came home suddenly, I wanted to be the surpriser rather than the surprisee. I ought to be able to hear footsteps and maybe voices as he came along the walkway toward the boat, but if he saw a light, he’d send the heavy mob in first, on tiptoe, and before I knew where I was, I’d be replaying Custer’s last stand with only a couple of vowels out of place.
The faint movement of air on my face told me that the cabin or galley that I was in was fairly large, but it was impossible to see a thing. My nerves more or less screaming now, I forced myself to wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The room built itself up around me, piecemeal, as the darkness separated out into discrete volumes.
There was a table right in front of me—long, low, and really convenient to trip over. There were two couches built into the sides of the room and something in the middle distance that looked like a tall cabinet of some kind against the farther bulkhead wall, with a squat, blocky object standing off to one side of it. In between me and the cabinet there was a chair, and the more I squinted at the chair, the more convinced I was that someone was sitting in it.
I stepped soundlessly to one side so that I wouldn’t be silhouetted against the open door behind me. It made no difference, of course—if anyone was sitting there, they’d already seen me and had plenty of chance to respond to my entrance. But the stillness and the silence persisted, and I reminded myself that taking things slowly wasn’t a luxury I could afford right then.
So I skirted the table and advanced into the room. That brought me broadside on to the chair and confirmed my first impressions; it was definitely occupied by someone who was sitting stock-still in the dark, rigidly upright, facing front even though I’d moved a quarter-circle around to the left.
I thought again about turning on the light, came to the same conclusions. My flesh creeping a little, I closed in on the chair and its motionless occupant. I put out a hand and brought it down gently on the silent figure’s shoulder.
Instantly it convulsed, its head snapping round in my direction, its back arching. It tried to twist away from me, but didn’t manage to get very far. The combination of squirming effort and more or less total failure to go anywhere left me mystified for about half a second. I realized that the figure was tied to the chair around about the same time that something hard and cold slammed into the back of my neck, dropping me to my knees. I didn’t stay there for long, though. The foot planted in my stomach sent me rolling and gasping, full length, on the floor.
The lights clicked on, blinding my dark-adjusted eyes. It wasn’t as much of a handicap as you’d think; winded, dazed, and curled up in a fetal ball, I wouldn’t have been able to see a whole hell of a lot in any case.
Damjohn’s unctuous tones intruded on my pain. “I have caller display, Mr. Castor,” he said with dripping scorn. “When Richard called me on Arnold’s phone—a phone that he’d previously lost to you in a brawl in a public house—what was I supposed to think?” He said a few other things as well—or at least he was still talking when I faded out.
Twenty-two
I WAS PROBABLY ONLY UNCONSCIOUS FOR A MINUTE OR so. As I bobbed my way painfully back up from the black well that Chandler used to get so lyrical about, I could still hear Damjohn’s voice. He was speaking in a clipped, commanding voice—giving orders, from the sound of it. Heavy footsteps moved across the cabin in response. Good. If he was talking to someone else, I could go back to sleep.
But the someone else hauled me roughly upright and gave me a hard shake to dislodge the cobwebs—almost taking my head along with them. I blinked my eyes open, took in a scene that was skewed at a nauseating angle and had a very depressing effect on my spirits.
Damjohn was sitting on one of the couches, at his ease, lighting a black cigarette. Behind him stood Gabe McClennan and Weasel-Face Arnold. Arnold’s battered face gave me a moment’s low satisfaction, but under the circumstances, it didn’t do a whole hell of a lot to warm the cockles. Two more bravoes to whom I hadn’t been introduced stood on either side of me, holding me up in the absence of any meaningful efforts from my rubbery legs.
The woman tied to the chair had a gray Parcelforce bag tied around her head.
“Mr. Castor,” said Damjohn with just a hint of paternal sternness. “At one point in this sad, complicated business, I paid you the compliment of trying to bribe you. I honestly wish you’d accepted.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I suggested. “What you tried to do was seduce me, because that’s what you like to do best. Now you’re about ten minutes away from a lobster quadrille with the Vice Squad, so let’s cut a deal. You drop the Blofeld act, and I won’t ask for a martini.” I was chagrined at how quavery my voice sounded. That whack to the top of the spine had knocked a lot of the fight out of me. I was going to need to play for time; a couple of weeks would do nicely, so long as I got bed rest.
Despite appearances, though, Damjohn hadn’t settled down for a nice long chat. He turned to glance over his shoulder at McClennan. “What are you waiting for?” he asked mildly. “A pay rise?”
McClennan jerked to attention as sharply as a West Point graduate. He came around the couch and crossed to stand in front of me.
“You wouldn’t take a fucking hint, would you?” he asked, glowering at me. He pulled my coat open, snapping off a couple of the buttons in the process, then did the same thing with my shirt. He seemed to enjoy it. I wondered for a brief, unsettling moment if I’d misunderstood the situation—if I was going to be raped before I was murdered. But then Weasel-Face handed Gabe a tray full of implements I vaguely recognized, and Gabe got busy.
There was a pot of henna, another half full of water, and a couple of brushes—one fat, one thin. Gabe dipped the bigger of the two brushes in the water, then in the henna, and painted a broad, messy circle on my chest. I gave an involuntary gasp; the water was cold. I began to get an inkling of what was about to happen, but if I let myself think about that and froze up with fear, I’d be dead for sure. In the absence of any better ideas, I continued to play the few paltry cards I had left.
I looked across at Rosa—assuming that it
“You should quit while you’re ahead,” I told Damjohn, slurring my words only slightly. “If you let her go, all you’re going to get is accessory to murder and wrongful imprisonment. Kill her, and you’ll do life. But not here. They’ll deport you back to Zagreb. You fancy twenty years in a Croatian prison? I reckon the time off for good behavior would arrive at the sharp end of an ice pick.”
Damjohn just smiled, as if I’d made an unfunny joke that he was going to be magnanimously polite about.
“I’m not going to kill Rosa,” he reassured me. “Not while she’s still a saleable asset. Eventually, if drugs and disease and distempered clients don’t get her first, it will be necessary to draw a line under her. For the time being, though, she’s fine. She’s young, she’s healthy, and she’s earning her keep. I’m actually quite fond of her. Don’t worry about Rosa, Castor.”
“Then why have you got her tied to a chair?” I asked. It seemed like a reasonable question, but Damjohn waved it away.
“I needed to make sure she didn’t speak to you. In the short term, I arranged that by keeping her here. But it was only ever an interim measure. You really should have just exorcised the ghost at the archive and taken your pay. Or, conversely, accepted my foolishly generous offer. You’ve got no one to blame for this but yourself.”
“Let me see that she’s all right,” I said, sounding for all the world like someone who still had a bargaining position to maintain.
Damjohn put his head on one side, frowned at me either in puzzlement at the request or in annoyance that I’d presumed to give him an order. Whatever went through his mind, he finally made a gesture to Weasel-Face, who walked over to Rosa and pulled the mail sack off her head. Underneath it she was gagged with a plug of cloth and a few loops of rope, and her right eye was swollen closed. Her other eye was open, though, and her expression as she stared at me, though terrified, was alert. It seemed as though she might get out of this with her life after all. On the other hand, from what Damjohn was saying, that would just be a suspended sentence.
“There,” said Damjohn, smiling at me almost mischievously. “I’m a man of my word, when I care to be.” I wondered whether that was really why he’d shown her to me—whether it was because after a lifetime of lying and
