AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 75

“It’s my daddy’s sixth and biggest yacht,” Eric told Courtney.  “A hundred and sixty-two feet.  A trifle Spartan, but it’ll do.”  He had his back to her, both knees on the gray leather sofa, as he looked out the viewport up at the New York City skyline, and smoked one of his strange cigarettes.  “He’s loaning it to me.  The Lowlander will be mine for a whole year.  We can go wherever I want to.”

“It’s a black beauty,” Courtney answered, as she sat on the queensize bed in the master bedroom.  She watched Eric stare out the elongated oval viewport, and she thought: Black Widow.  “Is the underbelly painted red?” she asked.

“What?”

She repeated her question for him.  But what she really was concentrating on was memorizing the passageways along which they had just walked——from the helipad over to what Eric called the sun deck, down the stairwell to the fore salon, by the dining room, and along the corridor to the bedroom suites.  Courtney had seen no crew.  Perhaps they were not aboard.  The boat felt ghostly.

“Underbelly,” Eric sneered.  “The bottom of a ship is called a hull.”  He smoked.  He backed off the sofa, and streaked across the suite.

“Is it red?” Courty asked.

Eric reached into a tiny refridge and pulled out an iced Perrier.  “Is what red?”

“The hull.”

Eric drank it down like he hadn’t tasted water in two desert days.  “Hull . . . What about the hull?”

Courty gave up on the line of questioning.

Eric went back to the sofa.  He blew a smoke ring that disintegrated against the window.  “What about the hull?”

“Never mind.”

“No!  What about it?  What about the hull?”  He had turned around and was looking at her.

Surrealistic pause.  “Is the hull red?”

He seemed startled by her question.  “Oh, yes.  As a matter of fact, I believe it is.”  The window again absorbed his attention for the duration of the cocaine cigarette, as he muttered whisperings that Courtney could not quite catch; something about showing someone the best part or showing the old fart.  Relighting another, he came over to her, sat down on the bed close to her, and began to finger her arm.

Up close, Courty could see cracks in his facade.  Eric truly did not look healthy.  It wasn’t just her fingernail-gouges down his face or the sewn-up fork gouge across the side of his head . . . His lips were cracked and peeling, and his eyes . . . His pupils were gigantic, and he was squinting in the low light.  It looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.  His skin was pale.  He was jittery, his hands couldn’t keep still, and when they moved they were trembly.  He kept nervously scratching a spot on his arm; the skin was raw there.  He wasn’t even breathing right: fast, short little gasps.

“I knew you’d grow to love me.”  Eric flicked the ash into the green jade dolphin’s mouth on the bedstand.

Courtney stifled a choke.  “How did you know that I’d grow to love you?” she asked.

“Can’t tell you.  It would give it all away.”

“The aphrodisiac of money?” Courty asked.

“Nah.”  BIG inhale.  “More basic.”

The air in the cabin was now stuffy, blue with secondhand cigarette drug-smoke.  Eric did not offer her any (of whatever it was), and she was certainly not in the least desirous of some, but Courtney wondered if she was getting high herself just off the sidestream smoke.

Eric suddenly volunteered: “Girls always fall in love with their kidnappers.  I’ve seen it over and over on TV and in the movies.”

Courty restrained an impulse to earp up on him.

Courtney had mentally committed herself absolutely to Byron Reed, and she felt it.  Whatever action she took, she knew it would have to be all the way, absolute, 100%.  If she turned to fight Eric, she would have to destroy him.  If she fled, she would have to run so far that Eric could never find her, EVER!  But whatever action she took, there could be no pusillanimous pussy-footing about!

Tubes Through The Roof!

Courtney smiled demurely at Eric, hating herself for it.  “You’re so clever.  I love clever men.”  What bilge.  She imagined Eric violently dead, and the fantasy calmed her.

Eric looked at her for a long time, not speaking.  Finally, he stubbed the cocaine ciggy half-out in the green jade artwork that Eric was using as an ashtray: it was shaped like a dolphin’s mouth.  The image of flicking ashes into a dolphin had been supremely loathsome to Courtney.  Now, watching the gently burning sweet-smelling filtered cigarette stuck just inside the dolphin’s mouth, Courtney had the comical image come to her of a school of dolphins neatly divided into smoking and non-smoking swimming-sections.

“You intoxicate me,” Eric said, like synchronous reality, since it was precisely what Courtney was thinking: the infernal toxic drug was intoxicating her.

There was something about his intensity that seemed out of focus.  He got up and walked across the master bedroom, restlessly.  Immediately, he lit up another!  Then, he walked back.  Forth.  Back.  Puffs of smoke trailed.  Something about his stroll was not quite human; it was overly repetitive, like a robot.

It was so bizarre, Courtney finally couldn’t watch him anymore.  Her eyes surveyed her surroundings.

The yacht’s master bedroom was half-livingroom, half-bedroom.  Steel-gray leather couch, money-green queensize bed, TV console, burled walnut paneling, soft padded ceiling squares, which Courty guessed doubled as flotation devices.  The yacht, most especially the main bedroom, was furnished with restraint.  Even the adjoining antique gold sauna, like an open Swiss vault, was mandatory, unassuming, almost apologetic.  Considering what monstrous wealth could have done to glitz-up this yacht, the fine grained, superb reserve was a relief.

Eric finished the cigarette.  “Are you really pregnant?”  It came like a shot across her bow.

“I suppose you want to keep it.”  He stood; motionless; eyes on her.

Courtney scavenged for anti-abortion sounds of offspring survival to fight the feticide.  “It will be my gift to you: a Des Barres heir.”

He looked at her so sharply, that Courty feared she had apparently erred, not heired apparent.

“But it’s not mine!”

PDQ: “Everything I have is yours!”

Eric blinked, silenced.  He smoked another cigarette.  Another one!  The boy was going to have lung cancer down into his knees!

“True,” he said so much later, that this time Courtney didn’t know what it referenced.  He was muttering again, and his inflection had been odd.

“What are you smoking?” Courty asked.

“Coca paste.”

“What is that?”

“Cocaine.”

“Do you mean Crack?”

“No.  This is the safest and cleanest way to ingest cocaine.  Crack kills.”

Courtney contained cocaine comment.

“I had to have my nose rebuilt twice.  It got old after awhile.  I don’t snort it anymore.”  His voice sounded distracted, absent.  He wasn’t looking at her anymore.  He was wandering; around the bed, over to the curved couch, he turned on the TV, punched through about fifty channels, three or four seconds a channel, shut it off; guzzled another Perrier; sat down on the couch, smoked some more, looking at her, then not looking at her.

Then looking at her.  “You don’t care what happens to Byron Reed, do you?”

Her skin chilled.  She stalled: “I don’t know.”

“I understand,” he said, and smoked.  His spirits perceptibly brightened.  “You won’t have to know about it!”  He leaped up off the couch like a mountain boy about to charge out into the snow with his favorite sled.  “I’m going to go below.  I’ll be back after awhile.  Just stay here; I’ll be back.”  He gave her a kiss on her forehead.  But his mind was not anywhere in the vicinity of Courtney.  He stopped at the doorway.  “There’s no servants or crew aboard until tomorrow morning.”

And then he was gone.

She could hear his steps quicken as they receded.

“This is not my beautiful yacht.”  She felt light-headed, like the time when they were painting her and Lauren’s Manhattan apartment, and the smell had made her ditzy.

She picked up the receiver on the modern telephone next to the bed.  It had many buttons on it, obviously for intership intercom communication.  But although there was a standard touch-tone keypad, the numbers did not beep, and she couldn’t get a dialtone or an outside line.

She went to the doorway.  No one.  She stepped outside into the hallway; saw no one.  She listened acutely.  No one.  If she was being watched, there was no evidence of it.  Had her Amateur Night acting fooled them?  It was too easy; she didn’t believe it.  This was some sort of a test.  Had to be.

She wandered aft, down the hallway, noted again the framed nautical musings of Cocteau, Dufy, Gainsborough, and the miniature ‘Blueboy On Boat’ lithograph which Eric claimed was a counterfeit Toulouse-Lautrec curio, quite valuable even though a fraud, because of stylistic invention and the historical fact that it had fooled the art world for nearly a century.  The interior walls seemed sufficiently wood-paneled with high-gloss burled walnut to nearly make the ship unsinkable.

Courty wandered up on deck, seeing no one——the helipad was helicopterless——she wandered over to the ship’s right side (starboard?), wandered to the ladder at the center (amidships, Eric had said) leading down to the pier.  Boat lights glittered, reflecting off the water of the bay, almost hypnotizing Courty into a trance.  She could hear city sounds, and the distant rumbling of a far off tugboat.  The towering Manhattan skyline was so majestic, it tempted Courtney to renounce California.  It made her heart hurt with melancholy, wishing she were safe at home in her apartment, with all her friends around.

Safe . . . what was safe?

She glanced around casually, nobody was watching her.  She walked further back to the . . . (what did he call it?) stern gangplank . . . and stopped there, looking all around.

She could go down the queenly carpeted gangplank and escape.  Way, way over there were two men and three women on the catwalk over by a near 100-foot yacht; they were talking, perhaps 800 or 1000 feet away, their voices audible in the night (but not discernible).  And in the other direction, there, coming this way: a distant strolling security guard for this pier of stately ships.

The safety of the faraway pleasant voices was so seductive that it lured her onto the top of the gangplank.

A telephone.  The police.  A few buttons pushed, a few words spoken.

She closed her eyes, imagined police swarming all over the yacht.  But where would be the proof?  Would her word be good against the word of a Des Barres?  It would be her and Reed against Eric Des Barres and all his loyal lackeys.  The richest family in America, second in political power only to the Kennedys.  And Courtney wondered, as she had wondered many times before, if the Kennedys had had Marilyn Monroe killed to protect JFK . . . oh, God, she could feel her mind drifting, she could feel it’s complete lack of focus, she could feel it flitting about like a dragonfly . . . alighting here for a sip, alighting there for a taste . . . then back to a nude Marilyn sprawled beautifully dead across her bed, no, the Kennedys didn’t have her killed, but they could have!  They had the power to do it, and get away with it!  Such an awesome, dangerous power!  And the Des Barres family, what power did they have?  Courtney was sickened, thinking about the possibilities.

Footsteps coming toward her, across the gangplank onto The Lowlander, snapped her out of her anguished inward reverie.  It was the two men she had seen socializing near the yacht across the pier.  One Black man, one white man.  They were both looking at her as they walked.  The white guy was big, with a macho stud attitude.  The Black man was thinner, his legs inside his trousers seemed bone-thin.

Courty watched the white man recognize her.  His footsteps faltered, his facial expression registered surprise and embarrassment, as he recognized her.  Then he covered with a flush of false pride: he leered as he passed close to her and stepped onto The Lowlander.

“Hello, Buffy!” he said, laugh-shouting the words at her, pinching her bottom with his fingers as he passed her quickly.  The second man laughed.

She turned and stared after the two of them.  They were swaggering!  And sniggling with laughter.  The Black man digging his elbow into the other man’s ribs.  Courtney shook her head, trying to free it of the sense of unreality; only to be slugged with remembrance and delayed recognition.  The way the white man was walking!  The guy who had pinched her was one of Eric’s gang-rapists!  And the Black man, so thin, yes, she was sure of it now, he was Matthew, one of the rapists too!  Two of the stocking-headed stars of RAM-BAM.  The guy pinching her was like slapping her in the face, and forcing her to recognize him.

Her skin chilled, and she started to shiver with remembered horror.

She watched the men disappear below deck.

Courtney wanted to RUN across that gangplank!  She wanted the nearest telephone NOW!  She wanted to talk to the police NOW!

Tears flooded her eyes, and she wiped them away, stopped crying almost as fast as she had started.

It was useless.  It was too dangerous!  Reed had been right, long ago in California, when he had said that we have to finish it.  We have to end it.  Calling the police . . . she didn’t think it would end things, she rather thought it would anger Eric into violent reprisal.

For a moment Courty closed her eyes, feeling the gentle night wind on her wet face, hearing the tranquil water sounds.  Her shivering stopped.

A sad smile graced Courtney’s face as she turned to go back.  Reed would want me to leave.  No.  Not without you.

Her heart began to beat with the extra blood pressure of apprehension and fear.  Her feet began to tiptoe silently, taking her down below . . .

COURTNEY, Chapter 76
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47