ELEVEN
Eight minutes after Larry had died and exactly twenty minutes after I had left Kennedy and Royale in the cabin I was back there, giving the hurriedly prearranged knock. The door was unlocked, and I passed quickly inside. Kennedy immediately turned the key again while I looked down at Royale, spread-eagled and unconscious on the deck.
‘How’s the patient been?’ I inquired. My breath was coming in heaving gasps, the exertions of the past twenty minutes and the fact that I’d run all the way back there hadn’t helped my respiration any.
‘Restive.’ Kennedy grinned. ‘I had to give him another sedative.’ Then his eyes took me in and the smile slowly faded as he looked first at the blood trickling from my mouth then at the hole in the shoulder of the oilskin.
‘You look bad. You’re hurt. Trouble?’
I nodded. ‘But it’s all over now, all taken care of.’ I was wriggling out of my oilskins as fast as I could and I wasn’t liking it at all. ‘I got through on the radio. Everything is going fine. So far, that is.’
‘Fine, that’s wonderful.’ The words were automatic, Kennedy was pleased enough to hear my news but he was far from pleased with the looks of me. Carefully, gently, he was helping me out of the oilskins and I heard the quick indrawing of breath as he saw where I’d torn my shirt-sleeve off at the shoulder, the red-stained wads of gauze with which Mary had plugged both sides of the wound – the bullet had passed straight through, missing the bone but tearing half the deltoid muscle away – in the brief minute we’d stopped in the radio shack after we’d come down that ladder again. ‘My God, that must hurt.’
‘Not much.’ Not much it didn’t there were a couple of little men, working on piece-time rates, perched on either side of my shoulder and sawing away with a crosscut as if their lives depended on it, and my mouth didn’t feel very much better: the broken tooth had left an exposed nerve that sent violent jolts of pain stabbing up through my face and head every other second. Normally the combination would have had me climbing the walls: but today wasn’t a normal day.
‘You can’t carry on like this,’ Kennedy persisted. ‘You’re losing blood and –’
‘Can anyone see that I’ve been hit in the teeth?’ I asked abruptly.
He crossed to a wash-basin, wet a handkerchief and wiped my face clear of blood.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said consideringly. ‘Tomorrow your upper lip will be double size but it hasn’t started coming up yet.’ He smiled with humour. ‘And as long as the wound in your shoulder doesn’t make you laugh out loud no one can see that one of your teeth is broken.’
‘Fine. That’s all I need. You know I’ve got to do this.’ I was slipping off the oilskin leggings and had to reposition the gun in my waistband. Kennedy, beginning to dress up in the oilskins himself, saw it.
‘Larry’s?’
I nodded.
‘He did the damage?’
Another nod.
‘And Larry?’
‘He won’t need any more heroin where he’s gone.’ I struggled painfully into my coat, more than ever grateful that I’d left it off before going. ‘I broke his neck.’
Kennedy regarded me long and thoughtfully. ‘You play kind of rough, don’t you, Talbot?’
‘Not half as rough as you’d have been,’ I said grimly. ‘He’d Mary on her hands and knees on the monkey-board of the derrick, a hundred feet above the deck, and he was proposing that she go down again without benefit of the ladder.’
He stopped in the middle of tying the last button on his oilskin, crossed in two quick strides, grabbed me by the shoulders then released them again at my quick exclamation of pain.
‘Sorry, Talbot. Damn foolish of me.’ His face wasn’t as brown as usual, eyes and mouth were creased with worry. ‘How – is she all right?’
‘She’s all right,’ I said wearily. ‘She’ll be across here in ten minutes’ time and you’ll see for yourself. You’d better get going, Kennedy. They’ll be back any minute.’
‘That’s right,’ he murmured. ‘Half an hour, the general said – it’s nearly up. You – you’re sure she’s all right?’
‘Sure I’m sure,’ I said irritably, then at once regretted the irritation. This man I could get to like very much. I grinned at him. ‘Never yet saw a chauffeur so worried about his employer.’
‘I’m off,’ he said. He didn’t feel like smiling. He reached for a leather note-case lying beside my papers on the desk and thrust it into an inside pocket. ‘Mustn’t forget this. Unlock the door, will you, and see if the coast is clear?’
I opened the door, saw that it was clear and gave him the nod. He got his hands under Royale’s armpits, dragged him through the doorway and dumped him unceremoniously in the passageway outside, beside the overturned chair. Royale was stirring and moaning: he would be coming to any moment now. Kennedy looked at me for a few moments, as if searching for something to say, then he reached out and tapped me lightly on the shoulder.
‘Good luck, Talbot,’ he murmured. ‘I wish to God I was coming with you.’
‘I wish you were,’ I said feelingly. ‘Don’t worry, it’s just about over now.’ I wasn’t even kidding myself, and Kennedy knew it. I nodded to him, went inside and closed the door. I heard Kennedy turn the key in the lock and leave it there. I listened, but I didn’t even hear his footsteps as he left: for so big a man he was as silent as he was fast.
Now that I was alone, with nothing to do, the pain struck with redoubled force. The pain and the nausea came at me in alternate waves, I could feel the shore of consciousness advancing and receding, it would have been so easy just to let go. But I couldn’t let go, not now. It was too late now. I would have given anything for some injection to kill the pain, something to see me through the next hour or so. I was almost glad when, less than two minutes after Kennedy had left, I heard the sound of approaching footsteps. We had cut things pretty fine. I heard an exclamation, the footsteps broke into a run and I went and sat behind my desk and picked up a pencil. The overhead light I had switched off and now I adjusted the angle extension lamp on the wall so that it shone directly overhead, throwing my face in deep shadow. Maybe, as Kennedy had said, my mouth didn’t show that it had been hit but it certainly felt as if it showed and I didn’t want to take any chances.
The key scraped harshly in the lock, the door crashed open and bounced off the bulkhead and a thug I’d never seen before, built along the same lines as Cibatti, jumped into the room. Hollywood had taught him all about opening doors in situations like this. If you damaged the panels or hinges or plaster on the wall it didn’t matter, it was the unfortunate proprietor who had to pay up. In this case, as the door was made of steel, all he had damaged was his toe and it didn’t require a very close student of human nature to see that there was nothing he would have liked better than to fire off that automatic he was waving in his hand. But all he saw was me, with a pencil in my hand and a mildly inquiring expression on my face. He scowled at me anyway, then turned and nodded to someone in the passageway.
Vyland and the general came in half-carrying a now conscious Royale. It did my heart good just to look at him as he sat heavily in a chair. Between myself a couple of nights ago and Kennedy tonight we had done a splendid job on him; it promised to be the biggest facial bruise I had ever seen. Already it was certainly the most colourful. I sat there and wondered with a kind of detached interest – for I could no longer afford to think of Royale with anything except detachment – whether the bruise would still be there when he went to the electric chair. I rather thought it would.
‘You been out of this room this evening, Talbot?’ Vyland was rattled and edgy and he was giving his urban top executive’s voice a rest.
‘Sure I dematerialized myself and oozed out through the keyhole.’ I gazed at Royale with interest. ‘What’s happened to the boyfriend? Derrick fall on him?’
‘It wasn’t Talbot.’ Royale pushed away Vyland’s supporting hand, fumbling under his coat and brought out his
gun. His tiny deadly little gun, that would always be the first thought in Royale’s mind. He was about to shove it back when a thought occurred to him and he broke open the magazine. Intact, all the deadly little cupro-nickel shells there. He replaced the magazine in the automatic and the gun in his holster and then, almost as an afterthought, felt in his inside breast pocket. There was a couple of flickers of his one good eye that a highly imaginative character might have interpreted as emotions of dismay, then relief, as he said to Vyland: ‘My wallet. It’s gone.’
‘Your wallet?’ There was no mistaking Vyland’s feeling, it was one of pure relief. ‘A hit-and-run thief!’
‘Your wallet! On my rig? An outrage, a damnable outrage!’ The old boy’s moustache was waffling to and fro, he had the Method school whacked any day. ‘God knows I hold no brief for you, Royale, but on my rig! I’ll have a search instituted right away and the culprit –’
‘You can save yourself the trouble, General,’ I interrupted dryly. ‘The culprit’s got the money safely in his pants pocket and the wallet’s at the bottom of the sea. Besides, anyone who takes money away from Royale deserves a medal.’
‘You talk too much, friend,’ Vyland said coldly. He looked at me in a thoughtful way I didn’t like at all and went on softly: ‘It could have been a cover-up, a red herring, maybe Royale was knocked out for some other reason altogether. A reason you might know something about, Talbot.’
I felt cold. Vyland was nobody’s fool and I hadn’t looked for this. If they got suspicious and started searching me and found either Larry’s gun or the wound – and they would be bound to find both – then this was definitely Talbot’s farewell appearance. Next moment I felt colder still. Royale said: ‘Maybe it was a plant,’ rose groggily to his feet, crossed over to my desk and stared down at the papers in front of me.
This was it. I remembered now the far too carefully casual glance Royale had given the papers as he had left the room. I’d covered maybe half a sheet with letters and figures before he had gone and hadn’t added a single letter or figure since. It would be all the proof that Royale would ever want. I kept looking at his face, not daring to glance down at the papers, wondering how many bullets Royale could pump into me before I could even start dragging Larry’s cannon from my waistband. And then, incredulously, I heard Royale speak.
‘We’re barking up the wrong tree. Talbot’s in the clear, he’s been working, Mr Vyland. Pretty well nonstop, I should say.’
I glanced at the papers in front of me. Where I’d left half a page of scribbled figures and letters there were now two and a half pages. They had been written with the same pen and it would have taken a pretty close look to see that they hadn’t been written by the same hand – and it was upside down to Royale. The scribbled nonsense was as meaningless as my own had been, but it was enough, it was more than enough, it was my passport to life, given me by Kennedy, whose acute foresight in this case had far outstripped my own. I wished I had met Kennedy months ago.
‘OK. So it’s somebody short of cash.’ Vyland was satisfied, the matter dismissed from his mind. ‘How did you make out, Talbot? We’re getting pushed for time.’
‘No worry,’ I assured him. ‘All worked out. Guaranteed. Five minutes buttoning-up down in the scaphe and we’re set to go.’
‘Excellent.’ Vyland looked pleased but that was only because he didn’t know what I knew. He turned to the thug who had kicked the door open. ‘The general’s daughter and his chauffeur – you’ll find them in the general’s stateroom. They’re to come here at once. Ready, Talbot?’
‘Ready.’ I got to my feet, a bit shakily, but compared to Royale I looked positively healthy and nobody noticed. ‘I’ve had a long hard day, Vyland. I could do with something to fortify me before we go below.’
‘I’ll be surprised if Cibatti and his friends haven’t enough supplies to stock a bar.’ Vyland was seeing the end of the road, he was all good humour now. ‘Come along.’
We trooped out into the corridor and along to the door of the room that gave access to the caisson. Vyland gave his secret knock – I was glad to note that it was still the same – and we went inside.
Vyland had been right, Cibatti and his friend did indeed do themselves well in the liquor line and by the time I had three stiff fingers of Scotch inside me the two little men sawing with the crosscut on my shoulder had given up the piece-work and were back on time rates and I no longer felt like banging my head against the wall. It seemed logical to expect that the improvement might be maintained if I poured myself another shot of anaesthetic and I’d just done this when the door opened and the thug Vyland had sent to the other side of the rig appeared, ushering in Mary and Kennedy. My heart had been through a lot that night, heavy overtime stuff to which it wasn’t accustomed, but it only required one look at Mary and it started doing its handsprings again. My mind wasn’t doing handsprings, though, I looked at her face and my mind was filled with all sorts of pleasant thoughts about what I’d like to do to Vyland and Royale. There were big bluish-dark patches under her eyes, and she looked white and strained and more than a little sick. I’d have taken any odds that that last half-hour with me had scared and shaken her as she’d never been scared and shaken before. It had certainly scared and shaken me enough. But neither Vyland nor Royale seemed to notice anything amiss, people forced to associate with them and not scared and shaken would be the exception rather than the rule.
Kennedy didn’t look scared and shaken, he didn’t look anything at all except the perfect chauffeur. But Royale wasn’t any more fooled than I was. He turned to Cibatti and his side-kick and said: ‘Just go over this bird here, will you, and see that he’s not wearing anything that he shouldn’t be wearing.’
Vyland gave him a questioning look.
‘He may be as harmless as he looks – but I doubt it,’ Royale explained. ‘He’s had the run of the rig this afternoon. He might just possibly have picked up a gun and if he has he might just possibly get the drop on Cibatti and the others when they weren’t looking.’ Royale nodded to the door in the convex wall. ‘I just wouldn’t fancy climbing a hundred feet up an iron ladder with Kennedy pointing a gun down the way all the time.’
They searched Kennedy and found nothing. Royale was smart all right, you could have put in your eye all the bits he missed. But he just wasn’t smart enough. He should have searched me.
‘We don’t want to hurry you, Talbot,’ Vyland said with elaborate sarcasm.
‘Right away,’ I said. I sent down the last of the anaesthetic, frowned owlishly at the notes in my hand, folded them away in a pocket and turned towards the entrance door to the pillar. I carefully avoided looking at Mary, the general or Kennedy.
Vyland touched me on my bad shoulder and if it hadn’t been for the anaesthetic I’d have gone through the deckhead. As it was I jumped a couple of inches and the two lumberjacks on my shoulder started up again, sawing away more industriously than ever.
‘Getting nervous, aren’t we?’ Vyland sneered. He nodded at a mechanism on the table, a simple solenoid switch that I’d brought up from the scaphe. ‘Forgotten something, haven’t you?’
‘No. We won’t be needing that any more.’
‘Right, on your way. You first … Watch them real close, Cibatti, won’t you?’
‘I’ll watch them, boss,’ Cibatti assured him. He would, too, he’d bend his gun over the head of the first person to breathe too deeply. The general and Kennedy weren’t going to pull any fast ones when Vyland and Royale were down there with me in the bathyscaphe, they’d stay there under gun-point until we returned. I was sure that Vyland would even have preferred to have the general with us in the bathyscaphe as extra security, but apart from the fact that the scaphe held only three in comfort and Vyland would never move into the least danger without his hatchetman by his side, that 180-rung descent was far too much for the old general to look at.
It almost proved too much for me, too. Before I was halfway down, my shoulder, arm and neck
felt as if they were bathed in a mould of molten lead, and the waves of fiery pain were shooting up into my head and there the fire turned to darkness, and down into my chest and stomach and there they turned to nausea. Several times the pain and the darkness and the nausea all but engulfed me. I had to cling on desperately with my good hand until the waves subsided and full consciousness returned. With every rung descended the periods of darkness grew longer and awareness shorter, and I must have descended the last thirty or forty rungs like an automaton, from instinct and memory and some strange sort of subconscious willpower. The only point in my favour was that, courteous as ever, they had sent me down first so that I wouldn’t have to fight the temptation of dropping something heavy on their heads, and so they weren’t able to see how I was suffering. By the time I had reached the platform at the bottom and the last of them – Cibatti’s friend, who was to close the platform hatch – had arrived, I was at least able to stand up without swaying. My face, I think, must have been the colour of paper and it was bathed in sweat, but the illumination from the tiny lamp at the foot of the cylindrical tomb was so faint, that there was little danger of Vyland or Royale detecting anything unusual. I suspected that Royale wouldn’t be feeling so good after the trip either, any man who has sustained a blow or blows sufficient to put him away for half an hour isn’t going to be feeling on top of his form a mere fifteen minutes after he recovers. As for Vyland, I had a faint suspicion that he was more than a little scared and that his primary concern, at the moment, would be himself and the journey that lay ahead of us.
The platform hatch was opened and we clambered down through the entrance flooding chamber of the bathyscaphe into the steel ball below. I took the greatest care to favour my bad shoulder when I was negotiating the sharp, almost right-angle bend into the observation chamber and the journey wasn’t any more than agonizing. I switched on the overhead light and made for the circuit boxes leaving Vyland to secure the flooding-chamber hatch. Half a minute later he wriggled into the observation chamber and shut the heavy wedge-shaped circular door behind him.
Fear is the Key Page 23