Frank, à la Jack Benny, said, “Well, I don’t know, Rochester. I may need the car myself later on.”
Kelly had gone into the garage and opened the driver’s door of the Mercedes. Sitting behind the wheel, he was trying various keys in the ignition. Robby walked in and stood on the cement beside him and said, “How is it?”
Kelly gave him a quick glance, said, “Fine,” without really seeing him, and tried some more keys.
“See you boys later,” Frank called, and got into the Cortina.
Robby, standing in the garage beside the Mercedes, watched Frank. He saw Frank adjust the seat, insert the key, start the engine, and signal for a left. Robby started laughing. Faintly he could hear Frank cursing. The directional light went off, and a few seconds later the Cortina rolled backward down the driveway.
The Mercedes started with a roar. “There!” shouted Kelly. He shut the engine, took the right key off the ring, got out of the car, and handed the key to Robby. “We’re set,” he said.
With the heel of her shoe, Jigger tapped out Morse code on the metal porthole cover:
S
O
S
S
O
S
S
O
S
“Damn,” she said, gave it up at last, and flounced onto her bed. How was she going to get out of here? Wasn’t there anybody around? What about the people in the next boat, couldn’t they hear her?
The people in the next boat, had they been home, might in fact have been able to hear the tapping, but the people in the next boat — Major Alfred ffork-Linton and Miss Adelaide Rushby — were out.
Frank parked the Cortina in the parking lot of Mahoe Bay Hotel, shut off the engine, and just sat there a minute till the trembling went away. “Never again,” he muttered. He then got out of the car with a feeling perhaps comparable to that of someone getting out of Wormwood Scrubbs, shut its door with more than necessary force, gave the car a dirty look it didn’t deserve — it wasn’t the car’s fault if he wanted to drive on the right, sit on the left, and shift with his right hand — and walked away toward the hotel.
Mahoe Bay Hotel, like many of its sister hotels along the coast, was all in pieces. Its main building, a free-form airy whatsit two stories high, contained little beyond the desk, administrative offices, bar, a shopping mall, and some meeting rooms upstairs. The outdoor dining room was beyond that, near the swimming pool, and for the rest the hotel consisted of concrete cottages painted in pastels, each containing four units, all scattered here and there around a palm-dotted plain beside the sea.
Frank, for reasons not even known to himself, had decided to be Bud Collyer being Clark Kent. Going to the desk, he used Collyer’s voice to say, “Hello, there. I’m from the Festival Committee. Where’s the screening room?”
The clerk, a young lady with a blank expression, blinked slowly and said, “Beg pardon, sir?”
“Where they show the movies,” Frank said.
“You mean a cinema?”
“I mean,” Frank said, with Bud Collyer’s Clark Kent patience, “the place in this hotel where Sassi Manoon is going to be watching a moving picture in” — he checked his watch — “forty-five minutes.”
“In the hotel here?”
Frank sighed. “You don’t own this place, do you?” he asked.
“What?”
“I mean, you work for somebody else, don’t you?”
She nodded slowly, doubtfully.
“Good,” Frank said. “May I speak with him or her?”
“Who?”
“Your employer.”
“You want the manager?”
“Please,” Frank said. “For the love of God.”
“All right,” she said agreeably, and went through a door and out of sight.
Frank waited, tattooing his fingertips on the formica.
The young lady returned, with another young lady, who looked at Frank with some suspicion and said, “The manager isn’t in right now. May I help you?”
“Hard to say,” said Frank. “I’m from the Film Festival Committee, and I would like to see the place where the pictures that move like magic will be shown on the wall for Miss Sassi Manoon.”
“You mean the screening room?”
“Yes,” said Frank. “That’s wonderful. The screening room, that’s what I meant.”
“Around that corner,” she said coldly, “and through the second door on your left. Up the stairs, down the corridor to your right. Fourth door on the right.”
“Thank you so much,” said Frank.
“By the way,” she said, still cold. “We don’t appreciate racial slurs in Jamaica.”
“Oh,” said Frank. “I didn’t know that.”
“Try and remember it,” she said.
“I will,” said Frank. “I definitely will.”
Kelly fingered the Persian carpet hanging on the wall. “This one, I think,” he said. It was nine feet by twelve.
The salesman, an India Indian, smiled politely and rubbed soft hands together. “An excellent choice,” he said.
“And it can be delivered now?”
“This very moment,” the salesman said. “Good. It would be hard to find my house otherwise. This way, your truck can follow me out there.”
“Excellent,” said the salesman.
The checkbook that Kelly took from his pocket now was certainly legitimate, and Kelly had no doubt that its owner really did have all that money in a Kingston bank. Of course, if the owner had checked his car’s glove compartment this morning, from which Frank had rifled the checkbook outside Sir Albert Fitzroy’s place last night, and if he had already reported his loss to the bank, and if the salesman checked with the bank before Kelly left the store, there might be a sticky moment or two, but with the amount of drinking done at last night’s party, he felt pretty safe on the first two ifs and the obsequiousness of the salesman encouraged him to feel safe on the third.
The encouragement was not false. The salesman took the check Kelly wrote — for three hundred twenty-seven pounds six shillings fivepence — with all the innocent joy of a yokel taking title to the Brooklyn Bridge. “I will have the carpet rolled,” he said, “and placed at once within our van.”
“I’ll wait in my car,” Kelly said. “The Mercedes out front.”
“Of course,” the salesman said, smiling and bowing. “I saw you drive up.”
Kelly was sure he had. A chauffeur-driven Mercedes commands the right kind of attention, and the man in the back seat of same commands the right kind of belief.
“In just a moment, then,” the salesman said, and Kelly returned his smile and went outside and got into the back seat of the Mercedes. Robby, behind the wheel, was sitting at attention, looking straight ahead, both hands on the steering wheel. The engine was running.
“Turn the engine off,” Kelly said. “We look like we’re ready for a getaway.”
“Air conditioner,” Robby said. “Engine off, air conditioner off. It gets hot in here.”
“Oh,” said Kelly.
Still facing forward, Robby said, “How’d we do?”
“Fine,” Kelly said. “Just the way Starnap said.”
“Starnap,” Robby said, “has a very devious mind.”
“Here they come,” said Kelly.
Out of the driveway between the buildings came a Volkswagen Microbus, the big boxy one, painted a pale green. White letters on both sides said: MONTEGO BAY CARPET AND UPHOLSTERY COMPANY LTD. Fort Street, Mongtego Bay.
Kelly nodded through the rear window at the driver of the VW, who nodded back. There were two men in the VW, both Negro, both sturdy-looking.