asked for her old job back.
Well, we learn from our mistakes. Susan had had this current job, customer relations with Avenue Resorts, for three years now, and she firmly understood that her job was notto have relations with the customers, so she didn’t. She knew that Avenue Resorts, even though its management was clean enough to pass any state gaming commission inspection, was mobbed up in some deep echelon of its command, but the fact of the mob didn’t have anything to do with her work and didn’t impinge on her in any way. The people of Avenue appreciated her, and she appreciated them, and that was that.
For three years she’d enjoyed her nice little house along the canal outside Biloxi, and she was sure she’d enjoy the nice house she’d just bought along the river south of Saratoga Springs, home of the famous racecourse, less than an hour commute from the boat. Mr. Culver the banker had tried to clip the airline attendant’s wings, but it hadn’t worked. And it wasn’t going to work, ever again.
Take Assemblyman Kotkind. At first, he’d tried to be grumpy, insisting on being met on the pier and escorted aboard, defiantly announcing the presence of his armed “aides,” two state cops in civvies, all muscle and gun, no brain. She’d rolled with the initial punches, turned up the sex just a little bit, and in no time at all Assemblyman Kotkind was giving her sidelong looks of his own and having a little trouble concentrating on the job at hand.
Which was, she knew, what the politicians call repositioning. When a question is still undecided, a politician can have any opinion at all on the subject, but once the matter is settled, there’s only one place for a politician to be: with the majority. Whatever Assemblyman Kotkind might personally think about legal gambling, he’d been publicly opposed to it, probably because that played well in his district, but now legal gambling was a fact, and the sky had not fallen, and it was time for Assemblyman Kotkind to be retroactively judicious.
On the other side, it was very much in Avenue’s interests to butter up this assemblyman, to help him in his effort to switch horses in midstream without getting wet. As it says in the Bible, there’s more joy when we get one to switch over to us than there is for the ninety-nine we’ve already got in our pocket. Therefore, “I am yours to command,” Susan told the assemblyman, with her most professional smile.
“I just want to see for myself what the attraction is here,” the assemblyman said, looking at the front of her blouse. He was short enough to do that without being really obvious about it.
She took a deep breath, and turned slightly into profile, also not really being obvious about it. “That’s what we’re here for,” she assured him. “You look us over as much as you want. Avenue Resorts wants you to see everything on this ship.”
“Good,” the assemblyman said, and blinked.
“And you’ll findthis way, Mister Assemblyman our first consideration is always safety.”
He gave her a different kind of look, considerably more jaundiced. “Not money?”
She laughed lightly. “That’s our second consideration,” she said. “Safety first, profit second. We’ll take this elevator up to the sundeck, you’ll get a better idea of what’s happening.”
It was a fairly tight squeeze in the elevator, but everybody managed to keep some distance between bodies, even the assemblyman. Riding up, Susan explained the nomenclature of the three decks: sundeck on top, open to the air; boat deck below that, the enclosed promenade with the lifeboats suspended outside; main deck below that, with the restaurants on the outside and the casino within.
At this point, they had the sundeck to themselves. The views up here were terrific, both up and down the river and westward toward Albany, the old and new buildings pressed to the steep slope upward, making a kind of elaborate necklace around the big old stone pile of the statehouse.
“Home sweet home,” Susan suggested, with a gesture toward that massive stone building.
“I’ve seen it before,” the assemblyman told her, being gruff again. “Tell me what’s happening now.”
“Come to the rail.”
She and the assemblyman stood at the rail, with the two state cops on the assemblyman’s other side. The ship was still tied up at the dock, and would remain there for another five or ten minutes. “First we have our safety drill, then the cruise begins,” she explained. “The Spirit of the Hudsonhas never sunk, and never will, but we want to be sure everybody’s prepared just in case the unthinkable ever does happen. You see the lifeboats directly below us.”
The assemblyman agreed, he did see them there.
“You see the crew opening the glass doors along the promenade. Every passenger’s ticket contains a code giving the location of the lifeboat that passenger should go to in case of emergency. The crew members down there are explaining lifeboat procedures now, and showing them the compartments on the inner wall containing life jackets. We don’t ask the passengers to try on the jackets, but crew members down there do demonstrate how it’s done.”
“If this unthinkable of yours does happen,” the assemblyman said, “and this unsinkable tub sinks, which is ourlifeboat?”
Well, she could see she was going to have to do a whole lot of tinkling laughter with this little bastard before the day was done. “Why, Assemblyman Kotkind,” she said, “naturally you andI would be on the captain’s launch.”
“Ah, naturally,” he said. “And speaking of the captain”
“He wants you to join him for dinner,” she said hastily, knowing that the last thing Captain Andersen wanted while setting sail was some bad-tempered politician underfoot. “You and your aides, of course,” she added.
“Of course,” the assemblyman said, while the “aides” continued to stand around looking blank-faced and correct. Poor guys, she thought, giving them some of her attention for the first time. If six hours with this gnome is going to be tough for me, what must it be like for them?
3
Dan Wycza thought this woman Susan Cahill would be therapeutic. She looked like somebody who liked sex without getting all bent out of shape over it, somebody who knew what it was for and all about its limitations. Look how she was giving Lou Sternberg those flashing eyes and teeth, those tiny bumps and grinds, not as a come-on but as a method of control, like the bullfighter’s red cape. Wycza knew Sternberg would be enjoying the show and at the same time he’d enjoy pretending to be taken in by the show. The bluffer bluffed.
