Cendrars' Quatrain

During the 1940s, Blaise Cendrars, a one-armed, vagabond French poet who helped found modern French poetry, expressed the desire to have his remains scattered over the Sargasso Sea in a quatrain:

will be a man fulfilled if, when my time comes,
I can disappear anonymously and without regret,
At the originating point of our world, the Sargasso Sea,
Where life first burst from the depths of the ocean floor towards the sun.

His wish would remain unrealized; in 1961, Cendrars died penniless and was buried in the vault of a friend in a Paris cemetery.

Some sixty years later, writer, ex-solicitor, and "deal facilitator" Jack Fingon stumbles upon Cendrars' quatrain and sees in it a potentially lucrative venture. He decides to grant the poet's wishes, proposing to transport Cendrars' ashes to the Sargasso Sea with journalists and a film crew in tow. But when resistance to his proposal stokes his curiosity, Fingon makes a shocking discovery: Cendrars was disinterred and cremated thirty-three years after his death. Now it is up to Fingon to determine why Cendrars has been left by his protectors to vagabond in the hereafter.

In this historical thriller, Fingon's investigation leads him back to World War I battlefields of Champagne and to the tragedy behind the myth of one of France's greatest poets.