Darker Than Amber (5 page)

"Why?"
"Because it's been going on so long. You get the feeling the odds are going bad. Because they're nervous, if they grab me again, they'll take it out on me for scaring them by getting away. They'll make me beg to be back down in that water wired to a rock."
Meyer appeared to hand me my eleven o'clock bottle of chilled Tuborg. She turned toward him and said, "You sore or anything?"
"Should I be?"
"Maybe you should. But it's kind of a thing with me, Meyer. I was in a Home for a while, and I had to do every kind of scut work there was and I swore I wouldn't ever again, even if I had to use food money for maid service."
He moved around her and against the rail. We talked. He asked gentle questions: she finished her drink at last and went below and came back with another just as tall and just as dark. I suspected that her nervousness about her future had been making her increasingly talkative with me. And the beginning of the second drink unfastened her tongue a little more. She began to try, quite obviously, to shock Meyer out of his placid and friendly acceptance of her, and in doing so gave us enough clues and false clues so we could fit together a coherent and plausible history.
Her brothers had been blown up while playing on a Hawaiian beach, had dug up something that went off. After the war her mother had brought the six-year-old Vangie to the States. Her mother had come to track down the Navy officer who had promised to divorce his wife and marry Vangie's mother. The officer brushed her off. Her mother found waitress work, acquired a brutal boyfriend. By the time Vangie was ten she was unmanageable in school. When they threatened to send her to an institution for delinquent children she called their bluff by becoming so shamelessly delinquent they had to send her away. After she had been in the institution two years, a truck crushed her mother to death against the back wall of the restaurant where she worked. At thirteen, looking almost eighteen, she seduced the resident director of the institution and blackmailed him into taking her off all menial work and giving her special food and privileges. Over a year later somebody reported the situation to the state attorney general's office, and the director, to save his own neck, smuggled her out and turned her over to a vice ring working the Virginia Beach area. They beat all rebellion out of her. She was transferred to other stations on the national circuit, and by the time she was twenty-four she was working for a call circuit in Jacksonville and making the top dollar in the area. Two years ago she had been recruited into the dangerous game she would not describe.
Certainly the breaks had gone against her. Circumstance had turned her into an emotional basket case. You could bleed a little for the Hawaiian child who couldn't comprehend what had happened to the big brother who had carried her around on his shoulders.
The Busted Flush droned roughly east by northeast up the channel in the midday glare. I'd pulled my T-shirt off and I was slumped back in the big topside pilot seat, squinting to pick up the familiar markers, steering by means of bare toes braced against a top spoke of the wheel. Swathed against the sun, shadowed by the huge hat, Miss Vangie talked on and on in that creamy contralto, Meyer braced nearby, beaming and nodding, a devoted audience. She lunged back and forth through time, with side trips into obvious fantasy and self-delusion, her mode of speech changing from imitation duchess elegance to clinical crudity. All the basic patterns emerged, the way a design will appear after the etcher has made his ten thousand tiny engravings on the copper plate. Perhaps some social psychologist would have given his chance of an honorary degree to have the whole recital on tape.
It was interesting at the beginning I guess any normal person has curiosity about the inner structure of organized prostitution, the dangers to avoid, the payoffs, the mechanics of solicitation, the ways of extracting extra bounty when they get hold of a live one. But after a time it was repetitious and dull. Too much detail about the furnishings of darling apartments, about the accumulation of darling wardrobes. The life of a sandhog tunneling under a river can be fascinating until you have to listen to a play-by-play of every shovel load of muck. And so when Meyer went below to fix lunch, and she decided she was maybe getting too much sun through reflection off the water and followed him down, the silence was welcome.
In the silence I wanted to sort her out. Her twelve years on the track had coarsened her beyond any hope of salvage. Though I know it is the utmost folly to sentimentalize or romanticize a whore, I could respect a certain toughness of spirit Vangie possessed. She had not howled as she fell to her death. She had not flinched or murmured as we cut the hooks out of her leg. And she had bounced back from the edge of death by violence with remarkable buoyancy. The talking jag seemed the only symptom of how shaken she had been. I could think of few women I had known who could have taken such terror in stride.
I realized I felt proud of her. This reaction was so irrational it startled me. I tracked it down to its obvious source. It was the inevitable sense of ownership. I remember talking all night long to a damned fine surgeon. At one time during the night he spoke of the ones he had hauled back through those big gates when he had no right to expect it could be done. "They become your people," he said. "Your kids. You want the good things for them because they get it on time you gave them. You want them to use life well. When they crap around, wasting what you gave them, you feel forlorn. When they use it well, you feel great. Maybe because it's some kind of a ledger account, and they have to make up for what those others would have done, those ones you lost for no damn good reason."
I knew that the risk I'd taken had been for the sake of putting another hooker back on the tiles. So I had to believe she had enough essential spirit and toughness to be able to make it some other way, and would.
At three-thirty, after Vangie had sacked out, the wind changed, moving in our direction, making it so hot at the topside controls I had Meyer take the wheel while I strung a tarp for shade. Then we sat and talked about our passenger, agreeing that the talking jag was reaction hysteria.
"Also," Meyer said, "she has to level with us. She can't help adding trimmings, but it is essentially true. Maybe she didn't want to tell a pair of civilians about her career. Maybe she wanted to pretend to be something else. But if she'd pretended to be something else, how would that work when we get to Miami? Say she was going back to the model agency? Back to the husband and kiddies? Back to the old secretarial desk? By leveling she's asking for help and advice. How does she get out of the range of the people who'll take another try at her?"
"But without leveling all the way. I had told him about that part of the conversation he hadn't been there to catch.
"Travis, she keeps walking around it, getting a little closer every time. I think she wants to tell us. I think she wants to get it off her chest. Whatever she's been doing for the past two years, it makes her feel guilty. But she has a real dilemma. If she tells us enough so we can tip off the authorities, her girlfriends will suffer right along with the men in the group. Even so, if we stay receptive, I think she'll get around to it, just in the forlorn hope we'll be able to tell her what to do."
"Got any guesses about what she's been doing?" I asked.
Impatiently he said, "You listened to her, just as I did. Blackmail doesn't upset her. Nor does conspiracy, nor theft, nor extortion, nor addiction, nor mayhem. Let's say there aren't too many choices left."
"At least it upset her."
"Yes indeed. After two years, it began to make her edgy."
Tarpon Bay seemed a reasonable halfway point, and after I had moved well off east of the channel, set the big hook in good bottom and killed the engines, she came stretching and yawning up into the sunset light to say that it looked as if we were in a lake, and why were we stopping, was it busted?
I explained that we didn't want to overtax the captain by running all night, so parking was standard operating procedure.
As it was very still and very hot, I got the big auxiliary generator going, and we buttoned up the boat and put the air-conditioning on high. The fading day put an orange-gold light through the starboard windows of the lounge. I briefed her on the music machinery, and after she couldn't find anything she liked among my tapes or records, I put the FM tuner into the circuit and she prowled the band from end to end until she settled for a Hollywood station whanging away at what Meyer terms beetle-bug mating chants. She boosted the bass and put the gain slightly below torture level. My big amplifier fed the rackety-bang into the big wall-mounted Bose stereo speakers, giving us all the resonances and overtones from twenty cycles all the way up to peaks no human ear can detect.
I had let her dig into the broad bin. She had left it open, of course, with a strew of discards on the floor nearby, just as she left any empty glass at the place where she finished it, hung the clothes she took off on the floor, left the bourbon bottle uncapped on the galley countertop, cluttered the head with toiletries, lipsticked the towels, left dark hairs in the basin. Though indifferent to all the spoor she left behind her, she spent all the time she was not talking, eating or sleeping in tidying herself. She put in a fantastic amount of mirror time, and was delighted to find a little kit in the broad bin which gave her the chance to work with great concentration on fingernails and toenails, filing the broken fingernails carefully.
In the most unlikely event she was ever aboard for a longer cruise, I knew I would have to ration the showers she took. She would strain the capacity of even the oversize fresh-water tanks aboard the Flush.
Digging through the broad bin she had come up with short brown shorts in a stretch fabric and a sleeveless orange blouse which she did not button, but had overlapped before tucking it into the shorts so that it fitted her torso very trimly. Barefoot, she danced alone on the lounge carpeting, half of a dark drink in her hand. The dance was mildly derivative of the frog-fish-watusi, moving to a new place, facing in a new direction from time to time.
Meyer and I had dropped the desk panel and we sat on either side of it, playing one of those games of chess where, by cautious pawn play by both of us, the center squares had become intricately clogged as the pressure of the major pieces built up, and each move took lengthy analysis. While he pondered, I watched Vangie. She gave no impression of being on display. Her face was without expression, eyes partially closed. She rolled and twisted her body to the twang-ka-thump music, but in a controlled and moderate way.
I could not tell if she was lost in the music or lost in thought. Nearly everyone over nineteen who tries the modern dances of the young looks so vulgar as to be almost obscene. And I would have expected Evangeline to be no exception. But when she bowed her head, the wings of dark hair swung forward, and in the rhythmic turning of her upper body from side to side, in the roll and swing and cadence of her hips, she achieved that curious quality of innocence the young ones project, wherein body movements that are essentially sexual become merely symbolic sexual references, mild and somehow remote.
I knew she had no awareness of our watching her from time to time. I tried to identify the factors that enabled her to project that special flavor. The brief shorts enhanced the length and grace and elegance of her legs. The way she had overlapped the blouse made it loose across the bosom, blurring her contours. Part of the effect was due to the restraint of her movements. But in large measure it had to be the shape of her in waist, flanks, hips, thighs, buttocks. There was a look of fullness and ripeness, but all of it trimmed by the interwoven musculature under that thin subcutaneous fat layer that makes the softness of woman. There was no loose wobbling, no saddlebag pads of flesh above the hips, no softness of waist, no jounce of inner thigh or sag of belly. There was a tilt of that flatness just below the last knuckles of the spine, that flat place where there are two dimples in healthy flesh, and below that the buttocks swelled into a solid roundness, without droop or flaccidity. Then it was the tightness of the flesh of youth that must give these dances their curiously somber quality, a brooding, inward look to those earthy movements. When the flesh is taut, the dance becomes strangely ceremonial. It is a rite that celebrates the future, and it was eerie to see how accurately it could be imitated by a woman who had left any chance of love so far in the past.
When it was my move, I saw that Meyer had not, as I had expected, begun the disruption of the balance of power in the center squares. He had moved a bishop, bringing more force to bear. As I began to study it, he went away and came back bearing what he calls his tourist disguise, a huge black camera gadget bag. He put it down, bent over it and pawed around and selected a Nikon body and a medium telephoto lens.
He turned the palm of his hand to catch the same light that was on her face, and took a meter reading from his palm. He set speed and aperture, went down onto one knee, focusing with the lens aimed upward toward her. The clack of the reflex mechanism was muffled by the music. He moved to a new angle, caught her again and again, unaware, until she turned in her solitary ritual and saw him and stopped and said, "Oh, come on!"
"Strictly amateur," he called to her over the din of music. "Dead fish, broken sea shells, old stone walls, lovely faces."
"But here's what you want, Meyer, for God's sake," she said. She shook her dark hair back, turned at an angle to him, wet her lips, arched her back, then stood hipshot, head lowered, eyes hooded, lips apart, staring into the lens with stylized lustful invitation.
She struck three such poses and Meyer recorded them dutifully, but I knew he had no interest in that kind of record. When he thanked her and put the camera away, she went over and turned the volume down and said, "I posed for a lot of art model stuff, you probably saw it in girlie magazines, except I haven't done any the last two years. I've got such a good body, the way it photographs, I got pretty good money, but let me tell you it's harder work than you'd think. It worked out pretty good as something to keep some money coming in when we got the word to knock off for a couple of weeks, and another thing, when you tell the fuzz you're a model, and you've got the glossies and the magazines to prove it, they better believe it."