Дональд Уэстлейк - Forever and a Death

“He wasn’t much help, I must say that,” Kristin Baldur commented.

Captain Cousseran, with obvious professional courtesy toward another mariner, said, “I’m sure he and his crew did everything they could.”

“No,” she said, “I mean when we talked to him.”

Jerry said, “When you talked to him?”

Michael Baldur explained, “The Mallory came into Brisbane early this morning. We flew up there to speak with the captain.”

“As much as we could,” his wife said. “He has practically no English at all. We could barely understand a word he said, and I’m not sure he ever grasped what we were trying to say.”

Jerry said, “But—” then left the thought unexpressed, bewildered by it. His memory of Captain Zhang’s voice on the loud-hailer was still all too clear: “ I am asked to inform you... ”

Why had Captain Zhang pretended not to understand or speak English? Had he been embarrassed in the presence of Kim’s parents, made uncomfortable by their grief? (Though in fact they were being very restrained, all in all.) Had it actually not been Captain Zhang who’d talked to them by radio from the Mallory , but some other crewman, or somebody connected to Richard Curtis? Or did Captain Zhang have something to hide, and that’s why he’d evaded the Baldurs? But what could he have to hide?

Before Jerry could respond, Captain Cousseran did, saying, “I never had trouble with Captain Zhang’s English, on the radio.”

“Well,” Kristin Baldur said, “if you can communicate with him, that’s wonderful. There are questions... well, we just wanted to know , know what happened, what it was like, and... even what the search was like. Captain Cousseran, if you and Captain Zhang can speak together, and understand each other, would you ask him that? How much did they look for Kim? How long did they spend on it? What made them give up when they did?”

Maybe Captain Cousseran had belatedly realized, like Jerry, that there must be something odd going on here, with Captain Zhang suddenly bereft of English. He looked uncomfortable as he said, “I’m not sure how to get in touch with him, I have no idea where Mallory is by now, or where it’s going.”

“It’s in Brisbane,” Michael Baldur said. “It will stay there at least two weeks.”

Captain Cousseran didn’t look happy at that news. He said, “Are you certain? The owner can call for the ship at any—”

“Not now,” Michael Baldur told him. “It lost one of its launches on the way back. Apparently, some crewman did a very poor job when it was hauled back aboard after the search, and in the night it dropped off and was lost.”

Captain Cousseran frowned. “That’s very unlikely,” he said.

“But that’s what happened,” Michael Baldur said. “That’s what we were told in Brisbane. What with one thing and another. Captain, I must say I got the impression that’s a very sloppily run ship. In any event, the harbormaster in Brisbane won’t give the Mallory permission to sail until it has all its lifeboats, and it will be two weeks before they can replace that one and adapt it to the ship.”

Jerry said, “I’ll talk to him.”

They all looked at him in surprise. Michael Baldur said, “Talk to who? Captain Zhang?”

There’s something wrong here, Jerry thought. I have no idea what it is, and I don’t dare even to think it might mean that somehow Kim is still alive, it almost certainly doesn’t mean that at all, but something is definitely wrong. Captain Zhang loses his command of English. The Mallory loses one of its launches. There’s something wrong.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll leave in the morning, go up to Brisbane, talk with Captain Zhang.”

“I wish you the best of luck,” Kristin Baldur told him, as though to say she thought he’d need it.

On the drive south out of Brisbane on Pacific Highway, Manville and Kim discussed what they should do. He hadn’t managed yet to get in touch with either of his friends, the one in San Francisco or the one in Houston. The test at Kanowit Island had been on Tuesday, this was Thursday, and he needed to reach one or both of those guys before the weekend, which meant by noon, their times, tomorrow.

The question was, what would he say to them? What position was he in now, and what position was Kim in? Richard Curtis had clearly found himself in an escalating situation beyond what he’d originally intended, but where was he now? He’d gone from the simple hope that the Planetwatch diver wouldn’t survive, so as to free himself from Planetwatch’s — Jerry Diedrich’s — intense surveyal, on to acquiescence in a kind of passive killing of the diver, on to an active scheme to murder her, on to a feeling that Manville had to be murdered as well, because of Curtis’s own indiscretion. But what was his situation now? Had the threat from Curtis receded, or was it still as strong?

The original idea, that Kim should die in order to render Diedrich harmless, was no longer workable. She was off the boat, she was known by at least a few neutral observers to be alive, the scheme could not play out. On the other hand, though Manville and Kim could report they’d been attacked by Curtis’s people, they had no way to prove it. And although they knew Curtis was up to something illegal and dangerous, they didn’t know what it was — just something involving a soliton wave, and good luck explaining that to some policeman in a Brisbane precinct house. So, at this point, did Curtis consider them a peril, or merely a nuisance, or nothing at all?

Before they showed themselves to anyone, official or otherwise, they had to know how much danger they were in. They’d been lucky to escape from that first batch of men Curtis sent after them, but they weren’t apt to be that lucky again, and Curtis could hire all the men he needed.

So once they found a safe hiding place, they both had some telephoning to do, discreetly. Manville would try again to reach either Tom in San Francisco or Gary in Houston, while Kim wanted to talk to Jerry Diedrich, to let him know what had happened and to find out if he had any idea what Curtis’s scheme might be. First, though, to hide out, in a crowd.

The little red car Manville had rented was an Australian-made British-designed Ford, with the steering wheel on the right, because Australia follows the British system of driving on the left. “I feel as though I’m driving,” Kim said at one point, in the passenger seat beside him. “I keep pressing down on the brake, and there isn’t one.”

Barely half an hour south of Brisbane, the pastel world of vacationland began. Men and women and children dressed in pink and topaz and aquamarine strolled in couples or ricocheting family groups past buildings painted in pink and topaz and aquamarine. Sunburned overweight undressed bodies were everywhere. A glittery sheen of grease and excitement vibrated in the warm humid air. Then at Coomera, the northern rim of the Gold Coast, less than forty miles south of Brisbane, the crowds grew even denser, tourist hordes packed hip to hip and camera bag to camera bag. “One thing for sure,” Manville said, “nobody will find us here.”

Expensive high-rise hotels fronted the beach along Cavill Avenue, the main drag, but a block or two back from the sea were the economy motels. While Kim waited in the car, Manville checked into one of these. The room was clean and anonymous, with one bed along each side wall, and except for the cute paintings of koala bears over the beds could have been anywhere in the world.

Kim went straight to the smaller bed, a single along the right wall. “I’m starving,” she announced, and lay on her back atop the bedspread. “I’ll just rest for a minute, and then we’ll go get something to eat.” And fell sound asleep.