Against the Tide (14 page)

14

T
he few, precious hours Lydia spent with Bane each night in the Custom House were becoming the most magical part of her life. Each night she waited for him to meet her at the Laughing Dragon; then they walked the six blocks to the Custom House. Who would have thought reading through stacks of dusty tax registers could be so exciting? But anything done alongside Alexander Banebridge was fascinating to her. He showered her with irreverent taunts, and she flung them back just as quickly. Sometimes they simply pushed the shipping forms to the side and wallowed in the joy of having someone to talk to.

“So why Lewis and Clark?” he asked her. “Why not Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson? They seem like more traditional people to idolize.”

They sat at a large worktable in the tax assessor’s office, huddled within the circle of amber light provided by a single kerosene lantern. Lydia pulled another stack of documents onto her lap, idly turning the forms in search of the distinctive stamp of a bill of lading. “I think because they were faced with both a physical and
a mental challenge at the same time,” she said. “My life seems so small and humble in comparison. Each day Lewis and Clark were confronted with danger and the unknown. They kept plowing forward, pushing their bodies through hunger and disease and exhaustion until they didn’t know if they could even last another day. I admire that.”

“Would you have gone along with them? If you’d had the opportunity?”

Lydia thought of her cozy apartment, her safe job, and the secure world she had built for herself. “Probably not,” she reluctantly admitted. “I like stability too much, but it is fun to daydream about such things.”

“Most women daydream of a husband and babies. Adorable little angels who only laugh, never cry.”

“Why do you sound so cynical?” she asked. “Don’t you want to have children someday?”

“That would require a wife, and I’ve already told you that will never happen for me.” Bane’s voice was flat and unemotional as he opened another file and began extracting the bills of lading. It hurt, the way he erected a wall between them so swiftly and completely. The reason she suspected he would never marry hurt even worse.

“Is it because you are already in love with someone?” Lydia asked softly. “Was it Rachel Fontaine?”

Bane froze. “Why do you ask that?”

“You are different when you speak about her. You seem . . . reverent, almost. I rarely see that side of you.”

Bane set the file aside and leaned back in his chair. “I was not in love with Rachel. Not in the sense you are referring to.”

Lydia was embarrassed at how quickly the tension drained from her shoulders. Bane noticed. “Don’t go building any romantic daydreams about me,” he warned. His face was serious and his
voice was rough with pain. “I think I need to explain exactly why marriage would be completely impossible for me.” She could see a muscle throbbing in his jaw and he stared bitterly at the floor beneath his boots. “The Professor’s preferred manner of controlling his enemies is not a direct assault—he is too devious for that. He prefers to kidnap or terrorize the people his enemies love. That’s how he would try to get to me if I ever married or had children. And Lydia,” Bane looked up at her, his eyes intent, “the Professor is perfectly happy to hold on to his hostages for years. I’ve never let anyone get close to me. I can’t risk that, Lydia.”

He stood and walked outside the circle of light from the oil lantern, pacing in the darkened corners of the room. “I’ve never told this to anyone, but I think you need to understand exactly the kind of life I led. I cared deeply about Rachel and I was grateful to her for helping me, but if the Professor had ever learned of my admiration for Rachel, it would have put her in danger. My visits to the admiral could be brushed away as normal business, but if I ever socialized with the family? Attended church alongside them or shared a holiday? The Professor would know I had grown soft, and none of the Fontaines would be safe. I’ve never allowed myself to grow attached to anyone. I have business associates, but no friends. In earlier years I used to see families in the park and imagine what it would be like to have a family of my own, but it’s a ridiculous exercise in torture. I quit doing it a long time ago.”

Lydia’s heart squeezed at the image his words conjured up. This man lived in
exile.
He was always on the outside, looking at a life he could never touch. She wanted to rush to him, encircle him in her arms, and give him the warmth and affection he had been denying himself, but he had not stopped speaking and she dared not interrupt.

“I don’t expect you to be able to understand,” he said slowly, “but
watching the Fontaine children grow up is the closest thing I will have to a family of my own. I only see them every few months when I am in town on business to see the admiral, but it has been . . .” Bane struggled to find the words. “It has been a great delight to watch those babies grow into toddlers, and then into children. But if the Professor ever learned what that family means to me . . . heaven help them.”

Bane’s voice was hollow as he looked at her. “And I can never risk your safety either.”

Silence stretched between them. She knew the grinding ache of living without the warmth and security of a loving family, and she longed to provide that warmth to Bane. “What if I was willing to take the risk?” she asked.

She could barely discern the outline of his features as he leaned against the wall, his arms folded across his chest. His face was in shadow, but she could sense he was looking directly at her.

“If it were in my power,” he said slowly, “I would run away with you to some wild Caribbean island where we could live together in the wilderness. Somewhere we could bask in the sunshine and dance in the rain. We’d eat fish we pulled from the sea and drink wine straight from the bottle.”

Lydia leaned forward, a glimmer of excitement beginning to smolder within her chest. Hadn’t she always secretly dreamed of doing something bold and daring? With Bane beside her, she would be brave enough to run the risk. “Bane, why can’t we? Why can’t we just disappear together and never look back?”

A bleak smile touched the corner of his mouth. “Oh, Lydia, you are as innocent as the newborn day,” he said. “If I dragged you into the muck of my world, you would always be looking over your shoulder, fearing the next stranger you encountered on the street. I could not bear to watch you grow into a nervous, embittered
woman. The Professor’s network spans the entire world, and there is
nowhere
we could go where he could not find us.”

He pushed away from the wall and began moving toward her. She stood and rushed toward him, feeling his arms close around her. He placed a desperate kiss on the side of her face, then whispered into her ear, so softly she could barely hear the words.

“Lydia, I love you,” he whispered. “I’ve never said those words to another woman, and for the rest of my life, I will be thankful you are in this world. I love your humor and your irreverent, gentle brilliance. I love your courage. I love the way you stand up to me and laugh while you do it. But I can’t take you with me. When I leave Boston, you will never see me again.”

With an abruptness that startled her, Bane released her and strode back to the table, sitting down and pulling another stack of files toward him. She felt swept up in a whirlwind of emotion, but Bane’s face was blank. “We have two more hours to get through all the Italian ship records from last year,” he said. “I think we can do it, don’t you?”

His voice was light and energetic again. It was as though the achingly beautiful words he had just whispered in her ear had never been spoken.

She lowered herself into the chair, not trusting her legs to support her any longer. “I suppose so,” she said weakly.

Bane sat on the edge of the bed in his spartan hotel room, running his fingers along the edge of the photograph of Rachel holding her two children. What would his life have been like had Rachel not intervened and got him aboard that ship heading to Brussels? If he had stayed closer to her, could he have prevented her death?

His shoulders sagged. On the morning of her death, Rachel
Fontaine had been a healthy young woman, but a slip on the ice had broken her wrist. The doctor advised opium to dull her pain while he set the bone. Even if Bane had been right beside her, he would have told her to take it. Just once shouldn’t have been a problem.

The doctor administered the opium via injection, but within ten minutes Rachel’s lungs began seizing and she could not get enough air. Never having taken so much as a drop of opium before that day, how was she to have known it would affect her that way? Her body had had a profound reaction to the drug. It seized her lungs and made it a battle for her to draw each breath of air as she began to lose the battle against exhaustion. Bane later heard it took her six hours to die. She had been awake throughout the entire ordeal.

He couldn’t blame Rachel’s death on the opium smugglers, but she was another casualty of a drug that was so freely dispensed and so little understood.

He had never told her what she meant to him.

Back when he knew Rachel, he was still looking over his shoulder every hour, protective of her and determined to stay ten steps ahead of the Professor and his men. He had allowed himself to become soft in Boston. He needed to remember the sense of fear that had kept him alive during those early years on the run.

He folded the photograph in half. It had been careless of him to even carry such a photograph of Rachel and her children. If the Professor had learned of it, he would have known where to strike. Bane would never forget the memory of her face, but that didn’t lessen the pain as he held a corner of the photograph to the candle flame and watched as it consumed the paper.

15

O
n the sixth evening of their work at the Custom House, Bane finally found a solid lead. They were in the office of Inspector Ian McGannon, one of five customs agents who checked incoming cargo and prepared an inventory for tax purposes. At the bottom of McGannon’s wastebasket was a single cigar band.

Bane held the band of green-and-gold foil up to the light of the lantern. “It appears Inspector McGannon has expensive taste in cigars,” he said to Lydia.

She shrugged. “I don’t know anything about cigars.”

“I do.
Candemir
are the finest Turkish cigars.”

The presence of Turkish cigars in Inspector McGannon’s office probably signified nothing, but Bane thought a little peek into the man’s desk drawers might not be a bad idea.

The
Candemir
cigar box was in the desk’s lower right-hand drawer. The ornate green-and-gold box had an inscription on the top. Bane held it to the lantern and could easily read the carefully printed English letters:

To my dear friend Ian McGannon,

Please enjoy Turkey’s finest.

Demir Mehmet

“Lydia, what is ‘Demir Mehmet’? Is it a name or a phrase?”

He showed her the inscription. “It is a man’s name. Mehmet is a common surname in Turkey.”

Bane tapped his fingers across the surface of the box. It wasn’t a good idea for a customs official to accept gifts, even inexpensive ones such as a box of cigars, from merchants. Bane opened the lid and poked through the remaining cigars in the box. And then he found what he had spent months looking for taped to the bottom of the box.

It was a list of ships sailing out of the port of Constantinople. And next to each ship was the estimated date of arrival in Boston.

A cold smile curved Bane’s mouth. This was precisely the sort of thing a customs inspector would need to know if he was being paid to overlook cargo on specific ships. A quick scan of the dates revealed that four of the ships had already arrived within the past few months. The other six were all due to arrive during the coming year.

“What are you thinking?” Lydia asked. “I don’t like that chilling expression on your face.”

Bane grabbed a piece of scrap paper from the wastebasket and began making a copy of the list. “I suddenly have a burning desire to check the bills of lading for these four ships,” he said. “I suspect a careful examination may point us to the source of the opium that has been streaming into this port for the better part of two years.”

Older records were in the basement, where aisle after aisle of filing cabinets stood like megaliths in the darkened interior.

“Where to begin?” Lydia asked.

Bane found the bank of cabinet drawers that held records from the port of Constantinople and began riffling through the files, looking for a ship called the
Black Swan,
which the note indicated should have arrived the last week of July. His mouth twisted in distaste as memories crashed into the forefront of his mind. Over the years he had discovered dozens of ships just like the
Black Swan
quietly smuggling opium ashore and avoiding the staggering taxes the government demanded. Bane found the records for the
Black Swan
and held the lantern high.

The original bill of lading was in Turkish with an English translation appended to the document. A glance at the bottom of the form revealed Ian McGannon’s signature. Before the ship could be unloaded, McGannon and the ship’s purser would have walked along each aisle of crates in the hold, creating an itemized list of the cargo.

Bane scanned the document, noting the
Black Swan
carried bolts of silk, hand-woven carpets, and barrels of almonds. He handed the Turkish document to Lydia.

“Read the items in the list,” he said. “I need an exact word-for-word translation.”

“Six barrels of olives, ten barrels of almonds.” She had to squint in the dim light and tilted the document toward the lantern. As Lydia read, Bane scanned the English document, noting each item as she read it.

“Four crates of cigars. Fifteen crates of coconuts,” Lydia said.

Bane nearly dropped the lantern.
“Coconuts?”

Lydia double-checked the document. “Yes, right here,” she said, pointing to the word.

Bane’s eyes narrowed as he scanned the English document. As he suspected, there was no mention of coconuts. Not that he expected to see it.

“Smuggling opium inside the husks of hollowed-out coconuts is one of the easiest ways to transport large quantities. No wonder McGannon did not want the word to appear on the English bill of lading. Especially since Turkey does not impress me as one of the world’s foremost coconut exporters. How many crates did you say were in there?”

“Fifteen crates.”

Bane’s knees nearly went weak. That was thousands of pounds of opium. When opium was transported in coconut husks, it was the refined, dangerous version. And the
Black Swan
was merely one of ten ships on McGannon’s list.

Bane’s voice grew cold. “Let’s find the manifest for the next ship on the list.” The trail was white-hot, and Bane was almost certain what he would find. The
Scarletti
arrived in August, and after pulling the documents, he noted the exact same discrepancy in this ship’s bill of lading, as well as with the other two ships that had already arrived.

“Each of these documents was signed by Ian McGannon,” Bane said. “It is clear to me he was paid to look the other way for ships arriving from Demir Mehmet.”

Lydia had a hopeful expression on her face. “If you can prove that McGannon is the source of the smuggling, will that mean you can block the opium coming into Boston? Is this the beginning of the end?”

Her question revealed in stark clarity how green Lydia was in the ways of the opium trade. He closed the file drawer. “No, Lydia. The opium trade is a hydra-headed monster. When we cut off one head, another will grow somewhere else. And when I find out where that is, I will seek it out and kill it there as well.”

Lydia’s eyes were luminous in the dim light. “This means you will be leaving Boston?” The pain in her voice was unmistakable.
He fought the temptation to draw her within the circle of his arms and comfort her. There was nothing he could do or say that would make this any easier.

“Yes, Lydia. I will take these documents to the authorities in the morning, so there is no need for us to keep coming to the Custom House. I won’t have any need for a translator after tonight.” He turned away and closed the file drawer so he would not have to see the anguish in her eyes. The slamming of the drawer echoed in the darkness of the room. How foolish he had been to believe he could indulge in a casual flirtation with her and then walk away without feeling like his heart had been torn from his chest.

Bane held her hand as they mounted the staircase leading up to the grand rotunda of the Custom House. A little weak moonlight streamed through the windows, and he knew with painful clarity that he had only a few more minutes with the only woman he had ever loved. He kept walking across the lobby toward the front door, but she refused to follow him.

“I don’t want you to go.” Lydia’s voice was pale and brittle in the darkness.

He did not turn around. He forced his voice to sound calm, but he kept his face averted from her. “I’ll get you the two hundred dollars I owe you, but my nearest bank is in Philadelphia, so it may be a week or two before I can get it to you.”

A brisk rustle of fabric sounded behind him, and then Lydia tugged at his arm, forcing him to turn and look at her. “I don’t care about the money,” she said. “I care about you and this awful life you have been leading. Don’t shut me out. Don’t walk away from what we have.”

Lydia’s head was high, hopeful determination in her face. How quickly her spirit would dim if she were always on the run beside him, never sleeping more than a few nights in a single location.
He raised his hand to cup the side of her face. “There is no room in my world for orderly ink bottles or safe harbors,” he said softly. “Eventually, you would grow to hate being with me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you just put an end to the Professor? You know where he lives, and if you called the authorities, you could
put a stop
to him.”

He could, but he wouldn’t. If he snuffed the Professor out, some other drug lord would move in to fill the void, and Bane would have no insight on how to stay one step ahead of him. “It’s because I know how the Professor’s mind works that I’ve been so good at predicting his behavior,” he said. “I made a vow to do whatever was humanly possible to wreak havoc on the opium trade, and the best way to do that is to allow the Professor to maintain his position.”

Now she was angry. “So you are going to sacrifice your entire life to this? Be forever on the run—forever alone—all so you can carry on your one-man crusade.”

She was entirely correct. The cost of his crusade never weighed more heavily on him than it did at this very moment, but it could not change the vow he made to himself or to God. The most effective way for him to block the import of smuggled opium was to understand the mind of the man who controlled the operation. He could not abandon that mission.

“I’m sorry I’ve disappointed you,” he said. If he spelled out all the ways he was sorry, he’d be talking until the sun rose. It was time to get out of here and end the agony. Lydia looked wounded and desolate at his words, but standing here wasn’t going to make things better, so he opened the door and left the building. The bitter darkness swirled around him as he walked down the icy street.

Lydia’s footsteps scurried behind him, and he paused while she caught up to him. Without looking at her and without a word, he proffered his arm for her to take. They walked in silence through
the night. This would be the last time he walked beside her, the last time he felt her slim little hand curled around his arm. Lydia was his partner, his match, and she adored him. The knowledge was killing him, but he had an irrational desire to prolong the agony. He slowed his steps as they drew closer to the Laughing Dragon, buying just a few more seconds of her company, a few more seconds of having a companion in the world.

Inevitably they came to the door of the Laughing Dragon. The coach light illuminated the lovely planes of Lydia’s face, but her eyes were narrowed in determination. How very Lydia, her refusal to accept defeat. It made him love her all the more.

He pulled her closer, breathed deeply of her clean scent, and pressed his lips against the soft shell of her ear. “Forget you ever knew me,” he whispered. “Pretend I never existed. Go back to your world and never look back.”

She stiffened in his arms. “I can’t do that.”

Neither could he. She was branded onto his soul, where her memory would blaze as long as he lived. He extricated himself from her arms, looked down into her beautiful face, and lied.

“I can.”

Lydia’s mouth compressed into a hard line, and steel flashed in her eyes. “I won’t give up on you,” she said. “There haven’t been very many things in my life that have been worth fighting for, but Bane, you are one of them.”

The door banged as she entered the Laughing Dragon, leaving him alone on the street.