Blackbone (6 page)

Especially not like this, when his courage—what there was of it—came from a bottle.

The kettle whistled. She returned to the kitchen, made the coffee strong and black, and brought him a large cup. She helped him sit up and got him to drink some of it.

When he was beginning to think more of his throbbing head than his rage at her, she sat down on the floor in front of him and waited.

For a long time, he wouldn’t look at her. Then his eyes slid to her face, and some of the fight went out of him.

“What did Charlie Hemphill say?” she asked.

Warren ran a hand through his hair. “He wanted to know why I wanted to know, so I made up some bullshit about State Department business, hush-hush, connection with the museum, and then I mentioned your shipment. He had the cargo manifest as cabled from Liverpool, and we found it on there with no trouble. One crate shipped from the British Museum, care of Loring Holloway, Metropolitan Museum, New York. There’s some kind of a lid on information regarding sinkings but—”

“Sinking?”

“Yeah... latest word is that the
Delaware Trader
was torpedoed by a German U-boat seven days ago. She went down with all hands.”

Loring’s eyes shot to the floor.

“And cargo,” Warren added.

She hardened. “All of it?”

“Well, now, that’s the interesting part. There was a survivor—”

Loring looked up sharply.

“—from the U-boat. A German officer. Nice catch for the Navy. Seems that after they torpedoed the
Delaware Trader,
this U-boat surfaced to finish her off with their deck gun. Very dumb. They got nailed by one of our antisub patrol bombers. The survivor was their gunnery officer, one Herr Leutnant Rolf Kirst, rescued at sea by the destroyer escort USS
Sharpe.”

“When did they pick him up?”

“Oh, couple days later. He was found floating around in the Atlantic inside—guess what?—a crate.”

Loring stared at Warren. A weight descended in her stomach. “Where is it?”

“You’re so sure it’s yours, aren’t you?”

Oh, Christ, Warren,
she thought.
You don’t know how sure I am, how I know, I know! But I have to know for certain and can’t you please stop playing this little game and get on with
it... ?

“It’s a goddamned miracle, is what it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“That he’s alive at all. I went to see Commander Lehman, captain of the
Sharpe,
over at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. He said nobody survives that amount of time in the Atlantic this time of year. Kirst should have died of exposure within minutes, but somehow he found that crate and crawled inside—”

“Was it my crate?”

Warren glared at her. He wanted to tell it his way. “Yes, damnit. Stickered and tagged, stenciled all over it— ‘Property of Metropolitan Museum, New York City, U.S.A.’“

Loring’s heart jumped. “You say he was found inside it? What about the—the shipment—the artifacts... ?”

“The only thing in the crate was Kirst.”

“Well, what did he do with... ?”

“Nobody knows. He wouldn’t talk. Lehman questioned him through an interpreter. He didn’t even respond to German. Not a peep. But the crate was empty—”

“Did you... ?”

“I asked, yes. Lehman figured Kirst must have thrown everything out in order to make room for himself.” Warren gave her a hard look. “He was trying to save his life. I doubt if he looked at your stuff and put his hand over his heart and said, Oh, my God, the museum needs this, I’d better jump out.”

“I want to meet him.”

“Not possible. He’s been shipped to a POW camp.”

“Where?”

Warren smiled thinly. “Ah, that’s where Sherlock really had his work cut out for him. I had to hop my ass over to Naval Intelligence and see someone named Zalman Ball. I invoked the museum, the city of New York, the State Department, Anglo-American friendship, and he just kept saying, Sorry, the disposition of prisoners in this country is classified, and so is the location of POW camps. And since I couldn’t exactly be too open with him about what was in the goddamned crate that was even remotely interesting to State—”

“The shipment contained archaeological artifacts from a dig in Iraq. Call him up and tell him, and find out where they sent Kirst.”

Warren stared at her with a little crooked, drunken smile. He sipped more coffee. “At last a morsel, a tidbit, a tiny scrap of a hint. What sort of artifacts?”

“Pottery, tablets, some things over two thousand years old—a major find, Warren.” She didn’t dare tell him more.

Warren sipped loudly. “A sad loss for the world of archaeology, I am sure.”

“More than that.”

“What more?”

“The significance would be... meaningless to you. It wouldn’t make sense.”

“It already doesn’t.”

Loring shifted uncomfortably.

“Look, Lor. The stuff in the crate is gone. It went to the bottom of the ocean so Kirst could get into the crate and save his ass. So make a report to the museum director and call it quits. You can’t change what’s happened, and you’re certainly not the first person in this war to lose some shipping.”

Loring jumped up. “I’ve got to know what happened!”

“Loring, for God’s sake, the museum is wall-to-wall artifacts! What’s another more or less?”

“It’s not enough for somebody to tell me it went to the bottom of the sea.
I have to know for sure!”

“You’re obsessed with this.”

Her eyes blazed. “Yes!”

Warren sat back grimly. “Oh, Christ, I’m a fool. I am just a goddamned pipeline for you. And I’ve been clinging to hope for months. Hope when there is none. I realized it today, when I was on the line to Washington trying to squeeze information out of some chicken general.... You don’t trust me—not with your life, your love, or your body. You don’t even trust me with those goddamned errands you send me on. I’m pulling strings for you, but you keep me in the dark over
why!”

He spread both hands on the sofa and heaved himself to his feet. “What’s so goddamned important about the
Delaware Trader
and that shipment and you getting to that German officer? Why do you have to
know?”

“Warren, I can’t discuss it. Thanks for what you’ve—”

“Don’t patronize me!”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“You wouldn’t believe it.”

“No?”
He was shouting now. “Well, if
I
wouldn’t, then
what about the people in Montana?”

His face twisted with emotion, then all at once he was falling backward. He landed on the sofa and slid from there to the floor. He sat looking at her stupidly, then broke into a satisfied smirk. She knelt beside him.

“What people in Montana?”

Warren gingerly placed his coffee cup a few feet away on the floor. It was empty. He reached into his coat pocket and produced some papers, which he waved enticingly at Loring.

“Kirst,” he said. “Herr Leutnant Kirst has been shipped to a POW camp at Blackbone Mountain, Montana.”

Relief flooded through Loring, along with the unpleasant certainty that if she took those papers from Warren, she would never see him again. She suddenly felt very guilty.

“These are for you.” He placed the papers in her hand as if he were entrusting her with the Japanese invasion plans. “Travel instructions and a letter of introduction from the State Department. I’ve already wired the commandant. He’s expecting you.”

She kept the papers. “Look, Warren—”

“Don’t make a speech.”

“I wish you’d understand. I have to follow through on this....” He was already dragging himself to his feet. She stayed on the floor. “I promise—when I get back, we’ll straighten out our lives, and it won’t be the way it’s been—”

“It sure won’t, lady.” He was moving toward the door.

Loring rose and made a move to follow, but something held her back. Warren reached the door and opened it. He turned and gave her a bitter smile. “I’ve turned away some interesting possibilities since I’ve known you. I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m going to find somebody who wants me.”

He straightened his coat and tie and walked out. “Thanks for the coffee,” he said as he shut the door.

Loring stared after him, feeling nothing but the touch of the papers in her hand.

She turned away and looked for somewhere to sit, and at last the tears started to come. Determined not to give in to this, she swore at herself, but the tears still came, because deep inside she knew that despite never having given Warren Clark any real encouragement, she hadn’t been completely honest with him either. She should have told him way back at the beginning, when she suspected that his ultimate purpose was to win himself a wife who would cook for him, poop out his babies, and rise up the Washington social ladder on his arm. An ornament, not a woman. His very presence had always carried the hint that her career was an illusion, that reality lay within what Warren Clark had to offer, and not within the world she had built for herself. The trouble with that was, there was no room for the real Loring in Warren’s world.

Look forward, she told herself, clutching the papers tightly. Look forward to what? What she had been dreading ever since Warren told her the ship was overdue? It went further back than that. Back to Iraq, to the tablets and the silver flask and the legends and the rock splitting and water gushing and all the nightmares she hadn’t been able to deal with throughout the long dark hours of the war.

Fleeing Iraq, returning to London, burying the artifacts in the bowels of the museum with instructions that they not be touched, researching their origins, learning, learning.... It all flooded back into her mind. She hurried to the kitchen and poured coffee for herself, then thought, no, that would keep her awake the rest of the night, but yes, perhaps it would keep her from dreaming, because she knew what tonight’s dream would be—the faces, the swirling bodies and groping arms, the cries....

Shakily, she sipped the coffee and opened the papers on her kitchen counter, studying Warren’s neatly worded letter “To Whom It May Concern:”... The letter faded from her vision and she saw a frightened young woman after her first year in the field, huddled in the library at the British Museum, poring over Arabic texts and maps and illustrations, growing more and more terrified by the hour. Sleepless nights, long days with her nose in those books, learning, learning.... Taking courage only from the thought that the flask was safely stored in the bottom of the museum, that no one else would ever touch it or even know it was there or what it was. Hoping as she left England and returned to America that it would remain untouched forever, until she died, and the terrible responsibility fell to someone else.... What folly! How stupid to think that she could escape it!

And finally bringing it to America, having it packed in a watertight crate with all the other Iraqi artifacts, believing the propaganda as Warren had said, that the U-boats were finished in the Atlantic. But no, they were far from finished. They had one last little job to do, and they had done it well.

Kirst. She had to get to him, speak to him, learn what he had done with the flask. And that could merely be the beginning.

Chapter 5

Mahmud Yazir carefully measured milk into his tea and stirred it delicately. He tossed the used bag into his wastebasket, then raised the cup and sipped. He edged the old leather chair back so he could squeeze in behind his desk, between the sagging bookshelves and the stacks of borrowed library volumes. Through his closed office door, he heard the laughter of students passing in the corridor. Ignoring them, Yazir tried to relax with his tea. But it was difficult. Loring’s call last night had been anxious, her tone urgent. Yazir was not looking forward to this meeting. Stress was bad for his heart.

He looked up at the faded wall maps opposite his desk, maps of the present-day Middle East and of the ancient Babylonian Empire, the latter covered with thumbtacked notations written in an Arabic scrawl. Beneath the maps were more stacks of books and yellowed periodicals. Yazir thought fleetingly of reorganizing the clutter, then he gazed out the window and saw Loring Holloway hurrying up the walkway to the first-floor entrance.

Yazir recalled the last time she had been to see him, shortly after her return from England. She had breezed in, nervous and excited, wanting to tell him all about her field work in Iraq, but at the last minute, after raising his interest to unbearable heights, she had abruptly decided not to tell him anything. One minute she was in the room with him, the next minute she was gone.

Yazir sighed. Perhaps now he was going to get the story, but why would it be urgent so many years later? It was 1940 when Loring was attached to the British Museum expedition. For months she had worked a dig in the desert lands near the Euphrates River. Before that, she had been one of Yazir’s top students here at Columbia University. She had gone through History of Ancient Civilization with him, then continued through his upper-division Middle Eastern Folklore program, then she had taken her master’s degree in archaeology. Yazir had sponsored her for the British expedition, and before leaving, Loring had showered him with gratitude. But upon returning, except for the one brief, exasperating meeting, she had avoided him.