Feast of Murder(77)

What Gregor thought he needed the Coast Guard to rescue was the body of Charlie Shay, but he didn’t say that. Julie was beginning to look green again. He gripped her firmly by the elbow and guided her carefully into the narrow passage leading out of the bow. She put her hand out and steadied herself against the side of the boat. She almost missed. The low bow rail was like a cutout in the boat’s side. At one point there was nothing at shoulder height but air, and at the next there was a thick polished wall. Julie’s hand came down on the dividing line between the two and she stumbled.

“Careful,” Gregor said.

“I am being careful,” Julie said, “I—oh, there’s Mark.”

“Where’s Mark?” Gregor looked up as soon as he spoke, and when he did there was no avoiding Mark. He was standing at the back, beyond the wheelhouse and the stairs to the deck below, on the way to the stern. He had his back to them, but he looked tense.

“Mark?” Julie called tentatively.

Mark didn’t hear her. He jerked his arms above his head, brought them down again in fists, and yelled, “Tony Baird you son of a bitch.”

Then he launched himself into nothingness.





2


Gregor would have moved faster if he hadn’t had Julie Anderwahl at his side. His instinct told him to get her away from his side as quickly as possible—and it wasn’t sexism, either. He’d seen women agents at the Bureau who had been taught to fight. He’d also seen women like Julie, who had been taught not to fight, get messed up in a fight. He helped her forward anyway, at least far enough so that she had another spool to sit on. Then he left her and went running into the stern.

Coming up behind Mark Anderwahl, Gregor had not been able to see Tony Baird or anything else in the stern. He didn’t know what to expect. Everything else that had happened on the Pilgrimage Green had happened in a crowd, as far as he could tell. Maybe that was why he was half-convinced he would find a crowd when he got to the stern. He didn’t. Tony Baird was there, flat on the deck with Mark Anderwahl on top of him. Both of them were fighting like men who had never been in a fight before. That was what happened when you did away with the peacetime draft. Men didn’t learn how to punch each other out. They probably didn’t learn how to punch each other out at Groton, or wherever these two had gone, either.

Tony’s face was turning blue. Gregor thought Mark Anderwahl was strangling him. From the way Mark was lying on Tony, it was hard to tell. Mark Anderwahl was kicking his feet into the deck, pounding them like a child having a tantrum. The tips of his shoes were splintering against the wood. Gregor looked them both over and went for Mark Anderwahl’s ankles. That seemed to Gregor to be his mission on this trip: to go for people’s ankles.

Gregor Demarkian was fifty-six years old, tall and broad but twenty pounds overweight and out of shape. Mark Anderwahl was a well-muscled young man in his thirties with a membership in a fashionable gym. It didn’t matter. Mark was an amateur and at a positional disadvantage. Gregor jerked him loose with no trouble at all and hauled him across the deck. The action brought back to Gregor one of the primary truths of his life. He was not a physical man. He was not supposed to do things like this. He was supposed to think.

He dropped Mark Anderwahl against the inside curve of the stern and turned back to Tony Baird. Tony was sitting up and rubbing his hand against the side of his throat, still angry.

“Don’t even think about it,” Gregor told him. “After you two tell me what’s going on, you can go back to killing each other. Before you do you can just sit right where you are. Both of you.”

“He threw it overboard,” Mark Anderwahl said. “He had a walkie-talkie or a radio or something and he threw it overboard.”

“He’s out of his mind,” Tony Baird said.

“I saw him,” Mark Anderwahl insisted.

The two young men were now both standing again, and instinctively squaring off. Gregor tried to interpose himself between them without letting it become too obvious that that was what he was doing. The last thing he wanted was to end up in the middle of this fight.

“You had something on you the day we arrived,” Gregor said to Tony Baird. “You dropped it on the pier when Bennis Hannaford and I were coming through the fog to come on board. At the time I thought it looked like a child’s walkie-talkie.”

“It was probably a cigarette lighter.”

“I know what a cigarette lighter looks like, Mr. Baird.”

“Cigarette lighters look like anything. I’ve got one in the shape of a football.”

“You wouldn’t have tossed a cigarette lighter out to sea,” Mark Anderwahl said. He turned to Gregor, appealing. “I came up on deck to look for Julie. I was just wandering around when I came back here, and there he was, standing at the side, holding his arm back like he was going to pitch a baseball. And then at the last moment I saw it. A radio.”