The corrugated iron shutters were still down over the wide entrance arches of the terminal when Norman drove up at eleven. He wanted to catch the manager of the air-cargo office early. Peculiar customs regulations existed for fresh foodstuffs arriving by air, and he had a sheaf of official papers with him. But there was nothing to do but wait. No live thing stirred outside the airport except a stray donkey trailing a broken rope across the entrance walk in the beating sun, and browsing on a border of red lilies.
Bob Cohn came driving up in a small gray navy truck a few minutes later. Cohn had unofficially volunteered the truck, with his commanding officer’s unofficial permission, to transport Norman’s two hundred chateaubriand steaks to the Georgetown freezer. Norman had asked this favor, and Cohn had cheerfully arranged it. The fact that Hazel was coming on the same plane as the steaks had gone unmentioned.
“Hi,” Cohn said, squatting beside Norman, who was sitting on the hot tarry-smelling driveway, in the shade of the Rover. The frogman’s leg muscles stood out stringily under the red-brown skin. “I told you eleven was too early.”
Norman looked at him for a moment and then said baldly, “So, Iris Tramm is Governor Sanders’ mistress.”
Cohn’s eyes widened, and his smile faded away. “What? What makes you say that?”
“She told me.”
“She told you?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“I see. Were you surprised?”
“I was stupefied. And that got her angry.”
A little lizard stood on the roadway staring at them, pulsing out its throat in a grotesque red loop. Cohn caught it with a rake of a hand. “What else did she tell you?”
“Not much. She sort of threw me out.”
Cohn opened his palm on the ground, and the lizard leaped free and ran. He grinned at Paperman, his teeth white and regular in his hawkish sunburned face. Cohn wore a T-shirt, very brief khaki shorts, and heavy dusty shoes with white socks. “She got that angry, eh? She got angry at me, too, when I once said I didn’t think you knew.”
“The way I had it figured, you were probably the lucky man,” Paperman said.
Cohn laughed out loud. “I’m the guy Iris tells her troubles to. Back in October the governor asked my C.O. to check her out in an aqualung, because she was wild to try it. Idrew the assignment and so we got friendly. The lung gave her claustrophobia, and she made only two dives. She’s a good swimmer, though, and a game woman.”
“You never even made a pass at her? She’s smart, and she’s very pretty.”
Cohn shrugged. “Iris has always treated me like an eighteen-year-old, Norm.—Well? Did you mind?”
“Mind what?”
“Finding that out,” Cohn said, looking him in the eye, and Paperman felt that the frogman understood what had happened the night before, in all its main points.
He hesitated, then spoke stoutly for the record. “Not in the least. But she didn’t believe me.”
Cohn nodded slowly, and thought for a few moments, head down, juggling pebbles in one hand; and then began to talk about Sanders. He was a California Republican, a minor professional politician whose chief asset—so Cohn said—was that he was a Negro. Aside from that, Alton Sanders was a typical career bureaucrat, perhaps brighter than most, hard-working, knowledgeable, alert, and bound to end as a congressman, or an undersecretary in the Cabinet, unless he made a bad mistake; such as, for instance, marrying a white woman who was a former film star notorious for drunken collapses, and an ex-communist to the bargain. Iris’s real problem wasn’t loving a Negro, Cohn said, it was the more common one of loving a married man, who wouldn’t break up his marriage and career for an unsuitable woman he’d fallen in love with.
“You came along about the time she was facing up to that,” Cohn said. “Reena was down here, you remember. For a showdown, supposedly, but nothing was happening. When you came into the bar that night for the first time, with all your jokes and Broadway talk, you were a lifesaver. I’d never seen Iris spark the way she did to you. I thought she was working up to try to drown herself, and maybe she was, but you diverted her. She’s been worrying over you and your hotel ever since. Iris likes you.”
Paperman said, not too steadily, “I liked her. I mean, I still do.”
Cohn nodded. “This needed no force reconnaissance to find out. But Norman, why were you so shocked? If you stopped to think about it, what could a smart, beautiful woman like her be doing all alone on a West Indian island? It could only be that her life was such a lousy mess, she’d be strictly nobody to get involved with.”
The entrance shutters began to rattle and screech upward. Paperman said as he stood, “You’re wise beyond your years.”
He had forgotten how small and slight Henny was. She was the first white person out of the plane, after several natives descended the little ladder. She eagerly waved at him, with the smile that he loved, and came toward the gate in a fast walk just short of a scamper. She wore a small beige hat, a tailored black suit, she carried a fur on her arm, and she proclaimed New York as a tiger proclaims jungle. Atlas emerged from the plane right behind her, in a blue brass-buttoned jacket and white flannel pants, hoarsely bawling over his shoulder. He carried a small canvas bag with a bottle sticking out. So much Paperman saw, and here was Henny, running the last few steps and embracing him, with the desperate hug of a lost child that has been found. The smell of her perfume was as welcome and as novel as her kiss.
“My God, you look marvellous,” she said.
“Where’s Hazel?”
“Oh, still pulling herself together. She’s been doing a heavy make-up job for the last half-hour on that bumpy rattletrap. Hi there, Bob! Jesus, the men look good down here. What a ride! Murder! We’ve been dodging through thunderstorms. It’s so clear here!”
“HEY, NORM! HAVE THEY GOT A BAR YET IN THIS SHITTY AIRPORT?” roared Atlas, halfway to the gate. “I’m shaking like a leaf. I need a drink!” He grasped Norman’s hand in a damp huge paw. Atlas was pale, and unshaven, and the dark bags under his red eyes were appalling, but otherwise he was the same, complete to the bourbon reek.
“Welcome back, Lester. I’m sorry there’s no bar. We’ll rush you back to the Reef and you can tank up.”
“Doesn’t the son of a bitch look healthy and happy?” Adas said to Henny. Even when he wasn’t shouting, he had the voice projection of a hog-caller, and after his first remark, everybody in the airport was staring at him. “Look at that relaxed face. Why, he’s dropped ten years. This can only come from laying all the women who register at the Gull Reef Club. It tones up the system.”
“Oh, shut up, Lester,” said Henny.
“Why? Listen, if Norman’s giving that extra service it ought to be advertised. I might pitch in to help him handle the Christmas rush. HAW HAW HAW!”
“What the devil, where’s Hazel?” Paperman said. “They’re starting to unload the luggage.”
A motor-driven wagon was beside the plane, and men in overalls were slinging suitcases and parcels out of a hole in the plane’s side. Cohn said, as two frosty oblong paperboard boxes were handed out smoking, “There comes your meat, Norm.”
“What meat?” Henny said.
“And there’s Hazel,” said Cohn. “We’re all set.”
The girl stood on the top step, one white-gloved hand resting in the doorway, posing for invisible news photographers. Her light clinging pink silk suit displayed a voluptuous figure; she wore no hat, her dark hair fell to her shoulders, in an old-fashioned charming way, and at this distance she looked fresh and dewy as a primrose. With a queenly little wave that might have been for Norman, for Cohn, or for everybody in the airport, she came down the stairs, and behind her the Sending emerged from the doorway, carrying Hazel’s fur-collared coat, and her hatbox, and her make-up bag, and a typewriter, and a tennis racket, and his own coat, and two cameras.
Hazel gave her father a brief hug and an offhand kiss, looking over his shoulder at Bob Cohn with immense startled eyes. “My goodness! It’s you!”
“Sure.”
“What on earth are you doing here? Why aren’t you off somewhere a couple of hundred feet underwater, strangling an octopus?”
“The navy’s discharged me for arteriosclerosis, Hazel.”
“Oh yes, no doubt.”
The Sending came to the gate, panting, perspiring, and tourist-white. “Hazel, I looked under every seat,” he said. “That eyebrow pencil is gone.”
“Oh, well, I’ll buy another one. You remember Bob Cohn.”
Klug looked Cohn up and down and said, “Oh, yes. The frogman. Are you meeting somebody?”
Atlas was herding together the six passengers who were guests of the Club. “Here’s our gang, Norm! They had first preference on my booze while it lasted, by God. Gull Reef hospitality this time began right in San Juan, didn’t it, folks?”
“In Idlewild Airport for me,” giggled a gray-headed woman, whose feathered hat was askew over one ear. “My, there’s always a first time for everything, isn’t there? I think I like straight bourbon out of paper cups.”
“You’re a swinger, Millicent,” said Atlas, throwing his arm around her waist. “Us two are going to make beautiful music together. Let’s go, sexpot. We’re in the tropics now.” He waggled the woman around in a revolting parody of a Calypso dance.
“That’s right. Keep everybody amused, Lester, for one minute,” Paperman said. “I’ve got to check on the meat.”
“What meat?” said Henny. “Where are you running off to?”
The air-cargo manager, a plump Kinjan in a business suit—named Elias Thacker, according to the plate on his desk—waved a wad of papers as Norman entered the office. “All fix. You got you meat. It all pile in de shade by de cargo depot. You drives you car right on de field troo de next gate and picks it up.” With great relief, Norman paid the charges and signed the papers. He found Cohn waiting outside the office. Norman asked him to load the meat in the station wagon, and take it back to town.
“Sure thing,” Cohn said. “Say, your Hazel looks pretty good.”
Norman shrugged. “She always does. Her boy friend seems a bit haggard.”
“Why, no. He’s full of the old fight. He wants to go down in an aqualung right away. Today. Says he swam for Chicago University.”
“Can you find him a lung with a slow leak?” said Paperman.
Cohn laughed and went off. Norman returned to the Gull Reef party, which sat now on benches in a huddle, the only people left in the terminal. Atlas, hunched and sagging, glowered at Norman as he came. “Norm, what’s the holdup? You got a bunch of hot and tired people here, including me.”
“What’s this meat that’s causing all the trouble?” Henny said.
“No trouble. Everything’s fine.”
Norman started to tell them about the Tilson party and the chateaubriands.
“Hey, Norm!” Cohn was calling to him from the field, on the other side of the locked plane gate about twenty feet away. “You did say steaks, didn’t you?”
“Of course. Chateaubriand steaks. Why?”
“Come and take a look. Better hurry.”
Norman ran to the gate, clambered up the hinges, and vaulted the high wire fence.
“Norman!” shouted Henny. “Who do you think you are, Tarzan? Stop that.”
“What now, for Jesus’ sake?” bellowed Atlas. “We’re dying here!”
Norman followed Cohn at a trot to the cargo depot, where eight frosty wire-fastened paper cartons were stacked on the porch, oozing blood. Large green labels on each package read San Juan Wholesale Meat Supply. Highest Grade Chicken Necks and Wings.
“Look here.” Cohn squatted, pointing to shipping labels pasted to the side of each carton, with typed addresses:
Grosvenor House
Barbados, B.W.I.
Rush—Perishable.
“I would guess there’s been some mistake, Norm,” he said. “They probably took off the wrong shipment.”
“It’s a nightmare,” said Paperman, clutching his head. “What gibbering lunatic in Barbados wanted eight cartons of chicken necks and wings air freight, for Christ’s sake?”
A loud growl of revving motors startled him.
“That plane! Bob, my steaks have to be on that plane. The cargo office has the airway bill!”
The airplane was swinging around for take-off, far down the runway. Paperman ran out into the knee-deep grass of the field, thrashing his arms in the air. The plane roared past him, lifting off the ground, and dwindled away into the sky. He came back to Cohn, and said with a deathly grin, “Maybe there’s another pile of cartons somewhere. My pile. Let’s go to the freight office.”
There were no other cartons. Mr. Thacker blamed the pilot. He had been in a hurry to take off again, and had rushed the cargo boys. This was always happening, he said. That particular pilot was a very unpleasant man. Probably the steaks had been under the pile of luggage bound for Barbados, Trinidad, and Caracas, and the pilot certainly should have given Mr. Thacker’s boys a chance to have a good look. But no, hurry, hurry, hurry, and naturally the boys, seeing packages of frozen meat, had assumed that this was the Gull Reef shipment.
“Yes, yes, but what’s going to happen to my steaks?” exclaimed Norman. “They’re off to Venezuela, defrosting as they go.”
“God knows,” said Mr. Thacker. “It is an unfortunate confusion.”
Lester Atlas barged into the office. “Norman, what the hell? They’re closing the goddamn doors of this terminal.”
Norman told him in great agitation what had happened. Atlas gave the cargo manager a grossly charming smile. “Where’s the next stop for that plane, Mr. Thacker?”
“Barbados,” said the manager.
“Barbados,” Atlas purred. “Now how about telephoning Barbados, Mr. Thacker, and telling them to take off those steaks, see, and put them in a freezer, and send them back on the next plane. Don’t you think that would be a nice idea?”
The cargo manager said cordially that this was irregular procedure, and out of the question. There would be the matter of the freezer charges; the Barbados people needed the airway bill before they could take the meat off the plane; he had no authority to make overseas calls; it was all the fault of Windward-Leeward Airways, but unfortunately their agent was gone for the day by now; and he himself was late for lunch. As he said this he started to walk away from his desk.
Atlas charged and blocked him, his smile turning to a horrid glare. “Listen, mister! This airport operates on a federal subsidy and I just happen to have a few connections in Washington,” he thundered. “I swear to Christ that Federal Aviation Agency men will be down here next week checking into the competence of a certain ELIAS THACKER”—he spat out the name like a curse—“if anything happens to those steaks. You hear me?” He ripped the telephone off its cradle. “Now, who do I talk to in Barbados? I’ll handle this, and then I’m calling my Washington attorney, right from this telephone, mister.”
Thacker rolled white-rimmed eyes at Paperman. “Dis de porson what on de cover of Time?”
“That’s the person,” Norman said.
The cargo manager sadly took the telephone. “I see what we can do.—Ovaseas?”
Atlas stood over the cargo manager as he put the call through. Norman meantime found Cohn, and asked him to take the guests to the Reef in the Land Rover; he would drive back the navy truck, he said, as soon as this business was wound up. “Okay,” Cohn said, “I guess we can get everybody into the Rover, all right, except maybe Hazel’s friend. There’s quite a mess of luggage, and all.”
“Splendid. I’ll bring him,” Norman said.
The Barbados call took a half hour to get through, and somehow Thacker arranged the return of the steaks, or said he did. Norman drove Atlas and Klug to Georgetown along the back road down the coast, which usually elicited raptures from newcomers to Amerigo; but Klug was not impressed. “The filth of this place,” he observed several times, mopping his face. He also said things like, “Don’t they have trash collection on this island?” and, “What’s the incidence of diseases like cholera and leprosy? I should think every other native would have something.”
It struck Paperman that, in truth, Amerigo was a damned dirty place. He had long ago stopped seeing the empty beer cans, sodden cartons and newspapers, and broken boxes that lined the roads, but now he saw them again. The Kinjan drivers habitually drank beer or fruit nectar as they went, and disposed of the cans with a cheerful toss through the window. Every half, mile or so there was a large iron trash bin, heaped to overflowing or wholly invisible under a garbage mound. Rusting wrecks of cars dotted the wayside. When a Kinja automobile expired, its corpse was dragged off the road and in a day or two was picked clean to the chassis; there it lay where it had fallen, oxidizing fast in the sun and sea air, but still requiring a few years to rot to earth. Cars in all stages of decomposition were part of the island scenery.
In his first days of enchantment, Norman had seen only the lovely views of hills and sea. In time he had noticed, and been repelled by, the refuse and the wrecks; then these had become a vague annoyance, just one more of the tropical irritations like the sand flies and the power failures. On balance he still thought Amerigo was a pretty place, if not exactly Eden. Klug obviously didn’t, but Norman had a feeling that Klug would never like the tropics. He was a perspirer. He was perspiring in streams, his shirt was streaked black, and his handkerchief was wet and gray.
Norman found Henny in his apartment, freshly combed and made up, wearing a brand-new, sheer creamy lace negligee, and nothing else. She had lost a bit of weight. “Oh, hi there,” she said, casually tightening a blue silk sash around her slim waist. “Is the meat crisis solved? I thought I’d go on ahead and get a shower before lunch. This is a nice little apartment. Airy, anyway.”
Norman took her in his arms.
“Really, Norm, what’s this bottle of champagne on ice here for? And all these gardenias and red lilies? I mean, brother, how corny can you get?” He was kissing her, and these sentences emerged between kisses. She went on, “Aren’t you hungry? I’m famished. Let’s have lunch. Norm, really, if I go drinking champagne before I have something to eat I’ll never make it down the stairs. Norman, for pete’s sake, it’s been all of three weeks. Don’t overdo it or I’ll get suspicious.”
“How’s your pain?” he mumbled into her hair.
“Pain? What pain? Oh, the pain. Funny, I had it like mad all the way down on the jet, but then it went away in that bouncy ride. The doctor says—Norman. Ye gods. Mr. Hot Hands.”
“I’m glad to see you, Henny.”
“That’s good,” Henny said, and she sighed deeply. “Oh, well, go ahead. Open the champagne.”
Cohn, Hazel, and Klug were finishing lunch at a large round table when Norman and Henny came out on the dining terrace considerably later, looking gay and somewhat silly. Hazel sat with her chin on her fist, yawning. The two men appeared to be arguing volubly. “What happened to you? Sit down,” Hazel said to her parents. “These fellows started on courage, and got on to bullfights, and I’m about to pass out.”
Klug gave an ironic little smile to the Papermans. “Grace under pressure is the topic. It all began with aqualunging, and branched out—”
“Let me finish and then I’ll shut up on this, Hazel,” Cohn said. “Sure, I admit that I’d be too scared to try to stab a wounded bull to death with a sword. I said that ten minutes ago. But I just don’t know if the act is courageous. Isn’t it just a cruel, dangerous form of commercial entertainment? I guess those fellows show grace under pressure, whatever that is, doing all the stylish dancing close to the horns. But I think the only courageous thing to do in a bull ring would be to try to stop the bullfight.”
“That’s not bad, actually,” Klug said, with a small reluctant smile, and an instructor’s approving nod. “You insist on a moral content to courage, then. You’re not content with an abstract, lovely arabesque of death and risk. I think you might develop that point of view in an article. It would have thrust, coming from a man in a hazardous occupation.”
“Me? I can barely sign my name,” Cohn said.
“Oh, come, come,” said Klug. “In any case, to get back to the point, will you, or can you, take me out for a dive in an aqualung? Or is it against regulations, and will I have to rent a lung somewhere? Because dive I will.”
“I guess you can make a dive with us if you want to,” Cohn said. “We’re going lobstering tomorrow morning on Cockroach Rock, and my commanding officer is pretty non-regulation.”
“Perfect,” said the Sending.
“Gosh, can I come?” said Hazel.
Cohn said to her with an affectionate light in his eye, “Want to make a dive, Hazel?”
“Horrors, no. I just want to see Shel go down and come up.”
Henny said, “Well, you’ll certainly see him go down.”
“The rest,” Norman said, “is a question of grace under pressure.”
Klug stood. “Do you have any idea where I can lay my head tonight? I want to get unpacked and into some cool clothes.”
“The island’s pretty tight,” said Norman. “Why don’t you telephone Casa Encantada? They might squeeze you in.”
“Casa Encantada—Enchanted House,” said Klug. “Sounds delightful. Bye, Hazel. I’ll be back here for dinner.” He leaned down and gave her a proprietary kiss, which she seemed to relish, her immense slanted eyes sparkling on the frogman.
“Casa Encantada?” Cohn wrinkled his forehead at Paperman, as Klug walked off. “I really think you’re guessing wrong, Norm.”
“What’s the matter with that place?” Hazel said suspiciously to her father. “You’re so mean. I know you. Has it got rats?”
“Birds,” Norman said. He glanced at his watch. “Do you know where Atlas is? He and I have an appointment at the bank soon.”
“He went swimming,” Hazel said. “What a horrid man! All night long I kept pretending I didn’t know him. Then he’d come, and paw me and kiss me and call me his niece. His niece! ‘Haw, haw, Hazel, give Unkie a kiss! Con permisso!’ And him smelling like an old highball with a wet cigar in it.”
“You have to understand Lester,” Henny said. “Lester is very lonesome.”
“I’ll bet. The lonesomest man in town.”
Cohn took Hazel off for a ride in a navy boat—an LCP, he called it—to see the harbor and the submarine base. Henny declared she was too excited to eat; and while Norman devoured a hot roast-beef sandwich with great appetite, she went roaming around the hotel. She returned full of enthusiasm for the new rooms. “Why, they’re all but done, and they’re fine! You won’t know those rooms when they’re decorated. But golly, Norm, who’s that menacing creep with the tiny squinty red eyes? The one that keeps sharpening a big machete? He gave me one look and I got the chills. You ought to get rid of him.”
“I’ll get rid of you first,” Norman said. “That’s Hippolyte. You be nice to him. He’s a little eccentric, but he’s a genius. He’s our handy man. He built those rooms. He can fix anything. He can do anything. He’s a savior. He’s irreplaceable.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” said Henny. “Where’s Janet West? Is she still in that same cottage?”
“Who? Iris? Well, yes, I suppose she is. I mean of course she is. I only mean I don’t know whether she’s there just now.”
“I want to ask her if Hassim got all the stuff I asked for,” Henny said, looking at Norman—so he thought—a shade appraisingly. “How is she? Has she been on any benders?”
“Janet? No, no, she’s really very sedate, at least around here she is. She keeps very much to herself, you know.”
“What do you call her? Janet or Iris?”
“Well, Henny, here on this island everyone calls her Iris. It’s just that you said Janet.”
Atlas appeared, looking unusually dignified in a gray featherweight suit and a dark tie. “Get a move on, Norm. We’re due at the bank.”
“Coming.” Norman drank up his coffee.
Henny said, “Can I phone Janet at her cottage?”
“Well, I guess so,” Norman said with elaborate lightness. “You might disturb her if she’s napping, that’s all. She generally shows up at the bar around five or six.”
“Oh, I’ll just give her a ring,” Henny said.
In the banker’s small, chilled office, increasingly choked with cigar smoke, Atlas and Llewellyn pored over large real estate maps and blue-bound accounting statements, and talked financial cabalisms, while Norman worried about a meeting between Iris and Henny. Iris would be discreet, if she were sober, but he didn’t think she was sober; and he feared Henny’s anger. It was not beyond her to get on an airplane and go straight home. She had given him notice after his coronary that she would endure no more of that nonsense. The warning had rung like iron.
Atlas rapped fat knuckles on a large blue-inked map. “Can I take this along for now, Llewellyn? Norman and I want to drive out and look at the property.”
“Naturally, Mr. Ot-loss.”
“Are there going to be any other bidders?” Atlas said, rolling up the map.
“I know of two others.”
Atlas looked down at the small banker sitting primly at his desk. “The property’s going to go for three,” he said jovially. “Maybe three and a quarter.”
The banker smiled. “I’m afraid it will not go then. The bank advanced three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Of course we must recover our princi-pal, at least.”
“How in the Christ could you lend so much money to a goofball with a balance sheet like that?”
Llewellyn danced his fingers together over his little potbelly. “He had syndicate financing of a quarter of a million from Florida, after all, which was all spent here.”
Atlas said, “Yes, and which those misguided Florida clucks will never see again.”
“I fear not. But you see, meantime Crab Cove is almost built, isn’t it? And somebody is bound to finish it. Then it will be an asset to our island.”
Lester grunted. “Jesus Christ, of course. What a setup! You’re sitting here like a croupier, aren’t you? Bring the suckers in, clean them out, and play the game again tomorrow. The house never loses.”
The banker spread his hands upward. “We exist to serve our expanding little community.”
“You’re all right, Llewellyn. We’re going to get along,” Atlas said. “Let’s roll, Norm.”
Crab Cove looked terrible to Paperman when they went walking on the property. Seen from the road, the rows of pagoda-like homes had quaint charm. Up close, the houses were visibly incomplete, abandoned in mid-construction as though the workers had fallen in a plague. Dirt-streaked toilets and bathtubs stood in the middle of living rooms; entrails of wire burst from walls; rubble of wood and plaster was everywhere, and the muddy paths between the houses were aswarm with mosquitoes and flies. Atlas squished from house to house, exclaiming with delight, sinking to his ankles in mud, leaving filthy tracks on the tile floors. A silent black caretaker trudged behind them, with a silly short-haired Kinjan dog, all bones, sores, and fleas; the animal never stopped leaping and barking.
“Norman, this thing is a gold mine,” Lester said, inserting his usual obscenities of enthusiasm in suitable places, “Three-fifty! Why, there’s twenty-five houses here. They’re finished. A hundred thousand cleans this place up and makes a park of it. All right, say a hundred fifty thousand. Can’t go higher. For half a million you’ve got yourself twenty-five Caribbean houses to sell, and these houses have got to go for forty each. Why, there’s three big bedrooms and two baths in them, patios, barbecues, and they’ve got beach rights. What am I talking about, forty? You know the thing to do, Norm? Furnish half of them. Get some smart faggot down from New York, you know, to fill them with that stylish crap from Japan and Denmark that comes in here duty-free. Then you got class. Norm, think! We’re talking about a profit of half a million dollars here, I swear. All we need is a selling job. Find families in the States who want to own a home in the Caribbean. There’s millions of them. Florida’s all finished. It’s cold and rainy, and full of those goddamn jellyfish.”
Paperman was unimpressed. Adas didn’t know Kinja; he couldn’t picture the horrible possibilities, nobody could without having lived on the island. The unfinished plastery-smelling houses of Crab Cove seemed to Norman full of the vengeful West Indian jumbies that had nearly ruined him at Gull Reef, and that had bankrupted Akers. He started to say that he was too busy to handle real estate, but Atlas cut him off. “Norman, will you wait till I buy the thing before you start arguing? If I bid it in, you’ve got yourself a finder’s fee of five thousand dollars. Is that bad for a start?” He looked at his watch. “Holy mackerel! Can you get me back to the Club in ten minutes? I’ve got a red-hot call coming in from New York.”
He told Paperman as they went jouncing back to town along a broken tar road heavily lined with rotting autos, that his Montana deal was coming to a head. It was the biggest thing he had ever touched. But as usual, he was in for a fight. Other operators had gotten wind of the situation, and had also started buying stock and lining up proxies. He was going to win out, but it would be a close thing. His real problem had been to find out who his opponents were. They were acting through a dummy, an obscure St. Louis lawyer, and it had taken Lester several weeks to figure out that a syndicate of rivals of his from Phoenix were the competition. He knew their money resources. They would back down before he did, so the temporary run-up of stock prices didn’t bother him, though he was rather extended now. “You can’t lose your nerve in this business, Norm,” he said jovially. “I’ve been in situations when I was hanging on by my teeth, and I was once damn near busted. This one isn’t half bad.”
Norman left him at the telephone in the office, and went to his apartment. The afternoon sun had heated it up as usual, despite the open windows. Henny was sprawled on the bed in her slip, fast asleep. A note was propped against the vase of flowers on the bed table:
Had some drinks and am passing out. Wake me up. I want to talk to you!!
This was an innocuous note, except to a guilty man. Norman thought it was charged with rage and menace, and he considered sneaking off. But that was pointless; he took heart, and shook her. Henny moaned, rolled on her back, and opened her eyes; and by the look in them Paperman knew that for the moment he was safe. She held out her arms sleepily.
“What’s all this?” he said, waving the note.
“Oh, yes.” Henny sat up and yawned. “Listen, Norm, did you say she wasn’t drinking? That woman’s going to be in bad shape if we don’t get her out of her cottage. She’s on a real toot. Empty bottles are all over the place. She drinks bourbon and water, then switches to a beer, and then has more bourbon and water, and I mean not that much water, you know? So far she’s all right, just a bit fuzzy in her talk maybe, but her mind is clear. She says this is how she loses weight, isn’t that ridiculous? She just drinks and takes it easy and reads for a week or so, she says, and never eats, and ten pounds melt off. She’s got dusty yellow Marxist books piled around her bed, Strachey and Mike Gold and all that, and a stack of old seventy-eight records on her phonograph. It’s sort of eerie, Norm. She just talked on and on about her first husband, and Hollywood and the Party. She’s completely back in the thirties. It was all kind of wild, but fascinating. I asked her to have dinner with us but she said she didn’t want to intrude, and anyway she’s not eating. How about you calling and urging her? She likes you, though she thinks you’re sort of ridiculous, the way I do. I died laughing when she told me about the ants. Why didn’t you write me about the ants?”
“Did she—why is she on the booze? Did she say?”
“No. Has she got a boy friend here? She must have. I’ll bet she had a fight with him. That’s how she’s acting.”
“I’ll try to get her to come to dinner.”
Atlas was smoking a cigar in a lobby armchair, leaning forward with one elbow on his knee. His face was sagging and gray. His eyes looked straight ahead, unseeing, as two pretty girls went laughing by in bikinis, their billowy white flesh aquiver.
“Everything all right, Lester?” Norman ventured to ask. “Did you get your call?”
“Eh? What? Oh, sure, Norm. I got it. Everything’s going to be fine. It’s one of those things. Come on and I’ll buy you a drink. I need a drink or four.”
“Sure. I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”
Norman went to the Pink Cottage, and halted outside. On the phonograph Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr were blasting out Friendship. Meadows began to bark, and after a moment Iris opened the door.
“Well, bless my soul if it isn’t Joe Hill,” she said, “alive as you or me.”
Paperman was relieved to see that she looked all right. He had feared to find an unkempt stumbling wreck, but Iris was well-groomed and erect in a charming flowered housecoat he hadn’t seen before. Her eyes were too bright, her speech was too emphatic, and she was holding a drink that was too dark.
“Hello, Iris.”
“Come in, come in. What are you drinking? You’re smack in time for the cocktail hour. Where’s Henny? She’s looking yummy, isn’t she? Thin as a rail. That’s for me, boy. I’m not eating again until my scale’s down ten pounds. What did you say you were drinking? Shove a couple of those books aside and sit down. I’ve been looking up a few things.”
“Iris, all I wanted to say—do you mind if I turn that phonograph down?”
“I’ll do it, honey. I’m a nut, I like it to shake the walls.” She jabbed a button. The sudden silence in the cottage was more oppressive than the loud music. “Yes, Norm? What can I do for you?”
It seemed absolutely incredible to Norman Paperman that last night he had made love to this woman. She was a sad, worn stranger.
“Iris, that’s nonsense about not eating for a week. You’ll get sick as a dog, you know that, and you’ll end up in a hospital.”
“So will you, Norm, whether you eat or not. As a matter of fact you’re just out on a short parole, aren’t you, dear? But don’t worry, Meadows needs looking after, and I’m not going to the hospital on this bloody rock. I can take very good care of myself, Norm. I’m an old hand at that, and if I get to feeling at all bad my doggie and I will head right out on a plane back to San Diego, where my folks will take care of us. All right?”
“Henny is worried about you, and so am I, that’s all.”
“Henny’s a good scout. Do you want me to get out of the cottage? Do you think I’ll embarrass you? I really won’t, but I don’t want to add to your problems, Norm. I’ll get out if you’ll feel easier that way. I can find another place.”
“Good God, Iris, are you trying to make me feel like a bastard? You needn’t work at it.” He put his hand to his brow. She was standing near him, and she caught the hand.
“Darling, no! No! Of all things! Why, you fool, what have you got to feel bad about?”
“Iris, come to dinner with us. Really, on all counts, it’s the best thing for you to do.”
She let his hand drop, and smiled, and looked drunk. “Take my word for it, Norman, I can’t eat.”
He got up and went to the door.
“Norman,” she said in a different, bashful tone.
He turned. “Yes, Iris?”
“Well, it’s just—Oh, hell, look here, I sort of thought you didn’t know. I was almost sure anyway. After all, I was playing it that way right along. I was putting you on the defensive last night, dear, women do that, but it was lousy. I’m sorry.”
Paperman was unable to answer, because his throat swelled shut. He went out.