He walked a trail once around the ship with the air cold and wet and fresh, freezing in his nostrils as he breathed. He stepped to the railing and stood in the cold darkness to enjoy the sea air.
Around him lay a suspension of silence, with the ship’s turbines a continual dull thrum of sound. He looked out again at where the blackness of the sky met the blackness of the sea, the liquid traces of moonlight on the dark water. Above, the night’s stars shined like distant diamonds shook out on a velvet sheet. Closing his eyes, he listened to the deep churn of the turbines. Only with concentration could he feel the easy movement of the big ship in the water. Joe opened his eyes and stared into the dark, unblinking with his head raised as though smelling the salt in the air
“You don’t look so bad off, old man.” Huntington’s polished voice came out of the darkness from behind him. Joe turned and watched the man approach along the railing, walking with a quiet and steady gate. One of the Englishman’s hands stayed in his coat pocket, as did one of Joe’s. He wore a properly pressed English smile across his face, his black hair slicked back. His eyebrows were cocked and he still wore his rakish smile, which made him look like a man who enjoyed an occasional adventure or even a good scrape.
“Pardon me?” Joe said.
“The way you were standing,” Huntington said, nodding toward the railing. “I’ve seen plenty of sick men lean against the rail like that.” He paused. “You don’t look all that ill. Mal de mer, the French call it. They have such a way of making even unpleasant things sound romantic.”
Joe made a half turn to face Huntington. “You’re not looking hard enough.”
Huntington looked at him again and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose not. You appear to be wearing a few rather new bruises.”
“I slipped,” Joe said.
Huntington nodded as though absorbing Joe’s words, then said, “You slipped?” He punctuated his words with a half-laugh. “You must take proper care.”
“I lack the necessary sea legs for ocean voyaging.”
Joe looked as closely as he could into Huntington’s eyes, searching for any sign that Huntington had been involved in the beating. He saw none, but that meant little.
Huntington smiled a pleasant smile. He looked out toward the sea. “You must be anticipating our arrival with eagerness.”
Joe did not answer. One more day on the ship, then clearing customs at Cherbourg, and after that he could choose his person—himself, Gresham, or someone else entirely, someone with no past. He could hide himself in with the thousands of other American men traveling to France. In plain sight.
“Are you going to Paris?” Huntington asked, watching Joe with steady eyes.
“Undecided,” Joe said, his words tinged with a growing distrust. “Why do you ask?”
Huntington turned his back to the railing and leaned against it. While the man had the unmistakable air of superiority bred deeply into an English gentleman, Huntington did not have that aura of disdain and smugness. He removed his cigarette case, silver on top with a college line traversing one corner and his monogram in the middle. Holding the case in the palm of his hand, he opened it with his thumb and held it out toward Joe. A dozen short, white cigarettes perfectly lined the inside of the metallic box.
Joe shook his head and turned so that he also leaned back against the rail. “No thanks,” he said.
“They’re American. Chesterfield’s.”
“No,” Joe said and began to add more but just stopped.
“A Yank who doesn’t smoke. Something of a rarity, I suppose,” Huntington mused and took a cigarette from his case.
“Never had the urge, except maybe once during the war when I was wounded.”
“Ah,” Huntington said, nodding, “necessity’s sharp pinch. I know that need quite well.”
Joe wondered whether they were playing a game, how much Huntington knew of Gresham, whether he was really a cousin to one of the men in the photograph, whether Huntington had anything to do with the searching of his room.
Huntington tapped the cigarette twice on the closed lid of his case and put it unlit in the corner of his mouth. He then opened his overcoat, loosened his tie and collar, and pulled his shirt open enough for Joe to see the purple remains of a round scar just inches from the base of his neck. “Got it during the Somme. Lucky bastard potted me just as I stepped from the trench ladder.”
He retightened his collar and added, “Another . . . to the arm . . . in the mud, Passchendaele. I suppose I didn’t learn my lesson the first time.”
Joe nodded. “Mine aren’t as easily exposed,” he said.
“Funny thing, though,” Huntington said. “I turned out the lucky one at the Somme. I was wounded right off and right in front of a medical lad.” He blinked and added, “Not one in four of my men survived that morning. A bloody waste.”
They said nothing for a moment while Huntington lit his cigarette from a silver lighter and took a deep drag. Joe began to like Huntington. The man was a bit arrogant, to be sure, but the arrogance was a bred arrogance that had been softened by a life lived outside of manors and manners.
Looking at the orange glow of the cigarette between his fingers, Huntington asked, “What is your name, sir?”
Joe felt his face darken. “You know my name. Wynton—”
“I mean your real name.” He leaned closer.
Joe could smell the man’s expensive cologne as though he had been set for a good night, dressed in black and detailed like a prince.
“You ever heard what happened to the curious cat?” Joe asked.
“You mean the one who lied about his name, was found to be a stowaway, and turned over to the authorities? That curious cat?” Huntington looked at Joe, eyebrows raised, a non-committal grin on his face.
Joe fingered the revolver in his pocket. “What’s your point?” he asked and felt his body tense and his eyes press.
“No point, old man. Just asking for your name, your real name.” He continued to study his cigarette some more, holding it a foot from his face and tilting it so that the smoke curled in its own gray column against the black backdrop of the ship’s walkway. He held it that way and gazed at it in a posture that seemed to Joe as something Huntington might have learned at Eton or choreographed from a duke or a prince.
Joe breathed heavily but did not say anything, his breath pluming in the night’s cold air.
Without looking at Joe, Huntington said, “I’m sorry, old man, did you say something? Your name?”
Through a plume of cigarette smoke, he added, “And please don’t tell me that you are Wynton Gresham. Wynton Gresham is dead. I know that.” He looked around and scratched at his cheek before continuing. “Against my better judgment, I like you, old man. Don’t make me call a ship’s mate to assist us.”
Had Joe not been so tired and sore and stiff and addled, he probably would have felt a panic rush through his body. As it was, though, he just felt tired.
Huntington breathed in a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled softly, tilting his head slightly and letting the cloud dissipate before he spoke, “Still fingering the gun in your pocket?” He smiled and added, “Something of a crude joke, wouldn’t you say, had a woman said the same thing to you?”
Huntington leveled his gaze and continued, “What I want to know, sir, is who you are and why you are impersonating Wynton Gresham.”
Joe took a minute to consider his options—tell the truth, tell another lie, or toss Huntington to the sharks. The last option sounded most appealing to Joe, but he might as easily end up swimming with the fishes himself. He flipped a mental coin and it came up tails.
“My name is Joe Henry,” Joe said with a sigh, his words forming through a cloud of steam from his breath. “I’m a friend of Gresham. A week ago, he wired me in New York and said that he had reservations on this ship and could not come—I don’t know why—and asked if I wanted the ticket. I said yes and he wired it to me.”
Huntington looked at Jo
e through eyes that studied and weighed and gauged him without any hint either of acceptance or disbelief. Joe did not smile nor did he allow his eyes to break from Huntington’s stare. It was a simple lie. He hoped that its simplicity would carry it, even under the scrutiny of the Englishman’s hard gaze.
Huntington remained leaning against the rail until it appeared that he had sifted through the conjured story and had come to some sanction. He flicked his cigarette into the ocean. Joe could see the orange glow disappear into the drift. He stepped away and turned to face Joe head on as though forming one pole of dueling opposites. “It is probably a lie, but it might not be. If it is another lie . . . well, at the least, you will be detained in Cherbourg. Maybe, I will simply kill you.”
Joe met Huntington’s gaze. “Killing me would not be that easy,” he said.
“Possibly,” and he shrugged.
“Now let me ask you something,” Joe said, hoping to deflect the conversation from him. “Did you search my room earlier?”
Huntington coughed a laugh. “No,” he answered, “I am not the only person interested in Gresham.”
“Who else is?” Joe asked.
Huntington laughed again, not unpleasant. “What an interesting irony life can become.” Huntington smiled and pushed himself from the rail. He removed and lit another cigarette, inhaling a drag before taking a step toward the entrance to the deck.
“Wait a minute,” Joe said.
Huntington turned back. “Yes?”
“I talked with you. You talk with me. Give and take.”
Huntington laughed. “You told me enough lies to fill a Scottish maun. Do you want me to tell you a lie as well?”
In his mind, Joe worked around the rough edges of the truth. He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. Gresham is dead. Shot. By whom, I don’t know. I found him and the police think I killed him, but I didn’t. I needed a quick exit. His ticket on this ship provided that for me.”
“And your name?”
“Joe Henry, as I said.”
Huntington nodded. “That sounds closer to the truth. With Gresham’s death, what makes you think I won’t now turn you over to the ship’s officers?”
“You may, but you may have anyways,” Joe said, regaining some balance. “You need something, or you want something from me, else you would not have searched me out. You came to me hoping to find Gresham. You didn’t, and now you have more questions. Maybe I can help.”
After a full-beat pause, Huntington stepped closer. “Maybe.”
Joe said slowly, “And maybe you can also help me.”
Huntington nodded. “Quid pro quo.”
Joe said, “You scratch mine, I scratch yours.”
Huntington nodded.
“Who searched my room?” Joe asked.
Huntington took a drag on his cigarette, holding it in for an extra second before tilting his head to exhale. He watched the gray smoke disappear as though he was searching its depths.
“There are others,” he said, “besides myself, who are interested in the manuscript Gresham was writing about Champagne. I had been doing some research into the battle myself when I found the address of a man in Paris who had been there with Gresham and my cousin. He told me about the manuscript and I reserved passage as soon as I could. Unfortunately, I was unable to locate Gresham before his murder. My. . . friend in Paris told me that Gresham was sailing for France on this charter. I had already booked it for myself in case I could not connect with Gresham in the States, and then I read about his murder and thought that the entire trip had been a waste. Imagine my surprise when I find that a dead man is a sailing mate.”
Joe shrugged.
“Who’s your friend in Paris?” Joe asked. “Your friend’s name?”
Huntington smiled and shrugged. “Not yet,” he said.
Joe looked out at the sea then back at Gresham. “What do you have against Gresham?”
“Until recently, I had believed, as did others, that Gresham was the one who sold out the advance.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Neither do I; not anymore,” Huntington said. He held out his cigarette, studying the half-inch of ashes on the end before flicking the cigarette out and over the railing. “If you give me a copy of the manuscript to read tonight, tomorrow I will tell you everything you want to know.”
Joe shook his head. “I don’t have a copy.” He added. “Not with me.” He watched Huntington arc a single eyebrow.
“Ah, well then—”
“Who else is on board?”
Huntington smiled. “I’ll contact you in the morning.”
“Why was Gresham killed? What had he written that would get him killed?”
“That should be obvious.” Huntington held a finger up as though silencing a school boy. “Tomorrow we shall speak more.” He waved his hand in the air and walked toward the doorway, trailing a wake of breath steam behind him.
Huntington disappeared into the white light of the ship’s vestibule. Joe watched him until the swinging doors shut, then turned toward the bow of the ship and let the wind wash his face with a cold and steady breeze. He wondered, looking at the charcoal outline of the ship receding into the darkness ahead of it, where he would have been had he just stayed in Greenwich and let himself be arrested. He wondered also where he would be in a week from that moment, where a smart man would be if he himself were a smart man. He had not liked the idea of someone pulling his strings when he was in the army, and the closer he sailed to France the more that uncomfortable feeling returned.
Joe walked through the empty hallways to his cabin and found the toothpick still tight where he had left it. He unlocked and opened the door and let the toothpick fall to the carpet. He lay down on the bed and fell asleep with his clothes still on, the buffalo robe as a covering.
In a dream he studied himself naked, eyes closed and mouth shut tight in a strained line as though he were clenching it against the pain. Blood stained his left cheek from a wound to his shoulder which had already crusted and blackened. His torso was streaked with sweat and mud. Another wound blackened on his left hip and pinpricks of shrapnel had turned his legs into mosaics of blood and bruises and mud. He dreamed of a morning, but his dreams were felon and uncertain. He dreamed things that could not have happened. Men and parts of men flying in slow motion through the smoke-hazed morning to land in small and large splashes within the muddy and water-filled hollows from old bomb shells. Holes opened inside the middle of men’s bodies as they ran and some fell as though tripping when they suddenly lost the lower portion of a leg. A man, his jaw shot off, walked dumbly across the pockmarked landscape, arms limp and useless, his eyes speaking a horrible language. He tripped over men who lay with their bodies opened and entrails spilling out and giving off a purplish vapor like whiskey lit with a match. He saw a no-man’s land in his dream. Within that no-man’s land there was nothing alive. Every tree truncated and left to stand with jagged tops, no bushes or grasses to hold water in the ground, only mud stained red. Every man not dead felt dead and felt as though he would never again be alive. In his dream, the morning became afternoon. He lay in his own blood and filth through the rest of the eventide and through that night. The next morning he listened to flies and to the moans of men who prayed to die. He heard rats feed on men, some of whom not yet dead. He watched a bloody and muddy mongrel dog pick its way through the broken rubble of bodies until finding one it wanted and then begin to eat pieces of a dead man’s exposed and opened stomach.
V
“Those were soul-thrilling days. We who lived through them, knew that they marked a dividing line in our experience, and that henceforth all we did and were would gravitate about that central moment of our lives.”
—“Captain X,” Scribner’s Magazine, October, 1915
WAKING IN SWEAT AND WAKING SUDDENLY TO THE DARKNESS OF his room, he felt a panic from rising in a dark place and not knowing where he was. Slowly he recalled where and who he was and who he
was not. He lay back down and sighed. For most of the rest of that night he lay mostly awake but fell asleep again near sunrise. Hours later the light from the morning sun through the porthole window woke him for good.
His head and his body ached in companion, two bloody chaps at the bar rail besting the other in the consumption of pain. Joe wished he had a couple of pints with which to drown them both. In the mirror above the washstand he again looked into the face of Lazarus, although not as healthy.
“Bloody fool,” he said to his reflection and waited for an answer that did not come.
Joe imagined the coroner’s jowly face in Greenwich hanging above his as he lay stretched on a table like that etherized patient he had once read about. The coroner would look up from his notes to announce the results of his inquest. Joe said out loud into the clear liquid of the mirror, “Cause of death—gross ignorance and stupidity,” and he smiled, which hurt.
Near noon, Joe found the focus for his eyes. He sat on the rumpled blankets of his unmade bed, wondering what new ignorance he would suffer that day. He wrote his quick list for that day:
Wash & Shave
Pick-Up Clothes
Exercise
Stay out of Damn Trouble
Dammit
He sat for a moment, fountain pen in hand, thinking of nothing else for his list, so he began to rearrange the mess of his room, returning his clothes to their hangars or to the chest of drawers. He washed and shaved and set himself for the day and wondered why Huntington had not yet contacted him. By mid-afternoon, he was again leaning on the ship’s railing, dressed in Gresham’s tweed suit, standing on the promenade deck to inhale the salt air that was almost cold. Its brisk bite made him feel more alive than he had felt for days.
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