The door opened and a young guy walked in, smiling. “Hello, there,” he said. The door shut again behind him, and Sassi heard the lock being refastened.
“I’ve been in this picture,” she said. “You’re here to rescue me.”
“Not exactly,” said the young guy, still smiling. “I’m one of the kidnappers.” He walked over and looked out the porthole. “We won’t be stuck together long,” he said.
Sassi felt the boat getting into motion again. She said, in a dazed sort of way, “You’re one of the kidnappers?”
“That’s right. It’s sort of complicated. Right now I’m a prisoner too, but when we get to the island we’ll—”
“How come you sound like Michael Caine?” His smile turned more boyish and his voice turned James Stewart. “Well, gosh, ma’am, I couldn’t, I couldn’t just say.”
“Oh, my God,” cried Sassi, “it does imitations. There is a fate worse than death!”
Robby sat in one of the two fixed chairs on the top deck, watching the Major’s boat surge through the blue sea ahead, leaving an endless running white V into which Nothing Ventured IV endlessly chased. The two sparkling boats on the sparkling sea beneath the sparkling sky in the sparkling sunlight made a beautiful sight, but Robby was in no mood for beauty. Robby was being glum.
There were too many complications. Too many people involved, too many chances for things to go wrong. Instead of three kidnappers, there were now five, and instead of one kidnappee, there were now two. There was less money to be made, there were more risks, and all and all Robby didn’t like it a damn bit. But what else was there to do? Circumstances had conspired against them.
He was distracted from his gloomy thoughts by a noise behind him. Looking around, he saw Miss Rushby coming up the steps, very Victorian and out of place. “May I join you?” she asked, and paused at the head of the steps to catch her breath.
Robby gestured at the other chair. “Please do.”
“Thank you.” She settled herself with a great flurry of contented sighs and skirt adjustments, then shook her head and said, “What a blessing it is to be away from that girl. Do you know, she refuses to believe I won’t plot some sort of escape with her?”
“It’s hard to tell who’s on whose side sometimes,” Robby said.
“That is true. How does she happen to be here at all?”
Robby had been needing some sort of distraction from his somber thoughts, and Miss Rushby for some reason had a restful effect on the people in her presence. Robby found himself telling her all about last night, about the activities at the party, and Jigger’s stumbling across Kelly, and then the capture of Jigger and the return of Kelly, and at the end of it all Miss Rushby shook her head sympathetically and said, “My. You three seem to have had a much harder time of it than Alfred and myself.”
“You don’t seem right for something like this,” Robby told her, “if you don’t mind my saying so. You and the Major.”
“Oh, don’t I know it,” Miss Rushby said ruefully. “We thought and thought before deciding to go ahead with it. But we did need a great deal of money quickly, and at last this seemed the only way to get it.”
“All of a sudden you needed money?” Robby couldn’t picture it.
“For our boy Percy.”
“Your boy?”
Miss Rushby laughed in an embarrassed way and said, “Oh, the Major and I are married, we’ve been husband and wife thirty-seven years next April.”
“But—”
“You mean my name?” Miss Rushby smiled her sweet smile and leaned forward confidentially, saying, “That isn’t my real name. Nor is the Major using his own name.”
“But—” Robby was at a loss. “I thought you knew people in England. That Spence guy was supposed to be the son of an old friend.”
“Well, of course,” Miss Rushby said. “We are very well known under these names. When Alfred and I arrived in the United States thirty-four years ago we were sure of two things. First, because of the Depression — that was why we’d left England — we were going to have to make our way by our wits, which meant we daren’t travel under our own names. Family, you know.”
“Yes,” said Robby in a dazed sort of way.
“And second,” Miss Rushby said, “we knew we would be much likelier to succeed if we were believed both to be single. And a bit racy.”
“You’ve lived under fake names for thirty-four years.”
Miss Rushby nodded. “Yes, we have. But that’s all coming to an end. After this adventure, Alfred and I intend to retire. I hope you’ll understand if I don’t tell you where, but in our retirement we shall return to our rightful names and admit to being husband and wife.”
Robby looked at the Major’s boat, out there ahead of them, then back at Miss Rushby. “You’re a couple of con artists,” he said.
“I have never been partial to American slang, I must admit,” Miss Rushby said, “no matter how long I have been exposed to it. But I suppose the phrase is accurate. Once the contract-bridge craze of the thirties died down, it did become necessary for us to branch out into other endeavors, but I assure you this is absolutely the first and last affair of this sort we have ever been involved in.”
“Us, too,” said Robby. “We want to make a quick killing and retire.”
Miss Rushby looked at him. “Retire? At your age? From what?”
Robby shrugged. “From the rat race,” he said. “How come your son needs money all of a sudden?”
“Poor Percy,” Miss Rushby said, and shook her head with long-suffering maternal compassion. “He will try to follow in our footsteps, so to speak, his father’s and mine, and things always will go wrong for him. Nothing really serious, just embarrassments and minor difficulties, until this last time, but apparently he will never learn.”
“What’s his problem now?”
“Have you ever heard of Undurwa?”
Robby shook his head.
“It’s one of the new African countries,” Miss Rushby said. “Or perhaps it was one of them, or wants to be one of them, or is seceding from one of them, I never did get it straight. Those natives there have no more idea of self-government than — oh, I am sorry.” And she blushed beet-red.
“I was born in Boston,” Robby said.
Miss Rushby seemed a little confused by that. “Yes,” she said, “but still—”
Robby sighed. “Tell me,” he said, “about Percy and this whatever-it-is in Africa.”
“Undurwa.”
“Underwear, that’s it.”
“Yes,” said Miss Rushby. “Well, it seems Percy sold some rifles and ammunition to a colonel in the south-western province. I do remember that, it was the south-western province.”
“Weren’t the rifles any good?”
“They didn’t exist,” Miss Rushby said. “And poor Percy didn’t leave the country fast enough. So now they’re holding him, and the colonel wants his money back, and Percy has one month to get it for him.”
“Where’s the money he got from the colonel?”
“He sent it out of the country with a young lady he met last year in Mozambique. She hasn’t been heard from where he was supposed to meet her.”
“Oh,” said Robby.
“Yes,” said Miss Rushby. “Percy is too awfully trusting sometimes, I can’t think which side of the family he got it from.”