Carnal Hours

alleyway, where I escorted him into near darkness. I could smell his lime cologne.

“Turn slowly,” I said, “and stand with your back to the wall.”

But he didn’t turn slowly-he whirled, and then his hand was on my wrist, and the fucker flipped me.

When I landed on my ass, hard on the gravel, I was sitting up with both my hands empty. I looked up at him and he was studying me with an expression of sheer boredom. My gun was in his hand, casually.

“Do let me help you up,” he said.

“Thanks ever so,” I said.

He dropped my gun in his sport-coat pocket and offered me his hand and I buried my head in his stomach and rammed him up against the nearest wall.

“Perhaps I should introduce myself,” he said, groaning, as I held him pinned there. I threw a fist toward his midsection and a hand gripped my wrist and stopped me.

“I’m…an agent with His Majesty’s Royal Naval Intelligence,” he said. “So let’s dispense with the foreplay, and get right to the intercourse-shall we?”

I backed away, breathing hard. I held out my hand. “Give me back my gun.”

His smile was faint and crinkled. He viewed me as a parent might a petulant child, though he was no older than me, I’d wager.

“Certainly, Mr. Heller,” he said, and lifted the gun gingerly from his pocket and held it out to me by its barrel.

I put it back under my arm. “That was a nice job of knocking me on my ass.”

“Judo,” he explained, smoothing out his jacket. “Those bloody Japs do know their stuff.”

“You seem to know my name,” I said, brushing off the back of my pants. “You got one-or just a number?”

He was withdrawing a cigarette from an oxidized gold case, tamping it down.

“Fleming,” he said. He lighted up the cigarette and turned the harsh angles of his face orange. “Ian Fleming.”

We took a back booth at Dirty Dick’s. A steel band was banging away on the little stage, and a high-yellow native woman in a skimpy two-piece outfit was doing a dance called the limbo, which amounted to an acrobatic feat of shimmying under a progressively lowered pole held by two darker grinning male cohorts. The crowd was grinning, too, and I recognized among the faces many of the reporters here to cover the trial.

“Remarkable dexterity,” Fleming said, exhaling smoke.

“She’s more flexible than I am. What the hell’s this about, anyway?”

“Just a moment-let’s let this charming girl take our order.”

The almost-pretty dark-haired waitress was white, but she wore a well-filled floral sarong and had a matching flower in her hair. She was probably twenty-five and fairly immune to come-ons by now, but she warmed to Fleming immediately, though he did nothing but bestow her a mild smile.

“Bourbon and branch water, dear,” he said.

“Rum and Coke,” I said.

She beamed at Fleming, fluttering elaborate fake lashes, and he granted her another little smile.

“As you may have guessed, Mr. Heller, I’m taking an extended layover in Nassau to…shall we say, keep tabs on the Oakes case.”

“Why would British Naval Intelligence have any interest in a murder case involving civilians? Even rich ones?”

Fleming stamped out his cigarette in a glass ashtray and immediately withdrew another from his gold case and lighted up. “Well, one of the people involved on the periphery is not, after all, strictly speaking, a civilian. He’s what you call a VIP-and he’s in a…delicate position. A vulnerable position.”

Now I was getting it.

‘The Duke of Windsor, you mean. The ex-King with the Nazi sympathies. He’s a living, breathing embarrassment to your country, isn’t he?”

Fleming’s smile was almost a sneer. “On the contrary-the Duke is beloved, worldwide. My government’s concern is that he not be…misused. That he, himself, not be embarrassed.”

“Yeah, right.”

The waitress brought our drinks; she and Fleming exchanged smiles, hers generous, his miserly.

“I’m afraid the Duke is rather easy prey for financial operators. He’s known to…resent the limitations of his annual allowance, particularly in wartime.”

“I may bust out crying.”

“The Duke also resents the limitations imposed on exchange control-limitations designed to keep British money available to the British war effort.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow any of this, let alone see how it relates to the Oakes murder.”

“Oh but it does.” Fleming sipped his drink; smoke curled from the cigarette between the fingers of his other hand. “You see, several years ago, the Duke entered into a partnership with Sir Harry Oakes.”

“So?”

“The other partners included Harold Christie, as you might well imagine, and a certain Axel Wenner-Gren.” Fleming raised an eyebrow. “Now, the Duke’s friendship with Wenner-Gren has, I will admit, been a source of embarrassment for the Crown.”

I shrugged. “There are those in Nassau who say Wenner-Gren got a bum rap when he was blacklisted.”

He laughed silently. Then he said, “Allow me to tell you a little story about the wealthy Wenner-Gren. In September of ‘39, Wenner-Gren was sailing the Southern Cross from Gothenburg to the Bahamas. Off the northern coast of Scotland, he quite coincidentally happened to see the British liner Athenia as it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. He picked up several hundred survivors on his yacht, great humanitarian that he is, and wired President Roosevelt, encouraging him to utilize the ‘horror of this disaster’ as a basis for peace efforts with Germany. Now, we in Naval Intelligence were just wondering why the Southern Cross, with its many radio aerials, and unusually powerful transmitters and receivers, just happened to be in that particular spot in that ocean at that particular moment.”

“That is an interesting coincidence.”

“Other fantastic coincidences were to follow-the Southern Cross was also conveniently on hand when Allied pilots, training in the Bahamas, crashed into the sea. He rescued these pilots-but had he been watching them train? Before he was banished from these waters, Wenner-Gren liked to keep aboard his ship samples-in depth-of the various armaments manufactured by his company, the Bofors Munition Works. He also kept unusually large fuel tanks aboard the Southern Cross, which led to the nasty rumor that he’d been refueling U-boats.”

I sat forward in the booth. “And this is the same ship that the Duke and Duchess would take little outings to America on?”

“Oh yes. Wenner-Gren would ferry the Duchess to Miami so she could see her dentist. The Windsors’ favorite dessert? An immense sherbet replica of the Southern Cross.”

“Charming.”

“Isn’t it? Still, there are those of us in Naval Intelligence who are just cynical enough to consider Axel a…bad influence on our boy.”

The native band was still clanging away at their steel drums, but I barely heard them.

“Well, Wenner-Gren’s in Cuernavaca or someplace, isn’t he? What harm can he do now, where your Duke is concerned?”

“The harm, Mr. Heller, if indeed there is any, has to do with that business relationship I mentioned-the one the Duke shares with Christie and Wenner-Gren, and the late Sir Harry Oakes. That mutual business venture, you see, is a bank. Specifically, Banco Continental in Mexico City.”

I shrugged and sat back. “So what? International finances are what you’d expect of people on that level.”

Fleming drew on his cigarette. Blew out smoke, smiled mysteriously. “Mr. Heller, I am being frank with you, but there are limits on just how much I can explain. Let me see if I can put this succinctly for you. During war time, certain practices are…discouraged. Such as sending money illegally from a struggling Empire to invest alongside blacklisted neutrals in a country ripe for sabotage.”