Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

“Sir?”

“Do you want to come along with me and talk to those people who brought Staniker in?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

Sam unwrapped his package. It was a small, expensive tape recorder, an import from Japan, transistorized, built to operate on nine-volt batteries at a recording and playback speed of one and seven-eighths inches per second. The monitor speaker could be detached to reduce bulk even further. The shop had shown him how to use it. A switch could put it on continuous record, or, in the other position, set it so that it was voice-activated with a dial to adjust the sensitivity. He had purchased extra reels and extra batteries.

He set it up and turned it on. He counted to ten, moved six feet back and counted to ten again, and went over to the door and counted to ten, a third time. He rewound the tape and played it back. Within the cycles-per-second range of the human voice, it had good fidelity, better than it had sounded in the shop.

He saw he had aroused Jonathan’s interest. “What’s that for?”

“I used to do some trial work. They kept telling me I did it just fine. But I couldn’t get to like it. I learned one thing. You think you are listening to everything, but you always miss a little. You catch it when you play it back. Sometimes it’s important.”

“What good is it going to do?”

“It’s a pretty good little machine.”

“I mean what’s the point in talking to those people?”

“They saw Staniker in bad shape. Conscious and in bad shape.”

“So?”

“So maybe they heard something he won’t talk about when he gets his health back.”

“You’re playing games, Sam.”

“How’s that?”

“Maybe to keep busy, go through some motions. What difference does it make how it happened? Maybe Staniker screwed up the details. The only thing that matters is that he thinks he’s the only one who escaped. I guess maybe you think so too. So you want to go thrashing around to find out how it happened. Why? Who cares about how ? There’s just one thing I care about. She’s alive! No matter what Staniker might think, Leila is alive!”

“Easy, boy.”

“God damn it, don’t give me that look of pity! I haven’t flipped. And I am not that kind of sentimental jackass who thinks the virtuous survive and the evil ones die.” He stood up slowly. “And I think — I really think I’m strong enough to endure losing her. It would rack me up for a long time, Sam. But eventually I’d work my way out of it. Listen carefully. I sat in that chair for most of the night. And a lot of today. And I’ve said to myself that she is dead. Leila is dead. There isn’t anything anybody can do about it. Dead and gone and you’ll never see her again. And only a damned fool would think anybody below decks could survive explosion and fire. But something keeps me from really believing it. Almost as if she were standing over there in the corner behind me and shaking her head sadly and wondering how I could be so stupid. You know how she was in the water. Dazed and burned and half-conscious, she’d keep afloat by instinct. Somehow she was thrown clear, I swear it. We were close, Sam. As close as people ever get. It wasn’t kid stuff. We were lovers. For over a year now. And that was good, but it wasn’t the basic part of us. It was just a way to — say something to each other about what we were to each other. If she’s left this world, my heart would be a stone. But it isn’t. But if I don’t find her soon enough, one day, all of a sudden, I’ll know she’s gone.” He sat again, face in his hands, made a single dry sound, a cough like a sob.

Sam Boylston poured a half tumbler of Canadian whisky from the bottle he’d bought in the package store in the lobby. He dropped in two cubes, swirled it, took it over and fitted it into Jonathan’s big hand. “Knock it down,” he ordered.

Jonathan drank half, coughed, finished it, gagged and shuddered and handed the glass back. Sam once again debated telling the boy about the money. It would justify Sam’s interest in finding out just what had happened. Yet it might be the final proof that Leila had died. If somebody had gone after the money, there would be no survivors. If the money was the target, then Staniker was in on it. And Sam knew that one of the rarest traits in the world is the ability to tell a complex lie time after time without slipping somehow.

The boy did not realize that his conviction she was alive was merely a device to protect himself from a blow he was not yet ready to endure. Sam realized it would be quite easy to explain it to the boy and tell him about the money. Irrational reactions had always made him impatient.

“I sound like a nut,” Jonathan said. “I can’t help what I believe.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

Jonathan looked mildly surprised. “Go look for her. Now I know where to look.” He got the chart and opened it up on the bed. “Here is where it happened. Here is where they found Staniker. So Leila had to get carried onto the Bahama Banks to the north of the Joulters. It’s all shallows. There’s supposed to be at least two thousand little hummocks of sand and rock, some with vegetation, that are still out of the water at high tide. I’m going to go to Andros, get some kind of a little boat and — go find her. She wouldn’t panic, you know. She’ll manage to stay alive long enough. Long enough for me to find her. And she looks fragile, but she’s tough. She could endure a lot.”

It was his obvious duty to point out to the boy that such a search was pure fantasy. He had no useful experience with boats and the sea, and no first-hand knowledge of that area. It was pure damned foolishness. And what good was this sort of idiotic hope if in the end it would finally collapse.

As he began to choose his words, he saw himself in the mirrored door of the bath. And he could remember other times, other mirrors, when he began to choose those words which would open the paths of logic for Leila, or for Lydia Jean, or for Boy-Sam. Why in God’s name were the emptiest dreams the very ones they thought most important? They wrote their stupid little melodramas and then were so terribly terribly hurt when you didn’t come on stage and say the lines they’d written for you. Did they want humoring? Did they want accomplices in utter sappiness to make themselves more secure in delusion?

So this time, he thought, instead of turning off the stage lights and dropping the curtain, I’ll play it their way. He turned toward Jonathan and said, “If you say that’s where she is, then that’s where she is. And the more help I give you, the sooner you’ll find her.”

“I... I guess that’s right, sir.”

“I’ll pay the shot on leasing a decent boat with a crew who know those waters. If the boat doesn’t draw much over three feet, she can thread around through the channels. And you can use a dinghy with a kicker for shallower work. Can you handle it, or will it take both of us?”

“I can handle it. Is it okay if I see what I can do right now about lining up a boat?”

“Sooner the better.”

The moment the boy left, Sam Boylston felt irritated at himself. Humoring them involved a curious kind of weakness, and created an uncomfortable obligation. Once you started the game, you had to keep on playing it. And it was a game which could bring you nothing.

Now, with his visit to the Barths and the Hilgers aboard the Docksie III, he was beginning a game more to his liking. It would have an ending, and in the ending there would be a hard and merciless satisfaction. After that would come time to mourn the sister lost. But was not his game as pointless as Jonathan’s, actually? That fragment of insight jarred him, and he thrust it aside. Delicate little philosophical comparisons were good parlor games for people like — Lyd, Leila and Jonathan. Any man who went around inventing doubts and reservations was emasculating himself. Neither compulsion, his or Jonathan’s, would bring Leila back. But his might well keep someone from profiting through the loss of her. When a man released his clasp They snatched everything from him forever.