Circle of Bones (33 page)

“Well, yes.” Sex made all the difference, he thought.

“We knew what we were doing was wrong.”

 He ran his finger over the skin on her forearm. “But it was right in so many ways.” 

She shivered and drew her arm back. “I wasn’t supposed to know your real job. You were just another trust fund Yank playboy enjoying the lower cost of living south of the border. And yet you asked me to do things for you.” She jerked her head in his direction and flashed him a quick look. “And I’m not talking about those things. I mean work things.”

He chuckled at her discomfort. She never could talk about it. She never wanted to say those things, and that made it all the more interesting to watch her mouth when she tried. She’d done things to please him. “You were a great help to me.” If you only knew, he thought.

“I’d convinced myself I was only doing you favors — but,” she said lifting her eyes to his, “it was more, wasn’t it? That last day.” She turned away and spoke to the back of the seat in front of her. “I want to ask, but I’m afraid of what your answer will be.”

He pasted a wounded expression on his face and leaned forward to try to get into her field of vision. “Riley, how can you think that? Really. I was in —” He stopped. “You’re not going to hit me again if I say that word?”

“I might. Don’t say it. You know you don’t mean it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

She made a noise as though something had caught in her throat. “The flight’s not
that
long,” she said.

Neither of them spoke again for quite a long time. He ordered another glass of wine. He would answer her questions. Soon. But not here. She was petite, but strong and fit, and he couldn’t afford to have her go ballistic on the plane. She flipped through the pages of the in-flight magazine. She wasn’t even looking at the print on the pages. He could feel her mind crawling all over him.

She startled him when she spoke. “So when we get there, are you going to disappear again?”

That’s it, he thought. He’d won. She wanted to be with him. She
wanted him.

“We won’t get in until midnight. I have a car and driver meeting us. The weather forecast is for snow. I’ll drive you home so you can get some rest and change.”

She tugged at her shorts with one hand and felt her tousled hair with the other. “I’m not even dry yet. I’ll freeze dressed like this.”

“My driver will have blankets in the car.”

She bit her lower lip and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. The worry lines appeared again between her brows. “If I go with you, Diggory, there won’t be any surprises, right?”

“Absolutely not,” he lied.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

The Atlantic Ocean 

February 13, 1942

“Bloody hell,” Woolsey said as he wiped the cold sea water off his face.

Gohin was the first among them to stagger to his feet. Woolsey saw that the muscular French ensign looked dazed, and he was no longer carrying the pistol. As the man standing closest to the rail when the bomb went off, Gohin had been been blown back halfway across the deck and his face was covered with blood. He may have been hit with a large bit of shrapnel or bone, or his nose was just bleeding from the concussion. Either way, he looked a fright.

Michaut was the first man out of the conning tower, but he was followed by a handful of others. Though Woolsey could not understand what they were saying, he was glad to hear Captain Lamoreaux answer them with a steady voice. But when Woolsey looked into the captain’s eyes, he saw they were focused not on Gohin, but on the gun that lay on the deck between the two men — the gun that was closer to Woolsey than to either of the Frenchmen.

The three men on the lower deck moved at once. Woolsey was at a disadvantage because he was sitting on his backside, but he tried to crawl on all fours across the slippery deck. The big French ensign landed on top of him as Woolsey’s fingers closed around the gun, but after receiving a couple fierce jabs to the kidney and a crushing blow to his wrist, Woolsey gave in. He wasn’t much of a fighter. Gohin pulled the gun from Woolsey’s limp fingers and the big Frenchman got to his feet. He delivered one final kick to Woolsey’s ribs as he muttered the word, “
Salaud
.”

Woolsey lay curled in a ball struggling to breathe.  At Gohin’s order, Michaut and one of the deck officers pulled him to his feet while a couple of sailors grabbed the captain’s arms. They half dragged the two of them across the deck to the ladder, then with Gohin pointing the gun and shouting orders, the men herded Woolsey and Lamoreaux up and down the various ladders and back down the long passage to the door to the hold. 

Inside, Mullins’ body lay where they had left it. Woolsey felt Michaut’s grip tighten on his arm at the sight of it. The sailors released the captain and he began talking to Ensign Gohin in earnest.

“Michaut, what’s he saying?” Woolsey whispered.

“He tell Gohin that he know a secret. That he want to talk to Gohin alone.”

“What’s Gohin saying?”

“He say Captain want to play trick. He must talk in front of all the men.”

Michaut stopped talking when the captain began to speak and Woolsey heard several of the men draw their breath in. Then the captain walked over to Woolsey and held out his hand. “Give me your knife,” he said in English.

Woolsey reached into his pocket and drew out the folded rigging knife. He handed it to Lamoreaux. Walking to one of the wine crates, the captain crouched down and proceeded to pry open the rough wood. He removed what looked like a large, antique, hand-made champagne bottle and held it up for Gohin to see the label. There was something odd about the way he handled the bottle – he held it with two hands as though it were very valuable. Woolsey wondered if he was trying to buy Gohin off with the promise of an exceptional vintage. Just like a frog, he thought. Lamoreaux kept talking, explaining something in French, but when Woolsey looked to Michaut for a translation, he saw the young man’s mouth hanging open and slack, his eyes wide in anticipation. Woolsey was trying to figure out what the old man was up to, when the captain lifted the bottle with a sharp jerk upward, then frapped it down hard on the steel deck. The dark green glass shattered and dozens of shiny gold coins clattered to the deck.

For several seconds, it was as though they were in a film and the reel had stopped. The group of a half dozen men stood frozen in an open-mouthed tableau. Then, in a single instant, the film started up again, and they were all thrust into motion at once. Officers and sailors alike, they ran to the crates and began pulling them apart with their bare hands. Gohin stuffed the pistol into his back waistband and fell to his knees with the others. Bottles crashed and broke, as the men scrambled across the floor shouting and laughing and stuffing their pockets with the bright, shiny coins. Broken glass soon covered the deck, but the oblivious sailors ignored the red stains at the knees of their white duck trousers as they rushed to open more crates.

Though the men holding his arms had forgotten about him and released him, Woolsey stood there and watched the pandemonium, trying to make sense of it. Did they know about this back in New Haven? Did they know about this gold and still want to send the
Surcouf
and her treasure to the bottom? Or was it possible their intelligence was not so accurate after all? With the bomb gone, Woolsey had failed in his mission to destroy the sub. Might he rise in their estimation if he could deliver to them a fortune in gold?

The sound of the gunshot was deafening in the relatively small chamber. Woolsey swiveled around, unsure, at first, who had fired. Then he saw Captain Lamoreaux standing over Mullins’ body, the gun in his hand pointed at the dead man’s torso. 

Gohin slapped at his empty waistband then scowled at the captain. Woolsey figured that the captain had shot into the body to avoid killing anyone else with a ricochet. It worked, and he now had their attention. He turned the gun on them and spoke in French. One by one, they began to empty their pockets and place the coins on the bloody, glass-strewn deck.

Lamoreaux pointed the gun and barked an order. His men started toward the door. When the last of them had exited, the captain turned to Woolsey and said, “The men will get their way. We go to Martinique.”

“And what about your orders?”

The captain spit on the deck. “After the Allies tried to sink
Surcouf
, you think they deserve my loyalty?”

“And what about me?”

“When we arrive in Martinique?” He shrugged his shoulders and blew air out through his rounded lips. Then he rested one hand on the edge of the door. “You will hang,” he said giving the door a strong push.

The door slammed closed and the lights shut off, plunging the hold back into darkness.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Îles des Saintes

March 27, 2008

8:40 p.m.

Cole sat on the bench seat of the galley dinette with his left leg stretched out straight, his foot braced against the doorway, so he wouldn’t slide off the seat as
Shadow Chaser
rolled in the southeasterly swell. He bit his lower lip and turned the brass plate on the green marble calendar for the hundredth time. On the table before him lay various charts of the area, the lockbox, and his father’s well-thumbed journals. 

He had told the Brewster brothers that the object was a cipher disk that would give him the exact coordinates of the location of the submarine. Talk about wishful thinking. He had no idea how the thing might work. As far as he could tell, the purpose of the calendar was to learn the day of the week for any given date. First, you had to know the date — month, day and year — and then the calendar would tell you what day of the week that date fell on. As for how that could be translated into a cipher disk, he was stumped.

He thought about setting it to his own birthday, November 19, 1971 and then realized that the calendar only started in 1998, so that wouldn’t work. Most of the possible dates were in the future. Assuming his father wanted him to set it to a certain date, what date did he have in mind?

Cole turned his attention back to the books and picked up the last of the journals. He opened it to the last page and read the words there for the umpteenth time.

Dear son,

Wits end is where I am. Spent a bit of time there. Expect to be there til the end of days. Got to stop. Them. American president is part and parcel. What goes up must come down. Not a nickel to my name. It’s all yours now. Got to stop. Them. The Creoles sing a song in the islands. It’s called Fais pas do do. Like this.

Fais pas do do, Cole mon p’tit coco

Fais pas do do, tu l’auras du lolo

Yayd d’dir

Y’did yd

Jamais fais do do.

Cole had been certain since the first day he’d read this page that there was something different about it. His old man was trying to tell him something secret here, but doing it in such a way that it wouldn’t be clear to anyone who might look through the journals. Cole had tried everything to decode those words during these past months, and when he was trying to use the French Angel coin as key, nothing had worked. Not until Riley came along, that is. 

Cole shook his head to try to clear it. He hadn’t been able to concentrate on the problem at hand all night. His mind kept returning to her. What was happening to her? Where was she at this moment? Had she arrived in Washington? He thought about the way she tucked her hair behind her ear, how she smelled like the orange blossoms he remembered from his childhood, and the way the light danced in her eyes when they dug up the calendar. 

The calendar.
Concentrate
, he told himself. This blasted calendar paper weight that his father thought he would understand and yet, he had been at it most of the night, and he still had no idea what it meant or how to use it. What was the connection to the journals or
Surcouf
? The calendar had the names of the months written in the center, the years on the background plate, and the day names and numbers on the two plates. How did that relate to his father’s cryptic note and this odd French Creole song? Or did it relate at all? In the end, the message of the French Angel had nothing to do with this journal, other than maybe the reference to the word nickel. 

He started to read the page through one more time, and he paused at the end of the second sentence. His father had used the word “time.” Wits end. Where on a calendar is wit’s end? How much time did he spend there? He wrote
expect to be there until the end of days.
Cole sighed and rubbed his tired eyes with both hands. The old man could never make anything easy for him. Wits end. Cole felt like he was already there. He wished he could understand what his father was trying to tell him.

“Cole,” Theo called from the bridge. “We’re approaching the bay. Do you want to take her in?”

He closed the journal, slid off the bench seat and made his way to the wheelhouse. Through the forward window, he saw Riley’s boat at anchor deep inside the moonlit bay.  Cole checked his watch: eight-thirty. 

“We made good time,” he said.

“Helps to have the current and the wind on our tail.”

Cole stared at the sleek white sailboat. “Glad to see her boat looks fine.”

Theo glanced at Cole over the tops of his glasses. “It’s not her boat you’re worried about.”

“I told Riley I’d look after it. We’ll drop the hook close by. Might even raft up. There’s not much wind in here for now and it would be more secure. I’ll take her in. You go ready the anchor.”

Thirty minutes later, the
Shadow Chaser
was anchored with the little sailboat tied to her port side, fat fenders preventing the two hulls from bumping together. Cole stood, his forearms resting atop the bulwark, and stared down at the deck of the
Bonefish
. Theo appeared at his side and the mate handed him one of the frosty beer bottles he was carrying.