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“Mr. Rennison!” Her hair was wild. She was more excited than the time the Russian satellite had turned up on the beach.

“Yes, Winnie,” I said. “What is it?”

She stared at me, goggle-eyed. I thought I might have to go around the desk and slap her, but suddenly she shouted, “Fire! Fire!”

“What? Here?”

“Riverside Tavern!” she said. “The boathouse!”

I noticed something sweet and oddly familiar in the morning air. I followed Winnie out as the fire bell rang — Constable MacMahon pulling the rope, rousing the volunteers. To no avail it turned out: when they went to start the truck, the battery was missing. (Suspicious, people said later.) But there would have been little chance of putting out the fire anyway: the Riverside boathouse was built on piers about fifteen yards out in the lagoon. The catwalk had burned by the time Winnie and I arrived, and the flames were dying down. Thick smoke lay over the harbor. A crowd had gathered along the path. They were laughing, joking.

“Smell it, man!” said Vero, the bartender from the Majestic. He made a show of inhaling, rolled his eyes. Marijuana smoke filled the air. Out in the harbor I saw Schindler, owner of the Riverside, standing on the deck of his cruiser. He wore a long white dressing gown and dark glasses. He stood perfectly still. He did not look concerned to me.

With a crash and a hiss, the floor of the boathouse fell into the harbor. Wild applause from the crowd.

When I returned to the bank after lunch, there was a cardboard box on my desk — a foot and a half long, maybe a foot wide and a foot high, sealed with thick tape.

“Winnie, what is this?”

“Mr. Schindler’s boat boy brought it in for safekeeping. Said you’d know.”

But I didn’t know. I picked the package up. At least fifteen pounds. We had a safe large enough to hold cash for the day, occasionally overnight, and perhaps a few documents.

“Winnie, this parcel will never fit into our safe. You shouldn’t have accepted it.” She shrugged her shoulders. A copy of the receipt she had given Schindler lay on my desk.

“He’s a good customer, Mr. Rennison. You always say to me, we have to treat the customers nice. The customer is always right. That’s what you always say, Mr. Rennison. You do.”

I heard the sound of the Land Rover on the harbor road. An unexpected visit. Burnett was sweating when he came in, although his iron grey hair remained firmly in place. I stood, prepared to accompany him across the road for a glass of the special rum they kept for him, but there were to be no pleasantries: he waved me back to my chair with a flutter of the handkerchief he had been using to wipe his brow. He said, “Go away, Winnie.” When she’d gone, he said to me, “You’ve noticed these bloody airplanes.”

“Airplanes?”

“Bloody gnats circling the island. Spotter planes. Now the police are coming. A bloody swoop.”

We had two kinds of drugs on Pigeon Cay. Bales of marijuana came from Jamaica and Mexico for local use and for shipment elsewhere. And there was the more sinister business of cocaine. Those who speculated about these things — and we did so in low voices; both the cartels and the DEA were supposed to have informants on Pigeon Cay — believed that fisherman picked up packages that were dropped by air or ship along the lee side of the island, down past the sound. The drugs were transferred to speedboats that made the runs to Miami under cover of darkness. You could sometimes hear the rumble of engines at night. From time to time the police made sweeps of the islands — what Burnett was talking about — looking for trawlers, speedboats, anything they could find. But they’d never been here, to Pigeon Cay.

“Explains the fire,” I said.

“Fire?”

“The boathouse of the Riverside burned down this morning.”

“Ah. Actually, Schindler was out to see me last night,” said Burnett. “Don’t like the fellow. Still...”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“Wants a favor of some kind. Don’t know what. Sending him along to see you.”

Of course. This was the purpose of Burnett’s visit. He would have heard about the police from Schindler, who would know from his contacts in the government. Everybody was on the take, from the prime minister on down. Burnett wouldn’t want to know about the favor. By then I knew I had already done it.

I called Healey, asked him to come over to my house later. When he arrived, I pointed at the package on the kitchen table. “From Schindler. He wants me to put this in the safe.”

“Cocaine?” said Healey. He was less discreet than the rest of us. I told him I wasn’t able to say.

“What about Burnett?” said Healey.

“You know Burnett — see no evil, hear no evil.” We never said out loud that Schindler was a drug dealer. He was one of the bank’s best customers.

“So, why don’t you put it in the safe?”

“Because it won’t fit unless we open it, if then. And if we open it, we know what it is.”

“Yes. I see your point,” said Healey. “Let’s keep the package under your bed for now. We don’t know for sure that the sweep will happen.”

Saturday night at the club was a special event: Burnett’s talk on Woman in the Modern World. We were behind in these matters. In the cities of North America, lesbians inseminated via turkey basters were having babies with the help of midwives and supportive friends. On Pigeon Cay, the gentlemen were bemoaning the loss of the old rituals — the wife dressed for dinner, martinis at the ready, when her husband came home. I joined Healey, Burnett, and old Tom Hargreaves at the Snug Bar. The conversation turned to the topic of our visitors. Hargreaves said that a view was developing in the village that Mrs. Arbuthnot should stop buying. The shopkeepers had been giving her credit on the strength of her connection with the bank — she was a friend of Burnett’s, and she was staying with me — but the bills were mounting and they were becoming alarmed.

“Stretching a point to call her a friend,” said Burnett. “Had a letter from a chap in Boston. Good cause and so forth — music for natives. Said why not, we’d put her up.”

“We meaning me.” I said. “And there’s two of them.”

“Didn’t know anything about the son,” said Burnett. “Sorry about that.”

“What about those tape recorders?” said Healey. “He’s been all over the island. They think he’s looking for drop sites. They think he’s with the police.”

“Is that possible?” said Burnett.

At that moment the bell rang, the commodore calling the meeting to order.

The Royal Bahamian Police Force arrived on Sunday, the same day as the concert.

“They’re going house to house,” said Lloyd, back from his early morning walk looking in people’s windows. He was more animated than I had ever seen him.

“Impossible,” I said. “That would be illegal. They would need search warrants and so on.”

But when I stopped in at Drover’s to pick up the Miami papers, I saw them, a group of men in shiny black shoes and synthetic jackets coming up the Queen’s Highway from the pier. They wore dark sunglasses. You weren’t supposed to catch their eye, but how could you tell when they wore those glasses. I saw another group, in uniforms, heading out along the road to North Point in a jeep.

Back at my house, I rushed to the bedroom and hauled the package out. I stared at the thing, racking my brains. I looked up; was there a space in the rafters? Not enough pitch — and I couldn’t see a door. Then I thought: the cistern; I would suspend the box on a rope from the roof of the new tank. I grabbed the package and ran into the garden. The trapdoor to the cistern had two metal handles as though you could flip it open, but the door was concrete; it would require a tractor to move it. A plane swooped in low from the west. I stooped over the package, imagining that they might be able to spot it from the air. When the plane was out of sight, I carried the box back into the house, trying to conceal it under my shirt. Mrs. Arbuthnot and Lloyd were standing by the window. They had evidently watched my entire performance.