The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  “She is a good, stiff boat,” the girl shouted. “Perhaps she could take the Genoa jib, but it is a very big sail, I think, and I would like to see it first in not so strong a wind. And without the jenny forward we do not need the mizzen for balance aft. I think we have enough sail, yes?”

  I yelled, “Lady, I’m a real chicken-sailor; the less of that canvas stuff I have to worry about, the better I like it. Or is it dacron?”

  She laughed. “I think you are a fraud, my friend. You steer very good. You know your boat very good. I think you are much better seaman than you say.”

  “God, don’t tell my chief! He’ll put me in command of an aircraft carrier next time around.”

  She laughed again, and stepped over to ease the main sheet slightly, and caught the wheel before the boat could swing off course. She looked spectacular standing there with her strong, bare, golden-brown legs braced against the motion of the boat and some wisps of shining hair starting to blow free of the bandana. She was a little unreal, a painting entitled The Norsewoman; but then as I’ve said the whole situation was unreal.

  Mac would keep putting me on these damned boats. The first one I could remember being involved with in the line of duty was a little fifteen-foot outboard I had to learn to launch off a trailer; now I seemed to have worked my way up, somehow, to this great thirty-eight-foot, twelve-ton brute of a motor sailer. You’d think, with my own Viking ancestry, I’d start getting that fine seagoing feeling when I trod the handsome teak decks, and I’ll admit that once in a while I did experience a small atavistic thrill, but mostly it was just a very demanding exercise in caution—as a good old New Mexico boy from west of the Pecos, I know I don’t really know what the hell I’m doing on these eastern waters, or any waters, so I concentrate on not making any disastrous errors and leave the fancy seamanship to others. Like Ziggy Kronquist.

  Presently, we were charging through Plum Gut, the narrow slot between Plum Island and Orient Point. According to the chart, this was the eastern end of Long Island—well, one of the eastern ends. Since Long Island is forked, there are two. The longer one sticking out into the Atlantic farther south is Montauk Point, toward which we were heading.

  We found more wind in Gardiner’s Bay beyond the Gut. Spray started slashing aft. I said to hell with it and retreated to the deckhouse; I’ve spent enough time outdoors that I feel no need to prove how rugged I am by getting wet when I don’t have to. After a little, the motor died to idling speed, and Ziggy came in, slamming the door shut, and paused to wipe her dripping face with the front of her T-shirt, casually revealing, among other intriguing things, that she’d done a lot of sunbathing without a top on. She took the wheel and put the engine into gear again and brought it back up to cruising revs, 1,800 RPM.

  “Windshield wipers?”

  “Right in front of you.”

  There were three of them, one for each section of the divided windshield, and they could drive you crazy watching them, since they operated independently, totally unsynchronized. They had a considerable amount of work to do now to keep the glass clear. It was getting brisk out there; and Lorelei III was heeled over farther than I’d ever had her. With the sails helping the engine, she was also moving faster than I’d ever dared to make her, exploding the short seas that came at her. She felt solid and powerful, and it was an exhilarating ride, but if I’d been doing it I’d have been worrying, as we went roaring past Gardiner’s Island and the wind continued to increase, about how much the eight-year-old sails and rigging could take. My gorgeous shipmate apparently had no such reservations; she seemed to be enjoying every minute of it.

  “Look, nine and a half knots!” Ziggy pointed to the dial. “We should be picking up the Montauk breakwater soon… Ah, there it is. Come, we had better get her ready for harbor. You can roll up the mainsail and I will bring down the staysail…”

  A few minutes later, under power alone, I took us between the breakwaters into Lake Montauk just inside the point, and did a passable job of docking us in one of the marinas—it wasn’t hard, after a couple of months of practice, as long as I kept in mind that, having a big, three-bladed propeller that turned counterclockwise in the European fashion, Lorelei III backed stubbornly to starboard no matter what you did with the rudder. I’d offered Ziggy the job, but she’d said that I should do it. After all, I was the skipper and should be seen acting as such; she was just the dumb square-head crew.

  After we had everything shipshape on deck, I offered to take her to dinner at one of the restaurants in the small town of Montauk, but she said she didn’t think the chicken breasts I’d bought earlier in the week should lie in the refrigerator too long, and she wanted to familiarize herself with the galley anyway. She told me to relax in the deckhouse with a magazine or something; but she popped up after a few minutes.

  “I found a little bottle of vermouth in the galley. Do you wish a vodka martini?”

  I said, “That’s what it’s for. If you’ll join me.”

  “Ah, I thought you would never ask. Sit still. I am very good with martinis.”

  Sitting in the red plush cocktail corner in the pleasant deckhouse, with cheese and crackers on the little teak table before us, we raised our martini glasses—actually fairly ugly plastic tumblers that had come with the boat—and drank to a good day’s run, a promising start to our voyage south. I had the curtains drawn all around. It was too bad to miss the sunset over the marina, but I can’t relax comfortably in a lighted greenhouse when I know there may be hostiles in the growing dark outside. Anyway, the curtained deckhouse, totally private, made for a certain pleasant intimacy. I tasted my martini and thought she’d gone a little heavy on the vermouth, but I’m not very choosy about my booze, and I wouldn’t have mentioned it for the world.

  “What’s the matter with me, Ziggy?” I asked.

  She frowned, uncomprehending. “What do you mean? I have made no complain.”

  “Not you. Those other bastards. I mean, I feel like a wallflower.”

  “Wallflower?”

  “Neglected,” I said. “Nobody’s tried to kill me. Have I got halitosis or body odor or something?” She looked baffled. I grinned and went on. “Look, a guy named Fancher starts bringing this boat up from Florida; halfway here he falls over dead. A gal named Guild just steps aboard for a couple of days and winds up with brains on her face. A guy named Jesperson inhabits the bucket very briefly and is fished out of Long Island Sound after learning the hard way that breathing water isn’t as effective as breathing air. Have I got all that straight?”

  She made a face expressing distaste. “You do not put it very delicately, but yes, I believe it is straight.”

  I said, “Okay; but then a guy named Helm comes aboard and spends two whole months living and working on this jinx boat, awkwardly taking her out for practice runs whenever the repairs allow it, doing his best to look like easy prey, a real stumblebum mariner—it wasn’t hard—but in all that time nobody makes a move on him, nobody. It’s enough to give a man an inferiority complex. What did those other three have that I haven’t got, that nobody wants to murder me?”

  “Maybe you have it backward, Matt,” Ziggy said after a moment’s thought. “Maybe it is what you have that they did not have.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “A gun?”

  4

  She returned from the galley after putting the chicken into the oven. It was an apparatus I’d never used since I’d come aboard, being a frying pan man from way back. All the cooking I know, which isn’t much, I learned over western camp fires. Ziggy sat down beside me and picked up her martini.

  “I was told that you have the reputation of being a truly dangerous man, and a particularly fine marksman,” she said.

  I said, “Any good target shot can beat me any day in the week.”

  “With the targets shooting back? I doubt that very much.” She laughed. “I was warned that you are in a different class, shall we say, from our organization of nice little boys and
girls playing at coastal security.”

  “Oh, is that what you’re playing at?”

  She shook her head ruefully. “I should not have said that; it is a terrible secret. Please forget it.”

  “Coastal security, what’s that? Never heard of it.” I grinned. “I suppose the folks who built me up so big were the ones in your outfit who were trying to talk you into coming on a boat on which three people have already died. They were trying to convince you that, in spite of bodies falling to the deck like autumn leaves, you’d be perfectly safe with Sure-shot Helm?”

  She smiled. “Something like that, yes.”

  “And your theory is that the opposition also got to leeward of me and caught a hellish whiff of brimstone and decided they were better off leaving dangerous old me alone?”

  “Is it not a possibility?”

  I shrugged. “Well, it’s flattering to think that my official reputation is so terror-inspiring that it frightens into trembling immobility people who’ve already committed at least two murders, possibly three. But it doesn’t seem very likely; and after all, Guild and Jesperson weren’t totally unarmed and untrained innocents, were they?”

  She shrugged. “Actually, I believe they did have guns and I know they’d had some training, but they were not very experienced agents. Not like you.”

  “You make me feel like a veteran of the Indian wars. If you’re a real good girl, Grandpa’ll show you his scalp collection some time,” I said. I frowned. “There’s another possibility. I’ve been told that Truman Fancher was a real gung ho sailor. What about your friends?”

  Ziggy said, “They were much involved with sailing in their free time, both racing and cruising. That is why they were chosen to investigate this boat. Of course I was selected for the same reason.”

  I said, “Your outfit really has a pool of nautical talent available, doesn’t it? It isn’t every undercover agency— security agency?—that can produce experienced seamen, and particularly seawomen, on demand, time and again.”

  “But that is only natural, since we are concerned with the shoreline—” She stopped, and laughed. “You are pumping me. Is that the right word, pumping?”

  “Pumping is right,” I said. “But it’s a very reluctant well I’m pumping. Back to the reason nobody wants to kill me. You suggested it’s because I’m dangerous; but could it be just because I’m stupid?”

  “Stupid? In what way?”

  “In a nautical way. Three salty sailors, if we include Fancher, have died on this vessel. But a landlubber from the Great American Desert has survived since August unmolested. Maybe there’s something incriminating on board that I just don’t see because I don’t really know how things are supposed to be on this kind of boat, or any kind of boat… Say Truman Fancher suddenly spotted something new and unfamiliar and disturbing on the yacht he’d gone to a lot of trouble to import from Europe a good many years ago, so somebody fixed up a heart attack for him. Say Henrietta Guild was only on board a day before she heard a sour note in the rigging, so to speak; so she had to die. Say they got rid of Martin Jesperson when he also noticed something offbeat… But Matthew Helm lived on board week after week happily overlooking a peculiarity of his floating home that a real sailor couldn’t help but spot, so the people who were watching let the poor dumbo survive untouched. You haven’t noticed anything odd about the good ship Lorelei III, have you?”

  Ziggy shook her head. “So far she seems like a perfectly normal boat, for a motor sailer. She is heavy, of course, and undercanvased, but that is standard for the type. They are not expected to sail in light winds; that is what the eighty-horsepower motor is for. A true sailboat this size would only carry half that power.” She glanced at me. “And you have found nothing peculiar? No clues to say why some person feels this boat must be sunk? Nothing suggestive in the ship’s log?”

  I said, “Fancher’s logbook wasn’t on board when I got the boat, not surprising considering the number of people who’d had her since he died,” I said. “Of course she was a considerable mess when I took her over; everything wet below and lockers busted open and compartment hatches strewn about, along with cushions and carpets and stray gear—I suppose the Coast Guard had to do some hasty exploring, with the cabin knee deep in water, before they found where it was coming from. I had my work cut out for me, getting everything dried out and repaired and put back where it belonged.”

  “You seem to have done a very marvelous job,” Ziggy said, looking around the comfortable deckhouse. “Well, I think there is a little more martini in the pitcher; then I must see about those chickens…”

  She was a better cook than bartender; and after dinner we went ashore to let her make a call from the pay phone in the marina parking lot. She’d started off alone, but I’d told her that could not be permitted; if I was to be responsible for her I could hardly let her wander around in the dark all by herself. She saw my point, but waited until I’d moved out of hearing before she punched in her number. As we walked back out the dock toward the boat after she’d finished talking, she laughed softly.

  “I told them you are a big phony,” she said. “I told them you could sail the boat perfectly well alone; you were only acting helpless so they would send you somebody female you hoped would share that big bunk with you.”

  She wasn’t looking at me when she said it, and I didn’t look at her. “Aw, shucks,” I said. “And here I thought I was being so clever.”

  She said, “I will wash the dishes. “You will dry, yes?”

  It was kind of cozy, cleaning up the galley, reminding me of after-dinner sessions with my mother many years ago; although I was very much aware that the lady with her hands in tonight’s dishwater was not my mother. Afterward, we had coffee in the deckhouse and listened to the weather report on the VHF radio.

  Ziggy said the predicted winds, ten to twenty knots out of the southwest, would make things a little rough on the next leg of our voyage, an overnight crossing to Cape May, New Jersey, since we’d be in the open ocean bashing right into it for almost two hundred miles. However, she’d satisfied herself today that the boat was seaworthy, and the motor sounded fine, and we were under instructions to keep moving south if we possibly could. We’d check the weather in the morning, but if the reports were no worse we’d give it a try.

  She said she was a bit tired and we probably wouldn’t get much sleep on the long run tomorrow; if I didn’t mind she’d turn in now.

  “Good night, Matt. It was a good day, ja?”

  “Very good, Ziggy. Sleep well.”

  I watched her go forward, with her long shining hair once more loose down her back, the glorious blond shipmate of every yachtsman’s dreams even if she did put too much vermouth in the martinis. I took my coffee on deck and wandered about checking the dock lines, although I was sure that no line secured by Ziggy Kronquist would have the temerity to come unsecured. It was a misty night; the marina lights looked big and fluffy, like dandelions gone to seed.

  There was no light from the forward hatch. I wondered if she slept raw, or in a nightie, or pajamas; she kind of looked like a pajama girl to me. I felt a little exposed standing on deck, although the masts and rigging of the neighboring sailboats, and the superstructures of the cruisers and sportfishermen, would have made it hard for anybody to get a clear shot at me. Even a good night sight would only show them the obvious obstructions; they’d never know that there wasn’t an unseen rigging wire in the line of fire to deflect the bullet. Anyway, if they’d wanted to go the sniper route they’d already had plenty of better chances. Stepping back down into the deckhouse, I stumbled over one of Ziggy’s shoes. I’d been right about her shedding them at the first opportunity. The inimitable Dr. Matthias Helmstein, noted expert on female behavior.

  I went to bed in my usual wary fashion; on this voyage I had to worry, not only about assassination, but about concussion. I mean, as I’d indicated to Ziggy Kronquist, the boat looked husky enough outside, but inside she was not designed for gents s
ix-four. The master stateroom, in particular, was low-bridge territory. You could scalp yourself, and I had, going down the steps aft, entering or leaving the little head to starboard, and even getting into the big double bunk—shelves lined the sides and stern of the boat above it, and if you flopped back onto the pillow incautiously you could damn near knock yourself out on the nice teak woodwork overhead. I’d learned to insert myself cautiously, like a sardine entering a can.

  Then I lay awake, listening to the small splashing sounds of the waves against the hull. Moved by the night breeze, Lorelei III strained gently against her lines. Two couples, not quite sober, stopped to talk some distance down the dock. They said good night noisily, and one couple came past our slip.

  “Darling, we seem to know the dullest people on earth,” the woman said quite clearly. They boarded a boat farther out the dock, and the marina was silent again.

  Time passed very slowly, but I was in no danger of falling asleep in spite of the long day of fresh air and sunshine. Suddenly she was there, at the head of the two steps leading down into my cabin from the deckhouse. The marina lights penetrated the drawn curtains well enough that I could see the shape of her if not the details. I could certainly see that Dr. Helmstein had got it all wrong. She wasn’t a pajama girl. She wasn’t a nightie girl, either.

  “No,” she said when I moved. “Please, no light.”

  “It’s your party.”

  My voice wasn’t as steady as I would have liked it to be. I threw back the covers and sat up, mindful of the overhead shelf, watching the dim, nude, spectacular figure come down the brief steps and make its way to the starboard side of the bunk, the only one available since the other side was built against the boat’s hull, which made it a hell of a bed to make up every morning. There wasn’t much floor space between the bed and the dresser to starboard, and it slanted up aft to conform with the shape of the boat’s hull, reducing the already limited headroom; Ziggy had to duck to reach me.