“If I call in tomorrow?”
“The prints will be ready. Never fear.”
The music from the upper floor was faintly audible. Dharam Singh ignored it, pretending that it did not exist. Fletcher turned to go.
Dharam Singh said: “You would care for some refreshment perhaps?”
“Thank you,” Fletcher said, “but no, not just now.”
The refreshment would have been tea, and there would have been Dharam Singh’s conversation. He did not feel a desire for either at that moment.
Dharam Singh nodded. “As you wish. Another time perhaps.”
“Yes; another time.”
Though he had not accepted Singh’s offer of refreshment, Fletcher decided nevertheless to call in at another establishment which went under the name of the Treasure Ship before returning to Joby Thomas’s house. The Treasure Ship could hardly have been said to live up to the splendour of its title, for it was an ill-lit, rather dingy saloon with swing half-doors, a zinc-topped counter on the left as you went in, a sanded floor and a dozen or so round tables with two or three chairs to each. It seemed, as usual, to be doing reasonably good business, but there were a few vacant tables and some space at the bar. Tobacco smoke hung like a thin fog in the motionless air, and a powerful odour of rum greeted him as he pushed his way through the swing-doors. Some of the male and female customers glanced at him as he walked in, but with no especial interest; he had been living in Port Morgan long enough to have become an accepted part of the local scene.
He ordered a beer and Fat Annie got it for him, smiling a welcome.
“You had a good day, Mist’ Fletcher?”
“Good enough, Annie.”
She was so wide Fletcher doubted whether she would have been able to sit in an armchair unless it had been specially made for her. So perhaps she used a settee when she wanted to relax. She was a motherly kind of person — at least she had always appeared so to him — but he had heard that she kept a machete under the counter and was quite prepared to use it if anyone caused trouble. He had never seen her use it, or even threaten to, but if it came to that he had never seen anyone cause trouble, so it could have been true.
He leaned on the bar and drank some of the beer, and he caught sight of one of the sisters who occupied the upper floor of Dharam Singh’s house sitting at one of the tables with a blond-headed man who had the look of a Scandinavian seaman. He had, too, the look of a man who had progressed a considerable distance along the road to being drunk, and Fletcher thought it was high time the sister got him out of there, since he might well be the sort who would become rowdy and force Annie to bring out the machete. The sister was a well-built girl and not at all bad-looking; as in fact all three of them were, so it was easy to see why they made a fairly comfortable living and never got behind with the rent.
And then he heard Fat Annie say something that sounded like “Oh, oh!”, and he saw the two men walk in, setting the doors swinging violently. They had a kind of swagger about them, an air that seemed to say they were the boss men and nobody had better get in their way. They were as lean as whipcord and as black as tar, and they had hair cut down so close you could see the scalp shining through. They were wearing suits of an exaggerated cut and startling hue, brilliantly patterned shirts, gold ear-rings and pointed shoes. They paused just inside the doorway and glanced round the room in a supercilious manner, letting their gaze rest for a moment on each person in turn before moving on to the next.
“Oh, oh!” Annie muttered again. “Leopards!”
Everything had gone very quiet. Everyone had stopped talking, stopped doing anything, as though a sudden frost had crept into the hot room. Everyone except the blond seaman; he just went on talking, and because it was all so quiet everyone could hear what he was saying. Not that it amounted to much; it was not something you would have bothered to record on tape for the benefit of posterity. It was all a bit slurred and it had to do with personal relations between himself and the sister; nothing for anyone else to bother about.
But it seemed to bother the Leopards. Possibly they thought that everyone should have closed up when they walked in — and that included the blond seaman. Possibly they thought it was an affront to their dignity that he should go on talking without their permission. Or possibly they simply resented the fact of a white man saying things like that to a black girl.
Whatever the reason, they walked across to the table where the sister and the blond seaman were sitting, and there was that swagger in their gait as if they owned the earth and meant to keep it that way. The sister saw them coming and looked scared, but the seaman was not giving a damn.
“Oh, oh!” Annie muttered a third time; and Fletcher guessed that she could see trouble coming, but she made no move to get the machete; she seemed to know that this was something out of her league, something too big for her to handle.
The Leopards reached the table, and one stood on one side of it and one on the other. The blond seaman looked up at them. He was startled but not scared.
“What you want?” he said. “What in hell you want, huh?”
“Out!” one of the Leopards said. He gave a jerk of his left thumb in the direction of the door. “Out!”
“What the hell!” the seaman said. “What the blutty hell!”
“Out!”
The sister was standing up. “Come along. Let’s go.” She was scared sure enough.
“Damn that,” the seaman said. “I wanna ’nother drink.” His gaze swivelled round and settled on the Leopard who had told him to get out. “An’ damn you too, you black bastard.”
They took him then. They got his arms up behind his back, and the chair went sliding away and the table went over and there was a lot of broken glass lying on the floor. He was a big man and he looked powerful, but he didn’t stand a chance; they marched him down the room and went out through the swing-doors. The sister followed, still looking scared. Fletcher thought she had some reason to be.
The Leopards came back five minutes later and the room was still silent. They walked to the bar, and Fletcher glanced at their shoes to see whether there was any blood on the pointed toes, but there was not. Maybe they had wiped it off on the seaman’s clothes. They ordered rum and Annie served it to them, but no money changed hands. They were standing close to Fletcher, and the one who was the closer said:
“Who are you, whitey?”
Fletcher told him — politely.
Annie said quickly, as if scenting more trouble and wanting to head it off: “Mist’ Fletcher’s okay. He live here. He bin here long, long time.”
“That so?” the Leopard said. He looked Fletcher slowly up and down — arrogantly, insolently. “That really so?”
“That’s so,” Fletcher said; still polite.
“You like it here? You like the climate mebbe? You like the people?”
“The climate’s fine. The people too.”
“You never wanna go back home?”
“Not yet.”
“Mebbe you ain’t got no home to go to.” The Leopard laughed. The other Leopard laughed too. Annie appeared to relax a little; if they could laugh the crisis was perhaps over.
“Maybe I haven’t,” Fletcher said, playing it cool.
They seemed to lose interest in him. They drank their rum and left; they were evidently not going to make a night of it — not there. Possibly they had other business to attend to.
When they had gone the atmosphere became less tense; conversation started up again, became louder, the laughter less restrained. The Leopards had had an inhibiting effect. Annie looked as though she would have liked to spit if she had not been too much of a lady.
“Trash,” she said. “Garbage scraped up off the streets of Jamestown. They got guns, too. You see them, Mist’ Fletcher?”