Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories Page 8

  ‘Now you know why I came down to the beach with my trousers on,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know where the heck to leave the things. I got a funny feeling about them—felt they were sort of contraband.’

  ‘You didn’t——?’

  ‘Oh! no,’ he said. ‘They’re legitimate enough. They’re still currency—only you don’t see ’em any more.’

  ‘Then where on earth did you get them?’

  ‘Bought ’em,’ he said.

  ‘But where?’

  ‘Over at the island. Yesterday.’ He smiled a leather-tight pursing sort of smile that brought his lips together in a thin and parsimonious line. ‘And if I have any luck I’ll buy some more today. Maybe a hundred. Maybe two.’

  ‘You must be crazy,’ she said. ‘All your life you been making money. Now you start buying it. That’s crazy.’

  Mr Pickering sat down in the sand to unlace his crimson crêpe-soled deck shoes. In one of them was a spoonful of white sand and he slowly and thoughtfully poured it away like salt from the heel.

  ‘You know the house along the road?’ he said. ‘The white one with the blue roof? The one you like so much? With the red bougainvillea on the walls?’

  ‘I like that house—yes.’

  ‘What say we buy it?—not now, but in a couple or three weeks. Before we go home?’

  ‘But you know what they’re asking for that house? They’re asking——’

  ‘I know what they’re asking.’

  ‘Well, you know we could never find that kind of money. Where would we find that crazy money? Not in Detroit, today.’

  ‘We don’t have to find it,’ Mr. Pickering said. ‘It’s here.’

  Mr Pickering looked over his shoulder in time to see the coloured boy in the white jacket walking towards them with drinks on a tray.

  ‘Wait till the boy’s gone,’ he said. ‘Well, there you are!—how’s the rum-swizzle trade?’ The coloured boy smiled and bent down and Mr Pickering took two red-golden punches from the tray. ‘One of the things I like about this hotel is this free drink they give you mornings.’

  ‘You pay for it,’ Mrs Pickering said. ‘You pay in the end.’

  ‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘I forgot my water-goggles. Boy, would you send somebody down with my water-goggles and my flippers—Room 17. Quick as you can, please.’

  ‘Yessir.’

  When the boy had gone Mr Pickering sat sucking rum through a straw and watching the long, almost phosphorescent lines of breakers spuming on the inner reefs of the bay. They were very beautiful in their pure curling regularity, like waves of bright-brushed hair. Beyond them the sea had the blueness of vitriol, with stripes of acid green, fading to sandy yellow, where the shallows were. Beyond that the thin low rocks of an island seemed like nothing more than a blue-brown floating board except when spray hit them, and leapt like a wild white horse into clear ocean beyond.

  ‘It’s all over there,’ Mr Pickering said.

  ‘On the island? How did you find that out?’

  Mr Pickering sucked once more at the straws of his glass and then looked about him to see if anyone was coming. The boy had not come back.

  ‘You’ve heard of Maxted,’ he said.

  ‘But that was a long time ago. That’s closed, isn’t it? Everybody’s forgotten about that.’

  ‘When a man’s murdered nobody forgets about it. Especially the person who did the murder.’

  Mrs Pickering played with sand, letting it run like iridescent mist through her podgy fingers, and said that she didn’t see what the murder of the man named Maxted had to do with gold on Rock Island.

  ‘Or for that matter with you.’

  ‘The man had an empire,’ he said. ‘A bit here, a bit there. A fortune here, one over there—God, nobody knows how much he had. This is only one bit of it.’

  ‘You’re going to try to tell me he left odd fortunes lying around in gold pieces,’ she said. ‘Just for the picking up.’

  ‘You might call it funk money,’ he said. ‘You might call it insurance. Some would. Dictators do it—a cache here and a cache there. You know—against the evil day.’

  ‘The boy’s coming with your goggles,’ she said. ‘You know I think I’ll go to the hotel. I find it very nearly too hot to sit in the sun.’

  ‘Just wait two minutes. While the boy’s gone. Then I’ll have my swim.’

  The boy brought Mr Pickering’s goggles, a pair of rubber frogmen flippers and a telephone message on a tray.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Mr Pickering said. He reached for his trousers and gave the boy two English shillings. ‘That’s fine. Thank you.’

  The boy went away and Mrs Pickering said: ‘Who is that from?’

  ‘Man named Torgsen,’ he said. ‘You know the funny little pink house near the harbour? Has shells and sea-fans and goddam porcupine fish hanging up outside? He keeps that. He’s got a motor boat—he’s going to take me across to the island.’

  ‘This afternoon?’

  ‘Two o’clock,’ he said. ‘He’s the one who knows all about it.’

  ‘If he knows all about it why doesn’t he keep it to himself? What’s he have to let you in on it for?’

  ‘Now you’ve hit it,’ Mr Pickering said.

  He was fitting on his flippers. When both of them were fixed his feet had the appearance of those of a giant green duck.

  ‘They’re all scared to hell,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows just enough to scare everybody else.’

  ‘About the murder or about the money?’

  ‘Both,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘When war broke out Maxted salted away about a quarter of a million in gold coinage on the island. The island belonged to him anyway and he had three motor-boats keeping trespassers away. That’s what I mean about funk money.’

  Mrs Pickering said she understood about the funk money but not about Torgsen. ‘Why should that old junk-store shell-collector know anything?’ she said. ‘He looks like a soaker to me.’

  ‘He’s a remarkable man,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘Maxted made a pal of him. He liked catching out of the way fish and getting Torgsen to set them up. You soak them in formaldehyde and then they harden up in the sun. Maxted had a big collection, all done by Torgsen.’

  Thoughtfully Mr Pickering began to polish the eye pieces of his goggles.

  ‘If the money was so hush-hush I don’t see how Torgsen got to know about it anyway,’ Mrs Pickering said.

  ‘Maxted began to pay him in gold,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘That’s how.’

  ‘I don’t see how that makes sense.’

  ‘Oh! yes,’ he said. ‘That makes sense. That was the vanity part. It wasn’t only that Maxted liked empires. He liked behaving like an emperor. Sometimes he’d go in to see Torgsen and if a fish wasn’t ready he’d knock Torgsen down. One day he pressed his thumbs under his eyes until his eyeballs stuck out.

  Mrs Pickering began to say that she did not wonder that Maxted, making so many enemies, had been murdered at last, but Mr Pickering said:

  ‘Funny thing, he made friends that way too. Torgsen was a friend. Every time Maxted knocked him down or shoved his eyeballs out he’d come back next day in a terrible state—remorse and all that—and beg forgiveness and say what a brute he’d been and what could he do to show how sorry he was?’

  ‘Torgsen was the fool.’

  ‘Oh! no,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘I don’t think so. Maxted would give him ten or twenty pounds as sort of compensation. Easy money. Then one day he kicked him in the belly and knocked him unconscious—and then next day Maxted was in a terrible way and that was when he paid him in gold.’

  Mrs Pickering in a bored way got up and put her wrap on her shoulders and thrust her feet into her pink sisal-grass beach shoes that had an embroidery of pale green and blue shells on the toes.

  ‘It all sounds like drink to me,’ she said. ‘Anyway I’m going up to change now. Don’t be very long. You know how it is if we’re not in there when the gong goes.’

  ‘He was
a drunk all right,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘But that doesn’t alter the fact that Torgsen can buy dollars and sovereigns on the island. That’s a fact you can’t get away from.’

  ‘I’d better take your trousers, hadn’t I?’ she said. ‘I’ll put the coins in my handbag. By the way, what do you give for them?’

  ‘They’re glad to get about twenty per cent less than they’re worth,’ he said. He laughed with brown, leathery, acquisitive lips. ‘Figure it out while you’re dressing.’

  Mr Pickering put his goggles on and flapped down to the sea like a semi-naked, balding, upright frog. For some time he swam in and among the low reefs protecting the little inner bay from the trade winds that blew beyond the headland. The water everywhere was so clear and limpid that he could see in these sea-gardens shoals of blue and orange fish, a few inches long, and larger fish of striped pink and blue. The seaweed, rose-violet in places, chocolate in others, sometimes bright yellow, waved everywhere about him with the gentle torment of shoals of anchored eels.

  When he came out of the sea and went back to his place on the beach he lay there for some time with his face upturned to the sky. The sun was very hot and there was no sound in the air except the small folding lap of minute waves eating into smooth white sand.

  ‘Somebody knows,’ Mr Pickering told himself. ‘Somebody must know.’

  In that moment he remembered the crab; and as he turned his head he saw to his surprise and delight that it had come out again to look at him, poised on its wiry yellow legs, with its queer, ghoulish, disembodied little eyes.

  ‘Part of it’s under the sea,’ Mr Pickering said, ‘or in the sea. I found out that much.’

  ‘You know, you came here to relax,’ Mrs Pickering said. ‘Trying to pick a murderer is no way to recuperate after pleurisy.’

  ‘I’m not trying to pick any murderer,’ he said. ‘I’m interested in picking up a fortune.’

  ‘Just the same, one links with the other,’ she said. ‘And anyway it doesn’t relax you.’

  ‘I feel great,’ he said. ‘You got to give your mind something to do anyway, haven’t you? You just can’t sit the whole time.’ Mr Pickering, in three weeks of Caribbean sun, watching the infinite blues of Caribbean waters, had almost forgotten the harsh and competitive world he had left in Detroit. Sometimes he took from his wallet one of the cards which Charlie Muller, his partner, and himself had fixed up after long deliberation and which both of them thought was pretty good. ‘We insure anything,’ it said, ‘and sell the world.’ These words and the cards on which they were printed, together with Pickering & Muller: Brokers, seemed no longer real when seen through the foggy distances of three weeks of time. Nor did Charlie Muller seem real; nor the high offices from which Mr Pickering and his associate and six stenographers looked across the wintry lake and the wintry Canadian distances beyond. It was surprising, Mr Pickering thought, how a world could slip away from you; surprising, too, how another, the world of Torgsen and Maxted’s murder and Maxted’s gold, could so insidiously replace it and so soon.

  ‘Well, I got a hundred and eighty dollars worth,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s sit here,’ Mrs Pickering said, ‘and watch the sunset.’

  Mrs Pickering’s passion for watching sunrise and sunset brought them every evening, in the hour before dinner, to a small promontory on the eastern edge of the bay. Below, on the white beach, the long line of hurricane-stricken palms, in almost horizontal curves, took on the strange appearance of gigantic burnished scimitars in the gold-rose glow of dying light. The enormous sinking sun set the calmest of seas on fire. On top of the promontory was a wooden seat above which grew trees of incense covered with small trails of parasite orchids of pinkish mauve, uncommonly like butterflies, and the air was heavy with the drenching sweetness of the incense flowers.

  ‘Look at the sea now,’ Mrs Pickering said. ‘Every wave has a pink tip on it. Look at it now—isn’t that heavenly? In a minute it’ll be orange or yellow or something—it changes so quickly.’

  Mr Pickering looked at the sea and saw on its brilliant surface, four hundred yards from shore, a long dark boat, narrow like a canoe, piled high with what seemed to be a system of wrecked hen-coops.

  ‘There go the craw-fish boys,’ he said. ‘Setting their pots. That’s another thing I have to do—spear craw-fish.’

  ‘It’s all red now,’ Mrs Pickering said. ‘Look!—it’s all red like fire.’

  ‘You suppose they do catch craw-fish?’ Mr Pickering said. ‘Could be they didn’t—you know, it could be!——’ he suddenly got up from the seat, descended the small flight of steps that had been cut into the black rock of the promontory and went down to the edge of the sea.

  Over by the thin brown reef the boat had stopped. Mr Pickering peered across the green-red sunset waters and watched as one after another the hen-coop craw-fish pots were pitched into the sea. He could see in the boat two brown-skin boys wearing tattered grey shirts and sombre trilby hats. He could see clearly the splash of each craw-fish pot whitening the delicate surface of the sea. Then the rock of the reef itself seemed to leap up from the surrounding liquid fire with such striking solidity that Mr Pickering was suddenly overwhelmed with the brilliance of an astounding idea.

  ‘Look—that’s it, that’s it,’ he said. ‘I bet you a million to one that’s how Maxted hid it. Torgsen says it’s under the sea—and I bet all the tea in China that’s how it got there.’

  A double echo of his voice, strangely contrived between rock and sea, brought back to him the sudden realisation that he was speaking to himself. He ran back up the steps. Mrs Pickering was standing in a posture of bent rapture against the low concrete wall built round the top of the little cliff. Mr Pickering, running in rubber-soled shoes, seized her elbow so suddenly that she gave a short cry, startled.

  ‘Oh! you scared me. You really did—I was watching the sun just disappearing—look at it, you can see it moving. Look—it’s going down.’

  ‘I just figured it out,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘It’s simple really. Obvious. Maxted liked these rare fish. He loved poking about these reefs—used to spend days at it, Torgsen says. So what does he do? he puts the stuff there—there are millions of these damn reefs and cays where you could hide stuff and nobody would ever know. Well, nobody—somebody knows. Torgsen knows.’

  ‘It gets dark so quickly,’ she said. ‘Look, there’s only a tip of the sun now. It’s just like a fingernail—just like a red lacquered fingernail. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Ah-ah,’ he said. ‘That’s beautiful. You see the craw-fish boys are going back now. Funny how they always come just at the same time.’

  The scarlet upper tip of sun slid with arresting swiftness below the horizon, leaving the sea smouldering with wavelets of pure orange touched by strokes of eucalyptus green. The air fell suddenly so dead calm that the dip of the single stern oar of the craw-fish boat threw a distinct snap in the air as it flipped at the sea.

  ‘It won’t be long now before the fire-flies are out,’ Mrs Pickering said. ‘I love it when the fire-flies begin.’

  Until this long southern vacation Mrs Pickering had never seen fire-flies before, and her first sight of them in the hot sub-tropical darkness, like dancing gas-green glow-worms, had startled her almost as much as the crab had startled Mr Pickering when he first saw it in the sand.

  ‘And that reminds me. You know, I found out something about them,’ she said. ‘I was reading it in a magazine while you were over at the island this afternoon. Those lights they have—they’re signals.’

  ‘What of?’ Mr Pickering said. ‘Danger?’

  ‘No. It’s like morse-code—I mean semaphore. Each of these flashes is in a sort of code—either it’s one, two, one or it’s two, one, one or something like that and it’s a signal from the female to male.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About love. About mating and all that. The male one flies around on his own wave-length or whatever you call it, one, two, one, until he fin
ds a girl-friend on the same wave-length making his signal.’

  ‘Then they clinch, I suppose?’

  ‘I think it’s the most beautiful thing,’ she said.

  Mr Pickering did not answer this time and his wife sat with enraptured patience looking at the sea. All its colours were dissolving and softening down to one colour—at least you thought it was one colour until you looked, as she did now, with eyes of half-closed penetration, and then you saw that it was an iridescence of fifty colours, perhaps a hundred, perhaps more, each small wave with its smeared brush-stroke of tenderest coloured light.

  ‘You know, it’s funny,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘You mention this murder and they all start talking about the price of bananas or some damn thing. Nobody wants to talk.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ she said. ‘It’s ten years ago, so why not let it rest? It’s over and done with. And a good thing.’

  ‘Not on your life,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘The murderer’s here on this island. And don’t tell me that’s a good thing. They sometimes do it again, you know that.’

  ‘All right. Have you a theory?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘But I probably will have after I’ve been over to Cat Cay tomorrow. That’s just a lump of reef and sand over on the other side of Rock Island. You don’t see it from here. But I’ll bet my office to a nickel that’s where the other part of the gold is.’

  ‘Nearly dark now. Only blue and tiny bits of yellow on the water. You can feel the wind turning, can’t you?’

  During the day-time the wind, the trade-wind, fresh and warm and illuminating the dark blue water with bars of snow foam, came from the sea. At night it blew from the mountains.

  ‘Didn’t they try a man once for it and let him off?’ Mrs Pickering said.

  ‘They did.’

  ‘Then don’t you think they’d have tried someone else if the murderer is here on the island? After all it’s so little. Just a few thousand people, that’s all.’

  ‘You got it there,’ Mr Pickering said. ‘It’s little—so everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows something. Everybody knows and everybody keeps his mouth shut.’