Domino Island

by Desmond Bagley

  We were escorted off the boat by men dressed in clothes of a vaguely nautical sort, and there were others in dinner jackets standing around, apparently doing nothing. All were broad-shouldered and tough-looking. As much money flows through a casino as through an average bank and the security must be at least as good. However, a casino is hampered by the fact that the security must not show. It would be hard to work up an atmosphere of merry, whirling high life in an environment of bulletproof glass, steel bars and tellers’ cages, so security is by surveillance conducted as discreetly as possible. The hardboiled, dinner-jacketed gents were the front men, put up to show the wise that the security was indeed there. The real security would be less in evidence.

  We drifted along with the crowd and, in the foyer, Jill ran into a man she knew from Salton’s political group. The introductions were polite but cursory, and she only stayed for a few words. Then we went on towards the main hall and I looked back to see the man reaching for a telephone.

  Business was thriving. Apart from the one-armed bandits around the walls, the casino offered roulette, blackjack, baccarat and craps, and all the tables were busy. I’m not a gambler because I’m numerate enough to know that the odds are rigged and if you play the tables consistently you’ll be the loser in the long run. There are others who think differently and they’re a nutty crowd.

  At least the kids were losing their money with abandon, the secretaries and junior-grade executives on their first vacation outside the States who were prepared to risk a few dollars in order to buy a glamorous experience to tell the folks back home. They were having fun.

  Not so the older gamblers, who placed their bets unsmilingly and, win or lose, never relaxed the passivity of their closed faces. Among these were the system players, each with his ballpoint pen and notebook close to hand, who recorded every play and bet according to whatever system they were using. These were the mathematical ignoramuses who seem to believe that the wheel has a memory and remembers what it has just done. All were serious, for gambling is a serious business with nothing funny about it, and these were the people who kept men like Gerry Negrini in Havana cigars.

  We stood and watched for a while, then Jill said, ‘Let’s go into the bar.’

  She led the way and we passed a glass cage where a teller was dispensing chips to a voluble American woman. I noted the wad of dollar bills she pushed at him, and said, ‘Is American currency valid here?’

  ‘Any currency is valid here. Have you ever known a casino turn away money?’

  I grinned. ‘Not often.’

  We went into the bar and I saw Ogilvie perched on a stool at the far end. He saw me too but he made no move. He knew I’d give him a signal if I wanted him. Jill and I claimed a couple of newly vacated stools and ordered drinks and I blinked when the bartender told me what they cost. Sending a couple of men to Campanilla could bankrupt Western and Continental.

  I jerked my head to signal to Ogilvie as Jill said, ‘I can’t stop thinking.’

  ‘Relax,’ I advised. ‘You’re making too much of it. When I’m doing a survey like this I ask lots of questions. Wait until all the returns are in before jumping to conclusions.’ Ogilvie came up and I said, ‘Mrs Salton, I’d like you to meet Owen Ogilvie, my associate.’ I saw a bewildered look come into Ogilvie’s eyes as he cottoned on, and added, ‘In the office he’s known as double-O seven.’

  ‘I was christened long before James Bond was invented,’ said Ogilvie. ‘Nice to meet you, Mrs Salton. Mr Kemp described you to me over the telephone.’

  Jill smiled. ‘Do I match his description?’

  ‘Mr Kemp has a very graphic imagination,’ said Ogilvie diplomatically.

  Jill looked over Ogilvie’s shoulder and her face altered in recognition of someone. I swung round on my stool and saw a tall man approaching. He held out both hands. ‘Jill, I’m delighted to see you. I’m sorry I was out when you phoned, but I got the message.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I can’t tell you how shocked I am about David.’

  ‘I know, Gerry,’ Jill said. ‘And thank you for your letter. It was very kind.’ She indicated me. ‘This is Mr Kemp and his associate, Mr Ogilvie.’

  We shook hands. Negrini was very American and not at all Italianate, despite his name. His voice was cultured and his manners smooth and he bore himself with an easy assurance. I could see how he would attract women and why the Saltons had liked him. We chatted for a few minutes and I was polite about his casino. At last he said, ‘I understand that you want to talk to me about something, Mr Kemp.’

  ‘Very mysterious,’ said Jill. ‘He wouldn’t tell me about it.’ The muscles of her face tautened slightly and I knew that she was looking at Negrini in a different way from before. Suspicion is the most corrosive of all thought patterns and warps the vision so that white becomes black and black white. I would have to make sure I let her off that insidious hook before I left Campanilla.

  Negrini said, ‘Well, I suggest we use my office.’

  ‘Fine.’ I slid off the stool. ‘Owen, will you entertain Mrs Salton until I get back?’ I smiled at her. ‘Don’t lose too much on the tables.’

  ‘I won’t,’ she promised. ‘I don’t play – I’m not allowed to.’

  ‘Not allowed to – why on earth not?’

  ‘I’m a Campanillan resident,’ she said. ‘There’s a fine of £100 for every bet I place in a casino. That’s the law.’

  I went with Negrini to his office. As we threaded our way through the crowd in the gambling hall, I asked, ‘Is that a fact that Campanillans aren’t allowed to gamble in the casinos?’

  ‘It is,’ said Negrini. ‘What Jill didn’t tell you is that for every bet she places I’m fined £100 too. Neither of us can buck those odds.’ We came out into the foyer. ‘And you know who came up with that little legislative gem? My own friend, David Salton.’

  I probed a bit. ‘You must have been annoyed.’

  ‘I was – but not too much. The natives wouldn’t bring in huge sums compared with the tourists, and anyway it makes us look good. Even a gambler worries about his image.’ He stopped before a door. ‘Here we are.’

  I noted the man lounging negligently in the corridor and was not surprised when Negrini didn’t have to unlock the door. We went inside and he waved me to an easy chair. ‘Drink?’

  ‘Scotch, thanks.’

  There was a sideboard with bottles and glasses laid out. He poured the drinks and said, ‘In here you get it free. Out there you pay.’

  ‘And pay and pay. You must be doing well.’

  ‘I get along.’ He handed me a glass. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Kemp?’

  ‘I represent the Western and Continental Insurance Company,’ I said.

  Negrini broke in. ‘I have all the insurance I need.’ He was smiling.

  ‘No doubt, but I’m not selling. We insured David Salton for a lot of money. Now he’s dead.’

  ‘I see.’ Negrini’s eyes turned hard. ‘And you’re here to figure out a way of not paying.’

  ‘Not at all. Insurance companies have been defrauded before but not, I think, in this case. And, in any event, the chairman of the company I work for is Mrs Salton’s uncle. He sent me here to look after her interests. At the present moment there is only one point at issue: did Salton commit suicide? If he did, there’s a clause in the policy which precludes payment until two years after his death.’

  Negrini was more relaxed. He lounged against his desk, drink in hand, and said thoughtfully, ‘Yes, I can see the point of having a clause like that.’

  I said, ‘The circumstances being what they are, we might even waive that clause if necessary.’

  ‘I can save you the trouble,’ said Negrini. ‘Salton didn’t commit suicide.’

  ‘Have you proof of that?’

  He shook his head. ‘No proof, but you can call me as a character witness. Salton would never take his own life – he wasn’t that kind of man. He was a fighter.’

  I pushed a little. ‘Did he fight you?’r />
  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I’ve been reading his speeches. He didn’t like casinos on Campanilla. He was tough about it, too.’

  Negrini shrugged. ‘All politicians have to make those sort of noises.’

  ‘Do you think he’d have won the election, become prime minister?’

  Negrini put his glass on the desk. ‘I’m not a gambler, Mr Kemp. People who run casinos aren’t gamblers because the edge is on their side and it’s working for them all the time. Salton would have won the election, no question. To prove how certain I was of that, let me tell you that I was keeping £10,000 in that safe in easily moveable banknotes.’

  ‘Why? What do you think he’d have done to you?’

  ‘Judging by his speeches, I’d have been on the first plane back to the States,’ said Negrini with a broad smile. ‘Of course, when he died all bets were off.’

  ‘So if Salton was … er … assisted in his death, you’d be a prime suspect.’

  Negrini was no longer lounging. ‘What the hell …?’

  ‘Calm down,’ I said. I’d poked him a little too hard and I still had a tricky question to ask. ‘How much did you contribute to his campaign funds?’

  He stared at me with unfriendly eyes. ‘You know, Mr Kemp, I have to admire your gall. What makes you think I gave Salton a nickel?’ He snorted. ‘Why should I, when he was going to run me out of the country?’

  ‘That’s what I want to know,’ I said, smiling. ‘It’s been puzzling the hell out of me.’

  Negrini grinned faintly and picked up his glass. He sipped the whisky and said, ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Does it matter? The point I’m making is that if you had something to lose by Salton’s death then you wouldn’t be a suspect if it turned out that he’d been murdered.’

  ‘I get the point,’ said Negrini. ‘But was he murdered?’

  ‘He died in suspicious circumstances and he had a lot of enemies.’

  He pondered a little, then crossed the room and pulled up another armchair. ‘All right, what do you want to know?’

  ‘Why did you contribute to his political campaign, and how did you get him to accept? From all accounts, Salton was a fine, upstanding fellow of impeccable morals, so why did he take your filthy gambling lucre?’

  Negrini narrowed his eyes. ‘You can’t be as naïve as all that.’

  ‘I’m a stranger around here. Just spell it out in easy words.’

  He spread his hands. ‘All right, it’s really quite simple. The big corporations, the off-shore funds, the banks – the whole Cardew Street crowd – they pack a lot of clout, and Conyers is their boy. They don’t like the aura that comes with gambling and Campanilla has been getting itself a bit of a reputation in that regard. They thought it was starting to taint their image, and no banker likes to be thought of as a gambler. That’s why they build all those marble halls to look like churches.’

  I nodded. It checked out precisely with what Jackson had said. Negrini said, ‘The word around town was that as soon as the election was over, Conyers was going to get his instructions to crack down on the casinos. Anti-gambling legislation was going to be pushed through and I’d be out. I had to find a horse of my own and the only one available who looked like a realistic runner was Salton. It had to be him.’

  ‘So you’d actually have been squeezed by Conyers if he’d won the election.’ That explained the £10,000 in banknotes: the casino owner was hedging his bets. ‘But how did you persuade Salton to see things your way?’

  ‘Salton was a realist. He didn’t mind gambling as long as it was controlled. He knew that if you don’t have legal gambling, you’ll have illegal gambling. And he was a tough negotiator – he was going to double the gambling tax. I went along with that on the basis of half a loaf being better than none, and all that jazz. There was going to be plenty left over.’

  I shook my head. ‘I still don’t understand why Salton fell in with you.’

  ‘Because he wasn’t after me. He was gunning for the striped-pants boys on Cardew Street.’ He paused, watching to see if I was keeping up with him. ‘Do you know how many Euro-dollars are funnelled through this island every year?’

  ‘I haven’t given it much thought.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone really knows,’ said Negrini. ‘But the lowest estimate I’ve heard is seven billion, and the highest was ten billion. You come to this island and all you see are tourists. There are a hell of a lot of them and that’s the way I make my money. But the tourists are just the froth on the top. Any government must raise taxes, so this government taxes imports and exports. Goods are taxed coming in and people are taxed going out. You can get on to this island free but you have to pay to leave. There’s a departure tax of two pounds a head for tourists and residents alike. If you buy a car here – say, an American car – you’ll pay a thirty per cent tax on top of the American price. They even tax the freight charges to bring the car from the States at thirty per cent.’

  I shrugged. ‘So?’

  ‘So you have a high cost of living here and a low wage structure. Salton didn’t like that and wanted to change things around. He wanted to cut the import taxes on food altogether so that people could at least afford three square meals a day. To do that, he’d have to tax something else. There are billions of dollars going through here and they don’t leave a cent behind in taxation – and that’s why you find a couple of new banks opening up every week.’

  I didn’t need a degree in economics to see that this would be an attractive prospect to a certain kind of investor.

  Negrini chuckled. ‘You ought to hear the Cardew Street crowd talk about Salton. You’d think he was a million miles to the left of Chairman Mao. There’s no one so righteous as a corporation lawyer attacked in the bottom line. Salton was going to slap a tax on the corporations, the banks and the trust funds – not enough to make them pull out, but just enough to get the money he needed for his political programme. It would be a pin-prick compared with what they pay anywhere else, but Cardew Street regarded him as a banana republic dictator about to nationalise the lot of them.’

  ‘And you financed him.’

  ‘For my own good.’ He shrugged. ‘And because I like to hear the sweet sound of corporations squealing. But God knows what’s going to happen now Salton’s dead. There’s nobody else in the party good enough to step into his shoes.’

  ‘Sounds like he was something of a one-man band.’

  ‘Not quite. But the political group he built around him since coming back to the island is full of young idealists, and none of them has any real experience outside of Campanilla. It was the money that put him in pole position – without that, he wouldn’t have had a look-in, especially as a white islander who’d been away for so long.’

  ‘So Conyers wins after all.’

  ‘Maybe – you never know with elections.’

  ‘Thanks for everything you’ve told me,’ I said. ‘It’s cleared my mind about a lot of things.’

  He stood up. ‘That crack you made about Salton being murdered. Do you believe that, or did you just say it to open me up?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly. I tapped the side of my head. ‘There’s a little man who lives in here and every so often he gives me a kick in the hunch-box. I’ve found him very useful in the past because he’s right a lot more times than he’s wrong.’

  ‘I don’t run down that kind of talent,’ said Negrini thoughtfully. ‘Out there on the tables I have an edge. In roulette I have a steady 5.71 per cent advantage so I know I’ll come out on the right side in the long run. But there are some people who can come in and buck the tide consistently. I don’t mind that either because it’s good for trade – a winner encourages others to play. But they scare me because I don’t know how they do it.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they do themselves. I know I don’t.’

  ‘And your little man says Salton was murdered?’

  I got to my feet. ‘Every time I think
of Salton and murder, something goes clang. It’s nothing to do with the insurance. Mrs Salton gets paid out come what may.’

  Negrini was acute. ‘If she didn’t do it.’

  ‘That makes no difference to us in the end. Someone gets paid. In the event that Mrs Salton killed her husband – which, incidentally, I think highly improbable – then the money would go to the next heir after Mrs Salton. I presume he has a family.’

  Negrini nodded. ‘There’s an older sister.’ He looked me in the eye. ‘I’m glad your little man doesn’t think Jill did it. David was a good man and Jill is a good woman.’ He took me by the arm. ‘Shall we join the lady?’

  ‘There’s just one more thing,’ I said. ‘I’ve been asking a lot of awkward questions and Mrs Salton picked up the drift. To pack it small, it’s possible she thinks that you were responsible for the death of her husband. I haven’t told her about your contributions to Salton’s fighting fund because I don’t think she knew about it.’

  ‘She didn’t,’ said Negrini. ‘David said she wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘So from her perspective, you’re an obvious candidate,’ I said. ‘I’ll attempt to disabuse her of the notion. In case you were wondering, my little man is silent about you. You had too much to lose.’

  ‘You’re an impressive man,’ said Negrini. ‘Do you know that? I have a feeling about you. I have a feeling that you’re a really hard-nosed bastard; that if you thought I’d killed David Salton you’d stop at nothing to pin it on me. Con-sequently, I’m glad you think otherwise. And you’ll have my thanks if you put it right with Jill. I value our friendship.’

  I liked Negrini – I liked him very much – but I had to ask out of purely personal curiosity. ‘One last question,’ I said. ‘Are you really a front man for the Mafia?’

  He smiled genially. ‘If I were, would you really want to know?’

  I grinned. It was an answer of sorts, and more than I had expected to get.

  IV