Maiden Voyage

THIRTY-THREE

Towards evening, the seas began to subside, and the gale-force wind began to blow itself out. At half-past seven, the skies to the southwest cleared away, and the passengers of the Arcadia were treated to a summer sunset on the scale of the Last Judgement—dazzling chords of light that played on a sparkling grey sea, and mountainous banks of cloud that were gorged with crimson, purple and smoky gold, and topped with cream. In the smoking room, where he had lost something very close to 600 pounds in large white fivers to Maurice Peace during the course of the storm, Sir Terence Harding-Crump stood by the porthole observing this glory for almost five minutes before remarking, "You think they'd tone it down a bit. This is a British ship, you know."

Maurice Peace, his mouth chockful of club sandwich, scooped in 250 pounds more, and said, "You're right, Sir Terence. It's in very squalid taste. God was supposed to be an Englishman, not a Broadway set designer." Then he smiled benignly at the gentleman opposite, whom he had now fleeced for the sixth successive game. But Maurice never cheated. Well, not very often.

The gentleman opposite was one of those odd coves who always stirred up a whirlwind of rumour on voyages like these. He was very tall, and he habitually wore perniciously small sunglasses, and a white silk scarf around the lower part of his face. His large head was topped by a dense thatch of peppery hair, a toupee so blatantly false, right down to the canvas backing which showed through the parting, that Baroness Zawisza had concluded that it could not possibly be worn by a man who was actually bald. "It is a disguise," she had declaimed, "not a cosmetic improvement. If a man were bald, and had to wear a toupee like that, he would die of embarrassment." The rest of the first-class lady passengers had at first supposed that the man was a ruined Russian prince, travelling incognito. But Princess Xenia soon scotched that idea. She knew all the Russian princes, especially the ruined ones, and even behind those menacing spectacles he was nobody that she could place. Then the ladies had wondered if he were a celebrated motion-picture star, hideously burned in an accident in Europe, travelling back to Hollywood for plastic surgery. Yet all the most famous motion-picture stars seemed to be accounted for. Douglas Fairbanks was on board, and hobbling bravely about with a bandaged ankle. Rudolf Valentino was filming The Eagle. John Barrymore, The Great Profile, was taking a vacation in Honolulu. And whoever it was under that thatch, it wasn't Charles Farrell or John Gilbert. Perhaps the mystery man was a great millionaire, returning to the United States after a tragic love affair. On the other hand, perhaps he wasn't.

What made him even more mystifying was his voice, which could only be heard indistinctly through his silk scarf. Was he American, or British? Perhaps he was a German, trying to elude the military police, who wanted him for grotesque war crimes. Perhaps he was Baron von Richthofen himself, the Red Baron, who was supposed to have been shot down in 1918.

But all anyone could determine for certain was that he was travelling alone and that he always dined alone. He ordered a nightly trolley a entrecote steak or poached halibut to be wheeled to his stateroom, which was one of the most expensive on board, and designed on a theme of "Joy"—which meant that he ate his steak amidst a great many frosted glass sculptures of naked girls with their arms flung up in the air. He emerged only after dark, to sit in the smoking room in his bizarre disguise, and play cards, usually for stakes of 600 to 700 pounds. Not too much, but not sneezing money, either.

Maurice shuffled the cards and beamed, "Another hand?"

The gentleman opposite shook his head slowly from side to side. "I think not," he said hoarsely. "She'll kill me if I lose any more."

"Ah, so there's a she?" said Maurice, quite affably, not obviously prying.

"It was a figure of speech. I was talking about fate."

"Ah, fate," said Maurice, in the manner of a man who knows all about fate, the same way that other men have become familiar with prostitutes or loan sharks. "Well, fate's a peculiar mistress, wouldn't you say so?"

"I suppose so. There are more peculiar things."

Maurice kept on shuffling. The cards flowed from one hand to the other in a ceaseless flickering flow, and he never looked at them once. "Well, then," he said, "that's an interesting point of view. What could be more peculiar than fate?"

"Mr. Wheatley's housing scheme," said the gentleman opposite.

Maurice snapped the cards into a single immaculate deck, and laid them face-down on the table. "I'm afraid you've lost me there, sir. What's Mr. Wheatley's housing scheme, when it answers?"

"It's a proposal, currently suggested by the British Government, that local authorities should build houses for the poor at a cost to the taxpayer and to the ratepayer of 240 pounds each. Well, it's scandalous nonsense, of course."

"I see," said Maurice. "Parliamentarian, are you? Is that it?"

The tall man sighed and lowered his head, so that Maurice had a generous view of his canvas-backed hairpiece. "It's all very difficult," he said, in a voice which was distinctly English. "This is not really my sort of style at all."

"Maybe another game will cheer you up," said Maurice, shuffling the cards yet again, so that they flowed out of one delicate, white-fingered hand into the other, like Chinese paper snakes. Maurice's hands could have been the hands of a watchmaker, or a Baldovinetti cherub. Gentle, soft, sure, with perfectly-manicured nails. Not effeminate, but immaculate. The hands of an expert gambler, a man who has spent most of his waking life in dim West Coast saloons and smoky New York speaks and chemin-de-fer pits all over the civilised world; a man who scarcely sees daylight from one Christmas to the next. Maurice could tell stories about poker games in Zurich that had gone on for nearly a week; about outrageous bets in France on the speed of Burgundian snails; and that last riotous night of legal gambling in Nevada, on October 1st, 1910, when he had won $17,630 on a single hand of faro, and had his left nostril bitten by a woman in a fruit-laden hat.

He had contrived all of his adult life to be on the scene of as many of the most historic, gilded, and richly profitable gambling events to which it was possible for one man to travel. He would bet on anything anywhere, from Epsom to Longchamps, from Hong Kong to Reno, provided the company was the classiest and the stakes were high. He was not a "Gentleman Jim"—one of those spuriously elegant gamblers with pomaded hair and ostentatious cufflinks. He was a plain workingman. But he was one of the best.

The tall man in the toupee watched Maurice shuffling for a while, and then pushed back his chair. "Yes, I think I'll pass, if you don't mind. You don't mind if I pass? Four hundred pounds is quite enough in one storm.'

"Suit yourself," said Maurice.

"I only wish that I could," replied the man in the toupee. He looked suddenly disconsolate, like a scarecrow with no crows to scare. "But it seems to me that my life these days has very little to do with suiting myself. I have served others for so long that most of the people around me have forgotten that I might have a few modest needs of my own. At least, she seems to have forgotten."

Maurice Peace grinned at him. It was rightly said of Maurice that he had the kind of face you thought you knew already, even when you were meeting him for the first time, but which you could never quite remember once he'd gone. Even his name seemed to fade from people's memories, like the print on a box of cereal that had been left too long in a grocery store window.

"I'll give you another game, old boy," put hi Sir Terence Harding-Crump, producing a crinkly sheaf of ten-pound notes from his grey Savile Row jacket. "Perhaps I can win back on calm seas everything that I lost when it was rough. And, besides, I believe I feel lucky again."

Completely ignoring Sir Terence, Maurice asked the man in the toupee, "Who's she? The she who seems to have forgotten?"

"She? Did I say she?" The man quite openly adjusted his toupee so that it covered more of his forehead, and tugged at his silk scarf. "Well, yes, she."

It didn't seem as if the man was going to explain himself any further and Maurice certainly wasn't going to press him. He was much more interested in the contents of the man's wallet than in the murky secrets of his private life, although his extraordinarily inept disguise was a most intriguing. The curious thing about it was that, as a disguise, it actually worked, because nobody could decide who he was. But then, it was possible that nobody knew who he was anyway, with or without his false hair, and his raffish silk scarf.

Sir Terence said, "Ready, Mr. Peace?"

"Oh, sure," said Maurice, a little abstractedly, and blocked the cards into a neat stack again.

"I think I'll have a drink," said the man in the toupee.

"A drink to forget, or a drink to cheer you up?" Sir Terence guffawed. At Harrow, his nickname had been Chortler.

"A drink to the successful outcome of this voyage,' the man in the toupee said dolefully. "And perhaps a drink to Their Majesties, for good measure."

"Try the king-size martini if you're not going to play any more cards," suggested Maurice, with that same sly grin. "It's a house special. Six ounces of freezing-cold gin over ice. A real belter. Mr. Ernie Byfield invented it at the Pump Room in Chicago, because he thought it would encourage his diners to spend more money on extravagant food."

"And did it?" asked Sir Terence, picking up his cards and fanning them out in his hand.

Maurice dispassionately looked at the natural nine which he had dealt himself. "Not a chance," he replied. "The staff were carrying the guests out to the taxi rank before dinner had even started."

The smoking-room steward came over with his silver tray balanced on his fingertips and took their order. Maurice, as usual, asked for club soda. Sir Terence wanted a dressed crab sandwich to keep him going until dinner.

"Do you have something riding on this voyage?" Maurice asked the man in the toupee in an offhand tone.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You said you wanted to drink to the successful outcome of this voyage. That led me to suppose that you might have something tied up in it. A stake in the shipping company, something like that."

The man said, "Yes, well, I suppose you could put it that way."

"Keys are a bit wobbly on the Stock Exchange," said Sir Terence. "If I were you, I'd order two of those martinis."

"Oh, I'm not a stockholder," said the man in the toupee. "More of a beneficiary."

"Curiouser and curiouser," Sir Terence said to himself.

Maurice was silent for a while, as he concentrated on his game. Then he said, "Did I ever see you in Monte Carlo?"

The man in the toupee lifted his head up. "Possibly," he said, although he didn't sound very sure of himself. "But, of course, you wouldn't have recognised me. I mean, I wouldn't have been dressed like this."

"Why are you dressed like that? All the ladies seem to think that you're a famous film star suffering from leprosy. Well, I don't know about the leprosy, but you're not a famous film star, are you?"

There was a lengthy pause. The man picked up a pencil that had been left on the table, and then set it down again. "No," he said, "I'm not."

"You're British?"

The man nodded.

"And you're not a leper?"

The man shook his head.

Maurice turned to Sir Terence, who was lighting up a Sobranie cigarette with a gold lighter by Terra Nova of Italy. "It's all very mystifying," he said. "Here we have a British gentleman who is not suffering from leprosy travelling in a patently obvious disguise. He may be a Parliamentarian of some kind, because he seems to be worried about welfare housing programme. He plays cards as if he were something of a regular gambler, and yet he plays them cautiously. His caution appears somehow to be connected with an unknown female whom he calls "she". Now, is that a puzzle or is that a puzzle?"

"I agree," said Sir Terence. "It's a puzzle." Then, "Damn," as Maurice beat him yet again.

"He's not a Government minister," said Maurice. "A Government minister couldn't get away from his office for long enough to cross the Atlantic dressed as a failed cellist. Besides, he expressed an anti-Government sentiment earlier on. Nor is he a senior civil servant. Senior civil servants don't usually go to Monte Carlo to gamble, and this chap has admitted that I might have seen him there."

The tall man in the toupee listened to all this with great moroseness, his arms folded on the card table. But behind his tiny dark glasses, his eyes were obviously following the soft sleight-of-hand of Maurice Peace's dealing, and the way the cards seemed to fly in and out of their suits at Maurice's unconscious command. He said nothing, though. Gave nothing away. If they wanted to find out who he was, and why he was here, they were going to have to do it by themselves.

The smoking-room steward arrived with their refreshments. The king-size martini manifested itself in a chilled tulip-shaped glass of magnificent proportions; while Sir Terence's crab sandwich was served on a silver plate that was decorated with cracked crab claws, piped mayonnaise, and flowers that were cut from radishes and tomatoes. It was impossible to order even a humble bacon sandwich on board the Arcadia without it being served up as though it were an exotic dish from one of the world's finest restaurants. Maurice's club sandwich had been a ziggurat of freshly-roasted turkey, Derbyshire cheese, iceberg lettuce, Polish tomatoes, and West Country ham; and it had taken him nearly two hours to eat it.

"Their Majesties," said the tall man in the toupee, rising from his chair and lifting his martini glass.

Sir Terence rose too, and out of respect for the Arcadia's nationality, so did Maurice.

"You know something funny," said Sir Terence, as they sat down again. "I used to know a chap out in Singapore who was an absolute devil for the wives of any officer who was more than one rank above his. I think it was his own quiet way of mocking the Army without getting himself into serious trouble. Randy bugger, and no mistake. The wives used to call him "Half-Hard Horace". Well, one night out at Selarang Park, which was where most of the brass used to stay—"

The tall man in the toupee belched loudly. "I beg your pardon," he said. Then he sat back in his chair and examined his empty martini glass from a greater distance, as if he were longsighted. "I beg your pardon," he repeated.

Maurice, looked at Sir Terence and raised a questioning eyebrow. Sir Terence shrugged. Through the porthole of the smoking room, the evening sun shone as if it were being painted for the cover of a children's annual for 1925.

It was almost time to dress for dinner, and the orchestra could be heard in the background playing a smooth preprandial melody.

"Steward," called the tall man in the toupee. "I believe I'll have another of those martinis."

"I regret that they're limited to one to a passenger, sir."

"I see. Well, bring one for my friend here, and if he doesn't want it, I'll drink it for him."

Maurice took a ten-pounds note off the table and gave it to the steward. "'Bring the gentleman what he wants, okay? I'll make sure that he doesn't throw himself overboard, or anything picturesque like that."

The steward palmed the money as deftly as Maurice had been dealing cards. "Very good, sir," he said, with that distant rabbitlike stare that is acquired through years of pocketing tips.