Devil's Breath

by G. M. Malliet

  Oh no. The light had changed, and now she could see the dark blue eye shadow was all wrong. Way too sparkly and trailer-trashy. She dipped a small brush in makeup remover and dabbed it along the crease of her eyes, erasing the excess. It was a trick she’d picked up from Maurice—well, from watching one of his videos on YouTube. There. Now she didn’t look so much like her sister.

  She hadn’t thought of Peggy in years. Stuck back there on some ranch in Texas with three kids, each one more homely than the last, trapped in a trailer with that doofus she’d dated in high school. Peggy liked to send photos by text message, as if Tina could somehow be persuaded to show a sisterly interest in that no-talent brood. Beyond thinking how much Peggy owed her, all familial ties were about nonexistent. She, Tina, had single-handedly kept their creepy stepfather away from her baby sister so she could have something approaching a normal life. And there the family debt ended, as far as Tina was concerned. Reminders were certainly not welcome.

  She sat back in her chair, critically surveying the emerging perfection in the mirror. There was one other male possibility on board, that Baron Whatsit, but he and his baroness looked to be pretty tight. Still, if Tina put her mind to it, the baroness would be packing her bags before she knew what hit her, and headed back to … wherever it was she came from. They were both a bit vague about that—she’d asked him when they’d first boarded, and he’d murmured something that sounded vaguely German. Romero had told her he’d met the pair in a casino in Monte Carlo. They’d hit it off, so he’d invited them to join him on the cruise. They were freeloaders, in Tina’s estimation, but Romero was such a sucker for the nobility.

  The baron might do for her needs in a pinch, Tina decided. He had the looks, and a title. Wowzer. And he was about the right age—she was getting a bit tired of this geriatric gig. Romero was sixty, for God’s sake. Yes, the baron was definitely something to keep in mind. Maybe the baroness would fall overboard. That would be nice.

  Or Margot would. That would be equally nice, and more likely to happen, since she was in the bag half the time, anyway.

  There was the sound of a knock followed by a door opening—it was probably Romero, come to collect her for the party. She turned in her chair, kilowatt smile at the ready. Keep him happy, for now.

  But it was only Delphine, the cruise maven or whatever. Apart from leading yoga classes each day, it was difficult to say what Delphine did. From the look of her, all long legs and blond ponytail, she might think she was in the running for Romero’s affections. Fat chance. Tina Calvert alone would decide who her replacement would be.

  “I’m just dropping this off,” Delphine said, placing a small shopping bag on the floor by the vanity. It had a logo on it, a big red L. “As promised. Dinner’s in ten minutes.”

  “I know. I’m just waiting for Romero. It’s funny he’s not here. He’s always on time.” She decided it wouldn’t hurt to remind this little yoga person that long legs or no long legs, Romero was miles out of her league. “For me, anyway, he’s always on time. He can’t stand to be away from me for a minute. It’s endearing, really.” Here, a conspiratorial wink: the women were close in age, both in their early thirties. “Older men can be so needy.”

  “Actually, I wouldn’t wait if I were you,” said Delphine. “I just saw him talking with the chef. They seemed to be in—well, they were having quite a heart-to-heart.” Actually, they looked like they were about to come to blows. The chef was temperamental—artistic, sure, but not in a good way. Sometimes a beautiful creation offset all the chaos from which it emerged, but not in Zaki’s case. He was a highly strung scoundrel, unable to keep his mouth shut—just to name the biggest things wrong with him. Delphine had learned to tiptoe very carefully around Zaki, and to leave him out of the loop wherever possible. “Anyway, Maurice is in the lounge already, having a cocktail. So you’ll have company while you wait. It might be a while.”

  Tina was thinking she was always her own best company. She stared at Delphine with distaste, for Tina didn’t like being upstaged in the “I Know Romero Best” competition. It was a narrow look that would quell most people living at the yoga-instructor level—a look Tina had perfected at the start of her career. “Feisty” was the word reviewers most often used to describe Tina. One treasured review had called her a petite virago—she’d had to look it up, but decided that overall, it had been a compliment.

  Delphine stared straight back, calm and unfazed, smoothing her ponytail over one shoulder. She could have told Tina she’d soon be on her way out of Romero’s revolving door—Delphine had been around long enough to spot the signs. He’d had nearly enough of Tina’s fatuous self-absorption. He’d find a role for Tina and she’d be gone before she knew it.

  But Delphine decided to leave all that to Romero. He was so good at it—so experienced.

  Hiding a smile, Delphine closed the cabin door behind her with a solid click.

  Chapter 5

  WARRIOR POSE

  Delphine moved through the narrow corridor with a ballerina’s grace, shoulders loose, arms floating at her sides like a woman treading water, swanlike as she limbered up the lean muscles of her long frame. Her conversation with Tina was already forgotten; Delphine had much bigger things to occupy her mind than that decorative nincompoop. She wondered if she’d have time for a few yoga poses before dinner. It wouldn’t matter if she were a bit late to the party; she was a strange hybrid of guest and employee, only there to make sure everyone had a good time, maybe flirt a bit with the male guests. Get them talking about their jobs and accomplishments, and most men were putty in her hands. The problem was she rarely drank—she had an athlete’s fear of taking on anything that might affect her focus, form, and concentration—and that made the cocktail chatter a bit of a chore. Certainly she didn’t do drugs, either, although she couldn’t say the same for everyone on board. Some of her early upbringing had stuck with her and she knew that people who got sucked into using drugs were lost souls, sometimes lost for good, and she wasn’t about to join their ranks. If they were dumb enough to use, that was their lookout.

  Now she lifted her arms over her head and twisted her upper torso from side to side, working off the tensions of the day. If the narrow passage had allowed for it she would have done a few sidekicks or spun like a whirling dervish—she had spent some time in Turkey two years before and had studied this form of active meditation. Oddly, she had come to believe the frenzied practice had something in common with the quieter discipline of yoga.

  Delphine was a woman constantly in motion, never still; she loved stretching her long torso and limbs into poses that would defeat even some of the masters of the art. She was competitive by nature and saw no irony in wanting to be the best at yoga as she once had been the best in dance at her New Hampshire high school. She had grown too tall for the career in ballet she’d been aiming for, but with yoga there were no limits except the limits the mind imposed.

  Delphine had been feeling lately that life really was good. This “cruise director” job aboard the Calypso Facto was more like a permanent holiday, and the minor irritants of putting up with people like Tina and Zaki were offset by the financial rewards. Besides, she had already decided she would not work with Zaki again; he would just have to go. She would figure out a way, but she had to be careful that Zaki not suspect she was behind his downfall. For Zaki was all about revenge. Such bad karma, that.

  As for Tina, that was surely just a matter of waiting. She was yesterday’s news and too thick to notice her boredom with Romero was mutual.

  When Romero had first offered Delphine the job she had thought it would be a matter of weeks, a temporary gig that allowed her to see a bit more of the world. But it had been many months now; she was in no rush to leave, and Romero seemed reluctant for her to go. She knew he had a hidden agenda in asking her aboard but she had soon put him straight on that score. She had told him her heart belonged to Dennis back home and as soon as she’d seen some of the world and built up her nest egg
she would go home and marry him. A bit to her surprise, the famously temperamental Lothario had backed off and was now as tame as a housecat with her. He’d told her she reminded him of his daughter back in California, and he’d now adopted this sort of fatherly attitude toward her. She had quickly seen the advantages of the job and was set to exploit the situation to the full.

  The sail up the French Atlantic coast had offered some of the most stunning views she’d ever seen in her life. The rocky coast of Brittany and the cliffs of Normandy had rendered her speechless. Her grandfather had taken part in the famous invasion, and while his war stories used to bore her silly, seeing those cliffs she’d felt a thrill of pride and kinship. Her grandfather had been brave, physically and mentally fearless. The mission had been crazy but he’d not backed down; he had not run away. He’d been reckless and bold, ignoring the risks. Just like his granddaughter. Later on, when he’d returned home … well, he might have taken a few shortcuts then, and he’d had one or two run-ins with the law, but risk-taking was just part of his nature. Go big or go home—for sure, that is what life was about. Her parents in contrast had been all about playing it safe. That was not Delphine’s style at all.

  It was funny how people, once they knew you were into yoga, assumed you were all about world peace and mindfulness. But the sheer physicality of it is what she loved; the mindfulness part was a bonus. Another word for it was simply “focus,” and that she’d begun to perfect in ballet. That razor-sharp focus that did not allow for mistakes.

  She turned the key in the lock of her cabin. The simplicity of life aboard ship also appealed to her: there was no room for excess baggage, physical or mental. She opened her closet and began sorting through the few dresses she had brought with her. She was dying to wear the new green sequined number, but it would be too much for tonight. Besides, she was saving that for the party to be held at the hotel where they would soon be docking—some sort of film premiere celebration. She took a basic black dress off its hanger instead, and took out the pearls and matching earrings that had been her grandmother’s. Dennis said the outfit made her look like the proverbial pint of Guinness—a tall blonde in a black dress.

  Dennis was so sweet. But Delphine wasn’t sure Dennis was for the long term. She had made him sound more important in her life than he was: just a little white lie she’d told Romero, with a few embellishments.

  Delphine was in complete control of her destiny, pulling all the strings. A free agent.

  Talk about mindfulness. She could beat anyone at that game.

  Chapter 6

  MAURICE

  The lounge of the yacht, like everything else about the floating palace that was the Calypso Facto, called to mind something Cleopatra might have designed. Or perhaps Imelda Marcos was a better, modern-day comparison, for Romero Farnier’s yacht was the equivalent of—what was it, over a thousand pairs of shoes? Whatever. Too many shoes.

  Maurice Brandon looked about him, drinking in the golden splendor along with his single-malt scotch, for Romero was a generous host, and no expense was being spared to keep his guests happy. The room was padded and gilded and tufted to within an inch of its life, and had about it the general air of a room in a French bordello cast adrift on the high seas.

  It was also a bit like the Titanic, now he came to think of it, a ship that was a floating temptation to the gods if ever one there were. They were miles from any icebergs but the English Channel was sort of like the high seas as far as Maurice was concerned. He was not a sailor and never would adapt to life lived at a rolling pitch. Still, he could only wonder at the star that had led him, little Maurie Baumgarten, out of Central Los Angeles to Hollywood to where he stood now, inured to the ceaseless glamour of his surroundings. If anything, he was finding incessant glamour and glitz to be the norm—absurdly, he found himself fussing if someone forgot to bring him the right sort of fish fork.

  It was a very long way from the walkup apartment he’d shared with his mother and younger brother decades earlier. The place had overlooked an alleyway behind a diner, its red brick growing blacker with the years, its trash cans more pungent, and the fights in its alley more lethal as they became more drug-fueled. The first thing he’d done when he’d started to earn serious money was move his mother out of there to a decent little place in Encino with a front yard and a patch of garden in the back. Over her protests, as it turned out. After a year she announced she missed the noisy old tenement, smells and dealers and all. Go figure. She’d died a month after making this late-night confession to him, before he’d had time to do anything about it. She’d been found in her garden among the plants she kept forgetting to water, managing to make him feel he’d hastened her death by organizing for her this sudden, shocking brush with the bourgeoisie.

  It was yet another item to chuck under the “no good deed goes unpunished” category, he thought now. Maurice was a meddler and he knew it, but his intentions always were the best. Moving his mother had resulted in much the same emotional snarl as he’d created trying to help Margot, back in the days when they were both young and salad green. He was one of those people who never seemed to learn. His diary entries could attest to that.

  He looked out the curved window spanning the front of the ship. That village in the distance, Monkslip-super-Mare, looked so spooky in the gloom of the fading light. There was, he decided, a rather eerie element shrouding this entire trip. That he and Margot should once again be thrust into close proximity, where he could observe her making the same old mistakes she’d always made, most of them involving men. Correction: all of them involving men.

  Maurice adjusted his dark-framed glasses, and out of habit his hand went up to smooth back his hair. He kept forgetting that his head was now as bald as an ostrich egg: he shaved it each morning, the same as his chin whiskers. As he’d gotten balder, shaving was the only way to avoid succumbing to the temptations of the dreaded comb-over, but fortunately the naked egg look was all the rage now among many men of a certain age. Among fashionable men at any age, he assured himself.

  He twisted the wedding ring on his left hand, missing his partner. Perhaps the new hairstyle, a bow to the inevitable, had brought him luck in love at last. He wished himself at home, bustling about, preparing healthy gourmet meals, instead of here dancing to Romero Farnier’s tune and eating far too much rich food, far too many desserts, and allowing himself just that one extra glass of wine at dinner. The on-board chef, Zaki, had too heavy a hand with the butter knife and cream pitcher to suit Maurice’s taste. But the job as stylist on Romero’s next film meant an influx of serious cash, which was just what was needed to keep the newlyweds afloat. He’d been tempted out of retirement because he’d paid too much for the new house in Nichols Canyon—showing off for his partner, wanting to spoil him rotten. Frank deserved it.

  He walked over to refresh his glass at the drinks table set out in anticipation of the dinner party. Really more of a heavy–hors d’oeuvres cocktail party: Romero had decided he wanted the guests to mingle and get to know one another better at last, and a sit-down dinner precluded that. If they didn’t know each other by now, Maurice reflected, after being confined to the ship for so long, they never would. Maurice never drank to excess, although right about now seemed a good time to start.

  He had a feeling about the evening. He would say this later only to Frank, because anyone else would write it off as after-the-fact self-aggrandizement (“See? I told you I was psychic!”). From the standpoint of officialdom, it would come across as foreknowledge of a crime, of premeditation; it would be impossible to explain that his feelings were just and only that—feelings. And to the best of his knowledge, unless he was completely losing his mind, he wasn’t planning any crimes at the moment.

  But the atmosphere was there, dark, dank, and menacing, and as difficult as his sense of dread and foreboding would be to explain to logical, practical, literal-minded people (which, it was to be hoped, policemen were), it was as real and enveloping as the fog that was creep
ing its way onto the deck of the yacht, muffling footsteps and masking faces and hiding intentions. Maurice, usually imperturbable, felt disturbed, uneasy in his skin, on edge with a free-floating anxiety he had come to recognize as a precursor of doom—or at the least, of a very bad day. He had felt the same way the day his mother died. Too late, he had gone to visit her, not calling ahead as he normally would have done. There was a sense propelling him, a sense that told him a phone call would be pointless, as she could not answer.

  How he had known that with such certainty he never could explain, even to himself. He had found her murdered in the back garden, the victim of a failed robbery or home invasion in the safe little sanctuary he’d bought for her. If she’d stayed in her slummy walkup, she’d be alive today.

  He often wondered if he’d inherited his sixth sense from her. She didn’t like her new home, but she’d never really been able to explain why. Had she simply been reacting subconsciously to the danger she could feel coming?

  Now the same dread he’d been feeling had to do with Margot’s presence on this luxury floating tub, and that was as close as he could get to pinning down the source of his mood. Margot was always trouble, she had always brought trouble with her; trouble was like something she carried in a bottle in her makeup bag, alongside her perfumes and eyelash curler.

  He decided to go and have a talk with her. If nothing else, he could warn her to be careful. Not that she would listen, but at least he would have tried. He had failed to save his mother because he hadn’t acted quickly on his premonition. Might he not now be given a second chance to make things right?