“You bastard,” I said in impotent anger.
He mocked me with a grimace of feigned sympathy. “I think you have had your revenge here tonight. A pity. It will take us weeks to clear up the mess, but in the meantime we shall feed your body to the hawks.”
“It’s no good shooting me,” I said defiantly, “because the authorities know I’m here.”
“Oh, my God! I am so very frightened!” Von Rellsteb laughed. “The authorities! You hear that, Lisl? Perhaps we had better surrender immediately.”
“My boat will be in Puerto Natales by now,” I plowed on in the face of von Rellsteb’s mockery, then tried a little of my own. “You probably thought it was going north?” I smiled, as though I pitied him his misconception.
“Actually,” von Rellsteb put a scornful English accent on the word, “I think your boat is on its way here. I suspect it has been hiding offshore for the last two days.”
I said nothing. How the hell did he know these things? And once again, just as I had when we confronted each other at the mine, I wondered if this devil was a mind reader.
Von Rellsteb laughed. “Mr. Blackburn, what VHF channel would you monitor if you knew you were dealing with the owner of an English boatyard? Which channel does your daughter prefer when she wants a measure of privacy?” He shook his head as though he was disappointed in my stupidity. “I have been monitoring channel 37 ever since you first arrived in our waters! I thought you might use it to try and reach Nicole, but instead I heard your friend answer your transmission last night. We couldn’t hear you, I imagine because you were using a low-power transmitter? Whatever, your friend is now innocently sailing toward us, and I assure you we will prepare a suitable welcome for him; you, I think, will be dead by then. But first, tell me! Are you responsible for the dreadful Mrs. Tetterman being here?”
I tried to look very vague. “Who?”
Von Rellsteb was silent for a second, then shrugged as though he did not really care whether I told the truth or not. “How did you escape at the quarry?”
It was my turn to shrug. “I flew.”
Lisl fired a burst of three or four bullets that missed my right shoulder by a whisker. The room was suddenly echoing with noise and stinking with the acrid smell of the gun’s propellant. “How did you escape?” she asked harshly.
“When you saw me fall,” I confessed, “I had a rope round my waist. I then climbed to the quarry floor and waited you out.”
“Nicole inherited your cunning,” von Rellsteb said with a touch of genuine admiration, “and perhaps also your daring. She is very brave. Too brave. I have always thought that one day she will come too close to a Japanese fishing boat and they will ram her. Of all of us, you see, she has caused the most damage to the Japanese nets. There are also times”—he smiled—“when I am tempted to hope that she will come too close to a Japanese fishing boat. She wants to take over from Lisl and me, but luckily for us Nicole does not, how do you say, own the farm? Which is why she went to England. She wanted her own farm.” He was watching me very closely. “But you already knew that. How does it feel to have a daughter who wants to kill you? Who killed her own mother? She meant to get you both, of course.”
He was trying to rile me, but I said nothing. That was not defiance, but helplessness. My heart was thumping in my chest, my stomach was bitter with defeat, my knees were weak and my mind a blur of hopeless schemes: I could jump to the window, I could leap to the hidden gun on the bed, I could grow wings and fly away. The truth was that I was going to die and von Rellsteb was enjoying the infliction of that truth.
“Why?” I finally managed to find my voice, though it was a very weak and plaintive voice. “Why do you do this? You’re supposed to be preserving life, not taking it.”
“Now you’re being very boring and entirely predictable,” von Rellsteb said. “Do you think that by enticing me into a sophomoric discussion of my motives you will gain time? Or perhaps you imagine you can persuade me to let you live? Maybe I should let you live until Nicole reaches us? She is coming, you know. I talked to her on the radio not three hours ago and told her you were here. Would you like to wait for her?”
“Yes!” I pleaded.
“I think not.” Von Rellsteb enjoyed thus contradicting my hopes, “because my people are waiting outside in the rain, and I would like them to come inside and get warm, which means I have to kill you before they return. Most of them are loyal, but some of them are still naive enough to be shocked by murder.” He aimed the rifle at my face and I saw Lisl half smile in anticipation of my death, then Jackie, who must have climbed the stairs to stand in the doorway that I had blown open with the Lee-Enfield, ordered von Rellsteb to put the gun down.
Von Rellsteb stiffened in shock, while an astonished Lisl half turned toward the sudden threat.
“Put the guns down!” Jackie’s voice was hysterical. “I’ll shoot!”
Von Rellsteb heard the desperation in that threat, and he must have realized that Jackie was almost helpless with nervousness. His eyes flicked toward me, and I could see what he was thinking, that he could step out of Jackie’s line of sight, then shoot me, but to do that he would leave Lisl exposed.
“Shoot him if he moves a finger!” I called to Jackie, and I wished she would shoot anyway, but I knew she would not. It was a miracle that she had even managed to aim her gun toward von Rellsteb, but she was about as likely to pull her trigger as eat a pork chop. Her sudden appearance had gained me time, but it would be my responsibility to talk Jackie and me out of this unexpected stand-off. “You can’t kill me,” I said to von Rellsteb, “so you might as well drop your gun. Both of you.”
“Why can’t we kill you?” Von Rellsteb, despite having Jackie’s gun aimed at his back, evidently found my defiance amusing.
“Because the San Rafael is coming back here”—I was snatching arguments out of the thinnest air—“and the women who arrived on the San Rafael will tell the crew that you murdered me, and that’ll be the end of you.”
“You are telling me the game is up?” Von Rellsteb mocked me with his use of the stilted cliché.
“Of course the game’s up, you fool!” I snapped.
“Not really,” von Rellsteb said happily. “I shall radio the San Rafael and tell them that their two passengers have decided to join our little band of conservationists, and that therefore they have no need to go so far out of their way. I think they will be grateful to be spared the expense of the fuel, don’t you?” He smiled. “I also think, Mr. Blackburn, that if your very nervous rescuer truly planned to kill me, then she would have fired at me already”—he paused to make certain I was directly in his rifle’s sights—“so fare thee well, Mr. Blackburn, fare thee well.”
And the gun fired.
Jackie screamed terribly.
Lisl began to turn. I threw myself backward, instinctively falling away from the expected bullets.
Von Rellsteb pitched forward.
Jackie still screamed.
I fell against the wall and bounced back towards Lisl. The sound of gunfire was obscenely loud, echoing off the walls and filling the house. Bullets were chopping across gilt-framed pictures and churning the wall’s horsehair plaster into dust and ruin. Picture glass shattered bright, mingling with the blood that was spurting vividly across the room.
It was von Rellsteb’s blood, because it had been Jackie who fired.
She had fired her rifle on automatic and, by luck more than judgment, her aim had been perfect. So perfect that her stream of bullets had literally exploded von Rellsteb’s chest. She had turned his torso inside out, so that blood and bits of lung tissue and shards of bone and strips of heart were spraying across the carpeted floor.