The Last Place God Made - Jack Higgins [38]
'Sounds too good to be true to me,' I said and meant it.
But Joanna Martin didn't think so. She sat down beside him and said eagerly, 'Do you think they'll be able to get news of my sister?'
'Certain to.' He took one of her hands again. 'It's going to be fine. I promise you.'
After that, to say that they got on like a house on fire would have been something of an understatement. I sat in the wings, as it were, and watched while they talked a lot, laughed a great deal and finally went down to join the small crowd on the dance floor.
I wasn't the only one who was put out. I caught a flash of scarlet in the half-light, Lola watching from behind a pillar. I knew then what the saying meant by a woman scorned. She looked capable of putting a knife between Hannah's shoulder blades if given half a chance.
I don't know what was said between the two on the floor, but when the band stopped playing, they moved across to the piano and Hannah sat down. As I've said before, he was a fair pianist and moved straight into a solid, pushing arrangement of St Louis Blues and Joanna Martin took the vocal.
She was good - better than I'd thought she would be. She gave it everything she had, a sort of total dedication and the crowd loved it. They followed with Night and Day and Begin the Beguine which was a tremendous hit that autumn and all one seemed to hear from radios everywhere, even on the River Amazon.
But by then I'd had enough. I left them to it, negotiated the catwalk to the jetty and walked morosely back to the hotel in the pouring rain.
*
I had been in bed for at least an hour, had just begun to drift into sleep when Hannah's voice brought me sharply to my senses. I got out of bed, padded to the door and opened it. He was obviously very drunk, standing with Joanna Martin outside the door of what I presumed must be her room at the end of the corridor.
He was trying to kiss her in that clumsy, unco-ordinated way a drunken man has. She obviously didn't need any assistance because she was laughing about it.
I closed the door, went back beneath the mosquito net and lit a cigarette. I don't know what I was shaking with - rage or thwarted desire, or both, but I lay there smoking furiously and cursing everyone who ever lived - until my door opened and closed again softly. The bolt clicked into place and there was silence.
I sensed her presence there in the darkness even before I smelled the perfume. She said, 'Stop sulking. I know you're in there. I can see your cigarette.'
'Bitch,' I said.
She pulled back the mosquito net, there was the rustle of some garment or other falling to the floor, then she slipped into bed beside me.
'That's nice,' she said and added, in the same tone of voice, 'Colonel Alberto wants to be off at the crack of dawn. Sister Maria Teresa and I have strict instructions from Hannah to be at the airstrip not later than seven-thirty. He seems to think we'll be safer with him.'
'You suit yourself.'
'You're a good pilot, Neil Mallory, according to Hannah, the best he's ever known.' Her lips brushed my cheek. 'But you don't know much about women.'
I wasn't going to argue with her, not then, with the kind of need burning inside that could not be borne for long. As I pulled her to me, I felt the nipples blossom on her breasts, cool against my bare skin.
The excitement she aroused in me, the awareness, was quite extraordinary. But there was more to it than that. I lay there holding her, waiting for some sort of sign that might come or might not - the whole world waited. And in that timeless moment I knew, out of some strange foreknowledge, that whatever happened during the rest of my life, I'd never know anything better than this. That whatever followed