“What kind of guy is Morrison?” he asked.
“Rugged. And very smart.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Off and on, since the war. We were in New Guinea together, and later sent in with a kind of shaggy and irregular outfit in the Philippines. On that guerrilla stuff, he could write the book.”
“That where he learned Spanish?”
“Yes, but not during the war. He was born in the Philippines; his father was in the mining business. But he has the knack—some people have it, some don’t. He also speaks Tagalog and German and a couple of very useless Central American Indian dialects. And Beatnik. Incidentally, where did you learn it?”
“Mexico, and Puerto Rico. But my accent’s not as good as his.”
“No,” Ruiz said.
“Where are you from?”
“Here and there. I went to school in the States.”
“U.S. citizen?”
“Yes. Since the war.”
He fell silent. Ingram waited. He hadn’t come out here merely to exchange biographical information. Maybe, with the Spaniard’s innate dislike for drunkenness, he was just escaping from the party, but he could have something else on his mind.
“How far are we from the coast of Cuba?” Ruiz asked then.
“Hundred miles,” Ingram said. “Maybe a little less. Why?”
“I just wondered. What would you say were the chances of making it in that raft?”
“How many people?”
“Call it one.”
“Still very dim, even with one. It’s too small.”
“That’s what I thought. But when we get started again, if we do, we pass pretty close, don’t we?”
“That’s right. The way into the Caribbean from here is through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. You’ll be within sight of Cape Maysi.”
“Maysi?”
“Punta Maisí. It’s the eastern tip of Cuba.”
“I get the picture.”
He’s going over the hill, Ingram thought. But why? They’ve got it all their way at the moment. Something nibbled at the edge of memory, and then was gone. “What’s the trouble?” he asked. He wouldn’t get the truth, but he might get one of the wrong answers he could eliminate.
“This is a sad operation,” Ruiz said. “And getting sadder. We’ll never make it.”
“There is that chance. And a very good one. But then I wouldn’t say that knife-and-run stuff in the Philippines was anything that’d make you popular with insurance companies.”
“Maybe I was younger then. When you’re nineteen, it’s always somebody else that’s going to get it.”
What is it? Ingram thought. “You worried about the booze?”
“Sure. Aren’t you?”
So that wasn’t it.
“How about a deal?” Ingram asked.
“No deal.” The voice was quiet, but there was finality in it.
“Stealing a boat’s not such a terrible charge. Especially if the owner doesn’t want to press it.”
“No,” Ruiz said. “I told you we’d been friends a long time.”
“But you’re looking for a way out.”
“That’s different. If you don’t like the action, you can always walk out. You don’t have to sell out.”
“Okay, have it your way,” Ingram said. He leaned back against the boxes. “This Ives—what kind of guy was he?”
“He wasn’t a bad sort of Joe if you didn’t believe too much of what he said. He talked a good game.”
“So I gather,” Ingram said.
There was a moment’s silence, and then he asked, “By the way, where’s the deviation card for the compass? Do you know?”
“The what?” Ruiz asked.
“It’s a correction card you make out for compass error. You did make a new one, didn’t you, when you swung ship?”
“Swung ship? What for? I think you’ve lost me, friend.”
“To adjust compass,” Ingram explained. “Look—you did swing it, didn’t you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“You mean you loaded three or four tons of steel down in that cabin and it didn’t occur to you it might have some effect on the compass?”
“Oh, that. Sure, we knew about it. You wouldn’t have to be a sailor. Any Boy Scout would know it. Anyway, Ives took care of it.”
“How?” Ingram asked.
“He took a bearing on something ashore before we loaded the guns, and then another one afterward. Whatever the difference was, he wrote it down somewhere. Al probably knows where it is.”
“I see,” Ingram said quietly. “Well, I’ll ask him about it.”
Ruiz slid the glowing end of his cigarette into the sand and stood up. “Guess I’ll go back and see if I can get some sleep. I hope.”
“Hasta manaña,” Ingram said. He started to get up.
“No,” Ruiz said in his cool, ironic voice. “Don’t bother following me to the door.”
“Okay. About Ives—did he ever actually tell you that was his name?”
“No. I figured Hollister was phony, of course, but that’s the only way I knew him. That and Fred.”
“What did Morrison call him?”
“Herman. What else?”
“Excuse a stupid question,” Ingram said. “Thanks for the bedding.”
“De nada,” Ruiz said. He melted into the darkness.
Ingram leaned back against the boxes and relighted his cigar. Somebody was lying, that was for certain. But who? The thing was so mixed up and the possibilities so endless you couldn’t put your finger on where it had to be. Why did Ruiz want out? That stuff about being afraid of the trip was almost certainly a smoke screen. That is, unless he knew of some other danger Ingram himself hadn’t learned of yet—something that made death or capture an absolute certainty instead of merely another chance you took. He was a professional soldier of fortune who’d lived along the edge of violence since his teens; he didn’t scare that easily, at nineteen or thirty-nine.
But there was another possibility. Could there be something unnatural in the Morrison-Ruiz relationship, in which case it was Rae Osborne who’d thrown the dungarees in the chowder? No, he decided; that was ridiculous. Deviation wasn’t necessarily accompanied by the limp wrist and effeminate mannerisms, but you nearly always sensed it, and there was none of it here. He was glad somehow; in spite of the circumstances, Ruiz was a man you could like. He’d been opposed to this thing from the beginning, and if he hadn’t been overruled by Morrison—Ingram sat up abruptly. There it was.
Would you like to go back?
That was the thing he’d almost remembered a while ago. It was what Morrison had said in Spanish before they realized he understood the language, the thing that had stopped Ruiz’ protests.
So they couldn’t go back.
But why? Because of the charge of theft? It had to be more than that. Were they afraid of the men from whom they’d stolen the guns? That might be it, of course, but he had a feeling it was still something more. Then it occurred to him that this didn’t really answer the question, anyway. Ruiz’ problem wasn’t simply that he couldn’t go back; for some reason he couldn’t go back, or ahead. You’ll go crazy, he thought; there couldn’t be any one answer to that.
He smoked the cigar down to the end and tossed it away. It described a fiery parabola and fell hissing into the water at the edge of the sand. Cuban music and the sound of off-key singing came from the Dragoon, and he saw now that they’d turned on the spreader lights. With that radio and the lights and refrigerator they would run the batteries down. Then he was conscious of annoyance with himself. You’ve lived alone too long, he thought; you’re beginning to sound like Granny Grunt. You form a mule-headed prejudice against a woman merely because nobody’s ever told her you don’t set highball glasses on charts, and now while you’re living one hour at a time on the wrong end of a burning fuse you’re stewing about the drain on a set of batteries. You ought to be playing checkers in the park.