Dagger Key and Other Stories

The island where we were kept was Billy’s private preserve. It was shaped roughly like a T, having two thin strips of land extending out in opposite directions from the west end. Billy’s compound took up most of the available space. Within a high white brick wall topped by razor wire were a pool, outbuildings (including a gym and eight bungalows), a helicopter pad, and a sprawling Florida-style ranch house that might have been designed by an architect with a Lego fetish—wings diverged off the central structure and off each other at angles such as a child might employ, and I guessed that from the air it must resemble half a crossword puzzle. There were flat screen TVs in every room, even the johns, and all the rooms were decorated in a fashion that I labeled haute mafia. The dining room table was fashioned from a fourteenth century monastery door lifted from some European ruin. The rugs were a motley assortment of modern and antique. Some of the windows were stained glass relics, while others were jalousies; but since heavy drapes were drawn across them, whatever effect had been intended was lost. Every room was home to a variety of antiquities: Egyptian statuary, Greek amphorae, Venetian glassware, German tapestries, and so on. In my bathroom, the toilet was carved from a single block of marble, and mounted on the wall facing it, a section of a Persian bas-relief, was yet another flat screen. It was as if someone with the sensibility of a magpie had looted the world’s museums in order to furnish the place, and yet the decor was so uniformly haphazard, I had the impression that Billy was making an anti-fashion statement, sneering at the concept of taste. Elvis would have approved. In fact, had he seen the entirety of Billy’s house, he would have returned home to Graceland and redecorated.

Beyond the wall was jungly growth that hid the house completely. The beach was a crescent of tawny sand fringed by palms and hibiscus shrubs and Spanish bayonet, protected by an underwater fence. A bunkerlike guard house stood at the foot of the concrete pier to which the cigarette boat was moored, and a multicultural force (Cuban, white, African-American) patrolled within and without the walls. The guards, along with gardeners and maids, were housed in the bungalows, but they entered the house frequently to check on us. If we stepped outside they would dog us, their weapons shouldered, keeping a distance, alert to our every movement. It was easier to find privacy inside the house. Relative privacy, at any rate. Knowing Billy, I was certain that the rooms were bugged, and I had given up on the idea that I could keep anything from him. Whenever Pellerin and jo were closeted in their rooms, I would walk along corridors populated by suits of armor and ninja costumes fitted to basketwork men and gilt French chairs that, with their curved legs and positioned between such martial figures, looked poised for an attack. I would poke into rooms, examine their collection of objets d’art, uniformly mismatched, yet priceless. Sometimes I would wonder if I dared slip one or two small items into my pocket, but most of my thoughts were less concerned with gain than with my forlorn prospects for survival.

Occasionally in the course of these forays, I would encounter a maid, but never anyone else, and thus I was surprised one afternoon when, upon entering a room in the northernmost wing with a four-poster bed and a fortune in gee-gaws littering the tables and bureaus, I saw Jo standing by the entrance to a walk-in closet, inspecting the dresses within. She gave a start when I spoke her name, then offered a wan smile and said, “Hello.”

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Browsing.” She touched the bodice of a green silk dress. “These clothes must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They’re all designer originals.”

“No, I meant aren’t you supposed to be with Pellerin.”

“I need breaks from Josey,” she said. “His intensity gets to me after a while. And he’s getting more independent, he wants time to himself. So…” She shrugged. “I like to come here and look at the clothes.”

She stepped into the closet and I moved into the room so I could keep her in view.

“He must bring a lot of women here,” she said. “He’s got every imaginable size.”

“It’s hard for me to think of Billy as a sexual being.”

“Why’s that?”

“You’d have to know him. I’ve never seen him with a woman on his arm, but I suppose he has his moments.”

She went deeper into the closet, toyed with the hem of a dress that bore a pattern like a moth’s wing, all soft grays and greens, a touch of brown.

I perched on the edge of the bed. “Why don’t you try it on?”

“Do you think he’d mind?” she asked.

“Go for it.”

She hesitated, then said, “I’ll just be a second,” and closed the closet door.