It was done and that was all there was to it. I’d have to take my chances.
Chapter 17
I got in some sleep during the day, dressed, had dinner alone, and was back at my hotel at nine to meet Stormy. I had a little argument with myself about packing a rod on the trip I was scheduled to take with him, deciding against it at the last moment.
Stormy was on time to the minute. I met him in the lobby and we went out to a taxi he had waiting. The driver evidently had his directions, for he pulled away and drove out to the Venetian Causeway without waiting for orders.
I tried to make some light conversation with Stormy, but it fell flat. He answered in monosyllables without making any attempt to keep the conversation going.
The taxi swung to the left at the end of the causeway, drove a couple of blocks along bayside concrete plants and lumber warehouses, threading through a narrow lane to a small wooden dock jutting out into a walled waterway a couple of hundred feet wide.
We got out there and Stormy told the driver to wait. A thirty-foot motorboat was tied up to the dock. Lights came on and the engine throbbed to life as I followed Stormy along the dock toward it.
Two men were waiting. Stormy grunted at them and we stepped aboard. One of the men threw off the ropes, while the other made the engine roar and twisted the wheel.
Stormy was standing close to my right side as water swirled between dock and boat. The other fellow pressed against my left arm. Starlight gleamed on blue steel as Stormy nudged me in the belly with an automatic. He said, past me:
“Frisk him, Mike.”
The fellow started going over me. I was plenty glad I had decided to leave my gun at home. “What’s this for?” I protested. “Please take that gun away from my stomach.”
“This is just a precaution,” Stormy told me. “You won’t get hurt if you’re all right.”
The man was going over me with a fine-tooth comb. He stepped back, breathing heavily. “Okay, boss. He ain’t carryin’ nothin’.”
“All right.” Stormy kept the muzzle of his gat hard against me. “Fix him up for a ride.”
I stood still and kept on protesting while the man stepped behind me and tied a blindfold tightly over my eyes. The engine was cut down to a muted throb and the boat was maneuvering in the center of the channel.
Stormy guided me to a chair after I was blindfolded. It was impossible to tell whether the boat went on east into the system of interconnecting waterways that thread the peninsula, or whether it swung out into the bay where it could cut across to the mainland, or swing out around the south tip of the beach into the Atlantic.
Stormy sat down beside me and said matter-of-factly: “I think you’re all right, guy, but Sandra doesn’t take chances on visitors she doesn’t know. This is the only way anyone can get to see her. After she gives you the once-over, you’ll either come without a blindfold or you won’t come at all.”
I told him it was a hell of a note, still trying to play my role of a dumb man-about-town out for a sort of lark. Stormy wasn’t very communicative, and I had to sit there and play a game of guessing our direction and speed.
Perhaps it can be done blindfolded on the water, but not by me. Put me in a car in a city I know and I can plot out a street by street course with my eyes closed. I was lost in a motorboat.
I smoked three cigarettes, chain-fashion, and had just lit my fourth when the engine cut out and we began drifting. The side of the boat bumped gently against a wall or piling, and there was movement about me. Three cigarettes meant approximately twenty minutes on the water, the way I smoke. Twenty minutes at fifteen miles an hour. Five miles, more or less, from the east end of the Venetian Causeway. Which didn’t mean a goddamned thing to me.
The boat was drifting along, bumping against a wall with its fenders. It came to a stop and Stormy pulled off my blindfold. We were in a thirty-foot channel, between concrete seawalls. A long tunnel with electric lights in the arched ceiling. We were tied up to a narrow platform with concrete steps leading up.
Stormy went up the steps. I followed him to a summer house. A flagged path led between Australian pines to the huge bulk of a house a couple of hundred feet away. Some of the windows were dimly lighted.
We went in a side door through a hallway to a big room that had class written all over it. Soft lights, paintings on the walls, rugs your feet sank into, comfortable lounging chairs and divans.
There wasn’t a living soul in sight. An empty silence met us. Stormy told me to sit down, went to a row of buttons on the wall and pressed one. I lit another cigarette and tried to fight back a creepy feeling that wouldn’t stay back.
Stormy came back and sat down by me. After we waited a couple of minutes, a voice exploded right in the middle of the room. I jumped and tried to look every direction at once while Storm listened.
It was an eerie, hollow voice. Yet so surcharged with husky resonance that the entire room tingled with the impact:
“Send Mr. Barlow up to me. You will wait there for the others.”
Stormy nodded, just as though the owner of the voice could see him. He said, “Come on,” to me, led me to the far wall and pushed a single button. An entire wall panel slid back, showing a small elevator cage.
I had gotten my breath by that time. “What is all this hocus-pocus?” My voice trembled and I wasn’t surprised that it did.
Stormy said, “Get in the elevator.”
I said, “I’ll be damned...” and he pushed me in. The panel slid back into place and a little light glowed in the ceiling of the cage. It started up. I gritted my teeth and tried to keep a firm hold on reality.
The cage stopped in front of a blank wall, and another panel slid back. The light above me went out and I stepped into a room not larger than ten by ten.
A girl stood beside the wall. She pressed a button and the panel went into place. A young girl. Not more than sixteen. She wore a single full-blown rose where Eve is reputed to have used a fig-leaf to good advantage. If there was any more to her costume, it was not visible.
Her cheeks were white and her eyes were piteous. So damned piteous that I couldn’t repress a step toward her. They widened and she shrank from me, breathing, “No,” so softly that I guessed at it rather than heard it.
There was a soft, hazy light in the room. I couldn’t tell where it originated. A damned clever concealed lighting arrangement. The floor was covered with an oriental rug, and there were drapes across a doorway at the other end.
The girl took my hand and led me toward the drapes.
I’m not going to say my heart wasn’t pounding like an air-hammer, when she pulled the drapes aside and motioned for me to go in. It was. A De Mille couldn’t have stage-managed the affair better. Say what you please, there’s a lot in a front. No man can withstand a direct appeal to all the senses at once.
I stood just inside the drapes and let them slither shut behind me. The same hazy light made me blink to focus my eyes on the woman who lay on a couch across the room. A soft rose light that touched every object in the room to indescribable glamour.
Threads of smoke curled up from burning incense at the head and foot of the low couch where Sandra awaited me. The odor wasn’t heavy nor unpleasant. A subtle fragrance suggestive of unrestrained voluptuousness, hinting at delectable gratifications, pervasively sensuous.
I don’t want to go off my nut telling about it. This is being written afterward. It’s difficult as hell to recreate a certain atmosphere in written words.
I’m admitting it got to me. I had an insane impulse to drop down on my knees and grovel forward to the woman on the couch. The light was faintly stronger over her, touching the flowing silk robes cleverly arranged to disclose the sinuous length of her while mysteriously concealing every intimate detail of a body that my pounding senses told me was the most beautifully seductive body I had ever seen.