When the cabin boy first walked through the smoking room, Joe did not even notice his call. Eventually, though, the boy’s words penetrated his trance, “Cable for Mr. Gresham. Mr. Wynton Gresham. Cable for Mr. Gresham.”
Joe folded his paper on his lap and called over the boy, tipping him before settling back in the chair. His intrusion into Gresham’s life, while never a game, took a ghostly turn as he fingered the cable’s envelope. He rested his head on the back of the chair and scanned the wood ceiling, finding only shadows and darkened wood.
The feeling of communing so closely with the dead had never rested well with Joe. It bored a hollowness through him, a white vacancy that emptied him, and he closed his eyes and steadied his breathing. He traced the seams of the envelope as though they were scars, lightly leveling his fingertips across the paper.
“Bad news, Mr. Gresham?”
Joe opened his eyes. The Englishman Huntington from the previous night’s conversation at the nearby table stood over him, well dressed in buttoned suit and knotted Oxford tie, hair slicked, and eyes steeled. On the surface, Huntington looked like too many officers Joe had seen in the war, men who cared less about other men’s lives than about their own polish. Joe never felt comfortable around men so quick to glorify themselves.
Huntington was a tall man, tall and thin and perfectly groomed. A man well bred. He had a half-inch scar at the bridge of his nose and his nose had shifted slightly to the left. That and another scar, slightly longer and razor thin, along his right cheekbone gave him the dashing look of a soldier of fortune. That look was made more so by the cock of the man’s eyebrow and slant of his smile.
Huntington wore a red and blue lapel pin that Joe recognized as from the British Fourth Army, Rawlinson’s group that had lost so many men during the Somme offensive. This man, Huntington, had been an officer. And from the scar on his nose and the sadness in his eyes, Joe could see that Huntington had been at the front of his men when they went over the top. He had received his pin honestly, along with his scars—for combat and not for drawing a general’s bath.
It was an earned sadness drawn with a deep sense of something ruined that Joe saw in the man’s eyes. The look of someone who had been there. It was a look that only another member of that club might understand. Others might recognize the sloe slant and comment on how that man seemed lost in some way; those of the brotherhood, regardless of allegiance or class, however, realized the cause.
“James Huntington,” he said, extending his hand for Joe to shake then sitting across from him. He removed a silver cigarette case from his inside pocket, opened and removed one, and tapped the cigarette against the case a few times, returned the case to its pocket and lit the cigarette. A drift of smoke made him squint at Joe.
“I could not help but overhear your name,” he said, leaning back and crossing his legs.
“Do we know each other?” Joe asked.
“No, no,” he said with a rakish flick of his hand. “My cousin, though, served with you. Thomas Wilde. You and he were together at the Champagne.” He breathed in and exhaled another plume of smoke. “Nasty battle, that Champagne. Worse, I think, than the Somme. At least we had a bloody chance, nobody selling us out before the scrape began.”
Joe nodded. He remembered the name from Gresham’s list, but with nothing more he couldn’t talk about Thomas Wilde. He said nothing, nodding in a way that he hoped sent a message of acceptance.
“Expecting a problem?” Huntington asked, nodding toward the cable.
“No.” He glanced at the cable and shook his head.
“I just thought by how you were avoiding the wire that you might have trepidations as to its contents, old man.”
“No. Nothing like that. I was just enjoying being at sea and away from any business.” Joe smiled. “Prolonging the eventual.”
“I see.” He slid back the cuff of his shirt to look at his watch. “Well, I was on my way to a dinner engagement when I heard your name. I do wish to talk with you, however, at a later time.”
Huntington stood, nodded in that English way of almost bowing, and walked slowly from the room. In the wake of Huntington’s cigarette, Joe was left wondering whether that had been a coincidence. Not likely, echoing the sheriff’s words. While Joe believed in coincidences in general, he did not trust them when they actually happened. And here, with Huntington, was more grist for his mental mill to grind away on. Huntington knew that Gresham was on the Berengaria, but Huntington did not know Gresham personally.
Joe didn’t like posing so publicly as Gresham with someone who might be able to identify his impersonation. He had little choice. He breathed heavily and slipped the edge of his pocket knife under the envelope’s fold and opened it to study the message on the yellow paper:
GRESHAM—
WILL BE PLEASED TO SEE YOU—STOP—AGREE W PREMISE—
WILL TALK PARIS—STOP—DILLARD
He held it open in front of him, looking over the words, searching for meaning. Dillard’s premise was most likely associated with Gresham’s manuscript, and Joe had an idea of what it might entail, although nothing more than a vaguely formed notion, no specifics. He imagined this Dillard having a copy of the manuscript or at least a detailed summary. He had read and agreed with something Gresham had written, something both men had known about and had possibly shared in experience. Joe folded the paper back into the envelope and tucked it safely in his coat pocket. The matter of clearing his name with the police in Greenwich might come in course, if Dillard did have a copy of the manuscript or could at least explain that premise he agreed upon.
Joe removed the wire and reread it before returning it to his pocket, and he filled in a scenario for the night when Gresham was killed. The men had come as representatives of Dillard, pretending to be friends of a friend, bringing a copy of Joyce’s book as well as news about Gresham’s former comrade. A little lie told at Gresham’s front door and the men were welcomed inside, offered a drink.
He considered what happened next. They offered to return to Paris with the manuscript, and Gresham would have informed them that it was unnecessary since he had already booked passage. They killed him, they probably would have anyway, and took the boxed manuscript.
Joe was startled by the sound of a bell. He looked around quickly, not quite certain where he was before he saw the room’s movement. The dinner call roused the roomful of men to the dining room like the Angelus calling the Catholic faithful. Joe fell in behind the other men moving slowly from their comfort to join wives and family. As the room emptied, Joe noticed two men near the door who did not leave their seats and who watched him. He met their stares long enough to know that they held an interest in him. He looked over his shoulder to see if they followed him from the room but they did not.
Joe checked his buffalo robe and was again escorted to join the Swedes. Again their conversation was polite but limited, and again the Swedes left quickly and Joe sat alone to finish his dinner. A five-piece string orchestra played Edwardian music, orchestral songs by Wood and Beecham that Joe remembered from his short time in a British convalescence hospital in Calais. Following a meal of tournedos and morels on a bed of braised cabbage, Joe drank a cup of weak coffee. Before leaving, he ordered a bottle of Bushmills to be sent to his cabin. He took the stairs to the “C” level and walked the deck back to his room, holding the buffalo robe closed tight against the winter cold and stopping once to look out into the dark from the amber-lit ship. He removed the buffalo robe upon entering the hallway and carried it over one arm.
His cabin was quiet and dark and slightly rolling in the calm sea as he entered.
Once the door was shut behind him, a flash of light erupted inside his head as a blow glanced off his temple. He fell to the floor, the room’s darkness his only shield from further punishment. Someone kicked out at him, but the kick landed against his shoulder. He rolled away from the kick then quickly back to grab hold of the man’s leg. He stood, lifting the leg and driving the man to th
e floor with the calf held tight against his chest. Joe let loose and fell with his entire weight on the intruder who exhaled a loud groan followed by the sucking sound of a man trying to find his breath. Joe raised up and punched into the darkness, finding the man’s chest and again finding the man’s neck and again punched at where he thought the man’s face to be. Another groan followed and he thought he must have finished his attacker.
He began to stand, but was stopped short by a hard blow between his shoulders. He fell back to the cabin floor, sucking hard for a breath. None came. His breathing, when he did finally regain it, came slow and laborious, as from a worn leather bellows. He could not rise and felt no strength in his arms or his legs, just a series of spasms as he struggled to regain his footing. He panicked and reached to find his gas mask even though his mind told him that he had already been exposed too long, long enough for his skin to blister and his eyes to close shut and allow only permanent darkness. Those actions and those thoughts, however, coming within a second that seemed like a threshold to eternity, faded as quickly as they had appeared.
A hard kick landed against his side as he rose to hands and knees followed by a series of punches. Within the room’s darkness, few of the punches landed with exacting force, but the number that did find the surface of his neck and back and then his face and chest as he fell and rolled away left their imprint. Before he passed out, a glaze of light from the opening door crossed over him. In his blurred state it appeared like the wavering light of a candle. All he saw of his intruders were the silhouetted shapes of two forms leaving the room and shutting the door behind them, shutting him into a double darkness.
He woke some time later to the sound of someone knocking on his door. He tried to speak, but the only sound that came from his mouth was like the gargled cackle of a pullet. The knock continued. He lay back in the dark room and let them knock. He lay on his side with drool crusted in the corner of his mouth, his face raw, his body a tender bruise, his senses battered.
When he realized that the person knocking on his door had probably been a cabin boy with his whiskey, he cursed. There were only a few things he felt he needed at that moment. Bushmills was high on the list.
He pushed himself from the floor and steadied himself against the reading table, found the pull cord and turned on the table’s reading lamp. There had been nothing professional about how the room had been searched, no order and no means. Just a matter of having spilled the contents of every drawer in the dresser as well as the steamer trunk, stripping and overturning the bed, piling every piece of clothing in the middle of the room as though readying it for a bonfire.
He sat on the empty bedsprings, one hand rubbing his forehead where it had broken his body’s free fall against the carpeted floor and the other wrapped around his chest. Joe knew what the trespassers had wanted for there was little reason to be so thorough if it were only about money, which he kept clipped inside his pockets in case he needed to make a quick bribe. He also knew that they had not found what they wanted, for he did not have it. Had it not hurt so badly to do so, he would have laughed at the irony of it all: He had hoped to become known as Wynton Gresham, and now he had paid a price for that. Someone thought he was Gresham, maybe they were connected to Gresham’s killers in Greenwich and thought that they had failed, now they may try finishing things during the cross-Atlantic.
IV
“The officers scrambled out of the advance parallels with a last shout of ‘En Avant, mes Enfants’ to the men and the wave of ‘invisible blue’ tipped the parapet with foam. The great offensive of 1915 had begun, and all those who took part in it are agreed that no moment of the battle was so thrilling, so soul-stirring and impressive as that which saw the first wave of Frenchmen in blue uniforms, blue steel Adrian Casques, with drums of grenades hanging at their waists, burst from the trench in which they had hidden for so many months and strike across the intervening No Man’s Land for the enemy’s line.”
—The [London] Times History of the War, vol VI, 1916
JOE SAT IN A HEAP ON THE FLOOR AND TOOK INVENTORY OF WHAT hurt. It wasn’t difficult except in discerning where one pain left off and another began. His head hurt, his neck hurt, his back and sides and chest hurt, his hands hurt. His legs did not hurt, but he figured that was because they were farthest from his brain and had to wait until closer body parts registered their complaints before they could get an open line.
He had been in fights before and had been beaten worse, but any beating left its legacy. His breathing was heavy and his heavy breathing ached inside his chest, but he felt nothing loose or broken. That was good news. He could see, he could breathe through his nose, and he could walk. Everything worked more or less as it had been originally designed. Over the night, however, he knew that he would tighten like dried leather.
He pushed his hair off his forehead and sat back against the overturned mattress of his bed. He was not seeing double, he felt no blood on his head and just a trickle from his nose, his ribs still attached, his hands not too swollen to make a fist. Not too bad after all.
When he stood, though, he felt the years of an arthritic man four times his age as the blood coursed through his wounds and bruises, and he had to sit again. The second time, he stood more slowly and used a chair for balance.
Weak and dizzy, he was like a man suffering through the blue devils of the DTs. He took his time walking to the light switch, a couple of stumbling steps then a pause to regain control then a couple more stumbling steps, until his body and brain began to register in approximately the same time and order. He turned on the wall switch. His eyes and head immediately rebelled against the light. Covering his eyes, he braced himself against the wall like an old drunk come from the pub to find the morning sun. Once he regained a semblance of control, he crossed the room to the porthole window, opening it to let in a draft of fresh air. He inhaled as deeply as his chest would allow, which was considerably less than a full breath, but he felt better for the air’s salty freshness.
From a side wall, he lifted off a framed picture, a landscape print by Cezanne, a single tree in front of a stand of trees on a Provence ridge. With his pocket knife, he removed the pins holding the paperboard backing. Inside the backing were the envelopes of names, the lists, and the photograph of the men in a trench, along with his few speculative notes. He replaced the paperboard, taking care to keep from leaving markings that would signal the backing had been removed.
He checked the bathroom and found his Luger missing. He had taped it to the back of the commode and all that was left was the tape. Back in the main room, he checked the desk’s trashcan for the .45. It was there beneath a pile of crumpled papers, cold and hard, a Smith & Wesson .45 1917 revolver with a short barrel the metallic color of a tempest sky. He smiled. The best place to hide something, he thought, was in plain sight. He glanced back at where Gresham’s photograph was hidden and thought momentarily of what his manuscript might involve—something hidden in plain sight.
His head hurt too much for such thoughts, so he went over the .45, something concrete with nothing hidden about it. After opening the cylinder to check the bullets and sighting through the foresight to gauge his unsteady hand, he lay the revolver on his washstand.
His mind flashed quickly and unexpectedly on a warm scene from his youth with his father sitting on the edge of a leather chair to work on the pieces of a revolver laid out on a trivet table pulled from in front of the fireplace. Joe kneeled across from his father to watch the man’s large hands disassemble and clean and reassemble the gun, which in his youth appeared enormous to Joe. After arranging the separate pieces across the metal table, Joe’s father would tap down the tobacco in his pipe before commenting on each piece, describing its fitting and its purpose. He wiped and oiled the revolver, its function and its placement and its mechanism, like a tuner at his Steinway.
In front of a banking fire with the revolver spread on the table in front of him and the night-sounds of the high desert outside the
ir ranch house, Joe came to know his father’s .45 as well as he knew the sandy arroyos he rode each day. Not a Smith & Wesson but a Colt that waited, along with his father’s tooled Western saddle and a cache of family heirlooms, in his uncle’s basement for his return to the Purgatory River at the base of the Sangre de Cristos in Southern Colorado.
Joe shook away the reverie. He stripped down to undershirt and pants, suspenders hanging slack to his sides. He pushed the pile of clothes to the wall before replacing the mattress so that he could just fall into bed when the time arrived.
Because the water pitcher had been placed on the floor beside the washstand and not broken against the floor, whoever had searched his room had done so with some care against noise. He put it back on the table and looked into the oval mirror above the table and wondered if Lazarus emerging from the dark had looked as bad as he did. He poured water into the bowl to clean his face then spoke to himself in the mirror. “You can’t run, buddy, and you can’t hide.”
He considered sliding into bed but knew that he should take a little exercise first. He had learned years earlier that after a fight, win or lose, the best thing to do was keep moving. If not, he would stove up tight as a chimney pipe and not even be able to rise from bed in the morning.
Dressed and wearing the buffalo robe, the .45 in one of its deep pockets, he set out for a couple of walking laps around the deck. He knew that he could expect a return visit from his intruders looking for what he did not have, but he did not want to be surprised again. After he closed and locked his door, he broke a toothpick between frame and door. Anyone opening the door would let it loose and not know where it belonged even if they saw it fall. If he could not keep them from entering his cabin, at least he could be prepared for them when he returned.
Death of a Century Page 8