Our vessel is much farther out in the lagoon than I had planned as the site of a sudden dip in the Deep. In fact, I sense great depths around us, perhaps even fiftee n feet.
I glance at the Divine Yvette.
"Can you swim?"
"Certainly not! That would involve dampening the hairs of my coat with other than the dry shampoo my mistress employs a groomer to use. I might get a ... "--sniff--"cold."
"You will get cold. Observe."
The Divine Yvette's perfectly round aquamarine orbs widen as they focus on the boat's bottom.
"Louie! That is water!"
"I am aware of what it is."
"And we are--oh, my dear mistress!--miles from shore."
"Only yards."
"Louie, you must get me out of this! Immediately!"
At last she has given me permission to do the unthinkable. I throw my full twenty pounds from one side of the tippy canoe to the other. In a moment the outrigger and bottom lift out of the lagoon.
The Divine Yvette emits a piercing cry, which is matched by a wail from shore.
"Louie!" my Miss Temple bellows, using all her lung power and wisely eschewing screaming,
"swim for the far shore."
I glance across the light-polished wavelets. Miss Temple is right. We are now closer to the far bank. With a last desperate lunge, I take the nape of the Divine Yvette's slender neck in my teeth and roll us both into the cold, wet, dark water.
Above us the tilted tippy canoe hangs for a moment like a shelter before crashing down on us.
I remember my daring dive from the flaming deck of the Treasure Island pirate ship. That scene flashes before my closed eyes as the Divine Yvette and I plunge deep into the lagoon. The Divine Yvette is a petite thing, but she has a lot of hair to absorb water. Now, I must reverse our swift downward, drowning descent and paddle us both to the surface.
I have never worked so hard in my life! My teeth are clenched in a death grip on the Divine Yvette's neck, in the hold her pedigreed mama used to cart her to and fro as a tiny kitten.
She is not so tiny now, nor am I. In this situation my fighting weight works against me. I can only windmill all four limbs, waiting for our freefall through the water to reverse its pull and let us pop to the surface like a cork. Er, like a cork from the finest bottle of French champagne, in case the Divine Yvette recovers and asks me to refine my figures of speech. How can a dude who does not talk have figures of speech? You got me.
And right now the water's icy, dark hands are wringing the strength from my body. I flail, and finally am rewarded by a sudden waft upward. And upward and upward. And upward and upward. I wish I could see light, but all is dark, and I am no longer sure whether we are drifting upward or plunging down.
Even when my head breaks the water's surface and I see and hear a lion of a volcano shooting flames into the black Vegas sky, I cannot believe it. In a minute the Divine Yvette's head bobs up alongside me, her eyes squeezed so shut a crowbar couldn't open them.
"Can you paddle?" I ask.
"I do not swim."
"Can you spread your toes and move your feet up and down?"
"Spread my toes? Louie, please! I only do so for the most intimate grooming rituals."
"Get intimate and get grooming, or you will drown like an unwanted kitten," I growl.
"I was never an unwanted kitten! I am the product of decades of the finest and most precise breeding techniques--"
I haul a mitt out of the water and smack her in the kisser. Sometimes dames require a firm hand, particularly when they are hysterical, or on a genealogy kick.
Turning my head (and inadvertently the Divine Yvette's unconscious one) I do the hardest thing I have ever done. I spot Miss Temple's fiery red hair in the crowd by the cameras, and I run for all my might away from her. I am running in water, you understand, toes spread, so what I am doing is swimming.
The Divine Yvette is a terrible burden. My jaws are frozen with strain. But I cannot let loose of her. My long, luxuriant tail has become a liability that could pull us both under. I struggle on, my head never high enough above the waves to see the shoreline for which I aim.
I can see the volcano, though, coughing up its bloody fire and rock, reflected in the water all around me.
I am swimming through icy fire, every limb aching with effort, my mind numbed by cold, even the Divine Yvette a mere memory. If I live through this, I will kill that Maurice!
Still, in my benumbed brain I hear an encouraging refrain: "Come on, Louie! Come on, boy!"
You would think I were Lassie.
The thought of being mistaken for a dog is so repellent that my flailing legs find new strength. I feel more light hitting the top of my head as the surrounding water seems punctured by stars.
In another moment human legs are splashing into the water around me. Yvette and I are lifted, her neck still clenched in my teeth, out of the water.
Miss Temple's face hangs over mine. "He is alive!"
A camera flashes beyond her, and all I can think is, I am still wearing that damn Hawaiian shirt.
This mishap could kill my career.
Chapter 26
Matt's Off Night
Walking the Strip resembles being lost on a carnival midway. Like a moving sidewalk, the Strip gives the impression that the people are standing still while the earth moves beneath them. No matter how long Matt kept walking, he felt he would never reach the end.
It reminded him of Sartre's brilliant play, No Exit, and its rather cynical line that "Hell is other people."
Even when pedestrians deserted the sidewalk for a long trek toward the dazzling entrance facade of a major hotel-casino, Matt suspected that they soon recycled back onto the Strip's implacable length and unquenchable brightness.
Somewhere in this milling mass of Thursday-night humanity, Cliff Efftnger might be stepping on and off the merry-go-round like everyone else.
Matt studied the passing parade, mentally reminding himself of the facial features of the man he was looking for. He found it hard not to be distracted by the fascinating variety of fellow strollers.
Tourists, of course, made up the bulk of the walkers, their clothes casual despite the cooler night air. Walking is the economy class's favored mode of transportation. Those who can afford to taxi up and down the Strip do so.
Did that mean Cliff Effinger, seen on foot, was pinching pennies? Or hiding his loot from various scams? That was the trouble with supposition: every conclusion generated another legitimate possibility.
Matt saw fallen trashy magazines littering the sidewalk edges. Waiting men jammed fistfuls of the pulp paper at passersby. Never at women, only men, and never at a man alone.
Crushed underfoot, revealing photographs offered private dancers and total fulfillment.
Matt wondered whose grown-up little girls and boys these nakedly seductive people were, and what kind of people those parents were.
Not so easy to dismiss the seamier side of life nowadays, when the villain wasn't that easy-to-blame old devil Sin so much as dysfunctional family cycles. What fun was there in stoning someone who had to be analyzed unto the fifth generation backward in time?
Did Cliff Effinger have a grim family history to excuse his pathetic bullying? Was he more to be pitied than condemned? Matt felt his fists ball in his jacket pockets. No. Some people were just bad. Evil. In the power of that old devil Sin.
He veered onto the long, curving sweep of sidewalk that approached the mega hotel rising in the distance at an oblique, coy angle. The straightaway was for King Car, the contraption that had first made Las Vegas a feasible resort for Hollywoodites three hundred miles away.
Who would have suspected that the hoi polloi, not Hollywood, would make this desert gambling oasis rich? Even a lowlife like Cliff Effinger had come here to make his fortune.