The Far Side of the Sun (32 page)

He was standing in front of the portrait of George VI. He seemed more of a stranger to her in these shadowy surroundings, focused on the job he was here to do. He was running his fingers around the frame of the picture.

‘It could be wired,’ he had explained earlier.

It was why they were here.

‘Did you see Christie’s eyes?’ he’d asked as soon as Christie had ushered them out of his office. ‘He couldn’t keep them off your king.’ He chuckled at her baffled expression. ‘He’s either a crazy royalist or…⁠’ he’d touched her chin to reassure her, ‘or he has something hidden behind that fancy picture.’

Now he carefully lifted it down to the floor. He was right. Behind it was a safe set in the wall. He worked fast and in total silence. He put his ear to the safe and with infinite patience commenced turning the dial, listening intently for the tumblers. Dodie didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t turn a page. But she listened hard. A sudden beam of light in the room made her jump. It came from the headlamps of a late-night car on Bay Street and swept over Flynn but he didn’t flinch.

Ten minutes. That’s all, by the luminous clock on the desk. It felt like ten hours. Dodie’s teeth hurt, she’d clenched them so tight. She knew when the click came by the sudden release of tension in Flynn’s body. He looked round at her, slats of light across his face, and grinned at her.

‘Geronimo!’

He worked quickly. He swung open the safe door, for a split second flashed a torch into its interior and, leaving three cash boxes behind, he scooped out a bundle of folders. He gave half to Dodie and they crouched on the floor away from the window, rifling through their contents by the light of the torch. Most proved to be contracts for the sale of private houses, a couple of factories, a hotel, change of ownership on an inherited orchard.

‘Nothing,’ Dodie hissed.

‘Patience.’

It was right at the bottom. A contract for the sale of a large tract of land and shoreline called Portman Cay at the western end of New Providence Island. They scoured through its legal terminology, extracted the map which pinpointed its position and hunted out the names of the vendor and purchaser. A Mr Michael Ryan and Mr Alan Leggaty.

‘Do you know the names?’ he whispered.

Dodie shook her head. ‘New to me. To you too?’

He nodded, glanced one last time at the map, and flicked off his torch. The sudden darkness felt threatening. Dodie quickly put the folders back in order and had just turned to ask Flynn whether there were any more of them in the safe when an abrupt noise made her freeze. Fear sucked the air out of her. It was the door.

Flynn’s hand touched her shoulder. ‘Don’t move.’

He was across the room and flattened against the wall behind the locked door, invisible in the darkness, though one of his shoes was cut in half by a stray slat of light. The noise came again. It was the rattle of a doorknob, a man’s tuneless whistle, and then again, yet another doorknob. A shuffle of feet. Then silence.

‘The nightwatchman,’ Flynn breathed.

Checking the offices. Clearly not a man to pocket his earnings and laze the night away on a bench under a tree with a pack of Woodbines, this one was conscientious. For another five minutes neither moved. Eventually the whistle vanished and reappeared below them in the street, as the man took his time ambling off to the next building.

‘He’ll be back,’ Flynn murmured, his voice urgent. ‘Time to go.’

Together they replaced the files exactly as they’d found them and while Flynn relocked the safe, Dodie returned the diary to its drawer. They left the room in a hurry, locked it once more and were halfway across the unlit area that was the reception hall for Harold Christie’s land agency company, when a rough voice shouted at them from the far corner, ‘Stop where you are. Put your hands up. Don’t move.’

Dodie’s heart shot into her throat. ‘No,’ she whispered. To Flynn more than to the hidden stranger. ‘Don’t do
anything
.’

‘Are you hungry?’ the voice demanded.

Relief tore through Dodie and she seized Flynn’s arm. ‘It’s a parrot. Christie keeps a bloody parrot in here.’

Flynn gave a laugh. A brief burst of exhilarating sound before he silenced it. Dodie loved him for it.

The smell of woodfires still drifted on the night air in Bain Town, reminding Dodie that she
was
hungry. Somewhere the staccato bark of a dog pricked the silence of her small hut, and she could hear the murmur of deep male voices. They were swapping late-night stories on their front stoops and drowning the day’s troubles in home-brewed beer. It was comforting, that sound. It reminded her of nights lying awake after her mother died and listening to her father and his friends drinking in the next room and arguing over what Prime Minister MacDonald should be doing to sort out the mess left by the Wall Street Crash.

She was waiting for Flynn to return. She didn’t know where he had gone but could tell by the way he’d set his shoulders and moved on light feet that he was preparing himself for something. She asked what for, but in reply he kissed her mouth and made her lie down so that he could massage her back once more with Mama Keel’s ointment. She didn’t tell him how much it hurt because she wanted his hands on her. She was happy to trade a little pain for that, and loved the way while he was doing it he teased her about turning into a cat-burglar, a shadow’s shadow he called her.

‘Nerves of steel,’ he’d said with respect.

He’d left his jacket behind and she put it on, sliding her arms into its sleeves, rubbing her cheek against its collar like a cat. She prowled the tiny hut, worrying, sliding her hands into his pockets and finding them empty except for a tin containing three of his hand-rolled cigarettes. She smoked them. She made deals with God.
Please let him come back to me unharmed in the next ten minutes and I will never again be a shadow’s shadow
. She promised.

But minutes ticked past. She couldn’t hold them back.

Let him come back to me in the next half hour and I will tell the police about the gold coins. I will make a fool of myself
.

But the minutes became hours.

Let him come back to me. Please. I will give You Morrell’s gun hidden in my safe-box underground at the beach. I will give You my job. I will give You my father’s bible. Please
.

Please.

Flynn slid back into the house, silent as a thought. He stripped off his clothes, the skin on his flanks gleaming white in the faint veil of moonlight that drifted through the window. He crossed to the mattress that lay in darkness and Dodie saw his head whip round when he found she wasn’t there.

‘Where have you been?’

His eyes struggled to find her in the blackest corner where she was sitting.

‘Dodie.’ She heard him inhale with relief.

‘Where have you been?’

He came towards her voice and knelt down in front of her, but something in her voice told him not to touch her.

‘Dodie, don’t ask me, please. It is better for you not to know.’ His voice sounded bone-tired.

‘It is not better for me not to know.’

‘It is safer. Believe me, it is…⁠’

‘No, Flynn. I’m not going to believe you. I am already in danger just because I nursed Morrell. So don’t tell me that.’

She saw the dark shadow of his head shake back and forth.

‘Listen to me, Dodie. I would never forgive myself if anything happened to you because I —’

‘Enough! Enough! I can’t go on not knowing. I can’t sit alone here night after night not knowing where you are and fearing I will find you in a filthy alleyway with a knife in your guts.’ She steadied her voice and asked again, ‘Where have you been?’

The darkness in her corner was hot and airless. Flynn exhaled a hard breath and after a long silence he drew her face to him, holding it against his cheek.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said.

He brewed them one of Mama Keel’s herbal teas. It calmed them. Dodie remained in her dark corner, but Flynn lit a candle and examined her face with an intensity that left her nowhere to hide. She was wearing the blue dress, her hair loose and uncombed, her eyes fiercer than she meant them to be, and the world shrank to no more than the circle of light from the candle. It threw pools of colour into the shadowy fringes of the tiny room, deep purples and rich magentas that crawled closer each time the candle flickered. They were seated on the floor, face to face, Dodie’s knees drawn up under her chin as if they knew she would need protection from his words. Flynn was wrapped in the sheet.

‘I went to see Sir Harry Oakes,’ he said bluntly.

She felt a layer of sweat spiral to the surface of her skin, but she said nothing.

‘I go often. Usually around midnight.’ His mahogany eyes were gentle. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me why?’

Still she said nothing.

He gave a small sigh. ‘It’s because I work for him.’

Outside, a tree branch groaned and cracked. Or was it inside herself? She could no longer tell.

‘What do you do?’ she asked.

‘You’re smart, Dodie, too smart. You were bound to figure out that something else is going on. Everything I told you before is the truth, but because I love you, I left some parts out.’

I love you
. His words moved in the room, rustling around her.

‘Explain to me exactly what it is you do for Sir Harry Oakes.’

‘After I quit Chicago, I ended up with Johnnie Morrell in Niagara Falls. That’s where Oakes was living. He was a multi-millionaire by then because of the Lake Shores gold mine near Kirkland Lake.’ A smile tilted Flynn’s mouth. ‘Oakes discovered it in 1912 and he was a generous guy with his bounty. The Niagara Falls community struck lucky there.’

‘How did you get involved?’

‘Like I said before, Oakes and Morrell were prospecting buddies from way back and so – through Morrell – I ended up working for Oakes.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Anything and everything. Prohibition had only just been knocked on the head. I was only sixteen but Oakes took a shine to me. He said I had guts and persistence, two things he sets high store by. The Canadian government was taxing him into a fury – milking him for eighty-five per cent tax – so he shifted himself and his family to the Bahamas, where there is almost no tax. He’s no fool.’

Flynn rose to his feet, fetched a cigarette and lit it, but he only took one drag and instantly stubbed it out. He took a prowl around the room before sitting down again in front of Dodie. She hadn’t moved.

‘You’ve got to remember, Dodie, that it’s all about money with men like Oakes. It’s what they eat and breathe, it’s their life. He’s real clever, you know. He went to medical school before he took himself off prospecting in the Klondike.’

‘Medical school?’ Dodie couldn’t imagine Sir Harry as a doctor. He’d scare his patients to death. She put out a hand and touched Flynn’s sheet-swaddled knee. ‘What then?’

‘The mob got after him, always on his back.’

‘Why?’

‘They aim to set up casinos here and Oakes won’t have any of it.’

‘I thought gambling was against Bahamian law.’

‘Darn right it is. But laws can be changed, if the right people decide to change them.’

She could hear a bitterness in his voice. ‘And you?’ she asked softly. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Oakes put me back to work with the Chicago mafia and Capone.’ He wiped a hand across his forehead as though dragging away the memory of it from his mind. ‘I was a kid. Too young and too stupid. Did I want to please and impress Harry Oakes, one of the richest men on the planet? You bet I did. So I became his eyes and ears within the mob. I report to him. Through me Oakes knows what’s going on and this way he keeps one step ahead of them.’

She bridged the gap between them by resting both hands on his knees. ‘What happened tonight?’

The light from the candle flickered across his tense face. ‘I asked him straight out if he’d arranged for thugs to kill Morrell on his way back into town. To get back his gold. He said no. We had a row. It wasn’t pretty but no one rows with Oakes and finds it pretty.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘He claimed he didn’t have anything to do with Morrell’s death. And he told me he doesn’t own Portman Cay.’

‘So it has to be Christie.’

‘Morrell would have known.’

Dodie edged forward and slipped her arms around Flynn’s waist, drawing them together. ‘Why don’t you leave the mob? Just abandon them?’

He laughed and it was a harsh sound.

‘You don’t walk away from the mob, Dodie. If you do – or if they find out you have betrayed them – they come after you like a pack of hyenas and tear you limb from limb.’

Dodie rested her cheek against his and found it ice cold. Everything had changed.

The day dawned grey and morose. Dodie and Flynn took one of the horse-drawn surreys out as far as Cable Beach past the golf club, and walked from there, enjoying the change in the air, the scents of far-away spices carried on the morning wind. Coral pink tracks twisted away through the wild and wooded landscape, where lizards basked hopeful of sunshine on rocky slabs. Hummingbirds whirred and darted to the last late blossoms of the jacaranda trees, faster than ants to jam.