The Revengers (33 page)

“Yes?”

She stared at me for a moment. I was beginning to realize that this was a girl who stared at everything, in the weird, intent way some nuts have. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re studying what they’re looking at harder than other people; in fact they may not be seeing it at all.

But her voice was quite sensible when she spoke, “I’m not going to kill you or the girl; that’s not the plan. Not unless you make me. Believe it. So don’t do anything hasty, please.”

Then she slipped outside and turned to mount the ladder to the flying bridge. The goon poked me with his gun, which was a hopeful sign. The gun-pokers are generally pretty easy; but it was too early yet. I had to think about Serena Lorca’s promise; I didn’t know for sure how many were on board; and I didn’t know the situation forward. I let myself be nudged and goosed down into the main cabin, all well-oiled teak except for the stainless stuff in the galley where a wiry, gray-haired man was cooking something. Number four.

I let myself be urged past the galley and up to a closed teak door in the bow. Another nudge with the gun muzzle indicated that I was supposed to open it. When I did, a hard shove sent me forward to stumble over a plastic bucket that was wedged into the small floor space between two bunks that met in a vee. The door slammed shut behind me.

There was a small girl huddled face down on the starboard vee-berth. I recognized the short-sleeved navy sweater and the white linen slacks and the high-heeled blue sandals. I’d been seriously worried about her ever since Serena Lorca had felt obliged to revise, slightly and maliciously, her report on the swell condition of the prisoner up forward; but the stench in the little wedge-shaped cabin was reassuring. If it was only that, it was nothing to worry about.

“Elly,” I said, touching her shoulder.

She shrugged my hand away miserably. “Go away!” she moaned. “Oh, God, I’m sick as a dog. Go away, damn you! Oh, Jesus, if there’s any way of being uglier and crummier and more revolting, little Elly will find it every time. . . . Oh, Christ, here I go again!”

I moved aside hastily to allow her access to the bucket. It wasn’t very nice of me, the girl was suffering, but I found myself grinning anyway. Miss Eleanor Brand was at it again, tearing herself down as usual. It was kind of like coming home.

I was proudly told as a boy that the family had descended, on one side at least, from seafaring Viking rovers who weren’t, subsequent research informed me, very nice guys. Well, I know a wealthy lady out West who’s very proud of an ancestral horse-thief she wouldn’t dream of letting in the house if he were to appear in the bewhiskered, tobacco-chewing flesh. I can’t say I’ve inherited any great nautical capabilities from those ancient Norse pirates; but they do seem to have bequeathed me a fairly rugged digestion, which stood me in good stead now. As the big sportfisherman pounded along toward an unknown destination, the motion in the cramped bow stateroom was violent and the vomit-stink was unpleasant; but I found myself unaffected except for a slight queasiness, perhaps because I’d had no chance to partake of nourishment since the day before.

Well, the first job, obviously, was to clean up the joint. When Eleanor indicated that she was through regurgitating for the moment, I picked up the bucket, knocked on the door, waited a bit, and opened it cautiously. Our jailer was braced in the narrow passageway outside, gun ready.

“What the hell do you want?” he demanded suspiciously.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He started to tell me it was none of my damned business, but shrugged instead. “Giulio,” he said.

It’s always easier to establish a useful relationship of mutual respect and confidence if you know and Use the name. “Okay, Giulio,” I said, “where do I dump this?”

“Use the head. No, the door to port. And be damned careful, Government Man.”

“I’m always careful, Giulio.”

It was a small, gleaming cubicle and it seemed a shame to defile it, but I got the bucket emptied and washed out, getting water from the shower, since the bucket wouldn’t fit into the diminutive washbasin. Then I couldn’t figure out how to work the nautical potty. I’d been shipmates with the kind you pump with a lever, but this was a much more elegant and complicated apparatus, presumably electrical in nature. I stuck my head out cautiously.

“How do I flush this cottonpicking thing?”

Giulio grimaced. “You’ve got to turn on the fancy electronic shit-eater, first. The macerator-chlorinator button, MC to you. When you get the green light, hit the flush button, F, and you’re in business. And when the bastard goes on strike, or leaks crap all over the boat, or runs the batteries down, you call the EPA and they come running to fix it for you. Haha. Funny story.”

“What’s the other button for, with the red light?” I asked.

“That tells you you’re out of shit-eating gunk and you’ve got to give it another dose before it will work. Hit R for refill to set it up, but you won’t need to. It was recharged before we shoved off. Mr. Lorca likes us to keep his boat ready to go.” His eyes narrowed. “Quit stalling and get it done, if you’re going to do it.”

I set up the right combination on the master computer and the smelly stuff was sucked smoothly out of the bowl, to be purified and sterilized to government specifications before being pumped overboard. Fascinating. It made me feel all warm inside to know that this part of the world’s oceans was safe from our pollution; you never know how much harm one small girl’s puke is going to do. Pretty soon, we’ll have diapers on all the whales and porpoises and be in great shape.

I washed my hands, got a clean towel, and a washcloth and dampened that, and went back in there and rolled her, protesting weakly, over on her back so I could work on her, washing her face and cleaning off her sweater where she’d messed it a little. She lay there exhausted by her convulsive illness, eyes closed; and I found that her pale little monkey-face did funny things to me. I’d been worried about her, badly worried. I was very happy to have caught up with her before anything more serious than seasickness had happened to her; and I wasn’t about to try to figure out how I reconciled my feeling for this girl with my feeling for Martha Devine. Or, for that matter, my feeling for Harriet Robinson, who’d died. But, obviously, what I needed was a burnoose, a camel, a sheikhdom, and a harem. Maybe two camels. Eleanor’s eyes opened.

“Hi,” she whispered.

“Dumb,” I said. “What did you want to go running off for, anyway? Like a little girl pouting because the big boys wouldn’t let her play football with them. Dumb.”

“How . . . how did you get here?”

I said, “You first. How did they catch you?”

She shrugged. “We took a taxi from the airport and told him to take us to the hospital. I didn’t expect to get in to see Kettleman at that hour, but at least I could find out if he was really there. Only, after we’d driven for a little, the cab driver simply slammed on the brakes very hard, so hard that we both wound up on the floor of the back seat. Before we could pick ourselves up there were guns at both rear windows. The girl was there. She’s kind of a weirdo, isn’t she? A man, she called him Giulio, got in the front seat with a gun and we drove along some more and there was a car crash behind us; and pretty soon they brought your man Fred and put him in with us. He’d been following us but they’d laid for him and run him off the road. They took us to the boat, this boat, and wanted Fred to call in—there was a phone connection to the dock—but he wouldn’t give them the number.”

I said, “But the call was made.”

She licked her lips. “Yes. I gave them the number, the one you’d told me. Remember? I’m sorry, Matt, but they were going to hurt him, maim him, very badly. There was a little gray-haired man with a funny French accent, they called him Robert; but he had a knife and he wasn’t funny at all. I couldn’t bear . . . anyway, the call was made, and Warren was ordered to talk to the woman at the other end who was apparently Fred’s wife, telling her that her phone was tapped, which was obviously a lie; I mean, if they hadn’t known the number how could they have tapped it? But they told Warren to tell her exactly what to say to you, the girl did; and what would happen to all of us, Fred particularly, if she tried to warn you in any way—they’d be listening. Only Fred broke loose and tried to reach the phone, to tell her something, and the man called Robert stuck the knife into him. . . . The girl gave him hell afterward, but then it was too late. Matt?”

“Yes?”

“Was I... was I wrong to give them the number? Did I help kill him?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think it made a damned bit of difference, Elly.”

“Thanks for saying that,” she whispered. “I’ll try to believe it. Now it’s your turn; how did you get here?”

I told her. It took a while. When I’d finished she didn’t say anything for a while, thinking it over. I was happy to see that the greenish tinge was fading from her face; apparently she was over the worst of it. At last she pushed herself to a sitting position and swung her feet over the edge of the starboard bunk, facing me as I sat on the edge of the port bunk.

“I'm hardly in a position to criticize, am I?” she said quietly.

“You mean Warren?”

She nodded. “Disregarding the question of the telephone number, Fred was there on account of me; he died on account of me. If I hadn’t charged off to Nassau like that. . . . Well, never mind. But with that on my conscience, I’m not really qualified to take a high moral stand. ... I just don’t understand why you had to kill Warren.”

I said, “I could say he was asking for it. I ran a considerable risk to disarm him once. How many times do I have to gamble my life for a gun-waving slob who keeps coming at me? I told you once to keep him in line or lose him. Well, you lost him.”

She shook her head quickly. “That’s not a satisfactory answer, Matt. You must have had a better reason for killing him than the mere fact that he disregarded a rather arrogant warning you’d given him once, through me.”

I said, “It wasn’t the reason, but it left me with no obligation to worry about his health; I’d given him all the breaks he had coming. I gave him the gun to test him. What I did was a sign of trust and confidence; if I was willing to give him back his gun that meant I was willing to let bygones be bygones and work with him to save you, didn’t it? But he didn’t respond to my gesture of confidence by taking me into his confidence and telling me what the problem was and asking my help to solve it. Obviously he didn’t want to work with me to save you; he wanted to do it all himself, at my expense. There just wasn’t any reasonable hope of making it a cooperative venture; he hated my guts and was almost as eager to make me look bad, as he was to save you. And so we come to the final reason for giving him that gun—to keep his little hands busy. If he hadn’t had that toy to play with he’d have jumped me from behind with some yah-yah, huh-huh karate or judo stuff, wouldn’t he?”

“Well, he did know—”

“Sure. Those big-biceps boys are always cracking bricks with the edges of their hands. It had the advantage of making my capture look very good indeed. Very spectacular and dramatic.”

“She . . . the Lorca girl, had promised Warren that if he delivered you she’d let me go.”

“She just promised me that she won’t kill us, that’s not the plan. I was happy to hear it; but I don’t think we need to take her promises or plans too seriously.”

“Matt, I didn’t... I mean, I tried to argue with him, to stop him. I told him I didn’t want to be ... be set free at that price.”

I grinned, and reached out to touch her cheek. “What happened to the ruthless little bitch who’d sacrifice anybody for a story?”

She wasn’t quite comfortable with my touch. She said stubbornly, “I still don’t think you should have shot him.” I said, “Suppose I’d put it up to you, Elly. Suppose I’d told you your life was at stake and you had to pick one man to take this boat ride with you and help you make it home again alive if possible. Over here we have the dossier of Mr. Warren Peterson; training, experience, general batting average in times of stress. Over here, Mr. Matthew Helm. Just making your decision on the cold official data, leaving personalities out of it entirely, which one would you have picked to give you the best possible chance of surviving your impending ordeal?” I shrugged. “It seems to me that I made the only choice possible on the record.”

She licked her lips and said, “You really are an arrogant and self-satisfied bastard, aren’t you, darling? . . . Matt!”

“What?”

She was regarding me oddly. “I’m kind of stupid this morning; I must have thrown up my brains along with my dinner. I didn’t realize. . . .”

“What didn’t you realize, girl reporter?”

“Why, you deliberately let yourself. . . . you let them capture you on purpose!”

“Well, how the hell else was I going to find you in a hurry?” I asked irritably. “There wasn’t time to call out the cops; and a bunch of clumsy guys in uniform poking around carelessly could have got you killed. I figured it was safer to work it from inside; I just had to get inside, and that was the logical way. Look, let me get these goddamned wet towels out of here, they’re stinking up the place. . ."

Again, I gave plenty of warning before opening the door, disregarding whatever Eleanor was saying to my back. Giulio was alert outside. He told me about the built-in laundry basket in the head compartment and I dumped my damp burden there.

“How’s the little lady?” he asked when I emerged.

“She’ll live,” I said. I glanced at the gun in his hand. “Well, for a while, at least.”

He said, “If Miss Lorca says you’re not going to die, you’re not going to die.”

“You mean she’s got The Power?” I asked. “Immortality at her fingertips? It should be worth a lot of money.”

“You know what I mean. Nobody’s going to hurt you if you don’t get antsy, is what I mean. I don’t know what the hell she wants you for, but it’s not that.” He glanced aloft, toward the flying bridge. “She’s a hell of a little sailor. I can’t figure it.”

“Why?”

“Well, you know,” he said awkwardly. “We all figured it would be a non-stop panic party when the boss told us she’d be running this boat from time to time as well as her own, and we had to take her orders and keep our mouths shut. I mean, a dame for a skipper is bad enough, and a young dame is worse, but her being a dyke like that, you know what I mean.” He made the old limp-wrist gesture. “I mean, you know, it takes guts to take a boat offshore, you never know what you’re going to hit out there.”