Before we flew to Eleuthera the Cunninghams and I had an informal board meeting. I handed out copies of the survey made by the American company, and added my report with its detailed recommendations.
"You're not expected to read all this now, but I'll give you a brief summary."
I ticked off the points on my fingers.
"We go into the Family Islands." I paused, and said in parentheses, "They used to be known as the Out Islands but the Minister of Tourism thinks that the Family Islands sounds more cosy."
"He's right," said Billy.
"And Shakespeare was wrong. There's a lot to names."
"Anyway, the future lies in the Family Islands. We go into real estate in a big way on Crooked Island, Acklins Island, Mayaguana and Great Inagua. And we buy a couple of cays in the Ragged Island Range. All this is undeveloped and we get in there first, especially before the Swiss money men move in and send the prices up."
I tapped another finger.
"We Jlut together our own package deals and farm them out to travel agents in the States and in Europe. In order to do that we either make deals with a couple of airlines or charter planes ourselves to fly our customers into Grand Bahama or New Providence. From there we'll either have to do a deal with Bahamasair or set up our own islands airline."
Another finger went up.
"Next I want one really top-class luxury hotel; not for the package tourist but for the people with money." I grinned.
"Simple folks like yourselves. Ten per cent of the visitors to the Islands come in their own aircraft and I want to capture that market."
"Sounds good," said Billy.
Billy One said, "Yeah, it seems to make sense."
Jack Cunningham had been flipping through the pages of my report.
"What's this about you wanting to start a school?"
1 said, "If we're building hotels we'll need staff to run them I want to train them my way."
"The hell with that!" said Jack roundly.
"We pay for training, then they leave and go to some other goddamn hotel like a Holiday Inn. No way are we doing that."
"The Ministry of Tourism is putting up half the cost," I said.
"Oh, well," said Jack grudgingly.
"That may be different."
Billy said, "Jack, I'm Chairman of this corporation and as far as I'm concerned you're the seventeenth Vice-President in Charge of Answering Stupid Questions. Don't stick your oar in here."
"Don't talk to your uncle like that," said Billy One. But his voice was mild.
"I've gotten my money in here," snapped Jack.
"And I don't want this guy throwing it away. He's already filled Debbie's head with a lot of communistic nonsense."
Billy grinned.
"Show me another commie with over ten million bucks."
"Two million of which we gave him," snapped Jack. He tossed the report aside.
"Billy, you damn near swore a Bible oath that the Government of the Bahamas was stable." He pointed at me.
"You believed him. He gives us a report which makes nice reading, but I've been reading other words in newspapers, for instance. There was a goddamn riot in Nassau three days ago. What's so stable about that?"
I knew about the riot and was at a loss to account for it. It had flashed into being from nowhere and the police had had a hard time in containing the disturbance. I said, "An American outfit pulled out and closed down a factory. They did it too damned fast and without consultation. People don't like being fired, especially when it's done without so much as a by-your-leave. I think that started the trouble. It's just a local difficulty. Jack."
He grunted.
"It had better be. Some American tourists got hurt, and that's not doing the industry any good; an industry, I might point out, which we're into for fifty million dollars."
I could see that any relationship I had with Jack would be uneasy and I determined to steer clear of him as far as I could. As for the riot, I had given a glib enough explanation, but I was not sure it was the right one.
Billy One said, "Let's cool it, shall we?" He looked at me.
"Would you happen to have any sour mash around?"
So it was smoothed over and next day we flew to Eleuthera. Eleuthera is 120 miles long but at the place where I had built the hotel it was less than two miles wide, so that from the hotel one could see the sea on both sides. Billy One looked at this in wonder.
"I'll be god damned!"
I said, "We get two beaches for the price of one. That's why I built here."
Even Jack was impressed.
During the course of the day I had a few words with Perigord and asked him about the riot in Nassau.
"What caused it?" I asked.
He shrugged.
"I don't really know. It's not in my jurisdiction. It's in Commissioner Deane's lap and he's welcome to it."
"Any chance of a similar occdrrence on Grand Bahama?"
He smiled grimly.
"Not if I have anything to do with it."
"Was it political?"
He went opaque on me and deliberately changed the subject.
"I must congratulate you on this very fine hotel. I wish you every success."
That reaction worried me more than anything else.
But the Grand Opening was a tremendous success and I danced with Debbie all night.
And so it went. The Theta Corporation was a success after its first year although more money was going out than coming in. After all, that was the point we were still in the stage of expansion. Billy was satisfied with the way I was handling things and so, largely, was Billy One. How Jack felt I did not know; he kept his nose out of things and I did not care to ask. Everything was going fine in my business life, and my private life was perking up, too, to the point where I asked Debbie to marry me.
She sighed.
"I thought you'd never ask."
So I took her to bed and we were married three weeks later over the protests of Jack whose open objection concerned the disparity in our ages, but he did not like me, something I knew already. Billy and, I think. Billy One were for it, but Debbie's brother, Frank, followed Jack's line. Various members of the family took sides and the clan was split to some extent on this issue. But none of them could say that I was a fortune-hunter marrying her for her money I had enough of my own. As for my own feelings about it, I was marrying Debbie, not Jack.
We married in Houston in a somewhat tense atmosphere and then went back to the Bahamas to honeymoon briefly at the new Rainbow Bay Hotel. Then we went back to Grand Bahama via Abaco where we picked up Karen who seemed dubious about having a new mother. Debbie and Karen moved into the house at Lucaya and I went back to running the Corporation. Two months later she told me she was pregnant which made both of us very happy.
But then things began to go wrong again because people who were coming to the Bahamas on vacation were going home to die.
Legionella pneumophila.
I learned a lot about that elusive bug with the pseudo- Latin name in the next few months. Anyone connected with the hotel industry had to learn, and learn fast. At first it was not recognized for what it was because those afflicted were not dying in the Bahamas but back home in the States or in England or Switzerland or wherever eke they came from. It was the World Health Organization that blew the first warning whistle.
Most people might know it as Legionnaires' disease because it was first discovered at the convention of the American Legion held at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia in 1976 where there was an almost explosive outbreak of pneumonia among those who had attended Altogether 221 people became ill and thirty-four of them died.
Naturally, Legionnaires' disease is bad news for any hotelier. No one is likely to spend a carefree vacation in a resort hotel from which he may be carried out feet first, and the problem is compounded by the fact that even those hotels which are well kept and disease-free feel a financial draught. Once the news gets around that a particular h
oliday resort is tainted then everybody gets hurt.
So it was that a lot of people, me among them, were highly perturbed to hear that Legionnaires' disease was loose in the Parkway Hotel in Nassau. I flew to New Providence to talk to Tony Bosworth, our Corporation doctor. He had his base at the Sea Gardens Hotel because New Providence is fairly central and he could get to our other hotels reasonably quickly, using a Corporation plane in an emergency. A company doctor was another of my extravagances of which Jack Gunningham did not approve, but he earned his salary on this, and other, occasions.
When I told him what was happening at the Parkway he gave a low whistle.
"Legionellosis! That's a bad one. Are you sure?"
I shrugged.
"That's what I hear."
"Do you know which form? It comes in two ways Pontiac fever and Legionnaires' disease."
That was the first time I had heard of Pontiac fever, but not the last. I shook my head.
"I wouldn't know. You're the doctor, not me."
"Pontiac fever isn't too bad," he said.
"It hits fast and has a high attack rate, about ninety-five per cent, but usually there are no fatalities. Legionnaires' disease is a killer. I'll get on to the Department of Public Health. Give me fifteen minutes, will you?"
I went away to look at the kitchens. I often make surprise raids on the kitchens and other departments just to keep the staff up to the mark. All departments are equally important but, to paraphrase George Orwell, the kitchen is more equal than others. Every hotelier's nightmare is an outbreak of salmonella. It was nearer half an hour before I got back to Tony and he was still nattering on the telephone, but he laid it down a couple of minutes after my arrival.
"Confirmed," he said gloomily.
"Legionnaires' disease. Suspected by a smart young doctor in Manchester, England, it was confirmed by the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre. The World Health Organization has identified a man dead in Paris and two more in Zurich; there's, a couple of cases in Buenos Aires and a rash of them across the States."
"All these people stayed at the Parkway?"
"Yes. How many rooms there?"
I had all the statistics of my competition at my fingertips.
"A
hundred and fifty. "
"What would you say the year-round occupation rate is?"
I considered.
"It's a reasonably good hotel. I'd say between seventy-five and eighty per cent."
Tony's lips moved silently as he made a calculation.
"They'll have to contact about 12,000 people, and they're spread all over the bloody world. That's going to be a job for someone."
I gaped at him.
"Why so many!"
"There's been some work done on this one since 1976. Studies have shown that this deadly little chap can live in water for over a year, so that's how far back it's standard to check. One will get you ten that the bacteria are in the air- conditioning cooling tower at the Parkway, but we don't know how long they've been in there. Look, Tom, this is pretty serious. The attack rate among those exposed is between one and five per cen t. Let's split the difference and call it two-and-a-half. That means three hundred casualties. With a death rate among them of fifteen per cent that gives us forty-five deaths."
In the event he was not far out. When the whole scare was over the final tally came to 324 casualties and 41 deaths.
"You seem to know a lot about it."
He gave me a lopsided grin.
"I'm a hotel doctor; this is what I get my salary for. Those casualties who don't die won't be good for much for a few months, and there's a grave risk of permanent lung damage, to say nothing of the kidneys and the liver."
I took a deep breath.
"All right, Tony; what do we do?"
"Nothing much. These outbreaks tend to be localized usually restricted to a single building. They've turned off the air-conditioning at the Parkway so there'll be nothing blown out."
"So you think our hotels are safe?"
He shrugged.
"They should be."
"I'd like to make sure."
"Testing for L. pneumophila is a finicky business. You need a well-equipped laboratory with livestock guinea pigs, fertilized eggs and so on. That's why the damned creature only turned up as late as 1976. And it takes a long time, too. I'll tell you what; I'll take samples of the water from the air- conditioners in the four hotels and send them to Miami but don't expect quick results."
"What about the room conditioners?" I asked. The lobby and the public rooms of the Sea Gardens were handled by a central air-conditioner, but each room had its own small one which could be set individually by the occupier. The same system worked at the Royal Palm because those two were our older hotels. The Abaco Sands and the brand-new Rainbow Bay had completely centralized air-conditioning.
Bosworth raised his eyebrows.
"You're taking this a bit far, aren't you?" He turned and took a fat medical book from a shelf next to his desk and flipped through the pages.
"We haven't developed an anti-bacterial agent for this one yet; nothing specific, anyway. Heavy chlorination would appear to be the answer.
"
"Tell me how it's done."
So he told me and I got busy. In the two hotels we had 360 rooms and that meant 360 air-conditioners to be emptied, filled with chlorinated water, left to soak for twenty-four hours, emptied again and refilled with guaranteed pure water. A big job.
I did not wait for Bosworth to report on the samples he sent to Miami, but got working on the big air-conditioners in each hotel, taking them out of service one at a time and using the same technique. But there was a difference. An air- conditioner in a moderately big hotel can handle up to 1000 gallons of water a minute and the cooling is effected by evaporation as the water pours over splash bars and has air blown through it.
A cooling tower will lose about ten gallons of water a minute as water vapour and there is another gallon a minute lost in what is known technically in the trade as 'drift'; very finely divided drops of water. Attempts are made to control the emission of drift by drift eliminators, but some always gets out. Tony Bosworth told me that any infectious bacteria would probably be escaping in the drift. I chlorinated that water to a fare-thee-well.
I supervised it all myself to make sure it was done properly. It might seem odd that the boss would do it personally but I had to make sure it was done in the right way. There was a lot riding on this, apart from the fact that I did not want anyone to die just because he had patronized one of my hotels. L. pneumophila had a nasty habit o not only killing people, but hotels, too.
Tony Bosworth was also pretty busy flitting from island to island attending suspected cases of Legionnaires' disease which turned out to be the common cold. Our hotels were clean but the tourists were jittery and the whole of the Bahamas ran scared for a little while.
It was not a good year for either the Bahamas or the Theta Corporation, and the Ministry of Tourism and I sat back to watch the people stay away. Tourism fell off by fifteen per cent in the next three months. The Parkway Hotel was cleaned up and certified safe, but I doubt if the room occupancy even reached ten per cent in the months that followed. The company that owned it later went broke.
Another thing it meant was that I was away from home more often than I was there. Debbie grew fractious and we had our first rows. It had never been that way with Julie but now, with hindsight, I remember that when Julie was expecting Sue I had been always careful to stay close. That had been my first baby, too.
So, perhaps, in a sense our quarrels were equally my fault even if I did not recognize it at the time. As it was I took umbrage. I was working very hard, not only protecting against this damned disease which was worrying the hell out of me, but also taking the usual workload of the President of the Theta Corporation, and I did not see why I should have to be drained of my energies at home, too. So the quarrelling became worse. It is not only jealousy that feeds o
n itself.
Debbie was still doing her thing with Cora, Addy and the Texan kids, but operating mainly from the Bahamian end. But then I noticed that she was spending more and more time back home in Texas. Her excuse was that Cora and Addy were hopeless at organization and she had to go back to iron out problems. I accepted that, but when her visits became more frequent and protracted I had the feeling I was losing a wife. It was not good for young Karen, either, who had lost one mother and looked like losing the surrogate. It was a mess and I could not see my way out of it.
My feelings were not improved when I saw the headlines in the Freeport J^ews one morning. There had been a fire in Nassau and the Fun Palace had burned down. The Fun Palace was a pleasure complex built, I think, to rival Freeport's International Bazaar as a tourist trap. It contained cinemas, restaurants and sporting facilities and had been a shade too gaudy for my taste. As modern as the day, it had a cheap feel to it of which I did not approve.
And now it was gone. Analysing the newspaper report it would seem that the firemen never had a chance; the place had gone up in flames like a bonfire almost as though it had been deliberately built to burn easily, and it took eighty-two lives with it, most of them tourists and a lot of them children. That, coming on top of Legionnaires' disease, would certainly not help the image of the Bahamas. Come to the Islands and die! Take your pick of method!
Over the next few days I followed the newspaper reports and listened to people talking. There were muttered rumours of arson but that was to be expected; after any big fire there is always talk of arson. The Chief of the Fire Brigade in Nassau was eloquent in his damning of the construction of the Fun Palace and the materials used in its construction. In order to give it a light and airy appearance a lot of plastic had been used and most of the victims had died, not of burning, but of asphyxiation caused by poisonous fumes. He also condemned the use of polyurethane foam as furniture upholstery.
Bahama Crisis Page 8