battering the column. Bubbles no longer came from his regulator.
When they reached the scooter, the leader cut the line holding it to the column with a pair of aluminium wire cutters, and it lunged forward and the three huddled together, their companion, tossed by the undersea waves, dangling behind them at the end of the life line, as the leader checked his compass and pointed the flashlight into the darkness, guiding the scooter away from the deadly column.
They disappeared into the black sea, pulling their macabre bundle behind them.
III
A bank of monitor screens along one wall gave Lansdale a closed-circuit view of the control rooms and the exterior of the Thoreau. Sleet was sweeping through the rigging and almost straight out across the deck.
The wind’s up to a hundred and ten, maybe twenty, knots already, he thought, Gale force and picking up.
There was a tap on the door.
‘It’s open,’ Lansdale said.
Marge came in and closed the door and smiled at him for a couple of seconds and then snapped the lock on the door without taking her eyes off him.
‘You’re downright shameless,’ he said.
‘There’s no such thing on this barge,’ she said.
‘Barge! Jesus, that’s sacrilegious!’ He laughed. ‘You’re just going with me because I’m captain of the football team.’
‘Naw. I wanted to see if hardhats really make love with their socks on.’
‘Depends how cold it is.’
‘It’s about twenty below out there and falling.’
‘Then maybe I’ll keep them on.’
‘The hell you will.’
She walked across the living room, stopping for a moment at his bookcase. Shelley, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Franek’s Zen and Zen Classics, French and Spanish dictionaries, copies of Red Harvest and Blood Money by Dashiell Hammett. Through the porthole she looked out over the gray, bleak, endless sea, the waves lashed by sleet and wind.
‘It’s scary,’ she said. And then she turned her back on the window. ‘God, I’ll be glad to get back to civilization where it’s light in the daytime and dark at night.’
He made her a rum and Coke and carried it across the room to her. ‘Why the hell did you stay out here for the holidays anyway?’ he said. ‘It sure as hell wasn’t the bonus.’
‘It helps. Sixty-two fifty a day on top of a hundred and twenty-five. That’s almost a thousand dollars for two weeks. Anyway, one of my sons is someplace in Vermont with the college skiing team, and the other one is at his girl friend’s house in Ohio. What’s to go home to?’
‘That’s it?’
‘Well ... you’re here, too.’
‘I thought you forgot.’
‘Not likely.’
‘Are you divorced?’ he asked. They had never talked about personal things before.
‘Widowed. Married at twenty-two, widowed at thirty- seven.’
‘What happened?’
‘He worked himself to death. Forty-two years old. One day he went off to the office and the next time I saw him he was lying in a funeral home with some creep dry-washing his hands over him, trying to sell me a five- thousand-dollar casket.’
‘A little bitter there.’
‘A little bitter? Maybe. Just a little. It sure turned my life around.’
‘Did you love him?’
‘Oh, I ... sure. Sure I loved him. He was a nice man.’
‘Christ, what an epitaph. Here lies Joe, he was a nice man.’
‘His name was Alec.’
‘It’s still a lousy epitaph.’
‘Well, he wasn’t a very exciting man. He was ... comfortable. Alec was wonderfully comfortable.’
‘So how come you end up a carpenter? On this barge, as you put it.’
‘I was into restoring antiques. It got out of hand. Next thing I know I was a full1ledged hardhat. How about you? A master’s degree in engineering and an armful of tattoos. That doesn’t fit, either.’
