The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (12 page)

“Go on,” I said.

“The third reason is that Barfield is down there in the cabin with another gun, with Mrs Macaulay. If you try anything, she gets it.”

“I don’t give a damn what happens to Mrs Macaulay,” I said.

He smiled. “You think you don’t, but that would change with the first scream. You don’t have the stomach for that either.”

“I’m the original gutless wonder. Is that it?”

“No. You’re just weak in a couple of spots where you can’t be in a business like this. I’ve sized you up since that afternoon at the lake.”

“Then you knew what she was up to? That’s the reason you shoved off and left us?”

“Naturally. Also the reason we roughed you up without really hurting you, that night on the beach. We wanted you to hurry and get this boat for them so we could find where Macaulay was hiding. It worked, except that he forced us to kill him. That’s that, and now I’ll take my gun back.”

Sweat broke out on my face. I had only to squeeze the trigger, ever so gently, and there would be only one of them. He watched me coolly, mockingly.

My finger tightened. I didn’t care what happened to her, did I? I cursed her silently, bitterly, hating her for being alive, for being here.

“George,” Barclay said quietly.

I went limp. I handed the gun to him, feeling sick and weak all over.

“What is it?” Barfield’s voice asked from the companionway.

“Nothing,” Barclay said.

I lit a cigarette. My hands shook.

He had wanted me to realize the futility of jumping one of them to get his gun as long as she was where the other could get her. I detested her. Maybe I even actively hated her. She and her lying had ruined everything for me, I was sick with contempt when I thought of her, and yet he’d known he could tie my hands completely by threatening her with violence. I was “weak” all right.

“The hell with Mrs Macaulay,” I said. “What did Macaulay do?”

“He stole three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth of diamonds from us. Since you were in the salvage business,” he went on, “you must have known the
Shetland Queen
.”

I looked up suddenly. “Sure. I remember her.”

She had gone down in about ten fathoms, off Campeche Bank last fall, and the underwriters had let a contractor salvage as much of the cargo as wasn’t ruined. They had saved some machinery and several thousand cases of whiskey that somehow hadn’t been smashed. The crew had been saved.

“So that’s the first time your diamonds were dunked,” I said. “But where does Macaulay fit in?”

I began to get the connection. Salvage – underwriters; the part about his being in the marine insurance business was true.

“They were aboard the
Shetland Queen
,” continued Barclay. “But they didn’t appear on the cargo manifest or any of the Customs lists. They were in some cases of tinned cocoa which were going to a small importing firm in New Orleans. A cheap way to ship diamonds but tough to explain if something happens to the ship, as in this case. The cocoa was insured, for two or three hundred dollars. We would have looked stupid trying to collect three-quarters of a million dollars from the underwriters when we’d paid a premium on a valuation of three hundred dollars. We couldn’t explain that to Customs either.

“Benson & Teen had paid off all claims, including ours, and were salvaging what they could, but they weren’t going to waste time bringing up a few dollars’ worth of tinned cocoa. They paid, and wrote it off. We made a few feelers. Since they were working inside the ship anyway, why not bring up our cocoa and let us drop our claim? They brushed us. We let it drop, before they got suspicious. We had to wait until they were finished and then do our own salvaging.

“But then some – uh – competitors of ours got wise and also tried to buy the cocoa from Benson & Teen. This was a little too much for Macaulay, who was in charge of the operation. He sent a confidential agent down to the salvage operations to look into this chocolate business on the quiet. This guy asked to have the cocoa brought up and, since he was acting for Benson & Teen through Macaulay, they brought it up. He found out what made it so valuable, devalued it, and phoned Macaulay.

“They had two problems. The first was getting the stones into the States without paying duty or answering any embarrassing questions as to where they had come from. The second was to keep us from getting them. We had two men in the Mexican port keeping an eye on the cargo that was brought in. Macaulay solved both problems at once. He’d been a bomber pilot in the Second World War, and held a pilot’s license. He came down to the Gulf Coast, chartered a big amphibian, and came after his agent and the stones. They were to meet in a laguna some ten or fifteen miles east of the Mexican port. They did, but our men were there too. They’d followed Macaulay’s man and lost him in the jungle, but saw the plane coming in and got there just as the man was climbing aboard. They recognized Macaulay and opened fire, killing the other man, but Macaulay got away in the plane.”

“With your stupid diamonds,” I said.

He nodded. We thought so. “Macaulay didn’t go back to New York, knowing what he was up against now. His wife disappeared also. The firm said he had suffered a heart attack and resigned. He’d told them, earlier, that he had to go to the coast because of illness in the family. We almost caught up to him two or three times. He never tried to sell any of the diamonds. We figured that, just about the time we ran him down in Sanport. He hadn’t sold them because he didn’t have them.

“He escaped us in Sanport, taking off in a plane with a man carrying an aqualung diving outfit. Macaulay, by the way, couldn’t swim. When we learned about the diver, we knew what had happened. The metal box with the diamonds had fallen into the water when Macaulay’s friend was killed.

“We stuck close to Mrs Macaulay, knowing she’d soon lead us to him. But just about that time we suspected he was back in Sanport because of a little story in the paper. About five days after Macaulay took off, a fishing boat docked with a man it had picked up in a rubber liferaft on the Campeche Bank. He told them he was a pilot for some Mexican company and had crashed while going from Tampico to Progreso alone in a seaplane. He took off the minute the fishing boat docked.”

“I get it now,” I said. “As soon as she got in touch with me you knew the castaway was Macaulay. And you realized he had crashed out there somewhere, but that he knew exactly where the plane was and could find it again, or he wouldn’t have been trying to hire a diver.”

Barclay nodded. “Correct. We also suspected he was in the house, but taking him alive wasn’t going to be easy. He was armed and panicky.”

“The thing that puzzles me,” I said, “is that you and your meatheaded thugs never did put the arm on her to find out where the plane was. You’re convinced now she knows where it is, but you let her come and go there for a week or more right under your noses.”

“We weren’t certain she knew
then
.”

“But you are now. Why?”

He lit a cigarette. Sanport’s lights were fading on the horizon.

“It’s simple,” he explained. “I wrote Macaulay a letter two days ago advising him to tell her.”

I shook my head. “Say that again. You wrote him a letter – where?”

“To his house. Even if he weren’t there she would get it to him.”

“And he’d be sure to tell her, just because you suggested it? Why?”

He smiled again. “Sure, he was an insurance man, wasn’t he? I just pointed out that there was always the chance something might happen to him and he ought to protect her.”

“By telling her where the plane was?” I asked incredulously. “So he could guarantee her being put through the wringer by you—”

He shook his head gently. “You still don’t see Macaulay’s point of view. He knew she’d be questioned. But suppose she
didn’t
know where the plane was?”

I saw the bastard’s logic. “Good God—”

“Right. Life insurance. He was leaving her the only thing that could stop the interrogation.”

I saw then what Macaulay must have gone through in those last few hours. He had to tell her.

I leaned my elbows on my knees and looked at him. “
You dirty son
—”

I stopped. I’d forgotten him. She’d been telling the truth.

Barclay had sent that letter to Macaulay only two days ago. I had to talk to her.

Barclay let me, too. He knew he was tying me tighter to Shannon and that I’d be easier to handle that way, so he called Barfield up. Barfield liked his sleep a lot more than he liked me. I could see his face burning as I went below.

She was lying on the starboard bunk with her face in her arms.

“Shannon,” I said.

“What, Bill?” Her voice was muffled.

“How long have you known what these gorillas are after?”

She turned slowly and looked up with listless gray eyes.

“Since three this afternoon,” she said.

I felt weak with relief or joy, or both of them. I’d been right. All the bitterness was gone and I wanted to take her in my arms. Instead I lit a cigarette. “I want to apologize,” I said.

She shook her head. “Don’t. I sold you out, Bill.”

“No,” I whispered. “You didn’t know. I thought you had lied, but you hadn’t. It doesn’t matter that he was lying to you.”

“Don’t make it any worse, Bill. I had six hours to call you, and you could have got away. I tried to, but I couldn’t. I thought I owed him that, in spite of what he did. Maybe I was wrong, but I think I’d still do it the same way. I don’t know how to explain—”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “You were telling the truth all the time. That’s all that matters.”

She stared up at me. “Why does it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

I wanted to shout it out to her, or sing it, but I kept my face blank and lit a cigarette for myself.

“I’m sorry about it,” I said gently.

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “It’s all right. He didn’t have a chance, anyway. I think they knew he was in the house, and anything we tried would have failed.”

“Why hadn’t he ever told you?” I asked.

“Ashamed, I think. He wasn’t really a criminal, Bill. There was just too much of it, and it was too easy, and no one would ever know.”

“It’s too bad,” I said. “It’s a dirty shame.”

She turned her face a little, and her eyes met mine squarely. “You know I must have suspected it, don’t you? Nobody could be stupid enough not to guess there must be more to it than he told me. I did suspect it. I can’t deny it. I was cheating when I told you what he told me, because I was afraid it wasn’t the truth, or not all the truth. But what could I do? Tell you I thought my husband was lying? Did I owe you more than I did him? Doesn’t eight years of time mean anything, or the fact he had never lied to me before, or that he’d always been wonderful to me? I’d do it again. You’ll just have to think what you will.”

“You know what I think? I’ll tell you about it some day.”

“Wait, Bill,” she whispered. “You don’t know all of it yet. When you do, you’ll think I’m a fool. He was going to leave me. He wasn’t on his way to Honduras when he crashed. He was going to destroy the plane and disappear somewhere on the Florida coast.”

I got it then. “And you’d have gone on to Honduras, thinking he would be there? And when he wasn’t, you’d have been certain he was dead? Down somewhere in the Gulf, or in the jungle?”

“Yes,” she said. Then she smiled a little bitterly. “But I wasn’t the one he wanted to convince. If Barclay and his men had managed to follow me down there, they’d give him up as dead too.”

“But running out on you? Deserting you, leaving you stranded in a foreign country?”

“Not quite stranded, if you mean money,” she said. “You see, it wasn’t in the plane. I thought it was, but it was in a bag of his I was supposed to bring down with me. None of it’s clear-cut, Bill. He was leaving me, and he had to double-cross his friend who bought the plane, but he wanted me to have the money.”

Conscience money, I thought.

Suddenly she was crying silently. “Does it make much sense to you that I still didn’t call and tell you, after that?”

“Does it have to?” I asked.

She put both hands alongside her face and said slowly, around the tightness in her throat, “I don’t know how to explain it. When he told me that, I knew I would leave him, but I couldn’t run out on him until he was safe.”

I tried to see Macaulay, and failed again. How could he inspire that kind of loyalty on one hand and be capable of the things he had done, on the other? I said nothing about it because it might not have occurred to her and it would only hurt her, but he had killed that diver, or intended to until the airplane crash saved him the trouble. The way he had it planned, there couldn’t be any second person who knew he was still alive. He’d probably killed him as soon as the poor devil brought up the box in that Mexican laguna. And he would have killed me, in some way.

Then I thought of something else. “Do you really know where that plane is?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yes. He told me very carefully. And I memorized everything he said.”

I wondered. She thought she did. Barclay was convinced she did. But apparently I was the only one aboard who had any idea of the immensity of the Gulf of Mexico and the smallness of an airplane. If you didn’t know within a few hundred yards you could drag for a thousand years and never find it.

Not that I cared if they found their stupid diamonds or not. It was something else. If they didn’t, Barclay would think she was stalling. “ – suppose she
didn’t
know,” he’d said softly. The implication was sickening.

“He didn’t show you on a chart?” I asked. “Or make a drawing?”

“No,” she said. “But it’s near a shoal about fifty miles north-north-east of Scorpion Reef. It’s around a half-mile long, running north and south. The plane sank two miles due east of it.”

“Was there white water, or did he just see the shoal from the air before he crashed?”

“He didn’t say.”

That wasn’t good. You had to assume too many things. You had to assume that Macaulay had known where he was himself and that the water was shallow enough at that spot to cause surf, so we could find it. If he’d merely seen a difference in the coloration of the water from above, we didn’t have a chance. Then you had to have faith in his ability to estimate his bearing and distance from the shoal in the wild scramble to launch the rubber raft.