Cargo of Coffins, Page 2

  “I don’t think we have anything to talk over, Lars. If you need money . . .”

  “Silver won’t buy your life.”

  Paco was amused. “In the numerous times we have met, Lars, you have yet to come out a winner.”

  “That was yesterday. This is today. Shall we go to some quiet place, Paco?”

  Paco shrugged. “I can understand that you might be angry about that Casablanca deal, but after all, Lars, you were the one who turned me over. Wasn’t I entitled to take you along to French Guiana with me?”

  “If you were, then I have some rights now,” said Lars.

  “Rights! Does an escaped convict babble about rights? See here, Lars. If you . . . Wait. You’re branded now. You can’t live inside the law. I’ve just had an idea.”

  “I am not interested in your ideas. Will you come or do I have to . . .”

  A man in brass-buttoned whites stepped between them, facing Paco. Lars was annoyed at himself. At the first flash of gold he had recoiled in fear of police. But this was not police. The man was elderly. His rum-reddened face was flabby, filled with small broken veins. His hair was white as a bleached bone. He wore a captain’s stripes and the insignia upon his cap matched Paco’s.

  “Sorry I kept you waiting,” said the strange captain to Paco. “They won’t take less than . . .”

  Paco shot a triumphant glance over the old man’s shoulder to Lars. “Just a minute, Captain. I wish to present one of my old friends. A man who might be expected to help us.” When the officer faced around, Paco, with a mocking wave of his hand, said, “Captain Simpson, this is Captain Lars Marlin.”

  Simpson’s weak eyes showed his distrust. His freckled hand in Marlin’s was cold and moist and weak.

  Paco swept on. “Marlin is an old friend of mine, Simpson. We were together years ago on the Moroccan Queen. You recall the incident?”

  Simpson was startled. He looked swiftly from Lars to Paco, and in an incredulous voice, cried, “You mean he’s . . .”

  Paco’s smile was amused. “Yes. He just managed his escape from Devil’s Island.”

  Simpson gasped and stared at Lars. The tattered giant’s glare was hot enough on Paco to wither him. The mighty fists were drawn up in steel mauls.

  But Paco’s quietly laughing voice surged on. “I see you remember, Captain. It was all very interesting. You recall when the French authorities searched the Queen for contraband dope? They found it on me, of course. Marlin here gave them the first clue which fastened it upon me. And you remember what happened after that. It was discovered that quantities of it were in his cabin. He swore he did not know how they got there, those little tins. Naturally they packed him off with me. Lars here is a very persistent fellow. He tried three times to kill me in the Penal Colony. That scar you can see on his chest was given him by my knife on the third try. And now he is with us again. Good, kind Lars.”

  Simpson was opening and closing his mouth like a red snapper. He was struggling for air.

  “And since,” continued Paco, “we have a use for such a man, it might be well to include him in the Valiant’s crew. I shall draw up a paper and leave it in the bank here, to be opened in case of my death, and the authorities will know exactly where to find him. Is that agreeable, Simpson?”

  “Good God, NO!” cried Simpson. “You’re mad! You are telling him a thing no one should know except ourselves!”

  “Nonsense,” said Paco, grinning easily. “He knows that where he would find me, he would find contraband. He knows that is my weakness. And besides, Simpson, it will keep you from getting a notion to rid yourself of me.”

  Lars glanced across the street. The Law was still standing there, completely unaware of anything wrong in that quiet group across the pavement. It was all so lazily peaceful in this hot afternoon sunshine. No man—or at least no sane man—would take the siesta hour to plan death.

  Lars studied Paco. He knew what to expect from the man. Paco was so plausible, so merciless, so much at his ease, that he was safe in any society. He classed murder with picking pockets.

  And Lars knew another thing. Paco would find some way to direct the police to him if he failed to follow Paco’s course. But in following that course, Lars knew that he could at last even up the mounting score. He could wait. He had learned to wait.

  Lars knew that Simpson was a fool. Paco had duped Simpson into playing a criminal role, using the man’s natural weakness and greed. Lars also knew that Paco no longer needed Simpson. He sensed that because he knew the ways of Paco all too well.

  “I . . . I shall have to consult Miss Norton,” gasped Simpson. “After all, I am only her captain. Perhaps,” he added hopefully, with an uneasy glance at Lars, “perhaps she will not consent to another crew member when there are no vacancies.”

  “She’ll consent to anything I propose,” smiled Paco.

  “Someday she’ll discover how wrong she is,” said Simpson. “We won’t be able to get away with this forever.”

  “But while we can get away with it, we can make our fortunes. What better means of transportation is there than the Valiant? Who would dare suspect Teresa Norton of smuggling? You are getting shaky, Simpson.”

  “What if I am?” said the captain, abruptly belligerent.

  Paco shrugged. “Let it pass. Suppose you catch up with Miss Norton—she just went toward the quay—and ask her.”

  “I don’t think I shall,” said Simpson. Suddenly he began to whine. “You can’t make me do this, Paco. After all, we know this man is an escaped convict. . . .”

  “So am I,” said Paco. “And so will you be someday. Get along and make the request.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  Lars knew how dangerous was the ground on which Simpson stood. A soft, purring note had come into Paco’s voice.

  Again Paco shrugged that fatalistic Latin shrug. “Refuse, then. Come, we grow too serious. Let us go somewhere and have a drink and after that I’ll file this paper at the bank.” He looked at Lars and the smile was uncertain for an instant. “No. I’ll file that paper now, across the street. Wait here.”

  Lars was helpless to stop this with three beneath the awning. Sullenly he watched Paco cross the pavement and enter the bank. He knew now he should not have delayed that bullet. He should have taken his chance when he had it, despite the risk.

  Lars and Simpson were uncomfortable together. Simpson considered Lars far beneath him and Lars considered Simpson a very low form of insect life. Simpson was a man who would betray an employer like the girl Lars had seen. He would sell out a trust for a pittance. He was weak and unintelligent. And though Lars might have warned Simpson, he did not. Simpson would not have taken the warning and the crime merited the punishment.

  Paco came back, breezily jingling the coins in his pocket, smiling with good humor, walking elastically.

  “And now, my uneasy companions,” said Paco, “let us partake of refreshment.”

  “Sorry,” said Lars slowly. “I’m afraid I’m not drinking with either of you.”

  Paco laughed merrily. “Still the same Lars! At least let us find you a good bed before we leave you. This afternoon I’ll bring you news . . . No. I have a better plan. Too bad you do not possess a strategic mind, Lars. I might have been dead by now if you had. Simpson, meet me in an hour at the Café of the Captains.”

  Simpson grumbled about it but it was easily seen that he was glad to get away from the company he was in. In mutual disgust and distrust they parted.

  Paco and Lars walked up the avenue between the palms and the white building fronts, proceeding silently for three blocks. As they turned down a side street toward a sailors’ hotel, Paco grinned suddenly.

  “Perhaps I wrong you, Lars.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You seem to be falling into this with suspicious ease.”

  “Am I?”

  “But I know you too well to suppose that you have changed your mind. You saw Miss Norton, didn’t you?”

  “Certainl
y.”

  “You always were a romantic fool, Lars. And there’s the difference between us.”

  “I am not interested,” said Lars.

  “But I am,” smiled Paco as they paced along toward a swinging sign. “That is the difference. You are a romantic fool and I am merely romantic. You allow scruples to stand in your way and thereby hamper yourself. Undoubtedly you were on the verge of potting me from cover this afternoon. But you didn’t. Why? Because it would not have been sportsmanlike to shoot an enemy in the back, no matter one’s opinions about that enemy. You probably thought you would go through with it, but you didn’t. You never would have, no matter how close you came.

  “Now I am different, Lars. I would have fired from cover and made my escape, sparing myself unpleasant entanglements such as those in which you now find yourself. You saw Miss Norton—I saw your face light up when I mentioned her name—and now you know that she is in danger from me. And that is making you walk ahead, wondering if you can help the first decent woman you’ve seen in years. The temptation to be near her in any capacity is too much to resist. You hope you can somehow kill me for what you think I have done to you and so you are willing to carry on and wait. You can wait, Lars. It is a good trick. One that I never learned. Here we are. We shall go in together. Your name is Lowenskold and you have been shipwrecked from the SS Tatoosh which sank off Cape Frio some days ago.”

  They passed through the lobby and the smiling, plausible Paco engaged a room for them both. There was nothing said about it. The clerk was of the opinion that Paco was a pleasant fellow.

  They climbed the musty staircase and came to a room which overlooked a muddy patio. The place was as bare as a cell, and Lars dwarfed everything in it.

  Lars sat down on the bed, Paco threw some bills on the table and grinned in Lars’ direction.

  “Go right ahead,” said Lars. “But don’t be under any delusions about this. I’m with you only so long as I can keep myself under cover. And paper or no paper, I’m telling you now, Paco, that your number is up.”

  Paco shrugged that Latin shrug of his. “We know each other, Lars. That makes it better. You know that I will kill you as soon as you are no longer useful to me. I know that you wish to kill me. We hate each other with great cordiality. We can work together, Lars.”

  Paco walked out and closed the door behind him. Lars stretched his tattered length on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, hands clasped under his neck.

  A brown lizard, upside down against the plaster, was walking with vacuum-cup tread. The lizard stopped and began to circle an unwary black bug. The tongue flicked and the bug was gone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Simpson Is Murdered!”

  LARS MARLIN dozed but it was an uneasy twilight into which he entered. The white room was uncomfortably like a prison cell, though far better than those of French Guiana. The plaster walls were cracked jaggedly, suggesting nonexistent rivers of a nonexistent world peopled with moths, roaches and wandering, hungry lizards.

  At each approach of footsteps, Lars would start up, realize where he was and then lie back. There was high danger in his being in Rio, but that danger was as nothing compared to the recent perils of flight. Even so, recognition would send him back to the mire of swamps and the living, feverish death of oblivion.

  Lars was too tall for the bed—built for smaller Spaniards—to accommodate him. He was lying cornerwise, bare heels on the one chair. In repose his face was handsome in its way, more because of the strength it indicated than because of the regularity of features. His mane of yellow hair had grown long and tangled, and his jaw was unshaven. Had it not been for the clear intelligence of his eyes and the hardness of his body, he might have passed for a beachcomber.

  Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside and he started up. But the sound died away and he lay back, wondering where Paco was. He doubted that Paco had gone to the Café of the Captains. He suspected Paco’s errand.

  He considered his position without any great concern. He was in a strange place, living under strange circumstances. Six years before, as master on the bridge of the Moroccan Queen, he would have mocked any soothsayer who had tried to tell them that at the end of these six years he would be lying in a sailor’s flophouse in Rio, considering ways and means of killing a man and dreaming intermittently, when he dozed, of a girl with a free swing to her walk and a pleasant if slightly imperious smile.

  But now that he was here, he was taking it quietly, as he had taken everything else Fate had doled out to him. His life had been a checkerboard of odd occurrence.

  His father had died in the Grand Banks fleet, leaving a nine-year-old boy to look out for his mother and two sisters. Lars had looked out for them as handsomely as a New England fishing town and the pay of a sailor before the mast would allow.

  At the age of fifteen, he had begun to pound out a reputation for himself with his sledgehammer fists. He had risen to a mate of a coasting steamer. He had sent three quarters of his pay home and had invested the remaining pittance in extension courses. He rose from mere trig to theory of equations. He slugged a course in maritime law until it flattened out into a diploma. He read until his arctic-blue eyes ached, burning the daylight with labor and the darkness with study.

  At eighteen, Lars Marlin had his master’s papers. At twenty-one he had his first command—a wallowing old tub running on a thin profit margin with sighing boilers and weary screw. With insight and left hooks he had made that hooker pay and men began to know that Lars Marlin was carving a place for himself in the watery world.

  One determined characteristic carried him through, gave him a name. Once he made a decision he never changed it. Vacillation to Lars was the worst crime on earth. He drove straight ahead making his own destiny, afraid of nothing. He had a retaining mind, an observing eye and knowledge which came from the entire ladder of knowledge—from the wharves to the universities.

  At twenty-four he had been given a Mediterranean command, and from the bridge of the Moroccan Queen, men hoped he would graduate to a swift transatlantic liner.

  At twenty-five he had taken on one Paco Corvino as chief steward because the man was recommended so handsomely. And three months later the officials of Casablanca had discovered contraband on the Queen. Lars had pointed the finger at Paco and Paco, in retaliation, had pointed back to the bridge.

  And now at thirty-one, with six years of hell behind him, he found himself lying in a third-rate hotel wondering about the best and quickest way to commit a murder.

  It was dusk when Paco came back. He slid through the half-opened door and closed it as silently as he had opened it. He stood listening for an instant, breathing hard. Then he turned and sat down on the other bed.

  He grinned at Lars. “Anybody call when I was gone?”

  “No.”

  Paco’s smile widened and his white teeth flashed. He was very relieved at this news. He got up and walked to the wash stand and began to wipe the grime from his hands. The water turned a faint pink color.

  “You’re sure nobody, not even a chamber boy, called?” he asked without turning.

  “I’m sure. What have you been doing?”

  “Fixing things up. Simpson was turning yellow. I can read men, Lars. You won’t deny that. I had pushed him as far as I could make him go. He was about to go mewling to Miss Norton. You saw it.”

  “What kind of contraband?” said Lars, lying on his side. He could feel the hard ridges of the .38 under him and his eyes were examining the possible target.

  “Heroin,” said Paco promptly. “They’re death on it in the States. Can’t even get it through a doctor. Never take it myself but I hear it’s good for the nerves—or bad for them. Prices are rocketing up north. But heroin is small stuff. Listen, Lars, would it surprise you to know that I have a way of making four million francs all in a lump? Within a month and with hardly any risk.”

  “I’m not interested in your plans,” said Lars.

  Paco laughed aloud.

>   “What’s so funny?” demanded Lars.

  Paco shrugged. He had evidently forgotten that he had already washed his hands, as he again approached the stand and repeated the process.

  “This Miss Norton owns the Valiant?” said Lars.

  “No. Her father does. He’s Tom Norton, president of the Equatorial Trading Company. He can sign his name to a ten-million-dollar check and still stay on easy street. The Valiant is a good little ship. Eighteen hundred tons, Diesel-engined. Pretty swank.”

  “Is Norton aboard?”

  “No. He turned it over to his daughter and her friends and told them to go have a good time. He probably wanted to get rid of Miss Norton—Terry, everybody calls her. She’s hotheaded and boy, can she get mad.”

  “So you’re operating against a girl. That’s worthy of you, Paco.”

  “Of course it is,” cried Paco. “What use have I got for these people with money and position? I hate them! And what a fine time I have laughing at them. They think I’m something pretty special because I’ve got better manners than they have, because I can wear my clothes better than their men can. They wonder about it just as though they were God’s chosen children, the only graceful people on earth. They order me around now but one of these days . . .”

  Paco was not smiling. He was bitter and the black jungle cat in him was plainly visible in his displayed fangs and hot black eyes. But he passed it over with a shrug and began to smile again. He was rubbing his hands very thoroughly with a towel as though to rid them of something.

  Finally he nervously perched himself on the edge of the bunk and began to manicure his nails with a little silver set he carried. He was very particular about his hands, more particular than ever on this day. They were the hands of an artist, and Paco, in his way, was an artist.

  “I suppose the police will be here soon enough,” said Lars quietly.

  Paco jumped and again the smile was gone. “How did you know?”

  “I suppose you thought I’d miss the case of nerves you brought back. I hope they swing you for it.”