Rafferty noted the livid welt across the bridge of the other’s nose, thought it fitted in well with the puffy ear, the lumpy jaw, and the more ancient but still visible bruised cheek, but he wisely made no comment on it. “Bunk was empty,” he reported succinctly. “Want to tackle the suitcase now?”
Jamison nodded; speech might affect his nose. And there wasn’t anything else in his search program, and time was running out. He walked over to the luggage rack and started to lay on hands with the experience of many years and many, many suitcases. He pushed aside the shirts on top and felt carefully along the edges of one side of the opened case. Nothing hard or rectangular came to hand. He moved to the other side of the suitcase and reached beneath, while Rafferty stared with admiration at the colorful attire.
“Ah!” Jamison looked up in triumph and withdrew whatever had caught his attention. It was a square bottle of brandy. His face fell. For a moment he was tempted to either take it into the bathroom and pour it down the sink as a sort of punishment, or take a strong nip for his troubles, but he thought better of it. He shoved it back, straightened out the top pieces of clothing, and shook his head dolefully.
“Well,” he said slowly, “I didn’t really think we’d find anything here, but we had to be sure. I doubted that Huuygens would trust a confederate with anything that valuable.” He sighed and glanced around the room. There were no signs that anyone other than the room steward had been there. He nodded, satisfied. “Eleven twenty-eight. Two minutes to get to Huuygens’ cabin. Let’s go!”
The main difference between the cabin of Kek Huuygens and that of André—other, Jamison was happy to note, than the absence of a third overhead bunk—was that the place had a lived-in look. There were books on the small ledge beneath the porthole, revealed when the drapes were drawn; there were two suitcases plus an overnight bag neatly stacked in one corner of the room, indicating that their contents were distributed in the proper drawers or on the proper hangers; a dish of caramels and a small clock were on the vanity, and the liquor bottles were lined up on the dresser.
The bathroom was disposed of with accustomed ease; Jamison was sure that no bathroom in the future would ever present a searching problem. The closets inspected proved to be devoid of interest, although Jamison carefully pressed each hanging suit and each pair of slacks between his palms before giving them clearance. The life jackets were opened, poked, and returned to place. During this endeavor, Rafferty had upended the chairs and determined that the stacked suitcases and overnight bags were, indeed, empty. Jamison approached the vanity and dresser with confidence; the answer simply had to be there. He found himself voicing this thought.
“It has to be there,” he said, logic on his side. “I saw him with the package in Barbados. He didn’t even try to hide it.”
“Umphh,” Rafferty mumbled, not disagreeing, but not agreeing, either. He reached down and pulled out the first drawer, carrying it to the bed for Jamison’s more expert search while Rafferty peered back into the dresser through the opening, and then probed for hidden treasure with an extended arm. This procedure was followed faithfully with each succeeding drawer in both dresser and vanity, from shirts to underwear and socks through pajamas, cummerbunds, handkerchief and ties. Jamison was becoming more and more petulant as time went on. And time seemed to be flying.
“Impossible!” he muttered blackly as the last dresser drawer was slid back into place. “It has to be here! I saw it.” The final possibility occurred to him; he moved the dish of caramels and the clock from the vanity, wrestled it away from the wall; but all he discovered was a year’s accumulation of dust. In disgust he shoved the furniture back in place, replaced the items on top of it, and dropped into a chair, glowering.
“Maybe he ducked it someplace else on the ship,” Rafferty suggested. In his own opinion anyone wishing to hide something on the MV Andropolis had to be pretty lacking in imagination to choose his own stateroom. There were so many better places available; under the rowing machine in the gym, for example. Nobody had used the machine to his knowledge since the ship was launched; or behind the ancient deckle-edged books in the library, mostly H. Rider Haggard and Elinor Glyn, with an occasional time-and-tide table thrown in for interest. Anything placed there could remain undetected for generations.
“No, no!” Jamison said impatiently. “This carving is valuable! Hide it where some stranger might inadvertently stumble on it and keep it? Never! Not Huuygens.” He looked around the sunlit room in desperation, willing himself not to look at the small clock on the vanity and see how time was escaping. “Damn it! It has to be here! I saw him with the package myself!”
“Well,” Rafferty said, more to fill in the conversational gap than for any other reason, “if I was going to hide something that size in a stateroom, myself, I’d put it in the air-conditioning duct, myself. The outside grillwork is—”
Jamison frowned at him. “The what?”
Rafferty pointed. “The air-conditioning duct. That thing there. The outside grillwork just snaps in place. Two seconds and you could hide—”
But Jamison was no longer paying attention to the other’s final words; he was dragging a chair over to the wall. He climbed on it, tugged the small wire grillwork free, and peered within. Less than six inches from his eyes was the neatly wrapped but gaudy package he had seen pressed so tightly under Huuygens’ arm just the day before. An unbelieving smile broke across his horseface; he looked like a sixty-to-one shot who finds himself to his own amazement in the winner’s circle.
“It’s here.” He said the words in a half-whisper, as if he really couldn’t bring himself to believe it. “It’s here!” He stared at the package worshipfully for several additional seconds, and then carefully replaced the grillwork and stepped from the chair, dusting his hands. Rafferty frowned at him.
“You ain’t going to take it?”
“No, no!” Jamison said, once more the master of the situation and now expounding basic theory to a neophyte. “You see, if we were to remove it, even with you here as a witness, what could we really prove? Only that we found a package in an air-conditioning duct. We couldn’t prove that Huuygens put it there. He’d simply deny it; after all, other people have access to his stateroom, he’d say, as witness our having found it. And what could we do? He’d walk off the ship scot-free.”
“Yeah,” Rafferty agreed, and fell back on principles of logic he’d been taught at his mother’s knee. “But you’d have the thing, wouldn’t you?”
“I’ll have it just as much in New York when we dock,” Jamison gloated, and smiled wolfishly. “And I’ll have Mr. Huuygens with it. Like that!” He clenched a fist dramatically, and then realized there was little time in the schedule for fist-clenching. He put the chair back where he had found it and studied the room. All was as it had been on their entrance. He looked up at the air-conditioning duct proudly, Rafferty’s part in the discovery already downgraded in the mental report he was still composing. He glanced at his watch; twelve noon on the button. Even his time calculations had proven perfect.
“Let’s go,” he said to Rafferty, and without thinking rubbed his nose. The instant shock of pain reminded him that all things have their price, even victory. “Let’s go,” he repeated, although less exuberantly this time, and led the way to the door.
André, having returned from a five-minute absence and reseated himself, was surprised to find Kek looking at him reprovingly. André reached for his drink, frowning.
“What’s the look for?”
“You shouldn’t have done it,” Kek said, and glanced across the room. A stranger to André, accompanied by a large ship’s officer, was passing through the bar, and the stranger looked as if he had put his face into one of the ship’s ventilation fans nose first and held it there too long.
André studied the battered features in puzzlement; then intelligence finally struck. He downed his drink first, as being of proper priority, and then said. “That’s Jamison?”
“That’s
right,” Anita said glumly, “and he looks like the cat who found the combination to the cream cellar.”
“I didn’t touch him,” André said, insulted. “I was in the men’s room. I never even knew what he looked like, before.” He found the clinching argument. “It couldn’t have been me. He’s walking, isn’t he?”
“In that case I owe you an apology.” Kek looked after the disappearing back sadly. “One thing is certain, our friend Jamison is accident-prone. I’d hate to be his insurance agent.”
“He winked at me!” Anita said, amazed at Huuygens’ attitude. “I tell you he found whatever he was looking for!”
“I doubt it,” Kek said calmly. “Well, one for the road—or I suppose roadstead would be more correct aboard ship—or lunch?”
“For the road,” André said, and wondered if his old friend Huuygens was losing his grip; if the redoubtable Kek was actually as unconcerned as he appeared to be.
Anita sighed. “Well, at least Jamison gave us an excuse to be together for the rest of the cruise.”
Kek looked at her gently. “I’m afraid not. As a matter of fact, your stint with us is done, and you managed it very well. I suggest you now go out to the deck buffet with that red-haired boy who has been glaring in this direction for the past half-hour. And then, when you have time, report to Mr. Jamison. And no, it is not necessary to report back to me what the two of you discuss.”
Anita frowned. “But I thought—”
“There will be other times and other cruises,” Kek told her gently. “And this time let’s not part with a slap. André is here to protect me this time.”
“Oh!” Anita came to her feet, whirled, and stalked from the bar. Billy Standish was after her in one bound.
“A little rough, weren’t you?” André asked.
Kek paused in calling a waiter. He faced André squarely, his gray eyes serious.
“You, my friend, are going to find out what being identified with me, even in someone’s mind as a ‘confederate,’ will mean when we go through Customs,” he said quietly. “I don’t like the thought of Anita being put through that routine.…”
15
The MV Andropolis, her flags flying bravely and her white paint gleaming brightly, plowed steadily through the Narrows, its polished railing crowded with passengers wondering where the two weeks had flown, drinking in the breathless wonders of the Brooklyn waterfront on one side and Staten Island on the other, pointing out, one to the other, things the other had just finished pointing out to them. The Verrazano bridge had been passed and commented on with awe, quite as if they had not seen it two weeks before on their departure. To their left, the Statue of Liberty stood, looking a bit tired after the years and many disappointments; to the right the twin towers of the World Trade Center loomed larger and larger in the morning sun, dwarfing the older, more dignified skyline of downtown New York. In the broad harbor ships drifted at anchor, ferries plied; garbage floated gently on the tide. The day was hot and humid, promising passengers a muggy welcome at the ancient gloomy Customs shed that should have been used for firewood when everything above Thirty-fourth Street was farmland.
In the interior of the luxury liner the companionways were jammed with stewards staggering Quasimodolike under mounds of luggage, transferring it from corridors to the promenade deck, where members of the deck crew piled it in mountainous heaps with the most crushable objects, if possible, beneath. Stewardesses frantically dragged linens from beds and pushed them into the corridor, or tried to drag vacuum cleaners into staterooms through the mob that was hastily preparing for the next cruise—for the ship sailed for Philadelphia as soon as the passengers were disembarked, there to allow others to rumple beds and fill ashtrays. In the bars, barmen counted bottles behind closed grillworks; in the huge kitchen storeroom chefs checked stocks while hand trucks propelled by caterer-employees feverishly tried to overcome the shortages before the ship sailed. In the saloons, passengers ladened with island purchases considered too precious for the handling by shipboard personnel busily scribbled each other’s addresses on bits of paper, to be examined curiously the next time a wallet or purse was cleaned out, and then thrown away. Whistles blew for unexplained reasons, horns honked at irregular intervals, while an insistent voice on the loudspeakers advised everybody not to dawdle once their luggage was on the dock, as the ship was sailing at once.
Jamison, having seen Kek Huuygens on deck patiently waiting for the tugs to edge the Andropolis into her berth, nodded in satisfaction and went below. He found Rafferty where he had left him, standing stolidly in the purser’s square, tapped the large security officer on the arm, and motioned him to follow as he walked down the aft companionway, stepping on linens and squeezing past laden stewards. At Huuygens’ cabin he was pleased to note through the open door that the place was stewardess-free. He entered, pulling Rafferty behind him, and closed the door, twisting the latch. He dragged a chair to the wall and climbed up, tugged the grillwork free, and peered within. A smile crossed his horseface. As he had figured, the brightly colored package was gone.
“Bingo!” he said softly to himself, and got down again.
“Not there anymore?” Rafferty asked.
“Of course not. Take a look,” Jamison offered generously.
“What good would that do?” Rafferty asked, his tendency for logic once more functioning. “I never saw it there in the first place.”
For a moment Jamison’s face fell. He mentally kicked himself for not having used Rafferty to better advantage as a witness when the two of them were last in the cabin. It was true that in that case Rafferty would be of small use in court, but the evidence of the carving was actually all that a judge would need to put Huuygens behind bars where he belonged.
“It was there and now it’s gone. Take my word for it,” he said shortly, and then his face creased in a smile and he rubbed his hands. “Now to see how Mr. Huuygens tries to get it through Customs!”
Mr. Huuygens, edging his way down the gangplank and then walking in the direction of the huge H hanging from a dingy rafter, was not greatly surprised to see a uniformed Customs official standing beside his three bags, refusing the importuning of earlier arrivals. In fact, he was surprised to see that other officials were also not at work as yet. He looked about for André, but although the large man had preceded Kek down the gangplank, he was nowhere to be seen. In the other direction, Anita, for once unaccompanied by Billy Standish, waited patiently for the Customs ritual to begin.
Kek came up to his bags and nodded pleasantly to the man hovering over them. “Those are my bags beside you,” Kek said, and reached into a pocket, bringing out a declaration form and handing it over. “Would you care to examine them?”
“I believe we’d rather do it inside,” the Customs man answered with a faintly malicious smile, refusing the declaration form by simply ignoring it. Stories about Huuygens were legion in the Customs service. “You don’t mind?”
“Of course I mind,” Kek told him a bit crossly. “Wouldn’t you?” He shrugged helplessly. “Well, if I must, I must, I suppose. Would you want me to help you carry one of those bags for you?”
“I can handle them quite nicely,” said the official, and picked them up. He led the way across the shed to offices there, while the other passengers looked after them curiously, certain a bribe of some kind had assured this passenger special treatment. They should know! Kek thought with an inward smile, and closed the door behind him. The Customs man set the bags down on a bench-cum-deck. Kek turned. His eyebrows raised in surprise.
“Mr. Jamison! You poor man, do they suspect you of something improper, too?”
“It’s time to end the masquerade,” Jamison said, and drew himself up, speaking in his most official manner. “Mr. Huuygens, you might as well know that I am with the Treasury Department—with the Customs Service, to be exact—and that we have strong reason to suspect you are carrying contraband. I’ve had my eye on you from the beginning; it was, in fact, my reason for bei
ng on the cruise. I’m afraid I must ask you—”
“No!” Kek said, absolutely astonished. “You mean—”
“I’m afraid it’s true. And I’m also afraid we must ask you to submit to a thorough search of your person and your belongings.”
“I’m amazed!” Kek looked it. “I must compliment you on a masterful performance. Are you sure you never had stage training?” He shrugged and got back to the matter in hand. “But the truth is, I’m afraid you’ve had all your trouble for nothing. Here’s my declaration form.”
“Ah, yes, your declaration form.” Jamison took it and scanned it calmly, smiled, and looked up. “Nothing to declare?”
“That’s right. So you see,” Kek said earnestly, “you’ve been mistaken.”
“I doubt it,” Jamison told him, in command every inch of the way. “What about that—ah, candy dish I saw you with in Barbados?”
Kek looked puzzled. “Candy dish?”
“The package under your arm at the shed in Barbados.” Jamison was the soul of patience. He hoped that Blazak, the other official, would watch and learn. “While you were listening to that steel-drum band. You said you’d found some waiter using it for an ashtray.”
“Oh, that? I’d forgotten about that. I don’t remember what I did with it, as a matter of fact. I probably forgot it and left it on the ship. I certainly don’t recall packing it.”
“Well.” Jamison smiled in friendly fashion. “Let’s see if we can help you find it. We’d never want you to lose a candy dish.”
“Is it that important, really?” Kek asked, exasperated.
“Yes,” Jamison said simply and gestured toward the cases. “Would you unlock them, please?”
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