“Need to pee!” Stella Marenko woozed, attempting to rise to her feet, and, on the second try, barely making it.
She reached out for Eric’s right forearm to more or less hold herself upright. “Be a good boy and help me!”
Eric gave Ivan Marenko a sour not-my-job look; Ivan shot back a shit-faced shrug that said, Oh yes it is. At which point, Stella Marenko tugged heavily at his arm, or perhaps lost her balance and teetered backward, the result in any case being that Eric found himself being dragged out of the bar and into the salon by a reeling drunk.
Once in the restaurant however, Stella Marenko’s balance suddenly improved at least to the point where she could walk more or less steadily by holding his arm and leaning up against him while nuzzling his ear.
In this state, but with much more physical force than seemed apparent or that Eric could easily resist without creating an even more unseemly scene, she steered him like a tug pushing a river barge not toward the nearest toilet, but out onto the promenade that ran around the lower deck.
There she threw her arms around his neck, pressing her body against him, pulling his head into her embrace, and for all the world seemingly whispering dirty sweet nothings in his ear.
“Must be someplace on this boat that isn’t bugged,” she said quite clearly. “You take me there now.”
Monique Calhoun had circled the lower promenade, wandered through the restaurant, peered into both lower-deck bars, subjected herself to the noise and babble of the upper-deck casino, mingled with the guests on the upper-deck promenade, then reversed course and did it all again backward, but, like the proverbial cop, just when she needed him, Prince Eric Esterhazy was nowhere to be found.
Or rather, no doubt, since Prince Eric was constantly in hostly motion and so was she, their trajectories had failed to intersect in the same place at the same time. There was probably a mathematical equation to explain it, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or something, but Monique, being no mathematician, preferred the characterological interpretation, namely that the karmic logic of a character like Prince Eric would of course impel his random motion along a path of least resistance to pissing her off.
Not that she had boarded
La Reine de la Seine
tonight in the best of moods to begin with. Avi Posner had made his displeasure plain after her report this morning.
“What you’ve given me so far is virtually useless. The Marenkos examine the climatech equipment and seem to understand what they’re looking at. They try to bribe their way into an unfinished exhibit out of piqued curiosity. They talk to a lot of climatologists on
La Reine de la Seine
where they seem permanently drunk. Low-grade, Monique, low-grade! Talk about
what
? Where’s the pattern? Didn’t I tell you that your priority assignment was to find out what
they’re
trying to find out?”
“You also told me, as I remember, that I was to obtain for them whatever they require, Avi, and believe me that alone is a full-time job! How am I supposed to cater to the every wish of people who seem to have one a minute, run the rest of Bread & Circuses’ VIP operation, which just happens to be my day job, and vet their drunken table-talk babble all at the same time?”
“Amateurs, amateurs . . .” Posner had grumbled. “You get copies of all of their table-talk recordings since they arrived out of Esterhazy and review them in your spare time!”
“Spare time? I heard you say
spare time
? And what
recordings
are you going on about?”
“The automatic recordings that Esterhazy’s surveillance equipment makes of everything that’s said on board the boat, what else!”
“Esterhazy didn’t mention anything about his equipment automatically recording everything. . . .”
“
Of course
it does! It has to!
The Secret Service of Lower Moronia
wouldn’t install surveillance equipment that didn’t!”
“But how am I supposed to get Esterhazy to admit it and hand over copies?”
“I . . . suggest . . . you . . . use . . . your . . . feminine . . . charm,” Posner had told her very very slowly as if indeed explaining it to one of the aforementioned morons.
This had not exactly piped Monique aboard
La Reine
tonight in a lighthearted mood, and fruitlessly trying to track down Eric Esterhazy in order to accomplish this moronically modest task was not improving it.
And while she was ignorant of the mathematical raison d’être for her current state of frustration, she now recalled a semimathematical method for resolving it that she had once heard, the lazy woman’s way out, namely that if you sat in one place long enough, anyone you were looking for would sooner or later come to you.
Nor did she need to be a mathematician to figure out that
where
she planted her ass would likely exert a non-random influence on the time-frame thereof.
Monique sighed, then made her way across the restaurant to the aft bar, and what even a certified agent of the Lower Moronia Secret Service could not fail to perceive as the logical nexus even if she wanted to—the table of Stella and Ivan Marenko.
The only places on
La Reine de la Seine
deaf to the surveillance equipment were the wheelhouse, hardly suitable for a private conversation, the interior of the fuel tank, not exactly practical, and Eric’s own dressing room, so the forced choice was obvious.
This had an upside and a downside and they were one and the same. The downside was that it required Eric to squire Stella Marenko down the corridor past the private boudoirs and for her to do her amorous drunk act when several people to-ing and fro-ing from their own assignations observed them en passant.
The upside was that it provided a sufficiently lubricious cover for their somewhat prolonged disappearance from public view.
Once inside the dressing room, however, Stella Marenko was all business. She parked herself on the bed, but sat upright on the edge, and made no protest when Eric, somewhat relieved, sat down on the
single chair rather than romantically close beside her.
“What do you know about Davinda?” she said, in a voice that betrayed no hint of drunkenness, quite impressive considering how much she had been slugging down.
“This is what?” asked Eric. “An obscure branch of Hinduism? Some new flavor of Third Force psychic energy?”
“This is
John Sri
Davinda. This is a human.”
“Oh yes, the name is vaguely familiar . . .”
“A climatologist from California. He presents climate model on last day of conference. What can you tell me about him?”
Eric shrugged. “Not much more than you’ve just told me,” he said. “I remember meeting him once, I think, the opening night of the conference. Dressed and barbered like the Ancient Mariner.”
“He is not aboard tonight?”
“He had the poor taste to appear drunk or stoned or insane onstage at the conference. In the absence of a proper classic vaudeville hook, Bendsten had to drag him off himself. For obvious reasons, he hasn’t been on Calhoun’s guest list since.”
“Put him on yours. Get him here.”
“May I ask why?”
“We want to talk with him, Ivan and me.”
“About what?”
Stella Marenko shrugged, a motion that came perilously close to popping her breasts out of her dress.
“There is mysterious something in Grand Palais under guard,” she said. “Secret is to be revealed on Sunday. Sunday program has closing ceremony, speech by Bendsten, something about Qwik-grow forest, something about playing with ocean currents from orbit, and presentation of climate model by Davinda. Closing ceremony, General Secretary, forest, orbital mirrors, these cannot be hidden inside canvas tent. Must be something to do with Davinda climate model, da?”
“Da,” said Eric, actually impressed by this woman for the first time; despite all appearances, obviously not just another stupid face. “But what?”
“What we must find out, Prince Potemkin,” Stella Marenko told him. “You know what means ‘Lao’? This is a word in English?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Not Russian either. Maybe Chinese, but—”
“What does this have to do—?”
“I hear Kutnik say this word to Aubrey Wright, he looks at me as if to see if I heard it, I do not think they speak Chinese, so . . .”
“So . . . ?”
“So maybe is code, how do call it, acronym?”
“For what?”
“Maybe for Sunday surprise package?” said Stella Marenko. “Maybe you better find out before they open it?”
“He takes Stella to the toilet,” Ivan Marenko informed Monique when she inquired after Eric Esterhazy.
“
He took your wife to the toilet?
”
Marenko laughed, shrugged, knocked back another slug of vodka. “Stella’s face, how you say, shitted?”
“Shit-faced,” corrected Dr. Bobby Braithwaite to a general round of less-than-sober laughter.
“Take load off feet, Monique,” Marenko said, patting the seat apparently temporarily vacated by his wife. “Tie load on,” he said, pouring her a glass of vodka.
Gingerly, Monique took her seat at the crowded table. The sit-and-wait theory, it would seem, would soon pay off. If Stella Marenko was so drunk that she required the services of Prince Eric to get her to the ladies’, then simple logic would seem to indicate that when she was finished with her business within, Eric would have to bring her back.
“What’s so important about knowing what the Sunday surprise is anyway?” Eric Esterhazy asked Stella Marenko. “If you’re right, it’s probably just Davinda’s climate model.”
“Nyet, climate model is
software
, software you don’t hide behind screening. Must be something else in there.”
“So what?” said Eric. “After the panic they’ve created with their rake white tornadoes, how can whatever it is be anything but an anticlimax?”
“Bad theater. Very stupid, da?”
“Da. Very.”
“
Too
stupid. Only assholes assume other players are assholes. No one ever tells you this, Prince Potemkin?”
Eric couldn’t help smiling. “Not quite as elegantly,” he said dryly.
“So not to be assholes, we must assume Big Blue Machine thinks their move will be smart, da?”
“Da,” Eric found himself muttering, and rather stupidly by his own lights. The quality of Stella Marenko’s English seemed to vary like a faucet she turned up and down at random, but the more she talked, the sharper she seemed.
“Ramirez tells you why we are here, da?”
“To decide whether to buy the recordings that prove the white tornadoes are fakes and expose the whole thing . . .”
“More than that, Prince Potemkin,” Stella Marenko said. “You ever ask yourself why?”
“
Why?
Why what?”
“Why do we even
think
of paying Bad Boys hundreds of millions of wu for recordings?”
“To use them to destroy UNACOCS and Big Blue. . . .”
“What for?”
“
What for?
”
“Why bother when we
already know
white tornadoes are fakes?” Stella Marenko said. “Why not just stay home, drink vodka, make love, and sit on our money?”
Eric could do nothing but stare at her with a mind as blank as the expression on his face. The expression on Stella Marenko’s face, however, revealed a frightening intensity.
“Because what Big Blue Machine
seems
to be doing is
too stupid
,” she said. “They pour last big money they have down rathole of UNACOCS. Take terminal gamble with faked white tornadoes, gamble they lose if we want to expose it. Why?”
“Because they’re desperate. Because they’ve sucked all the money out of the Lands of the Lost that there is to suck.”
“Da, maybe,” said Stella Marenko. “And if we find out they want to turn Siberia the Golden back into Siberia the Ice Box
just to make money
, we buy the recordings and use them to pound those capitalist bastards into mincemeat filling for pilmenyi!”
Now Stella Marenko actually grew pensive. “But . . .”
“But . . . ?”
“But what if something more important than money makes them so desperate?”
“More . . . important . . . than . . . money . . . ?” Eric said very slowly, rolling this novel morsel around in his mouth to see how it tasted. “What’s more important than money?”
“
Life
, Prince Potemkin,” Stella Marenko said. “Life on Earth. Not so easy to enjoy your money if you and everyone else and whole biosphere are dead. Da, white tornadoes are fakes. But this does not prove
Condition Venus
cannot be real. Maybe
is
real. Maybe
is
really starting to happen. Maybe Big Blue knows this. Maybe
this
is what makes them so desperate. Might be enough to have even unreconstructed capitalist bastards desperate for more reason than profit—especially if is big profit in selling awful truth anyway!”
“Da,” said Eric. “Da,” he repeated, remembering that Eduardo Ramirez had presented him with more or less this very train of logic. Apparently just before showing the white tornado recordings to
these very people
.