I didn’t suppose for one moment that Van Reck, with his three-foot steel bow, could come anywhere near that figure; the official record distance, handheld and bare bow, is still under six hundred yards. But that was of no importance. The only thing that mattered now was Estrilla.
She must have realized that her gun had been tampered with. She clicked the trigger again, twice, and then lowered it and just stood there, facing him, standing straight and solid and well in command of herself. I could see the angry, contemptuous look on her face. She knew I was there; but her look did not shift from him.
I saw Van Reck pull further back on the string. I saw him raise the bow the last few inches. But his sadism had betrayed him, he was too late. The moment Estrilla swung round and pointed that useless gun, I was up with my arm pulled back and already throwing that smooth round stone. I was once pretty good at putting the shot—or putting the stone, as it used to be called. Jimmy Fuchs, at Yale, gave me a few pointers in the old days, just before he gave the world a new record of fifty-eight feet, and that’s a sixteen pound shot. I had only ten pounds or so to fool around with, and I didn’t have to worry about form either. I just pulled back my arm and hurled it.
He heard me, Van Reck; he would, of course. But I hadn’t taken the time to shift my weight, or bring in my right knee, or bend my left. I just threw. He’d already swung round and his right arm was going back, the thumb curled round the string in his Mongolian draw. But he was too late, or I’d started too early; the bow was barely in line when the heavy stone hit him like a cannonball in the middle of his chest. I’d aimed at the small of his back when he was facing the other way.
I heard a sort of yell somewhere, a sound that might have been the cry of a gull or perhaps, more likely, the shriek of the Guincho bird that’s supposed to come along these shores once in a while; a strange, unearthly croak that could have been anything under the sun except a man calling cut. But there was no time to find out what it was, or even to let it do more than impinge itself upon the awareness. I was too busy watching Van Reck. The little bow flew out of his hands; and the shaft, at half pressure, made a graceful carve in the air and landed at my feet.
But Van Reck himself...He doubled up and seemed to fly back, leaving the ground completely with all his limbs spread-eagled, and a terrible sound came out of that speechless mouth, half scream and half roar. He sailed through the air a few feet and fell, and his own momentum carried him down the steep slope, rolling over and over towards the water. I saw the leather quiver that was across his shoulder break open, and his shafts were scattering in all directions as he rolled over and among them. He slid a little, and rolled again, and dropping down the last ten feet or so with a crash onto the rocks, where the water lapped at him hungrily.
Estrilla was already running towards him, the useless gun still in her hand, I didn’t wait for Astrid and I was there first, ready for him because this, like Fenrek, was the kind of man who never really died. Like a shark that’s been so long out of the water that it’s dead; unless you take a belaying pin to those razor toothed jaws first, you’d better not put your foot anywhere near them unless you want to lose it. I half expected him to rise up out of the water and go for me, with a knife in his hand, perhaps, or the strangling wire that is the favorite nighttime weapon.
But he didn’t.
I imagined that his neck might easily have been broken, but that didn’t matter very much, really. One of his own steel-pointed shafts was under the armpit, just the point of it entering the flesh at a very acute angle and passing out again the other side, like a skewer in a fold of white chicken meat, twisting the white flesh round and tearing it a little as well.
The red on its tip was a mixture of blood and strychnine. They make the poison out there by boiling the roots of the strychnos tree and straining the pulp through a crab shell. When it is good and thick and ripe and red, it’s ready.
It takes something like five seconds to kill.
And then, from somewhere behind us, Fenrek said:
“What a nasty business.”
CHAPTER 13
We stood there for a moment, staring at him like idiots.
He rose up out of the rocks and the breaking surf, Fenrek, half lying, half rising, and half falling over himself. There was a great red gash on his forehead, and he was still wearing his nice silk suit but without the shirt. He stumbled and fell flat on his face in the sand, and as I ran forward I saw what had happened to his shirt; it was all torn up and bound around his leg, binding a piece of sea-weathered cedar to one side and a round stick of what looked like Eucalyptus to the other. If it was meant to be a splint, it was a pretty lousy job. I ran to him fast.
But Estrilla was there before me. She flung herself down on top of him on the wet sand, her arms tight around his neck, half strangling him. Astrid came running up, crying now, and between the two of them they helped him to his feet as I stood there and watched. Estrilla was in a mild state of hysteria, and Fenrek put his arms round her and said:
“My darling...it’s all right, it’s all right...”
She couldn’t speak. She was climbing all over him, the hell with a broken leg that had got itself all twisted out of shape again in those comic splints. He seemed surprised at her hysterics, and he said, gently reproving: “You should have known, I don’t die quite so easily.”
He took her face between his hands—a broken wrist there, too, by the looks of it—and kissed her gently on the mouth, balancing himself on Astrid, trying to sort out one frantic female head from another and not succeeding very well; they were both all over him. He kissed her again, and caught my eye over her shoulder and said gruffly:
“Well, you might at least have the decency to look the other way.”
I said: “Not on your life.” It’s not often you get the chance to see a strong man in a moment of weakness. It was a weakness highly colored by an astonishment that was in itself astonishing; for God’s sake, didn’t he know how much she loved him?
I said: “So that was you, yelling back there. Pity. I thought for a moment it might have been a guincho. I’ve never seen one, and I was quite looking forward to the experience. Now lie down, if you can tear yourself away from the distaff for a moment, and I’ll have a crack at fixing that leg a little more tidily.”
Estrilla said quickly: “I’ll do it.” She wiped a hand at her tears, and laughed, and started crying again and hardly knew which side was up. I was astonished at the sudden change in her. But she pushed me aside, and I sat down with Astrid on the sand and watched her.
Fenrek lay down obediently, and she unwrapped all those pieces of torn shirt, and pulled aside the two crude pieces of wood, and I said:
“You’ll never do it alone. He’s a weak old man, but there might be a muscle or two left in his thighs. You’d better let me help you.”
She said: “No, I can manage.”
I looked at Astrid, smiling now so widely that I wondered if she too were going to break out all over in hysterics.
Estrilla put her foot in his crotch, took hold of the ankle with both hands, looked at him in a loving sort of way that can only be described as sickening, and said: “This is going to hurt you very much, would you like some cognac?”
Surprised, he said: “Well, of course I would. Do you have any?”
She shook her head miserably. “No, I don’t...” She pulled hard then, and twisted, quite expertly; I heard the broken bone crunch into place. Fenrek gasped and said: “Oh, you...you... bitch” But he took a deep breath and said: “All right, all right, that was fine.” He shook his head from side to side, his face very white, and then he shuddered and looked at me and tried to grin. He lay back on the sand and stared up at the sky while Estrilla put those foolish bits of wood back into place again. He said, to no one in particular: “There must be a longer piece of wood lying around here somewhere. A walking stick, a crutch...I found one, but it got away from me in the surf.”
I marveled at the strength he must have shown back there, with a broken leg and a busted wrist—the most painful of the breaks—fixing himself up laboriously with torn rag and bits of driftwood. I moved over and took a look at the wrist, a compound fracture with a piece of bone sticking through the flesh, and when Estrilla tried to shove me away again, I said: “That’s not going to be quite so easy.” But between us we got some rag wrapped around it. Not that that was going to help very much.
And while we were working on it, he said: “Is it too much to hope that Loveless is still in there somewhere?”
“Much too much. Loveless is on his way back from Guincho. He went there to send that telegram, remember? And damn his eyes, he took the Jensen. I only hope he doesn’t bash it into a tree.”
He surprised me: “The Jensen’s still at the top of the Bocea. You can see it from back there.”
“Oh? Well, that’s a stroke of luck.”
It wasn’t really. I realized that Loveless was not going to risk driving a car that just might be well-known enough to invite comment. If, as he suspected, the police were out looking for him along the coastal road, one of them might just have decided to pass the time of day with the driver.
I said; “So he’s walking there, it’ll take him a long time. But then, we always realized that he would have plenty of time, didn’t we? Till the dark of the night.”
Fenrek said: “Does he have the toxin with him?”
I fished into my pocket and brought out the little box for him to see. Through all that pain, his eyes were shining. “Good. So it’s just a question of finding one man.” He jerked his head at the shining steel of the container. “How do we destroy that?”
