Alistair MacLean - The Golden Rendezvous

I made it to the back of the bar without getting scratched too much and said to the barman, “How’s it going, Louis?”

“Very well, sir,” Louis said stiffly. His bald pate was gleaming with sweat and his hairline moustache twitching nervously. There were irregularities going on and Louis didn’t like irregularities. Then he thawed a bit and said, “They seem to be drinking a fair bit more than usual tonight, sir.”

“Not half as much as they will later on.” I moved to the crystal-laden shelves from where I could see under the back of the bar and said, “You don’t look very comfortable to me.”

“By God, and I’m not!” and indeed there wasn’t much room for the bo’sun to wedge his bulk between the raised deck and the underside of the bar; his knees were up to his chin, but at least he was completely invisible to anyone on the other side of the counter. “Stiff as hell, sir. Never be able to move when the time comes.”

“And the smell of all that liquor driving you round the bend,” I said sympathetically. I wasn’t as cool as I sounded. I had to keep wiping the palms of my hands on the sides of my jacket, but try as I would, I couldn’t seem to get them properly dry. I moved over to the counter again. “A double whisky, Louis. A large double whisky.”

Louis poured the drink and handed it across without a word. I raised it to my lips, lowered it below counter level, and a large hand closed gratefully round it. I said quietly, as if speaking to Louis, “If the captain notices the smell afterwards you can claim it was that careless devil Louis that spilt it over you. I’m taking a walk now, Archie. If everything’s o.k., I’ll be back in five minutes.” “And if not? If you’re wrong?”

“Heaven help me. The old man will feed me to the sharks.” I made my way out from behind the bar and sauntered slowly towards the door. I saw Bullen trying to catch my eye but I ignored him; he was the world’s worst actor. I smiled at Susan Beresford and Tony Carreras, nodded civilly enough to old Cerdan, bowed slightly to the two nurses the thin one, I noticed, had returned to her knitting and she seemed to me to be doing all right and reached the doorway.

Once outside, I dropped all pretence at sauntering. I reached the entrance to the passengers’ accommodation on “A” deck in ten seconds. Halfway down the long central passageway white was sitting in his cubicle. I walked quickly down there, lifted the lid of his desk, and took out the four items lying inside: Colt revolver, torch, screw driver, and master key. I stuffed the Colt into my belt, the torch in one pocket, the screw driver in the other. I looked at White, but he didn’t look at me. He was staring down into one corner of his cubicle as if I didn’t exist. He had his hands clasped tightly together, like one in prayer. I hoped he was praying for me. Even with his hands locked he couldn’t stop them from shaking uncontrollably. I left him without a word and ten seconds later was inside Cerdan’s suite with the door locked behind me. On a sudden instinct I switched on my torch and played the beam round the edges of the door. The door was pale blue against a pale-blue bulkhead. Hanging from the top of the bulkhead, dangling down for a couple of inches over the top of the door, was a pale-blue thread. A broken pale-blue thread: to the people who had put it there, an unmistakable calling card that visitors had been there. I wasn’t worried about that, but I was worried by the fact that it showed that someone was suspicious, very, very suspicious. This might make things very awkward indeed. Maybe we should have announced Dexter’s death.

I passed straight through the nurses’ cabin and the lounge into Cerdan’s cabin. The curtains were drawn, but I left the lights off: light could show through curtains, and if they were as suspicious as I thought, someone might have wondered why I had left so suddenly and taken a walk outside. I hooded the torch to a small pencil beam and played it over the deck head. The cold-air trunking ran fore and aft, and the first louvre was directly above Cerdan’s bed. I didn’t even need the screw driver. I shone the torch through the louvre opening and saw, inside the trunking, something gleaming metallically in the bright spot of light. I reached up two fingers and slowly worked that something metallic down through the louvre. A pair of earphones. I peered into the louvre again. The earphones lead had a plug on the end of it and the plug was fitted into a socket that had been screwed on to the upper wall of the trunking. And the radio office was directly above. I pulled out the plug, rolled the lead round the headphones, and switched off my torch.

White was exactly as I had left him, still vibrating away like a tuning fork. I opened his desk, returned key, screw driver, and torch. The earphones I kept. And the gun.

They were into their third cocktails by the time I returned to the drawing room. I didn’t need to count empty bottles to guess that; the laughter, the animated conversation, the increase in the deciBel ratio was proof enough. Captain Bullen was still chatting away to Cerdan. The tall nurse was still knitting. Tommy Wilson was over by the bar. I rubbed my cheek and he crushed out the cigarette he was holding. I saw him say something to Miguel and Tony Carreras at twenty feet, in that racket, it was impossible to hear a word he said — saw Tony Carreras lift a half-amused, half-questioning eyebrow, then all three of them moved towards the bar.

I joined Captain Bullen and Cerdan. Long speeches weren’t going to help me here, and only a fool would throw away his life by tipping off people like those. “Good evening, Mr. Cerdan,” I said. I pulled my left hand out from under my jacket and tossed the earphones onto his rug-covered lap. “Recognise them?”

Cerdan’s eyes stared wide, then he flung himself forwards and sideways as if to clear his encumbering wheel chair, but old Bullen had been waiting for it and was too quick for him. He hit Cerdan with all the pent-up worry and fury of the past twenty-four hours behind the blow, and Cerdan toppled over the side of his chair and crashed heavily to the carpet.

I didn’t see him fall; I only heard the sound of it. I was too busy looking out for myself. The nurse with the sherry glass in her hand, quick as a cat, flung the contents in my face at the same instant as Bullen hit Cerdan. I flung myself sideways to avoid being blinded, and as I fell I saw the tall, thin nurse flinging her knitting to one side and thrusting her hand deep into the string knitting bag.

With my right hand I managed to tug the Colt clear of my belt before I hit the ground and squeezed the trigger twice. It was my right shoulder that hit the carpet first, just as I fired, and I didn’t really know where the bullets went, nor, for that one nearly blinding instant of agony as the shock of falling was transmitted to my injured neck, did I care; then my head cleared and I saw that the tall nurse was on her feet. Not only on her feet but raised high on her toes, head and shoulders arched sharply forwards, ivory-knuckled hands pressed deep into her midriff; then she swayed forward, in macabre slow-motion action, and crumpled over the fallen Cerdan. The other nurse hadn’t moved from her seat: with Captain Bullen’s Colt only six inches from her face, and his finger pretty white on the trigger, she wasn’t likely to, either.

The reverberations of my heavy Colt, painful and deafening in their intensity in that confined metal-walled space, faded away into a silence that was deathly in more ways than one, and through that silence came a soft highland voice saying gently: “If either of you move I will kill you.”

Carreras senior and junior, who must have had their backs to the bar, were now turned round halfway towards it, staring at the gun in Macdonald’s hand. Miguel Carreras’ face was unrecognisable, his expression changed from that of a smooth, urbane, and highly prosperous businessman into something very ugly indeed. His right hand, as he had whirled round, had come to rest on the bar near a cut-glass decanter.