Quiller Barracuda

Chapter 5: LANGOUSTE

She was below me, looking upwards through her mask.

Two of them had worked all through the night.

Down, with her hands beckoning. I pretended not to see. Looking at all the sea fans, very pretty, so forth.

They'd gone through the flat with counter-snoop equipment and hadn't found a thing, nothing of his, anyway, only the bug that Monck had ordered put in there without telling me, but I'd stopped worrying about that by now because this wasn't going to be like other missions; this was a Classification One they'd got on the board and they were going to run me like a rat through a maze and I couldn't expect any manners.

Down, she was saying with her hands, encouraging me, nodding slowly, her light hair streaming in the current, so I tilted and went down to where she was waiting just above the sand, four atmospheres on the gauge. Okay! with her thumbs up. I made a bit of token fuss with the faceplate and then nodded yes, okay.

I've never seen Ferris move so fast, though he didn't seem to hurry: he just got a lot more done, calling people out of the woodwork and signalling London and Monck, telling me to get to the Cedar Grove on South River Drive and make certain I was clean when I got there; my hotel was blown and Ferris had got my things collected and sent to the new place.

This morning he'd used every trick in the book and got hold of Proctor's phone bills for the last three months and we'd gone through them and the most frequent local number we'd turned up had been called in the period of August 3rd to 19th and it was hers, Kim Harvester's, the woman drifting beside me with her long greenish eyes watching me through her mask.

Okay, so let's go on up now, her hands palming upwards and her flippers beginning to stroke, the stripes on her suit rippling in the underwater light and her hair drawn straight and then billowing as she slowed, waiting for me, then drawn straight again like pale seaweed in the current.

They'd known he'd gone for good because the peep Ferris had stationed in the building opposite had seen him pile a lot of his stuff into the seven-year-old soft-top Chevrolet in the street below; he'd even taken the stereo and the rowing-machine.

Up we go. Feel okay? Bubbles rising against the flat white surface.

They should have known the man they were handling. He'd seen the tag in the Toyota three cars behind him along Biscayne Boulevard and stopped at an Arco station to make a phone-call and then got back into the Chewy and driven on, and the police car had moved in before they'd gone three blocks and put the tag through the breathalyser while the Chewy had kept on going.

Sunlight bursting against the eyes, the body heavy again.

'You did very well,' she said when she'd pulled off her mask.

'Thank you.'

I'd told Ferris I wanted him to play the tape they'd made when I'd been in the flat talking to Proctor and do it now: I didn't want London to think I'd frightened him off with anything I'd said. Ferris had cleared me, called it a model exercise.

'How did you find me?' she wanted to know; we were stripping off our wet suits on the quay, where she'd got a shed full of equipment and lobster pots and some deep-sea fishing gear. 'I'm a bit out of the way.'

'Someone I was talking to yesterday said you were good. When did you leave the old country?'

'Years ago.' Shaking out her wet hair, 'My father was a small-boat skipper in Dover, but he finally couldn't stand the winters.' She hung up our suits and hosed them and then the air tanks, sluicing out the masks. 'What about you?'

'I'm just visiting.'

Looking down, then up again. 'You don't need scuba lessons.'

'It's been a long time. I'd lost confidence.'

There was a squawking of seagulls suddenly from the water beyond the boats and she swung her head and looked across at them, a square face but small, with a firm mouth, marks on the cheeks still from the mask, thirty, I would suppose, her skin ageing too fast in the sun. 'No,' she said, 'you haven't lost confidence. You were just making it look like that.' She smiled for the first time since I'd come down here.

'How long have you been teaching?'

'Oh, years.' She put a brush through her hair. 'So who told you where to find me?'

'George Proctor.'

She straightened – 'Oh.'

'He said you were a good teacher.'

'He's trash,' she said off-handedly as she looked away and then began stowing the air tanks.

'Can I give you a hand?'

'I do it in my sleep.' Lean-bodied and strong, turned-up khaki shorts and a tee-shirt, its back dark from her wet hair.

I was waiting for her to ask me how he was, Proctor, because he'd phoned her every day, sometimes twice a day, the last time nearly a month ago, but she just said, 'I didn't catch your first name.'

'Richard.' But then I suppose you wouldn't ask about someone's health if you'd dismissed them as trash.

'Since,' she said, 'you don't need scuba lessons and you haven't lost your confidence in the water, why did you come down here?' With a full frank stare.

'I hoped you might know where he's gone.'

'Oh.'

Someone was bringing a Chris Craft in, throttling the diesels down, two or three people on deck, very tanned, one of them with a line ready, and she waved back to them when they saw her. There was still a lot of flotsam swirling on the surface from the storm. There was flotsam all over the bloody place as a matter of fact: Ferris had put three men on me as an exercise in caution. A lot had happened last night – my room at the hotel had been gone through and someone had tagged me back there and then Proctor had got out very fast indeed and left no tracks, so anything could happen now and if anyone picked me up again and moved in, Ferris would want to know who they were and where they came from.

'Proctor is the key,' he'd said. 'He's also the access.'

Croder, at the board for Barracuda, would not have been pleased with that signal. Subject missing, no trace.

'Would you like some lobster?' the woman asked me.

'To eat?'

'What else would you do with a lobster? Don't tell me you're that kinky.' With a freezing smile, loathing me for even having known Proctor, but still too interested to let me go.

I said I liked lobster.

'Actually she's a tug,' Kim said, 'still is, really, though I've made a few changes.'

We'd put out a couple of miles, as far as the warning buoys on the reef, and dropped anchor.

'She was my father's, his one great love, apart from me. Two-inch oak on double-sawn oak frames, my God, the way they used to do things! She's still registered for coastwise and harbour work. Are you starving?'

'There's no hurry.'

'I've got to catch it first. There's some Scotch in that cupboard, unless you'd like wine. Help yourself.' She went into a berth and came back in a black bikini, hooking the bra and shutting the door with her bare foot. 'Aren't they handsome?' I was looking at the blown-up photographs of sharks all over the cabin. Brushing against me in the close quarters she said, 'I was rude to you back there on the quay.

'Sorry, but he really is such an absolute bastard. I won't be long – you can get some water on the boil if you like, that pan there, half full.'

Over the side in a perfect curve, no splash. The lobster-pot marker bobbed in the ripples.

I kept in the shade, under a canvas awning she'd rigged up aft of the cabin; the sun struck out of a full noon sky and the deck was giving off the smell of pitch. There was the glint of field-glasses again from the stern of the motor-launch that had nosed its way along this side of the reef soon after we'd dropped anchor.

Things had gone better in the night than I'd expected; the hags of Morpheus had been kept back by Ferris's telephone call reporting that Proctor had gone, and there'd only been a couple of hours after that, sometime before dawn, for sleep or nightmares. But there was still a sensitive area in my consciousness that I was deliberately avoiding, because it frightened me. It was about Senator Judd, and the way Ferris had put his question.

I'd face it later, when I had to, when I was forced to: and I would be, I knew that.

'Langouste a la Setoise ,' she said, 'but I think I should have marinated it. Garlic, tomatoes, oil, mainly – the olives are extracurricular because I dote on them. I had a French mother, not French, actually, Belgian. She met my father on the Dover ferry one night in a storm. Lonely people talk a lot, don't they?'

'Do you talk a lot?'

'You haven't noticed?'

'Are you lonely?'

'My God, four questions in a row. Is this any good?'

'C'est exquise.'

After a silence that wasn't obtrusive – 'Lonely in a way, yes, I suppose. Or this is the aftermath. He dropped me flat, only a few weeks ago.'

For Monique.

'You're well rid, aren't you?'

She looked up at me, her green eyes deeper in the shade of the cabin. 'It never really matters, you know, what they're like. He was the only man I've ever loved. Not loved, actually – been obsessed by. Why didn't you just – ' waving her fork – 'come to me and tell me what you wanted?'

'I didn't know how sensitive you might be feeling.'

She watched me for a moment. 'That was nice of you. But it cost you fifty dollars.'

Flash, flash from the launch near the reef.

I hadn't answered, and she said, 'You told me he's "gone". You mean cleared out altogether?'

'He took all his things.'

'But you said you'd been talking to him yesterday. He went last night?'

'Yes.'

'This really calls for the Chablis, you know.'

'I have to keep off it.'

'Oh. Are you some sort of official, then? I mean is he wanted for anything?'

'Not as far as I know.'

'That's a bloody shame.' Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside. With a big effort that only showed in her voice, lightly, casually – 'Did he talk about me?'

'We were talking business the whole time.'

A gull swooped and perched on the aft rail and she swung her head, then looked back at me. 'But you said he told you I was a good scuba teacher.'

'That was a lie. I couldn't think of a better introduction.'

'An honest liar – that's unusual. Then how did you really find me?'

'He'd cleared out in a hurry and left the flat in a mess, papers all over the place, including some phone bills.'

She was looking at me less often, and listening carefully, her eyes down. 'So how many numbers did you call? The whole lot?'

The one he'd called the most often, first.'

'Mine.'

'Yes'.

Looking away, 'There wasn't another number, since then, that he'd called often?'

'No.' She didn't want to know about Monique.

'Well it won't be long.' Pouring herself some more wine – 'So you found my phone number, but you didn't call me.'

'I got your answering machine.'

'And didn't leave a message.'

'You're listed.'

She drank some wine. 'I'm a careful soul, you see, and when a man comes here for lessons and uses his gear like an expert I want to know more.' She looked up at last. 'And I think I believe most of what you've said. Have you ever been rejected, Richard?'

'It happens all the time.'

'I doubt that,' holding my eyes for a moment. 'It's not the missing so much, the sex and all that. It's the colossal blow to the ego. You know? I mean I can find another man, the place is full of them – but even that isn't certain any more. He's made me suddenly feel unattractive, and I sense you're the rare kind of man who knows what that does to a woman.'

'It doesn't take a lot of imagination. But you ought to get that thought right out of your head. I've never been so close to a more attractive woman in my life.'

'Look, I wasn't – '

'I know.'

'Well it's always nice to hear.' She looked away at the reef. 'He's dangerous, did you know that? I don't just mean to women.'

'All I know is that he's in my debt.'

'Owes you money?'

'Yes.'

'That's why you want to find him?'

'Can you think of a better reason?'

'No, but there might be one.' She put down her knife and fork. 'Did I pass?'

'It was superb.'

'You can thank my mother. Does it sound as if I'm always fishing for compliments?'

'No, but women have to in a man's world.'

'God's truth.' She began clearing the table. "There's some fruit in the fridge. Smoke if you want to. Are they friends of yours?'

'Who?'

'The people over there with the field glasses.'

'In the launch?'

'Yes.'

'I hadn't noticed.'

'I think you had.' She brought a bowl of peaches.

'I don't want to sound cute, but with you diving for lobsters I'm not surprised there are some field glasses around.'

'My God, that was the fifties. They do it, these days, they don't just look.'

'Then they'll have to start just looking again.'

'That's true. It's frightening.' She sliced a peach. 'I suppose it's a way of keeping the population down. Are you in the same kind of business?'

'The same -?'

'As George Proctor.'

'Advertising, yes.'

'You live in the States?'

'No.'

'So you're not interested in the election. These aren't ripe, I wouldn't bother.'

'I don't know a lot about it, but I hope Judd gets in.'

She looked up quickly. 'He's got to. Mathieson Judd is not to be underestimated. He's a statesman with a world view that we haven't seen since Nixon, and he's not a megalomaniac. He'll get in. He's got to get in.'

She stopped, but I didn't say anything. She didn't want me to, wasn't looking at me: she'd withdrawn into herself. 'It's not just the Americans who are concerned, this time – the whole world's involved, and much more than usual when there's a change of administration here. I very much hope the Thatcher government realises what we've got in Mathieson Judd, because the outcome of this election's going to have a major effect on the UK.'

Stopped again. I still didn't say anything. She was poising a short chopping-knife vertically above the peach-stone on her plate, holding it carefully and taking little stabs, trying to split it, I suppose; but then if I'd asked her what she was meant to be doing with it she wouldn't know, would even wonder who I was, what I was doing here. She looked psyched out, robotic.

That area, the area of consciousness I was afraid of touching, exploring, was making demands on me now, moving right into the forefront of my mind, and I almost recoiled physically.

Stab with the knife, chipping at the peach-stone. 'His understanding of the internecine struggle for power inside the Kremlin is infinitely deeper than we've seen before in any US president, thanks partly to the partial lifting of the veil by glasnost, sure, but Judd isn't missing a trick.'

The short sea lapped at the sides of the boat, and a lanyard fretted in the wind. I didn't know if the launch had gone from the reef, wanted to know but didn't want to turn my head or do anything to break the silence, because I was into the zone of consciousness now, the one that made me afraid, and I lost the sense of time – the past and the present overlapped, leaving me in an eerie wilderness of the mind.

Then the knife split the stone and she looked up at me with her eyes blank for a moment; then she focused, and said, "They're not ripe, are they?'

'I don't know.'

Glancing at my plate, 'You haven't tried.'

So I made a gesture, and when I spoke again it was with the feeling of pulling the pin from a grenade. 'George Proctor feels the same way.'

She frowned. 'I wouldn't know.'

'He didn't talk to you about Mathieson Judd?'

'God no.' With a hurt smile, 'that wasn't our relationship. Just heavy sex and… what I thought was love.'

'Lucky escape,' I said. 'Think of it that way.' I got up and helped her clear the rest of the table.

'Yes, but it's not so easy. Do you like my sharks?'

'I was looking at them earlier.'

'There's a special one out here somewhere.'

'That you want to catch?'

'That I want to kill.' She ran the tap in the small metal sink, brushing against me sometimes, still in the bikini, her skin tanned, copper-coloured in the light from the portholes, with a powdering of dried salt on her shoulders.

'Isn't it the same thing?' Catch, kill.

'No.' She looked up at the photographs on the bulkhead. 'It's one of those, a thresher. It took my father, here in these waters. I was there.'

'When?'

'Eighteen months ago. Eighteen months, a week and two days.'

'How did it happen?' Talking about the tug, she'd said it had been the one great love of her father's life, except for me.

'We were just off the reef over there. The anchor got fouled and he went overboard to free it. The shark saw him.'

'I'm sorry.'

'A whole pack. We hadn't seen them.' She dropped the last plate into the rack and dried her hands and turned away, padding on her bare feet to the shade of the awning, looking across at the launch and waving, turning back to face me, 'maybe they'll stop gawping now,' her green eyes wet as she said, 'have you ever seen anyone eaten alive?' Before I could think of anything to say, 'I'm sorry. It's okay now, really. We've come to an agreement.' She came towards me slowly, her face hard now. 'They won't come for me until I find him, the male thresher, and kill him, or try.'

In the glare of the sun on the sea behind her she stood in silhouette, her short legs braced to the motion of the boat, her feet splayed a little and her arms hanging loose, her eyes alone catching the back-light from the portholes, glimmering in the dark of her skin. She looked primitive, naked, as she stood there speaking of primitive things.

'I go to meet them, you see, whenever they're in these waters. I go and swim with them.'

In a moment I said, 'Alone?'

'I took a friend once, with a camera.'

'This is you?' I was looking at the blow-up near the gallery, under the swinging lamp. 'In this one?'

'Yes.'

I'd noticed it before, and had meant to ask her about it because it looked unreal, surrealistic: the figure of the swimmer wasn't perfectly clear; it could be another shark, because of the surface reflection.

'They won't attack, you see, if you swim the right way – unless of course they're hungry and then it doesn't matter what you do. But my Dad was making a lot of fuss with the anchor – we'd got no idea they were anywhere near the reef or he wouldn't have gone down. Oh Christ -' I went to hold her as she broke suddenly but she shook my hands away – 'I'm okay now, but sometimes I've got to talk about it to someone and it's your bad luck today, you see – because there was my Dad down there fooling around with that fucking anchor and then there was just a lot of blood on the surface, a lot of threshing about and then the blood, Christ, it was a beautiful red -' shaking and with her breath moaning – 'he was a beautiful man, he coloured the whole sea like a flag, like a banner,' sobbing now but still standing straight with her arms hanging by her sides, refusing to bring her hands to her face, 'and that was all I could see of him, all that was left, a sunset on the sea in the early morning light, and you know what I don't understand? I don't understand why in God's name I didn't just go over the rail into all that beautiful red, so he wouldn't be alone.' The tears bright on her dark face, 'so I wouldn't be alone.'

The waves hit the boat and the lamp in the galley swung; the door of a berth creaked. After a time I said, 'A wonderful man.'

'How do you know?' on a sob.

'For you to have loved him so much.'

She swung her head, her hair flying out – 'Love isn't enough, is it, not powerful enough, however big it is, it can't guarantee anything.' She turned and leaned her back to the bulkhead and the tension went out of her and she looked across the sea, across to the reef. 'A wonderful man, yes. It was just over there.'

Where the short waves broke along the reef, tossing up flotsam. 'You can't keep away?'

She turned her head quickly. 'I don't want to.' Looking across the sea again, 'that's where I swim with them, and that's where I'm going to find it, and kill it.'

'How will you know which one it is?'

'I'll know. We think words are all there is.' She came back into the shade. 'Writing, speaking, we think it's the only kind of communication. We talk about vibes, but we don't really understand how deep they go, how strong they are. When I see that one, touch it, I'll know.' She went and found some tissues.

'Is this your father?'

'Yes.'

Laughing, in the photograph in the centre of the bulkhead, holding up a big fish, a tuna or something. A handsome man, not young but youthful, lean, tanned.

'I'll make some coffee,' she said.

'What time do you want to be back?'

'Whenever you do.'

'As soon as you like, then.'

She came and leaned her head against me, closing her eyes. 'It was nice of you to listen to all that. Not that you could help it, captive audience.' Moving away, 'D'you know how to get an anchor up?'

'Yes.'

'Okay, I'll put the coffee on and start the diesel. You look after the winch.'

More gulls now, and the din of a donkey-engine on the quay, the wail of a siren from deeper among the streets.

'I'll try and find George Proctor for you,' she said, 'if you like.'

'It'd be a great help.'

'How much does he owe you? Or maybe I shouldn't – '

'More than I'm ready to lose.'

'I can't promise anything.' She brought the engine down to slow and span the helm; she'd put on the khaki shorts again, with a sweater over the tee shirt; there'd been a cool breeze off the sea. She was easy in her movements, capable, in charge of herself, not the sort of woman who'd try killing a man-eating shark out of revenge.

I asked her, 'Why is he dangerous?'

She watched me for a moment, wondering, I think, whether to tell me. 'The last time I was in his flat, I was just leaving when the phone rang, so I told him I'd see myself out, and he went back to answer it. He couldn't see the door from where he was, and I stayed a minute to listen, to see who it was. It's not the sort of thing -' she shrugged – 'but I'd started to think there was "someone else", as they say. But it wasn't a woman. You can tell, can't you, even when they don't say their names, whether a man's speaking to another man or a woman?' She swung the helm hard over and shifted to full astern.

'Can you make a line fast round a capstan?'

'Yes.' The launch hadn't followed us in but it had left the reef and was moving towards the marina further along the shore. 'So what was he saying?'

'I don't remember much, really, because it obviously wasn't a woman. But I know he said something about "going over". "They suspect I've gone over", something like that.'

A gull swooped, screaming, sighting flotsam.

'Anything else?'

She glanced up at me from the line: something in my tone. 'Was that important? He mentioned an embassy, "your embassy", I think. The reason why I think he's dangerous is that he sounded like that, on the phone. You know how his voice can sometimes sound sort of – I don't know – menacing? Goes sort of silky. It always gave me the shivers. And there was a name he used, I remember now. It was Victor. Look, we're set up – would you jump down and catch the line? It'll save me whistling for someone.'

I dropped onto the quay and waited. Not Victor. Viktor. There was a phone on the tug but I didn't want to use that one. I'd have to find a booth as soon as I could and do it in private, signal Ferris: Proctor has been turned. Contact's first name, Viktor, at the Soviet Embassy.