A hundred yards away a black-suited figure moved behind a wall. Ransom stopped, waiting for the man to come out into the road. Quickening his pace, he set off along the avenue again, ignoring a door that opened somewhere behind him. Deliberately avoiding the route he and Whitman had taken, he turned left at the first intersection, then right again into the next street. Behind him, the ash drifted down across the roads, lightly covering his footprints.
Five minutes later he could hear around him the muted running steps of the men following his path. Hidden behind the intervening walls and houses, they moved along with him, extending in two wide arcs on either side, like a group of small boats tracking a sounding whale. The muffled footsteps padded across the empty porches with the faint creak of dry wood. Ransom crouched down and rested between two cars. Behind him the smoke plumes rising from the gardens were disturbed and broken.
He strode on again, pausing only at the crossroads. Despite his progress, Larchmont still seemed to lie two miles away beyond the dusty rooftops, as if his invisible pursuers were steering him in a circle. Wondering why they should bother to follow him, he remembered Catherine Austen's gibe-perhaps the fishermen marooned ashore by the dying lake and river were hunting for some kind of scapegoat?
He slowed down to regain his breath, and then made a last effort. He broke into a run and turned left and right at random, darting in and out of the cars in the hope of throwing off his pursuers. To his relief they seemed to drop behind. He turned again into the next street, and then found that he had blundered into a small cul-de-sac.
Retracing his steps, Ransom saw two black-suited figures scuttle through a gap in a ruined wall. He raced along the white dust covering the sidewalk, but suddenly the road was full of running men, vaulting across the cars like acrobats. A large net lay over the sidewalk. As he approached, it rose into the air, cast at him off the ground. Ransom turned and clambered between two cars. In the center of the road half a dozen men appeared around him, arms outstretched as they feinted with their nets, watching his feet with intent eyes. Their black serge suits were streaked with ash.
Ransom tried to break through them, using his weight to shoulder two of the small men aside. A net was thrown over his face like a heavy shawl. Knocking it away with the valise, he tripped in the tarry skeins underfoot, cast at him like lassoes from all directions. As he fell the fishermen closed around him, and the nets caught him before he could touch the ground. Swept off his feet, he was tumbled onto his back in the huge hammock, then lifted into the air on a dozen arms as if he were about to be tossed to the sun. Pulling at the thick mesh, he shouted at the men, and caught a last confused glimpse of their thin pointed faces below their caps. Then there was a wild scramble across the road, and his shoulders struck the ground. Swept up again, he collided head-on with the fender of a car.
Illuminated by the tinted sky, the curved beams rose above him on either side, reaching inwards to the open space over his head like the ribs of an immense stranded whale. Lying back on the mattress of old rags, Ransom counted the huge girders, for a moment imagining that he was indeed lying within the bowels of some beached leviathan, its half-rotten carcass forgotten on the shore.
Between the beams the lower sections of the hull-plates were intact, and walled him into the hold. Beyond his feet was the prow of the ship, one of the old herring-trawlers in the breakers' yards somewhere along the river toward Mount Royal. Metal ladders reached up the outer sides of the hull, and the floor was covered with piles of rusty metal sheeting, portholes, and sections of bulkhead. In the turning afternoon light the mournful wreck was filled by a last fleeting glow.
Ransom sat up on one elbow, feeling the grazes on his cheeks and forehead. He remembered the nets closing around him in the hot airless road, like the capes of bullfighters called out to the streets behind their arena to play some huge fish found leaping in the dust. He had been carried halfconscious down to the docks and tipped into the trawler's hold. Through a gap in the port side of the hull he could see the roof of a warehouse, a collection of gantries leaning against it. The smells of paint and tar drifted across the air.
Behind him was the stern bridge of the trawler, reaching up like a cliff into the sky. Two life belts hung like punctured eyes from the rail on either side of the bridge-house. Below, a faint light came from one of the cabins. There were no sounds of the fishermen, but a single figure patrolled the deck, a long gaff in one hand.
Ransom pulled himself on to his knees. He wiped his hands on the tags of cloth sticking from the mattress. The trawler had been beached in a small undredged dock below the former river level, and the wet mud had seeped through the keel plates. The dark cakes lay around him like lumps of lava. He stood up weakly, his head drumming from the mild concussion, and groped slowly across the floor of the hold. He paused behind the mast-brace, listening to a vague noise from the streets ashore. Then he felt his way down the starboard side of the hull, searching for a loose plate. On the bridge, the look-out patrolled the stern, watching the smokefires lifting from the city.
The noise drew nearer, the sounds of men running. Ransom went back to the mattress and lay down. The footsteps raced past the warehouse, and the group of ten or so fishermen reached the wharf and one after the other crossed the wooden gangway to the bridge deck. Between them they carried a large bundle in their nets. They leaned over the rail and lowered it down into the hold, steering it over the mattress. Then they released the nets and tipped a halfconscious man onto the mattress.
The bosun in charge of the hunting party came to the rail and peered down at their latest catch. A stocky broadshouldered man of about thirty, he was distinguished from the others by the mop of blond hair over his plump face. Ransom let his jaw hang slackly and fixed his eyes on one of the beams. Two feet from him an old gray-haired tramp snuffled and coughed, moaning to himself.
The blond man nodded to his men. They hauled up their nets and slung them over their shoulders.
A door opened in the bridge-house, revealing the light of a lantern. A tall man with a dark wasted face stepped slowly onto the deck, looking around him with a strong gaze. His black suit was buttoned to the neck, emphasizing the length of his arms and chest.
"Jonas-!" The blond man strode across the deck and reached out to the open door.
"Don't fear the light, Saul." The tall man pushed the arm away. After a pause he slowly closed the door, then moved forward among his men. He nodded to each of them in turn, as if approving their presence on his quarterdeck. In turn they glanced up at him with deferential nods, fingering the nets on their shoulders as if aware that they should be about some useful task. Only the blond-haired Saul seemed to resent his authority. He hung about irritably behind Jonas, tapping the rail as if looking for something else to complain about.
Jonas crossed the bridge and stood by the fore-rail. His slow movements along the deck were full of a kind of deliberate authority, as if this were the largest vessel he had ever commanded and he was carefully measuring himself against it, taking no chances that a sudden swell might not topple him from his bridge. His face had the tanned hardness of beaten leather, drained of all moisture by sun and wind. As he looked into the hold, his long arms reaching out to the rail, Ransom immediately recognized the marked slope of his forehead and the sharp arrowlike cheekbones. His eyes had the overintense look of some halfeducated migrant preacher constantly distracted by the need to find food and shelter.
He nodded at the supine figures of Ransom and the drunken tramp. "Good. Two more to join us in the search. Now back to your nets and sweep the streets. There'll be good catches f or the next two nights."
The men clambered to their feet, but the blond-haired bosun shouted: "Jonas! We don't need the old men now!" He waved contemptuously at the hold. "They're dead bait, they'll just weigh us down!" He launched into a half-coherent tirade, to which Jonas listened impassively, head bowed as if trying to control some inner compulsive nervousness. The men sat down again, grumbling to each other, some agreeing with Saul's complaints with forceful nods, others shifting about uncertainly. The loyalties of the group swerved from one man to the other, held together only by the unstated elements that they all sensed in Jonas' isolated figure.
"Saul!" The tall captain silenced him. He had huge, long hands, which he used like an actor. Watching him, Ransom noticed the calculation in all his movements, stepping about on the high stage of the bridge. "Saul, we reject no one. They need our help now. Remember, there is nothing here."
"But, Jonas-!"
"Saul!"
The blond bosun gave up, nodding to himself with a ticlike jerk. As the men shuffled along the deck and climbed down the gangway, he gave Jonas a bitter backward glance.
Left alone, Jonas gazed across the darkening streets, watching the men go off, nets over their shoulders, with the narrow compassion of a man born into a hard, restricted world. He paced the bridge of his skeleton ship, looking up at the smoke billows rising from the city as if debating whether to trim his sails before a storm.
The old tramp moaned on the mattress beside Ransom, blood running from one ear. His overcoat was stained by some pink fluid that Ransom guessed to be antifreeze. Now and then he woke for a brief, lucid interval, and then sank off again, gazing at the sky with wild, sad eyes.
Ransom stood up and groped across the hold. Above him Jonas came to the rail and beckoned him forwards, smiling at Ransom as if he had been waiting for him to wake. He called the look-out, and a ladder was lowered into the hold.
Painfully, Ransom managed to climb halfway to the rail. Jonas' strong hands reached down and seized his arms. He lifted Ransom onto the deck, then pressed him to sit down.
Ransom pointed to the tramp. "He's injured. Can you bring him up here? I'm a doctor, I'll do what I can."
"Of course." Jonas waved a long arm at the look-out. "Go down and we'll lift him out." As he held the ladder he said to Ransom: "A doctor, good. You'll come with us, we need everyone we can find for the search."