In her locked cabin, Arabella had removed the shade from a portable reading-lamp and stuck the bulb out of the porthole; and she was busily flashing an approximation of the Morse SOS signal into the night.
Bernadotti, still gripping his automatic, reached the cabin door within fifteen seconds, with the Saint just behind him. Bernadotti hammered on the door.
“C’mon, lady, turn that goddamn light out and open this door!”
It was clear that she had no intention of opening the door and every intention of continuing her signalling. It was as clear to Descartes, who appeared at the Saint’s elbow with Pancho only moments later, as to Simon himself; and he turned at once to the deaf-mute and barked out an order, with exaggerated lip-movements to be sure of being understood at once.
“The fuses — quick! The engine room!” If the Saint’s opinion had been asked he would have had to agree that emergency action was called for. From Simon Templar’s point of view, which was concerned with leaving himself plenty of room to manoeuvre without the complication of further intervention from outside, Arabella’s distress-signal had to be stopped, and quickly. Already, as Pancho shot off down the com-panionway to the engine room, it might be too late. It would depend on the alertness of whoever was at the helm of the boat that had been keeping pace behind them. And it would depend, too, on who that was...
The lights went out suddenly; then, after a few seconds of total darkness, the corridor lights came back on. Pancho must have found the fuse or main switch for the cabin lights, for they could see that there was now only darkness where a strip of flashing light had previously been visible under the door of Arabella’s cabin.
Descartes banged on the door.
“Open now!” he boomed. “Open, I say — or Enrico will shoot the lock. I will count to three only. One... Two...”
Bemadotti raised his automatic and Descartes stood aside.
“Three!”
The gun made a deafening crash that echoed and reverberated back and forth through the ship. The shot made a mess of the door and the jamb, but the lock itself still held — thus giving the lie to the countless western films in which lock-shooting is invariably and instantly successful.
Bernadotti charged the door with his shoulder, and the weakened jamb gave way. He dived into the cabin, grabbed Arabella roughly, and wrenched the lamp away from her. He gripped her painfully by the wrists and tried to drag her out; but she dug in her heels and fought back furiously with a hard kick to his shins followed by a strategically directed knee which caused him to double over in agony. When he finally straightened up it was with an extended string of Italian profanities; and then he advanced on Arabella with one fist upraised.
The Saint had followed him into the small and now unlighted cabin, and his first action was a preventive or, it might be termed, defensive one. The automatic was a nuisance and, so long as it remained in Bernadotti’s grip, a dangerous nuisance. It took the Saint about four seconds to dispose of that hazard in a controlled manner. First the fingers of his left hand closed in a steely grip around the Italian’s right lower wrist, effectively immobilising the joint to prevent the automatic from being turned and fired; and then one bony projecting knuckle of the Saint’s other hand was jabbed up hard into the same wrist, where it found a pressure-point near the pulse. The effect was that Bernadotti’s fingers sprang open as if by magic. The rest of Bernadotti yelped; and the gun, which was the object of the exercise, dropped to the cabin door. The Saint kicked it under the lower bunk, and proceeded from the defensive to the offensive phase of the operation.
He kept, and tightened, his grip on Bernadotti’s right wrist; and then he moved in close and bent the arm hard up behind the Italian’s back, bringing it to within an inch of the position that would break it or dislocate the shoulder.
And then, maintaining that grip, the Saint marched Bernadotti round to the door of the cabin, and with his other hand repeatedly banged the Italian’s head against the doorframe.
“I know you prefer to fight women, Enrico,” he said calmly during these exertions, “but don’t ever do it again while I’m in the audience. Next time I will break your arm.”
He released the arm and shoved Bernadotti away hard, so that he crashed into the bulkhead opposite the cabin door. But Simon had underestimated his resilience, and was caught partly off his guard by the sudden ferocity with which Bernadotti sprang back at him in a cursing rage for revenge. He succeeded in catching Simon with a hard but glancing blow to the side of the head, and for a few seconds a kaleidoscope of coloured lights danced before the Saint’s eyes. Bernadotti had meanwhile sprang back to gather himself for a new rush. Simon waited, poised easily on the balls of his feet like the superbly fit fighting animal he was.
Arabella watched from inside the cabin; Descartes had quietly drawn an automatic of his own from a pocket, but he was making no attempt to influence the fight. And so Bernadotti hurled himself forward again, with wolf-teeth bared in a blood-lust of fury; and Simon Templar stepped aside adroitly and delivered a single hard forehand chop to the man’s ribs.
There was a whmmph sound, and he fell back winded and gasping. Simon half-crouched, waiting for another rush...
But then something quite unexpected happened. Suddenly the corridor lights dimmed, almost to darkness; then, after a second or two, they brightened again, then dimmed... then brightened. And in time with those weird fluctuations of light there came from the direction of the engine room an even weirder sound, an unearthly laboured whining that climbed up and down the scale of musical pitch in synchronisation with the alternations of brighter and dimmer lighting.
“Pancho!”
Descartes’ exclamation reminded them of what had been forgotten in the heat of the struggle: that the deaf-mute had not returned from his electrical mission in the engine room.
Descartes motioned urgently to Bernadotti, who limped off down the companionway to investigate after a final murderous glance at the Saint. Descartes flicked the barrel of his automatic to draw attention to it.
“Monsieur Templar,” he said as the weird variations of light and sound continued. “You will please retrieve Enrico’s weapon now, rather than later. Carefully! Holding the barrel! Thank you. Now give it to me.” As Simon complied he added, “It was most careless of Enrico, was it not, to permit you to disarm him?”
It was then that the said Enrico reappeared grim-faced and shaken, and with naked fear in his eyes.
“Pancho is dead,” he told them. “Strangled with his own tie — in the generator.”
3
It was a scene of perfectly stark and graphically gruesome clarity.
There, heroically trying to keep on working, was the generator; and there lying across it was the prone and unquestionably dead body of Pancho Gomez, his tie caught in the flywheel spindle, which had dragged him in tight against itself. Sparks showered about his head with the periodic binding of the flywheel. The generator whined in varying pitch as it laboured against the unwonted resistance; and as its output fluctuated, so did the lighting.
All this could be, and was, taken in at a single glance. But to Simon Templar, and no doubt to the others, there was a central point of focus in that scene, a point that drew the attention inexorably and mesmerically, and made all the other details pale into mere backdrop. That compelling point of central and inescapable interest was the condition of the dead Pancho’s face. It was blue; and from between the blubbery lips, now grotesquely parted, there protruded a hideously swollen purplish tongue. Pancho’s ugliness in life had been remarkable, but it was nothing to his ugliness in death.