by Noel Hynd
Ray introduced me to a jowly fiftyish Englishman and now Nassau resident who went by the name of Colonel Abraham Chalmers, late of the British Army. We shook hands, the colonel and I. The colonel’s paw was fleshy and moist, more from sweat than the rain. He had a grayish white mane, a droopy moustache that matched, and worried eyes under bushy brows. He wore a pale suit with many buttonholes. The shoulders of the suit, nicely tailored to the colonel’s bulbous form, were pockmarked with raindrops which told me that the colonel hadn’t been there for more than fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. Beside him, braced against his chair and the table was a tall walking stick, carved presumably from a friendlier local wood than the manchineel tree.
Schindler introduced me by name. I quickly gained the impression that if I was okay with Ray Schindler, I was okay with the colonel.
“My friend Alan here is the new Edmund Lester Pearson,” Schindler said. “Finest true crime writer in America today,” he continued with undue flattery, “especially following Pearson’s death in 1937.” The colonel studied me. “Alan has a bestseller on The New York Times list as we speak.”
The colonel’s bushy brows shot toward the sky.
“Pleasure to meet you, sir,” Chalmers said, speaking in a too-dignified upper-class bellow that on another occasion might have encouraged me to turn and run. But I had already picked up signals from Ray. He wanted me to meet the colonel and hear what the old buzzard had to say. The colonel pumped my hand again and didn’t want to give it back. “Pleasure,” he said again.
“Ray is overly generous in his praise,” I demurred. “I had a bestseller earlier this year. It dropped off the list after five weeks.”
“Ah, but it was there.” the Englishman said.
“It was there.”
“Crime? Murders?” the colonel asked.
“Nazi espionage. I’m concerned with the war effort, as we all are.”
“But you write about murders?” Colonel Chalmers pressed.
“I do, sir.”
“Of what sort? Do tell?”
“Well, I should say that I favor what I might call ‘cerebral true crime’ over the more mundane ‘real life’ killer books,” I began. “The appeal of the latter seems often wallow in low horror. What intrigues me in a case, what I prefer to write about, are cases in which there is the allure of the puzzle: what made someone kill someone and how they did or didn’t get away with it and why. Who they are. What complexities drove them to commit a heinous crime. In my work, the victim is often the most fascinating character.”
“And what you write is factual?”
“It’s true crime, sir. Non-fiction. A literary cousin, perhaps, of the Golden Age detective fiction,” I suggested. “But a literary form of its own.” I paused. The colonel wanted more, I could tell. “I believe in justice for victims of murders,” I said. “That includes the death penalty for the guilty. Too many tears are shed in America for persons accused of murder or convicted of murder.”
The colonel nodded. We now seemed to be friends. “Couldn’t agree with you more,” he harrumphed. “Jolly!” Mercifully, the barman returned with a rum and Coke for me. “Bloody good,” the colonel said, sipping his own drink.
The colonel took a time out and dabbed at the sweat on his face with a handkerchief. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Sweat had come through his silk shirt, also. For an instant, he looked like a man coming around. Then he was back again. His eyes found me.
“Colonel Chalmers was no stranger to violence and blood when he was a younger man,” Schindler said, leading the conversation.
“Quite right, sir,” the old soldier agreed. “Unfortunately.”
The colonel started on what was apparently his third gin. My reporter’s instincts kicked in. I fed him a few questions and sounded him out on his own past. Schindler leaned back, watched and listened.
Colonel Chalmers, it turned out, had been the eldest son in a landowning family in the English Midlands, but had come by his rank the hard way. He had grown up in Warwickshire, he recounted quickly. As any patriotic young man would have, had joined the British Army at the outbreak of the Great War. His unit was the 48th South Midland Division. He and his comrades were sent to France in March 1915. They fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the Battle of Pozières and the Third Battle of Ypres on the western front. In November 1917, colonel’s division continued to Italy. On the Asiago Plateau in June of 1918, the colonel lost a third of his right foot to a bullet and another third to gangrene. That didn’t leave much.
“That’s why I use a stick,” he told me, indicating the walking staff beside him. He gave me a wide grin then thrust out a prosthetic boot that served as the lower half of his right leg.
I nodded. I understood.
“I was one of the lucky ones in Asiago,” he said. “It was all mountain fighting where I was. Three hundred thousand Italian soldiers died in six weeks. Poor buggers. I sat out the armistice in a hospital.”
The old coot was starting to appear to me as more of an owl than a buzzard.
“I was in a field hospital for two months. Wounds to the extremities were so severe that hundreds of British soldiers had to have limbs amputated. There was a French doctor, a devil named Tourino. He had a small guillotine, a variation on the type used to cut off royal heads in the Frog Revolution. He used it to amputate limbs. You could hear the blade falling all day and the men screaming. Chop, chop, chop. But it saved lives. It often precluded infection.”
I grimaced. He sipped his iced drink.
“Infection was a serious complication. My foot was infected, and I thought the blade was going to drop on me. No antibiotics. There was an Irish doctor who had this sodding practice of ‘debridement.’ I chose the Irishman to do my leg. The tissue around my wound was cut away and carbolic lotion was used to wash it. Then they wrapped it in gauze soaked in the same solution. No anesthetic, I’m grateful. They saved a third of my foot. I went home, then moved here in ’39. Not boring you, old man, am I?” he asked me.
“Not in the slightest, Colonel,” I said.
Across the table, Schindler winked to me. The colonel was a windbag. But Schindler found it informative to keep him talking. Detectives like people who talk too much.
“The colonel was amusing me with stories about ‘David,’ when you happened in,” Schindler said, guiding the conversation back to where it had been.
“David?”
“The Duke of Windsor,” said Schindler.
“Our revered and much beloved former monarch,” said the colonel acidly. “And now our esteemed Governor. ‘David’ is the name the chap is called within the royal family. To the rest of the world, as King, he was Edward VIII.”
“I see,” I said.
“The Colonel knows the Duke personally,” Schindler said. Ray held up a hand with two fingers crossed, suggesting the Colonel had tight knowledge of the governor and was ready to unload privately. I took the hint.
“And how do you find him?” I asked. “The newspapers in America used to find him quite charming, but now some of them see him as a wealthy bore.”
With pique and a harsh rattle of ice cubes, the colonel quaffed the end of his drink with a single gulp. He chewed on the ice for a moment, swallowed it and was ready to talk.
He started with the small stuff. Grist for the mill: The Governor of the Bahamas was notorious for never tipping his golf caddies or settling his gambling debts. He had ducked out of millions in gambling losses and luxury restaurant bills. He had always been that way.
“David may be the undisputed darling of the conservative American press and the dominions,” the colonel began, “but it’s all a pernicious charade played out before the naive public. I happen to like the man personally. But I also find him vacuous, vainglorious and effete,” he said.
“Effete?” I asked. It never ceased to amaze me how much some people would say to a writer given sufficient alcoholic lubrication. “Meaning what, sir?” I asked.
“Do you know t
he stories about the future King and the French prostitutes?” he asked.
“No, but I’m sure I’d enjoy hearing them,” I answered.
Ray winked at me when the colonel wasn’t looking.
“Ha! Raised as a Victorian, you know. ‘Filthy and revolting’ was his description of the naked prostitutes he once saw posing in a Calais brothel. His grew up fundamentally afraid of women. In July 1917, his equerries hired a French prostitute named Paulette helped him overcome his fears. A subsequent six-month affair with a Parisian courtesan named Marguerite Alibert gave the Prince a healthy appetite for sex.”
The colonel laughed. “From there on,” he said, “David has never rarely ever been out from between a woman’s legs. Often those legs have been married, the most recent two belong to the current Duchess. From the outset, this unusual woman has enchanted poor David. We used to see him getting down on hands and knees like a canine to paint her toe nails.”
Long before he met Wallis, Edward’s freewheeling bachelor lifestyle had become a great concern to the King and Queen. They were already concerned about his bisexual brother Prince George, who had become addicted to cocaine and morphine thanks to his relationship with the American socialite Kiki Preston, known as “the girl with the silver syringe.”
The colonel spared us no compromising detail. He recounted the good days of the 1930’s in England, good for the upper crust at least, when Mayfair society was agog with lurid speculation about her various liaisons and exploits, including her time spent learning curious sexual techniques in the brothels of Shanghai, as well as a leathery affair with an Italian diplomat named Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano, who later became foreign minister and Mussolini’s soninlaw. It was even thought that Wallis, in her free time, had seduced the Nazi diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had once famously given her a bouquet of seventeen carnations. Queen Mary, Edward’s mother, thought her a sexual hypnotist. A chronicle of these sexual adventures was apparently contained in an infamous document called “The China Dossier,” which was prepared years later for Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and King George V.
“You know, when David was first appointed Governor of the Bahamas,” rambled the colonel, “Edward called it a third rate posting. He refused to come here unless Churchill agreed to allow two soldiers to be released from Army service to act as his personal servants. Poor Winnie was grappling with the fallout from the Dunkirk evacuation and David’s having a hissy fit. Meanwhile, Wallis was concerned that their fine bedlinens be protected. She sent her maid to Nazi-controlled Paris to save them. On the quiet, Edward has hired Nazis in France to protect his various properties. He also insisted that they first sail to New York—so that his wife could go shopping along Madison Avenue. That said, in person they are a charming couple. They have a few kinks. We all do, don’t you know? What are yours, Alan?”
“I’m joyfully monogamous,” I said.
Colonel Chalmers didn’t hear my response. He was midway into another tale, the one about how angry the Duke had been in Bermuda when loyal female subjects receiving them had not curtsied to the Duchess. No grievance was too petty to be expressed to the counselor staff.
But then, his eyes continually scanning the bar, the Colonel fell silent. He switched his conversation to British cricket and how he had learned an off-drive from an underling in Coventry. At the same time, the decibel level in Dirty Dick’s dropped by half as patrons observed an ominous new double presence. I turned, glanced, and recognized the two-man surveillance team. I saw two gentlemen, one hefty and one wiry. I use the term “gentlemen” very loosely. They were in tropical suits and walked with their arms folded behind their backs. I had seen them once before and liked them even less now. The wiry one wore the same yellow tie, straw hat and cheap tropical suit. His partner was the hefty taller man in the canvas pith helmet.
They approached our table and stopped.
“Good afternoon, Colonel,” the smaller wiry one said. “Who are your guests?”
Schindler folded his arms. I noted his wariness.
The colonel hesitated for a moment, then answered.
“This is Mr. Raymond Schindler from New York,” Colonel Chalmers said. “He’s here to help defend Monsieur de Marigny. As you know, Mr. Greywater,” he said.
Schindler offered a hand in greeting. It was ignored. He withdrew it.
“De Marigny’s going to hang,” our visitor said.
“We’ll see,” Schindler couldn’t resist saying.
The little man—I’d say he was about five and a half feet—ignored Ray’s comment. His gray eyes slid over to me. I could feel the disapproval.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
Schindler introduced me by name as a friend from New York.
“This guy works for you?” the little sawed-off guy asked.
“No,” Ray answered quickly.
“What brings you here?” the smaller meaner one asked me.
“A vacation,” I lied.
“Funny time and place for a vacation,” he said.
“I think it’s a swell place and a great time,” I offered.
“Military?” he asked.
“Civilian,” I said.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I write books. About spies,” I said, sticking to a larger truth.
“You’re American? Canadian?”
“American.”
“Do you have identification?”
“May I ask why are you—?” I began.
“Just show him, Alan,” the colonel said in a friendly murmur. “Mr. Graywater here is with the government and is making a reasonable and friendly request.”
“Of course,” I said. “Happy to oblige.”
I produced my United States passport and handed it to him. Graywater flicked through the pages, found my picture, then glanced back and forth to be sure it was me. He examined the passport sideways, studying the stitching and the printing, searching for flaws.
“If you’re here as a tourist, why are you with this detective?” Graywater asked.
“We’re friends,” I said. “We know each other from New York.”
He took a second look at my passport.
He treated the document roughly. Then he snapped it shut.
“It’s legal to be friends,” I said.
“Not always,” he said. He tossed the passport onto the table, rather than handing it back. “Watch yourself. Stay out of trouble,” he said. His voice, aside from the ice in my drink, was the coldest thing I had encountered since arrival.
“Of course,” I said. “Thank you, sir.”
No response. They turned to continue through the room.
“Good day, gentlemen,” the Colonel said.
The old soldier released his staff. I could see his body slump. Graywater made no reaction. The fat one gave me a harsh eye and then a short nod. As he passed, I noticed for the first time that he carried a truncheon.
The two men made a tour of the room, asking another question here, another there. Then they went back out into the rain, which had ebbed but continued in its steadiness.
“The small one’s name, the one with the yellow necktie, is Julius Greywater,” the colonel said, when they were beyond earshot. “His mother was a local octoroon who owned a cat house on Eleuthera, his father was a disgraced Australian solicitor from Singapore. The old man moved here in the Thirties and was a notorious pimp.”
The colonel’s blue eyes tracked the pair through the room.
“The big one is Felipe McBruey. They both grew up here. Security. The powers that be send them around to make sure everyone knows that no one at the top table in the Bahamas is going soft.”
“Police?” I asked.
“It’s vague,” said the Colonel.
“Private security?”
“It’s complicated. You’re happier having not anything to do with it. Or not knowing.”
“I came here to know things, Colonel.”
“Be careful who you say that to.�
��
Conversation hesitantly resumed around the room. A feeling of relief washed through the bar. The rain had eased enough so that an extra window or two could be opened and a slight breeze wafted through. The breeze felt even better when Graywater and McBruey disappeared out the front door.
“This ‘top table,’ you mentioned,” I asked. “Who sits at that?”
“The Bay Street Boys,” he said. “The lawyers. The merchants. The bankers. The real estate people. The Bahamas is about money, how to make it and how to keep it. The islands are run by the people who make those decisions.”
“You must have a few names,” I said. “I’d love to meet some of these folks.”
Pointedly, Colonel Chalmers didn’t hear my inquiry, much less address it.
“Where do these security gorillas fit in with the local power structure?” I asked.
“At the top of the heap. Or that bottom, depending how you want to look at it,” Ray said. “Straight out in-your-face street intimidation. Think in terms of a visit from the Gestapo. Same style. Same intent.”
“Are they actually official police?”
“I don’t know. I ask people who live here and they answer by saying that order must be kept, the colored must know their place, and the economic security of the islands must be looked after. No one wants to answer that question.”
I eased back and looked away. “Okay,” I said. “I get it. I think.”
I glanced at the colonel. “Can you tell us anything about those guys?” I asked. “Who they work for?”
“None of my business,” the colonel said.
A waiter reappeared unrequested. He looked as relieved as the rest of us. He had refreshed our drinks without even our asking.
The colonel eventually regathered himself.
“These islands can be dark and intimidating sometimes,” he said. “It’s a warm bright place but with some very dark corners. Sometimes there’s fear. There’s contradiction. Sir Harry, God rest his soul, kept his doors unlocked but even he was worried recently. For the first time on the Bahamas he had recently acquired a gun.”