Prospero's Daughter. Elizabeth Nunez
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be his expertise, he might know nothing about botany, he might not be able to grow grass that looked like plastic or make polka dots appear on the petals of bougainvillea, but he was an expert in detective work. He could keep his focus in a deposition. “So he read to her?” Mumsford cut him off in mid-sentence.
“I gave him my books. I taught my daughter and he listened,” Gardner said.
“Your daughter did not go to school?”
“We don’t have school here, Inspector. It’s a leper colony. Or haven’t you noticed?”
“Surely her education?”
“Fire i’ th’ blood, Inspector. These tropical climes arouse a man’s sexual desires. We men are old goats. I could not put her at risk sending her to school in Trinidad.”
“Surely in a boarding school?” Mumsford asked, malice curling around the edges of his question.
“There are never sufficient protections. Besides, Inspector, she could do no better than to have me as a schoolmaster. Others might not have been so careful.”
“Careful?”
“To teach her what she needed to know.”
Mumsford was struck by his emphasis on needed but he stuck to his objective, which now was not merely to gather information, but to make Gardner pay for humiliating him. “But Carlos?” he asked, taking no little satisfaction in noticing that his line of questioning was agitating Gardner.
“If she were a princess in a castle, she could not have had a better tutor,” Gardner said.
Mumsford made himself clearer. “Was Carlos there all the time when you were teaching her?”
“I’m not sure what you are implying, Inspector, but yes, he was there sometimes. I took interest in him when I saw how quickly he learned. He had some aptitude for science. I gave him my books.”
“Was he a help to you, sir?”
“A help?”
“When you were working with the lepers, sir.”
“I was not needed to work with the lepers. I thought I made that clear, Inspector.”
“Ah, yes. Then in the garden, sir?”
“The garden?”
“Did he help you in the garden? With your orchids, sir?”
“Ah, my orchids.” A grim smile cut across Gardner’s face. “He excelled there. He learned quickly about crossbreeding, cross-pollination. He was a bastard, you see. A crossbreed himself.”
“And you think it was that he wanted to do?”
“That?”
“With your daughter, sir. Was it crossbreeding he was thinking of, sir?”
Gardner got up abruptly and paced the room. He ran his hand over the top of his head down to his neck. The elastic band that held his ponytail slid off and his hair hung in limp locks above his shoulders. “None of this. None of what I say to you must leave here.” He came close to Mumsford. The muscles in his face were taut as wires.
“Only to the commissioner,” Mumsford said. “Only between us.”
“He came to me and said he wanted to have children with her.” Gardner was breathing hard. A vein popped out along the length of his forehead, slight at first and then thick, blue, hard, ugly, pushing against his leathery skin.
“He said that? Those words exactly?” Mumsford was taking notes.
“No. He used an ancient language from one of my books.”
“Which book?”
“Never mind.” Gardner massaged the back of his neck. “He said he wanted to people the island with little Carloses.”
“People?”
“Make babies.”
“But his exact words, sir? Do you remember his exact words?”
“He said he wanted to people the island with Calibans.”
“Calibans?”
“He meant himself.”
“But he didn’t give you any indication to suggest . . .”
Gardner did not let him finish. “Do you take me for an idiot, Inspector? I know how to guard my daughter’s honor.”
“But when you were in the garden, sir. Were there times they could have been alone?”
“I resent these insinuations, Inspector.”
“I am sorry, sir. It’s my job, sir. I must ask. The commissioner will expect me to ask.”
Gardner’s hand tightened around the back of his neck, and his head fell on his shoulders. With infinite patience, as if he were speaking to a child, he said, “When I was not with them, Inspector, Ariana was always there. She was my spy.”
* * *
From the moment Gardner opened the back door in the kitchen, Mumsford was accosted by the stench. It came on the first wave of heat that, after the cool of the interior, felt like a blast from a blowtorch on his face. The combination of heat and foul odor almost knocked him off of his feet. His knees buckled and his head felt light. It was shit: cow shit, dog shit, pig shit. It stank as if the sun had vaporized all the shit in the world into the very particles of the air he breathed. He put his handkerchief to his nose, but even the cologne he had dampened it with that morning could not mask the stench. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck, and goose bumps ran down the length of his arms.
“Stink, isn’t it?” Gardner said, smirking.
In front of them it was green, an immaculate plastic lawn that had recently been cut, or, as the discomforting thought snaked its way into Mumsford’s consciousness, had never needed cutting, stretching out to a chain-link fence behind which the bush grew tall and wild. There was no animal in sight, no mound of shit anywhere.
“Where?” Mumsford looked over the handkerchief he held plastered to his nose and mouth.
Gardner grinned and motioned him to follow him.
What registered first in Mumsford’s brain when they turned the corner was color, a mirage of color. He saw color first because the sun dazzled him, because here, on this side of the house, there was not a sliver of green, no grass, no trees, just dry, brown dirt and beds of gray pebbles; because when he squinted to protect his eyes from the glare, it was the macabre shimmering of color that arrested him; because though he could not have missed the chain-link fence enclosing a tiny area behind the color and the outlines of the man inside, it was easier, less painful, to focus on the color.
“My orchids,” Gardner said.
Never in all his years of police work had Mumsford seen a sight more terrible. Never had he smelled a stench more foul.
“They are my pride and joy,” Gardner said.
The mirage cleared and the outlines took shape. A young man—Mumsford guessed he was about seventeen; seventeen it would be exactly, for Carlos Codrington was two years older than the girl—was sitting on a rock in the scorching sun, penned in an area hardly more than six feet by six. In front of him were Gardner’s orchids, a blaze of purple, pink, and white flowers springing out from a maze of brown roots clinging crablike to gray stumps of coconut tree trunks cut in half and sunk into beds of gravel.
“My prizewinners.” Gardner was beaming.
Mumsford’s throat burned, nausea mounted his upper chest. Except for black boxer shorts, the man was naked, his torso, his arms, thighs, and legs bare and blanketed with red bumps. Some of the bumps had turned into sores, and Mumsford could see blood seeping slowly out of them. Some were already pustulant. At his feet, on one side of the base of the rock,