Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (11 page)

A semitropical island paradise, the brochures had said. A splendid solitude, for those who seek it. A brilliant new sanctuary for sport. Deep sea fishing… swimming in warm clear waters… thinking long, quiet thoughts as you stroll the beach at evening. Sharpening your golf game.

We landed. “Come on,” I said to Sergeant Trotter in sudden, pleasurable anticipation, and undoing my seat belt, strode along and climbed down into the hot, scented sunshine.

You see? Insidiously, the banana bird and the palm tree were already there, invisible in my subconscious. Merely waiting to integrate.

THE AIRPORT AT GREAT HARBOUR CAY is neat, ornamental, and small, with palm trees, flower beds and an attractive low bungalow with a waterfall tinkling beside it, labeled
h. m. customs and immigration
. A row of Mini-Mokes, a long green French bus, and a London taxi stood below the control tower, which was a picturesque open-plan affair consisting of a cone cedar-tiled roof set on stilts. A row of flags flapped slowly in a light breeze. A young Negro in a gray jacket with a jockey cap balanced on the flat of his nose said, “Doctor MacRannoch, ma’am? Sir Bartholomew sent me to meet you. Ain’t you got no more luggage, Doctor MacRannoch?”

That was when I discovered my suitcase was missing. It took half an hour to check that it wasn’t on board, and that it hadn’t been mixed up with someone else’s. Sergeant Trotter, his efficiency called into question, swore that he had put it into the hold himself at Nassau. It wasn’t there. Someone had taken it off.

Since he showed signs of holding an immediate army inquiry, I said good-bye to Trotter and sent him off to pick up his boat for Crab Island. I elicited fresh assurances that my suitcase would be found and forthwith forwarded. I then got inside Sir Bartholomew’s tropical Fiat beside my purse, my medical bag, and my golf clubs, and was driven to Sir Bartholomew’s house.

Great Harbour Cay is an island just over seven miles long and less than two miles across, then undergoing transformation into a luxurious international playground for tropical sport, whose center was a private proprietary club named Tamboo. Or so the Edgecombes had graphically told me.

As we left the airport behind us and roared up the rough white shore road, you could indeed see what men and machinery were fashioning from a tropical patchwork of white beach and water and mangrove swamp, set with pine and palmetto brush, whose only life had been the decayed native village of Bullock’s Harbour with its primitive school and post office and church.

The roads were there, broad, straight and unsurfaced, scoring through the green jungle: Great Harbour Drive, Royal Palm Drive, Fairway Road. The beach was there, on our right: turquoise sea and dazzling sand, and a beach club, smothered in coconut palms and hibiscus, with some villas buried in flowers beside it.

But best of all, the golf course was there,
caution carts crossing
, said the notices, as we swept by empty crossroads with the sun beating down on our blue canvas canopy and the house-boy’s black ringed hands moving the wheel. And on either side, winding in and out to the sea, one caught glimpses of flags and fairways and manicured greens, of high, close-cropped trees and bunkers and weathered boards, swinging on chains: Hole No. 4, 400 yards, Par 4, Handicap 5.

To hell with my suitcase, I thought. At least my golf clubs were all right.

The Edgecombes’ house overlooked one of the fairways and was reached by road from the rising waste ground behind. This elevation I found unexpected. No one would describe Great Harbour Cay as a mountain. But it hadn’t the fiberless English flatness of most of the rest of the seven hundred “Friendly Tropical Islands.” Denise Edgecombe stood at the roadside to welcome me. She was gracious.

That was all right. I replied in the same key and we all went in, discussing the plight of my suitcase. “Let’s see what I have that will fit you,” said Lady Edgecombe. She was, I would guess, at least four inches taller than I was. She was wearing a pair of striped trousers with a black linen top and a lot of beads.

I said, “Don’t worry. It’ll turn up. Or if not, there’s probably a shop on the island.”

“There isn’t,” said Lady Edgecombe. She said it as if she were making a point of it, and I realized that we were at the door of the sitting room and that Sir Bartholomew was sitting in an easy chair just inside. “Of course, there’s the pro’s shop,” she added. “But we find things there awfully expensive.” She pushed open the door.

Like the few other houses I’d noticed, this one appeared built on stilts, in the form of a cluster of wood-clad rondettes, with a second level slung half down the hillside. The octagonal roofs, weathered silver, looked like a group of cockleshells left on a beach. A sun balcony, red and yellow with potted flowers and creepers, ran around the whole golf course side of the villa, but lay at present in shade; it must be, I supposed, at least a quarter to six. Denise said, “She’s lost her suitcase. Give her a drink, will you, Bart darling? I must go and change. We’re due at the clubhouse at seven. That’s your room.” She pointed to where the houseboy was already disappearing with my clubs and my bags, smiled cursorily, and disappeared. I was right. I was not Denise’s most-wanted guest.

Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe got up and patted a seat.

“You’ve done a day’s work. You must be tired. Come and sit down,” he said. “It’s good to see you. And I am sorry about your suitcase. What happened?”

He looked better. He looked, in fact, more relaxed than at any time I had seen him, with what one could recognize as authority back in his voice, and efficiency in his movements and manner. I said, “It got mislaid in Nassau. It doesn’t matter: they’ll send it. I’m glad to see you looking so well… No tomato juice, thank you. A Coca-Cola, perhaps?” Even in Loch Rannoch, we do not push things to extremes.

A moment later, standing over me with the drinks: “I shouldn’t have asked you to come,” he said abruptly. He sat down beside me. “Did you know it was Johnson’s idea?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I thought he’d washed his hands of us both.”

“Do you think he would?” said Edgecombe. And a moment later, “You think you know him, perhaps. But…”

“ ‘Inside that elegantly simple body lurks a mountain goat of a car’?” I quoted.

He betrayed no surprise. Perhaps he had smelled the Bossa Nova. “Let’s say that wearing those bifocal glasses is a personalized army assault vehicle with amphibian characteristics,” he said. “He possesses both brains and tenacity, which is why he is my superior officer. All I have is an amiable nature.” And he smiled at me and drank his martini.

“Why not retire fully, then?” I said. “If you don’t enjoy it? Or did you, before all this started?”

He took out a gold cigarette case, offered me one, and took one himself. “In a way,” he said. “You’re in the center. You hold all the strings. You send in your reports and the people at the top decide what’s to be done, and you see there’s no trouble when they send men to do it. It’s subtle, and interesting, and I never minded an element of danger. But this… this is something different.”

“This is murder,” I said. “Do you have a bodyguard?”

He lit his cigarette and drew on it before answering. “The staff is my own,” he said. “The boy you saw. One or two others. But I can hardly go about in an armored car. The very essence of this job is ordinariness. And mobility.”

“Then why choose a house here?” I said.

His eyes stayed for a moment on the door through which Denise had gone; then he turned and smiled at me. “Why not? You know I have a nominal job here. We’re only beginning. We have some permanent residents but most of the people who fly over are staying a week or a fortnight to look over property, to discuss buying, to try out the golf course. The company officials look after their business requirements. Denise and I come in on the social side. We live here for very little; we eat at the golf clubhouse. And no one minds if I move backward and forward to Nassau or Abaco or Miami. I still have some small business interests: investments to look after. And Great Harbour Cay is central to almost everywhere. Better than Nassau.”

“And Lady Edgecombe likes the social life,” I said.

He tapped the ash off his cigarette. “In season,” he said. “It gets a bit boring in the heat, but then so do all the Bahamas. I send her away in the summer. She likes to go to the States.”

“She doesn’t know what you do?” I asked.

He shook his head. “And she won’t know. I don’t want Denise becoming a target for our opponents, whoever they may be.” He looked at his watch. “Lord. Look, I don’t want to rush you, but we thought you might like to meet some of the more public company on the island. They all foregather at the golf clubhouse as a rule for drinks before dinner. Would you like to freshen up and we’ll take you?”

I looked down at my extraordinary uncreased blue silk. “Will this do?”

He grinned. “Of course it will. Suits you down to the ground.”

Which was one thing it certainly did not do. I got to my feet slowly. “Sir Bartholomew…”

“Bart. Please. If I may call you Beltanno?”

The thought of Denise calling me Beltanno flitted distastefully over my mind. But I couldn’t very well say, “
Doctor
MacRannoch, if you please.”

“Not at all,” I said. “I was about to observe. Surely the need for secrecy has now gone? Someone knows who you are. How can you possibly carry on with any form of classified work now?”

He took my empty glass from me, and stood viewing the bottom. “You see,” he said, “it entirely depends, doesn’t it, on who is trying to kill me. If it’s an enemy agent, then certainly my cover is blown, and I shall be out of work. But a man with a private grudge might be a different matter. Or so Johnson says. He also says, bless his fully automated positive thinking, that it would be a pity to throw overboard all my skills and experience until we have proof either way.”

“And I am to help you get your proof?” I said.

He stared at me. “That hasn’t been said. But whatever happens, Johnson’s cover mustn’t be broken.”

“I know. It nearly cost him two thousand dollars to keep it in Nassau,” I remarked.

Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe grinned, and held open my door. “Beltanno, my dear. He’s a top man. He probably gets that a week in expenses,” he said. “You keep in with my friend Johnson. He’s worth knowing, on several counts.”

It was not advice I cared for. In fact I found my view of Johnson Johnson had hardened a good deal, when out of his company. It was even possible that I had suffered some sort of hypnosis from those confusing bifocals, allied to the blow on my head. I shut the door, and taking off the wig, felt the wound on my scalp with exploring fingers. It was doing all right. So was I, I decided. I scrubbed up, redressed, and checked that the revolver was still in my bag. Then I went out to join Denise and Bart Edgecombe.

The sunset was of course quite spectacular: it dropped slowly into its own copper reflection, as we drove southwest to the clubhouse called Tamboo. I realized then what a lot of the island I still had to visit. The west side was greener and lusher than the east, and along the fairways of the golf course and beyond and behind were a great many villas, discreetly shielded by palm trees, with lights from veiled windows beginning to glow in the dusk.

“The yachting marina’s over there,” said Sir Bartholomew. “And the new waterfront houses, where you can park your boat on your doorstep. But just the prototype so far, of course. They’re still pile-driving the quayside. We’ll show you all that tomorrow.”

The Tamboo golf clubhouse had a deep, grottolike entrance in a façade of natural stone. Above one could see a terrace, and a pair of architectural rooftops like twin wedges of Gruyère cheese. Inside it was cool and airy, with a haze of greenery encased in rope baskets, and a pink unpolished brick floor. Yellow and red hibiscus blossoms lay on a glass table surrounded by tall wicker chairs.

Edgecombe had gone to sign me in at the long counter. It had a register and a radio telephone set lying on it. A thought struck me, and I strolled along after him.

A tall figure uncoiled from behind one of the high-backed Italian chairs and trod softly over beside me. “If you’re looking for Mr. T. K. MacRannoch,” said Wallace Brady blandly, “I’ve located him for you. And he’s right here.”

And from the edge of the neighboring armchair, peeping and smiling, I saw the Japanese golfer, the man I had last seen in that foursome behind me on Paradise Island.

“Oh,” I said.

“He likes to be called Mr. Tiko. The other name is a bit of a mouthful,” Brady said. “You know the last time I met you, we were in the middle of a conflagration in the Bamboo Conch Club? Then you all rushed out the door like you were crazy, and I never even knew what had happened until Sir Bart here turned up today and told me. Your friends sure carry a lot of money around.” His eyes, which had been struggling to keep off my hair, now candidly roved around and examined it. “Say,” he said. “Am I allowed to say I think it’s great?”

So Edgecombe hadn’t told him about the incident in Miami. I was thankful for his discretion, if irritated with Wallace Brady’s lack of it. “Thank you,” I said. “And how is the Crab Island bridge coming along?”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, so the Begum told you about that? It’s my spare-time baby, you know. The big job’s over here, or will be till it’s finished, but I couldn’t resist having a crack at that little problem. I think she’ll do.”

“Is it finished?” I said.

He was surprised. “Hellfire, it takes a couple of weeks to fling these things together,” he said. “Didn’t you see it as you flew over?”

I made a mental resolution to eschew Bossa Novas and try something else. “Then how did my father travel to Crab Island?” I asked. I assumed without question that the whole island had taken part, willy-nilly, in the transmission of James Ulric from Great Harbour Cay to Crab Island. He would make certain they did.

“By boat,” said Wallace Brady. He hesitated. “Your father is certainly nervous of water.”

“He isn’t nervous of water,” I said sharply. “He’s just sick.”

“He was,” said Brady. “In fact, we got the nurse to go over with him.”

I knew the company nurse, an admirable person who flew her own four-seater Cherokee aircraft and administered to the health of the island from a spotless mobile clinic down by the airport. She was pretty. “That would stop the trouble,” I said.

“It did. Come and meet Mr. Tiko,” Brady said.

The Edgecombes were waiting for me, so we all got introduced together.

My prospective fiancé was slightly under my height, clean, neat, and possessed of perfect American English. He no longer worked in Tokyo, but with an investment company in New York. From the gold fountain pen, the gold watch, and the gold tie pin, I gathered he was not in any real want. Brady, clearly, had told him nothing about me, beyond my name, which was not all that uncommon, particularly as MacRannochs were presumably ready preparing to gather on Crab Island like flies.