'If you've got a file on me, you know I fly a twelve-year-old Dove insured for £10,000 with one-third yet to pay.'
He dived his hand inside his jacket, and for a moment I thought I was going to get shot. But he just pulled out a notebook and pen, and started writing. 'No – we didn't know that. We're not allowed to keep a Jamaicaorfice.' Helooked up. 'You still haven't answered the big question. Could we have it just once, for the record?'
'Or I go on the grey list.'
Tvegot a job to do. You know that, Mr Carr.'
I nodded slowly. 'Yes, I know that. But I'm going to sound pompous for a moment first. I don't like grey lists. I have an old-fashioned idea that law enforcement agencies should stick to enforcing law. And when there's no law being broken, they shouldn't enforce anything else. Such as a grey list. That's a conviction without a charge, without a trial, without a chance of being found Not Guilty.'
'That's right.' He nodded calmly. 'That does sound pretty pompous. I do it myself sometimes. When I get to talking about people expecting cops to want to be cops without expecting them to enjoy their work. Without expecting them to get mad when they see somebody getting away with a racket just because there maybe isn't a law against it right there or then.' He smiled briefly. Or maybe it was just a flicker from thelamp on the low table between us. 'It drives my wife crazy sometimes, when I talk like that. Now let's get back to the big question.'
I stared at him through the dimness. I was beginning to think there might be more than just the Academy syllabus behind the FBI Mark I expression on his face. The thought wasn't altogether cheering.
'Just once,' he said. 'Just to justify my expense account.' He waved a hand over the empty glasses.
'I haven't flown arms to the República. I haven't flown for Jiminez, nor anybody connected with him – as far as I know.'
He paused, watching me. 'We'd heard-' then he shook his head. 'We haven't got a Jamaica office. Okay – so that's the record.' He stood up, and tossed a couple of notes on the table. Then we walked towards the lifts.
'Just as a matter of interest,' he said, 'why d'you want to meet these Repúblicapilots?'
'As I said, just a friendly talk. About why they bounced me this afternoon in their Vampires. Incidentally, where didthey come from?'
'South America.'
'I thought there was some sort of Latin American agreement limiting the trade of major arms. Like jets.'
'There is. It works, too. Until somebody wants to sell and somebody else wants to buy. But apart from that, it works. ' He stabbed a lift button and stood back to wait. 'You've just been explaining how much you don't care about what happens in the República. If you got into a public fuss witha Repúblicapilot, some people might misinterpret you.'
'In other words, don't hit anybody in the Sheraton.' I smiled at him. 'You know, when nobody's looking, you're quite a good FBI man.'
'Not my business. Starting a fight in the casino of the Sheraton isn't a Federal offence.'
The lift purred open beside us. In the flare of neon light, I could see the grid of tiny grained lines across his face, the grey in bis crew-cut. He was in his late forties. He'd lived in Puerto Rico, as an adult, through the bad years.
But perhaps I'd guessed that already.
I said softly: 'The casino? Thanks.'
'I took a look around before coming up here. Good luck – if you're fool enough to need it.'
THREE
The casino in the Sheraton is a tall, sober, well-lit room on the ground floor where government-licenced croupiers sometimes allow you to give them your money in exchange for about as much excitement as you'd get buying a tin of supermarket beans. And without you ending up with the beans, of course.
It doesn't get any more dramatic anywhere in San Juan. There was a time when it looked like heating up a little, when some of the hard boys Castro had tossed out of the Havana casinos came in to show the ignorant natives how many aces there could be in a pack. But they'd forgotten the joker: the FBI office. Some got their feet on the ground long enough to get their faces behind bars; the rest had rebooked for Las Vegas before they were off the airliner steps.
They'd have been superfluous anyway. The San Juan hotel casinos stand a living and prospering monument to the tourists' determination to lose enough money to feel wicked, and you don't need crooked gambling for that. You don't even need a house percentage when most of your customers come in prepared to lose ten, twenty, or fifty dollars – and stay there until they do, because to quit when they're ahead would be unsporting and show they weren't real ramblin' gamblin' men at all – just tourists.
One day I'll patent the idea of firing all the croupiers and scrapping all the tables and just hang up a waste-basket labelled: 'It is strictly forbidden to throw your money in here.'FU dierich.
At nine-thirty in the off-season summer the room was a lot less than crowded. There were a few people at the two roulettetables, a handful at the blackjack, and the usual noisy group at the craps. You don't pay any entrance fee, and the tables themselves change your cash for chips, so I just walked hi acting like any tourist acting like Edward G. Robinson acting like Al Capone.
That made me normal.
Nobody seemed to be in República Ah- Force uniform, but you can squeeze a small overnight bag into the cockpit of a Vampire 5, so they needn't have stayed militaristic. On a 'good-will' visit, it would have been unlikely anyway. And looking at faces wasn't much help either. Anybody flying jets for a Caribbean air force was as likely to have been born in Warsaw or Chicago as in Santo Bartolomeo.
I was wondering how many people I could ask, 'Excuse me, but did you happen to bounce me in a jet this afternoon?' before they sent for the house doctor, when a hand suddenly shoved a couple of dice under my nose and a voice said, 'You always had more luck than you deserved, Keith matey. Breathe a bit of it into these.'
Hand and voice had come out of the small, tight group around one of the craps tables, and for a moment I couldn't see who was behind them. But I knew that Australian accent, and I knew that hand: a big, steady paw, deeply tanned, covered with fine blond hairs and the small white scars of a lifetime spent grabbing for levers and switches in unfamiliar cockpits.
I waved a hand over the dice and intoned: 'A mother's dying curse on these playthings of the devil.'
An American tourist glared at me, shocked. "That, suh, is an insult to both motherhood and craps.'
There was an Australian chuckle and the dice rumbled on the table.
The stick-man chanted: 'Thu-ree. The shooter craps out.'
The crowd stirred, the shooter backed out and turned round.
'Still keeping your luck to yourself, Keith?' And we looked each other over for the first time in ten years.
He hadn't changed much. Broad, stocky, steady, like the hand. A snub square face with a tanned and oddly coarse skin, pale blue eyes, short curly fairhak. And a cheerful, watchfulexpression of enjoying this moment and making damn sure the next one didn't creep up on him unseen.
Ned Rafter, Australian gambling man and fighter-pilot-for-hire. You find the game or the war and Ned'll find you.1 He said: 'How're you doing, matey, all right?'
'All right.' We didn't shake hands; pilots don't, much -maybe it's too serious, too final.
I didn't ask how he was doing – I didn't need to. He was wearing a pearl grey silk suit of a cut you couldn't find within a thousand miles or several hundred dollars of the Caribbean. And I didn't need to askwhat he was doing, either.