The Tropical Issue (39 page)

I said, ‘Why?’

Raymond and Lenny both looked at Johnson, who looked straight back. Amy said, ‘Road blocked by effing trees. That’s right, isn’t it? Can you stand this, buster? There’s an hour of it.’

She was addressing the Owner. Johnson said, ‘It’s genius, Amy. Keep going. I’m full of Henry’s depth-charges.’

‘You look it, buster,’ said Amy. ‘You look as if you’re running on deaf-aid batteries.’

The car rocketed on, leaving me none the wiser. They knew something I didn’t. We weren’t going to the Victoria Hospital. We were actually approaching the end of the road that led back and down to the yacht harbour.

We were approaching it, and going to pass it.

We weren’t going to pass it. In the middle of the road, among a tangle of palm leaves and some bouncing coconuts, a short figure was planted, waving its bare knobbled arms. Amy braked.

Grampa Joe Curtis thrust his mottled face in the window and yelled, ‘Are you goin’ to . . .’

He broke off. ‘Hell: you’re the painter fella who bust up his ketch?’

‘Johnson. Yes, Mr Curtis. The road to Castries is blocked. Mrs Faflick’s kindly offered to take us to her home near Soufriere. What’s your trouble?’

It was the longest speech he’d made yet. At least it told me where we were going. Once I would have asked why.

Old Joseph’s sharp, elderly eyes passed over Raymond, registered me and ended with Amy.

‘You got room for one more?’ he said. ‘Hotel’s full. Bedrooms full. Folk sittin’ in each other’s laps all over the bar an’ the restaurant. Time for the Happy Hour, they’ll need to hold a mass marriage. The only one of us with a bedroom is that bloody dame Sheridan.’

Johnson said, ‘Amy? It was Mr Curtis’s boat that rescued us. We do rather owe him.’

‘Sure, there’s plenty of house-room,’ Amy said. She leaned back and opened the door. ‘Any more of you? Take one or two.’

Old Joseph held up his arms, and we pulled him in. Under his smart, tailored rainsuit in stone-colour, his bones were like pencils.

He said, ‘Get goin’. That storm’s on its way. Clive an’ Sharon an’ Porter want to live in a refugee camp, don’t let’s spoil their fun. You drive on, ma’am.’

She started up, shuttled through the gears again as if weaving concrete, and drove on, and south.

There are said to be 385 bends in the road between Castries and Soufriere. By now, the gale seemed all set to straighten them. Amy drove the twenty-nine miles from Marigot as if it had.

By the time we got to the fishing village south of Marigot, we had seen the first of the cabbage palms crashing. Green creeper, unfurled from the stays of telegraph poles, looped and flew in front of us, like adverts from low-flying aircraft.

The sea was white and grey and roaring, and the sky was going black.

Between that and the next village my main job was to keep the windscreen clear of the torn fronds and branches that kept hitting and packing it. Leaf-pulp and crushed fruit on the road made the wheels whine.

Smells streaked into the car, and dashed out of it. The warm vanilla smell of a copra factory, and the sweetness of cane, and the schoolroom smell of sulphur from the Pitons, like green sugar cones through the cloud ahead.

At the next village, the river was already flooding yellow-white over the bridge, wrapping the uprights in ragged sheets and bits of bleached cotton.

We crossed between walls of spray, and ran into a torrent of rain. It hit the road with the sound of tearing cloth and covered the windscreen like glycerine.

‘Jesus
,’ said Grampa Joe. The rain, whirling in through my open window, thudded on top of everybody, and every time the trees thinned on our left, the heavy car rocked and shuddered.

The radio crackled on, almost drowned out by the row from outside, and now and then produced a row of its own of quite a different sort.

Grampa Joe sat with a cigar shaking in one hand and his lighter trembling in the other and said, ‘What in the name of sweet Jesus are those dumb clucks doin’?
Singin’?’

Johnson roused himself to the extent of opening one eye. ‘National song of St Lucia,’ he said. ‘Ferdy Braithwaite would sing it to you.’

I wondered where Ferdy was, and if Maggie had got his shoulder fixed up, and if I would hear him sing Prince Eager again. I didn’t much want to hear him sing Prince Eager again, but I missed Ferdy.

Amy said, pleating the wheel, her eyes half shut against cigar smoke, ‘England’s greatest gift to St Lucia.
I’ll
effing sing it to you.’

I saw what she meant as she bucketed along, her voice raised in chorus with the radio voices, her lipless mouth keyholed round her cigar and her words smashed by explosions of coughing.

‘Sons and daughters of St Lucia Love the Land that gave you birth Land of beaches, hills and valleys Fairest Isle of all the earth Wheresoever you may roam Love, oh Love your island home.’

There were two more verses.

I can’t sing, but I joined in; and so did Raymond, once we got the hang of the tune.

I sang; and thought, What the hell have I got to sing about?

The last time I sang was on my water skis in Madeira, when I was made to board
Dolly.
The rich, superior yacht with the rich, superior Owner.

I knew
Dolly
now, as I didn’t then. I knew every stick of wrecked, filthy
Dolly.
After one night, she was part of my life.

I had left Madeira; I had left London with only one purpose. To pay out the man who killed Kim-Jim. Rita’s one-man crusade.

Now I was what I had always resisted being in private life: part of a team. For a moment, on board the
Princess
, I had thought the team had gone, and I might be on my own. And instead of feeling free, I’d felt the opposite.

I suppose it was a landmark.

And so, in a car racing a hurricane, with Ferdy hurt and Johnson the way he was and bloody violence behind and ahead and all round about me, I sang.

It was Old Joseph who said finally, ‘You seen a career counsellor about that caterwaulin’? Do us a favour? I got an anxiety disorder about hurricanes. I like peace to worry.’

‘We’re there,’ said Amy, and braked.

We let Amy get down first; and when she yelled we got out, collected our disabled, and staggered into the tropical Tube station which was the Faflick branch of Pets Inc. at St Lucia.

The only thing we had time to notice, in the semi-darkness under the roar of the trees, was that it was the best place in the world to stay through a hurricane.

It was built into the side of one of the Pitons, hollowed out of the crag so that all you saw on the face of the hill were the doors and the shuttered windows, and other great double doors, stretching further than we could see on either side.

Some of the doors had empty cages fixed in front of them, giving on to the big paved front yard. There were more cages under the trees, also empty. The Toyota’s garage was a little along from the house, and also scooped out of the hillside and strongly structured.

Raymond helped put the car in, and barred the door against the tug of the wind while Amy struck a match and led us into her hot, lightless sitting-room, where a couple of dogs made a fuss of us.

On the table were three stout candlesticks, with several candles in each. She lit them, and we saw we were in a comfortable, low-ceilinged room full of chintzy cane furniture and piles of magazines and out-of-date newspapers with dog bowls on them, and some nice but chewed rugs.

It was rather like Pets Inc. in England. You could imagine Celia or Jim Brook walking about quite easily.

But there was no one else here except the dogs and the caged guests and Amy. She had let her lad feed the animals and then get off home, because of the hurricane. She could reach the indoor cages herself through the house if she had to, but they shouldn’t need any attention.

She directed old Mr Curtis to a bedroom, if he wanted to wash and lie down, and showed Lenny another, for Johnson. She went off, with Raymond, to find and switch on the emergency generator. She seemed to have selected Raymond as having the highest combined I.Q. and muscle power, which was probably right at that.

Somewhere, a jenny started up. An inside door banged. Amy strode in, flicked down a switch, and blew out the candles. The chintzy armchairs got brighter and the air conditioners started to buzz again.

Then there was a crash like the end of the world, and Hurricane Chloe struck.

From beginning to end, a hurricane can punish one area badly for something like six hours, or three hours until its eye reaches the area, and three hours afterwards. The worst damage happens at the time the eye is passing and afterwards, and there are severe gales and squalls for a lot longer than three hours after that.

The noise is stunning.

If you know you’re safe, you can go to bed and stuff your ears and get hold of a sleeping pill, as Old Joseph did.

If you need to lie on your back, as Johnson did, then you are as well to do it, while you have the chance.

Lenny made himself earplugs from bread rolls, and kipped down in the same room. I said to Raymond, ‘Why don’t you do the same? If the house caves in, I’ll wake you.’

He looked down at me. ‘You really into congos?’ he said.

Cartwheels, he’d turned. With tassels on.

‘Learned from Leroy Horsemouth Wallace,’ I said.

The freckles on his cheeks stretched. ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘You and Amy let your hair down over your cocoa. No house with Old Joe’s wallet in it can fall very far.’

I went to tell Amy that she and I were sitting out the hurricane on our own. I found her in the kitchen, finishing off the sort of cook-out that would keep a cavalry regiment and its horses properly fed in battle conditions, assuming the supply line has snapped.

She told me how to help her, and we finished it easily between us. Then she said, ‘There you are. They’re a nice enough lot of young fellas, but my God, show them a saucepan. You keep dogs?’

I didn’t.

‘Don’t need a warm fuzzy. Quite right. Did the right thing about J.J.’s old lady, though,’ Amy said. ‘Poor old Bessie. See, these dogs are young. They’re nervous. You keep beside them, if I’m busy. So long as you’re calm, they’ll be all right.’

She meant well. I always did like her.

The storm banged and howled dimly outside, but we were safe from it. Shack people had to keep their windows open and live in the gale, because it made the house safer. Underground as Amy was, she could keep her shutters closed.

At her suggestion, I went round and checked them while she got the Hurricane Hole Hotel on VHF16 to tell them that Mr Joseph Curtis was safely at Faflick’s, in case anyone panicked.

I didn’t know she had a ham radio, till she showed me it. Apparently the first thing to blow out in a hurricane is the telephone system. Then it’s up to the hams to feed the central emergency unit, and the airport and the hurricane base in Miami.

There were only one or two hams, and if the lines came down, she was going to be busy. Meantime, it was past lunchtime, and we were hungry. We piled chicken creole on two plates and had a sort of picnic lunch in her office, which had no outside windows and was quieter, especially with the door shut.

We didn’t talk about the storm all that much. Amy’s animals often work for the same show people I do. We have a lot in common.

She knew this man in Beverly Hills who did tucked jowls and capped teeth for rich dogs, and I knew the guy who trained the U.S. Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue squad pigeons. He taught them to spot bright colours floating in water, and press on a buzzer.

As I’ve said before, pigeons are clever. ‘Like gerbils,’ I added.

There was a silence filled with horrifying noises from outside, during which Amy’s cigar glowed bright red in the middle of her Humphrey Bogart face.

At length: ‘Cool, man,’ she said. ‘But I can’t tell you anything.’ She paused. ‘Ain’t an effing law, though, that says you can’t guess.’

The basket of gerbils was in the room we were in, with the towel still in place over it. I got up and brought it over.

They’re nice. I used to keep them myself. Kangaroo-active. Plushy as Chad Valley toys, with double-sewn eyes you can’t choke on.

Almost hidden under the hay and general litter was the knob of the buzzer. Beside it was a bit of boiled egg and a dog biscuit. After they’d done what was expected of them, her gerbils had got their reward.

Like pigeons, gerbils can be taught to press buttons. In their case, when they sniff narcotics.

The basket had come aboard
Dolly
the first time I had visited Marigot harbour, and today. I wondered if, the night I found Johnson lying asleep in his cabin, a search might not have produced a little stranger in his luggage as well.

I said, ‘I have a theory. I think that the folk who boarded
Dolly
and wrecked her were dope runners.’

‘Oh?’ said Amy. The cigar smoke hanging about her leather face reminded me of smoke-clouded bifocal glasses.

I said, ‘I don’t think they were searching for drugs.’

‘Oh?’ said Amy.

‘No. See those boats smuggling drugs from Colombia, who attack an innocent ship, throw out the owners, transfer their load to her, and sail her themselves to Miami, pretending to be Fidel Castro delivery skippers?’

‘Bona fide,’ said Amy absently. ‘One of those?’

‘Yes. Except that because of the storm, they couldn’t sail
Dolly
to Miami. They had to go for the nearest safe harbour. And that was Marigot, where everyone knew
Dolly
wasn’t in the hands of a delivery skipper.

‘So they smashed her up but left her seaworthy, knowing that someone would tow her in, and the Customs would never think of ransacking a boat in that state. Then when the boat was deserted, they could take the cargo ashore and hide it somewhere.’

‘Clever,’ said Amy. The light shone on her white hair, and a row of nice smoke rings. ‘But I don’t see anyone unloading drugs from
Dolly
just now. The eye of the storm, thank God, is passing south of St Lucia. But it’s still got to pass.’