The lounge of the yacht, like everything else about the floating palace that was the Calypso Facto, called to mind something Cleopatra might have designed. Or perhaps Imelda Marcos was a better, modern-day comparison, for Romero Farnier’s yacht was the equivalent of—what was it, over a thousand pairs of shoes? Whatever. Too many shoes.
Maurice Brandon looked about him, drinking in the golden splendor along with his single-malt scotch, for Romero was a generous host, and no expense was being spared to keep his guests happy. The room was padded and gilded and tufted to within an inch of its life, and had about it the general air of a room in a French bordello cast adrift on the high seas.
It was also a bit like the Titanic, now he came to think of it, a ship that was a floating temptation to the gods if ever one there were. They were miles from any icebergs but the English Channel was sort of like the high seas as far as Maurice was concerned. He was not a sailor and never would adapt to life lived at a rolling pitch. Still, he could only wonder at the star that had led him, little Maurie Baumgarten, out of Central Los Angeles to Hollywood to where he stood now, inured to the ceaseless glamour of his surroundings. If anything, he was finding incessant glamour and glitz to be the norm—absurdly, he found himself fussing if someone forgot to bring him the right sort of fish fork.
It was a very long way from the walkup apartment he’d shared with his mother and younger brother decades earlier. The place had overlooked an alleyway behind a diner, its red brick growing blacker with the years, its trash cans more pungent, and the fights in its alley more lethal as they became more drug-fueled. The first thing he’d done when he’d started to earn serious money was move his mother out of there to a decent little place in Encino with a front yard and a patch of garden in the back. Over her protests, as it turned out. After a year she announced she missed the noisy old tenement, smells and dealers and all. Go figure. She’d died a month after making this late-night confession to him, before he’d had time to do anything about it. She’d been found in her garden among the plants she kept forgetting to water, managing to make him feel he’d hastened her death by organizing for her this sudden, shocking brush with the bourgeoisie.
It was yet another item to chuck under the “no good deed goes unpunished” category, he thought now. Maurice was a meddler and he knew it, but his intentions always were the best. Moving his mother had resulted in much the same emotional snarl as he’d created trying to help Margot, back in the days when they were both young and salad green. He was one of those people who never seemed to learn. His diary entries could attest to that.
He looked out the curved window spanning the front of the ship. That village in the distance, Monkslip-super-Mare, looked so spooky in the gloom of the fading light. There was, he decided, a rather eerie element shrouding this entire trip. That he and Margot should once again be thrust into close proximity, where he could observe her making the same old mistakes she’d always made, most of them involving men. Correction: all of them involving men.
Maurice adjusted his dark-framed glasses, and out of habit his hand went up to smooth back his hair. He kept forgetting that his head was now as bald as an ostrich egg: he shaved it each morning, the same as his chin whiskers. As he’d gotten balder, shaving was the only way to avoid succumbing to the temptations of the dreaded comb-over, but fortunately the naked egg look was all the rage now among many men of a certain age. Among fashionable men at any age, he assured himself.
He twisted the wedding ring on his left hand, missing his partner. Perhaps the new hairstyle, a bow to the inevitable, had brought him luck in love at last. He wished himself at home, bustling about, preparing healthy gourmet meals, instead of here dancing to Romero Farnier’s tune and eating far too much rich food, far too many desserts, and allowing himself just that one extra glass of wine at dinner. The on-board chef, Zaki, had too heavy a hand with the butter knife and cream pitcher to suit Maurice’s taste. But the job as stylist on Romero’s next film meant an influx of serious cash, which was just what was needed to keep the newlyweds afloat. He’d been tempted out of retirement because he’d paid too much for the new house in Nichols Canyon—showing off for his partner, wanting to spoil him rotten. Frank deserved it.
He walked over to refresh his glass at the drinks table set out in anticipation of the dinner party. Really more of a heavy–hors d’oeuvres cocktail party: Romero had decided he wanted the guests to mingle and get to know one another better at last, and a sit-down dinner precluded that. If they didn’t know each other by now, Maurice reflected, after being confined to the ship for so long, they never would. Maurice never drank to excess, although right about now seemed a good time to start.
He had a feeling about the evening. He would say this later only to Frank, because anyone else would write it off as after-the-fact self-aggrandizement (“See? I told you I was psychic!”). From the standpoint of officialdom, it would come across as foreknowledge of a crime, of premeditation; it would be impossible to explain that his feelings were just and only that—feelings. And to the best of his knowledge, unless he was completely losing his mind, he wasn’t planning any crimes at the moment.
But the atmosphere was there, dark, dank, and menacing, and as difficult as his sense of dread and foreboding would be to explain to logical, practical, literal-minded people (which, it was to be hoped, policemen were), it was as real and enveloping as the fog that was creeping its way onto the deck of the yacht, muffling footsteps and masking faces and hiding intentions. Maurice, usually imperturbable, felt disturbed, uneasy in his skin, on edge with a free-floating anxiety he had come to recognize as a precursor of doom—or at the least, of a very bad day. He had felt the same way the day his mother died. Too late, he had gone to visit her, not calling ahead as he normally would have done. There was a sense propelling him, a sense that told him a phone call would be pointless, as she could not answer.
How he had known that with such certainty he never could explain, even to himself. He had found her murdered in the back garden, the victim of a failed robbery or home invasion in the safe little sanctuary he’d bought for her. If she’d stayed in her slummy walkup, she’d be alive today.
He often wondered if he’d inherited his sixth sense from her. She didn’t like her new home, but she’d never really been able to explain why. Had she simply been reacting subconsciously to the danger she could feel coming?
Now the same dread he’d been feeling had to do with Margot’s presence on this luxury floating tub, and that was as close as he could get to pinning down the source of his mood. Margot was always trouble, she had always brought trouble with her; trouble was like something she carried in a bottle in her makeup bag, alongside her perfumes and eyelash curler.
He decided to go and have a talk with her. If nothing else, he could warn her to be careful. Not that she would listen, but at least he would have tried. He had failed to save his mother because he hadn’t acted quickly on his premonition. Might he not now be given a second chance to make things right?