“The only one,” Diana said.
“Then all the more reason. You shouldn’t have any trouble on an age basis, being twenty-nine, although I’m sure the custom at the pub will never believe it...”
Da Silva’s black eyes twinkled.
“You see?” he said. “I told you he had his talents, didn’t I?” He turned to Wilson reproachfully. “I don’t think it was very gentlemanly to mention the lady’s age, though.”
“But how—”
She glanced down at her bag; she lifted it decisively into her lap and opened it, checking the contents carefully. She lifted out her wallet, riffled through it, dug about until she had found an envelope in a zippered pocket, checked it, and then returned everything to its proper place.
“No. Everything is here and it hasn’t been touched—”
“Everything is there now,” Da Silva said evenly, “but I’m afraid it really has been touched. I’m sure you’ve noticed how unnoticeable our friend here is. I watched him bend over, extract your wallet and papers, and just a minute ago I saw him just as carefully return them. If he had disturbed anything in the process, he would have lost his merit-badge for pocket-picking. Or pick-pocketing, if you prefer.” He nodded. “It’s the reason he’s never had to turn to exotic dancing or piloting a plane to augment his income. I’m surprised you never heard of him. In the inner circle of Interpol he’s widely known as Wilson the Dip.”
Diana Cogswell stared at the two men, as her fingers clenched her bag tightly. She looked as if she were seriously considering losing her temper, whether it revealed things about her or not. The two men waited patiently for her decision. At last she merely sighed.
“All right,” she said quietly. “I’ve been put in my place. I’ll try to be more careful if I decide to try and fool you two geniuses again. It’s true. The police in Bridgetown arranged the whole thing. I work evenings at the Badger. All I can eat for supper, plus forty biwi a week.”
“Biwi?”
“It stands for British West Indies. The banks call it E.C. — Exchange Currency. It comes to about twenty dollars.”
Wilson smiled at her, a friendly smile.
“I imagine that Varig pays better, but on top of our meager stipend as intrepid police agents, anything is better than nothing.” His smile faded as he thought a moment. “This aunt of yours — does she have any idea you’re connected with Interpol?”
“Heavens, no!” Diana shook her head. “She merely thinks I couldn’t make it abroad and had to come home to eat humble pie. It’s far from unusual in the islands.”
“But will you be free to come and go?” Da Silva asked.
“Of course. My aunt’s an old lady, a widow. She has her little cottage, and she has a slight income from renting out my uncle’s old fishing boat. And besides,” she added a bit archly, “I am grown up, you know.”
Wilson bit back the obvious reply, turning to Da Silva.
“I hate to be argumentative, but just suppose McNeil doesn’t go to Brighton.” He raised his hand. “I know I said he probably would, but just suppose he doesn’t? Or just suppose he really is crazy, and doesn’t fall for Diana. What then?”
Da Silva looked at him steadily. “Then, quite obviously, we dream up something else. If he doesn’t go to Brighton, he’ll go someplace else, and that someplace else will have a pub. If he doesn’t go for Diana” — he shrugged — “then maybe we’ll have to find someone else. I can’t picture it, though.”
Wilson considered a moment and nodded.
“All right. So we’ve got Diana meeting McNeil and McNeil falling for her like a ton of bricks. With her help, of course. What then, brown hen?”
“Then,” Da Silva said quietly, “she simply needles him for always being broke. That’s all.”
The other two considered this for several moments; then Wilson nodded.
“Which could well drive him to go for the stuff, only with us on his tail. Yes, it could work, I suppose.” His gray eyes came up. “You also mentioned something about a cover for yourself. Any concrete ideas along those lines?”
“Not exactly,” Da Silva said, and smiled. He snapped his fingers for a waiter, placed an order for a repeat of their drinks, and leaned back, watching as the white-coated figure moved toward the crowded bar. “It just occurred to me that I really shouldn’t need one, not with you two both hard at work...”
The rickety yellow coastwise buses from Bridgetown have a route that carries them around the fifty-odd mile perimeter of the island, through Holetown and Speightstown — called Spiketown by its inhabitants for some reason lost in history — then around the northern surf of St. Lucy parish at North Point, down past Brighton and Bathsheba on the east and eventually back to Bridgetown by way of Seewell Airport and the lovely southern beaches. Duplicate buses are making the same rounds at the same time in the opposite direction, and their meeting places can be almost anywhere, depending upon how many passengers decide to stop for errands or to eat at how many places how many times, or other variables of a similar nature.
Visitors to the island of Barbados seldom if ever use this means of transportation; it is primarily meant for the delivery and pick-up of the maids and porters who service the luxury hotels that have sprung up along the wide, beautiful, formerly virgin beaches. It is also used on occasion by sugar plantation workers who are away from home for some reason, as well as by those people who prefer the anonymity of the bus to the more public view which would be almost inevitable should one travel by private car or taxi.
(The buses are also available on a rental basis for funerals, but their tendency to be late has given them a bad name. People who are perfectly willing to wait hours for the yellow vehicles themselves, somehow resent having their dead friends and relatives inconvenienced by a delay of even minutes.)
The drivers of the yellow buses are so familiar with their unvarying route that many people claim they often drive in their sleep; certainly their eyes remain half closed at all times, possibly against the glare of the sun or quite possibly against the monotony of the trip, and it is true that their feet seem to find the brakes automatically and their weathered hands reach out for the fare oftimes before the passenger is even sure he wishes to descend at that point. Nor do they ever pay the slightest attention to the passenger when at last he decides in their favor.
It must be said in fairness, however, that the small passenger who dropped from the bus at Brighton that late afternoon three weeks after Da Silva, Wilson and Diana Cogswell had met at the Trinidad Hilton in Port-of-Spain, was so unnoticeable in appearance that even had the driver chosen to study him (assuming the driver to have been awake) it is doubtful that he could have furnished a useful description later, other than the fact that the man was white, and white men were in the distinct minority of the buslines’ passengers.
The little man watched the bus pull from the dusty shoulder back onto the glaring pavement, and then turned to study his surroundings. The town of Brighton didn’t seem to be of a size even to merit mention on a map. It consisted of one section of the main road with a row of stone buildings on one side, aged by wind and rain, with a cluster of huts haphazardly taking up the space for several hundred yards behind them and running spottily in ever-lessening numbers down the road to disappear into a stand of giant palms. The stone buildings seemed to have been there forever; the commercial signs above their doors had long since lost any relationship to the business being conducted within. A shabby lean-to of driftwood and hammered gasoline tins used the last building on the street for support, displaying fruits and vegetables offered on the tops of wooden crates, and attracting the attention, seemingly, only of sand flies. The proprietor, if he existed, had small fear of thievery, for he was not in sight. Of people, the only one to be seen was a uniformed policeman in an old but highly polished open sedan, parked up the street from the bus stop, and now watching the small man with curious eyes.