Dead calm

by Charles Williams

  It was sickening. It was impossible. Why was she even thinking about the thing? And there was no use trying to threaten him with it. You couldn’t threaten a madman.

  She looked down then and saw she still had the marlinspike in her hand. It was over a foot long, of heavy bright steel, gently tapering from one thick end to a point at the other—the classic weapon, she knew from the sea stories she’d read, of the bucko mates of nineteenth-century square-riggers driving their crews around the Horn. She’d never be able to hit him with it from in front, but suppose she could get behind him?

  She might. His reactions were unpredictable, of course, but there seemed a chance he wouldn’t attack her out of hand if she came on deck, at least as long as she didn’t appear to be trying to interfere with him. And he’d turned his back on her before. But that was before she’d tried to sabotage the engine, she thought; he’d be suspicious of her now. Well, she could look out the companion hatch and see how he reacted before she went too far.

  There was another thing, too, she thought with growing excitement: once behind him, she could take a quick look into the binnacle and see what course he was steering. That would do away with all the trouble and possible inaccuracies of this other way.

  The marlinspike would have to be well concealed, but still where it could be withdrawn swiftly and without catching on anything. She experimented. After pulling up the bottom of her blouse, she shoved it into the waistband of the Bermuda shorts and down the outside of her left thigh. But the shorts were a snug fit in this area, and it showed when she walked. She moved it around in front of the hip, where it angled down the hollow of her groin to the inside of the thigh. It had passed inside her nylon briefs, and the steel had a cold and alien feel against her skin. That was better as far as concealment was concerned, but she was aware now of the error of having it inside the shorts at all. When she withdrew it, she had it by the wrong end. The place for it was inside the blouse, which was looser anyway. With the heavy end caught under her arm and only the point inside the waistband, it lifted out easily and quickly and was held just right to swing. Conscious of the extreme shallowness of her breathing, she slid back the bolt and opened the door.

  She crossed the after cabin, mounted the first step of the ladder, and peered cautiously out. Her head was still below the level of the deckhouse, but she could see him—or rather, she could see his head and the naked shoulders. He was seated behind the wheel, staring into the binnacle.

  He still hadn’t looked up, and she had no intention of venturing farther into his territory until he’d seen her and she could assess his reaction. From here she could still make it back to safety before he could get out from behind the wheel and catch her, but going too far would be like misjudging the length of chain by which some dangerous wild animal was secured. She waited, thinking of this and conscious of the incongruity or even the utter madness of the simile. Dangerous? This nice, well-mannered, unbelievably handsome boy who might have stepped right out of a mother’s dream? That was the horror of it, she thought. Conscious evil or malicious intent you could at least communicate with, but Warriner was capable of destroying her with the pointlessness and the perfect innocence of a falling safe, and with its same imperviousness to argument.

  He glanced up then and saw her. He smiled in evident pleasure and said something she couldn’t hear above the noise of the engine. It might be a trick, of course, to entice her within range, but she had to risk it. She went up the ladder, trying to hold her arm as naturally as possible while it clamped the end of the marlinspike inside her blouse. The sea was still like glass, aside from the long undulations of the swell, and after the dimness below she was dazzled for a moment by the shimmering glow of sunlight reflected from it. She stepped out onto the narrow strip of deck along the starboard side of the cockpit, very scared now and pretending to look aft along their wake as though searching for the other boat. Slowly, she thought; stop a minute, and then another step or two, and don’t try to smile; that would be too phony—

  “No,” he said. “Sit down there.” He indicated the starboard cockpit seat and then added, “Where I can see you.”

  It was impossible to tell by his tone or manner whether he suspected her of something, but she hesitated only a second. She didn’t have to go all the way back at once, and it would never do to argue with him. “Why?” she asked, but she sat down, some two or three feet forward of the binnacle and the wheel, with her left arm falling naturally at her side.

  “Because your face fascinates me,” he said, tilting his head slightly to the left and leaning over the wheel to view it better. “You have no idea what a study it would have made the way you were looking up and out at me like some hesitant naiad from a grotto—no. Naiads were Greek. You’re Scandinavian.”

  “Partly,” she managed to say. She didn’t even know whether he’d meant it as a question or not.

  “Oh, definitely Scandinavian. Under your clothes you’re probably as blond as snow.” He smiled, as though to reassure her that at their level of sophistication there was nothing tendentious in this discussion of her private blondness. “But it was your face we were talking about, the magnificent bone structure. Do you know you’ll still be a beautiful woman when you’re eighty? I’m speaking as a professional. I’m a painter, and painters always approach a face from the other side, to see what’s holding it up. Those high cheekbones and the tilted eyes are racial, of course; people say Slavic, or Tartar, or a half-dozen other things, but to me they’re always Scandinavian. If they came out of western or central Asia it must have been along the Arctic Circle…”

  He was still too far away to hit, even if he should happen to turn his head. For a moment she saw the whole scene with a sort of wondering horror—a civilized woman of the twentieth century, sitting here with the marlinspike of the Cape Stiff bully-boys secreted against her flesh between her nylon panties and her bra, listening while this handsome boy who was murdering her husband as surely as if he’d used a gun discussed with such charm and evident admiration the structure of her face. How much more of it could she stand? The point of no return was sunset, and if she was still alive then she’d be as mad as he was.

  It wasn’t that she couldn’t do anything, she thought, trying to isolate or identify the ultimate nightmare quality of it; she wasn’t tied, or locked up, or even openly threatened, and there was nothing to stop her now from leaping across that narrow space with the marlinspike aswing—nothing except that it might fail, and one chance was all she was going to get. It always came back to that. She had a life expectancy of just one more unsuccessful attempt to stop him, and then John would drown.

  Then was she already becoming paralyzed with indecision, like a boy with only one dime in a candy store, unable to make up his mind until the store had already closed and he was out on the sidewalk? She didn’t know, but she could see it coming. The stakes were too high, the pressure too brutal. Nobody was equipped to hold entirely in his hands the life of the person he loved above everything else on earth—no, not even in his hands, but poised like an egg on the back of one of them as though for an obstacle race in some macabre party game. Not even professionals, she thought; the surgeon called in another surgeon when the life of his own child was at stake.

  10

  But when he was quiet like this—if not rational, at least for the moment not in the seizure of that torment or terror—why in God’s name couldn’t she get through to him? It was obvious at a glance what kind of boy he was, and the way he’d been brought up; he’d open doors for you, give you his seat on a bus, or bring you a drink at a cocktail party. And while she suspected there might not be any great strength in him, there was no doubt he was educated, civilized, and probably incapable of deliberate evil or pointless cruelty until this thing, whatever it was, had happened to him. Then why wasn’t she able to reach in past the snarled wire-ends of his broken lines of communication and make contact with him, get him to realize what he was doing?

  Maybe she h
adn’t tried hard enough. Or she’d tried in the wrong way; she’d been half hysterical herself, and she’d screamed at him. And then she’d talked down to him, as though it were a recognized fact between them there was something wrong with his mind. Of course, she’d known the error of this the moment it was done, but it was too late to correct.

  Anyway, try once more, she thought, and with a better approach; see if you can’t establish some kind of contact before even bringing up the subject of going back. Get him to talk about himself? No-o. She hated to throw out the oldest weapon in the arsenal, but there she’d be flirting with the very danger she had to avoid, any reminder of the horror he was fleeing. The past, maybe, but stay away from the voyage; whatever it was happened at sea. Talk about painting, even if you don’t know much about it, talk about yourself. That was it, she thought; if she could establish an identity he could recognize, first merely as a woman who was friendly and sympathetic, and then as one he could help in some way, she might penetrate the insularity of breakdown and get through, at least temporarily, to the old behavior patterns. God, if she could only get him to pick up the phone.

  “… it’s an overworked word,” he was saying, “but definitely valid here. I know I could feel it.”

  She came back with a start. Was he still talking about her face? “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I missed that. What was it?”

  “Empathy,” he replied. “Sometimes you meet people you’re in full conversation with before a word has ever been said. It was that way when I first saw you. Oh, I don’t mean the sex thing—though God knows you have plenty of that.” Again his smile included her among the mature and the intelligent. He glanced into the compass and then back at her, leaning over the wheel. “I knew we’d like each other. I knew I could talk to you, and neither of us would need an interpreter. But I don’t even know your first name yet.”

  “It’s Rae,” she said. It was starting out beautifully; he was doing it himself. There were cigarettes and a lighter in the right-hand pocket of the Bermuda shorts. She took them out and tried to light one. In the six-knot breeze of their passage, it didn’t take too much acting ability to fail three times in succession.

  “Here, let me,” he offered.

  He lit the cigarette for her and passed it back, and lit one for himself. Good, she thought; one conditioned response might lead to another, and then another… Then it occurred to her she could be oversimplifying just a little the labyrinthine complexities of modern psychiatry; if doctors spent lifetimes trying to find out why a mind went off the rails and how to get it back, there seemed a chance it wasn’t quite that easy. But at least she was doing something. Saracen heaved up and swayed, quartering the long groundswell. Sunlight shattered into golden points of fire in his hair, and the fine gray eyes were alight with interest as they continued to search her face. She tried not to remember the way they’d looked when he was strangling her.

  “Thank you, Hughie,” she said simply. Don’t overdo it; don’t gush.

  “Je vous en prie, madame.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.” She was about to add that John was teaching her Spanish, but didn’t. Probably it was best to keep John out of it until she had some kind of bridge across the gap.

  “I detect just a trace of Southern accent, I think. From where?”

  “Texas,” she replied.

  “Oil?”

  She shook her head. “Every area has its slum dwellers. There are Texans who don’t own oil wells.”

  “See, I knew we’d like each other.” Then he added, “I’m from Mississippi. Or was originally.” He explained briefly he’d gone to school in Switzerland and spent most of his life in Europe.

  “Are your parents still there?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “My mother’s dead. She died six years ago.”

  “I’m sorry. But your father is still living?”

  The change in him was startling, attuned as she was to every nuance of his expression. “No!” he said loudly. “I mean—I don’t know!” Agitation was evident in his eyes, and she could sense his desperate groping through the mists in back of them.

  Then he appeared to regain control. “I mean, I haven’t seen him for years. He still lives in Mississippi, and we never write to each other.”

  She breathed softly. That had been close. It was obvious she’d made a mistake, but she couldn’t understand where or how. Surely his father hadn’t been on the boat. Pretend you didn’t see it, she told herself, and change the subject, fast.

  But he had already fully recovered, as though it had never happened. He smiled at her and said, “Never mind me; you still haven’t told me anything about yourself. Except that you’re from Texas, which you’ll admit yourself is trite. When they get to the moon, they’ll find out there’s not only a Texan there, but he’s already bought it, air-conditioned it, and organized a local chapter of the John Birch Society. I could tell you more than that about yourself, just for a start. The chances are you weren’t an only child; you had a very good orthodontist when you were young, or ancestors with exceptional teeth; you’re warmhearted, and you have a great deal of sympathy and understanding, but you’re impulsive; and status probably means little or nothing to you. All surface, of course, and some guesswork. So you take it. Tell me what the leopard was looking for on the slopes of Kilimanjaro.” His gesture included all the vast and empty Pacific. “Just a parking place, or did he hear music?”

  And the leopard was dead, she thought. But more immediately, that lightning reversal of mood was ominous; even when he was like this, he was further from reality than she’d believed. Well, you still had to try.

  “He heard music,” she said. “Perhaps not very good music, and maybe even sentimental, or trite. But he also saw something up there.”

  “What?” he asked. “Samarkand? A trail disappearing into the mist? Not the edge of a map, because maps don’t have edges any more. They just say continued on E-12.”

  “No,” she said. “What he saw was simply another leopard listening to the same thing. A rather handsome leopard in a furry and beat-up sort of way, with the same odd taste for Mickey Mouse music and listening to it in strange places. It was like this.”

  She didn’t like doing it; revealing herself this way to a stranger was too much like filling out a Kinsey questionnaire or undressing in public, but, weighed against any possible chance of success, the cost was small. She took a puff on her cigarette and wondered where to begin. Anywhere, she thought, just so you make him see you.

  “One night about a year ago a man came to the hotel where I was registered in Miami, Florida. He was a curt, rather hardbitten sort of man with too much arrogance and a slight limp, and I didn’t think I liked him. And apparently it was mutual; he didn’t seem to think too highly of me. I did believe he was honest, though, which was important in the particular circumstances. And the reason I thought he was honest was that anybody that disagreeable and that indifferent to the impression he made on other people almost had to be.

  “The reason for our being there—for my being in Miami at all, and for his being in my hotel room—was a yacht, a big two-masted schooner named Dragoon. It was mine—or had been. It also had quite a bit to do with the lack of friendliness in the meeting. In the first place, there was probably a sensed difference of attitude as to what a sailing yacht really was. To me it was just a piece of property, like a parcel of land or a stock certificate, that I happened to own, mostly by accident, and which I’d been aboard only once in the two years I had owned it. To him a boat—a good one—represented something else. But besides this, and much more important, was the fact Dragoon had just been stolen, and he was suspected by the police of having helped to steal it. They’d picked him up and questioned him, and then released him because they didn’t have any actual proof, not enough to hold him. I gathered from the police they’d had a difficult time with him; he wasn’t a man who took kindly to being called a thief.

  “But first maybe I’d bette
r explain how I happened to own a two-masted sailing yacht in the first place, since I cared nothing at all about boats then. I was a widow, and not even a wealthy one—just a lonely one. I’d been married for a long time and very happily to a quiet and gentle man who was also one of the coldest-nerved and most fantastic gamblers I’ve ever known. His name was Chris Osborne, and I suppose you’d say he was in the real-estate business, though real-estate speculation would be more like it. By the time he was forty-five he’d already made and lost several fortunes. I’d been his secretary before we were married, but even with that edge I don’t think I was ever sure at any given moment whether we were very well off or in debt. Not that it mattered a great deal. Without any children—” She couldn’t bring herself to mention the son who’d died. To a boy as young as Warriner it would mean very little anyway, and there had to be a limit somewhere to the coin you were willing to spend to get his attention. “Without any children to leave it to, I could never see any point in piling up money you didn’t need. We were happy, which was the thing that counted. Except that of course he was away a lot. I wasn’t much good at the social routine, because I’d worked most of my life, and women from better backgrounds and expensive schools could always make me feel awkward and put me on the defensive—I mean the ones who wanted to. So I had a business of my own, just for something to do when he was away, a small sports-car agency. But none of that’s important.

  “Chris was killed three years ago. He’d gone out to Lubbock to look at a cattle ranch he was interested in, and the plane he was flying went out of control in a thunderstorm and crashed. I won’t burden you with what it’s like becoming a widow just by picking up the telephone, but it’s one of those things you get through some way, then and afterward. It took nearly two years to straighten out his business affairs. He was overextended again and pretty thinly financed on several deals he was working on, and there was a tax case pending with the Internal Revenue Service. There wasn’t a great deal left in the end, but I worked it out as well as I could. And it was something to do.