from there. He turned and searched the after well-deck and the ventilators of number three and four holds, but could see nothing. But now it was gone.

Karen Brooke came back around the corner of the deckhouse. ‘Do you suppose poor Mr. Krasicki will be buried at sea also?’ she asked.

‘Probably,’ Goddard said. ‘I don’t think he had any family at all.’

She nodded somberly. ‘I love ships,’ she said. ‘But there’s something about this one that is beginning to scare me. I know it sounds silly—’

‘No, it’s normal enough,’ Goddard replied. ‘Deaths at sea affect people that way; to coin a phrase, they’re all in the same boat.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Do you know what our cargo is?’

‘Some copper ingots,’ she said, ‘and a little general cargo, but mostly cotton. Several thousand bales for the Japanese textile mills.’

He nodded. When she had gone on, continuing her walk, he stood looking somberly aft across the well-deck. Cotton. Great, he thought; that’s all we need now.

* * *

What little breeze there was died out by mid-morning, and the heat became an ordeal. An air of sullenness and unease lay over the whole ship; the second death in three days left its mark on everybody. Word was passed that the sea burial would take place the following afternoon at four. Tempers were on edge. A fight broke out on the deck below; Rafferty, the hoodlum room steward, beat up one of the oilers, and Lind had to be called to stitch up a cut face.

Shortly after eleven there was another breakdown in the engine room, and the Leander slowed and came to rest on a sea like burnished steel. A shaft bearing running hot again, Barset said; the chief hoped to be under way again in an hour, but the hour passed, and then two, while the Leander continued to lie motionless under the burning sun. No one appeared for lunch. Both women were apparently in their bunks, under the fans. Goddard continued to prowl the promenade deck, stopping every few minutes at the aft end of it to sniff the air and study the ventilators in the well-deck. It was just after one p.m., when he finally saw it, a wispy thread of smoke snaking upward from the starboard ventilator of number three hold. It thinned and disappeared, but there was no longer any doubt. The Leander’s cargo was afire.

Somewhere in the depths of number three hold was a smoldering bale of cotton like a cancer cell, being consumed by slow combustion that inexorably spread outward to attack adjoining bales. It could have been burning inside when it came aboard, or some longshoreman’s stolen cigarette might have started it. The smoldering could go on for days or weeks without bursting into flame, eating away, charring, half-smoldering, while the temperature inside the mass continued to rise, until it came out on the surface and some of the bales below began to collapse, exposing enough of it to the air to become a raging fire.

Did Steen know about it? Probably, Goddard thought, but unless he had a fire-smothering system in the holds there wasn’t much he could do about it but hold his breath and pray. If the burning bales were far down or in the center of the hold, trying to get water to them through thousands of others was futile, short of flooding the entire hold.

Sparks came down the ladder. He jerked his head curtly. ‘Captain says to come up to his office.’

Goddard studied him with silent and calculated arrogance for thirty seconds, and then said, ‘It must have suffered in the translation.’ He could get enough of this surly bastard; if he were convinced all Yanquis were overbearing pigs, why disappoint him?

With no change of expression, Sparks repeated the message in Spanish, which Goddard knew well enough to follow. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But I wasn’t referring to the language. Just the manners.’ He went up the ladder.

Steen looked worried. ‘Sit down, Mr. Goddard,’ he said with attempted casualness that didn’t quite go over. He was seated at his desk with a block of yellow paper in front of him. Goddard sat in one of the armchairs. Before Steen could speak, there was another knock outside the door. It was Mr. Pargoras, the chief engineer, a bald, swarthy man in khakis completely drowned with perspiration. He stepped inside and nodded to Goddard.

‘What is it, Chief?’ Steen asked. ‘About finished?’

‘It’ll be another half hour.’ The chief mopped his face with a sodden