Gianni's piloting made me uncomfortable. Cosmina's nuzzling made me uncomfortable. But most unnerving of all was Barney. Too polite to stare at us, he instead bored his gaze into our bench, obviously more interested in Cosmina's antics than the tour. His brow furrowed deeper with each of Cosmina's maddening purrs.
To make the situation even more uncomfortable, we turned into a long, narrow canal. The rain could no longer reach us, so narrow was the canal and so tall the walls. Everything was dark and abandoned: no lights graced any of the buildings, on either side of the canal, far into the distance. Gianni poled along sullenly while the ancient, bleached palaces loomed above us, windows dark and ominous, like the empty eye sockets of a line of skulls.
"I hear you like Romanian girls," Cosmina whispered so close that her breath tickled my neck.
"Where did you hear that?" I asked, surprised.
"Small ship," she said, offering me a sip from her champagne flute.
"Yeah," I said, declining the drink. "Well, I'm done with all that. No more feisty foreign women for me."
"We're not all feisty," she purred.
I tried not to chuckle at the implication that she was anything but feisty. The gondola slipped into nearly total darkness, and all grew quiet. Even Gianni's grumbling ceased as he poled quietly along. The sensory deprivation was nearly complete: no sight, no sound, and feeling only a gentle, floating sway. A hand slid up my thigh and I felt the warmth of lips near my ear. Cosmina asked, "Tell me about living in America."
Four hundred years later—or was it forty minutes?—the gondola slid up to the sidewalk where we began the tour. I almost didn't recognize the area, as it was now more or less deserted. Night had progressed such that locals had begun to dine and tourists had begun to retire. The area was not entirely deserted, however. A very wet and very angry Susie stood ramrod straight and steaming in the rain. Beside her hunched Eddie, arms folded and grumpy, looking more exhausted than ever. He had obviously long since lost any argument over whether or not to remain at the launch.
Gianni remained true to the last, nearly crashing the gondola against the concrete. He hissed with alarm, but fortunately the boat slid sideways to bump instead into a cluster of sunken piles. Even so, I winced in sympathy for the splendid black lacquer. Barney, Faye, and I wasted no time in fleeing the craft, whereas Cosmina seemed in no hurry to leave whatsoever. No doubt Susie's enraged pacing kept her back more than Gianni's spluttering outrage at no gratuity. Just for good measure, Gianni gave me one final harangue at how I exited the craft in a manner not to his liking.
Susie, of course, had not waited for the boat to be secured before hurling her outrage at Cosmina. Fists clenched, she shrieked, "What's wrong with you?!"
I tried to escape along with Barney and Faye, but the sturdy blonde spun on me and let loose another volley. "Don't you run away, you son of a bitch! This is your fault!"
"My fault?" I protested. "How could this be my fault? I got railroaded onto the tour!"
"You promised me that gondola tour!" Susie screeched at Cosmina with a voice curiously similar to nails on a blackboard.
"Well I couldn't exactly boot the second officer, could I?" Cosmina retorted.
With the two hellcats focused on each other, Eddie pulled me back to safety and muttered, "Sorry, dude. She's pretty mad."
"You think?" I grunted, noting the obvious.
"It's not your fault," he consoled. "I'll buy you a beer sometime. Come on, let's head back with Barney and the doctor."
"What, and leave these two arguing?" I asked, incredulous. Susie and Cosmina were literally screaming at each other now. A physical confrontation appeared imminent. The passersby, predominantly Italian at this hour, ignored the fireworks. This was Italy, after all, and Italians were used to creating such scenes themselves. And Eddie, it seemed, was used to leaving them: he was already disappearing around a corner. I hurried after him.
Chapter 5. Corfu, Greece
1
The next morning I did not talk to Cosmina about the fiasco over the gondola. What was the point?
Now it was a new cruise, and my attitude was improving. This was my eighth day on Wind Surf. My head was still spinning from all the different places I'd seen. The list was distinguished, but exhausting: Athens to Santorini to Elba to Corsica to Sicily to Rimini to Venice. Today, Corfu. Tomorrow? How 'bout Malta, just to mix things up? It was just too much to see. Suddenly I envied blind old Gertie. And none of that newness was taking into account a new home with new people and a new job.
My helping Cosmina with organizing her crowds went well. There were many shore excursions for an island so large as Corfu, and Cosmina had her hands full. She was too stressed to cause any drama—unrelated to work, that is. Cosmina thought she was decisive and bold, but really she was just hyperactive while things spun out of control. To be fair, during her panics she did move particularly fast, but it looked exceedingly unprofessional. Jitters do not equate efficiency.
But we soon found our balance, wherein I kept a necessarily relaxed commentary running on the microphone while she buzzed ever faster behind the scenes. After two hours of this, the final batch of guests had been safely placed onto their tour bus and Cosmina could wind down. This meant she could snack on cocktail onions—a decidedly strange daily ritual of hers—and suck down half a pack of cigarettes.
Smoking on Surf was one of the strangest aspects to my new home: crew could smoke in guest areas. Surf was a ship with a different attitude—and no space. The crew mess was so tiny that there was simply no room for people, food, and smoke, so the latter was only allowed after hours for the seamen denied guest access. As there was no crew bar, staff wishing to smoke had to mingle with guests. This applied to drinking, as well. Cosmina's preferred smoking location was at a table under the port steps outside the Compass Rose, the stern lounge open to the sea.
"Join me in port?" Cosmina asked after a loving suck of smoke-tainted air. "I know a great restaurant. Overlooks the sea."
"Sounds nice," I said. "But I can't. I'm going out today with Faye."
"Oh, yes, of course," Cosmina said with obvious contempt. "Ms. America."
"Dr. America," I teasingly corrected. "I know it probably sounds lame, but we're both big James Bond fans. They filmed For Your Eyes Only on Corfu. We thought it would be fun to sightsee with a theme."
"So she claimed," Cosmina said dismissively. She tilted her head to the side to light another cigarette. "She asked if I could arrange a car. Couldn't help her."
"A taxi would probably be better anyway," I said. "A local would know the spots. Faye found a list online."
Cosmina reviewed me and inhaled deeply.
"Uh huh," she finally grunted. "James Bond."
"Yes," I said simply.
"They film in any hotel rooms?" she said, smirking.
"Stop," I implored.
It was obvious Cosmina didn't believe me, but all she said was, "You kids have fun."
2
One of my favorite things about James Bond movies is the alluring beauty contained therein; not just in the particularly exotic and beautiful parts of the world, but more so in the particularly exotic and beautiful parts of the women. It didn't start that way, of course. As a wonder-filled youth I couldn't possibly imagine anything more exciting than a car chase in India, unless it was a boat chase in China. After a few more years I couldn't possibly imagine anything more exciting than a Russian secret agent codenamed XXX, unless it was an airplane pilot named Pussy Galore. Oh, yes, how could any teen not be profoundly struck by Dr. Goodhead, or Ms. Onatopp? In all that suave coolness, my favorite film had always been For Your Eyes Only, even as my favorite Bond girl was its Melina Havelock. A drab name, true, but there was nothing mundane about a French model shooting a crossbow.
Each time I watched it, the film always grew more exciting as it progressed. By the end I was overwhelmed with fantasies of exploring sunken shipwrecks in the Ionian Sea, ski slope assassinations in the Alps, pistach
io nut smugglers, babes galore, and finally an impossible assault of an enclave perched atop thousand-foot rocks in Metéora.
Faye had different memories of the decades-long series, of course, but they were no less important to her. How we discovered each others' love of the films was quite by accident. Her favorite Bond film had always been Moonraker—for some unfathomable reason—a fact discovered during our return to the ship after the gondola debacle. She had spent the day searching for St. Mark's Piazetta and the Venini glassworks, both of which were featured in the film. I had excitedly shared that I had just recently toured the monasteries at Metéora, where they had filmed the climax of For Your Eyes Only. Both of us expressed frustration that our companions had simply not been cool enough to appropriately geek out. But with Corfu the very next day, problem solved! Faye procured a list from the internet containing all the filming locations across the island.
Corfu was about forty miles long and shaped like a giant backwards comma. Because it floated in the Ionian Sea, rather than the Aegean with its bare, rocky islands like Santorini, Corfu was quite lush. In fact, the entire Ionian coast of Greece was excessively green. Trees of olive, fig, and pomegranate were everywhere, as were grapevines. Oodles of kumquats, too. Thus Corfu's beauty nourished more than just the soul.
Faye and I began with a walking tour of the huge Old Fortress that protected Corfu Town from marauders and pirates. To say it was impressive was an understatement: a solid heap of stone, bulky yet lofty, dominating a rocky peninsula that juts into the sea. Over the last dozen centuries the peninsula had lost all semblance of its natural beginning. The first defensive walls and accompanying Byzantine castle came up in about the 8th century. Later the Venetians took over. When the Turks came knocking, the Venetians thought it was time to up their defensive game. This conclusion came rather late, for the Turks had already conquered most of the island—to the tune of whittling Corfu's population of 100,000 down to 10,000.
Thus in the 16th century the Venetian rulers cut a deep chasm into the rock, separating the fortress from the mainland with a deep moat. Centuries later the British—who had by this time pretty much taken over every rock on Earth worth having—shaved the sides of the peninsula and capped them with smooth stone, providing no purchase whatsoever for any would-be ascent from the sea. The Brits abandoned the area in the 1860's, but not before destroying many of the defensive walls, much to the annoyance of the Greeks. But things were peaceful for a while after that, until WWII came and everything was bombed to hell. But even yet the stone monster lives, slumbering, crumbling with age and shaggy with unchecked growth.
Access to the Old Fortress—the nearby New Fortress being an adolescent 400 years old, by the way—was across Europe's second largest square, the Spianada. Faye and I crossed it without recognizing what it was, for it had long since grown into a park riddled with shaded walks and bristling with sculpture. Originally the Spianada had been clear-cut to allow unobstructed access for cannon fire. Ah, the good old days. We crossed the bridge over the long-since dried moat, and entered the complex.
The whole of it was so huge that it took twenty minutes of winding stone steps and walkways just to access the tower at the top. Every step of the way offered breath-taking views of the sparkling Ionian Sea and the mountains of Albania looming across it. Using Faye's list we identified the various locations of the movie filmed there: the harbor house for the Albanian warehouse action sequence, the underground tunnels where the henchman Locque almost ran over Bond in his Mercedes, and finally at the upper stone gate where Bond shot Locque and pushed his car over a cliff into the sea. What surprised me was how little movie moments were so easy to spot: both of us recognized a particularly long and distinctive set of stone steps that actor Roger Moore had run up, Walther PPK locked and loaded.
But we had other sights to see, and soon headed off into the countryside. Our joy was shared by our taxi driver—at first. He puffed up over our comments on his home's natural beauty and positively beamed at our eagerness to see so much of it. But circling the island's airport we were stopped up short by a surprise red light. Our road passed right by the runway, so close that approaching planes would actually collide with passing cars. Hence the red light. The wait was interminably long, a blow from which his enthusiasm was unable to recover.
Next stop was the famed palace called Achilleion. All the casino scenes had been filmed there, which evoked in me mixed feelings. Having lived in Las Vegas, I was not overly keen on seeing any more casinos. But I need not have worried about boredom: the palace was a marvel.
Built by Empress Elisabeth of Bavaria, the palace was designed with Achilles as the theme and heavily laden with world-class paintings and sculptures. Overlooking the lush garden's awe-inspiring beauty was the gargantuan bronze presence of Achilles himself, splendid in his hoplite uniform and standing defiantly with a spear easily twenty feet long. The centerpiece of the gardens was even more impressive, however, with the famed 19th century marble Dying Achilles. Here the fallen warrior lay prone, gripping the arrow in his ankle, anguished face upturned to implore aid from his divine mother. After perhaps an hour, which culminated in a drink at the eastern square where Bond met with the villain Kristatos, we headed onward.
Our taxi took us on a tour to the northwest corner of the island to an area called Paleokastritsa. The road rose ever higher and passed through numerous ancient villages of quiet distinction. Then the land dropped away into a dramatic jumble of coves and jagged cliffs; the sea particularly blue, the land particularly green, the villas particularly lucky.
We descended a narrow, winding road with hairpin turns through forests of robust olive trees. The taxi driver boasted that they were initially planted by the Venetians a millennium ago. The road, he continued, was built to keep pirates away from the villages uphill. Indeed, the road was so freakishly curvaceous—with quintuple S-curves switchbacked so tightly that straightaways were directly above each other like giant steps—that the Bond filmmakers used it for an elaborate car chase scene featuring Melina Havelock's poor little yellow Citroen 2CV. That scene was meant to simulate Spain, but the olive-harvesting extras had clearly been Greeks.
The beaches at the bottom, however, were mesmerizing and worth every caught breath of the descent. Not wanting to let the moment end, we decided to extend it by hopping onto a small tour boat. Half a dozen of us tourists buzzed around the picturesque inlets and coves, even sailing into the open mouths of caverns. We mostly ignored our driver, who droned on about various gimmicky touristic nonsense, such as calling an almost-cave St. Nicholas because tossing something into the water brings bubbles so fine they look like a snowstorm. He caught our attention, however, when he paused beside a cliff face.
"Though you can barely see it," he said. "There is a cavern in this rock. See at the water's edge? The entrance is only ten centimeters above the water—about three inches—but plenty deep. You can swim inside if you want."
"I'm not missing that for the world!" Faye exclaimed, electric blue eyes flashing. She unbuttoned her blouse and it was turn for my eyes to flash. Seeing my look, she defended, "Why not? Nobody knows us here. Nobody's from the Surf."
"We are," a hesitant voice called from the back of the boat. Two wavering hands rose from an elderly couple.
In the act of dropping her shirt onto the seat, Faye looked back in surprise, but then smiled wryly. "My bra's staying on anyway."
"More's the pity," I teased. Eyeing the thin white blouse, I devilishly suggested, “Perhaps keep the blouse and lose the bra?”
Nobody else made any move to join her. The other tourists just reviewed the trim doctor with surprise and, I daresay, not a little envy at her adventurous spirit. My envy was directly solely to her almost criminal lack of body fat.
"Come on," she ordered brusquely. "I'm not missing a chance to swim into an underwater cavern!"
For an instant her waif-like form poised upon the rail; barefoot, black hair swishing over slender shoulders, white bra an
d white capri pants radiant against Native American skin. Then she disappeared with a splash.
Before I knew it I, too, was shirtless and shoeless and stroking through dazzling blue after her. The warm water was immensely comfortable, even in clothing, and tiny bubbles tingled as we slid along beneath. We broke the surface inside the cliff face with a gasp, followed by a laugh of delight.
A neon blue glow in the shape of an eye emanated from the subsurface entrance, startlingly similar to Faye's own bright eyes. The cavern was perhaps twenty feet deep and ten feet wide, with every nook and cranny highly visible through the crystal-clear waters. White stripes wavered across the uneven cavern roof, reflected from below. I was surprised at the fresh smell in the air, reminding me of laundry still damp after detergent. Just outside the cave the air had been tinged with salt and fish. We splashed around a few minutes playfully, then returned to the boat. The driver hauled us up, dripping and flopping like the morning's catch.
On the way back to Corfu Town that afternoon we paused in one of the little gorgeous villages. After some quiet wandering we stopped at a café nuzzled in where the winding streets finally winnowed into nothing. Across from a warm wall of old mortar that had been patched and repatched, painted and repainted over the centuries, was an opening in the cobblestoned road. It was too small to be a square, but rather a swelling of open space dwarfed by neighbor buildings bristling with rickety balconies of whitewashed wood probably older than the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. Three tables were shaded comfortably by a cream-colored awning and a thick habitation of grapevines. One would presume there were more tables inside the stone structure—especially considering each was graced with placards numbered 12, 13, and 14—but one would be wrong. Inside was only a tiny kitchen.
High Seas Drifter (Cruise Confidential 4) Page 7
