We stared across the table in open hostility.
"If you know all about slumming, why come along?" I sneered back. "Why dirty your lily-white hands with all this human offal?"
She lit another cigarette angrily.
"Don't you know what a living Onymacris means to science?"
"No," I replied, "and I don't give a damn either.. Stein is no more hunting an extinct beetle than I am. I don't see him as the scientist in his ivory — or is it uranium — tower devoting his life and fortune to restoring one little beetle to the sum of human knowledge."
"I was absolutely right in my assessment of you," she said. "Tough, ruthless, self-centred, no gain but my gain. You wouldn't know what it felt like to have a leading ideal about a thing like this."
I was more curious than angry now.
"And you have — of course."
"Look," she said, "I was born during the civil war in China…"
"Is this autobiography really necessary?" I asked.
The barb went home. She flushed. She turned away to the porthole.
"It only is because it illustrates why I am here," she said. "I haven't got any illusions about Stein — or about you, for that matter. Or this expedition. But Onymacris matters — matters, oh, so much."
I wasn't going to let her get away with all that.
"There must be something darkly Freudian about conceiving a passion for a beetle," I said.
"Damn your cheap flippancy," she snapped. "When did you last speak decently to a woman?"
"I never do. It was one of the charges when they cashiered me."
She ignored this. "My father was one of the world's leading authorities on beetles," she said. "Without boring you with tales of hardship and being only one jump ahead of death for months on end, ahead of one opposing army or the next, he and I eventually got to the edge of the Gobi Desert. Mother, who was English, died long before that. He rediscovered Onymacris there. When at last we escaped from China, he died one night suddenly of a heart attack aboard a sampan near the Yangtse mouth. I didn't know about it till morning. The body was robbed by the coolies. His precious three beetles, which we'd kept alive when we thought we'd die of starvation ourselves, had been stamped flat. Just a couple of squashed things at the bottom of an old shoebox. A lifetime's work for science crushed out by some careless foot. I'm going to find Onymacris again — for science. I've got to. That's why I'm here."
"It must sound a pretty obvious question," I said. "But why not go back to the Gobi and get some more, if you're so keen?"
"First," she said a little didactically, and I could see now that she was a little older than her looks and figure would seem to indicate, "it's behind the Iron Curtain. Second, the place where we found them is now a prohibited area, anyway. Probably a sputnik launching site. An Iron Curtain behind an Iron Curtain. I know. I've tried."
"It seems a tough proposition." I agreed.
She came back shortly: "Onymacris is a tough proposition, Captain Peace. And I expect to find only tough circumstances where it is. That's what makes it so precious to science. It's not one of the things you find by chance on a Sunday afternoon walk. You've got to work for it. It's a tough proposition."
"Like this outfit," I said ironically.
She looked at me levelly. "Like this outfit, Captain Peace. Like yourself, Captain Peace. Like this coast, Captain Peace, which I am told you know so well. I'm after something tough, just like you, that's why I accepted Stein's invitation without hesitation. You can forget about the woman-comfort side of things. I thought I'd explain this clearly to you before you start showering your protective instincts on a helpless female."
"I don't see how you could be a doctor of science at Stockholm…" I began.
"Why not?" she flashed. "Every moment of my life I've slept, eaten, talked beetles. What's so strange about it? My father taught me everything — and more — a university ever could. A doctor's degree is a necessary appendage, that's all. It couldn't have been easier. A piece of cake." She lit another cigarette. She came back at me remorselessly.
"Why are you so cagey about this whole landing affair? Why don't you think it's safe?"
"Listen," I rapped out, fast losing patience, for she was so damnably sure of herself and her precious beetle. "Everyone loves this blasted beetle so much, you'd think it was pure gold. You'd think each one of us was acting within the law, when we're just as far outside it as could be. I'm putting you ashore — illegally — at an illegal spot on the ъ Skeleton Coast. You and Stein have absolutely no right to I be there. You yourself admit it isn't going to be easy. I say so too. I'm aiding and abetting a crime."
She looked at me cynically. "Stein will be paying you well enough."
I couldn't let it go.
"I'm doing this free, gratis and for nothing," I snapped. "I'm not getting a penny for this joyride."
"I don't believe a word of that," she retorted.
Her composure rattled me. What did a hint — or more — of the truth matter when it blackened Stein?
"I've been blackmailed into this trip," I said curtly.
"Blackmailed?" she said incredulously.
So Stein hadn't told her.
"Yes," I retorted. "I'm the sort of man you can blackmail — tough, self-centred, anything for personal gain. You said so yourself."
I had shaken her. I rubbed it home.
"You're dealing with tough people. I quote you again. You must expect these things."
She shook her head. "But…"
"There are no buts," I retorted. "If anyone gets word of this trip, you're in it as much as Stein or myself. If anyone is missing for a month from Walvis, or Windhoek — it's a small place — the police smell a rat, and they're very good at that. Or someone passes the word to Ohopoho that a white man — and a white woman — are in the Skeleton Coast."
"Where's Ohopoho?" she asked.
"It's a God-forsaken spot near the Ovambo border," I said. "It's the headquarters of the one official in the Skeleton Coast. There's an airstrip. He's got a radio-telephone. All he needs is a suspicious buzz and they'll send out a couple of jeeps and a truck to round you up without further ado."
She parried the thrust of my attack by switching her ground.
"I watched you up on the bridge," she said. "I would have said — for a moment — that you were almost happy."
I'd learned enough about her in a short while not to fall for that one.
"Thanks," I replied dryly. "A sharp problem in navigation is always prescribed for the patient in the Royal Navy."
The rapier-point flickered.
"Before or after cashiering?"
This woman with the red gold hair certainly knew how to cut across wounds with a scalpel.
She followed up the punch, but this time I was ready for it. Ready, like an old windjammer, under snug canvas for the squall.
"And you left her and followed the course of duty? And made yourself into a human chuck-out, a sort of maritime beachcomber."
"You've got your metaphors mixed," I stabbed back. "What interest is it to you how tough men spend their oil time? If you really want to know, I went to her flat to sleep with her before going on a suicide cruise — for the last time but I wasn't in the mood. In fact, I never got there."
Stein broke it up. He bustled in carrying a cardboard cylinder. He looked suspiciously at us both, but said nothing. He took a map from the cylinder and spread it out.
Here is my plan," he said briefly.
It was a small map, much smaller than my Admiralty charts, and was headed "Ondangua, World Aeronautical Shark"
Maps have always fascinated me. "I've never seen this map before," I said. It covered an area roughly from the Haonib River (which is really the southern boundary of the Skeleton Coast) to Porto Alexandre in Angola. It went as far eastwards as the great Etosha Pan, that inland lake where the elephant are counted in thousands and the antelopes thunder by your jeep like the charge' of the Light Brigade. It showed the Cunene River, international boundary between South West Africa and Portuguese Angola, for hundreds of miles into the hinterland. Stein smirked.