Circle of Bones (11 page)

She could see he was baffled by her silence, and she felt a brief moment of triumph at his unease.

“I have resources, you know,” he said. “Come on, let’s share a glass of wine, and you tell me all about what’s been happening with you. Surely you have time tonight to share a glass with an old friend?”

He slid his hand over to her shoulder and squeezed. Her scars ached, and she felt sick, as though her belly were full of shards of ice.

“Get your hand off me.” Her voice was low, trembling as she struggled to keep in control.

“Oh, come on, love, you don’t have to be like this.”

Her hand was in motion before she was conscious of her decision, and the crack of her palm striking his cheek startled the evening strollers like the sudden bang of a balloon popping. She kept her eyes focused on his as he lifted his hand to touch the growing red spot on his cheek.

“Don’t call me that,” she said in a harsh whisper. 

He bowed his head once and said, “I apologize. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“Offend? Oh please. Love? As if you knew the meaning of the word. I’ve been waiting more than two years for some kind of communication from you, some explanation of what really happened that day. Dig, people I loved
died
down there. Others were maimed and wounded and their lives changed forever. Including me.” She yanked at the collar of her polo shirt and exposed the patch of mottled skin on her right shoulder. 

Dig’s eyes flicked to the injury, then away again. “Riley –” 

“No. You take a long look, Diggory. And that’s after Bethesda’s best did their work. After months in the hospital. Wondering what happened to you, but knowing I couldn’t reach out to you. Waiting. And did I hear one word from you?” She tried to force a laugh. “Offend me? Every time I think about what happened I feel like I’m going to vomit. Those flames haven’t stopped burning. I’ve carried this, this —” She stopped, not knowing what to call it, afraid to put it into words. Just as all the other times when she thought about that day, she smelled the greasy smoke of burning flesh, and the stench of it made the bile burn at the back of her throat. She shook her head. “I don’t want any more of your lies. What I want is the truth. The truth about what happened down there.”

“Do you really?” he asked.  

He spoke in those seductive tones, and she clenched both of her fists in an effort not to hit him again.

“There’s more you and your kind aren’t telling me,” she said. “I know it. And if you won’t tell me,” she started, then stopped short of saying it. 

“What? It was a terrible thing, but it had nothing to do with us.”

“Oh really? Why is it I have such a difficult time believing that? I kept my mouth shut, kept you out of it, and every day I grew more sick with myself.” 

His hand started for her, ever confident that his touch could quiet her.

She raised her hands in self defense and stepped back. “You keep your hands off me, Diggory Priest. You hear me? I’m out of it now.”

Riley spun around and ran across the quay to her dinghy. She stepped into the boat, untied the painter, and pushed the boat away from the sea wall. Her outboard engine started on the first pull, and she spun the throttle, gunning the engine, forcing the small boat onto a plane. The hot wind stung her face and blew the tears from her eyes as her boat roared out into the dark harbor.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Pointe-à-Pitre

March 25, 2008

7:15 p.m.

Diggory stood on the quay and watched the small dinghy disappear out of the inner basin and into the night. The harbor side fish market was now abandoned, the tables empty, the dark awnings flapping in the breeze. Some movement attracted his attention farther down the dock, and he saw a large brown rat tightrope walk the dock lines securing one of the local fishing boats. The animal disappeared into the hold. 

Diggory shuddered then began walking down the street that formed one side of the inner harbor. He steered clear of the fishing boats moored along the seawall and walked down the center of the asphalt, his strides growing longer with each step. By the time he reached the end of the street where it curved in a sharp left, he broke into a run. He could still hear the high pitched whine of the straining outboard engine. One hundred yards ahead the houses gave way to a waterfront restaurant, and he rushed through the tables, pushing aside empty chairs and startling diners who watched wide-eyed as he hurried to the terrace. He stopped at the railing, breathing hard, staring out into the anchorage where the half dozen or so cruising sailboats bobbed in the wind chop. 

The sound of the outboard died and he waited. He was not disappointed. Less than a minute later a masthead light blinked on. Straining his eyes to see through the darkness he made out the white of the hull, the dim yellow of a cabin light. Her boat was a white-hulled sloop anchored close to the red flashing channel marker. It would be easy for them to find.

“
Monsieur, est-ce que vous voulez quelque chose a boire
?”

“
Non, merci,
” he said to the waiter who had appeared at his elbow. Much as he could use a drink, now wasn’t the time. He had found her, and this time, he would see it through to the end. Marguerite Riley represented one of his rare missteps, and now, here she was like a gift, one that would keep on giving with all its ramifications. 

He hadn’t been lying when he told her she had improved with age. She was the physical embodiment of Nietzsche’s Superwoman: fit, smart, and most of all, well-bred. There had been few women he remembered longer than a week or two, few who had been of his class. Riley had been different. He could not ask her to do the things he asked of the whores or the bored foreign service wives he encountered. He knew — from the first moment he saw her in her crisp, creased USMC uniform, brown shirt, blue pants, chest covered with ribbons, firm grip announcing herself as Sergeant Riley —  he had to have her and his usual sexual repertoire would never be seductive to a woman like her. The little upper crust daddy’s girl masquerading as the enlisted working class. She was the sort of girl who had acted as though he were invisible back when he was in high school and sitting in a booth waiting for his mother to get off work. 

Only a few days later, he’d asked her out and brought her back to his apartment in San Isidro. He’d shuddered at that first embrace when her fingers stroked the naked skin of his shoulders and back. With her, he had come the closest to feeling the pleasure of a caress. She was the polar opposite of the human offal his mother had worked with at the diner.

And now, she said she wanted to know the truth about what happened down in Peru. Riley, darling, he thought, you of all people should know when to leave well enough alone. And the amusing part was that he had every intention of telling her, in good time.

Diggory left the restaurant and ambled back toward the harbor on autopilot, lost in memories of Lima. As he passed the immigration office, he surfaced from his reveries, paused, and looked back in the direction of the anchorage. After a moment, he climbed the steps to the government building. He tried the door. It was open.

The reception desk inside stood abandoned. The clicking of his shoes echoed as he crossed the tile floor, and he heard giggling from a back room. He cleared his throat.

About a minute later, a young woman with enormous breasts and a huge gap between her front teeth emerged from the back room pushing at her lopsided bra with the back of her wrist. Her hair was tousled, and her skin flushed when she saw him look at the open buttons of her blouse. She clutched at her neckline and said, “
Bon soir, monsieur.
” 

He told her who he was and explained that he needed information.

Whether it was his ID or his charm, he didn’t know or care, but the secretary immediately showed him into the office of Monsieur Beaulieu, the French Immigration officer who, the girl said, had been on duty that afternoon. He was the one who had spoken to the American woman.

The man was in his shirt sleeves, his tie pulled loose, his bulbous nose reddened from the half-empty bottle of wine and the pair of smudged tumblers standing on his desk. Diggory showed him the same ID he had shown the secretary, and Beaulieu, impressed, invited him to take a seat. The immigration man told him that technically they were closed. That was the reason things were so informal at the moment. Clearly, he wanted to make a good impression on the important American agent.

Diggory didn’t care if he was preparing to slam it to the secretary on the desktop in the next hour. He just wanted some information. He spoke to the bureaucrat in flawless French.

“You understand that the questions I am asking you are confidential and of utmost importance to the national security of both of our nations. The young American woman on the sailboat in the harbor. Marguerite Riley. Did she clear in here?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I have her passport right here. There was a serious difficulty.”

“What happened?”

“She came in to clear, and she told us she had one passenger on her yacht. Picked him up in the water offshore off the coast of Basse Terre this morning.” He snickered and made a snorting noise in his large nose. “She said he was totally nude. Well, except for a necklace.”

“Describe this necklace.”

“She said it was a coin of some sort. Gold.”

“And the man’s name?”

“He gave her a false name.”

“What was the name?”

“Robert Surcouf.”

Diggory closed the door behind him leaving the immigration officer and his secretary to continue with the disgusting little rendezvous he had interrupted. He stood on the doorstep and watched the lights reflecting on the water of the inner harbor, the French tourists and locals mingling as they hurried on their way to home or dinner or, like Beaulieu, to surreptitious meetings or animal gropings. 

There were more than six and a half billion human beings roaming this earth, most of them little better than the vermin that climbed aboard the fishing boats at this time of night.  How marvelous that his Riley had crossed paths with the man he now sought. He would enjoy the opportunity to use her again and to finish, finally, the business he had started. Even Yorick would have to appreciate the symmetry of the situation. Life appeared random, that is until something like this fell into his lap. But here was another signal that his time was at hand. While he didn’t believe in God or Destiny or that any force like fate ruled men’s lives, Diggory saw this as proof that men like him, superior in intellect and breeding, often also had plain luck on their side — and the intelligence to know how to take advantage of it.

He patted the front pocket of his shirt, feeling the shape of the passport there, and he felt the hot blood rushing to his core. She was his now.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Aboard the Bonefish

March 25, 2008

8:15 p.m.

Riley didn’t stop crying until she reached her boat. She hoisted the dinghy in the davits, unlocked the main hatch, and turned on her anchor light. Routine was what always saved her. In the service, it had been her job, her duty and the best way to move beyond what had happened to her brother. When you had a job to do, something you had trained for, you could lose yourself in the work. After she’d left the service, she floundered back in DC, chafing under the memories and her attempt to live with her father. She’d always lived frugally and saved during her years on the government’s payroll, so she took her life’s savings and bought and moved aboard the
Bonefish
. On the boat, she had maintenance, routine, things she had to do to keep herself sane and the boat safe and secure. 

On this night, her routine allowed her to get back in control, but her mind wouldn’t turn off. Seeing Dig again had brought it all back. He’d called her that last morning in Lima, and she had gone to his apartment. They’d made love, and then with the sunlight streaming in the window bathing their naked bodies in golden light, he had asked her to do a favor for him. Of course, she had said. At that moment, she would have done just about anything to get to spend more time with him.

Stop it, she told herself. She reached up and turned on the overhead light in the main cabin, then slid onto the settee in front of her MacBook laptop computer. She tapped the space bar and the screen blinked on to reveal her email inbox. She still had not opened the email she’d received from Mercury that morning, but the name Hazel Kittredge was listed beneath the name of her employer and she clicked on her friend’s email instead.

Darling,

How are you and where are you? Please tell me you’re shacked up on some luscious Caribbean island with a well-endowed gorgeous man who owns a rhum distillery or some such romantic thing. You’re not still doing this all-alone-Super-Woman routine, are you? Call me!

XX,

Hazel

Riley smiled and felt for the first time in over an hour that she might be able to shake off the pall that Diggory Priest had cast over her life. She reached for her cell phone and thought a moment before dialing, wondering where and in what time zone her friend might be.

Like Riley, Hazel had grown up the daughter of a career diplomat, but Hazel’s father had never needed to work. Hazel’s grandfather had started life as a share cropper until he invented some device that improved car mufflers back in the fifties, and ever since her family had been
those
Kittredges of Atlanta. 

She dialed Hazel’s U.S. cell on the off chance she was stateside. Hazel picked up on the second ring.

“Darling! Where are you?” Her friend’s soothing alto voice worked better than a Valium.

“Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadaloupe.” Riley turned her body on the settee, settled back into the pillows, and stretched her legs out on the velvet upholstery.

“And you’re headed down to the Saintes, I hope?”