The Tropical Issue (10 page)

Then he turned his head, to check before crossing the road, and I saw that one side of his face was marked black and blue and red by a long, scraping graze. And that the hand holding his case had a bandage on it.

I took cover as soon as I glimpsed him, but even if I had been standing full in the sun, I doubt if he’d have seen me. He was making for a sports car parked nearby under the trees. He flung his briefcase in, opened the door, and in a moment was edging out into the traffic, going away from me. I was surprised the noise in my chest hadn’t stopped him.

The moment he was out of sight, I crossed the road and went into the hall of Coombe’s Bananas.

Behind the desk, the girl was on her feet, just going for lunch, and not too keen to be bothered with tourists in men’s hats who likely needed to be told the way to their consul, but quickly.

Before she could walk to the door, I said, ‘Excuse me. I have something to return to one of your company men. The one who’s just driven away. Do you expect him back soon?’

She spoke English, but not well enough to do two things at once. She stopped putting things in her bag, and looked at me.

‘No. He has gone to the airport. He will not be back. If it is for the company, I can take it.’ She looked at a clock on the wall.

I said, ‘No, it’s personal, sort of. Do you have an address for him?’

If I was going to handle it, she was happy to do anything that would get rid of me. She said, ‘He moves about; you will know. But I give you a card with the company offices.’ She opened a drawer, and spread out a handful of pasteboard.

‘And his full name,’ I said. ‘If you please.’

There was no reason why she couldn’t give me it, and she did. A company card, with two addresses in the Caribbean, one in Liverpool and one in Rio de Janeiro.

And the name of the well-dressed man who had just driven off to the airport. Who had a grazed cheek where I had hit my assailant, and a bandaged hand where I had stabbed him.

He was well-dressed because of his position.

And he hadn’t been lying when he claimed to know Natalie Sheridan.

The pasteboard I was reading told me that eventually, when I worked through the Portuguese writing.

The pasteboard which said, in full:

COOMBE INTERNATIONAL

Financial Director
Roger van Diemen

I suppose I thanked the reception girl. I remember she went out of the door ahead of me. I was still stuffing pasteboard into my bag, which was a sort of silver hoversock I was fond of, and thinking.

Of Mrs Sheridan, chiefly.

There were taxi ranks all up and down the Avenida, and I had just decided that I needed one when an estate car pulled over and a face I knew poked out of it.

Aurelio was quite cheerful. He called: ‘You O.K.? The hat is wonderful.’

I’d forgotten the hat. I suppose he recognised what I was wearing. The back of the car was full of odd veg. and spillings, but no shopping. I said, ‘Where are you going?’

‘To the airport,’ said Aurelio. People started hooting behind him, and he banged his horn a few times and bellowed a swearword before going right on talking.

He said, ‘Good news: a nice cable, after you left. Mr Curtis is arriving from Lisbon. You like me to pick you up on the way back?’

‘Mr Curtis is coming back to Madeira? Now?’ I said.

‘Sure,’ Aurelio said. ‘The plane’s running late, or there would be problems to meet it. The cable just came.’

I stood there in the din, breathing. Then I hauled at the handle. ‘Let me in. I’m coming with you.’

‘Sure,’ he said again. He wasn’t worried, even when my elbow changed the gear. ‘Take your time, Senhora Rita. No one comes quickly away when the Lisbon plane is late. The luggage. The crowds waiting to board.’

‘To board?’ I said.

‘To board the same plane, to fly back to Lisbon. It turns round. When late, very quick.’

Very quick was how he was driving now, in spite of what he was saying. Weaving through the traffic in the direction the sports car had taken.

Roger van Diemen’s sports car, taking to the airport Mrs Sheridan’s friend Roger van Diemen, who hated Kim-Jim and wanted to kill him. And who, without a doubt, was about to board the Lisbon plane Kim-Jim was about to get off.

There was no way they couldn’t meet. And there was no way that Roger van Diemen, seeing Kim-Jim arrive, was going to fly obediently out of the country and leave Natalie Sheridan and Kim-Jim together.

So a meeting between Kim-Jim and my banana nut case had to be prevented. And I knew who was going to help me.

I waited until we were on the northbound road out of Funchal. Then I spoke in a lovely clear voice to Aurelio.

‘If you see a green BRM on the road ahead of you, try and pass it. It’s got Mr Roger van Diemen inside, on his way to the airport.’

If I needed proof that Mrs Sheridan and her damned butler/chauffeur had been holding out on me, I got it then.

His hands went slack on the wheel, and a couple of bullocks drawing a tourist cart nearly became Funchal McDonald’s.

To do him justice, he didn’t say, ‘Who is Roger van Diemen?’ or ‘How do you know?’ or ‘What does that matter?’ He only said, hollowly after a space, ‘To meet Mr Curtis?’

‘To take a plane out himself. I don’t think he knows Mr Curtis is flying in. But of course he’ll see him, unless you and I stop him.’

There was another long silence, but the car had steadied. Aurelio said, ‘This morning, you did not know.’

‘This morning, I was a softie from Troon. Now I know better,’ I said. ‘He’s on mainline drugs. Why should Mrs Sheridan protect him? Because of what he could tell?’

‘Mrs Sheridan?’ Aurelio said. His tone said that he understood her, and I didn’t. ‘Nothing Mr van Diemen could say would harm Mrs Sheridan. Only, she wants to save him from himself.’

‘But not the folk he attacks,’ I said.

He glanced at me. He looked dead worried, and nervous with it. ‘But that was terrible,’ he said. ‘Mrs Sheridan could hardly believe it. But what to do? To tell you would not cure the harm. Only to get Mr van Diemen out of the country.’

‘So this flight away is her idea,’ I said. ‘Where is he going?’

He looked at the clock. ‘Now, you are right, there is no flight from the airport but this one back to Lisbon. Why there, I do not know. Business, maybe. From there, of course, anywhere.’

‘Barbados, St Lucia, Liverpool or Rio,’ I said. ‘Unless he’s left his job, too?’

I could feel him give in. If I knew all that, I knew everything. He said, ‘It is Mrs Sheridan to think of. You work for her too.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ I said. ‘I don’t say I don’t see life in my line, but junkie lovers is something else. I got beaten up.’

‘You got a thousand pounds,’ said Aurelio, scowling at me.

I looked at him. He wasn’t jealous. He just thought I was being unfair to Mrs Sheridan. It was clever of Mrs Sheridan to have told him what she paid me. She sure knew how to handle people. But of course, I had seen that already.

I said, ‘All right. Let’s save Mrs Sheridan some pain. How do we make sure Mr Roger van Diemen leaves the country?’

Buttling in the Algarve does nothing for the imagination, maybe because nothing is left to the imagination in the Algarve in the first place.

We arrived at the airport with nothing decided, and it was just as well, because between the scrum of people waiting to board the late plane and the scrum of people waiting to meet the late plane you couldn’t have picked out a winkle, never mind a tall, well-dressed Dutchman with a ring-scar all down his left cheek.

The Customs and baggage bit for incoming passengers was barred off. But anyone with their health and strength and sharp elbows could get into the lounge, which was full of families, businessmen and tourists hugging polythene coffins with orchids in them, and neat carrier bags with Madeira in them, and large broken parcels with Whicker in them.

The chairs were orange plastic, which reminded me. I took my hat off, and fifteen people either smiled, or turned their children away.

There was no point now in hiding myself. Fright and politeness between them had got Aurelio halfway through the crowd, but no further. He knew half the people there. A scene in Portuguese would have been beyond him, never mind in English.

If anyone was going to stop van Diemen and Kim-Jim meeting, it had to be me.

Being four feet eleven is a bugger. Someone half-rose from his chair to wave at someone. As soon as his bottom was clear, I slid his seat out and then stood on it.

The jolt as he sat down again, on the floor, fairly rocked me, but I managed to stand long enough to see round the place.

I didn’t much like what I saw. Through the glass windows all round the lounge there was a very good view of the control tower, and the airfield, and a TAP plane slowing down on it.

Also, there was a big outside balcony, to which welcome-parties bearing their welcomes were struggling, in order to look down at the welcomed and wave.

Among those making towards it, drink in hand, was this tall, well-dressed man with brown hair and a bruise on his suntan.

I got off the chair before I was pushed off, and fought towards him.

Four hundred Portuguese voices and several jet engines said that there was no way even my voice would carry. The Financial Director of Coombe’s Bananas crossed the balcony and paused to lift up his glass. I picked up a packet of peanuts and lobbed them into it.

Tennis is one of my games. The bag drop-landed fair and square in his drink and most of it went up his nose. There was a short spell of whooping and choking, during which someone banged him helpfully on the back and a woman, passing, tut-tutted about the streams on his trousers. Then he got his eyes clear, and his mouth open to threaten . . . and saw me.

Latins love drama. Behind me, the crowd had seen nothing. But as I battled the last two or three yards, the grinning crowd about van Diemen parted, and I found I had no trouble at all walking right through and staring up at him.

‘Remember me, Mr van Diemen?’ I said. I looked round at my audience and beyond them. The steps for the incoming TAP were in position.

When I looked back and up, I hit a violent glare. ‘I certainly do not,’ said Roger van Diemen. ‘But you may be sure from now on that you will be remembered. You threw that object just now?’

He still held his near-empty glass in one hand, its cuff dripping, and in the other, a soaked mopping-hankie. He sounded bloody annoyed, but not frightened.

I said, ‘You were lucky.’ The door to the aircraft had opened.

‘Lucky we didn’t have flying glass everywhere, I suppose,’ he said. ‘There are children about, you know. I don’t know what airports are coming to. Excuse me. I have to clean up.’

The tarmac began to look busy. An air hostess came out and stood to one side of the door, while another walked to the foot of the steps. A group of officials wandered out, followed by a fuel wagon and then by a luggage truck.

I stood plumb in front of the Flying Dutchman, and moved when he did. I said, ‘You were lucky I didn’t louse up the other cheek. What’s the sentence for rape in Madeira?’

People had begun to walk down the steps from the aircraft. Now he had his back squarely to the balcony and I could watch it round one of his shoulders.

He said, ‘Let me pass. I’ve never seen you before. What do you want? Money?’

The enjoyment round us went up a notch. Among the laughter and the exclamations, I risked another quick look behind him.

The last of a group of heads disappeared under the edge of the balcony, heading for the Arrivals area. Another bunch, in no hurry at all, were filing out and down the steps of the aircraft.

None of them was Kim-Jim.

Kim-Jim might be among the passengers that I’d missed. Or he might still have to disembark. I had to keep it up somehow.

Everyone wasn’t off the plane. The air hostess still stood on the top step, smirking at someone inside, and a small man in some sort of uniform walked to the foot of the stairs with a wheelchair.

There was some chat between him and the airline man, and then they both stood, looking up at the exit door.

I had looked too long, and too hard. Roger van Diemen was looking where I was looking. At the TAP plane from Lisbon on the tarmac, with every passenger out but for one.

I had nothing left to throw. I couldn’t get at his legs for a rugby tackle. If I dropped dead on the spot, Roger van Diemen was unlikely to remove his eyes from the plane, now he guessed why I’d held his attention.

Outside on the tarmac, there was an extra movement at the top of the gangway, and a steward began to come out, shaking hands with someone. And by the law of Rita’s filthy luck, it was bound to be Kim-Jim who would walk out on the steps, so that Van Damned Roger would see him, and cancel his flight, and stay on in Madeira and take Kim-Jim for a ride in a Mercedes as well, but this time a permanent one.

I was rescued by Ferdy.

Ferdy of all people, who had heard Kim-Jim was coming and rushed to the airport to meet him and was told by Aurelio where I was. Who waded through the entire crowd behind me and lifted me up by my Old English Patchwork so that I dropped my straw hat and every face in the lounge turned in my direction, including Roger’s.

I didn’t listen to what Ferdy was saying. I was shrieking into his ear.

‘Do something! That’s my nutter! The van Diemen guy! Throw me at him or something! Kim-Jim’s coming, and he mustn’t see him!’

Ferdy grinned into my face. My toes dangled just short of his kneecaps.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Natalie rang him and told him to get out. And don’t worry. Kim-Jim got smuggled off first. He’s waiting in the VIP lounge. Roger won’t see him.’

I could have killed Ferdy. For Mrs Sheridan’s sake, he had held out on me. He knew who my attacker was. He had lied. He was a bastard.

He had maybe saved Kim-Jim’s life.

I kissed him. I looked over his shoulder. The aircraft steps, I could see, were now empty.

Then Ferdy swung me right up, and I looked for Roger van Diemen.

He wasn’t there. A sort of swirl showed where he had been standing. I said, ‘The bastard has gone.’