The Drowned World

CHAPTER 8 The Man with the White Smile

His handsome saturnine face regarding them with a mixture of suspicion and amused contempt, Strangman lounged back under the cool awning that shaded the poop deck of the depot ship. He had changed into a crisp white suit, the silk-like surface of which reflected the gilt plate of his high-backed Renaissance throne, presumably dredged from some Venetian or Florentine lagoon, and invested his strange personality with an almost magical aura.

"Your motives seem so complex, Doctor," he remarked to Kerans. "But perhaps you've given up hope of understanding them yourself. We shall label them the total beach syndrome and leave it at that.

He snapped his fingers at the steward standing in the shadows behind him and selected an olive from the tray of small chow. Beatrice, Kerans and Bodkin sat in a semi-circle on the low couches, alternately chilled and roasted as the erratic air-conditioner above them varied its perimeter. Outside, half an hour before noon, the lagoon was a bowl of fire, the scattered light almost masking the tall apartment house on the opposite bank. The jungle was motionless in the immense heat, the alligators hiding in whatever shade they could find.

Nonetheless several of Strangman's men were messing about in one of the scows, unloading some heavy diving equipment under the direction of a huge hunchbacked negro in a pair of green cotton shorts. A giant grotesque parody of a human being, now and then he took off his eye-patch to bellow abuse at them, and the mingled grunts and curses drifted across the steaming air.

"But tell me, Doctor," Strangman pressed, apparently dissatisfied with Kerans' answers, "when do you finally propose to leave?"

Kerans hesitated, wondering whether to invent a date. After waiting an hour for Strangman to change, he had offered their greetings to him and tried to explain why they were still there. However, Strangman seemed unable to take the explanation seriously, swinging abruptly from amusement at their naivety to sharp suspicion. Kerans watched him carefully, reluctant to make even the smallest false move. Whatever his real identity, Strangman was no ordinary freebooter. A curious air of menace pervaded the depot ship, its crew and their master. Strangman in particular, with his white smiling face, its cruel lines sharpening like arrows when he grinned, disturbed Kerans.

"We haven't really considered the possibility," Kerans said. "I think we all hope to stay on indefinitely. We have small stocks of supplies."

"But my dear man," Strangman remonstrated, "the temperature will soon be up to nearly two hundred degrees. The entire planet is rapidly returning to the Mesozoic Period."

"Precisely," Dr. Bodkin cut in, rousing himself for a moment from his introspection. "And insofar as we are part of the planet, a piece of the main, we too are returning. This is our zone of transit, here we are re-assimilating our own biological pasts. That's why we have chosen to remain here. There is no ulterior motive, Strangman."

"Of course not, Doctor, I completely respect your sincerity." Shifts of mood seemed to cross and re-cross Strangman's face, making him look in turn irritable, amiable, bored and abstracted. He listened to an air-line pumping from the scow, then asked: "Dr. Bodkin, did you live in London as a child? You must have many sentimental memories to recapture, of the great palaces and museums." He added: "Or are the only memories you have pre-uterine ones?"

Kerans looked up, surprised at the ease with which Strangman had mastered Bodkin's jargon. He noticed that Strangman was not only watching Bodkin shrewdly, but also waiting for any reaction from himself and Beatrice.

But Bodkin gestured vaguely. "No, I'm afraid I remember nothing. The immediate past is of no interest to me."

"What a pity," Strangman rejoined archly. "The trouble with you people is that you've been here for thirty million years and your perspectives are all wrong. You miss so much of the transitory beauty of life. I'm fascinated by the immediate past-the treasures of the Triassic compare pretty unfavourably with those of the closing years of the Second Millennium."

He leaned around on one elbow and smiled at Beatrice, who sat with her hands discreetly covering her bare knees, like a mouse observing a particularly fine cat. "And what about you, Miss Dahl? You look a little melancholy. A touch of time-sickness, perhaps? The chronoclasmic bends?" He chuckled, amused by this sally, and Beatrice said quietly: "We're usually rather tired here, Mr. Strangman. By the way, I don't like your alligators."

"They won't hurt you." Strangman leaned back and surveyed the trio. "It's all very strange." Over his shoulder he rapped a short command at the steward, then sat frowning to himself. Kerans realised that the skin of his face and hands was uncannily white, devoid altogether of any pigmentation. Kerans' heavy sunburn, like that of Beatrice and Dr. Bodkin, made him virtually indistinguishable from the remainder of the negro crew, and the subtle distinctions between the mulattos and quadroons had vanished. Strangman alone retained his original paleness, the effect emphasised by the white suit he had chosen.

The bare-chested negro in the peaked cap appeared, sweat rilling across his powerful muscles. He was about six feet in height, but the rolling breadth of his shoulders made him seem stocky and compact. His manner was deferential and observant, and Kerans wondered how Strangman managed to maintain his authority over the crew, and why they accepted his harsh, callous tone.

Strangman introduced the negro curtly. "This is the Admiral, my chief whip. If I'm not around when you want me, deal with him." He stood up, stepping down from the dais. "Before you leave, let me take you on a brief tour of my treasure ship." He extended an arm gallantly to Beatrice, who took it timorously, his eyes glinting and rapacious.

At one time, Kerans surmised, the depot ship had been a gambling steamer and floating vice den, moored beyond the five-mile limit outside Messina or Beirut, or in the shelter of some estuarine creek under the biander, more tolerant skies south of the equator. As they left the deck a squad of men were lowering an ancient ornamental gangway to the water's edge, its bannisters of peeling gilt shaded by a white clapboard marquee painted with gold tassels and drapery, creaking about on its pulleys like a funicular gazebo. The interior of the ship was decorated in a similar pastiche baroque. The bar, now dark and closed, at the forward end of the observation deck was like the stern castle of a ceremonial galleon, naked gilt carytids supporting its portico. Semi-columns of fake marble formed little loggias that led away to the private alcoves and dining rooms, while the divided central stairway was a bad film set of Versailles, an aerial riot of dusty cupids and candelabra, the grimy brass overlayed with mould and verdigris.

But the former roulette wheels and chemin de fer tables had gone, and the scarred parquet flooring was covered with a mass of crates and cartons, piled up against the wire mesh windows so that only a faint reflection of the light outside seeped through. Everything was well packed and sealed, but on an old mahogany chart table in one corner Kerans saw a collection of bronze and marble limbs and torsos, fragments of statuary waiting to be sorted.

Strangman paused at the bottom of the staircase, tearing off a strip of fading tempera from one of the murals. "The place is falling to bits. Hardly up to the standard of the Ritz, Doctor. I envy your good sense."

Kerans shrugged. "It's a low-rent area now." He waited as Strangman unlocked a door, and they entered the main storehold, a dim stifling cavern packed with large wooden crates, the floor strewn with sawdust. They were no longer in the refrigerated section of the ship, and the Admiral and another sailor followed them closely, continually hosing them with ice-cold air from a faucet on the wall. Strangman snapped his fingers and the Admiral quickly began to pull away the canvas wrappings draped between the crates.

In the thin light Kerans could just see the glimmering outline of a huge ornamented altarpiece at the far end of the hold, fitted with elaborate scroll-work and towering dolphin candelabra, topped by a neo-classical proscenium which would have covered a small house. Next to it stood a dozen pieces of statuary, mostly of the late Renaissance, stacks of heavy gilt frames propped against them. Beyond these were several smaller altarpieces and triptyches, an intact puipit in panelled gold, three large equestrian statues, a few strands of sea-weed still entwined in the horses' manes, several pairs of enormous cathedral doors, embossed in gold and silver, and a large tiered marble fountain. The metal shelves around the side of the hold were loaded with smaller bric a brac: votive urns, goblets, shields and salvers, pieces of decorative armour, ceremonial inkstands and the like.

Still holding Beatrice's arm, Strangman gestured expansively a few yards ahead. Kerans heard him say 'Sistine Chapel' and 'Medici Tomb' but Bodkin muttered: "Aesthetically, most of this is rubbish, picked for the gold content alone. Yet there's not much of that. What is the man up to?"

Kerans nodded, watching Strangman in his white suit, the barelegged Beatrice beside him. Suddenly he remembered the Delvaux painting, with its tuxedoed skeletons. Strangman's chalk-white face was like a skull, and he had something of the skeleton's jauntiness. For no reason he began to feel an intense distaste for the man, his hostility more generalised than personal.

"Well, Kerans, what do you think of them?" Strangman pivoted at one end of the aisle and swung back, barking at the Admiral to cover the exhibits again. "Impressed, Doctor?"

Kerans managed to take his eyes off Strangman's face and glanced at the looted relics.

"They're like bones," he said flatly.

Baffled, Strangman shook his head. "Bones? What on earth are you talking about? Kerans, you're insane! Bones, Good God!"

As he let out a martyred groan, the Admiral took up the refrain, first saying the word quietly to himself as if examining a strange object, then repeating it more and more rapidly in a sort of nervous release, his broad face gibbering with laughter. The other sailor joined in, and together they began to chant it out, convulsed over the fire hose like snake dancers.

"Bones! Yes, man, dem's all bones! Dem bones dem bones dem…!"

Strangman watched them angrily, the muscles of his face locking and unlocking like manacles. Disgusted with this display of rudeness and bad temper, Kerans turned to leave the hold. In annoyance Strangman rushed after him, pressed the palm of his hand in Kerans' back and propelled him along the aisle out of the hold.

Five minutes later, as they drove off in one of the scows, the Admiral and half a dozen other members of the crew lined the rail, still chanting and dancing. Strangman had regained his humour, and stood coolly in his white suit, detached from the others, Waving ironically.