Spotlights played on the main building and the piers and the surrounding jungle and the water. Coloured lights lined both piers just below the water line, making the ocean here look green and red and yellow. Loudspeakers played lush string ensemble music with a fidelity that was surprisingly good for an outdoor system. On the paths and stone benches among the rock gardens between piers and casino sat or strolled a dozen or more of Baron’s customers, dark-suited men and bright-gowned women carrying iced drinks and talking together. A score of small boats were docked at the two piers, and at least as many larger boats were anchored offshore, many of them adding their own bright lights and music and laughter.
‘My God,’ said the girl. She seemed to forget for a second her fear of water, but her hand didn’t loosen its
grip. There was a reserved space for this shuttle boat at the shoreward end of the lefthand pier, and once they were settled in it the girl hurried ahead of Parker, scrambling up the steps as though the boat were sinking right now. She waited for him on top of the pier, smiling sheepishly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, taking his hand in a more relaxed way now. ‘I tried to keep it in.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said, although it wasn’t. But he’d have to make the effort to keep her in a good mood so she’d do good work.
The ground sloped upward from the pier to the blankfaced brick casino, looking strong and blind up there with its white pillars and its lack of windows. The rock gardens through which they had to walk to get to the casino had an intricate, fussy, Japanese look about them, full of varicoloured odd-shaped stones and tiny gnarled bushes. The stone benches here and there were grey, weathered, like Aztec ruins. Farther along, knotted jungle growth filled the slope up behind the casino, framing it in dark green.
As they moved away from the pier, Parker said, his voice low, ‘Start taking pictures.’
‘I already took two,’ she said. ‘One coming in and one on the pier.’
He was surprised. ‘Good,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll do my job.’
He believed her.
Tall broad glass doors led into the casino. Outside the night had a tropical heat and mugginess to it, but inside there was the coolness and dryness of air conditioning.
The glass doors had led them into a large high-ceilinged anteroom. The walls were a pale cream colour, the far ceiling iced with hanging glass chandeliers, the floor a checkerboard of huge black and white tile squares. Renaissance paintings hung on the walls, and dark wood antique chairs and love seats were spotted here and there along the sides of the room.
Broad arched open doorways led off on three sides, each with an identification in black discreet block letters on the wall above the arch. To the left, the dining room. Straight ahead, what were gently termed lounges. To the right, the casino proper.
Parker said, ‘Food now or later?’
‘Later. When my nerves calm down.’
‘This way, then.’
Parker and the girl went through the archway on the right, into the casino.
The ceiling here was lower, and modernistic; acoustical tile spaced with inset fluorescent light fixtures. The walls were pool-table green, done in a fabric wallpaper. The floor was carpeted in a darker green. Gaming tables were set at random throughout the room, facing this way and that in a careful, tasteful simulation of disorder. To the left, behind gleaming mahogany and a brass wire mesh, stood the cashiers, in black sleevebands and green eyeshades.
Parker bought two hundred dollars worth of chips, gave the girl a hundred, and spent some time moving around the room. He won a little at a crap table, betting against the point, lost a little on the red at roulette, won and lost and won again at chemin de fer.
There were no slot machines, only gaming tables of every kind. Parker and the girl stood at a poker table till a chair became free, and then the girl sat down and played half a dozen hands. She won a large pot with jacks full, squealed with joy, kissed the cards, clutched handfuls of chips to her breast. She called attention to herself, but in a good way, in a way that called no attention to the man with her. She played the sexy, naďve, gold-digging, wide-eyed blonde to the hilt, and the looks she got were compounds of amusement and lust.
After an hour they moved on to the dining room, where the food was viciously expensive but superb. The dining room was huge, but broken up by vine-grown trellises and flower-filled planters. A fountain in the middle of the room plashed quietly, and the waiters moved with silent speed.
Nowhere did he see a way to the second floor, no unexplained doors anywhere. There had to be more to the building, downstairs as well as up, but he couldn’t yet figure out the internal arrangement. Exits from the dining room led only to the entrance hall, to the lounges, and to the kitchen. From the casino there was an exit only to the entrance hall, and the men’s lounge was also a cul-de-sac, opening only onto the entrance hall. The girl told him the same was true of the women’s lounge.
Back in the casino, Parker left the girl at a crap table while he roamed around the room. The only answer was a hidden door, and this was the room most likely to contain it. Why Baron would have installed a secret door to the second floor when obviously the place had to have a way to get upstairs Parker couldn’t guess, but it was clear that Baron had done so.
It took him fifteen minutes to find. A thin vertical line in the baseboard at one point along the rear wall was the giveaway. The door sat so flush with the wall that no line or break in the wallpaper could be seen from more than a foot away, but down at the baseboard the joining wasn’t quite so perfect.
Parker didn’t stop to inspect the door; it would have to be under observation. In the next fifteen minutes he strolled slowly by it six times, studying it, finding no way to open it from this side. It would have to be controlled electrically from somewhere else, probably the cashier’s wicket.
Five minutes later he’d taken the girl away from the crap table and she’d had three shots of the section of wall with the door in it. Then they left the building and took the slate path around the right to the cockpit at the rear. The path was lined by thick hedges, separating them from a narrow path of lawn and then the dense jungle.
On the way around, she said, ‘I’ve never seen a cockfight. Do you mind if I take a couple pictures of it, just for myself?’
‘Go ahead.’
The cockpit was in a small, round, brick, windowless building with a green conical roof directly behind the casino. It looked like a truncated silo. Old-fashioned carriage lamps hung all around the building, and more lamps of the same style on black metal poles flanked the path.
There was an admission charge to the cockpit: five dollars a head. Inside, steeply slanted tiers of seats formed a circle around the smallish dirt area in the middle. It looked like an operating amphitheatre, or a miniature bull ring.
A fight was already in progress, the birds’ handlers calling to them in Spanish, the commissioners walking around and around the tiers calling out the odds and taking bets. There were two closed metal exit doors in addition to the door Parker had just come in.
The tiers were less than half full, and most of the customers looked like people seeing their first cockfight and neither understanding nor liking anything of what they saw. Here and there aficionados shouted encouragement and jargon in English or Spanish.
There was no money here. This was a gimmick, a touch of exotica to bring the customers in. It looked cheap and fly-by-night, a marginal operation. The money was all in the other building, in the casino.
Parker spent a few minutes looking the place over and then left. The girl came along, but reluctantly, staring back into the pit all the time they were climbing to the doorway. Outside, she held Parker’s arm and leaned against him. Breathily she said, ‘I never knew