III

“One must have lived through such moments to realize their tragic and passionate beauty. Hundreds and thousands of men in the vigor of their youth are massed together awaiting the shock.”

—“Captain X,” Scribner’s Magazine, May, 1916
*Describing the Second Battle of the Champagne*

WHEN THE SUN CAME UP, IT WAS TO A HARD, SHARP WETNESS THAT sliced to the bone. Joe took a clean suit and wool overcoat from Gresham’s steamer trunk before sending the trunk to the ship ahead of him. Gresham had been slightly less than an inch taller and only a bit wider in girth than Joe, so the suit fit Joe with the looseness of someone who had recently lost weight, or who had just recovered from an illness, or returned from war. He left the hotel and began his walk to the docks, steam rising from the gutters as he stepped across them outside his hotel’s entrance. The day was cold enough that he considered wearing Gresham’s rough buffalo robe but decided that the short walk would keep him warm inside the heavy weave of his overcoat.

The Berengaria, a twenty-year-old prize of war, would return him to France. The only other times he had sailed on a ship of that size was going to and returning from the war. The large and stout ship with its three black funnels scraping the heavy sky rested like a steel monolith in its berth. Ropes and boarding planks tethered the ship to the old wooden dock.

Waiting until a crowd arrived, he fell in with a group of college men as they boarded. He was the only sober one of the bunch. Gresham’s passport was looked at and the ticket was stamped. A young officer with red hair and more freckles than whiskers welcomed him to the Berengaria. After finding his cabin, Joe returned to the deck for the embarkation. Once underway, the ship’s broad beam would cut a wide and steady line through the ocean, leaving his past in its wake.

Standing near the stern of the big ship as it pulled away, he watched New York and America slip to the horizon and then drown into the line of the sea. In so many ways, his life had been formed in the crucible of that European war, and now, on that large and three-stacked ship, he was returning to the maw of the furnace that had forged him.

He spent the remainder of that day and most of the next three in his cabin, taking his meals there and venturing out early in the morning or late at night, avoiding others and hoping nobody recognized either him or the name he sailed under. He exhausted the hours inside his cabin in unsuccessful attempts to not think about the last few days. He tried reading Ulysses, the book that had been delivered to Gresham, but found it required more attention than he could muster. He played solitaire with a deck of cards found among the clothes in Gresham’s trunk, disassembled and cleaned the Smith & Wesson taken from the sheriff and the Lugar taken from Gresham’s home, twice read the Scribner’s magazine and a copy of Mencken’s Black Mask he had bought at the pier terminal before boarding, slept unsoundly for short periods of time.

In the middle of the third night at sea, he woke with the realization that he had become a fugitive from more than the police and the near past. His flight from prosecution formed something of a pattern. Since returning from the war, Joe had sensed that he had slipped to the leeward side of his life. Before the war he may have thought in terms of tomorrows and the molding of the possible. Since returning, however, he thought mostly in terms of the past and of what he no longer was.

In increments his world and then his future had been removed from him. Alice Bright’s letter had not been a complete surprise—too many men in his unit had received their own versions for it to be so—but, still, it had removed what he thought was his last tie to the land around Terceo, Colorado. With his family dead and his father’s ranchland foreclosed on, he had no place to return to. With Alice Bright married to another man, he had nobody to return to.

With nothing else, he stayed in the first place he woke up sober after leaving the Army in New York. It was not his past nor was it a future. It was barely a present. It was more like an escape.

Even so, like the rim of a turning wheel, the world was rolling forward. He felt that he was being dragged along as well, and that possibly he would find in Paris some purchase on firm ground and be able to chart a course for himself. Maybe, he thought, once he had extricated himself from the slough in which he had found himself, he would finally return to Southern Colorado.

He did not have a suite, but the cabin Gresham had reserved was spacious with bed, end tables, matching sitting chairs and round maple table, desk and high-back chair, and maple dresser in a deco style. The room held a tattered luxury that spoke to its magnificent past in the decades before the war when she was a grand lady of the sea. Like so much else that had entered the war’s crimson insanity, the Berengaria had finished the war almost a shell. The ship’s renovation returned only a degree of its previous stature, a façade of the past. Joe examined the contents of Gresham’s trunk. He could wear his own suits during the day and use Gresham’s dinner jackets and tuxedo coat in the evening. Joe had never worn knickers as a child and saw no reason why a man would ever willingly allow himself to don the clothes of a painted Willie, so he refolded the pairs of plus-fours Gresham had packed and returned them to the steamer trunk. The rest of the clothes he transferred from the trunk to the cabin’s dresser.

Joe felt certain that if he was not recognized or recognized as not being Wynton Gresham, that he would not stand out on the ship. The very last thing he needed was to be discovered as a stowaway, arrested, and detained in Europe for American authorities who would soon find a warrant for his arrest, so for those days he had become a dead man, Wynton Gresham, a prospect that did not disturb Joe nearly to the degree as the idea of being arrested as the murderer of that same dead man.

Inside the steamer trunk’s sock drawer, he found another envelope and whistled a long and low note when he opened it and found $800 in cash. That plus his own bank cash meant he could live quite well in Paris for at least a year. Long enough, he hoped, for Sheriff Jackson to discover who had actually killed Gresham or long enough, if need be, to establish a new identity in that old city.

When Joe took his lunch in his cabin on the voyage’s fourth day, the waiter mentioned that cabined meals were something of a custom. Many travelers needed a day or two in which to acclimate their legs as well as their stomachs to the gentle rolling of even a large ship like the Berengaria. Brought to him with his meal that afternoon was a simple note that was being sent to all passengers. A turbine had been damaged on the previous west-bound journey, “battling against high seas at a high rate of speed.” Thus, the note continued, the Berengaria would “omit calling at Plymouth and proceed directly to Cherbourg then Southampton for repairs.”

With a whiskey in hand, he toasted the smiles of fortune, “Thank you, Neptune, you old man of the sea.”

He ate fully, for not docking at Plymouth meant one less customs agent he might have to encounter, and unlike the French, who were notorious for their laxity in such matters, the British were their stodgy and anal selves. While he felt claustrophobic in his cabin, he was pleased with the prospect of leaving Britain on the northern horizon as the ship continued on to France.

After his lunch, he studied what little he knew about the mystery that had landed him on the ship. He unfolded his papers and placed them side-by-side on the round table, turning the sheet with its written list next to the list of names he had copied from Gresham’s notepad. Above them, he set the photograph he had taken during his escape from Gresham’s house.

For hours and through the afternoon, with his fingers tracing the outline of his face, he studied the items. He knew a relationship existed between the notes and the photograph but did not know what that relationship might be nor its extent. He translated his thoughts to paper, in notes and outlines and complete sentences, then crossed each out as each proceeded blindly to a dead end. The associations extended no further than the obvious—Gresham had begun a manuscript exploring the disastrous Battle of the Champagne, a manuscript for which he had probably been murdered.

Bending over the table to examine the photograph more closely in the looseness of the cabin’s ceiling light, he searched the grainy images of six men staring back at the camera from the duck board of a muddy trench, one man standing and the other five kneeling or sitting against the thatched and reinforced side. All six had dressed against the weather, wearing long wool coats with collars turned up. Their helmet rims cast straight shadows across their foreheads. The man standing, Gresham, turned partially to the side, looked across his shoulder at the camera and stood compacted against a cold wind with only the side of his face fully available to the light. A mist of steam rose transiently from the cup he held in his right hand as the others ate from their mess kits. The men who offered a smile offered only beige smiles. Their expressions were distant, except one, a stoop-shouldered Englishman whose face was partially hidden inside the shadow of his helmet. Across the bottom of the photograph, in the loose, sprawling hand Joe associated with the French, a caption had been written in white ink: “Champagne, 20 September 1915.” Beneath that, in smaller script as though an afterthought another date and a quotation: “25 September 1915—The feast of vultures, and the waste of life.” The later date was the date of the destruction that was the Champagne.

“The feast of vultures,” Joe said aloud. “I know that banquet well.” His words did not echo in the empty cabin although they might as well have.

Down the trench from the six men pictured, Joe could make out the hunched figures of a mass of men standing behind short ladders with a hand raised to the withy sticks. Joe recognized, even in the grainy photograph that he held in his fingers, the repose of men readying themselves for sudden death. A photograph of men who had gone to war with the optimism of youth and courage and had met a force much larger than them. There, in the Champagne as in Ypres and Gallipoli and Belleau Wood, the abstracts of nationalism had been defeated by the gross realities of violence.

Joe assumed the five men in the foreground of the photograph with Gresham were those on the list, one of whom would be Paul Dillard, the name on the envelope he had found in the desk, but Joe could not tell whose face might belong to which name. The name, Dillard, sounded English, but that helped little. He felt as though he was putting together a puzzle without the benefit of a guiding picture on the pieces. The hours of studying the papers and the photograph left Joe with little more than the certainty of their importance, the same sense he had when he had first laid them out on the maple table. Finally he pushed himself from the table and dressed for dinner.

It was time to join the living.

He was not surprised but impressed at seeing the ship at sail in the open ocean as he walked along the promenade deck toward the dining room. The sea was calm and black, the weather mild. Joe stopped a moment to view the Atlantic, its blackness spreading out from the ship until reaching the equal blackness of the night sky. The only noises he could hear came from the ship’s steady movement through the water. He bent over the railing to view the wake but could not. He could only imagine its white-topped curl snaking into the night.

He stopped for a moment to smoke a cigarette and taste the salt air. Three women, young enough not to have been affected by the war, stood nearby. They glanced at him and huddled for a talk, and Joe looked at them and felt nothing, no stirring of animal desire. They were children, not in age maybe but in experience. He envied their careless lives of innocence, of ignorance, but he wanted nothing to do with them. If he were to tell them what he had seen, they would run from him as they might run from a carnival freak show. His world was no longer the world they inhabited. Anymore, if he wanted a woman, he’d buy her. Just like in Paris when he was on leave during the war—he didn’t need to talk and he didn’t need to listen.

They walked past him as they left the railing like a line of dancing girls, and each looked the echo of the others—tall, thin, coquettish smile, cloche hat, oversized shoes that flapped noisily as they walked. Each carried a copy of Town Tattle, as if it were a real newspaper.

The first winked at Joe as she passed and said, “Wasn’t it nice?”

The second added, “Wasn’t it sweet?”

The third finished with “Wasn’t it good?”

Joe felt vaguely nauseated.

He walked along the empty deck with a continued feeling of unease at the luxurious and ostentatious beauty of the floating city. The floating mountain of light on which he walked seemed transitory in the night and in certain unformed ways he preferred the heavy-laden rocking and cramped quarters of the ships he had sailed in before and following the war. Like the world he knew, they had been stripped of their disguises. The Berengaria, however, had re-established its disguise as easily as having had its name changed from the German Imperator, which it had been for the first part of its life before the English had appropriated it as a war reparation.

He entered the dining room and stood implanted in its entry. A Louis XIV dining room spread out before him complete with an oak-beamed ceiling and paintings on the walls between floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the blackness. He looked upon this grand beauty but could not shake the feeling that all he saw was the façade of a past century, one that had been lost. The people seated at their tables wearing tuxedos and evening gowns were the last ghosts to be exorcised.

A steward stepped toward Joe and asked as though he did not necessarily care, “Your name, sir?”

“Joe—” Joe began without thinking, then added, “Gresham.”

“Joe Gresham?” The steward looked him up and down, surveying the loose fit of his tuxedo and passing judgment, mentally assigning Joe to an appropriate table, one far from the Captain’s table.

“Wynton, actually,” Joe said.

The steward huffed and consulted his list, taking his time, looking up twice to study a table and shaking his head, then looking back at his list then glancing again at Joe’s ill fit and again at a table and finally saying, with a wave of his hand, “This way, sir.”

They rounded the room until arriving at a table for six already serving five.

“Mr. Joe Winston,” the steward announced as he pulled out a chair, removed a white flag on the table marking the seat as vacant, and left.

“Gresham, actually,” Joe said to blank stares, forks of food held between open mouths and the table. “Wynton Gresham.”

Introductions at the table were made with difficulty as Joe found himself at a table of Swedes who spoke as much English as he did Swedish. They stumbled through the civilities, mirroring each other’s courtesy. The Swedes had eaten early and were finishing their entrées as Joe joined them. While Joe ordered his aperitif of Gendarme Herring, they began their ices. Debating for some time in their language that sounded like gargling to Joe, they finally decided to take their coffees elsewhere, maybe their stateroom, and left Joe alone at the table following apologies and bows and handshakes.

Joe watched them leave, as relieved as they obviously were at not having to fake niceties to someone they did not understand. When he looked around the room, he saw no suggestion of a ship at sea. The room, with miniature potted trees bordering the entrance and panels and paintings lining the walls, resembled more a large hotel’s dining area than that of a ship. The room could easily seat three hundred. Each table was covered with white linen. Lighting the room were honey-colored domes hung from the ceiling and brass torchieres along the walls. One entire wall of glass looked out over the water with tall windows veiled at the top in frostwork and curtained with patterned silk. Small tables for two lined those windows and in the interior of the room were tables of varying sizes, but none larger than for a seating of twenty. Joe felt in awe at what money could purchase—if not happiness then at least a big boat in which to cruise right up next to happiness.

He finished his aperitif and ordered Atlantic salmon for his entrée. Throughout his dinner, he listened in on the conversations at the tables near him, the games of circles each couple or group played. At the table behind his, an Englishman had been captured in conversation by an American couple from Oklahoma. The couple had taken a liking to a painting hanging in the bedroom of their suite and described it in some detail to the Englishman.

“That,” the Englishman said, “is a reproduction of ‘Flower Girl,’ George Frederick Watts’s famous painting. I served with his great-grandson at Passchendaele, a topping man.”

“It’s famous then?” the woman said more than asked.

“Oh, yes, absolutely.”

“I told you it was famous.”

“Yes, I heard him,” the husband said, his voice fat and jowly. “A copy, you say? Tell me, Huntington, where is the original?”

Huntington, the Englishman, said with obvious pride in a voice that bordered on but did not fully slip over to arrogance, “It belongs to the Duke of Marlboro and hangs in Grosvenor House, London. I have seen it often on my visits there.”

“How much is it?”

“‘How much,’ sir?”

Joe closed his eyes and pictured the trio. Huntington in his sporting tweed and pencil-thin moustache, long and aquiline nose, dashing in the country gentleman way. The American husband, a pig packer from the Panhandle who had followed Hormel’s lead in creating a disassembly plant and had become rich from selling pounds of bacon and ham and roasts. The wife, a woman larger even than her fat husband. She had never been as thin as she thought she was and would never be anywhere near as urbane as she wanted. But, then again, Joe thought, in Oklahoma, who would notice?

“Yes. The price. How much?”

“I doubt that it is for sale . . . at any price.” His words carried the warmth of a London fog.

The husband huffed. “It’s a famous painting?”

“Very famous and a great work by one of England’s finest artists. I recall—” and he was cut off by the husband.

“We will be in London in January. Grosvenor House? Watts? Enough money should buy any painting, don’t you think?”

Joe quit listening. In the past few years he had too often heard the same exchange, not about a painting but about an ideal, a standard reduced. Another intrinsic element lost. As when the newel post is removed from a staircase, the staircase loses strength and tumbles, the removal of what Joe and his generation had been taught were the cores of civilization had resulted in a generation destroyed by war.

The next afternoon, heavily bundled inside Gresham’s buffalo robe, Joe left his cabin for the men’s smoking room. A room with the rough, stretched leather elegance of a men’s club, it offered liquor and beer and conversation to those who wanted them, liquor and beer and privacy to those who wanted them. Joe considered the liquor, decided on the beer, and sought out the privacy.

Dozens of men loitered about the room, sitting together under the smoky lights, talking too loudly as men almost drunk often do. They fit into their booths, behind their whiskey and beers, surrounded by the haze of floating cigar smoke to debate the world’s problems.

“What about this upstart—Hitler?” one man asked another as they held their brandies in one hand, their cigars in the other. Neither really looked at the other, and they both spoke as though scripted. “Do you think he’s a communist?”

“No. Old Henry Ford wouldn’t be his best friend if he were.”

They nodded their heads and moved on to the next subject, pleased that they had at least settled that little bit.

Another table kept a livelier discussion running on how to approach Clemenceau’s call for America’s return to Europe to police the German stockpiling of weapons. Another table wagered on Dempsey’s wrestling match with “Strangler” Lewis to see whose sport was tougher, a debate that ended with two at the table taking things outside. A couple of other men talked like reporters on their way to the conference in Lausanne about the shipping problems along the Dardanelles. Joe kept away from them all. None of their words seemed to strike very deep for him, but the noise, the ambient buzz of all those conversations, settled around him, allowing him to relax for a few moments in his anonymity.

The room held a rustic comfort in its feel and smell of worn leather and rubbed wood, whiskey and cigar smoke. A few men had tipped their heads in Joe’s direction when he had entered, but neither they nor he offered to share a conversation. He sat in a large corner chair, leather and well worn, and eased himself behind a five-day-old copy of the New York Times, not the international edition but the New York morning edition from the day of the ship’s launch. He searched the paper for any mention of Gresham and found none. By the time his third stout arrived, he was rereading past news from before the departure, enjoying a comfortable detachment from the place and actions that he had left four days and a thousand miles behind him.

When the cabin boy first walked through the smoking room, Joe did not even notice his call. Eventually, though, the boy’s words penetrated his trance, “Cable for Mr. Gresham. Mr. Wynton Gresham. Cable for Mr. Gresham.”

Joe folded his paper on his lap and called over the boy, tipping him before settling back in the chair. His intrusion into Gresham’s life, while never a game, took a ghostly turn as he fingered the cable’s envelope. He rested his head on the back of the chair and scanned the wood ceiling, finding only shadows and darkened wood.

The feeling of communing so closely with the dead had never rested well with Joe. It bored a hollowness through him, a white vacancy that emptied him, and he closed his eyes and steadied his breathing. He traced the seams of the envelope as though they were scars, lightly leveling his fingertips across the paper.

“Bad news, Mr. Gresham?”

Joe opened his eyes. The Englishman Huntington from the previous night’s conversation at the nearby table stood over him, well dressed in buttoned suit and knotted Oxford tie, hair slicked, and eyes steeled. On the surface, Huntington looked like too many officers Joe had seen in the war, men who cared less about other men’s lives than about their own polish. Joe never felt comfortable around men so quick to glorify themselves.

Huntington was a tall man, tall and thin and perfectly groomed. A man well bred. He had a half-inch scar at the bridge of his nose and his nose had shifted slightly to the left. That and another scar, slightly longer and razor thin, along his right cheekbone gave him the dashing look of a soldier of fortune. That look was made more so by the cock of the man’s eyebrow and slant of his smile.

Huntington wore a red and blue lapel pin that Joe recognized as from the British Fourth Army, Rawlinson’s group that had lost so many men during the Somme offensive. This man, Huntington, had been an officer. And from the scar on his nose and the sadness in his eyes, Joe could see that Huntington had been at the front of his men when they went over the top. He had received his pin honestly, along with his scars—for combat and not for drawing a general’s bath.

It was an earned sadness drawn with a deep sense of something ruined that Joe saw in the man’s eyes. The look of someone who had been there. It was a look that only another member of that club might understand. Others might recognize the sloe slant and comment on how that man seemed lost in some way; those of the brotherhood, regardless of allegiance or class, however, realized the cause.

“James Huntington,” he said, extending his hand for Joe to shake then sitting across from him. He removed a silver cigarette case from his inside pocket, opened and removed one, and tapped the cigarette against the case a few times, returned the case to its pocket and lit the cigarette. A drift of smoke made him squint at Joe.

“I could not help but overhear your name,” he said, leaning back and crossing his legs.

“Do we know each other?” Joe asked.

“No, no,” he said with a rakish flick of his hand. “My cousin, though, served with you. Thomas Wilde. You and he were together at the Champagne.” He breathed in and exhaled another plume of smoke. “Nasty battle, that Champagne. Worse, I think, than the Somme. At least we had a bloody chance, nobody selling us out before the scrape began.”

Joe nodded. He remembered the name from Gresham’s list, but with nothing more he couldn’t talk about Thomas Wilde. He said nothing, nodding in a way that he hoped sent a message of acceptance.

“Expecting a problem?” Huntington asked, nodding toward the cable.

“No.” He glanced at the cable and shook his head.

“I just thought by how you were avoiding the wire that you might have trepidations as to its contents, old man.”

“No. Nothing like that. I was just enjoying being at sea and away from any business.” Joe smiled. “Prolonging the eventual.”

“I see.” He slid back the cuff of his shirt to look at his watch. “Well, I was on my way to a dinner engagement when I heard your name. I do wish to talk with you, however, at a later time.”

Huntington stood, nodded in that English way of almost bowing, and walked slowly from the room. In the wake of Huntington’s cigarette, Joe was left wondering whether that had been a coincidence. Not likely, echoing the sheriff’s words. While Joe believed in coincidences in general, he did not trust them when they actually happened. And here, with Huntington, was more grist for his mental mill to grind away on. Huntington knew that Gresham was on the Berengaria, but Huntington did not know Gresham personally.

Joe didn’t like posing so publicly as Gresham with someone who might be able to identify his impersonation. He had little choice. He breathed heavily and slipped the edge of his pocket knife under the envelope’s fold and opened it to study the message on the yellow paper:

GRESHAM—

WILL BE PLEASED TO SEE YOU—STOP—AGREE W PREMISE—

WILL TALK PARIS—STOP—DILLARD

He held it open in front of him, looking over the words, searching for meaning. Dillard’s premise was most likely associated with Gresham’s manuscript, and Joe had an idea of what it might entail, although nothing more than a vaguely formed notion, no specifics. He imagined this Dillard having a copy of the manuscript or at least a detailed summary. He had read and agreed with something Gresham had written, something both men had known about and had possibly shared in experience. Joe folded the paper back into the envelope and tucked it safely in his coat pocket. The matter of clearing his name with the police in Greenwich might come in course, if Dillard did have a copy of the manuscript or could at least explain that premise he agreed upon.

Joe removed the wire and reread it before returning it to his pocket, and he filled in a scenario for the night when Gresham was killed. The men had come as representatives of Dillard, pretending to be friends of a friend, bringing a copy of Joyce’s book as well as news about Gresham’s former comrade. A little lie told at Gresham’s front door and the men were welcomed inside, offered a drink.

He considered what happened next. They offered to return to Paris with the manuscript, and Gresham would have informed them that it was unnecessary since he had already booked passage. They killed him, they probably would have anyway, and took the boxed manuscript.

Joe was startled by the sound of a bell. He looked around quickly, not quite certain where he was before he saw the room’s movement. The dinner call roused the roomful of men to the dining room like the Angelus calling the Catholic faithful. Joe fell in behind the other men moving slowly from their comfort to join wives and family. As the room emptied, Joe noticed two men near the door who did not leave their seats and who watched him. He met their stares long enough to know that they held an interest in him. He looked over his shoulder to see if they followed him from the room but they did not.

Joe checked his buffalo robe and was again escorted to join the Swedes. Again their conversation was polite but limited, and again the Swedes left quickly and Joe sat alone to finish his dinner. A five-piece string orchestra played Edwardian music, orchestral songs by Wood and Beecham that Joe remembered from his short time in a British convalescence hospital in Calais. Following a meal of tournedos and morels on a bed of braised cabbage, Joe drank a cup of weak coffee. Before leaving, he ordered a bottle of Bushmills to be sent to his cabin. He took the stairs to the “C” level and walked the deck back to his room, holding the buffalo robe closed tight against the winter cold and stopping once to look out into the dark from the amber-lit ship. He removed the buffalo robe upon entering the hallway and carried it over one arm.

His cabin was quiet and dark and slightly rolling in the calm sea as he entered.

Once the door was shut behind him, a flash of light erupted inside his head as a blow glanced off his temple. He fell to the floor, the room’s darkness his only shield from further punishment. Someone kicked out at him, but the kick landed against his shoulder. He rolled away from the kick then quickly back to grab hold of the man’s leg. He stood, lifting the leg and driving the man to the floor with the calf held tight against his chest. Joe let loose and fell with his entire weight on the intruder who exhaled a loud groan followed by the sucking sound of a man trying to find his breath. Joe raised up and punched into the darkness, finding the man’s chest and again finding the man’s neck and again punched at where he thought the man’s face to be. Another groan followed and he thought he must have finished his attacker.

He began to stand, but was stopped short by a hard blow between his shoulders. He fell back to the cabin floor, sucking hard for a breath. None came. His breathing, when he did finally regain it, came slow and laborious, as from a worn leather bellows. He could not rise and felt no strength in his arms or his legs, just a series of spasms as he struggled to regain his footing. He panicked and reached to find his gas mask even though his mind told him that he had already been exposed too long, long enough for his skin to blister and his eyes to close shut and allow only permanent darkness. Those actions and those thoughts, however, coming within a second that seemed like a threshold to eternity, faded as quickly as they had appeared.

A hard kick landed against his side as he rose to hands and knees followed by a series of punches. Within the room’s darkness, few of the punches landed with exacting force, but the number that did find the surface of his neck and back and then his face and chest as he fell and rolled away left their imprint. Before he passed out, a glaze of light from the opening door crossed over him. In his blurred state it appeared like the wavering light of a candle. All he saw of his intruders were the silhouetted shapes of two forms leaving the room and shutting the door behind them, shutting him into a double darkness.

He woke some time later to the sound of someone knocking on his door. He tried to speak, but the only sound that came from his mouth was like the gargled cackle of a pullet. The knock continued. He lay back in the dark room and let them knock. He lay on his side with drool crusted in the corner of his mouth, his face raw, his body a tender bruise, his senses battered.

When he realized that the person knocking on his door had probably been a cabin boy with his whiskey, he cursed. There were only a few things he felt he needed at that moment. Bushmills was high on the list.

He pushed himself from the floor and steadied himself against the reading table, found the pull cord and turned on the table’s reading lamp. There had been nothing professional about how the room had been searched, no order and no means. Just a matter of having spilled the contents of every drawer in the dresser as well as the steamer trunk, stripping and overturning the bed, piling every piece of clothing in the middle of the room as though readying it for a bonfire.

He sat on the empty bedsprings, one hand rubbing his forehead where it had broken his body’s free fall against the carpeted floor and the other wrapped around his chest. Joe knew what the trespassers had wanted for there was little reason to be so thorough if it were only about money, which he kept clipped inside his pockets in case he needed to make a quick bribe. He also knew that they had not found what they wanted, for he did not have it. Had it not hurt so badly to do so, he would have laughed at the irony of it all: He had hoped to become known as Wynton Gresham, and now he had paid a price for that. Someone thought he was Gresham, maybe they were connected to Gresham’s killers in Greenwich and thought that they had failed, now they may try finishing things during the cross-Atlantic.