Pirate: A Thriller Page 5

  “Yes. Quite sorry, darling,” Hawke said, pulling a thick black turtleneck jumper down over his head. “Offshore work, you see. That’s the problem with freelance. Dreadful hours.”

  He gave her a peck on the cheek and withdrew his face before she could slap him.

  “You’ll find my office number in London scribbled inside,” he said, handing her a gaudy matchbook from the Casino Barriere de Cannes. “I do hope we’ll see each other again. A quiet dinner at Harry’s Bar, perhaps.”

  “You are the most—”

  Hawke put his finger to his lips and then said, “I know, I know. Unbearable. A cad. A fiend. I can only hope you’ll forgive me. You see, my dear girl, nobody quite knows this yet, but there’s a war on.”

  “War?”

  “Hmm,” he said, and started to turn away. She grabbed his sleeve and put a small white card into his hand.

  “What’s this?”

  “An invitation. The baron is hosting a small private dinner party aboard Valkyrie tomorrow evening, Mr. Hawke. To celebrate the launch of his newest ship. An ocean liner. Perhaps you would like to come, yes? As my guest, of course.”

  “On one condition. You must promise never to say that word again, darling,” he said. “‘Bullshit.’ It’s most unattractive coming from that pretty mouth.”

  He crossed the darkened room swiftly and pulled the heavy mahogany door softly closed behind him. Then he plucked his handwritten card from the brass fixture by his door, stuck it inside his pocket, and made a quick dash for the marble stairway.

  The Star of Shanghai was scheduled to sail on the tide at midnight. His old friend Brick Kelly, the CIA director, had informed him that somewhere deep in the bowels of that old rust bucket was a captured American operative formerly working deep cover. A dead man walking who just might be able to save the world.

  His name, Hawke had learned in Gibraltar, was Harry Brock.

  Chapter Five

  Paris, 1970

  WHAT A FRIEND ARCHITECTS HAVE IN SNOW, THE CORSICAN chuckled to himself, climbing out of his taxi. Almost a foot of the white stuff had fallen. Even the Gare d’Austerlitz, an ugly duckling by Parisian standards, looked beautiful with its frosting. The barrel-shaped man slogged across the Place Valhubert to the station’s entrance. No boots, just tired leather shoes, his icy wet socks sagging around his ankles in the slush. He’d left the taxi running. His fellow drivers at the stand would look after it, no problem.

  Yes, there are many grand railway stations in Paris, Monsieur Emile Bonaparte considered on this freezing December night, brushing wet snow from his eyes with the back of his hand, but this one, this ugly duckling hiding under its mantle of winter white, this one is all mine.

  A vaporous yellow light hovered inside the main hall’s soaring web of iron. A cloud of iridescent steam rose above the damp and overheated woolens of the teeming crowds. Surprisingly busy for a Sunday evening, he observed. There was a hubbub of noisy passengers as throngs departing for the South of France, Spain, and Portugal surged against travelers arriving from those selfsame destinations.

  Like the battlefield ebb and flow of charging armies, the old soldier imagined, firing a soggy unfiltered Gauloise. Emile felt a certain stirring of his blood, pleased with this ironic, militaristic turn of thought. In the café earlier, he’d spied a lengthy piece in Paris Soir and relished every word of the account, chewing it carefully with pride, seeing the action.

  On this very day in history, he saw, the second of December, 1805, his glorious ancestor Napoleon and his Grande Armée had defeated the Austro-Russian armies above the small Moravian town of Austerlitz. A sublime trap it had been. A feint here! There! Suddenly, the genius Napoleon had lured the Allies to the Pratzen Heights, had rushed in his III Corps to crush them! Ah, yes. Long ago and far away, but still shining through the mists of memory and history.

  An army on a hill. The glory of it. La Gloire!

  He looked up at the sudden shriek of a whistle. A massive white-sugared engine, heavily laden with snow, rumbled in amidst a cloud of frosty vapors. A rush of porters and people meeting the Nice–Paris train brushed by him. He jammed the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, shot the cuffs of his rough brown leather jacket, and joined the tide. Ahead, he saw the doors of the second-class carriages open, and his heart beat a little faster. He slipped on his heavy tortoiseshell glasses with brown, tobacco-stained fingers and scanned the emerging passengers. Was that—could it really be?

  Luca.

  Emile Bonaparte watched his son step down from the train and hardly recognized him. Well, he’s grown, hasn’t he? Emile thought. My God, he’s almost as tall as I am!

  “Papa! Papa!” the boy cried. Emile grinned as his son shouldered between two jostling women struggling against the tide. One of the two, the beefy one who’d dropped her string bag full of baguettes, shouted angrily, wagging her stumpy finger at his son. But the fifteen-year-old, seeing an opening, laughed merrily at her and darted and dodged ahead, making his way toward his father.

  Two very large men in loud sport jackets remained between father and son. Emile shoved past them and stepped forward and, with his arms spread wide, embraced his child. He was startled at the hard knots of muscle at his back and shoulders.

  “Luca!” Emile said, clasping him happily to his breast. “Did you bring it? You didn’t forget, did you?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Father! You only need look in my sack.”

  Emile released his son from the embrace (Luca was plainly embarrassed by such a show), and his son handed him the parcel. Inside, four brown bottles of Pietra, the beer of his native Corsica, difficult to find in the small shops in the St. Germain des Prés.

  “Eh bien, you must be hungry, eh?” he said, tousling the boy’s thick black hair. “Alors. Give me your knapsack. Let’s go eat some supper.” He picked up the boy’s battered valise and they headed for the exit. “Get ready. Cold as a witch’s tit, out there.”

  Outside, slogging through heavy snowfall back to the taxi rank, Emile was glad of his leather jacket and worried about Luca’s worn woolen one. With a nod toward his friend Marcel, who’d been guarding his old Renault taxicab, he motioned to his son. “Allons! Vite! Quickly! You’ll freeze!”

  “Good boy, Pozzo,” Luca said, opening the door and seeing the dog up front.

  The dog, a scruffy old mutt with one eye, but a good watchdog, growled his assent and the boy slid into the front seat beside him. It was filthy in his father’s taxi and smelled of sweat and black French tobacco, yes, but it was warm, and even Luca, who considered himself a true Stoic, was glad of it after trudging through the deep snow. With a single sweep of his short powerful arm, Emile cleared the fresh accumulation of glistening powder from the windshield, and climbed behind the wheel. The ancient engine turned over reluctantly and they were off.

  “Maurice is holding a table for me at Le Pin Sec,” Emile said, taking a left out of the car park and maneuvering the old Renault into the rutted snow of the Quai d’Austerlitz. “I know you like it.”

  “Papa, no, no. Lilas. I insist.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “It’s expensive. Yes. But I will treat you. I have made some money. Doing some jobs.”

  “Jobs, eh? What kind of jobs?” Emile looked at his kid with a side-long glance. The bookworm had finally started working?

  “I write articles for the papers,” the boy said, his face turned to the frosted window. “Political articles. They don’t pay much but I’ve saved it.”

  “Political, eh? More love poems to Lenin and Trotsky? You and your Brigade Rouge. I hoped you would have outgrown this romantic infatuation with Communism by now.”

  “There is a deep schism in the Corse, Papa,” Luca said. “The old, which is you. And the new, which is me. The Brigade Rouge.”

  “A schism? Is that what you said? Schism?”

  Luca just smiled and stared out at the passing images of his favorite city.

  “No comment, eh?” his father
said. He coughed something up, rolled down his window, and spat it out. He said, “Eh bien. No politics. I’m right and you’re left. I love you anyway. We’ll go to the Lilas. Give you and your fucking Red Menace the night off, eh, boy? Ha-ha!”

  Somehow, the old man managed to open a bottle of the Pietra with one hand, and he swigged it while he drove.

  “Merci bien,” he said, toasting his son with the bottle as they slid around a corner. “You want some?”

  “Merci bien à tu, Mon Cher Papa,” the boy said, taking the bottle and tossing back a swig, his dark almond eyes shining in the glow of the dashlight. Emile laughed. His youngest son had the glossy dark hair, long thick eyelashes, and sallow complexion of a true Corsican. Yes, here was a boy weaned on olive oil; you could almost catch the fragrant scent of the pine forests of the maquis in his hair. As his father drove and drank from his bottle, Luca squirmed uncomfortably.

  “What—there is something here—” There was a hard object on the seat, poking Luca’s hip. He raised himself up and grabbed it. A small black automatic pistol, he saw, holding it up to the light. It was flat and deadly looking. And, loaded, too, Luca could tell by the weight.

  “Give me that,” Emile said. He flipped the empty bottle over his shoulder into the back and stretched out his hand.

  The boy did as he was told and said, “A job, Papa?”

  “Phut, it’s nothing,” he said, slipping the weapon inside the side pocket of his leather jacket. “Some foreign crazies making too much noise is all. One of the New York families, I think. You know the types. Wiseguys. Foreign bullies. Busybodies. Think they can waltz onto our turf and intimidate me.”

  “Right,” the boy said, looking at Emile carefully. His father did dangerous things for dangerous people. He was an enforcer in the oldest and most feared crime family in all of France, the Union Corse. His father had been shot and stabbed many times in his long career. When they swam in the sea, you could see that his body had been—

  “Well. How was the ferry over to Nice?” Emile asked. “A nice boat?”

  “Ça va,” Luca replied matter-of-factly. And then, in English, he said, “I prefer horses to boats.”

  So, Emile thought, casting a sideways glance at his son. The boy’s mother had been working on his English, eh? The child had a gift for languages. Hell, he had a gift for everything. Philosophy. Literature. A genius, some people even claimed. He’d always been the most curious boy. Always with his nose in a book. History. Art. Science. When Luca was seven, and just falling in love with his maps, a teacher had asked which he preferred, history or geography.

  “They are the same,” the boy replied matter-of-factly, “geography dictates history.”

  Hah! That was a good one. But, when he told it later that night, standing with his mates at the bar, they’d just stared at him blankly. Idiots. All his comrades were idiots. Campesinos.

  And now, politics. The boy had drifted dangerously to the left for his father’s tastes. Writing fucking Communist manifestos. No way to make a living, pamphlets, that much was for certain. If Luca envisioned a career in politics, which he had confided to his mother that he did, he’d better start steering a middle course. That way, like any good politician, he could go whichever way the wind blew.

  “So, you’ve been riding?” Emile said, not wishing to spoil the reunion mood. He slowed down and turned right into the rue George Balanchine. “That’s good. A man who cannot sit a horse well is not to be trusted. How is your dear mother, eh?”

  “She hates you.”

  “Ah,” Emile said, and made a sound like a wet finger touching a hot iron. “Love is like that.”

  M. Bonaparte managed to find parking in the snowy street. A few minutes later, father and son were sitting at a small window table at the bistro Lilas. It had a narrow red facade on the street and the rear door opened onto the catacombs, a convenient exit when you needed it. Emile ordered for both of them, sliced Lyonnais sausages and roast Bresse chicken with cornichons.

  The stained vanilla-colored walls and the big zinc bar gave the place a prewar feel that older Parisian cabbies like Emile enjoyed when they were feeling flush. He saw familiar faces, but tonight he kept to himself, delighted just to bask in the rays from his brilliant and newly prosperous son.

  After they’d eaten, Emile ordered another demi of the delicious Châteauneuf-du-Pape to celebrate his son’s arrival. He refilled their glasses, hung a Gauloise from his lips, and said, “It’s good, eh, Lilas? The food? The wine? Like you remember it? Molto buono?” Emile, like many Corsicans, often switched seamlessly between Italian and French.

  Emile was enjoying the expensive food and drink and seeing his handsome son all grown up, employed, picking up the tab. He’d even taken tonight off, called in sick. In addition to his taxi, Emile worked five nights as a security guard at the Hôtel des Invalides, the massive old soldiers’ home that stood along the Seine. With the two incomes, he could afford to have a pretty good life here in Paris and still send enough to Corsica each month to help Flavia care for Luca.

  “Alors. You’re all grown up now, eh? Fifteen.”

  “Sixteen. Papa—who is that man?” Luca said. “Do you know him?”

  “What man?” Emile replied, looking around inside the crowded, smoky bistro. There were few women in the place, many men. Which one—

  “No. Outside. At the window. Staring at me.”

  Emile looked around and saw a man standing just outside, his nose an inch from the glass. The stranger smiled at Luca, then blew a plume of cigarette smoke against the glass, hiding his face. Emile rapped the window sharply with his knuckles and the face reappeared. The man, he looked like a skeleton with black holes for eye sockets, turned his ugly smile on Emile and crooked his finger, beckoning.

  “Some crazy,” Emile said to his son. He pushed back his chair and got to his feet. “Don’t move. I’ll go see what the devil he wants.”

  “Be careful,” Luca said.

  He watched his father take his brown leather jacket from the hook by the door and push through out into the snow. The face at the window disappeared once more into the snow. For a time, Luca sat blowing his warm breath against the glass and scribbling problematic mathematical equations with his fingertip. After some minutes, the garçon appeared. Where had his father gone? He wanted to know. Was he going to pay? Was something the matter?

  The skeleton suddenly appeared behind the waiter, staring at Luca. He had a long red scarf wrapped around his neck and he had snow on his shoulders. His face was bright red from the snow and cold and his curly, wet yellow hair was plastered to the sharp angles of his skull.

  “On your feet,” the soggy sack of bones said in American English to the boy.

  “Who the hell are you?” Luca asked, loudly enough to be heard by the boisterous group at the next table. A few heads swiveled in his direction.

  “Gimme the fuckin’ check,” the skeleton hissed at the waiter, eyeing the young Corsican for a few moments. The waiter went off and returned with the bill. The yellow-haired man pulled a wad of francs from his pocket and handed some to the waiter, who mumbled something and disappeared. Luca cast his eyes about the diners. No longer was anyone paying attention to him or the stranger.

  “Where is my father?”

  The man bent forward and whispered into Luca’s ear.

  Luca made a face and nodded his head, then followed the stranger outside into the snowy street. No one inside had said a word.

  There was a long black car parked at the curb. It wasn’t a French car, Luca saw, but an English one. A Rolls-Royce, a very ancient one with brass headlamps up front and a single violet carriage lamp mounted on the roof above the windshield. Like a hearse, he thought. Luca could see the black shape of his father seated in the rear between two large men.

  The bony man opened the driver’s side door. There was another man on the passenger side, big, the collar of his black raincoat turned up. Luca could make out a shaved head, a bashed-in boxer’s face
, and a close-cropped beard. The yellow-haired skeleton slid behind the big wheel, started the car, and turned on the headlights.

  Outside, all was blurred white.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” Luca said, turning to his father in the rear.

  “Shut your piehole, kid,” one of the two men sitting in the rear on either side of Emile said. It was New York English, the kind you often heard in movies but seldom in Paris. They were wearing very colorful sport coats and Luca remembered seeing them on the platform at the station. His father nodded his head, staring at Luca, telling him to obey. Yes, he would be quiet all right. That would be best. In fact, no one spoke as the big car slid through the snowy streets and crossed the river at the Pont Neuf, some of the turns very tight in the great long car.

  “Hey, Joe Bones,” the big man next to the window said in the thick accent of a movie gangster. “What’s wrong with this right here?” He spoke without looking over at the driver, pointing out the side window.

  “I ain’t Joe Bones yet, boss. Just Mama Bonanno’s boy Joey.”

  “You will be after tonight, kid, I’m telling ya. Make your frigging bones at last.”

  “So, whaddya want me to do?” the skeleton behind the wheel said out of the side of his mouth.

  “Pull over, for chrissakes. I want you should park it here. Nice and close. It’s fuckin’ freezin’ out there. Christ, snow in Paris? Who knew? Right here. Awright, Joey?”

  “Whatever blows your hair back,” Joey said, and pulled the big wheel over to the right. The black Rolls skidded to a stop next to a massive nineteenth-century cannon in the southwest corner of the cobblestone courtyard.

  “Well, kid, this is us,” the big man said, sucking in his gut and looking at Luca through a haze of cigarette smoke. He said, “Napoleon’s Tomb. I’m lookin’ forward to seein’ it. I hear it’s even bigger than my friggin’ mausoleum at Mount Olivet in Queens. Hey, how you doing, kid?”

  “Who are you?” Luca said.

  “Who, me?” The man stuck out his big meaty hand. There was a massive gold nugget on the small finger.