The Golden Rendezvous Read Online Free PDF

senor carreras. He replaced his hat as the last of the crates touched lightly on the floor of the 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.
    (for some strange whimsy, explicable only on a psychoanalyst's couch, lord dexter, himself a rabid teetotaller, had elected to name his various ships after divers wines and other spirituous liquors.) the brandywine had been one of two blue mail vessels engaged on a regular run between new york and various british possessions in the west indies, and lord dexter, eying the luxury cruise liners which plied regularly between new york and the caribbean and seeing no good reason why he shouldn't elbow his way into this