Pacino put on his cover and walked on the plywood and cans, hunched over, to the ladderway to the plug hatch. It was almost 1630. He’d need to hurry to make it across town to his apartment and change before going to the XO’s. He climbed out of the hull and looked down at the vessel, knowing that in the last month, she and her crew had assassinated Elias Sotheby. Farther down the pier, he turned to glance back at Vermont, which lay quietly at her mooring, acting innocent, but hiding deep and violent secrets.
3
Jeremiah Seamus Quinnivan’s Virginia Beach house looked like ten thousand others in the suburbs of Norfolk, Virginia. When Pacino cut the engine on the old Corvette, it was 1850, ten minutes before the appointed time. He’d be damned if he’d be late for the first thing he was ordered to do, especially when cautioned by Dankleff to be spot on-time.
For the last two hours, his mind had been so filled with what Quinnivan had told him about the attack on Elias Sotheby’s yacht that he realized for those hours he hadn’t thought about Carrie Alameda. And with that thought, the grief came crashing back to him, as hard as it had been before, but now made worse by the guilt of forgetting her. For just the slightest moment he could swear he could feel her presence in the car sitting next to him. Hoping he could somehow connect to her, he spoke aloud to the passenger seat.
“Carrie. I miss you. I miss you terribly. I think about you all the time. I hope you’re okay, wherever you are.” His voice trembled and then broke on the last phrase.
He waited, wondering if he’d sense something. A scent of her, or the feeling of a caress on his face. There was nothing physical, but maybe the slightest feeling of something peaceful came into his mind, almost a soothing feeling. For some moments he shut his eyes and tried to explore the sensation to see if it were real, but then his watch beeped that it was two minutes to the hour of 1900.
He took a deep breath and told himself he was back on duty and to swallow his overwrought emotions. He dried his eyes and got out of the car, which he’d parked across the street from the house, and suddenly noticed how odd it was that a ship’s party this big didn’t result in a street packed with parked cars. Maybe all the officers had taken car services over, he thought, which would have been a good idea if the amount of drinking he predicted actually happened.
Feeling uncertain and nervous, but trying to make his face seem composed and cool, he rang the doorbell. He hoped he had dressed properly for the occasion. Quinnivan had said it would be a casual thing, saying even shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops would be allowable. Pacino had dressed in jeans, the kind with no holes or rips in them, a dark blue button-down Oxford shirt and his brown, scuffed harness boots. Though it was May, the weather hadn’t awakened to spring yet and it was on the cool side, so Pacino had debated tossing on a leather jacket, but decided it would be silly just for the walk from the car to the front door.
The door opened and Pacino found himself looking slightly up at a stunning, slender tall brunette woman, perhaps thirty-five, with beautiful, bright sky-blue eyes, pouty lips and the features of a model or a newscaster, dressed in tall dark heels, a tight charcoal pencil dress that looked like cashmere, a diamond pendant around her throat, revealing a curvaceous figure that could stop traffic. Pacino chided himself, thinking staring at the XO’s wife’s chest would certainly violate protocol. And judging by her outfit, he was right to think he’d underdressed. Perhaps he should have worn a suit and tie. When she spoke, it was with a cultured London accent. “Hello, young man, come in, please, welcome, welcome, I’m Shawna, Seamus’ wife, come along.”
For a moment, Pacino was lost. Who the hell was Seamus, pronounced “shame-us,” he wondered. “Seamus?” he asked, hesitantly, as he stepped into the foyer that opened into the living room, a room tidy with what seemed fifty candles burning softly. Mellow jazz music emanated from the room’s sound system.
“Seamus Quinnivan,” she said. “You did meet him on the ship today, right? And you’re Patch Pacino, correct? Newly reporting aboard that wretched stinking vessel Vermont?” She crinkled her beautiful nose as she mentioned the name of the submarine. He nodded at her. She found a door in the kitchen, opened it and clicked a button on what looked like a wall-mounted intercom. “Seamus,” she called into the squawk box, “our first guest is here, Mr. Pacino.”
He could hear the XO’s jolly brogue shout up from the room below. “Pacino, get your ass down here to engineroom lower level!”
He looked at Shawna Quinnivan. She smiled warmly and said in her silky English voice, “Normally I’d offer you a drink at the bar here, but Seamus is all equipped down in his man-cave.”
Pacino swallowed. “If I can ask, ma’am—”
“Shawna,” she corrected him, touching his shoulder.
“Shawna.” He swallowed. “Where is everyone?”
She smiled. “Ship’s parties never start on time and this one isn’t set to kick into gear until eight pm. We won’t have a quorum until nine at the earliest. Some won’t even arrive until midnight. You military types, always hustling and bustling and being on-time or early for things. When you relax, you don’t want to be timing things by a clock.”
“Oh,” he said. “I thought the DCA, Dieter Dankleff, said it would begin at nineteen hundred sharp. Seven pm.”
“Dieter? Oh, you mean ‘U-Boat Dankleff.’ Yes, darling, that was just for you, dear,” she said, smiling brightly.
“Pacino!” Quinnivan bellowed from below. “Getcher arse down here!”
Pacino gave Shawna a grateful expression and went below to the lower level.
Quinnivan stood behind the bar fussing with the bottles and glasses. When he stepped around it, Pacino could see he wore old jeans with holes and rips, an open flannel plaid-patterned lumberjack shirt, a T-shirt with a faded image of a bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whisky and old scuffed and torn steel-toed boots. Pacino thought how out of a place a suit and tie would seem now. Quinnivan hurried over and shook Pacino’s hand warmly. “Welcome to engineroom lower level,” he said with pride, expansively waving at the room. “Come on, we have some twenty-five-year-old single-malt rare-cask whisky waitin’ for us. The two thousand dollar a bottle kind. I’ve been saving it for a special occasion. I held off on having the first drink until you could get here. You’re fookin’ late, by the way. If you’re early, you’re on-time. If you’re on-time, you’re late. And if you’re late, you’re off the team, yeah?”
Pacino found himself pulled over to the bar, where seemingly every alcoholic concoction known to mankind crowded the bar’s surface. Quinnivan produced two crystal rocks glasses and poured two fingers of the Macallan 25 scotch for each of them, handed one to Pacino, then raised his own glass and clinked it into Pacino’s. Pacino took a pull of the scotch, and it was smooth, smoky and mellow. Quinnivan downed his in one go and poured more for himself.
“Ah, a good scotch tastes like the dirt from the grave of an honest Scotsman,” he said. “But good fookin’ luck findin’ tha’.” He shook his head. “So, young man, what do ya think of the engineroom here?”
Pacino hadn’t even noticed the room, his vision tunneled to the Irishman and his firehose stream of words so heavily accented that he had to concentrate hard to translate it all into English. The room was large, in an L-shape, one part of it devoted to two pool tables lit by dim and mellow Tiffany hanging lamps. The walls were a thick mahogany paneling in places, interrupted by areas where old bricks formed the walls. The ceiling was a grid of heavy mahogany beams with an ancient tin pattern painted an off-white in between the beams. The copper-sheathed bar presided over the corner of the room, and the area toward the stairs featured a large brown leather couch and four overstuffed leather club chairs arranged around a heavy antique mahogany coffee table. The couch faced a fireplace big enough to roast a pig in whole and it was burning a few logs, giving the room a pleasant wood smoke aroma. The wall where the stairs entered the room had one of the new gigantic flat panels mounted on it, a Samsung “Wall,” a television so big that it needed a special truck to bring it to the house. Despite the stark modernity of the flat panel, the effect of Quinnivan’s decorating was that it almost seemed like an old-fashioned English gentleman’s club.