A Flag for Sunrise (41 page)

Mr. Heath watched them sit down, drawing thoughtfully on the lemon slice that had come with his fish.

“Stew Nabbs was in Key West,” Holliwell heard the man say. He himself was at the point of exhaustion. Of course the rum did not revive him.

“Ugh,” the woman muttered in a deep coarse voice, “the pits.
The
pits.”

The man giggled. A tiny-eyed giggle.

“Well,” Holliwell told his dining companion, “I’m going to bed. I’m out of it.”

Mr. Heath leaned forward and addressed him softly with a bland half smile.

“You’re not to go. Stay where you are.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Holliwell said.

Heath glanced over Holliwell’s shoulder at the couple and fixed his eyes on Holliwell’s.

“I want you to listen to these people. They’re extremely interesting.”

“What a guy,” the man behind Holliwell was saying to his friend. “Indictments on him from here to Seattle and he’s living it up in Key West. A house, you know? A bankroll. Fuckin’ guy. But it won’t last.”

Holliwell shrugged and frowned a question at Mr. Heath. But Heath had settled back like a man about to listen to some beloved music.

“Stay,” Heath whispered. “Listen.”

“You lived with him,” the woman said.

“I went by his pad up there. Off Duval. He’s got a kid passed out in the garage—the kid’s fourteen? Fifteen? On a tank of gas. I split. I said, ‘See you, Stewart.’ ”

“You were his pal,” the woman said.

“New York, Clyde Hotel. Aagh. That fuckin’ place. Needle Park over there.”

“Hey,” the woman crooned. “Hey, I remember, Buddy. Do I remember?”

“You remember Phelan, the loan shark?”

“I was into Phelan,” the woman said. Holliwell tried to bring her face to mind again. “You were also, Buddy. And Stew.”

“Everybody was. Me and Stew were supposed to be whattaya-callit. His men.”

“His leg breakers,” the woman said. In a sweet singsong, like one reminding a child of a lesson forgotten. “And legs were broken, in my recollection.”

The man began to curse immoderately.

“How was your dive today?” Heath asked.

“I was just thinking of the dive,” Holliwell said. “It was a lot of things.”

The young man was speaking again.

“That little harelip from Riker’s. The fuck was doing six bits a day and going to Phelan. Simpleminded. Phelan says put the arm on the little stiff. So we go to the big hotel there, the Ansonia. They got offices there, everything. Pay phone and we order shit from Riker’s. An hour later comes the harelip and we jump him. He runs, he screams like a cooze. Runs up a dozen flights of stairs. Finally me and Stew get him on the top floor. We hold him over the stairwell by his feet and it rains coin. His change, his wallet, his works, everything goes—and he’s upside down there making little bird noises. The whole goddamn time he never let go of that burger.”

“Down the purple corridor,” the woman declared, “the scarlet ibis screaming ran.”

“You know what Phelan says? He says how come you didn’t drop him?”

Holliwell’s eyes met those of Mr. Heath.

“Twixt, wasn’t it?” Heath asked. “I remember that wall very well. See anything marvelous?”

“There was something down there. I don’t know what.”

“Stew had holes in his shoes,” Buddy told his dining companion. “He wore rubbers every day. Fucking Clyde Hotel.”

“And Phelan passed away?”

“Did he ever,” Buddy said.

“Did you find it frightening?” Heath asked Holliwell.

“Oh,” Holliwell said, “I suppose. I gather it’s a sinister place.”

“It’s never been my idea of a sinister place,” Heath said.

“Right after Phelan got it,” the man behind Holliwell said, “Stew’s wig snapped. He went funny.”

“Ha,” the woman said, “I heard. I know what it was.”

“No, Olga,” the man said. He lowered his voice. “No, you don’t.”

The officers at the bar were much quieter now, drunk almost to silence. They neglected to play the jukebox. At one end of the dining hall, a waiter was counting out white candles from a stack on a table before him.

“We were still in the Clyde. Stew was chicken-hawking. All these kids, in and out. He dealt. He had a string.”

“Those kids are lousy,” Olga said. “Detestable.”

“He left town. He did one.”

“He did?”

“He did one. He took this chicken out.”

“Curtains?”

“I’m telling you,” Buddy said. “He went to L.A. I saw him there. Hollywood he went to.”

“The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” Olga said.

“He had chickens on skateboards. Dolls, a couple. Hustling.”

“Tray bizarre,” Olga said.

“Bizarre. He was on Percodans. He was into snuffing. Him and a friend.”

“Some friend.”

“They had clients took pix. They ran the roads, Stew and this friend. Chicken snatching. Kids up the bazoom, they grabbed them. The freeways, like. Off the street.”

“Gollywilkins,” Olga said.

The Japanese lanterns in the palm grove flickered, went out, then
came on again. The officers at the bar were leaving. One of them staggered past the tables into the grove, belched loudly and began to piss in the frangipani. Over the palm crowns hung an infinity of stars.

“It’s the simple life down the wall at Twixt,” Mr. Heath told Holliwell. “Clean down there. One sees so far.”

“I was thinking it was the same up here.”

“Humanist fallacy,” Heath said. “Appearances deceive. There’s a philosophical difference.”

Holliwell was unable to answer. Mr. Heath had proved himself a philosopher and once again Holliwell caught the saffron taste of Vietnam. The green places of the world were swarming with strong-arm philosophers and armed prophets. It was nothing new.

Heath was looking over Holliwell’s shoulder, holding his expression of affable uninterest. Buddy had lowered his voice further, it trembled with rodential wariness.

“Chickens were disappearing. Stew had these pix. He sold them. Famous names, he says.”

“Intense.”

“Me, I’m shit scared. I know this is happening. Stew knows I know. His friend is a big pinhead.”

“Poor baby.”

“The cops are finding these
children,
Olga. Blipped. Bitty kids almost. Sans parts. It’s big in the paper.”

“The parents don’t care,” Olga said. “They sell them.”

“Snuff pix, chickens, that was Stew. He was obnoxious about it. He said it was big.”

“Did he say he liked it?”

“He never said. I figure he liked it, right? I was scared, Olga. I left town.”

“The kids ask for it sometimes,” Olga said. “They’re lousy at that age.”

“That’s what Stew says. I says: See you, Stew. I was scared.”

“This,” Olga said, “is why I won’t live in Los Angeles today.”

When they stood up, Heath gave them a friendly nod. Holliwell forced himself not to turn around.

“Do you know how I came to notice them?” Heath asked. His florid face held the polite amiable smile. “It was a way of laughing
that bastard had. When I heard him laugh I knew what I had before me.”

“Not your ordinary run of tourist,” Holliwell offered.

“Yes … well, what’s ordinary today? There’s a very rubbishy sort of American loose on the world these days. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

“All kinds of people have money and leisure in the States. Surely you know that.”

“I thought the American of thirty years ago was a better type,” Mr. Heath said. “Not much savoir-faire but a sounder sort of chap.”

“I know who these people are,” Holliwell said. “I know what they come out of. I know more than I want to about them.”

“So their dinner conversation doesn’t shock you?”

“Does it shock you?”

“Not me, mate. I was there when we went into Belsen and quite honestly that didn’t shock me either.”

“What did it do for you?”

“It aroused my workmanlike instincts,” Mr. Heath said. “I have the same reaction to … them.”

“Olga and Buddy.”

“Yes. Olga. And Buddy. They make me think—ha, boyo. Time to go to work.”

“It is the same,” Holliwell insisted. “Up here and down the wall. It’s the same process.”

“That’s very tender-minded of you. Are you going to tell me all that lives is holy?”

“Not me,” Holliwell said. “But even Olga and Buddy have a kind of innocence, don’t they? And their friend in the story?”

“Holliwell,” Heath said. “Holliwell—God may forgive Olga and Buddy and company—he doesn’t have to share the world with them. You have children, I suppose?”

Holliwell confessed that he did.

“There’s someone murdering children in the villages here, did you know that? He’s killed five kids already.”

“I didn’t know. But that has nothing to do with these people.”

“Don’t you know your own side, man? I can assure you that I do. And when I hear that laugh—when I catch that pong in the air I feel like our good missionary friends, ready to go into my cure of souls.
I believe that God gave the likes of Olga and Buddy and the late Rudolf Hoess into my especial keeping. But because this civilization is corrupt and cowardly, because it insists on being tyrannized by weak, bent neurotics who don’t know the fucking meaning of self-respect or mercy—I can’t do my job.”

His knuckles were white on the glass of gin. He blinked and sipped of the drink and smiled again. “So I feel frustrated, you see.”

The officers of the Guardia were leaving the bar. The last to go whistled unpleasantly for the shy black barmaid who had been nervously serving them; when she came up to him, he stuffed a wad of bills under the bodice of her bright tight dress. Then he turned and watched the two men at the table across the hall.

“I’m a copper, really,” Heath said.

“Why did you ask me if I was frightened down the wall?”

“Ah,” Heath said, “rude of me. Sorry.”

“I didn’t think it was rude. Just a little peculiar.”

“My manners are dreadful,” Mr. Heath said. “I expect I’ll have trouble in the resort business.”

At Serrano on the windward shore, the frayed ends of a norther whipped the winch chains against the stabilizers and set the mooring lines to groaning. The dock lights showed soiled whitecaps speckling the milky harbor. Pablo worked the fuel line with one of Naftali’s pier hands. Freddy Negus leaned against the bridge housing, smoking, staring into the darkness beyond the lights. He was waiting for Tino.

Naftali’s men worked quickly. The crates of weapons, greased in creosote, were loaded in the holds on a waterproof tarp; the tarpaulin’s ends were tucked down and the holds half filled with sixteen-pound blocks of ice. Within an hour of tying up, the
Cloud
was nearly ready to get under way again.

In other circumstances, Negus would have kept a close eye on the loading, but on this night he let the dockers go about their work unsupervised. His attention was fixed on the unlighted road that led to the pier. Across the bay, the lights of an oil refinery glowed like the towers of a phantom city. Slightly above them, on a cactus-covered hillside deep in darkness, were the dim, scattered lights of Serrano
Town. A wall of barbed fencing and thorny acacia divided Naftali’s marina from the desert wilderness outside.

The dirt road that led to the pier was blocked by two Dodge trucks parked head to head across it; fifty yards beyond them was a steel hut lit by a single naked bulb over its doorway. A man with a holstered pistol stood under the light watching the loading operation. Negus cursed and went into the cockpit.

“I reckon he’s not coming,” Negus said.

Mrs. Callahan was stocking the galley shelves; Callahan himself was bent over his charts.

“And what does that mean?” Deedee Callahan asked.

“He never done this before,” Negus said.

Callahan said nothing.

“Listen,” Negus said, leaning on Callahan’s chart table. “Put it together, man. We’ve got this punk off the coast on our hands. Then Tino goes over and he doesn’t come back.”

“What are you suggesting?” Callahan asked. “That the kid did away with him?”

“By Christ, I wish I knew. But all of a sudden Tino’s gone and he doesn’t come back. Either he’s in something he can’t get out of—or else he thinks the deal’s queer and he’s pulling out.”

“Wouldn’t he have let you know?” Deedee asked.

“Hell, I’d have thought so. Maybe he wasn’t able.” Negus turned from the chart table and looked out through the windshield at the dark water. “It’s always number one first in this business. That’s the rule.”

Callahan kept his eyes on the chart, not answering.

When the fueling was done, Pablo took a brief turn at loading crates. He, too, was watching the dark road that led to the pier, thinking of the room in the Hollandia Hotel where the wind chime would be sounding faintly on the light breeze. From the pilothouse he heard Negus’ rasping petulant drawl. As he stepped onto the dock, he noticed that the armed man beside the shed had turned to look down the road, and that far in the distance along it was a flickering, wavering light. Pablo glanced over his shoulder at the pilothouse and jogged toward the shed.

“What’s up?” he asked the guard.

The guard looked at him, shrugged and looked down the road again.

As the light drew closer, Pablo saw that it was the night light of a bicycle; a tall islander wearing a mack’s violet platform shoes was pumping it along the sand-and-shell track. He pulled up beside the iron shed and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He and the man who stood by the shed spoke together in Papamiento. The rider held a manila envelope in his hand.

“Boy come up from town,” the guard told Pablo. “Got a letter for Mr. Negus.”

Pablo turned around and saw that the bulk of the iron shed stood between him and the
Cloud
’s bridge.

“I’ll take it,” he said.

“You Mistuh Negus?”

“That’s right,” Pablo said. “Just give it here.”

The man with the bicycle spoke again. He, too, wore a pistol on a web belt around his waist.

“This man say the boy come from the city. Twenny mile. Got to give him sometink.”

Pablo reached into his pocket for a handful of island bills. Gulden. He put a wad of them into the rider’s hand. He had no idea of how much they might amount to; they turned out to be enough.