It all happened very fast, and when the confusion was over, the waiter had vanished along with Maldemerde, Brandino was out cold on the floor, and I was forced to drop my own weapon because the person who’d decked him had a gun in my back. The Captain had been rescued, but Mayday now had a prisoner to replace him-—me!
“What now?” The voice came from behind me, from the holder of the gun.
I recognized it; Magda! The third conspirator was Miss Amanda Lowell-Cabot’s maid! The gun in my back was being wielded by the Breast, the Derriere! Magda!
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Mayday decided, “before Maldemerde puts together some muscle and comes after us.”
“Where to?” Zelda Poppins wanted to know.
“I know a place. Follow me. Bring him along,” he told Magda, jerking a thumb at me.
“What about him?” Magda nodded toward Brandino’s unconscious body.
“Too much trouble. Just leave him where he is.”
“I could shoot him,” Magda offered.
Never trust a naked Derriere! I reminded myself. It may look soft, but -
“The noise would attract attention,” Mayday said. “Just leave him there.”
He led the way down back stairways to the bowels of the ship. Zelda Poppins followed him. Magda brought up the rear, drumming my spine with the gun to insure that I wouldn’t slow them down.
At first I thought Mayday was leading us to the engine room. But once we were well below the waterline, he bypassed it in favor of an area down near the prow of the ship. He guided us to a fair-sized chamber which was filled with electrical circuitry and equipment. There was a dynamo, generators, relay switches, and a lot of other gismos which looked impressive, but which I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to identify.
“We’ll stay here and wait it out,” Mayday said cryptically. “You can bring us food,” he told Magda.
“You haven’t been identified with us yet, so it shouldn’t be too diflicult. As a matter of fact, you can get some right now. I’m starving.”
“What about him?” Magda probed me with her gun.
“Help me tie him up, and then you can leave.” Mayday rummaged around and found some electrical wire. He and Magda tied me to a chair with it. Then she left.
Mayday got busy doing something with the electrical equipment on the other side of the room from me. Zelda Poppins sat in a chair across from me, a revolver in her lap. The gun looked out of character for the school-teacherish looking schoolteacher.
“Are you really a schoolteacher?” I asked her.
“Yes.”
“How did you get mixed up in this?"
“Trying to live on a schoolteacher’s salary.”
“Then you didn’t win a lottery like everybody thought you did,” I deduced. “The story was a phoney.”
“That’s right. But if the Queen William wins the race, I’ll win a lottery all right!” She smiled a brittle, cynical smile.
“I don’t want to offend you, but you don’t seem the type for them to have sicced on the Captain.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. I’m precisely the type. Do you think some sexy Mata Hari could have done the job? Some siren? Why, that sort of woman would have scared him off the first time she batted her eyes at him. Maldemerde thrives on seducing timid, middle-aged lady passengers with money. I was picked to fit right into his pattern. He had to think he was taking advantage of me.”
“And all the time it was vice versa?”
“That’s right. Whenever Mayday was up to something, I kept the Captain occupied.”
“You’ve got a big mouth!” Mayday had finished whatever he was doing and strolled over to us.
“What’s the difference?” Zelda Poppins shrugged. “You’re going to kill him anyway, aren’t you?” From the tone of her voice, she might have been patiently explaining the multiplication table to a dull child.
“Not right away,” Mayday told her. “Mr. Victor here is going to be very useful to us,” he added.
“How?”
“He’s going to blow up this ship. That’s how.”
“And myself along with it?” I inquired.
“I’m afraid so.”
“But not you two.”
“No.” Mayday confirmed my reasoning. “Zelda, Magda, and I will leave the Lascivia when she docks at Colombo, Ceylon, approximately two days from now. It will be some hours later that you will detonate the bomb, Mr. Victor.”
“I don’t think I want to do that,” I demurred.
“You won’t have any choice, Mr. Victor. You see, you’re the fuse. Or, more accurately, your genital organ will be the fuse.”
“And just how is my you-know-what going to set off this bomb?” I asked.
“By becoming erect, Mr. Victor,” Mayday told me. “Your erection will blow you to smithereens!”
I remember the anonymous note I’d found pinned to my lampshade that first night at sea. I recalled the prophecy it had contained. The way Mayday was talking, it looked like that prophecy was going to come true:
He who lives by the sword dies by the sword!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ralph Nader13 !
He was the reason my tumescent dingus was to be the fuse for the bomb according to Mayday. He could have blamed General Motors, I suppose, but he was more inclined to pass the buck to the well-known consumer product analyst. “Some people spend their whole lives trying to catch other people making a little mistake, and Ralph Nader is one of them!” was how Mayday put it.
With two days of time to pass before we reached Ceylon, and me already a dead man as far as he was concerned, Mayday spoke freely about the situation. He confided that the bomb was really a last resort. It was only supposed to be exploded if the Lascivia gained a substantial lead over the Queen William, or if, as was the case now, the agents were exposed and unable to perform further sabotage.
That figured. If Captain Grabass won the race, it would be to his advantage to have the Lascivia intact. But, from his point of view, it was better to destroy her than to risk losing the race.
Mayday told me that it had been easy to smuggle the bomb aboard. The device was no larger than a pack of matches. But the explosive it contained was a hundred times as powerful as TNT. It hadn’t been necessary to sneak a detonator-timer mechanism past the Monaco Line security people because Mayday was depending on a substitute that was already on board.
In the hold of the Lascivia were three GM cars belonging to passengers scheduled to disembark with them at Cannes, the last stop on the cruise before New York. Mayday had planned to remove the starter-timer from one of these cars and use it to turn his explosive into a time bomb when and if that became necessary. However, around the time we were en route to Trinidad, Ralph Nader, back in Washington, had dropped his own bomb of sorts onto General Motors. Nader had published a report proving that the timing mechanisms in certain recent GM models were defective. General Motors had immediately recalled the parts.
They had been removed from the three cars aboard the Lascivia when we reached Trinidad. The replacements were scheduled to be installed when the ship docked at Cannes. Which meant that Mayday had no detonator for his bomb.
Except me!
Now, his alternate plan for triggering the bomb, which he confided to me, was as follows: The room we were in contained the ship’s generator. The bomb was to be attached to a “ground” plate of the generator through which no electricity ordinarily passed. This plate was stationary and was about two feet in diameter. It was suspended over a second, larger disc about seven feet in diameter. This plate rotated slowly atop the base of the dynamo, about four feet off the floor and a foot and a half below the stationary “ground” plate. It was “live”; electric current flowed through it; but the current was harmless as long as its flow wasn’t broken by contact with the “ground” plate. But such a contact would result in a short-circuit which would set the entire dynamo crackling with live, uncontrolled, high-voltage electricity. And, of course, it would also detonate the bomb.