Operation Nassau (15 page)

‘This is murder,’ I said. ‘Do you have a bodyguard?’

He lit his cigarette and drew on it before answering. ‘The staff are my own,’ he said. ‘The boy you saw. One or two others. But I can hardly go about in an armoured car. The very essence of this job is ordinariness. And mobility.’

‘Then why choose a house here?’ I said.

His eyes stayed for a moment on the door through which Denise had gone; then he turned and smiled at me. ‘Why not? You know I have a nominal job here. We’re only beginning. We have some permanent residents but most of the people who fly over are staying a week, or a fortnight, to look over property, to discuss buying, to try out the golf-course. The company officials look after their business requirements. Denise and I come in on the social side. We live here for very little; we eat at the golf clubhouse. And no one minds if I move backwards and forwards to Nassau or Abaco or Miami. I still have some small business interests: investments to look after. And Great Harbour Cay is central to almost everywhere. Better than Nassau.’

‘And Lady Edgecombe likes the social life,’ I said.

He tapped the ash off his cigarette. ‘In season,’ he said, ‘it gets a bit boring in the heat; but then so do all the Bahamas. I send her away in the summer. She likes to go to the States.”

‘She doesn’t know what you do?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘And she won’t know. I don’t want Denise becoming a target for our opponents, whoever they may be.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Lord. Look, I don’t want to rush you, but we thought you might like to meet some of the more public company on the island. They all forgather at the golf clubhouse as a rule for drinks before dinner. Would you like to freshen up and we’ll take you?’

I looked down at my extraordinary uncreased blue silk. ‘Will this do?’

He grinned. ‘Of course it will. Suits you down to the ground.’

Which was one thing it certainly did not. I got to my feet slowly. ‘Sir Bartholomew -’

‘Bart. Please. If I may call you Beltanno?’

The thought of Denise calling me Beltanno flitted distastefully over my mind. But I couldn’t very well say, ‘Dr MacRannoch, if you please?’ ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I was about to observe. Surely the need for secrecy has now gone? Someone knows who you are. How can you possibly carry on with any form of classified work now?’

He took my empty glass from me. and stood viewing the bottom. ‘You see.’ he said, ‘it entirely depends, doesn’t it, on who is trying to kill me. If it’s an enemy agent, then certainly my cover is blown, and I shall be out of work. But a man with a private grudge might be a different matter. Or so Johnson says. He also says, bless his fully automatic positive thinking, that it would be a pity to throw overboard all my skills and experience until we have proof either way.’

‘And I am to help you get your proof?’ I said.

He stared at me. ‘That hasn’t been said. But whatever happens. Johnson’s cover mustn’t be broken.’

‘I know. It nearly cost him two thousand dollars to keep it in Nassau,’ I remarked.

Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe grinned, and held open my door. ‘Beltanno. my dear. He’s a Top Man. He probably gets that a week in expenses,’ he said. ‘You keep in with my friend Johnson. He’s worth knowing, on several counts.’

It was not advice I cared for. In fact I found my view of Johnson Johnson had hardened a good deal, when out of his company. It was even possible that I had suffered some sort of hypnosis from those confusing bifocals, allied to the blow on my head.

I shut the door, and taking off the wig, felt the wound on my scalp with exploring fingers. It was doing all right. So was I, I decided. I scrubbed up, re-dressed, and checked the revolver was still in my bag. Then I went out to join Denise and Bart Edgecombe.

The sunset was of course quite spectacular: it dropped slowly into its own copper reflection, as we drove south-west to the clubhouse called Tamboo. I realized then what a lot of the island I still had to visit. The west side was greener and lusher than the east, and along the fairways of the golf-course and beyond and behind were a great many villas, discreetly shielded by palm trees, with lights from veiled windows beginning to glow in the dusk.

‘The yachting marina’s over there,’ said Sir Bartholomew. ‘And the new waterfront houses, where you can park your boat on your doorstep. But just the prototype so far, of course. They’re still pile-driving the quayside. We’ll show you all that tomorrow.’

The Tamboo golf clubhouse had a deep, grotto-like entrance in a façade of natural stone. Above one could see a terrace, and a pair of architectural rooftops like twin wedges of Gruyere cheese. Inside it was cool and airy, with a haze of greenery encased in rope baskets, and a pink unpolished brick floor. Yellow and red hibiscus blossoms lay on a glass table surrounded by tall wicker chairs.

Edgecombe had gone to sign me in at the long counter. It had a register and a radio-telephone set lying on it. A thought struck me, and I strolled along after him.

A tall figure uncoiled from behind one of the high-backed Italian chairs and trod softly over beside me. ‘If you’re looking for Mr T. K. MacRannoch,’ said Wallace Brady blandly, ‘I’ve located him for you. And he’s right here.’

And from the edge of the neighbouring armchair, peeping and smiling, I saw the Japanese golfer. The man I had last seen in that foursome behind me, on Paradise Island. ‘Oh,’ I said.

‘He likes to be called Mr Tiko. The other name is a bit of a mouthful,’ Brady said. ‘You know the last time I met you, we were in the middle of a conflagration in the Bamboo Conch Club? Then you all rushed out the door like you were crazy, and I never even knew what had happened until Sir Bart here turned up today and told me. Your friends sure carry a lot of money around.’ His eyes, which had been struggling to keep off my hair, now candidly roved around and examined it. ‘Say,’ he said. ‘Am I allowed to say I think it’s great?’

So Edgecombe hadn’t told him about the incident in Miami. I was thankful for his discretion, if irritated with Wallace Brady’s lack of it. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘And how is the Crab Island bridge coming along?’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, so the Begum told you about that? It’s my spare-time baby, you know. The big job’s over here, or will be till it’s finished, but I couldn’t resist having a crack at that little problem. I think she’ll do.’

‘Is it finished?’ I said.

He was surprised. ‘Hell fire, it takes a couple of weeks to fling these things together,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you see it as you flew over?”

I made a mental resolution to eschew Bossa Novas and try something else. ‘Then how did my father travel to Crab Island?’ I asked. I assumed without question that the whole island had taken part, willy-nilly, in the transmission of James Ulric from Great Harbour Cay to Crab Island. He would make certain they did.

‘By boat,’ said Wallace Brady. He hesitated. ‘Your father is certainly nervous of water.’

‘He isn’t nervous of water,’ I said sharply. ‘He’s just sick.’

‘He was,’ said Brady. ‘In fact, we got the nurse to go over with him.’

I knew the company nurse, an admirable person who flew her own four-seater Cherokee aircraft and administered to the health of the island from a spotless wheeled clinic down by the airport. She was pretty. ‘That would stop the trouble,’ I said.

‘It did. Come and meet Mr Tiko,’ Brady said.

The Edgecombes were waiting for me, so we all got introduced together.

My prospective fiancé was slightly under my height, clean, neat and possessed of perfect American-English. He no longer worked in Tokyo, but with an investment company in New York. From the gold fountain-pen, the gold watch and the gold tie-pin, I gathered he was not in any real want. Brady, clearly, had told him nothing about me, beyond my name, which was not all that uncommon, particularly as MacRannochs were presumably already preparing to gather on Crab Island like flies.

I was prepared to say nothing even about that, but as we gathered to walk up the flight of thick green carpeted stairs, Mr Tiko moved over and said, ‘We are similar of name, are we not, Dr MacRannoch? But I do not use all of mine. I am also doctor by university degree, but not of medicine: I am doctor of law. Tell me, it is not correct to wear formal dark suit in the evenings?’

We had got to the top of the stairs, where it appeared all the lights had gone out. I then saw it was merely part of the great American myth that everything after 6 p.m. including eating is more romantic if it is performed in the dark. I have known a fellow doctor actually walk out of a restaurant in New York because I insisted on dissecting my steak with a small pocket torch jammed into a candlestick. Here, I merely groped after the Edgecombes, who were each wearing a trouser-suit, but not of the kind Dr Tiko meant; and Wallace Brady, who was wearing a long coral shirt over sharp kidskin trousers. ‘It doesn’t look like it,’ I said.

We progressed through a doorway into an area of still greater darkness and voluminous noise of both the stereo and Bossa Nova variety. It appeared to be a large parquet-floored room crowded with dancing, sitting or leaning figures against a dim background of rose-geranium drapes. At one end, a large circular bar seating perhaps twenty on tall bamboo stools was gently lit from above by a cluster of some fifty vermilion lights in lobster-pot cases. The wall behind the bar was tiled in natural bark. A girl with very long blonde hair and a transparent white jumper reaching to the adductor brevis floated between us, talking French to a diaphanously clad boy. Lady Edgecombe stepped back and held me by the arm. ‘Did you see who that is?’

Before all else, a candidate, I should have said, for bronchopneumonia. But I allowed her to tell me.

‘I think,’ murmured Mr Tiko at my side, ‘I should perhaps go and remove my jacket and tie. More, with the best intentions, I am unable to do. Dr MacRannoch.’ He gave me a small bow and squirmed off.

I liked him. I should have to. Sir Bartholomew said, ‘Over here,’ and we crossed to the noisiest corner of the room where a great many irrationally dressed people were sitting drinking in black bamboo lattice chairs and beige sofas, in a welter of pot-plants. The names meant very little to me, but appeared to illuminate Lady Edgecombe, who became more graciously animated than I had ever known her: the ambience appeared to be stage, screen. TV, with a sprinkling of New York and Philadelphia society. There was even an English drawl here and there. It was difficult to ask them what they did when they all obviously assumed that one knew what they did, so I contented myself with ordering a Yellowberry and listening to a long item of scandal closely connected with a patient I had once operated upon. I had no idea what a Yellowberry was, but my companion, a lusty athlete with golden sideburns and a diamond locket over his suntan, had just ordered one and I hoped he was used to it, and even that it might be responsible for his present splendid condition.

It came, and was indeed yellow, and smelt of rum, banana liqueur and fresh orange-juice. Sir Bartholomew, straining out of the gloom, called, smiling, ‘I thought sensible doctors only tippled tomato juice.’

I called back, ‘I’ve gone off tomato juice,’ and felt a little contrition. It might, after all, be quite expensive. There was a cloud of Brut and the diamond locket suddenly swam into my field of vision. ‘I didn’t catch your name. You’re English?’

‘Scottish. Beltanno MacRannoch,’ I said, and counted. I can’t help it if it sounds like a warrant. At five he said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ and I said, ‘Never mind. Miss MacRannoch. It’s a Scots name.’

‘Ah.’ He looked nonplussed, I wasn’t sure why. Doubts, perhaps, about speaking my language? He said, ‘I thought from what your friend said that you were maybe a doctor?’

I sat there, quiet as an over-stuffed washing-machine, and ticked over the optional programmes. Say No. Get up and move off. Say Yes, but I prefer not to talk business. Say, What free advice are you after, brother? I pressed the button and slid the disc on the line.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am.’

‘Say!’ His smile really was breathtaking. He looked me up and down. ‘I’ll say you don’t look it.’

This, note, was a compliment. ‘You don’t either,’ I said.

The brilliant smile gathered hazed overtones. ‘I’m not,’ he said.

‘I thought you couldn’t be,’ I replied.

Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe, who had not become an Ambassador somewhere for nothing, leaned over smiling again and said. ‘Beltanno is one of the senior medical officers of the United Commonwealth Hospital at Nassau, Paul. Don’t let her faze you.’

‘You are?’ Three other faces joined the diamond locket and two other conversations began to break up. A girl in a white satin Tom Mix outfit said, ‘You mean you’re fully qualified and everything, the same as a man nearly? Isn’t that marvellous?’

‘It brings its own sense of wonder,’ I said after a moment. I was, after all, Edgecombe’s guest. There was a strangled laugh somewhere behind me which I thought, but was not sure, belonged to Wallace Brady.

‘Dedicated,’ said the diamond locket called Paul with some reverence. ‘That’s it, isn’t it, Doctor? Dedicated to suffering mankind? In Britain anyway,’ he added, his tone darkening slightly. ‘In Los Angeles, my God, they’re a heap of loot-grabbing horse-shit.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘In Britain as well. We’re allowed to charge a pretty stiff price for consultations in private. You’d be surprised.’

There was a brief silence, cut short by three voices speaking, and someone asked someone else to dance. The girl with the fringes got up and struggled off into the gloom, bearing her starvation-induced anaemia, I judged, with her. Diamond locket, who had eased off slightly, leaned back and said casually, ‘You know, it’s a funny thing about feet.’

It is a funny thing. Nine times out of ten, you can count upon it, the trouble is feet. Sir Bartholomew said, ‘Dance, Beltanno?’

I don’t dance, and he knew I didn’t dance, but I got up and worked my way through to him, and then into the centre of the large room where the crowd was so thick that we merely stood face to face with our hands clasped, rocking gently. ‘Can you forgive me?’ he said. ‘If I hadn’t been such a damned idiot, they’d never have known.’