A Man of Affairs

by John D. MacDonald

  Bridget took care of the introductions and Tommy helped Margaret Mary up onto the dock, and we watched the other fish off-loaded as Bert identified them. “Little amberjack. Couple of yallatails. Nice red snapper. But the ’cuda about to drive us nuts out there today.”

  “What are those outfits?” Tommy asked.

  “These here are a couple of Rumer Atlantic surf-casting spinners,” Buford said. “I got ’em on hollow glass spinning rods I had made to order. Mine’s got a little more flex to it than Margaret Mary’s. I carry three hundred yards of twelve-pound test monofilament, and I got Margaret Mary’s loaded up with about two hundred yards of twenty-five-pound test. I tell you, two years ago this little gal couldn’ta fought a crappie with a twelve-ton winch, but today she got that big albacore slick as you please. I’m fixing to cut her tackle down some.”

  “Lose much tackle today?” Guy asked.

  “Eight or ten rigs. Got into some big dolphin that took some of it, and big ’cuda took the rest. Romeo, you get somebody to get the meat off that snapper and put it on the cold and we’ll take it on back with us tomorrow evening. You can do what you want with the rest of the fish.”

  “Thank you very much, sar,” Romeo said, grinning.

  Bert got up on the dock and, speaking as though Romeo weren’t there, said, “These people sure go for fish. And they don’t get enough when they got to work all day like now. Romeo, how about you rinse off the tackle and set it in the dock house for me for the morning. Then you tell John to bring us a couple of bourbon to the room. There’s anything I like it’s fishing all day and then sticking my head out of a hot shower ever once in a while to nibble on a bourbon.”

  Lights had gone on all over the house. As we walked up the path I could hear the slap of small waves, the distant humming rumble of the generator house, the whine of a mosquito next to my ear.

  The pool lights were on. There were just two people left by the pool, Port Crown and Puss McGann. I saw Crown tilt his seamed face at the darkening sky and heard the bray of his laugh. I saw Puss slap at her leg and then they got up and started slowly toward the main house.

  People settled down on the shadowy veranda, in the main lounge and living room, or in the adjacent play room closer to the bar. Guy Brainerd had detached Bridget. After I got a drink, I slanted over, subtle as a moose, to the side of Cam Duncan who was watching Bonny Carson poke through the record cabinet.

  “This is some layout, Mr. Duncan.”

  “One of the ground rules is no last names on the island, Sam.”

  “So be it. Are you Cam?”

  “For Cameron. Cameron Mackenzie Duncan. You’re right about Dubloon Cay, Sam. It is some layout. Mike knew exactly what he wanted, and the only way he could get the island was to take it on a ninety-nine-year lease agreement with her Majesty’s Government. It hurts me to think he doesn’t own it, but he tells me he is going to have damn little interest in what will happen to it eighty-nine years from now. That’s when it runs out. I can see what he means.”

  “How does he keep in touch with what’s going on while he’s here?”

  “That’s one of the functions of the incredible Fletcher Bowman. Mike had a ham radio installation put in. Fletcher has an FCC license and a limey license, and every night he gets in touch with Ralph Pegler on Mike’s New York staff who has his ham station up at his home in Connecticut, and Mike is up to date on all catastrophes.”

  “Have you been working for Mike a long time?” I asked. It was a pretty leaden-footed question, and I think it amused him.

  “Not long. A couple of years now. I’m a tax attorney, of the new breed of specialist’s specialist, a corporation tax attorney. Mike has another kind of specialist on the personal tax questions, a bright boy named Dave McGinty. Dave is involved in a practically perpetual audit of Mike’s current affairs by the Bureau. Mike is in a bracket that calls for an automatic audit each year, and each year the return weighs about three pounds, so it takes most of the year to get through it. I don’t think Mike has the faintest damn idea of what he’s worth, and I don’t think anybody else does either. If anybody could make a close guess, it would be Amparo Blakely.”

  “Speak of the devil,” said Amparo Blakely softly at my elbow.

  “The question of the hour,” Cam said, “is what is Mike worth?”

  “I didn’t bring it up,” I said.

  She smiled at me. Even in her low heels she was almost six feet tall. “I didn’t think you did, Sam. I’ll give you an answer, Cam. Mike is worth a good deal of money sometimes. Other days he’s hardly worth anything. It all depends.”

  Cam said, “Anything you want to know about Mike, just ask Amparo. She’s the perfect confidential secretary. She won’t even tell you what time it is by Mike’s clock.”

  “Oh, poo! Cam, I worry about you. You ought to put some weight on. You’re a rack of bones, actually. It would take three of you to make one of Sam.”

  “I like to have you worry about me,” he said. They smiled at each other with obvious affection. She stood close enough to me so that I got more of the physical impact of her. She was built to my scale. She out-weighed Cam and looked perfectly capable of snapping his spine with her thumbs, but that did not make her look less feminine. She was of the female persuasion, brushed, scrubbed, scented, and packed tightly and pneumatically into her bronzy hide.

  “You shouldn’t look so worn and frail, Cam,” she said.

  Cam looked beyond her and said, “I am not so frail but what I feel a basic urge to tweak the place where those green shorts of the lady editor are the tightest.”

  Amparo turned and looked and said, “Go ahead, darling. I dare you. They look slightly fraudulent. I pray to God we’re not into a new age of fundamental falsies.”

  “Murphy called that rear elevation saucy,” I said.

  “And saucy it is,” Amparo said. “Our Miss Hallowell has a nice way with words. Elda Garry is, I am afraid, not entirely oblivious to the general impression created. Try a tweak, Cameron. Think of it as character analysis. Maybe she’ll go seven feet into the air and give a hoarse cry of anguish.”

  “Or lust. That would be worse,” Cam said. “I don’t think I could adjust to that.”

  “It would give her such a pretty problem though. Mike is Guy’s valued client. What happens to the valued contract if Guy’s favorite lady editor makes a scene over a gesture of affection on the part of one of Mike’s bright young lawyers?”

  “She looks as though she could make her decision in midair and come down with her script all planned,” Cam said.

  “Poor Guy,” Amparo said. “He seems to be inevitably and fatally attracted to tailored women who jangle. But I’m afraid we’re talking out of school in front of Sam. Sam, we’re both fond of Guy and you would be too if you could know him. He’s a very sincere man, and he has a genius touch for public relations. But he has foul taste in women, and each new one breaks his heart, and this one is just a bit more grim that the last two or three.”

  “Now?” Cam asked.

  “You really mean it, you wretch! All right. Now.”

  Cam winked owlishly and strolled over to where Elda Garry stood talking with Bundy and Jack Buck and Warren Dodge, laughing her silvery and shimmering laugh at them, inundating them with her fashionable little restaurant chatter.

  Cam edged in beside her, between her and Warren, and put his arm casually around her narrow waist. Amparo and I watched intently. We saw her stiffen and attempt to pull away and glance around at where Guy stood talking with Bridget. But Cam blithely hauled her back and she apparently decided to suffer the unexpected embrace. Then Cam’s thin hand slid down and, deliberately, emotionlessly, callously, he caught a tender roundness of flesh between thumb and finger and pinched and twisted at the same time. Elda Garry went up onto her toes and took a quick half step toward little Bundy, then recovered herself and turned sharply and stared at Cam. He gave her his ugly and amiable smile. It seemed almost possible to hear the little chromed
gears meshing in the sleek blond head. She glanced at Guy again, and glanced at Mike Dean as he came into the room in his Basque shirt and black Bermuda shorts, and brought her eyes back to Cam. And added it all up and gave him a pointy little smile and leaned closer and said something half under her breath. In a few minutes Cam came back to us.

  “You are a foul rascal,” Amparo said, laughing.

  “It’s all real,” Cam said. “And taut as a winter apple. You’re the analyst, Miss Blakely. As soon as she decided not to go up in smoke, what did she say to me?”

  Amparo frowned and pursed her lips and looked at the floor for a few moments. “Hmmm. Something like, ‘You are a naughty, naughty man.’ Right?”

  He shook his head. “You kill me, Amparo. I wouldn’t have minded a close guess, because it’s pretty obvious the kind of thing she would say. But you hit it precisely on the button, and that almost alarms me.”

  “We’re not always like this, Sam,” Amparo said. “Just when we get down here to the island. Then all the shoes come off and the hair is let down.”

  “You shook me up with that idea about falsies,” Cam said. “After suggesting a horror like that, I was forced to go check it out. Everybody is empty, and the bar is yonder.”

  We went into the play room. I had been hearing the sound of table tennis for several minutes. Tommy McGann was playing with a young girl. She was quick and slim and dark, and her hair was in long braids. She was dark as any gypsy, teeth flashing white in her face, lips painted a burgundy red. She wore a red off-the-shoulder blouse and pink skin-tight pants that came slightly below the knee and were laced with black at the sides.

  “Is that the Crown girl?” I asked Amparo.

  “That’s Lolly. I envy the resilience of the young, Sam. At three she got so potted I didn’t think she’d be able to find her room. Port was very annoyed with her. And now look at her.”

  After we put in the drink order, I turned and watched her. She seemed to be giving Tommy a close battle. Tommy won, twenty-one to sixteen, then Puss McGann and Jack Buck joined them in doubles, Jack and Puss against Tommy and Lolly. Jack Buck was the poorest player, but Puss was, by a considerable margin, the best. When Lolly was not smiling her face had a sullen look. Her young breasts were sharp against the red blouse. Jack Buck had the square face and the yellow brush cut of any Navy recruiting poster. But he did not manage to look like a clean cut young man. He looked like a dogged and somewhat dangerous young man. There was a knife tattooed on his right forearm, with a snake writhing around it. His gray eyes were slightly undersized and there was a hint of brutality around his mouth. I decided that were I Porter Crown, I would not take my rebellious daughter on a prolonged cruise with Jack Buck.

  The meal was served buffet style. The food was abundant and excellent. I wound up eating with Bridget, Amparo and Mike Dean at a table in the corner of the living room. Mike Dean ran the conversation like a train. Bridget and Amparo were the straight men. They fed him the right lines at the right times. Mike told the history of his looking around for a hideaway, and all the misadventures before he finally had it the way he wanted it. It was entertainingly told and in spots it was funny as hell. Mike made himself the stupid and innocent victim of all kinds of ludicrous mistakes, including one narrow mistake of nearly building on the wrong island. It was all much fun; and when the meal was over I wasn’t one millimeter closer to knowing anything at all about Mike Dean.

  After dinner Mike and Fletcher Bowman disappeared, and I guessed they were in their habitual nightly communication with the man in Connecticut. The bar was open. There was a fine moon. There was high fidelity music and dancing on the shadowy veranda, for those who cared to. Guy Brainerd, Porter and Tessy Crown and Cam Duncan played bridge. Bonny Carson had taken over the record player. She selected a lot of old stuff. And she would sit there on the floor, legs crossed, eyes shut, swaying back and forth and singing the lyrics without making a sound, her highball glass handy beside her.

  I danced with Puss McGann. I had never danced with her before. It was precisely what I had expected. Dancing is supposed to have sexual overtones and implications. Puss turned it into an exercise as sterile as tennis. She moved gracefully and correctly and followed well, but I could have been dancing with a sister. When Tommy and Puss danced, aside from the fact she was a little too tall for him, they were of almost professional talent. And Tommy danced very well indeed with Lolly Crown. She was smaller, and she seemed to fit his arms better than Puss did. I saw her watching them while they danced. She wore a slightly wistful expression.

  Dancing with Bridget was very pleasant indeed. She was a little warm and wavery with drink, but not too much so. She had an annoying tendency to hum the melody slightly off key, but that was all right too because she smelled good and felt good and was warm against me, and her face in the moving shadows was astonishingly pretty. Warren Dodge was gone. I was surprised he had lasted as long as he had. During the day he had taken on enough liquor to drop a moose in its tracks. Little Bundy kibitzed the bridge game, turning every ten seconds to look at Bonny Carson in a worried way. I wondered if he was trying to count her drinks. I watched Jack Buck dance with Tessy Crown, and there was a certain flavor about their dancing that made me wonder whether old Port was being stupid about his daughter or about his wife. I guessed Jack Buck at about twenty-eight, and Tessy somewhere in the ripeness of her thirties. Jack Buck was closer to her in age than Port in his early sixties.

  I found Louise on a big settee on the veranda and I asked her if she would dance. I had not danced with her before. She butted her cigarette and stood up obediently and came into my arms. Though she had that look of almost-tallness, she was not tall. I often have a great deal of difficulty dancing with women her size, particularly the ones who seem to feel awkward unless they can stab you in the side of the throat with their chin. But Louise had a sweet and easy and natural grace. She was feathery and lithe in my arms, tender and vulnerable and curiously precious. When the long record ended I said, “That was nice.”

  “I was afraid you’d be too tall. You’re not. Why do so many big men move so lightly?”

  “There’s a breeze now and it ought to keep the bugs off the dock.”

  We walked down to the dock. There were mosquitoes in the grass, but when we were on the dock the wind from the northeast was stiff enough to keep them away. From the dock we could see the moon three quarters full back over the house. The silver moonlight made the house lights look orange. We climbed into the cockpit of the Try Again and sat in the two fishing chairs and I lighted our cigarettes. We were better than two hundred feet from the house and the music came down sweetly to us, nostalgic. When I looked at her the moonlight was so bright on her still face that I could see that she was crying, making a private matter out of it, crying without a sound.

  “Louise.”

  “I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  After a long pause she said, “No,” so quietly I barely heard it. I wanted her to talk about it and yet I didn’t. I wanted her to talk because then she would be closer to me. But I also wanted her to be loyal to him in spite of what he was, because it is a cheap thing and a destructive thing in any marriage to spill your bitterness and pain and resentment all over someone else. And I thought that if she confided in me, she might end up resenting me.

  When her tears were over we talked casually about things of no importance, and then she said she thought she would go to bed. I got onto the dock and gave her my hand and pulled her up with just a bit too much energy so that she staggered against me. I put my hands on either side of her face, thumbs near the corners of her eyes, fingers in her dark hair. I looked down at the quiet face. Her eyes were unreadable pockets of a shadow. I kissed her gently and her lips were cool and unresponsive. Then I released her. She turned and walked away from me. I watched her. At the path she turned and walked at an angle across the lawn to one of the doors on the right wing of the veranda. She disappear
ed from the moonlight into the shadows.

  I sat on the edge of the dock for a long time, and then I went to bed.

  FOUR

  I am cursed by an inability to sleep later than six-thirty in the morning. I put on swimming trunks and a gray sports shirt and took a towel with me to the pool. When I climbed out the girl named Booty came from the house in her white uniform and, wearing a shy and grave half smile, asked me if I would like my breakfast by the pool, and what would I like. When the juice and easy-over eggs and bacon and coffee were laid out on the metal table under the umbrella it looked like a Kodachrome ad for breakfast.

  The Bufords joined me when I was on my second cup of coffee. They were ready for another day of fishing the flats. I asked him about the land development, and he went on and on about it. There were fourteen thousand acres. twenty natural lakes. It was called Lakeshore Gardens, and by God, it was the biggest and best development Florida had ever had. They’d put up four hundred homes already, and by the time they were through it would be a city of thirty or forty thousand people, with schools. city services, outdoor movies, shopping centers, the whole shooting match.

  Booty brought me more coffee after they left, and soon Louise joined me. She wore a pink swim suit with black ruffles at the bodice. You couldn’t have told from the way she acted that last night had ever happened. “Sam has Mike Dean said anything to you about talking business?”

  “Only that we’d get around to it sooner or later.”

  “Suppose they arrange to talk to us separately?”

  “That would be okay. But I would like your word that you won’t sign anything until we’ve talked it over together.”