I suppose the same thing happens to cat burglars and others of that ilk. Creep about long enough in silence and in darkness, and eventually one becomes sufficiently comfortable in that environment to dispense with fear. This happened to us. All we had to do was get to the boat and go home, and that’s what we were going to do. As far as I was concerned, the party was over.
My mistake.
I saw the man, perhaps a hundred yards ahead of us on the right. He was running toward us, and I grabbed Arlette and slapped a hand over her mouth to keep her from crying out. We dropped down to the ground at the side of the path.
Then the man stopped, abruptly. Forms had materialized out of the shadows, three of them. Someone cried out, but I could not make out what was said.
“Evan-”
“Shhh!”
Something metallic glinted in the darkness. There was sudden movement, and then a crisp volley of shots rang out, and the man who had been running let out a brief cry and clutched himself. Then, in slow motion, he crumpled up and fell gently to the ground.
More movement. A man rushed to him, dropped to the ground, picked something up, straightened up and ran. Two other men were with him. Together they bolted from the man who had been shot and tore up the path toward us. I held onto Arlette and kept her close beside me in the darkness. The trio of assassins passed within a few yards of us without stopping. They ran on down the path behind us, and we stayed absolutely motionless until their footsteps had disappeared in the night.
When the sound of footfalls ceased, Arlette started to move. I stopped her with a hand on her shoulder and held my finger to her lips. She subsided. For five hour-like minutes we remained where we were, silent, still. I waited for the sound of a siren, waited for one of the wandering guards to happen on the scene. The sound of the gunshots had been extraordinarily loud in the silence of the night, and it seemed impossible that no one would come.
If someone did, I didn’t want to be moving around.
But no one came. I looked at my watch and decided that no one was going to come now. I stood up, and Arlette rose to her feet beside me.
She said, “Who was-”
“I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
The man, tall and thin and dark and dead, lay sprawled in the middle of the carpet of plastic grass fronting the Man In The Home Pavilion. He had bled all over that artificial lawn, and soon the world would discover if it was in fact as wondrously washable as its promoters claimed. I went through the formality of looking for a pulse. There was none.
I patted his pockets, found nothing. I picked up the murder gun from the grass beside his body, sniffed the barrel, threw it down again. I wondered if the dead man was a Cuban – he did not look particularly Cuban – or if he had been killed by Cuban agents. I wondered how he fit into everything, if at all.
“Do you know him, Evan?”
“No.”
“Who killed him?”
“I don’t know that either.” I was suddenly dizzy, and I closed my eyes and took deep breaths to steady myself. We were in over our heads, I thought. We were playing a fool’s game with people who knew the rules far better than we.
“I think we should get out of here,” I said.
“I agree.”
This time we walked onward with caution. This time we moved in absolute silence, our ears attuned to the night sounds around us. This time, as we walked down the path to the waterway, we did not make the mistake of assuming we were alone.
But we still weren’t quite prepared. We reached the water’s edge, and I saw our little boat right where we had left it. And, alongside it, I saw another larger boat, empty.
Arlette’s hand tightened on my arm. And from the shadows a man emerged. There was a gun in his hand. He was smiling slightly, and he went on smiling as he placed the muzzle of the gun within three inches of my chest, directly over the heart.
Then he said, in highly accented French, “The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast.”
Chapter 11
The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast.
How interesting, I thought. It was a claim I myself would have liked to make, but one that if made would soon prove to be demonstrably false. Because I had the unassailable feeling that the bullet that would kill me had been cast, and that it reposed at that very moment in the cylinder of the revolver that was pointing at my heart.
“The bullet that will kill me is not yet cast,” the man repeated, a touch of malice in his voice. I looked at the gun and tried to estimate my chances against it. I could make some sort of grab for it, try to knock it aside and beat the idiot’s brains out. I readied myself, and then I took careful note of the way the index finger was curled tautly around the trigger. He wasn’t just pointing the gun at me. He was getting ready to fire it.
“Nor is the bullet yet cast, nor shall it ever be cast, that can put to death a grand idea. Nor is the bullet cast that will slay France.”
The same accent, the same vaguely familiar yet quietly meaningless sort of rhetoric. But the speaker was not the man now. It was Arlette, her voice ringing with conviction, her hand still firm in its grip upon my arm.
“And so I pledge myself,” she went on, “and my honor, and my life and soul, to the overthrow of the Bourbon yoke and the prompt restoration of the seed of empire-”
“Enough,” the man was saying now. “Enough, more than enough.” He lowered the gun and pocketed it. “You will understand that I have as little use for such passwords as you yourself, but at such times one cannot do less than display maximum caution.” He smiled savagely. “Of course I heard the shots. I was on the water when they sounded, and made my approach in silence. How was I to know who triumphed, eh? You could have been dead, and your assailants after me. Eh?”
“Of course.”
“You have the money?”
“Yes,” I said, wondering idly what money he meant, and who he was, and what Arlette had said to him, and what, for that matter, we were all of us doing here. “Yes,” I said, “I have it.”
“Very good. You will want this, of course.”
He handed me a flat black attaché case. I took it by the handle and ran my hand over the side of it. Fine leather, soft, smooth.
“And I will want – the paper sack? Yes?”
“But certainly,” I said, and handed him our sandwiches and burglar tools.
He patted it lovingly, then turned from us and tossed the sack into his own boat. He turned to face us again. “You might tell the man that we can undertake to ship more frequently if the market position holds up. You will tell him that?”
“Certainly.”
“I myself am only a courier. I speak messages as they are given to me, just as I relay parcels as I receive them. No offense?”
“None at all.”
“I am glad,” he said. He smiled again, like a wolf baring its teeth, vaulted into his boat, and turned a key in the ignition. His engines roared into life and his boat dashed off to the east.
Without a word, Arlette and I got into our own little boat. I bent over the little outboard motor and cranked it.
“The sound of the engine,” she began.
“The hell with it,” I said. “I want to get out of here in a hurry.”
The engine caught. I spun the boat around and headed back in the direction from which we had come; the opposite direction the larger vessel had taken. I wanted to get as far away from him as possible. I did not ever want to see that man again.
“Evan?”
“Yes?”
“This satchel.”
“Yes?”
“Do you know what is in it?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. Why did he take our sandwiches?”
“Perhaps he was hungry.”
She lapsed into a hurt silence. I piloted our little boat through the dark waters. Everything had gone quietly mad. I felt as though we were playing out parts in a script based upon a painting by Salvador Dali. Who was the dead man? Who killed him and why? Where did the other man come from, and why had he given us the satchel, and what was he talking about, babbling that the bullet that would kill him had not been cast? And Arlette-