by Otto Penzler
The trunk split apart fairly noiselessly, with just one or two minor squeaks, and he had to turn his head for a minute—for a different reason this time. The way it had opened, though, was all to the good, one side of it shielded him from Fowler’s bunk.
He had to go carefully on the next step, couldn’t just remove her. There were too many loose things in there, all the busted partitions and drawers would clack together and racket. He got them out first, piece by piece. She came last, and wasn’t very heavy.
Now here was where the steward came into it. He had a choice of risks: not to bother with the steward at all, to try sneaking down the passageway in the opposite direction with her. That was out entirely. All the steward would have to do was stick his head out of the little room where the call-board was and spot him. Or, to leave her out, but in here, in the dark, and tackle the steward outside. He didn’t like that one either. Fowler might open his eyes from one moment to the next and let out a yell. So he had to get her out of here, and yet keep the steward from coming near her outside. The inset between the cabins, outside the door, was the answer—but the steward must not turn the corner and come all the way! It was all a question of accurate timing.
He was as far as the cabin door now, but that was a problem in itself. He was holding her up against him like a ventriloquist’s dummy, legs still folded up flat while she hung down straight. He got the door open without any creaking, but a sunburst of orange seemed to explode around him and his burden. It didn’t reach all the way to Fowler’s berth, but it could very well tickle his eyelids open if it was left on too long.
He stepped across the raised threshold with her, holding on to the door so it wouldn’t swing with the ship’s motion. Then without letting go of it he managed to let her down to the floor out there. He turned and went in again alone, to ring for the steward; as he did so an optical illusion nearly floored him for a second. It was that Fowler had suddenly stiffened to immobility in the midst of movement. But he was in the same position that he had been before—or seemed to be—and his lids were down and the clucking was still going on in his throat. There was no time to worry about it, either he was awake or he wasn’t—and he wasn’t, must have just stirred in his sleep.
The steward’s bell, Sherman knew, didn’t make any sound in the cabin itself, only way out at the call-board. He punched it, got back to the door before it had time to swing too far shut or open, and then eased it closed. She was right beside him on the floor out there, but he didn’t look at her, listened carefully. In a minute he heard the put-put of shoeleather coming down from the other end of the passageway. Now!
He drifted negligently around the corner, started up toward the steward to head him off; the man was still two of those lateral insets away. They came together between his, Babe’s and the next.
“Did you ring, sir?”
Sherman put his head on the steward’s arm appealingly. “I feel rotten,” he said in a low voice. “Get me some black coffee, will you? Too many brandies all afternoon and evening.” He looked the part, from what he’d just gone through—if nothing else.
“Yes, sir, right away,” the steward said briskly. And then instead of turning back, he took a step to get around Sherman and continue on down the passageway, toward where the body was!
“What’re you going that way for?” Sherman managed to say, gray now.
“The main pantry’s closed, sir, at this hour. We have a little one for sandwiches and things in back of the smoking room, I’ll heat you some up there—”
“Here I go!” was all Sherman had time to think. The whole boat went spinning around him dizzily for a minute, but his reflexes kept working for him. Without even knowing what he was doing, he got abreast of the steward—on the side where she was—and accompanied him back, partly turned toward him. The steward was a shorter man, only Sherman’s outthrust shoulder kept him from seeing what lay sprawled there as the inset opened out to one side of them. He pulled the same stunt he had on Fowler when he was getting the trunk closed under his nose, kept jabbering away with his eyes glued on the steward’s, holding them steady on his own face.
The steward stepped past, and the opening closed behind him again. Sherman dropped back, but still guarding it with his body. His jaws were yammering automatically: “—never could stand the coffee in Paris, like drinking mud. All right, you know where to find me—”
The steward went on and disappeared at the upper end. Sherman, in the inset, crumpled to his hands and knees for a minute, like an animal, stomach heaving in and out. This last tension had been too much for him, coming on top of everything else. “All to keep from dying twenty years too soon!” he thought miserably, fighting his wretchedness.
He got himself in shape again in a hurry, had to, and a minute later was groping up the corridor in the opposite direction, lopsidedly, borne down by her dimensions if not her weight on one side, his other arm out to steady himself against the wall.
There was no one out at the stairlanding now that the steward was out of the way, and only a single overhead light was burning. He decided to chuck the stairs and do it right from this A-deck. One deck higher or lower couldn’t make any difference if he went far enough back to the stern. And there might be other stewards on night duty on the other deck levels.
He put her down for a minute on a wicker settee out there, unhooked the double doors to the deck, and looked out. Deserted and pitch dark. A minute later she was out there with him, and the end of his long, harrowing purgatory was in sight. Babe couldn’t keep his hands from trembling.
He didn’t go right to the rail with her. There was still the necklace, for one thing, and then the nearer the stern the better to make a clean-cut job of it. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face beyond the rail, but the deck wall on the other side of him showed up faintly white in the gloom, broken by black squares that were the cabin windows.
Near the end of the superstructure there was a sharp indentation, an angle where it jutted farther out, and in this were stacked sheaves of deck chairs, folded up flat and held in place by a rope. There were, however, three that had been left unfolded side by side, perhaps made use of by some late strollers and that the deck steward had missed putting away, and one of them even had a steamer rug left bunched across it.
He let her down on one of them and bent over her to finish freeing the necklace. The handkerchief had remained in place all this time, for some reason. But it was one of his own and huge, touched her shoulders. He had to discard it to be able to see what he was doing. Loosened, the breeze promptly snatched it down the deck and it vanished. His hands reached for the loose end of the necklace, where he had already filed it through close to the clasp—and then stayed that way, poised, fingers pointing inward in a gesture that was like a symbol of avarice defeated.
The platinum strand was there, but invisible now in the dark, naked of pearls! Not two or three but the whole top row had dropped off, one by one, somehow, somewhere along the way! The motion of carrying her, of picking her up and setting her down so repeatedly, must have loosened them one at a time, jogged them off through that break in the wire he himself had caused. And since it obviously hadn’t happened while she was still in the trunk, what it amounted to was: he had left a trail of pearls behind him, every step of the way he had come with her from the cabin out here—like that game kids play with chalk marks called Hare-and-hounds—but with death for its quarry. An overwhelming sense of futility and disaster assailed him.
They wouldn’t stay in one place, they’d roll around, but they were there behind him just the same, pointing the way. It was only the top row that had been stripped clean, the other two had been tourniqueted in too tight for any to fall off….
He had no more than made the discovery, with his fingertips and not his eyes, than a figure loomed toward him out of the deck gloom, slowly, very slowly, and Fowler’s voice drawled suavely:
“I’ll take the rest of’em now, that go with the ones I been pickin
’ up on the way.”
Sherman automatically gave the blanket beside him a fillip that partly covered her, then stood up and went out toward him, knees already crouched for the spring that was to come. The gloom made Fowler seem taller than he was. Sherman could sense the gun he was holding leveled at him by the rigid foreshortening of his one arm. The thing was, was it still empty or had he reloaded it since?
7
He started circling, with Fowler for an axis, trying to maneuver him closer to the rail. That brought the chair more clearly into Fowler’s line of vision, but the position of his head never changed, slowly turned in line with Sherman. Suddenly it dawned on Sherman that the dick didn’t know the whole story even yet; hadn’t tumbled yet to what was on that chair! Must have taken it for just a bunched-up steamer rug in the dark. Sure! Otherwise he’d be hollering blue murder by this time, but all he’d spoken about was the pearls. Hadn’t seen Sherman carry her out after all, then; thought he was just on the trail of a jewel smuggler.
“But in a minute more he’ll see her; he’s bound to!” he told himself. “Dark or not, his eyes’ll be deflected over that way. And that’s when—”
While his feet kept carrying him slowly side-wise across the deck, from the chair toward the rail, he muttered: “You will? Who says so?”
Fowler palmed his badge at him with his left hand. “This says so. Now come on, why make it tough for yourself? I’ve got you dead to rights and you know it! They’re so hot they’re smoking. Fork ‘em over and don’t keep me waiting out here all night, or I’ll—”
Sherman came up against the rail. Had he reloaded that persuader or hadn’t he? “I can only be wrong once about it,” he figured grimly. He jerked his head at the chair. “The tin always wins. Help yourself!” His knees buckled a notch lower.
He saw the pupils of Fowler’s eyes follow the direction his head had taken, start back again, then stop dead—completely off him. “Oh, so you are working with a shill after all! What’s she showing her teeth, grinning so about? D’ye think I’m a kid—?”
He never finished it. Sherman’s stunning blow—the one he’d promised him in the train— his whole body following it, landed in an arc up from where he’d been standing. His fist caught Fowler on the side of the neck, nearly paralyzing his nerve centers for a minute, and the impact of Sherman’s body coming right after it sent him down to the deck with Sherman on top of him. The gun clicked four times into the pit of Sherman’s stomach before they’d even landed, and the impact with which the back of the dick’s head hit the deck told why it didn’t click the two remaining times. He was stunned for a minute, lay there unresisting. Less than a minute—much less—but far too long!
Sherman got up off him, pulled him up after him, bent him like a jackknife over the rail, then caught at his legs with a vicious dip. The gun, which was still in the dick’s hand, fell overboard as he opened it to claw at the empty night. His legs cleared the rail at Sherman’s heave like those of a pole vaulter topping a bar, but his faculties had cleared just in time for his finish. His left hand closed despairingly around a slim, vertical deck-support as the rest of his body went over. The wrench nearly pulled it out of its socket, turned him completely around in mid-air so that he was facing Sherman’s way for a brief instant. His face was a piteous blur against the night that would have wrung tears from the Evil One himself.
But a human being was sending him to his death, and they can be more remorseless than the very devils of hell. “I don’t want to die!” the blurred face shrieked out. The flat of Sherman’s foot, shooting out between the lower deck-rails like a battering-ram, obliterated it for a minute. The gripping hand flew off the upright support into nothingness. When Sherman’s foot came back through the rails again, the face was gone. The badge was all that was left lying there on the deck.
The last thing Sherman did was pick that up and shie it out after him. “Take that with you, Cop, you’ll need it for your next pinch!”
Carrying out his original purpose, after what had just happened, was almost like an anticlimax; he was hardly aware of doing so at all, just a roundtrip to the rail and back. He leaned up against the deck wall for a minute, panting with exertion. The partly denuded necklace, freed at last from its human ballast, in the palm of his hand. “You’ve cost me plenty!” he muttered to it. He dumped it into his pocket.
Suddenly the deck lights had flashed on all around him, as if lightning had struck the ship. He cringed and turned this way and that. They were standing out there, bunched by the exit through which he himself had come a little while ago, stewards and ship’s officers, all staring ominously down toward him. He knew enough not to try to turn and slink away; he was in full sight of them, and a second group had showed up behind him, meanwhile, at the lower end of the deck, cutting him off in that direction. That last scream Fowler ripped out from the other side of the rail, probably; the wind must have carried it like an amplifier all over the ship at once.
“But they didn’t see me do it!” he kept repeating to himself vengefully, as they came down the deck toward him from both directions, treading warily, spread out fanwise to block his escape. “They didn’t see me do it! They gave it the lights out here just a minute too late!”
The chief officer had a gun out in his hand, and a look on his face to match it. They meant business. One by one the cabin windows facing the deck lighted up; the whole ship was rousing. This wasn’t just another hurdle any more; this was a dead end—the last stop, and he knew it.
Suddenly he came to a decision. The net was closing in on him and in a minute more his freedom of action would be gone forever. He didn’t waste it, but used it while he still had it to cut himself free from the first crime even while the second was tangling around him tighter every instant.
He found the rail with the backs of his elbows, leaned there negligently, waiting for them. Right as they came up, his elbows slipped off the rail again, his hands found his trouser pockets in a gesture that looked simply like cocky bravado. Then he withdrew them again, gave one a slight unnoticeable backhand-flip through the rails. The motion, screened by his body, remained unobserved; their eyes were on his face. The necklace had gone back to Manon, the job had blown up—but it couldn’t be helped, he had his own skin to think of now.
The chief officer’s eyes were as hard as the metal that pointed out of his fist at Sherman’s middle. “What’d you do with that man Fowler?” he clipped.
Sherman grinned savagely back around his ear. “What’d I do with him? I left him pounding his ear in 42-A. We’re not Siamese twins. Is there a regulation against coming out here to stretch my legs—?”
The night steward cut in with: “I didn’t like how he acted when he ordered the cawfee a while ago, sir. That’s why I reported to you. When I took it in to him they were both gone, and the insides of this man’s trunk were all busted up and lying around, like they had a fierce fight—”
A woman leaning out of one of the cabin windows shrilled almost hysterically: “Officer! Officer! I heard somebody fall to the deck right outside my window here, the sound woke me up, and then somebody screamed: ‘I don’t want to die!’ And when I jumped up to look out—” Her voice broke uncontrollably for a minute.
The officer was listening intently, but without turning his head away from Sherman or deflecting the gun.
“—he was kicking at a face through the rails! I saw it go down—! I—I fainted away for a minute, after that!” She vanished from the window, someone’s arm around her, sobbing loudly in a state of collapse.
The net was closing around him, tighter, every minute. “We all heard the scream,” the officer said grimly, “but that tells us what it meant—”
The bulky captain showed up, one of his shirttails hanging out under his hurriedly donned uniform-jacket. He conferred briefly with the chief officer, who retreated a pace or two without taking his gun off Sherman. The latter stood there, at bay against the rail, a husky deckhand gripping him by each shoulder now.
The gun was lowered, only to be replaced by a pair of hand-cuffs. The captain stepped forward. “I arrest you for murder! Hold out your hands! Mr. Moulton, put those on him!”
The deckhands jerked his forearms out into position, his cuffs shot back. The red welt across his knuckles where he’d bruised them against Fowler’s jawbone revealed itself to every eye there.
He flinched as the cold steel locked around him. “I didn’t do it—he fell overboard!” he tried to say. “It’s her word against mine—!” But the net was too tight around him, there was no room left to struggle, even verbally.
The captain’s voice was like a roll of drums ushering in an execution—the first of the hundreds, the thousands of questions that were going to torment him like gadflies, drive him out of his mind, until the execution that was even now rushing toward him remorselessly from the far side of the ocean would seem like a relief in comparison. “What was your motive in doing away with this man, sending him to his death?”
He didn’t answer. The malevolent gods of his warped destiny did it for him, sending another of the stewards hurrying up from the deck below, the answer in both his outstretched hands, a thin flat badge, a gnarled string of pearls, half-gone.
“I found this and this, sir, on the B-deck just now! I thought I heard a scream out there a while back and I went out to look. Just as I turned to come in again this, this shield landed at my feet, came sailing in from nowhere on the wind like a boomerang. I put on the lights thinking someone had had an accident down on that deck, and a little while afterward I caught sight of this necklace down at the very end. The wind had whipped it around one of the deck-supports like a paper streamer—”
Sherman just looked at the two objects, white and still. The night had thrown back the evidence he had tried to get rid of, right into his very teeth! There were two executions waiting for him now, the tall knife at Vincennes, the electric chair at one of the Federal penitentiaries—and though he could only die once, what consolation was it that only by one death could he cheat the other?