Max Collins - Carnal Hours

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.”

She walked just ahead of me and her high, rounded rump moved impertinently under the blue linen dress, as if the globes of her backside were constantly trying to balance themselves and failing, nobly.

“I’m in charge of Sir Harry’s household staff,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind bein’ greeted by a female.”

“Hardly.” I was following along with my coat slung over my shoulder, shirt clinging as if I’d been swimming in it, lugging my bag. Her rear end might be impertinent, I reflected, but Marjorie Bristol herself seemed as polite and businesslike as she was charming.

“We have a surrey waitin’ in Rawson Square,” she said, tossing me a friendly glance.

Beyond the wharf, native women sold straw headgear and baskets, their own flamboyant woven hats their best advertising tool; others peddled sponges, shells and coconut candies. Miss Bristol walked me past a peaceful palm-and hibiscus-flung postage-stamp park where black little boys rode ancient cannons and black little girls sat primly on green benches before a band shell, possibly while their mothers sold straw goods nearby. A Negro policeman, hands behind him, chin high, stood motionless on a corner of Bay Street, in his white gold-spiked sun helmet, freshly laundered white jacket, red-striped dark blue trousers and black reflective boots. He might have been a statue.

“That’s Queen Victoria,” Miss Bristol said to me-I was in step with her now-and she was referring to a real statue, pointing to a sun-bleached constipated-looking little lady of marble with crown and scepter sitting on her throne atop a squat pillar with a bright bed of flowers at her feet.

I frowned a little, shook my head. “Funny place to bury her.”

Miss Bristol looked at me in sharp confusion, but it only lasted for an instant and was replaced by as quick a smile. “Aren’t you a nasty one,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

“I am,” I said cheerfully, “and it’s better you find out now.”

Behind the seated stone Queen was a cluster of pink colonial public buildings, three sides of a quadrangle surrounding the stern little monarch.

“That’s the Parliament Square,” she explained.

But we weren’t headed there. We had paused alongside the park, where a lineup of high-roofed horse-drawn carriages awaited passengers who probably weren’t coming today; the native drivers slumped in their seats, asleep under their tugged-down straw-hat brims, fanned by their horses who were lazily tail-swatting the air and flies.

One of the drivers was awake, however, a thin, very dark gent in loose white apparel with a brilliant red sash around his waist. He had a grooved, friendly face, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and was somewhere between forty and sixty. And his carriage seemed larger and fancier-with both a front seat and back, leather-covered, and red satin side curtains-than the other horsedrawn hacks around him.

“Ah, Miss Bristol. Your guest is here.”

He stepped off his perch and found a place at the back of, and under, the carriage to stow my canvas bag.

“Thank you,” I said.

He smiled, revealing a gold eyetooth. “My name is Samuel, sir. I work for Sir Harry. If you need anyt’ing, ask.”

“Thanks, Samuel,” I said, and held out my hand and he seemed pleased to shake it. Then I drew back the carriage’s red curtain and helped Miss Bristol into the backseat. It was the closest I’d gotten to her so far, and it damn near made me giddy.

I settled in beside her, put my suitcoat in my lap. “If you don’t mind my saying, you smell fresher than all the flowers in Nassau. Particularly since, the way this weather’s hit me, I sure don’t.”

She laughed a little, but took the compliment well. “My sin,” she said.

“Pardon?”

When she turned to me, the wide straw hat brim brushed my forehead. “It’s a perfume: My Sin. That’s one of the blessings of living here…bargain price on imported scent.”

Taking a right onto the left side of the road, British-style, the carriage clip-clopped onto Bay Street, which ran parallel to the oceanfront and appeared to be the town’s chief thoroughfare and shopping district. Along the tree-lined street, curio shops peddled more straw hats, shells (conch and turtle), and pickaninny dolls, out of old stone buildings with tiny storm-shuttered windows and overhanging tiled verandas that shaded shoppers. The frequent supporting pillars made me think of horse-hitching posts, which perhaps was how they were still used, from time to time. This Old West touch was offset by the modern, official-looking gilt lettering of registered companies whose offices lurked above the stores-accountants, lawyers, merchants, insurance and real-estate agents, import-export companies….

Miss Bristol seemed amused as I took this all in. “Everyone want an office on Bay Street, Mr. Heller. This is where the money in Nassau is.”

“Does Sir Harry have an office here?”

“No. I said money, not wealth.”

Pharmacy windows advertised the famous perfumes Miss Bristol had referred to; and our surrey rolled past dry-goods stores; liquor stores; saloons; the Prince George Hotel; the Savoy cinema; a produce market that bustled halfheartedly.

“Almost deserted today,” Miss Bristol said, the music of her voice mingling with that of the carriage’s ever jangling bell. “Many of the Bay Street Pirates are in the U.S. on vacation right now….”

“Bay Street Pirates?”

“That’s what the merchants and the other money men on this street they always been called. Or the Bay Street Boys, or Bay Street Barons.”

For being “almost deserted,” there sure was plenty of traffic on the wide white thoroughfare-an odd amalgam of surreys, American and British autos, bicycles, and the occasional horse-drawn cart piled with bales of sponges.

“Funny,” I said.

“Funny?”

“I heard of Bay Street back in Chicago.” Her talk of money and the Bay Street Pirates had made it dawn on me, finally.

Beneath the vast brim of the straw hat, huge brown eyes narrowed; lashes fluttered like hummingbirds. “Really, Mr. Heller? Why would you hear of our Bay Street back where you come from?”

“They used to call it ‘Booze Avenue,’ didn’t they?”

She laughed silently. “Why yes, they did. I didn’t know you were up on our local history, Mr. Heller.”

“I’m not. But I do recall that with Nassau so close to the U.S., and with liquor legal down here, rum-running was big business. Not a little of that liquor ended up in Chicago hands.”

“Many fortune was made,” she said mysteriously.

“But not Sir Harry’s.”

“Not Sir Harry’s. No need for rum money when you have all that gold.”

Still, I had another twinge: those fortunes that were made in Nassau, in Prohibition days, meant local links to the mob that were likely still intact. It was enough to make you wonder who was sitting behind the gilt-lettered windows over those curio shops. When they weren’t on vacation in the U.S., that is.

“That’s where you’ll be stayin’ tonight,” Miss Bristol said, pointing at a mammoth, sprawling, half-colonial, half-Moorish pink wedding cake of a building that seemed to signal the end of Bay Street. “Sir Harry own that.”