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.
VII
HOW 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 disa
ppear?
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.
He wondered what the mate would use to simulate the bruises of strangulation and to give the lips that distinctive blue of cyanosis, but no doubt that had been carefully planned. He’d done a beautiful job with Mayr’s death pallor, with the aid of that white overhead light; probably just a light cream base of some kind with a liberal application of ordinary talc. Nobody had been within ten feet of the body except the two men who were sewing it into the sack. He’d been invited to watch the final stitches, of course, but what about Steen? Was he a witness, or a party to it?
There was another flash of lightning, followed immediately by a crashing explosion of thunder that seemed to shake the whole cabin. Then he sat up, suddenly alert. Somebody had rapped on the screen door. He pulled on the boxer shorts and slipped over to it. Opening the louvers, he looked out through the screen into the lighted passageway. It was Madeleine Lennox, in pajamas and a nylon robe. He unlatched the screen. “May I come in?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Just let me put on—”
She pushed the screen on back and stepped in. “Men and their idiotic modesty. We could be dead in the next five seconds.”
There was another searing flash that illuminated the cabin as though an arc light had been turned in the porthole, with a simultaneous crash of thunder. He saw her wince. She really was afraid of it, he thought. “I can’t stand it, on a ship,” she said. “There’s nothing else for it to hit.”
“It’s perfectly safe,” he reassured her. The darkness was impenetrable after the flash. “Sparks grounds his antenna, and it acts as a lightning rod.”
“Thank you, Dr. Faraday,” she said. A groping hand brushed his arm, and then she was against his chest. “Who the hell needs science?”
He took her in his arms; if she needed comforting, why be a churl about it? She felt very slender and soft inside the nylon robe, and her arms came up around his neck. In the next jagged flash of lightning he could see her uptilted face with the eyes closed, waiting to be kissed. He kissed her. Her mouth opened under his, and the arms tightened, and he noted with a detached sort of interest that he apparently wasn’t impotent after all. At the same moment the squall struck with a wild shriek of wind and horizontal rain that came slashing through the porthole. He broke free, slammed it shut, and tightened one of the dogs. Thunder crashed, and another searing flash of lightning left him blinded as he turned back to her.
They brushed together, and she was in his arms again, as adhesive as a Band-Aid. “We might be more comfortable,” he suggested humorously, “if we sat down.”
“I’m sure you would,” she murmured with her lips brushing his. “And I feel guilty as hell about it.”
He unbelted the robe and slipped it back over her shoulders. It dropped, and was followed by the pajama top. She guided his hand to the zipper at the side of the remaining garment and helped him slide it down over the rounded hips. He picked her up and carried her to the bunk.
There was no holding her back or pacing her, and she had no need for subtlety of finesse in her headlong flight to throw herself shrieking over the precipice. She came to climax three times, crying out and digging her nails into his shoulders as though driven by some kinship with the demonic force of the squall battering at the ship. He would have timed his own release to coincide with this final paroxysm as a matter of simple courtesy and the obligatory gesture of appreciation under the circumstances, but his attention had strayed and he was thinking of the time the Shoshone had been knocked down in a squall that had caught her lying dead in the water, with the result that he was late and the act ended on a note of anticlimax. He expected to be taken to task for this wooden performance, but apparently she hadn’t even noticed. Male flesh and willingness were all she demanded; she’d furnish the fire herself.
“In these days of instant everything,” she murmured, “it’s refreshing to meet a man who takes his time.”
He lit a cigarette for her. “I thought you were afraid of lightning.”
“Afraid? I expected to die every second.” She sighed. “But what a way to go. Men have no monopoly on that old barracks joke.”
The Leander was beginning to roll a little now as wind continued to howl around her. Rain drummed on the bulkhead beyond their heads. There was another simultaneous white flash of lightning and explosion of thunder. She gasped and pressed against him, and at the same time a hand slid down his body and began its seductive manipulation. He wondered idly if Freud had ever considered the phallus as a symbolic lightning rod.
There was no one else in the passageway except the young Filipino carrying a plastic cup of milk and a sandwich on a paper plate. Lind unlocked the door of the hospital and they entered. A single light was burning over the desk. The portholes were dogged against the fury of the squall outside, the deadlights closed down over them. Krasicki lay on the same lower bunk, motionless, staring blankly up at the bottom of the one above him. He gave no indication he was aware of them at all.
“He has closed the deadlights,” Gutierrez observed as he exchanged the sandwich for the stale one still untouched. “You think he is afraid of the lightning?”
“No,” Lind said. “Probably the portholes are eyes, looking at him.”
The youth shook his head. “Pobrecito.” He went out, closing the door behind him.
Lind stepped over and bolted it, and turned. “Okay,” he said softly.
Krasicki sat up and grinned with a display of yellowed teeth. “How’s it going?” he asked.
“Fine,” Lind replied. He pulled a chair over and sat down, leaning forward so they could converse in low tones covered by the tumult of the squall. “Hugo sends his congratulations.”
“And what about our audience? Still no complaints about the performance?”
“No,” Lind said. “They feel very sorry for you.”
“And the rendezvous? You’re in contact with the boat?”
Lind nodded. “It’s directly on our course, waiting. Five hundred and fifty miles away at eight P.M. Rendezvous is two A.M., two nights from now.”
“We’ll make it all right?”
“Yes, with several hours to spare. The timing will be adjusted by another engine room breakdown if necessary.” Lind smiled. “And of course there’s the other stoppage. For your funeral.”
Krasicki chuckled. “Put on a good show for the sentimental sheep.”
“The rope’s ready?” Lind asked.
“Yes.” Krasicki stood up and pulled back the
blue bedspread of the upper bunk. Strips torn from one of the sheets had been braided into a length of thin, strong rope. Lind examined it. He nodded.
“Make one end fast to an overhead pipe,” he said. “Stand on a lower bunk and put the noose around your neck. Tie it so it won’t tighten, of course. Five minutes after one bell strikes at eight thirty you’ll hear me unlocking the door. Goddard or the captain will be with me, but I’ll come in first. When you see the door start to open, step off the bunk, but support your weight with your hands on the rope until I’m all the way in. I’ll have you cut down in less than five seconds, so there’s no danger.”
“And what about the witness?”
“He won’t have a chance to touch you. I’ll send him for the first-aid kit. He just sees you, that’s all.”
“And the materials for the artwork?”
Lind tapped his pocket. “I have them here, and you can use the mirror to put them on. You know how the bruises look, and the congested face?”
Krasicki smiled coldly. “I have seen many men who danced upon the air, Herr Lind.”
Lind stepped over with his back against the door and appraised the angle of view. He came back to where Krasicki was standing, and pointed upward to the pipe. “I think right there, beside the flange. The witness will see you the second I throw the door open and jump in, but block his view of any details in case you move.”
Krasicki looked up. Lind flipped the rope over his head from behind, tightened it around his throat, and twisted. Krasicki’s eyes appeared to bulge, going wide with horror, and his mouth flew open in a silent scream. Hands clawed futilely at the rope for several seconds, and then dropped with a grotesque flapping motion. His body sagged and went limp. Lind eased him to the deck, but knelt beside him, the big muscles of his shoulders and forearms still corded with the brutal strain on the garrote. The whole thing had been done in total silence, like some ghastly ballet performed without music on a soundproof stage.
And the Deep Blue Sea Page 9
