bringing me over, muttering about the bad storm, even though by the time we made the trip, the storm was a memory. Heading back to Hog Island, in the wee hours, under a black starless moonless sky, even the sea had settled down. Calm again.
So were my nerves. The rum had done it. And the thinking.
The cottage was dark. I flicked on the light: no sign of Fleming, whose “tidying up” had been limited to removing the two dead bodies. Otherwise, the scattered glass from the broken doors and window, slivers and shards and jagged chunks, the shot-up sheets and blankets and mattress, scattered shell casings, the holes the.45s had punched in the walls, even the glistening pools of blood here and there, not dry yet thanks to the humidity, were testimony to what had happened here, a few short hours ago.
The mansion was not dark-several lights were on, and I hadn’t left them that way. Perhaps Fleming had, when he made his phone call for corpse-disposal assistance. He’d left the keys on the bed, and I walked over to the house down the palm-lined path and went in the kitchen way.
I found her-stumbled onto her, is more like it-in the round living room where two nights ago we’d been celebrating de Marigny’s victory amid the Inca artifacts.
She was pacing, almost prowling, before the blandly benign portrait of Wenner-Gren, her slim, full-breasted figure wrapped in a pink silk peignoir; she was smoking and on the coffee table between the facing curved couches was a bucket of ice with an open bottle of champagne.
“I thought you were going to Mexico City,” I said.
She turned quickly, startled. For an instant her face was frozen with incredulity, then it melted into a smile. Even at two in the morning, those bruised lips were rouged red.
“Nate! God, I’m glad to see you! I was so desperately
She rushed to me; under the sheer robe was a sheer pink nightie and where the pinkness of it ended and the pinkness of her began was a mystery she would no doubt allow me to solve. She hugged me, and made sobbing sounds, though she wasn’t sobbing.
“You’re alive!” she said into my chest.
“And well.” I smiled at her, holding her gently away from me. “What about Mexico City?”
She shook her head as if she had to clear it to answer my mundane question.
“Oh…all the flights were canceled, due to that bloody storm. Wasn’t another Mexico City connection for two days, and that would’ve been too late for the meeting Axel needed me for. I chartered a little boat back from Miami.”
“I see.”
“Let me get you something to drink.” She moved to the liquor cart. “Do you want rum? Or some of this bottle of Dom Perignon left from the other night?”
“The champagne. Please.”
She went to the coffee table, poured me a bubbling glass and said, “What in hell happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“At the cottage! I got back about an hour ago-Daniel was gone, and the cottage was a shambles! It doesn’t take an expert to know that somebody shot up the place. Nathan, there’s
“Yeah. I saw.”
She narrowed her eyes, studying me over the rim of the glass she was handing me. “You…you weren’t there when what happened happened, were you?”
I took the champagne. “Oh, I was there.”
She frowned. “Well, goddamnit, man! Talk to me! Did someone try to kill you?”
I walked over to the couch and sat; she sat across from me on the opposite couch, sitting on the edge, knees together primly like a schoolgirl, and with a schoolgirl’s wide, round, innocent eyes.
“Two men with guns came in and mistook some sheets and blankets for me. Fortunately I was sleeping on the couch at the time.”
“What did you do?”
“I shot one in the face three times. Or four. The other one has a bullet in the head.”
That knocked her back, just a bit. She blinked the lush lashes, swallowed, and said, “Where are the bodies?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. They were still there when I left to go over to Nassau, to confront Harold Christie.”
Her eyes got even wider. “You confronted Christie? What the hell did he say?”
I shrugged again. “He denied sending ’em.”
“What did you do to him…? You didn’t…”
“Kill him? No. I didn’t do a thing to the slimy little bastard. Say…tell me-when you saw the cottage in a shot- up shambles, did you call the police? Is anyone on the way?”
She made a meaningless gesture with the hand with the cigarette in it. “The phones seem to be out. I was frightened, Nate. Thank God you’re here.”
I nodded sympathetically. “You should get some rest. We should sort this out with Colonel Pemberton and his men after sunup sometime, don’t you think?”
She shuddered. “Oh, I simply
I looked at her for a long time.
Then I said, “You know what would relax you?”
She shook her head no; she sucked on the cigarette, holding in the smoke a long time.
“A bedtime story.”
As she blew the smoke out, her smile turned one-sided and wicked. “A bedtime story?” She shook her head again, her expression wry. “Heller, you
“No,” I said. I pointed at her. “You’re bad.”
She froze again, momentarily, then laughed it off, blond hair shimmering. She raised an eyebrow and her glass. “What happened to my bedtime story?”
I put my hands on my knees. “Once upon a time there was a grizzled old prospector who spent years and years looking for a fortune in gold. Finally, one day, he found some gold. Quite a lot of it, and it made him enormously wealthy, and so he married his sweetheart and had a wonderful family and moved to a tropical isle. But one day a war broke out in the outside world, and though he and his family were safe on their island, the prospector worried that this war might threaten his fortune. Then a former king and two very wealthy men-one who owned land and another with a great big boat-invited the prospector to start a bank with them, in a foreign land. To storehouse their money until the war was over.”
Di was frowning; the bruised lips were pulled tight and thin, and her blue eyes were cold, peeking out of slits. “I don’t think I much care for this story.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk about real life, then. Sir Harry was all for ducking wartime currency restrictions; what’s a little money-laundering between friends? But greedy as he was, hypocritical old goat that he was, Harry saw himself as a patriot. How would the man who personally funded five Spitfires for the RAF react if, say, he discovered that Banco Continental’s primary customers were Nazis…hoarding money they looted from Europe, building themselves enormous nest eggs they could look forward to, no matter how the war came out?”
She sipped champagne. “You’re talking nonsense, Nathan.”
“I don’t think so. I think Harry was just patriotic enough-and wealthy enough-to tell Wenner-Gren and Harold Christie and the Duke of Windsor to kiss his big fat rich behind. He’d been making plans to move to Mexico City, and had made several trips there in recent months, and on those trips he got a better picture of what was going on at Banco Continental. And he didn’t like what he saw.” I sat forward. “Sir Harry was going to blow the whistle, wasn’t he? On the whole sordid scheme!”
She threw her head back and shook her hair and laughed her brittle British laugh. “There is no such scheme, you silly man. Banco Continental is a legitimate financial institution, and while the Duke and others may be moving some money around in a questionable, even
I had a sip of champagne myself. Smiled at her. “Remember that dark unidentified fluid in Harry’s stomach that the prosecution never managed to identify?”
