The Arm of the Starfish Read online

  “I’m sorry, Kali,” Adam said, helplessly. Kali was lying back against the dune, her fair hair spread out on the sand. The moonlight fell full upon her beautiful face and body. He felt a profound longing to protect her, to rescue her from the evil that held her in thrall.

  She whispered, so that he could hardly catch the words, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For being you. It was the best day of my life when our planes got held up by fog and I met you in the airport.” She turned her face toward him, then reached out and touched him gently on the cheek, moving so that she was closer to him. Very lightly she put her lips against his, then, abruptly cutting his response, she jumped up, saying, “That isn’t fair to you. Come on, Adam darling, let’s have a quick dip and then you’d better get on back to the O’Keefes.”

  Like a naiad she ran swiftly across the sand and into the water, and he followed her, splashing through the waves.

  The moon was high and the ocean quiet. It was not long before they were beyond the breakers and into the rhythmic swells. Kali rolled over onto her back and floated, staring up at the moon. “You see, Adam, I think I can help you now. I can’t work against daddy, you do understand that, but I think I can help you not to work against O’Keefe. It won’t be safe for you to call the apartment when you come in to Lisbon on Friday, so we’ll have to arrange to meet somewhere. We could meet for lunch, couldn’t we? That would be perfectly natural, wouldn’t it?”

  Adam, too, was floating, letting the water ripple gently against his body, slap lightly at his cheeks. “That’s pretty much what’s expected, I think.”

  “Someplace large and obvious would be our best bet. There’s a good seafood restaurant, the Salâo da Chá. Anybody can tell you where it is. Meet me there at one.”

  “Fine.” Adam looked up at the moon. He thought of Joshua in the little plane flying straight along the path of moonlight as though he were heading toward the clear, cold light of the moon itself.

  “Adam, I’m so jittery about everything I could jump out of my skin. Let’s have a race.” She flipped over and faced out to sea.

  “What about undertow and stuff?” Adam asked.

  “Oh, Adam.”

  “Sorry, but I’ve learned to treat the ocean with a good deal of respect.”

  “For goodness sakes, Adam, I’m as used to this beach as I am to my own bathtub.”

  Adam asked, doggedly, “What about sharks?”

  “That’s nonsense. Daddy says it’s just a malicious story made up by people who’d like to see the hotel lose business. Come on. I’m going. If you’re scared you can go in to shore and wait for me.” She thrust her body forward in the water. After a moment’s hesitation Adam followed.

  Kali swam easily and well and she had a head start. Adam was stronger, his arms and legs longer, but he had to work to catch up with her.

  Just as he drew even and began to forge ahead he heard Kali scream.

  They were in the path of moonlight, now, and in the water beside them he could see a large, dark body. He felt a moment of cold blankness. Then, almost without thinking, he reached for the knife Poly had given him.

  17

  As Adam’s hand touched the sheath he felt himself being butted.

  Kali shrieked. “It’s a shark! Swim for your life!”

  He was butted again.

  His next reaction was not on the thinking level. He simply knew that a shark does not butt. A shark turns over on its back, white belly exposed, and attacks. The dark body bumping against him in the night water was not a shark.

  “Macrina!” he shouted.

  The moment of recognition was not conscious, it was pure and joyful instinct.

  Macrina kept butting at him. She was deliberately turning him around and heading him toward land. Kali was already swimming in, cleaving swiftly through the water, not looking back for Adam.

  “Thank you, Macrina,” Adam said, loudly, hoping that Macrina would understand the intonation if not the words, since he could not, as Poly seemed able to, talk in dolphin language. He turned and headed in to shore, looking back to see Macrina’s body, bright with moonlight, flash through the air and disappear into the sea.

  Kali stood, knee deep in water, waiting for him. She flung herself into his arms, sobbing and gibbering. “I was going to run for help—and then I saw you swimming in—it was a shark—oh, Adam, I’m terrified of them—oh, Adam, it was so horrible—oh, Adam, oh, oh, oh—”

  He held her, patting her gently. As her torrent of sobbing ceased he said, as calmly as he could, for his own legs were quivering and his heart thumping madly against his ribs, “It wasn’t a shark. It was a dolphin.”

  “You’re crazy,” Kali said. “Look.” She pointed to the water and he could see the swift black triangle of a shark’s fin moving across the path of moonlight. “That’s a shark. A porpoise leaps out of the water. Adam, I don’t know why it didn’t kill us. You saved me.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Adam said. “We both swam in as fast as we could.” But it had been Macrina who had butted him. That was it! he realized. Macrina had been warning him of the shark.

  “Sharks swim much faster than people. I just don’t understand.” Kali still clutched at him in a terrified manner.

  Adam tried to sound matter-of-fact. Instinctively he knew that he could not tell Kali about Macrina. “Let’s just be grateful that we’re here and that we’re okay. You’re shivering, Kali. Get your robe and let’s go in and get dressed.” He was still acting on an automatic level, his brain arrested, frozen by the icy bath of terror and moonlight.

  Kali leaned against him as they walked across the sand to where her robe lay in a small white pool by the ramp. Adam picked it up and held it for her as she got into it, shivering. Strangely enough he felt no desire to take her into his arms now, to hold her, to comfort her, to brush his lips against the fair hair, the delicate mouth. His mind was still suspended; his emotions, too, seemed caught and frozen in the moonlight. Everything about him was calm and cold, but somewhere inside was a small, still voice telling him what to do. His earlier anger at having Kali added to his responsibilities was gone; the moment of joy that had come when he recognized Macrina was gone. He knew that all that was required of him at the moment was to take Kali back to the hotel; then he would be free to go home to the O’Keefes.

  Typhon Cutter and Dr. Ball were drinking coffee and brandy in the lounge.

  “Dear children,” Dr. Ball cooed, “did you have a pleasant swim?”

  Kali walked up to her father. “Daddy, there are sharks. Adam and I saw one.”

  Typhon Cutter’s voice was unperturbed. “I think that highly unlikely, Kali. Were you in the ocean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you were going in the pool.”

  “It was too crowded.”

  Mr. Cutter pulled out a platinum case, extracted a cigarette, and lit it unhurriedly. “I would suggest that, if you think you saw a shark, you follow the hotel rules in future. They are, if you will remember, my rules, and I’ve asked you before to swim in the ocean only during the day time when there is a lifeguard.”

  “All right, daddy. Sorry. I just thought you’d want to know.”

  Typhon Cutter swung his cumbersome body toward Adam. “Did you see a shark?”

  “Yes, sir. I think so.”

  “You’re not positive?”

  “Not a hundred percent, Mr. Cutter. But as far as swimming at the hotel beach is concerned I’d certainly go on the assumption that there are sharks.”

  Dr. Ball stretched and crossed his legs. “A proper scientific attitude, my boy.”

  “I think I’d better go now,” Adam said. “I don’t expect anybody’ll be waiting up for me, but it’s getting late, and I do have to get up early.”

  He said goodbye to the two men and Kali took him to the roof. Before he climbed into the helicopter she moved close to him. The moonlight shone down on her face and he could not avoid or evade her i
mploring look. He took her gently into his arms. “See you Friday, Kali. Everything will be all right.” She nodded, rubbing her face against his shoulder, then lifted her lips to be kissed.

  He was surprised at his reaction, for he seemed to be two separate Adams; one responded fully to the physical excitement of the kiss and to her body pressed against his; the other, and the Adam who seemed at the moment to be in control, was thinking only of Friday, of the dangers and problems involved, and that he must not let himself be blinded by emotion no matter how badly Kali needed him. Indeed, if he was to be able to help Kali at all, he must keep his mind clear and disengaged. After Friday was over would be time enough to think of other things.

  He turned away from her firmly and got into the helicopter. As it rose clumsily straight up into the air and then headed east he could see her watching and waving after him.

  Again during the homeward journey the pilot did not speak. Adam, jumping down onto the sand, called “Obrigado,” which he had picked up as meaning “thank you,” and hurried toward the lab where he could see a light still burning in the big room.

  Dr. O’Keefe was working at one of the tanks, but went to his desk and sat down, rather wearily, as Adam knocked and entered. “I’m making some hot chocolate over one of the Bunsen burners,” the doctor said. “I find if I drink coffee this late at night I’m apt not to go to bed at all. Want to get yourself a cup from the cupboard over there?”

  “Thank you.” Adam got a cup and set it down beside the doctor’s on the counter top. “I’ll finish making this, sir.”

  Dr. O’Keefe looked at him probingly. “How did the evening go?”

  Adam stirred the fragrant chocolate. “All right, I think. There’s something that bothers me, and I can’t put my finger on it.” As he said ‘finger’ he almost dipped his own into the saucepan to see if the chocolate was hot enough, then decided that Dr. O’Keefe might not approve of this distinctly unsterile procedure. There was something wrong with the evening, and it was something quite unconnected with Kali. It had been bothering him off and on all during the flight home, although it had been Kali who had been in the forefront of his mind. He wanted very much to tell Dr. O’Keefe about Kali, but he had promised. However, at the moment Kali seemed to be on the periphery of the central problem which was to get the phony papers to Dr. Ball and the real papers to Josh or the Ambassador. On Friday when he met Kali at the restaurant he would make her see that he must tell Dr. O’Keefe. He could understand her feelings about this: Typhon Cutter was her father and she must still love him very much no matter what she had learned about his actions. You cannot suddenly stop loving where it has been the central emotion of your entire life.

  “Want to tell me about it now?” Dr. O’Keefe asked, “or would you rather wait until morning?”

  Adam decided, from the bubbles at the edge of the saucepan, that the cocoa was hot. “I don’t think it’ll take too long,” he said as he poured. “I can tell you while we have our chocolate.”

  Dr. O’Keefe reached into a desk drawer and brought out a tin of biscuits. He handed it to Adam, and accepted the steaming cupful.

  “I’m not quite sure how to start …” Adam took a biscuit.

  “Begin at the beginning, go on to the end, and then stop.”

  That, of course, was the trouble. He could not begin at the beginning, which was Kali’s cry for help. So he began with going into the terraced lounge.

  “So Ball was there,” Dr. O’Keefe murmured.

  “He’s a whited sepulcher!” Adam said vehemently.

  The doctor laughed. “He may be beautiful without, but yes, he’s full within of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

  “Then how can he possibly have a church and everything?” Adam asked.

  “The scribes and pharisees were respected by a great many people, and a great many of them did a respectable job. I suppose most people see only the outside—he’s a great one for rather showy good works—and have no idea of what’s within. Go on.”

  Adam’s memory again served him well. He was able to give a detailed account of the conversations in both the lounge and the dining room.

  When he had finished Dr. O’Keefe sat twirling a pencil. “It seems to me you did very well. What’s bothering you?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  Dr. O’Keefe continued to twirl the pencil, staring at it with concentration. At last he said, “Do you think maybe you feel that it was all too easy?”

  Adam looked up, his face alight. “That’s it! They believed me too easily. That I’d work for them, and that I didn’t trust you.”

  “It sounds to me as though you’d been pretty persuasive. Why do you think it was too easy?”

  Adam said, slowly, “I don’t think I’m that good an actor. I don’t mean that I was bad or anything, I really think I did all right, but—”

  “You think there may be a trap somewhere?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know why I think it. It’s just a feeling, and I may be all wrong.”

  Dr. O’Keefe swirled the dregs of hot chocolate in his cup. “No. I think I know why you feel the way you do. Cutter and Ball aren’t to be underestimated, and they aren’t easily sold a bill of goods, and that’s just what you were trying to do, and what you seem to have succeeded in doing, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Again there was a pause, during which Adam wished even more strongly that he hadn’t made his promise to Kali. Dr. O’Keefe took both cups to the sink and rinsed them out. “Tom Tallis will be in Lisbon on Friday. That’s one good thing. I think you ought to go directly to Tom, rather than to Joshua or the Embassy.”

  “But what about Dr. Ball—”

  “Yes, you’ll have to go there first, though I hate to have you with the papers on you when you see him. I’ll try to work out a plan between now and Friday. You’ve blundered into enough danger since you left New York without my sending you into more.”

  Adam said, “I want to do anything I can.”

  “I know, Adam, and I’m grateful. But you are in my care. If there were anyone else to send to Lisbon—”

  “There isn’t, and anyhow they expect me, and it would make them suspicious if I didn’t come.”

  Dr. O’Keefe stretched and yawned. “Let’s go to bed, boy. We’ll sleep on it.”

  They had turned out the lab lights and shut and locked the door behind them, when Adam said, “Dr. O’Keefe, I forgot to tell you one of the most important things of all.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s Macrina.”

  Dr. O’Keefe listened, standing quiet and unmoving, as the moon dropped slowly behind the hills. “If Macrina did that for you—”

  “But I could be wrong again, sir. Maybe I just thought—”

  “No. I don’t think there’s any doubting what happened. And each separate event added up makes me realize—” He paused, sighing.

  “Realize what, sir?”

  “That you are the one to go to Lisbon on Friday, no matter how much it goes against the grain for me to send you into what we both know will be danger.” The older man’s hand dropped onto Adam’s shoulder, but it was a touch completely unlike that of Dr. Ball. Whereas Adam had wanted to pull away from Dr. Ball and had had to will himself not to move, Dr. O’Keefe’s hand felt like his father’s; it seemed to be giving him strength, and determination, and the courage to do whatever it was that he had to do.

  “Good night, Adam,” the doctor said. “See you in the morning.”

  18

  The next day was, in a quiet and unexciting way, everything Adam had hoped the entire summer would be. Poly brought him his breakfast but was surprisingly reticent and the only question she asked about the evening before was what he had had to eat. Adam wondered if her father or mother had told her to leave him alone. He did his chores in the laboratory, drank coffee with Mrs. O’Keefe while the doctor was busy at his desk; Mrs. O’Keefe knew a great deal about her husband’s work and had often assi
sted him.

  Before lunch Poly called for Adam and he went swimming with all the children; they did not see Macrina, which was only partly a disappointment. Macrina would have made him think about the night before and all its implications, and he wanted a day of simple, straightforward work.

  In the afternoon Dr. O’Keefe rode over to the village. Adam was left in charge of the laboratory, happy and uninterrupted. Mrs. O’Keefe brought him tea, but left him alone, and he spent the time deep in concentration on the files.

  After dinner they sang again, and, as Adam’s mind had been held during the day by his concentration on his work, so now the music held him and he relaxed into the singing. When the younger children were in bed he walked with Poly at the edge of the ocean. Poly had slipped off her sandals on the sea wall, and walked silently, teasing her bare toes against the incoming waves, her white cotton dress blown tight against her twenty-twenty-twenty body. Not quite twenty-twenty-twenty any more, Adam realized. It wasn’t going to be long before Poly would be bursting out of childhood as she was already beginning to do out of her dress.

  As it grew darker there was a glittering against the dunes and Poly ran, colt-like, across the sand crying, “Fireflies!” and tried to catch the small sparkles between her hands. “Sometimes I catch them in a jar, just to look at for a little while, just to make a small lantern. But I never hold them for very long. I used to think they were tiny stars, but then I found out how cruel they are, and I don’t think stars should be cruel.”

  “Fireflies cruel?” Adam asked with tolerant good humor.

  “Oh, you know,” Poly said impatiently.

  “Fireflies have been pretty much left out of my education. All I know is that they’re the only source of light that provides illumination without incandescence.”

  “So far so good.” Poly held her cupped hands out to him, and a small startled spark flew out and up. She put her hand in Adam’s and pulled him down onto the dune. “Let’s sit for a while.”