But while Burr was rejoicing, Strelski's mind was already on the next practical step.
"So Pat goes ahead?" he said. "Pat's boys can go bury the magic box?"
Burr sobered at once. "If it's okay by you and Pat, it's okay by me," he said.
They agreed on the very next night.
* * *
Unable to sleep, Burr and Strelski drove to an all-night hamburger joint called Murgatroyd's on U.S. 1, where a sign said: no shoes, no service. Outside the smoked-glass windows sat shoeless pelicans in the moonlight, each to his mooring-post along the wooden jetty, like feathery old bombing planes that might never bomb again. On the silver beach, white egrets peered forlornly at their reflections.
At four a. m. Strelski's cellular phone peeped. He put it to his ear, said "yes" and listened. He said, "So get yourselves some sleep." He rang off. The conversation had taken twenty seconds.
"No problem," he announced to Burr, and took a pull of Coke.
Burr needed a moment to believe his ears. "You mean they made it? It's done? They cached it?"
"They beach-landed, they found the shed, they buried the box, they were very quiet, very professional, they got the hell out. All your boy has to do now is speak."
FOURTEEN
Jonathan was back in his iron bed at army school after they ripped his tonsils out ― except that the bed was huge and white, with the soft down pillows with embroidered edges that they used to have at Meister's, and a small herb pillow for the fragrance.
He was in the motel room one truck ride out of Esperance, nursing his battered jaw with the curtains drawn and sweating out a fever after telephoning a voice that had no name to say he had found his shadow ― except that his head was bandaged, he was wearing crisp cotton pyjamas, and there was a stitched device on the pocket that he kept trying to read by Braille. Not M for Meister, not P for Pine or B for Beauregard or L for Linden and Lamont. More like a Star of David with too many points.
He was in Yvonne's attic, listening for Madame Latulipe's footfall in the half-light. Yvonne wasn't there, but the attic was ― except that this was a bigger attic than Yvonne's, and bigger than the attic in Camden Town that Isabelle had painted in. And it had pink flowers in an old Delft vase, and a tapestry of ladies and gentlemen out hawking. A punkah dangled from a roof beam, making stately turns of its propeller.
He was lying beside Sophie in the apartment in the Chicago House in Luxor while she talked about courage ― except that the smell tickling his nostrils was of potpourri, not vanilla. He said I must be taught a lesson, she was saying. It is not I who must be taught a lesson. It is Freddie Hamid and his dreadful Dicky Roper.
He made out closed shutters slicing sunlight into blades, and layers of fine white muslin curtain. He turned his head the other way and saw a Meister's silver room-service tray with a jug of orange juice, and a cut-glass goblet to drink it from, and a lace cloth covering the silver tray. Across a thickly carpeted floor, he distinguished through the blur of his reduced vision a doorway to a large bathroom, with towels of ascending sizes folded along a rail.
But by then his eyes were streaming and his body was hopping the way it had hopped when he was ten and caught his fingers in somebody's car door, and he realised he was lying on his bandage, and his bandage was on the side of his head that they had smashed and Dr. Marti had repaired. So he rolled his head back to where it had been before he started his close observation, and he watched the punkah going round until the light-spots of pain had cleared and the undercover soldier's gyroscope inside him had begun to right itself.
This is where you get yourself across the bridge, Burr had said.
They'll have to mark the goods, Rooke had said. You can't just walk up to them with the boy in your arms to everyone's applause.
Fracture of the skull and cheekbone, Marti had said. Concussion, eight on the Richter scale, ten years' solitary in a darkened room.
Three cracked ribs, could be thirty.
Severe bruising of the testicles following attempted castration with the toe cap of a heavy training boot.
For it seemed that once Jonathan had gone down under the pistol whipping, it was his groin that the man had attacked, leaving among other traces the perfect imprint of a size-twelve boot in his inside thigh, to the raucous amusement of the nurses.
A black-and-white figure flitted across his vision. White uniform. Black face. Black legs, white stockings. Rubber-soled white shoes with Velcro fastenings. At first he had thought she was one person; now he knew she was several. They visited him like spirits, mutely polishing and dusting, changing his flowers and his drinking water. One was called Phoebe and had a nurse's touch.
"Hi, Mist' Thomas. How're you today? I'm Phoebe. Miranda, just you go fetch that brush again, and this time you sweep right under Mist' Thomas's bed. Yes, ma'am."
So I'm Thomas, he thought. Not Pine. Thomas. Or perhaps I'm Thomas Pine.
He dozed again, and woke to find Sophie's ghost standing over him, in her white slacks, shaking pills into a paper cup. Then he thought she must be a new nurse. Then he saw the broad belt with the silver buckle, and the maddening line of the hips, and the tousled chestnut hair. And heard the Mistress-of-the-Hunt voice, bang on station, no respect for anyone.
"But, Thomas," Jed was protesting. "Somebody must love you terribly. What about mothers, girlfriends, fathers, chums? Really nobody?"
"Really," he insisted.
"So who's Yvonne?" she asked, as she placed her head within inches of his own, spread one palm on his back and the other on his chest to sit him up. "Is she absolutely gorgeous?"
"She was just a friend," he said, smelling the shampoo in her hair.
"Well, shouldn't we be telling Yvonne?"
"No, we shouldn't," he replied, too sharply.
She gave him his pills and a glass of water. "Well, Dr. Marti says you're to sleep for ever. So don't think of anything except getting better extremely slowly. Now, how about distractions ― books, a radio or something? Not quite yet, but in a day or two. We don't know anything about you, except that Roper says you're Thomas, so you'll just have to tell us what you need. There's a huge library over in the main house, with masses of frightfully learned stuff ― Corky will tell you what it all is ― and we can get anything you want flown over from Nassau, You just have to yell." And her eyes big enough to drown in.
"Thanks, I will."
She laid a hand on his face to feel his temperature. "We just never can thank you enough," she said, keeping it there. "Roper will say it all far better than I can when he gets back, but honestly, what a hero. Just so brave," she said from the door. "Shit" the convent girl added, catching the pocket of her slacks on the handle.