He made a small smile. “My friends call me Freddie.”
“Well then, Freddie. How did a nice chap like you end up on the wrong side of the Duke of Windsor?”
“Do you ask me as a journalist, Mrs. Randolph, or as a friend?”
“Both. I’m a desperate woman, you know. Any little old tidbit might save my career.”
“Then I don’t mind telling you that the duke is a terrible bigot, a vain, weak, effeminate man, entirely ruled by his wife and his own greed.”
He still wore the smile, but his voice was 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. An Englishwoman, the sporty sort, do you know what I mean?”
“I have an idea. Thinks she’s Gertrude Bell and Good Queen Bess all rolled into one.”
He laughed. “Yes, like that. So she buys her own land, not far away from mine, and builds herself a big, splendid house, and what do you think? She has no well, no source of her own. The silly woman did not think to ask these practical questions before she purchased her little empire.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I suggested she build gutters and a water tank. We have plenty of tropical downpours in these islands, after all. But no. She has other ideas. And then I wait and wait for the governor’s signature, and there is no signature, so I sail back to Nassau and make an appointment at Government House and explain the situation, how the villagers are waiting for their fresh water, and do you know what he says, this fellow who ruled as king of England and her dominions for almost a year? Emperor of India, et cetera?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“He says he wants the water in those pipes—my water, mind you, from my property—diverted to Mrs. Forbes instead. He says the natives are used to collecting their water in buckets, they have never had running water, it won’t make a difference to them, while Mrs. Forbes, this munificent woman, she and her estate will provide work and money to the population, which is a gift of far greater value to them.”
My fingers rotated the end of the cigarette in the ashtray, round and round. De Marigny had a contradictory mouth, a thin top lip over a full, sensuous bottom lip, from which the smile had disappeared. He drank again, not deeply, and when he put the glass down he stared at me. The voices hammered around us. By some imperceptible means, our two stools had drawn closer together, almost in intimacy.
“And what did you say to that?” I asked.
“I refused, of course. Then I said some rather uncomplimentary things, which I shall not repeat, and which he pretended not to notice. He left the room. His—what’s the word—his aide-de-camp was horrified. I felt a little sorry for him, in the end.”
“The aide-de-camp?”
“No, the duke. He spends the first three and a half decades of his life being told he is like a god on earth. And he believes it! And now it’s a very different story. An attractive woman walks into his office and pays him the great compliment of begging for a boon, so he grants it—like a king, like an emperor—never imagining he cannot do this thing she asks. But what’s this? His subject won’t obey him. His subject crosses his thick colonial boots and tells the little emperor he’s nothing more than the governor of a pimple on the arse of the British Empire.”
“You said that?”
“Something like that, anyway.” He ground out his own cigarette. “Listen to me. When I was living in London, before the war, I met him twice. Once at Ascot. The second time at a hunting party in Scotland. He arrives in his own airplane, you see, flies in late to join us on his own bloody airplane, the Gypsy Moth—what an ass—and proceeds to tell us over dinner what a fine chap this Hitler fellow is, has all the right ideas, Germany and England should be the