Darker Than Amber (21 page)

Suddenly I saw Meyer among them. His name had not been called. He walked like the king of all the bears, looking up at the ship, searching me out. Spotting me, he made a single airy little gesture, a prince of the blood flipping a florin to the humble peasant. And if he ran into any special curiosity inside the doors of the shed, I could guess exactly how he would handle it, with cold professional gaze, great pomposity, excluding any possibility that Herr Doktor Professor Meyer could be given anything but the most privileged treatment.
I then saw him searching among the visitors behind the wire, as I was, to spot Merrimay Lane, our imitation Vangie. I believe he saw her just as I did, standing in too dense a clot of people, and he veered over to her, moved her along. They walked on either side of the wire fence until she had reached an open space. He paused and said a few more words to her, then hastened to catch up with the rest of the privileged ones, matching his quick stride to the blare of Stars and Stripes Forever.
I had not been able to spot Ans Terry, and I began to have worrisome visions of him in his bed exactly as I had left him, the blood ball in his brain slowly suppressing the automata of lungs and heart. His head had pounced pretty well. And even with the towel, I had knuckles sufficiently puffed to create four temporary dimples. The brain jelly bounces around inside the shell and the skull, sometimes tears readily. Lesser damage can leave the customer comatose for seven hours, seven weeks or seven years.
As my concern grew, I finally went hurrying back up to the Lounge Deck. Fourteen was wide open, and two maids were in there stripping the beds, chirping at each other in the cheery fluidities of Italian. It was a noticeably happy crew. The last cargo of sunburn had been trucked around the islands, the last sheaf of tips safety-pinned to the underpants, and Friday they'd be homeward bound with, at the end of the voyage, two weeks with the family while the Monica D. was freshened up in one of the company docks at Naples in preparation for the first July cruise to Mediterranean ports.
Down again, I went to the rail, leaned out and looked upward and about twenty feet forward of where I stood, inns Terry leaning on the starboard rail of the Sun Deck.
There were other people up there too, couples spaced at wide intervals along the rail. these were the relaxed ones, who saw no point in jamming themselves into the throng on the lower deck. the herd began to thunder off, they would drift on down and saunter off. They are the same people who keep their seats in airplanes while the sheep-like clog the aisle waiting for the doors to be opened. When the aisle is clear, they get up, gather their possessions, and quite often manage to get their luggage first and catch the first cab.
I went on up. I took a position about ten feet aft of Terry. His long sallow grooved face looked empty. His body was unnaturally motionless. I could see a little purple knot on his forehead, half of a grape. Trying to imagine what was going on in his mind, I had a sudden vivid memory of going to a small zoo when I was a kid, and being fascinated by the ceaseless, purposeless pacing of a polar bear. He went back and forth across the front of his cage. Six strides each way, shifting weight and direction exactly the same way for the return trip. That could be very much like what Ans Terry's brain was doing. He could not know Vangie had escaped her watery grave. Only he and Macklin knew where she'd been dropped and how she had been weighted. But there had been the reality of the drowned doll in his hand, looking like Vangie. Now Del had written a farewell note that made little sense and had gone over the side. And some body had come in in darkness and taken the money. His mind would be pacing back and forth, six strides, always the same, trying to find some relationship between these things.
He was not looking down. He was staring straight out, at nothing. I looked down and saw Merrimay in that open place along the fence. She stood with one hand holding the pipe that ran along the top of the chest-high fence. Her head was tilted back and she was looking up at me. I turned a little away from Ans Terry, and pointed my shielded right hand at him, three poking gestures. She nodded. She was wearing dark glasses.
A march ended. Into the electronic scratchiness between bands she yelled up at us. "Ans! Hey, Ans!"
His body tightened and he stared down. The next march started. I saw him find her and stare at her. She waved, pulled the glasses off, stood in Vangie's exaggeratedly hipshot way, and stared right up at him with Vangie's wide mocking grin.
He stared down at her, leaning forward further, his big hard yellowish hands clamping the rail. His mouth hung open. I looked down at her. She kissed the palm of her hand, blew the kiss upward. He made a sound half gag and half cough, and when I looked back toward him, I saw a shine of spittle on his chin, a wet strand swinging.
Suddenly he whirled and sprinted for the stairway. A couple was just turning away from the rail, middle-aged, quite smartly dressed. Terry did not change stride or direction. He dropped his shoulder slightly and plunged through the six-inch space between them. The man was whirled and slammed into the rail, and caught the rail and kept from falling. The small woman plunged off at an angle, arms flailing for balance, legs running to try to catch up, but she leaned further and further forward, and I was running as fast as I could to try to catch her. It was all slow motion. She pitched headlong into a stack of folded deck chairs, twisting the precision of the stack, tumbled loosely onto her back, rolling slack, the blood welling quickly through the multiple lacerations. I got a glimpse of her as I veered to follow Terry, and me I heard her husband yelling in a cracked bellow of terror, anger and outrage, "Help! Help!" Martial music blared and bothered his appeal.
As I reached the deck below I saw Ans just disappearing down the next gangway to the Deck. Behind him a fat man sat on the deck, bawling indignations. And as I tried to go around him, with an unexpected agility he extended a foot and hooked my ankle. I slapped both hands smartly on the deck, tucked my shoulder under and rolled, came up onto my feet, took three jolting backward steps and sat down solidly, facing the fat man. The two of us got up like mirror images of each other. "Stop all the goddamn running!" he yelled. "Busted a whole pocketful of cigars."
"I was trying to stop him from running."
"One of you is more than enough, buddy. Take your time. Everybody will get to get off. There's too much running."
I heard a hoarse excitement of shouts, went quickly to the rail, and stared down and saw Ans Terry coming down the gravity conveyor, sitting up, riding backward, clubbing with his fist at the burly deck hand who had hold of one ankle. The punishment knocked the man loose, and Terry grabbed the low stationary side rail which kept the luggage from falling off, swung his legs over, hung, dropped lightly to the concrete wharf, spun and headed directly toward the place where Merrimay stood behind the wire.
The Bodyguard chunked solidly into the meat of my hand, and I used my left forearm and the rail as a brace and squatted to aim at him, too aware of the decreasing accuracy of the short barrel at such an increasing distance, remembering it would throw high at the downward angle, and if I aimed at the small of his back I should hit the target area of the big back and, with my luck, knock him down. The blind violent beast-like urgency to get to the dead Vangie could have only one interpretation, a necessity to finish it again, regardless of consequence. But an agile and wiry porter came from the side and sprang onto that broad back, locking his arms around Terry's throat. He staggered under the additional weight, kept going more slowly. A dock guard trotted in to intercept him, and whaled him mightily across the belly with his billy club, an approach that reduces ninety-nine out of a hundred men to the immediate level of ferocity of an Easter bunny. But he was whamming a triple layer of muscles trained to the hardness of interwoven cordovan. Terry grasped the club, stopped, planted his heels, made a swinging motion like a hammer throw. The guard had the thong around his wrist. Somebody had shut off the music. I heard the brisk snap of bone as the guard went rolling across the cement. While stopped, Terry evidently decided to remove the minor annoyance on his back. He broke the hold on his throat, took the man's wrists, bent abruptly forward, a deep strong bow, a yanking leverage of the arms which sent the little brave one through the air to sprong into the wire mesh fifteen feet away and rebound. All the people had backed away from the fence. Merrimay, to my absolute and total astonishment, stood her ground, the knowing smile in place.
As I started to aim, the burly chap who'd been knocked loose on the conveyor and had ridden it all the way down got to Terry, clapped a hand on a bull shoulder, spun him and hit him with great enthusiasm, squarely in the mouth.
The people aboard and ashore were strangely silent. I could hear some little kids crying. Men were converging on the action with varying degrees of haste and caution. Terry hooked the burly optimist in the middle, doubling him into slow-motion collapse. A guard bounced a billy club off the sculptured blond curls. Two baggage handlers hit him high and low. Two hands from the ship were competing to hit him in the face. And then the cautious ones came diving in. Some went staggering back, rubber-legged One went down and started making unsuccessful efforts to get up. Terry was erect for a moment more, and somebody had snatched off the hairpiece. His skull glistened, and I heard the tock when the club rapped it. He melted down from view, and turmoil ended. They began getting off him, moving back, fingering their faces and looking at their hands for blood. A dock guard bent over Terry, gathered the limp arms behind him, clicked handcuffs on him. Overhead, on the Sun Deck, the same cracked voice was yelling, "Get a doctor! Quick! Get a doctor!"
The fat man stood beside me. He was looking down at the snubbed.38 still in my hand. I shoved it down into the holster until it clicked in place. The fat man said, "I don't know anything about anything, and I got terrible eyesight." He moved away from me, walking briskly.
Everybody aboard and ashore had suddenly become noisy, telling each other what they had seen. And, of course, everybody had seen something quite different. The last of the casualties were up on their feet, some of them leaning on friends. Terry began rolling from side to side, and they plucked him up and stood him on his feet, trickles of blood coming from fresh welts on the hairless skull. He went along, docile, one holding each arm. After about ten steps he suddenly began leaping, writhing and kicking, and began a terrible, spine-chilling, open-jawed howling. "Haaooo Haaooo Haoooo." It stilled the crowd sounds.
He tore loose from one man. The other was hanging on and being spun around. A third trotted up, timed the spinning, and clopped him on the skull again. Terry went down to his knees. They yanked him up and led him away to some structure beyond the customs shed. He stumbled along, head bowed and wobbling from side to side. The crowd noise had started up again. A dock guard walked to the blond hairpiece, bent over it, stared curiously at it. He reached to pick it up, pulled his hand back, wiped the hand on his thigh. It gave the crowd the release of laughter, semi-hysterical. The guard took the billy club and scooped it up, holding it at arm's length, balanced atop the club. He acknowledged laughter and applause with a little bow toward the ship, then toward the fence, and marched off just as, with the timing only accident can achieve, the PA system began the Colonel Bogie March.
I looked at Merrimay. She looked up at me, slipped the glasses back on, made a little shrug of query, palms extended. I made a circle of thumb and forefinger, and she nodded and turned and began walking to the place where it had been agreed Meyer would meet her as soon as he had cleared through customs.
The last of the baggage was being trundled in. The chain was dropped and the herd started down the gangplank in their cruise hats and salt-water burn. I went quickly back to Stateroom Six. It was nine o'clock.
She looked up as I came in, all the questions written on her face.
"No sweat," I said. "He got off okay. No reception committee."
"That's what I figured. Sweetheart, what was all the roaring going on out there?"
"Somebody got off drunk. A drunk dropping parcels, picking up two and dropping three more, that's real comedy."
The big pot had kept the coffee reasonably hot. Arturo had provided a generous little flagon of brandy, and she had lowered the level of it an inch or so. I had the inner trembles from thinking of how narrowly Terry had missed getting his hands on Merrimay, so I laced mine generously.
From time to time we heard loud happy Italian passing by in the corridor and on deck. The cleanup squads. She had wiped her mouth clean of the pinkness.
She turned my wrist and looked at my watch. "I'm lost without my little heart watch. I keep looking at my empty wrist all the time. It kept wonderful time. I got it at a discount place. Ninety bucks. It retails for a hundred and seventy-five." She leaned and stroked my arm, widened her big green eyes at me. "Gee, what a break you're getting, huh? Just me in these dumpy clothes, and not even a penny in my purse for luck. Poor McGee. And I've got whole racks and drawers full of the most darling clothes, and anyway forty pairs of shoes--that's my vice, buying shoes--and more perfume than a store, and I can't go near it. I suppose Ans'll sell it. Or go try to recruit a girl my size. Oh, I forgot for a minute. You said they'll probably knock him off too, and Frankie Loyal." She closed her eyes, shook her head, tapped her temple with a stubby forefinger. "I must be losing my mind! When the cops get that letter, nobody is going to have time to do anything. It's weird, you know, thinking I'll be the only one that got away. Just on account of you're so terribly smart, T... T.... Darling, would you forgive me? It's kind of insulting. I know, but you told me your front name and I know it starts with a T but I can't seem to remember it."
"Travis. Trav."
"Okay, I'll never forget again. Travis like travel. Because we're going to travel, baby. Far and wide. Do you know how good for you I'm going to be? You don't even know the half t. What kind of a place do you hide me out in in Lauderdale? Cute, maybe? I don't really care if it's a shack or a car or something. You know something, honey? I feel like kid when summer vacation starts. I got to have a new me. But you have to like it or I won't use it. I was thinking of one. I want to see if you like it What I was thinking, first name should have like the same sound I'm used to. You know, so I'll answer. So I thought Nel. There aren't many Nels around, and it is kinda quaint. Then for a last name I thought of the store names along Bay Street because we met there. And how about one of those with a hyphen in the middle? That hyphen stuff has always churned me up. So tell me if you like this. Miss Nel Cole-Thompson."