The Tropical Issue

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘Now,’ said Ferdy, sitting on the side of my bed and sliding his hand as far as he could get under the covers, to show there was no ill feeling, ‘now what about this nonsense yesterday? Someone tried to scare you off Natalie?’

  I was glad Mrs Sheridan had told him the truth, and not the camera story. As well as being a goat, Ferdy is a guy who knows his world and can give sensible advice when he feels like it. He heard exactly what happened to me, and he listened to Natalie’s reasons for not calling in the authorities.

  And he agreed with Natalie.

  He was quite firm, and perfectly reasonable. ‘I know, darling. The call for revenge is burning in that stout little heart. But it’s not going to do your career and Kim-Jim’s a power of good to be labelled publicly as a pair of sex-fiends after Natalie’s money, and that’s what the media boys will make of it.

  ‘I know,’ repeated Ferdy earnestly, ‘that you think I don’t want Natalie’s love life dragged into the open because Natalie is going to lay me a lot of lovely golden eggs in the near future and, of course, you’re right. But Rita . . . She’s going to lay you some also. And Rita, you do like eggs? Whites of, handy for hair?’

  I told you. He’s an idiot. I had hoped very much, as the gossip king of the western semiphore, that he would tell me what the kitchen wouldn’t. Even supply a few names and addresses.

  But he didn’t know any. No one but Natalie, he said, knew exactly whom Natalie was laying. Apart, of course, from Kim-Jim.

  I said, ‘I don’t want to be bumped off. I don’t want Kim-Jim bumped off either.’

  ‘My darling Rita,’ said Ferdy, ‘the fellow will have come to his senses and got on the first plane for Australia, I shouldn’t wonder. Portuguese police don’t like girls being beaten up and taxi drivers coshed and eminent ladies’ mid-life crises threatening to appear live on Cable.’

  ‘And if he happens to know Natalie as well as we do, and is sure that she won’t go to the police?’ I said. It was my jaw that was hurting. ‘Otherwise, why drive me all the way to Mrs Sheridan’s villa, once he’d clouted me?’

  ‘Maybe he thought you were going to flake out,’ Ferdy said. ‘Dodo said you looked just like—’

  ‘—a slab of junked meat in Emergency.’ I finished it for him, narkily.

  Under every muscle in Ferdy’s face and behind every whisker there was a laugh busting its guts to get out and shriek as he looked at me.

  I took one of his Birds out of my water jug, and twisted its neck for it, but he just tut-tutted, picked it up, and put it in his top pocket like an umbrella handle.

  He left, turning at the door to repeat his expectoration.

  ‘Leave it to Natalie,’ Ferdy said. ‘She has what are known as Ways and Means. She loves your make-up, darling. Rely on it. She’ll see no one knocks your socks off from here on.’

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say that, driven to it, I could produce some ways that were quite mean myself.

  I let him go. Then I got up, painted out my black eye, and went exploring.

  Rich houses don’t impress me. You get used to working out what’s hired, hocked or might be negotiable.

  Natalie Sheridan’s was a medium-sized villa. There was a high white wall round it, with creeper almost covering the closed-circuit cameras, and solid electronic-locked gates, with a slight Mercedes-sized chip to one side of them.

  Inside, it was all done in pink and grey suede and white marble, with flowering trees in white vats standing everywhere, and pink ruffled blinds to soften the sunlight. Kim-Jim’s room was next door to mine, on the first floor.

  I had a look inside, for sort of good luck, and it was just as I’d imagined it: neat and workmanlike with special places for all the things he was keen on: his record player and his world radio and his tapes.

  On a chest of drawers, in the middle, was the yellow cat I’d sent him. I came out smiling.

  His workroom was next to Natalie’s dressing-room, and there again, the arrangements were efficient and American and streamlined.

  The cupboards which lined the walls were full of packets and tubes and bottles arranged in date order and separated into their various uses: for cinema and T.V. work; for Mrs Sheridan and her friends. The make-up mirror was huge, with a special chair with a foot-rest in front of it.

  There was a sink with a mixer-tap and another fitted for shampooing, and a standard hairdryer and an infra-red stand for fuzzed hair. There was an incinerator chute. There was everything.

  I had seen something like it once or twice before in a private house, but I’d never before been in charge of one. I understood, a bit, how he’d come to leave the struggle outside to serve Mrs Sheridan.

  I left the room, and went downstairs to the other room, the morning-room and study where he sat, and where he did his secretarial bit.

  Unlike the rest of the house, the study was not pink and grey but done up in pine panelling, with rows of books and a couple of filing cabinets. One of the two desks, heavy on onyx and leather, looked like Mrs Sheridan’s.

  The other stood to one side and had a tape recorder on it, as well as a couple of telephones. Kim-Jim’s desk. And now mine.

  But this was also a sitting-room. In front of a real fireplace were two nice leather chairs and a good rug. And a T.V. with a video machine under it. And a cabinet full of cassettes.

  Here Natalie Sheridan would sit with Kim-Jim sometimes, I guessed, if they were alone. Or here Kim-Jim would relax, watching films while Natalie entertained her private business friends, or her boyfriends.

  Kim-Jim loved telly films. It was one of the things we had in common. I had brought a lot of tapes with me, most of them pirated or got for me on the side by my Byres Road pals.

  Dodo hadn’t found them, although she might have noticed that my pack of Modesse was a bit weighty. Dodo, whom I’d seen already when I carried the tea tray into the kitchen, was stony-faced according to custom, eyeing my drawstring pants of Old English Patchwork with the same look that she cast on my New Madeira black eye.

  Dolores and Aurelio, bustling, were friendly. Aurelio would be glad, he said, to take me into town. What Mrs Sheridan’s plans were they didn’t exactly know, except that two men and an Honourable were coming to dinner.

  After a bit they remembered the Honourable’s name, which was Margaret Oliver.

  A female Honourable. A female Honourable I had reason to know, because she was one of Ferdy’s real bits of crumpet. A bitch called Maggie.

  I was cross. I thought he was here to write a book on Sexual Strategy in Flowers, goddammit. What he’d already told me about pansies ought to have been enough to keep him going till Christmas.

  After that, I came out of the service door and fell over him.

  I fell across him because he was lying immediately outside the door on the furry wall-to-wall rug of Mrs Sheridan’s sitting-room, requesting me to be his Sexy Flower Assistant and load his camera for him.

  He had also freed Mrs Sheridan’s parrot, or perhaps it was Kim-Jim’s parrot, who was sitting on one of his shoulders, brooding over half a pound of unravelled cashmere and a bagel of bird shit.

  ‘She doesn’t need you till later,’ Ferdy said.

  ‘‘Screw the bitch,’ said the parrot.

  I stepped over Ferdy’s beautiful flannels.

  ‘I’ll pay you,’ Ferdy said. ‘Twenty a flower.’

  ‘‘Bugger the bastard,’ the parrot said.

  I walked to the door. ‘Not me,’ I said.

  ‘Who else is there?’ bawled Ferdy. He got up on one elbow, and the parrot fell off.

  ‘Bugger the bitch,’ roared the parrot, fluttering off him.

  ‘The Honourable Maggie. Your parrot knows her,’ I said; and walked out.

  The Bird of Paradise, I had noticed, still stuck out of his shirt pocket, with its neck broken.

  I hoped it bit him.

  As arranged, Aurelio dropped me in Funchal on his shopping trip.

  Before we parted, he came with m
e to the house of the driver with the placard, and at my request, asked him questions in Portuguese about how his Mercedes was borrowed. By, of course, the camera thieves.

  It was as well Aurelio was there, as the driver’s wife wasn’t keen to let me in, and kept shuffling about as if I was infecting the furniture.

  In any case, we didn’t learn anything new. He had been bopped on the head from behind, dragged into a toilet and his uniform pinched. End of story.

  We came out, and I thanked Aurelio, and he went off with the car and his shopping list, leaving me to explore the glories of Funchal.

  It took me some time, I can tell you, to find the place where the Mercedes had parked with me in it. The town was steep, and crowded and foreign. There were a lot of striped buses, but I couldn’t read where they were going. I got myself over a river and walked and walked and kept walking until I saw the view I had seen in the last of the light, when the car slowed down and stopped at the end of nowhere.

  I might not have been sure even then, except for the tyre marks. And the fact that it was eleven o’clock on the dot when I got there, and something chirped from the grass.

  My executive watch. You’d better believe it.

  And beside it, what the telly crime man calls the marks of a struggle.

  I never miss a crime series. I browsed all over the grass where the car had been, finding a few things that looked much the same in Troon and Madeira.

  Plus the pin I had used to jab with. Plus a gold cufflink with a crescent engraved on it. Cannon would have been proud. I was proud.

  I put it in my purse, and went off to find a taxi.

  All the roads in Madeira seem to run down from the mountains. They make a big holiday thing of the sledges that once brought stuff to market. Everyone I know, just about, has sent me this postcard, showing the sledges like baskets with tourists in them, and the men who steer them in white, with straw boaters on. And here in real life they were. Big deal, Rita.

  I wondered, now my fedora was bashed, if a boater would suit me.

  There were a lot of flowers about, likely committing misconduct, but no taxis. In the end, I paid a boy to lead me to the nearest rank, which was at the harbour. I walked towards it, looking about me.

  The Clyde is full of harbours. This one was quite big. There was a slipway with four fishing boats on it, and a row of empty cradles for yachts, and some groups of tanned Portuguese perched on walls chatting in checked shirts and cardigans.

  A wee white tunny fishing boat was making out to the open sea through the entrance, rocking some nice yachts lying over at anchor. One of them, a tall white beauty with glittering brass, flew a British flag. I wondered what port it came from.

  Outside the long harbour wall, a handsome cargo ship had arrived, big and clean as a liner, and covered with tackle. The flag at the masthead, a blue square with a yellow C on it, lifted now and then on the breeze.

  It had got quite hot, and I could feel my cheeks glowing all round my sunglasses, and remembered I hadn’t taken off my newly found watch, and therefore would have one brown and blue wrist and one white and blue.

  As I thought about it, the digital pipsqueaked for noon, and the cathedral clock clanged.

  There was a water skiing kiosk. I didn’t need to be back until evening.

  I stopped with my hand on a taxi, and looked out at the sparkling water. Then I looked again, I don’t know why, at the cargo ship.

  The driver was saying, ‘Where to?’ but I didn’t answer him. I said, ‘That’s a big ship. Does she call in here often?’

  ‘Often. Where to?’ said the driver.

  I was thinking. I said, ‘What is she called?’

  Behind his moustache, the driver’s face was getting red. He stuck his elbow out.

  ‘Is called Coombe Regina. Is banana ship. You want this taxi?’ said the driver.

  Bananas.

  ‘What,’ I said, ‘do you think I’m standing here for? You know the Funchal address of Coombe’s Bananas?’

  He did.

  ‘O.K.,’ I said, and got in. ‘Turn round and take me two blocks beyond it.’

  Cannon. Smiley. Move over.

  The Madeira headquarters of the Coombe Banana Company stands among the banks, the consulates and the other good-looking buildings near Queen Amelia’s Municipal Gardens in the Avenida Arriaga (I looked it up).

  It is also near the highly geared-up cellars of the Madeira Wine Association, from which, it being lunchtime, warm-looking tourists were coming out in a steady flow with some of their Madeira wrapped under their arms and the rest of it no doubt already in their bloodstreams.

  People were beginning to come out of Coombe’s Bananas too, as I found when I paid off the taxi and walked back along the street on the opposite side.

  It was a very fancy building, with double doors made of black curly iron and glass, leading into a tiled hall with plants in it. As the doors began to swing more and more, I could see that there was a reception desk and some armchairs further in, and a flight of white stairs on one side.

  The bananas, I worked out, occupied the middle and top floors of the building, and the staircase was the only exit.

  I worked it out because the crest of Coombe’s Bananas, the yellow C, was embossed on all the upper parts of their windows, just as it appeared on their flag.

  And on the cufflink of the guy I’d had this little disagreement with, in and out of the Mercedes.

  The door opened and another typist came out. So far no one very important-looking had been struck by hunger. No doubt the top agents, or such as could afford good suits and cufflinks, were still taking phone calls from Southampton or Hamburg or Tenerife, or wherever banana growers and banana eaters find one another.

  The door swung again, and a man in a cheap shirt and tie came out, carrying a jacket. He glanced across the street, saw me, and stared with such interest that he crashed into a woman with three children under four and another on the way.

  All of them yelled at him except the one who wasn’t born yet, and it taught me something. If I wanted to spy, blue and orange hair was a drawback. Telly Savalas didn’t have it. I needed a headscarf.

  I looked about. On either hand were touts with trays of embroidered hankies, standing firm in the way of outgoing customers of the Madeira Wine Association like battered steps in an off-season fish-ladder.

  None of the hankies would cover the blue or the orange, and there were no likely shops that were near enough.

  A man in a straw boater came along, this time on my side of the road. He grinned all the time he walked up to me, broke stride as he passed, and murmured something in Portuguese while pinching my patchwork. He then walked on, gazing backwards and winking. He was heading for a bicycle.

  It happens all the time. He looked normal. He had a loop of rope round one shoulder, and a jersey slung over a creased white open-necked shirt. His trousers were white, and he had little boots on. He also had a big black moustache and black eyes.

  He was one of the sledge-hammers who ran down the hill with the tourists. I said, ‘Mind the bike!’ and pointed behind him.

  He grinned, showing awful teeth, but the sense got to him just a little too late. He turned to see where I was pointing, and fell over the bike.

  I picked him up.

  There is an art in letting a fellow know that, although you don’t grudge a pinch, you don’t want another one. We got it worked out, as I handed him his rope with one eye on the opposite doorway. He understood that I was Scotch, and staying in one of the villas, and would fairly enjoy coming on one of his sledge rides.

  But first, that I wanted to hire his hat for an hour or two.

  For a bet. For a fair sum of money. And if he wanted I’d bring it back later.

  The distance between a come-hither and a friendly exchange between sexes is not so well marked in Portugal and her colonies as it is in Troon, for example, and it took a bit longer before we got everything straight. But we did in the end, and a handful of m
y escudos disappeared into his pocket.

  Outside, the hat was plain with a brown ribbon round it. I wouldn’t have minded knowing what it looked like inside, either; but he had it whipped off and fixed on my head before I could take a quick look. It had a nice concealing brim.

  He was not all that pressed for time, it then seemed. His name was Eduardo. After five swings of the door and the exit of three girls and two men without cuffs, never mind cufflinks, I explained that he’d ruin the bet if he stayed, and I’d bring his hat back in no time to the sledge station. He kissed my hand in the end, and crossed the street grinning, nearly causing two old Austins to crash. I was so busy watching him, I nearly missed the Coombe door open yet again, and a tall man come out, for a change.

  A tall, well-dressed man wearing a collar and tie, and grasping a briefcase.

  A man with a lot of fine, dark-brown hair that kinked over his ears and at the back of his neck. Dark brown, but not black like Portuguese hair. And with it, a square face that had tanned to a shiny red-brown, making a pair of light eyes seem even lighter.

  Then he turned his head, to check before crossing the road, and I saw that one side of his face was marked black and blue and red by a long, scraping graze. And that the hand holding his case had a bandage on it.

  I took cover as soon as I glimpsed him, but even if I had been standing full in the sun, I doubt if he’d have seen me. He was making for a sports car parked nearby under the trees. He flung his briefcase in, opened the door, and in a moment was edging out into the traffic, going away from me. I was surprised the noise in my chest hadn’t stopped him.

  The moment he was out of sight, I crossed the road and went into the hall of Coombe’s Bananas.

  Behind the desk, the girl was on her feet, just going for lunch, and not too keen to be bothered with tourists in men’s hats who likely needed to be told the way to their consul, but quickly.

  Before she could walk to the door, I said, ‘Excuse me. I have something to return to one of your company men. The one who’s just driven away. Do you expect him back soon?’

  She spoke English, but not well enough to do two things at once. She stopped putting things in her bag, and looked at me.