Operation Manhunt

by Christopher Nicole

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Jonathan snapped. So far he had not made up his mind how this situation should be treated, but he knew he could not afford to become involved with the police; most of his Guernsey troubles had started when the law had become interested in his activities. His sandals had already come off, and now he placed his foot against the girl and pushed; she gave a gasp and fell over, rolling down several steps before she could check herself. Crater still knelt above him, and he clasped his hands together to bring them down on Jonathan’s neck, but Jonathan struck first, closing his fist and driving it into Crater’s stomach. The photographer gasped, and fell against the wall. Jonathan reached his feet, checked as the bell rang downstairs. For a moment the three of them gazed at one another, their mutual desire for privacy communicating itself across the silence. Then Crater nodded, and the girl rose to her feet and straightened her dress. She gave Jonathan an anxious glance, put a hand up to her untidy hair, and went downstairs.

  “Why, Mrs. Saunders,” she said enthusiastically. “You’ve come for those prints. I really must apologize for my appearance. Tom was doing a special shot for a magazine.”

  Crater jerked his head at the studio, went inside. The room was in darkness, and Jonathan remained in the doorway until the light came on. Crater still breathed heavily from the blow in the stomach. He peered at himself in a mirror over the basin, washed his face. “So you’re tougher than you look,” he said. “Don’t think you’ll get away with it.”

  “Tell me what I’m getting away with.” Jonathan sat in the one chair the room possessed.

  The girl came in. “I suspect we’ve lost a customer,” she said, and stared at Jonathan. “What gives?”

  “We’ve decided to be civilized,” Jonathan said. “So let’s go back to square one. My name is Jonathan Anders, and you’re Tom Crater. And you?”

  “Linda Boarding.”

  “So now we can identify each other. Now. I’m interested in a photograph which you took a month ago. This makes you interested in me. Why?”

  Crater turned round. “You a policeman, or something?”

  He had to tell them something they would believe. “I work for myself.”

  “Private investigator, eh? Missing persons, maybe.”

  “You’re doing far too well,” Jonathan said.

  “But the idea of the police got him very excited,” Linda pointed out.

  “I get paid by the finished job, not the day,” Jonathan said. “I can’t afford to waste hours explaining things to the cops. Tell me about the photograph.” He took it from his pocket, laid it on the table in front of him.

  “You know that guy?” Crater asked. “The waiter?”

  “I think I do.”

  “And who is he?”

  “Sorry, chum.”

  “Then we’re no further ahead.”

  “I could give you my word that it’s on the up and up.”

  “Big deal.”

  “Which is more than you’ve been able to do for me.”

  “Listen, friend, what I know about this business wouldn’t cover the back of a postage stamp. Except that the more I see of it the less I like it.”

  “Then you want to tell me what you do know and get out. I may be able to cut you in on expenses, if you’ve any information worth having. I’ll be frank with you. My principal produced this photograph, which he took out of some travel magazine, said the waiter looks like a business partner of his who’s disappeared, and employed me to find him. So naturally, having identified the background as Barbados, I start here. And I don’t find much. Except you. So how about it?”

  Crater sighed, glanced at Linda, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me, Tom. I always said a pretty face was going to get you into trouble one day.”

  “Whose pretty face?” Jonathan asked. “Yours?”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere.”

  Crater sighed again. “I guess you’ve figured out that I’m not a Barbadian,” he said. “Actually, I came down here to take some publicity shots for a magazine, oh, three years ago now, and I liked it so much that I stayed. That’s by the by. I was at U.C.L.A. once, and I met this girl, see. Of course, we were only acquaintances. She was a bit out of my class. Geraldine O’Connor. Maybe you’ve heard the name?”

  “O’Connor isn’t exactly unique.”

  “Brian O’Connor is the one I’m talking about. The psychiatrist and neurologist. Ring a bell?”

  “No. Touch wood, I haven’t had to go looking for a head shrinker yet.”

  “Well, you can take my word for it that he used to be the goods. He’s retired now. Gerry is his daughter. Well, like I said, we went out together a couple of times and then I sort of flunked out while she was taking every degree known to man, and we lost touch. So you can imagine my surprise, and pleasure, when she walked in downstairs one day last month. Said she was on the schooner in the bay, and had seen my sign while on a shopping expedition the day before, so she decided to look me up as soon as she got the chance. Well, that was fine. But I might have known she wasn’t looking for me. She had a problem. She’d taken this photograph, see, and she wanted me to find out who the guy was. Not the one in the foreground. That’s Brian O’Connor, her dad. But she timed it just right to catch the waiter looking over his shoulder. I figure she’d been brooding about him since the voyage began, which was a couple of weeks before they put in here, but couldn’t make up her mind to do anything about it until she realized she knew someone in Bridgetown who might be able to help. You with me?”

  “Struggling. You say she told you they’d been at sea for a fortnight when they reached here. Where had they started from?”

  “I never thought to ask her that. But seeing as how it was Gerry, I hawked the print around the newspaper offices here. I made several copies first, and I cut out the waiter, so no one would be able to identify the ship. And guess what, the foreign affairs expert on the local paper gave a long, low whistle and said it was a photograph of some Polish general who disappeared about six months ago. That ring a bell?”

  Jonathan watched himself grinning in the mirror. He thought he did it rather well. “He was having you on.”

  “Then why are you looking for him?”

  “Because he’s taken off and left his business partner carrying the can for some fraudulent deals in London, that’s why. Polish general! Do you really think a Barbadian reporter would be capable of spotting one of those lads from a not-very-good photograph?”

  “Oh, some of these local guys are pretty sharp.”

  Too sharp by far, Jonathan thought. “So what did you do with your information?”

  “Well, I have a little speedboat, so I ran out to the schooner. And here’s the funny part. They wouldn’t let me on board, and while I was arguing with some beefy-looking sailor boy, Gerry herself came on deck. I called out to her, and she gave me a dirty look and walked away. So I pushed off, and that same day the schooner left.”

  “That figures,” Jonathan said. “So what did you do then?”

  “Well, hell, it never occurred to me that something was wrong. Gerry always was kind of a moody girl, and I thought maybe she’d regretted looking me up in the first place. I’m in this business to make money, and my business is yachting shots, mostly. So I sold the print to a magazine, and forgot all about it, until three days ago, this unpleasant-looking customer showed up asking questions about it. And while I was still brooding on this, another unpleasant-looking customer appears and starts asking questions. And what’s more, he goes to the same hotel the other guy was staying at.”

  “I was trying to find out who he was.”

  “So who is he?”

  “He carries a gun, which doesn’t sound so good. As for your girl friend, I don’t know what she and her dad were doing on board that ship, but the fact that she could take a trip ashore here by herself suggests that up to the morning she paid you a visit they were just guests. But if whoever’s running that ship has found out about the photograph, then what
your Gerry’s position is now I wouldn’t care to guess. But I also don’t know what we are going to do about it. That schooner could be anywhere by now.”

  “I’d say she might be around St. Vincent. That’s the next island over.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because that’s where your friend Brown has gone. I checked with the local airline, and they remembered him. If he’s looking for the schooner as well, it seems a fair bet to me that he must have got some kind of a tip.”

  “Thomas Crater, I could begin to like you. Where’s the local airline office?”

  “You going to Kingstown?”

  “On the first available plane.”

  “Then count me in.”

  “What about me?” Linda demanded.

  “You mind the shop, sweetheart. Haven’t you heard, there’s a blow coming? And right now you can nip down and get us two seats on that plane. I feel responsible for that kid.”

  Jonathan sighed. Something else for Craufurd to make remarks about, in due course. But it occurred to him that Tom Crater might be very useful, if only for his muscle.

  CHAPTER 3

  They saw the mountains first, massive, pointed mounds of rock, reaching toward the clouds, brilliant because of the morning sunlight reflected from their lower slopes. Their names were splendidly reminiscent of the West Indies’ multilingual past: Mount St. Andrew, Richmond Peak and Brisbane Peak, between them forming the backbone of the Morne Garu Range; and farthest north, perpetually topped by cloud, pointing at the sky like the loaded cannon that it was, Soufrière itself.

  Soufrière, Jonathan remembered, was French for sulphur, but this volcano, unlike its namesake in St. Lucia, was more than just a sulphur spring, as could be seen from a glance at the beaches which fringed St. Vincent’s coast. The sand was black. It wasn’t really sand at all, but volcanic ash, even after more than sixty years. He had always thought St. Vincent the most beautiful of all the West Indian islands because, unlike Haiti, it could be taken in at a glance, and for the very reason that it lacked the breathtaking lushness of Grenada or Dominica. The drama that had played so large a part in St. Vincent’s history was always evident.

  He strained his eyes. But there were no harbors on the east coast, called, significantly enough, Windward. Behind him there was only Barbados, and that at a distance of nearly a hundred miles. Here the Atlantic rollers pounded ceaselessly. Here the black sand had been softened, after so many years, to a gentle gray.

  The little plane turned left to begin its approach. Crater and Jonathan and one Barbadian were the only passengers, and Jonathan was still wondering if he should not have attempted to drop the American. He had had the night to brood on it, had accepted Crater’s invitation to dine with him and Linda Boarding at a restaurant in Speightstown, had talked about England and listened to them talking about the West Indies, had learned nothing to make him doubt their honesty. He felt fairly sure that Crater accepted the idea that he was a private investigator hunting for an absconding financier; the photographer’s sole interest was in Geraldine O’Connor, and now he saw himself as a knight errant attempting to rescue his damsel from the clutches of … what? He was disturbed not only by the unseen presence of the armed Mr. Brown; it was the sinister implications which seemed to surround the ship itself. Craufurd’s theory that Pobrenski, having gotten as far as the West Indies by some unknown method of transport, had decided to lie low and survey the general situation before approaching any Western government for asylum, fitted quite well with an inquisitive girl trying to find out something about an unusual steward. It did not fit the sudden departure of the Sidewinder after Geraldine O’Connor’s attempts at investigation. It began to look very much as if the Polish general, while preferring to pose as a steward, had equipped himself with a ship which would take him anywhere in the world whenever he felt like it, and had surrounded himself with a crew capable of acting as his bodyguard.

  But if that were true, why take the risk of having passengers on board at all? Especially someone apparently as well known as Brian O’Connor?

  He wished there was some way of passing on what information he had been able to glean, and of reassessing the situation. But Craufurd had allowed him but a single code word, “Eureka,” which would mean that the general had been found, and was willing to visit England; until that moment, contact was forbidden. Meanwhile, he had other problems. His hotel in Worthing had not been very pleased at his checking out the day after he had arrived, and there had been no time to book rooms in Kingstown. His funds were beginning to look a bit meager. Indman’s friend James Bond had never seemed to have the problem of trailing someone from island to island on what Craufurd considered adequate traveling expenses. But wiring for additional funds required him to sit still long enough for the money to reach him, even supposing Craufurd did not consign such a request to the wastepaper basket.

  “You think that old volcano is ever going to blow its top again?” Crater asked.

  “It goes every ninety years, so the legend says. 1812, 1902 … ?”

  “And then bang. Just a puff of smoke, and two thousand corpses scattered about the canefields. They were suffocated by the heat and the sulphur fumes, you know, not burned to death. Although there was a considerable lava flow, the casualties were all there before it reached the plantations.”

  “Ever been up to the lip?”

  “Have you?”

  “Once. It’s quite a climb. There’s a lake, down inside. Some of the local boys have been down to it. They say, even now, the water is warm.”

  “Is that a fact? I sure hope to be around when she goes again. With color film in my camera.”

  “You’ll have lots of warning. Last time she rumbled for nearly twenty years before she actually exploded. Could start any time.”

  “I’ll be listening. Here we go. This airport really gets to me.”

  The aircraft had swung in a wide circle to the south of the island, seeking the only piece of land flat enough to be used as an airstrip. Because the mountains and the jungle took up so much of the center of St. Vincent, the main road to the south coast ran right across the center of the airfield, bisecting the runway itself; they looked down at a pair of level crossing gates closed to keep back a couple of cars and a stream of bicycles as the little plane swung over the quarantine station on Young’s Island before coming in to land. To their left was the headland which formed the southern arm of the harbor of Kingstown. The anchorage itself was out of sight beyond.

  Customs and immigration formalities were at a minimum, and within minutes of landing, Crater and Jonathan were in the back of the solitary taxi that had troubled to meet the plane. “You have a hotel booking, sir?”

  “We only decided to come over last night,” Jonathan explained.

  “Ah, but the hotels will not be full at this time of the year.” The driver drove across the airfield and turned up the hill. “I will take you to the Anchor Hotel on Bay Street. They will have room.”

  “Bay Street will be just fine,” Crater said. “And then what do we do, Jonathan, old boy?”

  “Maybe this gentleman will be able to help us.” Jonathan leaned forward. “We’re looking for a friend of mine, name of Brown. Tall chap, with a little mustache. He came over from Barbados two days ago.”

  “Oh, yes, I have seen him. I didn’t drive him myself, but he has been walking around the town. He is staying at the Anchor Hotel, too.”

  Jonathan grinned at Crater. “Trailing somebody in a small town is almost too easy, wouldn’t you say?”

  Crater looked anxious. “Are you sure we’re doing the right thing? I mean, going to the same hotel.”

  “He doesn’t know me from Adam. Did he see you when he was in the studio?”

  “He spoke to me.”

  “So you’re over here to take photographs. You can wave your camera at him.”

  “Yeah,” Crater said thoughtfully. “Well, what do you know.”

  The taxi had reached the to
p of the hill, and Kingstown lay beneath them, like Bridgetown or almost every West Indian capital city, clustering at the foot of the hills. On the north side, six hundred feet above the town, the massive walls of Fort Charlotte glared seaward across the harbor. Sheltered from the east and the south, the roads were opened to the west, yet there was a fleet of small craft and interisland traders always in the bay. Riding at anchor amid them, like a swan lording it over a gaggle of ducklings, was a white-painted, three-masted schooner.

  “Seems like our friend Brown was on to a good thing, after all,” Crater said.

  Jonathan tapped the driver on the shoulder. “There’s a lovely ship. Has she been here long?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. She came in a week ago. There is something the matter with her, I believe. One of her propellers is broken.”

  The car followed the road through the town—the dusty streets and white-painted buildings offering a glaring contrast to the deep green of the forested slopes of Mount St. Andrew—swung left past the library, and came down to Bay Street. Here the road ran within feet of the sea; in these almost tideless waters the ocean could be allowed this close, neither threatening to flood, except in very bad weather, nor about to recede to uncover vast areas of unsalubrious mud. The Anchor Hotel was a small, pale-blue house, exactly opposite the schooner’s berth.

  The taxi driver opened the door for them. “You see Mistress Boden about somewhere to sleep, and I am sure you will be satisfied. And look, here is your friend Mr. Brown himself.”

  “Here we go,” Crater said.

  Brown was exactly as described in Barbados, except that he was more heavily built than Jonathan had expected. He wore a Panama hat and, despite the heat, a linen jacket over his sports shirt, and carried a raincoat. Binoculars and a camera and a haversack were slung from his shoulder.

  “Here’s a surprise,” he said. “You’re the photographer from Bridgetown.”

  “Fancy meeting you again,” Crater said. “I’m over here to take some photographs of Soufrière, for this gentleman. Jonathan Anders, meet—I never caught your name.”