Forever and a Death

by Donald E. Westlake

  The porthole above his head gave plenty of light for reading. His book was a collection of Maugham short stories of the South Seas; a very different place, then, but he supposed the people were much the same. The stories were comforting, because no matter how serious the problem, there was always some sort of acceptable resolution by the end. Reading, he could hope for the same sort of resolution for himself.

  Her head on the bunk was just to his right, and after a while he became aware of her breathing. It was less shallow than before, and less rapid, long slow breaths now, regular, without strain. It seemed to Manville that she had undergone a transition, from being unconscious to being asleep. Which meant she might soon wake, and then he’d have somebody to talk it over with. In the meantime, he read.

  21

  Kim looked at the ceiling. Daytime. The ship was in motion, and grayish light reflected from the passing ocean came in through the porthole to fidget on the pale ceiling.

  She realized she was awake again, and had been awake for… for a while.

  She remembered everything this time, and remembered most sharply that her body contained many pockets of pain that would activate if she made any move at all. So she lay still, on her back, and looked at the ceiling, and wondered where she was and what would happen.

  A page turned; a faint sound, but clear. Close by, to her left. Cautiously, she turned her head just slightly, waking soreness in her neck and back and shoulders. She looked sidelong, and a man was there, next to her, in profile. He was seated on the floor, head tilted down, legs bent up, reading a paperback book propped against his knees. She had never seen him before in her life.

  Slowly she moved her head back to position one, and closed her eyes. He must be a guard of some kind; so she was a prisoner. On Richard Curtis’s yacht? Why a prisoner?

  Are they going to arrest me? Is Richard Curtis going to make an example of me, and have me charged with trespassing and endangerment and all sorts of things, and have me thrown in jail? And where? In Australia, or in Singapore?

  She found herself afraid of Singapore. It was known to be very stern with lawbreakers, and very accommodating to its businessmen, and Richard Curtis had become one of Singapore’s most significant businessmen since he’d left Hong Kong.

  How could she escape? She could feel she was nearly naked, and the wetsuit wasn’t to be seen anywhere in the cabin. Even if her body weren’t so battered, she couldn’t possibly leap from a moving ship in the middle of the ocean.

  Jerry will help, she thought. Planetwatch will help, they have lawyers, they can do a lot. Once they find out where I am, and what’s happening to me.

  The scratch of a key in a lock made her eyes automatically snap open, and she saw the door start its inward sweep, felt movement to her left as the guard started to get to his feet. They should think I’m still unconscious, she thought, trying to find some advantage for herself somewhere in all this, and shut her eyes.

  The newcomer spoke first, sounding surprised: “Mr. Manville!”

  “Hello, captain,” her guard said. “Come to see your patient?” He sounded sarcastic, which surprised her.

  “Mr. Manville, please,” the captain said, as though he’d been insulted or demeaned in some way. “I’m not going to hurt her.”

  “You would have,” the guard said.

  “I don’t know.” Now the captain only sounded unhappy, and she recognized his as the voice she’d heard on the Planetwatch III’s sound system, arguing with Jerry. I am asked to inform you… Now he said, “I’m not sure what I was going to do, and that’s the truth. Mr. Manville, I’m not a bad man.”

  “Richard Curtis is,” the guard said, which surprised Kim a lot. Wasn’t she on Curtis’s ship? Wouldn’t the guard be one of his men? She listened, wondering, and the guard went on, “Captain, don’t do his dirty work.”

  “I will not harm her,” the captain said. “I promise you, Mr. Manville. May I look at her now?”

  “I’ll stay here.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m awake,” Kim said, because they would soon discover that anyway, and opened her eyes, and studied the two men standing there. The captain was Asian, middle-aged and worried-looking, wearing his dark blue uniform and braided cap without pride or distinction. The other man didn’t seem like a guard at all. He was rugged enough, she supposed, but something in his face seemed at once more intelligent and less brutish. And the man had been sitting and reading, after all.

  They both looked at her, and both seemed pleased that she was awake. The guard or whatever he was even smiled at her, as though to offer encouragement, as the captain went to one knee beside the bunk, gazed seriously at her, and said, “I am Captain Zhang of the motor ship Mallory. You were found in the water near Kanowit Island. That was yesterday. At first, it was thought you would die.”

  “I’m very stiff,” she said, and the effort of speaking made her cough, which hurt her torso. “And dry,” she whispered. “Very dry.”

  “In a moment,” the captain said, “we’ll help you to sit up. But first, if I may? We have not been able to be certain of the extent of your injuries.”

  Gently he moved the blanket and sheet down away from her upper body, exposing her down to the bellybutton. She became very conscious of her nakedness, and in a small voice said, “I’d like to have some clothing.”

  The guard said, “We’ll find you some. It’ll have to be men’s things.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “But I’m sure we can find something that fits. Right, captain?”

  “Oh, yes,” the captain said, but he was absorbed with other questions. He said, “Miss, you may have cracked or broken ribs. Excuse me, I must test. Tell me if this hurts.”

  “Yes!”

  “Ah, yes, there and…here?”

  “Ahh!”

  “And then the stomach, the internal organs. Forgive this.” His hands were blunt-feeling but somehow comforting. He pressed down in several places around her stomach and lower sides, asking each time if she felt pain, and she never did. “Very good,” he said at last, and moved the covers back up over her, then used the edge of the bunk to help him get back to his feet. “You have three cracked ribs,” he told her. “I am going to wrap your torso, just beneath the breasts, with an expanding bandage.”

  “Ace bandage?” she asked.

  “Yes, exactly,” he agreed. “We want the ribs to rest and remain still, so they can heal, but every time you breathe you strain them again. This is to keep them from moving too much. You’ll feel the constriction, it won’t be very comfortable, I’m sorry to say, but the sharp pains should be less, and in a few days, if you don’t move around too much, exercise yourself too much, it can come off.”

  “I ache all over,” she told him. She found she automatically trusted this man.

  “Yes, of course you do, you were very strongly battered. But I believe there’s nothing else broken, and the stiffness will ease.” Then, with a small sad smile, he said, “If you are my patient, I should know your name.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “I’m Kimberly Baldur. Everybody calls me Kim.”

  “And how do you spell your last name, please? I must put it in the log.”

  She told him, and he asked her age, and she said, “Twenty-three. And I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Well, yes, of course,” the captain said. “You’ve been unconscious quite a long time. Mr. Manville? Would you help Ms. Baldur to sit up?”

  The captain offered her his hands to grasp, so she could pull herself up, while Manville crouched against the head of the bunk to put his hands behind her shoulders and lift.

  Pains shot through her, especially around the chest, and she gasped and clenched her teeth, and sat slumped and miserable while the captain reached under the blanket to pull her legs sideways, and Manville helped to turn her, until she was seated on the edge of the bed with her bare feet on the floor, blanket still covering her from waist to knee.

  “Mr
. Manville,” the captain said, “would you help her to stay there, please, while I get the bandage? I’m sorry, Ms. Baldur, we’ll have to do the bandage first, before you leave the bed.”

  The pain was so intense she felt she might faint. “That’s all right,” she whispered, and Manville sat on the bed beside her, one hand on each shoulder to keep her upright.

  The captain had a medical bag with him, on the floor, and while he rooted through it the other man said, “I’m George Manville, I was the chief engineer on that test on the island. I’m the one who didn’t think to put in a fail-safe. So I’m to blame for what happened to you.”

  She tried to look at him, surprised, and saw his earnestness, and said, “Oh, no, I don’t have anybody to blame but me. All of my grand gestures end in pratfalls, Mr. Manville, don’t blame yourself for it.”

  “Here we are,” said the captain, and he wound the tan elastic bandage around her torso three times, not too tight, fixing the end with two small metal clips. “That should make things a little easier,” he said.

  It did. Breathing was somewhat harder, but when she moved there was much less pain. “Thank you.”

  “Let us help you to your feet.”

  God, she was shaky! Her legs felt like Play-Doh. When she was standing and they let go of her, she swayed back and forth like a sapling in a wind. “I don’t know,” she said, but somehow kept her balance.

  They helped her across the narrow room to the lavatory door. “We’ll wait in the corridor,” the captain told her, and Manville gave her another encouraging smile, and they went outside, shutting the door.

  She heard them talking together in the corridor as she weakly pulled open the lavatory door and hobbled inside. In the mirror there, she saw what a haggard wreck she was, how her hair looked like last year’s bird nest and there were great dark crescents under her eyes. And all over her body were large irregular bluish-gray bruises. That would be blood, wouldn’t it, under the skin. God, I really did hurt myself, she thought, and felt grateful wonder that she’d survived.

  Getting up from the toilet was the hardest part. But then she made it successfully all the way back to the bed by leaning on the wall the entire way. They were still talking outside, a murmur in which she could make out no words, and she wondered at their relationship. They’d seemed like antagonists at first, with Manville so clearly distrusting the captain, but now they were more like partners, at least in the matter of taking care of her.

  She arranged herself in the bed, sitting up, back against the wall, covered again with the blanket, and called out, “All right.”

  They came in, Manville first, and the captain said how pleased he was that she’d done the whole thing by herself. “You’re a young and healthy person, you’ll recover very quickly.”

  Manville said, “By tomorrow, when we reach Brisbane, you’ll be ready to walk off the ship under your own steam.” To the captain, he said, “We’ll be docking around seven tomorrow night, won’t we?”

  “Well…” All at once, the captain was evasive, Kim could sense it, but couldn’t imagine why. “It may be later,” he said. “I think probably we won’t arrive until two or three the next morning.”

  Manville must have sensed the change in the captain, too, because he frowned at him, but all he said was, “That late, I’m surprised.”

  The captain looked away from him, and at Kim, telling her, “I will have some soup brought to you, and some clothing. You should eat the soup, and then you should sleep some more.”

  “I am…tired,” she agreed. “But soup, yes. I’m hungry first. Thank you.”

  “I’ll be handy,” Manville told her, and it seemed to Kim he was saying it as much to the captain as to her. “If you need me.”

  22

  Manville had gradually reached the conclusion that the threat would now come from elsewhere. Originally, Curtis had ordered Zhang to make sure Kim Baldur didn’t live to see Brisbane, but after his confrontation with Manville he’d obviously changed that order. It could be seen in the attitude of Zhang himself; the man was weak and frightened, and would have done whatever Curtis asked of him, but would have been miserable while doing it. Now Zhang was a man from whom a heavy weight had been lifted.

  But not entirely. Curtis would not give up, he wasn’t the kind of man to accept defeat gracefully; or at all. He had two enemies now between himself and whatever this money-making scheme was, and one of them was Jerry Diedrich and the other was George Manville. He could get at Diedrich through Kim Baldur, but he would get at Manville much more directly.

  Why would they be arriving in Brisbane so much later than originally planned? It seemed to Manville that Zhang had been hiding something when he’d told them that, and what could it be but an attack from Curtis? But where, and when? Sometime before they reached Brisbane, and apparently Curtis needed the extra time to get it ready.

  In the meanwhile, though Manville felt he and Kim Baldur were both for the moment safe, he still took precautions. He moved himself into cabin 6, across the hall from her, and, while he was there, bolted shut the bulkhead doors at both ends of the passage.

  The girl mostly slept, and whenever she awoke she was starving. She moved on from soup to stew and bread, then some red wine, and improved by the hour.

  Manville ate his own meals with Zhang, in the crew’s mess, on the same level as cabins 6 and 7 but farther aft. Zhang was still hangdog, but pleasant, and they talked about neutral things: engineering, coastal shipping, the Mallory.

  With Kim Baldur, he had only one real conversation, and that was about Jerry Diedrich. He stood in the doorway and watched her eat a bowl of stew, and said, “Do you know why Diedrich has it in so much for Richard Curtis?”

  She looked at him in surprise, and said, “He’s a major polluter. Planetwatch is after all those people.”

  “I’m sorry, Kim,” he said, “but that isn’t exactly true. Curtis is in construction, he’s no saint when it comes to environmental laws, but he’s no worse than any of the others, and better than a lot of them. It’s Jerry Diedrich who has a personal vendetta against Curtis.”

  “Well, he despises Curtis,” she said, “because he’s a threat to the environment. But it isn’t personal.”

  “You all showed up at Kanowit because of Diedrich,” Manville pointed out. “That day, I’m sure there were a lot of threats to the environment, here and there around the globe, but what we were doing at Kanowit wasn’t one of them.”

  “The risk to the coral—”

  He shook his head. “There was none. We didn’t even want to endanger the seawall, much less the coral, because Curtis and his partners have a use for that island. They don’t want to destroy it.”

  “The chance you took—”

  “I’m an engineer, Kim. Forgive me, but I know the risks better than Jerry Diedrich, and when he showed up at that island it wasn’t because the reef was going to be destroyed, because it wasn’t. It was because Jerry Diedrich has a personal vendetta against Richard Curtis and wanted to harass him.”

  “That isn’t true,” she said, and he could see from her face that she was angry, closing down against him.

  “Okay,” he said, because it was obvious she had no idea why Diedrich had it in for Richard Curtis. “How’s the stew?”

  She took a second to decide if she wanted to hold onto her anger, then abruptly smiled and said, “It’s great.”

  “Good.”

  “And I do want to thank you.”

  He laughed, and said, “Don’t thank me yet, wait’ll I do something.”

  That conversation was in late morning of the day after she’d regained consciousness. That evening, Manville had dinner with Zhang, and said, “Captain, originally, we’d have been coming into Brisbane just about now.”

  Zhang looked worried and defensive. “Yes. That’s true.”

  “Curtis told you to slow down, to give him time to set something up to deal with Ms. Baldur and me.”

  Zhang looked down at the food o
n his plate, and didn’t respond.

  “Captain, I know you felt relieved when Curtis told you not to try to…hurt Ms. Baldur. But if you do nothing and say nothing, you’ll be hurting her. At least let us know what’s supposed to happen.”

  Zhang looked very deeply troubled. He chewed a mouthful of food, slowly, and at last swallowed it, and drank water, and said, “Mr. Manville, I don’t want to hurt anyone. But I don’t want my family to suffer either.”

  “I can understand that.”

  Zhang sighed. He couldn’t meet Manville’s eye. He said, “Someone, some people, will board us tonight, around one, when we go past the end of Moreton Island. I was told I should be alone on the bridge, everyone else should be asleep, I should pay no attention to whatever happens.”

  “Some sort of ship will come alongside? Grapple on?”

  “That’s what I understand.”

  Manville leaned back. “So when you dock at Brisbane, I won’t be on the ship anymore, and Ms. Baldur will have died of her experience in the sea off Kanowit.”

  “I don’t know,” Zhang said miserably. “I’m not supposed to know anything, and I don’t know anything.”

  “Captain,” Manville said, “what are we going to do? To protect you, and your family, and to protect Ms. Baldur, and to protect me. What are we going to do?”

  Slowly, Zhang shook his head. “I can’t think,” he said. “If there was something— As you say, to protect us all. But I can’t think what.”

  “Let’s put our heads together,” Manville said.

  23

  A hand touched her shoulder, and a voice softly said her name. Kim frowned, not wanting to be awake, because to be awake was to be in pain, but in thinking that thought she knew it was too late, she was already awake, and not going back.

  She opened her eyes and saw the dim room, the door propped open and the corridor light giving shape to George Manville, on one knee beside the bunk, still holding her shoulder, leaning toward her, something hushed but urgent in his manner. She felt afraid, and didn’t know why, and said, “What?”