By eight thirty the two women had to concede there no longer appeared to be any doubt. The messages had continued to come in. As Lind had predicted, Lieutenant Richter requested the cabin be sealed immediately. Fingerprint experts would board the Leander the moment she arrived in Manila. And by now they had begun to grasp that they were the focus of the world’s attention—briefly perhaps, but the world wanted news of just what had happened aboard this rusty old freighter lost in the immensity of the Pacific where the notorious Nazi war criminal had met his end. Captain Steen had already received requests from Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters, bidding for the exclusive story. He sat drinking coffee with them in the lounge, dazed as they all were. Lind came in with the news there was no change in Krasicki’s condition. He poured a cup of coffee and sat down.
Karen sighed. ‘But it’s still incredible that he fooled us so completely.’
Lind smiled. ‘Well, he’s been fooling a lot of people for over twenty years.’
‘He was a consummate actor,’ Goddard said. ‘He had to be, or they’d have got him long ago.’
Madeleine Lennox lit a cigarette and smiled faintly. ‘Well, that’s praise from an authority. And incidentally, now that we can begin to think of the scene without screaming, how would you direct it in a picture?’
‘I wouldn’t change a thing,’ Goddard replied.
‘No, but I mean, the technical aspects of it, the breakdown of the individual parts, where the cameras would be.’
‘Camera,’ Goddard said. ‘In a scene like that you can use only one, because of the lighting. You break it down into several setups, from different points of view, and shoot them individually. Usually, there’s a master shot and then as much backup coverage as the director feels he needs or can get. The broken glass—’ He stopped, and asked, ‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘After the real, I don’t think the make-believe will bother us. Do you Karen?’
Karen shook her head. Lind watched with interest.
‘In the make-believe,’ Goddard went on, ‘it’s still the touches of realism that give it the emotional impact. For instance, in a cheap Western a man is shot at point-blank range with a .44 and nothing happens except that, unaccountably, he drops dead. He’s been slammed with something with the foot-pounds of energy of a moving truck, but there’s not the slightest indication of it. With a good director, it’s different. You see what happens.
‘You shoot it this way: from my point of view, Krasicki with the gun, screaming, he raises the gun, and shoots. He’s not shooting at anything, because Mayr’s not even there beside me, and you may or may not use the shot itself, depending on the way it works best when you edit it. Then you set up just back of Krasicki and to one side to get the shot and the reaction of Mayr’s body to the impact of the bullet. And on to the next setup for the best view of Mr. Lind going for him to get the gun, and of course when you go back to Mayr again the makeup people have applied the red dye to the shirt and the corner of the mouth.
‘Breaking the light fixture and the mirror are just routine special effects jobs. It’s a small explosive charge that’s set off electrically—’
Madeleine Lennox interrupted. ‘I see. Then all the shots are blanks, and not just the first two.’
‘Oh, hell, yes; you never use live ammunition. You’d be locked up. But do you want to know the real accent of the scene, though, the thing that caps it, and that only a really superb director would ever think of?’
‘What’s that?’ Lind asked. He had his legs swung over the side of the armchair, sipping coffee as he watched with that same smiling interest.
‘When Mayr clutches the tablecloth as he falls. And in that terrible silence after all that screaming and gunfire you hear just a faint and very musical tinkling of silverware. That would leave ‘em gasping. It’d be a genius of a director who could improve on the staging of that scene.’
Goddard was conscious then of something very cold moving up his back, as though somebody were drawing an icicle slowly along his spine, and the hair began to stab his neck. He was looking right at Lind, who was still smiling faintly, and as he realized what he’d said he knew he was staring straight into the eyes of the devil.
‘Seems to be a case, then,’ Lind murmured, ‘of nature holding a mirror up to art.’
And only the two of them knew it, Goddard thought; the others didn’t even suspect it.
7
How many were there? Goddard lay naked on his bunk in the darkness and thought about it. The bos’n and that big sailor named Otto were obviously part of the apparatus, but was that all? What about the wireless operator? Or even Captain Steen himself? That was the chilling part of it; they could be all around him and he didn’t know who was involved. And maybe Lind already suspected him; with that diabolical mind you couldn’t be sure of anything, except that underestimating it was a mistake nobody would ever make twice.
Lightning flashed, illuminating the whole interior of the cabin for over a second. Without conscious thought, he began counting: one-oh, two-oh, three-oh . . . nine-oh. A great crash of thunder rolled and reverberated over the ship. It was still two miles away but coming closer. The fan whirred, stirring the lifeless air, but the cabin was like a sweatbox. The wooden door was pulled back and hooked, but the screen, which had louvered slats across it for privacy, was latched. In the silence he heard the faint sound of six bells striking in the wheelhouse. It was eleven p.m.
It’d be a genius of a director who could improve on the staging of that scene. One more stupid remark like that, he thought, and the next burial sack that goes over the side will have somebody in it, all right. Lind was the ship’s doctor, and with an imagination of that order there’d be no dearth of illuminating detail to enter in the log as to cause of death. Found dead in bunk of obvious cardiac arrest. Went to bed drunk, set mattress afire with cigarette, and suffocated. Suffered severe concussion in fall, and died two days later without regaining consciousness. With enough morphine in him to kill a rhinoceros. The findings would be subject to review by higher medical authority, of course, except for the minor difficulty that the body was buried in the ooze five miles down in the Pacific Ocean.
But there’s still a chance you’re wrong, he told himself. You don’t really know any of this; you’re only assuming it. All you really know is that it could be the greatest piece of illusion since Thurston, you know why it could have been done, and how it could have been done, but there’s no proof whatever that it was done. The cabin was lit up by another long flash of lightning, and the thunderclap came almost on the heels of it. A faint breeze came in the porthole now, with the smell of rain in it. Lightning flashed again, and the thunder was a sharp, cracking explosion that was very near.
Maybe he’d been led down the garden path by his subconscious distrust of all those coincidences of timing between the ship and Buenos Aires, and then when Mrs. Lennox had asked that ridiculous question about the first two shots being blanks he’d booby-trapped himself and leaped to the conclusion that just because it was possible it had to be true. Of course Mayr would like to be written off as dead, and what better way than being shot to death in front of five reliable witnesses and buried in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
Then what about Krasicki, or whatever his real name was? If the thing had been staged, there had to be some plausible and foolproof escape already prearranged; no matter how great his devotion to the cause or how high the pay, it was hardly likely he would set himself up as a human sacrifice. Just how did they wave the wand and make him disappear?