Trust No One by Glenn Dyer

Author:Glenn Dyer [Dyer, Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

2045 Hours, Thursday, January 7, 1943

At Sea Aboard the Spanish Freighter Cadiz

Antoine Brunel’s stomach was a repository of churning, burning acids that were determined to free themselves from the confines of his stomach. They eventually won out and Brunel retched in violent spasms into the crew compartment’s sink. The roars and howls from his bunkmates drove him out onto the ship’s heaving main deck, still wiping his chin clean with the sleeve of his gaberdine short coat. The coat was a gift, a loan, she said, from his self-appointed seagoing mentor, Josefa, the nearly two-hundred-fifty-pound Catalan cook, the de facto bully overseer of the Cadiz’s crew. She took a liking to Brunel, which initially saved him from being picked on by the experienced crew, but had quickly become unwelcome when he couldn’t seem to escape her constant leering disguised as, in her words, maternidad benevolente, benevolent mothering.

The Cadiz was making headway to Marseille in six-foot seas with leaden skies delivering a steady windswept rain. Antoine Brunel’s sole experience with sailing on a large seagoing ship was when his mother and father had taken him on the maiden voyage of the French-flagged liner Normandie. It was a present marking his eighteenth birthday. He had no more luck tamping down a roiling stomach then than he did now. The difference was the quality of the food sent down sinks and over railings then, as compared to his current circumstances.

Contending with his seasickness was, on one hand, a welcome distraction to his nagging concerns about the security of his satchel that hung around his neck and down his back under the gaberdine coat. He asked to place the satchel containing his newly acquired six-round Modèle 1892 revolver and the papers belonging to the seditious group in the ship’s safe. When his request was rebuffed with a round of mocking laughter, he was left with the satchel in his possession while he went about his duties as a deckhand and on watch topside.

If his father was correct in his thinking that the information in the papers, which implicated the Americans and the British in the assassin’s training, would prove valuable enough to trigger his mother’s release, he must protect the satchel with his life. He would have to put up with the questions and taunts from the crew, who had already received a profane-filled reprimand from Josefa. But the taunts continued whenever she wasn’t around.

After a series of dry heaves, Brunel left his position along the rail and returned to his bunk, where, he was sure, sleep would elude him. Upon entering the crew compartment, he took in the sight of four members wearing tweed flat caps and moth-eaten sweater vests sitting around a rectangular table playing a card game, each with a cigarette in various stages of being smoked dangling from their lips. Cigarettes. Brunel felt in his front right pants pocket for his lighter and only found some loose coins. Then he remembered tossing it to the old man on the felucca earlier that day.

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