Read Online And the Deep Blue Sea by Charles Williams - Free Book Online

the protocol.”
    “Well, I didn’t really save your life. I just happened—”
    “Mrs. Brooke, there were witnesses, so there’s no way you can weasel out of it. Cop out, and throw yourself on the mercy of the court.” He indicated the glass. “Do you drink?”
    “We-e-ell, not to excess,” she said gravely. “But I do have a small one now and then with motion-picture producers I meet floating around on rafts.”
    “I’d say you still had it under control. So if that includes ex-motion-picture producers, how about a martini?”
    “Thank you,” she said. He went back to his cabin and brought out the pitcher and another glass.
    He poured her drink, and they sat down at one of the bridge tables. “There are certain biographical data,” he said, “that we require here in the Central Bureau of Heroine Identification.”
    “It’s confidential, of course?”
    “Oh, absolutely. It’s processed by our computer complex buried under Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and purely benevolent in aim because it protects you from annoyances like privacy or forgetting to report all your income. Now, all I know about you is that you’re blond, very attractive, probably of Scandinavian descent, you hate airplanes, and you have insomnia and twenty/ twenty vision. What kind of file is that?”
    “Flattering,” she said. “And largely inaccurate. For one thing, I don’t hate airplanes.”
    “Oh, don’t be frightened, Mrs. Brooke,” he assured her. “You can hate airplanes all you like, as long as you don’t start questioning the divinity of the automobile.”
    She smiled. “But I really don’t. It’s just that I like ships better. Also, I work for a steamship company that is agent for the Hayworth Line in Lima. And my father was a shipmaster.”
    “American?” he asked.
    “No, Danish,” she said. She went on. Her father was lost at sea in World War II when his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. Her mother remarried when Karen was twelve. Her stepfather was an American businessman living in Europe, later transferred to Havana for several years and finally back to the States. Karen had gone to school in Berkeley, majoring in business administration, and until her marriage had worked for the San Francisco offices of her father’s old steamship company, the Copenhagen Pacific Line.
    “Danes keep in touch with each other,” she continued, “even if they become citizens of another country, so after my husband died I asked the line if they had a job for me in South America. I speak Spanish, of course, from those years in Havana, so they gave me one in Lima. I was there for a year, and now I’m going to the Manila office. Copenhagen Pacific doesn’t have direct service there, so I booked passage on here.”
    Thumbnail biography, he thought, is a good term. It’s impervious, and protects the raw nerve-ends beneath. And does nothing at all, of course, to explain why a pretty young widow would desert the action around the game preserves where she caught the first one and go wandering across the Pacific alone on a bucket of rivets like this.
    A man appeared in the doorway then and looked in at them and then around the lounge as though searching for someone. Goddard hadn’t seen him before, but Barset’s term “weirdo” came unbidden to his mind, and he knew it must be the passenger with the Polish name. There was no doubt he looked as though he had been ill, and for a long time, and in spite of his outlandish garb of white linen suit and open-throated purple sport shirt with a figured tie draped around it, there was something almost chillingly funereal and somber in his aspect. He gave the appearance of having once been a robust man who had shrunk to a rack of bones, for the suit hung from him in loose folds, as did the skin of his neck, and the gaunt face and the almost totally bald head were a glistening and unnatural white as though he hadn’t been out in sunlight in years.
    “Good morning, Mr. Krasicki,” Karen