“I am sure.” There was no sign of any hope there, just a statement of fact. She said: “We were trying to get down there, down the cliff, but there’s no way down, and then...then we saw this other man at the bottom, close by the entrance to the big cavern. It was the man with the bow and arrow, and he was shooting into the water, like a bow fisherman. But I don’t think he was fishing.”
I said: “No, he wasn’t. Van Reck his name is. Perhaps the most dangerous of all of them.”
“So we came into the lagosteria to hide from him.”
I said sharply: “Oh? Had he seen you?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Don’t think so isn’t good enough.”
She hesitated. “No. He couldn’t have seen us.” She looked to the other girl for confirmation. “Could he? Could he have seen us, Estrilla?”
But Estrilla didn’t hear her; she was out there somewhere in the distant past, living over the long days and nights again with a man she had loved, seeing his broken body now down there on the rocks.
Soon, the shock would leave her and the real pain would come, and that would be the danger time, when anything could happen.
But there was an elation creeping over me, entirely emotional and having nothing whatever to do with the logic of the intellect. Somehow, it was too hard to imagine Fenrek dying so easily. I was positive, as positive as I’d ever been about anything, that somehow or other, somehow, Fenrek was still alive. He just wasn’t the kind of man to die, at all, ever, from any cause. He’d lived through assassins’ bullets, and murderers’ guns, and the knives of a dozen assorted hooligans and villains and if his time had come now, at last...Well, I wasn’t ready to believe it. I thought it would be cruel to voice my hopes, but Astrid saw my face and said:
“Do you think...perhaps...you think he could survive a fall like that?”
I had to be very careful now. If we found him there, dead, the letdown would be too savage.
I said: “There is a chance, a chance in a hundred. He might easily have landed in deep water. The shot may have missed him after all. Perhaps he just lost balance when he turned to fire. We’ll never know unless we go and see.”
She was already halfway to the steps that led to the upper exit.
I said urgently: “Wait! Van Reck’s out there somewhere, the man with the bow and arrow. And there’s Estrilla.”
I went over to Estrilla and pulled her to her feet. I held her by the shoulders and said, very distinctly: “He may not be dead, Estrilla, we’ve got to find out. He may be down there in the water waiting for us to come and help him.”
For a moment, the life came back to her eyes; and then, just as quickly, it was gone. A moment of clarity, and then darkness again. She said dully: “Nao, e morto, he’s dead, I know it.” The eyes were glazing over again.
I shook her roughly. “And if he’s not? If he’s wounded and waiting for your help? Are you going to let him wait out there till he is dead, is that all you can do?”
The light came back once more, flooding her face. The moment of hope went as soon as it had appeared, but it was enough. She shook herself free and said, her lips tight and angry: “We will go and see.”
I held her still. “Do you have a gun, Estrilla?”
“Yes.” She fumbled briefly, a vague sort of gesture, and then said: “No...no. In my purse, I left it over the rocks there. When we ran...”
“Well, that’s useful.”
Astrid said impatiently: “Come on then.”
I told her to take it easy. There was a major question now. Should I leave the two of them here together, or not? What if Van Reck came in while I was out there searching for him? He could have guessed why I hadn’t come up in the open water, where he would have been waiting for me, that deadly little bow ready. I looked at my watch; Loveless had been gone just over forty minutes, and he had expected to be back within the hour. I knew that it could easily be a great deal less.
I said to Astrid, urgently: “Did your uncle call off the men who were looking for Histermann?”
“Histermann?”
“The escaped prisoner, the man who is lying dead on the rocks there now. Did he call off the hunt as I asked him to?”
“Yes, he did. He called Lisbon to do that just after you left.”
“Well, thank God for small mercies. If they tracked him down here...Van Reck’s the kind of man who’d sit there calmly and pick them off one by one till he ran out of shafts, one by one and the hell with everybody.”
It had always seemed to me to be the crucial aspect of this case, that we were dealing with men to whom the ordinary kind of risks meant nothing at all, to whom the most terrible gamble was nothing much more because they spent all their lives in an even bigger one. It was an aspect that had clearly shown itself on Loveless’ face, in his eyes, in his manner of talking and in his behavior as well. When the odds are too great, most men will give up, even the best of them. But not these mercenaries.
For them, it was devil take the lot of us if that’s the way it’s got to be. It was a philosophy that was perhaps alien to Europe or the States; but not to Africa, to Africa in arms, where there can be an unbelievable savagery lurking in every unfriendly bush.
I said, to no one in particular and surprising even myself: “They cut out his tongue, Van Beck’s, he can’t talk.” Trying to make some sense out of the comment, I added: “Another man who’s got precious little to live for, and that’s what makes them dangerous. Loveless and Van Reck, and we’ve got to find both of them, soon.”
Estrilla was in command of herself again. Brooding and angry, and no longer as alive as I’d known her before, but still very much in command. She said: “First, we find my Colonel.”
It was no good explaining that I couldn’t leave them behind; they’d neither of them have stayed there, anyway.
I said: “All right, you follow me, in absolute silence, ten paces or so behind, and, so help me, if either of you makes a sound that even I can hear...”
Estrilla said clearly: “No.” Her voice was very steady now. She said again: “No. I will go first.”
It took me a moment to see what she was driving at, and while I was thinking about it, she said, just as deliberately, very proud and reserved: “My Colonel is dead, Mr. Cain. Now you will take your orders from me.”
It wasn’t worth explaining that I’d never been under Fenrek’s orders; and what she had in mind made sense anyway. I said: “All right, so go down towards the beach from the concrete steps, but not all the way to the bottom. Take the ledge that you’ll find about two thirds of the way down, it’ll bring you out right below the mouth of the Bocca, among the oyster rocks there, you know where I mean?” If she insisted on playing the part of the cheese in the rattrap, I thought it only correct to make it as easy as possible for the rat to smell her out. She nodded.
“And you? Where will you be, Mr. Cain?”
“Above you, of course, every inch of the way. Don’t ever look up, just take it for granted that I’m there. Keep your eyes open for the man with the bow, he’s faster with that than you or I with a gun, make no mistake about it.”
