“A cover-up.”
“Bigger, a Royalgate. There was a message in that macabre presentation Howler created at Westminster.”
“A man in Tudor-era dress with a woman’s head on his lap.”
“But not just any man, but bloody old Henry VIII, the wife killer himself. Shortly before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Henry VII beat Richard III and became the first of the House of Tudor to reign. He was followed by his son Henry VIII, who sired the great Elizabeth I. He repaid Elizabeth’s mother for not giving him a future king by having her head chopped off.”
“Obviously, you think the message is that the Prince of Wales was going to be a wife killer, too. Tell me some more about the display at the Abbey.”
“I found out from Tussauds that the costume Howler ripped off was designed for Henry VIII. Add the woman’s head on bloody old Henry’s lap, and you have Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard. Henry was a brutal bastard, nuttier than a Christmas cake. He fell in love with Anne Boleyn when she was just twenty. He divorced his wife and cut England off from the Catholic Church when the pope refused to grant an annulment from the wife. Not that it did Anne much good—Henry soon bored of her, threw her in the Tower on trumped-up charges, and had her head chopped off.”
“What were the charges?”
“Witchcraft, adultery, and incest with her brother. It’s all pretty well documented that they were contrived by Henry to get rid of her. She lost her head when she was less than thirty, but she has a connection to two world-shattering events—a Church of England separate from the church in Rome, and birthing a daughter, Elizabeth, who would one day lead England to greatness.
“He was especially cruel to Anne because the charges were false. He also had his wife Catherine Howard beheaded. That was a bit unfair, too. She was accused of adultery, but it’s probable that her love affairs occurred before she married Henry. She did compound her error, though, by appointing a former lover as her personal secretary. Along with his wives, he had the heads of a bunch of others separated from their bodies.”
She said, “Henry was a real charmer. By today’s standards, he would probably qualify as a serial killer.”
“You can bet today’s Royals have wet dreams about the good old days when kings could get rid of troublesome wives and dissenters with a wave of their hand.”
“The problem with your friend Howler’s art piece, Henry holding the head of one of his wives in his lap, is that in our case, it wasn’t the wife who died but the husband.”
“True, but consider this about Howler—he’s smart, real smart, book smart, street smart, and at this stage of his life when he’s lost a few trillion brain cells from addiction, he’s crazy smart. He graduated first in his class from university and medical school and he was the best plastic surgeon in the country before the white and brown ladies stole his soul.”
“Which ladies?”
“Crack cocaine and tar heroin, his lovers of choice. Look, I’m certain Howler is on to something big about the prince, princess, and the killing. There has always been a rumor of a letter that the princess is supposed to have written in which she charged that the prince and his cohorts wanted to kill her because she was such a bother.”
“Who did she write it to?”
“I don’t know, no one’s come forward with it, but it fits in with her paranoia. You know she once claimed she’d been shot at while jogging at Kensington Park?”
“A car backfired?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? But we do know that she was hated and feared by the prince’s entourage. First she fought them because she felt they worked against her, prejudicing her husband about her, then they feared her because she couldn’t be managed, wasn’t a starter, as they thought of it. The point is, maybe the people around the prince had a lot to lose, or might strike at her out of a sense of loyalty.”
“You think Howler has this letter?”
I believe he has the letter, that the Abbey horror and having a tabloid reporter show up were signals to the palace that he meant business and wants those millions he’s been telling people he’s coming into. It’s just too coincidental for Howler to have a connection to the prince just before the prince is killed, and then gets picked up by the Royals and hidden away in a mental ward. It bears looking into.”
Marlowe found herself torn between running to the airport and back to the States, back to her apartment, where she would barricade the door and hide her head under the blankets … and tackling the mystery that Dutton believed he was on to. In her heart of hearts, she felt that she had let the princess down, that the woman was sacrificing herself because the only path Marlowe had found for a defense was one that the princess could not abide by.
Dutton said, “My proposal is this: Help me track down Howler and get the truth from him. He won’t talk without money. You have it, I don’t.”
“You said there were two things that needed to be taken care of.”
“Sex. We need to take care of that right away. I’ve been horny for you since the first time I jumped on your bones and got a feel.”
* * *
AS THEY STEPPED THROUGH Marlowe’s room door, Dutton let the door swing shut behind them and pulled her to him. She moved out of his arms. “I have to freshen up,” she said, then went into the bathroom and shut the door behind her.
She’d told him she busted her telly, but the one in her room wasn’t damaged. He turned it on with the remote and sat on the end of the bed. Another news story about the princess’s plea came on and he turned off the set. He hesitated a moment and then went to the bathroom door and opened it a crack. The shower was running.
He took off his clothes, went into the bathroom, and opened the shower door. He was surprised at her body. A woman who was not naturally thin or slender, her flesh was creamy and lush, her hips and behind generously rounded.
Her back was to him, with the shower spray coming down on her. He stepped into the shower and pulled the door closed. He touched her back, letting his hand slide down the curve of her spine, feeling the smoothness of her well-rounded buttocks.
“You have a beautiful body,” he said. “I’ve wanted to be with you since the first moment I saw you on the telly.”
He reached around her and cupped both her breasts with his hands. They were firm and full, the strawberrylike nipples getting hard beneath his fingers. His hands slipped down and touched her dark pubic mound.
He suddenly realized she was sobbing. He leaned closer, pulling her tightly against him.
“What’s the matter?”
She shook her head and twisted so he couldn’t see the tears.
“What is it?”
“I don’t want to just have sex,” she said, “I want to make love, not be jumped and humped.”
He drew back. “I’m sorry.”
She turned and pulled him back to her. “It’s not you, it’s the goddamn booze and memories. I was thinking about my husband, about the good times, the good sex at first, but when we started having troubles he’d grab me and ram it in like I was a piece of meat to beat. It’s been a long time since I’ve been with a man who didn’t think the longest time in the world was the time between coming and going.”
“Coming and—” Then he got it.
The tears came again and she sobbed, “I’m sorry, I didn’t want you to see me cry. It’s not you. I’ve been lonely for so long, not so much for sex, there’s always some guy who wants to knock off a piece, but for love. I’m so stupid, I’m just like the princess, I’m lonely and I’ve been waiting for a knight to pick me up and carry me off.”
“I’m no knight,” he said.
She put her arms around him and pulled him close, pressing his nakedness against hers. “Yes, you are, you’re my knight.” She put her hand around his penis and lowered her eyes at the swollen red glans. Her hand slid back and forth, stroking it gently.
She kissed him on the lips, the shower spray coming down on them.
“You must be a knight,” s
he whispered. “You have a long lance.”
He cupped both her breasts. He kissed the hard nipples, licking them with his tongue. She leaned back against the wall of the shower as his lips slid down her stomach, kissing and nibbling her flesh. Kneeling, he reached her pubic bush of hair and traced the hairline with his tongue, running the tip of his tongue along her bare skin.
Using the shower wall for support, she bent her knees and spread her legs. He placed his head between her thighs, pressing his mouth against the lips of her vulva. He kissed her fleshy lips, savoring them several times, then pushed his tongue into the opening.
The sexual hunger in her body was growing as his tongue found her sensitive clit and she squirmed with delight as he began to bring her to an ecstasy she hadn’t experienced in a long time. She tried to push his head away from her electrified organ, but he pushed back, keeping up the pressure until she dropped to her knees. She hugged him and ravished him with kisses.
“That was nirvana,” she told him, kissing him again.
Still being caressed by the shower spray, she kissed his nipples, surprised at how firm and hard they grew under her tongue as her hand went down, grasping his stalk until she had his stone-hard testicles in the palm of her hand.
She kissed his ear and whispered, “It’s your turn.”
Still cupping his balls, she kissed the tip of his penis, then traced it with her tongue. She pulled it slowly into her mouth at first, then sucking it harder as she moved it in and out, masturbating it with her mouth.
After a moment he pulled her from him. “I want to be inside you.”
They stood and stepped out of the shower, leaving it running behind them as they went into the bedroom. She lay on the bed on her back and pulled him toward her.
“Fuck me hard,” she said.
“You wanted love, not—”
She stopped him with a kiss, her mouth chewing impatiently at his lips. “I wanted love a minute ago, now I want to be fucked.” She pulled him down on her, spreading her legs, directing his penis into her. “It’s a woman’s right,” she whispered. “Sometimes we’re a princess and sometimes the slut in us comes out.”
58
The next morning they hired a car for their trip to the mental hospital in the York region to find Howler. Dutton drove. Leaving London, Marlowe was silent.
“You look like you’re mulling over serious affairs of state,” Dutton said.
“I’m still trying to grasp this puzzle in an enigma. Tell me about the prince.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything. I want to understand him.”
“Then you should start with the fact that he didn’t choose his life—and that it hasn’t been an easy one. I know it’s hard for people who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps to understand”—he gave her a sideways grin—“but it’s not easy to meet the demands the nation puts on the queen and the Prince of Wales. The rest of the Royals are a bunch of freeloaders, but the woman on the throne and the guy next in line earn their bread.”
“The princess told me he was barely held by his mother when he was a baby, something like thirty minutes a day.”
“Maybe so, though that was probably in the morning—I think he got another hug in the evening. So what does that tell you? Do you think his mum, the queen, lacks maternal instincts? Is that it … or did she realize from day one that the last thing her son needed was to be a touchy-feely kind of guy, that she had to toughen him up straight from the womb so that he would survive in this cold, cruel world? You really have no idea what he went through, do you? As a kid, a teenager, a young man.”
“I know what I had to go through, and it didn’t include being raised in a palace and pampered by servants. Pardon me if I have a hard time sympathizing with people who never had to work a day in their lives because they were born rich.” She sighed. “Okay, I see that you’re determined to bring me to tears, so tell me what he went through.”
“When you went to school, were you expected to be a brilliant student? A dynamite athlete? A natural-born leader?”
“Lots of kids are pushed by their parents to succeed.”
“He wasn’t just pushed by his parents, there were sixty million Brits and a billion other former British subjects around the world watching him, judging him, evaluating him, every moment of every day. Any slipup, any screwup, the slightest hint that he had human frailties, appeared on the front pages. Boarding school was hell for him, even sleeping in a dorm was a terror. If he snored at night he’d not just get hit by a flying shoe, but it would become a school joke and make it into the papers. When he was out on the playing field participating in sporting events, the boys took turns knocking him down and getting in a punch, so someday they could brag that they bowled over the king and put an elbow in his ribs.
“He was tested every day, in every way. If he was sensitive, if he couldn’t roll with the punches, he wouldn’t have lasted a week at boarding school or in the military. He had to take the punishment, keep—”
“A stiff upper lip.”
“And maintain a stoic countenance to the world. How could the princess expect him to show emotion toward her? He’d never been permitted to show anger, hate, love, or anything more than mild interest in anything or anyone—and God help him if he showed the wrong sort of interest.” He grinned at her. “Have you ever farted in public or picked your nose while driving? Front-page stuff if he did it. Taken a shower with a bunch of other school chums who bragged that their dick was bigger than yours?”
“Not lately.”
“He’d never done it, because if he did, some slime publication would put it on the front pages. At sixteen he flunked his O levels in math. The press tore him apart. Can you imagine what they would have done if he had had a premature ejaculation? The prince lived under a microscope from the moment he was born. He walked, talked, loved, and acted like an institution because he was one. This was a guy who’d probably never bought a pair of socks, didn’t carry money because he paid for nothing, wouldn’t know how to tip in a restaurant because he’d never picked up a check. If he went into a store to buy a jock strap, a large crowd would gather, the police would have to set up barricades and the Royal Protection Service would be sweating it because anyone within range could put a knife into their charge, and the papers would have twelve theories as to why he needed his balls tucked up.
“Think of it, luv, this was a guy who didn’t even dress himself. He changed several times a day, more if he was on tour. He had something like fifty suitcases when he traveled because he might have to change five or six times in a day. It’s easy to see why he got into polo and the hunt. They’re both games for the privileged few—and no one got to knock him on his arse.
“Can you imagine going through your entire life under a microscope, in which your every move was watched and evaluated and even criticized? It wasn’t until he was out of the military and into his twenties that he could even sleep alone with the knowledge that he could snore if he wanted to.”
“So you think it’s all a downside, this bit about being a prince.”
“Oh, no, the other Royals have it made. They get all the benefits and little of the flack that goes with the job. Like I told you, it’s only the Prince of Wales and his mum who face the firing line twenty-four hours a day, whose lives are dictated by duty, duty, duty to all of us unwashed Brits. And yes, luv, it’s a job I wouldn’t like. Would I change places with the guy? you ask. Hell, yes, if I could do it knowing what I know today, but not if it meant being switched at birth. My dick’s my own business and I don’t need the guys in the shower room sizing it up.”
“That’s a very intelligent way to think of it.”
“It is a very intelligent way to think of it, and you’re not getting it because you’re thinking of the prince as an institution and forgetting the person. The things you do naturally, being a mall rat, going to a movie, buying a new sweater, he couldn’t do any of it. Movie stars can’t do those things,
either, but most of them had a normal childhood and they chose their fate, busting their buns to get the fame because they wanted it.”
They drove in silence for a while, then he asked, “Well, do you understand the prince now? Do you see why the queen had to raise him tough, for his own protection and for the sake of the nation?”
“Sure, I’m real sorry that I was lucky enough to be born poor while your prince had to lick his silver spoon. I feel bad that I had to work for everything I ever had, that I had to wait tables and get my ass pinched in a casino lounge in order to get through school instead of playing soccer at a school for spoiled, privileged kids.”
He shook his head. “Didn’t hear a word I said.”
“I heard the part about duty, duty, duty, the princess was overwhelmed by her duties. I’ll give you this much about the two of them, the prince and the princess, they were a couple of birds who got their wings clipped at an early age and were put on display in a gilded cage.”
59
Marlowe and Dutton sat in the car in the dark parking lot in front of the mental institution where they expected to find Howler and a royal secret. It was a four-story building, built of dull gray concrete and sitting at the far end of an oversized parking lot.
“There will be only one Royal Protection officer on duty,” Dutton said.
“Why?”
“There’s only four of them assigned to cover twenty-four hours a day. The other three will be sleeping, resting, or playing pool at that pub down the road.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“We go to Plan B.”
“Which is?”
“We go back to London and have three days of kinky sex before you fly back to the States and I go back to making up stories about alien rape.”
“You really know how to make a woman feel needed for something besides sexual gratification.”
“That’s the police car in front.”
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