The Vulcan Disaster

“That means I may have a lead on where the arms shipment was unloaded before noon tomorrow, if I’m lucky. It means I am almost sure to have one by nightfall. The longshore workers are not easily fooled by falsified ships’ manifests, you know: they can’t read them in the first place. And there is no containerized service here. If crates of rifles came ashore here, they came ashore as crates of rifles, not as crates of oranges, and my friends will know precisely where they went.”

“Great,” I said. “And...”

“And if you’re interested, perhaps we can take ourselves a little stroll tomorrow night. And see what we can turn up. Who knows? By the time Tatiana’s second show is done we may have a lot more answers than we have now.”

“In the meantime, I wonder what I ought to do about those orders to phone in daily and keep in touch. I’ve stirred Basil up, but I’m damned if I want him in on this thing. No. The more I think about it the more I want to hand this all to him with a nice pink bow tied around it. Fait accompli...”

“My God,” Tatiana said, coming up with Will’s soup bowl and another pot of tea for the three of us. “You two are exactly alike. Stubborn as mules.”

“Comes with the job, my dear,” Will said with a tiny ritual bow before taking his first spoonful of soup. “Why, you should have seen some of the things David and I cooked up, working in Tokyo before the War, to keep a certain big cheese from taking credit for work we’d done.” He shook his head with a wry, faraway smile, remembering. He was himself again.

“Remind me,” I said, “to pump you about David Hawk.”

Will looked up, eyes wide. “He’d have me assassinated in some dingy alley. He would. And he wouldn’t pick any bumbling oafs to do it, either. He‘d send an expert, like you. And the man would come back with my scalp.”

“Not if you’re the man you were tonight.”

“Oh, I can still call upon the old stuff, now and then,” he admitted. He took a sip of the aromatic tea and smiled. “But then of course you also saw the other side of me tonight. No, Nick, I won’t last much longer. These things are coming thick and fast. I recovered quickly enough tonight, thanks to the fact that Tatiana acted as quickly as she did. But when it happens to me when she isn’t here... The last time, I was out of commission for four days. My dear friends in the Tanka community sent up the kind of prayers one sends up for the dead. They were more than half right, too. There is a part of me you can effectively write off as dead.”

“Will.” Tatiana’s hand, warm and tender, was on the old man’s knee. “No, please.”

“No, darling,” he said with a resigned — even serene — smile. “This thing Nick and I seem to have uncovered with your help, I have a feeling that it may well be the last job I get to do. If we do it well, why, nothing could make me happier than to go out, right here in Fiddler’s Green, still in the traces like an old drayhorse.” His hand covered hers; he smiled up at both of us. “And if we manage to finish the job to boot...”

The smile widened; the old merry gleam was back in it again.

Chapter Thirteen

We had ourselves a nightcap for good luck, and then Tatiana fixed me up a Japanese-style bed on the mats before the galley and kissed me good-night and went off to her own little cabin next to Will’s. After an hour or so had passed, in she padded, all warm and soft and naked and tousle-haired, and tucked herself in with me, and things got all chummy again. It’d been many lonely months since her last man and-she needed some reassuring the way women do. And of course I didn’t need much persuading. Bum ribs or no.

But then, after she’d slipped off into a tranquil sleep beside me, I found myself still too wound up, tired as I was, to get to sleep easily. I would have loved a smoke. I settled for lying back and letting the boat rock gently under me and for thinking about a lot of the events of the past two impossibly crowded days, and about a few questions I’d managed neither to answer nor to ignore.

For instance:

Three contenders for that shipment? Who were they all? I didn’t even know who the two Israelis were, except that they were a couple of cold, bloodthirsty bastards. But what were they up to? Were they renegades, perhaps, working for the OPEC people or one of the Arab Bloc nations? Free agents of some kind? I thought I knew better than to take them for official Israeli undercover types; I’d worked with some of them before, and this didn’t seem anything like their style, but I wasn’t sure.

Mercenaries? Not likely. Wild cards, emissaries of some foreign power we weren’t on to yet? Possibly. But without closing my mind on the matter, I was willing to guess that what we had here was the dedicated terrorist type, working for God alone knew who — but in it as much for the thrill of it all as anything. They seemed like paid professionals, after all... but then there was that strange business about the decoration of Meyer’s corpse.