Cries of the Lost (7 page)

W
E CHECKED
into a small resort hotel on Tortola just south of Road Town, capital of the British Virgin Islands. Our room faced Sir Francis Drake Channel, the blustery little sea around which most of the archipelago gathered. The night was clear, and even with a feathery palm tree in the way, we could see speckles of light from neighboring islands, and even the ghostly white shape of a sailboat running downwind toward the southeast tip of Tortola, and then maybe on to the U.S. Virgins and beyond.

“Now what, chief,” said Natsumi.

“I find postcards from the South of France irresistible.”

“C’est bon,”
was all she said, pulling me over to the big bed under the lazy ceiling fan, where we found a way to put aside all conflicting impulses and obsessions by focusing on the one area where full agreement was a sure thing.

C
HAPTER
4

A
t sunrise I was on my computer, where I spent a few hours burning down and wiping out all the evidence I could find of Florencia’s money laundering activities. There was no such thing as permanently destroying data, but I could slow down any investigation considerably.

Of course, the best way to stay hidden was for no one to be looking for you. I’d relied on that from the beginning. But things had now changed irrevocably. If pursuers had the safe-deposit box, they likely had some or all of the fraud scheme, which could well lead back to Florencia despite my best efforts.

Though not necessarily to me. There were other players entangled in her underground operations who could draw attention, create diversions. But there was no way for me to know that, so I always had to assume the worst.

At least I had a distraction: the content on the flash drive taken from the bank on Grand Cayman. It was a Word document, a single page filled with numbers set within little boxes.

Code.

Before being smashed by a bullet, my brain was uniquely suited to code-breaking, something I did as a hobby, though sometimes it came in handy in my professional pursuits. The brain injury caused a thing called dyscalculia, which is a technical way of saying I’d lost most of my math skills.

As it turned out I was able, through persistent practice, to rewire my neural circuitry well enough to regain basic arithmetic, and even get a grasp on certain algebraic formulas, but that was about it. Looking at that sea of numbers on the computer screen caused a surge of loss that was almost nauseating. But it passed in a moment, as I realized I didn’t have to be a great code breaker. I simply needed someone, or something, that was.

As in all things today, the solution began with the Internet. I searched for “codes and cyphers” and settled in for a lot of reading.

Natsumi woke an hour later and made us coffee while I explained the situation. She looked over my shoulder at the code and said, “Reminds me of roulette, only with more numbers.”

“Indeed. Though a spinning wheel isn’t going to help us here.”

“What will?” she asked.

“I think it’s some sort of substitution technique. Presumably, the numbers stand for letters, though it’s not a simple 1 = A formula. Different combinations of numbers, running forward or in reverse, or diagonally, form part of the process. I’ve downloaded some off-the-shelf code-breaking software, which is running in the background, but I don’t have much hope.”

“How come?”

“There’s probably a key, something that generates the numbers, but not inherent in them. In her scam, Florencia had used the phone number from the apartment she rented during grad school. If I hadn’t guessed that, it would have taken a powerful computer to crunch all the possibilities within a string of ten numbers.”

“But it’s doable,” she said.

“I think.”

I spent the rest of the day on the code, pausing for about a half hour to arrange the trip to Europe. Which is all it took, online booking being the easiest code in the world to crack. The next morning, the guy at the front desk whistled at a cluster of cabs and their drivers, who were playing some sort of board game under a big shade tree. Through an unspoken selection process, one of them took us to the ferry in Road Town, which roared across the whitecaps and swells to St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. We made it to the airport and boarded a plane that flew us, our bags and boxes of gear to Miami.

I spent most of the hop across the Caribbean quelling anxious thoughts about U.S. customs. My experience with international travel was thin, but even before the shooting, handing my passport to the American agents and watching them rummage through my belongings was decidedly creepy and ominous.

In the end, the female agent barely looked at us before scanning our passports, secured with stolen identities, and waving us through. The same was true at baggage search, which was literally nothing, the agents without a flicker of suspicion buying my story of being a telecommunications distributor on a selling tour of the Caribbean.

“Well, that was easy,” said Natsumi when we were well out of earshot.

“I used the force.”

I’d planned a day layover to go through everything, consolidating down to two carry-ons by stripping out excess gear, sending some of it to a storage facility I maintained in Connecticut, and a bit more to our final destination in France—the Villa Egretta Garzetta, pictured on the postcard in the safe-deposit box.

Feeling that our good fortune getting into the country reduced the odds of an easy trip out, I was moderately tense until we were aloft in the Iberia Airbus A340 heading for our connection in Madrid. Over the Atlantic, Natsumi slept while I played around with the code, with no success.

Still, I was convinced it was based on numeric substitution. Florencia was an MBA, a few courses shy of earning an actuarial degree, and her facility with numbers was nearly as good as mine. Maybe not with the more esoteric formulas, but she could usually see the significance of a complex spreadsheet at a single glance, absorbing the calculations in chunks, the way speed readers absorb whole paragraphs. It was more pattern recognition than anything, so it was likely she’d settled on some type of visual pattern, limiting the possible complexities.

It was also possible she’d designed it with me specifically in mind, a thought that caused a little twist in my heart. She may have never wanted to reveal her deeply buried secrets, but knew realistically, if something happened to her, I’d find out anyway. She knew me, knew my predilections and persistence. I’d uncover the fraud and embezzlement, trace the money and secure the safe-deposit box. And she would have been right—only she couldn’t know that the message sent beyond the grave, if it was indeed a message, would be received by a very different Arthur Cathcart.

I eventually exhausted myself, and managed to sleep the last hour of the flight to Madrid; and after a brief stay at the Madrid airport, we took the last leg of the trip to the Côte d’Azur.

T
HE BEST
way to imagine Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat is to picture a right hand, fingers together, with thumb out, jutting into the Mediterranean Sea from the southern coast of France. To the west, Nice is a fifteen-minute car ride. Monaco is about a half hour to the east.

St. Jean is the thumb to Cap Ferrat’s hand. Contained within the two peninsulas is some of the most beautiful and expensive real estate in the world, a fleet of super yachts extensive enough to mount a major invasion, and wealth beyond measure (partly because a lot of it resides in banks on Grand Cayman Island).

We landed in Nice an hour before sunrise. By the time we secured our bags and checked through customs, the sun was beginning to light the sky from behind the southern reaches of the Alps. Though I usually strived for anonymity in rental cars, I’d chosen a 5-Series BMW, the roads of the Côte d’Azur notoriously serpentine, providing frequent opportunities for the ill-equipped and inexperienced to plunge down sharp embankments.

Anyway, given how common BMWs were in that part of the world, there was little danger of standing out.

Leaving the airport in Nice, we drove along the Promenade des Anglais, traveling east parallel to the crescent-shaped beach. Apparently the nightclubs in and around the old hotels lining the Promenade were disgorging the last of the night’s club-goers, bleary-eyed, but still beautiful. A black-haired young woman in a painted-on, shiny green dress and impossibly high heels stuck out her thumb. I flashed by without hesitation, though a peak in the rearview showed her teetering on the high heels, looking incredulous at the receding BMW.

“Good decision,” said Natsumi.

“Security first,” I said.

“Hm.”

We followed the swoops and curves, the rise and fall of the coastal road, through the narrow confines of densely packed urban clusters, squeezing by colossal buses and dodging suicidal motorbikes. Yet in fairly short order we arrived, intact, at the Village of St. Jean. Not a village in the conventional sense, more a settlement of luxury homes surrounding a row of shops and restaurants set into the hillside, overlooking a harbor crammed with small watercraft, motor and sail, sheltered from the Mediterranean by a curvaceous concrete and stone breakwater.

With the harbor on our left, we drove halfway up the peninsula to where the red dot on my GPS pegged the location of the Villa Egretta Garzetta. I’d come to appreciate that the people of the Côte d’Azur had learned to live on the vertical, the hotel being a fine demonstration. You parked your car on the shoulder across the street, then climbed a steep masonry stairway to an iron gate, beyond which you continued the upward hike through thick, aromatic foliage over large, circular ceramic tiles.

The main entrance was to the far right of the building. To the left was a patio that extended the length of the hotel, covered by a pergola supporting a hundred years of wisteria growth. Hotel guests, the early risers, sat at round tables with starched white tablecloths, pouring themselves café noir from china pots and spreading jelly on croissants and baguettes.

Above the pergola were three stories of rooms, each with a small balcony where sprays of bougainvillea climbed across canary yellow stucco walls.

The lobby was windowless and about the size of a utility closet. A small chandelier cast a dull, yellow light from above, and a brass lamp did what it could to illuminate the front desk. Behind it stood a very tall, slender bald-headed man in his late sixties or early seventies. He gave a little bow.

Natsumi had the better French, so I let her navigate the greeting and check-in process. Monsieur Lheureux either had no English or chose not to use it, though his demeanor was very warm and engaged. This was likely aided by my choice of rooms—actually a full penthouse suite, their best, perched on the top of the hotel. In fact, they called it
Le Petite Villa Perché.
As with the BMW, it was an unfamiliar extravagance, but the only thing available on such short notice.

The manually operated elevator had room enough for one person and one bag, so we took turns. Monsieur Lheureux hoofed it up the stairs and gave us a tour of the penthouse, which had full views in every direction, with tangled gardens to the west and the mountainous Mediterranean coastline to the east, where at night we’d be able to see the lights of Monte Carlo. Before he left, a round, white-haired woman he introduced as Madame Lheureux showed up with a tray loaded with coffee, pastries, fruit and a copy of
The International Herald Tribune.

When they left, we took it all out to the balcony overlooking the wisteria-laden pergola, the front gardens of the hotel, and at water’s edge the red tile roofs of an estate invisible from the street behind a twelve-foot, pink plastered wall.

I remember having a single cup of coffee, and maybe half a croissant, when the weight of jet lag and sleep deprivation suddenly crashed down, driving us back inside and into the overstuffed antique bed and the welcome embrace of absolute unconsciousness.

“W
HAT DO
you know of Florencia’s childhood?” Natsumi asked me four hours later, back on the balcony with a fresh pot of coffee.