Night Over Water

by Ken Follett

  A look of anger passed briefly across Luther’s face, and Eddie knew his suspicion had been correct.

  Eddie went on. “And when the launch meets the Clipper, I have to see Carol-Ann, on the deck of the boat, before I open the doors, you understand? If I don’t see her I’ll give the alarm. Ollis Field will grab you before you can open the door, and the Coast Guard will be here before your goons can break in. So you make sure this is done exactly right or you’re all dead.”

  Luther got his nerve back suddenly. “You won’t do any of this,” he sneered. “You wouldn’t risk your wife’s life.”

  Eddie tried to foster doubt. “Are you sure, Luther?”

  It was not enough. Luther shook his head decisively. “You ain’t that crazy.”

  Eddie knew he had to convince Luther right now. This was the moment of crisis. The word crazy gave him the inspiration he needed. “I’ll show you how crazy I am,” he said. He pushed Luther up against the wall next to the big square window. For a moment the man was too surprised to resist. “I’ll show you just how goddamn crazy I am.” He kicked Luther’s legs away with a sudden movement, and the man fell heavily to the floor. At that moment Eddie felt crazy. “You see this window, shitheel?” Eddie took hold of the venetian blind and ripped it from its fastenings. “I’m crazy enough to throw you out this fucking window—that’s how crazy I am.” He jumped up onto the washstand and kicked at the windowpane. He was wearing stout boots, but the window was made of strong Plexiglas, three-sixteenths of an inch thick. He kicked again, harder, and this time it cracked. One more kick broke it. Shattered glass flew into the room. The plane was traveling at 125 miles per hour, and the icy wind and freezing rain blew in like a hurricane.

  Luther was scrambling to his feet, terrified. Eddie jumped back onto the floor and stopped him getting away. Catching the man off balance, he pushed him up against the wall. Rage gave him the strength to overpower Luther, although they were much the same weight. He took Luther by the lapels and shoved the man’s head out the window.

  Luther screamed.

  The noise of the wind was so loud that the scream was almost inaudible.

  Eddie pulled him back in and shouted in his ear: “I’ll throw you out, I swear to God!” He pushed Luther’s head out again and lifted him off the floor.

  If Luther had not panicked, he might have broken free, but he had lost control and was helpless. He screamed again, and Eddie could just make out the words: “I’ll do it, I’ll do it, let me go, let me go!”

  Eddie felt a powerful urge to push him all the way out; then he realized he was in danger of losing control too. He did not want to kill Luther, he reminded himself, just scare him half to death. He had achieved that already. It was enough.

  He lowered Luther to the floor and relaxed his grip.

  Luther ran for the door.

  Eddie let him go.

  I do a pretty good crazy act, Eddie thought; but he knew he had not really been acting.

  He leaned against the washstand, catching his breath. The mad rage left him as quickly as it had come. He felt calm, but shocked by his own violence, almost as if someone else had done it.

  A moment later a passenger came in.

  It was the man who had joined the flight at Foynes, Mervyn Lovesey, a tall guy in a striped nightshirt that looked pretty funny. He was a down-to-earth Englishman of about forty. He looked at the damage and said: “By heck, what happened here?”

  Eddie swallowed. “A broken window,” he said.

  Lovesey gave him a satiric look. “That much I worked out for myself.”

  “It sometimes happens in a storm,” Eddie said. “These violent winds carry lumps of ice or even stones.”

  Lovesey was skeptical. “Well! I’ve been flying my own plane for ten years and I never heard that.”

  Eddie was right, of course. Windows did sometimes break on trips, but it usually happened when the plane was in harbor, not in mid-Atlantic. For such eventualities they carried aluminum window covers called deadlights, which happened to be stowed right here in the men’s room. Eddie opened the locker and pulled one out. “That’s why we carry these,” he said.

  Lovesey was convinced at last. “Fancy that,” he said. He went into the cubicle.

  Stowed with the deadlights was the screwdriver that was the only tool required to install them. Eddie decided that it would minimize the fuss if he did the job himself. In a few seconds he took off the windowframe, unscrewed the remainder of the broken pane, screwed the deadlight in its place, and replaced the frame.

  “Very impressive,” said Mervyn Lovesey, coming out of the toilet. Eddie had a feeling he was not completely reassured, all the same. However, he was not likely to do anything about it.

  Eddie went out and found Davy making a milk drink in the galley. “The window’s broken in the john,” he told him.

  “I’ll fix it as soon as I’ve given the princess her cocoa.”

  “I’ve installed the deadlight.”

  “Gee, thanks, Eddie.”

  “But you need to sweep up the glass as soon as you can.”

  “Okay.”

  Eddie would have liked to offer to sweep up himself, because he had made the mess. That was how his mother had trained him. However, he was in danger of appearing suspiciously overhelpful, and betraying his guilty conscience. So, feeling bad, he left Davy to it.

  He had achieved something, anyway. He had scared Luther badly. He now thought Luther would go along with the new plan and have Carol-Ann brought to the rendezvous in the launch. At least he had reason to hope.

  His mind returned to his other worry: the plane’s fuel reserve. Although it was not yet time for him to go back on duty, he went up to the flight deck to speak to Mickey Finn.

  “The curve is all over the place!” Mickey said excitably as soon as Eddie arrived.

  But have we got enough fuel? Eddie thought. However, he maintained a superficial calm. “Show me.”

  “Look—fuel consumption is incredibly high for the first hour of my shift. Then it comes back to normal for the second hour.”

  “It was all over the place during my shift, too,” Eddie said, trying to show mild concern where he felt terrible fear. “I guess the storm makes everything unpredictable.” Then he asked the question that was tormenting him. “But do we have enough fuel to get home?” He held his breath.

  “Yeah, we have enough,” Mickey said.

  Eddie’s shoulders slumped with relief. Thank God. At least that worry was over.

  “But we’ve got nothing in reserve,” Mickey added. “I hope to hell we don’t lose an engine.”

  Eddie could not worry about such a remote possibility: he had too much else on his mind. “What’s the weather forecast? Maybe we’re almost through the storm.”

  Mickey shook his head. “Nope,” he said grimly. “It’s about to get an awful lot worse.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Nancy Lenehan found it unsettling to be in bed in a room with a total stranger.

  As Mervyn Lovesey had assured her, the “honeymoon suite” had bunk beds despite its name. However, he had not been able to wedge the door open permanently, because of the storm: whatever he tried, it kept banging shut, until they both felt it was less embarrassing to leave it closed than to continue fussing about keeping it open.

  She had stayed up as long as possible. She was tempted to sit in the main lounge all night, but it had become an unpleasantly masculine place, full of cigarette smoke and whiskey fumes and the murmured laughter and cursing of gamblers, and she felt conspicuous there. In the end there was nothing for it but to go to bed.

  They put out the light and climbed into their bunks, and Nancy lay down with her eyes closed, but she did not feel in the least sleepy. The glass of brandy that young Harry Marks got for her had not helped at all: she was as wide awake as if it had been nine o’clock in the morning.

  She could tell that Mervyn was awake, too. She heard every move he made in the bunk above her. Unlike
the other bunks, those in the honeymoon suite were not curtained, so her only privacy was the darkness.

  She lay awake and thought about Margaret Oxenford, so young and naive, so full of uncertainty and idealism. She sensed great passion beneath Margaret’s hesitant surface, and identified with her on that account. Nancy, too, had had battles with her parents, or, at least, with her mother. Ma had wanted her to marry a boy from an old Boston family, but at the age of sixteen Nancy fell in love with Sean Lenehan, a medical student whose father was actually a foreman in Pa’s own factory, horrors! Ma campaigned against Sean for months, bringing wicked gossip about him and other girls, snubbing his parents viciously, falling ill and retiring to bed only to get up again and harangue her daughter for selfishness and ingratitude. Nancy had suffered under the onslaught but stood firm, and in the end she had married Sean and loved him with all her heart until the day he died.

  Margaret might not have Nancy’s strength. Perhaps I was a little harsh with her, she thought, saying that if she didn’t like her father she should get up and leave home. But she seemed to need someone to tell her to stop whining and grow up. At her age I had two babies!

  She had offered practical help as well as tough-minded advice. She hoped she would be able to fulfill her promise and give Margaret a job.

  That all depended on Danny Riley, the old reprobate who held the balance of power in her battle with her brother. Nancy began to worry about the problem all over again. Had Mac, her lawyer, been able to reach Danny? If so, how had Danny received the story about an inquiry into one of his past misdemeanors? Did he suspect that the whole thing had been invented to put pressure on him? Or was he scared out of his wits? She tossed and turned uncomfortably as she reviewed all the unanswered questions. She hoped she could talk to Mac on the phone at the next stop, Botwood in Newfoundland. Perhaps he would be able to relieve the suspense by then.

  The plane had been jerking and swaying for some time, making Nancy even more restless and nervous, and after an hour or two, the movement got much worse. She had never been frightened in a plane before, but on the other hand she had never experienced such a storm. She held on to the edges of her bunk as the mighty aircraft tossed in the violent winds. She had faced a lot of things alone since her husband died, and she told herself to be brave and tough it out. But she could not help imagining that the wings would break off or the engines would be destroyed and they all would plunge headlong into the sea; and she became terrified. She screwed her eyes up tight and bit the pillow. Suddenly the plane seemed to go into free fall. She waited for the fall to stop, but it went on and on. She could not suppress a whimper of dread. Then at last there was a bump and the plane seemed to right itself.

  A moment later she felt Mervyn’s hand on her shoulder. “It’s just a storm,” he said in his flat British accent. “I’ve known worse. There’s nothing to fear.”

  She found his hand and gripped it tightly. He sat on the edge of her bunk and stroked her hair during the moments when the plane was stable. She was still frightened, but it helped to hold hands during the bumpy bits, and she felt a little better.

  She did not know how long they stayed like that. Eventually the storm eased. She began to feel self-conscious, and she released Mervyn’s hand. She did not know what to say. Mercifully, he stood up and left the room.

  Nancy turned on the light and got out of bed. She stood up shakily, put on an electric blue silk robe over her black negligee, and sat at the dressing table. She brushed her hair, which always soothed her. She was embarrassed about having held his hand. At the time she had forgotten about decorum, and had just been grateful for someone to comfort her; but now she felt awkward. She was glad he was sensitive enough to guess at her feelings and leave her alone for a few minutes to collect herself.

  He came back with a bottle of brandy and two glasses. He poured drinks and gave one to Nancy. She held the glass in one hand and gripped the edge of the dressing table with the other: the plane was still bumping a little.

  She would have felt worse if he had not been wearing that comical nightshirt. He looked ridiculous, and he knew it, but he behaved with as much dignity as if he were walking around in his double-breasted suit, and somehow that made him funnier. He was obviously a man who was not afraid to appear foolish. She liked him for the way he wore his nightshirt.

  She sipped her brandy. The warm liquor immediately made her feel better, and she drank some more.

  “An odd thing happened,” he said conversationally. “As I was going into the men’s room, another passenger came out looking scared to death. When I went inside, the window was broken, and the engineer was standing there looking guilty. He gave me a cock-and-bull story about the glass being smashed by a lump of ice in the storm, but it looked to me as if the two of them had had a fight.”

  Nancy was grateful to him for talking about something, just so that they did not have to sit there thinking about holding hands. “Which one is the engineer?” she said.

  “A good-looking lad, about my height, fair hair.”

  “I know. And which passenger?”

  “I don’t know his name. Businessman, on his own, in a pale gray suit.” Mervyn got up and poured her some more brandy.

  Nancy’s robe unfortunately came only just below her knees, and she felt rather undressed with her calves and her bare feet exposed; but once again she reminded herself that Mervyn was in frenzied pursuit of an adored wife, and he had no eyes for anyone else; indeed, he would hardly notice if Nancy were stark naked. His holding her hand had been a friendly gesture from one human being to another, pure and simple. A cynical voice in the back of her mind said that holding hands with someone else’s husband was rarely simple and never pure, but she ignored it.

  Searching for something to talk about, she said: “Is your wife still mad at you?”

  “She’s as cross as a cat with a boil,” Mervyn said.

  Nancy smiled as she recalled the scene she had found in the suite when she returned from getting changed: Mervyn’s wife yelling at him, and the boyfriend yelling at her, while Nancy watched from the doorway. Diana and Mark had quieted down immediately and left, looking rather sheepish, to continue their row elsewhere. Nancy had refrained from commenting at the time because she did not want Mervyn to think she was laughing at his situation. However, she did not feel inhibited about asking him personal questions: intimacy had been forced on them by circumstances. “Will she come back to you?”

  “There’s no telling,” he said. “That chap she’s with.... I think he’s a weed, but maybe that’s what she wants.”

  Nancy nodded. The two men, Mark and Mervyn, could hardly have been more different. Mervyn was tall and imperious, with dark good looks and a blunt manner. Mark was an altogether softer person, with hazel eyes and freckles, who normally wore a mildly amused look on his round face. “I don’t go for the boyish type, but he’s attractive in his way,” she said. She was thinking: If Mervyn was my husband, I wouldn’t exchange him for Mark; but there’s no accounting for taste.

  “Aye. At first I thought Diana was just being daft, but now that I’ve seen him, I’m not so sure.” Mervyn looked thoughtful for a moment, then changed the subject. “What about you? Will you fight your brother off?”

  “I believe I’ve found his weakness,” she said with grim satisfaction, thinking of Danny Riley. “I’m working on it.”

  He grinned. “When you look like that, I’d rather have you for a friend than an enemy.”

  “It’s for my father,” she said. “I loved him dearly, and the firm is all I have left of him. It’s like a memorial to him, but better than that, because it bears the imprint of his personality in every way.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He was one of those men nobody ever forgets. He was tall, with black hair and a big voice, and you knew the moment you saw him that he was a powerful man. He knew the name of every man who worked for him, and if their wives were sick, and how their children were getting along in sch
ool. He paid for the education of countless sons of factory hands who are now lawyers and accountants: he understood how to win people’s loyalty. In that way he was old-fashioned—paternalistic. But he had the best business brain I ever encountered. In the depths of the Depression, when factories were closing all over New England, we were taking on men because our sales were going up! He understood the power of advertising before anyone else in the shoe industry, and he used it brilliantly. He was interested in psychology, in what makes people tick. He had the ability to throw a fresh light on any problem you brought to him. I miss him every day. I miss him almost as much as I miss my husband.” She suddenly felt very angry. “And I will not stand by and see his life’s work thrown away by my good-for-nothing brother.” She shifted in her seat restlessly, reminded of her anxieties. “I’m trying to put pressure on a key shareholder, but I won’t know how successful I’ve been until—”

  She never finished the sentence. The plane flew into the most severe turbulence yet, and bucked like a wild horse. Nancy dropped her glass and grabbed the edge of the dressing table with both hands. Mervyn tried to brace himself with his feet, but he could not, and when the plane tilted sideways he rolled onto the floor, knocking the coffee table aside.

  The plane steadied. Nancy reached out a hand to help Mervyn up, saying: “Are you all right?” Then the plane tossed again. She slipped, lost her handhold and tumbled to the floor on top of him.

  After a moment he started to laugh.

  She had been afraid she might have hurt him, but she was light and he was a big man. She was lying across him, the two of them making the shape of an X on the terra-cotta carpet. The plane steadied, and she rolled off and sat up, looking at him. Was he hysterical, or just amused?

  “We must look daft,” he said, and recommenced laughing.

  His laughter was infectious. For a moment she forgot the accumulated tensions of the last twenty-four hours: the treachery of her brother, the near-crash in Mervyn’s small plane, her awkward situation in the honeymoon suite, the ghastly row about Jews in the dining room, the embarrassment of Mervyn’s wife’s anger, and her fear of the storm. She suddenly realized there was also something highly comical about sitting on the floor in her nightclothes with a strange man in a wildly bucking aircraft. She, too, started to giggle.