She cut squares from the roll of netting that had been in the trunk and with some thin wire gathered them into makeshift baskets. A small piece of the meat from the Norberts’ kitchen served as bait. They laid the traps together, anchoring them with small stones. As they worked, their heads were close, almost touching. She spoke softly. “They’re watching, I know. But they are stupid—we could be setting mines and they wouldn’t know. Some day we will.”
She looked up and her eyes held his for a moment, the expression in them intent and serious. Then in the next instant her head tossed and she was running into the water.
The sun was low in the sky, a fiery orange ball that lit the surface of the transparent pale-green sea with strands of orange and gold. Between the breaking waves the water flowed like the soft folds of an iridescent sari. Ras raced after her and dove into the water, feeling the salt of it sting his eyes, blurring the memory that had begun of a girl he had once loved, a girl who had worn a sari of green threaded with bronze and gold on the last day of her life.
He swam alongside her. “Can you swim to those rocks out there? At the last one there is a deep pool and a cavern. If the light is right it is a wonderful sight.”
Drops of water clinging to her eyelashes sparkled and flew away when she nodded and began an easy stroke beside him.
It was a long time since he’d made the dive, and he wanted to be certain the passage was still clear, certain no rock had dislodged itself. He had warned her to let him lead the way. Her hand was in his as they swam underwater toward an archway of rock leading under a ledge in the rock ceiling.
It was the purple coral he wanted her to see, the sea anemones and the swaying ferns whose undulations were said to have teased love-starved sailors into thinking they were mermaids. It was a perfect time; the sun and tide were just right. There was a small space where they could rise to the surface and rest before they dove again.
“I’ve never seen purple coral before,” she said.
“It is purple only in the water. It turns brown when it is in the air.”
He was ready to dive again, anxious to show her more.
“Wait, Ras. The sun will set soon. This is a good place to talk. No one can hear us, no one can see. There are other things you must know—about Yukano and the money that is yours in Switzerland—and the code. It’s important that you know the code right away. Should anything happen to me, then you could still get in touch with Benji.”
“Nothing will happen to you.”
She grinned. “I could drown.”
He shook his head. “You swim too well.” He smiled to himself, measuring the differences between them. She thought of setting mines in the sea and he saw saris in the sea. He wanted to show her the mysteries of an underwater grotto he had explored as a child and she wanted to plan a revolution. “This is not the place. The opening in the rocks above us is like a horn, and our words would be carried across the island.”
She looked at him, her eyes doubtful, but he knew she could not take the chance. She needed him. Benji needed him. He would be their tool, as Masaka had been the tool of the Cubans. Was there a difference? Would the people of Zemu Island feel any more loyalty to the man whom counterrevolutionaries would put in the Sultan’s palace than they did to Masaka? How many people would die?—Africans this time.
Despite his questions, he knew he would do what Benji asked. Not because he wanted revenge, or because success of the counterrevolution would make him free, but because it gave him hope. And without hope, no man can live and stay whole.
He took her hand, wishing he could explain what her coming to Zemu Island meant to him. But even if he were able to say it, he was afraid she would think him sentimental and not ready for the task that lay ahead of him.
“We have time for one more dive, and then we must go while there is still light.”
They swam toward the shore in the sun’s last golden path. In minutes night would fall. They left the water and felt the evening air was cool. She began to run, her wet hair streaming, calling to him, laughing, “Catch me if you can!”
A breeze stirred and furled the water’s waves. Dark leaves fluttered and shadows moved at the forest’s edge. Bearded men who looked like trees advanced across the sand. As if in a nightmare, he stood immobile.
He heard shots, her one sharp cry, but he looked away, so as not to see her body lying crumpled on the sand.
The Book That Squealed
Cornell Woolrich
The outside world never intruded into the sanctum where Prudence Roberts worked. Nothing violent or exciting ever happened there, or was ever likely to. Voices were never raised above a whisper, or at the most a discreet murmur. The most untoward thing that could possibly occur would be that some gentleman browser became so engrossed he forgot to remove his hat and had to be tactfully reminded. Once, it is true, a car backfired violently somewhere outside in the street and the whole staff gave a nervous start, including Prudence, who dropped her date stamp all the way out in the aisle in front of her desk; but that had never happened again after that one time.
Things that the papers printed, holdups, gang warfare, kidnappings, murders, remained just things that the papers printed. They never came past these portals behind which she worked.
Just books came in and went out again. Harmless, silent books.
Until, one bright June day—
The Book showed up around noon, shortly before Prudence Roberts was due to go off duty for lunch. She was on the Returned Books desk. She turned up her nose with unqualified inner disapproval at first sight of the volume. Her taste was severely classical; she had nothing against light reading in itself, but to her, light reading meant Dumas, Scott, Dickens. She could tell this thing before her was trash by the title alone, and the author’s pen name: Manuela Gets Her Man, by Orchid Ollivant.
Furthermore, it had a lurid orange dust cover that showed just what kind of claptrap might be expected within. She was surprised a city library had added such worthless tripe to its stock; it belonged more in a candy-store lending library than here. She supposed there had been a great many requests for it among a certain class of readers; that was why. Date stamp poised in hand she glanced up, expecting to see one of these modern young hussies, all paint and boldness, or else a faded, middle-aged blonde of the type that lounged around all day in a wrapper, reading such stuff and eating marshmallows. To her surprise the woman before her was drab, looked hard-working and anything but frivolous. She didn’t seem to go with the book at all.
Prudence Roberts didn’t say anything, looked down again, took the book’s reference card out of the filing drawer just below her desk, compared them.
“You’re two days overdue with this,” she said; “it’s a one-week book. That’ll be four cents.”
The woman fumbled timidly in an old-fashioned handbag, placed a nickel on the desk.
“My daughter’s been reading it to me at nights,” she explained, “but she goes to night school and some nights she couldn’t; that’s what delayed me. Oh, it was grand.” She sighed. “It brings back all your dreams of romance.”
“Humph,” said Prudence Roberts, still disapproving as much as ever. She returned a penny change to the borrower, stamped both cards. That should have ended the trivial little transaction.
But the woman had lingered there by the desk, as though trying to summon up courage to ask something. “Please,” she faltered timidly when Prudence had glanced up a second time, “I was wondering, could you tell me what happens on page forty-two? You know, that time when the rich man lures her on his yasht?”
“Yacht,” Prudence corrected her firmly. “Didn’t you read the book yourself?”
“Yes, my daughter read it to me, but pages forty-one and forty-two are missing, and we were wondering, we’d give anything to know, if Ronald got there in time to save her from that awful—”
Prudence had pricked up her official ears at that. “Just a minute,” she interrupted, and retrieved the book
from where she had just discarded it. She thumbed through it rapidly. At first glance it seemed in perfect condition; it was hard to tell anything was the matter with it. If the borrower hadn’t given her the exact page number—but pages 41 and 42 were missing, as she had said. A telltale scalloping of torn paper ran down the seam between pages 40 and 43. The leaf had been plucked out bodily, torn out like a sheet in a notebook, not just become loosened and fallen out. Moreover, the condition of the book’s spine showed that this could not have happened from wear and tear; it was still too new and firm. It was a case of out-and-out vandalism. Inexcusable destruction of the city’s property.
“This book’s been damaged,” said Prudence ominously. “It’s only been in use six weeks, it’s still a new book, and this page was deliberately ripped out along its entire length. I’ll have to ask you for your reader’s card back. Wait here, please.”
She took the book over to Miss Everett, the head librarian, and showed it to her. The latter was Prudence twenty years from now, if nothing happened in between to snap her out of it. She sailed back toward the culprit, steel-rimmed spectacles glittering balefully.
The woman was standing there cringing, her face as white as though she expected to be executed on the spot. She had the humble person’s typical fear of anyone in authority. “Please, lady, I didn’t do it,” she whined.
“You should have reported it before taking it out,” said the inexorable Miss Everett. “I’m sorry, but as the last borrower, we’ll have to hold you responsible. Do you realize you could go to jail for this?”
The woman quailed. “It was that way when I took it home,” she pleaded; “I didn’t do it.”
Prudence relented a little. “She did call my attention to it herself, Miss Everett,” she remarked. “I wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise.”
“You know the rules as well as I do, Miss Roberts,” said her flinty superior. She turned to the terrified drudge. “You will lose your card and all library privileges until you have paid the fine assessed against you for damaging this book.” She turned and went careening off again.
The poor woman still hovered there, pathetically anxious. “Please don’t make me do without my reading,” she pleaded. “That’s the only pleasure I got. I work hard all day. How much is it? Maybe I can pay a little something each week.”
“Are you sure you didn’t do it?” Prudence asked her searchingly. The lack of esteem in which she held this book was now beginning to incline her in the woman’s favor. Of course, it was the principle of the thing, it didn’t matter how trashy the book in question was. On the other hand, how could the woman have been expected to notice that a page was gone, in time to report it, before she had begun to read it?
“I swear I didn’t,” the woman protested. “I love books, I wouldn’t want to hurt one of them.”
“Tell you what I’ll do,” said Prudence, lowering her voice and looking around to make sure she wasn’t overheard. “I’ll pay the fine for you out of my own pocket, so you can go ahead using the library meanwhile. I think it’s likely this was done by one of the former borrowers ahead of you. If such proves not to be the case, however, then you’ll simply have to repay me a little at a time.”
The poor woman actually tried to take hold of her hand to kiss it. Prudence hastily withdrew it, marked the fine paid, and returned the card to her.
“And I suggest you try to read something a little more worthwhile in future,” she couldn’t help adding.
She didn’t discover the additional damage until she had gone upstairs with the book, when she was relieved for lunch. It was no use sending it back to be rebound or repaired; with one entire page gone like that, there was nothing could be done with it; the book was worthless. Well, it had been that to begin with, she thought tartly.
She happened to flutter the leaves scornfully and light filtered through one of the pages, in dashes of varying length, like a sort of Morse code. She looked more closely, and it was the forty-third page, the one immediately after the missing leaf. It bore innumerable horizontal slashes scattered all over it from top to bottom, as though some moron had underlined the words on it, but with some sharp-edged instrument rather than the point of a pencil. They were so fine they were almost invisible when the leaf was lying flat against the others, white on white; it was only when it was up against the light that they stood revealed. The leaf was almost threadbare with them. The one after it had some too, but not nearly so distinct; they hadn’t pierced the thickness of the paper, were just scratches on it.
She had heard of books being defaced with pencil, with ink, with crayon, something visible at least—but with an improvised stylus that just left slits? On the other hand, what was there in this junky novel important enough to be emphasized—if that was why it had been done?
She began to read the page, to try to get some connected meaning out of the words that had been underscored. It was just a lot of senseless drivel about the heroine who was being entertained on the villain’s yacht. It couldn’t have been done for emphasis, then, of that Prudence was positive.
But she had the type of mind that, once something aroused its curiosity, couldn’t rest again until the matter had been solved. If she couldn’t remember a certain name, for instance, the agonizing feeling of having it on the tip of her tongue but being unable to bring it out would keep her from getting any sleep until the name had come back to her.
This now took hold of her in the same way. Failing to get anything out of the entire text, she began to see if she could get something out of the gashed words in themselves. Maybe that was where the explanation lay. She took a pencil and paper and began to transcribe them one by one, in the same order in which they came in the book. She got:
hardly anyone going invited merrily
Before she could go any farther than that, the lunch period was over; it was time to report down at her desk again.
She decided she was going to take the book home with her that night and keep working on it until she got something out of it. This was simply a matter of self-defense; she wouldn’t be getting any sleep until she did. She put it away in her locker, returned downstairs to duty, and put the money with which she was paying Mrs. Trasker’s fine into the till. That was the woman’s name, Mrs. Trasker.
The afternoon passed as uneventfully as a hundred others had before it, but her mind kept returning to the enigma at intervals. “There’s a reason for everything in this world,” she insisted to herself, “and I want to know the reason for this: why were certain words in this utterly unmemorable novel underscored by slashes as though they were Holy Writ or something? And I’m going to find out if it takes me all the rest of this summer!”
She smuggled the book out with her when she left for home, trying to keep it hidden so the other members of the staff wouldn’t notice. Not that she would have been refused permission if she had asked for it, but she would have had to give her reasons for wanting to take it, and she was afraid they would all laugh at her or think she was becoming touched in the head if she told them. After all, she excused herself, if she could find out the meaning of what had been done, that might help the library to discover who the guilty party really was and recover damages, and she could get back her own money that she had put in for poor Mrs. Trasker.
Prudence hurried up her meal as much as possible, and returned to her room. She took a soft pencil and lightly went over the slits in the paper, to make them stand out more clearly. It would be easy enough to erase the pencil marks later. But almost as soon as she had finished and could get a comprehensive view of the whole page at a glance, she saw there was something wrong. The underscorings weren’t flush with some of the words. Sometimes they only took in half a word, carried across the intervening space, and then took in half of the next. One of them even fell where there was absolutely no word at all over it, in the blank space between two paragraphs.
That gave her the answer; she saw in a flash what her mistake was. She’d been wasting her time on t
he wrong page. It was the leaf before, the missing page 41, that had held the real meaning of the slashed words. The sharp instrument used on it had simply carried through to the leaf under it, and even, very lightly, to the third one following. No wonder the scorings overlapped and she hadn’t been able to make sense out of them! Their real sense, if any, lay on the page that had been removed.
Well, she’d wasted enough time on it. It probably wasn’t anything anyway. She tossed the book contemptuously aside, made up her mind that that was the end of it. A moment or so later her eyes strayed irresistibly, longingly over to it again. “I know how I could find out for sure,” she tempted herself.
Suddenly she was putting on her things again to go out. To go out and do something she had never done before: buy a trashy, frothy novel.
Her courage almost failed her outside the bookstore window, where she finally located a copy, along with bridge sets, ash trays, statuettes of Dopey, and other gewgaws. If it had only had a less...er...compromising title. She set her chin, took a deep breath, and plunged in.
“I want a copy of Manuela Gets Her Man, please,” she said, flushing a little.
The clerk was one of these brazen blondes painted up like an Iroquois. She took in Prudence’s shell-rimmed glasses, knot of hair, drab clothing. She smirked a little, as if to say, “So you’re finally getting wise to yourself?” Prudence Roberts gave her two dollars, almost ran out of the store with her purchase, cheeks flaming with embarrassment.
She opened it the minute she got in and avidly scanned page 41. There wasn’t anything on it, in itself, of more consequence than there had been on any of the other pages, but that wasn’t stopping her this time. This thing had now cost her over three dollars of her hard-earned money, and she was going to get something out of it.
She committed an act of vandalism for the first time in her life, even though the book was her own property and not the city’s. She ripped pages 41 and 42 neatly out of the binding, just as the leaf had been torn from the other book. Then she inserted it in the first book, the original one. Not over page 43, where it belonged, but under it. She found a piece of carbon paper, cut it down to size, and slipped that between the two. Then she fastened the three sheets together with paper clips, carefully seeing to it that the borders of the two printed pages didn’t vary by a hair’s breadth. Then she took her pencil and once more traced the gashes on page 43, but this time bore down heavily on them. When she had finished, she withdrew the loose page 41 from under the carbon and she had a haphazard array of underlined words sprinkled over the page. The original ones from the missing page. Her eye traveled over them excitedly. Then her face dropped again. They didn’t make sense any more than before. She opened the lower half of the window, balanced the book in her hand, resisted an impulse to toss it out then and there. She gave herself a fight talk instead. “I’m a librarian. I have more brains than whoever did this to this book, I don’t care who they are! I can get out whatever meaning they put into it, if I just keep cool and keep at it.” She closed the window, sat down once more.
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