The Revengers

by Donald Hamilton

  I regarded her for a moment, wanting to tell her that the best she could do was a hell of a lot better than most girls could have, or would have, done under the circumstances. However, it would have sounded patronizing; and she wasn’t anybody it was safe to patronize, so confident in some respects, so insecure in others.

  Instead I said absently, “I didn’t know panty hose were standard equipment with pants. It seems redundant.” I grinned. “But it explains something that’s been bugging me.”

  “What’s been bugging you, Mr. Helm?” she asked warily.

  I said, “I promised to report as the data came in, remember? We’ve already checked out the shoulders, and it’s agreed that the legs and ankles are okay. Well, when you were walking out to the plane ahead of me the other day, I took the opportunity to do a little further research, and I’m pleased to state that, in my opinion, you have a very passable little ass, Miss Brand. A nice, smooth, seamless little ass.”

  She drew in her breath sharply and started to say something angry and stopped. I saw her grin faintly instead. “Thank you, Mr. Helm,” she said, “but at the moment I feel my ass is fairly irrelevant, don’t you? And this discussion, fascinating though it is, doesn’t help get us back home with Serena Lorca’s story, which you’re not going to let me publish anyway. Here, you might as well keep this, since it’s no good to me.”

  She dug the plastic envelope she’d been given, folded, out of the snug pocket of her slacks. Suddenly the atmosphere of our little stateroom-prison had lost its warm friendliness. I took the envelope and tucked it away.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it, Elly.”

  “Just don’t ask me why I’m doing it, because I’d hate to have to figure out an answer.” Her voice was cold. “And I hope your friend, Bennett, appreciates it too, but it isn’t very likely, is it? Can a man like that appreciate anything? And you aren’t a bit welcome, either of you.” She drew a ragged breath. “Do you want the knife, too?”

  “No, it’s better with you,” I said. There was nothing to be accomplished by offering condolences for her lost story, or apologies for asking her to give it up, so I went on briskly, “I have a hunch we may wind up having to cut ourselves free of some rope or tape eventually. Giulio’s probably going to drop the easygoing act when it’s served his purpose, and tie us up for easy management. I’ve got a trick cutting gadget hid out, too; but it’s nice to know you’re holding something in reserve.” I hesitated. “Elly.”

  “Yes?” Her voice was stiff.

  “I really do appreciate the favor.”

  She said coldly, “It was that patriotic guff that really got me, I guess. How can a girl refuse anything to a man who can shovel crap like that?”

  “Sure,” I said. It was time to change the subject, past time, and I asked, “Elly, do you remember the last time you used that knife?”

  There was a little silence before she spoke, “It’s hard to forget, but why should I remember it?”

  I said carefully, “Because the girl who did that is the girl I want beside me when the break comes tonight, if it is tonight.” She didn’t speak. After a moment, I went on, “I don’t want you to have the wrong idea about what comes next. Forget everything you ever saw on TV or in the movies. It doesn’t really work like that.”

  “What do you mean, Matt?”

  I said, “Well, in a movie or TV show we’d be carefully plotting our escape, wouldn’t we? We’d be thinking of ways of breaking out of this cabin, of overpowering the opposition and tying the boys and girls all up in neat little packages, of summoning help by radio to get us off this floating bomb. Wouldn’t we? We’d be thinking very hard about saving our precious lives, but preferably with a minimum of bloodshed, being the nice TV hero and heroine we are. Right?”

  Her tongue touched her lips. Her hostility had faded. She was watching me closely. “Go on, Matt.”

  “That’s dream stuff,” I said. “Nice TV heroes and heroines don’t just finish last, they finish dead. I am going to let you into a secret that I don’t often share with anyone, particularly a delicate young woman. The basic principle of escaping, Miss Brand, is that there is no problem in escaping, none whatever, if everyone who’s in a position to prevent you from escaping has been killed. Do you follow me, Miss Brand?”

  She licked her lips. “Go on.”

  I said, “To turn a corny phrase, baby, we go for the throats, not the boats. Never mind that Giulio’s been reasonably polite to us, to date. Never mind that Serena’s a poor unbalanced girl from an unfortunate family situation. Never mind that Henry may be a hell of a sailor and even a reasonable guy in his salty way, and that Adam’s attitude is understandable, considering his racial background, and that Robert on the other boat is a hell of a cook, even if he’s a bit too rapid with a knife, and Arturo may have something to he said in his favor also, although I don’t happen to know what it is. We just forget all that. You just forget all that. Can you?”

  She drew a long breath. “I don’t know. It seems . . . a little drastic.”

  I nodded. “It’s a normal reaction. I’ve met it before. On a recent assignment I had to stop in the middle of the great breakout scene to argue with a tender young lady who thought I was being too hard on the poor guards who got in our way.” I shrugged. “Okay, it makes it tougher, but if that’s the way you feel, I’ll do it all myself, or try. I just thought that, since you were willing to get blood on your knuckles once for reasons you considered adequate, this time with your life at stake you might be willing to get your pinkies a little gory again. But—”

  “Matt, shut up!” When I looked at her, her face was pale. “Don’t talk so much. I just said it was drastic, that’s all. I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it. But you’d better be specific.”

  “Specific,” I said sourly. “Okay, if that’s what you want. Stop me if I get too rough for you. Here’s specific: if you get a chance to use that knife, it must go in all the way, low, edge up, and rip upward until it hits bone. Then you step back fast and let the guts spill out. If you get a chance to swing one of those winch handles you described, there should be brains on it when you stop swinging. Forget all about trying to escape. Escape will take care of itself, later. As long as there’s one of them standing, moving, even twitching slightly, you keep after him and to hell with escape. Too damned many people, thinking about getting away instead of concentrating on the job at hand, have been killed at the last moment by somebody they chivalrously refrained from finishing off when they had the chance, TV fashion. I don’t want to die because you were too sensitive to give somebody who was still wiggling another bash on the head, and he managed to reach a gun before he died.” I looked at her bleakly. “Are you still with me, girl reporter?”

  She swallowed. “Go on.”

  “That’s by way of general psychological preparation,” I said. “Specifically, I want you to concentrate on Serena. It’s not nice in the sense that she kind of favors our side against Giulio, if only to get her story out, but we know the story’s not going to get out if I can help it, so to hell with that. Remind yourself that she callously killed a pleasant young married woman and her child just to get support for this seagoing crusade of hers, not to mention a few other nasty stunts she pulled for her daddy. The girl’s a monomaniac and now she’s bound she’s going to use this last sailing torpedo of hers for the purpose for which it was intended. We simply can’t take a chance of leaving her loose and trying to reason with her later. If she isn’t attended to, we could easily wind up with another blown-up ship at the bottom of the Atlantic.” I waited but Eleanor was silent. I went on, “So stay near her whenever you possibly can. Go for her when the action starts. She’s bigger than you and stronger, but I’m hoping that all she’ll be expecting from a nice little landlubber like you is the usual hair-pulling, face-scratching, dress-ripping, shin-kicking ceremony that passes for a girlish fight. If you drive right in with the idea that you’re really going to smash her, put her out for good, not just m
uss her hairdo and spoil her clothes and her looks a bit, you stand a chance of catching her by surprise. Objections?”

  As I stopped talking, we heard Henry’s voice call out on deck, “Ship off the port bow, ma’am.”

  “Coming.” Presently, waiting in silence, listening, we heard the husky voice of Serena Lorca, also on deck now. “Ease sheets. Bear off. He’s passing well clear but we don’t want him close enough to wonder why we’re towing a tender way offshore where it would normally be stowed. But we might as well put the motor on the Zodiac as soon as he’s out of sight.” We heard her laugh pleasantly. “I think this weather’s going to hold for us. We’ll have a good night for hunting.”

  Eleanor was looking at me. “No objections, Matt,” she said quietly. “I don’t want any more sailors to die, or their ships, either. As you say, it’s too bad in a way, but she’s got to be stopped no matter what justification she thinks she has for what she’s doing.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Unfortunately, we probably won’t be able to prevent her from taking one more shot at it. We’ll just have to hope that first shot is a miss.”

  Chapter 32

  Lying in our bunks, that were separated aft but joined up forward where the cabin narrowed, we watched daylight fade from the hatch above, with our heads apart and our feet together. The wind had apparently lightened a bit; the boat’s angle of heel was smaller and I had no trouble remaining in my berth to windward. I didn’t know what my cellmate was thinking and I didn’t ask. I found myself wondering how Martha Devine would have reacted to my detailed instructions for disemboweling a man; but the simple fact was that I wouldn’t have given them to Martha, even though she’d once come through for me— and for herself—in a pinch, a rather tight pinch. But she was not as tough-minded a girl as this one, which was really nothing against her. Or for Eleanor Brand. They were simply different people-models, designed to function well under different operating conditions.

  It was hard to imagine Martha, for instance, avenging herself as directly and crudely on a pair of rapists, as Eleanor had done. To be sure, Martha had once considered punishing the other girl for a certain betrayal, but I had a hunch she’d been very glad when I’d relieved her of the self-imposed obligation. I suspected that she would never have carried her plan to a truly lethal conclusion, although she might have gone far enough to embarrass us. If she’d really been serious about the project she wouldn’t have given it up so easily. On the other hand, Eleanor would never have dreamed of marrying a crippled warrior out of the hospital and making a comfortable home for him. Unlike Martha, she was not a comfortable, homemaking kind of a girl. . . .

  Above us, the boat’s running lights went on, tinting the sails overhead with red and green. The spray had dried, and there was salt crusted on the transparent plastic hatch, our window to the darkening sky. It was no time to be thinking of Martha Devine, who’d come halfway across a continent to offer herself to me. She was looking as much for relief from the loneliness of widowhood, I guessed, as for an old excitement we’d once found together. But there was really nothing else left to think about. All the heavy thinking required here had already been done. You can drive yourself nuts trying to figure out in advance all the permutations and combinations you may encounter; better just to establish a few guidelines to follow and figure on taking it as it comes. Over the boat sounds, I heard movement in the cabin aft, approaching.

  “Here we go,” I said, sitting up and swinging my legs off the bunk.

  “I haven’t said thanks,” Eleanor said. “I haven’t forgotten that you’re here because of me, Matt. Thanks.”

  I said, “You might consider having a recurrence of your recent ailment at a suitable moment, if you don’t mind making a bit of a spectacle of yourself.”

  “All right.”

  There was a rap on the door. “Helm.”

  “I’ll see if he’s in,” I said. “Whom shall I say is calling?”

  “Come out careful,” Giulio’s voice said, unamused. “Very careful. The lady stays until she’s told.”

  I looked down at Eleanor as I rose, and reached down to brush her cheek lightly with my knuckles. She turned her head and gave me a straight and steady look, the meaning of which I couldn’t interpret. Perhaps her waiting thoughts had been running close to mine; perhaps she was telling me it was time I got my women sorted out before somebody got badly hurt. But this was really not the time for solving the complicated problems of my love life or, for that matter, of hers. Although they did keep intruding.

  “Easy,” Giulio said as I emerged. “Take it very easy now, friend.”

  The party was over and it was time to do the dishes. There had been a number of occasions when I could have tried to take him with some hope of success, although he could have been simply teasing me, testing me. I knew regrets for those lost opportunities, if that was what they had been, because he was giving me no opening now, backing cautiously ahead of me down the short, narrow passage between the head compartment to port and a bank of lockers, contents unknown, to starboard. He stepped aside when he reached the lighted main saloon, where the leaves of the big table had been lowered to make more room. He gestured to me to move past him.

  The black man I hadn’t gotten a good look at before, Adam, stood braced against the chart table with the shotgun at the ready. The knife on his hip was, as I’d guessed from Eleanor’s description, a custom job; and if I’d thought it was important, I could probably have dredged up the name of the knife-maker. You don’t generally invest in personalized cutlery like that unless you know how to use it.

  Adam was in jeans and an old work shirt from which the sleeves had been ripped. It was unbuttoned to the waist, so the first impression was more of gleaming black arms and chest than of faded blue cloth. The shotgun was a Winchester 12-gauge pump with the barrel sawed off just ahead of the magazine tube, as Eleanor had indicated. The shells were probably loaded with 00 Buck although, of course, I couldn’t see that. Somewhat smaller buckshot, with more projectiles to the load, producing a denser shot pattern, are actually more reliable against man-sized targets —as the man who’d shot Bob Devine had known. The ordinary guy with homicide in mind just goes for the shotgun ammo with the biggest, ugliest lead balls in it and feels happy. And there’s no doubt that 00 Buck will render a man quite dead enough under most circumstances.

  Serena Lorca, a remote and preoccupied look on her tanned and handsome face, was leaning against the galley counter with a roll of silvery tape in her hand: duct tape or air-conditioner tape, two inches wide, immensely strong and adhesive, nowadays used for emergency repairs everywhere, apparently even on boats. She looked at Giulio.

  “Front or back?” she asked.

  He hesitated, quite aware that a man with hands taped behind him is somewhat more helpless than a man with hands taped in front. Then he shrugged.

  “Front,” he said reluctantly. “Otherwise we’ll have to carry them up and down these damned ladders. . . . Hold your hands out, Helm. Wrists together.” He watched the tape being applied. Serena did not look at my face as she worked; she seemed to be living in a distant world of her own. When he was satisfied with her labors, Giulio nodded to her, and said to me, “Now get down there to leeward and take the place you had before. . . . Watch him, Adam.”

  I had to admire Giulio, turning his back casually on a shotgun in the hands of the black man whom, if my estimate of the situation was correct, he did not trust and probably intended to kill, along with Henry, along with Serena and Eleanor and me, as soon as reinforcements were available. But he showed no signs of uneasiness as he made his way forward. A few minutes later Eleanor had been fetched, taped, and planted beside me on the port settee where the slant of the ship would inhibit any hasty action we might consider—not that any such action was likely to be effective with our wrists bound.

  Giulio studied us thoughtfully. He said, “We’ll be turning out the cabin lights now so they can see better topside, but that shiny tape shows up good
in the dark, so don’t even think of messing with it, either of you. . . . All right, Adam. That does it. Secure that blunderbuss in the cockpit where you got it so it doesn’t slide around and go off and kill somebody.”

  “Well, I’d better get on deck, too,” Serena said after the black man had disappeared. She did not look at Eleanor or me. I realized that we were a part of her crusade that no longer interested her; she had more exciting things to think about. It was opening day of the ship-hunting season. She turned her faraway eyes on Giulio. “Just one more,” she whispered. “Stay with me a little longer, Giulio. Just give me this one more and I’ll be satisfied, like I promised Daddy. Ann will be satisfied.”

  “Good hunting,” Giulio said; but as she disappeared into the darkness above he looked at us and tapped his head significantly, reminding us that he might be a dangerous fellow, and he might have a gun, but he wasn’t as nutty as some people around. Then he reached for a switch and the cabin went dark. “Just make yourselves comfortable,” his voice said. “We could be here a long time. We chased the screwball dame around the ocean for two weeks once—I was on the backup boat, thank God—and picked her out of the water five times, not to mention several times that number of early-aborts, before she got one to come in right.”

  I said, “That makes you about as screwy as she is, doesn’t it?”

  I saw his shoulders move in a shrug, up on the weather side of the saloon. The Browning was a dull gleam in the dark. “Mr. Lorca says do it, I do it.” After a moment he went on, “But maybe you’ve got the wrong idea. She’s a nut, but we’re not against it, understand? It’s not just the pretty-sailboat-fairies who feel that way. Hell, there isn’t a real waterman in the country who hasn’t had to cut loose everything and run like hell when one of those king-sized motherfuckers came crashing through. To hell with your right-of-way and whatever fishing or trawling gear you had out.” Giulio laughed harshly. “Saw a big freighter come into Port Everglades with holes all over the glass of her bridge. A fisherman they almost ran down got mad and emptied a thirty-thirty shark rifle at them. No, don’t kid yourself, friend; we’ve got nothing against what she’s doing. We’ve had a lot of good clean fun, all of us, helping her play this fancy game, kind of a bullfight, like. Big bastards think they own the fucking ocean. No, we don’t mind a bit what she’s doing; it’s just that we can’t let her make trouble for Mr. Lorca, doing it.”