Diamondhead

by Diamondhead (UK) (retail) (epub)

  This weekly procedure was not without its perils. There had been one shuddering occasion when Foche and the girl had almost been caught, walking along rue de la Monnaie, with Claudette approaching on the other side of the street. Henri Foche had never raced into a church with such determination. Even the carved angels on the outer wall of the Cathedrale Saint Pierre looked startled at the sudden appearance of the serial adulterer, murderer, liar and international arms pariah. But they would look startled: angels have superior insights to the rest of us.

  And now Claudette was hot on his trail again. “Who are you seeing and where? I may need to contact you, especially if the police have more questions about Olivier.” She should have known better. If there was one thing Henri Foche could not abide under any circumstances, it was interference with his plans. Particularly from a woman, especially from his wife.

  He glanced up and said coldly, “Shut your damn mouth.”

  “I don’t think you should speak to me like that anymore,” she said. “I’m entitled to ask questions, and you are in a very vulnerable position politically.”

  Anger welled up inside him. No one thwarted Henri Foche, especially on matters involving illicit sex, to which he had been looking forward for several days. He stood up and walked over to her, drew back his right arm across his body, and whipped a backhanded smack right across his wife’s mouth and nose. The blow sent her reeling across the room. She hit the sideboard and slid down the wall next to it, blood pouring down her face, dripping onto her still half-open blouse.

  Foche stood looking down at her, fists clenched, as she cowered on the floor, sobbing and turning away from him. He lifted up his highly polished Gucci right foot and slammed a kick hard into her perfectly formed backside. “Remember,” he said, “I am Henri Foche, the next president of France. You are a partially reformed Saint-Germain whore. If I were you, I would not forget that.” With that, he walked back into his study.

  It was not the first time he had hit her. But this was very bad. Claudette had been brought up on the wrong side of the tracks, the product of a baker’s assistant and a violent dockworker who regularly beat her mother.

  Madame Foche had not arrived at the gates of the Elysée Palace, as it were, by some kind of a fluke. She had been a calculating and careful hooker, very beautiful, very selective, with a high-class clientele. Like most members of her trade, she had a powerful instinct to fight back when threatened. She stood up and walked into the kitchen and selected a serrated bread knife made by Sabatier. She was shaking with rage, pain, and humiliation.

  She walked into his study and said, very softly, “Henri, if you ever hit me again, I swear to God I will kill you. With this. I know what you are, and I know I am in danger. But you are a vicious bastard, and you deserve to die. And you won’t find me as easy to get rid of as poor Olivier Marchant.”

  Foche looked up. His eyes narrowed. “Just so long as you remember your place in this world, there will be no more trouble. Step out of line again, and you will regret it. I have bigger things on my mind than you. So get out and stay out.”

  Claudette left the room, slamming the door so hard the eighteenth-century house shook on its foundations. She retreated into her bathroom to repair her cut lip and still-bleeding nose. Her display of bravado had left her unaccountably exhausted. She was afraid of her husband, and always had been.

  She had seen some of his friends. She was aware of the reliance he placed on those two thugs, Marcel and Raymond. She not only believed he was capable of murder, she believed he had committed murder, and would not hesitate to murder her if he felt that was necessary.

  Her dilemma was twofold. If she ran, Foche would hunt her down and have her eliminated, simply because she may prove a danger to him. No one would ever know what had become of her. Third wives elicit little sympathy. But if she stayed, that would be a different form of hell: a world of constant humiliation, sexual demands, fear, and the ever-present knowledge that her husband was in bed with another woman. She had long ceased to love him, or even care about him. But Claudette had some pride, and she did not consider herself worthless, just a sex object for a cruel and sneering husband. She thought she had value and a worthwhile mind. She sat on the bathroom chair and wept tears of pure helplessness.

  She was a prisoner here in this perfect French provincial house, a captive of a truly bad person, and there was nothing she could do. Claudette understood she had not, by any means, led a blameless life, but she had been a good wife, and like many other people around the world, she fervently wished her husband dead.

  She was not comforted by the prospect of becoming a twenty-first-century Queen Marie Antoinette, living similarly in the Elysée Palace in Paris, afforded every human luxury the French taxpayers’ money could buy. Today she felt more like Marie Antoinette on October 16, 1793, trapped in her tiny cell in the Conciergerie, preparing herself to face the guillotine.

  She heard her husband leave and debated the fairly simple possibility of having him followed and building a case for divorce on the grounds of his perpetual adultery. But for what? To end up like Olivier Marchant, wherever he may be?

  * * *

  Mack Bedford decided to walk up to the shipyard for a final chat with Harry before they made their decision. He walked through the little town, occasionally stopping for a chat with local people he had known almost all of his life. But when he reached the big iron gates of Remsons Shipbuilding he saw what he thought might be a riot meeting. And in the middle of a throng of maybe a hundred men stood the proprietor of the yard.

  Mack jostled through the crowd and stood next to Harry, who told him, loud enough for all to hear, “Hi, Mack, you find me on probably the worst day of my life. I have just laid off my principal steelworkers. There is no more work here for them, and I doubt there’s going to be.”

  Judd Powell stood on the other side of Harry. He called out, “Guys, you know if there were any prospect of jobs, the boss would never have let you go. But all over the Western world the militaries are cutting back. Less ships are being built everywhere except Russia and the Far East. That may change, but it may take five years, and Mr. Remson obviously cannot fund a fifty-million-dollar-a-year wage bill until then.”

  “But what are we gonna do, Judd?”

  “We got wives, families, mortgages – what now?”

  “This is all we know – and no one’s been hired up the road at Bath for two years.”

  “There’s nothing else here… Are you saying we have to leave the town, move somewhere else?”

  “What about our kids, schools, grades, and everything else?”

  The questions rained in on Harry Remson and his foreman. It was nothing short of grief. As if someone had died. These hardworking men, men who came in and cut steel at seven on the coldest mornings. They were men who worked high on the hulls of these warships, forcing the cold steel into position. They were men upon whom the worldwide reputation of Remsons had been built. Men with wide shoulders, enormous strength and a work ethic that would have made a New York longshoreman blanch.

  They understood, albeit remotely, that Harry Remson and his family could not go on supporting them indefinitely if there was no work. But they could not rid themselves of the feeling they were somehow being cast out. Unfairly. Undeservingly. Unnecessarily. And now they had to go home and inform their wives they had been laid off and from now on they were officially unemployed. Just a government statistic, reporting to the benefit office in Bath every week, just to try to sustain family life. In some lessened form.

  Most of these steelworkers were used to furnishing their homes, exchanging their automobiles, and buying new wardrobes for the entire family when the generous triannual Remson bonuses were paid out, upon completion of the French frigates. And all of them knew they were about to feel a financial draft in every possible sense, with rocketing winter fuel bills in one of the harshest climates in North America. A few of them, in the last riven hours, had already contemplated moving away, becomi
ng strangers in a strange new place, perhaps somewhere warmer, where life might be less expensive.

  For the steel men the loss of work coincided with a shattering loss of face. Because they alone form the bedrock of the workforce. The word “steel” has an extra connotation in the shipbuilding industry. No one states, “Work is about to begin on a new warship” or “Remsons expects to get moving next month on the new order.” The phrase is traditional, and it appears in all naval lists of newly built warships: “First steel cut X months before the keel is laid.”

  And here they stood, one hundred men, each one of them with a lump in his throat, facing the day they thought would never come, facing the fact that their brutal hard work down the years had, in the end, meant nothing.

  Harry Remson knew how they felt. He had been on the phone to his own father for two hours that morning, and the old man, eighty-six years old now and stubborn to the end, had started and finished the long conversation with the same sentence: “Son, you gotta do what’s right for the guys. Don’t give up. Please don’t give up. It’s your duty to save them and the shipyard. Give it one more try. See if you can pull something off.”

  Harry had put down the phone close to tears. And now Judd had laid off the steelworkers as instructed. And he, Harry, somehow had to provide them all with a ray of hope. And that ray of hope rested, he knew, in the breech of a sniper rifle, aimed by one of Raul’s murdering bastards or, at least, someone comparable.

  “Guys,” he said, “I don’t guess it would do much good for me to explain how I feel, and how sorry I am. Like you, I never thought this day would come. All I can say is that I am still doing everything I can to save that next French order. I can promise nothing, because we are right now dead in the water. But I have one last trick to pull, involving an extremely awkward meeting in France. It might lead to something. But it might not. Meantime, I have paid all of you three months’ money, and your bonuses for hull number 718 are safe. You’ll get those start of next year. And, as you know, your pensions, however big, however small, are safe here at Remsons. None of you will get one dollar short.

  “But before you leave, I have one small request. Don’t any of you bail out on me or the yard or the town for a month. Because I just might pull this off in France. And right then I’m going to need you back. And if that happens, we’ll have a party they’ll hear in Bath.”

  A few of the men clapped; a few grinned. But most of the older ones stood stoically before the chief, resigned to their fate.

  Harry said simply, “I’m going to miss you guys. Every one of you. For me this is like the breakup of a family.” He turned away and walked back into the yard, too distraught to continue.

  Mack walked with him, while Judd stayed to talk to the men. The two international conspirators, joined now in a bond of clandestine intrigue, made their way to the office that overlooked the dry-dock.

  Mack went in first, while Harry stayed outside the door, speaking to his secretary. The lieutenant commander stood for a few moments looking down at the French warship, and then he turned to a small framed poem on the wall, a verse by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The title was painted in an elegant, old-fashioned script – The Building of a Ship. Beneath it were the lines:

  Build me straight, O worthy master!

  Staunch and strong, a goodly vessel,

  That shall laugh at all disaster,

  And with wave and whirlwind wrestle.

  This was the creed of Remsons, words that inspired Maine shipbuilders back to the age of the clipper ships, which, for sailors at least, were forever the greatest sailing vessels of all. They kept building them right here on the Kennebec until the close of the nineteenth century.

  Harry came into the office, all business now. No time for sadness. “What does he say, Mack? Did he turn us down?”

  “No,” said Mack. “He did not. He just said he needed a day to talk to his colleagues. I guess he meant the serial killers he employs to carry out this kind of high-risk contract.”

  “What’s your latest take on it?”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt he’ll say yes. It’s going to cost you two million. I don’t think they’d do it for less. And in a way we don’t want them to. When you’ve hired guys to do the unthinkable, it’s gotta be an address changer. Otherwise, why should they do it?”

  “Okay, let’s say they accept – what then?”

  “Well, we have to get 50,000 for expenses to them. And that’s a major worry, because we have to assume Switzerland is watertight.”

  “I’m happy with that end of the security. What I remain unhappy about is that 50 per cent down payment. Because it remains a hell of a way to make a million bucks. Take the money and never even try; run no risk. That’s what they could do. Just walk away with the mill, and never speak to us again.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t considered that, Harry. And you’re right. It is a problem. But in the end, that’s our risk. Theirs is getting shot by Foche’s security guys. According to Raul, we’re in it together, and we have to have some trust in each other.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what, Mack. Let’s see what they come up with. Meantime, I’ll get the fifty grand into Switzerland, ready to be passed on to the lawyer for pickup. When that’s in place we’ll decide whether to go ahead.”

  “We’re not going anywhere without it,” replied Mack. “Because each side has a very definite objective. We want someone dead; they want big money to carry it out.”

  “When’s the call, tomorrow morning?”

  “Yup.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  * * *

  Mack’s next stop was in the center of town, 342 Main Street, the New England Savings and Loan. The bank manager had agreed to see him, but neither man was very hopeful anything could be worked out.

  The manager, Donald Hill, was relatively new, had come up from a branch in Massachusetts, west of Boston. He hated Maine, loathed the cold, disliked the ocean, had a wife who was allergic to seafood, and considered all Down-Easters to be rustic clamheads. Also, he missed seeing the Red Sox and could hardly wait for a big-city promotion. On a manager-customer charm scale of one to ten, he had not yet made the chart.

  “Mr. Bedford,” he said unnecessarily, “this is a very large sum of money you wish to borrow. And your assets are not, shall we say, substantial. One house, owned in partnership with your wife, and a 200,000-dollar mortgage hanging over it on a twenty-year basis. If my bank advanced you one million dollars and you managed to pay back 10,000 a year, or 200 a week, without interest it would take you a hundred years. From our point of view, that would not represent a sound loan policy.”

  Mr. Hill hit the buttons on his calculator. “If we gave it to you on a 6 per cent rate, it would never be repaid unless you won the state lottery, which from our point of view would be unacceptable.”

  Mack Bedford gazed at him steadily. “Sir,” he said, “I have a little boy who is dying. He will die, unless I can get him to Switzerland for an extremely rare and difficult operation. The cost will be one million dollars. I am asking New England Savings and Loan for the money to save my boy. My US insurance will not cover foreign medical treatment.”

  “I understand the difficulty, Mr. Bedford, but I am afraid my company cannot be responsible for every hard-luck story that comes through the door. You are asking for the impossible.”

  “For you this is so little,” said Mack. “But for me it is life and death. Would you consider asking your board of directors if they would speak to me? My full name is Lt. Cdr. Mackenzie Bedford, United States Navy SEAL, holder of the Navy Cross.”

  Mr. Hill looked up and nodded. “Sir, I would be more than happy to do so. I will speak to our Public Affairs Department and get some kind of recommendation from them. I mean, to whom you should speak. It may mean a trip to Boston.”

  “Sir, I would gladly meet in the Hindu Kush if I thought it would help.”

  “The where?”

  “It’s the back end of the Himalayas.
Not a bad place to get shot, since you mention it.”

  Donald Hill sensed he was out of his depth with this tall SEAL commander with the Down-East accent. And he decided to terminate this curiously embarrassing interview. He stood up and said, “Lieutenant Commander, I hope we can come up with something. Even in a bank as big as this one, there are still times when other considerations take precedence over purely financial matters. Don’t lose heart.”

  “I won’t,” replied Mack. “It’s not broken yet.”

  He walked out of the bank and retraced his footsteps toward home. It was lunchtime now, but he did not know whether Anne and Tommy were back, or even if the little boy had been detained at the hospital.

  The sun had vanished behind a great rolling cloud bank, and there would be no fishing tonight, even if Tommy made it home. There was a weather front forecast to come in from the southwest over the Gulf of Maine, and in his seaman’s bones he could feel the change, the slight alteration in wind direction, the cooler air, and the obvious onset of rain.

  Mack walked on down to the shore, not to the fishing spot, just to a little cove with a pebble beach and granite rocks holding back the dark, encroaching pines. He picked up a few stones and hurled them hard, one by one, watching them bounce at erratic angles off the beach. He could see the chop building down on the estuary, and a fishing boat was making all speed to an upstream harbor, like a rust-colored seabird racing back to the nest. Mack guessed her helmsman had decided against the weather. The big SEAL considered that a shrewd decision. Behind the trawler he could see huge clouds rising far astern, and they were not white; they were pewter, with trails of falling mist behind them. Rain and rising wind, heading onshore. Not good, with a rising sea surging toward the granite rock guardians of the land.

  There were still bright patches of light, the sun giving this July day one last chance. But Mack never thought of the land, not on days like this when the weather turned with such sudden venom. He thought of the ships out there, of those too far distant to make landfall by the evening. And he thought of the great white pillar of the Sequin light, still catching the dying rays of the sun, as the fishermen came slogging home against the hard sou’wester.