Circle of Bones (13 page)

By the time Diggory reached the sidewalk, the barbarian had already disappeared into the Rue Victor Hugo.  He recognized the man from a photo Caliban had shown him. Diggory allowed him to get ahead and disappear among the pedestrians, autos and motorbikes that jostled  along the narrow street. The man’s destination,
Le Mambo
, was a small bar up an even darker alley, the place where Diggory was supposed to meet him at eight — in fifteen minutes.

Maggie Riley would have to wait. 

Le Mambo
had once been a back street dive, but it had now been discovered by a younger French crowd. Dig squeezed past a voluptuous woman standing in the narrow doorway. She was trying to talk into a cell phone without dislodging the largest hoop earrings he had ever seen. Her white blond hair was molded into dozens of short, sharp spikes. When she paused, she stuck a cigarette between her lips and sucked until the end of the butt grew cherry red and her cleavage swelled. 

Once inside, Diggory waited for his eyes to adjust to the minimum light provided by the few red-tinted bulbs that hung from the ceiling on wires. The tables were only half-filled as it was still quite early for the French. The clientele tended toward the pierced nose and leather crowd, and the music pounding out from the large black speakers was the frenetic Franco-Caribbean pop they called
zouk
.

The man he was looking for was sitting at the corner of the bar with his back to the door, the red windbreaker appearing almost black under the red lights. It was obvious he was a mongrel, a mixed breed. His skin, or what Diggory could see of it round his neck, looked more gray than brown and his dark frizzy hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Along his face hung several long thin braids with cowry shells knotted into the plaits.

Diggory leaned the oars against the bar and slid onto the stool around the corner from the windbreaker man. He rested his arms on the bar, his steepled fingers very close to the barbarian’s sweating glass of beer.

When the man turned to face him, Diggory was amused to see a silver skull and cross bones hanging by a chain through his left ear. 

“D’ya mind?” the man said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, d’ya mind? Stay on your own fuckin’ side of the bar.”

Dig did not move. “Caliban told me I’d find you here.”

“Shit. Why didn’t ya say so.” The man tipped up his glass and drained his beer. Then he stuck out his hand. “Name’s Spyder, with a Y.”

Diggory ignored his hand as the bartender approached. He was an effeminate black man with hair shaped like abstract topiary and contact lenses that tinted his eyes an unnatural green. He asked Diggory if he wanted a drink. 

“He don’t speak nuthin’ but French,” the barbarian said. “I tried.”

Diggory ordered a glass of red wine which he had no intention of touching. Then he turned to the American and spoke in English. “We hired you to do a job.”

“Hey, I got this shit under control. We got the guy’s dinghy.”

“No, you do not have this shit under control, do you?”

The man gave Diggory a puzzled look. “What d’ya mean?” 

The bartender set the glass of red wine on the bar. Priest waited until he moved away before continuing. “I noticed you crossing the square from over one hundred feet away. You attract too much attention. This is a quiet business. Covert. Do you know what that means?”

“Are you calling me stupid?” the man asked, his words loud enough to be heard over the music from across the room.

“Lower your voice. Yes, I am calling you stupid. I also asked you a question. You don’t know what covert means, do you?”

The cheek on one side of the man’s face bulged as his tongue explored the molars behind his brown-colored front teeth. He ignored Diggory.

“Covert means secretive. Hidden,” Dig said. “We don’t want to broadcast to everyone what we are doing here. You want to blend in.” He felt like he was talking to one of the rodents roaming the streets. They would have understood him just as well. He pinched the nylon fabric of the man’s windbreaker between his fingers. “Red is not a color for someone who does not want to be noticed. Pushing people out of the way, kicking their dogs — this is not good practice for someone who does not want to be noticed. Are you getting my drift here?”

The barbarian refused to look at him. He stared at his glass and said, “Yeah.”

“I want you to follow orders, now. My orders. Do you understand?” 

“Yeah.”

“Look at me when I speak to you.”

The man ran his fingers across his two-day growth of beard, and Diggory saw that every finger was tipped with a crescent of black dirt under the fingernail. The man swiveled his head around and met Diggory’s eyes. His pupils were huge black pools. 

“There’s a woman,” Diggory said. “I want you to follow her.” 

“But that Caliban guy said he wanted me to snatch the doc, get the coin.”

“And you were so successful at that.”

“Hey, I said I got it under control.”

Diggory did not say anything for almost a minute.  He kept his eyes on the other man’s face and watched the barbarian grow more and more uncomfortable. A last, he said, “Do you understand that you work for me?”

The red windbreaker man looked away and signaled for the bartender to bring him another beer. When he spoke, he did not look at Dig. “Yeah, I got it.”

“You will do exactly what I tell you to do, and you will stop making these feeble efforts to think for yourself.” Diggory gave the man a description of Maggie Riley and told him she was sailing a white-hulled boat about thirty-five to forty feet in length anchored just off the red light in the entrance channel. “The boat might be named
Bonefish
.” Diggory remembered her telling him about her dream of owning a boat and naming it after the vessels she had sailed with her brother.

“I want you to locate the boat tonight, and —” Diggory twisted around and picked up the oars. He handed one to the other man and rested the remaining oar across his knees. The oars were designed to be taken apart for easier stowage. A small button protruded where the two halves of the oars joined and when Diggory pressed it in with his thumb, he was able to slide the two aluminum tubes apart. “I want you to leave these on her deck without her knowledge,” he said as he pulled out a small object that looked like a silver AA battery. He slid it into a small ziplock bag, then using several napkins from the pile on the bar, Diggory stuffed the wrapped device into the oar and connected the tubes once again. He held the second oar out to the barbarian. 

The man started to take it, then hesitated. “That ain’t a bomb, I hope.”

“No, it’s not a bomb. I don’t want her to know who left the oars. Understand?”

“Yeah, right. Covert.”

“Call in twice daily.” Diggory slid a slip of paper across the bar.

The man picked up the paper and looked at it as though it were written in an undecipherable code. “Call you? But that dude Caliban said —”

“Yes. Call me. Once in the morning, once at night. Stick with her. Tell me where she is and what she’s doing. But do it
covertly
.”

“And what about the other —”

Diggory lifted his palm to hush the man. “No questions, no thinking for yourself. You work for me now. Do you understand?”

The man shrugged and shoved the paper into a pocket of the nylon windbreaker. Tipping up his glass, he drained the beer, his Adam’s apple bobbing between the taut tendons in his neck. Then he left without another word and without leaving any money.

Filth, Dig thought. He’d always disliked using non-professionals for anything other than information, but it came with the job.

When he was on his way out the door, past the woman with the earrings who was still talking on her cell, Diggory felt his own phone vibrate in his pocket. He stepped away from the doorway and started down the street. Once he was alone, he pulled out the phone and looked down at the glowing screen. He recognized the number as that of the German school teacher from the night before. An image of her naked body flashed in his mind and he stopped walking. There were reports to write and arrangements to be made for the surveillance. And he remembered how this teacher was both exceedingly limber and inventive, and when he’d told her what he wanted the previous night, she’d viewed it as a challenge. With a flick of his wrist he opened the phone and pressed it to his ear.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Atlantic south of Bermuda

February 12, 1942

The captain swung the torch beam around the compartment and fixed it on each man. As the three Brits stared at him in silence, he raised his arm and wiped his face on his sleeve, which only served to smear the blood and make him look worse. 

“My men want to go home,” he said in heavily accented English, “but my orders were for Panama.” The French Captain shrugged. He appeared smaller, deflated.

Woolsey felt his mouth open to answer the man, then he realized he had never spoken to the Captain without the benefit of Henri Michaut’s translation. “You speak English?” he asked.

The Captain continued as though Woolsey had not spoken. “Who can blame them? The worst thing about putting into port is that we get mail. With news from home, their families tell them that life in occupied France is not so bad. They have mothers, girlfriends,” he shone the light on Mullins, “and boyfriends. So, we are now headed for Martinique.”

It was obvious, he spoke the language damn well. Thinking back, Woolsey wondered how many times he and the other Brits had spoken freely in front of the old man thinking he didn’t understand a word.

“So the Frog crew gave you the boot, eh Capt’n?” McKay spoke from deep in the depths of the hold.

“What does this mean, the boot?”

“Mutiny, Mate.”

“Ah, yes, this is the word. They intend to surrender to Admiral Petain in Martinique.”

“How long will it take —” Woolsey began.

McKay barked out a laugh. “Fuckin’ Hooray.”

Lamoreaux ignored him. “It is just over one thousand miles to Fort de France. Our electric motors are still giving trouble so we must stay at the surface. It would be too dangerous to dive. At the surface, the best we can do is ten knots.”

Woolsey didn’t have to know much about ships to do that math. Two hundred forty miles a day meant it was at least four days to Martinique. They didn’t have one.

Lamoreaux was rummaging about in the cases of wine bottles, the torchlight making the shadows dance on the bulkheads. 

“Captain, may I have a word?” 

“
Ahhh, voila, c’est ici,
” the Captain whispered to himself. He produced a sommelier’s knife and corkscrew, sat down on a crate and began to open a bottle. The loud
pop
of the pulled cork brought McKay out of the shadows. The Captain handed him the bottle and went to work on another.

Woolsey thought McKay sober was bad enough. “Captain, Sir, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. We need to keep our wits about us.”

After taking a drink from the bottle in his hand, Lamoreaux looked up at Woolsey and studied him for a moment. “I do not think you understand the situation.”

“I know I’m not ready to give up. There’s got to be something we can do. Surely some of your men remain loyal to you.”

Lamoreaux closed one eye and looked up at the ceiling with the other. He appeared to be running through the list of men in his head. At last, he spoke. “No, not a one.” He took a long pull on the bottle.

Woolsey knocked the bottle out of the man’s hand, and it broke when it hit the deck a few feet away. The sharp, fruity smell of the wine filled the compartment.

“Lieutenant, that was not wise. There is not so much wine here as you might think. Not for what we need.”

What was the man talking about? There were cases and cases of wine. “Captain, you can’t  sit here and get pissed while your men take over your command. Get hold of yourself, man. There are four of us here. We can overpower the guards next time they come in. This is your boat.”

Lamoreaux had reached for another bottle and was in the process of screwing the metal coil into the cork. He paused. “Lieutenant, there is no way that the four of us are going to succeed against one hundred and twenty-five men. Either, they are going to feed us to the sharks en route, or they are going to send you three to prison camps and they will hang me for treason – for joining DeGaulle. My boat — the
Surcouf,
the pride of the French Navy will go off with the Huns. You don’t think that is enough reason to get drunk?”

“Captain, there is something aboard this boat that your men know nothing about.”

Lamoreaux set the bottle aside and aimed the torch beam on Woolsey. “You know? What is this?”

“This thing, Captain, involves a third possible fate for us all – and it will sink your precious boat.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Captain Lamoreaux, there is a bomb on this boat and it is going to go off in about twenty hours.”

The captain threw back his head and laughed. “Psshht. Lieutenant. For a moment I thought you really knew something secret about my boat. But this?
Non
. You cannot trick me into trying something with you English.”

“This is no trick, I assure you, Captain. I set the thing myself.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Le Gosier

March 26, 2008

1:05 a.m.

Diggory counted the revolutions of the ceiling fan blades spinning over the center of the room and tried not to think about the naked woman lying next to him, face down on the bed, her right leg draped across his thighs. He could feel the sweat pooling in the spaces where her skin touched his. When she inhaled, the soft tissue at the back of her throat vibrated and the snores seemed to rise out of her open mouth like the bubbles of cartoon speech. There would be no sleep for him.

He had arranged to meet the school teacher — her name was Ulrika — at the casino, leaving himself enough time to return to his rooms and change into the clothes, slicked back hair and glasses of the Peruvian business man she had met in St. Francois. After a few drinks, they went to the
La Cheyanne
in Le Gosier where the gyrating crowds, pulsing lights, and blinking images on the big screens had excited her more than any pharmaceutical could. He didn’t enjoy dancing, not in amongst the throngs of filthy French and Creole young people who crammed themselves into beach discos on the weekends, but he was good enough at it so as not to be noticed as either too good or pitifully bad.