Authors: Donald Hamilton
“I see.” She shrugged her pretty shoulders. “Well, I must say you’re damn slow with the drinks… Ah, thanks.” She took the glass I offered her. By the time I returned with a wrung-out washcloth, it was half empty. I cleaned the blood off her fingers and got what she’d missed on her face and neck. She kept her eyes closed during most of this operation, but suddenly she opened them and looked up with a hint of malice. “How do you feel, Mr. Helm?”
I didn’t pretend not to catch her meaning. “Frustrated,” I said. “Being a gentleman, I obviously can’t make a pass at a lady with concussion of the brain. But you could have picked a more discreet nightie, ma’am.”
She laughed. “That was nicely said. I was feeling very unattractive, but you reassure me. Now try to tidy up the room a bit. You’ve been married, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It shows on a man. Well, then, you shouldn’t have too much trouble putting my belongings back in some kind of order; you know how a woman likes her things. And tomorrow you’ll take me to lunch and tell me all about yourself and your mysterious work. At the Royal Hawaiian, I think. Yes, the Royal Hawaiian, with all those bright, brittle people showing off for each other. I don’t expect you to compromise your silly security, of course. All you have to do is answer my impertinent questions with amusing lies. And then we’ll settle on a nice place to have dinner together… Yes, Mr. Helm?”
I said, “Skip it. You’re old enough to know your own mind.”
She smiled slowly. “You know, that’s quite true if not very flattering. And I’m also old enough to understand that continuing to associate with you may involve me in more disagreeable situations like this one. That’s what you were going to point out to me, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
She said, “Mr. Helm, I’m fully aware of it, and I think it’s wonderful. I’ve been bored to tears ever since I came to Honolulu. If there’s anything duller than a bunch of people cavorting about in skimpy bathing suits, it’s a bunch of people cavorting about in silly native costumes. Most fashionable resorts display only one of these aberrations; here you get both. I tell you, I’ve been bored practically to suicide for the best part of a week, but it’s a funny thing, Mr. Helm: tonight I have a splitting headache, my room looks like a junk yard, I’ve ruined
a pair of perfectly good nylons and got blood all over an expensive dress—but I’m not bored any longer. So tomorrow I want you to take me to lunch, and I want you to be sure to bring your gun. I’ve never had lunch with a man wearing a gun. Now make me another drink, like a good boy, and clean up this rat’s nest, and get out of here so I can go to sleep.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As I got to work, I was aware of her watching me in a speculative way, like a farmer who’s bought a horse and wonders if he’s made a good deal. Whatever she was, I decided, she was pretty good. If she was, as she’d intimated, just a hard-drinking society woman looking for screwball kicks, she at least had a certain amount of courage, to take the night’s events in her stride and risk more of the same.
And if, as seemed quite possible, she was something else entirely, it was still a good act well performed. In either case, it looked as if I wasn’t going to be suffering from loneliness if she had her way.
Well, I hadn’t been feeling exactly neglected in Honolulu even before she came along.
In the morning I went swimming again, on the theory that it’s not a bad idea, in critical times, to give the impression of being a creature of habit. It has been known to throw people off guard, even people who should know better. Besides, I was kind of curious to see if Jill would show up for our surfing date after what had happened between us last night. I wasn’t laying any bets either way, since the decision wasn’t hers, but the Monk’s, and I couldn’t predict how clever he’d try to be.
It was another clear tropical morning, with the sky brightening behind the rim of volcanic rock to the east of Waikiki, but today I didn’t have the sunrise to myself. Down the beach a little way, a couple of pretty, sleepy-looking girls in bikinis were being entertained by a couple of husky, wide-awake young men wearing sawed-off khaki trunks and military dog tags. I assumed they were off the transport we’d seen heading into port the night before, and I admired the speed with which they
had established diplomatic relations with the natives.
They barely noticed me as I braved the cool morning waves very briefly. Afterward, I took a long time drying myself and sat on the sea wall for a while just looking at the ocean. I was a little surprised, as I had been before, at the lack of traffic out there. It was my impression that in good weather just about anywhere along the edge of the American continent in summer you’d see multitudes of assorted vessels day and night. Here, off the largest harbor in the Islands, one distant freighter was the only ship in sight.
There were no pleasure craft visible at all, except for a couple of the twin-hulled, sloop-rigged catamarans used for taking tourists for nautical joy-rides. They were being made ready down the beach for the day’s business. I wondered idly about the deserted ocean: maybe these waters were too dangerous for small boats, for reasons hidden from a landlubber like me…
“Oh, there you are!” said Jill’s voice. “When I didn’t see you, I thought… I was afraid you’d decided not to come.”
I looked up. She was wearing a different bathing suit this morning—if you could call it a suit—and the guy who’d invented checked blue gingham would have wept to see what she was doing to a couple of scraps of his theoretically demure and modest material. She had the same old red board on her head, however.
I said, “Hell, are you still around, Sexy? I figured after last night’s flop, you’d run to Big Brother and have him find you somebody easier to seduce.”
Jill turned pink. “I… I brought another board,” she said resolutely after a moment.
“My God, you’re a real little optimist,” I said. “If I don’t trust you on dry land, what makes you think I’m going to trust you in forty feet of water?”
“It’s not that deep,” she said. “Just a minute. Let me get rid of this one.” She started toward the water’s edge, and looked back awkwardly, hampered by her unwieldy burden. “Please? Be nice, Matt. You know I’m only obeying orders.”
“That’s what the commandant of Auschwitz said as he fired up his ovens each morning.” I sighed and rose. “Oh, all right. Where is this damn board? I suppose you’ve got it rigged so it’ll either blow me up or sink me…”
The boys with the dog tags revised their opinions of me steeply upward when they saw what I’d drawn for a surfing instructor. They stared so hard and so long that their girls turned audibly peevish. Meanwhile I was learning how to stand on a surfboard in shallow water, not the easiest balancing act in the world, even with Jill to steady the thing. After I’d fallen off three times, she said I had the general idea, and got her own board, and demonstrated the prone paddling technique. You could also paddle kneeling, she said, but I’d better not try that until I got my equilibrium working a little better.
It was quite a lesson. Just getting out there wasn’t easy and catching a wave right, even with Jill to give me the timing and an initial shove, seemed for a while to be next to impossible. I hadn’t tackled a new sport for a good
many years, and I’d forgotten how clumsy a reasonably well-coordinated man can be when he really tries.
Then a big one came along, curling nicely as it reached us, and she pushed me off and called to me to stand up, as she had half a dozen times before. This time, however, I made it all the way to my feet without falling off, and as I found my balance I felt the thing really start to go. It was a strange sensation, hissing shoreward on a tender, tricky little plank with the wave roaring angrily right astern. I saw how it could become habit-forming, like skiing or auto racing.
I rode it clear out, and dropped down at last, and paddled back out to where Jill sat on her board, waiting for me.
“Not too bad,” she said. “Now on the next one, try to steer it a little, just to get the feel. Throw your weight back a bit and tilt the board in the direction you want to go. You’re not going to be able to ride big surf straight off like this, you know. You’ll want to turn at once, the minute you catch the wave, and slide across the face of it, away from the break… Matt?”
“Yes?”
“Who’s the frigid brunette, anyway? The one you were talking to at the party?”
I grinned. “What makes you think she’s frigid?”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to insult your dreamboat. I hope you had a lovely time in her room last night.”
I said, “You’re just jealous because I spurned you for another woman. Maybe I’m tired of tanned blondes. I
could also get tired of being watched all the time.”
“That would be tough,” she said coolly. “Real tough. Take it up with Washington, Matt. You know there’s nothing I can do about it. And you haven’t answered my question.”
I said, “If she’s anything but Mrs. Kenneth McLain from Washington, D.C., I don’t know about it.”
Jill said, “She may be Mrs. Kenneth McLain, but she’s not from Washington, D.C. We’ve checked her out that far already. And she was asking for you here. Before you arrived. Here at the hotel.”
I thought this over for a moment. “Thanks for the tip,” I said. “I had a hunch she was a little too good to be true. So that’s why Monk decided to have her room searched. I wondered. Of course you could be lying to me.”
“Of course,” Jill said, smiling.
I grimaced. “Well, whatever she is, tell your friends that batting folks over the head with gun barrels is clumsy technique, not to mention the fact that it’s hard on the guns. There are plenty of other ways to take people out of action.”
“How did you know it was a gun barrel?”
“A sap wouldn’t have cut the scalp that way. You’re sure she was inquiring about me? Before I came?”
“Quite sure.” Jill glanced past me. “Outside! Get ready. See if you can catch this one all by yourself. When I say go, paddle like hell…
Go!
”
I felt the lift of the wave, stroked hard with both arms, and felt the board start to plane; then the nose dug into solid water, the rear end rose, and I was thrown off. Half
the Pacific Ocean landed on top of me. I clawed myself to the surface, retrieved the board, and returned to Jill. She wasn’t laughing when I got there, but that wasn’t saying she hadn’t laughed earlier.
“That’s known as pearling, or pearl diving,” she said. “You had your weight too far forward, so your board just dove for the bottom. Are you tired? You’ve been at it for almost an hour.”
I said, “Let’s see if I can’t make just one more reasonably good ride so I know I’ve got the idea.” I kicked my feet a bit to keep my board from swinging away from hers, and looked down into the clear water, some six feet deep. The coral down there looked brown and slimy alive, not bright and clean like the dead stuff you see in the stores. I said, “I hope you don’t have any sharks around here. California’s having a rash of them, from what I read in the papers.”
Jill shrugged. “Oh, once in a while somebody reports seeing one, generally a hysterical tourist.”
“Yeah,” I said dryly, “I know those hysterical tourists with arms and legs bitten off. You can’t trust those people not to exaggerate.”
Jill laughed, and we waited for a wave, rocking gently so far from the beach that it felt like the middle of the ocean. I’d never been so far offshore without a real boat to support me, but I was gaining confidence in my board and my swimming ability—it occurred to me that I’d been doing a lot of swimming lately, in various parts of the world, with various companions, some of whom were
no longer alive. It wasn’t a happy train of thought, and I shunted it out of my mind.
The sun was up now and the water was suddenly warm and pleasant. The beaches were filling with bathers. A couple of tiny sailboats had ventured out from shore and were jockeying around to seaward of us. Both of them caught a wave at an outer line of breakers and came planing in toward us. One got crosswise and capsized, but the two kids in bathing suits flipped it back up with hardly an effort and scrambled back aboard, laughing.
I swung my board around, expecting the same wave to reach us, but it died before it got that far and rolled by as a smooth and useless swell. I watched a water-skier go by far out, bouncing along behind a small speedboat with an enormous outboard motor. It seemed kind of unnecessary to get hauled around the ocean by all that horsepower when there were waves you could slide on for free.
“Matt?” Jill said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is that what you really think?”
“What?”
“What you’re reported to have said in Washington. About… about our involvement in Asia.”
I regarded her for a moment, with some irritation. She was straddling her red board casually, riding it like a horse, obviously just as comfortable on it as a cowboy in his favorite saddle. Her soaked blonde hair streamed down her back, and her slender body, practically naked, was brown and wet and intriguing. I was annoyed with
her for breaking the pleasant, lazy mood of the morning. I was even tempted to play along with her a little, just to maintain our happy relationship, but it would have been out of character and I couldn’t take the chance.
I said, “Too bad, kid. We could have had a lot of fun together in the line of duty. Maybe some day you’ll learn not to press too hard. See you on shore.”
I flopped down on my board and headed for the hotel. I heard her calling my name, but I kept on paddling. Pretty soon I heard the splash of her strokes behind me and the hiss of her board going through the water much faster than mine—she really knew how to drive the thing.
“Matt!” she said, drawing alongside. “Matt, wait! I didn’t mean—”
I stopped paddling. We coasted along side by side, losing speed. “I suppose you’ve got a waterproof tape recorder buried somewhere in this balsa,” I said grimly.
“It isn’t balsa, it’s polyurethane,” she said. “And there’s no recorder.”
“Well, it’ll sound good in the report, anyway. ‘By shrewd interrogation, subject was led to confirm political opinions attributed to him, saying, quote…’” I shook my head. “Baby, do you really think I’m stupid enough to pull the same boner twice? Okay, so I once made a casual statement in answer to what I thought was a casual question, which was my mistake. Maybe I was even drunk enough to try to back up my opinion when it was challenged, but I’m sober now, and I’m clear out of the casual-statement business. Anybody who wants to know
what I think about anything political is going to have to use scopolamine or pentothal in large doses. Do I make myself clear?”