The frail young man shook his head. "I think not, Mr. Wages," he said softly. "I believe that my prayers have been answered. I asked that someone become interested in Herr Froelling's story — and that has finally happened."
Govan's once young face suddenly looked very old and very weary. It was the worn look of those who do the thankless tasks of the world and make it a better place in which to live.
"How can I pay you back for this?" The moment I asked this, I realized that the words sounded clumsy and inappropriate.
"You already have done as much by just coming, Mr. Wages. Take it, with my humble gratitude."
Half an hour later I was back in the Vauhall winding my way back to Negril. There were literally hundreds of questions, ideas, theories and possibilities rattling around in my old brain, so many that I couldn't seem to capture any one of them and lock onto it. Added to all that was the fact that Chauncey's overly aggressive and decidedly antisocial behavior had left me sore in just about every part of my body except my ears. In my most recent survey, they were the only things that didn't hurt.
Among the more pragmatic questions was the one that related to Chauncey and how the bull-faced little man had learned about the Poqulay bribe. There were any number of possibilities, but none of them seemed to hold much water. Had one of the lieutenant's gun-toting crew members squealed on his greedy superior? Or could it be someone at Rick's, or, for that matter, a member of the Prometheus team? All of the aforementioned seemed somehow unlikely, yet all remained distinct possibilities. But if it was a member of the Prometheus team, then I had an even bigger problem. It was fast becoming a matter of who I could actually trust.
And, while I was concerned about that aspect of the situation, I was even more intrigued about what Father Govan had revealed about Froelling, the Garl and Big Doobacque. I was doing my best to weave a connection between those three apparently dissimilar and separate components of the whole situation.
Could it be that something aboard the Garl actually triggered the cataclysm? It would have to be, I reasoned, something with both tremendous energy and the power to kill. But that theory raised even more questions. What kind of "thing" could permanently alter the environment of an entire island? Admittedly, I was piecing together information from a whole lot of questionable sources. Some of it was Hannah's "what if," more of it came from fishing with Papa Coop off the reef, still other fragments came from observing the carnage at Deechapal and on the deck of the Bay Foreman. Now there was Govan's input, and it came from an only occasionally lucid ex-Nazi whom Jamaican authorities had already branded as mad.
Still looking for a thread of rationality in all of it, I stopped in Champa, Mary Mary's old hometown before she toddled off with Papa Coop, and tried to find out if anyone had heard from the old lady. I couldn't find anyone who had, so I bought two Red Tops, opened them both, crawled back in the Vauhall and headed for Negril. It was at that point that I realized that the Elliott Grant Wages theory on the fate of the Garl, the disaster at Deechapal, the fate of the Bay Foreman and Bearing Schuster's much sought after cylinders was starting to crystalize — and that brought me to another conclusion. If I was right, it was one helluva terrifying theory.
By the time I pulled into the parking lot of the Ciel, it was late in the day and every part of me was either hurting like hell or completely malfunctioning. I limped across the parking lot, through the open air dining room and out onto the beach. The Achilles was still there, moored at the small two-slip marina in front of the Yankee Club. There was no sign of Queet, Hannah or anyone else on the Prometheus team. The Sloe Gin was still anchored several hundred yards offshore. So I meandered back into the tiny bar, ordered a Black and White, found a comfortable chair, and took out Govan's muslin-wrapped journal. It was only a matter of minutes until I was again completely engrossed in all that had transpired between the young priest and the old Nazi.
It didn't take long to find the entry where Froelling had described the night of the mutiny aboard the Garl. Though written in Govan's style, there was little doubt that it was Froelling's words and recollections.
"It was impossible to get additional supplies in Montego Bay. Jamaican authorities would not honor the currency of any country other than the victorious Americans and their allies, and supply channels were in chaos. There were unconfirmed reports that the Bal Balone, the Argentine freighter scheduled to take our cargo in Montego, had been seized by British authorities looking for fugitives from the defeated Third Reich. I was desperate. Bormann had given me very specific instructions. Since the six cylinders had been carefully stowed in sequence, he said he was the only one who knew which ones contained the bodies of the Fuhrer and Eva. The digits appearing on the end of the cylinders next to the valve panel corresponded to a letter of the alphabet. The first and last letters of the one word that could be formed from the only possible numerical combination gave the clue which would tell us which cylinders actually contained the bodies. The three of us — Hans, Karl and myself — spent countless hours trying to solve the riddle.
"When the rendezvous with the Bal Balone did not materialize, I became very concerned. Despite orders from Bormann, I took the captain of the Garl into my confidence and informed him of the real purpose of our mission. I considered the risk to be minimal since the man was hand-picked by Bormann and had repeatedly demonstrated his loyalty to the Third Reich.
"The decision was made not to inform the men that we were continuing on to Buenos Aires until after we had left the small port west of Montego and put in at Port Royal for supplies. On the morning of the second day out from Montego, I knew that both the captain and I had erred in our judgment. A portion of the crew became surly and beligerent, and it was obvious that word of the containers' contents had become known throughout the ship. By the third day the undercurrent of mutiny was apparent.
"At 1600 hours on the third day, a man by the name of Lok came to my cabin and at gunpoint forced me and my two aides into a lifeboat. He informed me that the captain was already dead and that the men were planning to bring the cylinders up on deck, one by one, and inspect them. Lok said their intent was to make sure that Adolph Hitler was destroyed once and for all.
"We were cast adrift, and the Garl's crew headed west for the island of Big Doobacque, where German loyalists were to be put ashore.
"It was the second day after we had been cast adrift that my aides and I heard something that sounded like a great explosion, distant and ominously muffled. We watched, horrified, as a hissing, yellowish cloud approached us over the water. For some reason I was thrown from the small craft and remember quite vividly seeing the silhouette above me on the surface. For what seemed like an eternity, it pitched and yawed violently — then, just as suddenly, it again settled. I held my breath for as long as possible, and when I surfaced, I gulped in the foul air. It was, I recall, like inhaling razor blades. I felt the thin crystals of the yellow vapor slice into my mouth and nose and throat. Within a matter of seconds I was coughing and choking on my own blood. A burning sensation settled in my mouth and pierced my chest. I began to ingest salt water in great quantities, and suddenly I was regurgitating the foul substance. Despite it all, I somehow managed to crawl back into the small boat. My comrades were mutilated, frozen in grotesque and twisted shapes. In one terrible and horrifying moment something very violent had descended upon them, causing pain so intense that they had clawed out their own throats.