Off the Mangrove Coast (Ss) (2000) (10 page)

"She must have been a fine girl," I said, for he was deeply moved.

"She was the only thing in my life! Only a madman, a mad American, would return to France after the war broke out. But I loved her.

"Look at me. I'm not the kind of man many women could love. I'm too rough, too brutal! I'm a seaman, that is all, and never asked to be more. A good man at sea or in a fight, but I have no words with which to say nice things to a woman, and she was a beautiful girl with an education."

Tomas took out his wallet and removed a worn photograph. When I looked at it, I was frankly astonished. The girl was not merely a pretty girl, she was all he had said, and more. She was beautiful.

Furthermore, there was something in her eyes and face that let you know that here was a girl who had character, maybe one who knew what loyalty was.

"She is lovely," I said sincerely. "I never saw anyone more beautiful!"

He was pleased, and he looked at me with his face suddenly lighter. "She was magical!" he said. "The best thing in my life. I came first to her house with her brother, who had been my shipmate on a voyage from Saigon. She was a child then, and I thought of her as nothing else.

"So, when next I came to the house, I brought her a present from Liverpool, and then others from Barcelona and Algiers. Simple things, and inexpensive, the sort of things a sailor may find in almost any port, but they had romance, I suppose, a color.

"I gave them simply because I was a lonely man, and this family had taken me as one of them, and because the giving of things is good for a lonely heart.

"One day, she was twelve then, I think, she had gone to a theater in the Boulevard de Clichy with her brother, and when they came out, she saw me with a girl, a girl from a cafe in the Pigalle. She was very angry and for days she would not speak to me.

"Her brother teased her, and said, "Look! Marie thinks already she is a woman! She is jealous for you, Tomas!" "

He smiled at the memory. "Then, I was gone again to sea, and when I came again to the house, Marie was fourteen, taller, frightened, and skinny. Always she stared at me, and I brought her presents as before. Sometimes I took her to the theater, but to me she was a child. She was no longer gay, full of excitement and anger. She walked be side me very seriously.

"Four years then I was gone, and when I returned ... you should have seen her! She was beautiful. Oh, I tell you, she was a woman now, and no doubt about it.

"I fell in love! So much that I could not talk for feeling it, but never did I think for a moment that it could matter. "But did I have a choice? Not in the least! She had not changed, that one. She was both the little girl I knew first and the older one I knew later, and more besides. She laughed at me and said that long ago she had made up her mind that I was to be her man, and so it was to be whether I liked it or not! Me, I liked it. She was so much of what I wanted that she frightened me.

"Can you imagine what that did to me, m'sieu? I was a lonely man, a very lonely man. There had been the girls of the ports, but they are not for a man of soul, only for the coarse-grained who would satisfy the needs of the moment. Me, I wanted love, tenderness.

"I know." He shrugged. "I don't look it. I am a sailor and pleased to be one, and I've done my share of hard living. More than once, I've twisted my knife in the belly of a man who asked for it, and used my boots on them, too. But who is to say what feeling lives in the heart of a man? Or what need for love burns inside him?

"My parents died when I was young and the sea robbed me of my country. In such a life, one makes no close friends, no attachments, puts down no roots. Then, this girl, this beautiful girl, fell in love with me.

"Fell in love? No, I think the expression is wrong. She said she had always loved me even when she was a child and too young to know what it meant.

"Her mother and brother approved. They were good people, and I had lived long among them. Then the mother died, Pierre was away in the colonies, and Marie and I were to be married when he returned. So we lived together.

"Is this wrong? Who is to say what is right and what is wrong? In our hearts we understood and in France, well, they understand such things. What man is to live without a girl? Or a girl without a man?

"Then away I went to sea on my last trip, and while I was gone, the war came, and with it the Germans. When I returned, I joined the maquis to get back into France. Her letters were smuggled to me.

"Marie? She was a French girl, and she worked with the underground. She was very skillful, and very adept at fooling the Boche. Then, something happened.

"One of the men close to her was betrayed, then another, finally, it was her brother who was killed. The gestapo had them, but they died without talking. One night I came to her to plead that she come away with me, it had been three years that I had fought in the underground, for her, almost six. But she told me she could not go; that someone close to her was working with the Nazis, someone who knew her. She must stay until she knew who it was.

"Yet try as she could, there was no clue. The man was shrewd, and a very devil. He finally came to her himself, after her brother was caught. He told her what he knew of her underground activities and of mine. He told her unless she came to live with him that I would be tortured and killed.

"He had spied upon her. He had even discovered her burning the candle before the dagger for Pierre after he was killed. He told her of it, to prove how much he knew to prove he knew enough to find me and she had admitted the reason.

"In the letter in which all this was told, she could not tell me who he was. He had friends in the underground, and she was fearful that learning who she was writing about, they would destroy the letter if they saw his name, and then she would be cut off from me and from all help.

"She would give me his name, she said, when I came next to Paris. He had not forced himself on her, just threatened. We had to plan to do away with him quickly. Marie said, too, that she was afraid that if the invasion came, he would kill her, for she alone could betray him; she alone knew of his activities for the Nazis.

"The invasion a secret? Of course! But when orders began to come for the underground, come thick and fast, we knew it was coming. Then, the landings were made, and for days we were desperately busy.

"We rose in Paris, and they were exciting, desperate days, and bitter days for the collaborators and the men of Vichy. Their servitude to the Nazis had turned to bitterness and gall; they fled; and they begged, and they died.

"When I could, I hurried to the flat where Marie lived. It was near here, just around the corner. I found her dying. She had been raped and shot by this collaborator two days before and she had crawled to her apartment to wait for me. She died telling me of it, but unable before her last breath to give me his name."

"And there was no way you could figure out who he was?" I asked.

"How?" He spread his hands expressively. "No one suspected him. His desire for her was such that he had threatened her, and in threatening her he had boasted of what he had done. That was a mistake he rectified by killing her.

"Only one thing I know. He is one of our little group here. She said he lived in this neighborhood, that he was waiting here more than once when he accosted her. He thinks himself safe now. My girl has been dead for some time and her body buried. She is never mentioned here.

"Mombello? He is an Italian. Picard is a chemist, and has had traffic with Germany since the twenties. Matsys? An iron foundry owner who retained it all through the war, but who was active in the underground as were Pi-card and Mignet."

We were interrupted then by some others coming into the cafe, yet now the evening had added zest. Here was a deadly bit of business. Over the next two hours, as they . trooped in, I began to wonder. Which was he?

The slender, shrewd Mombello with his quick, eager eyes? That lean whip of a man, Mignet? The heavy Matsys with blue and red veins in his nose, and the penchant for telling you he'd seen it all and done it all. Or was it dry, cold Picard who sipped wine through his thin lips and seemed to have ice water for blood?

Which man was marked to die? How long would Tomas sit brooding in his corner, waiting? What was he waiting for? A slip of the tongue? A bit of drunken talk?

None of these men drank excessively. So which one? Mombello whose eyes seemed to gloat over the body of every woman he saw? Mignet with his lust for money and power and his quick knife? Or big affable Matsys? Or Pi-card with his powders and acids?

How long would he wait? These five had sat here for months, and now ... now there were six. I was the sixth. Perhaps it was the sixth to tip the balance. Here they were caught in a pause before death. Yet the man who killed such a girl, and who betrayed his country, should I not go free. There was a story in this, and it had an ending, somewhere.

Over the following gray days, several in a row, the conversation ebbed and flowed and washed around our ears. I did not speak privately to Tomas again but there seemed an ongoing, silent communication between us. Then, in a quiet moment of discussion, someone mentioned the bazooka, and it came to me then that another hand had been dealt... mine.

"A strange weapon," I agreed, and then moved the tide of conversations along the subject of weapons and warfare. I spoke of the first use of poison gas by soldiers of Thebes when they burned sulfur to drive defenders from the walls of Athenian cities, then to the use of islands of defense; a successful tactic by the Soviets in this war, previously used by the Russians defending themselves against Charles XII of Sweden.

Then other weapons and methods, and somehow, but carefully, to strange knives.

Tomas ignored me, the spider in his web, but he could hear every word and he was poised, poised for anything.

Mignet told of a knife he had seen in Algiers with a poisoned barb in the hilt near the blade, and Mombello of a Florentine dagger he had once seen.

Tomas stayed silent, turning his glass in endless circles upon the table before him, turning, turning, turning. We locked eyes for a moment and before he looked away he seemed to sigh and give a nearly imperceptible nod.

"There was a knife I saw once," I said suddenly, "with engraving on it. A very old knife, and very strange. A figure of Christ on the cross rose above a fallen snake. The religious symbolism is interesting. I'd never seen its like before, the worksmanship was so finely wrought."

A moment passed, a bare breath of suspended time ... "It was not the only one, I think," Leon Matsys said. "Odd things, they were used in some custom dating back to the Crusades."

He looked up, about to say more, then slowly the life went from his face. He was looking at Tomas, and Tomas was smiling.

Jean Mignet's eyes were suddenly alive. He did not know, but he suspected something. He was keen, that one. Leon Matsys's face was deathly pale. He was trapped now, trapped by those remarks that came so casually from his lips. In the moment he had certainly forgotten what they might imply, and could not know that it would matter. He looked to one side and then the other, and then he started to take a drink.

He lifted the glass, then suddenly put it down. He got up, and his face was flabby and haunted by terror. He seemed unable to take his eyes from Tomas.

I glanced at Tomas, and my muscles jumped involuntarily. He had the ancient knife in his hand and was drawing his little circles with its point.

Matsys turned and started for the entrance, stumbling in his haste. The glass in the tall door rattled as it slammed closed, leaving only a narrow view of the dimly lit street.

After a moment Tomas pushed his chair back and got up and his step was very light as he also went out the door.

*

THE DIAMOND OF
P
ERU

The Penan people of Borneo say that the forest and the earth will provide for you if only you will let them. I hadn't exactly found that to be true, but what did I know? I was an American, stopping briefly in their land and ignorant of their ways.

I was down to my last few coins when John and Helen Lacklan arrived in Marudi. I'd come down from Saigon to make my fortune but luck had not been with me. For over a year I'd been living like a beachcomber who had accidentally found his way inland. There was a longing in me to make my way back home but no money to do it with.

I'd told myself it was better to stay where I was and wait for an opportunity. Around Sarawak, in those days, a white man could go a long way just on confidence and the color of his skin.

My luck paid off in this way: a friend in the government office offered to send me some tourists, Mr. and Mrs. John Lacklan. He had set me up, time and again, with minor engineering and construction jobs and was responsible for my having been able to keep body and soul together over the last few months. The Lacklans were an American couple, in from Singapore. They were recently married and, most importantly, they were looking for a diamond.

Now they find diamonds around Bandak, around Ku-san, and near Matapura, to name only a few places. They also find some rare colors in the Sarawak River. Most so-called "fancy" stones are found in Borneo, for diamonds come in a variety of colors, including black. But after looking over the possibilities they had come up the Baram River to Marudi or Claudtown, as some called it, and Van-dover was going to send them to me.