“I hid it in there. The coin.”
“What?”
“Before I hitched a ride back to my boat yesterday. I couldn’t take a chance they were watching. Can’t let them get their hands on it. So, I hid it inside some sort of scrapbook that was in your chart table. The book was there yesterday, and now it’s gone.”
Behind him, tucked in among the books on sailing, emergency medicine, 12-volt electronics, and sail repair, she saw the scrapbook.
“Turn around,” she said. “It’s behind you. Next to the red book, The 12-volt Doctor’s Practical Handbook. I moved it last night.”
He twisted at the waist. “Damn. It’s hard to recognize spine out.” He pulled it out and handed it to her. “Look in the back,” he said. “Inside the last plastic sleeve. I hid it with a bunch of newspaper clippings in Spanish.”
She took the scrapbook from him but hesitated before opening it. The newspaper clippings were stories from La Republica and Diario del Sol she had saved, but never looked at once she’d returned stateside. That was nightmare country. She patted the last page and felt the bulk of the coin and chain. It slid out when she tilted the book on end and fell out with a solid clank onto the teak table.
He didn’t move to take it. “Pick it up,” he said. “Look at it.”
Riley set the knife down on the settee beside her. She picked up the coin. The heft of it was surprising. There were those words again: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.
He said, “It’s almost half an ounce of ninety percent fine gold — minted in Paris in 1899. There are plenty of the twenty-franc ones around, but they didn’t make many of these fifty-franc pieces. Hardly any made it into circulation.”
Riley turned the coin over and examined the design. It showed an angel depicted in profile, a male nude, well-muscled in the style of Greek statuary, with feathered wings sprouting from the back and a cloth thrown over one shoulder. The angel was writing on a stone tablet. The first word was Constitution. Beneath that there was something else, numbers maybe, but the print was too small to read. On the right of the angel was a rooster and on the left, a cup.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“There are tons of legends about these French Angel coins. They’re supposed to provide protection, good luck, health, you name it.”
“Back to luck again.”
He hunched his shoulders and spread his hands palms up. “It all started with the coin’s designer, Augustine Dupres. He was a medalist to King Louis XVI. After making several medallions in honor of the newly minted French Constitution, Dupres fell out of favor and was sentenced to death. According to the story, on the day of his execution, he knelt in his cell to pray, clutching the coin in his hand, and when the executioner saw a flash of sunlight reflected off the gold, he broke into tears and allowed Dupres to escape.” Cole chuckled.
“Quite a story,” she said.
“Oh, it gets better. See, it’s more likely that Dupres used the gold to bribe the guard, but from that day on, this design was known as the Lucky Angel. It wasn’t used again until 1871 when France started minting the twenty-franc coins. Those coins became good luck talismans for sailing ship captains, and fighter pilots have carried them from World War I to Vietnam and even now in Iraq.”
“So where are you going with all this history?”
“Give me a chance to finish. These fifty-franc coins were only minted intermittently between 1878 and 1899. Few were ever released into circulation. They were kept in the vaults of the French National Treasury — that is, until the Nazis invaded, stole the gold and sold it to the Swiss to finance the German war machine.” He paused and when she looked up at him, he said, “Or so the story goes.”
“And you know another version?”
He grinned. “Indeed I do.”
She didn’t know whether this was going to be another of his paranoid conspiracy tales, but the historical connection was intriguing. “Okay, you’ve hooked me. What happened?”
“Well, my father was British, you see, and a bit of an amateur historian. He wrote about this in his journals. His version states that in June, 1940, as the Nazi Panzer tanks rolled toward Paris, a French submarine was in dry dock in Brest. A small group of Free French patriots, one of whom owned a small winery outside Paris, did not want to see their country’s gold fall into Nazi hands. They had been planning for this day and they had made several hundred special Champagne bottles. They loaded several trucks with what looked like a simple wine shipment. They took off on a dash for Brest.” He paused and grinned.
She couldn’t help it. She had to ask. “Did they make it?”
He nodded. “Although there are no reports or cargo lading documents, my father claimed to have found proof that in the dark of night, with no help from the crew, they loaded all the wine crates into the sub’s cargo hold. On June 18th, 1940, she sailed for England. Those resistance fighters who stayed behind were killed as the Nazis rolled across France. But, on June 20th, Surcouf arrived in Plymouth, England, tied up at the Devonport Naval Dockyards, and no one but her captain knew she had more than a thousand pounds of gold from the French National Treasury hidden in her hold.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Aboard the Shadow Chaser
March 26, 2008
10:00 p.m.
Cole climbed up the rope ladder that he had left rigged off his trawler’s starboard bulwark earlier that afternoon. After helping Riley swing her bare legs over the rough metal, he hollered out. “Lucy, I’m home!” in his best Ricky Ricardo imitation.
Theo’s lanky frame appeared in the doorway of the pilot house, and he gave a brief shake of his head as he took in the fact that his captain, who was wearing only his Speedos, had brought along a guest. “Late for dinner, Captain, as usual.”
“Food is exactly what we need. We’re starved.” He grabbed Riley’s hand and led her forward. “Theo, meet Captain Maggie Riley, who prefers to be called Riley, of the good ship Bonefish, yonder. She sailed me home this evening when our friends the Brewsters showed up again.”
Mention of the Brewsters did not deter Theo’s interest in their guest. “Welcome aboard,” he said. After shaking Riley’s hand, Theo pushed his glasses up his nose to get a better look at her. He stood a full head taller than Riley, and Cole watched him lean back and give her body a quick up and down assessment. Even in the weak light from the pilot house, she was bound to notice, and Cole hoped she understood what it was like for a couple of guys to spend all these weeks on a working boat with no women around. And certainly none who looked like she did.
“Glad to be here,” she said.
Theo bent down and in a stage whisper said into her ear, “Be careful.” He pointed to Cole. “You do him one little favor and in his world, you’re his ally for life.”
Cole saw Riley smile. Theo, with his clipped, British-Caribbean accent had that effect on people.
“Thanks for the warning,” she whispered back.
“I made the mistake some months back,” Theo said, “and he shanghaied me proper. Been shackled to this bloody ship ever since.”
Cole waved Theo aside. “Blasphemy!” He leaned in and whispered. “Don’t mind him. He thinks I don’t pay him enough. Fact is, I can’t afford what he’s worth, but we can’t let him know that.” Then raising his voice, he said, “Come along, I smell young master Theo’s cooking, and it is not to be missed.”
Either the meal of grilled mahi-mahi, rice and peas, and fried plantains was one of Theo’s best efforts or it was the company. Cole tended to think it was the latter. After pouring Riley a glass of chilled Chardonnay, he had slipped into his cabin and changed into his best pair of cargo shorts and the one clean T-shirt he had left. Then by turns, he and Theo regaled Riley throughout the meal with stories of their adventures and misadventures in rebuilding the Shadow Chaser and designing her for maritime salvage work. They told tales of the Outer Banks and the Brewster brothers. They were acting a little like Peter and the Lost Boys fighting for Wendy’s attention. But it was terrific to have a woman on board. She smelled good and she laughed at his jokes. Right there, he thought, it was a massive improvement over Theo.
