that you could handle the job, but also just what kind of man you were.
There are a couple of reasons why a mistake could be absolutely fatal. That seemed like a good way to do it. It would give me most of the day to size you up, and in a place where we wouldn’t be seen together. Unfortunately, I was wrong about that. I knew I was being followed, but I thought I’d gotten away from them. However—” She blushed slightly and looked away from me in confusion. “I don’t think there was too much harm done, since he took it for something else—”
I was ill at ease myself. Tweed Jacket hadn’t been the only one.
“What is it you want me to do?” I asked. “Don’t forget, I’m merely an employee of a salvage company. Any job negotiations are supposed to be handled by the owner—” She shook her head emphatically. “No. That’s out. We don’t want a corporation, or a committee, or an expedition. It has to be one man, and one man only, and it has to be one who’ll keep his mouth shut for the rest of his life. If you do it, you’ll have to quit your present job, giving some other reason, of course—”
“It doesn’t involve breaking any laws?”
“No,” she said. “But I’ll warn you. It could be quite dangerous. Even afterward, if they found it out.” She stopped suddenly, frowning a little. “No. Wait. Since you’ve brought up the question, I’ll be perfectly frank with you. There is one aspect of it that probably isn’t quite legal. That is taking a boat into the waters of a foreign country and landing two people secretly. But there’d be no chance of your getting caught, and it doesn’t sound like a particularly reprehensible crime—”
“Depends on what they were being landed for,” I said.
“Simply,” she said, her eyes somber, “so they could live in peace. And go on living.”
I nodded, thinking about it. I had a hunch she was telling it to me straight. She and her husband were running from Tweed Jacket and God knew how many more for some reason, but somehow I couldn’t connect her with anything criminal. Of course, I didn’t know anything about him at all, but I was beginning to like her very much. I tried to warn myself. It hadn’t been twenty minutes since I’d gone off halfcocked in the other direction. Maybe there was just something about her that precluded objective appraisal, at least as far as I was concerned. “What is the deal, specifically?” I asked. She took another drag on the cigarette, and crushed it out very slowly in the ash tray. She looked at me. “Just this,” she said. “That you buy and outfit a seaworthy boat large enough to accommodate three people but which can be handled by one seaman with the help of two landlubbers. We’ll furnish the money, of course, but the whole thing is to be done under your name or an assumed one, and we have no connection with it, for obvious reasons, until the very hour we go aboard. Secretly, and without being followed. That isn’t going to be easy, either. Sail us to a place off the coast of Yucatan and recover something from a private plane which crashed and sank—”
“Wait,” I said. “In how much water? Do you know?”
“Just roughly,” she replied. “About sixty feet, I think.”
I nodded. “That’s easy. The depth, I mean. But finding the plane is something else. You could spend years looking for it, and still never locate it. Planes break up fast, especially in exposed positions and shallow water.”
“I believe we can find it,” she said. “But we’ll go into the reasons for that later. After we recover what my husband wants from the plane, you sail us to a spot on the coast of a Central American country and land us. That’s all.”
“What Central American—” I started to ask, and then stopped. The vagueness had been intentional. “I land you? What about the boat?”
“The boat is yours. Plus five thousand dollars.”
I whistled softly. There was nothing cheap about this deal. Then two thoughts hit me at exactly the same time like two slugs of Scotch. The boat is yours was one of them, and the other was Ballerina. It was like hearing somebody had left you a million.
“Wait,” I said eagerly. “How much do you plan to spend for a boat?”
“Could we get an adequate one for ten thousand?”
“Yes,” I said.