Darker Than Amber

by John D. MacDonald

  Ten

  At a little past noon I was back aboard The Busted Flush. I leave the air conditioner set to cycle when the inside temperature gets past ninety.

  I put the thermostat back down to seventy, then went through into the forward bilge with my brick of money. My safe is an aluminum box. A child could open it with a church key. But the child who could find it would frighten me.

  Forward, on the port side, below the waterline, I have a section of fake hull. Drill a hole and the sea would come spurting through, and keep coming, because there is an open sea cock that keeps it filled with about sixty gallons. There is a little lever which closes the sea cock. The lever is carefully concealed. I close the sea cock. I press an area of the hull just so. Then I can get a blade under the other end and pry it open. It swings on concealed bronze hinges. Thirty gallons or so rush down into the bilge and the pump starts automatically. I reach into the gap and down between the double hull section, and pull the box free of the brackets that hold it. I shake the water from it. It has a good rubber gasket, a clamp fastening with good leverage. I open it, put the brick of currency inside, push it back down against its buoyancy, back into the brackets. I swing the heavy curve of wood back into place. I open the sea cock. I hear the faint garglings as it fills again, up even with the outside waterline. The fake hull in that area is always slightly damp. One small artistic leak that trickles about a meaningless cup of sea-water a day. I have a second safe, a barrel job, hidden quite carefully. I keep a few good things in it. Not too much. Enough to keep disappointment from being too acute. A man who finds something does not keep on looking.

  And so, on that Friday, I went right from Bahia Mar to Port Everglades to check on Monica Day. More properly, the Monica D. D for DeLorio Shipping Lines. Day as in the Italian pronunciation of the letter D. The home base of the company is in Naples. From November through June they operate two small single-stack, single-class cruise ships out of Port Everglades. On the drive down I had remembered why the name was familiar. The sister ship was the Veronica D.

  When I went over the bridge I saw three vessels moored there. One was the Veronica D. No particular activity around her. I drove into the port area and parked the rental car by the big customs shed. There were a few people around and a mild and aimless air of activity. Cases of provisions were being taken off a truck and put on a conveyor belt that ran up to an open cargo hatch in the side of the hull where the hands were grabbing the cases and stowing them. A man stood with a clipboard, checking the items aboard. I found a gate ajar in the wire fence and walked with an air of purpose to the forward gangplank. An officer in white was at the top of it, just stepping aboard. I went on up. There was a smart young seaman on the side deck, and he watched me walk up the incline and stood at attention, blocking the way.

  “Sir, is not permitted coming aboard now. Is later.”

  “I want to talk to the purser.”

  “Is ver’ busy now, sir, for the sailing. Five o’clock sailing. Much work.”

  I found a five-dollar bill for him, shoved it into his tunic pocket. “Why don’t I stand right here and you run and find him and tell him it’s important?”

  After a little hesitation, he hurried off. He was back in a very short time with a man who looked like a fifteenth-century bishop. He had a regal manner, a spotlessly crisp white shirt.

  “May I be of some help, sir?”

  I led him a dozen steps forwards, out of earshot of the gangplank guard. “A question of identification, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  I showed him two of the wallet-sized pictures of Vangie.

  “Do I know her? Oh, yes, of course. It is Mrs. Griffin. Mrs. Walter Griffin. She has sailed with us … five times, perhaps six. Over two seasons.”

  “Can you describe her husband?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. A large man, brown, very strong looking. A large jaw, small mouth.”

  “Have they acted unusual in any way?”

  “I would say no, not really. Always the best accomodations, an outside room on the lounge deck. Quiet people. Stay to themselves. A table for two they must have. They do not join in the fun, you know? The poor woman, she cannot take the sunshine, so I wonder why she does go on cruises. He would spend much time in the sun. They are generous with tipping. Is there trouble? Perhaps she is the wife of some other person. Believe me, I could not make any statement about such a thing. We cannot get involved in a thing of that kind. It is not our affair.”

  “I am not going to ask for a statement.”

  “There is nothing more I could tell you. I hope I have helped you. Oh, one thing. They have always taken our shorter cruises.”

  “Where is the Monica D. now?”

  “On her last Caribbean cruise of this season. We have had our last. Tonight we sail for Italy, perform Mediterranean cruises, and return in late November. The Monica D. will join us in the Mediterranean.”

  He took out a thick black wallet, leafed through some cards, handed me one. “This, sir, is the cruise schedule of both vessels this season. Could you now excuse me, please?”

  I stood in the shade of the customs shed and found, on the card, the final cruise of the season of the Monica D. It was a seven-day cruise. She had left Port Everglades last Tuesday at ten o’clock in the evening. She had arrived this same Friday at Kingston, Jamaica, at seven in the morning, and would leave at five in the evening today. Tomorrow she would arrive at Port-au-Prince at one in the afternoon and leave at nine in the evening. On Monday she would arrive at Nassau at one in the afternoon and leave at five o’clock—just four hours later. And dock right back here at eight in the morning next Tuesday.

  With Ans Terry and Del aboard. Nice quiet people, who’d keep to themselves and occupy an outside room on the lounge deck and tip generously.

  I decided it would be very interesting to fly over to Nassau late Sunday or early Monday and ride back on the Monica D. At this time of year they would have available space.

  Ans and Del might be a little bored. I might liven up the last leg of the journey. But there was one problem to solve, and if the Veronica D. was sailing at five, a little close observation might give me a valuable clue. And it was a situation where I might well use Meyer’s disciplined brain.

  I found The Hairy One just returning from the beach with two sandy moppets in tow, ages about four and five. He explained that it was a small favor for the mother, a chance for her to go to the hospital to visit the father, who had managed to set up an A-frame to hoist a marine deisel engine up where he could work on it, and then had lowered it onto his right foot.

  “It is saddening,” he said, “to learn how the young are being deprived of their cultural heritage. This pair had never even heard of Little Red Ridinggoose and the Three Bare Facts.”

  “He’s all mixed up,” the little girl explained solemnly.

  “He found a penny in my ear,” the little boy proclaimed.

  He sacked them out in the bunks aboard the John Maynard Keynes for the obligatory nap, and I heard him explain solemnly that he wouldn’t tell on them if they didn’t take their naps, but to keep him from being a bad liar, they had to look like people taking naps, so they had to close their eyes, breathe deeply, and make no sound at all for a little while. And as long as they were doing nothing but pretending to take naps, they could be thinking him up a better ending for Little Red Ridinggoose. She deserved better than to be sent off to Yale.

  We sat on the cockpit deck under the shade of an awning he had rigged. The sea breeze moved by. We kept our voices down.

  I was aware of his careful and intense and questioning stare. He said at last, “You have the look of having felt a stale cold breath on the back of the neck, Travis. The jocular detachment, that look of the bemused spectator has been compromised.”

  “It got very iffy. It got very close in all respects. Somebody who gives you just one small poor chance is very good indeed, and the him or me rationalization is never totally satisfactory. By dawn’s early light
I buried him on a beach, in soft sand, using a hunk of driftwood, and it keeps bothering me that I buried him face down. It makes no difference to him. But I keep remembering the look of the back of his neck. The one called Griff. And I am not ready to talk about it. Not for a while. Some night, Meyer, in the right mood, I’ll tell you.”

  “Tell me just one thing now. Will anybody come looking for you?”

  “No. He thought it was going to be the other way around. So he made certain nobody would be looking for him. He set it up very nicely. Only the names were changed. And nobody else in the group knows of me or has seen me.”

  “And there is still the interesting lure of the money, eh?”

  “I brought that back.”

  “So that’s the end of it?” The smile on that massive and ugly face was all too knowing.

  “That’s what I tried to talk myself into.”

  “But then it would keep going on, wouldn’t it?”

  “And the shape of it is just about what we guessed, Meyer. I keep picking up more details. And, as a reasonable guess, I think they’ve murdered between thirty and forty men in the past two years. And it could have been going on before that, before Vangie was recruited.”

  “I knew the figures would be high.”

  He surprised me. “How could you know that?”

  “We estimated the total take. If any single venture netted a really large amount, there would be people tracking down every tiny clue. Heirs in hot pursuit of money in six figures would be tireless, and able to pay well for expert assistance. But ten or fifteen or twenty thousand … there would be less furor, and a much longer list of potential victims. Of course you have one curious problem. You’re not so naïve as to appoint yourself an angel of vengeance, burying them in the soft sand, face down, one at a time.”

  “I have to crack one open. So wide open it will stay open, and then I have to hand it over to a cop bright enough to see what he’s got, and I have to do it in such a way that I can melt back into the woodwork. I have two candidates. And a little thought or two for each of them. But let me use you on the one problem that baffles me.”

  “Only one?”

  “Only one at a time, Meyer.”

  • • •

  At twenty minutes to five we arrived at dockside in all the confusions of sailing. They were obviously going to have a fairly full ship for the transatlantic run. The literature I had picked up at a travel agency on the way over said the capacity was three hundred plus. Passengers were boarding. They had three gangplanks out. Crew only. Passengers only. Visitors only. We went up the visitors’ gangplank. The gate onto the deck was narrow. We were each given a rather dogeared blue card. One crew member gave us our cards, and as he did so, he chanted the new head count in Italian, and the crew member standing behind him marked it on a clipboard. We did not go below. We performed little experiments. We tried to leave by the passenger gangplank and were politely turned back. Meyer asked if he could leave the ship for a few minutes and keep his blue card and return. Ah, no sir. It is so easy, just geeve it now, we geeve it back, eh?

  The time grew near. The ship’s group of six musicians stood on one of the lower weather decks, playing sentimental Italian songs of sorrow and parting. People threw paper streamers. People ashore behind the wire waved and waved and waved. There was a call for visitors to leave. And another. And a final call. And we watched the jam as they surrendered their blue cards, putting them into the outstretched hand of the crew member. He would count them in batches, sing out the count, drop them into a slot in a wooden box as his companion kept score. Meyer went ashore. I leaned on the rail a dozen feet from the gangplank. The two crewmen conferred. The dock crew was beginning to cast off the first lines. One crew member hurried off.

  Over the increased tempo of the music the bull horn blared, “Please. Your attencion! One guest is steel aboard the sheep. Please, that guest weel go ashore immediately.”

  So I surrendered my blue card and went ashore, and the crew member was slightly disapproving of me. They pulled the gangplank away as soon as I stepped off it. I found Meyer behind the wire, grinning. He pulled me away from the people and said, “Very simple, once you figure it out. It makes you wonder what took you so long.”

  “If you try to make me guess, old buddy …”

  “Two visitors go aboard. One takes both cards. He waits for the maximum traffic density of the people leaving, those times when the card collector accumulates a stack and counts them during the next lull. They count cards, not heads. So the two cards, aligned to look like one, get popped into his outstretched hand. All cards issued are accounted for. If somebody visiting happens to lose his card while aboard, if it blows over or something, no sweat. He just says he lost it. They let him off, take him off the count. The system leaves everything tidy. But they sail with one extra. If they had to sail without getting the correct count, there’d be a determined search for a stowaway. They sail with an extra passenger they know nothing about, and in transit, the arithmetic is adjusted back to the proper number. The accomplice cannot come aboard as a passenger, of course. It would distress them to run a short count. It would imply somebody fell overboard.”

  We turned and watched the Veronica D. moving away from the dock. “I could have slipped him both cards,” Meyer said, “and you would still be aboard.”

  That night, up on the sun deck aboard the Flush, I told him all of it. All except the Griff part. And I told him the things I thought I might try. And he came up with a few impressive refinements.

  Saturday morning, after I had rather unwillingly agreed to a more direct participation on his part, I made the ticket arrangements for us. A flight early Monday morning from Miami to Nassau on Bahamas Airways. And two tickets back to Port Everglades from Nassau on the Monica D., Stateroom Number 6 for me, an outside room on the Lounge Deck. And, for Meyer, the most remote thing I could find, according to the chart of the ship, an inside room on B Deck. There were only ten staterooms on B Deck, and those were clustered in the stern section. He got Number 215, a cubicle with a bed and pullman upper, a shower and a toilet.

  We then went to see an old friend of mine named Jake Karlo. No one knows his age. He is about the size of a full-grown cricket. His standard gait is a jog trot. He has kept up with the changing times. When I first knew him he had a tiny office in a ratty old building in one of the oldest parts of downtown Miami. He booked third-class talent into fourth-class saloons—beefy strippers, loud young unfunny comedians and loud old unfunny comedians, off-key sopranos for weddings, and off-key baritones for funerals, musicians who would take years to make it, and musicians who had made it too long ago, butterfingered jugglers, trained dogs and shabby chorus lines. But he could make you believe each act was the greatest.

  Now he has an office layout of such size, elegance and persuasion it is sometimes called Goodson-Todman South. He owns substantial percentages of several successful clubs, a piece of a theater chain, a big interest in a television production company, and a hundred per cent of both an equipment rental firm and a big commercial color lab. With the steady growth of the Miami area as a moving picture and television center, Jake has maneuvered himself into a position where he can supply all the necessary production equipment, furnish all necessary technicians, build and rent sets, supply people for bit parts and for use as extras, costume them, and process the film for final editing.

  Several years ago several con artists moved in on him, set him up beautifully, bled off his working capital, then moved in closer to bail him out in return for control. Somebody recommended me. I had to get Jake to imitate total defeat, and when their guard dropped and they began congratulating each other, we worked our own con game on them. Jake has not forgotten.

  He came running across his half acre of carpeting. I introduced him to Meyer. Jake leaned back on his heels and stared up at me, like a man admiring a tall building. “Mr. Meyer,” he said, “how this monster saved my life, believe me! Thieves from the Coast in black neckties,
they knew everything. They knew how to peel poor old Jake Karlo like a banana. So what problems could they have with a type like this McGee? Such a big rugged honest one, like they would cast him in westerns, and actors those people eat for breakfast. When they left, maybe it was by Greyhound bus. All we let them keep was the cufflinks and the black neckties, heh? This McGee, he never comes to see an old man just for friendship. Always some favor. What is it now? Jake Karlo’s right arm? All you do is ask, it’s yours.”

  “Meyer,” I said, “you will never believe it, but this active young man has twenty-one grandchildren.”

  “Twenty-three. Keep track, at least. But not one with the name. Every one we had was a girl yet. Six of them. Who gets the name? My brother’s boy. Such a genius! Seven jobs I try him in. Even emptying wastebaskets, he could find some way to cost me a thousand dollars an hour. Come on. Sit, gentlemen. I told them out there, no calls, no interruptions.”

  I told him what I wanted, and he spread out the four photographs of Vangie, the five by sevens. He sat behind his giant desk and looked at them with pursed lips.

  “You look,” he said, “you say lovely. Oval face, delicacy, some oriental blood. Absolutely great eyes. Then more and more you keep seeing animal. Like a warning there. Watch out. How about the size, the build?”

  “About five seven. Hundred and twenty to twenty-five. But the kind of body that looks riper than the weight. Physical condition of a dancer.”

  He nodded. “Sure. One kid I’ve got, she’s five foot and doesn’t go a hundred pounds. Not really so much upstairs or downstairs, but what gives it that look, the waist is practically nothing. You’ve got with her a fourteen-inch difference from waist to hips, nineteen to thirty-three. She’s doing a fishbowl at the Shoreliner, and the bar business, it’s making everybody rich, just when the smart money figured the fishbowl bit was dead forever.”

  Seeing the puzzlement on Meyer’s face, I said, “A nude girl dances very slowly, making sort of swimming motions, in a little brightly lighted room directly under the bar. Mirrors reflect the image of her, only about four inches tall, into fishbowls full of water spaced along the bar. It’s an effective illusion. Jake, have you got anybody who might fit the bill?”