I was too wild to be scared. “Listen, Barclay. This whole thing is going to come unzipped. If he hurts her, it’s you I’m coming for, and you’re going to have to use that gun to stop me. If you think you can find that reef without my help, go ahead.”
It hung poised, ready to go either way. I tried to take a breath through the tightness in my throat. “Don’t be a damned fool,” I went on. “If she were going to lie, would she give you a stupid position like that? Maybe there is a shoal there, or somewhere within fifteen miles or so. All that area hasn’t been sounded. Macaulay could have been off in his reckoning. The only thing to do is go there and see, and you’ll never get there unless I take you. You name it. Now.”
He saw I was right. He motioned for Barfield to turn her loose. The tension drained away, and I was limp. I’d bought a little time, but I knew that when the next time came I’d be tied up before they started.
She stood up, turned deliberately to smile at me, and went below, ignoring them.
Barfield lounged on the seat with a cup of coffee in his hand. “The hero,” he said. “We’ve got a real, live hero aboard, Joey.”
* * *
Barclay took over again while I ate a sandwich and drank some coffee. I relieved him at six. He and Barfield went below and sat in the cabin, talking. After a while I heard them turn on the radio. It had short wave in addition to the marine bands, and they got an Argentine station playing Latin American dance music. Sunset was a great splash of salmon and orange and pink, fading slowly while the sea stretched out like a rolling, dark prairie.
I was about to call Barclay to take the tiller so I could light the running lights when Shannon came up through the hatch. After I’d shown her briefly how to handle it, she took over while I attended to them.
When I came back she slid forward and sat there near enough to touch, but not touching, saying nothing. Sunset was a bad time of day if you had trouble, but I could sense she didn’t want any help with it, at least not yet. There was an odd awkwardness between us. It would go away after a while, but until it did there was nothing we could do about it. I tried imagining that this was the Java Sea and we were alone aboard, two people who had forgotten the rest of the world and had been forgotten by it. For a moment it was very real, and the longing was almost unbearable.
There was just enough light in the afterglow to see her face, and when I looked around again she was crying. She was doing it quite silently with her head tilted back a little and not trying to put her hands up to her face or wipe away the tears or anything. The crying just welled up in her and overflowed.
“I’m sorry, Bill,” she said after a while. “This will be the last time. I got to thinking of him all alone there in that big house, with it getting d-dark outside. He was afraid of the dark. For months he was terrified of it. B-But always before I was there with him—”
He was leaning on her. She held him up and kept the sawdust from leaking out while he planned to double-cross her and leave her. And when it blew up in his face he went back and leaned on her some more. I didn’t feel anything for him, nor care a damn if it did get dark outside, but it was a gruesome picture if you couldn’t keep your mind off it—a dead man lying there alone in all that Swedish modern with one bridge lamp burning day in and day out and a phonograph still going if it hadn’t shut itself off. He probably wouldn’t be found for over 24 hours yet. She’d said Tuesday and Friday were the days the maid came. When they did, they’d pick up her car out at the airport almost immediately and know they had it made, all except finding her.
There was nothing I could do. I let her cry. It was a helpless feeling.
After a while she got it under control, and she said quietly, “I wonder why nothing is ever simple and clear-cut. Why can’t things be completely black or completely white, instead of all mixed up? What he did amounted to deliberate betrayal; so that should make it easy, shouldn’t it? There’s your nice, pat answer. It’s routine. It’s a cliché. She was in love with him, but he wasn’t in love with her. That’s fine, except it was the other way around. He was a heel. That’s simple and easy, except it wasn’t true.”
I waited, saying nothing. She was trying to tell me about it, or maybe trying to straighten it out in her own mind, and she didn’t want me mixed up in it. Not yet, anyway. She was talking to a psychiatrist, or a priest, or to herself.
“He was driven to it. It’s easy to say it was his own fault, that he was old enough to know it was wrong, and that he began it deliberately. But people have been tempted by easy money before, and it’ll go on happening as long as you have people and have money. What I’m trying to say is that in the beginning there was no question of running out on me. Maybe he even thought he was doing it partly tor me. He liked to give me things. Expensive things.
“You don’t dive or fall into something like that all at once. It’s gradual. It was simple at first, and then it failed and it was more difficult, and in the end it was an obsession. And he was afraid. There’s no way I can make you understand fear like that, probably, because it’s something the human race has forgotten. Being hunted, I mean. It’s been too long. It’s an individual experience now, and you have to go through it yourself to know what it’s like.
“So that brings us to another easy answer. All he had to do was forget the stupid diamonds and get word to Barclay where they were so they’d go recover them and quit trailing him. And all a heroin addict has to do is make a New Year’s resolution and quit. And how did he know they’d stop trying to kill him even if they got them back? He’d stolen from them, hadn’t he?
“So in the end he was driven into a corner and he knew the only way he would ever be free of them was to make them think he was dead. And to make it convincing he had to leave me and let me think he was dead, too. Send me out as a decoy. Sacrifice me, or something. So condemn him. But before you do, try to remember that he was already beginning to break. The carrousel was whirling like a centrifuge now, and he was no longer the same man who’d got on back there when it was a children’s ride.
“I wasn’t in love with him—not the way I know it can be. I liked him, and I admired lots of things about him, and he was wonderful to me and I owed him everything. But that’s not love, is it? So when I learned what he’d done, or tried to do, all I had to do was walk out. Wasn’t it? You see? Simple again.
“Listen, Bill. My father was a vaudeville-skit Irishman, with all the props. He was little and pugnacious and he got into fights and he was lovable. He worked on the docks when he wasn’t in trouble with the union bosses or drunk or in jail for disturbing the peace. We never had anything. I didn’t finish high school. I was a big, awkward, slangy, sexy-looking blonde who didn’t have anywhere to go except bad. I couldn’t speak English, and I didn’t know how to walk or wear clothes or have the taste to buy them if I’d had the money to do it with. When I met him I was twenty and working in a night-club chorus. I couldn’t dance and I couldn’t sing, but there was a lot of me to look at in the costumes we wore, so nobody complained. He asked me to marry him, and I did, realizing it probably wouldn’t happen twice in one lifetime. I mean that anybody that nice, with taste and discrimination, would fall in love with what amounted to just a lot of bare skin, even if it was smooth.
“He came from a very nice family; his grandfather had been a United States Senator. He wasn’t particularly rich, but he had a good job. He was fifteen years older than I was, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t that sort of thing at all. He was wonderful to me. I’m still a big, sexy-looking blonde, and I’ll never know anything startling, but if I’m not as awkward and slangy and brassy as I was at twenty I owe it all to him. He had a knack for teaching me things without hurting my feelings or making me feel he was ashamed of me.