Almost sick with anger and fear, Graham went back to his cabin.
He lit a cigarette and tried to think reasonably. He should have gone straight to the Captain. He could still go straight to the Captain. For a moment he considered doing so. If he … But it would be useless and unnecessarily humiliating. The Captain, even if he could get to him and make him understand, would probably receive his story with even less sympathy. And he would still have no proof that what he said was true. Even if he could persuade the Captain that there was some truth in what he was saying, that he was not, in fact, suffering from some form of delusional insanity, the answer would be the same: “Nobody is going to murder you on this ship. There are too many people about.”
Too many people about! They did not know Banat. The man who had walked into a police official’s house in broad daylight, shot the official and his wife and then calmly walked out again, was not going to be unnerved so easily. Passengers had disappeared from ships in mid-ocean before. Sometimes their bodies had been washed ashore, and sometimes they hadn’t. Sometimes the disappearances had been explained, and sometimes they hadn’t. What would there be to connect this disappearance of an English engineer (who had behaved very queerly) from a ship at sea with Mr. Mavrodopoulos, a Greek business man? Nothing. And even if the body of the English engineer were washed ashore before the fish had rendered it unidentifiable and it were found that he had been killed before he had entered the water, who was going to prove that Mr. Mavrodopoulos-if by that time there were anything left of Mr. Mavrodopoulos but the ashes of his passport-had been responsible for the killing? Nobody.
He thought of the telegram he had sent in Athens that afternoon. “Home Monday,” he had said. Home Monday! He looked at his unbandaged hand and moved the fingers of it. By Monday they could be dead and beginning to decompose with the rest of the entity which called itself Graham. Stephanie would be upset, but she’d get over it quickly. She was resilient and sensible. But there wouldn’t be much money for her. She’d have to sell the house. He should have taken out more insurance. If only he’d known. But of course it was just because you didn’t know, that there were such things as insurance companies. Still, he could do nothing now but hope that it would be over quickly, that it wouldn’t be painful.
He shivered and began to swear again. Then he pulled himself up sharply. He’d got to think of some way out. And not only for his own sake and Stephanie’s. There was the job he had to do. “It is in the interests of your country’s enemies that when the snow melts and the rain ceases, Turkish naval strength shall be exactly what it is now. They will do anything to see that it is so.” Anything! Behind Banat was the German agent in Sofia and behind him was Germany and the Nazis. Yes, he’d got to think of some way out. If other Englishmen could die for their country, surely he could manage to stay alive for it. Then another of Colonel Haki’s statements came back to him. “You have advantages over the soldier. You have only to defend yourself. You do not have to go into the open. You may run away without being a coward.”
Well he couldn’t run away now; but the rest of it was true enough. He didn’t have to go out into the open. He could stay here in the cabin; have his meals here; keep the door locked. He could defend himself, too, if need be. Yes, by God! He had Kopeikin’s revolver.
He had put it among the clothes in his suitcase. Now, thanking his stars that he had not refused to take it, he got it out and weighed it in his hand.
For Graham a gun was a series of mathematical expressions resolved in such a way as to enable one man, by touching a button, to project an armour-piercing shell so that it hit a target several miles away plumb in the middle. It was a piece of machinery no more and no less significant than a vacuum cleaner or a bacon slicer. It had no nationality and no loyalties. It was neither awe-inspiring nor symbolic of anything except the owner’s ability to pay for it. His interest in the men who had to fire the products of his skill as in the men who had to suffer their fire (and, thanks to his employers’ tireless internationalism, the same sets of men often had to do both) had always been detached. To him who knew what even one four-inch shell could accomplish in the way of destruction, it seemed that they should be-could only be-nerveless cyphers. That they were not was an evergreen source of astonishment to him. His attitude towards them was as uncomprehending as that of the stoker of a crematorium towards the solemnity of the grave.
But this revolver was different. It wasn’t impersonal. There was a relationship between it and the human body. It had, perhaps, an effective range of twenty-five yards or less. That meant that you could see the face of the man at whom you fired it both before and after you fired it. You could see and hear his agony. You couldn’t think of honour and glory with a revolver in your hand, but only of killing and being killed. There was no machine to serve. Life and death were there in your hand in the shape of an elementary arrangement of springs and levers and a few grammes of lead and cordite.
He had never handled a revolver in his life before. He examined it carefully. Stamped above the trigger guard was “Made in U.S.A.” and the name of an American typewriter manufacturer. There were two small sliding bosses on the other side. One was the safety catch. The other, when moved, released the breech which dropped sideways and showed that there were cartridges in all six chambers. It was beautifully made. He took the cartridges out and pulled the trigger once or twice experimentally. It was not easy with his bandaged hand, but it could be done. He put the cartridges back.