by Morris West
Manny Mannix hailed me again. “I’ve got witnesses, Commander. Witnesses to say that I made you a fair offer for something you don’t own anyway. Now I’m moving in.”
I bent and picked up the rifle and showed it to him.
“I told you you’d have to fight for it, Manny.”
There was another bellow of laughter. Manny swung round and called an order to a seaman standing apart in the eyes of the boat.
In an instant the canvas was thrown back. My puzzle was solved. The humped shapes were depth-charges, looted from some island dump. Behind them was a small machine-gun mounted on a tripod. There was a full belt in the magazine and our man had his finger on the button.
“Still want a fight, Commander?” yelled Manny.
The gallery roared at his wit. Then his face darkened and his voice took on a new, venomous note.
“I’m moving in, Commander . . . as of now. You take your boat and sail her back inside the reef and stay there. If you so much as stick your ears out before we’re finished, you’ll be cut down. And just in case you and your little Wop think of any frogmen’s tricks—like working the bottom when my boys are resting—remember those.” He pointed to the sinister metal cans lying on the forward deck. “We’ll take a little run and drop ’em on you as we go.”
And there it was—the Royal Flush. And Manny was sitting on it. The last hand and we could do nothing but watch him scoop the chips into his pocket and go home. For the second time I was broke and busted in a game with Manny Mannix.
But I wouldn’t give Manny the satisfaction of hearing me say it. Out of the comer of my mouth I spoke to Nino and Johnny.
“Nino, get the anchor up. Johnny, get the engines started and we’ll take her home. Don’t hurry. Take it slow and easy. Pat and I will stay here.”
They didn’t ask questions. They moved quietly, almost languidly, to their posts, while Manny and his minions watched the gambit with silent puzzlement and the man behind the gun stood tense and ready.
Nino got the anchor up. I heard the cough of the Wahine’s engines and the stem flurry as the gears meshed and the screw bit into the water. Then, mercifully, we were moving. Pat and I still leant against the rail and I still held the rifle tucked under my arm with the safety-catch off. Manny didn’t want a shooting war—yet—but if he started it I wanted him as the first casualty.
The watchers on the rail were silent as we nosed out, still broadside to, and Johnny swung the wheel and headed eastward along the reef to the channel entrance. The man behind the gun slewed it round to follow us. Then suddenly a great roar of laughter went up. It rang like a monstrous obscenity across the clean sunlit water.
Nino, Pat and I walked aft to join Johnny Akimoto in the cockpit.
“That’s the most horrible, brutal thing I’ve ever seen.” Pat’s voice was low and controlled, but her dark eyes were black with anger. “It was so cold-blooded and—and stark.”
I grunted unhappily. “It was no more than I expected. The gun and the depth-charges were the only surprise. But, knowing Manny, I should have been prepared for those, too.”
“I think,” said Nino Ferrari with judicial calm, “I think I do not like this Manny fellow very much. I think he is the son of a whore. He called me a Wop, but my people were civilized gentlemen when he was a dirty thought in his great-grandfather’s mind. I shall think about him, very seriously.”
Johnny Akimoto said nothing. He stood aloof at the wheel—a dark, lonely figure, nursing the Wahine homewards with a kind of pathetic carefulness. Something had happened to this gentle man. It was as if he and the boat he loved had suffered a defilement from the mere presence of the black lugger and her tatterdemalion crew. His wise eyes were full of cold anger. The skin was drawn tight along his cheekbones and the line of his jaw.
Not another word was spoken until we cleared the channel and dropped anchor in the placid water of the lagoon.
Then we held a council of war. We would transfer the stores and the diving equipment to the beach camp. We would move Pat’s tent up the beach close to our own. We would keep a twenty-four-hour watch on the black lugger and her activities. We would beach the work-boat and the dinghy in sight of the camp and we would all sleep ashore. At this point Johnny Akimoto disagreed.
“No, Renboss. You and your friends will stay ashore. I stay with the Wahine.”
“I don’t know if that’s wise, Johnny. I think we’re safer together. No harm can come to the Wahine. They’ll see us unloading the stores. If they decide to move in on the island—which I doubt—they will leave her alone and come to the camp.”
Johnny shook his head. He said in a level voice, “No. This island is your island, Renboss. The Wahine is my boat. Each of us will guard what is his own. I will keep one rifle and half the ammunition. You will take the other gun to the camp. Nino has his pistol, so the division is fair. Believe me, Renboss, it is better this way.”
Nino Ferrari nodded agreement when I looked at him.
“Johnny is right, my friend. Let him do as he wants. One of us can come out each day to keep him company and bring him fresh water. Besides, the Wahine is our life-line. She must be kept safe and in running order, in case we need her.”
So it was agreed. It took us four trips in the dinghy to get all the gear ashore, and from the black lugger outside the reef Manny Mannix watched us through the long afternoon. When evening came Nino, Pat and I sat round the camp-fire and saw the riding lights of the Wahine rise and fall on the lonely water, and, farther out, the yellow glow that streamed from the cabin hatches of the big lugger.
In his detached professional voice Nino Ferrari discussed the situation.
“What happened this morning was a shameful thing; but it does not profit us to curse and sweat and be angry about it. In the end it may turn out to our advantage.”
“The hell it may!” I burst out angrily. “Manny’s in possession. Manny’s got the equipment. Manny’s got the time and the money. If we make a single move he can shoot our heads off. We’ve just got to sit here, and-”
A small firm hand was laid on my arm, and Pat’s calm voice brought me up short.
“Let Nino finish, Renn.”
Nino chuckled and winked at me.
“I told you, you got yourself a good woman, my friend. I did not tell you before, but when I saw that hold this morning, my heart was down in my flippers. I have seen these things before, you understand, and I can tell you now that more than three-quarters of that hold is buried in the sand. You saw the angle of the deck. If you will think about it you will realize that when her nose went down everything movable would slide down also. So if the chests are there they are most probably far down under the sand. There are freaks, of course, and accidents, but that is the way I read the story.”
“Read it any way you like, Nino, the fact remains that Manny’s got suit-divers and pumps. He can work longer than we can. He can hose away the sand. He can stay out there till he does it.”
Nino chuckled and shook his head.
“You amateurs! He has a pump, sure. But what sort of a pump can you work from a small crate like that? How long will it take him to shift a thousand tons of sand? You talk of time. Sure he has time, but time is money. He has the wages of the crew and the skipper and the divers. He has the charter of the boat. He will work so long, and if he does not find the treasure-chests he will pack up and go home. Why? Because he is a business-man. Because there is always a limit to the amount of money he can spend. Then, when he goes, we move in. He has made our job easier for us, you see?”
Nino’s logic was unshakable. I had no answer to his argument. I was an angry man. He was cool as a judge. Pat nodded her approval of his calm reasoning. I felt ashamed of my helpless anger.
Then we saw a spotlight switched on aboard the lugger. Its naked beam made a great pool of light on the water outside the reef. We heard the rattle of a winch and the steady, distant beat of a pump. We saw a monstrous shape lowered over the side of the lugger into t
he lighted pool.
Manny was a business-man. He knew that time was money. He was going to work round the clock.
Chapter 15
WE woke each morning to the steady thudding of the pumps. We saw the black lugger riding still at anchor over the wreck of the Dona Lucia. We saw the sleepy movement of men about her cluttered decks. We saw Johnny Akimoto perched on the bows of the Wahine dangling a line overside to fish for his breakfast.
We would race down to the beach to wash the sleep out of our bodies; and then, while Pat made breakfast, Nino and I would tidy the camp and scavenge in the undergrowth for our day’s supply of wood. Then one of us would take the work-boat and putter out to spend the morning with Johnny aboard the Wahine. His anger had gone now; he was able to smile again, and he moved comfortably about the decks of the Wahine like a householder in his garden plot. But there was about him a quality of wariness and caution, the attitude of a man waiting for the inevitable in the midst of a brief, illusory peace.
Then, because there was nothing else to do, I would take Pat on small tours of inspection of my embattled island kingdom. I taught her the names of the trees—casuarina, tournefortia, umbrella-tree, native plum. I showed her the great hoop-pines, whose seeds had been carried by birds from the mainland. I showed her where the noddy-terns rested under the soft leaves of the pisonias.
We picked wild orchids on the rock ledges. We sat for coolness under the drooping fronds of tree-ferns. We watched the green-tree ants sewing leaves together, using their babies as a living shuttle from which came the long silky thread that bound and cemented them together. We watched them spin their stables, pens and galleries of fine silky mesh where the mealy-bugs lay imprisoned like domestic cattle until their time came to be killed and eaten.
We sat, entranced, at the angling spider who hangs from his web and fishes for fluttering moths with a drop of moist glue hung beneath his body.
We tried, and failed, to make friends with the lean and shaggy goats, protected by an old law against the needs of shipwrecked mariners. Their tracks were everywhere in the bush and we followed them up to the saddle between the twin horns, and looked down on the brown cliffs, with the white water beating at their flanks. Perched solitary, like dawn people, between the sea and the sun, Pat and I watched the glory of green islands strung on the broken strands of the reef. We saw the blue turn to green and yellow where the deeps ended and the shallows began. We saw the light slant off the heaving bodies of porpoises, and the skimming arrowheads of flying-fish, and the small dark shape of an ancient turtle that had seen, perhaps, the coming of the Dona Lucia.
We climbed the twin peaks and I pointed out the narrow cleft in the rocks which was the only semblance of a cave on the island. But we withdrew hurriedly from the heavy animal smell that greeted us. A bearded goat thrust his head out of the shadows and grinned at us.
Then we would go back to the camp to find Nino, stretched on the sand, sunning his dark body and grinning at us like the god of the goats himself.
Nino was a constant wonder to me. Time meant nothing to him. His spare, muscular body was endowed with a feline grace. He moved like a cat and he had the cat’s capacity for instant relaxation and repose. He refused to spend his energies on profitless speculation or activity; yet his mind was clear and sharp as a knife-edge.
“I am counting the days, my friend,” he would say, “but I am also enjoying them. I am telling myself that, in a week—ten days—two weeks at most, they will lose heart and go away. Until then, I am enjoying myself. I have not had a holiday like this in years.”
I felt an odd sense of guilt when I realized that I was thinking the same thing. Locked in the small circle of the reef, denied all opportunity for action, I had resigned myself to the calm of the lotus days and to the pastoral peace of my love for Pat Mitchell. We told ourselves that this way of life we could enjoy for ever. We would build a house on the island. We would buy ourselves a boat like the Wahine. We would see our children grow brown and sturdy in the sun. We wove a tapestry of lovers’ dreams, shot with the colours of the sunset and the sea.
Then, one day, something happened aboard the black lugger. I was watching her through the glasses when I saw a sudden flurry of movement on her decks. I heard a distant shout above the beat of the pumps. I saw the group playing cards on the forward hatch break up and scurry aft. I saw the dark body of one of the island boys scramble up from the cockpit and make as if to dive overboard. I saw him caught and held and dragged forward and flung, face down, on the hatch-cover.
I saw him beaten, mightily, while the crew stood round grinning and Manny Mannix took the cigar out of his mouth and laughed and laughed.
I handed the glasses to Nino Ferrari. He stared at the scene for a moment, then passed them to Pat. She handed them back to me without a word, then walked away and retched on the sand.
The beating continued, steadily, methodically, monstrously, until the black boy had ceased to struggle and lay bloody and broken on the hatch-cover.
Then I saw a horrible thing.
Manny Mannix made a curt gesture with his cigar. There was a moment’s hesitation and then four men stepped forward, took the limp form by arms and legs and heaved it overboard. For perhaps a minute it floated, a dark mass on the smooth water, drifting slowly away with the current from the side of the lugger.
Suddenly I saw the black dorsal-fin of a shark. Then another and another. There was a flurry and a threshing of water as the scavengers fought over their meal, then . . . nothing. But I thought I saw a dark stain spreading out with the ripples. I put down the glasses. Nino Ferrari spat in the sand.
“Now,” he said quietly, “now I think it is time we did something.”
That evening I rowed out to the Wahine and brought Johnny Akimoto ashore for a discussion. He, too, had seen the terrible little drama and his eyes were smouldering with anger.
The four of us sat in the circle of firelight and watched Nino Ferrari bend forward, smooth the sand with his palm and begin to draw a map. . . .
“Here,” he said, “is the island, with the beach in front and the cliffs behind. Here is the lagoon. Here is the line of the reef. Here it swings wide out in front of us. There it comes in close and becomes one with the rock-shelf at the back of the island. Here is the camp. Here is the Wahine. And there”—he made a cross in the sand with his finger—“there is the lugger, and the wreck.”
He straightened up, lit his cigarette, inhaled deeply and blew out smoke from his mouth and nostrils. Then he spoke. His voice was low and even, but full of deep feeling.
“Before I tell you any more, I want to say this. A man’s life is a precious thing. It is worth more than all the gold of the Dona Lucia, more than all the wealth in the world. I have seen many men die, some of them because of things I have done. I have seen a few men beaten and killed, as that one was killed today. In that I had no part. But the older I get the more I know that each man’s death is the death of a part of myself, because my life is sharing in theirs. I tell you this so that you will understand that what I propose is not a light thing, not a thing done for gain, but for justice.”
He broke off. He smoked for a moment, silently. His eyes were veiled. The rest of us watched him, tense, expectant. Then he went on.
“I am going to blow up the lugger.”
The words dropped into the silence like pebbles into a pool. Johnny Akimoto breathed out with a small sound like the hissing of a gas-jet. I felt Pat stiffen. Her hands caught at my arm. She was shuddering violently. Nino Ferrari talked on calmly.
“The limpet mine is a very simple weapon. Very safe for the man who uses it. It is fixed by suction to the underside of a hull. It has a time-fuse which is set to give the attacker a margin of safety in which to escape. I brought four of them with me to use on the Dona Lucia—now I shall use them against the lugger.”
He bent forward and began again to draw in the sand, while the rest of us watched in speechless fascination.
“Here”
—he pointed to a spot where the reef came close to the island under the shadow of the western horn—“here is where the current begins. It sets along the reef and runs out along the edge of it towards the spot where our friends are working. When the tide is full it makes three, perhaps four, knots. A man could enter the water here and swim down with the current. It would take him no more than half an hour to reach the ship. He would come up to it on the opposite side from that on which the divers are working. He would fix the mines and swim, still with the current, in the direction of the channel. He would shoot the channel and swim back to the Wahine. The whole operation would take an hour and a half—no more.”
He straightened up and looked at us. His dark eyes searched our faces. It was Johnny Akimoto who spoke first.
“I think, it is a good idea, Renboss. If Nino will have me, I will go with him.”
Nino shook his head. “No, Johnny. This swim must be made under the water; I go alone.”
Now it was my turn.
“If you go at all, Nino, I’m coming with you.”
Nino looked at me. He darted a swift, warning glance towards Pat, who still clung to my arm, white and shaken. Then he said slowly, “You should understand, my friend, that in a thing like this there is always a certain risk . . . and time-fuses, you understand, and the depth-charges which are still lashed to the deck.”
“It’s my party, Nino,” I said. “If you go, I go with you.”
Then, sharp and high, Pat Mitchell’s voice cut into our discussion.
“None of you will go. This morning we saw murder done. That’s a matter for the police. We’ll take the Wahine, or I’ll take the work-boat, and we’ll go straight to Bowen and report what’s happened here.”
It was Johnny Akimoto who answered her, gravely, sombrely, like a father telling a painful truth to a child.
“No, Miss Pat. The moment we try to move out of the channel, they would turn the machine-gun on us. Besides” —he hesitated, and then went on—“what was done this morning was done in daylight, in full view. They know that we saw, and they are not frightened. Because I think —I know—that when they are ready, they have it in mind to kill us also.”