Read Online Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman - Free Book Online

white robe and glass of iced tea waved to a man who stood in the blurry heat of a charcoal fire on the porch of a big house. I looked to the horizon. Vera’s world was out there, the silk bazaars and desert fires and farther east the Nile Delta, where Moses, according to the Bible and Fr. Heaney, was set adrift in a basket. I glanced back toward the pier and saw Vera walking toward me, passing through the shadows, her bathing suit flashing like blue magic.
    “What’s your story, Jim?”
    “It’s a small one.”
    “I left Kurt sleeping. When the wave hits the blanket he’ll wake up quick.”
    Vera laughed, playing it out in her head. She stood beside me. I felt Kurt’s shirt brush my arm. The surf swirled around our ankles. Pelicans raced in dark succession over the ocean, their wing tips inches from the waves; farther out fishing boats waddled silently where the water met the sky, reminding me of tin ducks at a carnival shooting stand. The bay we had crossed earlier was salty, tangy, tamed, almost restful with its bulrush and bone-gray trees, but this ocean was wild and pure and rough, its colors changing with sun and cloud from blue to deep blue to green to the foaming white edge of the wave’s curl. The waves struck the beach and pulled back, rushing out to their deep, hidden source, moving in warm and cool currents, invisible serpents. I ran from Vera and jumped into a wave, my body slicing through the water, feeling the pressure and the tug, the immense weight, and then surfacing, water running off me, shining in the sun, my face warm until another wave knocked and rolled me, my back scraping the sand, stinging and cool, and laughing with my mouth closed beneath the water, surrendering to its power. I walked out, dripping, toward Vera. I shook my wet hair.
    She squealed and pushed me away. We stood looking at each other, smiling; me young and sand-scraped in the light, and Vera, her back to the dunes, her face toward the ocean. What is that word when all seems right, when a moment marks itself in you somewhere and you keep it? Resplendent. My dictionary called it resplendent.
    “Let’s swim to the other side.”
    “You’ve been there.”
    “I’ll go back. You go, too, Jim. See what’s out there. So much. There was a church in Carthage on the cliffs. It had clinging vines and loose stones. The mosaics were fading. In the afternoons an old man would walk up the hill and play piano in the church. I never knew what he was playing, but the notes rolled out of that old church and over the sea and for all I knew they kept going and never quieted. I sat there many afternoons listening to that old man’s music and watching far-off boats. Can you picture it?”
    “Yeah. It’s like in the near sunset, when a guy’s on his stoop, drinking a beer and smoking a cigar and listening to the Phillies on the radio. You can smell the aftershave coming off him and hear his wife inside through the screen door. It’s as if his day is done and for a couple of hours he lives inside that radio.”
    “Those are the things you carry forever, Jim. Those scents and sounds.”
    Vera walked back from the water and sat in the sand. I sat with her. Late-afternoon clouds, white, not threatening, hung before us. Sand crabs skittered; the tide crept up. Vera rubbed her scar.
    “Sometimes it itches. It’s hard like a stone. Feel it.”
    She was right.
    “It’s part of my story, Jim.”
    “You don’t have to tell me.”
    “I thought you wanted to know.”
    “I do, but a scar like that, I guess, is personal. I just don’t know why we’re on this trip or where we’re going.”
    The man was from Marrakesh. He was not a spice merchant; he was a rich man’s son Vera had met in a tea shop. He said he was a jeweler, but he was a smuggler, a man who traded diamonds and guns across Africa. He was tall and lean with long muscles and he moved, Vera said, as if he never touched the ground. He fed her pomegranates and saffron rice. Vera had