Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (10 page)

The entire operation had taken barely a minute. The attackers regrouped in a soft-paddling circle and then broke up and began to swim around slowly. They were searching. Hely gripped the lapels of her silent escort and swung his body more directly above hers. His face rested on her mask. The color seemed to have been washed from his eyes and she stared into what looked like circles of soiled linen. A lustless arm rested on her breast. She moved her head a fraction for fear of being seen. Beyond his fronds of hair, she saw a black figure flat above her, propelling himself along with the occasional flick of his flippers. He circled, dipped down, and hovered by her. She realized her teeth were clamped hard on her mouthpiece. Surely he would see the bubbles? His progress had disturbed some of the bodies. Other bubbles rose, freed from their traps in the clothes and corpses. Hely gripped her boyfriend to her. The invader passed. She saw the black figures diminish and fade towards the top, and toppled the body off her.

The hatch. It was the only other way out. All the invaders might not have left the massive chamber, but at least they were out of sight. She flicked in and out of the piles of bodies, her flippers whipping urgently, her fingers pulling at the bodies beneath her, at hair and clothes and limbs, to speed her progress. Once she felt the cold meat of a hand in hers. A wet-suited corpse floated above her. She jerked the leg down and through the mask saw Roland’s eyes.
In death as in life,
she thought,
weak and frightened.
She moved on, a shadow among shadows, frightened, but fixed in purpose. Next she was using the branches of the fallen Christmas tree to propel herself, and then she raced up the side of the wall and through the pale light oblong of the hatch. She looked behind: there was no sign of pursuit.

She thought about Roland and the boys. There was no cause for regret. They were worthless. It was almost as if they had contributed to their own deaths. She had had the guts to rummage deep into that graveyard, and had lived. They had not, and had died.

Her mind was quite cool. It focused only on survival. To survive the slums, she had learned how to duck, how to run, how to hide, how to lie, and how to smile. They had become reflex actions. Now Hely was running like a hare at the sound of a gun: quite instinctively. She fled as she had done many times before, thinking and planning as she moved.
Head for the stern,
she thought. That is out of the water and will give cover if those men are still around. She swirled along the corridors without a glance at the rooms she passed: a laundry, a library, a television room. She thrust past the soft-limbed bodies that were everywhere, using them as levers for speed. Hely sped through the passengers’ quarters, onwards and upwards. She checked her depth gauge as she went. She must stop to decompress soon. Stopping was risky if the men were following, but to go on without decompressing from that depth was certain death. She twisted like an eel into a cabin.

Blue-and-white-checked bedcovers tangled on what had been the ceiling. A suitcase floated against the fitted carpet above her. The minutiae of someone’s domestic life was shattered on the floor. An alarm clock, coffee cups, a glass still holding a twist of lemon, a ring. She picked it up and examined it. Cheap rubbish. She flicked it away in disgust. Suddenly, a face peered at her through the half-open door, and Hely snatched for the knife strapped to her leg. She relaxed with a sigh. The face, fixed in a bilious smile, floated slow and unwinking across the doorway. It was just another body, caught in some gentle current.

Hely thought. She had gone some distance towards the stern. Soon she would be under the engine room. Then she would surface and see if it was safe to return to the yacht. She still had her haul. The trip had not been entirely wasted. The gleaming green figures on her watch showed she had decompressed for seven minutes. It should be ample. She should be safe from the bends, that terrible flirtation with death that came from too rapid an ascent. She almost smiled as she remembered other chases in earlier days. It was always like this. Always in the dark. Then there had been the slam of a policeman’s boots behind her, the skidding on corners, the swerving and the frantic grabbing for lungfuls of air. Then there was always the delicious moment when the pursuer was lost, the panting rest in the corner of an alley somewhere, and the chance to rejoice in the haul. Then it had been a snatched handbag perhaps. Hely patted her purse. She did not need to look this time. Life, she thought, never really changes. Only the stakes got bigger, and the policemen didn’t wear boots anymore.

When she had seen the water beginning to brighten she knew she was nearing the surface. She headed for the light. It was not bright enough for the sky. It must be a pool somewhere in the boat. Then she had surfaced in the great dark barn and struggled to the side. There were some people. A little man with ginger hair. A girl. A man in an undershirt with a gun. She needed time to think.
Cry,
thought Hely, and the tears ran.

The story did not hang together. It offended all Rogo’s instincts as a policeman. He reran it through his mind. A girl pops up in the middle of a sinking ship looking like she’d just stepped out of the centerfold of
Playboy,
unzips her rubber suit so’s you can see halfway to Kalamazoo, sobs like hell, gets all the guys patting her back and wishing they were patting her ass, and then tells a story you wouldn’t hand a ten-year-old.

“Look, let’s try to get it straight, lady,” Rogo said. He was kneeling down beside her, the gun still in his hand. “You say you were on a cruise, you heard the call, and you and your buddies came looking for survivors. Okay. So where are your buddies? You say they got trapped—where, for God’s sake, and how, and why couldn’t you help them? You came here—why not swim out the way you swam in and go back to your boat? I’m not knocking your story but there sure’s one helluva lot of holes in it.”

Rogo’s questioning was not very popular with the other men. Martin was on his knees, his arm around the girl in enthusiastic consolation. “Don’t worry,” he kept saying. “You’re among friends now. We’ll look after you.” He took her hand and squeezed it. His little pink face shone with sincerity and excitement too. James Martin, haberdasher, was still having the adventure of a lifetime.

That was why he had returned. All his life he had been nobody. His schooldays were spent in anxious smiles to please the big guys. He was the last to be picked for a ball game. Later he was the one the girls kissed on the cheek and said was cute. Even his business was the smallest in Anaheim. At the Rotary meeting, Martin had to sit quietly and listen to Delano who ran the big food store and old Marcus Dowdney who owned the furniture business. Even when he organized the Christmas raffle for them, they hardly noticed him. “You did a great job there, Jack,” Mr. Delano would say. Three years he had been a member, and he was so insignificant they didn’t even know his name. James Martin despised himself a little, and his life a lot. He didn’t want to go back home. And when he did, he wanted to have his photograph on the front page of the local paper. Boy, old Dowdney would know his name then.

For the first time in his life, he felt like a hero. He felt like a cowboy. He felt like a marine. He felt like all the things he had always wanted to be. James Martin, haberdasher, from Anaheim, the worst football player in high school, was on his knees in a sinking ship holding a beautiful woman in his arms. Anyway you looked at it, it beat selling socks.

He brushed her wet hair back from her face. “You’ll feel okay in a few minutes. You just rest. Comfortable? My knee’s not digging into you, is it?”

Hely’s plight even dragged Manny Rosen out of his desperate longing to be away from this place. He sat on the girder beside her. “You listen to him, miss. He’s right. You’ve had a nasty shock, I guess. You young kids nowadays, I don’t know, you don’t look after yourselves. Flesh and blood you are, you can only take so much.” Belle had come out of that same pool and died. Her body was just a few feet behind him. She had been flesh and blood and now she was a lump of ice. “Listen to an old man,” he added. “Take it easy, huh?” His hand wiped a smear of oil off his tragic, drooping moustache.

The girl was obviously distressed. Klaas agreed that the story was confused, but then the girl was shaken. “Coby,” he whispered, “do you think I should go to the
Magt
and fetch the brandy? This young woman is badly shocked.” He was a little surprised to see the hard set of his daughter’s face. “I do not think she is in any danger of dying,” she said. “She looks very much alive to me, papa.” Coby had watched her every second since she climbed out of the pool. She had seen the imploring words and glances. She had seen the girl’s wary look when Rogo said he was a policeman. She had seen something else in her eyes when she had looked at Jason, still leaning against the girder, his face unmoved. “I don’t think she’s quite as ill as she appears, father,” said Coby.

Women’s tears. Rogo had seen them before. No one had cried more than the seventeen-year-old girl who had strangled her mother with the belt off her coat, and then gone out and bought a new belt. He had seen innocent, beautiful faces before too. One of them had been on a photographic model who had left an ax in her boyfriend’s head. Rogo was unimpressed by tears and beauty and innocence. He pressed his questions.

“Tell it again, lady, and a little more detail this time, please.”

He felt Martin’s furious look. “Don’t you think you’re being a little unfair, Mr. Rogo?” The question was as close to a challenge as Martin cared to go.

“Yes.” This time it was Manny Rosen. His voice sounded censorious too. “Give the young lady a chance to recover first, then I’m sure she’ll explain everything.” He appealed to the whole group. “Anyway, we haven’t time to go into all this now. Don’t forget, we’re sinking.”

Sympathetic bystanders. Rogo knew all about them too. He also knew how to handle them. “Thanks a lot for your tips, fellas, now how would it be if you just let me hear the lady talk?” He leaned forward to watch her face when she spoke. He was usually right about faces. “Let’s have it again from the top. And slowly.”

The girl closed her eyes and gasped. Manny and Martin exchanged looks. They had said all they dare.

She opened her eyes again. Rogo’s questioning, remorseless gaze was still there. The lanterns yellowed the waiting faces. The red fires roared spasmodically. The slow dripping, like Rogo’s questions, went on relentlessly. It was Jason’s voice that cut in.

“Leave her, Rogo.”

The cop did not move. “Shut up, cowboy,” he replied. “I’ll handle this.”

“I told you, Rogo, she’s had enough. Give her a break.”

“And I told you, keep out of it.” Rogo had turned now. He was rising, and the terrible struggle between the two men was being reborn. “Keep out of it, d’you hear?” He was almost shouting again.

This was it. The battle for supremacy, interrupted by Hely’s arrival, established more fiercely than ever. It had to be settled. Jason had stopped lounging and teasing. He had moved away from the girder with his feet apart, and Rogo held the gun firmly on him. He was only a few feet away from Jason and he talked as he edged nearer.

“I’ve had enough, mister. I had enough of you the second I saw you. And if you don’t like cops that’s just too bad because . . .”

The girl’s scream tore open the darkness of the vault. Rogo spun awkwardly, one foot raised on a chunk of metal, the other braced behind him. He had a quick flash of the girl in the wet suit with her mouth open. Then Jason hit him. Off balance, he crashed to the floor, twisting as he fell. Even as he landed he felt the gun torn from his hand and Jason’s knee on his throat. “You goddamn sonofabitch!” The words came in a croak.

Manny started to tremble. Martin began to say, “I don’t honestly think you’re going to solve anything . . .” No one was listening. Martin finished the sentence weakly, for his own benefit, “by falling out like this.”

Jason rose in one movement and backed three paces away. He kept the gun aimed at Rogo’s stomach. He spoke evenly, without any hint of anger or excitement.

“You’ve got it all screwed up, Rogo. Maybe you’ve been on this boat too long. Maybe you shouldn’t have come back. You’re too jumpy. You’re trying to hammer everyone into the ground. Forget what you think about me, and the girl too for that matter. We don’t count. Think about your job. Remember, that’s why you’re here.” Rogo’s eyes flickered towards the hold. Uncertainty replaced the anger on his face. Jason was still talking. “This isn’t a contest for who’s the toughest kid on the block. There’s half a billion dollars’ worth of gold bars in there and you’re supposed to be sitting on them for Uncle Sam. Remember! Old Glory, apple pie, all that crap you guys believe in. Well, believe in them. Do it! Do your job! You’re a cop, Rogo. Act like a good one.”

Coming slowly to his feet, Rogo wiped his hands on his thighs. “Okay, okay,” he murmured. Louder, he said, “A guy asks a coupla questions and you go out of your tree.”

It was over.

“And another thing,” Jason said, but now he was grinning and the gun was swinging by his side. “This damned peashooter of yours. It’s been soaked. Bet you a bar of gold you can’t get a shot out of it.” He pointed it into the black distance towards the propellers and squeezed the trigger steadily. It clicked harmlessly. “Bet you’re glad you’re not after Jesse James with that, Batman.” He threw it across to Rogo, who caught it, looked at it, and sent it clattering among the wreckage by the small pool. It was only a lousy lady’s gun anyway.

He said, “Yeah, well it don’t really make so much difference. These days you gotta have an affidavit signed by Jesus Christ before you can pull the trigger. So what the hell! Come on then, cowboy, you’re the one talking duty. Help me get that hold door open.”

Side by side, the two men set off scrambling over the rubble.

“Whew, that sure was a relief.” Hely hardly heard Martin’s words. She had sat up to see the confrontation. Her own anxiety to shake off the pestering questions of the cop had gone. Her scream, she knew, had given the man in the old jeans the chance to move. But what a man. She had never seen anyone like him before. She had known strong men and tough fighting men, but this was different. He had talked the cop down. He had won the battle, and then calmly handed the gun back to the vanquished. Again the pink-faced man beside her was squeaking away, “Because if two guys don’t hit it off together in this sort of situation . . .” Hely was not listening. She was thinking. That was the man. She must have that man. He was the one. She had seen what she wanted just as certainly and coldly as she had seen the rings on the fingers of the dead. She scrambled to her feet, holding down the excitement inside her.