Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“You will,” he said.

I wondered if he was speaking of the affair he was having with another man’s wife; I wondered if the woman was Linda Gail Pine.

He pushed off from my air mattress and dove to the bottom of the pool, not surfacing for almost two minutes, gasping for air, eyes wide, like a man with an invisible cord strung round his throat. “See? I’m more fish than mammal,” he said. “Don’t get caught up in rules, Holland. Accept the spoils of war. If you don’t, someone else will. Just don’t take a tour of a Saudi jail.”

“You’ve seen one?”

“I keep a short memory about those kinds of things,” he replied. “Hey, the world is a lovely, exotic brothel, in the best possible way, if a fellow wants to have a run at it. Regarding Linda Gail Pine, I know what you were thinking. Forget it. I may be a bastard, but I wouldn’t lie to a man like you, one I respect.”

He began swimming laps, taking long strokes, breathing with his mouth turned to one side, his tanned body slicing through the water. I was twenty-nine. He was about thirty-five. His body was as supple as a teenager’s. In terms of real age, he was a whole generation older than I. He pulled himself up on the side of the pool and sat on the tile, his legs hanging in the water, strands of his coppery hair in his eyes, his profile as handsome and ethereal as a Greek god’s.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he said.

“I think you may be from an earlier time.”

“Like one of those fellows with a washboard brow flinging a javelin at mammoths?”

“More like a Byronic figure swimming through a wine-dark sea,” I replied.

“What I wouldn’t trade to have your gift for language. I majored in geology. We used to say, ‘Six months ago I couldn’t spell “geologist.” Now I are one.’ You dream about the war much?”

“I dream about the death camp where I found my wife.”

“You’re lucky.”

I got off the air mattress and stood up in the shallows. I pushed the mattress toward the deep end and watched it bump into the concrete drain gutter. “I guess I didn’t understand you.”

“My squadron leader’s kite burned. He was trying to get the canopy open. I saw his face when he went down. He was alive inside the flames. I swear he looked straight at me, like he wanted to tell me something.”

“Tell you what?”

“That he understood. That it wasn’t my fault.”

His eyes never blinked. They were red from chlorine, glistening with moisture.

“I tried to get a guy out of a Sherman that was on fire,” I said. “The plates burned my hands. I gave it up. We didn’t create those events, Roy. They were imposed upon us.”

“That’s the first time you called me by my first name. Know the real reason I want to go into business with you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You need somebody to save you from yourself. It’s you who’s out of the past. What’s the title of that great French ballad? The Song of Roland? That’s you, Holland. No matter what you say, you hear the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux.”

The wind gusted across the surface of the pool, wrinkling it like old skin. My blood ran cold. Could Roy Wiseheart see into my soul? Were he and I more alike than I wanted to concede?

Chapter

13

THE NEXT MORNING I drove to Lake Charles and took Rosita with me because I didn’t want her home alone with the likes of Harlan McFey roaming around, perhaps seeking revenge. Before I left the house, I picked up the morning newspaper from the lawn and stuck it in my coat pocket without looking at the front page. Hershel met us at the motel on the south end of town, out by the lake. The air was

cool, the sun buried inside rolling clouds that reminded me of the dust storms in the early 1930s. Waves full of sand and tiny nautical creatures were scudding up on the shoreline, then receding into the water. I thought I could smell gas on the wind from the swamp, a hint of early winter and a drawing down of light from the shingles of the world. Hershel was standing in the porte cochere, staring at the southern horizon, his face as hot as a lightbulb. “I’ve got us a boat. Let’s get out to the rig,” he said. “These guys aren’t listeners.”

“You have to explain that to me.”

“This bonehead driller didn’t have the blowout preventer on. He said the dome was at least another two thousand feet, if it was there at all.”

“What does the geologist say?”