Tale of the Thunderbolt (13 page)

And they passed down a hall to a dining room. The furniture in the Governor's House, richly covered and well carved, did not match — the collection was perhaps pieced together from various recovered antiques on the island.

The man standing in the dining room did not match the elegant furniture either: a stumpy, tanned man bristling with energy and heavy white sideburns. The latter first traveled down his jaw, then turned up to join his mustache. He was broadly, powerfully built, and stood with the ready stance of a judo sensei. Perhaps because of the thickness of his chest, his arms seemed stunted by comparison, dangling afterthoughts on his barrel frame like the forelegs on a
Tyrannosaurus rex
. He stood beside a sideboard, over which a hand-inked map of Jamaica hung in a gilded frame. Behind him, pairs of French doors opened out onto a balcony filled with fragrant white jasmines and red ixoras. According to Carrasca's account, her grandfather had served as an officer in the Old World's Royal Navy, which had to put him close to his seventies.

“Sixty-eight, my son, sixty-eight,” he said, turning to the young people. He slapped his broad belly, the gesture cracking like a pistol shot in the enclosed room. The expanse of stomach, which hung out from a gaily colored shirt over suspendered canvas trousers, did not ripple from the impact, demonstrating still-firm muscle beneath. “Everyone always wonders that when they see me, but are too polite to bring it up. Thought I'd save you the trouble. Am I right, Leftenant?” he asked, buttoning his shirt to preserve some formality at the meeting.

“And they always guess ‘not a day over fifty,' sir,” she said, suddenly transformed into a young girl amused at her grandfather's antics.

“The next question, at least to any young man who sees the two of us together, is where did she get her height and her looks?” Jensen said, apparently reading Valentine's mind again. “Maria — my daughter — was even shorter than I was, may she rest in peace. It's her father's doing. Tall, handsome Cuban man he was, hair like yours — Mr., Mr. — ”

“Valentine,” Carrasca supplied.

“That's the problem with age, my son, and it's a real bugger. What happened thirty years ago is bright as the island's sun, but what you talked about just this morning disappears into a fog. But there was more to Eduardo than looks. As brave and as sharp as they come. Also dead, by the way. Should fair fortune be with you and you see long service, Valentine, you'll see too many of the best ones die.”

Valentine's memory, always too ready to parade the faces of the women and men he had known and lost, rose to the occasion. Jensen gathered as much from the expression on his guest, and he changed the subject.

“Let's eat, the cold dishes are already served,” the commodore said, moving to a chair. “Come down by me, you two, no sense shouting at each other over twelve feet of table. That American President Eisenhower used to take dignitaries out on his back porch and talk to them, said he ‘got a better measure of the man' or some such. I do the same thing over the dinner table. Cook tells me the chicken turned out well, and no one does a glazed ham like he does. Cook!” Jensen bellowed through the wall. “We're ready when you are.”

By the time they were seated, one of the picture-frame-like carved panels on the wall opened, and the sweating cook appeared with a tray. He began to arrange dishes before the three: chicken swimming in orange sauce, some kind of peppery-smelling stew, corn and potatoes surgically carved and neatly arranged. A second man followed, bearing a thick ham glazed with slices of pineapple and something that looked like black cherries.

The three began to help each other to servings from the varied dishes, as the cook poured wine into glass goblets, the only matching dinnerware on the table.

“Captain Utari doesn't know what he's missing. I invited him, but then he hates this sort of thing. There's no sailor like him, but he refuses to do anything with shoes on, or eat anything that can't be bitten off the tip of his knife. Or maybe he just has a superior sense for the ridiculous. But as I'm fond of saying, this Port wasn't just founded to preserve life, but to — ”

“ — preserve a way of life,” Carrasca finished, reaching across the table to pat the commodore's hand.

Valentine sipped lightly from the wine.

“Don't like it? It's a bit harsh, I know, but I get tired of rum and brandy,” Jensen apologized. “Jamaica's a second Eden as far as I'm concerned, except for the wine. Don't know enough about it to tell you why. Years ago we had some pretty fair stuff from the old hotels and resorts, but it's been used up over time.”

“I wouldn't know. Haven't had many chances to drink it. What I've had has been from dandelions or blackberries. This is rather good — in comparison.”

They spent a few minutes eating under the anxious eye of the cook. He hovered like a teacher watching his pupils take a make-or-break exam. Valentine, who usually disliked the feeling of having too much of anything: alcohol, food, or even leisure, ate heartily until he heard his innards groan in discomfort.

Valentine raised his glass. “May I offer a toast? To the bounty of Jamaica, my hosts, and especially to the author of the best dinner I've had in years,” he said, dipping the goblet in the cook's direction.

“I second the motion,” Carrasca said, eyes reflecting flickers of the candlelit room.

“Hear hear,” added the commodore through a full mouth.

Fresh fruits and a sweet, milky pudding identified as flan finished the meal. The commodore enjoyed a private dessert, a toasted marrow bone. He went to work on the contents with a miniature fork, and Carrasca turned to him expectantly.

“Young man,” Jensen began, sucking unabashedly at the bone, “my granddaughter tells me you tried to take the gunboat.”

“Had matters taken a better turn, we would have gone straight to Haiti.”

“Valentine, there's nothing on Hispaniola but death. Are you looking for allies in the islands? You wouldn't find any on Haiti who'll help you up north. They have miseries enough.”

“Or here,” Carrasca said, her eyes turning hard. “We had a group of you Freeholders arrive before, when I was sixteen. Marched them through town and everyone cheered. They gave us lots of talk about guerrilla cadres and hit-and-run raids. Uniting the different parts of the island to go after Kingston. All they managed to do was get some of our inland people killed and a lot of families on the other side of the Blue Mountains hanged. There wasn't any cheering when they left. If you think the people of Jayport — ”

“Nothing like that,” Valentine said, startled at her sudden turn in temper. “I'm looking for a weapon, not allies. I'm not asking you or anyone to fight Reapers.”

“Malia,” her grandfather said, “the reprisals weren't Mr. Valentine's fault any more than they were Major Hawthorne's.

“Forgive my granddaughter,” Jensen added, turning to Valentine. “After the aborted uprising, they wiped out one of our settlements up in the mountains. That's where her mother died,” he said, clamping his mouth firmly shut and looking at Carrasca. “My great mistake.”

“Not yours, Granddad,” she said. “You saw the uniforms, counted the guns, heard Hawthorne's promises. Believed in him. He knew the kind of words to use. Even on Mum. She was a widow, Mr. Valentine, and — ”

“Let's not bore our guest with family business,” Jensen said. He looked at his granddaughter for a moment, as if trying to summon her mother's features from Carrasca's shapely face, then turned back to Valentine. “You need that ship you were on, the gunboat, to get this weapon?”

“Get it and get it back to the mainland. We needed something big enough to carry it, a ship that could anchor off the coast long enough for me to find it and load it, then be able to go back unchallenged. The
Thunderbolt
is as large as they come in the Caribbean these days.”

“You're wrong,” Jensen said. “The Dutchmen down south have an old cruiser still working, God knows how. I think it used to be an American ship, too. It could blow the
Thunderbolt
in half, but the Dutchmen are on our side. In fact, I was planning on feeding your gunboat with their diesel fuel.”

“Was?” Valentine said, sensing an opening.

“Mr. Valentine, I'm looking for a weapon, too. We are growing here. It's getting harder and harder to support the people we have. Always more coming in, not always the sort we need, but still mouths to feed. I've never been much good at turning needy people away. The best land, at least for planting, is on the south half of the island. It's not just my people I worry about; it's my ships, as well. This harbor is worthless in a real storm. But if I could get old Kingston, take it somehow from the Specter — that's what we call that trumped-up devil running things there — a lot of our problems would be solved. A real harbor with a real shipyard, though it's run to ruin like everything else, would mean a lot to us. Just that every time I've tried” — he nodded in his granddaughter's direction — “it's gone wrong.”

Jensen stood and went to the map of Jamaica above the sideboard. He extended one of his short, thick arms and pointed to the coastline.

“The Specter has it pretty good. He's about as secure in his position as he could be. Lives on a sort of estate, in a castle, no less.” Jensen pointed at a black square just off a crescent-shaped bay on the southern coast, west of Kingston. “They say he sometimes appears on the walls, to watch the women work his fields or see a new wagonload of the condemned come up the road, bound for the killing hole.”

Just right for a Kurian,
Valentine thought.

“He's jealous of his lands, always worried about another of his kind moving in. He has his Black Guard — that's those Reapers you call 'em — and he keeps a good-sized regiment of Asians to keep the rest of the Jamaicans down. Those are the Horsed Police. Then the Chinese and Indians in turn run the Public Police — more thugs, mostly a rabble, that organize the farms and labor using the hard end of a club. Same old game: elevate an ethnic minority to a position of privilege that said minority knows will disappear if the ruler does, then give a lot of brutes a little power. He's got informants everywhere . . . even within my palisade, I expect. Kind of reminds me of a web with a fat spider sitting in the center of it, sensitive to vibrations at the edges. We try to enter the web, we get stuck, there's just not enough of us to get to him, even with the guns we've been stealing and stockpiling. Years before Major Hawthorne arrived, my son-in-law once tried to recruit some of the gangs in the mountains, but they killed Eduardo for his trouble. We can do what we want in the water around Jamaica, but that doesn't do much for us. He can get everything he needs from the land and the southern shoreline and the occasional armed trade ship. About all we've managed to do is keep his brothers and sisters from showing up to run other parts of the island, like maybe ours on the north coast or the Cockpit Country in the west.”

“I suppose he never leaves that castle,” Valentine said, looking at the scale of the map.

“We've never heard of it, if he has,” Carrasca said.

“That's usual for a Kurian. Their Reapers act as eyes and ears. No need to risk venturing out,” Valentine said. “They stay in their holes with just their servant or two ever seeing them. Immortality turns you into a recluse, evidently.”

Now that he knew more about the island's situation, he saw the chance of an answer. Maybe not even a chance, maybe more of a prayer. “Sir, I'll take your analogy about the web one step further.” Valentine felt his skin flush, not from the wine, but from his quickening pulse.

“Don't let me stop you. I'm listening.”

“His organization also has the weakness of a spider's web.”

“What's that?”

“If you kill the spider, the web falls apart in a matter of days.”

 

Even Cook paused and looked at Valentine.

“My son, I would say it is impossible,” Jensen finally said. “The Specter lives in a bloody fortress, a real rock castle. It's about as old as the British flag on this island, and he's got it fixed up. Word is he stays in some cave beneath it. A dozen or so years ago, some of the Jamaicans on the other side got the same idea as you. Thirty of them swore a blood oath: they'd kill him or they'd die trying. They'd managed to get a key to a back door, thought they'd sneak in and do him in. They got together a few guns — the rest had fishing spears and machetes. Two of those Black Guard Reapers caught them on the approaches, and they died, to a man. Of course, the Special Police tried to round up their families, but I'll say this for the Jamaicans: they know how to keep a secret better than anyone I've ever heard of. Offers, bribes, even using torture they got only a name or two, and still there was enough of a delay for their children to head for the bush. Captain Utari lost his older brother in the attempt, by the way. That's how we ended up with him in our orphanage.”

“Then what did you mean, you
would
say it is impossible?”

Jensen looked at Cook, suddenly uncomfortable. “This is going to sound like utter bollocks, Valentine, but I want to tell you, nevertheless. There's a woman living inland the Jamaicans go to for advice. Sort of a witch, she is, at least to them. They call her Obay. Over six feet tall, and they say she has four breasts. According to the stories, she once suckled four infants at once, her top two breasts thrown over her shoulders to two tied to her back, and then two to the front, and they grew up to be the four great headmen of the free inlanders. They really exist, by the way, they're known as the four Kernels, though I suspect what they really mean are Colonels. She holds festivals at the solstices and equinoxes, when they go to her for predictions. An oracle she may be, I'm thinking now,” he paused, perhaps for dramatic effect, but more likely out of embarrassment. “At the last one in December, she said a man would come from the sea, a Crying Man. This man would rid the land of the Specter.”