The water ballet guys favored Speedos whether they were in the water or not, and spent a lot of time in the ship's gym, pumping iron and admiring themselves in the mirrors. The troupe's three women kept to themselves except when they went for a smoke on the fantail. I and my band, when performing, abandoned the contemporary look we'd adopted in Europe and did so in our traditional alpaca-wool ponchos.
Our first performance, as the Tang Dynasty sped south through the night toward Hong Kong, was received fairly well, especially considering that we performed in a language that no one else on the ship actually spoke, and that the audience had come to see the Hopping Vampires anyway.
All but one. Right in the front row, where I could scarcely miss him, was a man in a red poncho and a derby hat. He spent the entire concert grinning from ear to ear and bobbing his head in time with my nephew Esteban's electric bass. I could have understood this behavior if the head under the derby had been from the Andean highlands, but the face that grinned at me so blindingly was plump and bespectacled and Asian.
The man in the poncho gave us a standing ovation and generated enough enthusiasm in the audience to enable us to perform a second encore. Afterwards, he approached.
“Mucho fantastico!” he said, in what was probably supposed to be Spanish. “Muy bien!”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I'm a huge fan,” he said, dropping into something like English. “That was a terrific rendition of ‘Urupampa,’ by the way.”
“I noticed you were singing along.”
I soon understood that he was a Japanese businessman named Tobe Oharu, and that he belonged to a club devoted to Andean folk music. He and a group of fellow enthusiasts met weekly at a bar dressed in ponchos and derbies, listened to recordings, and studied Spanish from books.
He was so enthusiastic that I never had the heart to tell him that in our culture it's the women who wear the derby hats, whereas the men wear knit caps, or in my case a fedora.
“I had no idea you were performing here till I looked on the Tang Dynasty website the night before I left!” he said. “My friends are going to be so jealous!”
I tried this story on for size and decided that the odds were that it was too bizarre not to be true. Besides, I knew that Japanese hobbyists were very particular about wearing the right uniform, dressing up for instance as cowboys while listening to Country and Western.
“How did you happen to become a fan of Andean music?” I asked.
“Pure accident. I was on a business trip to Brussels, and I heard a group playing at the central station. I fell in love with the music at once! How could I help it, when it was Fernando Catacachi I heard on the kena.”
Since Fernando happened to be my uncle, I agreed at once that he was the best, though personally I've always had a soft spot for the playing of another uncle of mine, Arturo.
Oharu's eyes glittered behind his spectacles. “And of course,” he said, “Fidel Perugachi is supreme on the secus.”
There I had to disagree. “His playing is full of showy moves and cheap, audience-pleasing tricks,” I said. “Compared to my brother Sancho, Perugachi is an alpaca herder.”
Oharu seemed a little taken aback. “Do you think so?”
“Absolutely. It's a pity we're playing only traditional music, and you can't hear Sancho on ‘Twist and Shout.’”
Oharu considered this. “Perhaps this could be an encore tune tomorrow night?”
I had to credit Oharu for being a man of sound ideas. “Good plan,” I said.
He offered to stand us all a round of drinks, but I begged off, pleading jet lag. I had to meet with Jesse and with the water ballet guys between the first and second show and get involved in some serious plotting.
I did stick around for the opening of the Bloodthirsty Hopping Vampire Show, however. The title was irresistible, after all. I'd tried to chat with the performers during the interlude, but with no success. Apparently the actors all spoke a Chinese dialect shared by no one else on the ship: they were just told the time they had to show up, and went on from there.
The massed vampires, with their slow, synchronous hops, achieved a genuine eerie quality, and the young hero and his girlfriend were clearly in jeopardy, and were rapidly depleting their considerable store of flashy kung fu moves when I had to drag myself away for the meeting with Laszlo.
*
Next morning, after breakfast, Tang Dynasty’s tourists swarmed from the ship for their encounters with the boutiques of Tsim Sha Tsui and the bustle of Stanley Market. From the other side of the ship, unobserved by the majority of the passengers, I and the entire Water Ballet of Malibu motored off on one of the ship’s launches for our top-secret rendezvous with the Goldfish Fairy.
Laszlo had told everyone we were going, and he’d told everyone about the top-secret part too- except he’d made out it was a top-secret rehearsal of new water ballet moves, moves that he wished to conceal from the eyes of jealous rivals. His supercilious character and his obsession with artistic control helped to make this story more plausible, but even so I’m not sure we would have been given a boat if we hadn’t greased a few palms among the crew.
It hadn’t taken me long to work out that there was no way to conceal the fact of our presence in the Pearl River Delta, and secret water ballet rehearsals was the best cover story I could work out on short notice. It was bizarre, I knew, but it was bizarre enough to be true, and Laszlo and his crew were going to make it truer by conducting some genuine training.
The day was warm and humid, with shifting mists at dawn that had burned off by midmorning. We roared south out of Hong Kong’s harbor, with bronzed Apollos striking poses on the gunwales like figureheads on the U.S.S. Muscle Beach. The posing wasn’t entirely affected, as with all the diving gear stowed in the boat there was scant room for people; and the women of the troupe, with cigarettes in their sunscreen-slathered lips, draped themselves disdainfully on the bags that held the towels and the softer bits of scuba gear, and declined to speak to anyone.
About an hour after leaving port, our satellite locators told us we had reached our destination, and we sent our anchor down, shortly followed by Laszlo, one of the Apollos, and my own highly reluctant person.
I had decided that, as the person in charge, I should inspect the Goldfish Fairy myself. Though I had acquired diving skills for a task that involved retrieving documents from the cabin of a Tupolev aircraft that had made the mistake of crashing into the Black Sea, the Tupolev had been at a mere twenty-five meters, and the Goldfish Fairy was at sixty, well below the depth at which it was safe for sport divers such as myself to venture. But Laszlo and his crew- who by the way all had names like Deszmond and Szimon- had instructed me in the various skills required in staying alive at two hundred feet, and they would be on hand to look after me if I had a misadventure. I decided that the risk was worth taking.
I was carrying a ton of weight as I went over the side, not only the two cylinders on my back but another pair that would be clipped onto the anchor line at certain depths so that they could aid our decompression stops. Out of deference to me, I suspect, we were all breathing air, instead of the nitrogen-oxygen-helium mixture usually employed at depth- I had no experience with “Trimix,” as it’s known, and Laszlo had decided to save the exotic mixtures for when the water ballet guys actually had to stay down for a while and work. This would be a fast reconnaissance, it was thought. Fast down, and slowly but surely up again.