Horse Under Water

46 Little else to give

Tomas and I sat looking at each other for a long time. When I finally said it I let it come as casual as can be. ‘So when you came out of prison you took a trip to a suburb in Hanover and bought a spade?’

‘I’d have needed more than a spade,’ said Tomas. ‘When I got back there I went to the house where Loveless had buried the “Weiss List”. The whole place was one great twelve-storey block of workers’ flats.’

‘So how did you get it?’

‘You make me laugh,’ said Tomas. I found it difficult to believe. ‘Don’t you realize even now that we have been outsmarted by a man who is cleverer than both of us put together?’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘One man has access to that “Weiss List”, to the only copy that remains in existence. One man went to a lot of trouble to get it and even more to putting it somewhere where only he can get it.’ He paused; after a long silence he said, ‘The papers are inside a German Naval meteorological buoy[33] on the sea bed. To service the buoy one needed to have a radio recall unit which “called” the buoy to the surface by transmitting a radio signal to it.’

‘And that’s what you were trying to do just now.’

‘No,’ said Fernie, ‘that unit that da Cunha gave me was only a listening unit. We heard the buoy on the surface just as Senhor da Cunha heard it and gloated over it every evening. He had given me the listening unit.’ Tomas’s voice went very quiet. ‘He’d tricked me again.’ He looked up at me sharply. ‘It’s back on the bottom of the ocean now!’

I nodded. Tell me about Smith,’ I said.

‘Smith was only one,’ Tomas went on, ‘da Cunha forced a lot of people on the “Weiss List” to send him money or gifts.’

‘But you soon got the idea,’ I supplemented, ‘you told Smith to arrange supplies of morphine so that your little partnership with Kondit would flourish.’

‘It wasn’t hard to guess, I suppose.’ Tomas nodded.

I said, ‘What did da Cunha do with the money?’ There was no reply. I said, ‘Did he finance the Young Europe Movement? Did it all go to present-day Fascist groups?’

Tomas closed his eyes, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m still a believer.’

‘And to finance his ice-melting laboratory experiments?’

‘Like many great men,’ said Tomas, ‘Senhor da Cunha has some childish weaknesses. His ice-melting machine is one of them.’ His eyes were still closed.

Augusto’s voice from the wheelhouse sounded above the beat of the sea. We were nearing the coast.

‘I’ll come up,’ said Tomas. As he said it there was a thump like a heavy hammer being swung against the hull. ‘A piece of flotsam,’ said Tomas. Augusto had brought the throttles back to half-speed. Again there was a thump and a third immediately after. Augusto coughed and then fell down the ladder into the cabin. I caught him. Augusto was limp as he slid to the floor. The front of my suit was soaked in blood. Augusto’s blood.

Tomas and I stood motionless as we processed the possibilities through our brains. I was thinking of nautical mishaps, but Tomas had a more practical bent. He knew the person concerned.

‘It’s Harry Kondit,’ he said. The boat purred gently towards the shore.

‘Where?’ I said.

‘Firing his target rifle from the cliff-top,’ said Tomas. There were two more thumps and now, listening for it, I heard the gun crack a long way away. The floor was slippery with blood.

Tomas was as calm as a Camembert. He said, ‘If we go up to the wheelhouse we get shot. If we stay here the boat heaves itself on to the cliff at Tristos and we drown.’ The boat lurched against the swell.

‘Can we get to the rudder control without going across the deck?’

‘Too slow, in this sort of sea we have to do something quick.’

Without Augusto at the helm the boat was slopping and slipping beam-on to the sea. It was a plywood boat. I imagined it hitting the rocks and changing to firewood at one swipe. Augusto had stuffed a signal flag into his mouth. He bit on it hard instead of screaming through his punctured lung.

Tomas was carrying the little refrigerator across the cabin, and up the four steps. How he lifted it I have no idea. It thumped into the wheelhouse and then Tomas climbed to the bridge, using it as a shield. He pushed it forward and I heard a great echoing clang as one of Harry Kondit’s bullets glanced off the metal. Tomas was lying full-length on the deck by now, with the lowest part of the control wheel in his hand. He pulled it and the boat began to answer. Through the port-hole I could see the rocks. They were very close, and after each great wave the water ran off the jagged fangs like a drooling monster awaiting its prey.

The boat was well into the turn now. I shouted to Tomas to come back in; he yelled, ‘Do you want to go round and round in a bloody circle?’ He stayed where he was. Again there was a slam of metal hitting metal. The door of the refrigerator fell open and coke bottles, ice and smoked salmon came sliding down into the cabin.

As soon as we were round far enough Tomas jammed a footstool into the wheel. He began to crawl back, but he had left it too late. The change of course that had reprieved the boat sentenced Tomas to death. The refrigerator was no longer a shield. H.K. pumped bullet after bullet into him; but with those Zeiss × 4 telescopic sights, one would have been enough.