"Told Corky he was full of shit. Nose out of joint, that's his trouble. Better go gently with him. Nothing worse than a queen with a chip on his shoulder."
"But I do go gently with him. All the time."
"Yeah. Well. No-win situation probably. Hell's it matter, anyway?"
* * *
Roper returned to the subject a couple of days later. Not of Corkoran, but of Jonathan's presumed squeamishness regarding certain sorts of deals. Jonathan had been up to Daniel's bedroom to suggest a swim, but Daniel wasn't there. Roper, emerging from the royal suite, fell in beside him, and they walked downstairs together:
"Guns go where the power is," he announced without preamble. "Armed power's what keeps the peace. Unarmed power doesn't last five minutes. First rule of stability. Don't know why I'm preaching to you. Army chap, army family. Still, no point in getting you into something you don't like."
"I don't know what you're getting me into."
They crossed the great hall on their way to the patio.
"Never sold toys? Weapons? Explosives? Tech?"
"No."
"Ever bump into it? Ireland or somewhere? The trade?"
"I'm afraid not."
Roper's voice dropped. "Talk about it another time."
He had spotted Jed and Daniel sitting at a table on the patio, playing
* * *
Jonathan is jogging.
He says good morning to the Self-Expression Wash & Beauty Salon, no bigger than a garden shed. He says good morning to Spokesman's Dock, where some weak rebellion had once been quelled and Amos the blind Rasta now lives in his tethered catamaran with its miniature windmill to recharge his batteries. His collie, Bones, sleeps peacefully on deck. Good morning, Bones.
Next comes the corrugated compound called Jam City Recorded & Vocal Music, full of chickens and yucca trees and broken perambulators. Good morning, chickens.
He glances back at Crystal's cupola above the treetops.
Good morning, Jed.
Still climbing, he reaches the old slave houses, where no one goes. Even when he comes to the last slave house he does not slow down but jogs straight through its smashed doorway to a rusted oil can that lies on its side in one corner.
Then stops. And listens, and waits for his breathing to settle, and flaps his hands to make his shoulders loose. From among the muck and old rags in the can he extracts a small steel spade and starts to dig. The handset is in a metal box, cached here by Flynn and his night raiders to Rooke's specification. As Jonathan presses the white button, then the black button, and listens to the bird song of space-age electronics, a fat brown rat lollops across the floor and, like a little old lady on her way to church, lollops into the next-door house.
"How are you?" Burr says.
Good question, thinks Jonathan. How am I? I'm in fear, I'm obsessed by an equestrienne with an IQ of 55 when the sun's shining, I'm clinging on to life by my fingernails twenty-four hours a day, which is what I seem to remember you promised me.
He recites his news. On Saturday a big Italian called Rinaldo flew in by Lear and left three hours later. Age forty-five, height six foot one, two bodyguards and one blond woman.
"Did you get the markings on his plane?"
The close observer has written them nowhere but knows them by heart.
Rinaldo owns a palace in the Bay of Naples, he says. The blonde is called Jutta and lives in Milan. Jutta, Rinaldo and Roper ate salad and talked in the summer-house, while the bodyguards drank beer and sunbathed out of earshot lower down the hill.
Burr has follow-up questions concerning last Friday's visitation of City bankers identified only by their Christian names. Was Tom fat and bald and pompous? Did Angus smoke a pipe? Did Wally have a Scottish accent?
Yes to all three.
And did Jonathan have the impression they had done business in Nassau and come to Crystal afterwards? Or did they simply fly London to Nassau, then Nassau-Crystal in the Roper jet?
"They did business in Nassau first. Nassau's where they do the respectable deals. Crystal's where they go off the record," Jonathan replies.
Only when Jonathan has completed his report on Crystal's visitors does Burr move to welfare matters.
"Corkoran gumshoes after me all the time," says Jonathan. "Can't seem to leave me alone."
"He's a has-been and he's jealous. Just don't press your luck. Not in any direction. Hear me?" He is referring to the office behind Roper's bedroom. By some feat of intuition, he knows it is still Jonathan's goal.
Jonathan returns the handset to its box and the box to its grave. He treads down the earth, scrapes dust over it, kicks bits of leaf, pine kernels, dried berries over the dust. He jogs down the hill to Carnation Beach.
"Hidah! Mist' Thomas the magnificent, how you do today, sir, in your soul?"
