The Simeon Chamber (10 page)

“It wasn’t last night,” said Nick.

“You’ve been out for the better part of two days now. We were beginning to think we’d have to take shifts sitting here, holding your hand.”

“Two days? Did he take anything from my apartment?”

Nick shook his head. “By the time he finished with the place there was nothing worth taking.”

Sam remembered his brief episode of consciousness, stumbling around in the chaos of his apartment. He had hoped that maybe it was just a bad dream.

“What do you think he was looking for?” Pat swept her hair over one shoulder and sat on the edge of the bed, crossing one leg over the other. Nick’s eyes darted to the partially exposed thigh and back to Sam.

“I have no idea. I’ll just have to go through everything when I get out of here and see what’s missing.”

Nick chuckled. “Good luck. That place wasn’t exactly a bonded warehouse before it was trashed.” He paused momentarily, a dry grin spreading across his face. “But it is a golden opportunity for a crafty lawyer to soak his friendly insurance company.”

Angie cast a disapproving eye at Nick. “Sam would never think of such a thing.”

“Of course not, Mrs. Bogardus. I should be stricken on the spot.” There was a mocking tone of contrition in Nick’s voice.

The old lady nodded as if to accept the apology. She picked up Sam’s keys from the nightstand next to the bed. “I’ll go over to the apartment and clean the place up tomorrow. I’ll box everything up for you and call a moving company to take it home. And when you get out of here you can come home too. You should never have left in the first place. I told you that, didn’t I?”

Sam knew she was on a roll. 1

To Angie Bogardus redundancy was a virtue to be cultivated and developed. Once an idea had passed her lips it would be repeated in all of its myriad forms as if its echoes somehow lent certitude to the proposition.

He ignored the invitation in hopes that it would be forgotten quickly. But experience told him he was in for an encore just as soon as Angie could usher everybody out of the room. The thought only intensified the pain in his head. Trying to return the conversation to Nick’s comment, Sam said: “Who the hell carries apartment insurance? Besides, you’re gonna have to stop the lawyer bashing. Pat doesn’t like it.”

“Some people just have no sense of humor.” Angie chimed in from the chair in the corner, seizing the opportunity to take a dig at Pat.

Pat looked at Sam with a pained expression. She rose from the edge of the bed and turned toward the wall. He couldn’t catch most of the invective, but the word “bitch” came through distinctly.

A cold stare passed between the two women that did not go unobserved by Bogardus or Carol, who sensed that her services were needed. She whispered into Angie’s ear. The older woman rose and followed Carol toward the door.

“We’ll be back in a couple of minutes,” said Carol. “We are going to powder our collective noses.”

“Take your time,” said Pat. “Some noses are bigger than others.” She winked at Carol as the secretary led the old lady from the room.

Nick quickly plopped himself into Angie’s abandoned chair and started to tell Sam what he’d discovered two nights before.

With Sam and Pat listening intently, he read from his handwritten notes the interpretation of the four pages of parchment he’d worked out. He explained that from everything he could deduce, the parchments were authentic and appeared to be part of Drake’s missing journal. Nick carefully studied the two lawyers for expressions of disbelief. So far so good, he thought. It was the next part that strained credulity. He hesitated, uncertain if he should talk about the final five lines on the parchment with Pat present. He still bore the scars of her verbal lashing following the Alleghany fiasco.

“I think the documents could be significant for scholars in pinpointing the location of 3

Nova Albion,” said Nick.

Pat looked at him and lifted her eyebrows.

“Probably Marin County,” Nick explained. “The place where Drake is reputed to have landed in the summer of 1579.”

She nodded soberly, a slight smirk settling on her lips. The two of them were at it again, Jason and his Argonaut in search of the Fleece.

“There is one more thing,” said Nick. He took a deep breath. “In translating the documents there is a brief passage near the end.”

Nick’s voice trailed off. “It’s really only a partial statement because it ends in mid-sentence. The rest would be on another page that unfortunately we don’t have.”

“What is it?” asked Sam.

“I don’t know if we should be talking about this here,” Nick looked at the open door.

Without hesitation he walked over and looked out into the hall. He then stepped back into the room and closed the door. He paid no attention to the large man in the chauffeur’s uniform who mingled with patients several feet away near the nurses’ station.

The nurses had all stepped away, and the man peered over the counter at the large chart under the acetate cover on the other side. It showed a schematic of the rooms on the floor. The man’s eyes focused on Room 417 and under it the name “Bogardus, S.J.”

Pat sat upright on the edge of the bed, disbelief etched in her face. “What are you talking about?” She shot a quick glance at her partner. “You don’t believe this nonsense? Some loosely wrapped woman from the limousine set up in the wine country shows up in your office with four pieces of paper containing a scrawl that some Shakespearean actor has to decipher, and you two are ready to throw over your careers and start renting backhoes again.”

Sam ignored her. “What do you make of it, Nick?”

“I’ll tell you one thing. If those parchments are the real thing they’re worth a small fortune.

The question is—where’s the rest of the journal? If it still exists and we can find it, we’ll have conclusive evidence of where Drake landed. From that we should be able to figure out the rest.” 5

“Are you sure your translation is accurate?” asked Sam.

“It’s not verbatim. But the message is clear.”

“I don’t believe this,” said Pat in a mocking half-laugh. “Two grown men sitting here engaging in a fantasy. I guess I can understand Sam, he got kicked in the head the other night, but what’s your excuse?” Pat’s words carried the biting tone of ridicule as she looked Nick squarely in the eye.

“Listen, Sam, I don’t need this,” Nick bellowed. “If she can’t deal with the situation maybe she should find something more profitable to do with her time. Maybe she should trot down to the emergency room and find a new client.”

Pat rose from the edge of the bed with fire in her eyes just as a physician in a white smock blew through the door behind them. He was followed closely by a grim-lipped, intense nurse.

“What in the world is going on in here?” said the doctor. “We can hear you people all the way down the hall.” He was young and arrogant. Sam guessed he was no more than an intern on his regular rounds, but he wallowed in authority and quickly took the chair on which Nick had been sitting and returned it to the other side of the room.

“This man has suffered a concussion and you people are making enough noise to raise the dead. You’re going to have to leave.”

Sam ignored the intern and turned to Nick.

“Are the parchments in a safe place?”

“It’s taken care of. Don’t worry,” said Nick. “I have a friend sitting on them for the present, a forensics man who’s checking the handwriting for authenticity. I’ll know in a day or two if they’re real. If so we’d better pool our wits and talk to your client to see if we can find the rest of the journal.”

The intern, taking one look at the curvaceous Paterson, had turned his attention to her first and gingerly ushered her from the room, taking several seconds longer than necessary to talk to her in the hallway outside. He returned for Nick, who winked at Sam over his shoulder as he was led from the room.

“See you tomorrow,” said Sam.

“We’ll see about that,” said the doctor.

Sam could only hope that the intern would be as efficient in barring Angie from the room. 107

But somehow he knew it was not to be.

The young physician pushed Nick out the door, closing it behind him, and then returned to the bed. He began to probe Sam’s bandage with his fingers, lifting the surgical tape that held the gauze to the forehead.

“Ahhh.” The movement renewed the piercing pain in Sam’s head.

“I’m afraid that you’re going to have a scar when this heals, though most of it should be covered by the hairline.” The intern spoke in a distracted monotone, a dialect no doubt copied from one of his professors. “We had to shave a small patch of hair for the stitches. It’ll grow back in a few weeks. You were damn lucky. Whatever they hit you with actually chipped a small sliver of bone out of your skull. It was a glancing blow. If it’d hit straight on I’m afraid it would have punctured the skull. Suffice it to say you wouldn’t be with us today.”

The intern’s fingers were rough, sending shock waves through Sam’s head, intensifying the throbbing ache deep inside. The graphic description of his wound didn’t make Sam feel any better, nor did the fact that he had narrowly escaped death provide him with any answers as to the identity of his assailant. But he was beginning to understand the motive. Someone else wanted the Davies parchments. But who?

The intern moved away from the bed. “I’ll have a nurse replace this bandage with a clean one, but for the moment keep your hands away from the stitches.”

Sam had no intention of touching the burning wound. The doctor walked to the end of the bed and lifted the medical chart, making notations.

“How long am I going to be here?” asked Sam.

“That depends on what the neurologist has to say. But I would suspect two or three days minimum.” The intern finished his notes and left the room.

Sam stared at the ceiling for several minutes, the throbbing in his head slowly subsiding as he slid off into a restful slumber.

It was nearly three in the afternoon when Jennifer returned to her office. A package in the familiar red, white and blue wrapper of the messenger service had been pushed through the mail slot in the door. 9

She dropped her briefcase by the desk and carefully opened the package. It was heavy, nearly an inch thick. As the wrapper peeled back, the first pieces of paper came into view, a jumble of old magazine and news clippings.

The yellowing newsprint on one of the articles carried a banner headline: “GHOST SHIP CRASHES IN DALY CITY.” The three-column picture below told the whole story. The gondola of a blimp lay teetering on its engine mounts in the middle of a crowded street draped by the deflated air bag.

Jennifer passed her eyes over the lead paragraph of the story.

SAN FRANCISCO—An antisubmarine blimp from the U.S. Naval Command at Treasure Island crashed on the streets of Daly City yesterday afternoon, narrowly missing several houses and power lines. The blimp, which floated out of control over San Francisco for hours, was unmanned when it came to rest on Bellevue Avenue at 3:52 P.M. There is no word on the fate of the crew.

The story covered two columns, and clippings from another page were stapled to the first. Jennifer read the story carefully and paged through the other items in the stack of papers. A magazine article, dated two weeks after the newspaper clipping, provided more details of the crash. Jennifer’s eyes were caught by the caption under the picture with the story:

To date there is no word on the fate of Lieutenant James Spencer and Chief Petty Officer Raymond Slade, the two crew members aboard the ill-fated blimp when it left Treasure Island. Both men were missing from the craft when it came to rest on a city street.

She lifted a pen from the set on her desk and circled the name “Raymond Slade,” her eyes narrowing as she isolated in on the page.

She studied the magazine article and other clippings, reading and rereading each. In an outdated style they spawned endless speculation on the fate of the blimp crew. Unnamed sources conjectured that the crew had been 1

captured by a Japanese submarine and carted off to Japan for interrogation in preparation for a major assault on the U.S. mainland.

Other theories included a freak gust of wind that had rolled the gondola on its side in midair, throwing the men from the craft into the open sea below. Others hinted at possible foul play —a murder-suicide by one of the crew members. No solid evidence existed for any of the theories advanced in the articles.

Jennifer paged through the papers until she came to a large brown envelope with a navy insignia in the upper left-hand corner. She opened it and found a letter on official military stationery. It was signed by a Captain Jack Caulford and addressed to Dorothy Spencer. The terse sentences of condolence smacked of a routine form letter, the redundant protocol of wartime sympathies. She turned her attention to the list of personal belongings accompanying the letter and quickly found the entry she was looking for—the four pages of parchment with the Chinatown stamps. The pieces were beginning to fit into place.

There was only a fleeting awareness of recrimination as she considered the story she’d told Bogardus, for most of it was true. She had revealed all, except for the death of James Spencer and its sordid circumstances, which, after all, she had yet to confirm. Her eyes returned to the name Raymond Slade, circled on the page of newsprint. She knew that if the lawyer did his job, she would soon resolve the suspicions that had haunted her since childhood. 4

Sam slept fitfully through the afternoon and the following evening and woke to the sounds of early morning hospital clatter. During the night the needle feeding the I.V. solution into his left arm had been removed. His bladder reminded him that he was still human. Taking the initiative and wishing to avoid a bed pan, Bogardus pushed the covers to one side and slid his legs over the edge of the bed, feeling for the cold, hard linoleum. It was a long way to the floor, and when his feet finally found it Sam discovered that his legs were unsteady. The pain in his head had subsided, but he was dizzy and unsure of himself as he felt his way 3