Five Passengers from Lisbon, page 12
“Yes...”
“I can’t imagine...” He broke off to cough and then got out cigarettes and offered them to her. His hands were thin and unsteady as they held a match for her. He lighted his own cigarette and went on: “Daisy Belle told me all about it, too, this morning. Marcia, you couldn’t have just imagined that attack on you, could you?”
She shook her head and, watching her, he said, apologetically: “No, no, I’m sure you couldn’t have. But it seems so inexplicable, somehow. I don’t understand why anybody would want to attack you. Do you have any possible explanation for it?”
Again she shook her head and again rather apologetically he answered for her: “No, I’m sure you can’t have. But it”—he rubbed his eyes wearily—“it makes no sense. Who was it? Who was it that knocked out André, and why? Of course, he says he’s not sure whether anybody hit him or not. But it seems reasonable to think that somebody did. I suppose he might know more than he’s admitting....”
There was a question in his hesitation. Marcia said quickly: “He doesn’t know what happened. He thinks he may have slipped. I’m sure if he knew anything about it he’d tell the Captain.”
“Well,” said Luther rubbing his eyes again, “I think so, too. The Captain naturally thinks it was somebody from the Lerida, if it was anybody. I mean,” he amended it quickly, “I believe you; I know you. He seems a little skeptical. However, he had me up this morning to question me. I think I convinced him that I hadn’t gone around all night bopping my friends.” He laughed and then coughed again, and Marcia, unwillingly, yet irresistibly driven by some impulse she would not have wished to name, said: “How did you convince him?”
“By being in the engine room with his first officer all the time the ruckus was taking place, apparently,” said Luther, with another thin chuckle. “Daisy Belle prowled the ship, she says, looking for me. She was furious; bless her. She thought I ought to have been in bed. But it was warm down there. And worth the climb up again; but then I’m all right if I take things slowly. I’m crazy about engines,” said Luther simply. “Always have been. I might have done something about it if I hadn’t had so much money. Oh, well,” he sighed, “you can’t live life twice. I suppose I’d go along exactly the same way if I had it to do over again. Only next time I’d pick a better heart and a better pair of lungs. Not,” he added hurriedly, “that I’ve anything to complain about. Well, well, I’ll just go along and get a bit of exercise before Daisy Belle catches me and sends me inside.” His tone warmed, as it always did, when he spoke of Daisy Belle. He gave another thin chuckle, which again turned into a cough and straightened up. “See you...”he said, and started back along the deck again. Marcia gratefully watched him go. So Daisy Belle had prowled the ship looking for him.
It explained the dampness on her coat. It gave her an alibi which, to Marcia, at least, was a very real and complete alibi, for Daisy Belle cared for Luther as if he were a child. She was loving, stern and indefatigable. And in speaking to Marcia, obviously, she had simply never thought of mentioning so usual and probably so brief an errand.
Marcia’s own short return to the cabin on B deck had happened to coincide with Daisy Belle’s search for Luther. That was all. It might not have satisfied the Captain; it did satisfy Marcia.
She would put everything else out of her mind, including Gili’s story. Gili was unpredictable, Gili was emotional, Gili could twist this way or that, like a cat, without the slightest warning. She would put everything Gili had said out of her mind.
Even what she had said of Mickey.
Again she thought of that, incredulously, yet lingering, in spite of herself, to explore every word and look. Yet Gili’s words were merely words, certainly without a basis of any sort of fact. Everything about it was absurd and confused and—and all wrong.
At least something, somewhere, was wrong. Something outside emotion; something within another province, as if a small segment of a familiar picture had been turned askew, placed inaccurately, so all at once the whole picture was rather puzzling and strange.
She tried to seek out that obscurely wrong piece, pin it down, decide exactly how it was wrong, but she could not. It was too nebulous a glimpse, too tenuous an impression. Her thoughts swerved back to the important thing, herself and Mickey and Gili.
The fog seemed thicker and darker; even the sky seemed to press down blackly, smothering the ship, and the foghorn sounded again, roaring all around, isolating the ship in sound as she was already isolated in fog. Mickey did not come back. Josh did not come back. Considerable time actually must have passed. And suddenly Marcia didn’t like the empty, cold deck, and the fog, and the deep waves of sound crashing upon her ears. Inside the busy ship were lights and warmth and people; she rose and then saw that someone was standing on the deck, leaning against the railing, a patient, obviously, for he was wearing a long red bathrobe.
Apparently he had only then come out on deck. She’d have to pass him to re-enter the ship by the same door from which she had come. She looked along the deck in the other direction, orienting herself.
She was on the upper boat deck, on the same level with the Captain’s quarters. In order to reach her own cabin she’d have to go to the next deck below. Only a short distance away from her, toward the right, was a stairway which must lead downward to that deck. She glanced again at the man in the red bathrobe and, as she did so, he turned a little and she could see the glimmer of white bandages about his head. She did not wish to meet his look; she did not wish to pass him. It was an obscure yet urgent impulse. She turned abruptly toward the open stairway leading to the deck below.
The foghorn stopped and all its clashing echoes died away. The small thud of her heels seemed very loud in the sudden silence. She felt that the man at the railing was watching her. Without definable reason, she hastened her steps so as to pass quickly out of his range of vision.
The deck below seemed deserted, too. She reached the last, wet black step and turned sharply around the stairway.
But the deck was not deserted; it was, instead, horribly inhabited.
Marcia stopped, holding the railing. The foghorn began again, so waves of sound broke over the deck, shaking the ship and all the impenetrable gray world about her with dreadful tumult. It kept on sounding while Marcia stood, looking down at the dark, swarthy little man who lay with his eyes no longer suspicious and wary but blankly open, staring upward. He was Manuel Para and his throat had been cut.
A very long time seemed to have passed when suddenly she knew that someone was coming down the stairway immediately above her, following the steps her feet had taken. She looked up. It was a man in a red bathrobe. She could see him, and he had no face but only white bandages with holes for eyes.
And it was strange, she thought in some remote level of awareness, that there was something familiar about the way he moved down the steps toward her. It was almost as if she knew him.
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The foghorn stopped. The patient in the red bathrobe had, in a swift second or two, come nearer, and Marcia turned and ran.
She screamed, too, without intending to do so, but no one could hear, for the foghorn started again. Waves of sound, lost and despairing and lonely, shook the ship and echoed from the fog drowning her voice, submerging all existence like a nightmare in its own confusion.
But it was not really a nightmare. She reached a companionway and whirled into the lighted ship. Two nurses in smart little caps seemed to float out of the lights. They said things to her and instantly there were people and voices everywhere.
The scene dissolved and shifted, again like a dream. She was in a small office. She was in an armchair with chintz cushions. A metal filing cabinet stood in a corner. A nurse with a captain’s bars on her collar was beside her, saying: “Now, now, it’s all right. Now, now...”
But it wasn’t all right, because someone came to the door and opened it a few inches and whispered to the nurse. Marcia watched her pretty young face lose its color, turn pinched and white. She cried: “Who was it? It can’t be! Murder...”
The pale-gray walls had photographs upon them. Between the curtained ports on a bracket was a small green pot of ivy. Beyond the open door was the nurse’s stateroom, its high bunk neat and flat under a blue cover. The whispers at the door stopped. The young nurse closed the door and went to sit at the desk, as if the position reinforced her. She said stiffly: “It’s true. He was one of the seamen, Manuel Para. He was in the lifeboat with you.”
She looked at Marcia and, after a moment, said: “You are cold. I’ll get you something hot.”
But instead she went to the telephone on the wall above the desk. Again Marcia’s whole consciousness seemed to reach out for physical details, small and reassuring. She watched the nurse set an arrow at a number on the face of the telephone as gratefully as if the nurse’s action, as if the cheerful neat little office had the power to deny the dreadful disorder on the deck outside, amid the wet veils of fog, with the desolate, lost sound of the foghorn drowning all creation in its own despair.
The nurse turned from the telephone. “He already knew. He says to check the wards. I have to go. I’ll send someone to you.” Suddenly she was gone.
Why was Manuel Para murdered?
Marcia closed her eyes and immediately it was as if she were in the pitching little lifeboat again, going down, down, down into darkness and destruction, with a dead man in the boat, with Manuel Para and the other seaman in the boat, with herself and Daisy Belle, Gili and Luther and Mickey dim shapes in the night, huddled together. Held inexorably together by the storm as, now, they were held inexorably together by murder.
A long time must have passed when the door opened at last, and it was Josh Morgan. He lifted her up and held her against him. “Marcia, Marcia...”
He was real, too, like the neat little office, like the photographs, like the homely pleasant details of living, except this reality was much better. She was alive and warm and safe; she had emerged from a fantasy of horror. She clung to Josh Morgan and could not talk.
He seemed to know that. He put his cheek down against her face and held her until her breath came evenly, until the warmth of his embrace had shut out the cold of the lifeboat.
“All right now?” he said at last.
“He was there, Josh. Under the stairway. I started down to B deck, and Para was there....”
“I ought not to have left you alone.”
He had gone to find Mickey. Suddenly she remembered that, and Gili and everything that had gone before. She could see Gili’s slanting, triumphant green eyes and smiling red lips, and the soft golden shimmer of Mickey’s cigarette case.
Josh said: “I didn’t find André. He wasn’t in his cabin. I looked and...Marcia, what happened? Was anyone with you when you found him?”
She wouldn’t think of Gili now. She replied: “No. Except the patient. He was there by the railing. He followed me down the stairs.”
He put her away from him sharply, his hand gripping her shoulder. “Who followed you down the stairs? Tell me everything.”
But there was not much, really, to tell. A patient leaning against a railing; a dead man on the deck below; the patient descending the steps above her. She hesitated, and added: “I thought for a moment that I knew him. But I couldn’t have known him. And I screamed and ran....”
He held her suddenly tighter. “That was what I told you to do. Run and yell like hell and...Listen, Marcia, what was there about him that you recognized?”
“Not anything, really. There couldn’t have been! His face and head were bandaged. It was all so quick and confused. I can’t be sure of anything.”
“But it was a man? You are sure it wasn’t—well, Gili? Or Daisy Belle Cates?”
She hadn’t thought of that.
And had the patient with the bandages over his face actually been one of the Lerida survivors? Had he murdered Manuel Para? The red-clothed, faceless figure had had for her a curious sense of horror. Actually, though, had a primitive sense of danger outside herself intervened to warn her?
Josh Morgan was so white that he looked gray. He said: “We’ll go to the Captain.”
Again the scene suddenly dissolved into another. They left the little office and were in the narrow passageway, climbing stairs, hurrying through the ship.
A ship that was subtly different.
Only the wards were guarded and unchanged, protected by all the minute, invulnerable mechanism of care from even the knowledge of murder. Brightly lighted, cheerful, invincibly protected, it was as if the wards were sanctuary. They had an entity apart from the rest of the ship; the fact of murder was outside and could not touch them.
But the news of the murder had gone like wildfire over the rest of the ship, and there was already a hubbub of swift and controlled activity. Groups of men, transportation officers and staff, accompanied by seamen who were not then on duty, searched the ship, leaving no inch of hiding place unexplored.
The Lerida survivors had been brought aboard, and murder and suspicion had been brought aboard with them. It was almost as if the ship herself was aware of it, as if every shadow might harbor murder, as if every creak might betray that stealthy presence. The men searching went armed.
Twice on the stairway to the upper deck Marcia and Josh passed such groups, hurrying and intent, with revolvers in holsters strapped around their waists.
They reached the door of the Captain’s quarters. It opened and Mickey started out, saw them and stopped.
“Marcia!” He was pale and excited; he took her hand and drew her toward him. “Marcia, where have you been? Are you all right? I tried to find you....”
Behind him, Captain Svendsen said: “Come in, Colonel Morgan. You too, Miss Colfax.”
Colonel Wells, the medical officer in command, was there too. The room was shadowy, except for a light on the desk which threw the Captain’s weathered face and the weary dark pockets around his eyes into sharp relief. “I was about to send for you, Miss Colfax,” he said. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
So again she told her story. When she had finished the Captain and Colonel Wells exchanged a long look.
“There is a patient with a bandaged face on this trip, isn’t there, Colonel?”
Colonel Wells cleared his throat. “Right. He’s navy, an enlisted man. If I remember the case correctly his face is burned. He was on a destroyer which was torpedoed. He got the burns—bad facial burns and paralyzed throat muscles—swimming through oil that was on fire.”
“I think I’ve seen him on deck.”
“He’s ambulatory; nothing the matter with him except his face and throat. He’ll eventually get a plastic and skin grafting job. However, he ought not to have been on deck today. No deck privileges were granted, owing to the fog. And”—Colonel Wells cleared his throat again—“and besides it may not have been he. There are hundreds of red bathrobes. And I suppose if anyone wished to he could get hold of some gauze and wrap up his face. It would be an excellent disguise for a man or for a woman.”
The Captain’s eyes were like pins of light, impaling Marcia. “Was it a man or was it a woman?”
“I thought then that it was a man. I suppose it could have been a woman.”
“You didn’t recognize him? Or her?”
“N—no.”
“You are not sure. Was there anything familiar about him? His height? The way he walked? The way he carried his arms? There are a hundred ways in which you recognize people, besides seeing their faces. What was it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about him. Except that he was there.”
“Have you seen the patient Colonel Wells mentioned?”
She had seen hundreds of patients. She could not have identified one of them in any way, but she could not remember any whose face was bandaged except the figure on the stairway. She said so quickly. Captain Svendsen made a brusque move of impatience and Colonel Wells moved to the telephone. “I’ll check on this man,” he said. They listened to his terse questions. He said finally: “Tell him to report to the Captain’s quarters at once. Send his field jacket along with him. Right, Lieutenant.” He hung up the receiver and turned toward them. “His name is Jacob Heinzer. He’s not in a ward, he’s in one of the cabins. Ambulatory, as I say, and perfectly able to take care of himself. Matter of fact, I’ve never even seen his face. The present bandages won’t be removed until he gets to the surgeon. But aside from that he’s all right. However”—Colonel Wells looked out into the fog again for a moment and said—“if he was there on the stairway, why didn’t he report the murder? He must have seen Para; he must have seen Miss Colfax. And what happened to him? I got there as soon as it was reported to me; it couldn’t have been over five minutes. He wasn’t there then; I’m sure of that. Of course in five minutes on a ship anybody can get anywhere, almost. But still, I cannot help thinking of the ease of assuming that particular disguise—a red bathrobe, gauze. Every patient on board has a red bathrobe. They were issued to the Lerida survivors also, men and women alike. As to the gauze...” The Colonel shrugged. “That should not be difficult, either.”
The Captain’s bleached eyebrows were drawn somberly together. “What about the knife? No weapon was found; it could have been thrown in the sea. It doubtless was.”
“From the wound, I’d say it was a sizable knife. Not a pocket knife. But that could not have been taken from any of the surgeries or dispensaries,” said Colonel Wells flatly. “That is impossible. The cases are sterile and locked.”
The Captain sat down. He looked thoughtfully at his red, strong hands. “We’ll have to try to establish the approximate time of the murder; try to investigate from that basis. You examined the body, Colonel?”
