He traveled east, toward Selma, and a few miles farther on he saw a police car coming toward him, its siren wailing. The tommy gun was ready, but the cruiser just sailed past, ignoring him. So far so good. But in fifteen minutes they’d be at the truck stop, and the car’s disappearance might have been noticed. The troopers would radio Selma and… at this rate he’d have to change cars every ten miles to Mon Louis, and leave a trail that any fool could follow in the process. He needed a car whose theft wouldn’t be noticed for several hours.
He put his foot down harder on the gas, and within ten minutes he entered a town alongside a railroad track. He was running parallel with a train. Now if it was going south… He stopped to look at the map, and found that it must have come from the south. A pity, but the station would be a good place to dump the car he was in. The police didn’t know in what direction he was headed.
He followed the train into town, keeping the orange glare of the locomotive in sight between the buildings, and reached the station only a minute or so behind it. After parking the car away from the single streetlight, he sat there wondering what to do. He’d have to leave the tommy gun, that seemed certain. He pushed it under the front seat and was opening the door to get out when another car almost hurtled into the yard. A man leaped out and raced to the train platform just as it was pulling out.
Paul smiled beatifically. A third piece of luck in twenty-four hours; someone somewhere liked them. He watched the train clank out of the station, waited to check that there were no arriving passengers, then recovered the tommy gun from its hiding place and strolled calmly across to the man’s car. The key was still in the ignition.
They drove south through the cotton fields, through ramshackle settlements full of black children and small towns that all looked the same, through Megargel, Uriah, Bay Minette, strange names for a strange land of bright colors and fading endeavor. As the sun went down it seemed to Amy as if the golden light transformed each vista into a sepia photograph, pushing time backward a century and more. And then, with darkness having fallen, the movie screens, set high in the fields, their flickering images reflecting from the roofs of their wheeled congregations, seemed only to emphasize the point, to offer a present that was too unreal to hold back the past.
It was past ten when they crossed the bay bridges and drove into Mobile, a larger version of the same picket and neon mélange. Amy bought a newspaper while they were stopped at a city intersection. There was no mention of train holdups, no mention of U-boats. “Nothing,” she told Gerd. “But I wouldn’t expect anything, not with our cargo.”
“Perhaps we imagined it all,” he said, swerving to avoid a cab that had cut across him. “Christ, don’t they teach Americans to drive?”
“You’re in the wrong lane,” she told him sweetly.
“And what happens when we get there?”
“The boat should be waiting. The Lafayette. Captain’s name is Warren. He lives on the boat.”
“I thought you said it was French-speaking.”
“Not completely.”
“What’s he know?”
“Nothing. As far as he’s concerned, we just want a ride to Cuba — one that doesn’t involve customs inspection. But he’s expecting only two people.”
“Hmm. People who haven’t been shot up, presumably.”
“I thought we’d imagined all that.”
Mon Louis looked French. It was a small fishing community built on a narrow peninsula between the bay and an inlet, with wooden houses and a long, sheltered anchorage crammed with shrimp boats. The first two people they stopped spoke a French that neither could understand, the third, on hearing the name Lafayette, spat a long stream of tobacco juice between his feet and gestured them toward the end of the dock. There they found the boat, one of the least prepossessing in sight, faded paint from the deck down, rust from the deck up. But it was floating.
There was no one aboard. “I’ll start loading,” Gerd said. “The invalid first.” He glanced up and down the waterfront, but there was no one in sight; all the noise seemed to be coming from a bar about two hundred yards away.
Gerd had lifted Kuznetsky down onto the dock when the car arrived. It was Paul. His eyes had lost the bitter expression she’d seen in the forest, but he avoided looking at Amy. “A frog among princes,” he murmured, looking at the Lafayette. “Nothing’s too good for us eagles, eh?”
He and Gerd carried Kuznetsky along to the boat, then lifted him across and onto the deck. Gerd noticed that the tide was in — either good planning or luck. Probably the former, he thought. But for the kid everything would have gone like clockwork.
“You’d better sit down,” he told Amy, noticing how unsteady she looked. “I said you’d be better in a couple of days, not hours.”
She watched as they hauled the ten crates out of the camper, onto the dock, and across to the boat. “You were always complaining about the lack of exercise on the U-boat,” Paul said as Gerd, the job finished, sat down and wiped his brow.
“You can unload them all at the other end,” Gerd said. “We’d better find the owner of this pleasure cruiser before the tide turns. No, you stay where you are,” he told the other two. “I need to practice my French.”
“I’ll take a look at Smith,” she said, not wanting to be left alone with Paul.
Gerd found Warren, a short, wiry man with a shock of black hair above a crowded face, playing dominoes in the bar. He was about fifty, and judging from the skin on his face, he’d spent a lifetime in the sun. Gerd introduced himself as Jack Smith.
“You’re early,” Warren said curtly, concentrating on the game.
“What about the tide?”
“An authority on the sea, eh? What about the tide?”
“It’s turning.”
“Plenty of time. Have a drink.” He passed over the bottle of bourbon, called over his shoulder for another glass.
It was delicious, but not, Gerd decided reluctantly, the ideal lining for an empty stomach. The game went on, and he fought to restrain his impatience. At last Warren got up, called over a young man who turned out to be his son and crew, and accompanied Gerd back to the boat. Both fishermen were mildly drunk.
Paul came out of the cabin, and leaned against its side. “Okay?” he asked Gerd.
“What happened to him?” Warren asked, looking past Paul at the inert Kuznetsky. “Hey, I was told two, not three passengers…”
“Be more company for you,” Paul said lightly.
“And it’s four,” Amy said, emerging from the shadows in the bow, her hands behind her back. “You were paid for the journey, not by numbers.”
“Who the hell are you people?” Warren’s son exclaimed, backing toward the side.
“Tourists,” Paul said succinctly, bracing himself for a lunge. Why the hell hadn’t he thought to have a gun on him?
“Hold on,” Warren said calmly. “I’m sure we can agree on something here.”
“We’ll throw the camper in as extra payment,” Amy said coolly.
“Okay, I’ll have to move it off the dock.”
“No.” Her voice was harsher than Paul had ever heard before.
“Look, lady…”
She stepped into the light, bringing the Walther out from behind her back as she did so. “Cast off,” she said to Gerd.