Алистер Маклин - The Golden Rendezvous

“A minute, sir. Dr. Marston, Miss Beresford has–”

“I can see, I can see. How in the world did you manage” Close to us now, he broke off and peered at me with his short-sighted eyes. “I would say, John, that you’re in the more immediate need of attention.”

“Me? I’m all right.”

“Oh, you are, are you?” He took Susan by her good arm and led her into the dispensary. He said, over his shoulder: “Seen yourself in a mirror recently?”

I looked in a mirror. I could see his point. Balenciagas weren’t blood-proof. The whole of the left side of my head, face and neck was covered in blood that had soaked through hood and mask, matted in thick dark blood and even the rain hadn’t been able to remove: the rain, if anything, had made it look worse than it really was. It must all have come from Tony Carreras’s bloodstained shirt when I’d carried him up the ladder of number four hold.

“It’ll wash off,” I said to Bullen and the bo’sun. “It’s not mine. That’s from Tony Carreras.”

“Carreras?” Bullen stared at me, then looked at MacDonald. In spite of the evidence in front of his eyes, you could see that he thought I’d gone off my rocker. “What do you mean?”

“I mean what I say. Tony Carreras.” I sat heavily on a, chair and gazed down vacantly at my soaking clothes. Maybe Captain Bullen wasn’t so far wrong: I felt an insane desire to laugh. I knew it was a climbing hysteria that came from weakness, from over-exhaustion, from mounting fever, from expending too much emotion in too short a time, and I had to make a physical effort to fight it down. “I killed him tonight down in number four hold.”

“You’re mad,” Bullen said flatly. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Don’t I?” I looked at him, then away again. “Ask Susan Beresford.”

“Mr. Carter’s telling the truth, sir,” MacDonald said quietly. “My knife, sir? Did you bring it back?”

I nodded, rose wearily, hobbled across to MacDonald’s bed and handed him the knife. I’d had no chance to clean it. The bo’sun said nothing, just handed it to Bullen, who stared down at it for long unspeaking moments.

“I’m sorry, my boy,” he said at length. His voice was husky; “Damnably sorry: But we’ve been worried to death.”

I grinned faintly. It was an effort even to do that. “So was I, sir, so was I.”

“All in your own good time,” Bullen said encouragingly.

“I think Mr. Carter should tell us later, sir,” MacDonald suggested. “He’s got to clean himself up, get those wet clothes off and into bed. If anyone comes–”

“Right, Bo’sun, right.” You could see that even so little talk was exhausting him. “Better hurry, my boy.”

“Yes.” I looked vaguely at the bag I’d brought with me. “I’ve got the ropes, Archie.”

“Let me have them, sir.” He took the bag, pulled out the two coils of rope, pulled the pillow from his lower pillowcase, stuffed the ropes inside and placed them under his top pillow. “Good a place as any, sir. If they really start searching, they’re bound to find it anyway. Now if you’d just be dropping this pillow and bag out the window.…”

I did that, stripped, washed, dried myself as best I could and climbed into bed, just as Marston came into the bay.

“She’s all right, John. Simple fracture. All wrapped up and in her blankets and she’ll be asleep in a minute. Sedatives, you know.”

I nodded. “You did a good job tonight, Doctor. Boy outside is still asleep and I hardly felt a thing in my leg.” It was only half a lie and there was no point in hurting his feelings unnecessarily. I glanced down at my leg. “The splints–”

“I’ll fix them right away.”

He fixed them, not more than half killing me in the process, and while he was doing so I told them what had happened. Or part of what happened. I told them the encounter with Tony Carreras was a result of an attempt to spike the gun on the afterdeck: with old Bullen talking away non-stop in his sleep, any mention of the Twister would not have been clever at all.

At the end of it all, after a heavy silence, Bullen said hopelessly: “It’s finished. It’s all finished. All that work and suffering for nothing. All for nothing.”

It wasn’t finished, it wasn’t going to be finished ever. Not till either Miguel Carreras or myself was finished. If I were a betting man I’d have staked the last cent of my fortune on Carreras.

I didn’t say that to them. I told them instead of the simple plan I had in mind, an unlikely plan concerned with taking over the bridge at gunpoint. But it wasn’t half as hopeless and desperate as the plan I really had in mind. The one I’d tell Archie MacDonald about later. Again I couldn’t tell the old man, for again the chances were heavy that he would have betrayed it in his half delirious muttering under sedation. I hadn’t even liked to mention Tony Carreras: but the blood had had to be explained away.

When I finished, Bullen said in a hoarse whisper: “I’m still the captain of this ship. I will not permit it. Good God, Mister, look at the weather, look at your condition. I will not allow you to throw your life away. I cannot permit it.”

“Thank you, sir. I know what you mean. But you have to permit it. You must. Because if you don’t…”

“What if someone comes into the sick-bay when you’re not here?” he asked helplessly. He’d accepted the inevitable.

“This.” I produced a gun and tossed it to the bo’sun. “This was Tony Carreras’s. There are still seven shots in the magazine.”

“Thank you, sir,” MacDonald said quietly. “I’ll be very careful with those shots.”

“But yourself, man?” Bullen demanded huskily. “How about yourself?”

“Give me back that knife, Archie,” I said.

I slept that night and slept deeply, as deeply, almost, as Tony Carreras: I had neither sedatives nor sleeping pills, exhaustion was the only drug I needed.

Coming awake next morning was a long slow climb from the depths of a bottomless pit. I was climbing in the dark but in the strange way of dreams I wasn’t climbing and it wasn’t dark, some great beast had me in his jaws and was trying to shake the life out of me. A tiger, but no ordinary tiger. A sabre-toothed tiger, the kind that had passed from the surface of the earth a million years ago. So I kept on climbing in the dark and the sabre-toothed tiger kept on shaking me like a terrier shaking a rat and I knew that my only hope was to reach the light above, but I couldn’t see any light. Then, all of a sudden, the light was there, my eyes were open and Miguel Carreras was bending over me and shaking my shoulder with no gentle hand. I would have preferred the sabre-toothed tiger any day.

Marston stood at the other side of the bed, and when he saw I was awake he caught me under the arms and lifted me gently to a sitting position. I did my best to help him but I wasn’t concentrating on it, I was concentrating on the lip-biting and eye-closing so that Carreras couldn’t miss how far through I was. Marston was protesting.

“He shouldn’t be moved, Mr. Carreras, he really shouldn’t be moved. He’s in constant great pain and I repeat that major surgery is essential at the earliest possible moment.” It was about forty years too late now, I supposed, for anyone to point out to Marston that he was a born actor. No question in my mind now but that that was what he should have been: the gain to both the thespian and medical worlds would have been incalculable.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and smiled wanly. “Why don’t you say it outright, Doctor? Amputation is what you mean.”