She had persuaded him — browbeaten him, actually — into a pair of gaudy bathing trunks she had insisted on buying for him at the men’s shop on A deck. That he looked a clown, he well knew. He hadn’t been exaggerating his opposition to physical exercise; he loathed it. As a boy he had been skinny and undersized, marked with acne, nearsighted. He had sat down most of his life. He won prizes in school. At the University, he went into particle physics and took a First. Accepted instantly at the Camberwell Experimental Facility, he had remained there ever since, becoming, in due course, Deputy Director. He was still skinny, still small, still nearsighted, his face pocked with acne scars, his knees knobby. He was not, in short, and nobody knew it better than he, the kind of man an attractive young woman would ordinarily notice at the side of the pool on a luxurious ocean liner.
Not that he cared about all that, he reminded himself. Given a choice between the emotional and the intellectual life, he had long since chosen. The passionate side of his nature had atrophied, and he now knew that he was one of those occasional individuals who manage to go through life without feeling any real emotions at all.
Anne glided up through the water. She flicked a few drops up at him. The expression in her green-flecked eyes was unreadable.
“Coming out?” he asked.
She shook her head. Suddenly, reaching out, she took his foot in both hands and bit his big toe.
It was no playful nip, but a real bite. He yelled in surprise and pain. Heads came around. Somebody’s glass smashed on the tile.
Anne kept her teeth clamped together at the base of Little’s toe and tried to worry him into the water. He resisted the pull, unable to believe that anything as appalling as this could be happening. She seemed determined to get down to the bone. He felt a dreadful embarrassment — most of the others at poolside were English — and at the same time a queer kind of elation, a rush and prickling that was almost sexual. She had singled him out.
“For a variety of reasons,” Little said stiffly, gripping the rail very hard, “what you suggest is impossible. Pleasant, no doubt. But impossible.”
They were on the boat deck, looking out at the moon’s path trembling across the water. The air was warm and soft, almost tropical. It was after midnight, and it seemed to Little that his brain, which had brought him this far, had contracted to the width of a laser beam.
Anne touched her lips to his shoulder. “Impossible’s a big word. If everybody’d thought things were impossible, we’d still be riding in canoes, and here we are on the Queen Elizabeth.”
“The Queen Elizabeth is possible. I concede that. It’s what you suggest that’s impossible.”
She turned him, her arms inside his unbuttoned jacket. The touch of her fingers, against his first sunburn in twenty years, was pleasantly painful.
“What’s wrong with trying?” she whispered.
They were in bed together, in the narrow bunk in Little’s cabin. Anne’s finger ran down his breastbone and ticked along his ribs.
“Sweet Jesus, you’re thin. No muscles at all. How do you manage to twirl the knob of that microscope?”
“We don’t use microscopes. We guess.”
“Quentin, baby, what made you think you couldn’t?”
He drew away slightly. “Everyday occurrence and all that. It isn’t an everyday occurrence with me. It isn’t an every-month occurrence. The last time it happened—”
“A wife and two children. That argues a certain sexual normality.”
“A wife, true. Surely we don’t want to talk about my domestic sexual arrangements?”
“Why not?”
“I’ll give you one word on the subject of Delia. She’s beyond belief.”
“Then why did you marry her?”
“I’m a little hard to believe myself at times.”
Anne plumped up the pillows and rearranged herself. “If I didn’t know you think it’s weak-minded, I’d have a cigarette.”
“Have one. I’ll join you.”
She made a small ceremony out of lighting the two cigarettes. Little had given up smoking many years ago, when the statistics proved beyond any possible shadow of doubt that the innocent little things would kill you. But now, he told himself, it hardly mattered, did it? He looked at his watch. Fifty-eight hours.
“Now,” he said, breathing out smoke. “It’s time to settle accounts.”
She said quickly, turning, “Quentin, before you say anything. You know I promised myself I was going to find out what was eating you, if it was the last thing I did. And you dared me! I’ve never been able to turn down a dare. I used to break bones all the time. When I’m halfway through a mystery story I always turn to the last page to see who did the killing.”
“I fully intend to tell you. I know I’m obligated.”
“I said wait. I’m letting you off the hook.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I mean it. I know — I was willing to seduce you to get it out of you! But things have changed. I’m still curious about your wife. You’re really crazy if you think I’ll be satisfied to be told she’s beyond belief. You can get away with that kind of tight-lipped crap in jolly England. Not here. But as far as the rest of it goes, forget it.”
She smoked for a moment in silence. “I don’t know how to say it. You’re such a fascinating person. I’ve never met anybody remotely like you. I still don’t know why I bit your toe. There it was at the edge of the pool, big and homely, and it had nothing to do with your intelligence or anything else. Just a fact of life, and I bit it. What I’m trying to say — you aren’t a dare any more. You’re a living, breathing, copulating human being, and probably if I hit you over the head hard enough, you’ll become unconscious. If you don’t want to tell me, don’t tell me. Sigmund Freud didn’t know everything. Maybe it doesn’t help to talk about it. Anyway, do we want to waste our time talking?”
He felt a stab of irritation. “You’re muddying the waters, Anne. We didn’t put it in writing, but it was a perfectly clear-cut arrangement, and I have no intention of welshing. First sex. Then conversation.”
She kissed him hard. “Shut up. Keep your goddamn secrets.”
He pushed her away. “You asked for it. You’re going to get it, the whole thing from the first day. But I warn you, you won’t believe much of it.”
He hadn’t succeeded in holding onto his cigarette. He brushed it out of bed before the sheets could catch fire. His fumbling attempt at returning to cigarettes struck him as both symbolic and funny. He laughed. It was more of a cough than a laugh, but in an instant it took hold and he couldn’t stop laughing. Even to his own ears it sounded hysterical. Laughter, like sex, was something else he hadn’t done much of recently.
“And the comical thing,” he said, “is that if I’d known I was capable of this it might not have happened. But nobody can do a damn thing about it now.”
Chapter 2
The police sedan pulled into the dock area. Ian Cameron, a cop who was very tough, even brutal, but one of the few of the type who realized that criminals were people, reached into the back seat for a paper bag containing a bottle of cognac. He gave it to Michael Shayne.