The Revengers (7 page)

Harriet studied me thoughtfully. “You’re very convincing, darling. But then, you always were.”

I said, “Hell, as far as her story about me is concerned, she’s doing me a favor. If it says what I think, I couldn’t ask for a better PR job, could I? Once that piece is published, I won’t even have to carry a weapon. Everybody’ll know what a terrible, dangerous fellow I am; they’ll tremble in their shoes when they see me coming. They’ll all straighten up and fly right without my even having to threaten them. One piercing look from my murderous blue eyes will do the job.”

She looked at me for a moment longer, and shrugged minutely. “If you’re not going to do anything constructive with that damned bottle, slide it this way.”

Taking the bottle I moved within her reach, she poured some whiskey into my almost-empty glass and then gave herself a moderate refill. The boat rocked gently from the wash of a large cruiser leaving the harbor.

I said, “As far as Miss Brand’s revelations are concerned, naturally we’d like to find out if she’s going to expose any of our people who are still unknown to the opposition, particularly any who are off on dangerous business at the moment. At least that way we can yank them home before somebody lowers the boom on them. And naturally, we’d like to persuade her nicely to soft-pedal the names of a few agents whose usefulness might actually be impaired. . . The woman beside me had stirred uneasily; now she threw me a sharp glance. I said irritably, “Damn it to hell, Harriet!”

“What’s the matter?”

“You didn’t always have such a cliche mind. When I say persuade I mean persuade; I’m not talking about the pincers and thumbscrews.”

“Well, you can hardly blame me for—”

“You’re reacting like a TV-crazy kid. Snap out of it,” I said harshly. “Years ago you killed one of our people, or you had a henchman do it for you. You’re still sitting here alive and healthy, aren’t you? With a shiny new past provided by us. We don’t go around casually massacring or torturing crazy ladies who just don’t happen to like us. You should know that if anyone does.”

There was a little silence. Then, deliberately, she reached out a long, slim hand—she hadn’t gotten it entirely clean, but that was irrelevant—and turned my face toward her and leaned forward to kiss me lightly on the lips.

“I’m sorry, my dear. When you live with corny people, you develop corny reactions. You should drop around 'more often to keep me sensible.” She grimaced, and seemed to become aware of her unromantic appearance. She retrieved her hand abruptly. “Well, tell me what you want so I can finish up my work and take a shower. Essence of Diesel Number Two seems to be the perfume of the day.”

“As I said, we’d like to persuade her to cooperate a little,” I said. “My clever idea, cold-blooded, I admit, is that a gal whose life you save is likely to be grateful to you and may even be talked into getting her publisher to delete a name or two you’d rather not see in print. But that’s pretty iffy. It may not break that way at all, and even if it does, Miss Brand seems to be a girl whose gratitude—or friendship, or loyalty—you don’t want to rely on too strongly if her work is involved. So my chief concern is simply keeping the dame alive. If we can cash in on it afterward, so much the better, but we simply can’t afford the suspicions that will be aroused if somebody kills her right now. After her series on us is published, and people have had time to forget, she can he down and croak for all we care; but at the moment, her life is very precious to us.”

Harriet laughed softly. “Well, that’s clear enough, brutally clear, but it doesn’t really tell me what you want from me.

I said, “I want to make sure she’s not sticking her long snoopy nose—well, her short snoopy nose, judging by her picture—into anything dangerous—”

Harriet shook her head quickly, and I stopped. She said, “You’d better not count on that, Matt.”

“I see. Thanks. That’s one thing I needed to know. So we plug in Contingency Program Number Two; and as official troubleshooter I’ll roll up my sleeves and prepare myself to protect the inquisitive bitch from whatever trouble she manages to stir up. Can you tell me where it’s likely to come from?”

The woman beside me hesitated. “How much do you know about what she’s doing?”

I said, “Well, I didn’t take that bloody Triangle nonsense of hers too seriously. I figured she was using that to hide behind while she probed away secretly at something else. So what was she likely to be investigating while she pretended to be collecting fascinating data on the Mysterious Sea of Missing Ships? What made her pick that particular cover story, to cover the story she’s really working on? It came to me in a flash; and I had Washington crank up the computer and find out if there had been any new cases of ships going mysteriously missing of late. They sent me a bunch of clippings and some other stuff, very interesting. Inside and outside the Deadly Triangle, folks have been polluting the sea bottoms with busted-up vessels in a most reprehensible way, racking up well above the normal run of collisions and storm losses and groundings. The computer kicked out over half a dozen it thought deserved special

attention—I haven’t gotten around to reading them all— and that doesn’t count the most recent one that was in the newspaper I read on the plane coming east. Come to think of it, I’ve got that one in my pocket. Here.”

I dug out the torn-out piece of newsprint and laid it on the cabin table. Harriet turned it so she could read the headline above the picture of a neat new ship proceeding peacefully across a placid ocean.

"
TANKER SINKS
,” she read aloud. “Date and so forth. . . . Four lives were lost when the tanker
Fairfax Constellation
, shown above on its maiden voyage in 1963, went down off the Bahama Islands in moderate weather after reporting an explosion and fire on board. The remainder of the crew was picked up etc., etc. . . . The twenty-five thousand ton ship was registered in Monrovia, Liberia. After taking on a full cargo of oil in Aruba, it was proceeding towards Wilmington, North Carolina, when the disaster occurred. The cause of the explosion has not been determined. ... It!” she said explosively.

“What?”

“
It
, for God’s sake!” Harriet made a face at the clipping. “I’m getting goddamn sick and tired of these Libbers mangling the goddamn language. A ship is not an it, goddamn it! A ship is a she, and has always been a
she
. As a woman I simply loved having hurricanes named after me; it’s bad enough now when they call a nice, big, beautiful blow ‘David,’ for God’s sake! It should have been ‘Danielle,’ or ‘Dorothy,’ or ‘Dora’ or something, a real credit to our sex. But when they have the gall to deprive us of having a lovely thing like a ship, even a seventeen-year-old flag-of-convenience rust-bucket like that, referred to in the feminine! . . .” She grinned abruptly. “Did you hear about that big whirlpool off Norway? You’re now supposed to call it the Personstrom, or the equal ladies will have your hide. Instead of the Maelstrom—
Male
strom—get it?”

I said, “Lady, you need another drink. Ugh!”

She laughed and said, “I gather you’re convinced that all these recent sinkings are related in some way.”

“Wasn’t Eleanor Brand? Isn’t that why she came to see you a second time, remembering from the previous interview that you know a hell of a lot about anything that floats?”

After a moment, Harriet nodded. “You’re a good guesser. Yes, that’s why she stopped by on her way down to the Caribbean; but I couldn’t give her much help. Big ships aren’t really in my line. Anyway, you’ll have gathered I wasn’t very fond of Miss Eleanor Brand; and, of course, there were . . . reasons why I didn’t particularly want her hanging around asking questions.”

“Reasons?”

“Now who’s being stupid?” she asked. “Naturally, I don’t want her putting me into an article or giving me any other kind of publicity. And I certainly don’t want to get her interested enough in me to start checking up on my past, do I? And when a conscientious reporter gets important information from a certain source, he starts checking that source for reliability, doesn’t he? Or she?”

“So you were careful not to give her any important information,” I said. “What important information?”

She hesitated and looked oddly embarrassed. She spoke too quickly, “I didn’t mean . . . I was just speaking generally. What I meant was that I simply brushed her off as fast as I could; the last thing I wanted was her calling attention to me by quoting me as her tame nautical advisor.”

“Sure,” I said. “What about me?”

“What do you mean?” Her voice was guarded.

“How about being my tame nautical advisor, Hattie? I’d like to have some idea of what this gal is getting herself, and me, involved in. You must have done a bit of thinking about this recent rash of ship sinkings, and even if big ships are out of your line, you know a hell of a lot more about them than I do.”

She started to speak quickly, and stopped. There was a brief silence; then she said, “I’m afraid I can’t be much help to you, Matt.” She wasn’t looking at me; and her voice sounded strangely uncertain, for her. Then she drew a deep breath and turned to face me a bit defiantly. She said, “No, that’s not true. I won’t lie to you. I simply don’t want to be much help to you, any more than I wanted to be much help to Eleanor Brand. For just about the same reasons.”

It shocked me a little. It was not what I’d expected from Captain Harriet Robinson, as she now was; even though it was a perfectly sensible attitude.

I said, “You still feel pretty vulnerable, even after all these years, is that what you mean?”

She nodded. “I . . . there could be something rather peculiar going on, Matt; but if there is, I don’t want to be mixed up in it in any way. Please try to understand. I mind my own business, ashore and on the water, and I let others mind theirs. Cap’n Hattie is deaf and blind and very, very, dumb, in a bright sort of way; and everybody knows it. I don’t ever see anybody smuggling drugs although it takes a lot of concentrated not-seeing. I do my fishing legally and if somebody else does it some other way you can never prove it by me. Everybody loves me and nobody hates me and I want to keep it that way. I don’t want to make anybody mad. I don’t want to give anybody reason to start asking questions about me even if you did fix up my records so nicely, for which you have my thanks. But I earned that, in a way, didn’t I? I don’t really owe you for that.”

“You don’t owe me a thing, quite the contrary,” I said.

She was looking out the cabin window, again refusing to meet my eyes. “
Please
understand. I’m still an easy mark for anybody who wants to make a real project of digging into my past. Even if you want to, you can’t protect me beyond a certain point, can you? Not if they learn the truth and take it to the proper authorities. There are still some old charges that could be revived if it’s learned that I’m alive; charges I doubt even your big man in Washington has pull enough to do anything about, if the information gets into the hands of an eager official—prosecutor?— who feels compelled to act on it. Accessory to murder is only one; they could call what I did up there conspiracy, or even treason, couldn’t they? I. . . I was so goddamn proud and cocky in those days, Matt, and so goddamn stupid! And I don’t intend to go to prison, my dear; I couldn’t endure that. It’s bad enough being . . . being exiled like this. . . Her voice stopped. We sat silent for a moment; she seemed to be listening to a replay of her own words. I felt her shudder beside me. She whispered, aghast, “God, listen to me, Matt! What’s happened to me? I sound like a sniveling coward hiding in a dark cave!”

I said quickly, “It’s all right. I shouldn’t have—”

“No, goddamn it, it’s not all right!” Her voice was fierce. “That’s no way to live, what the hell am I thinking of? I have picked up some hints—”

“No,” I said. “You really don’t owe me anything, Harriet. The debt runs the other way. I shouldn’t have come.” I got up. “Thanks for the drinks. I’ll be on my way. It’s been nice seeing you.”

She said harshly, “You goddamn spook, park your ass and listen. Sit
down!
” There was a resonance to her voice; the ring of command. I sat down. She said, “I’ll give you a reference and a name; what you do with them is up to you. The reference is COLREGS Rule 18-a-iv. The name is George Winfield Lorca. And I did not give any of that to Miss Brand, why should I stick my neck out for her? But if you want to use it, directly or for trading purposes, be my guest.”

I asked, “Why should you stick your neck out for me?” She smiled and reached out to touch my lips with a silencing forefinger. “No questions. You got what you came for. Now you can go.”

There was a hint of challenge in her voice, a go-to-hell inflection that made me look at her sharply. After a long moment I asked, “Did I?”

“Did you what?”

“Get what I came for?”

She drew a long breath, regarding me intently. After a little, she said very softly, “Hey, spook, I think we have a problem.”

I cleared my throat. “I don’t know about we, but when a skinny seafaring dame in greasy khakis begins to look good to me, I know I have a problem. A skinny seafaring dame who kicked me off her boat with curses when last met.” She smiled slowly. “But who hadn’t been too hard to talk out of her dress and shoes a little earlier.”

I cleared my throat again. “As I recall, that’s all you were wearing at the time, a dress and shoes.”

She asked, “Well, how do you want me tonight, quick or pretty?”

I told her I preferred my ladies gift-wrapped, if that was what she meant and if she truly wished to be my lady. She said for me to have another drink and start the clock when I heard the shower stop, let it run five minutes, and I should be right on target.

I was.

Early morning is usually a good time in the Florida Keys, calm and clear. I slipped out of the double bunk in the wedge-shaped stateroom up in
Queenfisher’s
bow—the big berth, set at a slant with respect to the boat’s centerline in order to take advantage of the oddly shaped space, pretty well filled the little forward cabin—and carried my clothes up into the deckhouse, leaving her asleep. I couldn’t shave or change into anything clean until I got my suitcase out of the car, so I simply hauled on shorts and pants for the time being. Shoeless and shirtless gents cause no particular comment around a Florida marina; but I had to admit that my torso was kind of fish-belly pale by local standards.