I ought to stay with him, but I know that is too much for him to bear. I am ashamed and disgusted with myself and I hate what I have done. It all may turn out badly too. But I must not think about that. I will now return to the anæsthetic I have used for seventeen years and will not need much longer. Although it is probably a vice now for which I only invent excuses. Though at least it is a vice for which I am suited. But I wish I could help that poor man whom I am wronging.
“Drive me back to Freddy’s,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
The Coast Guard cutter towing the Queen Conch was coming down the hawk channel between the reef and the Keys. The cutter rolled in the cross chop the light north wind raised against the flood tide but the white boat was towing easily and well.
“She’ll be all right if it doesn’t breeze,” the Coast Guard captain said. “She tows pretty, too. That Robby built nice boats. Could you make out any of the guff he was talking?”
“He didn’t make any sense,” the mate said. “He’s way out of his head.”
“I guess he’ll die all right,” the captain said. “Shot in the belly that way. Do you suppose he killed those four Cubans?”
“You can’t tell. I asked him but he didn’t know what I was saying.”
“Should we go talk to him again?”
“Let’s have a look at him,” the captain said.
Leaving the quartermaster at the wheel, running the beacons down the channel, they went behind the wheelhouse into the captain’s cabin. Harry Morgan lay there on the iron-pipe bunk. His eyes were closed but he opened them when the captain touched his wide shoulder.
“How you feeling, Harry?” the captain asked him. Harry looked at him and did not speak.
“Can we get you anything, boy?” the captain asked him.
Harry Morgan looked at him.
“He don’t hear you,” said the mate.
“Harry,” said the captain, “do you want anything, boy?”
He wet a towel in the water bottle on a gimbal by the bunk and moistened Harry Morgan’s deeply cracked lips. They were dry and black looking. Looking at him, Harry Morgan started speaking. “A man,” he said.
“Sure,” said the captain. “Go on.”
“A man,” said Harry Morgan, very slowly. “Ain’t got no hasn’t got any can’t really isn’t any way out.” He stopped. There had been no expression on his face at all when he spoke.
“Go on, Harry,” said the captain. “Tell us who did it. How did it happen, boy?”
“A man,” said Harry, looking at him now with his narrow eyes on the wide, high-cheek-boned face, trying now to tell him.
“Four men,” said the captain helpfully. He moistened the lips again, squeezing the towel so a few drops went between them.
“A man,” corrected Harry; then stopped.
“All right. A man,” the captain said.
“A man,” Harry said again very flatly, very slowly, talking with his dry mouth. “Now the way things are the way they go no matter what no.”
The captain looked at the mate and shook his head.
“Who did it, Harry?” the mate asked.
Harry looked at him.
“Don’t fool yourself,” he said. The captain and the mate both bent over him. Now it was coming. “Like trying to pass cars on the top of hills. On that road in Cuba. On any road. Anywhere. Just like that. I mean how things are. The way that they been going. For a while yes sure all right. Maybe with luck. A man.” He stopped. The captain shook his head at the mate again. Harry Morgan looked at him flatly. The captain wet Harry’s lips again. They made a bloody mark on the towel.
“A man,” Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. “One man alone ain’t got. No man alone now.” He stopped. “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.”
He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all of his life to learn it.
He lay there his eyes open again.
“Come on,” said the captain to the mate. “You sure you don’t want anything, Harry?”
Harry Morgan looked at him but he did not answer. He had told them, but they had not heard.
“We’ll be back,” said the captain. “Take it easy, boy.”
Harry Morgan watched them go out of the cabin.
Forward in the wheelhouse, watching it get dark and the light of Sombrero starting to sweep out at sea, the mate said, “He gives you the willies out of his head like that.”
“Poor fellow,” said the captain. “Well, we’ll be in pretty soon now. We’ll get him in soon after midnight. If we don’t have to slow down for that tow.”
“Think he’ll live?”
“No,” said the captain. “But you can’t ever tell.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
There were many people in the dark street outside the iron gates that closed the entrance to the old submarine base now transformed into a yacht basin. The Cuban watchman had orders to let no one in, and the crowd were pressing against the fence to look through between the iron rods into the dark enclosure lit, along the water, by the lights of the yachts that lay moored at the finger piers. The crowd was as quiet as only a Key West crowd can be. The yachtsmen pushed and elbowed their way through to the gate and by the watchman.
“Hey. You canna comein,” the watchman said.
“What the hell. We’re off a yacht.”
“Nobody supposacomein,” the watchman said. “Get back.”
“Don’t be stupid,” said one of the yachtsmen, and pushed him aside to go up the road toward the dock.
Behind them was the crowd outside the gates, where the little watchman stood uncomfortable and anxious in his cap, his long mustache and his deshevelled authority, wishing he had a key to lock the big gate and, as they strode heartily up the sloping road they saw ahead, then passed, a group of men waiting at the Coast Guard pier. They paid no attention to them but walked along the dock, past the piers where the other yachts lay to pier number five, and out on the pier to where the gang plank reached, in the glare of a floodlight, from rough wooden pier to the teak deck of the New Exuma II. In the main cabin they sat in big leather chairs beside a long table on which magazines were spread, and one of them rang for the steward.
“Scotch and soda,” he said. “You, Henry?”
“Yes,” said Henry Carpenter.
“What was the matter with that silly ass at the gate?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Henry Carpenter.
The steward, in his white jacket, brought the two glasses.
“Play those disks I put out after dinner,” the yachtsman, whose name was Wallace Johnston, said.
“I’m afraid I put them away, sir,” the steward said.
“Damn you,” said Wallace Johnston. “Play that new Bach album then.”
“Very good, sir,” said the steward. He went over to the record cabinet and took out an album and moved with it to the phonograph. He began playing the “Sarabande.”
“Did you see Tommy Bradley today?” asked Henry Carpenter. “I saw him as the plane came in.”
“I can’t bear him,” said Wallace. “Neither him nor that whore of a wife of his.”
“I like Helène,” said Henry Carpenter. “She has such a good time.”
“Did you ever try it?”
“Of course. It’s marvellous.”
“I can’t stick her at any price,” said Wallace Johnston. “Why in God’s name does she live down here?”
“They have a lovely place.”
“It is a nice clean little yacht basin,” said Wallace Johnston. “Is it true Tommy Bradley’s impotent?”
“I shouldn’t think so. You hear that about every one. He’s simply broad minded.”
“Broad minded is excellent. She’s certainly a broad if there ever was one.”
“She’s a remarkably nice woman,” said Henry Carpenter. “You’d like her, Wally.”
“I would not,” said Wallace. “She represents everything I hate in a woman, and Tommy Bradley epitomizes everything I hate in a man.”
“You feel awfully strongly tonight.”
“You never feel strongly because you have no consistency,” Wallace Johnston said. “You can’t make up your mind. You don’t know what you are even.”
“Let’s drop me,” said Henry Carpenter. He lit a cigarette.
“Why should I?”
“Well, one reason you might is because I go with you on your bloody yacht, and at least half the time I do what you want to do, and that keeps you from paying blackmail to the bus boys and sailors, and one thing and another, that do know what they are, and what you are.”
“You’re in a pretty mood,” said Wallace Johnston. “You know I never pay blackmail.”
“No. You’re too tight to. You have friends like me instead.”
“I haven’t any other friends like you.”
“Don’t be charming,” said Henry. “I don’t feel up to it tonight. Just go ahead and play Bach and abuse your steward and drink a little too much and go to bed.”
“What’s gotten into you?” said the other, standing up. “Why are you getting so damned unpleasant? You’re not such a great bargain, you know.”
“I know,” said Henry. “I’ll be oh so jolly tomorrow. But tonight’s a bad night. Didn’t you ever notice any difference in nights? I suppose when you’re rich enough there isn’t any difference.”
“You talk like a school girl.”
“Good night,” said Henry Carpenter. “I’m not a school girl nor a school boy. I’m going to bed. Everything will be awfully jolly in the morning.”
“What did you lose? Is that what makes you so gloomy?”
“I lost three hundred.”
“See? I told you that was it.”
“You always know,
