The Tropical Issue

by Dorothy Dunnett

  I wondered what God was doing, and looked behind. Much further back than before, the wheelchair flashed chromium as it passed windows. From the same light I saw Johnson still in it, with Lenny freewheeling behind. They were coming quite fast, and Johnson had a coil of rope in his lap.

  The crossroads got closer.

  Rope. He could fling it to us, and pull us out one by one, breaking our spines on the cobbles.

  He could pass us, and cordon the road, catching the rope on the front runners and tipping us all out to fracture our skulls.

  He could lassoo the rods joining basket to runners except that he hadn’t the weight now to brake us. We should just pull him down after us until he skied up our backs.

  He could lassoo the rods and anchor the rope to a lamppost. The lamppost might hold, but the basket would still tip us all out and likely kill us.

  The junction was nearly on us. You could see it quite clearly, from the lights of a car about to cross our bows from my side.

  We couldn’t turn, the other road was too narrow. ‘Yell!’ said Ferdy. We yelled.

  The car was an old Peugeot. It entered the crossroads just as we did. It slammed on its brakes. The bumpers raked all along my side of the basket. The man inside, I could see, was hysterical.

  Then we were over the junction, and plunging down on the far side.

  I looked back, once, at the Peugeot. And so saw the wheelchair, damn him, adroitly avoiding the car, turn safely as we couldn’t turn. Turn into the nice, level sideroad and trundle off, leaving us to dive straight on and brave the chute Godless.

  Twenty minutes, that ride is supposed to take. I wake up at night sometimes still, thinking of it. Just as, at work on a film, you learn what people are like under pressure, so I learned that much more about Kim-Jim and Ferdy.

  That they were quick-witted, both of them. Steering by shifting their weight, they learned to make for anything that would slow the sledge without tipping us over.

  A pail of water. A litter of cardboard and cabbage leaves. We made a few mistakes. We hooked the chair of a man being shaved outside a barber’s shop, and we upset a lot of light empty crates that weren’t empty, but had these fed up ducks in them.

  The cobbles behind us filled with complaining fat beaks like a football crowd. We had two in beside us, and a shaving brush.

  Ferdy was as fit as a ballet master. It was he who stood up and snatched two umbrellas, from where they hung upside down on an awning, with the sledge swerving beneath him. Until they blew out, they slowed us a fraction. Then he hooked a pail of cement with one handle, but that just spun us into the side, upsetting a man with a basket of cabbages. People were shouting by now, all up and down the Rua, and kids raced after us, throwing things, till we left them far behind, still running and squealing.

  A guardia jumped in front of us at one point, blowing a whistle, and jumped quickly off in a flash of blue-grey, which was a pity, as he would have slowed us a lot.

  A constant hooting behind us made me turn round. It came from a lorry.

  It wasn’t trying to pass. It was offering to throw us rope, out of each window.

  The sledge swooped and curved. People scattered below us, dragging bikes and trolleys and babies out of the way. Beyond that were trees, and a major crossing, and the river. Beyond that, in fact, was disaster.

  I turned my back on it, and knelt on the bucketing seat, and prepared to catch one of the ropes. Ferdy on his side did the same. Kim-Jim, his teeth clenched under his granny glasses, took our clothes in two powerful handfuls and grimly hung on to us.

  The driver leaned out of his side of the lorry and flung the end of a huge rope to me. I caught it, and he let it uncoil itself.

  On the other side of the lorry, the passenger leaned out and flung the end of a new coil to Ferdy. Ferdy caught it. The passenger, still in his peaked cap, was Lenny.

  The two ropes began to unfold and Ferdy and I, balancing each other, bent to tie the free ends to the sledge stanchions.

  For, while a sudden roping would have tipped us out on our heads, the lorry could match our speed, and then pull us up slowly.

  It was brilliant.

  I finished tying my rope at the same moment as Ferdy. At the same moment Kim-Jim swallowed and said, ‘Folks. It’s too late.’

  And it was.

  Ahead lay this big junction, swarming with vehicles. Swarming with whistle-blowing guys in white helmets and crossbelts who were having no effect at all on the traffic, which was on its way home to Mama and didn’t want to know about sledges.

  And if that wasn’t enough, there was a lorry stalled on the junction before us.

  A big lorry. The biggest I’d seen in Madeira, stationary, with its back to us, filling the whole of what I later believed to be the Rua do Bom Jesus.

  ‘Bom Jesus!’ in fact was what Ferdy said, or something very like it. There was no time for the coils of rope behind us to take the strain slowly. Even if the lorry behind us reversed, it would do nothing but send us flying into that great solid back of plate metal.

  We hurtled down to the crossroads, and this huge bloody truck sitting there, blocking our path.

  The truck got bigger and bigger. And longer. And higher.

  The truck heaved itself up until the stars and the lights were blocked out, and we swooped screaming downhill the last yards into blackness.

  Just before we arrived it got to its full height. It discharged its cargo. A curtain of green sugar cane dropped from its inside and spread, sliding and squelching on the roadway in front of us.

  Screeching and smoking, the sledge hurtled down. It hit the soft, stringy mass, ran through it, ran up part of the uptilted truck, overturned in slow motion and turfed the three of us out, like a very slow catapult, into a bed of yielding green sweetness.

  Sight and hearing briefly left me. I got to all fours. I heard the wholesale intake of breath, as the Portuguese audience got over its fright and prepared its lungs for suitable comment.

  I looked round, still on all fours, and saw Kim-Jim bent over, hunting his glasses, and Ferdy already upright and dancing a knees-up, his tanned head wreathed like Bom Jesus with cane leaves, and a struggling duck up his cashmere.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the flash, travelling uphill, of chromium.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ said Johnson, ‘that you have passed the Madeira Visitor’s Test.’

  ‘You will attend your Award Dinner on Friday. Crispy Duck with Diaphragm Jelly. After which the sugar cane owner busts your chops for you.’

  He was sitting, a trace out of puff, in the wheelchair, with his hands still folded peacefully over his cardie. He added, ‘Congratulations. Lenny is bringing the Daimler.’

  Ferdy was crying. He leaned forward, the duck in his hands, and kissed Johnson. ‘You got the rope?’ he said. ‘And the lorries?’

  I suddenly felt pleased about ordinary things, like the Honourable Maggie.

  ‘Don’t thank me,’ Johnson said. ‘I’ll be staying a few days at Reid’s, if Miss Geddes wants to settle her phone calls. You could send the five hundred dollars there too, if you don’t happen to have as much on you.’

  Ferdy started crying again. Kim-Jim looked bemused through buckled glasses. I was so surprised and so cross I was speechless.

  Men are what spoil the breed.

  Men are bums.

  That’s what gives men a bad name: bums like Johnson.

  Chapter 8

  He meant it, too. Before the next day was out, we all got our invites to dine with the Owner in a private room in Reid’s Palace Hotel on the Friday. The words Bring your Cheque book, being understood, were not actually printed.

  I wasn’t going to pay for my phone calls. I wasn’t going to go to the dinner. I was fed up with the lot of them, for I couldn’t get one of them to listen. I couldn’t get one, even Kim-Jim, to believe that that runaway sledge was no accident.

  Dead tourists are bad for the economy. Sledge ropes as frayed as that had to be sa
botaged. Sledge runners as fast as that had to be doctored.

  I had shoved the sugar cane off and looked at the runners myself, in the street lights, while the sledge was still upside down.

  They were black with scorch marks, but that was all you could see. If they had been sprayed, the slippiness had worn off with the rubbing.

  I wanted to go back to Monte, and find people, and ask a lot of other questions as well, but no one would let me.

  Suddenly the Daimler was there, and money and names and addresses were changing hands, and the doors shut and the smoked-glass windows went up, and Ferdy and Kim-Jim stopped exclaiming at each other, and jabbering thanks and questions and whoops and howls at Johnson, and it got very quiet in the back seat as well as the front.

  When we arrived at the Sheridan villa, Kim-Jim was actually asleep behind his squint glasses, and Ferdy had started to hold his spade-bashed body and grunt when he breathed, which I paid no attention to, as I had the mother and father of all headaches and my jaw hurt, and I wasn’t grunting.

  Johnson wouldn’t come in to visit Natalie, and from the Good Riddance way the car doors got slammed behind us, I guessed his nurse-driver had voodoo’ed it.

  Then when we got in we found the two male dinner guests and the Honourable Maggie were expected at any moment, and Natalie needed her face done.

  She made all the right shocked noises over a digest of what had happened, kissed Kim-Jim warmly and sent him off to his room, and told Ferdy she was sorry about his bruises, but hadn’t he better change, for this little dinner was quite important.

  It came out that the little dinner was strictly for five, and that Ferdy was staying with his client Natalie, while his girlfriend, by her own choice or not, had a suite in a nearby hotel. Which was interesting.

  I started to tell Mrs Sheridan while I was doing her face that her banana friend was still on the island, but she knew that already from Aurelio.

  Then I started to tell her that Kim-Jim and Ferdy and I had nearly been killed, and this guy van Diemen had done it, but she only got up, saying, ‘Look, I’m busy now, Rita. I really don’t think what you are saying is possible. But if it will make you feel any better, I’ll check tomorrow where Mr van Diemen is. He probably got the next plane . . . Is my hair done, or did you mean to smooth that bit?’

  We did not discuss the fact that she had guessed all along that her bananas friend was the one who attacked me. She had paid a thousand quid not to have Roger bothered, and she didn’t have my fat jaw to worry her.

  Also, come to think of it, she now had Kim-Jim back. If I got scared and walked out tomorrow, she could play the reserve. I wondered when the reserve would tell her that he might not be playing.

  Dinner was to be served in the formal dining-room, and Aurelio and Dolores and the non-resident help had set it all out with silver and napkins and candles. The smell of food reminded me that I hadn’t had anything since my breakfast-tray.

  I came to an arrangement with Aurelio. Then, on my way up to Kim-Jim and Ferdy, I paused to see the three guests arriving.

  The two men came first, and together. From Ferdy, I knew that the silvery American with the rimless glasses and the matching hankie and tie must be Mrs Sheridan’s American lawyer. His first name was Harvey. His second name, which I have to copy out, was Kazimierz.

  The second man might have been harder to place. Short, and inclined to be tubby, with a European face but a Pacific tan. Handmade shoes, bespoke shirt and dark glasses, even at night. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, a hair-piece.

  Fred Gluttenmacher, wealthy business man, who might, if well handled, put up the money for this film Natalie was hoping to get into. And Ferdy, he said, was hoping like mad to get into with her.

  And finally, the Hon. Maggie. Nineteen, rich and high-handed, which was maybe why Mrs Sheridan enjoyed handling her. It showed that Natalie Sheridan wasn’t afraid of young competition. It put Ferdy in his place by throwing a bone to him. It would light up the eyes of Fred Glitterbocker. And it drew the attention of the Hon. Maggie’s important friends to the schemes and plans of Natalie Sheridan.

  Maggie was quick on the draw, but hadn’t the Sheridan brainpower or experience. The most important thing about Maggie is that she comes from a long line of dabs who never got into trouble under anything less than a Duke.

  Maggie had a feather boa, and a black Vidal cut and long, long legs leading to a velvet ra-ra and a coin-dotted transparent blouse, with the coins cleverly placed not to hide anything. She was small. She was slim. Her face, which I’d made up a few times, was O.K., with a cheeky, tipped nose. Her figure was smashing.

  Maggie liked meeting people in trade. She would wait until someone got familiar, and then shoot him dead with light remarks about Sandringham. I saw her start work on the toupeed Fred Glitterbloggs, and Mrs Sheridan smile and tap her foot, waiting for Ferdy.

  As I mentioned, I rather like Ferdy. I went along to his room.

  Ferdy had had four straight whiskies since he got in from the sledge run, and was mellow.

  With Kim-Jim’s help, I got him into his Pancaldi shirt, while Kim-Jim found a waistcoat and took his ducked ducks off. When we sent him downstairs, he had partly recovered. And anyway double vision, I thought, would do him nothing but good when he saw Maggie.

  Once they were all in the dining-room, I found the trays Aurelio had promised me, and took them into the study, which was also Kim-Jim’s sitting- and dining-room.

  The fire had been lit, and Kim-Jim was sitting in one of the easy chairs waiting for me, with the green parrot grasping his shoulder and sort of combing his hair in a homey way. The parrot said, ‘I guess there’s just you and me left,’ and let off a lot of gunfire, still combing Kim-Jim’s thatch lovingly.

  I put the food down and said, ‘Is he yours? I thought he came with the furniture.’

  And Kim-Jim took off his buckled glasses and laughed, and said, ‘Lee and Amy Faflick. You know? If you do, you’ll know who to blame for the language. His name’s Cone.’

  ‘My name is Bond . . . James Bond,’ the parrot said.

  ‘Do you teach it?’ I said.

  The parrot rubbed its face against Kim-Jim’s. It knew him. He was fond of it. I supposed, when he left, he would take it. I lifted up the jug of wine Aurelio had given us, and poured some for us both, and put it down. The fire shone red through it, and through Kim-Jim’s glass as he lifted it and saluted me.

  ‘It learns,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me your secrets with Cone in the room. Do you think you’ll like it here?’

  He really wanted to know. But for him I wouldn’t be here. It wasn’t his fault that some freaked-out guy was fouling it up.

  I said, ‘Of course I like it. It’s great. Your equipment is magic. There’s nowhere I’d rather be, once we get rid of this bananas guy. You know, today wasn’t an accident.’

  He didn’t want to talk about today. I suppose, like me, he was shaken, and he had bags under his eyes that you didn’t see when the glasses were on.

  Twenty years from now I’d have bags, but I could paint them out. Kim-Jim didn’t use make-up. It was one of the things I liked about him. Just as I didn’t really mind specs, unless they had twirps like Johnson behind them.

  Kim-Jim said, ‘I know you’re worried. I wouldn’t have come back if you weren’t. But let me thrash it all out with Natalie. She’s got a lot of clout, that particular lady. If anyone is really bothering you, she’ll get rid of them.’

  ‘It’s you he’s after,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t have come back. Why did Mrs Sheridan ring you?’

  He had pushed the food away, but kept the wine. He had clean, workman’s hands, well-kept like the rest of him. I could imagine, whatever the job, he was never unshaven; never without every last item of his kit, all ticked and recorded.

  He said, ‘Of course she was right to ring me. She wanted to warn me. She wanted to tell me about you. She knew I knew about Roger. He’s been treated for this addiction. In between times, he can be qu
ite all right. She doesn’t want to get him into trouble. Just to get him to go quietly away and get himself looked after till he’s better.’

  He continued, ‘I see it like this. I brought you here. You’re my responsibility. I’m sure there’s no danger now, but I wouldn’t be happy if you were here and I wasn’t. And anyway, I have things to arrange. Natalie doesn’t mind. She thinks I’ve broken vacation to reassure you, and while I’m here, I might as well show you the ropes. . .’

  He grinned. ‘I’ll do that, of course. You don’t need much showing. But if, in a while, you’re quite sure you would like it, and she has got used to you too – why, then I could even wrap it up while I’m here. I could tell her I’m going.’

  I said, ‘She won’t understand. She won’t understand anyone wanting to leave her. If you tell her you’re not coming back, you’ll also have to tell her why.’

  ‘I know. She’s proud,’ he said. ‘I’ll be careful, don’t worry.’

  He spoke of Natalie, as he always did, with a sort of old-fashioned respect, like a village chemist talking about a good customer. He spoke about everyone like that. I never heard him gossip, even about his own people.

  From things he had let fall, I fancied he didn’t see his work in the same way as his father and brother. Perhaps even he didn’t have much in common with them, or his sister, or you would imagine he would never have left California.

  I once thought it was because the family name was too famous, and he didn’t feel up to it. Later, it seemed to me that he was just as good in his own way as they were, and that he had parted company with them for other reasons; but he never said what they were.

  There were photographs of them all in his bedroom, beside my yellow cat. Great old Joseph, now in his eighties, scowling at the camera as if there was a director behind it. Clive, whose name every early science fiction buff seems to remember; who could turn an actor into a Chinaman or a werewolf with what the studios thought was pure magic.

  Clive was Kim-Jim’s elder brother, and as tall as Kim-Jim, but black-haired with a moustache that was red. Clive was wifeless at present, so the magazines said, although the picture upstairs showed him half-stripped beside a great swimming pool, with a gorgeous girl with blonde hair leaning over him.