World Gone By: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

tones, as if hesitant for the word to leave her mouth. She’d also never met Henry’s eyes, not once in their whole courtship. If someone were to witness their early evening strolls, that witness could be forgiven for believing Rebecca conversed not with Henry but with the road, the porch, the trunks of trees.
    Even so, to prove that he did, in fact, have ambition, Henry had enrolled in criminal law courses at night, all the way over in Gainesville. On his free nights, instead of having a few beers with the other guards at Dickie’s Roadhouse, or catching up on laundry, or, God forbid, just relaxing, Henry drove ninety minutes each way to sit in a sweltering box of a room near the rear of the University of Florida campus and listen to Professor Blix, a drunk, disbarred lawyer, slur his way through lectures on fraud in the inducement and motions to compel.
    Henry knew it was good for him, though. Knew Rebecca was good for him. She’d make a fine mother. One day soon, he hoped, she might even let him kiss her.
    Female Prisoner 4773, however, had already kissed Henry Ames pretty much anyplace he had skin. She’d told him about herson, Peter, and her hopes to reunite with him in five years, maybe move back to Italy with the boy if this war ever ended and Mussolini and his Black Shirts were driven from power. Henry knew she was using him—just because he was small town didn’t make him an idiot—but she was using him to achieve safety for her and her son, which seemed a worthy cause. She certainly wasn’t asking him to become something he didn’t want to become—a lawyer—she was just asking him to help save her life.
    So he was making a mistake sleeping with her, yes. Maybe the biggest mistake of his life. One he’d never recover from were it exposed. He’d lose his family over it. He’d lose Rebecca. Lose his job. Probably be shipped off immediately to fight the Nazis, flat feet be damned. Die in some bombed-out village along a stagnant river that no one had ever heard of. Leave behind no offspring, no evidence he’d ever existed. A waste of a life.
    So why couldn’t he stop smiling?
    JOE COUGHLIN, the Tampa businessman with the dubious past and a history of great benevolence toward his adopted home of Ybor City, met that morning with Lieutenant Matthew Biel of Naval Intelligence in his office at Suarez Sugar.
    Biel was a young man with blond hair cut so tight to his scalp one could see the pink beneath the bristles. He wore sharply pressed khakis and a black sport coat with contrasting gray plaid sleeves over a white shirt. He smelled of starch.
    “If you’re trying to look like a civilian,” Joe told him, “you might want to study a few more J. C. Penney catalogues.”
    “That where you shop?”
    Joe thought of telling this yahoo what he thought of J. C. Penney—he was wearing a suit that had been hand-tailored infucking Lisbon, for Christ’s sake—but he refrained and poured Biel a cup of coffee instead, brought it around the desk to him.
    Biel accepted the coffee with a nod of thanks and said, “This is a very unassuming office for a man of your stature.”
    Joe sat behind his desk. “Seems appropriate for a vice president of a sugar company.”
    “You also run three import companies, don’t you?”
    Joe sipped his coffee.
    Biel smiled. “Two distilleries, a phosphate mining concern, and pieces of several businesses back home in Boston, including a bank.” He looked around the office again. “That’s why your attempts at humility here are so fascinating.”
    Joe put his coffee cup down on the desk. “How about you tell me why you’re here, Lieutenant.”
    Biel leaned forward. “A guy got beaten on the docks in Port Tampa the other night. You hear about it?”
    “A guy gets beaten every night in Port Tampa. It’s the docks.”
    “Yeah, well, this guy was one of ours.”
    “Whose?”
    “Naval Intelligence. Apparently he asked one question too many of some of your guys and—”
    “My