Wind Raker - Book IV of The Order of the Air (32 page)

“Yes, sir,” Jimmy said again, and pushed his chair away from the table.

Jerry looked at Douglas. “Douglas, if you want to come with us today, you have to promise not to cause trouble.”

Douglas looked down at his plate. “I wasn’t —”

“Maybe you should stay here,” Stasi said.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine, Mrs. Sorley,” Willi said, with a smile, and Douglas nodded.

“I’ll be good. I will!”

His expression was far from chastened, but Jerry decided that it was agreement enough. “Right. If you’ve had enough breakfast, go get our lunch basket from Mrs. Fong, please.”

“Ok.” Douglas slid out of his chair and disappeared into the kitchen.

Stasi gave Jerry an unhappy look. “I don’t want him to be a bother —“

“We’re not going to get a lot of work done today anyway,” Jerry said. “Not between the holiday yesterday and a half-day tomorrow.”

“And rain coming,” Willi interjected.

“He’ll be fine.” Jerry gave Stasi what he hoped was a reassuring smile. Her attempts at proper mothering were painful — so different from the woman he’d finally grown to like — but he thought he understood why she felt she had to try. “Don’t worry.”

“No.” She managed a smile of her own, her lips bloodless and thin without the scarlet lipstick, and Jerry pushed his own plate aside.

“Let’s go.”

The graduate students were ahead of them at the dig, Hanson fussing with the big box camera while Tompkins checked a line of stakes that had been bent sideways overnight. Willi scowled, seeing that, and levered himself out of the truck, leaving Jerry to follow more slowly. Jimmy scrambled out of the back of the truck, pulling Douglas with him, and Gray gave them a cheerful greeting, pointing them toward the sieves. That was a good place to start, Jerry thought, as long as Jimmy didn’t get too bossy with his brother, and turned as the Ford that carried the Museum’s laborers came slowly up the hill. It was Charlie Ma’s truck, and he gave Jerry a cheerful nod as they all clambered out.

“Nice day, huh, Doc? Did you see the fireworks?”

“You’re late!” Gray called. “Get over here and don’t waste any more time.”

Ma’s mouth tightened, and Jerry said, “I didn’t see them, unfortunately. But it was nice to have a holiday. Mr. Gray!”

“Sir?”

Jerry waited until Ma and his men were out of earshot. “If you treat them like that, you won’t get good work out of them.”

“They’re day labor,” Gray said.

They’re the Museum’s picked men,” Jerry pointed out. “Dr. Buck’s choice. You don’t want to be responsible for them quitting on him, do you?”

For a moment, he thought Gray was going to protest, but then the boy thought better of it. "No, sir.”

“Ease up,” Jerry said, and turned away.

He made his way across the broken ground to where Willi was examining the plan, and Willi looked up alertly “Trouble?”

“The same that you mentioned.” Jerry took a deep breath. “We’ll need to keep an eye on him.”

Willi nodded. “He doesn’t bully the boys, at least. That may be the best place for him.”

“He doesn’t bully Jimmy because Jimmy’s white,” Jerry said. Anger tightened his voice, and he made himself relax. “No, today I’ll give Jimmy and Douglas to Tompkins, he’s got younger brothers, he said, and I’ll work with Gray myself.”

“If you think that’s best.” Willi’s attention sharpened, and Jerry turned at the sound of another car on the rutted track. It was an unfamiliar vehicle, and Jerry frowned, wondering if it was someone else from the Museum. But as it pulled in beside Ma’s car, he heard Willi give an exasperated sigh. Lorenz climbed carefully out of the driver’s seat — he was alone, Jerry saw, with some relief; he wasn’t sure he could have faced Sommer — and made his way toward them.

“Good morning,
Herr
Professor,” he said. “And Dr. Ballard.”

“Good morning,” Willi answered. “I trust your friend made it safety back to the ship?”

Lorenz looked momentarily annoyed. “He did. Before me, in fact. I was rousted out of a bar by our shore patrol, and he —“ He seemed to realize the humor of it, and smiled ruefully. “When I got back aboard, he was waiting for me. So all is well.”

“I’m glad,” Jerry said, and meant it. He couldn’t wish exposure on anyone. “Willi, if you want to show
Herr
Lorenz around the site, I’ll just have a word with Gray.”

“Yes,” Willi said. “Yes, that would be good.”

Jerry worked his way awkwardly around the end of the trenches to the spot where Ma and the rest of the diggers were opening a new trench along the western edge of the platform. “Now, Mr. Gray —“

“Dr. Ballard!” Tompkins stood upright by the sieves, something cupped in his hands. Douglas bounced up and down beside him, and even Jimmy looked excited. “Dr. Ballard, Dr. Radke, I think we’ve got something interesting.”

Jerry dragged himself across the broken ground again, Gray following, and Tompkins held out what looked like a piece of bone. “Look at the cracks and the burned place.”

Willi took it, reaching for the jeweler’s loupe he carried in his pocket, and gave a grunt of surprise. “An oracle bone? Surely not.”

Jerry took it, frowning. The fragment was smaller than the palm of his hand, and clearly only part of the piece; a series of splits and cracks that radiated from a burned point on the edge, where the rest of the bone had been broken away. He had read about oracle bones — they were older than the Ming, though, bones and turtle shells inscribed with question and then pressed with a red-hot iron until the bone cracked, the pattern forming the answer to the question. “I don’t see any inscription.”

“No.” Willi picked up the bone again, loupe firmly fixed against his eye. “Under the Zhou, the diviners stopped carving the questions, but wrote them in cinnabar ink, which washed away over time. I have seen blank bones before —“ He stopped, shaking his head. “But. This may just be the remains of someone’s pig roast.”

“The point of burning is too deliberate, surely,” Jerry said.

Tompkins cleared his throat. “It came from the fill we took out of trench nine, Dr. Radke.”

That was the one that ran along the northern edge of the unexplained platform. Jerry pursed his lips in a soundless whistle. “Very interesting.”

“Yes.” Willi turned the bone over again. “A rib bone, I think, which is not typical. Not unheard-of, but very much not typical. And this style is Chou, not Ming. But…”

Jerry nodded. “We need to get the rest of this sifted. Good work, Tompkins.”

“May I help?” That was Lorenz, hovering at the edge of the group. “Professor Radke knows I have done this before.”

“Yes,” Willi said, before Jerry could answer. “I want this sieved as soon as possible. If there is more — I want to find it now.”

T
hey spent the rest of the morning working through the pile of dirt, everyone from the visiting German cadet to Dr. Ballard himself manning a sieve, but to Douglas’s disappointment, they didn’t find anything except a few fishhooks. Dr. Ballard told everybody to break for lunch — and about time, too, Douglas thought, wolfing his sandwich — and then he and Dr. Radke and Mr. Hanson huddled together talking while everyone else smoked and drank tea and talked about the fireworks and the dig and somebody’s girlfriend. Nobody really wanted to talk to him, but Douglas was used to that. And anyway, he had a plan of his own. The boy from the
Emden
, Midshipman Lorenz, there was no good reason for him to be here except to spy on the dig, and it was Douglas’s duty to make sure he didn’t find out anything he shouldn’t. Douglas gave a quick glance around, saw that no one was paying any attention to him, and stepped off into the pineapple plants as though he was going to find a place to pee. He could see Jimmy and Lorenz sitting on the tail of the truck, and worked his way through the underbrush and the spiky leaves until he could lie on the dry bottom of the ditch that ringed the field and listen without being heard.

“Do you smoke?” Lorenz held out his pack of cigarettes. Douglas could see Jimmy weigh the odds — would he look grown-up, or would he get sick like he did when he tried it back home? — but then shook his head.

“No, thanks.”

“You’re probably smart. Our leader says that tobacco is a vile habit, but I haven’t been able to quit.” Lorenz lit his own and lifted his face to the sun. He seemed really ordinary, but then, Douglas supposed that would be the sort of person who would be recruited as a spy. “God, this is beautiful! Do you live here?”

Jimmy shook his head. “My — I guess he’s our stepfather — Mr. Sorley — his company is testing a seaplane here, and he brought us with him.”

Douglas shook his head. He supposed everybody knew that much, but you weren’t supposed to tell potential spies anything. In fact, you were supposed to try to throw them off the track, which he figured meant you could make up stuff. But Jimmy never did that.

“It can be difficult when one’s mother remarries.”

“My mother’s dead.” Jimmy’s voice was bitter.

Lorenz’s face changed. “Oh. I am sorry.”

“Our father left,” Jimmy said, after a minute. “I don’t know what we did — I tried to keep everybody in line, but they wouldn’t do what I said, and so he was always yelling. Then we got up one morning and he was gone.”

Douglas drew himself deeper into the bushes, bit his lip to keep from yelling back. It wasn’t his fault, or Merilee’s. Dad had gone to Denver to look for work, and probably he’d gotten hit by a bus or he was sick somewhere but he’d come back. Eventually. But not until after they’d been to Hawaii, and maybe not for a while after that, because Mrs. Sorley was the best cook ever and Mrs. Fong made pork barbecue and jook and brought him
char sui bao
from the market — and it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t.

“It’s hard being the responsible one,” Lorenz said. “But you took care of — your brother? Is that him who was helping?”

Jimmy nodded. “Douglas. And my sister. Merilee.” He gave Lorenz a sideways look. “Girls are hard. And I didn’t know what to do about the diapers.”

“Very hard,” Lorenz said. “You did well to take care of them at all.”

“If it hadn’t been for Merilee, I wouldn’t have had to go with Mr. Sorley,” Jimmy said. “But the milk was sour and she wouldn’t eat oatmeal.”

That was because the oatmeal was awful, Douglas thought. He’d never heard Jimmy talk like this — usually he just yelled at them, and told them Mrs. Sorley wasn’t a good mother, which wasn’t fair at all.

Lorenz nodded as though it all made perfect sense, and they sat for a while in silence, just the sound of the men talking and the distant surf and something rustling through the underbrush beyond the line of cars. Finally Lorenz stubbed out his cigarette.

“My father was killed when I was three, killed in the war, so I didn’t really know him. We had his pension, my mother and I, but it wasn’t so much, and when the inflation came — I was just about your age — we lost our flat and we had to stay wherever my mother was working. That was a shop sometimes, or sometimes a club… There was one night she came home with her purse stuffed full of million-mark notes — so full it wouldn’t even close — and she woke me up to show me. But by the time the bakery opened in the morning, you needed another purse just as big to buy a loaf of bread. She was so angry, because she said the men knew when they paid her that it would happen —“ He broke off, shaking his head, and lit another cigarette. “My father’s mother took us in. She lived in the country, and there was food. She was strict but — not unkind. She got me into the Marineschule because her brother was killed at Jutland.” He grinned, his teeth very white in his tanned face. “I wasn’t very grateful at first, but now I’m glad. We’re going to change things. Our leader has a plan, and he’s going to make sure that can never happen again.”

“That’s what Mr. Sorley says about the new president,” Jimmy said. “He’s going to make things better.”

“I hope he will,” Lorenz said politely.

“A lot of people don’t like him,” Jimmy said. “But they’re greedy. Or stupid. People can be pretty stupid.” He was quoting Dr. Ballard, Douglas knew, but Lorenz treated him as though it were his own idea.

“So you give them rules, simple honest rules that are the same for everybody. Good people will follow them willingly because they’re right, and the bad ones will be punished, and we can teach the weak ones how. They’ll learn for their own good.”

“Some people don’t like rules,” Jimmy said, and Douglas wriggled in annoyance. He was pretty sure Jimmy was thinking about him, because he wasn’t very good at following rules he didn’t agree with. And now Mrs. Sorley was agreeing with Jimmy all the time, and he really was trying…

“It’s so much better when you follow the rules — it’s easier when there are rules and you follow them.” Lorenz was looking toward the trenches, where Dr. Ballard and Dr. Radke were arguing about something, Dr. Radke waving his arms like a windmill. “When you know what you’re supposed to do and you do it and so does everybody else.”

“People ought to follow the rules.” Jimmy nodded. “It’s not that hard!”

“It’s not,” Lorenz said. “That’s what our leader wants, rules that everyone follows, that don’t let financiers and profiteers steal from everyone else.”

“When I grow up,” Jimmy said, “I want to go to West Point. I’ve got good grades, and I think Mr. Sorley could get our Senator to sponsor me. I want to serve our country — like you said, to make things right.”

Douglas caught his breath. Jimmy’d never said anything about that to him, not to anybody. But Lorenz nodded as though it were the most reasonable thing in the world.

“You would make a good officer, I think. And perhaps we will make things right together.”

“I’d like that,” Jimmy said.

I
t was Friday night and the supper club was crowded, with good food and a lively band. Alma and Lewis revolved slowly near the edge of the dance floor, and she told herself to relax. She was borrowing trouble, uneasy for reasons she couldn't place. It had nothing to do with the day's flight, which had gone amazingly smoothly. Even Lily had been smiling, pleased by this evidence the warding had worked. It had been their best flight yet. Not even the most paranoid person could have found any evidence of a jinx.