Casuarina Bridge. It crosses the Great Lucayan Waterway.’
‘So?’
‘So we’re going to cross it.’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Billy.
I said, ‘We’ve been passing streets, all named and paved. Those poles carry power lines. Now, I don’t know how it is in the States where any wide place in the road can call itself a city, but to me a road is something that goes from one place to another, but a street is a place, and it usually has houses on it.’
Billy was momentarily startled. ‘Houses!’ he said blankly. ‘No goddamn houses! Nary a one.’
‘That’s it. But I’ve more to show you or, rather, not show you. We’ll get a better view from Dover Sound.’ I carried on driving, following the signposts to Dover Sound and Observation Hill. It is not really a hill – just a man-made mound with the road leading up and a turning circle at the top. I stopped the car and we got out. ‘What do you think of that?’
Billy looked at the view with a lack of comprehension. I knew why because I had been baffled by the sight when first I saw it. There was land and there was water and it was not easy to see where one stopped and the other began. It was a maze of water channels. Billy shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t know. What am I supposed to think?’
I said, ‘Think of my house and the lagoon. This is the Grand Lucayan Waterway – it cuts right across Grand Bahama, nearly eight miles from coast to coast. But it has forty-five miles of water frontage.’ I flapped open the map I held. ‘Look at this. You can see where the streets and waterways fit together like fingers in a glove.’
Billy studied the map then took out a calculator and began punching buttons. ‘At a hundred feet of water frontage to a house that’s nearly 2500 houses. Where the hell are they?’
‘There’s more. Look at the map.’ I swept my hand over an area. ‘Twenty square miles of land all laid out in paved streets with utilities already installed – the unfleshed skeleton of a city of 50,000 people.’
‘So what happened?’
‘An election happened. Pindling got in and the investors ran scared. But they’re coming back. Take a man who runs his own business in Birmingham, Alabama, or Birmingham, England, come to that. He sells out to a bigger company at, say, the age of fifty-five when he’s still young enough to enjoy life and now has the money to indulge himself. He can build his house on the canal and keep his fishing boat handy, or he can take one of the dry land plots. There’s sun and sea, swimming and golf, enough to keep a man happy for the rest of his life. And the beauty of it is that the infrastructure already exists; the power station in Freeport is only working to a tenth of its capacity.’
Billy looked over the expanse of land and water. ‘You say the investors are coming back. I don’t see much sign.’
‘Don’t be fooled.’ I pointed back the way we had come. ‘You can see the landscaping has begun – tree planting and flower beds. And that big parking lot, all neatly laid out. It looks a bit silly, but it’s probably earmarked for a supermarket. There are houses being built right now, but you don’t see them because they’re scattered over twenty square miles. Give this place a few years and we’ll have a thriving community. That’s one answer to a question you asked – what’s the future of the Bahamas?’
He rubbed his jaw. ‘Yeah, I see what you mean.’
‘Don’t take my word for it – look for yourself. I’ll lend you a plane and my chief pilot, Bobby Bowen, and you can do some island hopping. Go to Abaco; we have a hotel there – the Abaco Sands at Marsh Harbour. Go on to Eleuthera where we’re building a hotel. Have a look at some of the other islands and don’t leave out New Providence. I’ll give you a list of people you can talk to. Then come back and tell me what you think.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll do just that.’
Billy went on his tour a couple of days later after looking around Grand Bahama, but Debbie stayed on at the Royal Palm. Billy confided in me that he had brought her along in an attempt to cure a fit of the blues; apparently Debbie had been having man trouble – an affair had turned sour. Anyway, she fell into the habit of going to the house and using the pool, and she and the children became friends in jig time. Debbie would pick up the kids from school and take them home and then stay on to lunch with Julie. Julie must have liked her because she put off her trip to Florida until Billy came back.
As for me, I was damned busy. I rousted Jamieson, the chief accountant, who fairly set the computer smoking as we figured the net worth of the company as at the end of that month. I wanted to have all my ammunition ready and dry for Billy when he came back because I had the notion he would be ready to talk turkey.
One evening after Julie had put the girls to bed I told her about Billy’s proposition and asked what she thought of it. She was ambivalent. She saw the possibilities for expansion, but on the other hand she said, ‘I don’t know if it would be good for you – you’re too independently minded.’
I knew what she meant. ‘I know I like to run my own show and that’s my problem – how to extract forty million bucks from the Cunninghams without losing control. I have a few ideas about that and I might be able to swing it.’
She laughed at me. ‘I always knew I married a genius. All right, if you can do that then it won’t be a bad thing.’
I had to consult my sisters, Peggy and Grace. Both had stock in the West End Securities Corporation, enough for them to have a say in any decision as big as this. Peggy lived on Abaco with her son and daughter and her husband, Bob Fisher, who ran the Abaco Sands Hotel for the corporation. Grace had married an American called Peters and lived in Orlando, Florida, with their three sons. It seemed that the tendency of the Mangans to produce girls was confined to the males. It meant some flying around because this was not something that could be settled on the telephone, but I had written agreements by the time Billy came back.
He returned to Grand Bahama after eight days, having gone through the Bahamas like a whirlwind. He was armed with so many facts, figures and statistics that I wondered how he had assembled them all in the time, but that was like Billy – he was a quick student.
‘You were right,’ he said. ‘The Bahamas have potential, more than I thought. You didn’t tell me about the Hotels Encouragement Act.’
I laughed. ‘I left you to find out yourself. I knew you would.’
‘My God, it’s like stumbling across a gold mine.’ He ticked the points off on his fingers. ‘No customs duty on anything imported to build or equip a hotel; no property taxes for the first ten years; no company taxes for the first twenty years. And that applies to hotels, marinas, golf courses, landscaping – anything you can damn near think of. It’s incredible.’
‘It’s why we’re going to have two million tourists next year.’
He grunted. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. I was talking to that tourism guy, Butler. He told me that eighty per cent of your economy and two-thirds of your population are supported by tourism. That’s a hell of a lot of eggs in one basket, Tom.’ His voice was serious. ‘What if something happens like war breaking out?’
