“And watch your step.” He spoke very clearly, “Just—watch your step. Every inch of the way.”
He flicked the switch of the S-phone. “Jerry? We’re here for the rest of the night. At daylight, come on in. There’ll be people coming and going around the lagosteria, maybe. But anyone looks like he’s headed this way, into the Bocca, even looks like it, I don’t care who he is...you just let me know, man. Right?”
I shuddered at the way he tossed that box back among the ropes in the cupboard.
He sat there and stared at me moodily while I went to work on the exhaust.
An hour to daylight. An hour before the Navy would start lobbing shells in on us. It wasn’t a very happy thought.
CHAPTER 11
I said: “You don’t know much about motors, Loveless. That’s no way to strip a carburetor.”
He said impatiently: “I’m a soldier, not a bloody mechanic. But I know enough about engines to strip down a Weber.”
It was seven o’clock in the morning, and we were still both there, all in one piece. I wondered if the Navy was out there waiting, lining up the sights of its heavy guns. It occur to me that Fenrek might want to try something else, before taking such drastic action as I’d suggested. I hoped he would; but there didn’t seem much else that he could do.
Loveless was looking at the spark plugs suspiciously, still keeping ready for instant movement, still with that damned sawed-off gun held ready for immediate action. I didn’t expect him to trust me, yet, though the more he thought about our collaboration, the more reasonable it must have seemed to him. It’s hard for the twisted to realize that most people are fairly straight.
But he was still brooding about it, all the same. He said, scowling: “How come you were working with the police?”
I told him the truth, it was easy enough. I said: “General Queluz hired me to find you. He was hoping you might clear him of that trouble back in Angola.”
“Hired you? So you work just for money, is that it.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“No. With some of us, it’s...it’s something more than that.” My God, he was getting patronizing. He threw down the plugs and said: “So you didn’t pencil line them after all?”
“Nope. I put a wedge in the exhaust system. You’d never have found it. All we have to do now is take it off at the manifold and worry it out again, that won’t be hard. If you’d left the carburetor alone we could have been out of here in an hour.”
He said sullenly: “Time, we’ve got. Plenty of time.” He was still wondering just how far I could be trusted, and knowing that it wasn’t very much.
He got on the S-phone and said to Histermann out there: “Get down to Cascais and send a telegram, tell them to hold the plane up for twenty-four hours. Same time, same place, but tomorrow.” He listened for a while. I knew what Histermann was protesting about. He said at last: “All right, all right, so they’re out looking for you. So go to Guincho instead, they’re not likely to be out as far afield as that.” He listened again. “What? Aye, that might be true. What? At this time of the morning?” There was a worry creeping over his face. He flicked off the switch and looked at me and said softly:
“It’s nearly daylight out there, and there’s no traffic on the road, none at all.”
I shrugged. Just as he had done, I said: “At this time of the morning?”
“There ought to be a few fishermen coming in, the shrimp trucks, a couple of bicycles at least.” I said nothing, and he went on: “Unless they’ve got the roads blocked off.”
That’s what I’d been afraid of. The first step if Fenrek was doing what he was supposed to do; he’d have had the early traffic diverted to the inland road, with the fisherfolk held up five miles back and told to wait. A destroyer would have been standing offshore too, ready to lob its shells into the cave. It could only mean that Fenrek really was ready to blow us all up, unless he could come up with a better idea in time. And I hate relying on other people’s ideas, even Fenrek’s.
I found an excuse. I said: “Well, obviously you haven’t heard.”
“Heard what?”
“They found out that the red stain in the water wasn’t just a red tide, they found out it was cochineal. A bright move that, incidentally.”
He shrugged it away. “It seemed necessary to fool them just a little longer. So they found out?”
“Of course. And since they weren’t worrying about a simple case of mussel poisoning, they performed autopsies on those people who were killed, and found it was botulin. So...” I shrugged, “as far as they were concerned; it was Scotland all over again. They closed the beach off for five miles each way.”
It made sense, and I didn’t expect him to reject it, and he didn’t. I pushed the point home. I said: “If Histermann’s going into Guincho, he’ll be stopped. Not because he’s an escaped prisoner, but just because he’s moving on a road that’s been put off limits.”
His face was getting very tired. He said wearily: “It was all so easy, Cain, before you happened along.”
I thought I’d better needle him a bit, to help him make up his mind, if it wasn’t already thoroughly made up. I said:
“The mistakes were all before I happened along, not after.” He said nothing, knowing there was more to come. I said: “If you’d put a few drops of dimethylarsenous acid in with the toxin, you’d have fooled them completely, they’d never even have started looking for botulin. And you can buy that in any drugstore at fifty escudos a pound.”
Dimethylarsenous acid is the term you use when you can’t remember weed-killer, but I didn’t suppose he’d know that; he didn’t have the looks of a gardener. He wasn’t really very interested, but he said:
“Oh? And what would that have done?”
I gave him a little more misinformation, to show how knowledgeable I was in the things that mattered most to him.
I said: “It would have made them suspect an underground seepage of poison gas. It’s fairly common.”
“That’s as it may be, but I never even heard of such a thing.”
Bolting the carburetor back into place, I said: “But you’re not a microbiologist, are you?”
I waited for his reply. It came very quickly: “And you said you weren’t either.”
“No, I am not. I’m not even a psychopharmacologist. But I’m a very erudite sort of fellow, Loveless, and I know a lot about the neurotoxin poisons, and you’re fooling around with one of those like a three-year-old child with a live grenade. You need expert help, you’ll get nothing but an early grave without it, and that’s why you and I together can make this thing really work. My brains, your guts. In a year, working together, we could be kings, both of us.”
He laughed, a dry, humorless laugh. “King of the non-people, what a bloody prospect.”
