The Tropical Issue (40 page)

‘But later?’ I said. ‘When do the winds die?’

‘They don’t,’ Amy said. ‘But we should be down to an effing gale, say, by sunset.’

She went on smoking, and looking at me.

‘You think it’s silly,’ I said.

She said, ‘Did I say so? You worried about that son-of-a-bitch Johnson? He’ll live. He’s too angry now to do anything else. Ask him about the gerbils. He’ll probably tell you.’

I lay back with my sneakers apart, in my borrowed pants and my borrowed shirt and my flattened orange wig with no make-up. ‘But you won’t tell me.’ I said. ‘You won’t tell me if they smelt drugs this morning on
Dolly
?’

Amy got up. ‘Cat,’ she said. ‘You’ll find out soon enough. Meanwhile, there’s work to be done. Let’s clear these dishes and see what Chloe has got to say.’

At four o’clock in the afternoon, the eye of Hurricane Chloe passed to the south of St Lucia. By then all communications except by ham radio on standby power had been knocked out, and Amy had been at the instrument for an hour, relaying messages, and talking to the meteorological office at Hewanorra.

During this time, and the hours that followed, three-quarters of the banana plantations were ruined, the roofs were peeled off the copra and sugar factories, churches and schools were reduced to their skeletons, and forests of palms were blown down.

Amy sat, and relayed messages.

She knew me. She didn’t ask me to relieve her. I brought her strong tea, and sandwiches and whisky, and when one by one Lenny and Raymond and finally Johnson came in quietly to stand and watch, I fed them too.

Old Joe, asleep on his pill, snored without waking. The last time I went to the kitchen, I heard Amy say, ‘She knows about the gerbils.’

In the office, Raymond had taken her place at the radio to let her relax with her drink. Johnson, carefully propped on the edge of the desk, was leafing through her notes of floods and road blockages. He put them down.

‘If they’re your gerbils, they’ve probably been moonlighting,’ he said.

He turned to me. He didn’t look like a write-off. He looked the way anyone might look who had broken a couple of ribs. Slightly cautious, wholly filled up with painkillers, and otherwise placid. Too placid, perhaps.

He said, ‘I don’t plan to be beaten up, but there may be some rough stuff this evening. You don’t need to get mixed in it.’

Men. ‘How do I keep out of it?’ I said.

‘No problem. Just stay here with Amy. Teach her tricks,’ Johnson said.

The shutters shook and shook, and the door rattled and rattled. It was five-thirty, and nearly official sunset.

Time for Chloe to wane. And the banging we could hear wasn’t all Chloe. It was caused by a pair of fists hammering on Amy’s front door. And added to that, you could now hear the sound of shouting, half carried away by the gale. The shouting of a strong, impatient voice. A woman’s voice.

The voice of Dodo of the Teeth, who stood on the threshold when we dragged the door shuddering open, bawling the same thing over and over, while behind her stood the malicious, grinning figure of Old Joe’s grandson Porter.

‘Where you-all bastards got her?’ Natalie’s companion was yelling. ‘Where you-all put my poor Miz Natalie?’

She caught sight of me.
‘You,
you no-good nothing! If you harm a hair of her head, I swear by my Daddy, I kill you!’

‘I didn’t think they still said that,’ Johnson said. ‘But Amy, do bring her in . . . Rita, I’m helluva sorry.’

I knew what he meant.

I was too late.

It had begun, and I was mixed up in it.

The news that Dodo slung at us all in such fury turned out to be true.

When, in the fading hours of the hurricane, she had gone to her mistress’s room in the Hurricane Hole Hotel, it was to find that Natalie Sheridan, syndicated political journalist, divorcee, economist, maker of sharp documentaries, and late employer of Rita Geddes, had totally vanished.

The idea that the quickest way to find Natalie was through the ham radio at the Faflick Pets Inc. near Soufriere was Dodo’s own.

It was sensible. She knew Old Joe Curtis was with Amy already. Porter had found an abandoned car, and against the hotel’s urgent advice, they had set off in the last of the light. It had not been an easy journey.

If she had found only Amy and Joe, Dodo would have downed a rum punch, confided all her troubles to Amy, and been content to have the terrible news transmitted, efficiently, to the right authorities.

Instead, she saw before her the four familiar faces of those in whom Miz Natalie had been so disappointed.

Including the undersized creature with the unfortunate hair whom Miz Natalie had befriended, and who had deceived her. Conspired against her. Prepared to blackmail her even, it had been said.

Being already the richer for one suspicious death in Madeira.

I saw it all on Dodo’s face even before she accused me of kidnapping Natalie, and even of luring old Mr Curtis into my lair.

She demanded to see them both. We had to wake up Old Joseph to convince her that we weren’t selling him for money or spotted lampshades. Then she demanded to be shown over the rest of the house, in case we were concealing Miz Natalie.

Porter lay back on the sofa, shut his brown eyes and giggled. He looked high on something. But perhaps it was just relief and amusement.

He was giggling at Dodo. He was giggling at the rest of us too, if you watched him. His grandfather knew it: threw him a look like a laser beam, and then went back to extracting our news of the hurricane.

What had happened to Natalie didn’t interest Old Joe. Except that it had struck him, if not Dodo, I thought, that Porter might have had something to do with it.

Amy, used to behavioural problems, had chosen to take the agitated Dodo firmly round the entire settlement, to see for herself that Miz Natalie was not on the premises.

I went along too, at Dodo’s request, and the dogs came without invitation.

Actually, I wanted to see Amy’s animals. So, it seemed, did Raymond and Johnson. When she opened the door off the scullery that led to the long, stone-flagged path of the zoo, the two men came through and walked along with us.

It made me uneasy. I thought, for a man who was supposed to be in the Victoria Hospital, Johnson had already been on his feet longer than he should, and that either Raymond or Lenny would have stopped him.

All they had done, so far as I could see, was supply him with one of Amy’s training sticks, which he was using to take some of his weight. And, I suspected, stuff him full of painkillers again.

For the rest, the zoo was a nice antidote to Dodo, in a way. One side was just wall, with sinks and hoses and bales of stuff and shelves of jugs and cartons and bottles.

The other side was wired and partitioned to hold all the various creatures the Faflicks were curing, or training, or breeding. In different cages, Amy had little monkeys, and opossum, and a pile of fers-de-lance, which is the poisonous snake of St Lucia.

And in a huge cage, three times the size of the others, were the green and blue St Lucian parrots, hopping, swinging, nudging each other; swivelled in sleep; or intent, stabbing and prodding, on their grooming routine.

They were big, argumentative parrots. The noise they made was like the noise of that skyful of birds, fleeing the hurricane.

Amy was used to the questions people asked.

‘They don’t talk,’ she said. ‘My talkers have private apartments. Now, you silly bitch, what’s the matter?’

Unshaken, Dodo followed Amy’s gaze to one of the dogs who, from prancing and sniffing and wagging her tail, had suddenly broken out into barking. The second one joined her.

‘Excuse me,’ said Amy. ‘Would you care to walk to the end on your own? I have to get back.’

She didn’t wait. She caught Johnson’s eye as she passed him, and ran. Raymond had already turned back and was sprinting along the zoo alley to the house proper.

Natalie’s maid said, ‘Is something wrong?’

‘A tree falling, perhaps. Rita will show you the rest,’ Johnson said. He didn’t run, but he turned and limped fairly grimly after Amy and Raymond.

Dodo looked after him, and then wheeled and gazed at the rest of the corridor, which ended in a blank wall. She said, ‘Is there another building through there?’

According to Amy, the hillside was dug out for half a mile with concrete storerooms and workshops, some interconnected and some not.

The zoo had no outlet. To get to the storehouses, you had to go out through the house and enter by separate doors from the yard.

Which was what the others had gone to do.

Whatever was going to happen, I wasn’t going to be left out of it. I didn’t excuse myself. I just left Dodo standing, and turned and ran back to the house.

At the connecting door, Johnson was waiting for me. ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘Was Old Joe in there with you?’

He hadn’t been.

‘Really?’ said Johnson. ‘Then he’s vanished as well. It’s like the Bermuda Triangle. You didn’t unlock the snakes?’

I hadn’t.

‘In that case,’ said Johnson, ‘let’s make sure, for God’s sake, that nothing happens to the divine Dodo, at least.’

Upon which he locked the connecting door to the zoo, and ignoring Dodo’s muffled cry, gripped his stick and led me out after the others into the darkness and the wind.

I had thought, and I supposed Amy had thought, that someone had designs on the Toyota. By the time we got outside she was standing, Raymond at her side, shining her torch on the double barred doors of the garage.

They were closed, which didn’t satisfy her. I was surprised. I was innocent. On Amy’s insistence, Raymond opened the garage and we all trailed inside, to make sure that nothing was missing.

The Toyota was safely there, and a truck, and a lot of equipment. Behind them all was a door, leading away from the house and the zoo. Talking and flashing her torch, Amy opened it.

Raymond stayed holding the doors, but Lenny followed Amy, and so did Johnson and I. Boughs and palm fronds and bits of bushes whirled through the big doors, and I wondered why Raymond wasn’t closing them.

Pitched to carry over the racket, Porter’s voice teased us from the door. ‘Busy, cats? You know you locked in one angry lady? I’ve just released her.’

With Amy, that put him into the opossum class. ‘Well, that’s great,’ she said. ‘Now you effing go back and stop her coming outside and forgetting she doesn’t know the first effing thing about hurricanes.’

Leaning on the door, his clothes trembling and flapping, Porter was enjoying the torchlight. He called, ‘I think the old bag is right. I think you’re all planning to run off with Natalie. I’m not moving my butt.’

‘Then bring it with you,’ said Johnson mildly. ‘We don’t know where Mrs Sheridan is, but we think someone’s breaking into a storehouse. There’s a string of them, so Mrs Faflick says. If we cut along here, we may surprise them.’

Porter grinned, his hair vibrating. ‘Sir,’ he said. ‘That’s a load of crap. The dogs would be barking.’

‘They stopped because they were told to,’ said Johnson. ‘The person holding your arm is Raymond. He thinks you should come along with us, too. Amy, wonder-woman, get the jeep out.’

She put the torch down and began to do what he asked. A scuffle began and ended in the doorway. Amy started the engine, checked that the doorway was clear, and began to back into the yard.

It was neat. If someone was breaking in further along, they might be reassured. And if they were watching, out there in the dark, they might not notice that some of us had slipped through this door at the back of the garage.

They might not know, with any luck, that such a door existed. Or that it led, as I saw, directly to the network of storehouses.

Johnson picked up Amy’s torch, and switched it on as the garage doors closed. Raymond shot the bolts with one hand. With the other, he was holding Porter. In Amy’s code, S.A.S. tiger-wise.

Porter’s face was white with fury. He was a tall, well-made boy. He had probably never been physically compelled to do something he didn’t want to do in his life.

‘Oh, dear,’ Johnson said. ‘Do run along if you’re worried. If we find Mrs Sheridan, we’ll send her back to the house with a message. Raymond, let him go at once.’

Raymond did, a bit slowly.

Porter said, ‘That was just as well. But I’m coming. I want to see what you’re up to.’

Lenny waited beside me at the door, as if he’d seen it all happen before. I wondered if he had. Amy hadn’t come back, but I thought I’d heard the house front door bang, and hoped she had safely stopped Dodo from interfering.

Raymond, like a good lieutenant, was watching Johnson, whose current style was a sort of slow attentiveness, as with an angler in a boat he wasn’t rowing.

Johnson said, ‘All right, Porter. After the next chamber, the rooms connect without any doors, so we have to put out the torch and be quiet. Can you, as Amy would say, shut your effing mouth for five minutes?’

Porter glared, but he came. Johnson and Amy. The gerbils were lucky. I wouldn’t want to be trained by Johnson.

Blundering along in the dark past the Faflicks’ junk, I tried to work out myself what he was up to.

The dogs had warned of a break-in. They were trained, and I believed them.

In such a storm, no one in his senses would break into a storehouse to steal anything. Even if you had somewhere to put it, the thing might be sucked out of your hands before you got there.

In such a storm, a guy in his senses might, however, break into a safe place to stow something. To hide it for a short time. To store a priceless, portable commodity such as the load of cocaine planted on
Dolly.

For that, the Faflicks’ place was ideal. Remote, with only Amy to reckon with. And possibly Joe, the rich old yob from the big yacht. Amy had told the world about Joe. But not about the presence of the rest of us.

The rest of us. Here and now, three men and Porter and me. With Johnson’s wiring and Porter’s ego as handicaps.

The bushes had not been full of Neurosis officials tipped off by Johnson.