by Gene Wolfe
He tried to recall it. “I don’t remember. J Deck, but not the rest of it.”
“She told you, though?”
“Yes. Yes, she did.”
“All you’d have to do is crook your finger.”
“At first, yes. After that, I’d have to keep her entertained. Charlie Blue couldn’t, and I doubt that I’d last as long as he did.”
“Would you try?”
Skip considered, counseled by the gentle roll of the fishing boat. “If she were all I had? Yes, I suppose I would, in a feeble, middle-aged way. I wouldn’t succeed, and I know it. But I’d try to postpone failure.”
“She’s my mother. What if I take after her?”
“I answered that already.”
“Fair enough. Did you notice the corpse in the water? No, I can see you didn’t. It was close to the wharf. You had to look almost straight down.”
“Perhaps we should have reported it,” Skip said.
“I thought of that, but we didn’t have much time and we couldn’t have helped him. He was floating facedown, and part of his head was gone.”
“Don’t cry. Please.” He embraced her.
“It’s just … Thanks for the hug.”
“Anytime.” Skip held her a little more tightly.
“I couldn’t think of his name, but nobody could forget that shirt. He came to stand with us when we were waiting to get off the ship. He was at the party.”
“Albano Alamar.”
“Yeah. Him.” Chelle wept.
Not knowing what else to say, Skip said, “I imagine that could be a rough town at night.”
It did not seem to help. When Vanessa joined them a few minutes later, that did not help either.
* * *
Ten or twelve hours later, their captain shouted up at the ship, making a trumpet of his hands. After what seemed a long wait, a dark-faced man with a thin mustache looked over the side. “You desire to come on board?”
“Yes!” Skip called. “Two passengers and an employee! We were left behind!”
The dark face vanished. Vanessa said, “What’s the matter with them?”
Skip was getting out his wallet. “I imagine they’re debating how to get us on board without stopping the ship.”
He had paid the owner when the dark face reappeared. “You, señor. You first. Then the other man. Then the women.”
“Whatever became of women and children first?” Vanessa muttered.
Chelle said, “They don’t want to be accused of feeling us up afterward. Do we want Achille, Skip?”
He shook his head. “I’ll tell them when I get on board.”
A rope was thrown into the fishing boat and tied to a mast. After fifteen minutes or more it became the monorail of a canvas contrivance resembling a pair of trousers.
Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “I thought they’d lower a boat for us.”
Without replying, Skip stepped over the broad ring that formed the waistband, and pulled it up. A moment later, ring and trousers pulled him up, moving him almost horizontally at first, then higher and higher until two swarthy men grabbed him and heaved him across the Main Deck railing.
The man with the thin mustache was leaning against a bulkhead; his arms cradled a submachine gun. “Your cabin number, señor?”
“Twenty-three C.”
“Ah! You are rich. We will discuss your ransom tomorrow, I think. Sit down.” The man with the mustache gestured with the barrel of his submachine gun. “Over there.”
Skip sat, and watched as the canvas contrivance was sent down its rope again. “You’re hijackers, aren’t you?”
The man with the submachine gun pointed it at him. “¡Silencio!”
Achille was next up. He put the point of a hook through the cheek of one of the men who had pulled him up, and was knocked down and kicked repeatedly.
Vanessa followed; she seemed to grasp the situation immediately, and explained that she had very little money. “Technically, I’m just a petty officer. I’m Virginia Healy, the social director, and a citizen of the North American Union.”
The man with the thin mustache made her a mock salute with his submachine gun. “As I, señora, am not.”
“May I go to my cabin? I’ll stay there, if that’s what you want.”
“No, señora. Sit beside that man.”
“Him?” Vanessa hesitated, looking at Skip. “I was on the boat with him, Señor…?”
“Del Valle, señora. Su servidor.”
“He’s really quite unpleasant, Del. I would prefer—”
“¡Abajo!”
Vanessa sat, and Skip watched the canvas contrivance go over the rail once more. “Do me a favor,” he whispered.
“I apologize for being so nasty, I only wanted him to think—”
“Put both hands behind your back. Like mine.”
“We weren’t in cahoots.” Vanessa’s hands moved as she spoke.
“Good,” Skip whispered.
The contrivance returned bearing Chelle. She cleared the railing, and the ring supporting the canvas trousers fell at her feet.
The man with the submachine gun smiled slyly. “I fear, señora, that—”
He staggered backward, dropping his submachine gun. There were more shots, two or three coming so quickly that Skip could not count them, although afterward it seemed to him that everything had taken place in slow motion: Chelle drawing from inside her loose blue blouse; blood oozing from a hole in a man’s face to soak his thin mustache; two men falling toward each other, so that their dying bodies nearly collided; Skip himself struggling to get to his feet, hampered by air far thicker than water.
He stumbled across the deck to the submachine gun and scooped it up.
The deck thundered, pounded by running feet. He felt, rather than heard, another shot and saw the first man fall, saw the dead man’s look of surprise and the dark off-center dot on the dead man’s forehead.
Awkwardly, he braced the steel butt-plate of the submachine gun against his shoulder, so intent upon haste that he did not recall that he had never fired such a gun before, had never fired any gun. Pulling the trigger made the gun jump and rattle in his hand, surprising him so much that he let go of the trigger. There were half a dozen dead men on the deck now, and behind and to his right another gun reported in swift and measured words: Dead! Dead! Dead!
Eight or nine or ten now.
Skip’s finger found the trigger and he fired again, a five (or six) round burst. A carpet of the dead and the dying stretched toward the bow. Beyond it other men had turned to flee.
Chelle grasped his sleeve. “We’d better get inside before they get on top of us.”
He followed her. Vanessa had gone already, or so it appeared. Achille was searching the body of the man with the thin mustache, searching clumsily but swiftly, tearing at the dead man’s clothing with his hooks. Skip motioned to him.
Then ran, sprinting to keep up. A perforated metal guard kept his left hand away from the hot barrel of the submachine gun. As he ran, he tried to guess how many cartridges were left. His first burst had been … Ten or twelve? More? The second about five. How many shots did these things hold?
Chelle had stopped to look back at him. He slowed and managed to gasp, “Where we going?”
“To Stateroom One!” She pointed up. “Run!” At once, she was dashing away, easily outdistancing him.
“Mon! Mon!”
He stopped and turned.
“They after us!” Achille waved a hook.
“Get down,” Skip told him, and raised the submachine gun.
* * *
The veranda had seemed safest, so that was where he was. If they came, there would be no chance for him to run out into the corridor. But if they looked only through the Changeglass veranda doors, they would not see him sitting on weathered teak on the far side of the farthest chair.
This was B Deck, he decided. This veranda was larger than their own, so B Deck or A Deck. And the sun was—oh, blessedly! blessedly
!—sinking into the western sea.
Idly, he explored his empty submachine gun. Push this little switch down, and the trigger would not move. Push it up and it would. This button held the sheet-metal box that should (but did not) contain cartridges.
“Here, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is the very weapon employed by the defendant—that is to say, by me. My esteemed colleague the prosecutor will try to draw your attention from it. I must draw your attention to it. The weapons employed by criminals—”
His mobile phone vibrated. Laying aside the empty submachine gun, he found the tiny, shaking instrument and flipped it open.
His first whisper was so soft that he could not hear it himself. He tried again: “Hello?”
“This you, sir? You’re in shadow.”
“Yes, Mick, it’s me. I’m outside and the sun’s almost down. Ask questions if you want to establish my identity.”
“Okay. Who’re we defending in the cyborg case?”
“John J. Weyer.”
“Who’s Virginia Healy?”
“That’s a name that a certain woman may have used when she went into the hospital.”
“Fine, it’s you. I’ve got the Z man’s report. The name she gave at the hospital was the first one you gave me when you called, Vanessa Hennessey. The hospital was South Side Community. She checked herself out the next day. Do you—?”
“Wait,” Skip said. “Early or late?”
“Eight fifteen. My guess is that’s as early as she could do it.”
“I concur.” Skip paused to think, shading his eyes as he stared out at the Caribbean. “What else?”
“Nothing much except the knife. The Z man got a look at it, but they wouldn’t let him take a picture. It was a steak knife, he said. Thermosetting handle, ten-centimeter blade, slightly curved. Serrated. Sharp point.”
“Ah!”
Tooley chuckled. “Glad we pushed your button.”
“Anything else?”
“Mixed descriptions of the stabber. The cop—his name is Burgos—found three people who said they’d seen him. He was average height, tall, well dressed, white, and Latino. He was or wasn’t carrying something in his other hand, a newspaper or an attaché case. Helpful?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you going to ask whether we’ve found Vanessa Hennessey, sir?”
“I never told you to find her. I asked you to try to trace her movements.”
“Meaning that you know where she is.”
“Correct.”
“Still alive?”
Skip sighed. “I hope so. She’s Chelle’s mother. I told you that.”
“Yes, sir. How is she? Ms. Blue, I mean.”
“Mastergunner Blue. She’s not out yet, although she will be soon. Technically, she’s on leave.”
“I’ve never seen her, sir, and I’ve been trying to get a description. I know you’re contracted.”
“Correct.” Skip sighed again. “We are.”
“Beautiful?”
“Depends. How do you feel about tall, rangy blondes with one hand bigger than the other?”
Tooley chuckled. “That would depend on which hand, sir.”
“The right hand.”
“Love them. I may try to move in on you.”
“You’d probably succeed. I haven’t told you about the clear blue eyes or the glowing smile. You may never see them, but they’re there.”
“Going to keep her under wraps, sir?”
“I wish I could.”
“There’s something—well, I hesitate to mention it, sir. But…”
“You feel you should. I’ve got something like that, too. You first.”
“All right.” Tooley took an audible breath. “Your secretary’s resigned. That was day-before-yesterday. I talked to her.”
Skip said nothing.
“I didn’t learn a lot, sir.”
“Susan? Susan quit?”
“Yes, sir. I asked her to stay ’til Friday to brief Dianne. And me. Next week Dianne will have to hold the fort. With you away, there can’t be much for her to do. She’ll have a half a year to get the feel of it.”
“Uh huh.”
“I’m the one who told her, sir. I said she was your acting secretary until you came back, that she’d have to ask all her questions fast, and that you’d decide whether to make it permanent when you got back.”
The sun was almost down; Skip peeped at it, a segment of burning red gold. “I may not come back,” he told Tooley. “I’ll explain that in a moment. Did Susan give any reason for resigning?”
There was a silence. Skip waited.
At length: “I think you know the reason, sir.”
“Of course I do, Mick. That wasn’t what I asked you. I want to know what she said, if anything.”
“She said she would never be thirty again, sir.”
“Nor will I. Did you tell her that?”
“No, sir.”
The sun had gone; high in the west, Skip saw the first star. “I doubt that she will want to come back, but if she does give her back her old job. No loss of seniority. Say she’s been on unpaid leave.”
“Got it, sir.”
“This ship’s been taken, Mick. Hijacked.”
Tooley’s whistle was audible.
“They spoke of ransom.” Skip wanted to sigh, but did not. “Chelle killed the man who spoke of it, and that was my fault. I wasn’t thinking clearly, just worrying about what they would do to her.” He paused, wanting to pace up and down.
“I’d say you had every right to worry.”
“Yes, I suppose. If I had it to do over … Well, maybe I’d do the same thing. At any rate he’s dead now.”
“They’re holding you, sir?”
“No. I’m hiding. I have good reason to believe they’ll kill me if they find me. And—”
Tooley interrupted. “What did you do?”
“That doesn’t matter. The thing is that I don’t want you to notify the Coast Guard.”
“I had just decided to do that as soon as we hung up.”
“Don’t. It seems certain that the captain or one of the other officers got a message out, to say nothing of the passengers. We may have hijackers—hell, we do—but this isn’t the seventeenth century. So they probably know already. Unless there’s someone a lot more important than I am on board…”
“I’ve got it. What if I could organize a private rescue?”
“Then do it. I’m not certain the Coast Guard would rescue us, to tell you the truth. I’ve been involved with a couple of hijacking cases—”
“I know, sir. The City of Port Arthur. International Law of the Sea Tribunal. All that nonsense.”
“In one of those cases, the ship sunk. The hijackers scuttled it—or that’s the official line. Do hijackers take ships in order to sink them?”
“I wouldn’t if I were a hijacker.”
“Nor would I. Do you think you can really organize a rescue?”
“Yes, sir. It’ll take money, but I believe it might be done.”
“See Ibarra. You’ll have to sell him on it. You don’t have to sell me. I just hope you can pull it off.”
“You can count on me.” Tooley cleared his throat. “I’ve told you what I called to tell you, sir. All right if I ask a question?”
“Of course. What is it?”
“What are you going to do now? You said you were hiding.”
“I’m going to try to get into Stateroom One. That was what we tried to do when we got loose—get to Stateroom One. There were hijackers, and I don’t know whether they got Chelle and her mother. I heard gunfire, and when I got there I fired and ran. A cabin door was open and I ducked inside.”
“And hid?”
“No. I’d seen a young man—this was yesterday—who jumped from veranda to veranda. I didn’t actually see him do it, but it was what he must have done. He was about your age, I’d say. I’m quite a bit older than he was, but I did the best I could, balancing on the railing with a
hand on a partition and grabbing a railing post of the veranda above and so on. Scrambling up. Those partitions are between the verandas horizontally, but you can swing around them if you try. I stopped here when I was too tired to go farther.”
“I hope you’re rested now, sir. What’s in Stateroom One?”
“I don’t know,” Skip said.
REFLECTION 6: The Best Course
The moon is high—clearly I slept. They’ll sleep, too. Most of them and perhaps all of them. What have they done with the passengers? There’s no one behind these glass doors, no one in the bedroom behind this veranda. Luggage, yes, and a rumpled bed; but no people. We would have seen bodies in the water, surely. Not a great many perhaps, in proportion to the passengers and crew; but ten or twenty, certainly. We saw none, except for poor Al Alamar. He returned to the ship, found the hijackers in control, and tried to fight them. He was a soldier, and a brave one.
Did the other soldiers fight? Some of them at least? There were a good many on the ship, apparently, most of them in second class. There were enough for Vanessa to hold a meet-greet-and-hook-up party for them.
Chelle went, and I ought to have gone with her. She was angry, but would she have made a scene if I had come in later? Very possibly she would, if she were drunk by then. Certainly she was drunk later—or so I’d like to believe. Was our seventh person drunk too? Was Jane Sims drunk? Did she think Jim or Jerry might be Don? Was Don a soldier? I’d like to think that he was, and that she did.
If the soldiers fought, Jim and Jerry may be dead, for which I now owe them even more. As much as I owe poor Al Alamar.
I’m no soldier nor am I brave, only a killer with an empty gun. Vanessa thought I was brave because I fought that military cop. That wasn’t courage, only rage. Rage because he had struck me, and frustration because Chelle hadn’t recognized me. We killers, we murderers, how often we do it because we’re angry or frustrated or both. That man who kicked a little child to death. His girlfriend’s child, and perhaps he was its father. He or some other man she had met in the same bar or another bar.…
Chelle may be pregnant; but if she is, the infant she carries will not be mine. Will I ever have a child?
Have a son? Will I, someday, kick him to death?
How many murder cases have I defended? Eight I can think of offhand. Even a murderer deserves to have someone to speak for him, someone who will explain to the jury why he did what he did and show him where his best interests lie. I did what I could for them, even for the woman who killed her own children.