“It’s my experience, Miss Strong, that the only person I can really count on is myself,” Chambrun said.
“Thanks,” I said.
He smiled at me. “You are part of me, Mark—you, and Ruysdale, and Jerry, and one or two others. Without you I wouldn’t be me.” His face darkened. “As things stand now, Gallivan can pack his bags and walk out of here. We’ve got nothing to hold him on. Dreyfus is our best bet.”
A pale moon was fading slowly over the Palisades. My taxi took me within about fifty yards of the river’s edge. Dozens of small boats bobbed on the water’s choppy surface. Out in the center of the river I could see the long, graceful bulk of the Merina, lights in several cabin windows. The problem was to get out to her.
There was a little white-painted shed near the shoreline, and I saw that there was a light in the window. It turned out to be the office of a night watchman who wasn’t inclined to be helpful. He was an old gent, with a couple of days’ growth of grizzled beard on his face.
“I can’t take you out to the yacht without orders from Captain Pappas,” he said. “How do I know you got any business out there?”
I showed him the slip of paper I had with the telephone number on it. “Does this check out with the number you’ve got?”
He scowled at it. “Maybe,” he said.
“The yacht’s phone is out of order,” I said. “Try for yourself. If it’s been fixed since I tried, tell Captain Pappas it’s Mark Haskell. He’ll send in a small boat for me.”
Grudgingly the old man tried the phone on the table beside his coffeepot. I could hear the operator’s voice telling him “temporarily out of order.”
“I’ve got ten bucks that says you’re too old to row me out to the yacht,” I said.
The old man gave me a sour smile. “I’ll take the bet,” he said.
I got in the back of his dinghy and he started to row me out to the Merina. The Jersey shore was a dark mass, with almost no lights visible. The old man rowed slowly, methodically.
“We’re going to miss Mr. Karados,” he said. “Nice guy. Generous spender. One time when I was sick, before I came under Medicare, he paid all my hospital bills. They don’t come like him often. Most of the guys who own the big boats are too snotty to know you’re alive.”
There was a gangway down the side of the yacht, and the old man eased us skillfully alongside. I gave him his ten-dollar bill. Someone with a thick accent hailed us from the deck.
“Someone to see Captain Pappas,” the old man called up.
Then I heard a voice that gave me the biggest boost of the evening.
“Mark! I thought you’d never come,” Jan called down to me from the deck.
I scrambled up the gangway and met her on the deck. She was still wearing the raspberry dress.
I saw the dark figure of the sailor who’d hailed us, evidently on his way to call Pappas.
“You’re all right?” I asked Jan. She was standing close to me, and I put my hands on her arms. She smelled like flowers.
“Of course I’m all right,” she said. “But you didn’t come, and the phone was out of order, and George thought I should stay here until we had word from you.”
“George?”
“Captain Pappas.” She came even closer. “What happened when you faced Tim with it?”
“Faced him with what?”
“The message I sent you.”
“What message? Let’s start over from the beginning.”
“The message I sent you by Captain Pappas,” she said, her eyes widening. “What I knew about Tim.”
“Pappas didn’t deliver any message from you,” I said. “I saw him at the Beaumont. He didn’t bring any message.”
Her fingernails bit into the flesh of my arms. “Oh, my God!” she said. She drew me along the deck toward a canvas-covered lounging area at the stern of the boat.
“Who did George see at the Beaumont?” she asked.
“Gallivan. I set them up with an office where they could talk. He never said anything about a message from you. He said he hadn’t seen you. He called the yacht while I was with him and asked if you were here. They told him you weren’t.”
“He couldn’t have called the Merina,” she said. “The phone is out of order. It went out just after I called to ask how you and Miss Ruysdale were. Did you know I’d called?”
“Yes.”
“Right after that the phone went out,” Jan said. “I told George what I knew and he agreed to go ashore and tell you and Mr. Chambrun. You mean, like he never did?”
“He never did.” I was holding her close to me and we spoke in whispers. “What do you know, Jan?”
“About Tim,” she said. “Oh, it goes back some six months. I did the wrong thing then, I guess. But sometimes Nikos seemed so—so sort of square, if you see what I mean.”
“What was he square about?”
“Oh, like his ideas about sex. And he would never forgive anyone for anything, no matter how good an excuse you might have for displeasing him. ‘An old elephant,’ Tim called him. ‘Never forgets and never forgives.’”
“So?”
“There was a party like I said, six months ago. It was given by one of the big buyers for a West Coast store. There were designers, and fashion writers, and models—everyone who was anybody in the fashion world. I went with Rosey Lewis and Tim. It was kind of wild and gay. Among the people there was Bernard Dreyfus, one of the Dreyfus brothers. They are big manufacturers of copies of the top designers’ stuff.”
“I know about him,” I said.
“Nikos hated him,” Jan said. “It seems that back in World War Two the Dreyfus Brothers were collaborators with the Nazis. I guess you know from Mr. Chambrun that Nikos was on the other side. I remember thinking if Nikos knew I’d even said hello to Bernard Dreyfus, he might kick me out, bag and baggage. Well, at that party there was a man named Conrad Schwartzkopf. He was a big West German banker and a former Nazi who somehow got forgiven, Tim told me. This Schwartzkopf was with Bernie Dreyfus, and I saw Tim was very chummy with him. Rosey and I both remarked that Nikos would blow his stack if he knew Tim was playing footsie with this Schwartzkopf, or even Bernie Dreyfus. We mentioned it to Tim as we were driving home from the party in a taxi. Tim looked kind of sick when we brought it up.
“‘Be a couple of good kids and forget it,’ he said. ‘Nikos has his peculiarities. We’re living in a new world, not back in the days of occupied France. Schwartzkopf is one of the biggest financial powers in Europe. Between us I’ve been dealing with him—for Nikos. He’s made Nikos more money than you could dream. But if Nikos knew, he’d have me drawn and quartered, even though I’ve been doing something very much to his advantage.’
“It sounded reasonable. I knew Nikos and so did Rosey. Tim was his financial adviser in a way, and he’d always made sound decisions. Nikos always said that. After Tim left us, Rosey made a kind of bitter remark to me. ‘Tim isn’t waiting for Nikos to die,’ she said. ‘He’s setting up his own power complex for when it’s all his.’
“‘Should we tell Nikos?’ I asked her.
“‘It’s Tim’s party,’ she said. ‘He’s making money for Nikos—as if he needed it! Nikos is a little old-hat.’
“So neither of us ever said anything about it. Then, this afternoon, when I realized what had happened to Nikos’s pills, I began to wonder if Nikos was about to find out about Schwartzkopf and Tim’s dealings with him somehow. Tim couldn’t let that happen, you see. Nikos would have cut him off; it would have cost Tim millions of dollars. Then, when Rosey was found, I realized she might have thought along the same lines I was thinking and faced Tim with it. I was scared to death, Mark. I’d taken Mike Faraday away from you, but I was scared to go back to the hotel. So I came out here. I called you and they told me you and Mr. Chambrun had left the hotel. When I tried again the phone was out of order. So—so I told George Pappas everything, and he went ashore to find you and tell you. Only—”
“Only he tol
d Tim instead,” I said. I gave her the rundown on the sellout of Max Lazar’s line. “Dreyfus must have threatened to tell Nikos about Schwartzkopf. Gallivan had to play ball with him, and he had to take care of Nikos because either way his goose was cooked. Then, when Rosey faced him with it, he had to take care of her. You’d be next on the list, except he has a yen for you. Apparently your Captain Pappas decided there was a rich gravy in it for him if he played along with Tim.”
“But he hasn’t forced me to stay here!” Jan said.
“Have you tried to go?”
“No, because I thought—”
“Well, let’s try,” I said.
A light flickered a few yards away in the darkness—a cigarette lighter. I saw the handsome face of Captain Pappas.
“Don’t try,” he said. The flame disappeared, and all I could see was the red end of his cigarette.
“George! You’ve double-crossed Nikos!” Jan said.
“Mr. Karados is dead,” Pappas said in his deep, accented voice.
“So your bread is buttered on Gallivan’s side of the street,” I said.
“One must be practical,” Pappas said, the red end of his cigarette bobbing up and down as he spoke.
“It isn’t going to work,” I said, trying to sound calm and collected. “They’ve got enough on Gallivan now, I think, to close in. There won’t be any payoff, Captain. He won’t inherit anything from Karados now.”
Pappas chuckled. “There’s been plenty siphoned off through the years,” he said, “safely salted away in Swiss bank accounts. Once we are outside the territorial waters of the United States, we go to where no one cares. And we live. You’d better plan to get used to it, Miss Morse. Tim has a liking for you.”
“And where do I fit into this future?” I asked.
“I regret to say your future will come to an end somewhere at sea, Mr. Haskell. You should have been advised not to meddle in other people’s business.”
“They know I’m here on the yacht,” I said.
“It won’t matter what they know, once we’re twelve miles out,” Pappas said. “Listen.”
I could hear the hum of diesel engines, and a faint vibration under my feet.
“We’re weighing anchor now,” Pappas said.
“Going without Gallivan?”
“We pick him up down the harbor. They’d look for him here when he turns up missing. The details are all perfectly arranged. I’m sorry for you both, but I have to think of myself.”
The little red circle started to move away, and then turned back. “I have a man watching from the top deck with a machine gun. If you have any heroic notions about going over the side, just know that you’ll be chopped to pieces.”
He was a huge man, but his tread on the deck was catlike in its silence. I looked at the shoreline. We were moving slowly down the river. No one but night owls would see us going, and all they would see would be the ship’s lights. We would attract no attention. There was no way to stand at the rail and wave at someone for help. The moon had already dipped down below the Palisades, and the river was as dark as the inside of your hat. The intermittent city lights seemed like weak little blobs in the distance.
Jan clung to me, her body shaking. “It can’t be real!” she whispered.
It was clear enough that the ship-to-shore phone had simply been switched off at this end. Gallivan already knew that I was aboard. He must also know that there was no point in his wasting time trying to talk Lazar into changing his mind. The time had come for him to put an escape plan into action. He would have slipped out of the hotel and headed for some predetermined escape point at the foot of Manhattan Island where he must have a boat waiting to bring him out to the Merina. While Chambrun and Hardy scurried around the corridors of the Beaumont looking for him, Gallivan would come aboard and the yacht’s powerful engines would take us out to sea before any sort of help could take shape.
“Isn’t there anything we can do, Mark?” Jan asked.
I think I’ve already indicated that I’m not a man of action. I’ve never climbed mountains, so to speak. I was too young for the Korean War and too old for Vietnam. I’ve never confronted anyone in my life with a weapon. Heroics are not and never have been my pattern. I’m a nice, polite young man approaching middle age who knows how to make a good dry martini and has a reasonable equipment in the way of small talk and a seven handicap at golf. Greek pirates—and that’s what Pappas and his men really were—were a long way from being people I knew how to handle. But I had nothing to lose by trying something. Twelve miles out and I was going overboard with an anchor tied to my feet.
But what?
The Merina was sliding, swiftly now, down past the West Side Piers. I began to have a succession of crazy ideas. If I could set the ship on fire, it would attract attention. If I could somehow get to the engine room and literally throw a monkey wrench in the works, it could stop our reaching the pickup point for Gallivan.
“Where is the ship-to-shore phone?” I asked Jan. “It sounds crazy, but the most sensible thing would be to put in a call for help.”
“There are phones in most of the master staterooms,” Jan said. “But the main control center is in the wireless cabin, which is next to the wheelhouse on the top deck. The wireless operator would be there now.”
“I understand there are all kinds of weapons on board. Do you know where they’re kept?”
“There’s a sort of game room forward,” Jan said. “There’s a ping-pong table and other things. And there’s a series of locked cupboards. Nikos opened them once to show a guest. There were all kinds of guns, underwater gear, fishing knives.”
“How do I get there?”
“Through the first companionway on the starboard side and then as far forward along the inside corridor as you can go.”
“Now listen,” I said. “It’s the wildest kind of a chance, but so help me, it’s the only one I can think of. You go down to your cabin and sit by the phone. I’ll try to get myself some kind of weapon and go up to the wireless cabin. There I’ll try to force the wireless operator to open the phone line. You call Chambrun for help.”
“Mark, Pappas isn’t careless. You’ll never get away with it.”
“You got a better idea?”
I was conscious of her warm breath, of her lips against my cheek. “Oh, God, Mark, I’m sorry I got you into this,” she said. Then she took my hand. “This way,” she said.
We walked together to the companionway and down about three steps into the interior of the ship.
“My cabin’s at the rear,” she said. “Number two. The game room is straight forward. Good luck, Mark.”
I knew I was going to need it, and I had the fateful feeling it wasn’t going to be forthcoming. I walked quickly to the end of the passage and opened the door in front of me. The game room was relatively large, and I instantly saw the row of paneled lockers facing me. I hadn’t taken a step toward them when a door at the far end opened and a white-coated steward appeared. He gave me a toothpaste smile.
“Can I get you something, sir?”
“No, thank you,” I said.
“A drink, perhaps, sir?”
“No, thank you.”
He nodded, and then, God help me, he went over to the little service bar in the corner and sat down on a stool. So much for my chances of getting myself a weapon. I turned and walked back down the passage and up the companionway to the deck again. Off to the left I could see the outline of some familiar Wall Street skyscrapers. We were getting to the foot of the island, the city. I heard a distant bell and became aware of the ship slowing down. It had to be now or never. I climbed the iron stairway to the top deck. Forward I caught a glimpse of the giant figure of Pappas, standing in the glassed-in wheelhouse. I was face to face with the door of the wireless cabin. I turned the doorknob and went in.
A dark young man in a blue uniform was sitting by the wireless equipment. Just to the right of him I saw the ship-to-shore phone, with a series of switch
board connections. He, too, had a toothpaste smile. He lifted up his right hand and in it was a very serviceable-looking gun.
“Sorry, you can’t come in here, sir,” he said, and he meant it. He flipped a switch with his left hand and Pappas’s voice came over the intercom system.
“Yes, Aristo?”
“Your male guest is visiting me, Captain.”
“Thank you, Aristo.”
I was thinking what my chances would be of rushing the wireless man, gun or no gun, when the door opened behind me and Pappas and a seaman came in.
“This is off limits, Mr. Haskell,” Pappas said. “Anyhow, you’re just in time to welcome the owner on board. This way, please.”
So much for the All-American boy’s heroics.
We went out onto the top deck. The seaman went down the iron ladder to the main deck and Pappas signaled me to follow him. He came down behind me.
I realized the yacht’s engines were silent, and we were drifting, slowly, downstream. Coming from the shore, headed straight for us, was a little power boat. A man sat in the rear at the controls, and I saw the raincoated and hatted figure of Gallivan in the bow. I turned away, feeling sick at my stomach. Everything was working perfectly for them.
The little boat came alongside and I heard the seaman shout something to the pilot of the small boat. Someone was throwing out a line.
“Come on, Tim, shake a leg!” Pappas shouted over the side.
I turned back to watch. The hat and raincoat appeared above the rail and the seaman helped Gallivan onto the deck.
Only it wasn’t Gallivan.
“Good evening, Captain Pappas,” Pierre Chambrun said. He looked at what must have been my pea-green face and smiled. “‘Miss Otis regrets—’” he said.
Pappas looked as if he’d been turned to stone.
“Just bearing down on you from overhead, Captain, is a police helicopter,” Chambrun said. “Coming up the harbor from Staten Island is a Coast Guard cutter. Knowing your preparedness to fight off a boarding party, it seemed my coming in advance of the authorities was the best way to avoid bloodshed on both sides. Gallivan has had it. We convinced him he was in enough trouble without bringing harm to Miss Morse and Mr. Haskell. The girl is all right, Mark?”
Girl Watcher's Funeral Page 16
