Scorpion Reef

  What chance did we have of getting away from them? And if we got away, where did we go? With not only the police after us but the rest of the “button, button” crowd as well. The two we had on our backs now were only part of them. The game never really ended. It just took them a while to find you, and then it started all over again. Macaulay had never been able to shake them, had he?

  I was measuring coffee into the percolator when the idea began to take form. I stopped dead still, so abruptly I spilled the coffee from the spoon, enthralled with the beauty of it. Half of our problem didn’t even exist. Go back?

  Who wanted to go back?

  Here was the Ballerina, the answer to any blue-water sailor’s dream. There she was, beyond that curtain, the girl I’d never had out of my mind since the moment I met her. And behind me, in a black satchel, was eighty thousand dollars. I stood there holding the coffee can in my hand, feeling the deck heel down and hearing the sound of water along the hull while I rolled the names around on my tongue: Grand Cayman, Martinique, Barbados, Guadeloupe, Granada— Not the big places, not San Juan or Port-au-Prince or Havana, where we’d be caught, but the little ones, the small tropical islands with long golden beaches and native villages in sheltered bays where the water was blue and still.

  They’ll never find us. That much money would last us a lifetime. I thought of it and could feel the intense longing take hold of me. Just the two of us. It was like looking at paradise. And on the other side of the world—Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Tongareva, the Marquesas—all those names out of Conrad and Jack London that made your mouth water. Go back? With all that tropic, coral-reefed, blue-watered world there waiting for us, and the boat and a fortune right here in our hands? Why in the name of God hadn’t I thought of it before? We’d change the name of the sloop, and her port of registry. Change our own names, and be married by a priest in some out-of-the-way native village.

  * * *

  Aboard the American tanker Joseph H. Hallock, the master looked up from the thick journal and frowned. It was past midnight. He sat in a leather-upholstered easy chair in the dim and well-ordered seclusion of his office with the book in his lap in the glow from the single reading lamp. There was only the faint vibration from the big diesels aft to indicate he was at sea.

  His eyes were thoughtful, as if something puzzled him. Slipping a finger between the pages to mark his place, he flipped back, looking for something. When he found it he reread the passage. With the thumb and forefinger of his left hand he pinched his lower lip in a gesture that was characteristic of him when he was thinking, and sat for another minute staring at the page. Then he shook his head and went on reading, a little faster now, forgetting he was up long past his bedtime.

  * * *

  I came abruptly back to earth, and the dream faded. All that was waiting for us, but knowing it and yearning for it only made reality worse. You couldn’t dream Barclay away, nor escape from Barfield by imagining he wasn’t there.

  But there must be a way. There had to be.

  I put the coffee away and began slicing bread for sandwiches. I took salami and cheese from the icebox. What were the chances at any given moment? Last night Barclay had mockingly handed me his gun, knowing I wouldn’t use it because Barfield could kill her. But now she was behind me, and they were both in the cockpit, Barfield unarmed. Suppose—

  Suppose I went out there, came close to Barclay on the pretext of handing him a sandwich, and slugged him. He was slender, fine-boned, and probably easy to hurt, and he had two guns in his pockets. I might get one. But what would happen? For a fraction of a second I was off guard as far as Barfield was concerned, and he didn’t have to be armed if you didn’t have your hands up. He’d belt me from behind and I’d be lying in the cockpit having my face kicked in. He was built for it, and he knew his business.

  But they had to sleep sometime. So what if they did? They slept one at a time, and the other was watching me. And there was always the threat of what they could do to her. If I got hold of a gun they could make me give it up if they had her. Anything I tried had to work the first time, and all at once, or it was no good at all.

  But five days! Maybe a week. They had to slip up sometime. If I kept watching them, and waiting—

  I was stacking sandwiches on a plate when the curtains parted and she came out. She was wearing a summery blue cotton dress and sandals, and her legs were bare. She had put her hair back up, but it was still faintly damp and a little of its fine, soft sheen was lacking. Salt water was poor for a shampoo. She wore no make-up.

  She came over beside me. Self-consciousness was still like a wall between us. “Feel better?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I’m hungry, too.”

  She glanced beyond me, toward the companionway. They couldn’t see down here unless they were in the forward end of the cockpit. Sunlight streamed in the open hatch and slid along the deck as we rolled slightly in the sea.

  The big eyes were grave, and her lips scarcely moved. “You’re pretty wonderful,” she said. “Thanks for understanding.”

  Then she went on, in a louder tone: “Shall I help you carry something up to the animals?”

  “Sure,” I said. I handed her the sandwiches. “Take these, and I’ll bring the coffee and some cups.”

  We went up. Barclay was at the tiller, and Barfield lounged on the port side, his legs outstretched. He drew them in, and grinned. “Going for a swim, honey?” he asked.

  She glanced briefly at him as if he were something that had crawled out of a ditch after a rain, and sat down on the starboard side holding the plate of sandwiches in her lap.

  Barclay smiled coolly. “I trust you’ve recovered.”

  She nodded. “I have. Thank you.”

  He signed to me. “Take the helm for a while Manning.”

  I set the coffeepot on the cockpit deck and moved back. He slipped past and I took the tiller. The sun was low in the west and the breeze had subsided to a light air scarcely filling the sails. Barclay sat down on the weather side beyond Barfield and took one of the sandwiches from the plate. A lock of brown hair was breeze-blown across his forehead and he looked more like a young poet or student than ever, if you forgot the heavy sag of the jacket and didn’t look too closely at the cool deadliness of the eyes.

  He glanced at me and then at Shannon. “If you’ll be kind enough to give me your attention I shan’t have to say this more than once. We are now at least fifty miles from the nearest land. Obviously, any further attempt to swim ashore is futile. I have thrown overboard the oars to the dinghy, so you can’t get away in that. Any attempt at upsetting the status quo will be met with a pistol-whipping.”

  He stopped. Barfield had leaned forward to take a sandwich from the plate on her lap, and while he was about it he patted her on the knee. She stared at him with icy contempt.

  “Listen to the nice man, baby,” he said.

  “You are listening, aren’t you, Mrs. Macaulay?” Barclay asked coldly. “I was speaking primarily to you, since you will be the recipient of the pistol-whipping if Manning tries to get out of hand.”

  She was superb. She turned and regarded him calmly. “I hear you. But you don’t have to impress me; you forget, I’ve already seen you at work.”

  He shrugged. “That being the case, shall we get down to business? Your husband told you where his plane crashed. I should like you to tell us exactly what he said.”

  “Of course I’ll tell you,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I? But I fail to see why you had to bring me out here to ask a simple question like that.”

  “Obvious, isn’t it?” he said. “But go ahead.”

  “All right. It was late in the afternoon, he said, near sunset, when he picked up Scorpion Reef. He changed course slightly so as to hit the Florida coast somewhere above Fort Myers. A few minutes later he began to have trouble with his starboard engine. Then it caught fire. He couldn’t put it out, and he knew he was going to crash. He had noticed a reef or shoal below him just a minute or tw
o before, and tried to get back so he could land on the downwind side of it, where the sea wouldn’t be so rough, but he couldn’t make it. He crashed on the east side of it, about two miles off, and the plane sank almost immediately. He just had time to climb out on a wing, and throw the raft in the water. As you probably know, he couldn’t swim at all.”

  “Why didn’t he try to get the diamonds off with him?”

  “He had stowed the box in a locker so it wouldn’t go flying around if the weather got rough. And the locker was aft, already under water.”

  “What about the other man? The diver?”

  This was the only part of it that hurt her. She hesitated for a moment, and I could see the sickness in her eyes. “He said the man didn’t have his belt fastened, and was killed in the crash.”

  You could take your choice, I thought. He might have been alone, already a murderer, or he could have left an injured man to drown. Or possibly there was just a slim chance he was telling the truth. She could hold onto that, anyway.

  “Very well,” Barclay said. Then he lashed at her suddenly: “Now. Why was he so sure of his exact bearing from that reef? He didn’t have time to take a compass reading before the plane went down, and he didn’t have a compass on the raft.”

  She was quite calm. “It was late afternoon, I said. The sun was setting. The plane, the very northern end of the surf on the shoal, and the sun were all in one straight line.”

  She looked around suddenly at me. “I remember now, you asked me that, didn’t you, Bill? Whether he could see surf from the raft. And I’d forgotten.”

  I nodded. It would make a difference, all right; but you still had to find the reef. It was hopeless.

  Barclay dropped the rest of the sandwich over the side and cupped his hands to light a cigarette. “Very well. Now, what was the position?”

  “Fifty miles north-northeast of Scorpion Reef.”

  He stared coldly. “And why did you say it was to the westward when I asked you last night?”

  “I’m sure I didn’t,” she replied.

  “The fact remains, you did. Make up our minds, shall we?”

  “It’s north-northeast.”

  “Very well,” he said crisply. “George, run down and bring up that chart. And the parallel rulers and dividers.”

  Barfield brought them up and the two of them crouched over the chart in the bottom of the cockpit. She drew her knees to one side and continued to regard them as if they were some kind of vermin. Barclay’s face was thoughtful. “North-northeast—”

  “Make it twenty-two degrees,” I said. “Get it off the compass rose and slide the rulers over.” I knew what he would find, and waited, a little tensely.

  He had the line, and picked up the dividers. He looked over at me, his eyes questioning. “Edge of the chart, isn’t it? Mean latitude, or something?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sixty nautical miles to the degree.”

  He picked the distance off and set the dividers along the line. Then he turned his head and stared bleakly at Shannon Macaulay. “Perhaps you would like to try again.”

  “You asked me what he told me,” she said indifferently. “I have just repeated it, word for word. What else would you like me to do?”

  “Tell the truth, for one thing.”

  “I am telling the truth.”

  He sighed. “I see. Then we are to assume the chart-maker was lying. The nearest sounding shown here is forty-five fathoms. A practical joke, no doubt.”

  “And why do you think I would lie about it?”

  “Really? For a paltry three quarters of a million?”

  There was Irish in her, all right, and it flared now, the second time I had seen it. “Why, you idiotic vermin! I wouldn’t stoop to pick up your damned, filthy diamonds if I stumbled over them in the dark. I don’t want them. I wouldn’t have them. I have no interest in them whatever. If I had them here in my lap, I’d give them to you, and be glad to get rid of them. But there’s no way you can understand that, is there? I’d be wasting my breath trying to explain it to you.”

  “Excellent scene,” he said. “More effective, as a rule, however, if you throw something. Now, shall we start over?” He paused, and nodded to Barfield. “George.”

  Barfield turned, still on his knees, and caught her left wrist. He started to twist it, slowly at first.

  I pulled my feet under me, and crouched, still holding the tiller. “Call him off,” I said.

  Barclay slipped the gun out of his right-hand jacket pocket and pointed it carelessly in my direction. “As you were, Manning.”

  “Call him off!”

  Barfield had stopped to watch us, but he continued to hold her arm. Her lips were tightly compressed, and I knew it was already hurting.

  I was too wild to be scared. “Listen, Barclay. This whole thing is going to come unzipped. If he hurts her, it’s you I’m coming for, and you’re going to have to use that gun to stop me. If you think you can find that reef without my help, go ahead.”

  It hung poised, ready to go either way. I tried to take a breath through the tightness in my throat. “Don’t be a damned fool,” I went on. “If she were going to lie, would she give you a stupid position like that? Maybe there is a shoal there, or somewhere within fifteen miles or so. All that area hasn’t been sounded. Macaulay could have been off in his reckoning. The only thing to do is go there and see, and you’ll never get there unless I take you. You name it. Now.”

  He saw I was right. He motioned for Barfield to turn her loose. The tension drained away, and I was limp. I’d bought a little time, but I knew that when the next time came I’d be tied up before they started.

  She stood up, turned deliberately to smile at me, and went below, ignoring them.

  Barfield lounged on the seat with a cup of coffee in his hand. “The hero,” he said. “We’ve got a real, live hero aboard, Joey.”

  Barclay took over again while I ate a sandwich and drank some coffee. I relieved him at six. He and Barfield went below and sat in the cabin, talking. After a while I heard them turn on the radio. It had short wave in addition to the marine bands, and they got an Argentine station playing Latin American dance music. Sunset was a great splash of salmon and orange and pink, fading slowly while the sea stretched out like a rolling, dark prairie.

  I was about to call Barclay to take the tiller so I could light the running lights when Shannon came up through the hatch. After I’d shown her briefly how to handle it, she took over while I attended to them.

  When I came back she slid forward and sat there near enough to touch, but not touching, saying nothing. Sunset was a bad time of day if you had trouble, but I could sense she didn’t want any help with it, at least not yet. There was an odd awkwardness between us. It would go away after a while, but until it did there was nothing we could do about it. I tried imagining that this was the Java Sea and we were alone aboard, two people who had forgotten the rest of the world and had been forgotten by it. For a moment it was very real, and the longing was almost unbearable.

  There was just enough light in the afterglow to see her face, and when I looked around again she was crying. She was doing it quite silently with her head tilted back a little and not trying to put her hands up to her face or wipe away the tears or anything. The crying just welled up in her and overflowed.

  “I’m sorry, Bill,” she said after a while. “This will be the last time. I got to thinking of him all alone there in that big house, with it getting d-dark outside. He was afraid of the dark. For months he was terrified of it. B-But always before I was there with him—”

  He was leaning on her. She held him up and kept the sawdust from leaking out while he planned to double-cross her and leave her. And when it blew up in his face he went back and leaned on her some more. I didn’t feel anything for him, nor care a damn if it did get dark outside, but it was a gruesome picture if you couldn’t keep your mind off it—a dead man lying there alone in all that Swedish modern with one bridge lamp burning day in
and day out and a phonograph still going if it hadn’t shut itself off. He probably wouldn’t be found for over 24 hours yet. She’d said Tuesday and Friday were the days the maid came. When they did, they’d pick up her car out at the airport almost immediately and know they had it made, all except finding her.

  There was nothing I could do. I let her cry. It was a helpless feeling.

  After a while she got it under control, and she said quietly, “I wonder why nothing is ever simple and clear-cut. Why can’t things be completely black or completely white, instead of all mixed up? What he did amounted to deliberate betrayal; so that should make it easy, shouldn’t it? There’s your nice, pat answer. It’s routine. It’s a cliché. She was in love with him, but he wasn’t in love with her. That’s fine, except it was the other way around. He was a heel. That’s simple and easy, except it wasn’t true.”

  I waited, saying nothing. She was trying to tell me about it, or maybe trying to straighten it out in her own mind, and she didn’t want me mixed up in it. Not yet, anyway. She was talking to a psychiatrist, or a priest, or to herself.

  “He was driven to it. It’s easy to say it was his own fault, that he was old enough to know it was wrong, and that he began it deliberately. But people have been tempted by easy money before, and it’ll go on happening as long as you have people and have money. What I’m trying to say is that in the beginning there was no question of running out on me. Maybe he even thought he was doing it partly for me. He liked to give me things. Expensive things.

  “You don’t dive or fall into something like that all at once. It’s gradual. It was simple at first, and then it failed and it was more difficult, and in the end it was an obsession. And he was afraid. There’s no way I can make you understand fear like that, probably, because it’s something the human race has forgotten. Being hunted, I mean. It’s been too long. It’s an individual experience now, and you have to go through it yourself to know what it’s like.