by Paul Gallico
Rogo unclipped the suspenders that held up his evening dress trousers. The trousers sagged onto his hips. He had wanted to wear a belt but Linda had insisted on suspenders. It was the last favor the poor kid had done him and even then she had said she would not go to dinner with him looking like the garbage man. Funny, he thought, now it might save his life. You never know, you just never know. His trousers began to slide down and he grabbed them and cursed with clinical fluency in the darkness.
The bizarre effects of the inversion of the Poseidon were nowhere more ludicrously dramatic than in the hairdressing salon. Hely’s light revealed an extraordinary world of familiar objects made suddenly strange. The large, thickly padded chairs hanging from their elegant chromium-plated stalks. From the hand-basins, also still in position, the plugs dangling foolishly on their chains. The floor was buried in piles of wigs, hairnets, curlers, bottles, lotions, shampoos, combs, and brushes.
Jason was examining the room for possibilities. “Yeah, this will do,” he said. “The problem is, I can fix a trap okay, but how do we get the rat to walk in?”
“How do you mean?” Hely was checking the details of their surroundings.
“Well,” he explained, “he’s going to come through that door pretty warily even if we aren’t armed. And if he sees me before I zap him . . .” He turned his index finger into a gun barrel.
Hely said, “I can make him walk into your trap.”
He looked puzzled. “How?”
“The oldest way in the world.” Hely drew down the zip on the front of her wet suit. It fell apart. Her bared body glowed in the gray shadows. “It might take his mind off things for a minute.”
Jason slipped his hands inside the opened jacket and felt the taut bow of her back curve in his hands. She was like a coiled spring, and her body kicked in his hands as she moved against him. She angled her moving mouth against his. Then she leaned back to focus on his face.
“Right from the start I knew I wanted you,” she said. “I saw something in you. Rogo saw it, that’s why he is nervous of you. You and that tiger, that was the bravest thing I have ever seen in my life. Want me, Jason, please want me too.”
“You sure as hell pick some funny places to turn a guy on.” There was none of the usual flippancy in his tone. “Yes, I do want you, Hely. We’re the same kind of people. We’re special people. You and me, we’re going to be alone together.”
It was the rare compact between two solitary people who had never known the passive emotion of need. They simply saw and took, with the mutual recognition of champions meeting. His hands on her back, their words sealed an understanding made in the shadow of death.
But Hely could not forget the purse on her belt. In it were the rings and other jewelry that might betray her. She had to find out if Jason was ruthless as well as strong. His tough handling of the policeman indicated he was no great respecter of law and order. But the sharpness of his detestation for Bela appeared to reflect some deeply held principles. Hely had to know.
“You could have made a deal with Bela,” she said. “Why didn’t you? Is it because he kills for money?”
His arms held her loosely. His face crinkled into a grin. “No, not really. I don’t care too much about what the world calls moral anymore. I used to, believe me. But world morality once called me a hero, then made me a killer and despised me for it. Morality’s like the weather. Don’t ever count on it.”
Her hands lightly stroked his face. “I don’t understand,” she said still searching.
His eyes went over her head and there was an old remembered hurt in them. “Vietnam? Okay? They sent me out there. To fight for freedom, to kill the baddies in the black hats and run the outlaws out of town. I did. Then they decided the guys in black hats weren’t such baddies after all, gave them the town, and my status sort of shifted from hero to murderer in one go.”
Hely began to see. She asked, “Does it matter what people think?”
His voice had a dreary distant note. “No, I don’t suppose so. But it matters what I think of me. I shot up a helluva lot of those little brown guys out there because I thought they were the killers. Now everyone says they were nice, home-loving, tax-paying citizens who just wanted to run their own country their own way. So what do I do? Give the kiss of life to all the ones I killed? And me, I’m one of those kinda friendly fellas, you know. I got to know one of them real well. Used to go for a beer with him. Taught him how to play poker. Met his family. He was a great little guy. When he used to worry about what would happen, I’d say ‘Don’t worry, Uncle Sam’s right behind you on this one. We’ll see you through.’ The day we quit I went out on a chopper. I could see him in the crowd, that little brown face round like a coin. He was watching. He didn’t wave or beg to come or call me a traitor, but I knew all those things just the same. We left him. Correction: I left him. The Cong were bound to get him. I see that face a lot when I close my eyes.”
She was talking to an honest man. The cold realization struck through the heat of her emotion for him. Hely knew he must never find out about the contents of the purse. He could never accept it. Whatever he was doing now, however illegal, it could surely never encompass her sort of life. But it would be all right. He would never know.
“What about me?” It was Hely’s last question. “You don’t know anything about me. I could be another Bela. I could be a robber or a killer or a whore.”
Amusement lit up his eyes. “You know what they say, even if you’ve never seen gold before you’ll know it when you clap eyes on it. You’re gold.”
She kissed him again, this time quite demurely, and knew she was safe.
The voices down the corridor of Broadway carried to them. “Quick!” Jason snapped. “You know what to do. You hook ’em, I’ll bop ’em.”
The proprietor of the haberdashery store in Anaheim was exceedingly upset. Martin stood in the doorway of the ship’s library and tried to assess the wreckage in the poor light, and considered how unfairly the world treated him. The wreckage was complete. When the ship turned turtle, and in the subsequent movements, the shelves which would once have lined the room tidily had been flung all over what was once the ceiling. Books were scattered everywhere. They were piled in soaking mounds. There were chairs and tables, some splintered and broken. One bookcase, inexplicably, had survived almost intact. A few stubborn screws still held it against a wall, retaining virtually all its load of books. It looked incongruously neat in that scene of anarchy.
“We should be okay here,” said Martin, leading in Coby and her father.
It was, he thought, an insult. Whenever there was danger of any kind, he was always placed among the noncombatants, with the old men and the women. He was as brave as any of them. Rogo had been more afraid of the tiger than he had. He would have stood up to Bela just as gallantly as the others, given the chance. But they always put him at the back. It was the humiliating course of his life yet again. Poor little James! Don’t play with the rough boys, James. You’re too little for the football team, James. Don’t argue, he’s bigger than you, James. All his life he had had sand kicked in his face, and now they were doing it again. They had packed him off with the peaceful Dutchman and the young girl and told him to hide until it was all over. He was angry and, as usual, no one had even noticed.
He had shepherded Klaas and the girl along Broadway until they met the water. They had almost walked into it. This was where the sea took over and lay still, quiet, evil, waiting to claim the rest of the ship. Then he had led them back to the first room that was clear of the water. They must be, he judged, about seventy yards further down into the ship than Rogo and Jason. Well, he had done as he had been told. He had found them a refuge.
The girl’s fingers were locked around his arm. She was very pretty, he thought. He felt her fingers almost encircle his arm, and again the pain of the insult came back to him. She could hardly have spanned Rogo’s arm with both her hands. And he had seen the way her eyes hung on Jason. No one had ever
looked at James Martin like that. He patted her fingers and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll look after you.” It sounded quite manly.
Her fingers squeezed him. “Thank you,” she said. “I know that Jason is going to get us all out of this mess. Don’t you think he is an extraordinary man?”
A lifetime’s secret resentment burned in him against all the Jasons he had known. “I wouldn’t be too sure about him, miss. We don’t even know why he came here. I certainly wouldn’t want to rely on a person like him. He looks like a crook to me.”
“Oh no!” Coby was aghast. “No, no. He saved us back there, didn’t he?”
Martin knew he would regret it even as he delivered the words. But not even his sense of shame could prevent it. “I think he was more interested in saving that blonde, and I guess we all know why.”
Little girl protest matured swiftly into grown woman’s spite. “If you mean,” said Coby, “that she’s been chasing him since the minute she set eyes on him, then . . .”
The first scream chopped her off in midstream. It was high and shrill, sustained on one note until it faded for lack of breath. It was followed by a second, then a third. It was a scream of complete madness. There was no mind directing the noise. It was coming from inside the library.
THE TRAPS
9
Captain Bela looked with great distaste at the gray crescent of oil which marked his cuff. It was messy. The whole operation had become messy. Captain Bela, who always liked to boast that his work was like his cuffs, clean and impeccable, was irritated that neither appeared to be so at that moment.
He was standing in the hold. The beam from his torch showed quite clearly the prize which had drawn him to the Poseidon, but the moment of triumph was marred. The packing cases, strongly nailed and wired together, had almost all survived the buffetings of the ship. One, thrown on its end in the corner behind the door, had smashed open, and through the splinters of wood had fallen several ingots of gold. Bela picked one up in his left hand. It took the light from the flash and turned into a soft mellow flame. It was so small and slim, like a bar of chocolate. Stamped in the metal were the words “one kilo gold” and yet it must be worth four thousand dollars. And there also printed into the metal the famous “four nines”—999.9. Even gold itself was not complete perfection, Bela thought. But he knew it had a magic that lay beyond its dimension and value. Gold, he thought, was like a woman. You could set down on paper all her attributes, but you could not measure the power of her beauty. Gold and women: the incalculables, the immeasurables, the currency of power.
He kept the bar in his hand as he headed back towards the square of blue sky where his men had cut through into the ship. The gold was there for the taking, without a doubt. Most of it would be returned to his employers in Athens, and he would be handsomely rewarded for his efficiency and silence. But since no one would dare risk arguing about it, Captain Bela felt that several of the bars would be lost, and his Swiss bank account show a surprising improvement.
He used the knuckles of his flashlight hand to balance as he stepped over the smashed chunks of metal, softly cursing the sheer untidiness of the whole business. It was, he thought, the tragedy of the Western countries that they failed even to understand the crude laws on which they constructed their own philosophies. They could not even grasp the cornerstone of their own childish ethic: the market price. This had been a case in point. Jason held a reasonable bargaining position: Bela had offered him the price that situation required. But the American had then reacted on some irrational impulse that had thrown the whole thing into confusion. Jason was a romantic, and Bela cursed his own stupidity for trying to deal with him. Those people always introduced purely subjective emotions into what was a straightforward business transaction. They were unpredictable. And yet, Bela sighed, the Americans were supposed to be the great capitalists who understood the disciplines of trade.
He should not have been surprised. He had heard of Jason’s work around the Mediterranean and he should have recognized the unprincipled actions of a woolly-minded romantic. He seemed to sail in and out of the law as much as Bela. His work certainly seemed as dangerous. But whereas he, Bela, worked to a clear set of rules that were governed by the market price, Jason did not.
Bela had first come across him when the Komarevo had been taking Greek Cypriots off the island at the time of the Turkish invasion. There were people who needed to move quickly and quietly, there were arms shipments. Some men who had paid for deliverance saw Bela’s smile as he took a second payment, and handed them over to their enemies. That was business. Jason too had been moving people and guns, but often, by all accounts, without any reward at all. It caused confusion. It spoiled the market for professional men like Bela. It was inefficient. Jason was an American and could have no interest, either personal or political, in the squalid lives of those who could not manage their affairs properly. There were other stories, too, of the blond American taking a hand in the illicit commerce of the seas, stories of bravery and daring, and Captain Bela knew that he was a man who was respected. A capitalist who worked at a loss—no wonder the West was cracking!
Bela slid the flat ingot onto a shelf formed by a shattered catwalk beside the rope ladder. That one bar would pay his tailor’s bills for a while. But for the moment he must impose some order on this business. He had made mistakes, and he must correct them urgently. He should never have been tempted to reason with Jason. He should have killed him immediately. True, Jason did have many friends, and perhaps Bela would have to slip behind the Iron Curtain and endure that spartan life for a little while. That would be an inconvenience, but Jason must die. So too must the policeman. That was clearly agreed in his contract.
His other mistake was in losing his temper. Bela never lost his temper. That was his finest quality. He held on to his composure and kept his wits clear. This time, for once, he had failed, and it irked him. Perhaps it was Jason’s bantering tone, perhaps that obdurate policeman, perhaps it was the shock of the tiger or the stupidity of that old man holding a gun on him. Whatever the accumulation of motives, he had quite lost control when he saw them escaping into the rest of the ship, and had screamed at Anton and the others to catch them. He could have left them to sink with the ship, as it surely must soon, or killed them as they tried to return. There had been no need to take the risk of hunting them. Still, Anton and his crew were highly professional, and Jason’s ragbag friends were not armed; they should be able to clear the matter up easily.
Very well, he thought. There were now only two considerations. First, the gold must be moved. He must have ten or twelve men from the Komarevo to transport the bars back to his vessel as quickly as possible. And they must be properly armed to deal with Jason and the rest if any of them escaped Anton. Too much time had been lost already.
A light smile appeared on his slim, intelligent features. Despite the difficulties, he had clarified the problem quite simply. He scaled the rope ladder with deft, quick steps, and was giving out orders to the man in the pinnace even as he swung a leg over the top. It was all falling neatly into place again. The smile vanished. A button had been torn off his blazer.
Half running, half climbing, bumping and clawing their way, Anton and the two other gunmen sped as best they could over the unhelpful wreckage of the boiler room. They had been whipped into action by Bela’s shouts of rage—“After them, you oafs! Kill them! What are you, little girls?” They had never before seen the captain in such a fury and it had sent them tumbling down the companionway and on into the ship as fast as they could.
Anton was worried. It was apparent even to him that things were not going to plan, and now it was confirmed by Captain Bela’s rage. He was the first to the open door at the opposite end of the boiler room and he paused, panting, to shine his light down into the corridor which lay in front. His nose was bleeding. He had an ache in his stomach. His toe hurt. The policeman had tricked him. Anton had not had any games with him. He thought with warm pleasure of the e
njoyment he would have when he caught the little policeman and twisted his body. He would enjoy hearing the policeman scream.
It took him several seconds to realize that the scream he was hearing was real, and not the one in his daydreams. It was a long, high wail, followed by two more, and it came from down at the far end of the corridor, well beyond the vague shapes of the walls and doors he could see in his light. It must be one of those two girls. They must be hiding right down there at the bottom. Anton wanted to be the first to find them, simply for the pleasure of it, and for the reward of Captain Bela’s smile.
