China Jewel (6 page)

Willoughby circled and found his path to bring the flying boat safely to the ocean. Fortunately the surface was not rough and the plane came in easily. Bill arranged for them to sit in style up on the seaplane wing. They had climbed up through the large panel opening above the passenger compartment, the same doorway Cutter had used to come aboard. Outside they sat on the wide fuselage section behind the four engines. The swells of the water moving slowly by tipped the craft back and forth on the smaller flotation wings on the sides of the huge hull.

Bill had the crew bring up comfortable chairs. Monroe served them whiskeys in antique Pan American glasses from the former China Clipper service. Around them the warships towered over the seaplane as well as the racing clippers. From China was a frigate about 433 feet, painted light gray. A French-made Chinese helicopter hovered the deck, the red star and stripe on its side. Bill said he thought that warship had been built near their destination, Guangzhou.

From Argentina was a river patrol ship, white with an ensign of a white multipoint star inside red circle, the name Tonina on her stern. A Super Puma helicopter prepared to take off. The Brazilians had sent one of their Inhauma class corvettes, 314 feet long. Its helicopter also circled the brigs, painted gray. Cutter noticed the word "marinha" on its side. Portugal represented its navy with a frigate, gray hulled with a flag of red and green vertical stripes. Near it was a French warship which Bill said was either stationed at Brest or at New Caledonia.

From Peru was the frigate Montero, its Sea King helicopter revving up with the letters “naval” on its side. “She’s from Callao,” Bill said. “We’ll see her out in the Pacific.” The United Kingdom had sent down the St Albans, a warship from Glasgow. She cruised alongside a gray American guided missile ship with its Sikorsky Seahawk just landing.

Music flowed from below on speakers built into the surface of the seaplane fuselage. The words came loud and solid in the hot sunlight.

“My Rio, Rio by the Sea-o

Flying down to Rio where there’s rhythm and rhyme.

Hey feller, twirl that old propeller,

Got to get to Rio and we’ve got to make time.”

As he raised his bourbon, Bill asked, “Do you recognize the song?”

Cutter shook his head.

Bill said, “This is Fred Astaire singing in the movie
Flying Down to Rio
. The director had his beautiful starlets harnessed up on the wings of seaplanes doing a dance routine as the planes flew into Rio. I’ve never forgotten seeing that show.”

He grinned at Cutter. “You think I’m nuts.”

“It’s your money. I just help you make it.”

“You do good, Jimmy. No, I have a plan to jazz up the finish line so it is very American. I guess I owe it to my ancestors. They fought for all this back when River Sunday was a little village, starting out building fast ships. Anyway, here’s to us.” Bill raised his glass to Cutter.

The start was across a line between two launches from the Chinese frigate. The racers tacked back and forth fighting for the best starting position. Strand’s boat seemed to be having trouble. Crewmen were on deck puling on a stubborn halyard to adjust one of the spars. The Peregrine and the Willow were neck and neck coming up to the line. Cutter clenched his fist in excitement. Monroe held Bill’s hand. The horns of the various boats began blasting with excitement. Jim heard the crews cheering. Then the Chinese launched a rocket which went up tumbling brightly in the sky. The race was on.

The wind blew from the north and east as was typical in these latitudes at this time of year. The brigs had maneuvered until they crossed the line with their sails out in a dead run. The boats headed almost bow to bow in the direction of Brazil to the southeast. Each captain had lain on the studding sails so his craft appeared to have mass expanses of sail over tiny hulls. The sails extended to almost twice their regular width with the extra cloth. The sailors stayed aloft giving constant attention to the thin spars that held the fabric to the wind. The Chesapeake brig began to move to the lead, with the French boat a half-length behind. The British raced another length behind and the other American brig wallowed a second full length behind. Strand’s crew was having trouble raising a main course.

“His crew hasn’t had much training,” observed Bill.

“They’ll learn or capsize, “said Cutter. He added, “Couldn’t happen to a better boat.”

“Glad we got your son. He’s a real sailor,” said Bill, raising his glass.

Cutter nodded. He was indeed proud. He remembered when he, Katy, and Jamie had dinner three weeks ago. They sat in the Fells Point section of Baltimore, the village where the giant three-masted clippers had been built in the last century.

“We ordered for you,” said Katy, kissing him as he bent over to her. She looked as beautiful as ever with her long black hair and well tanned face. Jamie smiled, nodding as he watched them. She wore her new summer dress, the one Cutter had given her at Ocean City on their last full weekend at the beach.

“I’m sorry I’m late. It was a final conference call on budget for the promotion program. I had to listen in. I put my foot down when they wanted Johnson Company to pay for the staffers to stay in luxury hotel rooms in China at the finish. Salespeople get economy class the way it has always been.”

“How is your training? I read some of the stuff you guys have to do. Too high for me,” he offered.

“I couldn’t go up on those masts,” said Katy.

“I like it,” said Jamie.

God, Cutter thought, he’s got his mother’s looks.

“Mom wants me to visit in Buenos Aires after the race, Dad.”

Jamie looked at Katy as if he wanted to say something more, and then stopped.

“We should order,” said Katy, quickly picking up the menus.

“What are you two up to?” asked Cutter, seeing their glances at each other.

“Katy wants a leather jacket from Argentina. Mom says she’ll get it for me to give to her.” Cutter felt at that moment like a father and at the same time more attached to Katy.

As he had sat, he had remembered the last words his wife had said to him as she took her suitcase and his son away from him in Africa. She had turned to him on the way out the door. She had said, “You see, I have myself understood many soldiers in my country. It is not so new for me. You think you’re so damn brave, but you are not. You think you have, how do you say, guts, like those you served with at Vietnam. You haven’t got any real guts though, James, just the kind you need in battle. True courage is not shown with a pistol. You must live with others and stay around, take the good and bad, participate in life and its losses. You must foremost take care of your own, to be a soldier.”

She had gone on speaking with her Spanish accent, “Someday you will realize this, run in the direction of the firefight as you always say, and then remain afterward for the real hard work cleaning up after the damage done by the guns. I think you would not have been able to care for the wounded. I don’t know about you, James. You’d say you have to go on ahead with the fight. Care of your own, though, is important. It takes a kind of love. Until you have that love, your son and I will not have, in you, a man who we can rely upon to look out for us.”

She had hesitated then she had added, “You love success more than you love love.”

Those words repeated over and over in his mind as he felt the big seaplane maneuver to take off. As the hull bumped over the wave tips, moving faster, he tried to settle back. He looked out the window once more as they headed for the Azores and home. The tiny square riggers below had their sails up and trimmed. The wind blew over their stern quarters in the way that allowed those old ship designs to perform at their best. He’d done all he could to win. Suddenly he thought of what Stringer had said about safety. Out here he could feel the smallness of the Peregrine. For the first time in the many years he had managed projects and profits for Bill, he worried. He didn’t know what to do about this new feeling.

Chapter 5

June 7, 10 AM

Baltimore, Maryland

On the first morning back from the ocean flight, Cutter drove Jolly’s pickup to Baltimore to talk to Katy about John Reedy’s story. While driving, he telephoned Missus Williams. He did not mention the confusing ship woodwork found in the barn. He told her only his team needed to redraft the Peregrine’s history for the media.

They began by discussing the Peregrine sendoff she had attended in River Sunday. “My husband would have been so proud,” she said in a cracking voice showing her years.

Cutter continued, “I have to go over every step of the ship’s history to prepare a complete press release. I wondered if you had discovered any more of her records.”

She thought for a moment, then replied, “After my husband died, all the research he had compiled on the old ship was stored. Then, when this race came along, Bill Johnson asked me to review the papers for anything about shipments of opium. I found nothing.”

Cutter said, “I’d appreciate your going back through the files.”

“Of course, I certainly will,” she assured him. “I’m not as quick a reader these days with my old eyes so I'll need time. I’ll have to get my gardener to help me move the cartons.”

“I understand, Missus Williams. Anything will be helpful.”

Navigating the city’s traffic-clogged avenues, he finally parked in front of the venerable Maryland Historical Society and Museum. It was a modernized brick building in a part of the city once famous for street meetings of Confederate sympathizers. Inside Cutter moved through the quiet lobby surrounded by dusty glass exhibits of colonial silver and artifacts. The yellow walls displayed faded oil portraits of Maryland ship captains and Revolutionary War patriots. Many other pictures illustrated more modern heroes of Maryland and America, with a few minority faces.

Cutter rode a tiny elevator to the second floor and went down a familiar corridor. He stopped at the office of Chief Curator, Katy Marbury. Cutter opened the door to see, amidst shelves, tables and scattered teetering piles of books, a black-haired woman, pretty and seemingly too young for her obviously powerful job. Katy was behind a desk piled with papers, concentrating on a phone call. She looked up, smiled and quickly said goodbye to her caller.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” she said as she took off reading glasses revealing a well-featured face. She adjusted her hair as he approached.

Cutter did not hesitate but bent down and kissed her, long and with feeling. Then he said, “I wasn’t sure I could get away from the race. I only got back last night from the starting line out in the Atlantic.”

“You are what I need.”

“Me too,” he said, holding her hand, looking into her blue eyes.

“I haven’t seen you since our dinner with Jamie,” she said. He had been counting the days too. Their schedules did not mesh given her lecture travel and his shuttling between New York and River Sunday on the Peregrine project.

Katy reached for a folded newspaper on her desk, among the assorted manuscripts. “I read about your ship again. You’ve got a good promotion office. Besides, I’m a patriotic Maryland girl.”

She held up the article. “Maryland entry makes excellent start in China clipper race.” Below the headline was a picture of the Peregrine with all her sails drawing, her hull several boat lengths ahead of the next entrant, the Willow.

“No one is as happy for this state as my boss, Bill Johnson. To listen to him, you’d think the Chesapeake craftsmen invented boats.” He cleared books from the seat of a leather-covered wooden chair. The small brass label on its crest indicated the antique had been shipped to Maryland from a Boston maker in 1720.

“I like him anyway,” Cutter said as he sat down.

“How long can you stay with me?” she asked.

He grinned. They could read each other pretty well by now.

She added, “We could hire a plane and in five hours we could be naked on that Caribbean beach again.” Her eyes glistened.

“How about naked right now?” Cutter smiled.

“Close the door,” she whispered, color coming into her cheeks.

“I’m afraid the overseers of the Maryland Historical Society would throw me the hell out of here,” Cutter said. He added, with a wink, “Worth it.”

“OK,” she said, sitting back, “I’ll control my impulses and wait.” They looked at each other, with smiles of satisfaction and abandon. For Katy, the romantic outbursts contrasted with her scholarly career. For Cutter she opened a window to a new life filled with a love he had not known before.

He picked up a six-sided pewter container at the edge of her desk. “I’ve seen one of these.”

“Tea caddy from our collection. Your ship had these aboard. They were used to carry tea to America from China. See the design on the top?”

“A box decorated like this is in the company hallway display in New York.”

“It represents the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees.”

“Where is that?”

“You’re going to take me to see it when you win the race. It’s in Guangzhou, the place you are sailing to.”

He put it down. “You got yourself a deal.”

Cutter carefully tested his weight on the antique chair. He judged even with the suspicious squeak of the wooden joints he was safe.

“I’ve got a problem,” he said.

“That Chippendale chair?”

“No,” he said, with a laugh. “I mean, I need your professional help.”

A look of concern traced her face as she sat forward. He continued, explaining the discovery of the Osprey name.

“Why didn’t Bill know?”

“The people of color in River Sunday kept to themselves.”

She nodded. “They were not about to stir up hatreds.”

He said, “Whether any of this is relevant to our ship is the question. I have to make sure. I need a researcher, someone like you who can keep the work confidential.”

Her face wrinkled. Cutter had fallen in love with that expression. She said, “Research on ships is a whole field in itself, Jimmy. Better experts than me exist for this work.”