‘Put ‘em down anywhere,’ he said. ‘A couple of aspirin would have done just as well.’
Goddard looked past him, and nodded. Egerton was already unconscious and obviously dying of massive hemorrhage. Lind had spread the jacket open and cut the shirt away, exposing his chest. Blood was everywhere, in the thick mat of gray hair, running down his ribs, and staining the jacket and bedspread beside him. The pillow under the side of his mouth was soaked with it. The eye was closed, and his breathing ragged and labored. There was no froth in the blood on his chest Goddard noted; he would have thought there would be, since one or both the shots must have gone through the lungs. He was about to mention this to Lind when Captain Steen appeared in the doorway. Sparks, he said, was trying to locate a ship in the area with a doctor. Lind shook his head.
‘It’s no use,’ he said. He felt Egerton’s pulse, gave a despairing shrug, and gently lowered the wrist. ‘Just a matter of minutes.’
‘Seems dark for arterial blood,’ Goddard remarked, wondering at the same time what difference it made. When you lost enough of it, you died, no matter what shade it was.
‘Probably the pulmonary,’ Lind replied. ‘It carries venous blood.’
Egerton’s breathing changed to a gasping rattle that went on for over a minute and then stopped abruptly. Lind reached for the wrist again, probing for the pulse that had apparently ceased. He put it down and gently raised the eyelid with a thumb to look at the pupil. He sighed and closed the eye.
‘That’s all,’ he said.
Captain Steen lowered his head. He appeared to be praying. Then he straightened and said, ‘I’ll tell the steward to bring a sheet.’
Lind turned on the basin tap to wash the blood from his hands. Goddard turned to go out. He felt something under his shoe and looked down. It appeared to be a tiny awl. He pushed it over against the bulkhead with his foot and went out into the passageway, and as he neared the entrance to the dining room he heard the sudden, mad sound of Krasicki’s voice again. He looked in, and at the same moment Lind ran past him, still drying his hands on a towel.
Captain Steen was in the room, along with Barset and two other men, one of whom Goddard recognized as the AB who’d given him the shin. The other was a squat, ugly man in his thirties with almost grotesquely massive shoulders and arms. He had an old knife scar in the corner of his mouth and the coldest blue eyes Goddard had ever seen. Krasicki’s hands were bound in front of him and his feet were tied together, but he was sitting up and trying to slide backward away from the men in front of him, still shouting in that unknown language. The squat man and the AB reached down and caught his arms to pick him up. He shrank away from them, and screamed.
‘Easy, Boats,’ Lind said. ‘Let me try to talk to him.’ The two men let go and stepped back. Lind knelt and spoke quietly to Krasicki. ‘We’re not going to hurt you. Everything’s all right.’
This had no effect at all; the mad eyes were completely without comprehension. Lind spoke in German. Insulated within his madness, Krasicki paid no attention, merely continuing to rave in the language none of them understood.
Lind spoke to Barset. ‘Take a couple of your men and canvass the whole crew; see if anybody speaks Polish. It might help some if we knew what he’s saying.’
‘We already have,’ Barset replied. ‘No dice.’
‘Well, we’ve got to quiet him down,’ Lind said. He went out and came back with the first-aid kit. He filled a hypodermic syringe and motioned for the bos’n and AB to hold Krasicki. When the latter saw the syringe, as old and frail as he was it took three men to pin him down sufficiently for Lind to inject the sedative. Goddard felt sick.
In a few minutes Krasicki began to subside. He slumped. ‘Get a stretcher,’ Lind said to the bos’n.
Goddard went forward to the lounge. It was empty. He wondered if Karen and Mrs. Lennox had gone to their cabins. Then he saw them pass in front of one of the portholes. He went on deck and around to the forward side of the midships house. They were leaning on the rail, still looking badly shaken as they watched the reddening western sky. He told them Egerton was dead.
Madeleine Lennox said faintly, ‘I’ll have nightmares the rest of my life. That poor man.’
All three exchanged a glance then with the identical thought: Which one?
‘What will happen to Mr. Krasicki?’ Karen asked.
‘They’ll turn him over to the Philippine authorities,’ Goddard said, ‘but after that it’ll be like Kafka with LSD. An Englishman is murdered on the high seas by a Pole with Brazilian citizenship who’s obviously insane and couldn’t be legally guilty of murder in the first place, and it all happens on a Panamanian ship that’s probably never been to Panama. He’ll be committed, but at his age I doubt he’ll live till they figure out where.’
‘And what about poor Mr. Egerton?’ Madeleine Lennox asked. ‘Will he be buried at sea?’
‘I don’t know,’ Goddard replied. ‘Depends on what they hear from the next of kin.’ It was probably another twelve days to Manila, but the body could be preserved by packing it in ice if the Leander’s facilities were up to it.
Karen Brooke shuddered. ‘It’s so horribly senseless. Just because Mr. Egerton reminded him of somebody.’
‘Some German, apparently,’ Goddard agreed. ‘The chances are he was in a concentration camp during the war. Incidentally, why do you say Mr. Egerton, if he was a colonel?’
‘He asked us to,’ Karen said. ‘He was retired, he said, and “colonel” sounded pompous and Blimp-ish.’ Tears came into her eyes then, and she brushed at them with her fingertips. ‘Oh, damn! He was so sweet.’
They fell silent, watching the splendor of sunset as the Leander plowed ahead across the gently undulating sea. Goddard thought moodily of man’s journey through this flicker of light between the two darknesses, a journey he fondly believed he charted and scheduled in spite of the fact it lay across a landscape subject to a random precipitation of falling safes. Egerton lived through the attempts of countless trained and dangerous men to kill him during World War II, and then was casually swatted by a frail and helpless old man about as deadly as Peter Rabbit except that he was mad. As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.
Lind came around the corner of the deckhouse then, and beckoned to him. ‘I want to show you something,’ he said. Goddard followed him. They went back to Egerton’s cabin. The bos’n and AB were standing outside the door, and Captain Steen was just inside. Egerton’s body was still on the bunk, now covered with a sheet, the ends of the stretcher projecting from under it.
‘Look at this,’ Lind said. He stepped to the head of the bunk and pulled back the sheet from Egerton’s face. The black eye patch had been removed and was lying beside his check. Goddard gave a little start of surprise.
‘I’ll be damned,’ he said. Both the eyes were closed, but the left, which had been covered with the patch, bore the same rounded contour of lid as the other.
‘It came off when we were rolling him onto the stretcher,’ Lind said. With a thumb he gently pushed the lid up as far as the iris, and then closed it again. ‘Perfectly normal eye. The patch was a phony.’
‘Why?’ Goddard asked. ‘But maybe there was something wrong that made it light-sensitive.’
‘Photophobia?’ Lind said. ‘He obviously didn’t have measles, and in iritis and other inflamed conditions the eye’s as red as a grape. Anyway, it was on his passport picture.’