“Is this the contraband?” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“Contraband? What do you mean?”
“Lloyd’s tape recorder.” Lloyd held up a tiny microphone. “Under the chesterfield. He listens to everything. It’s his hobby.”
I gaped at them.
“I must say I am disappointed, Mr. Rennison. Very disappointed. I’d have thought you would go straight to the police. In my opinion drugs are a scourge. You should visit certain parts of Boston, or New Haven.”
“But — you don’t think — if you heard on the tape recorder...”
She held up her hand to stop me. Then she pointed at the box (I saw where Lloyd had learned the gesture), an Old Testament prophet. “So what are you doing? Trying to hide the package?”
There was no point in denial. A brief pause. Mrs. Arbuthnot said, “Tell you what. Let’s put it in the cello case.”
“How on earth? — that would mean opening the package...”
“Let us not be hypocrites, Mr. Rennison. Lloyd will look after it.”
I busied myself with the breakfast. Lloyd came out of the bedroom twenty minutes later, lugging the cello case. It seemed to be bulging, but it was closed. Lloyd became vocal.
“Had to remove the extra strings,” he said, “and the tool kit. But it’s all in there now, packed around the cello.” He tapped the case with the flat of his hand. “I used masking tape. Fifteen little bags, like packages of icing sugar...”
I interrupted him. “Yes, certainly, all right then. How about another cup of coffee, some waffles?”
The police reached our end of the village after lunch, a fat sergeant and four men in uniform, the same group from the jeep I had seen in the morning. Two of the men were smoking cigars.
“Excuse me, sir, a few questions. Mind if the lads have a look around while we talk?” He was English. The soldiers were black.
“You have a search warrant?”
The sergeant removed his hat and scratched his head. He looked tired. “No. No, sir, that we don’t. But the drug squad, they do — every house in the village. They’re concentrating on the obvious places, the bars, the boathouses up the swamp. Very thorough they are. Look everywhere, tear up the floors, they piss in the cistern. Don’t miss a trick. And good with their hands, if you take my meaning. Shall I get them?”
I stood to let the men pass. They glanced in the cupboards, under the beds. Lloyd hovered in the background.
“Lovely view,” said the sergeant, gazing out the double doors to the terrace. “You hear things at night? See boats entering the harbor, like?”
“No,” I lied.
When I first came to Pigeon Cay, I had been amazed at how blind people were to the shadowy world that existed parallel to their own, how they ignored it. I came to understand. You didn’t want the police dragging you in to sign statements. You didn’t want them camped on your doorstep. You didn’t want trouble. Besides, smuggling was deeply entwined in the economy of the islands, always had been. I knew. I saw the money every day.
The sergeant turned to the cello case leaning against the wall. “What’s this, then?”
“A cello,” I rasped. Then, regaining my composure, “it belongs to my houseguest, the distinguished American cellist, Alexandra Amelia Arbuthnot. No doubt you have heard her. She is on tour. She is giving a concert at the Majestic Hotel this evening.”
“Right, let’s have a look.” He motioned to one of the soldiers. I watched frozen, horrified.
The door of the bathroom opened. Mrs. Arbuthnot emerged in a cloud of steam. She wore a long silk dressing gown that clung to her robust figure. Her hair hung wet about her head as though she were a sea goddess. She was armed with the hair dryer. She said, “Do not touch that case.”
“Eh?” said the sergeant.
“The instrument inside that case is two hundred years old. It is extremely delicate. If the damp sea air touches it, untold damage will result. My tour will be in ruins. I am a guest of your government. I shall hold you responsible.” She returned to the bathroom and shut the door.
The sergeant stared after her for a moment. Then he said, “Right, then, we’re on our way. Come along, lads.”
We passed the other group of police as we carried the cello case from my house to the hotel later that afternoon.
“Tell me,” I said to Mrs. Arbuthnot, “are you really a guest of the government?”
“In a manner of speaking. Their representative stamped my passport. By the way, you needn’t wait for us after the concert. There’s going to be a small reception. Madame Grumbacher is giving us dinner.”
To Madame Grumbacher’s credit, the Palm Court looked quite believable. The chesterfields and armchairs had been replaced with round tables and folding chairs. Footlights had been borrowed from Methodist Church Drama Club. The stage was set up in the corner with an upright piano, and a chair and music stand for Mrs. Arbuthnot. Behind the piano was one of several enormous potted palms. There were seats for perhaps seventy-five in the room, and all were taken. Another ten or fifteen people stood at the bar.
Lloyd fussed for about twenty minutes, setting up his machines. Then he vanished.
The police arrived halfway through the concert, five of them, the ones in plainclothes and dark glasses. They stood at the back and surveyed the crowd. A murmuring and shuffling of chairs as people turned. Mrs. Arbuthnot’s cello case lay closed on the floor beneath the piano. After ten or fifteen minutes the police left, clumping along the wooden floor in counterpoint to “Lara’s Theme.”
After the concert, I returned home and had dinner by myself, one of the casseroles that Mrs. Hamish prepared for me twice weekly. I opened a bottle of wine and took my plate onto the terrace. It was a warm night, and windless; the putrid smell of the mangrove swamp wafted across the harbor. At around eleven, I saw two lumbering police boats head out towards the channel. The sweep was over. In the distance I heard the engine of a small plane.
I was awakened in darkness. Something jarred the house. I heard shouting. Someone was throwing things at the walls; any minute they seemed likely to hit a window. I grabbed my dressing gown from the hook. About fifteen boys and men were gathered in the blackness of the garden. I recognized a few of them as from the Riverside. There was the smell of liquor. I saw the flash of pool cues. Someone said, “Where’s the spook, boss?”
There had been several arrests that day among the smaller dealers who hung around Annie’s and the Riverside Tavern. Now the police were gone, and they wanted their revenge.
“It’s four in the morning. Come back tomorrow. You want me to call Constable MacMahon?” This was a hollow threat, and they knew it. I heard a commotion behind me; some of the men had entered the house by forcing the terrace doors. I turned, and the others swarmed past me. The bedroom lights were switched on.
But there was no one there. Madame Grumbacher had spirited them away. Lloyd must have come back during the concert and taken their luggage. Their flight only confirmed the belief that Lloyd had been undercover, that he’d brought the police. But now he was gone, and they were mollified.
Schindler was not. His voice came over the radio first thing in the morning, squawking my name before I had finished shaving. I picked an open channel. “You’re phoning about your documents?” I said.
“My documents?”
“The package. I assumed it was documents, the way it was sealed.”
“Documents? That is what you assumed?”
“That is what I assumed. Were they important documents?”