The Lucifer Gospel

30

Lyman Mills would have been a perfect example of the glamorous American success story except for the fact that he wasn’t really American; he only seemed that way. The son of a British soldier who had been cashiered for refusing to fight with the North Russian Expeditionary Force after spending three years in the trenches of France and Belgium, Mills immigrated to Canada as a child, spending much of his childhood in Halifax and then Toronto, where his father worked as a waiter and his mother ran a boardinghouse.

In a number of interviews given over the years, Mills said he could never remember a time when he hadn’t wanted to be a writer. He dropped out of school early, spent his early years as a copy boy at the Toronto Star hearing stories about Hemingway and Callahan from the previous war, and finally quit the paper to join the Royal Air Force Coastal Command, where he flew, and fell in love with, the Grumman Widgeon, a four-seater patrol flying boat that was a miniature version of the huge Pan Am Clippers that spanned the globe.

After the war, married and with a child on the way, Mills went to work for an advertising company and specialized in writing copy for liquor ads. This led to his first novel, originally entitled Aged in Oak, but eventually called The Label, an insider’s look at the workings of a huge distillery, following its fortunes over several generations, including through Prohibition. Seven hundred and eighty-eight single-spaced pages’ worth.

When half a dozen Canadian publishers turned it down as being too “racy” and “crude,” with little or no “socially redeeming content,” Mills climbed on board the overnight train to New York with the four-and-a-half-pound manuscript under his arm and sold it to the first publisher he saw on Fifth Avenue. The only suggestion his editor had was that he type double-spaced in the future for the sake of everyone’s eyesight.

Thus began Lyman Mills’s skyrocketing career as an extoller of everyday things and people, from the post office (The Letter), to automobiles (The Car), to buildings (The Tower) and the weapons industry (The Gun). One book a year, year in and year out, for three decades, stories filled with a simple formula of sex, adventure, action, and lots of interesting facts all tied together with page-turning plots. As one critic put it, “Lyman Mills may not stand the literary tests of time but he sure gets you through those hot summer days at the beach.” Reviewers scoffed and no one admitted to buying him in paperback, let alone hardcover, but somehow he wound up selling millions of copies, hard and soft, in seventy-five countries and thirty-eight languages. He wrote more than thirty instant bestsellers, all of which were made into movies or TV miniseries and in one case both. Along the way he indulged his old love and found his mistress, JS996, which he renamed Daffy after the Walter Lantz cartoon duck, a World War Two Widgeon based in Nassau during the war, and found in a Miami junkyard. Restoring the old seaplane to pristine shape became the passion of his later years, and he and his long-suffering wife, Terry, used Daffy to fly all over the Caribbean.

Then, after the death of Terry, a day before the horrible events of 9/11, Lyman Mills just quit. Physically in perfect health even into his eighties, the writer told an interviewer that the loss of his wife had broken his heart and he’d simply had enough of everything, writing included. He retired permanently to his estate on Hollaback Cay and was never seen in public again.

Hollaback Cay was a seventy-eight-acre island twenty miles south of New Providence with a main beach, its own reef, two rainwater cisterns, a 220-volt solar power generator, and a hurricane-proof harbor for sheltering large boats and Daffy the seaplane.

The house stood on a dramatic limestone outcropping on a low hill above the little harbor, facing out to sea. It was modest for a man of Mills’s means, a simple U-shaped bungalow with a narrow swimming pool in the sheltered courtyard and large open arches that brought the outside in. The walls were all in light shades, the floor cool, natural stone, and the furniture modern. There was art everywhere, Picasso, Lйger, Dubuffet, Georgia O’Keeffe, and others, all real and most of them priceless. Where there wasn’t art there were bookcases crammed with titles ranging from Simon Schama’s magnificent art-history biography Rembrandt’s Eyes to the latest John Grisham. One whole wall of the spacious living room was filled with nothing but various foreign editions of Mills’s own work, hundreds of them.

The author sat on a long canvas-colored couch and sipped a glass of iced tea brought to him by Arthur, his very British and unexpectedly Caucasian servant. Mills looked like a very well-tanned and slightly less muscular version of Sean Connery, right down to the thinning, snow-white hair, the gray beard, and the trademark jet-black eyebrows. Unlike Connery’s deep brown bedroom eyes, however, Lyman Mills’s were as blue as the seascape in front of him. His accent was different too, not British plums, Canadian twang, or American drawl, but a flat, uninflected mid-Atlantic mixture of all three. Like his writing, the voice was approachable, nonthreatening, and intelligent, a gentle baritone. He would have made a perfect announcer on National Public Radio. He wore khakis, an open-collared white cotton shirt and blue deck shoes without socks. Nothing he wore had a monogram on it and everything could have come off the rack at JC Penney.

“It’s an interesting story,” he said, putting his tea down on the big glass-and-bamboo coffee table in front of him. There was a litter of up-to-date magazines and the Book Review section from the previous week’s Sunday New York Times on the coffee table as well; Mills might be a recluse, but he was still in touch with the world. “Mind you,” he continued, “I don’t think I believed a word of it until you mentioned the name Devereaux in connection with the Acosta Star.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” said Finn.

“Just a moment.” Mills got up and left the room. He returned a few moments later carrying several thick file folders. He sat down and dumped the folders on the coffee table.

“I’ve had a lot of people try to con me over the years-I’ve been researching a book and had people outright lie to me-but one thing they always had in common was an inability to get the details right.” He smiled at them across the table. “Someone once asked Stephen King how he wrote a book and he answered ‘one word at a time.’ Never a truer word was said. It’s all in the words, the details-not so much the facts-the details. I spent the better part of ten years off and on researching the Acosta Star. It was the story I was working on when I quit. Going to call it The Ship… what else?” He smiled again. He flipped open one of the file folders, but it was obvious he knew the material by heart.

“There were three hundred and twenty passengers and a hundred and ninety-four crew members aboard the Star when she left Nassau on the sixth of September. She was supposed to sail down to San Juan, then Santo Domingo, and finally Kingston, Jamaica, before heading back to Miami. It was a standard cruise, she’d made the trip plenty of times. The fire broke out after a boiler explosion. Eight crew members were killed outright, three more in the fire. Fourteen passengers were killed and accounted for. Six just never turned up. One of them was Peter Devereaux. Nobody trying to lie to me, or just trying to pull the wool over my eyes, would have known that name or his background. Particularly since Devereaux was always one of my favorites.”

“Favorites?” Finn asked.

“A novelist who writes about historical events, even when they’re fictionalized, is always looking for holes to fill, missing pieces,” explained Mills. “That was Devereaux. He came aboard in Nassau. That was strange enough-most people boarded in Miami, there was no real airport then-but when I started delving into his history I found out he didn’t have one; everything dead-ended when I tried to find out about him pre-University of Kansas. The only real connection I could find was to Switzerland, and maybe Italy before that. I also found out from a few survivors who’d met him on board that he spoke Italian like a native. There was another missing person on the ship who turned out to be a ‘hole’ as well, a man named Marty Kerzner traveling on a Canadian passport. Except the passport was a phony. Given the way Israeli Intelligence likes to use Canadian passports for her agents, I put two and two together and came up with five: for the purposes of the book I made Devereaux an Italian war criminal who was personally responsible for the deaths of several hundred Beta Israel Ethiopian Jewish orphans in Addis Ababa-a story that still needs to be told, I might add; not much written on the subject of Italian war criminals-and made Marty Kerzner into Martin Coyne, who is actually based on a real Mossad assassin named Moses ’Boogie’ Yaalon.” He beamed another one of his pleasant, slightly melancholy smiles in their direction.

“Complicated,” murmured Hilts.

“Ever talk to the legal department of a publishing company? Or someone from the staff of Oprah? You’ve got to cover your ass, sir, believe me.” He laughed, but the humor had a bitter tinge to it. “I haven’t written a new book in years, but I still have to talk to my agent at least twice a week and my lawyer almost as often. Somebody’s always trying to sue me. The last time it was an illiterate lunatic from the Fulton Fish Market who thought that I’d based one of my unsavory characters on his life story.”

“How did that turn out for you?”

“My lawyer suggested to his lawyer that if his client would be willing to admit in public to doing some of the unsavory things my character had done, then he might have a case, and maybe twenty to life in Ossining as well.”

“So what do you think really happened to Peter Devereaux?” Finn asked, reining in the writer’s slightly meandering story. “Do you think there was any real connection between him and this Kerzner fellow?”

Mills took another sip of iced tea and leaned back against the pale couch cushions. “All I know for sure is that they both have suspicious backgrounds and that neither one of them was rescued before the hurricane and brought to the naval station in Key West.” He gestured toward the files on the coffee table. “I’ve got the list right there.”

“What about this Bishop Principe, is he on the list?”

“Yes. He was one of the ones who died during the fire.”

“What do you think happened to them?” Finn asked.

The old writer scratched delicately at his scalp, as though he was afraid of dislodging the last few wisps of hair floating almost invisibly across it. “Well, dear, before you and your pilot friend came along and screwed up my plot with your tall tale, I’d have said that they simply died in the explosion or the subsequent fire and were overlooked, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Somebody must have done a head count,” said Hilts. “You’d think it would have been a standard safety procedure.”

“It was,” replied Mills. “I had a lengthy telephone conversation with Capitan Francisco Crevicas, the master of the Acosta Star. He ran the check himself. A party of crew members checked every stateroom, every deck. Everyone was accounted for. He said that after everyone was off they stayed with the ship for more than an hour. He said by then some of the deck plates were glowing cherry red from the flames and paint was peeling off the hull in huge chunks. According to him no one could have survived.”

“Where was this?”

“Twenty miles south and slightly east of Curley Cut Cays. That’s the tip of Andros Island. According to the captain the fire broke out just as they were coming off the Tongue of the Ocean.”

“What did I tell you?” said Tucker Noe, speaking for the first time since they’d arrived.

“If you learn nothing else from your experience here,” said Mills, “learn that Bonefish Tucker Noe is always correct, right, Mr. Noe?”

“Always key-wreck, that’s key-wreck, Mistah Mills,” the old man answered with a smile and an outrageously put-on Bahamian accent.

Mills swooshed the ice cubes around in his empty glass. “You’ve asked me a lot of questions,” he said, looking at Finn. “Now I’d like to ask a few of my own.”

“Shoot,” said Finn. She glanced at Hilts, sitting beside her across from the white-haired writer. “We’ve got nothing to hide.”

“As the unfortunate Mr. Lennon once said, everyone’s got something to hide,” responded Mills. “But that aside, can you tell me why you think your Mr. Adamson would be pursuing you so energetically. I met the man once or twice at cocktail parties and charity functions. He never struck me as being a homicidal maniac. You seem to be saying that the man is involved in some long-running criminal conspiracy involving stolen religious artifacts. It’s a little far-fetched, you’ll have to admit.”

Hilts answered. “Rolf Adamson comes from a long line of hyper-Christians. In his book, if it’s done in the name of Christ, it’s automatically ”right.’ ”

Mills smiled. “Hyper-Christian. Interesting term. You think he’s on some sort of crusade?”

“It worked for Richard the Lionheart. In his mind some kind of groundswell response to terrorism is just what the doctor ordered.”

“Fire with fire, that sort of thing?”

“And an eye for an eye.”

“Imperialism disguised as self-defense?”

“Something like that. We can invade everyone from Grenada to Afghanistan, but if anyone spills a drop of our blood, it’s terrorism.”

“Now we’re talking politics,” Mills said and smiled.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if politics wasn’t what it’s all about,” said Hilts. “Big power, big money, big politics.”

“Adamson?”

“Why not?” Hilts shrugged. “He uses this so-called Lucifer Gospel as a political device to rally around. The whole theory he’s putting out is that Christ spent his last days in the real promised land, America, which by definition makes Americans the real Chosen People.”

“Given the time frame it would probably make the chosen people members of the Algonquian tribe, if my knowledge of Native people is reliable.”

“The people from the Bible Belt could overlook that,” said Hilts. “Christ was an American; quite a platform for a fundamentalist political party. According to Adamson, the Lucifer Gospel is the one thing the Bible is missing: the teachings of Christ in his own words.”

“You truly think that’s what this is about?”

“Adamson’s got the background for it, and the ambition. He also has the money to make it happen. We’ve been heading in this direction since Reagan. Getting the United States back to its Puritan, witch-burning roots.”

“It’s still very hard to believe. According to you this man Hisnawi is involved. A Libyan, a Muslim. How do you explain that?”

“The same way you explain Iran, Iraq, even Venezuela and Cuba. Oil. Money. A deal. Who knows? Adamson’s got a lot of money and he’s been spreading it around. He got the license to launch a new dig in the desert for a reason, and it wasn’t to locate the remains of a Coptic monastery. Maybe Hisnawi wants to be the next dictator of Libya after he takes out Qaddafi, who’s getting pretty long in the tooth these days, I might add.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” said Mills.

Hilts nodded. “I’ve given it a lot of thought.”

“And you, Miss Ryan, where do you fit into all of this?”

“I’m not sure. At first I thought it might just have been a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now I’m not so sure.”

“You believe Mr. Hilts’s story?”

“I’m still with him, aren’t I? And Simpson’s involvement seems to be through me, or my father. I don’t have all the answers yet.”

“And you think those answers might be on the Acosta Star?”

“Some of them. One thing I do know is that we’re in a hurry. The passports we’re using aren’t going to last forever. We need proof to take to the authorities. At least something to show that we didn’t have anything to do with Vergadora’s murder. The ship is the next step, that much is clear.”

“I don’t think your Martin Kerzner with the Canadian passport and Peter Devereaux not turning up as a survivor is a coincidence any more than you do, Mr. Mills.” Hilts offered his own smile. “And I think you’re curious as hell to find out.”

The writer lifted his glass, took one of the ice cubes and cracked it between a set of remarkably strong teeth for a man of his years. He chewed on the broken chips for a moment, then swallowed. He put the glass down on the table again with a hard clunk.

“We’ll need something stronger than iced tea and lemon.” He grinned, then turned and looked back over his shoulder. Almost by magic Arthur the servant immediately appeared.

“Yes, sir?” the man said, shimmering into the room.

“Do we have any Kaliks in the refrigerator, Arthur?”

“I’m sure we do, sir.”

“Then why don’t you fetch us some,” said Mills. “Then my new friends and I can get down to work.”