Saint Overboard (31 page)

“Can you hear me?”

It was Vogel’s voice, reverberating
metallically through the
telephone.

“Okay,” answered the Saint
mechanically, and heard his own
voice booming hollowly in his ears.

Ivaloff beckoned to him; and he stood up and walked clumsily
to the stern. A section of the taffrail had been
removed to give
them a clear passage,
and a sort of flat cradle had been slung
from the end of the boom from which the bathystol had been
lowered. They stepped on to it and grasped the
ropes, and in
another moment they were swinging clear of the deck and
com
ing down over the water.

Taking his last look round as they went down, Simon caught
sight of the outboard coming back, a speck
creeping over the sea
from the north-west; and he watched it with an
arctic stillness in
his eyes. So, doubtless,
the lighthouse had been dealt with, and two more innocent men had gone down
perplexedly into the
shadows, not
knowing why they died. Before long, probably, he
would be able to tell them… .

Then the water closed over his window, and,
as it closed,
seemed to change startlingly from pale limpid blue to
green. In
an instant all the light and warmth of the world were
blotted
out, leaving nothing but that dim emerald phosphorescence. Looking up, he
could see the surface of the water like a ceiling
of liquid glass
rolling and wrinkling in long slow undulations, but
none of the crisp warm
sparkle which played over it under the
sun came through into the weird
viridescent gloaming through
which they were
sinking down. Up over his head he could see the
keel of the
Falkenberg
glued in bizarre truncation to that fluid
awning,
the outlines growing vaguer and darker as it receded.

They were sinking through deeper and deeper
shades of green
into an olive-green semi-darkness. There was a thin
slight singing in his ears, an impression of deafness: he swallowed, closing
his nasal passages, exactly as he would have done in coming down in
an
aeroplane from a height, and his ear-drums plopped back to
normal. A
long spar rose out of the green gloom to meet them,
and he realised
suddenly that it was a mast: he looked down and
saw the dim shapes of
the funnels rising after it, slipping
by
…
the white
paintwork of the upper decks.

The grating on which they stood jarred against
the rail of
the promenade deck, and their descent ceased. Ivaloff
was clam
bering down over the rail, and Simon followed him. In
spite of
all the weight of his gear, he felt curiously light and
buoyant—
almost uncomfortably so. Each time he moved he felt as if
his
whole body might rise up and float airily away.

“Unscrew your valve.”

Ivaloff’s gruff voice cracked in his helmet,
and he realised
that the telephone wiring connected them together as well
as keeping them in communication with the
Falkenberg.
Simon
obeyed the
instruction, and felt the pressure of water creeping
up his chest as the
suit deflated, until Ivaloff tapped on his hel
met and told him to
stop.

The feeling of excessive buoyancy
disappeared with the reduc
tion of the air. As they moved on, he found
that the weights
with which he was loaded just balanced the buoyancy of his
body, so that he
was not conscious of walking under a load; and
the air inside his helmet was just sufficient to relieve his shoul
ders
of the burden of the heavy corselet. Overcoming the resis
tance of the water itself was the only labour of
movement, and
that was rather like
wading through treacle.

In that ghostly and fatiguing slow-motion they
went down through the ship to the strong-room. It was indescribably eerie,
an
unforgettable experience, to trudge down the carpeted main
stairway in
that dark green twilight, and see tiny fish flitting
between the balusters
and sea-urchins creeping over a chan
delier; to pick his way over scattered
relics of tragedy on
the floor, and see queer creatures of the sea
scuttle and crawl
and rocket away as his feet disturbed them; to stand in
front of
the strong-room door, presently, and see a limpet firmly
planted
beside the lock. To feel the traces of green scum on the door
under his
finger-tips, and remember that a hundred and twenty
feet of water was piled up between him and
the frontiers of hu
man life. To see the
uncouth shape of Ivaloff looming beside
him, and realise that he was its twin brother—a weird, lumber
ing,
glassy-eyed, cowled monster moving at the dictation of Si
mon Templar’s brain… .

The Saint knelt down and opened his kit of
tools, and spoke
into the telephone transmitter:

“I’m starting work.”

Vogel was reclining in a deck chair beside
the loud speaker,
studying his finger-nails. He gave no answer. The
slanting rays of
the sun left his eyes in deep shadow and laid chalky
high-lights
on his cheekbones: his face was utterly sphinx-like and
inscruta
ble. Perhaps he showed neither anxiety nor impatience
because
he felt none.

Arnheim had returned, clambering up from the
dinghy like an ungainly bloated frog; and the three hard-faced seamen with him
had hauled
it up on the davits and brought it inboard before
moving aft to join the knot of men at the
taffrail.

Vogel had looked up briefly at his
lieutenant.

“You had no trouble?”

“None.”

“Good.”

And he had gone back to the idle study of his finger-nails,
breathing gently on them and rubbing them slowly on
the palm
of the opposite hand, while
Arnheim rubbed a handkerchief
round
the inside of his collar and puffed away to a chair in the
background. The single question which Vogel had
asked had
hardly been a question at
all, it had been more of a statement
challenging
contradiction; his acceptance of the reply had been
simply an expression of satisfaction that the
statement was not contested. There was no suggestion of praise in it. His
orders had been given, and there was no reason why they should have mis
carried.

Loretta stared down into the half-translucent
water and felt as
if
she was watching the inexorable march of reality turn into the cold
deliberateness of nightmare. Down there in the sunless liquid silence under
her eyes, under the long measured roll of that
great reach of water, men were living and moving, incredibly,
unnaturally, linked with the life-giving air by
nothing but those
fragile filaments
of rubber hose which snaked over the stern; the
Saint’s strong lean hands, whitened with the cold and pressure,
were moving deftly towards the accomplishment of
their most
fantastic crime. Working
with skilled sure touches to lay open
the most fabulous store of plunder
that could ever have come in
the path even
of his amazing career—while his life stood helpless
at the mercy of the two men who bent in monotonous
alterna
tion at the handles of the
air compressor, and waited on the
whim
of the impassive hooknosed man who was polishing his
nails in the deck chair. Working with the almost
certain knowl
edge that his claim to
life would run out at the moment when his errand was completed.

She knew… . What had she told him, once?
“To do your
job, to keep your mouth shut, and to take the conse
quences”
… And in her imagination she could see him
now, even while he was
working towards death, his blue eyes
alert and absorbed, the gay fighting
mouth sardonic and un
afraid, as it had been while they talked so
quietly and lightly in
the cabin… . She could smile, in the same
way that he had
smiled goodbye to her—a faint half-derisive half-wistful
tug at
the lips
that wrote its own saga of courage and mocked it at the
same time… .

She knew he would open the strong-room; knew that he had
made his choice and that he would go through with
it. He would
never hesitate or make
excuses.

A kind of numbness had settled on her brain, an insensibility
that was a taut suspension of the act of living
rather than a dull anaesthesia. She had to look at her watch to pin down the
leaden
drag of time in bald terms of
minutes and seconds. Until his
voice
came through the loud speaker again to announce the
fulfilment of his
bargain, the whole universe stood still. The
Falkenberg
lifted and
settled in the stagnant swell, the two
automatons
at the air-pump bent rhymically at the wheels. Vogel
rubbed his nails gently on his palms, the sun
climbed fractionally
down the western sky; but within her and all around
her there
seemed to be a crushing stillness,
an unbearable quiet.

It was almost impossible to believe that only
forty minutes
went by before the Saint’s voice came again through the
loud
speaker, ending the silence and the suspense with one cool steady
sentence:
“The
strong-room is open.”
 

3

Arnheim jumped as if he had been prodded, and
got up to
come waddling over. Vogel only stopped polishing his
nails, and turned a switch in the telephone connection box beside him. His calm
check-up went back over the line.

“Everything is all right, Ivaloff?”

“Yes. The door is open. The gold is
here.”

“What do you want us to send
down?”

“It will take a long time to move—there
is a great deal to
carry. Wait.
…”

The loud speaker was silent. One could imagine
the man
twenty fathoms down, leaning against the water, working around
in
laboured exploration. Then the guttural voice spoke again.

“The strong-room is close to the main stairway. Above the
stairway there is a glass dome. We can go up on
deck again and
break through the
glass, and you can send down the grab. That
way, it will not be so long.
But we cannot stay down here more
than a few
minutes. We have been here three quarters of an hour
already, which is too long for this depth.”

Vogel considered this for a moment.

“Break down the glass first, and then we
will bring you up,” he
directed, and turned to the men who were
standing around by
the
winch. “Calvieri—Orbel—you will get ready to go down as
soon as these two come up. Grondin, you will attend
to the
grab——
”

For some minutes he was issuing detailed
orders, allotting
duties in his cold curt voice with impersonal efficiency.
He shook
off the lassitude in which he had been waiting without
losing a fraction of the dispassionate calm which laid its terrifying de
tachment on
everything he did. He became a mere organising
brain, motionless and
almost disembodied himself, lashing the
cogs of his machine
to disciplined movement.

And as he finished, Ivaloff’s voice came
through again.

“We have made a large enough opening in
the dome. Now we
should come up.”

Vogel nodded, and a man stepped to the
controls of the winch. And at last Vogel got up.

He got up, straightening his trousers and
settling his jacket
with the languid finickiness of a man who has nothing much
to
do and nothing of importance on his mind. And as casually and
expressionlessly as the same
man might have wandered towards
an ashtray to
dispose of an unconsidered cigarette-end, he
strolled over the yard or two that separated him from the air
pump, and bent over one of the rubber tubes.

His approach was so placid and unemotional
that for a mo
ment even Loretta, with her eyes riveted mutely on him,
could
not quite believe what she was seeing. Only for a moment she
stared at
him, wondering, unbelieving. And then, beyond any
doubt, she knew.
…