He shrugged, poured himself another drink, but didn’t drink it at once. His eyes stared out of the window at the deepening blackness building up over the mountains to the east while his fingers unconsciously moved the glass in little circles on the white tablecloth. A sudden puff of wind brought a light sprinkle of rain through the open windows; waiters hurried to close them, muffling the sound of the aircraft on the runways. Da Silva suddenly upended his glass, crushed out his cigarette, and put out his hand.
“Let me have another.”
Wilson dutifully pushed the package across the table, waiting silently for Da Silva’s mood to pass. The swarthy man lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, and tossed the spent match toward the ashtray.
“Well,” he said in reminiscence, “it was quite an inquiry. I was in charge. It took some of the passengers and even a few of the crew a while to realize that a Brazilian ship is Brazilian national territory wherever it is — I’m speaking of the non-Brazilians, of course — but eventually we got that cleared away and got down to business. I learned a lot of useless things; at the time I thought it was unusual in an investigation, but I’ve learned better since. We learned, for example, that the ages of those four drum players was somewhere between twenty and fifty — depending to a large extent on the age of the person being interviewed. We also learned that they could play their instruments with remarkable skill, which, in the islands, I was informed, is like describing someone in Brazil as playing good football—”
“Soccer,” Wilson interrupted.
“Soccer in your country. Football in every civilized nation on earth. However, I’m not in the mood to argue. Let’s say it’s like looking for a teen-ager in the States who plays guitar. Satisfied? All right. Oh, yes — there was one other bit of evidence of major importance that came to light at the inquiry. The deck officer was enough of a seaman to notice that when they tied their rowboat to the gangplank, they used a running hitch of some sort, because when the big man who ran the gang gave it a tug in the opposite direction, the knot ran free. Apparently, according to Webster, that’s the definition of a hitch. I didn’t know it before, and even after all these years I’m still not sure I believe it now.” He sighed heavily. “Anyway, that apparently made them sailors, since who but a sailor would know anything about hitches? Except, possibly, Boy Scouts, and I sincerely doubted we were dealing with Boy Scouts.”
“A reasonable conclusion.”
“Thank you.”
“However — you were about to say — good sailors in the islands being about as rare as chess players in Russia, that information also proved to be of momentous help to you.”
“Correct.” Da Silva nodded. “So there we were. We took down over a hundred thousand words in shorthand at the inquiry — more than enough for a bad novel — every word anyone remembered anyone else saying, including themselves. Quite a performance...”
“No fingerprints on or about the safe?”
“All neatly wiped off. As a matter of fact, the youngster watched him do it. The advantages, you see, of our improved means of communication; anyone with a TV set or the price of a movie now automatically wipes all knobs after using.”
Wilson stared at him and then shook his head almost in admiration.
“Not a bad evening’s work. Half a million dollars...”
Da Silva smiled at him sardonically. He crushed out his cigarette and reached for the brandy, filling his glass. He raised it, looking at Wilson over the rim.
“Really not all that much when you think about it in this day and age,” he said. “Just about enough to keep your Department of Defense going for — what? Thirty seconds? A minute?”
“About a minute and a half, if you want to be accurate,” Wilson said, and smiled. “Of course that’s on the basis of an eight-hour day, which few in Defense work — except, of course, the soldiers in the field. But in getting other people’s money, the Pentagon, you want to remember, are professionals. This half a million isn’t a bad amount for a few rank amateurs to put into their pockets and get clean away.”
Da Silva paused in his act of drinking and then finished his glass. He set his glass down and stared at his friend in surprise.
“Get away? Who said they got away?” He shook his head in amazement at Wilson’s lack of faith. “What a thought! I told you I was in charge of the case, didn’t I?”
“What did they do? Talk in their sleep? Walk into a police station and confess?”
“They did neither. They disappeared after leaving a bad taste in the mouth of the deck officer and a chopped-up face and a sore skull — plus a certain loss of faith in the kindness of his fellow humans — for the purser. The Scottish engineer was more philosophical, at least. To him the loss was only money — and not his, at that.”
“Then, how—”
“What they did leave,” Da Silva said, his tone conversational, “was a lesson to all people who talk too much. You might try to learn from them. The big boss man not only knew where the safe was, he even knew where the toilet was, and the purser’s cabin and his office and everything. That’s quite a bit of knowledge regarding a ship that hadn’t even been in Bridgetown before. That was his big mistake. With that gun and that edged front sight he could have gotten the boy to admit that the safe was in the purser’s office, and gotten him to open it, too. But he had to prove he already had the information.” Da Silva shook his head. “He talked too much, and he said things you just don’t pick up in idle conversation in a waterfront bar, certainly not within twenty-four hours of a ship’s arrival in port.”
Wilson nodded agreement.
“So you figured he hadn’t gotten it from a Ouija board, but that someone in the classroom had been helping him with his homework, and that was cheating. Which you frown on.”
“With reason,” Da Silva said virtuously. “Cheaters never prosper.”
“A Barbadian in the crew.”
“I think I’ll recommend to your Ambassador a well-deserved pay-raise for you,” Da Silva said, and nodded his head. “A rare occasion, but you are right. Except, of course, that the people there prefer to be called Bajans instead of Barbadians.”
“A steward.”
Da Silva frowned at the tablecloth and then looked up.
“I don’t know if that would qualify as a correct answer or not. He was the ship’s librarian, a clever lad, but he doubled as a bar steward every now and then, so I’ll let it go. There were three Bajans in the crew: one in the kitchen, one in the deck crew, and this ship’s librarian. There was — and still is, as a matter of fact — a sergeant of police in Bridgetown named Storrs, except he’s the Chief Inspector there now; he handled the questioning of these people, and he did a beautiful job.”
“A confession?”
“No, the man never confessed, but he was one of the two who had been ashore the previous night when the ship came in. He also came from a small town in St. Joseph parish called Brighton, near Bathsheba. The other one who had been ashore came from Holetown. Storrs did a check of the two towns and found that in Brighton our four pals were not only well known for their steel-drum playing, but also for a few of their nastier habits. They were picked up with no great effort, and a week later they were extradited to Brazil.”