Return to Skull Island (4 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

“I have to admit this is something I hadn’t quite counted on,” said Pat from the cell across from the one I had been tossed into.

“Yeah? I thought you’d thought of everything.”

“Don’t be such a smart aleck. I’ll get us out of this.”

“I’m sure you will. You certainly got us
into
it easily enough.”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic.”

She was obviously going to get on a high horse, so I sat in a corner to stew. There were only three cells in the place, one large one in which I was confined, and two smaller ones opposite a narrow passage. It was in one of these that the furious Miss Patricia Wildman paced like a caged leopard. All three cells were little more than cages of rusty iron bars, with adobe outer walls pierced by tiny, barred windows and a brick floor covered with soiled straw. The only drain was in the middle of the passage. The passage itself had only one door, which I knew led to the office of the magistrate.

“She looks like angry leopard,” said a voice behind me, echoing my own thoughts. I whirled, startled, to see that the other occupant of my cell—who I had until that moment completely ignored, assuming, from an unprepossessing appearance, that he was merely an alcoholic derelict sleeping off last night’s fiesta. But now he was standing and I was inclined to revise my evidently hasty estimation. He was a tall fellow, at least my height, perhaps an inch or two more, made to look even taller by an extraordinary gauntness. He had an aristocratic face topped by a shock of jet-black hair that hung lankly to his shoulders. He looked, I thought, not unlike the pictures of Rasputin, the mad monk of the late Tsar Nicholas of Russia, but without the beard, thank God. His English was perfect—cultured but with the over-precision that betrayed the fact that English was not his native tongue.

“A magnificent creature,” he was saying, not taking his eyes off Pat.

“What do you think this is, a zoo?”

“You think you are being funny, but you are closer to the truth than you think, my friend.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, indeed. Our gentle host, General Culebra, enjoys collecting exotic creatures such as this for his, ah, amusement.”

“I heard that!” said Pat. “I’ll make him wish he collected stamps instead.”

“Ah! The kitten flexes her claws, does she?”

“Do you talk like that all the time?” she said. “If so, I can tell you right now it’s getting pretty tiresome.”

“You doubt, then, that the General will make you part of his collection? I do not think he would like to be disappointed.”

“He’ll just have to bear it the best way he can. If he tries anything funny with
me
he’ll be collecting dust in the local mortuary, if this benighted place has one.”

“Just who
are
you, anyway?” I asked my cellmate. “I take it you’re not a native of this two-bit country?”

“Heaven forfend! I should hope not—and you have my undying gratitude for noticing. I was beginning to fear that I had become too, um, absorbed in the local culture.”

“Afraid you’d gone native, eh?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, let me introduce myself. My name’s Denham, Carl Denham—maybe you’ve heard of me? I make films, adventure stuff, you know: true-to-life, red-blooded pictures.” The cultureless Philistine only looked at me blankly, so I continued with our introductions. “That little firebrand over there is Miss Patricia Wildman—it was her bright idea that got us into this jam, I might add.” Which got me an inarticulate snarl from the opposite cell.

“Well, my new friends, I am Count Vassily Alexeivich Milnikov and it is the greatest of pleasures to have met both of you.”

So I was right, I thought. He sure enough
is
a Russian, no doubt one of the thousands of aristocrats who fled the bloodbaths following the Glorious October Revolution. I’d run into them in every port in the world. Most of them were bums. I decided to keep a close eye on him . . . and my wallet.

Interesting as all of this was, it brought me no closer to an answer to my immediate concern: What was going to happen to us? And Englehorn and the
Venture
, for that matter? Nothing good that I could think of and I was thinking mighty hard.

We were left entirely alone for most of the remainder of the day—no one even brought us any food, though the lack of water quickly became the most serious issue. Pat had given herself a little privacy by hanging from the bars of her cell the ragged blanket that had covered her cot, though she spent little enough time behind it. She seldom broke her monotonous pacing, hands clasped behind her back, chin sunk onto her chest, face scowling, deep in thought. There was no light provided us either, other than what came through the small windows. As evening fell it quickly grew dark as a cave inside our prison. There was only a brief flare whenever the Russian lit a cigarette, but even that ceased when he fell asleep (on the only cot, too, which he had already claimed as his own), eliminating any possibility of conversation on my side of the prison.

“Pat?”

“What?”

“How’re you doing?”

“I’m all right. I’m sorry I got you into this, Carl. I really am.”

“I’ve been in worse scrapes.”

“What do you think’s going to happen?”

“Not much. I don’t think that Culebra’s going to want to take many chances with getting Uncle Sam on his back. We’re Americans here—well, two of us are anyway—so there’s not much he’d risk doing beyond letting us stew in here for a while and then throwing us out of the country. You’ll probably lose your cargo, though. He’ll seize that as contraband. Maybe the
Venture
, too.”

“I’d hate that—he’d just use the weapons against the poor people who want to overthrow him.”

“Yeah. That’d be tough all right.”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic.”

I could see that Pat was working up a mood again, so I left her to stew while wondering to myself just what sort of jam we’d really gotten ourselves into. There was no American embassy we could turn to—Uncle Sam hadn’t recognized the new government and had recalled the consul when Culebra had taken over (San Serif had only rated a consulate—it was too dinky an outfit to have rated a full-fledged embassy). I didn’t know if there were any American businesses I could ask for help—not that I had any reasonable expectation of receiving any if I did ask. And if there were any foreign businesses still operating in the country, they were doing so entirely at Culebra’s pleasure and sure weren’t about to rock the boat on the account of a couple of out-of-luck Yankees. I couldn’t think of a thing to do except hope that I might be able to fast-talk the General if and when I ever got a chance to meet him. How smart could the dictator of a backwater dump like this
be
, anyway?

It must have been well past midnight when I heard the locks rattling. I hadn’t been asleep, so I saw the first crack of yellow light as the door opened. Half a dozen men came in, a couple of them holding kerosene lanterns. I didn’t say a word and, although I knew he was also awake, neither did the Russian. I had no idea if Pat was sleeping or not—I couldn’t see her behind her curtain—but I would have bet the only dollar I owned that she’d been aware of the opening door long before I had. That sort of cat-like attention would have been just like her. I thought the men had come for me; after all, surely
someone
would have recognized my name by now, but instead they went straight for Pat’s cell and unlocked it.

“Say,” I asked, and a couple of the men jumped at the sound of my voice. They were mighty nervous, which might be a good thing so long as they kept their fingers off their triggers. “What do you boys want here?”

“Non of yor beeziness, hombre,” was the surly reply. “An eef you know wha iss good for you, you’ll shot up an go bock to sleep.”

“How can I, with all the noise you’re making?”

“You con go bock to sleep or be
put
bock to sleep . . . permanently, if you geet my dreeft, señor.”

I did and shut up.

“Good God,” I heard Pat say, truculently, “how’s a girl going to get any sleep around here with a lot of halfwits arguing all night?”

Two or three of the men were in her cell by this time and had pulled down her blanket. I was relieved to see that she’d chosen to sleep fully dressed. I didn’t want to think of what those men might have done had they found her any other way. As it was, one let out a long low wolf whistle.

“Shut it up, Pablo!” said the one who so far had done all the talking. “You hombres geet th’ frail out a here an remember: El Jefe don wan any off yor dirty feengerpreents on her.”

I didn’t like the sound of that and neither, evidently, did Pat.

“Tell the General thanks for the kind invitation,” she said, “but no thanks. I’d be delighted to see him in the morning, however. Would you ask him if he’d care to join me for breakfast?”

“Shot op.”

Two of the goons had her arms pinned and I could see by the grimace on her face that their grip was none too gentle.

“Hey!” she said through gritted teeth. “Not so rough, boys. I’m a delicate little butterfly.”

Whereupon she stamped with all her weight on the instep of the foot of the man on her right. He shrieked like a girl and as his grip on her loosened, she wrenched free and jammed the palm of her right hand into the nose of her other captor. That organ burst like a ripe tomato, the man’s eyes crossed and he fell like a poleaxed ox. I could see by the way he hit the floor—like a sack of grain—that he was dead before he landed, probably with splinters of bone driven deep into his brain by Pat’s powerful blow. The first thug had only just had time to react to what she’d done before she chopped the edge of her hand squarely across his Adam’s apple. He went to the floor, too, but not dead—just coughing up blood as he tried to breathe through his crushed windpipe. Pat, who had not stopped moving since stomping on the first man’s foot, kicked out behind her, popping the third guy’s kneecap with the sound of a broomstick being snapped. The fourth went down beneath her, her knee jammed up under his sternum and her thumbs headed for his eyes. The fifth and last man, the one who so far had done all the talking, had watched all this violence with remarkable calmness. Now he drew his gun, reversed it and cracked Pat over the head with the butt. It sounded like two billiard balls colliding. She dropped like a marionette that’d just had its strings cut.

“Get th’ hellcat out off here,” he ordered.

“Wha about heem?” asked one of the only others who was still able to speak, pointing at the dead man.

“Wha about heem? He ain’t goin anywhere. You can com back for heem later.”

“Where are you taking her?” I demanded.

“I said that was non off yor business. Now shot up because you start to annoy me.”

Well, God knew I didn’t want to do that. I watched as Pat was half carried, half dragged out of the room. There was a trickle of blood bisecting her pale face. The leader took a long black look at me that I didn’t like at all, then followed his men, shutting the door behind him.

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Well, good luck,” said the Russian from the cot behind me.

“We can’t let Pat be, be . . .”

“What do you mean we’? She’s nothing to me. Besides, if I try anything it won’t do her the least bit of good and will just serve to make things worse for all of us. I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life in here.”

The man was obviously a contemptible egoist. No wonder the Bolshies lined his kind up against the wall. Well, it was up to me, then. But of what to do I hadn’t the foggiest notion. In my rage I grasped the heavy bars of the cell and shook them with everything I had. I don’t know what I expected to happen, but all I produced was a lot of noise and a shower of rust. Who would have thought such a crappy country could have managed to build such a strong jail?

“Hey! Hold it down in there! You’ll wake up the whole damn town!”

Who was that?
I turned to my companion, but he was obviously as surprised as I was.

“Hey!” the voice called again. “Hey! Over here! Mr. Denham!”

It was someone at the window. I shoved the Count off the cot and dragged it under the little barred opening. Standing on it, I peered into the darkness.

“Mr. Denham?”

“Yeah, it’s me, Denham. Who’s out there?”

“It’s me, Phipps, from the
Venture
, with the Captain and some other fellows. Is Miss Wildman there?”

“They’ve taken Pat—Miss Wildman somewhere.”

“Hold on a second, we’ll get a rope to you.”

A moment later I saw the end of a heavy rope waving just beyond the bars. I reached through and grabbed it.

“Tie it round the bars and when you got it, stand back, OK?”

I made a couple of loops around the bars and then tied off the rope with a good, strong knot.

I said OK and with that I heard the sound of an engine coughing into life. Gears ground and the cable twanged as it became as taut as an iron rod. I could see what they had in mind and stood well back from the window. They were going to pop it out of the wall so I could crawl through the hole. There was a groan and wide zigzag cracks suddenly appeared and then the entire wall tipped over into the darkness beyond. This happened with a tremendous roar and the building shook as though there had been an earthquake.

I stood in the gaping opening for a silent moment, admiring the sudden and unexpected panorama of Los Las by moonlight. In the immediate foreground was a dilapidated truck. A rope led from its rear axle to the pile of rubble that had been the late wall of my cell. Beside the truck—too stunned by the magnitude of what they had done, or too abashed—were Phipps, Bart and old Englehorn himself.

“We’d better get out of here,” he said. “That must have waken up the whole town.”

I had my doubts about that, looking around at the still-dark windows that surrounded us. I had a momentary flush of admiration for the San Serifian’s dogged devotion to unconsciousness.

“We’ve got to rescue Pat, Captain. Culebra’s got her.”

“He has, eh?”

“Maybe half an hour ago, maybe a little longer. A bunch of his men took her. She killed at least one and crippled a couple of others, but they still got her.”