“I’m hungry, too.”
“Not for food, unfortunately.” She spun from the porthole and its ugly view — a mile of brown, rolling river and low, muddy banks where squat, sullen natives tended to melt back into the bushes when the Sweet Delight went by — to indicate the evidence of Ballard’s arousal, which stood up, darker than the rest of him, as straight as a flagpole.
“Let’s have sex on this table. It’s a lot more comfortable than it looks.”
“Kind of defeats the fucking purpose, wouldn’t you say? Comfort’s hardly the point.”
“Might as well be as comfy as we can, I say.” He raised his arms to let his hands drape from the four-inch marble edging on the long steel table. “There’s plenty of space on this thing, you know. More than in your bed at Clare.”
“Maybe you’re not as porky as I thought you were.”
“Careful, careful. If you insult me, I’ll make you pay for it.”
At fifty Ballard had put on some extra weight, but it suited him. His shoulders were still wider far than his hips, and his belly more nascent than actual. His hair, longer than that of most men his age and just beginning to show threads of gray within the luxuriant brown, framed his wide brow and executive face. He looked like an actor who had made a career of playing senators, doctors, and bankers. Ballard’s real profession was that of fixer to an oversized law firm in New York with a satellite office in Hong Kong, where he had grown up. The weight of muscle in his arms, shoulders, and legs reinforced the hint of stubborn determination, even perhaps brutality in his face: the suggestion that if necessary he would go a great distance and perform any number of grim deeds to do what was needed. Scars both long and short, scars like snakes, zippers, and tattoos bloomed here and there on his body.
“Promises, promises,” she said. “But just for now, get up and get dressed, please. The sight of you admiring your own dick doesn’t do anything for me.”
“Oh, really?”
“Well, I do like the way you can still stick straight up into the air like a happy little soldier — at your age! But men are so soppy about their penises. You’re all queer for yourselves. You more so than most, Ballard.”
“Ouch,” he said, and sat up. “I believe I’ll put my clothes on now, Sandrine.”
“Don’t take forever, all right? I know it’s only the second day, but I’d like to get a look at them while they’re setting the table. Because someone, maybe even two someones, does set that table.”
Ballard was already in the bedroom, pulling from their hangers a pair of white linen slacks and a thick, long-sleeved white cotton T-shirt. In seconds, he had slipped into these garments and was sliding his sun-tanned feet into rope-soled clogs.
“So let’s move,” he said, coming out of the bedroom with a long stride, his elbows bent, his forearms raised.
From the dining room came the sharp, distinctive chirping of a bird. Two notes, the second one higher, both clear and as insistent as the call of a bell. Ballard glanced at Sandrine, who seemed momentarily shaken.
“I’m not going in there if one of those awful jungle birds got in. They have to get rid of it. We’re paying them, aren’t we?”
“You have no idea,” Ballard said. He grabbed her arm and pulled her along with him. “But that’s no bird, it’s them. The waiters. The staff.”
Sandrine’s elegant face shone with both disbelief and disgust.
“Those chirps and whistles are how they talk. Didn’t you hear them last night and this morning?”
When he pulled again at her arm, she followed along, reluctance visible in her stance, her gait, the tilt of her head.
“I’m talking about birds, and they weren’t even on the yacht. They were on shore. They were up in the air.”
“Let’s see what’s in here.” Six or seven minutes remained until the official start of dinner time, and they had been requested never to enter the dining room until the exact time of the meal.
Ballard threw the door open and pulled her into the room with him. Silver covers rested on the Royal Doulton china, and an uncorked bottle of a distinguished Bordeaux stood precisely at the mid-point between the two place settings. Three inches to its right, a navy-blue-and-royal-purple orchid thick enough to eat leaned, as if languishing, against the side of a small square crystal vase. The air seemed absolutely unmoving. Through the thumb holes at the tops of the plate covers rose a dense, oddly meaty odor of some unidentifiable food.
“Missed ’em again, damn it.” Sandrine pulled her arm from Ballard’s grasp and moved a few steps away.
“But you have noticed that there’s no bird in here. Not so much as a feather.”
“So it got out — I know it was here, Ballard.”
She spun on her four-inch heels, giving the room a fast 360-degree inspection. Their dining room, roughly oval in shape, was lined with glassed-in bookshelves of dark-stained oak containing perhaps five hundred books, most of them mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth century novels ranked alphabetically by author, regardless of genre. The jackets had been removed, which Ballard minded, a bit. Three feet in front of the bookshelves on the deck side, which yielded space to two portholes and a door, stood a long wooden table with a delicately inlaid top — a real table, unlike the one in the room they had just left, which was more like a work station in a laboratory. The real one was presumably for setting out buffets.
The first door opened out onto the deck; another at the top of the oval led to their large and handsomely-furnished sitting room, with reading chairs and lamps, two sofas paired with low tables, a bar with a great many bottles of liquor, two red lacquered cabinets they had as yet not explored, and an air of many small precious things set out to gleam under the parlor’s low lighting. The two remaining doors in the dining room were on the interior side. One opened into the spacious corridor that ran the entire length of their suite and gave access to the deck on both ends; the other revealed a gray passageway and a metal staircase that led up to the Captain’s deck and cabin and down into the engine room, galley, and quarters for the yacht’s small, unseen crew.
“So it kept all its feathers,” said Sandrine. “If you don’t think that’s possible, you don’t know doodly-squat about birds.”
“What isn’t possible,” said Ballard, “is that some giant parrot got out of here without opening a door or a porthole.”
“One of the waiters let it out, dummy. One of those handsome Spanish-speaking waiters.”
They sat on opposite sides of the stately table. Ballard smiled at Sandrine, and she smiled back in rage and distrust. Suddenly and without warning, he remembered the girl she had been on Park Avenue at the end of the sixties, gawky-graceful, brilliantly surly, her hair and wardrobe goofy, claiming him as he had claimed her, with a glance. He had rescued her father from ruinous shame and a long jail term, but as soon as he had seen her he understood that his work had just begun, and that it would demand restraint, sacrifice, patience, and adamantine caution.
“A three-count?” he asked.
She nodded.
“One,” he said. “Two.” They put their thumbs into the round holes at the tops of the covers. “Three.” They raised their covers, releasing steam and smoke and a more concentrated, powerful form of the meaty odor.
“Wow. What is that?”