At the top she was very intent. It was a brilliantly clear day and she stood with the high velocity, smoke-tinged wind whipping at her ponytail and, with Madison’s help and a map, spotted the Italian mainland to the northeast, spotted Malta to the south and then a dim haze which might have been Tunisia to the southwest. She tried in vain to see Corsica. She stared to the east and squinted her eyes hard trying to see Greece. And then cupped them, squinting, trying to see Turkey. But, of course, even from ten thousand feet, they were under the horizon, Greece being over three hundred and Turkey over six hundred miles away.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a (bleepch),” she said. “Old Bittie wasn’t lying. The world is round after all!”
All the way down through the lava flows, down through the beech forests, down across the vineyards and back to Catania, she kept marveling about it. “Why don’t we fall off?” she said. “What if we skidded or something? How come the water doesn’t run out of the ocean?”
Madison tried to explain gravity to her by holding up a couple of oranges as we bounced along. She held the oranges. She even made the driver stop the car. But she couldn’t get the oranges to snap together the way Madison had said. She thought he was lying.
We made the ninety miles back to Palermo in time for a late dinner aboard and you would have thought it would have left its mark on her. It didn’t. She explained to me that hash oil cured anything and that is the last I remembered.
The next morning at breakfast she unfortunately found the town, Corleone, just south of us. “Hey,” she said, “isn’t there a Corleone mob?”
I flinched visibly.
Madison assured her that there was indeed a Corleone mob. They controlled the unions and shipping lines and every US port, gambling and prostitution, and if it wasn’t for them, Faustino “The Noose” Narcotici, capo di tutti capi, would be a happy man indeed. The Corleones were death on drugs.
“Prostitution?” said Teenie. “I didn’t know there was a whore’s union. Hey, Inky, how does this fit in with your white slavery racket? Do you have a closed shop or don’t you?”
“The Corleones,” I said stiffly, “are people you leave very much alone.”
“Hey,” she said, “that sounds dangerous. Maybe we better get the hell out of here while we still have our scalps. Where is your list, Maddie? We better get them screws churning.”
She got the list and promptly marched off to the ship library. The sports director wouldn’t take my word for it that I hadn’t had any pot last night and he worked me until my muscles screamed.
Despite all the warnings and urgency at breakfast, when I left the gym and came to lunch, we were still in Palermo and there was no sign of Teenie at the table.
“She went ashore about nine,” the chief steward said. “She was wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with no lenses in them and said she was going to the University of Palermo. Her fiancé went with her.”
I dawdled through the afternoon. We still lay in port. I didn’t want to go ashore: this talk about Corleones had made me a bit nervous.
I looked at the viewers. Heller was busy taking examinations at Empire University. Maliciously, I thought that if Teenie was so suddenly interested in universities, maybe she should be sicced on to him. Longingly I fingered the two-way-response radio. I just couldn’t figure out how to get Teenie back to New York without my being later hit for rape of a minor.
The Countess Krak had both Balmor and Bang-Bang in tow, still looking for a graduation present. She went into a store and, for a bit, my attention lagged. Then suddenly I found myself staring at a handful of rifle shells!
“Yes, ma’am,” came a clerk’s voice. “Those are Holland and Holland .375 Magnum cartridges.”
“They knock an elephant flat,” said Bang-Bang. “One boom, one dead elephant.”
“I was thinking of other game,” said the Countess Krak.
Any lethargy I felt up to that instant congealed into panic.
Those huge, gleaming brass cases with their lethal slugs had only one message for me.
POW! POW!
I almost shrieked. Then I realized that it was a knock on the door. Sanity returned.
I was only too glad to shut down the volume and throw a hasty blanket over the viewers.
“Miss Teenie is back,” came the chief steward’s voice. “And I think she needs your help.”
I hastily left. Anything to get away from those deadly viewers.
She and Madison were in the library. Her unlensed glasses askew, Teenie pointed at a tower of books Madison had worn himself out carrying.
“Those (bleeped) professors,” Teenie said, “are supposed to be so educated and half of them don’t even speak English. We had to buy those at a bookstore. They got plenty of pictures but I didn’t notice until we were halfway back to the ship that they’re all in Italian! So it’s up to you, Inky. You’re the only one that can sling the spaghetti around. Start translating.” She sank into a chair and began to inhale the cream soda that a steward brought, reducing the bottle tide at an alarming rate. “Whew!” she said. “It’s good to wash the catacombs out of my throat.”
“We stopped by the catacombs on the way to the university,” Madison said. “They have the corpse of an American consul there who knew Garibaldi.”
“Corpses, corpses, corpses,” said Teenie. “Jesus, they even got them hanging from pegs on the wall! Cold and rattly. Corpses all around staring at you with sightless eyes.”
I chilled.
“But get on with the translation, research staff,” said Teenie. “Start winding that spaghetti around so it spells Brooklyn.”
The top one was a volume of the history of the Corleone family! Timidly, I opened it and found myself staring at a photograph of “Holy Joe.” Shades of Silva! Yes, there was the date of his assassination! Yikes! There was a photo of Silva!
I put the book quickly aside. I picked up the next. It had a flashy cover, a bust head in a helmet.
“Now, that’s the one we’re interested in,” said Teenie. “Alexander the Great.”
“Quite an outlaw,” said Madison. “His mother, Olympia, poisoned his father, naturally, and the boy went on to rape the whole known world. He had a psychoanalytic problem but, no matter, he was one of the greatest outlaws of all time. Just a barbarian from Macedonia and he could do all that.”
“You already know about him,” I said.
“No, no,” said Teenie. “We haven’t dug into his private life at all. We haven’t any idea how he got such good PR when he was such a bum. Crazy, too. Thought he was a god. But we need a few more details and then we’ll be able to split for Macedonia.”
“Wait,” I said. “That’s awfully close to Turkey. If the Turks get their hands on me, I’ll be shish kebab.”
“That’s why we got the books on the bottom,” said Teenie. “When we finish with Alexander, we can go look into ‘Chinese’ Gordon.”
“To China?” I said.
“No, no, Inky. Jesus, are you ignorant. ‘Chinese’ Gordon made his last stand in Egypt. And you can see right there on that globe that you can go from Macedonia to Egypt without hitting Turkey. I’m looking forward to riding a camel up the pyramids anyway. So start chewing alphabet about Alexander so we can get out of this place. A tough-looking Mafia type was asking after you on the dock and we don’t want to have to stick you in those catacombs with all those dead eyes staring at you for the rest of eternity.”
We sailed just as soon as we could get a pilot and tug.
That evening, as we headed for the Strait of Messina that separates Sicily from Italy, I was not waiting up to see the whirlpools that had almost sunk Ulysses. I was in my bedchamber and the record player was going full blast.
Teenie was sharing a joint and weaving to the throb of a new record she had bought. She was giggling. The heavy-rhythmed song went:
Go on home!
To bed.
Go on home!
To bed.
To me.
&
nbsp; Go on home!
To bed.
To me.
To Oh, Boy!
Push it home!
To me.
To Oh, Boy!
Push it home.
Stupid (bleep) that I was, I thought she was giggling because she was high on pot!
PART FIFTY-EIGHT
Chapter 1
In a leisurely way, through deceptively calm seas, I was being sailed onward to my doom.
Fate is sometimes like a headsman who is in no hurry: he gets the victim on the platform, adjusts the condemned man’s neck just so, artistically hones his axe and sends an assistant off for a mug of beer so he can enjoy the scenery and gloat before he delivers the sizzling swoosh that will sever forever the desirable connection between skull and torso.
There is no doubt that the scenery was beautiful. We rounded the bottom end of Greece, passing through the Cyclades into the legendary Aegean Sea. The azure waters were lapped by the cooling breezes of late spring; the white cotton-puff clouds rose in majesty above the fabled isles of song and story. The white yacht drew a gentle wake but it was a fatal mark in my history.
Over to the east of us lay Turkey, but it was farther than a hundred miles and out of sight—and, unfortunately, out of mind for me. Our course lay between the two continents of Europe and Asia. As I was well-oiled on pot at night and distracted by exercise all day, Asia, where catastrophe awaited, might as well have been on another planet.
Four cruising days were consumed, days like drops of lifeblood running out unseen. I had found that the yacht, at low speeds, did not bob around at all even in a moderate sea and Bitts was nothing loath to drink beer in his pilot chair and yarn with his watch officers about Jason and the Golden Fleece and experiences they themselves had had with girls and ouzo on one or another island that we passed. Teenie herself seemed to find this very educational, for she was up there two or three times a day.
I gave attention to my own duty. Every day I checked up on Heller and Krak. There was seven hours’ time difference now and it was three or four in the afternoon aboard the yacht before they were very active in the morning in New York.
Only once did I hear a mention of the yacht. They were at breakfast in their condo sunshine room because it was pouring rain outside.
“I’m sorry you lost the ship,” said Heller. “It was very nice.”
“The Turkish navy had more use for it than I did,” said the Countess. “You’ve been cured completely of your silliness about other women and I have no slightest idea of ever running away from you again. Besides, we’re finishing up here very swiftly and we’ll be going home in no time at all. So, who needs it?”
I did. Without it, I would be in the clutches of Turkish authorities at best or full of holes from Nurse Bildirjin’s father’s shotgun at worst. Little did I know how much worse it was going to get.
Macedonia, where Alexander’s father, Philip, had ruled, is at the north end of Greece. We sailed into the Gulf of Salonika with Mount Olympus, home of the Greek gods, rising in snowcapped majesty to our port. We threaded our way through the fishing craft off the city of Katerini and, turning northeastward, sailed gracefully into Thessalonica, the second major port of Greece.
They found us a nice, clean berth, bombarded us with welcomes, and Teenie and Madison rolled up their sleeves to hunt down the haunts of Alexander the Great.
They pushed me into accompanying them and in a wheezing car, left over from World War II, we rattled off to the site of Philip’s capital, Pella, twenty-four miles northwest of the modern city.
The archaeologists had been busy and that was all I could say for it. In an otherwise pastoral scene, they had laid bare foundations and several floors. I will admit the floors of the former residences were interesting: in later homes on Earth, you find paintings on the walls but in the time of Alexander the Great, they put the pictures on the floors! They were pebble mosaic, many-hued, heads of lions, scenes of the hunt and they WALKED ON THEM!
I right away told Teenie and Madison that this was very significant psychologically. It was obvious to me. I tried to explain it to them. “Greek gods,” I said, “dwell in the sky. Now, you can get the idea of baby Alexander trotting around here in his diapers and he sees all these Earth scenes under his feet, so of course, he thinks he’s a god in the sky. Simple. An obvious case of spacio-psychological mispositioning of the medulla oblongata, leaving him with no option but to conquer the world.”
They didn’t get it.
“That doesn’t explain why his mother poisoned his father,” said Teenie, working a camera she had mysteriously acquired and framing a shot of a particularly silly-looking lioness who was busy chomping a luckless man and laughing about it.
“Well, that’s just it,” I said. “I’ve been reading these books and she didn’t. Philip was assassinated by a young man who thought he had suffered injustice at Philip’s hands. I gave it to you in the notes I made for you, Madison.”
“Oh, I read them,” said Madison. “It’s just more natural that Olympia would poison her husband. Besides, it makes better headlines. I can see it now in the Athens Times: 18-point quote Outraged Queen Slips Hubby Arsenic unquote.”
“It isn’t factual,” I protested.
“Factual?” said Madison, sweeping his hand to indicate the ruins of the ancient city, “what does FACT have to do with it? Alexander was ninety-nine percent a PR creation. The legends of his life have almost nothing to do with fact. He was one of the most romanced-about outlaws in history. PRs, according to your own notes from those very books, were sweating for centuries to dream up new copy about Alexander. And as for the poison story, even that is too close to the truth to make good newsprint. She had plenty of reason.”
“Oh, come now,” I said.
“Open your books!” said Madison. “Every time Philip turned around he was marrying some new woman. He practically had bedsores from so many nuptial couches. And when he finally married a skirt named Cleopatra—not the Egyptian one—his wife Olympia got fed up, grabbed Alexander, jumped into her chariot and left the kingdom in a cloud of horse biscuits. One marriage too many. A man that marries at all should be in a padded cell and a man that commits bigamy ought to be tied down and tortured by the most fiendish psychiatrist available.”
It spoiled my day. I went over and sat down under an olive tree. He had expressed my own beliefs and plights altogether too well.
It was right at that moment that the true significance of the threat in Turkey hit home. I was already married twice in New York.
The thought of marrying another in Turkey was more than I could bear and when I remembered that Nurse Bildirjin was a sadist who put her knees into chests while a patient’s skull was being drilled, I began to shudder. And when the fact that she was also underage wriggled into my mental torture scene, I began to be quite ill.
When we returned to the ship for lunch, I ate very little and begged off from further excursions in the afternoon. They left without me.
Slumped in the owner’s salon, I was not cheered the slightest bit to hear from the lips of the small, bald-headed Mr. Twaddle, the Assistant Dean of Students at Empire, that Heller had passed all his examinations with flying colors.
“Wister,” said Twaddle, standing up and removing his pipe, “I posted a notice to see you personally because I am utterly astounded! You are very close to a first ever. One hundred percent across the boards in a vast array of subjects. It’s really quite astounding what we at Empire can do with a student. I look at these grades from that military college and compare it to these grades for your senior year here and it’s hard to believe my eyes. What a diligent student! Goodness gracious, how you have reformed! Shows what constant application in class will do under our superlative faculty. And amazing, you never missed a single day in attendance.”
“I find it somewhat astonishing myself,” said Heller. The dog! He’d never set foot in those classrooms after the first few days! That Izzy had arranged it all!
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br /> “So that puts your class average at the top as well. So I am pleased to tell you, and wanted to do so personally, that you are graduating as a Bachelor of Nuclear Science and Engineering next week, Magna Come Laude.”
“I appreciate it,” said Heller.
“Oh, don’t thank me. There’s another note here from Miss Simmons. She’s usually an absolute tiger on students. Hard to understand. She’s the one who called it to the attention of the faculty that you should be given the highest possible honors. Here’s her note. She says, ‘I am eternally grateful to this student for the way he has promoted relations between my students and myself. Without what he has done, it would be a joyless world.’ She even made a speech at faculty meeting, telling them she had never been more satisfied.”
Voyage of Vengeance Page 24