Caribbean

  When he returned to the Belgrave for a late dinner, he was on his way to his room on the second floor to wash up, when he heard muffled voices as he passed the Ponsfords’ door. Since he did not recognize them, he suspected that something might be amiss, and impulsively he tried to shove the door open, but it was locked from the inside, so with a rush of his shoulder he banged his way in, only to find himself facing Major Leckey, still in uniform, Mr. Ponsford and Mrs. Ponsford, who was holding a revolver pointed right at McKay’s head. Along two walls forming a corner were ranged the elements of a compact high-powered radio at which sat a colored man he had never seen before. An authoritative voice in London was issuing directions which McKay could not understand.

  ‘Close the door,’ Major Leckey said with crisp authority.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘Shut up!’ Mrs. Ponsford snapped, her lips taut, her gun still pointed unflinchingly at McKay.

  Then, slowly, as he caught fragments of what was being sent and received, he deduced that pompous but subservient Major Leckey was heading a secret island apparatus which was reporting directly to similar intelligence agencies in London. For some reason Leckey and his team found it necessary to bypass the Gee-Gee and his official shortwave radio.

  Now, from words that were dropped, it became obvious that the Ponsfords, tested agents from years back and with experience in different countries, had been sent from headquarters to reinforce Leckey’s operation, and the fact that they had fooled McKay so completely was proof that they had fooled others as well.

  Mouth agape, he stared at the Ponsfords, piecing together the hints they had revealed concerning their mission but which he had failed to detect or evaluate: They did say they’d been friends of the Earl of Gore. Probably that’s why they were sent on his trail. They seemed to have a complete dossier on Delia, and I should have wondered why they’d have taken the trouble. And once they learned I was a newspaperman, they went out of their way to convince me that they were vaudeville silly-ass Englishmen. They kept turning up at all the right spots. I feel damned stupid, with her pointing that gun at me, after the way I dismissed her as a gossip.

  ‘Tell them,’ Leckey was saying to the man at the dials, ‘that we shall be sending them military details as soon as our man gets here. In the meantime, Mrs. Ponsford, since our Delia will probably turn up somewhere as a German agent, will you give headquarters the details of that obscene wedding?’ Handing her revolver over to her husband, who kept it pointed at McKay, she delivered an icy, matter-of-fact report: ‘Delia behaved much as she did in Malta last year, but this time she messed around with a respectable local mulatto shopkeeper, practically ruining him, and perhaps at her father’s suggestion, she took pains to bedazzle a simple-minded American journalist in hopes of coloring his reports in Hitler’s favor. Tonight she married your well-vetted Baron Sterner, one-time tennis partner of that other German baron, the respectable one, Gottfried von Cramm, who has displayed gestures of friendship toward Great Britain.’

  Turning the microphone back, she reached for her gun and resumed guarding McKay, but the transmission was interrupted by the breathless arrival of Leckey’s man, who had been surveying and photographing the Graf Spee. It was Bart Wrentham from the Waterloo, and when he saw McKay with the gun pointed at this head, he blurted out: ‘What in hell is he doing here?’

  ‘He stumbled in,’ Leckey said crisply, ‘and we can’t allow him to stumble out until the Spee has sailed.’

  Paying no further attention to his friend, Black Bart went to the transmitter and told the operator: ‘Get me Brazil,’ and for about ten minutes he provided an agent of the British admiralty with a professional assessment of the pocket battleship. Then Leckey took over, speaking to London: ‘Why did the Graf Spee make this extraordinary visit? From things Captain Vreimark said accidentally, but so that we would be sure to hear them, they wanted our governor general to report favorably on German-British friendship. And since they had to know that some group like ours would be trying to determine the capacity of their ship, they invited us to roam around it. They wanted to scare us and for us to scare you. Their game succeeded. It is indeed a formidable ship.’

  McKay was fascinated by what he was hearing, but he was not yet prepared for what Leckey reported next: ‘Lord Wrentham is a total prisoner of their propaganda. He extols Hitler, says he’s watched the Nazi rise to power, and now believes he’s unstoppable. He tries to convince any official visitor that Germany is destined to rule Central Europe and more. He despises France and holds America in contempt, but he’s smart enough to coddle naive American journalists and mask his convictions from them. We know he is an ass, but a dangerous one because people like him so much. All Saints is a good place to keep him isolated from the European capitals, but he must be continuously watched.’

  Having submitted their reports, the five plotters quickly disassembled their radio and packed its various parts in a surprisingly small set of hand-held grips. Then Leckey turned to the Ponsfords and asked: ‘What are we going to do with him?’

  ‘He’s heard too much,’ Mr. Ponsford warned. ‘And he is a newspaperman.’

  ‘What are you recommending? That we shoot him?’

  ‘Under other circumstances, yes. Certainly we can’t let him run to his typewriter with what he’s heard.’

  Black Bart said: ‘I’ve found him to be honest. Look at his articles.’

  ‘Yes,’ Leckey said, staring contemptuously at McKay. ‘Do look at them. Sycophantic. Falls in love with a bitch like Delia, writes poems of praise.’

  ‘So what are we going to do?’ Mr. Ponsford asked, and Leckey said: ‘We’ve got to keep him here until the Graf Spee is on its way to Brazil. And we must keep Lord Wrentham thinking that his close association with the German ambassador went unnoticed.’ Finally speaking directly to McKay, he said: ‘So you stay in this room, guarded, until morning. Then we’ll decide.’ Turning now to Mrs. Ponsford and her revolver, he asked: ‘Can you guard him till morning?’ and she nodded.

  So the four men, Leckey, Ponsford, Black Bart and the radioman, left the room, taking their radio gear to some other hiding spot, and were seen no more that night.

  Without flinching, Mrs. Ponsford held the gun on McKay, rebuffing his attempts to engage her in revealing conversation. Once she observed: ‘This may seem a dirty business, but the enemy is unspeakable.’

  ‘Then you think there’ll be war with Germany?’

  ‘Don’t you? After what you saw with the Spee?’

  ‘Would you shoot me if I tried to bolt?’

  ‘Try me.’

  He did not speak again until he had to go to the bathroom, and she said: ‘Go ahead,’ but she followed him into the little room, saying: ‘No escaping out the window like they do in the flicks.’ After a while he protested: ‘It’s not possible for a man to urinate with a woman standing behind him with a pistol to his head,’ and she said: ‘Keep trying.’

  Soon thereafter she suggested: ‘Try it sitting down,’ and while he perched on the stool she ran water noisily in the basin, and this encouraged him to override his inhibitions.

  Toward morning he asked: ‘Why did you put on such an English garden-party act with me?’ and she said: ‘From the first I suspected we might want to use you. I acted the way you expected me to. Encouraged you to accept me.’

  ‘But why does Leckey play the fool?’ and she explained: ‘For the last eight years he’s had one of the world’s most difficult jobs. Keeping tabs on real fools. If he ever stopped acting his role for one minute, they might trap him.’

  ‘Is he in charge of your group?’ and she replied: ‘I won’t tell you. Bart at the Waterloo could be, or my husband, or me.’

  ‘But Leckey gives the orders,’ and she said: ‘He seems to. Maybe that’s the secret of his long success.’

  When dawn in the east reflected on Pointes Nord and Sud, Major Leckey and Bart returned and told Mrs. Ponsford: ‘Get some sleep,’ and she handed the revolver to Bart.


  She fell asleep in minutes, and Leckey asked McKay: ‘Under what arrangements can we let you live?’ and it was Bart who offered the workable suggestion: ‘He might be made to understand that his America is going to be at war with Hitler just as soon as we are. If he understood that, we could get him to swear that he’d write nothing about tonight … or our stupid Gee-Gee … or the Nazi gauleiter Sterner.’

  ‘Would you accept his word? On a matter of such vital importance?’

  ‘I think we have to.’

  ‘Will you give us such assurance, McKay?’ Before Millard could answer, Leckey said: ‘Before you swear to a promise you can’t keep, remember, if you double-cross us, we have people like the Ponsfords who will quietly slip into Detroit one afternoon, and you’ll have a nasty accident.’

  ‘I think I’m piecing the bits together,’ McKay said. ‘I’m not sure you’re right about Germany, but I’m sure you think so.’ He licked his dry lips and said: ‘I give you my word.’

  ‘Nothing about the Gee-Gee being a German accomplice, whether he knows it or not? Nothing about Baron Sterner? Nothing about our radio? Nothing about me or Bart, since we have to remain here?’

  A harsh agreement was reached, covering each incident in the All Saints case, with McKay swearing that he would forget every significant aspect of the battleship’s visit and in no way imperil the cover of Leckey, Bart Wrentham or the Ponsfords. But these matters were eclipsed by the echoes of a loud fracas on the street below. They hurried out into the sunrise … to find a crowd gathering at Etienne Boncour’s jewelry shop. ‘What’s happening?’ Leckey snapped, and two women, shaken with horror, pointed dumbly at the store entrance.

  Pushing their way through the muttering crowd, the two men entered the beautifully organized shop, its gleaming counters neatly aligned. But when they looked at the display case that housed the expensive Rolex watches, they saw draped across it, arms and legs grotesquely extended, the inert body of the shop’s owner. Etienne Boncour had shot himself through the head, and his body had pitched forward with such force that it had shattered the glass case.

  McKay was stricken by the appalling sight of his dead friend, but Major Leckey took only one hasty professional look, then quickly assumed his aide-de-camp pose. Waving his hand sideways to disperse the gawking onlookers, he snapped out a chain of orders: ‘Be about your business. Go, go! Leave a path there!’ and he pushed people back to make way for the converted truck that edged its way in to remove the dead body to the morgue.

  AT FIFTY-ONE, Michael Carmody was beginning to wonder if he would ever find in his classes the brilliant kind of lad who makes teaching bearable.

  ‘None so far,’ he groaned one Monday morning as he reported early for the weekly grind. ‘Acceptable students, yes, but never that flaming talent bursting free to remind you of young Raphael or Mozart. P’raps they don’t make ’em anymore.’

  An Irish immigrant to Trinidad, Michael Carmody was an instructor at Queen’s Own College in the pleasant town of Tunapuna, some eight miles east of the capital of Port of Spain.

  Queen’s Own, in the British fashion, was called a college (in other parts of the world it would be called a high school), the supposition being that if a bright lad wanted to move ahead to advance his education, he would next attend a university. The educational standard was high and top graduates had no difficulty in either winning bursaries to the best universities in Great Britain or doing well when they got there, so Carmody kept hoping that one day there would come wandering into his room a future Isaac Newton.

  That Monday in 1970, as he reached his desk and dumped on it the books he had taken home with him on Friday, he saw awaiting him a sheet of white paper containing only the words Master Carmody. Lifting it, he found attached to it a second sheet of fourteen lines of poetry arranged in the classical form of the sonnet. Taking his chair and leaning back, feet on the desk, he read the sonnet, looked up at the ceiling and said: ‘Well now!’

  In the few minutes before the students entered he read the poem again, and thought: This has to be Banarjee, and he visualized the timid Indian boy, fifteen years old, thin as an ebony wand, with dark complexion, a mass of almost shining black hair, and luminescent eyes that he seemed afraid to show in public. Ranjit Banarjee was unusually shy, especially with girls, and although he gave every evidence of possessing a mind of surprising capacity and range, he excelled in none of the traditional subjects. Classified by his teachers as ‘a difficult lad but never disruptive,’ he moved quietly through the school system, always keeping somewhat apart from the other students—a Hindu in a Catholic school, an Indian among blacks and mestizos.

  The bell signaling the opening of school rang and the delightful young people of Trinidad streamed into the room, all boys, since this was a segregated Catholic college, established in the years when the island had been Spanish. The complete range of color was represented, from blackest black of the Negroes whose ancestors had been slaves, to the half-black, half-white of the mestizos, the light browns of the Hindus and Muslims, to the delicate tans of the Spanish and French families with black infusions at some distant time, and on to the whites like Carmody who had come mainly from the British Isles, and relatively recently. As they came rollicking into his room he thought: A tropical bouquet, and how much more refreshing than the sea of pasty white that used to greet me in Dublin.

  When his students came to attention he said, holding the two pages aloft in his left hand: ‘This morning we start with a surprise, and a most pleasant one I can assure you. When I came to work this morning I found a poem waiting on my desk. From the way it is laid out, can you tell me what kind of poem it is?’ One boy called out: ‘A sonnet,’ and Carmody asked: ‘How do you know?’ and the boy said: ‘Eight lines at top, six at bottom.’

  ‘Good, and the poem is good too,’ and with that, he began in a rich Irish brogue intended for the recitation of poetry:

  ‘When the immortal caravels passed through

  That splendid crescent of the Carib isles,

  They left the grim Atlantic and the crew

  Cheered as they burst into a sea of smiles.

  The waves were gentler here, the breezes soft,

  The sun irradiated all the sea.

  Bright-colored birds sang as they soared aloft

  To celebrate this subtle victory.

  ‘It was strange treasure that he found this day,

  Columbus of the never-bending mind:

  Not gold or silver or the facile kind

  Sought by his queen, who lusted for Cathay.

  He found new lands of ordinary clay

  Two continents of hope for all mankind.’

  Betraying his delight with the sonnet, Carmody said quietly: ‘I’m sure we can guess who wrote these lovely words,’ and almost automatically the boys turned to look at Ranjit Banarjee, whose embarrassment showed as he enjoyed the fruits of authorship.

  ‘Yes,’ Carmody said, ‘our fledgling poet is Ranjit, a quiet lad whose waters run deep,’ and the class applauded, but he stopped them with a surprising discussion that none who heard it would ever forget: ‘There’s a great deal wrong with this poem, and in our enthusiasm we must not overlook the errors. Let’s look at the octet first.’

  But after a long discussion of the rules of sonnet writing, Carmody stopped abruptly, placed his hands flat on his desk, and leaned forward: ‘Students, what have I just been engaging in?’ When no one spoke, for they had not understood what point their teacher was trying to make with his harsh criticism, Ranjit said in a low voice: ‘Pedantry.’

  ‘Yes!’ Carmody cried, bringing his hands down on his desk with an invigorating slap. ‘Pedantry. Remember what we said about Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger? Victor, what was it?’

  ‘He knew all the rules for writing a song but never how to write one.’

  ‘Yes! Our Ranjit has broken all the rules, but he has written a perfectly lovely little sonnet immortalizing a great explorer.’ He smiled approvingly at Ranjit
, then concluded: ‘And I, who know all the rules for sonnet making, could never in a hundred years compose a decent one. Ranjit, you’re a poet and I’m not.’

  Having at last identified a possible genius, Carmody decided to strike fast and hard, and that afternoon he asked Ranjit to remain behind as the other boys thundered off to the cricket field: ‘Ranjit, you’re a quiet lad, but one with great potential. What course in life do you intend following as you grow up?’

  Innocently, the Indian boy looked up at this master he had grown to respect, and said: ‘I don’t know.’

  This irritated Carmody, who banged his desk: ‘Dammit, lad, you’ve got to put your mind to something, don’t you? Time’s wasting. Look at Dawson. He wants to be a medic, and by the end of next year he’ll have finished, right here in Queen’s, many of the courses he’ll need for the first year of his university work. What will you have accomplished and in what direction are you heading?’

  When Ranjit said defensively: ‘But I don’t know. It’s all so confusing,’ Carmody decided to take matters into his own hands. After gaining permission from the dean, he plopped the boy in his little Austin and drove to Port of Spain, asking Ranjit to direct him to his grandfather’s Portugee Shop.

  ‘My grandfather is Sirdar Banarjee. Sirdar is a traditional name in our family.’

  Sirdar was a bustling white-haired man who had kept his Portugee Shop focused on two essential services: providing cheap, well-made clothing for the locals and expensive trinkets for the tourists, with special emphasis on keeping both groups happy. Eagerly extending his hand, he said effusively: ‘Ranjit tells me you’re his favorite master, a very intelligent man indeed, Trinity College in Dublin. Now, what can I do for you?’