The Tropical Issue

by Dorothy Dunnett

  It was Old Joseph who said finally, ‘You seen a career counsellor about that caterwaulin’? Do us a favour? I got an anxiety disorder about hurricanes. I like peace to worry.’

  ‘We’re there,’ said Amy, and braked.

  We let Amy get down first; and when she yelled we got out, collected our disabled, and staggered into the tropical Tube station which was the Faflick branch of Pets Inc. at St Lucia.

  The only thing we had time to notice, in the semi-darkness under the roar of the trees, was that it was the best place in the world to stay through a hurricane.

  It was built into the side of one of the Pitons, hollowed out of the crag so that all you saw on the face of the hill were the doors and the shuttered windows, and other great double doors, stretching further than we could see on either side.

  Some of the doors had empty cages fixed in front of them, giving on to the big paved front yard. There were more cages under the trees, also empty. The Toyota’s garage was a little along from the house, and also scooped out of the hillside and strongly structured.

  Raymond helped put the car in, and barred the door against the tug of the wind while Amy struck a match and led us into her hot, lightless sitting-room, where a couple of dogs made a fuss of us.

  On the table were three stout candlesticks, with several candles in each. She lit them, and we saw we were in a comfortable, low-ceilinged room full of chintzy cane furniture and piles of magazines and out-of-date newspapers with dog bowls on them, and some nice but chewed rugs.

  It was rather like Pets Inc. in England. You could imagine Celia or Jim Brook walking about quite easily.

  But there was no one else here except the dogs and the caged guests and Amy. She had let her lad feed the animals and then get off home, because of the hurricane. She could reach the indoor cages herself through the house if she had to, but they shouldn’t need any attention.

  She directed old Mr Curtis to a bedroom, if he wanted to wash and lie down, and showed Lenny another, for Johnson. She went off, with Raymond, to find and switch on the emergency generator. She seemed to have selected Raymond as having the highest combined I.Q. and muscle power, which was probably right at that.

  Somewhere, a jenny started up. An inside door banged. Amy strode in, flicked down a switch, and blew out the candles. The chintzy armchairs got brighter and the air conditioners started to buzz again.

  Then there was a crash like the end of the world, and Hurricane Chloe struck.

  From beginning to end, a hurricane can punish one area badly for something like six hours, or three hours until its eye reaches the area, and three hours afterwards. The worst damage happens at the time the eye is passing and afterwards, and there are severe gales and squalls for a lot longer than three hours after that.

  The noise is stunning.

  If you know you’re safe, you can go to bed and stuff your ears and get hold of a sleeping pill, as Old Joseph did.

  If you need to lie on your back, as Johnson did, then you are as well to do it, while you have the chance.

  Lenny made himself earplugs from bread rolls, and kipped down in the same room. I said to Raymond, ‘Why don’t you do the same? If the house caves in, I’ll wake you.’

  He looked down at me. ‘You really into congos?’ he said.

  Cartwheels, he’d turned. With tassels on.

  ‘Learned from Leroy Horsemouth Wallace,’ I said.

  The freckles on his cheeks stretched. ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘You and Amy let your hair down over your cocoa. No house with Old Joe’s wallet in it can fall very far.’

  I went to tell Amy that she and I were sitting out the hurricane on our own. I found her in the kitchen, finishing off the sort of cook-out that would keep a cavalry regiment and its horses properly fed in battle conditions, assuming the supply line has snapped.

  She told me how to help her, and we finished it easily between us. Then she said, ‘There you are. They’re a nice enough lot of young fellas, but my God, show them a saucepan. You keep dogs?’

  I didn’t.

  ‘Don’t need a warm fuzzy. Quite right. Did the right thing about J.J.’s old lady, though,’ Amy said. ‘Poor old Bessie. See, these dogs are young. They’re nervous. You keep beside them, if I’m busy. So long as you’re calm, they’ll be all right.’

  She meant well. I always did like her.

  The storm banged and howled dimly outside, but we were safe from it. Shack people had to keep their windows open and live in the gale, because it made the house safer. Underground as Amy was, she could keep her shutters closed.

  At her suggestion, I went round and checked them while she got the Hurricane Hole Hotel on VHF16 to tell them that Mr Joseph Curtis was safely at Faflick’s, in case anyone panicked.

  I didn’t know she had a ham radio, till she showed me it. Apparently the first thing to blow out in a hurricane is the telephone system. Then it’s up to the hams to feed the central emergency unit, and the airport and the hurricane base in Miami.

  There were only one or two hams, and if the lines came down, she was going to be busy. Meantime, it was past lunchtime, and we were hungry. We piled chicken creole on two plates and had a sort of picnic lunch in her office, which had no outside windows and was quieter, especially with the door shut.

  We didn’t talk about the storm all that much. Amy’s animals often work for the same show people I do. We have a lot in common.

  She knew this man in Beverly Hills who did tucked jowls and capped teeth for rich dogs, and I knew the guy who trained the U.S. Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue squad pigeons. He taught them to spot bright colours floating in water, and press on a buzzer.

  As I’ve said before, pigeons are clever. ‘Like gerbils,’ I added.

  There was a silence filled with horrifying noises from outside, during which Amy’s cigar glowed bright red in the middle of her Humphrey Bogart face.

  At length: ‘Cool, man,’ she said. ‘But I can’t tell you anything.’ She paused. ‘Ain’t an effing law, though, that says you can’t guess.’

  The basket of gerbils was in the room we were in, with the towel still in place over it. I got up and brought it over.

  They’re nice. I used to keep them myself. Kangaroo-active. Plushy as Chad Valley toys, with double-sewn eyes you can’t choke on.

  Almost hidden under the hay and general litter was the knob of the buzzer. Beside it was a bit of boiled egg and a dog biscuit. After they’d done what was expected of them, her gerbils had got their reward.

  Like pigeons, gerbils can be taught to press buttons. In their case, when they sniff narcotics.

  The basket had come aboard Dolly the first time I had visited Marigot harbour, and today. I wondered if, the night I found Johnson lying asleep in his cabin, a search might not have produced a little stranger in his luggage as well.

  I said, ‘I have a theory. I think that the folk who boarded Dolly and wrecked her were dope runners.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Amy. The cigar smoke hanging about her leather face reminded me of smoke-clouded bifocal glasses.

  I said, ‘I don’t think they were searching for drugs.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Amy.

  ‘No. See those boats smuggling drugs from Colombia, who attack an innocent ship, throw out the owners, transfer their load to her, and sail her themselves to Miami, pretending to be Fidel Castro delivery skippers?’

  ‘Bona fide,’ said Amy absently. ‘One of those?’

  ‘Yes. Except that because of the storm, they couldn’t sail Dolly to Miami. They had to go for the nearest safe harbour. And that was Marigot, where everyone knew Dolly wasn’t in the hands of a delivery skipper.

  ‘So they smashed her up but left her seaworthy, knowing that someone would tow her in, and the Customs would never think of ransacking a boat in that state. Then when the boat was deserted, they could take the cargo ashore and hide it somewhere.’

  ‘Clever,’ said Amy. The light shone on her white hair, and a row of nice smoke rings. ‘But I don’t
see anyone unloading drugs from Dolly just now. The eye of the storm, thank God, is passing south of St Lucia. But it’s still got to pass.’

  ‘But later?’ I said. ‘When do the winds die?’

  ‘They don’t,’ Amy said. ‘But we should be down to an effing gale, say, by sunset.’

  She went on smoking, and looking at me.

  ‘You think it’s silly,’ I said.

  She said, ‘Did I say so? You worried about that son-of-a-bitch Johnson? He’ll live. He’s too angry now to do anything else. Ask him about the gerbils. He’ll probably tell you.’

  I lay back with my sneakers apart, in my borrowed pants and my borrowed shirt and my flattened orange wig with no make-up. ‘But you won’t tell me.’ I said. ‘You won’t tell me if they smelt drugs this morning on Dolly?’

  Amy got up. ‘Cat,’ she said. ‘You’ll find out soon enough. Meanwhile, there’s work to be done. Let’s clear these dishes and see what Chloe has got to say.’

  At four o’clock in the afternoon, the eye of Hurricane Chloe passed to the south of St Lucia. By then all communications except by ham radio on standby power had been knocked out, and Amy had been at the instrument for an hour, relaying messages, and talking to the meteorological office at Hewanorra.

  During this time, and the hours that followed, three-quarters of the banana plantations were ruined, the roofs were peeled off the copra and sugar factories, churches and schools were reduced to their skeletons, and forests of palms were blown down.

  Amy sat, and relayed messages.

  She knew me. She didn’t ask me to relieve her. I brought her strong tea, and sandwiches and whisky, and when one by one Lenny and Raymond and finally Johnson came in quietly to stand and watch, I fed them too.

  Old Joe, asleep on his pill, snored without waking. The last time I went to the kitchen, I heard Amy say, ‘She knows about the gerbils.’

  In the office, Raymond had taken her place at the radio to let her relax with her drink. Johnson, carefully propped on the edge of the desk, was leafing through her notes of floods and road blockages. He put them down.

  ‘If they’re your gerbils, they’ve probably been moonlighting,’ he said.

  He turned to me. He didn’t look like a write-off. He looked the way anyone might look who had broken a couple of ribs. Slightly cautious, wholly filled up with painkillers, and otherwise placid. Too placid, perhaps.

  He said, ‘I don’t plan to be beaten up, but there may be some rough stuff this evening. You don’t need to get mixed in it.’

  Men. ‘How do I keep out of it?’ I said.

  ‘No problem. Just stay here with Amy. Teach her tricks,’ Johnson said.

  The shutters shook and shook, and the door rattled and rattled. It was five-thirty, and nearly official sunset.

  Time for Chloe to wane. And the banging we could hear wasn’t all Chloe. It was caused by a pair of fists hammering on Amy’s front door. And added to that, you could now hear the sound of shouting, half carried away by the gale. The shouting of a strong, impatient voice. A woman’s voice.

  The voice of Dodo of the Teeth, who stood on the threshold when we dragged the door shuddering open, bawling the same thing over and over, while behind her stood the malicious, grinning figure of Old Joe’s grandson Porter.

  ‘Where you-all bastards got her?’ Natalie’s companion was yelling. ‘Where you-all put my poor Miz Natalie?’

  She caught sight of me. ‘You, you no-good nothing! If you harm a hair of her head, I swear by my Daddy, I kill you!’

  ‘I didn’t think they still said that,’ Johnson said. ‘But Amy, do bring her in . . . Rita, I’m helluva sorry.’

  I knew what he meant.

  I was too late.

  It had begun, and I was mixed up in it.

  Chapter 21

  The news that Dodo slung at us all in such fury turned out to be true.

  When, in the fading hours of the hurricane, she had gone to her mistress’s room in the Hurricane Hole Hotel, it was to find that Natalie Sheridan, syndicated political journalist, divorcee, economist, maker of sharp documentaries, and late employer of Rita Geddes, had totally vanished.

  The idea that the quickest way to find Natalie was through the ham radio at the Faflick Pets Inc. near Soufriere was Dodo’s own.

  It was sensible. She knew Old Joe Curtis was with Amy already. Porter had found an abandoned car, and against the hotel’s urgent advice, they had set off in the last of the light. It had not been an easy journey.

  If she had found only Amy and Joe, Dodo would have downed a rum punch, confided all her troubles to Amy, and been content to have the terrible news transmitted, efficiently, to the right authorities.

  Instead, she saw before her the four familiar faces of those in whom Miz Natalie had been so disappointed.

  Including the undersized creature with the unfortunate hair whom Miz Natalie had befriended, and who had deceived her. Conspired against her. Prepared to blackmail her even, it had been said.

  Being already the richer for one suspicious death in Madeira.

  I saw it all on Dodo’s face even before she accused me of kidnapping Natalie, and even of luring old Mr Curtis into my lair.

  She demanded to see them both. We had to wake up Old Joseph to convince her that we weren’t selling him for money or spotted lampshades. Then she demanded to be shown over the rest of the house, in case we were concealing Miz Natalie.

  Porter lay back on the sofa, shut his brown eyes and giggled. He looked high on something. But perhaps it was just relief and amusement.

  He was giggling at Dodo. He was giggling at the rest of us too, if you watched him. His grandfather knew it: threw him a look like a laser beam, and then went back to extracting our news of the hurricane.

  What had happened to Natalie didn’t interest Old Joe. Except that it had struck him, if not Dodo, I thought, that Porter might have had something to do with it.

  Amy, used to behavioural problems, had chosen to take the agitated Dodo firmly round the entire settlement, to see for herself that Miz Natalie was not on the premises.

  I went along too, at Dodo’s request, and the dogs came without invitation.

  Actually, I wanted to see Amy’s animals. So, it seemed, did Raymond and Johnson. When she opened the door off the scullery that led to the long, stone-flagged path of the zoo, the two men came through and walked along with us.

  It made me uneasy. I thought, for a man who was supposed to be in the Victoria Hospital, Johnson had already been on his feet longer than he should, and that either Raymond or Lenny would have stopped him.

  All they had done, so far as I could see, was supply him with one of Amy’s training sticks, which he was using to take some of his weight. And, I suspected, stuff him full of painkillers again.

  For the rest, the zoo was a nice antidote to Dodo, in a way. One side was just wall, with sinks and hoses and bales of stuff and shelves of jugs and cartons and bottles.

  The other side was wired and partitioned to hold all the various creatures the Faflicks were curing, or training, or breeding. In different cages, Amy had little monkeys, and opossum, and a pile of fers-de-lance, which is the poisonous snake of St Lucia.

  And in a huge cage, three times the size of the others, were the green and blue St Lucian parrots, hopping, swinging, nudging each other; swivelled in sleep; or intent, stabbing and prodding, on their grooming routine.

  They were big, argumentative parrots. The noise they made was like the noise of that skyful of birds, fleeing the hurricane.

  Amy was used to the questions people asked.

  ‘They don’t talk,’ she said. ‘My talkers have private apartments. Now, you silly bitch, what’s the matter?’

  Unshaken, Dodo followed Amy’s gaze to one of the dogs who, from prancing and sniffing and wagging her tail, had suddenly broken out into barking. The second one joined her.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Amy. ‘Would you care to walk to the end on your own? I have to get back.’
r />   She didn’t wait. She caught Johnson’s eye as she passed him, and ran. Raymond had already turned back and was sprinting along the zoo alley to the house proper.

  Natalie’s maid said, ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘A tree falling, perhaps. Rita will show you the rest,’ Johnson said. He didn’t run, but he turned and limped fairly grimly after Amy and Raymond.

  Dodo looked after him, and then wheeled and gazed at the rest of the corridor, which ended in a blank wall. She said, ‘Is there another building through there?’

  According to Amy, the hillside was dug out for half a mile with concrete storerooms and workshops, some interconnected and some not.

  The zoo had no outlet. To get to the storehouses, you had to go out through the house and enter by separate doors from the yard.

  Which was what the others had gone to do.

  Whatever was going to happen, I wasn’t going to be left out of it. I didn’t excuse myself. I just left Dodo standing, and turned and ran back to the house.

  At the connecting door, Johnson was waiting for me. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘Was Old Joe in there with you?’

  He hadn’t been.

  ‘Really?’ said Johnson. ‘Then he’s vanished as well. It’s like the Bermuda Triangle. You didn’t unlock the snakes?’

  I hadn’t.

  ‘In that case,’ said Johnson, ‘let’s make sure, for God’s sake, that nothing happens to the divine Dodo, at least.’

  Upon which he locked the connecting door to the zoo, and ignoring Dodo’s muffled cry, gripped his stick and led me out after the others into the darkness and the wind.

  I had thought, and I supposed Amy had thought, that someone had designs on the Toyota. By the time we got outside she was standing, Raymond at her side, shining her torch on the double barred doors of the garage.

  They were closed, which didn’t satisfy her. I was surprised. I was innocent. On Amy’s insistence, Raymond opened the garage and we all trailed inside, to make sure that nothing was missing.

  The Toyota was safely there, and a truck, and a lot of equipment. Behind them all was a door, leading away from the house and the zoo. Talking and flashing her torch, Amy opened it.