“That volcano erupted, killing all of the town’s thirty thousand inhabitants but one,” Drummond said, extracting Charlie from much-needed slumber.
“Volcano?” Charlie blinked the sleep from his eyes. He could do nothing about the whiskey-induced headache.
The interior of the jet, like the sky, was copper in the setting sun. Drummond stabbed an index finger against Charlie’s window, pointing at what appeared to be a greenish cloud rising from the ocean.
“You think that’s a volcano?” Charlie said.
Drummond chewed it over. Or he was focusing intently on refastening his seat belt. Charlie couldn’t tell which. He figured the old man was a 4, tops.
The plane dipped, revealing the green cloud to be a round-topped mountain, coated with lush jungle. Soon Charlie distinguished individual trees, standing almost as close together as carpet fibers, their leaves shimmering in the last of the day’s light.
“Mount Pelee, yes.” Drummond seemed pleased to have recaptured his train of thought. “It virtually split in half on May 8, 1902. An interesting piece of information is that the lava traveled into the town of Saint-Pierre at two hundred and fifty miles per hour, thwarting all of the citizens’ attempts to escape it.”
Charlie reckoned that his father might be correct about the volcano. Drummond had always had an uncanny ability to retain volumes of what he-and usually he alone-considered interesting pieces of information. Upon learning that Drummond had spent his life as a spy rather than an appliance salesman, Charlie recognized that the Interesting Pieces of Information functioned like Clark Kent’s plain business suit and thick eyeglasses, hiding the hero beneath. Sometimes the information offered Charlie critical glimpses of Drummond’s unconscious. Other times it was drivel.
“But you said there was one survivor.”
“Right,” said Drummond. “Cyparis was his name, as I recall, and he was protected from the thirty-six-hundred-degree Fahrenheit ash and poisonous gas because he was underground at the time, in a stonewalled cell in the town jail, awaiting hanging. After the lava cooled, he became a star attraction in P. T. Barnum’s traveling circus.”
Charlie was given hope in his own predicament. “The only sure thing about luck is that it will change,” he said. An old track adage.
Drummond regarded him strangely. “Where are we?”
Make that a 3 on the lucidity scale, Charlie thought. “A guess is over whatever country has Mount Pelee in it.”
“Mount Pelee? That’s at the northern tip of Martinique, the eastern Caribbean island that’s an overseas department of France.”
Charlie hadn’t imagined Martinique being so expansive but, rather, a beach-rimmed dot of an island. Like Drummond, he gazed out the window. Red adobe roofs began to show through the forest. As the jet descended, the roofs grew closer together, soon outnumbering the trees. Lights from other buildings, streetlamps, and streams of vehicles created a glowing dome. Such a vast and populous metropolis would exponentially complicate their task.
“Fort-de-France,” said Drummond, as if encountering a long-lost friend.
“Not the one-washer town I had in mind,” Charlie said.