Henri,' Stubby Gates said. 'YOU go an' wash up, an' me an' these people'!! go up an' wait for you in the galley.'

The young man nodded and eased himself from the bunk.

As they moved away, De Vere said softly, 'Poor little bastard.'

'Is he always locked in?' Dan asked.

'Just at night when we're in port,' Stubby Gates said. 'Captain's orders.'

'Why?'

'It's to make sure 'e don't take orf. The captain's responsible for 'im, see?' The seaman paused at the top of a companionway. 'It ain't as bad for 'im, 'ere, though, as in the States. When we was in Frisco they 'ad 'im 'andcuffed to 'is bunk.'

They reached the galley and went inside.

'How about a cuppa tea?' Stubby Gates asked.

'All right,' Dan said. 'Thanks.'

The seaman produced three mugs and crossed to an enamel teapot which was standing on a hot plate. He poured a strong dark brew to which milk had already been added. Putting the mugs on the galley table he motioned the others to sit down.

'I expect, being on a ship like this,' Dan said, 'you get to meet all kinds of people.'

'You said it, matey.' The seaman grinned. 'All shapes 'n' colours 'n' sizes. Some queer ones, too.' He glanced knowingly at the others.

'What's your opinion about Henri Duval?' Dan asked.

Stubby Gates took a deep swig from his own mug before answering.

' 'E's a decent little fellow. Most of us like 'im. 'E works when we ask 'im to, though a stowaway don't have to. That's the law o' the sea,' he added knowledgeably.

'Were you in the crew when he stowed aboard?' Dan asked.

'You betcher! We fahnd 'im when we was two days out o' Beirut. Thin as a ruddy broomstick, 'e was. I reckon the poor bastard was starvin' before 'e come on the ship.'

De Vere had tasted his tea and put it down.

'Bloody awful, ain't it?' their host said cheerfully. 'It tastes o' zinc concentrate. We picked up an 'old full of it in Chile. Bleedin' stuff gits in everything – yer 'air, yer eyes, even the tea.'

'Thanks,' the photographer said. 'Now I'll be able to tell them at the hospital.'

Ten minutes later Henri Duval came to the galley. In the meantime he had washed, combed his hair, and shaved. Over his shirt he wore a blue seaman's jersey. All his clothing was old but clean. A tear in the trousers, Dan noted, had been neatly darned.

'Come and sit down, Henri,' Stubby Gates said. He filled a fourth mug and placed it before the stowaway, who smiled his thanks. It was the first time he had smiled in the presence of the two newsmen, and it lighted his face, making him seem more boyish even than before.

Dan began the questioning simply. 'How old are you?'

There was the slightest of pauses, then Duval said, 'I twenty-three.'

'Where were you born?'

'I born on ship'

'What was the name of the ship?'

'I not know.'

'Then how do you know you were born on a ship?'

Again a pause. 'I not understand.'

Patiently, Dan repeated the question. This time Duval nodded understanding. He said, 'My mother tell me.'

'What nationality was your mother?'

'She French.'

'Where is your mother now?'

'She die.'

'When did she die?'

'Long time back – Addis Ababa.'

'Who was your father?' Dan asked.

'I not know him.'

'Did your mother tell you about him?'

'He English. A seaman. I never see.'

'You never heard his name?'

A negative headshake.

'Did you have any brothers or sisters?"

'No brother, sister.'

'When did your mother die?'

'Excuse -I not know.'

Reframing the question, Dan asked, 'Do you know how old you were when your mother died?'

'I six year old.'

'Afterwards, who looked after you?'

'I take care myself.'

'Did you ever go to school?'

'No school.'

'Can you read or write?'

'I write name – Henri Duval.'

'But nothing else?'

'I write name,' Duval insisted. 'I show.'

Dan pushed a sheet of copy paper and a pencil across the table. Slowly and in a wavering, childish hand the stowaway signed his name. It was decipherable but only just.

Dan gestured around him. 'Why did you stow aboard this ship?'

Duval shrugged. 'I try find country.' He struggled for words, then added, 'Lebanon not good.'

'Why not good?' Involuntarily Dan used the young stowaway's abbreviated English.

'I not citizen. If police find -I go to jail.'

'How did you get to Lebanon?'

'I on ship.'

'What ship was that?'

'Italian ship. Excuse -I not remember name.'

'Were you a passenger on the Italian ship?'

'I stowaway. I on ship one year. Try get off. No one want.'

Stubby Gates put in, 'As far as I can figure it, 'e was on this Eyetalian tramp, see? They was jist goin' back and forth rahnd the Middle East. So 'e 'ops it at Beirut an' gits on this one. Git it?'

'I get it,' Dan said. Then, to Duval, 'What did you do '" before you were on the Italian ship?'

'I go with men, camels. They give me food. I work. We go Somaliland, Ethiopia, Egypt.' He pronounced the names awkwardly, making a back-and-forth movement with his hand. 'When I small boy, crossing border not matter, no one care. Then when I bigger, they stop – no one want.'

'And that was when you stowed on the Italian ship?' Dan asked. 'Right?'

The young man nodded assent.

Dan asked, 'Do you have any passport, papers, anything to prove where your mother came from?'

'No paper.'

'Do you belong to any country?'

'No country.'

'Do you want a country?'

Duval looked puzzled.

'I mean,' Dan said slowly, 'you want to get of this ship. You told me that.' A vigorous nod, assenting.

'Then you want to have a country – a place to live?'

'I work,' Duval insisted. 'I work good.'

Once more, thoughtfully, Dan Orliffe surveyed the young stowaway. Was his tale of homeless wandering true? Was he, in fact, a castoff, a misborn whom no one claimed or wanted? Was he a man without a country? Or was it all a fabrication, an artful texture of lies and half-truths calculated to elicit sympathy?

The youthful stowaway looked guileless enough. But was he really?

The eyes seemed appealing, but somewhere within them was a veil of inscrutability. Was there a hint of cunning behind it, or was imagination playing tricks?

Dan Orliffe hesitated. Whatever he wrote would, he knew, be hashed over and checked out by the Post's rival afternoon paper, the Vancouver Colonist.

With no immediate deadline, it was up to himself how much time he took in getting the story. He decided to give his doubts a thorough workout.

'Henri,' he asked the stowaway, 'do you trust me?'

For an instant the earlier suspicion returned to the young man's eyes. Then abruptly he nodded.

'I trust,' he said simply.

'All right,' Dan said. 'I think perhaps I can help. But I want to know everything about you, right back from the beginning.' He glanced towards where De Vere was assembling his camera flash equipment. 'We'll take some photographs first, then we'll talk. And don't skip anything, and don't hurry because this is going to take a long time.'

Chapter 5

Henri Duval was still tiredly awake in the galley of the Vastervik.

The man from the newspaper had a tongue with many questions.

It was a puzzle at times, the young stowaway thought, to be certain what he wished. The man asked much, expecting plain words in return. And each answer made was written down quickly upon the sheets of paper before them at the table. It was as if Duval himself were being drawn out through the hurrying pencil point, his life that was past placed carefully in order. And yet, about so much of his life, there was nothing of order, only disconnected pieces. And so many things were hard to tell in plain words – this man's words – or even to remember in just the way they happened.

If only he had learned to read and write, to use pencil and paper for storing things from the mind, as this man and others like him did. Then he, too – Henri Duval – could preserve thoughts and the memory of things past. And not everything would have to stay in his brain, as on a shelf, hoping it would not become lost in forgetfulness, as some of the things he searched for now, it seemed, had done.

His mother had spoken once of schooling. She herself had been taught as a child to read and write. But that was long ago, and his mother had died before any schooling for himself could be begun. After that there was no one else to care what, or whether, he learned.

He frowned, his young face creased, groping for recollection; trying to answer the questions; to remember, remember, remember…

First there had been the ship. His mother had told him of it and it was on the ship that he had been born. They had sailed from Djibouti, in French Somaliland, the day before his birth and he believed that his mother had once told him where the ship was bound, but he had long since forgotten. And if she had ever said what flag the ship flew, that was forgotten too.

The birth had been hard and there was no doctor. His mother became weak and fevered and the ship's captain had turned his vessel, putting back into Djibouti. At the port, mother and child had been taken to the hospital for the poor.

– They had had little money, then or later.

Henri remembered his mother as comforting and gentle. His impression was that she was beautiful, but perhaps this was

'only fancy because the memory of how she looked had faded in his mind and now, when he thought of her, her face was in shadow, with features vague. But she had given him love; that much he was sure of, and he remembered because it was the only love he had ever known.

The early years were disjointed fragments in his mind. He knew that his mother had worked, when she could, to keep them in food, though at times there had been none. He had no recollection of the kind of work his mother had done, though he believed at one time she had been a dancer. The two of them had moved around a good deal – from French Somali-land into Ethiopia, first to Addis Ababa, then Massawa. Two or three times they had made the Djibouti-Addis Ababa trek.

At the beginning they had lived, though meagrely, among other French nationals. Later, as they had become poorer still, the native quarter was all the home they knew. Then, when Henri Duval was six, his mother had died.

After his mother's death his memories were mixed again. For a time – it was hard to be sure how long – he had lived in the streets, begging for food and sleeping at night in whatever hole or corner he could find. He had never gone to the authorities; it had not occurred to him to do so, for among the circle he moved in the police were looked on as enemies, not friends.

Then an elderly Somali, living alone in a hovel in the native quarter, had taken him in and provided shelter of a sort. The arrangement had lasted five years and then, for some reason, the old man left and Henri Duval was alone once more.

This time he drifted from Ethiopia across into British Somaliland, getting work where he could, and for another four years he was variously a shepherd's helper, a goatherd, and a boat boy, eking out a precarious day-to-day existence with wages seldom more than food and shelter.

Then and later, crossing international borders had been simple. There were so many families with children on the move that officials at border points seldom bothered with the children individually. At such moments he would merely attach himself to a family and pass unnoticed through the guards. In time he became adept at it. Even in his late teens his small stature continued to make this possible. Until, at twenty, after travelling with some Arab nomads, he was stopped for the first time and turned back at the borders of French Somaliland.,

Two truths were now revealed to Henri Duval. One: his days of slipping across borders with groups of children were over. Second: French Somaliland, which until this moment he had regarded as his own country, was closed to him. The first thing he had already suspected; the second came as a profound shock.

Fatefully, inevitably, he had encountered one of the fundamentals of modern society: that without documentation – the all-important fragments of paper, the very least of which is a certificate of birth – man is nothing, officially non-existent, and belonging nowhere on the territorially divided earth.

If men and women of learning have, at times, found the proposition hard to accept, to Henri Duval – without schooling of any kind and forced through his years of childhood to live like an unloved scavenger – it had come with shattering impact. The Arab nomads moved on, leaving Duval in Ethiopia, where he now knew he had no right to be either, and for a day and a night he sat huddled near the border crossing point at Hadele Gubo…

… There was a fold of bleached and weathered rock. In its shelter the twenty-year-old youth – still a child in many ways – stayed unmoving and alone… Directly ahead were the arid, boulder-studded plains of the Somalilands, bleak in moonlight and barren in the bright noon sun. And across the plains, sinuously winding like a dun-coloured serpent, was the dust-blown roadway to Djibouti – the final tenuous thread between Henri Duval and his past, between his childhood and his manhood, between his body, undocumented except by its living presence, and the sun-baked coastal city whose fish-smelling alleyways and salt-encrusted wharves he had thought of as his birthplace and his only home.

'Suddenly the desert ahead seemed familiar and inviting ground. And like a creature drawn by some primeval instinct to the place of its birth and mother love, so he longed to return to Djibouti, but now it was out of reach, as so much else was out of reach and would remain so for always.

Then, thirst and hunger at last stirring him, he rose. He turned from the forbidden country, heading north, because he had to head somewhere, towards Eritrea and the Red Sea…

The journey into Eritrea, west coast territory of Ethiopia, was one that he remembered clearly. He remembered, too, that on this journey he first began to steal systematically. Previously he had stolen food, but only in desperation when begging or work had failed. Now he no longer sought work and lived by thievery alone. He still stole food whenever there was an opportunity, and also goods or trinkets which could be sold for small amounts. What little money he got seemed to disappear at once, but always in back of his mind was the thought of accumulating enough to buy a passage on a ship – to some place where he could belong and could begin life again.

In time he had come to Massawa, port of coral and gateway from Ethiopia to the Red Sea.

It was in Massawa that retribution for stealing came close to overtaking him. Mingling in the crowd near a fishmonger's stall, he had purloined a fish, but the keen-eyed merchant had observed and given chase. Several others in the crowd, including a policeman, had joined in and within seconds Henri Duval was being pursued by what, to his youthful frightened ears, sounded like an angry mob. At a desperately fevered pace he had led them around Massawa's coral buildings and through tortuous back streets of the native quarter. Finally, having gained enough headway to reach the docks, he had hidden himself amid bales of ship's cargo awaiting loading. From a peephole he had watched his pursuers search, then eventually give up and go away.

But the experience had shaken him and he resolved to quit Ethiopia by any means he could. In front of his hiding place a freighter was moored and after nightfall he crept aboard, stowing in a dark locker which he stumbled into from a lower deck. The vessel sailed next morning. Two hours later he was discovered and brought before the captain.

The' ship was an antiquated Italian coal burner, plying leakily between the Gulf of Aden and the eastern Mediterranean.

The languid Italian captain boredly scraped dirt from beneath his fingernails as Henri Duval stood, trembling, before him.

After several minutes had passed the captain asked a sharp question in Italian. There was no response. He tried English, then French, but without result. Duval had long forgotten the little French he had learned from his mother and his speech was now a polyglot hodgepodge of Arabic, Somali, and Amharic, interspersed with stray words from Ethiopia's seventy languages and twice as many dialects.

Finding he could not communicate, the captain shrugged indifferently. Stowaways were no novelty on the ship and the captain, unhampered by tiresome scruples about maritime law, ordered Duval put to work. His intention was to dump the stowaway at the next port of call.

What the captain had not foreseen, however, was that Henri Duval, a man without a country, would be firmly rejected by immigration officials at every port of call, including Massawa, to which the ship returned several months later.

With the increasing time that Duval spent aboard, the captain's anger increased in ratio until, after ten months had gone by, he called his bosun into conference. Between them they devised a plan – which the bosun obligingly explained to Duval through an interpreter – whereby the stowaway's life was to be made so untenable that sooner or later he would be glad to jump ship. And eventually, after something like two months of overwork, beatings and semi-starvation, that was precisely what he did.

Duval recalled in sharp detail the night he had slipped silently down the gangway of the Italian ship. It was in Beirut, Lebanon – the tiny buffer state between Syria and Israel where, the legend says, St George once slew his dragon.

He had left as he had come, in darkness; and departure was easy because he had nothing to take and no possessions except the ragged clothes he wore. Once disembarked, he had at first scurried through the dockyard, intending to head for town. But the glimpse of a uniform in a lighted area ahead had unnerved him and sent him darting back, seeking shelter in the shadows. More reconnaissance showed that the dockyard was fenced and patrolled. He felt himself trembling; he was twenty-one, weak from hunger, incredibly alone, and desperately afraid.

As he moved, another shadow loomed. It was a ship.

At first he thought he had returned to the Italian freighter and his immediate impulse was to steal back on board. Better the misery he knew than the prison he envisaged waiting if police arrested him. Then he saw that the shadow was not the Italian ship but a larger one and he had scurried aboard it like a rat up a rope. It was the Vastervik, a fact he was to learn two days later and twenty miles at sea when starvation conquered fear and drove him, quaking, out of hiding.,

Captain Sigurd Jaabeck of the Vastervik was very different from his Italian counterpart. A slow-speaking, grey-haired Norwegian, he was a firm man, but just, who had respected both the precepts of his Bible and the laws of the sea. Captain Jaabeck explained sternly but carefully to Henri Duval that a stowaway was not compelled to work but could do so voluntarily, although without pay. In any case, whether working or not, he would receive the same rations as the ship's crew. Duval chose to work.

Like the Italian shipmaster. Captain Jaabeck fully intended to dispose of his stowaway at the first port of call. But unlike the Italian – after learning that there was to be no quick disposal of Duval – the thought of ill-treatment did not occur to him.

And so for twenty months Henri Duval remained aboard while the Vastervik mooched, cargo questing, over half the oceans of the world. They jogged with tramplike monotony through the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. They touched North Africa, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, England, South America, the United States, and Canada. And everywhere the petition of Henri Duval to land and remain was met with an emphatic no. The reason, when port officials bothered to give it, was always the same – the stowaway had no papers, no identity, no country, and no rights.

And then, after a while, when the Vastervik had settled down to accepting Duval as a permanency, the young stowaway had become something of a ship's pet.

The Vastervik's crew was an international miscellany which included Poles, Scandinavians, Lascars, a Chinese, an Armenian, and several English seamen of whom Stubby Gates was the accepted leader. It was the latter group which had adopted Duval and made his life, if not pleasant, at least as tolerable as crowded conditions in the ship allowed. They had helped him in speaking English, and now, although his accent was thick and phrasing awkward, at least with patience on both sides he could make himself understood.

It was one of the few genuine kindnesses that Henri Duval had ever experienced, and he responded much as an eager puppy dog responds to approval from its master. Nowadays he did personal jobs for the crew, helped the officers' steward, and ran shipboard errands. In return the men brought gifts of cigarettes and sweets from their trips ashore and occasionally Captain Jaabeck provided small sums of money which other seamen spent on Duval's behalf. But with it all, the stowaway was still a captive and the Vastervik, once a refuge, had become his prison.

Thus Henri Duval, whose only home was the sea, had come to the gates of Canada on the eve of Christmas.

Chapter 6

The interrogation had taken almost two hours. Partway through, Dan Orliffe had repeated some of his earlier questions in different terms, seeking to trip the young stowaway into an admission or inconsistency. But the ruse failed. Except for misunderstandings of language, which were cleared up as they went along, the basic story stayed the same.

Near the end, after a leading question phrased with deliberate inaccuracy, Duval had not answered. Instead he had turned his dark eyes upon his interrogator.

'You trick me. You think I lie,' the stowaway said, and again the newspaperman was aware of the same unconscious dignity he had noted earlier.

Ashamed at having his own trickery exposed, Dan Orliffe had said, 'I was just checking. I won't do it again.' And they had gone on to something else.

Now, back at his beat-up desk in the cramped, cluttered newsroom of the Vancouver Post Dan spread out his notes and reached for a sheaf of copy paper. Shuffling in carbons, he called across to the night city editor, Ed Benedict, at the city desk.

'Ed, it's a good story. How many words can you handle?'

The night city editor considered. Then he called back. 'Hold it down to a thousand.'

Pulling his chair closer to the typewriter, Dan nodded. It would do. He would have liked more but, assembled tautly, a thousand words could say a great deal.

He began to type.