Rembrandt's Ghost (5 page)

Tulkinghorn fussed with his papers, muttering to himself. He resurfaced, nodding. “Yes, here we are,” he said. “According to my information, your father was a senior visiting fellow at Magdalene College Cambridge, which was in fact his alma mater.”

“That’s right. He was there during World War Two. They asked him back to teach sometime in the sixties.”

“Nineteen sixty-nine to be exact,” said Tulkinghorn. “He spent ten years there, off and on between digs. He returned to the University of Ohio in the summer of 1979 to head up their department of archaeology.”

Finn nodded. “My mother wanted me to be born in the States.”

“Indeed,” murmured Tulkinghorn. “Be that as it may, Pieter Boegart read archaeology at Magdalene from 1970 to 1973. Lyman Ryan was his tutor and thesis adviser. Between 1973 and June of 1979, he was a lecturing assistant to your father as well as field supervisor on several of his digs in Central America.”

“He knew my father. That doesn’t make him my mother’s lover.”

“No,” Tulkinghorn agreed. He put the pipe down on his desk and opened the center drawer. He withdrew a small package of letters held togetherby a thick rubber band. The letters looked old. The envelopes were pale green, her mother’s favorite color. “These make Pieter Boegart your mother’s lover.” He used one bony index finger to push the pile of letters across the desk toward Finn.

She stared at them. “What are they?”

“Love letters. Billets-doux as the French like to call them. From your mother to Mr. Boegart. They are all dated and they are quite explicit, I’m afraid.”

“You’ve read them?”

“Mr. Boegart insisted when I expressed concern at his bequest.”

“Why would you express concern?” Finn asked sourly, her eyes still on the package in front of her.

“Miss Ryan, Pieter Boegart is a majority heir to one of the largest shipping lines in the world. Netherlands-Boegart actually
is
the largest container corporation in the world. The fortune is immense. To consider paternity, let alone accept it, is a serious legal matter. You could well become what is commonly referred to, I believe, as a spanner in the works.”

“A what?” Finn asked.

“A monkey wrench in the gears,” Billy translated quietly.

“A problem,” said Finn.

“Indeed,” said Tulkinghorn, glancing at Pilgrim over his reading glasses.

“Why did Boegart think I was his child?”

“The timing,” replied the old man. “According to Mr. Boegart, his relationship with your mother ended in August of 1979, shortly before she left England with your father. You were born in May of 1980, some nine months later. You were, um, almost certainly conceived in this country. At Cambridge, presumably.”

“That doesn’t mean it was him.”

“The letters would indicate that your father, Lyman Ryan, was incapable of paternity.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Finn asked. “My father was infertile?”

“No,” said Tulkinghorn. He looked excruciatingly uncomfortable now. “It would seem from the letters that he was incapable of the act”—he paused and raised a hand to the knot of his tie— “the act of coitus.”

The word was so archaic and clinical that Finn would have laughed out loud if the whole thing wasn’t so awful and so bleakly intimate.

The old man went on. “It would also appear that he tacitly condoned the relationship between Mr. Boegart and your mother.” He paused. “There was a difference in age, as I understand it.”

“Twenty years,” Finn said flatly. When her par-nets had met, her father had been in his early forties, her mother barely twenty-one. A May- December marriage, teacher and student. Ten years later it was her mother’s turn. She had been now thirty-one, the young student, Boegart, only twenty.

Finn stared at the photograph on the desk in front of her. Her father had no red hair or freckles, but her mother’s hair had been a deep auburn, and in the summer, there was always a delicate sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. It was possible, maybe even probable. There was a terrible irony to it all. In a few moments she had learned more about her parents than she had ever wanted to know. Things no child
should
know. “Why are you telling me this?” Finn said angrily.

“I’m sorry,” said Tulkinghorn. “I mean neither to offend nor to anger. Your blood relationship with Mr. Boegart is irrelevant with regard to his own will and your status as a beneficiary. Any claims to the rest of the Boegart holdings, most of which are in trust, will most likely require some form of confirmation. DNA analysis, that is. I felt that you should be forewarned. News of this will inevitably reach the press. There will be consequences.”

“I’m not making any claims to anything,” said Finn.

“Quite so,” Tulkinghorn said with a nod. “Be that as it may, Mr. Boegart’s instructions to you both are quite clear.”

“Instructions to us both?” Billy prompted.

“The bequests are cojoint. They involve three items.”

“Which are?” Finn asked.

“A painting, which is in the next room, a house, which is in Amsterdam, and the SS
Batavia Queen
, which at last report was somewhere off the western coast of Sarawak.”

Conrad “Briney” Hanson, captain of the breakbulk freighter
Batavia Queen
, dragged on his Djarum Filter, inhaling the clove-spiced smoke deeply before expelling it with an exasperated sigh, squinting in the harsh tropical sun. He stood on the flying bridge of the old rust bucket, leaning with his elbows on the salt-corroded rail, looking forward.

The bow had swung around on the anchor in the ebbing tide, and three-quarters of a mile away he could see the thick virgin jungle of Tandjung Api. In the distance he could see the white flush of the low waves breaking on the curving sandy beach. It looked deceptively calm but he knew it was an illusion. At low tide this was foul ground with barely six feet of clearance over a long shoal ridge.

If the old fool of an engineer didn’t get the enginesrunning soon they’d be trapped here for hours if not actually grounded. He could hear McSeveney belowdecks hammering away with something heavy and cursing in a mixture of Malay pidgin and foulmouthed Scots brogue that would confound even the most knowledgeable linguistic expert.

The dark-haired, deep-tanned captain took another drag on his kerak native cigarette, then snuffed it out in the sand-filled tin can duct-taped to the pipe rail for just that purpose. He glanced down to the fo’c’sle deck, baking hot in the sun. Eli, the powerful-looking, bare-chested able seaman from Mozambique, was painting things while his skinny friend Armand scaled rust. Eli was as black as the inside of a piece of coal, and Armand, who hailed from somewhere in the Balkans, was pale as a vampire and always wore a strange vinyl Cossack hat with ear flaps to keep the sun off his shaved head. They were a strange pair: black Eli with his tattoos and the long wormlike scars across his back that he never talked about; Armand with his pale skin and his hat.

Briney Hanson stared out toward the jungle. Who was he to call them strange? What was a good Danish boy from Thorsminde doing out here in the land of headhunters and China Sea pirates, hauling shipments of fluorescent lightbulbs and bicycles from Bangkok to Shanghai or cocoa powder, handbags, and car parts from Kaohsiung to Manila? A man who spent his days weaving through the reefs and islands and his nights occasionally fighting off stolen fishing boats full of Abu Sayyaf terrorists or MILF fanatics waving RPG rocket launchers and Chinese AK-47S. Not to mention driving the ancient converted World War Two corvette through the odd typhoon, monsoon, or tsunami?

The answer to that was relatively simple. He didn’t like herring. He didn’t like how they looked, tasted, or smelled, especially pickled, and he certainly didn’t want to spend his lifetime catching them like his father. He’d always been in favor of a simple live-and-let-live philosophy; he’d stay away from the herring and the herring would stay away from him.

After that the rest of the unraveling was easy. Five years in the Royal Danish Navy right out of high school, three in icebreakers, two in supply ships, able seaman in the Danish Merchant Marine, mostly on cargo ships and livestock carriers, working his way up steadily through the ranks until he had his master’s papers, then losing everything in a drunken knife fight in Kowloon. Waking up in a Manila flophouse having his pocket picked by a ten-year-old boy, a conversation in a waterfront bar with the leather-faced captain, Nick Lumbera, signing on with him as mate aboard the
Batavia Queen
, then replacing him when dear old Nicomedes died of a stroke in the midst of a force-nine gale in the Malacca Strait. The
Queen
was carrying a bellyful of mentholated cough drops to Bombay, the whole ship smelling like a bad cold.

He’d brought the ship through the gale and the strait with Lumbera safely stowed away in the hold’s cold room and delivered the cough drops to Bombay on schedule. Pleased, the ship’s owner, the Shanghai-Sumatra Shipping Corporation, a tiny subsidiary of the Boegart maritime empire, asked Briney if he’d like to stay on as the ship’s master without too many questions being asked. After all it wasn’t easy to find qualified people willing to endure the grueling backwater tramp through two dozen primitive shallow water ports. He’d taken the job with almost no hesitation since it was unlikely he’d ever be offered anything better.

That was a decade ago. In a few years from now, he’d be able to call himself middle-aged. He had nothing saved, no pension, no family. The
Batavia Queen
was almost seventy and reaching the end of her useful life. Without a prohibitively expensive refit, it was only a matter of time before Hanson was given the order to take the old girl to her grave at Alang, that bleak spot on the Indian coast known as the Beach of Doom. It would be the end of his useful life as well. His own wrecking beach would most likely be at the bottom of a bottle in a sweltering room above a Rangoonbar. He butted another cigarette in the sand can. It was amazing how easy it was to get from there to here, from then to now.

“Jakolin mo ako!”
The watertight manhole on the portside of the main deck directly below the flying bridge crashed open and McSeveney appeared, the narrow, darkly freckled face streaked with grease, his hair bunched in a nylon net made out of one leg of a woman’s panty hose.
“Putang inang trabaho ito! Ya wee houghmagandie Jockbrit! Ya bluidy ming mowdiewark sasunnach sheepshagging shiteskitter!”
He hawked and spit a gob of something semisolid over the side of the ship. “
Cack-arse hamshanker!
Gives me the
diareaky
, it do,
tam-tit fannybawz
thing!” He kicked the mushroom vent at the base of the deckhouse.
“Yah Hoor! Yah pok-pok Ang okie mo amoy ang pussit!”
He paused.
“Cao ni zu zong shi ba dai!”
he added in Mandarin, just in case there was any doubt.

Hanson knew that Willy could curse for an hour without repeating himself. “Problem, Scottie?” he called.

McSeveney peered up at him, his beady black eyes squinting. He looked like an enraged gopher in an ancient pair of striped coveralls. “I hate being called that, as you well know!” Willy snarled, his Edinburgh accent sharp as vinegar and thick as molasses. “That man was no Scot, he was a bluidy Canadian, and this is no
cludgie
starship—that’s fer dammit sure. So you can shut yer
geggie
!” He hawked over the side again and stared belligerently up at Hanson.

William Tung McSeveney was, according to him at any rate, the result of the unlikely mating of a red-haired Scottish clerk working for Jardine-Matheson tallying opium profits in the 1800s and a whore from Macau named Tung Lo May, a name that always reminded Hanson of something you might find on a Chinese take-out menu. The combining of the nationalities continued enthusiastically for several generations, the final result being Willy, raised in the slums of Fountainbridge in a Chinese laundry and enrolling in Sea Cadets at Bruntsfield School where Sean Connery had gone some years earlier. His only dream had been to get out of Auld Reekie, the Smoke, Edinburgh, as rapidly as possible. At fourteen he’d signed on the SS
Lanarkshire
as an unlicensed engineer, fourth grade, bound for Africa and Asia. He’d never set foot in Scotland again, working on fifty different Straits Trade ships from Hong Kong to Rangoon until he finally found a home and a set of old Scotch boilers on the
Batavia Queen
.

The
Queen
was older than anyone aboard her. Originally built as a Flower Class Corvette K-49 at the Vancouver Shipyards on Canada’s west coast, she was lent to the Royal Australian Navy and spent the war years dodging Japanese torpedoes and carrying troops through MacArthur’s Philippines from Darwin to Rabaul. After being paid off at Subic Bay at the end of the war, she was bought by Burns Philips, given the name she still bore, and spent the next twenty years as an interisland trading ship, her belly torn apart to create a crude cargo hold.

In the sixties she was transformed again—this time into a salvage and survey tug traveling the same routes in search of wrecks and sunken ships from the war that could be raised and floated for scrap. The scrap business eventually self-destructed and the
Queen
went back to being an interisland trader once more, being passed from owner to owner over the years like an old streetwalker in decline, eventually finding herself carried on the Boegart List almost as an oversight.