“It’s a little after twelve now,” he went on. “You’d best go below, George, and catch up on your sleep. Manning can stretch out here in the cockpit and I’ll take the first watch, until six. When Manning relieves me, you’ll have to come on deck.”
Barfield grunted something and went below, carrying the satchel.
When he had gone, Barclay said, “I’d advise you to be chary of provoking him, Manning. He’s quite dangerous.”
I sat down, as near him as I dared, and lit a cigarette. “It would be tragic, wouldn’t it?” I said. “I mean, if he blew his stack and killed me before I found your lousy plane for you and the two of you could take turns at it.”
“Why should we kill you?”
“Save it,” I said. “I knew all along you wouldn’t. But aren’t you going to give me a letter of recommendation? You know, something like: ‘This will introduce Mr. Manning, the only living witness to the fact that we killed Macaulay and that his widow is innocent—“
“Not necessarily,” he said. “You won’t go to the police. You can’t. You’re wanted for murder yourself.”
I wondered if he thought I would believe that. Certainly the chances were I wouldn’t go to them. I’d have everything to lose and nothing to gain. But if I were dead and lying on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico somewhere in two hundred fathoms of water, there was no chance at all. And .45 cartridges were cheap.
I moved a little nearer. Just a slight shift of the buttocks along the seat, almost imperceptible. I glanced at his face. It was calm and imperturbable in the faint glow from the binnacle. I stretched and slid another inch. I could almost reach him.
The eyes were suddenly full of a mocking humor. “Here,” he said. He took the .45 automatic out of the pocket of his jacket and held it out to me butt first. “Save scuffling for it. Undignified, what?”
My mouth dropped open. For a fraction of a second I was too startled to do anything. Then I recovered myself and grabbed it out of his hand.
“That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?” he asked solicitously.
“Come about,” I said. “Take her back to the sea buoy.”
“I say, you are a theatrical devil, aren’t you?” His voice was amused.
“You don’t think I’d kill you?”
“Frankly, no.”
“So it’s not loaded?” Completely deflated, I took the gun in my left hand and pulled the slide back. I stared. It was loaded.
“You won’t pull the trigger,” he said, “for several reasons. You don’t want to go back to Sanport, because the police are searching for you. And in the second place I doubt very seriously that you are capable of shooting a man in cold blood. Requires a certain detachment you don’t have—”
“Go on,” I said.
“But, naturally, the principal reason is that Barfield is down there in the cabin with another gun, and he’s between here and Mrs. Macaulay. If you attempted anything, he has her. And he can be quite unpleasant if necessary. Has a knack for it.”
“I don’t give a damn what happens to Mrs. Macaulay,” I said.
He smiled. “You think you don’t, but that would change with the first scream. You don’t have the stomach for that, either.”
“I’m the original gutless wonder. Is that it?”
“No. You’re just vulnerable in a number of areas in which you can’t be in a business like this. I’ve made quite a study of you since that afternoon up there at the lake.”
“Then you knew what she was up to? That’s the reason you shoved off and left us?”
“Naturally. Also the reason we were a little rough with you, without actually hurting you, that night on the beach. We wanted you to hurry a bit and get this boat for them so we could find where Macaulay was hiding. Worked out quite well, too, except that he was in such a funk he forced us to kill him. However, that’s all in the past. Right now, would you mind giving my gun back if you’re finished examining it?”
Sweat broke out on my face. I lifted the gun, lined it up squarely between the mocking brown eyes, and flicked the safety off. My hand shook so badly it wobbled. I had only to squeeze the trigger, ever so gently, and there would be only one of them. He watched me coolly. I wondered if there was any fear in him at all. He couldn’t be human.
My finger tightened. I was taut as guitar strings all over and the muscles hurt in my arms. I didn’t care what happened to her, did I? I cursed her silently, bitterly, hating her for being alive, and hating her for being here.
“George,” Barclay said quietly.
I went limp. I handed the gun to him, feeling sick and weak all over.
“What is it?” Barfield’s voice asked from the companionway.
“Nothing,” Barclay said. “Sleep tight, old boy.”
I lit a cigarette. My hands shook.
“Charge it to clarification,” Barclay murmured.
He had wanted me to know it, wanted me to realize the futility of jumping one of them to get his gun as long as she was there where the other could get her. This way it hadn’t cost anything. I wondered what kind of mind I was dealing with. He knew things about me I didn’t know myself. I detested her. Maybe I even actively hated her. She and her lying had ruined everything for me, I was sick with contempt when I thought of her, and yet he’d known he could tie my hands completely by threatening her with violence.
Clarification, he called it. It was about as clear as the bottom of the Mississippi.
“I shouldn’t feel too badly about it,” Barclay said. “Exploitation of weakness is purely routine in war, chess, or tennis, and older than any of them. And she is admirably constituted to be a carrier. Rather delectable wench.”
“Carrier?”
“Typhoid Mary of vulnerability, to use a medical analogy, assuming any extension of the areas of potential hurt to be a pathological condition. Regard for another human being is an exposed nerve end, if you follow me. Imagine a surrealist football player trailing his solar plexus or testes after him like an eleven-foot bridal train. Unwieldy, what? And damned convenient for the opposition in case the score is close.”
“The hell with Mrs. Macaulay,” I said.
“Forgive me if I talk too much. Grow philosophical at sea, particularly under sail. Unpleasant habit.”
“What are you going to do with her after you find the plane?”
“Frankly, I haven’t given it any thought, old boy. And since neither of us gives a damn what happens to her, as you say, why waste time in speculation? Lovely night, isn’t it? Are you fond of Swinburne?”
“We were like that,” I said. “What did Macaulay do?”
“He tried to steal, or did steal, some three quarters of a million dollars worth of diamonds from us.”
The sum meant nothing to me. He could have said twenty dollars or a billion and it would have been the same as far as I was concerned. It was something they were after, and Macaulay had been after. I was just a pedestrian who had been shoved into the line of march and run over.
The breeze was almost directly abeam. We shipped some water amidships and a little spray blew into the cockpit. Barclay handled her well; he was a good helmsman. A clumsy one might have had the cockpit full by this time. I leaned down and cupped my hands to light another cigarette and looked around at him. The brown eyes gazed thoughtfully at the compass card. He was the most completely baffling human being I had ever run into, and I knew somehow that if we were to sail this boat around the world for the rest of our lives, just the two of us, I wouldn’t be any nearer to understanding him on the last day than the first. He was cold-blooded, entirely without conscience, and still you almost liked him. Why, I didn’t know.