The place they called the Starlight Casino was full of people, a tour group by their looks. I had a few minutes before my appointment with Mr. Kavilan, and sometimes you got useful bits of knowledge from people who had just been through the shops, the hotels, the restaurants, the beaches. Not this time, though. They were an incoming group, and ill-tempered. Their calves under the hems of the bright shorts were hairy ivory or bald, and all they wanted to talk about was lost luggage, unsatisfactory rooms, moldy towels and desk clerks who gave them the wrong keys. There were a surly couple of dozen of them clustered around a placatory tour representative in a white skirt and frilly green blouse. She was fine. It was gently, “We’ll find it,” to this one and sweetly, “I’ll talk to the maid myself,” to another, and I made a note of the name on her badge. Deirdre. It was worth remembering. Saints are highly valued in the hotel business. Then, when the bell captain came smiling into the room to tell me that Mr. Kavilan was waiting for me—and didn’t have his hand out for a tip—I almost asked for his name, too. It was a promising beginning. If the island was really as “kindly” as they claimed, that would be a significant plus on my checklist.
Personnel was not my most urgent concern, though. My present task was only to check out the physical and financial aspects of a specific project. I entered the lobby and looked around for my real-estate agent—and was surprised when the beachcomber type by the breezeway stretched out his hand. “Mr. Wenright? I’m Dick Kavilan.”
He was not what I expected. I knew that R. T. Kavilan was supposed to be older than I, and I took my twenty-year retirement from government service eight years ago. This man did not seem that old. His hair was blond and full, and he had an all-around-the-face blond beard that surrounded a pink nose, bronzed cheeks and bright blue eyes. He
didn’t think of himself as old, either, because all he had on was white ducks and sandals. He wore no shirt at all, and his body was as lean and tanned as his face. I had dressed for the tropics, too, but not in the same way: white shoes and calf-length white socks, pressed white shorts and a maroon T-shirt with the golden insignia of our Maui hotel over the heart. I understood what he meant when he glanced at my shoes and said, “We’re informal here—I hope you don’t mind.” Formal he certainly was not.
He was, however, effortlessly efficient. He pulled his open Saab out of the cramped hotel lot, found a gap in the traffic, greeted two friends along the road and said to me, “It’ll be slow going through Port, but once we get outside it’s only twenty minutes to Keytown”—all at once.
“I’ve got all day,” I said.
He nodded, taking occasional glances at me to judge what kind of a customer I was going to be. “I thought,” he offered, “that you might want to make just a preliminary inspection this morning. Then there’s a good restaurant in Keytown. We can have lunch and talk—what’s the matter?” I was craning my neck at a couple we had just passed along the road, a woman who looked like a hotel guest and a dark, elderly man. “Did you see somebody you wanted to talk to?”
We took a corner and I straightened up. “Not exactly,” I said. Somebody I had once wanted to talk to? No. That wasn’t right, either. Somebody I should have wanted to talk to once, but hadn’t, really? Especially about such subjects as Retroviridae and the substantia nigra?
“If it was the man in the straw hat,” said Kavilan, “that was Professor Michaelis. He the one?”
“I never heard of a Professor Michaelis,” I said, wishing it were not a lie.
In the eight years since I took the hotel job I’ve visited more than my share of the world’s beauty spots—Pago-Pago and the Costa Brava, Martinique and Lesbos, Bermuda, Kauai, Barbados, Tahiti. This was not the most breathtaking, but it surely was pretty enough to suit any tourist who ever lived. The beaches were golden and the water crystal. There were thousand-foot forested peaks, and even a halfway decent waterfall just off the road. In a lot of the world’s finest places there turns out to be a hidden worm in the mangosteen—bribe-hungry officials, or revolutions simmering off in the bush, or devastating storms. According to Dick Kavilan, the island had none of those. “Then why did the Dutchmen give up?” I asked. It was a key question. A Rotterdam syndicate was supposed to have sunk fourteen million dollars into the hotel project I had come to inspect—and walked away when it was three-quarters built.
“They just ran out of money, Mr. Wenright.”
“Call me Jerry, please,” I said. That was what the preliminary report had indicated. Probably true. Tropical islands were a bottomless pit for the money of optimistic cold-country investors. If Marge had lived and we had done what we planned, we might have gone bust ourselves in Puerto Rico … if she had lived.
“Then, Jerry,” he grinned, turning into a rutted dirt road I hadn’t even seen, “we’re here.” He stopped the car and got out to unlock a chainlink gate that had not been unlocked recently. Nor had the road recently been driven. Palm fronds buried most of it and vines had reclaimed large patches.
Kavilan got back in the car, panting—he was not all that youthful, after all—and wiped rust off his hands with a bandanna. “Before we put up that fence,” he said, “people
would drive in or bring boats up to the beach at night and load them with anything they could carry. Toilets. Furniture. Windows, frames and all. They ripped up the carpets where they found any, and where there wasn’t anything portable they broke into the walls for copper piping.”
“So there isn’t fourteen million dollars left in it,” I essayed.
He let the grin broaden. “Look now, bargain later, Jerry. There’s plenty left for you to see.”
There was, and he left me alone to see it. He was never so far away that I couldn’t call a question to him, but he didn’t hang himself around my neck, either. I didn’t need to ask many questions. It was obvious that what Kavilan (and the finders’ reports) had said was true. The place had been looted, all right. It was capricious, with some sections apparently hardly touched. Some were hit hard. Paintings that had been screwed to the wall had been ripped loose—real oils, I saw from one that had been ruined and left. A marble dolphin fountain had been broken off and carted a few steps away—then left shattered on the walk.
I had come prepared with a set of builder’s plans, and they showed me that there were to have been four hundred guest rooms, a dozen major function areas, bars and restaurants, an arcade of shops in the basement, a huge wine cellar under even that, two pools, a sauna—those were just the sections where principal construction had gone well along before the Dutchmen walked away. I saw as much of it as I could in two hours. When my watch said eleven-thirty I sat down on an intact stone balustrade overlooking the gentle breakers on the beach and waited for Kavilan to join me. “What about water availability?” I asked.
“A problem, Jerry,” he agreed. “You’ll need to lay a mile and a quarter of new mains to connect with the highway pipes, and then when you get the water it’ll be expensive.”
I wrinkled my nose. “What’s that smell?”
He laughed. “Those are some of the dear departed of the island, I’m afraid, and that’s another problem. Let’s move on before we lose our taste for lunch.”
Kavilan was as candid as I could have hoped, and a lot more so than I would have been in his place. It was an island custom, he said, to entomb their dead aboveground instead of burying them. Unfortunately the marble boxes were seldom watertight. The seepage I had smelled was a very big minus to the project, but Kavilan shook his head when I said so. He reached into the hip pocket of his jeans, unfolded a sweatproof wallet and took out a typed, three-page list.
I said he was candid. The list included all the things I would have asked him about:
Relocation of cemetery
| $350,000
|
New water mains, 1.77 miles
| 680,000
| (10-inch)
|
790,000
| (12-inch)
|
Paving access road, 0.8 miles
| 290,000
|
But it also included:
|
Lien, Windward Isles Const. Co.
| 1,300,000
|
(Settlement est.
| 605,000)
|
Damage judgment, Sun/Sea Petro.
| 2,600,000
|
(Settlement est.
| 350,000)
|
Injunction, N.A. Trades Council
|
(Est. cost to vacate
| 18,000)
|
The total on the three-page list, taking the estimated figures at face value, came to over three million dollars. Half the items on it I hadn’t even suspected.
The first course was coming and I didn’t want to ruin a good lunch with business, so I looked for permission, then pocketed the paper as the conch salad arrived. Kavilan was right. It was good. The greens were fresh, the chunks of meat chewed easily, the dressing was oil and vinegar but with some unusual additions that made it special. Mustard was easy to pick out, and a brush of garlic, but there were others. I thought of getting this chef’s name, too.
And thought it again when I found that the escalope of veal was as good as the conch. The wine was even better, but I handled it sparingly. I didn’t know Dick Kavilan well enough to let myself be made gullible by adding a lot of wine to a fine meal, a pretty restaurant and a magnificent view of a sun-drenched bay. We chatted socially until the demitasses came. How long had he been on the island? Only two years, he said, surprising me. When he added that he’d been in real estate in Michigan before that, I connected on the name. “Sellman and Kavilan,” I said. “You put together the package on the Upper Peninsula for us.” It was a really big, solid firm. Not the kind you take early retirement from.
“That’s right,” he said. “I liked Michigan. But then I came down here with some friends who had a boat—I’m a widower, my boys are grown—and then I only went back to Michigan long enough to sell out.”
“Then there really is a lure of the islands.”
“Why, that’s what you’re here to find out, Jerry,” he said, the grin back again. “How about you? Married?”
“I’m a widower too,” I said, and touched my buttoned pocket. “Are these costs solid?”
“You’ll want to check them out for yourself but, yes, I think so. Some are firm bids. The others are fairly conservative estimates.” He waved to the waiter, who produced cigars. Cuban Perfectos. When we were both puffing, he said, “My people will put in writing that if the aggregate costs go more than twenty percent over that list we’ll pay one-third of the excess as forfeit.” Now, that was an interesting offer! I didn’t agree to it, not even a nod, but at that point Kavilan didn’t expect me to. “When the Dutchman went bust,” he added, “that list added up to better than nine million.”
No wonder he went bust! “How come there’s a six million dollar difference?”
He waved his cigar. “That was seven years ago. I guess people were meaner then. Or maybe the waiting wore the creditors down. Well. What’s your pleasure for this afternoon, Jerry? Another look at the site, or back to Port?”
“Port, I think,” I said reluctantly.
The idea of spending an afternoon on the telephone and visiting government offices seemed like a terrible waste of a fine day, but that was what they paid me for.
It kept me busy. As far as I could check, the things Kavilan had told me were all true, and checking was surprisingly easy. The government records clerks were helpful, even when they had to pull out dusty files, and all the people who said they’d return my calls did. It wasn’t such a bad day. But then it wasn’t the days that were bad.
I put off going to bed as long as I could, with a long, late dinner, choosing carefully between the local lobster and what the headwaiter promised would be first-rate prime rib. He was right; the beef was perfect. Then I put a quarter into every fifth slot machine in the hotel casino as long as my quarters held out; but when the light by my bed was out
and my head was on the pillow the pain moved in. There was a soft Caribbean moon in the window and the sound of palms rustling in the breeze. They didn’t help. The only question was whether I would cry myself to sleep. I still did that, after eight years, about one night in three, and this was a night I did.
I thought if I had an early breakfast I’d have the dining room to myself, so I could do some serious thinking about Val Michaelis. I was wrong. The tour group had a trip in a glass-bottomed boat that morning and the room was crowded; the hostess apologetically seated me with a young woman I had seen before. We’d crossed paths in the casino as we each got rid of our cups of quarters. Hair to her shoulders, no makeup—I’d thought at first she was a young girl, but in the daylight that was revised by a decade or so. She was civil—civilly silent, except for a “Good morning” and now and then a “May I have the marmalade?”—and she didn’t blow smoke in my face until we were both onto our second cups of coffee. If the rest of her tour had been as well-schooled as she it would have been a pleasant meal. Some of them were all right, but the table for two next to us was planning a negligence suit over a missing garment bag, and the two tables for four behind us were exchanging loud ironies about the bugs they’d seen, or thought they had seen, in their rooms. When she got up she left with a red-haired man and his wire—one of the more obnoxious couples present, I thought, and felt sorry for her.
Kavilan had given me the gate key, and the bell captain found me a car rental. I drove back to the hotel site. This time I took a notebook, a hammer, a Polaroid and my Swiss Army knife.
Fortunately the wind was the other way this morning and the aromatic reminders of mortality were bothering some other part of the shoreline. Before going in I walked around the fence from the outside, snapping pictures of the unfinished buildings from several angles. Funny thing. Pushing my way through some overgrown vines I found a section of the fence where the links had been carefully severed with bolt cutters. The cuts were not fresh, and the links had been rubbed brighter than the rest of the fence; somebody had been getting through anyway, no doubt to pick up a few souvenirs missed by his predecessors. The vines had not grown back, so it had been used fairly recently. I made a note to have Kavilan fix that right away; I didn’t want my inventory made obsolete as soon as I was off the island.
One wing had been barely begun. The foundations were half full of rain water, but tapping with the hammer suggested the cementwork was sound, and a part where pouring had not been finished showed good iron-bar reinforcement. In the finished wing, the vandalism was appalling but fairly superficial in all but a dozen rooms. A quarter of a million dollars would finish it up, plus furnishings. Some of the pool tiles were cracked—deliberately, it seemed—but most of the fountains would be all right once cleaned up. The garden lighting fixtures were a total writeoff.
The main building had been the most complete and also the most looted and trashed. It might take half a million dollars to fix the damage, I thought, adding up the pages in my notebook. But it was much more than a half-million-dollar building. There were no single rooms there, only guest suites, every one with its own balcony overlooking the blue bay. There was a space for a ballroom, a space for a casino, a pretty, trellised balcony
for a top-floor bar—the design was faultless. So was what existed of the workmanship. I couldn’t find the wine cellar, but the shop level just under the lobby was a pleasant surprise. Some of the shop windows had been broken, but the glass had been swept away and it was the only large area of the hotel without at least one or two piles of human feces. If all the vandals had been as thoughtful as the ones in the shopping corridor, there might have been no need to put up the fence.
About noon I drove down to a little general store—“Li Tsung’s Supermarket,” it called itself—and got materials for a sandwich lunch. I spent the whole day there, and by the time I was heading back to the hotel I had just about made up my mind: the site was a bargain, taken by itself.
Remained to check out the other factors.
My title in the company is assistant international vice president for finance. I was a financial officer when I worked at the government labs, and money is what I know. You don’t really know about money unless you know how to put a dollar value on all the things your money buys, though, so I can’t spend all my time with the financial reports and the computer. When I recommend an acquisition I have to know what comes with it.
So, besides checking out the hotel site and the facts that Kavilan had given me, I explored the whole island. I drove the road from the site to the airport three times—once in sunlight, once in rain and once late at night—counting up potholes and difficult turns to make sure it would serve for a courtesy van. Hotel guests don’t want to spend all their time in their hotels. They want other things to go to, so I checked out each of the island’s fourteen other beaches. They want entertainment at night, so I visited three discos and five other casinos—briefly—and observed, without visiting, the three-story verandahed building demurely set behind high walls and a wrought-iron gate that was the island’s officially licensed house of prostitution. I even signed up for the all-island guided bus tour to check for historical curiosities and points of interest and I did not, even once, open the slim, flimsy telephone directory to see if there was a listing for Valdos E. Michaelis, Ph.D.
The young woman from the second morning’s breakfast was on the same tour bus and once again she was alone. Or wanted to be alone. Halfway around the island we stopped for complimentary drinks, and when I got back on the bus she was right behind me. “Do you mind if I sit here?” she asked.
“Of course not,” I said politely, and didn’t ask why. I didn’t have to. I’d seen the college kid in the tank top and cutoffs earnestly whispering in her ear for the last hour, and just before we stopped for drinks he gave up whispering and started bullying.
I had decided I didn’t like the college kid either, so that was a bond. The fact that we were both loners and not predatory about trying to change that was another. Each time the bus stopped for a photo opportunity we two grabbed quick puffs on our cigarettes instead of snapping pictures—smokers are an endangered species, and that’s a special bond these days—so it was pretty natural that when I saw her alone again at breakfast the next morning I asked to join her. And when she looked envious at what I told her I was going to do that day, I invited her along.
Among the many things that Marge’s death has made me miss is someone to share adventures with—little adventures, the kind my job keeps requiring of me, like chartering a boat to check out the hotel site from the sea. If Marge had lived to take these trips with
me I would be certain I had the very best job in the world. Well, it is the best job in the world, anyway; it’s the world that isn’t as good anymore.
The
Esmeralda
was a sport-fishing boat that doubled as a way for tourists to get out on the wet part of the world for fun. It was a thirty-footer, with a two-hundred-horsepower outboard motor and a cabin that contained a V-shaped double berth up forward, and a toilet and galley amidships. It also came with a captain named Ildo, who was in fact the whole crew. His name was Spanish, he said he was Dutch, his color was assorted and his accent was broad Islands. When I asked him how business was he said, “Aw, slow, mon, but when it comes January—” he said “Johnerary”—“it’ll be
good.”
And he said it grinning to show he believed it, but the grin faded. I knew why. He was looking at my face, and wondering why his charter this day didn’t seem to be enjoying himself.
I was trying, though. The
Esmeralda
was a lot too much like the other charter boat, the
Princess Peta,
for me to be at ease, but I really was doing my best to keep that other boat out of my mind. It occurred to me to wonder if, somewhere in my subconscious, I had decided to invite this Edna Buckner along so that I would have company to distract me on the
Esmeralda.
It then occurred to me that, if that was the reason, my subconscious was a pretty big idiot. Being alone on the boat would have been bad. Being with a rather nice-looking woman was worse.
The bay was glassy, but when we passed the headland light we were out in the swell of the ocean. I went back to see how my guest was managing. Even out past shelter the sea was gentle enough, but as we were traveling parallel to the waves there was some roll. It didn’t seem to bother Edna Buckner at all. As she turned toward me she looked nineteen years again, and I suddenly realized why. She was enjoying herself. I didn’t want to spoil that for her, and so I sat down beside her, as affable and charming as I knew how to be.
She wasn’t nineteen. She was forty-one and, she let me know without exactly saying, unmarried, at least at the moment. She wasn’t exactly traveling alone; she was the odd corner of a threesome with her sister and brother-in-law. They (she let me know, again without actually saying) had decided on the trip in the hope that it would ease some marital difficulties—and then damaged that project’s chance of success by inviting a third party. “They were just sorry for me,” said Edna, without explaining.
Going over the tour group in my mind, I realized I knew which couple she was traveling with. “The man with red hair,” I guessed, and she nodded.
“And with the disposition to match. You should have heard him in the restaurant last night, complaining because Lucille’s lobster was bigger than his.” Actually, I had. “I will say,” she added, “that he was in a better mood this morning. He even apologized, and he can be a charmer when he chooses. But I wish the trip were over. I’ve had enough fighting to last me the rest of my life.”
She paused and looked at me speculatively for a moment. She was swaying slightly in the roll of the boat, rather nicely as a matter of fact. I started to open my mouth to change the subject but she shook her head. “Do you mind letting your shipmates tell you their troubles, Jerry?”
I happen to be a pretty closed-up person—more so since what happened to Marge. I didn’t know whether I minded or not; there were not very many people who had offered to weep on my shoulder in the past eight years. She didn’t wait for an answer, but went on with a rush: “I know it’s no fun to listen to other people’s problems, but I kind of need to say it out loud. Bert was an alcoholic—my husband. Ex-husband. He beat me
up about once a week, for ten years. It took me all that time to make up my mind to leave him and so, when you think about it, I seem to be about ten years behind the rest of the world, trying to learn how to be a grown-up woman.”
It obviously cost her something to say that. For a moment I thought she was going to cry, but she smiled instead. “So if I’m a little peculiar, that’s why,” she said, “and thank you for this trip. I can feel myself getting less peculiar every minute!”
Money’s my game, not interpersonal relationships, and I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to react to this unexpected intimacy. Fortunately, my arm did. I leaned forward and put it around her shoulder for a quick, firm hug. “Maybe we’ll both get less peculiar,” I said, and just then Ildo called from the wheel:
“Mon? We’re comin’ up on you-ah bay!”
The hotel site looked even more beautiful from the water than it had from the land. There was a pale half-moon of beach that reached from one hill on the south to another at the northern end, and a white collar of breaking wavelets all its length. The water was crystal. When Ildo dropped anchor I could follow the line all twenty-odd feet to the rippled sand bottom. The only ugliness was the chain-link fence that marched around the building site itself.
The bay was not quite perfect. It was rather shallow from point to point, so that wind-surfing hotel guests who ventured more than a hundred yards out might find themselves abruptly in stronger seas. But that was a minor problem. Very few tourists would be able to stay on the boards long enough to go a hundred yards in any direction at all. The ones who might get out where they would be endangered would have the skills to handle it. And there was plenty of marine life for snorkelers and scuba-divers to look at. Ildo showed us places in under the rocky headlands where lobsters could be caught. “Plenty now,” he explained. “Oh, mon, six year ago was
bad.
No lobster never, but they all come back now.”
The hotel, I observed, had been intelligently sited. It wasn’t dead center in the arc of the bay, but enough around the curve toward the northern end so that every one of the four hundred private balconies would get plenty of sun: extra work for the air-conditioners, but satisfied guests. The buildings were high enough above the water to be safe from any likely storm surf—and anyway, I had already established, storms almost never struck the island from the west. And there was a rocky outcrop on the beach just at the hotel itself. That was where the dock would go, with plenty of water for sport-fishing boats—there were plenty of sailfish, tuna and everything else within half an hour’s sail, Ildo said. The dock could even handle a fair-sized private yacht without serious dredging.
While I was putting all this in my notebook, Edna had borrowed mask and flippers from Ildo’s adequate supply and was considerately staying out of my way. It wasn’t just politeness. She was obviously enjoying herself.
I, on the other hand, was itchily nervous. Ildo assured me there was nothing to be nervous about; she was a strong swimmer, there were no sharks or barracuda likely to bother her, she wasn’t so far from the boat that one of us couldn’t have jumped in after her at any time. It didn’t help. I couldn’t focus on the buildings through the finder of the Polaroid for more than a couple of seconds without taking a quick look to make sure she was all right.