Waking
on holiday is always a pleasure. No alarms ring, and there is no need to rush.
Sleep recedes gently, like an outgoing tide: one can wake, and doze again, and
then wake once more, chasing evanescent wisps of departing dreams. Lindsay
yawned, and stretched, and looked at his watch. It was mid-morning. He yawned
again, and swung his legs over the edge of his bed. He was in an hotel room,
and a window facing him framed a clear blue sky. He stretched experimentally a
couple of times, and levered himself to his feet as his mind brought back the
previous day, and the day before that, and the day before that as well, and he
felt a hero.
He rubbed his eyes, and caught sight of the
movement in a large wall mirror, and inspected himself. The man in the mirror
stared at him quizzically. He was really in pretty good shape, all things
considered: nice looking, not too podgy, needing a shave, perhaps, and clean
teeth, and a shower, but nothing shameful. He surveyed his room, and padded
quickly to where he had left his suit draped across a chair. But his money was
quite safe. Later on he could take it to a bank. Right now he needed to get his
act together, feed himself, and find Simon Swann, Collier’s PR man. He would
also have to think up some good excuse for missing the direct London-Nassau
plane. He would talk of some kind of hold up. The words seemed to fit the bill
very well.
Half
an hour later he felt like a new man. He was clean, and his teeth shone. He
brushed his hair up into a neat crewcut, and looked out of the room window. Not
a cloud to be seen, a garden stretching down to a beach, and azure sea beyond
that. He admired himself again, because he felt that he deserved a little
admiration after three days of thrills and spills. The man inspecting him was
coolly elegant in a pink shirt and cream slacks, and his shoes had kept their
parade ground shine. He was ready for breakfast.
The
British Colonial was a big hotel, with tiled floors and big high cielinged open
spaces in a vaguely Spanish colonial style. Lindsay wondered where he would
find a restaurant. He was starting to look when he heard a voice raised in greeting. He turned, to
see Swann and four other men slumped deep into cane armchairs.
He
raised his own hand. Now he would find out whether any word of his Berlin
adventure had travelled ahead of him.
Swann
stood, to pull up a sixth chair, signalling to a hovering waiter. The PR man
was neat and well-groomed in a seersucker
tropical
suit and open-necked silk shirt, but with a bit of a goaty look about him. It
was something about the way he managed his hair, with long white sideburns
pointing up a shining bald pate. Lindsay looked at the other four men,
inspecting each quickly in turn. He knew two of them, Jack Cowan, the editor of
International Homes, a dapper freeloader with a permanent smile and a fondness
for fashionable venues, and Bob Armstrong, from The Economist, another smooth
man with the saturnine look of a lawyer. Both nodded with the familiarity of
acquaintance, but neither showed any curiosity.
Swann
bubbled. ‘Do you all know each other?’
He
looked at Cowan and Armstrong, who both nodded. The other two men smiled
amicably. Both had the crisp short sleeve shirts, well-pressed chinos and
well-established tans of men who travel the world’s smart places Swann
introduced them as Brian Goodwin and Ted Harding, golf correspondents from the
Daily Mail and the Financial Times.
The
waiter brought drinks.
‘Have
a planters’ punch, dear boy.’ He watched Lindsay take a tall yellow tumbler
topped with a little straw umbrella floating on a slice of orange. ‘We must all
drink to King Cay’s success.’
Six
hands raised six tall tumblers, and Lindsay sipped. The planters’ punch was
strong with white rum, and he felt the spirit go straight to his head. He was
not sure he was wise to drink on an empty stomach. Swann gestured to him to sit
down, but he stayed on his feet. ‘I need something to eat.’
Swann
sighed. ‘You’ll be missing good drinking time, dear boy. But if you must, you
must.’
He
got to his feet again, to point towards an open archway. ‘The restaurant’s
through there, or there’s a burger bar, if it’s closed.’ He hesitated. ‘You
know the drill?’
Lindsay
looked at him quickly.
‘Put
your room number on all your bills, and I’ll take care of them.’
‘Nothing
to pay?’
‘Not
a cent, dear boy.’
They
both beamed. Nothing could be nicer than an hotel where simply everything came
free.
Lindsay
found the restaurant, and a waiter, and settled to eat. Swann was a good man.
It was strange. The PR man was very much a dandy, always unruffled, always
smooth, always charming, always beautifully turned out. But he had been a
Commando hero during the Second World War, kicking hell out of men like Wotan.
Perhaps Wotan’s side had lost because it lacked charm.
He
demolished a plate piled with griddle cakes doused in syrup and melted butter,
with crisp rashers of bacon on the side, a pot of hot black coffee, and a glass
jug filled with orange juice. Nothing could beat an American breakfast.
Swann
and his four companions were still sprawled in their cane chairs as he returned
to the bar, and a small forest of empty glasses had sprouted on the table
between them. Lindsay stayed on his feet. He had eaten, and now he planned to
find a secure home for his cash, and then swim and sun himself a bit. He needed
to unwind.
Swann
assented graciously. ‘Quite right, dear boy, quite right. You’ll find the
talent on the beach, if there is any.’ He made a face. He had already scouted
along the British Colonial foreshore, and the only women were heavy middle-aged
American and Canadian matrons. He planned to stay in the bar, and water his
charges. Good PR focussed on caring for journalists’ needs.
The
British Colonial beach was a dream of white gold sand, edging into a
transparent green-blue sea, fine, and spotlessly clean. Lindsay stashed his
cash away in the hotel safe, and then padded through the hotel and across the
garden to stretch out on a towel and doze.
Cordelia Altenburg also ate a late breakfast, nibbling at a bowl of fresh pineapple chunks mixed with slices of melon and banana, seated with her grandmother at a white-painted wrought iron table on the terrace of her father’s villa. The villa was a long, elegant cream-coloured building in the Spanish manner, with a colonnaded arcade running its full length fronting onto the terrace, every room opening onto the arcade, and a wide covered passage running the full length of the villa at the back of the building, again with doors to each room. The largest room was a big drawingroom cooled by swirling fans, furnished with two comfortable sofas facing each other across a low coffee table, and a grand piano in one corner, for both Altenburg and his daughter were competent pianists, and liked to entertain each other. Three matching armchairs completed a sociable semi-circle around the coffeetable, with an enormous colour television standing in a corner. Several huge pots of fuchsias provide splashes of colour, contrasting with a huge painting of the flower of the Prussian army proclaiming Kaiser Wilhelm Emperor of all Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The villa also had a large diningroom with a table capable of seating twelve at a time, and several bedrooms, each with its own luxury bathroom. Two more rooms in a small annex tacked on to one end of the villa housed a couple of offices with desks, tables, typewriters, telephones and a telex unit, whilst a rather larger utility block set back behind the other end housed the villa’s kitchens and quarters for Altenburg’s Bahamian servants. The whole was surrounded by neatly tended lawns, and a neatly gravelled road cut through a wall of scrub surrounding the lawns to a small marina where Altenburg kept a couple of cruisers and a yacht. The villa also had its own airstrip, and a second complex of low functional buildings painted in camouflage green lay a little way beyond it. The buildings merged almost invisibly into the surrounding scrub, and housed the villa’s security guards, a group of men in green American fatigues who spoke German amongst themselves, and greeted each other with roman salutes. Sometimes they also spoke Spanish, when visitors came, and showed their visitors how to handle small arms at a firing range in one of the buildings, and how to assemble small bombs, and other interesting explosive devices, in another. They circled the villa at night with large dogs, whenever Altenburg was present. But they never spoke to his servants.
Cordelia finished her bowl of chopped fruit, and rang a small silver bell for a servant to come and clear the table. She was a girl accustomed to living in style. She had now spent two years studying the history of art at Madrid University, with a particular emphasis on late Renaissance culture, and wished to build herself a collection of fine things, and find herself a fine husband, but not necessarily in that order. She considered the Altenburg palace in Madrid her home. But her father also owned an estate in Mexico, near Vera Cruz, where he grew sugar cane, and a silver mine high in the mountains, plus a villa on the French Riviera, between Nice and Menton. She was fluent in English, Spanish, German and French, after an education at L’Aiglon in Switzerland following her mother’s untimely death in a car accident, and accustomed to holidays on both sides of the Atlantic, for the Altenburg and Hanson families were both large and sociable clans. Now she was having a break at King Cay, though she regarded the island as rather less fashionable than the beaches along the Cote d’Azur. She was also determined to avoid Diego Vitoria.
Vitoria was a Cuban exile, with money, plenty of money, and close to her father. He seemed determined to woo her and win her. However she regarded him with deep suspicion and distrust. People whispered that he was a drug king, a cocanero. She also rated him an arrant poser, because whilst he laid claim to great expertise on all things beautiful, she had found him him sadly misguided on Spanish painting and furniture, and she doubted his antecedents, because whilst he claimed to be descended from a Grandee of Spain, she had found no connections between Spanish and Cuban Vitorias in her father’s copy of the Almanach de Gotha, the handbook to European aristocracy. She also considered him extremely vain, and less than frank about his age, for whilst he claimed to be thirty-six, or fourteen years older than herself, she had a feeling that he had lopped several years in a bid to seem youthful, and might be coasting up towards forty-three, or even forty-four. She was consequently not keen on his company, though Vitoria appeared to be so conceited that he could not take no for an answer.
She planned to keep herself for something very much better, perhaps a nice young Spanish count, with a substantial estate in Spain, and possibly a place on the Argentinan pampas, a collection of fine paintings, and perhaps a polo pony or two, or else an Italian prince, dark and saturnine, with an ancient castle in Calabria badly in need of restoration.
She was consequently considerably less than interested when her grandmother began to talk about a nice English journalist she had met on her flight from New York. Journalists were not rich, and certainly did not belong in the castle league.
‘He’d have to have a country house, grandmama.’ She closed her eyes to visualise something quite fine, a Palladian mansion perhaps, set in its own park amongst peacocks, and crammed with beautiful things. Or even a Georgian manor filled with period furnishings. Decaying, perhaps, but capable of being rescued.
‘He said he owned a flat in London, dear.’
Cordelia sniffed. A flat sounded wholly downmarket. Then she reflected for a moment. Journalists were men with sharp noses, and a little smart research might help send Vitoria packing. ‘Did he seem bright?’
‘Sharp as a pin, dear.’
‘Collier wants us to fly over to Nassau for a buffet on Wednesday evening.’ Cordelia spoke a little dreamily. It might be an idea worth pursuing.
‘We’ll go.’ Dorothy Hanson had spent most of the past ten years chaperoning her niece backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. But she still had all the directness of her Yankee origins. She had heard that well-known names would be attending the buffet, and she liked to swim in smart social circles.
Meanwhile Altenburg and Vitoria sat with Collier and two Collier henchmen in Collier’s Nassau office, and the five men were jovial with the air of men setting their seals on a more than promising project. Collier was a large man in a dark blue shirt, with a brightly coloured tie at half mast, and long hair for an American, wavy hair that tended to flop around when he was excited. He had the quick eyes of a salesman. He had lived in the Bahamas for the best part of five years, ever since losing his licence to sell mutual funds in the US, and possessed a shadowy past. But he had grown rich on dubious ventures, and was reputed to move millions for shy men and women on both sides of the Atlantic who preferred to live beyond the reach of taxmen and investment and currency controls.
King Cay ranked as his latest fiscal evasion. He had started selling plots on numbered titles registered with a Lichtenstein-based trust, and had already placed more than a fifth of the development with US, European and Latin American investors seeking a tax-free haven, whilst the Vatican had blessed the island with a hefty chunk of Banco Ambrosiano cash.
Now he was trying to buy Altenburg out. He did not mind him owning a slice of King Cay equity, but Altenburg had also kept a villa on the north shore of the island, with an airstrip, and a camp where he trained Cuban exiles for the CIA. The camp made bad news next to a world class leisure project. Bailey could have done it, but Bailey had brought the mob with him, and Altenburg had freaked out. Then Altenburg had pulled in Vitoria, because Vitoria was sweet on his daughter. But Vitoria made his money from drugs, and drugs made even worse news for a world class leisure project, particularly as Collier suspected Vitoria might use Altenburg’s airstrip to run cocaine into Florida. Now he was working on a third deal. But he was keeping it very much to himself.
Wilhelm Altenburg was tall and fairhaired, with a duelling scar on one cheekbone and a deep tan, elegant in a light cream linen suit. He was watchful, because he mistrusted both Collier and Vitoria. He had liked the Cuban initially, and toyed with the idea of matching him off with Delia. But people had begun calling Vitoria a cocanero, and both Delia and her grandmother had taken against him. He was no longer certain that he wanted a Cuban son-in-law. But the deal was still on the table, and selling the villa promised to make him yet another fortune, sooner or later.
He was proud of King Cay. The island had begun as a gamble, back in the Fifties, because of its location, on a direct line from Berlin to Mexico. Altenburg had spent four years during the war commanding a Waffen SS kommando with a particularly brutal reputation, rounding up and slaughtering Jews in Poland, and had then fled to Spain, sheltered by sympathisers and travelling on forged papers. He had moved on to Mexico, to try and make something of a collection of half forgotten family interests. He had been energetic and capable, and they had begun to prosper. He had then returned to Spain, seeking trustworthy former comrades, and met Alice Hanson, on a trip with her father to inspect Hanson shipping interests. They had married and settled in Madrid.
The Hanson clan had initially been most suspicious. But Altenburg was handsome and aristocratic, as well as a shrewd businessman, and had prospered Hanson shipping interests as well as his own silver mining and sugar plantation operations. An acquaintance had offered King Cay, a barren chunk of limestone and scrub, and he had bought the island very cheaply.
There had been some problems, a clutch of native fishermen and their families with huts on the northern coast. But Altenburg had profited from his wartime experiences, and the fishermen had disappeared. He had built himself a nice villa, and added a little camp staffed by recruits to the Teutonic Knights, to provide unpaid security. The camp also brought in a handy stream of revenue from the CIA. Now the villa stood as a key bargaining counter. Collier needed it to complete King Cay. But he had run out of cash. Bailey had come and gone, tarred by a mafia brush. Now Vitoria was proving a pain. He wanted Delia thrown in as part of the deal, and Altenburg knew he could not throw his daughter anywhere.
Vitoria thought about Delia. He was a dark man, with a neat little black moustache, black hair and flashing eyes, very Spanish looking, and perhaps even more elegant than Altenburg in a dark blue blazer with gold buttons straight from Savile Row, crisp pale blue shirt, well-pressed white linen chinos, and highly polished black loafers. Altenburg’s daughter was proving much too choosy, and his male pride, the pride of a descendant of a Grandee of Spain, was a little bruised. She was a prime catch, a girl from a good family, one of the best, standing to inherit a good fortune, beautiful, and with brains into the bargain. Such girls were not found very often. But she was giving him absolutely no encouragement, and he suspected that he was making a fool of himself in pursuing her. Yet she lay at the heart of his plans. King Cay was a jewel, a real treasure. He had agreed to buy Altenburg’s villa as a wedding present for Delia, because paying money to Altenburg mean money coming back when he died. But Delia was being horrendously stubborn.
Collier leaned back in his chair, and his smile was serene, because everything was running smoothly to plan.
‘Well, gentlemen, I think we’re ready.’
Collier’s two henchmen both looked pleased with themselves. One was Collier’s finance director, his money honcho, and wore horn-rimmed glasses. The other was his planning chief, the young man responsible for converting cash into bricks and mortar, and making sure clubhouse, golf course and marina were all completed on time. Both were neat in lightweight seersucker suits.
‘Yes, sir.’ They spoke in chorus, like a pair of twins.
Collier nodded approvingly. ‘Right. So we have our press conference on Wednesday morning, the buffet Wednesday evening, and everyone goes out to the island Thursday.’
His henchmen nodded in unison. Everything was in place, everything was ready. Air traffic control was operational, and they had shipped a clutch of elderly Parisian buses to the island to ferry incoming guests from the airstrip to the clubhouse and back again. The clubhouse was spick and span, the bars were stocked, the musicians ready and waiting, the chefs and catering staff poised to create a feast, and the golfcourse was verdant. No stone had been left unturned, nothing had been left to chance, nothing had been forgotten. Generous bonuses were at stake, and neither henchman wished to lose out.
Collier got to his feet. He was a big man, but well-shaped, a keen golfer and yachtsman. The two henchmen took his hint and left. Altenburg glanced at his watch. It was time for him to go as well: he needed to return to the island to look after his mother-in-law, freshly arrived from New York. He looked at Vitoria hard. There were things he needed to discuss with the Cuban.
They walked slowly along Bay Street, side by side. The Cuban glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. ‘Is she still taking her time about making up her mind?’ He found Delia’s delaying tactics irritating. He would have beaten his own daughter into quick submission.
Altenburg nodded. ‘She’s only a girl.’ He wondered how he could persuade the Cuban to buy him out first, and wait.
‘She’s part of the deal.’
The man with the duelling scar did not reply. It was true, she was. But she was his only child, and he could not force her.
Vitoria was suave. ‘Wilhelm.’ He put his hand on Altenburg’s arm, to show his sincerity. ‘I love her.’
Altenburg sighed. ‘I also love her. But she has a mind of her own.’