They entered to see Pendergast and the young woman voyaging with him—Constance Greene, his niece or something—in the salon, lights low, sitting around the private dining table with the remains of an elegant repast before them.
“Ah, Mr. Kemper,” said Pendergast, rising and pushing aside his watercress salad. “And Mr. Hentoff. I’ve been expecting you.”
“You have?”
“Naturally. Our business is not complete. Please sit down.”
Kemper arranged himself with some awkwardness on the nearby sofa. Hentoff took a chair, looking from Agent Pendergast to Constance Greene and back again, as if trying to sort out their real relationship. “May I offer you a glass of port?” Pendergast asked.
“No, thank you,” said Kemper. An awkward silence developed before he continued: “I wanted to thank you again for taking care of those card counters.”
“You’re most welcome. Are you following my advice about how to keep them from re-winning?”
“We are, thank you.”
“Is it working?”
“Absolutely,” said Hentoff. “Whenever a spotter enters the casino, we send over a cocktail waitress to engage him in trivial conversation—always involving numbers. It’s driving them crazy, but there’s nothing they can do about it.”
“Excellent.” Pendergast turned a quizzical eye on Mr. Kemper. “Was there anything else?”
Kemper rubbed his temple. “Well, there’s the question of . . . the money.”
“Are you referring to
money?” And Pendergast nodded to the bureau, where Kemper noticed, for the first time, a stack of fat envelopes wrapped in thick rubber bands.
“If those are your casino winnings, yes.”
“And there’s a
about the money?”
“You were working for us,” said Kemper, feeling the lameness of his argument even before he had made it. “The winnings rightfully belong to your employer.”
“I’m nobody’s employee,” said Pendergast with an icy smile. “Except, of course, the federal government’s.”
Kemper felt excruciatingly uncomfortable under the silvery stare.
“Mr. Kemper,” Pendergast continued, “you realize, of course, that I arrived at those winnings legally. Card counting, shuffle-tracking, and the other techniques I used are all legal. Ask Mr. Hentoff here. I didn’t even need to draw on the line of credit you offered me.”
Kemper cast a glance at Hentoff, who nodded unhappily.
Another smile. “Well then: does that answer your question?”
Kemper thought of reporting all this back to Cutter, and that helped stiffen his spine. “No, Mr. Pendergast. We consider those winnings to be house money.”
Pendergast went to the bureau. He picked up one of the envelopes, slid out a thick wad of pound notes, and lazily riffled through them. “Mr. Kemper,” he said, speaking with his back turned, “normally I would never even think of helping a casino recover money against gamblers who are beating the house. My sympathies would lie in the other direction. Do you know why I helped you?”
“To get us to help you.”
“Only partly true. It’s because I believed there was a dangerous killer on board, and for the safety of the ship I needed to identify him—with your assistance—before he could kill again. Unfortunately, he appears to still be one step ahead of me.”
Kemper’s depression deepened. He would never get the money back, the crossing was a disaster on every front, and he would be blamed.
Pendergast turned, riffled the money again. “Cheer up, Mr. Kemper! You two may yet get your money back. I am ready to call in my little favor.”
Somehow, this did not make Kemper cheer up at all.
“I wish to search the stateroom and safe of Mr. Scott Blackburn. To that end, I will need a passcard to the room’s safe and thirty minutes in which to operate.”
A pause. “I think we can manage that.”
“There’s a wrinkle. Blackburn is currently holed up in his room and won’t come out.”
“Why? Is he worried about the murderer?”
Pendergast smiled again: a small, ironic smile. “Hardly, Mr. Kemper. He’s hiding something, and I need to find it. So he will need to be coaxed out.”
“You can’t ask me to manhandle a passenger.”
“Manhandle? How crude. A more elegant way to effect his removal would be to set off the fire alarms for the starboard stern side of Deck 9.”
Kemper frowned. “You want me to set off a false fire alarm? No way.”
“But you must.”
Kemper thought for a moment. “I suppose we could have a fire drill.”
“He won’t leave if it’s just a drill. Only a mandatory evacuation will dislodge him.”
Kemper ran his hands through his damp hair. God, he was sweating. “Maybe I could pull a fire alarm in that corridor.”
This time, it was Constance Greene who spoke. “No, Mr. Kemper,” she said in a strange antique accent. “We’ve researched the matter carefully. You need to trigger a central alert. A broken firebox would be too quickly discovered. We’ll need a full thirty minutes in Blackburn’s suite. And you’ll have to temporarily disable the sprinkler system, which can only be done from the central fire control system.”
Kemper stood up, Hentoff quickly following. “Impossible. This is a crazy thing to ask. Fire is the most dangerous thing that can happen aboard a ship, aside from sinking. A ship’s officer, deliberately triggering a false alert . . . I’d be committing a criminal offense, maybe a felony. Jesus, Mr. Pendergast, you’re an FBI agent, you know I can’t do that! There must be some other way!”
Pendergast smiled, almost sadly this time. “There is no other way.”
“I won’t do it.”
Pendergast riffled the fat packet of notes. Kemper could actually smell the money—it was like rusty iron.
Kemper stared at the money. “I just can’t do it.”
There was a moment of silence. Then Pendergast stood, went over to the bureau, opened the top drawer, placed the wad of notes inside, and then raked the rest of the envelopes off the bureau into the drawer. He shut the drawer with slow deliberation and turned to Hentoff and nodded. “See you in the casino, Mr. Hentoff.”
There was another silence, longer this time.
“You’re going to . . . gamble?” Hentoff asked slowly.
“Why not?” Pendergast spread his hands. “We’re on holiday, after all. And you know how I adore blackjack. I was thinking of teaching it to Constance as well.”
Hentoff looked at Kemper in alarm.
“I’ve been told I’m a quick study,” Constance said.
Kemper ran his hand through his damp hair again. He could feel the wetness creeping down from his armpits. It just got worse and worse.
The atmosphere in the room grew strained. At last, Kemper finally let his breath out with a rush. “It’s going to take some time to prepare.”
“I understand.”
“I’ll aim for a general fire alarm on Deck 9 at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. It’s the best I can do.”
Pendergast nodded curtly. “In that case, we’ll just have to wait until then. Let us hope things are still, ah, under control by that time.”
“Under control? What do you mean by that?”
But Pendergast simply bowed to each of them in turn, then sat down once again and returned to his
