Operation Nassau (32 page)

‘Right. Wallace?’ said James. He hardly let Mr Tiko finish speaking. He was steaming with triumph and malice.

‘Will you marry me, Beltanno?’ said Wallace. ‘For nothing,’ he added.

‘No,’ I said. I remembered with a pang the moment when he attacked Johnson Johnson in my defence. Then I remembered the
Haven
and felt a little less like a failed premium offer. The Begum said reasonably, ‘But, Beltanno. You must marry someone.’

I saw my father shoot her a look of surprise and gratitude. ‘Brady. It’s settled,’ he said.

‘Or Krishtof Bey,’ said the Begum. ‘He’d take you with seventy- five thousand dollars.’ She stared hard at my father, daring him to visualize sweetie-mouse-coloured grandchildren in ballet tights. There was an unfriendly silence.

‘Or Krishtof Bey,’ said my father weakly, after a moment. The Begum sat back with a sigh. I said, ‘I’m not marrying Krishtof Bey either.’

The Begum said sweetly. ‘You’re marrying one of them. Or one of your friends will be sorry.’

I had forgotten Johnson Johnson entirely. I stared at her, plumbing her perfidy. Unless I married, said that brittle, mandarin smile, she would betray Johnson Johnson’s identity.

I smiled back. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I choose Mr Tiko.’

‘You can’t,’ said my father. ‘You heard him. I’ve refused my consent.’

‘We know why, as well,’ said the Begum. ‘You’re afraid of his golf handicap.’

‘You’re mad,’ said my father. ‘I could beat any one of that tribe from a bus with one hand in my pocket.’

‘Then play him for Beltanno,’ said the Begum.

A simple solution conceived by Medusa. You would not think for a moment that any sane person would consider it seriously. You would never dream that, having embraced the principle, Wallace Brady should complain that he too should be allowed to play golf for a wife, and that the Begum, judiciously holding the balance, would decree that Krishtof Bey must also have a share in the match.

Account for it as you might - mispaired chromosomes, pancreatic deficiency or straightforward mental retardation - you would still barely believe that a group of coherent mixed adults could agree to meet the next afternoon at the golf-course at Great Harbour Cay, and there compete, match-play, over an eighteen-hole course, for the privilege of marrying Dr B. Douglas MacRannoch: winner gets the bride, with veto rights over any candidate possessed by James Ulric MacRannoch. provided that he wins more holes than the man to be vetoed.

I think I used a lot of strong language for which I failed to apologize. I know that, at first, all my brain could grasp was that I was being asked to mortgage my whole future for Johnson’s despicable safety. It further came to me that I risked being linked in holy matrimony with a murderer. Was this why Wallace Brady had asked for my hand? Why Krishtof Bey had expressed a wholly unexpected interest in legal attachment?

On the other hand, it came to me through the sound of my own protestations. Johnson Johnson had undertaken in twenty-four hours to expose Edgecombe’s would-be assassin. If he didn’t. Sergeant Trotter was going to put the whole thing in the hands of the police, and the Begum could expose whom she wished. If he did, we should know the name of the miscreant by the end of the golf match, and it was quite on the cards that my prospective fiancé, whichever he might be, would be led off the golf-course in handcuffs.

I wondered what kind of game Krishtof Bey played.

I said, ‘All right. I think you’re all drunk. But I’ll do it.’

There was a hazy silence. It came to me that none of us was entirely stone sober, and that, further, no one had expected me to agree. James Ulric sat down suddenly. Mr Tiko bowed, an expression of faint alarm on his face. Wallace Brady was grinning.

The Begum Akbar rose, shook out her long, filmy wrappings and, crossing, laid a hand on Mr Tiko’s bowed shoulders.

‘And,’ she said, ‘all you did was finish their jigsaw.’

The rest of that evening and the following night are obscured by a deep fuzz of sleep.

A normal reaction to unusual stress, not to mention a crisis of an unprecedented and personal nature. I recall using much these words to describe my weary condition to Johnson, a little later that evening.

I remember his patient rejoinder. ‘You’re tiddly,’ he said. ‘Go to bed. You look like an overworked loofah.’

That was after I had broken the news of the golf competition. I see now why he thought I was intoxicated. At the time, he showed only mild hysteria and was willing enough to answer my questions.

Once the Begum’s guests had all left, Johnson had been busy. Without consulting me or anyone else, he had roused Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe, and, helped by Spry, had put him in
Dolly
’s speedboat. Sir Bartholomew was now safely at home on Great Harbour Cay, guarded by his own houseboys and with Spry to supervise for good measure. So that I could relax. Edgecombe was safe.

‘Bully for Edgecombe,’ I said. I cannot excuse the blight which attacks my vocabulary. ‘But what about us? I suppose that means the murderer is still on Crab Island? Who is it? You said that you knew.’

‘I do,’ Johnson said. ‘But it still can’t be proved. Any one of our suspects could have doctored the
Haven
after she was loaded . . . although I’ve discovered one thing. When she took on the explosives, the job was done by a team from Bullock’s Harbour. A group who naturally knew Pentecost and his brothers.’

The deceased waiter from the Bamboo Conch Club. ‘On Mr Brady’s instructions?’ I asked.

‘Exactly. But for all we know, Mr Brady’s instructions may have been perfectly innocent. Someone else may have given Pentecost’s friends their less legitimate orders. One of them, we suppose, dived and placed
Dolly
’s beacon under her hull.’

‘And fixed the alternator leads? And put the sugar into the fuel-tank?’ I said.

Johnson’s bifocals were two blank enigmas. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘That had to be done by someone aboard.’

Letting out Krishtof Bey. Unless Krishtof Bey were working with someone. I said, ‘Is it possible that two of these people are in league together against Edgecombe?’

‘Yes,’ said Johnson. ‘It’s not only possible, it is certain. The question being, naturally, which two?’

I went to bed almost immediately afterwards. Whichever two they were, they had to be brilliant golfers. Otherwise it just wouldn’t be my bloody luck.

I awoke to cloudless skies and a thoughtful breakfast tray, followed rather tentatively by the Begum, who sat erect at the foot of my bed and said, ‘Everyone is quite well and Sir Bartholomew has had a splendid night I am told: Beltanno, dear, I expect you want to call the whole golf-match off?’

I said, ‘If I don’t marry, will you really walk out on my father?’

She gazed at me for quite a long time from those painted eyes. At length, ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘And tell everyone who Johnson is?’

This time the silence was longer. ‘No,’ she said.

‘That wasn’t what you said downstairs yesterday.’

‘If I had,’ said the Begum, ‘you wouldn’t have agreed to the match.’

‘And you wanted me to agree to it? To have my husband picked out by his putting?’

‘Yes,’ said the Begum with disarming simplicity. ‘I want you and James Ulric to discover that you can’t control one another by force any more. Will you do it, Beltanno? Now you’ve had time to consider?’

‘Try,’ I said heavily, ‘and keep me away.’

The morning dragged. Sergeant Trotter sailed off to Great Harbour Cay to measure the ground for the unspeakable MacRannoch Gathering. Wallace Brady went ostensibly swimming and was actually found at the back of the orchid wood with a driver and a bucket of golf-balls. Krishtof Bey posed by the swimming-pool for Johnson until I walked past by accident, upon which he jumped to his feet and leaped round me, finishing in a one-footed arabesque with both my hands pinned to his bosom.

When I protested, he assembled himself back in the normal standing-position and said, ‘I am behind-hand with my mating proposal. Is there a standard form of wording particular to the MacRannochs, or may I express it in the universal language of the Dance?’

‘Can you play golf?’ I said.

He could. I let him dance round me for a bit, and then went to look for my father.

I found him with a bag of golf-balls by the flamingo pond. I went away without speaking, and made sure that the Begum had put his nose-filters into his suitcase. I had a feeling he was going to need them.

Then I went to my room with the Chinese vase and the white bearskin carpet, and packed my own suitcase for Great Harbour Cay. My fate was going to be decided there this afternoon, and I wasn’t going to miss it.

My father is a man of firm prejudices, and has driven many a sociologist out of his mind on a golf-course.

He has a swing like a flail forage harvester which can carry a British ball 260 yards and an American one three feet, still teed up on its divot.

James Ulric dislikes American balls. James Ulric dislikes hundred-yard tees and large greens with five pin-positions. He doesn’t like big trees in his way. He doesn’t like soft sculpted sand-traps, which he likes to call bunkers; or Old Man Par, whom he refers to as Bogey. He doesn’t like conspicuous golf-wear but neither does he like to be heated, so my father walks round a golf-course wearing long, seated shorts, tennis shoes, and a white jockey cap a trifle too large for him. Today, as a concession to Hymen, he had put on a shirt.

We were all nervously jocular, there on the terrace in front of the Great Harbour Cay golf-club. Stepping ashore from the restored splendours of
Dolly
, we had enjoyed iced drinks on the club sun-deck while Johnson made a necessary trip to see Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe, and Wallace Brady went off to check our golf-carts and booking.

James Ulric was grumbling, I remember, because it was later than planned through Johnson’s delay in bringing round
Dolly
. I thought it a little unfair, since, after all, he had had to sail her single-handed with Spry gone. Then I realized that James Ulric would have grumbled in just the same way before playing Toulouse-Lautrec at lawn tennis. My father likes to be certain of winning.

Wallace Brady on the other hand was thoughtfully silent both before and after his absence, and Krishtof Bey concealed whatever he was feeling by paying shameless compliments to the Begum. Mr Tiko, whom I had seated as far as possible from my father, discoursed a little distractedly on how to rake a Zen garden. We were all, I think thankful when the time came to walk down to the terrace with our golf-clubs, where Johnson soon joined us.

Sir Bartholomew Edgecombe, we gathered, was still in good health, and his arm was making sound progress. My father cleared his throat. ‘Trotter tells me you’re calling the police in this evening. About time. too. If that man Edgecombe’s an intelligence agent. I’m not surprised the Russians are everywhere.”

The Begum Akbar gazed at him severely. ‘You don’t read enough thrillers.’ said Thelma. ‘Of course he is being attacked by enemy agents and he has volunteered to remain so that his colleagues may trap them. The island is probably full of M.I. 5 at this moment.’

‘Planting the bloody palm trees heads down,’ said my father. ‘I know the Civil Service. And I say call the police. You know that fellow Harry? I had a talk with him just before coming away. He says you were all nearly killed on
Dolly
yesterday morning.”

There is a limit to the length of time even a broker may be anaesthetized. The failure to blow up
Dolly
had been a public act which had forced Johnson’s hand no less than the murderer’s. There had been five people on board
Dolly
, and not all of them were going, as I had, to make stupid promises of silence. With Harry awake and Trotter restless and the rest of us thoroughly alarmed, the private stalking bit was going to stop, as of this evening. Either Johnson got results or Sir Bartholomew was going to be whipped off to safety and the chances of finding the culprit had vanished for ever.

And I didn’t see, frankly, how Johnson was going to get results during a golf-match with Sir Bartholomew safely under guard in his house.

Unless I was wrong, and not all of his suspects were going to take part in the golf-match? For example -

‘Good afternoon, all,’ said Sergeant Trotter, beaming across the bridge to the terrace. ‘I heard you were forgathered for a historic occasion. Any room for a little ‘un?’

My father’s face was a remarkable blend of unnatural courtesy strongly tinctured with blatant hostility. ‘Not as a candidate: no. no!’ went on Sergeant Trotter, with speed. ‘A great admirer and all that, but the rover type, I am. No. But a cracking good golf game, now: that I should like to see. If nobody has any objection?’

Wallace Brady, Krishtof Bey and my father were silent. Mr Tiko bowed. The Begum said, ‘Not at all: come along. Johnson and I are going to watch too. How shall we pair off the golf-carts? James, shall I drive for you?’

The carts were standing, two by two with their blue and white canopies, freshly out from the feeding-grounds. The Begum, peach-coloured tissue fluttering, took the leading one beside the white-hatted person of my father. Mr Tiko, bowing, led the way to the next and invited Sergeant Trotter to take the high wheel while he strapped on his golf-bag. Johnson, in a creased khaki bush shirt, said to Krishtof Bey, ‘Come on. They call me the Devil of Brooklyn,’ and they got into the third. I looked at Wallace Brady.

‘Well?’ he said. He was looking rather presentable, in a chalk-striped cream tunic and trousers, which set off his tan. He said. ‘Can you stand it? I feel it gives me an unfair advantage, to sit beside my incentive.’

‘I can stand it,’ I said. Conversation became suddenly full of unnatural pitfalls.

Brady strapped on his golf-bag and came to sit beside me on the white passenger seat. He said, ‘Edgecombe’s got you in a hole, hasn’t he? I guess since the whole story is going to be bust wide open this evening, this must be Sir Bartholomew’s last chance to pull off a capture. And I’d further guess this golf game is no accident. He thinks one of us is trying to kill him still, doesn’t he? Trotter, Krishtof or me?’