We stood a few feet away looking down in the terrible silence of all hands. The mutilation was horrible, the bodies broken, the faces all but obliterated. I recognized them chiefly by the differing colors of their hair, woman’s hair. The doc stepped up, knelt, hands moving professionally. Not even needing a shake of the head. I was distantly aware of the Jesuit also kneeling there, of the Sign of the Cross, the murmur of Latin words over them. Then of Girard kneeling, running her fingers in a moment’s caress through the hair of each, seeming to pause a moment to wrap a curl of Talley’s around her finger. I reached down and pulled her away. Without being told to do so, three of the sailors took off their dungaree shirts and placed them over them. Storekeeper Talley; Radioman Amy Walcott—“Ears” to all; Lieutenant (jg) Rollins, anti-submarine warfare officer. No one spoke. No one said it. The men got the bodies onto the stretchers and, taking a considerable time to do it, we carried them over the rocks and managed them, wading, into the boats. No one said it. Not said then, but to be said very soon. Someone was killing off the women.
8
The Plan
We sat alone, Lieutenant Girard and I, in my cabin above the sea, those other customary formal selves of ours—not the woman and the man of the cave—that had dealt so long with problems of ship’s company now presiding.
The days following the discoveries of the bodies of Talley, Walcott, and Rollins had brought over the settlement like darksome clouds many things, in varying portions, one or the other chiefly holding reign at various times, switching about: a great fear, an unutterable rage, a sense of just-suppressed panic, all tangible as are objects one touches. There had been tough sessions in this cabin, differing groups, combinations, present at different times as we drew upon every resource, every idea to get at it, that any hand might have: the doc, Thurlow, Selmon, the Jesuit, Girard, Porterfield, Bixby, Delaney, Preston . . . in time literally every member of ship’s company included in one session or another—and not only for ideas, but for another immensely secretive reason of my own, that one of them being the killer, he might by some betraying gesture, some slip of word, give himself away; a minimum of hope there as to anyone so accomplished thus far in his own secrecy and stealth. A multiplicity of thoughts and explanations held forth. One even that they could have been suicides, women finding out that they were unable to do, or continue doing, what they were asked to do: a thought earlier brought up about Rollins now being applied to all three. The suggestion—from Selmon—had outraged Girard, who had turned fiercely on him. “Jesus-God, that seems to be the party line for all of these women. I won’t have it.” Backed by every single one of the remaining women, in unanimous agreement that there had been not the slightest indication of such a thing from any of the dead women. Even, in discreet sessions with Girard and myself only present, the men assigned to each of the three women and interviewed separately by the two of us further confirming—in discreet language—quite the opposite (in addition, she and I alert in particular for suspects in these). And finally, the doc not present at that session, still performing his autopsies, the matter settled at the next one where he was, in a brief exchange.
Doc: “Rollins had been on those rocks some time. Talley and Walcott more recently. All had been choked first.”
Captain: “Enough so to die before they hit the rocks?”
Doc: “No way to tell.”
An exchange which sent something unspoken but terrible moving through that quiet group of shipmates present.
Various measures proposed to deal with the immediate threat. One struck down fast at the very first meeting: The doc had raised the idea of moving all the women into the empty dormitory.
“You mean stop the Arrangement?” I had said.
“At least temporarily.”
The Jesuit had exploded in a manner unexperienced from him, with an overt rage at the softly proffered proposal.
“What’s going on in the cottages must continue. Has to continue.”
I turned. “Lieutenant Girard?”
We had all looked at her, some absolute air of authority in these matters holding us, compelling us toward her, whatever her decision might be; deferring to her at every turn.
“The chaplain is correct,” she said coldly, and in the tones of command-giving. “To do what the doctor suggests would be to give in to whoever it is. Absolutely not.”
Her having spoken, it was as if that was that. “Very well,” I said. “The Arrangement will continue. Meantime, no woman to go alone on walks.”
I was referring to the walks all of us from time to time took in our ceaseless fascination of exploring the island. “Every woman to be accompanied at all times by an armed man of ship’s company. You will see to that, Mr. Thurlow.”
Looking at the navigator I remembered those highly successful interrogations he had accomplished in the Bixby matter, this rather gentle officer able to get answers from men when something turned obdurate inside him; as had happened now.
“I want every man, every officer questioned, Alex,” I said. “By yourself. And when you’ve gone through them all, start over again. As many times as may be necessary. Understood?”
“Aye, sir,” he said with a sort of grim satisfaction. “Understood.”
Thurlow’s questioning of ship’s company had turned up nothing. He kept at it. A tenseness had settled over our community. Something intolerable; an inner rage felt in oneself, one’s shipmates. A sense of evil having taken up abode amid us. Nevertheless the outer life continuing as before. The settlement battened down . . . waiting.
All of this time I had felt something was gathering, taking shape in Girard, something she was holding back. Now, alone with me, the feeling came true, and the reason. The death of Talley in particular had changed her; though those of Walcott and Rollins also. It was just that the storekeeper had worked directly under her for as long as they both had been aboard the Nathan James. She was a different woman, the sense of a terrible ferocity—brutal, cold, inexorable, almost emotionless—felt just below the surface, sometimes sending a chill even through me; mother lion whose cubs were being snatched away, killed, slaughtered; companion with it, a terrible resolve, felt like a field of force from her, to get whoever it was. Altogether that most dangerous kind of heartbreak and violation, one that never sheds tears.
“Yes, I have a plan,” she said, her voice coming as quietly as ever but a hardness in it that had not been there before. If she had been feminine before, she was now female, cruelly female. “First, I don’t trust anyone. What I want to do . . . If we tell everybody in one of those sessions it will get out, alert him. Anyone could be the killer. The only way to do it is alone. Myself. I don’t trust anyone else. No one.”
“Let’s have it,” I said briskly.
She told it to me. I was appalled, suddenly rock-hard myself.
“You alone? Absolutely not,” I said. “Far too much danger to yourself. I wouldn’t consider it. Aside from that, I can’t imagine whoever it is would show himself on that cliffside again.”
She was relentless. “Maybe not. But maybe so. Arrogance goes with that kind of murder I would think. Or maybe killers do return to the scene of their crimes. Especially that kind of killer. The kind who’s hungry for more.” Her voice came at me like an attack. “We’ve got to do something, for God’s sake. We’ve got to try anything. We can’t just sit here.”
“The other point remains.” My voice meeting hers unbending. “We can’t have you the next one. The answer is no.”
She waited a moment, yielding not an inch; pushed then against the absolute rejection, right through it. Softly, insidiously, this time.
“Then you come along. You’re a marksman, Captain. Like myself.”
I sat silent. She leaned forward a little, moved craftily into that opening.
“Here’s how we do it.”
She laid it out, briskly, precisely; working out the plan to the finest detail; the tactics; the timing. I listened to it with great suspicion. Final
ly she sat back, not just unyielding—demanding.
“Do you come along? Or do I do it some night on my own?”
“You wouldn’t dare. Not against my direct order.”
“Captain, in this matter I don’t give balls about your orders. You try me.”
Something hard and cold as diamonds in her eyes, looking unflinchingly into mine.
“I’ve got to get him. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”
“I’ll come along,” I said.
9
Executioner
Moonlight fell across the cliffs that night. Full moonlight washed the cliffs, fell through the tall trees onto the main dwellings, farther on lanced through stilled branches onto the twenty-six smaller structures housing the women—five of these now vacant. Silence only answered the moon rays, all ship’s company, the island itself, asleep. Or apparently so, though down the cliffs terns awakened in their nests to a quickened rustle in the bush, gave forth their clipped irascible sound at the intrusion, this not being repeated returned to whatever sleep it is that terns enjoy. Silence resumed as a solitary figure stepped from the bushes and stood free of all noisy foliage, stood upon the long naked smooth rock ledge high above the sea; the moonlight defining the figure clearly as that of a woman; wearing Navy dungarees; no cap or hat; moonlight so full as to pick up the very color of the wheat-light woman’s hair.
She sat down upon the ledge, safely back from its plunging brink, hands clasped around drawn-up knees; sat as though in reverie, regarding the sea stretching in a vast glittering plain to distant horizons; moon and unnumbered constellations unloosed in a cloudless sky conspiring with the sea in an offertory of unutterable beauty, infinite loneliness; the woman’s figure seeming all relaxed, calmly poised, whatever tense alertness actually there cloistered. She had done this before. Four nights now, come to the ledge, sat upon it; as though waiting for someone; some unnamed one to come calling upon her; as a woman might wait for a lover.
The vigil kept again, after a while she got up, for some reason took a step or two nearer the edge, looked over the chasm as though pondering it, the awful drop onto the jagged moon-struck rocks far below upon which shipmates, sisters, had fallen and which seemed now to reach longingly high up to her, their shapes actually given a voice by the sea playing on them a metronomic low-pitched rhythm, the only sound in the silent night. She turned back toward the slope that led down from the heights, an air of disappointment conveyed at rendezvous not kept, departing, perhaps to come another time, perhaps to give up once and for all on her wanted visitor; had taken a dozen steps or so across the ledge. Saw him standing there, motionless in the moonlight, a silhouetted shape, perhaps thirty feet down the ledge. Seemed to take a breath, then come perfectly still, motionless as was he. Stood regarding him dispassionately across that space between them.
She must have known that rather delicate figure the very moment I myself did so; crouched in my guard post within the bushes, a fractional moment’s time allotted for the terrible shock of recognition, of identification. Then, instantly, a refusal to accept: Perhaps he himself was out for a stroll on a night so glorious; some wild absurd mistake to imagine that he, a man above all committed to the sanctity of reason, could have committed such acts; that almost frail body surely not even physically capable of doing so, the choking the doc had mentioned; mind insidiously then flashing back to a service record, to a scene on another faraway sea of a young officer hoisting himself with such effortless ease as to elicit a captain’s admiration aboard a French yacht full of the dead: gymnast’s hands, stationary-rings-specialty hands . . . Mind then almost violently coming off of this, again rejecting; waiting for explanation, surely momentarily to come from him, from there: From within my own darkness the scene before me seeming as though cast in daylight by the brilliance of the moon; the long ledge gleaming, the two figures frozen in shadowy tableau, actors on a stage awaiting direction.
Then voices, low but crystalline clear in the windless night, the unearthly hush. His, first, as detached, yes, as reasonable as I had always known it to be in shrewdly explicating some perverse problem facing us, one only he could hope to solve, involving his recondite field; present even now that remote, self-confident tone which had unfailingly carried the assurance that he could deal with the situation, knew precisely what he was up to; now leavened with an almost courtly air; the words themselves, however oblique, ghastly certifying what one could not believe.
“Lieutenant Girard. I wouldn’t have hoped for yourself.”
Like a heart-quake, an instant of unbearable sadness and despair deeper than any known pain that the same young officer who stood there . . . without him and his skills, exercised often with heedless courage, seeking out the very air we could breathe, we would never have made it, none of us would be here. Then that was swept away by the urgency of concentration on the arranged tactics; body prepared to move instantly from those bushes; right hand reaching stealthily down to unfix the safety catch on the .45 caliber, hand remaining on the cool metal; waiting, unstirring, breathing itself kept down. With a relief seeing that he stood between the cliff’s edge and herself, myself a good deal closer to her than was he. Calculating: not quite at point-blank range for such a close-up gun, I would prefer him a step or two closer. Then the words from her heard after a pause, as though at some remarkable wonder; identity not enough, some puzzle that she still wished to solve, riddle to unravel; her voice as low as his but no reasonableness at all in it, rather a vast perplexity, laced with a strange cruelty.
“You intend to get us all?”
If she wished to elicit, he seemed all ready to supply answers: an old habit. To supply even a history. I could almost feel the soft unseen smile. Then hear the familiar mild loftiness.
“Actually, the undertaking began in that passage through the dark and the cold. The three women . . .”
A catch of breath from her, the felt surprise.
“You mean . . . Salinas, Kramer, Stoughton.” She said their names, shipmates long since gone, resurrecting their memories.
“They were the easiest. After all, men were going over the side with some frequency.” His voice uninfected, routine . . . rational; entirely unreluctant at the revelations; even, now, the faintest touch of vanity in it. “I believe I can say that no one ever suspected.”
“No one did.” A kind of mordant bitterness in hers. Proceeding, as though wishing, for some reason unknown, to extract confession from him, perhaps to make sure of each beyond all doubt, a prosecutor not content with one count of murder, or with three, but wanting the last one.
“Then the first one of the island? Austin. What did you do with her?”
“I buried her in a cave,” said matter-of-factly.
“Dillon?”
“Her also.”
“You killed the woman you were sleeping with.”
“What does that have to do with it? Just screwing.”
“Then the three more here. Talley . . . Walcott . . . Rollins. Over this cliff,” she said. The first dim savage intention in her voice. “Onto those rocks down there.”
At that, as if for the first time affected by this orderly recall of the sequence of events, or by the reference to the immediacy of scene of the most recent ones, he took a couple of steps toward her. I rose slightly in the bush, myself as much at hair-trigger as the weapon where my hand rested. I was astonished to hear her, still standing her ground, continue this dialogue, in her voice now a tone of curiosity, lethal curiosity I was beginning to feel . . . Myself hesitating, somewhat baffled, beginning to be fearful for her safety. Then seeing perhaps her purpose, as he came to a halt: to make him do so. Perhaps, I thought, with the intention also of bringing him step by step nearer to me. Holding back, trusting in her decision as to the necessity of what she was up to. She, as if she vitally required further information still; he, as before, recovered quickly, quite willing to reply with impeccable elucidation to any questions she might have; her continuing the interro
gation now, pressing harder, more relentlessly.
“Why, in God’s name?”
He had stopped his advance, as if, as always, fascinated himself by any abstruse matter, challenging the intellect, any in the higher realm, and glad in particular that she had asked that question, as if justifiability was the easiest part of all.
“Plain enough.” I could sense the shrug. “What we had seen. Seen on the beaches of Italy. Those creatures at Amalfi—seen what my own specialty had done to them. Africa. Seen in the Kenya bush. Seen India, seen black sooty skies, night at noonday . . . All that aggrandizement of horrors, don’t you remember? The unendingness of it, the perfection of the job man had done! Done coldly, almost carelessly. Yes, I think that puts it accurately—or as much so as I can rightly convey.” It was as if he were questioning himself, trying as always to accomplish his prided precision. “I simply came to know that anyone who had managed to do all that didn’t have the slightest claim to continue. Shouldn’t continue. Even for his own sake, don’t you know? Something so elementally deviant, warped, in him; some deep, irreparable fissure in his psyche. Doesn’t belong here. Not constructed quite right for this world. In all of creation the only evil thing. The only one to destroy for the sake of it. Much better for him to go. Give some other species a chance—couldn’t possibly do worse. Mutatis mutandis.”
He spoke in tones of earnest persuasion, as if it were important to him to convince her of the inescapable logic of both his decision and his actions.
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