by Blake Banner
The suite was large and comfortable, with a sofa and armchairs and a small dining area with a dining table. There was also a terrace with, as the name promised, a spectacular view of the Gulf of Mexico. I gave Cyndi the note and went into the bathroom to stand for twenty minutes under the shower, letting the bruises, the stress and the aches wash away. When I finally stepped out of the cubicle and grabbed a towel, Cyndi was standing in the doorway, leaning on the jamb, watching me, smiling. It wasn’t what you’d call a friendly smile. It was more insolence, with a touch of provocation.
She was still wearing the clothes we’d got her from the general store: the red plaid shirt, jeans and boots, with her crazy hair tied behind her head. She didn’t look like a senator.
I dried my face and said, “What are you doing?”
She shrugged. “An eye for an eye.”
“Witty. Are you going to throw me over your shoulder and toss me on the bed? I promise I won’t scream.”
“Have you got a boating license?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Of course you have. I’m not sure if your scars outnumber your muscles, or your muscles outnumber your scars. Has anybody ever counted them?”
She looked amused at the fact that I wasn’t self conscious. I ignored her, toweled my hair, then started drying my body.
She said, “When do you want to do this?”
“We’re both tired. We need a good rest and a good meal. I also don’t want to stand out and draw attention. So we go shopping, get some luggage and some appropriate clothes. We go out for dinner tonight like a regular couple. You are Mrs. Walker…”
“With all the fringe benefits?”
I raised an eyebrow at her, pushed past and went to start dressing. “Tomorrow morning we dress for yachting. We have breakfast in the dining room and go and collect our boat. We tell reception we’ll be back tomorrow or the day after, we’re not sure. The room’s booked for a week anyway, but we don’t want the coast guard searching for us.”
She watched me dress for a moment without saying anything, then nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
At eleven we took Slee’s BMW and drove to Macy’s on S. Padre Drive. There I endured the agony of accompanying a rich woman shopping and we spent a small fortune replacing the clothes we had supposedly packed for a short spring vacation on the Gulf of Mexico, and lost on the trip there. I even bought a blue blazer and some cream pants for myself so I’d look the part the next day. Just before we left the store, at one o’clock, Cyndi went to the ladies’ and changed. She emerged with exquisitely understated makeup and a six hundred dollar silk dress. She looked beautiful, but I found myself missing the general store plaid shirt, the jeans and boots.
She handed me four bulging bags of clothes and raised an eyebrow at me. “You look disappointed.”
“Yeah?” I shrugged. “The surgeon said that to me too.”
“What surgeon?”
“The one who delivered me. Let’s go and have lunch.”
The concierge seemed relieved when we returned looking like the kind of people who booked suites at his hotel. We had the bellhop earn his tip by carrying the shopping up to our room, and then had a suitably expensive luncheon in the hotel dining room.
That evening we took a cab to the Yardarm on Ocean Drive. It’s not much to look at from the outside, but it’s comfortable and friendly, there is lots of wood and good wine, and the food is something to write home about, if you have a home to write to. We were shown to a table with a view of the Gulf. I ordered two martinis, very dry, and while he went to get them, we looked at the menu. I saw her smile.
“You brave enough to order oysters?”
“If you promise not to have veggie pasta.”
She laughed. “You have my word.”
The waiter came back with our drinks. I said, “We’ll have a dozen oysters, with a dry, chilled Tio Pepe. Then my wife will have the lobster Thermidor and I will have the Black Angus ribeye. You have Rioja?”
He smiled as if I had asked him if he had a full complement of fingers and toes. “Yes, sir, naturally.”
“Then we’ll have a cold, white Marques de Murieta for my wife’s lobster, and I’ll have a Marques de Riscal with my steak.”
He gave a little bow and went away. Cyndi narrowed her eyes at me. “What was that little number about, cave man? I get to make decisions on whether we bomb Syria, but you order my drinks, my food and my wine?”
“Stop flirting with me. It boosts my testosterone. Next thing I’ll be clubbing you over the head and dragging you by your hair into a cave.”
“Is that what it is?”
“Besides, you’re married, remember?”
She nodded at the table, like she was having a private conversation with it that I couldn’t hear. After a moment she said, “Am I?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She raised her eyes and studied my face. “Have you forgotten? You believed he was in bed with Omega. You thought he tried to have me killed.”
“I haven’t forgotten. I just figured you’d been through enough. We’re supposed to be resting today.”
“You mean I am. This is probably a walk in the park for you.”
“Not really.”
“Well, anyway.” She sat back in her chair. “You asked me to think about who could have hired those Irish boys.”
I nodded and sipped. “And…?”
“It obviously wasn’t Charles.”
“I’d say that’s a safe bet.”
“So I can only think of one person.”
“Who?”
“Michael, my husband.”
I scratched my chin. “That’s one hell of a turn around, Cyndi.”
She gave a small laugh and studied the olive in her glass for a moment. Then she looked up at me. She was smiling, but it wasn’t humorous. “What? You think it would need a bigger crisis than the one I’ve been though, to bring about such a change? In the last—what is it, three, four days?—eight men and two helicopters have tried to kill me. That will do things to a girl, Lacklan. Maybe that’s your daily bread. It’s not mine. It made me think.”
“What? What did you think?”
She shrugged. “You were right.” She offered me an ironic smile that was not free from bitterness. “That will come as no surprise to you. I guess you are used to being right. But I had to think coldly and unemotionally. Politicians can do that.” She shook her head. There was something very sad about the gesture. “Omega has the resources for electronic eavesdropping, so it would have been no surprise to have them drop in on us at the end of our first leg. But, like you said, four thugs from a small time gang outside Baltimore? That makes no sense.” I was nodding and she gestured at me with an open hand. “Of course you had arrived at this understanding of the situation within seconds of…”
I smiled. “Of seeing their weapons and their clothes.”
The bitterness and the irony slipped from her expression and she laughed. “OK, Mr. Bond. But it took me a little longer. So, I asked myself, in what interpretation of the facts did it make sense for minor members of a Baltimore gang to, A, want to kill me, and B, after your long, intricate, improvised detour on day one, even know where I was!” She paused, staring at me. “ I kept asking myself, ‘OK, it’s weird that they wanted to kill me, but how the hell did they know where I was?’”
“And then I burnt your clothes…”
The waiter appeared at my elbow and gave me a peculiar look. He placed the oysters on the table, and the wine waiter brought us an ice-bucket with the bottle of Tio Pepe in it. He poured the wine and withdrew.
We were quiet for a minute while we each squeezed lemon onto the fresh mollusks, tipped them into our mouths and let them slide down our throats.
She smiled at me, sipped the wine and nodded. “I would have had Bollinger. I was hoping I’d hate the sherry, but it’s actually a perfect choice.”
I didn’t answer.
She ate another, sip
ped again. “Yeah, then you burned my clothes. And I began to think. Who was that close? Who was close enough to bug my clothes, my suitcase, my phone…?” She paused. “But not just that. There were a couple of people close enough. But who would then use minor Irish mobsters, instead of professional Omega hit men…?”
I interrupted her. “Were you having an affair with Major Hawthorn?”
She looked genuinely scandalized. “No! Of course not!” She sighed, halfway through preparing another oyster. “Look, Lacklan. I know my behavior since this morning has been a bit…”
“Provocative?”
“Yes, I suppose that would be the word. But please don’t get the wrong idea. I am a very loyal, faithful woman. You are a very unusual man, and this is a very unusual situation. But you can take it as gospel that I would not cheat on my husband—assuming I have one.”
“He’s a very lucky man.”
“I used to think so. Now I am not so sure. The only person who could have got that close to me was my husband. And, despite the state I was in, it did not escape my notice that after you burned all my possessions, they lost track of us.”
“But they did not lose track of Hawthorn and his men. So whoever bugged you, knew to keep tabs on him too.”
“Exactly. So I had to think seriously about it.” She heaved a big sigh. “My husband is a criminal attorney. We met in college, and right back then he was a firebrand. He was very passionate about things like our ancient liberties, the constitution as a weapon against tyranny, human rights… It was what I loved about him. People would often give him a hard time because he would defend everyone and anyone, from a pickpocket to major drug dealers and the Mob. He defended Juan Alvarez…”
“Patrick Donnelly is your husband?”
“Yes.”
“So he is Irish, not Scottish. McFarlane is your name, not his.”
“I lied. I lied to protect him. At the time I thought you were some kind of crazy, homicidal maniac.” She laughed. “I think I still do, on some level.” Then the humor passed and she became serious. “I always believed he was a good man. The amount of work he has done pro bono over the years must run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, protecting the rights of those whom society has robbed. He didn’t care if they were good or bad people. He always said that what he was fighting for was not his client, but his client’s rights—a society where everyone, good or evil, was entitled to the impartiality of the rule of law.”
We were quiet for a while, and as I squeezed lemon on the last of my oysters, I said, “A person’s beliefs can change. Forty-eight hours ago you believed in your husband. What it does tell us is that, potentially, he had the right connections to send those thugs after you if Omega told him to…”
I hesitated.
She said, “Kill me?”
I nodded. “Yeah. If they told him to do that, he would have the connections to send those four thugs.”
“Yes, he would. And I am quite sure he did.”
“I’m sorry, Cyndi.”
She shrugged. “If you play with fire, you get burned.” She studied my face for a moment, then added, “You’re thinking that I don’t seem very upset.”
“I’m not sure. Maybe.”
She gave a small sigh. “The answer to that comes in two parts, Lacklan. The first is that in a strict, Presbyterian home like mine, you learn to hide and control your emotions.”
I raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Unless you are being attacked by helicopters and gangs of armed men.”
“We might make an exception there. Briefly. The other is that over the last forty-eight hours I have cried and screamed more than I have in my entire life. So, perhaps by normal standards I don’t seem very upset, but by my Scottish, Presbyterian standards, I am disconsolate.”
The waiter came and took our plates away. I refilled her glass and mine and we sat in silence, looking at each other and drinking. It was intimate, but there was no awkwardness about it. Eventually she asked me, “Is there a woman in your life? You and Marni…?”
“There is a woman, but it’s not Marni.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Does she know that?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Not Marni…” She said it to herself. “Well, whoever she is, she’s a lucky woman. I just hope she’s tough.”
TWELVE
It was a bright, sunny morning. There was a brisk breeze out of the southeast and enough of a swell to send the occasional shower of spray across the bow. At half past nine that morning we’d told the concierge we were going to be sailing along the coast for a couple of days, and strolled off to collect the yacht. It was a Little Harbor centerboard sloop, and was making a nice six knots tacking into the wind. Once you have tasted it, there are few feelings as satisfying as sailing. For some reason, it’s about as close as you can get to feeling free.
I was at the helm, with the mainsail close hauled, casting a shadow over the cockpit. It wasn’t warm, maybe a pleasant sixty-eight Fahrenheit, made fresh by the breeze. Cyndi was sitting in the cockpit, looking out at the immense sweep of the sea, drinking coffee from a tin mug. The wind was enough to make her raise her voice when she spoke to me.
“How far is it?”
She slid closer to me to hear my reply.
“Hundred and fifty miles, give or take. We’ll be there for breakfast tomorrow.”
“What is it, an island?”
I shook my head. “As far as I can see, it’s open water. They’ll be there in a boat.”
“Why would they choose a place like that?”
I smiled. “Because it’s inconvenient, you can see for miles around if anybody is approaching, and water makes it very difficult to eavesdrop. It interferes with electronic listening devices. So it’s the ideal place to have this kind of meeting.”
She gave her head a small twitch, then gazed out at the sea again. “Good to know. What do they want from me, Lacklan?”
“What do you want from them?”
She shrugged. “An ally I can trust.” She turned her head to look at me with meaning. “Someone to join forces with against this corruption.”
“Then I guess that’s what they want from you, too. Gibbons is passionate and committed. As long as you are fighting his fight, he’ll stand by you. Marni is good and honest. They’ll be good friends to you if you play straight with them.”
“You were in love with her.”
“I probably still am. I probably always will be.”
“So she broke up with you?” She was frowning.
“No. But her work, her war against Omega, that takes up the whole of her life. There is no room for anything else.”
“That’s sad. Are you bitter?”
I had once asked myself the same question. After a moment, I nodded. “Yeah, I’m bitter. But I haven’t quite lost my humanity yet.”
“That’s why you want to get out of the fight.”
“So as not to lose my humanity?” I thought about it. I thought about Abi, Sean and Primrose, Kenny and Rosalia. I thought about Independence, and my house in Weston, and I wondered what made those things increasingly important to me. Were they as close as I could get to roots? Roots that could tap into my humanity?
“Maybe you’re right,” I said at last. “You and Marni, and Gibbons, are trying to save humanity. I’m just trying to save my own humanity.”
At midday she made us hotdogs and we cracked some cold beers. We sailed through the afternoon, driving ever south of east. Evening fell and the sun set behind us, putting fire in the sky and spilling blood on the sea, until both were quenched and absorbed by the dark blue of night. Then the moon rose ahead of us, waning now, but still huge and bright, casting an eerie, almost green light over the ocean. And about her, an absurd number of stars pierced the sky.
At one in the morning Cyndi went below to sleep. At two she came out again with a bundle of blankets, and settled herself on the floor of the cockpit so she could lie and look at the stars. I gazed up at the stars
with her for a while, and when I looked at her again, she was asleep.
The sun rose at seven thirty, the wind picked up and so did the swell. Soon afterwards Cyndi awoke, stretched and staggered below again with her bedding. At eight she came out with coffee and a plastic bag of stale croissants. We didn’t talk. I ate and drank and scanned the horizon.
At half past eight I spotted a large, white schooner dead ahead. I estimated her at about one hundred feet, she was Bermuda rigged and lying at anchor. Fifteen minutes later we were close enough to see two figures on deck, watching us. One was a rotund man in white pants and a blue blazer, watching us through a telescope – there was no question, he was obviously Gibbons—and the other was Marni: slight, in jeans and a sweatshirt. The schooner’s name was written in large, gold letters along the prow: the Magna Carta. As we drew closer, Marni waved and I waved back. Gibbons closed his telescope and walked away to the cabin. After that, Cyndi helped me lower the sails, and we used the engine to come within ten yards.
There we dropped anchor, launched the dinghy and I rowed us across to where Gibbons had lowered a retractable ladder. I made us fast, Cyndi climbed aboard and I followed.
To say the meeting was awkward would be like saying Mount Everest was substantial, or that Genghis Khan was naughty. The four of us stood on the deck looking at each other for four of the longest seconds I have ever lived through—and I’ve lived through some very long seconds. Finally, Gibbons held out his hand to Cyndi and said, “Senator, it is very good of you to come and see us in these, somewhat unorthodox, circumstances.”
She shook his hand and slipped seamlessly into the role of politician. “Professor.” She smiled at Marni. “And you must be Doctor Gilbert. It is an honor to meet you both in person at last. I was at your ill-fated conference, you know…”
I looked at her in surprise.
“Yes, Lacklan. I hadn’t told you, but I already owed you my life, even before this trip.”
Marni reached out and shook her hand. “Senator, thank you so much for meeting us.” Then she looked at me, but didn’t hold my eye. “Hello, Lacklan.”