The Chief

Nobody aboard knew where Chief Petty Officer Orrin Gale had been before he was thirty-one years old.

That was the first fact about him, and it was the one that made all the others possible. He had come into the Navy late, at an age when most men who stay in have already been in for a decade, and he had come in with no prior sea time at all, which meant he had started, at thirty-one, at the bottom of the enlisted ladder, in the working parties that scrub and paint and carry, alongside nineteen-year-olds. He had come in with a certificate of good conduct from a police department, and a discharge from a job that he described, when he described it, as "claims." He never described it otherwise. Once, in the chiefs' mess, a chief electrician asked him what he had done in the claims business and Gale had said, "I decided who was telling the truth," and smiled in a way that closed the subject like a door.

The men had two theories, and neither was ever proven and neither ever died. The first was that he had been an adjuster for a maritime insurer, and that somewhere in the paperwork of a sunken barge a sum of money had gone to a place it should not have gone. The second was that he had simply been nobody: a small life ashore that had failed, and a second life built out of an institution that would not ask about the first. Both theories assumed he was hiding something, and I never settled it. I asked at two funerals and one bedside over eleven years and got the first theory twice and the second theory once, and nothing that could be checked, and that is all anybody will ever have. Sailors are not subtle about the difference between a man who is private and a man who is hiding, and every man in that ship felt the second thing in Gale and none could have told you why.

What could not be disputed was that he had risen fast, and that he had deserved it, at least on paper.

He was sober. He was deferential to officers in a way that made officers feel he was doing them a favor. He never raised his voice. He kept his uniforms pressed in a ship where nobody's uniform was pressed, and his shoes shined, and there was not a scuff on him from the day he came aboard. He was all bright work, a chief once said: the surface polished to a shine, and nothing under it that did any work. And on one occasion, seventeen months before our cruise, aboard a different ship, he had done a piece of ferreting so exact and so useful that a captain had written his name into a fitness report in a sentence that Gale would quote for the rest of his career. A storekeeper had been moving fuel purchases off the books and selling the difference ashore for two years, and everybody in the supply department had known it and nobody could prove it, and Gale had proved it in nine days with a ledger, a calendar, and a question asked at the right time of the wrong man. The captain called it integrity. The supply department called it something else. Both were right.

So they had made him the ship's discipline chief, an old job in a modern uniform: a chief of police for a town of three hundred people with nowhere to go. He owned the ship's discipline record. He ran the urinalysis program and the search program and the small-arms locker and the brig, which was two cells and a bolted door between the paint locker and the trash room. He wrote the page thirteens, the administrative remarks that go into a man's record and follow him from command to command. He sat in on the captain's mast. He decided, in practice, whose name went forward and whose name quietly did not.

He owned the record. That is the sentence that matters, and everything else about him is a footnote to it.

The methods were small. That is the thing landsmen never understand about a ship: there is almost nothing you can do to a man in the open, and there is almost no end to what you can do to him in the record. Gale never did anything large. He moved a man's rack assignment so that the man slept under the blower that blew cold all night, and the move was correct, the man's old rack was needed, and there were four reasons written down in the right column. He held a liberty port two days for a man who had laughed at him in the mess, because of an error on a form, and the error was real, and the form had been turned in late. He wrote "counselled" in a man's file for a locker left open where the standing order said lockers were to be closed, and the standing order did say that. He put a name at the top of a working party that spent eleven hours on the boat deck in weather, and the roster was fair, and the roster was always fair.

Every one of those actions was defensible. Any one of them, taken alone, was nothing, and any chief aboard would have done four of them in a week without thinking. Taken together, over months, aimed at one man, they were an atmosphere. That was his art: he did not punish men, he changed the weather around them, and then he wrote down what the weather did.

Now: what was the matter with him? That is the question the whole business turns on, and it is the question that the record never asks and never answers, and the reason the record is worthless.

An old book gave the kind of man a name, and the name was not a doctrine about mankind but about individuals: natural depravity, a depravity according to nature. It is rare, and it is respectable by every measure a board of inquiry could apply -- it does not drink and does not steal and does not raise its voice -- and behind all of that there is a fire answerable to none of it, and the fire takes the form of a perfectly rational plan. I have read the book twice since, looking for Orrin Gale in it, and he is not there. That is not the book's fault.

The trick of such a man is that his madness is not continuous. It is occasional, evoked by one particular object, and concealed, so that when it is most active it looks exactly like good judgment. He can sit in a chiefs' mess and discuss the weather and be liked. What he cannot do is stop.

Some part of this was in Orrin Gale -- not the whole of it, because a thing like that is bigger than any one man who carries it; but enough of it, and the thing had taken root in him, and it had one object, and the object's name was Nolan Hollis.

Here is how it worked.

Gale watched him for two weeks before he said a word about him to anybody. He watched him on the mess decks and in the passageways, and once from the deck he stood and looked up at the yardarm where the new man was working with a rag, up against a sky going gold at the edge, hair the colour of brass with the light coming off it. And what Gale saw -- this is my reading of it, and after eleven years I have no better -- was not a rival and not a threat and not a man who had ever done him a single injury. He had never in his life looked at a human being who had less interest in him.

The men thought the chief hated the new man for his looks. That was the general theory and it was wrong and it was nearly right. It was not the face. It was the other thing, the thing that the face was a window into: the man had no residue. In all his twenty-one years, Nolan Hollis had never once willed another human being harm, and had never once in his life felt that specific burn -- that low, intelligent, self-knowing burn -- of wanting to. Gale, who had felt it as a man feels his own pulse, and who had built a whole career out of knowing what men were like underneath, had met a man who had no underneath. And here was the worst of it: Gale could see the value of that. He saw it clearly enough to want it. He looked at that soft, unresentful, unpoisoned nature and he understood that it was beautiful, and that it was the only thing in the world he could never have, because the wanting was the thing that made it impossible.

To be nothing more than innocent. The contempt that rose in him was not contempt for the man. It was contempt for the possibility, and behind it, in a place he did not go, something hungrier than contempt.

The captain was the only other man in that ship who could have seen all of this. That is not a compliment to either of them. It is only a fact about how many people on a destroyer are paying attention.

Gale had an assistant.

Seaman Apprentice Carl Oyler was nineteen years old and had a nickname he hated. The crew called him Tick, not for his voice, which was loud and ordinary, but for the way he moved: quick, sideways, out of one passageway and into the next, appearing at the elbow of conversations that had nothing to do with him. He was the chief's errand, and everyone knew it, and there is no lower position in a ship. He carried the search rosters and the locker tags and the messages. He reported things he saw. Some of the things he reported he had actually seen, and some of them he had made out of the shapes of things he had half seen, and by the fourth week of the cruise he had reported the new foretopman three times: once for a locker left open, once for laughing after taps, and once for saying something about the ship's food that nobody could quite remember hearing.

Gale knew perfectly well that the third report was invented. He chose to believe all of them anyway, and this was not a mistake; it was a purchase. When you need a record, a boy who invents records is an instrument, and Gale could pick up a slight instrument, know it at once for what it was, and use it with a clean face.

The chiefs' mess found out about him at the end of the fifth week.

It was evening, after a long day of drills, and the mess was full, and there were eleven chiefs around the table and Master Chief Ava Ledoux at the head of it, which is where the senior enlisted person in a ship sits whether she wants to or not. Ledoux was fifty-one and had twenty-nine years in and a face that had stopped pretending about anything. She did not like Gale and she did not dislike him; she distrusted him in the surgical way a good senior chief distrusts any chief who has never once in his career been seen to be wrong.

Somebody had brought up the new man, as somebody did most nights that month. And a chief machinery repairman said something cheerful about the singing, and Gale said, in his clean, completed, official voice, without looking up from his tray:

"Popularity is not a qualification. It is a symptom."

The table went quiet in the particular way a table goes quiet when twelve people simultaneously decide not to look at each other.

"That's interesting, Chief," Ledoux said. "What's it a symptom of?"

"Of a man who has made himself the centre of something he does not intend to run," Gale said. "I have seen it before." He put down his fork and looked at Ledoux with the mild courteous expression he used when he was being watched by someone who could hurt him. "It is my job to notice, Master Chief. Nothing else."

"Then notice this," Ledoux said. "You've got a two-striper in the foretop who can't read his own evaluation form, who has never been late, never been drunk, never been in a fight since he came aboard, and who is, by every chief in his division's account, the best worker on the deck. And you've been writing his name on search lists and holding his liberty for two weeks over paperwork." She said it flatly, not as an accusation but as a count, the way you count ammunition. "If you have a case, bring it. If you don't have a case, leave him alone. I don't want whatever this is in my mess."

And this was the reversal, and it happened so quickly that half the table did not see it.

Gale did not deny it. Denial would have been a plea. He put both hands flat on the table and he said, "Master Chief, I am the one person in this ship who is paid to be suspicious of a man who is too easy to like. If you would like me to stop, tell me to stop, and I will write the date and the order in my notebook and I will stop tonight." He looked around the table, one face at a time, mild, courteous, unhurried. "But I would ask the mess to consider what happens the next time we have a Halstead, and somebody asks us why nobody noticed."

Nobody said anything for a while. And then a chief stoker who had known Ledoux for eleven years and liked her a great deal said, "Well, he's got a point there," and the table broke, and the conversation moved on to something else, and Gale finished his meal, and by the time he left the mess Ledoux was the one who looked as though she had raised her voice, which she had not.

He had not defended himself at all. He had simply picked up the Halstead and put it on the table between them, like a knife, and let everyone decide whose hand it was in.

Three days before the mess dinner, the captain had called Lieutenant Commander Iris Banerjee into his cabin, and it did not stay in the cabin.

Banerjee was the ship's legal officer. She was thirty-four years old, a lawyer before she was a sailor, and she had the particular quality of a person who has decided that precision is a form of kindness, which makes her nearly unbearable to men who would rather be told a comfortable thing. The captain had handed her a fleet directive and told her to brief the wardroom on it, because it was new and because it was the sort of thing the wardroom needed to have heard at least once before it was needed.

The directive was called Standing Directive 12-3, "Summary Proceedings in Communicated Silence," and it ran to nine pages.

She stood at the front of the wardroom on a Thursday afternoon with the nine pages in her hand and she read it out the way it was written, which is to say in the flat grammar of a headquarters that has never been at sea. It permitted a commanding officer, under conditions of communicated silence, to convene a board of not fewer than three officers to inquire into an offence of a capital nature, and, where the material facts were not in dispute, to enter a finding and sentence, subject to review when communications were restored.

Commander Dale Ferris, the executive officer, was sitting in the front row with his arms folded. He was a broad man with a jaw like a piece of machinery and the permanent expression of a man with a hundred things to do. "So it's a drumhead," he said. "Say the word."

"It is a board of three officers," Banerjee said. "It is not a court-martial and it cannot be, because a court-martial needs a convening authority and the convening authority is above the captain and the captain cannot reach him. That is the whole reason the directive exists."

"Can he hang a man with it?"

She did not blink. "He can enter a sentence. Under the directive, the sentence available is the sentence the offence carries. For a capital offence, that is death."

Somebody at the back said something that was not quite a word.

"But," Banerjee said, "the directive has a clause, and the clause is the point. It applies where the material facts are not in dispute. That is not a formality. Read it as a wall. If there is a dispute about intent -- if the question is not what a man did but what he meant -- then the facts are in dispute, and the board has no jurisdiction, and the correct action is to hold the man and wait for the link."

Ferris made a small impatient noise. "Then the directive is useless. Nothing at sea is ever not in dispute."

"Then we should say so and stop pretending otherwise," Banerjee said. "But that is a policy question, Commander, and I am the lawyer, not the policy."

The captain was not in the room. That was noted by several people, and it is worth noting again, because if he had been in the room he would have heard the clause said out loud, cleanly, by the only lawyer aboard, before any of it happened. He would still have done what he did. But it would be good to know how it sounded to him.

That night, a little before midnight, Chief Petty Officer Orrin Gale stood alone in the passageway outside the chiefs' mess, in the dark, with his back to the bulkhead and his hands behind him, and he said a sentence out loud.

"There is a movement aboard this ship," he said, quietly, to nobody, "and I have reason to believe the foretopman is at the centre of it."

He said it again. He said it a third time, changing one word. He listened to himself the way a man listens to a tool being sharpened, and when he was satisfied he took out a small notebook with a black cover and wrote something in it and put it away, and then he walked forward along the passageway past the paint locker and the two cells and the bolted door, under the bell and past the ladder to the deck, and went to his rack and slept, and slept well, the way a man sleeps who has finished a piece of work.