Harry & the Bikini Bandits

by Basil Heatter

  There were reefs all around the island, but Mr. Albury never hesitated. He ran straight in over them as if they didn’t exist. We touched once, but the stoutly built old boat bounced right across. I was learning that this was the Bahamian method of navigation. In those shallow keel boats you could get away with it. Any modern, yachty craft would have been wrecked instantly.

  Mr. Albury said there was an anchorage around the other side of the island. We would go in there and walk back to the house. I could see the house more plainly now, and it was quite different from anything else I had seen in that part of the world. It was very simple and very modern with lots of glass and unpainted wood. There were two people sitting out on a sort of terrace on the west side away from the wind. We were still some distance away and I could barely make them out.

  “Miss Hester has a guest,” Albury said. “I’m surprised. She never has anyone here.”

  The woman stood up. She appeared very small. She waved in our direction and Albury waved back. The man remained seated. As we approached I could see that he had black hair and a black beard, but that the rest of his body was covered with red hair. It was Harry.

  CHAPTER 25

  JEZEBEL LAY ON THE REEF. SHE WAS CANTED over on one side and the waves were breaking over her foredeck. I got a good view of her as we went around the point to the anchorage. I was still kind of stunned from that first glimpse of Harry and now, seeing Jezebel wrecked on the reef, I did not know what to say.

  Mr. Albury regarded me thoughtfully and said, “Is that your uncle’s craft?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I am sorry to see her in such sad condition, but at least we did not have to look very far. Was that your uncle on the terrace with Miss Hester?”

  “Yes.”

  “Poor fellow. Perhaps he tried to make his way in after dark.”

  “I guess so.”

  “These waters can be very treacherous for a stranger. The tide races in and out at a great rate hereabouts. Under certain conditions it is almost impossible for a sailing vessel to tack through the passes.”

  Jezebel looked sad and lonely. Her sails were thrown about every whichway and I could see that her jib, still hanked halfway up the stay, was in tatters. I felt a real sense of loss. I had not imagined that I could get so attached to that cantankerous old tub. Even the flash of anger I felt toward Harry seemed to melt away when I saw the wreck.

  I wondered what had happened to the monkey and the cat.

  Harry was as cool as ever. He acted as though nothing had happened and was not surprised at all to see me come walking along the path to that house.

  “Well, if it isn’t Number Three?” he said.

  “Hello, Uncle Harry.”

  Nothing from either one of us about how we had got there.

  “Too bad about the Jezebel,” I said.

  “Yes, quite.”

  “What happened to Ho and the cat?”

  He shrugged. “They got ashore. Running around somewhere. Funny thing, never knew either one could swim. But when she struck they went over the side like seals. Just shows what you can do when your ass is at stake.”

  I think I really hated him at that moment. So damned casual about it all. Even about the wreck of the Jezebel. And did he know or care that Charity was dead and Grogan in jail? But then I remembered that we were not alone. I mean under the circumstances how else could he behave?

  As if he had read my thoughts he said, “Miss Soames, this is my nephew Clay.”

  I looked at her for the first time. I don’t know what I had expected, but she was not it. Somehow I had expected her to be very old, like Mr. Albury, I mean living alone on that island and all. But she was not old. Nor exactly young either. It was hard to tell. She had brown hair—kind of faded gold from the sun—and parted in the middle and drawn back on either side of her forehead. Her face was sort of square with high cheekbones and gray blue eyes, which were quite large as they regarded me gravely and directly. For a moment I was not conscious of anything else but the eyes. Then I took in the rest of her. She was wearing old jeans torn off at the knees and a faded denim shirt. She was barefoot and her arms and legs were honey colored from the sun.

  “How do you do, Miss Soames?” I said. “I guess you know Mr. Albury.”

  “Indeed I do. How have you been, Gideon?”

  “Never better, Miss Hester.”

  They smiled at each other as if they spoke some kind of quiet inner language that neither Harry nor I could understand. In a way they were something alike. Not outwardly, of course, but there was something about their eyes and the way they smiled that was similar. A kind of contentment. Maybe it came from living on islands. Maybe it came from living alone.

  “You told me you would come over for dinner one day, Gideon, but you never did.”

  “When a man gets to my age, Miss Hester, food is no longer very important. You will have to forgive me, but I suppose I just did not think of it.”

  “It was only an excuse to have your company.”

  “I know,” he said in his gentle voice, “but in any event here I am now.”

  “I didn’t mean to nag at you, Gideon.”

  She had a cool way of speaking. Cool voice and those cool gray eyes. I mean she was polite but detached. Like the best kind of school teacher. I wondered if that was what she had been. And how she had ever come to a place like this.

  She said, “Harry, would you bring out some ice?”

  He winked at her and nodded, got up and went into the house. The way he did it gave the impression that he felt very much at home there. I wondered if they had known each other before. It was hard to tell with Harry. Five years or five minutes; he treated them all the same.

  While he was gone I said to her, “How did he come to hit the reef?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” she said with a little smile.

  “I will,” I said.

  When he came out carrying the bucket of ice cubes, she reached into a kind of old wooden sea chest there on the terrace and brought out a bottle of Scotch. “I know you like Scotch, Gideon. What about you, Clay?”

  “No thanks.”

  She said, “I can’t offer you Coca-Cola or anything like that. Those soft drinks rot your stomach and teeth, you know.”

  “Water will be fine,” I said.

  She gave me a glass of water with ice in it. And she gave Harry and Mr. Albury and herself straight Scotch. And she drank hers without a quiver. Maybe she had not been a schoolteacher after all.

  I said, “How did you come to hit the reef, Harry?” He looked straight at me and said, “To tell you the truth I was stoned out of my mind, Clay.”

  Everybody chuckled but I knew he wasn’t kidding. Harry meant what he said and said what he meant. It was one of his better qualities.

  “Also,” he said with a smile, “I was short an engineer. It was a little after midnight and a hell of a norther blowing. I knew there was an entrance here somewhere and I was trying to get inside. I was under power and the damn thing quit when I needed it most. I tried to get the canvas on her, but by the time I had the jib halfway up she had struck. I thought a rising tide might float her again or bounce her across, but she hasn’t budged an inch. I stayed with her the rest of the night and then in the morning I swam in.”

  “When was that?” I said.

  “Yesterday.”

  So he’d had plenty of time to stash the money somewhere.

  “Is she a total loss?” I said.

  “Too soon to say. I know she’s holed somewhere, but how badly I can’t say.”

  “Do you want me to do some diving on her?”

  “I was hoping you would suggest that, Clay.”

  “Heard any news?” I said, trying to look as casual as possible.

  “No radio. Hester doesn’t believe in them. What’s up? End of the world? Pollution? War with the Eskimos?”

  “Nothing special. Just wondered what happened with the Colt-Bears game.”

  �
�My nephew, as you can judge from his size, is a football player,” he said to Miss Soames. “I’m not sure he thinks about much of anything else. It’s great to be carefree and young.”

  “I don’t think the young are ever carefree,” she said. “It’s not at all easy to be young.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Mr. Albury. “I have never envied the young. I find it far more comfortable to be old.”

  Miss Soames served us beans and rice. Unlike most ladies I have known, she did not apologize for the food. Come to think of it, I never heard her apologize for anything. She said if I wanted to stay I could bunk in with Harry in the shed.

  After lunch Mr. Albury lay down under a tree and went to sleep. Miss Soames went off by herself for a walk along the beach. Harry showed me the shed. It was attached to the house but not part of it. There was a gasoline-powered generator in there and the usual stuff I guess you need to live in a place like that. Also a big Johnson forty-horse outboard that somebody had taken apart and not yet put together. And a couple of hammocks slung from posts.

  As soon as we were alone he said, “How did you find me?”

  “Grogan told me.”

  “How is he? What happened to him?”

  “He’s in jail.”

  “Damn.”

  I told him then about Charity and how Grogan had turned back for her.

  “My God,” he said.

  I mean whatever else he was, I don’t think he was that good an actor. I was convinced that this was the first he knew of it. He kept shaking his head and saying over and over, “Poor damn little Charity. And that crazy Grogan. What about the rest of them?”

  “Miss Wong disappeared and I never saw her again. Burger was questioned by the police, but of course they never could prove anything against him except that he had been out bashing around in his Whaler. The last I saw of him he was back on Charisma.”

  He suddenly narrowed his eyes and looked at me very sharply. “Listen, you don’t think it was me who shot Charity, do you? I mean you know damn well it was that guard. My gun wasn’t even loaded.”

  “I know.”

  “Just so you know, dammit.”

  “I know.”

  “All right then.”

  “Just tell me one thing.”

  “What is it, kid?”

  “When you took off down the channel did you see me in the water?”

  He looked at me a long time, and before he spoke he gave me the old, warm, to-hell-with-everything Harry Hook grin. Except that this time I wasn’t buying it. And I knew that if he lied I would know it. But he didn’t lie. “Yes,” he said.

  He didn’t offer an explanation. “Never explain, never apologize,” was his motto. I had heard him say it often enough. He claimed it was the only healthy approach to any relationship.

  “What became of the money?” I said.

  He could have given me some phony story about having lost it in the wreck but he didn’t. “I’ve got it,” he said. “You’ll get your share.”

  “You meant to dump us all and get away with the whole thing, didn’t you?”

  He grinned again. “What do you think?”

  “I think that was the way you planned it.”

  “Then you must be right.”

  I picked up one of the hammocks and a coil of rope and started out.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I’ll bunk outside,” I said. “It stinks in here.”

  CHAPTER 26

  IT WAS HARD TO STAY MAD AT HARRY. A sense of outrage is hard to keep up for any length of time anyway, and how could you stay mad at a man who made no effort to apologize or explain or defend himself! To him it was all a game and none of it seemed to matter. I mean I am sure he was sorry about Charity, but he did not brood about it. He said that she was doomed anyway. He was sensitive to vibrations and he had never met anybody with so many vibrations of doom. He was a fatalist about things like that, and poor Charity had obviously been heading for a sticky end anyway. It was true that in a way he had been the agent for her death, but even that had been inevitable—all planned beforehand by the fates or sea gods or whatever.

  I told him that in my opinion what he was saying was just a big cop-out—a nice way of shifting responsibility. He said that nobody was really responsible for anybody else, and that a man was responsible only to his own sense of morality, whatever that might be.

  “What about Grogan then?” I said.

  “Grogan was a fool and a born loser. What good did it do to turn back for the girl? Did it save her life?”

  “No, but he couldn’t have known that at the time.”

  “If he had stopped to think, he would have realized that nothing he could have done for her would have affected her in the end anyway. He was only putting his own neck under the chopper for no reason.”

  “He was in love.”

  “I agree. Poor, silly, little bastard. But what is love? Love is a selfish emotion. Possessive. Greedy. A greedy man will eat more than is good for him. A loving man will love more than is good for him. Grogan is in jail now because he was greedy and loving.”

  “Haven’t you ever been in love?”

  He shook his head. “Not that way. There have been women I was fond of and that I enjoyed being with, but if I never saw them again that was all right, too. When the time came to split I always did it without a quiver.”

  “Like with Miss Wong?”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “Anyway, you’re putting the cart before the horse. You said Grogan is in jail now because he loved Charity. In a way you’re right, but the real reason he’s in jail has nothing to do with that.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That you talked him into a crazy scheme to rob the casino. That’s why he’s in jail.”

  He looked around and put a finger to his lips and said, “For God’s sake, tone it down to a dull roar, will you.”

  “What does it matter now who hears? What does any of it matter now?”

  “Shut your bloody mouth, you idiot.”

  For the first time since I had come to Rumbullion Cay he was losing his temper. In a sense I liked him better that way. I mean at least he was human, not a block of ice peddling generalities about doom and fate.

  “All right,” I said.

  “You want to start diving on Jezebel now?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  Neither one of us had mentioned the money. I was willing to leave it that way. For the time being I didn’t want to think about it.

  I said goodbye to Mr. Albury and thanked him for bringing me over. He said it was nothing and that he hoped we would be able to salvage the wreck. Miss Soames was there to watch him go. She gave him a hug. I liked her for that. We watched him take off, going wing and wing down channel. He sure could sail, that old man. I said, “I like him.”

  “So do I,” she said.

  “Have you known him long?”

  “Years.”

  “He seems very well educated.”

  “For what?” she said with a smile. “For a black?”

  She was testing me, I realized.

  “I mean for someone who lives alone on an island,” I answered, knowing as I said it that it wasn’t what I meant to say. Yes, all right, for a black then.

  “I live alone on an island,” she said.

  “But you haven’t lived here always.”

  “Neither has Albury. He was a doctor at one time. Took his degree in London.”

  “Then what’s he doing here?”

  “I’ve never asked him. Island people don’t ask questions.” Meaning, of course, that I shouldn’t ask her any questions either. But it was clear that something had happened with both of them, with her and Albury, that had driven them to this kind of life. She was a strange woman. I mean she was pleasant enough but very cool. Detached. She had taken my appearance on the island for granted and she would take my disappearance just as easily. No questions. Something like Harry that way. A ki
nd of inner strength. They had themselves. Other people were not all that important to them.

  Harry came out of the shed carrying a face mask and a pair of flippers. He said, “You’ll need these. There’s a hell of a tide rip sets on and off that reef.”

  Miss Soames said, “Aren’t you going with him?” Harry shrugged. “He’s better at it than I am.”

  She regarded him with those cool gray eyes and said nothing. But she got to him. I saw a little flush along his cheekbones. It was the first time I had ever seen him put out by what anybody thought of him. Then he grinned and put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a squeeze in a familiar kind of way. She didn’t pull away but she didn’t respond the way a Carole Burger would have done. She just stood there until he dropped his arm. I saw him flush again. I thought it was just possible that maybe at long last he had met his match. I grinned at her, and although she didn’t smile back, there was something in her eyes that made me feel good.

  “I’ll be seeing you,” I said and picked up the mask and fins and walked down to the water. Although my back was turned I had the feeling that she was still watching me.

  I put on the fins and wet the mask and waded out.

  He was right about the tide. It must have been running at a good three or four knots. Without the flippers I don’t think I could have made it. As it was, I was pretty well beat by the time I hit the deck.

  At least it was easy getting aboard with the poor old girl laid over on her beam ends that way. She was on about a forty-five-degree angle, and you had to hang on to something just to get around. The hatch was open and even from the deck I could see water sloshing over the floorboards, but it was hard to tell if that had come through a hole in the bottom or had been washed in from above.

  I guess a shipwreck must be one of the saddest sights in the world. A car wreck is bad enough, but when a car is really smashed it seems to be turned instantly into broken glass and junk metal. But a boat on a reef still has her personality. The water joggles her and she still seems half alive and struggling to get off. She is like a wounded bird caught on barbed wire. Every motion digs the barb a little deeper, but she will still beat herself to death in the effort to escape.