And the Deep Blue Sea (11 page)

Lind spread his hands. “Krasicki seemed to have no doubts.”

“But everybody’s believed Mayr was dead,” Madeleine Lennox said. “For over twenty years.”

“Not everybody,” Lind replied. “They were still looking for him.”

“He must have discovered they were on his trail,” Goddard said, “and tried to run for it.”

“My guess,” Lind said, “is that Egerton was a new identity. Simply running wouldn’t have done any good, if they were closing in on him.”

“Sure,” Goddard said. “And wait—that wireless from
Señora
Santos. Warning, probably, that they were about to crack the Egerton identity, or were asking questions.”

“Good thinking, Sherlock,” Lind said. He handed over the second radiogram. “You’re right on the button.”

Goddard read it aloud.

MASTER S/S
LEANDER

SAN FRANCISCO RADIO

JUST LEARNED THIS HOUR OF YOUR WIRELESS TO CONSUELA SANTOS REVEALING DEATH OF ALLEGED WALTER EGERTON STOP HER TESTIMONY APPEARS ESTABLISH CONCLUSIVELY MAN WAS HUGO MAYR BUT IMPERATIVE REPEAT IMPERATIVE YOU PRESERVE BODY BY ANY MEANS POSSIBLE TO PERMIT FINAL IDENTIFICATION THROUGH FINGERPRINTS YOUR ARRIVAL MANILA STOP ACKNOWLEDGE SOONEST HANS RICHTER.

There was a moment of stunned silence. Then Goddard whistled softly. “Buenos Aires time is—what? Sixtieth meridian?”

Lind nodded. “Roughly four hours ahead of ship’s time now.”

“There will be hell to pay. The first message was filed at least two hours before he was buried.”

“No, Sparks is in the clear,” Lind said. “His hours of watch are set by international agreement, according to time zone. And it’s no fault of the skipper’s. He notified the responsible party named by the deceased, and was told there was nobody wishing to claim the body. And, anyway, the ship’s not operated as a branch of the West German police; it’s just an unfortunate foul-up, and not irrevocable, by any means. We’ve already anticipated the next message.”

“What? Oh.” Goddard saw what he meant “Sealing off the room.”

“Right,” Lind said. “Skipper fired back a reply to the first message saying Egerton was dead and had been buried at sea, and then Sparks got the second one, from the same station. So they passed each other. It’s obvious what they’ll want. Apparently Mayr’s fingerprints are on file, so if the room’s untouched till we get to Manila it’s almost certain the experts can raise enough prints to establish positive identification.”

“It was locked anyway, wasn’t it?” Goddard asked.

“Yes. Last night, just as soon as the bed linen was removed. But I’ve closed the porthole, and we’ll put a padlock and hasp on the door to double-lock it.”

“Should be fairly routine,” Goddard agreed. “There’s the tooth glass, and the mirror on the medicine cabinet.”

Lind nodded. “And the cabin steward says he had a set of silver-backed military hairbrushes. Well, I’ve got to get back on watch.”

He went out. The others were silent for a moment, trying to absorb the fact that the urbane and charming Englishman they’d all liked so well was the infamous Hugo Mayr, the butcher of Poland and the most widely sought Nazi since Eichmann.

Madeleine Lennox shook her head. “No. I simply can’t believe it. I try, but it just won’t go down.”

“Of course,” Karen said, “they’ll find out it’s a mistake.”

No, Goddard thought; they wouldn’t find out it was a mistake. It all fitted together too beautifully; the fake eye patch alone destroyed the whole Egerton identity, so you started fresh from that point with a man who could be anybody. And when a West German police officer in Buenos Aires and a Polish concentration camp victim on a ship four thousand miles away simultaneously made the same identification, it was hard to argue with. He stopped then, and frowned, aware of something disturbing about it. Was it the fact that Krasicki had recognized him after a quarter century? No, he thought, the basic configuration of a man’s face might change a great deal between, say, twenty and forty-five, but after that it was identifiable until it began to go to pieces in extreme old age. And the Pole had known him under circumstances calculated to impress the face on his memory, to say the least. No, it was something else. He knew what it was then, and smiled to himself.

He had dealt too long in illusion, and was trying to make life conform to the rules of fiction. Believe me, fellas, I’m not trying to pick the script to pieces, but this I just can’t buy. Look, we’ve got this Nazi
schmuck
the whole world’s been looking for for twenty-five years, and then all of a sudden, on the same day and practically the same hour,
two
people make him, halfway around the world from each other, so he’s killed, buried, and identified like it was something programmed on a computer. You see whattamean? He’s running from this West German fuzz, and just
happens
to wind up on a ship with this poor joker he gelded in 1943. You’re right, Mannie, it would never work.

Madeleine Lennox asked, “What do you think, Mr. Goddard?”

“Oh,” he said. “That the only tragedy of the whole thing is Krasicki.”

“Then you do believe he was Hugo Mayr?” Karen asked.

“Yes. And if they’d discovered it only a few hours earlier, Krasicki wouldn’t have had to spend what’s left of his life in an institution for the criminally insane.”

By eight thirty the two women had to concede there no longer appeared to be any doubt. The messages had continued to come in. As Lind had predicted, Lieutenant Richter requested the cabin be sealed immediately. Fingerprint experts would board the
Leander
the moment she arrived in Manila. And by now they had begun to grasp that they were the focus of the world’s attention—briefly perhaps, but the world wanted news of just what had happened aboard this rusty old freighter lost in the immensity of the Pacific where the notorious Nazi war criminal had met his end. Captain Steen had already received requests from Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters bidding for the exclusive story. He sat drinking coffee with them in the lounge, dazed as they all were. Lind came in with the news there was no change in Krasicki’s condition. He poured a cup of coffee and sat down.

Karen sighed. “But it’s still incredible that he fooled us so completely.”

Lind smiled. “Well, he’s been fooling a lot of people, for over twenty years.”

“He was a consummate actor,” Goddard said. “He had to be, or they’d have got him long ago.”

Madeleine Lennox lit a cigarette and smiled faintly. “Well, that’s praise from an authority. And incidentally, now that we can begin to think of the scene without screaming, how would you direct it in a picture?”

“I wouldn’t change a thing,” Goddard replied.

“No, but I mean, the technical aspects of it, the breakdown of the individual parts, where the cameras would be.”

“Camera,” Goddard said. “In a scene like that you can use only one, because of the lighting. You break it down into several setups, from different points of view, and shoot them individually. Usually, there’s a master shot and then as much backup coverage as the director feels he needs or can get. The broken glass—” He stopped, and asked, “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Yes,” she said. “After the real, I don’t think the make-believe will bother us. Do you, Karen?”

Karen shook her head. Lind watched with interest.

“In the make-believe,” Goddard went on, “it’s still the touches of realism that give it the emotional impact. For instance, in a cheap Western a man is shot at point-blank range with a .44 and nothing happens except that, unaccountably, he drops dead. He’s been slammed with something with the foot-pounds of energy of a moving truck, but there’s not the slightest indication of it. With a good director, it’s different. You
see
what happens.

“You shoot it this way: from my point of view, Krasicki with the gun, screaming, he raises the gun, and shoots. He’s not shooting at anything, because Mayr’s not even there beside me, and you may or may not use the shot itself, depending on the way it works best when you edit it. Then you set up just back of Krasicki and to one side to get the shot and the reaction of Mayr’s body to the impact of the bullet. And on to the next setup for the best view of Mr. Lind going for him to get the gun, and of course when you go back to Mayr again the makeup people have applied the red dye to the shirt and the corner of the mouth.

“Breaking the light fixture and the mirror are just routine special effects jobs. It’s a small explosive charge that’s set off electrically—”

Madeleine Lennox interrupted. “I see. Then all the shots are blanks, and not just the first two.”

“Oh, hell, yes; you never use live ammunition. You’d be locked up. But do you want to know the real accent of the scene, though, the thing that caps it, and that only a really superb director would ever think of?”

“What’s that?” Lind asked. He had his legs swung over the side of the armchair, sipping coffee as he watched with that same smiling interest.

“When Mayr clutches the tablecloth as he falls. And in that terrible silence after all that screaming and gunfire you hear just a faint and very musical tinkling of silverware. That would leave ’em gasping. It’d be a genius of a director who could improve on the staging of that scene.”

Goddard was conscious then of something very cold moving up his back, as though somebody were drawing an icicle slowly along his spine, and the hair began to stab his neck. He was looking right at Lind, who was still smiling faintly, and as he realized what he’d said he knew he was staring straight into the eyes of the devil.

“Seems to be a case, then,” Lind murmured, “of nature holding a mirror up to art.”

And only the two of them knew it, Goddard thought; the others didn’t even suspect it.

H
OW MANY WERE THERE? GODDARD
lay naked on his bunk in the darkness and thought about it. The bos’n and that big sailor named Otto were obviously part of the apparatus, but was that all? What about the wireless operator? Or even Captain Steen himself? That was the chilling part of it; they could be all around him and he didn’t know who was involved. And maybe Lind already suspected him; with that diabolical mind you couldn’t be sure of anything, except that underestimating it was a mistake nobody would ever make twice.

Lightning flashed, illuminating the whole interior of the cabin for over a second. Without conscious thought, he began counting:
one-oh, two-oh, three-oh
…
nine-oh.
A great crash of thunder rolled and reverberated over the ship. It was still two miles away but coming closer. The fan whirred, stirring the lifeless air, but the cabin was like a sweatbox. The wooden door was pulled back and hooked, but the screen, which had louvered slats across it for privacy, was latched. In the silence he heard the faint sound of six bells striking in the wheelhouse. It was eleven
P.M.

It’d be a genius of a director who could improve on the staging of that scene.
One more stupid remark like that, he thought, and the next burial sack that goes over the side will have somebody in it, all right. Lind was the ship’s doctor, and with an imagination of that order there’d be no dearth of illuminating detail to enter in the log as to cause of death.
Found dead in bunk of obvious cardiac arrest. Went to bed drunk, set mattress afire with cigarette, and suffocated. Suffered severe concussion in fall, and died two days later without regaining consciousness.
With enough morphine in him to kill a rhinoceros. The findings would be subject to review by higher medical authority, of course, except for the minor difficulty that the body was buried in the ooze five miles down in the Pacific Ocean.

But there’s still a chance you’re wrong, he told himself. You don’t really know any of this; you’re only assuming it. All you really know is that it could be the greatest piece of illusion since Thurston, you know why it could have been done, and how it could have been done, but there’s no proof whatever that it was done. The cabin was lit up by another long flash of lightning, and the thunderclap came almost on the heels of it. A faint breeze came in the porthole now, with the smell of rain in it. Lightning flashed again, and the thunder was a sharp, cracking explosion that was very near.

Maybe he’d been led down the garden path by his subconscious distrust of all those coincidences of timing between the ship and Buenos Aires, and then when Mrs. Lennox had asked that ridiculous question about the first two shots being blanks he’d booby-trapped himself and leaped to the conclusion that just because it was possible it had to be true. Of course Mayr would like to be written off as dead, and what better way than being shot to death in front of five reliable witnesses and buried in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?

Then what about Krasicki, or whatever his real name was? If the thing had been staged, there had to be some plausible and foolproof escape already prearranged; no matter how great his devotion to the cause or how high the pay, it was hardly likely he would set himself up as a human sacrifice. Just how did they wave the wand and make him disappear?

An escape could be engineered, of course, even after he was turned over to the Philippine authorities, but there was a flaw in that. The chances were there had been a real Krasicki, a Polish Jew and a botanist resident in Brazil, who’d either died out in the jungle or received an individual dose of the “final solution” so they could take over his identity, in which case this one could hardly be put on display for the world’s press with the obvious danger that somebody who’d known the real one would spot the fraud. Passports could be doctored, if you had the price and connections, and a blown-up reproduction of a 2½ by 2½ passport photo would seldom be recognized by the sitter’s mother, but turn those Time-Life photographers loose on the subject himself and you were in real trouble.

No, Krasicki—he might as well continue to call him that—Krasicki had to disappear before they reached Manila. And the simplest way, of course, was another death and sea burial. The cast and staging wouldn’t have to be anywhere near as elaborate as the first one, and the groundwork for it had already been laid—the precautions against suicide, removal of the tie and belt and the serving of his food in soft plastic containers without cutlery. Conveniently, of course, nobody had given a thought to the fact that he could tear strips from the bed linen and hang himself. Some morning when they opened the door, he’d be dangling from those overhead pipes. Lind would send the other party, the witness, for something, cut him down, and announce with that manly and understated despair he did so well that it was no use; Krasicki’d been dead for hours.