And the deep blue sea

then as much backup coverage as the director feels he needs or can get. The broken glass—’ He stopped, and asked, ‘Are you sure you want to hear this?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘After the real, I don’t think the make-believe will bother us. Do you Karen?’

Karen shook her head. Lind watched with interest.

‘In the make-believe,’ Goddard went on, ‘it’s still the touches of realism that give it the emotional impact. For instance, in a cheap Western a man is shot at point-blank range with a .44 and nothing happens except that, unaccountably, he drops dead. He’s been slammed with something with the foot-pounds of energy of a moving truck, but there’s not the slightest indication of it. With a good director, it’s different. You see what happens.

‘You shoot it this way: from my point of view, Krasicki with the gun, screaming, he raises the gun, and shoots. He’s not shooting at anything, because Mayr’s not even there beside me, and you may or may not use the shot itself, depending on the way it works best when you edit it. Then you set up just back of Krasicki and to one side to get the shot and the reaction of Mayr’s body to the impact of the bullet. And on to the next setup for the best view of Mr. Lind going for him to get the gun, and of course when you go back to Mayr again the makeup people have applied the red dye to the shirt and the corner of the mouth.

‘Breaking the light fixture and the mirror are just routine special effects jobs. It’s a small explosive charge that’s set off electrically—’

Madeleine Lennox interrupted. ‘I see. Then all the shots are blanks, and not just the first two.’

‘Oh, hell, yes; you never use live ammunition. You’d be locked up. But do you want to know the real accent of the scene, though, the thing that caps it, and that only a really superb director would ever think of?’

‘What’s that?’ Lind asked. He had his legs swung over the side of the armchair, sipping coffee as he watched with that same smiling interest.

‘When Mayr clutches the tablecloth as he falls. And in that terrible silence after all that screaming and gunfire you hear just a faint and very musical tinkling of silverware. That would leave ‘em gasping. It’d be a genius of a director who could improve on the staging of that scene.’

Goddard was conscious then of something very cold moving up his back, as though somebody were drawing an icicle slowly along his spine, and the hair began to stab his neck. He was looking right at Lind, who was still smiling faintly, and as he realized what he’d said he knew he was staring straight into the eyes of the devil.

‘Seems to be a case, then,’ Lind murmured, ‘of nature holding a mirror up to art.’

And only the two of them knew it, Goddard thought; the others didn’t even suspect it.

7

How many were there? Goddard lay naked on his bunk in the darkness and thought about it. The bos’n and that big sailor named Otto were obviously part of the apparatus, but was that all? What about the wireless operator? Or even Captain Steen himself? That was the chilling part of it; they could be all around him and he didn’t know who was involved. And maybe Lind already suspected him; with that diabolical mind you couldn’t be sure of anything, except that underestimating it was a mistake nobody would ever make twice.

Lightning flashed, illuminating the whole interior of the cabin for over a second. Without conscious thought, he began counting: one-oh, two-oh, three-oh . . . nine-oh. A great crash of thunder rolled and reverberated over the ship. It was still two miles away but coming closer. The fan whirred, stirring the lifeless air, but the cabin was like a sweatbox. The wooden door was pulled back and hooked, but the screen, which had louvered slats across it for privacy, was latched. In the silence he heard the faint sound of six bells striking in the wheelhouse. It was eleven p.m.

It’d be a genius of a director who could improve on the staging of that scene. One more stupid remark like that, he thought, and the next burial sack that goes over the side will have somebody in it, all right. Lind was the ship’s doctor, and with an imagination of that order there’d be no dearth of illuminating detail to enter in the log as to cause of death. Found dead in bunk of obvious cardiac arrest. Went to bed drunk, set mattress afire with cigarette, and suffocated. Suffered severe concussion in fall, and died two days later without regaining consciousness. With enough morphine in him to kill a rhinoceros. The findings would be subject to review by higher medical authority, of course, except for the minor difficulty that the body was buried in the ooze five miles down in the Pacific Ocean.

But there’s still a chance you’re wrong, he told himself. You don’t really know any of this; you’re only assuming it. All you really know is that it could be the greatest piece of illusion since Thurston, you know why it could have been done, and how it could have been done, but there’s no proof whatever that it was done. The cabin was lit up by another long flash of lightning, and the thunderclap came almost on the heels of it. A faint breeze came in the porthole now, with the smell of rain in it. Lightning flashed again, and the thunder was a sharp, cracking explosion that was very near.

Maybe he’d been led down the garden path by his subconscious distrust of all those coincidences of timing between the ship and Buenos Aires, and then when Mrs. Lennox had asked that ridiculous question about the first two shots being blanks he’d booby-trapped himself and leaped to the conclusion that just because it was possible it had to be true. Of course Mayr would like to be written off as dead, and what better way than being shot to death in front of five reliable witnesses and buried in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?

Then what about Krasicki, or whatever his real name was? If the thing had been staged, there had to be some plausible and foolproof escape already prearranged; no matter how great his devotion to the cause or how high the pay, it was hardly likely he would set himself up as a human sacrifice. Just how did they wave the wand and make him disappear?

An escape could be engineered, of course, even after he was turned over to the Philippine authorities, but there was a flaw in that. The chances were there had been a real Krasicki, a Polish Jew and a botanist resident in Brazil, who’d either died out in the jungle or received an individual dose of the ‘final solution’ so they could take over his identity, in which case this one could hardly be put on display for the world’s press with the obvious danger that somebody who’d known the real one would spot the fraud. Passports could be doctored, if you had the price and connections, and a blown-up reproduction of a 2? by 2? passport photo would seldom be recognized by the sitter’s mother, but turn those Time-Life photographers loose on the subject himself and you were in real trouble.

No, Krasicki—he might as well continue to call him that—Krasicki had to disappear before they reached Manila. And the simplest way, of course, was another death and sea burial. The cast and staging wouldn’t have to be anywhere near as elaborate as the first one, and the groundwork for it had already been laid—the precautions against suicide, removal of the tie and belt and the serving of his food in soft plastic containers without cutlery. Conveniently, of course, nobody had given a thought to the fact that he could tear strips from the bed linen and hang himself. Some morning when they opened the door, he’d be dangling from those overhead pipes. Lind would send the other party, the witness, for something, cut him down, and announce with that manly and understated despair he did so well that it was no use; Krasicki’d been dead for hours.

He wondered what the mate would use to simulate the bruises of strangulation and to give the lips that distinctive blue of cyanosis, but no doubt that had been carefully planned. He’d done a beautiful job with Mayr’s death pallor, with the aid of that white overhead light; probably just a light cream base of some kind with a liberal application of ordinary talc. Nobody had been within ten feet of the body except the two men who were sewing it into the sack. He’d been invited to watch the final stitches, of course, but what about Steen? Was he a witness, or a party to it?

There was another flash of lightning, followed immediately by a crashing explosion of thunder that seemed to shake the whole cabin. Then he sat up, suddenly alert. Somebody had rapped on the screen door. He pulled on the boxer shorts and slipped over to it. Opening the louvers, he looked out through the screen into the lighted passageway. It was Madeleine Lennox, in pajamas and a nylon robe. He unlatched the screen. ‘May I come in?’ she asked.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Just let me put on—’

She pushed the screen on back and stepped in. ‘Men and their idiotic modesty. We could be dead in the next