The Tropical Issue

by Dorothy Dunnett

  I said, ‘Could he make it?’

  ‘It’s full of banks and ridges,’ Johnson said. ‘If he keeps clear of the mud.’

  Perhaps Clive could keep clear of the black, boiling mud being sucked up and thrown by the squalls. Perhaps he could dodge the eddying steam. Perhaps he could avoid the scalding pools, and the lakes fountaining liquid at an average heat of 196 °F.

  But Old Joseph couldn’t.

  Amy said sharply, ‘Rita! Where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ said Johnson. A megaphone blared, followed by a sparkle of warning rifle fire all round the crater.

  Inside the bowl of the caldera the tall man stopped, half hidden in steam, and looked round. The megaphone blared again.

  Surrender. Or we shoot.

  For a moment, it looked as if Clive would ignore it. He looked ahead, to the dark slopes beyond the steam. To get out of rifle range he would have to run. And between him and the slopes lay the deep pools, with the steam blowing all ways in the gale.

  He was no hero, Clive. He half put his hands up and turning, began crossing the crater to where the nearest line of police was.

  He had left his father behind.

  Johnson swore.

  In the distance the tall man dropped his loud-hailer and turning towards us, seemed to be signalling something. Johnson banged once, abruptly, on the side of the car with his fist. He said, ‘Watch her, Amy,’ and made his way, painfully, to meet the other man.

  I stood on the edge. I said to Amy, ‘You know the caldera. Tell me what’s safe.’

  She said, ‘You’ll kill yourself as well as these two. Is it worth it?’

  I said, ‘I don’t care about Clive. I don’t think the old man knew a thing about this till tonight. I don’t think he’s any more to blame than I am.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Amy said. ‘But he chose to save Clive.’

  ‘Then I choose to save him,’ I said. ‘Porter. He’s your grandfather. Are you coming?’

  ‘There?’ said Porter. ‘For that crazy old coot?’

  I thought he would come, all the same, when I stepped off, but he didn’t.

  I didn’t bother Amy any more for instructions, because I couldn’t have followed them anyway, now I thought of it. Peering from one side to the other, Old Joseph seemed to have lost his grasp of where he was, or what dangers he ought to be looking for. I guessed he had got himself scalded already.

  Clive had nearly got to the edge. The police had got their criminal. If Joe’s grandson wasn’t going to rescue him, I doubted if anyone else was.

  I walked to the edge of the volcano, and set out.

  The car lights lit up the near side of the crater. It shelved down in sharp crumbling ridges and hillocks, and sometimes there were tracks, with the crystals of sulphur sparkling like hard yellow frost underfoot.

  After a bit, I found one of these. Then the slope gave way beneath me, and began to crumble like shale, and steam from an unseen pool lashed my leg like a whip through the cotton, warning me to jump aside.

  It was all like that for a bit, or worse. When I was far in, and thought I was safe for a second I stood, my heart thumping, my breath whining, and looked across the crater.

  Old Joseph had paused as well, against a billowing black and white backdrop, like the spray of a snow-plough on peatland. Except that this peat and this snow were scalding. Were hot enough to boil the flesh from your bones, if you let it.

  Old Joseph turned my way a little, and I shouted.

  The megaphone suddenly took up the call. I realised that it was directing Old Joe’s attention to me. And that it was telling him, very slowly and clearly, how to get out of the caldera.

  Also, that all the cars had now been driven up, and their lights joined in a circle of beams that lit up the steam, and me, and Joe’s short, distant figure. The megaphone spoke, clearly, in Johnson’s voice.

  ‘Rita. Stay where you are. We’ll get him out this way.’

  With a younger man, I expect they would. A few hours ago, even Old Joseph himself would have listened, scowling, to such instructions and would have carried them out well and defiantly.

  Tonight was different. Tonight, his whole view of his family had been turned upside down. Tonight he had just seen his son giving himself up to the police. Tonight he was old, and very tired, and probably already in pain. The megaphone boomed, and he tried to follow it, but he didn’t succeed.

  I didn’t know if I could follow it, if I were standing where he was, but I could try.

  I started moving again.

  I had got halfway towards him by the time the bigger pools were coming close, and I had to find them and watch every flurry. The steam itself helped, white as milk in a brook, showing the swirls and the currents.

  There was no way to guess how the spray would fall. The splashes pricked and bit like the sand-flies that annoyed you at Marigot, as you ate your candlelit dinner on Dolly’s satiny deck.

  But the sand-flies didn’t leave blisters, or the breeze from the frangipani thrust your nose and throat full of dry sulphur, so strong and so choking that breathing was like inhaling a pepper-pot.

  I caught a bad gush just after that: a ladleful of bubbling grey custard that draped my shoulder and sank into the skin, even though I tore the thin cotton straight down from the neck.

  The booming of the megaphone was an enemy as well as an anxiety. I needed my ears, to hear the warning cluck of the mud, and the change in tone of the wind. I saw Joseph had stopped, and was neither looking about him, nor paying attention to what he was being told.

  The megaphone noticed it too. After a pause, it addressed me instead.

  This time, it didn’t try to tell me to stand still, or how to get to Joe, or how to take myself back to the rim. It just said, in a new voice; a voice I didn’t know:

  Rita. There is a ridge on your right, with a hollow behind it. Get there quickly.

  To my right.

  The megaphone said, Towards me.

  I turned towards the sound, and I jumped, and I rolled to the bottom of a hot, gritty dip that was not full of boiling liquid, so that it was the correct right.

  As I jumped, I saw Old Joe still standing. I think I yelled at him to lie down, but of course a voice wouldn’t carry, and in any case it might have been the wrong thing, otherwise they would have told him.

  They hadn’t told him to do anything.

  It wasn’t that they didn’t care. I had heard them trying.

  It must be that there wasn’t anything that would help.

  Which was right, of course.

  A second later the squall hit that they’d had warning of, and churned round the big pool of boiling grey mud like a butter paddle, and lifted it into the air.

  I saw it come. I saw it arch like a tongue over the spot where Old Joseph was standing, the friend of Louis B. Mayer, the confidant of the Warner Brothers, and begin to fall.

  I put my head in my arms and heard it spattering, too, on the other side of the ridge where I’d been standing.

  It didn’t hit me.

  After a while, the megaphone started again.

  The new voice said, ‘Rita? Stand up if you can.’

  I stood up, and turned to where Joe Curtis had been standing, and there was nothing there.

  After a bit, I turned the other way, and faced the necklace of car lights round the rim.

  The voice said, ‘He’s gone, Rita. Now we want you out fast. Listen, do what I tell you, and hurry. Now. There’s a hot pool three steps my way. Take three steps instead straight ahead. Now four steps away from me. Right? Now another four towards me and stop. Wait. Right.’

  I waited.

  To me. Away from me.

  Right. And left.

  Someone who knew the crater, and had a map, and binoculars, and a lot of briefing about Rita Geddes.

  I didn’t wait long, and then the megaphone produced another burst of directions, another pause, and even at one point some questions which I answered
by waving my arms.

  He made one mistake, and I got splashed, but only a little. By the end, I was mostly out of the steam and it was just a case of climbing uphill.

  It was a nuisance, climbing the soft grit, and I stumbled a lot, and wasn’t helped very much by the glare of the lights just above me. When there was no more use for it the megaphone stopped, and instead the speaker’s ordinary voice, just above me, said, ‘That’s a tough slope. You’re in all the rubble. It’s better this way. Over to me.’

  He came down and helped me the last yard or two, his binoculars banging my shoulder, but I didn’t actually see who he was, because when I got to the top, I appeared to pass out.

  I woke as they carried me into Amy’s house.

  I was no longer in my borrowed pants and ripped top, but in a man’s shirt and what seemed to be someone’s loose overalls.

  I had, what’s more, been in the hands of a party who knew his medical stuff. I was covered in ointment and bandages.

  Under them, my shoulder felt pretty awful, and my skin seemed to have caught fire all over, including my face. My lips wouldn’t work. The sulphur I’d been inhaling seemed to have stuffed my head to twice its normal size and my lids felt thick and swollen.

  I had an impression of passing a police van already parked in the yard, and seeing lights in the store room where the cocaine was, and where the shootings had happened.

  I also had an impression of Porter’s voice in a squabble, but I couldn’t make out what about.

  Then Raymond laid me down on the sitting-room sofa, and Amy brought in a thing like a vet’s bag which probably was a vet’s bag, and prepared to check over the results of the journey.

  When I opened my eyes, she seemed to be pleased, and so did Raymond and Johnson, who stopped murmuring together and came over and looked at me.

  Johnson’s glasses were cordial. He said, ‘You look like a mock-up for an onion, but you’re going to be fine. Join the club. Any club you want to join would be proud to have you.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ said Raymond. ‘They clapped as you climbed out of the crater. The whole island would be agog, poor sods, if they hadn’t to deal with this bloody visitation.

  ‘We’ve had a ham message through three relays from Maggie, stuck all night at the airport. She and Ferdy weathered it all out together.

  ‘They’re O.K. Total frenzy of excitement and frustration because she missed everything. Other garbled greetings to you. Wants to start up a meaningful Lesbian relationship, if I got the French patois right.’

  He wasn’t tight. It was just the kind of relief Ferdy gets after his P.M.T. sessions.

  I was terribly glad about Ferdy, and quite glad about Maggie, but not much about anything else. Johnson said, ‘Amy, what about brandy?’

  ‘There it is,’ Amy said. ‘What there is of it. I’m going to take this lady off to bed.’

  ‘But a drink first,’ Johnson said.

  I looked up.

  He said, ‘A lot has happened. We should talk about it.’

  Amy said, ‘Can’t it wait? What’s that effing banging? Where’s Lenny?’

  On cue, the sitting-room door opened, and Lenny’s head came in.

  He smiled at me, and I smiled back, painfully. He said, ‘Mrs Faflick . . . Mrs Sheridan’s maid.’

  He didn’t get any further, because he was pushed aside by the person he was talking about. Dodo strode in.

  We all looked at her, and I heard Porter draw in his breath.

  She looked the same as she had when she had come to report that Natalie had vanished. She looked unslept and rather cross and rather worried and extremely surprised as she looked at the sofa and saw me.

  She said, ‘My good Lord, you bin scalded, girl?’

  The hostile stare moved to Amy. ‘You-all lock your guests up when you go out? But for that Porter I might still be with those animals.’

  Johnson said, ‘You didn’t go out, Miss Dora?’

  Dora. I never knew that was her name.

  She stared at him. ‘In that storm?’ she said.

  Of all the events of the night, she had heard nothing.

  I wondered how they were going to tell her. I saw Porter wondering the same thing, and realised suddenly what was going to happen.

  It happened. Porter said, ‘You missed something, Miss Dora. You missed the shooting-match along near the yard there. You missed seeing Johnson shoot and kill Mrs Sheridan.’

  ‘Miz Sheridan?’ Dodo said.

  ‘Yes?’ said a charming, effectively pitched voice from the doorway behind her.

  Dodo moved to one side.

  Natalie stood on the threshold. Her golden hair was a little ruffled, and the dress she wore was not her own but one I guessed Dodo had found in Amy’s room.

  But the well-photographed face was the same, and the smile, and the large violet eyes sweeping the room, and finally dwelling on me.

  ‘Oh, dear. Poor girl,’ she said. ‘Has she pulled the kettle over?’

  Johnson was watching Porter, and so was I.

  Natalie was alive.

  We saw Porter work out what that meant, the thoughts crossing his handsome face one by one.

  The woman Johnson had shot, the woman whom Clive Curtis had tried to make us believe was his hostage, had not been Natalie Sheridan. It had been someone made up to look like her.

  Someone wearing a make-up so perfect that we had all been taken in. All except Grampa Joe, the oldest hand in the trade, who had seen the face from outside and recognised it.

  And who, from that, had known at once that the cockerel mask must hide Clive.

  You could see Porter’s thoughts reach that point and then boggle.

  And you could see him begin to realise, slowly and finally, who the woman with Clive and Roger van Diemen had been.

  Porter turned to Johnson. He said, ‘You shot my mother.’

  He began talking in short, howling breaths. ‘You turned your gun on my mother. But for you and your ridiculous tart, she would be alive. My uncle would have gone on with his career. My grandfather would have kept the Paramount Princess, and he would never have known. He’d never have gone to that damned volcano. He’d never have died that disgusting death . . .’

  His face was all spoiled with amazement and fury and venom. There was no sorrow in it.

  He said, ‘A famous old man. Everyone knew him. Everyone had heard of him. And now, because of your Mickey Mouse conscience, Joseph Curtis can’t even be buried. I watched my grandfather boil to death in that cauldron tonight.’

  ‘So you did,’ Johnson said. I have never heard such chilly dislike in anyone’s voice.

  ‘So you did, you squalid, unmentionable brat. You stood still and watched him without lifting a finger. He would be alive now, and so would your mother, if you had kept your mouth shut when you were told to.’

  Porter started to speak. Johnson’s voice splintered his words like an ice-pick.

  ‘And if you found your grandfather’s end horrifying, spare a thought, won’t you, for Rita? She had to stand inside the crater, inside the cauldron, inside that hellish place.

  ‘She had to stand there and watch, as you did, your grandfather boil to death, as you so graphically put it.

  ‘Except that he wasn’t Rita’s grandfather. He was her father.’

  Chapter 22

  ‘Rita’s father? Joe Curtis?’ Natalie said.

  Her amazement was absolutely genuine.

  She stared at me, seeing me, and then not seeing me, as the rest of what we had been saying took hold in her mind.

  Then the amazement faded, and in its place came the look I now knew well. The look of the clever woman. The political observer. The syndicated journalist.

  Natalie sat down gracefully, as was her habit. She crossed her ankles and, smoothing the terrible dress she had on, folded her hands equally gracefully in her lap. Then she looked at us.

  ‘Put me in the picture,’ she said.

  Johnson left Raymond to tell her. W
hile he did, Amy found a half-bottle of brandy, which she handed to Johnson before seating herself, and Johnson gave me half of it immediately, in a very large tumbler. Then he took a chair at my side, rather carefully.

  I drank quite a lot of it quite quickly, and didn’t listen too hard to what Raymond was saying. I hadn’t got used, yet, to what I’d lost. What I’d never had, anyway.

  I suppose Raymond knew it. He gave only the barest bones of the story, beginning with the boarding of Dolly and the lining of her bilges with dope, which the Customs had discovered in Marigot.

  I didn’t know they had discovered it. I thought Amy had. But he went quickly on, and ended with Clive and Sharon finding a temporary home for the dope in Amy’s place, thinking her in Castries, or safely indoors in the storm.

  Halfway through, I realised that Natalie didn’t know yet that Roger van Diemen was dead. I wondered what she would say, and what capital Porter would make of it all.

  But Raymond had thought of that. He didn’t go back to Natalie’s affair with van Diemen. He left out Coombe’s altogether, and just said that there had been another man helping Clive, and that he had been shot dead.

  Later, no doubt, someone would break the news to her. She would probably be quite relieved. And then, when she thought of the publicity, she wouldn’t.

  All through, I could see Porter walking about, and picking up things, and putting them down with a thud, even though Natalie wasn’t looking at him. The police had been quite satisfied that Porter and his grandfather didn’t know of the smuggling. Raymond had told Natalie all that as well.

  She wouldn’t forget, either. You could see the computer brain, filing and docketing. She hadn’t forgotten what Johnson had last said, either.

  She looked with sympathy at me, and said helpfully, ‘And Rita was part of the family? How does she come into it?’

  ‘She doesn’t,’ said Porter. He walked past Dodo and Lenny and Raymond, and found a dog dish at his feet and flip-kicked it out of his way. It broke neatly, and he watched it with satisfaction.

  Then he looked at me and flashed his perfect, spaced teeth.