“They killed a good friend of mine. I got one of them. I want the other.”
“You shall have him. If I have to kill him for you.”
“You do and I’ll wait until that leg’s cured and I’ll break the other one for you. I want him myself.”
“He’d do it too, Leon,” Sonia said, smiling. “Harry — I mean Nick — is very tough.”
“I know,” Leon said. “All right. But now what are we going to do? We’ve got to make plans, and amended ones at that. This leg... well, the original idea was to get me aboard as part of the galley help. I was a sous-chef in a three-star restaurant once; Sonia was to create an opening there, as she created others in the past. Not yours: that young man simply couldn’t take any more of Mlle. Komarova.” He turned to her and took her hand. “Sonia? Do you still want out? Because...”
“No, no,” she said. “Not now that I know who is going to be working with me on the boat.” Her eyes went to me once; her face flushed.
“You’re sure? Because a greater burden will be upon you now...”
“No, no.” She reached over and took my glass; her fingers touched mine as she got up and went to the sideboard. The house was small, isolated, lived-in. It was high above the bay and, I figured, there ought to be some kind of view of the Mediterranean by dawn.
“Okay,” I said. “But what did the Sons of David want the shipment for? To arm their group and start a war?”
“Yes, and, being the fanatics they are, when their plans were foiled they murdered everyone who, in their opinion, had double-crossed them. This of course meant Meyer, for one, and of course you did the job for them on the Vietnamese gentleman who started the whole thing, and who was the real double-crosser.”
“The General?”
“Yes. And then, as your Mr. Hawk suggested, the whole thing passed into the hands of a third group.”
“Who? Komaroff?”
“That’s what we’re not sure. But, as Hawk says, Komaroff’s activities have undergone certain changes of late. Where once he sold arms to both sides, to anyone, now he is getting choosy; and in the present case he is choosing the side of the various terrorist groups on the Palestine Liberation Organisation list. He has been selling them every surplus arm he could get his hands on. And on credit, which was not his practice before. He has definitely taken sides.”
“What do you think caused the change?”
“We’re not sure. But, as Sonia said, the Sons of David are like the pilot fish that follow a shark. The trouble with the Nazi mentality they exemplify is that it tends to seek out kindred minds, regardless of left or right. Fanatics of the left are more like fanatics of the right than either is like anyone else. And they understand one another. They are like different drawers in the same desk.”
“So?”
“Sonia has not been to sea with Mlle. Komarova for some months now. The great lady” — his tone was sarcastic — “has disappeared from view. Perhaps with some lover so disreputable she dare not show him to the world, perhaps to some dope den. In the meantime, all this has been happening. We suspect Komaroff has found new friends, and that they accompany him as advisers.” His brows rose in perplexity. “Or as captors?” He shrugged. “Something decidedly odd is happening. And it is your job, and ours, to find out what it is.”
I looked outside. There was a pink tinge in the dark sky. It’d be dawn in moments. My God, where had the time gone to? “Meanwhile,” I said, “what are your boys up to?”
“Among other things, we’ll be staying in contact. The Sons of David being here... your friends Shimon and Zvy, incidentally, are — or were? — among the top ‘hit men,’ I think you call them, in their organization. Anyway, their being here means that we are very likely right, all of us: the trouble is aboard the Vulcan. All three of us — you, I, the Sons of David — have independently come to that conclusion. Thanks to various sources, we have at least a vague idea as to the itinerary of the Vulcan in the next few weeks. We will contact one or the other of you from time to time. In the meantime we are keeping an eye out for the missing ship.”
“You mean it’s still out there? Hasn’t been unloaded yet?”
“Yes, or so we think anyway. Under what name, what flag... who knows? But we’ll know before long, we think. And Nick: the people aboard the Vulcan, the dangerous ones, the ones who are influencing Komaroff...”
“Yes,” I said. “I was going to ask you to go on a bit more about them.”
“Among them is a man whose original name, some time back, was Kurt Schindler...”
I whistled. Schindler? Alive? The highest-up man in the hierarchy of what Mr. Himmler called the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem — an even bigger wheel than Eichmann himself.
“Ah,” I said, after I’d thought about that a bit. “So you haven’t changed agencies after all. You’ve got a little personal stake in this too, just like me.”
“Worse,” Sonia said. She was standing by the window. “I want Schindler myself, as bad as you want Shimon. But Leon, he lives for this thing. He needs this... this holy cause of his the way a flower needs sunshine. He...”
“That’s very good,” Leon said. His face was drawn and pale, but there was a thin smile on it. “That’s it, my dear. It is a kind of tropism by now. Instinctive. I think Nick understands, though.”
“Yes,” I said, “I guess I...”
“Harry,” Sonia said from the window. “I... I mean Nick. Look.” She was pointing out across the suddenly visible bay. The rosy-fingered dawn was right on schedule, and the blue bay curled at the foot of pink mountains below us and to the west of us as her hand pointed down the coast toward Monaco and Italy. “It’s here,” she said. “It’s early. I...” The words trailed off. I stood and looked where she was pointing. Just inside the mole I could make out the classic lines of a great three-masted sailing ship. The Vulcan had arrived.
Chapter Twenty
“What are they doing now?” I said, watching the crew aloft, scampering from sail to sail. We seemed, for some reason, to have our nose pointed at a looming cliff, and for some even stranger reason we were not going that way at all. We were slowly moving sideways down the little river to its mouth.
“The action is called backing and filling,” Michel said in his flawless, accent-free English. He wasn’t exactly my kind of guy, but he’d have to do for company. Sonia — Vicki, dammit, I’d have to remember that — hadn’t turned up in three days. “Look,” he went on. “We filled the topsails to go this way. Notice the direction the wind is going? Well, once we’d held her in the fairway past the headland there, we backed the mainyard to stop her and make her drift broadside downstream. Now the motive power is the tide.”
“Don’t you have auxiliaries?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “but Monsieur Komaroff has a bit of tummy today and doesn’t like the feel of the diesels under him. Fortunately, the crew make short work of this sort of thing. And heavens, Harry, you’re in no hurry to go anywhere, are you? I mean, we’ve no place to be, dear boy. If it weren’t for the lovely party Alex is planning up in the Islands tomorrow night, it’d be a crushing bore. But I do adore those rough Greeks. So... what is the word...”