A Man of Affairs (4 page)

He nodded dubiously and said something about getting another leg to stand on, and went back to Ricky’s department with his empty glass.

“That wasn’t very kind, Sam,” Louise said.

“I mean it seriously. If he’ll come in, I think it would be good for him.”

“It must be nice to sit way up there and look down upon all of us and decide what’s good for us.”

I felt my face get hot. “I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I just meant that…”

“You meant that he does nothing and that makes you uneasy because everybody should be brisk and industrious like you.”

“Damn it, Louise, you don’t…”

She smiled in a tired way. “Sorry. Pay absolutely no attention.” She hitched her chair toward the window and began to look down at the green and misted earth below, and I knew I had been dismissed.

Puss was across the way playing solitaire at a small table. After one venture into the whisky sour area, she was back to her normal brandy on the rocks. I went over and sat opposite her and said, “Black ten on the red jack.”

“Oh, I know all about that, Sam. I’m saving it for when there isn’t anything else left to do. How about some gin?” Tommy was up front between the pilots, bending over them and talking. Warren had sat down in the rear of the plane and was looking at a magazine. Louise was looking out the window, and her look of holiday had faded.

“For how much?” I asked Puss.

She bit her lip. “Hmmm. How interesting do we want to make it? Dime a point?”

“That’s too damn interesting. That would make my hands sweat. A nickel?”

“Done. Cut for deal.”

By the time Ricky served lunch, I was a hundred and eighty-eight dollars to the good and she was furious at me, at the cards and at herself. She is a girl with a highly developed competitive instinct. By the time we made the gas stop she had gotten forty dollars back and she was bored with the game. She scrawled a check on her Texas bank.

We made West Palm on schedule, landing amid the heavy civilian and Air Force traffic on the joint base, and it took fifteen minutes to get clearance to West End.

Warren had drunk himself into a semi-catatonic state, sleepily and massively out of touch with reality. The rest of us looked out the windows as we flew east over Palm Beach, over the big hotels and the random blue patchwork of swimming pools, out over the Atlantic surf line. In twenty-five minutes we began to see the islands of the Bahamas, the vividly streaked blue and tan and green of the shoal waters of the Bahama Flats.

I saw a huge waterfront establishment which, except for an enormous swimming pool, looked from the air like some sort of military base. A narrow paved road ran along the shoreline to a ramshackle village about a mile away, and continued on through the village and down the coast. Except for the big establishment and the village, the rest of what I could see of the narrow island looked overgrown and uninhabited.

We landed on a paved, eroded airstrip and taxied to the terminal building. It was a small frame building surrounded with dust. It had a stubby tower, and had at one time been painted gaily but the colors had faded. Across the taxi strip from the terminal several light planes were parked and lashed.

As we went down the steps a man came toward the aircraft, walking briskly and smiling warmly. He seemed impervious to the grubby surroundings of the airport. At forty feet he radiated impressive charm and complete efficiency. He wore sand-colored walking shorts, a chocolate-brown sports shirt, a yachting cap, Allan Murray Space Shoes in a sandal design with tall dark-brown wool socks. His exposed knees were sturdy and dark brown, the hair on them bleached pale. He was tall, with solid shoulders and a handsome rather heavy face. He had a wide white smile and he was theatrically gray at the temples. As a television huckster he would have been termed true and valid. I had the uncomfortable feeling that you could be marooned on an island with this fellow for seven years and never get a clue as to what he was thinking. He would be inevitably and interminably polite and charming, and were he forced to kill you and eat you, he would be deft and slightly apologetic and quite noble about it. And he would know exactly which leaves and berries to boil with you to give you the right flavor.

He went directly to Louise and took her hand in both of his and made like Gregory Peck being a young girl’s uncle and said, “I’m so glad you could make it, Louise. Mike sends his apologies. There’re other guests on the island and he couldn’t get away or he would have met you himself. Hello, Tommy.” The handshake was both manly and Ivy League.

Louise introduced him to Puss, and then to Warren. Warren had a ponderous list and a bleared expression. And she said, “And Sam Glidden, Fletcher Bowman.”

I got the manly handshake. He looked directly into my eyes, unwaveringly. It is an unnatural affectation and it always makes me feel uneasy. “Glad you could join the party, Sam. Mike is delighted. He’s been following your career, and we both feel you can make valid contributions to our little conference on the island.”

“Uh. Thanks,” I said. I wished I could have been glib. I wished he’d let go of my hand. He made me feel as if I were wearing coveralls and chewing a kitchen match.

“I’ll get your stuff hustled through customs,” he said. “And I’ve lined up three so-called taxis. Don’t be alarmed by them. They’ll get us to the Grand Bahama Club. It’s only three quarters of a mile away. Our boat is tied up at the club dock and well have a fifty-minute run to Dubloon Cay. Suppose you all wait over there in the shade and we’ll hustle the baggage off.”

When we were in the shade of the terminal building I looked back. He was talking to the crew and they were bobbing their heads. Two Bahama boys were helping Ricky get the luggage off. I had the same big old brown scuffed suitcase I had taken to college. There was a big case that I imagined belonged to Tommy. Both women seemed to have four matched pieces each.

All the baggage went in one cab, and Fletcher Bowman split us, three and three, in the other two cabs. He managed to arrange it so he rode with Louise and me. I felt quite certain that he knew that we were the two to focus on.

We got a brisk travelogue. “The airstrip belongs to the Grand Bahama Club. Chap named Butlin built the Grand Bahama Club after the war. A British syndicate operation. Put millions into it. But nobody had figured out how to get the people here to fill it. It went broke and sat empty until a few years ago and then another group took it over. They seem to be doing well enough. They put the income back into improvements. It’s really quite comfortable. See those buildings there. Completely empty. Moldering away. I doubt the hotel will ever get large enough to put them to use. But the plantings are nice, aren’t they? Here we are. This is the part they use now.”

The part in use was huge. We went on into the lobby. It was airy and vast and pleasantly decorated. We could look out through glass walls at wide green lawns, brilliant flowers, stone walks, several acres of awning in wide blue and white stripes, the gigantic swimming pool, and the vivid waters of the Bahama Flats beyond the coconut palms.

I saw Warren take his bearings, turn and head directly for the bar off the lobby.

“If you like,” Bowman said, “you people can have a quick drink or take a quick look around. I’ll see to the luggage and meet you down there on the dock in ten minutes. That’s our boat, tied up on the left side, the green and white one.” He smiled and nodded and marched off.

Tommy and Puss headed for the bar. “Look around?” I asked Louise. She was looking hesitantly toward the bar.

She gave me a bright and completely artificial smile and said, “Let’s.”

We walked out a door and by a large airy dining room with yellow tablecloths and headed for the swimming pool.

“Your Mister Bowman is quite a production. Has Dean got many more at home like him?”

“He’s not my Mister Bowman and I wouldn’t know.”

“Don’t snap at me, Louise.”

“I’m sorry. I guess I just feel… sort of cross. Anyway, I think he’s very nice.”

“Do you know anything about him?”

“He said he’d been with Mike Dean for quite a long time.”

“He’s a very plausible guy.”

“Sam, will you look at that poor little mouse on the high board? She waited too long.”

There was an awkward girl in that gangly hinterland between childhood and adolescence on the high board. She wore a brown swim suit. She stood pigeon-toed, holding her nose, her left hand outstretched for balance. She was looking down at the water and she was frozen there. Her friends were yelling at her to jump. After a painful eternity, she turned and scampered back to the safety of the platform. A small boy jeered at her and ran out on the board and off the end and made running movements all the way down. The girl clung to the iron railing, shaking her head. I looked at Louise. She was looking up at the girl, her lips slightly parted, an odd expression on her face.

“That’s me,” she said softly.

“What?”

She turned quickly and the mood was lost. “I… I don’t know what I meant. I didn’t mean anything.” So the muted and competent Louise Dodge felt somehow that she was on a high place and afraid to jump. Maybe she felt she had waited too long. And I wondered if, also, she felt she were in some area of transition, some awkward area between two kinds of existences.

We walked to the far end of the big pool.

“Look,” I said.

The girl had gone out to the end of the board again. Her friends were counting aloud, chanting a count. Shrill voices saying, “Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten—GO!”

She wavered and could not. She started to turn and lost her balance. She waved her arms wildly and screamed and fell, and grabbed her nose when she was half way down. We watched her swim to the side, race up the ladders, run out to the end of the board and go off almost without hesitation.

“After the first time, it’s easy,” I said.

“That’s what they say,” Louise said.

Somehow we had started talking on two levels. It made me feel clumsy with her, and yet curiously excited. I could not deny the strength of the attraction I felt toward her. I could not look at her without thinking how it would be to touch her. But it was something I was going to have to sublimate. I knew that. And this funny sort of talk made it more difficult to thrust desire out of my mind. I did not want to think of desire, because then I thought of Warren Dodge, and my mind would make ugly, sick little pictures of the two of them together, of his grossness defiling her lucently ivory body. Somebody had written the wrong story book about Louise and Sam. We didn’t meet when we should have met. When we were both ready to meet. A time like that goes by and you can’t get it back. You can howl or you can whine, but you can’t go back to any of those forks in your own road and try the other turn instead of the one you took.

Anyway, this wasn’t the girl with the braid and the blue dress. This was a woman and she was twenty-seven, and you could look at her eyes and the shape of her mouth and make a fair guess as to how often and how badly she had been hurt.

When we saw the others down on the dock we headed that way. The boat was called the
Try Again,
and it was a twenty-six-foot sports fisherman with outriggers, twin screws, two swivel fishing chairs bolted to the deck, a broad beam and an oversized cockpit. The crew was a knotted charcoal-colored little man in khakis named Romeo. When we were aboard, some boys on the dock tossed our lines aboard. Romeo eased it out and then opened it up and it really got up and went. There was a northeast wind and enough of a chop so that the
Try Again
spanked white spray out fifteen yards on each side of the bow, but it ran steady and dry.

Bowman, braced easily against the movement of the boat, gave us all more of the travelogue, speaking above the sound of the gutty engines.

“This is one of the great fishing areas of the world,” he said. “You have the flats for dolphin, albacore, king, tarpon, barracuda, amberjack, Spanish mackerel and so on. Then, down toward Bimini, which isn’t much of a run from here in the
Try Again,
you get marlin, tuna, sail, mako, the big stuff. Mike doesn’t get as much time to fish as he’d like to have. He’s a real bug on it. The day before yesterday he got an eighty-seven-pound barracuda on thirty-pound test line. Ugly devil.”

I couldn’t resist it. “I thought you were in New York the day before yesterday, Mr. Bowman.”

It didn’t cause a ripple. “Please call me Fletcher, Sam. I got down yesterday. Amparo showed me a picture of it she took with one of those Polaroid cameras. That’s Amparo Blakely. She’s Mike’s indispensable girl Friday. Last year Mike brought a four-hundred-and-thirty-pound marlin to gaff on sixty-pound test line. The fight lasted over three hours.”

Tommy had been listening avidly. He moved in on Bowman with what sounded like highly technical questions. Bowman seemed to give informed answers. It gave me the uneasy feeling that there would be damn few subjects that could come up that Bowman wouldn’t have the inside pitch on, and couldn’t discuss with mellow confidence and self-effacing charm. He had a white scar in one thick black eyebrow and I wondered who had had the pleasure of putting it there. The sun was hot and the three male tourists, Tommy first, shed jackets and, ties and rolled up shirt sleeves. The air seemed to be reviving Warren. He asked Bowman if there was a drink aboard. Bowman was apologetic and dreadfully sorry that there was not. But we would be at Dubloon Cay in half an hour now. It was just thirty miles northeast of Grand Bahama.

I found myself looking at Louise. She was standing by the rail, holding onto one vertical support for the Navy top. The wind snapped her glossy black hair against her cheek and molded her dress tightly against her high breasts and against her thighs. I just looked at her and when I turned and looked at Bowman he was still talking to Tommy, but he was looking over Tommy’s shoulder at me. He held my glance for a quarter beat and then looked away, but I had the feeling he had gotten the message.

THREE

BOWMAN POINTED OUT DUBLOON CAY and it didn’t look as though there was anything on it. It was low and about three miles long. Then we went around a point and we could see the small tidy bay, the long T-shaped dock, a wide expanse of lawn that sloped up to a long low building of weathered wood, with many porches and verandas. As we came closer I could see a pool to the left of the house, with umbrellas and people lying around in the sun, and a tiny figure of somebody in a white coat carrying a tray of drinks. To the right of the main house, back in the pines, were several smaller structures. There was a cruiser about forty-five feet long moored to the dock, as well as several skiffs with outboard motors. A hundred yards to the left of the dock, along the semicircle of sand beach, a small float plane was pulled up against the sand and moored with long lines tied to palms. There was a low sea wall between the lawn and the sand beach. The layout looked like a small and efficient hotel, fashionable and comfortable. God knows Mike Dean could afford it.

Romeo reversed the engines at the last possible moment and Bowman fended the boat off the dock until Romeo had the fenders in place and the lines secured. Two Bahamian boys in white jackets trotted down and got the luggage onto the dock. We each identified our own luggage, and Bowman told the boys what rooms we were to be put in, and told us that the best thing to do would be follow the boys and unpack and change into something comfortable and join the party out by the pool. He said it was a little too late for sun clothing as the bugs would be out in another hour to drive us all indoors.

We were all in the right wing of the building. The McGanns were beside me and the Dodges beyond them. My room was clean and rather bare and very small. A room for sleeping only. There was a small tiled bath. One door opened onto the corridor and the other door onto the long front veranda with its view of the bay and the open sea beyond, and twin islands in the distance. I unpacked, changed to gray slacks and a dark blue sports shirt, and walked out onto the veranda at about five-thirty. The sun was getting lower, but there was still a lot of heat in it. I had no intention of heading for the pool by myself.

Fifty feet along the screened veranda a screen door hissed. I looked up from lighting my cigarette and saw a blond girl come in, walking from sunlight into shade. She wore a knit shirt in a narrow red and white stripe, red shorts that were very short indeed. She was a round-faced leggedy blonde, toffee-tan, barefoot, humming a something song, swinging her legs in the song’s rhythm, carrying a half drink in her hand. She saw me and lifted the drink as though in a toast and said, “Hello now,” and turned into a room two doors from mine. She left me with memories of legs and smile, and a sense of the whole island being brought into better focus. I sat in a deep canvas chair and put my legs on a low round wooden table, and in a few minutes Tommy and Puss came out. We decided to wait for the others and it was not a long wait, and then we went on out to the pool where everybody was, and where the drinks were.

I had seen plenty of pictures of Michael Davis Dean, and I had heard a lot of talk about him. I knew what he would look like. A big head with heavy features of that spuriously noble design that makes you think of togas and Cicero. A shock of prematurely white hair, unkempt in the contrived way of a second-rate poet. Nobody seemed to know very much about his past. His father had been well off. Mike had never gone to college. He got his first national publicity back in 1934 when he was thirty. In the big receivership tangle over the Geiss Roller Bearing empire, it was Mike who popped up out of no place, holding aces back to back. He had never married. I had heard a lot of words about him. Crafty, unscrupulous, power-mad, egomaniac. And also, charming, able, generous, genius.

I was not braced for Mike in the flesh. He had a deep tan and he wore a straw coolie hat and an ankle-length pink sarong, professionally knotted at the waist and thoroughly rump-sprung. He was shorter than he had looked in his pictures; he stood about five-nine. There were hard shifting slabs of muscle in his back and shoulders and chest, and the sarong was knotted around a slightly protruding belly that looked hard as a rock. His eyes were a very pale gray-blue, and his chest hair was heavy and white. He had something of a Hawaiian look about him. He radiated intense energy, and a conspicuous charm. It was almost impossible to imagine him in any group he would not dominate merely on the basis of an animal magnetism. I sensed that this was a man who would commit himself one hundred and ten percent to anything he decided to do. I sensed that it would be a sorry situation to be standing in his way.

Fletcher Bowman introduced us. Mike was, bewilderingly, a jolly and muscular elder brother to Puss, a courtly uncle to Louise, a drinking partner to Warren Dodge, a fellow sportsman to Tommy, all in the space of a minute and a half. When he released my hand he grinned shrewdly up at me and thumped me lightly in the ribs with a slow fist big as a burl of mahogany, and said in a voice the others could not hear, “Well make some talk when we get a chance, Big Sam.”

And the hell of it was that it made me feel flattered and honored to be given this special attention, even though I knew it was only a part of his tactics. “I’m the uninvited guest,” I said.

“Self-invited. And the only reason for that is because I didn’t think there was a chance you’d come. You fit right into this picture the way we want to set it up, Sam. Folks, you’ll need a drink before we make the rounds. No, Fletcher,
I’ll
take them around.”

He motioned and one of the white-coated men came over and took our drink order. Mike was drinking steaming coffee from a pewter mug with a glass bottom. A small boy with a white jacket and great dignity came over to us and offered a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

Mike rapped him on the top of the crinkly skull and the boy grinned with quick pleasure and worship. “This is Skylark,” he said. “Romeo and Ruby’s youngest. Romeo and Ruby stay here on the island the year round and keep things in shape. When I move in with a crowd, they beef up the staff with their relatives and stock up on food and liquor.”

Our drinks came and Mike took us on a circuit of the pool. I knew it would take quite a little while before I could fit names to the faces. But there was one that was easy. Bonny Carson. I had expected to find at least one person from the entertainment world there, but I would not have guessed it would be Bonny. She hit her peak in the late forties and early fifties when she starred in several hit musicals. Outside of infrequent guest spots on television, she had dropped out of sight. But the big-eyed clown face was unmistakable. She had strong gifts of comedy, and a brass voice with which she could lift the roof off the house when she belted out a song. But on a Wednesday evening, the tenth of May, on Dubloon Cay, she was solemnly and somewhat sullenly drunk, and she was showing her thirty-five-plus years. There was a little man hovering around her, name of Bundy. He had a sharp pale nervous face, more than his quota of nervous mannerisms: ear tugging, head scratching, lip pulling. His smile went off and on like a timed electric sign. In shorts he looked somewhat like the pictures you have seen of self-conscious chickens defeathered by a tornado. He had a fiercely protective attitude toward Bonny Carson.

There was another woman who stood out, Amparo Blakely, Mike Dean’s indispensable secretary. She would have been noticed anywhere. She was big. She was nearly six feet tall, and she was big-boned and she was close to forty; but none of those attributes detracted from her look of being a completely feminine and forceful and desirable woman. I had seen her in photographs featuring Mike Dean. In those pictures she had usually been a few steps behind him. I had not realized how big she was, but I had a clear memory of her striking face. I knew that Amparo was a not unusual Spanish name and I had wondered if she was partly Spanish. But now, seeing her in the flesh, I suspected that she was half Mexican Indian. Though her eyes were pale, her face, tanned to a red-bronze, had that Aztecan look of humid passions hidden behind the Indio mask.

I had heard the many legends of Mike Dean’s Amparo Blakely. It was said that she had become independently wealthy by riding along with Mike on his deals. She had been with him a long time. And now, with ease and assurance, she was acting as his hostess. I had heard it hinted that their relationship was more than professional. As I looked at her, at the mature, magnificent and superb body in a white and aqua dress, I did not see how any platonic relationship between Mike and this total woman would be possible. They both had a look of being more alive than the rest of us.

Her hair was dark when she was in the shade, but the sun brought out coppery glints in it. She wore crude gold earrings in a barbaric design. And as she moved among the guests she had that inimitable look of being utterly at home in her world and within herself.

I looked around and I knew there were one hell of a lot more people on the island than I had expected, and I knew I should get them all sorted out as quickly as possible. I wanted to know who was working for and with Mike Dean, directly and indirectly. You can tell a lot about a man by the attitude of the people who work for him. Fletcher Bowman was a younger, more suave, less forceful edition of Mike Dean. But he was so obscured behind all his masks of mannerisms I could not detect his actual attitude toward his boss man.

I wanted information and so I looked around and detected what I thought might be the most pleasant way of acquiring it. The blond cutie I had seen on the veranda was back at the pool, and she had changed to a blue blouse and a white skirt. She sat on a couch built like a trampoline, a yellow canvas cover spring-fastened to a tubular bronze frame. She had a new drink and she was humming her little song and half-smiling into the middle distance and tapping a slender foot in a tall blue shoe as she sat facing a dull fireball of a sun that was sliding down into a sea that had turned to oiled slate.

I stood over her and said, “On the first go-round I got it that you’re called Murphy, but I didn’t get the rest of it. And I’m lousy on names and so I need maybe a briefing on you and the rest of the throng.”

She came back out of her middle distance and focused on me, warm and friendly as a pup.

“In my file folder it says here that you’re the biggest thing on the island and your name is Sam Something.”

“Glidden.”

“Have it your way. And I am a shade drunk from drinking, and you may sit down and be briefed.” She patted the yellow canvas beside her and I sat down. “About this Murphy,” she said, “I am Bridget Hallowell and I used to be called Bridey until that damn book came out and then it became Murphy. I am starting an international movement to get it back to Bridget where it belongs.”

“Bridget it will be. And on the briefing, start with you.”

“After I get you lined away. First I want the measurements. Men shouldn’t be so big. I do not mind being made to feel dainty and fragile, but not
this
dainty and fragile.”

It is something I have had to get used to. “Six feet four and a quarter, Bridget. Two hundred and eighteen pounds. And I will be thirty-one on the twenty-fourth of next July. I am vice-president of the Harrison Corporation.”

“And unmarried.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, it shows a little. Sort of. Anyway, dear Fletcher told me you were when he told me to be nice to you on account of you are not matched up with any female and social situations seem to go better by twos, so I am your girl, sort of. So you better chide me for being a little drunk, and maybe give me a hurt look. You know you look more like thirty-five.”

“Gosh, thanks.”

“I expect it’s from being so big. Now about me, I am now leading this here mad gay life I dreamed about. It is like this. Long, long ago when I was a mere child of sorts, I won a short story contest and so, natch, I wrote a novel. But it was stinky. And then I sold some nauseating gloop to the love magazines, and then I packed up, I did, and I went to New York, I did, and freelancing was too too rough so I went on a magazine and I wrote how-to things. How to keep mealy bugs out of your screened terrace. What to do about adolescent acne. And then I got married and I should have researched something called how to stay married because it was going terribly sour after only five months and then he resolved it on the Sawmill River Parkway by slewing off it into a big maple tree; and that was November last year, and now I am a fledgling with Brainerd Associates, which is a small and very rich and very discreet public relations firm. Over there, talking to Fletcher Bowman, you will see a terribly sincere man named Guy Brainerd. The one with the bald head and all the chin. He is my boss man. Mike Dean pays the firm a fabulous sum every year to make Mike Dean a wholesome household word, and I have been assigned to the Dean account, and so I was brang down on the airplane like one of the brass.” She turned and gave me an odd look and said, “Don’t get things mixed up, Samuel. I am pretty damn good at what I am doing.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“This empty-looking head is not that empty. I don’t know why you make me feel I should explain myself. Anyhow, look over there at the end of the pool, at the gal with the sleek blond hairdo and the sleek blond manners and all the jangle bracelets and the poison green shorts tailored to that saucy little rump. That is Elda Garry and she is a lady editor on
Blend,
and we have her almost talked into running a great big warm feature on Mike Dean, his philosophies and philanthropies. Elda and my boss are having a thing, and it has been going on for some little time now, and it is very handy for them to come down here, and I suspect I was brought along to make it look a little better, maybe. Guy’s wife is pure undiluted bitch, and isn’t it funny that in getting away from her, he’ll run right to more of the same? Golly, I bet you didn’t know you’d get briefed this good.”

“It’s thorough,” I said.

“Let us continue. The guy Elda is talking to is Cam Duncan. He’s a lawyer and he works for Mike.” I had noticed Duncan when we were introduced. He was in his thirties, a tall, shambling, frail-looking man with mouse-colored hair and an engagingly ugly face and a crooked and charming grin. “He’s a honey bug,” said Bridget.