“Please forget my tarantulas,” he said. He tried to add a disarming smile, the way Don Pickett did, but he could tell that his smile had congealed right in the middle of his face, revealing his discomfort. “I never meant to introduce spiders into the discussion.” Not a single laugh. They could all tell how nervous he was. “I was making a speculation in answer to a question, and it was a pointless speculation, and I apologize for that, since it was pointless speculation that created the need for this press conference in the first place.” The words were coming out right, but the tremor in his voice was sending an entirely different sort of signal.

  By the time the press conference was over, his head hung so low he had to roll his eyes upward to see the raggedy pack he feared, the Press.

  Afterward, as the reporters were departing and the television crews were packing up, Roger, Julian, and Don stood behind the table, and Julian said to Roger: “See? Wasn’t so bad, was it. You did great.”

  He didn’t say it with the slightest bit of exhilaration, however, not the way you would with a rookie athlete who has just performed admirably in the fray. No, he said it mechanically, as if he really meant, “See, that may have been bad, but it wasn’t as bad as you were afraid it was going to be.”

  “Just a couple things,” he added. “Stay away from things like tarantulas. We don’t want to make Armholster any angrier than he already is. Even a 800-pound hawg’s cuddlier than a spider. And there’s no need to bring in English Avenue. We want to present Fareek as a nice young man who goes to college at Georgia Tech. But don’t worry, you did fine.”

  Roger stood there massaging his hands and worrying a lot.

  The name “Nassau, the Bahamas” had always conjured up in Peepgass’s mind a tropical capital that looked like an enlarged version of some posh resort such as the Pinehurst Inn in North Carolina or the Greenbrier in West Virginia—but with an ocean, palm trees, manicured greenswards, white columns, shady verandas, green-and-white awnings, and trim black policemen clad in white pith helmets, short-sleeved white officer’s blouses, pleated white shorts, knee-high white socks, and white shoes, contrasting smartly with their dark skin, standing on white platforms in the middle of the main intersections, crisply directing traffic.

  In fact, there was nothing crisp about Nassau at all, so far as Peepgass could tell, and it wasn’t an enlarged version of anything, or not anything in the U.S.A. It was a tiny, moldering old colonial capital with a lot of patchedup, painted-over old buildings, cramped and crowded and leaning against one another for support. The whole of downtown wasn’t bigger than Normandy Lea, where he lived. Number 23 George Street, the official address of Colonial Real Properties, Ltd., was a laugh and a half. As he walked up the narrow stairs that began scarcely a yard inside the front entrance, he couldn’t help but smile. Staggering up the wall in a line parallel, more or less, with the staircase were forty-one brass plaques bearing the names of American and European banks and corporations, including, he couldn’t help but be pleased to notice, First Gould Guaranty, one of the biggest banks in New York. The shiniest plaque of all, since it was the newest, was the forty-first: Colonial Real Properties, Ltd. And that was all his.

  It was no use walking up any farther, because there was no office of Colonial Real Properties to be found. But there wasn’t one for First Gould Guaranty, either. For the biggest—First Gould—as well as the smallest—Colonial Real Properties—this was merely a dummy address that enabled one to carry out so-called overseas financial operations. The banks, for example, could use the Bahamas to set up Eurodollar accounts for their customers. Individuals could hide money here, in Bahamian banks, with a secrecy that was tightly protected by Bahamian banking laws. Not for nothing did Nassau call itself Little Switzerland. Ever since the Civil War, when blockade runners—such as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind—used the Bahamas as a safe harbor from which to do business with the Confederacy, Americans had been using the Bahamas to get around American laws. Bootleggers used the Bahamas for warehousing during Prohibition. Drug dealers were using it for essentially the same purpose at this moment. Nassau was so close to the U.S. mainland, it was only a thirty-minute flight from Miami and an hour from Atlanta. Peepgass wasn’t so deluded as to compare himself with Rhett Butler, Frank Nitti, or … or … or—he couldn’t think of the names of any drug lords—nevertheless, there it was, etched in brass: COLONIAL REAL PROPERTIES, LTD.

  Pleased with himself, he walked slowly down the stairs, savoring his forty colleagues in brass all over again, and out onto the street. He glanced at his watch: almost 10 a.m.; only thirty more minutes to kill before his appointment. This was the beginning of the hot season in the Bahamas, but the streets were still jammed with cars, mostly small Japanese cars, or so it seemed to Peepgass, with motorbikes that sounded like chainsaws, with exhausted barouches and horses that went clop, clop, clop, clop, and policemen with no pith helmets who kept blowing whistles. Somewhere a vendor kept crying out, “Doctor Shells! I yem Doctor Shells!” Tourists, many of them with pinned-on ID tags from some cruise ship that had pulled into Prince George Docks, had poured onto the sidewalks in a hiving mass and were swarming over the shops and arcades and emerging with straw hats, conch shells, and every imaginable knickknack of straw, wood, and glass. For an instant Peepgass looked down his nose at this scene of frantically roiling indolence, but in the next instant he was grateful for it. He was thankful for the protective coloration, having gone to considerable trouble and expense to dress like a tourist himself. He was clad in a number of items he would never have been caught dead in otherwise, a straw hat with a floppy four-inch brim, black sunglasses, a pale blue short-sleeved sport shirt of the sort that is designed for wearing outside the pants and has a pair of big pleated breast pockets and a pair of purely decorative buttons at the base of each side seam, a pair of Old People’s checked pants—why was it that old people were so crazy about checked and plaid patterns?—and a pair of putty-colored suede Sperry Top-Sider laced moccasins. The outlay for the clothes alone had come to close to $200; the bill for three days and nights at the Carnival’s Crystal Palace Resort and Casino would come to something in the neighborhood of $600, the round-trip airfare, Atlanta/Nassau, was $266 and would have been more if it wasn’t for the Saturday-night layover—in other words, awfully close to $1,000, a sum he couldn’t begin to afford for a weekend in the Bahamas or anywhere else. But it was necessary. It was an investment, an investment, an investment, he kept telling himself. And if there ever came a day when anyone cared to check out his travels, it would look like a perfectly ordinary long weekend for a lonely, middle-aged man, a perfectly ordinary member of that hive of American worker bees known as middle management, separated from his wife and family, cut off from the familiar, cozy weekend chores associated with owning a middle-class house in Snellville with a basketball backboard and hoop set up on a stanchion near the garage on the edge of the driveway. A tourist he was, a tourist rooting here and there with a whole swarm of tourists; only that and nothing more.

  Like any other tourist, he made his way east on Marlborough Street and down Frederic Street and then walked along Shirley Street until he reached the Public Library. He had already heard about this curious place, but it was nothing like what he imagined. Like everything else in Nassau, it was tinier … and touched with the taint of … seediness. It was a circular building, no more than twenty feet in diameter, best Peepgass could judge, with seven or eight open cubicles along the circumference. In the cubicles were shelves of books along two sides and a window on the third. In the center of the circle was a small wooden enclosure where a rather bored brown-skinned librarian sat. From her post she could see into every cubicle, although she seemed to have no particular interest in doing so. The building, which was now close to 200 years old, had originally been built as the town jail. What were now library cubicles had originally been cells with barred windows and doors; and where now sat a librarian who could see into every cubicle had been a warden who could see into every cell. All at once it occurred to Peepgass—and probably to no one else in Nassau that day—that 200 years ago, at the turn of the century, the circular prison had been the very latest in modern penology. All at once he froze, staring fixedly at this odd little room, and his spirits plummeted. Modern penology … he’d learn about modern penology, all right, at this turn of the century, if he took a misstep in this little … overseas venture … But damn it, Peepgass, are you going to remain a wimp, a dork, a staff nerd until it’s too late to do anything about it? Are you going to keep your red dog chained up until PlannersBanc gives you a Steuben glass phoenix—which was already known, intramurally, as “getting the bird”—the bank was far too cheap to give retiring drudges something made of precious metal, such as a gold watch, anymore—are you going to wait until Lomprey or some other hunchback gives you the bird and waves bye-bye? That—your own willing self-imprisonment—would be a far worse fate than any actual incarceration, is it not so?

  Thus, gradually, Peepgass bucked himself up, took a deep breath, and left the library to keep his appointment with his erstwhile Harvard Business School classmate, Harvey Wyndham, whose real estate office, Arthur Wyndham & Son, was just two blocks away. The “& Son” was Harvey’s encoded sign of defeat, just as “staff officer” was Peepgass’s. Like almost everyone entering the Harvard Business School, like Peepgass himself, Harvey, with his father’s blessing, had indulged in dreams of dazzling entrepreneurship or corporate leadership or, at the very least, getting stunningly rich through investment banking. But Harvey’s temperament had been like his own: passive and, by the standards of the late twentieth century, fatally soft. Perhaps, without realizing it, that was why Harvey and he had become such pals in Cambridge. Every month they saved up as much of their modest remittances from home as they could and splurged on a big lobster dinner at Durgin Park, which to them was an absolutely Lucullan dining experience. Harvey’s father, Arthur Wyndham, ran a successful real estate business in the Bahamas and had flourished in the 1960s when so many newly rich Americans began to discover the Bahamas’ far-flung islands and clear (utterly) blue (truly) water. The “& Son” he had added to his firm’s name in the early 1960s, mainly to flatter and perhaps delight his little boy, only six or seven at the time, on whom he absolutely doted, but also to give the firm an aura of venerable longstanding, which it in fact did not yet have. He loved Harvey far too much to have ever pressured him to stay in the Bahamas and take over the business. But Harvey had found out soon enough, on his own, the hard way, that he was not the sort of young man from a tiny oceanic colony with a British accent who was going to set the business world on fire in the United States. Within eight years he had drifted back to the Bahamas, him and his Harvard MBA degree, and become the “& Son” that had been merely his father’s fond hope. And—you had to give him credit—Son, with his mild manners and low-keyed charm, had proved to be an able salesman of island real estate to status-hungry Americans and Brits and Germans, and the old man had happily turned Arthur Wyndham & Son over to Son five years before he died.

  Peepgass had not actually laid eyes on Harvey Wyndham since they graduated from the Business School, but they had continued to exchange Christmas cards all these years and had talked on the telephone half a dozen times. These calls had been occasioned by Peepgass’s becoming aware of property that PlannersBanc needed to liquidate or have appraised in the Bahamas. Whenever he could, he had steered the business Arthur Wyndham & Son’s way.

  The offices turned out to be on the second floor of a super-annuated but rather pretty three-story pink stucco building with white trim and a white tile roof on a corner of two busy little streets not far from the old Jacaranda and East Hill mansions. In the outer office were eight to ten women at computer terminals or on the telephone and, along a wall, a whole lineup of well-dressed men and women at handsome wooden desks, salespeople and property management personnel, presumably. God knew how many more employees there must be on the floor above. This was an impressively large staff for a real estate firm. A plump woman with a heavy and, to Peepgass’s ears, somewhat mannered British accent immediately ushered him into Harvey Wyndham’s office, which was on the corner.

  The room was not especially large, but the stylishness of it struck Peepgass right away. Walls of darkest aubergine that set off four magnificent old-fashioned triple-hung windows that ran floor to ceiling, framed by spanking white louvered shutters on the sides and ornate white Victorian woodwork in the form of an ornate cornice at the top and an ornate eighteen-inch-high skirting at the bottom. Through the windows you could see the old-fashioned sloped roofs of Nassau, the tops of palms, and an infinite blue sky. Harvey Wyndham stood up. Peepgass could notice the changes immediately. His once-thick brown hair was no longer all that thick or all that brown. On top were a few lonely strands that barely bridged the two remaining crops. He wore a long-sleeved white guayabera shirt, quite an exquisite one, that only halfway successfully hid his much too broad midsection and hips. But the greatest change of all, as he smiled to greet his old MBA compatriot, was in his eyes. They were the tired but amused eyes of a man who had been in on this smuggler’s paradise of an island for so long, he had by now seen it all and could no longer be surprised.

  As Harvey gestured to indicate he should have a seat in a big old King George armchair, Peepgass said, “Well, Harvey, I don’t know how you do it. You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Oh my God, please,” said Harvey, placing both hands on his big belly where it swelled out against the guayabera shirt, “there’s an American author I never heard of before I went to Harvard, Washington Irving, and do you know what he said? He said, ‘There are three ages of man: youth, middle age, and you-haven’t-changed-a-bit.’”

  Peepgass laughed as they sat down. “Well, I guess I was talking about the inner you, Harvey.”

  “The inner me likes to eat, too. Three times a day. Likes rum also. You’re the one who hasn’t changed, Ray.”

  “Well … only in the Washington Irving sense,” said Peepgass, although his honest feeling was that it was true, in his own case. “My problem is that my career hasn’t changed, either.” He felt comfortable enough with his old friend to say that right off the bat.

  So they did a little Business School reminiscing and gossiping about what A had achieved, what B hadn’t achieved, and C, who had never been heard from again. Then they briefed each other on their marriages.

  Finally it was Harvey who narrowed the focus down to the present moment. “Look, Ray old boy, I have to admit I’m dying of curiosity. You sounded … awfully … mysterious … on the telephone.”

  Peepgass smiled. “I didn’t mean to be mysterious. I was just being …”—he paused and raised both hands as if trying to seize upon the right word—“ … discreet, I suppose. The thing is … I’ve formed a corporation, Harvey, right here in the Bahamas. It’s called Colonial Real Properties.”

  “Oho!” said Harvey. “Competition!”

  “No,” said Peepgass, “I could never compete with you, Harvey, even if I were so ungrateful as to want to. No, the word isn’t competition, it’s cooperation. A little synergy, to use the current Business School patois.”

  Harvey sat back in his chair, cocked his head, and gave him more of the look he had detected when he first walked in the room, a smile surmounted by a wrinkled and weary amusement about the eyes. He lifted his right hand languidly from his lap, palm up, and said, “How so?”

  Peepgass tried to look as relaxed as Harvey obviously was, but he knew he wasn’t pulling it off. “Entre nous, I’ve formed my company for a single real estate deal. If I am correct—and I think I am correct—PlannersBanc is about to acquire a prime piece of property in suburban Atlanta, a big mixed-use complex, via a deed in lieu of foreclosure. You follow me so far?”

  Harvey nodded.

  “Now, the bank,” said Peepgass, “will be ready to unload this piece of property for something in the neighborhood of $50 million, just to get it off its hands quickly and quietly and with a minimum of embarrassment. I mean, the loans we made to the developer for the construction of the tower were insane—the sort of nutty thing that happens when you let yourself get caught up in the frenzy of a real estate bubble and you start talking about lending as ‘marketing’ and big loans as ‘big sales,’ that sort of thing.”

  “How much did you lend him?”

  “A hundred and seventy-five million.”

  Harvey made a whistling noise between his teeth.

  “Exactly,” said Peepgass, “and nobody at the bank is particularly anxious to advertise this corpse to the shareholders. So I think they’re ready to unload it for something in the vicinity of $50 million and bury it and forget about it. Now, I know of a syndicate in Atlanta, made up of people with impeccable financial statements, and I think they’d love a little bottomfishing like this. But they need to be led to the proposition by a real estate broker. I’d be happy to do it myself, but A, I work for the bank, and B, I’m not a real estate broker. Do you know what I’m going to say next?”

  “No,” said Harvey with a jaded smile and regular crinkles of amusement about the eyes, “but I’m all ears.”

  “The broker would have three tasks to perform,” said Peepgass. “First, he’d have to broker the initial transaction, the purchase of the building for about $50 million. He’d get a 6 percent commission. That’s $3 million. Second, the syndicate would want to sell the building within two to three years. And by then, I feel certain, such a building will have regained its true and fair value on the market, which would be about $120 million. The brokerage commission on that sale would be $7.2 million, making a total of $10.2 million in brokerage fees over a two-to-three-year period. And third, the same firm would be the broker of record for new leases. The building is less than half leased up now, and so I figure there’s another $300,000 in leasing fees. That gives us a total of $10.5 million in fees altogether. Is all that clear so far?”