Broken Promise

by Simon Toyne

  ‘He told us all of it. He said the signature had to be of a historically recognized figure in order to make it legal and that the King of Spain at the time of this deVaca character was Charles the somethingth.’

  ‘Carlos the fifth.’

  ‘There you go.’ Daryl fumbled his cellphone from his pocket and opened the photos, looking for a clear shot of the last part of the message. He found one and zoomed in so the signature part filled his screen. ‘OK, I got it. There’s a bent cross which is a C, right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is.’

  Daryl laughed. ‘There you go, C for Carlos.’

  There was a pause, just long enough for a little crack of doubt to form, then Doctor Thompson drove a wedge into it.

  ‘It doesn’t spell Carlos,’ she said.

  Daryl’s smile froze. ‘But this guy, he said …’ He zoomed in on his phone until the image started to pixellate.

  ‘It doesn’t spell Carlos,’ Doctor Thompson repeated. Daryl heard the rustle of paper again then the tapping of keys. ‘When I got Ms Treepoint’s message I pulled up the archive photos we have. I’m looking at them now. That symbol next to the bent cross, the circle with the two lines through it, that’s a “U” not an “A”. Then we have the two hatched lines, which is an “L”, and the symbol like an eye is an “O”.’

  Daryl stared at the photo of the petroglyphs on his phone, his eyes passing over each symbol as Doctor Thompson described it.

  ‘Then what does it say?’ he murmured, his brain too jangled to be able to string the letters together or make sense of them.

  ‘It spells CULO,’ Doctor Thompson replied. ‘It was a common trick of the conquistadors to make deals that appeared genuine but were written in such a way that they were actually meaningless. This is a prime example. Everything is legitimate until the very end when deVaca signs off in a way that not only invalidates the agreement but also pokes fun at the chief he’s striking a deal with. He would have known the Indians didn’t understand Spanish so he signed it off with an insult. Not Carlos but Culo. Culo is Spanish for “ass”.’

  The room seemed to shift and the phone fell from Daryl’s hand and banged against the wall. He reached out to grab the countertop to stop himself from collapsing. His knees felt weak and he was short of breath. He could hear a tiny voice that sounded like it was coming from a long way off and he realized that Doctor Thompson was still talking. He reached for the phone and brought it back to his ear.

  ‘Hello!’ Doctor Thompson said. ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Daryl managed.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said again, then hung up and collapsed onto a stool, taking deep breaths to try and stop the room from spinning. It couldn’t be right. Maybe she’d been looking at the wrong photographs, some other markings on some other cave. Only she hadn’t. The symbols she’d described were the same as the ones on the photos he’d taken that morning.

  He took more breaths, long and deep, and smelt something sharp and acrid. He rose to his feet and stumbled to the kitchen where the two ham slices he’d thrown on the hot plate to defrost were now smoking and curled up and black at the edges. He spotted a fire extinguisher fixed to the wall by the back door and lunged for it, pulling it free just as the charcoaled edges caught flame and started to burn. He tugged at the safety pin and pointed the extinguisher at the fire. It had already spread across the surface of the hot plate, throwing up curls of black smoke as the oil burned.

  The pin came loose and he was about to press the lever to discharge the foam when a thought struck him. Nate Prime had already set up interim insurance on this place, which meant the building was now insured in his name. He couldn’t remember the exact amount but it was around thirty thousand dollars, enough to mitigate his losses. A loss adjuster would come and try and screw him but it wasn’t that big a claim so he wouldn’t bust his balls too much. Besides, who was to say what might have happened here? Maybe Rita forgot to turn something off before she left. Or something switched itself on on a timer and there was no one here to notice. Either way this building was worth more to him as a smoking pile of embers than a diner. And it was Rita’s place. So let it burn.

  He put the extinguisher back in its holder and wiped it down with his sleeve. Next he wiped all the cupboard handles and surfaces he’d touched, keeping low as he moved past the burning hot plate, away from the smoke and the worst of the heat. Out in the diner he wiped down the coffee pot and the payphone then looked around trying to remember what else he might have touched. He checked the road to see if it was clear then hurried out back to his car and was back on the road before the smoke had started to rise above the roof.

  Sooner or later someone would spot that the diner was on fire and call it in, but by then it would be too late. The nearest fire truck was in Van Horn and it would take at least twenty minutes to get here. By then the whole place would be nothing but ashes and flame. He glanced in the rear-view mirror, checking to see if anyone was on the road behind him, and saw that he was still wearing the cap he’d taken. He took it off and threw it on the passenger seat. A souvenir of Broken Promise, Texas. Man had that place ever been named right.

  But Daryl had also made a promise that wasn’t true and he warmed his hands now at the memory of it. Last night when Rita said she needed a hundred grand to start afresh he’d said he couldn’t lay his hands on that much cash. But there was another safe in his office, filled with bearer bonds and gold bars and at least another fifty grand in cash. That uppity motherfucker who thought he knew everything had not known about that now, had he? He could easily have given Rita a hundred grand but he’d kept his head in a tight spot and had only given her seventy-nine thousand. The asshole had been oddly particular about that number for some reason. Daryl figured he must be one of those autistics, like Rain Man or something. That would explain how he knew so much random stuff about random shit. Probably also why he wanted such an exact figure. But in the end he wasn’t so smart. He hadn’t known about Daryl’s other safe and he hadn’t known what those damn symbols said in the cave neither. And Rita was off down the road in search of her new life with twenty-one grand less than she coulda had and Daryl felt good about that. He felt good that her old home was burning down too. Then he saw the billboard ahead for the Lucky Reservation Casino and the phrase ‘Three million dollars profit a week’ popped back into his head.

  He didn’t feel so good after that.

  Chapter 18

  Rita had driven solidly for the best part of ten hours when tiredness finally overtook her. She’d intended to drive until night fell again and put at least a couple of states between them and the events of the previous night but the long miles and the bright sun and endlessly rolling road had gradually worn her down until even the simple act of keeping her eyes open required an almost superhuman effort.

  She looked over at Asha, asleep in the passenger seat. She’d fallen asleep soon after they’d left Broken Promise and Rita had let her stay that way, aware that it was probably the best antidote to the poisonous night she’d had and doubly aware that when she woke up they’d have to talk about it all. It wasn’t the humiliation of being forced to sign away her property at the point of a gun that galled her most, or the fact that Asha had been witness to it all; it was the casual discovery that Eddie was dead and everyone in town seemed to know about it, at least that’s what Meeks had said. And though she normally didn’t believe one word in ten that came out of his mouth, in this particular case she believed him. Why would he lie about it? There was nothing in it for him, and Daryl Meeks never did anything for free. She’d thought the people of Broken Promise were her friends, that everyone there looked out for everyone. Turned out they’d been no better than lying to her the whole time.

  ‘Honey,’ she said softly. Asha stirred in the passenger seat but didn’t wake. ‘Honey,’ she repeated, a little louder this time.

  Asha stretched and opened her eyes, blinking against the sunshine. She looked outsi
de the window at the passing landscape. Tall fir trees lined the road and flashed past in a smear of green.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Colorado somewhere. Listen, I need to stop. I’m so tired that if I don’t lie down soon I’m going to drive us into a ditch.’

  Asha rubbed her eyes and peered ahead, her younger eyes spotting a sign further down the road. ‘There’s a motel or something up ahead.’

  Rita eased off the gas a little and focused on the sign like it was the finishing line at the end of a long, long race. It was maybe half a mile further but she was so tired she wasn’t even sure she could make it.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about me, you know,’ Asha said suddenly.

  ‘I’m not … why do you … what made you say that?’

  ‘Because of what Daryl Meeks said about Dad. I figure you’re probably worrying about me, but I kind of knew he was never coming back. I mean it’s sad that he got himself killed, but he was trying to get some money together for you, for us, just like he said he was. And that’s kinda cool, you know? So I’m sad that he’s never coming back, but mostly I’m happy. Happy that he didn’t run away from us. That he kept his word but was just unlucky is all. He was a good guy. My dad was a good guy. And that’s awesome.’

  Rita felt hot, stinging tears rise up and she let them fall. She was too tired to stop them anyway. Her beautiful, earnest, serious daughter had just stuck a pin right through the heart of thoughts that had been whirling around in her head for practically the whole drive.

  ‘Mom?’ Asha said, with the questioning tone in her voice she’d had ever since she could talk.

  ‘What, honey?’

  ‘Do you believe in angels?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that man who came to the diner and told us what the symbols said.’

  ‘Solomon. His name was Solomon.’

  ‘Solomon,’ Asha repeated, like it was a magic word. ‘Who was he?’

  Rita shrugged. ‘I ain’t sure but he weren’t no angel. He was just some drifter looking for a free meal.’

  ‘But don’t you think it was funny, him turning up like that when the land was about to be sold, and being able to read those symbols that nobody else could read, so it made the land worth more? Also, why did he stand up to Daryl Meeks like he did? I mean, he had a gun but that Solomon didn’t seem scared at all and it made me not feel scared too. He stood up to Daryl Meeks and told him to his face that he weren’t gonna shoot us and I believed him. Why did he do all that, do you think, when he didn’t need to and when he didn’t get nothing out of it? I think he turned up for a reason. To watch over us maybe.’

  ‘You think he was some kind of a … guardian angel?’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe.’

  ‘Honey. He lied to me about some coin he had in order to con me out of a steak dinner, then he put us at risk, and for what? To squeeze a few more measly dollars out of Daryl Meeks. He weren’t no angel. He was just another macho asshole making life difficult for us.’

  ‘Eighty dollars,’ Asha murmured.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Eighty-one dollars actually. He was real particular about that figure and seemed happy when he got it. I wonder why that was?’

  Rita rubbed her eyes and forced them to stay open for just a little longer. ‘Well I guess we’ll never know. Maybe I can figure it out once I’ve had some sleep.’

  She turned off the road past a sign saying ‘Pagosa Springs Inn. Free WiFi. Free Breakfast. Free Parking’ then followed the track to a cluster of buildings that looked like miniature log cabins. She pulled into a parking spot by the office and cut the engine. ‘Wait here while I check us in.’

  She got a key to a double room and drove round to a cabin with a view of the mountains that she had no intention of enjoying until she walked into the room and saw them framed by the big picture window. They were tall and craggy and monumental and fringed by fir-tree forests that looked like they should have snow on their boughs and probably did in winter. It was about as different a vista from anything in Broken Promise as it was possible to get and the sight of it made her relax in a way she hadn’t been able to since she’d started driving. Because they weren’t in Texas any more and because Asha was OK.

  She sank down on the edge of a bed and stared out at the view, dimly aware of Asha, moving around in the background, checking out the bathroom and unpacking stuff from her bag. Maybe they’d stay here, find a house with a view of the mountains. She couldn’t imagine ever getting tired of looking at them. She wondered whether seventy-nine thousand dollars would be enough to put a down payment on a nice place and again felt a slight tug of regret that she didn’t have just a little bit more.

  ‘Mom?’ The questioning tone was back.

  ‘Uh huh?’

  ‘I think I know why Solomon made Daryl give us those eighty-one dollars.’

  Rita looked round. Asha was standing by her bed. Her backpack was open, the contents were spread around it. She had something in her hand, a small piece of paper that she held out for Rita to take.

  It was a thin slip of paper with the logo of the Lucky Reservation Casino embossed on the top and an amount made out to cash and printed in figures and words. Twenty-one thousand dollars.

  It took a moment for her sleep-starved brain to figure out what it was and what it meant. She took a sharp breath as she realized and looked up at Asha with a mixture of wonder and shock on her face.

  Twenty-one thousand plus the seventy-nine thousand and one she got from Meeks added up to exactly one hundred thousand and one dollars. It was the magic figure she’d always thought she needed to start a new life.

  Maybe he had been an angel after all.

  Chapter 19

  Solomon managed to catch a ride in a big rig heading east just as the sun was starting to climb high enough in the sky to fry everything beneath it. The driver was a grizzled bear of a man who went by the name of Aces and had a belly so large he could practically use it to steer with. He was hauling a load of lumber to Galveston and was happy to take Solomon the whole way for the company, though he was not exactly the talkative type, which suited Solomon just fine. After the briefest of ‘hello’s and ‘where you headed?’s they settled into a comfortable silence with only the sound of the road and a Christian Rock station for company, filling the miles with upbeat songs about being lost, being wretched, seeking love and finding Jesus. Jesus lay at the end of every journey, it seemed. Maybe that’s who he’d find in France.

  Solomon slipped his finger inside the flap of his jacket and felt the rough edges of the gold embroidery that spelled out in French – This suit was made to treasure for Mr Solomon Creed – and gave the address in the south of France of the tailor who’d made it. Solomon had no memory of ever visiting France or of having the suit made. But he figured that the tailor must have spent time with him, taken his measurements, discussed fabrics and finishes, taken details of payment. He must have known Solomon and might therefore be able to help him remember who he was. Maybe he could even help him understand why he knew what statue stood in Idaho Springs, or how he could move faster than a striking snake, or smell the oil on a shotgun held by a man hiding in the shadows of a cave. He’d smelled the man too, and known who it was before he stepped into view. That was why he’d told the lie about the name carved on the wall, another little untruth to make amends for the one he’d told earlier, a lie to cover the lie deVaca had told five hundred years earlier. Two wrongs actually making a right.

  He hoped that Rita did not dwell too much on what she thought she may have lost by selling the land to Meeks, because the truth was she’d lost nothing. The land was next to worthless and Meeks had paid at least double what it was worth.

  ‘Hungry?’ Aces barked from the driver’s seat.

  Solomon considered the question. His steak dinner was more than half a day behind him now and the night he’d had and miles of walking after had long since burned it all off.

  ‘Getting
there,’ he said.

  ‘There’s a place up ahead that does a mean burrito and a fair cup of coffee. How’s that sound?’

  It sounded great but there was a problem. Solomon found the worn quarter in his pocket, all the money he had in the world and not nearly enough to buy himself a meal, let alone the driver whose kindness he was currently enjoying.

  ‘This place ahead,’ he said. ‘Will it be busy?’

  ‘Should be at this time of day.’

  Solomon nodded and smiled. Lots of people. That was good. It only worked if there was a sizeable crowd.

  ‘Then I’m buying,’ Solomon said.

  Aces glanced over at him. ‘You sure?’

  Solomon nodded. ‘Least I can do to say thanks for the ride.’

  Aces looked unconvinced. ‘You got money?’

  Solomon felt the worn surface of the bicentennial quarter between his thumb and finger.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. Then he looked up as a sign flashed past.

  Galveston 542 miles

  He’d be at the ocean by nightfall, in France within a few days. And then …?

  The radio continued to play, songs of journeys that all ended at Jesus. But Solomon didn’t want to find Him at the end of his journey. What he wanted was the answer to the simplest and also the most complex question of all.

  Who am I?

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This short story actually started life as a novel.

  I’d handed in the first draft of Solomon Creed (called The Searcher in the US and Canada) and was drumming my fingers, anxiously waiting for notes and feedback and all the stuff that seems to take forever once the heavy lifting of actually finishing a novel is done. And while I waited and paced I started to think about where Solomon would go to next and how he might get there. I knew he was heading to France, because the tailor-made suit jacket he wore in book one had been made there and it had a label with an address stitched into it. The first book also ended with him walking away from the town of Redemption, Arizona, heading for a port and a ship that might take him to Europe to find the tailor who made it, hoping he in turn might be able to tell him who he was.