Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (17 page)

Bela slid the flat ingot onto a shelf formed by a shattered catwalk beside the rope ladder. That one bar would pay his tailor’s bills for a while. But for the moment he must impose some order on this business. He had made mistakes, and he must correct them urgently. He should never have been tempted to reason with Jason. He should have killed him immediately. True, Jason did have many friends, and perhaps Bela would have to slip behind the Iron Curtain and endure that spartan life for a little while. That would be an inconvenience, but Jason must die. So too must the policeman. That was clearly agreed in his contract.

His other mistake was in losing his temper. Bela never lost his temper. That was his finest quality. He held on to his composure and kept his wits clear. This time, for once, he had failed, and it irked him. Perhaps it was Jason’s bantering tone, perhaps that obdurate policeman, perhaps it was the shock of the tiger or the stupidity of that old man holding a gun on him. Whatever the accumulation of motives, he had quite lost control when he saw them escaping into the rest of the ship, and had screamed at Anton and the others to catch them. He could have left them to sink with the ship, as it surely must soon, or killed them as they tried to return. There had been no need to take the risk of hunting them. Still, Anton and his crew were highly professional, and Jason’s ragbag friends were not armed; they should be able to clear the matter up easily.

Very well,
he thought. There were now only two considerations. First, the gold must be moved. He must have ten or twelve men from the
Komarevo
to transport the bars back to his vessel as quickly as possible. And they must be properly armed to deal with Jason and the rest if any of them escaped Anton. Too much time had been lost already.

A light smile appeared on his slim, intelligent features. Despite the difficulties, he had clarified the problem quite simply. He scaled the rope ladder with deft, quick steps, and was giving out orders to the man in the pinnace even as he swung a leg over the top. It was all falling neatly into place again. The smile vanished. A button had been torn off his blazer.

Half running, half climbing, bumping and clawing their way, Anton and the two other gunmen sped as best they could over the unhelpful wreckage of the boiler room. They had been whipped into action by Bela’s shouts of rage—“After them, you oafs! Kill them! What are you, little girls?” They had never before seen the captain in such a fury and it had sent them tumbling down the companionway and on into the ship as fast as they could.

Anton was worried. It was apparent even to him that things were not going to plan, and now it was confirmed by Captain Bela’s rage. He was the first to the open door at the opposite end of the boiler room and he paused, panting, to shine his light down into the corridor which lay in front. His nose was bleeding. He had an ache in his stomach. His toe hurt. The policeman had tricked him. Anton had not had any games with him. He thought with warm pleasure of the enjoyment he would have when he caught the little policeman and twisted his body. He would enjoy hearing the policeman scream.

It took him several seconds to realize that the scream he was hearing was real, and not the one in his daydreams. It was a long, high wail, followed by two more, and it came from down at the far end of the corridor, well beyond the vague shapes of the walls and doors he could see in his light. It must be one of those two girls. They must be hiding right down there at the bottom. Anton wanted to be the first to find them, simply for the pleasure of it, and for the reward of Captain Bela’s smile.

He set off, slipping and half falling on the uneven footing, down into the darkness. He would find them. Then tonight there would be fun and money and girls and vodka.

The other two watched him go. The man with one eye—the other was a closed flap—had lost his gun in the panicky scramble when the tiger came out. He had retrieved it and now its menacing aim followed his flashlight down the corridor. “Let him go,” he said. “We take it more careful. They’re not armed, but no chances, huh?”

The second agreed. He was a thin-faced, pale man, a moustache weakly hanging on his upper lip. He too had been stunned by the frightening sequence of events in the engine room. But at least he had recovered in time to shoot the old man. He also had his flash in one hand, his automatic in the other. “Anton, he’s crazy,” he mumbled.

Shoulders nervously hunched, they worked their way warily into Broadway. They ignored the bodies their feet bumped against; dead men held no terrors for them. They ignored too the windless stench of the place.

The man with one eye took the left-hand side. There were several doors, mostly open, in the first few yards. He stood boldly in the doorway of the first; there was little to fear. It had been a storeroom which was now a jumble of broken shelves and scattered tins. There was nowhere anyone could hide. He checked two more, each one revealing nothing. His companion was several yards ahead, with fewer rooms to search, and was now only a scuffling shadow.

The next room took longer. It was the children’s playroom. That meant they must be moving from the part of the corridor which housed the unseen services to the public facilities. He kicked over a toy house which had landed on its side. Then he searched behind a huge shiny slide. Nothing.

The next door was already open. Again he stood boldly. The extraordinary topsy-turvy scene had only begun to reassemble itself in his mind as a hairdressing salon when his light picked out the girl. He flicked his gun up quickly. She was standing against the far wall, her arms flung open and her hands empty. Her wet suit was unzipped, and the browns and golds of her body burned like flames in the cold black coffin of the ship. Her stance, feet apart, head thrown back, unsmiling mouth parted, was unequivocal. She held out one hand and with all four fingers beckoned him. Her body arched backwards, a switch of silver hair flickered across her shoulder. He began to walk, mesmerized, towards her, the light, the gun, his one eye, all on that tense and bending body.

There is a fraction of time so small that the mind can only record a picture, without analyzing or rationalizing it. He saw clearly the girl. He saw too that into his picture there came a leg. From above, out of the blackness. What seemed a single, amputated leg. And it was moving fast. For all that, his eye recorded the faded blue of the denim, whitening at the knee. That was all. The two fantasies, of half-naked girl and dismembered limb, blew apart as the foot stabbed into his throat. It hit deep and hard, just below the chin. He gave a small cough as people do to attract attention, and slumped over backwards. His fantasies died with him.

Jason knew the short, slashing blow had connected properly as his foot sank into the softness of the neck and felt the snap as the man’s head kicked back. He let go of the chair suspended from the ceiling, where he had been clinging like a monkey, and dropped to the floor lightly.

He turned the man over. One eye stared at him. Jason closed it with a delicate finger. He was dead. “Well,” he said, “I guess he won’t be chasing the chicks anymore. You were great, Hely. You sure staged one hell of an act there. I nearly forgot to jump the bastard.”

Hely said, “That wasn’t an act, Jason.” He looked over his shoulder. She went on, “No, Jason. It was for you. Now!”

The tone was imperative. Jason rose and advanced towards her. They both saw in that blinkered moment the force that drove them together. It was beyond attraction and love. It was beyond even strength and sexuality. It was one of those few dark, undeniable, elemental powers that cross all moralities and codes—that raw instinct that canceled all others. It was life and death, together. And for a time the whole earth revolved around the axis of their spinning, greedy bodies, until at last they sank into each other’s exhausted arms.

As natural as the cries and gasps that had come from her throat, the tears then came from Hely’s eyes. She sobbed joyously on his shoulder. She cried, and cried again in delight at her own tears. She had discovered something in herself—the capacity to feel. She was no longer independent. She was no longer free. She was no longer untouched by the world around her. She was part of it, and she wept.

She would throw the rings away, she thought. They no longer mattered. She lay in the crook of his lap as he sat, knees up, back against the wall, her tears warm on her cheek. His voice spilled over, her, comforting and warm.

He was talking about his early life. It was all about a small town somewhere, a sunny place where fish took boys’ hooks, and it seemed right that they should. He talked too of men called slants and gooks who suddenly seemed to have thoughts and feelings and families like him, and a friend who went fishing with him, and the fish took the hooks just the way they did back in his small town, and the friend, the man who never waved or spoke as the helicopter left, but stayed to die.

He spoke of what he called “the little people,” the victims of vast international policies, whose lives were upturned at the stroke of a dictator’s pen or the whim of a fickle electorate half a world away. The little people all around the world whose lives are exposed in the name of expediency.

His voice came through her trance. “All they taught me was warfare. I can fire any gun in the field, I can drive a tank, I can fly a chopper, I can sail a boat, I can climb a mountain, and I can kill with my bare hands. That’s my craft. Only now I try to use it to straighten out a debt I can’t repay in full.”

Some of it she understood. But all of it revealed a man who was propelled by belief. That belief would change her life as surely as it had changed his.

The moustache had not grown as he had hoped. With the back of his flashlight hand, he brushed it and it felt soft and feminine. It was not easy to be a respected killer at the age of twenty if you could not even produce a virile moustache.

He kicked open the door on his right. It looked like a small theater. From the corridor, his flash beam revealed little of the inside, and he waited for a moment. He was anxious to accomplish this job well and was prepared to be cautious.

So far it had not been a good day. He was tired of the other members of the crew of the
Komarevo
teasing him about his age, his slight build, and the not absolutely essential morning shave. What was it Bela had said? “It looks like a baby mouse that lay down and died.” The others had laughed.

Then there had been the tiger. He had not run away, it was true, but he had frozen in the corner, the Stechkin useless in his hand. He had recovered only in time to shoot that stupid old man with the pistol, and the captain had also got in two shots at him. Captain Bela had been furious about the way things were going wrong. This was his chance to recover the situation for his boss. There were only four men and two girls, all unarmed, and he would run them down and destroy them. Then Bela would respect him, and the others would stop treating him like a child.

He walked slowly through the doorway. His right hand was ready on the trigger. His left, holding the light, also supported the gun. There would be no mistakes.

Yes, it was a theater. His light, clumsily angled upwards, revealed the dangling seats. It was odd, this upside-down feeling everywhere. The dead air was unmoving. He had to brace his legs to hold his position on the ceiling, cambered by the angle of the ship. His feet inched forward until they stopped against a heavy, inert object. He knew what it would be. A body. On the blurred rim of the beam he could see three or four of them: men, judging by their clothes. Two of them appeared to be in dinner jackets. Another was in an undershirt. What had he been doing at midnight on New Year’s Eve that entailed being half-dressed? Well, at least he would have died happy.

Something was wrong about the seats above his head. One of them, only one, was not hanging down. There was a tape or something hanging from it. The seat suddenly crashed down, and he felt his nerves prick and his stomach hollow and dropped into a crouch. The gun and light pointed at the seat. Why had there been that sudden movement? His left leg rested on the back of one of the bodies, the one in the undershirt. Eyes, light, gun, nerves, everything was directed to that seat which completed the perfect symmetry of the row, like inverted gravestones.

The movement of the seat had been odd. There was something else odd too. Even as he realized what it was, it was too late. It was the body beneath his leg: it was
warm.
But before he had a chance to work on the thought he found himself being catapulted into the air and across the room. The body beneath him had thrown him three or four yards away. He landed on his face, his arms and legs flying, and for a moment felt himself spinning on a surface of glass, like a fallen skater. His Stechkin had gone. Where was his gun? Still spinning, he wildly swung the light around. He moved it too quickly and the beam skimmed over the unhelpful shadows. The gun must be nearby somewhere. Frantically he saw the dead man rising. The bulky figure in the underwear shirt was heading toward him, a menacing, waddling figure, with arms bent, holding a rope or something. He grasped the light in both hands, half sitting up, to steady it. He must find the Stechkin before that living corpse got to him.

The now steady beam found it, cool and black and polished. It had come to rest about four yards to his left, against the wall. Two leaps, two frog leaps from this position, and he would reach it. But there was no time. The advancing figure was almost upon him. Then there was a crashing, splintering sound. The pounding figure sank a foot into the ground. He saw the look of stupefaction on his pursuer’s face and saw him lift enraged, imploring hands and cry, “Sweet Suffering Jesus!” Of course, the lights! The theater lights were concealed in glass-fronted boxes built flush into the ceiling. That was the glass surface he had traversed. The bulky man had crashed through. He was imprisoned around his calves by jagged knives of glass.

Bela’s man spluttered a mad laugh of triumph and leaped towards the gun. He landed halfway there and immediately sprang again. But the trapped man grabbed his own legs and tore them free of the savage glass teeth and sprang towards him.