The Perfidious Parrot (23 page)

The other demon was smiling too, offering another tasty can, rivulets of thawing dew running down its gleaming sides. “Proast,” the other demon said.

Mickey, sipping from the can, peering through a dirty window, saw an orange glow through the twisted fig tree’s roots outside. Sunrise? Demons double in the early morning, but the window faced west. Maybe the intruders were regularly human. Repo men? But he owed no money on his car and owned nothing else. He realized he had slept all day. Pictures put themselves together in his slowly booting-up brain. Nasty Nick. Female chests. Nasty Nick’s partner, Bad Baldy. Showing Mickey the door. Things hadn’t gone too well. He focused on his visitors, who were filling up most of the spare room in the tiny camper. Two almost identical short men in clean jeans, polished half-high boots, ironed shirts, new-looking baseball hats with the same text (“Sounds like bullshit to me”) were
smiling and emitting the weird sounding vowels that were part of their speech. Mickey got up slowly, smiling too, as if welcoming the unknown parties. He touched one. Yes. Solid.

“Hi,” one visitor said. “You are Mickey? Show us girlie bar? Hello? Eat somezing first? Stone kreps?”

“Fried fishes?” the other visitor asked. “Squid soup?”

Mickey, although mostly living on alcohol now, still ate sometimes and seafood seemed like a good idea. “Who …” he croaked, rubbing his throat, “… 
are
you?”

“Vriends,” both short men said simultaneously. They introduced themselves. Cornelius offered a cigarette protruding from a crumpled blue pack. “French, very koot.” Fernandus flicked his lighter.

Mickey inhaled deeply, then coughed. His friends patted his back affectionately. The sudden and powerful intake of nicotine cleared Mickey’s brain. Mickey sucked more smoke from the black smoldering tobacco. “Yes, good.” He put on his jeans and T-shirt. “You do have money, have you?”

“Plentie of munnie,” Cornelius said. “We haf,” Fernandus said. They showed handfuls of bills, twenties and fifties. “Enuf?”

Mickey thought so. Taking a cold shower outside helped to clear his brain further. It produced a theory that would explain the two little men who were now sitting on the steps of the camper, slapping at mosquitos, blowing smoke at flies. “You’re from a ship?” Mickey asked. “Crew? Someone gave you my name and address? I’m to be your guide?”

“Sure,” Cornelius said, smiling. “Datsit,” Fernandus said, “cruise ship. The
Statendam
.”

“Pursers,” Cornelius said. “Smuggled dope. Made munnie. Now spend it. You show where. Girlies.”

“First eat fishes,” Fernandus said.

The three ate in a garden restaurant, specializing in seafood, off Whitehead Street. No liquor was served but Cornelius and Fernandus had dropped six-packs into Mickey’s trunk and now retrieved them. Broiled fresh snapper came within an oval of lemon slices, stone crab was served with its own hot sauce, the frozen lemon pie with freshly whipped cream. “Ahhhhh,” the foreigners kept saying, “Koot.” They also kept raising their cans. “Proast.”

“Proast,” Mickey toasted. This was all all right. Lady Luck had shown up again to repay him for expert services rendered. His tolerance for alcohol had gone down steeply lately and even though he hadn’t had more than four of five beers Mickey was drunk. He was telling his sympathetic hosts about the beautiful and pure Christina, who had once shared his camper. How this good woman had been seduced by the island’s worst pimp. How Nasty Nick made the innocent Christina work in a bad place, The Perfidious Parrot. How he couldn’t visit Christina there anymore. His audience listened spellbound. “Main Chott,” Cornelius growled. Fernandus merely gasped. How could such injustice be? It could, Mickey assured them. Mickey picked a frangipani flower off a bush next to his chair, compared the white flower to his beloved Christina, made his hosts smell her subtle fragrance, then scowled, then crushed the flower. “Nasty Nick did that.”

“Say no more,” the avenging spirits told their protegée. They paid the bill, leaving the smiling waitress with a large
tip. They hopped into Mickey’s car. The chariot, with Mickey at the wheel, roared off.

Not ten minutes later, after speeding through red lights, across sidewalks, parks and parking lots, careening on the wrong sides of streets, its horn blaring, its driver and passengers shouting, the Chevy had traversed the city, and slid sideways across The Perfidious Parrot’s parking lot, where it braked abruptly. Doorman Nasty Nick was hit by a shower of crushed oyster shells, plowed up by the Chevy’s wheels.

“That’s him?” Karate asked Mickey.

“He’s mine,” Mickey screamed but the two Dutchmen, standing on the car’s back seat had jumped out of the car and assaulted their temporarily blinded opponent before Mickey had even opened his door. Karate went for Nick’s head, Ketchup for Nick’s knees. The victim had been a semiprofessional boxer and was ready to throw some punches but his attention was distracted by a new threat looming up. A tall hooded human shape, riding a pink bicycle, entered the scene via a sidewalk and now circled Nick. De Gier, wearing a black cape with glowing bones painted on it, pulled off his hood. A skull grinned, deep-set red eyes glowed from ivory sockets.

“What …?” Nasty Nick screamed before Karate hit him on the temple and Ketchup pummeled him under the belt. Mickey, professionally trained to take pleasure in painful destruction, kicked Nick between the legs.

Mickey, delirious with alcohol and rage, took the cyclist for his own wake-up demon, arriving late. He waved at the spook and ran inside, following his mates who had already rushed into the nightclub’s hall. Bad Baldy, Nasty Nick’s partner, a huge man, backed by a muscular wide-shouldered bouncer, blocked
the way. Baldy was about to reach for a shotgun hidden behind a counter. Ketchup whistled on his fingers and Karate pointed at something above Baldy’s head. The big man looked at the hall’s ceiling. Ketchup jumped and slid across the counter, swiveling as he moved. His feet kicked Bad Baldy in the belly. Baldy slumped forward. Mickey’s clasped hands thumped Baldy’s shaven skull. Karate grabbed the shotgun, hit the remaining bouncer on the chin with its butt, aimed the weapon at the ceiling and fired both barrels. Then the three attackers invaded the main room. The DJ, another big man, joined the melee while the raucous rock music kept playing and women kept stripping and contorting their bodies. Some clients joined the intruders, others chose to assist the DJ. Baldy reappeared. Mickey caught a flying chair and broke it on the big man’s head. Baldy went down again.

“CHRISTINA!” Mickey shouted. The name became a battle-cry. Christina, a petite redhead who was trying to leave through a broken window, was pulled back by the legs by Mickey. She had no desire to be saved but was picked up anyway, bundled in a torn-down curtain and carried outside. A falling candle set a tablecloth on fire and soon flames were licking at the walls, igniting wooden furniture, crackling along the seams between dry floor boards.

While the building burned Ketchup and Karate made sure the still defensive Christina was tied up in Mickey’s backseat. Passing cars, attracted by the fire, drove onto the parking lot. Other cars were frantically trying to leave. Sirens were heard in the distance. Ketchup and Karate directed traffic so that the Chevy could get away. The two little men stepped into shadows and disappeared. The spooky cyclist was long gone.

*   *   *

Newspaper cuttings, faxed by Sergeant Ramona Symonds to Rinus de Gier c/o
The Old Rum House
in St. Eustatius, Netherlands Antilles:

Cutting # 1 (
Key West Police
Daily Report)

St. Eustatius, one of the three northern Netherlands Antilles, is barely six miles long and two miles across. Facing Oranjestad, St. Eustatius’s capital and port, a hamlet with some few hundred inhabitants, the
Admiraal Rodney
had dropped her anchor and swayed quietly on a calm sea.

Grijpstra and Carl Ambagt, aboard the
Rodney
’s sloop, were being rowed ashore. De Gier waved at them from the balcony of his second story hotel room. The Old Rum House, built centuries ago from the island’s sandstone and local lumber, topped by roofs of imported Dutch tiles, stood on a cliff commanding views of the ocean and neighboring islands. The commissaris and the skipper watched what was going on from the
Rodney
’s sundeck. Ambagt Senior was on his second sherry (“Laying out my daily schedule in an orderly fashion,” he had just said), the commissaris was on his first double espresso. The skipper was spilling sherry on a freshly laundered admiral’s uniform, the commissaris’s shantung suit was crumpled from its
many ocean splashings. A folded face towel placed inside his pith helmet by the ever-thoughtful servant kept it from sagging over the commissaris’s eyes.

“Looks like a little bit of heaven,” the commissaris said, pointing his cane at St. Eustatius.

Skipper Peter snorted. “For rugheads only.” His hand swept in a halfcircle indicating the entire crescent of the Antilles. “You know what is out here? Nothing but nasty niggers.” The skipper looked at the island morosely. “There, on ‘Statia’ as they call it, is a hotel on the other side, called
Beachcastle
or somesuch. Me and Carl stayed there some years back and we were robbed.”

“By black people?” The commissaris shook his head. “How unfortunate. At gun point?”

“Burglars,” Skipper Peter barked.

“You caught the criminals in the act?”

Skipper Peter said he had not, but his luggage was stolen.

The commissaris looked stern. “So how do you know the culprits were black?”

Ambagt Senior grimaced. “Carl and I had been out for a walk, or been trying to. There is a lot of litter piled up on the beach here. We were worn out by having to step over broken buckets, torn ropes, bottles and what have you and were looking forward to a rest, but back in our room all our clothes and gear were gone.” Skipper Peter mimed the sad surprise of that fateful moment. “Your stuff is gone. You ever had that happen to you? Makes you feel naked?”

The commissaris said yes. Luggage fails to arrive at airports. Kind of pleasant. You don’t have to carry what isn’t there. Lightening of the daily load. Less to worry about.

“Yes,” Ambagt Senior said sadly. “Worry. Most annoying. Objects change into empty space. Nothing to hold on to. But they had left us something, my new camera, a thirty-five millimeter Nikon. The damn thing sat there, staring at us from the table.”

“Your burglars had no interest in photography?” the commissaris suggested.

“Not that so much,” the skipper said. “There was film in the camera which I had developed much later. There were our own snapshots and two clear pictures of big black backsides.”