The Wheel of Darkness Page 20

  At this, Captain Mason looked troubled. “The closest port is St. John’s, Newfoundland, so if we were to divert, that’s where we’d go. However, we’re not going to divert. We’re continuing to New York.”

  Bruce was aghast. “Why?”

  “These were the commodore’s orders. He has his . . . well-considered reasons.”

  “Which are?”

  “Right now we’re skirting the edge of a large nor’easter sitting on the Grand Banks. Diverting to St. John’s will take us into its heart. Secondly, diverting to St. John’s will also take us straight across the Labrador Current during the July iceberg season, which, while not dangerous, will require us to slow our speed. Finally, the diversion will only save us a single day. The commodore feels that docking in New York City would be more appropriate, given—well, given the law enforcement resources we may require.”

  “There’s a maniac on board,” said Emily Dahlberg. “Another person could be murdered in that ‘single day.’ ”

  “Nevertheless, those are the commodore’s orders.”

  Bruce stood. “Then we insist on speaking directly with him.”

  Captain Mason also stood, and as she did so the mask of professionalism slipped away for a moment and Bruce glimpsed a face that was drawn, weary, and unhappy. “The commodore can’t be disturbed right now. I’m very sorry.”

  Bruce glared back at her. “We’re sorry, too. You can be assured that this refusal of the commodore to meet with us will not be without repercussions. Now and later. We are not people to be trifled with.”

  Mason extended her hand. “I’m not unsympathetic to your point of view, Mr. Bruce, and I’ll do all I can to convey to the commodore what you’ve said. But this is a ship at sea, we have a ship’s master, and that master has made his decision. As a former captain yourself you’ll surely understand what that means.”

  Bruce ignored the hand. “You’re forgetting something. We’re not only your passengers—and your customers—but we’re your responsibility as well. Something can be done, and we plan to do it.” And, motioning his group to follow, he turned on his heel and left the room.

  36

  PAUL BITTERMAN STEPPED OUT OF THE ELEVATOR, SWAYED, AND steadied himself on the polished chrome railing. The Britannia was in heavy swell, but that was only part of the problem; Bitterman was struggling with the combination of an exceedingly heavy dinner and nine glasses of vintage champagne.

  Still gripping the railing, he looked up and down the elegant Deck 9 corridor, blinking, trying to orient himself. Raising a hand to his lips, he eased up a belch that tasted—revoltingly—of caviar, truffled pâté, crème brulée, and dry champagne. He scratched himself idly. Something didn’t look right here.

  After a minute or so, he figured it out. Instead of taking the port elevator, as he usually did, in the champagne fog he had somehow taken the starboard, and it had gotten him turned around. Well, it was easily fixed. Humming tunelessly, he fumbled in his pocket for the passcard to suite 961. Letting go of the railing, he struck out a little gingerly in what he thought was the right direction, only to find the room numbers moving in the wrong direction.

  He stopped; turned around; belched again without bothering to raise a covering hand this time; then headed back the other way. His head really was remarkably fuzzy, and to clear it he tried to reconstruct the series of events that had brought him—for the first time in his fifty-three years—to a state approaching intoxication.

  It had all started earlier that afternoon. He had been seasick ever since waking up—hadn’t been able to eat a bite—and none of the over-the-counter medicines offered in the ship’s pharmacy seemed to help in the least. Finally, he’d gone to the ship’s infirmary, where a doctor had prescribed a scopolamine patch. Placing it behind one ear, as directed, he’d gone back to his stateroom for a nap.

  Whether it was the miserable night he’d passed, or whether the patch itself had made him drowsy, Paul Bitterman didn’t know. But he had awoken at nine-fifteen in the evening, blessedly free of seasickness and possessed of both a dry mouth and a superhuman hunger. He had slept right through his normal eight o’clock dinner, but a quick call to the concierge had secured a reservation at the final seating for the night—at ten-thirty—in Kensington Gardens.

  As it turned out, Kensington Gardens appealed greatly to Bitterman. It was more trendy, youthful, and hip than the rather stuffy restaurant he’d been eating in, there were some truly delicious women to look at, and the food was excellent. Surprisingly, the restaurant wasn’t full—in fact, it was almost half empty. Ravenous, he proceeded to order chateaubriand for two and then consume the entire portion. An entire bottle of champagne had been insufficient to slake his thirst, but the attentive wine steward had been only too happy to supply him with a second.

  There had been some strange talk at the table next to him: a worried- looking couple, discussing some corpse that had apparently turned up. It seemed he might have slept through some serious event. As he made his slow and careful way down the Deck 9 corridor, he decided the first order of business tomorrow would be to get to the bottom of it.

  But there was another problem. The room numbers were now headed in the right direction—954, 956—but they were all even numbers.

  He paused, gripping the hallway railing again, trying to think. He’d never find 961 at this rate. Then he laughed out loud. Paul, old buddy, you’re not using your noodle. He had come out on the starboard side, and the odd-numbered staterooms, like his, were all on the port side. How could he have forgotten? He’d need to find a transverse corridor. He set out again, weaving ever so slightly, the fog in his brain offset by a delightful floating sensation in his limbs. He decided that, deacon or not, he’d have to drink champagne more often. Domestic stuff, of course—he’d won this trip in the YMCA raffle and could never afford bottles of vintage French on his teacher’s salary.

  Ahead and to the left he could see a break in the line of doors: the entrance to one of the midships lobbies. This would lead to the port corridor and his suite. He stumbled through the door.

  The lobby consisted of a brace of elevators opposite a cozy lounge with oak bookcases and wing chairs. At this late hour, the place was deserted. Bitterman hesitated, sniffing. There was a smell in the air here—a smell like smoke. For a moment, his sense of lazy euphoria receded: he’d attended enough safety drills to know that fire was a ship’s worst danger. But this scent was unusual. It was like incense, or, more precisely, the joss sticks he had once smelled in a Nepalese restaurant in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

  More slowly now, he walked through the lobby to the port corridor that lay beyond. It was very quiet, and he could both hear and feel the deep thrum of the ship’s diesels far below his feet. The smell was stronger here—much stronger. The strange, musky perfume was combined with other, deeper, far less pleasant scents—moldy fungus, maybe, along with something he couldn’t identify. He paused, frowning. Then, taking one look back at the lobby, he turned into the port corridor.

  And stopped abruptly, inebriation vanishing in an instant.

  Up ahead lay the source of the odor: a dark cloud of smoke that blocked his path down the corridor. Yet it was like no smoke he had ever seen, strangely opaque, with a dense, dark grayish color and a rib-like outer surface that reminded him—in some bizarre and unpleasant way—of linen.

  Paul Bitterman drew in his breath with an audible rasp. Something was wrong here—very wrong.

  Smoke was supposed to drift through the air, curling, and shifting, attenuating to faint wisps at the edges. But this cloud just sat there, man-sized, strangely malignant, motionless, as if confronting him. It was so regular and even that it looked solid, an organic entity. The reek was so strong he could barely breathe. It was impossible, alien.

  He felt his heart suddenly accelerate with fear. Was it his imagination, or did the thick cloud have the form of a man, too? There were tendrils that looked like arms; a barrel-like head with a face, strange legs that w
ere moving, as if dancing . . . Oh, God, it looked not like a man, but a demon . . .

  And it was then the thing slowly stretched out its ragged arms and—with a horrible, undulant purpose—began to move slowly toward him.

  “No!” he shouted. “NO! Keep away! Keep away!”

  The desperate shouts that followed quickly opened stateroom doors up and down the port-side corridor of Deck 9. There was a brief, electric moment of silence. And then, the sound of gasps; shrieks; the thud of a fainting body collapsing on the carpet; the frantic slamming of doors. Bitterman heard none of it. All his attention, every fiber of his being, was riveted to the monstrous thing that glided closer, ever closer . . .

  And then it was past.

  37

  LESEUR STARED FROM HENTOFF TO KEMPER AND BACK AGAIN. He was already feeling aggrieved that the commodore had shoved this problem onto his plate—he was a ship’s officer, after all, not some casino employee. Not only that, but this problem wouldn’t go away—it just kept getting worse. With at least one murder, and perhaps as many as three, he had more dangerous and alarming things to deal with than this. He shifted his stare from Hentoff to Kemper and back again.

  “Let me make sure I’ve gotten this right,” he said. “You’re telling me this Pendergast fellow contrived for the card counters to lose a million pounds at the blackjack tables, in the process raking in almost three hundred thousand for himself.”

  Hentoff nodded. “That’s about it, sir.”

  “It seems to me that you just got fleeced, Mr. Hentoff.”

  “No, sir,” said Hentoff, a frosty note in his voice. “Pendergast had to win in order to make them lose.”

  “Explain.”

  “Pendergast started off by tracking the shuffle—a technique in which you observe a full shoe of play, memorizing the positions of certain critical cards or groupings, called slugs, and then follow them through the shuffle, visually. He also managed to get a glimpse of the bottom card, and since he was offered the cut, he was able to place that card inside the deck exactly where he wanted it.”

  “Doesn’t sound possible.”

  “These are well-known, if exceedingly difficult, techniques. This Pendergast seems to have mastered them better than most.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why Pendergast needed to win to make them lose.”

  “By knowing where certain cards were, and combining that with a counting system, he was able to control the cards going ‘downstream’ to the rest of the players by either jumping into a game or sitting it out—as well as by taking unnecessary hits.”

  LeSeur nodded slowly, taking this in.

  “He had to shortstop the good cards in order to let bad ones go downstream. To make the others lose, he had to win.”

  “I get it,” said LeSeur sourly. “And so you want to know what to do about this man’s winnings?”

  “That’s right.”

  LeSeur thought for a moment. It all came down to how Commodore Cutter would react when he heard about this—which, of course, he would eventually have to. The answer was not good. And when Corporate heard about it, they would be even less sympathetic. One way or another, they had to get the money back.

  He sighed. “For the sake of all of our futures with the company, you need to get that money back.”

  “How?”

  LeSeur turned his weary face away. “Just do it.”

  Thirty minutes later, Kemper walked down the plush corridor of Deck 12, Hentoff in tow, feeling a clammy sweat building inside his dark suit. He stopped before the door of the Tudor Suite.

  “You sure this is the right time for this?” Hentoff asked. “It’s eleven P.M.”

  “I didn’t get the sense LeSeur wanted us to wait,” Kemper replied. “Did you?” Then he turned to the door and knocked.

  “Come in,” came a distant voice.

  They entered to see Pendergast and the young woman voyaging with him—Constance Greene, his niece or something—in the salon, lights low, sitting around the private dining table with the remains of an elegant repast before them.

  “Ah, Mr. Kemper,” said Pendergast, rising and pushing aside his watercress salad. “And Mr. Hentoff. I’ve been expecting you.”

  “You have?”

  “Naturally. Our business is not complete. Please sit down.”

  Kemper arranged himself with some awkwardness on the nearby sofa. Hentoff took a chair, looking from Agent Pendergast to Constance Greene and back again, as if trying to sort out their real relationship.

  “May I offer you a glass of port?” Pendergast asked.

  “No, thank you,” said Kemper. An awkward silence developed before he continued: “I wanted to thank you again for taking care of those card counters.”

  “You’re most welcome. Are you following my advice about how to keep them from re-winning?”

  “We are, thank you.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Absolutely,” said Hentoff. “Whenever a spotter enters the casino, we send over a cocktail waitress to engage him in trivial conversation—always involving numbers. It’s driving them crazy, but there’s nothing they can do about it.”

  “Excellent.” Pendergast turned a quizzical eye on Mr. Kemper. “Was there anything else?”

  Kemper rubbed his temple. “Well, there’s the question of . . . the money.”

  “Are you referring to that money?” And Pendergast nodded to the bureau, where Kemper noticed, for the first time, a stack of fat envelopes wrapped in thick rubber bands.

  “If those are your casino winnings, yes.”

  “And there’s a question about the money?”

  “You were working for us,” said Kemper, feeling the lameness of his argument even before he had made it. “The winnings rightfully belong to your employer.”

  “I’m nobody’s employee,” said Pendergast with an icy smile. “Except, of course, the federal government’s.”

  Kemper felt excruciatingly uncomfortable under the silvery stare.

  “Mr. Kemper,” Pendergast continued, “you realize, of course, that I arrived at those winnings legally. Card counting, shuffle-tracking, and the other techniques I used are all legal. Ask Mr. Hentoff here. I didn’t even need to draw on the line of credit you offered me.”

  Kemper cast a glance at Hentoff, who nodded unhappily.

  Another smile. “Well then: does that answer your question?”

  Kemper thought of reporting all this back to Cutter, and that helped stiffen his spine. “No, Mr. Pendergast. We consider those winnings to be house money.”

  Pendergast went to the bureau. He picked up one of the envelopes, slid out a thick wad of pound notes, and lazily riffled through them. “Mr. Kemper,” he said, speaking with his back turned, “normally I would never even think of helping a casino recover money against gamblers who are beating the house. My sympathies would lie in the other direction. Do you know why I helped you?”

  “To get us to help you.”

  “Only partly true. It’s because I believed there was a dangerous killer on board, and for the safety of the ship I needed to identify him—with your assistance—before he could kill again. Unfortunately, he appears to still be one step ahead of me.”

  Kemper’s depression deepened. He would never get the money back, the crossing was a disaster on every front, and he would be blamed.

  Pendergast turned, riffled the money again. “Cheer up, Mr. Kemper! You two may yet get your money back. I am ready to call in my little favor.”

  Somehow, this did not make Kemper cheer up at all.

  “I wish to search the stateroom and safe of Mr. Scott Blackburn. To that end, I will need a passcard to the room’s safe and thirty minutes in which to operate.”

  A pause. “I think we can manage that.”

  “There’s a wrinkle. Blackburn is currently holed up in his room and won’t come out.”

  “Why? Is he worried about the murderer?”

  Pendergast smiled again: a small, ironic smile. “
Hardly, Mr. Kemper. He’s hiding something, and I need to find it. So he will need to be coaxed out.”

  “You can’t ask me to manhandle a passenger.”

  “Manhandle? How crude. A more elegant way to effect his removal would be to set off the fire alarms for the starboard stern side of Deck 9.”

  Kemper frowned. “You want me to set off a false fire alarm? No way.”

  “But you must.”

  Kemper thought for a moment. “I suppose we could have a fire drill.”

  “He won’t leave if it’s just a drill. Only a mandatory evacuation will dislodge him.”

  Kemper ran his hands through his damp hair. God, he was sweating. “Maybe I could pull a fire alarm in that corridor.”

  This time, it was Constance Greene who spoke. “No, Mr. Kemper,” she said in a strange antique accent. “We’ve researched the matter carefully. You need to trigger a central alert. A broken firebox would be too quickly discovered. We’ll need a full thirty minutes in Blackburn’s suite. And you’ll have to temporarily disable the sprinkler system, which can only be done from the central fire control system.”

  Kemper stood up, Hentoff quickly following. “Impossible. This is a crazy thing to ask. Fire is the most dangerous thing that can happen aboard a ship, aside from sinking. A ship’s officer, deliberately triggering a false alert . . . I’d be committing a criminal offense, maybe a felony. Jesus, Mr. Pendergast, you’re an FBI agent, you know I can’t do that! There must be some other way!”

  Pendergast smiled, almost sadly this time. “There is no other way.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  Pendergast riffled the fat packet of notes. Kemper could actually smell the money—it was like rusty iron.

  Kemper stared at the money. “I just can’t do it.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then Pendergast stood, went over to the bureau, opened the top drawer, placed the wad of notes inside, and then raked the rest of the envelopes off the bureau into the drawer. He shut the drawer with slow deliberation and turned to Hentoff and nodded. “See you in the casino, Mr. Hentoff.”