The Revengers

by Donald Hamilton

  I said, “But the call was made.”

  She licked her lips. “Yes. I gave them the number, the one you’d told me. Remember? I’m sorry, Matt, but they were going to hurt him, maim him, very badly. There was a little gray-haired man with a funny French accent, they called him Robert; but he had a knife and he wasn’t funny at all. I couldn’t bear . . . anyway, the call was made, and Warren was ordered to talk to the woman at the other end who was apparently Fred’s wife, telling her that her phone was tapped, which was obviously a lie; I mean, if they hadn’t known the number how could they have tapped it? But they told Warren to tell her exactly what to say to you, the girl did; and what would happen to all of us, Fred particularly, if she tried to warn you in any way—they’d be listening. Only Fred broke loose and tried to reach the phone, to tell her something, and the man called Robert stuck the knife into him. . . . The girl gave him hell afterward, but then it was too late. Matt?”

  “Yes?”

  “Was I... was I wrong to give them the number? Did I help kill him?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it made a damned bit of difference, Elly.”

  “Thanks for saying that,” she whispered. “I’ll try to believe it. Now it’s your turn; how did you get here?”

  I told her. It took a while. When I’d finished she didn’t say anything for a while, thinking it over. I was happy to see that the greenish tinge was fading from her face; apparently she was over the worst of it. At last she pushed herself to a sitting position and swung her feet over the edge of the starboard bunk, facing me as I sat on the edge of the port bunk.

  “I'm hardly in a position to criticize, am I?” she said quietly.

  “You mean Warren?”

  She nodded. “Disregarding the question of the telephone number, Fred was there on account of me; he died on account of me. If I hadn’t charged off to Nassau like that. . . . Well, never mind. But with that on my conscience, I’m not really qualified to take a high moral stand. ... I just don’t understand why you had to kill Warren.”

  I said, “I could say he was asking for it. I ran a considerable risk to disarm him once. How many times do I have to gamble my life for a gun-waving slob who keeps coming at me? I told you once to keep him in line or lose him. Well, you lost him.”

  She shook her head quickly. “That’s not a satisfactory answer, Matt. You must have had a better reason for killing him than the mere fact that he disregarded a rather arrogant warning you’d given him once, through me.”

  I said, “It wasn’t the reason, but it left me with no obligation to worry about his health; I’d given him all the breaks he had coming. I gave him the gun to test him. What I did was a sign of trust and confidence; if I was willing to give him back his gun that meant I was willing to let bygones be bygones and work with him to save you, didn’t it? But he didn’t respond to my gesture of confidence by taking me into his confidence and telling me what the problem was and asking my help to solve it. Obviously he didn’t want to work with me to save you; he wanted to do it all himself, at my expense. There just wasn’t any reasonable hope of making it a cooperative venture; he hated my guts and was almost as eager to make me look bad, as he was to save you. And so we come to the final reason for giving him that gun—to keep his little hands busy. If he hadn’t had that toy to play with he’d have jumped me from behind with some yah-yah, huh-huh karate or judo stuff, wouldn’t he?”

  “Well, he did know—”

  “Sure. Those big-biceps boys are always cracking bricks with the edges of their hands. It had the advantage of making my capture look very good indeed. Very spectacular and dramatic.”

  “She . . . the Lorca girl, had promised Warren that if he delivered you she’d let me go.”

  “She just promised me that she won’t kill us, that’s not the plan. I was happy to hear it; but I don’t think we need to take her promises or plans too seriously.”

  “Matt, I didn’t... I mean, I tried to argue with him, to stop him. I told him I didn’t want to be ... be set free at that price.”

  I grinned, and reached out to touch her cheek. “What happened to the ruthless little bitch who’d sacrifice anybody for a story?”

  She wasn’t quite comfortable with my touch. She said stubbornly, “I still don’t think you should have shot him.” I said, “Suppose I’d put it up to you, Elly. Suppose I’d told you your life was at stake and you had to pick one man to take this boat ride with you and help you make it home again alive if possible. Over here we have the dossier of Mr. Warren Peterson; training, experience, general batting average in times of stress. Over here, Mr. Matthew Helm. Just making your decision on the cold official data, leaving personalities out of it entirely, which one would you have picked to give you the best possible chance of surviving your impending ordeal?” I shrugged. “It seems to me that I made the only choice possible on the record.”

  She licked her lips and said, “You really are an arrogant and self-satisfied bastard, aren’t you, darling? . . . Matt!”

  “What?”

  She was regarding me oddly. “I’m kind of stupid this morning; I must have thrown up my brains along with my dinner. I didn’t realize. . . .”

  “What didn’t you realize, girl reporter?”

  “Why, you deliberately let yourself. . . . you let them capture you on purpose!”

  “Well, how the hell else was I going to find you in a hurry?” I asked irritably. “There wasn’t time to call out the cops; and a bunch of clumsy guys in uniform poking around carelessly could have got you killed. I figured it was safer to work it from inside; I just had to get inside, and that was the logical way. Look, let me get these goddamned wet towels out of here, they’re stinking up the place. . ."

  Again, I gave plenty of warning before opening the door, disregarding whatever Eleanor was saying to my back. Giulio was alert outside. He told me about the built-in laundry basket in the head compartment and I dumped my damp burden there.

  “How’s the little lady?” he asked when I emerged.

  “She’ll live,” I said. I glanced at the gun in his hand. “Well, for a while, at least.”

  He said, “If Miss Lorca says you’re not going to die, you’re not going to die.”

  “You mean she’s got The Power?” I asked. “Immortality at her fingertips? It should be worth a lot of money.”

  “You know what I mean. Nobody’s going to hurt you if you don’t get antsy, is what I mean. I don’t know what the hell she wants you for, but it’s not that.” He glanced aloft, toward the flying bridge. “She’s a hell of a little sailor. I can’t figure it.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you know,” he said awkwardly. “We all figured it would be a non-stop panic party when the boss told us she’d be running this boat from time to time as well as her own, and we had to take her orders and keep our mouths shut. I mean, a dame for a skipper is bad enough, and a young dame is worse, but her being a dyke like that, you know what I mean.” He made the old limp-wrist gesture. “I mean, you know, it takes guts to take a boat offshore, you never know what you’re going to hit out there.”

  “Or what’s going to hit you,” I said, watching him. I saw his dark, rather handsome, face close up; he wasn’t going to discuss that subject. To reassure him I went on smoothly, if a bit pedantically, “That’s just a myth, you know. Hell, the old Greeks took homosexuals for granted; and their armies were full of them. At the Battle of Cheroneia, the Thebans had a whole regiment of them. Well, the Macedonians attacked and the Athenians on the left broke and ran, and the center was smashed, but the Sacred Band of Thebes on the right stood firm; they died where they stood, all three hundred of them, each man beside his lover or whatever the hell you call it. Nobody figured it had anything to do with courage back in those days.”

  He eyed me suspiciously, obviously wondering what my sexual predilections were. “Sounds like you know a lot about it.”

  I grinned. “No, I just read historical novels.” I sniffed. “Sme
lls good, just like food. But maybe she’s not going to kill us outright, she’s just going to starve us to death. . . .” He had me check on Eleanor who said she didn’t want anything to eat, God no! He was pretty cautious about getting me back into the deckhouse, seated at the table; and about watching me while I ate. The food was very good. The cook’s name was Robert and he had a funny French accent. He was a wiry little man with gray hair, as I’ve said. The description fit the man who’d tortured and killed Fred. It seemed likely that he’d taken this seagoing job because his knife work had gotten him into trouble on land; and, while I was grateful for the excellent meal, I thought it would be nice to do something about Robert some day if it wouldn’t interfere with more important duties. . . .

  We spent the afternoon resting on our bunks. Toward evening we heard somebody yell, “Sail Ho!” up above. Half an hour later, the door opened and we were ushered aft into the cockpit and helped aboard the single-masted sailboat that lay alongside, rolling heavily in the long Atlantic swells. The name painted large on the flanks of the vessel, racing fashion, was Jamboree; Miss Lorca’s fifth sailboat, according to Brent, in the two years since her beautiful young friend had died.

  I hoped the present yacht was not scheduled to go the way of the previous four; but it wasn’t much of a hope.

  Chapter 29

  When a sailboat heels to starboard it’s on the port tack, and when it heels to port it’s on the starboard tack, don’t ask me why. It was starboard tack now as we headed out into the Atlantic in a freshening southeasterly breeze. Eleanor and I had the bow stateroom again with a pair of vee-berths very similar to those on the powerboat we’d just left; but there the resemblance ended—except for the constant factor of the bucket. It was a smaller and darker prison without any portlights in the side of the boat, just a transparent hatch above through which we could look up at the two, taut, triangular sails forward, jib and forestaysail, if I remembered my nautical nomenclature correctly. The mainsail, my salty memories told me, was the big one aft, outside our range of easy vision.

  Perhaps because of the sailboat’s lesser speed, the motion was not as sharp and jerky as the sportfisherman’s had been; in scientific terms the period of oscillation was longer, and the amplitude was greater. Every so often the whole boat would drop right out from under us coming off a wave and leave us airborne until we caught up with our mattresses again as they were still going down, or met them coming back up. With the hatch closed against the flying spray that lashed the foredeck, it was warm and stuffy in the tilted fifteen degrees to port, give or take ten, and it wasn’t the most comfortable detention cell I’d known; and I’d known a few.

  Eleanor held out for about half an hour after we were under way again. Then it hit her again, but her spasms were getting pretty unproductive now. There really wasn’t much for me to get rid of, but it seemed advisable to maintain the useful image of the poor suffering young lady and the patient loyal gentleman looking after her conscientiously, so I made the pilgrimage to the head whenever she gave me an excuse. Giulio had accompanied us to this new boat, complete with Browning 9mm; but we had a fine relationship now, Giulio and I, two big strong men bound together by their noble, and rather patronizing, concern for a little woman’s weakness.

  There had been two men sailing Jamboree when we boarded her. One of them was now asleep on a bunk tucked away up behind the leeward of the two settees that faced each other across the teak table in the main cabin, preferably known, I believe, as the main saloon—not salon, unless you’re a sissified ad-writer who doesn’t know any better. There was another, similar berth up to windward. Still another bunk, I’d noted as I came below, was located to starboard alongside the galley aft, almost under the main hatch that led to the cockpit. It was a quarter berth, running back alongside the engine under the cockpit seats. You used the head of it for a seat when working at the chart table. Apparently this bunk was reserved for Serena Lorca as skipper and navigator; her shoes and purse were on it. She was now barefoot on deck sailing the boat with the assistance of the second crew member. I gathered that Giulio was not expected to assist in the working of the ship. Strictly a powerboat man with a sideline in muscle, he’d been brought along to function as guard and jailer only.

  The head compartment on this boat was in the same location as on Ser-Jan, to port just aft of our pie-shaped prison cell in the bow. It was smaller, with no separate shower facilities. A grating and drain in the floor, and a fixture above, indicated that you were expected to keep yourself clean on board by using the whole compartment as your shower stall and to hell with what else got wet in there. The washbasin was even more rudimentary than that on the big sportfisherman; and the principal plumbing device was a slightly smaller version of the same electric toilet, equipped with the same elaborate console, displaying the same green and red lights and push-button controls. Well, at least I wouldn’t have to be checked out on it again; I’d already soloed on that general model. The installation seemed to be brand new. When I mentioned this to Giulio, he made a gesture of disgust.

  “Christ, the head that was in there was perfectly good, but she’s an older boat, built before the crapper law went into effect, so Miss Lorca had to rip it all out and spend a couple of grand to make it legal.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I can see how she might not want to do anything illegal.”

  “Get the hell back in there where you belong,” he snapped, but there was no real anger in his voice.

  It was getting quite dark by now but the electric lights in our cell were in functioning order—I’d checked—one over each bunk. I turned mine on. This brought some shouts from the deck and a pounding on the door.

  “Switch it off, how the hell can they see to steer with all that light shining up on the headsails?”

  “Sorry, lights off.”

  I hit the switch again, and lay in the dark listening to the rushing, splashing sounds of the boat going through the water. It seemed unnatural, but kind of pleasant, to be moving along briskly without any motor noise or vibration. Looking up through the transparent plastic hatch, beaded with spray, I could see the sails overhead weakly defined by the colored running lights—apparently, whatever Serena Lorca had in mind, it did not involve illegal invisibility for her boat. The picture was clear: she was avenging her dead lover just as her daddy was avenging the hole in his head. Only the final details of her revenge remained to be explained; and instinct told me she intended to explain them to us before long. The trouble with being a master criminal is that if you’re a good one, and keep your mouth shut as you should, nobody knows how great you are. Most of them can’t stand that forever. They want their genius admired by somebody. I had a strong hunch we’d been elected to admire Miss Lorca’s.

  “Matt.” Eleanor’s voice reached me faintly through the noise of the boat’s progress.

  “How’s it going down there?” I asked.

  She had the secure berth down to leeward, while I was clinging to the precarious one up to windward. There was a canvas contraption I could raise to keep me in place up there, but I preferred not to immobilize myself to that extent.

  “Matt!"

  There was sudden panic in her voice; I realized she hadn’t heard my response for the boat sounds. I eased myself out of my bunk and, avoiding the everlasting bucket on the floor, got myself sitting on the edge of hers, and found her shoulder in the dark. Her hand found mine, gripped it convulsively for a moment, and released it.

  “Oh, God, I’m such a scared and puny thing!” she breathed.

  “That’s right,” I said. “And ugly and spoiled. Don’t forget ugly and spoiled.”

  “Damn you, Matthew Helm! . . ” I heard her giggle in the dark: “Very well, Dr. Helmstein. Very vel. Ve vill zee shock treatment permit, in moderation. But I’m really kind of a mess, aren’t I? God, I’ve been sick! Do you know that it’s worse throwing up when you haven’t anything to throw? Do I smell too bad?”

  “A little sour,” I said judiciously.
“Not unbearable.”

  “Sorry about that. I mean, if I were really nauseating, you could . . . you could grit your teeth and hold me without being, well, overstimulated by this smelly repulsive creature in your arms.”

  From her, it was as much of a plea for comfort and reassurance as I was likely to get. It was also, I realized, a rather brave breakthrough, considering what had been done to her once and how it had left her. Of course, she was drawing a clear line between what would be permissible and what wouldn’t if I did accept her suggestion; but the fact that she could make it at all was an encouraging sign.

  I said carefully, “You’d better let me get over on the low side. That way I won’t land on you and squash you when the boat tosses us playfully. . . . Ouch, what the hell was that?”

  “I’m sorry, did I get you with my heel?”

  I said, “My God, do you still have those spikes on? You’d better fire that male nurse of yours. Let me . . ."

  “Never mind.”

  “High heels are frowned on, on shipboard, ma’am.”

  “To hell with that,” she said. “Did you ever get stomped by a high-heeled lady, Matt? I mean, really perforated? A determined gal can do a lot of damage with her heels in a pinch; so let them think I’m just too damned miserable to know, or care, that I’m in bed with my shoes on.” Later, as we lay side by side, I could feel her fighting it; me, my closeness, trying to maintain a discreet measure of separation between us, but the motion of the boat was against her, settling us as firmly together at the lower side of the slanting bunk as tamped tobacco into a pipe. Gradually I felt her rigid body relax against me. She whispered, “This isn’t very fair to you, is it, Matt? But I’d rather you wouldn’t. . . . I don’t think I can yet. . . . I just need, well, company.”

  I won’t claim I wasn’t aware of the small warm body in my arms and didn’t react to it at all. For some perverse reason I found myself remembering another night of gentlemanly frustration I’d endured not too long ago with a different lady, although with separate bedrooms the conditions hadn’t been nearly so intimate. But it didn’t seem advisable to share the memory with my present companion.