I pointed to the scuba harness I had brought down. 'Show me that you can use that thing.'
I watched her as she put it on and made no attempt to help her. She seemed familiar enough with it and chose the belt weights with care, and when she went into the water she did it the right way without any fuss. I put on my own gear and followed her and we drifted around the bottom of the pool while I tested her on the international signals which she seemed to understand. When we came out, I said, 'You're hired.'
She looked puzzled. 'Hired for what?'
'As second string diver on the Uaxuanoc Expedition.'
Her face lit up. 'You really mean that?'
'Fallen told me to hire someone -- -and you can't come along as a passenger. I'll tell him the bad news.'
He blew up as predicted, but I argued him into it by saying that Katherine at least knew something about archeology and that he wouldn't get an archeological diver this side of the Mediterranean.
She must have worked on her husband because he didn't object, but I caught him looking at me speculatively. I think it was then that he was bitten by the bug of jealousy and began to have the idea that I was up to no good. Not that I cared what he thought; I was too busy drilling his wife into the routine of learning how to use the air compressor and the recompression chamber. We got pretty matey and soon we were on first name terms. Up to then I'd always called her Mrs. Halstead, but you can hardly stick to that kind of thing when you're both ducking in and out of a pool. But I never laid a finger on her.
Halstead never called me anything but Wheale.
III
I liked Pat Harris. As a person he was slow and easy-going, no matter how mistrustful and devious he was when on the job. Just before we were due to leave for Quintana Roo he seemed to be spending more time at the house and we got into the 'habit of having a noggin together late at night. Once I asked him, 'What exactly is your job, Pat?'
He ran his finger down the outside of his beer glass. 'I suppose you could call me Fallen's trouble-shooter. When you have as much dough as he's got you find an awful lot of people trying to part you from it. I run checks on guys like that to see if everything is on the up and up.'
'Did you run a check on me?'
He grinned, and said easily, 'Sure! I know more about you than your own mother did.' He drank some cold beer. Then one of his corporations sometimes has security trouble and I go and see what's going on.'
'Industrial espionage?' I queried.
'I guess you'd call it that,' he agreed. 'But only from the security angle. Fallon doesn't play dirty pool, so I stick to counter-espionage.'
I said, 'If you investigated me, then you must have done the same with Halstead. He seems a pretty odd type.'
Pat smiled into his beer. 'You can say that again. He's a guy who thought he had genius and who has now found out that all he has is talent. That really disappoints a man -- settling for second best. The trouble with Halstead is that he hasn't come to terms with it yet; it's really griping him.'
'You'll have to spell it out for me,' I said.
Pat sighed. 'Well, it's like this. Halstead started out as a boy wonder -- voted the graduate most likely to succeed and all that kind of crap. You know, it's funny how wrong guys can be about other guys; every corporation is stuffed full to the brim with men who were voted most likely to succeed, and they're all holding down second-rate jobs. The men at the top -- the guys who really have the power -- got there the hard way by clawing their way up and wielding a pretty sharp knife. There are a hell of a lot of corporation presidents who never went to college. Or you have guys like Fallon -- he started at the top.'
'In his business,' I said. 'But not in archeology.'
'I'll give you that,' said Pat. 'Fallon would succeed in anything he put his hand to. But Halstead is a second- rater; he knows it but he won't admit it, even to himself, and it's sticking in his craw. He's eaten up with ambition -- that's why he was going solo on this Uaxuanoc thing. He wanted to be the man who discovered Uaxuanoc; it would make his name and he'd salvage his self-respect. But you twisted his arm and forced him in with Fallon and he doesn't like that. He doesn't want to share the glory.'
I contemplated that, then said cautiously, 'Both Fallon and Halstead were free in throwing accusations at each other. Halstead accused Fallon of stealing the Vivero letter. Well, we seem to have cleared up that one, and Fallon is in the clear. But what about Fallen's charge that Halstead pinched the file he'd built up?'
'I think Halstead is guilty of that,' said Pat frankly. 'Look at the timetable. Fallon, out of interest's sake, built up a dossier of references to the Vivero secret; Halstead knew about it because Fallon told him -- there wasn't any need to keep it under wraps because it didn't seem all that important. Fallon and Halstead came back to civilization after a dig, and Halstead found the Vivero letter. He bought it up in Durango for two hundred dollars from an old guy who didn't know its value. But Halstead did -- he knew it could be the key to the Vivero secret, whatever that was. And apart from that it was archeological dynamite -- a city no one had even heard of.'
He reached out and opened another bottle of beer. 'I checked on the date he bought it. A month later he picked a quarrel with Fallon and went off in a huff, and Fallen's Vivero dossier disappeared. Fallon didn't think much of it at the time. As I say, the Vivero file didn't seem so important, and he thought Halstead might have made a genuine error and mixed up some of Fallon's papers with his own. And he didn't think it worth his while to add to the grief that Halstead was stirring up just about that time. He thinks differently now.'
I said slowly, 'It's all very circumstantial.'
'Most evidence is,' said Pat. 'Crimes are usually committed without witnesses. Another thing that inclines me to think he did it is his general reputation in the profession.'
'Not good?'
'A bit smelly. He's under suspicion of faking some of his results. Nothing that anyone can pin on him, and certainly not enough to justify him being drummed out of the profession publicly. But certainly enough for anything
