We drove into a tiny village where barefoot black children in torn tee shirts were playing soccer in the road, by the light of one dim street lamp. The shacks by the side of the road were lit by lanterns, and the smell of the tropical air was tainted by garbage and latrines. The kids parted as we drove through and they stared at us silently and solemnly until we were out on the dark country road again.
“So I assume Morgania is named after Captain Morgan?” I asked. “The pirate?”
Oliver grunted and chuckled. “No sir. Everybody thinks that, ain’t been here. No sir. Morgania was named after Colonel Morgan, not Captain Morgan. Not Captain Henry Morgan, this island named after Colonel Morgan, Colonel Ben Morgan. Yes sir. Ben Morgan. Colonel Ben. Thass why we speak English, see. Southern English from the American South. Morgania was founded by Colonel Ben Morgan to be a colony of the Confederate States of America. He brought his whole plantation down here to start over after the South got sold out by Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.”
“He brought all his slaves?” Kitty asked.
“Colonel Ben treated us good,” Oliver answered. “Treated us real fine. Still does.”
“But that was a hundred and fifty years ago,” I pointed out.
“They’s always been a Colonel Morgan. Big house on the hill. Always been a Colonel Ben. The Morgan family still own all the businesses on this island. Everywhere people work, everywhere they spend their wages. Treat us good, yeah. Treat us good. Morgan Shrimp Company, Morgan Fruit Company, Morgan Grocery Store, general store, hotels, bars, it’s all Colonel Ben’s. First Bank of Morgania, that, too. Yes sir. Treat us good. We’re not slaves no more, see. See those lights up ahead? Those lights, all bright? Thass Pirate’s Paradise. Morgan family own that, too. Yep. Own that too. You gone love it. Y’all don’t dive?”
“We’re in the tourist business,” Kitty repeated. “Thought we’d do some exploring. I hear there are some little islands around Morgania? Keys, they’re called? That’s what our friend said.”
Oliver said, “Hmmm.”
“Polly’s Key?” Kitty persisted. I took her hand and tried to squeeze caution into it, but she was on a roll. “You been out there, Oliver?”
Oliver pulled over to the side of the rutted, lonely road and stopped the car with the motor running. He twisted his shoulders around and stared at us. His face was blacker than the night. “Who tole you about Polly’s Key?” he asked.
“Friend,” Kitty said. Her voice was faint, and I could tell she knew she’d pushed her luck.
“Who? Who’s your friend, Missus?”
“Guy named Roger,” I said. “We met him in a bar in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. Didn’t learn his last name, never saw him again. He said Morgania was a beautiful island and we should come see—”
“Mista Raja,” Oliver growled. “He’s right. Morgania is a beautiful island, no thanks to his ass. He’s funny business, not tourist business. You stay away from Mista Raja, you hear? Stay away from those keys, too. Dangerous out there. Snakes, spiders, poisonous plants, big bats, bad lizards, funny business. You hear me? No funny business. No funny business. Now I’m gone drive this car, but you tell me you’re here on funny business, I turn right around and straight back to the airport. I’ll have you on the next plane out. For your own safety. Okay? Next plane out.”
“Tourist business, Oliver,” I assured him. “Strictly tourist business.”
His stare was so silent we could hear the air alive with insects. Then he nodded. “Good. Thass good. Tourist business.” He turned forward again and got the car out onto the road. “Lots to see on this island,” he said. “Plantations, harbors, shipwrecks, parrots, flowers, hills, waterfalls, sandy beaches, then they’s diving. Y’all don’t dive?”
“Don’t dive. We could learn?”
“Yeah, they be glad to certify you at the resort, you learn to dive, rent quipment, dive and see the prettiest fish you ever. Yeah, pretty fish, Cap’n. You too, Missus. Pretty fish. Golf, we got golf, there’s tennis, golf, lots of stuff. You want I’ll show you all over the island. Whole day, cost you twenty dollars. Whole day, and we stop for lunch, you buy lunch and the beer. Whole day. Any time, you just call your friend Oliver. Yeah. Call Oliver. Well, you two, here it is. Here we are. Pirate’s Paradise. Bess hotel in Morgania. Bess in the world. Best.”
He drove his cab through estate gates and along a flagstone drive lined with palm trees. The palace before us was lit up like Disneyland, all white and pink, surrounded by floodlit gardens. He rolled to a stop in front of the glass and brass entrance, opened his door, and extracted his body from the front seat. He opened our doors and we climbed out of the back seat. He lifted our luggage from the trunk and placed it on the curb in front of the hotel entrance.
“This is it,” he said. “Bess place you ever stayed, for sure.” He reached into his back pocket and drew out a damp, bent business card. “OLIVER CAB,” it read. “4211.” “Thass the phone number. Any time you want a ride, you just call me. I know what you want to see, and I show you. You got that?”
“Got it,” I said.
“Got it, Missus?”
Kitty nodded.
Oliver nodded back and handed me the card, then granted us his gap-toothed smile. “You two stay a long time here in Morgania and you have a great time, you hear? Great time. And you got a ticket out, if you need it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I take you to the airport. And if you need to get out faster than that, emergency, something like that, you call me, call me, call me. I get you out. I get you on the next plane.”
He wiped his right hand dry on the tee shirt that barely covered his massive belly, then offered it solemnly. I shook the hand, then Kitty shook it. She gave him one of her smiles and his grin grew to reveal a couple of bright gold molars.
“How much do we owe you?” I asked.
Oliver chuckled and shook his head. “All paid for,” he said. “Paid in advance.”
“What do you mean? Who—”
“One more thing, Cap’n. You happen to run into Mista Raja? You tell him he still owes me for the ride I gave him that one time. That Yankee bastard stiffed me.”
***
I set our suitcases down on the floor and flipped on the soft indirect lighting. “Ye gods,” I said.
Kitty said, “Not bad.”
Our room had two king-size beds, hardwood floors, teak furniture, paintings of tropical sunsets on the walls, an air-conditioning unit in the window, a cabinet with a large-screen TV and an array of little liquor bottles, a refrigerator, and a ceiling fan making lazy circles. A bottle of champagne was chilling on the round table in the corner of the room, next to a basket full of papayas, bananas, and oranges. We walked into the bathroom, which had a gold throne, two sinks shaped like seashells, a marble tile floor, and a walk-in shower.
Back out in the bedroom I said, “So who gets which bed?”
Kitty gave me a tired but wicked smile. “Oh don’t give me that crap,” she said. She put her hands on my shoulders and brought her friendly chest in contact with mine. “You know we’re sleeping in the same bed. And it’s going to be this one, closest to the bathroom, because you get up to pee so much.”
“Well, I’m of a certain age,” I said. I gave her shoulder blades a friendly going over. She had some knots in there that I planned to untie later. Just being friendly here, nothing nasty.
“So throw the suitcases on that other bed and we’ll unpack after.”
“After what. Now Kitty—”
“After dinner,” she said. “Isn’t anyone else around here hungry?”
“Come to think of it, I’m starved. The last thing we ate was that strange, tasteless item in the San Salvador airport.”
“And I could also use a coupla three drinks,” Kitty added. “That looked like a pretty cool bar. Now leggo. I got to go wash my face and do a few things.”
***
“Oh shit. There he is agai
n.”
The Captain’s Pleasure bar was on the outdoor terrace, a big circular bar surrounded sparsely by drinkers on stools, all braying like yuppies on holiday, comparing their day’s adventures underwater. A team of brawny black bartenders in starched tropical shirts kept us all well poured while they bounced and nodded to the reggae. They also brought us plate after plate of complimentary hors d’oeuvres: nachos, ceviche, and peanuts dusted with cayenne to keep us thirsty. A jolly joint, and Kitty, decked out in a lavender miniature dress that clung to her torso like crepe paper, was on her second coco loco, a hollowed-out coconut full of ice, fruit, umbrellas, straws, and who knows how much rum. I stuck to Tanqueray, which made me think of Carol, but I was too weary to be sad about that. I was, in fact, getting mellower by the minute until Kitty said it: “There he is, Guy. That bald asshole.”
Indeed he was, directly across from us. It was him all right, sitting by himself, with empty stools on either side of him. He’d changed into a fresh white guayabera, but there he was, blowing smoke rings at his martini glass. Kitty said, “I’m going to go ask him what the fuck he wants exactly.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Look, it’s a coincidence, okay? Let the man have his drink in peace. It’s been a long day for all of us, and—”
“Bullshit, Guy. He’s stalking us. Not just me. It’s not just my bod he’s got his eye on. It’s the both of us, and I’m going to find out what this is all in the hell about.”
But just as she was starting to slip from her stool, the man looked up and caught my eye. He smiled, raised his eyebrows in a slight nod, held out his martini glass and toasted us across the distance. Kitty slipped back into the saddle and said out of the side of her mouth, “Now what. He’s seen us.”
It was out of our hands. The man stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. He brought his martini with him as he glided around the bar and approached the stool on Kitty’s left. “Hello, fellow travelers,” he said through a smile made of perfect teeth. “Mind if I join you?”
“Feel free,” I told him. I slid a plate of nachos in his direction and said, “Help yourself.”
“Thanks, but I’m saving room for dinner. They do this amazing red snapper here, the whole fish, with wine and almonds. My name’s Lew, by the way. Lewis Pomeroy.”
I held my right hand out in front of Kitty and said, “I’m Guy Mallon. And this is—”
“Catherine,” she said. “Catherine Williams. What do you do, Mister Pomeroy?”
“Lew. I’m on vacation. I don’t do much of anything when I’m on vacation. I come here for the diving. Do you folks dive?”
“I don’t know why everybody comes here for the diving,” Kitty said. “The pool doesn’t even have a board. I checked it out. Guy, buy me another one of these coconut thingies.”
Pomeroy’s face broke into a surprised smile. “That’s not the kind of diving everybody’s talking about, Catherine. Have you ever been SCUBA diving?”
Kitty snorted coco loco out of her nose and slapped him gently on his strong and hairy forearm. “I know, I know. I was kidding, man. You think just because I’m gorgeous I’m stupid or something?”
Pomeroy relaxed his smile into all charm and said, “Of course not.” He held up his left hand for one of the bartenders and waved his right over all of our drinks. The bartender beamed and nodded and got to work.
“So Lew,” Kitty said. “Don’t want to tell us what you do for a living?”
“Can’t,” he answered, still smiling as if his secret was a sex toy. “Company secret.”
“CIA?” she guessed.
“If I were CIA I wouldn’t tell you. But I’m not. I work for myself, and I work all the time, but when I come on vacation I refuse to talk about it. Real estate if you must know, but please, let’s don’t talk about that. I’m on vacation. How about you two? Guy, I believe you said you were traveling on business?”
“No,” I said. “Well, maybe I said that. I think I just meant we’re not honeymooners. Catherine and I work together and we decided to take a vacation together. We’re tourists. The tourist business I guess you’d call it.”
The bartender set drinks in front of us all.
“I bet you work for the war on drugs,” Kitty persisted. “Am I right?” She took a long suck on her straw. “You work for that asshole Barry McCaffrey, right?”
Still smiling, Lewis Pomeroy said, “Never heard of him. He’s probably not a diver. So. You two work together, huh? What kind of business?”
“I just retired,” I said. “I used to be a book publisher. But let’s don’t talk about publishing either, okay?”
“No kidding. What kind of books?”
And we were off and running, chatting about poetry and bridge loans, points and typos, galley proofs and escrow, good neighborhoods and bad reviews, hardwood floors, balloon payments, warehouse space, fire insurance, printer’s bills, and Fannie Mae. It lasted through two more drinks, by which time Kitty was ready to do a back flip off her stool. At long last, Lew Pomeroy put down a credit card, shoved my credit card back at me emphatically, and said, “Time for my snapper. Care to join me?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “We’ve stuffed ourselves on hors d’oeuvres. Enjoyed chatting with you.”
Kitty said, “Likewise, I’m sure.”
Lew said, “Get a good night’s sleep. You’re going to love Morgania, take my word for it. Good night, Guy. Good night, Kitty.”
***
We had rolled out of each other’s good-night hug and I was halfway to dreamland, riding on a cloud of gin and lulled by the slow, soft click of the ceiling fan, when Kitty said, “How the hell did he know my name was Kitty?”
“Huh?”
“That Lew guy,” she said. “He called me Kitty.”
“That’s your name,” I pointed out.
“I introduced myself as Catherine. Which is my name. Where did he come up with Kitty?”
“Lot of Catherines are called Kitty. You know what? I’m really sleepy. How about—”
“Is our door locked?”
“Yes. Good night.”
“He’s working for Roger, I bet,” Kitty said. “I’ll bet you a million dollars.”
“You don’t have a million dollars.”
“He’s one of Roger’s goons. Probably here to do a pickup, take a bunch of coke back to L.A. Or maybe Roger sent him out to California to keep an eye on me, make sure I didn’t cause any trouble.”
“Like what kind of trouble?”
“Like following him here to Morgania and busting his sorry ass for what he did to Gracie, that’s what. See what I mean? That Lew dude is tailing us. He’s working for Mista Raja.”
“Hmmm.”
“I’m really tired, Guy. Sorry but I’m falling asleep. Good night, Guybaby.” Within seconds she was softly snoring.
I lay there twitching and listening to the click of the ceiling fan, which seemed to get louder and faster for what felt like half an hour before it faded into a soft background pattern and got gauzy, the rocking of an airplane flight, the gentle whirlies of gin, and there was Carol, smiling at me from her desk at the office, smiling and humming.…
“Guy?”
I shook my head. “Huh? What the hell time is it?”
“Who do you suppose paid Oliver to pick us up at the airport?”
“Mmph.”
“And how come that dude wasn’t on our plane?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“So here’s how I figure it,” Kitty said, when we had finished our third cup of coffee. The breakfast had been silent, probably because we were both so hungry, but probably also because we were both thinking nonstop about what the fuck we were doing in Morgania anyway. At least I was, all through the cantaloupe, papayas, bananas, sweet rolls, Spanish eggs, and coffee, lots of coffee. “You listening to me, Guy? Here’s how I figure it.”
I set down my cup and wiped my lips with a napkin. “How d’you figger it, Miss
Kitty?”
“That loodood is working for Mista Raja.”
“Loodood?”
“Come on, Guy. Stick with me here. It’s not like we’re on vacation. Lew. Lewis Pomeroy he calls himself. He’s working for Roger Herndon. Right?”
“Doing what?” I asked.
“Keeping an eye on us. It’s obvious.” Her eyes were glittering.
“Kitty,” I said, “have you considered how dangerous this is? What we’re doing? This mission we’re on? We’re talking guys with guns. Coke traffic. Pirates are romantic and all, but nowadays they’re all business. They’re into vengeance and pain. Not to mention local politics, jails, tin toilets, disease.…I mean—”
“You trying to back out on me, you little fucker?”
I looked at my coffee cup, wishing there were more coffee in it.
“Huh?”
I looked up into her face, which was on the point of crumbling, and said, “No, Kitty. I’m with you.”
***
After breakfast we went into the resort dive shop. “Everybody’s all dive, dive, dive,” she said. “The least we can do is snorkel, as long as we’re here. Besides, I want to talk to whoever’s in charge.”
So we rented fins and snorkels from the weathered hippie who ran the shop. Kitty looked quite charming behind the faceplate of a neon-blue mask. As I was signing the MasterCard slip, she asked the old salt, “Lew Pomeroy been in this morning?”
“I don’t know a Lew Pomeroy,” he told us. “You folks are my first customers of the day.”
“You never heard of Mister Pomeroy?” I asked.
“Newp. Course I doubt if he ever heard of me either,” he said.
End of that road, I decided. “So how do we find the best snorkeling spot?”
The proprietor looked at his wristwatch. “You folks staying here at the resort, right? Okay, go get your swimsuits on. Be sure and put on a lot of sunscreen, okay? Okay, be down there at the marina at ten o’clock, that’s like twenty minutes from now. I’ll have somebody there to take you out, show you the spots, bring you back.”
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