The Corpse Without a Country (16 page)

Ilona fired. I caught Reese in the throat with the edge of my hand. He gagged and stopped fighting. From up above a man began to curse shrilly.

The motor of the incoming boat suddenly cut off. There was a light bump as two hulls came together. I heard the sound of a grapple digging into the rail of the cruiser. Then there was the thud of heavy feet landing on the deck.

Reese got a knee in my crotch with enough force to lift me off him. He scrambled to his feet. Big Arne suddenly filled the cabin. His face lit up when he saw Reese.

I started getting up. Arne yelled, “This one is mine!” and he drove a huge fist into Reese’s side. I could hear the crunch of cartilege separating as Reese’s ribs gave way. He fell down and began to lose his last six meals.

I said, “There are two more on shore, Arne.”

“Yust one,” he said happily. “The lady, she took care of the other.”

He started out, climbing onto the rock pier. Ilona was already ahead of him, scrambling up the rocks, holding Reese’s gun in one hand. I glanced to the port side and there was Mr. Ghatt. He sat in the cockpit of one of Arne’s fast launches, holding a rifle. He smiled benignly at me and didn’t say a word.

I said, “Hi,” and went forward to the radio telephone. I stopped, one hand reaching for the controls. I turned and looked at Reese who was still being sick. I cursed him and his gun. Those two shots he had fired had hit the radio-phone squarely. I would have better luck shouting than trying to use that mess.

I went on deck and jumped to the pier and started climbing. Ilona and Arne were disappearing over the top of the headland. I nearly fell on Les. He was sitting in the shadow of a rock, holding one bullet-shattered hand between his legs and moaning. He was out of things as far as I could see.

I reached the top of the headland and stopped. Out to sea, the
Pride
was steaming merrily on its way, out of hailing distance. And everyone aboard having their “crossing the line” shot of whiskey or aquavit, or whatever they preferred, I thought sourly.

Down below, a man clad in a pair of trunks, a money belt, and a sack on his back, was standing with his hands held over his head. Tumbro was beside him, his hands up too, but his fingers twitching, as though he wanted the rifle standing against a rock not three feet from him.

Ilona was holding Les’s rifle on the pair and Arne was climbing down to help her. I didn’t move. Arne didn’t need me to help him have fun.

He reached the rock, hit the man in the trunks a backhand blow that knocked him sprawling and turned on Tumbro. “You’ll never sail in my boats again!” he shouted pointlessly, and smashed Tumbro’s nose flat against his face.

Arne carried Tumbro to the cruiser, herding the newcomer ahead of him. Finally he had everyone stowed aboard except Ilona. She had disappeared. She finally showed up, a dangerously innocent look on her face.

I said to Arne, “If you’ll move Mr. Ghatt aboard this cruiser, I’ll borrow your launch. I’m in a hurry.”

He was looking happily at the slaughter he had committed on Reese and Tumbro. “Yah. Sure,” he said cheerfully.

I went aboard the launch and helped Mr. Ghatt safely aboard the cruiser. He said, “Thank you, Mr. Durham.”

Ilona joined me in the launch. I said, “Loquacious chap, that Ghatt.”

“He spoke two sentences at a time once,” she said. She was looking over the launch. “Just how fast is that fishboat?”

“Not fast enough, I hope,” I said. I looked at the chronometer on the instrument board. “We’ve got an hour and ten minutes at the most—
if
this rig holds together.”

I headed out of the bay, the throttle open wide. If the launch wasn’t going to hold together, we’d find out soon enough.

T
HE LAUNCH WAS REALLY A
high-powered kind of dory used by Arne’s purse seiners to take the fishnets and spread them at the fishing grounds. As a result, it had no cabin, and the early morning wind blowing straight into our faces had fingers of ice.

I hunched over the wheel and shivered. Ilona rummaged around in a locker and came up with two slickers, one of which she gave me. That made it a little easier to stand the chill, but my teeth kept on chattering.

Ilona went away and rummaged some more. I heard a pleased exclamation in Danish. She came back, holding up triumphantly a bottle of Arne’s special holiday aquavit.

She opened the bottle and handed it to me. I took a good, deep drink. I felt as if someone had aimed a blowtorch at my tonsils, and as if someone else had set off a heat bomb in my stomach. I pushed the bottle back at Ilona and blinked the tears from my eyes so I could see where I was going.

She took a long pull at the bottle and didn’t even blink. But then almost any Dane could have done the same. I have the firm belief that most of them are weened on the stuff.

She said, “Ah, I am somewhat less cold now.” She took another drink. “That was very clever of you tonight, diverting Fuller. Otherwise he would most certainly have shot Arne. He and Mr. Ghatt were not very subtle in their method of coming into the bay.”

I said, “No one ever accused Arne Rasmussen of being subtle. But he gets results.”

Ilona offered me another drink. I waved it aside, figuring that I was pretty well thawed. Anyway, from here on in I needed a clear head.

She took back the bottle and had a third nip. I said, “If you aren’t warm yet, you’re a very chilly dame.”

She said, “Chilly dame? That I do not understand. Am I so different from other women?”

I said, “Not in many ways. In fact, there are places where you’re an improvement. But sometimes …” I paused and sorted out all the questions I had to ask her.

“Just why did you chase me all over Puget City?”

She didn’t answer. I glanced at her. She was sitting huddled by my leg, as much out of the wind as possible, and there was a foolish smile on her face. I repeated my question and she lifted her head. I looked into those beautiful eyes and realized that, despite her training, the aquavit had caught up with her. Since she probably hadn’t eaten much more than I had lately, and since she was indulging in her first chance at relaxation for some time, I could understand that distilled atom juice taking effect.

To put it bluntly, she was half potted.

She said, “I chased you because I thought you were working with them. I am sorry.”

“Because you saw me with Tom Harbin there on the Island?”

“Yes, that and so many little things. And then you took Miss Calvin to the Pad, and you had that report that you would not give to me….”

She moved closer and rubbed her shoulder against my leg. I didn’t mind. I said, “What could possibly have been in that report that made you go after it like that?”

“There was nothing,” she admitted. “But we did not know this until we stole it from Reese Fuller’s office.”

“Then you were the ones who wrecked his place?”

“I am sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I said. “I enjoyed looking at the results.” I stopped and thought over what she’d said. “So Reese got the report. But that doesn’t explain why you kept taking my clothes apart at the seams.”

She reached up her free hand—the other one had a death grip on the bottle—and ran her fingertips down my cheek. That was quite a sensation. It upset my concentration and I carefully put her hand back where it belonged.

She said, “But I thought that you had the wire recording of Tom Harbin’s final report concealed on your person. That is a favorite trick of spies, hiding wire-recorded information in the seams of their suits.”

I said, “You mean that you knew Emily had taped the message and not destroyed it as she claimed to the boss?”

“I suspected,” Ilona said. “You see, for some time I was able to make myself accepted at the Pad; that was a kind of headquarters for gathering and dispensing information.”

I had figured out that much. I wondered how deep Willie was in this. I said, “So you figured that I had taken the wire-recorded message and was trying to smuggle it to Reese in my clothing?”

“I suspected,” she said again.

I grinned. “You give me too much credit. I’m not a trained espionage agent.”

“I am glad. But do you forgive me?”

What else could I do? “Sure,” I said.

She reached up and threw a pair of beautiful arms around my neck. I thought for a minute we were going to have our third wrestling match and, since I needed both hands for the wheel, I ducked away.

“There are times and places for wrestling,” I said. “This isn’t one of them.”

She backed away. “I was showing my pleasure at our newly formed friendship,” she informed me stiffly.

To take her mind off my ungentlemanly behavior—and
my
mind off her—I said, “See if you can find a chart somewhere, will you? I want to know if we can go between those islands dead ahead.”

Both Boundary and Corning were behind us now. In the distance, showing light from a light station, was our destination. Between us and it were dozens of smaller islands. If I could go between instead of around some, I could save considerable time.

Ilona rooted in the locker and came up with a chart and a storm lantern. This she managed to get lighted by crouching down beneath me. I couldn’t see her but I could hear her spreading out the chart and Swearing and, I think, hiccoughing in Danish.

She said, “There is a narrow channel of ten fathoms between the two. But you must stay in the center. It looks very bad otherwise.”

“Can do,” I said.

She rattled the chart some more. Suddenly she giggled. I said, “You also have a strange sense of humor as well as being a strange dame. What’s funny about a nautical chart?”

“I am thinking of the international complications,” she said. “I have told you that I am an expert on international matters?”

I said, “Like international wrestling?”

She wasn’t having any such banter; her mind was on something else. She said with slightly squiffed dignity, “I am serious. Have you ever noticed that the international boundary crosses the middle of Boundary Rock?”

“Sure,” I said, “that’s how Arne and his skippers know when they’ve hit home waters again.”

“And did you notice the position of Emily Calvin’s body?”

I said, “She was sitting.”

“No. I mean where on the Rock she was placed.”

I closed my eyes and visualized the scene. And then I knew what Ilona meant by international complications. Because Emily had been sitting dead center on the Rock.

So who tried her murderer, Canada or the United States?

I said, “That’s one thing I’m not going to worry about.”

“I do not believe that you have the proper sympathy for the poor girl. She is a
corpus delicti
without a country.”

The term wasn’t quite accurate, but I didn’t argue. I said, “You’re a ghoul.”

“I am drunk,” she said as if she were correcting me. I heard the chart rustle and I looked down and she was lying on it, quietly asleep.

Drunk or sober, she was quite an operator, I thought. I put my eyes back on the islands looming up ahead.

The hands of the chronometer had begun to move with terrifying swiftness. The launch boiled up a terrific wake and threw white water up from the bow in a fine spray that drenched my head and face and ran off the slicker I wore like a pounding rain. Yet we seemed to be almost standing still. Endless time passed as one small island after another rose out of the moonlit sea and slid along our rail and then fell astern. Ages passed before the guiding light on the big island grew to more than a pinpoint.

And we seemed to have the water to ourselves. Now and then I could see the running lights of distant ships—freighters, large fishboats—but none were close enough to make more than dots of light against the sky. If Ridley’s fishboat was still plowing along, it was running dark. I saw no sign of it.

Over in the east I saw the first hint of dawn. I looked at the island ahead and at all the water lying between us and it and I began to pray.

The chronometer gave me a maximum of ten minutes. It wasn’t very much time.

But
the launch kept pounding away at distance, boiling up its frothy wake, gulping in the miles, and when I swung toward the dock that lay a block from the hospital, I still had two minutes of my seventy remaining.

I cut the throttle and slid toward the dock. Lieutenant Maslin was trotting toward me through the ugly, early morning light. He grabbed the line I threw out and tied me up. I didn’t bother to waken Ilona; I jumped ashore before the launch stopped bumping.

I said, “Where’s the boss?”

Maslin jerked a thumb at the hospital. “We got a call,” he said. “Tom Harbin’s come around. I’m waiting for the Coast Guard.”

I looked toward open water and saw the white Coast Guard vessel coming. I looked across the harbor at the dock on the other side and saw Ridley’s fìshboat riding at anchor.

I started to run.

T
HIS WAS THE DEAD HOUR OF THE MORNING
. The staff was still at a minimum, with only the private nurses, such as Tom’s, stirring.

I went by the half asleep lobby attendant and down the corridor. I went around a bend and there was the boss with two of the men he had hired for guards standing beside him. He looked haggard, but when he saw me he managed a big grin.

“Tom’s going to be okay,” he said.

“Why aren’t you in there?”

“I’m waiting for the nurses to get him awake and cleaned up.”

I yelled, “Nurses?” and grabbed for the doorknob. It wouldn’t turn. The door was locked. I yelled louder, “Kick the damn thing down!”

This was one time the boss didn’t want to argue with me. He lunged at the door panel. The pair with him followed suit. I was already at work. The lock gave. I tumbled into the room and tripped over something. It was Tom’s regular private nurse, stretched out cold.

Tom was in bed, still asleep, and Jodi was reaching for him, getting ready to break his neck with one of her cute judo tricks.

I dove for the bed and caught her a swipe in the ribs that sent her sideways against the night stand. Medicine spilled to the floor and she followed it.