The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,14

strange sensation of unease I had felt there in the office of the FBI. Merely by turning my head I could look along the port side of the deck, between mizzen and main, where I had stood that day with head bared to the brazen heat of the sun and watched the body as it faded slowly and disappeared, falling silently into the depths and the crushing pressures and eternal darkness two miles below. It was the awful finality of it—the fact that if the FBI couldn’t find out something about him, pick up his trail somewhere, they might never know who he was. There’d never be a second chance. No fingerprints, no photograph, no possibility of a better description, nothing. He was gone, forever, without leaving a trace. Was that it? Was it going to bother me the rest of my life—the fact that I had failed to bring the body ashore where it might have been identified?

Oh, hell, I thought angrily, you’re just being morbid. You did everything humanly possible. Except remove the stomach; that would have helped, but you chickened out. So you did like the man; that’s no excuse. It’s done. But it wouldn’t have changed anything in the long run. You were still three hundred miles from the Canal. And in that heat, trying to stretch it any longer would have been more than just unpleasant; it could have become dangerous. Burial was a practical necessity long before it became a ritual.

But there must be some clue. We’d been together for four days, and in that length of time even a man as uncommunicative as Baxter would have said something that would provide a lead as to where he was from. Think back. What was it Soames had said about association? Right here within this span of forty feet was where it had all taken place. Start at the beginning, with the first time you ever saw Baxter, and go over every minute.

I stopped. Just why was it necessary? Or rather, why did I feel it was? Why this subconscious fear that they weren’t going to find anybody in Panama who knew Baxter? The man said he’d worked there. If he had, the FBI would run him down in a day. Was it merely because the San Francisco address had proved a dead end? No, there must be more. . . .

* * *

It had rained during the afternoon, a slashing tropical downpour that drummed along the deck and pocked the surface of the water like hail, but it was clear now, and the hot stars of the southern latitudes were ablaze across the sky. The Topaz was moored stern-to at a low wooden wharf with her anchor out ahead, shadowy in the faint illumination from a lamp a half block away where the row of palms along the street stirred and rustled in the breeze blowing in from the Caribbean.

It was eight p.m. Keefer had gone off to the nearest bar with two or three dollars he had left from the twenty I’d advanced him. I went below to catalogue and stow the charts I had bought. I switched on the overhead light and stood for a moment at the foot of the companion ladder, looking forward. She was all right. She had a good interior layout, and the six-foot-two-inch headroom was adequate.

The small bottled-gas stove and stainless-steel sink of the galley were on the port side aft, with the wooden refrigerator below and stowage above. To starboard was a settee. Above it was the RDF and radiotelephone, and a chart table that folded back when not in use. Just forward of this area were two permanent bunks, and beyond them a locker to port and the small enclosed head to starboard. These, and the curtain between them, formed a passage going into the forward compartment, which was narrower and contained two additional bunks.

The charts were in a roll on the settee. I cut the cord binding them, and pulled down the chart table. Switching on the light above it, I began checking them off against my list, rolling them individually, and stowing them in the rack overhead. It was hot and very still here below, and sweat dripped off my face. I mopped at it, thinking gratefully that tomorrow we would be at sea.

I had a Hydrographic Office general chart of the Caribbean spread out on the table and was lighting a cigarette when a voice called out quietly from ashore, “Ahoy, aboard