Free And the Deep Blue Sea by Charles Williams Page B

laughed, and Madeleine Lennox exclaimed, “Yes. What about this Mrs. Lennox bit? I thought you were supposed to say Madeleine baby.”
    Krasicki bent over his plate again, but his lips were moving silently as though he were talking to himself. Then abruptly he stood up, threw down his napkin, and stalked out.
    There was a moment of embarrassed silence, and then Karen said, “The poor thing; he’s been very ill.”
    Lind nodded. “And I think he had a pretty rough time of it during the war. He has horrible nightmares.”
    “Pity,” Egerton agreed. “A frightful shame—all that wreckage.”
    The others began to question Goddard about filmmaking, and the incident was forgotten. The dining room steward went out to get coffee. Goddard was relating a comic foul-up of some kind on a sound stage and everybody was laughing when in the edge of his peripheral vision he saw Krasicki reappear in the doorway. He thought the Pole had come back to excuse himself or perhaps to finish his dinner, and by the time he’d got a good look at the man’s face and the foaming madness in his eyes it was too late to do anything but witness it.
    Krasicki screamed something that sounded like mire! You go mire!, the tendons standing out on his throat, and the mindless, primordial sound of it lifted the hair on Goddard’s neck. He came on, raving in some language Goddard had never heard, while spittle ran out of the corner of his mouth, and raised the automatic in his right hand and shot Egerton through the chest at a distance of six feet.
    Both women screamed with the crash of the gun, and Egerton shook under the impact of the slug. Goddard hit Madeleine Lennox with a shoulder, driving her to the deck on the other side of her chair, while Captain Steen snatched at Karen and threw her down. Lind was out of his chair then, lunging around the corner of the table for the Pole, who went on spraying spittle across it with the demonic force of his outcry which rode up over the continuous screaming of the women and then was punctuated by the crash of the gun as he shot again. Egerton jerked spasmodically against the back of his chair and started to slump.
    Lind had Krasicki’s arm then, swinging it up and grabbing for the gun, while Captain Steen and Goddard were trying to get around the other end of the table to reach them. Krasicki was still pulling the trigger. The third shot smashed the overhead light fixture, showering glass, and the fourth, as Lind spun him around, shattered the long mirror on the bulkhead across the room.
    Lind tore the gun from his grasp, bumped him under the jaw with a forearm, and shoved. Krasicki slammed backward and collapsed on deck like a bundle of rags. The screams cut off then, and there was an instant of unearthly silence, broken only by the tinkle of glass as another shard of the mirror fell to the deck and broke. The dining room steward came running in, followed by Barset, who braked to a stop, and whispered, “Sweet, suffering mother of Christ!”
    Goddard turned and looked at Egerton. A trickle of blood ran out of the corner of his mouth, and under the hand clutching at his chest the white shirt was stained with a growing circle of red. His left hand clawed at the tablecloth as he tried to hold himself erect, and when he toppled and fell over sideways he dragged it with him to the accompaniment of breaking china and a marimba tinkling of silverware.

V
    L IND FLIPPED THE SAFETY ON the gun and tossed it to Captain Steen. Already lunging around the end of the table toward Egerton, he snapped at Barset and the dining room steward, “Tie him up and sit on him. Better get help; he’s crazy.”
    “I’ll send for the bos’n,” Steen said.
    Goddard jumped to help Lind. They got Egerton out from behind the table and picked him up by shoulders and legs. Madeleine Lennox and Karen ran out of the door, sobbing as they averted their faces from the limp and bloodstained figure of the Englishman. Lind and Goddard hurried