White Death Page 25

  throw you out of the museum reception? You look a little, ah, rum- pled."

  “The reception was fine. But I learned that Washington is going to the dogs.”

  'Nothing new there. Hope that tux wasn't rented,“ Gunn said. ”Worse,“ Austin replied. ”I own it. Maybe NUMA will buy me a new one.

  “I'll take it up with Admiral Sandecker,” Gunn said. Austin refreshed their drinks, then laid out the story of the meet- ing with Marcus Ryan and the evening's events.

  After absorbing the account without comment, Gunn tapped the report on his lap. “Any thoughts on how your dogsled adventure fits in with this wild tale?”

  “Lots of thoughts, but nothing coherent. I'll sum up what I know in a single sentence. The people who run Oceanus deal ruthlessly with anyone who gets in their way.”

  “That would be my conclusion, too, based on what you've said.' Gunn paused for a moment, brow furrowed. He had the capacity to think as coldly and clearly as a computer. He processed the moun- tain of information, separating the wheat from the chaff. After a few moments, he said, ”What about this Basque character, Aguirrez?"

  “Interesting fellow. He's the wild card in this poker game. I talked to a friend at the CIA. Aguirrez may or may not be allied with Basque separatists. Perlmutter is looking into the family background for me. All I know for now is that he's either a Basque terrorist or an amateur archaeologist. Take your pick.”

  “Maybe he could bird-dog this thing for us. Too bad you can't get in touch with him.”

  Austin set his drink down, pulled his wallet from his pocket and extracted the card Aguirrez had given him as he was leaving the Basque's yacht. He handed the card to Gunn, who noted the phone number on the back. “Why not?” he said, and handed the card back.

  Austin picked up a phone and punched out the number. He was tired from the night's exertions, and his expectations were low. So he was startled when he heard the familiar basso voice on the line.

  “What a pleasant surprise, Mr. Austin. I had the feeling we'd be talking again.”

  “Hope I'm not interrupting anything important.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Are you still in the Faroes?”

  “I am in Washington on business.”

  “Washington?” “Yes, the fishing in the Faroes didn't live up to its reputation. What can I do for you, Mr. Austin?”

  "I called to thank you for pulling me out of some difficulties in

  Copenhagen."

  Aguirrez made no attempt to deny that his men had chased away the club-yielding thugs who'd attacked Austin and Them Weld. He simply laughed and said, “You have a way of getting yourself in dif- ficult situations, my friend.”

  "Most of my troubles have to do with a company called Oceanus.

  I was hoping we might chat about that subject again. Maybe you could bring me up to date on your archaeological investigation as well."

  “I'd like that very much,” Aguirrez said. “I have meetings in the morning, but tomorrow afternoon would be convenient.”

  They agreed on a time, and Austin jotted down the directions Aguirrez gave him for an address in Washington. He hung up and started to fill Gunn in on the short conversation, when the phone rang. It was Zavala, who had returned from Europe. Joe had fixed the problems with the Sea Lamprey, then had jumped ship when the Beebe had been invited by the Danish vessel Thor to join in a Faroe Islands research project.

  “Just wanted to let you know I'm home. I've hugged my Corvette and I'm about to head out for a nightcap with a beautiful young lady,” Zavala said. “Anything new since I last saw you?”

  “The usual stuff. Tonight, a crazy Eskimo on a dogsled chased me through the Mall with murder in his heart. Other than that, things are quiet.”

  There was silence at the other end of the line. Then Zavala said, “You're not kidding, are you?”

  “Nope. Rudi's here. Drop by my place and you'll get the whole sor- did story.”

  Zavala lived in a small building in Arlington, Virginia that had once housed a district library. “Guess I'm cancelling that date. Be by in a few minutes,” he said.

  “One more thing. Still got that bottle of tequila we were going to break into back in the Faroes?” “Sure, it's in my duffel bag.” “I think you better bring it with you.”

  NUMA 4 - White Death

  26

  THE NEXT MORNING, Austin stopped at the Museum of Natural History on the way to NUMA headquarters. Gleason was in the exhibition hall when Austin arrived, and he didn't look happy. The guests, music and food of the reception had disappeared, but that wasn't the main cause of his concern. The display cases were empty. Not even a placard remained.

  Gleason was beside himself. “This is terrible, absolutely terrible,” he was saying.

  “Looks like you had a fire sale,” Austin said.

  “Worse. This is a total disaster. The sponsors have pulled the ex- hibition.”

  “Can they do that?” Austin realized it was a dumb question, even as the words left his mouth.

  Gleason waved his arms. “Yes, according to the small print in the contract they insisted we sign. They are allowed to break up the ex- hibition any time they want to and give us a small monetary com- pensation instead.”

  “Why did they close the show?”

  “Damned if I know. The PR firm that set the whole thing up said they're just following orders.”

  “What about Dr. Barker?”

  “I tried to get in touch with him, but he's vanished into thin air.”

  “You've been closer to Oceanus than most people,” Austin said getting to his real reason for stopping by the museum. “What do you know about Dr. Barker?”

  “Not much, I'm afraid. I know more about his ancestor.”

  “The whaling captain he mentioned?”

  “Yes, Frederick Barker, Sr. One of the Kiolya knives you saw on display originally belonged to him. It was more than a hundred years old. Dreadful thing, and razor-sharp. Gave me a stomachache just looking at it.”

  “Where would I look for information on Captain Barker?”

  “You can start in my office.” Gleason cast a woeful glance at the empty display cases. “C'mon. Not much for me to do here.”

  The office was in the administrative wing. Gleason gestured for Austin to take a seat, then plucked an old volume from the shelf. The title was Whaling Captains of New Bedford. He opened the book to a page and plopped it in front of Austin.

  “I dug this out of our library when the exhibition first came through. That's Captain Barker. The New England whaling skippers were a tough lot. Many became captains in their twenties. Mutinies, destructive storms, hostile natives-all in a day's work to them. The adversity made some men ogres, others humanitarians.”

  Austin examined the grainy black-and-white photograph in the book. Barker was dressed in native garb, and it was hard to make out his features. A fur parka framed his face, and bone goggles with hor- izontal slits in them covered his eyes. White stubble adorned his chin.

  “Interesting eyewear,” Austin said. “Those are sunglasses. The Inuit were very aware of the dangers from snow blindness. They would have been particularly important to Barker, whose eyes were probably sensitive to light. There was al- binism in Barker's family. They say that's why he spent so many win- ters in the frozen north, to avoid the direct sunlight.”

  Gleason explained that in 1871, Barker's ship, the Orient, was wrecked, and the captain was the only survivor. “The natives saved Barker's life, and he spent the winter in an Eskimo settlement. He recounts how the chiefs wife pulled off his boots and thawed his frozen feet out with the warmth of her naked bosom.”

  “I can think of worse ways to thaw out. Where does the Kiolya tribe come in ?”

  “They were the ones who saved him.”

  “That seems out of character with what you told me of their blood- thirsty ways. I would have expected them to kill a stranger.”

  “That would have been the normal case, but
don't forget that Barker stood out from the ordinary whale hunter. With his pure white hair, pale skin and eyes, he must have looked like some sort of snow god.”

  “Toonook, perhaps.” “Anything is possible. Barker didn't go into detail about some things. Quaker society in New Bedford would not have approved of one of their number posing as a god. The experience transformed him, though.”

  “In what way?” "He became a staunch conservationist. When he got home, he urged his fellow whale men to stop slaughtering the walrus. The Ki- olya rnuscled in on the walrus hunting grounds like a street gang tak- ing over new drug turf. They even took women and tools from those they conquered. The other Inuit tribes practically starved as a result until they banded together and drove the Kiolya away. Barker saw this conflict over walrus meat and wanted to end it. He was grateful

  to the Kiolya and thought if the walrus were saved, they might change their marauding ways.“ ”Was he right?"

  “Barker was naive, in my view. I don't think anything would have changed their behavior, short of brute force.”

  Austin pondered over the answer. As a student of philosophy, he was a great believer in the theory that past is present. The Kiolya might be the key to unraveling the tangled skein that surrounded Oceanus.

  “Where could I go to learn more about the tribe?” “Canadian police blotter, for the most part, I'd venture. There isn't much information between their diaspora and the present, but I did find a crazy story that verifies what I said earlier about the god thing.” He rummaged around in a filing cabinet and produced a 1935 clip from The New Yor/ Times, encased in a plastic envelope. It was datelined Hudson Bay. Austin took a minute to read the story:

  The Arctic north added another mystery to its history of explo- ration when a half-crazed German crawled out of the frozen tun- dra claiming that he was the sole survivor of an airship disaster.

  Canadian authorities said the German, who identified himself as Gerhardt Heinz, was brought in by a group of unknown Eskimos who had apparently rescued him. The Times found Mr. Heinz in a hospital ward, where he died a short time later. In the interview, Mr. Heinz said,

  "I was on a secret trip to the North Pole for the greater glory of the Fatherland. We landed at the pole, but on the way back, we sighted the wreck of a boat frozen in the ice. The captain insisted on landing on the ice to investigate. It was a boat of great antiquity, probably hundreds of years old. We removed a frozen body, which we placed in the airship cooler, along with some unusual items.

  “After rising from the ice and traveling a distance, we experi- enced mechanical problems, and had to land. The survivors de- cided to try to cross the ice, but I stayed to guard the zeppelin. I was near death when the local natives found me, and I was nursed back to health.”

  Mr. Heinz said that the natives spoke no English, but he learned that their name was 'Kiolya.' He said that they thought he was a god, having come from the skies, and when he requested through sign language that they bring him to the nearest settlement, they complied.

  German authorities contacted by the Times said that they had no knowledge of Mr. Heinz nor of any dirigible voyage to the North Pole.

  Austin asked Gleason to run off a copy of the article and thanked him for his time and information. “Sorry about your exhibition,” he said on the way out.

  “Thank you.” Gleason shook his head. “It simply astounds me why they pulled up stakes so abruptly. By the way, have you heard about Senator Graham? That's another disaster. One of our strongest supporters.”

  Austin said, “I think I saw Graham last night at the reception.”

  “You did. While he was driving home to Virginia, his car was forced off the road by a truck. He's in critical condition. Hit-and- run.”

  Sorry to hear about that, too.

  “Damn,” Gleason said. “Hope it's not true about bad things run- ning in threes.”

  “There may be a simpler explanation for your run of bad luck,” Austin said.

  “Oh, what's that?” Austin pointed to the sky, and in all seriousness, said: “Toonook.”

  NUMA 4 - White Death

  27

  ST. JULIEN PERLMUTTER stepped into his spacious Georgetown carriage house and cast an appreciative glance around at the hundreds of volumes, old and new, that spilled off the sagging wall shelves and flowed like a vast river of words, breaking off into tributaries that ran into every room.

  An ordinary human being confronted with this seeming confusion would have fled the premises. A beatific smile came to his lips, as his eye lingered on one stack, then moved on to another. He could rat- tle off titles, even quote whole pages, from what was generally ac- knowledged to be the world's most complete collection of literature regarding historic ships.

  He was starving after dealing with the rigors of a trans-Atlantic flight. Finding space aboard a plane to accommodate his substantial bulk was not a problem; he simply reserved two seats. But even the Binary offerings of first class were, to Perlmutter's way of thinking, the equivalent of a church ham-and-bean supper. He headed for the kitchen like a heat-seeking missile and was glad to see that the house- keeper had followed his shopping instructions.

  Even though it was early in the day, before long he was dining on a Provenale-style stuffed lamb with potatoes perfumed with thyme and washed down with a simple but well-balanced Bordeaux. Thus fortified, he was dabbing at his mouth and magnificent gray beard with a napkin when the phone rang.

  “Kurt!” he said, recognizing the voice on the line. “How in blazes did you know I was back?”

  “There was a report on CNN that Italy had run out of pasta. I as- sumed you would be coming home for a square meal.”

  “No,” Perlmutter boomed. “Actually, I returned because I missed being taunted on the phone by impertinent young whippersnappers who should know better.”

  'You sound in fine fettle, St. Julien. It must have been a good trip."

  'It was, and I do feel as if I've eaten all the pasta in Italy. But it's good to be back on my own turf."

  “I wondered what you had turned up on my historical query.” "I was going to call you later today. Fascinating material. Can you drop by? I'll brew up some coffee, and we can talk about my find- ings.

  “Five minutes. I just happen to be driving through Georgetown.” When Austin arrived, Perlmutter served two giant cups of cafe latte. He pushed aside a pile of books to reveal a chair for Austin, and another stack to make room for his own wide haunches on an over- sized sofa.

  Perlmutter sipped his coffee. “Well, now, getting down to business... After you called me in Florence, I discussed your query about the Roland relics with my host, a Signor Nocci. He remembered a his- torical reference he had seen in a letter to the Medici Pope penned by a man named Martinez, who was a fanatical supporter of the Span- ish Inquisition, particularly where it applied to the Basques. Mr. Nocci put me in touch with an assistant curator at the Laurentian Li- brary. She dug out a manuscript written by Martinez in which he di- rects particular venom at Diego Aguirrez.”

  “The ancestor of Balthazar, the man I met. Good work.” Perlmutter smiled. “That's only the start. Martinez says flatly that Aguirrez had the sword and the horn of Roland and that he would pursue him, and I quote, 'to the ends of the earth,' to retrieve these objects.”

  Austin let out a low whistle. “That establishes that the Roland relics were real and puts them directly in the hands of the Aguirrez family.”

  “It would seem to verify the rumors that Diego was in possession of the sword and horn.”

  Perlmutter passed over a folder. “This is a copy of a manuscript from the Venice State Archives. It was found at the naval museum in a file having to do with war galleys.”

  Austin read the title on the first page. “An Exoneration of a Man of the Sea.” The publication date on the frontispiece was 1520. The preamble described the work as, An account by Richard Blackthorns an unwilling mercenary in the service of the Spanish Inquisition, a hum- ble sailor who has a
lways stood in defence of His Majesty's name, in which he proves infamies that have been brought against him to be untrue and warns any and all never to trust the murdering Spaniards.

  He glanced up at Perlmutter. “Blackthorne is surely a master of the never-ending sentence, but what does he have to do with Roland and the long-dead Aguirrez?”

  “Everything, m'lad. frything.” He looked into the bottom of his coffee cup. “While you're up, old boy, would you fetch me a re- fill? I'm feeling peaked after the rigors of travel. Get one for your- self.”

  Austin had no intention of getting up, but he rose from his chair and went for the refills. He knew that Perlmutter functioned best when he was eating or drinking.

  Perlmutter sipped his coffee and ran his hand over the manuscript as if he were reading it with his fingers. “You can study this at your leisure, but I'll give you a quick summary now. Apparently, Black- thorne fell afoul of rumors that he had willingly served the hated Spaniard, and he wanted to set the record straight.” “That came across loud and clear in the preamble.” “Blackthorne was worried about the stain on his name. He was born of a respectable merchant family in Sussex. He went to sea as a youth and worked his way up from cabin boy to master of a merchant vessel plying the Mediterranean. He was captured by Barbary pi- rates and forced to become a rower on an Algerian galley. The gal- ley was shipwrecked, and he was rescued by the Genoese, who turned him over to the Spanish.”

  “Remind me never to be rescued by the Genoese.” “Blackthorne was a hot potato. According to the Inquisition sys- tem, any Englishman was a heretic, and subject to torture, arrest and execution. English and Dutch sailors shunned Spanish ports for fear they would be arrested. If you were caught with a copy of the King James Bible or possessed some ancient classic deemed heretical, you were, to put it literally, toast.”

  Austin glanced down at the folder. “Either Blackthorne survived or his memoirs were ghostwritten.”

  “He had nine lives, our Captain Blackthorne. He actually escaped once from the Spanish but was recaptured. He was eventually dragged from his dark cell in irons to stand trial. The prosecutor called him an enemy of the faith and 'other opprobrious names,' as he put it. He was condemned to death and was headed for the stake, when fate intervened in the unlikely form ofEl Brasero.”