The Great California Game

“Everybody needs a little fun now and then. Right?”

I swallowed. “Right, right.”

That was where we left it, we of the good ship Gina, me going to change into clean gear then totter along to the galley for a nosh, Tye strolling to resume his patrol, Blanche staring at her reflection slowly sucking her lips in to even her lipstick. And the drugged girl somewhere in that chemical paradise from which few travellers ever really return.

CHAPTER TEN

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IT WAS Chanel who came to tell me I was wanted. I liked Chanel. She was personal maid to Mrs. Melodie van Cordlant, my one-cent lucky lady. I’d have stayed in the galley to explain that eating was a good means of preventing starvation, but it’d have been no good.

I climbed to the next deck. Think of what that poor Kelly had told me. What was it? They wouldn’t even let her to LA, for the California Game. She tried bribing me with her poor ravaged body, just like she’d paid Mr Squeaky Clean Bill for providing her drugs.

Weird words.

The poor lass was just demented—or else she was also addicted to gambling. I knocked at the door Chanel had told me: the long conference cabin. I was glad I’d donned clean and was scented like a rose garden. Maybe this was my reward, Gina wreaking her unsated lust on my poor defenceless frame?

The long boardroom was empty. A few papers were strewn here and there, crumples being fed into a portable shredder by Blanche and two stewardesses. Gina reclined, good enough to eat.

“Yes, Gina?” I said, all confidence and intimacy.

She hardly glanced up.

“Oh, Lovejoy.” I was suddenly new and insignificant. “To Manfredi’s. Soonest” She looked past me. “Blanche? Get me that Harvard architect. Two minutes.”

“Yes, Miz Gina.”

“Er… ?” I said, still oozing charm.

She noticed me with irritation. “Manfredi’s, Lovejoy. Go.”

I cleared my throat. “Er, I don’t think I quite understand —”

Hands grabbed me, mostly Tye’s but with assistance from two other hulks. I was flung into my old gear, mercifully cleaned, hustled into the shore boat, and rushed breathless and bewildered to a waiting motor on shore.

Well, I’d prayed for an end to my servitude, but I was narked now it had come.

I didn’t know it, but next dawn was the day I’d start killing people.

ONCE, I knew this bloke Ted who wrote what he called copy. Ted was a university academic, and like the rest he moonlighted on his Eng Lit job by scribing for newspapers. A sad bloke, he was simply one of these geezers who’d never done anything except teach — never known an honest day’s labour. He was made redundant in the Great Cutbacks. Suddenly he found himself facing the stark truth that he was unemployable. Now he trundles a handcart about Surrey villages scouring for tat, old rubbish which he tries to sell. He does it badly, needless to say. If he’d ever worked, with hands, he’d have been okay. As it is, he’s had to invent a conspiracy among his university alumni to justify his bitterness. Tells everybody they were all jealous.

We all do it. I did it, that morning when Fredo arrived and found me disgruntled on the pavement. He said very little, just to get the garbage out in the alleyway because Josephus was having woman trouble.

“I asked Nicko for a few days off,” I lied brightly.

“Sure.” New York’s elastic word speaks volumes.

Della was thrilled I was with them again. Jonie came and told me I’d missed a brawl in the bar between two guys berserk over the Superbowl. Lil told me she’d known all along I was crazy over her. Two new waitresses, and a new shabby shuffler to help Fredo in the kitchen, and we were ready to cope with Manhattan. I was angry, dejected in the best Ted manner, fuming to myself as I started smiling, giving out my cheery “Hi, there!” to all and sundry.

I’m not really posh-minded. No, honestly I’m not. But I really had thought that on the Gina, first names with Nicko and all that, I was plugged in to something special. As New Yorkers bowled in for breakfast and my routine banter, I found myself thinking over oddities. Bill—who was he? Nicko owned the world, sure. And Gina ran much of it, sure. But whenever anybody spoke of reporting or checking or approving, it was always Jennie’s name that cropped up. And Orly was her oppo.

“I reckon Dallas Cowboys aren’t in it this year,” I told a driver I recognized. I didn’t understand who the Cowboys were, but remembered he was for. His trigger phrase reflexed him into a soliloquy that gave me time to think.

The California Game? I’d been given orders to report nightly to Gina. Any progress on Moira Hawkins and her loony Sherlock plan. Yet here I was washing and serving at Fredo’s joint when Gina and the Gina were a-bobbing on the briny of Long Island Sound.

“They’re too erratic, for one thing,” I challenged my customer, into his third mound of pancakes. (You won’t believe this, but he poured syrup over them, next to four rashers of bacon. Warning: American grub’s lovely; its arrangement takes some beating.)

“Tell me who’s more consistent!”