The Huguenot Thief
Page 1
THE
Huguenot
THIEF
A novel by
L.K. Clement
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters and events in this book are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Gatekeeper Press
3971 Hoover Rd. Suite 77
Columbus, OH 43123-2839
www.GatekeeperPress.com
Copyright © 2016 by L K Clement
All rights reserved. Neither this book, nor any parts within it may be sold or reproduced in any form without permission.
ISBN Hardcover: 9780997762525
ISBN Paperback: 9780997762518
eISBN: 9780997762501
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to my granddaughter Ava, and my other granddaughter who knows who she is.
They are my heart.
Contents
Prologue
Part I Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Part II Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Part III Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Charleston: July, 1969
The pawnshop hunched over King Street, its cracked cantaloupe-colored stucco walls revealing ancient brick. Charles Sims stood in front of the dirty bay window that framed a mishmash of South Carolina’s antebellum history. Inside the window, a tattered Confederate flag lay draped across a rough wood platform. A three-foot tall dollhouse, fashioned to resemble one of the mansions on East Bay Street, perched on the flag; a slave badge dangled from one of its miniature shutters. Finishing the display was an incongruous ESSO sign hanging from the ceiling.
Looking south, he could see no other open businesses and most of the storefronts had boards nailed across windows and doors. Like the pawnshop, the other buildings leaned over the street, each with its own variety of sad dereliction: crumbling bricks, rotten wood, fire-blackened roofs and faded stucco. He wondered if Upper King Street would ever revert to its original vibrant and bustling self.
This was the last place he would try today. Neither of the Lower King antique storeowners had taken more than a cursory glance at the item in his duffle, and on a whim, he had decided to try an Upper King pawnshop. That idea now seemed ludicrous given the obvious poverty of the area. Charles turned to walk to a phone booth visible on the next block, hoping he would find an intact yellow pages book. He would call an antique store in West Ashley. As he ambled towards the phone
booth, he heard a shout behind him, “Hey, come on in. I’m open.”
Charles twisted his head and saw a slight young man with an afro standing on the sidewalk. The man resembled a caramel dandelion, his black billowing hair ready to drift away with the next breeze. Charles said, “Are you talking to me?”
The man laughed. “You see anybody else out here in this heat? Come on in. We got air conditioning.”
The prospect of an air-conditioned building was enough for Charles, given the unbearable heat of Charleston in July, little improvement over Saigon’s weather. He trotted back to the pawnshop and pushed himself and his duffle bag through the door. A bell tinkled as the door slammed shut.
“I’m Joe,” said the man, holding out his hand.
Charles shook his hand. “Charles Sims, nice to meet you.” Joe was younger than Charles was, in his twenties, and his hair bobbled around him like a halo, radiating out almost to his shoulders. He also was missing two fingers from his left hand and, uncharitably, Charles wondered if the man had cut them off himself to avoid the draft.
Joe eyed Charles’ army uniform. “You mean Captain Sims, don’t you?”
Charles shrugged and looked around the shop. Guns hung on the wall, a few from the Civil War era. The requisite number of guitars and other musical instruments dangled from hooks on the unpainted rough brick walls—unused symbols of earnest ambitions snuffed out by lack of money, enthusiasm or talent. Towards the back of the shop was a counter, part of which lifted to allow access to a room where papers fluttered on a metal desk. Over the desk, in a rectangular hole punched into the wall was the promised air conditioner, humming and dripping condensate onto an ivy plant.
Joe walked to the counter and slapped it, saying, “Ok, whatcha got?”
“I’m not sure you’ll be interested.” Charles put his duffle on the antique pine floor, noticing termite tunnels, unzipped a side pocket, and then stood and put a small box in front of Joe. “My mother passed last week. I came home from Saigon to make the arrangements. She had this in a safe deposit box down at the bank.”
“Sorry for your loss.” Joe picked up the box and turned it around in the light. “It doesn’t open?”
“Not that I can see.”
Joe set the box down on the counter. It appeared to be a carved block of wood, half the size of a large brick. The corners were smooth as if rubbed by many hands. On what Charles presumed was the top was an engraved figure in a robe with its arms out. In one hand was a baby, in the other a flower. The body of the figure was composed of miniscule pieces of glass.
“This is mosaic. And this,” Joe pointed to the red center of the flower with the little finger of his left hand, “could be some kind of gemstone.” His voluminous hair moving gently, Joe looked up at Charles. “What do you know about this thing, Captain?”
“Please, call me Charles, not Captain.”
“Ok, Charles, what do you know? Without knowing its age, or its purpose, the box isn’t worth much unless that re
d stone is a diamond or a ruby. I don’t have the right equipment to tell.” Joe looked expectantly at Charles. “Your mother didn’t leave any clues?”
His mother had indeed left him a letter, but Charles would not share its contents. He had never heard the family story she wrote about—that of a Huguenot girl who had stolen a reliquary from a convent and brought it to Charleston in 1685. It was not like his mother to have kept such a story to herself, so he was skeptical, especially since she had never been religious, and, during her last five years of life, she’d had dementia. Then again, the fact that she had rented a safe deposit box just for this item made him wonder if the seemingly inconsequential object could be valuable.
After seeing the box, and reading her letter, he had left the bank, gone to the library across the street, and looked at pictures of reliquaries—beautiful gold and gem-encrusted containers that clearly were of value. Those objects were nothing like this seemingly solid piece of wood decorated with glass, with no discernable opening.
“Forget it,” Charles said, grabbing the box and stuffing it back in his duffle.
Joe stepped away from Charles and reached up to touch his hair. “This shop may not look like much, but I can give you a good price for most things. You got anything else to sell?”
Charles hefted the duffle back onto his shoulder. It had been crazy for him to come to this part of town. Hospital workers were on strike, and this morning’s front page was covered with a picture of visibly sweating white National Guardsmen, their guns pointed towards the mostly black shouting workers. There was another march today. A uniformed white man did not have any business loitering on streets that would be crowded with angry workers and teenage Guardsmen, their damp hands holding lethal weapons that Charles knew, from recent and nauseating experience, were easy to fire.
He’d find another way to get the money necessary to keep the farm going until he could leave the Army and come back to Charleston for good. “Maybe I’ll come back later this week. I’ll see what I can find in my mother’s stuff,” he lied.
Joe tilted his head. “Well, I won’t be here, Captain. I’m headed to London tomorrow to study art. This is my uncle’s store.”
Charles was so astonished that he dropped his duffle bag. “London?”
Joe laughed. “I’m an artist. How else do you think I knew what a mosaic was?” He ran his hands around his hair. “This is my last day with this ’do.”
Feeling his face redden, Charles stepped towards Joe and held out his hand. “Best of luck to you, Joe.”
“You too, Charles. Sorry to hear about your mother. Stay safe in ‘Nam.”
The bell tinkled as Charles left the shop.
He stood on the sidewalk, watching the few people who were on the street move as if in slow motion, their gestures distorted by the wavy, heated air floating above the potholed blacktop. They moved as sluggishly as Neil Armstrong had when he had stepped on the moon two nights previously. Charles had watched the event, simultaneously feeling wonder and resentment; the same government that could propel men into outer space could not provide his men boots that were punji stick resistant.
He had two more days to settle everything, and then it was back to Vietnam. If the West Ashley antique store wasn’t open, he’d go to Savannah. There was no strike there.
Part I
Charleston: Present Day
Chapter 1
A mockingbird woke Kate, as it had every morning for the six months she and her husband Jack had been in this rental house. Its song was a bit louder today. Perhaps on this April morning it was calling for a mate. The bird always perched on the same branch: a branch right outside their bedroom window, a branch she had asked Jack to saw off in the hope the bird would find another location to practice its repertoire. He had reminded her that the branch was attached to an ancient live oak that couldn’t be touched without prior approval from their landlord, and maybe even from the city, given the size of the tree. Their small house was in Harleston Village in downtown Charleston, a fine location to be sure, but Kate missed their former home—a cottage on the Ashley River, a house lost in the tumult of the financial downturn when they couldn’t pay the mortgage. Jack’s construction projects had disappeared almost overnight.
At tune number five, she sat up and pulled a strand of her hair from Jack’s fist. As she slid to her side of the bed, she caught sight of her forearms, the skin puffy and red with scratches. This was the second time in the past week she had awakened to see these welts. Without telling her doctor or Jack, she had lowered the amount of lithium she took each day, attempting to find a dose that did not make her feel as if she was watching her life rather than experiencing it. This self-marking, which had occurred before in her manic episodes, meant she had lowered it too much. If Jack saw her arms, he’d demand that she return to a psychiatrist, her husband always optimistic that there would be a new psychotropic drug for Kate to try.
A fellow patient in her psychiatrist’s office had once described his moods to her as a roulette wheel— mania red, depression black. He told her he never knew what color was going to come up every morning. Kate supposed a life somewhere in the middle, neither red nor black, should be her goal, but she was hoping to get a just a little of her mania, always productive, back into her life by lowering the lithium.
No matter how detailed she made the description, Jack couldn’t comprehend the feeling of omnipotence a mania delivered. During the few times he had witnessed a full-fledged episode, Kate knew she must have appeared dangerous and reckless. What he observed—the endless talking, writing for days, not bathing or eating, had frightened him. From Kate’s point of view, though, one of her manic episodes had helped her create her most well received work, a book on female French saints. She had been able to put herself in those women’s heads, imagining their exultations and their terrors. How could she explain to anyone the intimate power of feeling that you were in the mind of someone who had been dead for centuries?
Kate showered and dressed in her daughter’s bathroom. Four more days and Sara would be home for spring break. She walked over and touched her daughter’s decrepit-looking teddy bear. “Little bear, she’ll be home soon.”
After coffee and a banana, Kate left the house and went to the small wood building in the back yard that passed for a garage. The structure held a variety of construction paraphernalia, some of which clung to her bike like spider webs. Jerking the bike free, she slammed the rickety door and heard something fall on the other side with a loud clang. She hoped the noise woke Jack, but not until she was gone.
Leaving early would not only avoid his questions about her arms but also serve to evade round two of an argument from the night before. He had reacted badly over her desire to attend an upcoming conference in Istanbul. The conference was a year away, and Kate was determined to go, with Jack’s blessings she hoped, but without, if she had to. After the attempted coup in Turkey, and the bombings in France, he had become irrational about her traveling, and Kate was exhausted trying to explain to him how important the city of Istanbul was to a religious scholar. Besides, she had told him, the Turkish government was sponsoring the conference.
Her husband often advised her to ‘get out more’, believing his wife led a life too introspective, but obviously getting out more did not include going as far as Istanbul.
She was still furious, and felt spiteful and petty. Some of that was likely due to the lowered lithium, but she welcomed the anger, proof that her emotions had not been permanently sequestered by the drug.
Checking her watch, she decided to go by the French Huguenot Church on the corner of Queen and Church streets. She loved the Huguenot Church, its pink gothic spires stabbing the sky, sharp as the faith and the fear that had motivated the Huguenots to leave France. She had attended this church all her life. Most members were descendants of the original Huguenot colonists who had fled Catholic France in the late 1600s, the refug
ees arriving in Charleston with little more than their
lives.
A half block away from the church, Kate’s bike hit a cobblestone. Her forward momentum threw her into the grass along the narrow road, thankfully into a patch free of broken beer bottles and dog crap. She stood, saw the tire was flat, rejected the idea of pushing the bike all the way to the college, and pulled out her cell. She wouldn’t call Jack to come get her; she’d call her boss, Adam. A car pulled up behind her.
“Dr. Strong,” a voice called.
“Yes?” she said, looking up from her phone.
“Do you need some help?”
She recognized Samuel Sadat, owner of an Oriental rug store in town. “That would be lovely, thank you.” He stood half out of his car, another man—his brother Imran she presumed—in the front seat. She thought the two were Russian, and seemed to remember that they had been in Charleston for two years. Samuel was plump and jovial, and was the first person customers saw when entering the rug shop. His brother, always lurking in the back of the shop when Kate visited, looked like the mask of a pharaoh, brooding and mysterious.
“We are going to the airport. May we drop you off somewhere? You are not hurt, are you?”
Kate looked at him and thought of her options. She could push the bike, wait for Adam or accept the ride. Calling Jack was still not an option. “No, I’m not hurt, and I’d very much appreciate a ride—if you don’t mind putting my old bike in your beautiful car!”
She and Samuel Sadat wedged the bike in the Mercedes’ trunk and she got into the back seat, chatting with Samuel about their store’s newest carpet acquisitions, none of which she could afford. Imran said nothing. Five minutes later, she had thanked Samuel and was climbing the long, wide staircase to her second floor office.
“Kate.” She turned on the stairs and saw Adam Chalk—her boss, friend, and head of the history department—at the door of his office. He was not sporting his typical grin and seemed preoccupied. They had worked together for over a decade, and she knew his moods almost as well as she knew Jack’s. Her research into Christian saints and relics couldn’t neatly be classified by the college, so the administration had temporarily put her under Adam’s bailiwick. That temporary assignment was now ten years old.