The Devil's Alternative [antikvár]

The castaway would have been dead before sundown but for the sharp eyes of an Italian seaman called Mario. Even when he was spotted he had lapsed into unconsciousness, the exposed parts of his near-naked body grilled to second-degree burns by the relentless sun, and those parts submerged in sea water soft and white between the salt-sores like the limbs of a rotting goose. Mario Curcio was the cook/steward on the Garibaldi, an amiable old rust-bucket out of Brindisi, thumping her way eastward towards Cape Ince and on to Trabzon in the far eastern corner of the north shore of Turkey. She was on her way to pick up a cargo of almonds from Anatolia. Just why Mario decided that morning in the last ten days of April 1982 to empty his bucket of potato peelings over the weather rail instead of through the rubbish chute at the poop he could never explain, nor was he ever asked to. But perhaps to take a breath of fresh Black Sea air and break the monotony of the steam-heat in the cramped galley, he stepped out on to deck, strolled to the starboard rail, and hurled his rubbish to an indifferent but patient ocean. He turnéd away and started to lumber back to his duties. After two steps he stopped, frowned, turnéd and walked back to the rail, puzzled and uncertain. The ship was heading east-northeast to clear Cape Ince, so that as he shielded his eyes and gazed abaft the beam the noon sun was almost straight in his face. But he was sure he had seen something out there on the blue-green rolling swell between the ship and the coast of Turkey twenty miles to the