18

Unlike Richard Jameson some weeks earlier, Mr Rogers on his arrival at Charleston in South Carolina did not check into the Four Seasons Hotel; nor was he met by anyone resembling a Southern senator who was addressed as Judge. He had exchanged his black suit for a crumpled light fawn one which fitted so tightly across his frame that the middle button was seriously strained. On arrival he was met by no one, and from the airport he took a taxi to a modest hotel in a side street. Before retiring for the night, he sat at the bar drinking tall glasses of Jack Daniels on the rocks while engaging in friendly chat with the barman.

The next morning he spent much time on the telephone and at noon received his first visitor, a grey-haired black man who drove up to the hotel in a battered 1985 Chevrolet. The visitor, Clover Harrison, was soon sitting with Mr Rogers in the bar eating a sandwich and drinking beer served by the same friendly and chatty barman. After an hour, Mr Rogers and Clover Harrison left in the ancient car. In the afternoon they paid a visit to a shack with a corrugated tin roof outside which they sat at a wooden table sipping a mixture of lemonade and sarsparilla with two elderly women and a very ancient man who spoke little. They then drove on to visit the local Baptist chapel and drank tea at the home of its pastor. Back in the city, they passed the evening going from piano bar to jazz club, Mr Rogers consuming a prodigious quantity of bourbon without it apparently affecting him in the slightest. Clover Harrison did the talking; Mr Rogers the paying.

It was at the last of the jazz clubs that they received some information which took them the following morning to a small, neat house in the city’s western suburbs where they spent several hours drinking coffee on the front porch with a middle-aged black woman. She was a widow and lived alone. They then retraced their steps to the hospital in Charleston and a doctor’s office, and after more visits in the afternoon and early evening to other houses Mr Rogers was delivered back to his hotel where once more he began telephoning. For the next seventy-two hours this was the pattern of his days and nights, and he never once ventured outside the hotel except in the company of Clover Harrison. Twice again they visited the middle-aged woman with whom they had drunk coffee, and with whom at their last meeting Mr Rogers left several pages of manuscript written in his neat handwriting. But one place they did not visit was the office of a Mr Jerome Walker, attorney-at-law, the frail and elderly black lawyer who had placed the advertisement for Sarah Wilson in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune. Mr Walker was ill, and according to Clover Harrison failing fast. But that did not prevent Mr Walker from hearing of the presence in town of an inquisitive gentleman from London; and Judge Jed Blaker, as he was called although he had retired from the bench, was duly informed.

On the fourth day after Mr Rogers’ arrival, Clover Harrison picked him up at the hotel and drove him to the airport and bade him farewell. From Charleston Mr Rogers flew west to San Francisco, missing by only a few hours the arrival of another visitor from London, Richard Jameson, who checked into the Four Seasons Hotel and who spent the rest of that evening and several days thereafter in the company of Judge Jed Blaker.

At San Francisco airport Mr Rogers was met by a lean, craggy-faced woman with cropped black hair speckled with grey, dressed in a check shirt and ill-fitting pants. ‘Jules,’ she said, thrusting out a hand and snatching his bag from him. She marched him to a cab which delivered them to an open air car-park some way from the airport. In her bottle-green XJS soft-top convertible Jaguar, Jules lit a cheroot and they sat talking for the best part of an hour.

As she started the engine before moving off, she handed him a card. ‘Eleven o’clock,’ she said, looking him over. He was still in his fawn suit which stretched so tightly over his stomach. ‘Shirt and pants,’ she added.

At the Sheraton Palace, a far more up-market hotel than Mr Rogers had frequented in Charleston, she sat in the car and watched as his stout figure stepped lightly up the steps and disappeared into the hotel, accompanied by a porter carrying his bag.

Shortly after eleven o’clock that evening, Mr Rogers, now more comfortably but somewhat incongruously dressed in a flowered shirt and white trousers, took a taxi to the address on the card. At the door of the club he presented it to the doorman and was admitted. The place was dark and very crowded, lit almost solely by the coloured lights flickering on and off on the dance-floor. He pushed his way to the bar, ordered bourbon, and observed the dancers.

A middle-aged, moustachioed couple glided past. They were wearing light grey suits with ties and white shirts, so that Mr Rogers thought that perhaps it had been unnecessary to spend his clients’ money purchasing his new outfit. But he soon saw that most of the other dancers of either or indeterminate gender were in shirts and pants, except for some very tall, beefily built, heavily made-up dancers in elaborate ball-gowns. For ten minutes he watched; then he saw Jules coming towards him leading by the hand a slender Oriental figure, a head shorter than she. When they were a few yards from Mr Rogers, Jules pecked the cheek of her small partner who immediately turned away.

Jules beckoned, and Mr Rogers followed her to an empty table, slightly raised, guarded from the dance-floor by a brass rail. From time to time dancers leaned over the rail and spoke to Jules and embraced her. Each time she introduced Mr Rogers. ‘Harry,’ she said, ‘from London, England.’

After half an hour they were joined by the person whom Mr Rogers had come to meet, a grey-haired man who walked with a stick. He was skeletally thin, had a grey moustache turned down at the corners of his mouth and wore, Mr Rogers noted ruefully, a shirt of a far more conservative design than that which he had purchased in the hotel shop. As soon as the newcomer had seated himself at their table, Jules imperiously waved away any who approached. After an hour of conversation, Mr Rogers left and took a cab back to his hotel.

Next morning, he abandoned his extravagantly flowered shirt for one of a plain dark blue, but slung from his shoulder a leather bag. When Jules collected him, he had already taken a long call from Charleston during which Clover Harrison told him of the arrival of Jameson. Mr Rogers advised him to leave town until he was certain that Jameson had departed.

Like his activities in Charleston, Mr Rogers’ visit to San Francisco settled into a pattern; by day, a series of visits to the Castro and the Haight and elsewhere, usually to apartments up winding, outside stairs and small, white or pink box-like houses, wreathed in climbing roses and orange blossom; by night visits to clubs. The registry office and the hospital and several law offices were also visited but it was in the apartment of the thin man and his younger companion that Mr Rogers spent most time. On the third morning after his arrival, he put a call through to the friendly barman at the hotel where he’d stayed in Charleston and asked the barman to check Clover Harrison’s address to make sure he had left town. Later the barman reported that he had been round to Mr Harrison’s rooms and been told by the owner of the drug-store that Mr Harrison was away but the apartment had recently been broken into.

It was a thoughtful Mr Rogers who left with Jules for the airport, once again attired in his tight-fitting fawn suit. He flew east to Atlanta, ignoring other reservations in his name on flights to LA and to Boston. In Atlanta he boarded a flight to Miami where, on arrival, he hired a car and drove to West Palm Beach. After more calls from a call-box, he drove to the WPB airport, handed in the car and reported to the offices of Caribbean Ferry Services. He was left to wait, drinking coffee and watching television. After two hours, he was conducted from the offices to a Beachmaster turbo-prop executive jet warming up on the apron. During the flight, Mr Rogers sat alone in the cabin behind the two pilots, writing. On arrival at Belize he joined a Vargas flight to Rio. He stayed the night at the airport hotel and next day flew on to Buenos Aires.

After two days in BA, and with no sign that he had been followed south by Richard Jameson, he flew back across the Atlantic, and reported to Oliver Goodbody in Oliver’s flat in Kensington. A day later he was on his travels again, this time to Europe.