'Now tell me what you have to do for your fifty cents. '
The little black boy was very serious and bright. He repeated her instructions exactly. Then the boy's face lit up.
'Hey, rnissus, I could deliver yo' letter myself.
Carrie's hand sunk deep into her wallet for the money. 'No, no. ' She shook her head. 'That man over there will do it. And you should tell him that a big black man is watching him. Tell him the letter is going to the black man's girlfriend.'
'All right. All right. Give me everything. I take it to him all right.'
The boy disappeared while crossing the square
the hectic, colorful crowd. Carrie panicked. Started to cross the street herself.
Then the boy suddenly resurfaced near the lounging hippies. He approached the Loner, grinning a mile, waving the long yellowish envelope.
The long-haired man and the boy negotiated in front of the boathouse.
A buttery sun was rising up just over the building's buckling tin roof. SAN DOMINRCA-BEST PLACE IN THE WORLD was painted in red on the shack.
Finally the Loner accepted the letter.
Carrie sat on a bench and took out the morning Gleaner. COUPLE SLAIN ON BEACH. Cross-legged, wearing her large horn-rinnned glasses, she was among twenty or thirty tourists reading books and newspapers down a long line of sagging white benches.
The Loner looked up and down the crowded street for his benefactor. Very paranoid, apparently. Then the man did an odd little bebop step for whoever was watching. 'Dyno-mite. ' they would find out his nickname later that day.
Finally the Loner headed off in the direction of Trenchtown District. to deliver a soon-to-be-famous letter at 50 Bath Street.
The American embassy in Coastown was wonderfully quiet, Macdonald was thinking.
A little like West Point's Thaver Hall in the lull of summertime. Like the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he'd spent one lonely, lazy summer after the an-ny.
Green-uniformed security men walked up and down long corridors on the balls of their spongy cordovans. Whispery receptionists whispered to messengers about the latest machete murder. Friendly Casuarina trees waved at everybody through rows of bay windows in the library.
Peter passed the plush wood and dark leather furniture in every room and hallway. Heavy brass ashtrays and cuspidors left over from the Teddy Roosevelt era. The smell of furniture polish was everywhere. Lemon Pledge furniture polish and fresh-cut hibiscus and oleander.
Peter decided that it was all very official and impressive-very American, in some ways-but also very cold and funereal.
And frightening.
Dressed in a neatly pressed Henry Truman sports shirt-windblown palm trees and sailboats on a powder blue background-with a permanent flush in his cheeks, Peter was led up to his hearing by a starchy butler type. A haughty black in a blue holy communion suit.
Up thick-carpeted stairways. Down deserted passageways with nicely done oil portraits of recent presidents on all the wall space. Up a winding, creaking, wooden stairway.
Finally, into the doorway of a cozy third-floor office. A neat room where some teenager could have had the bedroom of his dreams.
A young man, a public safety adviser, was sitting at a trendy', refinished desk inside the attic room. Very suntanned and handsome, the man struck Peter as a case study favoring the pseudoscience of reincarnation. The subconsul was an exact lookalike for the dead American actor Montgomery Clift.
'Mr. Campbell. ' The snippy black literally clicked his heels. 'A Mr. Peter Macdonald to see you, sir. '
'Hi,' Peter said. 'I'm sorry to bother you like this. '
'No bother. Sit down. Have a seat.'
Peter sat on a wine red settee across from Campbell. Then, talking with a soft Midwestern accentvaguely aware of the Helter-Skelter horrors and dangers he was officially associating himself with-he began to tell Brooks Campbell what he'd seen....
The two black men chugging up through high bush from the beach at Turtle Bay.
The blood so bright, stopsign red, it looked as if it had to be paint.
The striking blond man forever framed among sea grapes and royal palms in his mind.
The expensive German-made rifle. The green sedan. The jacket from London... all of it happening roughly parallel with the place where the two nineteen-year-olds had been killed and mutilated, had their corpses desecrated beyond belief.
By the end of the strange, appalling story, a new, wonderful sensation: Peter felt that he'd actually been listened to.
Campbell was leaning way back on his swivel chair, smoking a True Blue cigarette down to the filter, looking very serious and interested. Looking like a young, troubled senator in his starchy blue shirt with the rolled-up sleeves.
'You said you'd gone around another bend in the Shore Highway.' Campbell spoke in a deep orator's voice. A hint of wealth in it; a slight lockjaw tendency. 'Did you see the black men actually join up with this other man? The
