And The Deep Blue Sea

4
‘Appendectomy?’ Lind asked. ‘Spinal tap? Bothered with impacted teeth? Lover’s catarrh? I’m always looking for a live one.’
Goddard grinned and indicated the skull jammed behind some books on the desk. ‘Not if that’s a former patient.’
‘Bought it from a Moro down in the Celebes,’ Lind said. ‘You can still see where somebody got him with a bolo; probably the guy who sold it to me. Drink? Short one before lunch?’
‘Sure, if it’s that or surgery,’ Goddard said.
Lind yanked open a drawer and brought out a bottle of Canadian Club and two glasses. ‘Did you know that the references to wine in the New Testament really meant Welch’s grape juice? It was a faulty translation from the Greek.’
‘Yeah, I’ve heard that,’ Goddard said. He looked around the cabin again. While at first glance it would appear it could only have been assembled by a pack rat, a madman, or the vortex of a tornado, a more subjective appraisal revealed the blazing and restless mind that complemented the vast male exuberance of its tenant. More outpatient clinic or dispensary than living quarters, it also bore some resemblance to a library after an earthquake, with traces here and there of a museum. Anchored to the deck was a sterilizer containing scalpels, tooth forceps, hemostats, and hypodermic syringes. Boxes and specially built shelves held the contents of a small pharmacy—bottles, vials, tubes, splints, packaged sutures, and rolls of gauze and tape. There were several ebony carvings and a bolo, and books were everywhere, in English, German, and French, two full shelves plus more piled on the settee and on the deck. Some were medical textbooks, in addition to the standard first-aid manuals. Cugle and Bowditch were sandwiched between Faulkner and Gide. Goddard ran his eye on down the rows—Goethe, African Genesis, Vance Packard, Also Sprach Zarathuslra, L’être at le Néant. There was a combination, Nietzsche and Sartre.
Lind handed him the drink, and they clicked glasses. ‘Down the hatch.’
‘Skol,’ Goddard said. ‘You were a medical student?’
‘Two years. And you used to be a merchant seaman?’
‘A few trips as ordinary when I was a kid. How’d you know?’
‘You asked me if I was the mate, remember? Not chief mate or first mate.’ Lind opened a closet. ‘I’ve got some slacks here that might fit you. How big are you?’
‘Six feet one,’ Goddard said. ‘One-ninety.’
‘Should be just about right then.’ Lind handed him two pairs of light flannel slacks. ‘Some Chileno dry-cleaner shrunk ‘em. And here’s another sport shirt, a drip-dry.’ He added socks, belt, a pair of slippers, handkerchiefs, and a spare safety razor.
‘Thanks a million,’ Goddard said.
‘I’ve got a weak stomach. Can’t eat with people who never change their clothes.’ Lind tossed off the rest of his drink, and shook his head. ‘I don’t see why in hell you couldn’t have had scurvy, at least. Pick up a guy drifting around in a million square miles of ocean on some woman’s diaphragm, and he’s healthy as a horse.’
* * *
Cabin B, in the starboard passageway of the promenade deck, contained two bunks on opposite sides of the room, a desk, closet, and small rug, and had its own shower. Lunch was served at twelve thirty, Barset said, and dinner at six. There was no bar, but he could buy anything he wanted from the bonded stores. Goddard looked over the list and ordered six bottles of Beefeaters gin, a bottle of vermouth, and three cartons of Camels.
‘And would you ask the cabin steward to bring me a pitcher and some ice?’ he added.
He showered, put on a pair of Lind’s slacks and a sport shirt and the slippers, and stowed the rest of his meager possessions. Closet space was going to be no problem. The cabin steward pushed open the door and came in without knocking. He was young and looked tough, with a meaty face, green eyes in which there was no expression whatever, and shoulders that strained at the white jacket. Brutal hands with a number of broken knuckles held a tray containing ice and a pitcher. ‘Where you want it?’ he asked.
‘On the desk,’ Goddard said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Rafferty.’
‘And where are you from, Rafferty?’
‘Oakland. Or maybe it was Pittsburgh.’
It’s done to death, Goddard thought. If he were trying out for the young storm trooper or the motorcycle hoodlum I’d turn him down as a cliché. Rafferty put down the tray and asked, with just the right shade of insolence, ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ Goddard said. ‘But in Oakland or maybe it was Pittsburgh, somebody probably told you about pushing open doors without knocking.’
‘I’ll try to remember that, Mr. Goddard, sir. I’ll try real hard.’
‘I would, Rafferty,’ Goddard said pleasantly. ‘Inevitably in this vale of tears you’ll run across some mean son of a bitch who’ll dump you on your stupid ass the second time you do it.’
There was the merest flicker of surprise at this unusual reaction from the square world; then the turntable started again and the needle dropped back into the groove. ‘How about that?’ Rafferty said. He went out.
Goddard mixed a pitcher of martinis, for the second time today a little disgusted with himself. But maybe he was simply becoming aware of people again and had a tendency to overreact, the way sensation is exaggerated in a part of the body that has been numb for a long time. He poured a drink over ice and went out into the passageway. He remembered the dining saloon was aft, next to Barset’s quarters, so the lounge should be forward. There was a thwartships passageway here with doors opening onto the deck, port and starboard, and a wide double door into the lounge. He looked in.
There was a long settee across the forward end with portholes above it looking out over the forward well-deck, several armchairs, a couple of anchored bridge tables, and some bookshelves and a sideboard. A blonde woman in a sleeveless print dress was standing with her back to him, one knee on the settee as she looked out an open porthole. She was bare-legged and wore gilt sandals, and her arms and legs were tanned. ‘Mrs. Brooke?’ he asked.
She turned. He was conscious of a slender, composed face with high cheekbones and just faintly slanted blue eyes. The sailors were right, of course; she was pretty, but it was the impression of poise that interested him more. She smiled at him, the eyes cool and supremely self-possessed. ‘Yes. How do you do, Mr. Goddard.’
‘Nobody ever saved my life before,’ he said, ‘except possibly a few people with iron self-control who didn’t kill me, so I’m not sure of the protocol.’
‘Well, I didn’t really save your life. I just happened—’
‘Mrs. Brooke, there were witnesses, so there’s no way you can weasel out of it. Cop out, and throw yourself on the mercy of the court.’ He indicated the glass. ‘Do you drink?’
‘We-e-ell, not to excess,’ she said gravely. ‘But I do have a small one now and then with motion-picture producers I meet floating around on rafts.’
‘I’d say you still had it under control. So if that includes ex-motion-picture producers, how about a martini?’
‘Thank you,’ she said. He went back to his cabin and brought out the pitcher and another glass.
He poured her drink, and they sat down at one of the bridge tables. ‘There are certain biographical data,’ he said, ‘that we require here in the Central Bureau of Heroine Identification.’
‘It’s confidential, of course?’
‘Oh, absolutely. It’s processed by our computer complex buried under Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and purely benevolent in aim because it protects you from annoyances like privacy or forgetting to report all your income. Now, all I know about you is that you’re blonde, very attractive, probably of Scandinavian descent, you hate airplanes, and you have insomnia and twenty/ twenty vision. What kind of file is that?’
‘Flattering,’ she said. ‘And largely inaccurate. For one thing, I don’t hate airplanes.’
Oh, don’t be frightened, Mrs. Brooke,’ he assured her. ‘You can hate airplanes all you like, as long as you don’t start questioning the divinity of the automobile.’
She smiled. ‘But I really don’t. It’s just that I like ships better. Also, I work for a steamship company that is agent for the Hayworth Line in Lima. And my father was a shipmaster.’
‘American?’ he asked.
‘No, Danish,’ she said. She went on. Her father was lost at sea in World War II when his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. Her mother remarried when Karen was twelve. Her stepfather was an American businessman living in Europe, later transferred to Havana for several years and finally back to the States. Karen had gone to school in Berkeley, majoring in business administration, and until her marriage had worked for the San Francisco offices of her father’s old steamship company, the Copenhagen Pacific Line.
‘Danes keep in touch with each other,’ she continued, ‘even if they become citizens of another country, so after my husband died I asked the line if they had a job for me in South America. I speak Spanish, of course, from those years in Havana, so they gave me one in Lima. I was there for a year, and now I’m going to the Manila office. Copenhagen Pacific doesn’t have direct service there, so I booked passage on here.’
Thumbnail biography, he thought, is a good term. It’s impervious, and protects the raw nerve-ends beneath. And does nothing at all, of course, to explain why a pretty young widow would desert the action around the game preserves where she caught the first one and go wandering across the Pacific alone on a bucket of rivets like this.
A man appeared in the doorway then and looked in at them and then around the lounge as though searching for someone. Goddard hadn’t seen him before, but Barset’s term ‘weirdo’ came unbidden to his mind, and he knew it must be the passenger with the Polish name. There was no doubt he looked as though he had been ill, and for a long time, and in spite of his outlandish garb of white linen suit and open-throated purple sport shirt with a figured tie draped around it, there was something almost chillingly funereal and somber in his aspect. He gave the appearance of having once been a robust man who had shrunk to a rack of bones, for the suit hung from him in loose folds, as did the skin of his neck, and the gaunt face and the almost totally bald head were a glistening and unnatural white as though he hadn’t been out in sunlight in years.
‘Good morning, Mr. Krasicki,’ Karen said. ‘I’m glad to see you’re up and around today.’ She introduced Goddard, who stood up and shook hands.
‘You have been very—how do you say?—fortunate,’ Krasicki spoke with a strong accent. ‘You must excuse me. I have little English.’
‘You’re Polish?’ Goddard asked.
‘Yes. But since many years I live in Brazil.’
Probably a DP, Goddard thought, one of the homeless of World War II. Krasicki muttered something and turned abruptly and went out. A moment later Madeleine Lennox swept in, pausing dramatically just inside the doorway to chide Karen, ‘So! You’ve already grabbed off our celebrity.’
She proceeded to dominate the scene with an animation that Goddard appraised as falling somewhere between kittenish and hectic, and which after a while began to puzzle him as he became aware there was an alert and cultivated mind being sabotaged by all this determined girlishness. Normally you could ascribe it to the desperation tactics of fifty having to compete with thirty, but that would seem to make little sense here where there was no competition and nothing to compete for. They sat down at the table, Karen across from him and Madeleine Lennox on his right. She thanked him a little too effusively but would just have to pass up the martini. She limited herself to one a day, and always took that just before dinner. But he was going to give her a rain check, wasn’t he?
She did look younger than fifty, Goddard thought, particularly the figure, and he realized the one martini a day was part of it, along with a rigid diet and exercises to keep the waist in. Her face, while quite pretty, showed perhaps a few more lines than the face of an actress the same age, but the actress would have had a larger and more expensive staff at work on the project and plastic surgeons would have winched up on the halyards once or twice by this time. The ash-blonde hair, which was shoulder-length, had no doubt been carefully chosen as the easiest shade for hiding the gray, but she had fine eyes with the intelligence showing through at moments when she forgot to be captivating.
She’d seen Tin Can, and adored it. It was so authentic, dear, she cooed, turning to include Karen in the conversation; it was obvious Mr. Goddard was an old navy man himself. Wouldn’t it be the most fantastic thing if he’d known her late husband, who’d been in destroyers then himself? He was the executive officer of one in that same battle. Goddard said he was sorry, but he didn’t remember a Lieutenant Lennox, so they’d probably never been on the same ship. He was an enlisted man, anyway.
She knew a lot of people around Southern California, mostly in San Diego but some in Bel Air and Beverly Hills. It was while she was gaily tossing off these names, all unknown to Goddard, that her left leg first brushed against his under the table. He paid no attention then; it was an accident, of course. No woman could be that unsubtle. She launched into an explanation of why she was aboard the Leander. She’d been taking a cruise around South America on a freighter of the Moore McCormack line, intending to get off when she reached the Canal where she had a reservation to board a Lykes freighter bound for the Far East, but she’d become ill and had to go to a hospital in Lima. By the time she recovered it was too late to catch the Lykes ship, so she’d booked passage on the Leander. Her knee brushed lightly against Goddard’s again, came back, made a little stroking movement up and down, and remained. It didn’t take Mrs. Lennox forever to finish with the weather and move on to more significant topics; they’d known each other about ten minutes.
She couldn’t be that desperate, he thought; she’d be walking up the bulkhead. It was just that she was afraid of the younger woman and wanted to tie him up with an option. He wasn’t sure whether he was sorry for her, amused, or merely bored. It had been months since he’d slept with a woman, or even thought about it, and he’d assumed, with no particular interest, that he might be impotent.
Haggerty, during that marathon drunk when he discovered the underground skyway, had brought up the subject the night they’d shared the same room, and asked him whether he was gay. He’d said no, he was researching an article for Reader’s Digest; continence was the new hope for alcoholics with a time problem. Exactly, she’d said; something had to go, and she’d always advocated sexual freedom herself. People had a perfect right not to go to bed with each other; all it took was courage. And now that they’d made this bow in the direction of conformity, why didn’t he open the other bottle? He’d never known what particular hound was pursuing Haggerty down the nights and down the days, but he hoped she’d worked it out. She was nice.
There was the sound of chimes in the passageway then, announcing lunch. Goddard excused himself and took the pitcher back to his cabin. There was a dividend in it, which he poured and drank as he dumped the ice in the basin, still thinking idly of Madeleine Lennox. He went aft to the dining saloon. There were two tables, each seating eight, extending fore-and-aft on opposite sides of the room, but only the port one was used. Captain Steen sat at the aft end of it, with Karen Brooke on his right and Madeleine Lennox on his left. Goddard looked inquiringly at the dining room steward.
‘You sit there,’ the latter said, indicating the place next to Madeleine Lennox. He was a heavyset youth with a florid and rather sullen face. Goddard sat down, wondering what luck of the draw had placed him again within range of that gregarious left leg. Or was it luck? At the same moment Mr. Krasicki entered. He seemed uncertain as to where he was to sit, and the steward indicated the chair next to Karen Brooke. The two women smiled at him, and Captain Steen said, ‘We’re very glad to see you up, Mr. Krasicki.’ The latter nodded and attempted a smile, but said nothing. Goddard noted there were two other places set, the one at his left, and the one at the forward end of the table, which would no doubt be Lind’s. The steward made no move to serve the soup, and Captain Steen appeared to be waiting for something.
‘Mr. Egerton said he didn’t want any lunch,’ the steward said. ‘And Mr. Lind won’t be here.’
Captain Steen nodded, lowered his head, and said grace. When he had finished, Krasicki asked, ‘That is the other passenger, Mr. Egger—Edger—?’
‘That’s right, you haven’t met him, have you?’ Mrs. Lennox said. ‘It’s Mr. Egerton. You’ll like him; he’s very nice.’
She turned to Goddard and went on brightly, ‘He’s English. A retired colonel.’
Krasicki interrupted, his face screwed into a frown of intense concentration as though he had difficulty following her. ‘An English, you say?’
‘Yes,’ Madeleine Lennox replied. ‘But he’s been living in Argentina.’
The steward had begun serving the soup, but Krasicki paid no attention to it. He was still staring at Madeleine Lennox with that rapt concentration. ‘For many years?’ he asked. Goddard noted at the same time that Karen had turned and was looking at Krasicki thoughtfully. Madeleine Lennox replied that she didn’t know how long.
Krasicki appeared to become self-conscious under their regard and mumbled, ‘You must excuse me. I have little English.’ The corner of his mouth began to twitch. He lowered his head over his soup and began to eat it rapidly.
Both women then demanded Goddard tell them what had happened to the yacht. With apologies to Captain Steen, who’d already heard it, he gave an understated account of the affair, hoping he wouldn’t have to go through it again for Egerton.
Still feeling some of the aftereffects of his three-day ordeal, he took a nap after lunch. It was nearly five when he awoke, logy and dispirited. He showered and went on deck to walk off some of the torpor. After a few laps he mounted to the boat deck. Lind was on the wing of the bridge. Goddard made a gesture of greeting but didn’t go forward; as a passenger he had no right on the bridge unless invited. He was walking back and forth along the starboard side when the wireless operator came up the ladder aft and passed him with a blank stare. He was carrying a message form. At the same time Captain Steen emerged from the wheelhouse. He read the message, and called out to Goddard. Goddard walked forward.
‘It’s the confirmation from our agents in San Pedro,’ Steen said. ‘They’ve received the deposit.’
‘Good. Fast work,’ Goddard said.
The wireless operator spoke to Captain Steen. ‘The station in Buenos Aires has a message for us, but I haven’t been able to raise him yet.’
‘Well, keep trying, Sparks,’ Steen said. The wireless operator nodded and left. ‘Buenos Aires?’ Steen said, puzzled. ‘I wonder what that could be. Unless it’s for one of the passengers.’
‘One of my girl friends wishing me a happy birthday,’ Lind said. He winked at Goddard. ‘They pour in from all over the world.’
Goddard went back to his cabin, mixed a pitcher of martinis, and lay back on the bunk propped on two pillows as he stared moodily up at the ceiling. So? After Manila, what? Where did you go from there? And why? Consider the noblest of the apes, he thought; the only rational animal, by his own admission. He throws in another gallon of adrenaline and goes bounding over the landscape like a goosed gazelle to save his life, and then after he saves it he stops and looks back and says, what the hell am I running for, my name’s not Smith. He was roused from these somber reflections by the sound of chimes in the passageway. He finished the martini and went back to the dining room. Karen and Madeleine Lennox were already there, standing talking to Captain Steen. He suddenly remembered he’d forgotten all about the drink he’d promised Mrs. Lennox.
She hadn’t. Somewhat overdressed and made-up, she accused him archly as he walked in, ‘Mr. Goddard, I must inform you your verbal promise isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.’
‘Guilty, with extenuating circumstances, Your Honor,’ Goddard said with a grin. I dozed off.’ He turned to Karen. ‘Mrs. Brooke, if I’m typical of the characters you save, I wouldn’t blame you if you went into some other line of work.’
She smiled, and said, I don’t believe you’ve met Mr. Egerton.’ Goddard turned. Egerton had just entered behind him, looking very striking with the neat gray hair and moustache, the black eye-patch, and a white jacket over a white sport shirt. He shook hands warmly, and said, ‘Welcome aboard, Mr. Goddard.’ Beaming at the two women, he added, ‘Sporting of you, I must say, to go to all that trouble so we’d have a fourth for bridge.’
Lind came in then, and they sat down. Egerton was on Goddard’s left, next to Lind at the end of the table. This was the side of the table next to the bulkhead, so they were facing toward the doorway. Just as Captain Steen was about to say grace, Krasicki appeared in the door. He stopped abruptly, staring at Egerton. Goddard, watching him, was aware of something faintly disturbing about it. Krasicki gave a start then, and came on in. Karen spoke to him kindly.
‘I think you’ve met everyone except Mr. Egerton. This is Mr. Krasicki.’
Egerton stood up and held out his hand. ‘Delighted, Mr. Krasicki. And happy to see you’re feeling better.’
Krasicki mumbled something and shook hands. They sat down, Krasicki directly across from Goddard. Captain Steen said grace, and the steward began to take their orders. Egerton turned to Goddard, and said, ‘I understand you’re in the cinema.’
‘I used to be,’ Goddard said.
‘He’s gathering material for his next opus,’ Lind said. ‘Across the Pacific on a Hot-Water Bottle.’
There was a laugh, and Captain Steen inquired, ‘Was your boat insured?’
‘No,’ Goddard said. ‘The theory was that if it went to the bottom, the odds were that I would too. Sound, I thought, but Mrs. Brooke loused it up.’
‘Women,’ Egerton agreed, ‘are incapable of understanding dedication to a scientific principle.’
‘Exactly,’ Lind said. ‘You have to feel sorry for them. They never experience the deep personal satisfaction of being dead and knowing they were right.’
‘Karen,’ Mrs. Lennox remarked. ‘I think we’re outnumbered. Should we counterattack or retreat?’
‘Maybe Mr. Krasicki is on our side,’ Karen replied. She turned and smiled at the Pole, trying to put him at ease in this exchange that was obviously too much for his English. But the latter was paying no attention. He was staring across the table again at Walter Egerton with almost maniac intensity.
‘You have—’ He stopped, appearing to grope for words. ‘You are many years in Argentina?’
‘Why, yes, about twenty,’ Egerton replied.
‘Twenty? Twenty?’ Krasicki repeated, frowning. He looked at Lind.
‘Zwanzig,’ Lind translated. He added, for the others, ‘Mr. Krasicki is actually quite a linguist. He speaks Polish, Russian, German, and Portuguese, but German is the only one I know.’
‘Zwanzig. Aha,’ Krasicki muttered, still never taking his eyes from the Englishman’s face. ‘You have—how do you say?— become unactive—’ He gave up then and spoke to Lind in rapid German. Lind nodded and turned to Egerton.
‘He says you must have retired quite young.’
Even Egerton’s natural poise was a little shaken by that unwavering scrutiny, but he managed to smile. ‘Thank you, Mr. Krasicki; that’s quite flattering. But I was invalided out. Spot of bad luck in Normandy.’
Lind translated this for the Pole. The dining room steward was putting their orders in front of them, but no one began eating. There was another exchange in German between Krasicki and Lind. Lind shook his head as he spoke, and Goddard’s impression was that the Pole had said something he was reluctant to translate. Krasicki turned to Egerton again and tried English.
‘The—aye? The—eye?’
The two women turned their attention to their plates embarrassed by this bad taste, but Goddard continued to watch, aware of some undercurrent here that was more serious than poor manners.
‘Ah—yes,’ Egerton said stiffly. ‘That, among other things.’
It was Karen who smoothed it over. She smiled at Goddard and asked, ‘You do play bridge, I hope?’
‘A little mama-papa bridge,’ Goddard replied. ‘Nothing spectacular. And only after a careful search for weapons.’
The awkwardness passed for the moment, and conversation became general. Goddard continued to study Krasicki between replies to Mrs. Lennox’ chatter on his right. The Pole appeared to withdraw inside himself, eating silently as he bent over his plate, oblivious to the others except to look up now and then at Egerton. Then in a lull he began a rapid exchange in German with Lind. They both smiled. Krasicki turned then and included Egerton in the conversation, still in German. To Goddard’s surprise, Egerton replied in the same language. The Pole stiffened, and his eyes glittered accusingly.
‘Ah! You speak German. I thought you were English.’
‘Yes, of course I speak it,’ Egerton said easily. ‘I attended Heidelberg for two years. Before Sandhurst, that is.’
The others had fallen silent. Krasicki’s eyes continued to burn into Egerton. ‘But you did not say this.’
Egerton shrugged, obviously annoyed but still urbane. ‘Well, really, old boy, one doesn’t normally go about boasting of one’s accomplishments. Bit of a bore to one and all, what?’
Krasicki made no reply, but Goddard noted the nervous twitching at the corner of his mouth. Karen came to the rescue again. ‘I think what we should do is find out why Mr. Goddard doesn’t speak Hollywood.’
The others laughed, and Madeleine Lennox exclaimed, ‘Yes. What about this Mrs. Lennox bit? I thought you were supposed to say Madeleine baby.’
Krasicki bent over his plate again, but his lips were moving silently as though he were talking to himself. Then abruptly he stood up, threw down his napkin, and stalked out.
There was a moment of embarrassed silence, and then Karen said, ‘The poor thing; he’s been very ill.’
Lind nodded. ‘And I think he had a pretty rough time of it during the war. He has horrible nightmares.’
‘Pity,’ Egerton agreed. ‘A frightful shame—all that wreckage.’
The others began to question Goddard about film-making, and the incident was forgotten. The dining room steward went out to get coffee. Goddard was relating a comic foul-up of some kind on a sound stage and everybody was laughing when in the edge of his peripheral vision he saw Krasicki reappear in the doorway. He thought the Pole had come back to excuse himself or perhaps to finish his dinner, and by the time he’d got a good look at the man’s face and the foaming madness in his eyes it was too late to do anything but witness it.
Krasicki screamed something that sounded like mire! You go mire!, the tendons standing out on his throat, and the mindless, primordial sound of it lifted the hair on Goddard’s neck. He came on, raving in some language Goddard had never heard, while spittle ran out of the corner of his mouth, and raised the automatic in his right hand and shot Egerton through the chest at a distance of six feet.
Both women screamed with the crash of the gun, and Egerton shook under the impact of the slug. Goddard hit Madeleine Lennox with a shoulder, driving her to the deck on the other side of her chair, while Captain Steen snatched at Karen and threw her down. Lind was out of his chair then, lunging around the corner of the table for the Pole, who went on spraying spittle across it with the demonic force of his outcry which rode up over the continuous screaming of the women and then was punctuated by the crash of the gun as he shot again. Egerton jerked spasmodically against the back of his chair and started to slump.
Lind had Krasicki’s arm then, swinging it up and grabbing for the gun, while Captain Steen and Goddard were trying to get around the other end of the table to reach them. Krasicki was still pulling the trigger. The third shot smashed the overhead light fixture, showering glass, and the fourth, as Lind spun him around, shattered the long mirror on the bulkhead across the room.
Lind tore the gun from his grasp, bumped him under the jaw with a forearm, and shoved. Krasicki slammed backward and collapsed on deck like a bundle of rags. The screams cut off then, and there was an instant of unearthly silence, broken only by the tinkle of glass as another shard of the mirror fell to the deck and broke. The dining room steward came running in followed by Barset, who braked to a stop, and whispered, ‘Sweet, suffering mother of Christ!’
Goddard turned and looked at Egerton. A trickle of blood ran out of the corner of his mouth, and under the hand clutching at his chest the white shirt was stained with a growing circle of red. His left hand clawed at the tablecloth as he tried to hold himself erect, and when he toppled and fell over sideways he dragged it with him to the accompaniment of breaking china and a marimba tinkling of silverware.