The Lucifer Gospel (23 page)

“Interesting people you have here.”

“Places like New Providence have always attracted interesting people. How many countries have a motto like ‘Pirates Expelled, Commerce Restored’?”

“You make it sound like there’s some question of that.”

“Jury’s still out on the pirate issue. Time was they had names like Morgan and Teach. Now it’s Escobar and Rodriguez.”

“We were talking about the
Acosta Star,
” interrupted Finn.

“That’s so.” The old man nodded.

“Sidney here said you saw her go down,” said Finn. “In a hurricane.”

“Donna,” Tucker Noe said, nodding. “She was in the eye, burning like a candle. I was making for Guinchos Cay or Cay Lobos before I sank myself.”

“You were out in a hurricane in this?” said Hilts.

“She was the
Malahat
. Old Chris-Craft fish boat I used to take charters out on.”

“A fishing charter in a hurricane?”

“Other business. And you’ve clearly never been in a hurricane. They have a tendency to come out of nowhere, just like Donna.”

“What other business?” Finn asked.

“None of yours,” answered Tucker Noe with a crisp edge to his voice.

“Oh,” said Finn, suddenly understanding what the other business was.

“You just leave it at that.” He glanced at Poitier. “I have changed my ways since then,” he added stiffly.

“Bull crap.” The taxi driver laughed. “You just changed your methods, old man.”

“Nevertheless,” said Tucker Noe, turning back to Hilts.

The photographer waved dismissively. “No problem. This was at night?”

“That’s right.”

Simpson had said eleven at night, Finn remembered. It seemed as though his information was on the mark.

“How did you know it was the
Acosta Star
?” asked Finn.

“I didn’t, not right then,” answered Tucker Noe. “Though I had my suspicions.”

“No radio?” asked Hilts.

“I had one, but no one was calling on it,” said the old man.

“And presumably you were ducking under the radar,” said Hilts.

“This was 1960, young man. There wasn’t much in the way of radar at all back then. The Bay of Pigs was still almost a year away. I doubt if Señor Castro had a gallon of gasoline to spare for patrol boats. The
Acosta Star
was a torch, not a spy ship or any kind of threat.”

“Did you try to help?”

“No, I stayed clear. There was no sign of life, you could see that the davits were all swung out, lines in the water, lifeboats gone. A ghost ship.”

“Was she under power?” Hilts asked.

“Hard to say. Maybe. The swells were very bad. She might have stayed afloat for a long time if it hadn’t been for the hurricane. I reached Cay Lobos just before midnight. There’s an old lighthouse there. I beached
Malahat
on the lee shore and went up the tower just before the weather broke again.”

“What happened?”

“The hull had obviously been weakened. She broached and broke in half toward the stern. She was gone in less than a minute.”

“No survivors?”

“As I said, she was a hulk. Everyone capable of getting off was obviously gone. There was no one left on board to survive.”

“Acosta Star
was a big ship. How come no one ever found her?”

“She was a big ship but it’s a bigger ocean. I was the only one to see her go. Most wouldn’t have put her that far south or west. By rights she should have gone down in the Tongue, which is where most people think she is. Down in the deep.” He paused. “But she’s not.” The old man plucked the dark, carved coral king off the chessboard and twirled it between a gnarled old thumb and forefinger. “She’s in a little more than fifteen fathoms—her keel at a hundred feet maybe—lying on a sandy bottom in the shadow of a place called No-Name Reef. You could fly over her at wave height and never see her unless it was just the right time of day. Not that it matters any now.”

“Why’s that?” Hilts asked.

“ ‘Cause no one ever goes to No-Name Reef no more,” Poitier answered.

“Why’s that?” said Finn.

“Because No-Name Reef is in disputed Cuban territorial waters,” responded Tucker Noe. “It’s not 1960 any longer. There’s lots of patrol boats and lots of radar these days. The only other people traveling in those waters are coke runners in ‘go-fast’ boats outward bound from Barranquilla or Santa Marta on the Colombian coast, and they’re usually better armed than the Cubans or the DEA. The
Acosta Star
is in a war zone.”

“Maybe your friend could help,” suggested Poitier. “The writer fellow. As I understand, he knows that old ship inside and out.”

Tucker Noe threw his friend a warning glance but the taxi driver ignored him. “Lives out there all alone on Hollaback Cay, must be bored out of his skull. You and that Mills character went out to the wreck a few times, didn’t you, old man?”

“Lyman Mills? That writer?” asked Finn. “The one they used to call the poor man’s James Michener?” Lyman Aloysius Mills had virtually invented the idea of the beach bestseller. As a teenager Finn had read her mother’s creased and spine-cracked hand-me-down copies, inhaling them like hot buttered popcorn.

“Man owns a private island in the Bahamas don’t qualify as a poor man’s anything in my book,” said Sidney Poitier with a laugh.

“That Mills?” Hilts repeated.

“That’s the one,” said Tucker Noe with a nod.

Lyman Mills would have been a perfect example of the glamorous American success story except for the fact that he wasn’t really American; he only seemed that way. The son of a British soldier who had been cashiered for refusing to fight with the North Russian Expeditionary Force after spending three years in the trenches of France and Belgium, Mills immigrated to Canada as a child, spending much of his childhood in Halifax and then Toronto, where his father worked as a waiter and his mother ran a boardinghouse.

In a number of interviews given over the years, Mills said he could never remember a time when he hadn’t wanted to be a writer. He dropped out of school early, spent his early years as a copy boy at the
Toronto Star
hearing stories about Hemingway and Callahan from the previous war, and finally quit the paper to join the Royal Air Force Coastal Command, where he flew, and fell in love with, the Grumman Widgeon, a four-seater patrol flying boat that was a miniature version of the huge Pan Am Clippers that spanned the globe.

After the war, married and with a child on the way, Mills went to work for an advertising company and specialized in writing copy for liquor ads. This led to his first novel, originally entitled
Aged in Oak,
but eventually called
The Label,
an insider’s look at the workings of a huge distillery, following its fortunes over several generations, including through Prohibition. Seven hundred and eighty-eight single-spaced pages’ worth.

When half a dozen Canadian publishers turned it down as being too “racy” and “crude,” with little or no “socially redeeming content,” Mills climbed on board the overnight train to New York with the four-and-a-half-pound manuscript under his arm and sold it to the first publisher he saw on Fifth Avenue. The only suggestion his editor had was that he type double-spaced in the future for the sake of everyone’s eyesight.

Thus began Lyman Mills’s skyrocketing career as an extoller of everyday things and people, from the post office
(The Letter),
to automobiles
(The Car),
to buildings
(The Tower)
and the weapons industry
(The Gun)
. One book a year, year in and year out, for three decades, stories filled with a simple formula of sex, adventure, action, and lots of interesting facts all tied together with page-turning plots. As one critic put it, “Lyman Mills may not stand the literary tests of time but he sure gets you through those hot summer days at the beach.” Reviewers scoffed and no one admitted to buying him in paperback, let alone hardcover, but somehow he wound up selling millions of copies, hard and soft, in seventy-five countries and thirty-eight languages. He wrote more than thirty instant bestsellers, all of which were made into movies or TV miniseries and in one case both. Along the way he indulged his old love and found his mistress, JS996, which he renamed
Daffy
after the Walter Lantz cartoon duck, a World War Two Widgeon based in Nassau during the war, and found in a Miami junkyard. Restoring the old seaplane to pristine shape became the passion of his later years, and he and his long-suffering wife, Terry, used
Daffy
to fly all over the Caribbean.

Then, after the death of Terry, a day before the horrible events of 9/11, Lyman Mills just quit. Physically in perfect health even into his eighties, the writer told an interviewer that the loss of his wife had broken his heart and he’d simply had enough of everything, writing included. He retired permanently to his estate on Hollaback Cay and was never seen in public again.

Hollaback Cay was a seventy-eight-acre island twenty miles south of New Providence with a main beach, its own reef, two rainwater cisterns, a 220-volt solar power generator, and a hurricane-proof harbor for sheltering large boats and
Daffy
the seaplane.

The house stood on a dramatic limestone outcropping on a low hill above the little harbor, facing out to sea. It was modest for a man of Mills’s means, a simple U-shaped bungalow with a narrow swimming pool in the sheltered courtyard and large open arches that brought the outside in. The walls were all in light shades, the floor cool, natural stone, and the furniture modern. There was art everywhere, Picasso, Léger, Dubuffet, Georgia O’Keeffe, and others, all real and most of them priceless. Where there wasn’t art there were bookcases crammed with titles ranging from Simon Schama’s magnificent art-history biography
Rembrandt’s Eyes
to the latest John Grisham. One whole wall of the spacious living room was filled with nothing but various foreign editions of Mills’s own work, hundreds of them.

The author sat on a long canvas-colored couch and sipped a glass of iced tea brought to him by Arthur, his very British and unexpectedly Caucasian servant. Mills looked like a very well-tanned and slightly less muscular version of Sean Connery, right down to the thinning, snow-white hair, the gray beard, and the trademark jet-black eyebrows. Unlike Connery’s deep brown bedroom eyes, however, Lyman Mills’s were as blue as the seascape in front of him. His accent was different too, not British plums, Canadian twang, or American drawl, but a flat, uninflected mid-Atlantic mixture of all three. Like his writing, the voice was approachable, nonthreatening, and intelligent, a gentle baritone. He would have made a perfect announcer on National Public Radio. He wore khakis, an open-collared white cotton shirt and blue deck shoes without socks. Nothing he wore had a monogram on it and everything could have come off the rack at JC Penney.

“It’s an interesting story,” he said, putting his tea down on the big glass-and-bamboo coffee table in front of him. There was a litter of up-to-date magazines and the Book Review section from the previous week’s Sunday
New York Times
on the coffee table as well; Mills might be a recluse, but he was still in touch with the world. “Mind you,” he continued, “I don’t think I believed a word of it until you mentioned the name Devereaux in connection with the
Acosta Star
.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” said Finn.

“Just a moment.” Mills got up and left the room. He returned a few moments later carrying several thick file folders. He sat down and dumped the folders on the coffee table.

“I’ve had a lot of people try to con me over the years—I’ve been researching a book and had people outright lie to me—but one thing they always had in common was an inability to get the details right.” He smiled at them across the table. “Someone once asked Stephen King how he wrote a book and he answered ‘one word at a time.’ Never a truer word was said. It’s all in the words, the details—not so much the facts—the details. I spent the better part of ten years off and on researching the
Acosta Star
. It was the story I was working on when I quit. Going to call it
The Ship
… what else?” He smiled again. He flipped open one of the file folders, but it was obvious he knew the material by heart.

“There were three hundred and twenty passengers and a hundred and ninety-four crew members aboard the
Star
when she left Nassau on the sixth of September. She was supposed to sail down to San Juan, then Santo Domingo, and finally Kingston, Jamaica, before heading back to Miami. It was a standard cruise, she’d made the trip plenty of times. The fire broke out after a boiler explosion. Eight crew members were killed outright, three more in the fire. Fourteen passengers were killed and accounted for. Six just never turned up. One of them was Peter Devereaux. Nobody trying to lie to me, or just trying to pull the wool over my eyes, would have known that name or his background. Particularly since Devereaux was always one of my favorites.”

“Favorites?” Finn asked.

“A novelist who writes about historical events, even when they’re fictionalized, is always looking for holes to fill, missing pieces,” explained Mills. “That was Devereaux. He came aboard in Nassau. That was strange enough—most people boarded in Miami, there was no real airport then—but when I started delving into his history I found out he didn’t have one; everything dead-ended when I tried to find out about him pre-University of Kansas. The only real connection I could find was to Switzerland, and maybe Italy before that. I also found out from a few survivors who’d met him on board that he spoke Italian like a native. There was another missing person on the ship who turned out to be a ‘hole’ as well, a man named Marty Kerzner traveling on a Canadian passport. Except the passport was a phony. Given the way Israeli Intelligence likes to use Canadian passports for her agents, I put two and two together and came up with five: for the purposes of the book I made Devereaux an Italian war criminal who was personally responsible for the deaths of several hundred Beta Israel Ethiopian Jewish orphans in Addis Ababa—a story that still needs to be told, I might add; not much written on the subject of Italian war criminals—and made Marty Kerzner into Martin Coyne, who is actually based on a real Mossad assassin named Moses ’Boogie’ Yaalon.” He beamed another one of his pleasant, slightly melancholy smiles in their direction.