Second Wind Page 24

  The water slowed the bullets’ speed, but not enough. Refraction as a really useful shield in water worked better the deeper the target, as the bent rays of light made the target appear where it was not. If one shot at the apparent victim, one would miss the real one. Deep water ... I gulped air and swam downwards, and the bullets missed, but Odin hadn’t taxed my lungs more.

  It seemed ages, this time, before the floodlights poured onto the terrace and pool, until the swarm of navy blue uniforms erupted from the bushes with sirens and bullhorns and shouts and meaningful guns ... It seemed familiar that I should be ordered at rough gunpoint to get out of the water and to kneel and be pressed down with a heavy hand at my neck, and be screamed at in gibberish in my ear and have handcuffs clicked onto my wrists behind my back.

  The police weren’t the same ones as those that had come before. These were if anything more afraid and in consequence more bullying. As I’d virtually summoned them to save my life, I couldn’t complain.

  Across the pool, Michael, in the same ignominious kneeling position, was talking his way out, “A bit of fun, officer, merely a game.” and claiming friendship with the police captain and with the commissioner further up the scale.

  Arnold, along with Evelyn and Amy, could none of them understand why they should be treated this way. It was outrageous. The police would be demoted, every one.

  “What’s your take-home pay?” Michael was asking. “I could double it.”

  Into this overdramatic scene ambled Robin Darcy, yawning, clad in a silk dressing robe, seeking out the highest blue rank and apologizing that his guests should have set off all the intruder alarms. “Very sorry, lieutenant. The alarm sets itself on a timer to summon you automatically.” Darcy promised the false alarm wouldn’t happen again. He was afraid his guests had been playing boisterous party games. It was his fault entirely for having forgotten to switch off the system. He would of course be pleased to contribute as usual to the Police Ball Fund.

  Robin Darcy, with small anxious-looking steps, then accompanied the lieutenant around, followed by a disappointed blue uniform wielding an undo-handcuffs key. They came with liberation via a spitting-mad Amy, a loudly furious Evelyn (“in my own house!”) and a growling deep bass from Arnold.

  Michael, though violently threatening unspecified revenge on everyone, was unlocked also, to my extreme dismay.

  “We might have booked all your guests for aggressive behavior,” the top rank said, slotting away his notebook and pen, “if it weren’t for Sheila.”

  Darcy reminded him that I still knelt there patiently, though in fact at the time the patience was at least half too much tiredness to do anything else.

  “Who is Sheila?” Darcy asked.

  The blue uniform raised his eyebrows. “Hurricane,” he said succinctly. “We don’t want our cells filled with play-boys.”

  His assistant unlocked my wrists, but Michael had more or less pulverized my ability to stand. The lieutenant, seeing it, warned that hurricane or no hurricane Mr. Ford would find himself behind bars if there was any more trouble.

  The policemen, job done, put up their guns and departed, and Evelyn, in bossy hostess mode, shepherded her guests, even including Michael, back into the house. She gave me merely a furious glance and left me outside.

  I sat in one of the pool chairs and gazed at the peaceful sky.

  I supposed I could put up with the discomfort that washed in waves through my protesting body; I could put up with it better if anything had been achieved, but it was too soon to say.

  Somewhere distant in the house a telephone rang and was answered. The security firm, I remembered, checked that all was well in the household, after a police raid ending without arrest.

  It was thanks to Sheila that there had been no arrest.

  Robin Darcy, alone, came down from the terrace and took the chair beside me.

  “Thank you,” I said, and he nodded.

  He sat for a while without speaking, watching me as if I were some kind of beetle. All he could see, I imagined, was the stiff soreness that made movement a trial, the legacy of Michael’s ferocious fists and feet.

  I asked if Michael was still around, and Darcy said no, because of the police warning Michael had gone tail-down to the house he and Amy owned north of Miami.

  Like a fed lion, I thought. Sated.

  “He can be brutal when he gets going,” Darcy said.

  “Yes.”

  Minutes passed.

  I said, “Will you fly with me tomorrow to Trox Island?”

  He stood up abruptly, as if I’d drawn a knife on him, and jerkily walked a circuit round the pool. Returning, he sat as before and asked, to my surprise, “How do you see me?’

  I smiled involuntarily. “When I went to Caspar Harvey’s lunch that Sunday,” I said, “Bell Harvey told me you’d been born clever, and I wasn’t to be fooled by your cozy appearance.”

  “Bella! I didn’t think of her as so perceptive.” He sounded put out by it.

  “I listened to her,” I said, “but on that day I didn’t imagine I needed to pay much attention to what she said.”

  “And on the whole, I thought you were hardly bright enough for your job.”

  He sounded suddenly depressed, saddened beyond expectation, as if he’d lost a major game. He had believed in himself too much, I thought.

  “I listened to Bell,” I said, “and during our stay with you and with Michael and Amy, and after our disaster in Odin, where I learned about the Unified Trading Company, I saw that you were the one who knew how to achieve things, and because I liked you, I regretted very much that you dealt in deadly metals.”

  He said, “And do you now think I don’t deal in those metals?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I’m certain you do.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  I said, “Your purpose is inside out.”

  “Perry ...” He was restless. “You talk in riddles.”

  “Yes, so do you. You sent me a message to find my way through a labyrinth, and ... well ... I have.”

  Robin Darcy looked stunned.

  I said, “You are John Rupert’s superior officer.”

  I waited for him to deny it, but he didn’t. He looked pale. Breathless. Horrified.

  “John Rupert and Ghost consult you,” I said, “and you tell them what to do. They are part of a hierarchy of which you are the top.”

  Robin Darcy stared, blinked, took off his owl frames, polished them needlessly, replaced them, cleared his throat and asked how I came to such a conclusion.

  I merely said that that morning I’d understood the workings of instinct and impulse. “And it simply crept into my mind,” I said, “that if I trusted my instinct in liking you, then you weren’t evil, and if you weren’t evil you weren’t selling death, you were more likely defeating those that did. If you see things that way round it means that when you gather together a whole lot of destructive transfers, you prevent the worst ones from going through, and sometimes you manage to lose others, but you yourself remain unsuspected by your fellow Traders. You lead a very dangerous double life. Michael would probably kill you if he found out. So you needed me ... or someone like me ... to be your eyes, without me knowing it. Everything I told John Rupert and Ghost went straight to you.” I smiled ruefully. “We’d have done better if we’d talked face to face.”

  Robin was shocked. “I couldn’t have done that.”

  I guessed, “It was outside ‘need to know’?”

  He heard my irony, but he’d long trodden a double path where “need to know” divided life from death.

  “So ... will you come to Trox?” I asked again.

  “What about Sheila?”

  “I’m afraid she may be along for the ride.”

  “Who’s going with you?” he asked.

  “You, me and the pilot.”

  “What pilot? Not Kris?”

  “Not Kris,” I agreed.

  He sat in another long silence, then he
said, “You’re not fit to go anywhere. Why are we going?”

  “Hope,” was all I said, but he turned up the next morning at the General Aviation aircraft park at Miami Airport, early, as arranged.

  I introduced him to Unwin and reunited him with the airplane, which was the same one, chartered from Downsouth, that he had flown in to Trox before.

  Unwin gave me a broad grin and patted Robin Darcy on the back. Amused at the mixed Darcy expression at this piece of presumption, I checked again with our pilot how our trip looked for weather as I stowed my holdall in the cabin.

  “The lady Sheila,” he said, “has overnight picked up her skirts and hiked northeast. She’s Category 2 and building, and if I lived on Grand Cayman Island, I’d be hiring me this morning to go and fly me out.”

  Long years a professional, Unwin moved economically around the airplane and forgot nothing. I’d thought Kris a good pilot, but Unwin flew like silk. In his hands Trox Island appeared punctually in its coordinates and the solidified grass strip accepted the rented turbo-prop twin without lurch or slither. When he had braked to a standstill near the ruined church, Unwin climbed down alone and walked off by himself towards the remains of the village.

  It seemed strange for me to be back on that land and stranger still to have Robin Darcy beside me.

  As we sat in the seats behind the pilot’s, I said to Robin, “You heard Amy say the island’s hers?”

  He nodded. “She maintains it’s hers as no one else had set foot on it for months. Some sort of ancient law. I believe.”

  “She said I’d never been here.”

  “Yes,” Robin said, explaining, “she wants her claim unopposed.”

  “I suppose you know,” I said to Darcy, “she stands to make a million or so from pasteurization techniques if she can keep that herd of cattle isolated. You must actually know that, as you helped her chase off the whole population with your radioactive mushrooms. You came back and tested that herd again in radiation protection suits the day you took me blindfolded to Cayman. The herd isn’t radioactive and will be worth several fortunes ... maybe.”

  “How do you mean ... maybe?”

  I said, resigned, “I drank the milk of those cows, and it gave me a unique illness now called Mycobacterium paratuberculosis Chand-Stuart X.”

  He said with understanding, “So that’s why you were in that hospital! But you’ve obviously thrown it off. That won’t prove that you were on the island.”

  “The antibodies will.”

  He said, “Oh,” and then, “Oh,” again. “And culture dishes by the hundred, I suppose.”

  “Those too.”

  “So you can prove you were on the island:’

  I said, “Not only that. Amy won’t like the illness you can get if there is a glitch in pasteurization. It’s a fierce disease, acute at first and lingering after. It seems I still have weeks of treatment ahead before I’m cured.”

  I didn’t care much to think about it. and to change the subject I said to Robin, “What became of the original folder full of letters in strange foreign scripts?”

  “The one you saw here, that you managed to get out of the safe?”

  “That one,” I agreed.

  “I was astounded when John Rupert reported you’d seen it.”

  “But you came back here for it.” I said. “And you took it away the day you shipped me blindfolded to Cayman, and thank you for that.”

  He smiled. “It didn’t fool you, though.”

  “Just saved me from a watery grave.”

  “Michael was all for dumping you”—Robin nodded, and went on with gloom—“and he was also keen to get on with making profits from the orders in the folder, as there had already been too many delays, so he took it when I wasn’t looking.”

  Robin had had trouble with the Traders insisting on doing their own thing. He said, “Only last night Michael told me he wasn’t very good with all those different scripts so he had given the folder to Amy to put it back in the safe here on Trox Island with all her cow stuff while he worked out what to do, and as far as I know it’s still there. That must be one of the reasons why Michael will fight anyone anywhere, because he’s made a fool of himself.”

  “Do you want that folder?” I asked.

  “Of course. But the safe won’t open.”

  “Who says?” I asked.

  “Amy says it won’t open so no one can take her cattle records.”

  “It might not matter,” I said. I brought Jason Wells’s careful envelope of photos out of my holdall. “I took all of these on the island,” I said. “The first ones are of the raked clean mushroom sheds before the hurricane, and of the village and cattle before the hurricane, and the last one of cows and the three of the foreign scripts are from after.”

  Robin looked with fascination at the pictures of the scripts.

  “I’ll use these,” he said. “Better than nothing.”

  I opened the aircraft’s rear unfolding door and stairs and, blown sideways by the wind, I walked down them, not blindfolded and with clothes and shoes on, and Robin hesitantly stopped, holding onto the handrails.

  “Come on,” I encouraged him. “There’s no danger of radiation. The residents here were scared away by something like George Loricroft’s little packet of alpha particle powder, which gave off a lot of noise but made no one sick.”

  Robin shrugged and followed me down the steps, and we walked in the blustery wind together towards the second of the thick-walled huts.

  There were bulls about in the ruined village, and Friesian cows that mooed and rubbed against me, as I patted them with fondness despite the rotten time they’d given me. They were, after all, the world’s only source of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis Chand-Stuart X.

  Robin and I went into the hut away from the gathering gale, and looked at the safe.

  Robin tried 4373 3673 (HERE FORD) and nothing happened.

  “Amy’s right,” he said, frustrated. “It doesn’t open.”

  “Try 3673 4373.” I said, “FORD HERE.”

  Robin gave me a gruesome look of skepticism but punched in the numbers. Still nothing, still immovable door.

  “Hopeless,” Robin said. “Amy was right.”

  “Amy was right,” I agreed. “Amy knows her way about video rentals, and she may know about pasteurization, and she also knows about safes.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “There’s no electricity on this island,” I said.

  “I know that...”

  “So what powers the safe door?”

  Robin, clever in all ways except in elementary science, frowned and didn’t answer.

  “Batteries,” I said.

  I slid downwards the small metal plate located under the display of numbers and letters, and there, side by side, stood a row of three very ordinary double-A batteries.

  “But,” Robin objected, “it’s got batteries in it, and it still doesn’t open.”

  I said, “It’s got three batteries, but it’s got space for four.” I fished in my holdall, brought out the unopened pack of four double A’s that I had bought with my camera, and, removing the three old ones, I pushed the four new ones into place and closed the flap.

  I pressed 4373 3673, listened to the sharp click, lifted the flat lever upwards and opened the door.

  Inside there was Amy’s row of cattle files and one familiar buff folder. I lifted it out, checked its contents and with a slightly ceremonial gesture handed it to Robin.

  Astonished, he said, “How did you know how to open it?”

  I answered him, “I spent four days alone on this island. I know this safe well. I discovered its password. I checked its batteries. I just couldn’t decipher the scripts.”

  “I’ll get that done,” Robin said. “I’ll use them. Nothing you have done will be wasted.”

  EPILOGUE

  Unwin flew through Hurricane Sheila.

  He flew three straight passes through the eye at ten thousand feet and leveled the
fuel in the tanks as a matter of course. Downsouth’s turbo-prop twin, in his hands, took Category 3 pressures and wind speeds as merely numbers that he dictated for me to write down.

  I didn’t weep in the eye. The science was accurate, but the heart-wrench was missing.

  Robin looked thoughtful and was airsick.

  I carried the rescued folder in the holdall and Robin showed me, a few weeks later, several short handwritten notes in Hebrew, Greek, Russian and Arabic.

  “They say thank you,” he said.

  By then I’d returned to the BBC and put on for the winter the Edwardian cape-coat version of me, and over in Kensington John Rupert in pleased surprise said his superior officer wanted Perry Stuart raised to “need to know” status.

  I and Ghost, thin white-haired grandfather, bounced vigorous young tempests into unputdownable textbooks that I signed by the hundreds in schools, and after that in five hundreds in bookstores.

  I seldom saw Kris. One sordid anecdote too many scuppered his job finally with the BBC, despite his Norse god Flook-alike presence. No longer talking of trains, he spent the insurance from the Luton crunch on a drama course and let out his extravagant nature playing superheroes.

  Bell, who phoned me often for advice as a brother, swung as ever between love and exasperation, nuptials on, nuptials off, indecision rules, O.K.

  Behind my back my faithful Jett van Els conspired with my grandmother to make my Monday morning impulse irreversible, but with contentment we came in time to “I do,” “I do,” and I gave her a ring and a promise.

  Under the successful exterior, the damage inflicted on me by Michael Ford still stung as a painful memory, try as I might to ignore it. To have been smashed to a standstill by a thug, I told myself, wasn’t an abject disgrace, it was one of life’s little hiccups. Try telling that to the winds!

  In Robin’s dangerous double life, the Unified Trading Company faded away, to be replaced by new recruits who understood from day one that action first, report later was the wrong way round.

  The Traders atrophied, the Select Group bloomed.

  Evelyn left Robin with a goodbye note.

  Jett stayed at home when Robin Darcy and I drove from his home in Miami to Florida’s capital, Tallahassee, to hear Amy’s claim to be the owner of Trox Island.