The Revengers (35 page)

I felt her make an impatient gesture in the dark. “Bennett certainly wouldn’t ask any favors for you.”

“I don’t have to be a shit just because he is.”

“Why?” she demanded. “You still haven’t told me why!” I said, “Well, it’s really your fault.”

“Mine!”

“Look, girl reporter,” I said, “you’re already raising hell with the U.S. Government for employing a bunch of homicidal jerks like me, correct? Well, your last piece was on Bob Devine, but your next one is on me. There’s nothing I can do about that. You’ve told me it’s even beyond your control by now; it’s in the works; so we’re just going to have to weather that storm as best we can. All we can do is try to keep you from getting killed so we won’t be blamed for that, too.” I drew a long breath. “Okay, you’re raising hell and that’s your business, but goddamn it, can’t I ask you in a friendly way to take it a little easy for a while? Don’t clobber the poor damned OFS with this new thing before Washington has had time to catch its breath from the way you’ve blasted us. Sure, Bennett is a revolving sonofabitch and he’s got some other rotary bastards working for him; but there are a lot of good men in that outfit. Although your experience with them may make it hard for you to believe, they do a lot of good work. You’re not going to bring those larcenous kids back to life no matter what you write, are you? If Bennett’s still around a couple of years from now, fine, go after him with my blessing. Use what I told you tonight, even. Permission granted. But right now you’ve made enough trouble, to be blunt about it, and I’m asking you to take a little rest from your journalistic hell-raising. Give us a little rest, please. Let it all cool down a bit before you light the publicity fires again.”

There was a long silence. At last her voice came out of the noisy darkness, “What’s a revolving sonofabitch?”

“A guy who looks like an SOB any way you turn him.”

“I haven’t heard you say any nice things about the OFS before.”

“I probably wouldn’t go around saying nice things about my brother, either, if I had a brother. He’d probably be an infuriating stuffed shirt with a dull nine-to-five job and I’d consider him a total loss—until an occasion arose when I’d have to remember that, as the old saying goes, blood is thicker than water.”

“Mr. Bennett is hardly your brother.”

“Don’t be too sure. At least his man Burdette is my brother and that kid Burdette was trying to break in safely is my kid brother. We’re all members of the same big happy squabbling and bickering governmental family and we’re all in more or less the same line of work, most of us for the same reasons.”

“What reasons, Matt? I’ve always wondered.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “Now she wants my philosophy of life! Well, there are a lot of reasons, and one is that there are some people who just aren’t happy unless they’re being shot at occasionally and getting to shoot back. You don’t have to understand that. It’s a dirty little secret these safety-minded and supposedly nonviolent days, but just take it as a fact. There are the manhunters who get their kicks out of tracking down what’s been called, and is, the most dangerous game on earth. There are the do-gooders who want to fix up the world according to their own ideas and ideals; you find those everywhere, even in our business. And there are the power-hungry gents who get their jollies from carrying guns and commanding men who carry guns. There are lots of other motives, not all nice, maybe none of them nice, but there’s one motive we’ve all—-well, most of us—had in common at one time or another, although some of us keep forgetting it.”

“What’s that, Matt?”

I said irritably, “Well, it may not be the best damned country in the world, although I haven’t seen a better, but it’s the only damned country we’ve got. Now for Christ’s sake, let’s get some sleep. It’s been a long day and I have a hunch tomorrow isn’t going to be any shorter.”

The whole thing was a little unreal, I thought the following morning as I took the place indicated by Giulio on the settee at the low leeward side of the main cabin table, with Eleanor beside me. It was the most comfortable place at the table, like a reclining chair reclined—as a matter of fact I’d sat there earlier to eat breakfast under Giulio’s supervision—but it immobilized me almost as effectively as if I’d been tied hand and foot. The table was a large drop-leaf affair, leaves up now, firmly secured to the cabin sole with the great aluminum mast coming up through the middle of it. It wasn’t going anywhere. There was no chance of my dumping it into Giulio’s lap, for instance, like John Wayne cleaning out a Western saloon; and with Eleanor blocking the way out on one side and that massive item of teak furniture filling most of the cabin, I could never hope to fight my way uphill against the heel of the boat to get at him.

But such hostile thoughts seemed almost wicked under the circumstances. After all, since we’d put to sea, our captors had all been just as nice to us as they could be. Nobody’d slugged us or kicked us or even spoken harshly to us. We’d suffered no mistreatment at all, and no hardships—except for those unavoidable on a yacht under way. My only possible complaint was that Giulio wasn’t half the cook the Frenchman, Robert, had been back on
Ser-Jan
. My breakfast coffee had been weak and my eggs badly overdone. Considering other captivities I’d endured, a little unreal.

Serena’s first words only heightened the atmosphere of unreality. She was very polite and gracious, “I want to thank you,” she said. “I want to thank you both for taking me at my word.”

There were, of course, certain flaws in this civilized and well-mannered atmosphere. While the cabin itself was quite respectable with its oiled teak and comfortable upholstery, the occupants were no longer quite so respectable. My own slacks and sports shirt were getting pretty limp and I needed a shave. Eleanor had washed her face and combed her hair, and her dark sweater was moderately durable, but her nice linen slacks looked fairly disreputable and slept-in by this time. Giulio needed a razor even worse than I did, being darker; and his natty boating uniform was kind of wrinkled and grubby. Serena’s short hairdo was undisturbed and her red bodice was performing its elastic duties as efficiently as ever; but her white shorts weren’t quite as crisp and immaculate as they had been, and I’d noticed when she came down the companionway steps that her bare feet were dirty. Well, I guess the sharp white flannels and natty blue blazer are no longer part of the yachting scene.

I heard one of the men on deck speak to the other; the ratcheting sound of a winch followed, as one of the sails was trimmed. Serena was still speaking, sitting above us on the high side of the slanting cabin table with Giulio and his gun beside her—another uncivilized blemish on this friendly boating picture.

“I know you’re an experienced professional,” she said to me, “and I was very much afraid you’d seize some opportunity to attempt a violent escape with Miss Brand. Well,” she added with a glance at Giulio, who’d stirred, “what you thought was an opportunity. Giulio is fairly experienced, too. But, please, I don’t want to threaten or challenge you in any way. You’re here because I need you; and I need you alive. No harm is going to come to you, either of you. Please believe me.”

It sounded good, it sounded very reassuring, but I couldn’t help watching her eyes. They still did not behave like normal eyes, casually glancing from this to that; they simply stared at what she told them to stare at until she told them to stare at something else, sometimes nothing at all.

Watching those disconcerting brown eyes, wondering how much real sanity was behind them despite her elaborate courtesy, I almost missed the much more important signal that showed for an instant in Giulio’s eyes when she assured us that no harm would come to us: just a brief flicker of expression, half-evil and half-amused, that betrayed the truth. It was a chilling thing. It warned me that I’d almost made the kind of mistake you don’t survive, the mistake of overconfidence, of underestimating the enemy, the old-pro mistake of thinking you’re so damned smart and tough nobody can outwit you, nobody can touch you. Suddenly I realized that this ordinary-looking waterfront thug in his sailor pants and jersey, carelessly brandishing his 9mm Browning like an amateur, had been playing with me just as I’d been playing with him—establishing a nice atmosphere of mutual respect, even a kind of friendship, while he waited for the moment to kill.

I forced myself to keep looking where I was looking; if I glanced his way, he’d know I knew. I said to the girl, “Well, it’s nice to hear.”

She nodded to me and said to Eleanor, “I’m about to give you your story, Miss Brand, the story you’ve been working on so hard. To start with, I’m sure you’ll both be interested in knowing that you’re sitting on top of a sizeable charge of powerful explosive.” She smiled at our expressions. “Oh, don’t worry. It’s totally stable. As a matter of fact, it was built into the boat right after I bought it while I was making other changes, some required by recent changes in the law. It’s practically part of the boat; it’s fiberglassed into the hull, way down in the bilge, where nobody can possibly find it without tearing the boat apart. And it’s no danger to anyone until the fuse is armed a certain way.”

“How?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I won’t tell you that. The person who knows how to arm it, knows how to disarm it; and there’s no need for you to know that.”

I shrugged. “Okay, what kind of a fuse?”

She hesitated, and spoke obliquely, “I’m not going to tell you any more about the explosive. First, because it’s got a complicated technical name I can’t even remember; and second, because if you know what it is, you may be able to trace where it came from, and I don’t want to get anybody who helped me into trouble. As for the fuse, that was kind of a problem. A practical problem, but also a moral problem.”

Eleanor stirred. “Moral? That’s an odd word to use in this connection, Miss Lorca.”

Serena Lorca’s face hardened. She said coldly, “Not at all. You see, I didn’t want to kill the lousy bastards myself, Miss Brand, so I couldn’t use a remote-control firing device where I had to push the button. That wasn’t the idea. I wanted the fucking sons of bitches to kill themselves.” She drew a deep breath and gave a nervous pull to her bodice and spoke precisely, “The practical aspects were quite challenging. You’ve just spent a night on a sailboat under way; you can see that any kind of impact device is out of the question. The charge would explode the first time the boat fell off a wave hard. The same is true of any detonator depending upon the attitude of the vessel. Sailboats assume all kinds of insane attitudes without being involved in collisions; being knocked flat by a squall is all in a day’s work.”

“Proximity?” I said.

She nodded. “I believe proximity fuses were used on torpedoes way back in World War II. Since then, of course, a lot of missiles have had them. I can’t tell you much about this particular type of fuse except that we—somebody—picked up half a dozen as military surplus through an illicit-arms dealer who . . . well, never mind that. They were adapted for me by one of my father’s . . . well, by a specialist in that line. They’re set to go off within thirty feet of any large metallic object. That’s fair enough, I think. After all, the fuse is buried in the middle of the boat. Any large steel power vessel that comes within thirty feet of the center of a forty-foot sailing vessel at sea is certainly not obeying the law of the sea that requires her to keep clear. COLREGS 18-a-iv. I didn’t feel obliged to handicap myself by requiring a direct hit.”

Eleanor said, “I should have guessed. You got the idea out of a book, and I think I know the book.”

“Book, hell!” the black-haired girl said harshly. “There isn’t an offshore sailor alive who hasn’t dodged one of those great, arrogant, mechanical monsters out at sea and wished to God he had something to shoot back with. I thought of something like that, something big I could fire at the bridge and blast the bastards—a bazooka or something—but this way is better. This way it’s up to them. If they obey the law and steer clear, they’re safe. If they keep coming and ignore the lousy sailboat as a lot of them do—to hell with it, it’s just a crummy little yacht, let it get out of the way if it can—or if they simply don’t bother to watch out for it at all, why then they’re dead and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of seagoing assassins.” Eleanor said, “It seems to me you’re condemning the whole crew of a ship to death for the carelessness of a couple of men on the bridge.”

“Don’t be too sure it’s carelessness. Those big ship people just think they own the damned ocean, laws or no laws,” Serena said. “And if the engineers and motor men didn’t make the vessel go, it wouldn’t run people down, would it? If they’re going to operate their lousy engines and move twenty or fifty or a couple of hundred thousand tons of metal and cargo through the water at twelve to twenty knots, knowing what kind of homicidal clowns are steering it topside, then they’re just as responsible for what it hits as the creeps up on deck. Tell the Jews they should have let Eichmann go because he was only taking orders!” She drew another long breath and hauled at her bodice again, although it still seemed to be doing its job pretty adequately. “All right. I won’t go into the actual details, because you’ve both heard about the Fairfax Constellation sinking, so you’ve got the general idea. The story I told that man, Peterson, was pretty accurate except for some dramatic flourishes. All that’s left is to give you your press kits. You’ll note I’ve supplied waterproof envelopes for them. I promised you wouldn’t get killed; I didn’t promise you wouldn’t get wet, although it depends a little on the weather.” She turned her unblinking stare on Eleanor. “But as a journalist, you should be willing to put up with a wet ride in a rubber boat in order to witness the deadly Bermuda Triangle in action. It was the Bermuda Triangle you were investigating, wasn’t it, Miss Brand?”

She slid two plastic envelopes down the slanting, heaving table. Eleanor hesitated before opening hers.

“Press kit?”

“Well, this is a press conference, isn’t it, Miss Brand?” the black-haired girl said. “I’m giving you the background material for the demonstration you’ll be witnessing as soon as I can arrange it I’m sure you’ve attended many such preliminary conferences. I hope I’m conducting this one properly; I don’t have your experience.”