A Man of Affairs (5 page)

“How about the ageing ranch hand?” I asked. “The one talking to Mrs. McGann.” He was a faded man in weary khakis and a big pale sombrero, with a cud in his cheek. I hadn’t quite caught his name when we were taken around, but Puss had caught it and given a little squeal of delight and the man had told her he hadn’t seen her, by God, since she was so little she had to climb the corral fence to get on a horse.

“Puhleeze!” Bridget said. “You are referring to Porter Crown of Crown Ranch, Tex-Crown Oil, Crown-Arabian Oil, Crown-Dean Aviation Devices, et cetera.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Personally I think he is an old floopph. The harem job on his left is his third wife, Tessy. She’s got an accent a hatchet would bounce off. Hungarian, I think.” Mrs. Crown, in Italian beach wear, was an abundant redhead who seemed to be constantly in a half doze, pearly and sexual. “That fifty-foot hunk of brass and mahogany at the dock, the
Portess,
is theirs. Port calls it their little boat. He keeps it and the big boat at Padre Island. There’s a crew of two who sleep aboard. The big chunk of muscles who just started talking to Bonny Carson is named Jack Buck. He has the strong impression he’s irresistible. He crews the
Portess.
Port is democratic, so Jack Buck gets to eat and swim and drink with the folks. But the democracy does not extend to Fidelio. He’s the little Mexican chef and steward on the boat. They brought the
Portess
across the Gulf and around the Keys and up here to the Bahamas. Port and Tessy and Port’s daughter.”

“Which one is she?”

“You’ll meet her later. She’s about nineteen and she looks like a gypsy and I hear tell she’s just about as wild as one. This little cruise is to get her mind off somebody old Port didn’t approve of. She’s the only child of his second marriage. I think she’s a brat. Her name is Lolly, from Laura, and old Port calls her Lollypop. She drank hard and folded early. Now where am I?”

“Who is the Bundy character with Bonny Carson?”

“Some kind of a manager. He’s trying to swing something with Mike. God only knows what. Turn-about is fair play, Sam’l. All I know about your group is that some of them are named McGann and some are named Dodge, and they have big chunks of stock in this Harrison thing Mike is interested in. Who belongs to whom?”

“The dark girl is Louise Dodge, and the beefy one over there is Warren Dodge.”

“She doesn’t look very happy. So the other two are McGanns. The male McGann is kinda cute.”

“He’s Louise Dodge’s brother.”

One of the white-coated Bahamians came to us for a drink order. “More of the same, please, John,” she said, and put her empty glass on his tray. I asked for another, also. When he went away I said, “How big a staff is there?”

“Seven, if you count that adorable little Skylark.”

“Are there any missing guests, besides Lolly Crown?”

She made a count of the group. “Nope. Seventeen counting everybody. Then, with Fidelio, there are twenty-five on Dubloon Cay. What they call a mixed group. Maybe a mixed-up group.” She turned on the poolside cot and tucked her knees under her and looked directly at me and said, “Are you here to try to knock a couple of spokes out of Mike’s big wheel?”

“What gives you that idea, Bridget?”

“I heard them wondering about you on the airplane, Fletcher Bowman and Cam Duncan. I was supposed to be asleep but I wasn’t, quite.”

“They say anything I should know?” I asked easily.

“I just got the idea they think you’re pretty bright and it may take some selling to sell you on whatever they have in mind.”

“They don’t have to sell me. They just have to sell the Dodges and the McGanns. I don’t own any stock in Harrison. I work for wages. I work for the owners.” The question she had put to me bothered me. One moment everything had seemed very casual, and then her question had made it look like a stage setting again. As though Mike Dean’s organization had planted all these people by the pool and cued them very carefully. It was like being with a small group of friends at a very big and very busy roulette table, and suddenly having a strong hunch that every other gambler at the table was a shill for the house.

A lazy black mosquito landed on her arm, ready to feed. She slapped it and said, “The nightly visitors are beginning to move in. Look at that sun, Sam! Half gone, and not a cloud. It looks like a red-hot rivet in a steel plate. Let’s take our drinks and I’ll give you a short tour of inspection, like the one Elda Garry and I were given. Guy Brainerd has been here before.”

She showed me the house, the main lounge, the game room, the gleaming kitchen with its hotel equipment and the servants fixing dinner. She knew them by name and introduced them and they seemed to like her. It was hard to believe she had been down only a little longer than one full day. Ruby, Romeo’s wife, was a massive woman. The only other female servant was named Booty. She seemed to be about eighteen or nineteen. She was Ruby’s niece. She was quite tall, and luxuriantly, splendidly constructed. She was the color of cocoa, and the skin of her face had an unbelievably fine texture. Her mouth was heavy and Negroid, her nose fine and slim, her eyes like the eyes in the ancient drawings of Egyptian women. She masked shyness with a dignified reserve; and when she walked she bent forward slightly from the waist and did not swing her arms, as though to hide from the world the new ripeness of breasts and belly.

When we left the kitchen, Bridget told me that Booty was glad to have this extra work because she was soon to be married to a man who captained one of the charter boats that operated out of the Grand Bahama Club.

We started down a path in the rear of the building, but the bugs were out in too much force. We hurried back and Bridget said, “Nothing too spectacular down there anyway. Just a big generator house and the well house and the pumps and a big storage tank. Over there is where the servants live.”

“Who owns the little float plane?”

“Golly, I forgot all about them! Change the count to nineteen and twenty-seven total. It belongs to a man named Bert Buford. Mike is in on some big land syndicate deal in Broward County north of Miami, and Bert is the resident manager of one of the developments they’ve started. Bert flies over quite often with his wife, whether or not Mike is here. He comes for the fishing. The wife is named Margaret Mary. And you have to say the whole name. She’s a southrun type girl. They’ve been out in one of the skiffs and they should be back by now. And, by golly, there they come.”

They had come from the east and turned into the bay. The outboard made a rackety sound in the fading day. We went down onto the dock, and Romeo came down to help and before the skiff had come up to the dock, Guy Brainerd and Elda Garry, and Tommy and Louise had joined us. Louise gave me a quick look of question and I knew she was wondering about this sudden friendship with the girl they called Murphy.

Guy Brainerd said, “The others are too blasé to walk down to look at a fish. Just us greenhorns.”

“I gave up fishing when I was terribly young,” Elda Garry said in her mid-Manhattan accent. “A boy expected me to put a perfectly horrible looking thing on my own hook. I think it was called a damnittohell or something like that.”

“Hellgrammite,” Bridget said tersely. “Aquatic larva of the dobson.”

“Really,
darling, that little head of yours is positively
stuffed
with things. It should have been called a damnittohell, because when I tried, it bit me, and I haven’t been fishing since. My God, look at the size of that thing!”

The man in the skiff had stood up and eased a big fish onto the dock. It was streaked with gorgeous shades of blue and green and gold. The man was knobbly and towheaded and he had the pinched un-tannable face of the cracker. He wore a baseball cap, a T-shirt and jeans sawed off at the knees. “There’s a right good albacore, Romeo,” he said. “Hi, folks. Hi, Murph. I’m Bert Buford and this here’s my wife, Margaret Mary.” She was dark and comfortable looking and she made me remember an object I hadn’t thought of in years. It had belonged to my mother. It was a plump little pincushion in the shape of a kitten.

Bridget took care of the introductions and Tommy helped Margaret Mary up onto the dock, and we watched the other fish off-loaded as Bert identified them. “Little amberjack. Couple of yallatails. Nice red snapper. But the ’cuda about to drive us nuts out there today.”

“What are those outfits?” Tommy asked.

“These here are a couple of Rumer Atlantic surf-casting spinners,” Buford said. “I got ’em on hollow glass spinning rods I had made to order. Mine’s got a little more flex to it than Margaret Mary’s. I carry three hundred yards of twelve-pound test monofilament, and I got Margaret Mary’s loaded up with about two hundred yards of twenty-five-pound test. I tell you, two years ago this little gal couldn’ta fought a crappie with a twelve-ton winch, but today she got that big albacore slick as you please. I’m fixing to cut her tackle down some.”

“Lose much tackle today?” Guy asked.

“Eight or ten rigs. Got into some big dolphin that took some of it, and big ’cuda took the rest. Romeo, you get somebody to get the meat off that snapper and put it on the cold and we’ll take it on back with us tomorrow evening. You can do what you want with the rest of the fish.”

“Thank you very much, sar,” Romeo said, grinning.

Bert got up on the dock and, speaking as though Romeo weren’t there, said, “These people sure go for fish. And they don’t get enough when they got to work all day like now. Romeo, how about you rinse off the tackle and set it in the dock house for me for the morning. Then you tell John to bring us a couple of bourbon to the room. There’s anything I like it’s fishing all day and then sticking my head out of a hot shower ever once in a while to nibble on a bourbon.”

Lights had gone on all over the house. As we walked up the path I could hear the slap of small waves, the distant humming rumble of the generator house, the whine of a mosquito next to my ear.

The pool lights were on. There were just two people left by the pool, Port Crown and Puss McGann. I saw Crown tilt his seamed face at the darkening sky and heard the bray of his laugh. I saw Puss slap at her leg and then they got up and started slowly toward the main house.

People settled down on the shadowy veranda, in the main lounge and living room, or in the adjacent play room closer to the bar. Guy Brainerd had detached Bridget. After I got a drink, I slanted over, subtle as a moose, to the side of Cam Duncan who was watching Bonny Carson poke through the record cabinet.

“This is some layout, Mr. Duncan.”

“One of the ground rules is no last names on the island, Sam.”

“So be it. Are you Cam?”

“For Cameron. Cameron Mackenzie Duncan. You’re right about Dubloon Cay, Sam. It is some layout. Mike knew exactly what he wanted, and the only way he could get the island was to take it on a ninety-nine-year lease agreement with her Majesty’s Government. It hurts me to think he doesn’t own it, but he tells me he is going to have damn little interest in what will happen to it eighty-nine years from now. That’s when it runs out. I can see what he means.”

“How does he keep in touch with what’s going on while he’s here?”

“That’s one of the functions of the incredible Fletcher Bowman. Mike had a ham radio installation put in. Fletcher has an FCC license and a limey license, and every night he gets in touch with Ralph Pegler on Mike’s New York staff who has his ham station up at his home in Connecticut, and Mike is up to date on all catastrophes.”

“Have you been working for Mike a long time?” I asked. It was a pretty leaden-footed question, and I think it amused him.

“Not long. A couple of years now. I’m a tax attorney, of the new breed of specialist’s specialist, a corporation tax attorney. Mike has another kind of specialist on the personal tax questions, a bright boy named Dave McGinty. Dave is involved in a practically perpetual audit of Mike’s current affairs by the Bureau. Mike is in a bracket that calls for an automatic audit each year, and each year the return weighs about three pounds, so it takes most of the year to get through it. I don’t think Mike has the faintest damn idea of what he’s worth, and I don’t think anybody else does either. If anybody could make a close guess, it would be Amparo Blakely.”

“Speak of the devil,” said Amparo Blakely softly at my elbow.

“The question of the hour,” Cam said, “is what is Mike worth?”

“I didn’t bring it up,” I said.

She smiled at me. Even in her low heels she was almost six feet tall. “I didn’t think you did, Sam. I’ll give you an answer, Cam. Mike is worth a good deal of money sometimes. Other days he’s hardly worth anything. It all depends.”

Cam said, “Anything you want to know about Mike, just ask Amparo. She’s the perfect confidential secretary. She won’t even tell you what time it is by Mike’s clock.”

“Oh, poo! Cam, I worry about you. You ought to put some weight on. You’re a rack of bones, actually. It would take three of you to make one of Sam.”

“I like to have you worry about me,” he said. They smiled at each other with obvious affection. She stood close enough to me so that I got more of the physical impact of her. She was built to my scale. She outweighed Cam and looked perfectly capable of snapping his spine with her thumbs, but that did not make her look less feminine. She was of the female persuasion, brushed, scrubbed, scented, and packed tightly and pneumatically into her bronzy hide.

“You shouldn’t look so worn and frail, Cam,” she said.

Cam looked beyond her and said, “I am not so frail but what I feel a basic urge to tweak the place where those green shorts of the lady editor are the tightest.”

Amparo turned and looked and said, “Go ahead, darling. I dare you. They look slightly fraudulent. I pray to God we’re not into a new age of fundamental falsies.”

“Murphy called that rear elevation saucy,” I said.

“And saucy it is,” Amparo said. “Our Miss Hallowell has a nice way with words. Elda Garry is, I am afraid, not entirely oblivious to the general impression created. Try a tweak, Cameron. Think of it as character analysis. Maybe she’ll go seven feet into the air and give a hoarse cry of anguish,”