Max Collins - Carnal Hours

“Excuse me,” I said, “isn’t this Colonel Lindop’s office?”

“Not anymore, mon,” he said. “He been transfer.”

“What?”

The guy shrugged, and went back to finishing the final N.

I stopped by Captain Sears’ office, but he wasn’t in, either. I asked the captain’s male secretary about Lindop, and his answer was chilling.

“Colonel Lindop has been transferred to Trinidad,” the man said, a skinny white guy with a skinny black mustache and insolent eyes.

“Trinidad? When?”

“As of the first of this week.”

“Well…what in hell for?”

“For now and forever,” he said with quiet sarcasm, “as far as I know.”

Minutes later I was at the top of George Street, bolting up the long stone stairs, above which Government House sat like a big stale pink-and-white wedding cake; halfway up the stairs was a landing where the statue of Christopher Columbus, one hand on his sword, one hand on his hip, kept swishy watch. At the top of the stairs, across a cement drive, a black sentinel in white standing before the front door’s archway asked me my business. I said I had an appointment with the Colonial Secretary, and was allowed to pass.

When I opened the door with its elaborate E and royal crest inset in the heavy glass, I practically fell over a pile of suitcases, bags and trunks.

I heard footsteps echoing in the high-ceilinged foyer with its marbled wallpaper and pastel drapes (the Duchess’ touch, no doubt), and the man I’d lied about having an appointment with-Colonial Secretary Leslie Heape-was striding over to me, dragging one leg as he did. A First World War injury, I’d been told.

“How did you get past the sentry, Heller?” Heape demanded loudly, frowning.

“He asked me who Babe Ruth is,” I said, “and I knew.”

This humor was lost on Heape, a colorless career soldier in his mid-forties whose white uniform was far sharper than its wearer.

“If you still have the deluded notion that you’ll be granted an interview with His Royal Highness,” Heape said, “you’re wasting my time, and yours.”

“I’ll talk to you, then. What the hell happened to Colonel Lindop?”

“Nothing happened to Colonel Lindop. He’s had a request in for a transfer for some time; the Governor put it through.”

“But he’ll be back for the de Marigny trial, surely.”

“I sincerely doubt it-what with wartime transport difficulties, and the extent of Erskine Lindop’s new duties as Commissioner of Police in Trinidad.”

I sneered. “That’s convenient-right before the trial opens, a key defense witness is suddenly transferred off the island onto the moon.”

Heape’s jaw was as stiff as his leg. “Colonel Lindop was a prosecution witness, and my understanding is that he’s given a signed deposition detailing his knowledge of the case. His replacement, Major Pemberton, will be available for testimony.”

I didn’t know Pemberton, whose name I’d just seen wetly on Lindop’s door; if he’d been in on the investigation, it could only have been on the fringes.

“Who’s leaving?” I asked, jerking a thumb toward the pile of luggage.

He smiled faintly. “Other than yourself? His Royal Highness and Her Grace.”

“What? Don’t tell me they’ve been transferred to Trinidad!”

“It’s their American tour.”

Then I remembered the Duchess making a seemingly offhand comment at the dance at Shangri La: New York will be a relief… .

Feeling a little dazed, I said, “So, then, His Royal Highness won’t be around for the de Marigny dog-and-pony show?”

“No,” Heape said. “Why should he be?”

And he escorted me to the door.

Under a nighttime sky that seemed a deeper blue than usual, with few stars and no moon, on an otherwise lonely stretch of beach, around a sparking, crackling bonfire glowing orange and yellow and red, swayed forty or fifty natives, arms and legs pumping as they danced around the blazing driftwood, to the beat of crude congalike drums and plaintive tuneless tunes blown on twisted conch-shell horns. Though the women wore white sarongs and white bandannas, and the men wore colorless tattered shirts and trousers, the reflected shades of flame mingling with the shadows of night made of them a living, colorful design.

From a respectful distance on the sidelines, where the coconut palms began, Lady Diane Medcalf and I watched. Like the native women, she wore white-a man’s shirt and ladies’ trousers; I was in white too, a linen suit under which the bulge of my nine-millimeter Browning was both uncomfortable and obvious.

This excursion to one of the out islands, Eleuthera-where at night, white men were seldom seen outside the large settlements-represented the first time I’d dug my automatic and shoulder harness out of my suitcase on either of my Bahamas trips. Maybe it meant I was a coward, or a bigot, or maybe a bigoted coward.

But whatever I was, I preferred to be a live one.

After all, some of the black men dancing around that bonfire were cutting the air with machetes about four feet long. They would dance close to the fire and seize driftwood branches from its edge and then hold them in closer, getting them burning good, after which, bearing them as torches, trouser legs rolled up, the men waded into the shallow water.

And then their machetes began to slice the air, and more significantly, slice the sea. It was as if the machete-wielding men were attacking the water itself.

“What the hell are they up to?” I asked, working my voice up and over the pounding native drums. “What the hell sort of voodoo ritual is this?”

Di’s brittle British laughter found its way over the “music.” “It’s not voodoo, Heller-not exactly. This is a fish chop.”

“Fish chop?”

“Those men aren’t trying to cut the water, they’re fishing.”

And I’ll be damned if they weren’t: now the men were reaching in the water and coming back with silvery objects that were then tossed up on the sand. Fish, attracted by the driftwood flares held over the water’s surface, were swimming up to the men and getting a slash from a machete for their trouble.

“Later the whole gang’ll eat their catch,” Di said.

But right now men and women alike were gyrating, twirling, leaping, in an abandoned frenzy, even as the slain silvery fish were tossed onto the beach by the flailing fishermen.

An old woman was wailing, “Come down, Mary! Come down!”

“They sure know how to have a good time,” I said.

“I wish the guests at my affairs would loosen up like that,” she said.

“I bet you do.”

We had come here by motor yacht, a gleaming white vessel called the Lady Diane, a gift to her from the absent but ubiquitous Wenner-Gren. While no Southern Cross, it had a large white cabin with a bar and modern white-leather furnishings. The three-hour journey from Hog Island had been painless-cocktails and conversation and cuddling-and her colored “boy” Daniel had tied us up at a ramshackle little dock by a native village near this beach.

We were supposed to meet someone named Edmund, but he-and everyone else, apparently-had gone to the fish chop. We had followed the drums here….

What brought us to this island was a story Di had told me several days ago, in my bed in the guest cottage at Shangri La.

“Have you given any thought,” she asked casually, sitting up nude to the waist with a silk sheet covering her lap and a gin and tonic in hand, “to the motive for Harry’s murder being those fucking gold coins of his?”

Now I sat up; I was also nude to the waist, but that was considerably lesser a deal. “What fucking gold coins?”