“How much could it damage him?”
“Badly. Both him and the others involved. You Americans have taken quite a fancy to the phrase ‘power structure.’ Ours here is small, but very strong. One generally knows who might be doing what, and how well they are managing it. I shall merely trap the likely ones into revealing Squires’s plan and activities. It shouldn’t be at all difficult.” He smiled, made a small chopping gesture with a small hand and said, “Then we shall make quite certain everything they touch from now on shall turn out very badly indeed. Squires and friends accepted that risk. And lost. I am grateful to you for a most interesting talk.”
“Could I ask a favor, Sir Willis?”
“Of course!”
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I would like to know Squires’s movements last Friday, Saturday and Sunday—where he went and who might have been with him.”
“No trouble at all, my dear fellow. And I should like to know as well. Ring me here at—this same hour tomorrow and I shall have it for you. I have been wondering, and perhaps it is none of my affair, if the authorities might conduct a—a more productive investigation were they to be told of the money carried aboard?”
“If it’s possible, Sir Willis, I’d like that kept quiet. If—it was taken, and there was a lot of publicity about it, it might drop out of sight for a long time. And it seems to me it is getting a lot of publicity right now. I had a television team with a movie camera and lights trap me just outside the Harbour Club this morning. From a Miami station. They wanted a statement. It would seem to me that—a public mention of the money would compound the confusion. And anybody with any useful information might get lost in the crowd of crazies who would come forward. I’d like to go at this quietly. If, in the future, I think a lot of new attention would help, then I can bring it up. Sometimes—special information can be a good lever.”
“And if whatever happened had nothing to do with the money?”
“I have to keep remembering it might have been that way. It’s hard to think clearly when—you’re emotionally involved.”
Sir Willis appeared to look more attentively at Sam Boylston. “Forgive me, Boylston, but I’ve rarely been exposed to Americans who make that distinction. Makes doing business with them a bit of a bother at times. Judgments based on emotions are quite valid, of course, if one happens to know what he is doing and why.” There was, Sam felt, a considerable power in this pink and white doll-man, a knowledge of the flaws in others and himself, a readiness to take any kind of advantage so long as it did not offend his own image of himself as an ethical man.
This immaculate little old man was going to quietly dismantle all the works and dreams of Squires and friends, burn the rubble and sow their lands with salt. And some phases of this program would enrich Sir Willis in one way or another. In a sudden, expanded comprehension of self, Sam Boylston realized he had made exactly this same decision himself, had made it about big Tom Dorra and old Judge Billy Alwerd. Though their role had been peripheral, their actions had been illegal enough to give Sam his rationalization. There had been an icy little focus of satisfaction and anticipation in the back of his mind whenever he had thought of them since finding out about the money loaned to Bix Kayd. When he had time to devote to them, he would find out their every area of income and investment, and see to it that small things began to go wrong. A man in a boat who has to devote all his time to caulking the seams, bailing, working the pump, has no time for careful navigation, no time to look for the reefs. If Dorra and Alwerd were to respond with total speed and energy and calm intelligence to every challenge, he could do them no real harm. But those two were hunch players, drifting at half efficiency through a haze of myth, superstition and self-approval. Shrewder than most, perhaps, but capable of fatal mistakes in judgment if too many things started to go wrong at the same time. And, when they began foundering, he could reach into the chaos and pluck out a few useful things at sacrifice prices.
As his intent became more apparent to himself, Sam saw the similarity between himself and this scrubbed old man with the eyes as cold as Burmese sapphire. And he felt a curious contempt for Sir Willis and for himself.
As Sam left, amid the expressions of mutual gratitude, Sir Willis said, “Perhaps one day we might talk about the special advantages of setting up business interests here in the Bahamas. I suspect, dear boy, we might find some unexpected mutual benefits—of the sort you chaps from your province of Texas seem able to appreciate.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” Sam said, but knew from a flicker in cool blue depths he had not quite carried it off. The original feeling of affinity had faded away.
He telephoned Sir Willis at the bank on Friday morning at ten. Sir Willis said, “Bear with me, Boylston, if I seem a bit—indirect. Our friend was expecting a radio message from your fellow countryman Saturday morning. It did not come. Saturday afternoon he went to his vacation spot from his home base by float plane, and was left off there, along with a young chap who is in the way of being a personal aide and secret’ry. On Sunday evening our friend used his marine radio there at his place to ask the float plane to come by Monday morning and take him off. He went back to his home base, leaving the secret’ry chap alone there, should anyone come visiting, I expect. By now he has returned also, but I do not know precisely when. As to the friends of our friend, I had a chat with the one I thought most likely last evening. It became rather an ugly conversation, but it was all confirmed. There were two of them, as I suspected, beside our friend. I can guarantee silence on the part of the one I talked with. Much better if our friend has no inkling that I know of the nasty bit of work he hoped to arrange. Is all this sufficient for you?”
“I’m grateful to you, Sir Willis.”
“May I offer my hope that things will turn out far better than—you have reason to expect at the moment. Do let me know if I can be of any help. Matters which you might find difficult I could probably arrange quite easily. We are quite a small community, actually. And it would have been a great pity had anyone of your countryman’s special—talents acquired such substantial land interests here, particularly in such a manner. It would have been troublesome to oust him, as we most certainly would have, sooner or later.”
Sam Boylston’s room phone rang at ten o’clock Friday evening as he was pacing restlessly, uncertain as to what he should do next.
If it had been—as he was quite certain Sir Willis would term it—foul play, it had to depend on word of the money leaking out. The leak could have come from careless talk in Texas, in Nassau, in Freeport, possibly even in Miami. With a promise of a share of that much money, some very savage talent could be recruited along the lower coast of Florida. Small cruisers came over at will, and several men masquerading as sports fishermen could monitor the calls from the Muñeca and trace her and intercept her at the proper time and place.
But the timing of it seemed almost too close. The Muñeca had left Nassau Friday morning. Kayd had planned to meet Squires on Saturday. But he had not made his routine radio contact on Saturday morning.
Kayd’s shrewdness had to be taken into account. He would make certain that information about the fortune aboard didn’t leak out. He would certainly keep it from his family. And he would not take aboard any hired captain who had not been checked out very carefully.
What if the Muñeca had arrived at Musket Cay earlier, say by Friday evening? They were headed that way. The cruiser could make it comfortably. Just because Squires had arrived Saturday afternoon, it did not mean he had not arranged for a little reception party to arrive there, possibly by private boat, a day or more earlier. Or perhaps somebody in Squires’s confidence had arranged it without Squires’s knowledge. It seemed to fit the timing. Perhaps the logical course was to go to Freeport first, then back to Musket Cay.
His mind would travel in logical patterns and rhythms, but at intervals he could not anticipate, he would suddenly realize that every conjecture was based on the assumption all aboard had
been slain and the bodies stowed aboard to sink with the boats into the great black depths of the Tongue of the Ocean. Logically it was an acceptable assumption. Emotionally he could not believe such a thing could have happened to Leila. She was too vibrant, too spirited, too totally alive to be wasted so mercilessly, so prematurely. In those moments remorse and grief and rage combined into an emotion as strong as a physical illness, darkening his vision, clogging his throat, giving him ripples of nausea which made cold sweat on his body and made his legs feel too weak to support him.
He was recovering from one of those moments when the phone rang and he heard Jonathan’s excited and unsteady voice say, “Sam? Are you there, Sam? They’re bringing Staniker in.”
“In where? Who is?”
“Some people on a boat. They found him somewhere, on some island, and they’ve asked for an ambulance to meet them.”
He reached the Prince George Wharf area in time. He found Jonathan in the crowd. A cruiser was angling in, spotlight trained on the dock area. A man was trotting, waving them along to a place inside the main wharves where the dock levels were suitable for small boats. The big cruise ships with their festival lights dwarfed the Chris-Craft. The ambulance was waiting. The cruiser edged in. Lines were heaved to the men on the dock. As the cruiser was moored, there was a silent lightning of flash bulbs and strobe lights, and the doctor and the ambulance attendants stepped aboard, carrying the stretcher.
Ten
BY FIRST LIGHT on Sunday, in the sea mist, on the incoming tide, Corpo was wading the flats east of his island, hunting scallops, humming tunelessly, speaking greetings to each one as he shoved it into the gunnysack fastened to his belt. He had guessed it would be time for them to be in, and knew he had to get out there before the tide deepened it too much.
And it pleased him to have the silence and privacy of the mist and the dead calm. They couldn’t see him from the mainland shore, from all their candy-colored houses. No doll-wives shading their empty little eyes to stare out at old Corpo as if he was a bug who’d moved too close.
“Not a damned house back then,” he said, as if speaking to someone a dozen feet away. “Who was here first? I ask you that, man to man. Who was here first? Sergeant Corpo, that’s who.”
Sooner or later they’d work themselves up and get up some kind of damned petition. Like before. Potentially dangerous. Squatting on public lands. Health hazard. Known to be violent. Get one of their bloody writs, send the sheriff boat around, make a lot of trouble for nothing. Hell, the nearest part of the island to the mainland shore was a good half mile, and with a private channel five feet deep between the island and the shore anyhow.
Would mean losing the beard again, and all the itching when it was growing back in. Sit there in court in a white shirt with all the candy people staring at him, wishing they could snap their fingers and he’d disappear. The Lieutenant would have to handle it again, like the other times. It was hard to follow what he said, and some of it didn’t seem the way Corpo remembered it, but it was good to listen to.
“If it please the court, I would like permission to reconstruct the circumstances which brought Sergeant Walter Corpo to this area. He was a platoon leader in my company in 1944, an infantry combat veteran by then, a young man who had enlisted in December of 1941 after one year and a few months of college. I led a patrol of fifteen men into the small village of Selestat near the Rhine. We were ambushed. Sergeant Corpo took cover by a fountain in the square and gave us covering fire to enable us to withdraw, with little hope of being able to retreat in turn. He was not ordered to cover the retreat. It was his instinctive reaction. We got out with but three casualties and came back with the entire company. Sergeant Corpo was believed dead. It was obvious he had kept firing after being hit several times, gravely.
“A shard of metal, possibly a mortar fragment, had penetrated his skull. A corpsman detected a pulse and had him removed to an aid station, though believing he would soon die. From there he was taken back to a station hospital and then to a general hospital, both installations thinking his chance of survival remote. I believed he had died. I put him in for a posthumous decoration, and he was awarded the Silver Star. The war ended. I returned to law school. After graduation I entered the practice of law here in the city of Broward Beach. In 1948 the Veterans’ Administration got in touch with me and asked me if I would go over to Bay Pines Veterans Hospital near St. Petersburg on a matter regarding Sergeant Walter Corpo. He had asked for me.
“I discussed the case with his doctors. He was in excellent physical health. The brain injury, however, had left him with certain disabilities. Complicated instruction confused him. His attention span was short. He would say exactly what he meant in every circumstance, a trait our culture does not find palatable. They did not consider him dangerous. But they had noticed an increasing unrest in him, an increasing irritability at being forced to live in such close quarters with so many other men. They doubted he could earn a living. But he was eligible to receive a total disability pension. He had no relatives close enough to take any interest in him. Could I be of any help?
“He knew me. He was glad to see me. He was absolutely certain I could get him out of that place. He had saved my life twice. I brought him back here with me. He lived in my home. I had an outboard boat and motor. He had a taste for being alone. He began to spend longer and longer periods on the water. After he was gone for three days I demanded an explanation. He took me to that small mangrove island in the bay, approximately ten acres in area, nameless at that time and now known as Sergeant’s Island. He had, with what must have been incredible effort, hewed a curving channel back through the mangrove to a small hammock of palmetto and cabbage palm, and he had used the outboard motor to wash the channel deep enough to use. He had constructed a crude shelter out of driftwood, tarpaper, tin cans hammered flat, and some battered windows scavenged from the city dump. He said it was what he liked and what he wanted, and he wouldn’t be in anyone’s way.
“I will now present for the consideration of the court, two documents. The first is from the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund giving Sergeant Corpo permission to reside upon that state-owned land until such time as title passes into other hands. The second is also dated in November of 1949 and is signed by the Chairman of the County Commission, and grants Sergeant Corpo all the necessary zoning exceptions applicable.
“Once a month Sergeant Corpo comes to the mainland, picks up his disability check at my home, cashes it at my bank, buys provisions and returns to Sergeant’s Island. Over the years he has considerably improved his cottage. Should he not appear for his check, I would go there at once to see what happened to him. He is in splendid physical condition. He wants merely to be left alone.
“There has been talk of violence. There was one such incident. Seven years ago a pack of teen-age boys came to the erroneous conclusion that Sergeant Corpo was a drunk, and that the cottage might well contain a large supply of whisky. There were five of them. They decided to raid the island. They thought Sergeant Corpo some sort of harmless nut. I could have told them that Sergeant Corpo grew up in the swamplands of Georgia, that when he was twelve and thirteen he would go into those swamps hunting and be gone a week without anyone worrying about his safety. I could have told them how silent and deadly the Sergeant was on night patrol duty.
“They raided him on a Saturday night. He heard them coming. He turned his lanterns out. He went outside, circled them, found their boat and cast it adrift. Then, in the night, he took them one at a time, lashed them to the mangroves with pieces of rope, spacing them far enough apart so they could communicate only by shouting to each other. Then he went back to his cottage and cleaned up all the mess and litter and breakage they had caused. He did a good job. Then he came over here to the city and asked the authorities to come pick up the boys. It was dawn when they gathered them up, cowed and terrified, their faces grotesquely puffed by insect bites, eyes swollen shut. They were of good family, had been in troubl
e prior to the raid, but to the best of my knowledge, have stayed out of trouble ever since.
“I submit that these petitioners who are making a new attempt to dislodge Sergeant Corpo are expressing not any feeling that he is a public nuisance, but rather a social judgment, and wish to penalize anyone who is unwilling or unable to conform to their particular standards of housing, habit, dress and deportment.
“Your honor, I am reminded of the prim lady who lodged a complaint against the owners of property adjacent to hers on the grounds that it was being put to immoral use as a nudist colony. The officers who investigated were confused by her statement of carryings-on right out in plain sight, having noticed the high wall, the large size of the adjoining grounds, and the remote location of the nudist establishment. When asked what she meant by plain sight, she said, ‘Right from my roof with my husband’s binoculars, you can’t hardly miss it.’
“When the only room left in our society for men such as Sergeant Corpo is inside an institution, it will be time for us to re-examine our goals—and our humanity.”
“Hoooheee, how the Lieutenant does go on,” Corpo said. “And how you this fine morning, Mr. Scallop? Excuse me. Pop you into the sack with all your folks. Get your tribe thinned out some before the mist burns off, and the Sunday damn fools come roaring around here in circles, pulling other damn fools on skis, scaring the fish and stirring up the mud.”
He turned and looked back at his island, a vague darkness in the mist, and turned back to his chore, only to find himself staring at a blue hull inches in front of his eyes. It had appeared so suddenly, with so little warning, his first impression was that he was being run down, and gave a hoarse yell and sloshed backward in the thigh-deep water, stumbling, catching his balance.
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