Butler Did It! (14 page)

“Are you sure?” teased Matthew, “don’t
be brave on our account; I know you must be in a lot of
pain!”

“Cut it out, willya? I’m fine and you
know it,” grumbled Tommy, slumping into one of the rear seats. “You
drive, Big Shot.” He said, covering his eyes with his hand and
obviously dismissing Butler from his sight.

“Should he be coming along?” Katharine
asked, in an undertone.

“Yeah, ignore the histrionics. He’s
just using us as an excuse to escape from EB,” murmured
Matthew.

They docked the Carmine at Praslin
Island and proceeded to Katharine’s hotel. It was one of the
cheaper hotels, in the center of town, unlike the more luxurious
dive resorts located closer to the water. The ‘Isle de France’ was
a drab, five-story affair that took up a quarter of the block. It’s
only claim to French culture was an outdoor café attached to one
side and a bar located on the roof. Without thinking of the
potential danger, Katherine rushed through the entrance and headed
for the front desk.

“I’m Katharine Annenberg, I need to
check for messages. And I’m afraid I’ve lost my key.” She told the
desk clerk.

Matthew and Tommy scanned the lobby for
possible trouble, but there were no suspicious men hidden behind
newspapers or peering through the potted palms.

“So much for the classic thug in the
lobby routine,” said Tommy, “but get a load of those two blondes in
the corner.”

Amid the crowd of tourists in the
lobby, the two women stood out; statuesque, blonde Scandinavian
Goddesses. Each was a flawless beauty, identical in everything
except dress. Matthew whistled under his breath.

“Hey, I think they’re staring at me,
too. I’ll bet they’re models. I wonder if I could get a date.”
Tommy leered, conveniently forgetting that he already had a
girlfriend.

“What, with one or both?” queried
Butler.

“Either, or,” Tommy replied. “Nothing
like a matched pair.”

“Might have your hands full there,”
murmured Butler, turning back to watch Katharine at the
desk.

Katherine had a couple of messages from
the owner of the rental boatyard and one from the group of scuba
enthusiasts that she had made plans to dive with today. She opened
a sealed envelope as she walked over to them. “Oh, look! One of my
shots is a finalist in the SUBIOS competition!” She said excitedly,
waving the letter.

“Congratulations. When will you know if
you’ve won?” Butler asked.

“The award dinner is tomorrow night.
It’ll be announced then. As for today, the dive trip has already
left and there’s nothing going on with SUBIOS until this evening.
So I guess I’ll just have to hang around for the day.”

Matthew didn’t hesitate. “Let’s have
lunch then, and maybe we can find something entertaining to
do.”

“Could I have some time to shower and
get changed?” She begged. “An hour would do.”

“Of course,” said Matthew, “Tommy and I
will do some errands and meet you back here.”

“How about if we meet in that little
outdoor Café around the corner?” asked Katharine.

“Sounds good,” said Matthew on the way
out, “see you there in an hour. Come on Tommy, stop looking at the
ladies. Let’s get some things done.”

“Killjoy” replied Tommy, as they walked
out onto the street.

<<>>

Tommy and Butler made their way to a
beachfront bar, the sort that tends to cater to locals more than to
tourists. It was just shabby enough to make strangers leery of
entering. In such places, people are often not as hostile as they
seem and Butler knew that it would be a great place to glean
information. The pair ordered a couple of beers and sat down at the
bar. Matthew and Tommy represented themselves as two beleaguered
males seeking refuge from their girlfriends’ constant demands. This
warmed up the men hanging around the bar and after a polite amount
of small talk and a second round, which included all of the men
within earshot, Matthew turned the conversation in the direction he
wanted it to go.

“Yeah we just got in yesterday. You
know, just as we were setting anchor out near Little Curieuse, we
saw the weirdest yacht I have ever seen. It was huge, sleek, and
all black, or at least it looked black, it was hard to tell. That
thing must have cost a bundle!” He speculated, fishing for
information about the owner of the yacht.

“Only one boat like that around here,
that’s the ‘Rapier,’ the ship of
Levasseur Le Pirate!
” said
one of the locals at the bar. “He lives on a compound over on the
north point of Mahe. He thinks he is descended from
La
Buse
.”

“La Buse?”
Asked Tommy, “what’s
a Buse?”

“La Buse!”
repeated the man
jovially. “The Buzzard! He was this big pirate who landed here
three hundred year ago. Some say he left treasure at Bel Ombre on
Mahe, but no one has ever found it. This Levasseur, he say he‘s his
great, great, great, something or other.”

“Yeah, he got the nose for it,”
hollered a guy further down the bar. “That’s why they called the
first Levasseur
The Buzzard
, cause of that big beak of
his.”

“Does he wear an eye patch?” asked
Matthew incredulously. “My girlfriend said she thought she saw a
guy with an eye patch.”

“Ha, no! That guy, Sven Larsen, works
for him. He
un bastarde
for sure!”

“That Levasseur not so great himself,”
chimed in another local.

“My sister, she work over there on his
compound. She say last night Ol’ Levasseur so pissed about sumting,
he throw a big fit. He so bad all them working for him leave
post-haste. He yelling at that Larsen guy and throwing things
around. She say she even hear gunshots. That’s when everybody run,
my sister run three kilometers in the dark.”

“Wonder what he was pissed at?” Tommy
muttered.

Matthew silently mouthed
Kobi
.

“Sounds like a dangerous man,” said
Matthew, giving Tommy a significant look.

“Mei Oi!”
said another local.
“
Mon ami
Abdulla was working for him… Levasseur got this
collection of old African weapons and he think something gone
missing. He beat Abdulla up so bad he never walk right again and
the weapons not even be gone. The housekeeper just move them when
she clean.”

“What a joke, no?”

“Yeah, that’s real funny.” Tommy
growled.

“My friend Abdulla went to the
gendarmes, but he got no justice. The gendarmes just say it was an
accident. That Levasseur, he got too much money and he knows too
many people.”

“Well, we had better get back to the
women,” said Butler with a big stretch. “We’ll get an earful if
we’re gone too long.”

They left to the catcalls and cheerful
goodbyes of the locals.

“We’d better get on back to Katharine
‘post-haste’,” said Matthew when they got outside. “The situation
may be more dangerous than we thought”

“I’m thinking the same thing,” said
Tommy and they headed off for the hotel at top speed.

<<>>

A quick scan of the outdoor café showed
no sign of Katharine.

“Let’s get up to her room, if we’re
lucky, they haven’t found her yet,” said Matthew, punching the
third floor button in the elevator.

“They could be up there, now,” said
Tommy, “We’d better be ready.”

The elevator doors opened slowly. Tommy
and Butler hid on the sides of the doorway like actors in a bad
action movie. There were sounds of heavy breathing and grunting
coming from the corridor. After a second, they realized that one of
them was going to have to stick his head around the corner and take
a look. In accord with long held tradition, they settled the
dispute with a fast game of rock- paper-scissors.

“It figures,” murmured Tommy, looking
at his losing scissors. “You always win when it’s a dire
situation.”

As Tommy peeked into the hallway, a man
hollered, “Going down? Hold the elevator!”

Tommy and Matthew stepped out into the
hallway to find a rotund man dressed in shorts and sandals with
black socks, wrestling three big suitcases toward them. He gave
them a rather odd look but was grateful when they each grabbed a
suitcase and hustled him into the elevator.

When Matthew knocked on the door of
Katharine’s room, his heart sank. The voice that answered did not
belong to Katharine.

Butler and Tommy immediately leapt into
action. Butler grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall and Tommy
grabbed a nearby potted fern.

“How are we going to get out of here if
this goes sideways?” Tommy whispered.

“That elevator’s too slow to be any
use, check the door to the stairs,” Butler whispered
back.

“It’s okay, we’ve got a clear path
down,” said Tommy from the stairwell.

“Okay, if we have to, we’ll make a run
for it that way,” Butler whispered.

Butler called out in a petulant,
whiney, husbandy voice through the door to Katharine’s room,
“Honey, my arms are full and I can't grab my keys, you're going to
have to open the door for me.”

After a small amount of fumbling, the
door began to open. Butler yelled and fired the extinguisher
through the opening gap, and then threw it into the room. Tommy
immediately followed with the potted fern. The extinguisher
fortuitously bounced off the head of a thug holding a silenced
automatic. In the brief glance available, Butler could see another
thug crouching behind the bed. Two silenced shots crashed into the
far wall of the corridor. By mutual agreement, Tommy and Butler
bolted for the stairs.

“These guys mean business!”

“I didn’t see Katharine in the room,
did you?”

“No, I don’t think she was there. Do
you think we did any damage?”

“Not enough! We are going to have to
think of something else!”

Just as Tommy and Butler started down
the stairwell at a rapid clip, two more thugs started up the
stairwell from below, both packing silenced automatics.

“Whoops! We can’t go down!”

“Then we’ll have to go up!”

The pair pounded up the stairwell,
climbing two more flights before suddenly exiting onto the
roof.

<<>>

At the same time, in the quiet little
bar on the roof of the hotel, Charles and Henrietta Smythe-Stuttler
were sitting in the shade of a potted palm, their backs to the
gorgeous view of the harbor. On the table, between two brightly
colored umbrella drinks, a large map of the Seychelles lay before
them as seductively as a five-course dinner.

“I don’t want to spend the day on Bird
Island,” said Henrietta, in an overly commanding voice. “I want to
go to Victoria and shop. I simply must get a Coco de Mer for our
front room. And I need presents for Virgie, Lorraine, and all the
other girls in my knitting club. Oh, won’t Agnes go simply green
when I bring everyone gifts from the Seychelles.”

“But Hen,” whined Charles, “Bird Island
has colonies of Fairy Terns and Common Noddies nesting there.
Unfortunately, we’re too early to see the Sooty Tern Migration;
they won’t arrive until next month.”

“Charles, I know what you get with
colonies of birds and I know what it smells like. We’re not going
to waste our day on bird watching.”

Charles rolled his eyes.

At the bar, under a bamboo and nylon
canopy, a woman in tight polka-dotted Capri pants and rhinestone
studded cat’s-eye sunglasses was talking loudly at the
barman.

“…
and he had the effrontery
to claim that my foot was a 9D when it has always been a
4C.”

Her American accent was as sharp as the
flaming pink fingernails she tapped on the bar. Behind the bar,
Jean, the bartender, displayed polite indifference to the gratingly
high-pitched voice, while contemplating the hours of torture
remaining before his shift ended. His head nodded to her rants much
like a bobble doll, and just to show that he was worth tipping, he
threw in an occasional sympathetic syllable. On the woman’s lap, a
pink-dyed miniature poodle laid his head on his paws, giving in to
doggy boredom. The voices of the people behind her were getting
louder, disturbing her story about the horribly rude clerks in her
favorite Italian shoe store.

Distracted from her monologue by the
couple’s disagreement, the woman eased off her barstool. With her
big hairdo, large bust, and ample behind, she bore a remarkable
resemblance to her poodle. With a cigarette in one hand, drink in
the other, and the tiny pink poodle carefully wedged under her arm,
she tottered on skinny legs over to their table. Jean, the
bartender, knowing just how many Slow Gin Fizzes she had consumed,
was not at all surprised to see that she was exhibiting an amazing
amount of yaw in her walk.

“Oh, Sweetie”, she breathed, leaning
down over the table and giving Charles a good look at her
artificially enhanced cleavage; “You just gotta go to the boutique
at the Hilton in Victoria. They have the most wonderful jewelry
there.” She gave a lipstick-lined smile to Hen, who did not return
it. Charles mumbled something about his desire to see the world’s
oldest tortoise.