Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“How about giving me a chance to talk?”

“Nope.”

He held up his hand, his fingers spread. “Five minutes,” he said.

“I don’t like your politics, and I don’t like your racial attitudes, Mr. Wiseheart. I don’t like the way your wife was looking at Mrs. Holland, either.”

“My wife lost her sister to Huntington’s disease and thinks she’ll die the same way. She has an obsession with germs. She’s erratic and unpredictable and tried to burn our home down. Her behavior has nothing to do with you, your friends, or Mrs. Holland.” He turned up the underside of his wrist and glanced at his watch. “I’m flying to our home in the Bahamas in one hour. Do you and your wife want to come? I’m madly impressed by both of you.”

“No, thanks.”

“The fishing is great. Get in. What have you got to lose?”

“I think I’ll say good night instead.”

His hair was neatly clipped, his face egg-shaped without a sag in it, his complexion flawless. He had the confidence and serenity of a man who understood the world and did not contend with it. He turned off his engine. “There are no secrets in our line of work,” he said. “You and your partner are laying the underwater line to the first oil rig to drill more than one mile from the American shoreline. The rig is being towed into place as we speak, over in Louisiana, south of Vermilion Parish. In ten years that part of the Gulf will be lit with oil rigs from one horizon to the other. You and Pine can be stringing pipe to every one of them.”

“You hire industrial spies, Mr. Wiseheart?”

“I don’t have to. They come to my office every day. I throw most of them out. You say you don’t like my politics? Would you care to explain to me what my politics are?”

“Thanks for coming by,” I said, and started to walk away.

He got out of the car, a bottle of champagne in his hand. “I bought this for my brother-in-law’s birthday, but he hates my guts and told me to get out of his house. So I’m going to drink it for him. Join me.”

“I’m a closet teetotaler.”

He broke the neck off the bottle on the car bumper, the foam running down his hand and wrist. He poured into his mouth, staining his chin and shirt. “If I just swallowed a piece of glass, it’s your fault,” he said. “Come on, take a drink. You’re a bloody fire-eater. Don’t pretend you’re not. I can see it in your eyes. We’re cut out of the same stuff.”

I had to concede he put on a fine show. “We’re fixing to have some pie and go to bed,” I said.

“No matter whether we ever do business or not, I want you to understand something. I didn’t know about your wife’s background. I’m sorry if I offended you all in any way. I’m not an anti-Semite. There might be people in my family who are, but I’m not one of them.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

“One other thing: Neither Truman nor Roosevelt would bomb the train tracks going into the extermination camps. You didn’t happen to vote for that pair, did you?”

“I can’t remember.”

“You like motion pictures?”

“Anyone who doesn’t like motion pictures is probably spiritually dead.”

“I make them. Check it out,” he said. “See you around, Mr. Holland. For reasons of personal integrity, you just turned down a fortune. If I had ten like you, I could own half the country.”

I TOOK A PECAN pie and a bottle of milk out of the icebox and fixed plates for Rosita and me at the kitchen table while I told her everything Roy Wiseheart had said.

“He’s a man who gets what he wants. He’ll be back,” she said.

“He’s not totally unlikable.”

“Are you rethinking his offer?”

“I don’t see the advantage. There’s another problem, one I didn’t mention. A friend of mine flew with Wiseheart in the South Pacific and told me a disturbing story about him. The squadron leader’s plane was hit, and Wiseheart was supposed to escort him back to base. Instead, he went down on the deck after another kill. The plane he splashed turned out to be an unarmed trainer. Two Zeros came out of the clouds and blew the leader out of the sky.”

“That’s a terrible story.”

“Maybe he thought he was protecting his leader. But my friend said Wiseheart had four kills and needed a fifth in order to be an ace.”