Flashback (53 page)

"Tell 'em, Mack," Butch said.

Mack began speaking Spanish, translating. The refugees grumbled, a swelling buzz that grew, then abruptly died. Anna guessed he'd gotten to the part about mouthing off and getting shot.

Perry handed his weapon to Butch and pointed at the nearest crouching family group, a very young mother, babe in arms and a man of an age to be her father or uncle. "Andale, andale," he yelled.

Anna's sketchy Spanish education included the word for hurry. The owner of Pepe Delgado's where she'd waited tables in college used to yell it at the waitresses.

The woman clutching her child and the man with them hurried to where Perry stood near the corpse, the symbol and promise of what was meted out to those who would disobey. The woman Butch had shot was still screaming.

With brutal efficiency, Perry collected their offerings in a lawn-sized garbage bag he pulled from one pocket or another. He patted the refugees with professional thoroughness, learned, Anna was willing to bet, by being patted down himself prior to probably more than one arrest.

"Andale." The next two sheep hastened to the shearing pen.

"We've got to do something," Donna said.

Anna shared the sentiment but had no idea what "something"-at least something that didn't end like the last act of Hamlet-would entail.

"Why don't they rush him?" Donna hissed.

"They're used to being ruled by force," Anna said. "Peaceable citizens aren't accustomed to running headlong into machine gun fire."

"Good point."

The Cubans kept coming. The sack grew fatter. Perry, bored by easy pickings, grew ever more violent, cuffing those who were too slow or too quick or too human. He backhanded a boy of eight or nine, knocking him to the ground. The mother sprang at him. He shot her with the.44 that appeared from somewhere on his person and she fell back. More red-red and surprisingly beautiful blood spattered the sand in the wash of the floodlights. Paulo cried out. He and Mack took a step forward. Butch, an Uzi under each arm now, turned toward them and they stopped.

"We've got to do something," Donna said again.

"You're right," Anna said. "Give me ten minutes and then create a diversion."

"What kind?"

"Be creative." Overcome with the movie-bred idea of saying, "synchronize watches," Anna looked to her wrist. Her timepiece was barricaded in the office with Daniel and Teddy. No matter; salt water had probably stopped Donna's anyway.

"What's the plan?" Donna asked.

"It's a little sketchy at this point," Anna admitted.

Donna looked as if she had more questions. She didn't ask and Anna was grateful. "Ten minutes," Donna said.

Anna returned to her peephole where two chunks of concrete lay one atop the other. When both Butch and Perry were occupied with their harvest, she said, "Okay."

Donna left in a crouching walk. No one shouted in alarm or pointed. Seconds later the big woman was gone, hidden in the fort's moat.

Anna followed, feeling the rush of fear as she entered the exposed area and a bowel-loosening relief when she reached the shelter of the moat and lay flat along its wall.

Donna was already heading back the way they'd come, forging ahead with such force she left a sizable wake in the rain-pocked water.

Patrice was waiting, chest-deep in water, next to the moat wall.

Anna hung her head over the brick till her face was less than a foot from Patrice's. Rain had plastered Patrice's thin, over-permed hair to her scalp. So close, even with what little light bled over from the beach, Anna could see the coarseness of her skin, the bluntness of her features. Patrice was there, and strong and brave, and she looked beautiful as far as Anna was concerned.

"Go with Donna," Anna whispered.

"I stay with you," Patrice replied.

Anna hadn't the courage or fortitude to argue with her convincingly, so she didn't try.

"We've got eight or so minutes till Donna does whatever it is she does. Here's the plan." Quickly she outlined her thoughts.

Patrice was silent a moment.

"Got a better idea?" Anna asked hopefully.

Patrice smiled. "I was just admiring its simplicity," she said. "It's got that classic Popeye and Brutus style."

Anna was glad Patrice had refused to leave. "Let's do it," she said.

It was a matter of less than two or three minutes before they were in place. They'd crawled on their bellies like ungainly lizards along the top of the moat wall till they were above and behind Butch. There was no cover and had either of the gunmen taken time away from their gathering of ill-gotten gains to look, they would have seen them. So close, so exposed. Anna and Patrice's lives would have been instantly forfeit. If any of the refugees saw them, they gave no sign. Once a little girl pointed, but her mother snatched her up and began whispering in her ear.

Lying in plain sight atop the moat wall like a couple of sacrificial ex-virgins, time seemed to stop. Anna's internal clock ticked away not minutes but the quarters then halves of hours as they waited for Donna to create enough of a disturbance the two armed men would be distracted and confused for a moment.

Just as Anna was beginning to think archaeologists of the future would discover her bones splayed over the concrete cap of the wall and muse over cause of death, she heard the unmistakable sound of an engine revving. It was impossible to tell if it was one of the sportfisher boats offshore or if Donna had fired up the runabout.

The noise grew. Too rumbling for the runabout; a deep guttural roar of a piston engine with an attitude.

"On my God," Patrice muttered at the same moment a wild Indian cry built with the scream of an engine suddenly glutted with gasoline.

Anna looked south where the noise gathered. Suddenly the spotlight from one of the offshore vessels swung, and a vision acidic in its intensity and epic in execution came shrieking out of the darkness. Donna, astride Mrs. Meyers, throttle ratcheted down, both screaming like banshees, roared down the top of the moat wall. The Harley looked immense and black and silver and mean; Donna, wet hair streaming behind, wide shoulders bunched into muscle, a Valkyrie, an Amazon. The bike seemed to be coming at the speed of sound though it couldn't have been traveling more than thirty miles an hour tops.

Anna glanced at Patrice. Her face was radiant with love. No surprise; at that moment Anna was in love with Donna herself. Patrice's face cleared, all business now. She nodded. Anna nodded back. As one they rose.

Below on the beach all eyes were turned toward the southern moat wall, Donna, Mrs. Meyers. The Cubans were rapt, the religious seeing a vision but not sure whether it was sent by God or Lucifer. Mack and Paulo looked as men look when reality ceases to have meaning anymore, rivers run uphill, the sun sets at midday and the animals of the field speak.

Butch had turned toward Donna, but he was too close under the wall to get a good shot. Perry ran past his growing garden of dead and wounded, raised his.44 and took aim.

"Now," Anna said. She and Patrice launched themselves at Butch. As Anna left the ground she was aware of two things: the sound of a gunshot and the crash of metal on concrete. Then she slammed into Butch's back.

32

My Dearest Peg-

I am sorry for the long silence. Things here have been sadder than you could possibly imagine or than I could write about at the time. Now that the worst has passed I will do my best. I may be telling you in person before you receive this letter. I am coming home and I will be coming alone.

I suppose I should begin where I left off more than a month ago.

If I remember, at that time I had decided that I must find what, if anything, Joseph had to do with Tilly's going missing. Because of the strange and sudden ascendancy of Sergeant Sinapp I knew there was something amiss between them. Because none but Sergeant Sinapp and the men under his thrall had the necessary power and brutality-along with any reason-to remove Tilly from me, I needed to know if Joseph had been a party to it.

I had it in my mind to confront Joseph and cry, whine, threaten or shame him into telling me why he had withdrawn his protection from Tilly and me; why he had, by inaction, allowed the inhabitants of Fort Jefferson to conic under the de facto control of Cobb Sinapp, a man with the moral code of a shark-and this being said, I know I have insulted the entire species of fish.

I managed to keep myself in the narrow bed in Tilly's room till the coming sunrise turned the window from black to gray. It was my intention to wake Joseph and have it out with him before anyone was astir to distract or interrupt us.

Given the nature of my visit to the connubial bed was not such that a thin cotton gown felt adequate, I dressed in the clothing I had cast off the day before-not the britches and blouse of Joseph's I'd borrowed, but my own dress and petticoat.

As I was working the skirt down over my shoulders-the waist of this dress is narrow and the buttons down the back don't open far enough to make donning and doffing it a simple matter-I felt the letters. They were the same letters I had stuffed into my pocket when Joseph came home as I was searching his desk, reading his correspondence, and wondering if he was being adulterous.

Having worked the dress into place, I took these letters and sat in the old rocker we'd given Tilly for her use. It sits near the window where what little light available would help me to make out the writing. I lit a candle to assist the dawn and looked at my booty.

Two of the letters were military matters; notification of death in one case and a discussion of new supply ships and routes in the other. The third was of great interest. It was from Colonel Battersea of the late Confederate Army. The letter had been sent from New Brunswick, Georgia, which, if I remember correctly, is Colonel Battersea's home.

I believe I may have mentioned the colonel's situation. He and Joseph were thrust into that untenable situation so common in the late and tragic events of the war.

The colonel had been one of Joseph's instructors at West Point. He was not a good deal older than his students, being only twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time of his employment there. The colonel (a lieutenant then) took an interest in Joseph. He had him to dine with he and his wife on more than one occasion and assisted him in many small ways while Joseph was a cadet under his care.

After Joseph graduated the friendship continued though, of necessity, only by way of letters. Joseph would write him often with problems or questions concerning military matters, and Colonel Battersea would always respond with sound advice.

Once he and his wife and their eldest daughter paid us a visit as they were passing through the garrison in Pennsylvania at which we were posted.

As fate would have it, this same Colonel Battersea ended up at Fort Jefferson, a prisoner of war under Joseph's wardship. The colonel never asked for preferential treatment and, though I knew Joseph ached to give him at least better rations and some small services to make him more comfortable, he never did. His own brand of military honor would not allow him nor would so doing earn him the colonel's respect.

They did talk quite often and played chess in the evenings on occasion. In this war of brothers and neighbors such interaction is not unusual. The colonel had been here half a year or more when he began getting letters of his wife's declining health. By war's end she had wasted away till, according to the daughter that wrote in the wife's stead, she weighed no more than a child. It seemed clear she would soon die.

Joseph attempted to secure the colonel's early release (by this time it was known the prisoners of war were to go home in peace) but for reasons I'm not privy to-perhaps nothing more than the organizational disarray the army was thrown into by the long and bloody war-permission to release Colonel Battersea was not forthcoming.

Shortly thereafter the colonel took matters into his own hands and escaped, stowed away it was surmised on one of the ships that stopped for recoaling. In his own way, I know Joseph celebrated his old mentor's escape, but he said little about it.

Anyway, that said, I read the letter from Colonel Battersea-the one I had stolen from my husband's desk-with great interest.

I shan't recopy the entire letter here. After reading it I returned the letters to Joseph's desk-an act facilitated by my breaking the latch earlier. Colonel Battersea wrote Joseph of his wife's death and of how grateful he was to have been with her at the end. Though the language was careful, for one acquainted with his story, it was clear he thanked Joseph for his escape from Fort Jefferson. It did my heart good to know my husband had been party to such a kind deceit.

Yet I believe this good and Christian act has been turned against Joseph. Should it be made known that he, a Union Army captain, aided and abetted the escape of a prisoner of war, his career would be over. He would be court-martialed and, if not imprisoned, then drummed out of the service.

For Joseph this would be tantamount to excommunication. The army is his life, his religion. I don't think I overstep when I say it embodies his very self. As Sergeant Sinapp has long been Joseph's henchman, I don't doubt Joseph enlisted his aid in the colonel's escape. It is my belief Joseph underestimated how tamed Sinapp was and that, having been complicitous in this escape, the sergeant turned on the master. Sinapp is using this knowledge to blackmail Joseph. Joseph, an honorable man, mightn't know how those of Sinapp's ilk hate him; the more servile they are the more hatred they possess.