From London Far (31 page)

Jean ceased to speculate – it being revealed to her suddenly that it was now or never. She must jump and swim. She must jump, and then swim heaven knew where – out beyond the anchorage perhaps and round to a less precipitous shore. It was the thinnest of chances – but she must take it,
now
.

She braced herself to spring. And as she did so the men forward parted, and for a fatal second she was rooted in astonishment to the deck. The submarine – she saw in the uncertain light of a low torch – appeared to have been invaded by a number of small naked boys. And the next instant she saw something queerer still. A familiar figure was striding up the deck, and in front of it moved a little red glow as from a sweetly smoking pipe. The glow disappeared – much as if some second thought had led to the hasty discarding of so Anglo-Saxon an object – and Richard Meredith advanced into a fuller light. He made straight for von Schwiebus and took him by the hand. ‘Pantelli!’ he exclaimed with Latin exuberance; ‘I am Signor Pantelli and arrived just in time.’ His glance turned to Jean and for a moment genuine amazement flooded his features. Then he threw himself forward.
‘Mia carissima sposa!
’ he exclaimed, enraptured. ‘My dear, dear wife!’

DOVE COTTAGE

The lakeside home of Otis K Neff tilted, slid, turned upon itself, and momentarily disappeared as the huge flying-boat banked and circled in order to land against the wind. Foam-flecked water pistoned upwards, hung suspended, fell abruptly into nether space just as the waters of the Gulf of Mexico had done hours before. They were climbing again. ‘Jes’ impossible,’ said Mr Drummey. ‘A whole blame regatta all over the place.’

Richard Meredith peered downwards and saw that what he had taken for larger flecks of foam were the sails of yachts dispersed over a great area of water. He also saw once more the abode of Mr Neff. ‘Does he really
live
there?’ he asked. ‘It must take him an uncommonly long time to get around.’ In the Old World, he was reflecting, there were persons whom heredity and the pressure of custom constrained to live in structures of similar size and elaboration. But everything that lay below here Mr Neff had, it seemed, caused to be built himself. He had taken so many score acres of wooded lakeside and started from dot. Now there was this. And again Meredith incredulously peered. ‘Extraordinary!’ he murmured.

‘It sure is a beautiful home.’ Mr Drummey did not take his eyes from his instruments. His voice was expressionless. Nevertheless, Meredith was aware that he liked Mr Drummey, and that Mr Drummey was no more astray in the matter of evaluating Mr Neff’s splendours than a whole committee of editors of Juvenal and Martial would have been. ‘A swell home,’ said Mr Drummey. ‘It must be wonderful to feel you own all that after coming up the hard way. Hold on, there’s another turn.’ His eye was on half a dozen gauges at once. ‘Jes’ get yourself a home like that and you can be certain you’ve made good. If you get doubts in the night, you simply switch on the lights and start planning another wing. Architect yourself, perhaps – Signor Pantelli?’

The intelligence of Mr Drummey was of the sceptical order. And the two young men who assisted him to navigate this aerial leviathan were discernibly sceptical too – much more so than the sombre Captain von Schwiebus had been at first. ‘An architect?’ said Meredith. ‘Dear me, no. I deal in pictures, and that sort of thing. And it’s an important moment for me to meet so big a collector as Mr Neff.’

‘Ah.’ Mr Drummey was looking down with distaste at the yachts that were keeping him airborne longer than need be. ‘I’ve been told he buys a lot – and I’ve ferried some for him, too. Yet somehow there aren’t too many on show down there.’ And he jerked a thumb in the direction of Mr Neff’s swell home. ‘I’ve sometimes wondered if he kind of misers them.’

‘Misers them?’

‘Treats them as if they were a store of gold beneath his mattress. There’s a story he has a whole gallery he never speaks about, and won’t let other folks speak about either.’

‘Dear me,’ said Meredith. ‘I hope he will have something to say about my Giorgiones.’

‘Giorgiones?’ Mr Drummey leant forward to turn a switch, offered some technical remarks to one of his assistants, and then looked full at Meredith. ‘Surely there aren’t so many of those around?’

‘Very few indeed, Mr Drummey. But I’ve got three. And as soon as I contacted Mr Neff’s agent in Tampico and heard there was a chance of a deal I wanted to have the pictures sent along. They ought to be down below there now.’

‘I see. Well, we’ll be going down now. Perhaps the Signora had better have a piece of barley sugar. Nothing like glucose.’

‘I certainly don’t want barley sugar.’ Jean Halliwell was gazing absorbedly downwards. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’s utterly monstrous, of course. But it can’t really be said to be in bad taste.’

Mr Drummey raised an eyebrow. ‘Peddling Giorgiones?’ he asked.

‘Mr Neff’s house. It ought to be a howling horror. But really it’s more like a vast, polished, and at the same time high-spirited joke.’

For the first time Mr Drummey laughed. ‘Ever been to Beverley Hills?’ he asked. ‘Crammed with darn fool people believing they’re living in one sort of solemn museum-piece or another. Tudor mansions, chunks of Versailles, Spanish Mission – all that. And really they’re all inhabiting good jokes. Just the architect having a little fun.’ Mr Drummey spoke absently, and while giving Jean a glance so swiftly appraising that she felt like an oil gauge or a speedometer. Suddenly he put out his chin like one whose mind is made up. ‘Say,’ he said, ‘what is all this, anyway?’

The Signor and Signora Pantelli looked at each other. They looked at Mr Drummey and – more doubtfully – at his silent assistants. ‘I understand’, said the Signor cautiously, ‘that this is Mr Neff’s private plane, and that you are all employees of his?’

‘Yes.’ Mr Drummey, as if to give leisure for a little confidential conversation, was beginning a lazy sweep of some ten miles’ radius in air. ‘And we’ve known some darn tight squeezes through the arms of the law. Eh, Joe? Eh, John?’

‘Sure.’ Joe and John spoke in concert and without taking their eyes from their several tasks.

‘Faithful servants of the firm,’ said Mr Drummey. ‘Straight enough, in a way. You can’t work for someone big without putting through a few pretty cheap-looking deals.’

‘Dear me!’ Meredith was perplexed. ‘I should have imagined that to hold rather of working for someone small.’

‘You can’t’, Mr Drummey, ignoring this, continued, ‘work for a man at all without backing him against others of his own sort – can you? Wouldn’t be honest. And that naturally lands you with some pretty low jobs to do. You carry on while you can.’

‘You don’t stick your head out,’ said Joe.

‘On the other hand,’ said John, ‘you don’t close your eyes.’

‘You have to watch for the limit,’ said Joe. ‘And we kind of feel that while ferrying fake Wops is one thing–’

‘Fake Wops!’ Meredith, though most irrationally, was extremely indignant.

‘–abduction is quite another.’

‘Abduction?’ Jean looked at Joe in astonishment. ‘You don’t really think I’m being abducted?’

‘I do not.’ Joe frowned, apparently feeling that he had delivered this opinion more confidently than was polite. ‘Though you’d be worth it every time.’

‘It was an Englishman,’ said Mr Drummey. ‘Jes’ the other day. He was scared plumb mute, it seemed to me. But I guess he wasn’t making the trip anything like willingly.’

Jean sat upright. ‘Did he tell you he was Higbed?’

‘He did. He came scrambling through a lot of crates aft there, looked as if they might be full of books. And “I’m Higbed,” he says. And at that the man Flosdorf – he’s one of Neff’s secretaries – leads him off and gives him a drink. Kind of nasty feeling about the whole thing.’

‘And mysterious,’ said John. ‘Seemed as if Neff wasn’t to know. Flosdorf had this Higbed and the crates landed way down by what’s called the Belvidere, and told us to keep our traps shut.’

‘Did you happen’, Meredith asked, ‘to notice anything about this Higbed’s physical condition?’

‘Bad.’ Mr Drummey was decided. ‘Looked as if he’d been dragged through somewheres several weeks on end. Which makes it queerer the way I saw him two or three days afterwards. Sitting by the lake sleek and pleased as anything, puffing at a cigar and watching some girls bathing from a boat. Really watching them, if you know what I mean, but doing it open and unashamed. Might have had some theory he was being only fair to himself that way.’

‘Well, it’s Higbed, all right.’ Jean glanced at Meredith. ‘The dafty in abeyance and the great male Higgy uppermost, once more. But it’s difficult to see what it all means.’

‘Difficult to see what fake Wops mean.’ And Mr Drummey looked at Meredith inquiringly. ‘Talking?’

‘Sure – that is to say: Yes.’ Meredith was momentarily confused by this impertinent intrusion upon another idiom. ‘A little talking would probably be an excellent thing.’

‘Then we’ll jes’ take another turn round the block.’

And gently Otis K Neff’s flying-boat banked and began to describe a farther county-wide circle in air. Its hub, the lakeside home of Otis K Neff, showed still like a small, towering city far away below.

‘So this von Schwiebus really believed you were Mr and Mrs Pantelli?’ Mr Drummey looked swiftly at Jean. ‘Quite early I figured it you two couldn’t be married.’

Meredith smiled. ‘Well, with von Schwiebus the deception did not, in fact, continue for very long. He must always have been suspicious, and in the end he just found out. Perhaps Miss Halliwell and I were neither so Italianate nor – ah – so conjugal as we ought to have been. We were exposed, and von Schwiebus reported to the scoundrel Don Perez by wireless.’

‘By wireless!’ John, whose business was radio among other things, looked at Meredith wonderingly. ‘They could do that?’

‘Apparently so. And although at the time it appeared to seal our doom, in point of fact it has been an altogether fortunate circumstance. It means that at the headquarters of the International Society they are still quite unalarmed. A little dispirited, perhaps, but nevertheless feeling quite secure.’

‘I don’t get all this.’ Mr Drummey was frowning at his instruments. ‘For here you are, making a come-back as the Pantellis – and free as air, more or less.’

‘But that is only because of the misadventure that befell the submarine almost immediately afterwards. You must understand that as yet you have by no means heard the whole story.’ Meredith looked apologetic. ‘I hope that this is not occasioning an altogether unreasonable expenditure of petrol? Perhaps you would prefer to land in some quiet cove–’

‘The firm can stand the gas. And when you’re up it’s best to stay here. It’s the getting up that takes it out of the old crate.’

Jean, who was eating barley sugar after all, tucked a chunk into her cheek. ‘And it’s just like that with submarines. It seems they can always go down, but they won’t always come up again. Particularly if they haven’t any longer got proper dockyards and so on behind them. Right at the start von Schwiebus told me that one trip soon his craft would just refuse to surface. And they have to surface, you know, for the engines to do some sort of breathing exercises every now and then. Well, the fatal occasion had come. They worked all the proper machines, but the submarine just stayed put. So after a time they worked some other machines that released rafts and things on the surface. And then they got into a sort of life-saving contraptions and let themselves out through an escape hatch one by one. But there weren’t any left over for Mr Meredith and myself, so we were left on board. Jean sucked at her barley sugar. ‘Kind of caretakers,’ she added.

‘They did that?’ Mr Drummey relieved his feelings by soaring several hundred feet in air.

‘As a matter of fact, von Schwiebus tricked them into thinking he could get us out too. So it wasn’t the fault of his crew at large.’ Jean spoke as if she felt that she had come to something really important at last. ‘I expect they were very decent men, really.’

‘I expect they were.’ Mr Drummey climbed higher. ‘All fond of mother. Go on.’

‘There we were – for quite a long time.’ Meredith continued the story. ‘It became very stuffy. No doubt you have read descriptions of people in such a plight.’

‘Sure.’

‘After a time – a good long time – I fell to wondering whether there might be a revolver somewhere about. Miss Halliwell, I believe, had the same idea, and we both rummaged round. But nothing of the sort was to be found. So we just waited. But insensibility appeared to be a long time in coming. The situation was one which it seemed more and more futile to prolong.’

‘Sure.’

‘The submarine was, of course, bewilderingly full of mechanisms of every sort. And it occurred to me – perhaps merely because my mind was clouded – that by manipulating some of these it might be possible to open a hatch, admit the sea, and have done. The moral issue–’

‘Sure.’

‘Eventually I must have been blundering round in a frenzy, turning a wheel here and tugging at a switch or lever there. But the only result was to set going some powerful engine which made the whole craft vibrate and merely increased our discomfort. And this went on for what seemed an eternity. Eventually there was added a gentle but somehow very sickening rocking motion. It was Miss Halliwell who sensed its possible significance. She tried the hatch by which we had first descended into the interior of the vessel. It was designed to open upwards, so that the pressure of the water had, of course, made it immovable. But this time it opened easily. We were looking at a blue sky.’ Meredith paused. ‘There can be little doubt that I had succeeded in coaxing the machines to achieve what von Schwiebus and his crew had found impossible.’

Joe and John glanced at each other doubtfully. But Mr Drummey gave an impassive nod. ‘Jes’ that,’ he said. ‘What could be more likely? And then you started up all the other motors, hoisted an improvised white ensign, and sailed your prize into port.’