The storm was over, although the sea was still so heavy the ship rolled a little. Marcia slipped her arm through Mickey's and they crossed the slippery deck and stopped to lean over the railing. The sky was cloudy with scarcely a star showing, but the radiance of the lighted Red Crosses on the ship touched the black water so they seemed to move in a glittering track of red and gold light. Mickey, his shoulder pressing against hers, said suddenly: "What did the Captain say? What happened? Did you tell him that I am using Andre Messac's name?"
"No. No, but, Mickey ..."
"Andre, darling."
"That's it, Mickey. We've got to tell them your real name."
He sighed and took out a package of cigarettes. He had never got used to having cigarettes, plenty of cigarettes, all he wanted. He said now again, as he had said so many times in the past weeks: "Cigarettes! Think of it! Real cigarettes! Have one?"
She took it and bent to the small flame in his cupped hands. As she did so, she saw the mangled, twisted scar tissue of the fingers. She wanted to put her lips upon them; she mustn't do that and wound his pride, or let him know how terribly that sight wrenched at her heart. He said: "I wanted a chance to talk to you before the Captain did and simply couldn't make one. The first I knew of the murder was when they got me up there in the Captain's quarters and I couldn't get away to warn you not to tell them that I'm using a borrowed passport."
"But, Mickey, we've got to tell the truth."
'Tell them who I really am? Why? The passport is all right. They'll never question it. If that's what you are worried about . . ."
"No, no, it's not that! It's because—oh, there are so many reasons, Mickey. For one thing it's—well, it's the truth."
He smoked for an instant, his fine, sensitive profile clear in the rosy light. "You subscribed to my idea of using that passport when I suggested it," he said finally. "You agreed to it."
"Yes, but . . ." She could not say, but that was so we could leave quickly, so I could get you away from anything and everything that would remind you of all the horror that you must forget. She said, substituting: "Yes, it seemed convenient and much quicker than waiting. It didn't seem important so long as we were not going directly home. I thought that later at Buenos Aires, when we applied for passports home we could simply tell the consul exactly why and what happened. But now we are going directly home; we'll arrive at a home port. The only thing to do, I think, is to tell the truth and make an appeal to the State Department."
"They'll send me back to Europe."
Would they? She wished desperately that she knew more of law. Had they been not only mistaken in attempting something that, at the time had seemed so natural and so right, but had they been criminally wrong as well, offending the law? She said slowly: "We were wrong to do it, Mickey. I shouldn't have let you. You weren't well, you weren't yourself. All that . . ."
"Listen, Marcia," said Mickey suddenly, "that's beside the point. You'd better know right now that I'm Andre Messac from now on. Everybody thinks that Michel Banet, the concert pianist, is dead. Well, then he's going to be dead."
"Mickey ..."
"Andre. I am Andre Messac from now on. Marcia, for God's sake, pride is the only thing left to me. I can't let people know the truth! If you tell them who I am, there'll be nothing but pity and curiosity and failure for me, for the rest of my life. I've got to have my chance at a new life. Some sort of new life . . ." Mickey flung away his cigarette, a tiny red rocket, into the sea. "Pity and curiosity, a man stared at, pointed at, talked about. Michel Baaet, they'll say; he could have been the world's greatest pianist. Look at him now. And look," said Mickey, his voice rough, "at his hands."
He spread them out, pitilessly, as if they had a separate being, subjecting them to the light.
4
She wanted to cover them with her own hands. As she had had to do so many times, she smothered the impulse which would disclose pity. She had already in her heart recognized the necessity of preserving the pride which, he had said, was the only thing he had left out of that golden wealth of promise.
She started also to remind him, sensibly and as matter-of-factly as possible, that the important thing was to be alive, to emerge—living, breathing, able to talk and walk and even laugh again—from a horror which so many did not survive. But that too seemed without substance; contemplating the misfortunes of others does not lighten one's own trouble but instead adds to it.
The thing to do then was to fasten upon the subject at hand, think about that, talk about that. Andre Messac and a false passport, on which Mickey proposed to enter the United States. And perpetuate a false identity which he proposed to assume for the rest of his life. A shadow of all sorts of potential legal complications hovered at the edge of her mind; but just then the main point at issue was a simple, clear question of honesty. In a curious way the project of using Andre Messac's papers had not seemed dishonest in Lisbon. It had seemed an expediency, a therapeutic measure which was so important just then to Mickey that the use of the passport was as uncomplicated by scruples, as direct and purposeful as the use, say, of an oxygen tank for a person with pneumonia. It had seemed lucky that the photograph on the passport was, Mickey had said, so bad and blurred that Mickey—or indeed almost anyone—could use it. Once in Buenos Aires they would straighten the thing out, make a clean breast of it, wait until Mickey could enter the United States on the quota, if that was necessary. He was a French citizen; she knew that. He had been educated not only in Paris but in New York, so English was like his mother tongue.
Concerned mainly with the desperate and sometimes despairing hope of restoring Mickey to himself, she had thought only of that. The way had opened which seemed right, and she had snatched at it gratefully and tucked the other and inevitable problem away to be faced when they reached it. And now they had reached it, suddenly, unexpectedly and urgently.
It was the more urgent, naturally, because of the murder of Alfred Castiogne. No matter how briefly he had entered their lives, nor how little he had meant to them as a person, the mere fact of the murder occurring as and when it had occurred, entangled them, brought the light of an investigation to bear upon every person in that lifeboat. All her instinct was for going to Captain Svendsen and telling him the whole truth.
But Mickey, she saw suddenly, had intended all along to do this very thing. Never would anyone really know what had happened to Michel Banet; a new name, a new personality was to be his shield. Knowing Mickey as he had been before the war brought a crashing end to his bright world, and knowing him now, she could not fail to comprehend it. It was exactly like Mickey. He had returned to her probably, only because his love for her was greater than his pride.
She said suddenly, out of the silence: "Who was Andre Messac?"
Mickey lighted another cigarette and squinted at the smoke clouds floating off into the night. "He was one of us," he said.
She waited, again instinctively avoiding direct questions. He would tell her what he could tell her, whatever he could bring out of tragic memory and into painful words. He said: "He was arrested at the same time that I was. He died—later. I never knew exactly how, or, as a matter of fact, when. But I saw his mother in Paris; she still had his clothes and papers and all that. There had not been time when we were arrested that day to do anything, to get any of our personal possessions. There wasn't time for anything. I remember trying to get them to let me phone to you."