The Sunshine Cruise Company

by John Niven

  Vanessa was weeping hard as she cradled Julie, who was making no sound, just big fat drops rolling down her cheeks. Susan was sitting with her head in her hands, rocking back and forth gently, interspersing her sobs with the words, ‘Idiot, idiot … I’m such a bloody idiot.’ Jill? Jill was something else. She was like fifteen old village ladies at a funeral: pacing back and forth, wailing, howling uncontrollably and occasionally uttering a piercing cry of ‘Oh Jamie! JAMIE!’ She was one notch off rending her garments. Even Ethel was dabbing at her eyes repeatedly.

  Susan and Julie caught each other’s numbed gaze now and then, neither of them quite able to categorise the panic, the terror sweeping over them. Or better to say ‘the horror’, for terror is the apprehension of the awful. They were beholding it. They were in the midst of it. They couldn’t even pay the hotel bill.

  What now? With no money and no life to return to?

  What now?

  After it had all gone on for a few minutes, Ethel let out a deep sigh, blew her nose, and said, ‘Oh, that’s better. Right, so what are we going to do?’

  Julie said, ‘Eh?’

  ‘We’ve had a good cry. Fine. What’s our next move?’ Ethel wheeled herself into the middle of the room.

  ‘Move?’ Susan said, having to raise her voice to be heard over Jill’s wailing.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ethel said, then added, ‘Jill? JILL? Shut up, love. That’s enough.’ Jill looked like she’d been slapped. She shut up. Vanessa sniffed and quietened down. The room was suddenly as silent as it had been loud.

  ‘We don’t have a move, Ethel. What move?’ Julie wiped her face with the back of her hand. ‘We can’t go to the police. We can’t go back home. We’re finished.’ Her lip started to quiver again.

  Ethel took a long breath and shook her head as she considered her words very carefully before saying slowly and deliberately …

  ‘You. Fucking. Bunch. Of. Pussies.’

  Everyone looked at her.

  She took a moment before continuing sarcastically, ‘Boo-hoo. The bad men took our money, Ethel! What’s going to happen to us now? We’re finished, Ethel! Are you telling me that this is it? This is our next move? FUCKING BALLS IS IT!’

  She turned to Vanessa and, in a calm, conversational aside, said, ‘Vanessa, be a darling and run next door and fetch the bag that’s under my bed, would you?’ before turning back to the others.

  ‘They’re gangsters, Ethel!’ Jill screeched.

  ‘BALLS!’ Ethel replied. ‘BIG GIANT HAIRY BALLS! Gangsters?’ She snorted so hard Susan feared the top of her head might explode. ‘I was fighting fascists in the East End of London when these Russian cock-munchers were just a faint pulse in some Bolshevik rapist’s pants. So who’s for crying and who’s for fighting? Eh? Because if you think I’m going to quietly wheel myself off to prison while these vodka-swilling …’ Vanessa ran back in and slammed the heavy bag on the bed next to Ethel. ‘… borscht-munching, Trabant-driving, Cossack-dancing toerags tool about spending our hard-stolen cash then you’re out of your bloody minds.’ Ethel reached into the bag and pulled out Nails’s sawn-off shotgun.

  ‘But wha … what are we going to do?’ Jill asked.

  ‘Well, we know where he fucking lives, don’t we?’ Ethel said.

  ‘But they know our faces, Ethel!’ Julie said.

  ‘They won’t when I’m finished …’

  Everyone turned.

  Susan was standing by the dressing table. She had popped open the latches on her new make up-case. Susan had stopped crying. She was wearing a very different expression to the one she’d had a few moments ago. The eyes, the set of the jaw, she looked … she looked like Ethel. ‘Ethel’s right,’ Susan said. ‘Fuck this.’

  Another voice piped up. ‘Fuck this!’

  They all looked at Jill, who even now was clamping a hand over her own mouth, astonished at herself. Vanessa gasped as Ethel racked the slide on the shotgun, chambering a round. She looked up at the old watermarked ceiling and, in a voice that put concentric circles in the glasses of water on the chest of drawers, that shook the very plasterwork, screamed to the heavens: ‘I’M COMING HOME, MA!’

  SIXTY-THREE

  ‘JUST ’CAUSE SHE DANCE THE GO-GO, IT DON’T MAKE HER A HO, NO!’

  Wyclef Jean blared from the walls of speakers, the dance floor starting to come to life now. Tamalov sniffed – the cocaine sharpening his sexual appetite even as it shrivelled his penis – as he surveyed the action from his perch in the VIP booth and found life to be good. Nearly six million in euros. He could take the rest of the year off. Hell, he could take the next decade off. Robbing robbers: the perfect crime. The VIP area was a small room with half a dozen big plush couches, roped off from the rest of the club by velvet ropes spanning an entrance through which the VIPs could survey the action on the floor, the ropes guarded tonight by Benny, who allowed only the closest friends or the choicest girls to pass. Benny was grinning from ear to ear – the thousand-euro bonus wad stuffed in his hip pocket, a thank-you for his help earlier. Spread the wealth, Tamalov believed.

  The CRACK of another champagne cork caused him to turn and grin. Franco and Rolf and Harry, celebrating their good fortune, already with a few girls hanging off them, already doing blow right there on the table.

  Tamalov, full of joy, full of magnanimousness, wanted to do something for Franco. It’d been worth handing Benny that thousand just to see the way his dark face lit up. Franco’s finished passports had been masterpieces, not that they’d been needed in the end of course, but they might yet be resold with the photographs changed. They were safely tucked in the vault at home, along with the English money. Good old sterling: usually so solid. That was it – he’d come good on his word and find Franco a real peach tonight. A young honey to party with, to dance the go-go with them. He loved bringing young girls back to the house, the way they strode around his pool in their bikinis or their underwear, coltish, unsteady on their heels, their sexual characteristics sometimes freakishly pronounced, the breasts, butts and boxes almost too much for their undeveloped frames to handle. They all acted so cocksure and confident, as though this was the life they were used to at sixteen or seventeen, strutting around millionaires’ homes full of coke and liquor. But, the best part, the most fun, was how, now and then, you’d see fear and uncertainty flickering in their faces, the sense of being truly out of their depth. Life was good.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  YES, SUSAN HAD worked hard with make-up before, performing many reversals of age and sex that had proved undeniably convincing to the good people of Wroxham. There had been the hours transforming Mr Collins the butcher into a convincing alehouse hostess when they’d been short-handed for The Taming of the Shrew. There’d been the summer when she’d made Mr Wintergreen the convincing recipient of the love of Deborah Foster in South Pacific. Their ages had been sixty-one and twenty-three respectively. Or the time illness had forced her to transform Justin Bates (the understudy), nineteen at the time, into a passable Richard III.

  But here and now, in the midnight hour in this cheap French flophouse, it could well be argued that she had accomplished her greatest work. If the reaction of her tiny audience of two was anything to go by anyway …

  When Vanessa stepped through the doorway from the bathroom Jill’s hand had gone to her throat and she’d sighed. ‘Oh, Vanessa darling, you look absolutely beautiful.’

  Vanessa wore a red wrap dress they’d bought her as a treat in Diane von Furstenberg in Cannes. Her hair had been cut into a sharp bob and her make-up brought out her lips and cheekbones making her look easily twenty-one years old.

  Ethel contented herself with a more straightforward response: she nodded in approval and said, ‘They’ll be eating chips out of your knickers, love.’ This was not entirely true. As Vanessa twirled for the ladies and the tightness of the dress across her rump was displayed, it became apparent that she wasn’t (indeed that she couldn’t be) wearing any knickers.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Jill cut
in. ‘Isn’t that a bit on the raunchy side?’

  ‘You look gorgeous, Vanessa,’ Susan said, admiring her own work.

  ‘Right,’ Ethel barked, putting the handgun she’d been cleaning in her lap, clapping her hands together, ‘we’ve had Beauty. Let’s have the Beast!’

  A muffled ‘Piss off, Ethel’ came through the thin wall to the bathroom, there was some shuffling and cursing, and then the door burst open and true silence descended upon the room.

  Julie was backlit by the stronger light from the bathroom. She was striking a self-conscious pose in the door frame, pouting a little. The first thing that was apparent was the degree to which she’d kept her figure over the years. Generally, more recently, it had been hidden away in sweats or in the sexless uniform of the care home. Here it was encased in a tight black velvet dress, another purchase on the Cannes shopping spree. Susan had hitched the hemline up another three inches, displaying more of Julie’s legs than had been seen for many years. But it was the hair and make-up that really did it, that really made Jill gasp and Ethel say, ‘Holy. Fucking. Shit.’ For Julie seemed to have halved in age in the last hour. Her hair had grown in volume and was spilling down her neck and into her cleavage. There were no discernible lines on her face, her eyes looked clear and unwrinkled, the eyes of a woman of twenty-eight or twenty-nine.

  ‘Merde, Julie,’ Vanessa whispered, looking at the apparition beside her.

  ‘Hang on, hang on …’ Susan said as she fumbled for the dimmer switch on the wall beside her. She dialled it down reducing the level of light in the room until it was closer to what you’d expect to find in a nightclub. The two of them looked like sisters. Definitely older and younger sister, but still.

  ‘What do we think?’ Julie said, cocking a hip, throwing an arm around Vanessa’s shoulder.

  ‘Well,’ Susan sighed, taking in the amount of leg and cleavage on display, wondering for the first time if she’d slightly overdone it, ‘if we don’t get the money back we could make a fortune on the game.’

  SIXTY-FIVE

  BY GOD THE Englishman’s snoring was intolerable, Dumas thought as Boscombe’s bandsaw whine cut through the unmarked police car. He looked at his wristwatch again – just after midnight. He clicked on his radio and said softly, ‘Rear unit, anything to report?’

  ‘No,’ came back the tired response.

  Wesley yawned and shifted over in his seat, trying to distance himself from his boss. ‘How long are we going to wait?’ he asked in a stage whisper.

  Dumas shrugged. ‘This shithole is open until 4 a.m.,’ he said. ‘So as long as it takes, I am afraid.’ He too was whispering and Wesley realised that they were both trying not to wake Boscombe, his snoring being preferable to his sarky comments and underhand farting.

  Great, Wesley thought. Another four hours of this. He’d always imagined that being on a stakeout with Interpol would be a lot more exciting than this. Still, it could be worse, he reflected, gazing across the street at the queue shuffling closer to the velvet ropes outside Le Punisher. He could still be young enough to be putting himself through all that in the name of a good time.

  Had Wesley looked closer, had he, say, walked across the street and up and down the queue, looking intently into the eyes of the hopefuls trying to gain entry to the club, he might have recognised at least one of the faces on display …

  Julie’s heart was thumping as she and Vanessa approached the rope. She’d just seen two couples in a row turned away. Granted one of them had contained a very drunk girl and the other a boy whose outfit said building site more than anything else, but still, they’d all been considerably younger than her. She felt Vanessa give her hand an encouraging squeeze as the group in front of them walked through into the hallowed portal of Le Punisher and the velvet rope fell back down and now it was their turn to step forward.

  She heard Vanessa saying something casual in French as she went to crest the rope, acting as though it was her God-given right to be inside. It seemed to be working too, the rope was lifting and Julie, trying not to make eye contact, was simply following in straight behind her. But then, no, the rope was coming back down, in front of Julie, cutting her off from Vanessa, and the girl with the clipboard was looking her up and down. Oh shit, Julie thought. The girl was saying something to her in French. Julie reached for the words, trying to frame a response, but Vanessa was already in there, saying the words ‘Stella McCartney, Stella McCartney’, and suddenly, magically, the girl was nodding, smiling, and the rope was floating back up and Julie too was on the inside.

  ‘What was she saying?’ Julie asked as they floated down the hallway, towards the booth at the end where you paid the entrance fee.

  ‘She wanted to know where your dress was from!’ Vanessa said, laughing.

  ‘Christ,’ Julie said, ‘my heart’s going like a fucking rabbit. Here …’ She slipped Vanessa a hundred-euro note – one of the last hundred-euro notes they had – to pay their admission while she started thumbing a text with her free hand.

  SIXTY-SIX

  ‘FRIGGING IN THE RIGGIN, THERE WAS FUCK ALL ELSE TO DO!’

  Ethel’s idea of passing the time on stakeout involved rugby songs. Lots of rugby songs. Or rather, a handful of the same rugby songs endlessly and lustily repeated. She had just finished a charming ditty about a banker’s daughter who opened her drawers for cash and was now on her second (possibly third, Susan reflected) rendition of something about a vessel called the Good Ship Venus. They had only been there half an hour. Jill, in the back, had long since put her headphones on, trying to drown out the onslaught with some Debussy.

  Susan’s phone beeped and she looked at Julie’s text: We’re in. She showed it to Ethel who nodded, drew breath, and went straight back into singing ‘THE FIGUREHEAD WAS A WHORE IN BED AND THE MAST WAS A BIG BENT PENIS! FRIGGIN IN RIGG—’

  ‘OK, Ethel! Please! I can’t think straight,’ Susan snapped.

  Ethel shut up instantly, the world’s filthiest jukebox unplugged. ‘What’s there to think about?’ Ethel said.

  ‘Well, what’s going on in there for a start …’ She nodded down the dark side street they were parked on, towards the main road and Le Punisher.

  ‘That’s not thinking, that’s worrying.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You can’t affect anything that happens in there now,’ Ethel said, popping a mint in her mouth. ‘So you’re not really thinking, are you? You’re just worrying. Grant me the serenity to accept stuff and the balls to fuck up that which I’m not having and all that malarkey, Susan darling.’

  ‘Have you ever thought about doing a self-help book, Ethel? Anyway – what about afterwards? Supposing, and it’s a big suppose, all this comes off tonight and we get our money back. Do you really think this plan to get it all out of the country will work?’

  ‘It’s got to work better than the alternative, sweetie,’ Ethel said.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Stay here and get arrested or killed.’

  Susan sighed. ‘You really do have a remarkably simple way of looking at everything, don’t you?’

  ‘Key to a long life, don’t you know,’ Ethel said. ‘Forget all that rubbish about fats and sugars. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Anyway, your old mucker Terry was right about South America, that’ll be a doddle. They don’t give a shit. I mean, they don’t put your hand baggage through a scanner when you land in a country, do they? The real hurdle is going to be getting it out of France …’

  Well, Susan thought, it’ll be a bloody miracle if we even get that far.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  JULIE DIDN’T KNOW the song – it seemed to be just one huge, thumping bass note while the words ‘around the world, around the world’ were endlessly repeated – but she was surprised at how easily, after two double vodkas, it all came back to her. She was moving her hips in a circular motion, her hands flapping gaily above her head, like many of them on the packed dance floor were doing. Vanessa was something else – a group of men kept
an edgy semicircle near her and she was batting off an advance roughly every thirty seconds. Julie had had two rough whispers in her ear herself.

  They had worked their way across the floor, close to where a set of steps led up towards a velvet rope guarded by a bouncer and, Christ, yes, now they were close Julie could see through the smoke and sweat and strafing lasers that it was the very bouncer who had pulled a gun on them – the one who had come to the hotel – and, behind him, past the rope, perched on the edge of a plush sofa and talking animatedly to someone, she saw the shock of white hair. Tamalov.

  She turned her back, facing Vanessa now, and wiggled her bottom in the direction of the VIP room.

  Benny, in his turn, was scanning the crowd, when his eyes moved up off the (admittedly decent) arse of an old woman (certainly well into her thirties) in a short black dress and onto the face of the girl in the red dress she was dancing with.

  Holy Christ.

  Jackpot.

  Benny took a couple of steps down the stairs to the edge of the dance floor and beckoned to the girl through the crowd. Vanessa saw him making the ‘come here’ gesture and danced her way towards him. Julie watched the guy shouting in her ear, Vanessa nodding, then shrugging. She went to turn away but the bouncer took her gently by the wrist and, smiling, shouted something else to her. Vanessa nodded and danced back to Julie.

  ‘He wants me to go into the VIP area.’

  ‘OK …’

  ‘But just me.’

  Dancing, smiling, Julie said, ‘Can you handle it?’

  ‘Of course. Don’t worry, Julie.’

  ‘I’ll be watching, at the bar. OK?’

  Vanessa nodded, pecked her quickly on the cheek, and writhed back through the crowd towards the waiting bouncer, giving Julie a sheepish grin before she tottered up the steps towards the dark, roped-off booth, her long legs wobbling on heels as she ascended.