Philip Kerr - The Shot

‘Apparently, there’s a one-shot hole they have got there,’ Ralston was saying, ‘with this enormous tee. Big as a baseball diamond. You can play it as a two-hundred-yard drive over a lake, or as a hundred-and-twenty-five-yard pitch.’

‘It sounds interesting.’

‘Then it’s a match,’ said Ralston.

The crowd applauded loudly as the Cubans picked up the first point. Their opponents now retired to the bench behind the eighth-place pair, to await their turn to play again. The first team to reach seven points would be the winner. But Ralston was already crushing his ticket and dropping it to the floor. He produced a silver cigarette case and waved it at Tom, who shook his head, preferring his own brand. Lighting himself with a matching Dunhill, Ralston stood up and extended his hand.

‘It’s been a pleasure, Mister Jefferson.’

The two men shook hands.

‘Going so soon? The game’s just beginning.’

‘I have a dinner engagement at eight thirty,’ said Ralston, glancing at the chunky gold Girard-Perregaux he wore on his wrist. ‘And if I’m not careful I shall be late.’

‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Tom.

‘Don’t forget my quiniela exacta ,’ said Ralston, and then he was gone.

Tom waited in his seat for a minute or two, and then followed.

Leaving the frontón , Ralston walked a couple of blocks south along the Miami Canal and didn’t even glance up as a Transamerica Constellation left MIA with a shattering roar that made Tom glad he hadn’t rented a house in Miami Springs. When Tom looked down again Ralston was climbing into a light-blue Cadillac Eldorado Brougham — a car that seemed to contradict everything the man had said about too much chrome and not enough simplicity. With tail fins that towered more than three feet above the sidewalk, the Eldorado was Baroque on wheels.

Tom ran back to where he had parked his own car, although there seemed little reason for haste; he thought it would have been harder following Elvis, whose own pink Cadillac drew crowds wherever it went. Finding the Chevy Bel Air, he vaulted the door, gunned the small-block V8 into life, and then sped off down 31st with an audible squeal of tyres, catching up with Ralston just in time to see him turning south on to 27th Avenue.

With the Eldorado comfortably in his sights, Tom settled down in his seat and took his foot off the gas a little, just in case Ralston was the suspicious type. At a traffic light he let a bus and a Dodge station wagon get in front of him, and lit a cigarette. Then they were moving again.

Miami was a Company town, the largest CIA station in the world, and it was an open secret that Suntan U let the spooks use its campus as a school for espionage. In any other town this might have seemed remarkable, but the CIA was a major source of city revenue, pumping more money into the local economy than all the pari-mutuel gambling machines put together. There were as many companies and institutions offering a front for the CIA as there were coconut palms and poinciana trees. It was one of the reasons Tom lived there. That, and the golf, of course. For a while Tom thought they were heading to the university campus. Or maybe Ralston’s golf club. But a little way north of the Biltmore, where 37th Avenue became Douglas Road, Ralston turned east on to 22nd Street, and just a few minutes later the two cars were driving over the Rickenbacker Causeway with the sunlit blue waters of Biscayne bay flickering beneath them.

Ralston drove fast, but it was no effort for Tom to keep pace with the big Cadillac. The Chevy was built for speed rather than the smooth, effort-free driving experience that characterised the Cadillac. The Bel Air was a hot car for a hot date, or so Pat Boone had implied on his weekly TV show for Chevy a few years back when Tom had bought it. Thinking about that always made Tom smile. He tried to imagine the kind of hot date that would have necessitated the handy extras Tom had with him in the car: taped under the driver’s seat, a Smith & Wesson .44 Special; and, inside the trunk, underneath the spare tyre, a nine-shot .22 Harrington & Richardson revolver with a two-inch barrel. Elvis didn’t look the kind of guy who would have minded that, but somehow Tom didn’t think Pat would have approved.

The clock on the Bel Air’s dashboard said eight o’clock by the time the blue Cadillac turned on to the exclusive Ocean Drive, where even an undeveloped waterfront lot cost as much as forty thousand, and sighed up to the front of the luxurious Key Biscayne Hotel. Tom cruised past, executed a U-turn, and drew up on the opposite side of Ocean Drive.

There was plenty of space to park even as big a car as the Cadillac, but Ralston handed the keys to the parking valet and, affably acknowledging the doorman’s smart salute as though he knew the man well, disappeared inside the hotel. Tom waited while the valet drove the Cadillac somewhere out of sight. It looked very much as though Ralston was staying in the hotel.

When the valet reappeared, Tom hit the gas and turned into the hotel driveway. He parked the Chevy out front himself, walked up to the valet, and nodded back at the car.

‘Am I all right there?’ he asked, handing the valet an over-generous five-dollar bill.

The valet, who was aged about twenty and Irish, with a dumb Irish face that reeked of tobacco, grinned his immediate assent.

‘Don’t you worry, sir. I’ll watch it for you. Want me to clean the windshield?’

‘Yeah, thanks. Listen, I’m supposed to meet a Mister Ralston here.’

‘Mister Ralston?’ The young Irishman frowned. ‘Ralston, you say. Is he a guest of the hotel, d’you think?’

‘Silver hair, glasses, drives a light-blue fifty-seven Cadillac Eldorado? Y’know? With the built-in tissue-box, and the gold-finished drinking cups?’

‘You mean Mister Rosselli, don’t you sir?’

Tom smacked himself on the forehead.

‘Mister Rosselli. Of course. That’s the name. Where the hell did I get Ralston from?’ He shook his head. ‘I dunno. I guess I was paying too much attention to that car he drives.’

‘He went into the hotel only a few minutes ago, sir.’

‘He did, huh? Thanks a lot. You know, this could have been so embarrassing.’

‘Don’t mention it, sir.’

Tom went to walk through the door, then turned on his heel, grinning sheepishly.

‘Pardon me. But Mister Rosselli. His first name is John, I suppose.’

‘I believe it is, sir, yes.’

‘Well, at least I got that right. John. You’re sure about that?’

‘Oh yes, sir. Mister Rosselli lives here. Most of the time.’

‘Thanks. You’ve been very helpful.’

Inside the cool lobby of the hotel, chattering macaws and cockatoos added to the deliberately tropical atmosphere. Tom walked to the front desk and enquired of the pansy on duty as to Mr Rosselli’s whereabouts. Miami wasn’t just a spook town. It was a pansy town, too. Only in England could you be a spook and a pansy.

‘You know? I think I just saw him walking into the restaurant. Would you like me to have him paged?’

‘No, that’s okay,’ said Tom. He went into the bar and ordered a lime daiquiri. With Ralston, or Rosselli, safely ensconced in the restaurant, Tom was half-inclined to try and search his room. As usual he carried a simple diamond pick — a piece of flat, cold-rolled steel with a barely perceptible diamond on the tip — in the cuffs of his pants, just the thing to rake the pins in a hotel door lock. But picking took time and it was still a little early in the evening to expect that Rosselli’s floor — he didn’t doubt that a trip to the hotel garage would have found him the keys to the Eldorado attached to Rosselli’s room number — would remain quiet for as long as he would need to open the door. Because he liked to know as much about his potential clients as possible, especially when they were new to him. In Tom’s line of business he could not be too careful that he wasn’t being set up by a cop, or a federal agent. But there wouldn’t have been too many law-enforcement officers who could have afforded the Key Biscayne. Not to mention a thirteen-thousand-dollar Cadillac.