Read Her Name Will Be Faith Online
Authors: Christopher Nicole
Her Name Will Be Faith
Her Name Will Be
Faith
By Christopher Nicole
under the pseudonym “Max Marlow", written in conjunction with Diana
Bachmann
Text copyright © 2012
Christopher Nicole
All Rights Reserved
Saturday 29 July: Early
morning
Saturday 29 July: Evening
and after
CHARACTERS
THE DONNELLYS
Josephine (Jo), Englishwoman on
editorial staff of
Profiles
magazine
Michael, junior, her husband,
partner in the New York stockbroking firm of Donnelly and Son
Owen Michael, their son
Tamsin, their daughter
Michael, senior (Big Mike),
Michael's father and senior partner in Donnelly and Son
Barbara (Babs), his wife
Belle Garr, their elder daughter
Lawson Garr, son-in-law, real
estate agent in Nassau, Bahamas
Marcia, their younger daughter, an
artist
Benny, her fiancé
Dale, their younger son
Florence Bennett, Jo Donnelly's
housekeeper
NATIONAL AMERICAN BROADCASTING SYSTEM
J. Calthrop White, President and
chief shareholder
Kiley, Executive Vice-President
Richard Connors, chief weather
forecaster
Julian Summers, his assistant
Jayme, his secretary
Dave, newsreader
Rod Kimmelman, reporter
Maisie, switchboard operator
Joe Murray, J. Calthrop White's
chauffeur
HURRICANE TRACKING TEAM
Dr Eisener, official at the United
States Hurricane Tracking Center, Coral Gables, Florida
Captain Mark Hammond, United States
Navy, seconded to the Weather Bureau
Bob Landry, his co-pilot
Mackenzie, his navigator
THE ROBSON FAMILY
Neal, friend of the Donnellys
Margaret (Meg), his wife
James, their son
Suzanne, their daughter
MICHAEL DONNELLY'S YACHT CREW
Larry Simmons
Pete Albicete
Mark Godwin
Jon Tremayne
Sam Davenport
Sally, Sam's wife (not in crew)
Beth, Larry's wife (not in crew)
ON ELEUTHERA
Melba, the Donnellys' cook
Josh, her husband, their gardener
Goodson, their nephew
Christabel, airline agent
JO DONNELLY'S INTERVIEWEES
Washington Jones, janitor at the
junior Donnellys' New York apartment building
Celestine, his wife Patsy, their
daughter
Lila Vail, widow from Florida, now
living in New York with Tootsie, her widowed sister
Dai Evans, their neighbor
Nancy Duval, Joe's hairdresser
Bill, her husband Ernest, his
brother
Alfred Muldoon, a New York cab
driver
Stuart Alloan, a dropout
Garcia, a criminal fugitive, his
friend
NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT
Commissioner Grundy
Assistant Commissioner McGrath
Captain Harmon
Captain Wright
Captain Jonsson
Captain Luther
Bert, Florence Bennett's husband
Ed Kowicz, Managing Editor of
Profiles
Gordon, a Florida weather forecaster
Bill Naseby, Mayor of New York Mitch, his assistant
Seth Hatton, President of the Hunt National Bank
The President of the United States.
`Tropical cyclones
are the most energetic and destructive of all weather systems.'
The Times Atlas of
the Oceans
WEDNESDAY 24 MAY
The Atlantic
The big amphibian was alone in the sky. Four hundred
miles due east of
Puerto Rico, Captain Mark
Hammond looked down on fleecy white
clouds, and, where they had drifted
apart, on to the surging blue of the North Atlantic Ocean.
It was a sight with which he was
thoroughly familiar. Since his
secondment
to the Weather Service a year earlier, he had flown out here at least once a
week, looking, watching… May was traditionally the
quietest month of the year, weather-wise, but there had been major
storms
in May before. And now the
month was drawing to a close; next Thursday
would mark the official
beginning of the hurricane season. If there was a
Tropical Storm about, it was his duty to find it, and let the scientists
determine its potential, long before it could approach land.
Dr Eisener was at his shoulder. "You can take her
down now, Mark."
Mark's long thin neck moved as
he nodded; his neck matched both his body, which seemed to be coiled even in
the spacious flight deck, and his
face, in which a long nose and pointed chin gave him a
certain resemblance
to
a cigar-store Indian. A Californian, he had volunteered for a spell in
the Weather Service to see how the other half of the
country lived, and often wished he had stayed at home: Miami to him was like a
poor man's San Francisco… and California had been hit by three hurricanes last
year: Florida, protected by the natural breakwaters of Cuba and the Bahamas, by
none at all.
He gave the signal to his
co-pilot, and the aircraft began to sink through
the clouds. If she wore navy colors, she was
still the very latest in flying laboratories, only a few hundred hours old,
with sensors protruding from
her roof and
wings and belly to record every possible aspect of the
atmosphere in which she found herself… and her true commander was
Eisener, surrounded back in the
main cabin by his staff and their various
computers
and radars; if the satellites whirling high in space above their
heads were photographing every cloud over the
ocean, it was Eisener who
was going to add the fine print for the
nation's busy weather forecasters.
Mark certainly didn't wish a
major storm on anyone. But as discovering
such
an event was, at the moment, his sole reason for existing, he hoped one day to
justify that existence. There hadn't been a truly major storm,
a Category Four hurricane; for instance, in the
North Atlantic since before
he had
been born. So Category Three storms, of which Gloria back in
1985 remained the most famous, could do a whole
lot of damage – it was
still
the possibility of a really big one, which fascinated everyone connected
with
Atlantic weather. One was about due.
The aircraft sank lower and lower. The clouds were
above them now,
the dark blue of the ocean
below them coming closer every second. There
was clearly very little wind; only the occasional wave flopped into a
whitecap,
dissolving in a splurge of foam; even the trade wind was in a May-like mood.
Now Mark was skimming the surface
of the sea, the huge turbos
throttled
back almost to stalling point as he allowed Eisener to suck seawater
into his tanks. Although it was calm enough to
splash down without difficulty – and get up again – if he had to,
this was always the most tense
part of the patrol; he breathed a sigh of
relief when Eisener's voice came through the intercom, "Okay, Mark, take
her up."
The engines increased power, the
plane rose like a bird, and a moment
later
was through the clouds.
"Home, I think," Eisener said, coming up to
the flight deck. "Anything?" Mark asked.
"Why, yes. Something."
Mark turned his head in surprise. "Today? It all
looks pretty good to me."
"It all is pretty good," Eisener agreed.
"Save for the water temperature. I have a reading of 27° Centigrade."
"At the end of May?"
"Interesting, isn't it?
Especially when we add it to all those other
readings."
"Yeah, Doctor," Mark said. "Goddamned
interesting."
The aircraft droned back over
Puerto Rico and Haiti, gaining height to
fly across the serrated mountains of Communist Cuba, then
dipping lower
again as the tiny Bahamian
islands came into view – splashes of green against the pale colors of the
immense sandbank on which they rested – before landing at Key West soon
after six. Mark went straight to the
public
telephone after debriefing, dialed a New York number. "Hi," he
said. "Richard about?" He waited,
drumming a finger on the glass wall
of the booth.
"Connors," said the voice on the end of the
line.
"Mark."
"Hi, old buddy. Something
for me?" Richard Connors' drawl was
suddenly
animated.
"Could be. How does a water temperature of 27°
Centigrade in mid-Atlantic grab you."
"On 24 May?"
"That's what the man says. And let me give you
some more." He listed
numbers, slowly,
giving his friend time to write them down. "Yeah,"
Connors
said, thoughtfully. "Yeah. Thanks a million, Mark. You coming north any
time?"
"I've a furlough next month. You got an apartment
yet?"
"Maybe. We're talking terms this afternoon.
There'll be a bed in the lounge."
"So I'll see you. Guess what. Or who, I saw the
other day. Pam."
"Great," Connors said without enthusiasm.
"How's she doing?"
"Looks pretty good to me. Tall, tanned..."
"And terrific," Connors
agreed, and sighed. He could picture her in
front
of him. But her predilection for sun, sand, and sea, and the beach bums who
went with those things, had been the prime reason for his
divorce. Without which, he thought grimly, he would
never have left
Florida… not even to be on nationwide television.
"Next time, give her my regards. And Mark… keep me up to date on those
water temperatures, eh?"
"You got it," Mark said, and hung up.
THURSDAY 25 MAY
National American
Broadcasting Service Offices, Fifth Avenue
"I have Connors outside, JC," Kiley said.
J. Calthrop White grunted as he perused the financial
pages of the
New York Times,
and Kiley twisted his fingers together. He
might be network manager, but the company president was a difficult man to work
for, or with. J. Calthrop White was a short, thin man, whose energy belied his
shock of white hair, and whose irascibility made a
nonsense of his puckish
features; his more junior employees were wont to
refer to him as Jesus Christ, and his more senior staff sometimes supposed that
he also might have mistaken his initials.
"Who's Richard Connors?" he asked.
"The new forecaster, JC," Kiley explained.
"From Florida," White remarked, still
studying his paper.
"Well, from California, actually, JC," Kiley
said nervously. "But he
worked in
Florida, yes. For three years."
"So what decided you to bring him up here, for
Chrissake?"
"Well, JC ..." Kiley's fingers were tying
themselves in knots. "Down
in Miami he
was big. He's got it all. Looks, personality, charm, knowhow
... and an almost prescient way of forecasting the
weather. He was
getting seventy plus
letters a week down with WJQT. I reckon he'll make
an impact on the
ratings up here."
"Weather forecasters make impacts?"
"Everyone watches the
weather, JC; it's right after the News. Give
them a face they like watching, a guy who sounds
like he knows what
he's talking about,
and they just start watching one particular channel to listen to that guy
again."
J. Calthrop White at last raised his head. "How
much?" he asked.
Kiley knew that
although his boss was thinking of the ratings, he wasn't
actually referring to them. "Well, I had to
go a little over the odds," he
said.
"How much?" White repeated.
"Well, seventy-five."
White leaned back in his chair. "Kiley, you are
paying some shavetail
beachbum as much as a
cabinet minister to tell me it's gonna rain
tomorrow? Jesus
Christ!"
"He's good," Kiley said.
"And it's only a one-year contract, renew
able."
"He had better be good," White said.
"Show him in."
Kiley almost ran to the door. "Mr White can see
you now, Richard."
He held the door ajar, and Richard
Connors entered the big office
which looked down the length of Fifth Avenue from the top floor of the
National American Broadcasting
Service building. White looked him up
and down. The new weather forecaster was six feet three
inches tall, and
had
an undeniably handsome face except for the broken nose which had
mended slightly off the straight,
but this in turn gave him an attractively
macho appearance. His shoulders were good and it was easy
to tell he
was fit.
He also exuded confidence. These were all characteristics which J. Calthrop
White personally disliked in other men, as he possessed none
of them himself. Except confidence.