For a moment or so, I rested my toes on the brake pedal and stared at the knot of fishermen who were hauling a bundle of wet clothing with great proficiency over the side of their boat. My fingers turned cold on the steering wheel, though the day was as hot as ever, the air turgid in the wake of last night’s storms. I got out of the car and walked closer. A couple of men stood by, arms folded, and I asked them what was happening.

“There’s a body.” He pointed to the water. “They found a body in the harbor.”

“Who?”

The fellow shrugged. “Never seen him before.”

I worked my way closer, until I saw them lay out the body on the damp, hard sand. I wondered why nobody had called the police, and then I remembered the police were dealing with matters at Westbourne. As they arranged the fellow just so, his wet clothes sopped around his body, his head lolled to one side, for an instant—and just for that instant—I caught a glimpse of his blanched face. In my shock, I thought it was Tommy. That was the only dead man I had ever seen until now, so irrationally I saw that pasty skin and those blank open eyes and screamed to myself, Tommy! and my body reacted accordingly, the jolt of energy, the splintering of nerves against the skin.

Then I saw his ears that stuck out like wings from his head, and I knew it wasn’t Tommy, of course not. Tommy lay beneath the earth of Queens in the Randolph family plot, under a headstone that nobody visited or cared for, because Tommy had been the kind of fellow to raise love in someone’s heart only to slay it afterward, until nothing was left of that love. But Tommy was a handsome devil with neat, flat ears. This face belonged to the man I knew as Mr. Smith, the man who’d delivered to me the envelopes addressed to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Of Lyford Cay, Harold Christie’s great dream, for which he had mortgaged himself to Sir Harry Oakes, there wasn’t yet much. He had spent a fortune laying out pipes from the other end of New Providence Island for water and electricity and so on, but all the houses and golf courses and tennis courts had yet to be built. Lyford Cay was just an investment, was a piece of land cleared of scrub and pine and swamp and waiting for a future.