Max Collins - Carnal Hours

“How’s life at Shangri La?”

“Swell. I’m a Ronald Colman kind of guy, you know.”

“Where’s Di?”

“Oh, she had to fly to Mexico City for a few days, to confer with her boss.”

He was opening the door to his outer office for me when he narrowed his eyes and said, “If you don’t mind my asking…when did you start carrying that weapon around?”

“I thought this new suit Lunn made me disguised the fact.”

“It does, fairly well. You’re on shaky legal ground-would you like me to try to get you a temporary permit?”

We were walking through the outer office now.

“No thanks. I’ll just plead ignorance, which is something I’m used to. If we ask permission, they’ll only take it away from me.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Why am I heeled, as we say back in the States? I don’t know. With Lansky involved, with Barker and Melchen beating the shit out of witnesses, with voodoo and jealous husbands and burned-to-a-crisp millionaires, it just seemed…”

He opened the door. “Prudent?”

“Prudent,” I said.

We headed down the stairs to the street with Higgs in the lead.

“At least they’re not following you around anymore.” Higgs grinned. “With those practical jokes you played on them, and wild-goose chases you sent them on, I would imagine our local constabulary-and their Miami advisers-have learned their lesson.”

We stepped out onto Bay Street; the balmy Bahamas breeze felt good-not hot, not cold.

“I’m not so sure, Godfrey. The last couple days I’ve felt like they had a tail on me again.”

“Really?”

“Yeah-a couple times I’ve spotted a guy. Tall. White. He’s good-in a car, he turns off on a side street before he gets made; on foot, he disappears into the nearest store or restaurant, and doesn’t reemerge…but it’s the same damn guy every time.”

“Could be a reporter, you know. They’ve been streaming in of late.”

“I don’t think so. This one’s a cop of some kind.”

Higgs shook his head. “Well-with the trial coming up in a few days, it’ll be over soon. This harassment will end.”

Higgs nodded and headed toward where his car was parked, and I turned the other way; Dirty Dick’s was just two blocks down. I’d gone half that distance when I noticed him.

Not you again, I thought, catching his reflection in a shop window.

He was across Bay Street, keeping half a block behind me; tailing me from the opposite side of the street was a good touch, but with all but a few of the stores closed, and hardly anybody on the sidewalks, painfully obvious nonetheless.

For a tail, he just wasn’t anonymous enough: tall, lean, dapperly touristy in a powder-blue jacket, yellow shirt and tan pants; a long, cruel, handsome face interrupted by a nose that had been broken at least once, with high cheekbones and sunken cheeks; dark hair falling in a comma over his forehead; cigarette dangling from tight, thin lips.

I unbuttoned my jacket and crossed the street; he kept walking as if he hadn’t seen me. I was walking toward him now, and when I passed him, I turned on a dime and came immediately up behind him and put the nine-millimeter’s nose in the small of his back.

“Let’s talk,” I said.

“Why don’t we?” he said, blandly British.

“The alley should do.”

“It should do nicely,” he agreed.

I walked him to the alley; an American sailor and a woman who was probably some RAF pilot’s wife walked by arm in arm, smiling at each other. My shadow-who I was sticking to like his shadow-marched calmly into the alleyway, where I escorted him into near darkness. I could smell his lime cologne.

“Turn slowly,” I said, “and stand with your back to the wall.”

But he didn’t turn slowly-he whirled, and then his hand was on my wrist, and the fucker flipped me.

When I landed on my ass, hard on the gravel, I was sitting up with both my hands empty. I looked up at him and he was studying me with an expression of sheer boredom. My gun was in his hand, casually.

“Do let me help you up,” he said.

“Thanks ever so,” I said.

He dropped my gun in his sport-coat pocket and offered me his hand and I buried my head in his stomach and rammed him up against the nearest wall.

“Perhaps I should introduce myself,” he said, groaning, as I held him pinned there. I threw a fist toward his midsection and a hand gripped my wrist and stopped me.

“I’m…an agent with His Majesty’s Royal Naval Intelligence,” he said. “So let’s dispense with the foreplay, and get right to the intercourse-shall we?”

I backed away, breathing hard. I held out my hand. “Give me back my gun.”

His smile was faint and crinkled. He viewed me as a parent might a petulant child, though he was no older than me, I’d wager.

“Certainly, Mr. Heller,” he said, and lifted the gun gingerly from his pocket and held it out to me by its barrel.

I put it back under my arm. “That was a nice job of knocking me on my ass.”

“Judo,” he explained, smoothing out his jacket. “Those bloody Japs do know their stuff.”

“You seem to know my name,” I said, brushing off the back of my pants. “You got one-or just a number?”

He was withdrawing a cigarette from an oxidized gold case, tamping it down.

“Fleming,” he said. He lighted up the cigarette and turned the harsh angles of his face orange. “Ian Fleming.”

We took a back booth at Dirty Dick’s. A steel band was banging away on the little stage, and a high-yellow native woman in a skimpy two-piece outfit was doing a dance called the limbo, which amounted to an acrobatic feat of shimmying under a progressively lowered pole held by two darker grinning male cohorts. The crowd was grinning, too, and I recognized among the faces many of the reporters here to cover the trial.

“Remarkable dexterity,” Fleming said, exhaling smoke.

“She’s more flexible than I am. What the hell’s this about, anyway?”

“Just a moment-let’s let this charming girl take our order.”

The almost-pretty dark-haired waitress was white, but she wore a well-filled floral sarong and had a matching flower in her hair. She was probably twenty-five and fairly immune to come-ons by now, but she warmed to Fleming immediately, though he did nothing but bestow her a mild smile.

“Bourbon and branch water, dear,” he said.

“Rum and Coke,” I said.

She beamed at Fleming, fluttering elaborate fake lashes, and he granted her another little smile.

“As you may have guessed, Mr. Heller, I’m taking an extended layover in Nassau to…shall we say, keep tabs on the Oakes case.”

“Why would British Naval Intelligence have any interest in a murder case involving civilians? Even rich ones?”

Fleming stamped out his cigarette in a glass ashtray and immediately withdrew another from his gold case and lighted up. “Well, one of the people involved on the periphery is not, after all, strictly speaking, a civilian. He’s what you call a VIP-and he’s in a…delicate position. A vulnerable position.”

Now I was getting it.

‘The Duke of Windsor, you mean. The ex-King with the Nazi sympathies. He’s a living, breathing embarrassment to your country, isn’t he?”

Fleming’s smile was almost a sneer. “On the contrary-the Duke is beloved, worldwide. My government’s concern is that he not be…misused. That he, himself, not be embarrassed.”

“Yeah, right.”

The waitress brought our drinks; she and Fleming exchanged smiles, hers generous, his miserly.

“I’m afraid the Duke is rather easy prey for financial operators. He’s known to…resent the limitations of his annual allowance, particularly in wartime.”