Dead calm

by Charles Williams

  She nodded. “Now and then. When it comes up.”

  “Good. We’ll take it on the starboard side.”

  Five minutes passed. The breeze faltered but came on again before they lost steerageway. It was less than fifty yards away now. Ingram motioned her a little to port and stood ready with the boathook. The dinghy began to slide past along the starboard side, less than ten feet off. He hooked it neatly at the bow, hauled it inward, and got hold of the painter. He led it aft and made it fast with a grin at Rae. “Nice going.”

  It was a run almost downwind now to the other yacht. He started the main and mizzen sheets and studied her through the glasses. She was lying on a westerly heading, abeam to the breeze. “Right just a little,” he said to Rae. “Well come up astern and lay to about a hundred yards off.”

  The gap began to close slowly, and then more slowly as the breeze faltered. It stopped altogether, and the sea became like heaving billows of silk, blinding off to starboard with the glare of the sun. Then, just before Saracen began to yaw on the swell, it came on again. The sails filled. The distance was less than a half-mile now.

  “I don’t like that sluggish way she rolls,” Rae said.

  “She’s got water in her, all right,” Ingram agreed.

  “Are you sure it’s safe to go aboard?”

  “Sure. She won’t capsize, with all that keel under her. And she won’t go under all at once.”

  “But suppose you’re below? You might get trapped.”

  “I won’t go below if she’s that close. I can tell when I get on her.”

  They were still over two hundred yards away when the breeze died again. Saracen drifted forward a few yards and began to wallow as she slewed around. Ingram surveyed the remaining distance with exasperation, and searched the horizon on all sides. “Slick as a bald head,” he said and sheeted the booms in. “This’ll have to do. I’m going aboard.”

  “Why not start the engine?” she asked.

  “He might wake up.”

  “I doubt it.” Then she caught his meaning. “Why? What difference does it make if he does?”

  He hesitated; then he shrugged. “I don’t like the idea of leaving you on here alone with him. Unless he’s asleep, I mean.”

  “Why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “I don’t know. It’s stupid, I realize, but there’s just something about him I don’t quite buy. Not till I know more about him.”

  “Well, of all the worriers.”

  He grunted. “You’re probably right. But let him sleep, anyway.” He loosed the dinghy’s painter and hauled the boat up alongside. Before he stepped down into it he took a careful look around the horizon for squalls. It could be highly dangerous if one made up suddenly while Rae was alone, with all sail on her. There was nothing, however, that looked even remotely suspicious. “If you get another whisper of breeze,” he said, “work her on down and come about off the stern. I won’t be long.”

  “Right. You will be careful, won’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Wait. Don’t you want to put on that life-jacket?” It was still lying where Warriner had taken it off.

  He grinned. “What for?” Nobody could capsize a dinghy in a sea like this. At the same time, he wondered why Warriner had been wearing it. Timing himself with Saracen’s roll, he stepped lightly down into the dinghy and pushed away from the side.

  It rode like a chip on the oily groundswell, and reflected sunlight glared in his face as he shipped the oars and began pulling toward the other yacht. As he drew nearer, he could see the sails were sloppily furled and that the deck was littered with an unseamanlike mess of uncoiled and unstowed lines. The main boom rested on its gallows frame, but the mizzen swung forlornly back and forth, banging against its slackened sheets. She was at least six inches below her normal waterline, he thought, and her movements were heavy and sluggish, like those of a dying animal, as she lurched over and back under the punishing rays of the sun. He felt sorry for her, as he always did for a boat in trouble. He changed course slightly to pass under her stern and come up on her starboard side. Her name and home port were spelled out in ornate black letters edged with gilt against the white paint of her transom.

  Orpheus

  SANTA BARBARA

  He was still some twenty yards away, rounding her stern, when he heard a crash from somewhere inside the hull, followed in a moment by another. Apparently something had come adrift, a drawer or a locker, and was slamming back and forth on the water inside her. He pulled quickly up along the starboard side and, as she rolled down on the swell, caught one of the lifeline stanchions. After shipping the oars, he gathered up the painter and stepped on deck. He was near amidships, opposite the doghouse. As he made the painter fast he could hear the flow and splash of water inside her hull, sweeping from side to side as she rolled. He didn’t like the feel of her under his feet. Better make it short, he thought.

  Aft of the doghouse was a slightly raised deck, enclosed by a low railing, which extended back almost to the mizzen-mast and the helmsman’s cockpit. There was a skylight in the center of this, apparently above the after cabin. It was closed and secured. He stepped aft, feeling her unsteady lurch as she rolled, ducked under the main boom, and looked into the doghouse hatch. There were only four steps leading down, since the top of it was quite high above the deck outside. There was no water here, but the deck was covered with a litter of charts and scratch pads and pencils from a drawer that had slid out of the chart table on the starboard side. He came on down the steps and looked quickly around. The port side and that part of the starboard side forward of the chart table were taken up with settees covered with some white plastic material. On racks above the chart table were a radiotelephone and radio direction-finder.

  Aft, beside the steps leading up on deck, was a low doorway, and amidships at the forward end was another. The latter was open. He stepped over to it and peered through. Steps led downward to the main cabin, which was in ruin. At the after end, on the port side, were a sink, stove, refrigerator, and stowage cupboards, while to starboard was a table surrounded on two sides by a leather-covered settee. Everything was drowned, and the cabin was filled with the dank odor of wetness and decay. Water at least two feet deep swirled back and forth, crashing into the stove and refrigerator and settee and dripping from the bulkheads and ceiling, all intermingled with rolling cans from some burst locker, sodden articles of clothing, and books from an emptied bookshelf. It was sickening. At the forward end was a doorway which probably opened into a lavatory, and to the left of it a curtained passage to the forward cabin. He stepped down and splashed through the swirling debris to the passage and peered in. The two bunks were rumpled and dripping, and water rocked back and forth between them. It was just as Warriner had said. He wondered what he was looking for.

  He turned and hurried back to the doghouse. Through the windows he caught a quick glimpse of Saracen gracefully riding the groundswell two hundred yards away, still becalmed. The mere sight of her was comforting after the ruin below. The door at the aft end of the doghouse was closed and secured with a hasp, through the staple of which a pair of dividers had been dropped. He pulled the dividers out, and as he turned to toss them on the chart table his eye fell on the ship’s log, behind a clip on the bulkhead above it. He frowned, puzzled. Warriner had apparently been telling the truth otherwise, so why had he lied about that? He’d said the logbook was pulp, sloshing around in the bilges. And that the radio and chronometer and sextant were all ruined. Nothing up here was wet at all. And as water rose in the cabins below, wouldn’t he have brought his passport and money and other valuables up here where they’d stay dry? It would be the natural thing to do. They might be in one of the other drawers of the chart table. Well, he’d look for them in a minute. He pushed open the door and peered down into the after cabin.

  A dark-haired woman who appeared at first glance to be completely nude was huddled on the far end of the right-hand bunk, her back against the bulkhead at the
foot of it and her legs drawn up under her chin as if to get as far as possible from the door. One hand was up to her mouth and her eyes were wide with fear, which changed to amazement and disbelief as she stared into his face. She cried out, “Stop! Stop, it’s not him!” And in the same fraction of a second Ingram saw the other one reflected in the panel mirror mounted on the after bulkhead between the bunks. A man was standing just below him, to the left of the steps leading down, a big man, naked from the waist up, with a broad, beard-stubbled face smeared pink with diluted blood running down from a wound somewhere in the sodden mess of his hair. In his upraised hand was a billet of wood, apparently the end of a drawer he’d pulled from under one of the bunks and smashed. He’d been poised to bring it down on Ingram’s head, and when the girl’s piercing outcry stopped him he tried to recover. At the same moment Orpheus lurched over to starboard, and he fell into the water washing back and forth across the cabin sole. He pushed himself to a sitting position in the water with his back against the other bunk, brushed a hand across his bloody face, and looked up at Ingram with a hard and bitter grip.

  “Welcome to Happy Valley,” he said. “Where’s the All-American psycho?”

  “Get on deck!” Ingram snapped. “Ill be back.” He whirled and plunged up the steps into the open, ducked under the main boom, and dropped into the dinghy. His hands fumbled as he loosed the painter. Two explosive strokes with the oars brought him into the clear past Orpheus’s stern, where he could see across to Saracen. Her position was unchanged except that she had swung around and was lying broadside to.

  Rae was alone in the cockpit.

  He breathed softly and dug in the oars, feeling sweat begin to run down into his eyes. He came up the broad slope of a swell and ran down the other side like some frenzied, two-legged waterbeetle in flight for its life. It’s all right, he told himself. It’s all right. There’s no reason the crazy son of a bitch would wake up. Then, across a hundred and fifty yards of open water, he heard the growl of the starter. Rae was coming to pick him up.

  4

  He tried to signal to her. At the risk of capsizing, he stood up in the dinghy and frantically sliced the air in horizontal sweeps of his opened hands, but she was bent over the controls now and didn’t see. The starter growled again, and this time the engine started with a coughing backfire that spread gooseflesh between his shoulderblades. One of his oars started to slide overboard. He grabbed it and dropped to the seat again. Muscles writhed across his back as he dug them in and lunged, flinging the dinghy up the side of the swell. He was to blame. She’d been watching with the glasses and had seen the way he’d exploded out of the doghouse and run across the deck, and, knowing only that there was something urgent about his getting back, was trying to help. Saracen was swinging now, under way and foreshortened as she began to bear down upon him. The gap was only a hundred yards, and closing. Some of the fear began to leave him. It was going to be all right. He heard her cut back the throttle and drop the engine out of gear. Then when he turned his head again he felt himself grow cold all over. There was a spot of golden color just to the left of the lined-up masts. It was Warriner’s head. He was standing on the companion ladder, looking aft.

  Nothing seemed to move. There was a piercing clarity about every detail of the scene—the foreshortened hull pointed toward him, the little curl of bow wave under her forefoot, the tall spires of Orion achingly white against the sky, and just this side of Rae’s face that spot of gold like a medallion poised on edge above the cambered top of the deckhouse—but the whole thing was frozen like a single frame of motion-picture film with the projector jammed. Saracen was seventy-five yards away, with Warriner’s head just beginning to turn. A few seconds either way could decide it, but they were something over which he no longer had any control.

  Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe he actually had forgotten the people he’d locked in there to drown. Or if he’d really been asleep, maybe his reaction time would be off just enough to make the difference— The film jerked then, between the down-thrust oars and the stroke, and the projector began to run. Warriner’s head swung on around, and he saw the dinghy and the sinking Orpheus beyond. He leaped the rest of the way into the cockpit, and his figure merged with Rae’s.

  Ingram heard the engine race, still out of gear. It slowed and came back up again almost in the same instant, with the load on it now. Which way would he turn? At the risk of a fraction of a second’s raggedness in the beat of the oars, he had to turn his head and look. Saracen loomed over him less than four lengths away, the gap closing faster now as she gathered speed, but she was already beginning to swing to starboard. He dug in his left oar and spun the dinghy around almost at right angles to cut across her course.

  Saracen, in a hard-over right turn, was on his left now. He could see Rae fighting to reach the ignition switch. Warriner, holding the wheel with one hand, threw her back. She fell to her knees on the short section of deck aft of the cockpit, but sprang up and flung herself on him again. Ingram’s eyes stung with sweat, and the oars were bending as he threw the dinghy forward. The engine roared at full throttle; Saracen’s bow was swinging off faster now than he was gaining, but the stern was still coming down toward him. Twenty yards … fifteen … The locked and struggling figures in the cockpit suddenly burst apart. Warriner’s fist swung, and Ingram saw her fall. She lay in a crumpled heap on the afterdeck, unmoving, one arm dangling over the stern as if she were calling out for help. Ten yards … four … three … The turn was completed now, and the stern was beginning to draw away from him. He gave one more desperate heave on the oars, stood up, and flung himself at the rail. The dinghy kicked backward under him. His outstretched hands were two feet short, and then he was in the churning white water under the quarter.

  He was already behind the propeller, or he might have lost an arm. He felt the solid kick of the water thrown back from it whirl him over, and then his head was above surface and Saracen’s stern was ten yards away. It dipped as her bow rose to an oncoming swell, and for an instant he could see Rae’s figure face down on the afterdeck, her hair very dark against the bleached and weathered teak. “Jump!” he yelled. “Jump! Get off!” She lay motionless.

  For the first time in his life at sea he completely lost his head. It lasted for only a moment, and when he realized what he was doing, that he was threshing madly at the water, trying to swim after Saracen’s receding stern, he got control of the panic inside him and brought himself up. Lifting his face above water, he roared out once more with all his remaining breath, “Jump, Rae! Jump!” The limp and dangling arm was his only answer. She was either badly hurt or unconscious.

  The dinghy was behind him. Both oars had slipped overboard. He found them, threw them back in, and lifted himself in over the transom. He was more scared than he had ever been in his life, and the whole scene came to him through the winy haze of a desire to get his hands on Warriner and kill him, but there was no time to give way to futile emotion. He whirled the dinghy about and sent it racing across the two hundred yards of open water toward Orpheus, trying not even to think except of what he had to do, as if it were an exercise. Saracen was going straight away, and he could still see Rae’s figure on the stern.

  He turned his head. The man and woman had come on deck and were standing just aft of the doghouse, watching him. He shot the dinghy across the few remaining yards, slammed into Orpheus’s port side, and pulled in the oars. Neither of them had made a move to take the painter. He grabbed it himself, leaped on deck, and made it fast. “Have you got any glasses?” he asked.

  The man grinned bleakly. “You didn’t seem to do any better than we did. Maybe you have to be crazy yourself to outguess him.”

  Ingram caught himself just short of smashing him in the face—not because the man was already hurt or because he was probably in no way to blame, but merely because it would waste time. “Binoculars?” he asked again. “Where are they?”

  The man jerked a thumb toward the doghouse. “Rack, ju
st inside the door.” But the woman had already taken a step down the ladder and reached for them. Ingram lifted them from her hand without thanks, without even seeing her, and whirled, bringing them to bear on Saracen. She was still going straight away on the same course. As he adjusted the knob, she leaped sharply into focus, every detail distinct. Rae still lay huddled on the afterdeck, as far as he could tell in the same position. Warriner was at the wheel, looking forward, apparently into the binnacle. Maybe he had forgotten she was there. Then Ingram realized the futility of any conjecture as to what went on in Warriner’s mind. “Have you got a spare compass?” he asked without lowering the binoculars. “Boat compass, or a telltale in one of the cabins—”

  “There’s a little one in a box in the chartroom,” the man said.

  “Get it,” Ingram ordered, “and set it in the dinghy. Then put your azimuth ring on the steering compass and keep calling out the bearing of that boat.”

  “And what’s all that jazz for?” the man asked. He hadn’t moved.

  Ingram lowered the glasses then and looked at him for the first time. “You do what I tell you to, you son of a bitch,” he said, “and do it now. My wife’s still on there. If he throws her overboard, I want to know where. And if I don’t get to her in time because I didn’t have a course, and a compass in that dinghy, you’ll go next.”

  “Just a minute, friend—” the man began, but Ingram had already turned away and locked the glasses on Saracen again. She was at least a half-mile away; he could still see Rae lying on deck, but less clearly now. He heard the woman say, “Oh, stop it; just do as he says. You find the compass, and I’ll get the azimuth ring.” He paid no attention. He was trying to make a cold appraisal of the several possibilities while at the same time struggling in the back of his mind with the dark animal of fear. This might be the last time he would ever see her, this dwindling spot of color fading away toward the outer limit of binoculars, but that was something he couldn’t think about. If he lost his head, there was no chance at all.