The Last One Left

Chapter Twelve

On Saturday afternoon, the day after Staniker was brought back to Nassau, when Sam Boylston returned to his room at the Nassau Harbour Club, Jonathan Dye seemed unchanged in any way. He was still sitting in the straight chair by the desk, hunched and miserable, arms resting on his knees, knuckly hands dangling.

His color was poor, eyes puffy, his beard a dark shadow on the angular jaw and long throat.

He looked up and nodded absently at Sam, then directed his stare back toward the nubby texture of the gray rug.

Sam put a package on the bed and said, “I’ve got permission to talk to the Barths and the Hilgers. Sir Willis fixed it up.” The boy did not answer. Sam said, “You can see their point. The reporters got their story from those people before the police could stop them. It was second hand. Nobody can be certain it’s what Staniker actually told them. They could get some details wrong. So it’s better to wait for the results of the interrogation of Staniker and keep reporters away from those people. People usually have a tendency to dress a story up when they’re the center of attention. It makes them more important. They’ve been questioned by the authorities now. But the results of that won’t be released to the press. Their boat is tied up at Yacht Haven. Want to go down there with me in a few minutes? Jonathan!”

“Sir?”

“Do you want to come along with me and talk to those people who brought Staniker in?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

Sam unwrapped his package. It was a small, expensive tape recorder, an import from Japan, transistorized, built to operate on nine-volt batteries at a recording and playback speed of one and seven-eighths inches per second. The monitor speaker could be detached to reduce bulk even further. The shop had shown him how to use it. A switch could put it on continuous record, or, in the other position, set it so that it was voice-activated with a dial to adjust the sensitivity. He had purchased extra reels and extra batteries.

He set it up and turned it on. He counted to ten, moved six feet back and counted to ten again, and went over to the door and counted to ten, a third time. He rewound the tape and played it back. Within the cycles-per-second range of the human voice, it had good fidelity, better than it had sounded in the shop.

He saw he had aroused Jonathan’s interest. “What’s that for?”

“I used to do some trial work. They kept telling me I did it just fine. But I couldn’t get to like it. I learned one thing. You think you are listening to everything, but you always miss a little. You catch it when you play it back. Sometimes it’s important.”

“What good is it going to do?”

“It’s a pretty good little machine.”

“I mean what’s the point in talking to those people?”

“They saw Staniker in bad shape. Conscious and in bad shape.”

“So?”

“So maybe they heard something he won’t talk about when he gets his health back.”

“You’re playing games, Sam.”

“How’s that?”

“Maybe to keep busy, go through some motions. What difference does it make how it happened? Maybe Staniker screwed up the details. The only thing that matters is that he thinks he’s the only one who escaped. I guess maybe you think so too. So you want to go thrashing around to find out how it happened. Why? Who cares about how? There’s just one thing I care about. She’s alive! No matter what Staniker might think, Leila is alive!”

“Easy, boy.”

“God damn it, don’t give me that look of pity! I haven’t flipped. And I am not that kind of sentimental jackass who thinks the virtuous survive and the evil ones die.” He stood up slowly. “And I think — I really think I’m strong enough to endure losing her. It would rack me up for a long time, Sam. But eventually I’d work my way out of it. Listen carefully. I sat in that chair for most of the night. And a lot of today. And I’ve said to myself that she is dead. Leila is dead. There isn’t anything anybody can do about it. Dead and gone and you’ll never see her again. And only a damned fool would think anybody below decks could survive explosion and fire. But something keeps me from really believing it. Almost as if she were standing over there in the corner behind me and shaking her head sadly and wondering how I could be so stupid. You know how she was in the water. Dazed and burned and half-conscious, she’d keep afloat by instinct. Somehow she was thrown clear, I swear it. We were close, Sam. As close as people ever get. It wasn’t kid stuff. We were lovers. For over a year now. And that was good, but it wasn’t the basic part of us. It was just a way to — say something to each other about what we were to each other. If she’s left this world, my heart would be a stone. But it isn’t. But if I don’t find her soon enough, one day, all of a sudden, I’ll know she’s gone.” He sat again, face in his hands, made a single dry sound, a cough like a sob.

Sam Boylston poured a half tumbler of Canadian whisky from the bottle he’d bought in the package store in the lobby. He dropped in two cubes, swirled it, took it over and fitted it into Jonathan’s big hand. “Knock it down,” he ordered.

Jonathan drank half, coughed, finished it, gagged and shuddered and handed the glass back. Sam once again debated telling the boy about the money. It would justify Sam’s interest in finding out just what had happened. Yet it might be the final proof that Leila had died. If somebody had gone after the money, there would be no survivors. If the money was the target, then Staniker was in on it. And Sam knew that one of the rarest traits in the world is the ability to tell a complex lie time after time without slipping somehow.

The boy did not realize that his conviction she was alive was merely a device to protect himself from a blow he was not yet ready to endure. Sam realized it would be quite easy to explain it to the boy and tell him about the money. Irrational reactions had always made him impatient.

“I sound like a nut,” Jonathan said. “I can’t help what I believe.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

Jonathan looked mildly surprised. “Go look for her. Now I know where to look.” He got the chart and opened it up on the bed. “Here is where it happened. Here is where they found Staniker. So Leila had to get carried onto the Bahama Banks to the north of the Joulters. It’s all shallows. There’s supposed to be at least two thousand little hummocks of sand and rock, some with vegetation, that are still out of the water at high tide. I’m going to go to Andros, get some kind of a little boat and — go find her. She wouldn’t panic, you know. She’ll manage to stay alive long enough. Long enough for me to find her. And she looks fragile, but she’s tough. She could endure a lot.”

It was his obvious duty to point out to the boy that such a search was pure fantasy. He had no useful experience with boats and the sea, and no first-hand knowledge of that area. It was pure damned foolishness. And what good was this sort of idiotic hope if in the end it would finally collapse.

As he began to choose his words, he saw himself in the mirrored door of the bath. And he could remember other times, other mirrors, when he began to choose those words which would open the paths of logic for Leila, or for Lydia Jean, or for Boy-Sam. Why in God’s name were the emptiest dreams the very ones they thought most important? They wrote their stupid little melodramas and then were so terribly terribly hurt when you didn’t come on stage and say the lines they’d written for you. Did they want humoring? Did they want accomplices in utter sappiness to make themselves more secure in delusion?

So this time, he thought, instead of turning off the stage lights and dropping the curtain, I’ll play it their way. He turned toward Jonathan and said, “If you say that’s where she is, then that’s where she is. And the more help I give you, the sooner you’ll find her.”

“I... I guess that’s right, sir.”

“I’ll pay the shot on leasing a decent boat with a crew who know those waters. If the boat doesn’t draw much over three feet, she can thread around through the channels. And you can use a dinghy with a kicker for shallower work. Can you handle it, or will it take both of us?”

“I can handle it. Is it okay if I see what I can do right now about lining up a boat?”

“Sooner the better.”

The moment the boy left, Sam Boylston felt irritated at himself. Humoring them involved a curious kind of weakness, and created an uncomfortable obligation. Once you started the game, you had to keep on playing it. And it was a game which could bring you nothing.

Now, with his visit to the Barths and the Hilgers aboard the Docksie III, he was beginning a game more to his liking. It would have an ending, and in the ending there would be a hard and merciless satisfaction. After that would come time to mourn the sister lost. But was not his game as pointless as Jonathan’s, actually? That fragment of insight jarred him, and he thrust it aside. Delicate little philosophical comparisons were good parlor games for people like — Lyd, Leila and Jonathan. Any man who went around inventing doubts and reservations was emasculating himself. Neither compulsion, his or Jonathan’s, would bring Leila back. But his might well keep someone from profiting through the loss of her. When a man released his clasp They snatched everything from him forever.

At quarter to seven on Monday morning, Sam Boylston tapped at the door of Apartment 6, Harbour Heights Apartments. In a few moments the door opened as far as the safety chain would permit, and the girl in white looked at him through the gap.

“Sam Boylston,” he said. “I know I’m a little early. If it’s inconvenient I can come back...”

She closed the door, released the chain and let him into the small, bright, tidy living room. “Yes, you are early, Mr. Boylston, but perhaps it is better. I might not do this thing you want. Would you have some coffee with me?”

In her speech she had the Bahamian trait of emphasizing the unexpected word. Her face was too narrow for beauty, black bright eyes set too closely, her skin dusky sallow in the way of the mixed blood of the Islands. But she had freshness and style. Special Nurse Theyma Chappie was assigned to the daytime trick, eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, caring for Captain Garry Staniker in his private room at the Princess Margaret Hospital.

She brought his coffee to the table by the windows where she had been eating her breakfast, and they sat facing each other.

“I understand, Nurse. There’s no way I can force you.”

“It is what I said to my brother. Sir Willis has been very good to him, very helpful. If he had not been, perhaps I could not have had my training. But I am a professional person. There is an obligation to the patient. Also to the hospital. And there could be trouble with the officials too. To take a risk, I told my brother, I would have to believe it is a good thing to do, perhaps a necessary thing. We have been ordered to say nothing to reporters. Perhaps this is lies. A trick.”

He took out his wallet, unsnapped the packet of identifications and handed it to her. “I am exactly what I say I am, Nurse, a lawyer from Harlingen, Texas.” After she had looked at the identifications, as she handed them back, he handed her the color snapshot of Leila he took from another compartment of the wallet. “This is my kid sister. She was a guest aboard the Muñeca.”

“So pretty!” she said, and in a little while handed it back to him. “But they will question this captain carefully, no? What is the need of what you wish me to do?”

“There is one reason I cannot explain either to you or to the authorities, a reason to believe that Staniker may have — with or without help — killed those six people aboard and sunk the cruiser.”

She looked shocked. “But he does not seem such a person!”

“I want to know how he responds to questioning. I will be looking for things they will not be looking for. I think they are worried about carelessness. I am worried about guilt.”

“Then why not tell them your reasons, Mr. Boylston?”

“Because then, from their questions, he will know they know that reason. And he will be much more careful in his answers. It is a standard interrogation procedure, Nurse. If you pick up a murderer and charge him with a small robbery that happened on the same night, you will learn more than if you charge him with murder.”

“If I help you will it become — evidence in a court so it will come out how I helped you?”

“No. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe the boat blew up. If I learn anything that makes it seem otherwise, I’ll have to get him in some other way.”

She studied him. “He is like a thing to you. Something to hunt.”

“Do you think people should get away with mass murder?”

“Of course not. But if you want — too badly to believe he is guilty of something, maybe you will believe what you want to believe.”

“I’m not like that.”

She tilted her head. “... No. Perhaps not.” She took a quick look at the gold watch pinned to the bodice of her uniform. “I guess you must show me now how the machine works.”

“You’ll do it then.”

“But if it is found, I will have no idea how it came to be there.”

She marveled at how small the recorder was. She caught on very quickly as he explained the operation. She said that there was a deep shelf in the bedside stand, and she could place it on the back of that shelf behind a stack of fresh face towels, a place where she could easily turn it on or off.

When he asked her opinion of Staniker’s condition, she said, “He is a very strong one. He went a long time without help. For many persons, it might have been too long. There could be bad luck, perhaps more kidney damage than Dr. McGregory thinks. Or a pneumonia which will not respond to antibiotics, or a pulmonary edema we cannot control. He seemed dazed. And the tongue is very bruised and lacerated from the convulsions. He speaks with difficulty. Maybe the Doctor will permit an interrogation today. I would guess tomorrow. It will depend on his condition, of course.”

She fitted the recorder into her white shoulder bag, patted it. “I am glad it is such a small thing. And works so silently.” She looked amused and said, “Perhaps I can borrow it one day and find out if Helena entertains someone I know here when I am on a night shift and she is working days.” She flushed and said, “We share this place. There were three, but that is too many. The other went to an out island clinic. Now we must go, or I shall be late.”

Down on the street level, he watched her trundle her pale blue motor scooter out to the curb, kick down upon the starter lever and move away into morning traffic, her slender back very straight.

He had a professional uneasiness about the little electronic ear she carried with her. It was an eavesdropper with total recall. The slow considerations of the law have not kept pace with the technology, and so the explosive expansion of listening devices and techniques exists in a gray area. Inevitably, when the law lags too far behind the realities, an eventual permissiveness is achieved through the mere weight of investment, employment and universal use. The average citizen, when he thought of it at all, saw nothing wrong in the good guys bugging the homes and offices and phones of the bad guys. But history had the queasy trick of constantly reversing the roles. Had the redcoats been able to bug G. Washington’s winter encampment, he could have been fatally surprised on the shores of the Delaware.

The clever and compact little microphones and transmitters could spy on all sounds. The polygraph could, in a sense, spy upon the mind itself. And there was a dreadful inevitability about that day in the future when the state of the art obsoleted the business of affixing the sensors to the subject, the day when polygraphs could be taken without the knowledge of the subject. This would be the final and deadly invasion of all privacy.

He could recall the precise incidents which had led to his feeling of uneasiness. He had consented to handle a divorce action for an old friend. It was an area of the law he found distasteful. The old friend showed up with the specialist he had employed. The specialist had traced the wife to the particular motel where she would go with her lover. He had then installed equipment in a particular room and arranged that the couple be given that room. With obvious professional satisfaction, the specialist, in Sam Boylston’s darkened office, had projected his infra-red 8-mm movie film, taken by a camera mounted inside a ventilator grill, and had concurrently played a tape captured by a mike and transmitter affixed to the underside of the motel bed. He heard the voice of the woman whose parties he and Lyd had attended, saying in a moaning and gritty voice, “Now! Now! O God! O beautiful! O beautiful!”

When the film ended, the expert had turned off the tape and opened the blinds. As he rewound tape and film onto the reels, the only sound in the office had been the muffled hacking sobs of his friend sitting there with his face in his hands. Sam had told him to find another attorney, one who would be willing to use this inadmissible evidence as a club to beat down any demand the wife might make for support. The expert was not angry or upset. Merely very very puzzled. Without such brutal and clinical proof, the marriage might have been mended. But once exposed to the fleshy explicits, the husband could not endure the thought of any reconciliation.

The second incident occurred when a small corporation in San Antonio, engaged in a proxy battle, had engaged him to find out how all their strategies became known before they could put them into effect, and what charges they might bring against the raider.

By employing another firm of investigators, a branch office of a national organization which made much of the number of ex-FBI agents they employed, he learned that the internal security had been penetrated in an unusual manner. An expert had imbedded a sensitive and shock-resistant induction mike and transmitter into a ball of sticky putty-colored material the size of an English walnut, and from outside the security fence, at night, had used a sling shot to paste it against an upper panel of one of the third floor windows of the conference room where, every morning, the executive committee of the Board of Directors met. The transmitter had a thirty-six hour life, and the substance in which it was imbedded took about the same amount of time to dry out and fall from the pane. The tape recorder, voice activated so that no attendant was necessary, had been placed along with the receiver in the store room of a diner well within the five-hundred-yard range of transmittal. Realizing the difficulties of taking legal action, Sam had recommended that the executive committee meetings be continued in such a way as to provide information that would seem valid but would mislead the opposition, and that the actual battle plans be arranged in secret meetings off the plant premises.

To protect himself professionally against this ever more sophisticated electronic invasion, Sam had employed the agency to give him a thorough grounding in the advanced techniques, and had also contracted to have his offices “swept” from time to time at random intervals to determine if any devices had been planted therein.

The third incident was far more subjective. It happened after Lydia Jean had been gone from home for two months, living with their boy in Corpus. And one night as he was going to bed, he had the sudden thought of how easy it would be to employ an agency to install phone taps and keep track of her movements and make regular reports. He knew that the thought was not as sudden as it seemed. It had that special flavor of thoughts which lie on the floor of the mind for a long time before emerging into the conscious mind.

It was a wretched idea. If she could not be trusted, there could be little point in yearning for her to come home. If she learned he could do that to her, his chances of ever getting her back were that much less. As he discarded the idea, he realized that ever since he had learned of the new marvels in electronic espionage, he had been gradually accustoming himself to speak less openly to everyone in his own offices and in those he visited. He had thought of it as merely a sensible precaution. If one assumed everything was overheard and recorded, one could cease worrying about what might be safe to say. It made a life more drab, more guarded, more ceremonious. All men of any degree of responsibility had begun to speak for the record, for the unseen audience, and old intimacies had withered because closeness must depend upon the exchange of the innermost thoughts. Orwell, in 1984, had not considered the consequences of such a diffusion. An ever-watchful Big Brother could be outwitted, but a gnat-throng of little brothers could only be endured. Miniaturization of electronic circuitry was effecting that great change in human relationships which, in other cultures, had been created only by using secret arrest, imprisonment and torture to turn brother against brother.

He got behind the wheel of his rental car, but before he could start the engine, another of those strange spasms of grief and loss squeezed and twisted his brain and his heart. Chin on chest, eyes tightly shut, he grasped the steering wheel with such strength it numbed his hands and started a tremor in his arms and shoulders. It was more like a combination of terror and anger than like a sense of loss. During those few moments when it was most intense, the three women of his life merged into a single entity, something which was sister-dead, wife-lost, mother-dead, fading swiftly, leaving him to stand chilled and alone, like a small figure in a barren landscape in an old book.

He came out of it and, as before, found that the spasm had dulled and slowed his mind. Daylight had a cinematic unreality, and he had to reconstruct the schedule he had set himself, putting each errand into its proper place, like stacking tumbled blocks of great weight.

When Sam Boylston returned to the Nassau Harbour Club there was a message for him to call a Mr. Cooper at a number in Austin. Yandell Binns Cooper, known throughout the southwest as Stuff Cooper, father of Carolyn, Bix Kayd’s second wife. Sam returned the call and braced himself for the force and weight of Stuff’s imperative personality.

But after the secretaries had put him through, Cooper sounded vague and mild. And old. “Sam? Sam, boy, I tracked you down through your office. Is it like all the papers and television got it?”

“I’m afraid it is, Mr. Cooper.”

“Damn all! Ever’ one of ’em, eh? All the time I was thinking it was some kind of thing ol’ Bix was pulling. Everybody knowed he was upsot having to let go too much of that Bee-Kay stock a couple years back. What I figured it for, he wanted to turn up missing so as some of his people could buy it in cheap. Thursday it had fell off to eleven something and I picked up some on a hunch. When he calls me back I know what my broker man is going to tell me, he can’t find any takers noplace. Damn over-the-counter stuff. Sam?”

“I’m here, Mr. Cooper.”

“Sam, I can’t believe it. I keep on seeing her. She had that special smile for her daddy. I keep on seeing Carrie the way she was when they made her queen for that bowl game, way up on the float, all them flowers, ruffly dress, holding that booquet, a-wavin’ and smilin’. It ain’t right, boy. You know that.”

“I know it.”

“And that pretty little sister of yours, and those kids of Bix’s from before. I didn’t want her to marry Bix. Hell, he’s only five years younger’n her daddy. You know what I wanted, boy. I made it clear enough. When you and Carrie were going together.”

“I know. It just didn’t work out, Mr. Cooper.”

“I keep thinking she’d be alive if they had. You can’t blame me for that now. Lydia Jean is as sweet as they come for sure. Maybe a better wife than Carrie would have made you. What she wanted most, I guess, was being the wife of a big man, so she could go in any store and they’d all jump and come running up, rubbing their hands and smiling. I told her one time that was just what she’d get with you. It would mean waiting a little spell, that’s all. You’ve been proving me right, boy. I’m glad for you, but it don’t help much right now. You about to head on back?”

“Pretty soon I guess.”

“You being a lawyer I guess you can imagine what kind of a mess it’s going to be for a long long time. It wasn’t just Bix not letting his right hand know what his left hand was doing. He was more like that Hindu gal they got statues of, three or four arms growing out of each shoulder, and not one of them hands knowing what any other of the hands was up to. Everybody connected with him in any business way is plain scrambling right now, like trying to run acrost the front of a landslide. He’d set up his private affairs pretty complicated too, from a couple things Carrie told me. All kind of insurance trusts and residuary trusts and holding corporations and foundations and so on. I bet he covered every possible contingency except a common disaster where him and Carrie and Stella and Roger all passed on at one and the same time. I bet you the state boys and the feds and the lawyers don’t get it all unwound for twenty years and more. Sam?”

“Yes sir.”

“Nothing I’m doing is going to make much point to me for a time. What do you say, you come on back and we’ll set it up to go down there to Yucatan and get those same guides and horses I told you about and see if we can get us a jaguar. Might be Ollie Sloan could be talked into coming along. He’s been in sorry shape since his wife died, and you know him pretty good, don’t you?”

“Well enough, Mr. Cooper. I’ll let you know.”

“You do that. And if there’s any red tape over there about that accident, anything I can help with, you call me, hear?”

As he hung up he felt sorry for old Stuff Cooper, and he also felt exasperation and an old guilt about Carolyn Cooper. It was one of Stuff’s myths that Carolyn and Sam had “gone around together” at the University. Sam had been in his first year of law school and Carolyn had been four years younger, a sophomore. At that time Sam had not met Lydia Jean. Carolyn, her daddy’s darling, was vivid, outgoing, arrogant and beautiful, and came complete with white Cadillac convertible, hefty allowance, and an impressive capacity for vodka gibsons. There had been a weekend party at a ranch. At the last moment his date caught a virus and couldn’t make it. He went alone. And the party turned into one of those gaudy brawls which provide several years’ worth of gossip. After Carolyn’s date passed out, she became blankly, blindly, helplessly drunk. Sam was on his way to his car when he came upon two boys hustling the stumbling girl toward the outbuildings. They objected to having their plans changed. It took him four or five minutes to encourage them to see it his way. By then Carolyn was sitting in the grass, hiccuping.

He picked her up and took her to her white convertible, stepping over one of her escorts as he did so. She toppled over and began to snore. He went into the big ranch house and found her purse and the suitcase she’d brought but hadn’t unpacked.

He drove her car over two hundred and fifty miles to the Cooper ranch, arriving at first light, stopping inside the gate, a good mile from the ranch house. When she woke up, she looked wanly at him, then scrabbled her way out of the car throwing up down the front of her dress as she did so, then falling to her hands and knees.

At her suggestion he opened a cattle gate and they drove across pasture land to a water hole bordered by a stand of live oaks. He put her suitcase on the hood of the car. He turned his back as she stripped and walked barefoot across the hoof-marked mud and immersed herself in the clear water, holding her dark hair up out of the way as she dunked, scrubbing her face with her free hand, rinsing her mouth. After she came out, he stood with his back toward her still, and told her what had happened and what he had done.

When she told him he could turn around, he found her standing beside the hood of the car and the open suitcase six feet from him. She had made up her face. She was brushing her dark hair, and looking at him in challenge and expectation. She had posed herself in the first red-gold rays of sunrise, standing hip-shot, half turned to the sun so that it glowed against naked thigh and flank and across the faint round of belly, and against the side of one breast, leaving the other in the half shadow of the gray light of morning, nipples rigid with the sensuous stimulus of displaying herself to him.

“Thought you were too meechy-mild to come on man-size, honey,” she said, taking slow strokes with the brush. He could hear the crackle of static electricity in her black hair in the windless morning.

“So what are you proving, Carrie?”

“It’s what you’re up to proving, isn’t it? Ol’ Stuff keeps saying I should find me a man to steady me down before I get messed up for sure. From what you said, I came too scary close. I’ve been telling him I want me an older man, somebody making out good, not some boy.”

“What makes you think I’m making out so good?”

“Oh, Sam, you haven’t got a pee pot, I know, and you’re not as far older as what I had in mind, but you’ll have the law degree soon, and Stuff can put tons of business your way, and I notice people do what you tell them to do mostly. Maybe you could tell me too and I’d listen. It’s what I need, I know. Not some boy with the only thing on his mind getting it day and night. Maybe it’s my time right now, and you came along just right — for the both of us.”

Leaning against the car boot, looking at her, he had thought of how it would be to marry Yandell Binns Cooper’s darlin’ girl. He would get the law work from Cooper and his whole crowd eventually. Title work and land grants and water rights. Ranch tax work, and mineral rights, and options on sections, and grazing rights. It would lock him into a secondary power structure, and he might work up to a hundred thousand a year gross, but he would be one of Stuff Cooper’s hired hands, and Stuff’s sons would get the land, because that was the feudal way of doing it.

She turned toward him with a half smile, and tossed the brush into the suitcase and said, “The only way I can make out is after being looked at. So it’s like two birds with one stone, Sammy. You get to know if the deal is worth it, the looking and the rest too, and you must have seen that old pink puff quilt in the trunk when you taken my suitcase out, then we’ll get Concita to fix us up a breakfast like you never saw before, and tell Daddy-Stuff when he comes downstairs his worries are done.”

“Better put your clothes on, honey.”

“Nobody’ll come by here.”

“Get dressed, Carrie.”

“Me being sick like that put you off? I feel real good now, Sammy. Think of it like it’s a reward for you saving me like you did and getting a good thump under the eye for your troubles. It isn’t black yet but it’s going to be.” She approached and put her hands on his shoulders and tilted her head.

He did not move or touch her. “Get dressed!”

When she swung he leaned back just in time, but a fingertip hit the tip of his nose, stinging it, making his eyes water. She dressed, used a stick to poke her soiled dress into a patch of brush, slammed her suitcase shut and threw it onto the back seat.

At the ranch house Stuff Cooper was already up. His approval of Sam Boylston was immediate and obvious, and Carolyn, to make Sam uncomfortable, hinted to Stuff they had been seeing a lot of each other. When Carolyn went up to bed, Stuff warmed up the Cub and flew Sam back to the house-party and landed on the ranch strip there. It was too early for anyone to be stirring.

As Sam Boylston drove his old car back toward the university, he kept thinking of how she had looked in the first sunlight of the morning, and he thought of that off and on for quite a long time, then had met Lydia Jean and hadn’t remembered it again until the invitation to the wedding of Carolyn Cooper and Bixby Kayd had arrived.

There had been a few times when he had wondered if maybe it wouldn’t have been better to have grabbed that chance. But after he knew he was doing better than he could have done by marrying Carolyn, he found he felt grateful to her in a strange way. When you make a choice you have to do your damnedest to make certain you did the right thing. You have to make your choice come true. And later he had appreciated how shrewdly the nineteen-year-old girl had gone about it, how sound her instinct had been in judging a man she did not know at all well. She had pretended to be the wanton, and had made him desire her so badly it had bloated his throat, knotted his belly and made his knees feel watery-weak. He had come within a half heartbeat of taking her, and she had so clearly stated the bargain beforehand, he would have honored it had he done so, because he could not permit himself to live with that obvious a flaw in his self-image. The girl had known that about him, had guessed at the severities of his self-disciplines.

He shrugged off the memories of Carolyn, unboxed the duplicate tape recorder he had bought before returning to the Harbour Club, and began listening once more to the tape of the Hilgers and the Barths answering his questions aboard the Docksie III. He found it uncommonly difficult to keep his attention in close and careful focus. It irritated and puzzled him. One of the abilities he had found most useful was the knack of shutting out everything except the task at hand, and never permitting any random thought or distraction to intrude.

And this kind of listening was part of his profession — to listen to the words people said and weigh the nuances, guess at the deletions, evaluate the inconsistencies. Verbal communication was astoundingly inexact. People seldom listen to one another. But the truth was always there in some form, sometimes only a shape seen through layers of mist.

He began tape and stopwatch again, brought himself into a total focus, and began to jot down a log of the portions needing a more careful evaluation. The segments to study were when Dr. Barth, the wiry sunbrowned dentist with the steel-rimmed glasses was answering questions, and where Lulu Hilger, the tall brunette wife of the owner of the cruiser, was speaking. They had been the only ones in the cabin when Staniker had explained what had happened.

When Jonathan Dye knocked at the door, Sam emerged from his work, was instantly aware of hunger and was surprised to see that it was two o’clock in the afternoon.

Jonathan strode about the room full of restless energy and explained that he could make a deal with what seemed to be the right boat and man, if Sam approved.

“His name is Moree. Stanley Moree and he’s from Nicholl’s Town at the north end of Andros, Sam. He knows the Great Bahama Bank like the back of his hand. He built a boat he could use on the Bank. It’s a sailing catamaran and he can set the rudders up so it draws less than a foot of water. He’s got a way to fix a little five-horse Seagull motor on it, and he built in a fresh-water tank too. He’s even got a little one-lung gas generator he can start up that’ll run a little marine radio. When we find her we might have to get help in a hurry. He says that if I buy the provisions, he’ll charge me four pounds a day. Or twenty pounds a week. That’s only fifty-six dollars. It’s seaworthy. He’s brought it over here and taken it back a dozen times. It’s here now. And he can leave any time. It’s only twenty miles, a little more, from the tip of New Providence to Nicholl’s Town and from there we’re only twelve or fourteen miles from the Joulter Cays. Some friends I’ve made here say he’s a good man. Is it okay with you, Sam?”

“It’s fine with me. I brought some cash along out of the office safe.” He went to the closet and took his billfold out of the inside pocket of his jacket, and with his back to the room took four hundred dollars from the amount in the back compartment, hesitated, added another two hundred. He handed the money to Jonathan saying, “I didn’t know what I might need it for. Renting a plane or a boat. Something like that.”

Jonathan counted it. “This is — quite a lot. Thanks, Sam. I can get some other things I was thinking about. Some more first-aid stuff. And a good pair of binoculars. Some flares. And I want to see if I can find one of those bull-horn things that run off six-volt batteries.”

“Take some salt tablets for yourself. And sun lotion. Get a good sleeping bag.”

“Stanley Moree is going to phone me here in a few minutes. To find out if it’s okay. Then I’m to meet him at the boat in an hour.”

“There’s some interesting things on this tape. Want to hear them?”

“If you don’t mind — I mean, I can’t get very interested in what Staniker said or didn’t say. It’s sort of — after the fact. Sam, could you tell him I’ll meet him down at the boat, and everything is all set?”

After Jonathan was gone, Sam Boylston went out onto the small balcony into the sun heat from the air conditioning. He leaned his palms on the cement of the balcony wall. The great clowns, he thought, were great because they could give you a pungent taste of that curious emotion, that fringe emotion where tragedy and comedy overlapped, could make your eyes sting while you guffawed. Jonathan, in his tall bony, sallowed, half-clumsy toughness, in all his earnestness and his self-delusion, would glide through the crystalline Kodachrome shallows in the homemade catamaran, lift the bull horn to sun-cracked lips and send that forlorn electronic bray across the nubbins of sand and rock and weed, startling the crabs and the sea birds. LEILA LEILA LEILA.

He looked over at a group of young people at tables on the far apron of the pool. They were locals, children of people with memberships. These were sailboat people, race-week people, sports-car people, raised in the big and gracious old homes which faced the sea. Colonial British, raised among such a flood tide of tourism they accepted it as that sort of inconvenience one puts up with without rancor or particular attention — as Arab children accept the flies in the marketplace. He heard a girl laugh, and her voice had the extraordinary clarity and timbre peculiar to the English woman, and he singled her out as she walked toward the pool, a limber young thing, red-gold tan, sunbaked hair, brief dusty-pink swim suit, looking back to laugh again at her group. A boy got up to follow her and swim with her, a young man muscled and poised, totally assured of himself and of his place within his world. He was older than the others, the same age as Jonathan perhaps. Sam realized that in some past existence he had wanted, for Leila, some Texan counterpart of such a young man. Now, with a sudden feeling of revulsion, he saw how such a one would take the news of the sinking of the Muñeca. Pain and grief, of course. But a manly acceptance, tinged with a certain subconscious unadmitted pleasure in the martyr role, the public image to sustain of having loved and lost. “Damned shame, sir. Bad show.”

Far better the grotesquerie of disbelief, the absurd search, Don Quixote with bull horn and Japanese binoculars, peering and braying across the ten-thousand-year silence of the shallow Bank, giving not a damn for image, for impression, for status of any kind.

And I care too much, he thought. So much that I blush for a kind of madness I should cherish. So much I have pressured them all — Leila, Lydia Jean, Boy-Sam — trying to turn them into Carolyn Coopers and fellows full of sleek and watchful assurance...

The room phone rang and he went in, closing the glass door, to tell Stanley Moree he had a firm contract and Jonathan would join him at the boat. He then ordered food to be brought up to the room. After he had eaten, he listened again to Lulu Hilger’s voice in a sequence which interested him.

“I was watching over him. Bill and Bert were topside. Francie had been with me, but it made her too nervous watching him. And there was an unpleasant smell where the burns on his arm were infected, even after Bill Barth had dressed them, and Francie is always just a little queasy when she stays below in any kind of a sea. It never bothers me.

“He was sleeping, but he would thrash around sometimes and groan and mumble. Bill took his temperature before, and it was over a hundred and two. And his pulse was very fast. I wondered if he was getting more fever. I was sitting on the foot of the bunk. I leaned way over and hitched closer and put the back of my hand against his forehead. He gave kind of a convulsive jump and grabbed my arm just above the elbow. He sat right up, staring at me and breathing hard. I can’t remember exactly what he said. He had terrible strength in his hand. I think I almost fainted from the pain. See? I’ll have these bruises for weeks. He called me Christy. He seemed to be pleading with me to understand something. And like he was almost in tears about it. He was saying something like, ‘It wasn’t that way! You’ve got to understand that, Christy. You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to.’ He seemed terribly agitated. Then he slumped back suddenly, letting go of me. He was breathing very deeply and very fast. His eyes were closed. His face was covered with beads of sweat.

“I had some lavender-flavored rubbing alcohol, and I sopped a little hand towel with it and swabbed his face off, keeping it away from his eyes. His breathing slowed down. Then he opened his eyes and he was himself and he knew who I was. I asked him who I was. I said he’d called me Christy.”

“What was his reaction to that, Mrs. Hilger?”

“I guess it scared him to know he’d been out of his head. It would scare anybod—”

“No. I mean exactly what did he do and say?”

“At first he didn’t say anything. He closed his eyes. He pushed my hand away from his face. Not roughly. Just slowly and gently. Then he asked what he’d said. I said he was trying to make Christy understand something and he was asking her for help. I said that people in delirium don’t make sense. I said he was just a little wilder this time.”

“And there was a special reaction then?”

“I don’t know what you mean by special, Mr. Boylston. He seemed surprised. ‘This time?’ is what he said, lifting his head off the pillow. I told him that the other times he was just moaning and thrashing and mumbling.”

“How soon after that did he go into convulsions?”

“It wasn’t long after that. Four minutes. Five. It scared me half to death. I thought he was dying. I know what I should have done, but I didn’t know it then. You’re supposed to wedge something across their teeth, as far back as you can get it, so they won’t chew their tongue to ribbons. I ran and yelled to Bill and he came hurrying down. By then Captain Staniker was quiet again. Asleep or unconscious. He was like that without any change when they took him off and put him in the ambulance.”

He put the tape on fast wind, all the voices sounding like a nest of agitated mice, and, with a couple of pushes on the rewind button, located the resonant and antagonistic baritone of Bert Hilger, plumbing contractor and owner of the Chris-Craft named Docksie. He numbered himself among the boat-people. Sam Boylston was an outsider. A batch of boat-people had been lost at sea, and he resented technical questions from someone who did not know the bilge from the binnacle, yet was compelled to answer because of the familiar gratification of imparting expertise.

“Check and check and check again,” he said. “You stay healthy if you don’t depend on the gadgets, Boylston. You mistrust them every minute. Duplicate everything and check the gadgets against each other. I run on gas, so I got two sniffers in the bilge, independent of each other. But before I make a run I still crawl down there and hold a cup with a few drops of gas in it next to the probes to make sure the buzzers and blinkers work on both of them. I’m wired for separate electric on both engines, independent fuel supply, and I watch fuel consumption, battery levels, rate of charge like an eagle. I check the compasses against each other and against the charts. I got two big hooks rigged so I can drop them fast if I get into trouble. I listen to every piece of weather I can find on the dial. I carry spare wheels and a wheel puller. Hell, things have gone wrong. Things always go wrong. But if you don’t trust anything, you don’t get into bad trouble. When the sea is building, you’ll find the Docksie in a protected anchorage with all the water and supplies we need to wait it out.”

“Then you think the Muñeca should have had a detection device for gas fumes.”

“The question doesn’t mean anything. She was diesel. If I was diesel and had a gasoline generator and gas cans of fuel for it below decks, I would have had a sniffer. Some perfectly sound boat owners I know wouldn’t have. Most of them, maybe. It’s how careful you want to be.”

“Suppose Staniker was at anchor and wanted to turn on the generator.”

“Then without even thinking about it he would have opened some hatches and run the blower first. He wasn’t some Kansas clown on his first cruise, you know. He was running, and when you’re running you don’t think of any accumulation of fumes in the bilge, not with a diesel, because you’ve got air movement through the bilge. You pick it up with a bow ventilator arrangement and it runs through and comes out somewhere near your transom. But the way I see it, he ran into a freak situation. He had a following wind and sea at about the same knots he was making. So he was running with dead air below. It wasn’t moving.”

“And the explosion that blew him into the water could have ignited his diesel fuel?”

“I wouldn’t know about that. As I understand it, compression creates heat, and I’ve seen some of those custom jobs they make for heavy duty work up there in North Carolina. They’re solid. Any fuel has a flash point. Put enough heat on it all of a sudden, and it will go. And if it did, the only place anybody would have a chance would be if they were on the fly bridge. And even then you’d get seared pretty good, the way he did.”

“Does it seem odd to you that no other boat saw the fire?”

“Why should it? Let me show you on the chart here. He was north of Andros according to the approximate position he gave me, up beyond North Goulding Cays far enough so no one would see him from Morgan’s Bluff, Nicholl’s Town or Mastic Point. He was moving in toward coral head areas, and it was night, and nobody who didn’t know how to sneak through there, as he did, would be well clear of it, way out in this area, far enough away so they’d see a glow, but if they did, the normal guess would be some kind of fire on shore.”

“Mr. Hilger, could you show me a few other places on this chart where it would be the same sort of situation, I mean where a fire at sea would attract so little attention?”

“Well — let me see now. Mmmm. No. I guess you could say that was another part of the way his luck was running. When your luck goes bad on the water it seems to go bad in every possible way.”

“And it would be deep water there they tell me.”

“It’s the Tongue of the Ocean, Boylston, and it comes in pretty close to the eastern shore of Andros. It’s a steep one. Within a hundred yards, say you’re heading east, you can go from forty feet of water to six thousand. That’s why they’ve got that experimental base at Fresh Creek on anti-submarine warfare. That’s down the coast of Andros, about forty miles south-southeast of the Joulters.”

“Thank you ver—”

He thumbed the button that took it off playback, then pressed the rewind button. He put the reel back into the original box and put it into the drawer in the bedside stand. He loaded a new reel on the recorder, and put the little machine into the side pocket of his jacket as he left.

It was almost five thirty when Theyma Chappie admitted Sam to the tidy little apartment in the Harbour Heights development. She had been home from the hospital long enough to shower and change. Her dark hair was undone, ribbon-tied, spilling down her slender back. The ends of it were damp, and she smelled of flower perfume and soap. She wore a sleeveless rose-pink knit shift in a coarse soft weave, gathered at the waist with a narrow belt of the same material, flat white sandals with gold thongs. Her mouth was made up a little more abundantly than in the morning. She had a warmer, livelier look.

He accepted her offer of a drink and said he would take whatever she was having. It was gin and fresh fruit juices in large weighty old-fashioned glasses with a sprig of fresh mint. He sat on a severe couch upholstered in pale gray fabric. Under the glass top of the coffee table in front of him was a display of exotic seashells. She sat on a low footstool on the other side of the table, arms wrapped around her knees, and in reply to his question, she gestured with a tilt of her head toward the recorder, the one she had taken to the hospital and brought back. “Oh, it was a most easy thing. But I was frightened all the time it was there. You can see. Most of the tape is used up. He was much better today. Except for the speaking. His tongue is swollen and bruised. It is painful for him to talk or eat. He must speak carefully. But they did question him today. Dr. McGregory permitted it. The fever is gone. Sub-normal, actually. Pulse slow and strong. No rales in the chest. But these things can turn bad quickly.”

“How much questioning?”

“I would say forty minutes this morning. And almost an hour later in the day.”

“Officials?”

“Yes. I could not say who. The head nurse brought them and asked me to leave.”

“Did any newspaper people interview him?”

“Oh no! And they are eager ones, I tell you. All manner of sly tricks. Oh, I say I could have made very much money today, to help some of them sneak into the room. Or to ask the Captain some question and then tell someone what he answered. One of them offered me five pounds to take a little camera in and take a picture of him. Stay five feet from him, the man said. Look through here. Push this little button. Bring the camera back to me. The flash bulb is all ready.” She frowned. “When I said I could not do such things, all the time I knew what I had hidden near the bed behind the towels.”

“It isn’t the same, Nurse.”

“Best you keep telling me that, Mr. Boylston.”

“If there was any trouble about it, I guess Sir Willis could intercede for you.”

She made a face, took deep swallows of her drink. “My brother asked this. I think we may leave Sir Willis out of it. The great man would not bother his head. You know? It would offend him, I think, to be asked to help such an unimportant little female person. He would say, Oh my God, what will they ask of me next? And he would worry about what all his important friends might think if he came to the rescue of...” She stopped quite suddenly and gave him a look of challenge he could not interpret. “It does not matter. One learns to look after oneself, yes?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Is something the matter?”

“All of a sudden you ducked behind a wall.”

She pondered that, then smiled. “I rather like that. Yes. I went behind my wall. Perhaps I forgot my place for just one little moment. Sir Willis is Bay Street. And so are you. A Bay Street in Texas. You have the look.” She pressed her fingertips to her cheek. “I heard what it is called there, I think. A touch of the tar brush? Perhaps it is uglier there than here. But ugly here, too. At least here we are not something one lays with to change one’s luck.”

“I reckon we’ve got our share of people who like to suffer on account of the color God happened to be handing out at the time.”

“Ah. Cowboy talk! It is beautiful! I have made you angry. Why should you be angry? I am doing you a favor. I am giving you a very nice drink. Who are you to get angry if I say the world happens to be round?”

“What gives you the right to classify me?”

“Ho! So back there in your Bay Street of Texas, you are some bold crusader, yes? And so you go rushing out from your big office to defend some poor nigger girl because she has this so touching confidence in you, yes? Ah, you are a very valuable fellow!”

He stood up quickly with his drink and went and stood at the windows, staring out, eyes unfocused, at the distant vista of Nassau harbor. She came and deftly took his empty glass from his hand. She rattled ice in the small kitchen, brought him a new drink.

“Is the world round, Mr. Boylston?”

“Sam. It is very damned round.”

“I am Theyma, Sam. And it is too bad it is so damned round I think.”

“My wife left me over five months ago, Theyma. Not for another man, or because I was mixed up with another woman. Nothing like that. I seem to be a little less than her ideal. One of the things she threw at me surprised me. About a year ago the brother of a woman who worked for us got into a cutting scrape down in Brownsville. The woman’s name is Rosalie. Short, dark, plump, cheerful, not too much English. She’s Mexican-American. She asked me to defend her brother. I did the sensible thing. A lawyer in Brownsville owed me a favor. He does a lot of that kind of work. I asked him to take the case. The brother got off with ninety days, which was pretty good, considering. Rosalie acted huffy about it. When my wife left me she said that was one of the times I let her down, when I let Rosalie down. I said I wasn’t that kind of a lawyer. She said there were apparently only two kinds of lawyers. I thought it was a lot of romantic idiocy. Until you shook me up, Miss Theyma.”

“Have you lost her for good?”

“I don’t know. I hope not. I miss her, and I miss the kid. He’s five now. I can’t let myself think she’s gone for good. This is a stronger drink.”

“It seemed like a good time for the drinks to be stronger.”

“I was wrong about Rosalie’s brother?”

“If she trusted you, yes. It is a matter of honor, of her being part of your family. If you appeared in court and he went away for a year, she could still be proud.”

He turned toward her, smiling, and said, “Miss Theyma, why does so much of the round, round world make so damned little sense?”

And as he tried to keep the tone light, to his dismay he felt his eyes filling with tears. He tried to hide it by finishing his drink. But when he lowered the glass, she took it from him and set it aside and took his hands in hers and stood, head tilted, looking at him in a troubled way.

“I did not mean to hurt you, Sam.”

“I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me!”

“Sam, I was being naughty. That is all. To give you — what is it? — needles. I did not mean to hurt. To hell with the roundness of the world, Texas Sam.”

“Okay.”

She studied him. “You know what I think about you? You are a very severe man. Very strong, very rigid, very honest in your own fashion. Too much is happening for you now. The loneliness of no wife and boy. The pain of the sister. Hatred for that Captain. Be careful, Mister Sam. A man can break, and he can do mad things and spoil everything forever.”

The directness of her sympathy made his eyes begin to smart again, and in a clumsy and unexpected way of hiding his face from her, he took her into his arms. She stood rigidly, but without protest, and he had the feeling she had stopped breathing. Then her arms slipped around him. She inhaled tremulously, pressed the warm wiry slender strength of her body against his, her fingers prodding into the muscles of his back, rolling and twisting her hips against him, nipples suddenly hard as little pebbles against his chest, through fabric. As he felt the planes of her slender back, the small ripeness of her hips, he inhaled in her crisp hair and soft throat an incongruous scent from childhood, suddenly recognizing it as the smell of vanilla Necco wafers. As he searched for her mouth, she suddenly gasped, thrust at him, wrenched herself away, ran to the couch and sat on the very edge of it, head bowed, back deeply curved, fists on her tawny knees, breathing audibly.

He went to her, touched her shoulder. She reached up and put her hand over his. “Sorry,” she breathed. “Sorry.”

“My fault.”

She stood up, gave him a wan smile and went off to her bathroom. It was a full five minutes before she came back, in full possession of herself.

“Sam, there are too many ways a thing can go wrong, I think.”

“How do you mean?”

“You must know how naughty I really was. You were very attractive to me. The look of you and how you move, and the color of your eyes. I thought it would be a very pleasant matter, you know? This pretty shift, and nice drinks, and then I would challenge you in some small ways so you would notice me as I am, and then we would take the challenges to bed and turn them into good sport. See? I have no shame. To arrange a thing so coldly, I can do it only if the attraction is strong and if — it can be — unimportant. So we spoiled it.”

“Did we?”

“Of course! I have concern for you, Sam. Too, too quickly we have some meaning for each other. The chance to be casual is gone. I cannot risk anything that would be more than that. Or would you.” She grinned. “In your marvelous language, who needs it? Now please put a new tape in your little machine and go away, my dear Sam, before we become damn fools and forget how round the world is.”