They passed between two gateposts that reminded him of Italian villas on Lake Como. Beside the gates stood a white bungalow with barred windows and security lights, and Jonathan took this to be a gatehouse of some kind, because the jeep slowed to a crawl as the gates appeared, and two black guards made a leisurely inspection of its occupants.
"This the one the Major say comin'?"
"What do you think he is?" Frisky asked. "A fucking Arab stallion?"
"Just askin', man. Ain't no cause for perturbation. What they do to his face, man?"
"Styled it," said Frisky.
From the gates to the main house was four minutes by Frisky's watch at around ten miles an hour for the speed bumps, and the Toyota seemed to move in a left-handed arc with sweet-smelling water to the left, so Jonathan reckoned a curved driveway about 1.5 kilometres long skirting the shore of a man-made lake or lagoon. As they drove he kept seeing distant lights between the trees and guessed a perimeter fence with halogen lamps, like Ireland. Once he heard the flutter of a horse's feet scampering beside them in the dark.
The Toyota rounded another turn, and he saw the floodlit façade of a Palladian palace, with a central cupola and a triangular pediment supported by four tall pillars. The cupola had round dormer windows like portholes lit from within, and a small tower that shone like a white shrine in the moonlight. On the top of the tower stood a weather vane, with two coursing dogs pursuing a spotlit gold arrow. The bill for the house is twelve million pounds and more to come, Burr had said. Contents insured for another seven, fire only. The Roper doesn't reckon on being robbed.
The palace stood on a grass mound that must have been shaped for it. There was a gravel sweep with a lily pond and a marble fountain, and a hooped marble stairway with a balustrade rising from the sweep to a high entrance with iron Ianterns. The lanterns were lit and the fountain was playing; the double doors were made of glass. Through them Jonathan glimpsed a manservant in a white tunic standing under a chandelier in the hall. The jeep kept going across the gravel, through a cobbled stableyard that smelled of warm horses, past a spinney of eucalyptus trees and a floodlit swimming pool with a kids' end with a slide, and two floodlit clay tennis courts, and a croquet lawn and a putting green, between a second pair of gateposts, less imposing but prettier than the first, to stop before a redwood door.
And there Jonathan had to close his eyes because his head was splitting and the pain in his groin was driving him nearly mad. Besides, it was time that he played dead again.
Crystal, he repeated to himself as they carried him up the teak staircase. Crystal. A Crystal as Big as the Ritz.
* * *
And now in his luxurious confinement the unsleeping part of Jonathan still toiled, noting and recording every symptom for posterity. He listened to the day-long flow of black men's voices from outside the shutters, and soon he had identified Gums, who was repairing the wooden jetty, and Earl, who was shaping boulders for a rockery and was an avid supporter of the St. Kitts football team, and Talbot, who was the boatmaster and sang calypso. He heard land vehicles, but their engines had no throat so he divined electric buggies. He heard the Beechcraft plough back and forth across the sky to no routine, and each time it passed he imagined Roper with his half-lens spectacles and Sotheby's catalogue riding home to his island, with Jed beside him reading magazines. He heard the distant whinnying of horses and the scrabbling of hooves in the stableyard. He heard the occasional roar of a guard dog and the yapping of much smaller dogs that could have been a pack of beagles. And he discovered by degrees that the emblem on his pyjama pocket was a crystal, which he supposed he might have guessed from the beginning.
He learned that his room, however elegant, was not excused the battle against tropical decay. As he began to use the bathroom he noticed how the towel rail, though polished daily by the maids, grew salt sweat spots overnight. And how the brackets holding the glass shelves oxidised, as did the rivets fastening the brackets to the tiled wall. There were hours when the air was so heavy it defied the punkah and hung on him like a wet shirt, draining him of will.
And he knew that the question mark was still hanging over him.
* * *
One evening Dr. Marti paid a visit to the island by air taxi. He asked Jonathan whether he spoke French, and Jonathan said yes. So while Marti explored Jonathan's head and his groin, and hit his knees and arms with a little rubber hammer, and peered into his eyes with an ophthalmoscope, Jonathan answered a string of not very casual questions about himself in French and knew he was being examined about other things than his health.
"But you speak French like a European, Monsieur Lamont!"
"It's how they taught it to us at school."
"In Europe?"
"Toronto."
"But which school was that? My God, they must have been geniuses!"
And more of the same.
Rest, Dr. Marti prescribed. Rest and wait. For what? Until you catch me out?
"Feeling a bit more like ourselves, are we, Thomas?" Tabby asked solicitously, from the seat beside the door.
"A bit."
"That's the way, then," said Tabby.
As Jonathan grew stronger, the guards grew more watchful.
* * *
But of the house where they were keeping him Jonathan learned nothing, stretch his senses as he might: no doorbells, telephones, fax machines, cooking smells, no scraps of conversation. He smelled honey-scented furniture polish, insecticide, fresh flowers, potpourri and, when the breeze was in the right direction, horses. He smelled frangipani and mown grass, and chlorine from the swimming pool.
Nevertheless, the orphan, soldier and hotelier was soon aware of something familiar to him from his homeless past: the rhythm of an efficient institution, even when the high command was not there to enforce it. The gardeners began work at seven-thirty, and Jonathan could have set his clock by them. The single chime of a tocsin sounded the eleven o'clock break, and for twenty minutes nothing stirred, not a mower or a cut-lash, as they dozed. At one o'clock the tocsin sounded twice, and if Jonathan strained his ears he could hear the murmur of native chatter from the staff canteen.
A knock on his door. Frisky opened it and grinned. Corkoran's as degenerate as Caligula, Burr had warned, and as clever as a box of monkeys.
* * *
"Old love, " breathed a husky, upper-class English voice through the fumes of last night's alcohol and this morning's vile-smelling French cigarettes. "How are we today? Not stuck for variety, I must say, heart. We kick off Garibaldi scarlet, then we go blue-based baboon, and today we're a sort of livery, rather stale donkey-piss yellow. Dare one hope we're on the mend?"
The pockets of Major Corkoran's bush jacket were stuffed with pens and male junk. Huge sweat patches reached from his armpits across his gut.
"I'd like to go soon, actually," said Jonathan.
"Absolutely, heart, whenever you like. Talk to the Chief. Soon as they're back. Due season and all that. And we're eating all right and so forth, are we? Sleep the great healer. See you tomorrow. Chűss."
And when tomorrow came, there was Corkoran again peering down at him, puffing at his cigarette.
"Fuck off, will you please, Frisky, old love?"
"Will do, Major," said Frisky with a grin, and he obediently slipped from the room while Corkoran paddled through the gloom to the rocking chair, into which he lowered himself with a grateful grunt. Then for a while he drew on his cigarette without saying a thing.