And the Deep Blue Sea (16 page)

She agreed with him that something should be done for serious drinkers, and offered to help with the study. As a minority group, they’d been sadly neglected, and with the oncoming generation turning increasingly to pot and acid there was a very real danger they might become extinct, their entire culture lost forever. Only yesterday, in some bar, she’d heard a man order a frozen daiquiri.

To simplify the logistics of the operation he changed to bourbon too, and they carried a survival kit of three bottles in her luggage for the late hours of the night, morning horrors, and as insurance against election days, civil uprisings, or any natural catastrophe which might cause the bars to be closed. He had never known anybody who could drink as much as Haggerty and show as little effect of it except to talk, to talk incessantly, amusingly, and forever, apparently as a sort of perpetual exercise in the avoidance of all thought or of ever, in an unguarded moment, saying anything she meant. The night they’d shared the same room he had awakened toward dawn to see her sitting on the floor in pajamas, her cheek down on one arm spread across the seat of a chair while the hand slowly clenched and unclenched in agony.

“I’m sorry, Haggerty,” he said, for a moment forgetting the rules. “Is there anything I can do?”

“That,” she said, “is the first stupid thing I ever heard you say.”

She wasn’t entirely in accord with him, however, that the automobile dwellers were hostile. This fallacy, she believed, had grown out of the slipshod methods of some of the early investigators intent only on a quick doctorate and nailing down a grant to be off to Africa, and was based on nothing sounder than the fact that so many anthropologists had disappeared into the California countryside never to be heard of again. Subsequent studies had revealed that nearly all of them were alive and well in Los Angeles.

She explained this one night when they were finishing off a last bottle of Jack Daniels in her room. He’d forgotten which airport hotel it was, but it overlooked a freeway, and they were watching the endlessly hurtling projectiles curving past them.

“All we can do,” he said, “is pray that Slivovitz got through to Fort Huaracha. Can you keep loading the rifles while I deliver the baby?”

“No,” she said, “you’re falling into the same error, and for the same reason, as Huysmann when he first advanced the hypothesis that it was some sort of primate equivalent of the lemming migration. He wasted a whole seventy-thousand-dollar grant trying to find where they were throwing themselves off the cliff, and backtracking to discover where they were springing out of the ground. He simply didn’t notice they were going in both directions. That’s why I can’t believe the intent of it is hostile at all. If they were chasing something, all eight lanes would be going the same way.”

Tieboldt did discover this, she went on, but he was just as baffled by it as Huysmann had been by overlooking it. It had already been established that they were highly sexed, and that they were a bartering people who subsisted by selling each other things they called goods and services. His theory was that it was dance of some sort, a ritual evolved out of these aspects of their tribal heritage, but he could never come up with a satisfactory answer as to how either courtship or commerce could be carried on while they were going past each other in opposite directions at a combined velocity of a hundred and forty miles an hour.

Later investigators had decided the only way to the answer was to enter the dance and see where it led, which accounted for nearly all the missing scientists. It was estimated that at the present time there were still twenty-seven anthropologists circling endlessly around the Los Angeles freeways like spaceships in orbit, unable to find a way off.

Frownfelter’s paper, “The Carapace People of the San Fernando Valley,” was by far the most reliable work on the subject, and the one that did the most to dispel the myth that they were hostile. “He spent a whole winter observing the members of a group near Van Nuys,” she went on, “gradually gaining their confidence and allaying their fears that he intended any harm to the carapaces until he was allowed to approach quite near and study them at first hand. He found them quite friendly and open, and even eager to point out the advantages of their particular shells.

“He was surprised to discover that they weren’t physically attached to the carapace in any way, even by an umbilicus, and that they could leave it at will, though they were always reluctant to do so. Whether this emotional attachment was sexual in nature or quasi-religious, he was never able to determine, but he inclined to the latter since it seemed to be shared equally by both sexes. Is there anything left in the bottle?”

One morning Haggerty was simply gone. She’d checked out before he got up, and left no message. Then, two days later, the drunk had abruptly come to an end. He was aboard an afternoon flight from San Diego to San Francisco. The miniskirted stewardess had just served him a double martini when he looked down and saw the blue of the Pacific below them and wondered how he could have been so stupid that it had never occurred to him before. He’d been searching in the wrong place all the time. It was out there. He handed the drink back to her. “Tell the captain to have one on me.”

“You want him to lose his job?” she asked with mock severity.

“Give him a doggie bag. He can take it home.”

For the fifth time Karen Brooke tried to wrench her thoughts back to the book in her hands, but too many conflicting emotions were pulling at her. She was uneasy, and helpless, and illogically angry at herself. Captain Steen worried her, and she couldn’t make up her mind about Lind. He remained a complete enigma. One moment she trusted him, and then the next she was convinced he was a monster or madman.

And there was nobody she could talk to. Goddard? He was too self-sufficient and impervious to share any of her forebodings about this ship, and would only make her feel ridiculous. Further, in the past hour she had faced the fact, finally, that she didn’t like him, and it was the timing of this that had occasioned her self-anger. Why couldn’t she have arrived at the conclusion before she inadvertently saw Madeleine Lennox slipping into his cabin? This, she told herself hotly, had nothing to do with it, but the stupid fact remained there to taunt her.

She had found him attractive at first, with the homely male face, the assurance, and good manners, until she began to suspect this was all there was to him, that there was no warmth anywhere or capacity for feeling. She was sick to death of the hard, the smooth, and the impervious. They were too good at everything, and never seemed to have any doubts at all. Fear was alien to them because they were convinced they could, and nearly always did, walk away from the wreckage unscathed, while the involved, the less well-coordinated, and the earnest squares got their heads knocked off. And when, infrequently, one of the group did kill himself in the pursuit of kicks, the others bore it very lightly. Within a month after she’d watched in horror as Stacey fell from that sheer rock face in Yosemite, three of his very good, and very married, friends had made passes at her.

She was aware she was by no means unique in this; it probably happened to most widows and divorcees, but the callousness and the calm assumption they were doing her a favor had left her with what she felt was a permanent aversion to the breed. Too bad about old Stace, but they knew how rough it must be, and there was no sense in her wrecking her health. The fact that their marriage was already shaky and might have wound up in divorce hadn’t changed her reaction to these impervious but magnanimous studs who were willing to service her until she had made a permanent arrangement of some kind. And Goddard was another one, merely a few years older and hence a little smoother and more assured, and more immunized against the danger of ever feeling anything.

She dropped the book on the desk, and switched out the light. The fan droned on in its futile attempt to do anything about the heat. She felt very much alone and troubled, and it was a long time before she could get to sleep.

When Goddard awoke it was dawn and Madeleine Lennox was awake beside him, raised on one elbow to appraise the failure of her hand’s manipulation. Their eyes met. “O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low?” she asked. She smiled, kissed him softly on the cheek, and climbed naked from the bunk to gather up her pajamas.

When she went out, he stepped to the door and watched until she was inside her own cabin again. There was no one else in the passageway. He was just about to close the door when Barset appeared at the far end of it. He called out to ask how Captain Steen was.

Improving, Barset replied; resting much easier. Goddard closed the door and lit a cigarette, knowing Madeleine Lennox would have heard the good news too. Hell, there was nothing to worry about; it was all imagination.

I
N THE PANTRY NEXT DOOR
to the dining room Rafferty stirred the coffee again in the small pot to be sure the two tablets were dissolved. He glanced at his watch. It was seven twenty-five
A.M.
; ten minutes to go. He set the pot on a tray with the little pitcher of condensed milk and the sugar bowl, slipped on the white jacket with its exciting hard slab of weight in the right-hand pocket, and carried the tray down the passageway to Madeleine Lennox’ cabin. He knocked. “Coffee,” he said.

“Just a minute,” she called out. There was the sound of the door’s being unlatched. He went in. She was sitting on the side of her bunk in pajamas, lighting a cigarette. She smiled. “You’re a little early this morning. Thank you, Dominick.”

“Y’welcome,” he said. He set the tray on the desk beside the bunk, and as he turned he took the usual good look down the open collar of the pajamas. She never seemed to get wise. Not a bad-looking pair of knockers, either, for an old biddy, and several times he’d been tempted to reach down and cop a handful, but you never knew. She might squawk. Not that he was afraid of Barset, but he didn’t want that big cold-eyed son of a bitch looking down his throat; he’d seen some of his work.

If he’d moved in soon enough he might have got some of it, he thought, stepping into the bathroom as though checking the towel supply and soap. Barset had beat him to it, though; he was pretty sure the scrawny bastard had been dipping his wick in it ever since they left Callao, and now it looked like Goddardstein was having it delivered to his room. Out of sight, he whistled tunelessly, opened and closed the door of the medicine cabinet, and turned on a faucet momentarily. That Hollywood phony, who’d he think he was fooling, changing his name? The whole place was Jews and nigger-lovers, they ought to burn it down.

He came out. “I’ll bring you a couple fresh towels,” he said, looking around at her as he reached for the door.

“Thank you.” She tilted the pot to fill the cup again, and added some more sugar. He went out into the passageway. She hadn’t noticed a thing; that crappy condensed milk covered the taste of it all right. He stepped out on deck on the starboard side and looked forward. The bos’n and Otto and the other sailor were halfway down it now, coming this way as they washed down with the fire hose and brooms. Four minutes to go.

He stepped back into the passageway and went forward to the linen locker. He picked up two bath towels, came back, and knocked on the door of Madeleine Lennox’ cabin. Before he slipped in he shot a glance both ways along the passageway; nobody was in sight. She looked up and patted back a yawn. She smiled at him, with a puzzled shake of the head, and said, “I feel so sleepy.”

“It’s this heat,” he said. “I better close your porthole; they’re washing down.”

He stepped past her, brushing her knees as she sat on the bunk, and leaned over the desk to dog down the porthole. The coffeepot and cup were both empty; she’d drunk it all. He turned and went into the bathroom, still carrying the towels.

Madeleine Lennox gazed dreamily after him and yawned again. Why, he didn’t look down my pajamas that time, she thought in wonder. After a beautifully planned and executed maneuver like that—God, what’s the matter with me, didn’t we sleep at all last night?—after that perfect down-range turn to come in over target at the precise angle to see clear to my navel, he didn’t even look. Could I have aged that much in five minutes?

She was conscious of a roaring sound that puzzled her for a moment; then she recognized it as the stream from the fire hose beating on the bulkhead of Harry’s cabin next door. But she still seemed to be floating off into a rosy cloud, and it was hard to focus or keep her thoughts straight. What
was
she thinking about? Oh, yes, the twilight of the boob. Her declining box-office. Somewhere between age thirteen, when they started trying to see up your dress, down your dress, or through your dress, and age ninety, when the show had been warehoused for years, there had to be some precise instant of time like the exact balancing point of a teeter-totter when they simply stopped peeking, once and forever. Like that. Was it possible she had pinpointed this historic moment? Five minutes ago she could have sold advertising space on them, at least at sea—

There was a swishing sound of water along the deck outside, and then an even louder drumming as the stream from the fire hose beat on her own bulkhead and closed porthole. And coincident with this momentary din she saw Rafferty emerge from the bathroom. He had a towel in his right hand, and as he came toward her with his beefy grin he suddenly flipped the towel over into his left, and under it was a blue-black slab of metal which as the widow of a naval officer she could recognize as a sidearm even at the moment of dropping off to sleep like this. He raised it over her head, but there didn’t seem to be much she could do about it.

Rafferty slashed downward with the .45, catching her just above the hairline on the left side of her head, the brutal impact lost under the beating of water against the bulkhead. As she pitched forward he caught her and stretched her out on the bunk with the towel under her head. Dropping the gun back in his pocket, he began yanking at the legs of the pajamas. Damn it, there must be a zipper somewhere. He located it at her left hip, stripped off the garment, and hurriedly unbuttoned the pajama top. Being careful to keep her head on the towel, he turned her face down, and peeled this garment off to complete undressing her.