The Tropical Issue (34 page)

Behind her back, Porter pulled a face and blew me a kiss and mouthed some sort of promise. I nodded and grinned. I could still feel his fingermarks.

Johnson had got the cricket-mad taxi to wait for us, and we dragged Maggie from the crowd round the severed head and got into it.

I hadn’t looked at it again. I said, ‘It probably was someone on the plantation. You could cut a head off with a coyote.’

It was a squeeze in the back, and Johnson’s arm had to go round my shoulders.

He said, ‘It’s either cutlass or machete. But on the whole, I rather go for coyote.’

His fingers played on my far shoulder. ‘Rita, you’re free. Maggie, you’re going to be sick. Ferdy, I’ve got an empty boat, and you’ve got an empty house somewhere. Let’s go to one of them, and get drunk.’

Considering everything, he did have good ideas.

At Ferdy’s suggestion, we went to Ferdy’s house, which smelt of Natalie’s personalised scent, and quite a bit of my scent from
Dolly.

The help had gone, which was just as well. Using Ferdy’s recipe books, we worked our way down four more items in his daiquiri list. After that, instead of having lunch, we all went to bed. I went to my own room, and Ferdy and Maggie, I suspect, to Natalie’s.

Wherever Johnson went, he was up first. I was second, and wandering into the kitchen in my bare feet and shirt tails, found Johnson cooking himself scrambled eggs with his bifocals looking solemn under his hair. He was wearing a kimono I recognised as belonging to Ferdy in his John Weitz Japanese mood, and his feet were bare, too.

It was a bit like 17b all over again.

He must have thought so as well, for he said, ‘I’ve saved you the whites. Shut the door while I award you a prize for not having a fit of the vapours. You weren’t to blame for that killing.’

An open book. I said, ‘They must have thought I was his girlfriend. They must have thought he let me in close to the building.’

The eggs curdled. Johnson spooned them on two bits of buttered toast, put a plate under each, and shoved one along the breakfast bar to me.

‘Cap the seeps from the daiquiris. Knives and forks beside you. He wasn’t a hotel security man, he was one of theirs, anyway. My guess is that they planned to get rid of him in any case after the meeting. Making a hand of his head was just a warning and a deterrent to others. Nasty people.’

He had got himself a glass of milk, and he looked at me over it.

‘I asked you if you’d mind getting the push from Natalie. How would you feel about getting it from me?’

I went to the fridge and got myself milk as well. There was silence from the rest of the house. If he thought it was safe to discuss this with Ferdy and Maggie around, then I supposed it was safe.

I said, ‘You mean, now we’re coming to the dangerous bit?’

‘Never crossed my mind,’ Johnson said. ‘Thought you might trust me to go in for the kill without you, though. I’m taking
Dolly
to St Lucia, and Roger van Diemen was flying there this morning. Also, incidentally, Carl Thomassen, I am told.’

‘I haven’t retired yet,’ I said. ‘Who else is sailing with you?’

He had got his pipe out, and was hunting for matches. ‘Raymond and Lenny, of course,’ he said. ‘Ferdy wants to take some photographs, and I don’t mind taking him. Which probably means Maggie as well.’

I sat looking at him, and he set the flame to the stuff in his pipe. I said, ‘And if it’s dangerous, why is it all right for them to go?’

Johnson flicked the burnt match into the sink, and leaning both elbows on the table, looked at me with the pipe in his mouth. Then he took it out.

‘Because they’re not dangerous to me, and you are. Trapping a faceless gang of drug merchants is one thing. It’s quite another not to give the game away when they turn out to be people you know. As now seems very likely.’

‘Who?’ I said. I didn’t want any more scrambled eggs.

‘You saw as much as we did. Three men and a woman,’ said Johnson. ‘You didn’t hear, as we did, what they talked about. The Coombe plan, of course. But their immediate worry is that they’ve got a load of cocaine to get rid of. And van Diemen’s network isn’t ready.’

‘So?’ I said.

He puffed gently and removed the pipe again. ‘So they decided to make their own arrangements, and send the cocaine on to Florida.’

I played with my fork, and there was a short silence. He didn’t break it.

I said, ‘The
Paramount Princess
is going to Miami. You think I’ll give you away, if those people in masks were the Curtises?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. I expect she’s sailed by now, anyway,’ Johnson said. ‘But I thought you should realise that van Diemen’s partners may very well be people you think of as friends. People whom van Diemen knows too, or they wouldn’t have troubled to keep their masks on in front of him.’

‘Unless they don’t know each other either,’ I said.

‘It’s possible. But at least one of them must have been on Madeira. At least one of them must be on his or her way now to Florida. Someone may possibly land in St Lucia, to keep an eye on what van Diemen is doing.

‘We know who’s on the
Princess,
and where she’s going. She’ll get quite a reception at Miami. If she’s full of cocaine, there will be a full-scale enquiry, and the link with van Diemen and Coombe’s will probably come out without too much trouble.

‘My part of the job is watching Roger van Diemen, and anyone else who has decided, for various powerful reasons, to move from Barbados to St Lucia.’

I said, ‘Last night at the chalet, I said they might switch their plans. And you agreed.’

‘Yes,’ said Johnson. He continued to smoke, quite calmly. ‘They’ve a lot of cocaine. They have to put it somewhere.’

There was another silence. I said, ‘And you’re afraid, if I come on
Dolly,
that I can’t keep quiet about all this?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Johnson said. ‘You couldn’t trust anybody.’

‘Except you,’ I said.

‘Um,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’d have to trust me. Actually, I know you don’t much like Lenny or Raymond, but they wouldn’t see you stuck either.’

He paused, and said, ‘And on top of that, I must tell you that it would be dangerous. People who cut people’s heads off are usually not short of weapons, and the will to use them. Also St Lucia is a hundred miles to the north-west, and there’s a bloody storm coming up.’

He sounded cross, and I suddenly knew why, but I didn’t say so. I said, ‘I think you are saying that I can come if I want to. I want to.’

‘Want to what?’ said the Hon. Maggie, peering round the kitchen door. ‘J-J., Ferdy is having what he calls a little
crise
of the
foie.
Any suggestions?’

Johnson tapped out his pipe, and picking up his empty plate, carried it to the sink. ‘Third of rum, third of whisky, third of absinthe,’ he said. ‘It’ll blow him into the middle of next week. Then we carry him down to the
Dolly.
If you’ve both decided you’re coming, that is. I want to sail in two hours.’

Maggie laughed. ‘It’s a pipe-dream,’ she said. ‘D’you know how long it took the three of us to do all the paperwork last time?’

Johnson smoothed the folds of his kimono and walked primly towards the door.

‘Supplies and paperwork long since set up by Raymond and Lenny. Do you imagine,’ said Johnson, ‘that this is a sudden decision? With the Rotary Club of St Lucia stamping their feet there in the Green Parrot?’

We sailed out of Carlisle Bay at half past six, just before sunset, waved off by a number of tiddly holidaymakers from the Holiday Inn, and by a select number of properly dressed parties from the Royal Barbados Yacht Club who used (said Johnson) to play bridge with him, but could still apparently afford the fare to Barbados.

To the people who stood stirring their planter’s punch and asking why the hell he was leaving at night, Johnson replied, waiting for the rope that Raymond was throwing him, that he had a date in St Lucia, and
Dolly
would be a damned sight safer in Rodney or Castries than here.

Which was apparently true. I asked Raymond, as I was helping him to stow the dinghy on the saloon roof.

After the digital watch, I didn’t expect to be Raymond’s favourite passenger, but he was less rude than I’d expected, maybe because there seemed to be so much to do. Also, remembering the handstands in the Mandarin cap and the tassels, I realised that even Raymond had his moments.

You couldn’t actually say the same for Lenny, who hardly said a word as he showed me where to stow the satchel of clothes and my make-up kit, which was all that I’d been allowed to bring with me.

All the rest of my gear, and my fifty quids’ worth of scent, were back in Ferdy’s house, by kind permission of Ferdy.

And that was another thing. Ferdy was to share the master stateroom, it turned out, with Johnson.

I had a bunk in the double cabin in the front of the boat. Sharing with Maggie.

With Raymond brutally outcast to the single cabin, and Lenny aggressive, and Maggie after both Ferdy and Johnson, it looked like being a great voyage. With a storm blowing up.

No one bothered to tell me what that meant. ‘Take a pill,’ said Johnson abstractedly, when I asked him. ‘We’ll be in St Lucia by teatime.’

He was lying, and he knew he was lying. But I didn’t find that out till later.

Ask me about tropical storms.

The last one to hit the West Indies came from well down the African coast. This one had to be corny. It started where we had all started. From a little disturbance somewhere just south of Madeira.

By the time Johnson and I were playing in the steel band, it had become a tropical depression, moving westerly.

He knew that too, because Raymond heard all the broadcasts and told him.

By the time we were at the banana plantation, it had become a tropical storm, moving slowly west at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. In thirty-six to forty-eight hours, it should reach the Windward and southern Leeward Islands on its way to Central America. Giving
Dolly
an easy sail of a night and a day to get into St Lucia before it hit us.

Unless, of course, it weakened first.

Unless, of course, it strengthened, from a tropical storm to a hurricane.

Hurricanes can travel across an area 400 miles wide, and produce wind gusts of over 125 miles an hour. Hurricanes in one day release the same energy as a 420 megaton hydrogen bomb.

Don’t ask me about hurricanes.

All I knew that evening was that there was a lot of movement in the sea, and that nobody lay around the cockpit cushions drinking, or admiring
Dolly’s
lights on the water, or the glow of Barbados disappearing behind us.

Instead, Johnson stayed almost all the time at the helm, his glasses flashing green in the binnacle light and saying things periodically to Lenny or Raymond or Maggie which caused little bursts of action, with rubber soles thudding on deck, or the buzz of a winch, and a bit of puffing and swearing.

Ferdy had been given the charts, and would occasionally come up from the saloon with his glasses on, which I had never seen before, frowning over a folded bit of paper, which he and Johnson would peer at.

Supper came early and was taken in relays down below, except by Johnson, who ate at the wheel and drank what looked like Perrier water. Nobody heroically took his place, so I assumed he was taking first shift, and would go to bed later.

It wasn’t like the sail from Martinique to St Lucia at all, being at night, and busy, and four times the length, and having Ferdy with us instead of Natalie, which was a definite improvement.

The change to Owner was something I found I could put up with, as well. Nobody called him Johnson any more; just skipper. Someone had to be the boss, and he was it.

I tried once or twice to help with what was going on up on deck, and just got in the way, so I went and got hold of Lenny and said if he didn’t mind my breaking all his bloody dishes, I’d clear the table after the last relay and wash up.

I heard him go and ask Johnson, but the helm must have approved, because Lenny came back and showed me where to put everything, and thanked me.

Quite soon after that, he disappeared to his cot in the prow and after a bit Maggie, too, looked in to say she had been told off to sleep for a spell, and would I kindly keep out of the cabin.

She sounded as if she’d rather like to have told me to shut up the clash in the galley as well, but no doubt decided that clean pans were worth suffering for.

I finished with some trouble, because every now and then the ship would shudder, and everything that could jump, jumped. I already knew the signal for going about, when the ship suddenly leaned the other way, and everything that could fall, fell.

The radio was on, and through the noise of the wind, and the ship heeling her way through the sea, I could hear announcements, in level, distinct voices. Twice I heard Johnson’s voice, pitched differently, apparently speaking on the radio-telephone.

I was glad we had a radio-telephone. I was glad we had radar, and a direction-finder, and an echo-sounder and even an automatic pilot.

Lenny and Raymond and Maggie had sailed
Dolly
across the Atlantic, not Johnson.

Maggie might know about boats, but I didn’t know her track record for stamina. Ferdy might be light enough on his feet, but I doubted if he really knew much about boats.

And Johnson might be skipper; might have raced his bleeding boat or other people’s all over the world, but all he had actually sailed since his gruesome smash-up was a calm twenty-five miles out of Martinique.

I hung up the drying cloths and went up into the cockpit and said to Johnson, ‘I reckon you’re going to need a cook.’

He looked down from the sails, his glasses glittering green like a comic strip. Which was another thing, with all these ropes and draughts and elbows about.

He said, ‘I keep a spare pair with my socks,’ and smiled like a kosher cat at Raymond, who was sitting beside him, not understanding, and looking peevish.