Banana Republic

by Rawson, Eric;

  Before he could do any damage, however, Vaught’s attention was captured by the bubbling cauldron on the stove. He picked up a rag and lifted the lid. He thrust his face into the aromatic steam, breathing deeply, his tiny blue eyes overflowing. There was a king-sized mixing bowl on the counter. He ladled it full of stew. His mouth watering, he carried the bowl in both hands into the bar, helped himself to the last bottle of guaro, and sat down to feast.

  When he had consumed the last drop of parrot stew, he took a couple of gulps of guaro and tossed the bottle over his shoulder. He was feeling much better. He moseyed into the lobby and sat down on a horsehair chair. It was a pleasure to take the cotton out of his ears and relax after all the torturing.

  He pulled out his knife, tossed it in the air, caught it and hurled it, in a single motion, across the lobby. The blade snicked into the mahogany panel of the front desk. Excellent fun!

  He got up and went over and yanked the knife out of the panel. Then he bounced into the kitchen and gathered all the knives he could find and went back to the lobby. No point in getting up every three seconds. He dropped back onto the chair and began to fling the knives with an easy rhythm at the front desk. Every time one snicked into the panel, the service bell tinkled.

  

  Butch Higbee and Cornelia Anderson stood beside the cot on which Roy Hannity was breathing his last. A thin rotten blanket covered him up to his chin. His boots stuck out over the end of the cot. On the other side of the barracks, dumped in a heap on a lower bunk, Elliot Evans jabbered and moaned.

  “Ain’t much to do for him now,” Cornelia said. She glanced at the customs agent. “Either one a them.”

  “You wanna blame someone, ya know?” Higbee said, squeezing Cornelia’s hand and bending down to see if Hannity had fully died. In his other hand Higbee was holding several sticks of dynamite. “Man gets bit by a skeeter, falls into a delirium, and passes on. It’s the skeeter done it, yet somehow it seems like he’s the one to blame.”

  Cornelia squeezed his hand back and sighed. “It comes to us all, sinner and saint. Some deserve it, and some don’t.”

  “The important thing is you don’t blame yourself,” Higbee said.

  

  Walter Whitaker charged through the front door of the hotel. There was no chance on earth that he was going to allow William Porter to leave Coralio with his, Whitaker’s, wife. As he strode toward the front desk, bellowing for Higbee to bring him the Luger, he needed his gun, a knife flashed through the air and caught him neatly between the ribs.

  He froze in his tracks and collapsed, straight down, like a demolished house.

  Leonard Vaught got up from the horsehair chair and went over and squatted beside the banana king. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. Vaught could hear the death rattle, the mouth open like an O, then the tongue hanging out like a beaver tail and the color fading from Whitaker’s face.

  This was a situation. He could not think of a good explanation to offer when Higbee came back, hopefully with some dynamite. He wondered if he should pull the knife out of Whitaker’s chest but decided it would be better if he went outside to meet his commanding officer. After they had the money from the custom-house safe, he could mention this matter. Maybe by then he would have a good explanation for how the knife got there.

  Whitaker stared at him with blue dead eyes.

  

  Standing at the rail of the Pantagruel, smoking a cigar and contemplating the vicissitudes of existence, Porter caught a flash from the corner of his eye and turned his head, registering in an instant the four walls of the custom house bursting into a symmetrical blossom of fire. The boom rolled across the lagoon, followed by the sound of debris raining on the wharf and pieces of corrugated steel sizzling in the water.

  

  Butch Higbee held the lantern high, illuminating the smoldering wreckage. He looked, not at all sorrowfully, at what remained of Leonard Vaught. It had been an unusually fast fuse.

  The Syracuse floor safe, blistered and soot-blackened, was locked tight.

  As the first landing boat from the U.S.S. Tacoma nudged up to the wharf, grim and silent, he turned on his heel and strode toward the wye. The banana train, pulled by a old 0-6-0 switch engine, was building up a head of steam, ready to roll for the plantations, where there were no United States Marines to tell anybody what to do.

  

  The Pantagruel was a 6814-ton luxury liner commissioned in 1891, 139 meters from stem to stern, with twin screws, five boilers, and a top speed of eighteen knots; had a twenty-four foot draught; had a crew of fifty-five. The captain was a Swede and a teetotaler. There were two-hundred and forty-two passengers, none of them children, including a countess who had married an American banker. Porter learned all this from the steward, who had become loquacious and annoying after pocketing Porter’s lavish gratuity for securing a chambre deluxe for Isabel and himself. The cabin had been vacated in Rio de Janeiro by a husband-wife team of naturalists who intended to catalog the birds of Mato Grosso and do a little spelunking, although the steward doubted that they would survive long enough to do either. Brazil was a hotbed of pestilence; if you weren’t laid low by disease, the food would attack your stomach-lining; if not that, then the natives would perform unspeakable acts upon your person; it was a wonder anyone came back alive. Why didn’t these fat cats take cruises to the Greek Isles like everyone else? That’s all he had to say.

  

  The next day Porter spent several hours on the foredeck, swept by wind and burned by sun, considering the vast glittering future that spread before him like…well, the vast glittering sea that spread before him.

  Isabel played quoits with some back-chatty women hungry for new gossip. After several weeks at sea, they had wrung one another dry of interesting material.

  “Who is your traveling companion, my dear? He is so deliciously Western.”

  “That reminds me of what happened to Ingrid Sorenson. I believe that fellow she took up actually branded her on the thigh.”

  “Only yesterday I heard her discussing table wines with a seagull.”

  Isabel winged her quoit overboard, gathered her skirts, and headed off to find Porter. He was sitting on the gunwale, more swept and burned than he had intended, but no less happy.

  “We’re at the captain’s table for supper,” she noted. “How much did that cost you?”

  Porter turned and smiled benignly. “A gentleman does not discuss such matters.”

  “So how much did it cost?” And she pinched him on the arm.

  

  Shorty Morrison had been an operative of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency since he was twenty-one years old. His first assignment was the Homestead Strike in ’92. He had missed out on the major violence but had managed to break the bones of more than a few illiterate hunkies who thought a twenty-five percent pay cut was an unfair labor practice. Since then, the Agency had not sent him on the bread-and-butter goon jobs. They had drones who could run down coal miners or beat up union leaders on behalf of Henry Clay Frick. Morrison belonged to the elite.

  He had spent a gorgeous childhood in the Caribbean. His father was a purchasing agent for a Belfast candy company, who had moved his family to Martinique for several years, then to Puerto Rico, buying sugar. Because he was fluent in both French and Spanish, knew the lifeways of the islands, and never got sick, Shorty Morrison was assigned the territory from Anguilla to Trinidad, bossing a Pinkerton crew when tracking fugitives or protecting supply depots, operating solo when bribing politicians or hobnobbing with financiers.

  On the first evening out of Coralio, approximately 17° N, 87° E, no land in sight, he located William S. Porter in the lounge. The lounge was decorated with red silk wall coverings and blue-green upholstery and carpet. It was festooned with evergreen garlands and sprigs of holly in celebration of the season. Morrison spotted Por
ter reclining on a velvet settee next to a massive Christmas tree, munching on a tongue sandwich, gazing at the opalescent glass ceiling, and delighting in a bubbly glass of Perrier-Jouët. His female friend was dancing with a white-haired gentleman in an evening suit who paused every minute or so to hack into a billowy blue handkerchief before, gasping and red-faced, he picked up the orchestral beat and whirled the poor woman across the parquet. Morrison knew who she was—Isabel Eames Whitaker. She had featured in the society pages not so long ago. After that, she was broke and desperate. Morrison thought she was still beautiful—that’s what had saved her, he supposed; that, and her wits—with creamy skin and auburn hair and bloodshot hazel eyes that looked forward to adventure. She smelled interesting.

  While Isabel was keeping her feet out of harm’s way, Morrison dropped down beside Porter so that their thighs and shoulders were touching. Porter tried to shift away and found himself pressed up against the velvet arm of the settee. “Excuse me,” he said. “Are we long-lost relatives?”

  “This is no joke, bo,” Morrison said.

  He had a handgun in his jacket pocket, and he pressed it against Porter’s ribs.

  Here we go again, Porter thought. He managed to twist himself around and take a good look at the gunslinger. Blondish, green-eyed, lithe, and flush with good health. He looked extremely proficient.

  “I know you,” Porter said. “You ride a unicycle.”

  “I do. Alfred Morrison’s the name.”

  “Where’s your little sailor suit, Alfie?”

  “Oh, that.” Morrison shrugged. “My idea of a disguise. The best way to stay close to the action is to make a spectacle of yourself. Everybody calls me Shorty.”

  “Are you trying to rob me, Shorty?”

  “No, sir, Mr. Porter.” Morrison shook his head. “I’m recovering two million dollars in gold certificates for the Imperial Insurance Company of New York, New York.”

  “So you’re Shorty Morrison the insurance man.”

  “Pinkerton man,” Morrison replied.

  “Sorry. How long were you in the country?”

  “Since Walter Whitaker landed in New Orleans. I came in on the Andrador.”

  “Ah, so you were one of those fellows. I made inquiries, but you had disappeared—into plain sight, it turns out. You saw the intervention coming.”

  “A seven-year-old child could see what Walter Whitaker was up to. Imperial Insurance sent my partner and me to monitor the sitch. Our job was to prevent Francisco Flores from bolting with the loot. I stayed in Coralio in case he tried to take to the seas. My partner went to the capital to trail Flores if he went overland. Tomkins, that’s his name. I haven’t seen or heard from him. He could be dead for all I know. I hope not. He’s a heck of a bridge partner.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, Shorty, why are you bound for Manhattan? Have you finished the job?”

  “Don’t be obtuse, bo. You know I haven’t.”

  “Explain it to me anyway.”

  “Let’s go to your cabin.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Porter tried to clear some territory on the settee, but Morrison pressed him tight. The gun nosed at his ribs.

  “Put your glass on the cart, buddy. We’re going below.”

  “So we are.”

  Porter pushed himself up, carefully, and Morrison stood up, carefully, and without a backward glance at Isabel and the waltzing wheezer, they went below, slowly.

  

  As she whirled around the Christmas tree, Isabel caught sight of Porter as he left the lounge with somebody wrapped around his waist. How odd. What was the point of stewards if they left it to the paying passengers to sweep up the drunkards?

  “My dear, I knew your mother-in-law when she was a wee girl,” her dancing partner was saying. He coughed extravagantly. “Many’s the happy evening I passed—” He gasped and stumbled. Caught his breath. “I passed with Delma Whitaker—except then she was Delma Van Dyke, of course—in the house on Washington Square, playing checkers. Well, you know Delma. Always trying to cut the cat with the scissors or tossing her father’s papers in the fire. Do you care for cats, my dear? You look as though you should.”

  His name was Charles Cruikshank, of the plate-glass-importing Cruikshanks; he was seventy-two years old; he and Mrs. Cruikshank had a box at the Met; he was recovering from bronchitis exacerbated by the uncongenial tropical atmosphere. He had seen her perform many times. Too, too bad about the incident at the Auditorium in Chicago. Walter Whitaker was a fine, fine fellow, a real lively bastard, just like his mother. Delma Van Dyke, of course.

  “The whole problem with this pension-for-life movement is that the unions think the industrialist can just print his own money,” Cruikshank said out of nowhere. He began to hack violently.

  Isabel, skirts whirling, was flung again around the Christmas tree, knocking into the other couples. She began to regret having said hello to anyone at dinner. She was just so excited to be on the high seas.

  

  As they moved down the passage, Morrison lit a cigarette. They discussed the circumstances. Morrison reckoned that no city on earth was more beautiful than New York at Christmastime. Porter observed that writing insurance policies on tin-pot governments did not seem a profitable business strategy.

  “I don’t peddle the lousy paper,” Morrison said. “I just recover the goods. And apprehend the perpetrators.”

  They reached the cabin. Porter unlocked the door. Morrison pressed him inside and kicked the door shut with his heel. The pistol, visible now, motioned for Porter to sit on the bed. It was a snub-nosed .38. Naturally. He added it to the catalogue of weapons that had been aimed at him in the previous six months.

  Morrison scanned the cabin. “Posh.”

  “Better than I’m used to,” Porter said. “Why didn’t you grab me in Coralio?”

  Morrison leaned against the door, resting the belly-gun on his left forearm.

  “No extradition papers. Heck, I didn’t even know that you had the dough. I thought maybe that Cajun, Pierre, had it, but I went through his room at the stables and that craphole of a barbershop and his store—nothing. Then I saw you and the Whitaker dame rowing out with that quack doctor. I couldn’t think of another reason you’d risk sailing for the States, or another reason she would go with you, unless you had the lump.”

  “What about love?”

  “Don’t snow me.”

  “You have it all figured out,” Porter said sourly. “A real quick study, you are.”

  “Have you picked out a new name?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have.”

  “Care to share it?” Morrison stepped over and opened the porthole and flicked his cigarette stub into the night.

  “Maybe, in time,” Porter said. “Are you going to cuff me?”

  The Pinkerton expressed surprise. “What for? My interest is in recovering the stolen property.”

  “So you aren’t detaining me?”

  “Do you have a bounty on your head?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not dangerous.”

  “Have you murdered, raped, stolen horses, stolen cattle, advocated the overthrow of the United States government, kidnapped, robbed a bank, robbed an armory, robbed a train, organized an illegal union, or engaged in white slavery?”

  “No, but I’m a federal fugitive.”

  “What charge?”

  “Embezzlement. And jumping bail.”

  “What sort of establishment?”

  “First National Bank of Austin.”

  “Ah,” Morrison said. “I suppose I should notify the captain.…”

  Light began to dawn. “You’re going to abscond with my money!” Porter exclaimed.

  Morrison blushed. “I suppose I am. I have a number of connections in these latitudes. I can live out my days in trop
ical ease.”

  “I could turn you in.”

  “Fat chance, bo. You poke your head up without a cloud of money to hide your mug and you’d be pinched in two shakes. You’re better off hopping the first steamer back south.”

  The Pinkerton made a good point. “You make a good point, Shorty. We could split the money.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s only fair.”

  “I’m not a fair-play fellow. Enough palaver.” He gestured with his gun. “Let’s have it.”

  Porter, with leaden fingers, retrieved the Gladstone bag from the wardrobe. He dropped it on the bed.

  “Open.”

  Porter undid the latches.

  “Count it out.”

  “What for?”

  “In case you’ve squirreled some of it.”

  The idea had not occurred to Porter; he cursed himself.

  He reached into the bag and pulled out a bundle of fifty-dollar notes. Twelve-hundred and fifty dollars total. Another bundle. Then a couple of twenty-dollar bundles. Tossed them on the bedspread. “Keep going,” said Morrison, with an avaricious gleam.

  Porter fished out another bundle. Something did not feel right. He riffled it with his thumb. Again.

  “You’re not going to like this, Shorty.”

  Morrison stopped leaning against the door and stepped closer.

  Porter broke the paper band and spread the bundle across the bedspread. The top banknote was an 1888-series twenty-dollar United States gold certificate. Everything else was neat-cut newspaper. The first blank, the one below the gold certificate, was a partial print of The Banana Mule.

  “Son of a bitch.” Morrison grabbed the bag and dumped the contents on the bed and scrabbled frantically through the bundles of newsprint.

  He whirled and stuck the gun against Porter’s throat. “Where is it?”

  A light bitter smile sprang to Porter’s lips. He had been outplayed. He shook his head. “I’d hate to guess.”

  

  The news that she was a widow reached Isabel Whitaker on the second day out, when the headline cables caught up with the Pantagruel west of Cuba. The ship’s newspaper spoke of Walter Whitaker as a business pioneer, philanthropist, and agricultural genius. Isabel also noticed a column-filler from Paris about the new season’s skirt designs. The Empire gowns in the extreme style are not so popular as they were, which, she thought, was good news, despite everything.