Rembrandt's Ghost (14 page)

“Vaguely. Relative to the
QE2
the
Batavia Queen
is pretty small, right?”

“Relative to the Pacific Ocean, it’s tiny,” answered Billy. “But, according to the information Tulkinghorn gave us, she’s got a shallow draft, only eleven feet, which makes it ideal for us. It means she can go almost anywhere, even up a lot of rivers.” They reached the yacht basin and went down a short flight of wooden steps to the floating pier. “Did you ever watch Jacques Cousteau on the telly?”

“Sure. That horrible John Denver song and all those guys in red wool hats.”

“
Calypso
, his research ship, was a converted minesweeper, almost the same as the
Batavia Queen
but smaller.”

There was almost no activity in the marina; there was a note on the door of the little hut at the foot of the stairs. Lights burned in the big clubhouse farther along the yacht basin. “Probably having his dinner,” said Billy. “Let’s go check out the
Flush
and then see if we can find the harbormaster.” They turned left along the dock that floated parallel to the dike. It was almost fully dark and the only noise was the lapping of the water against the pier footings and the dull thumping of yacht fenders as they banged against the moorings.

They reached the berth where they’d tied off the
Flush
that morning. Billy stepped onto the boat first and Finn followed close behind. The ship rocked slightly as they boarded. Finn heard a sharp clicking sound. Directly in front of her Billy was silhouetted against the mast.

Suddenly he spun around. “Do you smell that?”

Finn sniffed the air. Faint but there.

Gasoline.

Billy threw himself toward Finn, knocking her backward.

The
Busted Flush
exploded. The sun rose all around them. There was a terrible noise with a pummeling life of its own. Heat blossomed like a huge bright flower and then there was nothing at all.

Finn came to less than a minute later, coughing, soaking wet, and terrified. She sat up and realized that she’d been thrown into the tall grass and shallow water between the floating pier and the dike. She could see the burning remains of the
Flush
fifty feet away, settling into the water on the other side of the pier. She climbed to her knees, muddy sand clinging to her hair. She stood and then staggered toward the dike. “Billy?”

“Here.”

She heard coughing and splashing water. A shadow rose up in front of her, hand extended. She reached out and grabbed it. Together she and Billy made it to the dike and pulled themselves up. They turned and stared. The
Busted Flush
was a torch on the water. The pier where it had been berthed was on fire as well. They could see people running along the dock from the direction of the clubhouse. Suddenly there was another thunderous roar and a blast of heat as the gas tank on the forty footer that had been berthed two slips down from the
Flush
exploded. A lurid bright green flare arced crazily out across the water.

“What happened?” said Finn.

“Bomb,” answered Billy.

“I heard a sound, just before.”

“So did I. A trembler switch, I think it’s called. Some kind of motion sensor anyway.”

“I smelled gas.”

“They cut the fuel line.”

“Make it look like an accident?”

“Maybe,” said Billy. He ran his hand through his hair. There was a look of anguish on his face. “They blew up my boat. The bastards. They blew up my boat.” There were tears in his eyes.

Finn grabbed his arm. The people from the clubhouse were getting close. Finn could hear the screaming of a siren. “We have to get out of here. There’ll be questions. Questions we can’t answer. We could be held up for days.”

“How could they do that? Blow up the
Flush
?”

“It could have been worse,” said Finn. “It could have been us. If you hadn’t pushed me off the boat when you did, I’d be dead.” She kissed him on the cheek. “You saved my life, my lord.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” he said, but he was smiling now. The light from the burning boats flickered across his face.

“We’ll get them for what they did,” promised Finn, pulling him away. “But now we’ve got to get away from here, fast.”

They vanished into the night.

The flight to Singapore was a grueling fifteen hours in a brand-new Airbus-A380. The double-decker monster had taken off from Schipol Airport in Amsterdam with air-conditioning problems and all the twelve-wheeled grace of a flying sperm whale. There was supposed to be a gym somewhere on the enormous airliner as well as a coffee shop, but Finn never found either.

As they flew over all of Europe and most of Southeast Asia, she dozed, swaddled in the sounds of five hundred people chattering in a dozen different languages. She woke up for reheated meals and brief inconsequential conversations with Billy and gave in to the dubious pleasures of watching three John Travolta movies in a row on her little seat-back video screen. After a while being thirty-eight thousand feet in the air and going six hundred miles an hour began to feel almost normal.

After seven and a half time zones, one rubber omelet, two glasses of second-rate Riesling, and a Hainan chicken snack in puff pastry that looked like a McDonald’s fruit pie, they arrived at Changi Airport in the middle of the night. According to Finn’s and Billy’s body clocks, it was early morning and time for breakfast, but all Finn saw on the way in from the airport was a forest of brightly lit skyscrapers and about ten thousand redbrick apartment buildings. They went down some streets with low-rise buildings containing small shops, but they were few and far between; the entire island of Singapore appeared to be one massive downtown.

They climbed out of the cab in front of an aristocratic nineteenth-century building surrounded by floodlit palm trees. It looked like something out of a story by Somerset Maugham, which was exactly what it turned out to be. The name in gold written on the stark white portico above the entrance said it all.

“Raffles?” Finn asked. The most famous hotel in the old British Empire.

“The very one.” Billy nodded, grabbing their bags. “Noel Coward, Rudyard Kipling—all that. The last tiger in Malaya was shot under the Raffles bar.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Finn, cocking an eyebrow.

Billy smiled. “Neither did I until I read the brochure on the flight.”

“Isn’t this going to be a little expensive?” Finn asked as they stepped into the soaring, ornately decorated mid-Victorian lobby. It was no Motel 6. There were silk carpets on marble floors and silver buckets filled with exotic flowers wherever they looked.

“Yes,” said Billy. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s just for one night. I called Tulkinghorn on the plane and told him about the
Flush
. She was well insured and I have other resources as well.” He grinned broadly. “Including a bank manager who loves extending my overdraft just to have an over-extended duke on his list of clients.”

“That kind of thing really goes on?”

“You bet your patootie it does sweetheart,” Billy answered, doing an awful James Cagney imitation. “Watch this.” She followed him to the front desk and stood by as he introduced himself to the night manager of the hotel, a man in his sixties wearing a turban and what appeared to be an Armani suit. The first clue seemed to be Billy’s aristocratic English accent. The second clue was the first mention of the word “lord.” Finn never even saw a credit card produced for identification or money change hands. The night manager stiffened, rang a bell, and started snapping orders to subordinates. Within thirty seconds someone had taken the bags from Billy’s hand, and thirty seconds after that they were on one of the old-fashioned elevators being shepherded up to their Palm Court suite. Ten minutes later, with the smell of orange blossoms and jacaranda all around her, a suddenly exhausted Finn Ryan slid between silk sheets and was instantly asleep.

The next thing she knew, it was morning and Billy was standing beside her bed wearing a fluffy white bathrobe and drying his hair. “Wake up,” he said. “The shower awaits. Breakfast on the verandah in fifteen minutes. Eggs. Bacon. Orange juice. Coffee. Scones. Jam. Hurry up.”

The shower was like a piece of heaven and the breakfast was even better. The suite had its own porch that overlooked the broad rectangular courtyard of the hotel, jammed, as advertised, with scores of palm trees. A crystal bowl the size of a volleyball stood in the center of the table, overflowing with every kind of fruit imaginable. Everything was served on silver. The toast came in a rack, the butter was chilled but not hard, and the scrambled eggs were perfect. The bacon was ambrosia; the coffee was dark, pungent, and delicious.

“This is the kind of breakfast movie stars eat,” Finn said.

“Then that would make you Julia Roberts,” said Billy. “Have some juice.”

Finn happily followed orders and finished up her breakfast. After the food was eaten, they stayed on the balcony enjoying the last of the coffee and the exotic view.

“Okay,” said Finn after a few long moments staring down at the crushed stone paths, the flowers, and the palms. “Enough Rudyard Kipling for one day. What’s on tap?”

“On tap? In the Writers Bar? Tiger draft, I expect.”

Finn launched a piece of cold toast across the table at him. “You know what I mean.”

“The hotel has a computer I can use. I want to research that gold piece Derlagen the skinhead attorney gave you, and I thought we should check that book you picked up against the rutter. The author was a diplomat’s wife or something.”

“I’d forgotten all about it,” she said. She got up, went back into the suite, and rummaged around in her overnight bag. She found the book and the box with the figurine in it and brought both back to the table.

“Agnes Newton Keith,” said Finn, reading the flyleaf blurb. “
The Land Below the Wind
. Her husband was with the Colonial Service as Conservator of Forests. She’d been a reporter for the
San Francisco Examiner
. It’s all about their adventures in Sandakan, a remote province of North Borneo. I thought all of Borneo was remote.”

“Some places more than others, I expect,” answeredBilly. “It’s a gigantic place. Third-largest island in the world. A quarter million square miles and almost all of it jungle. That’s as big as Holland, France, and Belgium combined. About the same size as the Saudi Arabian Desert.”

“You’ve been reading brochures again.” Finn smiled.

“It was a long flight.”

Finn took the gleaming figurine out of the box and set it down on the pure white linen tablecloth. “So what does North Borneo have to do with a gold pendant from Central Africa?”

“It could be anything,” said Billy. “As I understand it gold is very hard to age. It looks the same if it’s a thousand years old or if it’s been smelted yesterday. Eternal gold and all that.”

“Mansa, or King Musa, went on a pilgrimage to Mecca in the thirteen hundreds,” said Finn, “but that only gets us as far as Saudi Arabia.”

“Who traded with Saudi Arabia back then?”

“There was no such thing. It was a bunch of separate sultanates. There are theories about Chinese treasure fleets getting to Oman and Jeddah around the same time as Mansa Musa. It’s a stretch, but it’s a possibility.”

“Of course there’s also the possibility that cousin Pieter is just a rich, eccentric lunatic who’s gone and got himself bunged up in the rain forest somewhere, and none of this lot means anything.” Billy laughed. “My family’s actually rather famousfor being eccentric, myself being a prime example.”

Finn picked up the little figure, letting her thumb gently run over the soft, buttery metal. “Willem Van Boegart went away on the
Flying Dragon
in the late seventeenth century and came back to Amsterdam a wealthy man. That much we know is true, the
rutter
proves it. Our little gold horseman here may be proof of where that wealth actually originated.”

“A Chinese treasure ship?”

“Admiral Zheng. He made seven great treasure voyages, the last one in 1433. There were hundreds of ships involved. They took porcelain and silks with them on the outward voyage and returned with gold, gems, ivory, and spices. There were reports of several hurricanes and wrecks. Maybe our little gold friend came from a wreck that Willem Van Boegart discovered on the voyage of the
Flying Dragon
.”

“Wouldn’t that be bloody marvelous?” said Billy. “Picking up where old Willem and Pieter left off. Now
that
would be an adventure.”

“In my experience danger and adventure are often the same word,” cautioned Finn. “Remember what happened to the
Busted Flush
.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” said Billy. “In fact I hope we run into those fellows again.”

“It makes for a nice movie plot but reality is something else again, believe me.” She didn’t have to dig very deeply in her memory to see the body of the man who’d died on a railway line in Italy, or a young boy slaughtered beside a tomb in Cairo’s City of the Dead. In her short life, she’d seen enough violent death to last her forever; there was no bravado or courage in it, only brutality, pain, and the hot copper smell of spilled blood. Suddenly the coffee tasted bitter and the heat of the bright sun became oppressive. “What about the ship?”