He lay still for a moment trying to sum up the situation. He was still tied. Maudie, presumably, hidden. Boris dead. Jata, locked in. Joss, Coco and Godfrey, totally harmless. He hoped Rolf realized that. Unfortunately, he was a psychopathic killer and capable of killing everybody on the island.
He heard soft breathing above him; occasionally there came a rustle of bedclothes and a soft high moan. Female. He was in the keeping of Bunny, and Bunny was a restless sleeper.
He waited until the wind rattled the palm leaves outside, then he tested his bonds. Tight. His hands were tied to some protuberance on the wall. He moved them and found a mortar seam jutting out between the stones. He rubbed the rope against it and the concrete crumbled damply. Damn Joss for using lousy cement...
He settled back and breathed heavily through his open mouth. He wished he’d been left with Ace instead of Bunny. There was no way to reach the woman.
Something tickled his wrists, and he felt a shooting pain in his hand. A rat, hell. Lie stilclass="underline" oh, if I only had something to put on my ropes so the rat would chew them...
This is the rat that gnawed the rope.
But no, he’s moving up, pitter-patter of little feet heavy weight on chest, he smells the blood from those burns...
No!
It was more than he could take; with a thrusting twist of his body he rolled over, spilling the rat on the floor. It scurried away, and from above him came the crackle of the coconut straw mattress. Her voice came sharp and clear without a semblance of sleepiness:
“Fuzz, you awake?”
Burt said nothing.
Patter of bare feet, scrape of a match, tinkle of lamp chimney. Yellow light filled the room. Careful not to blink, Burt stared at the ceiling. He heard the whisper of her bare feet, saw her face appear only inches from his. Her hair was a black, tousled cloud.
“You’re awake, sure. You’re really blind, are you? Rolf thought you might fake it.”
Burt tightened his lips and kept staring upward. The strain made his eyes water.
“You crying, Burt? No, you wouldn’t cry, would you? What have you been doing?”
“Counting sheep, what else?”
She laughed without humor. “Can you count what you can’t see?” She tugged at his bonds with a skillful hand, then rose to her feet. “You should’ve talked sooner. You wouldn’t have had to spend your last hours as a blind man.”
She picked up the lamp and walked toward the bathroom. From the corner of his eyes, Burt saw the curved outline of her body silhouetted by the lamp she carried before her. Her black, ankle-length gown flowed around her like smoke.
The door closed, leaving the room in half-darkness. Burt closed his eyes and felt the tears course down his temples, into his ears. He heard the gurgle of the chain-flush toilet, then the sputter of the shower. Outside the day grew lighter.
The bathroom door opened. Burt turned his head back toward the ceiling. He was aware of the woman walking toward him on silent bare feet. She moved in a slow, stagy, hip-rolling fashion, shrugging the gown off her shoulders and catching it behind her. A moment later she stood over him, filling his vision with the twin hemispheres of her breasts bisected by the gentler curve of her stomach. She bent down, and he smelled the soap-washed odor of her skin. He felt her hand searching intimately.
She rose with an abrupt snort. “Man, you are blind. Blind as a bat.”
She walked away and Burt heard her rummaging in her suitcase.
She appeared again in his field of vision, laid her clothing out on the bed, and began dressing. Without looking at her directly, Burt noted the difference in the way a woman dresses in the presence of a man, and the way she does it when she’s unaware of being watched. There was no languor of movement; buttons and zippers were no longer keys which could open windows into a mysterious world, but only garment fastenings. It was a matter-of-fact operation, totally devoid of erotic ritual, like harnessing a horse or setting a table. Her voice filled the spaces between the swish and rustle of her clothing. She would accompany Rolf to meet the men in Caracas, she said. Rolf wanted her along because she knew the language better than he did. She talked to Burt with a vague condescension, as though she had already come to regard him as less than a man. Burt decided that it would be worth all the pain in his eyes, if it only made her careless...
“Where is Rolf now?” he asked.
“He went to Petit—” She caught herself. “He went to give his wife her... uh, food for the day. He’s picking me up on his way back. Then we’ll...”
Burt barely heard the rest of it. Petit, he thought, Petit Martinque, Petit Baliceaux, Petit Mustique, Petit Cannouan, Petit St. Vincent, Petit this and that. Even the Tobago Gays had three islands with such a prefix; Petit Rameau, Petit Bateau, and Petit Tabac. One of those remote clods, he decided, but which one?
He turned his attention to the woman. Dressed now in a white blouse, smoke-blue skirt and matching shoes, she sat on the bed and peered into a hand-mirror propped against the lamp. Her words became slurred as she applied lipstick:
“... spend two days without me, Baby, but don’t break up. I’ll be back. Meantime you’ll be tied up here in the dark like a little rabbit. No food, no water. Don’t try to untie yourself because Hoke or Ace will be outside. They can’t come in because I’m padlocking the door and taking the key. Don’t bother to yell because they won’t answer. Rolf calls it the black hole treatment; you’re supposed to gabble like a turkey when you come out. I don’t know, personally; I did two years in a reformatory because of guys like you and we went through things just about as bad. But maybe Rolf knows what he’s doing...”
Rolf did know what he was doing, thought Burt; so had the Chinese Reds, the Japanese and the wardens of Devil’s Island. They’d learned that you totally destroy a man’s will when you bury him alive.
He watched her reach into her purse and take out a tiny black cylinder not more than a half-inch long. She spread a handkerchief on the table, unscrewed the cylinder, and took out an object which glistened like a drop of water on her right index finger. With her left hand she spread the lids of her right eye and touched the finger to it. Her eyelids fluttered rapidly. She clenched her fists and beat them gently against the table.
“Oh, brother, I know how you felt when Rolf dropped that sap in your eyes. These lenses are a bitch at first, like running around with a cinder in your eye.” She pulled out a tissue and blew her nose, then bent to insert the other lens. “But I can take it another week.”
“Oh, is that when you drop the masquerade?”
“That’s when they stop hurting.” She gave a laugh which ended in a sniffle. “Man, you live in a dream world. This is no masquerade, this is for real. Bunny DeVore is dead; I’m Tracy Keener for the rest of my life.”
Burt felt his lips go dry. “And the real one? She dies, I suppose.”
“You’ve got the scene, Baby.” Bunny closed her purse, got up and went into the bathroom. Her voice floated back through the open door. “It’s been a drag running out to... to that island every day, practicing how she moves, how she walks and talks. Rolf’s a real perfectionist. What if we meet some of our old friends, he says. Personally, I don’t intend to give them the time of day, I’ll be in and out of Capri, Monaco, Hawaii, and anyway there’s my height. But Rolf says a woman’s height is expected to fluctuate according to what shoes she’s wearing and—”