5
Lind flipped the safety on the gun and tossed it to Captain Steen. Already lunging around the end of the table toward Egerton, he snapped at Barset and the dining room steward, ‘Tie him up and sit on him. Better get help; he’s crazy.’ ‘I’ll send for the bos’n,’ Steen said.
Goddard jumped to help Lind. They got Egerton out from behind the table and picked him up by shoulders and legs. Madeleine Lennox and Karen ran out of the door, sobbing as they averted their faces from the limp and bloodstained figure of the Englishman. Lind and Goddard hurried down the passageway with him and put him on the bunk in his cabin.
‘The first-aid kit on the settee in my cabin,’ Lind said. ‘And bring the sterilizer, the whole thing.’
‘Right.’ Goddard ran up to the next deck. Men were coming out of the officers’ messroom. ‘What is it?’ they asked. ‘What happened?’
‘Krasicki went berserk,’ Goddard said. ‘Shot Egerton.’
The sterilizer was secured to the desk with catches. He released them, unplugged it, and grabbed up the first-aid kit. When he hurried back into Edgerton’s cabin, Lind was bent over the bunk. He straightened, holding a bloodstained towel, and gestured wearily.
‘Put ‘em down anywhere,’ he said. ‘A couple of aspirin would have done just as well.’
Goddard looked past him, and nodded. Egerton was already unconscious and obviously dying of massive hemorrhage. Lind had spread the jacket open and cut the shirt away, exposing his chest. Blood was everywhere, in the thick mat of gray hair, running down his ribs, and staining the jacket and bedspread beside him. The pillow under the side of his mouth was soaked with it. The eye was closed, and his breathing ragged and labored. There was no froth in the blood on his chest Goddard noted; he would have thought there would be, since one or both the shots must have gone through the lungs. He was about to mention this to Lind when Captain Steen appeared in the doorway. Sparks, he said, was trying to locate a ship in the area with a doctor. Lind shook his head.
‘It’s no use,’ he said. He felt Egerton’s pulse, gave a despairing shrug, and gently lowered the wrist. ‘Just a matter of minutes.’
‘Seems dark for arterial blood,’ Goddard remarked, wondering at the same time what difference it made. When you lost enough of it, you died, no matter what shade it was.
‘Probably the pulmonary,’ Lind replied. ‘It carries venous blood.’
Egerton’s breathing changed to a gasping rattle that went on for over a minute and then stopped abruptly. Lind reached for the wrist again, probing for the pulse that had apparently ceased. He put it down and gently raised the eyelid with a thumb to look at the pupil. He sighed and closed the eye.
‘That’s all,’ he said.
Captain Steen lowered his head. He appeared to be praying. Then he straightened and said, ‘I’ll tell the steward to bring a sheet.’
Lind turned on the basin tap to wash the blood from his hands. Goddard turned to go out. He felt something under his shoe and looked down. It appeared to be a tiny awl. He pushed it over against the bulkhead with his foot and went out into the passageway, and as he neared the entrance to the dining room he heard the sudden, mad sound of Krasicki’s voice again. He looked in, and at the same moment Lind ran past him, still drying his hands on a towel.
Captain Steen was in the room, along with Barset and two other men, one of whom Goddard recognized as the AB who’d given him the shin. The other was a squat, ugly man in his thirties with almost grotesquely massive shoulders and arms. He had an old knife scar in the corner of his mouth and the coldest blue eyes Goddard had ever seen. Krasicki’s hands were bound in front of him and his feet were tied together, but he was sitting up and trying to slide backward away from the men in front of him, still shouting in that unknown language. The squat man and the AB reached down and caught his arms to pick him up. He shrank away from them, and screamed.
‘Easy, Boats,’ Lind said. ‘Let me try to talk to him.’ The two men let go and stepped back. Lind knelt and spoke quietly to Krasicki. ‘We’re not going to hurt you. Everything’s all right.’
This had no effect at all; the mad eyes were completely without comprehension. Lind spoke in German. Insulated within his madness, Krasicki paid no attention, merely continuing to rave in the language none of them understood.
Lind spoke to Barset. ‘Take a couple of your men and canvass the whole crew; see if anybody speaks Polish. It might help some if we knew what he’s saying.’
‘We already have,’ Barset replied. ‘No dice.’
‘Well, we’ve got to quiet him down,’ Lind said. He went out and came back with the first-aid kit. He filled a hypodermic syringe and motioned for the bos’n and AB to hold Krasicki. When the latter saw the syringe, as old and frail as he was it took three men to pin him down sufficiently for Lind to inject the sedative. Goddard felt sick.
In a few minutes Krasicki began to subside. He slumped. ‘Get a stretcher,’ Lind said to the bos’n.
Goddard went forward to the lounge. It was empty. He wondered if Karen and Mrs. Lennox had gone to their cabins. Then he saw them pass in front of one of the portholes. He went on deck and around to the forward side of the midships house. They were leaning on the rail, still looking badly shaken as they watched the reddening western sky. He told them Egerton was dead.
Madeleine Lennox said faintly, ‘I’ll have nightmares the rest of my life. That poor man.’
All three exchanged a glance then with the identical thought: Which one?
‘What will happen to Mr. Krasicki?’ Karen asked.
‘They’ll turn him over to the Philippine authorities,’ Goddard said, ‘but after that it’ll be like Kafka with LSD. An Englishman is murdered on the high seas by a Pole with Brazilian citizenship who’s obviously insane and couldn’t be legally guilty of murder in the first place, and it all happens on a Panamanian ship that’s probably never been to Panama. He’ll be committed, but at his age I doubt he’ll live till they figure out where.’
‘And what about poor Mr. Egerton?’ Madeleine Lennox asked. ‘Will he be buried at sea?’
‘I don’t know,’ Goddard replied. ‘Depends on what they hear from the next of kin.’ It was probably another twelve days to Manila, but the body could be preserved by packing it in ice if the Leander’s facilities were up to it.
Karen Brooke shuddered. ‘It’s so horribly senseless. Just because Mr. Egerton reminded him of somebody.’
‘Some German, apparently,’ Goddard agreed. ‘The chances are he was in a concentration camp during the war. Incidentally, why do you say Mr. Egerton, if he was a colonel?’
‘He asked us to,’ Karen said. ‘He was retired, he said, and “colonel” sounded pompous and Blimp-ish.’ Tears came into her eyes then, and she brushed at them with her fingertips. ‘Oh, damn! He was so sweet.’
They fell silent, watching the splendor of sunset as the Leander plowed ahead across the gently undulating sea. Goddard thought moodily of man’s journey through this flicker of light between the two darknesses, a journey he fondly believed he charted and scheduled in spite of the fact it lay across a landscape subject to a random precipitation of falling safes. Egerton lived through the attempts of countless trained and dangerous men to kill him during World War II, and then was casually swatted by a frail and helpless old man about as deadly as Peter Rabbit except that he was mad. As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.
Lind came around the corner of the deckhouse then, and beckoned to him. ‘I want to show you something,’ he said. Goddard followed him. They went back to Egerton’s cabin. The bos’n and AB were standing outside the door, and Captain Steen was just inside. Egerton’s body was still on the bunk, now covered with a sheet, the ends of the stretcher projecting from under it.
‘Look at this,’ Lind said. He stepped to the head of the bunk and pulled back the sheet from Egerton’s face. The black eye patch had been removed and was lying beside his check. Goddard gave a little start of surprise.
‘I’ll be damned,’ he said. Both the eyes were closed, but the left, which had been covered with the patch, bore the same rounded contour of lid as the other.
‘It came off when we were rolling him onto the stretcher,’ Lind said. With a thumb he gently pushed the lid up as far as the iris, and then closed it again. ‘Perfectly normal eye. The patch was a phony.’
‘Why?’ Goddard asked. ‘But maybe there was something wrong that made it light-sensitive.’
‘Photophobia?’ Lind said. ‘He obviously didn’t have measles, and in iritis and other inflamed conditions the eye’s as red as a grape. Anyway, it was on his passport picture.’
Captain Steen held out the passport, opened to the photograph. It was a perfect likeness of the slender, patrician face, and the eye patch was there. ‘We’re involving you in this, Air. Goddard,’ Steen explained, ‘because obviously you are already involved. We’ll all have to testify at a hearing in Manila.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Goddard said. ‘But I don’t get the fake eye patch.’ He looked at Lind. ‘Any ideas?’
Lind shook his head. ‘No. Unless he was mentally a little off himself, but it didn’t show in any other area.’
‘Beats me,’ Goddard said. ‘But what about burial? Docs his passport give the name of somebody to be notified?’
‘Yes,’ Captain Steen said. ‘The same as he gave on his reservation application.’ He turned a page in the passport. ‘It’s apparently not a relative, though. A Se?ora Consuela Santos, in Buenos Aires. She’s being notified now.’
Goddard nodded. Lind pulled the sheet back over Egerton’s face, and called out, ‘All right, Boats.’
Goddard went back to his cabin and mixed a double martini in a water tumbler. He carried it into the lounge. It was dark outside now, and the lights were turned on. Barset came in to draw the curtains over the portholes, since they were directly below the bridge. He shook his head, and sighed.
‘Ke-rist! My hair’s still going up and down like a porcupine’s quills.’
‘Where’d they put Krasicki?’ Goddard asked.
‘In the hospital, where you were. Engineers installed a hasp and padlock on it. Mate shot enough junk in him to keep him quiet all night, but if he stays screamin’ crazy they may have to move him forward somewhere. Nobody’d ever get any sleep down there.’
‘Let’s hope he quiets down. He’s not very strong anyway; he’ll kill himself.’
‘Probably be better off, the poor old bastard. Jesus, what a home away from home; a crazy on one deck and a stiff on another.’ Barset sat down and lit a cigarette. ‘Tell me something. Around Hollywood, is the tail situation really as wild as they say it is? I mean, you pick it off trees, like oranges?’
‘I know,’ Goddard said, ‘you want to become an actor.’
‘Nah! I’m not that goofy. But I often thought I might try to get on in the commissary of one of those studios. Not as a busboy or anything like that, you understand; I’ve had a lot of experience in the food business and catering. Is it pretty much union?’
‘Everything’s strongly unionized,’ Goddard replied.
‘Umh-umh,’ Barset said. ‘Well, I’d like to talk to you about it sometime. Maybe you could give me a couple of contacts.’ He went out.
Goddard’s thoughts returned to Egerton and the puzzle of the affected eye patch. It could never make any sense at all as long as you assumed that Egerton was what he said he was and gave every evidence of actually being: an English officer with a distaste for ostentation, invalided out of the army for typically understated wounds. So the next assumption had to be that the whole Egerton identity was a fake, an image that had been skillfully put together by a smooth con artist. But what in the name of God would a con man be doing in a seagoing low-rent district like this? No doubt there were numbers of them working the first class on the trans-Atlantic liners, but on here if he cleaned out the whole passenger list he wouldn’t make expenses.
Karen and Madeleine Lennox came in. He told them about it. They were incredulous, and then as mystified as he was. It was totally unlike Mr. Egerton. ‘Where did he join the ship?’ Goddard asked. ‘At Callao,’ Karen replied. ‘We all did.’ But he and Krasicki didn’t see each other at all?’
Karen frowned thoughtfully. ‘No, they came aboard at different times; Mr. Krasicki just before we sailed, I think. Then he must have become ill almost immediately; we thought for the first day or so he was just seasick, until Mr. Lind said he had a fever. They did see each other once before today, though.’ She told them about the episode when Goddard was being rescued. ‘It was the same thing,’ she added. ‘I mean, the impression that Mr. Krasicki thought he recognized Mr. Egerton, but Mr. Egerton had never seen him at all.’
‘Delusion.’ Goddard nodded. ‘Paranoia. God knows what.’ But why had Krasicki asked about the eye? Captain Steen came in then to assure the two women that Krasicki was safely locked up and under sedation. He was soothing and apologetic to them, but bleakly distressed over the martini Goddard was sipping.
‘I’m surprised, Mr. Goddard, that you wouldn’t have shown a little more respect for the dead.’
It must be, Goddard thought, that they never attempt to reconcile the flaws in their argument simply because they’re not aware of them. They assure us our departed brother’s not just an unfortunate lump of cooling meat that’ll never see another sunrise or hear a mockingbird, or feel softness under him or wine in his belly again, or design a toilet seat he’s proud of. Perish the thought. He hasn’t died at all; he’s just gone on to the richer, more beautiful life for which this was merely the apprenticeship; and now that he’s caught the brass ring and entered into this eternal paradise, for some unaccountable reason they feel sorry for him. Apparently his luck ran out before he could enjoy all the suffering he was entitled to.
‘It’s only a different estimate of the appropriate, Captain,’ he said. ‘And since there’s no way we can poll Colonel Egerton, we’ll never know who was right.’
Sparks entered, carrying a message form. He ignored the others and spoke to Captain Steen. ‘I got it off, by way of KPH in California. And then I finally raised that Argentine-station that had a message for us.’ He held it out. ‘It was for Colonel Egerton.’
‘It’s a little late, Sparks.’
‘Yes sir. I’m sorry I couldn’t get it earlier, but it was only filed this morning. And they should have routed it through one of the North American stations.’
‘Well, I’d better see what it is.’ Steen opened it, and looked surprised. ‘Hmmm. It’s signed Consuela. That must be Consuela Santos, the same woman our message is to.’
‘Yes, sir. Probably. We should have an answer from her in a few hours. I’ll stand by.’ The operator went out.
‘It’s not important,’ Steen said wearily, ‘but it would have been nice if he could have received it.’ He read the message aloud. ‘Colonel Walter Egerton S/S Leander Enrique joins me in wishing you bon voyage All our love Consuela.’
Karen and Madeleine Lennox both had tears in their eyes at the tragic and unintended aptness of the message under the circumstances. Goddard was conscious of the thought that six days out was a little late for filing a bon voyage message. Well, the sailings of freighters were usually erratic and unpredictable.
* * *
The dining room was empty when Goddard went in at a quarter after eight the next morning. Captain Steen had already had breakfast, the young steward said, and the two women had asked for coffee and fruit juice in their cabins.
‘I don’t think I blame them,’ Goddard said. It would take a little time to knock some of the sharp edges off the memory of their last meal here. ‘What’s your name, steward?’
‘Karl,’ the youth said. ‘Karl Berger.’
‘Well, I think all I want, Karl, is some coffee and a dish of the stewed apricots.’
The crew had done what it could to eradicate the traces. A new light fixture of a different type had been installed in the overhead, and the broken mirror removed. Where the bullet had entered the bulkhead behind the mirror, the hole had been drilled out and a plug installed, stained to approximate the shade of the paneling. Goddard finished the fruit, lighted a cigarette, and was sipping coffee when he was struck by the thought that it was curious that Krasicki should have had a gun aboard. No doubt it had been in that triple-locked steamer trunk Barset had spoken of, but unless the trunk had a Customs-proof secret compartment he was asking for trouble in wholesale lots. The authorities of all countries took a very dim view of tourists packing handguns. He shrugged. The man was unbalanced; he might have been carrying around a whole arsenal.
Goddard turned then and looked at the back of Egerton’s chair beside him. Apparently neither of the bullets had gone on through; the backrest was unmarked. Unless, he thought, they had passed under it, between it and the seat, in the space between the two upright members. He looked around at the bulkhead directly behind it, thinking this was a grisly pastime to accompany his morning coffee. There was no trace of a bullet hole in the paneling.
‘They didn’t go through, Sherlock,’ a voice said behind him. Goddard turned. Lind was smiling at him from the doorway, seeming to fill it with his height and great width of shoulder. He came on in and sat down.
‘I was just wondering about it,’ Goddard said. ‘What was the caliber of the gun?’
‘Nine millimeter,’ Lind said. ‘It was a Czech automatic. But it’s not the caliber that matters; it’s what it hits. You got a good grip on your breakfast?’
‘Sure,’ Goddard said.
‘I probed both of ‘em. One broke a rib going in, and as near as I could tell from the angle the second one hit one of the vertebrae. There was no exit wound at all, which is why there was so much hemorrhaging through the entrance wounds. Where they come out, you could drain a swimming pool.’
‘I know,’ Goddard said. Something about it still bothered him, but he wasn’t sure what it was; anyway, Lind knew more about it than he did. ‘Any word yet from Consuela Santos?’
‘Yeah.’ Lind lit a cigarette. ‘Skipper got a reply about one this morning. She says Egerton had no living relatives except a cousin he’d been out of touch with for years. She thought he was in Australia, but she doesn’t know where, and he could be dead himself by now.’
‘So you’ll bury him at sea?’
Lind nodded. ‘That’s all we can do, and turn his effects over to the British consul in Manila. It’ll be at four this afternoon, just at the change of watch. Have you ever seen one?’
‘No,’ Goddard said.
‘Not much to it.’ There was a nicker of amusement in the sardonic blue eyes. ‘Dress is optional. With your extensive wardrobe, I’d suggest a frock coat, black top hat, and a dark ascot.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got to check Krasicki again, see if I can get through to him. You want to come along?’
‘Sure.’ Goddard started to get up.
‘Finish your coffee. There’s plenty of time.’
‘Do you know anything about him at all?’ Goddard asked. ‘Family? Why he was going to Manila?’
Lind nodded. 'I talked to him quite a bit while I was trying to treat his fever. He doesn’t know whether he has any family or not; he was never able to find any of them after the war. He was in the Polish army and taken prisoner in 1939. He’s Jewish, of course, so he went the usual route, the concentration camps, cattle cars, labor battalions, medical experimentation, waiting for the gas chamber. Somewhere along the line I think he was castrated. Couple of times I’ve gone into his cabin and he’d have a hand in his crotch, crying—’
‘Oh, Christ.’ Goddard said.
‘Yeah. Anyway, after the war he was a DP, shuffled around from one country to another, but he finally made it to Brazil and they let him become a citizen. He’s a botanist, and before the war was an associate professor of silviculture at Cracow University. He became quite an expert on tropical hardwoods, and does surveys for timber exporters. He just finished one over in the monta?a of Peru, and was going to do the same thing in Mindanao and Luzon. Likes being out in the jungle; he’s afraid of people.’
‘You wonder why,’ Goddard said.
They went outside and down the ladder to the deck below. It was a brassy, stifling morning with no breeze at all except that set up by the forward progress of the ship itself. The bow wave spread outward and back in a long V toward the horizon, and far out a school of porpoises leaped and played in it, keeping pace with its steady march across the flat and unending prairie of the sea. Off to port, several miles away, was a piled dark mass of thunderheads shot through with the fitful play of lightning and trailing a purple veil of rain.
‘Going to have some squalls today,’ Lind said.
No sound issued from the padlocked door. Lind unsnapped the lock, and they went in. Krasicki, clad only in the wrinkled white linen trousers and no longer bound, lay on one of the lower bunks. His eyes were open, but he did not even turn his head as they entered, and gave no indication he was aware of them at all. Goddard watched carefully as Lind spoke to him in English, and then in German, but there was no expression of any kind in the eyes, simply blankness. Except for the faint rise and fall of the hairless and emaciated chest, and the motion of a hand as he brushed an imaginary fly from in front of his face, he might have been a corpse. University professor to vegetable, by easy stages, Goddard thought. The wreckage, Egerton had said; and then he’d been killed by it. ‘The lines are all down,’ he said.
Lind nodded. ‘Complete withdrawal. There may be a chance it’s only temporary; all we can do is wait.’
The Filipino boy entered with a bowl of fruit, some sandwiches, and water. Goddard noted that the bowl and pitcher were of soft plastic and the sandwiches were on a paper plate. Krasicki’s belt had been removed, and the garish tie was nowhere in the room. They were taking no chances of a suicide attempt. There was no head, but he had been given a sanitary pail; any attempt to lead him to a toilet might provoke another outburst.
They went out. As Lind was relocking the door, Goddard remarked, ‘It’s odd he’s so pale; I mean, with an outdoor job.’
‘Heliophobe,’ Lind said. ‘Can’t stand sunlight at all; his skin burns like a crisp, so he has to stay covered completely. And as a matter of fact, in the jungle there’s practically no sunlight anyway. He had kind of a lame botanical joke about it; said if he were a plant he’d be classified as negatively heliotropic. It means turning away from the sun.’ He broke off as they came to a companionway at the end of the passage. ‘Come on down. You can see how it’s done.’
‘Egerton?’ Goddard asked.
‘Yeah. Bos’n’s working on him now.’
They went down to the next deck. There was a dimly lighted passageway here outside the engine room casing which contained a number of locked storerooms and the steward’s big freezer and chill box. One of the doors was unlocked. Lind opened it and stuck his head in. ‘How you doing, Boats?’ He went in, followed by Goddard.
It was a bleak steel cubicle with a single overhead light, empty except for two wooden horses with a door lying across them. Egerton’s body was on the door, being sewn into the canvas burial sack by the bos’n and one of the sailors, a blond-bearded, heavily built man in his twenties whom Goddard had heard addressed as Otto. They looked up from their work and nodded, but said nothing. The sack was a single long strip of white canvas a yard wide, doubled under Egerton’s feet and stitched up the sides by the two men with sail needles and white twine. They were almost finished; only the head remained exposed. The gray hair was still neat, even in death, Goddard noted, and the slender face was pale as marble under the naked light.
‘It’s weighted at the foot,’ Lind said. ‘The engineers gave us the cap of an old bearing. Weighs about fifty pounds.’
Captain Steen came in, carrying a rolled flag. ‘Good morning, Mr. Goddard,’ he said, and turned to the mate. ‘Here’s the Union Jack, Mr. Lind.’
Lind took the flag. ‘After well-deck, port side; that all right?’
‘Yes. And I would appreciate it if everybody who can would change to shore clothes. That doesn’t include the black gang on watch, of course.’
Lind nodded. ‘I’ll pass the word. Incidentally, there are two British subjects in the crew; the eight-to-twelve fireman and the second cook. It might be a gesture of some kind if we asked them to bear a hand bringing the body out. And maybe Mr. Goddard would like to represent the passengers.’
‘I’d be glad to,’ Goddard said.
He watched moodily as the bos’n pulled the remaining canvas up over Egerton’s face and matched the corners. The two men went on stitching up the edges of the white anonymous sack.