The Four Corners of the Sky

by Michael Malone

  Fierson shrugged at Annie. “But I admire your tenacity.” He shook her hand. “Lieutenant. You’ve done a service to your country. Gentlemen, thank you.” He bowed his head briefly. “I hope we’ve kept it comfortable. Best of luck.” The assistant held open the door for him.

  After the State Department official left, the other participants at the meeting quickly gathered their belongings to follow him out. Willie detoured to a sideboard of croissants. Dan moved over to talk to him.

  As Trevor passed close to Annie, he leaned in to her and surprised her by whispering, “Trust Helen Clark. She’s with us. She’s got your back. Be careful, Annie.” He moved on as if he hadn’t spoken to her at all.

  Lt. Commander Bok stopped Annie in the doorway. “Good luck.”

  “Thank you, sir. With permission, sir, a question. If I can manage to get back to Key West in time, and make it to Patuxent River for the test flight, can I fly it?” She saluted him. “I would really like the opportunity, sir.”

  A tiny smile escaped the edge of the lt. commander’s tightly compressed mouth. “Lieutenant Goode, if you can make it back to Sigsbee in time, the Navy will fly you to the test.”

  “Thank you, sir!” Annie smiled so infectiously that even Officer Sims grinned back at her.

  ***

  Dan fumed about McAllister Fierson as Annie and he followed a husky MP down a long corridor to the area where Raffy was being held. Fierson’s heading home to fish with his grandson on Jupiter Island struck Dan as “just right.” Jupiter Island, Florida, was the most expensive zip code in the United States; there were only about two hundred households there, most of them Duponts and Fords and Harrimans and the descendents of Prescott Bush and other Yale Bonesmen. “I guess he feels ‘comfortable.’”

  Raffy sat crouched at the end of his cot in a neat, spare “confinement area.” His fingers laced around his knees and he was talking out loud to himself. He still wore the lime-green floppy trousers and yellow shirt with dancing alligators that he’d had on days ago and he looked dirty and tired. His voice was as soft and rhythmic as a rumba.

  Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

  Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

  So intent was the musician on Caliban’s poetry that he seemed not to hear their approach.

  Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

  Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices

  That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

  Will make me sleep again…

  The Cuban saw Annie and his face lightened, incandescent. “Annie! Can you believe what I just did?” He jumped to his feet, reached his manacled hands out to her. “I did a whole speech! Did you hear me do that whole speech?”

  She took his hands. “I did.”

  He was exuberant about his achievement. “It just all came into my mind! Just the way your papa would recite it for me in our cell. I could never do that before! I couldn’t retain the words. But now, just listen to me!

  …And then, in dreaming,

  The clouds methought would open and show riches

  Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,

  I cried to dream again.

  “A-plus, Raffy,” she told him.

  “You look like shit, Rook,” growled Dan. “They haven’t messed with you, have they? Nothing nasty?”

  Raffy pointed significantly at his ear, spun his finger at the ceiling of the room as if to suggest there were people up there listening. “Loneliness is the sum of my torture. As prisons go, it’s still America.”

  Dan asked, “Then why’d you blab your guts? You gave it all up. I thought you were going to present that Jesus splinter to your mom in a big prodigal son number? But you gave it up to the Feds.”

  The musician hunched his shoulders apologetically. “Annie, forgive me but I didn’t give up more than necessary to only serve eighteen months and I ask your pardon for what I did give up but if you’d done time in Dade County, well, all I can say is, if Hamlet thought Denmark was a prison, let him go to Dade County for eighteen months. I’d prefer no months at all, and losing la espina de la corona de Jesús Cristo to those s.o.b.s that was supposed to go to my mama, that is a deep, deep pain.” He sighed, his eyes large and sorrowful. “But vivamos nuestras vidas cotidianas.”

  Annie explained to Raffy that he was about to be released into Dan’s custody. “And guess what? We are going to Cuba. You were right about that.” Annie told him of her deal with the government. How in exchange for her help, Jack Peregrine would be given protection and medical attention. She, Dan, and Raffy were going to fly her father’s Cessna to Havana today, using Raffy’s relatives to make their illegal water landing and their entry into Cuba possible. They would withdraw the contents from her father’s bank drawer in the Plaza de Armas, just as Raffy had discussed with her.

  Raffy’s “no” was so vehement that his black ponytail bounced on his neck. “I was never in that water plane but the one time with Jack and that’s the time when we landed in a very stormy sea and we almost crashed to death and my relatives were not waiting in their little boat but the Cuban police were waiting in a big boat and they caught us! That’s when we went to jail together, your papa and me. The mice and rats are not so cheerful the way they are always singing and dancing in Walt Disney, let me tell you. So no, gracias, I am not flying with you to Cuba.”

  Annie assured him they weren’t going to have bad weather and they weren’t going to jail; they would just fly in, fly out. Didn’t he want to go home, see his mother?

  “‘I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.’ I don’t have the nerve for little planes, especially not on ocean waves. And Cuba? My memories are not so good. As my grandpapa Simon told my abuela, ‘A broch tzu Columbus!’”

  Dan asked, “Is that Yiddish for fuck Christopher Columbus?”

  “Pretty much,” admitted the small musician. He motioned Annie away from Dan, whispering, “Your papa is alive.”

  “I know he is. So does the FBI.”

  “Feliz Diaz is paying him a million dollars in cash for La Reina. In cash! A million dollars! Your papa is going to get that money to you. Don’t trust the government. Trust your family.”

  Annie pulled back, ironic. “Ah, my family? When did you last see my ‘papa’?” She wasn’t sure whether they could be overheard, even whispering, so she hesitated to tell Rook any specifics about how she’d spotted her father last night at the hotel in Key West. “They don’t seem to have caught him.”

  “Ah.” Rafael held the forefingers of both hands to his soft lips, blew away all questions. “Shhh. Flights of angels.”

  “Flights of angels to where exactly? Has he left the country?”

  The slender man lifted his shoulders rhythmically, so that the alligators danced on his yellow shirt. “I know nothing. I am only Rosencrantz and I forget the other one.”

  “Raffy, isn’t a friend like family? Wouldn’t you rather help out Jack, your best friend, than sit here alone in this cell?”

  He glanced sadly around the small bare barred room. They looked at each other.

  Dan said, “Do it, Rook. Annie’s fought for you. You should have heard her in there fighting for you. Come on. Help her.”

  The Cuban sighed at the ceiling. “Ahhh, Annie…‘my love’s more richer than my tongue.’…” He sighed at the floor. “I’ll do it.”

  Dan gave him both thumbs up.

  Annie told the MP that they were ready to go. The young man helped Raffy to his manacled feet.

  “I don’t want to do this,” Raffy whispered to Annie. “I really don’t want to. I don’t want to go back to jail in Cuba. Not without Jack.”

  She kissed him. “You won’t,” she promised. “I’m going to get you through this. And you’re going to see your mother. She doesn’t want to see a Thorn of the Holy Crown in a silver box. She wants to see you.”

  His ponytail flicked from side to side. “That’s what you think.”
>
  Annie stepped back so the MP could walk him out of the room. “Everything’s going to be okay. Do you believe me?”

  His eyes sweetened. “I do believe you.” He leaned around her to Dan. “You, you son-of-a-bitch Miami police, I don’t believe. But her I do.”

  Dan slapped the Cuban’s thin back, assuring him he’d be home with Chamayra and they’d be hanging out the Love sign in no time.

  “No time would be better than eighteen months,” sighed the Cuban as he shuffled down the long, overlit corridor.

  ***

  Just as McAllister Fierson had pledged, the government made the arrangements. If there was one skill the government had, Dan noted, it was VIP arrangements: The government knew how to grease the wheel (in the packets Trevor had handed them there were Canadian passports and Cuban pesos and euros with which to bribe any people whom it might be appropriate to bribe). The government was good at paving the way (at the Key West airfield, Annie’s father’s Cessna Amphibian was already checked out, gassed up, and waiting on the ramp). They knew how to jump the queue.

  Annie moved the Cessna to first position on the tarmac. Eagerly Dan pulled open a loosened panel in the fuselage of the Cessna. Annie had told him the sort of panel to look for, predicting that her father would have hidden the gold statue of the Queen of the Sea just as he’d done before in the King of the Sky. Why else would he have told her in his phone call last night, “The Queen’s in the plane”?

  Dan whistled when he pulled out of its green cloth wrapping the gold Virgin Mary in the Incan Pachamama cape, with her sunburst crown and large rectangular emeralds inserted in three of the seven gold rods. “Look at this thing! Holy Mother of God.”

  Carefully strapped into his seat, Raffy clutched a life jacket. “Yes, it’s the Holy Mother. Are you being funny? Don’t be funny. Aren’t you scared?”

  Dan looked out the window at the naval crews. “I tell you what’s scary. I’m in love with somebody in the U.S. military.”

  Cleared for take-off, Annie taxied onto the runway and turned to look down the center. “You know what, Dan? You’re a whole lot better off with the military than you are with politicians. Like I keep reminding Sam, it was Eisenhower who said, ‘Watch out for the military-industrial complex.’ It was Admiral Leahy who said dropping the A-bomb on Japan would turn us into Dark Age barbarians. Good guys are in the military.”

  Raffy shouted at Annie, “Stop talking, stop talking, pay attention to what you’re doing. Oh Jesús Cristo, hear my prayer!”

  Dan laughed. “‘Hear my prayer’? Rook, you said you weren’t a believer.”

  Raffy checked the buckle on his guitar in the seat next to him. “‘I love long life better than figs.’ And Chamayra will kill me if I get myself killed!”

  ***

  The flight was not a long one. Within the hour, they spotted the green mountains of Cuba’s coast. The mountains were heartbreakingly beautiful.

  Soon their small plane was approaching a quiet harbor north of Puerto Esperanza in the western province of Pinar del Rio. Right on time, they were coming in for a sea landing on the Archipiélago de los Colorados: lat 22º 47’ N, long 83º 43’ W. Annie radioed her position as instructed back at Sigsbee. She raised the wheels and soon was being guided in her descent by Raffy’s cousin Tico Ramirez. He’d been watching for them from his boat, just beyond the reef off the coast of the dockmaster’s office in the harbor.

  The sea was gray and unexpectedly rough.

  Annie glanced behind her at a strange noise. Raffy was making it. “Dan, get Raffy’s head down between his legs right away!” The musician was hyperventilating in loud gasps. She called back from the cockpit. “Raffy, take it easy! This is nothing! This is just a little choppy! Hang on.”

  Dan cupped his hands over Rafael’s nose and mouth. “Breathe slowly, paisano. Don’t fight me, you chickenshit Cubano.”

  “Let go, son of a bitch,” panted Rafael, pulling free of Dan, his hair flying, distracted from noticing that the seaplane was gliding with a smooth straightforwardness onto the bouncing waves. “O my Savior, gracias, gracias!”

  They motored toward the buoy where Raffy’s cousin’s boat was waiting to meet them. So far, Dan admitted, everything had happened as Jack had said it would. “Let them send you to Havana, he said. Fierson will pretend it’s about Cuba and the church and the statue. And the FBI will really believe it. Jack’s gone way up in my estimation. I don’t mind having him for a father-in-law. If they double-cross us and he gets 20 years, I’m going to go visit him in prison.”

  They still didn’t know what was in the bank pouch or what picture Jack wanted them to give Helen Clark. Or what Raffy was supposed to do that he always did.

  “It will all fall pat,” the Cuban promised, cheerful now that he was out of the sky.

  Chapter 50

  Only Angels Have Wings

  Sam, in the recovery room following her surgery, felt herself float up to the ceiling away from the pain. She had wings and was flying all around the room but, like a fly or a bee in search of an exit, she couldn’t find her way out and struck herself against the windows.

  Annie, seven years old, stood with Clark at the foot of the hospital bed, their heads tilted back, turning to watch her aunt fly from light to light. “How come she’s got wings?” Annie asked Clark. “Is she dead?”

  Clark said no, that Sam was not going to die yet because she hadn’t finished cleaning out the attic as she often promised to do before she died.

  “Only angels have wings,” Annie told him.

  “Don’t flyers?” he asked.

  “That’s true,” the solemn little girl agreed. “Flyers have wings.” She unpinned the tiny medal bar of wings from her jean jacket and broke it in two, fastening a wing to each of her shoulders. The wings suddenly grew to full size, sprouting out of her jacket, and, using them to fly, Annie glided up to the ceiling next to Sam, who was trying to kick open a transom window. “Come back, Aunt Sam. It’s about that time.” The phrase was the one Sam used nightly to let Annie know it was time for her to go to bed. Tugging on Sam’s hand, Annie floated down with her in looping circles back onto the hospital bed below. Sam lay on the bed and Clark pulled up the white sheets around her.

  ***

  An hour later, in the recovery room, Sam awakened from her dreams, worried that Jack hadn’t received the FedEx he’d asked her to send him two nights ago to his hotel in Key West—enclosing the photograph of Jack and Annie at The Breakers Hotel in West Palm Beach that he’d left in Annie’s little blue suitcase so many years ago and that Sam had framed when she’d found it. There had been something about that photograph that Jack had suddenly needed. Sam couldn’t now remember if Jack had explained what the importance was and she worried that maybe she hadn’t sent the FedEx correctly. Had she talked to Jack since she’d sent it?

  Something had happened to her this morning; something had fallen on her. The old Worth armoire, that’s it, it had been her mother’s armoire. She’d been distracted, listening to news on the television from down the hall while she’d tried to drag the heavy ornate walnut piece of furniture into Jack’s room. That’s right, she was fixing up Jack’s old bedroom for his recuperation. The armoire had caught on the doorsill. Served her right. She’d been wearing her old leather weight-lifting belt to help strengthen her back but it hadn’t helped. She was not as strong, not as fast as she once had been. Why, when she was a girl, she’d once caught a runaway horse for a neighboring farmer and she’d ridden the horse home bareback. Once she’d killed a wild pig with a bow and arrow. She’d shaken apples out of the tops of trees for her friends and rescued her brother Jack from a bull’s charge.

  Jack had called the teenaged Sam “the fastest woman alive.” He’d boasted to D. K. of her “amazing catch” of the infant Annie when the year-old baby was crawling so fast across the porch that she headed straight off into the air over the top of the steep steps. Jack was standing not far from the steps, talking to D. K. about the K
ing of the Sky. They hadn’t noticed the baby. Sam had been upstairs, cleaning out the rooms that she never seemed able to empty of the collected past. She heard Annie laughing downstairs in the hall and then the door screeching open. According to Jack, Sam had flown down the stairs and through the air out onto the porch and never touched the floor before she had snatched Annie’s heel with her outstretched fingers and stopped her from falling.

  But then Jack always exaggerated.

  Sam drifted back into a dream in which she was trying to edit together a film but at the same time she was showing that film on a projector at the Paradise, Emerald’s now defunct old movie house. Sam was in a state because the film kept jamming and breaking off and unraveling, twisting like small black snakes, like a mechanical hydra, lashing the projection room. She had to keep stopping the movie, to the displeasure of the audience. They sat in the dark, chanting “Slowpoke! Slowpoke!” which is what her mother had called her when she’d “dawdled” over difficult homework.

  The scenes of the movie, jumbled and disjointed, included awful memories that Sam had told no one but Jill and Clark and that she was upset to see playing out at the local cinema. In one scene, her father Judge Peregrine, austere in his black robes, spoke directly to the camera in extreme close-up. Addressing the mourners at the funeral of his two-year-old son John Ingersoll Peregrine, he told them that “candidly” he did not care for his daughter Samantha, whom he considered not particularly bright and that “frankly” he had an aversion to his son Jack, who had from his youth been defiant and volatile and beautiful and who had therefore always reminded the judge of his wife.