Gurden examined the room's terminal facilities: radially limited access, no color, and the sound pickup had been crushed by a previous occupant and hung by one peeled glass fiber.
The bed had one sheet, on the bottom, and half a blanket. A stenciled notice on the headboard informed him that occupants who chose to unroll their own sleeping bag could have it chemically freshened "diurnally" by the ship's maid service for an additional charge of five dollars American.
He tried to remember, with no success, if "diurnal" meant twice a day or only once every two days. The room rented by the half-day but he and Sandy were paid up for a full forty-eight hours.
"Hello, lover."
Gurden turned to Sandy's greeting.
"Hiya. Where've you been?"
"Had some business to attend to, checks to cash and fun to fund. You know."
Tom did know. He could smell it on her: the scents of love, the sweat of a man, the wafting aroma—part chemical, part infrared radiation—of fresh-burst hormones.
Gurden was not sure whether he had always had this talent for seeing the hiddens of the soul and body in their simple signatures. Perhaps this sense was something new, only available to him since mysterious men had been trying to kill him. And perhaps Sandy's condition was obvious to anyone who looked: a woman who had recently been satisfied. He gave it a mental shrug; this was meat for a later meditation.
"What's the town like?" he asked.
"Bright. A bit frantic. A lot more going on than when I was here last."
"When was that?" Gurden remembered she had once told him that she was a northern girl, French-Canadian extraction by the way of Denmark and Normandy, generations back.
"A hundred years ago," Sandy replied, "when this was a sleepy little seaside town, full of children and sandcastles, and gambling was not allowed."
"You're kidding."
"Of course I am. Gambling has always been the main, the only, reason to come to Atlantic City."
"So... "he groped for a metaphor. "You're all set up, but my cash reserves are still a bit low. Three hundred a day for digs this grand are going to break me right quick."
"What are you going to do?"
"Did I see a piano bar on the way in here?"
"I didn't know you could swim."
"I'll fake it. The pool's not that deep."
Gurden unfolded his bag and took out two scrolls of musicfax. They were his bonafides: original compositions that, fed into a pianola, would prove his talent extended beyond real-time key pounding.
"Don't sign any long-term contracts," Sandy warned him. "We have to keep moving, remember?"
Gurden paused with a hand on the doorlock.
"Why? I thought we just had to keep out of sight."
"We certainly want to get beyond the range of those killers. Jackson Heights to Atlantic City is just a cross-town Tube stop."
"Oh." He contrived to look perplexed. "And the Carolinas are the ends of the earth, right?"
"They're a destination. That's all."
"So I think we've got time enough, before we have to get there, for me to scare up some pocket ballast."
"All right. Take your gig. You feel lonely without an audience, don't you?"
"Doesn't everybody?" He smiled and let himself out.
In the hallway—a square metal tube lined with dogged hatches and recessed lights—Gurden let out a breath.
Had Sandy always been that readable?
She once had seemed mysterious, he remembered. Cool and self-contained, she would move in her own ways and at her own times. That meant she could also be capricious. It once had seemed she delighted in a sudden shopping trip, a picnic, or a horseback ride. "It's my day," she would say and then go off for twelve hours of solo adventure. But, until now, that adventure had never included another man. Nor a clumsy lie to shield him.
Tom Gurden shook his head and turned left down the corridor, the way they had come in, to find the hull's manager.
* * *
"Can you swim?" Brian Holdern asked him.
"Of course I can swim. Cant everybody?"
"Not since the Groundwater Seepage Act outlawed the use of chlorine in artificial pools and they all gunked up with algae inside of three weeks."
"Why is your pool any different?"
"This is a marine hull. They don't care what we let dump into the ocean so long as it's chemically pure and doesn't float or precipitate out. A little chlorine overboard might actually help kill the blooms around here." Holdern rolled his tobacco prosthetic around to the other side of his mouth.
"So you can swim. Do you prune easily?"
"Excuse me? I'm a damned fine jazz musician, Mr. Holdern. What does—picking—prunes?—have to do with the job?"
"Not picking 'em, Tom. Looking like one. Most guys spend three hours in the water and they end up looking like an East River disposable. Most of my piano players learn to rub silicon bearing grease on their bodies. Maintains the hydrostatic balance and—kind of a plus in your line of work—gives your pecs and hams all kinds of definition underwater. Drives women wild. You'll have to fight them off."
"I'll keep it in mind."
"Hell, son. Get yourself a supply of grease—good inert stuff that won't leave a slick—or go fish for another job. I'm not having any pasty white boy pucker up like a seedless grape and turn off my customers, you hear?"
"Yes, sir. Grease myself. Every night. Now, do I have the job?"
"Sure you do, or why else would I waste my breath explaining everything to you?"
"Thank you, Mr. Holdern." Gurden started backing toward the door.
"First set starts at seven-thirty. Three solid hours. And if you sink or prune, you're out."
"Yes, sir."
"Be sure to grease your privates good, too."
"What's that?"
"Rub it into your dick, son. This pool is strictly come as you are. No suits allowed. Especially not on the waitresses or the musicians."
"I see."
"Still want the job?"
"Of course. Seven-thirty."
"Keep smiling, son."
"I will, Mr. Holdern."
* * *
The grease was thick and heavy, like warm paraffin, except it felt cold on his skin. He could warm it up by rubbing hard with his palms against the long muscles of his thighs and shins and around his kneecaps. It did not seem to absorb into the skin but, instead, lay there like a mold of stiff gelatin.
Gurden started on his shoulders, reaching around to get his back. He had to strain his arms and push gobs of the grease alternately high and low with his fingertips. Maybe he could rub it in with a towel or something. One of the hull's towels—that would be poetic justice.
For the briefest instant as he worked with the heavy goo, he flashed on chain mail and the weight it must put on a man's arms and chest. The same cold, liquid weight. Dead weight and dead cold.
He thrust the image from his mind.
Practical matters. When he started to sweat—as he always did playing good jazz—would patches of the pale silicon grease shed and float away in the water? More important, would the stuff let his skin breathe? He had read about children in the Middle Ages, painted with gold and silver pigments for fairs and church pageants, who had died of dermal suffocation. Unless this grease... And how had those piano players who went before him in the Holiday Hull come to quit their job?
Probably they couldn't keep up with the women.
Gurden continued slathering and rubbing until he was clad in stiff grease from the soles of his feet to his jawline. Then he found a white blocked-paper robe and wrapped it about himself, slipping the room key into its pocket. He carried the role of musicfax in his hand.
The lounge deck was still deserted and mostly dark at seven-thirty. The pool, lit from below, glowed green and silver. The piano floated in the shallow end, not making a ripple.
Casting aside the robe, Gurden stepped into the
water. It was just less than body temperature. He'd find out about the sweat soon enough. The piano bobbed as he approached it, pushing his own bow wave.
The instrument was the shape of a baby grand, straight along the back side and curved on the front. The lid lifted easily and he held it up with the prop stick.
And there all resemblance to a piano ended. Instead of the cast-iron frame and steel strings, he found rows of bottles, racks of clean glasses, a bucket of ice, bowls of cherries, lemon and lime wedges, and pickled pearl onions. Two quarter kegs—one of dark lager, the other of pilsner—and their taps nestled in the piano's heel. Against the inside of the fallboard, where the hammers and action would be in a real piano, he found a big twelve-volt automotive battery.
"Can't you pick up after yourself?"
The voice came from the poolside above him.
Gurden turned to find a young woman, very naked, shimmering with the same greasy complexion he wore. She was standing upright and proud, holding his robe and straightening it.
"The customers don't want to stumble over your old clothes, do they? This goes in the closet."
"I'll get—" He started toward the side.
"Don't worry. Just for tonight, I'll stow it for you."
Gurden breathed a sigh and slipped around the far side of the piano. One look at her had started a series of reactions that would take him a moment to control.
She walked over to a wall of mirrors, pushed one and it popped open to reveal an empty space with rack and hangers. Now, where had she put her own robe? Tom had been warned against using the customer's changing lounge. Or had she walked in here wearing only grease?
The girl returned, moving smoothly and making no effort to hide herself. It had often been Gurden's observation that a woman walking flat-footed, without high heels, looked dumpy and knock-kneed, thumping along like a squaw. This woman, however, seemed to move lightly on her toes with legs at full tension, gliding like a ballerina.
"I'm Tiffany, your waitress."
"I guessed. I'm Tom Gurden, the piano player."
"Of course you are. This your music?" She picked up the fax, unrolled it, and seemed to read it. For a minute, then two, she was absorbed by it.
"Good stuff," she said. "But of course you can't play it in here."
"Why not?"
"Our patrons cant jive dance—too much resistance in the water. They've gotta do slow dances. Old romantic stuff."
"Slow dances. Nude. In the water. I see."
"You bet you do. We'd better average nine-point-five orgasms an hour, or the customers get their money back. You keep up on your antibiotics, don't you?" she asked cheerfully.
Tiffany slipped into the water and swam-walked toward him. Gurden noticed, for the first time, that her make-up was as exaggerated as a stage actor's: flaring brows penciled up on her forehead, broad wings of blue eye shadow and black eye liner drawn out to her temples, highlighter and blusher smeared across her cheeks, mouth drawn big with gloss and lipstick. It hid the girl underneath, and her sense of nakedness, as effectively as a rubber mask.
Her hair was red, straight, and even. In the strange light it had the shine of a polyester wig—which it undoubtedly was.
Tom Gurden took his eyes away, back to the piano.
"What's the battery for?"
"What battery? Where?"
He pointed it out behind a rack of glasses.
"Oh, that must be power for your piano."
"This is not a piano."
"Well, you know, the keyboard."
He examined the business end of the instrument for the first time. It was a sixty-six-key Yamaha Clavonica, bolted against the fallboard of the floating box. The whole mechanism was hinged to ride down under his hands as he floated in the water. A restraining bar with wrist straps would hold him in position as he treaded water. The keys and sliders wore a plastic skin to keep moisture out of the circuits. The speakers had been remounted under the back lid, and a secondary set of hydro transponders hung down where the pedal lyre would normally be. When Gurden hit the bass chords, his audience would feel it in their bellies as well as their eardrums.
"Right," he said. "Power for the piano. What happens if this box leaks and it shorts out while we're in the water?"
"Boy, for a fellow who gets to swim with naked ladies, are you ever a pessimist."
"Don't any men come in here?"
"Yeah, and 'come' is the operative word. But you don't have to worry about them. Or not about most of them, anyway."
Tiffany took out her tray, which was buoyed to float one side up, and arranged a high-sided dish of complimentary peanuts on it. With a little shove, she scooted it out to the center of the pool.
"What do the customers—and you—do about paying?"
"Two drinks are included in the hundred-dollar cover charge. Any more, and I keep track on my keypad." She showed him as she strapped it onto her wrist. "It goes on their hotel bill. But nobody comes here to do serious drinking. The booze just keeps them liquid."
She turned and swam back to the edge of the pool.
"Would you help me with the ice?"
"Ice would go well about now," Gurden said brightly and followed her.
The icemaker was behind another mirrored panel.
Tiffany took out a wickedly curved pair of tongs, handling them expertly. While Tom held up the lid of the ice chest, she worked their points into the sides of a twenty-kilogram block. All the time she had to arch her back to keep the skin of her belly and breasts from touching the frosted metal rim of the chest, or she would stick hard. When the tongs were set, Tiffany clamped her fist around one handle and nodded at the other. They both held up the lid with their free hands while lifting the block out.
They carried it between them back to the pool.
"Do we float it across?" he asked.
"Not unless you know a lot of people who like raw chlorine in their drinks. You hold this while I float the piano over."
He had to take both of the tong's handles and straddle the block with his legs. In the warm, moist atmosphere, it streamed cold vapor up into his crotch. He could feel himself shriveling, which was not all that unpleasant a sensation.
Tiffany swam the piano to the side of the pool at a languid pace, enjoying his apparent discomfort.
"Get it centered, now. Straight into the bucket, or the weight will tip this rig and we'll end up paying retail for all that booze."
Gurden took a breath, hoisted the block, stretched out beyond the edge of the pool, bumped something lightly, and then lowered—did not drop—the ice into the waiting bucket. The piano rode six centimeters lower in the water with its weight.
"Very good for a first time," Tiffany said. "Next time you'll keep it out of my hair, won't you?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Good boy. Here come our first customers. So you'd better get down here and start making music."
* * *
As instructed, Alexandra entered the onshore casino at precisely eight o'clock and went to the third roulette table from the left. Hasan was not there.
For a while she watched an American in white leather make thirty thousand dollars in six spins, doubling his money each time, then lose it on one final spin. The last spin had brought the rest of the table in with him, and now a groan went up around her.
That the wheel was rigged, Alexandra had no doubt. That it would be rigged so obviously—this she had to see once for herself to believe.
"Your money is not safe here," murmured a familiar voice at her shoulder, almost lost in the background buzz.
"Of course not, My Lord. But what puzzles me is why you choose to be here."
"The Wind of God blows at my back."
"Your organization needs money?"
"That we get in a continuous flow from the rich American Arabs, who think their donations will scour the Holy Land to revenge the Homeless Ones. What I need is an excuse for having the money."
"A Palestinian playboy in Atlantic City?"
Hasan made a small moue with his lips.
"You risk being mistaken for an exiled Persian or a fat Egyptian," she went on, gently teasing.
"I am a man of many disguises."
"And many purposes. Why did you call me?"
A shout went up around them, the joy of sudden winners. She and Hasan joined in the general round of polite clapping.
"You and Gurden dally here," he said. "In that floating bordello. Why?"
"It was his idea."
"Can't you keep the boy occupied—and entertained?"
Alexandra bristled at that. "He needs to earn money. He did not have a stash ready for traveling."
"You could have offered."
"I did. But he's a proud man; he wants to pay his way. And I could not hurry him without arousing suspicions. As it is, he's feeling pushed."
Hasan hid his face as a photoflash went off at a nearby table. Under his arm, he replied: "There is a schedule, you know."
"Your timetable—not his," she said to the back of Hasan's neck. "Gurden must think the flight is his own idea. Or else you should put a bag over his head and be done with it."
"I need a captive in the proper state of preparation. His body is useless to us without his mind at the right peak."
"So let me develop it in my own way."
"In a bordello?"
"Pleasure and pain have their uses."
"Pain especially."
"Sadist!" She stuck her tongue out at him, just the barest tip so that no others could see.
"Whatever. Prepare him. And have him at the pickup point on time." Hasan turned away in the press of people as another round of cheering broke out at a lucky spin.
"But where will that—?" Her question was useless. She was talking to the empty air.
* * *
Eliza: Good morning. This is Eliza 774, an on-line function of United—
Gurden: Let me speak to Eliza two-one-two, please. This is Tom Gurden.
The Mask of Loki Page 10