For about ten minutes Kate was too shocked to notice Dave’s prolonged absence. Her imagination was abruptly ordered somewhere else, as not the smallest aspect of human anatomy escaped the attention of the camera: every mucous tract, subcutaneous fold and sebaceous follicle. But what was most surprising to her was not the explicit intimacy of what was depicted, but that there should be any women who were still willing to have unprotected anal intercourse. Just where had these women been for the last ten virally preoccupied years? Did they imagine that just because they were doing it in a movie they would be protected by the special effects department?
Almost as fascinating to Kate as what was happening on the screen were the faces of the audience. Bowen grinning like an ape. Sam Brockman cleaning his glasses every few minutes and making a silent whistling noise from time to time. Rachel Dana watching Jellicoe and enjoying his thunderstruck demeanor. Two of the targets from the Britannia, Nicky Vallbona and Webb Garwood, laughing loudly and cracking the most tasteless jokes. Kate wondered if Bowen had even registered that they were there.
She’d heard men — Howard was one such — claim that porno was boring, but somehow she’d never quite believed it. Bowen looked anything but bored. Even in the half-darkness of the Jade’s viewing theater, she could see a light sheen of sweat glistening on his upper lip which he wiped periodically with the back of his hand. But after a while she realized she really was bored. It wasn’t so much the lack of story she found tedious as the monotonous serial continuity, as if what was being enacted was a precise ritual. The girl always sucked the man before he licked her; then, always, he penetrated her vagina as a prelude to sodomy, before finally he came all over her face as if by this final act of degradation the reality of what was happening was there revealed. To Kate this last act in the ritual pointed up the lie of porno: no man had ever come in her face, and if it ever did happen — woe betide the guy who thought he could get away with that shit — she would hardly have been disposed to treat his load as if it had been the choicest Beluga.
Dave sat down beside her and said, ‘Aren’t you grossed out yet?’
‘Where have you been?’ she demanded.
‘I got detained. Did you know Calgary Stanford is on this ship?’
‘The movie actor?’
‘I’ve just been talking to him.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Kind of ordinary, really.’
Dave glanced around the little theater and caught sight of Al, and then one of the guys from the Baby Doc. Al’s face was something by Goya; grotesque. Kate was shaking her head.
She said, ‘People just do not behave like this. Even in movies. They don’t go around fucking each other like rabbits. It’s just not feasible.’
Dave looked sideways at her and said, ‘Feasible? You sound like you’ve got the latest Nielsen figures on this one, Kate.’ He looked back up at the screen and then grimaced. ‘Anyway, these aren’t movies. Not the ones I go to.’
‘Hey, I’m the one who’s supposed to say that. C’mon,’ she said. ‘Let’s get out of here before the next money shot. While I’ve still got an appetite.’
Going downstairs, Dave said, ‘Why don’t you come back to my boat and let me make you a sandwich?’
‘Sounds good. Besides, I need a little air. The breathing’s getting kind of noticeable in there. Like a locker room in winter. Now I know what it’s like to sit in a car with a hosepipe attached to the exhaust. I guess that’s why it’s called a blue movie.’
Kate watched Dave make the sandwiches. He did it carefully, and with a touch of panache, as if he enjoyed cooking and preparing food. In some ways he was quite the new man. In others he was reassuringly like all the old ones. She liked the way he wasn’t always speaking, as if he was used to his own company and didn’t mind it. Self-contained, she thought.
‘You can be quiet if you want, Van,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind. I like a bit of Dolby in my men. The thing that cuts down on noise, y’know? Like an electronic blue pencil. I bet you’re the kind to let a girl talk herself into bed.’
‘Could be.’ Dave returned to the sofa with a plate of neatly cut sandwiches.
Kate waited until he had picked one up and was teeing up his first mouthful. She said, ‘Take me to bed, Van. Right now. No more hard-boiled. From now on, I’m zip-lipped.’
Dave looked at her and then back at his sandwich which stayed about an inch away from his mouth. He said, ‘You mean right now?’
‘Before I think about it some more and change my mind.’
Kate had no intention of changing her mind. Maybe she did have one or two reservations about what he had told her: her best guess was that he had fed her this story in order to find out if it was him or his money she was really interested in. She would probably have done the same thing herself. She understood about money, even if she was not much interested in it herself. For Howard, money had been the major motivation of nearly everything he did. He was driven by money, as if it turned up at the start of every day with a peaked cap and a mobile phone. For Kate it was merely the means to an end, and right now it had little or no relevance to what she wanted most, which was to go to bed with Dave. But she enjoyed making him choose between having a sandwich and having her. She leaned toward him and nuzzled his ear with the tip of her nose.
‘Where I’m taking you now,’ she said, ‘the cooking’s wonderful, painstakingly prepared, and the service is excellent. So don’t even think about eating anything else. Not if you ever want to be welcome back to this restaurant.’
Dave put down his sandwich. He was hungry but there were some things better done on an empty stomach.
‘Did you sleep OK?’
Dave stretched on his king-sized bed and rolled toward her.
‘Weird,’ he said. ‘I dreamed I had Alzheimer’s disease. Only trouble is I’ve forgotten what happened.’
Kate glanced at her watch.
‘Still joking at six o’clock in the morning, I see.’
Dave grinned and rolled on top of her.
‘Can you think of anything else to do?’
‘I could make you breakfast,’ she offered. ‘I feel kind of guilty about making you sacrifice that sandwich.’
‘I’ve forgotten about that too. Breakfast sounds good, though. I could eat a horse.’
As he slipped out of bed, Kate said, ‘I already did.’
Dave grinned again. ‘You haven’t forgotten about my proposition, have you?’ he asked.
‘What proposition is that, lover?’
‘You know? Living with the famous Phantom, in the South of France?’
‘Oh yeah, that. The Pink Panther thing. No, I hadn’t forgotten about it. I’m like an elephant. I never forget a name or a face.’
Dave nodded. A good memory for names and faces was probably a job requirement for a Fed.
‘And?’
‘This is some kind of test, right? Like the three caskets in The Merchant of Venice. Gold, silver and lead.’ Kate searched Dave’s face for some sign that he recognized she knew what he was up to. ‘All that glisters is not gold?’
‘So which is it to be?’
She rolled across the crumpled sheets toward him and sat up. ‘With you? I don’t know. If I said I chose lead, you’d probably shoot me.’ Kate wagged her finger at him. ‘Come on, Dave. I’m not interested in the money.’
Dave flinched. ‘What money?’
‘Your money. The Dulanotov family fortune.’
‘Oh, that.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. But it’s like I told you. The money’s based on crime. There’s no family fortune. I’m a thief, Kate. I steal for a living. Like old Cary Grant.’
She shrugged. ‘OK. If you say so. Well then I haven’t ruled out becoming Grace. Not yet.’
Like hell she hasn’t, thought Dave, and went to take a shower.
Kate frowned. He really was serious about this test of his. Couldn’t he see she wasn’t remotely interested in his money? As soon as she heard the water running Kate started to search the room. It wasn’t that she shared Kent Bowen’s suspicions of him. That was just stupid jealousy. But Dave volunteered so little about himself and she wanted to know more than the crumbs she had gleaned from the few questions he had honored with straight answers. She didn’t think for a moment he was a thief. How many thieves knew Shakespeare and Pushkin? But there was something he wasn’t telling her, of that she was sure. Something that she needed to find out. At the FBI training academy she had learned to recognize when someone was hiding something. For a brief period in her early career she had entertained notions of joining the Behavioral Science Unit. But after The Silence of the Lambs came along it seemed that everyone wanted to be Jack Crawford or Clarice Starling, and she had ended up in General Investigations and Narcotics. Now, looking over the room, she had no idea what she was searching for. The large number of books only seemed to underline what she already knew — that Dave was widely read. Most of the clothes in his closet were predictably new and came from expensive shops, as she had expected. There was no cash lying around. Nor any travellers’ cheques, credit cards; not even a driver’s license. Most infuriating of all, she could not find Dave’s passport. The explanation was inside Dave’s walk-in closet. A combination wall safe. Just what any self-respecting millionaire would have had. You didn’t stay rich by leaving money lying around.
Kate came out of the closet and sat on the edge of the bed. If only she had taken the safe-cracking course instead of psychology. Absently she stared at Dave’s bookshelf. It was like a reading list for a summer school. Many of the titles were classics. Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Nabokov. Even a few published movie scripts. A nod to post modernism. Some philosophy too: Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Gilbert Ryle and George Steiner. But the more she stared at the books the more it started to seem that for all its apparent inclusiveness, there was something missing, like a piece from a cutlery set. Yes, that was it. And not just one piece. Maybe one whole item. Like a set of fish knives. Gradually she perceived what it was. There were no books on business. Not one. And this struck her as curious. Millionaires were interested in money, weren’t they? Especially if they worked in Miami’s Financial Center. Howard had been forever reading books about making money. Beating the Dow. One Up on Wall Street. The Midas Touch. The Three Minute Manager. He must have bought that one just around the time he was reading The Two Minute Lover.
Kate picked out Dave’s well-thumbed paperback edition of Crime and Punishment. She hadn’t read the novel since she’d been in Law School, when it really had seemed like one of those books that might change your life. Or, at the very least, the way you thought about criminals. Idly she was turning back the cover when something caught her eye. Something was printed there, on the inside cover, in bright blue ink.
Something was stamped on it.
She stared at it incredulously, as if she had been admiring some clever bookplate, reading the words printed inside the simple roundel with more care than if they had been a visa on the passport for which she had been searching.
But this was something much more revealing.
She whispered the words out loud, as if she needed to hear them spoken in order to absorb what was implied.
‘Property of the Miami Correctional Center at Homestead?’
Could it be that Dave really was a thief? And not just a thief, but an ex-con?
Hearing his shower end, she closed the book and returned it quickly to the shelf. Then, slipping into the spare dressing gown, she left the stateroom and went up to the galley. Maybe she could rustle up a relaxed, loving and laid-back sort of face along with some breakfast.