Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  I had packed my luggage early in a childlike hurry to be among the first to get off the boat, and went off to the dining-room for a gross breakfast to celebrate the end of this horror voyage: grapefruit and prune compote, eggs, bacon, mushroom and black pudding, cinnamon toast and honey – at least the Zephyr’s chef lived up to his billing, in five days I must have put on ten pounds. I was even humming in a breezy, tuneless fashion as I ambled along the corridor to my cabin and found my luggage gone. For a moment, I wondered whether I had wandered into the wrong cabin, but no, this was G16 all right.

  ‘Oh your luggage has already been collected, sir. Mr Wilmot’s orders.’

  The steward was impressed and smiling, his smile becoming broader when in my agitation I gave him a larger tip than I had intended.

  Up on the deck – where Sirocco, Mistral and the rest of the super suites were – there was a special carpeted gangway to the shore being assembled.

  ‘Could you tell me where I could find Mr Wilmot’s luggage?’

  ‘Mr Wilmot’s luggage? That would be priority baggage, already taken ashore, sir.’

  ‘Well then, can I go ashore?’

  ‘Not yet, not till Mr, oh here he is now.’

  ‘They ready for us, Charles?’

  Dodo approached the gangway which settled down into place, the canopy being drawn tight by the two seamen and the metal struts clinking into their slots, all as though to his command. In his great belted Alpine-mammal overcoat, he was as huge again as when Jane had first introduced me to the darling Wilmots. Behind him wheeled by Charles the chauffeur in his peaked cap was the other darling, scarcely visible behind the Campbell tartan rug tucked around her and the gauzy black veil turned round her head and neck with a pair of dark glasses poking out. Jane too was wearing dark glasses and gave no sign of recognition.

  ‘You missed a swell party last night. We drank the boat dry.’

  ‘Can you tell me what’s happened to my luggage?’

  ‘Your luggage? I guess that went on with our stuff. You don’t want to get held up by the hoi polloi, correction, by hoi polloi, hoi being the definite article, so saying the hoi polloi is like saying the the people. Did you know that, Mother?’

  No reaction from behind either pair of shades.

  ‘Where is my luggage actually now?’

  ‘It’s on the launch taking it over to Sting’s boat. You’ll come with us, won’t you, on a little cruise round the harbour. It’s a great introduction to New York, and you’ll just love Sting.’

  ‘Sting? Who’s Sting?’

  The pink carpet had been clipped down into place and the pink rope across the gangway untied, and the petty officer or whoever he was saluted, as the Chairman of the Line led his party ashore.

  ‘Sting Ray Rawston,’ Dodo flung back as he padded along the gangway which creaked and groaned to the tread of his huge feet. ‘You never heard of him? It’s a fantastic story – ragman’s son from the Lower East Side, got himself to Brooklyn Law School, then squeezed on to Joe McCarthy’s team as third gofer, never looked back. Now he’s one of the two or three biggest corporate lawyers in Washington. He’s an amazing guy.’

  ‘But shouldn’t the luggage go through Customs?’

  ‘Oh we had the bags cleared on board, Tommy Valenti looked after it. We’ve been buddies since way back, long before he became Commissioner, wasn’t it, Mother?’

  Charles was just tipping the wheels of Tucker’s chair to minimise the shock of hitting American soil when to my amazement from behind the dark veil in a low but clear voice came the words, ‘No, when.’

  ‘No when what?’

  ‘When he became Commissioner. You didn’t know him before that.’

  ‘Oh is that the truth? Memory like an elephant, that woman has. Now Tucker will be leaving us here, she’s done enough sailing for a girl who’s still sick, so Charles will take her off upstate to the Mount Ararat which in my opinion is just about the best convalescent home on the East coast and we’ll go see Sting.’

  He bent down to give Tucker a kiss, making as though to pull aside the veil without actually doing so, his lips in fact bussing the hinge of her dark glasses. Jane did much the same, and Charles took over again, pushing the wheelchair across the quayside to the limo, over the sodden litter and squashy fruit, through the crowd of yelling porters, dockers and friends and relations of the passengers. I had been so intent on trying to catch Dodo’s words that only now did the peculiar impact of this disorderly throng hit me, so unlike the quiet still crowd on an English quayside. To my senses, which were scarcely less disordered, it seemed as though their yells and the rattle of their trolleys and the baying of their hooters were part of some protest against us, or against Dodo’s behaviour. It took a minute or two to see that this was a cheerful sort of disorder, cruel if at all only because it was heedless.

  Meanwhile, there I was, chained to them if I wanted to see my luggage again. And it was not that hard to deduce that this was not just a kindly gesture, a wish to show me the finest views of New York, although the genial side of Dodo might well have wanted that too, but a calculated device to keep an eye on me.

  And then there it was, speeding away in some slinky launch to god knew where, my luggage, suddenly so dear to me: the big sky-blue Samsonite case with its shiny metal edges bought especially for this voyage, and inside the familiar old clothes never thought of with affection till now, the heather mixture sports jacket, the elephant-grey trousers, the suit from E. M. Whaley outfitters of Salisbury bought in a farewell outing with my father before he left the country for good and took to London and went downhill, folded as my father had taught me, sleeves back on themselves and the shoulders together lining outwards before the whole jacket was folded in half (method never questioned, however crumpled the suit was when unpacked), and beside the big suitcase, my only other piece, the bulky black briefcase, weathered now, the leather crackled along the top, and buffed tawny at the seams, the EIIR below the lock already faded after less than a decade’s wear, the civil servant’s standard model you got from a little shop in Victoria near Westminster Cathedral when you joined the service (although if you were a high-flier, you would soon swap it for a square-edged businessman’s case in tan or oxblood to show you weren’t a dim bureaucrat, but I liked the dimness).

  We had only a moment to wait before another limo, seemingly as long as the liner we had just left, rumbled along the quay and Dodo was calling out, in a mock-cross Italian voice: ‘Eh, Giorgio, what-a keep-a you so long?’ Numb and seething if it is possible to be both at the same time, I hopped in after Jane and we glided along the quayside.

  ‘Pier 97a, Giorgio, the far end, Mr Rawston’s boat, Sting Ray.’

  Inside the cavernous limo, there was easily room for the three of us in the back seat so that our thighs slopped against each other. Dodo was in the middle and he had hardly settled down on the soft squabs before his great paws were patting Jane’s thigh and mine too and he was murmuring, ‘Well, isn’t this great,’ but a shade mechanically as though it was expected of him, even with a hint of anxiety. Perhaps despite appearances, the Tucker business had got to him after all.

  At the far end the berths were narrower and the private yachts in them clanked at their moorings in some tranquillity, with only the odd crewman pottering about the deck or slung alongside in a cradle painting and scraping. Sting Ray V, Puerto Rico, was twice the size of her neighbours. Her great creamy bow knifed into the hazy sky. Under a canopy on the deck high above us, I could see men in white moving about.

  ‘Sting, I want you to meet a very good friend of ours, Gus Cotton from England. Gus is over here for the British government in a top-secret mission. Leastways he hasn’t told me yet.’

  ‘Then he’s got more sense than most of them pointyheads down in Washington DC.’

  Ray Rawston looked me up and down with eyes of the most brilliant blue, the blue of a hot summer sky, yet not at all piercing, in fact they seemed somehow opaque, as if they were a new typ
e of miniature sunglasses to protect his real eyes from the world’s glare. Like the other men standing or sitting under the canopy, playing backgammon or fixing drinks, he was dressed in white from yachting cap down to deck shoes. He was not as much tanned as yellowish and lightly pockmarked. He seemed intensely alert, and his smile was brief as though to let it go too far might cause him to miss a trick.

  ‘Geez Sting, I heard your boat was something, but this beats all.’

  ‘Won it in a poker game, no, matter of fact, it used to be Edgar Schulz’s. When Edgar went belly up, the bank was looking for a quick sale so I took it off their hands for three point two. Had it valued the other day at seven and a half, so I reckon I’m saving money instead of you know the old thing –’

  ‘Tearing up hundred dollar bills in the shower?’

  ‘Right. You’ll have a daiquiri, Mrs Wilmot?’

  ‘Do you have a Manhattan? Isn’t that the way to celebrate coming into New York on a morning like this?’

  ‘It surely is. You’re so right.’

  One of the young men in white ducks sorted out the drinks and we settled ourselves round the long table with its gleaming blonde and chestnut veneer and looked down over the pier sheds to the towers shimmering along the riverside.

  ‘Gonna be hot today. That mist’ll clear soon. You’ll have a Manhattan too, Gus. As the lady says, this is the way to say hi to this city.’

  The drink dispersed a cool calm through my system and I found myself nestling back in the cushions with a feeling of detachment, as though I wasn’t really there at all.

  ‘It was when we were in there for the contract for the South-West highway, you know, the El Paso thing, and there was Muller and a couple of the other big guys in there, and our point man was George P. O’Donnell. You remember Georgie, he was a pallbearer at Joe’s funeral, well he was the man we had to have because he had access to the two or three congressmen who mattered on the Transportation Committee but he wasn’t any too reliable and he would come in with a sly expression on his face saying I don’t know Ray but Consolidated Texas Highways are pitching a pretty good game, which means how about another hundred thousand on my consultancy fee and he was really pissing us around. Gus, you must be well acquainted with fellows like that in government work, guys who just won’t stay bought and think the Good Lord brought you into this world to keep filling up their pail, isn’t that right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said vaguely, the second Manhattan just beginning to keep the passages cool.

  He paused to take a flicker at his daiquiri and Jane rose from the depths of her white upholstered deck chair in that abrupt gawky way of hers and said:

  ‘Would you excuse me, I think I’ll just take a walk along the deck, I didn’t realise how homesick I was for old New York.’

  ‘Go right ahead, Jane, great to have you aboard,’ Rawston said before carrying on:

  ‘So I said to our guys, man does not live by bread alone, it’s time to bring on Billy. You remember Billy McVea, face like a choirboy, personal habits of a sewer rat. We sent Billy into the washroom on the executive floor, he had accreditation being a Senate page, and he had Georgie on his knees begging for it before the end of the lunch break. We had no trouble after that, didn’t even need a camera. Poor Billy, you heard about that?’

  ‘Yup, it was suicide was it, because I heard –’

  ‘Sure it was. The guy had a load of debts and a cocaine habit that you or I would have had trouble financing.’

  The blue eyes looked more opaque than ever.

  ‘He was a friend of that friend of yours, Lonzo something or other, the one who was killed in that air crash with the other guys.’

  ‘Was he? I didn’t know that.’

  Dodo Wilmot shifted fractionally in his chair as though he had just discovered something digging into him.

  ‘You didn’t know he was that way? Lonzo?’

  ‘No, I did not.’

  ‘Oh yes, there was a club they all hung out in, the Chameleon.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘That was a bad business, that crash, for you, I mean.’

  ‘Well, of course, it was a very great personal sadness. They were all good friends of mine, but businesswise it didn’t make a dime’s worth of difference, because they were all corporately committed before the trip.’

  ‘Really? I heard they came over to decide whether to commit for the second tranche.’

  ‘That was a technicality,’ Dodo returned a touch coldly. ‘Matter of fact, there were a couple of penalty clauses in there that would have kicked in if they’d decided to pull out. Anyway, some of the Reagan people wanted a piece so I had plenty of other options.’

  ‘So it’s a done deal?’

  ‘Just tying up the loose ends as of now, Sting.’

  ‘Tying up the loose ends,’ Rawston echoed in a tone of gentle wonder. ‘I heard there was some politics in there, export licences, things like that. You know anything about that, Gus? Country still belongs to you, don’t it?’

  ‘Well, it’s part of the Commonwealth, but it’s independent now. I don’t know if you need an export licence for emeralds.’

  ‘Emeralds,’ Rawston repeated, gazing up at the canopy flapping in the breeze. ‘A beautiful stone. But it’s a funny thing, Dodo, I never heard of any emeralds worth shit coming out of that part of the world. You must have found one hell of a mother lode for all those important investors to fly down there.’

  Wilmot chuckled, a heavy, satisfied chuckle as if he himself had just cracked a joke which had surprised him by its excellence.

  ‘It didn’t actually state emeralds on the prospectus. Precious stones and other minerals is what it says.’

  ‘Other minerals. I bet those folks over by the East River would like to take a peek at those other minerals.’

  ‘We took legal opinion, Sting. You tell me where it says sanctions cover the kind of business we had in mind.’

  As Dodo was speaking, the engines started up and the boat glided away from the pier and began a shallow arc across the Hudson easing over toward the Jersey shore where a faint mist still hung over the sandy cliffs. In a couple of minutes we were far enough off for the whole steepling throng of the Midtown skyscrapers to stand out clear and breath-taking against the sky.

  With a third Manhattan on its way down me I found it hard to concentrate on anything but the view sliding past under the dappling canopy.

  ‘. . . there was a certain little lady who would not have liked it if she’d known.’

  ‘She must have been pretty goddamn dumb if she couldn’t work it out. What the hell she think those boxes were full of?’

  ‘Rock samples, Sting. Rock samples going down to Jo’burg for analysis.’

  ‘You lost a coupla crates in the crash, I heard.’

  ‘You hear a lot, Sting. Yeah, there were a couple burst open.’

  ‘And she didn’t dig even then?’

  ‘Well, you were there, Gus. Helen ever say anything about those boxes?’

  ‘Not to me. She was very upset about the crash, of course.’

  ‘As we all were, Gus, as we all were.’

  ‘But the girl, the blonde, she was a chemist wasn’t she?’

  ‘How’d you know that?’

  ‘You told me, five minutes ago.’

  ‘I knew your Manhattans were strong, but I didn’t know they were that strong. Yeah, she was a chemist all right and a little bit more than a chemist if you get me. A great piece of ass, but out of this world.’

  ‘Well, they do say blondes have more fun.’ Rawston seemed not much interested in this side of things. ‘But wouldn’t a chemist recognise raw beryllium when she saw it?’

  ‘Oh now there you’ve spoilt our little secret,’ said Dodo in a mock-sad baby voice.

  ‘Which route you send it through, Beira and up the Gulf?’

  ‘Sting, you are too persistent, you don’t leave a fellow no privacy.’

  ‘Big new reactor project starting up in Iraq, th
ey tell me.’

  ‘Let’s talk about emeralds, I don’t know a thing about the other stuff.’

  So at last it trickled through to me, as it must have trickled through to Helen after the boxes burst open on the hillside and she saw the powdered beryllium, not the rock samples she had been told they contained. Perhaps she had more or less known before but had not liked to admit it even to herself.

  ‘You need to get in quick there, Dodo. They tell me some other stuff’s coming along, half the price, no supply problems, alloys better too.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll be in and out quicker than a rattler up your pants.’

  As they were laughing, a man in white ducks came past and peered in under the canopy. He was carrying my big blue case. The sight of it sent a throb of affection and panic coursing through my fuddled nervous system.

  ‘Where you want this one, Mr Rawston?’

  ‘You put it in Marlin, Danny, – no, Crawfish.’

  ‘No,’ I said trying to suppress the hysteria in my voice, ‘I’m sorry but I really have to get to my hotel because I have to –’

  ‘You won’t come cruising with us? That’s terrible. OK, then you just take a raincheck and we’ll do this again, Gus. I know there’s a lot we have to talk about, both of us working for the government an’ all. I’ll call you, and that’s a promise. We’ll let you off at 42nd Street. It’s been a pleasure to have you aboard.’

  ‘I’m so happy I could bring you folks together. A trip to the States wouldn’t be complete without meeting with the one and only Sting Ray Rawston.’

  ‘Geez, Dodo, you’ll make me blush,’ said the one and only, without the faintest hint of embarrassment, grabbing a black microphone on a flexible metal stalk above his head and snapping into it like a man talking to a cabdriver. ‘Luca, will you drop our guest off at 42nd Street?’