by Paul Gallico
Rogo laughed. “That’s one helluva job to take on. Me, I ain’t got time to put the world right. Only my corner.”
Their faces were barely a foot apart, oil-stained and streaked with sweat, and they exchanged a look of mutual understanding. “Batman, you are so right. From here on out, I just tend my own garden.”
“Fine,” Rogo answered. “And right now we got this half-assed Commie in our garden. Let’s knock the living daylights outta him again.”
They were rising when the burst of automatic fire halted, and Bela’s clear, pleasant voice came through the darkness. “Talk, Captain Jason.”
“You got nothing to say that will interest me, Bela,” came Jason’s unhesitating reply.
“Perhaps you will correct that opinion when you hear, comrade.”
Bela had been thinking. He had been furious at losing the initial advantage in the battle. Two of his men were dead, three more were injured. They had now found new positions among the debris where that hail of ricochet could not reach them. But they were faced with a long fight to try to get rid of Jason and his men and get at the gold, especially now that Jason’s group had acquired rifles and ammunition. By the sound alone, it was obvious the guns were not of modern design, but it would still make Bela’s job that much more difficult, and that much more protracted. Time was running out.
Then a thought that had been troubling him from the start surfaced from his subconscious. The girl. The skin diver. What was she doing fighting side by side with a policeman of apparently bullheaded integrity, and a romantic idealist like Jason. That was their weakness. He would exploit it.
“I will tell you, Captain Jason. If you should get out of this—and that is very unlikely—how will you account for the fact that your representatives of law and, I believe you call it, order are in the company of a ghoul?”
THE DIVE
13
A mystified silence followed his words. Rogo and Jason made uncomprehending faces at each other. “What’s he trying to pull now?” grunted Rogo. Martin, Klaas, Coby, and the nurse all searched each other’s eyes for some explanation and found none. Hely was sitting on her haunches. She laid the rifle down beside her. Her face was downcast. The dream was falling apart.
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Jason shouted back. He sounded neither interested nor excited.
Bela was relishing every minute of it now. “The underwater lady, Jason. She is the ghoul. She and her friends were robbers of the dead. Thieves, crooks, liars. They had been stripping jewelry off the bodies below. My men killed the rest but she got away. Ask her.”
Jason’s grin at this preposterous claim hesitated before Rogo’s stunned face, and vanished when he turned to Hely. She was as pale as death. She could not lift her eyes to look at him. He could see the glistening lines of tears on her face. He slumped against the cold metal.
Deliberately, very slowly, Rogo rose and walked over to her. His voice was soft and gentle. “We better take a look in that purse now, sister.” She did not move or try to hinder him.
His hand scooped down in the bag. For a second he closed his eyes. Then he brought his hand out and opened it for all to see. Even in that dim light the jewels were a handful of dancing lights. And there in the middle of that vision of glittering wealth was the finger, one end a polished nail, the other a ragged, bleeding stump.
Jason raised his head and saw. His whole body tightened. His lips pressed to a thin line, the muscles of his jaw tensed, and the breath came harshly down his nose.
Then he spoke, at first quietly. “I thought you were real. I believed in you.” His voice began to rise. “And you were a fake, a phony. A lying, thieving sham. Scum! You are scum!” His fury echoed around her sunken head. “Get out! Go! Get away from me!”
He put his arms flat on the curved top of the turbine, lowered his contorted face, and soundless grief shook his broad back and shoulders.
They were mesmerized with shock. Hely rose, her face still down, and set off towards the companionway. She moved like a robot. No one attempted to shoot her, or even to speak to her. She seemed suddenly to be in a different world that had no contact with theirs. All their eyes were held by that figure. She was alone in her sin.
By the companionway she stooped and picked up the mask and flippers, the weight belt and air cylinders that were still where she had dropped them when she surfaced in the pool.
Then she did raise her head. In the light from the nearby hole, they saw a face that was a graveyard. It was beyond all guilt and sorrow and pleading and forgiveness. No hope or fear lay in those waxen, still beautiful features.
“For you, Jason, I would have been an angel.”
The whispered words seemed to glow in the dark silence. The big American’s gripped fists began to beat out a crazy thunder on the steel drum, and he cried again, “Get out! Get out! Get out!” When they looked back, she had gone.
She was walking, neither slowly nor quickly, back down into the ship. The flickering yellow of the boiler-room fires and the smoky grays of the long passageway passed unnoticed. So too did the distant sound of shooting.
In an odd way, she thought, the jewels in her purse should have been proof of her capacity to love. They proved, surely, that she governed her own body and mind so absolutely that she could become anything or do anything. In the name of so slight a thing as ambition, she had willed herself to be a robber of the dead. In the name of love, what she could have achieved? She could have fashioned herself to Jason’s desire. She could have embraced virtue with twice the fervor she gave to vice. But how could she explain that to Jason? He would never have been able to understand.
She came out of her reverie at the sight of the half-open door leading into the hairdressing salon. She looked inside. How could it be that the short time she had spent in that one wrecked room could have changed her life irreversibly? Now all her past had been destroyed. She was marooned in time: no past to return to, no future to advance towards. She had only the emptiness of the present.
Hely stumbled on, passing the theater and the library, until she came to the water’s edge, where the sea flapped feebly against the panels of the upturned ship.
Mechanically, she fell into the routine of the expert scuba diver. She spat into her mask to stop it misting, and tugged it on. She heaved her twin cylinders of air onto her back and fastened the straps. She added her weight belt over the other straps in the routine safety procedure. She pulled on her fins. Then she walked into the sea. She followed the darkened water-filled corridors and staircases down into the ship until she found her way to the open sea.
She rose to the surface, lifted her face mask and, treading the water gently, looked around. The Naiad was turning to go. She still had time to reach it and leave behind this place of self-revelation and self-destruction.
The glasslike surface was broken by the wreckage that had been shaken from the liner when it crashed over, and the clear horizons only emphasized the hideous carnage that lay all around her. There were crates and bottles, unidentifiable pieces of clothing, an officer’s cap, papers, and there, glittering brilliantly not a foot away from her, a plastic Santa Claus. There were shattered spars and a wooden bench from the deck that was now merely driftwood, and an empty lifebelt that must have floated away unused. And yet she felt no urge to return, and for a minute or two she paddled aimlessly and wondered whether to go back to Jason. She could face Bela’s bullets or the sullen hostility of Rogo and the others, but she could not face Jason, knowing he would never believe that this Hely was not the one who robbed the dead. She had smashed his dreams as surely as he had smashed hers, and she understood the contortions that had twisted his face.
The water was not blue. If she had not been so self-absorbed she would have noticed it immediately. She looked about again. The sky was clear and cloudless and the January sun bright, but the sea, even in winter a dazzling blue-green, was the color of porridge. Hely was puzzled. She scooped her hand across the surface and
examined it. It looked like water taken from a river in full spate. It was murky with particles of dirt. Then she noticed a second thing: it was not cold. At the back of her mind there began to form an obscure and improbable thought. Could it be true? And Jason. What about Jason? There was only one thing to be done. She pulled her face mask down, jackknifed in the water, and kicked off downwards, her uncertainties now dominated by a need for action.
As she swam she saw that the sunlight which penetrated the surface was drowned by the filth and debris and gallons of oil that congested the water. She could see only three or four meters at the most.
She finned down strongly, her silver hair streaming behind her like a pennant. She checked her depth gauge. Thirty meters. She would have to go much deeper if she were to find out what she suspected. Hely had always guarded her life with care and observed the strict and necessary disciplines the risks demanded. This would be a deep dive. Normally she would not have undertaken it without other divers, without a shot line to guide her back, and without all the apparatus and backup that such a perilous operation required. They no longer applied. This was an act of calculated folly. Her drumming feet drove her on and on. The dirty brown of the surface had turned to the blues of the deep. The water was getting murkier too, and there were none of the unwinking fish that usually come to observe human intruders.
She checked her gauge again. This was madness. She could barely see two meters now. Then, down below her. she glimpsed a pinpoint of light. The yard-long fins drove her further, and the light became a glow, a white glow on the ocean bed. All around her, the sea was thick with filth and mud until it was like swimming in a blinding hailstorm, and it was as warm as bathwater.
There was a distant thunder, half-felt, half-heard. The hailstones became pebbles and then rocks, bounding with balletic grace through the water.
The white glow seemed to widen, and Hely saw the whole haunting scene in its light. The bottom of the sea was moving. The earth itself was rising. The underwater cliffs and valleys, normally scenes of silent peace and beauty, were falling apart. One huge ridge of rock lifted, then crashed in slow motion. The light grew bigger. The rumbling became a roar, and the whole floor of the sea swelled up in the shape of a cone, and trembled massively.
Hely could feel herself being dragged down. She had lost her buoyancy by going too deep. She began to sink to the earth shaking below. Hely drove her fins into the water, athletic muscles pumping against the drag. Gradually she began to move upwards.
She glanced at her depth gauge. She had gone far too deep. But if she went up slowly, at no more than eighteen meters a minute, and stopped frequently to decompress, she should be all right. She reached for the plastic card tied to her lifejacket and checked the number of stops she would have to make. Stops of one minute at first, then six minutes, then twelve minutes . . . It was too long. She could not afford the time. There was only one way to get back to Jason now.
With one hand she flicked open the quick-release catch of her canvas belt with its thick lead weights, and watched it sink. Then she opened the tap of her small air cylinder and felt her adjustable-buoyancy lifejacket puff up around her, and she began to rise. She went slowly at first, then faster and faster towards the faint gleam of daylight above, shooting up like a human cork.
She felt giddy and slightly giggly, and recognized with some fear what that meant. What was it divers called it? Rapture of the deep, that was it. The first effects of nitrogen narcosis, when breathing under pressure releases bubbles of nitrogen into the bloodstream. She understood it as well as a doctor can diagnose his own ailments. She had heard too many warnings about the bends not to know what would happen to her.
She focused hard on the task that lay ahead of her. Already she felt strange. It must be the nitrogen putting the brain centers to sleep. She must act now. She must make no mistakes. She tore the mouthpiece away for a moment and began to exhale steadily. That should prevent her from bursting her lungs on that rocketing ride to the top.
She must also retain control of her mind. She conjured up a picture of Jason. She was going to Jason. She must remember that. She glanced down. Her feet were dangling loosely. She was losing the synchronization between mind and body. She concentrated fiercely, and her flailing flippers began again.
She felt weightless, soaring like a bird in the blue. There was no pain. But her arms and legs felt strangely fluffy and useless, and all she could seem to see were the bubbles flowing from her mouth. Silver bubbles, pretty silver bubbles, she thought, shining like jewels . . . The jewels. The jewels and Jason. She must remember Jason. She must hold that one picture in her mind, his grin and those armor-piercing eyes.
There was another thing to remember. Something to help her. All the experts had always told her that the speed with which people succumb to the bends depended on willpower. A strong-minded diver could last much longer than one who panicked. If she thought only of Jason and kept his picture before her then she could do it. She could fight off the waves of clouds that seemed to fill her head. The willpower that had propelled her through life could surely carry her through this one last journey. Then Jason would know that she could have been an angel. Then he would understand. This was the only way she could show him.
The sea was getting lighter now. She had passed all the stages where she should have stopped to decompress. It was too late. The clouds drifted across her mind again. Jason! She tugged herself sharply back with his name. This would prove to him the quality of her love, and that was all that mattered now.
Above her loomed the blurred shape of a ship. It was upside down. She could not think why the ship looked upside down. Of course. It was the Poseidon. Jason was in there. The thoughts would not come now, and she had to push them through the thick mist. Dimly she could see that two of the funnels had crumpled and were lying on their sides. The third, the one nearest the stern, was intact. She replaced her mouthpiece, and swam up the side of the funnel. She found the inspection plate. She pulled at the handles. She had seen other handles like that. She remembered: the handles on the hold door, and the tiger, and Jason. She must keep remembering Jason. His face was still there, framed in the clouds. The plate floated off and spun slowly away into the depths, and she slipped inside. She could see pipes. She must follow the pipes. Half pulling herself with her hands, struggling to keep her fins beating the water, she worked her way along. She was in the fiddley, and she knew those twisting tubes that took away the fumes and smoke must lead to the engine room. And to Jason.
Suddenly she was clear of the water. Why couldn’t she see properly? There was something in her mask. Her thoughts had got lost too. There was a ladder. Her fingers were around the ladder. Fingers like the finger she had cut off. Like the finger in her purse that had cost her Jason. He was at the top of the ladder. Swaying and clinging, she climbed rung by painful rung. She saw the fingers come off the rung and felt herself leaning backwards and wondered quite detachedly if they would get hold of the rung again. They did.
Then she was at the top. It was silent. Desperately she fought to push back those clouds again. She began crawling. She saw another picture. This one was the Dutch girl. Hely spoke. She was sure she was speaking, although she heard nothing, and the Dutch girl nodded. Then there was another face, the one she had kept before her all the time she swam, but she did not know if it was the real face or the one she had painted in her mind. His lips were moving but there were no words, and she thought he did know now, he did understand, and nothing mattered after that. Then the clouds swept the skies of her mind, covering everything.
AMONG THE SHADOWS
14
As soon as that black and tragic figure of Hely had gone, Bela dropped back among the shadows of the stern and began whispering instructions. He had gained two advantages with his declaration about the girl. Jason’s crew were now one gun short, and it had also given him the opportunity to assess their position more accurately. Now he must act quickly to get at the gold. If only the oth
ers had surrendered Rogo, he could have released them and started work on moving the ingots.
Two more of his men began to work their way towards the patch of daylight. They crept on their stomachs through the steel jungle to reach a position where they could pour their fire into the narrow canyon that sheltered their enemies. The rest kept up a steady fusillade.
“Sweet Jesus!” Rogo realized what was happening. From the new angle of their attack, Bela’s killers were able to rake the gap at the hold end of their barricade, and that part of their small sanctuary was now loud with the slap and whistle of bullets.
He grabbed Coby’s arm and almost flung her up to the end which was still protected. “C’mon, get outta here!” He helped Martin to his feet, and also bustled the nurse away from the danger zone. The attackers could see the gap now and the bullets zinged into the hold, against the door, and ricocheted back against the turbine. They had lost at least half their haven.
“Hey, cowboy.” Rogo gently shook Jason’s shoulder. He was still slumped against the metal drum. “Jump to it, fella. We gotta have the full team out today.” He looked into Jason’s face. It was numbed with shock and grief. He shook him again and whispered, “Your old pal Batman needs a hand.”
Nothing seemed to touch him. Jason closed his eyes wearily, opened them again, and his voice was a dull croak. “Just when I was beginning to believe again, Rogo. Just when I thought I’d found something that was true. And it wasn’t true. She was a fake, like everything else.”
Putting both hands on his shoulders, Rogo turned Jason to him. He spoke with surprising tenderness. “I know, pal. I understand. But we still gotta bust these rats.”
Martin had dragged himself up to the far end of the barrier and was trying to shoot round it. Coby was with him and gamely firing, although the recoil from the old gun nearly knocked her over each time. Klaas was rising and firing every few seconds, and the nurse knelt behind them, reloading and passing up the guns. Jason took his place alongside Klaas, but he fired automatically and did not speak.