Against the Tide (11 page)

Suddenly, she was envious of Bane. What must it feel like to be so wholly committed to a cause? To have a purpose that meant her life made a difference in the world? If she joined forces with Bane, she would be working toward a goal larger than herself. Something meaningful and lasting and good.

And yet, a niggling sense of insecurity still plagued her. “Bane, I have a contract with the landlord of my apartment. If I don’t live up to it, I will be evicted.”

“How much do you need to buy your apartment?”

“I need another two hundred dollars within the month.”

“You’ll have it. Work with me each night this week, and by the end of it, I’ll see you have enough to buy your home.”

It was a gamble, and Lydia had never been a big fan of gambling. If it was within her power, she would spend her days in the safety of her Navy Yard job, and the rest of her time in the familiar, cozy little box of her apartment. But the only way she could hang on to her home at the Laughing Dragon was by taking a risk, and she was going to do it.

11

T
he Custom House was a splendid neoclassical building sitting at the base of the Long Wharf. Fluted columns stretched across the front of a building capped by an immense dome, and Lydia was in awe as she stepped inside the rotunda. The marble floors, magnificent dome, arching Palladian windows . . . all around her was evidence of the fortune Boston earned from its maritime history as the premier port in America. “It’s splendid,” she whispered, her voice echoing in the darkened interior.

“You don’t need to whisper,” Bane said as he walked beside her. “We are just here to help the evening cleaners dispose of some trash.”

She still felt like a thief in the night. It helped that the real cleaner, whom Bane introduced as Joe Durning, opened the door for them and was now busily pushing a mop across the marble floors.

“We’ll take care of the trash collection in the east wing, Joe,” Bane said as he flashed a wink at the man.

She followed Bane across the rotunda and into the eastern wing that housed the offices for the cargo inspectors. Bane headed into
the first office and took a seat behind the desk. “Pull up a chair and let me show you how this works.”

The first thing he did was poke through the wastebasket. “I’m looking for letters or anything that might suggest blackmail or bribery. Someone in this building is being paid to look the other way while the opium is shipped in.”

But this particular wastebasket contained nothing but two apple cores and a copy of the
Boston Post.
Lydia understood that looking at the contents of a wastebasket was not illegal, but she grew less comfortable when Bane started riffling through the unknown custom official’s desk.

Bane showed her the difference between a bill of lading, cargo insurance forms, and a ship’s manifest documents. He showed her the various stamps used on each of the forms. When she had agreed to this job, Lydia did not realize she would be getting an education on maritime recordkeeping, but Bane told her this would expedite their work. “I need you to start going through these stacks for anything that resembles a bill of lading. Set aside anything in a language you can read.”

They worked by the light of two lanterns. After several hours, all they had found were three bills of lading, one from Turkey and two from Italy. None of them contained the sort of information Bane was interested in. As dreary as the work was, the hours flew by. They pulled open drawers of filing cabinets, and now that Lydia knew what sort of forms she should be looking for, she was able to start on her own drawer.

Lydia grasped the work quickly, which didn’t surprise Bane, since she had one of the sharpest minds he’d ever encountered. She fascinated him . . . a woman whose life had been as chaotic
and rootless as his own, yet she had remained pure. Her relentless sense of buoyancy was magnetic. He liked simply being near her, soaking up some of her clean, radiant optimism.

“How was it your family ended up in Sicily?” he asked.

Lydia shrugged. “Papa said it was because Mama was a Turk. He always said it with a huge smile, like he was trying to get a rise out of her. She, of course, said it was because Papa’s singing was so bad no one could tolerate us.”

Lydia replaced a file and withdrew another. “Looking back on things, I think it had a lot to do with money. Sometimes we left in the middle of the night, usually on days when Papa had a big argument with men on the pier. I knew we were poor, but we never went hungry. Most of my birthdays and Christmases came and went without gifts, but Papa could always make me feel so special on those days. He would pick out a constellation in the stars and make up a story in which I was always the heroine. He would talk about how I slew a dragon or rescued a kingdom. For weeks I would gaze at that constellation and think about the story he made up for me. Other kids might have had toys and fancy clothes, but who else had stories written about them in the stars?”

Her eyes, illuminated by the dim light of the lamp, were haunting in their loveliness. Lydia was remembering something magical, while Bane thought the story rather sad.

“What about you?” she asked suddenly. “I am an open book, but you never tell me anything about yourself.”

“What do you want to know?” he asked cautiously.

“Where were you born? Let’s start there.”

That seemed harmless enough. “San Francisco. I don’t remember much about it. I was . . . taken away . . . when I was only six.”

“What do you mean, ‘taken away’?”

The memory of his mother’s screams still haunted him, but he
kept his face impassive. “My stepfather was mixed up in the opium trade from China,” he said. “I never knew anything about that at the time; to me, he was just a hard, angry man my mother feared. One day a bigger drug lord tried to buy him out, and my stepfather refused. A week later I was snatched out from my mother’s arms as she was shopping for fish at the market. Two men walked up to us and grabbed me. One of them threw me over his shoulder and took off running. I remember turning my head up to look back at my mother. One of the men shoved her to the ground. She staggered to her feet and kept running after us, but she had blood on her face and on the palms of her hands. She was reaching out and screaming my name.”

Lydia’s eyes were round with horror, but he felt compelled to finish. “That was the last time I ever saw my mother. I was put on a train and sent to Vermont, where the Professor kept me holed up in his mansion. He sent notes to my stepfather, threatening to send me back in a coffin if my stepfather didn’t comply. That is the way the Professor works. He kidnaps someone of value to force compliance among his enemies. It tends to be very effective.”

Bane’s early months at the mansion in Vermont had been horrible because he couldn’t stop thinking of his mother’s terror-stricken face. He had been desperate to get home so he could make sure her hands were bandaged, the blood wiped from her face. She had always tended to him when he was hurt, and he needed to do the same for her. He had begged, pleaded, thrown tantrums. When his rages had grown so loud they disturbed the Professor, the cook fed him opium-laced tea until he was pacified. He had hated that tea. It was sickeningly sweet, and he knew there was something wrong with it. So he had taught himself to control his rages. On the inside he had been screaming, but on the outside he had projected an entirely calm appearance. The ability to mask his emotions had served him well ever since.

“How long were you kept there?”

“Eleven years.”

Lydia gasped and dropped the file. “How is such a thing possible? Didn’t your parents comply with the demands?”

Bane shrugged. “For a while, but eventually I began ingratiating myself with the Professor. I found him fascinating. My stepfather was a bully who raged and gave his temper free rein. The Professor never did. He always treated me kindly, or it least it appeared so to me. I noticed how all the servants seemed to fear him, and I wanted to earn his approval. Over time, the Professor decided to keep me and dump my father. He raised me as his own son.”

Lydia’s eyes were huge pools of sadness. “So that was how you got mixed up in living a life of crime?”

Bane hated, absolutely
hated
talking about those years, but she needed to hear about it. He had noticed the way Lydia looked at him with a blend of amusement and fascination in her eyes. Were he ever free to pursue a woman, Lydia Pallas would be the first, last, and only woman he would be interested in, but it was pointless to even dream about it. Lydia was too priceless to entangle in his dangerous world.

“Over time, the Professor’s trust in me grew. He wanted me in the room while he planned his strategy. He educated me in the ways of banking, trade routes, political networks. He encouraged me to study history and literature so I could pass myself off as a gentleman. From the time I was twelve years old he paid me a salary, just like his other chief lieutenants. By the time I was a teenager I was carrying out tasks for him in Boston and New York.”

Bane had made only one halfhearted bid to escape. When he was fourteen he toyed with the idea of making it on his own. He dodged away into the streets of Philadelphia and tried to go honest. It was the first time he had known what it meant to go hungry, and
he had sought shelter in an orphanage simply to get a hot meal. Lining up with a passel of bratty children for a bowl of soup taught Bane to appreciate what he had with the Professor. The Professor treated him like a man and gave him a sense of purpose. Bane had been too young to begin making it on his own, so he had returned to the Professor, who welcomed him back into his corrupt fold.

“The Professor taught me how to build alliances, play one group off the other,” Bane continued. “What he never saw coming was that I would find salvation. From that day forward, my whole world turned on its axis. When I began to live for a purpose beyond my own vicious ambition, I saw a glimpse of pure joy and I wanted more.” He told Lydia of a woman named Clara who, even though he sinned against her time and again, refused to give up on him.

He dragged a hand through his hair, remembering those first, panic-filled months as he tried to make a getaway. “The Professor didn’t just let me walk away. I knew how his operations worked, the names of all his connections. He put a price on my head, and for years I was the most sought-after man in the country. It was an uncomfortable life at first. I never stayed more than a single night in any location. I changed my name a dozen times. I was always on the move, always looking over my shoulder.”

What Bane did not add was that in those first few weeks he had succeeded in liquidating two of the Professor’s largest bank accounts, one in Atlanta, and the other in Richmond. Bane had had no idea what he would do with the money. Spending it on himself was not an option. The money was tainted with opium and the blood of innocents. Bane had moved the money to several secure accounts and let it accumulate until the day when he would be powerful enough to begin using it to fund his crusade. It was a beautiful irony that the Professor’s own money was now being used to fuel the political candidacy of men Bane wanted to see in office.

He continued by telling Lydia how he landed at the feet of Rachel Fontaine and that her kindness had made it possible for Bane to make a clean escape from the country by joining the navy. He became Admiral Fontaine’s most trusted associate as he worked overseas, gathering information on foreign naval technology and sending it back to Boston. All the while he had been plotting to someday take down the Professor.

“What was she like?” Lydia asked. “The admiral’s wife?”

How could he possibly describe Rachel Fontaine? So many people underestimated Rachel because of her kindness, but Bane never did. The woman had a backbone and a moral compass that were awe-inspiring. “She gave me the chance to prove I was more than a vicious criminal,” Bane said. “After I met Rachel, I was put in a uniform and given a chance to earn an honest dollar. Can you imagine what that felt like?”

He told her how he sought out the naval chaplain onboard ship and learned more about his new faith. At each of the dozens of ports where his ship docked, he looked for churches and saw how fellow believers practiced their faith in France, India, and Egypt. The architecture was different, and the music sounded odd, but the timeless thread of the sacred that echoed through the millennia was present everywhere he went. Each church was like an oasis in the desert, transporting him to a place that was pure and holy.