The Lucifer Gospel

28

In any other country Nassau International Airport would have been a bus station. Low ceilings, fake wood paneling on the walls, cracked floor tiles, and cheap yellow plastic seats in the waiting room. Sometimes, if the Tourist Office is in the mood, a grouchy steel band will be banging away in one corner surrounded by cardboard cut-out palm trees and homemade Christmas tinsel.

U.S. customs preclearance for people on the way out means that lines sometimes trail outside the building and into the parking lot. Most of the time neither the air conditioning nor the conveyor belt work. The airport personnel don’t work at all unless they have to. The security checks are about as lax as the ones you get at Ouagadougou Airport in Burkina Faso. There is only one set of toilets and one cafeteria-style restaurant, and only one shop, called Nature’s Gift, which sells only soap. This is the place where people from the United States come to catch a flight to Havana. Once this was the gateway to Paradise.

This Eden, however, like any other, was prone to corruption. The snake in this garden was organized crime, and the apple from the tree of knowledge looked suspiciously like cocaine and marijuana going in one direction and bales of hundred-dollar bills going in the other, after spinning around in electronic Laundromats with names that sounded like banks but weren’t. One way or the other six hundred and fifty metric tons of cocaine and ten times that much marijuana flowed through the islands of the Bahamas every year. The cash would fill a hundred freight cars. Cockroaches in the Bahamas have wings, lizards are everywhere, and the roads are full of potholes. When the Disney cruise ships dock in Nassau they play the first four bars of “When You Wish Upon a Star” on their horns so loudly you can hear it on the other side of New Providence Island.

On the other hand, the sand is blindingly white, the sea is the color of emeralds, and the sky is like sapphires. Swimming is like paddling around in a giant hot tub full of tropical fish. The people are polite and genuinely friendly, it rains for an hour or so every day just when you’re getting a little too hot, and they don’t put white people in jail, if the Fox Hill Penitentiary is any indication. Public transportation is cheap, fun, and frequent and the food is wonderful.

Finn and Hilts managed to catch a shuttle from Paris to London and then a nonstop flight from there to New Providence. Thirteen hours and ten minutes after climbing out of the Paris Catacombs they were climbing into a cab at the airport in Nassau. The sun beat down like a hammer, and the cab was without air conditioning. Swain amp; the Citations were doing “Duke of Earl” on the stereo.

The driver introduced himself as Sidney Poitier. He looked just about the right age for it, his eyebrows and the stubble on his chin stark white against his dark skin. He was wearing round, tortoiseshell glasses that looked old enough to really be made from tortoiseshell. The eyes behind the lenses were watery with age and desperate experience beyond imagining. They were also bright with humor and intelligence. Uncle Remus driving a taxi. What Richard Pryor might have been like at seventy, Finn thought.

“Is that really your name or just something for the tourists?” Hilts asked, surprised.

“My name before his. I believe I’m a year or two older. Poitier’s nothing special on the islands for a name. Sidney neither. He from Cat Island, as I recall. My old dead mother say he was a bad one so they send him to Miami to get good. That a laugh, General: the word ‘good’ and the word ’Miami’ like oil and water; no mixing them up. I say to people, my name’s Sidney Poitier, and they say, Guess who’s comin’ to dinner, but it sure as shit ain’t this Sidney eatin’ at the Royal Bahamian in the damn heat of the night. Which say, you goin’ anyplace in particular or you just want me to drive you around, General?”

“A hotel,” said Finn. She’d slept well enough on the long flight but she definitely needed a shower.

“You come from England on the B.A. and you don’t have a reservation?” Sidney asked.

“We were pressed for time,” said Hilts. The only luggage they had were a pair of British Airways flight bags they’d picked up at Heathrow and filled with necessaries from the airport shops.

“You eloping or something like that, General?” asked Poitier. The taxi was sweeping around the forested edge of Lake Killarney. Pine trees, not palms.

“Something like that.”

“Then you lookin’ for something you might call more or less secluded, right?”

“More or less,” Hilts agreed.

“Got just the place for you then, General,” said Poitier, agreeably.

“I thought you might.”

They turned off John F. Kennedy Drive onto the scruffy track of old Blake Road and soon came out onto West Bay Street and the chain of condo complexes, gated communities, and million-dollar beachfront bungalows that make up Sandyport.

Following Bay Street along the coast they reached Cable Beach, with its long row of high-rise hotels, nightclubs, and restaurants. Eventually the hotels faded away as they went around the deep, pretty curve of Go Slow Bend and reached the narrow strip of public park at Saunders Beach. After that the bloom was off the rose. A mile out in the water a white concrete tower that looked like something out of The Jetsons ruined the view, and Poitier told them it was the old Crystal Cay Observation Tower and Aquarium and was usually closed for one reason or another.

On shore the beachfront houses became older and crummier, interspersed with bars, clubs, and condo units poking up through the sand and limestone and sparse patches of grass. Just past a yellow house, surrounded by a razor-wire-topped stone wall, the taxi turned again and they pulled up into the driveway of a time-battered Victorian clapboard with a screened porch and narrow windows that looked as though it belonged on the set of Psycho. A carved wood sign out front announced that this was the office of Sir Percival Terco, M.P., Minister of Justice. Directly across from the big old house was a row of fish-fry shacks. The nearest one said Deep Creek.

Poitier grunted. “Percy hasn’t been Minister of Justice since Linden O. Pindling in ninety-two, but he likes the sign. And nobody here calls him Sir, believe me, General. He went away to England on holiday a few years back, came home and said Queen Elizabeth knighted him while he was there. Brought back a fancy piece of parchment with the Terco crest on it. Said it was hundreds of years old. Swans on it.” He snorted. “Black swans, maybe.” The old taxi driver laughed. “Motel’s around back.”

He drove in behind the house. A long L-shaped white building that looked like renovated slave quarters or a transformed chicken house stood at the end of an asphalt lot. There seemed to be seven units. There was a strange cupola like an afterthought on top of the building and a set of stairs running down to the ground with a banister made of old pipe. In the middle of the parking lot was a raised wooden platform in the shape of a boat. Above it was a sheet of rippled fiberglass, just like the one over the carport of Pyx’s place in Aix-les-Bains, except this one was yellow instead of green and topped in turn by a big satellite dish. There was a television mounted in a padlocked wooden box in what would have been the bow, a Ping-Pong table amidships, and a charcoal barbeque in the stern. Where the rudder would have been on a real ship was a public telephone mounted on a pole. In between the barbeque and the satellite TV were rows of padded benches and some lawn chairs. Behind the deck of this wooden boat sailing in its parking lot sea, between the edge of the asphalt and a swampy-looking inlet, was a huge cream-colored old Daimler Princess, tires rotted off, weeds growing up around the winglike fenders and the wide running boards. Something from another time.

A very black, very skinny man in baggy pants and a moth-eaten wifebeater undershirt was cooking something on the barbeque that was creating enormous amounts of smoke. “Lloyd,” said Poitier. “Percy’s brother. He owns the motel.”

“Where’d he get the car?” asked Hilts.

“The Duke of Windsor,” said Poitier. “Creamie-pie leave it here when he left the king’s employ. Lloyd been going on about fixing it since 1956. Which is about as much true as Percy been knighted by the Queen. Lloyd’s a good man though, General. He won’t do you wrong.”

“Creamie-pie?” Finn whispered.

“The Duke, I guess,” Hilts said and shrugged.

An elderly black woman as skinny and ropy as beef jerky with a face to match came out of one of the motel units wearing bright blue rubber gloves and carrying a red pail with a mop in it. She saw the taxi and waved her free hand. Her smile was more like a grimace of pain.

“Mrs. Amelia Terco herself,” Poitier explained. “Mother to Lloyd and to Percy. Does the cleaning for her boys. Looks like her rheumatism’s acting up.” He laughed. “ ‘Course, it’s been acting up since Hemingway came here to bonefish once.”

“A little old for that kind of work, isn’t she?” Finn asked, startled. The woman was ancient.

“Don’t you go telling her that,” Poitier said with a laugh. “She bite your head off. Tell you Percy was useless except for lying in Parliament and Lloyd too lazy to clean up after himself, let alone other people.” They climbed out of the taxi. Lloyd waved his spatula then went back to staring down into the smoke pouring up from the grill.

“Good mornin’, good mornin’, how are you this mornin’?” said Poitier to Lloyd Terco, joining him at the barbeque. “Brought you some business.”

“Well, that’s nice,” said Lloyd, squinting through the smoke. “You want some nice grouper, young lady?” he asked, smiling at Finn. The smoke wafted over her. It smelled delicious, and she told him so.

“Get the pretty young thing a plate, Mr. Poitier, and one for her friend as well,” instructed the chef in the undershirt. Poitier went to a table laid out in front of the big TV and picked up a couple of paper plates and some plastic cutlery. “He tell you his name was Sidney Poitier?” Lloyd asked.

“He did,” Hilts said. “Isn’t it?”

“Far as I know,” answered Lloyd. “Calling him that since he was six years old, which in his case was a long, long time ago. Just wondered if he brought it up. He usually does. Thinks he gets better tips that way.”

Poitier came back with the plates and the utensils.

“Telling lies again, Lloyd Terco?”

“Whenever I can,” Lloyd answered. He used the spatula to slide a couple of lightly battered slabs of fish onto the plate. “If I had a deep fryer we’d have some chips or some conch fritters, but I don’t so we won’t.” He pronounced “conch” konk. “Sad thing, but I’d burn myself if I had one,

so p’raps it’s for the best.”

Finn sat down on the nearest bench and rested the plate on her knees. She started to cut into fish with the plastic knife and fork.

“Eat it with your fingers, girlie. Mr. Poitier there brought you the knife and fork just to prove we have manners. Won’t cook you in a pot or some such.”

“No bones in your noses either,” said Hilts.

“Those are African niggers, my son. Island niggers got civilized a long time ago,” said Poitier blandly. He winked at Finn. She took a bite of the fish and winked back. Poitier liked that. The fish melted in her mouth. She tasted beer and lime. Lloyd handed fish out to everyone and then took some himself. He put his plate down beside one of the lawn chairs, went to the front of the boat and opened up a small fridge under the TV. He uncapped four bottles of Kalik and brought them back to his guests. Finn took a swig. She wasn’t much of a beer drinker, but this was like drinking liquid honey.

“Great,” she said.

“Funny name,” said Hilts, reading the label. He pronounced it kay-lik.

Lloyd corrected him. “K’lick,” he instructed, just barely separating it into two syllables. “Named after the sound the cowbell in a steel band makes.”

Finn took another bite of fish and sipped her beer. A tiny, bright red lizard ran across her foot. She was suddenly a very long way from ten hours in a British Airways 757 eating chicken korma, the pale kid with snot running across his upper lip licking it away every minute or so, staring at her between the seats.

A little bit of a breeze blew up from the inlet. There was a faint smell in the air, an odd mix of rotting vegetation, seaweed, and smoke that should have been a turnoff but was strangely invigorating. Alive in a very simple, basic way. All she wanted to do was take a nap and stop thinking about anything at all, which of course was exactly the reason people came to the Bahamas in the first place. She took another bite of fish. Her plate was empty.

“More,” said Lloyd. It wasn’t a question. He spatluaed her another few chunks of the battered fish. She ate it and drank more beer. Another lizard ran up the telephone pole. She was in a lizard-infested heaven.

“Gecko,” said Lloyd, noticing her glance. “A little tiny alligator without any teeth. Hemidactylus frenatus. They eat bugs, keep the rooms spider-free, you know.” Hemidactylus frenatus? Lloyd had hidden depths, she thought.

Lloyd turned to Hilts. “You want a room, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Fifty a night if you don’t use the AC too much. We watch the games out here if it’s good weather. Comes with the room.”

“Games?”

“Mostly fights. Tonight it’s a couple of middle-weights from Brazil. Eight o’clock. Beer’s cheap, popcorn is free.” He nodded to Poitier. “Show them a room, Mr. Poitier.”

“Sure, General,” Poitier said with a nod. He took the overnight bags from them even though they weighed almost nothing and they filed around to the shady side of the big chicken-coop building.

“You’re a bellboy too?” Hilts asked.

Poitier shrugged. “He gives me the room on the roof, I bring him customers, take them to the airport or into town. Fair trade.” He put down the bags and opened the door with a key that was dangling from the lock with a big number tag on it. Room one. It was in the middle of the row.

“One?”

“Eleven. Other number fell off and Lloyd never replaced it.”

“There’s not eleven rooms in the place.”

“Lloyd’s got a thing about seven and two so he left them out.” He unlocked the door, pushed it open and picked up the bags. They followed him inside. If the outside looked like a Bahamian Psycho, the interior of the room fit right in. It had all the ambience of the Bates Motel. Two rust-stained inset laundry sinks for dishes, a gas camping stove for cooking, a pair of lumpy beds, and a sagging ceiling. Bathroom cubicle in the back with a shower stall. The floor was covered with emerald-green Astroturf. “Pretty good for fifty bucks,” said Poitier. The old air conditioner in the window was sealed with caulk.

“As long as the roof doesn’t fall in,” said Hilts.

“Been that way for years, no reason why it should fall down now.”

Poitier leaned over the nearest bed and switched on the air conditioner. It wheezed into life and made a noise like a Volkswagen heater in the middle of February.

“Enjoy,” said Poitier. He left them alone.

Hilts watched a gecko skitter across the ceiling on gummy little feet that seemed to have suction cups on the toes.

“I like it,” said Finn.

“The gecko?”

“The room.” She sat down on one of the beds. It sagged even lower. She’d seen worse on archaeological digs with her mother in the Yucatan, but not much worse. “It’s homey.”

“That’s one word for it,” Hilts agreed cautiously.

“Hiltons have reservations computers. Data terminals in the rooms. This place doesn’t even have telephones. We can’t call out. No one can call in. Its cheap and it’s safe.”

“I guess.”

“So how do we find out about the Acosta Star?”

“DeVaux’s ship?”

“That burned and sank.”

“That one.” Hilts thought for a moment. “Maybe Lloyd or Sidney know something. They’ve been around since Creamie-pie, after all.”

“I wonder how he got that name,” she said and frowned.

“I hate to think,” answered Hilts. They went outside and back to the boat. The smoke had cleared. Poitier and Lloyd Terco were sitting down and drinking beer, staring at the old car and the swampy inlet beyond. A few ancient-looking conch boats were staggering out into the open water beyond the inlet, fishermen in shorts and wifebeaters like Lloyd’s sitting on the little cabin roofs or crouching by the outboard tillers. Wind blew through the long sawtooth leaves on the palms. You could almost see how it had been before Columbus, a few Carib Indians on the beach, cracking open conchs, stripping out the meat with stone tools, staring out to sea, waiting for genocide to catch them napping.

Hilts and Finn sat down on a bench facing the two men.

Hilts spoke. “Either of you gentlemen know anything about a ship called the Acosta Star?”

There was a short silence. The two men exchanged a look and a shrug. It was Lloyd who answered.

“French in the beginning. Ile de France, I think. Built in 1938 or so. Brand-new and they sunk her in the harbor to keep the Germans from getting her. Dutch after the war. They sold her to the Italians. When me an’ Mr. Tibbs here worked on old St. Georges she was called Bahamian Star for a few years, flyin’ convenience out of Liberia, but then Acosta Lines bought her. Must have been sometime in the late fifties, because they didn’t have her long before she burned and went down in Donna.”

“Donna?”

“Hurricane. Small and nasty.”

“She sank in a hurricane?”

“She caught fire first. Engine room. Got most everyone off and left a skeleton crew to fight the fire. Donna came out of nowhere and she disappeared.”

“Where?” Hilts asked.

“If I knew I wouldn’t have said disappeared.”

“The neighborhood.”

Poitier answered. “Some say the Tongue, some say the channel.”

“The Tongue?” asked Finn.

“Tongue of the Ocean,” explained Lloyd Terco. “Lot of locals just call it Toto. A hole in the water just east of Andros, a hundred miles long and ten thousand feet deep.”

“Other people say Donna swept her farther before she sank. Great Bahamas Bank, Old Bahama Channel offshore from Cuba.”

“What do you think?” Hilts asked.

“Don’t,” said Poitier. “Don’t bother thinking about something had nothing to do with me so long ago.”

“Tuck thinks about it. Talks about it too,” offered Lloyd.

“Tuck?”

“Tucker Noe. He’ll tell you he saw her go down, right in front of his eyes, off Lobos Cay Light, and that’s even farther. Pirates and Cubans and Boomers.”

“Boomers?” asked Hilts.

“Nuclear submarines,” said Poitier.

“Who’s Tucker Noe?” asked Finn.

“Fishing guide. Almost as famous as Bonefish Foley. Between them those two old men bonefished for every president since Lincoln and Ernest Hemingway besides.”

“He’s still alive?” Hilts asked.

“Hemingway? Naw, he long gone.”

Finn smiled as she realized they were ribbing Hilts on purpose and he kept falling for it.

Hilts scowled. “I meant this Tucker Noe.”

“Just barely,” Lloyd said and laughed.

“Can we talk to him?”

“Sure,” said Lloyd. “You can talk but that’s not sayin’ Tuck goin’ to answer.”