He could see me, then; but the refraction of the water was worrying him. It’s a simple enough equation if you’ve got any sort of an education at all; the sine of the angle of incidence above the water (or any other isotropic medium for that matter), bears the same ratio to the angle of distortion below as the speed of light in air does to the speed of light in water, and all you have to do is work it out. Simple. But I didn’t really expect him to know much about the formulae for refractive indices, and to be fair, the water was turbulent anyway, which meant that the index was constantly changing.
So he was just guessing how far behind me he should aim, and being thrown completely out of kilter by a mathematical problem he knew nothing about. He wasn’t even sure whether he should be aiming where I was going or where I’d been, and was trying to find out by trial and error, which is always a slow process.
I could almost sympathize with him. To a man of his proved expertise it must have been very frustrating to see those expensive broadheads so widely missing their mark.
Another shot went very wide. He was aiming ahead of me now, quite wrongly, with only a vague, refracted shape for his target, deep under ten feet of pounding waves. But the next was terrifyingly close when he realized his mistake and was lucky enough, perhaps, to shoot through a pool of momentarily-still water; it was no more than a few inches to my side. I went deeper and turned hard to the left till I bumped my head savagely into the rock wall. I could feel the turbulence of the sea now, with the water above me lighter in color, a blinding blue-white, and the waves dashing onto the rocks there. But I still did not dare to surface.
Another shaft went by me, and another, so fast on its heels that it was hard to believe they had both been loosed from the same bow. I wondered how many more he had left, and remembered the quiver I’d noticed the first time I’d seen him, in the lagosteria, a quiver with ten, twelve, maybe fifteen or more of his deadly red-tipped arrows. I tried to get deeper and couldn’t; there was a steel bar bent around my legs, a steel bar that was cemented into the channel’s bottom with a heavy rope tied to it and leading off to the right. I knew at once what it was.
I hauled hard on the rope and pulled myself into a narrow tunnel, so narrow that my shoulders were brushing on both sides, I thought: What happens if I take a deep breath now? The pain in my lungs was almost insupportable. The passage went on and on and on and on as I hauled fast on the rope; it was too tight a fit for swimming now, and the claustrophobic feeling added very considerably to my worries. But I knew the rope led to the lagosteria; it was the guideline for the baskets that would be hauled in there from the open sea.
And then, suddenly, the rope swerved upward over a cluster of big smooth boulders, and my head was up above water in cold, musty air, bumping against the heavy concrete upper floor of the lobster beds. There was a moment of panic when I wondered if someone had closed the trap again, but there it was to one side, wide open and inviting. I treaded water for a moment while I got my lungs filled up and working once more, and then swam slowly towards it and pulled myself up. I rolled over on my back and lay there, gasping for air and knowing that it was all over now, that there was air to breathe once more...
In the semi-darkness, a shadow stirred; and a sound disturbed the silence. Someone said, a hollow little voice: “Cain?”
I rolled over fast and was on my feet at once.
It was Astrid. She stood there, staring at me, her face white, her eyes startled. Close behind her, Estrilla was crouched as though she were ready for some sort of action, and I saw that her eyes were filled with tears.
I said: “For God’s sake. How did you get here? And why?”
For a moment, nobody spoke. I said, a wave of sudden fear sweeping over me: “Where’s Fenrek?”
Estrilla suddenly started to cry, quite uncontrollably, hiding her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. She was no longer the calm and cool and competent young agent from Interpol; she was, instead, a broken, shattered woman for whom the end of the world has suddenly come, terribly and unexpectedly.
Astrid said, her voice low and soft and infinitely sad: “My uncle is dead. They shot him.”
CHAPTER 12
Astrid was suddenly in my arms. I could feel the sobs she was trying to stifle. She said nothing. There was nothing to be said. The shot I had heard? I just held her to me for a while, her face buried in my chest.
I saw Estrilla sink to her knees on the hard floor, as though now that I was there with them there was no need for any support of her own anymore; it was as though the foundation had given way, completely, and the dam was about to burst. It was already bursting. Her grief seemed to well up inside her, almost bloating her as she sank down, quite helplessly. I wondered if Fenrek had loved her as much as she loved him...He was always extricating himself from some affair or other, getting close, too close, to an attractive woman and then pulling away from her, always too late.
I asked gently: “What happened? I heard a shot.”
Astrid pulled away from me then, and dried her eyes. She looked at Estrilla and knew that it was up to her, to Astrid herself, to tell me. She took a deep breath and said, haltingly:
“He was coming down himself to find you. As soon...soon as it got light.”
“Alone?”
“Alone except for the two of us, but that’s really the same thing, isn’t it? For all the good it did him. He wanted to take Estrilla in case...in case she could go for help when he found out whatever it was he hoped to find out. And I couldn’t...couldn’t stay there alone, and he understood that.”
“No shells from the Navy, then?”
“No shells. He refused to have anything to do with it. He said...he said there must be another way, and we came down here to find one. Everyone had gone from the Alentejano, there were just the three of us there, and when it became light, he couldn’t wait anymore. So we came down to the beach, taking a long way round. There was nothing we could see, of course, and...in a little while, he told us to stay among the rocks down there, below that abandoned shack, you know where I mean?”
“Yes, I know where you mean.”
“He told us to hide there, not to move at all, while he looked for a way into the Bocca through the lagosteria. There are a lot of interconnecting tunnels, and he knew about them.”
It was a small point, but I had to know. “How did he know about them? He doesn’t know this coast as well as all that.”
“No...Estrilla does, though. She’d told him about them and get through to you without being seen.”
He would have had his head blown off the moment he’d gotten within a hundred yards of us, but I didn’t tell her that.
I said quietly: “And then?”
“Then...he was crawling along a ledge above the cave. From where we were, we could see him quite clearly, and...and... and then...Estrilla was a little higher up than I was, and she said suddenly: there’s someone below him! And I ran up the rock to look, and just at that moment my uncle turned around and fired his revolver, and this man below him fired too, at almost the same moment. If I hadn’t seen the flash of his gun...”
“A shotgun?”
“I think so. A shotgun or a rifle, I wouldn’t know really, not at that distance. But Uncle fell, and it was...Oh God, Cabot, it’s a hundred feet down to the rocks below there. He fell, and...” She was crying again, very quietly, trying to hold herself in check and not succeeding. How can you hide such pain?
There was a long, low moan from Estrilla. She was out of it all, lost completely in the depths of her anguish. I knew it would be a long time before she’d recover; a girl from northern Portugal, where emotion is the strongest, the most vital of all the senses, a passion so crippling in its intensity that only death can put an end to it. Up in the north I’ve seen a fado singer break down on stage and have to be led away in hysterics, quite carried away by her own imaginings. Estrilla knelt there now, with her hands down at her sides, her eyes glazed, as though she weren’t part of us anymore.
I went to her and lifted her to her feet I said: “You’ll have to pull yourself together, Estrilla. You must!” She just stared at the ground as though she hadn’t heard me. I sat her down on the heavy cover of the hatch; I wished I had some cognac, not only for her. But there was something else I had to know.
I said: “When he fell, did you see where he landed?”
Astrid shook her head. “No, it was too far down. We ran towards the place, both of us, and we found...we found the other man there, and he was dead. There was a bullet hole in his shoulder, just...just here.” She touched her own shoulder, close by the neck. From where Fenrek had been, high above him, it was straight down and into the heart. Fenrek was the best snap shot I’d ever met.
I asked: “You searched? And found no sign of him at all?”
She shook her head again. “Nothing. Just rocks and deep water, and...and heavy waves breaking over them. But...he’s down there somewhere, and he’s...he’s dead.”
I said: “We can’t be sure of that, can we? Not till we see for ourselves.”
