Operation Nassau

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Denise. The white population of Nassau is not all that enormous. I said, ‘Is his name by any chance Edgecombe?’ and received half my tomato juice down my Bri-Nylon two-piece as the woman Denise jolted my arm. ‘He’s in hospital? Bart! Is he hurt?’ she said, her voice sliding upwards.

  Conversation stopped. There was no point in doing anything about the tomato juice. It is in any case possible to put the whole garment into a washing-machine. I said briskly, ‘He is perfectly well: only getting over a fairly sharp stomach upset. The hospital has been trying to reach you . . Lady Edgecombe, all afternoon.’

  She stared at me, frowning. Her voice was attractively husky: her accent less native, I felt, than the result of an excellent tutor. She said. ‘Oh, Bart! I had to leave my hotel. He was a day late . . .’ She pressed my wrist again, her sharpened nails damaging the first and even second stratum of my epithelium. ‘You work there! Is he all right? He’s not badly ill? Oh, dear!’ She broke off to stare at me as a new danger occurred to her. ‘I hope he has a good doctor!’

  ‘Does he have a good doctor, Beltanno?’ asked my father, his hair a quiff of white above that ridiculous gnome’s face, and the orange and green flowered shorts.

  Spasmodic childishness is a feature of my father’s condition. I addressed Lady Edgecombe. ‘I am his doctor. I am sure my father will arrange for you to go straight to the hospital, and find another hotel in Nassau for a day or two. Perhaps your brother George could assist.’

  ‘Who?’ said Lady Edgecombe. Her hair, I now saw, was not naturally blonde, although it had been skilfully treated, and she wore false eyelashes, though no other make-up. A certain development of the leg muscles, added to the undoubted grace of her carriage, made me think that she had belonged at one time to some branch of the dancing profession. ‘I haven’t got a brother George,’ said Denise Edgecombe.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It was another patient. I do beg your pardon. Father -’

  But Sadie, Father’s big Bahamian driver from Eleuthera, was already waiting to take Lady Edgecombe to see her husband. It was not until after he had gone that I discovered he had used my car. ‘But you’re not on call?’ my father said. ‘I forgot to tell you they were mending the Chevrolet.’ He stood, vodka bottle in hand, and surveyed my juice-smeared Bri-Nylon. The remaining guests, finishing their drinks, lay about chatting. My father said, reasonably, ‘I wasn’t to know you had a date to hear Bang Bang Lulu at the Bamboo Conch Club.’

  The years have made him, as you can see, inexorably frivolous. I said, ‘I have an appointment at the Coral Harbour marina.’ There was a slight pause, then one of the Lyford Cay group said, ‘I’ll drive you.’ His martini was still three-quarters up and the offer was hardly enthusiastic. I accepted however, politely, and after retiring briefly to change my two-piece for a pleated cotton dress by Horrocks I have found comfortable for many years, I returned to the drive where a car was drawn up waiting. My father was nowhere in sight, so I got in. The driver started the engine.

  We were half-way to the gates before I realized that the man sitting beside me at the wheel was not the socialite from Lyford Cay. I saw an older man of dark colouring and insignificant features, wearing neither a Bermuda beach set nor the briefer assembly of, I understand, St Tropez. I observed well-worn slacks, and a still older shirt made of thick terry towelling. There was a bulge in his left trouser pocket. It could have been caused by a pipe. It was quite possibly due, I considered, to a small firearm of the automatic variety.

  I had no syringe with me this time. As we swung out onto the road I gripped my bag hard with one hand and let my other fall idly close to the doorhandle just as the driver said, agreeably enough, ‘I swapped with Booby Swanston. I hope you don’t mind. Who is George?’

  ‘I should like you to stop this car,’ I said evenly.

  Behind us was a lorry piled with bananas and a small horse-drawn surrey full of tourists with This horse is called Elvis scrawled on the front board.

  ‘What, now?’ said my driver. The spectacles he wore covered his eyes, but his tone was justifiably surprised.

  ‘When you have an opportunity.’

  The glasses flashed in my direction, and I saw then that he had adjusted presbyopia: his spectacles were bifocal. Why did nothing forewarn me? Why did I think my only danger was physical?

  He said, ‘I thought you had a date in Coral Harbour?’

  ‘I have,’ I said, ‘a message to take to a person named Johnson Johnson.’

  He put his hand out of the window and waved; the banana lorry passed by, and the surrey, and Smiley and the Boys’ Bus Service and a bicycle advertising the Nassau Conference of the Seventh Day Adventists. He slowed, drew into the side and came to a stop.

  Then his arm came round, and I stiffened. But he merely reached to the back of the car, hauled towards him an old corduroy jacket, and emptying the pockets quickly and neatly, laid on the bench seat between us a driving licence, a passport, a number of envelopes and a folder advertising a one-man exhibition of paintings in the Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami. ‘Indeed you do?’ he said. ‘Then you can deliver it. I’m Johnson Johnson.’

  I read the documents. While I did so he drew the object from his pocket, which was indeed a blackened briar pipe, filled it, and struck a match, his eyes all the while watching me, as I was aware. He said. ‘Does the thought of my bronchial carcinoma upset you?’ and as I looked up with impatience, he smiled slightly and applying the match, lit his pipe. ‘You’re very patient with all us frail humans,’ he said. ‘If I had your message, I might know what’s frightening you?’

  ‘Frightening?’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ he said, puffing. We had stopped beside the life-sized white horse outside Hobby Horse Hall, between the golf-course and the lactocalamine pink of the Emerald Beach Hotel. ‘How many other times have you jumped into a car and then immediately demanded to get out?’

  ‘Three,’ I said shortly. ‘Once with a depressive case turned hypomanic, once with an intoxicated ambulance driver and once to escape carbon-monoxide poisoning from a faulty exhaust pipe. The emergency situation is perhaps more frequent in medicine than in portrait-painting.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ said the man Johnson gently. He received back his documents and taking from me the sealed letter from Bartholomew Edgecombe, which I handed over in silence, he read and then pocketed it.

  ‘I understand,’ he said. A bus full of tourists passed by. The sun, low in the palm trees, was losing some of its heat. You could smell the sea on the other side of the road. I waited.

  After a moment he said, ‘Bart Edgecombe is an old friend of mine. You did your duty, I know, but I want to thank you none the less for dealing with a rather nasty chain of events.’ He paused. ‘Dr MacRannoch . . there are some things I’d rather like to ask you, and perhaps there are some you want to find out from me. Would it scare you to come with me now and share a meal and a talk aboard Dolly? I’d run you back afterwards. You could phone your home from the club if you wanted.’

  Johnson Johnson, the Miami folder had said. One of the World’s Foremost Portrait Artists Displays his Paintings in Florida. Forty of Society’s Most Prominent Luminaries. I could see no sign of schizophrenia. It seemed unlikely that a sane man would perpetrate any public illegality before his exhibition. I am not in the least easy to scare. I agreed to dine with Johnson on his yacht Dolly.

  Coral Harbour is a private development in one of the moneyed quarters of New Providence Island, and about twenty minutes from Nassau. To get to it you have to drive over the hill, where the Bahamians live in huts and houses of clapboard and peeling stucco with dingy netted windows, or with no windows at all: shacks perched up high in the dirt with the crumbling doorstep a gap of three feet away from the threshold. Men were pouring out of the workyards and children were wavering up and down the narrow streets on high-handled American bicycles. I noted a child I had treated the previous week for a cranial lesion: her mother had been told to keep the child indoors and
quiet.

  Then we passed through Oakesville, the supermarket and Sir Harry’s monument, and were in a green and white well-kept road network again, ending in the Lyford Cay-Nassau roundabout beyond which were the cone-topped pharos guarding the entrance gate to Coral Harbour’s 2,500 acres of golf-course, beaches, villas and waterways. And the yacht club with Dolly.

  ‘. . .This fashionable community; a wonderland of spacious home sites and silken beaches in the heart of a tax-free, sun-blessed economy. Are you a radical doctor, Doctor?’ asked Johnson.

  We were driving along a broad avenue lined with bush-cut pines spaced like green wigs on wigstands. A nursery on the right displayed a drilled squad of short potted palms, destined for landscape designing. We passed the golf-course. ‘Or,’ Johnson added, ‘do your fellow men hold no charm for you, anyway?’

  ‘Very little,’ I said calmly. ‘I prefer to pit my wits against science. My relaxation, for instance, is golf.’

  ‘And bridge? No, not bridge,’ Johnson answered himself, as it happened, quite accurately. ‘To depend for success on a partner would be highly unethical. But I’ll take you on at golf some time. Dr MacRannoch.’

  I felt no need to say anything. We came to the double road, with its spine of hibiscus and palms, and the water-based villas with their polythened cars and cruising boats tied up to the patio. A palm roundel with flags stood in front of the club, which was low and modern with a lot of plate-glass and crazed-stone facing and white wrought-iron balcony. Johnson parked the car and we went in.

  I waited on the fur rug. The scarlet-lit water grotto under the open-tread staircase glowed in the deepening dusk: someone lit a cigarette in one of the group of armchairs. A voice, bodiless above my head, said, ‘Don’t do it again, will you? Just don’t do it again.’

  My epidermal hair follicles sprang upright, but I do not give way easily to emotion. I set my foot on the stairs, just as Johnson, arriving suddenly with some letters in his hand, said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and a couple, laughing, began to come down the steps over my head. The young woman, in a white lace trouser-suit, said in an American voice, ‘Sure I’ll do it again, and you’ll stand by and like it. It’s a free world, darling David.’

  I stepped back, my hand prodding Johnson, to allow them to pass. Darling David was quite unremarkable, in long shorts and a sweater and greying brown hair. I had never seen him before. Then he said, ‘Well, come along. Bar’s open,’ and the voice was quite different, too, from that caressing voice in the Trueman. Johnson said, ‘It’s a lovely evening for a sail. You don’t mind, do you, having dinner on board? Spry is quite a good cook.’

  ‘If I might make that phone-call first,’ I said, and I saw him smile.

  ‘Of course, Doctor. Go ahead. I’ll wait just outside.’

  There is no point in being foolishly trusting.

  After I had called my father, who displayed a mild interest that Johnson Johnson should have sought my company and no interest whatever in my immediate and future plans, I joined my host outside and we walked along the well-manicured edge of the marina where the cruising yachts lay under the palm trees, like bedpans, I thought, in a sterilizer. Johnson said, ‘Here is Dolly.’ and led the way up on deck.

  If you know about boats she is a gaff-rigged auxiliary ketch, of about fifty-odd tons, which implies a great deal of money. She had a curious detachable shell fitted over the cockpit, which Johnson slid back without explanation. For the rest she was quietly and expensively fitted, not only with awnings and Neiman-Marcus soft furnishings, but with a depth-finder and R.D.F. unit. I noticed a big- scale radar set which I’d heard one of the lab technicians daydreaming about, over a sputum swab. They cost ten thousand dollars.

  I cut the tour short in the pricy saloon and led the way back to the cockpit. The big diesel engine was rumbling. A small middle-aged man in white overalls and yachting-cap stepped aboard, the mooring rope in his hand, coiled it and came forward towards us, expressing inquiry.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Johnson. ‘There’s not enough air. I’ll take her.”

  He had a hand on the wheel as he spoke. He moved a lever, and Dolly began to nose out into the waterway. ‘Get us some drinks, Spry, will you? We’ll get up the coast a bit and find some quiet water for dinner. . . Spry does all the work here, Dr MacRannoch. What will you drink? We’ve all kinds of fruit-juice. Or something carbonated, if you’d rather.’

  I settled for fresh lemon and soda, and sat carefully in the deep cockpit cushions, the wind stirring but not untidying my hair, which I like to keep short. The palm trees moved past, and the other boats, their lights drawing the eye in the gathering dark. I wondered, acidly, if Johnson also had a Japanese heir. The slight savour I had begun to feel in the occasion had vanished. Johnson said, ‘What do you spend on your golf?’

  I said, ‘I beg your pardon?’ Moneyed persons often do this. In Nassau there are only two topics of conversation: business and sex.

  He increased his speed slightly, but the engine was still very soft. He said, hardly raising his voice, ‘Green fees eight dollars, power cart ten dollars, balls eighteen dollars fifty the dozen. And a complete set of clubs and bag, if you have them, what? Four hundred dollars?’

  ‘Ten pounds,’ I said. ‘Second-hand, five years ago.’

  ‘Relative to an M.O.’s salary,’ he said, ‘it still adds up. Dolly is my battle with nature.’

  He grinned, and I expect my expression relaxed. Then Spry arrived with the drinks and Johnson, giving him the wheel, stepped up and perched on the side deck, his feet, male-like, on the cushions, the wind flipping his hair. He said, ‘About George.’

  It felt, suddenly, rather like an operating day: nine till two, three days a week. You press the electric eye with your elbow and the double doors slide silently open and you are first. The room on the left is empty, where later you will sit waiting while your fellow doctors talk fast cars and fishing, and swop stained, sexy paperbacks. Round the corner you can hear the chink as the nurses work at the instrument trolley, and the black rubber masks hang like burst tyres in a long drooping row on the wall.

  Then the doors slide noiselessly open again behind you and Barber, your surgical consultant, strides in and says, ‘Well. McGonagall?’

  I said sharply, ‘Suppose you tell me first what was in Sir Bartholomew’s letter?’

  ‘That he had been poisoned,’ Johnson said. ‘He was quite convinced, and I believe him.’ He paused, and then said, ‘You suspected that?’

  ‘I knew it,’ I said. ‘I took samples. It was arsenic.”

  We had moved out to the open sea. Trees on the shore were dense green, the palms still, like fringes on thinly bent wire; while on the horizon the paling sky was banded with cloud-banks like meths-tinted wadding. The sun, hesitating, lingered rose-pink on Spry’s overalls. Johnson said, ‘And you had a threatening phone- call. Yet you didn’t go to the police?’

  ‘I didn’t perform the tests until this afternoon,’ I said.

  ‘And the phone-call?’

  ‘Sir Bartholomew said it was a joke by his brother-in-law George.’ I paused, and then said, ‘In the clubhouse just now, the man who came downstairs spoke the identical words.’

  ‘I wondered why you were staring at him,’ said Johnson. ‘So I made some inquiries while you were phoning. He is well known and accepted, although the girl was not his wife. He has not left the island for three weeks at least . . So now you know that Bart Edgecombe was attacked by a poisoner, and that his wife has no brother named George. It was, incidentally, a stupid story to tell you.’

  ‘Not wholly,’ I said. I kept my voice calm. ‘It told me that Sir Bartholomew also knew what had happened, and didn’t want police interference. I should imagine he is expecting you to explain why. At a guess, it concerns his wife Lady Edgecombe.’

  ‘Poor Denise,’ said Johnson unexpectedly. ‘No. It only concerns Lady Edgecombe in that she is the neglected spectator in a scene of continuous short-fall pandemonium. Bartholomew Ed
gecombe was a highly paid servant of the Crown and is now the chief British intelligence agent in the Bahamas.’

  I am aware that I have a first-class brain. It is always a pleasure to meet with another. I said, ‘You are his superior?’

  Johnson smiled, wryly, in the gathering dark. ‘I am his nursemaid,’ he said. ‘And you, for your sins, are his doctor.’

  We had grouper for dinner: a good, solid fish with a sauce, followed by a first-rate orange souffle. It was a change from hotel Franco-American catering: Jumbo Frog Legs Provençale. It was also a change from Minnie Pearl’s Chicken. I enjoyed my meal, during which Johnson would not talk at all about the Bart Edgecombe business; and even after it, when, in the coolness of the cockpit, with the engine shut off, he talked a great deal.

  There are four main rocket-tracking stations in the Bahamas, with an American staff drawn from the Air Force, Pan-American World Airways and the Radio Corporation of America, as well as one or two much smaller two-person affairs on the minor islands. The tracking of moonshots and other missiles from the American rocket range is done by the electronic brains in these stations, a submarine cable transmitting their findings to Cape Kennedy, which is only forty miles north of Miami across a narrow stretch of Atlantic.

  Permission may be obtained without difficulty to see these tracking stations, which have about them nothing either glamorous or peculiarly interesting, and whose staff tend to be jocular in the extreme. It had never struck me therefore that there could be any purpose in espionage in this part of the world. Which was. I suppose, precisely what the public was intended to think.

  ‘Bart’s a good man,’ Johnson said. ‘Hard-working. Thorough. The last person to run into trouble.’ The sun had gone down on a copper band into the sea, and it was now perfectly dark, with the quock of a night heron coming occasionally over the water. Dolly moved, slackly, with the waves and the steam from our coffee, coiled white in the warm air, lit from below, where Spry was clearing the meal.