The Eden Inheritance (40 page)

‘When is she coming?' he asked. His voice was tired now, resigned, his energy ebbing with the anger.

‘She didn't say. There wasn't time.'

His hands unclenched, stroking light little patterns on his linen covered knees.

‘Call her back, Ingrid. Find out what her plans are and then arrange for the air taxi to meet her.'

‘I'll call her tomorrow. She won't have had time to book a flight yet.'

‘But do it!' His voice rose again with an echo of the old iron will. ‘Make sure she is met by our pilot. I don't want …' He broke off as a wave of pain caught him, pressing his forearm hard against his stomach.

Ingrid pretended not to notice. That was the way Otto wanted it. He hated sympathy. But mentally she completed the sentence he had left unfinished. She knew without being told the reason he was so anxious an air taxi should meet Lilli at Barbados International Airport. He did not want it to be Jorge waiting there for her. He did not want her seeing him a moment sooner than she had to – and certainly not before he had had a chance to talk to her first. For now that he was dying there were things Lilli had to know, for her own safety and for all their sakes.

‘Don't worry, Otto, I'll do it,' she promised him.

Little as she wanted Lilli here, it was the least she could do.

Guy de Savigny completed the entry in his log book – Madrepora to Caracas, Caracas to Madrepora – waited for the ink to dry, then closed the log book with a snap and stowed it in his learner flight bag alongside his map and headset. He tidied the papers on his desk, securing them with a bulldog clip and hanging it on the appropriate hook below the notice board. Then, with relief, he headed for the door.

In the heat of the Caribbean afternoon the little hut on the perimeter of the landing strip which served as an office for Air Perpetua resembled an oven – even with the windows and doors fully open and the ceiling fan twirling, the temperature inside must, he reckoned, be in the hundreds. His short-sleeved pilot shirt was sticking to his back and he wanted nothing so much as a cold beer and the chance of a swim in the pool at the little house that had been put at his disposal. But it would be an hour or so yet before he was free to go – he had reported a magneto drop on his aircraft when he had landed after the trip to Caracas and he wanted to check with the engineer that it had been sorted out before he left the airstrip and headed home.

Outside the hut Manuel Santander, his fellow pilot, was stretched out in a white plastic chair, legs propped up on the low picket fence, swarthy face upturned to the sun. Guy dropped down into the chair beside him, pulling it back a little to get the best of the shade.

‘Y-up.' It was Manuel's customary greeting and pretty much the extent of his vocabulary. Though Guy had been working alongside him now for almost three weeks there was precious little communication between them and it added to Guy's mounting sense of frustration. For in spite of living and working here, flying in and out of the tiny airstrip which lay at the very edge of the ocean, the island was as much a closed book to Guy as it had ever been. He had met Fabio Sanchez, whose family, it seemed, owned Air Perpetua along with various other business interests in South America and the Caribbean, but his conversation with him had been limited to what was expected of him in return for his short-term contract as a pilot He had drunk at a bar on the other side of the island run by a local known as Johnny Shovelnose because, it was said, he had once had a close call with a shovelnose shark and was missing half of one foot to prove it, but the patrons there were, for the most part, too drunk or too high on drugs to be able to sustain a sensible conversation. And he had not been able to get any closer to the villa than flying over it at eight hundred feet when he approached the airstrip from the northern side of the island. He had looked down on the fine two-storey building with its hibiscus-covered veranda and spacious well-tended grounds and itched for an opportunity to get inside to see for himself the treasures Bill had described and meet the German who lived there. But he had had no opportunity to do so and any questions he had asked of Manuel had met with the blank wall of the other pilot's surly refusal to communicate.

In all his years as a pilot Guy had never met as unfriendly a fellow pilot as Manuel and he cursed his luck in having run into one here just when he wanted to learn as much as possible about the island and its inhabitants. Pilots were, on the whole, a gregarious lot, given to talking too loudly and too much, but Manuel was the exception to the rule, and try as he might Guy could not like him. Manuel had a thin weasely face, a thin drooping black moustache and thin lips. His long fingernails were as carefully manicured as a woman's but his personal hygiene did not extend to deodorant – expensive and difficult to come by in the islands – and on the occasions when he had flown with Guy the cockpit had been filled with the sickly-sweet smell of sweat, both fresh and not-so-fresh, and Guy had had to turn his head away, opening the side vent to take a few breaths of untainted air.

Although Manuel sometimes flew with Guy as a safety pilot when he was ferrying passengers, Guy had never flown with Manuel, and this he found surprising. As the senior pilot of Madrepora, Guy would have expected Manuel to take the passenger trips whilst he was left to fly the freight, but this was not the case. Though Guy had done one or two trips to the mainland for supplies it was Manuel who came in and out in an Islander loaded with cartons and cases, whilst Guy's aircraft, a Twin Otter, was mainly used as a taxi service.

‘What the hell do they do with all that stuff?' Guy had asked Manuel one day, watching the local workers unload Manuel's aircraft into a truck. ‘I brought in a load of food for the hotel only yesterday and I would have thought the natives lived mostly off local produce.'

Manuel had shrugged.

‘It's business.'

‘What business, for Christ's sake?'

‘Oh, this and that.'

His face wore its usual closed-in look and Guy knew he would get no more from him.

Packages left, too, in Manuel's aircraft.

‘Batique cloth wear,' Manuel had said when Guy questioned him. ‘It's manufactured here. The old man deals in it – that and his rare stamps.'

‘You'd need a hell of a lot of rare stamps to fill your aeroplane.'

Manuel shot him a strange look, his small black eyes all but disappearing in the swarthy skin that surrounded them.

‘So who is the old man?' Guy enquired, glad of the opportunity to ask some questions about the man who was his quarry.

‘Herr Brandt? He's a German. In partnership with the Sanchez brothers, Jorge and Fabio, and their father, Ternando.'

‘Do we ever get to fly him?'

‘Not much. When he leaves the island, which isn't often, Jorge Sanchez takes him. That's Jorge's plane – the white Beechcraft Baron.'

It was probably the longest speech Manuel had ever favoured him with.

‘So we see the old man down here at the airstrip sometimes then?' Guy persisted, encouraged.

‘We have done. He's ill now though. Won't be going anywhere for a bit.'

‘Ill?' Guy repeated sharply. ‘What's wrong with him?'

‘I couldn't say. I mind my own business.'

The implication was clear. I mind my business and you should mind yours. Guy's dislike for Manuel grew, fuelled by the feeling of frustration. He was within spitting distance of the man who might very well have been responsible for looting his family's heirlooms and taking the lives of his countrymen – his own father and uncle included – but he might as well still be in England flying the mail for all the good it had done him.

He held on to his patience with difficulty.

‘Well all I can say is there must be a pretty good living in batique cloth and rare stamps,' he said laconically. ‘They're hardly short of a penny or two, are they, any of them?'

Manuel refused to answer, simply burying his head in one of the paperback Westerns he read when he had nothing better to do.

There was a paperback book lying on the ground beside his chair now, propped open at the page he had reached, and as Guy sat down he picked it up, pointedly discouraging conversation.

Guy shrugged mentally. He had given up trying to get anything out of Manuel. But where, he asked himself, did he go from here?

Inside the hut the telephone began to ring, a shrill tinkling sound. Manuel continued to read his book. Guy glared at him, annoyed by his attitude, then got up himself and slammed into the office, reaching across the desk for the telephone.

‘Air Perpetua.' The black bakelite was so hot it was almost burning his hand.

‘Who is that?' It was a woman's voice, low and educated, with the faintly guttural sound of a German accent. Guy felt the tiny hairs at the back of his neck rise.

‘This is Captain de Savigny.' Guy winced at the sound of his own name. He wished he could have changed it so as not to alert von Rheinhardt to his presence, but having to produce his pilot's licence when applying for the job made such a thing impossible.

‘Ah – good Frau Brandt here. I would like you to meet a passenger who will be arriving in Barbados from New York tomorrow. The flight is due in at two-forty in the afternoon and the passenger is to be brought directly here. We will have our car waiting for her at the airstrip when you land. Is that all right? You are not already busy tomorrow?'

‘No, I'm not busy tomorrow,' Guy didn't mention the fact that he had been due to take a day off the following day. ‘ Who is the passenger?'

‘Her name is Fraulein Lilli Brandt. She is my stepdaughter. Please take good care of her.'

‘I never do anything else,' Guy said, but it was all he could do to keep the jubilation out of his voice. He'd just been wondering how the hell he could make some contact with the Brandt family and now, totally unexpectedly, fate was handing him the opportunity on a plate.

‘Fraulein Lilli Brandt … my stepdaughter,' the woman had said. That could mean only one thing. Fraulein Lilli Brandt must be the old man's daughter.

Thank God the call had come in this afternoon! If it had come tomorrow when he was taking a day off –
wasting
a day, swimming and lying in the sun – he would have missed out. Thank God, too, for the faulty magneto which had delayed him at the airstrip, and for Manuel's bolshy attitude. For once the man's surly behaviour had worked in Guy's favour.

At last he was going to meet one of the Brandts, as they called themselves. Tomorrow he was going to fly the old man's daughter.

‘I've booked the air taxi to meet Lilli,' Ingrid said.

Otto nodded without raising his head from the back rest of the lounger supporting it. Today he had had Basil settle him in the salon rather than out on the veranda; even given the shade of the hibiscus he hadn't felt able to endure the brightness of the sun outside. He had slept badly – thinking about Lilli coming home had kept his mind active and wide awake even between the bouts of pain that came more and more frequently, and he felt weak and exhausted by it, a pale shadow of his old vigorous self. It was, he thought, as if his illness had drained him not only of his strength but also his personality, turning him into a figure of pathos to be pitied and humoured instead of respected and feared. That, most of all, he found insupportable.

‘Who did you speak to?' he asked, gathering himself together with an effort, ‘ Not Manuel, I hope?'

‘No. But it wouldn't be him doing the trip anyway, would it?

He works mostly for Jorge, doesn't he? This was the new pilot, I think. Do you know anything about him?'

‘No. Fabio engaged him since I was … ill. Why do you ask?'

‘I just wondered. He sounded English – very English – but he had a French-sounding name I didn't quite catch it.'

Otto's eyes narrowed in his wasted face, his mind, a little fuddled because of the drugs he had been forced to take this morning, wandering to the past. France during the war, a château in Charente, vineyards and cognac, an aristocratic family. Memories from another lifetime, before his Führer had been humiliated, before the Fatherland had fallen, before he had fled to South America with the help of his old friend Vicente Cordoba, and long before Cordoba acquired Madrepora on his behalf. Before Magdalene, before Lilli …

His eyes strayed to the treasures filling the salon – the silver candlesticks, the bronze statuette of Ceres, the little Louis XIV clock and the beautiful glowing triptych he always referred to as ‘Lilli's triptych'. They had surrounded him now for so long that he had forgotten they had once belonged elsewhere, in a château in Charente. Strange he should find himself thinking of it now.

With an effort Otto dragged his hazy thoughts back to the present and savoured the relief that came from knowing that Lilli would be flown in, not by Jorge or one of his cronies, but by the new pilot, whatever his name might be. He hadn't been in Madrepora long enough yet to be involved with Jorge and his dangerous games – at least Otto assumed he hadn't. That meant that for the moment, Lilli was safe. To Otto, nothing else mattered.

A
S THE AIRLINER
took off from Kennedy, gaining its cruise level and heading south for the Caribbean islands, Lilli sipped a glass of champagne and made a conscious effort to relax.

Not easy. Since talking to Ingrid she had scarcely slept. Now, though she felt spaced and exhausted, the adrenaline was still flowing in unsteadying bursts, making her flesh tingle and creep every time she thought of what she was doing, and she knew that in spite of the comfort of her seat in First Class she would not be able to sleep during the flight.

That, of course, was what she had had in mind when she booked it – the prospect of arriving fresh and rested in Barbados had overcome her natural reluctance for what she thought of as needless extravagance. Lilli had been brought up on nothing but the best – and the best meant first-class travel amongst other things. But the easy living had not spoiled her. If anything it had given her a fierce determination to stand on her own two feet and do without those luxuries she was unable to afford on her own salary, rather than supplementing it with hand-outs from her father.