16 The Saint Overboard Page 22

  As he hurried up the companion, Simon was rapidly knotting his tie behind his neck and stuffing it under his shirt. The auto­matic, already threaded on it by the triggerguard, hung at his collar-bone, where he could reach it in full diving kit so long as the helmet was off.

  Calvieri and his assistant had been out of sight when the Saint struck that one vital blow, and they showed no surprise when he appeared on deck alone. In point of time only a few seconds had elapsed since they stumped up the companion before the Saint followed them; and the helmsman had had a separate message to give to Ivaloff. Probably they thought nothing about it; and the Saint's demeanour was so tractable that it would have seemed quite safe for him to be moving about without a close guard.

  He sat down on the stool and unlaced his shoes. His experience that afternoon had made him familiar with the processes of dressing for the dip, and every second might be precious. As quickly as he could without seeming to be in frantic haste, he tucked the legs of his trousers inside his socks, pulled on the heavy woollen pants, and wriggled into the woollen sweater. They helped him on with the long coarse woollen overstockings which came up to his thighs, and steered his feet into the legs of the diving suit. Calvieri rubbed softsoap on his wrists, and he gripped the sleeve of the dress between his knees and forced his hands through the vulcanised rubber cuffs with the adroitness of a seasoned professional. They slipped on the strong rubber bands to tighten the fit of the wrists; and then, while Calvieri laced and strapped on the heavy-boots, the other man was putting the cushion collar over his head and wrestling the rim of the suit on to the bolts of the breastplate.

  While they were tightening down the wing-nuts around the straps he slipped a cigarette out of the packet which he had put down beside him, and lighted it while they hitched on the lead weights back and front of the corselet. All the time he was lis­tening tensely for the first warning of Vogel's approach; but Calvieri had stepped back from the job before he heard foot­steps and voices on the deck behind him.

  "Alors ... à demain."

  "À demain, m'sieu."

  Simon stood up. He heard the wooden clumping of Baudier climbing down into his dinghy, and then the double steps of Vogel and Arnheim coming along the deck. The hazards were not yet past.

  A complete diving outfit weighs one hundred and eighty pounds, which is not the handiest load to walk and lounge about in on land; but Ivaloff was husky enough, and the Saint had to risk making him seem eccentric. He walked laboriously to the taffrail and leaned on it, smoking and watching the man in the dinghy pull slowly away out of range of the deck lights towards the shore. Behind him he heard the vague sounds of Vogel being encased in his suit, but there was no conversation. On his dip that afternoon, Simon had noticed that Vogel encouraged no unnecessary speech from his crew, and he had been hoping that the rule would still hold good. And once again the bet had come off. The Saint had been sent down before—why should the dress­ers comment on his being sent down again?

  At last he heard the chuff-chuff of the air pump, and the slow thudding tramp of heavy boots behind him; and Calvieri ap­peared beside him with his helmet. He stooped for it to be put on, without turning his head, and waited for the front window to be screwed on before he looked round.

  Then, safely hidden behind the small panel of reflecting plate glass, he turned round to the ladder which had been fitted into sockets on the counter, and saw Vogel following cumbrously after him. And at the same moment a three-hundred-watt sub­marine lamp suspended from the boom was switched on, deluging the after deck and the sea over the stern with light.

  They sank down in the centre of its cone of brilliance. There was the sudden shock of air pressure thumping into the ear­drums, the sudden lifting of the load of the heavy gear, and then the eerie silence and loneliness of the deep. The lamp, lowered into the water after them, came to rest at the same time as they reached the bottom, and hung six feet over their heads, isolating them in its little zone of light. The effect of that night descent was stranger even than the twenty-fathom plunge which the Saint had taken in daylight. The lamp gave more light within its circumscribed radius than he had had in the Chalfont Castle even when the sun was blazing over the surface of the sea; and the water was so clear that they might have been in a tank. The contours of the rocky bottom within the narrow area in which vision was possible were as plain as if they had been laid out under the sun. The Saint could see scattered fronds of weed standing erect and writhing in the stir of imperceptible currents, and a few small surprised pollack darted under the light and hung poised in fishy puzzlement at the unceremonious invasion of their sleep.

  Vogel was already ploughing away towards a huge rounded boulder that was dimly visible on the blurred outskirts of their field of light, and Simon adjusted his escape valve and waded after him. Again he had to adapt himself to the tedious struggle which the water forced upon every movement: it was rather like a nightmare in which invisible tentacles dragged against all his limbs and reduced progress to a snail-like crawl which no effort could hasten. It seemed to take several minutes to cover the few yards which he had to go; and as he got nearer he noticed that Vogel seemed to be trying to wave him away. He turned clumsily aside and swayed up towards the other side of the rock.

  It occurred to him with a sudden clutch of anxiety that the lamp by whose light they were moving might make everything that happened down on the sea floor as plainly visible to the men on the deck of the Falkenberg as it was to him. And then, with his lips twisting in a faint curve of grim and unrelaxed relief, he realised that he had no cause for alarm. The ripples and tiny wavelets scampering across the surface of the water above would break up all details into a confused eddy of indistinguishable shapes. They would hardly be able to see any more than a swirl­ing nimbus of light down in the opaque surge of the deep. Why else would Vogel go down himself with one trusted man to keep the secret of his fantastic treasure-house?

  He saw that Vogel was looking upwards, his helmet tilted back like the face of some weird dumb monster of the sea lifted to a blind pre-historic sky. Simon looked up also, and saw that the grab was coming down through the roof of the tent of light over them. Vogel began to work himself out to meet it, and the Saint did the same. Following what he could divine of Vogel's inten­tion, he helped to drag the great claw over and settle it around the rock by which they had been standing. Then they moved back; and he heard Vogel's voice reverberating in his helmet.

  "All ready. Lift!"

  The wire cables straightened, became taut and rigid as steel bars. A little cloud of disturbed sediment filtered out like smoke from the base of the rock. It was going up, rolling over to follow the diagonal drag. ...

  "Stop!"

  The boulder lurched once, and settled; the hawsers became slack again. Looking down breathlessly through the wispy grey fog that curled sluggishly up around his legs, the Saint saw that where the stone had once rested was now an irregular black oval crater in the uneven floor. At first he could make out no more than the hazy outlines of it, but even then he knew that the shifting of that rock had laid open the last of Kurt Vogel's se­crets, the most amazing Aladdin's cave that the hoards of piracy had ever known.

  3

  Vogel was floundering to the edge of the hole in the awkward slow-motion which was the best that either of them could achieve down there, his arms waving sprawlingly like the feelers of an octopus in an attempt to help himself along. He sank down on his knees and lowered his legs into the pit: there seemed to be a ladder fixed to the rock inside, for presently his feet found the rungs and he began to descend step by step.

  Simon started to follow him, but again Vogel waved him back. He heard the muffled clatter of the telephone.

  "Stay there and guide the cases down to me."

  The Saint hesitated. Down there in that narrow cavern at his feet, beyond any doubt, was Vogel's outlandish strong-room; and down there must lie the stupendous booty for which so much had been risked and suffered—for which thre
e men had already set out on a quest from which they never returned, for which Wes­ley Yule had gone down into the silence and died without know­ing why, for which Loretta and himself had stood under the sentence of death and more than death. Having fought his way to it so far, at such a cost, it was almost as much as he could do to hold himself back from the last step.

  And then he realised that the step could wait. The murky smokiness under his feet was settling down, and he could see Vogel's helmet gleaming below him. The boulder which had just been lifted away was protection enough for the treasure. There would be no more doors to open. . . .

  A vague bulk swaying into the margins of his vision made him turn with a start. The grab had released the boulder and gone up, and now it was descending again with a stack of bullion cases clutched in its giant grip.

  "Steady!" snapped the Saint into his telephone, and heaved himself unwieldily towards it.

  The descent stopped; and he got his hands to the load and pushed it towards the hole. It was hard work against the resist­ance of the water, and he needed all his strength. At last it was in position, and he ventured to give the order for it to go on.

  "Lower slowly."

  The grab descended again, while he strained against it—the Falkenberg was not quite vertically overhead, and the five or six feet which the load had to be held out seemed like a hundred yards. He kept his weight thrusting against it till it was below the lip of the hole, and presently Vogel gave the order to stop. Simon recovered his balance with an effort. He could feel a pric­kle of sweat breaking out over his body, and his vision seemed to have become obscured. He realised that a film of steam had con­densed inside the glass panel of his helmet; and he opened the air cock on the left of his helmet and sucked in a mouthful of water, blowing it out over the glass as Ivaloff had told him to do that afternoon. It ran down into the collar of the dress, and he could see better.

  The claw opened when Vogel gave the word, and presently came up again empty. Simon helped it over the edge of the hole and let it go by. He tried to estimate how much had gone down on its first voyage. Half a million? A million? It was difficult to calculate, but even the roughest guess staggered the imagination. It is one thing to talk airily in such astronomical figures; it is something else again to see them made concrete and tangible, to push and toil against a load of solid wealth which even a million­aire himself might never see. It dawned upon the Saint that he had always been too modest in his ambitions. With all his fame and success, with all the amazing coups which he had engineered and seen blazoned across the front pages of the world's press, he had never touched anything that was not beggared by this prodi­gious plunder of which the annals of loot might never see the like again.

  But he could judge time better than he could judge the value of bar gold. About four minutes, he concluded, was all that went by between the time when the grab vanished empty out of the light and the time when it came sinking down again with the second load. Therefore it would be wise to prepare the setting for the last scene at once.

  Again he toiled and struggled to steer the laden grab over the hole. But this time, as soon as it had gone below his reach, he groped round for Vogel's life-line and drew down a fathom of slack from the hands that held it up on the deck.

  Then he took the keen heavy-bladed diver's knife out of its sheath on his belt.

  He knew exactly what he was doing; but he was without pity. He thought of Professor Yule, with the winch inactive and the oxygen failing, waiting for death in the grey-green darkness of the Hurd Deep, while his voice spoke through the loud speaker in the blessed light and air without fear. He remembered himself standing in the wreck of the Chalfont Castle, waiting with a cold and cynical detachment for the monotonous chuffing of the air driving into his helmet to give place to the last silence in which death would come. He remembered Loretta, and the price for which he had done Vogel's work—a price which she had chosen, he knew now, a different way to pay. And he was without pity. In his own way, in all his buccaneering, he had been just; and it seemed to him that this was justice.

  He began to cut through the fibres of Vogel's life-line.

  Load after load of gold came down, and he had to put his knife away while he fought it over to the hold and held it clear while it went down to Vogel; but in the four-minute intervals between those spasms of back-breaking labour he sawed away at the tough manila with his heart cold and passionless as iron. He cut through Vogel's life-line until only the telephone wires were left intact. Then he cut through his own line till it only hung together by the same slender link. When he had finished, either line could be severed completely with one powerful slash of the knife-blade. It had to be done that way; because while the loud speaker would not tell which line a voice came over, and the telephonic distortion combined with the reverberation inside the helmet would make it practically impossible to identify the voice, the man who held the other ends of the lines would still know which was which when the time came to haul them up.

  Altogether six loads came down, and the Saint's nerves were strained to the uttermost pitch of endurance while he waited for the last two of those loads. Even then, he could still lose everything; he could still die down there and leave Loretta helpless, with the only satisfaction of knowing that Kurt Vogel at least would never gloat over his defeat or her surrender. If the helms­man recovered too soon from the volcanic punch under the jaw ... He rubbed his cold right fist in the palm of his left, hand, wondering. His knuckles were still sore and his wrist still ached from the concussion; he was sure that never in his life had he struck such a blow. And yet, if Fate still had the cards stacked against him . . . He wondered what sort of a bargain he could strike, with Vogel at his mercy down there. . . .

  "That's all."

  It must have been Arnheim's voice. The Saint heard it through a sort of muffling fog for which the acoustics of the helmet could not have been entirely responsible. He saw that the empty grab was coming up out of the pit for the last time. It bumped over the rocky floor, swung clear, and rose up under the steadily blazing lamp. The gold was all down, and only the account remained for settlement.

  The thudding beat of the Saint's pulses which had crept up imperceptibly to a pounding crescendo during those last minutes of nerve-splitting suspense suddenly died down. Only then did he become aware, from the void left by its cessation, that it had ever reached such a height. But his blood ran as cool and smooth as a river of liquid ice as he folded Vogel's telephone wires over his knife-blade and snapped them through with one powerful jerk of his arm.

  Quietly and steadily as if he had been dressing himself in cos­tume for a dance, he brought the end of Vogel's lifeline round his own waist and knotted it in a careful bowline. He spoke into the telephone in a sufficient imitation of the flat rhythm of Vo­gel's accent.

  "Wait a moment."

  He drew down some more of his own life-line and hitched it round a jagged spur of granite above the cut he had made in it, so that it would still be anchored there after he broke the telephone wires.

  The top of Vogel's helmet was coming to the surface as he climbed up the ladder.

  Simon went down on one knee at the edge of the hole. His right hand dabbed round and found a large loose stone, twice the size of his fist. He picked it up.

  "No," he said, still speaking with Vogel's intonation. "You stay here. I have something else for you to do. I shall come down again in a few minutes."

  Vogel's hand came over the top of the hole and clutched for a hold. His head rose above the surface, and he waved the Saint impatiently back to make room for him to clamber out.

  Simon did not move.

  The broken end of Vogel's life-line trailed away from its lash­ing on his helmet, but he did not seem to have noticed it. His head turned up towards the light, and his lips moved in some words which no one would ever hear.

  The Saint stayed where he was.

  Perhaps it was the fact that he received no answer to whatever he had sai
d that started the first wild and ghastly doubt in Vo­gel's mind. Perhaps it was the absolute immobility of the grotesque shape crouching over him. Whatever it may have been, he stopped. And then he brought his helmet slowly nearer to the Saint's, until barely six inches separated their front windows.

  The Saint let him look. It had never been part of his plan that Vogel should be spared that final revelation. For the first time he held up his head and turned it so that the other could get a straight view into his helmet. The light above them reflected into his face from Vogel's upturned casque and filtered through the side panels to outline his features. The effect must still have been dim and shadowy, but at that close range it would still be recog­nisable.

  And Vogel recognised it. His black burning eyes widened into fathomless pools of horror, and the thin bloodless lips drew back from his teeth in a kind of snarl. For the first time the smooth waxen mask was smashed away from his face, and only the snarl of the wolf remained. Then he began to speak. His mouth twisted in the shape of soundless words that no human ears would ever hear. Until he found that there was no answer and no obedience; and one of his hands groped round and found the loose trailing end of his severed line . . .

  God knows what thoughts, what roaring maelstroms of incred­ulous understanding, must have gone thundering through his brain in those infinite seconds. He must have known even then that the death which he had meted out to others had found him in his turn, but he would never know how it had come about. He had been on the peaks of triumph. He had won every point; and this last descent should have been no more than a stereotyped epilogue to a finished history. He had left Simon Templar a pris­oner, outwitted and disarmed and beaten, locked up to await the moment when he chose to remove him forever from the power of interference. And yet the Saint was there, smiling at him with set lips and bleak steel-blue eyes, where Ivaloff should have been. The Saint had come back, not beaten, but free and inescapable. The crew had dressed him and sent him down without a word. That was the last bitter dreg of realisation which he had to ac­cept. The Saint had reversed their weapons. But how it had been done, how the crew had been bribed or intimidated, by what inconceivable alchemy the Saint had turned the tables, remained a riddle that he would never solve.