Wind Raker - Book IV of The Order of the Air (18 page)

Everyone laughed. "You might try the plate," Alma said, producing one. Stasi beamed while Dora cheerfully stuffed buttercream in her mouth.

"I want some too," Douglas said, bouncing up and down. "A really big piece."

"You can have a really big piece," Stasi promised.

"An enormous piece!"

"We'll see how far it goes," Alma said. "Everyone needs to have some. Dora. You. Merilee. Jimmy. Me and Mr. Segura and Mr. and Mrs. Sorley and Miss Lee and Dr. Ballard… That's ten pieces." Alma looked uncharacteristically flustered by the geometry of cutting the cake.

"I should have made two cakes," Stasi said.

"I don't need to have a piece," Jimmy said. He was standing back from the table, his face closed.

"Of course there's cake for you," Alma said.

"Just a little one for me," Lewis said. "Half sized. I'm pretty full from lunch."

Alma passed out plates and forks and pieces while Mitch took three or four more shots, getting in everyone's way in the process. Dora plunged in happily with only mild disregard of the fork. Everyone was talking loudly.

There was the sound of a distant airplane motor, the change of pitch for a dive, and Lewis' head jerked up. There shouldn't be….

No one else seemed to have noticed. Alma was laughing with Miss Lee as they passed plates to Jimmy and Stasi, and Mitch was still tinkering with the camera, trying to get a picture of Dora and Merilee eating cake together. Jerry was sitting in one of the side chairs with the plate before him, the light glancing off his glasses as he listened to something Alma was saying.

But the sound was gone, if it had ever been real. And maybe it hadn't been. If it were real someone would have noticed. They were aviators and vets. Lewis took a deep breath. He had imagined that, the sound of a plane in a dive just over the house, and not for the first time since they'd come here.

Not a ghost. That was a modern engine, and he'd asked around. There hadn't been any significant crashes anywhere nearby. A single engine plane, not anything like the Catalina, so it wasn't precognition of an accident that waited for them. Someone else's future crash? And that didn’t feel right either. It felt bigger than that, like he looked at one tiny corner of a big picture.

Miss Lee held out a plate for him and Lewis shook his head. It had no right to intrude on Dora's birthday like this, the shades of what might be, not urgent but so hard to ignore. Quietly, Lewis let himself out on the lanai. He needed a minute to breathe, a moment to compose his thoughts.

The day was clear and bright, a perfect day for flying. Lewis looked out over the tops of trees further down the hill, houses and neighborhoods nestled among palms, all the way to the edge of the bay blue against the white shapes of the waterfront buildings. On the horizon to the right Diamond Head made a stark line against the sky, while to the left Ford Island nestled amid the waters. The wind made the palm fronds whisper.

The door opened and closed behind him. He knew Stasi's step.

"It's very peaceful, isn't it?" Lewis said, wishing it were.

Stasi nodded. She was looking into the eye of the wind, her hair blown straight back from her face, tight skin showing the faint bleed of lipstick at the corners of her mouth like a stark mask, black hair, white face.

"Very peaceful," Lewis said. He watched a car crawling along the road under the trees. Closing his eyes would only make it worse.

"You can't make it stop that way," Stasi said. She didn't look at him, only out across the bay.

"I've got to control it," Lewis said.

"You won't that way," she said gently. "Pushing it down will only make it come back. You have to just let it run its course." She leaned against the rail, her eyes on the distant clouds over Diamond Head and Hickam Field. "What do you see?"

"Shadows on the water." Lewis blinked, lifting his face into the wind. "Like great flocks of birds. The shadow of their wings on the waves." He shook his head. "I don't know what it means."

"Don't you?" Stasi did look at him then, sideways, her arms about her midsection as she leaned on the rail.

"The end of my peace," Lewis said.

She said nothing, only waited.

"I'm oathbound," he said. "I swore an oath under the trees at Lake Nemi. I belong to Diana, and I lead a charmed life until She calls me. Until She calls for the sacrifice." The wind stirred his hair, plucking at the sleeves of his shirt, slipping inside his collar, cool and quiet. "It's just that I love life too much. I don't want it to be over." He lifted his head, watching the shapes of clouds, the swooping shapes that weren't really there. "I'll do what needs to be done when the time comes. And She's given me beautiful years, none better in the world. I just don't want it to be soon. That's all."

Stasi said nothing, just took his fingers and squeezed them.

Beyond, the shadows of clouds shifted across Pearl Harbor.

W
illi left the Museum’s car parked in a sunny lot on the edge of the harbor, and made his way along Ala Moana toward Fort Street, glad of the breeze that damped some of the afternoon heat. The ground at the dig was still too wet to make more excavation practical, so he and Jerry had made sure the trenches were undamaged after the days of rain and turned the graduate students loose at noon. Jerry had been glad of the opportunity to attend his friends’ daughter’s birthday party — there were times, Willi thought, that Jerry acted entirely like a doting uncle. He couldn’t help wondering what Mrs. Segura had known about her first husband, what their relationship had been, for her to be so clearly fond of Jerry.

This was not the time to worry about that problem. In fact, it was not a good time to think about it at all. He should concentrate on his errand, on delivering his letter without fuss, and then perhaps stopping for a drink at one of the more respectable bars. He would have earned it, and that would give Jerry’s friends plenty of time to finish their birthday party and for him to drown any sense of guilt. He was not harming Jerry in any way, and the dig’s reputation couldn’t be any more peculiar. There would be no harm done.

He turned onto Front Street, the sweat crawling on the back of his neck in spite of his lightest suit and pale Panama hat. At least, he preferred to blame that on the heat rather than nerves. After all, there was no real reason be nervous, not this time. All he had to do was deliver the letter that rested in his breast pocket, a careful, noncommittal account of the dig so far, a single page of deliberately technical comment. He had never been on a dig before that was expected to report to the local Consul’s office, not even when he had been in Persia after the war and it might have been reasonable. The Lop Nur dig had reported directly to Berlin via radio, but that had not been his concern. No, this was bound to have something to do with the dig’s secret funding. He was betting that the man behind it was Karl Lindemann, who had put up a chunk of the money for Lop Nur, and therefore it was all about the Nazis’ bizarre racial theories, and he’d had a bellyful of that in China.

There was no missing the American Factors’ building. It dominated the waterfront, and when he pushed though the enormous doors into the lobby, the space was proportional. The floors were a faux-classical mosaic, the walls marble, and a four-story rotunda swelled overhead. At least it was a little cooler inside, with the stone and the shadows, and he paused for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the relative dark. It was a busy place, three or four Chinese men lined up at one of the counters, where a Chinese clerk worked behind the gold-painted grill; a pretty Hawaiian girl in a cheap silk dress stood nervously beside one of the closed grills, relaxing only when a boy in a seersucker suit came hurrying out of the office block to join her. Young romance, Willi thought, and headed for the stairs.

The consul’s office was on the second floor, a suite of rooms wedged between a Russian shipping firm and the secondary office of Norddeutscher Lloyd. Willi smiled at the young woman who was acting as receptionist, and addressed her in German.

“Excuse me,
Fraulein
, but I just need to leave a note for
Herr
Hackfeld?”

“Of course, sir.” By her accent, she was Bavarian, a pretty girl with a deep tan and bright blue eyes. “May I say who it’s from?”

“Professor Radke.”

“Oh.” She looked momentarily startled. “I’m sorry,
Herr
Professor, I didn’t recognize you.
Herr
Hackfeld asked me to inform him when you arrived.”

“I didn’t think I was expected,” Willi said, startled in turn, and the door to the inner office opened.

“
Herr
Professor!” That was Hackfeld himself, the local man who served as consul, tall and blond and very American in his linen suit. He bustled over, holding out his hand, a slighter man trailing in his shadow. “A pleasure to see you again.” His German was perfectly fluent, but carried a touch of an American accent.

“
Herr
Hackfeld.” Willi gave him a polite half-bow, heels together as though they were back in Berlin, and the other man gave him an unreadable look. He was somehow familiar, Willi thought, but couldn’t place where he’d seen him before.

“I don’t know if you know
Herr
Lange?”

“It seems to me that we have met,
Herr
Lange?” Willi said, and Lange bowed slightly in turn.

“Last year in Hankow,
Herr
Professor. You have an excellent memory.”

Hankow. First on the way to the dig, at a party sponsored by Norddeutscher Lloyd, and then again on the way home, huddling with a group of Willi’s colleagues. He had been the one to receive the sealed box that was the result of the cave experiment… Willi’s skin crawled at the memory, but he managed to shake the man’s hand. “A pleasure to see you again.”

“And you, Professor.”

Willi reached into his jacket and brought out his letter, held it out carefully between them. “I’m afraid I have very little to report, but everything that I have is here.”

“Come on into my office,” Hackfeld said, and Willi had no choice but to obey.

At least it was cooler there, with a ceiling fan that drummed steadily overhead. Hackfeld fussed about, offering cigarettes and a light, and Willi accepted, smiling politely and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Lange took one as well, and drew a long lungful of smoke, releasing it with a sigh.

“I am curious about your progress,
Herr
Professor. Such an interesting project.”

“Everything is in my report,” Willi answered.

“Of course. But if you wouldn’t mind — a verbal report from the man in the field is always most illuminating.”

“As you wish.” Willi remembered then that Peterson had said that Lange was something in Naval Intelligence. He hadn’t really believed it, not if the man was involved with the mystic fringe, but now he was not so sure. “Honestly, it’s a peculiar project. The idea that Chinese ships could have reached these islands during the Ming dynasty? It seems much more likely that some later settler, a trader or a missionary, perhaps, broke some souvenir of their travels, and it was lost amongst less solid trash.”

“That area has always been fields, though,” Hackfield said. “As long as white men have been on the island, anyway.”

“So the records show,” Willi agreed. “And indeed we’ve found no signs of white settlement, just a rather ordinary native village. But we also haven’t found any more Chinese porcelain.” And that was all true, though not perhaps perfectly accurate; he wasn’t prepared yet to offer an opinion on the black stone with its mysterious carving, and he certainly wasn’t going to mention it to Lange until after he had made an academic decision.

“I would like to know more about Professor Ballard,” Lange said. “He seems a very odd choice for this business — it’s not at all his specialty, I believe.”

“It’s not,” Willi said. “But — you know he lost a leg in the war, yes? It has kept him out of work for years, and what he has said to me is that he needs to prove that he can handle a dig site if he wants to work again. And no one in the field — no one of better reputation — wanted to take a chance on this job.”

“And where does he want to dig so badly?” Lange asked. He leaned forward to tap the ash from his cigarette and the ring on his left hand caught the light. It was a skull and crossbones, dull silver crudely modeled, leaves to either side of the main symbol forming an odd bezel. Willi had seen rings like that before in the Lop Nur — two of his colleagues had worn them, and… He shoved that memory into the back of his mind. At this moment, it meant only that Lange could be trusted even less than he had feared, and he made himself shrug, the world slipping neatly back into gear.

“Egypt, I think, would be his preference. Or possibly the Turkish coast, he’s talked about both those places. But I think he would go anywhere. As I said, he’s desperate to get back to work.”

“I think someone told me he used to work for the Met in New York?” Hackfeld said.

“He has been on some small contracts for them,” Willi said, ruthlessly sacrificing Jerry’s reputation. “Things, to be honest, no one more important would take. Mind you, he’s certainly competent, but —”

“A cripple,” Lange said.

“Just so,” Willi said, and ground out his own cigarette with a hand that did not tremble at all.

They went over the same ground again, and then he was dismissed, with the polite reminder that he was expected to keep the consulate informed of his progress. Willi smiled and agreed, and didn’t stop to light another cigarette until he was halfway down the stairs. Outside on Queen Street, he stood for a moment in the dazzling light, trying to decide what to do next. He couldn’t stand to go back to the bungalow — couldn’t stand to talk to Jerry just now, not with this conversation still so raw. He had known from the start that this was his choice: cooperate and continue to work under the new regime, or find that no one would hire him, or publish his papers, while his funding vanished around him… Jerry would understand, he thought. He knew what it was like to be out of work, to have no one willing to take a chance; he’d understand why Willi had to cooperate, irrational as these people were. If they wanted to find Aryan supermen in Hawaii — well, he wouldn’t lie, that was professional suicide, but he would be meticulous in his reports, and no one would be able to say he hadn’t been cooperative. But he would find a bar first.