“It will be more than a simple incident,” the Captain told him. He went into the wheelhouse and returned immediately. He had a pistol in his hand, and he pointed it at the chest of the American officer. “If you attempt to look at my cargo, if one of your men so much as makes a false start toward the hold, I shall instruct my crew to give battle. I will shoot you and your fellow officer where you stand, and I will issue orders to have your men tossed overboard."
“You can’t possibly think that you stand a chance against a destroyer,” the officer pointed out.
“No,” the Captain agreed. “But I wonder if they would dare sink me and risk an incident of that magnitude with Portugal. Indeed. I wonder if you dare to fight back on board my ship at all. Can you imagine the uproar if so much as one of my men were to die in such a fracas? Your government wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”
'“You’re right. But look,” the officer pleaded, “won’t you reconsider and voluntarily let us examine your cargo?”
“No. And that’s final. Now, gentlemen, I must ask you to leave my ship immediately.”
“Very well.” The senior officer sighed. “You’re right. We can’t risk forcing you. But rest assured, Captain, that we shall escort you out of these waters.” He turned back as he reached the deck below. “But I wonder what it is, Captain,” he called, “that you’re taking such pains to conceal.”
I also wondered. Was the Captain merely standing on his rights, his dignity, maintaining face? Or did he really have something to conceal? I pondered the question as we picked up steam and resumed our course again. The destroyer steamed behind us like a mother hen prodding a baby chick out of the coop. The question went out of my mind as I realized that one shot from those forty-inchers would probably be enough to send us to the bottom. But the shot was never fired.
It was very late when I finally left the deck and went to my cabin. The flashlight beam hit me square between the eyes as I opened the door. The karate kick bounced off my tummy a split second later.
I fell away from it, out of the light-beam. A shadow hurtled past me on its way through the doorway. I reached out and got a grip on its ankle. It twisted as it fell and tried to bash my skull with the flashlight. Before it could succeed, I chopped at the wrist of the hand holding the light, and the flashlight went spinning across the room.
Two fingers were digging into each of my eyes now, seemingly trying to pry them from their sockets. I pried them loose, but it was a moment before I could see anything but blood and tears. No sweat. Except for that of my adversary, who was perspiring profusely.
It made him slippery—hard to hold. While I was still getting my vision back, he slid free of me and again tried for the door. I grabbed for the sound he made and came up with a handful of his rear end. It was hardly an ideal grip, but I held onto it anyway.
Abruptly, he stopped struggling and let his weight fall backward, full on top of me. I let out a grunt as he sat down hard on my belly. It was the part of my anatomy which seemed to be taking the most punishment in this fracas.
But my eyes, at least, had cleared by now. As I wrapped an arm around the intruder’s and wrenched so that he came crashing to the floor beside me, I was able to get a look at his face in the ray shining from the flashlight across the cabin. “Well, I’ll be damned!” I exclaimed as we continued struggling.
The face was right out of Warner Bros.’ heyday. It was the snake-face of Peter Lorre hissing at Bogie3 . It was the round and whiney visage of old Sneaky Pete4 himself testifying that the days of really expert villainy were far from over. It was Mr. Moto5 himself , all decked out in a ship steward’s uniform. It was Zombie Petey risen from the grave and pretending to be a steward on this old Portugee bucket, but really up to his old nefarious tricks of rifling the hero’s stateroom again.
As a kid I’d hissed Lorre with the rest of the kids and envied Bogie every blow he’d rained upon the little brute. And now I had my chance to get in some licks myself. Only the Lorre-like steward had picked up some tricks since the Maltese Falcon days, some tactics the old-time movie censors would never have allowed.
Right now, for instance, he had a firm grip on my left gonad and was gritting his teeth with the effort of trying to tear it from my body. I kept him from succeeding by slamming my foot into his shoulder. It made him relinquish his devilish grip, but he had another one up his sleeve. He flipped quickly and wrapped his legs around my throat. His ankles locked at the back of my neck, and I found myself writhing with the desperation of a fish out of water.
Maybe he was supposed to be the villain, but it was no time for the hero to have Marquis of Queensbury6 scruples. I managed to twist my head slightly and sank my teeth into the calf of his leg. I kept biting as hard as I could until his grip relaxed, and then I managed to wrench free. I shot to my feet, and so did he.
On the face of it, I suppose I should have had all the best of it. I outweighed him by fifty pounds, stood a foot taller, and had muscles where he had skinny, undersized bones. But anybody who’s ever seen a Peter Lorre movie will appreciate the fact that the cunning knowhow of my adversary more than made up for what he lacked in bulk.
He used his head. Like a battering ram—that’s how he used it. The moment we were both on our feet, he ducked under the punch I threw and rammed my Adam's apple with his noggin. While I was choking, I landed a karate chop on the back of his neck.
It was only a glancing blow, but it rocked him. His knees buckled, and he grabbed at me for support. But he made the grab as aggressive as he was able. He got both hands on my beard and yanked as hard as he could, trying to pull me off balance as he fell. But all he succeeded in doing was tearing the phony beard loose from my face. This threw him even farther off balance, and I finished him off -- for the time being-—with a knee slammed into his descending jaw.
He lay quietly at my feet now, my beard still clutched in his hands like some fallen battle pennant. I turned on the light and looked down at him. He was out cold. I got the beard loose from his fingers and went into the bathroom where I put it back on as best I could. I picked up my eye-patch from the floor where it had fallen during the fight and also put that back on. By then my Lorre-like sparring partner was beginning to stir. I pulled him to his feet and hustled him out of the cabin.
“Where are you taking me, good sir?” he whined nasally.
“To the Captain,” I told him. “He’ll know how to deal with a thief on board his ship.”
I had to pound on the captain’s cabin door to rouse him. His eyes shot open wide when he saw the marks of the fight still on us. He held open the door of the cabin so we might come inside.
“What has happened, Mr. O’Ryan?” he asked when I didn’t relinquish my arm-twisting hold on the steward.
But my prisoner beat me to the answer. “This man iss not what he seems,” the steward hissed Lorre-ishly. “Believe me, Captain, he iss up to no good. His beard iss false. And he doesn’t really need that eye-patch. It iss only a part of his disguise. I do not even think that he iss Irish. He spoke to me before without a trace of a brogue.”
I made a mental note to thank the little bum for reminding me about the brogue. It had indeed slipped before. I made sure it was there when I spoke to the Captain now. “Sure an’ this little feller was ransackin’ me cabin, Captain,” I told him. “ ’Twas a terrible fight he put up afore I was able to subdue him. What I want you to be findin’ out is just what he was afther among me belongin’s.”
“Why should he have been after anything special, Mr. O’Ryan?” the Captain asked shrewdly. “He’s simply a thief. That’s all. I’ll see that he’s taken care of.” He took a gun out of his bureau drawer. “You may leave him with me,” he said. “I’m sorry that you were victimized this way. But it is fortunate that you caught him.”