The Tropical Issue (25 page)

Natalie said, ‘It is beautiful. M. le President, you are fortunate. You don’t know, Johnson, how much we’ve all been hoping you’d feel like painting again. Perhaps you managed something on Tobago?’

I sat back from the painting, keeping my face straight, and wondering how he would take his promotion to Christian-name status.

He didn’t seem to notice it. He said, ‘I’ve got a sketch block on board, but Ferdy’s a hard task-master. I didn’t get a lot done.’

He turned obligingly to the President. ‘Mr Braithwaite, the photographer, is compiling a book of flower portraits. I can imagine how much he will find to enjoy on your beautiful island.’

Sexual strategy, I noticed, wasn’t mentioned. He didn’t look at Natalie, either.

If you knew Natalie, you could see her working on her self-control. But her voice, when it came out, was quite normal.

‘I was expecting Ferdy here to meet me,’ she remarked. ‘To visit St Pierre and La Pagerie. He didn’t mention his plans?’

If you believed Johnson, neither Ferdy nor his botanist pal Dr Thomassen had mentioned their plans. Johnson had left them on Tobago, he said, still extremely busy.

‘What a pity,’ Natalie said. ‘In that case, I see I shall have to deal with Martinique on my own. I suppose it is best to get to these places by car?’

‘One may go by sea,’ the President said. ‘Although, as you know, I have a car and a guide for Madame, whenever she cares to leave.’

‘I’d take the car,’ Johnson said. ‘You’ll enjoy the drive to St Pierre. Do that first, and catch the rainforest on your way back to La Pagerie. Which is really worth seeing. Museum. Church where Josephine was christened, 1765. Her cradle. Famous love letter to her from Napoleon. Sugar mill, ruins of. Come back and have dinner on board. Miss Geddes going with you?’

The President clasped his hands. ‘Miss Geddes? Ah!’

Natalie raised her eyebrows.

The President said, ‘This car I have, it will take yourself and the guide, who is a driver. A third is not so comfortable.’

The hair. I could see Natalie working out why I’d been censored, and agreeing.

‘But that is quite all right,’ she said. ‘I have no need of Miss Geddes on this trip. Rita, the cameras?’

Johnson and I left her there, putting the President through his paces over the film while the little car, and the guide, waited patiently.

They must have had quite a job to find a car so small it wouldn’t take three. As I walked out into the sun with the Owner, I remembered the President’s glance at my hair. He hadn’t been surprised.

I said, ‘Well, what else did you bloody tell the Tourist Department? That I was on coke and laid beach boys for money?’

‘Roughly,’ said Johnson. ‘I wanted a chat. If I can find Lenny, we can go out to
Dolly.’

I pulled myself together and got my brain working.

Of course, Lenny would be here. Lenny and pals had sailed
Dolly
across the Atlantic from Madeira. Lenny and pals, including Raymond.

I said, ‘Is Raymond here?’

‘Mary-had-a-little-lamb country. Raymond is always here,’ Johnson said. ‘At least, at the moment he’s stocking up for Lenny’s rum cocktails. How’s your vodka addiction?’

I was answering him when I found he had disappeared. I looked about and found I was in the middle of a shopping street. You wouldn’t have thought it possible to lose interest in duty-free French scent, but I had. On the other hand, if Johnson had been wearing any, I should have known where to go.

Then he reappeared in a doorway and said, ‘Then what about sours?’ and I followed him, still talking, into a dark, empty space with low music playing somewhere, and planters’ fans twirling miles up in the ceiling, and what seemed to be paintings all over the walls as far up as the eye could see.

A gallery. Naturally. Where a painter sells paintings if he needs a new set of cups for his yacht. I don’t suppose the Nemesis Department throws its money about.

Narcotics.

A dark man sitting behind a desk said something cheerful in French, and Johnson said something cheerful back and made for the stairs talking, apparently to me, about daisies.

As well as paintings, there were sort of rugs hung on the wall, and long bits of net and whiskery rope, all done up in patterns.

He stopped on the stair. ‘Macrame. Knotted sisal. A folk art, now highly fashionable. Wear it, drape it, fish with it, or use it in your chip pan. Raymond, two daisies.’

I should have known. At the top of the stairs was more gallery, and a door leading to a wee office, and inside the office, three people in various attitudes of slump, sitting at a table littered with half-empty glasses and jugs of melting ice and newspapers.

One of them seemed to be a taxi driver, slowly lowering what I hoped was orange juice. Beside him, sure enough, lolled Raymond, his yellow hair all fuzzed in the heat like crimped yak, wearing a safari jacket and shorts over nothing.

His expression when he looked up was relaxed. Then it tightened, as if he was missing his armour. ‘Miss Geddes,’ he said.

‘Where’s Lenny?’ said Johnson.

There was an opened newspaper between me and the third person, who couldn’t therefore be Lenny, especially as the paper was written in French.

The third person, not putting the paper down, said, ‘Oh everybody, listen,’ and began quoting, in French. I got it later, and copied it out.

‘Terry,’ murmura Jacinda, ‘tu ne crois pas qu’il serait possible qu’on se marie avant ton depart . . . un mariage secret, je veux dire? Personne n’aurait besoin de le savoir sauf nous . . . mais je serais . . . je serais ta femme.’

The third person read it all out, over-acting something shocking.

It was a woman. Behind the shaking paper, I couldn’t see her, but I knew her voice. I looked, shocked, at Johnson.

‘Barbara Cartland,’ he offered.

The paper came down and it wasn’t Barbara Cartland. It was the Hon. Maggie, in black Vidal haircut, moon glasses and a tie-top and green pants over nothing.

The Hon. Maggie, who had got herself asked by the Owner to help Lenny sail from Madeira. Lenny, Raymond and pals. Lenny, Raymond, and Maggie, switched from photographers and in hot pursuit of bums in bifocal glasses.

A West Indian Rum Daisy consists of gomme syrup, curacao, lemon juice, soda water, and a hell of a lot of rum.

I had two, and sat sulking while Maggie read out all our horoscopes. I was Taureau and Johnson was Poisson, which he sure bloody was.

I was still sulking when Raymond and Maggie went off with the driver to buy extra food for Natalie’s dinner party. The taxi, when I looked into it, was full already with what they had bought that morning, consisting mainly of rum and a crate, I bet, of French duty-free perfume.

I had lost interest in Johnson. He was a block ahead, talking about volcanoes, when he noticed I wasn’t with him. I had almost got into Albert’s when he got back to me and wheeled me round. He said, ‘What’s your favourite scent?’

I haven’t got one, but I know what the most expensive one is. I told him.

‘Got it on board,’ he said. ‘Present from Bessie. Come on. Policy talks.’

I didn’t believe him, but I trailed beside him, receiving a lecture on eruptions, all the way to the sea. It was still boiling hot and his glasses, I was glad to see, were steamed up.

Some charter company people, who seemed to be pals of his, had whistled Lenny over from
Dolly,
and the white Avenger launch I remembered so well was floating at their dock.
Dolly’s
other boat was tied up beside it, waiting for what Johnson referred to as the Rum Babas.

He could, of course, afford to be calm about Maggie, considering Raymond’s particular leanings. He was apparently calm about the taxi driver as well.

Lenny handed me into the launch and out of it like a picket letting somebody through for his hankie. As I got shown to a cabin to tidy up, I heard Johnson say, ‘Absolutely no whisky, boss. Miss Geddes will vouch for me.’

Although it didn’t show, he’d had one daisy more than I’d had. I remembered the empty chloride and Lady Emerson’s house. If he had a problem, it was none of my business. My business was to pin Kim-Jim’s murder on Roger van Diemen, without getting let down by drunks.

The cabin was finely fitted and fresh and comfortable, and designed by the same hand that painted that picture. Before I left it, Lenny tapped on the door and brought in, with Mr Johnson’s compliments, a thing like an Easter Egg containing about fifty quids’ worth of the scent I had mentioned.

I looked at it, waiting for the rabbit or ten knotted handkerchiefs but it stayed looking like fifty quids’ worth of perfume. Lenny, breathing over me, undamped his teeth again and snarled,
‘And,
Miss Geddes, if I can just mention . . .’

I wasn’t surprised. I know when aggro is coming. I stared at him. I don’t believe Ferdy when he says my hair counterattacks like a cockatoo’s, but I felt it begin to stand up.

But whatever Lenny was going to mention, it never came. Johnson called his name once, quite nicely, from the saloon, but with a note behind it that sent Lenny’s feet to the door, never mind lifting his hair.

I got to the saloon myself, and accepted a seat on the same handsome settee that I’d sat on in my bathing-suit in Madeira, and remarked that the perfume was great.

I didn’t know what else to do. A Gay Yacht loaded with bottles of all known makes of perfume is something again.

‘Never without it,’ said Johnson. ‘Comes in handy as bribes for their girlfriends and mothers. Will a fish salad do? Raymond and Maggie are eating on shore.’

A mind-reader is something else also. Raymond and Maggie.

‘I wish,’ said Johnson, ‘that you’d let me call you Rita. My name, unfortunately, is just Johnson.’

He took a look at my expression and added cheerfully, ‘I’m sorry. Awkward to have the same wavelength. But useful at times. Let’s have a glass of wine, to please Lenny, and talk about Roger van Diemen.’

He had hauled off his tie, and slung his jacket aside. His arms were brown, and his throat inside his shirt. We weren’t on the same wavelength really. I’m not that much of a fool. He was clever. And my thoughts are easy to read.

A great team. An open book and a lush.

And he read me thinking that, too. I saw him.

We had our meal outside, under the awning, while the yacht rocked to her anchor and the sunlit water sent dazzling lights everywhere.

We talked for thirty minutes. Or Johnson talked, while I had two helpings of cold crab with palm heart salad, and fresh pineapple with cream, and coffee with Poorer and Fewer, and two glasses of wine.

What he said made me thankful that Natalie hadn’t delayed our trip any longer.

His tour of Coombe’s finished and his investigation complete, Roger van Diemen was now in Barbados.

The signs were that his report was in the hands of his boss. And the chances were that the next thing that would happen would be the meeting to launch the new dope ring.

Eating, I kept my eyes down and my thoughts, I hoped, to myself.

Barbados. An English-speaking island, not a French one, and about a hundred miles or more to the south. Natalie and I had slept there last night, after the long flight from London. We had slept there, and Roger van Diemen was somewhere on the same island.

Johnson said, ‘So what I
don’t
want you to do, is go after Roger yourself. He’ll know I’m around, and you’re around in the area, but if we show no special interest, he’ll keep out of our way.

‘This time, I’m sure he won’t trouble you, and I don’t think he’ll be anxious to dash from the islands. If he moves, it will be because he’s been told where to go for the meeting.

‘My guess,’ said Johnson, ‘is that the people he’s working for will meet him where he is, in Barbados. It’s the busiest island, with a huge through-put of casual traffic. And a nuclear bomb could go off in Bridgetown without anyone hearing, never mind noticing, once Caurry-fista has started.’

‘Caurry-fista,’ I repeated. Barbados is full of descended Scots. I didn’t know they had left-handed processions.

‘Rita.
Carifesta
,’ said Johnson. ‘The Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts. A two-week regular binge of Euro-Creole culture shared by thirty countries in and around the Caribbean, and hosted this year by Barbados.

‘Jazz and folk music. Books and poetry and handicrafts. Drama, ballet, films and cooking. Carnival. Fighting. There will be syringes in every gutter and everyone will be bananas. Roger and his pals will hold their billion-dollar meeting, and we shall tape it.’

The Lone Ranger and Tonto. ‘You and me?’ I said. He’d had more wine than I thought.

‘Not if I can help it,’ he said. ‘That stuff you’ve brought is meant to keep you out of trouble, not get you into it. You did collect it?’

I nodded. He meant my fishing-tackle case, which was sitting in the Bakoua Beach Hotel with a Bakoua straw hat on top of it.

I don’t know how he got the wavelength that time, but he suddenly said, ‘By the way. What colour
is
your hair under that dye?’

I thought everyone knew. ‘White,’ I said. Naturally.

‘Naturally,’ he said. He had picked an expensive pipe out of a rack of expensive pipes and was filling it. ‘This doesn’t worry you? Or sailing?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘On the film I did with Kim-Jim, everyone was sick except me. You didn’t say what happens after the meeting. You bug it, you indemnify Roger van Diemen and his boss, and you arrest them?’

‘Identify,’ Johnson said automatically. The pipe had caught, and he was shaking the match out.

‘Well now, that’s another matter. Remember Charlie Chan. The Thin Man. Fu Manchu, come to that. To arrest people, you need evidence. To catch them actually handling some dope would be nice. But whether we pull it off all in one move or not, it’ll be simple once we know who we’re dealing with.’

There was too much smoke about. I didn’t trust it. I said, ‘Would they buy dope so soon? Before the Coombe scheme has started?’

‘If it’s on offer. They’ll have some other outlets. They’ll need a cash flow to set this up as well. A worldwide network of fruit- and drug-stores takes some financing,’ said Johnson.