Then he lit a long Cuban cigar and looked through the windows at the soft rolling swell of the Atlantic outside the Tina. And he smiled.
The first round of the page-one battle had gone to Thebos. But Skouratis would see how Thebos liked it in the game in a few more days, when he was on the receiving end.
But that was still a day or two off.
Right now, Skouratis was on his way to a party, and at full speed. He looked at his watch. The first night's party was still underway.
No matter. He would be present for the second night's festivities.
CHAPTER NINE
There had not been a better party since closing night aboard the Titanic.
A female foreign minister from one of the African countries, who had been selected for vaginal muscle control by a national leader who had himself been chosen for genital heft, was the admitted star of the proceedings when she ensconced herself in a stadium broom closet and offered to take on all comers for five dollars each. American.
There was a long line in front of the closet, which created a terrible problem for the French ambassador who wanted to wait in that line, but didn't want to abandon the line that was queued up to receive souvenir key chains made of pure gold and inscribed with the name of Demosthenes Skouratis by his fellow shipbuilder, Aristotle Thebos.
The Frenchman solved the problem with typical Gallic savoir faire: get the gold, the broad could wait.
Besides, judging from the grunts from the closet, she seemed to be ready for a long evening.
Aristotle Thebos looked down from the velvet-lined royal box overlooking the gigantic arena and watched the Indian delegation wrapping sandwiches in handkerchiefs and stuffing them into the pockets of their ill-fitting clothes.
"There they are," he said aloud. "The leaders of the world. Doesn't it make you feel better to know that they are responsible for keeping the world safe?"
Helena smiled softly. "The power of the world, Father, is right where it always is. In the hands of those who are qualified to use it. Thank the Lord."
Below them, United Nations delegates scurried about, from caviar to cognac, from souvenir to slot, congratulating themselves on their foresight in moving their headquarters away from a city where prying journalists seemed to think they had some kind of obligation and right to report on what other people did.
Two fistfights broke out. Three Asian diplomats who had been engaged in a contest to determine who could chugalug the most Courvoisier from beer mugs were passed out in a corner.
Thebos looked around the auditorium.
"The only thing that spoils my pleasure is that the shoeshine boy is not here tonight."
"He will not come at all, Father," Helena said.
"Oh, no. He will be here. After he reads the press, he will be here." He smiled, a brilliant smile of long, white even teeth that illuminated his face and made it seem even tanner than it wag. "If he has seen early editions of the press, he is already on his way. But he is for tomorrow. For now, I am going back to the yacht. The older one gets, the more quickly one tires of watching the clowns at a circus."
"I, too, Father."
Their bodyguards led the way as they left the royal box, forming around them a wall of mean muscle and surly bone.
Then, somehow, Remo was behind the bodyguards and walking alongside Helena.
"Where you going?" he asked.
"I thought you didn't like me," she said.
"I don't. But you've seen the alternatives." He nodded back over his shoulder toward the banquet hall, which was beginning to resemble a Roman arena after a riot.
"Hey, You. Move out of there," one of the bodyguards yelled, then came toward Remo, hands outstretched.
"Go away," Remo said. "Can't you see I'm talking to the lady?"
The guard put his hands on Remo's shoulders. Remo slapped them away. The guard tried to raise his hands again but they would not lift.
"What is all this?" Remo asked the girl. "Why do you rate all these gorillas?"
"Who is this person?" Thebos asked Helena.
"Me first," Remo said. "I asked my question first. You wait."
"This is my father," said Helena. "Mr. Thebos."
Remo snapped his fingers. "Oh. You're the one who gave the party."
Thebos nodded.
"You ought to he ashamed of yourself," Remo said.
"Ashamed?" said Thehos. "Helena, who is this person?"
"Ashamed," Remo said. "Giving these people a party is encouraging them. Ashamed."
"Who is this?"
Thebos, Helena and Remo had kept moving slowly forward, up the large, wide, automatic escalators, surrounded by guards. The guard who had put his hands on Remo's shoulders was left far behind, still staring at his hands, unable to move them and unable to see anything wrong with them. Thebos turned and stared at Remo, trying to recognize the face.
"I'm Remo," said Remo.
"He is Remo," said Helena. She shrugged her shoulders,
"That is all hardly illuminating." Thebos had to skip as the escalator reached the top deck. Helena stepped out easily. Remo just kept sliding as the escalator deposited him on the thickly carpeted floor. Without moving his feet, he slid forward smoothly for three feet before resuming walking.
"I work here," Remo said. "I'm with Iran. That's what they call it now. Chiun, though, he calls it Persia. I think I would have liked it better when it was Persia. The melons were great, Chiun says."
Thehos stopped.
"You are Remo," he said, as if he had just heard the name for the first time.
"That's how it comes out," Remo agreed.
"And you are with Iran?"
Remo nodded, then looked up to see Thebos' cold eyes on him. They were hard, gray eyes, as deep as glacial ice, and they measured Remo by the inch, weighed him by the ounce, sized him up for the minutest trace of character, and apparently found him wanting.
"Guards," Thebos called out. "Remove this person." He smiled at Remo. "I'm sorry," he said, almost apologetically, "but Helena and I must leave now and you are bothering us."
"I'm not bothering her," Remo said.
"He's not bothering me," Helena said.
"You are bothering me." Thebos backed away as the guards reached Remo. Well trained, they moved at him from the front, back, and both sides as Thebos pulled Helena away to give them working room.
Remo vanished in the mass of black suits that converged upon him. The suits seemed to rise up like a healthy dough in which the yeast had just begun to work. The suits pulsated once, then moved down again into a heap. Thebos and Helena could see arms flying, legs winding up to deliver kicks, grunts of exertion.
Then Remo was standing alongside them, looking back at the guards. He nodded to Thebos. "Nice fellas. Come on. I'll take you where you're going."
He grabbed Helena's elbow gently and steered her away from the mass of scuffling guards. Thebos followed. Every step or two, he turned and looked back at the bodyguards who were still battling with each other.
"How did you do that?" Helena asked.
"What?" said Remo.
"Escape from them."
"Oh. That. Well, there's really nothing to it. You see, you wait until they move in a rhythm and then you join the rhythm, and it kind of like pulsates and when it goes outward, you go outward with it, but they go back in and you keep going and you're gone and most people's senses aren't good enough to realize there's one less person in the pileup. Leave 'em alone, they'll be fighting a long time before they find out I'm not there. It's like a bullet, you know. You can't get hurt by a force when you're moving in the right rhythm with it. If you moved in the same path as a bullet, just as fast as it moved, it wouldn't hurt you. You get hurt when a bullet's going one way and you're not going with it. You could even catch a bullet if you wanted to. But I don't recommend that because it takes practice."
"How much practice?" Helena asked.
"Fifty years. Eight hours a day."
"You're not even fi
fty years old."
"Yeah, but I had Chiun for a teacher. That takes forty years right off the top."
The main deck was more than a hundred feet above the waters of the Atlantic. Remo looked around for steps to take them down to the Thebos launch tied up alongside the huge ship and while he did, Thebos quickly pushed Helena into an elevator on the deck and it started down toward the platform just above the level of the water.
"Good night, Remo," called out Helena, as the elevator sank below the deck railing and her face disappeared from view. Her face seemed wistful and disappointed.
Remo leaned over the railing and watched the elevator move rapidly down the side of the ship toward the launch.
Thebos and Helena stepped out onto a platform that led them onto the boat. Dammit, Remo wanted to talk to her. She or her father might have some idea of what Skouratis was doing with this ship; why he might have built all those secret passages and rooms.
The crew of the Thebos launch untied and with a whoosh of powerful inboard engines moved away from the Skip of States toward the Thebos yacht, sailing slowly along five hundred yards away.
On the main deck, even a hundred feet above the water, Remo could taste the wet salt droplets on the tip of his tongue. His face felt damp from the thin ocean spray, so diffused at the great height that it had no more substance than wet fog.
Beneath him, the Atlantic looked black and cold. The brilliantly painted white launch disappeared into the blackness of the night as it powered away from the United Nations ship and its lights.
Damn, thought Remo.
He kicked off his black loafers, and vaulted the rail. On the way down to meet the Atlantic, he slowed his breathing and forced the blood flow of his body away from the skin's temperature and deeper into his internal organs. His skin temperature dropped as he dropped, while he made sure the cold surrounding blanket of ocean water did not suck the life-preserving heat from his body.
He knifed into the Atlantic feetfirst, plunged down twenty feet, then arced his body so he turned a large, lazy, underwater somersault and came up swimming toward the Thebos yacht. Ahead of him, he could hear the launch's engines.
Helena Thebos sat in a deck chair at the rear of the launch. Alongside her, Thebos answered her unspoken thought.
"He is a very attractive man, I suppose," Thebos said. "But very dangerous."
"Some say that of you," Helena said.
"But, of course, in my case, it is incorrect," said Thebes, with a small chuckle. "Unless you are unlucky enough to be a pretentious Greek shoeshine boy who has never learned not to insult his betters through his pretensions. This Remo is something else though. There have been many deaths on that ship because of him."
"How are you aware of that, Father? You have not been on the ship until tonight."
"I have heard stories," Thebos said vaguely. "And do not forget that eight of our best men are back on that ship. Seven of them are trying to catch each other. One of them cannot move his hands or his arms. He is dangerous, this Remo. Believe me."
Helena Thebos was silent. Her fingers rested on the polished chrome railing of the launch. She felt a light moist pressure on her fingers as if a damp minnow had leaped from the water and brushed her hand. She pulled her fingers away.
"You speak of Skouratis," she said. "I do not understand what you intend with him, Father."
"Nothing, dear," said Thebos.
He looked straight ahead and Helena recognized the look. He was staring ahead, through days, weeks, months or years to some uncharted future that only he could see. A small smile played along the sides of his mouth. She put her fingers back on the railing and recoiled almost immediately when it was touched again by something damp. She looked at her fingers, then leaned toward the railing and looked down at the water, expecting to see a loose rope flapping against the side of the launch. Instead, she saw Remo's teeth. He was smiling at her. Then he raised a finger to his mouth for her to be quiet.
She looked toward Thebos to see if he had noticed anything, but Thebos was still staring ahead toward a world where his fantasies were fact, his power unquestioned, his status unequaled.
Helena looked back at the water. Remo was gone. Gone. Had she imagined it? She looked around the water near the boat. No trace of him.
She smiled. Imagination and desire were powerful drugs. She could better understand her father and his private reveries.
When the launch returned to the yacht Ulysses, crewmen clustered around to help Thebos and Helena from the small boat.
Helena lingered on the deck of the yacht, looking around in the water, then sighed. Imagination.
But her fingers still tingled.
Thebos was speaking to the pilot of the launch. "Go back," he said. "You will find eight of our lunatics aboard the big ship. Bring them back."
"Where will they be, sir?"
"Probably fighting with a ghost on a lower deck," Thebos said.
Helena turned away as Thebos kept talking.
"Good night, Father," she said.
"Good night, dear."
Thebos let his eyes follow her as she walked away. Tall and lissome, as her mother had been. But her mother had been a businesswoman in her own right, a woman of unfailing judgment and driving talent. Men had often told Thebos that they would rather deal with him than with his wife—not because she had a better business head than he, but because her overwhelming beauty made them worse businessmen. Helena had inherited some of the beauty and all of the intelligence, but from neither father nor mother had she inherited any business sense at all. How he wished for a son. But his first wife had died long ago trying to give birth to a boy who died also, and the succession of Thebos' wives had been no more successful. No sons to carry on the fight against Skouratis. Just Helena. Thebos smiled. At least he had a daughter; Skouratis had nothing. The one daughter he had once had was a suicide soon after marrying Thebos. It was one of the things in life most worth remembering.
Behind him, the launch started again and moved away from the yacht across the black ocean toward Ship of States.
Thebos went to bed. Tomorrow Skouratis would arrive and tomorrow all things would be made right. All things.
And he would be Number One. Without question.
Helena's personal maid had prepared the bed in her forward stateroom and now slept in a small connecting room, attached to her mistress by a call button connected to a small earphone she wore while she slept. This tradition came from decades of service to the Thebos family.
The small night-light was on in the room when Helena entered. Without real hope, she glanced about the room but it was empty.
Remo had been a hallucination, a mirage, the result of drinking two glasses of Ouzo instead of one, Too bad.
She sat at her dressing table, taking off her jewelry, then looked up startled when the bathroom door opened and Remo strolled out wearing one of her soft velvet shower robes.
He met her eyes in the mirror. "I'm glad you had this," he said. "My clothes were soaked and I hate making it in wet clothes."
"Making what?" said Helena.
"Love."
"Oh? We are going to make love?" asked Helena. She stood and turned to face Remo who was tying the bathrobe's belt into a knot around his waist.
He looked at her with inkwell-deep eyes. "Naturally. Aren't we?"
Helena paused. "Yes," she said softly. "But not naturally."
"I've heard about you Greeks," Remo said.
Helena laughed, a small, tinkly, soft sound that, without being loud, managed to contain all joy. She shook her head. "Naturally means once. And we are going to make love more than once. Many times more than once." She removed her gold-wire earrings.
"Think I'm up to it?" Remo asked.
"You will be, American. You will be."
"Good. But first we'll talk."
"No. First, we'll make love. Then we'll talk." She used a long-handled wooden device to pull down the back zipper of her evening gown.
"W
e'll talk as we go," Remo said. "If your father hates Skouratis, why's he throwing him a party?"
Helena shrugged. The motion slid her black gown down off her shoulders.
"One never knows what my father is doing. I think he is really impressed by Skouratis' ship."
"I don't believe it," Remo said.
"I don't want to believe it," Helena said. She slid both arms out of the sleeves of the gown. "Skouratis is a crass, heavy-handed, evil man who belongs in a barnyard. I have warned my father: who sleeps with sheep smells like sheep dip."
"Yeah, well, Greeks probably know more about that than I would," Remo said.
"I hate that man. He contaminates all he touches."
"He built a pretty good boat," Remo said.
"A ship, not a boat. Ptaah. A stunt. It may never cross the ocean." She stepped out of her gown. She was wearing silk lace panties and a thin demi-bra that pushed her breasts upward and inward.
"The boat's like a city," Remo said.
"Ship," Helena corrected again. "Who cares?" She turned to her dressing table and lit a dark brown cigarette. Even across the room, Remo could smell the deep pungent tobaccos.
"Do you know there's a ship inside that ship?" asked Remo. "Like an underground city."
"The whole thing should be underground," Helena said, taking another deep drag. She giggled. "Or under water. Maybe with luck it soon will be. Along with the zoo it carries." She laughed aloud. "Noah's zoo survived; this one fails; one out of two isn't bad."
"You don't know anything about any secret passages on that ship?" Remo said. "Remember those guys who came out of the wall today at us?"
"Just more of Skooratis' idiotic security measures," Helena said. She placed the cigarette in an ashtray and reached behind to unhook her bra.
"Did you mention it to your father?" Remo said. "Does he know what Skouratis is up to?"
"He has no idea," Helena said. She dropped the bra onto the floor. She took a last drag off the cigarette before stubbing it out in the ashtray. Then she lifted her arms in welcome and walked across the room toward Remo.
"Time for bed," she said with a smile.
Remo shook his head. "I better get back," he said. He untied Helena's bathrobe. Under it he was still wearing his slacks and tee shirt.
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