The Betrayers (18 page)

“I don’t think you’re really going to kill me, darling,” she said. “I don’t think you really killed Mr. Pressman. It was… it was just a joke, wasn’t it?”

“Sure,” I said. “I always joke about homicide. Funniest subject on earth. You ought to see him, just for laughs. Lying there on his bed with a blank look on his face and a hypo puncture in the back of his neck. He thought I
was just putting him to sleep for a little while. Isn’t that a scream? Can you imagine where he got such a ridiculous notion, Duchess?”

She licked her lips again. “Matt, I—”

I went on without letting her finish, “You’d have died laughing when he realized he was actually being killed. Funniest thing I’ve seen since the power mower threw Uncle Hector and came roaring back to chew him to pieces.”

“Matt, please—”

I said, “And then there’s Hanohano, if you like good homicidal fun. In case you don’t recognize the name, that’s the Hawaiian character who followed us from the airport. He’s lying out in the sugarcane with two knife holes in his chest. Blood and gore everywhere. Funny, my God! Really a gasser. I’m sorry you missed it; you’d have laughed your head off.” I sighed. “Actually, I feel kind of bad about Hanohano. Did you know that the state of Hawaii has a population of nearly three quarters of a million, but there are only about ten thousand native Hawaiians left? They’re practically extinct. I feel kind of as if I’d gone out and shot down one of the last trumpeter swans. But if you like jokes, here’s the real hilarious thing. When I got to Lahaina after taking care of the Hawaiian, there was a man hanging around the docks. He seemed very interested in me. It was almost as if he’d known I’d be coming. Now, how do you figure he could have learned that? After all, I hadn’t told anybody where I was bound. Anybody but you.”

She said desperately, “Matt, you don’t understand—”

I said in a harsher tone of voice, “You sold me out, Isobel. Or have you been reporting to Monk all along? Anyway, tonight you made love to me, then you got me talking over drinks, and then you betrayed me to the opposition. Now I don’t know exactly where you fit into this, or who you really are, or how much you know about this kind of business, but you can’t be dumb enough not to know the penalty for being caught the way I’ve just caught you.”

“If you’d let me explain—”

“There’s nothing to explain,” I said. “I’ve killed two men tonight, two men against whom I had nothing except that they were in the way. I feel a little bad about that. Not much, but a little. But I wouldn’t feel a bit bad about killing you. Native Hawaiians may be in short supply, but the world’s never going to run out of double-crossing bitches. Like sparrows and starlings they’ll be with us forever. One would never be missed.” I paused and went on deliberately, “On the other hand, you may just possibly be of some use to me, Duchess. Not much use, just enough for me to risk leaving you alive for a while
if
you keep your trap shut,
if
you make absolutely no trouble whatsoever, and
if
you do exactly as you’re told. No tricks, no arguments. What do you say?”

She licked her lips. “What use do you have for me, Matt? What are you going to do to me?”

“Never mind that. I’ll tell you when the time comes.”

There was a brief silence. Isobel drew a long breath. “I
don’t have much choice, do I? All right, I’ll do whatever you say, Matt.”

I looked at her for a moment, and got to my feet. “Okay. It’s a deal. Now you grab this side and I’ll grab the other. Let’s get it afloat.”

She stared at me blankly. “What?”

“The boat, stupid. You didn’t really think I was going back to Lahaina, where people are undoubtedly waiting for me—people you sicced on me. Come on, let’s put it in the water. Molokai, here we come.”

She was on her feet now. “But… but you’re mad! Why, it’s miles and miles of open water! We’d never make it in this little thing!”

I said, “Hell, the Polynesians came clear up from the South Pacific in a hollow log to colonize this place. If I can’t sail a modern, unsinkable fiberglass boat across a lousy ten-mile channel in clear summer weather, my Viking ancestors will disown me.”

Something funny happened then. I saw her look out to sea for a moment and down at the tiny sailboat at our feet. It was hardly more than a surfboard dressed up with a mast, rudder, centerboard, and a cramped little cockpit into which you could stick your feet as you sat on the open deck a few inches above the water. In the dark, I saw the slow beginnings of a smile form at the corner of her mouth. I’d forgotten the screwball streak she’d displayed once or twice before. Suddenly she threw back her head and laughed.

“You’re crazy, darling! You’re absolutely insane!”
There was nothing in this requiring a comment from me, so I made none. She said in a tentative voice, “I don’t suppose I get to change my clothes.”

That still didn’t require any response. Regardless of what I’d planned earlier—or said I was planning—I’d hardly have gone to the trouble now of getting her down to the boat unseen, only to risk letting her go clear back up to her room where someone might be watching, not to mention the tricks she might play on the way. She’d given me no reason to be considerate of her or her wardrobe, and after all, what clothes were actually needed in this climate? It wasn’t as if we were setting out to cross the North Sea in midwinter.

Isobel hesitated and looked down at herself in a speculative way, as if estimating what her appearance might be a couple of hours from now. Abruptly, she threw her purse into the footwell of the boat and bent over, raising her skirt garter-high. Current fashions being what they are, it didn’t have far to go. A moment later she was standing there with her stockings and high-heeled pumps in her hand, having got them off with commendable speed for a lady who’d just been commenting unfavorably on the joys of going shoeless.

The reckless little half-smile on her face said she’d show me. To hell with her pretty clothes, it said: anything crazy I could do, she could do crazier. I had an uneasy feeling that she’d defeated me somehow, but I couldn’t quite see how.

“Aye, aye, Skipper,” she said. “Ready for launching, sir.”

“Well, toss that stuff into the cockpit and let’s go.”

Together we dragged the boat down to the water’s edge and waded out with it to where we could work on it conveniently. I saw Isobel flinch when the first wave that met us soaked her dress to the hips; after that she paid no more attention than if she’d been wearing a bikini. We checked the rudder, slipped the centerboard into its slot, hoisted the sail, and scrambled aboard. Then we were gliding smoothly away from the land, leaving five little boats where there had been six before—but I didn’t think anyone was likely to count them until the beach boys arrived in the morning.

Even then, the chances of Monk’s men discovering that one of the toy hotel boats was missing wasn’t very great. They wouldn’t be thinking in terms of cockleshells. All they would know and report, I hoped, was that Pressman was dead and that Isobel and I had disappeared mysteriously during the night.

Isobel shifted position on the deck beside me. “Ugh, if there’s anything clammier than a wet bathing suit, it’s a wet girdle,” she said. “Matt?”

“Yes?”

“I still hate you. I loathe and despise you. I just happen to have a weakness for mad men and mad projects. Do you understand?”

I grinned. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll try not to presume on your weakness, ma’am, but I guarantee nothing. Now you’d better slide that wet girdle out to windward a bit to balance us. It looks breezy up ahead…”

Not being an experienced seaman, I can’t give all the technical details of the trip. The basic problem, as posed by the charts and my pocket compass, was simple enough. We wanted to sail north to Molokai, but the trade winds, which blow from the northeast in those parts, didn’t really want to let us. This conflict of opinion made things quite wet and violent on board, particularly after we passed the tip of Maui and no longer had the mass of that island to shelter us.

I’d expected a certain amount of commotion, and I’d made what preparations I could. I’d collected Isobel’s shoes and purse and glasses, and my shoes and gun, and rolled them up in my coat. I’d secured the bundle with my necktie and lashed it to the mast with her stockings, which lowered my popularity quotient even further. I guess no woman likes to see knots tied in her nylons. But at least we were cleared for action, so to speak, and everything was lashed down that could fall off or blow away or wash
overboard when we entered the channel proper. It was just as well.

In theory, I knew, a sailboat should be able to head within about forty-five degrees, or four compass points, of the wind. In other words, with a northeast wind blowing, our northerly course was theoretically possible. This much I remembered from what I’d been taught by the old Navy chief who’d run the small-boat training school I’d attended at Annapolis years ago. I could recall him explaining to us exactly why a sailboat goes to windward. He’d drawn the parallelogram of forces on the blackboard for us. Then he’d taken us out for practical instruction, one by one, and I remembered his simple directions for sailing close-hauled, as it’s called:
Just hike your ass out to weather, sir, and watch your luff.

It had seemed a relatively simple procedure in a good-sized sailboat on the sheltered waters of Chesapeake Bay in broad daylight. On a fiberglass shingle in the Pailolo Channel at night, with the trade winds blowing across a thousand miles of open ocean and the waves marching out of the darkness mast-high, it got considerably more complicated. Well, I don’t suppose they were really mast-high, and it wasn’t much of a mast anyway, but after pounding into the stuff for over an hour and capsizing once, I began to have some doubts as to the feasibility of the voyage on which I’d embarked.

I mean, there’s something very discouraging—not to say frightening—about clinging to an overturned boat in the dark in the middle of nowhere, even when you know
perfectly well it won’t sink and you’ll be able to get it upright again as soon as you catch your breath from the ducking. The water was reasonably warm; there was no question of dying of exposure. Nevertheless I began to have a nagging suspicion that those old Polynesians with their hollow logs might just possibly have been better men than I.

It was then, as we rolled the boat back on its bottom and squirmed aboard, that I heard Isobel give her kookie little laugh once more.

“Darling, you’re absolutely the world’s worst sailor!” she shouted. “Let me take her.”

“What?”

“We’re not making any headway. Move over. Give me the tiller. Let me show you… All right,
don’t
trust me. But you’re pinching her to death.”

“What the hell does that mean?” I yelled. “Pinching whom?”

“The boat. You’re frustrating the poor thing terribly. You’re trying to make her point much too high. You’ve got that silly little lateen sail sheeted in so hard it can’t draw properly, and you won’t let it out an inch: that’s why we flipped just now. And every time she does get some way on her, you run her up into the wind and stop her dead!”

It was a surprising amount of nautical lingo to come from the lips of a decorative pillar of society, even a thoroughly wet one. However, I didn’t have time to figure out the implications at the moment. A wave broke over the bow and sluiced along the deck on which we sat, half filling the cockpit. There was some kind of bailing device
working down there, but for a minute or two the little vessel handled sluggishly with the extra weight of water, and I had my hands full keeping her under control.

Then I pulled my compass out of my pocket and nudged my companion to draw her attention to the luminous needle. “We’ve got to steer north, don’t we?” I shouted. “Molokai’s north, not northwest.”

I heard her laugh again. “Darling, you can’t work a sailboat by compass! You’ve got to sail by the wind and the sea. Molokai’s over thirty miles long; we’re not going to miss it. Once we’re there, in protected water, we can make up whatever we’ve lost to leeward. But you’re not sailing a racing yacht, Matt, with a deep lead keel and lots of momentum. You’re sailing a centerboard skimming dish. To hell with pointing, you’ve got to keep her footing. Slack that sheet and bear off. Let her drive, or we’ll be splashing around here all night.”

Again, the seagoing jargon had a strange sound, considering the source, but this was hardly the place to worry about it. I hesitated only a moment. She could be tricking me somehow, but what the hell, I couldn’t do worse than I was doing. I remembered that on land a sheet may be a piece of cloth, but on the water it’s a rope—excuse me, a line. I let some of the nylon cord that controlled the sail slip through my hand. I pulled on the tiller, and felt the little boat swing and steady, and take off slantingly down the back of a wave like an eager pony.

Rising, she shouldered the oncoming crest aside and made the swift downward rush again, almost planing. I
felt a hand take hold of the nylon line to which I clung, and I looked quickly at the woman beside me.

“At least let me tend sheet for you,” Isobel shouted. “Now you’re getting the idea. Just keep her driving!”

That was all there was to it—except about four more hours of wind and spray. It was still dark when we reached Molokai, feeling the motion ease as we sailed into the lee of the island. Presently I spotted the flash of breakers ahead, and made out the solid mass of the mountains against the starry black sky. It took us a while to beat around the end of the island against the wind. We felt the full blast of the trades again, rounding the easternmost point of land, but pretty soon we were able to swing away from it and run more or less downwind, really flying. The sky was getting light behind us. The forbidding north coast of Molokai began to open up to our left.

I headed into the first bay I saw, but there was a station wagon parked on the sandy beach—fishermen perhaps—and a road wound up the cliff behind it. I remembered Jill telling me about the road that went just around the end of the island and no farther: I’d obviously headed in too soon. I steered back out, and let a couple of minor openings go past, and managed to jibe and dunk us once more as I turned in again. As Isobel had suggested, I was undoubtedly the worst sailor ever to visit this coast.