And Josh gave a short hard laugh. "You really are a fool, Gili," he said. "You know the truth about Banet. Tell it for God's sake, and save yourself."
"I didn't kill him. She did. And I have nothing more to say."
Josh turned to Captain Svendsen. "This was not the first time she told Marcia all this. The first time, though, she was more specific. Marcia, tell them what she said to you."
She thought it would be difficult to tell. It was not. She told the ugly little story quickly and as impersonally as if it happened to someone else. Gili had said about the same thing that Daisy Belle Cates had heard her say on the later occasion, except she was more specific. Marcia remembered the words too well. "She said that they wanted to leave Europe, that they had no money. That he came back to me in order to get money for both of them."
"When was that?" asked Colonel Wells.
She told him, the first day they had been on the Magnolia. About noon. "And you believed her?"
"For a moment. Then I didn't."
"Did you question Banet about it?"
"After I thought about it, I could not believe it. Then I asked him about it, yes. He said it was not true."
"And you believed him?"
She nodded. Suddenly she was drugged with weariness and shock. The motion of the ship, the lights, the white faces around her, beyond everything the knowledge of Mickey's murder and of the things that Josh suspected of him seemed all of it to weigh together too heavily to be supported.
Perhaps everyone felt something like that. It was late and growing later. The Captain, however, gave it words.
He questioned Gili bluntly. It was a curious, dogged struggle between them and for the moment Gili won. "I've told you everything I know. Everything . . ."
"Was Banet a Nazi?"
"I don't know."
"Where did you know him?"
"In Lisbon. And on the Lerida. That's all."
"Why did you say he belonged to you?"
"I told you that."
"But he was a Nazi?" - "I don't know." And then she added: "Ask her. Ask Marcia. She killed him."
Colonel Wells said: "As Colonel Morgan points out, today is not the first time Miss Duvrey made her claims about Banet to Miss Colfax."
Josh picked it up quickly. "So if Marcia had been going to shoot him, she'd have done it then. Not now." He said it as if it were obvious, but he watched the Captain with, it seemed to Marcia, a too-well concealed anxiety. And the Captain said doubtfully: "Perhaps only today she was convinced." He looked at his watch. "I've got to get back to the bridge. The ship is as safe with my first officer as with me, but I've never left the bridge in a fog in my life before!" Anger crossed his face again. He looked at them and said shortly: "Well, on land there are police, and fingerprints and laboratories and all that. I'm no detective and no psychiatrist. I don't know about clues. But . . ." he paused for an instant. His sheer physical strength and solidity was as impressive just then as the deep anger that was in his eyes. "But," he added, "I am master of this ship. And I'll see that whoever did this hangs. Whether Banet deserved it or not, it was murder; those two Portuguese were murdered. Urdiola is still locked up. I do not believe that there was any way for him to have escaped and murdered Banet."
Colonel Wells interrupted, "I beg your pardon, Captain. The patient with the bandaged face. I inquired about him. He has an incontrovertible alibi for the whole day. Usually he's a little hard to check on; that is, it seems that he has rather a habit of taking advantage of the sympathy everybody feels for him and wandering about the ship when and as he pleases. But except for his meals he spent the entire day in one of the wards playing bridge with three other boys. He went to mess with two of them who are also ambulatory. They'll all swear to it. So he could not have gone to Miss Colfax's cabin just before lunch and he could not have murdered Messac—that is, Banet. He is out as a suspect."
"He was never in," said the Captain bluntly again. "Now then, there's something that you people may not know about a ship. I said I am no detective. I wouldn't know what to do with a fingerprint if I had one. But on a ship, no matter what happens or when, some time, somewhere an eyewitness turns up. I have a long experience at sea. You can count on that as being true. So any information that any of you have intentionally or unintentionally concealed might just as well be given to me now. It will come sooner or later, some way."
Oddly he actually seemed to feel the confidence that was in his words. It radiated strongly and rather terrifyingly from that solid, thick blue figure. He turned to leave the lounge and then turned back. "And I might add," he said briefly, "that I have wirelessed home a full report together with an urgent request for all available information about every Lerida passenger I picked up. I did this the day we rescued you. I have already reported Banet's real name and murder. I should very soon begin to receive any facts which the State Department or the F.B.I., or any other source is able to secure."
He moved toward the door.
And Gili said: "Stop."
She got out of the corner of the sofa in one motion it seemed and across the lounge to the Captain. "Will you promise me protection?"
"So you're going to confess,'' said the Captain.
"No, no!" She cried. "I have nothing to confess. I don't know who murdered Castiogne or Para. I didn't kill Mickey. But if you've wirelessed for information . . ." She stopped and sucked in her lower lip and, her eyes sullen but frightened, cried: "I didn't mean to be a Nazi. I couldn't help it. I had to be a Nazi to—to live!"
"That is what they all say," said the Captain. "What about Banet? Hurry up. Tell me anything you know."
Suddenly she was willing. Too willing—now that Mickey was dead, now that she believed they would know anyway as soon as the replies to the inquiries the Captain had sent out were received. Now that she had decided to throw herself on his mercy.
Mickey as Andre Messac probably would have been reasonably safe, at least for some time, from those inquiries; he would not have been safe as Michel Banet.
This emerged at once. She talked rapidly, loudly, repeating herself, disclaiming responsibility—a torrent of words so frankly designed to ingratiate herself by accusing Mickey that even Daisy Belle with her civilized tolerance for human frailty looked rather sickened. Gili told everything she knew, apparently, not once but many times.
Mickey had been a Nazi. He had turned Nazi immediately, and to convince his torturers of his sincerity had betrayed Andre Messac and others. Gili knew that. He had boasted of it in the early, egotistically triumphant days of the Nazis. Gradually he had worked into a position of some small eminence among them, in a branch of the Gestapo, as a matter of fact. His business was that of informer. Gradually the Nazis began to trust him. He was bitter about his hands, but apparently had no thought of revenge. Instead, he seized every opportunity to solidify his standing with the Nazis—probably he believed that if he had a future it lay now with them.
He was by no means a major war criminal. Still, he had achieved enough importance in a small way so, when the war was over, somebody was sure to inform the Americans, or at least so he feared, which amounted to the same thing. And his real name was known in America, perhaps not as well and familiarly as Mickey, with his artist's naive egotism believed, but well enough to offer danger.
So he had to escape. He had to hide his identity. It was an added touch of cold cruelty that he really had got Andre's passport from his mother, who believed Mickey, as Marcia had believed him.