by George Wier
The Brazos was the only navigable river within range. It was his only option.
The storm followed them, as if driven by diabolical intelligence. An intelligence with a taste for revenge.
Perhaps Satan, then. Louis could never bring himself to put his faith in a benevolent Deity. A malevolent one, though, was more realistic given the nature of life. Regardless, he would have to drive Le Royale far up river to escape, and all the while the storm would be bearing down hard upon them. Sailing upriver through the meandering channel would take time, and time was a luxury he could ill afford.
It was the year of the Christian Savior 1673. The whole world was being swallowed up by Christianity, or so it seemed. Louis had narrowly escaped heresy charges himself by going to sea at the age of fifteen. His parents had been Huguenots, both slaughtered during the Purge when he was a lad of eight. He had grown up under the uncertain guidance of his mother’s brother.
Louis had been outspoken and willful. He did not believe in the Christian God, and had forever refused to take part in worship. He was one of a select few who had no God except his own ability to make his way in the world and do more than survive — Louis du Orly would commit the greatest blasphemy of all. He would flourish and prosper or die in the attempt. Thus far in his life he had found no middle ground between these two extremes.
From the seaport at Brest he entered the merchant employ of a garrulous shop-keeper, Simone LeBlanc, who while engendering Louis’ loyalty would later sell his contract to a trading company that was set to sail for the New World. And here he was, a hold laden with the ripest fruit of the New World — gold — and he was running like the coward he was certain his men now thought him to be.
“Monsieur Le Fitte,” he called to his mate.
“Capitan?”
“I am about to do something. Something untried. If any ill befalls me, you are to take command.”
“Oui,” the young man replied, fear etched into his features. “What are you going to do?”
“I am going to make a pact with the Devil,” Louis said. He turned from the quizzical gaze of his officer and looked toward the sandbar.
They were short of the bay by perhaps a hundred miles.
His eyes tracked back to the storm.
It would be close. Far too close.
Du Orly was twenty-five years old now, and had spent the last seven years of his life terrorizing the Spanish on the high seas. His Lettres de Marque gave him license in the name of the King to burn, pillage and sack the Spaniards’ ships. Just now the Dutch and the English, aside from his own shipmates, were his only friends.
Louis smiled and turned his eyes from the coming hurricane toward the steps down into his ship. He shut the gentle salt breeze outside behind him and plunged into the darkness belowdecks.
There on his desk was the chest, its gold framework limned with a shimmer of dying sunlight from the port window.
It had taken him days to work out the intricate lock. The pick tools, most of them garnered from among the crew, lay scattered across the desk. From memory he made quick work of the lock, and at the small snik sound, lifted the lid.
It lay inside upon a tiny mattress of fleece.
He reached in and withdrew the cold object and turned it about in his hands, his eyes roving over it, looking for any seam, any mark that might betray its maker or its manner of manufacture. There was none.
The object was in the shape of a wish-bone, no more than twenty inches high, and heavier than any normal metal, including gold itself. He had discovered its purpose by accident on their third day of flight from the storm. It had been beneath his coat, its bluish, smooth metal against his shirt, when he went down into the hold to inspect the treasure.
Before he could remove his key from his breeches, he felt the tugging.
This object of the Aztecs was pulling toward the door, as if it hungered. It came free of his shirt and pressed hard against the inner lining of his coat, tugging, shifting.
Louis had backed away from the hold door carefully, and as he did the tugging diminished, slowly. “Gold,” he had thought. “It hungers for gold.”
Later, sitting at his desk, he had watched the closed chest that contained the object. He had waited and thought on it while he waited.
If word of the thing were to spread among the Spaniards, they would come for him. They would track him to the ends of the Earth and seize it.
And it had whispered to him that same terrible night: I hunger, Louis.
Later that night he had awakened from a fevered dream and stood for an hour regarding the chest, waiting for it to speak again.
And now, this day, with the hurricane almost on top of them and the men in fear, Louis du Orly he reversed himself along the passageway and emerged again upon the deck.
He strode to the foredeck of the ship. The men there stopped their work to watch him.
Louis du Orly lifted the object to the sky.
Overhead the slate gray clouds banked as if they were a mountain about to tumble down upon them. It heaved forward each passing moment with the weight of the great storm behind it.
“Hear me!” du Orly cried. “Hear me, Storm. Hear me, God. Hear me, Satan!”
The men stood still, their mouths open and their eyes wide as their captain shouted towards the sky.
“I command you to deliver us!”
The lightning bolt flicked to him faster than the eye could travel. It danced and wove through the object, his arms, his brain, and then exited his left boot.
He fell and knew no more.
*****
Louis du Orly awoke with a metallic taste in his mouth and a powerful thirst.
He sat bolt upright from his bed. Outside the wind howled and the rain peppered the port window.
Le Fitte was by his side.
“Where are we?” Louis asked.
“On the Brazos de Dios.”
“Safe?”
“The hurricane is here. We have lost two men.”
“How long? How long was I asleep?”
“Three days.”
“Three?”
“Oui. I feared for your life.”
The ship swayed and rocked, driven hard by the wind and rain. Louis tried to sit, but his lieutenant pushed him gently back down.
“Rest, Capitan. Please. We will need you, if we are to survive this.”
Louis nodded and laid his throbbing head back onto his feather pillow.
“How far? How far upriver?” he asked.
“A hundred miles. Possibly more.”
“Impossible,” Louis exclaimed.
“We have not once had to tack against the wind. The river is wide and deep and the way has been clear. It is a miracle sent from — It is a miracle.”
“Where? Where is the blue bone?” Louis asked.
“In the chest.”
Louis’ eyes turned toward the table, and as he did, a lance of sheer pain went through his skull. The chest was there.
“Locked?” he asked.
“Even so.”
Louis felt unaccountably tired. His strength ebbed away quickly. He gripped his lieutenant’s hand, fought to gather his thoughts to say something, something important, he felt, but as he grasped for it, it fled. And darkness descended upon him again.
“Rest, mon Capitan,” Le Fitte said.
Du Orly snored softly.
CHAPTER ONE
It seems there is never a good time for anything to happen in life, good or bad.
For instance, I was in a courtroom about to hear the closing arguments in a lawsuit between a friend of mine and the guy who had rooked him out of a neat hundred-thousand bucks when I got the word that my best friend from childhood had been killed.
Bradley Fisher and I had known each other from second grade straight on through. I never had a brother, but if I had I don’t know that he could have been any closer to me than Brad had been. Once.
I’d had a feeling of intense wrongness from the moment my hea
d had hit the pillow the night before. That feeling had intensified in my dreams and I had awakened covered in a cold sweat around three-fifteen in the morning, that time when the night seems to be its darkest and the hope of any light is a world removed. I’d read once that three-fifteen was the witching hour. I never knew any witches to confirm it, but still, it’s an hour that’s best slept through. Somehow I had gotten back to sleep, nuzzling into the warm, slumbering cocoon that is my wife.
Trial had resumed at nine as if the night had never occurred. But my usual slim breakfast had turned into a ball of nervous lead around nine-thirty and despite the fact that I had my head in the very serious game that was unfolding before me, the sense that something, somewhere, had gone south stayed with me.
My pager vibrated.
I don’t normally carry a cell phone or a pager, but Julie was scheduled to deliver at any time and if all went well I’d be a father.
Somehow I knew that the oppressive and disquieting feeling of wrongness had nothing to do with Julie or the baby.
I jumped in my seat. The vibration in my pants pocket felt like an electric shock — as if I’d touched a live wire. I fumbled in my pocket, attempting to look nonchalant.
A row ahead of me, just past the inlaid wood barrier between the public and the court, my friend looked over at me with a puzzled expression on his face. I used my face to try to convey a shrug. It worked. He nodded once, giving me an “Okay.”
The ‘979’ prefix on my pager told me at once that the number was from back home — Bryan, Texas, my hometown, or at least within the same area code.
My throat went dry.
It was Brad’s home phone number.
The judge looked at me. He had a practiced, concerned look on his face.
I shook my head: Nothing.
“I gotta go,” I whispered.
The Judge nodded.
*****
“Hello?” It was Mary Jo, Brad’s wife, who answered the phone.
“Mary Jo. It’s Bill.”
“Oh God. Bill. Brad’s dead.”
I felt the blood drain out of my head. Suddenly I was leaning against the smooth travertine blocks that made up one of the walls outside the court room. I tried to say something, but I had no breath.
“Bill. I’m so sorry — ” Mary Jo choked down into heavy sobs.
Somehow I managed to breathe.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I knew they were going to kill him. I tried to tell him. But Brad doesn’t — didn’t listen to me.”
“Mary Jo. It’s not your fault. Brad never listened to anybody.”
It was true.
I recalled an instance where Brad hadn’t listened. Back around early 1990 Brad had called me up in a frenzy to get me in on the ground floor with him in what would later be called the Junk Bond market. He invested eighty thousand dollars, the bulk of his inheritance from his father, and sat back and waited for it to turn into a cool million. I did my best to warn him off of it without making him wrong or thoroughly raining on his parade. I’d wanted him to hold back. To try ten thousand first, or maybe five. He wasn’t having any of it. I’m not even sure he heard me. There are no dreams quite like golden dreams — money falling from the sky like pennies from heaven. And there was no way that Brad was going to let the dream walk on by.
When the bottom fell out of the junk bond market I called him up, hoping that I wasn’t too late. I’d had the disturbing image in my mind of my best friend holding a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. But Brad was all right. It was okay for me to breathe easy. You live and you learn. “Don’t ever worry about me, Bill,” he had said. “I’ll always be here.”
Except he wasn’t. Not anymore.
“Bill?” Mary Jo said. I could hear the concern in her voice. She’d just lost her husband and here she was worried about me.
“Don’t worry about me, Mary Jo,” I told her.
“That’s what Brad always told me. Don’t repeat him, Bill.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try not to. But it’s hard.”
“Bill, I know who did this. I know who killed him.”
“Okay, Mary Jo. I’m coming. Right now.”
*****
Outside the Travis County Courthouse I walked the block over to where I parked my Mercedes during the trial. Along the way I called Julie.
“How you feeling, Darlin’?” I asked her.
“I’m fine. Why aren’t you in the trial?”
“Baby, I just got some bad news. My old running buddy, Bradley Fisher — his wife paged me while I was in Court. Brad’s dead.”
“She called me and I gave her your pager number,” she said. “She didn’t sound so good but she wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“I was wondering how she got my number.”
“She just said it was an emergency. I’m sorry, Baby,” she said. “Are you going to be okay?”
I thought about it. I suppose I had to be.
“I’ll be all right. It’s a bit of a shock is all. Brad and I have been drifting apart for some years.”
“And now he’s gone,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“You need to take off, don’t you?” I could hear it in her voice: the certainty of someone who knows me like no other could.
The baby was due at any time. I couldn’t not be there by her side when the time came, whenever that was.
“Bill?”
“I’m here,” I said.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, reading my mind, as always. “Go, okay? Just go.”
“I’ve got to be here when you deliver,” I said, my throat feeling dry.
“You will be. Just no more hanging from blimps, no more shootouts. You got that?”
“Baby. We don’t even own a gun.”
“I know. But somehow guns seem to find you.”
“Yeah,” I said. She was right. “I know.”
“How did he die?”
“Mary Jo told me that somebody killed him and that she knows who did it. Beyond that, it’s why I’m going. I simply don’t know.”
“And you need to.”
“Need to know?” I asked, but then realized Julie was anticipating me, as usual. “Yeah. I suppose I have to.”