“Mind your own business,” said Burr from his corner, and they all laughed. But beneath the jolly laughter lay a truth they were all aware of: the less Jonathan knew about Roper and his works, the less likely he was to betray himself.
“Billy Bourne’s your trump card, Jonathan,” said Rooke. “Look after him. As soon as you’re paid, make sure you send him his commission. When you’re on a new job, be sure to call Billy and tell him how it’s going. Play straight by Billy, and he’ll open any door you want. Everybody Billy loves loves Billy.”
“This is your last qualifying round,” said Burr. “After this, it’s the final.”
Next morning, when Jonathan had had his early swim and everyone was fresh and rested, Rooke got out his magic box: the clandestine radiotelephone with alternating frequencies. First they went into the woods and played hide-and-seek, taking it in turns to cache the box and find it. Then, between briefing sessions, Rooke made Jonathan talk to London, back and forth until he was at home with the system. He showed him how to change the batteries and how to recharge them and how to steal power from the mains. And after the radiotelephone, Rooke produced his other prize exhibit: a subminiature camera got up as a Zippo lighter that was not just idiot-proof, he said, but actually took photographs. In all, they spent three days in Connecticut, which was longer than Burr had intended.
“It’s our last chance to talk this through,” he kept telling Rooke, as a way of excusing the delay.
Talk what? Through to where? Deep down, as Burr afterwards admitted to himself, he was waiting for an obligatory scene. Yet, as so often with Jonathan, he had no idea how it should have unfolded.
“The equestrienne’s still riding high, if that’s any consolation,” he said, hoping to cheer Jonathan up. “Hasn’t fallen out of her saddle yet.”
But the memory of Yvonne must have been hanging too heavy on him, for he barely managed a smile.
“He had a ding-dong with that Sophie woman in Cairo, I bloody know he did,” Burr told Rooke as they flew home.
Rooke gave a disapproving frown. He did not hold with Burr’s occasional flights of intuition, any more than he believed in blackening a dead woman’s name.
“Darling Katie is as mad as a wet hen,” Harry Palfrey announced proudly, seated over a whisky in Goodhew’s drawing room in Kentish Town. He was gray-haired and ravaged and fifty, with puffy drinker’s lips and haunted eyes. He wore a lawyer’s black waistcoat. He had come straight from his work across the river. “She’s Concording back from Washington, and Marjoram is on his way to Heathrow to meet her. It’s a war party.”
“Why doesn’t Darker go himself?”
“He likes cut-outs. Even if they’re his deputy, like Marjoram, he can still say he wasn’t there.”
Goodhew started to ask something else but thought it better not to interrupt while Palfrey was unburdening himself.
“Katie says the Cousins are waking up to what they’ve got. They’ve decided that Strelski lulled them into imbecility in Miami and you and Burr aided and abetted him. She says she can stand on the banks of the Potomac and watch the smoke rising off Capitol Hill. She says everyone is talking new parameters and power vacuums in their own backyard. Filled or created, I can’t quite fathom which.”
“God. I do hate parameters,” Goodhew remarked, buying himself time while he replenished Palfrey’s whisky. “I had formulaic this morning. It ruined my day. And my master escalates. Nothing rises for him, or increases, or grows, or advances, or progresses, or multiplies, or matures. It escalates. Cheers,” he said, sitting down again.
But as Goodhew spoke these words, a cold shudder passed over him, raising the hair down his spine and causing him to sneeze several times in quick succession.
“What do they want, Harry?” he asked.
Palfrey screwed up his face as if he had soap in his eyes, and ducked his mouth to his glass.
“Limpet,” he said.
12
Mr. Richard Roper’s motor yacht, the Iron Pasha, appeared off the eastern rip of Hunter’s Island at six o’clock exactly, prow forward like an attack boat, cut against a cloudless evening sky and growing perceptibly as she advanced toward Deep Bay over a flat sea. In case anybody doubted it was the Pasha, her crew had already called ahead by satcom to reserve the long mooring on the outer harbor, and the round table on the terrace for sixteen at eight-thirty, and the front row for the crab races afterwards. Even the menu was discussed. All the adults like seafood. Chips and grilled chicken for the children. And the Chief goes crazy if there isn’t enough ice.
It was between seasons, the time of year when you don’t see too many big yachts cruising the Caribbean other than the commercial cruise ships out of Nassau and Miami. But if any of those had tried to put in at Hunter’s Island, they’d have received no warm welcome from Mama Low, who liked rich yachties and abominated the common herd.
Jonathan had been waiting for the Pasha all week. Nevertheless, for a second or two after he sighted her he fancied himself trapped, and amused himself with the idea of escaping inland to the only town, or hijacking Mama Low’s old bumboat, Hi-lo, which was anchored, with outboard fitted, not twenty yards from where he was staring out to sea at the Pasha’s approach. Twin two-thousand-horsepower diesels, he was rehearsing. Extended afterdeck for helicopter, oversized Vosper stabilizers, seaplane launcher on the stern. The Pasha is quite a lady.
But foreknowledge did not ease his apprehension. Until this moment he had pictured himself advancing on Roper, and now Roper was advancing on him. First he felt faint, then hungry. Then he heard Mama Low yelling at him to get his white Canadian ass up here double quick, and he felt better. He trotted back along the wooden pier and up the sand track to the shack. His weeks at sea had seen an improvement in his appearance. An oceangoing looseness marked his stride, his eyes had gentled, his complexion had a healthy glow. As he climbed the rise he met the western sun starting to swell before it set, forming a copper rim round its circumference. Two of Mama Low’s sons were rolling the famed round tabletop up the stone path to the terrace. Their names were Wellington and Nelson, but to Mama Low they were Swats and Wet Eye. Swats was sixteen and wreathed in fat. He was supposed to be in Nassau studying, but wouldn’t go. Wet Eye was lean as a blade, smoked ganja and hated whites. The two had been working on the table for the last half hour, sniggering and achieving nothing.
“Bahamas makes you stupid, man,” Swats explained as Jonathan passed by.
“You said it, Swats, I didn’t.”
Wet Eye watched him, no smile. Jonathan gave him a lazy salute like a wiping clean, and felt Wet Eye’s tight gaze follow him up the path. If ever I wake up dead it will be what Wet Eye likes to call his cutlash that has slit my throat, he thought. Then he remembered that he didn’t expect to be waking up too many more times on Hunter’s Island, dead or otherwise. He took another mental reckoning of the Pasha’s position. She had started to turn. She needed a lot of sea.
“Mass’ Lamont, you’s a lazy white Canadian slob, hear me? You the laziest white slob a poor nigger ever had to hire, an’ that’s God’s truth. You not sick no more, Mass’ Lamont. I’m goin’ tell that Billy Bourne you just plain fuckin’ lazy.”
Mama Low sat on the veranda beside a tall and very beautiful black girl in plastic curlers known only as Miss Amelia. He was drinking beer out of a can and yelling at the same time. He was “twenty-two stone tall,” as he liked to say of himself, “four feet across and bald as a light bulb.” Mama Low had told a vice president of the United States to go fuck himself, Mama Low had fathered children as far off as Trinidad and Tobago, Mama Low owned serious real estate in Florida. He wore a cluster of gold skulls round his huge neck, and in a minute, when the sun set, he would don his churchgoing straw hat with paper roses and “Mama” done in mulberry needlework across the crown.
“You gon’ cook them stuff’ mussels o’ yours tonight, Mass’ Lamont?” he yelled as loudly as if Jonathan were still down at the water’s edge. “Or you
gon’ lie about a-fartin’ and a-pullin’ at your little white fancy?”
“Mussels you ordered, Mama, mussels you get,” Jonathan replied cheerfully, as Miss Amelia with her long hands delicately parted the outlines of her hair.
“So where you reck’nin’ get them mussels from? You thought o’ that? The shit you have. You jus’ brim full o’ white man’s bullshit.”
“You bought a fine basket of mussels from Mr. Gums this morning, Mama. And fifteen crawfish, special for the Pasha.”
“From Mr. Gums the kinkajou? I did? Hell now, maybe I did so. Well, you go stuff ’em, hear me? Cos we got royalty comin’, we got English lords and ladies comin’, we got rich little white princes and princesses comin’, and we’re gon’ play fine nigger music to ’em, and we’re gon’ give ’em a taste of gen-u-ine nigger livin’, yes baass.” He took another pull of his can of beer. “Swats, you gon’ push that fuckin’ table up them steps or you gon’ die of old age?”
Which, plus or minus, was how Mama Low addressed his troops each evening when a half-bottle of rum and the attentions of Miss Amelia had restored his humor after the trials of another day in Paradise.
Jonathan walked round to the washrooms behind the kitchen and changed into his whites, remembering Yvonne, which he did each time he put them on. Yvonne had temporarily supplanted Sophie as the object of his self-distaste. The bubble of nervousness in his stomach had a sexual urgency. His fingertips kept tingling as he chopped the bacon and the garlic. Charges of expectation like electric shocks ran across his back. The kitchen was spotless as a ship’s galley and as trim, with stainless-steel worktops and a Hobart steel dishwasher. Glancing through the barred window while he worked, Jonathan observed the Iron Pasha’s advance in framed shots: her radar mast and satcom dome, then the Carlisle and Finch searchlights. He could make out the red ensign winking on her stern and the gold curtains in the stateroom windows.
“Everyone you love is aboard,” Burr had told him in a call to the third public phone cabin on the left as you walk out to sea on Deep Bay pier.
Melanie Rose was singing along to gospel music to the radio while she scrubbed sweet potatoes at the sink. Melanie Rose taught Bible school and had twin daughters by someone called Cecil—pronounced Cee-sill—who three months ago had taken a return ticket to Eleuthera and thus far had not used the second half. Ceesill might come back one day, and Melanie Rose lived in the cheerful hope he would. Meanwhile Jonathan had taken Cecil’s place as second cook to Mama Low and on Saturday nights Melanie Rose consoled herself with O’Toole, who was cleaning grouper at the fish table. Today was Friday, so they were starting to get friendly.
“You goin’ dancin’ tomorrow, Melanie Rose?” O’Toole inquired. “Ain’t no point to dancin’ alone, O’Toole,” said Melanie Rose with a defiant sniff.
Mama Low waddled in and sat down on his folding chair and smiled and shook his head, as if he were remembering some damned tune he couldn’t shake out of it. A voyaging Persian had recently made him a present of a set of worry beads, and he was swinging them round his enormous fingers. The sun had nearly set. Out at sea the Pasha was sounding her air horns in salute.
“Oh man, you some damn big feller,” Mama Low murmured admiringly, turning to stare at her through the open doorway. “You sho’s hell one big white fuckin’ millionaire king, Lord King Richard Fuckin’ Onslow Fuckin’ Roper, sir. Mass’ Lamont, you cook nice tonight, mind. Otherwise that Mr. Lord Pasha of Roper he gonna have yo’ ass. Then us po’ niggers gonna help ou’selves to what’s left of that ass, same as nigger pickin’s off a rich man’s plate.”
“What does he make his money from?” Jonathan asked while he toiled.
“Roper?” Mama Low retorted incredulously. ‘You mean you don’t know?”
“I mean I don’t know.”
“Well, sure as hell, Mass’ Lamont, I don’t. And I sure as hell don’t ask. He’s some big company from Nassau that’s losin’ all its money. Man’s as rich as that in recession time, he sure as hell some mighty big crook.”
In a short while Mama Low would start creating his hot chili sauce for the crawfish. Then the kitchen would fall into a dangerous hush. The sous-chef was not born yet who dared suggest that the yachties came to Hunter’s Island for any other reason than Mama’s chili sauce.
The Pasha is in, her party of sixteen will soon arrive, an atmosphere of battle grips the kitchen as the first diners take their places at the lesser tables. No more brave talk, no more last touches of camouflage paint or nervous checking of the weapons. The unit has become a silent team, relating with eyes and bodies only, waving round each other like mute dancers. Even Swats and Wet Eye have gone silent in the tension as the curtain rises on another fabled night at Mama Low’s. Miss Amelia, poised at the cash desk in her plastic curlers, is braced for the first bill. Mama Low in his famous hat is everywhere, now rallying his troops in a stream of subdued obscenities, now out front jiggling and dissembling with the hated enemy, now back in the kitchen again, grating out orders made more effective by the suppression of his massive voice:
“Fine white lady, table eight, she some kind o’ fuckin’ caterpillar. Won’t eat nuttin’ but fuckin’ lettuce leaves. Two Mama’s salads, O’Toole! Bastard kid on six, he won’t eat nuttin’ but fuckin’ hamburgers. One kid-sized hamburger, and spit on it! What’s happenin’ to the world, O’Toole? Ain’t they got no fuckin’ teeth no more? Don’t they eat no fish? Wet Eye, take five 7-Ups and two Mama’s punch to table one. Move it. Mass’ Lamont, you just keep on goin’ on makin’ them mussels, six more dozen ain’t too many, hear me, just you be sure you keep back sixteen portions for the Pasha. Mussels goes straight to the balls, Mass’ Lamont. Ladies ’n’ gentlemen gon’ screw their hearts out tonight, all on account yo’ mussels. O’Toole, where’s the dressings, you done drunk them? Melanie Rose, hon’, them taters needs turnin’ or they’ll be sackcloth and ashes before yo very eyes!”
All this under the protective strains of the six-strong Huntsman’s steel band, which roosts on the sprawling roof of the terrace, the sweating faces of the players glistening in the fairy lights, white shirts glowing in the strobes. A boy called Henry is singing calypso. Henry did five years in Nassau prison for pushing coke and came home looking like an old man. Melanie Rose told Jonathan that Henry wasn’t any good for lovin’ no more, not after his beatings. “Some native people is sayin’ that’s how come he sing so high,” she said with a sad smile.
It’s a busy night, Mama Low’s busiest in weeks, which explains the extra excitement. Fifty-eight dinners to be served and sixteen coming up the hill—Mama Low has spotted them through his eyeglass—and this is still low season. A whole tense hour goes by before Jonathan is able to do what he likes to do when the lull comes: sluice some cold water over his head and take the measure of his customers through the fish-eye peephole in the swing door.
A close observer’s view. Measured, technical, thorough. An in-depth, undeclared reading of the quarry, ahead of any contact with him. Jonathan can do this for days on end, has done it in ditches, hedges, lying up in barns, his face and hands dappled with camouflage paint, real foliage stitched into his battle dress. He is doing it now: I shall come to him when I come to him, and not before.
First the harbor below, with its horseshoe of white lights and small yachts, each a separate campfire sitting on the glass of the sheltered water. Lift your eyeline by a knuckle and there she is: the Iron Pasha herself, dressed for a carnival, gold-lit from stem to stern. Jonathan can make out the shapes of the guards, one forward, one aft, and a third lurking in the shadow of the bridge. Frisky and Tabby are not among them. Their duties tonight are on land. His gaze moved in tactical bounds up the sand track and passed under the driftwood archway that announced the sacred kingdom of Mama Low. It scanned the lighted hibiscus bushes and the tattered Bahamian flag dangling at the halfway point either side of the skull and crossbones. It paused at the dance floor where a very old couple held each other close, touching each othe
r’s faces unbelievingly with their fingertips. Jonathan guessed they were emigrés still marveling at their survival. Younger dancers pressed together in stationary ecstasy. At a ringside table, he picked out a pair of hard men in their forties. Bermuda shorts, wrestlers’ chests. A thrusting way of using their forearms. Is it you? he asked them in his mind—or are you two more Roper leash-dogs?
“They’ll probably use a Cigarette,” Rooke had said. “Super-fast low job, no draft.”
The two men had arrived in a new white powerboat shortly before dusk, whether a Cigarette or not he didn’t know. But they had the stillness of professionals.
They stood up, smoothing their nether parts and slinging their handbags over their shoulders. One of them threw a Roman wave in Mama Low’s direction.
“Sir? Loved it. Oh, nice eating. Brilliant.”
Elbows aloft, they waddled down the sand path to their boat. They were nobodies, Jonathan decided. They belonged to one another. Maybe. Or maybe not.
He shifted his sights to a table of three Frenchmen and their girls. Too drunk, he decided. They had already put away twelve orders of Mama’s punch among them, and nobody was pouring his drink into the flower vase. He focused on the mid-deck bar. Against a background of yachting pennants, heads of blue marlin and tail ends of plundered neckties, two black girls in radiant cottons perched on high stools, chatting to two black men in their twenties. Maybe it’s you, he thought. Maybe it’s the girls. Maybe it’s all four of you.
Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed a low white powerboat heading out of Deep Bay toward the ocean. My two candidates eliminated. Maybe.
He allowed his gaze to begin the climb toward the terrace, where the worst man in the world, surrounded by retainers, jesters, bodyguards and children, was disporting himself in his private Camelot. As his boat now mastered the harbor, so the person of Mr. Richard Onslow Roper mastered the round table, the terrace and the restaurant. Unlike his boat, he was not dressed for spectacle but had the comfy look of a fellow who had thrown on a few clothes to answer the door to a friend. A navy pullover was slung carelessly over his shoulders.