Alex saw there were tears welling in the old man’s eyes.
“Well, I—”
“No, no, I don’t want to hear any of your self-deprecating nonsense. No. You found my little girl and you brought her home, just like you said you would, only—”
The senator had to stop and pull his handkerchief from the breast pocket of his old hunting jacket. He rubbed it roughly across his face and stuffed it back inside the pocket.
“Only she’s sitting out there right now in the top of that old oak tree of hers writing her new book instead of…instead of buried beneath—” The old man bent down and scratched one of his dogs behind the ears. He couldn’t continue.
“What’s her new book about?” Alex asked, trying to help the old fellow through the moment.
“Pirates, I think,” he replied, not looking up.
“Does she still not know I’m here?” Alex asked after a few moments had passed.
“ ’Course she don’t know!” the senator exclaimed. “She hasn’t got the foggiest notion I called you either. But, well, she’s been down here with me for over a month now. Not a lot to do around here and I could see on her face she was pinin’ away for you. Plain as day.”
“Did she talk about what happened, Senator?” Hawke asked.
“Well, she told me a little. I didn’t push her. She was funny. Said it was like some ride at Disney World, ‘Pirates of the Caribbean with Live Ammunition,’ she said. But she was pretty shaky when I picked her up at the airport down in N’Orleans. I still don’t know how those damn Cubans abducted her in the first place.”
“I’m still trying to put it all together, sir. She’d gone to a club the night before our picnic. She told me she spoke to a Russian at the bar that night. She’d suffered a mild concussion, you know, and she doesn’t really remember, but she may have unwittingly told him our plans for the next day. I don’t know. At any rate, the Cuban submarine I was tracking was in those waters at the time. And the Cubans at that point were trying to use Vicky to get to me. Suddenly, there was an opportunity for a kidnapping.”
“I still don’t understand how they managed to get hold of her,” the senator said. “Out in the water.”
“My guess is that they did know our plans that day. They hid in the trees on the small island just across the cut from the one I’d chosen for the picnic. They probably had us under optical surveillance, waiting for an opportunity. And when Vicky went swimming alone, they had it.”
“But you would have seen them, right, Mr. Hawke?”
“Normally, yes, but she was taken from below. Vicky was grabbed by the ankles and pulled underwater by two Cuban thugs wearing scuba gear. Apparently they called themselves Julio and Iglesias. They’re the ones she overheard bragging about the bomb being hidden in the teddy bear. Anyway, they dragged her ashore, hid her in the pines, and they were all picked up by the Cubans’ submarine later that night.”
“Did they hurt her, Mr. Hawke? Tell me the truth. Did those people harm my little girl?”
“No, sir, they did not. She was smart and brave and used her wits to stay alive. But I would say we arrived pretty much in the nick of time.”
The senator just nodded his head and took a sip of his drink. In the silver ice bucket at his elbow, there was a lovely sound as ice melted and shifted.
“Needless to say, I’m forever in your debt, sir,” he said finally, turning away.
The crickets had come alive now, and great billowing flocks of blackbirds filled the flaming skies above the oaks and elms and pecan trees.
“Times like this, I sometimes think of Tom and Huck and Jim out there on the river, Mr. Hawke. Poling their raft along the bank, looking for somewhere to tuck in safe for the night.”
“Yes,” Hawke agreed, for the first time realizing that this really was it. The real McCoy, his mother had called it. The mighty, the muddy, the one and only.
M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i.
“My mother was an American,” Hawke said, gazing out at the river. “She grew up on the Mississippi, Senator. Somewhere south of here. Near New Orleans. I’ve never been here before. But I’d like to stay a few days. Maybe Vicky and I could wander down the River Road, try to find her old place. Then, maybe, spend the afternoon in New Orleans.”
“I’m sure Vicky would love that, sir.”
“Laissez les bon temps roulez,” Hawke said.
“You speak French, Mr. Hawke?”
“Let the good times roll. It was my mother’s favorite expression. She was teaching me French. Creole patois, I guess. And then—”
“I know all about it, son.”
“Mr. Senator?” A screen door swung open and an ancient fellow in a beautiful green felt jacket with brass buttons stepped onto the verandah.
“Say hello to Horace Spain, Mr. Hawke. He’s been running the joint for the last seventy or eighty years.”
“Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Hawke,” the old fellow said, stepping out through the pools of yellow light spilling from the windows. “I believe we spoke on the telephone late one evenin’. That shore was a sad time in this old place, suh.”
“Yes, I’m sure it was,” Hawke said, shaking his hand. “A very sad time.”
“Mr. Senator? What time we fixin’ to have supper this evenin’? Miss Vicky run off without saying nothing to nobody, and Cook, she fit to be tied what with us havin’ company coming in all the way from England and all.”
“You getting hungry?” the senator asked Alex. “I hope you like honey-fried chicken, black-eyed peas, dirty rice, and hush puppies.”
“Senator, I’m so hungry right now I could eat a watercress sandwich.”
“Now that’s hungry, sir, that’s mighty hungry.”
The senator picked up his silver-headed cane and rose slowly to his feet. He stood for a moment or two, gazing out beyond the long row of trees to the river. There was a big oak tree atop the levee, with three huge branches starkly silhouetted against the evening sky.
It was, Hawke knew, the Trinity Oak. The place where Vicky felt closest to God.
“Well, hell, son,” he said. “What do you say we mosey on down to the river and fetch that little gal home to supper? What do you say about that?”
Epilogue
“You’re teed up too high.”
“Sorry?”
“Your ball is teed up too high. That’s why you’ve been popping them up in the air like Ping-Pong balls,” Ambrose Congreve said.
“Ah, that’s it, then. Thank you.”
“Not at all.”
“Nothing more?”
“Not a thing.”
“You’re quite finished with your tutorial?” Sutherland asked.
“Quite.”
“Good,” Sutherland said, and swung his seven iron. The ball rose cleanly and majestically from the tee, soared over the treacherous patch of ocean and bunkers that guarded the green, and landed softly about three feet shy of the pin. An easy birdie.
“Hmm,” Congreve said. He coughed, saying something that might or might not have been “Jolly good.”
“Always take the cookies when they’re passed,” Sutherland said, stepping aside. “A lucky shot.”
Congreve strolled up to the tee box and stood gazing at the tiny patch of green some hundred and sixty yards away. A late-afternoon fog had rolled in from the ocean, making an already difficult hole even more challenging. To his right was the dense thicket of a palm grove and sea-grape. On his left, waves broke upon the shoreline of jagged coral that gave the world-famous golf course its name. Dientes de Perro.
The Teeth of the Dog.
