As he waited for sleep to come, he smelled a pungent odor. It was her. But it reminded him of something else. The sexiest smell in the entire world.
The smell of ripped and gutted fish.
It wouldn't let him sleep. He prayed for sleep, but the tuna smell in his nostrils was like scented cotton.
He waited until her snoring filled the room before throwing off the bed covers and digging his feet into his slippers.
He padded into the den and turned on the computer. The paneled walls were adorned with schooner prints. A varnished pine plaque over the monitor had a legend burned into it by a soldering iron: From Sea To Sea.
The system went through its interminable sign-on cycles, and finally he accessed his e-mail via the service.
There was no message from the one who haunted his thoughts. It had been nearly a month. Where was she?
The cellular telephone in his briefcase buzzed. Snapping it open, he lifted it to his face and spoke. "Yes?"
"Commodore."
"Go ahead."
"We had another inconvenient encounter."
"Details, please."
"A U.S. vessel in the Nose. We were conducting routine truffle operations, and the illegal spotted the Hound on his fish-finding sonar. We had to take action."
"Vessel status?"
"Scuttled."
"Crew?"
"Cat food."
"Witnesses?"
"None. As before."
"That will do."
"Aye-aye, Commodore."
"Continue herding operations. Report any anomalies."
"Aye, sir."
Closing the cell phone, he laid it beside the terminal. His eyes went to the screen.
And there, like a beacon, glowed a New Message prompt line.
To: Commodore@net.org From: Kali@yug.net Subject: Call me instantly
But the message area was only blank space.
"Bitch!" he muttered.
He had been warned never to call, never to visit, without being summoned first. No one gave a man of his stature orders, and that was part of the thrill, of course.
He punched out the number from memory and waited with pounding heart and an uncomfortable rising sensation in his crotch.
"If you dialed correctly, you know my name," her cool contralto voice said. "Speak."
"Mistress."
"Commodore."
"Er, I have your message."
"All is well, I trust," she said coolly.
"As well as it can be with the current situation."
"Still conducting tests?"
"Er, yes. We had an accident this evening."
"You must tell me all about it." It was not a polite invitation, but a firm command.
"Be glad to."
"In person."
"I would be delighted. Shall I bring something?" Her voice dripped with contempt. "Bring your obedience, worm." And she hung up.
He changed from his stained pajama pants into fresh trousers and sped through the sleeping city to the place he knew as the Temple.
It was unlocked. He stepped into the anteroom and through double doors beside which danced barbaric carvings of bare-breasted females with ripe lips, lascivious hips and multiple arms poised to please. In the preparation room he removed his clothes down to the last stitch.
His manhood was already rising. He swallowed hard, presented himself to the mirrored door of one-way glass. He saw himself. Behind the obscuring glass, she was looking at him, he knew. He could feel her blazing blue eyes upon him.
Her cool question floated through the barrier. "Are you prepared to enter my presence?"
"I am, Mistress."
"Then assume the position of approach."
Falling on hands and knees, he crept toward the door, bumping it open with his head.
Like a scuttling crab, he entered the room.
He kept his eyes on the polished floor because the penalty for doing otherwise was severe, and it was too early in the encounter to expect the corporal delights to be visited upon him.
He stopped when his head bumped her stiletto boots and one lifted to press its steely pointedness into his bare back.
"Tell me," she said flatly.
"Anything."
"Tell me what happened tonight that disturbs you so."
"Another U.S. fishing vessel stumbled onto a test. It had to be disposed of for security reasons. Crew and vessel are no more."
"Very wise."
"No one will ever know."
Her tone turned sarcastic. "Except you and I and everyone involved. That is how many individual persons?"
"I imagine thirty, all told," he stuttered.
"Thirty people in on a secret that could ruin your career, if not your life. If only one percent of them tell one person, how big a leak is that?"
"Considerable," he admitted.
"How big?"
"Disastrous."
"That's better." Her voice shed its bitter sarcasm, though it could hardly be said to soften.
"It's a well-known axiom, Commodore, that if you tell one person a confidence, you must assume you told three. Because most people feel the urge to confide in their most trusted confidants, who in turn will confide in theirs, and so on several times over until the secret is fully out and no longer a secret but common gossip."
"Stories distort in the telling."
"It may be time to move to the next level."
"Escalation?"
"I have read your polls. They are sinking. You are sinking."
"I am receptive to your merciless counsel, as always, Mistress."
"Of course. How could it be otherwise?"
She dug her heel into his back, and the bullwhip-whose leather he smelled but did not see unwound from her unseen hand to fall heavily over his head like a shiny, crinkled tentacle.
"I can see you are in need of convincing."
In fact, it was the contrary. But he had more urgent needs. Already the bullwhip was being gathered up into a tense, tight coil of unreleased energy.
"Whatever you decree, Mistress."
"I decree pain!"
And the bullwhip cracked down on his back like a bitter, stinging kiss.
His face was pushed into the black floor. His hardness burned, sliding to one side under the pressure of his recoiling body. Later he would discover friction burns. He loved friction burns. They were like a badge of honor.
She was hectoring him mercilessly. "You will escalate. You will provoke and you will obey."
"I will obey."
"You will obey absolutely!"
"I will obey absolutely."
And kneeling before him, she lifted his head by the sweaty hair, thrusting her womanly face into his own. Her eyes burned like icy blue diamonds. Her golden hair was a wild cloud framing a perfect face made more perfect by the yellow silk domino mask. Her lips glistened with a bloody shine. They pulsed with her moist, confident exhalations, not an inch from his eager ear.
"I will tell you what you must do ...."
Chapter 11
Tomasso Testaverde was a survivor. From his earliest days of stealing fish off the slush-laden wheelbarrows and ice buckets on the busy Kingsport, Massachusetts, wharves of his youth to the day he crewed his first dragger, he was a survivor.
It was said of Tomasso Testaverde that he was a survivor to the day he died.
He died on a day just like any other. All of the days of Tomasso Testaverde's life were essentially the same. That was to say, larcenous.
Deep in his larcenous heart, though Tomasso didn't see himself that way, he was a low thief.
When he stole fish off the docks and cooked them over fires made in the crumbling, naked chimneys of Old Dogtown, where witches used to dwell in the long-ago days before his grandfather Sirio came from Sicily, Tomasso saw himself as simply an opportunist. One who took advantage of life's little opportunities. Nothing more. And besides, he was hungry. His father was away for weeks at a time fishing cod off the Grand Banks, or sometimes seining mackerel off the Virginia coast. Tomasso's mother was, as they liked to say, a woman whose heels grew rounder the longer her husband's shoes were not tucked under her bed.