Nevertheless, he commanded. By the stillness of his patrician head. By the speed of his smile and the intelligence of his expression. By the attention lavished on him by his audience, whether he spoke or listened. By the way everything around the table, from the dishes to the bottles to the candles in their green string jars to the faces of the children, seemed to be ranged toward him or away from him. Even the close observer felt his pull: Roper, he thought, it’s me, Pine, the chap who told you not to buy your Italian marbles.
And as he was thinking this, a general cry of laughter went up from the terrace, led by Roper himself and evidently provoked by him, for his bronzed right arm was flung out to make the humorous point and his head was lifted to the woman who faced him across the table. Her carelessly disordered chestnut hair and naked back were thus far all Jonathan could see of her, but he remembered at once the grain of the skin inside Herr Meister’s bathrobe, the endless legs and dusters of jewels at the wrists and neck. He felt the surge that had passed through him the first time he set eyes on her, the stab of indignation that someone so young and beautiful should accept the captivity of a Roper. She smiled, and it was her comedian’s smile, kooky, slanted and impertinent.
Blocking her from his mind, he allowed his gaze to range the children’s end of the table. The Langbournes have three, MacArthur and Danby one apiece, Burr had said. The Roper drafts them to amuse his Daniel.
Lastly came Daniel himself, aged eight, a tousled, pallid boy with a determined chin. And at Daniel, Jonathan’s eye paused guiltily.
“Couldn’t we use somebody else?” he had asked Rooke. But he had hit against their iron wall.
Daniel is the apple of the Roper’s eye, Rooke had replied, while Burr looked out of the window. Why go for second best?
We’re talking five minutes, Jonathan, Burr had said. What’s five minutes for a kid of eight?
A lifetime, Jonathan thought, remembering a few minutes of his own.
Meanwhile Daniel is in grave discourse with Jed, whose raggedy chestnut hair divides into two roughly equal parts as she leans downward to address him. The flame of the candle sets a gold fringe on their two faces. Daniel pulls at her arm. She rises, glances at the band above her and calls to somebody she seems to know. Sweeping up her flimsy skirts, she swings one leg then the other over the stone bench, as if she were a teenager vaulting a garden gate. Jed and Daniel scamper hand in hand down the stone staircase. Upper-class geisha, Burr had said, nothing recorded against. It depends what you’re recording, thought Jonathan as he watched her take Daniel in her arms.
Time stops. The band is playing a slow samba. Daniel clutches Jed’s hips as if he were about to enter her. The grace of Jed’s movements is near-criminal. A flurry interrupts Jonathan’s reverie. Something dire has happened to Daniel’s trousers. Jed is holding them at the waistband, laughing away his embarrassment. Daniel’s top button has broken loose, but Jed in an inspired act of improvisation pins him together with a six-inch safety pin borrowed from Melanie Rose’s apron. Roper is standing on the parapet, gazing down on them like a proud admiral inspecting his fleet. Catching his eye, Daniel releases Jed long enough to give a child’s wave, sawing the air from side to side. Roper responds with a thumbs-up. Jed blows Roper a kiss, then takes Daniel’s hands and leans back, mouthing the rhythm for him to follow. The samba quickens. Daniel relaxes, getting the hang of it. The liquidity of Jed’s hip movements becomes an outrage against public order. The worst man in the world is too much blessed.
Returning his gaze to the terrace, Jonathan makes a perfunctory inspection of the rest of the Roper party. Frisky and Tabby sit at opposite sides of the table, Frisky favoring the left draw, Tabby covering the diners and the dance floor. Both men appear larger than Jonathan remembers them. The Lord Langbourne, blond hair still bundled in a ponytail, converses with a pretty English rose while his gloomy wife scowls at the dancers. Across the table from them sits Major Corkoran, lately of the Life Guards, sporting a battered Panama hat with an old Etonian hatband. He is making gallant conversation with an awkward girl in a high-necked dress. She frowns, then blushes and giggles, then corrects herself and takes a stern mouthful of ice cream.
From the top of the tower, Henry the impotent singer breaks into a calypso about a-very-sleepy-girl-who-couldn’t-get-to-sleep. On the dance floor, Daniel’s chest is cuddled against Jed’s mound and his head against her breast while his hands clutch her hips. Jed lets him rock against her in peace.
“Girl on table six got tits like l’il warm puppy dogs,” O’Toole announced, prodding Jonathan in the spine with a tray of Mama’s punch.
Jonathan took a last long look at Roper. He had turned his face toward the sea, where a moon path led from his fairy-lit yacht to the horizon.
“Mass’ Lamont, sound the Allelujah, sir!” cried Mama Low, majestically sweeping O’Toole aside. He had donned a pair of ancient jodhpurs and a pith topee, and he was armed with his famous black basket and riding crop. Jonathan followed Mama Low onto the balcony and, white as a target in his chef’s tunic and hat, rolled the brass tocsin. The echoes were still booming out to sea as the children of the Roper party came pelting down the path from the terrace, followed at a more becoming pace by the adults, led by Langbourne and a pair of wispy young men of the polo-playing classes. The band played a roll of drums, the perimeter torches were doused, colored spotlights made the dance floor glisten like an ice rink. As Mama Low moved center stage and cracked his whip, Roper and his entourage began taking their reserved places in the front row. Jonathan glanced out to sea. The white motorboat that might have been a Cigarette had vanished. Must have rounded the headland to the south, he thought.
“Right where I’m standin’ heah is the startin’ gate! Any nigger crab tries to beat the startin’ pistol, that’s ten lashes cold!”
His pith helmet tipped to the back of his head, Mama Low is giving his celebrated rendering of a British colonial administrator.
“This historic ring right heah”—indicating a circular red stain at his feet—“is the finishin’ post. Every crab in this basket heah has got a numbah. Every crab in this basket heah is goin’ to run his ass oft, or Ay am gonna know the reason whay. Every crab who doesn’t make the finishin’ post heah will go right back into the chowdah.”
Another crack of the whip. The laughter dwindles to silence. At the edge of the dance floor Swats and Wet Eye are dispensing complimentary rum punches from an elderly perambulator that once bore the infant Low himself. The older children squat cross-legged, the two boys with folded arms, the girls hugging their knees. Daniel is propped against Jed, thumb in mouth. Roper stands next to her. Lord Langbourne takes a flash photograph, distressing Major Corkoran. “Sandy, old love, for Christ’s sake, can’t we just remember it for once?” he says in a murmur that fills the amphitheater. The moon hangs like a pink parchment lantern over the sea. The harbor lights bob and twinkle in a restless arc. On the balcony where Jonathan is standing, O’Toole lays a proprietary hand on Melanie Rose’s arse and she wriggles herself obligingly against it. Only Miss Amelia in her curlers spurns the proceedings. Framed in the white-lit window of the kitchen behind them, she is intently counting the cash.
The band plays another roll of drums. Mama Low bows to the black wicker basket, grabs the lid and bears it into the air. The crabs are under starter’s orders. Abandoning their perambulator, Swats and Wet Eye strike out into the audience with their books of tickets.
“Three crabs racin’, all crabs is evens!” Jonathan hears Swats yell.
Mama Low is appealing to the spectators for a volunteer.
“I’m lookin’! I’m a-lookin’!” he cries in an enormous voice of black man’s pain. “I’m a-lookin’ for a fine white pure Christian chil’ who knows his bounden duty by these dumb crabs and won’t stand no back-talkin’ or insurrection. You, sir! I’m pinnin’ my humble simple hopes on you.”
His whip is pointing at Daniel, who lets out a serio-comic yell and buries his face in Jed’s sk
irts, then rushes to the back of the audience. But one of the girls is already scampering forward. Jonathan hears the rah-rah voices of the polo boys applauding her.
“Well played, Sally! Sock it to ’em, Sals! Jolly good!”
Still from his place of vantage on the balcony, Jonathan takes a raking glance at the bar, where the two men and their girls are clustered in earnest conversation, resolutely ignoring the dance floor. His gaze glides back to the audience, the band, then the dangerous patches of darkness in between.
They’ll come from behind the terrace, he decides. They’ll use the cover of the bushes beside the steps. Just make sure you stay up on the kitchen balcony, Rooke had said.
The girl Sally or Sals pulls a face and peers into the black basket. The drummer strikes up another roll. Sally reaches one bold arm into the basket, then the other. To shrieks of laughter, she puts her whole head in, emerges with a crab in each hand and places them side by side in the starting gate, while Langbourne’s camera whirs and zooms and flashes. She dives in for the third crab, adds it to the starting line and bounds back to her place, to more rah-rah from the polo set. The trumpeter on the tower sends up a hunter’s tattoo. Its echoes are still resounding round the harbor as a pistol shot tears the night apart. Caught off guard, Frisky drops into a half-crouch, while Tabby starts to push back the spectators to make himself shooting space, without knowing whom to shoot.
Even Jonathan momentarily searches for the shooter, until he spots Mama Low, sweating under his topee, pointing a smoking starter’s pistol at the night sky.
The crabs are off.
Then, casually, it was happening.
No formality, no epiphany, no commotion, no screams—scarcely a sound beyond Roper’s curt order to Frisky and Tabby to “stand still and do nothing, now.”
If anything was remarkable at all, it was not the noise but the quiet. Mama Low abandoned his harangue, the band stopped playing fanfares and the polo players gave up their frenzied cheers.
And this quiet developed slowly, in the same way that a large orchestra fizzles out at rehearsal, with the most determined players, or the most oblivious, going on for several bars before they too dwindle to a halt. Then for a while all Jonathan noticed were the things you suddenly hear on Hunter’s Island when people stop making such a din: bird cries, cicadas, the bubbling of the coral water off Penguin Point, the bray of a wild pony from the cemetery and a couple of tinny wallops of a hammer as some late toiler down in Deep Bay negotiates with his outboard. Then he heard nothing at all, and the quiet became vast and terrible, and Jonathan with his grandstand view from the balcony picked out the two broad-armed professionals who had left the restaurant earlier in the evening and ridden away in their new white Cigarette but were now edging along the lines of the spectators like sidesmen in church, taking their collection of pocketbooks, wallets, purses and wristwatches and little wads of cash from people’s back pockets.
And jewelry, Jed’s particularly. Jonathan was just in time to see her bare arms lift first to her left ear, then to her right, pushing aside her hair and bowing slightly. Then to her throat to remove her necklace, just as if she were about to climb into someone’s bed. Nobody is mad enough to wear jewelry in the Bahamas anymore, Burr had said: unless they happen to be Dicky Roper’s girl.
And still no fuss. Everyone understanding the rules. No objectors, no resistance or unpleasantness at all—for the good reason that while one of the thieves was tendering an open plastic briefcase to receive the congregation’s offerings, his accomplice was wheeling the beat-up perambulator with the rum and whiskey bottles on it, and the cans of beer in their ice tub. And among the beer and the bottles sat eight-year-old Daniel Roper like a sacrificial Buddha, with an automatic pistol at his head, enduring the first of the five minutes that Burr had said wouldn’t matter to a boy his age—and perhaps Burr was right at that, for Daniel was smiling, and sharing the good joke with the crowd, grateful for relief from the scary crab race.
But Jonathan didn’t share Daniel’s joke. Instead, he saw a flickering of light from somewhere inside his eyes, like a red splash of fury. And he heard a call to battle stronger than any he could remember since the night he had emptied his Heckler at the unarmed green Irishman, so loud that he wasn’t thinking anymore, he was only doing. For days and nights—now in the conscious part of his brain, now the unconscious—he had been steeling himself for this moment, relishing it, fearing it, planning it: if they do this, the logical response will be that; if they are here, the place to be is there. But he had not reckoned with his feelings. Until now. Which no doubt was why his first response was not the one that he had planned.
Having stepped as far back into the shadows as the balcony allowed, he slipped off his white chef’s hat and tunic, then ran into the kitchen in his shorts, heading for the cash desk, where Miss Amelia sat working on her fingernails. He grabbed her telephone, held the receiver to his ear and rattled the cradle long enough to establish what he already knew, namely that the line was cut. He picked up a dishcloth and, jumping on the central table, removed the neon strip that lighted the kitchen. Meanwhile he ordered Miss Amelia to leave the cash desk exactly as it was and hide herself upstairs, no bellyaching, no trying to take the money or they would come after her. By the glow of the arc lights outside, he then hastened to the work surface where he kept his knife block, selected the most rigid of his carving knives, and ran with it, not back to the balcony but through the scullery to the service door on the south side.
Why the knife? he wondered as he ran. Why the knife? Who am I going to slice up with a knife? But he didn’t throw it away. He was glad he had the knife, because a man with a weapon, any weapon, is twice the man he is without one: read the manual.
Once outdoors he kept running southward, ducking and leaping between the century cacti and the sea-grape trees until he gained the brow of cliff that overlooked Goose Neck. There, panting and sweating, he saw what he was looking for: the white motorboat, moored on the eastern side of the inlet for the men’s escape. But he didn’t pause to admire the sight. Knife in hand, he ran back to the darkened kitchen. And though the whole exercise had not taken him above a minute, it had been quite long enough for Miss Amelia to make herself scarce upstairs.
From the unlit kitchen window on the north side, Jonathan took stock of the thieves’ progress, and blessedly in that time he was able to harness some of his first, murderous anger, for his focus improved and his breathing settled and self-discipline, more or less, was once more his. But where did his anger come from? From somewhere dark and far back in him. It rose and spread over him in a flood, yet its origin was a mystery. And he held on to the knife. Thumb on top, Johnny, same as buttering bread . . . weave the blade and watch his eyes . . . not too low now, and bother him a little bit with your other hand . . .
Major Corkoran in his Panama hat had found a chair and was sitting astride it, arms folded along the backrest and chin propped on his arms, watching the thieves as if they were a fashion show. Lord Langbourne had surrendered his camera, but the man with the briefcase no sooner had it than he threw it irritably aside as unacceptable. Jonathan heard a drawled “Oh, fuck you.” Frisky and Tabby stood like men possessed, rigidly at the alert not five yards from their quarries. But Roper’s right arm was still held out to them in prohibition, while his eyes remained fixed on Daniel and the thieves.
As to Jed, she was standing alone without her jewelry at the edge of the dance floor, her body made jagged by the tension, her hands spread on her thighs, as if to stop herself from running to Daniel.
“If it’s money you want, you can have it,” Jonathan heard Roper say, calmly. “Want a hundred thousand dollars? Have it in cash, got it on the boat, just give me the boy. Shan’t send the police after you. Leave you completely alone. Long as I’ve got the boy. Do you understand what I’m saying? Speak English? Corky, try ’em in Spanish, will you?”
Then Corkoran’s voice, obediently passing on the same message in decent Spanish.
Jonathan glanced at the cash desk. Miss Amelia’s till stood open. Half-counted piles of money lay strewn across the counter. He stared down the zigzag path that led from the dance floor to the kitchen. It was steep and crudely paved. Only a lunatic would try to push a loaded perambulator up it. It was also floodlit, which meant that anyone stepping into the darkened kitchen would be unsighted. Jonathan slipped the carving knife under his waistband and wiped his sweated palm on the seat of his shorts.
The raiding party was starting up the path. The way in which the captor held his hostage was a matter of crucial interest to Jonathan, because his plan of action depended on it: what Burr had called his plan of plausibility. Listen like a blind man, Johnny, watch like a deaf one. But nobody, so far as he remembered, had thought to offer him advice on how one man with a carving knife prises an eight-year-old hostage from two armed gunmen and survives.
They had made the first leg of the path. Below them the motionless crowd, their faces brilliant under the arc lights, stared after them, not a movement among them, Jed still apart from them, her hair copper in the glow. He was beginning not to know himself again. Bad images of his childhood flooded his vision. Answered insults, unanswered prayers.
First came the bagman, then twenty yards behind him his accomplice, dragging Daniel up the path by his arm. Daniel wasn’t joking anymore. The bagman was striding out hungrily, the stuffed briefcase hanging at his side. But Daniel’s kidnapper moved in awkward, twisted strides, his upper body turning repeatedly while he menaced the crowd, then the boy, with his automatic pistol. Right-handed, Jonathan recorded, bare-armed. The safety catch at “on.”
“Don’t you want to negotiate with me?” Roper was shouting at them from the dance floor. “I’m his father. Why won’t you talk to me? Let’s do a deal.”