“Betsy brought you my note?”
“Yes, Kirby.”
“And you talked to her?”
“All night, just about. She kept trying to make me remember things about your uncle. She thinks there’s something special hidden. I don’t have it. I don’t even know what it is. Your uncle was a very unusual man. He was so smart, Kirby, he didn’t need any special kind of thing. His great mind was enough. I did just as he told me to do, and no matter what they do to me, I’ll never, never—”
“I understand your loyalty, Wilma. Out of that loyalty could you be denying the existence of something you know exists somewhere?”
“I swear I’m not, Kirby. I swear it. She told me where you were. Why would you hide in the apartment of a cheap person like that, Kirby?”
“As I don’t know the man, I’m not ready to pass judgment.”
“Would that be how you met this trashy girl? Who is this girl, Kirby?”
“Bonny Lee is a good fr—excuse me. Bonny Lee is a girl I am in love with.”
“Oh dear,” Wilma said.
Bonny Lee winked at Kirby. “Y’almost flunked out, friend.”
“That was a lie, wasn’t it?” Wilma asked in an almost inaudible tone. “When you told me you were frightened of women. You were saving my face, weren’t you? How you must have laughed after you got away from me!”
“I told you the truth. I ran in pure panic, Wilma.”
“But right now you seem—different. You don’t seem scared of anything in the world—anything.”
“I’m scared of a lot of things.”
“But he’s gettin’ right brassy around the broads lately,” Bonny Lee said and giggled at Kirby’s look of annoyance. “I hear tell he undressed one right on a public beach. Din’ even know her name.”
Wilma looked horrified. “Kirby! Are you well?”
“I’m perfectly all right,” he said angrily.
“Didn’t she struggle?”
“Poor dear little thang couldn’ move a muscle,” Bonny Lee said.
“Please, Bonny Lee! Please.”
“Sure, sugar. I’ll be good.”
“Wilma, have you been keeping track of the news reports?”
“I think I heard it all, but parts of it I can’t remember very clearly. About that yacht and your things being on it, and about you escaping from those policemen this morning, and taking their guns. It just—didn’t sound like you.”
“When did Betsy leave here?”
“Very early. She said she was going to go race a bluff. That doesn’t sound quite right. Run a bluff? Yes, that was it. But the expression is unfamiliar.”
“I guess you must realize her bluff didn’t work.”
“I don’t understand what happened. I guess it was almost three hours later when those sailors got here. They rang the bell properly, so I assumed it was Roger or you or even Betsy coming back. They forced their way in. They seemed quite—cordial in a rather unpleasant way. When I started to be severe with them, Rene, he’s the big one, but I didn’t know his name then, smiled and took my wrist and turned it slowly until I was finally down on my knees with my face against the carpet. It was absolute agony. My arm still feels odd, you know. Then I knew I had better go along quietly. I couldn’t understand who they were. I was afraid they were some thieves who had hurt Roger and made him tell where they could find me, and then they were going to force me to reveal the location of that money, that absurd money that’s all gone. But I gathered they were taking me to a yacht, the yacht they worked on, and that Betsy was there waiting for me. They made me sit on the floor in front with my head back under the dash. It was very hot and dirty and uncomfortable. Then suddenly something was very wrong. They became cross with me and with each other, and they argued about what to do and then they came back here. From what they said, I gathered the boat had left without them. They were most surly and rather apprehensive until at last we heard the news about the yacht. But they said Betsy had been taken ill. She seemed a very tense and excitable person, but I did not guess she was close to having a breakdown.”
“Sis,” Bonny Lee said, “you kill me. You really do. Those bassars grabbed that Betsy girl and took her onto that boat and hurt her until she said where they could find you and find Kirby here, and made Kirby promise to come on account of being maybe able to help Betsy and to keep them from doing you like they done her. This thing you don’t know what it is, they want it bad.”
Wilma stared solemnly at Bonny Lee. “Hurt her?”
“Sweetie, of a Saturday night in the wrong part of New Orleans, you can get you crippled for a lifetime for a cruddy seven bucks, so why should this make you bug your eyes? Where you been livin’?”
“This is terrible!” Wilma said. “Your uncle would have agreed, Kirby. We must find out what it is they want and see that they get it, or prove to them no such thing exists.”
Bonny Lee gave a laugh of derision. “We know what they want, and they don’t get it.”
“What is it?” Wilma demanded.
“Bonny Lee!” Kirby said warningly.
“No sweat, sugar. Even if I wanted to tell her, she just isn’t ready yet and I can lay odds she never will be. What’ll we do now?”
“Get her out of here.”
“But where? Oh. My place. Hells bells. At least it’s the one address those people don’t know already.”
Wilma stared at Kirby, her unpainted lips parted. “Did you—overpower those two sailors, Kirby?”
“Watch it, Winter,” Bonny Lee said. She turned to Wilma. “Sweetie, you don’t drink so good.”
Wilma flushed. “It seems that I just—I just stopped giving a damn about anything. Life had become too confusing to be endurable.”
“Surprise hell out of you, sis, how much more complicated life can get for a drunky broad. Get out of here, Kirby, and I’ll find some damn thing to put on her.”
“I have clothes.”
“I know, sweetie. And glasses. And your picture in the papers.”
Kirby got up and walked out of the bedroom. As he took the first step into the living room, the side of his head blew up. As the floor came toward him, he seemed able to observe the phenomenon with a remote, clinical interest. It was the way they blew up a cliff. First you saw the flash and then the dust and the rumble and tumble of boulders. He heard a remote screaming of women as he fell into velvet.
Eleven
KIRBY CAME up from far places, like blundering up cellar stairs in the dark toward the edge of light at the kitchen sill. He opened his eyes and the light was like a spray of acid. There was a slow regular pulsation over his ear, like a child trying to get a balloon started.
Somebody took hold of his chin and shook his head roughly, and he marveled that it did not come loose and fall off.
He squinted up into the oversized face of the big one, Rene.
“Look at some good knots, buddy,” Rene said jovially.
Kirby was sitting in an armchair. He looked down. There was a single strand of clothesline lashing both arms together, just above the elbows, pulling his elbows tightly together, making him hunch his back awkwardly. His hands, slightly numbed, were not restrained, but the arc of their movement was limited. A second strand lashed his knees together, just above the knees. Both lines were fastened with a single, competent square knot.
“Learn something every day, buddy. Never tie wrists. Never tie ankles. See them knots? You can’t get anywhere near either of them with your fingers or your teeth, and you got no way to wiggle out. You don’t know a thing about knots.”
“I guess you got loose,” Kirby said dispiritedly.
“And got Raoul loose. He was nearly loose anyway. So I got by the door and pow!”
“Yes indeed,” Kirby said. “Pow.” He looked around the empty room. “Where’s Miss Beaumont? And Miss Farnham?”
“Beaumont? That was the blonde, huh? She decided not to hang around.” Rene looked and sounded annoyed. He had a makeshift bandage on his w
rist and long deep scratches on his throat. “When we tried to grab her, she went off like a bomb. Bit hell out of me. Scratched like a tiger. Kicked Raoul good, belted him one in the eye and went out the back, through the door you busted all to hell.”
Kirby struggled to force his mind into paths of logic. Rene sat on the couch. He seemed perfectly relaxed.
“Aren’t you afraid Miss Beaumont might summon the police?”
“Her? Nah. She won’t. She run right into the boss and a couple boys he picked up local. One good thump on top of the head settled her right down.”
Kirby moved his arms and was able to see his wrist watch. It was twenty minutes of five. “What’s going to happen now?”
Rene shrugged. “We just wait. The boss is figuring some kind of deal to get you and Wilma onto the Glorianna. Maybe they’ll take off with all the right clearances, then anchor off someplace, and we’ll get out to her in a small boat.”
“Oh.”
“It made the boss real happy to see you, Winter. I guess you’re the jackpot in this thing. The boss thinks everything is going to work out just fine from here in. It got pretty messed up for a while. Too much publicity. The boss hates publicity on a business deal. If, like they say, you got twenty-seven million hidden away someplace, I guess you’re worth a lot of effort.”
“Where would they take Miss Beaumont?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if too many people are still interested in the boat. They’d have to take her someplace else, and if the boss has gotten some more help lined up, maybe there’s another place lined up too. How about that twenty-seven million, Winter?”
“What about it?”
“That’s what the boss is after, hah?”
“I wouldn’t have any idea.”
“Anybody steals that much, they’re a pigeon for the first people that can get to him. Money like that isn’t any good unless you can keep it a secret.”
“I’m happy to have the benefit of your expert advice.”
Rene came slowly to his feet, walked over, leaned, reached and with calloused thumb and finger gave the end of Kirby’s nose a forceful quarter turn. It was contemptuous, degrading and astonishingly painful. The tears ran down Kirby’s cheeks.
“Talk nicer when you talk to me,” Rene said. “We got a long wait. You can make it easy and you can make it rough.”
Rene went back and sat down and began to pare his ridged nails with a pocket knife. After a few minutes had passed, Kirby said, “Excuse me, but did Joseph say when we might be taken away from here?”
“Who?”
“Mr. Locordolos.”
“I ain’t seen him. Just the boss was here. Mrs. O’Rourke.”
“Oh.”
Rene shook his head sadly. “And that Wilma got very snotty with the boss. That wasn’t so smart. The boss gave her a shot. A Syrette thing like out of an aid kit. Thirty seconds and she was snoring like a bugle.”
Raoul came wandering in from the direction of the kitchen. His left eye was puffed. He was spooning something into his mouth out of a can held in a big brown fist.
“What you got now?” Rene asked disgustedly.
“Beans.”
“More beans for God’s sake?”
“Good.”
Raoul sat in a chair and finished the beans. He set the can aside, wiped his mouth on his forearm, stared blandly at Kirby for a few moments, then turned to Rene and began to speak in a language Kirby was able to identify after a few moments as the vulgar French of North Africa, larded with Spanish, Italian and Arabic words. Though he could follow it very imperfectly, he suddenly realized Raoul was suggesting to Rene that he be permitted to go into the bedroom and cure his boredom by amusing himself with the scrawny little sleeping chicken. Raoul accompanied this request with winkings so convulsive they distorted half his face.
To Kirby’s horror, Rene did not react with appropriate violence. In fact, he seemed bored. He asked some casual question Kirby did not catch. Raoul said something about who was to find out, in any case. And what harm could it do? It would pass the time.
As it seemed that Rene would shrug and nod approval, there was a curiously muscular convulsion in Kirby’s mind, like a gagging in the throat. The fat watch—the golden edge—had pulled reality too thin, had made it too easy to think of the submissive world as a stage for low comedy, for tricky effects, for narrow triumphs of virtue over the brute. The watch had dislocated the world, had made temptingly feasible all the traditions of fantasy, but here would be no slender triumph of virtue. Here, for Wilma Farnham, all the games could end, and he would be powerless to stop these two. For Kirby Winter the world settled suddenly back into its ancient grind of blood and pain, of small lonely disasters in the hearts of men.
He caught the sense of Rene’s next remark, something about waiting, something about how, if they had to stay here the whole night, then, orders or no orders, they would share the chicken, wait until she wakened and could be suitably instructed in obedience, and then cut cards for her.
Raoul shrugged and yawned and said that inasmuch as he had already lost money at cards, maybe now they could play again and this time make the chicken part of the stakes. For later.
Kirby’s eyes had finally stopped watering. The end of his nose felt as big as a biscuit.
The two men moved over to the coffee table. As Rene shuffled the pack he stared at Kirby and said, “How’d you put us out and tie us up?”
“I had help,” Kirby said.
“That figures. Did you use some kind of a gas, maybe?”
“Something like that.”
“The boss wondered. She’ll want you to tell her all about it. Anything she can use, she wants to know about.”
“Deal,” said Raoul.
The cards made small flapping sounds in the humid silence of the room. From all evidences, Kirby felt that it was a reasonably good guess that the watch might still be in the right hand pocket of the borrowed slacks. He bent his cramped back further, shoved his lashed elbows down beside his right thigh and ran his left elbow along his thigh. He felt the round bulk of the watch and thought he heard a tink of the heavy chain against the case.
“Don’t get smart,” Rene said, suddenly alert.
“Just trying to work a cramp out of my shoulder,” Kirby said humbly.
Raoul spoke in the crude patois of the African port cities. Kirby missed much of it, but he caught the essence. Don’t exercise yourself about the clerk type, my friend. He is too weak and scared and helpless to make problems for us.
The helplessness, Kirby realized, was the greatest danger. The gold watch could as easily have been a mile away, for all the good it could do him. Helplessness froze the mind, preventing any kind of creative scheming. It made one believe that Charla would manage to arrange everything just as she wanted it, in spite of the police search, in spite of all the alarms and publicity and public fascination with an amount of money beyond any rational comprehension. And in spite of anything he might do, he would find himself on the Glorianna with the crew of five and the three shattered young women. Or perhaps, all impudence gone, Bonny Lee was at this moment falling all over herself in her eagerness to tell Charla about the mysterious powers of the inherited watch. Soon they would come for it, test it, and perhaps quietly and efficiently crack the skulls of everyone connected with the venture and drop them off at the edge of the Gulf Stream, with suitable wires and weights.
The awareness of defeat, the anticipation of defeat, was like a sickness. He had only pride to fight it. This is the time, he thought, when I must become whatever Uncle Omar thought I could become, hoped I could become—or give up completely.
He wondered if Bonny Lee’s little car was still out there. It would seem logical that they would leave it behind. It was rather conspicuous. For Charla, Bonny Lee would be a new factor in the equation. But he sensed that Charla adjusted with maximum speed and efficiency to all new factors. He was doubly grateful he had told Bonny Lee about the whole mess he wa
s in. She would be in a better position to anticipate Charla’s moves. He hoped Bonny Lee had the good sense to play absolutely dumb. If there was the slightest hint she knew anything of value, Charla would not rest until she had found out what it was—as unpleasantly as possible.
If Bonny Lee’s little car was out there, one could assume the keys were in it, as Bonny Lee had known the probable necessity for leaving quickly.
Rene and Raoul were arguing over the play of one hand. Raoul seemed to feel he had been cheated.
“About that twenty-seven million,” Kirby said.
They both stared at him. “Yes?”
“It’s very boring and uncomfortable just sitting here. Maybe there’s some game three could play. For some of the money.”
“You’ve got no money,” Rene said. “We took it. We split it. Twelve hundred.” The rest of it, Kirby remembered, was tucked under Bonny Lee’s mattress.
“I could give you an I.O.U. against the other money.”
Rene looked contemptuous. “And the boss would pay us off on your I.O.U. Winter?”
“She wouldn’t. I would.”
“You won’t be doing anything.”
Here was the special moment of truth. Defeat was implicit in the length of clothesline around his arms, biting into his flesh. He smiled at the two men. “Don’t you wonder a little bit why I’m taking all this so calmly?”
Rene looked mildly uncertain. “You’re not like a lot of the jokers the boss has clobbered. I figured you’d try to make a deal with me. I wouldn’t buy, even if you did. But maybe I wonder why you don’t.”
“Deal,” said Raoul.
“Shut up. Winter, I don’t see how you got any edge at all. Three days aboard and you’d sign over your sister, if she asks you. She’ll pick you clean and then she’ll keep you for kicks or throw you away, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”
“Deal,” Raoul said again.
“The best Mrs. O’Rourke can get from me is a partnership deal.”
“That’s going to surprise hell out of her.”
“I expect it to. I’ve got it all tucked away in photo and thumbprint accounts.”
The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything Page 17
