Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 07 Read Free

a mob job? Rich guys had those kind of connections all the time. I sighed. “When does he want to see me?”
    “Day after tomorrow, if it’s convenient. You’d fly to Miami in the morning. The following morning, you’d be in the Bahamas. It’s beautiful there, Nathan, truly it is.”
    What sounded beautiful was that G-note guarantee.
    And my agency could sure as hell use a handsome yearly retainer from a major corporation like Oakes’ Lake Shore Mines of Canada. Maybe I could even open up a Canadian branch of the A-1….
    “You’ll do it, then?”
    I frowned at him and shook my finger in his face. “Mr. Foskett, Sir Harry Oakes may be the richest man in the world, but somebody’s got to teach him that money can’t buy you everything.”
    His face fell.
    Then I grinned and patted his tan cheek like a baby. “But, Walt—that somebody isn’t going to be me. I can use a thousand bucks.”

 
    I barely had a foot on the spongy wooden surface of the landing wharf before I slipped out of my suitcoat; I’d worn lightweight clothing, including a seersucker suit and short-sleeved white shirt, but they couldn’t stand up to one minute of muggy Nassau. It was probably only about eighty degrees—child’s play for a Chicagoan who could stand up under the coldest and hottest weather the planet had to offer—but that didn’t stop my shirt from going immediately sopping.
    A houseboat-like affair at the tip of the dock next to the bobbing seaplane was where we waited momentarily for our baggage—mine was a single canvas duffel—and at the end of the short pier in a one-story modern shed was a Pan Am passenger station where a polite, casual Negro in a white shirt as dry as mine wasn’t and the crown-crested blue cap of a royal immigration officer asked me a perfunctory question or two and waved me on.
    No passports were needed here, I’d been told; and no currency exchange was necessary—though a British colony, New Providence would be glad to take my American money.
    Back out in the humid air, I drank in the languid, off-season, wartime ambience of a wharf that no doubt often bustled, but not now. The handful of American tourists who’d made the Miami flight with me—with European travel a memory, the rich had to go somewhere in the summer, even if it was the tropics—were shanghaied by a barefoot black troubadour bearing a weather-beaten banjo. In tattered shirt and trousers and a wide straw hat and just as wide a smile, he accompanied himself, plinking, plunking on the banjo, beating out rhythm with his knuckles on the instrument’s face as he sang in a jaunty baritone, “Wish I had a needle, so fast I can sew, I sew my baby to my side and down the road we go…”
    The tourists stood with their bags in hands, with expressions ranging from delight to annoyance, and when the troubadour tipped his hat and then turned it upside down, they pitched some coins in. I wasn’t part of his audience, but wandered over and flipped in a dime myself.
    “Thank you, mon,” he said.
    “Always this sticky in July?”
    “Always, mon. Even de trees sweat.”
    And he was off to find new pigeons.
    Warehouses and other stone structures—this one labeled Government Ice House, that one labeled Sponge Exchange, another Vendue House, whatever that was—fronted the water’s edge. People were on the move, only not too fast. Most of the faces here were dark, with women in sarong-like garments but longer than Dorothy Lamour’s, and many of the men were bare-chested, ripplingly muscled, perspiration-oiled; both genders often carried baskets and other objects on their heads (despite frequent elaborate straw hats), perfectly balanced, making a way of life out of a childhood expression: Look, Ma, no hands.
    As I strolled away from the wharf, duffel bag in hand (not on my head), I glanced back at the harbor, its choppy blueness irresistible to the eye. A strip of land at the immediate horizon (inelegantly named Hog Island, I later