It was dark when he awoke again, thirsty and hungry and craving a cigar. Someone must have smoked one nearby recently because the whole room smelled of cigar smoke. Finn hadn’t had a cigar since the plane crash. He didn’t even like them all that much, but the relaxing comfort of a smoke would be good right now.
He cracked his eyes open to look around. There was no sign of the old nurse, just a shadowy man in a fine suit, sitting in the corner with a magazine propped on his lap. He was smoking a fat, hand-rolled cigar.
“How are you feeling?” the man asked.
“Like I could use a cigar,” Finn replied, his voice coming out like a croak.
The man reached into his breast pocket and produced one. His body had been neglected, broken, and abused, and Finn wanted the comfort of that cigar enough to prop up on an elbow for it. He clamped it between his teeth while the other man struck a match. It illuminated a surprisingly young man with a round, pleasant face. His hair was neatly groomed down the middle, and he had the wholesome look of an altar boy.
Finn took several quick draws to light the cigar, then sank back against the pillow, savoring the soothing hit of nicotine. “Thanks,” he said.
“Say nothing of it,” the man said.
“Are you a doctor?” Finn asked.
The man shook his head. “Just a concerned citizen who wants to see you healed. Dr. Sullivan reports that you are expected to make a complete recovery.”
“You’re not joshing me, are you?”
“I wouldn’t joke about something like that. You’re too important to my cause.”
Finn drew another pull on the cigar. Maybe he was still muddleheaded because, aside from his ability to fly an airplane, he wasn’t important to anyone. The sooner he could get back up inthe air, he could regain the fraying threads of dignity and meaning in life.
“What’s your cause?” he asked.
“I raise money for the Commission for the Relief of Belgium. I think you would make a convincing spokesman. You have an interesting story to tell.”
“Sorry, friend. The only thing I want to do once I get out of this bed is get back to France and rejoin my squadron.” The two dozen pilots he left behind there were his only family. He was letting them down by lying here abed in New York. Maybe he couldn’t fly for a while, but he could help train new pilots.
“Your commanding officer has assigned you to me.”
Finn coughed on a lungful of smoke. Captain Romano only became his commanding officer last week when he arrived in New York. “Who are you?” Finn asked.
“Bertie Hoover, chairman of the Commission for the Relief of Belgium.”
Finn let out a low whistle and collapsed back onto the pillow. Bert Hoover was one of the richest men in America. Rumor had it that everything he touched turned to gold.
“You look a lot younger in person,” Finn said. “Mr. Hoover, sir—”
“Please, call me Bertie. My wife says I have a baby face because it’s round, but I’m forty-three and old enough to know who I want for an important assignment.”
Now Finn felt guilty for accepting the fancy cigar since he was going to turn down the man’s job offer. “Look, I don’t know anything about public speaking. I dropped out of school in the ninth grade. You could do better with someone else.”
“How did you escape from Belgium?”
The question took Finn by surprise. It was the one everyone had been asking, and so far Finn had rebuffed all their attempts to learn the truth. Bertie Hoover was the last man on the planethe’d confess it to. He gave a little shrug and said, “My memory on all that is a little blurry.”
It was a lie. He remembered everything about the day he snuck into the hold of that river barge. Six hundred sacks of rolled oats had just been off-loaded, and grit still swirled in the air. Even now it seemed like he could smell the scent of dried oats.
Suddenly, Bertie Hoover wasn’t so congenial anymore, and his voice grew accusatory. “You got to Rotterdam by illegally slipping aboard a barge that had just delivered relief supplies from the CRB.”
“Maybe,” he hedged.
Hoover leaned closer, with no sign of the baby face in his fierce expression. “You endangered the venture I’ve devoted my life and my fortune to. Theonlyreason Germany permits my relief supplies into Belgium is because I swore on my honor I wouldn’t allow my ships, trains, or barges to be used for anything other than humanitarian relief. Germany has been suspicious of the CRB since the beginning, and the instant they suspect I’m helping Allied pilots escape across the border, they’ll slam the door on my operation and nine million people will be in danger of starvation. By using one of my barges to escape, you jeopardized an entire humanitarian relief mission.”
Finn set the cigar on a plate and folded his arms, unable to look Bertie Hoover in the face because everything the man said was true. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Sorry isn’t good enough.”
