Five Passengers from Lisbon, page 11
“These men were in the Lerida lifeboat. Their names are”—he glanced at a paper on his desk—“Manuel Para and Jose Urdiola. Now then”—he turned to her, his shrewd, deep-set eyes were very direct and urgent—“was it either of these two men last night?”
The two men shifted uneasily. Their dark eyes were angry, suspicious, and altogether impenetrable. She felt a curious embarrassment under that dark suspicious scrutiny, but she looked at them, thinking back, trying to dredge up some distinguishing mark, some sound, some clue. There was none. She only vaguely remembered their faces, here and there about the Lerida. She remembered them merely as black figures bending over oars, shifting about, huddled in the lifeboat.
She shook her head. “I can’t tell. There was nothing I can remember. But someone...”
The Captain cut into her speech. “You told me that one of them tried apparently to revive Castiogne.” He glanced at the short, sturdy-looking man, and said shortly: “Para, step forward.”
He did so quickly. “Yes, sir.”
“Was it this one, Miss Colfax?”
“I think so. I could not see his face.”
Para burst out in fluent and vehement English: “But, sir, I told you. I tried to revive him, yes. I did not know he was dead. I thought exhaustion, yes. A collapse. I told you. I did not know he was dead. I told you...”
‘That’s enough,” said the Captain curtly. He nodded at Major Williams and said: ‘Take them away.”
Para, looking worried and angry, followed the other who had said nothing. Major Williams closed the door smartly after them. The Captain said directly: “What do you know of the Cates couple?”
She stiffened. Had someone already told him Gili’s story? She replied warily: “I met them in Lisbon while we were waiting for a passage.”
“What do you know of them before they reached Lisbon?” Suddenly and disconcertingly she remembered Daisy Belle’s words: “We stayed with a—a friend; in a chateau in the hills back of Nice!” What friend? And why had Daisy Belle lied so needlessly, apparently so pointlessly, the night before?
The Captain’s eyes were too observant. For an instant she felt that he could read her thoughts. She said quickly and firmly: “They were caught in France and remained there. He was ill. I think they lived somewhere along the Riviera....”
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, his blue eyes very piercing and determined and also, queerly, impatient. “Look here, Miss Colfax. I’ve no time for evasions. I’d better tell you some things that you may not know. For one thing, Alfred Castiogne was murdered. You don’t seem to be able to realize it. His body is in the morgue now. We never have a burial at sea. We’ve never, in fact”—pride came into his voice for an instant—“we’ve never had a death at sea. We’ve a proud record. But the point now is, this Portuguese third officer was murdered. There is no question in my mind as to whether or not one of you in the lifeboat murdered him. But...” He hesitated; a sort of reluctance touched his straight, hard mouth. “But I have to be fair. Colonel Wells is the medical officer in command. He examined the body, and he went to considerable trouble to investigate all the circumstances and facts available. And, to make it short, considering, he says, a question of rigor mortis and the length of time the man was dead when he was discovered, there is no proof that he was killed in the lifeboat.”
“You mean someone else could have killed him! Someone, here on this ship...”She half rose to her feet.
“Wait! I didn’t say that,” snapped the Captain. “Nobody on my ship did it. I know my ship. My men are, as you know, of the Merchant Marine. I took on some new men last trip, but I investigated them thoroughly. I don’t believe that Castiogne was murdered on the Magnolia. I believe, and so does Colonel Wells, that he was murdered in the lifeboat. But”—the Captain sighed, and said rather wearily—“we’ve got to be fair. As far as I can discover, this man, Castiogne, was assumed to have collapsed. Manuel Para, as he admits, tried to revive him. As you heard, he claims not to have known that he was dead, which is perfectly comprehensible, but does not prove anything. Castiogne could have been dead then, already murdered, or he could have been in a state of collapse and murdered later. Two Magnolia seamen—whom I have questioned, I assure you, to my own satisfaction—carried Castiogne up the Jacob’s ladder and put him down for a moment or two on the floor along the companionway. There was some excitement and haste about getting you all aboard; the sea was running rather heavy. They were bringing litters for those of you who could not walk. There were, in short, several minutes during which nobody actually had his eyes on the man Castiogne. Naturally there was a certain amount of going and coming, hurrying, trying to save you all,” said the Captain, looking for a moment rather as if he wished he had not undertaken saving any of them.
“But then somebody—anybody on the ship...”
“No, Miss Colfax, not anybody on the ship. Nobody in the wards, none of the patients could have done it. And I do not believe,” he was suddenly sarcastic, “that any of the nurses would be very likely to creep up to the man and stick a knife in him. Or any of the doctors. For one thing, I’ve seen all of them under fire; what they’ve done is save lives—hundreds of them—through their own personal bravery. You can keep the nurses and doctors and the patients out of your calculations. And, so far as I’m concerned, I don’t believe any of my ship’s personnel had anything to do with this. But the fact is”—he paused again and said in a sort of angry, but honest concession—“the fact is there is a period of time on the Magnolia during which he could have been killed. He wasn’t killed then,” he said stubbornly. “I’m sure of it. But he could have been. So...” He shrugged. He was angry and stubborn, exasperated but honest. “So there you are. The simple fact is that he could have been killed in the lifeboat, or during the half hour or so while he was on the Magnolia before the doctor seeing to him discovered that he had a stab wound. It hadn’t bled much; flesh had closed over it so the hemorrhage was inside.”
He glanced at the watch on his thick red wrist, and said: “I’m only telling you all this, Miss Colfax, because it’s the truth. Because I want you and everybody else on the lifeboat to help, not hinder my necessary investigation.”
He shoved back his chair with a quick motion and got to his feet. He was reaching for his oilskins. “I’m going back to the bridge,” he said. “I’m risking my ticket to leave it for a moment in a fog like this. Think it over, Miss Colfax. Try to remember...”
He held the door open for her courteously, and then walked faster than she along the passage, so she followed the rustling oil-skinned figure with its shock of blond hair. He disappeared around some curve.
Thinking again of Daisy Belle Cates, it seemed to her suddenly childish and unfair to give her no chance to defend herself against the nagging little question in Marcia’s own mind. There could be a dozen reasons for Daisy Belle’s absence from the cabin the previous night, a dozen reasons for the damp coat, a dozen reasons for a merely careless misstatement—all of them innocent.
She came to a main lobby. Daisy Belle was not about, neither was she in the cabin on B deck. She wanted to talk to Mickey, too; probably he would be on deck. She put the nurse’s coat around her shoulders and climbed the stairs again to the lobby of the deck which, on the Magnolia, corresponded to, and in practice was the boat deck. Still she saw none of the Lerida survivors. She went out on deck, and instantly it seemed to her she entered a remote and secret world. The fog was everywhere; the ship seemed to lie quite still in it, unmoving, except for that deep faraway pulsation. The railings were beaded with moisture. She could scarcely see beyond them. But Gili was standing at the railing. She, too, wore a nurse’s thick, warm coat. Her golden head was bare and looked rather lank and wet. She turned quickly and saw Marcia.
“Oh,” she said. A flash of expectancy in her face changed to quite frank and open disappointment. “Oh, it’s you.”
Marcia said: “Have you seen André? Or Mrs. Cates?”
“No.” Gili’s voice was sullen. She waited a moment and shivered a little and glanced swiftly back of her, along the deck both ways, her green eyes darting here and there. She said: “I don’t like the fog. I feel all the time as if somebody is near me, somebody I can’t see or hear or...I don’t like it.” Marcia, suddenly, didn’t like it either. She said, however, lightly: “Why don’t you go inside then?”
Gili did not reply. Instead she tugged at a pocket and got out a cigarette case and clicked it open. She offered it to Marcia. “Cigarette?”
“Thank you, I...” Marcia stopped.
The case was Mickey’s. She knew it and remembered it well—the thin, plain gold, the design around the edge. She stared at it and saw, besides the case, tables in restaurants with rose shaded lamps, tables in the sun, along the walks, below the bronze-leafed trees of the Bois—she could almost hear the squawking taxis and smell liqueurs and coffee.
She sad stiffly: “Where did you get that?”
Gili was looking at her. Her face was secret, her eyes uneasy. She licked her mouth, and said: “Oh, that. The case. I—I borrowed it. It belongs to Mickey.”
Fog was so close it seemed to drift between them. For an instant, Marcia thought, how odd—she knows his real name. Mickey.
Then Gili’s green eyes changed, and Marcia could see that change. Uneasiness was suddenly shot with brilliance, with triumph.
Gili gave a kind of shrug. She bit her full red lip and looked away. Marcia said, in a voice she did not recognize as her own, it was so stem, so queer and hard: “Where did you know him? How long?”
Gili bit her lip again. She shot a sidewise, green glance at Marcia. She said: “All right. We may as well understand each other, you and I. I knew it would have to be some time. It may as will be now. Mickey belongs to me. He only came back to you for your money. We wanted to leave Europe, you see, and we have no money.” She smiled. “He knew he could get enough for both of us from you.”
10
Someone came rapidly along the deck behind Marcia. She heard the quick, hard tread and she saw the flash of relief in Gili’s face as she looked beyond Marcia over her shoulder. “Why, Colonel Morgan,” cried Gili. Her voice was eager, her face alight. Her eyes avoided Marcia. “How nice,” cried Gili, and Josh Morgan stopped beside them.
“Hello,” he said, looking at Marcia, then looking at Gili. His coat was faintly beaded with fog; the metal on his cap looked frosted. He seemed very big and substantial, looming up in the gray mist. Gili said quickly with a nervous sort of giggle: “I’m going inside. The fog is too cold. See you later...” She hunched her coat up around her neck and slid away hurriedly across the wet strip of deck and inside the ship.
“Now what’s all that for?” said Josh Morgan. He looked from the door which had closed so quickly, with such a suggestion of slyness and haste, back to Marcia. “She’s scuttling away like a scared cat. What’s she done?”
Marcia moved, so she avoided his eyes, so she looked into the fog, so he could not see her face. Actually she was conscious only of a deep inner stillness, as if everything about her had stopped.
It wasn’t true; it couldn’t be true!
Yet hadn’t an unwilling awareness caught and stored up certain small things—a look in Gili’s eyes, the way her head moved against Mickey’s shoulder, a knowledgeableness, somehow, between them? Only that morning she had thought of Gili’s presence in Mickey’s cabin—so assured, so at ease—and then she had reassured herself, almost without intending to do it. She had answered a question without admitting that it was a question.
But Gili was lying. She had to be lying. Mickey loved her, Marcia.
The man beside her said rather gently: “Come and walk with me, will you? Have you had lunch? It’s past time, you know....”
“I had a late breakfast,” she replied automatically. She could not look at him. The railing was wet and cold under her hands, but it seemed just then the only fixed and certain point in life. If she held the railing tightly enough, long enough...Josh Morgan put his hand over her own. “Look at me. What’s that woman done to you?”
She stared down at his hand. It was big and warm and well-shaped, with a small seal ring on the little finger.
Then she thought of Mickey’s hands—fine and square, with their pitiful scarred fingertips, fingertips that had once been so strong and fine—the fingers of a musician. Gili had lied.
Josh Morgan took her own hands from the railing and tucked one of them under his arm. “I’ve got to have a walk. Come along.” She could feel the texture of his sleeve, the hard warmth of flesh and muscle below it. His overcoat, swinging loose because of the sling on his other arm, swung a little over her too. The fog was cold and moist against her cheeks and lips. She moved dong beside him, as if he had wound her up and set her in motion. They reached a sheltered spot beside a projecting bulkhead. It was not far, as a matter of fact, from where she had found Mickey in the darkness of the previous night.
Josh Morgan was watching her closely. He said: “Stay here, will you? I’ll be back.”
Close to the ship the water was visible; she watched the black waves with curling white caps rush away from the ship and then dissolve into gray. Josh Morgan returned and he had a steamer chair which he set up in the protected angle of the bulkhead. “Come on,” he said, “sit here.”
She said stiffly: “I’ve got to talk to Mickey.”
“All right, all right. Anything you like. I’ll get him for you. Only just for a minute or two, stay here. Are you warm?”
She was in the chair. He leaned over to tuck her coat around her chin. For a moment it was like any other ocean voyage—a steamer chair, the rush of water, the fresh, wet sea air.
He sat down on the foot of her chair and lighted a cigarette. “Don’t talk if you don’t want to. I’ll do the talking. How about my life story? Let me see. Well, I was born in California, I went to school in Massachusetts, studied law at Columbia and got a job writing for a newspaper. Then I went to Paris and got another job....You’re not listening to me. Well, it isn’t very interesting, really. Listen, Marcia, that woman’s a little wharf rat Don’t let her hurt you like that. I can’t”—he tossed the cigarette over the railing into the fog; he leaned over suddenly, quite near—“I can’t bear it,” he said. He put his arm around her, holding her close, as one might gather up a child. Only then he kissed her, turning her face with his hard cheek, feeling for her lips. His mouth moved away a little but still so she could feel its warmth and tenderness, and he kissed her again. There was only, in all the world, the rush and murmur of the fog-shrouded waves and the man who held her, close against him, his mouth upon her own.
After a long time, time for the world to be remade, time for a ship to go on and on upon its journey, he lifted his face.
The long deep blast of the foghorn sounded, breaking in waves around them, prolonging the moment, holding them both suspended in time and space, searching each other’s eyes.
The last echoes dwindled in the fog. He said slowly: “I didn’t know I was going to do that. I didn’t mean...” He broke off abruptly and said: “That’s not true. I did mean it. I meant it since I saw you there in the Captain’s cabin. I meant it since...” Again he stopped; this time he released her so she lay back against the chair. He got out another cigarette, turned it in his fingers and went on: “So you see, I can’t let anyone hurt you like that. Besides, I don’t think he’s worth it.”
Her breath was uneven; all the stillness inside her had been driven away. She was suddenly and poignantly aware of the smallest details—the wet cold air, the crimson fold on her knee where her coat had fallen back, the throbbing of the ship’s engines, the distant clear sound of a ship’s bell, the level blue-gray eyes of the man sitting on the foot of her chair, his tanned face, the way his black eyebrows curved. The little half smile on his mouth that had so lately touched her own.
But it was all wrong, confused. This was a man she did not know. It was Mickey she loved.
He said again: “Believe me. He’s not worth it. I mean Mickey, André”—he paused and added quite slowly, quite deliberately—“or whoever he really is.”
She had said Mickey. She remembered it clearly. “Did I call him Mickey? It’s a—a nickname....”
“I see.” He looked at the cigarette in his hand and said: “Do you want me to find him now?”
Now? she thought. Face Mickey now, ask him about Gili, hear what he might say? She took a long breath. “Yes, please.”
“Shall I tell him to come here?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her again, his eyes intent and dark. “You’re sure?”
He waited a moment, as if to give her a chance to change her mind, then briskly he got up. “All right. I’ll not be long,” he said briefly and walked rapidly away along the deck.
She watched his tall figure, the coat swinging, striding along the deck into the fog. He turned abruptly at some door and went inside without looking back.
The fog, after he’d gone, seemed to come closer.
It was extremely quiet there on the deserted deck. She thought the decks were forbidden to patients that day owing to the fog. The white planks were slippery and wet, the brass and metal glistened with moisture.
She wondered where Josh Morgan would find Mickey and what she would say and why she had let Josh Morgan undertake such an errand. When she heard footsteps coming slowly along the deck she looked up quickly, thinking it was Mickey.
It was, however, Luther Cates strolling along toward her, his hands in the pockets of an army overcoat which was much too large for him, and a black beret he had got from somewhere pulled rather drearily over his forehead. He looked tired and ill, with heavy pouches under his faded blue eyes and a purplish tinge to his lips, but smiled when he saw that she was looking at him and hastened his pace to stop beside her.
“Hello,” he said. “Not down at lunch?”
Again she said she did not want lunch. He sighed and leaned against the bulkhead looking, somehow, extraordinarily concave because of his thinness and the loose bulk of the coat. “I hear there was some excitement last night,” he said. “I got back to our cabin just after you’d gone. Found André all bandaged up.” He looked at her sharply and anxiously. “Are you all right?”
