Hot Ice (27 page)

Over the quiet dusk and jungle silence, Jacques’s stereo poured out what any self-respecting DJ would have called hit after hit—commercial-free. She could’ve floated for hours.

“We’d better camp.”

Turning her eyes away from the sunset, she smiled at Doug. He’d long before stripped off his shirt. His chest
gleamed in the dim light with a light sheen of sweat. “So soon?”

He bit back a retort. It wasn’t easy to admit that his arms felt like rubber and his palms burned. Not when young Jacques was still bopping with the beat, looking as though he could row until midnight without slackening pace.

“It’ll be dark soon,” was all he said.

“Okay.” Jacques’s lean, limber muscles rippled as he stroked. “We’ll find an A-Number-One campsite.” He turned his shy smile on Whitney. “You should rest,” he told her. “Long day on the water.”

Mumbling under his breath, Doug rowed toward shore.

Jacques wouldn’t allow her to carry a pack. Hefting hers and his sack, he entrusted her with his stereo. Single file, they walked into the forest where the light was rose-colored, touched with mauve. Birds they couldn’t see sang to the darkening sky. Leaves shimmered green, damp with the moisture that was always present. Now and then Jacques would stop and hack at vines and bamboo with a small sickle. The scent was rich: vegetation, water, flowers—flowers that climbed through vines and burst through bush. She’d never seen so many colors in one place, nor had she expected to. Insects hovered, humming and whining in the twilight. On a frantic rustle of leaves a heron rose out of the bush and glided toward the canal. The forest was hot, wet, and close and had all the tastes of the exotic.

They set up camp to the tunes of Springsteen’s
Born in the USA.

By the time they had a fire started and coffee heating, Doug found something to be cheerful about. Out of Jacques’s sack came a few small containers of spice, two lemons, and the rest of the carefully wrapped fish. With them, he found two packs of Marlboros. At the moment, they meant nothing compared with the other loot.

“At last.” He held a container that smelled something like sweet basil up to his nose. “A meal with style.” He might have been sitting on the ground, surrounded by thick vines and insects just beginning to bite, but he liked the challenge. He’d eaten with the best of them, in the kitchens and under chandeliers. Tonight would be no different. Breaking out the cooking utensils, he prepared to enjoy himself.

“Doug’s quite the gourmand,” Whitney told Jacques. “I’m afraid we’ve had to make do with what’s been available so far. It hasn’t been easy for him.” Then she sniffed the air. Mouth watering, she turned to see him sautéing the fish over the fire. “Douglas.” His name came out on a sultry breath. “I think I’m in love.”

“Yeah.” Eyes intense, hands firm, he gave the fish an expert flick. “That’s what they all say, sugar.”

That night the three of them slept deeply, replete with rich food, plum wine, and rock and roll.

When the dark sedan pulled into the small seaside town an hour past dawn, it drew quite a crowd. In charge, impatient, and out of sorts, Remo stepped out and brushed through a huddle of children. Having the instinct of the young and the vulnerable, they made way for him. With a jerk of his head, he signaled the two other men to follow.

They didn’t deliberately try to look out of place. If they’d come into town on mules, dressed in lambas, they’d still have looked like hoods. The way they’d lived, the way they intended to live—badly—oozed through their pores.

The townspeople, though inherently wary of strangers, were also inherently hospitable. Still, no one approached the three men. The island term for taboo was
fady.
Remo and company, though trim in their crisp summer suits and glossy Italian shoes, were definitely
fady.

Remo spotted the inn, and signaling his men to circle the sides of the building, approached the front.

The woman of the inn had on a fresh apron. Breakfast smells came from the rear though only two tables were occupied. She looked at Remo, sized him up, and decided she had no vacancies.

“Looking for some people,” he told her, though he didn’t expect anyone on that godforsaken island to speak English. He simply pulled out the glossies of Doug and Whitney and waved them under her nose.

Not by a flicker did she show any recognition. Perhaps they’d left abruptly, but there’d been twenty dollars American money on the dresser. Their smiles hadn’t reminded her of a lizard. She shook her head.

Remo peeled a ten-dollar bill from the wad he carried. The woman simply shrugged and handed him back the photos. Her grandson had spent an hour the evening before playing with his new pig. She preferred his smell to Remo’s cologne.

“Look, Grandma, we know they got off here. Why don’t you make this easy on everybody.” As incentive, he peeled back another ten.

The innkeeper gave him a blank look and another shrug. “They are not here,” she said, surprising him with her precise English.

“I’ll just take a look myself.” Remo started for the stairs.

“Good morning.”

Like Doug, Remo had no trouble recognizing a cop, in a one-horse town in Madagascar or in an alley in the lower Forties.

“I am Captain Sambirano.” Stiffly proper, he offered his hand. He admired Remo’s taste in clothes, noticed the still-puffy scar on his cheek and the cool grimness in his eye. Neither did he miss the healthy wad of bills in his hand. “Perhaps I can be of some assistance.”

He didn’t like dealing with cops. Remo considered
them basically unstable. In a year, he could make approximately three times what the average police lieutenant pulled in, for doing the same thing. Backwards.

But more, he didn’t like the thought of going back to Dimitri with empty hands. “I’m looking for my sister.”

Doug had said he had brains. Remo put them to use.

“She ran off with this guy, nothing but a two-bit thief. The girl’s infatuated, if you know what I mean.”

The captain nodded politely. “Indeed.”

“Dad’s worried sick,” Remo improvised. He pulled out a thin Cuban cigar from a flat gold case. Offering one, he noticed the captain’s appreciation of the fragrance and the glint of classy metal. He knew which approach to take. “I’ve managed to track them this far, but…” He let the sentence trail off and tried to look like a concerned brother. “We’ll do anything to get her back, Captain. Anything.”

While he let that sink in, Remo pulled out the photos. The same photos, the captain noted silently, that the other man had shown him only the day before. His story had been that of a father seeking his daughter as well, and as well, he’d offered money.

“My father’s offering a reward to anyone who can help us. Understand that my sister’s my father’s only daughter. And the youngest,” he added for clout. He remembered, without much affection, how pampered his own kid sister had been. “He’s prepared to be generous.”

Sambirano looked down at the pictures of Whitney and Doug. The newlyweds who’d left town rather abruptly. He glanced over at the innkeeper who kept her lips folded in disapproval. Those eating breakfast understood the look and went back to their meal.

The captain wasn’t impressed by Remo’s story any more than he’d been impressed by Doug’s the day before. Whitney beamed up at him. She, however, had impressed him, then and now. “A lovely woman.”

“You can imagine how my father feels, Captain, knowing she’s with a man like him. Scum.”

There was enough passion in the word to let the captain know the animosity wasn’t feigned. If one man found the other, one would die. It mattered little to him, as long as neither died in his town. He saw no reason to mention the man in the panama with a similar set of pictures.

“A brother,” he said slowly as he drew the cigar under his nose, “is responsible for the welfare of his sister.”

“Yeah, I’m worried sick about her. God knows what he’ll do when her money runs out or when he just gets tired of her. If there’s anything you can do… I promise to be very grateful, Captain.”

The captain had chosen law enforcement in the quiet little town because he hadn’t much ambition. That is, he didn’t care to sweat in the fields or callous his hands on a fishing boat. But he did believe in making a tidy profit. He handed Remo the photographs. “I sympathize with your family. I have a daughter myself. If you’ll come with me to my office, we can discuss this further. I believe I can help you.”

Dark eyes met dark eyes. Each recognized the other for what he was. Each accepted that business was indeed business. “I’d appreciate that, Captain. I’d appreciate that very much.”

As he walked through the door, Remo touched the scar on his cheek. He could almost taste Doug’s blood. Dimitri, he thought with a flood of relief, was going to be very pleased. Very pleased.

Over her breakfast coffee, Whitney added Jacques’s fifty-dollar advance and retotaled the list of Doug’s expenses. A treasure hunt, she decided, had quite an overhead.

While the others had slept during the night, Doug beside her in the tent, Jacques content under the stars, Whitney had lain awake for some time, going over the journey. In many ways it had been a lark, an exciting, somewhat twisted vacation complete with souvenirs and a few exotic meals. If they never found the treasure, she would’ve written it off just that way—except for the memory of a young waiter who’d died only because he’d been there.

Some people are born with a certain comfortable naiveté that never leaves them, mainly because their lives remain comfortable. Money can provoke cynicism or cushion it.

Perhaps her wealth had sheltered her to some extent, but Whitney had never been naive. She counted her change not because she had to worry about pennies, but because she expected value for value. She accepted compliments with grace, and a grain of salt. And she knew to some, life was cheap.

Death could be a means to an end, something accomplished for revenge, for amusement, or for a fee. The fee might vary—the life of a statesman was certainly worth more on the open market than the life of a ghetto drug dealer. One might be worth no more than the price of a syringe full of heroin, the other hundreds of thousands of cool, clean Swiss francs.

A business, some had taken the exchange of life for gain to the height and routine of a brokerage firm. She’d known it before, considered it the way one considered many of the daily social ills. Aloofly. But now she’d dealt with it personally. An innocent man had died, and she might very well have killed a man herself. There was no telling how many other lives had been lost, or bought and sold, in the quest for this particular pot of gold.

Dollars and cents, she mused as she looked down at her neat columns and totals on the notepad. But it had become much more than that. Perhaps like many of the carelessly wealthy, she’d often skimmed over the surface of life without seeing the eddies and currents the less fortunate had to pit themselves against. Perhaps she’d always taken such things as food and shelter for granted until the last few weeks. And perhaps Whitney’s own personal view of right and wrong often depended on circumstances and her own whims. But she had a strong sense of good and bad.

Doug Lord might be a thief, and in his life he might’ve done innumerable things that were wrong by society’s standards. She didn’t give a hang about society’s standards. He was, she’d come to believe, intrinsically good, just as she believed Dimitri was intrinsically bad. She believed it, not naively, but completely, with all the healthy intelligence and instinct she’d been born with.

She’d done something more while the others had slept. Restless, Whitney had finally decided to glance through the books Doug had taken from the Washington library.
To pass the time, she’d told herself as she flicked on a flashlight and located the books. As she’d begun to read about the jewels, the gems lost over the centuries, she’d become caught up. The illustrations hadn’t particularly moved her. Diamonds and rubies meant more in three dimensions. But they’d made her think.

Reading through the history of this necklace, that diamond, she’d understood, personally, that what men and women craved for adornment, others had died for. Greed, desire, lust. They were things Whitney could understand, but passions she felt too shallow to die for.

But what of loyalty? Whitney had gone back over the words she’d read in Magdaline’s letter. She’d spoken of her husband’s grief over the queen’s death, but more, his obligation to her. How much had the man Gerald sacrificed for loyalty and what had he kept in a wooden box? The jewels. Had he kept his heritage in a wooden box and mourned a way of life that could never be his again?

Was it money, was it art, was it history? As she’d closed the book she had been left uncertain. Whitney had respected Lady Smythe-Wright, though she’d never quite comprehended her fervor. Now she was dead for little more than having a belief that history, whether it was written in dusty volumes or glittered and shone, belonged to everyone.

Marie had lost her life, along with hundreds of others, with rough justice on the guillotine. People had been driven from their homes, hunted, and slaughtered. Others had starved in the streets. For an ideal? No, Whitney doubted people often died for ideals any more than they truly fought for them. They’d died because they’d been caught up in something that had swept over them and carried them along whether they wanted to go or not. What would a handful of jewels have meant to a woman walking up the steps to the guillotine?

It made a treasure hunt seem foolish. Unless—unless it
had a moral. Maybe it was time Whitney discovered her own.

Because of this, and because of a young waiter named Juan, Whitney was determined to find the treasure, and to kick dust in Dimitri’s face when she did.

She faced the morning confidently. No, she wasn’t naive. Still, Whitney held to the basic belief that good would ultimately outdo bad—especially if good was very clever.

“What the hell’re you going to do when the batteries on that thing run down?”

Whitney smiled up at Doug before she slipped the thin, hand-held calculator and her notepad back in her bag. She wondered what he would think if he knew she’d spent several hours during the night analyzing him and what they were doing. “Duracell,” she said sweetly. “Would you like some coffee?”