7
How many were there? Goddard lay naked on his bunk in the darkness and thought about it. The bos’n and that big sailor named Otto were obviously part of the apparatus, but was that all? What about the wireless operator? Or even Captain Steen himself? That was the chilling part of it; they could be all around him and he didn’t know who was involved. And maybe Lind already suspected him; with that diabolical mind you couldn’t be sure of anything, except that underestimating it was a mistake nobody would ever make twice.
Lightning flashed, illuminating the whole interior of the cabin for over a second. Without conscious thought, he began counting: one-oh, two-oh, three-oh . . . nine-oh. A great crash of thunder rolled and reverberated over the ship. It was still two miles away but coming closer. The fan whirred, stirring the lifeless air, but the cabin was like a sweatbox. The wooden door was pulled back and hooked, but the screen, which had louvered slats across it for privacy, was latched. In the silence he heard the faint sound of six bells striking in the wheelhouse. It was eleven p.m.
It’d be a genius of a director who could improve on the staging of that scene. One more stupid remark like that, he thought, and the next burial sack that goes over the side will have somebody in it, all right. Lind was the ship’s doctor, and with an imagination of that order there’d be no dearth of illuminating detail to enter in the log as to cause of death. Found dead in bunk of obvious cardiac arrest. Went to bed drunk, set mattress afire with cigarette, and suffocated. Suffered severe concussion in fall, and died two days later without regaining consciousness. With enough morphine in him to kill a rhinoceros. The findings would be subject to review by higher medical authority, of course, except for the minor difficulty that the body was buried in the ooze five miles down in the Pacific Ocean.
But there’s still a chance you’re wrong, he told himself. You don’t really know any of this; you’re only assuming it. All you really know is that it could be the greatest piece of illusion since Thurston, you know why it could have been done, and how it could have been done, but there’s no proof whatever that it was done. The cabin was lit up by another long flash of lightning, and the thunderclap came almost on the heels of it. A faint breeze came in the porthole now, with the smell of rain in it. Lightning flashed again, and the thunder was a sharp, cracking explosion that was very near.
Maybe he’d been led down the garden path by his subconscious distrust of all those coincidences of timing between the ship and Buenos Aires, and then when Mrs. Lennox had asked that ridiculous question about the first two shots being blanks he’d booby-trapped himself and leaped to the conclusion that just because it was possible it had to be true. Of course Mayr would like to be written off as dead, and what better way than being shot to death in front of five reliable witnesses and buried in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
Then what about Krasicki, or whatever his real name was? If the thing had been staged, there had to be some plausible and foolproof escape already prearranged; no matter how great his devotion to the cause or how high the pay, it was hardly likely he would set himself up as a human sacrifice. Just how did they wave the wand and make him disappear?
An escape could be engineered, of course, even after he was turned over to the Philippine authorities, but there was a flaw in that. The chances were there had been a real Krasicki, a Polish Jew and a botanist resident in Brazil, who’d either died out in the jungle or received an individual dose of the ‘final solution’ so they could take over his identity, in which case this one could hardly be put on display for the world’s press with the obvious danger that somebody who’d known the real one would spot the fraud. Passports could be doctored, if you had the price and connections, and a blown-up reproduction of a 2? by 2? passport photo would seldom be recognized by the sitter’s mother, but turn those Time-Life photographers loose on the subject himself and you were in real trouble.
No, Krasicki—he might as well continue to call him that—Krasicki had to disappear before they reached Manila. And the simplest way, of course, was another death and sea burial. The cast and staging wouldn’t have to be anywhere near as elaborate as the first one, and the groundwork for it had already been laid—the precautions against suicide, removal of the tie and belt and the serving of his food in soft plastic containers without cutlery. Conveniently, of course, nobody had given a thought to the fact that he could tear strips from the bed linen and hang himself. Some morning when they opened the door, he’d be dangling from those overhead pipes. Lind would send the other party, the witness, for something, cut him down, and announce with that manly and understated despair he did so well that it was no use; Krasicki’d been dead for hours.
He wondered what the mate would use to simulate the bruises of strangulation and to give the lips that distinctive blue of cyanosis, but no doubt that had been carefully planned. He’d done a beautiful job with Mayr’s death pallor, with the aid of that white overhead light; probably just a light cream base of some kind with a liberal application of ordinary talc. Nobody had been within ten feet of the body except the two men who were sewing it into the sack. He’d been invited to watch the final stitches, of course, but what about Steen? Was he a witness, or a party to it?
There was another flash of lightning, followed immediately by a crashing explosion of thunder that seemed to shake the whole cabin. Then he sat up, suddenly alert. Somebody had rapped on the screen door. He pulled on the boxer shorts and slipped over to it. Opening the louvers, he looked out through the screen into the lighted passageway. It was Madeleine Lennox, in pajamas and a nylon robe. He unlatched the screen. ‘May I come in?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Just let me put on—’
She pushed the screen on back and stepped in. ‘Men and their idiotic modesty. We could be dead in the next five seconds.’
There was another searing flash that illuminated the cabin as though an arc light had been turned in the porthole, with a simultaneous crash of thunder. He saw her wince. She really was afraid of it, he thought. ‘I can’t stand it, on a ship,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing else for it to hit.’
‘It’s perfectly safe,’ he reassured her. The darkness was impenetrable after the flash. ‘Sparks grounds his antenna, and it acts as a lightning rod.’
‘Thank you, Dr. Faraday,’ she said. A groping hand brushed his arm, and then she was against his chest. ‘Who the hell needs science?’
He took her in his arms; if she needed comforting, why be a churl about it? She felt very slender and soft inside the nylon robe, and her arms came up around his neck. In the next jagged flash of lightning he could see her uptilted face with the eyes closed, waiting to be kissed. He kissed her. Her mouth opened under his, and the arms tightened, and he noted with a detached sort of interest that he apparently wasn’t impotent after all. At the same moment the squall struck with a wild shriek of wind and horizontal rain that came slashing through the porthole. He broke free, slammed it shut and tightened one of the dogs. Thunder crashed, and another searing flash of lightning left him blinded as he turned back to her.
They brushed together, and she was in his arms again, as adhesive as a Band-Aid. ‘We might be more comfortable,’ he suggested humorously, ‘if we sat down.’
‘I’m sure you would,’ she murmured with her lips brushing his. ‘And I feel guilty as hell about it.’
He unbelted the robe and slipped it back over her shoulders. It dropped, and was followed by the pajama top. She guided his hand to the zipper at the side of the remaining garment and helped him slide it down over the rounded hips. He picked her up and carried her to the bunk.
There was no holding her back or pacing her, and she had no need for subtlety of finesse in her headlong flight to throw herself shrieking over the precipice. She came to climax three times, crying out and digging her nails into his shoulders as though driven by some kinship with the demonic force of the squall battering at the ship. He would have timed his own release to coincide with this final paroxysm as a matter of simple courtesy and the obligatory gesture of appreciation under the circumstances, but his attention had strayed and he was thinking of the time the Shoshone had been knocked down in a squall that had caught her lying dead in the water, with the result that he was late and the act ended on a note of anticlimax. He expected to be taken to task for this wooden performance, but apparently she hadn’t even noticed. Male flesh and willingness were all she demanded; she’d furnish the fire herself.
‘In these days of instant everything,’ she murmured, ‘it’s refreshing to meet a man who takes his time.’
He lit a cigarette for her. ‘I thought you were afraid of lightning?’
‘Afraid? I expected to die every second.’ She sighed. ‘But what a way to go. Men have no monopoly on that old barracks joke.’
The Leander was beginning to roll a little now as wind continued to howl around her. Rain drummed on the bulkhead beyond their heads. There was another simultaneous white flash of lightning and explosion of thunder. She gasped and pressed against him, and at the same time a hand slid down his body and began its seductive manipulation. He wondered idly if Freud had never considered the phallus as a symbolic lightning rod.
* * *
There was no one else in the passageway except the young Filipino carrying a plastic cup of milk and a sandwich on a paper plate. Lind unlocked the door of the hospital and they entered. A single light was burning over the desk. The portholes were dogged against the fury of the squall outside, the deadlights closed down over them. Krasicki lay on the same lower bunk, motionless, staring blankly up at the bottom of the one above him. He gave no indication he was aware of them at all.
‘He has closed the deadlights,’ Gutierrez observed as he exchanged the sandwich for the stale one still untouched. ‘You think he is afraid of the lightning?’
‘No,’ Lind said. ‘Probably the portholes are eyes looking at him.’
The youth shook his head. ‘Pobrecito.’ He went out, closing the door behind him.
Lind stepped over and bolted it, and turned. ‘Okay,’ he said softly.
Krasicki sat up and grinned with a display of yellowed teeth. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ Lind replied. He pulled a chair over and sat down, leaning forward so they could converse in low tones covered by the tumult of the squall. ‘Hugo sends his congratulations.’
‘And what about our audience? Still no complaints about the performance?’
‘No,’ Lind said. ‘They feel very sorry for you.’
‘And the rendezvous? You’re in contact with the boat?’
Lind nodded. ‘It’s directly on our course, waiting. Five hundred and fifty miles away at eight p.m. Rendezvous is two a.m., two nights from now.’
‘We’ll make it all right?’
‘Yes, with several hours to spare. The timing will be adjusted by another engine room breakdown if necessary.’ Lind smiled. ‘And of course there’s the other stoppage. For your funeral.’
Krasicki chuckled. ‘Put on a good show for the sentimental sheep.’
‘The rope’s ready?’ Lind asked.
‘Yes.’ Krasicki stood up and pulled back the blue bedspread of the upper bunk. Strips torn from one of the sheets had been braided into a length of thin, strong rope. Lind examined it. He nodded.
‘Make one end fast to an overhead pipe,’ he said. ‘Stand on a lower bunk and put the noose around your neck. Tie it so it won’t tighten, of course. Five minutes after one bell strikes at eight thirty you’ll hear me unlocking the door. Goddard or the captain will be with me, but I’ll come in first. When you see the door start to open, step off the bunk, but support your weight with your hands on the rope until I’m all the way in. I’ll have you cut down in less than five seconds, so there’s no danger.’
‘And what about the witness?’
‘He won’t have a chance to touch you. I’ll send him for the first-aid kit. He just sees you, that’s all.’ ‘And the materials for the artwork?’
Lind tapped his pocket. 'I have them here, and you can use the mirror to put them on. You know how the bruises look, and the congested face?’
Krasicki smiled coldly. ‘I have seen many men who danced upon the air, Herr Lind.’
Lind stepped over with his back against the door and appraised the angle of view. He came back to where Krasicki was standing, and pointed upward to the pipe. ‘I think right there, beside the flange. The witness will see you the second I throw the door open and jump in, but I’ll block his view of any details in case you move.’
Krasicki looked up. Lind flipped the rope over his head from behind, tightened it around his throat, and twisted. Krasicki’s eyes appeared to bulge, going wide with horror, and his mouth flew open in a silent scream. Hands clawed futilely at the rope for several seconds, and then dropped with a grotesque flapping motion. His body sagged and went limp. Lind eased him to the deck, but knelt beside him, the big muscles of his shoulders and forearms still corded with the brutal strain on the garrote. The whole thing had been done in total silence, like some ghastly ballet performed without music on a soundproof stage.
After another minute the big mate relaxed the tension on the rope, fashioned it into a slip-knot about the dead man’s neck, and passed the other end over the pipe above them. He hoisted Krasicki up with the ease of a mother picking up a baby, held him clamped in his left arm while he used the right to take up the slack in the rope, pass it around the pipe again, and tie it off. He let go. Krasicki’s feet dangled a few inches off the deck, and his body began to swing slowly back and forth with the gentle rolling of the ship. Lind went out and relocked the door.
* * *
Madeleine Lennox made one final hoarse outcry, and a flash of lightning revealed the mask of ecstasy now become pain as it approached the unbearable, the face twisted and distorted and the eyes clamped tightly shut as her head rolled from side to side. The writhing body strained upward against Goddard’s as though in some dying effort to engulf and devour this instrument of her torture, and then collapsed and went limp with the suddenness of a snapping spring. The ragged exhalations of her breath were hot against his naked shoulder where a moment before the nails had gripped and dug.
Insatiable, Goddard thought, and wondered what her husband’s life had been like when he was at sea, knowing, as he must, of the succession of lovers bracketed by these silken, frenetic thighs. Maybe he didn’t even mind, he reflected, knowing her emotional involvement in the encounters was probably no greater than it would have been with a procession of repairmen trying to deal with a recalcitrant television set.
There was no doubt she’d worked out a novel system for coping with it, by staking out a male world where there was no competition at all. Women passengers on freighters were nearly always elderly, with exceptions like Karen Brooke a one-chance-in-a-hundred possibility, and the younger, swinging crowd wouldn’t be caught dead on one. The ship’s officers, though probably married in most cases, were still sailors, and far from home, living a monastic life where sexy females were a collector’s item. All steamship companies frowned on this sort of hanky-pank on the part of their masters and mates, of course, but in man’s long journey toward the light, fornication had survived harsher edicts.
He sat up and lit a cigarette. In a moment she stirred drowsily, and murmured, ‘I thank you.’
‘For what?’ he asked.
‘For the obvious. You’re very good, Mr. Goddard, at a social activity that bores you to death.’
‘Bored? Of course I wasn’t.’
‘Oh, I’m not complaining, dear man. I feel wonderful, and believe me, getting there is more than half the fun. I just wondered why. You could have burned your draft card; you obviously don’t have to prove anything.’
‘It wasn’t like that at all,’ he said.
‘Good manners,’ she decided. ‘I think that’s the clue. You see, you’re not even angry now, at this classic example of the perversity of females.’ She laughed softly. ‘I like you; you’re nice. Uninvolved and totally aloof, but nice. Could I have a cigarette?’
He lit one and passed it to her, and set the ashtray on his stomach. Thunder continued to rumble, but it was farther away now and the fury of the squall was diminishing.
She was silent for several minutes, and then she said musingly, ‘There’s still something about it that bothers me.’
‘About what?’ he asked.
‘Krasicki. Going berserk that way,’ she said. ‘If he did.’
Alarms tripped and began to ring their warning. 'I don’t think I’m following you.’
‘Don’t let it bother you. I’m not sure I know myself what I’m talking about. But there was something you said afterward that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind.’
So that stupid remark may get both of us killed, he thought. Unless he was being sounded, which was just as dangerous.
‘You remember,’ she went on, ‘you said it would be a very good director who could have staged that scene any better. I know you didn’t mean it that way, but afterward I got to thinking about it, and began to have the craziest feeling that what I’d seen hadn’t even happened. Am I making any sense to you at all?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Unless you’re taking off into philosophical concepts of reality that’re too deep for me.’
‘I’m not talking about philosophical concepts,’ she replied. ‘I’m talking about deliberate, planned illusion.’
‘Wait a minute!’ He tried for the right tone of amazement and incredulity. ‘You mean you think that could have been faked?’
‘I don’t know. But it was too perfect. Too many separate elements came together at exactly the right point in space and time for random chance, and there are two or three things about it that bother me. One is the way Krasicki tricked Egerton—I mean Mayr—into speaking German. That was clever, but could a man with a deranged mind have done it?’
‘A disturbed mind doesn’t mean a moronic mind,’ Goddard protested. ‘And he had been a university professor.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But there’s another thing. In the theater, I think you call it blocking.’
Sharp, Goddard thought, unless she’s been coached. ‘That’s right. The movement of actors in a scene.’
‘Umh-umh. So with three men at the table, Lind is the only one in a position to grab Krasicki and try to stop him. The captain is clear at the other end, and you’re behind it.’
‘The skipper always sits at the head of the table,’ Goddard said. ‘And in my case it was pure chance.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ she replied. ‘Where you were sitting had been Krasicki’s place. He’d never come to the dining room since we left Callao, but the place was always laid for him in case he did show up.’
Goddard was thinking swiftly and uneasily. Barset could be involved in it, or the dining room steward, or both. Or they could have been merely following instructions from Captain Steen. But it was Madeleine Lennox who was the dangerous problem at the moment. It would seem absurd, of course, that she could have any part in the plot itself, but there was a very real possibility she could be involved with Lind. Suppose the mate was using her to find out just how much he suspected?
As a trap it was deceptively simple, and beautiful in its deadliness. He was supposed to warn her, tell her there was a good chance she could be right but to keep her mouth shut if she hoped to get to Manila alive. If she were innocently playing with dynamite, that would stop her. But if she weren’t, if she reported it to Lind, he’d very neatly positioned his own neck on the block. But there was another way.
‘You’d better cut down on spy movies,’ he said. ‘You’re beginning to believe them.’
‘Then you think I’m imagining things?’
‘Look, the man was shot twice through the chest in full view of five people. You saw the blood—’
She interrupted. ‘I know. It must have been real, so that ought to clinch it, but something about it still bothers me. I keep trying to remember what it was.’
He sighed. ‘You’d be a defense attorney’s dream as a witness in a murder trial. Yes, I saw this man’s head blown off with a .45, but I don’t believe for a minute he was hurt.’
‘I guess you’re right,’ she said.
Maybe he’d convinced her. But when she went back to her own cabin he still wasn’t sure.
* * *
It was a hot, bright morning with a gentle breeze out of the southeast, almost directly astern. The Leander rose lazily and almost imperceptibly to the quartering swell as she plowed ahead. Eight bells struck as Goddard emerged from the passageway and began his morning walk around the promenade deck. The squall had sluiced all the salt from her decks and bulkheads, and there was a freshly scrubbed look to her paint that matched the clean and untroubled beauty of the day. Gone, too, were his suspicions of last night; the whole idea was ridiculous, he decided now, and thought with amusement that Mrs. Lennox wasn’t the only one who’d seen too many spy movies.
He had completed four laps around the deckhouse when he noted the ship was passing through a vast colony of tiny Portuguese men-of-war, apparently newly hatched, their sails no larger than a fingernail. He stopped at the after end of the deck and lit a cigarette as he leaned on the rail to watch them drift past in numbers that must run into millions. It was a phenomenon he had encountered two or three times at sea and which always puzzled him. How could they hatch in such numbers in one place? He was wondering about it now when he became conscious of an odor like that of burning cloth. He looked down, thinking he must have set his shirt afire with the cigarette, but there was no sign of it. Then the odor was gone, as strangely as it had appeared. He must have imagined it.
Only Captain Steen and Madeleine Lennox were in the dining room when he entered. They were just finishing their breakfast, and he was struck by the odd preoccupation of their manner as they greeted him. Steen looked troubled. Mrs. Lennox turned as he sat down, and asked archly, ‘Did that awful thunderstorm scare you last night, Mr. Goddard?’ Lind came in at the same moment, and Goddard was conscious of a vague impression that wasn’t what she’d started to say at all.
Lind laughed as he sat down. ‘Don’t be insulting, Mrs. Lennox. A line squall scare a man who’d go around the Horn in a Dixie cup?’
The others laughed, a trifle self-consciously, and after they had gone out, Lind said to Goddard, ‘I’ve been reading up on catatonic states, and there are a couple of things I’d like to try on Krasicki. You want to come along?’
Goddard was startled for an instant, thinking of his fears of the night before; then he shrugged. ‘Sure,’ he said. They finished breakfast and went down to the deck below. Lind called out to the Filipino youth to bring Krasicki’s breakfast, and Goddard stood in back of him as he unlocked the door. Lind pushed it open, let out a curse, and leaped inside. Beyond him, Goddard saw Krasicki’s body dangling from the overhead pipe.
‘Get the first-aid kit!’ Lind shouted, drawing a knife and slashing at the braided rope.
Goddard wheeled and ran down the passageway, his mind racing even ahead of his feet. He’d been right. And now his performance had to be as convincing as Lind’s. There was another shout behind him as he sped out on deck and up the ladder, but he kept going. He was panting as he hurried back down the passageway with the kit two minutes later. Several crew members were now jammed around the open door, peering in. He started to push through them, and Lind’s voice barked, ‘Clear the door! Let him through!’
Krasicki’s body lay on the deck, the rope now gone from his throat, exposing the brutal mark it had left. Very realistic, Goddard thought; just don’t get too close. Lind straightened, and said wearily, ‘I tried to stop you. He’s been dead for hours.’
Goddard shook his head. ‘It’s a rotten shame.’ We’re a real team, he thought; with a good director, we could do anything.
‘Goddamn it!’ Lind exploded. He gestured toward the braided rope. ‘The one thing we didn’t think of.’ He whirled toward the door. ‘Break it up, you guys! What are you gawking at?’
Nice touch, Goddard thought; male frustration, anger directed at self, relieved by shouts. And at the same time distracts attention from the exhibit in case its nose twitches or respiration is too evident for close scrutiny. He looked around the room, and noted the deadlights were closed over the portholes.
‘He closed ‘em last night,’ Lind said. 'I noticed it when I was in here around eleven. And like a stupid bastard, I didn’t even wonder why. Here, give me a hand to put him in the bunk.’
Goddard looked around for Otto or the bos’n, but neither was present. Then, in an instant of utter confusion, he realized Lind was speaking to him. The big mate was looking at him with a faintly sardonic smile. ‘You’re not afraid of a dead man, are you?’
‘Oh. No,’ Goddard said, fighting for recovery. Lind caught Krasicki’s legs. Goddard stooped and grasped the bare arms near the shoulders, feeling the cold flesh and the rigidity of death, and they lifted him onto the bunk.
Lind pulled a sheet from one of the other bunks and covered the body. He turned then, and his eyes met Goddard’s as he made a helpless gesture with his hands. ‘For the rigor to be that far advanced,’ he said, ‘he must have done it right after I was here. I’m a hell of a doctor.’
Goddard was still trying to control his expression and sort out the chaos of his thoughts, but he managed an automatic reply of some kind. ‘There was no way you could tell,’ he said.