As one of those sourceless Third Force epigrams had it: “Wherever you go, there you are.”
There was another one that went: “The way out is the way through.”
Ambiguous persiflage as the Third Force versions might be, the B&C version reduced it to pragmatic operative terms: “Deal with it first, and figure it out later.”
The crew
was
lifting the gangway, the Marenkos
were
on board
La Reine
, and now so was John Sri Davinda, and her task, however problematic, however she had managed or rather
been
managed to find herself stuck with it, was to keep the one from the other.
There seemed to be only one chance.
In for a dime, in for a dollar, as they still said anachronistically in New York long after that currency had gone out of circulation.
Now that we’ve established what you are, it’s just a question of price.
That
was one New York line that Monique doubted would ever lose currency.
As was his expected custom, Prince Eric Esterhazy was up in the wheelhouse as the lines were cast off and Captain Klein warped
La Reine de la Seine
away from the dock, but he was not taking his usual prideful pleasure in the departure spectacle.
Instead, he was peering down at the forward promenade, where Monique Calhoun was trotting purposefully up behind John Sri Davinda, who stood leaning against the forward railing staring out across the Seine at the lights of the Trocadéro or perhaps just into space.
“Eric . . . ?
Eric!
”
Eddie Warburton was shouting at him to utter the next pro forma command.
“Oh . . . right . . . ” Eric muttered. “Light her up, Eddie!”
“Rock and roll!”
Bah-
bah
-BAH!
BAH-BAH!!
The familiar orchestral fanfare sounded. The halogen tubes lit up
La Reine
. The big holographic smokestacks sprang into virtual being spouting twin phantom plumes of black smoke and clouds of white steam. The riverboat’s lasers exploded virtual star shells and Roman candles and rockets across the Parisian sky. The great paddle wheels began to turn. “When the Saints Go Marching In” resounded over the Seine.
The Queen of the River
was under way.
But the princely master thereof was peering down at Monique Calhoun talking to John Sri Davinda with all the lordly dignity of a jealous husband peeking through a keyhole.
Not that sexual jealousy had anything to do with it. That would be laughable. Nor was it a matter of curiosity. The promenade was miked and he could always play back the conversation later.
But the way Monique had glommed onto Davinda as soon as he was aboard, while interesting on an informational level, was not a pleasant operational omen. It obviously meant that she intended to do her best to keep him occupied.
To keep him away from the very people Eric was commissioned to lead him to, Stella and Ivan Marenko.
La Reine de la Seine
reached the center of the channel, and, on cue, the band broke into the blithe tune of “Rollin’ on the River.” But somehow Eric doubted this was going to be an easy rollin’ voyage.
“Strange weather we’ve been having lately . . .” Monique Calhoun ventured, trying to hide her exasperation.
True enough, even though what had been described as a “freak saturation high” generated by “transient jet-stream anomalies” by the Green spinmeisters and “a symptom of long-term increase in planetary atmospheric humidity levels” by the Blue had rolled out as precipitously as it had rolled in.
She had approached Davinda via her professional capacity, which, by now, she had almost come to think of as her cover.
Hello, I’m Monique Calhoun, your VIP services representative, is everything all right, are you having a good time, is there anything at all I can do for you?
Anything at all
?
All the while trying to whip entendre on it with an intrusion into the penumbra of his body space.
But John Sri Davinda had not only been oblivious to such flirtatious subtleties, he had not even turned around to acknowledge her presence.
“I have no current requirements,” had been the extent of his reply.
Monique would’ve taken it as an insult to her feminine charms had not Davinda given off such a strong anti-erotic anti-vibration, something that went far beyond what every woman experienced from time to time mistakenly flirting with a confirmed homosexual. She sensed a void in this man beyond the sexual. As someone or other had said about some place or other, there was no there there.
And so, since this guy
was
a climatologist and had about as much small talk as a zombie, what
else
was left but to try the weather?
“Define the time-frame,” John Sri Davinda now replied in that flat robotic voice.
“The last couple of days,” Monique snapped peevishly.
“Within the limits of predictive extremes.”
“And your forecast for the rest of the week, Dr. Davinda?” Monique said sarcastically.
“In so short a time-frame, chaotic uncertainty makes meaningful prediction impossible.”
“Great! You’re a big-time climatologist, but you can’t even tell
me if it’s going to rain on Sunday so I know whether to carry an umbrella or not!”
“A hard rain will fall,” said John Sri Davinda.
He said it in quite another voice, this one all too colored with some extremity of human emotion that Monique could not quite parse. And perhaps didn’t want to. For now, Davinda did finally turn to face her, and his visage was a deeply disturbing sight.
The pupils of his heavily bloodshot eyes were hugely dilated. There was a blankness there that seemed both affectless and haunted. As if something had been . . . washed away. Or washed over.
Yet the muscles of his lips were trembling as if in concentration, as if in
desperate
concentration, as if he were struggling to control them, as if there were something trapped behind those eyes trying to . . . get out.
And not quite making it.
Monique had secured some hallucinogenic cactus for Davinda, and to judge from his abortive performance at the UNACOCS emergency session, he had attempted to speak under the influence of either the peyote or some other drug, perhaps not unmixed with alcohol.
Was he stoned now?
Or worse, had permanent damage been done to the neurons or biochemistry of his brain?
“Hello in there?” Monique said, half sarcastically, half in genuine human concern. “Is there anyone at home?”
The idea of keeping Davinda away from the Marenkos via sexual dalliance now seemed about as practical as arousing the phallic ardor of a corpse and only marginally more appetizing.
“Am I interrupting something . . . personal?”
“Hardly,” Monique found herself blurting truthfully as she turned to the sound of Eric Esterhazy’s voice, so nuanced with all the bantering slyness, the testeronic overtones, the masculine humanity, that Davinda’s lacked.
Merde! Shit! Damn!
There Eric stood, big, blond, and handsome, every gram and smirk of him exuding erotic innuendo, the hunky cocksman image of everything John Sri Davinda was not. Even the ways he had of pissing her
off, and they were legion, were the mirror image of Davinda’s dead-fish inhumanity.
On a cellular and hormonal level, she was all too glad to see him. What her body wanted to do was get rid of Davinda and stick with Eric. But her brain reminded her that her professional duty was to do exactly the opposite.
“Good,” said Eric in his oleaginous phony-prince voice, “it’s always such a charming pleasure to see you again, Ms. Calhoun,” and true to his official persona, made with the hand-kissing act.
“No offense,” he said, “but it’s Dr. Davinda I’ve been asked to find.” He turned to John Sri Davinda. “And now that I have, Dr. Davinda, I’d like you to accompany me inside to meet some very interesting people who are just
dying
to offer you their most generous hospitality.”
“And who might that be?” Monique asked.
As if she didn’t know.
From a strictly physiognomic standpoint the smile that Eric gave her might appear to be as bland as the affectless expression of John Sri Davinda. But what lay behind it was anything but.
“Our magnanimous friends from Siberia,” he said, “Stella and Ivan Marenko.”
Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s true, the sainted Elvis had sung, as Eric remembered, but Monique’s wasn’t exactly, and this bit of cruelty was no worse than the teasing foreplay she had run on him, so . . .
“Perhaps you’d care to come along, Ms. Calhoun?” he said. “If you’ve got nothing more entertaining to do?”
Monique Calhoun gave him a long lingering look, half drop dead, half professional control over what must be seething within that Eric found quite admirable.
“I’d be delighted,” she lied through invisibly clenched teeth.
What else could she say?
It was obvious that her mission was to prevent from happening exactly what was going to happen, no doubt to the extent of entertaining Davinda in one of the boudoirs to keep him away from the Marenkos. But she was not going to be able to prevent it. And to
show pique now would only make matters worse. Her best course was to tag along like a good little minder and attempt to exercise what damage control she could.
Though what she or her handlers imagined might now be damaged remained elusive. And there might be tactical advantage in finding out.
The Marenkos had kept a seat empty between them, and that, of course, was where Eric Esterhazy had to plant John Sri Davinda. The nightly soiree at the Marenkos’ table had only begun to get under way when they arrived; there were several empty seats, and Monique took one as close to Davinda as she could get, which was two chairs away, that of Ivan Marenko, and that of Chu Lun, the Guangdong Minister of Environment. Unbidden, certainly by her, Prince Eric slid in beside her.
Also at the table were Allison Larabee and Paolo Pereiro, whom Monique had seen together so often that she was beginning to think they were an item, Dr. Braithwaite, who seemed to be a regular, the Qwik-grow biologist Dieter Lambert, three journalists covering UNACOCS for StarNet, NovaNews, and Public Eye, and several other people she didn’t recognize.
As usual, the table talk was mostly climatological, this being a conference where everyone
was
trying to do something about the weather at a time when the weather seemed to be suddenly getting ominously stranger, what with the white tornadoes, the hot humid murk that had enrobed much of France and the Low Countries, the wave of Saharan heat that had rolled over the Midi, the so-called Indian Ocean El Niño, the unconfirmed rumors of monster waterspouts over the equatorial Pacific.
Ordinarily, such dire disaster talk among the so-called experts would have held Monique’s attention, but now she found herself tuning it out in favor of a dumbfounded personal fascination with the object of her current professional mission—John Sri Davinda.
Davinda wasn’t taking part in the climatological gloom-and-doom talk. He wasn’t talking at all. The Marenkos were keeping him occupied with other matters.
Davinda might have all the masculine presence of a human disney, but that didn’t prevent him from guzzling the Marenkos’ vodka like a camel tanking up at an oasis or snorting up their designer dust like a vacuum cleaner.
His capacity was amazing. Stella stuck the dust-laden mirror under his face every few minutes and Davinda never turned it down. While he snorted, Ivan would refill his glass; when Davinda was finished with the dust, Ivan would clink glasses with him, and Davinda would dutifully empty it.
There was something bizarrely machinelike about it. The Marenkos were doing their considerable best to get him thoroughly smashed and Davinda offered no resistance. But he didn’t seem to be enjoying himself either. Monique could detect no change in his demeanor, probably because his brain had somewhere somehow been permanently gelatinized already.
Monique was beginning to have hope that while she had failed in her Posner-given mission to keep Davinda from the Marenkos, the evening might just pass without them being able to grill him, which was to say that Davinda might pass out before he even passed into the conversation.
No such luck.
“. . . haven’t said a thing all night, Dr. Davinda,” said the Public Eye reporter.
“Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve seen a paper by you in years and years,” said Pereiro.
“What ever happened to publish or perish?” said Dieter Lambert.
“He hasn’t published, but he don’t seem t’have perished,” said Dr. Bobby Braithwaite, fixing his gaze on Davinda, snorting up another line of dust. “But at least y’can’t say he’s not tryin’,” he added to less than kindly laughter.
This at last seemed to return John Sri Davinda to the land of the living. He put down his rolled bill with half a line of dust still before him and looked across the table at Braithwaite. Or at least turned those empty eyes in his direction like twin sat dishes.