He yearned for those arms and the gentle caresses of Mistress Kali's fingers. He could almost feel them on his brow, his lips and in other places it was not good to think about when he was alone.
Still, the thoughts had come unbidden.
Going to a bookcase, he took from its place a book of old erotica, the Kama Sutra.
It was going to be a long night. There was no telling when Mistress Kali would reply again, if at all. But for his mind to concoct the speech he planned to give on the morrow, it must be agile.
Certain hormones facilitated his thinking processes. He only wished that their release did not require a naughty book and his own manipulations ....
It was very undignified. If only he had a snakehipped, kohl-eyed personal slave to apply the necessary unguents to the needy portions of his anatomy, which more and more felt the distress of a fish caught on a hook.
A very stimulating hook, he had to admit.
Chapter 22
The death of Tomasso Testaverde would have amounted to as much as his ill-spent life were it not for the fact that Tomasso Testaverde was of Sicilian blood.
After the autopsy his bluish corpse was released to his next of kin.
The trouble was no one wanted the remains.
Not his mother, from whom he was estranged.
Not any of his hardworking uncles.
Finally his father's father, Sirio Testaverde, agreed to take possession of the late Tomasso Testaverde. Sirio showed up at the Barnstable County morgue and said simply, "I have come for my grandson, Tomasso."
"This way," the bored morgue attendant said.
They walked the antiseptic corridors of death in silence. The still, cool air smelled of pungent chemicals. These things did not bother Sirio, who had skippered Grand Banks schooners in the golden era of the cod schooners. Although he hadn't gone to sea in two decades, there were still fish scales under his fingernails and salt grime caking his hairy nostrils. He was a greaser, as Sicilian-born fishermen were known.
The body was slid out of the morgue drawer and a sheet thrown back.
Sirio saw the blue design on the unrecognizable face of the only son of his only son and said, "Minga! This is not Tomasso."
"Dental records say it is."
"What is that on his face?"
"That's how he was found. The funeral home will clean him up for interment."
"He was found this way?" Sirio muttered, his old eyes squinting.
"Yes."
"That means someone did this thing to him," he growled.
"You'll have to take that up with the Coast Guard. They have the full report on file."
Sirio Testaverde did. He learned the unpleasant details of his grandson's passing, the fish inserted where fish should not go, the face painting, all of it. And although he had disowned his grandson many years ago for dishonoring the proud Testaverde name, the thin blood in his thready veins leaped hot and fast.
"I will avenge this outrage," he said, voice low with feeling.
"We have no suspects at this time," the Coast Guard information officer stiffly informed him. "Anyone could have done this."
"The sign on his face, it has meaning?" Sirio pressed.
"He may have painted his face this way."
"For what reason?"
"Maybe he was a hockey fan. They like to paint their faces to show support for their favorite team."
"Hockey! Tomasso is Sicilian. We do not follow hockey. That is for others."
"I think that blue symbol is a French-Canadian team's emblem or something. I don't follow hockey, either."
Sirio Testaverde took possession of Tomasso's abused body and, after turning him over to the Kingsport Funeral Home, went to the United Fishermen's Club and began speaking to any who would listen in a low, urgent voice.
"It is the damn Canadians that did this to my son's only son. The Testaverde name stops in this century because of what these scum have done," raged Sirio Testaverde.
"Canadians?" someone asked incredulously.
"Have they not seized our boats?" Sirio countered.
This was allowed.
"Do they not compete for the same fish as we?" Sirio added.
This, too, was admitted.
"They have come into our waters for as long as I am alive and on the seas, and after they exhaust our waters, they close off their own. We are excluded from the Grand Banks. Did we exclude Canadians from our waters? No. We did not. This is inherently unfair. Something must be done."
"It is their waters to close," a reasonable voice said.
"The waters belong to no one but the strong. To those strong enough to take fish from them. We are Sicilians. And Americans. We are strong. Canadians are weak. We will take their fish if we so wish."
"What if they try to stop us?"
Sirio Testaverde shook his sun-shiny fist in the smoky club. "Then we will take their boats and their lives."
On any other night Sirio Testaverde's exhortations would have been dismissed as the bitter grievings of an old man who has come to the end of his bloodline.
But in one corner of the club, set high on a rude shelf, a television set poured down its flickering kinetic light. The network news was on. No one was paying much attention to it. Neither was it being ignored entirely.
"We will take what is ours because we are men," Sirio was saying. "For too long we get a poor price for our landings because we compete with Canadian fish that is trucked in to the Boston Fish Pier, already dressed and cooled. First they overfish our waters, then they overfish their own. Now they send their damn fish to our markets. They are swine."
A fragment of a report caught the attention of a man seated closest to the TV. He turned up the volume.
"...In New York, UN Secretary-General Anwar Anwar-Sadat has made a claim that is creating quite a stir in diplomatic circles," the mellow-voiced anchor was saying. "It seems, according to the Secretary-General, that a U.S. Coast Guard cutter and a submarine suspected to be of Canadian origin-French-Canadian origin, to be precise-clashed in disputed waters on the Grand Banks with the result that the sub was sunk with all hands aboard. In Ottawa, Canadian officials vigorously deny this story. From Montreal, additional denials. Yet the Secretary-General is insisting the report is true and furthermore that, like the current fishing crisis, it is a sign that individual nations cannot be trusted to oversee their own territorial waters, and that a UN high commission be established to patrol and safeguard the high seas, incidentally protecting the much-overfished stocks that are the cause of so much international friction these days."
"See!" Sirio said, pointing to footage of the UN Secretary-General addressing a group. "See. The damn wog is correct. No one owns the sea. Let us take what is ours!"
In other times Sirio Testaverde's demands would have fallen on deaf ears. For these were hardworking men who rose with the sun and, when they at last returned to port, slept for days afterward.
But times were tough. Massachusetts had surrendered to Maine the distinction of being the most successful fishing state in the nation. These were men who owned their own boats, their own businesses, but had no control over their product. They were farmers of the sea, and their crops were in perpetual failure.
"We must take!" Sirio ranted.
Others began to vent their own grievances.
Soon Sirio's gravelly calls were taken up by younger, more vigorous seamen.
The hour grew late and the voices grew angry and, as word spread, the smoky hall filled with many out-of-work fishermen.
"I say," Sirio Testaverde shouted, pounding the table at which he sat, "that we assemble an armada and take what belongs to us by virtue of our superior might."
The scarred and cigarette-burned table shook with the vehemence of Sirio Testaverde's slamming fist. All around the room, other fists struck old wood, and voices, low and sullen, grew high and agitated.