Once aboard, Monique had to freely admit that
La Reine
was impressive, even in empty repose, and more grudgingly that its splendor was rather tasteful.
The abundant brasswork was the real thing, down to the nautical
fittings and the nails that secured the genuine teak decking. The restaurant-cum-cabaret that occupied the lion’s share of the lower-deck cabin was classical elegance—plain white walls set off with brass fittings, round tables with napery in white and blue, not so much gold braid as to be obtrusive, some nineteenth-century paintings of Mississippi River scenes of a tasteful size on the walls, but no garish murals.
Toward the bow end of the dining room was a saloon with a big mirrored bar and stools and cushy leather chairs around low tables. Stern-ward was another bar, this one entered via a closed door in a wall. It was smaller, and it gave out onto a small open area under a roof over the stern, but it was otherwise similarly appointed.
“The main bar is public,” Esterhazy told her. “This one we can close off and turn into a private club you can use for meetings.”
Back in the cabin, Esterhazy led her up a brass-and-teak spiral staircase, which led directly into the upper-deck casino. There were a low stage and bandstand to port and a bar without seating to starboard. The ceiling was painted a deep green and from it depended a mirror ball, quiescent now, whose glass facets had been smoked to a deep bronze. The walls were white paneling framed by a profusion of oiled oak.
There were roulette and craps and baccarat tables in the middle of the room, but most of it was occupied by small round tables suitable for poker or blackjack or bridge, all of which were covered in green pool-table felt.
The effect was perversely peculiar. “There should be a word for this,” Monique said. “It’s a kind of reverse-disney, isn’t it? Designed to be
less
sleazy than the real thing!”
Eric Esterhazy gave her a narrow appraising look, the most intelligent expression Monique had yet seen on his theatrically handsome face.
“The sort of clientele we favor isn’t interested in gambling frenzy,” he said. “Or rather, we don’t want that sort of clientele.”
Monique went over to one of the small tables, ran her hand teasingly over the felt surface, the edges, underneath, not really expecting to find anything obvious. “Better the sort of clientele who relax over a few drinks and a few wagers to loosen each other up for a little discreet and frank conversation . . . ?”
For a moment, they locked eyes, Esterhazy’s face as carefully blank as that of a male model in a fashion photo. “Why surely, Monique, you’re not suggesting that we would be so crass as to
bug
this pleasure dome?”
“Wah Prince Eric, wherever would a nice girl lahk me get an evil idea lahk that?” Monique drawled at him, dripping Spanish moss, but giving him the cold deadpan back.
The casino was surrounded by an open unroofed promenade with white garden tables at the bow and at the fantail, where one of them had been laid with a white tablecloth, blue china, silver cutlery, crystal, and a silver ice bucket containing a dry white Burgundy rather than champagne.
Esterhazy ushered her to the chair facing stern-ward, affording Monique a gorgeous view of the Eiffel Tower through a screen of palms and bougainvillea, and across the river, the great arc of the Trocadéro, stonework gleaming in the bright noonday sun where it peeked through the overgrowing foliage, bright green and red and blue parrots screeching and gabbling in the riotous blooms of the tropical gardens.
“Impressive,” Monique was constrained to admit.
“Bien sûr,” said Prince Eric, clinking glasses. “And only fitting, for after all, are we not two impressive people?”
One of whom is obviously more impressed with himself than with anyone else on the planet, Monique thought, but it was a toast it was impossible not to drink to anyway.
The “few little snacks” to which Eric had alluded in a reverse English sell worthy of Bread & Circuses proved to be impressive too. Oysters, mercifully non-bienville, but taken raw from their shells and served in cups crafted from fried saffron noodles. Not Mediterranean langoustine, but of all things, tiny tails of crayfish, imported, amusingly enough, from New York, stir-fried briefly in walnut oil with whole slices of fresh ginger, endive and red onions, and served over a cold salad of mango, papaya, coconut, lime slices, and whole leaves of fresh basil.
Impressive enough that Monique felt it would have been jejune to get down to the down-and-dirty before the dessert of peaches and apricots poached in rum and cinnamon over a cold champagne mousse.
Laying it on with a trowel, perhaps, but a girl could sure get used to it. But if she knew what was good for what was going to turn into an ongoing working relationship with Eric Esterhazy, not to mention her waistline, she had better retain her edge and equilibrium.
Prince Eric Esterhazy was growing bored with this pecuniary pavane and he had the feeling that Monique Calhoun was fecklessly dancing around the bottom line too.
“A million three . . .”
Her turn to curtsy.
“A million seven . . .”
My turn to bow.
And while what he now knew about the fetching Ms. Calhoun did not include hard information on who or what she was fetching
for
, it was enough to convince him that the current four-hundred-million wu difference between their positions was hardly of the essence of what this haggling was really about.
“Shall we cut to the chase?” he suggested.
“Why Eric, I thought this
was
the chase,” she purred.
“Don’t you find all this number-crunching a bit unseemly? Better left to accountants, wouldn’t you say, Monique?” He gave her his best bedroom smile. “After all, what’s four hundred thousand wu between people who would like to be friends?”
“Four hundred thousand here, four hundred thousand there,” she said deadpan, “after a while, it adds up to real money.”
Eric couldn’t help laughing. “By my calculations, half of four hundred million is two hundred million, which, either added to a million three or subtracted from a million seven, comes out to the same million five. . . .”
He swirled the remains of the wine in his glass, leaning back in his chair. “So,” he said, “we can either waltz slowly closer to the figure we both know we are going to reach in tedious ten-thousand-wu increments, or consider the difference split and go on to something more amusing. What do you say, Monique?”
“I say I’m ready to drink to a million and a half,” she told him, clinking glasses. She brought her glass to her lips, but paused teasingly
before drinking. “Provided we can reach an agreement on exactly what my principal is paying a million and a half
for
.”
“Your principal being . . . ?” Eric drawled speculatively, neither expecting a useful answer or receiving one.
“Why UNACOCS, the United Nations, of course,” Monique said sweetly. “Which, as we both know, is not exactly in a position to piss away money. And, as we both know, a hundred and fifty thousand wu a day is rather grossly overpriced for . . . a mere party-boat rental.”
The new dance had begun. This one at least promised to be more entertaining. Who knew where it might end? Perhaps ultimately in one of the belowdecks boudoirs . . . ?
“
La Reine de la Seine
is the finest party boat in Paris, after all. . . . ” Eric ventured.
“So I’ve heard. . . . I hear it has certain . . . clandestine enhancements. . . .”
“Ah yes, our belowdecks boudoirs of assignation,” Eric said suavely, giving her the eye. “There are a dozen of them, each with a different decor. You’d like to try one out perhaps? I’d be happy to provide a suitable demonstration.”
“I’m sure you would, Eric,” Monique Calhoun said dryly. Then, more promisingly: “And I believe you could. And at some point . . .”
She let it dangle, put down her glass. “But not just yet,” she said sharply. “You say you’re bored by all this waltzing around? Well so am I. We both know why I’m willing to overpay for
La Reine
. We both know what I really want, now don’t we?”
“I have my fantasies,” Eric said superciliously.
Monique frowned. The endgame was definitely at hand.
“All right,” Eric said in a harder tone, “so why don’t you tell me?”
“Why Eric, I thought you’d never ask . . .”
“No you didn’t.”
“Probably not, so shall we cut the crap, and cut as you say to the chase, which is to say the bottom line. Which is that for a million and a half for a guest list share, we have to have access to the surveillance equipment, or there’s no deal.”
“Surveillance equipment? Why whatever—”
Monique Calhoun bolted to her feet. “Nice not knowing you, Prince Charming,” she snapped.
“Wait a minute!”
She froze. “For what? The coffee and after-dinner mints? More moonbeams and malarkey?”
Eric made a great show of sighing in reluctant resignation. “All right, all right,” he said. “You win. You can’t blame me for trying.”
“Depends on
what
game you’re trying to play, now doesn’t it?” she said, but in much softer tones, and giving him a seductive smile whose sincerity was seriously in question. “And now I’d like to inspect the facilities, if you don’t mind—”
“My pleasure. Shall we go below—”
“And I don’t mean the boudoirs!”
“Oh yes, you do!”
“Oh no, I don’t!”
“Come with me, ma chérie, and I shall elucidate,” Eric told her.
And Ignatz shall obfuscate.
Monique did not exactly consider herself an expert on surveillance equipment, but by her technologically naive standards at least,
La Reine de la Seine
had been constructed as a data sponge with a thoroughness verging on the obsessive.
Chez Prince Eric, there was not a cubic centimeter of the boat not covered by cameras and microphones, down to the stalls in the toilets.
The cameras and mikes were tiny, powerful, and redundantly profuse. They were secreted in obvious places like the casino mirror ball, the restaurant chandelier, and behind every mirror on the boat. They were camouflaged as everything from nail heads to rococo swirls in gilt picture frames, to the screws connecting toilet-paper dispensers to the walls.
This Eric explained while pointing out an example here and there on their way through the casino, down the spiral staircase to the restaurant deck, and down a gangway to belowdecks country.
Down here,
La Reine
was strictly functional from amidships stern-ward: the galley and its larders, the engine room and the fuel tanks, the paddle-wheel gearing.
Amidships was a transverse corridor with Oriental-design carpeting, golden-glowing ersatz candles in brass sconces, and walls painted
a shade of rose verging perilously on the vulval. A series of doors ran along the bow-ward side of the corridor. Eric Esterhazy displayed what lay behind them for Monique’s delectation.
Some of these boudoirs were what she would’ve expected. An Arabian Nights harem, a Summer of Love hippie pad, a flaming pink honeymoon suite, were of course de rigueur in an operation like this. The simulated tree house was unexpectedly imaginative, as was the Indian erotic temple room. The dungeon with the straw floor and assorted manacles was something she cared not to contemplate. The softscreen room that could turn into a disney of anything was a modern touch. The eighteenth-century Sun King bedroom was far too kitschy for Monique’s taste. The palace of pure light was weird. The schoolroom was unsettling. The sauna seemed wholesome enough.
“All thoroughly bugged, I presume?”
“Every nook and cranny,” Eric told her.
“You could make a fortune recording what goes on and selling the. . . .” Monique paused. “You
don’t
, do you. . . ?”
“Would I tell you if we did? Would the sort of people allowed down here let me get away with it?”
“Probably not. But it might give you a certain leverage, now mightn’t it?”
“No comment. What kind of person do you think I am anyway?”
“No comment,” replied Monique. “What’s this one, the Marquis de Sade’s playpen?” she said, opening the final door before Eric could stop her.
Inside was a cross between a backstage theatrical dressing room and an outsized clothes closet. There was a bed against the far wall. Tidy, it wasn’t.
Monique gave Eric a quizzical look.
Eric smiled weakly back. “My own little onboard lair,” he said. He winked at her lugubriously. “For future reference, one of only two places on the boat blind to the surveillance equipment, if you’re the shy type.”
“The other being . . . ?”
“Not nearly as cozy . . . the computer room on the receiving end of the data stream, of course . . .”
Eric Esterhazy did not know much about computers and that which dwelled within them, but he knew what he liked. And Ignatz had been designed to be liked by the likes of him.
The problem with the data stream from the cameras and microphones permeating
La Reine
was that there was so much of it. Close to a thousand camera and mike pairs. Operating about eight hours a night. Eight thousand hours a day of video and sound recordings, most of which was not only useless but boring, and some of which, such as the toilet footage and all too much of what went on in the boudoirs, was disgusting as well.