They all went back up to cabin 1, which was Curtis’s when he was aboard, and where the telephone was located. Pallifer dialed the number Curtis had given him, and the man answered on the second ring; so he’d been waiting right there for the call, it was that important to him. “Yes?”
“Not in their cabins,” Pallifer said, being terse because there was no real privacy on a phone like this. “One launch is gone.”
“No,” Curtis said.
“I agree. We’ll look around.”
“Crew last.”
Of course; only disturb the crew if it was absolutely necessary. Pallifer said, “Do you suppose the captain’s been talking to them?”
There was a silence on the line, filled with electronic rustle, and then Curtis said, “I don’t think so. I think he noticed it slowed down.”
“That’s possible,” Pallifer said. “Means he’s pretty smart, though.”
“He is.”
“Should I discuss it with the captain?”
“If you think you should,” Curtis said. “But discuss it gently.”
Palliser shrugged, a little irritated. Gentle discussion never accomplished anything, “I’ll call you before we leave,” he said.
25
Manville moved back from the doorway to cabin 1 while the leader was still telling his men what he wanted done. The leader hadn’t believed for a second that he and Kim had fled on that launch, had he? No. A waste of time.
Manville had heard the thump of the two ships meeting, and had looked over the rail to see the last of them, the leader, as he moved from their launch into the Mallory. He’d trailed them ever since, as they went first to his cabin and then to Kim’s — Curtis had prepared them thoroughly, all right — and then back to cabin 1 for the leader to make that call.
What now? If he were alone, Manville would try to circle around them, get into an area they’d already searched, and then possibly get to their own launch and take off in it. But he also had Kim to consider, who couldn’t run, who could barely walk, and would not be able to defend herself.
What he needed was a weapon, some sort of weapon. Those four all had pistols stuck down into their belts, and at this point he had nothing. But if he could find something, and then get his hands on one of those pistols...
He’d always been a pretty good shot, against targets, never against anything alive. He’d belonged to a gun club for a few years, people who liked to plink at targets, try to compete against their own previous scores, but then the club was taken over by a group of hunters, “sportsmen” who wanted to politicize the organization and make it a mouthpiece for their own ideas, and Manville was one of those who’d dropped out. But he thought he was probably still pretty good, against something that didn’t move, and didn’t shoot back.
But the first thing was to find a weapon, some way to defend himself, and the second thing was to stay ahead of the search until he could circle around behind it. They were starting to look at the top deck, ignoring for the moment the bridge, moving from forward to aft, two of them on each side of the ship, taking their time. So Manville moved on ahead, and entered the large glass-domed dining room, and from there he went into the small service kitchen.
There were a lot of knives in here, some big cleavers, too, but Manville hoped for something better. Something like a club, to knock somebody out. He didn’t want to go around cutting people, wouldn’t know how to do it, probably didn’t have the stomach for it. The idea of stabbing another person made him queasy.
He looked past the peppermill two or three times before he finally focused on it. It was a large thing, darkly lustrous, like a rook in a giant’s chess set; probably a foot and a half long, it was made of rosewood, and when Manville picked it up it was as heavy as a baseball bat, with most of the weight near the base, where the metal grinding mechanism was fixed.
The peppercorns inside rustled when Manville hefted the thing, and he felt at first that it was too ridiculous to think of defending himself with a peppermill. But it was heavy, and it had the right shape for a club, and there was nothing else in here.
Carrying the peppermill next to his leg, Manville left the serving kitchen and went back through the dining room.
The four men were slowly moving this way, two through the central corridor, checking every door along their route, and one on each side, along the outer decks. Manville would have preferred to tackle the leader, who was older and scrawnier than the other three, but he needed to go after somebody who was alone, and that meant one of the bruisers searching along the deck.
At the aft end of the dining room, glass-windowed doors on both sides led out to the decks. On the starboard side, another door, solid wood, just aft of this one, led to a stairwell going down. The searchers were entering through every doorway they reached, looking inside, then backing out again. Manville stationed himself just inside the dining room door, gripped the peppermill hard, looked through the window, and waited.
Here he came. A big man, he walked with hunched shoulders and with head thrust forward, as though sniffing out his prey. His pistol was in his right hand, and he stepped cautiously, looking over his shoulder often, pausing before entering a doorway, then backing swiftly out again.
The man reached that stairwell door. Manville hung back, looking through the window in the door, seeing only the right side of him, the dark pants and black sweater, the right arm bent, pistol beyond Manville’s range of vision. The man stepped forward, disappearing, and Manville took a deep breath. He’d never done anything like this before, never anything like this. But there was no choice, and the time was now.
He pushed open the door, eased outside, stood with his back to the wall beside the open stairwell door, right arm cocked up across his upper chest, peppermill held up beyond his left ear, and waited for the man to back out to the deck, and from the other side of the ship he heard the scream.
It threw him off. All he could think was: They found her! And it immobilized him for just a second, while the searcher, as startled as he was by the sound of that scream, came lunging out of the doorway, forward rather than backward, pistol right there, and he actually saw Manville before Manville thought to swing the peppermill as hard as he could. It hit the man in the face, at the top of the nose, between the eyes. It knocked him back a step, but it didn’t knock him out. It wasn’t heavy enough, the damn thing wasn’t heavy enough.
And the man still had that pistol. Desperate, Manville swung again, and the heavy base of the peppermill thudded down on the man’s right wrist, and the pistol fell to the deck and went sliding away,
I need that pistol! Manville swung the peppermill with all his might, like a carpenter driving a masonry nail into a brick wall, three hard pounding frantic punches at that face, and then the peppermill cracked diagonally in two, the base and a long triangle of the handle bouncing off the man’s chest to fall at his feet, leaving in Manville’s hand a kind of long jagged wooden dagger.
The man was still on his feet, though goggle-eyed and reeling, hands groping as though for an opponent he couldn’t see. Manville lunged at his face with this new dagger, and the man staggered back, lost his footing, and toppled backward down the steep flight of stairs.
Pistol first. Manville ran to where it still moved on the deck, the polished metal sliding over the polished wood surface with every tremor of the ship. Hurling away the remnant of the peppermill, he snatched up the pistol, then ran back to point it down the stairwell. Only then did he look past the barrel of the gun, to see the man in a twisted heap down there, unconscious or dead.