by Howard Fast
“It means nothing to you—you took my child. Now you stand here pleading with us.”
“I’m not pleading,” Lenny replied quietly. “I don’t think you would plead either, if you were in my place, Mrs. Camber.”
“I couldn’t be in your place.”
“No? Well, who knows? The point is, Mrs. Camber, that you have your child now. Polly isn’t hurt. You have your child and I have nothing. So what difference will it make if I go with you? There’s no other way out of this awful place. I give you my word that once we’re out of the Meadows, I’ll leave you.”
“Your word!”
“It’s all I have, Mrs. Camber. All anyone has is his word—when you come down to it.”
At that moment, Polly lifted her head. She kept her eyes tightly closed, and she said, “Please let Lenny come with us.
For a long moment, Alice hesitated. Then she nodded and turned to the ladder. I offered to help with Polly.
“I need no help,” Alice said shortly.
Alice took Polly down the ladder to our outboard. Lenny followed. I came last, and I was not unhappy to leave that boat. But before I left, I did something rather peculiar—peculiar in terms of myself, that is, for now I was strangely calm and without emotion. My hands still shook from the physical effort I had gone through, but that was a physical thing. Fear and terror had left me, and I felt no emotion to speak of as I regarded that grisly scene upon the deck. In that, I was not unlike Alice and Lenny. Perhaps we had been through all the emotion that the human mechanism can produce in a few hours.
What I did was this. I went into the cabin, found a towel, and wiped out whatever fingerprints Alice and I might have left. Lenny’s prints were her affair, and in any case I could not have coped with them without wiping down the whole boat. Polly’s prints were not on file anywhere, but Alice’s and mine were. I wiped the woodwork around the door where I had touched it or where Alice might have touched it, and I wiped the sections of the rail we might have touched. Meanwhile, Alice was calling me. I used the towel to wipe my hands clean of the blood that was already almost dry on them, and then I left the cabin cruiser.
Down on the little float, I saw that the three of them were already in the aluminum boat, Alice and Polly—the child still in her arms—on the middle seat and facing the stern, and Lenny at the bow seat, looking forward.
“What kept you?” Alice asked. “We’re mad to stay here, Johnny. You know that.”
“I did what I had to do,” I said.
“Then get in now.”
Instead, I stood there listening. They heard it, too. We must have been hearing it for a while now—yet we had not reacted to it, not the lawn-mower crackle of an outboard, but the deep, powerful, muffled roar of a hundred-horsepower inboard.
I cast off the rope, stepped into the outboard, and pushed away from the float. Then I took an oar, and, as best I could, began to scull the boat away from the cabin cruiser toward the wall of reeds that lined the canal.
“What are you doing?” Alice demanded. “Why don’t you start the motor, Johnny?”
I pointed toward the eastern end of the passage, where a blur was already visible, as were the two white horns of spray that curled back from the nose of the oncoming boat.
“We can’t get past him, and I don’t know what lies to the west of us. There’s a whole maze of channels and canals and mud islands, and at night, with the tide going out, it’s like a death trap. Is it Montez, Lenny?”
“It sounds like his boat.”
“A Chris-Craft?”
“I think so.”
“Is he armed?”
“He carries a Lüger. He always carries it when he comes out to the boat.”
We were almost at the reeds now, and my oar was finding mud at about two feet. I stopped poling as we floated into the shadow of the tall, dry stalks that grow so thickly in the Meadows.
“He’ll use his pistol, and he’ll use it well,” Lenny said. “He’s a good shot.”
I held my hand up to my lips. He had cut the motor, and the low, sleek Chris-Craft was drifting up to the landing float. Even a whisper carries at night on the water, and we were no more than thirty yards from the cabin cruiser. We could not see Montez, for he was in the shadow, but we heard the thump of the boat against the landing platform as clearly as if we were in the boat itself.
Then Montez shouted, “Ahoy up there! Angie—come down and make fast!”
He waited for an answer, and when he received none, he shouted something in his own tongue. I heard Lenny’s name. He shouted again.
Then we heard him making his boat fast, and the sound of his steps as he climbed the ladder. He bulked wide and fat as he showed his silhouette over the rail, and then we saw the top of his head as he stood on the deck.
“Lenny!” he shouted.
I heard the cabin door slam, and I poled off from shore and pulled the starting cord. The motor spluttered but nothing happened. It was impossible. It had to start. Mulligan had given me a motor tuned as fine as a watch. A touch of the cord would turn it over. I pulled the cord again, and again nothing.
“Johnny, for God’s sake—start the thing,” Alice whispered.
On the boat, the cabin door slammed again, and suddenly I realized that I had made the fool’s error and that my indicator was not at start. I made the adjustment, pulled the starting cord, and the motor roared into life—and at the same moment, a spotlight reached out, swung in a circle, and touched us. It came, not from the cabin cruiser, but from the Chris-Craft. I never would have dreamed that the fat man could move so quickly, but he was already back in his speedboat. I had only the advantage of the few seconds it would take him to cast off and start his motor.
I put the throttle at full, and the bow of the outboard lifted as it roared down the canal. This was the first time I had opened the motor to top speed, and I said a prayer of thanks to Mulligan and the magic he had wrought with the twenty-horsepower Johnson; but even at its best, twenty horsepower is no match for one hundred-horsepower inboard in a sleek racing hull, and a moment later I heard the hoarse throb of the Chris-Craft.
We were out of the canal now, and I made my turn too suddenly—and the boat skidded and heeled as we ripped through the reeds. I had a sudden, awful vision of us sitting on a mud reef while the fat man picked us off at his pleasure, and then we were clear and I was skidding and lurching through a twisting passage in the reeds.
Montez had his own difficulties, and he rode at least six inches deeper than I did. I heard him throttle down to make his turn, and then as we cut into a clear, straight passage, throttle wide open, the Chris-Craft roared into life again. He was parallel to us in another passage, a wall of reeds separating us. I cut my motor suddenly. The nose of the boat came down and it lost headway quickly, as an outboard does. We lay there in the sudden silence, the water lapping at our hull, while the speedboat roared off to the north.
Alice was staring at me, clutching Polly and staring at me; and crouched at the bow of the boat, Lenny did not move or glance back. The moon reflected itself down the passage we lay in, silver dancing in the sluggish water that had been given a moment of life by our motion.
The questions were there but unspoken as the Chris-Craft coughed into silence. Now the silence was complete where we were, broken only overhead, where a big passenger jet ripped through the sky from east to west, and as the sound of the jet died away, the speedboat came alive again. It throbbed at low throttle, distant at first, and then coming closer and closer—and then its spotlight stabbed out and swept through the reeds.
We flinched at first, for the way the spotlight cut through the reeds and flickered past made us feel naked and vulnerable; yet I realized that we remained invisible and that until Montez found a way into our passage from his, we were as safe as if we were a mile away.
He passed us, and then his motor coughed into idle. He was standing still now, running in neutral.
“Camber!”
He had cut the s
potlight, and the nearness of his voice, coming out of a wall of darkness, was frightening. I put my finger to my lips. Lenny turned her head slowly and looked at me. I touched my mouth and shook my head.
“Camber,” he shouted, “you can hear me! Now listen!”
Polly, too, was staring at me, wide-eyed. I forced myself to smile at her, while I held my finger across my mouth.
“Now listen to me, Camber,” Montez called. “You can play dead if you want to, but you can hear me. It would seem that I underestimated you, and no man can do worse than to underestimate his adversary. Well, what’s done is done. This has been a bad night, but not beyond repair. I want to make a deal with you.”
He paused then and waited. It was a good tactic and psychologically sound, for I felt an almost irresistible impulse to enter into the argument. It required an act of will to remain silent.
“All right, Camber. I take it for granted that you are in a mood to listen. This is what I propose. Give me the key. I will give you ten thousand dollars, which I have with me. Let bygones be bygones. If Lenny is there in your boat, I make my peace with her. If you want her, she is yours. I will not interfere.”
Alice was watching me, her face like a hard mask.
“Camber! I await your answer!”
Then Polly began to cry, and Alice bent over her, caressing her and soothing her.
“Camber! I am not to be trifled with—as people have learned to their sorrow! I hear your child and I know you are there! Camber, your answer, please!”
Polly stopped crying. Alice was whispering to her. Lenny no longer looked at me. She lay forward across the bow of the outboard, chin resting on her arms, looking out at whatever she saw in the darkness.
“Very well, Camber—now listen to me. Your boat is no match for mine. I am armed and I am purposeful. I am not given to threats, but if you force my hand, I will play it to the limit. Do you understand me? If you doubt either my resources or my determination, I advise you to consult with Lenny. I am offering you a fair and proper deal. Do you accept?”
He waited a calculated interval. Then he started his motor and moved south.
The fat man had once served me lunch. I say “once” advisedly, for while I had eaten this lunch just noontime past, it was part of an already distant memory—and the memory included the savory taste of what was unquestionably the best food I had ever been served. He had also made me drunk, and he had taught me several varieties of fear and heartsickness. Head to foot, my clothes were wet with the blood of his associates, and his wife was sitting remotely and indifferently at the bow of my boat.
This all adds up to a close association, and I was hard put to comprehend why I was not impressed or afraid. Perhaps I was too tired. A certain euphoria had taken hold of me—not totally a comfortable feeling and yet not terribly uncomfortable either. It was an unreasonable feeling that whatever was going to happen to me had already happened; and that is not at all anything that I can easily explain.
I knew that Montez was looking for a cross passage into our channel, and I knew that sooner or later he would find one. Looking back at the situation, it would appear that there were more intelligent things to do than what I did, but that was not a day marked in any striking manner by intelligent actions on my part. I could have turned south, and then there might have been a fair chance that I would have lost Montez in the maze of narrow channels and an equal chance that I could have come out all right at Newark Bay; but mentally and physically, I was too exhausted for games of hide and seek. I wanted to be out of those desolate Meadows and back where there were people and houses and police, so I started the motor, put the throttle at full speed, and roared north through the channel.
The chance I took—a foolish chance at that—was to count on confusing Montez. He was moving south, and if he continued south, looking for a crossover to my channel, I might well have time enough to lose him completely. To the north of me was the wide bay—and north of that the land-locked mouth of the Hackensack River, and once we were actually in the river, I felt that we would be safe.
But Montez refused to be confused. The moment he heard the sound of my motor moving north, he turned his own boat, taking the very small chance that his channel as well as mine would have to connect with the bay. It must have been obvious to him and it should have been obvious to me—and became obvious when we heard the roar of the Chris-Craft behind us. I was no more than a hundred yards ahead of him when we broke into the bay, and then the speedboat closed the gap with no effort at all, and Montez was running alongside of me, one hand for the wheel and the other for the Lüger.
I cut the motor, and he cut his, and the two boats drifted together. I sat still, my hand on the throttle. Alice clutched Polly to her. Lenny did not move.
Altogether, it was a poor denouement, without drama, passion, or struggle, a stupid move and an obvious counteraction, a fat man and a gun, and all my effort gone to nothing.
I felt limp and beaten and beyond any further resistance. I think Lenny felt the same way. She huddled at the bow without moving, only turning her head so that she could watch the fat man.
The focal point of life in that boat was my wife, Alice, and my daughter, Polly, who clung to her mother.
“Well, Mr. Montez,” Alice said, “what do you intend to do now—shoot us all?”
“I think so,” Montez replied.
“I don’t think so,” Alice snapped. “I don’t think so at all.”
“You could be very mistaken, Mrs. Camber. From all I have heard about you, I have come to admire you. But you are far from infallible. You could be mistaken.”
“I can live without your admiration, Mr. Montez.”
“I think first we’ll have the key. Then we can talk about your fate.”
“The key—the key—the key!” Alice said. “I am so tired of hearing about that wretched key of yours that I could scream! We have no key, Mr. Montez. It is gone. We have lost it.”
He smiled. “You are a persistent woman, Mrs. Camber.”
“We don’t have the key.”
“I think you do. Do you know, I wouldn’t have to kill all of you. Only the child—”
“You’re a very ugly man, Mr. Montez.”
“I think that’s enough, Mrs. Camber.”
“I don’t.” She had glanced at Lenny. Twice, three times, Alice had glanced at Lenny, but Montez never took his eyes off Alice. He had met a remarkable woman and he knew that.
“No, I don’t think so,” Alice repeated. “Hardly enough.”
I glanced at Lenny now. The black purse she had with her was at her feet, barely visible. She had opened it and had taken from it a small, pearl-handled automatic, and had done this with almost no apparent movement at all. Now she held the automatic below the gunwale of the boat.
“Please shut your mouth, Mrs. Camber,” Montez said.
“Why, Mr. Montez?” Alice cried. “Because I might tell you the truth about yourself? Because I might say what you are—a fat, ridiculous, strutting capon? Yes, a capon! A silly, simpering eunuch! Not a gourmet—but a pig! Yes, a pig! A freak of nature, barred from love, who makes a religion of hate! Oh, just look at yourself, Mr. Montez! Just dare to!”
I thought Montez would destroy himself in an explosive stroke, so wild and evident was the explosion of anger within him. His fat, round face became even more bloated with the rush of blood, and he began to tremble and shake, his enormous body shivering like a mass of jelly. He rose to his feet, leveling the Lüger at Alice, but the hand in which he held it trembled with rage. He brought up his other hand, so that he might grip the gun firmly with both, and then Lenny shot him.
She shot him three times, but the first bullet, which caught him squarely in the forehead, killed him. He dropped the gun, which fell into the water between the boats, and then he stood for a moment, regarding us blankly.
Then he crumpled to the bottom of the speedboat, and the two boats began to drift apart.
Polly, her face buried in Ali
ce’s arms, was crying softly. Through it all, Alice had thought about that, and had made certain that Polly saw nothing. She heard what had been said, but at least she saw nothing.
Lenny looked at her own gun for a moment, then she dropped it into the bay. It left a wake of iridescent bubbles as it sank.
13: Mulligan
On the Hackensack River, just below Route 46, there is an old landing, and that was where Lenny told us to put her ashore. I told her that the footing was treacherous by night and that she would be better advised to come back to the Boat Livery with us. But she saw no sense in that, and I suppose she was right.
But then what would she do? She had to climb up the embankment to the highway—and then what? She only smiled at me and shook her head. I asked her to let me go with her at least to the road.
“You stay with your wife and kid, Johnny,” she said.
Polly was asleep now, cradled in Alice’s arms, and Alice herself said not one word, not a word of gratitude, not a word of farewell. Lenny climbed out of the boat, stood for a moment, looking at us, then walked across the stone dock and began the trudge up to the road. She was small and pathetic, and the night closed over her as if she had never been.
I went the rest of the way up the river at low speed. I could not have endured to open the throttle and race back at full, and now I didn’t care. I guess Alice felt the same way, because she did not urge me to hurry.
After a little while, when the lack of communication between us had become nearly unbearable, I reminded Alice that Lenny had the gun when we were on the cabin cruiser. She did not have to ask to come with us. She could have forced the issue at gun point.
“I suppose she could have,” Alice admitted. It was the first word she had spoken to me since Montez died.
“But she didn’t.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“When you come right down to it,” I said, “she saved your life.”
“Oh?”
“Well, didn’t she?”
“I suppose so,” Alice sighed. “You’ll wake Polly. She’s finally asleep.”
