He shrugged. “That’s Nassau to a tee.”
I turned on the stool and looked idly out the windows. “Racing today?”
“Our little weekly regatta. Not much of a turnout…lousy weather. They’ll be lucky not to get caught out in it.”
“Is that fella de Martini racing?”
“De Marigny you mean? Yeah. Sure.”
“I hear he’s quite a character. Real ladies’ man.”
The kid shrugged, rubbed the bar with his rag. “I don’t know about that. But he’s a hell of a yachtsman.”
“Really?”
“Really. He’s won all sorts of cups, including the Bacardi-and he’s only been at it four or five years. He ought to be in in a few minutes. Would you like to meet him?”
“No thanks,” I said.
Instead I nursed my rum punch and waited for de Marigny’s race to end.
Mine was just about to begin.
5
When de Marigny entered the clubhouse, he was chatting with two young male club members (possibly his crew), but there was no mistaking him: he was six three, easily, with dark, slicked-back hair and a well-trimmed Vandyke beard; slender, muscular, he wore a polo shirt with the arms of a pale yellow sweater tied around his neck like a clinging lover. I hate that.
On the other hand, despite Sir Harry’s unflattering description, I’d assumed the Count would be handsome- most gigolos are-but de Marigny had big ears, a prominent nose and fleshy lips. If you were casting
He did carry himself well, with confidence, affable if arrogant, and his two friends seemed hypnotized by his discourse. I couldn’t make out his words, but he had a thick Charles Boyer French accent, which I suppose some women might find charming. Not being a woman, I couldn’t be sure.
He seemed headed for the bar, so I tossed a quarter tip on the counter, slipped away before the bartender could introduce me, and went out to wait in the Buick.
Apparently de Marigny had a drink or two, because it was fifteen minutes later before he emerged from the clubhouse, still in his yachting togs but minus his sycophants, and strolled to a black Lincoln Continental. I wondered if Sir Harry’s daughter Nancy had bought it for him.
Beyond Fort Montagu, aping the curve of the island, East Bay Street became the eastern road, along which were fabulous oceanside mansions on land Harold Christie had most likely sold rich foreigners, and/or rumrunners. But de Marigny took a right, away from this affluence and into the boondocks, and I followed.
The same bushes and trees that so carefully adorned the grounds of wealthy estates grew wild here, pines and palms and bushes with red berries crowding each other alongside the narrow dirt road, like spectators eager for a look.
It was tricky not getting made, but the Lincoln kicked up plenty of dust, so I could keep my distance and still keep track of where the Count had headed.
Then the dust cloud abated, and I knew I’d lost him: he’d turned off somewhere.
Looking frantically right and left, I didn’t feel panicked for long: there the Lincoln was, stopped in the crushed-rock driveway of a run-down-looking white farmhouse. It might have been an American farmhouse but for its louvered shutters, and limestone construction that dated back a century or two.
I drove on past, perhaps a quarter of a mile, and found a place alongside the road where I could pull off. Then I left my suitcoat behind but brought along my camera, and walked alongside the road, where the brush was taller than I was, and edged up near the farm.
Back home there would probably have been a fence to climb or at least step over; here all I had to do was push gently, quietly, sneakily through the tropical brush, like a Jap sniper looking for a target. I didn’t have a rifle, of course, just my lethal little Argus, ready to snap an incriminating photo or two….
But de Marigny’s afternoon rendezvous was not with the wife of some wealthy crony of Christie’s, or some dusky native gal; rather, with half a dozen colored workers in well-worn straw hats and loose, sweat-soaked clothing. De Marigny’s sweater was no longer tied around his neck-it was gone, in fact-and his polo shirt was sweat-stained and sooty, clinging to a lanky but impressive musculature.
In the yard, alongside the farmhouse, two workers were adding more driftwood to a roaring fire beneath an old, cut-down oil drum that bubbled like a witch’s caldron. De Marigny’s men were on their haunches, dunking apparently freshly killed chickens-the absence of heads and bloody necks were the tip-off to this trained detective- into what I figured was scalding water.
And de Marigny was getting right in there with them, squatting down and dipping the chicken corpses by their feet into the boiling water. In fact, he seemed to be showing them how it was done, plucking the feathers from the softened flesh of the dunked birds. The ground nearby had a snowfall of feathers and down.
The flames were high, and the smoke was thick-even from my vantage point in the brush, my eyes were stinging.
De Marigny worked hard, maintaining a lighthearted attitude throughout, treating the Negroes like equals. One of them, a handsome, sharp-eyed youth of perhaps twenty-two, his clothes untattered, was clearly second in command. I heard de Marigny call him Curtis.
This went on for about an hour; I was squatting just like they were, only in the bushes, hoping New Providence didn’t have nasty lizards or poisonous snakes to give me a surprise. But there was only the humidity to make my life miserable, the faint whisper of a breeze ruffling the leaves. At least there were no bugs, like those damn sandflies on the beach….
Finally de Marigny disappeared inside and came back with his hair combed, the soot smudges washed off and his sweater over one arm. He collected Curtis, spoke for a moment to another of the workers, putting him in charge, and he and Curtis got in the Lincoln, both in the front seat but with the young Negro driving.
I quickly hightailed it back to my Buick, did a dandy little U-turn considering the space I had, and followed the Lincoln’s dust trail.
Glancing at Sir Harry’s list of de Marigny businesses-which included a beauty parlor, a grocery store and an apartment house-I didn’t see anything that sounded like a chicken farm. There was something vague, called De Marigny and Company, which had a Bay Street address.
If de Marigny was such a shiftless son of a bitch, as Oakes had painted him, how’d he assemble such an impressive array of business holdings? Of course, maybe it was his wife’s dough that got him set up in them all.
On the other hand, he’d been working his ass off plucking chickens, for Christ’s sake, shoulder to shoulder with his black workers. I had been in Nassau only since this morning, but I already could tell that was rare behavior.
The dust led back to the eastern road, where I caught sight of the Lincoln, turning west. My watch said half- past four, so de Marigny ought to be going home, and if my reading of the Nassau Street map was close to correct, that was the way we were headed.
It was. The Lincoln turned off on Victoria Avenue, and that jibed with the address I had on the Count. The sea at our backs, we were going up the hill now, moving along a quaint side street flung with palms where little pastel houses built on the incline had stone garden walls with bougainvillea and creepers trying to climb over them, even as flowering trees on the other side peeked over.
Soon the black touring car pulled into a driveway and drew around to the side of the house to the closed doors of a double garage. Curtis got out and so did de Marigny, not waiting for his driver to come around and open his door for him. What a guy.
De Marigny’s house reminded me of places I’d seen in Louisiana: a good-size, two-story, vine-crawling pink affair with green shutters and a screened-in veranda above and porch below, and exterior stairs along the driveway
