“So who sent you?” Fielding asked Alice.
He was fond of saying that the time they’d spent together-four weeks now-was like the mid-romantic movie montages that invariably feature the couple romping through the surf, except, despite a shared affinity for both jogging and the beach, he and Alice had yet to get around to that.
“Sent me?” She shifted uncomfortably on the silk-upholstered Louis XV settee in his den. Behind her, the exterior wall had been opened; the starlit beach appeared to be a mural. He paced before her, beneath the great white shark jawbone he’d kept above the mantel despite the decorator’s pleas.
“Sent you, yes,” he said. “Who sent you?” For the first time in a month there was no mirth in his tone. This, as opposed to some combination of the bare arms and legs protruding from her cocktail dress, the breeze off the sea, and the bamboo ceiling fans, probably explained her shiver.
Delicately, she said, “I’m not sure I know what you mean, darling.”
“Let’s save the trouble and pretend I’ve now asked, ‘Who sent you?’ ad nauseam, and endured all your variations of ‘Sent me where?’ and ‘Why, nobody sent me anywhere, darling,’ with you looking at me all the while like I’ve spent too much time in the wine cellar, shall we?”
“Okay, but I still won’t know what you mean.”
“All right, stick with that tack. I’ll counter with a threat. But first, so you won’t think it’s an idle threat, let’s broach for the first time the topic of what I do for a living. Alice, what do I do for a living?”
“You hunt for buried pirate treasure.”
“Sometimes I do, yes. But have you ever thought about buried pirate treasure?”
“How should I think about it, Nicky?” She was playing along as though he were a seven-year-old.
He resolved to keep his emotions out of it. “Say you’re a pirate. What sense would it make for you to take your treasure, which likely came at the sacrifice of lives and limbs, and dump it into an unguarded hole in the ground on a remote island you might never be able to find again?”
“What about the treasure of San Isidro?” she asked. His well-publicized search for the legendary pirate hoard was into a seventh month.
“Actually, the treasure of San Isidro is the maritime equivalent of an urban legend.”
“How about your gold escudos, then?” He’d supposedly found the cache after weeks of searching along the Argentine coast. News photographs showed him neck deep in a hole on a beach, holding one of the coins aloft, its gleam matching the one in his eyes. A neophyte collector, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al Saqr, bought the lot for six million dollars.
“I suspect you already know this, Alice-or whatever your name really is-but in case the brief you were given glossed over it, the truth is that the authenticity of the coins was questionable at best. Al Saqr knew that and didn’t care. Because the coin deal was really a cover for… what, you tell me.”
She looked away to hide her anguish. “Of course I’ve heard the rumors.”
He stopped pacing, waited for her to look, then locked eyes with her. “Ever hear the one about Nick Fielding, illegal arms dealer?”
“Look, if that’s the case-” She was embarking, he suspected, on an explanation of how she’d made her peace with it.
“It’s the case,” he said. “Moreover, as a dealer in illegal arms, one has to be ruthless, probably to a psychotic extent, though I’m probably an exception-then again, what psychopath thinks he’s a psychopath? In any event, I had a man keelhauled recently. Know what that is?”
“I don’t think I want to.” Her eyes pooled with tears.
“Sorry, you’ve got to. ‘Keelhauled’ means dragged under a ship’s hull so you drown, if you’re lucky. Otherwise you’re shredded by barnacles and whatnot. It would’ve been easier for me to put a bullet through the guy’s head, of course; the keelhauling was something of a public relations move.”
Weakly, she asked, “Are you going to keelhaul me?”
“Are you going to tell me who sent you?”
“Nicky, please, I-” Her voice broke into a sob.
“Then what good would keelhauling you do? You wouldn’t be able to tell me who sent you.”
“I wouldn’t be able to tell you regardless. I haven’t the first clue even why you think someone sent me.”
“How about the night on the Malecon, when the Blackbeard look-alike said, ‘What’s a matter, puta, you too good for us?’ First, the script was laughable. And how about the way he delivered the line a second time, just in case I missed it the first time because of the loud waves? Also, my dear honey trap, your hair was, and remains, red-my weakness for which is widely known. Now, before you accuse me of being vain, know I’ve done some homework. You claimed to be the only child of parents now deceased. You said you had an idyllic upbringing in Chiswick in West London, and you fled a tedious assistant solicitor’s life in Bristol to study marine biology in the Bahamas. And your story held water, as it were. Whoever sent you did a bang-up job on your legend, if that’s the right term. Probably you’re one of those spooks with the single-mindedness of a mountaintop monk; you can set your real life aside for months at a time. Still, you’re human, which means you can’t entirely extinguish your feelings for your real life. I’m willing to wager that that will be so in the case of Jane.”
Alice looked at him as though “Jane” were some strange-sounding word from the language of the indigenous Carib tribe.
She ought to have been curious which Jane he meant, though, for surely she knew several, let alone her de facto goddaughter.
“Poor play,” he said. “You’re masking your apprehension that I mean the little girl in South Yorkshire with pigtails the color of sunshine, who, on Christmas morning, opened an airmail package sent from this neck of the planet and delighted in its contents, a radio-controlled mermaid.” He was certain this detail would get a rise out of her.
She didn’t blink.
Could he be wrong about her?
“Well, then, that brings us to the evening’s threat,” he said. “Note the FedEx pouch over there on my desk. It arrived earlier from the UK, sent by a fellow limey of yours known as ‘the Knife’-trite, sure, but if anyone deserves the moniker, it’s him.”
He strolled to his desk, automatically checking his computer screen for new e-mails. Nothing. Then he took up the sealed pouch. “This contains the pinky finger from Jane’s left hand, removed late yesterday afternoon at the Rotherham rail yard, where she was found in what was believed to be a state of shock.” Fielding disliked having had to dispatch the Knife to South Yorkshire yesterday to chloroform and butcher an innocent child, but he believed it was for the greater good. “As you may know, Jane had been warned repeatedly against playing with the feral dogs there. The dogs are currently viewed as the culprits. Now, unless you tell me who sent you, the ‘dogs’ will revisit Jane and tomorrow’s pouch will contain-” Fielding stopped himself.
Alice had broken, though without the sobbing one would have expected based upon her maudlin performance to this point. “Fine,” she said with the nerve of a different person altogether. “I’ll tell you the truth. You’re right. I was sent here by MI6.”
“Okay, okay, good,” Fielding said, preoccupied. What had caused him to stop himself mid-threat was the winged envelope icon that popped onto the computer screen, sent by one of his fellow members of Korean Singles Online. “I just need to take five, Allie. Hector and Alberto will take you up to your room. I’ve just received some, er, news of the hunt.”
As soon as the two hulking servants led her out, he clicked open his message from Suki835. “Howdy, Cowboy232,” the text began, then launched into the movies and music she favored.
He scrolled to the important part, her photograph. She had a plump, round face; pleasant eyes; and an effortless smile. She couldn’t really weigh just 110, unless five four was the fib.
He moused to her silver left earring and magnified it several hundred times over, until he could read the text on the overlaid digital dot. Decrypted, it was indeed “news of the hunt,” but not the hunt for the treasure of San Isidro as he had implied: hounds lost rabbit and rabbit, jr., at utica and fillmore in bklyn at 00:35. rabbits driving ny daily news delivery truck north on utica. will unleash addl hounds asap.
Not good news, Fielding thought, but nothing to lose sleep over. How far could a feebleminded old man and a ne’er-do-well gambler get?