"It was fine," Chandler said. Gently, but firmly, he sat up and reached automatically into his pocket.
The girl sighed and straightened. "Cigarette? They're on the table beside you. Hope you like the brand. They only keep one big factory going, not to count those terrible Russian things that're all air and no smoke." She touched his forehead with cool fingers. "You never told me about that, love."
It was like an electric shock, the touch of her fingers and the touch of reality at once.
Chandler said stiffly, "My brand. But I thought you were there."
"Oh, only now and then. I missed all the naughty parts, though, to tell the truth, that's why I was hanging around. I do like to hear a little naughtiness now and then.. but all I heard was that stupid lawyer and that stupid judge. Made me mad." She giggled. "Lucky for you. I was so irritated I decided to spoil their fun too."
Chandler sat up and took a long pull at his drink. Curiously, it seemed to sober him. He said: "It's nothing. I happened to rape a young girl. Happens every day. Of course, it was one of your friends that was doing it for me, but I didn't miss any of what was going on, I can give you a blow-by-blow description if you like. The people in the town where I lived, at that time, thought I was doing it on my own, though, and they didn't approve. Hoaxing, you know? They thought I was so perverse and cruel that I would do that sort of thing under my own power, instead of with some exec or, as they would have put it, being ignorant, some imp, or devil, or demon pulling the strings."
He was shaking. He waited for what she had to say; but she only whispered, "I'm sorry, love," and looked so contrite and honest that, as rapidly as it had come upon him, his anger passed.
He opened his mouth to say something to her. He didn't get it said. She was sitting there, looking at him, alone and soft and inviting. He kissed her; and as she returned the kiss, he kissed her again, and again.
But less than an hour later he was in her Porsche, cold sober, raging, frustrated, miserable. He slammed it through the unfamiliar gears as he sped back to the city.
She had left him. They had kissed with increasing passion, his hands playing about her, her body surging toward him, and then, just then, she whispered, "No, love." He held her tighter and without another word she opened her eyes and looked at him.
He knew what mind it was that caught him then. It was her mind. Stiffly, like wood, he released her, stood up, walked to the door and locked it behind him.
The lights in the villa went out. He stood there, boiling, looking into the shadows through the great, wide, empty window. He could see her lying there on the couch, and as he watched he saw her body toss and stir; and as surely as he had ever known anything before he knew that somewhere in the world some woman or some man lay locked with a lover, violent in love, and was unable to tell the other that a third party had invaded their bed.
Chandler did not know it until he saw something glistening on his wrist, but he was weeping on the wild ride back to Honolulu in the car. Her car. Would there be trouble for his taking it? God, let there be trouble! He was in a mood for trouble. He was sick and wild with revulsion. Worse than her use of him, a casual stimulant, an aphrodisiac touch, was that she thought what she did was right. Chandler thought of the worshipping dozens under the sundeck of the exec restaurant, and Rosalie's gracious benediction as they made her their floral offerings. Blind, pathetic fools!
Not only the deluded men and women in the garden were worshippers trapped in a vile religion, he thought. It was worse. The gods and goddesses worshipped at their own divinity as well!
THREE DAYS later Koitska's voice, coming from Chandler's lips, summoned him out to the TWA shack again.
Wise now in the ways of this world, Chandler commandeered a police car and was hurried out to the South Gate, where the guards allowed him a car of his own. The door of the building was unlocked and Chandler went right up.
He was astonished. The fat man was actually sitting up. He was fully dressed, more or less; incongruously he wore flowered shorts and a bright red, short-sleeve shirt, with rope sandals. His coronet perched on his plump old head; curiously, he carried another, less ornate one. He said, "You fly a gilikopter? No? No difference. Help me." An arm like a mountain went over Chandler's shoulders. The man must have weighed three hundred pounds. Slowly, wheezing, he limped toward the back of the room and touched a button.
A door opened.
Chandler had not known before that there was an elevator in the building; that was one of the things the Exec did not consider important for his slaves to know. The elevator lowered them with great grace and delicacy to the first floor, where a large old Cadillac, ancient but immaculately kept, the kind that used to be called a "gangster's car," waited in a private parking bay.
Chandler followed Koitska's directions and drove to an airfield where a small, Plexiglass-nosed helicopter waited. More by the force of Chandler pushing him from behind than through his own fat thighs, Koitska puffed up the little staircase into the cabin. Originally the copter had been fitted for four passengers. Now there was the pilot's seat and a seat beside it, and in the back a wide, soft couch. Koitska collapsed onto it, clutching the extra coronet. His face blanked out he was, Chandler knew, somewhere else, just then. In a moment his eyes opened again. He looked at Chandler with no interest at all, and turned his face to the wall.
After a moment he wheezed. "Sit down. At de controls." He breathed noisily for a while. Then, "It von't pay you to be interested in Rosalie," he said.
Chandler was startled. He craned around in the seat but saw only Koitska's back. "I'm not! Or anyway" But he had no place to go in that sentence, and in any case Koitska no longer seemed interested.
After a moment, Koitska stirred, settled himself more Comfortably, and Chandler felt himself taken. He turned, easily and surely, to face the split wheel and the unfamiliar pedals of the helicopter. He started the motor, scanned the panels of instruments, and through maneuvers which he did not understand but whose effect was accurate and sure, caused the machine to roar, tilt and whir up and away. It was an admirable performance.
Chandler could not guess what member of the Exec was inhabiting his body at that moment; there were no clues; but whoever it was, it had turned him into a first-class helicopter pilot.
For more than an hour Chandler was imprisoned in his own body, without let or intermission. Flying a helicopter, it seemed, was a job without coffee breaks. The remote. exec who was controlling him did not trust his attention away even for a moment.
It was like being the prisoner of a dream, thought Chandler, watching his right hand advance a throttle and his feet press the guiding pedals. From time to time his head turned and his voice spoke over his shoulder to Koitska; but as the conversation seemed to be in Russian or Polish he gleaned nothing from it. There was not much talk, though; the fluttering roar of the vanes overhead drowned out most sounds. Chandler fell into a light, somber, not unpleasant reverie, thinking of Ellen Braisted and the Orphalese, of the girl Rosalie Pan and the fat, murderous slug behind him. It occurred to him, as a phenomenon worthy of study, that he was actually aiding and abetting the monsters who had destroyed his own wife and caused him to defile a silly but blameless girl ...