Scorpion Reef (18 page)

Barclay was pulling the sheet up over her nearly nude body with the impersonal efficiency of a nurse.

I looked at him. “Thanks,” I said.

“Not at all,” he replied. “Best fall into the other bunk yourself. You both look a bit done in.”

I indicated the sheet. “Why?”

He shrugged. “Why not? Gratuitous brutality is for fools.” He went out.

That was it, I thought, lost in a sea of fatigue. That was as near as I’d ever come to figuring him out and he’d said it himself. Gratuitous brutality was for fools. He was a pro, and was brutal only for pay. Why give away something you could sell? To Barfield this half-clad girl was a peep-show and a snicker; to Barclay she was an investment.

I stood beside her bunk, swaying a little, staring down at the lovely, wide-cheekboned, Scandinavian face and the long lashes on her cheek. Her hair was a sopping ruin. I knelt a little and started taking out the pins, and when it was loosed I spread it across the pillow. Maybe it would dry a little.

Her eyes opened. They looked up at me and her lips moved. “You could have made it alone.”

“I can’t think of any place I want to go alone,” I said.

“Neither can I,” she whispered.

I bent and kissed her, and everything caved in on me. I fell into the other bunk and was asleep before I could straighten out.

I awoke. Barfield was shaking my arm. “Rise and shine, Manning,” he said. “Barclay wants to see you.”

It all came back and I could taste the bitterness of failure. I sat up. I was stiff and sore all over, and the shorts were still wet with sea water. “What time is it?”

“Four o’clock. You’ve been sacked out for ten hours.”

“All right, all right. You can dock my pay.” I reached up on the shelf above the bunk and found a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. I fired one up and inhaled gratefully. She was still asleep in the other bunk with the sheet pulled up over her breast. She didn’t stir.

Barfield stepped backward and leaned against the locker. He had taken off his shirt and was pink with sunburn where he wasn’t covered with hair. I wondered where the other gun was and decided Barclay probably had both of them. They’d have better sense than to try to hide it somewhere. He had a magnificent build, with shoulders like a lumberjack, and I thought he’d outweigh me fifteen or twenty pounds. He moved with good co-ordination and was light on his feet for a man that much over 200, and I had an idea he’d take me in a fight. Either way, somebody would get hurt. He’d been hurt before. The nose was flat because it had been broken and he had white scar tissue running down into his left eyebrow. The gray eyes were sure of themselves and a little hard. His hair was crew cut and almost as white as cotton, or at least it looked that way against the tanned slab of a face.

I took another drag on the cigarette and studied the beat-up face. “Fighter?” I asked.

“Amateur. In college.”

“Football?”

He shook his head indifferently. “They hired their football players.”

She was lying on her back with her face turned to one side. Her hair streamed across the blue pillow slip in a cascade of silver, and you could see the outlines of her breasts under the sheet. Barfield stared. “What a build,” he said.

“Why don’t you go ahead and take the sheet off?” I asked. “She’s asleep.”

He shrugged. “You’re easy to get sick of. Work at it, don’t you?”

“This cruise wasn’t my idea,” I said. “I didn’t know I was supposed to be a ray of sunshine.”

“Well, you’d better roll off your fat and get on deck. Barclay wants you.”

“All right,” I said. “I signed for the message. You can scram.”

His face and the gray eyes were ugly, but he didn’t move toward me. Barclay had probably read him off about picking fights with the gilt-edged investments or letting himself be provoked. A fight could get out of hand, and Barclay needed his passengers alive for a while yet. He turned and went out.

I went into the after part of the cabin, got some dungarees out of a sea bag, and put on a pair of slippers. I looked in the small mirror on the bulkhead. My eyes were puffy with sleep and I needed a shave. I looked as rugged as I felt. Sticking a pack of cigarettes and some matches in my pocket, I went on deck.

It was a clear afternoon. There wasn’t much sea, and the breeze had moderated a little. She was still on the port tack under unreefed mainsail and jib. There was no land in sight.

“Good afternoon, Manning,” Barclay said. “Do you feel better?”

“Rested,” I said. “You want me to relieve you now?”

He shook his head. The only concession he had made to the informality of an ocean cruise was to take off his tie. He still had on the tweed jacket, and I could see the bulge of an automatic in each of the patch pockets. His face was pink from the sun, and his jaw was covered with a stubble of brown whiskers.

“No,” he said. “Barfield relieved me for a while this morning. You can take over at six. What I called you about was the matter of food. You can cook, I presume?”

“A little,” I said.

“Well, suppose you prepare something, sandwiches at least, and make some coffee. And call Mrs. Macaulay. Tell her we shall have a meal of sorts and a briefing session here at around five o’clock.”

“Briefing?”

His eyebrows raised sardonically. “Yes. We intend to take up, at long last, the trifling matter that brought us out here. I refer to the location of that plane. Provided, of course, that we don’t have any more distracting swimming parties. We should be some fifty miles offshore now, so perhaps she’ll leave her life belt below when she comes up.”

I took a last puff on the cigarette and tossed it overboard. “I have some news for you,” I said. “She lost the life belt when she went overboard and didn’t expect to reach shore. She was merely committing suicide rather than come back.”

“Very touching,” he said. “But you’ve come to the wrong department. I’m not the custodian of Mrs. Macaulay’s happiness.”

Barfield spread his hands and shrugged with burlesque sympathy. “You see, Mortimer? It’s a cruel world.”

“And I have more news for you,” I went on, ignoring Barfield. They’d know, sooner or later, so why not start preparing them? “You’re never going to find that plane. She told me what Macaulay told her, and you couldn’t find the Pacific fleet with the information.”

He shrugged. “Really, we don’t expect to find it that easily. It may be the second or third location before she begins to get near the truth.”

I kept my face expressionless, but it scared me. It was what I had been afraid of all the time. They had no conception at all of the immense waste of water out here and of the firsthand, pinpointed accuracy of information you had to have in order to locate something lost in it, The only thing they’d ever be able to see was that she wanted the stupid diamonds herself and was holding out on them.

“If you had lost your watch overboard between here and the sea buoy,” I said, “could you go back and find it?”

“An airplane is considerably larger, old boy. And Macaulay knew exactly where it went in, or he wouldn’t have tried to hire a diver. But enough for now. We shall take that up when Mrs. Macaulay is present. Right?”

I said nothing as I turned and went below. Arguing with him was futile.

I pulled the curtain aside and stood by her bunk. She slept peacefully, a little flushed with the heat. “Shannon,” I said softly. She didn’t stir. I touched her arm.

Her eyes opened and looked at me without comprehension at first. Then she stared around the cabin and just for a second her defenses were down as the whole ugly mess came back the way it does in that instant of waking. She absorbed it and took command without a sound.

“Hello, Bill,” she said. “I’m glad it was you.”

“How do you feel?”

She stirred a little, experimentally. “I’m not sure yet. Wobbly, I think.”

“You look wonderful.”

She made a wry face. “I’ll bet I do.”

“Really, you do. You’re beautiful.”

Self-consciousness seized us both. Too much had been compressed into too short a time. By any normal standards what we had done could have been called ugly and callous and an absolute travesty on any kind of good taste, but normal standards didn’t exist any more. Time was telescoped and flattened like the front end of a car in a head-on crash. We had been through a lifetime in less than a week, and we probably had less than another week to live.

Sure, he was dead, and he’d died violently less than 24 hours ago, but it meant nothing any more. He had deliberately erased himself long before that. He had run out on her to save himself. She had left him when she knew it— not physically, because out of some sense of obligation she had to stick with him and try until the end to save him in spite of his treachery, but she was gone nevertheless. She didn’t owe him anything; she’d paid it all and canceled the account.

I hoped she would see all that, too, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything about it now. A girl had a right to be fully awake, I thought, before being assaulted with a speech like that.

“I’m going to make some sandwiches and coffee,” I said. “Feel up to it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Fine. Stay right where you are for a minute.” I went into the after part of the cabin and drew a basin of fresh water. Setting it on the little stand between the forward ends of the bunks, I went back and picked up the cardboard carton of clothes and personal effects she had sent aboard. It was on one of the settees where Barfield had been pawing through it as we were coming down the channel.

“You’ll feel better,” I said.

She sat up on the bunk, clutching the sheet, with her hair falling about her shoulders.

“Big, beautiful Swede with an Irish name,” I said.

She smiled wanly. “I am half Irish,” she said. “But my mother was a Russian Finn nearly six feet tall.”

“And beautiful.”

“Very beautiful.”

I grinned at her. “Don’t ask me how I knew. I might tell you.”

I went out and drew the curtain.

W
HILE I WAS FIRING UP
the primus stove and starting coffee I could hear her moving around beyond the curtain. It was wonderful, just knowing she was there. Then I thought of those two in the cockpit and the wonder of it became torment. I damned Macaulay. He had done this to her.

He must have been a little mad there at the end. He should have known there was no hope of finding that plane. It must have become an obsession.

What he had done was pass her the baton in a rat race that could never end any way other than in her death. His stupid belief that he could find the plane again had convinced them, and now after Barclay’s off-beat piece of genius she was assumed to have all the facts and was supposed to run and hide until they hauled her down and killed her. I cursed them all for a bunch of fools. It was a game. It was “button, button.” The rules were simple. You dropped a cuff link in two hundred thousand square miles of empty ocean and then went back and found it. If you didn’t find it, you killed somebody. You didn’t know much about the odds on finding cuff links dropped in oceans, but you were hell on wheels at killing people.

What chance did we have of getting away from them? And if we got away, where did we go? With not only the police after us but the rest of the “button, button” crowd as well. The two we had on our backs now were only part of them. The game never really ended. It just took them a while to find you, and then it started all over again. Macaulay had never been able to shake them, had he?

I was measuring coffee into the percolator when the idea began to take form. I stopped dead still, so abruptly I spilled the coffee from the spoon, enthralled with the beauty of it. Half of our problem didn’t even exist. Go back?

Who wanted to go back?

Here was the
Ballerina
, the answer to any blue-water sailor’s dream. There she was, beyond that curtain, the girl I’d never had out of my mind since the moment I met her. And behind me, in a black satchel, was eighty thousand dollars. I stood there holding the coffee can in my hand, feeling the deck heel down and hearing the sound of water along the hull while I rolled the names around on my tongue: Grand Cayman, Martinique, Barbados, Guadeloupe, Granada— Not the big places, not San Juan or Port-au-Prince or Havana, where we’d be caught, but the little ones, the small tropical islands with long golden beaches and native villages in sheltered bays where the water was blue and still.

They’ll never find us. That much money would last us a lifetime.
I thought of it and could feel the intense longing take hold of me.
Just the two of us.
It was like looking at paradise. And on the other side of the world—Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Tongareva, the Marquesas—all those names out of Conrad and Jack London that made your mouth water. Go back? With all that tropic, coral-reefed, blue-watered world there waiting for us, and the boat and a fortune right here in our hands? Why in the name of God hadn’t I thought of it before? We’d change the name of the sloop, and her port of registry. Change our own names, and be married by a priest in some out-of-the-way native village.

Aboard the American tanker
Joseph H. Hallock
, the master looked up from the thick journal and frowned. It was past midnight. He sat in a leather-upholstered easy chair in the dim and well-ordered seclusion of his office with the book in his lap in the glow from the single reading lamp. There was only the faint vibration from the big diesels aft to indicate he was at sea.

His eyes were thoughtful, as if something puzzled him. Slipping a finger between the pages to mark his place, he flipped back, looking for something. When he found it he reread the passage. With the thumb and forefinger of his left hand he pinched his lower lip in a gesture that was characteristic of him when he was thinking, and sat for another minute staring at the page. Then he shook his head and went on reading, a little faster now, forgetting he was up long past his bedtime.

I came abruptly back to earth, and the dream faded. All that was waiting for us, but knowing it and yearning for it only made reality worse. You couldn’t dream Barclay away, nor escape from Barfield by imagining he wasn’t there.