The Fer-de-Lance Contract, page 9
When I nodded, he hurried back up the stairs and I stood listening to his car hum around the course again. He was driving too fast for a man who did not want attention, but he felt impelled to put distance between himself and the contraband weapons.
I checked them over again, loaded them, and put the box in the bathroom. It took me another half hour to finish the news magazine; then I brushed my teeth and locked the vaultlike steel door to the terrace, but kept the glass louvres open. The trade winds from the northeast blew constantly through the apartment, sometimes gusting, and harped a whistling sibilance through the casuarinas.
As I settled down to sleep, several mosquitoes began droning around my ears and I slapped at them ineffectively. Getting up, I searched the kitchen closet for an aerosol insecticide. There was none, but from the closet shelf I picked a six-inch square box that brought back old memories of India and Burma. The gaudy red box showed a green coil, some defunct mosquitoes with their legs in the air, and was labeled “GLOBE MOSQUITO DESTROYER.” Manufactured by the Earth Chemical Co., Ltd., Japan.
The damned things worked, too. There was a cheap tin stand inside and, after you had impaled one of the serpentine green rings on its prong and lighted the tip, it smoked like a punk, slowly, for five or six hours. They worked because the principal ingredient was pyrethrin, which was also used in the modern aerosol insecticides. I found other smudged tin stands on a shelf in the bathroom, and lighted up three of the little green snakes. The mosquitoes went away, and I went to sleep.
But not for long. Because I am an incontinent man and drink far too much, my bladder forces me awake every two or three hours. It was well after midnight when I swung my legs off the bed, glanced at the moonlit terrace, and froze.
Someone was sitting there, motionless, on the lounging chair. Not ten feet away from me, just beyond the massive door and the opened glass louvres. Not John Ratoon; that was the first check I made. A thick-bodied man, a big man. His bare feet at the end of the lounge chair held thonged sandals, and his muscular legs were tanned. Above the knees, he was in shadow and seemed to be watching not the apartment, but the moonlit golf course. A white man …
I stepped barefooted into the bathroom and as noiselessly as possible took one of the loaded machine pistols from the case. My swollen bladder was forgotten in professional indignation. This indolent bastard had moved in on me with ease, while I slept, and could have blown my head off. That fact would have been fairly newsworthy, too; a dead Yank with an apartment full of illegal weapons.
When I took the machine pistol off safety, there was a slight click and I waited. When nothing happened, I stepped back out and put the muzzle of it through the waist-high, open space of the glass louvres.
“Get up slowly,” I instructed the intruder, “keeping your hands well above your head. If you do anything else I’ll saw you right in two.”
The thick-bodied figure moved, but did not get up. “My dear chap,” it said jovially. “If I do that, might spill my drink, y’know.”
I squeezed the trigger. The big pistol jumped, a slug scorched off the tile under his lounge chair and went into a screaming ricochet off the terrace ledge.
“Now do it,” I said.
The thick-bodied figure sighed, got off the lounge chair, and put a tall glass down on the terrace edge. Ice tinkled in the glass. Then, leisurely, the figure raised both arms, and I recognized both the flaring skirts of the bush jacket and the indolent voice.
Unlocking the ponderous door, I stepped outside, patted him down, and ordered him inside. My guest was Colonel Peter Frampton, my old friend and fellow passenger on the Federal Palm. When I flipped on the lights, he sank into one of the big chairs and beamed at me.
“Really, old chap,” he admonished. “You have a vile temper. I was only admiring the view.”
“Colonel,” I said wearily, “what the hell do you want?”
“Best explained over a drink, y’know,” he beamed. “Just step outside, and get mine …”
“You’ll just sit there on your Perfidious Albion ass until I know why you copped a sneak on me.” Carrying the pistol, I moved past him into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “Still Cockade rum, I suppose?”
“Ah, good show, old man!” chortled the colonel. I broke out an ice tray, opened a bottle of soda, and took two glasses and a chilled bottle of the Barbados rum to the table beside him. My drink was moderate; his herculean and untainted by soda. “Cheers,” he said, and slugged at it.
“So?”
He looked at his wristwatch, on a thick wrist that was more rusted than tanned. “There’ll be a floor show in St. George’s in about twenty minutes,” he announced. “Thought you ought to see it. That’s why I didn’t waken you. No need, really, ’til the show starts.”
“What kind of show?”
“Some bad hats are going to burn down an appreciable section of the mercantile establishment in St. George’s,” he said, sounding not at all drunk. “Call them, if you will, malcontents, scofflaws, members of the Mongoose Gang.”
“That’s the P.M.’s security outfit, isn’t it?”
“Right. Five of the leading stores will be burnt down. They are all owned by Syrians.”
“But …” I was trying to digest it. “But there’s still time …”
Colonel Frampton laughed. “Oh, no. Not my bloody island, y’know. And I’m pressed for time. Staying with some yachting types at L’ance aux Epines, and we push off before dawn. Barbados way. But I thought you ought to see the fires.”
I strengthened my drink and stared at “Petah” Frampton closely. He had shed all the ramping mannerisms that had made me sure he was a public-school-type queer. And he seemed to know more about my business than I did, which vexed me. Still, he could have killed me while I slept.
I dressed, if putting on a short-sleeved sport shirt, shorts, and sandals can be called dressing. After I had locked the heavy door behind us and we were going up the stairs, I saw that he had cadged the almost-full bottle of Cockade rum and remarked on it. He replied simply that rum was the wine of warriors, and that he was an old one. I would surely forgive him.
I replied that since I hadn’t paid for it, I would. At the top of the stairs, parked before the entrance to the clubhouse, was a white Sprite with no top. Both of us stepped into it without opening the doors, and the colonel took off like a bomb. The noise of our passage whined across the moonlit valley and the empty fairways.
We went racketing toward St. George’s along the sweeping curves of the highway above Grand Anse Beach. It was perceptibly hotter, even at that hour, than it had been up in the high valley where the golf course was located. We made no attempt to talk because that was impossible in the wind-rush, but every few miles Frampton had a belt out of the bottle.
At the outskirts of St. George’s, he turned into an upward road, and we went humming between dark rows of houses. Only a few lights glinted on the dark harbor water down below, and at the marina all the masted vessels were battened down. When we were high above the harbor, Colonel Frampton braked the little sports car into an overlook and cut the motor.
We waited for an hour with an unobstructed view of the tiered harbor city, but nothing happened. Then, beyond the tunnel that separated the carenage side from the market side, a glow mounted, and smoke started pouring from a building we could not see.
“De Freitas and Sons,” said Frampton, stabbing with a finger. “Import-export, groceries, liquor store, and apartments.”
The fiery stain grew larger; smoke plumed from it. On the carenage side, two other fires started. Then a fourth. Sirens sounded, and from the fire station near the wharf, the engines rolled out with flashing red lights.
“They’ll do fuck-all,” announced Colonel Frampton moodily. “The poor sods would be better to piss on the flames. They don’t have enough pressure to begin putting them out.”
I took the bottle away from him, and had a short belt myself. He seemed well-versed on all aspects of St. Sauteurs’ life and institutions.
The fires mounted. Sirens screamed, lights went flashing on around the harbor, and people began to enter the deserted streets below. But there were still only four fires. Frampton said that one attempt must have fizzled; he started the car, and we went humming back the way we had come.
When we were almost back to the golf club, with the little white car racketing its passage off mango groves and stilt-supported huts, Frampton shouted to me that the “sods” were going to make a snatch attempt on our banker chap tomorrow. On his way to Government House.
“Wouldn’t try the Grand Anse road with him,” he advised in a modulated roar. “But there’s only the other way, through the plantations. Fearful road, that. They’ll probably have ambushes on both routes. You must blast the bastards, you know. Because if they get him and demand a ransom, this bloody government will stall and he’ll get murdered.”
We swept around the western perimeter of the golf course, silvered with moonlight, and the colonel had the tires wailing. He was the noisiest agent I had ever encountered. Tearing off more rubber as he whipped the small car to a sliding halt before the darkened clubhouse, he had another belt out of the Cockade rum bottle.
“Why will they kill him?” I asked.
“Because,” he said impatiently, “these blokes can’t pay for last week’s wash. And it’s a small island; they can’t hide him. Before you could get the money from the States, he’d be dead.”
“Do you know John Ratoon?”
“Much better than I know you. He’s the man behind it all. The revolt, the fires tonight, the snatch that will be attempted tomorrow.”
I stepped out of the white sports car without opening the door. “Colonel,” I said, “I’m indebted to you. My thanks.”
“Nothing,” he answered. Had another slug out of the bottle of Cockade rum, and settled it on the leather upholstery beside him.
“Besides which,” I said politely, “you are one of the best actors in the world, bar not Olivier. That act on the Federal Palm, as a ramping queer, was flawless.”
“Is it so?” he asked, beaming. “But then, none of us are what we seem, are we?” He started the waspish motor of the sports car. Over its uproar he shouted, “Please tell your Pearsall hello for me. I knew him long ago in the Greek Isles, where burning Sappho loved and sung…”
I nodded; he raised a hand in parting salute and tried to tear the tires off the sports car as he scorched it around and went humming back toward the beach road. I walked down the stairs, unlocked the heavy door, and locked myself in again.
Chapter 15
I had a late breakfast the next morning, sitting on the shaded terrace. Sipping my coffee, grown on the island, I watched large white sea birds stalking jerkily through the high grass rough of the golf course, and thought about the antic Englishman. The prancing colonel who had foreknowledge of arson in St. Sauteurs.
He had not been mentioned in my instructions, and his only connection with the agency was his mention of Pearsall’s name. Down below the terrace, a black boy on a motorcycle was herding goats off the course; he had his machine wheeling and swerving like a cutting horse … I decided I wouldn’t worry about the flamboyant Englishman because I didn’t have time to reach the yacht and check him out by radio-telephone.
Just after twelve o’clock, I carried the long box with the loaded weapons in it up the side stairs and put it in the back of Browning’s black sedan. After I explained to the driver that I wanted to go to the Spice Island Inn, but not along the beach highway, he nodded and said we could take a circular route to the south, by the sugar mill, and approach the hotel from the other side.
The narrow roadway led through St. David’s Parish, and was fringed by low red and yellow croton bushes and towering ceiba and saman trees. The voluble driver kept running on about how someone had tried to burn St. George’s down last night, five fires in the heart of town. I kept murmuring “oh?” and “that a fact?” and when my rectal sphincter twitched again, I cursed and told him to stop. Then I fought my way through the underbrush to a slight clearing, hunkered down, and relieved myself with a rush. Thinking it was a fine goddamned time to have dysentery hit.
A few miles farther down the road, we passed several poor shacks made of tin and thatch and I ordered the driver to stop again. Sitting on the sagging step of the nearest hut was something out of a nightmare or a Grimm fairy tale. And two small children just like her came running around the dilapidated hut. Albino Negroes. Queer creatures with parchment-white skin, pink eyes, and snowy, kinky polls absolutely devoid of pigment. Even their eyelashes were white.
When I waved, the driver drove slowly on, laughing. He said that there were quite a few of “those fellows” on the island, and that they grew angry when you said they were white. Howled that they were black people, like everybody else.
“Are they retarded?” I asked. “I mean, simple-minded?”
“No sah. Have one in secondary school, quite bright. He argue with you, fight with you. But they have a complex about it, I think.”
Remembering the thick, pale lips and snowy topknots, I could understand why. We passed the sugar mill, which was thundering away, and drove along the stream where its liquid residues emitted an incredible stench. A ramshackle, gaudily painted bus with the brave name, “Study Your Head!” crowded us off the road as it roared by, and then we passed Westerhall Point, L’ance aux Epines, and approached the Spice Island Inn from the south side.
It was still an hour before we were to leave for Government House, but Prime Minister Ferrê’s dark green Chevrolet was already there. The driver wore a dark suit, a black chauffeur’s cap, and looked a little muscle-bound. When I had transferred the box of weapons to the back seat of his official car, I tipped Browning’s driver and told him I would get a taxi back to the clubhouse.
There were three taxis parked nearby with drivers lounging in them, so I walked the P.M.’s man away, over to the shade under the horizontal branches of the almond trees. His name was Octave Leo, and when I explained the position, his heavy black face was first puzzled, and then dubious. I kept on talking, assuring him that if I had alerted the government, they would have had the hotel and the whole highway to St. George’s bristling with troops, firing wildly at each other. And probably, us.
That I wanted him to sit in the back seat with the American banker, Mr. Sisco, and be prepared to use a carbine on anybody who attempted to block our passage, or remove Mr. Sisco from the car. Did he know how to use a carbine? He nodded, and said he always kept one in the car. At all times. I said fine, that gave us an extra one.
He was still dubious, thumbing his flattened nose, and said he could get fired if anything went wrong. I asked what would happen to him if a distinguished guest of the government of St. Sauteurs, in his charge, was kidnapped and possibly killed? That such things had happened recently, in several Caribbean and Central American countries, notably the murder of the German ambassador to Guatemala, Count von Spreti.
Yes, he had read about that. But he was supposed to drive the government car, mon! It was what they paid him for. I replied that I had a great advantage over him; that I knew where the ambushers would hit us, and that I was a professional racing car driver, or had been, in the United States. This was a lie of purest ray serene, but the bulky black man considered it gravely. After I had peeled off a number of bank notes with impressive numbers on them, he decided my plan would work. He would sit in the back with Mr. Sisco while I drove.
As the lounging taxi drivers stared, I got behind the wheel of the dark green government car, and Octave Leo went into the hotel to get the American banker. While I was waiting, I tested the clutch, brake pressure, and the spring tension on the accelerator, hoping I could remember to stay on the wrong side of the road.
Fred Sisco came striding out of the hotel lobby in a dark tropical suit and tie, nodded to me, and ducked into the back seat. Octave got in beside him, and we swung around and back down the road toward St. George’s. We went humming by the open, treeless acres dotted with modem cottages, put up two years ago for St. Sauteur’s Caribbean Exposition, and stopped just short of the main road. We were still in sight of some of the cottages, but that couldn’t be helped.
Leaning back, I flipped the top of the box, handed Fred Sisco a machine pistol, and showed him the safety. Since he had been in the Marine Corps for two years, a lieutenant in Vietnam, I knew he would have no trouble with it. Octave wanted his own carbine from the floor of the front seat, and got it; I plucked a carbine from the case and put it on the front seat beside me.
Then, looking straight ahead and gesturing, I laid down the fields of fire. Emphasizing that if anybody got rattled, and started swing-shooting, we could easily annihilate each other. Thus, Sisco had the right rear 90-degree arc, Octave the left one, and I had the frontal 180-degree fire-field.
They both nodded, and instead of going north along the beach road I swung south toward Point Saline. Leo leaned forward, questioning, and I explained that the ambushers would almost certainly be waiting on the main approach to St. George’s. That we were going to double back past the sugar factory and go through St. David’s Parish on the plantation road. The black muscleman nodded and leaned back, satisfied with the explanation.
The road was pot-holed and spine-jarring, but the well-tuned car kept accelerating even while its suspension was taking a beating.
We roared past the sugar factory, by its stinking downstream waters, and were smashing through verdure, which kept slapping at the opened, front window vents, when I turned up the narrow mountain road which would bring us into St. George’s from the other side.
Both the steering wheel and column were vibrating under my hands when we swept by the parish police station and its cluster of rum shops. As I angled into the next turn, I saw two cars rolling silently down out of the green banana-tree gloom to box us off. As we approached them, I jammed down the accelerator.
