Gypsy in the Moonlight

By J L F Waldron

The year is 1942. World War II is in full swing in the Atlantic. The Caribbean islands form an arc of lookout posts arrayed against an unseen enemy. From here Great Britain and the United States spy the waves for German U-boats attempting a stealthy approach to the Panama Canal, the Gulf of Mexico and the strategic ports of South and Central America. Far from the deadly fray out in the mid Atlantic, life could have gone on as usual in the British colony of Trinidad. But this cosmopolitan island has become a crucial lookout, now manned by thousands of American servicemen. And as the days grow hotter and the nights grow longer lying in wait for those Nazi ships, restlessness turns to mischief, and mischief turns to murder.

Bonham Mars is determined to ride out this war, and the American "social invasion," as uneventfully as possible. After all, he has problems of his own. But when a neighbour goes missing and it seems he is the only one that can find her, he soon finds himself in the midst of a notorious industry that has blossomed around the mighty “Yankee Dollar.” He also finds himself on a collision course with a killer and a long line of uniformed, and un-uniformed, personnel determined to end his amateur investigation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J L F Waldron
• Release date: Feb 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310869556

J L F Waldron

J.L.F. Waldron (a.k.a. Lawrence Waldron) was born and raised in Port of Spain, Trinidad. An art historian by training, he has published several scholarly essays, newspaper articles and book chapters on the ancient, colonial and modern Caribbean. Gypsy in the Moonlight is his first novel, and the first in a series of Calypso Mysteries that explore the kinship between the noir and calypso genres of the 1930s and 40s. Waldron currently lives in New York City.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Pitch Lake

Darkness surrounded my head. A strong smell of petrol clogged my nostrils. Was I still sinking into the Pitch Lake? No, I was conscious now. But I still couldn’t find my body. Then lines of pain started trickling in from distant points, then flooding in. There it was—a tattered scrap of a man. It was me. Slowly the understanding came of where I was, and what was going on all around. I could feel the coarse fibres of an oily bag tickling my ears and the tip of my nose. The bag was over my head. I was not alone. Men’s voices came from at least two sides of me, and I realised that my hands were tied behind my back. We were in a moving vehicle. With every bump in the road, I landed on my own knuckles, jabbing myself in the base of the spine. After a few more of those jabs, I finally remembered how I had ended up in this situation. The American sailors had got the better of me in that roadside mêlée. And now, I supposed I was their prisoner.

The back of my head started to pound from the blow one of the Yankees had landed there. My ribs hurt when I breathed in the oily smell of the bag. I tried not to groan and let them know I was awake. They already knew too much—at least they acted as if they did. I needed to start keeping them in the dark instead.

I really hadn’t handled this case very well thus far. Everybody seemed to know what I was doing except me. In my defence, it had been years since I had conducted a criminal enquiry of any sort, and I had never done so with so few resources. The rope around my wrists, the aching lump on my head, and the oily buckram bag over that bumpy head were proof that I was lacking a certain know-how. It was time to apply myself, pay or no pay.

Marcie Fournier, my client (if you could call her that), didn’t have a farthing to pay me for this new extra-curricular activity. She had all but told me so when she came to my house the day before—in the complete lack of talk about compensation. Even so, my pro bono status was no reason to let people freely knock me out and put me in blinders and restraints.

The previous evening, I had been dozing in the Morris chair in the drawing room with the Sunday Gazette draped over my face wheneventually I was awakened by a timid knocking at the front. The day was in its last throes, but the waning sun still managed to cast a clear feminine silhouette across the pebbled panes of my French doors. I knew it was my neighbour Marcella Fournier by the shape of that silhouette. Ms Marcie, as everyone called her, was just coming home from one of those epic days at church and was wearing one of her famous hats. Against the pebbled glass, the shadow of her hat looked like some kind of monstrous bird bursting through the top of a volcano with sprays of lava all around.

When I opened the door, the actual hat wasn’t any less outrageous. I was right about the bird, which was made out of cleverly bent fronds of that palm they use around Easter time. And the plumes of lava turned out to be some kind of dark-coloured feather—maybe ostrich—meant to be the wings and tail of the bird nesting on her head. The cylindrical crown of the hat was all expert basketry. It was a millenary masterpiece born of too many arts and crafts evening classes at the church up the hill. With those skills, Miss Marcie could have designed Carnival costumes, yet she would never have spent her hallowed hours in such diabolical pursuits.

Ready for the Lenten season, I see, said I, suppressing a smirk once I had opened the left-hand side door. Squinting in the orange glow of the late January sunset I reshaped my awkward grin into a kindly smile. She seemed confused by my comment about Lent, so I pointed vaguely with my chin at the palm frond bird on her head. She smiled wanly and issued inside in response to some insistent gesture I must have made. Ms Marcie was a bespectacled lady of about fifty-five years with a puritanical way of keeping her back straight and her hands either at her sides as she stood, contentedly clasped in her lap when she sat, or with one arm dutifully bent at a 45-degree angle as she walked to accommodate the purse hung in its crook. She always stepped with the brisk, mindful clip of a soldier or some other operative who might be inspected. Whether we—the general public—or some higher power were intended as the primary audience was difficult to guess.

At any rate, her ceremonious self-portrayal was not in top form to-day. As she entered through the half-opened French doors, with her exotic hat contradicting her otherwise sober, cream frock and low-heeled pumps, she seemed rather fatigued and nervous now. I gestured towards the mismatched planter’s chair opposite the Morris where I had flung the Port of Spain. She took a seat on the front edge of the chair with her knees pressed together and turned to one side. It wasn’t the best chair for a lady. She fingered the edge of her threadbare Bible nervously. I noticed that her hands were quite pretty, if a little rough. It was a strange thing to notice since Ms Marcie always gave off the air of a woman twenty years her senior, more interested in being noted for her propriety than her prettiness. She was, nevertheless, a handsome woman and had passed on a healthy portion of her good looks to her offspring, for better or worse.

Mr Mars, I can’t find meh granddaughter! she declared, unable to restrain herself any longer and slipping out of that perfect King’s English I knew she liked to speak. I picked up the Gazette and took my own seat. Nobody knows where she is, she continued, regaining her composure and straightening her back a little. I pray to the good Lord that she is safe. Mr Mars, I have no one else in this world to ask besides you. Please help me find her. As I fell back into the Morris chair, newspaper in hand, I realised that I had not offered her a drink. I decided to do the Christian thing and forgive myself for that. This was too interesting to interrupt.

I heard her mother was behind bars, I said as gently as I could. Is she still there? Marcie’s daughter Henrietta had been thrown in jail a few days ago on prostitution charges.

Yes. I’m not sure exactly when they are letting her out.

Henrietta doesn’t know where your granddaughter is?

She won’t speak to me, Mr Mars. I came back from a church outing on Friday to discover she had been jailed and when I tried to go and see her yesterday, she refused to come out during visiting time.

Who was last to see your granddaughter? Do you know?

It must have been Henrietta. Nowadays she drags that girl everywhere she goes. She is pulling her into a terrible, terrible life. The middle-aged woman lowered and shook her head.

Your granddaughter was doing the same thing as her mother? I asked, trying again to be delicate. A breath caught in Marcie’s throat as she nodded.

She is a gentle, intelligent girl, Mr Mars. She always got top marks in school. She is not cut out for that life. What did she call herself? A hostess? I don’t know what that means.

It’s my understanding that the word has a lot of different meanings these days. What the government and the military mean by a ‘hostesses’ for the servicemen is not what people on the corner of Park and Charlotte mean by that word.

She is not like her mother, Mr Mars. I am very worried about her. We come from good people, Mr Mars. If it wasn’t for the hard times in this country these past years we wouldn’t even have moved to this part—

What is your granddaughter’s name again? I interrupted. I was as embarrassed to ask her that as she was of living around here. After all, we had been neighbours for years (my time away notwithstanding)—since they had first moved here from Belmont back in ‘33 or ‘34.

Bethany, she replied to my question. Some people call her Bessie, but she doesn’t like that.

I don’t know what I can do for you, Ms Marcie. I’m not police anymore, I responded, puzzling over what she seemed to be asking of me.

I just thought you might know the right people to ask on the force…discreetly of course, she answered, with a somewhat formal tone in her practiced English. If I go to the police directly and they launch some kind of formal enquiry, they might arrest Bethany…if she is found in the wrong company.

You may recall that I have very few friends left in the police, I reminded her. Marcie nodded thoughtfully. They used to hold me where they’re holding Henrietta right now—

Before they sent you to Nelson Island, she acknowledged, with sympathy but also impatience, concerned more with her granddaughter’s future than my past.

I could get certain police people in trouble just by asking them questions, I continued from the interruption. Simply associating with me could damage their good standing.

Yes, I understand, Mr Mars, she said, poorly masking her despair. Tears were welling in her tired eyes. I relaxed into the inevitability of having to do something, anything, because I was begged by a proud woman who would otherwise never have asked me for anything. It couldn’t hurt to ask around, I supposed.

I will see what I can do, I offered. Some relief played across her now haggard face. She was aging before my eyes as she dabbed at the tears with a dainty kerchief. But it’s late on a Sunday, so no one is around that I could talk to right now. In between my duties tomorrow, I will see what I can find out.

Thank you, Mr Mars, she said with a trembling voice, lifting her head to meet my gaze. I got up from my chair and helped her up from hers. She gripped my hand tightly, her nails digging into my skin a little, and showered me with more thanks. I was not used to this side of her. I saw her out the door and followed her through the gallery. I stood there dutifully as she climbed down the planks of my creaky front steps. I walked back inside and poured myself three fingers from an un-labelled bottle. That made the bottle just below half. I grabbed the Gazette and went back out to the gallery. Sitting on the old bench out there and leaning against the house, I took a sip of warm estate rum and tried to finish reading a placatory editorial about the cancellation of Carnival. But I just couldn’t seem to finish that last paragraph. It was getting too dark to read, and I was distracted by a neighbour-turned prostitute, now in jail; her missing daughter; and her distraught mother.

From my perch a few houses above the St. Ann’s River, I watched the shadows lengthen across the city. The sun turned from orange to red in the western sky over the glittering Gulf of Paria. The grey merchant vessels and battleships docked in the harbour and anchored out in the Gulf turned to maroon, then black silhouettes. As the sun finally began to set behind some indefinite spot in Venezuela, the insect-eating bats came out from under the eaves of the houses and started darting back and forth. The children in the street showed no signs of going inside but I hadn’t even noticed them until now. The stray dogs and pot hounds, well-rested from their long siestas, started patrolling the streets silently. Finally, the city was engulfed in darkness, except for some electric lights along the waterfront. The nocturnal insects got louder and louder, giving away their positions to the winged bat patrols. After the third or fourth sand fly bit me, I got up from the old bench, folded my paper and went inside. I had a lot on my mind for a Sunday night.

CHAPTER TWO

Morning Rounds

Monday morning, I woke up extra early to get ready for an uncommonly busy day. I entertained the misguided hope that, with my earliness, I might impress my employer. Then he might be more easily convinced to let me take some time off during the day. It would be my first chance to look into the Marcie Fournier business. I showed up at Chen Lai’s house in St. Clair around seven.

The Lai residence was two or three cupboards short of a bona fide mansion. Chen didn’t like to show off. The house was a compact, mostly neoclassical-looking thing with pediments and architraves—the kind of architecture that allowed colonial Protestants to pretend at ageless, secular grandeur without resorting to those churchy-looking pointed arches that you see around town. A Scotsman had built it around 1905 and lived there for thirty years before his family had sold it in a hurry to Chen Lai so that they could bury the old man back in Edinburgh and be done with the West Indies once and for all. Of course, the sale was much to the consternation of the neighbours since Chen’s family were the first people in this part of St. Clair darker than a fresh sheet of typewriter paper. Maybe the Lais could have avoided the sun before moving in, just to ease everyone’s mind. I had seen some Chinese who were whiter than white people because they cowered under parasols when the sun was burning on all cylinders.

The Lai house itself was painted white though, including all the wooden louvres and trimmings, with an orange terracotta tile roof. Concrete Ionic columns held up the porch, spanned by Italianate balustrades in the way that wooden posts and banisters might have done on humbler, more native homes. Chen had also installed some Demerara windows to cut down on the glare and heat from the morning sun especially. The shady porch and tilted windows nearly succeeded in naturalising the Mediterranean-looking edifice.

Clusters of blue and white Chinese pots lined the straight, clay-tiled walkway all the way up to the pedimented portico sheltering the front doors. The pots held a variety of gardenias, jasmine, and other little flowering shrubs, all neatly pruned. Two stands of palms flanked the boxy house when you saw it from the road. The garden was well tended, partly by Chen Lai himself on Sundays—the one day he was home per week. But most of the greenery was maintained by Mr Deodath the old gardener who was already finishing watering the hibiscuses and crotons when I got there. His black face, crowned with snowy white hair, came up from behind the bougainvillaea when I pulled up at the pavement. He regarded me with emotionless, bloodshot eyes. I waved. He waved back unsmilingly and returned to his work. He wasn’t particularly impressed by my excessive punctuality.

Chen, on the other hand, didn’t try to hide his surprise and annoyance at my jumping the gun. Errol Chen Lai was an irritable but soft-hearted sort. He was ready to cuss you with some nasty four-letter words at a moment’s notice, yet half of Port-of-Spain owed him money because if you approached Chen Lai with just the right amount of contrition, and with a few compelling biographical details you might get your hardware supplies on trust. Of course, there were only so many interesting stories you could tell him regarding your bad luck before you were barred from the shop. On the other hand, there were only so many ‘customers’ that could be barred from the shop before it went out of business. Overall, Chen did okay, with the house in St. Clair to prove it. The occasional scoundrel who never paid his bill was just the cost of doing business.

Chen Lai had started out back in 1925 with a general shop on Charlotte Street, a regular ‘Chinee shop’ selling all kinds of dry goods. From there he expanded to three shops around town by the early ‘30s. But then, in the hard financial times that soon followed, he sold two of those to a cousin and a Portuguese respectively and focused on the hardware and glass part of his business which he kept on Queen Street.

Almost everybody went to Lai House Furnishings & Glass for their windows, sheet glass and even the occasional car windscreens. He had heard every play on the word ‘Lai’ and just bore it patiently, sometimes taking the time to explain that it was pronounced ‘Loy’ like the actress Myrna Loy with the big, sleepy eyes. Chen Lai’s glass was mostly imported but some was custom made in a factory down south, and most of the custom cutting and even some of the etching was done right there on Queen Street by him and his son, Eric.

If you didn’t pay your bill, I wasn’t required to break your fingers or anything. Rather, one of the half-dozen reasons Chen kept me around was that oftentimes, I could warn him if a customer was a bad risk. My breadth of associations around town made me helpful as Chen considered your hard luck story. He could ask me what I knew about you, especially as pertained to the regularity of your employment and thus, your worthiness of an entry in his ledger book. With people constantly leaving old jobs and getting new ones, especially with the Americans, this was more taxing on my memory than it sounded. As for the more crooked customers, the sight of me standing there in the shop was a general deterrent to those with sticky fingers. So, Chen made the calculation that my pay was a small fraction of what he was saving by having me around.

Of course, I also did most of the driving for the Lai patriarch and his family, escorting him to the bank as well, and facilitating certain delicate situations that sometimes required my training, contacts, and reputation. Some days I spent driving back and forth all day on shop business with and without Chen, but on other days I just sat on a stool in one conspicuous spot or another of the shop and read the Gazette from front to back, coasting on my ex-police reputation. I was grateful to Chen for the steady work. After my return from Nelson Island, other employers weren’t sure whether that same reputation of mine was a good or bad thing and they didn’t care to pay just to find out.

I parked in the drive after Chen’s son, Eric, came out half-dressed and let me through the wrought iron gate.

What happen? How come yuh so early to-day? Eric asked with his wake-up face still on, but in a fresh, bleached merino.

I have some business to attend to after I drop you and your father off, I replied.

Hot date so early on a Monday?

Nah. Helpin’ an old lady with a problem.

How old this lady is? Thirty or thirty-five? he teased.

Boy, go and finish dressing, nah! I snapped as he turned to go back into the house.

When Chen finally came out fifteen minutes later, with his younger daughter Eugenia in her school uniform, he gave me a less pleasant interrogation than Eric’s and I gave him the same answers.

But what de ass?! So, I workin’ for you now? he complained. "You come here rushin’ me and I have to catch up to your schedule."

No rush, Chen. I’ll drop everybody off but then, I have to run across town for a little while. I replied, and then added, And watch your language in front of Eugenia. The little girl sucked her teeth as she got into the car and promptly buried her nose in a book.

Yuh t’ink Geenie don’t hear dat at school? Dem nuns can’t control everyt’ing. Okay, well make sure you come back by quarter to eleven, eh. We have to go down de Wharf to-day. Chen liked to drag me to the Wharf because I knew some of the customs officers and workers there. He suspected they wouldn’t swindle him or give him bad information if I came with him. I wasn’t completely sure he was right about that, but I didn’t mind him thinking it, and I stayed particularly friendly with the people there on his account.

I should be back well before that, Chen, I assured.

We dropped Eugenia off at school on Pembroke Street but because of a broken-down lorry on Park Street, we never got to the shop until twenty-five after eight. Time was still on my side though. I helped Chen and Eric to unlock the three sets of doors at the front. When we had turned on all the lights, Eric had set up the cash register, and the senior Lai had returned from the back office with his cigar box of orders and his dog-eared ledger book, I jumped back in the car and took off westward, across town in the direction of police head-quarters.

I didn’t dare set foot inside the station building itself, though. Since the incidents in ‘37 I had more than a few enemies in there, and in the force throughout the whole island for that matter. But I was still on various kinds of speaking terms with a few of the men. I knew where to find one in particular at this hour of the morning.

Sergeant Egon MacShain was a towering three hundred-pound Tobagonian who took his breakfast mid-morning every weekday from the fry shop near head-quarters. Because he was always at work long before anybody else on the shift, even the English Inspectors didn’t begrudge him his untimely breakfast errand. And because he was the largest officer at head-quarters, with a matching personality, nobody thought to broach the question with him of whether he should have continued speaking to me.

It was usually between a quarter past nine and a quarter to ten when he reached the fry shop on Duke Street on the first leg of a kind of informal rounds. There he swallowed down four fry bakes with fried fish or butter and cheese, depending on his mood (but either with a generous drop of pepper sauce), and a big enamel cup of cocoa tea. By the time he finished, he was sweating profusely in his crisp uniform and had to ask for a glass of ice water. Then he would swab the perspiration from his forehead, then from the back of his neck, before commencing aforementioned rounds in the lower half of the city. On his clockwise tour, he made sure the constables were where they were supposed to be, doing what they were supposed to be doing, commanding them more by the force of his firm but affable character than by any rank conferred upon him by the Crown. Then, along the streets in the south-western quadrant of town, he would eventually make his way back to the drudgery of the station on St. Vincent Street.

It was a good thing I’d wasted no time in getting to the fry shop. MacShain was early this morning. He was just handing back his empty plate at the stand-up counter when I pulled up beside the open front of the fry shop, got out and walked towards him. The smell of sizzling fish, and smoke from grease falling in the fire filled the street. People on their way to work, some already late, were still queuing up. My mouth watered, even though I had already eaten for the morning. I ignored the greedy impulse.

The hulking policeman saw me and raised his chin inquisitively. A girl behind the counter handed him a tall glass of water without him having to ask. The irregular pieces of ice in the glass clinked as he took a hefty gulp. Halfway down the glass, he took a breath, licked a stiffened upper lip and asked me what I wanted. He could read my business-like manner. I asked him to step out to the pavement so that we could talk. MacShain dispatched the remaining contents of his glass in four or five more little gulps, chewed on a little chip of ice and turned his back to me to return the glass. Then he took out an ironed handkerchief and wiped his perspiring brow hard like he was trying to soak up the next generation of sweat beads before they were born. On the pavement, I explained my little pro bono project for Marcie Fournier in a low voice so that the other fry shop customers wouldn’t overhear.

Why yuh don’t go Royal Gaol and visit de missin’ girl mudder? asked MacShain in an equally low voice.

The grandmother says that the mother isn’t talking to anybody. I exaggerated the prisoner’s refusal to communicate—keeping things simple. In fact, the information I needed was more easily, and less conspicuously, obtained from him than a jailed prostitute, or the prison guards who all knew me.

So, what you want me to tell yuh? MacShain’s words were more hostile than his tone as he began to walk away from the fry shop. I followed him.

Well, you fellas wouldn’t have bothered to jail the mother unless you had a fair amount of evidence. I mean, a lot of women might loosen up for a sailor, but you usually can’t prove that is a business transaction. This woman, on the other hand, is a known kerb conch. A middle-aged woman on the fry shop queue was startled when she overheard the slang. I was surprised she knew it and softened my voice again as MacShain and I walked along Duke Street, away from the police station to begin his tour. My point is: a known prostitute is bound to have associates some of whom are also known to police. I’m trying to find out who Henrietta’s friends are, who she goes around with. And I thought you might know. MacShain didn’t like how that sounded but caught my meaning.

Well I don’t know if you could call dem friends but dey have a few o’ them does be at de Scarlet Ibis out near Carenage, he said, leaning his head in a vaguely western direction. "Almost every night dey out dey now. De only way we does hold dem is when dey try to solicit servicemen here in town…and only den, because if de sailor arks dem first we don’t have a case. We cyah pursue dat. I nodded in acknowledgement and MacShain continued, But out dey by Point Cumana is a different world, boy. Dat is Yankee territory now. Dey have a skinny, big-breast one named Tracy, but I t’ink she in jail now, too. Another high brown one named Suzette—I aint see she in weeks now. Suzy-Q dey does call she. All o’ dem know Henrietta. And den you have Tess. I don’t know if dat is she real name, but Lord have mercy! Yuh know how much time inspectors hold dat woman and just let she go? Constables don’t go near she, yuh know. Dat woman does have yuh under a spell, boy. She does wear only yellow or turquoise: de dress, de jewellery, everyt’ing, MacShain’s voice was getting higher with every detail about this Tess. Soon he would be singing like Caruso. If you could talk to dat one, I sure she know everyt’ing about everybody. But bring yuh zepie or bathe in holy water first, boy…or say a psalm or somet’ing. Because dat woman could tie yuh up bad, bad."

I couldn’t tell whether MacShain feared or admired this Tess, or both, but evidently, and dubiously, she came highly recommended. I thanked him for his help and left him swiping at another generation of sweat beads on his forehead with the now-soaking wet kerchief. As I walked back to my car, getting closer to the police station, I could feel MacShain’s eyes on my back. He was as ambivalent about me as about that Tess woman, but I was sure he wasn’t imagining me in yellow or turquoise.

After buying some petrol up by the Savannah, I headed back over to the shop. Crotchety Chen downplayed that he was pleased by my early return. We went down to the Wharf and spent the rest of the morning there supervising the careful loading of his big glass shipment onto the lorry. With the Battle of the Atlantic now raging, it promised to be his last for a while. The big lorry wheels creaked under the weight of all that glass. Every now and then, I would give Vance, the driver, and the stevedores a helping hand with the larger crates. To-day, nothing seemed to be broken, either in the journey across the Gulf of Mexico or in the unloading at Customs. Chen was in a good mood, especially after safely unloading all those crates at the shop. Around 2 o’clock, he bought a meal for himself, Eric, the men on the lorry, and me. I even saw him slip a couple of dollars to the driver. Chen’s wife, Cleo, had died some years earlier and with that, he had stopped bringing frugal, home-cooked meals to work. Now, the three bachelors at the shop were known by every restaurant and hot lunch vendor in Port-of-Spain. As I shovelled hot pelau into my cheeks in the back office of Chen’s shop, I still had a craving for fry bake and Anchor cheese. Maybe I’d have some for breakfast tomorrow…if I lived through my unholy encounter with Tess that night.

CHAPTER THREE

The Scarlet Ibis

That afternoon I went straight home after dropping the Lais off in St. Clair. When I got back to the house, I flung my keys and hat on the centre table and marched to the wardrobe in the bedroom. There, I pulled out one of my two suits and my black Sanders brogues. Day old trousers and a sweaty shirt-jac were not going to help me fit in at the Scarlet Ibis. It wasn’t a fancy place but if I walked in there looking like a taxi-driver I wouldn’t be treated the same as a man of some professional station. I had to look better than the Americans to get any attention from the women there—local janes who had got used to stumbling home tipsy yet well fed, and with more money than their whole family put together. On the other hand, I couldn’t make so much style as to irritate the uniformed competition.

I had chosen the dark, single-breasted suit with the waistcoat—definitely not as stylish as the double-breasted one. But I left the waistcoat on the hanger, not wanting to look too formal. I went back out to the gallery and draped the jacket and trousers as best I could along the narrow bench to air them out in the last daylight hour. I dared not hang them on the banister where they’d attract attention. There are advantages and disadvantages to having ‘fast’ neighbours. Tonight, I could do without their looking into my affairs. I went back inside to bathe, shave, iron a fresh shirt and polish up my brogues.

When I finished dressing, complete with a maroon and gold tie choking my neck, and my underutilised, overpriced Borsalino cupped on my head like a tea cosy, I was ready to make trouble. It was about eight when I locked up the house and went down the steps and into the road. My house was a little grey and white three-room just above the first, irregular line of houses skirting the foot of the Laventille hills, near where Park Street crosses the St. Ann’s River and joins Piccadilly. From this crow’s nest, I could see anyone coming up the alley from those main roads. Unfortunately, they could also stay down on the corner and see me if I were outside in the gallery. Only a particularly attentive macko could even see my suit being sunned out on the bench as I got ready for a night on the town.

I usually parked my car a little farther up the winding alley behind the house, just where it turned sharply left to go deep into the hills. This way, it was unclear whether I was home or not to all except those who used this particular alley on their way to and from the city. But this evening, considering that I’d be heading right back out, I had left the Morris 10 parked right in front the yard. I could be only so private with my movements. I wasn’t even sure why I was being so secretive. A vague instinct made me not want people to know anything about my little side-job for Ms Marcie.

As I walked to the car, some boys—my first unwanted witnesses—stopped pitching marbles long enough to watch me get in and start up the engine. The Morris 10 was still fairly new and was one of only three cars ever parked on this narrow side road, so the children were always a little fascinated. To-day the Morris wasn’t too dusty, so they were cheated out of the penny it would have taken one of them to match the shine on it to the one I had put on my brogues. Maybe on the way back home I could find a dirt road to drive on and flush some enterprising young lad with marble money.

Dapper Dan! shouted my neighbour Royce from his gallery as I got into the car. My second unwanted witness. Royce had all but given up practicing his trombone now that there was to be no Carnival. He refused to play his noble horn for the Yankees at places like I was visiting tonight. Nowadays after his carpentry work, he dedicated his evenings to games of chance and strategy. A fellow they called Beans was playing cards with him and looked up and over his shoulder to see who Royce was talking to. The children were still staring. Beans raised his chin at me in acknowledgement, also cocking the toothpick between his teeth, and then went back to his likely losing hand. Beans always lost at cards, especially all fours, his favourite game.

So much for my stealthy departure. I waved at the two men from my car window and turned the starter. As my wheels started rolling down the hill the children sprung from their haunches and got out of the way. The stray dogs and pot hounds, however, took more convincing. I refused to blare my horn and announce myself to everyone else who wasn’t already watching me. I just kept rolling slowly towards them, over the flattish area where the boys had been playing, then inching down the badly paved slope with my foot on the brakes. Stubbornly they got up and strolled out of the road as if the infringement on their evening of relaxation was something no one had the right to demand. Why were they dozing at sunset anyway? Shouldn’t they have been up for their night rounds already? These were the same dogs you sometimes had to pelt a stone at to get them to stop barking and fighting while you were trying to sleep. But some pot hounds think they are people, and have people’s vices, like being late for work.

I drove across Piccadilly, over the bridge, and into town. Then I made my way through the city towards Western Main Road. This was going to be my first time down the Carenage end of the island since the arrival of the Americans. The Crown had leased much of that area to the US Navy in exchange for some old naval destroyers that it needed to fight Nazi ships and U-boats. Naturally, nobody asked the people down Chaguaramas if they wanted to be relocated like a tribe of red Indians so that Yankees could build a naval base there. In the end, even the governor himself saw his objections to the Chaguaramas base ignored by the government back in England. They needed those hand-me-down Yankee ships for another world war and, as far as they were concerned, the little island governor just didn’t understand.

For the accommodating depth of its water, Chaguaramas fit the bill. The Americans could moor any size ship there. The base was also in a strategic northern location. From there, Yankee patrols could intercept Nazi U-boats as soon as they entered the Caribbean; before they made a mad dash across the crown of South America for the Panama Canal. This northern position on an easterly island was probably the main reason the governor lost the argument with London. A tired, aging empire had hired muscle from a spry, adolescent one to strangle a nascent, mad one in its perambulator, and Trinidad was a nicely located, petrol-rich sentry box at the gateway to the invaluable territories of South and Central America.

Riveted to our newspapers and the wireless broadcasts, thrilled and frightened by our colonial conscription into the war effort, Trinidadians prided ourselves that we were less of a pawn and more of a rook. One newspaper writer called us, a wily little watch-tower with moveable navy destroyer legs and eyes aimed seaward, ready with depth charges for those goose-stepping Germans that we quickly learned to hate. A few years earlier, a calypsonian friend of mine, Saga, had made his first and last wax recording, a song about Hitler, which was promptly banned for its unflattering description of the emergent tyrant. But now that we were officially at war with the moustachioed madman, we were welcome to decry him as much as we liked in the written and recorded word. Still, the singers and newspaper men had to be careful how they groused about Hitler’s compere, Mussolini, and his soldiers in Ethiopia. Expressing disapproval of all ‘European invaders’ was a verse too far.

I wondered if that newspaper man who likened us to a rook had ever actually played chess—because a rook only looks like a watch-tower. In fact, we were neither rook nor pawn. There was no game piece that summed up what we were exactly. In reality, we weren’t just a watch-tower but a convenient cluster of oil derricks, the biggest supplier of petrol in the Empire in fact, and a training ground, proving ground and playground for American servicemen who bounced back and forth between strenuous drills and sinking boredom. The Yankees were like legionaries posted at some picaresque garrison nestled between creeping jungle and paved urbanity, with surprising levels of vice if you knew where to look.

From out Chaguaramas and dozens of other bases throughout the island, the anxious, restless Americans launched their social invasion. And tonight, I was a little sprat swimming against the shoal of GI’s that had taken Port-of-Spain. I passed scores of uniforms on the streets of the city before getting on Western Main Road, then crossed headlamps with at least a dozen vehicles full of them on my way out to Carenage.

Driving along the coast with the water on my left, every now and then, the road came close enough to the incoming surf for the spray to cloud my windscreen. Out in the Gulf, I could see the lights from American ships and also the dimmer ones from the Five Islands, my old residence. Warm memories flooded back of the seventeen months I had spent in my palatial, urine-perfumed, insect-infested chambers out there on Nelson Island. This was the closest I had been to the place since my release four years ago. So, what if I had spent much of 1938 ‘at His Majesty’s pleasure’? The thirties had been hard for everybody. I dismissed inopportune thoughts and cast my eyes back on the road.

Just before Point Cumana, the neon lights of the Scarlet Ibis Restaurant and Lounge became visible around a bend in the road. The one storey structure stood on short posts with wooden steps leading up to the front entrance. The building and its gravel car park were recessed in from the road, nestled under a precipitous limestone ledge. The cliff was overgrown with vines, which hung down almost touching the thatched roof. The Scarlet Ibis was doing its best to look rustic…in that foreign sort of way. Under the thatched eaves a few pieces of wicker furniture were put out on the veranda to seem hospitable. No one was using them. But that didn’t mean the place was empty. When I turned into the car park, I could hear the sounds of a crowd inside. About ten feet in from the road, there flickered the incongruous neon sign facing out towards traffic going in either direction. In the centre was a stilt-legged bird rendered in red neon tubes with one leg raised and bent to form a reversed delta, more like a flamingo than an ibis. Encircling the ambiguous aquatic bird were the words ‘Scarlet IBIS’—‘Scarlet’ on top, ‘IBIS’ on the bottom in capitals—both in white neon. The sign flickered and hummed audibly as