The Tropical Issue (7 page)

Natalie’s villa had a swimming pool, Kim-Jim had said. He never had much time to swim, but I wasn’t to let her work me so hard. I would be there as her beautician, and anything else I did was up to me. The most I might have to do was book the odd plane or hotel, or phone up people with messages. There were English girls Mrs Sheridan could hire for dictating. Everyone else spoke Portuguese.

Phone up people with messages.

I was glad that Natalie had had no more chats with Johnson Johnson before she left London.

Ferdy, who was busy on the artwork for a big, glossy book on Sexual Strategy in Flowers, to be printed in Luxembourg, reported that Johnson was apparently still making great strides considering, and had mentioned something about a bill for phone calls to Troon and Glasgow and Lisbon, as well as blue and magenta stains in the bathroom.

I thought of the blond boyfriend, and the security men, and all those bloody phone calls and the perfectly good quiche I’d made him, and told Ferdy that if his pal Johnson was fussed over anything, he could get Lady Emerson to pay for it.

Once, on my way past from Claridge’s, I’d seen a po-faced woman out walking Bessie past the flats, and another time, Bessie with Mrs Margate. Then, just before I went north, I saw Mrs Margate ouside a coffee-bean shop by herself.

I didn’t ask Ferdy, but it looked to me as if the capable woman had soon got her books.

And maybe even that old Bessie had got hers as well, if the Owner had crawled from his expensive new sickbed and coped with something apart from mail orders.

Male orders?

It was, luckily, none of my business. I was going to a new job, a rather special new job, in Madeira.

Abroad, it turned out, was very like Troon on an English Bank Holiday. Waiting early that evening to be met at the airport, I couldn’t understand what anyone said, even when they were speaking English.

I expected Mrs Sheridan’s car, but she had sent a hired driver who stood about, with a peaked cap and dark glasses and a big placard saying SRA RITA DA GODES.

It was some time before we found one another, even after the Arrival Hall was quite empty.

To get to Mrs Sheridan’s villa, I’d been told, you have to go from the airport through Funchal, the main town of Madeira. You begin by driving along the coast.

It was warm.

I expected that. The B.B.C. had filmed a programme about it,
Volcanic Islands of the Atlantic
, and a pal had taped it.
Madeira the Floating Garden; the Island of Gentle Summers and Mild Winters.

Before my dark glasses got too dark to bother looking through, I noticed a lot of blue water and red roofs and purple creeper, and a harbour with the sun about to fall into the water.

Then the Mercedes turned uphill to cut out the town, and ran into a lot of rutted roads with no walls and steep paths going up to farm cabins, and finally into a side lane that seemed to lead nowhere.

There were a few trees and a lot of dry earth about, but no sign of any houses at all, never mind a posh villa with swimming pool. It wasn’t the sort of countryside you would find Natalie Sheridan in, unless she was making a documentary.

The sun went down, and I couldn’t see much of anything any more. The driver was nothing but a dim shape in front of me.

I gazed at it, waiting for him to slide back the partition and grovel. I wasn’t going to be ratty with him. Anyone can get lost.

Instead, he got out of his door and jerked open mine.

I think I still expected him to start making excuses. I took off my dark glasses so that I could see him better, or as well as I could see anything under the brim of this Humphrey Bogart fedora I was wearing.

I couldn’t see him better because, under his hat, he had a stocking on.

I could see he was tall. I could see his uniform jacket was too small for him. There were four inches of shirt cuff and skin between his fists and his sleeves.

I said, ‘You’re not the man with the placard!’

I wasn’t too put out yet, because the cuffs had cufflinks in them. The worst I was expecting was rape.

‘Senhora Rita da Godes?’
he said. ‘You couldn’t even read it, you illiterate bitch. You should be deported.’

In English. In educated, foul-tempered English with loathing in every vowel.

A nutter. I won’t say I’m used to it, but if you’re not in a home for the aged you meet them.

The rule is get out of it, fast. He was leaning in on one side, and the door handle was not too far away on the other.

I sent one hand along quietly, exploring for it. I may have hockey legs, but they’re O.K. for running on.

I said, ‘Great. Let’s call the police. They’ll deport me.’ My fingers were two inches from the door handle.

He wasn’t the kind to be humoured. He said, ‘Stop bleating, my beauty, and listen.’

I was listening. The door handle was just an inch off.

I lunged for it and he lunged for me in the same moment.

He won. My hat fell off. Suddenly the car was full of him. His weight rammed me down, and his hand shoved my head back on the car ledge.

He was breathing hard. I expected rum or whisky, but his breath smelled of bacon and egg. Also something else. I couldn’t quite place it.

‘Scum!’ he said. ‘You and your partner!’

You get a lot of this in Scotland, if you have coloured hair.

I didn’t know what he meant by my partner, unless he was thinking of Satan, which was quite likely. Religious cranks, having sex on the brain, can be the nastiest in that line when they finally work themselves up and over the edge, which a lot of them do.

I said, ‘I got led astray by older people. I’ll listen, if you want to talk to me.’

I can’t say I meant to listen long. He must have been watching my eyes. I only glanced at the door, but a second before I tried to heave myself over again, he changed his grip quickly. One of his hands collected my wrists. The other dived for the back of my collar.

Then it all got pretty lively. I hacked his shins, and tried to jerk my hands free.

He’d played that game before too. Before my heels half connected he had swung himself, saving his legs. And his gripping hand simply squeezed my wrists tighter, while the other closed on my collar and twisted it, until the cloth in front of my neck nearly throttled me.

‘Sit, you stupid punk,’ he said. ‘And listen to me. You came here to meet Mrs Sheridan. You are going to see her. You are going to tell her you can’t take the job. And you are going to get yourself out of the country. Back to the hole you crawled out of, you and your partner.’

Natalie. He was talking about Natalie Sheridan.

I stopped being limp. ‘Are you nuts or what? Mrs Sheridan asked me to come here!’

‘Because you arranged it,’ he said. ‘Because that trickster Curtis gave her your name and told her how good you were. The old, old con. First, Curtis dupes her, and then you climb in beside him.’

I stared at the blur of his face. I couldn’t believe it. My partner in crime wasn’t Satan. It was meant to be poor Kim-Jim Curtis.

I thought it was silly to ask, because nutters don’t need to be logical. But I couldn’t help saying, ‘Why?’

Thinking about it all had made him tremble. It wasn’t nice. He wasn’t listening, either. He said, ‘She’ll tell you to publish and be damned. She’s not worth as much as you think, you know. She’s willed a lot of money away. Even if Mr Kenneth James Curtis gets her to marry him, there isn’t a jackpot.’

It was so weird I almost forgot the shrieks of my wrist bones. ‘He doesn’t
want
to marry her!’ I said.

The jerk on my collar made me gag again. ‘You know his plans, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You’re a fine pair. You’re a fine pair of blackguards.’

I wheezed, but he didn’t shift his grip that time. I made a big effort, and tried to explain it.

I said, ‘Of course Kim-Jim suggested me. He knew she’d like my work, and I’d like a holiday. As for the bloody woman’s money, what’s that to you? I don’t want it.’

‘I’m sure,’ he said. He sat, holding me two-handed like Andy Pandy and I could feel the sneer from where I was sitting.

He said, ‘You don’t want the money? Then prove it. Prove it by going right back to London.’

I gagged again, but he paid no attention.

‘Why should I?’ I said. ‘Give up a good paid job and a holiday because you’re Perry Como? And,’ said I rashly, because I was sore and angry and getting, by now, extremely annoyed with Abroad, ‘who are you anyway? One of Mrs Sheridan’s discards?’

I had planned, as the next move in the war, to crack my head in his face. He didn’t give me the chance.

I no sooner got those words out than he socked me.

He used the hand from my collar, which half freed me. I rocked with the blow, as he had done. I did one better and half twisting round, fetched my hands, still in his grip, gouging into his face as he lunged over.

I wear a lot of rings when I travel. Big ones. A lump of grey quartz from Fior dragged across his stockinged cheek like a hay fork.

He exclaimed, and smashed my wrists down. The blow, as every bang does, untucked the wide band of my executive watch. It slid down, taking his fingers with it. I ripped my hand away and aimed with finger and thumb for his nose. My other hand was still free. I nipped the hatpin from my lapel and speared his fist with it.

He couldn’t yell while I was twisting his nose, but he still had two limbs left, and a lot of superior weight, and he used it all. As the blows fell on my poor fatigued cotton top and what was under it, I hurled myself yet again at the bloody door handle.

It worked, in a way.

The door handle gave, and I tumbled head first on the ground, followed by my English fruitcake.

That guy was trained. He took my legs in hard scissors hold, and got my hands in the same one-handed grip as before, except that we were both lying on the ground to one side of the car instead of inside it.

I yelled, and went on yelling, but not for long. The bastard took off his peaked cap and slammed it over my face, holding it with the flat of his hand so that I could hardly breathe, never mind yell.

I thrashed my head from one side to the other as best I could, but he only leaned harder. He said, ‘This way, you get hurt. If you don’t leave Madeira, you get hurt a lot more. When are you leaving Madeira?’

‘Tomorrow,’ I said. Naturally. I put on an agreeing face under the hat and hoped like anything.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You leave Madeira tomorrow, and you don’t ever come back. You understand?’ He lifted the hat a bit, and I breathed.

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Or I get socked.’

Unwise. ‘Or you have an accident,’ my chauffeur said. ‘A fatal accident. As Kim-Jim Curtis will have, if he ever comes back. Tell him, will you?’

‘I’ll tell him,’ I said.

We lay, breathing at one another. I was waiting for something funny, but nothing happened. It occurred to me that, if I hadn’t resisted, we might just have had an exchange of snash in the back seat instead of a struggle.

Or maybe not.

He said, ‘Tell Curtis that if he comes back, I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him. Nothing surer.’

I thought of explaining that Kim-Jim might be fading out of Mrs Sheridan’s life, although Mrs Sheridan didn’t know it; and then thought why bother. I thought of explaining that Kim-Jim didn’t need anyone’s money and neither, come to that, did I, much. He could phone my stockbrokers.

I thought that anyone who had done what this guy had just done wasn’t worth wasting words on. All I had to do was keep agreeing, and then ring up his keepers.

Except that I didn’t know who he was.

He was lifting the cap on my face, slowly, as if he hoped to read my expression in the darkness. As he lifted it, I saw it wasn’t entirely dark. The car door still hung ajar where I’d left it, and a ray of light from inside was shining on him.

Shining on his arm with the shirt riding up, because the cufflink had snapped in the struggle. Shining on the skin of the arm, and on a couple of long purple scars that explained, in a way, all this rubbish.

Panic in Needle Park. The tracks of a drugtaker. And the smell of a drug, now I remembered it.

Heroin. You don’t live where I live without coming across it some time. Or without knowing what it does to people.

I did a silly thing and started to struggle properly. I flung my weight about as best I could, but he was a strong man.

When his grip on my hands suddenly vanished, I hardly noticed, I was so short of air, and the pain in my wrists was so hellish.

I don’t remember anything more, because that time, I didn’t see my gent draw back his fist. I didn’t see anything. I just felt the thud on my jaw, and on the back of my head. And from then on, I had no more problems.

I woke in bed later that evening in Mrs Sheridan’s house, with Natalie Sheridan herself leaning over me. I was aching all over.

I knew it was Villa Sheridan, because the bed was in a smart single room, equipped from a powerful income. Also, my things had been unpacked and stood about everywhere. Including my special cat with the smile, my video tapes and my recorder. Bloody Dodo.

I knew it was evening, because Mrs Sheridan wore crimson silk, jet earrings and Arpege, for a change, and had a small drink in her hand, which she put down as my eyes came to rest.

She said, ‘What a welcome to Madeira. Poor Rita. What on earth did they do to you?’

Her natural voice, I guessed, was clear and metallic. Ten years of hard work had brought it down to clear, warm and husky. Now it was sympathetic but bracing: buck up, Rita.

I lay still while I sorted her manner out. She had her hair done in a softer style than before, buckled at the nape of her neck and falling in a yellow silk tail. Her make-up was light as well, and kind of rosy. Motherly.

Her eyes were the eyes of a horse trainer who has just bought a horse.

I said, ‘Nothing permanent. I got bumped about by someone who thought Kim-Jim and I were after your money. I had to promise to leave Madeira tomorrow. And that Kim-Jim would never come back. Can I have a drink, please?’