16 The Saint Overboard Page 19

  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 inscruta­ble. 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 mis­carried.

  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 alterna­tion 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 knowl­edge 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 conse­quences" . . . 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 un­afraid, 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 de­tachment 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 mo­ment 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. ...

  Her eyes widened in a kind of blind horror. Why, she could never have said. She had seen death before, had faced it herself only a little while ago, had lived with it; had stood pale and silent on that same deck while Professor Yule died. But not until then had she felt the same frozen clutch on her heart, the same dumb stab of anguish, the same reckless annihilation of her re­straint. She didn't know what she was doing, didn't think, made no conscious movement; and yet suddenly, somehow, in another instant of time, she was beside Vogel, grasping his wrist and arm, tearing his hand away. She heard someone sobbing: "No! No! Not that!"—and realised in a dazed sort of way that she was hearing her own voice.

  "No! No!"

  "My dear Loretta!"

  He had straightened up, was looking down at her with his hooked waxen face cold and contemptuously critical. She became aware that she was breathing as if she had just run to him from a great distance, that her heart was pounding against her ribs like a deliriously wielded hammer, that there must have been a wild stupidity in her gaze. And she realised at the same time that the winch had stopped again.

  "Why have you done that?" she gasped.

  "Done what?"

  She was shaking his arm unconsciously.

  "Stopped bringing them up."

  "My dear girl!" His tone was bland and patronising. "That is the normal process. When a man has been working for three quarters of an hour at the depth where they have been, his blood becomes saturated with nitrogen. If he was brought up quickly and the pressure was suddenly taken off, the gas wo
uld form bubbles in his blood like it does in champagne when the cork is drawn. He would get a painful attack of diver's paralysis. The pressure has to be relieved gradually-—there is a regular time­table for it. Our divers have been stopped at thirty feet. They will rest there for five minutes; then for ten minutes at twenty feet; then for fifteen minutes——"

  She knew that he was trying to make her feel foolish, but she was too sure of her knowledge to care.

  "That's not all you were doing," she said.

  "What else?"

  "You were going to take one of those airlines off the pump."

  "My dear——"

  "Weren't you?"

  He looked at her impassively, as if he was playing with the possible answers at his disposal, deliberating their probable effect on her rather than their accuracy. She shrugged bitterly.

  "Oh, I know. You don't need to lie. You were going to kill him."

  A faint flicker of expression, the gleam of passionless calculat­ing cruelty which she had seen before, passed over his face.

  "And if I was? How deeply will his death hurt you?"

  "I should be hurt in a way you couldn't understand."

  He waited. She had an uncanny spine-chilling feeling that he was not sane—that he was giving rein to the solitary sadistic megalomania that was branded on all his actions, playing with her like a cat and savouring the lustful pleasure of watching her agony. Searching for his eyes under the heavy shadow of his brows, she suddenly found them devouring her with a weird rigidity that struck her cold. She found herself speaking dis­jointedly, breathlessly again, trying to drown the new horror in a babble of words that she would never be able to utter unless she let them pour blindly out.

  "I know why he went down. I know why he opened that strong-room for you. He wouldn't have done that to save his life —not his own life. He wouldn't have believed you. He tried to tell me that that was why he was going to do it, but couldn't make me believe it. He knew you meant to kill him as soon as it was done. He wasn't afraid. I saw him. I talked to him. He lied to me. He was splendid. But I knew. You offered him something that he could believe. You made him do it for me!"

  "Really, my dear Loretta, this is so dramatic. I must have misunderstood our friend Templar. So he becomes the perfect gentle knight, dying to save a lady's honour——"

  "Yes. I told you that you wouldn't understand."

  He gave a short harsh exhalation of breath that could not have been called a laugh.

  "You little fool! He never did anything of the kind."

  Then she remembered.

  "No. But I told him that I should like to live. He did it to save my life."

  "The perfect knight again!"

  "Something that you could never understand. I know now. That's the truth, isn't it? You made that bargain with him. My life against his—and a little work. Didn't you?"

  He sighed.

  "It would have been such a pity not to give such a classical chivalry its chance," he said.

  The sneer brought the blood to her cheeks. She felt a disgust that was almost petrifying. The mask which he had worn since she had first known him was gone altogether now. The smooth imperturbability of his face was no longer the veneer of impene­trable self-possession—it was the fixed grimace of a demon gloat­ing over its own inhumanity. Now she had seen his eyes. . . .

  "He never had any right to bargain for me," she said, and tried not to let her voice tremble. "I didn't ask him for any sac­rifice—I wouldn't take any. I'm here, and I can make my own bargain. The Saint's done all you wanted him to. Why not let him go?"

  "To come back presently and interfere with me again?"

  "You could make it a condition that he said nothing—that he forgot everything he knew. He'd keep his word."

  "Of course—the perfect knight. . . . How ridiculous you are!"

  "Did you always think that?"

  He stopped short, with his head on one side. Then his cold reptilian hand went up and slowly touched her face.

  "You know what I think of you, my dear. I told you, once. You were trying to deceive me. You tried to destroy me with your beauty, but you would have given me nothing. And yet for you I took risks—I placed myself in fantastic danger—I gam­bled everything—to keep you beside me and see how treacherous you could be. But!"—his hand suddenly dropped on her arm in a grasp so brutal that she almost cried out—"I had my own idea about how treacherous I would allow you to be, and how you would make amends for it later."

  He dragged her up against him and ravished her mouth, briefly, cold-bloodedly. She stood unresisting and still as death until he thrust her away.

  "Now," he said, "you are not in a position to make bargains."

  He stooped over the air-line again. She tore at his hand, and he stood up.

  "If you are going to be a nuisance," he said in his supercilious expiring voice, "I shall have you taken away."

  "You can't do it!" she panted. "You haven't everything you want yet. If you kill him, you could never have it."

  "I have you."

  "Only as a prisoner. You can do what you like with me, I suppose. What you want, you can take by force. If that's all you want——"

  "It will be enough."

  "But I could give . . ."

  "What?"

  He was staring at her, seized with a new stillness. There was a thread of moisture on his thin lips, and the high glaze on his cheekbones shone with a dull white lustre. His eyes squinted slightly, smouldering like dark coals. His soft clammy hands gripped her shoulders.

  "What?" he repeated.

  She could not look at him, or her courage would not be enough. Already she felt denied, shuddering at the dank chill of his touch. She closed her eyes.

  "If you let him go I will stay with you willingly—I will be to you anything that you like."

  4

  Altogether they took over forty minutes to come up—nearly as long as they had spent on the bottom. It was a wearisome business going through the gradual decompression, hanging suspended in the green void through the lengthening pauses, rising a little further and halting for another interregnum of blank inac­tivity. The Saint felt no ill effects from his long submersion other than a growing fatigue, which had become almost over­powering in the last ten minutes when they had been breaking through the glass dome above the stairway. He had never real­ised that the resistance of the water which had to be overcome with every smallest movement could eat up so much strength; fit and strong as he was, he had a dull ache in every limb and a nervous hunger for unhampered movement in all his muscles which made the exasperatingly slow ascent harder to endure than anything that had preceded it. He would have given half the millions which he had uncovered down there for a cigarette, but even that solace was unattainable.

  He realised at the same time that he was lucky to be able to experience discomfort. When he stood back from the open door of the strong-room and announced the completion of his work into the microphone beside his mouth, he had waited for the quick blotting out of all sensation. He did not know exactly how it would come, but he believed that it would be swift and certain. He had done all that Vogel required of him; and, beyond that, he survived only as a potential menace, to be logically obliter­ated as soon as possible, before he could do any further damage. Like Loretta, he felt that it must be infuriating to die, leaving so much unfinished, down there in the lonely dark, with none of the drunken exaltation of battle to give it a persuasive glory; but that was what he had gone down to do. When he still lived, he wondered what could have happened to bring him the reprieve.

  Had Vogel changed his mind? That was more than the Saint could make himself believe. Or had Vogel begun to wonder whether it would be safe to kill him, when he must be presumed to have associates somewhere who knew as much as he knew and knew also where he had gone, who would make inquiries and take action when he didn't come back? The Saint could see practical difficulties in the way of casually bumping himself off which might have mad
e even Kurt Vogel stop to think; and yet he couldn't quite convince himself that Vogel's strategic talents had at last been baffled.

  He was alive without knowing why—without knowing how long that delicious surprise could last, but believing that it could not possibly last for long. And yet the instinct of life is so strong that he was more occupied with wondering how he would turn the reprieve to the most profit. Even when he was working down there on the strong-room door, believing that he had no hope of seeing the light again, that same queer instinct of survival had made him prepare for the impossible chance. Now, when he moved his arm, he could feel a wet discomfort in his sleeve that was more than compensated by the small steel instrument which slithered against his wrist—an instrument which he had not pos­sessed when he left the deck of the Falkenberg, which might yet be worth more to him than all the gold of the Chalfont Cas­tle. . . .

  The water above his head thinned and lightened, became a mere film which broke against his helmet. The weight on his shoulders became real again, and the massive boots dragged at his feet. Then expert hands unlocked the helmet and detached it from the breastplate, and he filled his lungs with the clean sea air and felt the breath of the sea on his face.

  Vogel stood in front of him.

  "Perhaps you were justified in calling my former assistant an amateur," he remarked urbanely. "Judged by your own excep­tional standard, I fear he was not so efficient as I used to think."

  "It's hardly fair to compare anyone with me," murmured the Saint modestly. "And so where do we go after the compliments, Birdie?"