Джон Макдональд - The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything

On the eighth day after the fire, Charla came calmly aboard. It was mid-morning. She walked into the main lounge and said, “Hello, Joseph.” She sat down. He had jumped to his feet. He looked at her with consternation. She was perhaps fifteen pounds lighter. Her cheeks were hollow. Her eyes looked enormous. Her lovely flaxen hair had been cropped quite short. She wore a cheap little blouse and a cheap little skirt and she carried a big vulgar red purse.

He ran to her, knelt beside her chair and flung his arms around her and sobbed into her neck. “Oh, my poor darling, what has happened to you!”

“How are you, Joseph?” she asked. Her voice had a formless, faraway quality.

“How am I?” he cried. “I am terrible! ” He sprang to his feet, and, pacing back and forth, he described the outrage that had been perpetrated upon him. “They were like tigers! Veritable tigers!” he declared. “And he did it with that devil’s device, the same thing his uncle used upon all of us, but never so — exuberantly. My God, the expense it has been! I still can’t sleep. I keep waking up. In my sleep I see that tattoo.” He knelt beside her again. “We must have that device, Charla. We must have it. That soft fool should have killed us when he had the chance. Listen, my dearest. I have purchased information. He went from here to New York. He is with Bonny Lee Beaumont, the girl who escaped from you. An entertainer. They plan to go to Paris.” He stopped and looked at her closely. She seemed dazed. “Darling, you are not listening!”

She was staring at the paneled wall of the lounge. “Do you know what AWOL means, dear?” she asked.

“How should I know what that means?”

“Absent without official leave. Oh, they were very disturbed, you know. To have thirty-three of them go AWOL all at once, with an official vehicle.” She turned her head and looked mildly at him. “The vehicle was the truck, you see. They were on their way from Port Everglades to Key West. That’s where their destroyer is. Key West.”

Joseph struck himself in the head with his fist. “What are you talking about? Where have you been?”

“Suddenly I was in a truck, with a lot of sailors.”

“How hideous!”

“A destroyer is the smallest seagoing combat ship. It is generally from three hundred to four hundred feet long and displaces from two thousand to three thousand tons. Destroyers are used mainly to screen other ships, to picket certain areas and to escort ships.”

“Charla!”

“Destroyers are long-range, high-speed, hard-hitting ships. For protection they rely on watertight compartments and speed. Sailors call destroyers ‘tin cans’ because of their thin metal hulls.”

He grabbed her and shook her until her teeth chattered, but the moment he released her, the sing-song recital was resumed.

“The most common type of destroyer in the U.S. Navy is known as the 692 Class or ‘long hull,’ developed during World War II. They have two main engine groups of high-pressure steam turbines that total over sixty thousand horsepower. Engines, boilers and other machinery for propulsion occupy nearly three-fourths of their length below the main deck.”

He bent over in front of her and looked into her eyes. He saw for the first time a horrid benignity there, a calmness, a curious smugness — as though all searches were ended, all fires quenched.

“Listen to me, my dear. We shall leave tomorrow. We shall go to Nassau, Charla, and from there we shall fly to Paris. And there we will find this Kirby Winter and we—”

“No, dear,” she said calmly, sweetly.

“What?”

She stood up and yawned and stretched. He noticed that in spite of the way she had leaned down, her color was excellent. She started toward the hatch. “I just came aboard to get some clothes and some money.”

He followed her. “But where are you going?” he pleaded.

She turned and gave him a blank stare. In a tone of voice which indicated she thought it an incomparably stupid question, she said, “Back to Key West, of course.”

“But Charla!”

“They’re waiting for me, dear. Destroyers are armed with torpedoes in tubes on deck, multipurpose five-inch guns, and depth charges.”

She went into the stateroom. He heard her in there, humming. He could not remember the name of the song. It had something to do with anchors. He stood in the doorway. She started to change her clothes. But as soon as she was undressed, Joseph had to turn abruptly away and go to his stateroom, and lie down. When he heard her leaving, he called, “I’ll wait for you in Nassau!”

After she left, he wondered how long it would be before she turned up. He hoped it would be a reasonable length of time — long enough for him to adjust to her brand-new tattoo.

And at the moment Charla was clambering expertly into the waiting gray jeep, Kirby Winter, thirty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic, was lifting a glass of champagne to the angel lips of his white-headed wench and drowning quite happily in her rogue eyes.