by Dick Francis
Almost none, I thought, wasn’t enormously reassuring.
“So why mushrooms?” I asked.
“Robin was talking on the phone soon after I came,” Kris explained, “and I accidentally overheard him, and it was something about me and possibly my friend, that’s you, and Odin and mushrooms on Trox Island.”
“And you haven’t asked him about it?”
“Well ... not yet. I mean ... I don’t want to upset him ... he says he’s paying for us to go to Cayman, and he’s paying the cost of the aircraft ...”
“I’ll ask him,” I said, and later, peacefully, nightcap glass of cognac to hand, I mentioned Bell’s account of the Darcy mushroom and sod farm business and wondered where he found fungus and grass to grow best.
“Florida,” he promptly said. “I grow my grass in swamp-land up near Lake Okeechobee. Best wet agricultural conditions for sod in the States.”
“And someone mentioned Trox Island too. Where’s that?” I put no force into an ultra-calm inquiry, but even so I sensed a tightening, and then a deliberate loosening in my host.
“Trox?” He took his time answering. He opened a heavy gleaming wood thermidor and fiddled lengthily with cutting and lighting a cigar. Internal debate came out in punctuating puffs of smoke. I sat placidly, looking out from the terrace to the vast untroubled sea.
“Trox,” Robin said pleasantly at length, sure he had the whole tobacco tip redly glowing, “is one of the many little islands sticking up in the Caribbean Sea. I believe Trox is chiefly constructed of guano—that’s bird droppings, of course.”
“Fertilizer,” I agreed.
He nodded. “So I understand, but I’ve never been there myself.” He inhaled smoke and blew it out, and said how much Evelyn and he were enjoying having Kris and me as houseguests, and how interesting he had found Kris’s view of the future of space travel, and how much he looked forward to Kris’s reports on shaking hands with Odin. He had dropped Trox Island as if of no interest. I tried again to mention it and he cut me off immediately, saying flatly, “Think about Odin. Forget Trox Island. Let me fill your glass.”
Evelyn drew me away, wanting me to identify the stars, turning aside as boring our engrossment with shifting winds.
At the end of the evening Kris and I each returned to our colorful basic tropical bedrooms; brilliant fabrics, wicker furniture, white tiled floor, ceiling fan circling, bright bathroom adjacent, all an ultimate comfort. I fell asleep as easily as on the previous evening, but half-woke hours later in the dark wondering why the London streetlights weren’t throwing familiar shadows on the ceiling.
Miami ... I drifted to full consciousness ... I was in Sand Dollar Beach, named for the flat round decorative shells sometimes found on the shoreline. They were a sort of sea urchins of the order Clypeasteroida ... I’d looked them up.
I switched on the bedside light, felt restless, got up, padded in and out of the bathroom, and finally, with a towel and in swimming shorts made my way through the dark house, across the terrace and down into the soothing pool.
Robin Darcy, friendly but secretive, generous beyond normal, had given us too much and told us too little. So what the devil were Kris and I set on? And could it be a one-way trip?
Mrs. Mevagissey relied on my earnings, as I for twenty past years had lived on hers. I had no right to risk the money that paid the nurses. They alone made her existence bearable. My priority was to fly through a hurricane and to return home safely. Kris’s plans came second, Robin’s third.
Odin, my own knowledge and forward-looking perception told me, could grow quite quickly from Category 3 to Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which meant that the speeds of its winds would destroy every instrument put out to measure them. Category 5 meant Odin would deliver catastrophic damage in storm surge wherever it touched on shore; it could sustain incredible winds of around 180 miles an hour in its eye wall ... and little islands, with or without mushrooms, could be flooded and disappear.
I relaxed in the semi-cool water and swam lengths with economic strokes, covering distance without concentrating. All my life swimming had been the one competitive sport my grandmother and I had been comfortably able to afford for me, though from sixteen onwards I’d deserted municipal pools and Olympic-type racing for longer endurance trials and surfing. By the time Kris and I went to Florida I was growing out also of the urge to race at all, but I still had the shoulders and movements of long practice.
Thinking only of Hurricane Odin and Trox Island, I slid out of the pool in a while and stood, toweling, with my back to the house.
A voice behind me said with goose-bumpy menace, “Stand still and raise your hands.”
I nearly swung round thoughtlessly and would doubtless have been shot, but after a moment of reconsideration I dropped the towel and did as I’d been told.
“Now turn round slowly.”
I turned round, realizing that I, on the pool deck, was in unlit shadow to anyone up on the terrace.
Robin stood up there, lit from behind by a glow in the house. Round cozy Robin held a handgun pointing motionlessly where it could do me terminal damage.
“I’m Perry,” I said. “I was swimming.”
“Come forward where I can see you. And come slowly, or I’ll shoot.”
If he hadn’t so obviously been speaking the simple truth, I might have joked; instead I slowly stepped forward until the house lights shone into my eyes.
“What are you doing out here?” Robin asked blankly, lowering the gun to point at my feet.
“I couldn’t sleep. Can I put my hands down now?”
He shook himself slightly as if waking up, opening his mouth and nodding, but in the second before life returned to normal the pool area was suddenly full of blinding lights, blue uniforms, shouting voices and horribly purposeful black guns. The wish—the willingness—to kill reached me like shock waves. I felt battered by noise. I was told to kneel and did so, and was held down by a ruthless hand on my neck.
Robin was ineffectually speaking. The blue-uniformed police, not listening, continued with their rough mission, which was if not to put a bullet in him, at least to immobilize the intruder and shout garbled words into his befuddled ear, words Robin later identified as my “rights.”
For what seemed ages I went on kneeling ignominiously on the pool deck, feeling stupid in my swimming shorts, gripped by unfriendly hands, with wrists clicked into handcuffs behind my back (always behind one’s back in Florida, Robin said, and in most other states). My protests got nowhere against their loud-voiced and fulfilling abuse until Robin finally reached the chief uniform’s attention. The intruder, he apologized, was a houseguest.
A houseguest swimming at three-thirty in the morning?
Very sorry, Robin said. Very sorry.
Unwillingly deprived of their prey, the blue uniforms with surliness holstered their guns and rested their lightbulbs. They reported back by radio to their home base, produced forms for Robin to sign, treated both of us with continuing suspicion, retrieved their handcuffs and finally disappeared as fast as they had come.
I stood up stiffly, picked up the towel, crossed the terrace and followed Robin into the house.
He wasn’t pleased with me, nor inclined to realize that he hadn’t warned me about any alarms.
“I had no idea,” he said crossly, “that you would swim in the middle of the night. There are burglar alarms round the terrace which alert a security firm to the presence of an intruder. There’s a direct line to the police and a warning buzzer in my bedroom. I suppose you’d better have a drink.”
“No... I’m sorry for the trouble.”
I wound and tied the towel round my hips like a loincloth and Robin assessed me with thoughtfulness, crossing his wrists below his stomach to hold his gun.
“I must say,” he said judiciously, “that you behaved very coolly under fire.”
I hadn’t felt cool. My heart rate had been of Cape Canaveral speed.
I asked, “How far
off were they from actually shooting?”
“The distance of a trigger’s travel,” Robin said. He put his handgun into a pocket in his robe. “Go back to bed. I hope you sleep.”
Before I could move, however, the telephone rang, and without surprise at this early-morning summons, Robin answered.
“Yes,” he said into the receiver. “A false alarm. My houseguest ... midnight swim ... yes, everything’s fine ... yes ... yes ... it’s Hereford ... yes, that’s right, Hereford. No, the police weren’t happy, but I assure you all is well.” He put down the receiver and briefly explained to me that the security firm had been checking. “They always do, after the police radio in that it’s a false alarm.”
Robin accompanied me to my bedroom door, recovering his milder manner on the way.
“I should have told you about the alarm,” he murmured. “But never mind, no harm done.”
“No.” I smiled goodnight, and he with a laugh said he hoped I would be as unruffled when I met Odin.
Leaving Evelyn at home, Robin, Kris and I flew on Cayman Airways from Miami to Grand Cayman in the morning, Robin with still good humor telling Kris about our adventures in the night. Kris, on the far side of the house, had slept soundly through the din.
It was after we’d cleared immigration that trickles of decent information slowly reached me, but without flowing together to make a stream.
Robin and Kris, collected by car outside the airport, were driven away, telling me transport was there for me as well but otherwise leaving me standing in unexpectedly hot air temperature wondering what to do next.
“Next” turned out to be a thin woman in bleached often-washed cotton trousers and a white sleeveless top who walked straight up to me and said, “Dr. Stuart, I presume.”
Her voice was crisply grand-house-in-the-country English. She’d seen a lot of British weather forecasts and she knew me by sight, she said. She told me to get into the front cab of her orange pickup truck, standing not far ahead. She sounded accustomed to being in charge.
“Robin Darcy ... Kris ...” I began.
She interrupted. “Kris Ironside has gone for familiarization flights in the aircraft he’ll be flying. Get in the pickup, do.”
I sat in the cab and roasted in the heat, which allowed no respite, even with the windows open. It was the second half of October south of the Tropic of Cancer. I took off my too conventional tie and thought of a tepid shower.
“I’m Amy Ford,” the woman said, identifying herself as she drove out of the airport. “How do you do?”
“Could I ask where are we going?”
“I have an errand to run in George Town. Then to my house.”
She drove a short distance into a compact and prosperous-looking small town, its streets lined with shade trees and alive with camera-clicking tourists.
“This is the island’s capital, George Town,” Amy said, and added, “It’s the only real town, actually.”
“All these people...”
“They come off the cruise ships,” Amy said, and pointed, as we rounded a corner, to the broad open sea where three huge passenger ships rode at anchor, and imitation pirate galleons popped off imitation cannonballs, and container ships edged into the quayside bringing food and bulldozers.
Amy parked within running distance of the public library to return a book; then, after passing important-looking bank buildings, she drove back along the harborfront, where friendly drivers amazingly gave way with smiles.
“Nice place,” I said, meaning it.
Amy took the comment as natural. “My house next,” she said. “Not far.”
Her house, not far, as she’d said, must have covered eight thousand square feet of the oceanfront paradise it was set in; a clone of Robin Darcy’s easy opulence but magnified by two.
She led the way into a sitting room, small by the house’s overall standard, but blessedly cool with air-conditioning and a rotating ceiling fan. There was a view through heavy sliding glass doors of intensely blue sea, there were chairs and china figures in tropically exuberant colors, and there was a man in white shorts who said “Michael Ford” and shook my hand.
“You look bigger than on the screen.” His comment was without offense and said in roughly the same accent as his wife, though I would have placed him a shade lower in the social hierarchy, however bulging the coffers.
In between my basic weather work (and frankly to earn more in order to pay Jett van Els and her sisters), I lectured freelance and after-dinner talked. and. from a natural aptitude for mimicry, I’d learned to recognize the origins of many accents. Not nearly in such incredible detail as Shaw’s Professor Higgins. of course, but enough in the right places to amuse.
I would have put Michael Ford’s vocal roots, like my own, as somewhere in western rural Berkshire, but in his case the basic material had been polished by studied layers of gloss.
Scarcely taller than Robin Darcy. Michael Ford, with his tanned bare broad-shouldered torso and his strong shoe-and-sockless slightly bowed brown legs, looked like the useful muscle that the rounded Robin lacked.
Amy Ford said, “Cold drink?” to me and poured orange juice lavishly onto ice cubes, and it wasn’t until I tasted it that I realized there was a good deal of something like Bacardi in its kick.
I said, “Would you mind awfully telling me who you arc and why I’m here?” And I heard Amy’s tones in my own; slightly shocking.
Amy, however, appearing not to notice, did in part explain.
“I sold Robin my airplane. As I understand it, your friend is going to fly it through this hurricane Odin. and you are here to navigate. ”
I thought blankly, whyever would Robin buy a doubtless expensive airplane for Kris—someone he’d casually met at a lunch party—to fly through a violent storm?
“Robin bought my airplane for Nicky, actually,” Amy said. seeing nothing odd in it. “but of course Nicky went away.”
“Hurricane Nicky?” I asked.
“Naturally. Of course. But this new storm was brewing more or less on Nicky’s heels, one might say, and Robin said he’d met Kris, who was a good pilot, and Kris wanted to fly through a hurricane, so ... well ... here you are.”
As an explanation it raised more questions than it answered.
I said over my strongly laced juice, “Where is Odin this morning, do you know?”
As of two hours earlier, Odin, according to my helpful pal at the Miami Hurricane Center, had been intensifying south of Jamaica and causing the population of that island to contemplate safety in the hills.
“If you’re going towards Odin,” my pal warned, “remember that on Grand Cayman Island there aren’t any hills to go to.”
“Is Odin likely to hit Cayman?”
“Look, Perry, you know damned well that not even Odin knows where it’s going. But the report just coming in puts Odin high in Category Three, that’s a fierce hurricane, Perry, you get out of there. Disregard what I said before, and go.”
“What about Trox Island?” I asked.
He said, “Where?” and after a pause added, “If that’s one of that scatter of little islands in the western Caribbean, then don’t go there, Perry, don’t. If Odin goes on developing it could hit any of those islands head on and wipe them out.”
“Wind or storm surge?”
“Both.” He hesitated. “We can easily be wrong, so it’s better not to guess. At the moment I’d put my money on Odin veering northwest to miss Jamaica; and as Grand Cayman,” he finally assured me, “would then be straight ahead of Odin ... it’s a place to leave, not play around in, if you have any sense.”
I suppose I had no sense.
I asked, “Where exactly is Trox Island?”
“Is it important? I’ll look it up.” There was a rustling of paper. “Here we are. Islands in the West Caribbean ... Roncador Cay ... Swan ... Thunder Knoll. Here it is ... Trox. Number of inhabitants, anything from zero to twenty, mostly fishermen. Size. one mile long, half a mile wide. Highes
t point above sea level, two hundred feet. Volcanic? No. Constructed of bird droppings, guano, coral and limestone rock. Map coordinates, 17.50 degrees north, 81.44 west.” Another rustle of paper. “There you are, then, it’s just a peak of guano-covered rock sticking up from undersea mountains.”
“Any farming? Any mushrooms?”
“Why mushrooms? No. if anything, you might find coconuts. It says here there are palm trees.”
“Who does Trox belong to?”
“It doesn’t say in this list. All it says is Ownership Disputed.’ ”
“And is that the absolute lot?”
“Yes, except that it says there’s a landing for boats and an old grass strip for aircraft, but no fuel and no maintenance. Nothing. Forget it.”
He was busy at work and could talk no longer. His final advice was “Go home”: and he meant by home, England.
Michael Ford looked at the heavy gold watch weighing down his left wrist and pushed buttons on a vast television set until he reached a noisy channel giving alarmist details of the development of Odin.
Odin had become organized into a full-grown hurricane with a central area where the winds were circling ever faster, leaving a calm small round quiet center like a hub. Odin, with this well-developed “eye,” was now circling with winds of a hundred and twenty miles an hour or more, but was still going forwards slowly at seven. The low-pressure center of winds aloft had weakened and allowed a stronger circling in the central dense overcast, resulting in the distinct formation of the eye.
Kris, at least, would be pleased to hear the development was official.
Odin was seven hundred and fifty miles south of where Evelyn peacefully sunned herself on the Sand Dollar pool deck, and even from where I stood on Grand Cayman Island. the view through the windows of sand and palm trees, two hundred miles from a major storm, was calm, sunny and without a breeze. It seemed impossible that any speed of wind could blow away a town as thoroughly as Hurricane Andrew had, or that any ocean surge could drown three hundred thousand people as in Bangladesh. I knew pretty thoroughly the paths of the winds of the world and had studied most of the devilments of nature, but like many a volcanologist I’d warmed my hands from afar without walking round an erupting rim.