Salvage for the Saint (20 page)

The Saint nodded, his thoughts working to accommodate all the new factors that had suddenly entered the picture. Descartes had gone, abruptly; and just as abruptly, Lebec had appeared. And there was now the mystery of the Phoenix, and of who had been at the helm a few minutes ago. But whatever the changes in principal actors, there was one central focus of interest in that picture, and that was what Simon hung on to. Just across the water was a fabulous hoard of gold, lying only forty feet down; and he wanted a good proportion of it to finish up in his own personal coffers.

“Inspector Lebec,” he said pleasantly. “Would you like me to tell you where there’s four million dollars’ worth of gold bars?”

Lebec gestured towards the now stationary Phoenix.

“I think I can guess that, Monsieur Templar.”

The Phoenix lay at anchor, her engines stopped. She was still, silent, and devoid of any sign of life. They had taken a wide circular line in the launch, and approached from her bows, not knowing quite what they might find. The wheelhouse, and the decks, were apparently deserted. At a signal from Lebec the helmsman brought the launch close in alongside.

“There may be some trouble, Madame,” Lebec said. “You will please remain here.” He turned to the Saint. “And you—you will accompany me, Monsieur Templar.”

Simon followed Lebec, making something between a long pace and a short jump from the roof of the launch’s cabin to the deck of the Phoenix.

The Saint could have recalled many occasions in his life when tension-filled minutes had seemed to drag into interminable hours.

Those were the times when he had been most vulnerable, for one reason or another, and the enemy had been at his most inscrutably and dangerously unpredictable. But of all that array of nerve-stretchingly unen-joyable situations, there were few in which he had felt so helplessly, fleshcrawlingly exposed, so wide open to the whim or mercy of someone unknown, as he did now, prowling watchfully around the Phoenix’s decks and accommodation. Lebec was at least armed. The Saint wasn’t; and the comfort that he was able to draw from the presence of an automatic in the detective’s hand was realistically limited compared with the comfort it would have given him to have one in his own … Over and above which, he had reasons enough, from his point of view, for feeling uncomfortable about any degree of personal dependence on Lebec.

Lebec led the way cautiously into the saloon. There was no one there. The wheel-house, likewise, was deserted. So were the staterooms the Saint and Arabella had used. And so was the Captain’s cabin. There was no sign of anybody on board.

“It seems that we have on our hands a ghost ship,” Lebec said.

And then, right on cue as it seemed, they heard a sound which caused the hairs on the back of Simon Templar’s neck to stand up as if in response to the caress of an icy feather.

It was a weird strangled gurgling sound, a plangent wail with all the evil-laden menace of an unseen tomcat sending its persistent yowling threats into the night.

They stood still and listened, Lebec with his automatic poised.

And then the note of the caterwauling changed, and Simon heard in that sound a timbre, a quality of deeper resonance, which he knew he had heard somewhere before. He listened again, with his head on one side. It seemed to be coming from not far away. And as he listened he began to hear some distinguishable component noises, almost like syllables, in that dreadful bloodcurdling wailing. It began to sound, so it seemed to him, something like “Toorooroo-roro—loorarroo …”

Then suddenly it came to him; and with his heart dropping through his stomach with helpless dizzy laughter and relief, he turned the key in the locked door of the storeroom, the only place where they had not looked, and opened the door to reveal, prone among the paint cans and paraffin, one standard pie-eyed Finnegan, complete with bottle. Finnegan sang.

… loo-ra loo-ra,

Dhat’s an Oi-i-rish lo-lla

He broke off, squinting vaguely at the Saint and Lebec. Then his eyes rolled happily.

“Good afternoon, Captain,” said the Saint kindly. “No point in asking how you are. We can see you’re very well. But, Captain— somebody locked you in here. Did you see who? Was it Bernadotti?”

He might as well have put the question in Serbo-Croat to a deaf Chinese hedgehog. Finnegan snored blissfully.

Simon and Lebec carried him to his cabin, laid him on his bunk, and went back on deck.

“What now?” asked the Saint. “He didn’t lock himself in there, that’s for sure.”

Lebec stroked his chin thoughtfully for a moment.

“The gold must be recovered. You, as its finder, will qualify for the reward offered by the Government of France. I will support your claim, Monsieur Templar. But I require your services as diver.”

Simon could not have hoped for a better opening.

“Agreed,” he said. “Ten percent?”

The Saint had made a preliminary shallow dive to guide Lebec in bringing the Phoenix as near as possible directly over the sunken hoard, and he was ready to go down and load up for the first time. He had remembered the tough nylon net he had seen in the store room, and had tied it to a strong length of rope in such a way that it could be made secure after loading, so that Lebec, using the spare winch, could bring the loaded net up without risk of spilling any of its contents.

By the Saint’s estimate there were possibly six or seven hundred of the gold ingots to be brought up. That made six or seven hundred kilograms, or getting on for three-quarters of a ton of gold to be retrieved, using a net intended for fishing. There was no point in taking a risk of overloading the net, and Simon judged that sixty bars would be the most they could safely try to bring up in a single load. That meant he would have ten or twelve dives to make.

While he was getting all that exercise, there would be plenty to occupy his mind. As he began to take the net down for the first time, he found himself coming back again to a fantastically improbable notion which he hadn’t yet found a way of entirely dismissing from his thoughts.

It was the notion that Finnegan might not be all that he seemed; that his drunkenness was a pretence and a blind, merely the product of brilliantly convincing acting; that the seemingly innocent Irishman had after all done all those things of which the Saint had previously judged him incapable.

Simon swam down into the sunken cruiser, spread out the net on top of the golden hoard, and began loading it for the first time, with his mind still following that same corridor of thought—or was it a blind alley? Could Finnegan have been the shadowy man in the Bidou Club after all? Had he escaped in the blue van, only to reappear a few minutes later, stumbling about and carolling squiffily? Could Finnegan have “forced the strangulation” of Pancho, as Descartes had put it? And had Finnegan been the man at the helm, perhaps even humming a little ditty, when the Phoenix rammed the dinghy?

He had to admit to himself that it was just about possible. Finnegan could have done all these things. But had he? If he had, it was an acting achievement to stagger the imagination, a tour de force rivalling or surpassing the best the Saint had ever seen— and the Saint had seen some.

And again, if Finnegan had done all those things, there was still the toppling crate to be explained. There was still no way, as far as Simon could see, that the Irishman could have been responsible for that. Of course, it could conceivably have been a genuine accident; but wasn’t that stretching the theory too far—piling coincidence on top of fantasy?

And then there was the question of how Finnegan could have managed that last mind-boggling feat of locking himself in the store-room and leaving the key on the outside of the door.

The Saint’s mind continued to work at the problem as he steadily transferred the first clutch of gold to the net. Perhaps Bernadotti had locked Finnegan in? Perhaps he had realised what Finnegan was really up to, and had put him away to immobilise him while … While what? And in that case, where had Bernadotti vanished to? That question was the one that continued to echo most persistently through his thoughts.

In any case, where was Bernadotti?

But to pile puzzle upon puzzle, there was another missing party—one who, on an earlier hypothesis, would have been expected to show up before now. And that was Tranchier.

The idea that Tranchier was still alive and anxious to grab all the swag for himself had once seemed reasonable enough, but now the Saint was no longer so sure. If Tranchier was alive and knew that the Phoenix held the secret of the gold, why hadn’t the fish-faced Frenchman shown his phizzog?

Finnegan, Bernadotti, perhaps Tranchier, … two dead bodies … and the gold of Schwarzkopf-Tatenor. As Simon added the final few gold bars to complete the first load, he stepped off that carousel of thought and speculation and back on again, with the same question ringing in his head like a refrain.

Where was Bernadotti?

He tried a different tack, turning the reasoning around the other way. If Finnegan was as innocent as he appeared, why wasn’t Bernadotti there on the Phoenix?

There seemed to be only two reasonable explanations. The first was that Bernadotti was deliberately keeping himself hidden, and the second was that he had been got rid of.

The Saint couldn’t put it to himself any more neatly than that. If it was the former, it was hard to see that Bernadotti would have had time to hide anywhere except on the ship; but he had not been found there, and Simon was confident that no hiding place had been overlooked. And if it was the latter—if somebody had got rid of Bernadotti—well, at least his body could have been dumped in the other bay … And then, things would look decidedly black for Finnegan.

With the first quota of bars loaded, Simon fastened the net securely at the top and tugged sharply on the rope to signal Lebec and his crewmen to start hauling. He steadied the net as it began to move; but the pull up was not quite vertical—perhaps the repositioning of the Phoenix above had been slightly out, or perhaps a tide was dragging the heavy load. At any rate, as soon as the loaded net had been pulled up far enough to clear the hatchway, it swung a distance of seven or eight feet through the water, pushing the Saint ahead of it.

And as he came through the water and clear of the rail on the side of the sunken boat which had been blind to him while he was working, he saw a sight that made his scalp tingle electrically with the march of ghostly insects, and his heart almost stopped as if a cold hand had clutched it.

There, facing him, anchored to the sea bed close up against the side of the boat, was the answer to the question which had been echoing in his brain: Where was Bernadotti?

The man’s black hair waved lazily in the currents set up by the swing of the loaded net, and his eyes bulged in the rigid stare of death.

-3-

“Come on, come on, wake up!” shouted Inspector Lebec impatiently.

Captain William Finnegan began to stir uneasily out of his deep dream of peace; and then someone sloshed another bucketful of cold sea-water over him, none too gently.

Finnegan, flat on his back on the deck of the Phoenix, twitched three or four times, then spluttered, gasped, coughed, and finally opened his eyes. He looked up at the impassive form of Lebec framed against the fading blue and white of the evening sky.

“Wha—?” said Finnegan, and shut his eyes again.

Another bucket of water sloshed over him.

“Wha—?” said Finnegan, more loudly.

He tried to get up on one elbow, but fell back.

“Come on—wake up!” Lebec repeated.

Arabella shook her head dubiously.

“What’s the use? He couldn’t have done it,” she said. “Not in that condition.”

Lebec stood for a while, chewing his lower lip reflectively as he looked down at the groggily blinking Finnegan. Then he seemed to make up his mind.

“I agree. It is difficult to imagine that he could be capable of anything but sleep. And his condition was no better when we discovered him earlier, in the storage room.” Lebec glanced at his watch. “The next load will soon be due. Once we have dealt with it, we will lock him away until he becomes sober.”

Arabella looked around at the gold that lay spread out in shallow stacks on the deck. She could still hardly believe it all. It seemed incredible that in the space of two and a half days she could have been through so many experiences of a kind that had never touched her life before. She had been rescued from death in a bull-ring; she had been chased through a swamp and charged with a lance; she had been threatened by grotesquely dice-helmeted characters in a night club and had a man murdered almost in her arms, had been locked up in a police cell, and finally run down by her own yacht. It was quite incredible that all these things had actually happened to her; and it was equally hard to believe in the reality of all that gold.

But there it was before her eyes, gleaming in the rays of the setting sun—the magical sight of real gold in the gold of the sunset. There would be four million dollars’ worth, or so, and Lebec had told her that the ten percent reward would go half to her and half to the Saint.

Arabella had to confess to herself that the division seemed more than fair to her. True, without her yacht the gold wouldn’t have been found, and her equipment was being used to recover it. But she could hardly forget that it was her husband who had stolen it in the first place; and more than once since Lebec’s mention of the reward she had wondered whether as the thief’s widow she could not be debarred from taking a share in it.

“How many loads more?” she asked Lebec.

“Your friend Monsieur Templar thought two. One is due now. Then it will be the last.”

She indicated the gold on the deck.

“How much so far?”

Lebec fired off the question in French at the crewman from the launch, who was sitting lugubriously by the spare winch they had been using. He was waiting now for the next twitch on the rope, like a bored fisherman waiting for a bite. He consulted the careful record he had been keeping as he and Lebec counted the gold aboard.

“Cent soixante-cinq,” he said, without turning his head.