The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [184]
She turned back and waved good-bye. “No thanks, Brad. Just go home.”
“Okay, take it easy, Annie. Want me to call Sam?”
“Just go home.”
Chapter 47
Practically Yours
It was a long trip south down through the keys on US 1. Passengers in other cars waved happily at the pale blue 1957 Thunderbird coupe with its white top and whitewalls. The car, said Dan, probably looked to them like some old lost innocent dream of American freedom. Dan and Annie crossed bridge after bridge, heading toward Naval Air Station, Key West, at Sigsbee Park, where they would meet at JIATF EAST (the Joint InterAgency Task Force East) with agents and officers involved in “the Peregrine matter.”
From Key West, the southernmost tip of Florida, Jack Peregrine had been illegally flying in and out of Cuba in his Cessna Amphibian for years. While allegedly on “fishing trips” in the waters off the key, he had actually been smuggling goods into the country for Miami businessmen expatriated from the island. Dan’s investigation had never been able to prove exactly what the goods were: propaganda material, laundered money, weapons, drugs. Possibly Jack had also been smuggling on his own into the U.S.—maybe illegal immigrants, maybe artifacts like the Queen of the Sea herself. Dan wasn’t sure. He’d been focused not on Jack’s smuggling but his fraud scams.
Now Cuba (represented by officials at Museo Habana in Plaza de la Revolución) was claiming that Jack had stolen their sixteenth-century statue of the Virgin Mary. While they did not appear to have known about the relic until Feliz Diaz announced he was giving it to a cathedral in Miami, they had immediately insisted that because five hundred years ago La Reina had sunk in Cuba’s territorial waters it was therefore legally a national antiquity; to keep it would be diplomatic trouble. The FBI was in charge of getting it back for them.
Driving to Key West, Dan and Annie practiced what Annie would say in her “interview” with FBI and NAS officials at the Sigsbee meeting this evening. They also talked about their past marriages and their childhoods and their likes and dislikes. They had no trouble finding worlds to talk about.
In Islamorada, Dan suggested that Annie, exhausted, might want to nap. She insisted she wasn’t tired but her eyes kept shutting, the long curve of lash closing over blue. Finally she nodded against his shoulder. Later, drifting awake, she listened to him singing along with Sarah Vaughan. “What a difference a day makes. Twenty-four little hours.”
“You’re a terrible singer,” she mumbled drowsily.
“Awful,” he agreed. “But you can’t stop enjoying things just because you’re bad at them.”
It was a surprising point of view for Annie, who had always believed you had to be first or right or best or why bother. But then everything felt like a surprise to her now, including the realization that she’d been so often wrong. Riding in this car half-asleep, hearing the whir of the wheels, soft jazz on the radio, it all felt so surprising and yet so easy; it all felt comfortable enough for her to drift in and out of sleep, just as if she were home in Emerald. “Is everything okay?” she asked Dan.
“Fine,” he promised.
She’d certainly been wrong to so dislike him, and not that long ago either, just like…like, she yawned, like Claudette Colbert in…
The car hummed over miles of bridge, island to island.
The next thing Annie knew, she was staring up at gold in the afternoon sun. Dan was ending a phone call. He pointed as they passed a sign for Key West. She stretched, yawning, feeling curiously rested. “We’re in Key West? I never go to sleep like that,” she said. “Are we driving straight to Sigsbee?’
“No, they just postponed. We don’t meet them till 7 a.m., tomorrow.”
“I thought it was urgent, that we had to be there tonight.”
Dan lifted his hips to slip the phone back in his jeans pocket. “Don’t ask the Feds to explain themselves. They’re flying somebody named McAllister Fierson in from the State Department