Operation Nassau Read Online Free PDF

other times have you jumped into a car and then immediately demanded to get out?’
    ‘Three,’ I said shortly. ‘Once with a depressive case turned hypomanic, once with an intoxicated ambulance driver and once to escape carbon-monoxide poisoning from a faulty exhaust pipe. The emergency situation is perhaps more frequent in medicine than in portrait-painting.’
    ‘You’d be surprised,’ said the man Johnson gently. He received back his documents and taking from me the sealed letter from Bartholomew Edgecombe, which I handed over in silence, he read and then pocketed it.
    ‘I understand,’ he said. A bus full of tourists passed by. The sun, low in the palm trees, was losing some of its heat. You could smell the sea on the other side of the road. I waited.
    After a moment he said, ‘Bart Edgecombe is an old friend of mine. You did your duty, I know, but I want to thank you none the less for dealing with a rather nasty chain of events.’ He paused. ‘Dr MacRannoch . . there are some things I’d rather like to ask you, and perhaps there are some you want to find out from me. Would it scare you to come with me now and share a meal and a talk aboard Dolly ? I’d run you back afterwards. You could phone your home from the club if you wanted.’
    Johnson Johnson, the Miami folder had said. One of the World’s Foremost Portrait Artists Displays his Paintings in Florida. Forty of Society’s Most Prominent Luminaries. I could see no sign of schizophrenia. It seemed unlikely that a sane man would perpetrate any public illegality before his exhibition. I am not in the least easy to scare. I agreed to dine with Johnson on his yacht Dolly .
    Coral Harbour is a private development in one of the moneyed quarters of New Providence Island, and about twenty minutes from Nassau. To get to it you have to drive over the hill, where the Bahamians live in huts and houses of clapboard and peeling stucco with dingy netted windows, or with no windows at all: shacks perched up high in the dirt with the crumbling doorstep a gap of three feet away from the threshold. Men were pouring out of the workyards and children were wavering up and down the narrow streets on high-handled American bicycles. I noted a child I had treated the previous week for a cranial lesion: her mother had been told to keep the child indoors and quiet.
    Then we passed through Oakesville, the supermarket and Sir Harry’s monument, and were in a green and white well-kept road network again, ending in the Lyford Cay-Nassau roundabout beyond which were the cone-topped pharos guarding the entrance gate to Coral Harbour’s 2,500 acres of golf-course, beaches, villas and waterways. And the yacht club with Dolly .
    ‘. . .This fashionable community; a wonderland of spacious home sites and silken beaches in the heart of a tax-free, sun-blessed economy. Are you a radical doctor, Doctor?’ asked Johnson.
    We were driving along a broad avenue lined with bush-cut pines spaced like green wigs on wigstands. A nursery on the right displayed a drilled squad of short potted palms, destined for landscape designing. We passed the golf-course. ‘Or,’ Johnson added, ‘do your fellow men hold no charm for you, anyway?’
    ‘Very little,’ I said calmly. ‘I prefer to pit my wits against science. My relaxation, for instance, is golf.’
    ‘And bridge? No, not bridge,’ Johnson answered himself, as it happened, quite accurately. ‘To depend for success on a partner would be highly unethical. But I’ll take you on at golf some time. Dr MacRannoch.’
    I felt no need to say anything. We came to the double road, with its spine of hibiscus and palms, and the water-based villas with their polythened cars and cruising boats tied up to the patio. A palm roundel with flags stood in front of the club, which was low and modern with a lot of plate-glass and crazed-stone facing and white wrought-iron balcony. Johnson parked the car and we went in.
    I waited on the fur rug. The scarlet-lit