I threw the box over the side.
“I don’t believe it.”
I felt like singing. I knew I was smiling like an idiot but I couldn’t help it. “What’s so hard to believe? There’s too much money in the world. Ordinarily I wouldn’t throw it in the ocean because the fish can’t eat it. I only throw organic refuse in the ocean. Sometimes, though, a man has to bend so he won’t break. Sometimes he can do both. A question of compromise. The fish can’t eat a grenade launcher—” I threw the launcher over the side — “or a grenade” —I flipped the grenade after it — “or the wires on your wrists, or the rope around your ankles, or the anchor at the end of the rope. If you lift your head you’ll see the anchor. That’s why we’re adrift in the Atlantic, George, not just for the beauty of the phrase, the poetry of the words, but because the anchor is here in the boat and you’re attached to it. Are you getting attached to your anchor, George? The fish won’t eat it, or your clothes, but they’ll eat you, George!”
I started laughing and couldn’t get hold of it. I grabbed onto the rail and clenched my teeth and shut my eyes and took deep breaths, in out in out. I knew what was happening. A corner of my mind knew exactly what was happening, and I kept my eyes shut and my jaws locked together and kept taking deep breaths until the rough parts smoothed out again.
He was saying the same thing, over and over, as if the words had magical properties. “You’re crazy. You’re out of your mind, you’re crazy—”
I stood and watched him. I was calm now, and so of course he started to tell me that I had to calm down. “I think I’ll go below,” I told him. “That’s another nautical term. It means downstairs. Try to get some rest, George.”
I went downstairs and sat on a bed and wondered what they called beds on a ship. It wasn’t going well, I told myself. I couldn’t get organized, I kept going off on tangents and winding up hysterical. I had to straighten myself out. One thing at a time, one damned thing at a time.
I thought it all out and had it fixed in my mind when I went upstairs again. He was lying still, and for a moment I thought he was dead, but then his eyes turned to focus on me. He didn’t say anything.
I said, “I want you to understand all this. It’s almost 2:30 now. In an hour and a half, at four o’clock, the Pindaris will blow up. We may hear it, I’m not sure, I may, I mean. I don’t know what speed a big ship makes or—”
“The Pindaris will—”
“Please don’t interrupt. Let me talk, and then later you can ask all the questions you want, and I’ll try to answer them. I think I knew all along that I was going to blow up the ship. I think that’s one of the reasons I agreed to do the job in the first place. Those weapons are disgusting. They don’t just kill people, they kill everything. Everything. They kill the ground.”
“How did—”
“Please. You know the outfit I was in. We learned how to make bombs out of almost anything. I bought an alarm clock for the timer and opened up bullets for gunpowder. And other things. I set it all up while you were driving to the pier. In one of the crates I broke open. It won’t be much of a bomb. A little explosion and a little fire, but the explosion alone ought to be enough to start some of the napalm, and once that goes it’ll touch off most of the other stuff.”
I took a deep breath. “Of course, blowing up the ship takes the pressure off us, too. Me. They’ll know about it, that the weapons were destroyed, and it won’t be quite as important to find out who took them. Maybe they’ll decide that the criminals went down with the ship. So it’s safer this way, but that’s not the point, that’s just a fringe benefit.”
“A million dollars, a fortune in weapons, and a ship,” he said. He was talking to himself. “I don’t believe it. A ship, a freighter. I don’t—”
I waited until he stopped. I was going to tell him that the only thing that really bothered me was the damage the blast would do. It would pollute a large portion of the sea and might disturb the ecology of the whole area. I didn’t tell him because I knew he didn’t care, and also because it was something I didn’t want to think about myself. I would have to think about it sooner or later, but it could wait.
So I said, “I told you this because I had to, and it was something you had to know. But I know that you want to hear about yourself, don’t you?”
“You already told me.”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to dump me overboard.”
“That’s right.”
He had a tremendous amount of control. I could almost see his mind trying to come apart, but he managed to keep it in check. He couldn’t talk for a few minutes and I waited for him, and then he said, his voice steady, interested, “Why, Paul? Why?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Because I tried to kill you.”
“No. That would be stupid. I told you last night.”
“Then why?”
I had had the right answer ready before but now I couldn’t remember what it was. I hedged. “I’m safer this way. They might get to you, it’s possible. And you would throw me to them, you know you would. Or else you would kill me yourself. I’d always be the loose end, the one man on earth who knew about you, and you would go to Guatemala and come back from Guatemala and think about me. You’d have a million dollars free and clear with one man in the world who knew about you, just one man, and it might take a month or a year or five years but sooner or later it would get to you and you would try to kill me.”
“Never, Paul. Never.”
“You would.”
“Never, I swear it!”
It was a rotten trick and I was mad at myself. He had hope now. It was false hope, because he thought that was my real reason and that, since it was a rational reason, he could use reason to change my mind. He deserved to be treated as an equal. It was legitimate to hurt him, but this was not an honest way to do it.
The words rushed out of him. They were wasted, I couldn’t even listen to them, but I let him go on. He never exactly finished. He ran out of breath, and when he did I held up a hand, and he let me talk.
“What I just said was true, don’t interrupt, it was true, but that’s not why I’m doing this.” My head was splitting. I put my hand to my forehead and tried to hold it all together. “I want to tell you why. I want to, I want to tell you why, but there are too many reasons. I can’t sort them out. Everything runs together.”
“Paul—”
“You said I was crazy. No, no, wait, that didn’t bother me. Don’t you see? I know I’m crazy. But not just now, George. I’ve been crazy all along. My God, George, what do you expect? A guy cracks up and lives by himself on an island and runs around naked, of course he’s crazy! What else would he be? You think he gets cured out there? Do you cure a lion by putting it in a cage?”
I stared into his eyes. He was beginning to understand. I think he was beginning to understand.
“You let the lion out of the cage,” I told him. “I held the leash in my own hands and it worked, I stayed on the leash. Sometimes it was close but it worked. But when the job was over the leash went away. Do you see? Do you see?”
He couldn’t answer me.
“Why am I going to kill you? George, George, I have a hundred reasons. I have a million reasons. You came to my island. You went in my house. You read my list.” I couldn’t hold my voice down. It was getting louder and louder. “You threw a cigarette in the sand. Cellophane, the cellophane from the pack, you let it blow away. You watched me shoot the soldiers. You wouldn’t do it yourself but you watched me do it.