THE AFTERNOON PASSED IN AGONIZING sluggishness. The aisles filled with an assortment of South Florida’s snobs. Waiters circulated with canapés and champagne. A trio played show tunes in the hall’s far end. Harry watched helplessly as Storm endured three hours of polite torture. A number of patrons stopped by to offer condolences. Others enquired over the future of Syrrell’s and departed with snide humor in their eyes. Harry could not tell which hurt Storm more. The stench of failure, and Sean’s absence, hung over their booth.
When it was over, Harry drove them back over the causeway and followed Storm’s terse directions to her gym, where she told him she was going to work out and then run to the apartment. She looked as if she was waiting for him to argue. Harry recognized a good head of steam when he saw one, and didn’t even bother to tell her to take care. He bought a Starbucks coffee, found himself a comfortable spot of shade, and practiced the art of waiting. Forty minutes later Storm came out wearing a sleeveless T and shorts of a very interesting length. She glared in his direction, then set off running. Harry tossed his coffee and dogged her in the car.
He parked in front of the apartment, then walked down Worth Avenue to the sandwich shop. When he returned he heard the shower running. Harry left Storm’s sandwich on the kitchen counter and took his own meal down to the waterfront. The yacht club started where Worth Avenue bent to join the river road. Harry seated himself on the first empty bench and watched the waters flame through another tropical display. A couple of the moored boats were interesting—steel hulls, originally designed as oceangoing tugs, refitted as pleasure craft but retaining their ability to handle heavy seas. Harry had nothing but scorn for most of the other vessels. Overpowered palaces with silly lines, designed to cushion their owners against any hint of real life. Harry had long ago split the world into two classes: natives who worked for a living and the breed who lived to buy the flavor of the month. People like Sean, who could handle big numbers and stay focused on life’s important issues, were rare indeed.
Harry returned to the apartment to find Storm seated on a counter stool, dressed in a white terry cloth robe, her hair done up in a towel. She was still pink from her run and the shower. The sandwich wrapper was open. Storm stared at the untouched meal as he entered and locked the door and walked over and sat down beside her. Up close he could smell the shampoo she had used. Storm looked about twelve years old. And so very sad.
Harry decided he might as well talk about him, since Sean was on both their minds. “I got to know your grandfather about fifteen years ago.”
“Is this where I’m supposed to say you can’t be that old?”
“Ouch.”
“How old are you, Harry?”
“Eat all your sandwich and I might tell you.” When she turned over the top bread and picked up a morsel of meat, he said, “I’m old enough to know better. But stick me in a suit and put a pretty lady on my arm, hey. Suddenly I’m open to arguments to the contrary.”
“Having you here makes me feel like he’s a lot closer.”
He found himself swallowing sorrow solid as a brick. “Funny. I was thinking the very same thing about you.”
They savored a shared silence. Then, “So you guys met.”
“Yeah, back before the last ice age. I’d heard about this guy, a gallery owner who had an interest in some pieces of mine. Which was completely new. Back then, treasure dogs sold through middlemen. Gallery types wouldn’t touch us with a barge pole. They took their cue from museum directors and the bureaucrats, who claimed we were all thieves. When we got together, Sean struck me as a real hard case.”
“Right the first time,” Storm said.
“He knew his stuff, though. And he asked questions about what he didn’t know. I didn’t trust him at first, and he didn’t have trouble with that either. He had no idea where the boundaries were between what he could ask and what I couldn’t answer. He just took what I gave. He ate information. He devoured it. I had no idea what to make of this guy, running a major art house, down on his hands and knees on this carpet that cost more than my boat, tracking on a hand-drawn map as I explained how we found the stern hold of my latest salvage. The stern hold, see, that’s where—”
Storm took up the line. “The captain kept a strongbox in his stern cabin where his owners stored gold for the voyage home. They made two keys to the strongbox, which the captain could not open. One key locked it in the New World or the Spice Islands, the other opened it back in Europe. The richest passengers also had their cabins at the rear, many of whom traveled with their own strongboxes. The captain usually had another chest where steerage passengers could store their valuables.”
“You’re definitely Sean’s granddaughter.”
“That’s right,” Storm said. “I am.”
“Sean refused to buy anything outright. He said he’d front me what I needed for the next voyage, and keep the rest for when I got back, minus his cut. This was…”
“Unheard of,” Storm said. “Impossible.”
“You got to understand, my profession attracts a lot of scallywags. A lot of salvagers are one notch above pirates. You can imagine what happened when word got around there was this gallery owner who was offering to handle salvaged goods for a commission.”
“He got laughed at.”
“Right out of the bars from Banda Ache to Jamaica. But there was something about him, I don’t know.”
“You trusted him,” Storm said. “And you made a friend.”
“A year or so later, I took him out on a salvage operation. We were working a merchant vessel that went down off the coast of Cozumel, just happened to land on a reef outcropping shallow enough for us to dive. Sean had never strapped into diving gear before. The guy was like a kid on safari. First time down, he found a gold chain. Just plucked it out of the sand. Almost blew his ventilator, shouting and dancing around.”
“He kept it in his office. I never knew where it came from.” She gave that a beat, then, “I don’t want to go to the reception tonight.”
Harry started picking meat off Storm’s sandwich. “If you’re looking for somebody to talk about obligations and all that, you’ve come to the wrong place.”
“Sean would want me to go.”
“I’ll tell you something about your grandfather. He’d either be your best buddy or make you want to beat him with a ball-peen hammer. Which I almost did, the last time we met.” Harry ate another bite. “Go, don’t go. Nobody here’s gonna complain one way or the other.”
THAT EVENING, AS STORM TURNED the car into the Breakers Hotel drive, Harry plucked a word right out of her head. “Memories.”
She dragged up enough air to ask, “Sean brought you here?”
“For the most expensive burger I’ve ever tasted. A hundred bucks.” They joined the line of cars waiting to divulge their glitzy loads. He inspected her in the glare of hotel lights. “You look great, by the way.”
“Thanks.” Storm wore a vintage Balenciaga gown she had found in a Palm Beach–style garage sale. It was fashioned in the thirties Art Deco style, of black and white silk velvet. “It was still in the dry cleaner’s bag from last year.”
“Same event?”
“Yes.”
“With Sean?”
“He used the event to announce I was taking over the Palm Beach shop.” It had also been the first time Sean had ever publicly introduced Storm as his granddaughter. She tried to offer Harry a smile. “Like you said, memories.”
“Say the word, we’re out of here. Until then, we’ll tough it out together.”
The car jockey opened her door and welcomed them to the Breakers. Storm started to rise from the car, then turned back. She inspected Harry carefully.
“What?”
She leaned forward and kissed Harry’s cheek. “Thanks for being here, Harry.”
Harry didn’t speak. But he rubbed the spot where her lips had been and gave her a look she carried out into the night.
Harry Bennett entered the Breakers Hotel with a boxer’s swagger and a total lack of guile. No matter how she might buff and shine the man, Harry would always remain a buccaneer. Wearing his midnight blue Armani and formal shirt with studs and black bow tie, Harry was handsome in the manner of a drill sergeant in full dress uniform. She gripped his arm and fed on his hard-earned confidence.
The Breakers had originally been built as an afterthought to Flagler’s Royal Poinciana Hotel, which had stood three miles further inland. Guests had often requested rooms close enough to hear the surf, so a smaller inn of cedar and pine had been erected on the tip of Flagler’s ten square miles of Palm Beach Island. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the demand to stay in the inn nicknamed the Breakers by its regulars was greater than at the inland palace. When the inn burned down three years later, Flagler ordered a new beachfront structure built in the style that came to be known as the Gilded Age.
The arriving guests made a stately procession down the Spanish baronial hall, beneath a cathedral ceiling adorned with royal crests. They passed through the main bar and entered the vast circular ballroom. For Storm, last year’s event had swept by in a flash of elation. Her necklace had become one of the evening’s most talked-over items. The emerald pendant had weighed in at sixty-one carats, the largest of twelve stones found in a stern lockbox on the Kristinya, a Dutch vessel sunk off Curacao in 1715. Storm had recounted the tale four times that night, until a Hollywood mogul bought it over champagne and canapés for his newest leading lady.
This year’s reception was filled with cold shoulders and knowing smirks and poisoned hugs. Harry took up station a few steps back, his stone-like demeanor telling everybody he had no interest in small talk. Storm stood on the outskirts of a cluster that did not quite shut her out. When a quartet began playing Brahms, she decided she had endured more than enough.
But a male voice chose that moment to say, “This must be so very hard for you, Ms. Syrrell.”
Storm made a half turn and found herself facing the man whose photograph she had just seen inside an FBI file. “Do I know you?”
“You have been pointed out to me.”
Harry noticed the change and stepped forward. “Everything all right?”
Storm lifted her chin, motioning him away. Harry took a step back, but his gaze never shifted. Storm said to the gentleman, “You worked with my grandfather?”
“We did business together for many years.” He sipped from his glass, revealing a gold cuff link with the largest star sapphire she had ever seen. “I have an item for sale. One I wish you to handle for me.”
Selim Arkut, that was the name Emma Webb had used. Storm put him down as Persian or Turkish, late sixties, black hair laced with silver, the profile of a nobleman, the nose of a bird of prey. “Our shop is in the process of closing.”
“I am not offering the item to your shop, Ms. Syrrell, but to you personally.”
The night swirled around her, only now it left her untouched. “Is the item in Palm Beach?”
“Perhaps.”
“How do you want—”
“It would be best if our discussion remained confidential. Most particularly in regards to your aunt.”
“What do you have against Claudia?”
But the man had vanished, and her question was directed at empty air.