First the harbour below, with its horseshoe of white lights and small yachts, each a separate campfire sitting on the glass of the sheltered water. Lift your eyeline by a knuckle and there she is: the Iron Pasha herself, dressed for a carnival, gold-lit from stem to stern. Jonathan can make out the shapes of the guards, one forward, one aft, and a third lurking in the shadow of the bridge. Frisky and Tabby are not among them. Their duties tonight are on land. His gaze moved in tactical bounds up the sand track and passed under the driftwood archway that announced the sacred kingdom of Mama Low. It scanned the lighted hibiscus bushes and the tattered Bahamian flags dangling at the halfway point either side of the skull and crossbones. It paused at the dance floor where a very old couple held each other close, touching each other's faces unbelievingly with their fingertips. Jonathan guessed they were émigrés still marvelling at their survival. Younger dancers pressed together in stationary ecstasy. At a ringside table, he picked out a pair of hard men in their forties. Bermuda shorts, wrestlers' chests. A thrusting way of using their forearms. Is it you? he asked them in his mind ― or are you two more Roper leash dogs?
"They'll probably use a Cigarette," Rooke had said. "Superfast low job, no draught."
The two men had arrived in a new white powerboat shortly before dusk, whether a Cigarette or not he didn't know. Bui they had the stillness of professionals.
They stood up, smoothing their nether parts and slinging their handbags over their shoulders. One of them threw a Roman wave in Mama Low's direction.
"Sir? Loved it. Oh, nice eating. Brilliant."
Elbows aloft, they waddled down the sand path to their boat.
They were nobodies, Jonathan decided. They belonged to one another. Maybe. Or maybe not.
He shifted his sights to a table of three Frenchmen and their girls. Too drunk, he decided. They had already put away twelve orders of Mama's punch among them, and nobody was pouring his drink into the flower vase. He focused on the mid-deck bar. Against a background of yachting pennants, heads of blue marlin and tail ends of plundered neckties, two black girls in radiant cottons perched on high stools, chatting to two black men in their twenties. Maybe it's you, he thought. Maybe it's the girls. Maybe it's all four of you.
Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed a low white powerboat heading out of Deep Bay toward the ocean. My two candidates eliminated. Maybe.
He allowed his gaze to begin the climb toward the terrace, where the worst man in the world, surrounded by retainers, jesters, bodyguards and children, was disporting himself in his private Camelot. As his boat now mastered the harbour, so the person of Mr. Richard Onslow Roper mastered the round table, the terrace and the restaurant. Unlike his boat, he was not dressed for spectacle but had the comfy look of a fellow who had thrown on a few clothes to answer the door to a friend. A navy pullover was slung carelessly over his shoulders.
Nevertheless, he commanded. By the stillness of his patrician head. By the speed of his smile and the intelligence of his expression. By the attention lavished on him by his audience, whether he spoke or listened. By the way everything around the table, from the dishes to the bottles to the candles in their green string jars to the faces of the children, seemed to be ranged toward him or away from him. Even the close observer felt his pull: Roper, he thought, it's me, Pine, the chap who told you not to buy your Italian marbles.
And as he was thinking this, a general cry of laughter went up from the terrace, led by Roper himself and evidently provoked by him, for his bronzed right arm was flung out to make the humorous point and his head was lifted to the woman who faced him across the table. Her carelessly disordered chestnut hair and naked back were thus far all Jonathan could see of her, but he remembered at once the grain of the skin inside Herr Meister's bathrobe, the endless legs and clusters of jewels at the wrists and neck. He felt the surge that had passed through him the first time he set eyes on her, the stab of indignation that someone so young and beautiful should accept the captivity of a Roper. She smiled, and it was her comedian's smile, kooky, slanted and impertinent.
Blocking her from his mind, he allowed his gaze to range the children's end of the table.
Lastly came Daniel himself, aged eight, a tousled, pallid boy with a determined chin. And at Daniel, Jonathan's eye paused guiltily.
"Couldn't we use somebody else?" he had asked Rooke. But he had hit against their iron wall.
Daniel is the apple of the Roper's eye, Rooke had replied, while Burr looked out of the window. Why go for second best?
