Voyage into Violence (17 page)

Pam and Jerry had come out from dancing and found the Weigands in repose, and had joined them in repose—at least until the entertainer finished. A steward had brought them drinks. “All we need is fireflies,” Pam said, but here and there a cigarette glowed in the dimness, which was almost as good. “We'll bring them, another time,” Jerry said, beside her, and it did not seem preposterous—on such a night, in such a place, there could be nothing preposterous and nothing harsh.

The orchestra quit playing, and there were only low voices and, pervasively, the sound of water moving about the little ship, headed now toward the island of Cuba. Pam wished, idly, that she could think of a few appropriate lines of poetry, but found she could not, and abandoned the effort in midstream—let it drift away on the stream, as all else seemed to drift. She was half asleep, and Jerry was more than half, when the music commenced again.

“One more,” Jerry said, and stood up, and Pam was too relaxed, too accepting, to be more than slightly astonished at this improbable Gerald North, who usually had to be led—perhaps dragged was the more precise word—to the dance. She aroused herself and stood up, and they looked down at the Weigands. “The effort,” Dorian said, “would be great, as Mr. Porter once said of sloths. In another connection.”

The Norths went off toward the café, seeming to float. “Unless you want to?” Dorian said to Bill, who said, dreamily, “Mmm.” Tired by this exertion, they relaxed. Bill, to prove companionship—but to prove nothing—reached out and took her hand. Her slim fingers curled around his hand. It was some minutes before he realized that her fingers were cold; it was somewhat longer before he associated this fact with the corresponding fact that, on the sun deck, it was no longer as warm as it had been. “You're cold,” he told her, without accusation. “Shall we go inside?”

“Not yet,” she said. “It's too perfect. Am I cold?”

“You feel cold,” Bill said. He ran fingers up her bare, brown arm. “You feel quite cold.”

“To be practical,” Dorian said, “I have very little on. Perhaps I am a little chilly. I suppose I should have brought something out. But, it's too nice here.”

He would, Bill said, get her something. The yellow thing? She smiled at him. She thought, as Pam had thought before, that the atmosphere of a cruise brought out something in husbands. It was pleasant that it did. “If you like,” she said. “The yellow thing, by all means.” He would not be a minute, Bill told her, and—after some seconds spent in pulling himself together—rose with resolution from the deck chair and went about it. And, left alone, Dorian discovered that she was, really, rather too chilly for comfort. While she waited for the yellow thing, to be brought for her naked back by this charmingly attentive man, she would stir around.

She stirred. She walked a little way forward, and then a little way aft, among chairs which, now, for the most part were empty. It must, she thought, be late. It would have been more sensible to go in, even to go to the cabin, where it would be warm enough—into which they would carry their private warmth. When Bill came back—

She stood at the low rail which, amidship, was curved in to conform to the shape of the swimming pool below, so that, standing by it, one could look down on swimmers. But in the daytime, not at night. At night the pool was drained and cleaned, and left empty until morning.

She looked aft over the ship's stern and was entranced. Water, water which seemed to froth in its own light, boiled from beneath the ship, white against the darkness of the other water. It was like a waterfall foaming upward—a water
rise
, she thought. There was a kind of phosphorescence about the violent white water. And, watching it, one felt that the ship, pushing the water behind it, was plunging into the night, where before the ship had seemed to float motionless.

Far behind the ship, fading slowly into the darkness, the whiteness of the wake stretched—stretched straight into distance. It ended in the darkness, but that was only because of the darkness. If it were light, she thought—chose to think—one could look to the limit of one's vision and see the white path the ship had taken, stretching to, stretching beyond, the horizon.

She had her hands lightly on the rail, leaned forward a little so that she might better see the dancing of white water. She heard steps behind her and started to turn toward Bill, and in the same instant knew the steps were wrong, not his, and then, still with no time to move, felt a violent impact on her back, struggled to regain balance and knew herself falling. As she fell, she cried out. And, as she fell, she twisted herself, as a diver twists—as a cat twists—instinctively to control her fall.

Bill saw her fall. He had, climbing from A Deck, gone to the promenade deck and along it toward one of the steep flights which, outside the ship's enclosure, led from the promenade deck and the pool area, to the deck above. He saw her, a swirl of white, falling toward the pool, and heard her cry out. And ran—

Dorian, twisting as she fell, fell some ten feet. She landed on her back. She landed on the protective netting which, each night, was rigged above the empty pool. She lay still on the tight-stretched netting.

Bill ran toward her, and at the same time others ran—from the café on the deck above, from chairs on the promenade deck. A deck steward plunged down the stairway from the sun deck and, from somewhere, there was the violent, high sound of a boatswain's whistle, and after that more men ran.

Bill reached her first. She turned her head toward him and her eyes were open.

“Knocked—breath—out,” Dorian Weigand said, in a voice that proved it. “Somebody—pushed—”

He reached toward her, working his way out on the netting until he could reach her. She rolled, then, to hands and knees and when he said, “Wait!” said, in much her ordinary voice, “Oh, I'm all right.”

And she was, or nearly. Her unprotected back was welted by the rope and, she assured him, the dress, lower down, had been of insufficient protection. He would find, she said, clinging to him, that she looked like a waffle iron. But—she was all right.

That the ship's surgeon confirmed, and that she was extraordinarily lucky to be all right. Falling face down to a rope netting, with the chance of being tangled and twisted in it—that might have been very unlucky indeed.

“Luck nothing,” Dorian said, allowed to go with Bill to their stateroom. “I wiggled around.”

She did not, Bill agreed, move like a cat for nothing. He was still white from the shock of her fall; was, he decided, the shakier of the two.

But he, as he saw her fall, had forgotten the netting which would save her from a plunge to the steel bottom of the empty pool, and to death or cruel injury on it.

Someone else had forgotten it too. That, as Dorian told what little she had to tell—told of footsteps behind her; of the sudden forceful push against her back—became evident.

“Why me?” Dorian said, turning over to lie on her stomach. “What have I done to anybody?”

There was, then, no answer. It was only apparent that, with murder in mind, someone had moved out of the shadows of the dimly lit deck, moved softly until the last and then with a rush, indifferent to sound, and had pushed Dorian Weigand into what the attacker had supposed would be an empty swimming pool, its bottom twenty feet below the rail.

The ship's surgeon had provided two yellow capsules, and instructions—instructions which, Bill insisted, should be followed. A compromise was reached; she took one. After a time she slept, at first, restlessly, turning often in search of comfort, but then more quietly. Bill, in his bed across the stateroom, watched until finally she was quiet. He left a dim light burning so that he could watch her, moment by moment reassure himself. But he did not know what he watched against.

When she slept deeply, he began to fan his mind, seeking to stir that spark which might, nurtured, turn into a light. More things had happened, but they added only confusion. The attack on Dorian—to that there was no answer. An attack, as if by proxy, on him? But why? He could not, gloomily, see that at the moment he threatened anyone. The threads were tangled, and he did not progress in their untangling. A red thread, a green thread. Like electric lead wires, colored for identification, like—Why, he wondered, as thought grew dim in sleep, did he think of two threads, two wires, tangled together. A spark almost glowed, but sleep doused it.

Things were much brighter in the morning, except in the minds of Bill and Dorian, Pam and Jerry North. The Caribbean was very bright; the ship shone in sunlight, and after a time there was land, at first low and dark and ahead, then—very quickly—off the port-side, and the land was Cuba. They would, their dining room steward told them, dock before noon. They breakfasted; Dorian insisted that she was as good as new, and looked it. But she did, Bill told them, look rather waffle-molded from behind. And there was a rope burn, just visible, on one brown arm. But she was as good as new, and with coffee better.

Bill left them after breakfast. They went to the sun deck, and stood at the rail—now and then looking over their shoulders, gripping the rail firmly—and down into the sparkling pool in which, already, some cavorted. The sun deck was very different now, with the sun on it. There were no shadows. The deck chairs, which at nights were huddled, were rearranged for day. Right here she had been standing, Dorian said, showing them. (The wake now was a churning sparkle in darker water, no longer frothing magic.) And she still could not be sure whether the footsteps heard so briefly behind her had been those of a man or of a woman.

“A man,” Pam thought, and said. “The same one who pushed me, probably. A very pushing man.”

They sat in chairs, and Dorian assured them that it did not hurt a bit, although she did not sit, as she usually sat, in contained quiet. And they asked one another why, and came up with no very convincing answers.

Bill found Aaron Furstenberg, and got a name. He telephoned ahead to Havana, and got police headquarters, and identified himself through politely unwinding channels until he got to a man who had once been an opposite number. Bill explained. The one-time opposite number was co-operative. Matters would be expedited. Indeed, a car would be waiting. As to the other, assuredly. A man would watch. “The stake-out,” the opposite number said, with no accent at all. But of the firm itself, they had only reports.

Bill telephoned again, after allowing ten minutes, during which he fanned his mind once more. The police had, indeed, communicated with Carrillo et Cie. by the time Bill got them on the telephone. Carrillo et Cie. did, indeed, know Señor Aaron Furstenberg, an expert of distinction. And the police had told them what was requested—if the señora came, they would examine, they would appraise. But they would not buy. It was understood.

Why Dorian? The question repeated itself in Bill's mind, and remained unanswered. He went forward from the telephone exchange on A Deck and up to the promenade deck, and knocked on the door of stateroom P 21. This time he was answered, rather piercingly. “Come in and get them,” Mrs. Macklin said. “Took you long enough.”

Bill opened the door and was looked at. Mrs. Macklin was fully dressed, in a suit of purplish complexion. She was sitting in a chair behind a table on which were breakfast dishes. She held in one hand—a thin hand in which the tendons showed—a glass of what, one might presume, was tomato juice, at any rate basically. She looked at Weigand through piercing black eyes and told him he wasn't the boy.

“Thought you were the boy,” she said. “Come for these.” She indicated the dishes. “Well?” He started to speak. “Understand this Marsh man is dead,” she said. “Dead while I was looking all over the ship for him. What do you want?”

“I wonder,” Bill said, “if I might see your daughter?”

“Look around,” she told him. “You don't see her, do you?”

“No,” Bill said. He stood just inside the door.

“Unless you think I've locked her up in the bathroom?” Mrs. Macklin said. “I've got a headache. Think she cares? Up and out before I woke up. Well?”

Mrs. Macklin, Bill decided, was several persons. This one was the morning Mrs. Macklin, sober—but possibly rectifying that—and probably with a hangover.

“All of them're like that,” she said. “Always were. Oh, I know. Not as young as they are, just in the way. You'll find out.” She took a sip from her glass. “Try the swimming pool,” she said. “What do you want to see her about?” She took another swallow, this time larger. “Been up to something?”

“She?” Bill said. “Not that I know of. Mrs. Macklin—” He paused for attention. She said, “Well?” and finished what might have been merely tomato juice—or, of course, a Bloody Mary.

“I understand,” Bill said, “that you have some very valuable jewelry with you, Mrs. Macklin. Is it in the purser's safe?”

She put the glass down hard on the table. She put it down so hard that dishes rattled against one another. She said, “
Who told you that?
”

“Is it true?” Bill asked her.

“Is it,” she said, “any of your business?”

She had a point there, if she cared to press it.

“Perhaps not,” Bill said. “But—you complained that someone had got into your room. If you have valuables in your room—” It was not especially adequate. It seemed somewhat better than to ask, point-blank, if she harbored stolen jewelry of which a murdered man had carried pictures.

“Days ago,” she said. “And nobody did anything. You're just getting around to it now?”

Bill Weigand did not argue about the number of days. He said, “Then you haven't valuable jewelry?”

“Young man,” she said, “there's nothing the matter with my mind. Hear me? My mind's as good as it ever was.”

There seemed to be no answer at all to that.