Bodily Harm (34 page)

“So you thought I was with the
CIA
,” he says, as he sits down again.

Rennie is not so much embarrassed as startled. She isn’t ready for it, she drops her fork. “I suppose Lora told you that,” she says.

Paul is having fun. “It’s a strange coincidence,” he says, “because we thought you were, too.”

“What?” says Rennie. “You must be crazy!” This time it’s not surprise, it’s outrage.

“Look at it from our point of view,” says Paul. “It’s a good front,
you have to admit. The travel piece, the camera. This just isn’t the sort of place they do a lot of travel pieces about. Then the first person you connect with happens to be the man who has the best chance of defeating the government in the election. That’s Minnow. Nobody watching would call that an accident.”

“But I hardly know him,” says Rennie.

“I’m just telling you what it looks like,” says Paul. “Spot the
CIA
, it’s a local game; everybody plays it. Castro used tourists a lot, and now all kinds of people are using them. The
CIA
is using non-Americans a lot; it’s a better cover. Locals and foreigners. We know they’re sending someone else in; they may be here already. There’s always one or two here, and in my business you like to know who it is.”

“So it wasn’t the Abbotts after all,” says Rennie. “I didn’t think so, they were just too old and nice.”

“As a matter of fact it was,” says Paul. “But they’ve been recalled. Whoever comes in next will be taking a more active role. It could be anyone.”

“But
me
, “says Rennie. “Come on!”

“We had to check it out,” says Paul.

“Who is
we?”
she says. “Lora, I suppose.” Things are coming clear. They picked her up almost as soon as she was off the plane. First Paul in the hotel diningroom; so much for eye contact. Then Lora, the next day on the reef boat. Between the two of them they’d hardly let her out of their sight. There must have been someone following her around and reporting back to them so they’d know where she was heading.

“Lora comes in handy,” says Paul.

“Who went through my room?” says Rennie. It couldn’t have been him, since he was having dinner with her at the Driftwood.

“Did someone go through your room?” asks Paul. Rennie can’t tell if his surprise is real or not.

“Everything,” she says. “Including the box. The one in your spare bedroom.”

“I don’t know who it was,” says Paul. “I’d like to though.”

“If you thought I was the
CIA
, why did you send me to pick up the box?” says Rennie.

“First of all,” says Paul, “they don’t care that much about the dope trade. They like to know what you’re up to so they can maybe use it on you to get you to do something for them, but apart from that they don’t care. It’s the political stuff they care about. But the police hanging around the airport are something else. They’d seen Lora too many times, that was the sixth box we’d run through. We needed someone else and I didn’t want it to be me. It’s always better to use a woman, they’re less likely to be suspected. If you weren’t an agent, no harm done; unless you got caught, of course. If you were, you’d already know what was in the box but you’d pick it up anyway, you wouldn’t want to lose contact by refusing. Either way, I’d have the gun.”

“It was for you?” says Rennie.

“In my business you need them,” Paul says. “People shoot at you and you have to be able to shoot back. I had some coming up from Colombia, you can often pick them up down there, serial numbers filed off but they’re U.S. Army equipment, military aid, you get them from crooked generals who want to make a little money on the side. But I lost that boat and I lost the connection at the same time. Elva’s the contingency plan. She really does have a daughter in New York, so it was easy enough to fly her there with the money. Those people like cash. She didn’t know what it was for though. She didn’t know what was in the boxes.”

“Lost?” says Rennie.

“The boat got sunk, the general got shot,” says Paul. “I’ve just replaced both of them but it took me a while.”

“Who’s shooting at you?” says Rennie, who is trying very hard
not to find any of this romantic. Boys playing with guns, that’s all it is. Even telling her about this is showing off; isn’t it? But she can’t help wondering whether Paul has any bullet holes in him. If he has, she’d like to see.

“Who isn’t?” says Paul. “I’m an independent. They don’t like people like me, they want a monopoly.”

Rennie picks up her fork again. She lifts her fish, separating the bones.

“So that’s what all this was about,” she says.

“All what?” says Paul.

“All this fucking,” says Rennie, pronouncing the
g
despite herself. “You were checking me out.”

“Don’t be stupid,” says Paul. “It was mostly Marsdon’s idea anyway, he’s paranoid about the
CIA
, it’s like a monomania with him. He wanted us to get you out of here as fast as possible. I never believed it myself.”

This isn’t the answer Rennie wants. She wants to be told she’s important to him. “Why not?” she says.

“You were too obvious,” Paul says. “You were doing everything right out in the open. You were too nice. You were too naïve. You were too easy. Anyway, you wanted it too much. I can tell when a woman’s faking it.”

Rennie puts her fork down carefully on her plate. Something is being used against her, her own desire, she doesn’t know why. “I’ll do the dishes,” she says.

Rennie fills the sink with hot water from the teakettle. Paul is in the second bedroom, with the door closed. He says he’s trying to find out who’s winning the election. Local politics, he’s told her. Nothing to do with her. She can hear blurred voices, the crackle of static.

She’s scraping the fishbones off the plates when she hears footsteps on the porch. There are a lot more footsteps than she’s prepared to deal with. Wiping her hands on the dishtowel, she goes to the second bedroom and knocks at the door. “Paul,” she says. Feeling like a wife. Incapable.

Rennie’s in the bedroom, which is where she wants to be and where Paul wants her to be. Out there, in the livingroom, there’s a loud meeting going on. The results of the election are in, Ellis has seven seats, Minnow has six and Prince has two, and Rennie can add. So can everyone in the livingroom, but so far six and two still only make six and two.

It’s nothing to do with her though. Paul said that and she believes it. She’s reading the books he got for her somewhere, God knows where since they’re museum pieces, Dell Mysteries from the forties, with the eye-and-keyhole logo on the cover, the map of the crime scene on the back, and the cast of characters on the first page. The pages are yellowed and watermarked and smell of mould. Rennie reads the casts of characters and tries to guess who gets murdered. Then she reads up to the murder and tries to guess who did it, and then she turns to the back of the book to see if she’s right. She doesn’t have much patience for the intricacies of clues and deductions.

“You goin’ to let that bastard win?” It’s Marsdon, almost a shriek. “You let him fool you? So many years he betray the people, you goin’ to betray the people too?”

Dr. Minnow is making a speech; his voice rises and falls, rises and falls. He, after all, has more experience as well as more seats, he will be the leader of the opposition, if nothing else. Why should he back down in favour of Prince? He cannot let the Justice Party swing in the direction of Castro.

“Castro!” Marsdon yells. “All you tell me is Castro! Prince no Castro!”

Why here? Rennie asked. I’m the connection, Paul told her. Rennie wishes they would turn down the volume. She’s not doing too well with the murderers, but she’s eighty percent on the victims: two blondes with pale translucent skin, mouths like red gashes and swelling breasts bursting through their dresses, two tempestuous redheads with eyes of green smouldering fire and skin like clotted cream, each carefully arranged on floor or bed like a still life, not quite naked, clothing dishevelled to suggest rape, though there was no rape in the forties, finger-marks livid around the throat – they loved
livid –
or a wound still oozing, preferably in the left breast. Dead but not molested. The private eyes finding them (two hot-tempered Irishmen, one Greek, two plain Americans) describe each detail of the body fully, lushly, as if running their tongues over it; all that flesh, totally helpless because totally dead. Each of them expresses outrage at the crime, even though the victim provoked it. Rennie finds it curiously innocent, this hypocritical outrage. It’s sweetly outmoded, like hand-kissing.

After a while Rennie hears the sound of chairs being scraped back, and then it’s quiet. Then Paul comes into the room and starts taking off his clothes, as if nothing at all has happened. He peels the T-shirt off first, drops it to the floor. Already it seems to her a familiar gesture. Rennie counts: she’s known him five days.

“What happened?” she says. “What were they doing?”

“Dealing,” says Paul. “Minnow won. As of fifteen minutes ago, he’s the new prime minister. They’ve all gone off to have a party.”

“Marsdon backed down?”

“No,” says Paul. “He didn’t exactly back down. He said he was doing it for the good of the people. There was some disagreement about who
the people
were, but you have to expect that.”

“Did Prince just sort of abdicate?” says Rennie.

“Prince didn’t do anything,” Paul says. “Marsdon did it for him. Marsdon’s going to be Minister of Tourism, and they sawed off at Justice Minister for Prince. That’s why Marsdon didn’t struggle too hard. He wants to see the look on the face of the current Justice Minister. They hate each other like shit.”

He disappears into the bathroom and Rennie can hear him brushing his teeth. “You don’t seem too happy,” she calls.

Paul comes out again. He walks flat-footed, heavily towards the bed. He’s older than she thought. “Why should I be?” he says.

“Dr. Minnow’s a good man,” says Rennie. This is true, he is a good man, and it’s not his fault that goodness of his kind makes her twitchy. It’s like being with someone on a diet, which always makes her lust for chocolate mousse and real whipped cream.

“Good men can be a pain in the ass,” says Paul. “They’re hard to deal with. He’s a politician so he’s a user, they have to be, but he’s less of a user than most. He believes in democracy and fair play and all those ideas the British left here along with cricket, he really does believe that shit. He thinks guns are playing dirty.”

“What do you think?” says Rennie. She’s back to interviewing him.

Paul’s sitting on the edge of the bed, as if reluctant to get into it. “It doesn’t matter what I think,” he says. “I’m neutral. What matters right now is what the other side thinks. What Ellis thinks.”

“What does Ellis think?” says Rennie.

“That remains to be seen,” says Paul. “He’s not going to like it.”

“What about Prince?” says Rennie.

“Prince is a believer,” says Paul. “He supplies the belief. He thinks that’s all you need.”

Now at last he does get into the bed, crawling under the mosquito net, tucking it in before turning to her. He’s tired, no doubt of that, and Rennie suddenly finds this very suburban. All he needs are some striped pyjamas and a heart attack and the picture will be complete. He’s not the one who’s giving that impression though. It’s her own solicitude, faked. She knows something he doesn’t know, she knows she’s leaving. She’ll be on the afternoon boat tomorrow, and everything in between is just filler. Maybe she’ll tell him she has a headache. She could use some sleep.

Still, doubt is what you should give other people the benefit of, or that’s the theory. She owes him something: he was the one who gave her back her body; wasn’t he? Although he doesn’t know it. Rennie puts her hands on him. It can be, after all, a sort of comfort. A kindness.

“What do you dream about?” Rennie says. It’s her last wish, it’s all she really wants to know.

“I told you,” Paul says.

“But you lied,” says Rennie.

For a while Paul doesn’t say anything. “I dream about a hole in the ground,” he says finally.