by Blake Banner
As they drew up on the shore, the guy jumped out and helped her. She dropped a towel and a bag on the sand. The guy put up a parasol and a folding sunbed. She lay down and he pushed the launch back into the water and returned to the yacht.
As I watched him withdraw across the green water of the cove, I thought that in the absence of a plan of the boat, there was no point in waiting. Further, I had no idea how long they were going to stay. It might be a week, but they might leave tomorrow. I needed to act as soon as it was feasible, and on the face of it, that meant that night.
I finished the toast and stretched out my legs as I put the plan together in my head. After dinner I’d go down and take the Apollonis out of the harbor, and sail her round the south coast of the island to Pori Beach. It was about two miles and shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes. I would keep in close to the headland and drop anchor. I figured I could get within two hundred yards. There I’d put on flippers, mask and air bottles, and if I approached from the stern, the chances of the bubbles from the tanks being spotted were remote.
I’d plant the mines on the starboard side, away from the beach toward the prow, one above the waterline, the rest below. Then I would pull myself up on the boarding platform. There I would stow my gear out of sight and prepare my weapons before detonating the mine above the waterline. Once that mine went off it would be a free-for-all. Security and the crew would all charge forward seeking the source of the explosion. Anyone who needed to be protected would be confined to their cabins. They would not be sent to the lifeboats until the nature of the threat had been identified. So, I would head straight for the staterooms, kill any security or crew I encountered, locate the colonel and remove her to a launch, then blow the hull below the waterline.
Simple.
As I was thinking, I had been watching the tall, short-haired woman on the beach. She had got to her feet and crossed the sand to climb the steps onto the terrace. Now she stood talking to the waiter in Greek. He was bowing, goggling at the few bits of her body that were covered, drooling and making the kind of noises you might make after a lobotomy. He seemed to say “Naí,” a lot, which sounded like it should mean “No,” but probably meant “Yes.”
She turned and trotted down the steps again and back across the sand, while the lobotomized letch hurried into the shadows of the restaurant to convey her orders. Shortly afterwards he hurried out again with an ice bucket containing a bottle of champagne. I smiled to myself as I watched him run, stumbling across the beach to place the bucket by her side. He popped the cork, laughed too loud and poured her a glass. Upon which she dismissed him and returned to a book she was reading.
I wondered about going down for a swim and trying to get into conversation, but rejected the idea. I had my plan; anything else now would be a complication. I had another coffee and watched the babe in the green bikini. She didn’t do anything more interesting than read and sip her champagne. Nothing much happened on the yacht, either, so I paid for my breakfast and drove back to the hotel.
Charlotte was behind the reception desk sorting through mail when I walked in. She smiled without warmth.
“Have you had a good morning, Robert?”
“Pretty good. I went to have breakfast at Pori Beach. Looks like your friend has arrived.”
She looked back at her envelopes. “Really?”
“What was the name of his yacht? This was the Bucephalus. A beauty.”
She nodded and started slitting open envelopes.
“Yes, I think that was it.”
“If he books a table for dinner, I’d love to meet him.”
She glanced up with a smile that would have frozen lava. “I’ll bear that in mind, Robert. Will you be lunching in the hotel, or will you be taking a picnic? I can get Aggy to put something together for you if you like.”
“No, I’ll eat in.” I glanced at my watch. “I think I have time for a shower. It’s hot outside.”
She nodded and went back to leafing through her mail. I was clearly not welcome and I wondered what had happened since last night. I climbed the stairs thinking about it. She had said that night that Gabriel Yushbaev owned her, body and soul. He was here, now, and whether he saw her or not, she had to wear her metaphorical chastity belt and give all men the cold shoulder. She was his property, like any of the houses or apartments he owned around the world. He didn’t need to occupy them. He just needed to possess them, and keep the door locked; or the belt.
I stopped halfway to the landing and spoke across the empty lobby.
“I was going to ask you if you’d join me for dinner tonight.” She looked up at me but didn’t say anything. I gave something that might have been a smile. “I guess you’ll be on call, huh?”
She still didn’t say anything, so I went up to my room.
Six
I had lunch and spent the afternoon on the Apollonis, checking the engine and the rigging, and going over the hardware to make sure everything was in perfect working order. At five PM I took her for a test run up the southwest coast of the island as far as Pori Beach and had a look at the small coves at the south end of the bay. The cliffs were not huge, but I figured at night they would be enough to hide the Apollonis from view. From where I was anchored I could make out a small group of people on the top deck of the Bucephalus, lounging and drinking in the sun. The short-haired girl was there, and a tall guy dressed in white, but I could see no sign of the colonel. At six I headed back to Koufonisia, with the small, niggling doubt in my mind as to whether the colonel was on the yacht at all.
When I arrived at the hotel there was a Land Rover Defender 90 V8 sitting at the bottom of the steps. It wasn’t the kind of car you’d expect to see on Koufonisi, so I figured Yushbaev had shown up to inspect his property. I wondered briefly if he’d rolled the Land Rover off the boat, but dismissed the idea and figured Charlotte must have been looking after it for him. One piece of property looking after another.
But when I walked into the lobby Yushbaev wasn’t there. Charlotte was standing at the reception desk with a gin and tonic in her hand. She was still and silent, staring at the early evening glow of the doors that stood open onto the terrace and the swimming pool. There was the desultory sound of an occasional splosh laced lazily into the evening song of the birds.
After a moment Charlotte turned to look at me. I said, “Nice car.”
“Is it?”
“If you like that kind of thing. I find there is too much that can go wrong with high tech. The more sophisticated it is, the more fallible.”
“Are you making some heavy-handed point, Robert?”
“Probably. Something about the shallow allure of apparently impressive things, as compared with deeper, less impressive things that are more reliable and solid.”
She surprised me by busting into sudden laughter. She surprised me further because the laughter was not patronizing but genuinely amused.
“Oh, Robert, you know I think I had you all wrong. I think you’re actually quite sweet. Are you from Iowa or Wyoming, one of those cowboy states? Are you going to call me ma’am in a moment?”
I smiled and took a step closer to her with my hands in my pockets. “Nope. I’m from New York City, the Bronx, and I might call you many things, most of them pretty flattering, but none of them would be ma’am.”
She regarded me with the tail end of a smile on her lips. When she didn’t say anything I jutted my jaw at her drink. “You going to offer me one of those?”
“Of course.” She rang a small brass bell on her desk. “Martini?”
“Neither shaken nor stirred, just dropped in the glass. You going to introduce me to Yushbaev? Or has the pool been cordoned off?”
A small frown creased her brow. “I don’t recall telling you his name was Yushbaev.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not just a pretty face. There aren’t that many billionaires in this world, and there is only one Russian one called Gabriel.”
She sighed and looked back toward the pool. �
�In any case he’s not here yet. His current wonder-fanny is.”
It was my turn to laugh. “Wonder-fanny? Short dark hair and all the way up legs?”
“That’s the one.”
“You think she’d let me engage her in a conversation about Platonic idealism?”
“That’s naughty. You don’t know, she might be a genius. In any case what she would allow you to do is irrelevant. It’s what Gabriel would allow her to do that counts.”
Kostas Minor came shuffling out and Charlotte gave him his orders. He glanced at me resentfully for no reason I could fathom and shuffled away again.
“He’ll take it to you on the terrace. Though I must say I am disappointed.”
“Why’s that, Charlotte?”
“What happened to your high ideals regarding shallow sophistication and deep, solid reliability?”
“Oh, I am not interested in Wonder-Fanny, Charlotte.” She arched an eyebrow at me. She looked nice when she did that. I shook my head. “No, I am interested in the emperor of the universe, master of all things and owner of women, Gabriel Yushbaev.”
Her smile dissolved. “I hope you’re not going to do anything foolish, Robert. He’s…”
She trailed off. I gave a small nod. “I know what he is.”
I walked away from her and crossed the broad lounge to step out onto the terrace. The sky was turning dark in the east, but there was still pale blue-white over in the west. One star, Hesperus, hung over the horizon. The moon had not yet risen.
The pool was lapping turquoise in the cooling evening air, and the girl with the short, dark hair was lounging at the edge of it in a wet deck chair. Beside her was a tall drink with a straw. I went and stood eight feet from her head. I looked up at the sky, then down at her tanned body. It was desirable.
“Did I see you at Pori Beach this morning?”
She turned to look up at me. She was not quite expressionless. There was a touch of insolence and a hint of humor.
“Only you can know that. Did you see me?”
The accent was French. “I did.”
“Then there you have your answer. You ask your own question and you answer it.”
“Is the yacht yours?”
She kept her eyes closed. “The Bucephalus?”
“Was there another one there?” Now she turned to look at me. I smiled. “Annoying, isn’t it?”
She gave a barely perceptible giggle and closed her eyes again.
“The Bucephalus is not mine. It belongs to my friend.”
“Lucky friend. Where is he now?”
“He is on the yacht. He will come to this dump soon to have dinner.”
I sat myself down, facing her. “I wouldn’t call this place a dump. The food is very good.”
That got a reaction. Her eyes snapped open and her jaw dropped. “Ha!” she said. “If you had stayed in the hotels I have stayed at in Paris, in Moscow, in Los Angeles…”
“I probably have.”
She gave me a patronizing smile that made me want to take her bikini off and tan her fanny.
“I don’t think so, Mr…?”
“Call me Robert. You know, expensive and good are not necessarily the same thing.”
“Please! I do not need folksy philosophy from your cowboy ranchers.”
I wondered briefly if I had acquired a passing resemblance to Clint Eastwood in the last twelve hours and said, “I am not a cowboy…”
She seemed not to hear me and plowed on, “‘Always it begins, my daddy once told me…’ and then some nauseating platitude.” She gave another giggle. “In France we do not turn to our farmers for wisdom, Robert. We turn to Descartes, Michel de Montaigne, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, even Voltaire, though he is making us laugh, ha ha ha, he is making us also think. No?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I looked at her legs instead. They were still nice legs.
“What we do not do, Mr. American Cowboy, is go to our farmers and ask them, ‘Hey, Slim, what did your father tell you about epistemology? Can you tell me? What were your father’s thoughts on ontology, while he was digging out the pig shit?’”
“You made your point.”
“Bien.”
“But I still think you mistake cost for quality. Unless your boyfriend has to spend a lot on it, you don’t want it. Am I wrong?”
She muttered something that sounded obscene and closed her eyes again. After a moment she asked, “You are who?”
“Robert.”
“Robert who?” She opened her eyes and turned to look at me.
“Robert Foley.”
“I have never heard of you. You make money from a ranch or something? Tu sens la merde de vache!”
“No, sweetheart, I make money as a highly paid assassin. I get paid to take out pretentious little girls who mistake being rude for being intelligent. If you had half the intelligence and erudition you pretend to have, you’d be capable of having a conversation with a stranger without insulting him every time you open your pretty little mouth. And while we’re at it, the only smell of cow shit around here is coming from you.” I pointed at her. “Your daddy may have paid for a classical education, kid, but what you know about life could be written on one of your cute buttocks with room to spare for the pictures. Sister, you’re as shallow as a puddle of yesterday’s piss.”
I’d had some opportunistic hope of maybe postponing my attack and trying to get myself invited aboard the Bucephalus to do a bit of recon. But I’d given up on that idea almost as soon as I’d started my play. I stood, aiming to go to my room and dress for dinner, but her voice stopped me. It was laced with an interesting blend of curiosity and challenge.
“You think you know a lot about life?”
I took a pull on my drink, savored it and smacked my lips. “No. You think you know a lot about life, because you believe you bought that knowledge. I know that what you bought was bullshit. And I know that what little wisdom I have, I have gathered from my own experience. What have you experienced? The fantasy that whatever you want in life you can buy? That’s a cheap fantasy. Believe me, if you want expensive, you should try reality. Reality is really expensive.” I drained my drink, surprised at how mad I’d got, and put my glass down. “Try to enjoy your dinner, even if it’s not expensive enough.”
I went to walk away. She spoke quickly and suddenly. “My name is Marianne.” I stopped and raised an eyebrow at her. “But you can call me Marie.”
I didn’t answer straight away. “Well, thank you, Marie. You can call me Bob.”
“Will you dine here tonight?”
“Yes.”
“I will ask Gabriel if you can join us.”
“That’s nice of you,” I smiled, “but what if I have other plans? What if I don’t want to?”
Her cheeks colored. “Would you like to join us?”
I made the smile into a friendlier one. “Sure, that would be nice. Thank you.”
“I will go and dress now.”
She said it like she expected an answer. I didn’t have one, so I nodded and went indoors.
Charlotte was standing in the doorway with her back to me. She still had her gin and tonic in her hand. The dark was closing in but the sea was slightly luminous, making her into a shadowy silhouette. She turned as I crossed the lobby.
“Did you get what you wanted?”
“Maybe. It seems your owner is coming to dinner tonight.”
She turned away. “Don’t be cruel, Robert.”
I stepped out beside her and saw that the Land Rover was gone. “Has your man gone to fetch him?”
She nodded. “He bought the Land Rover. It’s the least I can do.”
“Did he buy the Land Rover, you and the two Kostas as a job lot?” I was surprised at the savagery in my voice. “Does he own the hotel, too?”
“What’s it to you?” She looked away at the quickening dark over the sea. “As a matter of fact he does. It’s convenient for him, and for me.”
/> There was an empty quality to the silence that followed which told me “convenient” wasn’t quite the word. I questioned it.
“Convenient?”
The word hung there between us. She kept her eyes fixed on the ocean. I said: “How the hell did you get into this, Charlotte?”
“Please, Robert, don’t patronize me. I don’t need a counselor. Life just fucks some people over sometimes. If you happen to be one of the unlucky ones, you take what’s coming to you and lump it. That’s just the way it is.”
“You really believe that?”
She sighed. “Do you believe the sun rises in the morning, Robert? Do you believe you are standing on solid ground? Do you believe we are talking? It’s not a question of belief, Robert. It’s there. It’s real. It’s not something you can have an opinion about.”
I gave a small shrug. “I always liked the Vikings.”
She gave a small snort. “You amaze me.”
“They believed that the Nornir…”
“The what?”
“The Nornir, the three Weird sisters, Urd, Skuld and Verdandi, the Fates of Norse mythology. They called them the Nornir.”
“Oh.” She sipped her drink, frowning at me. “What about them?”
“They were weavers. They wove the destiny of humans and gods alike. But the only points that were fixed in the skein of your destiny…”
She laughed. “Skein?”
I fought down a stab of irritation. “It’s the thread…”
“I know what it is, Robert, but it’s a little archaic, isn’t it? The skein of your destiny is hardly the sort of thing you expect an American to come out with.”
“You asked me not to patronize you. You done patronizing me?”
She looked away again. “Perhaps. What about the skein of a Viking’s destiny?”
I felt a sudden rush of bitterness and frustration and was about to tell her to go to hell. Instead I said, “The only fixed point in the skein of your destiny was the time and manner of your death. How you lived and how you died, that was up to you.”
She spoke to the darkness, away from me. “You said the manner of your death was predestined.”
