‘Tiens, voilà le Mann! Bonjour, bonjour, mon ami,’ someone yelled from the bar, and O’Hara peered through the darkness to see Justice Jolicoeur approaching him.
Justice Jolicoeur stopped a few feet from O’Hara and posed for a moment, as though he were studying a painting.
‘Alors! he said. ‘You have not changed by so much as an eyelash. Obviously you weathered your exile well.’
He was a wiry little man, and every inch, every ounce, was pure dandy. He wore a white-linen three-piece suit, a thin fire-engine-red tie and a blood-red carnation in his lapel. His boots were of black English leather and his cane was polished enamel with a hand-carved golden swan’s head grip. His curly black hair was slicked back tight against his skull, and when he spoke, his polished and cultured patois was superbly refined Creole, although for effect he sometimes lapsed into French, which he spoke like a scholar. Jolicoeur was a Haitian who had left the country with the Tontons, Papa Doe’s vicious secret police, hard on his heels. What he had done to earn the wrath of the dictator was a mystery. Joli, as he liked to be called, never discussed the past. But it was rumoured that he had arrived in St. Lucifer with two hundred one-hundred-dollar gold sovereigns in his hollow cane, and immediately conned Gus Junior into a retainer as the hotel’s official ambassador of good will. It was worth it to Gus to have Joli around. He gave the place a touch of class.
‘Quite,’ said O’Hara. ‘And you, you’ve never looked more prosperous, Joli. Are you keeping busy?’
‘You would not believe it. Thanks to the new hotels I have hardly a moment to myself. Merci, merci, Messieurs Hilton, Sheraton and you, too, Master Host.’ He blew them a kiss. ‘We have had to add a third voodoo show each night, just to satisfy the tourist demand.’
‘Voodoo? There isn’t any voodoo on this island.’
‘There is now, Mann. So far I have imported eighteen families from Port-au-Prince. They make more in tips in one night than they did in a year in Haiti.’
‘I see you’re still working the rooster scam at the door.’
‘Oui. And did you see the fire eater? He adds flavor to the coq fights.’
‘That’s almost a bad pun, Joli.’
‘Monsieur?’
‘Forget it. You know, you really oughta get that one guy a new chicken. That one-legged rooster doesn’t even look good enough to eat.’
‘Hey, that’s one mean bird, Sailor. Think about it — would you not be mean if you were that ugly and had to hop around on one leg to keep from getting your brains pecked out? Certainement he is the world’s champion one-legged fighting coq.’
‘I must tell you, Joli, among the many resourceful people I’ve known in my life, you are the most resourceful of all. You are the king of all con men.’
Joli beamed. His brown eyes twinkled with gratitude. ‘Ah, O’ Hara, you are a true chevalier.’ And he bowed with a flourish.
‘Now, where’s le Sorcier?’ O’Hara demanded.
‘He is waiting for you. Venez avec moi.’
Jolicoeur led him back past the bar and down a short hail. He rapped ferociously on the door with the cane.
The muffled voice behind the door bellowed, ‘Jesus Christ, Jolicoeur, come in, don’t tear my goddamn door down.’
Joli stepped in first and, with a flourish, said, ‘I am pleased to announce the arrival of le Marin, the Sailor, returned from exile.’
‘Hot shit,’ Rothschild said.
And the man they called le Sorcier jumped up and wrapped his arms around O’Hara. ‘Joli,’ he said, ‘go to the bar and bring back the best bottle of Napoleon brandy we have and a couple of glasses.’
‘Do we say “Please”?’ Job said, offended.
‘S’il vous-fucking-plait,’ Rothschild said.
‘Just two glasses?’
‘Okay, Joli, three glasses.’
‘Tout de suite,’ the little man said arid rushed off.
‘Jeez, Sailor, you look better than the last time I saw you. It musta been good for you, bein’ on the dodge.’
Time and the islands had tempered his accent, but it was still definitely Lower East Side Manhattan. He was a slender man, about as tall as O’Hara, deeply tanned, with high cheekbones and a hard, definite jaw. He had the wondrous expression in his eyes and mouth of one constantly about to laugh, which indeed he was. It was the way he looked at life. Life to Rothschild was a joke waiting for the punch-line, and he gazed, through stoned eyes, at the world as a madhouse, filled with frantic, scrambling, driven inmates.
An unruly-looking joint was tucked, unlit and forgotten, in the corner of his mouth, and the sweet smell of marijuana hung lightly in the air.
‘How about a hit? This is home-grown shit from right up there behind us on the mountain.’
‘I’m on a tight timetable, Michael. I don’t have time right now to get whacked out on your smoke.’
‘Suit yourself, Sailor. Grab a seat.’
The Magician rummaged through his tattered white jeans and then the pockets of his faded blue work shirt, trying to find a light. He was wearing white gloves. Rothschild always wore white gloves. He was not embarrassed by the fact that he was missing the two small fingers on each hand — that’s not why he wore gloves. He wore them because people seemed less concerned with his deformity and more concerned with the quality of his piano playing when they could not see where the missing digits had been.
The room was a small office, miserably cluttered, with a roll-top desk, an ancient and decrepit desk chair with a peeling leather seat and two rusty bridge chairs for guests. Junk was jammed in every cubbyhole and opening in the desk. He finally found a book of matches among the debris and lit the roach. He took a deep drag and sighed with relief.
‘What are you doing in Gus’s office?’ O’Hara asked.
‘Well, it’s a long story. But to make it short, Gus Junior is dead.’
O’Hara was genuinely sorrowed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there goes one of the greats.’
‘A true believer,’ said Rothschild. What happened, the old boy went out fishing by himself one day, didn’t come back. We found him the next day, floating just off the South Spike. Heart attack, Musta been fighting a big one The pole was still in the cup and he had strapped himself in the fighting chair. Whatever it was, he killed himself trying to lard it. The fish was gone, hook was bent out straight.’
‘I can’t think of a better way for the old man to go,’ O’Hara said.
‘Anyway, the old bastard left me the place, all his money, everything! I couldn’t believe it, Sailor. I mean, he left it all to me!’
‘A helluva responsibility, pal.’
‘Yeah. I already got some heat about the air-conditioning. I tell everybody, hey, it’s in old Gus’s will. I can’t change a thing. It’s a sacred trust.’
Joli returned with the brandy arid poured three snifters almost to the brim.
‘Merci bien,’ O’Hara said.
‘Ce n ‘est rien,’ said the little man, and raising his glass, offered a toast: ‘A votre santé!
‘To payday!’ O’Hara echoed in English.
‘Goddamn, we gave old Gus a send-off would have made the czar happy,’ Rothschild said. ‘In his will he says he wants a Viking funeral, like in Beau Geste, remember, with Gary Cooper, when they burned the fort with Brian Donlevy at his feet?’
‘Before my time,’ O’Hara said.
‘Mine, too, but I’ve seen it a dozen times on TV. Anyway, that’s the way old Gus wanted to go, so I send Christophe downtown, grab one of these runty little dogs always yapping in the street, and I rent a half-dozen fishing boats and we fill ‘em with stock from the bar and we wrestled the piano on Duprey’s big charter boat and took everybody in the hotel out beyond the South Spike and we laid the dog at his feet and I burned that goddamn fishing boat. I mean Gus, the dog, the boat, every-fuckin’-thing. And I played the damn piano and everybody got drunker than Chinese-fuckin’-New Year. It was beautiful. I’m sure Gus was cryin’, wherever he was. Everybody else was.