Simon looked over his shoulder. The sea had turned paler in the glassy calm of the late afternoon, and the sky was without a cloud, a vast howl of blue-tinted space stretching through leagues of unfathomable clearness beyond the sharp edge of the horizon.
“Meanwhile,” he said flippantly, “we might get a bit more morbid if I told you some more about the horrible dilemma of Elphinphlopham.”
She shook her head.
“No.”
“You’re right,” he said soberly. “There are more important things to tell you.”
“Such as?”
“Why I should fall in love with you so quickly.”
“Weren’t you just taking advantage of the garden?” she said, with her grey eyes on his face.
“It may have been that. Or maybe it was the garden taking advantage of me. Or maybe it was you taking advantage of both. But it happened.”
“How often has it happened before?”
He looked at her straightly.
“Many times.”
“And how often could it happen again?”
His lips curved with the fraction of a sardonic grin. Vogel had never promised him life—had never even troubled to help him delude himself that his own life would be included in the bargain. Whether he opened the strong-room of the Chalfont Castle or not, Vogel had given his sentence.
Simon Templar had had the best of outlawry. He had loved and romanced, dreamed and philandered and had his fling, and loved again, and he had come to believe that love shared the impermanence of all adventures. Of all the magnificent madnesses of youth he had lost only one—the power to tell himself, and to believe, that the world could be summed up and completed in one love. Yet, for the first time in his life, he could tell the lie and believe that it could be true.
“I don’t think it’ll happen again,” he said.
But she was laughing quietly, with an infinite tenderness in her eyes. “Unless a miracle happens,” she said. “And who’s going to provide one?”
“Steve Murdoch?” he suggested, and glanced round the bare white cabin. “This is the dungeon I fished him out of. He really ought to return the compliment.”
“He’ll be in St Peter Port by now…But this boat is the only address he’s got for me, and he won’t know where we’ve gone. And I suppose Vogel won’t be going back that way.”
“Two friends of mine back there have some idea where we’ve gone. Peter Quentin and
Roger Conway. They’re staying at the Royal. But I forgot to bring my carrier pigeons.”
“So we’ll have to provide our own miracle?”
“Anyway,” said the Saint, “I don’t like crowds. And I shouldn’t want one now.”
He flicked his cigarette-end backwards through the porthole and turned towards her. She nodded.
“Neither should I,” she said.
She threw away her own cigarette and gave him both her hands. But she stayed up on her knees, as she had risen, listening to the sounds which had become audible outside. Then she looked out, and he pulled himself up beside her.
The Falkenberg was hove to, no more than a long stone’s throw from the Casquet Rocks. The lighthouse, crowning the main islet like a medieval castle, a hundred feet above the water, was so close that he could see one of the lighthouse-keepers leaning over the battlements and looking down at them.
For a moment Simon was puzzled to guess the reason for the stop, and then the sharp clatter of an outboard motor starting up, clear above the dull vibration, of the Falkenberg’s idling engines, made him glance down towards the water, and he understood. The Falkenberg’s dinghy had been lowered, and it was even then stuttering away towards the landing stage, manned by Otto Arnheim and three of the crew. As it drew away from the side the Falkenberg got under way again, sliding slowly through the water towards the south.
Simon turned away from the porthole, and Loretta’s eyes met him. “I suppose the lighthouse overlooks the wreck,” she said.
“I believe it does,” he answered, recalling the chart which he had studied the night before.
Neither of them spoke for a little while. The thought in both their minds needed no elaborating. The staff on the lighthouse might see too much—and that must be prevented. The Saint wondered how drastically the prevention would be done, and had a grim suspicion of the answer. It would be so easy for Arnheim, landing with, his crew in the guise of an innocent tripper asking to be shown over the plant…
Simon sat down again on the bunk. His lips were drawn hard and bitter with the knowledge of his helplessness. There was nothing that he could do. But he would have liked, just once, to feel the clean smash of his fists on Vogel’s cold sneering face…
“I guess it’s nearly time for my burglary,” he said. “It’s a grand climax to my career as a detective.”
She was leaning back, with her head on his shoulder. Her cheek was against his, and she held his hands to her breasts.
“So you signed on the dotted line, Simon,” she said softly.
“Didn’t you always know I would?”
“I hoped you would.”
“It’s been worth it.”
She turned her face a little. Presently she said, “I told you I was afraid, once. Do you remember?”
“Are you afraid now?” he asked, and felt the shake of her head.
“Not now.”
He kissed her. Her lips were soft and surrendering against his. He held her face in his hands, touched her hair and her eyes, as he had done in the garden. “Will you always remember me like this?” she said.
“Always.”
“I think they’re coming.”
A key turned in the lock, and he stood up. Vogel came in first, with his right hand still in his side pocket, and two of his crew framed themselves in the doorway behind him. He bowed faintly to the Saint, with his smooth face passive and expectant and the great hook of his nose thrust forward. If he was enjoying his triumph of scheming and counter-plot, the exultation was held in the same iron restraint as all his emotions. His black eyes remained cold and expressionless.
“Have you made up your mind?” he asked.
Simon Templar nodded. In so many ways he was content. “I’m ready when you are,” he said.
2
They were settling the forty-pound lead weights over his shoulders, one on his back and one on his chest. He was already encased in the heavy rubber-lined twill overall, which covered him completely from foot to neck, with the vulcanised rubber cuffs adjusted on his wrists and the tinned copper corselet in position, and the weighted boots, each of them turning the scale at sixteen pounds, had been strapped on his feet. Another member of the crew, similarly clad, was explaining the working of the air outlet valve to him before the helmet was put on.
“If you screw up the valve you keep the air in the dress and so you float. If you unscrew it you let out the air, and you sink. When you get to the bottom, you adjust the valve so that you are comfortable. You keep enough air to balance the weights without lifting you off your feet, until it is time to come up. You understand?”
“You have a gift for putting things plainly,” said the Saint.
The man grunted and stepped back, and Kurt Vogel stood in front of him.
“Ivaloff will go down with, you—in case you should be tempted to forget your position,” he explained. “He will also lead you to the strong-room, which I have shown him on the plans of the ship. He will also carry the underwater hydro-oxygen torch, which will cut through one and a half inches of solid steel—to be used as and when you direct him.”
Simon nodded, and drew at the cigarette he was smoking. He fingered an instrument from the kit which he had been examining.
“Those are the tools of the man you killed,” said Vogel. “He worked well with them. If there is anything else you need, we will try to supply you.”
“This looks like a pretty adequate outfit.”
Simon dropped the implement back in the bag from which he had taken it. Th
e brilliance of the afternoon had passed its height, and the sea was like oiled crystal under the lowering sun. The sun was still bright, but it had lost its heat. A few streaks of cloud were drawing long streamers towards the west.
The Saint was looking at the scene more than at Vogel. There was a dry satirical whim in him to remember it—if memory went on to the twilight where he was going. Death in the afternoon. He had seen it so often, and now he had chosen it for himself. There was no fear in him, only a certain cynical peace. It was his one regret that Vogel had brought Loretta out on to the deck with him. He would rather have been spared that last reminder.
“I shall be in communication with both of you by telephone all the time, and I shall expect you to keep me informed of your progress.” Vogel was completing his instructions, in his invariable toneless voice, as if he were dealing with some ordinary matter of business. “As soon as you have opened the strong-room, you will help Ivaloff to bring out the gold and load it on to the tackle which will be sent down to you…I think that is all?”
He looked at the Saint inquiringly, and Simon shrugged.
“It’s enough to be going on with,” he said, and Vogel stood aside and signed to the man who waited beside him with the helmet.
The heavy casque was put over the Saint’s head, settled in the segmental neck rings on the corselet, and secured with a one-eighth turn, after which a catch on the back locked it against accidental unscrewing. Through the plate-glass window in the front Simon watched the same process being performed on Ivaloff, and saw two seamen take the handles of the reciprocating air pump which had been brought out on deck. His breathing became tainted with a faint odour of oil and rubber…
“Can you hear me?”
It was Vogel’s voice, reverberating metallically through the telephone.
“Okay,” answered the Saint mechanically, and heard his own voice booming hollowly in his ears.
Ivaloff beckoned to him, and he stood up and walked clumsily to the stern. A section of the taffrail had been removed to give them a clear passage, and a sort of flat cradle had been slung from the end of the boom from which the bathystol had been lowered. They stepped on to it and grasped the ropes, and in another moment they were swinging clear of the deck and coming down over the water.
Taking his last look round as they went down, Simon caught sight of the outboard coming back, a speck creeping over the sea from the north-west, and he watched it with an arctic stillness in his eyes. So, doubtless, the lighthouse had been dealt with, and two more innocent men had gone down perplexedly into the shadows, not knowing why they died. Before long, probably, he would be able to tell them…
Then the water closed over his window, and, as it closed, seemed to change startlingly from pale limpid blue to green. In an instant all the light and warmth of the world were blotted out, leaving nothing but that dim emerald phosphorescence. Looking up, he could see the surface of the water like a ceiling of liquid glass rolling and wrinkling in long slow undulations, but none of the crisp warm sparkle which played over it under the sun came through into the weird viridescent gloaming through which they were sinking down. Up over his head he could see the keel of the Falkenberg glued in bizarre truncation to that fluid awning, the outlines growing vaguer and darker as it receded.
They were sinking through deeper and deeper shades of green into an olive-green semi-darkness. There was a thin slight singing in his ears, an impression of deafness: he swallowed, closing his nasal passages, exactly as he would have done in coming down in an aeroplane from a height, and his ear-drums plopped back to normal. A long spar rose out of the green gloom to meet them, and he realised suddenly that it was a mast: he looked down and saw the dim shapes of the funnels rising after it, slipping by…the white paintwork of the upper decks.
The grating on which they stood jarred against the rail of the promenade deck, and their descent ceased. Ivaloff was clambering down over the rail, and Simon followed him. In spite of all the weight of his gear, he felt curiously light and buoyant—almost uncomfortably so. Each time he moved he felt as if his whole body might rise up and float airily away.
“Unscrew your valve.”
Ivaloff’s gruff voice crackled in his helmet, and he realised that the telephone wiring connected them together as well as keeping them in communication with the Falkenberg. Simon obeyed the instruction, and felt the pressure of water creeping up his chest as the suit deflated until Ivaloff tapped on his helmet and told him to stop.
The feeling of excessive buoyancy disappeared with the reduction of the air. As they moved on, he found that the weights with which he was loaded just balanced the buoyancy of his body, so that he was not conscious of walking under a load, and the air inside his helmet was just sufficient to relieve his shoulders of the burden of the heavy corselet. Overcoming the resistance of the water itself was the only labour of movement, and that was rather like wading through treacle.
In that ghostly and fatiguing slow-motion they went down through the ship to the strong-room. It was indescribably eerie, an unforgettable experience, to trudge down the carpeted main stairway in that dark green twilight, and see tiny fish flitting between the balusters and sea-urchins creeping over a chandelier, to pick his way over scattered relics of tragedy on the floor, and see queer creatures of the sea scuttle and crawl and rocket away as his feet disturbed them, to stand in front of the strong-room door, presently, and see a limpet firmly planted beside the lock. To feel the traces of green scum on the door under his finger-tips, and remember that a hundred and twenty feet of water was piled up between him and the frontiers of human life. To see the uncouth shape of Ivaloff looming beside him, and realise that he was its twin brother—a weird, lumbering, glassy-eyed, cowled monster moving at the dictation of Simon Templar’s brain…
The Saint knelt down and opened his kit of tools, and spoke into the telephone transmitter: “I’m starting work.”
Vogel was reclining in a deck chair beside the loud speaker, studying his finger-nails. He gave no answer. The slanting rays of the sun left his eyes in deep shadow and laid chalky high-lights on his cheekbones: his face was utterly sphinx-like and inscrutable. Perhaps he showed neither anxiety nor impatience because he felt none.
Arnheim had returned, clambering up from the dinghy like an ungainly bloated frog, and the three hard-faced seamen with him had hauled it up on the davits and brought it inboard before moving aft to join the knot of men at the taffrail.
Vogel had looked up briefly at his lieutenant. “You had no trouble?”
“None.”
“Good.”
And he had gone back to the idle study of his finger-nails, breathing gently on them and rubbing them slowly on the palm of the opposite hand, while Arnheim rubbed a handkerchief round the inside of his collar and puffed away to a chair in the background. The single question which Vogel had asked had hardly been a question at all, it had been more of a statement challenging contradiction; his acceptance of the reply had been simply an expression of satisfaction that the statement was not contested. There was no suggestion of praise in it. His orders had been given, and there was no reason why they should have miscarried.
Loretta stared down into the half-translucent water and felt as if she was watching the inexorable march of reality turn into the cold deliberateness of nightmare. Down there in the sunless liquid silence under her eyes, under the long measured roll of that great reach of water, men were living and moving, incredibly, unnaturally, linked with the life-giving air by nothing but those fragile filaments of rubber hose which snaked over the stern; the Saint’s strong lean hands, whitened with the cold and pressure, were moving deftly towards the accomplishment of their most fantastic crime. Working with skilled sure touches to lay open the most fabulous store of plunder that could ever have come in the path even of his amazing career—while his life stood helpless at the mercy of the two men who bent in monotonous alternation at the handles of the air compressor, and waited on the whim of the impassive h
ook-nosed man who was polishing his nails in the deck chair. Working with the almost certain knowledge that his claim to life would run out at the moment when his errand was completed.
She knew…What had she told him, once? “To do your job, to keep your mouth shut, and to take the consequences” …And in her imagination she could see him now, even while he was working towards death, his blue eyes alert and absorbed, the gay fighting mouth sardonic and unafraid, as it had been while they talked so quietly and lightly in the cabin…She could smile, in the same way that he had smiled goodbye to her—a faint half-derisive half-wistful tug at the lips that wrote its own saga of courage and mocked it at the same time…
She knew he would open the strong-room, knew that he had made his choice and that he would go through with it. He would never hesitate or make excuses.
A kind of numbness had settled on her brain, an insensibility that was a taut suspension of the act of living rather than a dull anaesthesia. She had to look at her watch to pin down the leaden drag of time in bald terms of minutes and seconds. Until his voice came through the loud speaker again to announce the fulfilment of his bargain, the whole universe stood still. The Falkenberg lifted and settled in the stagnant swell, the two automatons at the air-pump bent rhythmically at the wheels, Vogel rubbed his nails gently on his palms, the sun climbed fractionally down the western sky, but within her and all around her there seemed to be a crushing stillness, an unbearable quiet.
It was almost impossible to believe that only forty minutes went by before the Saint’s voice came again through the loud speaker, ending the silence and the suspense with one cool steady sentence:
“The strong-room is open.”
3
Arnheim jumped as if he had been prodded, and got up to come waddling over. Vogel only stopped polishing his nails, and turned a switch in the telephone connection box beside him. His cairn check-up went back over the line.
“Everything is all right, Ivaloff?”
“Yes. The door is open. The gold is here.”
Saint Overboard (The Saint Series) Page 19
