“Strong left jab,” answered Finn. She picked up the two bloody pieces of the skull and examined them.
“I wonder who you hit him with?” said Hilts.
“We’ll never know,” she replied. She gently placed the two pieces of the skull back on the stack of bones.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Hilts.
They made their way back to the main corridor and ran down it. Ten minutes later they reached another portal and the passageway began to slope upward, the walls bare limestone now instead of bones. Another ten minutes brought them to a second spiral staircase, where a woman sat behind a desk selling postcards and slide sets and a second uniformed guard sat with a sour expression on his face. Finn and Hilts climbed the long flight of stone steps and reached a small, plaster-walled room with a single push-bar door. They pushed and stepped out into blinding sunlight. Finn felt a swift wash of relief, as though she’d been granted a reprieve.
“He’ll be coming to by now if he hasn’t already,” Hilts warned. Squinting, Finn looked at their surroundings. They were on an unnamed backstreet somewhere. The wall behind them was whitewashed stone covered with peeling old graffiti. The tag on the wall read “Bad Idea.” Finn couldn’t have agreed more.
“Where to? she asked.
“Well, thanks to you we both have passports again, so maybe we should use them,” offered Hilts. “I’m beginning to think we’ve worn out our welcome in Europe.”
“Simpson said DeVaux’s last port of call was Nassau.”
“I can’t think of a nicer hideout. The Bahamas it is.”
28
In any other country Nassau International Airport would have been a bus station. Low ceilings, fake wood paneling on the walls, cracked floor tiles, and cheap yellow plastic seats in the waiting room. Sometimes, if the Tourist Office is in the mood, a grouchy steel band will be banging away in one corner surrounded by cardboard cut-out palm trees and homemade Christmas tinsel.
U.S. customs preclearance for people on the way out means that lines sometimes trail outside the building and into the parking lot. Most of the time neither the air conditioning nor the conveyor belt work. The airport personnel don’t work at all unless they have to. The security checks are about as lax as the ones you get at Ouagadougou Airport in Burkina Faso. There is only one set of toilets and one cafeteria-style restaurant, and only one shop, called Nature’s Gift, which sells only soap. This is the place where people from the United States come to catch a flight to Havana. Once this was the gateway to Paradise.
This Eden, however, like any other, was prone to corruption. The snake in this garden was organized crime, and the apple from the tree of knowledge looked suspiciously like cocaine and marijuana going in one direction and bales of hundred-dollar bills going in the other, after spinning around in electronic Laundromats with names that sounded like banks but weren’t. One way or the other six hundred and fifty metric tons of cocaine and ten times that much marijuana flowed through the islands of the Bahamas every year. The cash would fill a hundred freight cars. Cockroaches in the Bahamas have wings, lizards are everywhere, and the roads are full of potholes. When the Disney cruise ships dock in Nassau they play the first four bars of “When You Wish Upon a Star” on their horns so loudly you can hear it on the other side of New Providence Island.
On the other hand, the sand is blindingly white, the sea is the color of emeralds, and the sky is like sapphires. Swimming is like paddling around in a giant hot tub full of tropical fish. The people are polite and genuinely friendly, it rains for an hour or so every day just when you’re getting a little too hot, and they don’t put white people in jail, if the Fox Hill Penitentiary is any indication. Public transportation is cheap, fun, and frequent and the food is wonderful.
Finn and Hilts managed to catch a shuttle from Paris to London and then a nonstop flight from there to New Providence. Thirteen hours and ten minutes after climbing out of the Paris Catacombs they were climbing into a cab at the airport in Nassau. The sun beat down like a hammer, and the cab was without air conditioning. Swain amp; the Citations were doing “Duke of Earl” on the stereo.
The driver introduced himself as Sidney Poitier. He looked just about the right age for it, his eyebrows and the stubble on his chin stark white against his dark skin. He was wearing round, tortoiseshell glasses that looked old enough to really be made from tortoiseshell. The eyes behind the lenses were watery with age and desperate experience beyond imagining. They were also bright with humor and intelligence. Uncle Remus driving a taxi. What Richard Pryor might have been like at seventy, Finn thought.
“Is that really your name or just something for the tourists?” Hilts asked, surprised.
“My name before his. I believe I’m a year or two older. Poitier’s nothing special on the islands for a name. Sidney neither. He from Cat Island, as I recall. My old dead mother say he was a bad one so they send him to Miami to get good. That a laugh, Generaclass="underline" the word ‘good’ and the word ’Miami’ like oil and water; no mixing them up. I say to people, my name’s Sidney Poitier, and they say, Guess who’s comin’ to dinner, but it sure as shit ain’t this Sidney eatin’ at the Royal Bahamian in the damn heat of the night. Which say, you goin’ anyplace in particular or you just want me to drive you around, General?”
“A hotel,” said Finn. She’d slept well enough on the long flight but she definitely needed a shower.
“You come from England on the B.A. and you don’t have a reservation?” Sidney asked.
“We were pressed for time,” said Hilts. The only luggage they had were a pair of British Airways flight bags they’d picked up at Heathrow and filled with necessaries from the airport shops.
“You eloping or something like that, General?” asked Poitier. The taxi was sweeping around the forested edge of Lake Killarney. Pine trees, not palms.
“Something like that.”
“Then you lookin’ for something you might call more or less secluded, right?”
“More or less,” Hilts agreed.
“Got just the place for you then, General,” said Poitier, agreeably.
“I thought you might.”
They turned off John F. Kennedy Drive onto the scruffy track of old Blake Road and soon came out onto West Bay Street and the chain of condo complexes, gated communities, and million-dollar beachfront bungalows that make up Sandyport.
Following Bay Street along the coast they reached Cable Beach, with its long row of high-rise hotels, nightclubs, and restaurants. Eventually the hotels faded away as they went around the deep, pretty curve of Go Slow Bend and reached the narrow strip of public park at Saunders Beach. After that the bloom was off the rose. A mile out in the water a white concrete tower that looked like something out of The Jetsons ruined the view, and Poitier told them it was the old Crystal Cay Observation Tower and Aquarium and was usually closed for one reason or another.
On shore the beachfront houses became older and crummier, interspersed with bars, clubs, and condo units poking up through the sand and limestone and sparse patches of grass. Just past a yellow house, surrounded by a razor-wire-topped stone wall, the taxi turned again and they pulled up into the driveway of a time-battered Victorian clapboard with a screened porch and narrow windows that looked as though it belonged on the set of Psycho. A carved wood sign out front announced that this was the office of Sir Percival Terco, M.P., Minister of Justice. Directly across from the big old house was a row of fish-fry shacks. The nearest one said Deep Creek.
Poitier grunted. “Percy hasn’t been Minister of Justice since Linden O. Pindling in ninety-two, but he likes the sign. And nobody here calls him Sir, believe me, General. He went away to England on holiday a few years back, came home and said Queen Elizabeth knighted him while he was there. Brought back a fancy piece of parchment with the Terco crest on it. Said it was hundreds of years old. Swans on it.” He snorted. “Black swans, maybe.” The old taxi driver laughed. “Motel’s around back.”