carpeting. I knew it would knock close to a half million without extras, and it was the third time her husband had given her a boat for her birthday.
'The other two were hunuunge!' she had said. 'Great vulgar monsters. Had to have a crew aboard at all times. Now this one is cozy, what? Intimate, you might say. The old boy was playing the gold market and got pinched a bit. Apologized for the smaller boat.'
I was over on the beach and had found a sandbar that was supporting more than its share of clams. Lady Vivian and I had been out about two weeks, provisions were running a little short, and soon we would have to decide whether to put in to Nassau or run on over to Miami. I was putting the clams in a string bag. The sun felt needle-hot on my bare back. I was turning saddle brown, and Lady Vivian had turned to a very lovely reddish gold, except for the sunburned tip of her nose.
The deep chord of the air horns made me look out toward the Odalisque. Shave and a haircut, two bits. Then she came out onto the bow, a tiny golden figure in a white bikini, and motioned me to come aboard.
I hung the string bag around my neck, swam out through the warm crystal-clear water, and came up the boarding ladder.
The Green Ripper
'Good nap?'
'Splendid! And I felt absolutely marvelous until, like the dutiful person I am, I turned on the thing- ajiggy at call time, as usual, and damn me if the old bustard wasn't trying to get me. Baaaaad news, sweet McGeeee. I have to fly on down. His damned awful sister has decided to come out for a visit, and he thinks it would look most odd if Em not there to greet the old party. So what I told him, I would go on into Nassau tomorrow and fly from there, and find some dear friend who'll take the Odalisque on over to Lauderdale. Who might that dear friend be?'
'Give me a hint.'
'hymn, I was having such a lovely time. And we're getting so horribly healthy. All this popping into bed must be awfully good for one.'
Though tiny in the distance, she was substantial up close, a green-eyed, toffee-haired woman just barely on the sunny side of forty, if you could be]ieve her. She gave the healthy impression of someone about to burst out of her clothes, and in fact was willing so to do when the provocation was suffi- ciently explicit. She had very fine-textured skin, gentle as cream, and her body temperature seemed to run permanently at about four degrees above normal. In bed she was like a stove. She radiated both heat and need.
I put the clams away for later, washed up, and then mixed us a pair of the sour rum drinks she
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John D. Macl)onald doted on. We sat out on the afterdeck under the tarp I had rigged for shade.
We touched glasses, and as she sipped, she smiled with her eyes.
'So, there will be another cruise at least,' she said.
'As long as I can last.'
'You are a dear man. I see no sign of faltering, as yet.'
'Y sneak megadoses of vitamins, Viv.'
'You are the only person in this whole wide world I have ever allowed to call me Viv. Why do I like it when you say it?'
'Because you are helplessly in love with me.'
That got a hoot of laughter, her great bawdy laugh of derision. 'You know, dearest McGeeee, I would feel a great deal better if [d been able to pin you down about really helping us.'
'if don't think I could do any good.'
'Utter nonsense! You could do it easily, probe bly. It was my money, you know, not Sir Charles's. From my Uncle Memman. His people made it in the War of the Roses, or some bloody thing like that, seeing slop to both sides, I imagine. After death duties, not very much came down to me, as you can imagine. But it was comforting. You would know. You wake in the night and think of something that you might want, and you know you can buy it. It was truly a magnificent necklace. For forty thousand pounds, it had to be. And somehow,
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The ~ m'- - between appraisals, that wretched little animal switched it on us and now pretends to know nothing about it, and there is nothing we can do. Should you get it back for we, dear heart, we shalt auction it at Christie's and give you half the gavel price. Your customary arrangement, isn't it?'
'When I work, * is. I work when I need money. Otherwise I am retired. Like now.'
'aria! Living off my involuntary generosity? Last night the only possible roll to escape a double gammon was that incredible six four you rolled. Dear, I am really terribly serious about the necklace. Would you try? For me? For jolly old Viv?'
'Why not? 111 need the one he substituted, probably. 1~11 try to work something out.'
'Bless you!'
And the great warm tide of her pleasure and her gratitude took us down into the cool humming, buzzing grotto of the Odalisque below decks, into the deep bunk leaving behind us on the carpeting a hasty trail of bikini top, swim truffle, and bikini bottom where, with the accompaniment of her giggles and sighs and little instructional signals, we played our favorite game of winding up that lmcurious engine of a body of hers to such an aching pitch that a single Might touch, carefully planned, pushed her over the edge. After that, as always, she went into lazy yawning, smiles, a gentle kiss, and her deep deep sleep.
I picked up the discarded clothing, put -on my trunks, and quietly fixed an oversized old-fashioned glass full of ice and Boodles. Sipping size. I went topside to the By bridge, lounged on the padded bench in the fading heat of the late afternoon sun.
I remembered how it had been when I had come back home to Bahia Mar, to The Busted Flush, in mid-February, after the teams of skilled interrogators had pulled every last scrap of information, no matter how trivial or unrelated, out of the stubborn tangle in the back of my mind. It took me a week to tell Meyer all of it, at my own pace, quitting whenever I came up against something that needed more thought before I could talk about it willingly.
Meyer had been patient and understanding and, best of all, willing to believe what I still considered unbelievable.
'Travis, did you get any clue at all about whether they can stop the other teams?'
'] saw Max and Jake one more time, a few days before they let me come home. They let me ask some questions. They didn't answer a lot of them. They'd acted quickly enough to terminate a few of the training centers, but the rest of them moved out in time. At best it will push the target date further into the future. Maybe it will begin to happen a year from now.'
'~What about that Brussels thing?'
'A dead end. It was probably going to be one of their restaging areas, for retraining and re- equipping the survivors of the early strikes.'
The Green Ripper
'And Gretel had the bad luck to see Titus. That was why they... did away with her?'
'He was the link between the Church of the Apocrypha and the terrorist arm. They had a fat file on him, but not as an important wheel in the Church. Now the Church has gone underground. That cripples the financing. They probably over- reacted. If they had just given up the land purchase, forfeited the payment, it would have been enough What could Gretel have done, other than tell Ladwigg she had recognized his visitor? Overkill. Paranoia. Maybe just an urge to test a new deadly toy.' o did kill her?'
Nobody seems to know. Or care very much. It wasn't anything particularly personal, killing her or Ladwigg. It was just a case of thug to tidy up a security lapse.'
'~Will you be told anything more?'
~ 'There's no need ever to contact me again,' false said.'
'Are you sure you're all right?' Meyer asked earnestly.
'Y don't know how I am. Or exactly who I am.'
'Remember when I talked about the new barbarism last December? About the toad-lizard thing with the rotten breath, squatting in its cave? You met it, Travis. You felt the lizard breath. It is man's primal urge to decimate himself down to numbers which can exist on the wornout planet. It is man's self-hatred. The god of the lemmings, and of the poisonous creatures which can die of their own venom. It takes time to back away from that, Travis. Time.'
It had taken most of the five months to finish the job of sorting myself out. Meyer had put me on the right track. I didn't know what he had meant when he said to me, 'Not one of us ever grows up to be what he intended to be. Not one- of us fulfills his own expectations, Travis. We are all our own children, in that sense. At some point, somewhere, we have to stop making demands.'
There was no great moment of my saying, 'Aha!' or 'eureka!' It just slowly came clear, like the mist rising on a mountain morning. There was a black, deep, dreadful ravine separating me from all my previous days. Over there on the other side were the pathetic and innocent little figures of world- that-once-was. McGee and his chums. McGee and Gretel. McGee and his toys and visions.
I could not approach the edge of that ravine and look down. Far far below were the bodies of the dead.
And here I was, on this side. This side was today. This side was the crystal taste of icy gin, me brute weight of tropic sun, the tiny beads of sweat on my forearm, the lovely lines of the Magnum Maltese, those white popcorn gulls way out there, afloat after feeding, Viv's glad little cries of love, the way the stars would
