The Golden Rendezvous

by Alistair MacLean

“Yes, sir. But Jamieson could look out for me for an hour. Permission to search the passengers’ quarters?”

  “Wilson was right about that bee in the bonnet, Mister.” Which only went to show how upset Bullen was: normally, where circumstances demanded, he was the most punctilious of men and, in the presence of the bo’sun, would never have spoken as he had done to Wilson and myself. He glowered at me and walked out.

  He hadn’t given me permission, but he hadn’t refused it either. I glanced at Cummings: he nodded, and rose to his feet.

  We had luck in the conditions of our search, the purser and I, in that we didn’t have to turf anyone out of their cabins: they were completely deserted. Radio reports in the morning watch had spoken of weather conditions deteriorating sharply to the south-east and bulletins had been posted warning of approaching bad weather: the sun-decks were crowded with passengers determined to make the most of the blue skies before the weather broke. Even old Cerdan was on deck, flanked by his two watchful nurses, the tall one with a big mesh-string knitting bag and clicking away busily with her needles, the other with a pile of magazines, reading. You had the impression with them, as with all good nurses, that less than half their minds were on what they were doing: without stirring from their chairs they seemed to hover over old Cerdan like a couple of broody hens. I had the feeling that when Cerdan paid nurses to hover, he would expect his money’s worth. He was in his bath-chair, with a richly-embroidered rug over his bony knees. I took a good long look at that rug as I passed by, but I was only wasting my time: so tightly was that rug wrapped round his skinny shanks that he couldn’t have concealed a matchbox under it, far less a radio.

  With a couple of stewards keeping watch we went through the suites on “A” and “B” decks with meticulous care. I had a bridge megger with me, which was to lend cover to our cover story, if we had to use one, that we were trying to trace an insulation break in a power cable: but no passenger with a guilty mind was going to fall for that for a moment if he found us in his cabin, so we thought the stewards a good idea.

  There should have been no need for any passenger aboard the Campari to have a radio. Every passenger’s cabin on the ship, with the Campari’s usual extravagance, was fitted out with not one but two bulkhead relay receivers, fed from a battery of radios in the telegraph lounge: Eight different stations could be brought into circuit simply by pressing the eight pre-selector buttons. This was all explained in the brochure so nobody thought of bringing radios along.

  Cummings and I missed nothing. We examined every cupboard, wardrobe, bed, drawer, even my ladies’ jewel-boxes. Nothing. Nothing anywhere, except in one place: Miss Harcourt’s cabin. There was a portable there, but, then, I had known that there had been one: every night when the weather was fine Miss Harcourt would wander out on deck clad in one of her many evening gowns, find a chair and twiddle around the tuning knob till she found some suitable soft music. Maybe she thought it lent something to the air of enchantment and mystery that should surround a movie queen: maybe she thought it romantic: it could have been, of course, that she just liked soft music. However it was, one thing was certain, Miss Harcourt was not our suspect: not to put too fine a point on it, she just didn’t have the intelligence. And, in fairness, despite her pretensions, she was too nice.

  I retired defeated to the bridge and took over from Jamieson. Almost an hour elapsed before another defeated man came to the bridge: Captain Bullen. He didn’t have to tell me he was defeated: it was written on him, in the still, troubled face, the slight sag of the broad shoulders. And a mute headshake from me told him all he needed to know. I made a mental note, in the not unlikely event of Lord Dexter turfing us both out of the Blue Mail, to turn down any suggestions by Captain Bullen that we should go into a detective agency together: there might be faster ways of starving, perhaps, but none more completely certain.

  We were on the second leg of our course now, 10 degrees west of north, heading straight for Nassau. Twelve hours and we would be there. My eyes ached from scanning the horizons and skies, even although I knew there were at least ten others doing the same thing, still my eyes ached. Whether I believed McIlroy’s suggestion or not, I certainly behaved as if I did. But the horizon remained clear, completely, miraculously clear, for this was normally a fairly heavily travelled steamer lane. And the loudspeaker from the radar room remained obstinately silent. We had a radar screen on the bridge, but rarely troubled to consult it: Walters, the operator on watch, could isolate and identify a blip on the screen before most of us could even see it.

  After maybe half an hour’s restless pacing about the bridge, Bullen turned to go. Just at the head of the companionway he hesitated, turned, beckoned me and walked out to the end of the starboard wing. I followed.

  “I’ve been thinking about Dexter,” he said quietly. “What would be the effect—I’m past caring about the passengers now, I’m only worried about the lives of every man and woman aboard—if I announced that Dexter had been murdered?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “If you can call mass hysteria nothing.”

  “You don’t think the fiends responsible for all this might call it off? Whatever ‘it’ is?”

  “I’m dead certain they wouldn’t. As no mention has been made of Dexter yet, no attempt to explain away his absence, they must know we know he’s dead. They’ll know damn’ well that the officer of the watch can’t disappear from the bridge without a hue and cry going up. We’d just be telling them out loud what they already know without being told. You won’t scare this bunch off. People don’t play as rough as they do unless there’s something tremendous at stake.”

  “That’s what I thought myself, Johnny,” he said heavily. “That’s just what I thought myself.” He turned and went below, and I had a sudden foreknowledge of how Bullen would look when he was an old man.

  I stayed on the bridge until two o’clock, long past my usual time for relief, but then I’d deprived Jamieson, who had the afternoon watch, of much free time that morning. A tray came up to me from the galley, and for the first time ever I sent an offering by Henriques back untouched. When Jamieson took over the bridge he didn’t exchange a word with me except routine remarks about course and speed. From the strained, set expression on his face you would have thought he was carrying the mainmast of the Campari over his shoulder. Bullen had been talking to him, he’d probably been talking to all the officers. That would get them all as worried as hell and jittery as a couple of old spinsters lost in the Casbah: I didn’t see that it would achieve anything else.

  I went to my cabin, closed the door, pulled off shoes and shirt and lay on my bunk—no four-posters for the crew of the Campari—after adjusting the louvre in the overhead cold-air trunking until the draught was directed on my chest and face. The back of my head ached, and ached badly. I adjusted a pillow under it and tried to ease the pain. It still ached, so I let it go and tried to think. Somebody had to think and I didn’t see that old Bullen was in any state for it. Neither was I, but I thought all the same. I would have bet my last cent that the enemy—I couldn’t think of them as anything else by this time—knew our course, destination and time of arrival almost as well as we did ourselves. And I knew they couldn’t afford to let us arrive in Nassau that night, not, at least, until they had accomplished what they had set out to accomplish, whatever that might be. Somebody had to think. Time was terribly short.

  By three o’clock I’d got nowhere. I’d worried all round the problem as a terrier worries an old slipper, I’d examined it from every angle, I’d put forward a dozen different solutions, all equally improbable, and turned up a round dozen suspects, all equally impossible. My thinking was getting me nowhere. I sat up, careful of my stiff neck, fished a bottle of whisky from a cupboard, poured a drink, watered it, knocked it back and then, because it was illegal, helped myself to another. I placed this second on the table by my bunk, and lay down again.

  The whisky did it, I’ll always swear the whisky did it, as a mental lubricant
for rusted-up brains it has no parallel. After five more minutes of lying on my back, staring sightlessly up at the cold-air trunking above my head, I suddenly had it. I had it suddenly, completely and all in a moment, and I knew beyond doubt that I had it right. The radio! The receiver on which the message to the wireless office had been intercepted! There had been no radio, God, only a blind man like myself could have missed it, of course there had been no radio. But there had been something else again. I sat bolt upright with a jerk, Archimedes coming out of his bath, and yelped with pain as a hot blade skewered through the back of my neck.

  “Are you subject to those attacks often or do you always carry on like this when you are alone?” a solicitous voice inquired from the doorway. Susan Beresford, dressed in a square-necked white silk dress, was standing in the entrance, her expression half-amused, half-apprehensive. So complete had been my concentration that I’d never even heard the door open.

  “Miss Beresford.” I rubbed my aching neck with my right hand. “What are you doing here? You know passengers are not allowed in the officers’ quarters.”

  “No? I understand my father has been up here several times in the past few trips talking to you.”

  “Your father is not young, female and unmarried.”

  “Phui!” She stepped into the cabin and closed the door behind her. All at once the smile was no longer on her face. “Will you talk to me, Mr. Carter?”

  “Any time,” I said courteously. “But not here …” My voice trailed away, I was changing my mind even as I spoke.

  “You see, you’re the only person I can talk to,” she said.

  “Yes.” A beautiful girl alone in my cabin and plainly anxious to speak to me and I wasn’t even listening to her. I was figuring out something: it did involve Susan Beresford, but only incidentally.

  “Oh, do pay attention,” she said angrily.

  “All right,” I said resignedly. “I’m paying.”

  “You’re paying what?” she demanded.

  “Attention.” I reached for my whisky glass. “Cheers!”

  “I thought you were forbidden alcohol on duty?”

  “I am. What do you want?”

  “I want to know why no one will talk to me.” She lifted a hand as I made to speak. “Please don’t be facetious. I’m worried. Something’s terribly wrong, isn’t it? You know I always talk more to the officers than any of the other passengers”—I passed up the pleasure of loosing off a couple of telling shafts—“and now nobody will talk to me. Daddy says I’m imagining it. I’m not, I know I’m not. They won’t talk. And not because of me. I know. They’re all dead scared about something, going about with tight faces and not looking at anyone but looking at them all the time. Something is wrong, isn’t it? Terribly, terribly wrong. And Fourth Officer Dexter—he’s missing, isn’t he?”

  “What would be wrong, Miss Beresford?”

  “Please.” This was something for the books. Susan Beresford pleading with me. She walked across the cabin—with the size of the accommodation old Dexter saw fit to provide for his chief officers that didn’t require any more than a couple of steps—and stood in front of me. “Tell me the truth. Three men are missing in twenty-four hours—don’t tell me that’s coincidence. And all the officers looking as if they’re going to be shot at dawn.”

  “Don’t you think it strange you’re the only person who seems to have noticed anything unusual? How about all the other passengers?”

  “The other passengers!” The tone of her voice didn’t say a great deal for the other passengers. “How can they notice anything with all the women either in bed for their afternoon sleep or at the hairdresser’s or in the massage room and all the men sitting around in the telegraph lounge like mourners at a funeral just because the stock exchange machines have broken down? And that’s another thing. Why have those machines broken down? And why is the radio office closed? And why is the Campari going so fast? I went right aft just now to listen to the engines and I know we’ve never gone so fast before.”

  She didn’t miss much, and that was a fact. I said. “Why come to me?”

  “Daddy suggested it.” She hesitated, then half smiled. “He said I was imagining things and that for a person suffering from delusions and a hyperactive imagination he could recommend nothing better than a visit to Chief Officer Carter, who doesn’t know the meaning of either.”

  “Your father is wrong.”

  “Wrong? You do—ah—suffer from delusions?”

  “About you’re imagining things. You aren’t.” I finished my whisky and got to my feet. “Something is wrong, far wrong, Miss Beresford.”

  She looked at me steadily in the eyes, then said quietly: “Will you tell me what it is? Please!” The cool amusement was now completely absent from both face and voice: a completely different Susan Beresford from the one I’d known, and one I liked very much better than the old one. For the first time, and very late in the day, the thought occurred to me that this might be the real Susan Beresford: when you wear a price ticket marked umpteen million dollars and are travelling through a forest alive with wolves looking for gold and a free meal ticket for life, some sort of shield, some kind of protective device against the wolves is liable to be very handy indeed and I had to admit that the air of half-mocking amusement which seldom left her was a most effective deterrent.

  “Will you tell me, please?” she repeated. She’d come close to me now, the green eyes had started to melt in that weird way they had and my breathing was getting all mixed up again. “I think you could trust me, Mr. Carter.”

  “Yes.” I looked away—it took the last of my will-power, but I looked away—and managed to get my breathing working again, in-out, in-out, it wasn’t too difficult when you got the hang of it. “I think I could trust you, Miss Beresford. I will tell you. But not right away. If you knew why I say that you wouldn’t press me to tell you. Any of the passengers out taking the air or sun-bathing?”

  “What?” The sudden switch made her blink, but she recovered quickly and gestured to the window. “In this?”

  I saw what she meant. The sun had gone, completely, and heavy dark cumulus cloud coming up from the south-east had all but obscured the sky. The sea looked no rougher than it had been, but I had the feeling that the temperature would have fallen away. I didn’t like the look of the weather. And I could quite understand why none of the passengers would be on deck. That made things awkward. But there was another way.

  “I see what you mean. I promise you I’ll tell you all you want to know this evening”—that was a pretty elastic time-limit—“if you in turn promise you won’t tell anyone I’ve admitted anything is wrong—and if you will do something for me.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “This. You know your father is holding some sort of cocktail party for your mother in the drawing-room tonight. It’s timed for seven forty-five. Get him to advance it to seven-thirty. I want more time before dinner—never mind why now. Use any reason you like but don’t bring me into it. And ask your father to invite old Mr. Cerdan to the party also. Doesn’t matter if he has to take his wheel-chair and two nurses along with him. Get him to the party. Your father’s a man of very considerable powers of persuasion—and I imagine you could persuade your father to do anything: Tell him you feel sorry for the old man, always being left out of things. Tell him anything: only get old man Cerdan to the cocktail party. I can’t tell you how vital that is.”

  She looked at me in slow speculation. She really had the most extraordinary eyes, three weeks she’s been with us and I’d never really noticed them before, eyes of that deep yet translucent green of sea-water over sand in the Windward Isles, eyes that melted and shimmered in the same way as when a cat’s-paw of wind ruffled the surface of the water, eyes that—I dragged my own eyes away. See Carter, old Beresford had said. There’s the man for you. No imaginative fancies about him. That’s what he thought. I became aware that she was saying, quietly: “I’ll do it. I promise. I don’
t know what track you’re on, but I know it’s the right track.”

  “What do you mean?” I said slowly.

  “That nurse of Mr. Cerdan’s. The tall one with the knitting. She can no more knit than fly over the moon. She just sits there, clicking needles, botching every other stitch and getting practically nowhere. I know. Being a millionaire’s daughter doesn’t mean that you can’t be as slick with a pair of knitting needles as the next girl.”

  “What!” I caught her by the shoulders and stared down at her. “You saw this? You’re sure of it?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “Well, now.” I was still looking at her but this time I wasn’t seeing the eyes, I was seeing a great number of other things and I didn’t like any of them. I said: “This is very very interesting. I’ll see you later. Be a good girl and get that fixed up with your father, will you?” I gave her shoulder an absent-minded pat, turned away and stared out of the window.

  After a few seconds I became aware that she hadn’t yet gone. She’d the door opened, one hand on the handle, and was looking at me with a peculiar expression on her face.

  “You wouldn’t like to give me a toffee-apple to suck?” If you can imagine a voice both sweet and bitter at the same moment, then that is how hers was. “Or a ribbon for my pigtails?” With that she banged the door and was gone. The door didn’t splinter in any way but that was only because it was made of steel.

  I gazed at the closed door for a moment, then gave up. Any other time I might have devoted some minutes to figuring out the weird and wonderful workings of the female brain. But this wasn’t just any other time. Whatever it was, this just wasn’t any other time. I pulled on shoes, shirt and jacket, pulled out the Colt from under the mattress, stuck it in my waist-belt and went off in search of the captain.

  VI.

  Wednesday 7.45 pm.—8.15 p.m.

  As far as attendance went, Mr. Julius Beresford had no grounds for complaint that night: every single passenger on the ship had turned up for his wife’s cocktail party and, as far as I could see, every off-duty officer on the Campari was there as well. And the party was certainly going splendidly: already, at seven forty-five, practically everyone was already on his or her second drink, and the drinks served up in the drawing-room of the Campari were never small ones.