Cargo of Coffins Read Free Page B

sportsmanlike to shoot an enemy in the back, no matter one’s opinions about that enemy. You probably thought you would go through with it, but you didn’t. You never would have, no matter how close you came.
    “Now I am different, Lars. I would have fired from cover and made my escape, sparing myself unpleasant entanglements such as those in which you now find yourself. You saw Miss Norton—I saw your face light up when I mentioned her name—and now you know that she is in danger from me. And that is making you walk ahead, wondering if you can help the first decent woman you’ve seen in years. The temptation to be near her in any capacity is too much to resist. You hope you can somehow kill me for what you think I have done to you and so you are willing to carry on and wait. You can wait, Lars. It is a good trick. One that I never learned. Here we are. We shall go in together. Your name is Lowenskold and you have been shipwrecked from the SS Tatoosh which sank off Cape Frio some days ago.”
    They passed through the lobby and the smiling, plausible Paco engaged a room for them both. There was nothing said about it. The clerk was of the opinion that Paco was a pleasant fellow.
    They climbed the musty staircase and came to a room which overlooked a muddy patio. The place was as bare as a cell, and Lars dwarfed everything in it.
    Lars sat down on the bed, Paco threw some bills on the table and grinned in Lars’ direction.
    “Go right ahead,” said Lars. “But don’t be under any delusions about this. I’m with you only so long as I can keep myself under cover. And paper or no paper, I’m telling you now, Paco, that your number is up.”
    Paco shrugged that Latin shrug of his. “We know each other, Lars. That makes it better. You know that I will kill you as soon as you are no longer useful to me. I know that you wish to kill me. We hate each other with great cordiality. We can work together, Lars.”
    Paco walked out and closed the door behind him. Lars stretched his tattered length on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, hands clasped under his neck.
    A brown lizard, upside down against the plaster, was walking with vacuum-cup tread. The lizard stopped and began to circle an unwary black bug. The tongue flicked and the bug was gone.

CHAPTER TWO
    “Simpson Is Murdered!”
    L ARS M ARLIN dozed but it was an uneasy twilight into which he entered. The white room was uncomfortably like a prison cell, though far better than those of French Guiana. The plaster walls were cracked jaggedly, suggesting nonexistent rivers of a nonexistent world peopled with moths, roaches and wandering, hungry lizards.
    At each approach of footsteps, Lars would start up, realize where he was and then lie back. There was high danger in his being in Rio, but that danger was as nothing compared to the recent perils of flight. Even so, recognition would send him back to the mire of swamps and the living, feverish death of oblivion.
    Lars was too tall for the bed—built for smaller Spaniards—to accommodate him. He was lying cornerwise, bare heels on the one chair. In repose his face was handsome in its way, more because of the strength it indicated than because of the regularity of features. His mane of yellow hair had grown long and tangled, and his jaw was unshaven. Had it not been for the clear intelligence of his eyes and the hardness of his body, he might have passed for a beachcomber.
    Footsteps sounded in the corridor outside and he started up. But the sound died away and he lay back, wondering where Paco was. He doubted that Paco had gone to the Café of the Captains. He suspected Paco’s errand.
    He considered his position without any great concern. He was in a strange place, living under strange circumstances. Six years before, as master on the bridge of the Moroccan Queen, he would have mocked any soothsayer who had tried to tell them that at the end of these six years he would be lying in a sailor’s flophouse in Rio,