Conspiracy (England)/Chapter 4

was only some half hour later, when Wingate had a little recovered and had repeatedly pushed the call button, that Zanelli appeared. To this extent, at least, the owner still retained a little control aboard his own yacht. He did not yet have to abase himself by going in search of the captain; but, had the steward not come just about when he did, Wingate would have found himself constrained to even this humiliation. Mighty is the driving power of King Morphine, as all his subjects know!

“You rang, sir?” Zanelli mocked.

“Yes.” No longer did the millionaire rage, storm, abuse, threaten. Meekly suppliant was his tone. “Send Captain Jaccard here.”

“The captain's busy, sir.”

With calculating eyes Zanelli observed his titular master, the most miserable of humans.

“It's very important,” Wingate forced himself to articulate with pale lips. He felt himself on the ragged edge of collapsing again—this time perhaps for good. Every fiber and every nerve were shrieking for morphine. How much longer could will power drive them on? “Very important,” he repeated. “I must see him—at once!”

“The captain's given orders, sir, he mustn't be disturbed.”

For an instant, then, the millionaire's temper flared.

“Who the devil can give orders here but me?” he mouthed.

“The captain, sir. Beg pardon, but when a vessel's at sea, the captain's word is law.”

Wingate shuddered. His lips went crooked.

“Tell him to come as soon as he's disengaged,” he forced himself to articulate thickly. “That's all. You can go.”

Alone once more, he forced himself to a certain specious calm. He realized that the situation was desperate in the extreme, and might very possibly end in his death. Only one way of surviving seemed at all likely. He must submit to any exaction—for the time being, at least, until some turn of fate might redeal the cards.

He got enough control of his nerves to count the money in his dispatch box.

“Only about eight thousand here!” he groaned. “That's hardly enough to supply me for to-day—not quite enough, for I've been taking at least ten grains daily. And to-morrow—what the devil am I going to do to-morrow?”

An agony as of death's very self confronted him. Though morphine addicts rarely sweat, Wingate was sweating now, what with his suffering and with the stifling heat of the cabin.

“God, what a trap I'm in! What am I going to do?” Like one bereft of reason he beat weak fists on the desk. “What am I going to do?”

A sudden wild idea flashed to his brain. It nerved him to another search of his cabin. His revolver—where was it? Had he seen it when rummaging for morphine? He could not tell. Everything seemed all a blur.

He had had a gun. Yes, he remembered that, well enough. Where was it now? If he could find it—well, what did he count on doing? He hardly knew. Only a kind of tortured instinct drove him to hunt for the weapon.

All at once he caught a glimpse of blue metal, snatched the gun from a ruck of disorder, and slipped it into his pocket.

“Now, then!” he gulped, but trembled at his own thought. He had never fired that revolver. Since the war he had not fired any weapon, much less at a man. Whether he had nerve enough, now, to kill—if it came to that—how could he know? Yet somehow the possession of the gun a little steadied him, brought back a little power of thought.

He sat there, trying to formulate some plan. Trapped, outplayed, poisoned with drug addiction and bafflement and hate, he brooded. For all his wealth, he knew himself one of the poorest of men. Dimly he realized the truth that morphine had made of him, as it does of all its victims, a creature incapable of courage, truth, or manhood, robbed of will power, a mere husk and shell of his true self. Half his hate was for the thing he had become. Black pits of despair engulfed him.

“This gang's in earnest, right enough!” he thought. “They're diabolically clever. They've attacked me, not with blackmail, which a man can fight and sometimes conquer; not with force, which can be met with force; but with their ability to torture me beyond all endurance. Could anything be more devilish?”

That he himself was his own worst enemy he understood with perfect clarity. He was bound to the rack of his own inescapable necessities; and these men—his executioners—need do nothing, save to keep the drug away from him, to cause him the most excruciating and intolerable torment.

Nor, in case he should survive this ordeal, could he ever take vengeance. That would mean confessing his vice to the whole world. The tormentors could deny their plot, could say that the engine had broken down, could allege that Wingate had gone mad, or had been stricken with a fever.

The hellish cleverness of the trap vaguely dawned on the victim. Through all his pain and hate, somewhere from deep recesses of his mind uprose a sort of saturnine admiration for such well planned and perfectly executed strategy. More than once he himself had trapped and beaten a competitor, had been merciless and hard; but never once had any snare of his approached this for sheer, infernal cleverness.

“It's efficiency, all right!” he groaned, quivering at his desk. He hated himself doubly for being inefficient and unable to strike back. “They've got me in a jam, sure enough—but have they?”

Just for one instant the ghost of a fighting gleam brightened his feverish eye; but the gleam faded, submerged in dolorous weakness. He remained there, lagging, drooping, wrenched with the pangs of unspeakable agony. :

Half an hour later, having well disciplined his victim by a long wait, Captain Jaccard put in an appearance. He found the millionaire dressed and shaven, though with an oozing cut on the cheek where the nerve-racked fingers had let the razor slip.

Wingate seemed a bit calmer now, despite the fact that his martyrdom had really increased till every tortured neuron clamored for surcease from misery. Morphine has this truly devilish property, that it crystallizes in the nerve centers, and, when the supply stops, it begins to dissolve there. It is this dissolving that makes its victims writhe—that sometimes, if no more drug is given, actually kills them.

“Well, sir, how about it?” asked the captain.

“It's all right. I'll meet your terms.”

“That's good! I rather thought you would. But this is to be a cash business—strictly cash, or its equivalent in negotiable securities easy to turn into cash without question.”

“All right. I agree. Give me two tablets. Here's your two thousand.”

Wingate counted out the sum with shaking fingers, and laid it on the desk. Jaccard also counted the money, folded it with deliberation, and tucked it into his pocket. Then he uncorked the phial, shook out two of the precious tablets, and laid them down.

The owner gestured at the door. Without a word, the captain withdrew.

Another hour, and a calmed, nerve-strengthened Wingate sat at the table in the main cabin, under the open skylight, which admitted such air as stirred. An awning over the skylight dimmed the sun's glare. Tobacco smoke and the aroma of coffee filled the cabin.

Wingate was smoking his pipe, and seemed almost himself again. Even that, of course, meant a sufficiently pitiful figure for a man who had once been a first-rate athlete; but by comparison with the hours just gone, the improvement was enormous. In no affliction is relief so immediate as when morphine is given to an addict who has been deprived. Tortured nerves and flayed tissues almost at once respond, and relax to temporary comfort. A victim on the very point of death from abstinence will recover in an amazingly short time.

Wingate had been able to take a glass of orange juice, a slice or two of toast, and a cup of coffee. He looked not much different from his usual emaciated and sallow self, as he sat there in white flannels, master of his own nerves again—for a while!

“I think,” he was saying judicially to the captain, who sat across the table from him, “I think you and I had better reach some agreement at once.”

“Agreement?”

“Yes—an agreement. I suppose nobody is listening in?”

“Both engineers are below, the steward's ashore, and the three common hands are getting pretty close to Queensport by now.”

“Very well!” There was a long pause. “You're playing a risky game, Jaccard!”

“Perhaps, but the stakes are high enough to make it worth while.”

“Does it occur to you,” went on the millionaire, thinking of the gun in his pocket, “that you might possibly get killed, one way or another?”

“If I did, that would be most unfortunate for you,” replied the captain. “You see, I've got all the morphine hidden away where the devil himself couldn't find it. Not even Zanelli knows where it is. With me dead, you'd probably pass out in three or four days—after an exceedingly unpleasant experience.”

Wingate grimaced.

“You ought to have been a financier, instead of a crook!” he snarled.

“Thanks; but you might as well drop the personal remarks. I don't care about them. When you came on deck and asked me to come below, I thought you had some kind of a proposition to make.”

“Well, I have. Why can't we come to terms now as well as later? Name your figure.”

“Figure? For what?”

“For giving back my—medicine, and ending this cruise. Take me back to Queensport, and you shall have your discharge—you and Zanelli, both of you—with first-class recommendations.”

“Nothing doing! I'm not running my neck into any noose, thank you!”

“No noose at all. I won't make any row. I'll give you a good character. How about it? Say a hundred thousand, eh?”

“No, sir! In the first place, a hundred thousand isn't a drop in the ocean compared to what I'm going to clean up this time. As for the good character, I wouldn't trust a doper on his Bible oath!”

“You're using some pretty rough language, Jaccard!”

“Well, this is a rough time we're in for. We might just as well drop all the fine phrases, and all the nonsense about toothache and so on. I know all about you, Wingate! I've known all about you for a couple of years. If I hadn't, how could I have planned this little party?” Jaccard laughed grimly, his fist heavy on the table. “There's nothing doing on any proposition to buy me off with a little cash and a dope fiend's promise!”

Wingate flushed dully and made an ugly grimace.

“How about two hundred thousand, and go scot-free?”

“No!”

“I've got a long arm. If you put this through, look out!”

“Your arm will be a bit shorter before you and I kiss each other good-by,” mocked the captain. “It's no use trying to buy me off. I'm like the architect who said he had other plans.”

“But, damn it, can't you listen to reason? I'll raise the ante another hundred thousand. There, now!”

Jaccard shook a decisive head.

“If that's your only line of talk, I've got something more important to attend to. No, sir—I'm not going to do business with you on any such basis. Do you suppose I would go ashore with you and trust you to keep mum? Why, you'd have me on the hot coals in less than no time. I'm no such fool! Think I want to spend five or ten years playing checkers with my nose on the crossbars of a jail window? Forget it!”

“Incorruptibly corrupt, eh?” flung Wingate. “I see! I've known a good many men like that, in various walks of life; but there's one little detail you haven't fully considered.” He blew smoke, leaned back in his chair, and seemed at ease. A sense of physical comfort suffused his relaxed nerves and gave him a sort of specious calm. “If this hold-up goes on for a week or two, and we don't arrive at Key West, the Voyageur will be missed. Search will be made, and—”

“Never mind about that!” interrupted Jaccard. “I've attended to all that. You forget that I was the one who had to go to the customhouse and make out the clearance papers. There wasn't a word about Key West in those papers. I just put down: 'Indefinite destination—coastwise fishing trip,' and it went, all right. So there you are!”

Wingate pondered this rather arresting statement for a moment. Then, indignantly—or, at least, with attempted indignation—he exclaimed:

“Well, you are a thoroughgoing scoundrel, eh?” Somehow he had to admit a certain perverse appreciation of the man's foresight and completeness. How tolerant his drug-fed nerves had now become! “I couldn't have planned it better myself. Still, there's another fact to consider.”

“And what's that?”

Wingate tapped his pipe ashes into a bronze tray on the table before replying.

“It's just this,” he said. “I've only got about six thousand in cash left. That's not going to last any time at all, at present market rates.”

“You're right, it isn't! That's why you're going to shoot a wireless to your bank in Queensport, this morning, that you're sending me for more.”

“What?”

“Sending me for more—a lot more,” repeated the captain, unperturbed. “You can give me a written order, too. They know me. I've cashed a few of my pay checks there. It 'll all be easy sailing. If they haven't the cash on hand, they can get plenty by wire from your headquarters in New York. Negotiable securities—such as I approve—will do. Pretty good plan, isn't it?”

“You damned robber!” Wingate gasped.

“Never mind about that. Let's get busy. I want to get under way.”

“Under way? But the tender—that's gone!”

Jaccard laughed easily.

“Just a little fiction of mine,” he explained, “like the shaft being broken. I handed you that story to get the game started in some kind of way that wouldn't give you apoplexy. You're too valuable a man to take chances with, you see. When you get the note written to the bank, I'll connect with the tender, all right enough.”

Wingate stared with growing rage. The veins on his thin temples began to knot, to protrude. A gleam as of madness inflamed his eyes, which once more were narrowed by the contracting power of the drug.

Then, of a sudden, as if some final cord of control had snapped, he plunged a hand into his pocket, snatched out the gun, and at point-blank range leveled it at Jaccard. He pulled trigger. Only a metallic snap followed.

Cursing, he tried to fire again, and yet again. Nothing happened. Vastly amused, the captain laughed in his face.

“Of course I knew you had that,” Jaccard told him. “I'm not such a fool as to overlook a gun. I took out all the cartridges. I just wanted to see how much of a murderer you really are at heart.”

Wingate dashed the revolver to the floor with lurid oaths.

“There, now, that 'll do!” the captain commanded, curtly. “No more stage plays! Time's passing. You've got to get to work on that wireless to the bank!”

The millionaire, dazed though he was, clutched at this final hope. A code message—that might save him yet!

As with a kind of uncanny prescience, the captain smiled.

“And there'll be no funny business, either,” he added. “We'll use the A. B. C, code. I know all about that.”

Wingate groaned.

“Hamstrung!” he bitterly exclaimed. “Beaten at every point, by a common sailor!”

“As you like,” assented the captain. “Common enough in some ways, but uncommonly determined. I hold the tiller, and I'll steer the course for you. Your little act will be just to go along, nice and quiet.”

“You'll pay for this! You'll pay!”

“Never mind! I guess, when it comes to paying, you'll do most of that. You'd better hurry up, too, because you've only got a few tablets left, and you'll get no more till you plank down the cash. No checkee, no washee! If you don't get hold of some more money right away, by to-morrow you'll be clawing at the sides of the pit again, and groveling in the red-hot coals. You'll be in hell, for fair!”

“I'll send you there, before I'm through!”

“Don't talk like a complete idiot! Can't you see that you have no time to waste? Come on now—let's get busy with the wireless message and the note to the bank. Come on, come on!”