I spilled over onto my back, perfectly conscious, but absolutely unable to move a finger or even blink my eyes or move my tongue to the other side of my mouth.
I lay there thinking with a great coldness that the most probable finish of our little rumble would be for him to lift a bare foot high, and stamp it down onto my throat. And the rail was the other side of the other door, just ten feet across the dark weather deck. "To him, you are just an object," Meyer said in a lecturer's tone.
My dead head rolled from side to side as the ship rolled. When it rolled toward him, I could see him. He sat on the edge of his bed, head between his knees, making soft crooning noises.
He got up and with a painful deliberation, he edged by me, doubled over, and went to the door of the head and opened it. I moved a finger, a whole hand. I bent my right knee. I pushed myself over onto my face, got my hands against the floor, lifted the full eighty tons of myself up onto hands and knees, reached and caught the footboard of her bed, climbed up onto my macaroni legs. I turned and looked into the head. He stood, bent over, in front of the sink. He cuddled himself with one hand, and in the other he held the dripping doll, the cinderblock swinging. His mouth kept opening and closing, but I could not hear a sound. Life was running back into my muscles, like Popeye after the great hunk of canned spinach drops down his throat. He seemed frozen there, unaware of me, unaware of anything. I went to the doorway. The jaw shelf was turned just right, at the height of the middle of my chest, and three feet away. I took a hand towel from the rack, wrapped my right fist tightly, screwed my heels into the floor and started it with a pivot of hips and back, the fist moving ten inches to the impact point, and following through a good long yard, my knuckles almost brushing the floor.
He moved a half step to the side, fell so loosely his forehead bounced when it hit the tile. I found the money belt half under her bed. The second strap had torn loose.
When I was ready to leave, I took a final look around. I had put him back into his bed, in the position I had found him. The breathing sounded the same. The single strap held the money belt safely and snugly around my middle, under my shirt. I had both parts of the doll in my hand. When the dark head had broken off, it had rolled into a corner, but when I was hunting for it, the movement of the ship brought it rolling back out to meet me. I had let the water out of the sink.
And he would not know what parts of it were real. After the early honking and bell-ringing, shouts in the corridors, hasty rappings on the stateroom door, announcements to get all baggage into the corridors as quickly as possible, I dressed quickly. She had not moved a muscle, lay in a spill of cream hair, fatty little lips agape, eyes smudged with weariness.
According to his little placard, the room steward was named Arturo Taliapeloleoni.
I moved him back into a corner of his little office. "Scusi," I said. "I wish to ask you to help me with something of the greatest importance, per favore."
The blow in the throat had given my voice an unmistakably conspiratorial quality. It made him look apprehensive. "Ah?" he said.
"I am in numero sei. Here is a token of importance." He accepted it too casually, thinking it a ten. Then he saw the second zero and the color went out of his face, surged back pinkly. "If it is anything I can do, signore." The bill had flicked out of sight.
"I bought passage alone. But now there is a lady in my stateroom. She is from other quarters aboard. It is of the greatest importance that she and I be permitted to remain aboard until mid-morning."
"That would be impossible, truly!"
"Many things can be arranged. Indeed, they must be arranged. Or it is possible that as she walks out of the customs building her husband might shoot her right there, in front of your passengers. He is a violent man. Others could be hurt. It would not be good for the company."
Even his lips were pale. "It would be very bad. But there is the question of the luggage inspection, no?"
"Her luggage will be taken off by someone. Mine will be taken off by someone else, a friend. It will go through customs and be taken away."
"But if two passengers are missing?"
"The one who counts them could be told of the necessity for this arrangement."
I dipped my fingertips into my shirt pocket and extracted the other two bills, a fifty and a twenty. I gave him the fifty. "This could purchase some small cooperation in the counting?"
"It is possible."
I gave him the twenty. And this, of course, is for yourself and the room maid."
"The cleaning and the fumigation starts. From stateroom to stateroom
"Does not a man of your position have a sign he can place upon both doors of numero sei, that it is to be skipped until certain other work is accomplished? After all, you do not sail for the homeland until Friday, I understand."
"It is very difficult, but..
"How many chances in one lifetime does a man have to save the life of a beautiful woman?"
He straightened, lifted his chin. "It will be done!"
"You have great understanding."
When I went back to the room, she had still not stirred.
I selected the essentials she would need. Her white bag would hold them readily. I put the yellow and white checked pajama shift in the flight bag, squashed the bag flat enough to go into my bag, and, locking the door behind me again, toted it down to Meyer's hovel.
"Have you got a cold?" he asked.
I dropped the bag in the corridor outside the door. His was there. Both were tagged. "They'd both end up on the end table at customs inspection. I pulled the door shut, pulled my shirt loose, unstrapped the money belt.
He put it on, and I helped him fasten it with the aid of two pieces of cord to bridge the six or seven inch gap between the ends of the straps and the buckles.
"Just in case," I said, "anything goes wrong about getting off this bucket. in case somebody thinks it's a smuggler's cute trick."
He adjusted his shirt, patted his belly. "This is a damned poor way for an economist to handle money."
"Just while we're standing here, sure, it could have been earning twenty-two cents. Your next step is to act like a hostile lady in a supermarket."
"If I am not the first off, McGee, I shall be no further back than third place."
"I flipped your art work over the side. Sorry."
"And the fellow with it?"
"No. He'll wonder how much of it he dreamed. He never saw my face. But he'll know it wasn't Del who roughed him. He got his look at the doll. It put him into shock. I deepened it a little and tucked him into the beddybye. The steward is bribed. The pig buzzes like a bee, and we are a pair of unmitigated, revolving, reprehensible sons of bitches."
"Revolving?"