Still, the casino was deserted, and the gate in the cashier’s cage gaped open. Parker and Grofield hurried in there and Parker began to yank open drawers. ‘It’s here,’ he said.
There were a few bills scattered on the floor, and the main drawers were not entirely full, so at least one other person had done a little looting on the way out. But he’d left more than he’d taken, so it was all right. Parker and Grofield opened their suitcases on the counter and began transferring the money.
The lights flickered, and then flickered again. Parker took a flashlight from his pocket, and the lights went out for good. Parker switched the light on, and they went on filling the suitcases. Between the flashlight and the firelight they could see well enough.
When the hidden panel in the far wall opened and the bulky guy came running into the room, came catapulting in as though he’d just raced down a long steep hill, Grofield looked up and at first saw that the form looked familiar and second realized who it was. Softly, he said, ‘Parker,’ and when he felt Parker look over, he nodded towards the guy, now coming to a stop in the middle of the room, looking around crazily, a gun waving in his right fist.
Parker looked, and called, ‘Heenan!’
Heenan hadn’t seen them till then. Now he did see them, and recognized them. ‘It wasn’t me!’ he shouted, and started pulling the trigger, bullets spraying into the wall high above Grofield’s head.
Grofield rested his right elbow on the suitcase and emptied a borrowed gun into the leaping silhouette in front of the flames. Beside him, he could see Parker doing the same. Between them they must have fired ten times.
In the sudden silence after all the shooting, Parker said, ‘I say we find Salsa upstairs.’
They had all the cash from down here anyway. Grofield shut the suitcases, leaving the full one on the floor and carrying the other one. Ahead of him, Parker stooped and took the automatic from Heenan’s fist, and then the two of them went through the open panel and up the stairs to the lightless second floor.
6
BARON crouched in the darkness under his desk, in the kneehole, waiting for whatever would happen next. He knew now that this stage of his life was done, no matter what. The gambling island of Cockaigne was destroyed. Even if he should manage to rebuild, from where would the customers come, now that this debacle had occurred? Beyond that, the Russians and the Cubans, as single-minded and dull-witted as the majority of men everywhere, unable to think about anything but their own petty global concerns, would be convinced, unshakably convinced, that this holocaust was the work of American counterespionage, that his ‘cover’ (their word) had been broken, and that he was no longer of any use to them.
So Cockaigne was finished. But was Baron?
It was bad now. The men named Grofield and Parker were surely together on the island somewhere, and wouldn’t they be seeking their comrade? Salsa lay inert on the floor a little ways away, near the dead Steuber, whom Heenan had shot
That had been stupidity, stupidity compounded. Steuber had unlocked the cabinet where the handguns were kept, had swung wide the door, and suddenly Heenan was there, raging, terrified, clawing past Steuber, his hand closing on a Luger, an old gun, one from an earlier life. Steuber, rather than keep hold of the Irishman and wrest the gun away from him, had flung the stocky man away, with a grunt of impatience. The Irishman had landed heavily, and rolled, and had come up apoplectic. He was still close to Steuber, and Steuber took a step that brought him even closer, and he fired twice and Steuber fell over on his back.
That moronic Irishman. He had swivelled then, seeking out Baron, and had found him just as the lights flickered and went out. But he fired anyway, just once, as Baron leaped sideways in the sudden dark, and perhaps the sound of Baron hitting the floor had deceived him. In any case, he had done no more shooting, but had groped his way towards the stairs, Baron clearly hearing his progression across the room.
Baron himself was all turned around, and didn’t dare move to find a familiar piece of furniture and orient himself, not till the Irishman’s blundering footsteps had clattered away down the stairs. Then he had moved, and had just crawled into the side of the desk when he heard the firing begin downstairs.
He would not have heard any firing if the soundproofed door were shut, so Heenan must have left it open. Heenan himself necessarily was part of the gunplay down there, and the only ones Baron could think of who would be shooting at Heenan were Grofield and Parker, so those two were surely down there and would surely be coming up here. Baron crawled at once into the kneehole under the desk, crouched there in a ball, and waited to see what would happen.
He didn’t have long to wait. An uncertain light edged nervously along the walls, telling him someone was coming up with a flashlight. Then he heard their footfalls on the carpet in the room, and the beam of the light splayed around once, and one of them said, ‘Here’s Salsa.’
‘How is he?’
They all waited, Baron too, until the other voice said, ‘Dead. They beat his head in.’
Baron frowned. Had he done that? He’d let himself get too overwrought, too hysterical.
Above him, around him, they were prowling through the room, the flashlight stabbing this way and that. The sessions of his life had made him a man who did not easily get attached to a place, a landscape or a room or a piece of furniture, but the time spent on Cockaigne and specifically in this room had been among the most pleasant days of his life and so he had not been able to avoid developing a certain sense of proprietorship, a sense that now was violated by these strangers come to rob him of his money, his business, his safe harbour, and perhaps even his life. They prowled the room, hulking figures in the darkness behind their light’s stabbing beam, and from his crevice in the furnishings Baron watched them with eyes that hated and feared.
For a few moments the legs of one of them were thick prison bars just inches from his face; over his head the interloper was poking about the desk, riffling the papers and going through the drawers. He found the cashbox in the bottom righthand drawer, and said with muffled eagerness, ‘Parker!’ But he did not find Baron.
The cashbox didn’t satisfy them. They went through the filing cabinet, hurling papers about in their haste, and ultimately they found the wallsafe behind Shakespeare in the bookcase.
These were crude men, unskilled brutes. They hacked at the safe and finally shot its face off, and pulled from its depths Baron’s store of forged papers, his final private cash reserves, and the little flannel sacks of diamonds. Diamonds were sounder than any currency in the world, instantly convertible to cash in any civilized nation, readily transported and easily hidden. And, as he now watched, swiftly stolen.
They had brought a suitcase with them, and now it bulged with cash and diamonds. They closed it, and one of them said, ‘We’d better get out fast. The fire’s worse down there.’
The other one said, ‘Where’s Baron, I wonder?’
‘What do we care?’
Baron smiled a bitter smile, and the pale light receded, closed in at the far end of the room, confined itself in the stairwell.
Once they were gone, surely gone, Baron crawled out from beneath the desk. All was dark save the one window in this room, overlooking the front of the casino and the piers, and this window now showed a rectangle of dusky red. Baron hurried towards it, and looked out.
Was the whole island in flames? To his right the staff’s sleeping quarters was a torch, a hollow shell sinking in on itself. To his left the jungle underbrush was burning, even down to the water’s edge. And out in the water two yachts crammed together in a letter Y, slowly circling like the centre of a lazy whirlpool, burned like a campfire on the sea.