Angel's Ransom

by David Dodge

  ‘We’re coming! Wait!’

  Over Marian’s head he had caught a fleeting glimpse of color. He strained his eyes for seconds to verify that it was not his imagination, then led her toward the ladder and her imprisonment. Off the Angel’s starboard bow, now briefly visible, now obscured by scud and rain, a faint hazy red eye winked beside a steady green one.

  The port beacons were still two or three miles away when Holtz ordered the motors throttled down.

  The Angel had been wholly dark for half an hour, without running lights or interior illumination. So that he and Holtz could see better from the pilot-house with the binoculars they both carried, Jules had switched off even the binnacle lamp and the shielded glow of the instrument panel. Blake, again at the wheel, needed neither compass nor instrument in those familiar waters. In the wind-whipped mistiness through which the cruiser crept shoreward under bare steerage way, the lights of the Principality were only a dim curtain of spangled brightness framing the stronger beams of the beacons, but his mind saw what his eyes could not, the familiar stretch of rocky coast between Cap Martin and Cap d’Ail; here the sandy hook that was Monte Carlo beach, there the facing bluffs of Monte Carlo and Monaco-Ville, the shelter of the port between them, depth markings on a chart, a compass rose. Sea and wind were pushing the Angel toward the shore, as they would push any buoyant object, and an able-bodied man could stay afloat indefinitely in Mediterranean water even during a storm. With darkness to shield him, Holtz and Jules both intent on their shoreward watch, his escape called for no more than a quick plunge toward the door, a dive over the rail. Half a dozen steps would carry him to freedom.

  He had no intention of taking those steps. A plan for action was in his mind, but it called for an advance on Holtz’s gun, rather than flight from it. Marian’s attempted sacrifice had shown him a way, the only certain way, he could hope to gain possession of the Walther. Since Holtz could not be brought within reach except to shoot, someone would have to accept a bullet as the price of the accomplishment. Blake had come to the state of mind where he was ready to make the trade himself. He did not intend to die, unless luck went wholly against him. His death without control of the weapon would be as purposeless as Bruno’s. The limit was a single bullet, and with an assurance that he would be able to close with Holtz before the shot took effect. At that price, Holtz could be defeated.

  The chance had almost come while he was unlashing the power boat that now hung from outboard davits, ready to be lowered away. Holtz had put him to the job after the prisoners were locked up, standing watchful guard to make certain he did nothing to cripple the launch or foul the falls. A moment had come when a sudden pitch of the storm-tossed cruiser had thrown them both off balance. Blake, recovering first, might have made his attempt in the time Holtz could pull the trigger once, but the shot would have brought Jules out of the pilot-house full on his back while he was grappling for the gun. Afterwards Holtz was careful to hold to a stanchion for support, and when the launch finally hung ready on its falls he herded Blake into the pilot-house to take over the wheel again while he and Jules watched the shore together. Blake could only pray for circumstances to separate the two and bring him his opportunity before the egomaniac mind accepted the realization that the signal would never be received. Until his moment came, he marked time and obeyed orders.

  From the direction in which the binoculars were pointed, both men looked towards the tumbled rocks where Jules had put Roche ashore near Monte Carlo beach. Once Holtz asked the time. Jules lit a match, cupping the flame in his big hands, and blew it quickly out again. ‘Nearly two.’

  ‘How near?’

  ‘Five minutes.’

  ‘Run in closer, Captain. Slowly. I’ll tell you when to stop.’

  Blake put way on the cruiser at half speed. A moment later Jules said nervously, ‘We’re inside the capes.’

  ‘What of it?’ Holtz snapped.

  ‘Running this close to a lee shore is dangerous. If anything happens to the motors, we’ll end up on the rocks.’

  ‘Nothing is going to happen to the motors.’ Holtz lowered his binoculars with a snarl of irritation at his inability to see through the blurred windscreen. ‘That will do, Captain. Hold us as we are.’

  Rain and wind still defeated his attempts to see clearly. He sent Jules out on the pitching bridge wing to try for a better sight shoreward. The sailor came back almost immediately, cursing the moisture that filmed his binocular lenses as soon as they were exposed in the open.

  ‘It’s like looking through a waterfall,’ he grumbled. ‘There’s no signal. Between the weather and the banker’s watchdogs he’ll have to slip, he won’t try to make it tonight. We’d better lay out to sea until the storm breaks, and come in tomorrow night.’

  ‘Go in closer, Captain,’ Holtz said.

  ‘Hold it!’ Jules’s increasing nervousness made the counter-command a bark. ‘You’re just asking for trouble! There’s no safe place to land a boat in this blow even if we do catch a signal. Lay out to sea until tomorrow night!’

  ‘I said we were going in closer!’ Holtz’s voice snapped like a cold whip in the darkened pilot-house. ‘Don’t make me repeat my orders, Captain!’

  Blake reached for the throttles. He thought, One bullet, and felt a faint wonder that the thought did not particularly disturb him. He was too weary to be afraid.

  ‘I think we may have something, Chief!’ Corsi’s oilskins dripped water in the doorway of the Bureau du Pilotage. He was trying to keep excitement out of his voice, without success. ‘You’d better come take a look at the radar!’

  Neyrolle blinked and rubbed his eyes. He had been dozing fitfully in his chair since midnight. George was sound asleep, snoring, and Cesar had been dismissed hours earlier.

  Neyrolle hesitated to wake the reporter. He felt no obligation to live up to his bargain to share knowledge. The bargain had been broken by George’s lie, whether the lie was consequential or inconsequential. But he still needed cooperation in the event that they were able to use the pilot boat, and lives could depend on how readily the cooperation was forthcoming. A man as headstrong as George required careful handling.

  Neyrolle shook him awake, telling him of Corsi’s news while they were putting on slickers. The time was a few minutes after two o’clock, the storm still raged outside. George’s head was foggy with sleep when he left the Bureau, but the sharp whip of cold rain in his face cleared his brain immediately. He was alert and expectant as he followed Neyrolle and Corsi into the windy dark.

  They dog-trotted, heads down, toward a large yacht moored at the Quai des États Unis. George could not read the name on her counter, but he guessed that she was of British registry as soon as they were aboard. Someone with a British accent met them at the head of the gangplank and took them forward to the pilot-house. A second unmistakably English voice welcomed them into warm darkness where the luminescent green sweep of a radarscope rotated and throbbed, painting its shadowy picture of what lay around them in the night.

  Orientation of the picture was not difficult. Although the pattern made by the obstructing hills and bluffs on three sides of the harbor was meaningless, the shadow of the sea wall, broken by the gap of the harbor entrance, threw a recognizable vertical band slightly off the center of the pulsing scope. Beyond it, the storm filmed the screen with a mistiness that did not hide a small, more solidly defined shadow lying motionless well out toward the periphery of the scanner’s circle.

  Neyrolle lit a cigarette. In the glow of the match his expression betrayed nothing of what he felt. He said, ‘What’s her distance?’

  The clipped British voice answered, ‘We’re ranging at two miles now, so she’s about a mile-and-three-quarters out. Say, three kilometers.’

  ‘Miles will do. How long has she been there?’

  ‘We picked her up at ten miles around one o’clock. She came in as far as you see her in the next hour, then lay to. Been about in the same spot for the last quarter of an hour.’
/>   Corsi said, ‘she’s coming in! Look!’

  They watched the shadow blur, elongate, and re-form again, a green caterpillar crawling. It moved by fractions of an inch for minutes, then stopped.

  The voice of their invisible host said curiously, ‘I know it’s all very hush-hush and all that, but could a chap ask what you’re expecting of her? What’s she supposed to do?’

  ‘It will depend on whether she is what we think she is,’ Neyrolle answered non-committally. ‘Is there any way to identify a vessel by what is visible on your screen?’

  ‘You can guess at her dimensions. That’s about all.’

  ‘Please guess the dimensions of this one.’

  ‘Well, it’s not easy. She’s bigger than a speedboat, smaller than the Queen Mary. I’d say perhaps between fifty feet and two hundred, if it’s any help. Can’t do much better. Sorry.’

  ‘Thank you. Could you also perhaps guess at the meaning of her maneuvers?’

  ‘If it were any other kind of a night I’d say she was trying to find an anchorage in water too deep for her. In this storm, only a silly clot would even think of anchoring on a lee shore. She ought either to come into port or stand out to sea.’

  ‘Might she be looking for a signal from shore, or preparing to launch a small boat?’

  ‘She might.’

  ‘If she did launch a boat, would we be able to see it?’

  For a moment the silence was broken only by the throb and click of the scanner. The clipped voice said doubtfully, ‘I shouldn’t want to say, at two miles. It would depend on the size of the boat. Hold up a minute.’

  There was movement in the dark, a click. The picture on the scope lost its luminescence, fading as another formed in larger dimensions. The band of the sea wall was wider now, farther from the center of the scope, and filled more of the screen. The caterpillar shadow had disappeared.

  ‘That’s a one-mile ranging. You could see anything larger than a dinghy, maybe even a dinghy, on that scale. And no one who wasn’t completely crackers would try to row anything as small as a dinghy tonight, so the answer is yes, you could probably spot a boat coming in. Unless you wanted to keep an eye on the other craft at the same time, of course.’

  ‘For the moment, we wish to observe the behavior of the other craft,’ Neyrolle said. ‘If you would be so kind.’

  The switch clicked again. The first picture returned to the screen. On it, the caterpillar shadow had begun to move once more.

  They watched it for what seemed an interminable time. Except for his endless chain-smoking, Neyrolle gave no sign of nerves. George did not realize the pitch to which he himself was strung until beads of sweat on his face and neck made him reach for a handkerchief. They studied the pulsing scope through a haze of smoke from Neyrolle’s Gauloises while the caterpillar inched its slow way shoreward, stopped, inched again, then turned back. Reaching the position where it had been when they first saw it, it was motionless for almost an hour before it crept again toward the center of the screen, and the cycle of its withdrawal and return was repeated once more in the hour following. Afterwards it crawled toward the edge of the scope and disappeared. The unseen operator of the radar picked it up again, smaller and dimmer, on a five-mile ranging. Its course was steadily seaward.

  Neyrolle murmured politely formal thanks and stood up to leave without further comment. It was too much for George. He said unbelievingly, ‘Are you going to let her go? Just like that?’

  ‘I am doing what I think best.’ Neyrolle was holding himself under tight restraint. ‘Nothing has happened to frighten her, nothing shall happen to frighten her. We know from her behavior that she expects a signal on the hour. It will be daylight in another hour, so she leaves, but she will return again for a signal on the hour. The next time she comes within the capes, the net will be ready behind her. I dare not move without it.’

  ‘How do you know that she’ll ever come back? How do you know that Holtz isn’t cutting their throats right now, getting rid of the evidence because he knows the rendezvous has failed? How do you know anything?’

  ‘I know that a man who plans as carefully as Holtz has planned does not pin his faith on a rendezvous that must succeed or fail within the space of three hours. Thirty-five million francs will bring him back.’ In the smoky dark, still illuminated only by the throbbing screen on which a tiny green caterpillar inched its way seaward, Neyrolle’s voice suddenly lost its restraint. He said savagely, ‘When it does, you shall have your story! I promise you that!’

  SEVEN

  Scud and clouds had hidden the land by daybreak. The sea was moderating as the force of the wind diminished, the rain had stopped. Running seaward on the course Jules had given him at four o’clock, Blake was grateful to be able to open the windscreen and let brisk cold air blow into the pilot-house. He could not have remained awake without it.

  It was twenty-four hours since he had slept, and then only briefly. The tensions of the night had kept him keyed up until Holtz reluctantly abandoned the attempt to raise Roche’s signal through the storm, but the let-down had been bad afterwards. Accumulated fatigue was dulling his reflexes. He had begun to fear that when his chance at Holtz did come he might be too slow for success. He did not hope to be allowed to refresh himself with rest before the time came.

  Holtz and Jules had been at sword’s point ever since the Angel’s first approach to the shore during the night. Holtz had seen only excessive timidity in Jules’s reluctance to risk engine failure in dangerous water, Jules had been sullenly resentful of what he considered a landsman’s refusal to listen to a seaman’s cautionings. He had continued to argue that their only safe course was to stand out to sea until the storm died. The arguments were all on his side, the authority on Holtz’s, and the clash of wills had continued even after the approach of daylight forced Holtz to give in.

  Defeat, even temporary, made the gang leader ugly. There was no reason why the prisoners could not have been released from their cabins while the cruiser was out of sight of land, but he chose to leave them locked in. He was reluctant even to give Blake a relief from the long wheel watch, as Blake learned when Jules started up the pilot-house ladder at seven in the morning. Holtz called him back. Through the open windscreen Blake caught enough of their conversation on the foredeck to know that only the sailor’s dogged insistence on his own unfamiliarity with the demands of the cruiser’s machinery won Blake a brief respite. Jules’s face was dark with resentment when he came to take the wheel.

  ‘Merde alors, how ugly can a man be?’ he growled. ‘Because the wind is against him, everybody is his enemy. Go fill your grease cups, Captain, and stay clear of the little snake. He is in a mind to kill this morning. Fifteen minutes.’

  Blake ignored the warning. Mechanically performing his duties in the engine-room, he racked his dull brain for excuses that would allow him to approach Holtz during the quarter-hour of freedom. His mind was fixed on the bargain he had made with himself; one bullet in exchange for the Walther. But the price would not be insured unless he could come unchallenged within a reasonable distance of Holtz, and it seemed almost like a promise of success when Holtz came to the top of the engine-room ladder to call to him.

  ‘Come up,’ the gang leader said bleakly. ‘I want you in the salon.’

  The promise of success was not fulfilled. On deck, Holtz stayed well behind him, pistol ready, and shepherded him into the salon without once standing within the distance that could be covered in a single jump. The radio was going, and the panel of the bar stood open. An empty cognac bottle rolled back and forth on the deck carpeting with the rock of the cruiser’s hull.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Holtz said.

  He indicated the barograph with a movement of his head. The heavy descending line traced by the machine’s stylus before and during the storm had leveled off and was turning upward.

  ‘The storm is over,’ Blake said. He was thinking, It’s got to be done right. One bullet is all I can afford. It’s go
t to be done just right.

  ‘The radio said it is going to blow harder than ever this afternoon and tonight.’

  ‘Not with a rising barometer.’

  ‘Don’t toss words at me!’ Holtz seemed to shrink and gather in upon himself behind the leveled gun. ‘Why do your instruments say one thing and the weather report another?’

  The ominous coiling to strike warned Blake to think more of defense than attack. Holtz was venomously suspicious. He was drunk again, as Blake realized for the first time. A good ten feet separated them, the distance Bruno had failed to close before he died with four bullets, instead of one, in his body. Three of the brass cartridge cases had twinkled together in mid-air.

  ‘The barograph must have run down,’ Blake said carefully. ‘There’s a barometer in the pilot-house.’

  ‘We’ll take a look at it.’ Holtz jerked his head at the doorway. ‘Go ahead of me.’

  He did not move until Blake himself moved.

  The same watchfulness kept Blake from hoping for an opportunity on the way to the pilot-house. Holtz did not speak again until he had studied the barometer over the chart table. It registered the beginning of a new drop.

  ‘So you’re a sailor!’ he snarled at the startled Jules. ‘You blockhead, you don’t know enough to wind a clockwork before you forecast the weather by it! Tonight will be worse than last night! We haven’t a chance of getting in!’

  ‘The storm is breaking,’ Jules protested. ‘Look, the wind is down, the rain has stopped –’

  ‘– and the weather report says a new storm will blow up before nightfall!’ Holtz’s voice was thick with rage. ‘You stupid slab of Provençal beef! You belong behind a plough, with your feet in dung!’

  Jules flushed an angry red. His hand went toward the bulge in his belt before he remembered what was there, under the jersey. He turned the movement into an awkward gesture of conciliation.

  ‘If it blows up, it will blow out again,’ he said placatingly. ‘We’ve got time.’