The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  She licked her lips. “Matt, I—”

  I went on. “You lost your .22 at Schaefer’s Canal House. Before sending you away so she could take your place, in Annapolis, Mrs. Bell confiscated the .38 I’d lent you as a substitute. I’m just mean enough to suspect young ladies who aren’t supposed to have any firearms but button their jackets up tightly on a warm evening nevertheless: what could they possibly be hiding? And I don’t trust girls who’ve only hurt a foot, and have been getting around on it quite gracefully, but suddenly behave as if the whole leg were stiff when they swing it over a boat’s rail: what long object could they possibly have tucked into their pants to make them so awkward?” I spun the wheel to negotiate a turn in the channel. Without looking at her, I said, “You slipped it under the settee cushion as you came aboard yesterday. Get it and lay it on the chart table, please.”

  She said with sudden anger, “Have you been playing with me ever since I came aboard, all the time knowing that I…? Oh, that’s dirty, Matt.”

  I said, “Look who’s talking about dirty. And why should I antagonize a good pilot? Get the gun, please.”

  She turned away, and I heard her at the corner settee. A moment later the familiar old Colt Woodsman, with the sound suppressor we’re no longer allowed to call a silencer, was lying in front of me. It was, of course, conclusive evidence against her, it had last been seen in Roland Caselius’s hand. There was no reasonable way she could have got it back innocently.

  Her brief anger had evaporated. “I… I’m sorry, Matt,” she whispered.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  She licked her lips. “I… I’m just a complete, utter coward, after all, just like Mrs. Bell always said! I simply couldn’t go through all that… all that pain and humiliation again! I couldn’t stand the thought of having any more ugly things done to me. Living inside the freak they’ve already made of me is more than I can bear. I think… I think something broke inside me when they… when they ruined me like this, Matt.”

  “How did they catch you?” I asked. “They didn’t. Just because I… just because I’m yellow doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I wouldn’t have let them catch me. It was that red-haired creep.”

  “What red-haired creep?” I frowned. “You mean Barstow? He trapped you for them?”

  She nodded. “That’s right. Bill Barstow. He came up to me on the street right there in Beaufort while I was watching the Arab goons who were watching you. He said he wanted to show me something so I could tell you about it; he didn’t want to be seen contacting you directly. Well, he waved an ID at me, and of course I knew who he was, anyway; everybody in the organization knows Curly Billy, particularly the girls. I had no reason to suspect… Anyway, I went with him. He took me out to Gulf Streamer. She was anchored way up the harbor in Beaufort where she couldn’t be seen from the city dock where you were; but he had that red rubber boat with an outboard motor they’d carried on the foredeck. We climbed aboard the sportfisherman, and he opened the pilothouse door for me, and there they were, lying on the cabin sole all tied up; your little girlfriend and Mrs. T. Bell. I tried to duck out of there, but he was right behind me; he just laughed and got me in some kind of a crazy grip, he’s strong as a horse. He squeezed on my neck in a funny way, and I blacked out. When I woke up, I was tied up, too, laid out on one of the settees in Gulf Streamer’s deckhouse, and the Arabian Nights lady was there—Mrs. Fancher; she has a kind of full-blown Scheherazade look, don’t you think?—with a youngish man, kind of medium-sized but very fit, you know the kind, just bursting and bouncing with muscles and fitness, and handsome in a tough, mean, crew-cut, Nazi way. Mrs. F called him Rollie, dear.”

  “Roland Caselius,” I said. “He’s the guy who sneaked up behind you and hit you on the head and took your gun after you shot Roger Hassim… So our Dorothy has found somebody to take Hassim’s place in her affections.”

  “And her bed,” Ziggy said. “I mean, you can tell. She’s got him hooked; and I’d say, from the way she looks at him and touches him, that she’s found him very satisfactory, too, although she’s enough older that she’s not totally helpless with rapture, if you know what I mean.”

  I frowned. “What about Barstow? Did you gather that he was a recent recruit? Or was he a sleeper of long standing, planted in our government by the Russians years ago, say, and taken over by Caselius when the Evil Empire collapsed?”

  “Well, I got the impression that Caselius had something heavy on him, maybe that, but there was also a question of lots of lovely Arab oil money, not to mention the girl.”

  “What girl? Lori Fancher? “

  Ziggy laughed. “Who else? It isn’t like he’d be leching after our tough old Mrs. Bell, is it? It seems Miss Fancher had hurt his crummy little feelings; so he’d made her part of the price, a bonus on top of several hundred grand in a numbered bank account on one of those islands that still keep financial secrets… I’ll get some Judas money, too, if I follow orders, gobs of beautiful money to hear them tell it, maybe even enough to pay some high-priced specialists to make me human again with fingers and toes that all work and a face that doesn’t frighten… Oh, God, I just hate sniveling cowards who do nothing but gripe, gripe, gripe about their miserable existence!”

  Her second encounter with her torturers seemed to have thrown her into a real tailspin. After a moment, she gave a choked little sob and, leaving the wheel untended, stumbled down the companionway, bumping against the knife rack in passing. She was crying hopelessly as she made her way forward. I suppose she needed sympathy and reassurance, but for the moment I was too busy taking control to do anything about it.

  There was no sound from below, and I found myself remembering the noise of Ziggy bumping against the knife rack, that in retrospect hadn’t sounded quite like a simple bump. I leaned over to look down into the galley, and saw a gap in the rank of knives. The missing item was the big Sabatier that the first Ziggy Kronquist, the phony, had planned to stick into me, and had wound up sticking into herself. I’d been tempted to get rid of it on that occasion, and then I’d told myself firmly that I was not a sensitive fellow and I wasn’t going to discard a fine, sharp blade because it had once had a kind of blood on it for which it had not been designed. The stuff washes off, dammit.

  Now I said irritably, “Oh, sweet Jesus Christ!”

  I looked around. The Waterway was reasonably wide at this point. There was no traffic ahead or astern. I threw the engine into neutral and set the autopilot so the boat would stay in the middle of the channel as long as her momentum kept her moving. After that the wind or current might drift her into trouble, but she wouldn’t hit it very hard. I went down the steps quickly and made my way forward.

  I found the damn girl in the head compartment up there—toilet to you. It was a tiny cubicle just big enough to hold a throne and a sink, and she was sitting on the cover of the former with her left arm held over the latter. The big butcher knife was in her right hand. In order to expose the artery, she’d pulled away some of the tape that was wrapped around her left wrist to hold the finger splints in place.

  There was some blood in the sink, but although she’d sliced herself twice, neither cut was very long or more than skin deep. Technically, I believe they’re known as hesitation marks. It generally takes a suicide at least a couple of tentative tries before he, or she, manages to make the big, reckless incision that really opens up the arm or the throat and lets the life out. Face averted, the girl didn’t look at me as I took the knife from her.

  “Come on, Ziggy,” I said.

  “Useless!” she breathed. “The no-good bitch hasn’t even got the courage to kill herself! Gutless Ziggy, Secret Agent Zero, the nothing girl!”

  I said, “Come on before the damn boat drifts off into the swamp.”

  After a moment she drew a long breath. “Oh, all right. I’ll be with you as soon as I put something on it so I don’t drip blood everywhere, ugh.”

  “Sure.”

  I left the knife in the ga
lley sink—I didn’t think she’d try using it again—and scrambled into the deckhouse to find that Lorelei III was well out of the channel but still afloat with a few inches to spare. I engaged the gears and headed us cautiously toward the gaudy green rectangle of the nearest mark; we churned up some mud but made it. I told myself that one day I was going to sail out on the ocean where the bottom was a couple of miles down and all I had to worry about was storms and whales; this skinny-water navigation was too nerve-racking for a timid landlubber like me.

  “How about a nice vodka martini on the rocks, skipper?”

  It was my masked navigator, emerging from the main cabin with a clean white bandage on her wrist and a well-iced glass in her hand. I glance at my watch and saw that it really was about time for my prelunch libation.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Where are we?” Ziggy asked, coming to stand beside me. I showed her our position on the chart. After a moment, she laughed. “Do you know what those people expected me to do, Matt? They wanted me to… to get the drop on you and take over the boat.” She giggled. She seemed to have come to terms with whatever had been bothering her, and sounded almost happy. “Can you imagine it, Matt? I told them they were crazy, hadn’t they ever read your dossier? I told them I had about as much chance of making an experienced professional like you do what they said—novice me and my little twenty-two!—as I had of flapping my arms and flying; you’d just take the silly gun away from me and spank me like a baby. Or… or shoot me dead.”

  “What were you supposed to do after you took over the boat?” I asked.

  “I was supposed to make you turn up one of the side channels ahead, at West River Inlet. The river leads back to one of the anchorages in the marsh that’s recommended by the guide. I was supposed to make you drop the hook there; then they’d come aboard and take command. Of course, if you resisted, I… I was supposed to shoot you dead and run the boat in there myself, but I got the impression that Mr. Caselius didn’t really want me to.”

  I finished my martini and set the glass on the chart table. I said, “No, he wouldn’t. There’s a little personal matter between us; he wouldn’t want you to deprive him of the fun of dealing with me himself.”

  It was, of course, strictly a phony scenario; even Ziggy had found it laughable. Even if she hadn’t told them, Dorothy Fancher and Caselius would have known, when they gave her back her gun, that there wasn’t a chance in the world that she could carry out their instructions. And if they knew my capabilities, I had a pretty good idea of theirs. In particular I knew that Roland Caselius was a belt-and-suspenders man. There had been that shotgun ambush backed up by a hidden dynamite bomb. So what was the backup he’d arranged for the .22 Woodsman that, in Ziggy’s hands, wasn’t very likely to do the job it had been sent to do here…?

  Steering, I blinked as the red channel marker that was gliding by to starboard seemed to go unsharp for a moment. I saw Ziggy watching me oddly, and suddenly I knew exactly what kind of suspenders young Mr. Caselius had picked to help his belt keep his pants up, figuratively speaking. I had a moment of regret. She’d had a rough time, and she was a nice enough girl when she wasn’t feeling sorry for herself. However, she’d know the rules by which we operated; she’d know they gave me no choice. Perhaps, unable to do the job herself, she was deliberately inviting me to do it for her.

  I took the silenced .22 Woodsman off the chart table and fired four times as the mists closed in.

  24

  Coming awake, I first checked my surroundings as well as I could without opening my eyes. There seemed to be a body beside me, which didn’t surprise me greatly. Hell, one had been there when I went to sleep, why shouldn’t it be there when I awoke? Then the body beside me stirred and poked me with a sharp elbow.

  “Look, it’s a big bed; you don’t have to take up all of it!”

  It was a female whisper, but it was not, of course, Ziggy Kronquist’s whisper. I opened my eyes and found myself lying beside Mrs. Teresa Bell on the double bunk in Lorelei Ill’s aft stateroom. The door to the deckhouse was closed, as I seldom kept it, since it made the cabin seem very small and reminded me of the somewhat claustrophobic fact that the door was the only exit.

  Up forward, each compartment had an overhead hatch through which you could haul yourself out on deck in an emergency. There was no such hatch aft; and while portholes across the stern and along both sides of the stateroom provided good ventilation, they were too small to accommodate anything but a monkey. It wasn’t something I spent long, wakeful nights brooding about, but I’ll admit that I’d mounted a moderately large fire extinguisher near the foot of my bunk to help me fight my way out of there in case fire in the engine room, just forward, should threaten to block the doorway.

  The motor wasn’t running. Lorelei III seemed to be motionless, either aground or anchored in calm water. The sunlight at the curtained cabin ports was quite low. I’d drunk my doctored martini at just about noon; apparently I’d been out for several hours. As I watched, the angle of the sunlight on the curtainfolds changed very gradually. Okay. We weren’t aground, we were swinging lazily to an anchor.

  I determined that my ankles were lashed together with the thin white Dacron cord I’d bought a generous supply of when I was replacing the boat’s original, well-worn flag halyards; and my wrists were tied behind me, presumably with the same tough stuff. I turned my head and saw that the woman beside me was similarly bound. I squirmed myself a little distance away from her.

  “Thank you,” she breathed. “I’ve been trying to push you off ever since they threw you in here practically on top of me, but you just keep rolling right back against me, like a newborn seeking its mama’s breast.”

  That required no comment. I asked, “What’s the situation?”

  “We’re anchored just off the waterway. That is to say, Gulf Streamer is anchored and we’re tied up—rafted, if you want the nautical term—alongside. On the other side of Gulf Streamer there’s another powerboat rafted. About thirty-five feet; one of the standard plastic power cruisers somebody stamps out with a cookie cutter. I just caught a glimpse of it when they dragged me across from Gulf Streamer and dumped me in here.”

  I asked, “Did you see anybody on the strange cruiser?”

  Teresa laughed shortly. “There were men all over her; she seemed to have a crew like a Barbary pirate; and as a matter of fact most of them probably have relatives in that general part of the world, by the looks of them.”

  “Some of Dorothy Fancher’s playmates.”

  “It was a couple of them who hauled me over to this boat and kind of dumped me down the deckhouse steps. I landed on you and Kronquist, lying there. I thought you were both dead, but after they’d picked me up again and tossed me into this stateroom I heard somebody say that you were only unconscious due to knockout drops the girl had fed you, but you’d managed to shoot her before you passed out.”

  I examined it and found that I could live with it. Well, I’d had practice. I was helped—although I shouldn’t have needed help—by the fact that there had been no hatred in the dying girl’s eyes; I’d done for her what she’d been incapable of doing for herself.

  “You sound disapproving,” I said.

  I felt rather than saw her head shake. “Not of the shooting; quite the contrary, Helm. I’ve always wondered if your chief’s gang of secret assassins—sorry, I understand you like to call yourselves counterassassins—was as tough as everybody claimed. I’m happy to see that you live up to your advance billing and obey your own ruthless rules.”

  “Then why the disapproval?” I asked.

  “Well, you don’t seem to temper your ruthlessness with a great deal of intelligence, allowing a girl to slip you a drugged drink… Shhh, here they come.”

  I’d felt the boat rock slightly as somebody—more than one somebody—stepped aboard. The cabin door opened, and Mrs. Dorothy Fancher entered. Her long black hair made a neat turban around her head, and she’d found some new clothes to r
eplace the ones in which she’d gone swimming in the C. and D. Canal. Today she was wearing big brown trousers, narrow at the waist and ankles and voluminous elsewhere, of the kind of thin cotton stuff that comes pre-wrinkled. Her brown shirt, constructed from the same crinkly material, hung loose over the pants and had long flowing sleeves. How a woman could look voluptuous in that sloppy-floppy getup was a mystery, but she managed. She was followed by Roland Caselius.

  I’d seen him once before, of course, just out of pistol range at Schaefer’s Canal House at night; but this was the first time I’d got to study him up close in good light. As Ziggy had said, although not one of the overmuscled bodybuilders, he was clearly a fitness nut, nicely tanned, with clear blue eyes and cropped blond hair and a springy, bouncy way of moving. Okay, I told myself, so you don’t mix with him even though you’ve got some advantage in weight and reach. You blow his brains out with a gun or gut him with a knife. Fairness is for Boy Scouts.

  He was wearing a knitted blue sport shirt and stiff new jeans that didn’t look right on him. I remembered that he came from Germany. It’s funny about Europeans, they generally have problems with Mr. Levi Strauss’s sartorial invention. They yearn for blue jeans, they’ll rob and kill for them, but when they acquire their precious denim and put it on they seldom achieve the casual-cowboy look they dream of; they almost always manage to look as if they would really be happier in tailored gray flannel with a pinstripe.

  There wasn’t much room at the foot of the bed, but I noticed that the man and the woman managed to stand even a little closer—bodies touching—than the circumstances required: two large predators in love. Roger Hassim would be spinning in his grave.