$350,000
New water mains, 1.77 miles
$680,000 (10 inch)
$790,000 (12 inch)
Paving access road, 0.8 miles
$290,000
Lien, Windward Isles Const. Co.
$1,300,000
(Settlement est.
$605,000)
Damage judgment, Sun/Sea Petro.
$2,600,000
(Settlement est.
$350,000)
Injunction, N.A. Trades Council (Est. cost to vacate
$18,000
The total on the three-page list, taking the estimated figures at face value, came to over three million dollars. Half the items on it I hadn't even suspected.
The first course was coming and I didn't want to ruin a good lunch with business, so I looked for permission, then pocketed the paper as the conch salad arrived. Kavilan was right. It was good. The greens were fresh, the chunks of meat chewed easily, the dressing was oil and vinegar but with some unusual additions that made it special. Mustard was easy to pick out, and a brush of garlic, but there were others. I thought of getting this chef's name, too.
And thought it again when I found that the escalope of veal was as good as the conch. The wine was even better, but I handled it sparingly. I didn't know Dick Kavilan well enough to let myself be made gullible by adding a lot of wine to a fine meal, a pretty restaurant and a magnificent view of a sun-drenched bay. We chatted socially until the demitasses came. How long had he been on the island? Only two years, he said, surprising me. When he added that he'd been in real estate in Michigan before that, I connected on the name. "Sellman and Kavilan," I said. "You put together the package on the Upper Peninsula for us." It was a really big, solid firm. Not the kind you take early retirement from.
"That's right," he said. "I liked Michigan. But then I came down here with some friends who had a boat—I'm a widower, my boys are grown—and then I only went back to Michigan long enough to sell out."
"Then there really is a lure of the islands."
"Why, that's what you're here to find out, Jerry," he said, the grin back again. "How about you? Married?"
"I'm a widower too," I said, and touched my buttoned pocket. "Are these costs solid?"
"You'll want to check them out for yourself but, yes, I think so. Some are firm bids. The others are fairly conservative estimates." He waved to the waiter, who produced cigars. Cuban Perfectos. When we were both puffing, he said, "My people will put in writing that if the aggregate costs go more than twenty percent over that list we'll pay one-third of the excess as forfeit." Now, that was an interesting offer! I didn't agree to it, not even a nod, but at that point Kavilan didn't expect me to. "When the Dutchman went bust," he added, "that list added up to better than nine million."
No wonder he went bust! "How come there's a six million dollar difference?"
He waved his cigar. "That was seven years ago. I guess people were meaner then. Or maybe the waiting wore the creditors down. Well. What's your pleasure for this afternoon, Jerry? Another look at the site, or back to Port?"
"Port, I think," I said reluctantly.
The idea of spending an afternoon on the telephone and visiting government offices seemed like a terrible waste of a fine day, but that was what they paid me for.
It kept me busy. As far as I could check, the things Kavilan had told me were all true, and checking was surprisingly easy. The government records clerks were helpful, even when they had to pull out dusty files, and all the people who said they'd return my calls did. It wasn't such a bad day. But then it wasn't the days that were bad.
I put off going to bed as long as I could, with a long, late dinner, choosing carefully between the local lobster and what the headwaiter promised would be first-rate prime rib. He was right; the beef was perfect. Then I put a quarter into every fifth slot machine in the hotel casino as long as my quarters held out; but when the light by my bed was out and my head was on the pillow the pain moved in. There was a soft Caribbean moon in the window and the sound of palms rustling in the breeze. They didn't help. The only question was whether I would cry myself to sleep. I still did that, after eight years, about one night in three, and this was a night I did.
II
I thought if I had an early breakfast I'd have the dining room to myself, so I could do some serious thinking about Val Michaelis. I was wrong. The tour group had a trip in a glass-bottomed boat that morning and the room was crowded; the hostess apologetically seated me with a young woman I had seen before. We'd crossed paths in the casino as we each got rid of our cups of quarters. Hair to her shoulders, no makeup—I'd thought at first she was a young girl, but in the daylight that was revised by a decade or so. She was civil—civilly silent, except for a "Good morning" and now and then a "May I have the marmalade?"—and she didn't blow smoke in my face until we were both onto our second cups of coffee. If the rest of her tour had been as well-schooled as she it would have been a pleasant meal. Some of them were all right, but the table for two next to us was planning a negligence suit over a missing garment bag, and the two tables for four behind us were exchanging loud ironies about the bugs they'd seen, or thought they had seen, in their rooms. When she got up she left with a red-haired man and his wife—one of the more obnoxious couples present, I thought, and felt sorry for her.
Kavilan had given me the gate key, and the bell captain found me a car rental. I drove back to the hotel site. This time I took a notebook, a hammer, a Polaroid and my Swiss Army knife.
Fortunately the wind was the other way this morning and the aromatic reminders of mortality were bothering some other part of the shoreline. Before going in I walked around the fence from the outside, snapping pictures of the unfinished buildings from several angles. Funny thing. Pushing my way through some overgrown vines I found a section of the fence where the links had been carefully severed with bolt-cutters. The cuts were not fresh, and the links had been rubbed brighter than the rest of the fence; somebody had been getting through anyway, no doubt to pick up a few souvenirs missed by his predecessors. The vines had not grown back, so it had been used fairly recently. I made a note to have Kavilan fix that right away; I didn't want my inventory made obsolete as soon as I was off the island.
One wing had been barely begun. The foundations were half full of rain water, but tapping with the hammer suggested the cementwork was sound, and a part where pouring had not been finished showed good iron-bar reinforcement. In the finished wing, the vandalism was appalling but fairly superficial in all but a dozen rooms. A quarter of a million dollars would finish it up, plus furnishings. Some of the pool tiles were cracked—deliberately, it seemed—but most of the fountains would be all right once cleaned up. The garden lighting fixtures were a total writeoff.
The main building had been the most complete and also the most looted and trashed. It might take half a million dollars to fix the damage, I thought, adding up the pages in my notebook. But it was much more than a half-million-dollar building. There were no single rooms there, only guest suites, every one with its own balcony overlooking the blue bay. There was a space for a ballroom, a space for a casino, a pretty, trellised balcony for a top-floor bar—the design was faultless. So was what existed of the workmanship. I couldn't find the wine cellar, but the shop level just under the lobby was a pleasant surprise. Some of the shop windows had been broken, but the glass had been swept away and it was the only large area of the hotel without at least one or two piles of human feces. If all the vandals had been as thoughtful as the ones in the shopping corridor, there might have been no need to put up the fence.
About noon I drove down to a little general store—"Li Tsung's Supermarket," it called itself—and got materials for a sandwich lunch. I spent the whole day there, and by the time I was heading back to the hotel I had just about made up my mind: the site was a bargain, taken by itself.