The Poseidon Adventure Read online

  Richard Shelby said, 'Hollow leg.' He and his wife were a handsome couple and their daughter a fresh, gay creature. She had her father's somewhat square jawline and dark hair and her mother's refinement and vivacity combined with the American schoolgirl's sexless figure.

  The new arrivals were too far even for shouting, so Manny Rosen could only stand up and wave a welcome, for he liked them. The Beamer beamed back.

  A further scattering of passengers made their precarious way into the dining-saloon: Greeks, Belgians, a family of eight from Düsseldorf by the extraordinary name of Augenblick and a dozen or so others including British, Americans and some hardy Scandinavians. Rosen did not attempt to include them in the fold of The Strong Stomach Club since they were distributed at tables far removed over the vast area of the room. This honour he reserved for the little group who through the neighbourliness of the seating arrangements had come to acknowledge one another during the voyage.

  Lunch, at least to Robin Shelby, was threatening to develop into something exciting. Fiddles or racks were up on the tables to keep plates and cutlery from sliding to the floor and Peters with Acre his partner, the two stewards who served the four tables, performed ballets of equilibrium as they balanced trays.

  The six-foot-four of the Reverend Frank Scott came striding to his table rather giving the impression that he was impelling the ship with his legs than that the rolling vessel was moving him.

  Manny Rosen started to say, 'Welcome to . . .' but when Belle put her hand firmly on his arm, changed it to, 'Hi, Frank! We knew you'd make it.'

  Throughout the voyage it had been difficult to think of Scott as 'The Reverend'. Nearly everyone called him Frank or Buzz with the exception of Miss Kinsale who, with her more British respect for the American cloth, insisted upon addressing him as Dr Scott, and Rogo who referred to him as either Parson or Padre and managed to make both sound faintly mocking. The Europeans on board were quite baffled by him. He was so young and his sports achievements still so recent that the American contingent was unable to see him as anything but Buzz Scott, Princeton's star fullback, two-time Olympic decathlon champion, skier, conqueror of Andes Mountain peaks and perpetual winner in the athletic lists.

  Rarely off the sports pages during his college years he continued to make news during his studies at Union Theological Seminary as one of the party to climb the never before subdued San Jacinto peak in the Andes. At twenty-nine Scott was still a hustler and a bustler, an overpowering person, crew-cut, glowing with health and just saved from All-American-boy beauty by the wavering line of a broken nose. He had a direct, frank look-you-right-in-the-eye gaze that was both attractive and compelling and yet in a way also vaguely disconcerting, something undefinable and slightly disturbing behind the frankness. When he was at his games the glare of combat that came into his eyes was more suggestive of a heavyweight prize-fighter than a Minister of the Gospel.

  It was certainly true that he was all over the ship during the cruise, slashing bullet shots into unbeatable corners on the squash court; pounding out five miles around the promenade deck with a train of admiring youngsters in his wake, shattering clay pigeons without a miss at the sun deck skeet shoots; overwhelming opponents at deck tennis.

  His bronze torso had been on exhibition at the pool side. He daily violated the pulleys and exercise apparatus in the ship's gymnasium or put on gloves and toyed with the instructor there, a British ex-middleweight champion.

  Jane Shelby once remarked to her husband that, for her liking, he took up just slightly too much space. Her thoughts about his eyes she kept to herself for it seemed too absurd to suggest that so famous a public sports figure might harbour a touch of the fanatic except when he seemed to have carried the aura of the football field over into his own peculiar brand of evangelism.

  On this score he had managed to create a considerable impression by a sermon he had delivered one Sunday, when he had been asked to take Divine Service, and from which one had gathered that he was keeping himself fit and would continue to do so to score victories for God.

  Indeed, he had said outright during his discourse, 'God wants winners! God loves triers. He did not create you in His image to run second. He has no use for quitters, whiners or beggars. Every trial you're called upon to endure is an act of worship. Respect and stand up for yourselves and you will be respecting and standing up for Him. Let Him know that if He can't help you, you've got the guts and the will to go it alone. Fight for yourselves and He will be fighting at your side uninvited. When you succeed, it is because you've accepted Him, and He is in you. When you dog it, you've denied Him.'

  It had not been exactly Sunday church to which the various communicants had been accustomed but for the moment they had found themselves succumbing to the sincerity and fervour of his beliefs and they all had to admit in the end that at least it had been an experience and had given them something to talk about.

  Jane Shelby, upon emerging from the main lounge where the service had taken place, had said, 'Phew! I feel as though I ought to go out and beat someone at something.' And then she said, 'Do you know, that young man talks as though he believes he's signed on as head coach for God's team.'

  Her husband had replied irrelevantly and yet almost with a kind of reverence, 'He was the greatest football player ever turned out at Princeton.'

  Jane Shelby said, 'God should be pleased with that,' and he looked at her sharply to see whether she was joking but saw that she was keeping a perfectly straight face. Sometimes there were things about his wry, clear-eyed wife that eluded Richard Shelby. She had then asked suddenly, 'What do you suppose he's doing on this cruise?'

  'Oh,' her husband had replied, 'he told me. Taking a vacation between jobs.'

  'Between what jobs?'

  'I don't know,' Shelby had replied. 'I didn't ask him.'

  She then queried, 'Whatever do you suppose made a man like that go into the Church?' Then she added, 'You like him, don't you?' Jane Shelby was quite well aware that her husband practically hero-worshipped the younger Scott. She was quite prepared to look with her dry-humoured understanding on little boys who never grew up but there were unanswered questions about Scott that worried her and she wished that her husband were not quite so enchanted with his virtues.

  Shelby replied, 'Yes. He's quite a boy.'

  Actually, secretly Scott's choice of profession worried Dick Shelby, too. What made it all the more difficult for Shelby to understand was that Scott had come from a wealthy family. A spectacularly successful boy, what had led him into the ministry?

  Shelby himself was neither religious nor irreligious; he was simply a lifelong social and intellectual conformer. He believed that most men went into the church because they were not fit for anything else. The breed was completely foreign to him but because it was incumbent to his position as a Motors Vice President, he alternated Sundays between the exclusive Bloomfield Hills Country Club and the equally exclusive Grosse Point Episcopal Church.

  Upon the latter occasions he sat in his pew as befitted the head of the All-American family; his eyes properly lowered, his mind tightly shut to the abstractions produced by Dr Goodall from the pulpit. He considered the Rector to be a thundering bore, but conceded that he had a place in the social pattern and so was doing his job with the minimum of interference in the life of Dick Shelby. Religious feeling or emotion in no way entered the arrangement.

  Jane had then asked suddenly, 'He wouldn't be running away from something, would he? Or having a last fling?'

  Shelby's consciousness of things as they ought to be brought forth the reply, 'Ministers don't have flings,' and then quickly added in defence, 'Not that Frank is stuffy and he must have had plenty of passes made at him during the trip, but I'm sure he hasn't responded to any of them.'

  Jane had said, 'How do we know?' and than teased, 'He's probably too exhausted by nightfall.' Her husband hadn't thought it was funny.

  The Poseidon now heeled over again and Robin Shelby shouted, 'Whoa-a-a-a th
ere!' Scott loomed over the table, his huge frame following the angle of the ship. On the counter roll he slipped gracefully into his chair.

  Martin, a thin-lipped, wispy, greyish bantam cock of a man who never seemed to have a great deal to say, observed, 'You're just in time to join Manny's little organization -- The Strong Stomach Club.'

  Scott grinned, showing fine even teeth, except for one in front that had been chipped in his last game. His smile faded as he saw Rogo alone and he said, 'Is Mrs Rogo ill?' Even though the voyage was drawing to a close they were not on first-name terms. His voice had a fine timbre and was pleasant to the ear.

  'Yeah,' said Rogo.

  Scott said, 'I'm sorry.'

  Rogo said, 'Thanks,' and did not bother to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. He did not like Scott. In spite of his formidable physical attributes and reputation, Scott was a rah-rah boy to Rogo. All college-bred men, but in particular football players, were rah-rah boys to Rogo. The Columbia campus was a canker to him on the heart line of his beloved Broadway. He bristled with the age-old enmity between town and gown.

  Muller called over from his near-by table, 'Where's Mr Kyrenos?'

  Shelby replied, 'None of the officers seem to be here. I hope everything's all right.'

  Muller speared an olive and went at it in two bites with it held between thumb and forefinger. He said, 'All I know is it's devilishly uncomfortable. Why the deuce doesn't the Captain do something about it?'

  Rogo turned about in his chair to stare at Muller for a moment, his flat face showing unconcealed disgust. His contempt for Muller was almost as great as his dislike for Scott. If Scott was a rah-rah boy to Rogo, Muller was a sissy or a la-di-da. The San Franciscan was soft-spoken, soft-muscled, with too-white too-soft hands, slow moving and indolent and who, affecting the broad 'a' in speech, talked like what Rogo termed a half-ass Limey. He was further irritated by the cut of Muller's tailormade clothes.

  Rogo himself actually was proud of his own carefully manicured fingernails, but his hands were lumpy and battered where he had broken every knuckle upon the jaws or skulls of characters who had 'argued' with him. Arguing with him was Rogo's euphemism for resisting arrest. He was also something of a dude in dress, except that his clothes were unmistakably Broadway. He also always spoke in the slightly too-loud voice of the policeman who has become a successful plain-clothes detective. In his own way Rogo was something of a celebrity, particularly to New Yorkers, and held the Police Honour Medal for going in singlehanded to break up a prison riot at Westchester Plains, in which convicts had already killed two hostages.

  He had a bland, smooth-skinned face in which was set a pair of little piggy eyes, lids drawn down at the corners and which were never quite free from suspicion. To this was added a bashed-in nose acquired as a Golden Gloves welterweight champion. He hardly parted the whole of his mouth for speaking. He rarely smiled. His beat was the Broadway theatrical district between 38th and 50th, 6th to 9th Avenues, embracing some of New York's most unsavoury characters: rich gangsters, junkies, stick-up men, homos -- they were all alike to Rogo when he belted them.

  Belle Rosen said, 'Poor Linda, can I do anything for her?'

  The detective said, 'Nah, thanks, Belle. I guess she just wants to be left alone.'

  The Rosens and Rogo had known one another slightly in New York before they met again on the Christmas cruise of the Poseidon. The late-night crowd often patronized what Rosen referred to as his Pastrami Palace at Amster- dam Avenue and 74th Street before going home and Rogo sometimes used to drop in and look them over. This was sufficient to guarantee peace and quiet in Manny Rosen's delicatessen.

  Rogo's presence aboard the ship, despite his assurances that he was on his first holiday from his beat for five years, was never wholly accepted by the passengers. They preferred the fillip of mystery at having a real detective on board and produced a spate of gags such as: 'You look as though that dick had caught you in somebody else's cabin,' or: 'Why don't you give yourself up?' or, 'I saw the fuzz had his eye on you in the bar all last night.'

  Also the Poseidon rumour factory never gave up on the theory that Rogo was there for business, not pleasure. He was 'after' someone on the ship. The idea of a tough, Broadway cop dressing for dinner every night and going on sightseeing shore trips in Senegal, Liberia, the Ivory Coast or entering in the ping-pong tournament, simply did not wash with the gossipers and a number of attempts were made to pump him.

  Rogo's slightly vacant eyes of the professional destroyer would narrow into a squint of amusement, the closest he ever came to humour, when he was queried as to what was his real mission aboard and he would say, 'Ain't a cop got a right to have a vacation? Could be I wanted to see where all them jigaboos we got back home come from. Maybe I could get 'em to take some back.'

  The motion of the ship had become regularly spaced, though the angle of inclination was not always the same. Her old bones protested each roll.

  Richard Shelby leaned over towards the grab-bag table and said, 'No game today, Frank.'

  Scott grinned at him and said, 'Like to try anyway? I'll bet it would be interesting. Spot you five points.'

  Shelby's wife, horrified, said, 'Oh no, Dick!'

  Shelby looked uncomfortable for a moment, uncertain whether Scott was serious or not to risk breaking an arm or a leg in a canting court. But Jane had no doubts that the Minister was prepared to try. He seemed to be a lunatic where games were concerned.

  Shelby decided that Scott was kidding and said, 'Mother says no.'

  On the other side of the dining-saloon The Beamer, who was a partner in a stockbroking firm in the City of London, said, 'I'll have a double dry martini.'

  Pamela added, 'I'll have the same.' She was a plain, rather lumpy English girl with the thick legs attributed to games mistresses, dun-coloured hair cropped close and short and a high-flush complexion. But she had clear, friendly blue eyes and her expression, particularly when regarding The Beamer was one of almost perpetual wonder. Travelling with her mother she had attached herself to him during the voyage, or perhaps it was the other way around. She was innocently and captivatingly in love with him.

  The Beamer asked, 'How's your dear old Mum?'

  'Sick,' the girl replied.

  Pity,' said The Beamer and beamed at her. 'Then maybe we can have dinner together as well tonight.'

  She smiled back at him. Bates was far from handsome; fortyish with a round, red, innocent face, he arranged thinning hairs neatly across the top of his skull, was addicted to coloured waistcoats by day and was to be found in a silent, constant alcoholic haze which began at ten o'clock in the morning, perched upon a stool in the veranda, midships or smoke-room bar, beaming at every- one. At first he had been alone. When he made the accidental discovery that the girl could match him drink for drink and never show it, they were from then on inseparable.

  The martinis arrived. The Beamer toasted, 'Cheers!'

  Pamela said, 'Cheers!'

  The Beamer added, 'We'd better have another.'

  Robin Shelby was playing a game. He poised his bread roll and when the ship began to lean to port, he released it so that it went tumbling end-over-end until stopped by the fiddles at the edge of the table.

  The Poseidon, which had been sailing level for a moment, now canted over to port in a slow, continuing roll that for the first time seemed as though it would never end. Robin's bread leaped on to the floor. Everything began to go. To the musical sound of plates, knives, forks and glasses colliding with the wooden racks at the ends of the tables, was added the gentle jingling of the ornaments as the fifteen-foot Christmas tree, planted in a tub of sand affixed to the floor of the dining-room, leaned over alarmingly. Far over on her side, farther it seemed than she had ever been before, the ship appeared to hang there as though she were never coming back.

  Belle Rosen gasped, 'Manny, look!' For outside their window that blue and innocent, sun-gilded sea seemed to be directly beneath them as they were tilted over in their chairs. Her p
lump white hands gripped the table so hard that her rings cut into the flesh of her stubby fingers.

  It was no longer a game to young Robin. He was frightened and did not shout, 'Yay!' or 'Wow!', but held on tightly and looked anxiously across the table at his father. A silence gripped them all and Muller, pale, half rose, bracing himself against the glass pane. He was convinced that they were going over.

  The two stewards had both been serving at the time, and Peters, the taller, balancing hard against the tilt of the ship, said, 'That's all right, sir,' while Acre, forced to cling to the back of one of the chairs, added, 'She'll be all right. She always comes back.'

  It appeared that the big ship had never creaked or groaned or agonized so as she laboured to right herself and slowly pulled out of the roll. The sea which had come so menacingly close receded from the port windows and now showed blue sky, striated with cirrus clouds, as the vessel leant over on her starboard oscillation. She continued to oscillate diminishingly; plates and cutlery slid back into place again.