Read Online Operation Nassau by Dorothy Dunnett - Free Book Online Page B

the table with the other in time with the beat. Wallace Brady was watching me. I looked away.
    The singer came on, in frilled peach-coloured satin, slit to the knee. The songs in these quarters are predictable: ‘Yellow Bird’; ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’; ‘Island in the Sun’; proceeding purposefully through a brief range of calypsos and finishing with ‘Back to Back and Belly to Belly’ about the third serving of alcohol.
    With enthusiasm, the other members of my party ran this predictable gamut. All the verses of ‘Shame and Scandal in the Family’ were sung without stint by Johnson. Denise, following his lead, slightly out of tune, was becoming faintly confused. The singer left, and Leviticus walked up to his drums. ‘Leviticus’s Number,’ said Johnson, and signalled the red-waistcoated waiter for another bottle of champagne.
    Leviticus was of typically African appearance: the face strongly prognathous, the nasal bridge flattened, the two rows of teeth approximately parallel and in excellent condition. He wore black trousers and a black-and-white-striped shirt unbuttoned to the waist, with a large gold locket glittering on his chest. Due to the drumming, the muscular development of neck and shoulders was almost sufficient to dwarf the profile of jawbone and chin: to shake his hand, as I had once done, was like gripping a flat plank of wood.
    He came forward and sat facing us, between his two tall oval drums. The electric organ began, followed by the saxophone and trumpets, and, as they gained tempo, Leviticus joined in, the thudding beat mingling agreeably with the strident instruments in a strong rhythm which visibly excited his audience. Then the other instruments reached their fortissimo and broke off, leaving Leviticus to continue his drumming alone.
    The effect on a healthy adult of insistent rhythmic experience these days is a common subject for study. At the Bamboo Conch Club that night I watched with interest four hundred people receive the maternal seventy-two p.m. heartbeat with ecstasy. The drummer showed great skill in his evocations. From an exercise in varying resonance he insensibly improved on the speed until he reached a single-toned patter of sound, so quick that the notes blurred one into the other and the bleached palms, flat and flickering, moved too fast for the eye. Behind the barrier of sound a broken rhythm made itself felt, deeper in tone, syncopated and stealthy: it stopped; the drumming stopped, and Leviticus began slowly to slap the parchment of each drum with his hands.
    It seemed to me that I could feel the resonance of it in my soft palate, interspersed with bony clatter from my tympanic plates, as tempo, tone and timbre changed from second to second. Leviticus played with incision, his head flung up and down with the rhythm, the speed and colour of the rattling beats stirring the motionless audience, his hands raking curves in the air from one drum to the other.
    A ball overhead began to revolve, light from coin-like apertures spinning over the musician’s face, chest, throat and hands in a long wheeling spatter. The drumming rose to a frenzy. Leviticus’s head turned from side to side, his eyes rolling, his upper lip long and underfolded, his nostrils distended. His body glittered with sweat. I wondered what I would do if he had a frank haemorrhage into the ponto-midbrain junction, as seemed very likely. The noise stopped.
    The intoxicated applause continued for a long time, and was greeted most civilly by Leviticus, who finally signalled for silence. He then leaned forward, and placing his left elbow carefully on the light skin of the drum, he began with his right hand to pat out a tune on the parchment.
    Performed on a single drum surface, the range of notes available to him was not of course large. However, by adjusting the strain on the skin, he produced a simple tune, very soon recognizable. The audience, with shouts of joy, began to break into song with the