We sat on the cockpit deck under the shade of an awning he had rigged. The sea breeze moved by. We kept our voices down.
I was aware of his careful and intense and questioning stare. He said at last, “You have the look of having felt a stale cold breath on the back of the neck, Travis. The jocular detachment, that look of the bemused spectator has been compromised.”
“It got very iffy. It got very close in all respects. Somebody who gives you just one small poor chance is very good indeed, and the him or me rationalization is never totally satisfactory. By dawn’s early light I buried him on a beach, in soft sand, using a hunk of driftwood, and it keeps bothering me that I buried him face down. It makes no difference to him. But I keep remembering the look of the back of his neck. The one called Griff. And I am not ready to talk about it. Not for a while. Some night, Meyer, in the right mood, I’ll tell you.” “Tell me just one thing now. Will anybody come looking for you?”
“No. He thought it was going to be the other way around. So he made certain nobody would be looking for him. He set it up very nicely. Only the names were changed. And nobody else in the group knows of me or has seen me.”
“And there is still the interesting lure of the money,
“I brought that back.”
“So that’s the end of it?” The smile on that massive and ugly face was all too knowing.
“That’s what I tried to talk myself into.”
“But then it would keep going on, wouldn’t it?”
“And the shape of it is just about what we guessed, Meyer. I keep picking up more details. And, as a reasonable guess, I think they’ve murdered between thirty and forty men in the past two years. And it would have been going on before that, before Vangie was recruited.”
“I knew the figures would be high.”
He surprised me. “How could you know that?”
“We estimated the total take. If any single venture netted a really large amount, there would be people tracking down every tiny clue. Whores in hot pursuit of money in six figures would be tireless, and able to pay well for expert assistance. But ten or fifteen or twenty thousand… there would be less furor, and a much longer list of potential victims. Of course you have one curious problem. You’re not so naive as to appoint yourself an angel of vengeance, burying them in the soft sand, face down, one at a time.”
“I have to crack one open. So wide open it will stay open, and then I have to hand it over to a cop bright enough to see what he’s got, and I have to do it in such a way that I can melt back into the woodwork. I have two candidates. And a little thought or two for each of them. But let me use you on the one problem that baffles me.
“Only one?”
“Only one at a time, Meyer.”
At twenty minutes to five we arrived at dockside in all the confusions of sailing. They were obviously going to have a fairly full ship for the transatlantic run. The literature I had picked up at a travel agency on the way over said the capacity was three hundred plus. Passengers were boarding. They had three gangplanks out. Crew only. Passengers only. Visitors only. We went up the visitors’ gangplank. The gate onto the deck was narrow. We were each given a rather dogeared blue card. One crew member gave us our cards and as he did so, he chanted the new head count in Italian, and the crew member standing behind him marked it on a clipboard. We did not go below. We performed little experiments. We tried to leave by the passenger gangplank and were politely turned back. Meyer asked if he could leave the ship for a few minutes and keep his blue card and return. Ah, no, sir. It is so easy, just geeve it now, we geeve it back, eh?