“I have a friend in Los Angeles,” Jolanda said. “Who is part of a kind of guerrilla group, in a way—they’re planning to infiltrate this Valparaiso Nuevo and seize control. Take the whole place over, collect all the fugitives and turn them in for rewards. There’ll be a fortune in it, selling them all. And then they’ll live there like kings and queens. Fresh air, fresh water, a brand-new life.” Her gaze was curiously fixed and bright, brighter even than her usual druggy glare. She seemed to be staring past or through him, into some gleaming realm of fulfilled fantasies. “My friend asked me if I wanted to join them. We’d be billionaires. We’d own a whole little planet. It’s supposed to be beautiful up there in the L-5 worlds.”
Enron was fully sober at once.
“When is all this supposed to happen?” he asked.
“Very soon, actually. I think they said they would—” Jolanda put her hand over her mouth. “Good God, look at what I’ve done! I should never have told you any of this!”
“No, it is very interesting, Jolanda.”
“Listen, Marty, it’s not true, none of it, not a word! It’s just a story, a movie idea that they were making up, there’s nothing real about it! You mustn’t take it seriously. It isn’t true!” She was staring at him in horror. In a low somber tone she said, “You shouldn’t have let me have so much wine. Please forget everything I just said about Valparaiso Nuevo. Everything. I could get into enormous trouble if—if—” She began to cry, great lalloping sobs that shook her entire body. His hand was still caught between her legs and he feared that in her convulsive movements she would sprain his wrist.
“Shh. There’s nothing to worry about, Jolanda. I’m not going to say a word to anyone about this.”
Hope glistened in her eyes. But she still seemed terrified.
“You swear it? They would kill me!”
“The smart spy protects his sources, love. I am a very smart spy.”
She was still trembling.
Enron said, “But you must do one thing for me. I want to meet your Los Angeles friend. I want to talk with him, with his group. To work with them.”
“Seriously?”
“I am always serious, Jolanda.”
“But what I just told you about has nothing to do with your—”
“Ah, but it does. There are people on Valparaiso Nuevo who would be of great interest to the state of Israel, of that I am certain,” Enron said. “If these people are going to be for sale, we would like to contact the sellers very early in the proceedings. For that matter we would probably be willing to provide your friends with support of a very material kind as they undertake their project What is your friend’s name, the one in Los Angeles?”
Jolanda paused a moment before answering.
“Davidov. Mike Davidov.”
Enron felt his pulse rate pick up. “Jewish?”
“I don’t think so. I think it’s a Russian name. He looks sort of Russian.”
Enron slipped his hand free of her thighs and began to stroke her breasts again. In his most seductive imploring tone he said to her, “Take me with you to Los Angeles. Introduce me to your friend Mr. Davidov.”
“I don’t know, Marty—I don’t think I should—”
“Tomorrow. The nine o’clock shuttle.” No longer seductive. Commanding, now.
“It’s no use,” she said. “He’s already gone to Valparaiso Nuevo. A lot of the key people are up there already, scoping the place out.”
“Ah,” Enron said. “I see.”
He was quiet for a moment, thinking.
She leaped right into the opening he had provided for her. “Do you know what I want to do now?” she asked. “I want to stop talking about all this, all right? I’m a little bit drunk. More than a little. I’ve talked much too much and I don’t want to talk any more.”
“But if you would just—”
“No, Marty. It’s too dangerous. You’ll just take advantage of whatever I tell you. I want you to take advantage of me in a different way.”
“Take advantage?”
“You ought to know what I mean. But here. I’ll give you a hint.”
She took him by the shoulders and pulled him down to the floor with her. They landed in a tangle of arms and legs, laughing, and he buried himself quickly in the billowing abundance of her. A hot mingling of aromas came upward from her, wine and desire and sweat and even, he thought, the smell of the Screen with which she protected her fantastic satiny skin. Good. Good. He lost himself in her. There had been enough talk for now, he thought. He had been holding himself back for hours, patiently playing the games of espionage with her, and now he allowed himself to put his profession aside for a little while.
“Oh, Marty,” she murmured, over and over again. He gobbled the heavy globes of her breasts as though they were melons and thrust with the zeal of a prophet wielding his lance into the mysterious and apparently infinite depths of her quivering cunt. “Marty Marty Marty.” She held her body tilted high, her legs far apart with her feet waving somewhere in the air behind him, and slammed her thighs steadily against the sides of his body with each of his jolting thrusts. Fucking this Jolanda was like exploring some unknown continent, Enron thought. So big, so moist, so strange, so full of wonders and novelties. It was always like that, for him, with a new woman. The Jewish Balboa, the Jewish Mungo Park, Orellana, Pizarro, plowing unceasingly onward through one uncharted hairy jungle after another in the eternal quest for the unknowable prizes at the core of their hot, throbbing hearts. But this one was a greater enigma than most. She was the mysterious kingdom of Prester John, the lost realm of El Dorado.
They lay side by side afterward, naked, sweat-shiny in the heat of the night, laughing softly.
“It’s too late to go anywhere for dinner,” she said. “I’ll make something here. Would that be all right?”
“Whatever you prefer,” said Enron.
“And then maybe you can take a look at the third sculpture, the Agamemnon. Would you like that?”
“Perhaps after a time,” he said vaguely. “Yes. Yes, perhaps so.”
She was very amusing, Enron decided. And more useful than he had suspected. This would not be their last night together after all, not if he could help it.
When they were washed and dressed and she was clanking around in the kitchen he called in to her, “What you told me, about the leaders of this plot having already gone to Valparaiso Nuevo: was it true?”
“Marty, please. I thought we weren’t going to talk about—”
“Was it?”
“Marty.”
“Was it, Jolanda? I have to know.”
Clattering sounds, pots and pans. Then:
“Yes. They’re up there already, some of them. As I said.”
Enron nodded slowly. “So, then. I have a proposition. Please treat it with great seriousness. How would you like to take a little trip to Valparaiso Nuevo with me, Jolanda?”
12
out here in the chilly zone of the southern Pacific, somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii, the sea was a weird goulash of currents, streams of cold stuff coming up from the Antarctic and coolish upwelling spirals out of the ocean floor and little hot rivers rolling off the sun-blasted continental shelf far to the east. Sometimes you could see steam rising in places where cold water met warm. It was a cockeyed place to be trawling for icebergs, Carpenter thought. But the albedo readings said there was a big berg somewhere around there, and so the Tonopah Maru was there too.
He sat in front of the scanner, massaging the numbers in the cramped, claustrophobic cell that was the ship’s command center. It was midmorning. The shot of Screen he had taken at dawn still simmered like liquid gold in his arteries. He could almost feel it as it made its slow journey outward to his capillaries and went trickling cozily into his skin, where it would carry out the daily refurbishing of the body armor that shielded him against ozone crackle and the demon eye of the sun. You really had to load up on the infra/ultra drugs out here at sea, where the surface of the water reflected the light like a mirror and hurled it up into your face. Since leaving San Francisco, Carpenter had nearly doubled his regular dose of Screen, building up his armoring, and by now his skin had turned a shimmering iridescent greenish-purple. The effect was strange, but he liked it.