Gili gave a short, hard little sound very much like a snort and flounced out of the cabin. Josh Morgan said: "Good night, Messac. By the way, doesn't Cates share this cabin with you?"
"Yes," said Mickey. "I don't know where he is. I suppose he'll be along soon."
Josh said slowly: "It's odd, rather, that he is not here. I mean—the decks were searched. He wasn't in the officers' lounge when I was there just now."
"Oh, he's somewhere around," said Mickey. "We've all got a Cates bee in our bonnets."
"Maybe," said Josh. "But there aren't really many places to go on a ship."
Mickey shrugged. "There are hundreds of places! He'll be along any minute. And I'm not afraid of him, if that's what you mean. I can't exactly see him rising out of his bunk to murder me."
That, of course, thought Marcia suddenly, was the trouble. Perhaps it was always impossible to say to one's self, and believe it: this face I know is that of a murderer; these eyes have seen and approved a frightful thing; this hand has entered a dread conspiracy.
Mickey bent his blond head over Marcia's hand and kissed it, and then smiled at her, wearily but comfortingly. "Things will come out all right," he said. "You've been telling me that. Good night, darling."
Josh Morgan, at the door, said rather dryly: "I'll just stroll down to your cabin with you. Miss Colfax. I'm going that way."
He wasn't of course. His stateroom was almost certainly in quite another section of the ship. But he had found her, as Mickey had not found her, there on the black and foggy deck. He was at least partially convinced, as Mickey was not, that someone had been there, that someone had meant to murder her. "If anybody tried to kill you tonight, he'll try it again."
She said good night to Mickey and, because there was nothing else to do, really, went along with Josh Morgan's tall, crimson-clad figure.
She heard Mickey's door close. Gili had gone on ahead. The skirt of her curiously incongruous uniform flounced swiftly around the end of the passage. Already probably she knew the ship from stem to stem. Why had she been in Mickey's cabin?
Obviously to talk to him. As obviously as when Josh Morgan, an attractive and somehow very masculine man had entered, Gili had instantly, instinctively, made room for him at her side, leaned near him. Again it was childish and simple and, in its way, cunning. How long, though, had she been there? Had Mickey or someone else told her what had happened in that dark band of shadow on deck?
And where, actually, was Luther? And Daisy Belle?
They reached the central passage and a bell sounded clearly yet very far away, somehow, as if striking against the curtain of fog. Josh Morgan said: "One o'clock. It seemed later. . . ."
Again the capped head of a nurse peeked at them from the lighted ward office. A corpsman in white passed them on the stairs. He was whistling softly between his teeth and gave them a curious glance, and then, appearing to recognize the Colonel, stood aside respectfully to let them pass.
When they reached the deck below, Gili had disappeared. The typewriter was still ticking busily away in some office along the farther corridor. Josh Morgan said, low: "Who shares your cabin? The luscious blonde? Anyone else?"
"Mrs. Cates."
"Oh." They crossed the main passage and entered the narrow one. This time she counted and recognized her own door. He paused just before they reached it. "Look here," he said, and put his hand lightly on her arm, his eyes very direct and intent. "You're going to be okay, you know. Only remember what I said. If anything, anything at all, seems to you wrong or out of place or—oh, the least bit odd—run. Run and yell like hell." The flicker of a grin touched his mouth. His eyes remained, however, very grave and intent. "Will you? There are always people around."
"Yes. But there'll be the three of us. And it was a seaman. It must be one of the seamen."
He understood her, of course. He had suggested it himself, but he replied obliquely: "Captain Svendsen knows what he's about. He's an able man. By the way, you and Messac are to be married. Is that right?" He hesitated and added quickly: "I hope you don't mind my asking. I only thought . . ." He stopped and did not say what he thought.
Marcia said, rather stiffly, with an odd sense of crossing some boundary, of making a decision that, certainly, was ready made and had been made for a very long time: "Yes. We . . . That's why we were going home."
The line of his jaw stood out squarely and firmly. "By way of Buenos Aires?"
Again she said: "Yes. We could get passage; otherwise we'd have had to wait."
"Of course," he said, after a moment. "I see. Well, here we are." They reached the door to the cabin. He said good night, pleasantly and impersonally, and turned rather quickly away.
She wished, for an illogical and unreasonable moment, that he had stayed. Then she opened the door.
The cabin was still lighted. Daisy Belie Cates, in gray pajamas, lay in the upper bunk, smoking thoughtfully. Her thin, red-gray hair was done up in little tight wads of curls and tied with a piece of white gauze dressing. Any other woman would have looked ugly and grotesque; Daisy Belle even then had an irresistible air of elegance and dignity. Gili was in a comer, undressing furiously, flinging off her clothes, her face sulky and angry.
Both women looked at her—Gili sullenly, Daisy Belle coolly and pleasantly, yet with a sort of observation. (Daisy Belle a Nazi! With her proud, old, American name, her niceness, her civilized, forgiving decency. Impossible!) Daisy Belle said: "Oh, there you are. I was beginning to worry. I turned in ages ago, right after I talked to you. Did my hair and went straight to sleep." She yawned. "I don't think I'll ever quite catch up with sleep."
Gili gave her a hidden, venomous look from behind a swinging lock of bright yellow hair.
Marcia thought with a kind of sick stab, but you weren't here, Daisy Belle; you weren't here and you weren't asleep and you're lying. Why?
She could not just then question her. It was Gili who, hurling out the words jerkily, told Daisy Belle what had happened.
But in the telling, Gili, either intentionally or unintentionally, gave an account of her own actions during the two or three hours just past.
"I was in the nurses' lounge," she said. "I was there all evening. That is"—she bent to strip off a stocking—"for an hour or so. Then I strolled around to Andre's cabin. He wasn't there and I waited. I didn't know anything about it until he came with his head bandaged. It was terrible." She shivered and stripped off the other stocking, and Daisy Belle, sitting up, her face shocked, cried: "Marcia! I can't believe it! Are you sure it really was somebody? I mean, well, not just nerves and imagination?"
She said, yes, she was sure. Marcia turned to hang up her coat beside Daisy Belle's, hanging in the shallow closet, and Daisy Belle's coat was damp and dark around the shoulders, as if wet with fog.
Yet they had searched the decks; they had found no one.
They did not talk much after that. Daisy Belle, her fine face troubled, lighted another cigarette and smoked it with quick nervous puffs.
Gili crawled into pajamas, muttering about their discomfort, and then into the bunk opposite Marcia. Marcia undressed quickly, too, and turned out the lights. In the silence of the cabin, again, the ship herself came to life, sighing, throbbing, steadily forging ahead, as if she knew the precious cargo she carried.
Marcia, staring into darkness that presently became faintly less dark, so she could see the grayish round outlines of the open ports, thought again of the sinister, unwelcome and unwanted cargo that they had added to the ship.