Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (9 page)

“That’s enough, funny guy,” he bellowed. “You’re going to tell me what the hell this business of yours is and then you’re going to move your ass offa this boat.”

The gun did not appear to register with Jason. He simply said, “Not a chance, not a chance. Now what do you do? Shoot me or book me?”

As Rogo’s frustrated tongue stumbled, Martin decided to help. “You should listen to Mr. Rogo,” he told Jason. “He really is an important police officer. It’s just that we all got, well, kinda mussed up trying to get out. But he’s on a real big-time security job here looking after half a billion dollars in gold.”

His keen little face searched around for the reaction to this information. He didn’t see Rogo’s hand until it grabbed the front of his tattered dress shirt and heaved him up onto his toes.

“Martin, what’d you do with your brains—sell ’em with those goddamn socks?”

Martin’s chin strained. Through trapped teeth he mumbled, “Gee, I’m sure sorry, Mr. Rogo. I was only trying to help.”

Rogo’s fist opened and Martin fell like a sack. Rogo’s venom again faded. It was all too much. Take a rest, they had told him. Take Linda along with you. No one will know a thing, and all you have to do is to keep an eye on it. Go and sit in the sun, Rogo, they had said, and try to keep your hands off the belly dancers. Rogo spat into the pool. He said, “For Chrissakes!” but without real enthusiasm.

“Is that true?” Jason’s smile had gone.

“Yep.” Rogo was, temporarily at least, defused. “It’s true, okay. It’s in there.” He indicated the hold with a weary wave of the gun. All security had gone now.

Jason said, “Okay, then listen to me. We don’t have much time. This ship can’t stay afloat forever. She’s one-third clear of the water, there must still be quite a lot of air trapped down there, but we can’t be more than a couple of hours. Captain Klaas here, whether you like it or not, does have full authority to exercise salvage rights on this ship. That needn’t concern you. Klaas is a straight man. Look at him, for God’s sake. You’re supposed to be a cop, you should know an honest face when you see one. He’s not interested in trying to get his hands on government money of any kind. Right, Klaas?”

The Dutchman nodded. “I’m sure we can agree that you must continue your security operation, lieutenant. That sort of . . . well, extraordinary consignment is outside my scope, I assure you.”

Jason continued, “So you sit on your crock of gold and let Klaas go ahead with normal salvage work.”

It sounded reasonable. Rogo weighed it all very carefully. The Dutchman was a captain. Rogo’s faith in the integrity of a uniform and peaked cap was considerable. And the freak was at least American.

He spoke to Jason. “What about you? You tell me what your stake is and we got a deal.”

They all waited. Klaas juggled with his puzzle: if the man was honest, why wouldn’t he explain himself? This stupid argument was wasting time; the ship could go down at any moment, and they must act quickly and leave. Coby prayed that he would say something, anything, so that they would believe in him as she did. Manny wished this difficult man would declare himself so that they could leave this stinking cavern and the cold crumpled body that had been his wife. Martin, who had always believed in the authority of a clean collar and a regular change of underwear, wondered how it could be that such a shabby figure could command their attention and only wished he could do the same.

Rogo had a rough grasp of crowd psychology. He knew how to move them on, how to make the loudmouths back down. He had disliked this man on sight. His style was too close to that of the longhairs he despised. He loathed the flippant manner and the open contempt for authority. Rogo was the tough kid who had crossed the line to join the forces of authority and conformity; like most converts, he was fanatical in his beliefs. But he had seen something else in this man that made him uncharacteristically anxious to find a compromise: a quality Rogo could not pin down. He recognized it by the instinct all policemen develop. A hundred times you step into a bar fight. Sometimes it’s a Puerto Rican with an ax, sometimes a black with a knife, sometimes it’s a bunch of Poles. It didn’t matter. You took a quick look, and you knew you could take them, and batter them down with anvil fists.

Occasionally, not even once a year, you went through that door and saw a different type of man. It wasn’t size, it wasn’t toughness, it wasn’t anything like that, but you always knew it. “Sure I coulda took him,” he remembered hearing another cop say once, “but not without my .38 I couldn’t.” Here was another one. Rogo was not afraid. He was never afraid. But he was cautious.

He kept the gun on him. “So c’mon, mister. Let’s hear it. Then mebbe we can talk some.”

Jason shrugged. “That’s got to stay my business, Batman.”

The high steel hull of the ship amplified Rogo’s roar to a thunderous boom, and it was not until the last echo had rung in the dark corners that they heard the splashing. Every head turned. A black head, arms, and shoulders appeared out of the small pool and swam to the side. The underwater diver heaved itself out of the water, tore off the mask, her hair tipping in torrents down her shining black back.

“I’m Hely,” she said, and began to cry.

Fat ladies wear the finest jewelry. By the time they have found their potential source, have driven him on and up in the world, and have so subjugated him that every anniversary and birthday adds weight and worth to their fingers, necks, and wrists, they have also enjoyed at least thirty years good living. Incentive has gone, and their pride lies in the contents of wardrobes and jewelry cases rather than any steady reading of bathroom scales.

Fat women, also, are seldom fighters. When that flood gushed through the main dining room, it was the unadorned young who had fought for the surface, until they too sank back into the silence of their tinsel-draped tomb. The overweight and the old, decorated from their husbands’ industry, lay beneath.

That was the philosophy by which Hely led her team of divers into the vast upturned cavern. It was easily found. She led them down the side of the sunken ship and, swinging on the inverted railings, along the deck and down the first steps. There as she wondered which way to go, she noticed the sign. She flipped her feet up in the air to read it. “Come and Say Hello to the New Year!” She followed the arrow past more steps and through the door.

The thirty-foot-high chamber had become a sealed bowl containing a carnage made even more hideous by the trappings of carnival. From what had been the floor hung the bolted-down tables. All the other contents of the room had been scrambled together when the ship went over and the seas rushed in.

After the translucent blues of the clearer sea outside, Hely had to adjust her eyes to the cloudy gray of the water here. The only light seemed to come from the pale blue disks of the portholes, and from an oblong hatch in the far corner at the top of the room. With a wave of her arm she drew her stunned crew after her. She checked the depth gauge on the canvas strap around her wrist. They were well beyond the thirty-three-feet mark. They would have to decompress on the return. There was still no hesitation as she swam straight down into the sodden havoc.

She was right. The dead lay in mounds, dress shirts and billowing gowns their shrouds, and all around them were the foolish fripperies of good fellowship, the paper hats and streamers, waterlogged. The last few seconds of life had stripped them of standards of civilization which, even after centuries of acceptance, could never compete with the will to live. Men had trampled women. Young men had smashed aside older men. The dead were stacked in layers, according to their strength and determination. Hely smiled inside her mask: if these people, conformers and stalwarts all, could cast away the proprieties, what justification did she need?

She felt not the slightest distaste as she plunged into their bodies. They moved easily enough, weightless in the water. She grabbed a dinner-jacket collar from behind and pulled aside a young man, his hair still crisp and curly. She took a quick look at his watch: forty dollars, not worth taking. She rolled him away. Two more men, one with a disintegrating streamer round his neck, and a woman whose diamond-chip ring suggested true love and penury, merited no further attention. Hely was after the bad hearts, the asthmatics, the bronchitics, the obese and the self-indulged, the heavy smokers and hard liquor drinkers. They would have died first.

She found the first one under the Christmas tree. It must have been twenty-five feet high, and several bodies were trapped in its flattened branches now, almost as though they had been trying to climb it. Hely looked up. They must have been making for the hatch at the top of the room before the waters overtook them. When it had crashed over, some of the older guests had been caught. This one was a woman, hopelessly enmeshed in the silver branches of the tree. The light was poor, but through the murky gray of the water she caught the glint of gold. One-handed, she unclipped a bracelet. The woman’s plump unsunned arm drifted down again. The worry that had marked her face with lines in life was still there in death. She had the dutiful look of the good wife. Hely pushed her out of the way. Her right hand was locked in that of a man. Her gray hair floated in absurd curls away from her head; her lipstick made a small brown wound of her mouth in the opaque light. Ten years of regular visits to the beauty salon had done nothing for the fat that folded persistently under her chin, and it was beneath those rolls that Hely saw what she wanted: a necklace of sapphires surrounded by diamonds. “My God,” Hely mouthed. Her cold fingers struggled with the intricate catch. Three times her thumbnail slipped off the minute mechanism. The fourth time she slipped both hands around the woman’s neck, gripped the clasp between finger and thumb of each hand and began to twist it. The swollen, stupid face swayed backwards and forwards as she worked as though caught in an undignified exercise. Finally, the clasp broke. Hely slipped it, together with the bracelet, into the rubber purse strapped to her belt.

To one side of the Christmas tree, a grand piano had overturned and trapped several bodies. Again, Hely swung aside the corpses of the young with their costume jewelry. Here she found an elderly woman. She must have been eighty at least. She looked oddly peaceful. She’d had more time to contemplate the grave, Hely thought. Hely pulled her hand out from beneath the piano. At last! This was the real thing. There were two rings, a beautiful square-cut emerald flanked with baguettes and a marquise-shaped diamond. Together they must be worth at least thirty thousand dollars. Hely drew the knife from her leg sheath. She tried to slash the fingers. She could not get enough momentum behind her hand on account of the drag of the water. She held the hand on the piano keyboard. The notes echoed feebly as she reversed her knife and used the serrated edge to saw through the fingers. Pretty gray-brown flowers mushroomed in the water. She held the fingers in one hand and tugged at the rings. The emerald was jammed under the swollen knuckle. Rings and finger went into her purse.

Buoyed by the water and freed from gravity, Hely worked away as weightless as a bird among the bodies. The weak light which caught the glitter of the tree and the colored decorations was enough to pick out the jewelry. After ten minutes, her purse was half full. The value, even on the black market she reckoned, must be over a hundred thousand dollars. A ghostly fish, incurious, watched as she wrenched a diamond flower-spray brooch off a proud bosom, and the victim’s sodden paper hat, miraculously intact, slipped over open, unprotesting eyes.

Her work had disturbed the minor detritus, and the food and paper and cigars, together with the plaster from the walls, had become little more than sludge in the water. Through the clouds, Hely could just see the paddling shadows of her companions. Not one of them had dug down among the bodies as she had. They worked tentatively at the top and she could sense their disgust for the task. She felt a cold, hard anger inside. They were fine heroes lounging on the deck or the beach. That was all they were fit for, exhibits of mock masculinity for the admiration of tourist girls. When it came to real guts, they were limp-wrists. Hely had dreamed up this idea from the first Mayday call. She had planned it, had tempted and goaded them into it, had led them and told them what to do. Even then, they faltered and floundered for fear of dirtying their hands. She knew what would happen. When they got back to the
Naiad,
her haul would lie on the deck beside their timid collection of cheap garnet rings and ten-dollar brooches, and she would have to listen to their excuses and meet their weak, pleading faces. They had not the courage to defy her nor the courage to obey her. They looked like lions and acted like kittens. She would have to get rid of them.

When Hely saw the invaders come lancing through the gloom she knew their purpose at once. They swam in pairs. Hely watched their figures materialize. Two carried spear guns, the others held knives in their right hands, and they were making directly for the rummaging divers.

Hely settled herself gently on a heap of bodies, and pulled the nearest one on top of her. She felt it flop lightly against her and saw a smashed face close to hers. She grabbed his hair and pulled the head onto her shoulder so she could see. Above, Roland and the others were still daintily picking at the bodies when the invaders hit them.

It was like a slow-motion ballet in thick fog. The first two men, spear guns under their arms, back-paddled for a moment at about four yards distance. The
Naiad
divers worked on. Hely could not see the harpoon. She knew they had hit when two of her divers—one looked like the English boy—arched gracefully backwards and spun slowly in the water. The other invaders swept past. For a second, she could see the balance of the fight in their posture. The invaders were pointing down like arrows, predatory and aggressive, the
Naiad
divers were caught turning, turtle heads hunched into their shoulders, desperate arms extended to hold off the attackers. Then the figures, distinguishable only by their intent, merged. One, two, three, Hely counted the sudden clouds of bubbles that burst upwards. The invaders had slashed her men’s regulators, and the compressed air which should have gone from the cylinder to their mouths was released into the water. Hely caught the glint of silver several times through the swirling waters. They were stabbing the drowning men.