Blair counted the two steps it would take to cross the carpet, one in the mustard and one in pie, to reach Rowland, who raised his shotgun and said, “No palm trees or natives to hide behind now, are there? What do you think of my detective work? I think I finally have you. Your mother was a willing whore, a syphilitic, nameless nobody, the sort of garbage ships throw overboard at sea every day. Is that close enough?”
Blair shrugged. “You know, I have often said the same—and worse—for years. Because I was abandoned, whether she could help it, whether she died or not. It helps to hear the words from you because it reminds me how stupid and venomous they are. Especially stupid. Because she was no more than a girl, and when I think about how abandoned she must have been, without a penny after she got her ticket, no baggage, friendless, powerless, fatally ill before she got on board and knowing that she would probably die at sea, I appreciate how much courage it took for her to escape from here. So the one thing I know about my mother is how brave she was, and since I didn’t understand that until I came to Wigan, I suppose it was worth the trip.”
He finished his wine and set it down. It felt wonderful not to have every bone an aching worm. The shotgun started to transmit Rowland’s tremor and sweat rolled off his face.
“You shoot too much, dear,” Lady Rowland said. “It makes you feverish.”
Hannay leaned forward with a heavy whisper. “Rowland, if you ate less arsenic, your hands wouldn’t shake. If you were any whiter you could be a snowman, and if you were any more insane you could be Archbishop of Canterbury. My advice is to marry while you still have the wits not to climb the drapes. Responsibilities come first; madmen are not admitted to the House of Lords. You can go mad once you’re in.”
“May I?” Leveret eased the shotgun from Rowland’s hands.
“Well, I hate to go,” Blair said.
He slipped the knapsack over his shoulder and started down the path the way he had come. He had gone a hundred yards when he became aware of someone wading through the grass after him. He turned and faced Hannay.
“Your Grace?”
“Thank you, Blair. So rare of you to bow to me in any way. About the letter.”
“Yes?”
Hannay had it in his hand. He unfolded the single page and scanned the lines.
“It’s well done. All the Maypole ticks and flourishes. The question is, do I believe it?”
“Do you?”
“Not for a moment.”
Blair said nothing. Hannay blinked. In his eyes was salt water. His coat shook in the wind, loose as a sail.
“Not literally,” the Bishop added.
“What does that mean?”
“Not word for word. People sometimes ask me whether to believe in Genesis. Were Earth and the Heavens created in six days? Was Eve fashioned from Adam’s rib? Not literally. It’s a message, not a fact. The best we can do is try to understand.”
“Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Hannay refolded the page and pressed it flat in his breast pocket.
Blair looked back from the path. Hannay rejoined the picnic and it continued, barely audible from this distance. The scene had reestablished the languor of an English family set between English hills and English clouds, the sky as liquid as a pool.
From the bottom of the hill he looked back again and they were as tiny as figures in a bead of water.
In the haze of a Liverpool afternoon the African steamship Blackland parted from the North Landing and rode the ebb tide out the Mersey. Heavy with goods, low in the water, it nudged through the coal barges and ketches of the Long Reach, bearing north to begin with, then bending west and finally south to the open sea.
The Blackland was a doughty ark of civilization fat with Manchester cloth, Birmingham buttons, Bibles from Edinburgh and, from Sheffield, pots, pans, nails and saws. From London came Punch, The Times and communiqués from the Colonial Office issuing imperial orders and franchises, not to mention the mailbags of personal letters that made foreign service bearable. Packed with excelsior in wooden crates were cognac, sherry and trade gin, as well as quinine, opium and citric acid. From the hold wafted the perfume of the palm oil it carried on return trips.
The captain made a bonus on the fuel he conserved, and at best the Blackland made eight knots, which seemed none as it fought the oncoming swells of the North Atlantic. At the Bay of Biscay, however, the Canary current would surface and sweep the ship toward Africa. The Blackland would visit Madeira, execute a cautious swing around the emirates of the western Sahara, where Europeans had for centuries believed that the sea boiled and the earth ended, and, borne by the warm equatorial current, begin its African calls.
Passengers gathered in the first-class cabin at four for dinner and at seven for tea, and on their first night out stayed on deck late before retiring to their cramped berths. Coal soot spread by the engine stack made the ship into a locomotive under the ocean night.
Ahead of the stack, though, the rail was a balustrade for constellations as brilliant as freshly lit fires, familiar stars prized because they would soon be traded for the Southern Cross.
Finally, singly and in groups, the passengers tired and went below. Wesleyan missionaries already praying for Zulu souls. A doctor, not too well himself, dispatched to the smallpox epidemic in Grand Bassam. Salesmen versed in tinware, drugs, gunpowder, soap. A lieutenant headed for Sierra Leone to drill Jamaicans shipped for African duty. A new consul for Axim. Creoles in frock coats and beaver hats.
And last on deck, bound for the Gold Coast, a mining engineer named Blair and his wife, whom he called Charlotte, except when he called her Rose.
For Em
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Christopher MacLehose and Anne O’Brien for setting me on the road to Wigan, Kristin Jakob for the flowers, Jean Sellars for the proper attire, George Thompson for the poetry, and Ian Winstanley for the world underneath the surface.
Most of all, I owe Joe Fox, who for five books over fifteen years lit the way.
By Martin Cruz Smith:
THE INDIANS WON
GYPSY IN AMBER
CANTO FOR A GYPSY
NIGHTWING
GORKY PARK*
STALLION GATE*
POLAR STAR*
ROSE*
HAVANA BAY*
DECEMBER 6
WOLVES EAT DOGS
STALIN’S GHOST
THREE STATIONS
*Published by Ballantine Books
“Compelling … Dazzling … Richly intricate.”
—The New York Times Book Review
Arkady Renko is back in
HAVANA BAY
by Martin Cruz Smith
Cars with fins glide under dim streetlights.… Teenage beauties in halter tops troll for foreigners in Rolexes.… And somewhere on this island of heat and faded dreams, a Russian policeman must solve a case he cannot back away from—and enter an elaborate mystery forged between two former Cold War allies.…
“Irresistible.”—USA Today
“Engrossing.”—People
Published by The Random House Publishing Group. Available in bookstores everywhere.
Arkady Renko, Moscow’s top criminal investigator, is a man with a conscience, and it might cost him his job—and even his life.
GORKY PARK
Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, and cynical about everything except his profession. When three corpses are found frozen in the snow with faces and fingers missing, Renko must do battle with the KGB, the FBI, and the NYPD to uncover the truth. Meanwhile, he is falling in love with a beautiful dissident for whom he might risk everything.
POLAR STAR
He has made too many enemies. Once Moscow’s top criminal investigator, Arkady Renko now toils in obscurity on a Russian factory ship. But when an adventurous female crew member is picked up dead with the day’s catch, Renko is ordered to go against the Soviet bureaucracy to investigate an accident that has all the m
arkings of murder.
Published by Ballantine Books.
Available in bookstores everywhere.
Rose Page 37