“Daniel? Darling, you haven’t come back to England, have you?”
“I’m on the Pasha, Mums.”
“Daniel, really. Do you know the time? Where’s your father?”
“I didn’t get the crabs out of the basket, Mums. I chickened.
They make me sick. I’m all right, Mums. Honestly.”
“Danny?”
“Yes?”
“Danny, what are you trying to tell me?”
“Only we were on Hunter’s Island, you see, Mums. There was this man who smelled of garlic and took me prisoner, and another man who took Jed’s necklace. But the cook saved me and they let me go.”
“Daniel, is your father there?”
“Paula. Hi. Sorry about that. He was determined to tell you he’s okay. We got held up at gunpoint by a couple of thugs at Mama Low’s. Dans was taken hostage for ten minutes, but he’s totally unharmed.”
“Wait,” said Paula. Like his son before him, Roper waited for her to collect herself. “Daniel’s been kidnapped and released. But he’s all right. Now go on.”
“They marched him up the path to the kitchen. Remember the kitchen, up the path on the hill?”
“You’re sure all this happened, are you? We all know Daniel’s stories.”
“Yes, of course I’m sure. I saw it.”
“At gunpoint? They marched him up a hill at gunpoint? A boy of eight?”
“They were going for the cash in the kitchen. But there was this cook up there, a white chap, who had a go at them. He winged one, but the other one came back, and they beat him up while Daniel escaped. God knows what would have happened if they’d taken Dans with them, but they didn’t. All over now. We even got the loot back. Thank God for cooks. Come on, Dans, tell her how we’re giving you the Victoria Cross for gallantry. Here he is again.”
It was five in the morning. Burr sat motionless as a Buddha at his desk. Rooke smoked his pipe and wrestled with the Miami Herald crossword. Burr let the phone ring several times before he was able to pick it up.
“Leonard?” said Goodhew’s voice.
“Hullo, Rex.”
“Did something go wrong? I thought you were going to ring me. You sound as if you’re in shock. Did they swallow the bait, then? Leonard?”
“Oh, they swallowed it, all right.”
“So what’s wrong? You don’t sound victorious, you sound funereal.
What happened?”
“I’m just trying to work out whether we’re still holding the rod.” Mr. Lamont is in intensive care, said the hospital. Mr. Lamont is stable.
Not for long. Twenty-four hours later Mr. Lamont had vanished.
Has he discharged himself? The hospital says he has. Has Dr. Marti had him shifted to his clinic? Apparently so, but only briefly, and the clinic gives no information about the destination of discharged patients. And when Amato telephones in the guise of a newspaper reporter, Dr. Marti himself replies that Mr. Lamont has left without leaving an address. Suddenly, outlandish theories are being passed round the ops room. Jonathan has confessed to everything! Roper has tumbled him and dumped him in the sea! On Strelski’s orders, the watch on Nassau airport has been suspended. He fears Amato’s team is becoming too visible.
“We’re engineering human nature, Leonard,” says Strelski consolingly, in an effort to lift the burden from Burr’s soul. “Can’t get it right every time.”
“Thanks.”
Evening comes. Burr and Strelski sit in a roadside barbecue house with their cellular telephones on their laps eating ribs and Cajun rice and watching well-fed America come and go. A summons from the telephone monitors has them racing back to headquarters in mid-mouthful.
Corkoran to a senior editor of the leading Bahamian newspaper.
“Old love! It’s me. Corky. How are we? How are the dancing girls?”
Coarse intimacies are exchanged. Then the nub:
“Sweetheart, listen, the Chief wants a story killed . . . pressing reasons why the hero of the hour doesn’t need the spotlight . . . young Daniel, very hyper boy . . . I’m talking serious gratitude, a mega-improvement to your retirement plans. How about ‘a practical joke that came unstuck’? Can you do that, lover?”
The sensational robbery on Hunter’s Island is laid to rest in the great cemetery for stories permanently spiked by Higher Authority.
Corkoran to the desk of a senior Nassau police officer known for his understanding of the peccadilloes of the rich:
“Heart, how are we? Listen, in re Brother Lamont, last seen at Doctors Hospital by one of your heavier-footed brethren . . . can we just kind of lose that one from the menu—do you mind? The Chief would greatly prefer the lower profile, feels it’s better for Daniel’s health . . . wouldn’t wish to prefer charges, even if you found the culprits, hates the fuss . . . bless you . . . Oh, and by the by, don’t believe all that crap you’re reading about Ironbrand shares going through the floor . . . Chief’s considering a very nice little divi this Christmas; we should all be able to buy ourselves a piece of whatever we like best.”
The strong arm of the law agrees to withdraw its claws. Burr wonders whether he is listening to Jonathan’s obituary. And from the rest of the world, not a peep.
Should Burr return to London? Should Rooke? Logically, it made no difference whether they hung by a thread in Miami or in London. Illogically, Burr needed nearness to the place where his agent was last seen. In the end, he sent Rooke to London and the same day checked out of his steel-and-glass hotel and moved to humbler premises in a sleazy part of town.
“Leonard’s putting on the hair shirt while he waits this thing out,” Strelski told Flynn.
“Tough,” said Flynn, still trying to come to terms with the experience of having his agent immolated by Burr’s ewe lamb.
Burr’s new cell was a pastel-painted art deco box beside the beach, with a bedside light made out of a chrome Atlas holding up the globe, and steel-framed windows that buzzed to every passing car, and a doped-out Cuban security guard with dark glasses and an elephant gun, lounging in the lobby. Burr slept there lightly, with his cellular phone on the spare pillow.
One dawn, unable to sleep, he took his phone for a walk down a great boulevard. A regiment of cocaine banks loomed at him out of the misted sea. But as he went toward them he found himself in a building site hill of colored birds screaming from the scaffolding, and Latinos sleeping like war dead beside their parked bulldozers.
Jonathan was not the only one who had disappeared. Roper too had entered a black hole. Deliberately or not, he had given Amato’s watchers the slip. The tap on the Ironbrand headquarters in Nassau revealed only that the Chief was away selling farms—“selling farms” being Roperspeak for “mind your own damn business.”
The supersnitch Apostoll, urgently consulted by Flynn, offered no consolation. He had heard vaguely that his clients might be holding a business conference on the island of Aruba, but he had not been invited. No, he had no idea where Mr. Roper was. He was a lawyer, not a travel agent. He was Mary’s soldier.
Another evening came, and Strelski and Flynn determined to take Burr out of himself. They collected him from his hotel and, cellular phones in hand, made him stroll among the crowds on the promenade beside the beach. They sat him at a pavement café and fed him margaritas and forced him to take an interest in the people who went by. In vain. They watched muscular blacks in multicolored shirts and gold rings, rolling with the majesty of high life for as long as the highs and the living lasted, their dolls in skintight miniskirts and thigh boots toppling between them, their shaven-headed bodyguards in robes of mullah gray to conceal their automatic weapons. A swarm of beachboys on skateboards raced past, and the wiser ladies whisked their handbags out of reach. But two old lesbians in straw trilbies refused to be daunted and marched their poodles straight at them, causing them to veer. After the beachboys came a shoal of long-necked fashion models on roller skates, each more gorgeous than the last. At the sight of them, Burr, who loved women, di
d for a moment come alive—only to lapse again into his melancholy abstractions.
“Hey, Leonard,” said Strelski, making a last gallant effort. “Let’s go see where the Roper does his weekend shopping.”
In a big hotel, in a conference room protected by men with padded shoulders, Burr and Strelski mingled with the buyers of all nations and listened to the sales talk of wholesome young men with name tags pinned to their lapels. Behind the men sat girls with order books. And behind the girls, in shrines cordoned off with blood-colored ropes, stood their wares, each polished like a loved possession, each guaranteed to make a man of whoever owned them: from the most cost-effective cluster bomb through the all-plastic undetectable Glock automatic pistol to the latest thing in hand-held rocket launchers, mortars and anti-personnel mines. And for your reading man, standard works on how to build yourself a rocket-propelled gun in your own backyard or make a one-time silencer out of a tubular can of tennis balls.
“About the only thing missing is a girl in a bikini poking her fanny at the barrel of a sixteen-inch fieldpiece,” said Strelski as they drove back to the operations room.
The joke fell flat.
A tropical storm descends on the city, blackening the sky, chopping the heads off the skyscrapers. Lightning strikes, triggering the burglar alarms of parked cars. The hotel shudders and cracks, the last daylight dies as if the main switch has failed. Jets of rain spew down the windowpanes of Burr’s bedroom, black flotsam rides on the scurrying white mist. Billows of wind ransack the palm trees, hurling chairs and plants off balconies. Then disappear, leaving the battlefield to the defeated.
But Burr’s cellular phone, ringing in his ear, has miraculously survived the attack.
“Leonard,” says Strelski in a voice of suppressed excitement, “get your ass down here fast. We got a couple of murmurs coming out of the rubble.”
The city lights bounce back again, shining gaily after their free wash.
Corkoran to Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, lately unprincipled chairman of a group of derelict British trading companies, and occasional purveyor of deniable arms shipments to Her Majesty’s procurement ministers.
Corkoran is telephoning from the Nassau apartment of one of Ironbrand’s smart young men, on the mistaken assumption that the line is safe.
“Sir Tony? Corkoran here. Dicky Roper’s gofer.”
“Fuck do you want?” The voice sounds clotted and half drunk.
It echoes like a voice in a bathroom.
“Pressing matter, Sir Tony, I’m afraid. The Chief needs your good offices. Got a pencil?”
While Burr and Strelski listen transfixed, Corkoran struggles to achieve precision:
“No, Sir Tony, Pine. Pine like the tree. Pine like a sick dog, P for Peter, I for Item, N for Nuts, E for Easy. That’s right. First name Jonathan. Like Jonathan.” He adds a couple of harmless details, such as Jonathan’s date and place of birth and British passport number. “Chief wants the head-to-toe background check, Sir Tony, please, preferably by yesterday. And mum. All very mum indeed.”
“Who’s Joyston Bradshaw?” Strelski asks, when they have heard the conversation to the end.
Seeming to wake from a deep dream, Burr allows himself a cautious smile. “Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, Joe, is a leading English shit. His financial embarrassment is one of the major joys of the current recession.” His smile spreads. “Unsurprisingly, he is also a former partner in crime of Mr. Richard Onslow Roper.” He warms to his theme. “As a matter of fact, Joe, if you and I were fielding the all-English team of shits, Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw would feature high on our batting list. He also enjoys the protection of some other highly placed English shits, some of whom work not too far distant from the river Thames.” The relief shone through Burr’s strained face as he broke out laughing. “He’s alive, Joe! You don’t check a corpse, not by yesterday! Head-to-toe background, he says. Well, we’ve got it all ready for him, and nobody better suited to provide him with it than Tony bloody Joyston Bradshaw! They want him, Joe! He’s got his nose into their tent! You know what they say, the Bedouin? Never let a camel’s nose into your tent, because if you do, you get the whole camel.”
But while Burr was rejoicing, Strelski’s mind was already on the next practical step.
“So Pat goes ahead?” he said. “Pat’s boys can go bury the magic box?”
Burr sobered at once. “If its okay by you and Pat, it’s okay by me,” he said.
They agreed on the very next night.
Unable to sleep, Burr and Strelski drove to an all-night hamburger joint called Murgatroyd’s on U.S. 1, where a sign said NO SHOES, NO SERVICE. Outside the smoked-glass windows sat shoeless pelicans in the moonlight, each to his mooring-post along the wooden jetty, like feathery old bombing planes that might never bomb again. On the silver beach, white egrets peered forlornly at their reflections.
At four a.m. Strelski’s cellular phone peeped. He put it to his ear, said “yes” and listened. He said, “So get yourselves some sleep.” He rang off. The conversation had taken twenty seconds.
“No problem,” he announced to Burr, and took a pull of Coke. Burr needed a moment to believe his ears. “You mean they made it? It’s done? They cached it?”
“They beach-landed, they found the shed, they buried the box, they were very quiet, very professional, they got the hell out. All your boy has to do now is speak.”
14
Jonathan was back in his iron bed at army school after they ripped his tonsils out—except that the bed was huge and white, with the soft down pillows with embroidered edges that they used to have at Meister’s, and a small herb pillow for the fragrance.
He was in the motel room one truck ride out of Espérance, nursing his battered jaw with the curtains drawn and sweating out a fever after telephoning a voice that had no name to say he had found his shadow—except that his head was bandaged, he was wearing crisp cotton pajamas, and there was a stitched device on the pocket that he kept trying to read by Braille. Not M for Meister, nor P for Pine or B for Beauregard or L for Linden and Lamont. More like a Star of David with too many points.
He was in Yvonne’s attic, listening for Madame Latulipe’s footfall in the half-light. Yvonne wasn’t there, but the attic was—except that this was a bigger attic than Yvonne’s, and bigger than the attic in Camden Town that Isabelle had painted in. And it had pink flowers in an old Delft vase, and a tapestry of ladies and gentlemen out hawking. A punkah dangled from a roof beam, making stately turns of its propeller.
He was lying beside Sophie in the apartment in the Chicago House in Luxor while she talked about courage—except that the smell tickling his nostrils was of potpourri, not vanilla. He said I must be taught a lesson, she was saying. It is not I who must be taught a lesson. It is Freddie Hamid and his dreadful Dicky Roper.
He made out closed shutters slicing sunlight into blades, and layers of fine white muslin curtain. He turned his head the other way and saw a Meister’s silver room-service tray with a jug of orange juice, and a cut-glass goblet to drink it from, and a lace cloth covering the silver tray. Across a thickly carpeted floor, he distinguished through the blur of his reduced vision a doorway to a large bathroom, with towels of ascending sizes folded along a rail.
But by then his eyes were streaming and his body was hopping the way it had hopped when he was ten and caught his fingers in somebody’s car door, and he realized he was lying on his bandage, and his bandage was on the side of his head that they had smashed and Dr. Marti had repaired. So he rolled his head back to where it had been before he started his close observation, and he watched the punkah going round until the light-spots of pain had cleared and the undercover soldier’s gyroscope inside him had begun to right itself.
This is where you get yourself across the bridge, Burr had said.
They’ll have to mark the goods, Rooke had said. You can’t just walk up to them with the boy in your arms to everyone’s applause.
Fracture of the skull and che
ekbone, Marti had said. Concussion, eight on the Richter scale, ten years’ solitary in a darkened room.
Three cracked ribs, could be thirty.
Severe bruising of the testicles following attempted castration with the toe cap of a heavy training boot.
For it seemed that once Jonathan had gone down under the pistol whipping, it was his groin that the man had attacked, leaving among other traces the perfect imprint of a size-twelve boot in his inside thigh, to the raucous amusement of the nurses.
A black-and-white figure flitted across his vision. White uniform. Black face. Black legs, white stockings. Rubber-soled white shoes with Velcro fastenings. At first he had thought she was one person; now he knew she was several. They visited him like spirits, mutely polishing and dusting, changing his flowers and his drinking water. One was called Phoebe and had a nurse’s touch.
“Hi, Mist’ Thomas. How’re you today? I’m Phoebe. Miranda, just you go fetch that brush again, and this time you sweep right under Mist’ Thomas’s bed. Yes, ma’am.”
So I’m Thomas, he thought. Not Pine. Thomas. Or perhaps I’m Thomas Pine.
He dozed again, and woke to find Sophie’s ghost standing over him, in her white slacks, shaking pills into a paper cup. Then he thought she must be a new nurse. Then he saw the broad belt with the silver buckle, and the maddening line of the hips, and the tousled chestnut hair. And heard the Mistress-of-the-Hunt voice, bang on station, no respect for anyone.
“But, Thomas,” Jed was protesting “Somebody must love you terribly. What about mothers, girlfriends, fathers, chums? Really nobody?”
“Really,” he insisted
“So who’s Yvonne?” she asked, as she placed her head within inches of his own, spread one palm on his back and the other on his chest to sit him up. “Is she absolutely gorgeous?”
“She was just a friend,” he said, smelling the shampoo in her hair.
“Well, shouldn’t we be telling Yvonne?”
“No, we shouldn’t,” he replied, too sharply.
She gave him his pills and a glass of water. “Well, Dr. Marti says you’re to sleep forever. So don’t think of anything except getting better extremely slowly. Now, how about distractions—books, a radio or something? Not quite yet, but in a day or two. We don’t know anything about you, except that Roper says you’re Thomas, so you’ll just have to tell us what you need. There’s a huge library over in the main house, with masses of frightfully learned stuff—Corky will tell you what it all is—and we can get anything you want flown over from Nassau. You just have to yell.” And her eyes big enough to drown in.
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