The deadly isles, p.3
The Deadly Isles, page 3
He lay collecting his wits … There was furtive movement on the rocks above. Luke lay limp, watching through half-closed eyes. A human shape stood silhouetted on the bronze-gray sky, in a pose consciously or unconsciously dramatic: legs apart, shoulders back, head broodingly turned down, with eyes fixed on Luke. A new surge of water swept in, lifted Luke, carried him a foot or two forward, floated him back about the same distance. Luke let himself loll, limbs loose.
The dark shape remained watching for another minute, then departed. Luke waited. Over the sound of the surf he heard the vibration of an engine, a transmission in low gear.
The Citroën had departed.
Luke waited five minutes, then crawled up the shore to a broken cocoanut bole, where he seated himself, hunched and shuddering. He tested his limbs. There seemed to be no broken bones, no serious sprains. Impact with the water and the bottom had dealt him a tremendous blow, enough to daze him, and even now there was a ringing in his ears. He felt as if he might like to vomit … Luke drew a deep breath. No point feeling sorry for himself. He rose to his feet, staggered around the base of the cliff to the beach and plodded home. Divesting himself of his wet clothes he pondered the amazing fact that someone had tried to kill him.
Why? A question of enormous fascination. The who, at least, was known, or, rather, half-known.
Luke considered all the circumstances. Black-eyes had waited at the post office. This argued that Black-eyes knew only his address: the number of his post office box. So Black-eyes had sat with his newspaper until Luke came to claim his mail, then, following Luke home, had tried to kill him, and now no doubt felt certain that he had succeeded.
Imagining the look of his own corpse, Luke shuddered. The situation was weird. Luke could conceive no motivation for the act. Two other events had been coincidental: the closing down of Teahupoo project and the invitation to join the Dorado at Nuku Hiva. Was either event connected with the third? Absurd.
Perhaps the attempted murder was no more than a ridiculous accident: an Englishman holding to the wrong side of the road. Luke rejected the idea. More probably the attack stemmed from a case of mistaken identity, the renter of Box 420 or 422 being the intended victim. Again Luke shook his head. Black-eyes would be on his guard against so basic an error.
Luke went into his kitchen, poured rum and canned guava juice into a glass and watched dusk settle over the ocean. Presently Luke became angry, more angry than he had ever been in his life. He poured more rum and decided that money must be the root of the affair: Royce money. But why attack Luke, whose connection with the estate was remote? It would be instructive to discuss the matter with Brady, and learn his opinions. More definitely than ever Luke resolved to be aboard the Rahiria on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, he would have a reckoning with Black-eyes. If he could find him.
Chapter V
Aboard the Dorado the course was southeast 136° on the gyrocompass, with the last of the northeast trades on the port beam; a course which, extended, struck the coast of South America somewhere near Valparaiso. Lia innocently inquired why they did not sail directly to their destination instead of zig-zagging here and there across the ocean; before she could change her mind Brady brought out Ocean Passages and explained the wind systems of the world. “We sail east now,” said Brady in conclusion, “so that when we meet the southeast trades, we can reach into Nuku Hiva instead of fighting head-winds.”
Lia nodded. “That’s interesting.”
“Yes,” said Brady, “it is. I do believe there’s a Bowditch aboard; you’d probably like to look through it.”
Lia glanced down the deck to where Kelsey and Jean were basking in deck-chairs. “I really would, Brady —”
One of the paid hands approached, apparently with a problem. Brady said, “Excuse me a minute,” and Lia went quickly off to join Jean and Kelsey.
With all sails set the Dorado cut a bubbling furrow through the water. Cumulus clouds stood dreaming above the horizon but never edged in close enough to obscure the sun. Who could ask more from life? Brady demanded of himself. Never before had he been fully sentient! Lia’s indisposition was a thing of the past — another source of gratification — though now and again a pensive mood came over her. Oh well, shrugged Brady: a minor matter. He professed no insight into the mysteries of womanhood. Male and Female were as incommensurable as cats and crows; Lia’s quirks only corroborated this point of view. She probably wasn’t accustomed to idleness and needed something to do. A good job to teach her navigation: make her a true sea-going Royce!
By and large the cruise was a success. Carson as usual had been something of a trial: a situation now rectified, and Brady gave a grim chuckle. In Honolulu, the night before departure, Carson had gone off wenching. At sailing time, with Carson nowhere in evidence, Brady had slung his bag to the dock and put to sea, leaving Carson marooned. No one seemed to miss him.
Malcolm and Dorothy McClure who owned a boat of their own were in their element and vigorously savored each instant. Kelsey’s attitude was more complicated: no surprise, since she was far more complicated than her father and mother, a situation comparable to the evolution of a Corvette convertible from a pair of pre-war Buicks. Kelsey was dark, vivacious, on the smallish side, with an inexhaustible capacity for mischief. Brady considered her an unpredictable little minx and was careful to maintain absolutely correct relations. With nothing better to do, Kelsey teased and agonized Don Peppergold, a pugnacious crew-cut young man with a homely bull-terrier face. But the more he excited himself, the more haughty and flip she became, while Jean Wintersea looked on from the side, trying to calculate Kelsey’s technique. When Jean managed to isolate Don and engage him in small talk, he became orderly and polite.
Brady discussed the situation with Lia. “I suppose I should have evened the party out more carefully. I’d planned on Carson, of course — although Jean isn’t exactly Carson’s type.” Especially, Brady reflected, with Carson’s father married to Jean’s younger sister.
Lia had a trick of listening with eyebrows raised and eyes widened, as if in a state of intense concentration. She now agreed with Brady’s analysis. “Jean has never been terribly interested in men. I suppose what with her music she’s never had the time. Perhaps,” she mused artlessly, “I should have studied harder at the piano myself.”
Brady could not decide what she meant and the whole subject was dropped.
The Dorado proceeded into the southeast, through glorious blue and gold weather. During the late morning and early afternoon Brady, Malcolm McClure and Don Peppergold each stood a two-hour wheel-watch, relieving the paid hands, although with gyro-steering there was little to do except glance from time to time at the compass, occasionally trim or free a sheet. Brady navigated with assistance from and much boisterous argument with Malcolm McClure, who considered himself a navigational genius. McClure usually made the evening fix, using the ‘McClure Calculated Zenith Principle’.
“Absolutely barbarous!” scoffed Brady. “Only a person predisposed against order and justice could contrive such a boondoggle!”
“Not at all, not at all!” exclaimed McClure. “To the contrary, I’ve organized chaos.”
“You expect me to believe that? What could be simpler than shooting three stars, then — after a few trivial calculations, of course — laying down the position?”
“My system. It’s simpler by far.”
“Please, Mal! This isn’t a cocktail party. You’re talking to a man of the sea.”
“I’ve noticed the barnacles between your ears. My system is utterly logical. Imagine the celestial surface and the earth as concentric globes. It’s clear, is it not, that fixing the globes at any two points establishes their relationship? This is the basis of the system. Two star altitudes relate one sphere to the other. Calculation gives me the declination of the zenith, and with a time correction, the right ascension. I transpose coordinates to latitude and longitude and there we are. What could be simpler? I don’t even need to draw lines of position. I put a dot on the chart and say: ‘Right here!’”
“Unconvincing. Very very questionable. In fact, it sounds like the old Lamont system which is not only tedious but —”
“No, no, no!” The muscles in McClure’s gaunt face twitched in indignation. “I can work the whole routine on a spherical trig slide-rule.”
“Thereby introducing a new source of error.”
“Okay,” said McClure. “That’s it.” He slapped his palm upon the roof of the after dog-house. “We’ll do this. Lia can be judge and timekeeper.”
“Oh heavens,” said Lia half-laughing, “don’t involve me! I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“You can read a watch, can’t you?” Brady asked, with just a trace of tartness in his voice.
“Oh yes, if that’s all you want me to do.”
“That’s all,” said McClure. “You say: ‘Get ready — get set — go.’ Then Brady, you shoot your stars and plot your position; I’ll shoot my stars and plot my position. We’ll see who lays down a point first, then we’ll recheck and see which of us is forty miles off.”
“I’m too old for antics like that,” Brady declared bluffly. “Too old and too smart. A pity Carson isn’t here. He’d be a good match for you. As a matter of fact, Carson is a pretty fair navigator,” Brady told Lia. “I’ve taught him quite a bit. I’ll start with you too. Something everyone should know: celestial navigation.”
“Oh Brady. I’d be impossible. Things with knobs and scales just confuse me.”
“You’ll catch on, don’t worry. Mal, why don’t you sit in and maybe pick up a few shortcuts?”
“Shortcuts? What’s faster than no time at all?”
“How do you propose to fix a position in no time at all? I admit I’d like to learn.”
“I’m designing a computer to perform all the horse-work instantly: the McClure Navigator.”
“There’s been a dozen of them,” said Brady. “None were practical.”
“None made use of modern electronics,” stated McClure. “That’s the difference. Nowadays with loran and consolan and satellites, the emphasis is away from a purely navigational computer. Mine would fill a need.”
Lia had been thinking: Jean is a musician, Kelsey is a vamp. I’ll learn navigation and show them all. She asked brightly: “How does it work?”
“It’s a big wooden box,” Brady told her. “Inside sits a navigator with a sextant, a chronometer, a nautical almanac. Mal punches a button, the navigator writes the position on a slip of paper and pushes it out a slot.”
McClure nodded with placid good humor. “Something like that. Only the box is nine inches on the side, with three controls: an on-off switch, a selector for any of fifty major stars, an adjustment to correct for height above horizon. There are three read-out windows. The first is a clock, indicating the exact time — the instrument hears the time-tick and makes its own correction. The other two windows show longitude and latitude.”
“Oh?” sneered Brady. “And how do you use this miraculous device?”
“Simple. You select a star, say Arcturus.”
Lia interposed a question. “But how can you tell one star from another? This is something which has always puzzled me.”
“You learn the constellations,” said Brady. “It’s just like learning the streets of a city.”
“But they all look alike!”
“It’s just a matter of familiarity,” said Brady. “You’ll soon learn to recognize them.”
“Or else,” murmured Kelsey, lounging in a deck-chair twenty feet away.
“Well then,” said McClure, “back to my miraculous device. Looking through a sighting device you bring Arcturus into the field of vision. That’s all — no cross-hairs, no bubble, no finagling, no nothing. The instrument automatically centers itself on the star, once the star is brought into the circle of sensitivity. The instrument includes an artificial horizon, and can be used at any time of day or night. The artificial horizon is a mirror floating in mercury, with a pendant gyroscope.”
“That kind of set-up isn’t practical,” stated Brady. “It’s been tried.”
“No one has ever damped the surface electrostatically, using the earth’s magnetic field as a stable reference. I won’t go into the electronics of the thing. So: you turn the optics in the general direction of Arcturus, press a button. Then you do the same with another star, say Vega. Instantly your fix appears in the read-out windows. Any questions?”
“No questions,” said Brady. “If the Ouija board works, anything will work.”
“Don’t pay any attention to Brady,” Lia told McClure. “He only wants to get you excited.”
“I realize this,” said McClure. “Too bad, Brady. I’m not the excitable type.”
Jean, also sitting nearby in a deck-chair, gave a brittle laugh. “I’m not either, luckily for Brady. Last night he asked me to play the harmonica.”
“You should have brought your flute,” declared Brady. “Mal dances a mean horn-pipe.”
“At high school Lia used to tap dance,” said Kelsey McClure.
“Kelsey!” protested Lia. “You’re telling all my secrets!”
“Not all of them,” said Kelsey, with a wicked grin. “But don’t worry, I won’t.”
Dorothy McClure had been listening with half-closed eyes. She was pert and wholesome, with a clever straightforward face, curly reddish-gray hair, a complexion ruined by overmuch exposure to the sun. Now she opened her eyes and sat up. “Time goes by so fast! I remember that little skit so well; it seems only yesterday.”
“What little skit?” asked Brady.
“When Lia did that tap-dance routine.”
“Oh please, Dorothy! don’t bring that up. I was so clumsy.”
“You were nothing of the sort. Who was the other girl? Inez something or other.”
“Inez Gallegos,” said Kelsey. “She’s dead.”
“Dead? How could she be? Was it an accident?”
“She might have been accidentally murdered.”
“But how shocking! I met her downtown just a few months ago; she was with a young man. She didn’t introduce him, so it wouldn’t have been her husband.”
“She never married,” said Kelsey.
“Of course she did!” Lia declared. “I’m sure she was married.”
Kelsey shrugged. “If she had a husband the police couldn’t locate him.”
“Maybe for professional reasons she wanted to keep her marriage secret,” suggested Jean.
Having no share in the conversation Don Peppergold became impatient. “Secrets, secrets!” he sang out. “Everybody has secrets.”
Lia sighed. “I wish someone would tell me Brady’s secrets. Does anyone know?”
“Yes indeed,” said Brady. “There’s two of us. God is one, I’m the other. We’re both keeping quiet.”
McClure said in a tone of mild complaint: “If you or your colleague would ordain a few hatfuls of wind we might log a decent daily run for a change. The current’s taking us west faster than we can sail east.”
“Are you in a hurry?” Brady demanded.
Dorothy McClure gave Brady an affectionate pat on the knee. “Of course not. I hope we never get home. I feel like I’m on a honeymoon myself.”
“Life in the old dog yet, eh?” said Brady, with an appraising glance toward McClure.
The voyage proceeded. The ocean was an unbelievable bright blue, the swells were long and lazy: great low dunes of water ruffled by cat’s-paws.
On the morning of June 10 a succession of rain-squalls appeared from nowhere. Gusts of wind caused the Dorado first to heel, then to skirl away to the west, to the annoyance of Brady and Malcolm McClure, who were more than ever anxious for easting. On the same evening a spectacular thunderstorm moved in from the northwest. Great leaden clouds burnt purple when the lightning flashed. The sound of the thunder was almost inaudible and presently the storm moved to the northeast. By ten o’clock only dancing wires of lightning could be seen which by midnight had glimmered away completely.
Chapter VI
Luke drained his glass, set it down with a thud. He went into the house, packed a suitcase, threw it into the old Fiat pickup which seemed to belong to Armand. He drove up to the highway and turned left toward Papeete. Parked at the spot where he went over the edge was the black Peugeot sedan of the Taravao Gendarmerie.
Luke stopped, slowly alighted from the pickup. At the foot of the cliff a pair of gendarmes were turning flashlights this way and that across the rocks … Luke pulled at his beard. How had they learned of the accident so quickly? Only one other person besides himself had known … Luke returned to the Fiat, drove on.
Along the Papeete waterfront were a number of inexpensive hotels rarely if ever patronized by tourists. One of these, a few doors from the Vaima, was the Hôtel du Sud. For 200 francs Luke rented a second-floor room with a private verandah overlooking the waterfront: a vantage remarkably picturesque.
At the Vaima he bought a ham sandwich which he took up to his verandah. Here he sat until midnight formulating and rejecting schemes and plans. The gendarmes? He could put forward no evidence other than an identification made in a tenth of a second with the setting sun in his eyes. A waste of time. Finally he went to bed and presently fell asleep.
In the morning Luke borrowed a pair of scissors from the manageress of the hotel. He slashed off his beard, then shaved with the razor he had found in his suitcase. He scowled at the strange naked face in the mirror: how ingenuous, how foolishly cheerful he looked, even while scowling! Partly responsible was his unruly overlong hair. He needed a haircut. Without halting even for breakfast, Luke went to the barber shop off Rue Général de Gaulle and there was shorn. Returning to the waterfront he bought a copy of the local newspaper, took an outside table at the Vaima and ordered breakfast … An item caught his attention. The headline, translated from French, read: American Scientist Suffers Fatal Disaster. It appeared that M. Luke Royce, engaged in oceanographic research near Teahupoo, had been killed when his motorbike skidded from the road and plunged into the sea. The gendarmes, notified of the accident by a horrified passerby, had rushed to the scene but to no avail. The body undoubtedly had been swept out through the reef, the current running with great force at the time.
