After the key turned, he heard the soft tap, tap, tap of Binny’s loafers across the wood floor, coming closer.
“Deck?” he heard from behind him.
Still he didn’t move.
When he felt the weight of Binny’s hands on his shoulders, he stood and shook them off, spinning around, one fist raised.
The sight of Binny—his green eyes no longer glinting but dull, no smile playing over the off-center teeth—startled him for a moment, but then it fueled his anger, and he raised the other fist too, a boxer’s pose.
A coarse chuckle escaped Binny’s mouth. “Jesus, Deck, you look like a fool.” He batted down Dekalb’s hands. “Come inside before your nose gets pink.”
Binny turned and walked inside, leaving Dekalb standing there, his arms limp now, flattened by Binny’s words and the familiar coddling tone.
He followed Binny through the French doors and into the kitchen. Binny opened the Sub-Zero refrigerator with the knotty pine exterior, bending down to peer inside like he still lived here, reaching in for the peach juice, pouring them both a glass.
Dekalb ignored the offering. “How did you do it?”
Binny made a face as if that were a silly question. “Took it from the racks late one Friday night, before you delivered to the Shores.”
Dekalb dialed his mind back. BB Shore and her husband had taken delivery of the Gargeau after his recovery, after he thought Binny was gone from his life. “And then?
“And then I gave it to Sharton, replaced it two nights later.” William Sharton was one of the best, and undisputedly the fastest, forger in the city.
Dekalb felt a pulse of anger in his temples that Binny could be so nonchalant. “So tell me your price, Binny. Let’s get on with it.”
Binny sipped his juice, his long fingers wrapped around the small, bubbled-glass tumbler. They were as physically close to each other now as they’d been in over a year, and Dekalb could see the little U shape in the middle of Binny’s upper lip, the cinnamon-brown freckles in a curved trail below his eyes, the long black lashes. Binny pursed his mouth, and at the same time lifted his shoulders in a shrug.
It was that shrug that got him.
“Don’t!” Dekalb said to Binny.
“Don’t what?” A desperate, angry tone.
“Don’t play any more games with me!” Dekalb’s volume rose, and without moving his feet he strained himself toward Binny, feeling his face growing purplish. He couldn’t take this—Binny back in his kitchen, acting like he hadn’t orchestrated Dekalb’s personal destruction. “You’re hustling me for a reason. Tell me what in the hell you want.”
Another rough chuckle from Binny. “Hustling you? Is that what you think?”
“Blackmail then. Call it what you like.”
Binny leaned back against the counter. “This is what I want,” he said, waving the tumbler in an arc in front of his body.
Dekalb clenched his hands, his nails digging into the soft flesh of his palms, liking the thought that he might dig enough to draw his own blood. “My apartment? My furniture?”
“You, Deck, you idiot.” Binny set the glass down.
Dekalb swallowed, felt himself stall. “What?”
Binny’s eyes roamed his face. “Do you remember, after the hospital, how many times I called you, how many vases of lilies I sent, how many visits I tried to make to your office?”
Of course he remembered. He’d been trying to expunge Binny from his world, cleanse him from his pores, wanting to forget that the man he adored was just a con artist trying to get at his business.
“You used me,” Dekalb said.
“I loved you.” The flat, green eyes seemed to sink into Binny’s face, his mouth hung open a little, making him look out of breath. “I know you think you’re infallible, Deck, but you messed up there. I only wanted us to be closer, to share everything. I didn’t want half of your business, just to share a fraction, but you wouldn’t fucking listen. You jumped to conclusions, Deck, and you destroyed everything.”
Dekalb felt a prickle along his scalp, an inkling of fear that maybe he could have read it all wrong. He scoffed to show Binny he didn’t buy it, but the doubt crept in like smoke, making him flush with rage again. “Don’t do this to me.”
“Don’t do this to you?” Binny stood away from the counter, his face coloring, too. “You fucked it all up, Deck. Do you know where I’m working now? Do you know what you’ve reduced me to by spreading your lies about me?”
Dekalb didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. The pulsing in his temples grew stronger, almost thunderous.
“I’m working at the fucking Met.” Binny’s words got louder. “I’m selling scarves in the gift shop!” Binny waved his arm, and his hand connected with the tumbler on the counter, sending the glass skidding, peach juice lapping over the side. “You destroyed me, Deck, because you were too insecure to see what I was really asking you. I only took the Gargeau to make you hurt a little, to make you see that you couldn’t forget me.”
Dekalb wanted to pummel the sneer that twisted Binny’s mouth, the mouth that had once seemed so luscious. He wanted to smash the gleam that had crept back into Binny’s eyes.
“Name your price!” Dekalb screamed, enunciating each word, the shrill of his voice surprising him because he never screamed. Never. And yet now his reputation was flitting away on the easy words of BB Shore and her pack, and it was all disintegrating, all because of Binny.
“A thousand, twenty thousand, maybe a hundred thousand? Will that make you feel better?” Binny said, coming closer, and Dekalb saw a tear bead at the corner of one eye. Binny blinked fast, and it rolled down his pale cheek.
Dekalb coughed, nearly choked on air that seemed stuck in his throat. Was Binny telling the truth? Had he been proposing a marriage of sorts, a marriage of their lives, both professional and personal? No, he couldn’t let his mind roam there.
“Will that do it?” Binny was shouting now too, leaning nearer. “Will writing me a check and getting the Gargeau back make you feel safe? Will that do it, Deck? Is that all you need?”
Dekalb turned away, opening the drawer where Binny had left his carving knives, a drawer he rarely opened anymore because it reminded him of Binny, of those bleak days after the hospital when the knives sang to him, asking to be drawn, length-wise, from his wrists and up his arms. The silver steel of the largest blade was shining, glinting at him like Binny’s eyes used to. The handle was smooth polished wood with little brass posts screwed into it. Dekalb lifted it, the cool of the wood tucking perfectly in his grasp.
He’d get out in six years, four months and fourteen days, although parole was a possibility, too. Dekalb was a prisoner who no one worried about, who kept to himself. He liked tending to his cell, liked the ritual.
He spent his free time reading, keeping quiet until his weekly art lecture, where he often discussed Vernet, and the monthly book club, where he often asked the other inmates to read Sherlock Holmes. These groups were held in the rear of the cafeteria, and they were poorly attended. But the men who did come? They were good men, mostly because once a week or once a month, they’d chosen to be so. Dekalb was learning from them all the time.
He no longer cared that his stabbing of Binny and his own subsequent confession, had been sensationalized, exposing the art fraud. He wasn’t bothered that his assets had been liquidated to pay for criminal defense lawyers, his apartment sold, his paintings, furniture, and collectibles purchased by an auction house in London. He didn’t care that he’d never have lunch with BB Shore again.
The only thing he did care about, other than the other men he learned from, was Binny. Binny, who’d refused to testify against him even though he’d never breathe properly again. Binny, who was his only visitor, the only person who wrote or sent packages.
Binny.
DUNKIRK
by John Lescroart
(This story is dedicated to my father-in-law,
Robert F. Sawyer, who at 78 years of age
can still out run, out hike, out ski, out work
and out think just about everybody else out there.)
May, 1940
In full dark and shrouded in fog, the Dover Doll rose and fell in the still waters of the English Channel.
The Doll, an 18-meter former fishing boat converted to pleasure yacht, had disembarked from her berth in Dover at a few minutes before 7 p.m. that night, the 26th, one of the 161 British vessels that proved to be available on the first day of Operation Dynamo. The Doll carried a crew of four. Two of them—Harry and George– were boys under sixteen years of age, nephews of Duffy Black, a clerk from Churchill’s War Office who, because he’d spent much of his youth on the water, had volunteered to act as the captain of his brother-in-law’s boat during this crisis.
The last crew member, lately arrived from the Sussex Downs, was a elderly man who had, with great formality, identified himself to Duffy only as Mr. Sigerson. Taciturn and close to emaciated, Sigerson struck Duffy as a potential if not likely liability, but Churchill had called for volunteers post haste without regard to rank or age, and Duffy wasn’t in a position to turn away an able hand.
If, Duffy thought, he was in fact, able.
As they’d readied the Doll for its new mission, the last couple of days had laid that qualm to rest. The four of them had spent all day Saturday and Sunday stripping the boat of its deck chairs, footlockers, beach umbrellas and personal items, adding a supplementary gasoline tank, tuning the engine, preparing the boat for action. As far as Duffy could tell, Sigerson never even slowed down, much less took an actual break. He could carry more equipment than Duffy himself, or either of the boys; he knew his way around a radio; he radiated a calm and seemingly endless confidence and energy that seemed to motivate the boys and keep them on track. Beyond that, Sigerson had come with an extra duffel bag filled with a good quantity of canned food along with gauze, medicines, and other first aid supplies, prompting Duffy to inquire if he’d been a doctor during his working life.
“No,” Sigerson had replied, “although I did live with one for a number of years.” And then he struck a note that, obsessed with refitting the boat for its mission, Duffy hadn’t yet really considered. “This evacuation is not going to be accomplished without casualties. It’s best to be prepared.”
The mission was no less than to save what was left of the British Expeditionary Force under General Lord Gort before it was annihilated by the advancing German army. The BEF was now stranded in a ten-kilometer perimeter on either side of Dunkirk. Three days earlier, the Germans had turned north and west to the coast out of Abbeville on the Somme Estuary and taken first the city of Boulogne and, earlier today, the port at Calais. Now the panzers were moving north to the tip of the wedge at Dunkirk, although inexplicably they had paused at the Aa Canal, sixteen kilometers south of that city.
Mr. Sigerson, tall and thin, stood alone on the bow of the Doll, his smoked-out pipe clamped firmly in his teeth, the eyes above his angular nose searching for the shoreline in the black night. Off to his left, the oil tanks of Dunkirk, bombed earlier in the day by German Junkers Ju 87s—the famous Stukas—burned brightly even through the nighttime fog.
They had already passed a dozen or more boats returning to England laden with troops, and all had suggested using the fires as beacons to direct them to their destination. In the flickering dim light, Sigerson could make out five or six other boats, none larger than the Doll, within about a two hundred meter circle.
A whiff of Duffy Black’s cigarette—a Balkan Sobranie tobacco mixture about which Sigerson had once written a scholarly monograph—preceded the captain’s sudden appearance at his elbow. “Awfully decent of Jerry to light our way like this,” he said. “And just when you’ve about come to believe there’s nothing good to be said for ’em.” He laughed shrilly and blew a long plume of smoke into the air.
Sigerson said, “I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s perfectly natural to be nervous.”
“It’s just that I don’t want to spread my worries to the lads when . . .” He stopped, let out a brittle chuckle. “It shows, does it?”
“There are signs, yes.”
“Well, I’d be obliged if you could let me know what they are. Between you and me, I don’t mind telling you that I’m terrified, but I want to keep that hidden from the boys if I can.”
Sigerson nodded. “The laughter when you speak. The long exhale of your smoke. The cigarette all but crumbling between your fingers.”
Duffy looked down at his hand, brought the cigarette to his mouth, took a drag, exhaled out normally. “Thank you,” he said, without any accompanying chuckle. “All easily corrected.”
Sigerson threw a glance out to the water, then looked back over his shoulder. “I take it the boys are skilled at steering? It’s getting crowded out here.”
“They’ve both been on the water since before they wore long pants. I’d worry more about me when we get close in. So how about you? If you’re nervous, I must say you’ve got it well under control.”
Sigerson pulled his pipe from his mouth, put it in his pocket. “I’d be a fool if I wasn’t concerned. But I’m more surprised than anything. I wasn’t expecting the Boche would let us drive right up like this.”
“It may be they don’t know we’re here yet.”
But Sigerson, who had spent some of his time aboard at the two-way radio in the hold below, shook his head. “No. They’re monitoring our chatter and have reported it back to Guderian.” The German commander. “They even got Churchill’s speech. So they know what we’re trying to do, anyway.”
“You speak German?”
“I can get by.” He scanned the sky left to right. “But there’s no sign of them.”
Duffy trained his eyes in front of him. “I’m betting there will be plenty of sign come daylight, which is why I hope to be loaded up and long gone by then.” Suddenly, Sigerson grabbed him by the arm, pointed with his other hand. “There! Do you see that? We’re getting close.”
Squinting into the night, Duffy could now make out what looked at first to be a darker patch in the fog. To their right, a disembodied voice carried over the water. “Comin’ up on it.” The flaming oil fire to their left was no longer at eleven o’clock. It had moved down closer to nine. They were nearly to the shore.
Duffy turned and spoke up to the bridge. “Back it down half slow, Harry. I’m coming up. Georgie, give Mr. Sigerson another pair of eyes and hands down here, would you? I expect we’re gettin’ close.”
Another boat, low in the water, appeared out of the mist at under fifty meters, on a collision course straight for them. On the bridge, Harry gave a whistle and both boats jerked to the right.
As they drew alongside, Sigerson was close enough to see the faces of troops—fifty or sixty men stood on the deck, and who knew how many more below? They were a silent bunch for the most part, and when the captain called across, his words were clear. “Keep your hull up and slow, mate. Sand bars all the way in. Tide’s dead low.”
“How much more ahead of us?”
“Two hundred meters. More or less. They’re off the beach. Look for the queue. You’re coming up on them.”
By now Duffy was back at the wheel and he slowed the boat. Within seconds, Sigerson felt the tug of bottom drag that meant they’d touched, but only just touched, a sand bar. They kept moving forward, over it.
Sigerson looked overboard into the black water. The Doll drew a little over a meter—if it was loaded with men, it would draw more. Sigerson, hyper-aware, knew that they were about as close in to shore as they dared go.
His voice shrill with excitement, 13-year-old George called out. “There they are, uncle! One o’clock.”
Sigerson looked over to his right and sure enough, here was the classic British queue heading out from the shoreline. The men were up to their waists and deeper in the very cold water, their weapons at their shoulders, to all appearances patiently waiting for a boat to come about and invite them ab
oard. Perpendicular to the shoreline, all the way up as far as the eye could see in the flickering light from the oil fires, similar lines of men waited in the water at roughly thirty meter intervals.
Sigerson felt the now familiar tug from another sand bar. At the same time, he felt a subtle shift in the swell and knew that if they continued forward they would run aground. With no time for any hesitation, he yelled this information up to the bridge.
In an instant, Duffy had the Doll turned around and was backing it toward the line of men. Sigerson and Georgie rushed back to the stern and the boy threw the rope ladder overboard just as the motor cut to neutral.
The crew fell to their assigned tasks. Since Sigerson was far taller than Duffy or either of the boys, he had insisted that he was the logical choice to drop into the freezing water where he could stand and guide the troops in the darkness to the ladder. Georgie made sure that those aboard moved away for the others behind them. Harry kept the count of them, getting them arranged first below decks and then up on top; each of them keeping up a steady consoling patter. “Easy now, men. Watch the steps. Plenty more boats on the way. We’ll get you on the outside of some hot tea in a couple of hours.” Talking them forward. Moving them along. There was no time to be lost.
Duffy had calculated that they could recross the Channel with fairly decent control of the craft as long as they didn’t bring more than forty men on board. But the queue stretched unbroken from the boat to the shoreline, a distance of at least a hundred and fifty meters, and Sigerson, glancing toward the beach, realized that there was an endless supply of men. He kept handing troops up to the ladder, urging them to climb aboard. Without actually counting, he knew that he’d helped sixty-seven men by now.
In the Company of Sherlock Holmes Page 13