Now I leaned against the back of the facade, sucking in the smoke, a strong, bitter blend, my white linen suit washed green by the lantern, the nine-millimeter snug under my arm in the shoulder holster, jacket unbuttoned. I could go find some rope…with all the boats around that wouldn’t be hard…I could tie it around the base of that big electric coachman’s lamp and…
Fuck it.
I tossed the cigarette and it sizzled in a puddle and I climbed over the facade and dropped myself down the stucco face of the building until my hands were hooked over and gripping the edges above, wrists bent, while below my feet stretched and danced in the air, searching for that overhang.
I didn’t dare risk just dropping there—not enough width to maintain my balance. Over to my left was the lower part of the Columbus plaque; it was recessed and ornate, with a lot of rococo design work.
I let go with my left hand and every muscle in my body pulled as my right hand held on and my left scrambled over the plaque’s surface, like a blind man searching for a light switch, until finally my fingers clutched some sculptured rococo work that served as a handle for me to grab on to.
I let go with my right hand, and my body swung toward where my left hand held on, but suddenly my feet were touching the overhang—and not just my toes; my feet, turned sideways, had footing, at least as long as I had hold of whatever I had hold of in that damn ornate plaque.
Then my right hand searched for something else to grip among the design work, found another rococo handle, and my feet were securely under me and I had my full balance, and I dropped to the floor of the balcony below.
The water puddled there made me slip and I fell back, hard, against the wrought iron of the balcony itself, shaking it, but I didn’t lose my balance, and it didn’t give way, and I had my gun out from under my arm and in my hand when the French doors opened and a heavyset bodyguard in a straw fedora and tropical shirt—he looked a little like Wallace Beery—peeked out, his hands empty, to see if a branch had fallen or something.
I was on my feet with my gun in his belly before the stupid surprised expression was off his face. In fact, it was still there when I plucked his long-barreled .38 from under his arm, sticking it in my own waistband.
“Now back up,” I said, “hands high.”
“Look who dropped in,” intoned a deep, firm voice.
Meyer Lansky sat casually on a couch, legs crossed, in the sitting area of the big one-room suite; Harold Christie sat across from him in a comfortable armchair. Lansky, in light blue sport shirt and dark blue slacks, wearing sandals and socks, was smiling; he seemed faintly amused by my entrance.
Christie, who wore a rumpled canary-color linen suit with a red bow tie, looked astounded, and dismayed, the money-color eyes wide and blinking. He looked ten years older than when I first met him, at Westbourne, not so long ago; also skinnier, the flesh hanging on him like another rumpled suit.
Between them was a coffee table on which were their drinks and a briefcase that I figured belonged to Christie. A well-stocked bar was at the left, and a double bed was over at the right. The two of them—but for the bodyguard and me—were alone.
I ignored Lansky; also Christie, who was saying, “What in the hell are you doing here, Heller? What in the hell is he doing here?”
‘Tell your friend in the hall to come inside,” I told the bodyguard. “Tell him Mr. Lansky wants to talk to him.”
He nodded.
“Meyer,” I said, “tell him no signals. Otherwise I shoot up the place.”
“No signals, Eddie.”
Eddie nodded.
He poked his head out and said, “Boss wants to see you.”
The burly guy in the two-tone suit came in with Ring magazine under his arm and his guard down.
“What the fuck…?”
But he didn’t argue with the nine-millimeter in my one hand as my other took his .38 out from under his arm. Now I had two of them in my belt, Zapata-style.
“In the toilet,” I said, pointing the way with the nine-millimeter. “Immediate seating….”
I locked them in by wedging a chair under the knob.
“Get yourself a drink while you’re up, Mr. Heller,” Lansky said cordially.
“No thanks.”
“Suit yourself. It disappoints me that you think you have to go to such absurd lengths to see me. If you wanted to stop by, all you had to do was call.”
I stood between them, Lansky at my left, Christie at my right. Lansky was obviously unarmed and Christie wasn’t the type.
“You’re understaffed tonight, Meyer,” I said. “Two of your best boys are missing.”
The sharp, dark eyes tensed; otherwise, his weak-chinned homely face gave an impression of unconcern.
“And what two boys would those be?” he asked blandly.
“The two boys that were with you at the Biltmore, last time we spoke.”
“You’re mistaken. Those two had the weekend off. They didn’t make this trip.”
I smiled pleasantly. “Are you sure? Maybe I didn’t describe them well enough. There’s one with a bad toupee and a cheesy little mustache, although you might not recognize him now because I shot off one of his ears and, well, put three or four rounds in his face.”
Lansky’s eyes tightened even more, but otherwise his countenance didn’t change; Christie’s mouth was open, and he was trembling—that old witness-box flop sweat was starting in again.
“The other one has a scar, kind of shaped like a lightning bolt, on his left cheek, I think it’s his left cheek, with a kind of round face, oh, and a new touch—there’s a hole in his forehead…about here.”
Lansky nodded once. “I believe I do know who you’re referring to.”
“You should. You sent them to whack me out tonight.”
He shook his head no; gestured gently with an open hand. “You’re mistaken. I believe what you’re saying—I believe they did what you say they did, and that you did what you say you did. But I didn’t send them. Did you, Harold?”
Christie reacted as indignantly as if he’d been slapped. “Certainly not!”
I looked at them, one at a time, and laughed. “Why the hell don’t I believe you, fellas? A couple of standup citizens like you.”
Lansky sat forward; his manner was reasonable. He didn’t seem frightened, unlike Christie, who looked on the verge of wetting his pants. “Mr. Heller, why in the world would I want to have you killed? Before tonight, at least, you’ve done nothing to offend me.”
“He’s insane,” Christie said. “He insists on trying to put the blame for Harry’s death on me!”
“Well, I certainly had no part in Sir Harry’s death,” Lansky said flatly.
“I think you did,” I said. “I think Harold here asked you to send two of your strong-arm boys…specifically, my uninvited, now-deceased guests this evening…to help convince Harry to change his mind about blocking your mutual efforts to bring casinos into the Bahamas. But Oakes was a tough old bird, and he put up a fight and got himself killed—after which your two boys improvised that voodoo routine, to confuse the issue.”
“Mr. Heller,” Lansky said, shaking his head, smiling like a disappointed parent, “you’re the one who’s confused.”
“Oh really?”
“Really. If I wanted to put gambling into the Bahamas, Harry Oakes couldn’t have stood in my way.”
I was holding the nine-millimeter on him, but his calm, hard eyes were equally on me, and similarly deadly. And what he was saying echoed things Freddie de Marigny had told me in his jail cell….
“Gambling already is legal here,” Lansky said. “Merely suspended for the duration of the war. The law does forbid Bahamian residents from gambling, which is fine.” He might have been delivering a lecture on traffic safety at a junior high school. “The point is to get tourist trade. But with the war on, Mr. Heller, there are no tourists to speak of.”
“Which means,” Christie said edgily, bitterly, “there is no rush whatsoev
er to put casinos into the Bahamas!”
“Harold’s right,” Lansky said. “This doesn’t become a pressing issue until after war’s end…and even then, Sir Harry couldn’t have stood in my way. He would’ve had to be on the Executive Council to consider gaming license applications—and he wasn’t. He was a powerful man, yes—but he didn’t wield any power with Bay Street. He was an outsider, and he liked it that way.
“Heller,” Christie said earnestly, “Harry didn’t give a damn about gambling in the Bahamas—he didn’t care about the Bahamas anymore! He was gearing up to move to Mexico City—surely, you knew that….”
“No matter what either of you say,” I said, gun tight in my hand, “the two assassins who killed Sir Harry Oakes were your men, Lansky! The same two men that the dead Lyford Cay caretaker saw that night, the same two men I shot the shit out of about a fucking hour ago!”
Lansky may have been worried now; he could see that I was wound a little taut.
“Mr. Heller—if those two were responsible for Sir Harry’s death, it wasn’t at my say-so. It was some…free-lance assignment they picked up.”
Christie seemed to settle back in his chair, trying to disappear into it.
I turned the gun on him. “Then you hired them…you knew them, through your friend, here—”
“Heller,” Christie said desperately, “I had nothing to do with Harry’s death! I loved the man!”
“Mr. Heller,” Lansky said, and he risked leaning out and putting his hand on my wrist—not the wrist of the hand with the gun in it, but my wrist. “I’m a Jew.”
I looked at him like he was nuts.
“You’re a Jew, aren’t you, Heller?”
“Well…yeah. I suppose.”
“You suppose! It’s not something you have to think about, man! You think that evil bastard Hitler would take time to think about it?”
The homely little man actually seemed upset. Finally.
“What the hell are you babbling about, Lansky?”
When he spoke, he bit off each word, like a telegram he was dictating. “Do you really think I’d knowingly get in bed with a bunch of goddamn fucking Nazis, just to make a buck?”
It was like cold water had been thrown on me. “Nazis?”
Christie was glaring at Lansky.
I looked from one to the other. “What the hell do you mean—Nazis?”
Lansky let go of my wrist. “I’ve already said too much. You got balls, Mr. Heller, and brains, but right now you need the latter more than the former.”
A sick feeling was growing in the pit of my stomach.
Lansky stood. He put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Go. Go now, and this is just an honest misunderstanding. Stay, and…well, you’re either going to have to kill everyone here, or wind up with me mad at you. And we don’t either one of us want either one of those things, do we?”
Christie was sitting there like a toad in a suit, sweat and desperation all over his face. I might have to talk to him again—but I didn’t want Lansky around. Suddenly I knew that Lansky was damn near an innocent bystander in all this.
Suddenly I knew how big a mistake I’d made.
We were frozen there for what seemed like forever and was probably thirty seconds. Lansky stood looking patient, Christie sat looking distressed and me, I probably had the same green pallor as when I’d climbed down the building bathed in that pale green light.
“You gentlemen must have business to do,” I said, backing up, gun in hand, but lowered. “If you’ll excuse me.”
“This time I will,” Lansky said. “Why don’t you just use the door this time?”
I did.
It was approaching two o’clock a.m. when I returned to Hog Island. I’d gone to Dirty Dick’s to think and drink; I held myself to two rum punches, but didn’t hold back on the thinking. Despite the several hours I’d been gone, Daniel was waiting for me at Prince George Wharf, with the little motor launch. He had seemed nervous bringing me over, muttering about the bad storm, even though by the time we made the trip, the storm was a memory. Heading back to Hog Island, in the wee hours, under a black starless moonless sky, even the sea had settled down. Calm again.
So were my nerves. The rum had done it. And the thinking.
The cottage was dark. I flicked on the light: no sign of Fleming, whose “tidying up” had been limited to removing the two dead bodies. Otherwise, the scattered glass from the broken doors and window, slivers and shards and jagged chunks, the shot-up sheets and blankets and mattress, scattered shell casings, the holes the .45s had punched in the walls, even the glistening pools of blood here and there, not dry yet thanks to the humidity, were testimony to what had happened here, a few short hours ago.
The mansion was not dark—several lights were on, and I hadn’t left them that way. Perhaps Fleming had, when he made his phone call for corpse-disposal assistance. He’d left the keys on the bed, and I walked over to the house down the palm-lined path and went in the kitchen way.
I found her—stumbled onto her, is more like it—in the round living room where two nights ago we’d been celebrating de Marigny’s victory amid the Inca artifacts.
She was pacing, almost prowling, before the blandly benign portrait of Wenner-Gren, her slim, full-breasted figure wrapped in a pink silk peignoir; she was smoking and on the coffee table between the facing curved couches was a bucket of ice with an open bottle of champagne.
“I thought you were going to Mexico City,” I said.
She turned quickly, startled. For an instant her face was frozen with incredulity, then it melted into a smile. Even at two in the morning, those bruised lips were rouged red.
“Nate! God, I’m glad to see you! I was so desperately worried!”
She rushed to me; under the sheer robe was a sheer pink nightie and where the pinkness of it ended and the pinkness of her began was a mystery she would no doubt allow me to solve. She hugged me, and made sobbing sounds, though she wasn’t sobbing.
“You’re alive!” she said into my chest.
“And well.” I smiled at her, holding her gently away from me. “What about Mexico City?”
She shook her head as if she had to clear it to answer my mundane question.
“Oh…all the flights were canceled, due to that bloody storm. Wasn’t another Mexico City connection for two days, and that would’ve been too late for the meeting Axel needed me for. I chartered a little boat back from Miami.”
“I see.”
“Let me get you something to drink.” She moved to the liquor cart. “Do you want rum? Or some of this bottle of Dom Pérignon left from the other night?”
“The champagne. Please.”
She went to the coffee table, poured me a bubbling glass and said, “What in hell happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“At the cottage! I got back about an hour ago—Daniel was gone, and the cottage was a shambles! It doesn’t take an expert to know that somebody shot up the place. Nathan, there’s blood on the floor—and all that broken glass.”
“Yeah. I saw.”
She narrowed her eyes, studying me over the rim of the glass she was handing me. “You…you weren’t there when what happened happened, were you?”
I took the champagne. “Oh, I was there.”
She frowned. “Well, goddamnit, man! Talk to me! Did someone try to kill you?”
I walked over to the couch and sat; she sat across from me on the opposite couch, sitting on the edge, knees together primly like a schoolgirl, and with a schoolgirl’s wide, round, innocent eyes.
“Two men with guns came in and mistook some sheets and blankets for me. Fortunately I was sleeping on the couch at the time.”
“What did you do?”
“I shot one in the face three times. Or four. The other one has a bullet in the head.”
That knocked her back, just a bit. She blinked the lush lashes, swallowed, and said, “Where are the bodies?”
I shrugged. “I don’
t know. They were still there when I left to go over to Nassau, to confront Harold Christie.”
Her eyes got even wider. “You confronted Christie? What the hell did he say?”
I shrugged again. “He denied sending ’em.”
“What did you do to him…? You didn’t…”
“Kill him? No. I didn’t do a thing to the slimy little bastard. Say…tell me—when you saw the cottage in a shot-up shambles, did you call the police? Is anyone on the way?”
She made a meaningless gesture with the hand with the cigarette in it. “The phones seem to be out. I was frightened, Nate. Thank God you’re here.”
I nodded sympathetically. “You should get some rest. We should sort this out with Colonel Pemberton and his men after sunup sometime, don’t you think?”
She shuddered. “Oh, I simply couldn’t sleep.”
I looked at her for a long time.
Then I said, “You know what would relax you?”
She shook her head no; she sucked on the cigarette, holding in the smoke a long time.
“A bedtime story.”
As she blew the smoke out, her smile turned one-sided and wicked. “A bedtime story?” She shook her head again, her expression wry. “Heller, you are bad.”
“No,” I said. I pointed at her. “You’re bad.”
She froze again, momentarily, then laughed it off, blond hair shimmering. She raised an eyebrow and her glass. “What happened to my bedtime story?”
I put my hands on my knees. “Once upon a time there was a grizzled old prospector who spent years and years looking for a fortune in gold. Finally, one day, he found some gold. Quite a lot of it, and it made him enormously wealthy, and so he married his sweetheart and had a wonderful family and moved to a tropical isle. But one day a war broke out in the outside world, and though he and his family were safe on their island, the prospector worried that this war might threaten his fortune. Then a former king and two very wealthy men—one who owned land and another with a great big boat—invited the prospector to start a bank with them, in a foreign land. To storehouse their money until the war was over.”
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