Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (14 page)

His eyes returned to the steps of the companionway, barely four feet away. He leaned back against the bulkhead, and could feel the tension and fear of the others beside him, feeling nothing himself. He could see the steps that led through to the rest of the ship, to that terrible journey they had made. Belle had died there. That too was where her body had been swept by the merciful waters; plucked from his sight. He refocused on the tangle of debris on the floor. The light had improved since these men had cut a hole in the side of the ship. He could see the pipes and conduits now. Of course, he remembered, that had been the ceiling. The ship was upside down. Everything was upside down. Throwing his mind back to the time before everything was upside down was as difficult as recalling childhood. Scenes before the catastrophe flashed back to him, like old photographs. Belle tidying her cabin. “It’s our home, Manny, at least for a little time.” The New Year’s Eve celebrations that terrible night. With a start he realized it had only been the night before. It could not be possible. But that was when his world had, in every sense, turned upside down, and there was a memento of that time down there amongst the rubble. It was a champagne bottle. It must have been part of that New Year’s Eve celebration, swept through the ship on the rising waters, and then stranded as the lurch altered the angle of the liner.

Then he saw something else beside the bottle. It was jammed between two of the conduits, and it took him a full minute to recognize it among the flotsam and jetsam of metal and machinery. Rogo’s gun. Manny had seen hardly half a dozen in his life. He knew plenty of people who kept firearms. Self-defense they called it. But Manny never wanted to play around with them. “Dangerous,” Belle always said, and he agreed. Anyway, who’d want to hurt poor old Manny Rosen? The day Manny joins the Cosa Nostra, he gets a gun. Belle used to laugh at that. What was Rogo’s gun doing there? Ah yes. He remembered. Rogo had thrown it away when he discovered it didn’t work. No one wants a pistol that doesn’t work. Obvious, thought Manny, even to me who knows nothing about guns.

Through the insulation of shock that had protected him from the madness around him came a message so clear he almost jumped. His eyes riveted on the gun. It was such a small one, not a bit like the big pistols policemen usually carried. It had been soaked. But, and he grabbed the fleeting thought, these men did not know it would not fire. As the aged force their legs to carry them, Manny Rosen began to force his tired, stunned mind to work on that thought. He knew what he must do, and he knew too that he could do it. Belle would have wanted it that way.

It all rested between Bela and Jason now. The hovering violence, the threat of the looming Anton, the gritted courage of Rogo, faded. The tension between these two men was as taut as a wire from one side of the hull to the other. Bela dropped his elaborate courtesy. Jason abandoned his idle teasing. They were talking business.

Bela saw the opening that Jason was offering. “You will tell me?” he asked. He instinctively looked for the catches.

“For a price, Bela. And you know all about the price of things.”

Bela nodded. “What price?”

They were trading now. Jason said, “I have a consignment in the same place. I take my parcel, you take your gold. That is the deal.”

The silence in the engine room was agonizing as Bela thought. He spoke slowly. “That is possible, Captain Jason. You and I could reach an understanding. If we can perhaps help each other and make life a little easier, why not? On the other hand, what happens to our friends here? You see, it is part of my business that the policeman must not leave alive. It is essential. I have guaranteed it.”

Rogo listened as his life was bartered. Anton was simply holding him, waiting for Bela’s word to start.

Jason’s fingers drummed the girder behind his back. His face did not move. He said simply, “So who’d miss a cop anyway?” And Bela smiled.

Martin, Klaas, and Coby flinched at the way Jason threw away Rogo’s life. Manny seemed not to hear, his eyes rooted to the floor. Hely showed no emotion of any kind. But she kept her gaze on Jason, watching and wondering: there had to be something else, she thought.

Rogo half-twisted in Anton’s grip. “Now hold it a minute! I don’t care who’s holding the goddamn guns, no one makes a deal with my life until I get something to say about it.” No one looked at him.

Coby’s sobbing followed his roar. “Please, please, please, Captain Jason, don’t say that!”

Bela and Jason continued to regard each other as though there had been no interruptions. “One moment.” Bela sounded a little curious. “How can you be so sure I will let you walk out of here with your parcel? It can hardly be, Jason, that you have such a high regard of me that you would take my word.”

He was still looking for the trap. Jason gave a short bark of a laugh. “No, Bela, I wouldn’t trust you with the church funds. I can walk out of here for the same reason I am safe now. You can’t kill me, Bela. You don’t want that much trouble. You know my friends, and you know they’d find you.”

“You’re right, of course,” Bela said, pleased and a little relieved. “We are in permanent checkmate, you and I, Jason. So I will buy your deal and we shall both profit from it.”

Hely still searched for the explanation. Bela, she was sure, was every bit as merciless and murderous as he appeared. His part of the deal was straightforward. But Jason? No. It was wrong. He operated by motives she could not begin to guess, but she knew this could not be as it appeared: the whole scene was false to her. There was not even a flicker on his face as he turned to her and said, “Okay, Hely, open up the hold and show the captain here his surprise.”

It was all she could do to suppress the laugh. The tiger! So that was it. They had all forgotten it, except Jason. That was the surprise. And Jason knew that the tiger’s arrival would give him an advantage, a chance to strike. She ducked under the piping and scrambled over the wreckage, and it was only when she reached the hold door that she appreciated exactly what it meant.

When she opened the door, she could swing it back so that she would be protected. Manny and the others were across the engine room and would at least have a chance to scramble to safety. But Jason was only a few feet in front of the hold, directly in the tiger’s path.

She looked at him and saw in the grimness of his face that he knew exactly what he was doing. He understood her doubt, and his response too was unequivocal.

“Go ahead, Hely. Open the cage.”

“YOU’RE A KILLER, MANNY”

8

There should not have been a hold there at all, but Bela was not particularly surprised. It was rumored in the shipping world that the
Poseidon
’s new Greek owners were so anxious to make the old queen of the seas show a profit that they were mixing freight and passengers, dropping the old five-star standards regardless of reputation, and that they would carry just about anything anywhere. The hold must originally have been some sort of storage space, but, like everything else on the old liner, it had been made to pay its way.

The door opened without a creak on well-oiled hinges. Hely’s hand knocked down the securing handles and swung the door completely around so that she was obscured by it. Nothing happened. No one spoke, no one moved. Everyone’s eyes were riveted to that black hollow. Inside, dimly visible, were piles of packing cases, some smashed. Bela started towards it, saying, “Well, let us take a look . . .” when the tiger bulleted out.

It came from behind the cases. It moved at a fast, low run, as though its stomach were touching the ground, and it hurtled over the obstacle course of the floor quite soundlessly. Jason had turned sideways and pressed himself against the steel upright. It was only about six inches wide and the hot, heavy body of the beast brushed hard against his legs as it tore past. His rigid body swayed from the impact and for a second he closed his eyes. But he did not move.

The tiger stopped suddenly. It was frightened and hungry. When the ship had turned turtle its cage had been smashed, and since then the tiger had been flung about in the darkness of the hold with the packing cases at every new lurch and shift of position. Its great head turned to take in its new surroundings. It was halfway between Jason and Bela, some feet to the left of where Anton held Rogo. It rose on its hind legs, dropped its front paws gracefully onto an oil drum, flung back its head, and roared.

The effect was immediate. The one-eyed gunman standing in the debris towards the stern fell over backwards as though he had been struck. He lost his gun and without a thought for it began scrambling on his hands and knees up the mound of broken machinery behind him. Bela spun like a dancer and launched himself in a long, agile leap for the rope ladder. Of the two men near the companionway, the one with the thin moustache rocked back against the ship’s side, his gun loose in his hands, and made a low moaning noise; he was quite helpless. The other man dropped to one knee, lifting the metal-framed stock to his shoulder, and ripped off a burst at the tiger’s side. He emptied the full clip of twenty bullets with one squeeze of the trigger. The tiger snarled and twisted under the impact. Then it leapt. It passed Anton and Rogo in two gigantic bounds, and seized the kneeling man by the shoulder. His weapon clattered to the floor. His right arm flapped in futile protest at the tiger’s head. For a second, the beast paused and stared again around the room, the man held loosely in its mouth like a half-chewed bone. Then, like a stoned cat, it bounded down the companionway and out of sight.

Now was the chance for the movements Rogo had been rehearsing in his mind. He saw Bela swinging out of control on the rope ladder; one gunman still scrambling up the heap of metal, blinded by fear; the other slumped against the side, groaning and sobbing.

Rogo went into a well-practiced routine. He stamped down hard with his heel on Anton’s toe. He pumped his elbow viciously backwards into Anton’s stomach. As he felt the giant double forward, he snapped back his own head.

And he experienced a deep sense of satisfaction. He did not like paid musclemen. He had felt his shoe hit the toe, his elbow dig deep into the hard stomach, and his skull smash against the softer features of Anton’s face. He had scored on all three. Not even this big monkey could take all that and still come out fighting.

In those long seconds, Martin too saw his chance. The men with the guns were all temporarily distracted. Mr. Rogo was escaping. Jason, he saw out of the corner of his eye, had gone for Hely and was dragging her by the arm across the floor.

“Quick!” he screamed to his little group. “This way!” He grabbed Coby and swung her around to the companionway and pushed her.

Her feet missed the rungs of the ladder at the side and she crashed down. Klaas lowered himself quickly through and jumped. “Come on, Manny!” Martin shouted. The older man was kneeling. Incredibly, he seemed to be trying to pick something up. Martin shouted to him again and then jumped through the hole.

It was the instinct to flee. It hit them all and there was no resistance: Bela, the gunmen, the tiger, Martin, all of them propelled by the one overwhelming thought—escape.

Martin was the first on his feet, helping up the Dutch girl. She was crying, and her young woman’s face looked childish again. Klaas too grunted and heaved himself up with the lantern he still held in his hand. They were in a dark, narrow corridor. One body in their tangled pile did not move. They looked down. It was the
Komarevo
man. His shoulder was a pulp of blood and cloth. Half his face had been torn off. His teeth grinned madly where the flap of his cheek was ripped open. Coby wailed when she saw it, and Klaas put his arm around her again.

She peered in terror up the corridor. “Where’s that horrible animal?” she asked.

Martin, more familiar with the surroundings, squinted into the darkness. Beyond the corridor he could see through an open doorway into the boiler room, and beneath his feet the conduits and pipes that lined what had once been the ceiling. “Listen,” he said, tilting his head to concentrate. “I can hear it. It’s running away. Come on, it’s clear for us to get out of here. It’ll be miles ahead now.” He took Coby’s hand and the three of them set off, back down into the deep belly of the sinking ship.

In the seconds they had used for their escape, Rogo had freed himself and Jason had grabbed the girl. As soon as Rogo heard the dull grunt of pain behind him and felt the iron fingers relax, he too made for the companionway. He could hear Jason behind him and saw Manny Rosen on his hands and knees. At least, he thought, the odds will be better for us in that labyrinth of corridors and rooms.

“Stop!” It was Bela. He had stabilized himself by grabbing a bracket on the side of the hull with his left hand. The ladder was knotted around his legs and his off-balance body stood out from the ship at a sharp angle. But he was no longer rocking, and his right arm, thrust through the rungs, held the heavy Stechkin perfectly steady. He aimed at Rogo.

“A tiger!” He laughed. His face was white and taut and there was hysterical relief in the laugh. “You must have known, all of you. Brilliant, quite brilliant! But not successful, I fear. It doesn’t matter now. I shall kill you as I should have killed you from the start.”