“Simon, I wouldn’t have told him anything you said to me, but after we were on the plane I told him you’d said you were coming.”
“It’s perfectly okay,” Simon assured her. “I was afraid the Ungodly might get curious about what I’d do next, and I didn’t want to take the chance of being held up by some obstruction or other — including Inspector Teal. And this way our hosts here wouldn’t have time to object to any changes in the guest list. So I came a more roundabout but faster way.” He looked Wyler in the eye. “Since we’re all in on this thing, I assume there’s no reason you won’t cooperate.”
“I’m a lone wolf,” Wyler said. “I don’t believe in involving myself in other people’s affairs. If you want to play a ridiculous game of cops and robbers, go right ahead. Just don’t expect me to do more than keep quiet — particularly since no one’s troubled himself to tell me what kind of paranoiac fantasies have been built up around this thing.”
The Saint’s brows arched slightly.
“Paranoiac? I suppose Bill Bast just imagines he’s been killed?”
Wyler shrugged and looked as if he’d prefer to end the dull discussion and get on with the journey.
“I don’t see any reason to look beyond Manders. I could have told you six months ago he was on the way to leaving the rails. It didn’t take gossip about his personal oddities to point that up. There were obvious signs of deterioration: nervousness, forgetfulness, bad temper, feelings of persecution.”
“So one day he just flipped his lid completely and killed somebody?” Simon asked.
“It seems that way. Apparently you think otherwise.”
“Yes,” Simon said flatly. “I won’t give you the arguments for it now, but I wouldn’t have come here if I’d just been taken with a sudden notion to go travelling.” He glanced at Jenny. “In spite of the charming company available. But unless you have a positive interest in not seeing justice done, there’s nothing to stop you going ahead and enjoying your holiday and pretending you’re not well acquainted with me at all.”
“And shall we say Bast was confined with a headache?” asked Wyler sarcastically.
“There’s no point in lying. The news might get here at any time. Tell the truth, maybe with a little emphasis on that theory of yours about Manders’ mental instability. Now, where to?”
Jenny glanced at the message she had been reading when the Saint’s sudden appearance had interrupted.
“It says there’s a car waiting for us outside,” she said nodding toward one of the exits.
Just beyond the door was a parked limousine — gigantic, shiny, and black — and its idly standing driver, though not quite so gigantic, had a face and bare arms of approximately the same color and sheen. On his head was an impressive item of haberdashery which resembled an Ethiopian field marshal’s cap done in maroon. His shirt was a kind of iridescent pink, his trousers yellow, his feet sockless, and his shoes two-toned in oxblood and white.
Jenny looked appropriately awed by this specimen of native exotica; Grey, as usual, refused to look anything but superiorly bored.
“Mistah Bast?” called the Negro vaguely, at the emerging passengers, referring to a bit of paper in the pink palm of his hand. “Mistah Willy and Miss Tuhnah?”
“That’s us,” the Saint said to him, explaining that Sebastian Tombs was substituting for Mr Bast.
A minute later they and their bags were in the limousine, and soon they were raising dust on a northeast course. The driver set a speed he apparently felt commensurate with his vehicle’s grandeur, but fortunately the limitations of Bahamian highway construction — which is not adapted to wide or swift machines — put a limit on his ambitions, and his passengers were able to relax on upholstering which would have been worthy of the bed of a rajah. Even the frequent trumpetings of the horn were muffled by the heavy construction of the car and the hiss of the air conditioner.
Wyler looked impressed in spite of himself, and stole admiring glances at the luxurious shiny chrome fittings of the interior, and ran his fingers over the velvety surface of the arm rests. Jenny showed herself to be more sophisticated and devoted most of her attention to the Saint, who had had a feeling almost from the beginning that Jenny had the easy assurance of a solidly entrenched member of the moneyed classes, while Wyler showed signs of the bitter pride and bellicosity of insecure brilliance on the make.
“What’ll we do when we get there?” Jenny asked.
“Go swimming?” suggested the Saint.
At the same time he made an almost imperceptible negative motion of his head, which he was pleased to see that Jenny was sharp enough to pick up. The glass partition between driver and passengers was open, but even if it had been closed — as Simon could have requested — he did not have much faith that any back seat conversations would remain private. There were too many other possibilities for eavesdropping: a hidden tape recorder, for instance.
“Oh, doesn’t that sound like fun?” Jenny bubbled, putting on an act for the driver. “It’s fantastic to think that places like this exist all the time — while we’ve been creeping around in the fog.”
“What’s even more amazing,” Simon said, “is that anybody would care enough about us academic types to fly us across the ocean and drive us around in a fancy rig like this.”
His line, too, was for the driver’s benefit. Now he leaned forward and spoke directly to him.
“Does this car belong to our host, or do you hire out to anybody?”
“Belongs to Mistah Timonaides, sah,” answered the driver in the lilting accent of the islands.
“Didn’t you have anybody else to pick up — any other people going to the same party?”
The Negro looked around for an instant, his eyes invisible behind the giant blue shields of his sunglasses.
“What party you mean, sah?”
Simon refused to believe that the man could be quite that dense entirely on his own initiative.
“There are other people besides ourselves, aren’t there?”
“Oh yas.”
“Well, that’s the party I mean.”
“Oh yas. Other people come yesterday.”
Simon realized that twenty-five more questions would not produce any more results than had the first few. He had hoped the man would be eager enough to show off whatever he did know to let slip some bit of interesting information. With that possibility out of the way there was nothing to do but sit back and enjoy the ride.
And the ride was enjoyable. Not only did he have the very pleasant presence of Jenny on his left (she was between him and Wyler in the center of the seat) but he also had the shimmering sunglazed intensity of the sea on his right. The road eastward from Freeport ran along the southern coast of the island, away from the resort areas and real estate developments of the western end, whose once pristine beaches had been infected with spores drifting over from Miami and now glittered in places with the same disease, slightly adapted to new conditions.
Though Simon had never been to the eastern end of Grand Bahama, he knew it was still fairly untouched, and it struck him as curious that anybody — even such an unusual figure as Mr Timonaides, who had a reputation for curious activities — should be able to provide accommodations for the entertainment of two dozen or so visitors at such a distance from the established centers.
The limousine had passed the area of the American missile tracking station about twenty-five miles from Freeport when Simon leaned forward and spoke to the driver again.
“Where is the place we’re going?”
True to form, the fount of non-information uttered two words.
“Not far.”
“Not far” turned out to be another twenty miles or so along the same shore. Simon tried to keep in mind a picture of their progress. Seen on a map, the eastern end of Grand Bahama Island is like the head of a pick-ax running north-south, mounted on the thick east-west shaft of the main body of the island. The southern point of the pick, hooking southward into the ocean, disintegrates into many small islands, so the Saint knew that their journey would have to end about the time they reached that sharp southerly curve of coast, or else unless they were to transfer to a boat — the limousine would leave the shore it had been following and take a more northward route.