"Why? Are we going to whisper little nothings?"
"Not in the shape you're in."
3
The terminal at Montego Bay is chaos any time of the year, but it manages to get even worse during the holidays. A decidedly Americanized steel and calypso band segued from rock to reggae and even tried their hand at a few of the seasonal favorites. I tell most people they haven't lived until they've heard Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer rendered in raggae.
Tourists were falling all over themselves trying to find their luggage, converting American dollars and looking for a way out of the bewildering maze.
Byron Huntington was no help at all. He stood in the middle of the confusion, fuming. On the other hand, Maggie viewed it all with a certain kind of now-generation enthusiasm for noise and confusion. And thank God for Hannah — she took charge.
Still limping, I viewed the proceedings with a modicum of dismay and made note of the fact that it wasn't all that much different from the first time I encountered good old Jamaica.
I attempted to negotiate with a hackie whose comprehension of American-style English improved markedly with a $20 bill tucked securely in the palm of his hand. Hannah successfully rounded up the troops and the luggage. It was pleasurable to hear Huntington's howls when he learned he had to hustle his buns back down to Customs in the morning to clear our seven cases of scientific gear.
It was obvious that Bearing Schuster's influence was far-reaching. True to form, I turned out to be the one in every seven the custom's officials tagged for a luggage inspection. When the old boy came to my survival kit and spotted the broom handle, he quickly snapped it shut and hustled off to inform his supervisor. He returned with a very official-looking man in tow, and to my surprise I was extended a warm handshake, an even warmer welcome to Jamaica and sent packing.
It wasn't until our luggage was loaded into a creaking old Toyota van that Huntington condescended to step out of the airconditioned terminal into the tropical evening air and mingle with his teammates.
"Where to, mon?" the driver inquired before he began cheerfully grinding gears.
"The Rincon," Hannah instructed him. Positioned next to the driver, she turned around in her seat. "You'll like it," she informed us. "It's got a marvelous view of the harbor."
The driver snaked through a jungle of hissing, battered vehicles that included everything from a truck full of squealing pigs to a sleek, vintage Mercedes.
Ten minutes later, through a path cleared mostly by constant pressure on the van's horn, we were deposited at the Rincon amidst the first real evidence of the tranquility promised by the Jamaican tourist bureau.
We checked in, the others heading for their respective rooms while I headed for the bank of telephones at the far end of the lobby. I was on schedule, and I had to hope Queet was on his.
On the fourth ring he snapped it up.
"Yeah, mon."
"Queet?"
"Elliott?" I could tell he was grinning.
Queet Sebastian, like most of my friends, goes back a ways. When I first met him, he was still a first-rate guitarist, plucking strings first for Marley and eventually stateside, in some of the finer bistros up and down the east coast. But that was the up side of his story.
Queet was always very big with the ladies. One night, with a snoot full of coke, he put one of his bimbos through the window of his high rise apartment and splattered what was left of her dismal life all over a busy Manhattan intersection. The fact that the white chick had induced Queet's rage by slicing him from armpit to armpit didn't hold much water with New York's finest, and Queet pulled seven years of hard time down on his handsome black head. When he finally did get out, the cocaine was finally out of his system, but so was the talent. He went back to Jamaica, and we stayed in touch with each other for the past 20 years for no other reason than we liked each other.
I started right in, knowing there would be plenty of time later for catching up. I asked him two questions: "Is everything lined up?" and "Did you get in touch with Crompton?"
"That mon is one difficult cat."
"How about it? Are we gonna have any trouble if we start poking around the reef?"
"Elliott, mon," he trilled. I could see his sculptured, shiny black face with its full set of big white teeth smiling into the mouthpiece. "Of course, mon." There was a pause while he regaled me with one of his deep, full-throated laughs. ''The only problem is we got to figure a way past the Westmore police."
"Westmore? What the hell have they got to do with all this? That doesn't make any sense."
It would have been easy to lose another hour sorting through Queet's riddles, but things wouldn't have been any clearer than when I started. Queet Sebastian was suspicious about anything he couldn't see, and he couldn't see me because I was on the other end of a device he didn't trust in the first place. That's the way his mind worked.
"Is everything else set?" I asked, even though I knew Queet wouldn't commit himself.
There was the obvious sound of unfolding paper. It was easy to picture his brown eyes, scanning a piece of paper and reconfirming what he already knew but no longer trusted, because the devil dust had scattered his confidence right along with his talent. "The Ciel — day after tomorrow — breakfast, eight o'clock on the patio?"
"Can't you make it any sooner?"
There was a pause, and I heard a woman's voice in the background, slightly agitated. "No way, mon."
I smiled and hung up.
Even though I'd like to think differently, Jamaica is like anywhere else on this old planet. The people, like the land, are truly beautiful. Open, friendly, and trusting, they have an incredible zest for life. But when you carry this little hypothesis of mine to its ultimate conclusion, you also have to recognize that, like everywhere else, there are ways to get things done outside the system. In fact, outside the system is the system. It took only two muted conversations in the lobby of the Rincon to locate the whereabouts of the man called Sargent.
So, at 6:00 the following morning, standing by the swinging doors to the Rincon's kitchen, I was approached by a tall black man with an enormous smile highlighted by two evenly spaced gold teeth. To add to the picture, he was wearing grimy, blood-spattered whites, a testimony to the fact that he had spent the night butchering chickens.
"The mon say you want to see me."
I nodded, took him by his muscular arm and hustled him off to a corner where I could be reasonably certain no one could overhear us.
"Queet Sebastian says you're the man I'm looking for."
The smile intensified. At the mention of Queet's name, he appeared to relax.
"I need your services — two weeks, maybe more."
"Got a good job here, mon."
"I've got a better one."
"Looking for someone?"
I shook my head. "Not exactly — more like looking for some thing."
"You look here in the Bay? Maybe Kingston? Maybe down in the belly?"
I was reluctant to tell him, because the minute I mentioned the Cluster, I knew the price would go up. "The thing I'm looking for is somewhere in the vicinity of Doobacque."
I was right. The minute he heard Doobacque, the smile faded and he stiffened.
"How does five hundred dollars sound?"
Sargent was good. Before the words were even out of my mouth he had added a few of his own. "Dollars American — not Jamaican — dollars a weeknot trip."
I quickly agreed. Sarge was big, strong and hard as a rock, plus he had the best credentials in Montego Bay if Queet had recommended him. We shook hands.
"Lots of questions, mon, like name, where, when?"