They swung on to the causeway and across the wide expanse of unrippled water that separates the twenty miles of narrow island from the broad peninsula sprawling with St Petersburg and its suburbs.
Already as they idled up Central Avenue on their way across the town to the Yacht Basin and the main harbour and the big hotels, Bond caught a whiff of the atmosphere that makes the town the ‘Old Folks Home’ of America. Everyone on the sidewalks had white hair, white or blue, and the famous Sidewalk Davenports that Solitaire had described were thick with oldsters sitting in rows like the starlings in Trafalgar Square.
Bond noted the small grudging mouths of the women, the sun gleaming on their pince-nez; the stringy, collapsed chests and arms of the men displayed to the sunshine in Truman shirts. The fluffy, sparse balls of hair on the women showing the pink scalp. The bony bald heads of the men. And, everywhere, a prattling camaraderie, a swapping of news and gossip, a making of folksy dates for the shuffleboard and the bridge-table, a handing round of letters from children and grandchildren, a tut-tutting about prices in the shops and the motels.
You didn’t have to be amongst them to hear it all. It was all in the nodding and twittering of the balls of blue fluff, the back-slapping and hawk-an-spitting of the little old baldheads.
‘It makes you want to climb right into the tomb and pull the lid down,’ said Leiter at Bond’s exclamations of horror. ‘You wait till we get out and walk. If they see your shadow coming up the sidewalk behind them they jump out of the way as if you were the Chief Cashier coming to look over their shoulders in the bank. It’s ghastly. Makes me think of the bank clerk who went home unexpectedly at midday and found the President of the bank sleeping with his wife. He went back and told his pals in the ledger department and said, “Gosh, fellers, he nearly caught me!”’
Bond laughed.
‘You can hear all the presentation gold watches ticking in their pockets,’ said Leiter. ‘Place is full of undertakers, and pawnshops stuffed with gold watches and masonic rings and bits of jet and lockets full of hair. Makes you shiver to think of it all. Wait till you go to “Aunt Milly’s Place” and see them all in droves mumbling over their corn-beef hash and cheeseburgers, trying to keep alive till ninety. It’ll frighten the life out of you. But they’re not all old down here. Take a look at that ad over there.’ He pointed towards a big hoarding on a deserted lot.
It was an advertisement for maternity clothes. ‘STUTZHEIMER & BLOCK,’ it said, ‘IT’S NEW! OUR ANTICIPATION DEPARTMENT, AND AFTER! CLOTHES FOR CHIPS (1-4) AND TWIGS (4-8).’
Bond groaned. ‘Let’s get away from here,’ he said. ‘This is really beyond the call of duty.’
They came down to the waterfront and turned right until they came to the seaplane base and the coastguard station. The streets were free of oldsters and here there was the normal life of a harbour – wharves, warehouses, a ship’s chandler, some up-turned boats, nets drying, the cry of seagulls, the rather fetid smell coming in off the bay. After the teeming boneyard of the town the sign over the garage: ‘Drive-ur-Self. Pat Grady. The Smiling Irishman. Used cars,’ was a cheerful reminder of a livelier, bustling world.
‘Better get out and walk,’ said Leiter. ‘The Robber’s place is in the next block.’
They left the car beside the harbour and sauntered along past a timber warehouse and some oil storage tanks. Then they turned left again towards the sea.
The side-road ended at a small weather-beaten wooden jetty that reached out twenty feet on barnacled piles into the bay. Right up against its open gate was a long low corrugated iron warehouse. Over its wide double doors was painted, black on white, ‘Ourobouros Inc. Live Worm and Bait Merchants. Coral, Shells, Tropical Fish. Wholesale only.’ In one of the double doors there was a smaller door with a gleaming Yale lock. On the door was a sign: ‘Private. Keep Out.’
Against this a man sat on a kitchen chair, its back tilted so that the door supported his weight. He was cleaning a rifle, a Remington 30 it looked like to Bond. He had a wooden toothpick sticking out of his mouth and a battered baseball cap on the back of his head. He was wearing a stained white singlet that revealed tufts of black hair under his arms, and slept-in white canvas trousers and rubber-soled sneakers. He was around forty and his face was as knotted and seamed as the mooring posts on the jetty. It was a thin, hatchet face, and the lips were thin too, and bloodless. His complexion was the colour of tobacco dust, a sort of yellowy-beige. He looked cruel and cold, like the bad man in a film about poker-players and gold mines.
Bond and Leiter walked past him and on to the pier. He didn’t look up from his rifle as they went past but Bond sensed that his eyes were following them.
‘If that isn’t The Robber,’ said Leiter, ‘it’s a blood relation.’
A pelican, grey with a pale yellow head, was hunched on one of the mooring posts at the end of the jetty. He let them get very close, then reluctantly gave a few heavy beats of his wings and planed down towards the water. The two men stood and watched him flying slowly along just above the surface of the harbour. Suddenly he crashed clumsily down, his long bill snaking out and down in front of him. It came up clutching a small fish which he moodily swallowed. Then the heavy bird got up again and went on fishing, flying mostly into the sun so that its big shadow would give no warning. When Bond and Leiter turned to walk back down the jetty it gave up fishing and glided back to its post. It settled with a clatter of wings and resumed its thoughtful consideration of the late afternoon.
The man was still bent over his gun, wiping the mechanism with an oily rag.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Leiter. ‘You the manager of this wharf?’
‘Yep,’ said the man without looking up.
‘Wondered if there was any chance of mooring my boat here. Basin’s pretty crowded.’
‘Nope.’
Leiter took out his notecase. ‘Would twenty talk?’
‘Nope.’ The man gave a rattling hawk in his throat and spat directly between Bond and Leiter.
‘Hey,’ said Leiter. ‘You want to watch your manners.’
The man deliberated. He looked up at Leiter. He had small, close-set eyes as cruel as a painless dentist’s.
‘What’s a name of your boat?’
‘The Sybil,’ said Leiter.
‘Ain’t no sich boat in the Basin,’ said the man. He clicked the breech shut on his rifle. It lay casually on his lap pointing down the approach to the warehouse, away from the sea.
‘You’re blind,’ said Leiter. ‘Been there a week. Sixty-foot twin-screw Diesel. White with a green awning. Rigged for fishing.’
The rifle started to move lazily in a low arc. The man’s left hand was at the trigger, his right just in front of the trigger-guard, pivoting the gun.
They stood still.
The man sat lazily looking down at the breech, his chair still tilted against the small door with the yellow Yale lock.
The gun slowly traversed Leiter’s stomach, then Bond’s. The two men stood like statues, not risking a move of the hand. The gun stopped pivoting. It was pointing down the wharf. The Robber looked briefly up, narrowed his eyes and pulled the trigger. The pelican gave a faint squawk and they heard its heavy body crash into the water. The echo of the shot boomed across the harbour.
‘What the hell d’you do that for?’ asked Bond furiously.
‘Practice,’ said the man, pumping another bullet into the breech.