Cradle Of Solitude. Alex Archer
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He’d hung up on her!
“Why that little…jerk!”
Ignoring Bernard’s chuckles from the other side of the room, Annja hit the redial button.
“Doug Morrell’s office.”
“You hung up on me!”
“See that? I knew there was a reason we paid you to host the show. You’re remarkably observant.”
Honey not vinegar, Annja, honey not vinegar, she told herself.
She tried a different approach.
“I’m sorry, Doug. I’d be happy to discuss the ghost shark episode with you when I get back to the States,” she told him, ignoring the fresh round of chuckling that erupted from the other side of the room.
“I want a favor.”
“What?”
“I’d be happy to put you in touch with my contact at the Smithsonian, but it’s going to cost you a favor.”
I know I’m going to regret this, she thought. She sighed. “What is it?”
“Oh, no. I don’t mean right now. Just sometime in the future. You’ll owe me a favor, that’s all. Deal?”
“Owe you a favor? Are you out of your mind?”
“It was good talking with you, Annja. Enjoy the rest of your vacation and I’ll—”
“Fine,” she said, biting off her anger along with the end of the word. She knew she shouldn’t have laughed at the chupacabra thing but owing Doug a favor? No good could possibly come of this.
“What do we need the Smithsonian to do for us?” Doug asked.
Gritting her teeth, she said, “I need to have a letter authenticated.”
“Why didn’t you just call them up and ask yourself? It shouldn’t take more than a few months.”
Annja was shaking her head. “It’s not that simple, Doug. I’m helping the French police with an investigation in the catacombs—”
“Whaaat? The catacombs? You’re running an investigation in the catacombs and you didn’t tell me? I’ll send a crew over immediately.”
“It’s not like that, Doug. There’s nothing here of interest to the show. The authorities stumbled on the skeleton of a man in a Civil War uniform and—”
He interrupted her again. “Wait, I thought the catacombs were full of skeletons. What difference does it make that they found one in a French uniform?”
“The American Civil War, Doug, not the French. The French didn’t have a civil war.”
How he managed to run a show about historical subjects with such a limited view of world history constantly astounded her, but he took her correction in stride, seemingly without a second thought.
“American, okay, got it. Union or Confederate uniform?”
“Confederate. But that’s really beside the point.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. “This is good, Annja, real good. We can turn this into a world-class episode, just leave it to me.”
Knowing Doug, he’d find a way to suggest that the Paris catacombs were full of Civil War zombies, getting ready for the second rise of the South. Leaving it to him was the last thing she intended to do.
“Doug, we’re not doing an episode on this. I just need the letter authenticated.”
“Who’s it from?”
“The letter?”
“Yes, of course the letter. Try to keep up, Annja.”
I swear, one of these days I’m going to run him through with my sword, she thought. “Jefferson Davis.”
“Confederate President Jefferson Davis?”
Maybe he did know something about history, after all. Either that or he was quick with Wikipedia.
“The one and the same.”
There was silence for a moment. “Annja?”
“Yes, Doug?”
“Let me be sure I’ve got this straight. You discovered a skeleton, dressed in the uniform of a Confederate soldier, carrying a letter from President Davis, in the midst of the Paris catacombs and you don’t think there’s anything of interest there for the show?”
Annja had to admit he had a good point.
In the end, Doug agreed he would use whatever cachet the show had to get someone at the Smithsonian to examine the letter as quickly as possible. In return, she agreed to send over a copy of the video footage they’d taken to date so that it could be cleaned up and potentially used in an episode about discovering the skeleton at a later date.
Once that was settled, they agreed to check in with each other if anything significant developed and ended the call.
Not thirty seconds after getting off the phone, Annja realized that she probably could have just called up the embassy and asked Billy Garrison to get it done for her, given that she was officially working on a government matter, anyway.
But that would, of course, require talking to him and he’d have wanted to get together to discuss the situation in more detail, say, over dinner and drinks, and she’d have felt obligated to do so in order to get the letter properly authenticated and…no. Doug was the better option.
Owing Doug a favor couldn’t be all that bad, could it?
After a moment, she decided that, yes, it could be all that bad. Doug was the guy who had once asked her to pretend to be dead for a few weeks to milk the sales of the commemorative DVD set he’d put out when she’d been incorrectly reported dead.
Dutifully ignoring Bernard’s chuckles, Annja got back to work.
7
After examining the sack coat, Annja turned her attention to the pistol and sword Parker had been holding when he’d died.
The gun was a single action revolver, which she recognized as a Colt 1851 Navy Revolver from the engraving of a naval battle on the cylinder. The gun had been popular at the time of the Civil War. Her research told her that famous Navy Revolver users included Wild Bill Hickok, “Doc” Holliday and General Robert E. Lee.
Drawing back the hammer, she discovered that three of the six chambers still held percussion caps, indicating that they were loaded and ready to fire.
Apparently Parker’s enemy hadn’t been the only one who’d gotten a shot off at the fateful meeting, she thought.
She emptied the revolver, carefully storing the percussion caps, bullets and powder in separate vials, eliminating the chance of an accident while she examined the weapon.
When she was finished with the revolver she turned her attention to the sword. Since she’d miraculously inherited Joan of Arc’s famous sword, bladed weapons had become a passion for Annja and she immediately recognized this one as a Shelby cavalry sabre, named after General Joseph O. Shelby, leader of the Iron Brigade. When the Confederacy fell, Shelby, one of the few Confederate generals who had never been defeated in combat by Union troops, took his entire command to Mexico rather than surrender. The cavalry sword he’d carried throughout the war, a common enough model produced by the Ames sword company, was renamed in his honor after the war.
The blade was about forty inches in length and bore the CSA, or Confederate States of America, inscription, as did the brass guard. The grip was leather, wrapped with twisted brass wire. The entire weapon seemed to be in excellent shape and Annja gave it a few experimental swings through the air to get the sense of it. It was well-balanced, though shorter and lighter than the weapon she was used to using.