Alistair MacLean - The Golden Rendezvous

The whisky did it. I’ll always swear the whisky did it; as a mental lubricant for rusted-up brains it has no parallel. After five more minutes of lying on my back, staring sightlessly up at the cold-air trunking above my head, I suddenly had it. I had it suddenly, completely and all in a moment, and I knew beyond doubt that I had it right. The radio! The receiver on which the message to the wireless office had been intercepted! There had been no radio. God, only a blind man like myself could have missed it; of course there had been no radio. But there had been something else again. I sat bolt upright with a jerk, Archimedes coming out of his bath, and yelped as a hot blade skewered through the back of my neck.

“Are you subject to these attacks often or do you always carry on like this when you are alone?” A solicitous voice enquired from the doorway. Susan Beresford, dressed in a square-necked white silk dress, was standing in the entrance, her expression half amused, half apprehensive. So complete had been my concentration that I’d never even heard the door open.

“Miss Beresford.” I rubbed my aching neck with my right hand. “What are you doing here? You know passengers are not allowed in the officers’ quarters?”

“No? I understood my father had been up several times in the past few trips talking to you.”

“Your father is not young, female, and unmarried.”

“Pfui!” she stepped into the cabin and closed the door behind her. All at once the smile was no longer on her face. “Will you talk to me, Mr. Carter?”

“Any time,” I said courteously. “But not here…” my voice trailed away. I was changing my mind even as I spoke.

“You see, you’re the only person I can talk to,” she said.

“Yes.” a beautiful girl alone in my cabin and plainly anxious to speak to me and I wasn’t even listening to her. I was figuring out something; it did involve Susan Beresford but only incidentally.

“Oh, do pay attention,” she said angrily.

“All right,” I said resignedly. “I’m paying.”

“You’re paying what?” she demanded.

“Attention.” I reached for my whisky glass. “Cheers!”

“I thought you were forbidden alcohol on duty?”

“I am. What do you want?”

“I want to know why no one will talk to me.” She lifted a hand as I made to speak. “Please don’t be facetious. I’m worried. Something’s terribly wrong, isn’t there? You know I always talk more to the officers than any of the other passengers” — I passed up the pleasure of loosing off a couple of telling shafts — "and now nobody will talk to me. Daddy says I’m imagining it. I’m not. I know I’m not. They won’t talk. And not because of me. I know. They’re all dead scared about something, going about with tight faces and not looking at anyone but looking at them all the time. Something is wrong, isn’t there? Terribly, terribly wrong. And Fourth Officer Dexter he’s missing, Isn’t he?” “What would be wrong, Miss Beresford?”

“Please.” This was something for the books, Susan Beresford pleading with me. She walked across the cabin — with the size of the accommodation old Dexter saw fit to provide for his chief officers that didn’t require more than a couple of steps — and stood in front of me. “Tell me the truth. Three men missing in twenty-four hours — don’t tell me that’s coincidence. And all the officers looking as if they’re going to be shot at dawn.”

“Don’t you think it strange you’re the only person who seems to have noticed anything unusual? How about all the other passengers?”

“The other passengers!” The tone of her voice didn’t say a great deal for the other passengers. “How can they notice anything with all the women either in bed for their afternoon sleep or at the hairdresser’s or in the massage room and all the men sitting around in the telegraph lounge like mourners at a funeral just because the stock exchange machines have broken down? And that’s another thing. Why have those machines broken down? And why is the radio office closed? And why is the Campari going so fast? I went right aft just now to listen to the engines and I know we’ve never gone so fast before.”

She didn’t miss much and that was a fact. I said, “Why come to me?”

“Daddy suggested it.” She hesitated, then half smiled. “He said I was imagining things and that for a person suffering from delusions and a hyperactive imagination he could recommend nothing better than a visit to Chief Officer Carter, who doesn’t know the meaning of either.”

“Your father is wrong.”

“Wrong? You — ah — suffer from delusions?”

“About your imagining things. You aren’t.” I finished my whisky and got to my feet. “Something is wrong, far wrong, Miss Beresford.”

She looked me steadily in the eyes, then said quietly, “Will you tell me what it is? Please?” The cool amusement was now completely absent from both face and voice: a completely different Susan Beresford from the one I’d known, and one I liked very much better than the old one. For the first time, and very late in the day, the thought occurred to me that this might be the real Susan Beresford: when you wear a price ticket marked umpteen million dollars and are travelling in a forest alive with wolves looking for gold and a free meal ticket for life, some sort of shield, some kind of protective device against the wolves, is liable to be very handy indeed, and I had to admit that the air of half mocking amusement which seldom left her was a most effective deterrent.

“Will you tell me, please?” She repeated. She’d come close to me now; the green eyes had started to melt in that weird way they had, and my breathing was all mixed up again. “I think you could trust me, Mr. Carter.” “Yes.” I looked away it took the last of my will power, but I looked away and managed to get my breathing working again, in-out, in-out; it wasn’t too difficult when you got the hang of it. “I think I could trust you, Miss Beresford. I will tell you. But not right away. If you knew why I say that you wouldn’t press me to tell you. Any of the passengers out taking the air or sunbathing?”

“What?” the sudden switch made her blink, but she recovered quickly and gestured to the window. “In this?”

I saw what she meant. The sun had gone, completely, and heavy dark cumulus clouds coming up from the southeast had all but obscured the sky. The sea looked rougher than it had been, but I had the feeling that the temperature would have fallen away. I didn’t like the look of the weather. And I could quite understand why none of the passengers would be on deck. That made things awkward. But there was another way.

“I see what you mean. I promise you I’ll tell you all you want to know this evening” — that was a pretty elastic time limit — "if you in turn promise you won’t tell anyone I’ve admitted anything is wrong — and if you will do something for me.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“This. You know your father is holding some sort of cocktail party for your mother in the drawing room tonight. It’s timed for seven forty-five. Get him to advance it to seven thirty. I want more time before dinner never mind why now. Use any reason you like, but don’t bring me into it. And ask your father to invite old Mr. Cerdan to the party also. Doesn’t matter if he has to take his wheel chair and the two nurses along with him. Get him to the party. Your father’s a man of very considerable powers of persuasion — and I imagine you could persuade your father to do anything. Tell him you feel sorry for the old man, always being left out of things. Tell him anything, only get old man Cerdan to the cocktail party. I can’t tell you how vital that is.”