Tomaj closed his eyes briefly. “Blasted hell-dog,” he whispered.
“I was thinking same as you. Who’s he going to get to crew them? Every last salt on the coast stands squarely behind you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Perennial,” Tomaj said. Tomaj knew that Perennial Pete spoke the truth. Youx and Zaleski had also been to the Port Admiral at Tamatave, where Tomaj kept a flotilla of merchant ships. By decree of the Queen Consort, they’d been told, no more exporting of silks and teas from the Orient. The Port Admiral’s soldiers had stopped Tomaj’s lighters from stowing the holds of his merchantmen, and the ensuing confrontation during a pelting squall meant that chests of tea had to be taken back to the godowns.
Tomaj exhaled and attempted a smile. “Dagny. This is pleasant, indeed.” Boneaux did this every once in awhile when the mood hit him, placed embargoes on Tomaj. It wasn’t anything too unusual, after all. And it was a joy to see Dagny, though she was no doubt decked in a rig given her by the odious Frog. “What can I do for you today?”
She seemed agitated, following him as he poured himself the remainder of the brandy the footman had just brought in. “And it is very pleasant to see you again, Count,” she purred. “I wanted to thank you from the bottom of my soul for the voyage of discovery that surely took you out of your way and away from your business. Such wonders I have never seen! The leaping lemurs, the tomato frogs, the dodo eggs …” She looked up at him shyly. “And most of all… you.” She shut her eyes, and her lids shuddered. “You are … the most admirable and remarkable man I’ve ever had the delight to know.”
“It was my pleasure, Dagny. I want to bring you nothing but happiness.”
She opened her eyes, her expression beatific, and brushed his bottom lip with her thumb. She sighed. “I take it Monsieur Boneaux has caused some problems with your business.”
“Yes, well … Nothing that hasn’t happened before, my malala. Will you stay for dinner? We have some of those oysters you are so fond of…”
Dagny turned from him. “Perhaps, but … I must tell you something that struck me as suspicious when we were moored near Fort Dauphin. Your man Slushy came to me with a message from Boneaux. How could he have had this knowledge if he wasn’t privy to the inner workings of Boneaux’s court?”
“Indeed, I can see where that might cause you concern. But I don’t think you need to worry. Slushy is quite capable of chewing the fat with any number of questionable people. That old chef is chummy ships with everyone, because nobody fears him. He’s quite harmless, really.”
“Are you sure, Tomaj? Slushy and that Zaleski fellow give me the creeps oftentimes. How is it that Boneaux entrusted him with this message? I just feel that perhaps you shouldn’t be so free with your information—”
“Are you poking Charlie at my mates?” piped Bellingham, who had evidently been standing in the open doorway. He gave a stiff bow to Tomaj, but continued braying, “Zaleski’s been my sea daddy since I came in through the hawse holes! He’d go through the hoop for Cap’n Balásházy!”
Dagny held her hands out toward the boy. “Oh, dear Bellingham. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m sure they’re fine, upright men, perhaps when in your company and in the capacity of teachers, or—”
“Aye, they may frig about on a time, but they’d never be in league with a bilgey like Boneaux!”
“All right, Bellingham!” Tomaj felt compelled to shout, standing betwixt the boy and woman. “To your quarters on the double! I’ll not have you eavesdropping or insulting my guests! You may apologize to Miss Ravenhurst.”
“Sorry, Mademoiselle. But you’d best clear the yardarm in this instance. Zaleski and Slushy—”
Whap! Bellingham’s delicate etiolated face instantly went red when Tomaj slapped it. “That’s enough, Bellingham!” Tomaj shouted with enough force to blow the boy into the hallway with his voice. He shoved the scrambling youth out of the room, slamming the door behind Bellingham’s flapping limbs.
Dagny stood with her hand to her open mouth. “Tomaj!”
“I’m sorry, malala. He can be an annoying little powder-monkey, for one who has been so elevated in position. Why, when I found him at Saint Helena, he was just a ragamuffin—”
“No! I mean, how dare you strike him? Did you know that that poor boy doesn’t even know his given name? You don’t care for him as a father should, Tomaj! It’s no small wonder he looks up to Slushy and Zaleski, when the man who should be standing father to him all but ignores him, except to slap and reprimand him!”
Tomaj was instantly shamed. He walked to the sideboard, not to pour another cocktail, but to the menorah, where he used the central shamash candle to light another. The beloved woman was right, he had not behaved correctly, and rarely did toward the boy. Just a week ago he’d been pondering that he should help Bellingham with his Sheet Anchor, but of course had never done a thing about it.
“You’re entirely correct, my malala. I suppose I’m only behaving as my own father behaved toward me, that’s all.” She slipped an arm about his waist and caressed his belly. “After all, I have no other example to go by. But I shall try harder, for your sake.”
She pressed her face to his shoulder blade. “You shall do it for your own sake, for isn’t it best to undo the sins of your father? If your father struck you, say you will not repeat that mistake on the boy. There are sins of Salvatore’s father that he is not willing to repeat.” Fired by her thoughts, her fingers tickled between his waistcoat buttons and even between the buttons of his day-shirt, touching the sensitive band of muscle that ran from the navel to the pubic bone, causing his phallus to swell grossly. A delicious shiver rushed up his spine to where her abundant breasts were smashed against his back. “Haneirot hallalu anachnu madlikin ‘al hanissim …” he murmured.
“What is that?” she whispered. Her fingers delved further into his steamy crotch, the fingers of the other hand slipping apart his waistcoat buttons.
“Oh, this thing?” His voice sounded foreign, squeaky. He had to lean forward with one palm against the sideboard to prevent swooning.
“Well, yes, that thingamajig, candelabrum.” She fingered his erect nipple while drawing up her slipper to find a toehold at the top of his Hessian boot.
Jamming the shamash back into its central holder, Tomaj gasped, “It’s a … a menorah, a sort of Jewish, ah …” His prick was so stiff it throbbed, the head dry and hot against the cool of his China drawers. Her sinuous fingers burrowed further, smoothing against the base of his cock until he feared he might spontaneously come.
“Jewish …” Her hands stilled. Tomaj panted for more. “Oh, yes, of course, Jewish! You’re from Pest-Buda!” She resumed her roaming, wrapping her sweaty palm around his balls, and slithering the other into his armpit. “How could I be so ignorant? One doesn’t run into many Jews in Madagascar. I suppose I’m always thinking in terms of Christian and non-Christian, all the sass that goes on here about that. I knew many Jews in New York—”
“The blood of my ancestors.” Clapping his hand over hers that covered his balls, Tomaj squeezed brutally, coaxing a gasp from her. “You’re not a warm-in-the-tail bitch, Dagny—why do you behave like one?” When he released her hand, she only drew back to grip the root of his cock, clinging to his back like a baby sloth.
“Because I want you.” Her other hand tangled in his chest hair, scraping fingernails across his nipple, pinching it. When she commenced to pumping his prick, he knew he would get off if he didn’t stop her.
Yanking her limbs from him bodily, Tomaj spun to face her, shaking her by both shoulders. “Damn it, you’re not a lick-spigot, woman! And I won’t be treating you like one!”
Her eyes swam in her head as though she’d been chasing the dragon, and she clung to the loose pennants of cloth at his chest. She panted, and her eyes narrowed. “Perhaps because I am a lick-spigot… and for once, I like it.”
Then she was gone.
Tomaj had no chance to gather his wits, for she’d fallen to her knee
s and had speedily taken his cock out into the air, where it bobbed like a hunting fossa. Falling back upon the sideboard, Tomaj sank his fingers into her Apollo knot, mindlessly untying the cerulean blue ribbon that cinched a tiny fake—or was it stuffed?—bird to her coiffure. How immensely narcissistic it was, her small hand admiring his long, thick prick as she held the tip to her plush mouth, the prick drooling and throbbing.
He threw back his head in sheer agonizing pleasure as she teased him between plump, innocent lips. She snaked her tongue in a fat squiggle down the root of his phallus. He lost all modicum of reason, unaware until much later than he’d grasped the back of her skull and impaled himself inside her throat.
She took to it with gusto, plunging and sucking, making great smacking sounds, as though she gulped giant urns of milk. Tomaj sighed, and groaned, and made all manner of barnyard sounds, and German epithets spilled forth from his chest as he fucked her vastly adept mouth. Before he knew it—it was the thought of this woman and her face between his thighs, the sheer bawdy nastiness of it, that a fine Quaker woman—a scientist — would slurp up his meat with such voraciousness it seemed she aimed to suck him dry—he came down her throat, rushes of semen as he’d never known.
He quivered, the backs of his thighs trembled, and he fairly sobbed with the ecstatic rightness of it. He arched into her throat, and his free hand scrabbled at his cravat to loosen it, to toss it to the floor, and away went the waistcoat and the collar in heaps at Dagny’s knees as she kept sucking, slowing her ministrations until she merely sucked languorously, deeply—but how did she know to do that? At length he pushed her away, detaching her with a great smacking sound, and he quaked like a huge ridiculous Adonis, both hands entwined behind his neck, panting prick in the air before her face.
On her knees, she gulped hard and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and at length looked up at him with an artlessly devoted expression, her eyes large and round in their questing. Tomaj was helpless to resist, and he swept down to lift her in his arms.
What a fairy-tale princess in her dress of white crêpe lisse! How could a devout woman have debased herself at the feet of a dissipated rakehell like him? She clung to his neck as he carried her across the darkening room lit only by the two menorah candles, the entire house utterly still, the eerie quietude only punctuated by the whirring of bats outside over the lawn.
He fell backward onto a low divan where he often liked to read, keeping the woman in his lap as he stuffed his prick into his drawers. An inlaid Serbian table held a spirit lamp, scissors for trimming the lamp wick, and a set of scales, all contained in an exquisite tray of jade and lapis, but it had been weeks since Tomaj had been interested in having “the spirits of dead Buddhas inhabiting his brain,” and his favorite pipe had sat neglected.
She smoothed his unruly hair that had insisted upon coming out of the queue, and he tucked damp tendrils of her coiffure back into her knot.
“Tomaj, I—” she panted.
“Hush.”
Closing her eyes, she kissed his mouth softly. “I adore you. I’ll fix everything for you with Boneaux.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” he whispered.
“I can do it, I have the power,” she whispered back. “He may not love me, but he has his weaknesses. If I threaten to take away his gratification with me, he’ll become soaked with longing and desperation.”
“I know you have the power. I’ve seen it at work, upon the hard-willed and hopeless chambers of my own heart. I’m thoroughly in thrall to you, your innocence, your spirit, your love of the natural world, your delightful ways, but I cannot allow you to subjugate your honor to right something that bears righting only by myself. He’s hated me for a long time, before you ever arrived on this island—”
“Oh, honor, what is honor?” Dagny ran a fingertip down the bridge of his nose. “You have a mistaken idea of me, Count. You imagine that I am innocent.” She shook her head soberly. “I am not. You imagine that I am honorable. I am not. I have only one aspect worthy of praise, and that is that I fight like a devil for the lives of those whom I love, and will do whatever it takes to achieve that end.” She shrugged with a small smile, imbuing Tomaj with such an ardent glow of passion he wanted to lift the pipe once more, merely to dull this frightening feeling.
Instead, he caressed her throat. “That is admirable indeed, my malala, but I cannot allow that. I’ve never agreed with Sophocles that ‘the result justifies the deed,’ as I’ve seen too many men bent for hell from low activities, though the original intent was good. No,” he kissed her mouth so that she might pipe down. “For you to intervene between the two of us warthogs would put you in danger. I shouldn’t even allow you to be here with me. Oh, you can roam my grounds as you and your brother please. But you seem to be entirely too innocent of the cruelties that lurk in the blackened spirits of men.”
“Brothers,” Dagny corrected. “My brother Zeke came to your defense against Boneaux the other day. Can you imagine, Paul tried to pay me for a poor aye-aye that he had already paid someone else to shoot? Oh, but what is this? A medal of some kind?”
Her fingers against his chest had discovered his emblem. The silver medal hung on a silken cord, on one side the letter M with a cross interwoven, crowned by stars, the other side a figure of someone’s Virgin with beseeching arms. “Given to me by the king,” Tomaj replied.
She seemed delighted with the object, turning it over and over, frowning to make out the words written upon it: O Marie! Conçue sans péché! Priez pour nous, qui avons recours à vous.
Tomaj interpreted for her. “Conceived without sinning. Pray for us who are asking you for help.”
“If you’re an Ashkenazi Jew, why do you wear a Roman Catholic medal? You haven’t worn this before.”
“No, I haven’t.” Tomaj spoke so softly he wasn’t certain she could hear him, though their noses nearly touched. “Radama holds that this emblem was instrumental in the miracle of his sister bearing a son.”
How charming she was, looking from him to the medal, from the medal to him, turning it over between her slender fingers. “And you wear it because you—”
“Come,” he said with cheer, bundling her into his arms, placing her feet onto the floor. “The moon the past few nights has risen just over my hedgerow of traveler’s trees, around this time. Let me show you what the astronomer David Groper has discovered on the face of that planet.”
She wobbled a bit on her feet, and he steadied her arm. “Oh, he sees something there?”
“Indeed.” Tomaj tossed the remains of his collar to the floor. “By the aid of his powerful glass, he’s distinguished a large edifice. He’s certain that the moon is inhabited.”
Dagny took his arm and allowed him to lead her to the tall windows. “Is that so? I’ve often been able to see what looks like a face upon the moon’s surface, but certainly no edifice.”
This grand window, set into the weather side of the building, afforded him a view down a strictly manicured lane of trees to one of the ten guns of his battery that protected Barataria against encroachment from the sea. “Ah, a bit too early for the moon, perhaps in ten minutes. Now, what’s gotten into that dog?”
From the direction of the battery wall, Stormalong barked like a rabid cur, a most unusual occurrence. She was normally a mute, placid dog, good qualities in a shipboard animal. The ferocity in her voice piqued Tomaj’s defensive instinct, and he grabbed his loaded Parker’s from a table.
And remembered that a few days ago, after he’d shot a fossa harassing his chickens, he’d neglected to reload one of the barrels.
“A fossa?” Dagny asked.
“No …” His fingers on her wrist, Tomaj drew her back from the window when Stormalong’s barks turned to snarls, muted because her mouth was full… of something. “My malala. Why don’t you stand right here with your back to this wall. Yes, that’s it.” Tomaj crept lightly, though there was no need of it, snatching his cutlass from a sideboard and unsheathing it.
Stormalong’s muffled growls came closer now, not up the corridor of trees, but through the bushes that skirted his stables. “In fact, malala, there’s a sturdy table there to your left, perhaps you should hide—”
At the sound of running bare feet, Tomaj leapt aside from the window. With a high “Aaaiiiii …” that was familiar to Tomaj, the entire expanse of windowpanes imploded in a regal shattering of thousands of glass shards. Lit by the two menorah candles, they diffracted into a cascade of tiny lights, washing in its flood the black silhouette of a flailing man with the enormous dog adhered to the seat of his pants.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SEDUCING GABRIEL
UNDER THE TABLE, DAGNY!” TOMAJ HOLLERED AS he cocked the hammer of the Parker’s.
The rolling ball of man and beast presented no tolerable target. Tomaj didn’t wish to waste a bullet on the riceman’s leg or arm, and they tumbled so erratically he couldn’t risk shooting the dog. Tomaj circled them with the cutlass in his left hand, skipping and jumping whenever their limbs crossed his path, looking for an opening. Stormalong at last pinned the pirate long enough for Tomaj to whack the femur greatly with the cutlass, further stomping on the man’s leg in order to free the blade.
The riceman howled. “Get that monster off of me!” he squealed in the Cantonese lingo that Tomaj, as an occasional sinologist, was familiar with.
Stormalong set to mauling the man’s posterior, giving Tomaj the opening to hew through his neck bone, effectively silencing him with a great gush of blood that seemed oddly black in the dim light.
As Stormalong continued to roar and maul, Tomaj stamped with his boot heel on the hand, splaying it so he could kick toward Dagny the short, heavy yao-tao sword. “Take that knife!” In his rage Tomaj continued booting the Kwangtungman toward the other side of the room, to remove it from Dagny’s sight.
The sounds of crashing, bodies falling, glassware breaking, were coming from the reception room and foyer. Feet crunched and bodies rolled upon the reception room epergne laden with food on china plates …
The Strangely Wonderful: Tale of Count Balásházy Page 21
