One Forgotten Night Page 21

  He found himself talking to her as though she were there at his side. He said, “There are a lot of things I should have told you, sweetheart. I just wasn’t sure of anything. I wasn’t sure of you—”

  His voice broke. He raked a hand through his hair and shook his head. He wouldn’t let himself cry, not until he knew there was no hope for Nina. And I’m not giving up hope. No way.

  He cruised through Harvey Cedars and picked up a sign marking the turnoff to the Shore Haven Marina. The marina was quiet. That figured; it was a gray, gloomy Tuesday afternoon in October, and most of the people who kept boats at the Jersey shore were summer weekenders. Mike hung back in the shadow of a big boat lift and scoped the docks while gulls wheeled above, tearing the air with their harsh cries.

  There were three long docks lined with boats. Some of the boats were small day cruisers or fishing vessels, but many were large, glossy cabin cruisers. There were even two big boats that, Mike supposed, qualified as yachts; he figured there were a couple of million dollars, easy, tied up in this marina.

  Knowing what he did of Julien Duchesne, Mike was sure that the Diamantina would be one of the largest, newest and most expensive-looking sailboats in the marina. There were half a dozen likely candidates. From where he stood, Mike could see the names of two of them: the Kambuja and the Someday. He was going to have to walk out on the docks to check out the others.

  He looked around again. The place was quiet; it seemed deserted, although he was sure that there was someone in the marina office. But there was no sign of life on any of the boats in which he was interested.

  Slowly, feeling like a tin duck in a shooting gallery, Mike moved out onto the first dock. Two minutes later he had made the Diamantina. She was the big boat tied up at the very end of the dock, with a black hull, dark green canvas and a teak deck. That fits, thought Mike, remembering Nina’s vision. The boat’s portholes were shuttered; her hatchway was dogged down.

  There was no way to sneak up on a boat, Mike realized. Not unless he had scuba gear, and it was a little late for that. The dock was as barren of cover as a windswept prairie; anybody watching from the Diamantina would see him coming. And if they missed that, they’d feel the boat move as soon as he stepped aboard. But there was no help for it. Longing for the reassuring heft of his gun, Mike boarded the Diamantina.

  The narrow cockpit was empty, its side benches bare of cushions. There was no sound or movement from within the boat. Either those he sought had not yet arrived, or they had been here already and gone. Or they weren’t coming to the boat at all, and the trip had been a wild-goose chase, a wrong guess that might have cost him his only chance to save Nina. I’m not gonna believe that, baby, he whispered to her in his heart. You were right about the visions, I know you were. And somehow I’m gonna get to you in time.

  Mike took out his pocketknife, selected the largest blade and inserted it into the jamb of the hatch that led down into the cabin. He twisted it, and the flimsy lock slid open. Mike took a quick look over his shoulder—nothing was stirring down the dock. Apparently no one had paid any attention to the break-in aboard the Diamantina. He reflected sardonically that if he lived through the current crisis he could pick up some nice change working as a security consultant to the Shore Haven Marina. He slid the hatch open.

  Mike hadn’t often known the kind of dread that grips a man’s vitals and paralyzes him, filling his mind with thoughts of failure and making him sweat the acid sweat of true fear. He felt it now, and he admitted that he was terrified to walk down that hatchway into the boat. He wasn’t afraid that something was going to happen to him. He was afraid that this silent boat might be Nina’s tomb. He didn’t know what he would do if he found her down there, dead. He only knew that going down those stairs would be the hardest thing he’d ever done.

  He descended into the main saloon. The only light came from the hatchway. The room was dark, but Mike could make out wood-paneled walls, a chart table and leather-upholstered seats along the walls. Two doors opened off a passage at the forward end of the saloon—staterooms, Mike supposed. He was about to look around when he felt a gun barrel against the back of his head and a voice said, “Welcome aboard.”

  Chapter 12

  It might have been the agony in Nina’s arm that woke her. Her shoulder was on fire and her wrist was numb. She was still hanging from the handcuff in Irons’s car. And her head ached abominably where he had pistol-whipped her. She felt dizzy and nauseated, but even in the first confused moment of waking some instinct warned her not to move or make a sound. She didn’t want Irons to know that she was awake; he might hurt her again.

  The car was still moving. Carefully she sneaked a few quick peeks through barely opened lids. The quality of the light had changed. She was sure that several hours had passed, although the sky had clouded over and she could not catch a glimpse of the sun.

  She heard Irons and Julien talking. Gritting her teeth against the pain in her arm, she lay still, pretending that she was still out cold so that they would continue to ignore her.

  The two men were in the middle of an argument, apparently going over ground that they had covered before.

  “—tell me what to do,” Irons was saying acrimoniously. “You’re the one who screwed things up in the first place. You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you? First you got greedy, and then you got careless, and then you panicked.”

  “Leave it—I said I was sorry.” Julien’s voice was sulky. “But I’ve been thinking it over. There’s really no reason to call things off now. Once we get rid of her, we can go on as before. There’s no evidence against us. No one can touch us.”

  “You really are a fool, aren’t you?” said Irons. “I told you to put things on hold until the investigation moved away from Z and D, but you didn’t listen. Now I’m telling you the whole deal has gone bad. You ought to think about running for cover. And remember that I call the shots.”

  Julien was silent for a few minutes. Then he said, “Did you call her?”

  Irons heaved a sigh of exasperation. “Yes, I called her. Now will you please shut up? We’re almost there.”

  Nina risked another peek out the window, hoping to catch sight of something that would tell her where they were, but all she could see from her vantage point on the floor was a patch of gray sky. As she watched, the first drops of rain hit the window and trickled down the glass like tears.

  “Oh, great,” Irons muttered. “Now the weather’s acting up, too.”

  Julien gave an amused laugh. “This is nothing. Don’t worry.”

  Nina’s head was throbbing. She felt vague and confused; her ears were ringing, as though there were a babble of voices and sounds just out of her hearing. She watched the rain and felt a curious sense of double vision. The rain-streaked window seemed to be blurring and shifting before her eyes. The world had grown dim and foggy. Was the fog outside the car or in her mind? Random thoughts and memories of the past few days drifted through Nina’s mind. She heard Marta’s voice: “Don’t forget to take that nice green raincoat. The rainy season is about to start.”

  Suddenly Nina wondered how Marta had known about the coat. Nina had bought it on the day she was shot; she’d seen the sales slip. Yet Marta had been in Switzerland with Julien then. Or had she?

  Something shifted in Nina’s mind. She almost heard a click, as if a door had opened.

  And then she had her memory back.

  Her peril, the pain in her arm, even her fears for Mike were forgotten for a moment in a rush of sheer joy and thankfulness. For two weeks she’d been stumbling in the dark in a strange house. Now the lights were on and she was home. She remembered her life, and for a moment she was flooded with memories: being carried in her father’s arms to see the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, Charley surreptitiously teaching her how to drive in their mother’s car, holding her mother in her arms at her father’s funeral.

  There was none of the drama that had accompanied her visions, none of the white
flashes and vivid pictures. The change had been as smooth as stepping from one room to another. And the pain in her head was subsiding. Nina guessed that the blow from Irons’s gun, which had landed right where she’d been shot, had somehow triggered the return of her memory. Good does come out of evil, she thought. But I don’t think I’ll thank him.

  Nina was finally able to forgive Mike for his lingering doubts about her honesty. For now that she had recovered her memory, she felt a great rush of relief at the knowledge that she hadn’t been part of the smuggling ring. There were no dark secrets in her past. For two weeks she’d been living with the fear that she might have done something terrible. And if she hadn’t been able to banish that fear altogether, how could she have expected Mike to do so? He’d been doing his job, and doing his best to protect her at the same time.

  Now Nina knew the truth about the emerald she had mailed to her brother. She had found it in Julien Duchesne’s office.

  She’d gone there one afternoon two weeks ago to borrow a jeweler’s loupe....

  Nina had taken her loupe home the night before to look at some garnets for a pin that she was designing for her mother’s birthday. She’d forgotten to bring it back to the office with her, and now she needed it. She knew that Julien was out of the office—he’d gone to Switzerland on some family business. She’d borrow his loupe.

  She didn’t see it on his desk, so she sat down in his chair and opened the top drawer of his desk, the one where most people keep pens and paper clips. She didn’t feel that she was doing anything wrong. The drawer wasn’t locked; Julien must not keep anything very private in it.

  The loupe must be in here, Nina had thought. She’d seen him take it out of the drawer dozens of times. Her fingers closed on something round and heavy at the back of the drawer, and without thinking she pulled it out. It was a large, roughly cut emerald. Nina knew at once that she’d never seen this particular stone in her life. It was a big stone. Even with a less-than-perfect cut, it was worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

  Her mind raced. She knew that she should simply put the emerald back where she had found it and pretend she’d never seen it. It was Julien’s business. But she kept thinking of things she’d noticed about Julien lately—little things, but they added up to an ominous pattern. The whole company knew that he’d lost a lot of his investments, but he’d been spending money wildly. And his behavior had changed. She’d never particularly liked Julien, but in recent months he’d become almost unbearable, alternately manic and moody. He was especially excitable on their buying trips to Colombia, during which he sometimes disappeared for hours at a time on “personal business.” He had been more than usually nervous on the last trip, in June. Nina had wondered if Julien was using cocaine; she’d even thought about talking it over with Armand.

  But maybe Julien’s problem wasn’t drugs. The emerald burned coldly in her palm. It didn’t match anything in the Z and D workroom or inventory. Nina knew that it wasn’t logged on any purchase or work order. It had almost certainly come from Colombia; the color and the crude cut suggested as much to Nina’s expert eye. But she had personally examined all of the stones bought for Z and D in Colombia. And both she and Julien had declared no personal purchases at customs. Everything pointed in one direction: Julien had smuggled the stone. If he’d smuggled one, he’d probably smuggled more. He’d been behaving oddly even before their most recent trip; maybe the smuggling had been going on for some time.

  Nina didn’t know what to do. She wanted to go to Armand—but what if he were involved? She shrank away from that thought because she loved the Zakroffs, but she had to be sure. She was afraid to confront Julien directly. His hostility and unpredictability were getting worse. Just yesterday he’d practically taken her head off when she’d walked into his office while he was on the telephone. He’d grilled her suspiciously about what she’d overheard and seemed not to believe her when she swore to him that she hadn’t heard anything.

  The best thing would be to turn the problem over to the authorities, but what authorities? Nina couldn’t go to the police—she didn’t have enough proof of wrongdoing. Julien could bluff his way around the presence of a single stone.

  She decided to hang on to the stone until she had figured out what to do. Julien wasn’t due back in town for a few days; that gave her a grace period. She slipped the emerald into her jacket pocket and left Julien’s office.

  Then a chilling thought struck her: What if Julien weren’t working alone? Armand—or someone else, she amended hastily—could come looking for the gem. She’d better not try to keep it in her office or apartment. But if she did nothing, if she put the emerald back where she’d found it, Julien would dispose of it and there’d be no evidence at all. She made a snap decision and sent the stone to her brother in Chicago. She enclosed a photocopy of the valuations from the last buying trip in case Julien tried to fiddle with the paperwork to make the stone look legitimate. And she sealed the whole thing inside a double wrapping, with a note to Charley asking him to hang on to the inner package until he heard from her—

  “We’re here” came Irons’s voice, and Nina was jerked back to the present. The car stopped.

  “You get her,” Julien said, “and I’ll take this.” He hefted the attaché case.

  Irons opened the door to the back seat. One hand was in his coat pocket. He saw her looking at it and said, “It’s the gun. I’ll kill you unless you do exactly what I say.” He handed her a key. “Unlock the cuffs and unhook yourself from the car.”

  Nina’s arm had gone numb. As soon as she moved it, she felt the crippling pain of restored circulation. She rubbed her wrist and tried to straighten and flex the arm. “Now cuff your wrists together in front of you,” Irons ordered. Fumblingly, Nina obeyed. “Throw me the key. That’s the way. Get out.”

  She struggled to her feet and Irons draped the scarf over her wrists. “Now come with us.”

  Nina saw that they were at the ocean—they must be somewhere on the Jersey coast. The sea was gray. Spatters of rain fell from an overcast sky, and a cold wind was blowing. They were at a dockyard. Dozens of boats were bobbing at the docks, colorless and forlorn on the dreary autumn day.

  “She’s not here,” Julien was saying distractedly as he looked around the parking lot.

  “She’s probably on the boat. Come on.” Irons prodded Nina, and she walked carefully down a ramp and onto the dock. It was a floating dock; it bobbed and swayed sickeningly under her feet. The water looked as cold as death.

  Nina’s recovered memories dovetailed with what she had learned from Mike and what she had overheard between Irons and Julien. Irons and Julien were in on the smuggling operation together. Julien acted as the courier; maybe he also helped dispose of the stones, either on the black market or by providing faked provenances.

  She seethed with fury, remembering those trips back from Colombia with Julien. She’d stood there in the airport, innocently presenting her invoices and valuations and purchases to the customs agents, while Julien smiled blandly and acted the part of the big-shot businessman, chatting with the agents about the state of the gem business and the difficulties of a border guard’s job. And all the while he’d been carrying a fortune in contraband—gems that represented drug money.

  But something had upset Julien’s profitable applecart. Based on what she had heard that day, Nina guessed that when the international investigation got too close, Irons had ordered Julien to stop smuggling the stones. Julien, unwilling to give up the easy money, had defied Irons and brought in another lot of illegal emeralds. He’d been careless with them, though, and Nina had found one.

  Then the last piece of the puzzle fell into place for Nina....

  It was late at night, the night of the day on which she’d found the emerald in Julien’s office. Nina received a hysterical phone call from Marta Duchesne, Julien’s sister. Nina didn’t know Marta very well, and Marta had never called her at home before. But now she sounded beside herself with worr
y or fear.

  “I need you to help me,” she cried.

  “What do you want me to do? What’s wrong?”

  “It...it’s so difficult to explain. But I have to talk to someone. I need your advice. Can we go somewhere and get a drink?”

  Nina wondered whether Marta was suspicious of Julien. Maybe Marta, too, had found some piece of incriminating evidence. Marta urged her to come out to a restaurant for a talk, and Nina agreed, feeling that Marta might calm down more quickly in a public place. Marta picked Nina up. “I know a new place on the waterfront,” she said. She refused to answer Nina’s questions, saying, “I’m too upset to talk about it while I’m driving—wait until we get to the restaurant.”

  But Marta took an out-of-the-way route through the deserted streets of the North Philly warehouse district, and Nina started to get nervous. Marta’s manner was so strange, so tense and febrile. She kept looking at Nina out of the corner of her eye, not like someone seeking a confidante but calculatingly, like someone assessing a risk.

  The car began slowing for a red light. Marta said, “I was in Julien’s office today. Were you?”

  All at once Nina was scared. She didn’t care how big a fool she might be making of herself if her fears were unfounded: She wanted to get away from this woman, and she wanted to get away now. Without pausing to think she threw open her door and jumped out. But the car was still moving, and Nina stumbled and fell to her knees on the pavement. The car’s brakes screeched, and Nina looked back in fright. The last thing she saw was Marta’s face, distorted with anger as she aimed a gun.

  Now Nina knew. It was Marta who had shot her. Marta must have been in on the smuggling scheme all along; Nina remembered how close the Duchesnes had always seemed, and how Marta had always appeared to be the dominant member of the duo. Marta had probably found the emerald missing and gotten suspicious of Nina; maybe someone at Z and D had innocently mentioned seeing Nina in Julien’s office. Maybe Marta herself had seen Nina leave the office and soon after discovered the jewel missing. However she had found out, Marta had decided to kill Nina. She must have thought that her first shot was fatal. There’d been no time to check—in North Philly, her foreign sports car was as conspicuous as a UFO, and Marta wouldn’t have wanted to take a chance on being spotted at the scene of the shooting. So she’d left Nina for dead. Nina wished that she could have seen Marta’s and Julien’s faces when they learned that she was still alive.