The curtain was hanging very still. I said, my breath short, “You didn’t keep your part of the bargain!”
The ruler was lying there on the floor. “Oh, I’m keeping it,” she said, and her hand reached for it and picked it up.
A bowl of fruit in a silver basket shone in the light from the nightstand. “Oh, hell, Inky. You’re not cooperating at all! You’re just a punctured balloon.”
My hand was dangling down toward the floor. “Teenie, please go to bed.”
The bong was sitting on the table. Her fingers applied a lighted match to it. “Just another puff or two, Inky, and I’ll be able to finish it and complete my bargain.”
The ship’s wake hissed as it purled by. “Oh, Inky, aaaaaaahhhhhh!” came Teenie’s shuddering moan.
She was in my bathroom, combing her ponytail at my mirror. “Aren’t I being a good girl these days, Inky? I’m not even scratching your face the way I used to.” She admired herself in the glass. “And I’m putting on some fat now that I’m not eating out of garbage cans.” She was fixing the rubber band around her ponytail. “I don’t even bruise you anymore. You should appreciate me, Inky.”
I yelled at the ceiling, “(Bleep) you! GO TO BED!”
The basket of fruit, minus half its contents, gleamed in the dim light. “Oh, Inky!” she said reprovingly. “Strictly dishrag again.”
The bong teetered on the side table. Her hand steadied it and, with the other, she applied a match. “Well, I can remedy that! Just a couple more puffs, Inky, and then I can apply the ruler and go to bed.”
A horizontal beam of sunlight coming in through the port pried at my eyelids. I woke with a start.
The bedside clock said 7:00 AM!
Teenie’s head on the other pillow didn’t move. Lying on her side, turned away from me, she was sleeping with a smile upon her lips.
I shook her shoulder savagely. “Wake up, (bleep) you!”
She turned her head in my direction. An oversize grin sprang to her oversize lips.
“Oh, you (bleep)!” I snarled.
The sun was doing a crazy circle just above the horizon.
The bowl of fruit exploded.
Her hand picked up her robe and ruler from the floor.
“Inky, how can a girl keep a bargain like that when you just keep attacking her?”
She gave her ponytail a fluff. “I would have completed the measurements and gone to bed but you just never gave me a chance.”
Her hand was upon the door handle to her room. “Now I will never know if whales have the correct proportions.” She passed through and slammed the door.
“Have a nice sleep?” the steward said a few minutes later as he opened all the ports and began to air the marijuana smoke out of the room, a thing he had to do each morning.
I had a bath and breakfast and in no good mood went topside. Madison was by himself in the squash court, batting one of these balls that come back on a rubber band. The very sight of him made me furious.
The sports director had not come up to tear my muscles and limbs apart yet. I stalked over to Madison.
He looked fresh and handsome, a very collar-ad of a man, the kind girls are supposed to pant after and scream about. Teenie, liar that she was, had obviously been maligning him.
“Why don’t you do something about Teenie!” I snarled.
He looked at me with those sincere and honest brown eyes of his. “But I do do something about Teenie. I race with her with her new bikes against a miniature car. She’s even tried to teach me how to skateboard and I have a scraped knee to prove it. I swim with her. I dance with her and try to show her the latest steps. I resent your implications, Smith I’m doing all I can to bring her up and help you make a lady out of her.”
“You know (bleeped) well what I mean,” I grated. “Madison, are you a mother lover?”
“Smith, time after time I have noticed that you have no real idea of PR.”
“Jesus, Madison,” I said, “Don’t try to change the subject on me.”
“I’m not changing the subject. It just proves that you are ignorant of the whole field. I’ll have you know that the whole popularity of Sigmund Freud came about because he married into a New York advertising firm.”
“Good Christ, Madison! What does that have to do with it?”
“It has everything to do with it,” said Madison. “The whole fields of advertising and PR would be helpless if it were not for Sigmund Freud. If I went against his teachings, I could be thrown completely out of the field—excommunicated!”
“I can understand that,” I said. “I myself have every reverence for Sigmund Freud. But I cannot possibly see—”
“Smith, once again, I have to point out that you are NOT a professional PR man. If it got out in the field that I was not following the orders of a Freudian psychoanalyst, I would be absolutely ruined—financially, socially and in every other way.”
“Madison . . .”
“Smith,” he said, “I am not being fair to you, ignorant as you are. I was very well brought up. My mother is quite wealthy and the children of the rich, you know, must all be psychoanalyzed. It is a caste mark, so to speak. When I was five, I had nightmares. My analyst prescribed that I must sleep with my mother. This was many years before my father committed suicide, so that has nothing to do with it. I am simply carrying out the accepted prescription.”
“You mean you make love to your mother?” I said, aghast.
“Tut, tut,” said Madison. “All little boys love their mothers. The psychoanalyst was simply prescribing what was natural.”
He had conned me clear off the subject! “(Bleep) it, Madison! We’re talking about Teenie. Are you or are you not going to start making love to her and get her the hells off my hands? Don’t tell me that you’re allergic to sex with girls!”
He looked at me. The paddle fell out of his fingers. His jaw dropped. “Girls? Sex with girls? Oh, good heavens, Smith, that’s obscene!” He went pale green. He staggered to the rail.
The sports director, when he came up to torture me, gave Madison a Dramamine and sent him below to his bunk. “I can’t understand it,” he said. “Flat calm sea, the ship stabilized like a billiard table and I have a seasick passenger throwing up his boots. Shows you what a mental problem can do. That fellow needs to be psychoanalyzed.”
“He has been,” I said bitterly, “that’s the trouble.” And I settled down to hours on exercise machines to get rid of the pot.
PART FIFTY-SIX
Chapter 6
It was the twelfth day out of Bermuda when we sighted the low sand coast, the white mosques and hills of Casablanca. For the last day or so we had seen the occasional ship north- and southbound on the frequented routes. The sea had become somewhat more choppy and I was very happy of the chance to get ashore.
We were piloted and tugged to a fuel dock and I looked around. What on Earth were we doing here? The name might sound romantic but Casablanca looked awfully dirty and threadbare to me.
Madison was up and at it promptly. “I’ve got to study this king,” he said. “He sounds like a real first-grade outlaw. His name is Hussan-Hussan. When his father got independence from the French, they say Hussan-Hussan murdered him. He also murdered the man who had effected the real revolution and took the credit. He is held in power by the United States and he banks all the mineral receipts of the country in Switzerland in his own name. He keeps the majority of the population, who are Berbers, in total repression and perpetuates the minority rule by the Arabs with violence and force. He’s worse many times over than South Africa in racial subjugation and yet he gets away with it all. I’ve read all I can find in our library. Now I’ve got to find if he is a true outlaw and, if he is, study his approaches. So I’m going to be quite busy.”
He grabbed a taxi and was gone.
Teenie trotted down the gangway dressed in ponytail, sandals and shorts. A dock policeman sent her back to get a bra. She trotted down again and she was gone.
I w
andered up and down the pier. The town certainly didn’t look very inviting. Dust and Arabs with dust on them whining and begging through the dust. They were trying to sell me anything from donkeys to their sisters.
We were finished fueling and moved to another dock. It was just as dirty as the first. Arabs hopefully spread their wares on the pier, thinking we were a cruise liner. When nobody came off to be robbed, they spotted me sitting in a deck chair and shook their fists and went away.
I wondered where Charles Boyer was. Or maybe Humphrey Bogart. It didn’t look like the kind of place either one would frequent.
Suddenly a cab came tearing along the railroad rails on the pier. It braked to a halt. Teenie leaped out. She came tearing up the gangway and dashed into the ship. She went tearing up the ladder to the bridge and then shortly came tearing down.
She saw me. She was holding a yellow card.
“Oh, Inky!” she said “The nicest thing has happened. I had to come back to tell you. I am flying down to Marrakech. I also had to get a landing card as a sailor because I don’t have any passport.”
“Where,” I said, “is Marrakech?”
“It’s only about 140 miles to the south and in the interior. And they have beautiful scenery and cloth and camels and everything. Real sheiks. I’m going in a special plane and will be back tomorrow morning.”
“Hey!” I said. “You can’t go traveling in the desert in sandals and shorts! At least pack a grip!”
But she was running down the gangway. She wasn’t even carrying a purse! Well, great, I told myself. At least this is one night I’ll have some rest instead of exercise.
Then suddenly I looked at the cab. The shadow in it? Yes, it was the black-jowled man from Bermuda! What the hells was this? How did he get here?
Teenie got in and the black-jowled man closed the door and off the cab sped.
I went over to town and ate something called cous-cous, which consisted of balls of some cereal. Pretty tasteless, even though it was the national dish. The Turks should have taught these Arabs how to cook.
Madison dragged aboard about ten, all disillusioned. He found me in the salon listening to something besides Neo Punk Rock.
“He’s not a real outlaw,” said Madison. “He doesn’t take from the rich and give to the poor. He takes it from the poor and gives it to himself. He’s just a cheap crook, really. And he’s got lousy PR. Every time I mentioned his name to anybody, they spat at me. Hussan-Hussan isn’t even worth helping. I’m going to bed.”
Shortly, I followed his example. I had a beautiful, untroubled night’s sleep. I woke up early, feeling fine. To make matters even better, the sports director wouldn’t let me run because I’d get too much dust in my lungs.
Teenie didn’t get back in the morning. She showed up around 2:00 PM. A cab drew up and the driver hailed the deck. A couple of sailors went down and started unloading the cab.
There were several baskets. There were many boxes.
A second cab drew up and out stepped Teenie. She had on a red fez with a long tassel. She was wearing a gold-embroidered short jacket over a red silk shirt. She had on scarlet shorts and was wearing scarlet Moroccan leather boots. She had loops and loops of gold chain around her throat.
She leaned into the cab she had just gotten out of and somebody inside handed her a valise.
The black-jowled man!
He glanced upward at the deck of the yacht, saw me and then leaned back. The cab drove away.
Teenie came prancing aboard, counted all the baskets and bales which had now been brought to the deck and then spotted me. She came dancing over, grinning enough to split her face in half.
“Well, how do you like it?” she said to me, turning around.
“Gaudy, to say the least,” I said. “Listen, who the hells is that black-jowled man?”
“Oh, him,” she laughed. “He owns all the airlines that fly in and out of Morocco. He saw the yacht come in and he came over to take me down to Marrakech and get me to go down on him again. He really is crazy about it. He likes to watch the mountains down there while somebody does that to him.”
“And he bought you all these things?” I said, ignoring the fact that this was the second version of who he was. She could never tell the truth.
“Of course,” she said. “All kinds of goodies. You wait. I was thinking of you.”
Good as her word, when I retired that evening, she came waltzing in, in a filmy new negligee and with a box. She opened the box and told me to open my mouth, and into it she popped a green cube of candy, soft like jelly. It was very good.
“Nice, eh,” she said.
I agreed that it was very good candy.
“Have another one,” she said.
I ate a second piece of candy.
She did something very strange. She went back to her room and got a new radio, came back to my bedchamber, put it in the middle of the floor and tuned it in to the local radio station and simply sat there, listening to the singsong, whiny discords that pass for music to Arabs.
“What are you doing?” I said. The music was torturing my ears. She didn’t answer. She was just weaving back and forth to the crazy music. I said, “Well, at least give me another piece of candy.”
That got her. “For Christ’s sake, Inky. You want to kill yourself?” She glanced at her watch. “You’ve got another five minutes until it hits.”
“What hits?” I said, startled.
“Well, why the hell do you think I went to Marrakech? To get hash, that’s what. And all for you.”
“Hash?”
“Hashish, idiot. It’s condensed marijuana. They make the best hashish in the world in the Moroccan mountains. It packs a hell of a wallop. You go eating any more of that candy and you’ll overdose and go into panic. So just be calm, Inky. It takes about an hour to get into a real trip when you eat it, so be patient and listen to this nice music.”
“You (bleepch)!” I started to climb out of bed.
The walls suddenly shot fifty feet away from me. The ceiling went through the floor. I was in 1492 discovering Columbus.
I started to giggle.
“Ah, that’s better,” said Teenie. “Now just watch and I’ll show you a waterfall. Look at the muscles of my belly moving. When I showed them this in a nightclub last night in Marrakech, it got them all so hot I had to go down on the whole orchestra.”
She was fifty feet away, then two feet away. Her voice was a mile away and then right in my ear.
I was giggling insanely. I could not stop.
“Well, I’m certainly happy you’re happy about it,” said Teenie. “That was an awful lot of trouble I went to, but it sure looks like it was worth it. In fact, I’m starting to giggle myself and I only had one piece.”
For three solid hours I was giggling.
The Arab musicians came out of the radio and did a tap dance.
A camel walked in and said “Hello.”
Everything was terribly funny.
Later I was to remember that. Those giggles were a mask for stark tragedy that right that moment stalked. That’s what makes the memory so awful. When later I found out what was really happening, I could not possibly imagine how I had ever laughed about it, even under the influence of hashish!
PART FIFTY-SIX
Chapter 7
When I awoke we were at sea. I wondered where we were going.
“I’m glad you decided to lay off pot,” the steward said as he shaved me. “It’s so much trouble airing out the room.”
Little did he know!
When I left the breakfast salon, I walked up to the bridge. Captain Bitts was sitting in a pilot chair, basking in the morning sun, while a watch officer and steersman handled the ship. I walked all along the bridge, looking at all the instruments and gyros. Words like Fathometer and Repeater 1 and such didn’t mean very much to me. All the chrome and brass and dials added up to confusion.
Bitts rose as I approached. “Where we going?” I said.
; “Don’t you know?” he said, somewhat astonished. “You ordered it about 4:00 AM”
(Bleep) that hashish! “What did I order?”
“Oh,” he said, “you’re running a check on us. Don’t worry, we’re going right where you said.”
I looked at the low, sandy coast to starboard. It was backed by mountains—the Atlas? But it sure didn’t tell me where I was going. It just told me that we were running along a rather strange coast.
Voyage of Vengeance Page 19