The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction Page 9

  “It’s on the chart,” I said curtly. “Listen, Barclay. You’re stupid as hell. Even if you found the plane, that money’s not recoverable. I didn’t tell her, because the main thing they wanted was to get away from your bunch, but that currency’s pulp by now. It’s been submerged for weeks—”

  “Money?” he asked. There was faint surprise in his voice.

  “Don’t be cute. You’re not looking for that plane just to recover the ham sandwich he probably had with him.”

  “She told you there was money on the plane? Is that it?”

  “Of course that’s it. What else? They were trying to get to some place in Central America so they could quit running from you and your gorillas—”

  “I wondered what she told you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re nuts, Manning. We’re not looking for any money. We’re after something he stole from us.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s not important what you believe. But what makes you so sure, when you’d never met him and knew nothing about him at all?”

  “I know her. She wouldn’t lie about it.”

  He chuckled. “Wouldn’t she?”

  The Ballerina began lifting slowly on the long groundswell running in through the mouth of the jetties. I searched the darkness ahead and could see the seabuoy winking on and off. I wondered why Barclay had tried to get off a cock-and-bull story like that. He was in control; why bother to lie?

  “I found their bag, the one she sent aboard.”

  I looked around. It was the voice of George Barfield, down below.

  “Any chart in it?” Barclay asked.

  “No.” Barfield came out carrying something in one hand and sat down beside Barclay. “The satchel was in it, all right. About eighty thousand, roughly. But no chart, none at all.”

  “What?” It exploded from me.

  “What’s the matter with Don Quixote?” Barfield asked. “Somebody goose him?”

  “Could be he just got the point,” Barclay murmured. “She told him that money was in the plane.”

  “Oh,” Barfield said. “Well, I wanted to see everything before I died, and now I have. A man over thirty who still believes women.”

  I felt sick. “Shut up, you punk.” I said. “Put that bag down and throw a flashlight on it. There’s one on the starboard bunk.”

  “I’ve got it here.” Barfield put the bag down, flipped on the light and I looked at bundle after bundle of twenties, fifties, and hundreds.

  I sold my jewelry and borrowed what I could on the car. It’s the last chance we’ll ever have. I don’t know why they’re trying to kill him; it was something that happened at a party—

  “All right,” I said. “Turn it off, Barfield.”

  “You’re supposed to say, ‘turn it off, you punk.’ ”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “How long would it take you to learn enough navigation, Joey?”

  “Too long,” Barclay answered. “Leave him alone.”

  “I was pretty good at math.” Barfield said. “Want me to try it? I could get sick of this guy.”

  “Stop it,” Barclay ordered curtly. “Even if we could find the place alone, we still need a diver.”

  “Anybody with an aqualung.”

  “George,” Barclay said softly.

  “All right. All right.”

  “What’s in the plane?” I asked.

  “Diamonds,” Barclay answered.

  “Lots of diamonds.”

  “Whose?”

  “Ours.”

  “And she knows about it?”

  “Yes.”

  I wanted to hear it all. “And they weren’t trying to get to Central America?”

  “Yes, they were, at first. But Macaulay couldn’t take her in the plane because he had to take a diver.”

  I was a chump. A sucker. I’d believed her. Even when I’d had intelligence enough to realize the story sounded fishy I’d still believed it. She wouldn’t lie. Oh, no, of course not. Hell, how stupid could you get? She couldn’t go in the plane because he’d had to add a fuel tank to stretch out its cruising radius. I was their last chance to escape; she had trusted me with all the money they had left – she must have been laughing herself sick all the time. I even imagined her telling her husband about it. Dear, this poor sap will believe anything.

  And because I’d believed it I had killed that poor vicious little gunman and now the police would be looking for me as long as I lived. Only I wasn’t going to be living very long. I was scheduled for extinction when I found Macaulay’s plane and brought up what they wanted.

  So was she. And wasn’t that too bad? I wondered if she realized just what her chances were of selling Barclay and that big thug a sob-story of some kind. As soon as she told them where to look for that plane she was through. There should have been some satisfaction in knowing her double-crossing had got her killed as well as me, but when I looked for it it wasn’t there.

  So I was going back to feeling sorry for her? I was like hell. The dirty, lying, double-crossing – I stopped, puzzled. If she knew what was in the plane and where it was, why hadn’t they grabbed her off long ago? Why had they kept trying to sweat Macaulay out of hiding so they could take him alive and make him tell, when they could have picked her up any time they pleased?

  What the hell, was I still trying to find a way out for her? Of course they hadn’t wanted her as long as there was a chance she would lead them to Macaulay. Her information about the plane would be second-hand, and they’d only taken her as second choice after Macaulay was dead. She was all they had left.

  Well, I thought, they didn’t have much.

  14

  Barclay had me set a course for west of Scorpion Reef. Barfield watched me plot it in the chartroom.

  I gave Barclay the corrected course, and he let her fall off another point.

  “Now,” he said, “ever handle a sailboat, George?”

  “No,” Barfield replied, across from me. “But if your nipple-headed friend can do it, anybody can.”

  “Well, you won’t have to,” Barclay said. “Manning and I will split the watches. You’ll be on deck when he has it and I’m asleep. Mrs Macaulay can have the forward part of the cabin; you, I, and Manning can sleep in the two bunks in the after part. And Manning won’t go down there when one of us is asleep.

  “It’s after twelve now,” he went on. “Get some sleep, George. Manning can stretch out here in the cockpit and I’ll take the first watch, until six. When Manning relieves me, you’ll have to come on deck.”

  I sat down, as near Barclay as I dared, and lit a cigarette. “It would be tragic,” I said, “if he blew his stack and killed me before I found your lousy plane for you and the two of you could take turns at it.”

  “Why should we kill you?”

  “Save it,” I said. “I knew all along you wouldn’t. Just give me a letter of recommendation. You know, something like: ‘This will introduce Mr Manning, the only living witness to the fact that we killed Macaulay and that his widow is innocent—” ’

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “You can’t go to the police. You’re wanted for murder yourself.”

  He knew I’d have everything to lose and nothing to gain. But if I were dead and lying somewhere in two hundred fathoms of water there was no chance at all. And .45 cartridges were cheap.

  I moved a little nearer, watching his face. It was calm and imperturbable in the faint glow from the binnacle. I could almost reach him.

  The eyes were suddenly full of a mocking humor. “Here,” he said. He handed the .45 automatic to me butt first. “Is this what you want?”

  For a fraction of a second I was too startled to do anything. Then I recovered myself and grabbed it out of his hand.

  “You really wanted it?” he asked solicitously.

  “Come about,” I said. “Take her back to the seabuoy.”

  “What an actor!” His voice was amused.

&nbs
p; “You don’t think I’d kill you?”

  “No.”

  “So it’s not loaded?” Completely deflated, I pulled the slide back. I stared. It was loaded.

  “You won’t pull the trigger,” he said, “for several reasons. You can’t go back to Sanport, because of the police. You couldn’t shoot a man in cold blood. You aren’t the type—”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “The third reason is that Barfield is down there in the cabin with another gun, with Mrs Macaulay. If you try anything, she gets it.”

  “I don’t give a damn what happens to Mrs Macaulay,” I said.

  He smiled. “You think you don’t, but that would change with the first scream. You don’t have the stomach for that either.”

  “I’m the original gutless wonder. Is that it?”

  “No. You’re just weak in a couple of spots where you can’t be in a business like this. I’ve sized you up since that afternoon at the lake.”

  “Then you knew what she was up to? That’s the reason you shoved off and left us?”

  “Naturally. Also the reason we roughed you up without really hurting you, that night on the beach. We wanted you to hurry and get this boat for them so we could find where Macaulay was hiding. It worked, except that he forced us to kill him. That’s that, and now I’ll take my gun back.”

  Sweat broke out on my face. I had only to squeeze the trigger, ever so gently, and there would be only one of them. He watched me coolly, mockingly.

  My finger tightened. I didn’t care what happened to her, did I? I cursed her silently, bitterly, hating her for being alive, for being here.

  “George,” Barclay said quietly.

  I went limp. I handed the gun to him, feeling sick and weak all over.

  “What is it?” Barfield’s voice asked from the companionway.

  “Nothing,” Barclay said.

  I lit a cigarette. My hands shook.

  He had wanted me to realize the futility of jumping one of them to get his gun as long as she was where the other could get her. I detested her. Maybe I even actively hated her. She and her lying had ruined everything for me, I was sick with contempt when I thought of her, and yet he’d known he could tie my hands completely by threatening her with violence. I was “weak” all right.

  “The hell with Mrs Macaulay,” I said. “What did Macaulay do?”

  “He stole three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth of diamonds from us. Since you were in the salvage business,” he went on, “you must have known the Shetland Queen.”

  I looked up suddenly. “Sure. I remember her.”

  She had gone down in about ten fathoms, off Campeche Bank last fall, and the underwriters had let a contractor salvage as much of the cargo as wasn’t ruined. They had saved some machinery and several thousand cases of whiskey that somehow hadn’t been smashed. The crew had been saved.

  “So that’s the first time your diamonds were dunked,” I said. “But where does Macaulay fit in?”

  I began to get the connection. Salvage – underwriters; the part about his being in the marine insurance business was true.

  “They were aboard the Shetland Queen,” continued Barclay. “But they didn’t appear on the cargo manifest or any of the Customs lists. They were in some cases of tinned cocoa which were going to a small importing firm in New Orleans. A cheap way to ship diamonds but tough to explain if something happens to the ship, as in this case. The cocoa was insured, for two or three hundred dollars. We would have looked stupid trying to collect three-quarters of a million dollars from the underwriters when we’d paid a premium on a valuation of three hundred dollars. We couldn’t explain that to Customs either.

  “Benson & Teen had paid off all claims, including ours, and were salvaging what they could, but they weren’t going to waste time bringing up a few dollars’ worth of tinned cocoa. They paid, and wrote it off. We made a few feelers. Since they were working inside the ship anyway, why not bring up our cocoa and let us drop our claim? They brushed us. We let it drop, before they got suspicious. We had to wait until they were finished and then do our own salvaging.

  “But then some – uh – competitors of ours got wise and also tried to buy the cocoa from Benson & Teen. This was a little too much for Macaulay, who was in charge of the operation. He sent a confidential agent down to the salvage operations to look into this chocolate business on the quiet. This guy asked to have the cocoa brought up and, since he was acting for Benson & Teen through Macaulay, they brought it up. He found out what made it so valuable, devalued it, and phoned Macaulay.

  “They had two problems. The first was getting the stones into the States without paying duty or answering any embarrassing questions as to where they had come from. The second was to keep us from getting them. We had two men in the Mexican port keeping an eye on the cargo that was brought in. Macaulay solved both problems at once. He’d been a bomber pilot in the Second World War, and held a pilot’s license. He came down to the Gulf Coast, chartered a big amphibian, and came after his agent and the stones. They were to meet in a laguna some ten or fifteen miles east of the Mexican port. They did, but our men were there too. They’d followed Macaulay’s man and lost him in the jungle, but saw the plane coming in and got there just as the man was climbing aboard. They recognized Macaulay and opened fire, killing the other man, but Macaulay got away in the plane.”

  “With your stupid diamonds,” I said.

  He nodded. We thought so. “Macaulay didn’t go back to New York, knowing what he was up against now. His wife disappeared also. The firm said he had suffered a heart attack and resigned. He’d told them, earlier, that he had to go to the coast because of illness in the family. We almost caught up to him two or three times. He never tried to sell any of the diamonds. We figured that, just about the time we ran him down in Sanport. He hadn’t sold them because he didn’t have them.

  “He escaped us in Sanport, taking off in a plane with a man carrying an aqualung diving outfit. Macaulay, by the way, couldn’t swim. When we learned about the diver, we knew what had happened. The metal box with the diamonds had fallen into the water when Macaulay’s friend was killed.

  “We stuck close to Mrs Macaulay, knowing she’d soon lead us to him. But just about that time we suspected he was back in Sanport because of a little story in the paper. About five days after Macaulay took off, a fishing boat docked with a man it had picked up in a rubber liferaft on the Campeche Bank. He told them he was a pilot for some Mexican company and had crashed while going from Tampico to Progreso alone in a seaplane. He took off the minute the fishing boat docked.”

  “I get it now,” I said. “As soon as she got in touch with me you knew the castaway was Macaulay. And you realized he had crashed out there somewhere, but that he knew exactly where the plane was and could find it again, or he wouldn’t have been trying to hire a diver.”

  Barclay nodded. “Correct. We also suspected he was in the house, but taking him alive wasn’t going to be easy. He was armed and panicky.”

  “The thing that puzzles me,” I said, “is that you and your meatheaded thugs never did put the arm on her to find out where the plane was. You’re convinced now she knows where it is, but you let her come and go there for a week or more right under your noses.”

  “We weren’t certain she knew then.”

  “But you are now. Why?”

  He lit a cigarette. Sanport’s lights were fading on the horizon.

  “It’s simple,” he explained. “I wrote Macaulay a letter two days ago advising him to tell her.”

  I shook my head. “Say that again. You wrote him a letter – where?”

  “To his house. Even if he weren’t there she would get it to him.”

  “And he’d be sure to tell her, just because you suggested it? Why?”

  He smiled again. “Sure, he was an insurance man, wasn’t he? I just pointed out that there was always the chance something might happen to him and he ought to protect her.”

  “By tellin
g her where the plane was?” I asked incredulously. “So he could guarantee her being put through the wringer by you—”

  He shook his head gently. “You still don’t see Macaulay’s point of view. He knew she’d be questioned. But suppose she didn’t know where the plane was?”

  I saw the bastard’s logic. “Good God—”

  “Right. Life insurance. He was leaving her the only thing that could stop the interrogation.”

  I saw then what Macaulay must have gone through in those last few hours. He had to tell her.

  I leaned my elbows on my knees and looked at him. “You dirty son—”

  I stopped. I’d forgotten him. She’d been telling the truth.

  Barclay had sent that letter to Macaulay only two days ago. I had to talk to her.

  Barclay let me, too. He knew he was tying me tighter to Shannon and that I’d be easier to handle that way, so he called Barfield up. Barfield liked his sleep a lot more than he liked me. I could see his face burning as I went below.

  She was lying on the starboard bunk with her face in her arms.

  15

  “Shannon,” I said.

  “What, Bill?” Her voice was muffled.

  “How long have you known what these gorillas are after?”

  She turned slowly and looked up with listless gray eyes.

  “Since three this afternoon,” she said.

  I felt weak with relief or joy, or both of them. I’d been right. All the bitterness was gone and I wanted to take her in my arms. Instead I lit a cigarette. “I want to apologize,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Don’t. I sold you out, Bill.”

  “No,” I whispered. “You didn’t know. I thought you had lied, but you hadn’t. It doesn’t matter that he was lying to you.”

  “Don’t make it any worse, Bill. I had six hours to call you, and you could have got away. I tried to, but I couldn’t. I thought I owed him that, in spite of what he did. Maybe I was wrong, but I think I’d still do it the same way. I don’t know how to explain—”