Bond smiled into her eyes. He said: “If you hadn’t come, I’d have had to break that dinner date.” He turned back to the men, his voice businesslike. “All right. One of you take the motor-bike and report the gist of this to Colonel Schreiber. Say we’re waiting for his team before we take a look at the hide-out. And would he include a couple of anti-sabotage men. That shaft may be booby-trapped. All right?”
Bond took the girl by the arm. He said: “Come over here. I want to show you a bird’s nest.”
“Is that an order?”
“Yes.”
FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
The most beautiful bird in Jamaica, and some say the most beautiful bird in the world, is the streamer-tail or doctor humming-bird. The cock bird is about nine inches long, but seven inches of it are tail – two long black feathers that curve and cross each other and whose inner edges are in a form of scalloped design. The head and crest are black, the wings dark green, the long bill is scarlet, and the eyes, bright and confiding, are black. The body is emerald green, so dazzling that when the sun is on the breast you see the brightest green thing in nature. In Jamaica, birds that are loved are given nicknames. Trochilus polytmus is called ‘doctor bird’ because his two black streamers remind people of the black tail-coat of the old-time physician. Mrs Havelock was particularly devoted to two families of these birds because she had been watching them sipping honey, fighting, nesting and making love since she married and came to Content. She was now over fifty, so many generations of these two families had come and gone since the original two pairs had been nicknamed Pyramus and Thisbe and Daphnis and Chloe by her mother-in-law. But successive couples had kept the names, and Mrs Havelock now sat at her elegant tea service on the broad cool veranda and watched Pyramus, with a fierce ‘tee-tee-tee’ dive-bomb Daphnis who had finished up the honey on his own huge bush of Japanese Hat and had sneaked in among the neighbouring Monkeyfiddle that was Pyramus’s preserve. The two tiny black and green comets swirled away across the fine acres of lawn, dotted with brilliant clumps of hibiscus and bougainvillaea, until they were lost to sight in the citrus groves. They would soon be back. The running battle between the two families was a game. In this big finely planted garden there was enough honey for all.
Mrs Havelock put down her teacup and took a Patum Peperium sandwich. She said: “They really are the most dreadful show-offs.”
Colonel Havelock looked over the top of his Daily Gleaner. “Who?”
“Pyramus and Daphnis.”
“Oh, yes.” Colonel Havelock thought the names idiotic. He said: “It looks to me as if Batista will be on the run soon. Castro’s keeping up the pressure pretty well. Chap at Barclay’s told me this morning that there’s a lot of funk money coming over here already. Said that Belair’s been sold to nominees. One hundred and fifty thousand pounds for a thousand acres of cattle-tick and a house the red ants’ll have down by Christmas! Somebody’s suddenly gone and bought that ghastly Blue Harbour hotel, and there’s even talk that Jimmy Farquharson has found a buyer for his place – leaf-spot and Panama disease thrown in for good measure, I suppose.”
“That’ll be nice for Ursula. The poor dear can’t stand it out here. But I can’t say I like the idea of the whole island being bought up by these Cubans. But Tim, where do they get all the money from, anyway?”
“Rackets, union funds, Government money – God knows. The place is riddled with crooks and gangsters. They must want to get their money out of Cuba and into something else quick. Jamaica’s as good as anywhere else now we’ve got this convertibility with the dollar. Apparently the man who bought Belair just shovelled the money on to the floor of Aschenheim’s office out of a suitcase. I suppose he’ll keep the place for a year or two, and when the trouble’s blown over or when Castro’s got in and finished cleaning up he’ll put it on the market again, take a reasonable loss and move off somewhere else. Pity, in a way. Belair used to be a fine property. It could have been brought back if anyone in the family had cared.”