serious, and not at all hushed as you might expect, saying a thing like that in a place like this. I tapped my cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, taking care to keep my fingers steady despite the buzz along my nerves. “Golly. Say what you really think, Freddie.”
“I beg your pardon. Mine is an outspoken nature.”
“Oh, I don’t mind a bit, believe me. Is he a traitor?”
“No,” de Marigny said, “but he is the fool of the Nazis. I knew him a little before the war, you know, when I lived in London. It’s no secret he admired Hitler very much in those days. His wife, I think, is of the same mind. You will remember, I think, their visit to Germany, shortly after they married?”
“I remember, all right. That was some show. Parades and factory tours and what have you. Wearing their best clothes and their best smiles.”
“He is an idiot.” De Marigny sucked on his cigarette. His gaze, which had been trained amicably on me, lost a little focus, lost a little amity, and slipped to some point past my left ear. “I had a friend in those days, a good chap, handsome fellow, clever, a Jew. He traveled back to Berlin to persuade his family to leave. This was in 1936, I believe, after they passed these terrible laws. That was the last I ever saw of him.”
“Do you believe what some of the newspapers are saying? About the camps and so on? Or is it all just propaganda, like spearing the Belgian babies?”
He tossed down a considerable measure of whiskey and stared at the cubes of ice left behind. The air was warm, the way the air is always warm in Nassau, and you could almost hear the melting of the ice under the draft of the ceiling fan. His hand, holding the glass, was quite long, and the fingers looked as if they could crush rocks. I waited for him to speak. Most people will, if you give them enough time. Nobody likes a silence.
“I have a story for you,” he said at last. “I think it illustrates rather nicely the character of the man.”
“That’s what I’m here for, after all.”
“Some few years ago, when I first came to the Bahamas, I found a pleasant little ridge on the island of Eleuthera on which to build a house of my own. I had made some money, you see, in the London commodities markets, and I wanted what every fellow does. A castle of his own.”
“Naturally.”
He waved away a little smoke. “It’s a pretty island, Eleuthera. Long and narrow and undulating, like a ribbon”—he made a gesture with his hand, illustrating this ribbon—“so you are never far from these beaches of beautiful coral sand. It lies to the east, about two days’ sail from here. Eleuthera. This means ‘freedom’ in Greek, did you know that?”
“I did not. They don’t teach much Greek at girls’ schools, I’m afraid.”
“No? I suppose not. In any case, I bought two hundred acres on a ridge, sloping right down to the beach, and assured myself of a source of plentiful fresh water on the property. Then I built a nice bungalow.”
“So what happened? The duke decided he wanted it for himself?”
A large party burst into the room, six or seven of them, voices booming off the ceiling, reeking of sunshine and perspiration. De Marigny glanced across the furniture and observed them for a second or two, no more. Then he returned to me and said, smiling again, “Not quite. You see, in the village below this ridge, the Negroes have no fresh water of their own. The women boil seawater and collect rain in buckets, or else they walk for miles and then pay a penny a dipper. So I thought, since I was building this house in any case, I should also build a system to pipe water down to the village from my well, to these villagers who had nothing but dry rocks and barren soil. And I designed this system, and had the permit approved by the Executive Council, and all that was needed was the signature of the governor himself.”
“Oh, dear,” I said.
While he was speaking, Jack came silently in our direction and replaced the empty whiskey glass with a fresh one. De Marigny nodded his thanks and sipped. Though the sides of the glass were still dry, he held it gingerly. “Then this woman arrives,” he said. “A woman named Rosita Forbes, a writer.