It was tricky not getting made, but the Lincoln kicked up plenty of dust, so I could keep my distance and still keep track of where the Count had headed.
Then the dust cloud abated, and I knew I’d lost him: he’d turned off somewhere.
Looking frantically right and left, I didn’t feel panicked for long: there the Lincoln was, stopped in the crushed-rock driveway of a run-down-looking white farmhouse. It might have been an American farmhouse but for its louvered shutters, and limestone construction that dated back a century or two.
I drove on past, perhaps a quarter of a mile, and found a place alongside the road where I could pull off. Then I left my suitcoat behind but brought along my camera, and walked alongside the road, where the brush was taller than I was, and edged up near the farm.
Back home there would probably have been a fence to climb or at least step over; here all I had to do was push gently, quietly, sneakily through the tropical brush, like a Jap sniper looking for a target. I didn’t have a rifle, of course, just my lethal little Argus, ready to snap an incriminating photo or two….
But de Marigny’s afternoon rendezvous was not with the wife of some wealthy crony of Christie’s, or some dusky native gal; rather, with half a dozen colored workers in well-worn straw hats and loose, sweat-soaked clothing. De Marigny’s sweater was no longer tied around his neck-it was gone, in fact-and his polo shirt was sweat-stained and sooty, clinging to a lanky but impressive musculature.
In the yard, alongside the farmhouse, two workers were adding more driftwood to a roaring fire beneath an old, cut-down oil drum that bubbled like a witch’s caldron. De Marigny’s men were on their haunches, dunking apparently freshly killed chickens-the absence of heads and bloody necks were the tip-off to this trained detective-into what I figured was scalding water.
And de Marigny was getting right in there with them, squatting down and dipping the chicken corpses by their feet into the boiling water. In fact, he seemed to be showing them how it was done, plucking the feathers from the softened flesh of the dunked birds. The ground nearby had a snowfall of feathers and down.
The flames were high, and the smoke was thick-even from my vantage point in the brush, my eyes were stinging.
De Marigny worked hard, maintaining a lighthearted attitude throughout, treating the Negroes like equals. One of them, a handsome, sharp-eyed youth of perhaps twenty-two, his clothes untattered, was clearly second in command. I heard de Marigny call him Curtis.
This went on for about an hour; I was squatting just like they were, only in the bushes, hoping New Providence didn’t have nasty lizards or poisonous snakes to give me a surprise. But there was only the humidity to make my life miserable, the faint whisper of a breeze ruffling the leaves. At least there were no bugs, like those damn sandflies on the beach….
Finally de Marigny disappeared inside and came back with his hair combed, the soot smudges washed off and his sweater over one arm. He collected Curtis, spoke for a moment to another of the workers, putting him in charge, and he and Curtis got in the Lincoln, both in the front seat but with the young Negro driving.
I quickly hightailed it back to my Buick, did a dandy little U-turn considering the space I had, and followed the Lincoln’s dust trail.
Glancing at Sir Harry’s list of de Marigny businesses-which included a beauty parlor, a grocery store and an apartment house-I didn’t see anything that sounded like a chicken farm. There was something vague, called De Marigny and Company, which had a Bay Street address.
If de Marigny was such a shiftless son of a bitch, as Oakes had painted him, how’d he assemble such an impressive array of business holdings? Of course, maybe it was his wife’s dough that got him set up in them all.
On the other hand, he’d been working his ass off plucking chickens, for Christ’s sake, shoulder to shoulder with his black workers. I had been in Nassau only since this morning, but I already could tell that was rare behavior.
The dust led back to the eastern road, where I caught sight of the Lincoln, turning west. My watch said half-past four, so de Marigny ought to be going home, and if my reading of the Nassau Street map was close to correct, that was the way we were headed.
It was. The Lincoln turned off on Victoria Avenue, and that jibed with the address I had on the Count. The sea at our backs, we were going up the hill now, moving along a quaint side street flung with palms where little pastel houses built on the incline had stone garden walls with bougainvillea and creepers trying to climb over them, even as flowering trees on the other side peeked over.
Soon the black touring car pulled into a driveway and drew around to the side of the house to the closed doors of a double garage. Curtis got out and so did de Marigny, not waiting for his driver to come around and open his door for him. What a guy.
De Marigny’s house reminded me of places I’d seen in Louisiana: a good-size, two-story, vine-crawling pink affair with green shutters and a screened-in veranda above and porch below, and exterior stairs along the driveway side of the house. Unlike many of the neighbors’, with their limestone walls, de Marigny’s garden, to the left of the house, was defined by high, manicured bushes.
I drove on by, found a place to turn around a couple blocks up the hill, and came back to park on the opposite side of the street, about half a block from the house. The street was so narrow you had to park on the lip of sidewalk.
De Marigny’s Lincoln rolled out less than half an hour later. I assumed he was in the car, and took leisurely pursuit. As I passed his house, I could spy, through the open windows, servants scurrying. One of them was Curtis.
We were back on Bay Street soon, and I was able to put several cars between the Lincoln and the Buick and still keep de Marigny in my sights. It was dusk now, and we both had our lights on. In the thick of the shopping district-it was after five, but shops were still open-he found a parking place. I glided by, found one myself, and was getting out of the Buick when I saw him-in a brown sport jacket, lighter brown pants, cream-color shirt with no tie, and tan-and-white shoes, no socks. Very spiffy. He strolled toward the Prince George Hotel, pausing to light a cigarette beneath the flutter of Allied flags that adorned the entry.
I noticed that the upstairs office over the storefront next door said H.G. Christie, Ltd., Real Estate, Since 1922. Small world. Anyway, small town….
De Marigny didn’t go inside the hotel, but walked under an archway between it and the adjacent building, to the Coconut Bar and its beach-umbrellaed tables scattered on the terrace to wharf’s edge, where small boats, sails furled, swayed uneasily in the restless sea. The ceiling of this bar was a broodingly overcast sky.
Few of the tables were taken, but the Count was immediately waved over by a plump, dark-haired guy of about thirty-five in a handsome pale green suit with wide lapels and a dark green striped tie.
“Freddie! I want you to meet the most gorgeous girls in Nassau!”
“Impossible,” de Marigny said, massaging each syllable in his Boyer way, “I know them all…oh! I see I was mistaken.”
He was: the women sitting with the glad-handing American were lovely young women in their twenties, a brunette with a sexy overbite and a lanky blonde with a nice wide smile. They wore summery dresses and sat with their legs attractively crossed, sipping tropical drinks out of fruit-bedecked coconut shells.
The American was making introductions as the Count joined them, but their voices were lowered to a normal range now and I couldn’t make anything out. I risked a table within earshot, ordered myself a Coke with lime and watched the lead-gray sea ripple while I eavesdropped.
“Freddie,” de Marigny said, putting the accent on the second syllable and revealing that his plump American friend shared first names with him, “I must insist you bring these charming girls along tonight. My guest list is shockingly scant.”