“It’s not what you think, Emmie. I was as surprised to see the fellows last night as you were.”
“But you knew they had the gold?”
“Yes, I did know that. And that they left the boat at the quarantine station.”
“Why did you remain silent when you were telling the captain the rest of the story?”
“Well, I had made a deal with the fellows. You see, yesterday morning I woke Thibaut and told him I wanted him to help me search the cargo. He pointed out we’d need tools and went off to find some. He came back with the tools as well as the two other fellows. We opened all the crates, but found nothing. Then they split open some barrels and the whole floor was soon covered in some kind of lubricant. I had a feeling I’d let things get a little out of control, so I tried to rein the boys in. But they’d developed a certain momentum that would have been pretty difficult to stop. Finally, the only thing left was that giant piece of machinery. Some sort of press. It looked formidable, big pieces of cast iron with gigantic bolts holding it together. But the fellows knew its weak points and in no time its insides were exposed. That’s where we found the twenty bars hidden.”
“All but the four found on the women.”
“Yes, all but those four. Well, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, and the fellows even more so. But the gaiety didn’t last long. It seems that my comrades were strongly against turning over the gold. And they made several very persuasive arguments against my crossing them, all of which ended with me being bludgeoned and tossed overboard. I made the usual speech about honor and the law, appealed to their patriotism, etc., but it all sounded a little flat when stacked up against twenty bars of gold. Then I came up with a compromise. They could each have one bar, and I could live to see Brooklyn again. At first, they didn’t find my idea terribly appealing. But by then our efforts had roused one of the officers and we could hear him coming down the metal stairway. In a flash, the three of them were gone.”
“Then they managed to feign illness at quarantine?”
“Yes, but I imagine it had more to do with some authentic bribery.”
“How did they know to come here?”
“I’d given Thibaut our address. We’d gotten kind of chummy. That was before the mutiny, of course. Once they got ashore it dawned on them that disposing of gold bars in a strange city held certain perils. The people who’d be willing to take on the merchandise would be just the sort willing to send them to the bottom of the bay. And, as I said, Thibaut and I had developed a kind of rapport.”
“Before the mutiny,” I added for him. “And now you’ve found a lawyer to negotiate with the insurance company?”
“Yes, at least to test the waters. One never knows how these things will transpire.”
Harry’s prophecy proved more true than he realized. That evening, while he was out entertaining his new friends, two men from the French consulate visited me. It seems there was an effort underway to keep certain names from being associated with the affair. I was told that the present government of France would be needlessly maligned if a minister’s wife were linked to the theft. They proposed laying the blame on the purser, the steward, and the purser’s fiancée, and forgetting about Mme. Yvard and her niece.
“But we will need your cooperation, Mme. Reese.”
“That would be quite impossible,” I answered firmly.
“We understand, certainly, there should be some… acknowledgement of your efforts. Perhaps a payment of five hundred dollars?”
“Do you think my integrity can be bought so cheaply, monsieur?”
“No, certainly not. I would never suggest anything so crass. But, as I say, as an acknowledgement…. Perhaps one thousand dollars?”
“Will you release Mlle. Moreau as well? If there is one true victim here, it is she.”
“I don’t think there would be any objection to that.”
Having reached our agreement, they immediately handed me the money. All in cash. Their eagerness to complete the transaction caused me to wonder if I shouldn’t have held on to my integrity a little longer. But one can never be sure. If they had called me on it, I might have ended up with nothing but my integrity. So I had no regrets. And I have kept my side of the bargain to this very day.
A few weeks later, the insurer reached a settlement for the return of the three bars of gold. They would pay half the value, some twelve thousand dollars. The lawyer took a third of this, but then the three Frenchmen insisted Harry accept an equal share of the remainder for his help—two thousand dollars. I was very pleased for Harry. And for myself, for now I felt no need to tell him about the thousand dollars I’d received. I had plans for that money, and wished to husband it until I was ready to execute them. In the meantime, Harry rented a little office in Manhattan and went into business for himself. I thoroughly approved, of course. However, I declined his offer of a position in the firm. Insurance investigations can be exceedingly dull work and I would be loath to spend a week in Allentown documenting an excessive claim on a fire policy. Nevertheless, I did intend to take an interest in his work whenever it proved challenging. In fact, I was already lining up just such a case for him, and would soon be ready to let him know all about it.
Something Else Again
As many of you may be aware, I have continued my writing career under the name M.E. Meegs. Now, at long last, my first substantial work, a novella, has been made available to the discerning reader. Here is a taste from chapter one of Babes at Sea….
The muffled clatter of rain on slate infused the grubby attic room of the grubby inn with a palpable gloom, while the relentless drip caught by a cracked chamber pot provided an unnecessary reminder of the wretchedness of her state… plic… plic… plic….
For five days, Mrs. Biddle had waited for word. For five days, tension waxed as food and money waned—just as it had throughout the long, wet French spring… plic… plic… plic….
Eight months on the Pas-de-Calais, the last three in another leaking attic room, where for the first time in her life Mrs. Biddle had been compelled to accept charity. And that she resented most of all. Resented the fact of it, if not the cause. Now, in this last week of May, she had come to Cherbourg on a vague promise from a dubious man. And for five days and nights, she waited… plic… plic… plic….
Her mood, never one that could be judged sunny, had turned as foul as the weather. Still, as she sponged herself before the few remaining shards of a shattered mirror, Mrs. Biddle took solace in the resplendent, if intermittent, view. She had recovered nicely from her long infirmity. And what was privation to a woman who fed on adversity as lesser women feed on pastry? Tension for her was simply the unavoidable precursor to action. In this she resembled nothing so much as a coiled spring. A rather good-looking coiled spring, to be sure. Few others sported so statuesque a figure, so clear a complexion, or so blonde and lush a mane. As frequently happened, Mrs. Biddle was cheered by her own superiority. But, speaking honestly, she couldn’t deny she was a coiled spring in dire need of a good bath.
She had just finished dressing when there was a knock.
“Un message, madame.”
Mrs. Biddle opened the door and took a handwritten note from a boy in an ill-fitting uniform. As she read, he waited. She looked down at him in disgust.
“Va-t’en!” she shouted.
He made a face, then spat back over his shoulder, “Gadoue!”
It was with the slamming of the door that the fruit of Mrs. Biddle’s recent infirmity announced herself from her makeshift cradle—a small drawer suspended by cord from the peak of a dormer. Her mother picked her up and brought her to the bed. Then hoped against hope that the well had not yet run dry. For like her mother, Eugenia was not one to give up easily.
The name—meaning as it does well-born—was chosen as testament to Mrs. Biddle’s own opinion of herself. How could her daughter be otherwise? She did, of course, resent the encumbrance on a life which had been kept scrupulously free of encumbrances.
Not even marriage was allowed to impinge upon Mrs. Biddle’s devotion to self. But here, at her breast, was an extension of that self, and even if she loved the child only half so much as she loved herself—a daughter’s chromosomal entitlement—it would still be far more than any self-abnegating genetrix could muster.
“Bonjour, little sister!”
A petite girl—no older than seventeen, but last called ingénue at twelve—entered the room bearing a baguette and two pots. She set these on the table, then pulled an orange from one pocket of her jacket and a parcel of soft cheese from the other.
“Where did you spend the night?” Mrs. Biddle asked bitterly.
“Making sure baby sister has some breakfast beside the milk of a witch,” the girl answered in a thick French accent, but nearly correct grammar.
After throwing off her jacket, she tied her russet hair into a loose knot, then pried the baby from her mother—the latter making no protest. She sat down at the table and dunked a finger in the pot of milky chocolate, then let the baby curled in her arm suckle it. Mrs. Biddle rose and rebuttoned her blouse before the broken mirror.
“This is for you to eat,” the girl said, nodding toward the food but not looking upon the woman at the mirror. “I’ve well eaten.”
“Your belly full, is it? Have a care, girl, or soon you’ll find yourself with your own little sister. Or the pox.”
“That makes nothing to me,” the girl told her as she waved the small bottle of holy water she wore on a string about her neck and depended on as spiritual prophylactic.
“Simple peasant. You think that protection enough when you spend the night passing yourself about?”
“I do not pass myself about!” the girl shouted back indignantly. Realizing her tone had unsettled Eugenia, she softened it. “I was with a… éminent man, the husband of the mistress of the mayor.”
“He told you the mayor beds his wife?”
“Yes. And why not? It is a… honneur?”
“Honor. So, I have the mayor’s cuckold to thank for my breakfast?” Her pride temporarily subdued by the aroma of cheese and coffee, Mrs. Biddle took a place at the table.
“No. This is for baby sister—you are the cow it must go through first.”
“Then I suppose I must eat my grass.”
“And say meuh!” the girl added for the benefit of her little sister.
“I’m an American cow,” Mrs. Biddle corrected. Then, in a display that would have shocked any who knew her in the prenatal past, she gave her child a spirited “moo-oo!”
“So the cows talk different also?” the girl asked.
“Yes, and the roosters.”
“No cocorico?”
“Cockadoodledoo!”
While her elders went through their bilingual bestiary, Eugenia, quite reasonably, looked on in stupefaction. Barely three weeks out of the womb, she had not yet learned an infant must pay for her keep by lavishing signs of amusement on her caretakers whenever they chose to degrade themselves. She was grateful for the chocolate her benefactress had provided, but surely she had adequately expressed her appreciation by not immediately regurgitating it upon the girl’s blouse.
In truth, the girl—Mélisande, she called herself—was not even ten years younger than her “little sister’s” mother. Though her exact role was a matter of continuous debate, she was an adjunct acquired during the previous winter. She had arrived in Étaples sometime before Christmas and Mrs. Biddle had made occasional use of her as factotum, with the girl wanting no payment beyond lessons in English. It was, she claimed, with that objective that she had come to the colony of Anglophones on the Pas-de-Calais.
When the money ran low and Mrs. Biddle economized by moving to the hostel’s attic, the artful girl attended her more frequently—like the others at Étaples, she was convinced that sooner or later the proud woman would wire home for passage. For her own part, Mrs. Biddle knew full well the girl was merely ingratiating herself in the hope of securing a berth on the inevitable return voyage to New York. And Mélisande knew that Mrs. Biddle knew.
When spring arrived and the pregnancy proved difficult, Mélisande took on the duties of nurse, and her self-serving motives were mildly diluted with something resembling compassion. But the birth of Eugenia changed everything. Mrs. Biddle was completely dependent on the girl for two weeks, by the end of which Mélisande’s devotion to her “little sister” had become fact.
As a nearby bell struck one, the insufferably precious game ended when neither patron nor retainer could remember the call of a rhinoceros. Her dignified demeanor restored, Mrs. Biddle rose from the table and announced they would be sailing that evening.
Mélisande was ecstatic. Six months of attending this contumelious shrew had worn thin even her good humor. Now, at last, she was sailing to New York. And not as an ignorant provincial likely to end up the exotic in some tenderloin house of sport. She had used her time in Étaples wisely, mingling freely with the expatriate poets and artists—in some cases quite freely—and would arrive in New York thoroughly fly.
“I must go off to make arrangements,” Mrs. Biddle told her. “You’ll need to start packing. We catch a boat from the Gare Maritime at five.”
On picking up her jacket, Mrs. Biddle displaced that of the girl. The gold fob of a watch peeked out from a pocket. With a subtle grace born of careful breeding, Mrs. Biddle palmed the watch and slid it into her bag.
Down below, she negotiated her way through the damp, narrow lane, past the broken glass, half-eaten fruit, and filthy progeny of the slum, trying in vain to ignore the over-powering stench of urine. When an inebriated sailor slouching in a doorway made a suggestion she thought demeaning, Mrs. Biddle spat on him without turning her head. Though few would guess it to look at her—especially those unacquainted with her expectorial marksmanship—Mrs. Biddle was no stranger to her milieu. Her first memories were of a street indistinguishable from this in all its essentials, if not its particulars. The drunken sailor, for instance, who now stumbled from his haunt and challenged her with insulting gibes, would have been wearing the uniform of the U.S. Navy rather than that of the French. But if the menace was universal, the methodology employed in confronting it was quite personal. Mrs. Biddle lowered her arm and shook her sleeve. A straight razor fell into her palm.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
To be continued…
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Dear reader,
I do hope you’ve enjoyed this scrumptious sample. Those unable to resist a further helping will be happy to learn that Babes at Sea is on sale and awaiting their pleasure.
To learn more about the Byblos Foretold Novaplex, please visit: ByblosForetold.com
Yours, with unstinting gratitude,
M.E. Meegs
The Harry & Emmie Reese Mysteries
The next book in the Harry Reese Mystery series is the novel Kalorama Shakedown:
It’s December of 1901 and Harry has come to Washington to solve a string of jewelry thefts. But first he must match wits with a throng of thirsty newspapermen, a pack of rapacious lobbyists, and a young devotee of the Wizard of Oz. And as is usual, his dear wife Emmie has her own agenda.
Other books in the series:
#1 - Always a Cold Deck
#2 - Crossings
#3 - Kalorama Shakedown
#4 - A Charm of Powerful Trouble
#5 - Fair Play’s a Jewel
#6 - Posing in Paradise
Casebooks Dissembled: Omnibus I
(includes novels #1-3 + four short stories)
Emmie Reese Mystery Short Stories
The Birth of M.E. Meegs
Hidden Booty
Psi no more…
To hear about the latest release, free promotions, and discounts, be sure to subscribe to my email list! As a bonus, you’ll receive a free copy of the Harry Reese Mystery short story Humbug on the Hudson.
For more information on the books—including a glossary, list of characters, maps and chronology—please visit my
Web site at: HarryReeseMysteries.com
Robert Bruce Stewart
Hidden Booty (Emmie Reese Mysteries, Story #2) Page 4
