Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 07 (2 page)

“I really am
not
fond of tropical climes,” I said.

That was no smart-ass remark: Guadalcanal had been less than a year ago. I’d caught malaria there and it still flared up from time to time; only in recent months had the combat nightmares of that sticky, stormy hellhole subsided to where I could get some occasional restful sleep. My condition—what they used to call shell shock—had got me out on a Section Eight.

That’s military for crazy as a bedbug.

He was painting a picture in the air with a tanned, manicured hand; he wore a gold ring with an emerald the size of a doorknob in Oz.

“Nassau is a pleasant place, Nathan—an oasis in this war-torn world of ours.”

Funny how a Southern accent wrapped around crap like that can be seductive.

“Walter, it’s July. A getaway to the tropics is no real inducement. Let’s stick to the job itself. I like to know what I’m getting into.”

He shrugged. “Your expenses will be fully paid, and your minimum fee will be one thousand dollars, in advance, for one afternoon’s meeting with Sir Harry.”

That was seductive, too.

“Why me? Why not some Florida dick? Or somebody from the East Coast? Ray Schindler’s the society private eye—maybe you ought to call him. I have his New York number….”

“You were recommended by a friend of Sir Harry’s.”

“Who?”

“Sir Harry didn’t share that with me.”

“Brother.” What if this
was
a mob job? Rich guys had those kind of connections all the time. I sighed. “When does he want to see me?”

“Day after tomorrow, if it’s convenient. You’d fly to Miami in the morning. The following morning, you’d be in the Bahamas. It’s beautiful there, Nathan, truly it is.”

What sounded beautiful was that G-note guarantee.

And my agency could sure as hell use a handsome yearly retainer from a major corporation like Oakes’ Lake Shore Mines of Canada. Maybe I could even open up a Canadian branch of the A-1….

“You’ll do it, then?”

I frowned at him and shook my finger in his face. “Mr. Foskett, Sir Harry Oakes may be the richest man in the world, but somebody’s got to teach him that money can’t buy you everything.”

His face fell.

Then I grinned and patted his tan cheek like a baby. “But, Walt—that somebody isn’t going to be me. I can use a thousand bucks.”

I barely had a foot on the spongy wooden surface of the landing wharf before I slipped out of my suitcoat; I’d worn lightweight clothing, including a seersucker suit and short-sleeved white shirt, but they couldn’t stand up to one minute of muggy Nassau. It was probably only about eighty degrees—child’s play for a Chicagoan who could stand up under the coldest and hottest weather the planet had to offer—but that didn’t stop my shirt from going immediately sopping.

A houseboat-like affair at the tip of the dock next to the bobbing seaplane was where we waited momentarily for our baggage—mine was a single canvas duffel—and at the end of the short pier in a one-story modern shed was a Pan Am passenger station where a polite, casual Negro in a white shirt as dry as mine wasn’t and the crown-crested blue cap of a royal immigration officer asked me a perfunctory question or two and waved me on.

No passports were needed here, I’d been told; and no currency exchange was necessary—though a British colony, New Providence would be glad to take my American money.

Back out in the humid air, I drank in the languid, off-season, wartime ambience of a wharf that no doubt often bustled, but not now. The handful of American tourists who’d made the Miami flight with me—with European travel a memory, the rich had to go
somewhere
in the summer, even if it was the tropics—were shanghaied by a barefoot black troubadour bearing a weather-beaten banjo. In tattered shirt and trousers and a wide straw hat and just as wide a smile, he accompanied himself, plinking, plunking on the banjo, beating out rhythm with his knuckles on the instrument’s face as he sang in a jaunty baritone, “Wish I had a needle, so fast I can sew, I sew my baby to my side and down the road we go…”

The tourists stood with their bags in hands, with expressions ranging from delight to annoyance, and when the troubadour tipped his hat and then turned it upside down, they pitched some coins in. I wasn’t part of his audience, but wandered over and flipped in a dime myself.

“Thank you, mon,” he said.

“Always this sticky in July?”

“Always, mon. Even de trees sweat.”

And he was off to find new pigeons.

Warehouses and other stone structures—this one labeled Government Ice House, that one labeled Sponge Exchange, another Vendue House, whatever that was—fronted the water’s edge. People were on the move, only not too fast. Most of the faces here were dark, with women in sarong-like garments but longer than Dorothy Lamour’s, and many of the men were bare-chested, ripplingly muscled, perspiration-oiled; both genders often carried baskets and other objects on their heads (despite frequent elaborate straw hats), perfectly balanced, making a way of life out of a childhood expression:
Look, Ma, no hands.

As I strolled away from the wharf, duffel bag in hand (not on my head), I glanced back at the harbor, its choppy blueness irresistible to the eye. A strip of land at the immediate horizon (inelegantly named Hog Island, I later learned) defined the harbor; a lighthouse on the tip of the island made a white silhouette against the sky.

A few small sleek white yachts were searching in vain for the fabled Bahamian breezes, while two native schooners were gliding in, as if engaged in a lazy race. Unlike the rich man’s pleasure craft, these had a rough-hewn look, were sorely in need of paint and bore sails of patchwork rags. I thought they were fishing ships, but on closer look I could spot bins laden with brainlike objects that my brain finally discerned as sponges. So they
were
fishing ships, in a way, though I didn’t relish a fillet of one of their catches.

Another vessel, laden with baskets of fresh vegetables and fruit, drifted by with a colored contingent of young and old, from a granny sitting in a rocking chair to a giggling teenage girl whose nut-brown bare-chested beau was singing her a calypso chantey amidst goats, chickens, sheep and a cow, together on a sloop perhaps twenty-five feet long.

Anchored along the wharf, looking rather lonely, was a ferrystyle sight-seeing craft near a sign that said, glass bottom boat—sea gardens ferry—paradise beach. Perhaps fifteen passengers—including some attractive young women, who looked to be either British or American, with some off-duty RAF and Army boys mixed in—sat around the glass well of the boat, looking impatient, while the portly white white-haired “captain,” dressed in blazer and cap like a roadshow Captain Andy from
Show Boat,
paced the dock, casting about for more riders.

“You, there, lad!” he called to me.

I waved negatively at him and was about to turn to my left when a voice—a musical, female voice—came from my right.

“That poor man…such slim pickin’s these days.”

I turned quickly toward the voice, with high hopes for who it belonged to.

I wasn’t disappointed.

“You know,” she continued liltingly, transforming certain t’s into soft d’s, “there is usually a fleet of those ferries here, even this time of year. And those boats, they keep busy, too.”

She was a beautiful milk-chocolate girl in a floppy wide-brimmed straw hat with a red and blue and yellow floral band; her linen dress was robin’s-egg blue and buttoned down the front and made no effort to hide or for that matter enhance a slender, high-breasted figure that could speak for itself. She had the full sensual lips of some dark ancestor, and the small well-formed nose of some lighter one, and large, lovely, elaborately lashed mahogany eyes that were all her own. She was probably about twenty-five years old.

A woman this beautiful can take your breath away. Mine, anyway. I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out.

“But you really
should
see the sea garden while you’re stayin’ in Nassau, Mr. Heller,” she said, as if our conversation was bouncing right along. “That’s what the glass
bottom
is for….”

“Excuse me,” I said, swallowing. “You have me at a disadvantage….”

She laughed and her laugh was even more musical than her voice, which seemed to put weight on words and syllables in a sweetly random, intrinsically Caribbean fashion.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Heller. Your photo, it was sent ahead to us.”

She extended a slender hand; pink-and-red-and-white-beaded wooden jewelry dangled from her wrist, making more music. “Marjorie Bristol.”

I shook her hand, and her grip was strong, but the flesh was smooth and soft.

My tongue was thick as one of the sponges on those ragtag schooners. “Uh, I take it you must represent Mr. Oakes, Miss Bristol.”

“I do,” she said, repeating the dazzling smile, “but he prefer Sir Harry—an interestin’ combination of the grandiose and commonplace, don’t you think?”

“I was just thinking that,” I said.

“Let me take your bag,” she said.

“Not on your life, lady!”

She looked at me, startled.

I smiled. “Sorry. That came out rude. It’s hot, it’s sticky, and I’m in a foreign land. Please lead the way—but I’ll carry my own bag.”

She smiled again, but in a no-nonsense manner. “Certainly.”

She walked just ahead of me and her high, rounded rump moved impertinently under the blue linen dress, as if the globes of her backside were constantly trying to balance themselves and failing, nobly.

“I’m in charge of Sir Harry’s household staff,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind bein’ greeted by a female.”

“Hardly.” I was following along with my coat slung over my shoulder, shirt clinging as if I’d been swimming in it, lugging my bag. Her rear end might be impertinent, I reflected, but Marjorie Bristol herself seemed as polite and businesslike as she was charming.

“We have a surrey waitin’ in Rawson Square,” she said, tossing me a friendly glance.

Beyond the wharf, native women sold straw headgear and baskets, their own flamboyant woven hats their best advertising tool; others peddled sponges, shells and coconut candies. Miss Bristol walked me past a peaceful palm-and hibiscus-flung postage-stamp park where black little boys rode ancient cannons and black little girls sat primly on green benches before a band shell, possibly while their mothers sold straw goods nearby. A Negro policeman, hands behind him, chin high, stood motionless on a corner of Bay Street, in his white gold-spiked sun helmet, freshly laundered white jacket, red-striped dark blue trousers and black reflective boots. He might have been a statue.

“That’s Queen Victoria,” Miss Bristol said to me—I was in step with her now—and she was referring to a real statue, pointing to a sun-bleached constipated-looking little lady of marble with crown and scepter sitting on her throne atop a squat pillar with a bright bed of flowers at her feet.

I frowned a little, shook my head. “Funny place to bury her.”

Miss Bristol looked at me in sharp confusion, but it only lasted for an instant and was replaced by as quick a smile. “Aren’t you a nasty one,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

“I am,” I said cheerfully, “and it’s better you find out now.”

Behind the seated stone Queen was a cluster of pink colonial public buildings, three sides of a quadrangle surrounding the stern little monarch.

“That’s the Parliament Square,” she explained.

But we weren’t headed there. We had paused alongside the park, where a lineup of high-roofed horse-drawn carriages awaited passengers who probably weren’t coming today; the native drivers slumped in their seats, asleep under their tugged-down straw-hat brims, fanned by their horses who were lazily tail-swatting the air and flies.

One of the drivers was awake, however, a thin, very dark gent in loose white apparel with a brilliant red sash around his waist. He had a grooved, friendly face, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and was somewhere between forty and sixty. And his carriage seemed larger and fancier—with both a front seat and back, leather-covered, and red satin side curtains—than the other horsedrawn hacks around him.

“Ah, Miss Bristol. Your guest is here.”

He stepped off his perch and found a place at the back of, and under, the carriage to stow my canvas bag.

“Thank you,” I said.

He smiled, revealing a gold eyetooth. “My name is Samuel, sir. I work for Sir Harry. If you need anyt’ing, ask.”

“Thanks, Samuel,” I said, and held out my hand and he seemed pleased to shake it. Then I drew back the carriage’s red curtain and helped Miss Bristol into the backseat. It was the closest I’d gotten to her so far, and it damn near made me giddy.

I settled in beside her, put my suitcoat in my lap. “If you don’t mind my saying, you smell fresher than all the flowers in Nassau. Particularly since, the way this weather’s hit me, I sure don’t.”

She laughed a little, but took the compliment well. “My sin,” she said.

“Pardon?”

When she turned to me, the wide straw hat brim brushed my forehead. “It’s a perfume:
My Sin.
That’s one of the blessings of living here…bargain price on imported scent.”

Taking a right onto the left side of the road, British-style, the carriage clip-clopped onto Bay Street, which ran parallel to the oceanfront and appeared to be the town’s chief thoroughfare and shopping district. Along the tree-lined street, curio shops peddled more straw hats, shells (conch and turtle), and pickaninny dolls, out of old stone buildings with tiny storm-shuttered windows and overhanging tiled verandas that shaded shoppers. The frequent supporting pillars made me think of horse-hitching posts, which perhaps was how they were still used, from time to time. This Old West touch was offset by the modern, official-looking gilt lettering of registered companies whose offices lurked above the stores—accountants, lawyers, merchants, insurance and real-estate agents, import-export companies….

Miss Bristol seemed amused as I took this all in. “Everyone want an office on Bay Street, Mr. Heller. This is where the money in Nassau is.”

“Does Sir Harry have an office here?”

“No. I said money, not wealth.”

Pharmacy windows advertised the famous perfumes Miss Bristol had referred to; and our surrey rolled past dry-goods stores; liquor stores; saloons; the Prince George Hotel; the Savoy cinema; a produce market that bustled halfheartedly.

“Almost deserted today,” Miss Bristol said, the music of her voice mingling with that of the carriage’s ever jangling bell. “Many of the Bay Street Pirates are in the U.S. on vacation right now….”

“Bay Street Pirates?”

“That’s what the merchants and the other money men on this street they always been called. Or the Bay Street Boys, or Bay Street Barons.”

For being “almost deserted,” there sure was plenty of traffic on the wide white thoroughfare—an odd amalgam of surreys, American and British autos, bicycles, and the occasional horse-drawn cart piled with bales of sponges.

“Funny,” I said.

“Funny?”

“I heard of Bay Street back in Chicago.” Her talk of money and the Bay Street Pirates had made it dawn on me, finally.

Beneath the vast brim of the straw hat, huge brown eyes narrowed; lashes fluttered like hummingbirds. “Really, Mr. Heller? Why would you hear of our Bay Street back where you come from?”

“They used to call it ‘Booze Avenue,’ didn’t they?”

She laughed silently. “Why yes, they did. I didn’t know you were up on our local history, Mr. Heller.”

“I’m not. But I do recall that with Nassau so close to the U.S., and with liquor legal down here, rum-running was big business. Not a little of that liquor ended up in Chicago hands.”

“Many fortune was made,” she said mysteriously.

“But not Sir Harry’s.”

“Not Sir Harry’s. No need for rum money when you have all that gold.”

Still, I had another twinge: those fortunes that were made in Nassau, in Prohibition days, meant local links to the mob that were likely still intact. It was enough to make you wonder who was sitting behind the gilt-lettered windows over those curio shops. When they weren’t on vacation in the U.S., that is.

“That’s where you’ll be stayin’ tonight,” Miss Bristol said, pointing at a mammoth, sprawling, half-colonial, half-Moorish pink wedding cake of a building that seemed to signal the end of Bay Street. “Sir Harry own that.”