‘This is Mr Jackson,’ he said.
‘Avery Jackson?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
The cold flat voice on the other end said, ‘The package has been delivered.’
‘Any problems?’ Frazer asked.
‘Nothing I can’t take care of.’
‘Thanks very much.’
Frazer hung up, smiling with satisfaction as he left the booth. Ten minutes later his plane was announced. He bought a copy of Paris-Match and an Italian edition of Playboy in the newsstand and then boarded his plane.
Hinge hung up the phone and went back to his car. A rumble of thunder rolled slowly across the sky, and dark clouds drifted past the face of a full moon. Lightning shimmered among them and he felt the first tentative drops of rain. He ignored them. He was a few hundred yards from the entrance to the Half Moon Bay Club. He drove down to the palm-lined entrance and parked the car in the shadows, and hunching his shoulders against the raindrops that began pelting him, he hurried down o the beach. He stayed well back from the ocean as he studied the layout of the sprawling beachfront hotel, actually scurrying way from one small ripple of a wave.
The beach swung in a wide crescent from the squat two..story hotel at one end to the far side, where a stone breakwater separated its beach from that of the Holiday Inn. The registration desk was attached to the main building but was in the open, under a roof of shingles covered with palm fronds. Adjacent to it was an open-air bar and restaurant overlooking the bay. People were moving under the shingled awnings to escape the rain while a calypso band, accustomed to sudden storms, continued playing in the restaurant, its steely music echoing out across the bay.
The cottages began just beyond the restaurant, stretching around to the breakwater. They were built fifty or sixty feet from the water’s edge, one-story stucco units, most of them dark. He counted them. Eighteen in all. Lights gleamed from the last three in the line. Despite the impending storm, the sea was placid, slapping lazily at the shore.
It started raining harder as he followed the beach to cottage 16.
O’Hara and the Magician arrived at Eliza’s cottage two minutes after she did. She stammered as she described her encounter with Hinge, the terror still in her eyes.
‘You’re lucky,’ O’Hara said. ‘He probably didn’t have time to chase you.’ He shook his head. ‘We acted like a bunch of amateurs this time around.’
‘I’m the amateur,’ Eliza said. ‘If—’
‘Nobody’s to blame,’ said the Magician.
‘Yeah,’ said O’Hara, ‘we fumbled in the clutch. Best thing we can do is move on.’
The bright spring colors of the cottage, the yellow-and green-print slipcovers, the vase with cut flowers on the dresser and fresh fruit on the night tables did not help their mood. They sat glumly mulling over their options.
‘Maybe we should call the police, at least they could put out an APJ3 on Lavander and Hinge,’ Eliza suggested.
‘This isn’t the Bronx,’ O’Hara said. ‘I doubt they have ten cops on this end of the island.’
‘What a mess,’ Eliza said, genuinely concerned over Lavander’s welfare, or lack thereof.
The Magician scratched an unshaven chin. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you think this is bad, how’d you like to be caught in the middle of a fight between six truck drivers and fourteen midgets in the Soperton, Georgia, Waffle House at one o’clock in the morning?’
‘What!’ Eliza said, and started to giggle.
‘This is about ten years ago. I was down on my uppers and playing calliope for a little half -assed circus, and it went broke in Texarkana and there we were, stranded in the middle of nowhere. So I got the fourteen midgets together and formed this basketball team. I thought it would be a real novelty, them riding on each other’s shoulders to make baskets, running between the opponent’s legs, stuff like that. Only it turned out to be a one-line joke, funny for about half the first quarter, after that the audience started throwing their popcorn boxes at us. We were stuck in Dalton-fuckin’ Georgia, with all our games cancelled, so broke we were rubbing buffalo nickels together hoping they’d mate.
‘Dismal.
‘And then, damned if I didn’t find out these little suckers could sing! Man, they could belt it out like angels. Fourteen- part harmony. So we changed our name from Mike Rothschild’s Little Big Men to Jesus Rothschild and the Gospel Midgets, and to, everybody loved us. We were doing state fairs, charity gigs, revival meetings. The black people loved us. Kids loved us. Red dirt farmers would come with their families and fruit jars and get drunk and get religion. Sweet Jesus, we were saving souls and making money. Hallelujah, what a summer!’
‘Magician, what in hell are you talking about?’ O’Hara asked.
‘There’s a point, stick with me. One night we pull into Soperton, Georgia, which is about as big as a flea’s ass, and it’s maybe one o’clock in the morning and we pass this Waffle House, which is open, so we all pile in for coffee. There’s maybe half a dozen or so truck drivers in there raising hell and one thing leads to another and it’s getting a little nasty what with the midget jokes and shit, so Herman Heartfinder, who was kind of the spokesman for the little guys — he also had a very bad temper — he says for them to go easy on the midget jokes. This one driver says to Herman, “Hey, shortie, if your pecker was twice as big as your mouth, you’d still have to jack off with two fingers,” and Herman stands straight up, all three-foot-six of him, and lets fly with one of those old- fashioned glass
