Sion Crossing (8 page)

Well … it was something he would never know, even if he dared to make someone tell him, and they tried to do so. For it was not something that could be told, only a thing to be experienced; and he was now past the point, both in years and in seniority, where he would ever acquire such trench-truth. In fact, to be bleakly honest with himself, safely past, since he had no great confidence in his physical courage, but only the gravest doubts—

—that was a proper sentiment for brave, younger men, but not for him now, if ever.

And for thinner men, too. He peeked around again surreptitiously, only half-looking for the woman, and felt a small inner glow of satisfaction—even felt, against bitter experience, the beginnings of approval of America. Disapproval of those extra inches in the wrong direction had always been unfair, the more so as in three-quarters of the world a certain fullness of the figure was the hallmark of success and importance and superiority, not of self-indulgence and lack of self-restraint. It had been just his bad luck to live in the other quarter, where fatness was a crime.

But here, at least, he was safe—and doubly safe, because even if the silly woman didn’t turn up at all, and the whole trip proved abortive through no fault of his own, it would be of no consequence to his career. It simply didn’t matter: that had been the final calculation in his decision, the final safety factor which had stilled the small voice of caution, with the Senator himself merely confirming matters …

The Senator had been disingenuous, naturally. It was more than that, he wanted: he wanted the miracle itself, just that and no more. Because, if Oliver St John Latimer was allegedly so good, Senator Thomas Cookridge was undoubtedly a winner, and he wanted the lost treasure of Sion Crossing very badly indeed to go to such eccentric lengths to find it.

And that was where the really interesting questions started for Oliver St John Latimer. It no longer surprised him that he had the job, because that was due to a series of wholly explicable accidents in which he had played a starring rôle.

Very simply, David Audley was the perfect and natural choice, not so much because he was a historian, and a foreigner who would bring a fresh approach to an old mystery or even because of his well-known weakness for weird assignments (Audley’s overweening curiosity was his Achilles heel: Howard Morris would know that as well as anyone) … but simply because he had a proven track-record as a finder of things long-lost. And he, Latimer, was probably only here in Atlanta now because Howard Morris, in his extremity, had led the Senator to believe that, since Audley and Latimer were the brains of Research and Development (which was
true
), then Latimer and Audley were a team (which was palpably and laughably
untrue
).

No … but teams and laughter aside (though it
was
a good joke—and all the better for being at Audley’s expense for once) …
no
, what was truly interesting was the as-yet unanswered question of why Senator Thomas Cookridge needed the Sion Crossing treasure.

He had promised a full and frank answer after Latimer had reported back, but Latimer had long experience of unfulfilled promises and deviously sketchy answers in the aftermaths of assignments, successful or not. However, since he had almost equally long experience of finding answers for himself, for his own satisfaction if not for his advancement, that was not particularly worrying.

In any case, at least it had nothing to do with the hypothetical treasure’s intrinsic value. For what little research he had been able to carry out on the Senator, in default of being able to go back to R & D and with time pressing hard, had revealed one thing for certain: the Senator was a very rich man, as secure financially as he was politically. So the vulgar corruption of the profit motive was not something to be feared.

So there must be some other sort of profit involved, in some other and very different currency—

He shivered suddenly, and knew that it was not because of the contrast between the air-conditioned coolness of the terminal and the memory of those breaths of hellfire-heated-air outside. It was the knowledge that the other currencies included among them notes bearing higher ‘promise-to-pay’ legends, in exchange for things which mere money couldn’t buy. And …
and some of those things were very dangerous indeed, equally if you needed them or if you had them for sale
…
So
—

“Mistah La
tee
mah, sah?”

Latimer focussed on the very clean and well-polished floor of the terminal, at which he had been staring but not seeing a fraction of a second before; and also saw, on the edge of his vision on the floor, a pair of huge and very clean and well-polished and expensive shoes.

He thought …
no woman had a voice that deep, never mind feet that size, to fill those shoes
… and looked up from the floor slowly, controlling his reaction. And up. And up—

The man was very black. And very thin. But, even more than black and thin, he was very, very tall. He was so tall that it was quite understandable he should be stooping slightly beneath a ceiling ten feet above his head. And he had a huge grin on his face.

It wasn’t true that all black men looked the same to white men, just as all Europeans and Chinese were supposed to look the same as each other to each other: he had seen this black man ten minutes before, lounging head-and-shoulders against a wall somewhere—where?

Here, obviously. The question gyrated inside his brain, sweeping all others aside. They could wait—

“Mister La
tee
mah?”

“Latimer.” Whatever was about to happen, it must not be permitted to happen to anyone named La
tee
mah.

“Mister Latimer.” The black giraffe’s accent changed, transformed in that instant from Deep South to British.

“Yes.” Latimer frowned before he could stop himself, too many new unanswered questions crowding him. Absurdly, he felt that he had somehow given himself away.

“I’m sorry, sir—I missed you, sitting here.” The black man reached out with an impossibly long arm. “Your bag, sir?”

“Yes.” Latimer looked down quickly to the hand closing on his bag’s handle, then back upwards, conscious that he would still be looking upwards when he had stood up himself. “Who are you?”

“Kingston, sir.” The black man lifted the bag effortlessly, straightening himself towards the ceiling. “From Kingston, Jamaica. If you think of Kingston from Kingston then you’ll never forget my name, sir.”

Latimer stood up and continued to look up. But he was done with being stupid. “I was expecting Miss Cookridge. Where is she?”

Miss Cookridge. For a
step
-daughter that wasn’t right, but perhaps the Americans had different conventions—that, both in general and in this particular detail, he had not been able to establish, to his present regret.

“Yes, sir—Miss Cookridge.” The black man was already moving towards the exit on legs even longer than his arms, so that Latimer had to hurry unbecomingly to keep up with him. “She is waiting for us, at the car … We were a little late, sir—on the inter-state, there was this pick-up had an argument with a sixteen-wheeler, and we were de-layed somewhat, you see.”

The British accent was not quite perfect, but very nearly so—

Then the blast of super-heated humid air, with most of its life-giving cool oxygen boiled away, buffeted Latimer into speechlessness. All he could hope for now was that Miss Cookridge and the car were not far away.

Lucy Hennebury Cookridge
: he had turned the Senator’s snapshot over, and that had been written on the back of it. And although “Hennebury” was neither a particularly memorable or melodious name, never mind recognizable in any historical context, it was at least not actively outlandish, like William
Tecumseh
Sherman and General the Right Reverend
Leonidas
Polk, the Confederate warrior-bishop who had stopped a cannon-ball fired by one of Tecumseh’s gunners on the retreat-to Atlanta—

God Almighty! He was back to marvelling that anybody in his right mind had been able to conduct military operations in such ridiculous weather conditions as this! But that was the other singularly unpleasant thing about military operations down the ages: they had all too frequently been blithely conducted in ridiculous conditions—the mud of Petersburg and Passchendaele, the snows of Moscow and the Ardennes, the humid jungles of Guadalcanal and Kohima, and the egg-frying heat of the Western Desert. They had all agreed on a fine disregard for any sort of day-to-day human comfort, apart from the overriding general discomfort of being killed outright, if not maimed and jolted back to be blood-poisoned by some over-worked drunken surgeon in a cloud of flies. So this, across a few yards of Atlanta car-park, was no more than par for the usual battlefield course, give or take a hundred years of progress.

There was a female standing up beside a very battered and quite breathtakingly hideous car—a car hideous even by the standards of cars he had passed already, which all had
consumer durable
written all over them, being plainly designed for the scrap-heap as quickly as possible, their durability rusted and dented and consumed.

Damn! He was letting the heat and his doubts about Mr Kingston of Kingston get to him, fed by his anti-American prejudices! Naples on a bad day could be almost as bad as this; and Kingston was more British than American, judging by that accent; and if his own British car was so much better than all those around him, why wasn’t this car park full of British cars—instead of American … or Japanese?

The woman, though—

God! She was tall, too!

And thin—

He paused, suddenly irresolute because the tallness and thinness of Miss Lucy Hennebury Cookridge was really no more than an extrapolation from that one quick glance at the Senator’s snapshot, and on slightly closer scrutiny this woman didn’t particularly resemble that one: that one’s hair had been fluffed-out in some no-doubt-fashionable style, and this one’s was pulled severely back; and this one’s collar-bones were apparent, when that one’s had been decently covered; and, above all, this one’s cheekbones were hidden behind huge sunglasses, which also blacked out the candid, half-amused eyes which Miss Lucy Hennebury Cookridge had turned on the photographer.

And, in any case … he converted his doubt into a turnback toward Mr Kingston of Kingston, who was no longer ahead of him—who was no longer even beside him—

Mr Kingston of Kingston was performing a strange angry dance ten yards behind him, swinging the case (which was a lot heavier than it looked, with all the books in it which were compressing his two-three days’ change of linen)—swinging all that weight wildly as he stamped and twisted.

“Shit!” exclaimed Mr Kingston, angrily.

Latimer stared at the dancing negro. Of course, negroes
did
dance. They sang and they danced, and in the former times of Generals Sherman and Hood they picked cotton hereabouts, and were bought and sold for their pains. And fifteen years afterwards they had caught the British Army on the hop in Zululand, and had left very few survivors to tell the tale, as that visiting Afrikaner colonel had reminded him only recently, in a very different context, to support his view that the British did not understand
blek men.

“I beg your pardon?” He certainly didn’t understand this black man.

“Ffff …
dawgs
!” The dance ended with a curious pirouette.

“What?” Latimer could feel the eyes-behind-the-sunglasses hitting him between the shoulders. All appearances to the contrary—and although that rusty consumer durable contradicted the Senator’s image—it
was
the same woman, he decided.

Mr Kingston grimaced at him. “I have just trodden in some dog-shit, Mr Latimer.”

“Oh?” What threw Latimer was the near-perfect Stratford-atte-Bowe BBC English pronunciation. It was almost an Oxford voice: he could have heard it in Fellows’ Quad at Oxford—in fact, he had seen Hugh Dymoke execute something like that same dance after stepping in something deposited by one of Professor Gerrard’s spaniels, which habitually defecated outside his staircase. Strange—

The negro was staring past him. “Miss Lucy—”

Latimer junked the memory of Hugh Dymoke, and Professor Gerrard and his spaniels and their calling-cards—all dust now, with Colonel Pienaar’s dead redcoats and victorious Zulus—and turned to concentrate on the Senator’s stepdaughter.

“Mr Latimer.” She came from behind the car, and even in flat heels she looked down on him.

“Miss Cookridge.” It wasn’t her fault that she was elongated. But somehow the assumption of her step-father’s name offended his sensibilities. No doubt it carried more clout, but it was as without pride as a flag of convenience.

“I’m sorry we weren’t here to meet you.” She held out a slender hand. “We were delayed.”

“So I hear.” About thirty, give or take a few years depending on good or bad fortune. And, although he was no expert on the regional accents of America, neither a product of her step-father’s corn belt nor a Southern Belle from the Confederate States of America.

“Kingston told you?” She smiled down at him. “It’s our ridiculous speed limit. At least on your … motorways you can outrun the big trucks on the outside lane, and you’re safe there anyway. Here they’ll come alongside you, and then forget you’re there and push you off the road. It can be quite terrifying.”

There was English time in that voice, as well as knowledge of English roads.

“You’ve lived in England, Miss Cookridge?” It unsettled him to know so little about her—to know really nothing at all about her when by now she might know quite a lot about him: it was something like the reverse of the situations to which he was accustomed.

“Didn’t my step-father tell you?” The darkened glass concealed most of her expression. “About me?”

“Er … no, not actually.” Latimer was beginning to sweat beneath his lightest summer suit. “We didn’t have a great deal of time together, as a matter of fact.”

“But he convinced you.”