Montaro Caine A Novel

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DESPITE THE BEST EFFORTS OF MONTARO CAINE AND HIS ASSOCIATES, meetings with government officials to discuss the significance of the coins and the prophecies of Matthew Perch and Luther John Doe yielded no useful results. Alfonse Alfaro, the bald, bespectacled New York senator with his familiarly chubby face and thinning gray hair, quickly agreed to a meeting. But when Caine and Howard Mozelle revealed that they weren’t interested in discussing either the senator’s reelection campaign or his committee’s ability to influence mining safety legislation, he quickly adjourned the meeting and directed one of his secretaries to facilitate an appointment for the men with NASA’s chief of staff. The NASA rep informed Caine and Mozelle that he wasn’t at liberty to discuss whether he would or wouldn’t act upon the information they had given him, after which the men met with the deputy director of Homeland Security, who said that his agency’s funding had been slashed, and the men really needed to be talking to the FBI.

Anna Hilburn’s efforts to determine the whereabouts of Whitney and Franklyn Walker were proving to be no more successful. Whitney’s uncle Frederick and cousins said that Whitney and Franklyn were on vacation, but none of them knew where. Whitney’s uncle had sent a letter to the couple, but had received no response. Lawrence Aikens learned that Cordiss Krinkle was spreading the word that the couple was safely ensconced in some European country, but neither Aikens nor Curly Bennett was able to learn in which country that might be. And, after Aikens met with Montaro, both men agreed that whatever information Cordiss was spreading was probably false anyway. Near the end of a week’s worth of fruitless meetings, unproductive phone calls, and unanswered emails, Montaro understood something that P. L. Caine had impressed upon him when he was just a boy—that he would always have to rely on himself.

P. L. Caine’s ninety-ninth birthday celebration was held in the retirement community of Seaview Estates in Carmel. During Montaro’s childhood, P.L.’s birthday parties were lively and extravagant affairs, where the Canadian Club flowed freely, but now that P.L. had outlived just about all of his contemporaries, this birthday celebration was comparatively subdued—in attendance were a few friends P.L. had met at Seaview as well as Montaro and his family. The red velvet cake with white frosting was barely large enough to accommodate all the candles that Cecilia Caine had placed upon it.

The modest birthday party suited the Caines’ needs. Montaro could not recall when he had last spent this much uninterrupted time with his family; most probably it had been before Priscilla had entered boarding school. And, though Priscilla had alternately cried, shouted, and sent furious text messages on her iPhone during the limo ride to the Teterboro Airport, once the Caines had boarded their private jet, she didn’t speak, scream, or whisper another word about Nick Corcell. Even after the family had arrived at the Monterey Peninsula Airport, Priscilla didn’t even bother to turn her phone back on.

During the waking hours of their three days together, Montaro rarely left his grandfather’s side. While walking along the beachfront and chatting in his grandfather’s living room, he told P.L. everything about the coins and was surprised to find that his grandfather never doubted any part of his story. The man had seen nearly one hundred years of history and had traveled from the old country of Austria to the United States just a few years before the outbreak of World War II, leaving behind his parents, who had thought it would be safe for them to stay. He had fought in World War II on the American side, had witnessed the advent of motion pictures, computers, cell phones, transoceanic aviation, space travel, and the loss of his wife and only son—if anyone could believe that multiple worlds existed beyond ours, it was P.L.; he had already seen dozens.

“Grandpa, I know you’re not a scientist,” Montaro said one afternoon when his wife and daughter were out shopping on Ocean Avenue and the two men were alone at the counter in P.L.’s kitchen. “But the more I think about the nature of these coins and the more I become convinced that they can defy gravity, matter, space, and maybe even time, the more I’m beginning to think that there would be no need for the Seventh Ship to land in order to retrieve them. If the ship does land here, it would have to be for reasons other than the coins. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what those reasons could be.”

Though Montaro had been thinking out loud as much as he had been speaking directly to his grandfather, P. L. Caine listened intently and gave Montaro the same advice he had given him so long ago: “When the time is right, the truth will reveal itself,” he said. “Listen to what you can’t see, my boy, watch what you can’t hear, listen carefully to your inner voice, and trust your instincts. When the time to act arrives, I am sure you will know how to proceed.”

The words were simple and familiar, and yet they were all Montaro needed to hear to regain his confidence. For him, his grandfather’s voice had always had a magical quality, a healing power. His company was floundering, Richard Davis’s takeover bid had not abated, the coins were beyond Montaro’s reach, and, for the time being, so were Whitney and Franklyn Walker—and also, it seemed, his daughter. And yet, P. L. Caine’s words reminded Montaro of what he already knew—that he had the power to overcome all this; after all, P. L. Caine had lived through far worse and had survived.

The night after he and his family returned from Carmel, Montaro Caine sat alone in his Carlyle apartment, tired to the point of exhaustion. Part of him wanted black coffee, part of him wanted a stiff drink, but when he rose from his couch, he sought neither. Instead, he walked over to his living room desk and removed from the bottom left drawer the small, flannel bag that held the hand-carved model of the Seventh Ship. Ever since meeting Luther John Doe, Caine had often marveled at the mysterious way that nature had invested a master craftsman’s skills in the hands of a young black boy with a twisted chin, a withered leg, an unknown background, and a mind that seemed to exist in some universe light-years beyond our own. Caine had explored the surface of the carved object countless times, searching for seams that might reveal a hidden entryway, but he had never found one. And yet he didn’t doubt that at the appointed moment, somehow the ship would reveal its mysteries.

On this particular evening, Caine puzzled over the object for nearly an hour before reaching for the flannel bag to return it to his desk drawer, when, suddenly, the object began to vibrate in his hand. Stunned, he dropped it on his desk and stood from his chair. Slowly, the model of the Seventh Ship began to open. Dazzling colors and stunning three-dimensional shapes twirled around inside it. Then they billowed out of the wooden shell into Caine’s living room. Everywhere around him, colors and shapes transformed themselves into images of objects and beings that Caine had never seen or ever dreamed existed. There was no sound at all, yet the images seemed to dance to some internal music of their own. Caine felt as if he were actually hearing the colors, seeing the sounds. It was like watching a private display of the aurora borealis. Finally, the colors, shapes, and images all gathered together in a breathtaking formation above the object, at which point they suddenly froze. They remained like that, motionless, for ten seconds or so. Then, as if on cue, they instantly disappeared back into the interior of the object, which, in turn, slowly closed itself. And after the ship had closed and once again resembled nothing more remarkable than a woman’s compact, Montaro could still see a lingering image in his mind of a person he had never met and yet immediately recognized.

The time had come, just as Luther John Doe, Matthew Perch, and P. L. Caine had predicted. And it was at this point that Montaro, stunned beyond belief yet armed with new strength, felt as if he knew all that he had ever needed to know. And at this moment, too, he felt that his primary obligation was no longer to his company, or even to his family, but to an unusual man from another place and time named Matthew Perch.