Forever and a Death

by Donald E. Westlake

  Jerry clung to the waist railing along the wall of the bridge, and stared back toward the island and the sea. Buildings were being sucked down into the ground over there, the land itself had turned into brown sluggish waves, everything within the retaining wall was an eruption of mud.

  The sea from there to here was empty, rolling with the energy that punched outward from the island. Jerry stared hard at that water, but there was nothing to see. Not Kim, not Kim’s body; nothing.

  How had he done this? Was he responsible for this? He had wanted to destroy Richard Curtis, but he had only destroyed an eager and trusting child.

  And himself?

  7

  “Six,” George Manville said.

  So that was the last of the explosions. Manville and the three money people stood in the forward lounge, beneath the bridge, gazing out through the windows at what was becoming of Kanowit. The Mallory was nose-to to the island, tethered by the sea anchor, and it withstood the shock waves far better than that lumbering tub of an ex-freighter over there, now waddling desperately away, rocking and bouncing like a bathtub toy.

  Manville studied the island through binoculars, and what he saw was good. The land was liquefying, erupting like slow-boiled water. The structures on the island were breaking apart, collapsing into the mud. The ring wall had held.

  Another shock wave passed beneath the ship, tinkling glasses on the back bar, causing Madame deCastro once again to clutch at the railing beneath the windows. She said, “How much longer does this go on?”

  “Another two or three minutes,” Manville told her, and Richard Curtis came in from the ladder—actually a wide flight of wooden stairs down from the bridge—just outside. His heavy face was smiling, his tan seemed ruddier.

  Manville offered him a smile and a congratulatory salute. He liked this boss, his most recent boss, liked Curtis’s determination and decisiveness, liked the way he described a problem and then got out of the way of the experts. A hefty but solid man of 54, just under average height, Richard Curtis moved through life with a kind of unconscious aggression, as though at all times he were bulling his way through an unresponsive crowd.

  Now, he acknowledged Manville’s salute with a nod and said, “We’ve done it.”

  Curtis looked out toward the island, and the others followed his lead. The turmoil out there continued.

  “Yes, sir, we have,” Manville said.

  8

  Jerry Diedrich stood at the fantail, looking back at the distant island. The ripples had ended at last, or the ship had outrun them. The sea was itself again, moderate and unthreatening. The air was the same, soft and warm. Even the sky was just as blue as before, all as though nothing had happened. Only that, on the island, everything had changed.

  And somewhere in the water, Kim Baldur drifted, dead.

  And the reef, the coral? Had anything happened to that, any structural damage, any death of the living coral to make up for the death of Kim?

  He didn’t think so. It was a bitter pill, but it seemed to Jerry that Curtis and his engineers had been right, after all. Time would have to pass, experts would have to dive and study the terrain, but Jerry knew this subject, knew it well, and there were none of the telltale signs of environmental damage, no broader upheaval of the ocean, no debris. The retaining wall around the island hadn’t collapsed, so the coral footing beneath it must still be sound. The injuries to the fragile barrier reef they’d predicted and feared and had tried to guard against hadn’t happened.

  It was such a delicate thing they had just done over there. If Curtis and his engineers had been off in their calculations, just a little off, the destruction would have occurred, Jerry knew it. And he hated also the knowledge of himself he now had; at this moment, in his heart, he wished the catastrophe had come about, that some terrible harm had been done to the reef and the sea creatures and the sea itself, for no reason other than to prove to the world that Jerry Diedrich was right and Richard Curtis wrong.

  “Jerry?”

  He turned, and it was Tim, a member of the group, a college student from San Diego, with the bleached hair and eyes and flaking skin of a surf bum but the intense look of the devoted volunteer. Except that Tim now looked mostly worried.

  Does he blame me, Jerry wondered, and wiped at his face. “Spray got me,” he said.

  There was no spray up here, but Tim ignored that. He said, “The Captain wants to see you, Jerry.”

  “Be right there.”

  Tim looked as though he wanted to comfort Jerry somehow, pat his arm or say something encouraging, but couldn’t find a way to do it. So Jerry patted Tim’s arm instead, and went away forward, and up to the bridge, where Captain Cousseran said, “We have been in further conversation with the Mallory.”

  Steel yourself, Jerry thought, don’t show any weakness.

  He couldn’t wait to be alone with Luther, when he could release all these tense muscles, let the misery have him. His face as expressionless as he could make it, he said, “Have we? And what does the Mallory have to say for itself?”

  “They’re sending launches to the island, to inspect,” the Captain told him, and looked past Jerry to say, “in fact, they’ve started.”

  Jerry turned, and saw the two small boats, partly enclosed, bright red and yellow to be visible in an emergency, just moving out from under Mallory’s white flank.

  Captain Cousseran said, “They’ve warned us away. If we try to bring our own launch in close, they’ll call us trespassers, and repel us. They say, with force, if necessary.”

  Jerry looked into Captain Cousseran’s eyes, hoping to find sympathy there, or comradeship, but found only a correct dispassion. He said, “Captain, we can’t just— We can’t just leave.”

  “You’re thinking about the diver,” the captain said. “The captain of the Mallory promises his crew will search. If they find…the body…they’ll bring it on to Australia.”

  And use it in the campaign against us, Jerry thought. He said, “Captain, can’t we—”

  “No.” The captain shook his head. “I won’t permit my crew to go where they have been threatened with physical harm. We did not order that person into the water, we didn’t want him to go—”

  “Kim,” Jerry said. “It was Kim Baldur.”

  The captain raised an eyebrow, then nodded. “It would be her, wouldn’t it? A pity. A nice girl. Over-eager.”

  Her epitaph, Jerry thought, and looked out to where the launches slowly moved toward the island. He said, “What do we do now?”

  “We go back to Adelaide,” Captain Cousseran said. “We report the incident. We hope for the best.”

  The best. Jerry watched the red-and-yellow launches, out there across the gray water. They were closing with the island. The best seemed farther away than ever.

  9

  Curtis rode in the lead launch, Manville in the one behind. There were two crew members in each launch as well, and all eyes were supposed to be on the lookout for the body of the diver, but Curtis couldn’t stop staring at the island, as they moved out away from the Mallory.

  Mud. Soup, as he had predicted, in which every mark of man had sunk and crumbled and disappeared. And when he was ready, the same thing, the same sudden stripping away and finality, would happen again, on a much vaster scale. The buildings that fell then, when he was ready, the buildings that would crumble and melt away into the sudden soup, would not be low half-rotted barracks, but skyscrapers, concrete and metal and glass, some of which he himself had built, or helped to build.

  I gave them, he thought, I’ll take them away. And with just as much pleasure, just as much skill, just as much efficiency, the buildings he had helped put up he would knock down again.

  Until recently, when he visualized that destruction, the image in Curtis’s mind of the toppling skyscrapers was immediately supplanted by the image of the ancient bastards in Beijing, the shock and the fear on those age-lined pig-faces when they heard the news: someone has killed your golden goose. The i
mage of those faces had been enough for him, could bring him a smile every time he thought of it.

  But just in the last few days, he’d found himself, not willingly, thinking about the people inside the buildings. There would be no warning, merely a low rumble in the earth and then the buildings would go over like chainsawed trees. No escape.

  Those people in the buildings weren’t his enemies. But he wasn’t going to worry about them. They’d made their choice when they’d decided to stay, after the bastards from the mainland took over. They could have gone away, almost every one of them could have gone away. They could have gone to Macao, or Malaysia; many could have gone to Singapore (as Curtis had), or Canada, or a dozen other places in the world. But they chose to stay, so what happened was on their own heads.

  Still, now that he was thinking about it, it seemed to him, for a number of reasons, he would be better to make it happen at night. He’d always visualized it in daylight, in bright sun, the gleaming glass buildings as they went over, but that wasn’t necessary. He certainly wouldn’t be there to see it.

  At night, it would be easier to make the collections.

  It would be easier to get away without question. And, at night, the buildings would be nearly empty, all of the workers, the clerks, the bosses, all off to their bedrooms on the mainland, only a few left to feel the sudden sway as the floors shifted beneath them. It was their choice, it was not on Richard Curtis’s head; and yet, it was better to do it at night, when there would be fewer people in the buildings.

  The island was very close now. The crewman at the wheel steered the launch forward slowly, cautiously, watching for coral. Curtis opened the leather case and took out the video camera, knowing Manville would be doing the same thing on the other boat.

  When he looked back, Manville’s boat was already turning away to port. While Curtis circled the island to the right, Manville would circle it to the left, until they met on the far side. All the way, they would tape the island, showing its condition and the condition of the retaining wall.

  Seen through the viewfinder of the camera, the island seemed smaller, and the light brown mud looked almost solid enough to walk on, though Curtis knew it was quicksand there now, it would eat anything it was given.

  The launches moved slowly around the island, and the steersman next to Curtis gave a shout when he saw the second launch come around into view ahead of them. Curtis kept filming until his and Manville’s boats met, and then, in the bobbing water just offshore, they both put their cameras down and grinned across the peaceful water at one another. Manville made the A-OK signal, thumb and first finger in an O, and Curtis nodded.

  They were almost alone now, on the sea. From here, the Mallory was hidden by the bulk of the island, and the environmentalists’ ship was still in full flight toward the horizon, merely a dark blotch on the ocean. Looking over at Manville, Curtis made a sweeping pointing gesture, to say they should go back around the island now and return to the ship. Manville nodded, and Curtis told the steersman, “We’ll head back now.” Then he turned to stow the camera away, as the launch put about.

  It was the second crewman who saw it, part of the way back, a muted thing floating off to port, half-submerged in the slightly deeper water near where the other ship had stood. He called and pointed, and then Curtis and the steersman also saw it, and they veered that way, while Manville and the second launch waited on their original course.

  It was the diver, face up, air hose still clamped in mouth, wetsuit zippered shut over body and head, leaving only that blue-gray face exposed.

  It was a woman.

  The air tanks were still attached to the body, underneath it as it bobbed in the water, making trouble when they tried to grab hold and haul her aboard.

  While one crewman held an ankle and the other a wrist, Curtis bent over the launch’s side and managed to unhook the straps holding the air tanks in place.

  They drifted free, silver, glistening, and Curtis yanked the air hose from the diver’s mouth and helped the two crewmen drag her up over the rail and into the bottom of the boat.

  The body landed face down. Curtis went to one knee beside it, rolled it over, and unzipped the top part of the wetsuit, wondering if the diver carried ID. It would prove they had the body if they could radio the other ship the diver’s name.

  The wetsuit’s head piece was peeled back, and ash blonde hair spilled out, not long but very curly. The face within that halo of hair was young, unlined.

  Curtis leaned closer. Tiny droplets of blood seeped from the nostrils and the ears. Beneath the pale flesh of the throat, on the right side, a small bird fluttered. A pulse. She was alive.

  “Damn,” Curtis said.

  10

  When Luther Rickendorf got back to their cabin with the two drinks, held in the big palm of his left hand, he thought at first that Jerry had fallen asleep, and was glad of it.

  But then Jerry stirred on his bunk, having heard the door open, and rolled over. His face looked a mess, blotchy and drawn, the eyes still frantic. He blinked a lot, and stared at Luther as though he had no idea who Luther was.

  “Here you are,” Luther said, and extended toward him the vodka and orange juice, keeping the plain club soda for himself.

  Jerry propped himself up on the bunk, back against the bulkhead, and accepted the drink. He gulped some, spilling orange on his chin and T-shirt, then wiped his face with his free hand, looked less manically at Luther, and said, “Thank you.”

  “The least I could do.”

  “What’s that you’ve got?”

  “White wine spritzer,” Luther lied. “To keep you company.”

  The truth was, Luther had no desire and little liking for alcohol. He could not remember ever having felt the need to have his mood altered. He remained the same no matter what, an optimistic realist, and let the world swirl around him.

  It was because of Jerry that he was aboard this ship, not like the others out of any conviction or sense of mission. Tall and blondly Teutonic, Luther had grown up in Munich, his father an industrialist in the new Germany. He had known he was gay from his early teens, and with his strong good looks had never had trouble finding partners. When his father learned about him, shortly after Luther’s seventeenth birthday, he had proved to be an enlightened parent, up to a point. He would still consider Luther his son, would support him as necessary and acknowledge him as needed, but only so long as Luther stayed out of Germany.

  Luther’s exile began auspiciously. His father paid his tuition and expenses through three years to a bachelor of arts degree at Stanford University, in California. After that, with some financial help from home, he had become a ski instructor at Aspen for a few years, then had followed a lover from there who spent his summers as crew on the tourist sailing vessels in the Caribbean. He stayed when the ex-lover returned to the states, quickly became practiced around sail himself, met Jerry Diedrich one night in a bar on Anguilla, and his life as an environmental do-gooder began.

  When he thought sometimes of what an instinctive, unrelenting, unrepentant polluter of air and water and land his father was, Luther could only smile. To his father’s question, in one letter accompanying a check, “What after all is Planetwatch?” he had replied, “Something much much worse than homosexuality.”

  Now he sat on the other bunk and watched Jerry slurp his screwdriver. There were no large cabins on Planetwatch III, and this one was just big enough for the two bunks bolted into opposite walls, the drawers built in at one end, and the door at the other. If you wanted to make love, you crowded the two mattresses side by side on the floor between the bunks, and were careful to restore everything afterward, not to scandalize the others.

  Jerry said, “Did Kim have anybody on the boat? A boyfriend?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Not sleeping with anybody?”

  “I have no idea,” Luther said, “but I doubt it.”

  Jerry took more of his drink; about a third of it was left. He blink
ed past Luther at the wall. “You don’t suppose,” he said, his voice mournful, “she died a virgin.”

  Luther laughed; he couldn’t help it. “Nobody’s a virgin,” he said.

  “But she was so young.”

  “Jerry,” Luther said, “she did it to herself. Nobody sent her, nobody wanted her to go. Everybody wanted her not to go. Sooner or later, you’ll have to accept that. She did it to herself, and there was nothing you could have done about it.” He spoke with a faint accent, which usually gave him a pleasant and amusing sound, but when he was trying to comfort someone— though he had no way to know this—he came off mostly like a Viennese psychiatrist, remote and only professionally caring, not emotionally involved at all.

  Jerry said, “If anybody’s responsible, it’s Curtis.”

  And, as usual, his voice roughened, became harsher, when he spoke Curtis’s name.

  Luther wanted to tell him, “Forget Curtis. It’s over. Think about something else.” But he knew he’d be wasting his breath (even if it were possible for him to sound sympathetic), so he said, “What are you going to do?”

  “Singapore,” Jerry said.

  Luther was surprised. “Leave the ship? Why Singapore?”

  “Because that’s Curtis’s base,” Jerry said, “now that he’s out of Hong Kong. Because I have to know what he’s going to do next.”

  11

  There was no doctor aboard the Mallory, but Captain Zhang had taken a number of accrediting courses, enough to qualify him as a medical orderly, which was sufficient for the safety standards required in a ship of this size and purpose. Once he had the diver safely stashed, Curtis went directly to Zhang, on the bridge, and said, “I need you to look at the diver.”

  Curious, Zhang said, “To establish death?” The helmsman was over on the other side of the bridge. Lowering his voice, Curtis said, “To establish life.” Then, before the man could make a startled comment, he added, “This is between us. No one knows. Come down and take a look.”