quietly. I longed for a cheroot to soothe the tension of my nerves, but I was forced to forgo that comfort.
Time passed very slowly, and new fears came to plague me and make the waiting seem even longer than it was but finally, a few minutes before the promised hour, there was a renewed stirring and bustle on board the crash boat and once more Suleti -man Dada was helped up the ladder by his men and he took his place at the bridge rail looking down over the afterdeck. He was sweating heavily and it had soaked the area around the armpits and across the back of his white uniform jacket. I guessed that he had passed his own period of waiting by frequent recourse, to the whisky bottle, probably from my own stock that had been plundered from the cave.
He laughed and joked with the men around him, his vast belly shaking with mirth and his men echoed the laughter slavishly. The sound of it carried across the water to the beach.
Suleiman was followed by Manny Resnick and his blonde lady friend.
Manny was well groomed and cool-looking in his expensive casual clothing. He stood slightly apart from the others, his expression aloof and disinterested. He reminded me of an adult at a children’s party, seeing out a boring and mildly unpleasant duty.
In contrast, Lorna Page was excited and shiny-eyed as a girl on her first date. She laughed with Suleiman Dada and leaned expectantly over the rail above the deserted deck. Through the powerful glasses I could see the flush on her cheeks which was not rouge.
I was concentrating on her so that it was only when I felt Chubby move suddenly and restlessly, and heard his grunt of alarm that I swung the glasses downwards on to the deck.
Sherry was there, standing between two of the uniformed sailors.
They held her arms and she looked small and frail between them.
She still wore the clothes she had thrown on so hurriedly that morning and her hair was dishevelled. Her face was gaunt and her expression strained - but it was only when I studied her carefully that I saw that what looked like sleepless dark rings below her eyes were in fact bruises. With a cold chill of anger, I realized that her lips were swollen and puffed up as though they had been stung by bees. One of her cheeks was also fatly distorted and bruised.
They had beaten her and knocked her about badly. Now that I looked for it I could see dark splotches of dried blood on her blue shirt, and when one of the guards dragged her around roughly to face the shore I saw that one of her hands was bandaged roughly - and that either blood or disinfectant had stained the bandages.
She looked tired and ill, nearly at the end of her strength. My anger threatened to wipe out my reason. I wanted to inflict hurt upon those that had treated Sherry like this, and I had already begun to lift the rifle with hands that shook with the force of my hatred before I could control myself. I closed my eyes tightly and took a long deep breath to steady myself. The time would come - but it was not now.
When I opened my eyes again and refocused the binoculars, Suleiman Dada had the bullhorn to his lips.
“Good evening, Harry, my dear friend, I am sure you recognize this young lady.” He made a wide gesture towards Sherry and she looked up at him wearily. “After questioning her closely, a procedure which alas caused her a little discomfort, I am at last convinced that she does not know the whereabouts of the property in which my friends and I are interested. She tells me that you “have hidden it.” He paused and mopped his streaming face with a towel handed to him by one of his men before he went on.
“She is no longer of any interest to me - except possibly as a medium of exchange!
He made a gesture, and Sherry was hustled away below. Something cold and slimy moved in my guts at her going. I wondered if I would ever see her again - alive.
On to the deserted deck filed four of Suleimans men, Each of them had stripped to the waist and the floodlights rippled on their smooth darkly muscled bodies.
Each of them carried the hickory wooden handles of a pickaxe, and silently they formed up at the points of a star about the open deck. Next a man was led into the open centre by two guards. His hands were tied behind his back. They stood on each side of him and slowly forced him to turn in a circle -and show himself while Suleiman Dada’s voice boomed through the bullhorn.
“I wonder if you recognize him?” I stared at the stooped creature in canvas prison overalls that hung in filthy grey tatters from his gaunt frame. His skin was pate and waxy with deep-set dark eyes, long scraggly blond hair hung in greasy snakes about his face and his half-grown beard was thin and wispy.
He had lost teeth, probably knocked from his mouth with a careless blow.
“Yes, Harry?” Suleiman laughed fruitily over the loud hailer. “A sojourn in Zinballa prison does wonders for a man, does it not - but the regulation garb is not as smart as that of an Inspector of Police.”
“ Only then did I recognize ex-Inspector Peter Daly - the man who I had pitched from the deck of Wave Dancer into the waters of the outer lagoon just before I had escaped from Suleiman Dada by running the channel at Gunfire Reef.
“Inspector Peter Daly,” Suleiman confirmed with a chuckle, “a man who let me down badly. I do not like men who let me down, Harry. I really take it very hard. I brought him along for just such an eventuality. It was a wise precaution, for I believe that a graphic demonstration is so much more convincing than mere words!
Once again he paused to mop” his face and to drink deeply from a glass offered him by one of his men. Daly fell to his knees and looked up at the man on the bridge. His expression was of abject terror, and his mouth dribbled saliva as he pleaded for mercy.
“Very well, we can proceed if you are ready, Harry,” he boomed, and one of the guards produced a large black cloth bag which he pulled over Peter Daly’s head and secured with a drawn string around his neck. They dragged him roughly to his feet again.
“It’s our own variation on the game of blind man’s bluff.”
Through the glasses I saw the liquid flood soak through the front of Peter Daly’s canvas trousers, as his bladder emptied in anguished terror. Obviously he had seen this game played before during his stay in Zinballa prison.
“Harry, I want you to use your imagination. Do not see this snivelling filthy creature - but in his place imagine your lovely young lady friend.” He breathed heavily, but when the man beside him offered him the towel again Suleiman struck him a passionless backhanded blow that sent him sprawling across the bridge, and he continued evenly, “Imagine her lovely young body, imagine her delicious fear as she stands in darkness not knowing what to expect.”
The two guards began to spin Daly between them, as they do in the children’s game, around and around he went and now I could faintly hear his muffled shrieks and cries of fear.
Suddenly the two guards stepped away from him, and left the circle of half-naked men with their pick handles. One of them placed the butt of his weapon in the small of Daly’s back and shoved him, reeling and staggering across the circle and the man opposite was waiting to drive the end of his club into Daly’s belly.
Back and forth he staggered, driven by the thrust of the clubs.
Slowly his tormentors increased the savagery of their attack, until one of them hefted his club and swung it like an axe at a tree. It smashed into Daly’s ribs.
It was the signal to end it, and as Peter Daly fell to the deck they crowded about him, the clubs rising and falling in a fearsome rhythm and the blows sounding clearly across the lagoon to where we watched in disgust and revulsion.
One after the other they tired, and stepped back to rest from their grim work and Peter Daly’s crumpled and broken body lay in the centre of the deck.
“Crude, you will say, Harry - but then you will not deny that it is effective.”
I was sickened by the barbaric cruelty of it, and Chubby muttered beside me, “He’s a monster - I’ve never heard of nothing like that before!
“You have until noon tomorrow, Harry, to come to me unarmed and reasonable. We will talk, we will agree on certain matters, we will make an exchange of assets and we will part friends.”
He stopped speaking to watch while one of his men secured a line to Peter Daly’s ankle, and they hoisted him to the masthead of the crash boat where he dangled grotesquely, like some obscene pennant. Lorna Page was looking up at him, her head thrown back so the blonde hair hung down her back and her lips were slightly parted.
“If you refuse to be reasonable, Harry, then at noon tomorrow I shall sail around this island with your lady friend hanging like that-” He pointed up to the corpse whose masked head swung slowly back and forth only a few feet above the deck, “—from the mast. Think about it, Harry. Take your time. Think about it well.”
