Operation Nassau

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘Even if your father marries the Begum?’ said Johnson. He put down his whisky and began comfortably filling his pipe. ‘That’s quite a lot of loot to get rid of, even if he invests in Government stock. Anyway, who’s complaining? You sold me up the river to Krishtof Bey and look what happened. My underwear is exposed. And we are both sitting targets.’

  ‘Tell the police,’ said Wallace Brady.

  It was good advice. Good, sensible layman’s advice which Johnson was in no position to take. I thought of that row with Edgecombe yesterday, at Great Harbour Cay. If someone’s after you because you’re an agent, then he’s taking his time about it for a very good reason.

  Edgecombe was the sprat. Johnson, if not the whale, was at least the halibut. I watched Wallace Brady, who was sitting sipping his whisky with his pale eyes on Johnson. Johnson said, ‘I’m not going to get mixed up in it, children. Bad for business. You tell them, Brady.’

  ‘Right. I shall.’ Brady got to his feet, kicking a space in Johnson’s dog-eared possessions. He wore, with some distinction, the Bahamian undress dress uniform of casual silk shirt and light trousers.

  ‘But you’ll have to wait until four-thirty tomorrow,’ Johnson said.

  It doesn’t do to underrate Johnson. Of course. No telephones, and fixed-schedule radio-telephone facilities.

  It didn’t do to underrate Wallace Brady either. ‘That’s all right, I’ll borrow the launch first thing in the morning,’ he said. ‘And do it from Great Harbour Cay. Or I could fly to Nassau if necessary.’

  Johnson, peacefully smoking, was still undisturbed. ‘So you could,’ he said. ‘I wish we had the evidence to send with you. But you could take Dr MacRannoch. After all, she’s got to explain why she sat on it for so long.’

  Brady said slowly, ‘I’d forgotten that.’

  So had I. I must stop drinking alcoholic drinks prepared under doubtful conditions.

  Wallace Brady kicked a couple of shirts out of his way and strode across to stand over Johnson. ‘You don’t want the police, do you?’ he said. ‘It would spoil the leisurely high-society image. Dirty little men running over the Begum’s nice holiday island; maybe taking you off to a crowded hotel room in Nassau, or forcing you to stay and give evidence in some stuffy court. Beltanno doesn’t matter. Or Edgecombe.’

  ‘Well, honestly,’ said Johnson, taking the pipe out of his mouth. He looked slightly pained. ‘If Edgecombe’s an agent, then the last thing he wants is the police. We know that already. And if I don’t testify, and Beltanno testifies without evidence, your rushing off to Nassau will do precisely nothing but create an unholy mess, for Edgecombe and Beltanno most of all. Particularly if Edgecombe denies he ever told her he was an agent, as he is extremely likely to do. You see, there’s no solid proof.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Brady. He was pallid with suppressed anger. ‘There’s no solid proof. I didn’t take Beltanno’s arsenic notes, Johnson. What if Krishtof and Trotter didn’t steal them either? What if you emptied your own drawers and scattered your own papers just to save yourself trouble? Where are the notes, Mr Johnson? In your pocket?’

  ‘Good God,’ said Johnson. He rose slowly, pipe in hand, to his feet. Wallace Brady was half a head taller.

  ‘Turn out your pockets,’ said Brady. ‘Or I’ll turn them out for you.’

  Johnson put his pipe down. ‘Look,’ he said. An expanse of exasperated glass turned first on Brady, then on me. ‘A minute ago everyone was urging me to burn the damned things. I’ve just told you. You can’t use them without harming Beltanno.’

  ‘I know. I don’t want to use them. I just want to show you up. Johnson Johnson, for the selfish British bastard you are,’ said Brady. I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make sense, any of it. It didn’t make sense, unless Brady wanted these papers himself. And had looked for them. And had failed to find them.

  I stared at Johnson and Johnson, bemused, stared back at Brady; and Brady, with a grunt of exasperation, lifted his strong golfer’s right hand and lunged.

  I clapped my hands.

  For a moment the instant darkness took them both by surprise. Then I heard the thwack as their frames interlocked.

  Grunts, like whispers, are impossible to identify in the dark; and so is hard breathing. I retreated to the fireplace and listened as the struggle unrolled its course over socks, trousers and papers, yelpingly up to and over a drawer and momentarily into the base of a lamp. There was a crash, but clearly of the wrong calibre. Brady used a short, pithy word and I heard Johnson laugh annoyingly. Then the bumps and wheezing started again.

  They must have been evenly matched. Neither ever got disengaged for long enough to manage a clap. But one of them contrived to get a single hand free.

  They were close to me, on their feet and still pantingly wrestling when the pistol went off. As the light came on I saw it drop from Brady’s right hand, but he wasn’t quite quick enough. Before he could bring his fist up to defend himself, Johnson had hit him.

  It was nicely judged. I wasn’t going to have a broken jawbone to deal with. Wallace Brady merely followed one shoulder down into a pile of old Pringle sweaters and lay there, while Johnson went through his pockets. He got up, his respiration fast but quite even, and observed, ‘He hasn’t got them either. All the same, he made an awful fuss to cover up not going to the police, I thought. Didn’t you?’

  ‘I was too busy dodging,’ I said. There was a fresh bullet hole to the right of the fireplace, just a foot above where my head had just been.

  ‘He just wanted the light to come on,’ said Johnson blandly. I could see his eyes. They were ordinary, with white circles round them. I said, ‘He’s smashed your bifocals?’

  ‘What? No! No,’ said Johnson, and fished out a maroon leather case from his pocket He extracted and put on the lenses. He added, ‘I take my teeth out as well.’ I would have respected him, had I not been well aware that his teeth were his own. It struck me to wonder how in the course of that fight he had found time to case up his glasses. I remembered why I had followed him to his room. I said, ‘Right. I have something to say to you.’

  Johnson knelt and correctly rolled up Wallace Brady’s left eyelid. Nothing was taking place under it but the doll’s-eye movements of the deeply unconscious. Johnson got up, put his pipe in his mouth and wandered over to sit in a chair. He struck a match. ‘You want to know why I told all, after we had agreed that we shouldn’t,’ he said.

  I said, ‘I don’t need to be told. You’re using me as your ready-rigged bait.’

  ‘Bright girl,’ he said without so much as taking his pipe out of his mouth. ‘All right. Now suppose you triumph over hysteria and enable us to move on to a stable host-parasite relationship. What, so far, have we hooked?’

  I looked at the wall over my head and sat down with deliberation. ‘Wallace Brady,’ I said. ‘You know all I know about that. And Krishtof Bey. You will find it extremely hard to believe the latest news there.’

  ‘You know me. I’ll believe anything,’ said Johnson. ‘Tell me all you think I’m fit to be told.’

  But he wasn’t disturbed. At the end of my pungent if expurgated recital, he merely said, ‘Yes. That’s more or less the scene as I heard it.’

  I don’t know how I got on my feet. I said, ‘What the hell do you mean?’

  ‘What you think I mean,’ Johnson said. ‘You’re bugged, your room’s bugged, and there isn’t a move you make around the house or the garden that Spry or myself isn’t watching. You may be bait, but you’re barbed bait. Don’t worry, Doctor. All you have to do is enjoy yourself.’

  I thought of the four-minute kiss. I said, ‘You bloody little cold-bellied stinkpotter.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Johnson, looking hurt. ‘Blowboater or Ragwagoner if you must.’ He got up and pressed the hatch and began lugging Brady’s inert body towards it. I supposed he was going to search Brady’s bedroom as well.

  I stood and watched him. I could go to the police. I could go back to the hospital. I could le
ave.

  I couldn’t do anything and still remain Dr B. Douglas MacRannoch. I was a responsible citizen who had been enlisted by a high-grade professional. On the other hand, if he was painting Krishtof Bey by the pool, how the hell did Johnson expect to hear what happened or didn’t happen all the time in my bedroom? I stopped dead with my hand on the door and said, ‘A tape?’

  Johnson was watching Brady’s non-slip composition soles and heels smoothly recede through the hatch. ‘Rolls Out on Wheels for Easy Clean,’ he observed. He straightened. ‘Yes, a tape. But I edit it,’ he said. ‘In fact, some bits of it I really don’t hear at all. And whatever else I have done or not done to you, Dr B. Douglas MacRannoch, I think I have shortened your shelf life.’

  I slammed the door, but, being the Begum’s door, it closed with a click.

  I couldn’t find the bug. I undressed with the radio roaring and fell asleep to the strains of Tchaikovsky. I will narrate none of my dreams.

  TWELVE

  From that moment until Edgecombe’s arrival five days later, I contrived to remain, with some trouble, intact. The social life in fact became so prodigious, it was quite hard to keep one’s attention on murder.

  The house filled up and emptied and tilled up again. The Begum seldom had fewer than twelve bedrooms occupied, and parties of twenty or thirty were common for lunch, the visitors flying over to Stirrup Cay or Chub Cay or Great Harbour Cay and being met by the Crab Island launch. In the afternoon they would swim or engage in some other form of sport; in the evening those who were not staying returned after dinner. They came from New Providence and Miami, Eleuthera, Andros and Abaco. Occasionally, a friend would fly up from Jamaica or Antigua, stay a night and return. My father, I saw with amazement, organized their entertainment with the same single-track vigour he had always displayed towards the MacRannochs. Many of them, indeed, were MacRannochs. He showed no hint of bronchorestriction.

  As I have perhaps mentioned, I have myself little time for trivial chat. The European group tourist and the American Convention component I had found it best at all costs to avoid, unless lying before me on the operating-table. The young and fashionable I had also found suspect. In fact, I had a number of theories I thought it better to keep to myself.

  At James Ulric’s level, the level of Coral Harbour and Lyford Cay and Grand Bahama and Great Harbour Cay, the Bahamas are an expensive holiday playground. If you can afford it and are young, I would observe to myself, it is often because your wealth derives from your physique, which seldom makes for intellectual sparkle. If on the other hand you have made your fortune by unremitting juvenile industry, you are unlikely to have had time for anything else. Few self-made young men of twenty-three are entertaining outside their own subject.

  There remain the offspring of the rich: the unattached and young marrieds who holiday in the Bahamas at the homes of their parents, their aunts and their godmothers. These, I always found, cultivated a wide range of interests, like mustard and cress, on grounds about as profound as wet blotting-paper.

  I avoided them. I avoided the middle-aged rich from both business and society. These stayed with private hostesses or built luxury holiday houses, in which they entertained the same friends as at home, mixing tropical sport with drinking and horse-racing, bridge and canasta. Some of these I had occasionally been persuaded to partner at golf. I had seldom been disappointed when the relationship was carried no further.

  All these came to the Bahamas in high season only. Among the permanently retired, stultifying in the sunshine at a low regulo setting, I had found nothing in common. Indeed, the only human vigour I had ever been able to find had come from those, native or incomers, who worked on the islands. The bankers, the doctors, the tradesmen, the seamen. The vast teams of engineering contractors who were creating islands such as Great Harbour Cay.

  I had, I believe, mentioned all this to Johnson when he first suggested visiting Crab Island. He had denied none of it. which raised him a degree in my estimation. Indeed, I hardly know when I began to notice that my pilot groups had perhaps been too small.

  Brady, of course, if not a murderer, was an American engineer engaged in his profession. He played golf. He was quiet, entertaining, and had at least attempted to black Johnson’s eye on my behalf. In fact he had been more than cool to Johnson ever since.

  My feeling was that if Johnson’s elaborate protection had begun without my permission, it could proceed without my cooperation. It was up to Johnson to keep me out of danger. So when Wallace Brady asked me to play tennis with him, I played tennis. I swam. I allowed myself to be taught several card-games. Flexibility could go no further.

  Krishtof Bey was also a professional. He had made money early but he was also intelligent and of varied interests, possible subversion apart. His advances continued, but were in the nature of flattery and not alarming to handle. I was a little careful when Krishtof Bey sought my society, but not because I was afraid he would kill me.

  By the same token, if Rodney Trotter was a murderer, I have never yet met a better masseur, nor a man who with greater clarity could teach me to water-ski. He even got aqualung equipment and wanted me to go scuba diving, but Johnson whose launch we were using, regretfully vetoed it. I saw the point, even if Trotter did not. But I made a reasonable success, for a beginner, at skiing.

  The Begum’s other guests astonished me also. The first rich young socialite I met was an international skier and also a banker; the second had launched a chain of dress shops and just held her own one-woman painting exhibition. Among the self-made was an actor now equally known as a novelist; and a folk singer who has also made some excellent short films.

  There were almost no mustard and cress; no juvenile millionaires; no elderly playboys. All were engaged in some form of creative work with several others usually running it close. All could talk. Among the older men and women were dramatists and businessmen and art-collectors, farmers and landed proprietors actively and experimentally involved with their property: an American medical specialist I had long wanted to meet. Members of the administration from Nassau and the other islands came out to visit the Begum, and she blended them all into a comfortable melangé in the warm sunshine so that they talked and swam and relaxed, comparing notes and exchanging ideas, and, at the end of it, leaving the island themselves in some way enhanced.

  Conversation, to my surprise, was not arduous. None displayed any but a literary interest in my given name of Beltanno. By evening each day, instead of being footsore and exhausted, I was physically relaxed and mentally fresher than ever. My skin became brown round the new shapes of my swim- and sun-suits, and between my tie-on tops and my hipsters. In the evenings we had drinks: daiquiris, Tom Collinses, rum punches, and long slow dinners by candlelight out on the terrace with French wines instead of iced water; and music; and paper games; and dancing. Krishtof Bey and Johnson between them taught me how to dance in time with the music and then how to dance out of time with it. No one mentioned their feet.

  I remarked on that once to Krishtof Bey as we walked along the white beach after dinner, having sent on its way another launch- fill of the Begum’s departing house guests. He said, ‘Perhaps the Begum’s friends do not need free advice.’

  It was warm. In the dimness, the thin waves breathed in and dwindled on the smooth sand. I said, ‘No. That isn’t the difference. People who want free advice almost always earn far more than I do.’

  ‘But you frighten them,’ said Krishtof. He stopped, his voile body-shirt glistening in the dark. ‘People who are not articulate, how are they to know what to say to a woman doctor? Especially a woman doctor with a stern face, who plays golf and does not wish to be kissed?’

  I realized I should not have let him walk me away from the others. But one cannot really remember to be cautious all the time. I said. ‘Of course, I always tell them that as soon as I meet them.’

  ‘They sense it,’ said Krishtof. He ran the back of his hand down my arm and my reflexes bounded. ‘So they th
ink, what will interest this so austere woman? Only her own business, medicine. What can I say that will interest her, and will also be of some interest and benefit to myself? Ah. This remarkable and unusual symptom, they say, that I have observed in my feet...’

  I said, ‘You flatter them.’ The drifting fingers were caressing my neck.

  ‘No,’ said Krishtof. I wished he didn’t use quite so much Monsieur Balmain: it was making me dizzy. ‘No. You despise and therefore underrate them. I do not agree, this rich diet the Begum is giving you. How will you have patience, when you go back? Not everyone is witty and fluent. Some are just nice, inarticulate people.’

  ‘Like you,’ I said. I tried to move away slightly but his other arm had gone round my waist.

  ‘You wish to be sarcastic. But I am nice,’ said Krishtof Bey cheerfully. ‘I do not rape you when we first meet. I wait.’

  I said, ‘I appreciate that. I think we should go back to the house.’

  He had stopped walking, but the hand round my waist had not relinquished its grip. ‘There are people at the house.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But I do not wish to rape you before people,’ explained Krishtof Bey.

  ‘That,’ I said firmly, ‘makes two of us. Back to the house.’

  There was something magnificent about that man’s psycho- sexual development. He didn’t trouble to answer. He merely tightened his grip and shifted his system of leverage so that I fell slowly backwards on the white sifted sand, my bare shoulders cool in the surf. Then he kissed me.

  ‘Hullo.” said Johnson.

  I did not at first hear him. As before, rapid chemical and psychological changes appeared to be happening. Certainly I was beyond responding to quite painful stimuli, and uncoordinated eye movements were threatening. Krishtof Bey’s open mouth continued to adhere to mine, although I could hear he was growling. A minor wave washed over both of us sideways and splashed Johnson’s moccasins. He said admiringly, ‘Steam.’