‘Small one.’
While Yancy went off to get the glasses, Parker opened the attache case again and took from it a stack of papers. He closed the case, put it on the floor, sat down, and began to spread the papers out on the writing table. Yancy came back with two glasses, put ice and whisky in them, came across the room, and set one glass down beside Parker’s right hand. ‘Everything you asked for,’ he said, motioning at the papers. He sounded proud of himself.
One of the papers was a hand-drawn map, on a large sheet of heavy paper that, when opened out, covered the whole surface of the writing desk. The name ‘COCKAIGNE’ had been written across the top, and below it was the island, shaped somewhat like a rubber life raft, with the long dimension running east and west. Whoever had drawn the map had gone to a lot of medieval trouble, drawing tiny buildings on the island, drawing rows of waves and pretty fish jumping out in the ocean, drawing a complex arrow and letter N to show which way was north, even putting a few tiny trees in along the northern shore of the island to show it was all wild there.
This was the trouble with the Outfit, the organization run by Walter Karns. The Outfit had a lot of manpower, a lot of talent, but like every organization on both sides of the law it was so big it sometimes ran for the sake of running, like a man tromping an automobile accelerator to the floor when the gear shift is in neutral; the engine runs fine but the car isn’t going anywhere.
The same with this drawing. He’d asked for a map and they gave him a souvenir.
Yancy said, the pride still in his voice, ‘Well? What do you think of it?’
‘Where’s the frame?’
‘What? Oh, oh yeah, I see what you mean.’ Yancy laughed a little doubtfully. ‘Our man kind of got enthusiastic,’ he said.
‘Did he put everything in the right place?’ Parker said. ‘That’s the point.’
‘He’s got everything, every detail. You got nothing to worry about there.’
Parker pointed at the main building and the living quarters to the left of it. ‘How far are they apart? What’s the scale on this map?’
‘Oh,’ said Yancy. ‘Oh, for that you want the other map.’
‘The other map.’
Yancy rooted through the papers and came up with a standard-size sheet of graph paper. On it was another rendering of the island, this one simple, bare, and neat. Buildings were shown by numbered rectangles, with a key in the lower right. A notation below this key stated that one square on the graph equalled one thousand feet. Another notation said that the island was forty-seven point three miles from Galveston, and thirty-six point eight miles from the nearest land just north of Surfside, forty miles south of Galveston.
Yancy said, ‘Is that more like it?’
‘Here.’ Parker gathered up the other map in one hand, crumpling it some, and handed it to Yancy.
‘This was supposed to give you more of a picture of the place,’ Yancy said, defending it.
‘I’ve seen the place,’ Parker told him. ‘Sit down and drink.’
Yancy sat down. Parker studied the map.
There were fourteen buildings on the island, ranging in size from the large main building by the two piers along the southern edge of the island to the six tiny cottages on the northern slope. In addition to these, there was the building housing employees, and the small building where cockfights were staged, plus two storage sheds up the slope behind these buildings and the power plant at the top of the island, and finally two small boathouses to the west of the piers, around behind the employees’ living quarters.
The boathouses interested Parker. They meant there was a second point where a boat could be brought to shore, away from the exposed main piers. If the operation turned out to be workable, that might come in handy.
He put the map aside and looked at the rest of the papers. On three sheets were listed the names and duties of every employee on the island, plus whether or not they were normally armed and whether or not they lived on the island.
Baron had a large staff working his island; thirty-eight men and eight women. The casino had a staff of fifteen men, four of whom were armed. A chef, four waiters, a bus-boy, and a dishwasher, seven in all, staffed the dining room in the main building. Six men, none of whom were armed, operated the cockpit. Eight men, four of them armed, operated Baron’s fleet of small boats, bringing the customers out from the mainland. Two armed men served as Baron’s assistants, adjutants, and bodyguards. Six women were available for specialized cottage service, and two other women worked as maids. In all, including Baron himself, there were forty-seven names on the list.
Of the forty-seven, only seventeen lived permanently on the island itself. Aside from Baron and his two bodyguards, these included the four armed men who worked in the casino, the four armed boatmen, and the six cottage women. Even with everyone else gone, then, there would be eleven armed men on the island at all times.
Other papers gave further information about Baron’s empire. It was estimated that between seventy and eighty per cent of Baron’s customers came to the island in their own boats, some from as far away as New Orleans and Corpus Christi. For the rest, Baron maintained four fairly large cabin cruisers, each with a crew of two, to shuttle customers from and to Galveston. Two of these boats, manned by the unarmed shore-living boatmen, were based in Galveston, and the two manned by the armed island-living boatmen were based on Cockaigne.
The weapons available on the island were listed on another sheet, and it was an impressive list; rifles and handguns enough to start a revolution, plus tear gas shells and a couple of machine guns.
One page described the approaches to the island. Submerged rocks and reefs, plus steel and concrete additions by Baron, made it impossible to bring a boat of any draft at all in close to shore anywhere except at two points; the main piers in front of the casino, and the boathouses just to the west of the piers.
There were further sheets of facts which Parker either already knew or didn’t care about; statistics on numbers of customers, estimated total of money on the island at different times of day and different days of the week and
