“Soon,” he said, his tone dark and very guttural. “I feel it coming on. Soon it will be Carmen’s time.”
“She has lasted longer than many,” Bonsentir said.
“I like to think—” Simpson said, the words oozing out of him like some viscous effluent. “I like to think of her face the first moment when she knows, when she realizes what will happen to her.”
Both men were silent, admiring the thought. Then the door opened and Carmen floated in again.
“All done,” she announced and plumped herself back down beside Simpson, and leaned her head against his fleshy shoulder. He tilted her chin up with one hand and kissed her hard on the mouth. She wriggled her little body, excitedly, like a fish on a hook.
I got down from my chair and moved to the door and opened it a crack. It was time to take her out of there. The corridor was empty. I opened the door wider and stepped through. I took the three steps down to the next door and put my hand inside my coat for my gun. Suddenly a steel cable, thicker than the ones on which they hung the Brooklyn Bridge, went around my neck, and a vise clamped on my gun hand. I could smell the owner, it was the Mexican. And it wasn’t a steel cable, it was his forearm. I tried to stamp on his instep but the cable around my neck kept tightening. I jammed my left elbow back into his ribs. It had as much effect as if I’d slugged him with a marshmallow. I could feel the pressure build in my head. I couldn’t see anything but a reddish haze. My gun and gun hand were still immobile under my coat. I tried to bend forward and throw him but it was like trying to bend an oak tree. I couldn’t breathe. The reddish haze got darker and redder and finally enveloped me and I plunged into it and disappeared.
32
I woke up sitting on the floor in a bright little room with no furniture. I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them again. There was a strong light shining in my face. My neck hurt, my head throbbed, I was aware that the reassuring weight of my gun was gone from under my left arm. I squinted past the light and could make out forms, not very clearly. One of them was surely the Mexican with his huge upper body and long arms. Others I couldn’t make out. My mouth felt as if I’d eaten a blotter.
“He appears to have regained consciousness.” It was the voice of Dr. Bonsentir, descending from the clouds. “How convenient of you, Mr. Marlowe, to have come to us, just when we had decided we must find you.”
I braced my feet and edged my back up the wall and got myself standing. The Mexican moved out from behind the light and stepped closer to me. I could see my gun stuck in his belt. At least he hadn’t tied a knot in the barrel.
“Why don’t we just kill him right now.” Simpson’s voice came deep and thick from the darkness. “Then we won’t have to think about it anymore.”
I heard Carmen’s suppurating giggle.
“I think it would be better,” Bonsentir said, “to wait until we put out to sea again. It will make disposal of the body safer and less troublesome.”
“I don’t like to sail at night,” Simpson said. His voice was back up again. It had the petulant ring of a kid who didn’t want to go to bed early.
“I know, Randolph. It’s all right. We’ll keep him here until we get under way in the morning.”
“It’s too late,” I said. “Too many people know.”
“Who knows?” Simpson said. “I told you, Claude, he told people. Who knows? What do they know?” His voice went up and down like a piccolo solo.
“He would say that, Randolph. He’s in profound jeopardy and he knows it. He would say that and hope it would save him, but it won’t.”
“The DA’s chief investigator, Bernie Ohls, knows it,” I said. “And the DA, Taggert Wilde, and the San Bernardino DA’s office, and a Missing Persons’ cop named Gregory, and a hard case named Eddie Mars who right now is maybe a hundred yards away with a boatload of tough boys who are ready to come over here and shoot your ears off.”
“I know Eddie Mars,” Carmen said excitedly. Oh boy! A familiar name.
Simpson came around into the lamplight. His soft face was red.
“Stop it,” he said, his voice fluting down the scale as he spoke. It was eerie to hear, and at another time it would have been an interesting phenomenon. “You’re trying to frighten me. Nobody knows. They can’t. I’m too powerful. No one can know about me. So just shut your mouth, because you’re going to be killed.” The last sentence bottomed off into darkness.
My head felt like it was ready to rupture and my neck hurt and my throat was sore and I was a little dizzy, and sick of the light in my eyes and sick of being yammered at by an oversized brat. I hit him. It was a pretty good punch given the shape I was in. I felt his nose flatten and saw blood come. He screamed with a sound like glass shattering and stumbled back with his hands to his face and the blood running between his fingers, and kept screaming in high sharp bursts, like a European fire engine: whoop, whoop, whoop! I turned toward the Mex and something hit the side of my head and I went back once again to a place I’d been spending too much time in.
33
This time when I came around I was alone. The only light came from a small bulb in the ceiling. All the parts that had hurt before hurt worse, and in addition I had an aching bruise on the left side of my jaw just in front of my ear. I sat for a while, fighting nausea. There was no movement in the yacht other than the slight toss of the easy swells on which we rode. Through the porthole I could see that it was still dark. Time to stand up. I could do it. Six feet tall, 190 pounds. In top condition. I could just stand right up. I tried to get my legs under me and they felt like seaweed. I compromised by inching over against the wall and slowly sitting up with my back supported by the wall. Even the dim light hurt my eyes. I squinted. Maybe I wouldn’t get up just yet. Instead I’d survey the room, while I rested. There wasn’t much to survey. Whatever light had shone in my eyes was gone, as was all the furniture. There was another flowering tropical plant growing in a big pot in the corner, and two throw pillows that might have been on a couch at one time. Other than that I was in an empty steel room painted ivory, with a porthole too small to squeeze through.
My watch was broken, probably smashed when I fell, I didn’t know which time. I’d been falling so much that it could have happened anytime. There was a smear of blood on my shirt that must have gushed from Simpson’s nose when I’d hit him. I took some satisfaction in that. Painfully, with rest stops often, I got to my feet. The room spun. I hung there for a moment, teetering over the void. Then it stabilized. I was up. I edged along the wall to the door and tried it. It was locked. Surprise! There was no other way out. I looked at the potted plant. It was real, growing in dirt. With a big purple trumpet-shaped flower on it. If you were as rich as Randolph Simpson you could have flowering plants grow anywhere you wanted.
I looked at the plant for a minute and then sat down on the floor again, and held steady until the room stopped spinning, and took off my right shoe and sock. I put the shoe back on my sockless foot and slowly got to my feet again. I was getting the hang of it. Someday I’d probably be able to do it whenever I wanted to. If there was going to be a someday. Carefully I filled the sock about two-thirds full of dirt from the pot. Then I tied a knot in it and slapped it gently across my hand.
It felt about right. I walked to the porthole and opened it and took a couple of deep breaths of cool sea air. Then I went back and stood against the wall next to the door where it latched and with my left hand began to bang on the door.
“Let me out,” I hollered as loud as I could. “Let me out of here!”
I had to holler it several more times and keep banging on the door before I heard footsteps in the corridor and a jangle of keys and the door swung open. The Mexican came in with my gun still stuck in his belt and I laid the dirt-filled sock carefully against the side of his head back of his left ear. Very hard. He grunted and stumbled forward and went to his knees and I hit him again with my homemade sap, square across the back of the head this time, and he sighed and pitched face forward onto the floor. I kicked him hard in the head and then crouched beside him and got my hand under him and pulled my gun loose from his belt. The keys he’d used to open my door were sprawled five feet in front of his outflung hand. I picked them up and went into the corridor and locked the door behind me. I had the reassuring weight of the gun again, and this time I kept it in my hand. So many people had taken it away from me, I barely recognized it.