“Day after tomorrow, if it’s convenient. You’d fly to Miami in the morning. The following morning, you’d be in the Bahamas. It’s beautiful there, Nathan, truly it is.”
What sounded beautiful was that G-note guarantee.
And my agency could sure as hell use a handsome yearly retainer from a major corporation like Oakes’ Lake Shore Mines of Canada. Maybe I could even open up a Canadian branch of the A-1….
“You’ll do it, then?”
I frowned at him and shook my finger in his face. “Mr. Foskett, Sir Harry Oakes may be the richest man in the world, but somebody’s got to teach him that money can’t buy you everything.”
His face fell.
Then I grinned and patted his tan cheek like a baby. “But, Walt-that somebody isn’t going to be me. I can use a thousand bucks.”
2
I barely had a foot on the spongy wooden surface of the landing wharf before I slipped out of my suitcoat; I’d worn lightweight clothing, including a seersucker suit and short-sleeved white shirt, but they couldn’t stand up to one minute of muggy Nassau. It was probably only about eighty degrees-child’s play for a Chicagoan who could stand up under the coldest and hottest weather the planet had to offer-but that didn’t stop my shirt from going immediately sopping.
A houseboat-like affair at the tip of the dock next to the bobbing seaplane was where we waited momentarily for our baggage-mine was a single canvas duffel-and at the end of the short pier in a one-story modern shed was a Pan Am passenger station where a polite, casual Negro in a white shirt as dry as mine wasn’t and the crown-crested blue cap of a royal immigration officer asked me a perfunctory question or two and waved me on.
No passports were needed here, I’d been told; and no currency exchange was necessary-though a British colony, New Providence would be glad to take my American money.
Back out in the humid air, I drank in the languid, off-season, wartime ambience of a wharf that no doubt often bustled, but not now. The handful of American tourists who’d made the Miami flight with me-with European travel a memory, the rich had to go somewhere in the summer, even if it was the tropics-were shanghaied by a barefoot black troubadour bearing a weather-beaten banjo. In tattered shirt and trousers and a wide straw hat and just as wide a smile, he accompanied himself, plinking, plunking on the banjo, beating out rhythm with his knuckles on the instrument’s face as he sang in a jaunty baritone, “Wish I had a needle, so fast I can sew, I sew my baby to my side and down the road we go…”
The tourists stood with their bags in hands, with expressions ranging from delight to annoyance, and when the troubadour tipped his hat and then turned it upside down, they pitched some coins in. I wasn’t part of his audience, but wandered over and flipped in a dime myself.
“Thank you, mon,” he said.
“Always this sticky in July?”
“Always, mon. Even de trees sweat.”
And he was off to find new pigeons.
Warehouses and other stone structures-this one labeled Government Ice House, that one labeled Sponge Exchange, another Vendue House, whatever that was-fronted the water’s edge. People were on the move, only not too fast. Most of the faces here were dark, with women in sarong-like garments but longer than Dorothy Lamour’s, and many of the men were bare-chested, ripplingly muscled, perspiration-oiled; both genders often carried baskets and other objects on their heads (despite frequent elaborate straw hats), perfectly balanced, making a way of life out of a childhood expression: Look, Ma, no hands.
As I strolled away from the wharf, duffel bag in hand (not on my head), I glanced back at the harbor, its choppy blueness irresistible to the eye. A strip of land at the immediate horizon (inelegantly named Hog Island, I later learned) defined the harbor; a lighthouse on the tip of the island made a white silhouette against the sky.
A few small sleek white yachts were searching in vain for the fabled Bahamian breezes, while two native schooners were gliding in, as if engaged in a lazy race. Unlike the rich man’s pleasure craft, these had a rough-hewn look, were sorely in need of paint and bore sails of patchwork rags. I thought they were fishing ships, but on closer look I could spot bins laden with brainlike objects that my brain finally discerned as sponges. So they were fishing ships, in a way, though I didn’t relish a fillet of one of their catches.
Another vessel, laden with baskets of fresh vegetables and fruit, drifted by with a colored contingent of young and old, from a granny sitting in a rocking chair to a giggling teenage girl whose nut-brown bare-chested beau was singing her a calypso chantey amidst goats, chickens, sheep and a cow, together on a sloop perhaps twenty-five feet long.
Anchored along the wharf, looking rather lonely, was a ferrystyle sight-seeing craft near a sign that said, glass bottom boat-sea gardens ferry-paradise beach. Perhaps fifteen passengers-including some attractive young women, who looked to be either British or American, with some off-duty RAF and Army boys mixed in-sat around the glass well of the boat, looking impatient, while the portly white white-haired “captain,” dressed in blazer and cap like a roadshow Captain Andy from Show Boat, paced the dock, casting about for more riders.
“You, there, lad!” he called to me.
I waved negatively at him and was about to turn to my left when a voice-a musical, female voice-came from my right.
“That poor man…such slim pickin’s these days.”
I turned quickly toward the voice, with high hopes for who it belonged to.
I wasn’t disappointed.
“You know,” she continued liltingly, transforming certain t’s into soft d’s, “there is usually a fleet of those ferries here, even this time of year. And those boats, they keep busy, too.”
She was a beautiful milk-chocolate girl in a floppy wide-brimmed straw hat with a red and blue and yellow floral band; her linen dress was robin’s-egg blue and buttoned down the front and made no effort to hide or for that matter enhance a slender, high-breasted figure that could speak for itself. She had the full sensual lips of some dark ancestor, and the small well-formed nose of some lighter one, and large, lovely, elaborately lashed mahogany eyes that were all her own. She was probably about twenty-five years old.
A woman this beautiful can take your breath away. Mine, anyway. I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out.
“But you really should see the sea garden while you’re stayin’ in Nassau, Mr. Heller,” she said, as if our conversation was bouncing right along. “That’s what the glass bottom is for….”
“Excuse me,” I said, swallowing. “You have me at a disadvantage….”
She laughed and her laugh was even more musical than her voice, which seemed to put weight on words and syllables in a sweetly random, intrinsically Caribbean fashion.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Heller. Your photo, it was sent ahead to us.”
She extended a slender hand; pink-and-red-and-white-beaded wooden jewelry dangled from her wrist, making more music. “Marjorie Bristol.”
I shook her hand, and her grip was strong, but the flesh was smooth and soft.
My tongue was thick as one of the sponges on those ragtag schooners. “Uh, I take it you must represent Mr. Oakes, Miss Bristol.”
“I do,” she said, repeating the dazzling smile, “but he prefer Sir Harry-an interestin’ combination of the grandiose and commonplace, don’t you think?”
“I was just thinking that,” I said.
“Let me take your bag,” she said.
“Not on your life, lady!”
She looked at me, startled.
I smiled. “Sorry. That came out rude. It’s hot, it’s sticky, and I’m in a foreign land. Please lead the way-but I’ll carry my own bag.”
She smiled again, but in a no-nonsense manner. “Certainly.”