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intensified with her knowledge that they were a spectacle, and she was briefly grateful that so few people were there to see it. Only two men loitering on the jetty near the Angel ’s mooring seemed to be paying any attention to their approach.
    No one was in sight aboard the yacht. At its gangplank Holtz pushed her ahead of him and followed at her heels, crowding her impatiently until they stood together on the Angel ’s deck. Only then did he relax his nervous insistence on hurry, seeming to adopt a confidence of accomplishment the moment they stepped off the head of the gangplank.
    Blake found them there when he came up the engine-room ladder. He was cleaning his hands on a piece of waste, and he indicated the grease still on his fingers as a reason for not offering his hand when Marian, playing her humiliating part, said, ‘This is my - friend, Mr Holtz. We came for my bag.’
    ‘You got here just in time,’ Blake said. ‘I’m casting off as soon as my crew comes aboard. How ’s the ankle?’
    ‘Much better, thank you.’ She did not meet his eyes.
    ‘Where is the bag?’ Holtz asked.
    The little man ’s question was unexpectedly peremptory. Blake said, ‘In the pilot-house. I’ll get it.’
    ‘We’d like to go with you. Wouldn’t we, my dear?’
    Marian ’s ‘Yes’ was wooden, emotionless.
    Puzzled, aware of a n undercurrent he did not under stand, Blake looked at her for an explanation. She still avoided his eyes. He wondered if she could have brought Holtz along as a witness to the bag ’s existence, as an insurance for its recovery. He could not believe that she could be so distrustful with so little reason, but both Holtz ’s manner and her own bore out the conclusion that her companion was something more than a friend who was there only to keep her casual company.
    Still puzzled, he said, ‘Come along, by all means,’ and led the way. The bag was where he had left it. He stepped aside on the bridge wing to let Marian enter the pilot-house ahead of him, and was waiting for Holtz to precede him as well when the little man took a heavy Walther automatic from his coat and leveled it at Blake ’s belt buckle.
    ‘You first, Captain,’ he said tautly. ‘s tand over by the girl and keep quiet.’
    Blake ’s mind refused, for a moment, to recognize the reality of what was happening. His first thought was that he was being made the victim of a tasteless practical joke. The gun was overlarge in Holtz ’s small hand, like a clumsy toy in the hand of a child. But Holtz did not hold it clumsily, and his expression was not childlike. He had about him the air of a man who was going through a well-planned, well-rehearsed routine, and would make no mistakes.
    Blake hesitated only briefly in the face of the pointed gun, then followed Marian into the pilot-house. His perplexity was increased, rather than otherwise, by the expression of shocked incredulity on her face at the sight of the pistol. Her surprise could not have been assumed. She stared, wide-eyed, speechless.
    Holtz stood in the doorway, keeping his distance. Blake said, ‘What is this? What are you after?’
    ‘You’ll learn. Be quiet.’
    Holtz, without moving his eyes or shifting the unwavering muzzle of the Walther from its steady aim at Blake ’s middle, seemed to be listening intently for something. He stood half inside, half outside the pilot-house, one foot over the storm-sill of the doorway, his head cocked back, his mouth clamped in a grimace of tense attention. Blake could hear nothing except the steady putter of the auxiliaries he had started, see nothing from where he stood except the expanse of the harbor , the cruiser ’s foredeck, a part of the foredeck of the sail-boat moored alongside, and the Angel ’s twin anchor chains plunging rigidly out and down from her bow. He knew that the yacht ’s stern lines had been cast off when the anchor chains suddenly drooped, losing their strain, and the bow of the sailboat alongside