How could he fake the briefcase’s odor, though, the smell of rodents’ nesting? And why the photo of the glamorous woman with the smoldering eyes?
Bern wished now he’d brought all the passports with him so he could compare the photographs again. The young blond Jewish guy was actually his Hebrew-hating grandfather?
Wanting to question whether that was true was something that seemed less and less weird.
B ern signed off from the computer, picked up the passport and other stuff he’d brought—a bottle of Pepto-Bismol because he still felt seasick, a garbage bag just in case—and went outside into the sodium daylight of a marina after 10 P.M.
Yes, there was Moe out there by the docks, riding the dinosaur-sized dozer, cowboy hat tilted forward on his head as if he were on a mechanical bull. What was the retard doing this time of night? Outside, with a storm forming, too, light flashing in mountainous clouds to the east. The sort of day Bern was having, he’d probably be struck by lightning. Maybe for the best.
Bern walked toward the bulldozer. What he wanted to do was take the Luger replica he’d bought in Milwaukee and shoot the man between the eyes. Same one he’d used to scare the dork Ford, and stuttering what’s his name following behind the Viking so close Bern could hear them laughing their butts off whenever he stopped puking long enough to catch a breath.
To Moe, Bern had said, “You could’ve spewed on them but chose me instead?” The two of them finally on the dock; Bern on his knees, running cold water over his head. He’d wanted to say, “That shows questionable business judgment…a decision an executive probably wouldn’t make. Like handing the cops several thousand dollars’ worth of stuff that’s rightfully mine. A death wish, motherfucker, that’s what it shows!”
Another situation in which profanity would have been appropriate.
Take the Luger, stick the skinny barrel in the Hoosier’s ear, and squeeze off two or three from the eight-round clip. No…better yet, use Cowboy Moe’s own weapon, the chrome .357 six-shooter he carried in his truck. Afterward, turn himself in, and tell the jury exactly what had happened: I’m sitting there, minding my own business, so sick I wanted to die. Seriously—die. On the back of a boat, trying to breathe air that didn’t taste like diesel fumes. Finally, getting a little better—dozing, I’m pretty sure—when I feel what I think is salt water hit me in the face. But guess what…?
Not guilty. Even if only one of the jurors had experienced a hell trip like today with his idiot nephew. First time in his life Bern could actually smell colors. Reds, blues, greens—each with its own unique diesel stink, and they all triggered the gag reflex.
B ern was determined to keep his temper, though. He needed Moe. Couldn’t fire him yet because no way was Bern going out in rough weather again, no matter how much he loved the Viking. So Moe’s scuba and boating skills would be needed. Bern didn’t care anymore about profit, but he still wanted to find the wreck. For one thing, he wasn’t going to let the nerd laugh at him, then steal what rightfully belonged to him. Something else: His grandfather knew the wreck’s location. Why?
Bern had a lot on his mind—the Jewish thing drifting in and out between thoughts of holding a gun to the Hoosier’s head…of wondering what the old man’s real motives were…also seeing the glamorous woman, imagining her photo, hoping she was still around with those smoldering eyes. She had to have been some beauty queen the old man was wild about—why else the photo?
Forgiveness, as the old man used to say, was for people who didn’t have the balls for revenge.
That’s how Bern planned to spend the evening: sit in his condo, and leaf through the leather-bound journal, hoping a woman’s name jumped out at him from all that faded writing. The other papers, too, most of them in German, which he didn’t understand, but a name, at least, might point him in the right direction. Tell him the woman’s identity.
How would the old man feel if he knew Bern ripped the clothes off his old sweetheart?
Go insane, that’s what he’d do. Touch the sacred flesh was the best way to screw his grandfather.
Tomorrow, he’d put a call in to Jason Goddard, the old man’s personal assistant. Leave a message, because it was Saturday, then try a cell phone number that might still be good. Also, he was thinking of asking Augie to contribute his expertise, the little brownnoser who’d learned to speak and read German to get in good with the old man.
Trust him with the old man’s journal? He’d give some thought to that.
Now, though, Bern had to make nice with the redneck Hoosier—and do it in a hurry, too, with that thunderstorm coming. Moe was working overtime, trying to make up for what he’d done that afternoon.
Not a chance in hell.
21
I’d been wondering about it for a while but told Chestra, “I just realized something. There have to be twenty, twenty-five photographs in this room. But your godmother, Marlissa Dorn, isn’t in any of them. I find that surprising.” I waited for a moment, deciding if I should add, “There are none of you, either.” Then did.
The woman was standing with her back to me in the gold lamé gown, her shoulders wider than her hips, silver-blond hair piled atop her head, a pearl necklace visible beneath wisps of hair and delicate ears. Without turning, she said, “You’re not the first to notice. Tommy asked the same thing.”
Meaning Tomlinson.
Outside, there was a flash of blue light, then another. Lightning. It illuminated the balcony’s wrought-iron railing, trees beyond. A cell of cool wind blew through the doors as Chestra said, “Storms. I just adore them. Don’t you?” Then turned in synch with the movement of curtains as if she, too, had been levitated by wind.
“There’s a reason there so few photos of Marlissa and me,” she said. “For Marlissa, the explanation is fascinating, but sad, too. For me, though, it’s just ego plain and simple. I’m a proud old broad who can’t stand the way she looks, especially when compared to the way I used to look. Ego, pride.” She wagged her eyebrows and took a sip of her drink—chartreuse and soda, an exotic liqueur unfamiliar to me. “Name a conceit. I delude myself that it’s okay because I admit that I’m vain. I haven’t reached the age where my body only embarrasses others. Why advertise what you’ve lost and can never recover?”
I said, “I’m looking at a very handsome woman; one I find charming. I like her. Don’t be so hard on the lady, okay?”
“Handsome.” Her tone was dry, acknowledging the euphemism. “I guess I should be content with that. I have a photograph of my godmother, which I’ll show you—it’ll help you understand why I’m such a goose about photos. You’ll fall in love with Marlissa. Every man does. But wouldn’t you rather hear her story first? You asked the question: Why were Marlissa and Frederick several miles offshore in a storm?
“It’s possible, Doc, that you’ll be the first to see that boat in many, many years. What remains of it, anyway. You deserve an answer.”
I said, “I’d like to do both. And see pictures of you, too—there’ve got to be some around.”
Outside, there was another strobe of light. Thunder is noise created by a shock wave of air set in motion by an abrupt electrical discharge. This shock wave vibrated through the floor of the old house, rumbling as it rolled toward open sea.
Chestra listened for a moment, then was suddenly in a hurry. “You’re a dear man. But forgive me”—she touched her fingers to my cheek as she swept past, heels clicking on tile. I got a whiff of perfume, faint vanilla and musk—“I have to change.”
“What?”
“I can’t go to the beach dressed like this, and I never miss a storm. I feed on them. The energy. To see a big one come pounding off the Gulf—” She was already taking off jewelry—a bracelet, the pearls—as she headed for the stairs, her bedroom below. Over her shoulder, she called, “I won’t be a minute. Will you join me?”
I checked my watch. Nearly eleven. “I guess. But I still have a lot of work—”
“I’ll holler when I’m ready.�
� She put her tongue against her teeth and whistled—a wolf whistle. In Manhattan, it’s the way people would’ve hailed a cab to a Dempsey fight. “This one’s going to be a doozy, Doc!”
A photo of Marlissa Dorn. I was eager to have a look—although I expected to be disappointed. Chestra Engle was sharing a family legend, not talking about a real person. Legends never disappoint, people often do. Her godmother’s photo most likely would be the rule, not be an exception.
Even so…there were some exceptional photos in this museum of a house. As I waited, I poured a glass of wine—the woman had no beer—then moved from wall to wall as if touring an art gallery.
All three branches of Chestra’s family exhibited the physical characteristics that I’ve come to associate with wealth, particularly from the previous century: tall, confident smiles, good teeth, glossy hair, athleticism, and bone structure that contained at least some of the elements we associate with health and beauty.
Women in the Dorn branch possessed more of the classic attributes than most. They were uncommonly attractive. Nellie Kay Dorn was among the most beautiful of all. I’d recently touched my fingers to her headstone: BORN 1868, DIED 1934.
It could be a social maxim: beautiful people attract power, power attracts the beautiful and powerful. I wasn’t surprised, therefore, to find photographs of celebrities Arlis Futch had mentioned while describing the small, sociable place that was the Sanibel area in earlier times.
There were several photos of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. In one, she wore a flapper’s hat, her intelligent eyes aware of the incongruity. Another was labeled: Edna two days after fire, Palms Hotel. She looked exhausted—I remembered Arlis saying a manuscript she’d been working on had been lost. Marlissa’s blond lover, I noticed, was in the background of a third photograph. The poet was smoking a cigarette. He was holding a beach towel.
In separate photos, I found two celebrities whom Arlis hadn’t mentioned. One was New York playwright and novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart. The writer was posed in front of the house she and her son had built on nearby Cabbage Key; another was taken on a beach with members of the Engle and Dorn families.
The second celebrity was industrialist Harvey Firestone, the tire millionaire. I’d read that Firestone, Ford, Edison, and Lindbergh had all been friends, and remembered something about them collaborating on a search for synthetic rubber. Prior to World War II, most natural rubber came from the Pacific Rim, controlled by Japan, so the project was vital. Many of the plants Edison had tested in his Fort Myers laboratory were grown or collected locally—some from barrier islands, including Sanibel.
Rinehart and Firestone. Add two more powerful names to the mix.
There were more shots of Charles Lindbergh, some with his wife, Anne, both showing congenial smiles, their hands always linked in some way, like two islands that had joined as one. Celebrity was a weight. So was tragedy. They had experienced both—their eyes were armor-plated.
Union boss John L. Lewis was on the wall. With his bushy eyebrows, he resembled the crabby old guy on 60 Minutes, and looked about as much fun. There were other celebrities: Clark Gable, the boxer Max Baer, Danny Kaye, Raymond Burr, actress Patricia Neal—not unexpected in an exclusive hideaway like Sanibel Island. There was a photo of a tough-looking guy in a flight suit posing with several Dorn and Engle girls, all beauties. It was captioned: Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, Page Field, 1941, before bombing Tokyo.
Page Field was where Arlis had worked guarding POWs. Doolittle had trained there?
Marlissa Dorn’s German lover wasn’t in the background of this photo. But he was in several others—usually a vague figure, part of the scenery, but always aware of the camera’s presence.
Sanibel Island, World War II. The perfect place to seed a Nazi intelligence agent.
22
We crossed the porch into a chorus of wind and surf, the tree canopy writhing above us. It was a black night, but the sand trail was luminous through bare trees. The trail glowed white in the darkness as if saturated with sunlight from years in the tropics.
“I have only one flashlight. I’m sorry.” Chestra had changed into slacks, and a white blouse that snapped like a sail until she got her jacket on. She’d handed me a rain slicker as we went out the door and I was carrying it under my arm as I followed.
“Do you do this often?”
“What?”
I had to yell to be heard above the wind. “Do you…do you have some kind of shelter? Is that where we’re headed?”
“Shelter …Why?” It was impossible to hear so close to the beach, and she laughed the question away.
Chestra may have had a flashlight, but she didn’t use it. She seemed to know exactly where she wanted to be and was in a rush to get there. The storm was rolling in from the mainland—cumulus towers flickering to the east—as clouds sumped cooler air off the water, fueling volcanic updrafts with a black Gulf wind. It’s not unusual for sea and storm to interact in opposition. The woman had to lean toward the beach as she walked, one hand out to steady herself against the wind.
The trail narrowed as we crossed a dune of sea oats and cactus, trees behind us, ocean ahead. There were no stars, no horizon. The sea was a vague, unsettled darkness. Shoreline was defined by sound; whitecaps by the faint fluorescence of breakers as waves sailed shoreward, ridge after slow-rolling ridge. They made a keening hiss, accelerating as they bottom-shoaled, and then imploded—boom—before their mass was suctioned seaward, a formless volume reforming.
The rhythm was respiratory: flowing, then ebbing. Implosions were steady as heartbeats. It was as if something was alive out there, a huge and breathing darkness inhabiting a void that was the Gulf of Mexico.
“This is why I usually come in October!”
“What?”
Chestra waited for me to draw closer. “This is why I come to Sanibel during hurricane season. I have the beach to myself, and the storms are magnificent!”
We were on the beach, walking toward Sanibel Lighthouse, waves to the right, trees and a boardwalk on our left. On the horizon, storm clouds were mountainous lanterns that flared internally, discharging in random disorder. Ahead, the lighthouse turret strobed as precisely as a metronome: flash…flash—ten-second pause—flash…flash. Each frail burst was absorbed by darkness, diffused by wind.
“Do you feel that? Wait!” The woman held her hand up, and stopped. She tilted her head as if trying to identify an unfamiliar sound.
“Feel what?”
“The wind off the ocean. It’s dying.”
Darkness seemed to slow its respirations as my senses tested.
She hooked her arm into mine, a gesture so natural I didn’t notice for a moment. “The storm,” she said. “It’s nearly here.”
A squall cell moving seaward siphons air from the Gulf until just before it hits. The transition is prefaced by a momentary calm, then a gust of cold air as wind direction reverses. That period of calm is a dangerous time to linger in an open area because the storm, only minutes away, is preceded by a low-pressure wall that’s supercharged with electricity.
She was right. The sea breeze had calmed. We were standing on a base of silicone, within spray’s reach of a saltwater conductor. Hard to imagine a more precarious place. “It’s coming, all right,” I yelled. “We need to find cover.”
She was facing the storm. “Not yet. Just a little longer. Please?”
“Chessie”—a balloon of chilled air enveloped us—“this is crazy. We have to go now.”
I winced as a searing light bleached the world of color. A simultaneous explosion darkened it. A wall of wind followed, gusting cold from the east, and I felt the first fat drops of rain.
“Go ahead, Doc. I’m fine. This is what I love to do!”
In another cannon burst of electricity, I saw her face—she was smiling, skin pale as snow, and her eyes were closed.
Our arms were still linked. I tugged and stepped away, hoping she would follow. She didn’t. It was pouring now.
>
“Chess!”
“I’m okay. It’s what I want!”
Air molecules sizzle when torn from adhesion by electricity. Their glow is a zigzag schematic of the voltage that obliterates them. Air sizzled now as lightning bracketed us, positive and negative ions rejoining in thunderous strokes. A lightning bolt, when grounded through human tissue, is five times hotter than the surface of the sun. It cauterizes as it wounds—in one side, out another. The hole is darkened by exploded blood cells.
“We can’t stay here. I’m serious. This is insane.”
“Isn’t it! It’s exquisite!” She was laughing, her formal hairdo sodden ringlets in slow collapse.
I couldn’t leave her to the storm. A woman her age? For a moment, only a moment, I felt the same strange sense of freedom that I’d experienced during the worst of the hurricane. I was powerless against the random physics of earth and sky. Analysis was pointless, so why waste energy thinking about what might happen? A shadow vanishing into itself—that was the sensation. Release…
Above my head, there was a molecular crackle as a bolt touched the beach so near I smelled the smoke of incinerated sand. Another exploded in the canopy of a distant palm—fronds twirled like feathers through a fog of rain.
This was worse than insane, it was stupid. This wasn’t an unavoidable hurricane, it was a common squall. I squatted, swept Chestra Engle into my arms, and carried her through the rain toward Southwind.
D oc?”
Rain was rivering down the small of my back, my boat shoes were sodden. In my arms, the woman was a source of warmth, not a weight.
“Doc?”
“Chess.”
“Is…there something wrong?”
No, there was nothing wrong. Because it was the shortest distance, I’d carried her cross-country, angling into Chestra’s estate from the beach. With her still in my arms, I’d stopped just outside the picnic gazebo, the nearest structure, warm rain sluicing down. She was asking why we were standing in the rain when we could be inside. Why didn’t I carry her an additional few steps to the dry chairs that sat upon the dry floor next to the drink cart and hammock, all sheltered by the gazebo’s screens and shingled roof.
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