The Wager

14

With the door to André’s stateroom closed and locked behind them, Jamison and the security officer — whose name was L. James Rafferty — stood and looked about themselves a moment in the gloom; then Jamison walked swiftly to the porthole, throwing back the heavy drapes. The schedule did not permit of daydreaming. Brilliant sunlight streamed in, brightening the already-made-up twin beds, the warmly upholstered furniture, and the colorful pictures on the paneled walls. Jamison nodded, satisfied with the arena, and turned to Rafferty.

“Let’s go!” He might have been a Marine drill sergeant from his tone, but Rafferty was no recruit. The security officer bit back a yawn and looked at Jamison curiously. “You take the dresser and the vanity,” Jamison ordered. “Don’t forget to take out the drawers completely and look behind them. I’ll cover the closets and the bathroom first. Then we’ll look under the chairs and get to the luggage last. We’ll do that together.”

Rafferty shrugged and bent down to the dresser. His instructions from the captain had been to follow Jamison’s orders within reason, and to see to it that Jamison didn’t break anything. Jamison disappeared into the bathroom to reappear a moment later, nodding his head at confirmation of his study in depth of his own facilities.

“Nothing there except shaving things and a toothbrush. The tub is even with the floor and the toilet has no flush tank; operates on pressure, so there’s no place to hide anything there. No closets in the bathroom. The medicine chest is empty.”

The security officer, well aware of these facts, continued to pull out empty drawers, look behind them, and replace them. Jamison emerged from one closet and entered a second. He came out carrying a life jacket, a gleam in his eye.

“Something I overlooked before; life vests. Proves even the best of us can slip up, regardless of practice. Here, give me a knife while I slit this thing open...”

Rafferty was on his feet in an instant. In his mind, cutting and breaking were in the same category. “Hey! That’s ship’s property. You can’t cut it open. Ships sinks and some character jumps overboard in a bum life jacket, he can drown! Anyways,” he added, “there’s lifeboat drill tomorrow. The guy sees his life jacket all cut up, he’s going to know somebody was in here today.”

“That’s true,” Jamison conceded a bit regretfully. He scratched his nose. “Well, maybe we can just tell by feel.” He pushed on the hard kapok and nodded. “I suppose you’re right. Anyway, what we’re looking for is too big for these narrow pockets.”

“Incidentally,” Rafferty said, now that the subject had been broached, “what are we looking for?”

“A package. So big.” Jamison’s hands quickly outlined the various dimensions. “Probably wrapped in colored paper from one of the Barbados stores. It has an ivory carving inside, stolen from one of the other islands a few nights ago.”

“Oh. Okay, so long as I know,” Rafferty said, and moved to the vanity.

Jamison tipped over the two chairs and then put them back. He got to his knees to peer under the beds; in his schedule, peering under the beds followed dresser, vanity, bathroom and closets, and looking under chairs. He had never practiced it before, but he was sure it was the most effective progression. He came to his feet and was about to move to the suitcase, the pièce de résistance to any old Customs man, when he happened to glance upwards. A gleam came to his eye.

“Ah! An overhead bunk, folded into the wall! My stateroom doesn’t have one. I should have considered the possibility, though...” He was speaking mostly to himself. He reached up, twisted the handle, and tugged downward sharply.

“Hey!” Rafferty said in a loud voice. He had wanted to warn Jamison that the overhead bunks on the MV Andropolis, seldom used on cruises, were not counterbalanced and required care in lowering them. But he was too late. Jamison, sitting on the floor and holding tightly to his nose, was looking at him reproachfully, tears welling in his eyes despite his attempt to contain them. Rafferty bent over him, concerned; after all, as security officer he imagined the captain would expect him to see that bunks didn’t fall on people. “You all right?”

Jamison started to struggle to his feet. Rafferty instantly came to his aid with a hand under the other’s arm. Jamison fumbled a handkerchief loose, pressed it urgently to his nose, and staggered to the bathroom. Rafferty looked after him a moment, shrugged, and put the last of the empty vanity drawers in place. He then felt around the overhead bunk enough to convince himself that no package of the requisite size was hidden there, then closed and latched the cumbersome contraption, after which he sat down and calmly awaited Jamison’s return.

If there was no time in the tight schedule for daydreaming, there was certainly none for accidents. Jamison bravely put aside the wet washcloth that had replaced the handkerchief, and returned to the job, determined not to be deterred from his duty by mere pain, although it did occur to him that there should be some limit to the battering one agent had to endure on any particular job. If a person had to take risks of that nature, he might as well be in the FBI and get paid accordingly.

Rafferty noted the livid welt across the bridge of the other’s nose, thought it fitted in well with the puffy ear, the lumpy jaw, and the more ancient but still visible bruised cheek, but he wisely made no comment on it. “Bunk was empty,” he reported succinctly. “Want to tackle the suitcase now?”

Jamison nodded; speech might affect his nose. And there wasn’t anything else in his search program, and time was running out. He walked over to the luggage rack and started to lay on hands with the experience of many years and many, many suitcases. He pushed aside the shirts on top and felt carefully along the edges of one side of the opened case. Nothing hard or rectangular came to hand. He moved to the other side of the suitcase and reached beneath, while Rafferty stared with admiration at the colorful attire.

“Ah!” Jamison looked up in triumph and withdrew whatever had caught his attention. It was a square bottle of brandy. His face fell. For a moment he was tempted to either take it into the bathroom and pour it down the sink as a sort of punishment, or take a strong nip for his troubles, but he thought better of it. He shoved it back, straightened out the top pieces of clothing, and shook his head dolefully.

“Well,” he said slowly, “I didn’t really think we’d find anything here, but we had to be sure. I doubted that Huuygens would trust a confederate with anything that valuable.” He sighed and glanced around the room. There were no signs that anyone other than the room steward had been there. He nodded, satisfied. “Eleven twenty-eight. Two minutes to get to Huuygens’ cabin. Let’s go!”

The main difference between the cabin of Kek Huuygens and that of André — other, Jamison was happy to note, than the absence of a third overhead bunk — was that the place had a lived-in look. There were books on the small ledge beneath the porthole, revealed when the drapes were drawn; there were two suitcases plus an overnight bag neatly stacked in one corner of the room, indicating that their contents were distributed in the proper drawers or on the proper hangers; a dish of caramels and a small clock were on the vanity, and the liquor bottles were lined up on the dresser.

The bathroom was disposed of with accustomed ease; Jamison was sure that no bathroom in the future would ever present a searching problem. The closets inspected proved to be devoid of interest, although Jamison carefully pressed each hanging suit and each pair of slacks between his palms before giving them clearance. The life jackets were opened, poked, and returned to place. During this endeavor, Rafferty had upended the chairs and determined that the stacked suitcases and overnight bags were, indeed, empty. Jamison approached the vanity and dresser with confidence; the answer simply had to be there. He found himself voicing this thought.

“It has to be there,” he said, logic on his side. “I saw him with the package in Barbados. He didn’t even try to hide it.”

“Umphh,” Rafferty mumbled, not disagreeing, but not agreeing, either. He reached down and pulled out the first drawer, carrying it to the bed for Jamison’s more expert search while Rafferty peered back into the dresser through the opening, and then probed for hidden treasure with an extended arm. This procedure was followed faithfully with each succeeding drawer in both dresser and vanity, from shirts to underwear and socks through pajamas, cummerbunds, handkerchief and ties. Jamison was becoming more and more petulant as time went on. And time seemed to be flying.

“Impossible!” he muttered blackly as the last dresser drawer was slid back into place. “It has to be here! I saw it.” The final possibility occurred to him; he moved the dish of caramels and the clock from the vanity, wrestled it away from the wall; but all he discovered was a year’s accumulation of dust. In disgust he shoved the furniture back in place, replaced the items on top of it, and dropped into a chair, glowering.

“Maybe he ducked it someplace else on the ship,” Rafferty suggested. In his own opinion anyone wishing to hide something on the MV Andropolis had to be pretty lacking in imagination to choose his own stateroom. There were so many better places available; under the rowing machine in the gym, for example. Nobody had used the machine to his knowledge since the ship was launched; or behind the ancient deckle-edged books in the library, mostly H. Rider Haggard and Elinor Glyn, with an occasional time-and-tide table thrown in for interest. Anything placed there could remain undetected for generations.

“No, no!” Jamison said impatiently. “This carving is valuable! Hide it where some stranger might inadvertently stumble on it and keep it? Never! Not Huuygens.” He looked around the sunlit room in desperation, willing himself not to look at the small clock on the vanity and see how time was escaping. “Damn it! It has to be here! I saw him with the package myself!”

“Well,” Rafferty said, more to fill in the conversational gap than for any other reason, “if I was going to hide something that size in a stateroom, myself, I’d put it in the air-conditioning duct, myself. The outside grillwork is—”

Jamison frowned at him. “The what?”

Rafferty pointed. “The air-conditioning duct. That thing there. The outside grillwork just snaps in place. Two seconds and you could hide—”

But Jamison was no longer paying attention to the other’s final words; he was dragging a chair over to the wall. He climbed on it, tugged the small wire grillwork free, and peered within. Less than six inches from his eyes was the neatly wrapped but gaudy package he had seen pressed so tightly under Huuygens’ arm just the day before. An unbelieving smile broke across his horseface; he looked like a sixty-to-one shot who finds himself to his own amazement in the winner’s circle.

“It’s here.” He said the words in a half-whisper, as if he really couldn’t bring himself to believe it. “It’s here!” He stared at the package worshipfully for several additional seconds, and then carefully replaced the grillwork and stepped from the chair, dusting his hands. Rafferty frowned at him.

“You ain’t going to take it?”

“No, no!” Jamison said, once more the master of the situation and now expounding basic theory to a neophyte. “You see, if we were to remove it, even with you here as a witness, what could we really prove? Only that we found a package in an air-conditioning duct. We couldn’t prove that Huuygens put it there. He’d simply deny it; after all, other people have access to his stateroom, he’d say, as witness our having found it. And what could we do? He’d walk off the ship scot-free.”

“Yeah,” Rafferty agreed, and fell back on principles of logic he’d been taught at his mother’s knee. “But you’d have the thing, wouldn’t you?”

“I’ll have it just as much in New York when we dock,” Jamison gloated, and smiled wolfishly. “And I’ll have Mr. Huuygens with it. Like that!” He clenched a fist dramatically, and then realized there was little time in the schedule for fist-clenching. He put the chair back where he had found it and studied the room. All was as it had been on their entrance. He looked up at the air-conditioning duct proudly, Rafferty’s part in the discovery already downgraded in the mental report he was still composing. He glanced at his watch; twelve noon on the button. Even his time calculations had proven perfect.

“Let’s go,” he said to Rafferty, and without thinking rubbed his nose. The instant shock of pain reminded him that all things have their price, even victory. “Let’s go,” he repeated, although less exuberantly this time, and led the way to the door.

André, having returned from a five-minute absence and reseated himself, was surprised to find Kek looking at him reprovingly. André reached for his drink, frowning.

“What’s the look for?”

“You shouldn’t have done it,” Kek said, and glanced across the room. A stranger to André, accompanied by a large ship’s officer, was passing through the bar, and the stranger looked as if he had put his face into one of the ship’s ventilation fans nose first and held it there too long.

André studied the battered features in puzzlement; then intelligence finally struck. He downed his drink first, as being of proper priority, and then said. “That’s Jamison?”

“That’s right,” Anita said glumly, “and he looks like the cat who found the combination to the cream cellar.”

“I didn’t touch him,” André said, insulted. “I was in the men’s room. I never even knew what he looked like, before.” He found the clinching argument. “It couldn’t have been me. He’s walking, isn’t he?”

“In that case I owe you an apology.” Kek looked after the disappearing back sadly. “One thing is certain, our friend Jamison is accident-prone. I’d hate to be his insurance agent.”

“He winked at me!” Anita said, amazed at Huuygens’ attitude. “I tell you he found whatever he was looking for!”

“I doubt it,” Kek said calmly. “Well, one for the road — or I suppose roadstead would be more correct aboard ship — or lunch?”

“For the road,” André said, and wondered if his old friend Huuygens was losing his grip; if the redoubtable Kek was actually as unconcerned as he appeared to be.

Anita sighed. “Well, at least Jamison gave us an excuse to be together for the rest of the cruise.”

Kek looked at her gently. “I’m afraid not. As a matter of fact, your stint with us is done, and you managed it very well. I suggest you now go out to the deck buffet with that red-haired boy who has been glaring in this direction for the past half-hour. And then, when you have time, report to Mr. Jamison. And no, it is not necessary to report back to me what the two of you discuss.”

Anita frowned. “But I thought—”

“There will be other times and other cruises,” Kek told her gently. “And this time let’s not part with a slap. André is here to protect me this time.”

“Oh!” Anita came to her feet, whirled, and stalked from the bar. Billy Standish was after her in one bound.

“A little rough, weren’t you?” André asked.

Kek paused in calling a waiter. He faced André squarely, his gray eyes serious.

“You, my friend, are going to find out what being identified with me, even in someone’s mind as a ‘confederate,’ will mean when we go through Customs,” he said quietly. “I don’t like the thought of Anita being put through that routine...”