Jack and Susan in 1953

by Michael McDowell

  “I don’t see anyone like that at all,” said Jack. “Are you sure he’s—”

  “Of course I’m sure,” said Susan. “He said he will use any excuse to come to Havana for a few days.”

  When the stream of disembarking passengers had thinned a bit, the newlyweds made their way down the gangplank. They finally located James Bright—far away from the crowd. He was on an adjoining pier, his enormous weight delicately perched on a piling. The pier itself was old and filthy, but James Bright appeared fresh and cool. His eyebrows and moustache were a glistening white, as white as the three-piece linen suit he wore. His skin was nearly as pink as the linen tie about his neck. He wore tiny round glasses with emerald green lenses, and was delicately spooning a yellow ice out of a tiny paper cup.

  “I was avoiding the crush,” he said to them, without apparently looking up.

  “Hello, James,” said Susan.

  “Susan darling, I am so glad you’ve finally come to visit me again,” James Bright replied, still not looking up at her. “Not only are you no longer fifteen years old, but you also seem to have acquired an entourage. I approve of entourages, and yours makes up in good looks what it lacks in numbers. Is this a hired chaperone? Or Prince Charming perhaps—who broke his arm wielding a sword in your defense? Or is this a chance acquaintance made on the deck of the Andrea Doria? Is this a man who would be willing to accept my meager hospitality on this strange little island?”

  “I’m married, James. To Prince Charming here.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you.”

  James Bright extended his left hand—the one with the paper cup in it—out to the side, and a little dark-skinned boy ran up out of nowhere, snatched it away, and fled with it.

  Then James Bright held out his right hand, and shook Jack’s.

  “Jack Beaumont,” said Jack. “Susan and I were married on board the ship.”

  “How romantic.” At last he seemed to look up at them. He smiled a fragile, melancholy smile. He shoved his glasses down a bit on his nose and squinted up at them in the harsh sunlight. “Susan darling, do you forgive me for an unforgivable decade of callous neglect?”

  His eyes were sad, Jack thought. Weary.

  “Of course, I forgive you,” said Susan quickly. “I told Jack what you told me in the telegram. Your German is atrocious.”

  “But perhaps necessary,” James Bright said, turning his sad, weary eyes full upon Jack. “I have been watched.”

  Jack believed him, and thought how odd it was—to have so suddenly married Susan, and been plunged into a delirious happiness that had been totally unanticipated, and now here they were suddenly plucked out of it all again. It was like a fast-moving merry-go-round that’s halted with a wrench, the calliope music giving way to the scream of someone who was injured. That’s what it felt like, standing on this decaying pier in the massive shadow of the Andrea Doria talking to this fat, pastel, courtly gentleman with the sad, weary eyes.

  He glanced at Susan and knew that she was feeling the same thing. She probably felt the difference even more keenly, for James Bright was a relative for whom she had maintained a real—if distant—affection for many years.

  “I’ve reserved us rooms at the Internacional,” said James Bright. “Though now I think we ought to see if the presidential suite is available—for the happy couple. Susan, I hope—”

  “No, no, don’t say a word.” Susan seemed to anticipate her uncle’s apology. “Jack and I came down here to help you in any way we can—didn’t we, Jack?”

  Jack nodded yes, of course.

  “As long as you need us, we’ll be here.”

  “That’s right,” affirmed Jack.

  “Jack was fired from his job last Friday—”

  “I’m sorry,” said James Bright politely.

  “—and I quit my job on Tuesday, so we are as poor as churchmice, and for the time being we’re going to make you support us.”

  Jack was about to protest, but James Bright’s smile of pleasure at this declaration was so manifestly sincere, that he contented himself with, “Susan and I would like to help you, Mr. Bright, if we can.”

  “And I’m sure that with you two here, everything will be right as rain,” said James. He started to raise himself from the piling, but it wasn’t a real attempt—he merely seemed to lift his shoulders and torso a few inches before settling himself back down again. It was an indication of a desire to get up, rather than anything more substantial.

  Susan looked around the pier.

  “Where are your boys?” she asked.

  James whistled once, surprisingly shrilly, with two manicured fingers placed delicately behind his lower lip.

  Immediately, five small boys—including the one who had run off with the empty cup a few minutes before—converged on the man. Like an ancient Roman emperor beyond the responsibility even of moving himself about on the earth over which he reigned, James Bright was raised up with the coordinated efforts of the five small boys.

  “Five,” said James Bright looking around, as he was being arranged for movement, it was to be supposed, in the direction of the Hotel Internacional. “There are five of you. Why?”

  He looked around at the children, who seemed to move faster and faster, and counted them off, “Manuel One. Manuel Two. Felicio. Roberto. Then who are—”

  He stared with alarmed curiosity at number five. He was a bit older than the others—about nine, perhaps, and wore short yellow trousers and a dirty white shirt with all the buttons gone.

  In an instant, the older boy took a knife out of his trousers, jumped up into the air, and slashed it across the throat of Susan’s uncle. James Bright gave a startled gurgle as his emerald green glasses slipped off his perspiring nose and his enormous bulk sank to the planks of the pier.

  Jack and Susan rushed forward—Susan to help her uncle, Jack to grab the tiny assassin with his good arm.

  Manuels One and Two, Felicio and Roberto had drawn back in stunned horror at what had happened. Then with one movement they ran off down the pier, setting up a little thunder of bare feet on the planks, leaving their employer behind, and incidentally, crashing into Jack. Jack was knocked over, not only landing on his cast-bound arm, but also losing the grasp that he had gotten on the shirt of the knife-wielding child.

  The boy flung the knife into the water and took off toward the quay, his short legs pumping like pistons.

  Jack struggled to his feet, and found that the massive bulk of James Bright, with shining red blood covering his white suit, was hanging over the side of the dock. Susan, who weighed no more than a third as much as her uncle, was holding onto his trouser legs, valiantly attempting to prevent his slipping away completely.

  Jack threw himself forward and grasped the man’s arm, and also struggled to pull him back.

  James Bright’s face, upside down about a dozen feet from the water, was red with the blood that was flowing through the wound in his neck. Jack’s hand was about James Bright’s wrist tightly and he felt no pulse. Also the blood had ceased to spurt out of his neck. It flowed out sluggishly now, with no living rhythm. The man was suspended over the water like a piece of hung game.

  “He’s dead,” said Jack.

  Susan cried out—a hollow cry such as Jack had never heard before. Her grip was loosened for only a second on the white trouser legs, and then James Bright’s corpse dropped headfirst into the murky waters of Havana harbor.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  JACK STOOD ON the pier with his unbroken arm wrapped around his wife’s shoulder. From above, crew members of the Andrea Doria looked down, pointing and murmuring from the various decks of the ship and from portholes. Tourists—some of them who had sat at table with Jack and Susan on the voyage down from New York—stood on the dock, twisted telephoto lenses onto their Leicas, and snapped photographs of the massive corpse of James Bright as it was hauled out of the oily water of Havana harbor.

  The Havana police said they had an Aqualung and an experienced
diver, but until the Aqualung and the officer were found and brought together to the pier, a half dozen near-naked youths were diving in hope of recovering the knife with which the rich American plantation owner had been killed.

  Jack was glad that Susan’s Spanish was fluent. He was even happier that Susan remained as calm and staunch under these trying circumstances as he could possibly have hoped she would. Her eyes were red, but she had stopped crying. She answered all the questions that the police put to them, and she spoke with the doctor who signed the certificate of death and asked his advice on what to do with the body.

  Since any idiot could see that the man died as the result of the slash of a knife across the throat, no autopsy would be required. This was supposed to be a sort of consolation, Susan surmised. Three policemen took their names and New York addresses, and the name of her uncle and the name of his plantation on the coast in the province of Pinar del Río. At last, after the sodden body in its soiled suit had been unceremoniously wrapped in an olive-drab blanket and shoved across the back seat of a rickety police vehicle, Jack and Susan looked at one another, and wondered what they were going to do.

  Woolf did not act as if there had been a death in the family. He leaped at the sides of his narrow container. He chewed at the wooden bars, and barked loudly. He stopped only when he realized that no one had brought him food. Liberation from the cage made up a little for that, but not entirely.

  Eventually their luggage was absently gathered together and Jack and Susan climbed into a taxi and went to the Hotel Internacional. Susan spoke to the man at the desk in Spanish, and when he replied in English, she didn’t even notice but continued to speak to him in the native tongue. Jack inscribed the register: Mr. and Mrs. John Beaumont, and stared at the signature in perplexity, as if it were some obscure biblical inscription.

  Susan peered at the book, squeezed Jack’s arm, and managed a weak smile.

  Their room on the fifth floor overlooked the flower-bedecked plaza in front of the hotel. Woolf had been assigned to a small kennel in the basement of the hotel, which was darker than the ship’s hold and where his cage was smaller. Flakes of rusted iron came off in his mouth when he chewed the bars.

  Susan sat at the vanity, and looked at herself in the mirror.

  Jack stood at the window and peered out at Havana. The city looked simultaneously bright, colorful, and dirty. All the cars were American—and dented. On the other side of the busy roadway was the Gulf of Mexico, beating relentlessly and remorselessly against a decaying, ancient seawall. The ocean water looked hot and dangerous.

  “Have you ever before had to deal with death?” he asked her without turning around.

  “Not quite at such close range,” she replied. “And not someone as close to me as James. This makes me the last of the Brights.”

  “Actually, you’re a Beaumont now. There are no more Brights at all.”

  “We’re suspects, I bet,” she said wearily. “The police will think we did it. Or at least they want culprits. We got down off the ship and slit the throat of the first overweight rich man we came across, and wasn’t it a coincidence that it turned out to be my very own uncle?”

  Jack was not entirely surprised. It was the sort of thing that every tourist dreaded when he crossed an international border, whether he admitted it to himself or not: a trial for murder, or any crime, conducted in a language he did not understand. “What do we do about that?”

  “We hope they don’t arrest us,” said Susan. “I’ve heard jails are not very pleasant in Cuba. We should probably inform the embassy, maybe they can help. We should do that right now.”

  She made no move to rise, however, but continued to stare at herself in the mirror. Jack didn’t press.

  After a bit, Susan went on: “Then I should arrange for the funeral—I’m the only relative, and I’m already here. After that, we should see about the will.” She glanced at Jack in the mirror. “After they see how much I’ve inherited, they will really think that we did it.”

  The next few days were peculiar and wearying. Nothing much happened on Friday, and in Cuba over the weekend even the police torturers went home, and investigations into senseless murders were put off till Monday, when they might well have sorted themselves out, and gained a motive, or a perpetrator, or a witness. Jack and Susan, feeling cut off and alone, took Woolf for long walks around Havana during the day, always on the lookout for a chance glimpse of the boy who had committed the murder. In the evening they ate dinner as early as possible in the hotel dining room in order to avoid contact with other tourists. Other tourists did not have favorite uncles being kept in a butcher’s freezer around the corner.

  Jack had suggested that since nothing was doing on the weekend, they might drive down to James Bright’s plantation, but Susan did not feel it right to leave Havana before her uncle was buried and the investigation into his murder had been officially undertaken by the police. Susan, however, did think it a good idea to get in touch with the servants and other staff of her uncle’s estate, if only to let them know of James Bright’s death. And perhaps, she hoped aloud to Jack, they could provide some clue that would help to identify the child who had committed the dreadful act. Wrestling with the telephone system of Cuba required much patience and ingenuity, but all it produced was the operator’s opinion that the telephone at the plantation was out of order.

  Sunday night seemed impossibly hot and long, but early on Monday morning, Jack and Susan visited the undertaker and arranged for the funeral. It was to be quiet, as tasteful as any ritual taking place in Cuba could be, and James Bright was to be buried in the tiny Anglican cemetery on the edge of the suburb where most of the English lived. James Bright hadn’t been English, and he’d been a jovial agnostic, but he was known to the English community in Havana. Susan bought a black dress and Jack a black suit. There were daily interviews with the police, and attempts to find James Bright’s lawyer, who didn’t seem to be in his office, in his home, or at any of the bars where he was known to spend his late mornings and early afternoons. Most of their time was consumed in waiting, in finding out where a functionary was to be found (never in his office), or discovering what was expected of them in the way of forms and fees. They spent hours in uncomfortable chairs, their feet scraping on filthy floors, learning the minute habits of doorkeepers, stewards, and receptionists. Jack began to pick up a few words of the language.

  Results with undertakers, lawyers, police lieutenants, and what passed for detectives in Havana, were depressingly inconclusive. Many promises and a quantity of inaction that would have stalled a juggernaut on a downhill run.

  Even the inquest into the matter of James Bright’s death was somehow casual and off the mark. In a cramped noisy courtroom with a jury that had apparently been impaneled with the expectation of hearing some other case, two policemen testified. Neither of them had been present when the body was recovered. Jack was called next as a witness, and a quarter of an hour was spent in establishing the fact that he could not speak Spanish. Susan was not called at all, though the judge stared at her for a considerable amount of time. The verdict, it was announced, would be announced later.

  The only thing that did proceed with any speed was the funeral of James Bright. The sun hurried that along; burials in Havana tended to be quick affairs. There was no church service, only a burial at the Anglican cemetery. The graveyard attendant pressed a bottle of smelling salts into Susan’s hand as she and Jack entered through the creaking iron gate. When she shook her head no, the attendant replied in a quiet voice that the salts would come in handy to mask certain unpleasant odors.

  But there were no unpleasant odors, because James Bright’s casket was mounded with flowers. The tradesmen with whom he had dealt lavishly in Havana, his friends in the English community, several lower-echelon members of the American embassy, and even the elusive lawyer had sent wreaths and drapes of cut blooms.

  The only persons to attend were Jack and Susan; a weedy Englishman with a red nose a
nd the careful gait of the noontime drunkard; a man who was very evidently a policeman in plainclothes—plainclothes being in this case red trousers and a stiff black shirt patterned with large yellow roses; and a little short dark-skinned man in a shiny black suit who looked as if he had attended many funerals in his time.

  The ceremony was short and dignified. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, Susan flung a handful of earth onto the top of it and then turned away.

  The weedy Englishman came up to her and spoke a few incoherent words of sympathy, handed her a little dog-eared card with his name and address on it, and she thanked him. With a sense of quiet malice that Susan felt her uncle would have appreciated, she grabbed the plain-clothesman before he could slink away, shook his hand heartily and told him, in Spanish, that she was glad he had come because her uncle had often spoken of him in the highest terms of praise.

  The small dark man in the black suit alone remained, eyeing the detective, then Jack, and at last sidled up to Susan. The sense and drama of his movements might have been appropriate for an evil-smelling dark alley in the middle of the night, but this was one o’clock in the afternoon, the cemetery was open and dazzlingly bright. The only noise was that of the gravediggers’ shovels.

  Susan did not offer to shake this man’s hand, but the man approached her and said, “My deepest sympathies.” His English was unaccented.

  “Thank you,” said Susan. “Who are you?”

  “Richard Bollow. My assistant tells me…” Mr. Bollow trailed off. Bollow had been James Bright’s lawyer, and the last four days, Mr. Bollow had not been available for consultation.