Forever and a Death

by Donald E. Westlake

  Captain Cousseran could be stubborn when he wanted. Shaking his head, setting his jaw, he said, “She went without warning, without discussion.”

  Michael Baldur said, “My daughter was an impulsive girl, I know that.”

  “But she wouldn’t have gone,” Jerry insisted, “if she hadn’t listened to me.”

  Kristin Baldur smiled sadly at Jerry, and said, “Kim didn’t really listen to you, Mr. Diedrich. She would always jump first, and think about it afterwards. I don’t think she ever really understood the idea of personal danger. I was always afraid that, some time…”

  Michael Baldur reached over to grip his wife’s forearm. Her smile had become fixed, her large eyes brighter.

  Captain Cousseran broke through the moment, saying, “My regret is that we were unable to look for her ourselves. There was no question, of course. Still, it should have been our job to look for her and, if possible, find her.”

  Michael Baldur said, “That’s something else I don’t entirely understand. Why didn’t you stay to help search?”

  “We were trespassing,” Captain Cousseran told him. “We had been ordered away, and we had no choice but to obey. The other ship lowered two launches to study the island after the explosions, and to look for the—for your daughter. Captain Zhang assured me they would search for her, and I’m sure he did.”

  “He wasn’t much help, I must say that,” Kristin Baldur commented.

  Captain Cousseran, with obvious professional courtesy toward another mariner, said, “I’m sure he and his crew did everything they could.”

  “No,” she said, “I mean when we talked to him.”

  Jerry said, “When you talked to him?”

  Michael Baldur explained, “The Mallory came into Brisbane early this morning. We flew up there to speak with the captain.”

  “As much as we could,” his wife said. “He has practically no English at all. We could barely understand a word he said, and I’m not sure he ever grasped what we were trying to say.”

  Jerry said, “But—” then left the thought unexpressed, bewildered by it. His memory of Captain Zhang’s voice on the loud-hailer was still all too clear: “I am asked to inform you…”

  Why had Captain Zhang pretended not to understand or speak English? Had he been embarrassed in the presence of Kim’s parents, made uncomfortable by their grief? (Though in fact they were being very restrained, all in all.) Had it actually not been Captain Zhang who’d talked to them by radio from the Mallory, but some other crewman, or somebody connected to Richard Curtis? Or did Captain Zhang have something to hide, and that’s why he’d evaded the Baldurs? But what could he have to hide?

  Before Jerry could respond, Captain Cousseran did, saying, “I never had trouble with Captain Zhang’s English, on the radio.”

  “Well,” Kristin Baldur said, “if you can communicate with him, that’s wonderful. There are questions…well, we just wanted to know, know what happened, what it was like, and… even what the search was like. Captain Cousseran, if you and Captain Zhang can speak together, and understand each other, would you ask him that? How much did they look for Kim? How long did they spend on it? What made them give up when they did?”

  Maybe Captain Cousseran had belatedly realized, like Jerry, that there must be something odd going on here, with Captain Zhang suddenly bereft of English. He looked uncomfortable as he said, “I’m not sure how to get in touch with him, I have no idea where Mallory is by now, or where it’s going.”

  “It’s in Brisbane,” Michael Baldur said. “It will stay there at least two weeks.”

  Captain Cousseran didn’t look happy at that news. He said, “Are you certain? The owner can call for the ship at any—”

  “Not now,” Michael Baldur told him. “It lost one of its launches on the way back. Apparently, some crewman did a very poor job when it was hauled back aboard after the search, and in the night it dropped off and was lost.”

  Captain Cousseran frowned. “That’s very unlikely,” he said.

  “But that’s what happened,” Michael Baldur said. “That’s what we were told in Brisbane. What with one thing and another. Captain, I must say I got the impression that’s a very sloppily run ship. In any event, the harbormaster in Brisbane won’t give the Mallory permission to sail until it has all its lifeboats, and it will be two weeks before they can replace that one and adapt it to the ship.”

  Jerry said, “I’ll talk to him.”

  They all looked at him in surprise. Michael Baldur said, “Talk to who? Captain Zhang?”

  There’s something wrong here, Jerry thought. I have no idea what it is, and I don’t dare even to think it might mean that somehow Kim is still alive, it almost certainly doesn’t mean that at all, but something is definitely wrong. Captain Zhang loses his command of English. The Mallory loses one of its launches. There’s something wrong.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll leave in the morning, go up to Brisbane, talk with Captain Zhang.”

  “I wish you the best of luck,” Kristin Baldur told him, as though to say she thought he’d need it.

  4

  On the drive south out of Brisbane on Pacific Highway, Manville and Kim discussed what they should do. He hadn’t managed yet to get in touch with either of his friends, the one in San Francisco or the one in Houston. The test at Kanowit Island had been on Tuesday, this was Thursday, and he needed to reach one or both of those guys before the weekend, which meant by noon, their times, tomorrow.

  The question was, what would he say to them? What position was he in now, and what position was Kim in? Richard Curtis had clearly found himself in an escalating situation beyond what he’d originally intended, but where was he now? He’d gone from the simple hope that the Planetwatch diver wouldn’t survive, so as to free himself from Planetwatch’s— Jerry Diedrich’s—intense surveyal, on to acquiescence in a kind of passive killing of the diver, on to an active scheme to murder her, on to a feeling that Manville had to be murdered as well, because of Curtis’s own indiscretion. But what was his situation now? Had the threat from Curtis receded, or was it still as strong?

  The original idea, that Kim should die in order to render Diedrich harmless, was no longer workable. She was off the boat, she was known by at least a few neutral observers to be alive, the scheme could not play out. On the other hand, though Manville and Kim could report they’d been attacked by Curtis’s people, they had no way to prove it. And although they knew Curtis was up to something illegal and dangerous, they didn’t know what it was—just something involving a soliton wave, and good luck explaining that to some policeman in a Brisbane precinct house. So, at this point, did Curtis consider them a peril, or merely a nuisance, or nothing at all?

  Before they showed themselves to anyone, official or otherwise, they had to know how much danger they were in. They’d been lucky to escape from that first batch of men Curtis sent after them, but they weren’t apt to be that lucky again, and Curtis could hire all the men he needed.

  So once they found a safe hiding place, they both had some telephoning to do, discreetly. Manville would try again to reach either Tom in San Francisco or Gary in Houston, while Kim wanted to talk to Jerry Diedrich, to let him know what had happened and to find out if he had any idea what Curtis’s scheme might be. First, though, to hide out, in a crowd.

  The little red car Manville had rented was an Australian-made British-designed Ford, with the steering wheel on the right, because Australia follows the British system of driving on the left. “I feel as though I’m driving,” Kim said at one point, in the passenger seat beside him. “I keep pressing down on the brake, and there isn’t one.”

  Barely half an hour south of Brisbane, the pastel world of vacationland began. Men and women and children dressed in pink and topaz and aquamarine strolled in couples or ricocheting family groups past buildings painted in pink and topaz and aquamarine. Sunburned overweight undressed bodies were everywhere. A glittery sheen of grease and excitement vibrated in the warm
humid air. Then at Coomera, the northern rim of the Gold Coast, less than forty miles south of Brisbane, the crowds grew even denser, tourist hordes packed hip to hip and camera bag to camera bag. “One thing for sure,” Manville said, “nobody will find us here.”

  Expensive high-rise hotels fronted the beach along Cavill Avenue, the main drag, but a block or two back from the sea were the economy motels. While Kim waited in the car, Manville checked into one of these. The room was clean and anonymous, with one bed along each side wall, and except for the cute paintings of koala bears over the beds could have been anywhere in the world.

  Kim went straight to the smaller bed, a single along the right wall. “I’m starving,” she announced, and lay on her back atop the bedspread. “I’ll just rest for a minute, and then we’ll go get something to eat.” And fell sound asleep.

  * * *

  “What time is it?”

  Manville looked up from his paperback, to see Kim half-risen, blinking at him in the dim illumination from the bedside lamp. “Hi,” he said, and looked at his watch. “Quarter to nine.”

  “Day or night?”

  He had shut the blinds over the only window. “Night.”

  Slowly she blinked again, absorbing that information, then looked startled and said, “My God. I’ve been asleep…”

  “Almost ten hours.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “I thought you needed it.”

  “I thought I needed lunch.” She sat up the rest of the way, wincing and clutching briefly at her rib cage, then said, “Now I’m really starving. Now I need lunch and dinner both.”

  “Fine.”

  She rubbed her eyes. “What’s that you’re reading?”

  He showed her the cover. “It’s a caper story, called Payback, by an Australian writer named Gary Driver. He’s imitating the Americans, but he’s pretty good. He’s teaching me how to behave in dangerous situations.”

  Grinning at him, she said, “You behave fine.”

  “Thank you.” With a nod of the head toward the packages on the bed next to him, he said, “I got you some stuff. Toothbrush, toothpaste. Some more clothes. Don’t know if they’ll fit.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful.” She put her legs over the side to sit on the edge of the bed.

  “Maybe you want to shower and change before we go out.”

  “I would. Is that okay?”

  Getting to his feet, dropping the paperback on the empty bed, he said, “I’ll just try my friend in Houston again while you shower.”

  She blinked around at the room. “Oh. There’s no phone.”

  “There’s one by the office.”

  “You’re going to call someone at this hour?”

  “Thirteen-hour time difference. It’s quarter to ten tomorrow morning in Houston, Gary should be just coming into the office this minute.”

  Rising, tottering a little, she said, “When you come back, I’ll be transformed. And hungrier than ever.”

  “I’ll be quick,” he promised, and left the room, and walked around to the front of the building.

  The pay phone was in an alcove just inside the office door, separated from the main part of the office by a plywood partition; not a lot of privacy, but some. Manville used his phone card to make the call, and after one false try got the receptionist at Gary’s offices. “Millbrook and Tennyson.”

  There was no way to tell from that what sort of firm they were, but Gary Millbrook and his partner were architectural consultants, not the designers of structures for the most part but the people brought in by large corporate clients to vet the designs of others and make corrections and improvements where needed. George had worked with the company several times over the years, and he and Gary had gradually moved from a business relationship to an easygoing friendship.

  “George Manville for Mr. Millbrook.”

  “One moment.”

  It was about three moments, in fact, and then Gary’s familiar voice came on, saying, “If you want to know do I believe it, of course I don’t. Is there something I can do to help?”

  “What?” It seemed to Manville that Gary was starting well into the conversation, reacting to Manville before Manville had told him anything.

  “I don’t know how you got Richard Curtis mad,” Gary went on, “but I assume he’s playing dirty pool here.”

  “Gary, Gary, back up a little. What are you talking about?”

  “The Wall Street Journal, of course.”

  “What about it?”

  “George? Aren’t you calling about the piece in today’s Journal, that I just read maybe three minutes ago?”

  “I’m in Australia,” Manville explained. “I haven’t seen the Journal.”

  There was a startled pause, and when Gary spoke again his manner was subtly different: “You mean you are in Australia?”

  “Yes. Why? What does the Journal say?”

  “It’s a short piece deep in the paper, they don’t make a big deal out of it.”

  “What does it say, Gary?”

  “It says that yesterday Richard Curtis swore out a warrant against you in Brisbane, Australia—”

  “A warrant!”

  “—for industrial espionage. You’re described in the piece— It’s short, I could read it to you, if you want.”

  “Just tell me what it says.”

  “It says you’ve been working for Richard Curtis.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And it says you were doing things for him having to do with a new destination resort he’s building out on the Great Barrier Reef.”

  “Still true.”

  “And that Curtis just now found out that you tried to sell trade and business secrets to a Swiss company called Intertekno, whose principal owner is a financier named Robert Bendix.”

  “I’ve never heard of Robert Bendix, or Inter whatever.”

  “He claims you went to Bendix personally and showed him some documents,” Gary said. “According to the Journal piece, Bendix neither confirms nor denies, and Curtis has a warrant for your arrest on various felony charges, including theft of privileged documents belonging to him, and you have disappeared. You were last seen in Brisbane.”

  “I’m still in Brisbane,” George said. “Or near it.”

  “Well, that’s probably not a good career move, George. On the other hand, you really shouldn’t try to come home, or leave that country for anywhere else, because they’ll surely grab you at the airport and then you will look guilty.”

  “Oh, he’s done it to me, hasn’t he?”

  “Give me your number,” Gary offered, “I’ll ask around, get the name of a good lawyer for you over there.”

  “I’ll have to call you back,” Manville said. “What if I call you at noon your time, would that be too soon?”

  “No, fine. I should have something by then.”

  “Thanks, Gary.”

  “You’re in a mess, huh?”

  “A rotten one.”

  “Tell me about it when it’s all over.”

  “I’m looking forward to the day.”

  “I’m afraid you broke the old rule, George,” Gary told him. “Never fight with somebody whose pockets are deeper than yours.”

  “Now you tell me,” Manville said, but he didn’t feel much like joking. “I’ll call you in two hours.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Walking back to the room, wondering what he would tell Kim, Manville thought, Curtis doesn’t have to have me killed, not anymore. He doesn’t have to kill me, because he just did.

  5

  The pleasant pale green skirt was a wraparound, which meant it had to fit her. The blouse was loose, creamy white, scoop-necked. The panties were stretchy, and would do for now. He had wisely not tried to buy her a bra.

  All in all, Kim was satisfied not only with the clothing, but with Manville himself. From time to time, when she remembered the suddenness with which he’d shot that man on the ship, she felt astonishment all over
again, because he just didn’t seem like that kind at all. He was so reserved and low-key most of the time that you didn’t ever expect anything sudden from him, and certainly never anything violent.

  She had gotten over both her panic and her deep exhaustion by now, and was beginning to return to her normal optimistic self. She’d removed the Ace bandage in order to shower, and though her torso felt stiff and achy without it, and there were still twinges in her rib cage if she breathed too suddenly, she felt she’d rather try to live without that wrapping from now on. The long sleep had helped, the shower had helped, the fresh clothing had helped, and the knowledge that George Manville was reliably at her side helped a lot.

  She heard him come back into the room after his phone call, and shouted, “Be right out!”

  “Take your time.”

  “Oh, no,” she said, but not to him, to her reflection in the mirror. “I’m too hungry to take my time.”

  She finished with her hair—not much she could do about it, really—then washed the underwear she’d had on for the drive and hung it on the towel rack, and went out to find him seated cross-legged on his bed, reading his paperback novel again. He put it aside, stood, looked her over, smiled tentatively, and said, “Not so bad, I guess.”

  “I’ve had better compliments,” she said.

  He looked flustered: “No, I meant my part. The clothes.”

  “They’re great,” she assured him, and turned in a circle, arms out. “But now,” she said, “I really have to put some food in here, before there’s nothing under these clothes but skin and bone.”

  “There’s some kind of diner or cafe just down the street, doesn’t look too bad. We just have to be back here in two hours, so I can make another phone call.”

  “You talked to your friend?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it,” he promised, “while we eat.”

  * * *

  The best thing you could say for the place where they had their late dinner was that it wasn’t as garishly overlit as the similar place across the street. The food was acceptable, and there was beer; Fosters, in cans. Ladies could have a styrofoam cup with their beer, on request. Kim decided not to request.