His face was pink in the light of the flame; the lamps weren't on in here yet and the place looked like a jungle, the plants beginning to crowd in as the dying sun fired the walls and windows.
'Other people?'
Monck let smoke trickle out of his mouth, watching the huge man on the ladder. 'You'll be taking a look at Proctor, but it won't stop there. You didn't bring much baggage, but you can do a little shopping when you've the time.' He faced me suddenly, the wickerwork creaking, his faded blue eyes resting quietly on mine. 'I'm fully conversant with your record, and it must have occurred to you that Mr Croder wouldn't lightly toss you the chore of checking on a sleeper who's started sending in funny signals.'
This man, for all his baggy suit and thinning hair, wasn't coming across as a semi-retired staffer put out to grass in the dependencies. For one thing I knew the tone: he was telling me precisely what he wanted me to know and that was all, and he answered only those questions that called for it.
But I decided to take him head-on: 'Did Bureau One want me out here?'
The big overhead fans sent the smoke streaming away on the sticky air. His eyes were still on me, and when he was ready he said, 'Surely Mr Croder told you.'
'At the time, I wasn't ready to listen.'
Softly, 'Then I hope you're listening now.'
Glass crashed again and it sent a flicker along the nerves. It hadn't been bullshit, then, on Croder's part: the head of the Bureau had told his Chief of Signals to send this particular executive out here and I hadn't believed it because there wasn't even a mission on the board, but Monck had spelt it out for me a minute ago: You'll be taking a look at Proctor, but it won't stop there.
But Croder must have known that the mention of Bureau One would have got me out of London with no trouble at all – he hadn't needed to use Fisher like that.
'You say it won't stop,' I told Monck, 'at Proctor. But are we talking about an actual mission?'
He looked away, picking a bit of cigar-leaf off his lip and studying it with abstract care. A plump woman came through the doorway with her arms on her hips.
'Justin! You come on down from there, I need your he'p in the kitchen, man! Now you jus' come on down!'
'This stuff gonna fall on people's heads!'
'Ne' mind about they heads, they have to watch out for theyselves. You c'm'on down now, y'hear me?'
Monck didn't say anything until the huge man had got down the ladder and gone out. 'An actual mission… well I'm not sure, you see. My job -' he faced me again with a sudden swing of his head – 'is to keep you out here in the Caribbean until such time as things develop. Until we know where best to deploy you. Does that -?' He waited.
'Not really.'
'I didn't think so.' Shifting his weight in the chair, "I'll put it like this. Vibrations have been coming out of this region over the past few months and they've started to reach London. All departments have been working into the night for a long time now, especially Signals and Data Analysis and of course Codes and Cyphers. At first it had the look of a major narcotics development, understandable in this area; and then we thought it was something political involving Fidel Castro – again understandable, given the geography.' He dropped ash, watching it blacken on the wet tiles. 'We still don't know much, but we know differently. What it does concern is the upcoming American election, in which of course Senator Mathieson Judd is actively engaged. It also concerns the balance of power between East and West as it exists at the present time, which is precariously. So we're talking about something rather more than the requirements of a mission.' His faded blue eyes still on me, 'Let me put it this way. If the extent of things proves as far-reaching as we've begun to believe, I shall find it difficult to sleep soundly in my bed.'
Black girl, extremely pretty, more than that, vibrant, demanding male attention, petite in a silk dress that you could have hidden in one hand, watching me as I came in, so that I hardly noticed him in the shadows between the hanging brass lanterns, noticed him only when he moved slightly. I'd rung the bell and he'd called out for me to come in; they were standing quite a few feet apart, as if they'd been talking but not intimately.
'Here you are,' said Proctor, as if he hadn't quite expected me to come, though I'd phoned him ten minutes ago from the hotel.
I would talk to him, Monck had said at the airport in Nassau, with extreme caution. It's not out of the question that he's been turned.
And was wired, or had a bug running.
The door swung shut behind me; it was probably on a spring, though I hadn't felt it; there was no draught; the air in Miami tonight was deathly stilclass="underline" they said we were in the eye of the hurricane, the eye of Maria, though it had been downgraded to a storm after blowing itself out across the ocean.
'Monique, this is Richard Keyes.' I'd told him my cover name on the phone. 'Monique.' He didn't say her last name. She stood with one dark slender arm hanging with the hand turned for effect, like a model's, as she studied me, her eyes a sultry glimmer set in the black mascara.
'Good evening,' she said on her breath, then looked at Proctor. 'Call me?'
'Of course.' He didn't go to the door with her; as she passed me she left the air laced with patchouli.
I thought I heard a shutter bang in the wind, but it must have been someone upstairs, perhaps slamming a door: it was too soon for the storm to start up again.
'When did you get in?' He didn't offer to shake hands.
'Earlier on.'
'You come direct?'
'Through Nassau. You look good. Long time.'
'I'm all right. What'll you have?'
'Tonic.'
He went to the built-in bar where there was a ship's lamp burning; the glint of mosquitoes passed through the light. He didn't actually look all that good but I didn't think it was because of the bullet in him; Monck had said it didn't trouble him providing he didn't get into any kind of action. It looked, I thought, more like natural wear and tear: booze and late nights and girls like that one, a bit of a man, Monck had said, for the ladies.
'Lime or lemon?'
'I don't mind. Nice place.'
'It's all right.'
Lots of wicker and bamboo and big cushions nixed up with some Miami Beach art deco mirrors and wall plaques, fixtures, I would have thought, they wouldn't be his. Not much light anywhere, the walls mottled by the filigree work of the lamps hanging all over the place on chains, a Moorish touch. Big-screen TV set and VCR cluttered with boxes of tapes. a pile of glossies spilling onto the Persian rug – Vogue, Harper's, Elle, Vanity Fair. He'd established deep cover as an advertising rep, working through the major US east coast and Bahamian stations.
'Still on the wagon?'
'Pretty much.' I took the glass. It was more, I could see now as he stood close to a lamp, than natural wear and tear. He had a good face, unusually well-balanced, the dark eyes level and the nose dead straight and the chin squared, but the skin had started to go, even at his age, forty or so, because of the stress, which had made him start losing weight. It was in and around his eyes, too; they were less steady than they'd looked when we'd been waiting there in the cellar in Szeged near the Yugoslavian border the last time out together, waiting ten hours for them to find us and throw a bomb in and leave the pieces there for the rats to pick over. Czardas.