"MacLean, Alistair - The Golden Rendezvous" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Alistair)

hold, stared down at it for a few seconds, then turned and made his way
forward, lifting his hat again and giving me a clear, untroubled smile
as he came by. For want of anything better to do, I smiled back at him.
Five minutes later the ancient truck, the two packards, the jeep, and
the last of the stevedores were gone and macdonald was busy supervising
the placing of the battens on number four hold. By five o'clock, a
whole hour before deadline and exactly on the top of the tide, the S.S.
Campari was steaming slowly over the bar to the north of the harbour,
then northwest into the setting sun, carrying with it its cargo of
crates and machinery and dead men, its fuming captain, disgruntled crew,
and thoroughly outraged passengers. At five o'clock on that brilliant
june evening it was not what one might have called a happy ship.
Chapter 2
[Tuesday 8 p.m.-9.30 p.m.]
by eight o'clock that night cargo, crates, and coffins were,
presumably, just as they had been at five o'clock; but among the living
cargo the change for the better, from deep discontent to something
closely approaching lighthearted satisfaction, was marked and profound.
There were reasons for this, of course. In captain Bullen's case-he
twice called me "johnny-me-boy" as he sent me down for dinner-it was
because he was clear of what he was pleased to regard as the pestiferous
port of carracio, because he was at sea again, because he was on his
bridge again, and because he had thought up an excellent reason for
sending me below while he remained on the bridge, thus avoiding the
social torture of having to dine with the passengers. In the crew's
case it was because the captain had seen fit, partly out of a sense of
justice and partly to repay the head office for the indignities they had
heaped on him, to award them all many more hours' overtime than they
were actually entitled to for their off-duty labours in the past three
days. And in the case of the officers and passengers it was simply
because there are certain well-defined fundamental laws of human nature
and one of them was that it was impossible to be miserable for long
aboard the s.s. campari. As a vessel with no regular ports of call,
with only very limited passenger accommodation and capacious cargo holds
that were seldom far from full, the s.s. campari could properly be
classed as a tramp ship and indeed was so classed in the blue mail's
brochures. But-as the brochures pointed out with a properly delicate
restraint in keeping with the presumably refined sensibilities of the
extraordinarily wellheeled clientele it was addressing-the s.s. campari
was no ordinary tramp ship. Indeed, it was no ordinary ship in any
sense at all. It was, as the brochure said simply, without any
pretentiousness and in exactly those words, "a medium-sized cargo vessel
offering the most luxurious accommodation and finest cuisine of any ship
in the world to-day." it was the chairman of the blue mail, lord
dexter, who had obviously kept all his brains to himself and refrained
from passing any on to his son, our current fourth officer, who had
thought it up. It was, as all his competitors who were now exerting
themselves strenuously to get into the act admitted, a stroke of pure
genius. Lord dexter concurred. It had started off simply enough in the
early fifties with an earlier blue mail vessel, the s.s. brandywine.