Midnight Sailing, page 14
“And you didn’t?”
“I didn’t even know the questions. I’d been drifting along in a pleasant haze of dumb contentment, f didn’t even know I wasn’t happy. I hadn’t thought about it. It took the brutal end of another life to make me question my own. I was horrified at first to think the shock of father’s death might be responsible for my happiness…” She paused.
“How did your father make you unhappy?”
“He didn’t. Oh, he didn’t. It wasn’t his fault. He thought he was making me very happy, and I thought so too. Father was just like everybody else, I guess. He struggled and schemed and built all his life on the idea that having money and spending it was all anybody needed to be happy. And he was convinced that he was making me happy because he gave me everything I wanted, everything that money could buy. He would have bought me the best husband in the market. It was just an accident that I didn’t happen to want any man badly enough to let father buy him. I get cold all over when I think I might have—only a year ago.”
“So he bought you Mr. Charles Frayle, all wrapped in cellophane.” Larkin tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice.
The girl turned her head quickly. She seemed to be studying Larkin’s face in the darkness for a long time before she said slowly, “I’m glad you asked that question, darling. I wanted you to ask it. I owe you an explanation.”
“You don’t owe me an explanation.”
“Then I owe myself one. Are you tired of listening?”
“No, go ahead. Tell me all about dear Mr. Frayle.”
“First, may I have a cigarette, darling?”
“Of course.” The flame from Larkin’s briquet molded the girl’s face in soft, mobile contours. Her eyes were watching him from deep shadows as her fingers steadied his hand, then curled about his thumb as the light went out.
“I met Charlie Frayle,” she said, “about five years ago in Japan. I was in Yokohama with father for the spring and summer. Charlie came down from Mukden. He was a mining engineer, and had been surveying iron deposits near Kirin for some British interests when the Japs moved into Manchuria and took over the British concessions So Charlie was out of a job.
“He made a big impression on father. He knew all about silk and the trend of the market—more than you’d expect of a mining man. He told father he’d better hedge on silk and brought him a proposition that interested dad a lot.
“The Disarmament Conference had just gone to pieces in Geneva, and the whole world—particularly Japan—was getting ready to build more battleships and guns. Charlie pointed out that there was going to be a tremendous demand for vanadium, because vanadium increases the toughness and elasticity and tensile strength of steel for armor plate, and what-not. For a relatively small investment, Charlie said, dad could tie up half the world’s available supply of vanadium.
“Dad took him with us when we came back to the States a month later. There was a conference in San Francisco. I wasn’t in on it, naturally, so I can’t tell you the details. But I think General Rodriguez was there. Anyhow, dad’s investment apparently consisted in backing the general’s coup d’ état.”
“So the coup d’état was successful and P. G. Bonner was given concessions to vast vanadium deposits in Peru. Is that right?” Larkin prompted.
“Yes. Charlie was in South America most of the time during the next few years, but I saw him now and then in Washington and New York. Once he flew up just to spend a weekend—because it was my birthday…”
“So you fell in love with him.”
“Not exactly, darling. I don’t think I’ve ever been in love with him. In fact, I’m sure I wasn’t. I was intrigued. I still am. Charlie’s a fascinating person. He’s fun to be with and to listen to. He’s like no man I’d ever known before. I admired his way of looking at life, and I respected his independence. I still do. Father wanted to make him a sort of partner, in charge of the New York office, but he refused. He said, ‘I’m going to marry Dorothy, but I’m not going to be tied to anybody’s purse strings. I want a wife, not an endowment policy. She’ll share the kind of life I lead, and she’ll become accustomed to the manner in which I can support her.’
“I didn’t really decide to marry him until after—after father died. I was converted to his philosophy then. If happiness didn’t consist in just having money and spending it, it must lie in the making of money. Father was happy in making money. I’d be like him. I’d make my own happiness, my own money, my own life. I’d string along with Charlie.…”
“When do you marry him?” Larkin broke in.
“Never.” The girl threw away her cigarette.
Larkin sat up. He said, “That sounds like a mighty long engagement. Does Frayle approve?”
“He doesn’t know yet,” Dorothy replied. “I’ve just found out myself.”
“I get it. Antigone, vindictively faithful to the dead Polynices.”
“My Sophocles is a little hazy, darling,” the girl said. “But if you mean that I’ve been shocked out of the idea of marriage because I suspect Charlie might have killed Arthur, you’re wrong. At least partly wrong.”
“Then—what changed your mind?” Larkin was almost afraid to hear the answer.
“The realization,” the girl said softly, “that if I married Charlie, I probably wouldn’t be faithful to him. Charlie loves me, and I thought that was enough to make a marriage work. I’d never been really in love before, and I thought being loved was a strong enough bond—as much as I could hope for. But it isn’t. I know now that it isn’t.”
“When,” asked Larkin, “did you make this discovery?”
“Last night—when you kissed me. And this morning—when I saw Arthur lying on the deck—and you came over to me. Why is it, darling, that death makes life so suddenly distinct and real and important? Because in that moment this morning, the thing I could see most clearly was not that Arthur was dead but that I was alive and that I wanted terribly to be near you and—”
She stopped, her words smothered under the turbulent suddenness of Larkin’s kiss, her breath crushed out by the vehemence of his embrace. His arms swept around her, lifted her body to him with a primitive, inexorable force like the surge of the sea. Her lips burned against his for a long, hungry moment. Then she was limp in his arms, deliciously faint as the storm of his kisses rose with fierce tenderness. He was kissing her cheeks, her eyelids, her hair …
There was a great sound in his ears, now like the rushing fury of a gale, now like the throb of swelling chords of music, bursting with sweetness. The rhythm echoed through his breast and in the tightness of his arms about her yielding body, pounding, racing to a crescendo. Time stood still, then came flooding back from eternity, slowly, gently, indistinctly.…
Chapter Twenty-two: TEN CHINESE POETS
The Hudson Bay blanket had fallen to the deck. Larkin was lying in the girl’s chair, and Dorothy was twisted into a happy knot close against him. Her lips, under the angle of his rugged jaw, whispered, “Darling. Darling.” The tone was no longer light and casual.
Larkin said, “Has it occurred to you, adorable, that I love you so much that I can’t even think straight?”
The girl made a small contented sound that hummed against Larkin’s throat. Then there was a long silence. Larkin was aware of an exquisite sense of calm; of the fragrance of the girl’s hair blowing softly against his cheek; of the masthead light sketching slow, gentle circles against the stars.
“Sweetheart?” Larkin was first to speak.
“Yes, darling.”
“Do you know how much I love you?”
“No, darling. I know that I’m in a complete dither over you. And that’s all I know.” She sat up suddenly, looked at him long and intently. “It’s funny,” she went on, “but that’s really all I do know—about you. And yet I must have loved you pretty much from the first time I saw you, from the very moment of our midnight sailing, because I’ve been so ready to let my instincts lead me right to you, and so quick to trust you. After all, even knowing practically nothing about you, I did hand over my fate and my future to you when I gave you that envelope last night.”
Damn that envelope, thought Larkin. She would have to bring that up now. He was beginning to be glad someone had stolen it from him, glad that it no longer stood between them. But there was no escaping it, apparently. Might as well face it now. “That envelope—”
“That envelope,” the girl interrupted, “is my career and my new life. It’s the daughter of Pongee Bonner emerging as a person in her’ own right. It’s my reason for being on this ship, going back to the East.”
“But why,” Larkin demanded, “are you so set on doubling the Bonner fortune?”
Dorothy reached up and caressed Larkin’s cheek. She laughed—a little wistfully. “There isn’t any fortune.”
“None?”
“Not a cent. That’s why father killed himself.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Positive. So now you won’t love me any more?”
“More than ever,” Larkin said. But there was doubt in his voice. What about the charred blueprints that the police had found in the Bonner incinerator in Washington?
“You see,” Dorothy explained, “Pongee Bonner, the silk king, had his throne shot out from under him. Silk was worth five dollars a pound in 1929. The quotation was a dollar-sixty-eight the day he died. The old empire had been crumbling steadily, and there was nothing left but ruins—and debts. He wrote me a letter: ‘Your only legacy, my dearest girl, is my love and my insurance. My only comfort is that I am worth more dead than alive.…’”
“What happened to the letter?” Larkin demanded.
“I tore it up, of course.”
“Why ‘of course’? You might have spared yourself a lot of unpleasantness if you’d made it public.”
“How, darling?” the girl countered. “It would have done nobody any good—except those ghoulish newspaper reporters. It was nobody’s business but mine. And I didn’t want another pack of gigolos around me, baying after the insurance money—not even for the pleasure of telling them it’s all gone to pay father’s debts.”
“All?”
“All but just enough to finance the contracts of the Pan-American Vanadium Corporation.”
“Now listen, adorable.” Larkin sat up. There was no getting around those naval ordnance photostats. The mood was gone anyhow, the intoxication of the past half hour destroyed by the sober conflict of facts. He was coldly, deplorably rational again. “I thought you told me you trusted me,” he said.
“Of course I trust you, darling.”
“Not completely. Not enough to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God.”
“So help me God, I have.”
“You skipped the part about the blueprints,” Larkin said.
“What—what blueprints?”
“The U. S. Navy blueprints of the new antiaircraft gun,” said Larkin. “The ones that were burned in your father’s Washington apartment the day he shot himself.”
There was a stunned silence. The girl’s hands were cold as she eagerly, fearfully, grasped his. She asked, “How did you know about that?”
“Sweetheart, I love you,” Larkin said, “but I’m not a downright simpleton. Even a man in love can’t ignore your fiancé traveling second-class, obviously to escape notice; your ex-convict brother coming aboard in a coffin; your brother murdered—”
“How did you know we burned the blueprints.…
“The police lab analyzed the ashes! It was on the press wires the night we sailed,” said Larkin.
“But surely, darling, you can’t think father had anything to do with taking those blueprints. It’s ridiculous. Father was too big a man to engage in petty espionage like that!” The girl spoke rapidly, desperately.
“Then how did the blueprints get into his apartment?”
“I can’t imagine how. They may have been planted there—to frame him—to make that senator’s story seem true!”
“It’s not likely,” said Larkin, “that those plans would be left lying around so carelessly, if they are as important as the navy seems to think. Were they destroyed before or after your father was killed?” Larkin asked.
“After. They were beside him on his desk when—when we found him.”
“In that case, doesn’t it occur to you that he might have been trying deliberately to create the impression that he was guilty?”
“Why should he do that?”
“To protect someone he thought was involved. Someone he loved. You, for instance.”
“But that’s ridiculous!”
“Is it? Isn’t it true that you’re a friend of the Japanese naval attaché in Washington?”
“Yes; of course I know him. His sister was a classmate of mine at Vassar.”
“Then it’s not so impossible that someone might have convinced Pongee Bonner that his daughter was caught up in the very intrigue that he himself was blamed for.”
“It does seem possible, darling, now that you point it out… But—”
“Who burned the blueprints?”
“I did.”
“After you had photostatic copies made?”
“No, immediately.”
“Who made the photostats, then?”
“What photostats, darling?”
“You know that as well as I do,” Larkin said. “
Darling, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“All right, skip it. But tell me this: When you gave me that envelope last night, whom were you hiding it from and why?”
“From General Rodriguez. I’d been warned that the general might try to freeze me out of the vanadium combination. I suspected that his story of being robbed of his agreement was just a ruse to try to locate mine. He’d claim it was his—the one he reported stolen—then destroy it. He was anxious to appear as sole concessionaire.”
Larkin thought for a while. Then he asked, “What did your brother have in his pockets that might have interested the man Millie Greeve saw bending over the body?”
Dorothy shuddered. Larkin could feel the tremor run through her body: She said, “I don’t know. Do—do you really think it was Charlie Frayle that Millie saw?”
“I got the impression that it was Hood she saw,” Larkin said. “I had a long talk with Hood before dinner. He says your father owned a valuable collection of Japanese color prints.”
“That’s true,” Dorothy said. “Oriental art was a hobby of dad’s and he spent a good deal of money on it. But apparently his collection of prints was not as valuable as he thought.”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, I guess father wasn’t quite the connoisseur that he fancied himself. He used to say he had invested more than a hundred thousand dollars in his collection of color prints and that they were actually worth double that. Just before I left for the Pacific Coast, Mr. Pendenning, father’s attorney, had the collection appraised by an expert. The appraiser set the outside figure at thirty thousand.”
“That’s enlightening,” said Larkin. “Perhaps—” He paused, lit a cigarette, puffed thoughtfully for several seconds. Then he asked, “Was the print collection in New York?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know whether Jeremy Hood ever came to your place in New York?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Was your brother Arthur ever there—since his graduation from Ossining, I mean?”
“Arthur—well, yes. Arthur wouldn’t come when father was there, of course, because he knew father wouldn’t let him in. But he came to see me several times, when father was out of town.”
“The servants let him in when he came to see you?” ‘
“The butler would let him in,” the girl said. “Omori has been with us since Arthur was a little boy, and I think he liked him. At least he was sorry for him.”
Larkin exhaled a slow, pensive cloud of smoke. “Now that,” he said, “sounds as though we might be going somewhere.”
“Where, darling?”
“Where?” Larkin seemed startled out of a reverie by the echo of his own question. “Why, to Japan, I suppose—with Jeremy Hood’s chromoxylographs.”
“Mr. Hood isn’t taking color prints to Japan?”
“He is. And I think tomorrow morning you and I might call and have a look at them. You won’t mind, will you? Going with me to see Mr. Hood’s prints. After all, they’re not etchings…”
“Of course I’ll go with you. But why?”
“Maybe for no reason at all,’ Larkin said. “But I would like to watch the old man’s expression when I tell him that P. G. Bonner’s daughter wants to see his Ten Chinese Poets by Hokusai.”
Larkin flicked his cigarette away into the darkness. He was startled to see the luminous curve of the trajectory suddenly explode in midair, showering sparks to the deck. Shuffling feet scraped the planks.
Dorothy sprang up. She gasped, “Who’s that?”
Larkin saw movement in the night, thought he recognized a familiar form. “I imagine,” he said, “that it’s our ubiquitous Mr. Frayle.”
Chapter Twenty-three: SHATTERED FAITH, WOUNDED PRIDE
Charles Frayle materialized jauntily out of the gloom. He chuckled as he advanced.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “that I’ve come upon you.”
“I’m afraid you haven’t,” said Larkin. “I’m afraid you’ve been standing by for some time. I hope you were edified and entertained.”
“I was chagrined and heartbroken,” said Frayle carelessly, “to find that you exert such romantic fascination on my fiancée.”
“Your ex-fiancée,” Larkin said…
“As sudden as all that?” inquired Frayle, suppressing a yawn.
“Very sudden, Charlie,” Dorothy said at last. “But very real. You’ll want words with me, of course.…”
“We’ll have some light, first—if your hair’s not too badly mussed.” Frayle reached up and turned on an electric light fixed in an overhead beam. Larkin had not noticed it before. He wondered vaguely who had turned it off.
