Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal and Other Stories (10 page)

‘Well, for heaven's sake what is it?' she said.

‘I bet you never saw one of those before.'

‘Well, what is it?'

‘Look at it,' Mr Pickering said. ‘Take a good look at it. I bet you never saw one before.'

Mrs Pickering gave a surprised fleshy laugh and said:

‘Well, my goodness, it's some sort of dollar coin. Five!' she said. ‘Five dollars.'

‘Gold,' Mr Pickering said. ‘American.'

‘But we don't have gold——'

‘And take a look at that,' Mr Pickering said. ‘Guess what that is.'

He threw over to Mrs Pickering once again something which fell into dazzling soft sand without a sound.

‘This isn't a dollar,' she said. ‘This has got an animal or something on it. Sort of crocodile.'

‘Dragon,' Mr Pickering said. ‘St George killing the dragon. You know—St George of England.'

‘You mean to say this is English?'

‘English sovereign,' he said. ‘Gold. Used to be worth about five dollars. Now it's worth double—treble, maybe.'

With careful indifference Mr Pickering got up and began to take his trousers off. Underneath them he was wearing loose-fitting crimson swimming trunks on the left leg of which was embroidered a picture in blue and white of a diving girl. Mr Pickering folded the trousers neatly and then carefully walked across to his wife and laid them in the broad lap made by her pink-skinned thighs.

‘Look in the pocket,' he said. ‘Go on. Take a look in the pocket.'

Across the sand, beyond a line of hurricane-twisted palms, in front of the blue-walled hotel, a coloured boy in a white jacket was serving rum-punches to a group of sun-bathers lying under a vast orange umbrella. The sun flashed on the amber glasses, the tray and the silver tongs of the ice container as the boy lifted them.

Mr Pickering pretended to watch all this with an absorbed but casual interest. In reality he was watching his wife slowly take from the pocket of his trousers seven dollar pieces and thirteen sovereigns.

‘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.'