Harry and the Bikini Bandits by Basil Heatter - Chapter 12

1971 Genre: Vintage Sleaze / Casino Heist

A wildly erotic novel of intrigue, suspense, and adventure...

There's a lot to be said for my Uncle Harry. Mostly unprintable. All my life I'd heard about him, and from a distance he was a kind of legend. But the moment I signed on as one-man crew to his beat-up old bucket, Jezebel, I found my hero of the sea was really a pirate. Broads and booze kept him afloat between capers—and so far, his luck was holding...

But this new harebrained scheme—to heist the loot from an island gambling casino—was the daffiest—and most dangerous yet.

And there I was. Right in the middle. Up to my virginal ears in naked nymphs and Nitrous oxide—with nothing between me and the future but a leaky getaway and a pot of gold that was fast disappearing behind Harry's private rainbow.

CHAPTER 12

You mean you rob for a living? I wanted to ask him. But had no chance. He was too busy talking. A born instructor. Not only he but Grogan as well. That wee man? What has size got to do with crookery? Well, I mean with his archaeology and all. That was how he did it, Harry explained. They were working a deal together in Mallorca. What they did, they would go out on an old boat Harry had and plant all kinds of junk in the water and then take people out to find it.

It was a cinch, he explained, because the basic design of cooking pots used in the Mediterranean countries had not changed at all since the time of the Phoenicians, and so you rounded up about five dollars' worth of pottery and smashed them into little pieces and dumped them overboard and then when one of these archaeological cats came up with a hunk of pot he felt as if he had just made the scientific discovery of the age and already could see his name in the Encyclopedia Britannica and was perfectly happy to shell out twenty-five bucks a day for the use of the boat. They were mostly Germans. The Germans were very serious about it, and carried special little pointed hammers and magnifying glasses. The Germans were not the only ones, of course, but the others spent most of their time boffing the Mallorcan girls, and it was hard to tear them away to go look for pots.

"So what happened?"

He shrugged. "We stayed at it too long. They confiscated my boat and put Grogan in jail.”

"Why not you too?"

"As it happened I was balling the wife of the chief of police. She tipped me off and I got away with some smuggler chums who were running a high speed MTB to Gibraltar. I've always felt I sort of owed Grogan for that. A year in a Spanish pokey is no fun. Even with six months off for good behavior."

Now I understood why Grogan had been giving us all that jazz about lost civilizations. He was getting ready to salt the Great Bahama Bank.

"Well, we might do that," Harry agreed. "Or we might not. It's sort of penny-ante crap when you come right down to it. We might try for a bigger score. Shocked?"

Why should I be? It didn't sound so bad, all that about the old cooking pots. In a way he was doing people a favor. What if they went all their lives looking and never found anything? Frustration. This way everybody was. happy.

What would be my role? Dump the stuff or lead the divers to it or run the boat? Probably Harry at the wheel and me in the water and Grogan spouting all that bull about relics and artifacts. Did they really swallow all that crap? He reassured me. You wouldn't believe how stupid so-called serious scientists can be. You just needed a little bait. Someone like Miss Wong. One look at Miss Wong and you could make them think they had uncovered Noah's salad bowl.

But how did she feel about it?

She shrugged. "I am not concerned with middle-class morality, Clay. Good and evil. Right and wrong. To boff or not to boff. Who is to say? I do draw the line at murder, of course, but apart from that—let the heart sing a little."

I was willing to let my heart sing.

"Any little thievery in your past, Number Three?" I shook my head.

"Come on now. A little shoplifting? Power saw? TV?" Those binoculars. Beautiful Zeiss 7x50s. Fat Power Squadron clown lecturing sea scouts. Left them on the desk when he took us outside to demonstrate sextant. Red nose, redder jowls, bullshit artist. Once crossed Lake Michigan, so he said. Couldn't get those glasses out of my mind. Wandered back in. No one around. Grabbed them up and dashed for my locker. Tucked them away. Back with the group and not breathing hard. Heart pounding. Trickle of sweat between shoulder blades. Uproar. Hullabaloo Search everybody. Ridiculous. How are you going to stick anything that big in your pocket. Search locker next surely. Disaster. Ruined. But no. Never even thought of lockers. His red face exploding. Damn near crying. Went back that night and got them out. Moon craters big as oranges. But then weakened. Thought of his fat face and wet eyes. Tied them up in wrapping paper and left them behind the hedge near the hotel. Called him from pay station and spoke through handkerchief. "Your glasses behind hedge."

"What? What? Who is this?" Click. Career in crime cut short.

"No," I said.

"Very unnatural," said Harry. "Very bad for the psyche. Got to loosen you up a little, boy."

"I appreciate your concern, Uncle Harry."

"How about a little bank job? Nothing too pretentious. Start you off in a modest way."

"I don't think I'd be a success at it."

"Never know till you try. Do wonders for your libido. Give you the biggest hard-on you ever saw."

"Well," I said, "I'd like to think about it."

"Take Nassau for instance. Full of banks. Side by side. Possibly more banks to the square block than any place in the world."

"How come?"

"A little Switzerland is how come. Numbered accounts. No questions asked or answered. Internal Revenue told to fuck off. Easiest thing in the world to pick up a few hundred thou from one of those banks. Dig?"

He must be putting me on. Or was he? What did I really know about him? Anything—and the more outlandish the better—seemed possible with Harry. Sail around the world. Screw the Queen of England. Why not? He'd already seduced the Burgers that way. Funsville. Gamesville. Now me. Here on this crazy boat in the hot sun with a monkey and Miss Wong, it would be kind of silly to think of right and wrong the way you did in Nebraska. And then too I had the funny feeling that no matter what happened it wasn't really happening to me. It was like watching a film with actors. There was this actor playing Clayton Bullmore Third and it would be kind of fun to see what happened to him.

But if he really was a crook he was the most outgoing crook you ever saw. He discussed his plans as openly as if setting up the JayCee softball game. When we sat down to dinner he told Miss Wong, "We have just been talking over the possibility of heisting a bank in Nassau."

"Please pass the pepper," she said.

I mean did they think they were Bonnie and Clyde or what?

I never got tired of looking at her. That night she was more beautiful than ever. She had placed a candle in a sardine tin and her face was changeable in the flickering light. She was wearing one of Harry's blue denim shirts and an old pair of jeans. The shirt, as usual, was open to the waist and, as always, she wore nothing under it. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking. What, for instance, did she think about me? Sometimes she treated me like a kid and other times like a man. I was more than half in love with her. Not only because she was beautiful, but because she had this kind of like you know serenity. She gave you the feeling that if you had told her she was to be cut up in pieces and fed to the red ants, she would only have smiled. That, I think, was what drove a guy like Burger right out of his skull—this feeling that no matter what he did he could never buy or possess her.

And I guess maybe that was what she liked best about Harry—the fact that he never really wanted to own her and didn't give a damn. And maybe that was why I was never jealous of Harry even though I knew he was chavering her. He was like some kind of force of nature. You couldn't be jealous of him any more than you could of the wind and waves.

Harry had lit his cigar. "The thing is," he said reflectively, "those native cops are a joke. About the toughest thing they do is warn you not to ride your bike up a one-way street. They have a great band though. Tiger skins and big shiny horns. When that band is marching you could steal the governor's mansion right off the island brick by brick and nobody would care."

"Suppose you did crack a bank," she said. "How would you get the money away?"

"That's the real beauty part of it. I mean who would look for a gang of crooks on an old tub like Jezebel? A high-speed power boat or a private plane or some nonsense like that, but an old ketch doing five miles an hour wide open—uh uh."

"Have you ever robbed a bank before?" she asked. "No."

"Then you don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course not. But a fella has to start somewhere. I can hardly run a classified ad to the effect that a willing young robber is anxious to meet an experienced old hand."

"What I really don't understand is why you want to bother with it in the first place. If you really need money all that badly I suppose you could go to work."

"Watch your language. Anyway there's more to it than that. It would be a gas. A slap in the face for the establishment."

"But the establishment won't even know they've been slapped. They won't understand that you have been acting out of a deep ideological conviction. To them you will be just another cheap crook."

"Listen," I said. "If you really need money that badly I'll get a job. In a boat yard or something."

"You can't even get a work permit here, Number Three. Strictly the Bahamas for the Bahamians."

"Then we could go fishing. Sell what we catch to those big hotels in Nassau."

"Forget it. Never could stand the stink of fish."

"How about taking passengers? Put up notices in the hotels. Day sailing so much an hour."

He shuddered. "That would be worse than fishing. There is one other possibility though."

"Yes?"

"We could stick up the casino."

"Why is that better than a bank?"

"It's got more style. Not so middle class."

Like I told dad, he has pizzazz.

Banks, casinos, machine guns, getaway cars, sirens. I sentence you to spend the rest of your natural life . . . time off for good behavior . . .

"Well?" Harry said. "Are you with me?"

"It might be amusing," said Miss Wong. "What about you, Number Three?"

"What would you expect me to do?"

"You'll do as you're told."

"I would have to know more than that."

"Of course he would," said Miss Wong. "And so would I."

"No need to get excited."

She was clearly not excited. Her breathing was calm and her brow was as smooth as ivory. "As you very well know I do not believe in violence. I have no objection to a little heist for the sake of sport and to keep the juices flowing, but if guns are to be employed I want to know about it."

"Leave everything to Harry, luv."

"Fuck off."

"Now do you call that being reasonable?"

"Perfectly."

He scowled at her. It was a look to make your blood run cold. She never flinched.

"If you two think you can dictate to me you're off your chumps," he said.

"Take it or leave it," she said.

He turned to me. "Is she speaking for you too?"

"Yes."

"Listen, you can both jump ship anytime you want."

She went down the companionway steps and began putting her things into a little canvas bag marked Laotian Airlines.

Harry said, "Hold on."

"Yes?"

He had lost his bluster. "Stay."

"Why?"

"I need you."

She went on putting things into the bag.

"Listen," he said in a conciliatory voice, "it's all been worked out. The whole deal is in my briefcase. Grogan will be here in a little while and we'll go over it with you."

She put the Laotian Airlines bag aside but did not unpack it.