PART FIFTY-SEVEN
Chapter 2
Sitting in the owner’s salon that afternoon, I came out of a brief doze with a start.
I thought I was seeing things!
Right there on the viewer was a green ring. That’s all that was in the picture: a green ring. Like a smoke ring somebody had blown except that it was green.
I looked at the second viewer.
A green ring!
Oh, I knew that hashish would do me in. I was now seeing things! Yet I hadn’t eaten anything but lunch.
I looked back at the first viewer.
Another green ring.
I looked at the second viewer.
Same thing!
I noticed something. I wasn’t giggling.
I held my head in my hands. Maybe it wasn’t the hashish. Maybe that blow on my forehead had altered my vision. Maybe this was the beginning stage of going blind.
A horrible vision of Teenie leading me around on a leash and beating me with a white cane rose to plague me. It was her fault for leaving the skateboard there.
I glanced back at the viewers. Heller’s face was on one, Krak’s face was on the other. Now I knew I was having visions. They were both wearing sun helmets.
I shut my eyes tightly.
Krak’s voice. “Finished!” She sounded jubilant. I knew she meant me. Nothing else would give her such joy.
“Absolutely finished!” said Heller. He sounded so happy he could only be referring to my eyesight.
Experimentally, to prove him wrong, I cautiously opened one eye. Bang-Bang was on the viewer, full face. He was wearing an old Marine fatigue cap that said LT. RIMBOMBO on it. My time sense was gone. Bang-Bang had left the Marines years ago. “That’ll really knock ’em dead,” he said.
Another voice. Izzy’s face on the viewer. He was wearing a war surplus steel helmet. Now I WAS seeing things. “What I’m afraid of is retaliation.” I shut my eye. I was in no state to retaliate.
But I hadn’t closed my eye quick enough. J. P. Flagrant’s face. He was wearing an Indian war bonnet! Now I knew my vision was crazy. “What mean retaliation, paleface? Red brothers smoke plenty wampum. Do peace dance. Ugh.”
Izzy’s voice, “That’s kind of you to try to reassure me, but they might get the idea it’s a smoke signal to massacre everybody and hit the warpath yet.”
There was something not quite right about what he was saying. Suddenly I sat up straight and stared at these viewers. Where the devils were these people?
Now there was another face on Heller’s viewer. Some businessman? “If you really approve it, Mr. Floyd, I’d like to tell my men. They worked pretty hard.”
“It’s great,” said Heller. “I’ll go with you and tell them myself.”
“No, no,” said J. P. Flagrant. “Please don’t be premature.” He pulled back a sleeve of his beaded leather hunting coat, disclosing an expensive watch. “The celebration is not due to start for another hour. We’ve got to launch that stack with a bottle of champagne. You can’t kick off Beautiful Clear Blue Skies for Everyone, Inc. with just a casual thank you. There are fifty alligator farm buyers here in addition to all the contractors and workers. I’ve got the press coming in on a bus and two hundred Seminoles are going to yell themselves hoarse with tribal dances.” He was fumbling in a bullet pouch. “I’ve got your speech all written for you. And another for Mr. Epstein . . .”
“Oy!” said Izzy. “Not me!”
“Just the first half?” said Flagrant.
“No!” said Izzy in a panic.
“It’s a great speech,” said Flagrant, separating it out. “It starts, ‘We are gathered here in solemn conclave to celebrate, today, the greatest engineering marvel of the age. Fifty million spores a minute—fifty million are being rocketed into the sullied stratosphere of this, our noble planet. . . .’ You still sure you don’t want to give it?”
“NO!” said Izzy.
“All right. Then I’ll hand it over to Chief Ratty War Bonnet and he can give it and nobody will know the difference.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. They were in Florida to kick off the spores project. The rings had been spores being blown violently aloft through a five-hundred-foot stack.
They all walked down a path and Krak looked back. Yes, there was the vast area of vats and belts. And there was the stack. The rings were flying out of the top of it at regular intervals.
“I’m certainly proud of you,” said the Countess, putting her arm through Heller’s. “That’s one we can mark off the list and we’re that much closer to going home. Now, if we can just push along with these fuel things, we’ll be through in no time.”
I groaned. If they wound up a success, they would certainly ruin Rockecenter. And Lombar would comb the planet to find and kill me.
I looked at the two-way-response radio. I could think of nothing to tell Raht.
I turned the faces of the viewers to the wall. I could not stand to witness a celebration. It was too much like an Irish wake: the corpse being me.
PART FIFTY-SEVEN
Chapter 3
About three o’clock in the morning, Teenie came waltzing into my bedchamber. I stared. She was wearing a black hat, a red jacket and pants trimmed in gold, white stockings and black shoes. A bullfighter’s rig!
“Inky, Inky, wake up!” She gave me a punch with a feathered stick that had a sharp end. “You won’t believe what I have got!”
She raced back into her bedchamber and began to drag in boxes and open them. Gauze pants, veils, curl-toed slippers, headbands, bangles. A flamenco skirt, flamenco petticoats, mantillas, combs, castanets, ivory fans, flamenco shoes, on and on. And then she opened a jewel box. A gold necklace!
“Teenie,” I said, “what the hells is this all about? Tell me truthfully. Who is that black-jowled man?”
“We had to fly to Madrid to get some of this,” she said. “Private plane. We just got back.”
“Who is that fellow?” I demanded. “Why was he so angry with you?”
“Well, actually, he’s a Spanish nobleman. A duke. He owns half of Spain. And he was so angry with me because I ran out on him in Casablanca.”
“Teenie, are you going to tell me the truth for once? What was a Spanish nobleman doing in Bermuda and Casablanca?”
“Oh, he travels all around and, just by accident, he saw the yacht in the harbor when he was flying home from Morocco where he married Hussan-Hussan’s sister, a princess.”
“Oh, my Gods. Now you’re going to tell me that a man who just got married is interested in rolling you in the hay.”
“Well, you see, I promised his wife in Marrakech and I am ashamed to say I didn’t keep my promise but sailed off.”
“Teenie, stop flying around trying on clothes and give me a straight story for a change. Let’s start at the beginning.”
“Well, that’s where I am starting. You see, he told his wife how wonderful it felt when I went down on him and she demanded that I teach her. I couldn’t have the wedding breaking up, could I? But it’s all right now. She was in Madrid and I spent the whole evening showing her exactly how to do it and she did and oh, man, is he happy now. Eyes rolling right back in his head. So it’s all handled and we can sail. Oh, look at these pants.” She had her own off and had slid into the gauzy fabric. “You can see right through them. Look, Inky!”
She sure looked weird with a bullfighter’s hat and jacket on, wearing Arab invisible gauze pants. I had to laugh.
“That’s better,” she said. “And now, as a reward, just take a couple puffs on a bong and go back to sleep.”
“No.”
“Oh, come on, Inky. Don’t be a sourpuss.” She rushed off and came back with a bong.
I took a puff. It tasted slightly different.
She was getting out of her clothes. “Wait a minute,” I said. “If you’ve been fooling around with sex all night, you don’t have to harass me.”
“Oh, that was just a warm-up,” she said. “No fun, really.
I just did it so they’d have a happy married life. Move over.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “This bong tastes . . .” A heavy-headed sort of glee took hold of me. Everything seemed suddenly marvelous.
“Of course, it tastes different. You’re smoking fifty-fifty, marijuana and hashish. Here, let me have a puff.”
A night that was two years long ensued. I woke up. We were at sea. Teenie was gone. I found, as I lay there, I was having trouble with dates. This was either July or September in either 1492 or 2186. The steward had the ports open and was blowing the place out.
“What’s the date?” I said groggily.
“May first. ‘Wake me early, mother dear, for I’m to be queen of the May,’ as the song goes. If you opened a port before you went to sleep, you wouldn’t keep breathing it all night, sir.”
“Where are we going?” I said.
“Just where you ordered, sir,” he said.
“Let’s not get me into that again,” I said. “Please tell me.”
“Where the young lady’s fiancé wanted to go, sir—Marseilles. I must say, you are very indulgent of him. I personally consider the French a bunch of pigs.”
“It seems rougher,” I said, feeling the slight lift of the ship.
“It is rougher, sir. This upper part of the Med is always a (bleep)!”
I looked out the port. There seemed to be a rather heavy sea running. It made me feel queasy to look at it.
I got dressed and went on deck. I didn’t want any breakfast. There was quite a wind.
Madison was crouched down in a deck chair under the protection of a ventilator. He looked up from an old book. “Hi, Smith. I really appreciate this chance.”
“Of what?” I said gloomily.
He raised the book to show me the title. “The Count of Monte Cristo was a pretty wild kind of outlaw. I’ve often wondered if he was real or just the product of some master of our craft. One has to be able to separate truth from fiction.”
“Since when did PR start doing that?” I said.
“It’s a new idea I had,” said Madison. “And we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”
I didn’t want to get to the bottom of anything this morning. The stabilizers lagged a little bit and the ship had a definite pitch.
“In Marseilles harbor,” said Madison, “there is a prison called the Chateau d’If. The Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned there as a young sailor, according to this author, Alexandre Dumas. From thence he rose to a power amongst nations and was, in fact, an outlaw beyond compare. He is quite immortal. I want to see if there actually was a cell there with a tunnel like the one described. And it was terribly nice of you to send Teenie down to ask me. She certainly is a sweet, innocent child, isn’t she?”
That did it. I went to the rail.
“Always face downwind,” the sports director said, wiping me off. “You should have told the steward you felt queasy. Once you’re really seasick, Dramamine doesn’t do a (bleeped) bit of good. You get rid of it too fast. A few laps around the deck now and you’ll feel fine.”
It wasn’t a very successful voyage to Marseilles. In the first place the French, while very glad to gouge any port dues they could, were unable to understand why we wanted to visit the Chateau d’If.
Through an interpreter, for none of us spoke French, the port director told us that if we weren’t terrorists, he had no right to let people from the yacht wander around the town or harbor. There was a slim chance, though. If we could prove we were heroin smugglers, the port was wide open to us.
Madison was kicking the edge of a desk despondently. Teenie said we might as well go back aboard. She had some new pop records she’d got in Madrid and we could lie in bed and listen to them. That made me desperate. I beckoned the director into the next room. Through the interpreter I asked for a black fluorescent light. When I got it, I bared my chest and turned it on. They stared at the glowing letters, Rockecenter Family Spi.
The interpreter told them what it said.
Suddenly the port director was on his knees, kissing the cuffs of my pants. He was muttering and moaning.
“He says,” said the interpreter, “you should have told him this at once. He had no idea you worked for the man who controls the world’s illicit drug traffic. His slight against the Rockecenter name is unforgivable. He will now have to resign his post and end his days in disgrace.”
The French are so emotional, so extreme! “No, no,” I said, “it will be enough if you just let us come ashore and walk around and also visit the Chateau d’If.”
The director began to weep with relief. He muttered something.
“He wants to assure you,” said the interpreter, “that the illegal heroin traffic is maintained at its highest peak and hopes you won’t report otherwise.”
“I’ll take his word for it,” I said.
The port director got the interpretation and seized my hands, kissing them. He said something else, pleadingly.
The interpreter said, “He wants you to come to dinner at his house this evening. He has a beautiful wife and daughter and insists you spend the night and sleep with them both.”
I opened my mouth to protest and the interpreter quickly shook his head warningly. “Please don’t refuse him. You will insult the French national honor. It would put him in a terrible position. He would have a nervous breakdown.”
Wearily, I had to let Teenie and Madison visit the Chateau prison while I went to dinner.
All in all, Marseilles was a terrible experience. I left sharing wholeheartedly the opinions of my steward about the French.
The wife was fat and the daughter had a harelip.
Things like that tend to color your attitude.
PART FIFTY-SEVEN
Chapter 4
We sailed the following morning. The sea was rough and I lay stricken in my bunk. The captain and the sports director came in.
“I am making a ship inspection,” said Captain Bitts, “to make sure the French haven’t stolen us blind.” He gazed at my stricken face. “The chief steward tells me you went to the port director’s home. Have you still got your wallet?”
Miserably, I fumbled under my pillow. I nodded, yes.
“Well, all right, then,” he said. “We’ve only lost four fire hose nozzles. We were lucky.” He was about to leave when he turned back, frowning. “You didn’t drink any French wine, did you? They make it by squashing the grapes with bare feet and they often have athlete’s foot. I wouldn’t want the owner coming down with athlete’s foot of the stomach.”
“The port director served wine but I didn’t drink any,” I said.
“The port director!” he said, startled. “Jesus, you didn’t sleep with his wife and daughter, did you?”
I nodded miserably.
“Well, (bleep) my eyes!” said Captain Bitts. “Sports, rush up to my cabin and get my medical kit. Steward, have you bathed him?”
The steward looked pretty agitated. The chief steward frowned at him. The two of them grabbed me out of bed, thrust me under a shower and began to get to work with antiseptic soap.
“Burn the sheets and the clothes he was wearing,” ordered Bitts. “We can’t risk an infested ship. Nothing will kill French lice but fire. They carry typhus.”
The medical kit arrived. The captain got out syringes and needles that looked like they had been designed as bilge pumps. He filled them. They held me down. He shot me in the butt with three kinds of antibiotics and a heavy preventive dose of neoarsphenamine. It hurt!
As I was queasy, he finished up with a suppository of Dramamine. “If you’re not up and around in a few minutes,” he said, “I can give you an injection of Marezine for that motion sickness.”
Another injection? “I’ll be up right away!” I said.
Dressed in some new clothes, I wanly made my way to the breakfast salon. To my surprise, Teenie and Madison were at the table gobbling down omelets.
I pretended to eat so the waiter wouldn’t tell the ca
ptain I better have that injection. This (bleeped) crew knew everything that went on.
The omelet gobbling was getting me. I decided to distract them. “How did it go at the prison?” I said.
“Wonderful,” said Madison. “They opened every door in the place for us. They almost gave us the prison. What did you tell that port director, Smith?”
“It’s a state secret,” I said.