Chapter 29

Fingal’s Cave/31
AN ALARMING PHONE CALL

Katashi watched the young woman draw the panties up her smooth legs. She turned her back to him. The thong settled between pink-hued cheeks. She had a small tattoo on her right shoulder, but without his glasses he was not sure if it was a flower or a face. He didn’t want to see the woman clearly. He did not want to recognize her on the street. He wanted her to be no more substantial than a dream. He, himself, was not much more than a dream when the ferried women kneeled beside his bed and he touched them, pretending to paint them with his fingers, paint on a woman who had no resemblance to them, any more than to this woman who now removed the steel or marble or whatever the fuck it was at his request, though her lips were no less obdurate. She had no thought of him, this old man who paid more than was required, who offered her orange juice and goat cheese, who paused to write a note, to take a piss, to scratch a pimple on his sagging ass. Her clothes floated toward her. Shimmering. Shimmering.

“Is it a flower or a face?”

“Excuse me?”

“On your shoulder. Flower or face.”

“A mole.”

“Ah.”

She kissed his lips, nose and ears. For an instant, he forgot whether she was leaving or arriving.

“Sayonara,” she said, opening the door of the stateroom. Stepping into the passage, she stumbled, regained her balance, and called out, “Hey, how do I get back to Malibu?”

“Nigel’s waiting for you on deck. He’ll have a boat take you to the pier.”

“Cool.”

The woman gone, Katashi paced his room for ten minutes trying to remember a call he was supposed to make. The clear logic and steel-trap mental operations that had served Katashi so well in his various enterprises were starting to elude him. He was no longer sure what eight times seven or nine times six were. Not that he couldn’t figure it out with a little concentration, but the answers didn’t come to him instantaneously. The times tables weren’t at the top of his head. Not to mention algorithms. Nor were all the words with which he once constructed pristine—what did the physicists call it? Damn, he couldn’t remember!— arguments. Elephant—elegant! Elegant arguments that had penetrated his opponents’ positions like armored bullets through flesh (that ultimate argument rarely called for). In certain circles, he remained Fuka, the shark, but would Fuka soon be toothless?

The ringtone played for thirty seconds before Katashi distinguished it from memory’s melody. He almost failed to recognize the frantic female voice, but as his index finger touched the end button, the voice attached itself to a face and name that he’d sooner have forgotten.

“Slow down, slow down . . . I don’t understand a word that you’re saying, Cassandra.”