HOLMES MET ME AT THE HOTEL in the morning. I was still sitting in the crowded dining room, crowded not with diners but with high sideboards jammed with cut-glass vases, goblets, sets of hand-painted dinnerware, glass animals, paperweights, statuettes, and ornamental bric-a-brac that must have come from a half dozen different little old Victorian ladies’ lifetime collections. On the walls of the room were large, framed, rotogravure portraits of Martin Luther King, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II, and the Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, with smaller, framed photographs of the manager’s family, all of them full-faced, chubby, black adults and children dressed in their best clothes and posed carefully in front of a large car on a street in one of the boroughs of New York City. The manager was at his post by the door, reading the Daily Gleaner and keeping a close watch on the house keys dangling from a board next to his desk. I handed him the key to number thirteen, and Holmes and I strode out the door to my car.
Captain Ausley, Holmes explained to me as we drove down the Main Street toward the landing next to the public works department, was a friend of his. Otherwise we’d never be able to get over to the island. Back when they had first started building the Windjammer, Ausley had trained Holmes and several other local boys in basic mechanical and construction skills and, once trained, they had been employed for several years on the island—a chance both to work and to learn a skill they could use elsewhere. An opportunity for Ausley, too, I thought: cheap labor can be made skilled and still kept cheap if you train it yourself.
At the narrow plank dock, Holmes and I sat and smoked a spliff and waited for the regular morning launch to come over from Navy Island. Ausley made the trip over every morning to get mail and do some business in town, Holmes explained. In a short while we heard the launch start up, and soon we could see it crossing the quarter mile of water toward the mainland. It was a sixteen-foot, open boat with a banging old inboard motor and a blue-and-white-striped canvas tarpaulin stretched overhead for shade. A small-faced, shirtless and barefoot black youth ran the motor with one hand and held the tiller with the other. Standing like George Washington in the bow all the way across from the island was the man I assumed was Captain Ausley, the friend of Errol Flynn. He was a thickset man in his mid-fifties, also barefoot and shirtless, with a sandy gray crewcut. Holmes whispered that he never wore a shirt, just like a Jamaican. But look at how red his skin is, I said. The man looks like he took his shirt off for the first time a few hours ago and got himself badly sunburnt. He always looked that way, Holmes said. Red. When the launch drew near, I saw that Ausley’s scarlet chest was covered with a pelt of perfectly straight gray hairs, like an animal’s, each one laid softly down against the next and all of them about a single inch long. And I saw that he had a woman with him; she was slender, wearing a sleeveless yellow dress and string sandals, legs carefully crossed at the ankles. She was in her early thirties, but looked tired and cross. She was the kind of woman whose looks had been responsible for whatever career success she had met and whose career, therefore, had reached its zenith about three years ago.
The Captain jumped from the bow of the launch before it touched the dock and, ignoring the woman, walked briskly toward the parking lot, passing Holmes and me as if we were a turnstile. Holmes hailed him, and he wheeled around, squinted, recognized the tall black man and proceeded to scrutinize me. Walking slowly over to him, Holmes entered into hushed conversation with the red-skinned man, who continued to regard me with suspicion. Ausley shook his head negatively several times, but Holmes kept on talking.
Finally the beefy white man gestured with his hand for me to step forward. You some kind of reporter? he wanted to know. Absolutely not, I assured him. I’m more of a scholar, a teacher, I said, smiling, and then I told him I was interested in the island for scholarly and historical purposes, hoping as I burbled on that I wasn’t contradicting anything Holmes might have told him.
We’re very security conscious, Ausley said. If you let everyone onto an island, pretty soon it isn’t an island anymore, he aphorized. Then he was talking only to Holmes, ignoring me as he had ignored the woman, telling Holmes we could ride out on the launch now and get off the island when the launch returned to shore in an hour to pick him up.
There seemed to be a crime that I was investigating, and somehow my visit to Navy Island was part of the investigation. But I didn’t know what I was looking for. As we crossed the smooth water of the Port, I grew quickly excited by the mystery. There was a crime, yes, but what was it? This world was corrupt at the center, I knew that, and a primeval crime had determined that corruption, a crime known to everyone, white or black, Jamaican or foreigner. Despite the almost transcendent beauty of the place—the mountains, the sea, the lush green vegetation, the glossy-skinned, passionate people—the world here was tipped off to one side, canted, wobbly, precarious, and everything here was tainted somehow. It was as if there existed an explanation for its precarious, tilted state that was known but never acknowledged, as if the purpose for this abundant, splendid beauty were solely to hide some shameful secret. Flynn was a part of the secret, and Dr. Menotti and his son, and so were DeVries and his wife. Mrs. Flynn and her German shepherds, and the operation of Navy Island, too, were parts of the secret. Old Evan Smith was one of the willing keepers of the secret. Holmes and Terron Musgrave, the Rastafarian brethren, they all knew the secret but couldn’t communicate it to me. The Maroons knew the secret too.
Unable to translate it, I would have to perceive the secret on my own. I had been innocent, but now that I had begun to sense the impossibility of innocence in this world, I was fast losing it. One didn’t have to participate in the crime in order to lose one’s innocence; one merely had to acknowledge its existence. Innocence, I suddenly realized, is a point of view. Perhaps the only way to break the limits of a point of view, then, was to lose one’s innocence. And wasn’t that what I had come back here to accomplish, to break down the limits of a particular point of view?
Now the details began to flow more rapidly into my ken. Navy Island did indeed seem nothing more or less than a Laundromat for Mafia money. Everywhere there was evidence of enormous expenditures of American cash, with no evidence of any organized attempt to obtain a return flow. This was no business; it was a safe-deposit box. Half a dozen thatched-roof, two-bedroom cottages filled with modern appliances and furniture had been completed and were meticulously maintained, but unrented. A cocktail bar and restaurant building cantilevered over the water facing the Port was designed to accommodate a small number of people in an out-sized amount of carpeted and paneled space. There were several isolated beaches, carefully maintained paths and gardens and a roadway that circled the island and threaded the scattered cottages together. A large Quonset hut near the dock was filled with machinery, a diesel generator, golf carts in various states of repair, and a half dozen shirtless mechanics and laborers. The golf carts apparently were used to transport the “guests” from their cottages to the restaurant, which seemed to have several conference rooms above the cocktail lounge and dining areas. And all over the island were structures left half finished or foundations with no further work done, pathways cleared once but not maintained or paved afterward, piers and breakwaters begun but not completed.
I sat in the shade of the Quonset hut on top of an oil drum and asked questions of an intelligent-looking youth who was pulling the engine of a golf cart, and I learned that the architect had been deported from the island because his work permit had expired, that the whole resort was owned by a man named Casey—an American from Miami who showed up every few months for a week or two with a new girl friend each time and with other businessmen and their girl friends. He also told me that, besides Casey, Mrs. Flynn was one of the owners, which he said was required by law, Jamaican law. And the reason they had stopped construction on everything, the boy told me, was because the architect had left the island. Oh, I said.
As Holmes and I were about to step back into the launch for the return to the mainland, four burly policemen from Port Antonio in a sleek, white police boat came skidding up to the dock, got jovially out of the boat, and started walking up the path toward a forest of coconut palms. They were thirsty, Holmes explained, as the group joked and jostled its way along the path, quite at home here and confident that they could take their pleasure here, cut and drink from a dozen coconuts, urinate on the grass, tease and intimidate the workmen in the Quonset hut, and return to their powerful boat, which they had left tied at the dock with its motor still running, gulping gasoline patiently, and roar off, laughing, making plans for the weekend. They were all wearing blue coveralls and colorful knit tams on their close-cut heads—dark, muscular, well-fed men who passed me and Holmes by in precisely the same manner that Ausley had passed us earlier when he had landed at the mainland.
As we sat down in the launch and started back toward the Port, Holmes leaned over and told me that about six months ago Mrs. Flynn had used the police to kick a dozen families off her land—squatters—homeless, desperate families who had decided to build shanties on fallow land that had been won in a card game in a whorehouse. A number of the squatters had been shot up, Holmes said, but no one was killed.
The kid running the launch for Ausley was named Rocco, and on the way back Holmes unexpectedly revealed that Rocco was the son of the man who had been the witness to DeVries’ attempt to dispose of his wife’s body. Rocco smiled at me when he heard his name mentioned and nodded hello, acknowledging for the first time that we were aboard. Holmes handed him the butt end of the spliff we had been sharing, and the youth finished it off, flicking the remains into the water as we pulled up at the dock, where Ausley was waiting for his ride back to his island.
DeVries had not owned a horse or a pair of horses. He had owned two old mules, a brown and a gray, named Deke and Mitchell. A man named Jack told me this in the Princess in the early afternoon light. And, according to Jack—who was small, evil-smelling, alcoholic, a man in his late fifties who wore cast-off elegant clothing, evidently the remnants of the wardrobe of someone he had once worked for—DeVries had been a generally silent, grim man who talked more to his mules than to any man.
The witness to DeVries’ crime was named Rocco, like the son, Jack said, and yes, it was true that Rocco had seen DeVries out at Dolphin’s Bay trying to shove the body into a hole that opened into the sea below. DeVries had cut off the head of the corpse and had tried to stuff the body down a hole that a few feet down got too small for the body to pass through, and as a result the legs were sticking up in the air and DeVries was shoving at them when Rocco happened to pass along the road on his way to Errol Flynn’s ranch where he worked. DeVries saw Rocco and went after him with his machete, Jack said, but Rocco was young then and could run fast, so he got away. The reason the body was cut into pieces, Jack said, was because that was the only way they could remove it from the hole after DeVries had jammed it in there. Then they put the pieces, except for the head, which was never recovered, into a box and stored them in the freezer out at Frenchman’s Cove, which is owned by Mrs. Flynn, Jack said. The police went directly to DeVries, of course, because of what Rocco had told them, and asked him where his wife was. They knew the body belonged either to his wife or his girl friend, but without the head and with the limbs all hacked off, they couldn’t tell which woman it was. DeVries lied and said his wife was in Kingston and, a few weeks later when they went back to see if she had returned, she hadn’t, and that’s when DeVries went dumb. He never said another word. Because of the Doctor, Jack said. Errol Flynn’s friend, Dr. Menotti. He owned all the land at Dolphin’s Bay where DeVries was seen trying to stuff his wife’s body into the hole. His house was located on the other side of the road from the bay, a large house that he had set up as a hospital but that he never used as a hospital. What did he use it for? I asked.
Abortions. Mostly white American girls. A few English and Canadian girls, though. He did a lot of experiments there too, Jack added.
What kind?
Obeah.
On my way out to the Flynn estate for the second time, I saw Evan Smith walking along Main Street again, as rapidly and urgently as he had been walking before, but this time there was no rain for him to avoid, so I concluded that the rush must be his manner and that he was a more anxious man than I had first thought. He let me drive him to his destination, the Town Hall, where he seemed to have no other business than to turn around and head rapidly down the street again.
Men named Krucknik and Crandall, Smith told me, owned Navy Island after Errol Flynn, and then Krucknik died in a plane crash in Miami and Crandall inherited his half. Later he was joined by a Mr. Illa from California, who still shows up out there once or twice a year for a few days. A man named Rex Rand, Smith said, owned the Titchfield Hotel property, and Captain Ausley, who now manages the Navy Island property, used to manage it for him. Mr. Rand, as Smith carefully called him, wanted to build the Titchfield back up again after it burned, but he, too, got killed in a plane crash in Miami. Mr. Rand had also been one of the owners of the Biscayne Bay Hotel in Miami and a close friend of Richard Nixon. But Smith had never heard of anyone named Casey.
At the Errol Flynn estate, Castle Comfort, I was met again by the brace of German shepherds, and this time a maid—a white woman, surprisingly—in a uniform came along behind the beasts. She was an old woman, but tough and crisp, and when I asked to see Mrs. Flynn and was compelled to confess that I had no appointment, she told me that Mrs. Flynn was not at home. She asked where Mrs. Flynn could reach me, and automatically I gave her the name and telephone number of the de Montvin Hotel, when it suddenly occurred to me that I might be making a dangerous mistake. I could no longer stroll through these lives, like some kind of idiot tourist, without protecting myself. This was a world where evil powers—obeah, Mafia, corrupt cops sucking complacently on someone else’s coconuts, ritual death, kangaroo courts, decadence, and immense, exploitive wealth—all worked comfortably side by side like pickers in a vineyard. To be white was not necessarily to be evil, but to be white and then to come to know Errol Flynn in Jamaica was to lose one’s innocence. And once that happened, only a fool would not begin to protect himself.
No, no, that’s not right, the business about the de Montvin, I stammered to the maid. I’ll be somewhere else tonight, with a friend, and I’m leaving Port Antonio for Montego Bay in the morning, heading back to the States.
She nodded. I said that I would telephone Mrs. Flynn later, kicked my van into gear, and headed down the hill to the road and swiftly back to the Port, bouncing past the slavery walls, past the remains of the old sugar plantation that Flynn’s ranch had replaced, past the mill wheel, the cut-stone sheds and barns, and the huge open cistern, like a crater, with the ridge and the mountains lofting darkly on one side of the road and the turquoise sea and meadows on the other.