Десмонд Бэгли - The Vivero Letter

‘That’s water under the bridge,’ I said. ‘I’m as much to blame as anyone.’ Rudetsky was hovering solicitously behind Katherine. ‘Joe, I want his gun. I don’t trust the bastard with it.’

‘It’s in the box by the bed,’ said Katherine weakly.

Rudetsky made a sign with his hand. ‘Go get it, Smitty.’ He looked down at Halstead and stirred him with his foot. ‘You sure got him good. He’s going to have one hell of a headache.’

Katherine choked over the whisky. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

She fingered the side of her jaw tenderly. ‘He’s insane,’ she whispered. ‘He’s gone mad.’

I stood up and took Rudetsky on one side. ‘Better get Halstead back into his hut. And if it can be locked, lock it. We have enough on our plate without having to handle that lunatic.’

His grin was pure enjoyment. ‘I’d have done the same long ago but I thought Fallon would can me. Oh, boy, but you tapped him good!’

I said, ‘You can have a crack at him any time you like, and you don’t have to worry about being fired. It’s open season on Halstead now; I’ve stopped being so bloody tolerant.’

Rudetsky and Fowler bent to pick up Halstead, who was showing signs of coming round. They got him to his feet and he looked at me blankly with glazed eyes, showing no sign of recognition, then Fowler pushed him out of the hut.

I turned to Katherine. ‘How are you doing?’

She gave me a wry and lop-sided smile. ‘As well as might be expected,’ she said gently. ‘After a public brawl with my husband.’ She looked down at the table. ‘He’s changed so much.’

‘He’ll change a lot more if he causes trouble,’ I said. ‘And not in a way he likes. His credit’s run out Katherine, and you can’t do anything more for him. You can’t be a barrier between him and the rest of the world any more.’

‘I know,’ she said sombrely.

There was a shout from outside the hut and I spun around to the doorway. A single shot sounded in the distance, to be followed by a fusillade of rifle fire, a ragged pattering of shots. I left the hut at a dead run and made for the outskirts of the camp, to be waved down by Rudetsky who was sheltering behind a hut.

I went forward at a crouch and joined him. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘Halstead made a break for it,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘He ran for the forest and we tried to follow him. Then they opened up on us.’

‘What about Halstead? Did they fire on him?’

‘I reckon he’s dead,’ said Rudetsky. ‘I saw him go down as he reached the trees.’

There was a muffled sound from behind and I turned to see Katherine. ‘Get back to the hut,’ I said angrily. ‘It’s dangerous here.’

Two big tears squeezed from beneath her eyelids and rolled down her cheek as she turned away, and there was a dispirited droop to her shoulders.

I waited there at the edge of the camp for a long time but nothing happened; no more shots nor even the sound or sight of a living thing. Just the vivid green of the forest beyond the cleared ground of the city of Uaxuanoc.

Everything we did was under observation — that I knew. So I had a problem. We could take all the valuables down to the cenote quite openly and sink them, or we could be underhand about it and do it in secret. On balance, I thought that secrecy was the best bet because if we did it openly Gatt might get worried and jump us immediately with the job only begun. There was nothing to stop him.

That meant that all the packages Fallon had made up had to be broken open and the contents smuggled down piece by piece to my hut next to the cenote . Probably it would have been best to have just dumped the stuff as I had first suggested, but it seemed a pity to do that when the cave was available, so we used the cave. That meant going down there while Rudetsky lowered the loot, and that was something better left for after nightfall when prying eyes would be blinded.

For the rest of the daylight hours we contrived to give the camp an appearance of normality. There was a fair amount of coming and going between the huts and gradually all the precious objects were accumulated on the floor of my hut, where Rudetsky filled up the metal baskets we had used for bringing them from the bottom of the cenote in the first place.

Also on the agenda was the fortification of the hut, another task that would have to wait until after darkness fell, but Smith and Fowler wandered about the camp, unobtrusively selecting materials for the job and piling them in places where they could be got at easily at night. Those few hours seemed to stretch out indefinitely, but at last the sun set in a red haze that looked like dried blood.

We got busy. Smith and Fowler brought in their baulks of timber which were to be used to make the hut a bit more bullet-proof and began to hammer them in position. Rudetsky had organized some big air bottles and we hauled the raft into the side and loaded them aboard. It was tricky work because they were heavy and we were working in the dark. We also loaded all the treasure on board the raft, then Katherine and I went down.

The cave was just as we had left it and the air was good. I rose up inside, switched on the internal light I had installed and switched off my own light. There was a broad ledge above water-level on which the loot could be stored, and I sat on it and helped Katherine from the water. ‘There’s plenty of room to stash the stuff here,’ I said.

She nodded without much interest, and said, ‘I’m sorry Paul caused all this trouble, Jemmy. You warned me, but I was stupid about it.’

‘What made you change your mind?’

She hesitated. ‘I started to think — at last. I began to ask myself questions about Paul. It was something you said that started it. You asked me what it was I had for Paul — love or loyalty. You called it misplaced loyalty. It didn’t take me long to find the answer. The trouble is that Paul hasn’t — wasn’t — always like this. Do you think he’s dead?’

‘I don’t know; I wasn’t there when it happened. Rudetsky thinks he is. But he may have survived. What will you do if he has?’

She laughed tremulously. ‘What a question to ask at a time like this! Do you think that what we’re doing here will do any good?’ She waved her hand at the damp walls of the cave. ‘Getting rid of what Gatt wants?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It depends on whether we can talk to Gatt. If I can point out that he hasn’t a hope in hell of getting the stuff, then he might be amenable to a deal. I can’t see him killing six or seven people for nothing — not unless he’s a crazy-mad killer, and I don’t think he’s that’

‘Not getting what he wants might send him crazy-mad.’

‘Yes,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘He’ll be bloody annoyed. He’ll need careful handling.’

‘If we get out of this,’ she said, ‘I’m going to divorce Paul. I can’t live with him now. I’ll get a Mexican divorce — it will be valid anywhere because we were married in Mexico.’

I thought about that for a bit, then said, ‘I’ll look you up. Would you mind that?’

‘No, Jemmy; I wouldn’t mind.’ She sighed. ‘Perhaps we can begin again with a fresh start.’

‘Fresh starts don’t come so easily,’ I said sombrely. ‘We’ll never forget any of this, Katherine — never!’ I prepared to put on my mask. ‘Come on; Joe will be wondering what has gone wrong.’

We swam out of the cave and began the long job of transferring the treasure from the basket which Rudetsky had lowered into the cave. Basket after basket of the damned stuff came down, and it took us a long time, but finally it was all put away. We had been under for two hours but had never gone below sixty-five feet so the decompression time was just under an hour. Joe lowered the hose which dangled alongside the shot line and we coupled the two valves at the end to the demand valves on our scuba gear. During the hour it took us to go up he fed us air from the big bottles on the raft instead of using the air compressor which would have made too much noise.