The Ambassador's Son Read online

  “How can you know anything if it can’t be said over the radio?” Burr demanded.

  Phimble smiled. “Me and the skipper and the other boys, we’ve all been together long enough to know how to talk around things. For instance, Stobs says to me he guessed there ain’t no use making out a piss-and-moan list on board no more, and I know that means the skipper’s there. He don’t hold with complaining, you see, rips up any list the boys make. Then Stobs said Pogo went swimming, and I knew by the tone in his voice that meant he was dead, buried at sea.”

  “Your bushman’s been killed?” Burr pursed his lips, then shook his head. “I always liked that little guy. Did Stobs say anything cryptic about Kennedy, like that Irish potato-head’s been french-fried?”

  “No, but I saw him on Mary Island when he brought in his boat to rescue us. By the way, Missus Markham was on board. Seems her boat sank nearby.”

  Burr almost dropped his teeth into the sand. “Felicity is safe? Good God, man! You could have told me sooner! I’ve had a dozen boats out looking for her. All we found were some planks and a shark-chewed swabbie. So she’s safe. And John-Bull?”

  “He was with her.”

  “That incredible woman,” Burr admired, shaking his head in wonder. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore, Mister Phimble, you hear me?”

  “I hear you, sir. But the radio was full of static. I think the skipper’s still on the hunt for Lieutenant Armistead. Stobs said they’d heard the silversides was running up around Corolla and they were heading up there to go fishing. Corolla’s a northern island on the Outer Banks. Silversides is like a minnow, but I think what Stobs meant was the silver bar of a first lieutenant. You know, like Armistead.”

  “Armistead’s on an island up north? Did they happen to say in your special code which one?”

  “That’s all I know, Colonel,” Phimble replied. “But you know Missus Markham was in a sweat to get to Noa-Noa. Could be they’ve gone there or stopped along the way.”

  Burr frowned, then took off his helmet and wiped away the sweat on his brow with his sleeve. “Now, Mister Phimble, this is very important. You hear from Thurlow again, you tell him the billboard writer—that’s Admiral Halsey, but don’t say that, right?—still wants this matter taken care of, toot sweet.”

  “You mean he still wants the skipper to kill Armistead?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Burr glared at Phimble. “Did Thurlow tell you?”

  “He didn’t have to. After a while, you just know a man, even what he’s thinking. But I wish you’d tell bloody old Halsey that it ain’t right what he sent the skipper off to do. Josh Thurlow ain’t no hired assassin.”

  “Neither am I,” Burr growled, “but Thurlow knew the situation when he agreed to take on this thing.” He plopped on his helmet. “Call me if you hear anything more. By the way, what are you doing with this aircraft? Are those bombs attached beneath its wing?”

  “They are, sir. Five hundred pounders, general purpose. I decided to give Dosie a few more teeth while I had the chance.”

  “How’d you get this Catalina, anyway?”

  “We stole it, sir. The bombs, too.”

  Burr pondered Phimble’s answer, then waved his clerk on. The man jammed his foot to the floor, the jeep spinning wheels in the sand for about twenty feet, then skidded to a stop. Burr turned back, his arm over the seat and one hand on top of his helmet. “By the way, you talk to him again, tell Thurlow to duck. There’s something big coming his way.” With this ominous admonition hanging in the air, the clerk jammed the accelerator to the floor again, throwing a sandy rooster tail twenty feet high.

  Phimble watched the jeep boil up the road for a long second, then called quietly to Fisheye. Fisheye’s head popped out over the wing. He said, “I know what you want, Mister Phimble. You want to know when Dosie can fly. Well, it don’t matter if I say a day, a week, or a month, you’ll say you want her ready in a few hours. The truth is I don’t know when she’ll fly again, if ever.”

  “How about tomorrow?” Phimble asked. “The skipper needs us.”

  “Tomorrow it is,” Fisheye replied without hesitation.

  47

  Kennedy and Felicity sat on the veranda and toasted one another with gin and tonic. The clear alcohol filled Kennedy’s stomach with warmth, and then the warmth expanded outward to his extremities. “A man could work up a taste for this stuff,” he said, admiring his empty glass, which Mumba was quick to refill, appearing out of nowhere and disappearing back the same.

  Felicity propped her boots on the veranda railing and leaned back into her wicker chair. “It cushions the day,” she said. “It alleviates the worry, dampens the concerns, and makes small the fear. This, dear Jack, is the drink of the Solomons. Brain-numbing gin, the planter’s best friend.”

  “I should have thought it would be something local,” Kennedy said, putting his legs up on the railing beside hers. “Rum, perhaps, or something made from coconut.”

  “Etheridge of the Kananambo plantation on Choiseul experimented with making alcohol from coconuts,” Felicity said. “I visited his place back in ‘39 to find out about it. He had such great hopes for the concept, as did we all. Unfortunately, try as he might, the best he could do turned out to be nasty stuff, oily, unfit for human consumption. Missus Etheridge reported that it was a fine liniment, however.”

  The sun had turned into a fat red ball squashed against the sea and seemed balanced there, as if resisting being dragged over the edge. Finally it fell into the darkness with a splash of bright green light. Kennedy grinned and raised his glass to the sight. “I’ve never seen a green flash before, although I’ve heard of them.”

  Felicity smiled over the lip of her glass. “They happen every night on Noa-Noa, as long as there are no clouds on the horizon. It’s said you have to be in love to see a green flash, so I guess everyone on this island is a lover.”

  Kennedy took a moment to reflect and was pleased to discover an opinion. “I’ve read that romantic love, that which requires roses and candy, is actually a rather recent invention. Some say it is a product of the industrial age. A stable relationship, with the woman keeping the house, is required for men to get up and go to work according to the factory schedule. The Bible, interestingly enough, at least as far as I’ve read it, doesn’t seem to have much need for romantic love at all. Arranged marriages seem to be the rule.”

  Energized by nightfall, the mosquitoes began to buzz about their faces. In obligatory fashion, they both performed the Solomon Islands salute.

  “Apparently, you haven’t read the Song of Solomon,” Felicity remarked slyly. “It is but one long love poem.”

  “Or an ode to lust,” Kennedy suggested.

  “And what of other kinds of love?” Felicity probed. “What of the love between parents and their children?”

  “I’m not sure I take your meaning,” Kennedy confessed, which prompted him to hold up his empty glass, rewarded by Mumba’s quick action to refill it. The evening star had popped out, so bright it appeared to be burning a hole into the purple sky. There was also a squadron of fox bats swooping and turning, mosquitoes their prey. Kennedy felt like cheering them.

  “I believe a mother’s love is in her blood,” Felicity said. “I only had to hold John in my arms for an instant, and I would have gladly died for him. In fact, I would have died for him even while he was in my womb. I’m certain Bryce would have done the same.”

  Kennedy finished his glass, rewarded once more by the glug-glug sound of Mambo refilling it. Kennedy studied the evening star, now joined by its twinkling neighbors. Soon the Southern Cross would make its nightly appearance. He put his glass to his lips. Felicity had touched on a subject that made him nervous and in need of strong drink. Felicity could feel his unease. “What is it?”

  “May I tell you about my sister Rosemary?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes,” Felicity answered, in her smallest voice.

  “I believe my father hated her so much he des
troyed her.”

  “Why, Jack!”

  Kennedy was as astonished as Felicity. He brought his legs off the veranda railing and thumped his shoes squarely on its floor. “That was a foolish and untrue thing for me to say,” he said in an abashed voice. “I don’t know where it came from. The gin, I guess. My father did all he could for Rosemary.”

  Felicity leaned toward Kennedy. “You must tell me what happened,” she said. “Not so much for me but for yourself.”

  “No. It was just a stupid thing for me to say.”

  Felicity clutched his shirt and drew his face close to hers. He could smell the sweet alcohol on her breath. “Listen, Jack. Get this off your chest. Call me morbidly curious, I don’t care. I want to know why you said that your father destroyed your sister. There’s something inside you that needs to be talked out. So tell me, then you may yell at me, call me a nosy old bitch afterward. But tell me what you think happened to Rosemary.”

  Kennedy looked away, but Felicity gripped her handful of his shirt even tighter. Finally he nodded, and Felicity released him and curled up in her chair, her eyes fastened on him.

  “Rosemary was always a bit slow about things,” he said. “She had trouble learning in school, although she worked hard and became an excellent reader. She wasn’t much good at tennis or touch football or sailing, but she tried. She was, I don’t know, clumsy, you might say. But I always thought she had a good heart, and I never thought she was stupid, not at all. I always enjoyed being around her. We had lots of great talks. I think she enjoyed being around me, too.”

  Kennedy gripped his glass with both hands. “Looking back, I don’t think there was anything wrong with her, except she wasn’t like the rest of us. In any other family, she probably would have grown up, gotten married, had children, and nobody would have ever noticed that she was any different. Likely she would have been thought of as sweet, rather than slow. Hell, I’ve run across men out here who are doing their jobs just swell who are much like Rosemary. They’re simple, but good boys.”

  “Once and Again,” Felicity said, smiling as she thought of the twins.

  “Exactly! When Rosemary got older, it seemed to me that my father, who’d tended to ignore her until then, became preoccupied with her. I heard him say once that he was afraid that people would take advantage of her, especially men. Mother insisted that Rosemary enter a convent, and so they found one that would take her in Washington. There were stories of her going out at night, wandering the streets, looking for boys to meet. I’m not sure if the stories were true, but Pappy thought they were. He went on and on about how dangerous it was and how she needed to be better protected.”

  Kennedy drank, then held out his glass and heard the necessary glug-glugs from Mumba. “Without letting anyone else in the family know, he decided to have Rosemary lobotomized. That means a section of her brain, the part that controls emotions, was removed. She survived the operation, but her personality was taken away. My father had turned my sister, who’d never hurt anyone, into a vegetable. That’s why I said he destroyed her. She was left breathing, her heart beating, but the Rosemary I knew, that sweet, simple girl, was gone forever.”

  Felicity saw that Kennedy had finished his tale, by the way he raised his chin, but she refused to let him get away with it. The important part had yet to be told. “Why do you think your father did it, Jack?” she pressed.

  Kennedy stared at her. “I had a vision of Rosemary when I swam out into Blackett Strait to flag down nonexistent PT boats. I think she was trying to tell me why.”

  “But you have your suspicions, don’t you? It was more than just his concern for her safety, wasn’t it? Something perhaps he didn’t want her to tell?”

  Kennedy looked away, into the night. The geckos were chirping, and somewhere high on the mountain an animal cried out in terror. “I don’t know, Felicity,” he said quietly. “At the time, I was stationed in Washington with the Office of Naval Intelligence. My apartment was quite near her convent. Yet I never went to see her. Not once. Maybe if I had, I could have seen what was coming and protected her.”

  “You had no way of knowing what your father was planning. You mustn’t blame yourself.”

  “Who else is there to blame?” He turned pensive and looked up at the stars. “I wish sometimes I didn’t have to go back. I love being on my own in the wilderness.”

  Felicity reached out and touched his arm. “The Solomons are a terribly tough place to live, yet certain types of men and women are attracted here. Those with a sense of adventure, I suppose, or just a bit perverse in their desire to be disconnected from the remainder of the world.” Felicity dropped her hand from him, then fell into silence, reflecting, perhaps, on her own reasons for being in the islands.

  “I’ve never felt quite so alive as I have since I’ve been out here,” Kennedy said. “Maybe after the war, I’ll come back.”

  “If you wish it, there will always be a place for you on Noa-Noa. Just be certain, dear Jack, you are here because you want to be, not because you can’t face your father. I think he may be an evil man, but I know you are a good one. You are not him, always remember that.”

  “Thank God for my brother,” Kennedy said. “At least it’s him Pappy wants to make into a senator or even president. That leaves me with some choices. Poor, poor Joe. I always envied him. Now I feel sorry for him.”

  The mosquitoes, given impetus by a falling breeze, made another run, and Felicity and Kennedy accomplished the Solomons salute once more, then had another glass of gin, falling into a contented confusion that even the mosquitoes couldn’t dent until Mumba slithered out of some hole and announced, “Cook say damn fool dinner ready, missus!”

  Felicity chuckled, a throaty, gin-soaked chuckle. “Shall we dine, Lieutenant Kennedy, the terror of the Solomons, and a man with a universe of choices?”

  Even though he knew he was quite soused, and therefore his opinion not completely reliable, Kennedy thought the evening meal was actually nearly good, the cook apparently challenging himself to create something edible. He and Felicity were each served an entire chicken stuffed with shredded coconut. It was moist, flavorful, and only a little tough. Dessert was a baked mash of sugary bananas. Kennedy and Felicity dwelled at the table, raising their glasses to toast the king, the president of the United States, and Josh Thurlow in turn. “I wunner . . . wonder. . . where the bloody bas . . . bas-tard and his black girlfriend are even as I speak,” Felicity said, pleased with herself that she had managed a cogent, if somewhat slurred, thought.

  “I hope he’s taking care of my boat,” Kennedy replied, carefully articulating since his lips had gone numb. “Girlfriend? That gorgeous Marie? Surely you don’t mean it!”

  Felicity covered her mouth, unsuccessfully stifling her mirth. “Oh, my dear Jack. Of course! They make pashun too much long time, as they say in these parts. Her eyes scarcely left Thurlow once we got aboard your boat.”

  Kennedy tried to form a question. He was intrigued by the concept of Thurlow finding romance with a wild black woman of the Solomons, but he was also very tired. He longed for his bed and he longed for . . . “Felicity?”

  She smiled at him above her glass. Her response was a purr that ended on the upswing. Then she said, “I don’t believe I have been this jolly in years.”

  “You know what we should do?” Kennedy asked.

  “Yes, my dear, but I would prefer that we were both sober when we did it.”

  Felicity rose, gave Kennedy a firm hug, then wandered off to her bed. Disappointed, Kennedy moved back to the veranda. He sat in the chair he favored and contemplated the darkness. Then he thought he saw a movement, a shadow on the grass. “Mumba?” he called out.

  The dark form moved again, this time back into the shadows, before reappearing again, as if deciding to reveal itself after all. It approached, growing in size until the shadow turned into a tall man, naked except for a lap-lap. He stopped and leaned in until his face was caught in the glow of the lantern shining f
rom the parlor window. Tattoos began on his neck and went down his arms. Bone rings dangled from his ears. “Hello, Jack,” he said. “You remember me from school, don’t you? It’s David. David Armistead.”

  48

  Josh spent the night aboard the gunboat, and Penelope on shore. The two sailors, Billy and Davey, visited with the Jackson twins and met the rest of the boys and decided to stay aboard, too. “Can we join your crew?” they asked when the two caught Josh on the stern with his morning coffee.

  “You may,” Josh answered. “What was your ship? We’ll need to let them know you got through.”

  They named their ship, and Josh told them to tell it to Stobs to signal on to Guadalcanal, if and when he made contact, so that their family could be apprised. “We’d just soon not, sir, if you don’t mind,” Billy said. “Likely our families have already been told we’re dead. There’s every chance we still might get ourselves dead before we get back down south, no use having them cry over us a second time.”

  Josh pushed his cap brim up with his index finger. “What makes you think you might get yourselves dead? I thought Lieutenant Armistead was going to end the war.”

  “Well, sir, maybe so. But Joe Gimmee’s got something in the works that sure looks like there’s yet to be some fighting. He’s real interested in the way military things are done, you see, saluting and marching and all that. Davey here and I taught him what little we know about it. You think knowing how to drill in a straight line would help out in a battle?”

  “Not since Napoleon’s time,” Josh replied in an ironic tone. “Well, whatever you boys think best, but I believe your families would like to know you lived at least this long.”

  Billy and Davey promised to give it all some thought and went off, leaving Josh to wonder about Joe Gimmee’s interest in things military, or at least the formalities. Those thoughts were interrupted by a low note from shore, which proved to be a big, muscular man in a flowery lap-lap blowing on a conch shell. Josh had always heard about such things, even seen it in the movies, but could never figure out how in the world anyone ever got a sound out of a shell. He’d handled many a conch, and eaten more than a few, too, since they occasionally got tossed up on Killakeet, but using one as a horn never seemed an obvious thing to do.