“No.”
He kisses me again, brief and firm, not so much ending the kiss as interrupting it. He circles his giant arms around me and draws me into his chest and stomach, whispering words into my hair that I can’t hear, because the muscles of his shoulder lie against one ear and his hand rests against the other. His cotton shirt is damp with sweat. Stifling. The ridge of a button presses against my cheekbone, and I think, How strange; my cheek used to reach all the way to Simon’s shoulder.
Samuel says aloud: “I’m taking you back to the hotel, Virginia. This is no place for you.”
“I won’t go.”
“You don’t have a choice. I’ll carry you if I have to. These men—”
“They aren’t coming here, Samuel. That’s what I came to tell you. They’ll be on the water, right now, on the ocean just off the coast, and Simon’s with them. He’s going to show them exactly where your ship plans to land, and then they’ll take the cargo for themselves.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Because I know the revenue agent who recruited him. The revenue agent who’s going to be waiting on the shore to arrest the gang, and then to arrest you, too. It’s a double cross, Samuel. Isn’t that the word? He’s getting rid of you and coming out all clean and lily white himself, a real hero, all his problems solved, except for me.”
He lets me go. “Christ. A revenue agent?”
“Yes.”
“My God.”
“He’s the man who helped Simon with his forgery. An agent for the Department of Internal Revenue, who’s trying to—I don’t know—clean up the Florida coast, stop all the liquor smuggling. He admitted the whole plan to me. I told him a pack of lies, how I loved Simon and couldn’t bear it any longer, and I was going to go out on the beach and find those Ashley men myself if he didn’t tell me the truth, so he told me. It’s astonishing, really, what a man like that will admit when confronted with a woman’s weakness.”
He makes an agitated movement with his arm, the kind of gesture I’ve never seen in Samuel before, whose every physical act smacks of slow deliberation and purpose.
“This is the truth?” he says finally.
“Of course it’s the truth!”
“Simon’s still alive.”
“He’s alive, Samuel, he’s alive and he’s just off the coast, right now, waiting to . . . to strike, to . . . attack his own ship, or to pretend that he’s attacking. To lead the gang into the trap. To finish the job.”
“To this agent of yours. Waiting on the beach.”
“Yes. This very minute.”
“And this agent. He doesn’t know you’re here with me?”
“Of course not. He thinks I’m at the hotel, waiting faithfully for Simon to return.”
“Evelyn?”
“Asleep. Clara’s watching her.”
He swears again and turns to walk to the other side of the room.
“Why are you telling me this?” he says.
“To warn you, of course.”
“It’s too late. What the devil am I going to do about it? Go up against the Department of Internal bloody Revenue? Go up against the Ashley gang?”
“No. You—we—we’re going to tell them—tell the Ashleys—tell them this second that Simon’s about to betray them. That it’s all a frame-up.”
He swivels around to face me, and the action is so swift and vicious, it disturbs the cloying, liquor-laden air, causes the lantern to swing gently on its hook. Causes the kerosene flame to lick luridly on his cheek. “Tell them?”
“Yes. I know where the men are waiting on shore. We’ll go to them right now and warn them.”
“My God. Do you have any idea what they’ll do to him? To Simon?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t care? They’ll kill him, Virginia. They’ll shoot him like a dog, without the slightest hesitation.”
I’m wearing a loose, light jacket over my shirt and skirt, the same one I wore in the Japanese tea garden at the Flamingo Hotel, not because the night is cool—my God, it’s like the devil himself is heating his brimstone under our feet—but because it’s got large patch pockets on either side. I stick my right hand inside the corresponding pocket and draw out my Colt Model 1911 pistol.
“If they don’t,” I say, “I will.”
The pistol. My father gave me that pistol. It was a day or two before I left for France, I think, or maybe a little longer—that last week went by in such a hurry. Such a strange, flourishing panic that terrified and delighted me. Anyway, Sophie went to bed early for some reason, I forget why, and Father rose and turned off the gramophone and left the room, and I thought how strange that was, because Father usually outlived us all in the evening. He was always the last to bed, climbing the stairs in a heavy, pendulous tread that made me think of the Grim Reaper, or else Blackbeard. Sometimes he would pause on the landing—his bedroom was on the second floor, while Sophie and I slept on the third—and I would wonder if he was contemplating the next flight, whether he would knock on my door and want to speak to me, or just push the barrier open and not say a word.
But instead of saying good night and climbing the stairs, he returned a moment later with a box in his hand. I put down my book and knotted my hands in my lap.
“This is for you,” he said gruffly, holding out the box.
“What is it?”
“A gun. A pistol.”
He opened the lid and showed me. I looked back and forth between the pistol, nestled in old green velvet, and my father’s face, red-tinted and serious, and asked what it was for.
He looked amazed. Amazed and maybe pitying.
“To protect yourself, Virginia. Every woman who sets out on her own should have a means of protecting herself. The male sex is endowed with the greater share of physical strength. A pistol is a means of redressing that imbalance.”
I said that I didn’t know how to use a pistol, and he said he would show me. He took the instrument from its hollow in the old green velvet and made me hold it, explained to me what type of pistol it was and how it worked, all its constituent parts. He showed me how to take it apart and clean it—the imperative of cleaning a pistol properly, of making sure that an object so precise and lethal as a gun remained in absolute pristine condition, not a speck or a smudge to affect its reliable performance—until, I suppose, I managed to satisfy him.