The Revengers

by Donald Hamilton

  “This list is incomplete,” she said.

  Serena shook her head. “Maybe you’re thinking of the Bonaventura off Cape Sable. We’ve never operated that far north. She was carrying a load of illegal munitions, some fairly old and perhaps deteriorated. Or perhaps somebody didn’t want those weapons arriving at their destination. There was an explosion of undetermined origin, well aft, and the whole ship went up. Naturally, the owners didn’t want to admit the illegal nature of the cargo, so they did their best to add their ship to the list of mystery-sinkings; but the information is in the hands of the proper authorities by now.”

  Eleanor was watching her carefully. “What about the Zeta President that went down in the Caribbean south of the Mona Passage?”

  “You’ve done your homework,” Serena Lorca said approvingly. “But Zeta Shipping, Incorporated, is in financial trouble; you might say they’re ship-poor. Overextended. They paid some of the crew considerable money to scuttle the poor old President for the insurance in such a way that it would look like another. . . .” She stopped. Her hands had closed into angry fists, but she spoke in even tones, “The insurance company has been given the evidence and is pressing charges. And then, of course, there were those bright, pot-smoking kids who were going to become millionaires at my expense. . . . Everybody trying to get free rides, on my coattails, and nobody, nobody realizing what I’m trying to prove, what I’m trying to do out here! I promised my beautiful Ann that night, that terrible night when she disappeared forever and I thought I was going to die, too; I promised her that I’d live long enough to—”

  “Miz Lorca!” The call came from the cockpit.

  Serena Lorca was silent for a moment and I saw her throat work; but when she spoke her voice was normal again.

  “Yes, Henry?”

  “We got us a ship off to starboard on a crossing course, ma’am.”

  “Coming.” Rising and sliding out from under the big table, she gave us a thin smile. “Maybe we’ll have our little press demonstration sooner than I expected. Watch them, Giulio.”

  She took an instrument from a bracket on the bulkhead above the chart table. It looked like a good-sized compass with a pistol grip and sighting vanes. She climbed halfway up the companionway ladder and turned to stand there facing forward; we could only see the lower part of her body. Minutes passed; then she came back down and hung up the sighting compass again, shaking her head.

  “Container ship, passing well ahead; the bearing’s drawing forward. Well, I prefer to hunt at night, anyway.” She seated herself and regarded us for a moment. “You see, I don’t cheat. Maybe I could have started the motor and gained enough speed to put Jamboree across his course, but I don’t work that way. For one thing, it would have been legally wrong. With the motor going, we become a power-driven vessel under the law, even if we have the sails up; we’d have no more rights than he does, and coming from starboard he’d have the right of way. No, I play fair. I don’t make it hard for them to avoid me, if they try at all. And I make it very easy for them to see me if they’re looking. I carry a large radar reflector; and at night my running lights are much more powerful than the law really requires; as a matter of fact, I replaced all of Jamboree's at considerable expense. I give them every advantage I can; I don’t even arm the fuses in fog or bad weather when somebody could make an honest mistake. I’m not even breaking the law very much, really. Perhaps I should have a bureaucratic permit for the explosives and maybe fly a red flag or something to show I’m carrying dangerous cargo, but do you really think it would make any difference? If they can’t take the trouble to notice and avoid an eighteen-ton sailboat with eight hundred square feet of sail on a sixty-foot mast, do you think they’re going to see a lousy little eighteen-inch red flag?” She paused, and went on, “Well, any questions?”

  I asked, “What does the Senator think about all this?”

  “He’s paying for it; what do you think he thinks about it?” Serena Lorca stared at me unblinkingly. “Of course, I’m doing something for him in return.”

  “Like murder,” I said.

  “You’re thinking of the slinky glamor-blonde on the West Coast?” She shrugged. “I told you, I made somebody a promise, an important promise. Important to me. I’ll do whatever I have to do to keep faith with the dead and—speaking of murder—to show the whole world the kind of giant murder conspiracy that exists out here on the ocean. That’s more important than one dead Hollywood blonde and her squalling brat.” Her voice was quite even. “As for your macho friend who got shotgunned, he should have been more careful where he exercised his machismo. And your handsome lady down in the Keys was, after all, a fugitive from justice; she couldn’t have expected it not to catch up with her eventually, particularly when she started sticking her aristocratic nose where it didn’t belong. But there’s one thing for which I take no responsibility . . . Miss Brand.”

  “Yes?” Eleanor said.

  “I want to tell you I had nothing to do with . . . with what happened to you.” Serena Lorca licked her lips. “Believe me, I wouldn’t help inflict that on any woman. Those orders came from . . . from somebody else.”

  After a little pause, I said, “So you made a deal with your dad, you scratch my vengeance and I’ll scratch yours.”

  “Vengeance? I call it justice,” she said coldly. Then she grimaced and said, “Well, that’s getting pretty heavy, isn’t it? Let’s take it the way it happened. I had enough money, with the insurance from Tumbleweed, to buy one secondhand boat and prepare it. I was only thinking in terms of one . . . one run at that time. No backup vessel. I wasn’t in very good shape; I’d kind of flipped floating around out there alone in that rubber dinghy after . . . after losing everything. I was just out of that place where they were supposed to put my head on straight again. I didn’t really care if I came back or not, just so I got one of the murdering monsters. I wanted to hear the bastards screaming, burning; I wanted to see them jumping into the sea all on fire. I dreamed about it at night. Hell, I still do. Have you ever hated anybody, Mr. Helm?”

  I said, “It’s a luxury we don’t permit ourselves.”

  She laughed scornfully as if she didn’t believe me; and maybe she was right not to. She went on, “So I had the boat, the first one—that was the little ketch Barbara on your list—but, of course, I had to have technical advice; I don’t even know how to set off a stick of dynamite. And the stuff I needed wasn’t available on the open market. I suppose I should have expected that one of the men I approached secretly would know who I was and check with my father. There was a ... confrontation.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Yes. Of course, I’m not much of a credit to the family even when I’m not messing with high explosives. I’m sure he’s gone to a lot of trouble to cover up my little . . . idiosyncrasy. We’d kind of broken off diplomatic relations several years ago when he first learned about it. He told me I turned his stomach and I reminded him that . . . that his stomach hadn’t always been so delicate. Anyway, he came storming down to the yard where I was working on the boat, asking what the hell I was up to now. When I told him, he laughed.”

  There was a space of silence, except for the creaking boat sounds and the murmur of quiet conversation from the cockpit.

  “He laughed!” Serena Lorca said softly. “It was the last thing in the world I expected, that he should throw back his head—with that scar and the dramatic white streak in his hair that I’m sure comes partly out of a bottle—and laugh and laugh as if he’d heard the funniest thing in the world. Then he put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed me affectionately; the first time he’d touched me in years. ‘Rina!’ he said. ‘Little Rina, a chip off the old block after all! Going to blow them all to hell for what they did to you and your pretty friend, eh! That’s the spirit!’ You’d have thought I’d won a scholarship or a beauty contest or something.” There was contempt in her voice, but there was a wistfulness, too; perhaps she was thinking of the parenta
l approval she’d gotten too late and for the wrong reasons. She cleared her throat. “Then he asked if I didn’t have a drink around that half-pint ship of mine; and we sat down and had a beer apiece in the middle of all the tools and sawdust; a real father-daughter scene like never before. He said thoughtfully, ‘You know, Little Rina, there are a few people I’ve been wanting to blow to hell for what they did to me,’ and he touched the scar on his head. He said, ‘Only I’ve got to step pretty careful these days; they’ve got their eyes on me. But not on you, baby, not on you. Maybe we can work out a deal, eh?’ ”

  Eleanor looked up, frowning. “What did he mean? Who had their eyes on him?”

  Serena Lorca frowned at the interruption. I cut in before she could speak, “Hell, you were there when I discussed it with Velo, Elly. The syndicate has spent a lot of money to put Lorca where he is. It’s only natural they’d try to keep him in line to protect their investment.”

  Serena nodded. “And my father isn’t the kind of man who likes to be told what to do, or what not to do. He’d been brooding about you and your organization for a long time, ever since he was hauled out of Mexico almost dead like that. It had gotten to be an obsession with him. But he was smart enough to know that if he used his own men, his own organization, to hit back at you, if he’d run around making the necessary arrangements himself, the word would have been sure to reach the top that he was endangering everything by a stupid vendetta against the U.S. government. But who’s going to pay much attention to what his oddball daughter’s up to, as long as she doesn’t flaunt her offbeat sexual preferences before the great American public?”

  “So you made the deal?” I said.

  She nodded again. “Of course, knowing him, I knew he’d stick to the bargain only as long as it suited him and no longer. But that might be long enough for the whole big project I’d had in mind, and had given up because I didn’t have the resources. So I asked him, ‘Who do I kill?’ He laughed that big laugh of his and said, ‘Well, suppose you start with a dame out in L.A. named Hendrickson, Roberta Hendrickson. Call it a test, eh? Do a good job there and you can write your own ticket, all the boats you want, all the help you need.’ So I did.” She said it quite without emphasis, as if she’d merely obliged her daddy by picking up his suit from the cleaners on the way home. She smiled. “As you said, Mr. Helm, we kind of traded vengeances, all in the family. I did the legwork for his revenge, and he paid the bills for mine.”

  Jamboree came off a wave and landed with a crash that would certainly have triggered an impact fuse if one had been set. Eleanor was thrown against me. I felt her hand find mine for reassurance and squeeze it briefly, before she pushed herself upright again. I knew how she felt. I found Miss Lorca a bit scary, myself.

  I said, “Of course you know I didn’t shoot your dad, Miss Lorca. As a matter of fact, I eventually took care of the man who did shoot him.”

  She shrugged. “You set him up for it, whether you meant to or not. And you made fools of him and his men that night in Mexico.” She shook her head quickly. “Don’t expect him to be reasonable about it, after all that time in the hospital. Somebody had to pay for everything he’d suffered, everything he’d endured; and you and your government friends were elected.” She turned her eyes fully on me. “And don’t expect me to be reasonable, either, Mr. Helm.”

  “You said your dad didn’t dare use his own men,” I said. I jerked my head toward Giulio. “But he’s here.”

  She said, “Giulio is waterfront, not syndicate. He goes with the boat, right, Giulio? That goes for the two on Ser-Jan and for Henry and Adam, topside. They’re all men who’ve worked on Daddy’s boats at one time or another. They have nothing to do with the rackets.”

  Eleanor was studying the list she’d been given. She looked up and asked, “How do you explain that in none of the reports concerning these four sinkings has there been a single mention of a sailboat being sighted in the vicinity?”

  Serena Lorca laughed harshly. “You know the answer to that as well as I do. Oh, I’ve been seen, all right, my boats have been seen; but what ship’s officer is going to admit, or allow his crew to admit if he can possibly prevent it, that he’s such a nautical slob that he runs down little sailboats way out in the middle of the ocean where there’s all the room in the world for him to avoid them as the law demands? Hell, it isn’t even any real trouble; all it takes is a twist of the autopilot knob, no sweat. It’s not like a modern sailing vessel with vangs and preventers that have to be cast off and sails that have to be trimmed and maybe even a giant spinnaker that has to be brought down or a big genoa that has to be tacked before any significant change of course can be made. The old square-riggers were even tougher to maneuver. That’s why the law was written that way in the first place.”

  Eleanor was frowning doubtfully. “You really believe that they’re keeping quiet deliberately—”

  The black-haired girl snorted. “By now there’s at least a handful of officers and seamen around who know perfectly well that they hit a booby-trapped sailboat. But they’re damned well not going to jeopardize their careers and risk going to prison for criminal negligence by admitting what really happened; they’re happy to leave it as a great mystery of the sea. And maybe others are beginning to suspect the truth, but they’re not going to talk, either.”

  “Why not?” Eleanor demanded.

  “What, criticize the professional conduct of their noble nautical colleagues? No, indeed, they’re going to stick together like incompetent surgeons concealing each other’s botched operations. I told you it was a giant murder conspiracy. I’ll make a bet with you, Miss Brand. I’ll bet that when the whole story does come out, there’ll be a great scream of protest from the shipping industry at how terrible I was, to put my loaded sailboats out there for them to hit, and not one word about how unseamanlike and illegal they were to hit them. That’s where you come in. Write it! Tell them! Tell everybody that all I did was to sail back and forth across the steamer lanes as I had a perfect right to do. As Ann and I did in poor harmless Tumbleweed. All I’ve done is even the odds; I’m no longer totally helpless as I was that night. I’ve got a few pounds of explosives to give me a fighting chance against all those tons of machinery. I told you, I play fair. I don’t hunt them down. They hunt me down. If they don’t like what they find waiting for them at the end of the trail, that’s just too damned bad.”

  There was a period of silence as we contemplated the girl’s paranoid vision of an ocean full of enormous enemies and of herself as a shining Joan of Arc doing battle with these great, evil dragons of the sea. Serena Lorca gave that nervous tug to her bodice once more.

  “I can see you don’t really believe me,” she said to Eleanor. “But you have the facts on paper, signed by me. I want you to tell the American people, all the people, the truth about these arrogant incompetents shoving their great steel homicide weapons blindly across the oceans without the slightest concern for the small sailing craft that have just as much right to be out there as they have. But I’m not asking you to take my word for it, I’m going to show you. You’ll get a chance to see what it’s really like. It’s the story you’ve been after, isn’t it? Write it!” Abruptly, she turned to Giulio. “Give me that other gun, please.”

  “Miss Lorca—”

  “It’s all right; I know how to use it. I’ll watch Helm. You take Miss Brand topside and let her see everything she needs to; she ought to know a little about how a sailboat works to write her story. Henry can answer any technical questions she wants to ask.”

  Reluctantly, Giulio reached down and produced a revolver that looked familiar—Warren Peterson’s weapon, or one just like it. Serena checked the loads and snapped the cylinder back into place; when she turned the muzzle toward me, the gray lead noses of the bullets visible in the chambers on either side of the frame informed me it was still loaded.

  Eleanor obeyed the jerky command of Giulio’s firearm, and slid out from under the table. She made her way through the
galley and up the companionway out of sight, followed by her escort. I remained facing Serena Lorca.

  She watched me in her intent, disconcerting way. “I think you have some questions you didn’t want to ask in front of him,” she said.

  ‘Two,’’ I said. “First, if what you really want is publicity for your seagoing operation, why did you have Jurgen Hinkampf murdered before he could spill the beans? Seems to me that’s exactly what you’re after, the confession of one of the ships’ officers involved.”

  She frowned. “Hinkampf? Oh, the young mate on that last tanker. . . . I wasn’t in Nassau when it happened, but they told me he died of his burns. Murdered?”

  Her attitude was convincing. I said, “He was smothered to death in his hospital bed before he could break down and tell Eleanor exactly what he’d seen the night his ship went down. Do I gather that somebody’s covering up for you that you don’t know about, giving you protection that you don’t want?”

  She laughed shortly. “The protection is hardly for me, Mr. Helm. I didn’t know about Hinkampf, but I had a pretty good idea. My father never made a straight deal in his life. He’s making certain that now that I’ve given him the revenge he wants—well, most of it, and the rest will be taken care of as soon as Giulio takes care of you, if you let him—I don’t also give him the publicity he doesn’t want. For the sake of what I could do for him, he was willing to risk financing a few anonymous forays; maybe I gave him the idea that I’d do my best to keep them anonymous.” Her smile was crooked. “But now that he has no further use for me and realizes what I’m really after, he’s about to terminate our agreement, as the saying goes, unilaterally. Giulio’s here to see to that, too. To see to me right along with you. Only I don’t think he knows I’m aware of it.” She stared at me intently. “I know the way to beat him, one way. I hope you have a way, too, so you can help Miss Brand get clear with her story. Later, this gun will be in the second drawer of the galley dresser, right under the flatware. I can’t give it to you now because you’d try to use it prematurely, before I finish what I have to do. But if things go wrong for me, you’ll find it there.” She frowned at me. “You had another question.”