“One hardly has to be a major drama critic to recognize acting, Monique,” he prattled in a tone of airheaded silkiness. “And after all, I just welcomed aboard this floating den of iniquity the very cardinal who spoke out so stirringly against sin and the climatologist who might have walked out of her own conference but only as far as the opening-night party.”
He took her hand. “Shall we join them?”
“One . . . professional to another?” Monique said, favoring Eric with a tiny ironic smile.
Takes one to know one
, he tactically refrained from rejoining.
Monique Calhoun might not be in much of a mood for a party, but she could appreciate how well Prince Eric put one on,
one professional to another
.
Anyone could have produced the magnificent food by hiring a world-class chef and getting out of the way. But the way he had squared the circle of a straight buffet, which would’ve been tacky on a boat famous for its restaurant, and the fact that the said restaurant could seat less than half of the guests at any one formal setting, had been quite clever.
A lavish hot and cold buffet had indeed been set up at one end of the restaurant, where people could be served their choices on cunning
platters with holes in them to hold wineglasses. But those who wished to do so could seat themselves at the fully laid restaurant tables and be served from the buffet by waiters.
The music was just right too.
In the restaurant, an all-acoustic string and piano quartet quietly played jazz rearrangements of Baroque music, while in the casino, where something a bit more raucous was required, it was synth, electric guitars, sitar and tabla drums doing Hindu Hard but at a relatively low level.
That might be mere professional competence. But that neither band used a singer to interfere with conversation was a master touch all too unfortunately missing in so many soirees that Monique had attended.
And watching Eric Esterhazy work a room taught Monique that he was a lot more than an excellent caterer who looked good on the door.
“Good to see you back on board, been a while, hasn’t it Dieter, back when you were still married to Maria, as I remember. . . .”
“Better than I do, Eric, it all seems like a dream now, and not a very pleasant one. . . .”
He was constantly on the move, but ever so slowly, languidly, seemingly randomly, never appearing to be table or conversation hopping while agilely doing it just the same.
“Personally, Gail, I thought those notices were brain-dead. I may not know much about haute couture, but I know what I like. . . .”
“And so do I, Eric—tits and ass, tits and ass!”
Your perfect host, not merely moving from group to group, but melding groups into each other, moving people between them en passant.
“Yes, this
is
sort of an unofficial official party for the climate conference, Jean-Pierre, and if you want to meet Dr. Larabee, come along with me. . . .”
That he seemed to know everyone on
his
guest list—which seemed to run to show business and infotainment movers and shapers, syndic heavyweights, patrons and practitioners of the arts, high-level bureaucrats, and the sort of celebrities who, like himself, were famous for being famous—was hardly surprising.
“Allison, if I’m not interrupting, this is my good friend Jean-Pierre Balfort, chairman of the Syndique de la Seine. Jean-Pierre, Dr. Allison Larabee, of Condition Venus fame, and, I believe, Dr. Franco Niri, who was short-listed for the Nobel a few years back, and Dr. Istavan Bukan, the fellow in charge of the smoke and mirrors that keeps the Gulf Stream going and our Parisian asses from freezing off. . . .”
But that he seemed to recognize everyone on
hers
and not only greeted them by name but dropped the sort of bits of knowledge that hinted he knew and had admired their careers had to mean that he had either an eidetic memory or psychic powers, or more likely was using the sort of contact lens dataprompt favored by campaigning politicians and private club bartenders.
“You’re the cow fart man, aren’t you, Dr. Collins? All that methane!”
“Not just cows, Prince Esterhazy, all ruminants contribute their fair share of greenhouse gases.
Billions
of cubic meters per annum.”
“Which is why we should stop raising them and switch to getting our protein from beans instead. . . . ?”
“Bart was a confirmed vegetarian to begin with!”
“Well, I suppose I
could
give up tournedos Rossini and choucroute garni to save the biosphere if I had to, but on the other hand, beans make
me
fart, an all-too-common human condition, so wouldn’t that just put us back to square one . . . ?”
Even the manner in which she had been allowed to spend the past two hours drifting about as a detached observer impressed her with Eric Esterhazy’s professionalism. Knowing all too well that he had every intention of seducing her and that sooner or later in her own good time he was going to succeed, Monique had to admire the way he neither stooped to sidelong glances, nor attempted to squire her about, nor smarmily avoided her. She was one of the guests, and it was his job to make each and every one of them feel equally important.
Prince Eric was no mere professional bullshitter.
He was a true bullshit
artist
.
And only now, with the party well under way and their two guest lists thoroughly mixed, did Eric come sauntering over to her bearing two glasses of wine like the perfect host spying a nervous wallflower.
“You don’t seem to be having all that good a time, Monique,” he said, handing her one.
Monique shrugged. “I’m here as a working girl,” she said.
“Oh? I thought you were a citizen-shareholder in Bread & Circuses, not Ladies of the Evening. . . .”
“There are times when the distinction seems a bit subtle. . . .” Monique found herself muttering.
Eric leaned closer, deep into her body-space by any cultural criterion. “Then this might be a good time for a quick trip belowdecks,” he said.
“To do what?”
Eric beamed at her, took her hand. “Wouldn’t you like to try out my equipment?”
“Getting a little crude, aren’t we, Prince Charming?”
“The
surveillance
equipment,” he hissed, without leaving the role of the seducer making his move to the eyes of any beholders. “Though of course, on the other hand, if you’ve got something better in mind . . .”
Monique could not help laughing.
Nor could she help realizing that in this moment she did.
“Loose zips sink spy ships, Eric,” she told him, running a quick finger up through the air about a hand’s breadth from his fly.
Eric led Monique Calhoun by the hand through the dining salon and down the stairs just as if they were one more couple on their merry way to one of the belowdecks boudoirs, and the gossip would make the obvious assumption when he returned to his hostly duties a half hour or so later.
It was part of the mystique. A gallant host did not refuse a lady. A good enough sophist might even contend it was in the line of duty.
Nor did Monique do anything to break the public illusion.
If that was what it was.
Eric had the feeling, by instinct and long experience, by the moist warmth of her palm, that warm moisture was gathering elsewhere, that if he suggested a detour, it would be an offer she would be hard put to refuse. But hard as
he
was to put that offer to her, as insistent as Mom was that he
do
it already, his sense of timing said, No, wait, she
will
come to you, so let her do it in her own time, and it will only be the sweeter.
Besides which she was playing the current game quite well, giving him a real match, and the prolonged frisson of arch frustration was not exactly unpleasant and in the end would only make the match point more enjoyable.
So Eric, true to his princely word, keyed them into the computer room with his retina-print. Although Ignatz was recording everything as usual, one of the security boys from Bad Boys was inside pretending to be a technician, the human component of the Potemkin interface hiding
La Reine
’s resident AI from Monique Calhoun.
Much of what he was whiling away the time watching was not what the conventional would deem fit for the eyes of a conventional lady, a dozen of the screens being filled with the feed from the boudoirs and toilets, and the sound system producing an unseemly cacophony of grunts, moans, gurgles, and splashes.
Eric dismissed him with a lidded scowl, but noted with interest that Monique seemed more amused than offended by the copulatory, excretory, and urinary live uncoverage.
“I can understand why you’d have sight and sound from the boudoirs and even the washrooms,” she said, as they sat down in the swivel chairs, “but why the
toilet stalls
? What do you expect to happen there except . . . the usual?”
“You’d be surprised,” Eric told her, though somehow he doubted it. “Nevertheless, let’s kill the sound, and kill the toilet visuals,” he said, typing random numbers on the keyboard and allowing Ignatz to create the illusion that he was actually controlling the mike and camera feeds in this primitive fashion.
“There,” he said, “much more . . stimulating.”
Seven of the screens still showed couples—hetero, homo, and in one case an ambiguous threesome—having at it.
“Speak for yourself, Eric. If I want to watch porn, I’d prefer professional performers, decent lighting, and a director. The real thing just looks silly when you’re watching it.”
“Really? Haven’t you ever done it with mirrors?”
“I’ll bet
you
do all the time. And you probably don’t even need a partner to enjoy it.”
“Admittedly one does meet a better class of people.”
Monique laughed. And Eric had to admit that this sort of repartee was more . . . stimulating than the action on the screens. Who was it who had said that the most sensitive erogenous zone was the human brain?
“Well, shall we have a quick tour of the less erotic aspects of the party?” Eric said somewhat reluctantly.
He hit ‘Control H,’ which automatically replaced the boudoir feed on six screens with the schematics of the boat and their plethora of camera and microphone numbers.
Moving the cursor over the numbers on the diagrams with the trackpoint and clicking the pickup equipment on was within the limits of Eric’s modest computer expertise, and so he did it, more or less at random.
This filled the remaining fourteen video screens with a series of new visuals, but it also resulted in a screech of babble, as fourteen microphone feeds came gibbering out the sound system together.
“Uh, I think Control S also cuts the sound,” Eric shouted for the benefit of Ignatz as he typed it, who, picking up on the voice command, made it so.
“And then . . . to hear the feed from a microphone, you just put the cursor on it, and type Control M. . . .”
Eric did so with a microphone picking up a table in the restaurant.
“—said that the only reason to be here at all was the food and drink—”
“Well, Esterhazy
does
know how to cater a party, but
some
of the people at
this
one—”
“Boring!” Eric said hastily and switched to Allison Larabee having a tête-à-tête with Paolo Pereiro out by the aft upper-deck rail.
“Embarrassing, you mean!” said Monique.
“—means necessary.”
“Oh really, Allison, such cheap theatrics. . . .”
“Maybe, but this really
could
be our last chance.”
“You know as well as I do that the Condition Venus model is full of unresolved variables. . . .”
“And whose climate model isn’t?”
“Mine at least was eighty percent predictive in its time.”
“In its
time-frame
, Paolo, which was quite modest.”
“Whereas yours is far too ambitious to be predictive of anything short-term at all.”
“I hope I’m wrong, but I’m afraid I’m right.”
“I’ll believe it when I see one of your white—”
“Tedious climatech babble,” said Eric, cutting to two stools at the forward bar, where Lydia Maren was attempting to pick up Geoff Gilden, the Lloyds ambassador to Paris. “
Much
more amusing.”
“—in any of the boudoirs downstairs?”
“Oh, I’ve done the dungeon, once or twice, ma chérie.”
“S or M?”
“Depends on my mood, the phase of the moon. . . .”
“What’s so amusing about
this
?” Monique demanded.
“She seems to have no idea that Geoff is thoroughly gay.”
Monique frowned at him. “If you’re through peeping through keyholes, Eric,” she said, “may I give it a try myself?”
And she reached for the trackpoint, placed the cursor on the feed from a table in the private aft bar, where Hassan bin Mohammed was having a hunched, hushed conversation with three other men, hit Control M.
“—but it’s in their syndic charter—”