by David Dodge
‘I’ll see you –’ Freddy began. He swallowed hard and went dumb, unable to finish. His eyes were agonized. The Walther jabbed its hard promise in his back.
‘Go on!’ Holtz hissed.
Neyrolle was suffering his own kind of agony. The drift of the pilot boat had only served to screen the white coat behind Blake’s body instead of Freddy’s, and to drift any farther astern would deprive Corsi of his domination over the man in the pilot-house. Freddy was still tongue-tied; Corsi was looking anxiously at his chief for instructions; George, desperate for words, could think of nothing further to say; and Blake was silently crying, Let it happen now, if it’s going to happen! Let it come! when Laura di Lucca appeared wraith-like in the doorway of the salon, almost at Holtz’s elbow. She stood there, blinking at the unfamiliarity of daylight, for seconds before she spoke in a dead, emotionless voice that carried clearly to the men in the pilot boat.
‘This man murdered my husband. Please inform –’ Keyed up and waiting for the moment though he was, Blake was not as quick as Holtz. The gang leader had whirled and fired point-blank while Blake was still spinning away from the rail. The impact of the bullet drove Laura di Lucca back through the doorway as Holtz whirled again to meet Blake’s attack, barely too late to bring the gun around before Blake’s hand met his wrist and snapped the arm up and aside. The shot went harmlessly into the air.
‘That ends it,’ Blake said. ‘You’re beaten. Drop the gun.’
‘Jules!’ Holtz screamed. He kicked and struggled in the grip that Blake had on his wrist and body. ‘To me! Jules!’ His answer was a sudden throb of power in the Angel’s hull as her motors roared into life, followed immediately by a crackling burst of rapid fire from the mitraillette that Corsi had whipped from its concealment. The Angel heeled over slowly, gathering speed, driving not away from shore but towards it. Her circling movement took her almost into collision with the pilot boat, so that as they passed it, with Blake and Holtz still locked together in the embrace that held Holtz helpless and harmless, they looked down from a distance of a few feet at George Saunders and the intent up-turned face of Corsi above the ready mitraillette. Neyrolle, holding a drawn pistol, spoke to Blake.
‘Drop the scum overboard, Captain,’ he said calmly. ‘We’ll take care of him. Any more aboard, or does that finish it?’ The faces slid on by. Still gaining speed, the Angel yawed, and yawed again. It told Blake that she was a runaway, her wheel unmanned. With both motors wide open, she was headed for the rocks.
Holtz still fought, strong for his size but not strong enough to free himself. Blake felt no triumph, only weariness and a kind of anger that the gang leader refused to recognize defeat. He shook the wrist he held helpless, trying to snap the gun out of Holtz’s hand. Holtz clung to it tenaciously.
‘You’re beaten,’ Blake said again. The anger swelled and burst in his throat. ‘Everybody tricked you, little man. I did, and Laura di Lucca, and those men in the boat.’ He released the grip with which he had pinioned Holtz’s body, and suspending him by the upheld wrist of the gun hand so that his frantically kicking toes barely touched the deck, took him by the back of the neck and forced his head around toward Freddy, standing weak and shaken at the rail. ‘He tricked you. From the beginning. You took a check that sold you to the police. Think about that where you’re going.’
The Angel yawed again, calling him. Even in victory he could not escape her demands. By wrist and neck, he picked Holtz up bodily, swung him over the rail and let go.
The smaller boat was altering its course towards the man in the water as he ran for the wheel. A string of evenly spaced holes in the pilot-house windows, blood from a bullet wound in the head of the body crumpled on the deck matting, were the end of Jules. He would never face the guillotine he had feared. Blake pushed the body out of the way and took the wheel, seeing for the first time the cutter that bore down from the direction of the harbor, seeing as the Angel came about the other boats standing away from the capes to cut off flight toward the sea. Holtz had been well bottled, at the end. Blake did not realize that the little murderer had yet made his escape until the Angel lay alongside the still body rocking on blood-stained swells, and Freddy was saying foolishly, ‘He spat at me, Sam. He waited until we came alongside so he could spit at me, and then he lifted the gun out of the water and shoved it in his mouth. I can’t get over the way he waited to spit at me.’
The storm blew again, for a time, then subsided. The sea swell smoothed, the sky cleared, a moon rose, and the Mediterranean once more lay silvery and placid in the night below the bluff from which the lights of the casino looked down on the little port. The twin beacons at the harbor mouth threw bright reflections of red wink and green beam on the still water behind the jetty where the Angel was moored.
‘The damage to his ego was too much to take,’ Blake said. ‘He couldn’t stand knowing that his pawn had beaten him on the very first move. Spitting on Freddy was a last gesture of superiority. He couldn’t quite make it, but he tried.’
Neyrolle said, ‘There is a question I have not asked until now. You need not answer it, if you would rather not, and I shall not repeat anything you tell me. What did you say to Laura di Lucca when you unlocked her cabin door?’
Blake looked thoughtfully at the beacon reflections in the water. Neyrolle’s question led to other questions harder to answer, even in his own mind. But he wanted to answer them, if he could.
He said, ‘I told her that a boat was coming, and that Holtz would shoot her if she came up on deck.’
‘You expected it to bring her on deck?’
‘I hoped that it would. A promise of death was the only way I could reach her.’ Blake was heartened that he saw no condemnation in the face of any of his listeners. ‘I didn’t intend that she should die. I had to have a diversion to take the gun out of Freddy’s back, and I hoped that she would put in an appearance while I was expecting it and Holtz wasn’t. I was certain that I’d be faster than he. I was wrong. So she died.’
Valentina said, ‘She welcomed death. She would have been grateful.’
‘I try to persuade myself of that. It takes some of the sting out of the realization that I didn’t have the courage to tackle Holtz head on. I tried to bring myself to it, several times, but in the end I had to use her.’
‘You tackled him when you had a chance,’ Freddy said. ‘I wouldn’t call that cowardly, Sam.’
Blake did not answer. He had answered Neyrolle’s question, if not his own.
The four sat around a candle-lit table that Cesar had set up on the Angel’s afterdeck. The steward and the cook, alone of the crew, remained in Freddy’s service. The Belgian baroness had served her writ, and the yacht would lie at her moorings until the courts decided her ownership. Freddy’s invitation to a last dinner aboard had been extended to Marian and George Saunders as well as to the others, but both had declined with palpably flimsy excuses. Freddy had taken the excuses in good grace. In an earlier day he would have been piqued by a refusal to attend his court, angered that he could not command their presence. A short week had worked great changes in Freddy Farr.
Five days had passed since the Angel came into port with the bodies of Jules and Holtz under a tarpaulin on her foredeck and Laura di Lucca lying dead in the salon. The interval had been a difficult period for the survivors of the cruise, days of endless questioning in a glare of flash-bulbs and publicity. George Saunders had scored a clean twenty-four-hour beat over his competition, but after that Freddy had been fair game for the reporters who had descended on Monaco in hordes for the sensation of the moment. The sensation had held the headlines for three days, slipped to second pages by the fourth day, and given way on the fifth to the Tour de France as news of the moment. Already the curiosity-seekers had stopped coming down to the port to stare and gossip. The Angel was only another white yacht lying at her moorings, distinguished now by stipplings of fresh red lead where a line of bullet-holes had scarred her pilot-house, and a candlelit table on he
r afterdeck where a steward in a white coat served coffee and cognac to her owner’s guests.
‘I’m sorry George couldn’t come,’ Freddy said. ‘I’m saving a piece of news for him.’
He put his bandaged hand over the brandy bell in front of him as Cesar presented the bottle. Neyrolle said, ‘It will make headlines that you have given up cognac?’
‘I haven’t given it up. I just found out that I can take it or leave it alone, and I’m enjoying the sensation of leaving it alone. That wasn’t what I meant by news.’ Freddy grinned at Valentina. ‘Ask her.’
Neyrolle lifted his brandy glass politely to Valentina. ‘Mademoiselle?’
‘Madame.’ She smiled at her proudly grinning husband. In the mellow glow of the candle flames, she was more spectacularly beautiful than ever. ‘Since this afternoon.’
Neyrolle’s congratulations were as sincere as his surprise was genuine. He said, ‘I thought I knew everything important that goes on in the Principality. You keep a secret well.’
‘It didn’t happen in the Principality,’ Freddy said. 'We drove down to Menton. I wanted to give it to George as an exclusive, if I could. He’s kind of become my official biographer. And I can’t forget the risk he took to come out in the pilot boat.’ He added quickly. ‘Of course you and your man took the same risk. I don’t mean that I’m not just as grateful to you. More so, even.’
‘You need not feel indebted to any of us.’ Neyrolle swirled the cognac in his brandy bell, inhaling the bouquet. ‘For Corsi and me, it was part of our work. And George Saunders did not take the risk on your behalf.’
There was silence at the table for a moment. Valentina broke it.
‘Why did he take the risk?’
‘I am not quite certain. Primarily, I think, to be the first to speak with Marian Ellis when she was released from imprisonment. It was she, you will remember, whom he was most anxious to find when we first came aboard - even to the extent of searching Holtz’s body, not a particularly pleasant task, for the key that would open her cabin.’
Blake said, ‘They’d known each other in Paris. You’d found that out yourself. Naturally he would be worried about her.’
‘Perhaps. But my experience with George Saunders leads me to question his exposure of himself to probable gunfire in a small boat simply to be assured of the girl’s safety a few minutes sooner than he might have been otherwise.’
‘Why did he do it, then?’
‘Probably for the same reason that he punched a man who once accosted Mademoiselle Ellis on the street in Paris.’
‘Why was that?’
‘I am not certain,’ Neyrolle answered pleasantly.
Blake felt a growing irritation with the sous-chef. He did not like George Saunders, but Neyrolle’s hints struck him as a detraction behind the reporter’s back. And there was the coupling of Marian’s name to the same hints. Blake had known that she and George were more than casual acquaintances since her release from the Angel’s cabin. From that moment, George had been constantly in her company; guarding her from questioning by other reporters, standing by her side during Neyrolle’s own interrogation, stubbornly arguing against a condemnation of her part in the kidnapping, defending her against any implication of wrongdoing and insisting on his own explanations of her behavior until Neyrolle, who wanted only to know as much of the truth as possible, had dismissed them both. That the sous-chef should resent George’s protectiveness as interference was understandable. But that his resentment should reflect itself in innuendo directed at George and Marian behind their backs was unfair.
Blake said, ‘He probably punched him because he needed punching,’ and stood up. ‘I’d like to be excused now, if you don’t mind. I have a lot to do tonight.’
‘Ah, we’re celebrating,’ Freddy protested. ‘This is my wedding day. Forget the Angel until tomorrow and have another cognac. Cesar!’
‘I’m afraid not. I’ve got an announcement of my own to make. Tomorrow I leave the Angel, Freddy. I’m quitting you.’
The candle flames flickered in a light breath of breeze that passed across the deck. They were burning straight and clear again before Freddy said unbelievingly, ‘No, Sam.’
‘Yes.’
‘But why? Why now? What have I done wrong?’
Valentina’s golden eyes were asking their own question. Blake said, ‘You haven’t done anything wrong. You’ve started doing things right. I began liking you about a week ago, and I won’t go on taking your money. If you don’t understand that, I can’t explain. Take it that the Angel is going to be tied up for a while and I don’t feel like being tied up with her.’
He walked quickly away, to end the uncomfortable moment.
His departure was churlish. He knew it and was ashamed of it. But the conversation at the dinner table had become distasteful to him, and he had already delayed his announcement until the last possible moment. He wanted Freddy to have the certainty of Valentina’s companionship before he withdrew his own. As for the Angel, she no longer meant anything to him but a responsibility he was eager to be rid of. It had taken Holtz to show him what a servant he was to his command, the five days since Holtz’s death to tell him that the service could not continue.
That he had fallen in love with Marian was a truth he had accepted only since their return to Monaco. He had seen her only occasionally, and then always in George Saunders’s company. Jealousy, pure and simple, had brought the hard fact home to him. She was avoiding him, or seemed to be, and their infrequent conversations were awkward and restrained when they were brought together by the circumstance of an interview or a pose to be taken for Press photographers. How much of it was because of George’s presence forever in the background, Blake did not know. He meant to find out, one way or another. He had lived too long without love to yearn vainly for another man’s woman if she could be won away, and if she could not be won he had to know it. A declaration would force the issue, but even a declaration had been impossible until then. George on her side, Freddy and the demands of the Angel on his, had stood between them. Now, at last, he was free to make a move.
He was in the pilot-house gathering up his navigation instruments when a taxi came along the quay, its headlights jerking crazily as it bumped over the irregular paving, and stopped in the shadows where the quay was joined by the jetty. In a moment the headlights went off. The glass had not yet been replaced in the gaping pilot-house windows opened by Corsi’s bullets, and in the quiet of the still night Blake could hear the grind of the taxi’s old motor, the dying wheeze it gave when its driver shut off the ignition. Afterwards there were voices, a man’s and a woman’s; barely audible at first, then rising in what Blake assumed, without particular attention to it, to be an altercation between passengers and driver. His interest came to quick focus when the argument ended with a woman’s sharp ‘No!’, a man’s oath, and the hurried click of running heels on the cobbles of the jetty.
The dim lights on the sea wall showed only two running shadows; a slim one fleeing, a heavier one in pursuit. But he had heard those same clicking heels in flight before, and he did not hesitate in his own charge out of the pilot-house towards the after ladder. The candlelit table had been removed from the deck below. In its place were deck-chairs, and three dark figures in the immobile listening attitudes of people whose conversation has been interrupted by an alarm. Blake was quicker than any of them in getting to the head of the gangplank and the switch of the reflector.
The bright cone of light threw a glare on the figures struggling together on the jetty. George Saunders held her by wrist and waist, and was propelling her back toward the taxi waiting on the quay. She fought him silently, bracing her heels on the cobbles but unable to hold back against his greater weight and strength until Blake said, ‘Let her go.’ George’s face was ugly when he looked up into the glare of the reflector. He said, ‘Stay out of this!’
‘Let her go!’ Blake repeated. The hot, coppery taste of challenge was in his mouth. He went down t
he gangplank into the cone of light, his shadow looming black and large before him. George had released the girl before he reached them.
She rubbed her wrist. Her expression was defiant and fearful at the same time. She said, ‘Is Neyrolle here?’
From the darkness behind the reflector Neyrolle’s voice said, ‘What do you want with me, mademoiselle?’
‘I have something to say.’ She spoke to Blake without looking at him. ‘May I go aboard, Captain? It isn’t a trick, this time.’
‘We’ll both go aboard,’ George said angrily. ‘If you’re going on with this nonsense, I want to be there to hear it.’
‘I am going on with it. You can do what you like.’
‘You nitwit,’ George said. ‘You stubborn, stupid nitwit.’
Blake followed them aboard. On deck, Marian said, ‘Could we go into the salon, please? I’d like to be able to see.’
There was a compulsiveness about her that took them all to the salon, silently and without question. No one sat down. Blake was reminded of the other gathering, when they had stood under the threat of Holtz’s pistol. Marian had been by his side then, not facing him with the half fearful, half defiant look on her face and a red mark on her wrist where George Saunders’s fingers had hurt her.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party,’ she said to Freddy. ‘It would have been under false pretenses, and I’ve stopped pretending to - to - anybody.’
‘For the last time, will you stop this nonsense?’ George said.
‘You needn’t listen. I didn’t ask you to come.’ She spoke to Freddy with a kind of breathless urgency. ‘I’m leaving for Paris in the morning. I don’t expect that you’ll see me again. Before I go, I think you ought to know that I came here, to Monaco, to see if I could meet you and interest you, in - in the way the Belgian baroness interested you. George gave me the idea, in Paris. He had been studying you for a long time, reading about you in the newspapers, talking to people who knew you, and he had a scheme to use a girl to take your money. I was –’