Another silence ensued. It dangled across the thousands of miles between them.
Baxter wished he hadn’t let his temper get the better of him.
“Jean, look, I apologize. It’s early and I’m feeling a little raw—”
“Never mind.”
“You sure? I shouldn’t have jumped down your throat.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay, good… I’d hate to think you clammed up because you’d gone PC on me,” Baxter said with a strained chuckle. His chair creaked as he leaned forward to reach for his antacids. “The file you’re tracing, does it have a name?”
“We all have names,” Jean Luc said. Whatever that meant. His tone remained oddly chill; Baxter guessed he was still a little annoyed. “This one’s called Jarvis Lenard. He’s a groundskeeper from the village.”
Which in Baxter’s mind meant trouble, no doubt about it, considering how those people stuck together. This time, though, he didn’t allow himself to get frazzled.
“Eckers is on the job?”
“I told you we were going with our best.”
“That you did.” Baxter put a mint in his mouth, decided to add another.
“I think that’s a sound option,” Jean Luc said. “And while I’m offering advice, here’s another piece… wherever you’ve been, it’s not healthy for you. Take it from a friend, Reed. Next time you decide to get away for a few days, consider going someplace that gives more than it takes.”
Baxter frowned, not sure how to reply. But then the click in his ear rendered that moot.
Jean Luc had hung up at his end of the line.
In his study at the Bonasse estate, Jean Luc held the telephone’s cradled receiver in his fist a moment, then slowly relaxed his grip and stood from behind his desk. Probably he’d gotten angrier at Reed than his comments warranted; the man was what he was. The penultimate WASP, inescapably cloistered and ignorant despite his Ivy League education, a hopeless product of his genealogy and upbringing who couldn’t see past the tip of his patrician nose.
Expelling a long breath, he went across the wainscoted room to the side table on which the cubical walnut- and-glass display case had rested for as long as he could remember… his first look at it, in fact, had come while he was perched on his father’s shoulders. Even older than the case, the antique table dated from the early colonial period and had a blend of stylistic influences in its design — the curved, graceful elegance of its legs showing the hand of a Basque artisan, its ebony marble surface distinctly French in its proud Old World solidness.
Here on the islands things had always mixed together, until their origins almost couldn’t be sorted out.
With its clear top lid, clear glass front and side panes, and mirrored back, the case allowed the flintlock pistol it contained to be viewed from many angles. It was a striking weapon, passed down through the generations of his family from male heir to male heir… Jean Luc’s was a strongly patriarchal bunch, one in which women had often been seen as property, acquired to serve the needs of the men whose beds they readied with their hands and warmed with their bodies.
He looked down at the pistol nestled there in its fitted dark blue velvet riser, carefully preserved for almost two and a half centuries. The chased and engraved gold cartouches along its long nine-inch barrel, the cocking mechanism shaped like a gape-jawed serpent or dragon, the grinning gold demon’s head on the pommel — these had not dulled in the slightest with the years, surpassing in durability the lineage of the man who had first possessed it, and given it to his fourth great-grandfather as a seal of alliance.
On occasion when Jean Luc studied the weapon, he would find himself overtaken with visions of wooden pirate ships with broad sails and skull-and-crossbone banners, of naval battles with dueling cannons. Now it took him several minutes to become aware that his eyes had moved from the gun to center on his own reflection in the mirrored backing.
Reed was what he was, yes. In all his effete, degenerate weakness.
And he… he himself was passing. Always had been passing.
Jean Luc Morpaign did not want to look too deeply into his heart to ask which of them carried the greater freight of shame, or was the uglier within.
Hidden in the reeds, he watched the fowl from perhaps a yard away, grateful the thick, lazy air was without any hint of a breeze to carry his scent toward it.
He recognized it as a female whistler, plump with a wide black beak, long neck, reddish breast, dabs of white around her middle, and dark rump and tail feathers. When the tide had gone out and dusk lifted the afternoon heat, he had seen her venture a short distance from her nest among the mangrove roots, wading through the weeds to the brackish water on stilt legs, standing there in position and occasionally bobbing for small fish, crabs, and insects.
He stood perfectly still and watched, his bare brown feet in the cloying mud, his fingers clenched around a heavy wooden stick that measured about four feet from end to end. He had fashioned the stick from a tree limb, snapping it off a large drooping bough and cleaning the rough bark of spindly branches and leaves with a flat, sharp-edged stone. His shell windbreaker had been folded and knotted into a kind of improvised waterproof sling sack for holding the food supplies that he meant to bring back to his shelter. He wore this against his side, its sleeves tied together at the elasticized wrist openings to form a strap that looped around his neck. Right now it was lightly filled with the plants and such he’d gathered for tonight’s supper. There were young cattails and bulrushes he had uprooted from the mud, stripped of their tough, fibrous leaves, and cut down to their edible shoot stems with the same stone tool that had yielded his heavy stick. There were patches of green moss and leathery rock tripe he had soaked in the channel to cleanse them of the toxins that might otherwise wrack him with explosions of vomiting and streaming diarrhea. There were some clusters of wild berries, and even cockle leaves from the thorny clumps that grew in the drier soil inland. The leaf stalks, though bitter on the tongue, were said to ward off the fevers and skin infections with which a man could be stricken in the marshes, and would be more palatable once he peeled away their rinds.
He had survived on slim pickings before, though this particular assortment of food was a lower mark than he could remember.
In the deep poverty of his childhood, the mainstay of his diet had been pap, a thin, simple porridge of stale bread or cornmeal boiled in water. At breakfast his grandma, who had raised him and his two younger sisters since the death of their mother, would sweeten it with honey, or brown sugar, or the pulp of guava or pawpaw or coconut. When the family came together for their evening meal, the pap would be heartened with turnips and carrots and boiled bits of fish or chicken and their broths, and seasoned with the herbs grown in the tiny plot of a garden beside the single-room shack they all occupied. As he approached his teenage years and took on a variety of jobs for the well-to-do — quick to learn how to bring in a wage, he’d worked as a repairman, groundsman, whatever he could do with his hands — they had been able to improve their housing conditions and expand on the staples of their daily meals. And though Grandma Tressie had passed on long ago, he had continued sharing a portion of his income with his sisters after he went to live and work at Los Rayos, setting aside their money for his regular visits to the village.
Whether or not he had made his final visit…
Now he saw the whistler make a sudden jab at something she must have spotted in the shallows, her bill coming up quickly, a lump sliding down the sinuous tube of her neck. She would stay only a short time, not journeying too far from the nest she had built in the tangle of mangrove roots on the riverbank behind her, ready to defend her newly hatched ducklings against raiders. The best chance to steal up on her would be as she dabbled for food, dividing her attention between the shapes that flitted past her keen eyes below the water’s surface and the sounds that came from the direction of the nest. Should he fail to take her by surprise, the likelihood was that the bird still would not allow herself to be sundered from her young. She would fight to protect them from him, as from any threat, rather than attempt to flee.
This would make his task easier if no less regretful, for Jarvis Lenard hated to kill any living, breathing
