“What do you want us to send down?”
“It will take a long time to move—there is a great deal to carry. Wait…”
The loud speaker was silent. One could imagine the man twenty fathoms down, leaning against the water, working around in laboured exploration. Then the guttural voice spoke again.
“The strong-room is close to the main stairway. Above the stairway there is a glass dome. We can go up on deck again and break through the glass, and you can send down the grab. That way, it will not be so long. But we cannot stay down here more than a few minutes. We have been here three quarters of an hour already, which is too long for this depth.”
Vogel considered this for a moment.
“Break down the glass first, and then we will bring you up,” he directed, and turned to the men who were standing around by the winch. “Calvieri—Orbel—you will get ready to go down as soon as these two come up. Grondin, you will attend to the grab…”
For some minutes he was issuing detailed orders, allotting duties in his cold curt voice with impersonal efficiency. He shook off the lassitude in which he had been waiting without losing a fraction of the dispassionate calm which laid its terrifying detachment on everything he did. He became a mere organising brain, motionless and almost disembodied himself, lashing the cogs of his machine to disciplined movement.
And as he finished, Ivaloff’s voice came through again.
“We have made a large enough opening in the dome. Now we should come up.” Vogel nodded, and a man stepped to the controls of the winch. And at last Vogel got up.
He got up, straightening his trousers and settling his jacket with the languid finickiness of a man who has nothing much to do and nothing of importance on his mind. And as casually and expressionlessly as the same man might have wandered towards an ashtray to dispose of an unconsidered cigarette-end, he strolled over the yard or two that separated him from the air pump, and bent over one of the rubber tubes.
His approach was so placid and unemotional that for a moment even Loretta, with her eyes riveted mutely on him, could not quite believe what she was seeing. Only for a moment she stared at him, wondering, unbelieving. And then, beyond any doubt, she knew…
Her eyes widened in a kind of blind horror. Why, she could never have said. She had seen death before, had faced it herself only a little while ago, had lived with it, had stood pale and silent on that same deck while Professor Yule died. But not until then had she felt the same frozen clutch on her heart, the same dumb stab of anguish, the same reckless annihilation of her restraint. She didn’t know what she was doing, didn’t think, made no conscious movement, and yet suddenly, somehow, in another instant of time, she was beside Vogel, grasping his wrist and arm, tearing his hand away. She heard someone sobbing: “No! No! Not that!”—and realised in a dazed sort of way that she was hearing her own voice.
“No! No!”
“My dear Loretta!”
He had straightened up, was looking down at her with his hooked waxen face cold and contemptuously critical. She became aware that she was breathing as if she had just run to him from a great distance, that her heart was pounding against her ribs like a deliriously wielded hammer, that there must have been a wild stupidity in her gaze. And she realised at the same time that the winch had stopped again.
“Why have you done that?” she gasped.
“Done what?”
She was shaking his arm unconsciously. “Stopped bringing them up.”
“My dear girl!” His tone was bland and patronising. “That is the normal process. When a man has been working for three quarters of an hour at the depth where they have been, his blood becomes saturated with nitrogen. If he was brought up quickly and the pressure was suddenly taken off, the gas would form bubbles in his blood like it does in champagne when the cork is drawn. He would get a painful attack of diver’s paralysis. The pressure has to be relieved gradually—there is a regular time-table for it. Our divers have been stopped at thirty feet. They will rest there for five minutes, then for ten minutes at twenty feet, then for fifteen minutes—”
She knew that he was trying to make her feel foolish, but she was too sure of her knowledge to care.
“That’s not all you were doing,” she said.
“What else?”
“You were going to take one of those airlines off the pump.”
“My dear—”
“Weren’t you?”
He looked at her impassively, as if he was playing with the possible answers at his disposal, deliberating their probable effect on her rather than their accuracy. She shrugged bitterly.
“Oh, I know. You don’t need to lie. You were going to kill him.”
A faint flicker of expression, the gleam of passionless calculating cruelty which she had seen before, passed over his face.
“And if I was? How deeply will his death hurt you?”
“I should be hurt in a way you couldn’t understand.”
He waited. She had an uncanny spine-chilling feeling that he was not sane—that he was giving rein to the solitary sadistic megalomania that was branded on all his actions, playing with her like a cat and savouring the lustful pleasure of watching her agony. Searching for his eyes under the heavy shadow of his brows, she suddenly found them devouring her with a weird rigidity that struck her cold. She found herself speaking disjointedly, breathlessly again, trying to drown the new horror in a babble of words that she would never be able to utter unless she let them pour blindly out.
“I know why he went down. I know why he opened that strong-room for you. He wouldn’t have done that to save his life—not his own life. He wouldn’t have believed you. He tried to tell me that that was why he was going to do it, but couldn’t make me believe it. He knew you meant to kill him as soon as it was done. He wasn’t afraid. I saw him. I talked to him. He lied to me. He was splendid. But I knew. You offered him something that he could believe. You made him do it for me!”
“Really, my dear Loretta, this is so dramatic. I must have misunderstood our friend Templar. So he becomes the perfect gentle knight, dying to save a lady’s honour—”
“Yes. I told you that you wouldn’t understand.”
He gave a short harsh exhalation of breath that could not have been called a laugh. “You little fool! He never did anything of the kind.”
Then she remembered.
“No. But I told him that I should like to live. He did it to save my life.”
“The perfect knight again!”
“Something that you could never understand. I know now. That’s the truth, isn’t it? You made that bargain with him. My life against his—and a little work. Didn’t you?”
He sighed.
“It would have been such a pity not to give such a classical chivalry its chance,” he said.
The sneer brought the blood to her cheeks. She felt a disgust that was almost petrifying. The mask which he had worn since she had first known him was gone altogether now. The smooth imperturbability of his face was no longer the veneer of impenetrable self-possession—it was the fixed grimace of a demon gloating over its own inhumanity. Now she had seen his eyes…
“He never had any right to bargain for me,” she said, and tried not to let her voice tremble. “I didn’t ask him for any sacrifice—I wouldn’t take any. I’m here, and I can make my own bargain. The Saint’s done all you wanted him to. Why not let him go?”
“To come back presently and interfere with me again?”
“You could make it a condition that he said nothing—that he forgot everything he knew. He’d keep his word.”
“Of course—the perfect knight…How ridiculous you are!”
“Did you always think that?”
He stopped short, with his head on one side. Then his cold reptilian hand went up and slowly touched her face.
“You know what I think of you, my dear. I told you, once. You were trying to deceive me. You tried to destroy me with your beauty, but you would have given me n
othing. And yet for you I took risks—I placed myself in fantastic danger—I gambled everything—to keep you beside me and see how treacherous you could be. But!”—his hand suddenly dropped on her arm in a grasp so brutal that she almost cried out—”I had my own idea about how treacherous I would allow you to be, and how you would make amends for it later.”
He dragged her up against him and ravished her mouth, briefly, cold-bloodedly. She stood unresisting and still as death until he thrust her away.
“Now,” he said, “you are not in a position to make bargains.”
He stooped over the air-line again. She tore at his hand, and he stood up.
“If you are going to be a nuisance,” he said in his supercilious expiring voice, “I shall have you taken away.”
“You can’t do it!” she panted. “You haven’t everything you want yet. If you kill him, you could never have it.”
“I have you.”
“Only as a prisoner. You can do what you like with me, I suppose. What you want, you can take by force. If that’s all you want—”
“It will be enough.”
“But I could give…”
“What?”
He was staring at her, seized with a new stillness. There was a thread of moisture on his thin lips, and the high glaze on his cheekbones shone with a dull white lustre. His eyes squinted slightly, smouldering like dark coals. His soft clammy hands gripped her shoulders.
“What?” he repeated.
She could not look at him, or her courage would not be enough. Already she felt defiled, shuddering at the dank chill of his touch. She closed her eyes.
“If you let him go I will stay with you willingly—I will be to you anything that you like.”
4
Altogether they took over forty minutes to come up—nearly as long as they had spent on the bottom. It was a wearisome business going through the gradual decompression, hanging suspended in the green void through the lengthening pauses, rising a little further and halting for another interregnum of blank inactivity. The Saint felt no ill effects from his long submersion other than a growing fatigue, which had become almost overpowering in the last ten minutes when they had been breaking through the glass dome above the stairway. He had never realised that the resistance of the water which had to be overcome with every smallest movement could eat up so much strength; fit and strong as he was, he had a dull ache in every limb and a nervous hunger for unhampered movement in all his muscles which made the exasperatingly slow ascent harder to endure than anything that had preceded it. He would have given half the millions which he had uncovered down there for a cigarette, but even that solace was unattainable.
He realised at the same time that he was lucky to be able to experience discomfort. When he stood back from the open door of the strong-room and announced the completion of his work into the microphone beside his mouth, he had waited for the quick blotting out of all sensation. He did not know exactly how it would come, but he believed that it would be swift and certain. He had done all that Vogel required of him, and, beyond that, he survived only as a potential menace, to be logically obliterated as soon as possible, before he could do any further damage. Like Loretta, he felt that it must be infuriating to die, leaving so much unfinished, down there in the lonely dark, with none of the drunken exaltation of battle to give it a persuasive glory, but that was what he had gone down to do. When he still lived, he wondered what could have happened to bring him the reprieve.
Had Vogel changed his mind? That was more than the Saint could make himself believe. Or had Vogel begun to wonder whether it would be safe to kill him, when he must be presumed to have associates somewhere who knew as much as he knew and knew also where he had gone, who would make inquiries and take action when he didn’t come back? The Saint could see practical difficulties in the way of casually bumping himself off which might have made even Kurt Vogel stop to think, and yet he couldn’t quite convince himself that Vogel’s strategic talents had at last been baffled.
He was alive without knowing why—without knowing how long that delicious surprise could last, but believing that it could not possibly last for long. And yet the instinct of life is so strong that he was more occupied with wondering how he would turn the reprieve to the most profit. Even when he was working down there on the strong-room door, believing that he had no hope of seeing the light again, that same queer instinct of survival had made him prepare for the impossible chance. Now, when he moved his arm, he could feel a wet discomfort in his sleeve that was more than compensated by the small steel instrument which slithered against his wrist—an instrument which he had not possessed when he left the deck of the Falkenberg, which might yet be worth more to him than all the gold of the Chalfont Castle…
The water above his head thinned and lightened, became a mere film which broke against his helmet. The weight on his shoulders became real again, and the massive boots dragged at his feet. Then expert hands unlocked the helmet and detached it from the breastplate, and he filled his lungs with the clean sea air and felt the breath of the sea on his face.
Vogel stood in front of him.
“Perhaps you were justified in calling my former assistant an amateur,” he remarked urbanely. “Judged by your own exceptional standard, I fear he was not so efficient as I used to think.”
“It’s hardly fair to compare anyone with me,” murmured the Saint modestly. “And so where do we go after the compliments, Birdie?”
“You will go to your cabin below while I consider what is to be done with you.”
He left the Saint with a satirical bow, and went on to give further instructions to the two replacement divers who were waiting to have the straps tightened on their corselets. Simon sat on a stool and loosened the cords and straps of his boots, while his own breastplate was taken off. As he wriggled out of the cumbersome twill and rubber suit he managed to get the instrument in his sleeve into his hand, and during the process of peeling off the heavy woollen sweater and pants with which he had been provided to protect him against the cold of the water he managed to transfer it undetected into an inside pocket of his clothes. He was not dead yet—not by a million light-years…
He fished out a crumpled packet of cigarettes and lighted one while he sought a sign from Loretta. The smoke caressed the hungry tissue of his lungs and sent its narcotic balm stealing gratefully along his nerves, and over by the rail he saw her, slim and quiet and desirable in her scanty white dress, so that it was all he could do not to go over and take her quietly into his arms. Even to see her and to desire her in helpless silence was a part of that supreme ecstasy of the return to life, a delight of sensual survival that had its place with the smell of the sea and the reddening retreat of the sun, a crystallisation of the voluptuous rapture of living, but she only looked at him for a moment, and then turned away again. And then he was seized by the arms and hurried down the companion.
Loretta heard him go, without looking round. She heard the feet of men on the deck, and the whine of the winch as the second pair of divers were lowered. Presently she heard Arnheim’s fat voice:
“How much longer will this take?”
And Vogel’s reply : “I don’t know. Probably we shall have to send Ivaloff down again, with someone else, when Orbel and Calvieri are tired. I expect it will be dusk before we can reach St Martin.”
“Are they expecting us?”
“I shall have to tell them. Will you attend to the telephone?”
Loretta rested her elbows on the rail and her chin on her hands. Her face slid down between her hands till her fingers combed through her hair. She heard without hearing, gazed over the sea and saw nothing.
A touch on her shoulder roused her. She shivered and straightened up, shaking the hair out of her eyes. Her face was white with a sort of lifeless calm.
Vogel stood beside her, with his hands in his pockets. “You are tired?” he said, in his cold grating voice.
She shook her head.
“Oh, no. I
t’s just—rather dull, waiting, isn’t it? I suppose you’re interested in the work, but—I wish they’d be quick. We’ve been here for hours…”
She was talking aimlessly, for the sake of talking, for the sake of any distraction that would reassure her of her own courage. His thin lips edged outwards in what might have been a smile.
“Would you like a drink?”
“Yes.”
He touched her arm. “Come.”
He led her into the wheelhouse and pressed the bell for a steward. As the man entered silently, he said, “A highball?—I think that would be your national prescription.”
She nodded, and he confirmed the order with a glance.
He held out an inlaid cigarette-box and struck a match. She inhaled the smoke and stood up to him without recoiling, with her head lifted in that white lifeless pride. Her heart was beating in quick leaden strokes, but her hand was steady.
Was it to be so soon? She wished it could be over before she was weakened by her fear, and yet the instinct of escape prayed for a respite, as if time could give cold logic a more crushing mastery of her revulsion. What did it amount to after all, this physical sacrifice, this brief humiliation? Her mind, her self that made her a living personality, her soul or heart or whatever it might be called, could not be touched. It was beyond reach of all the assailments of the body for so long as she chose to keep it so. “You don’t burn your house down because a little mud has been trodden into the floor.” She, her essential self, could triumph even in the defeat of the flesh. What a lot of exaggerated nonsense was talked about that one crude gesture…And yet her heart throbbed with that leaden pulse before the imminent reality.
“Excuse me a moment.”
Either he had observed nothing, or he was insensible to her emotions. Without touching her, he turned away and moved over to the bookcases at the after end of the room.
She had her respite. The steward returned, and put down a tray on the table beside her; he poured out a drink and went out again without speaking. Loretta took up the glass and tasted it: after she had sipped, it occurred to her that it might be drugged, and she almost put it down. And then her lips moved in the ghost of a wry grimace. What did it matter?
Saint Overboard (The Saint Series) Page 20
