Chapter Six
Clarity opened her Thai character decryptor, looking up the words ‘mystery’ and ‘esoteric’ in the dictionary. Evans was in silent mode, and she was still trying to find how to communicate with the supercomputer about all that it knew, or about all that the decryptor held regarding initiation into the Mysteries. All that she found was that the Mysteries came from a variety of cultures and civilizations, the Samothrace culture, Middle Eastern Sufis, ancient Greece, and Rome.
After a pleasant dinner, Clarity and Flower followed Ribalaigua to the galley, helping out with the dishes. Flower refused to believe that she was meant for Chubby Caddy as a Sugar Baby, or that Bartleby was involving her, had involved her in some type of shady activity. She was a Sugar Baby for a few days and Bartleby´s trip was fun. Ribalaigua came into the kitchen with large plates, emptied from dinner. He warned Clarity that Bartleby had noticed how she was keeping close to Flower. Somehow, he expected her to mingle more with the pussy liners. The more worrisome fact was that Bartleby didn´t need Clarity for any particular task, she was an encumbrance.
“Every woman Sam meets ends up as a pussy liner, I sense,” said Ribalaigua. They came back to the outside dinner area on the upper deck of the ‘Lady Moura’. Bartleby approached Clarity, sipping a margarita, while Belina and Virgy were pulling Tiffany towards the liquor fountain flowing with Piña Colada. Sandy came to find Flower, telling her she would have to start swimming some laps the next day.
“Why?” asked Flower.
“Sam wants to take some photographs of you in bikini and wearing golden earrings, he thinks you´re a fantastic model and wants you to stay in shape. There are some hazelnut milk shakes for you after the swim.” Flower ran along with Sandy, leaving Bartleby with Clarity.
“I don´t like to see you idle, I want you to be my Sugar Daddy assistant,” said Bartleby, “and a clothing advisor to your friend.” Clarity thought the position of assistant would keep her abreast of anything important happening around her. He pointed to the yacht across them being repaired.
“Go check whether they´re through with repairs, and tell Cobbler that I´ll consider him as supplier for my boat´s bar as long as Tiffany is staying on the boat. And tell him I want the warped bottle of gin, he´ll know what I mean.”
It was night time. Clarity boarded Cobbler´s yacht. She ran across the lady she had met earlier on the yacht, Eve, the one with a t-shirt and jeans. The woman had traded her t-shirt for a white cotton shirt.
“I want to see Cobbler, got a message for him from Bartleby,” she said.
The woman led her to the flybridge of the yacht, where she saw a man, in his fifties, surrounded by one of the women who was aboard the yacht dressed in bikini, Cathy, busy charting a path. Cobbler Hargreaves was slightly overweight, his lips were red from too much sun and his grey hair showed some sparse areas. His eyes fidgeted from left to right, quick to appraise any change in the surroundings. He eyed Clarity and listened to her speak before saying anything to her. She told him that Tiffany had warned her of Bartleby and his features relaxed, becoming a lot more at ease.
“I can´t stand Bartleby, he´s not reliable, don´t trust him, we don´t get along very well.”
“I´ve spoken to Tiffany, why did you cross Bartleby´s path?”
“We intercepted your friend´s communications with Oleanne, found the selfie she sent. Just wanted to warn both of you of the danger in becoming Bartleby´s Sugar Baby. Your friend´s influentiable though, it makes it more difficult to warn her.”
Cobbler showed a half smile when he learned that Bartleby wanted Tiffany on his boat and a warped bottle of gin. He explained that he was looking for details on Bartleby´s transaction, the one he´d named operation sort-o-flying-seagull, or the ‘baby shower’. After drinking half a mug of beer, Cobbler explained that he was hoping that Bartleby would lead him to the Shawab, the man who had gotten him drunk one night and altered his former girlfriend´s way of thinking, making her want to be perfect, flawless. He knew through rumors in Tortola from fishermen, that the Shawab had changed her girlfriend´s real name to Optesia, a name deriving from the word optic, referring to her sense of sight, because she was a keen observer of details left unnoticed by most people. The name Optesia fitted her personality.
“I´ve met her in the island of Eleuthera, in the Bahamas,” said Clarity. It seemed that all shady businesses in the Caribbean had a common source. First Scafarel´s Hexas Style resort offering personal growth services, disguised as an infomercial to sell beauty lotion, then Bartleby´s shady transaction in the British Virgin Islands and her coming across the boyfriend of one of Scafarel´s ladies.
Bartleby´s eyes glistened with hope. It had been several months since the disappearance of his girlfriend, whose real name was Fay Osmond, and all of his days were spent looking for her. He wanted Clarity´s assistance to expose the shady dealings of Bartleby and to find Optesia. Clarity used her decryptor, which had a built in cell phone that worked worldwide, to call the ‘Lady Moura’, letting Bartleby know that they were still working on the engines. She told him she´d be back in an hour or two and explained to Cobbler Bartleby´s proposal.
“I´ve been using bitcoin to make buyout offers for Oleanne,” said Cobbler, “because it has a valuable list of clients.” Three shareholders controlled Oleanne, the man known as Chubby Caddy, the Shawab, and the adult film production company Telval Studios belonging to Cassandra Scafarel, the business woman that Clarity had met in Bahrain. Given Scafarel´s involvement with Telval, it was plausible that Bartleby or Chubby Caddy knew where Optesia was, because Optesia had shot an adult film, ‘Embroidered Air Avenue’, with Telval, in Bahrain. Cobbler used bitcoin for business as well. He was using the anonymous payment platform to receive high quality alcohol in exchange for bitcoins, liquor that he sold to retailers of the British Virgin Islands and wealthy yacht owners. But the Shawab wanted that business, and he was trying to squeeze Cobbler out of it.
“Have you made any sense of the empty bottles found on the ‘Lady Moura’?” asked Clarity.
He showed her one of the empty bottles. Pulling on a thin thread attached to the glass inside the bottle, he tugged out a thin tube emitting a wireless signal. Using some of his transmission equipment, he read the signal and translated the radio emission of the item, to numbers and letters of the alphabet. The tube had a set of bank transfer instructions and quantities, a number of boxes labeled as ‘baby shower gift’ volume, requested by the Shawab for Chubby Caddy, all of it delivered through Oleanne. There was no money amount, but the number of zeroes in the row left for transfer amount added to eight, leaving space for a sizeable eight figure amount.
The door of the flybridge opened. Anton stepped inside the flybridge, looking for Clarity, coming face to face with the woman in white cotton shirt, Eve.
“Bartleby wants you back on the ‘Lady Moura’”, he said, “he wants an answer from Mr. Hargreaves on his proposal.” Cobbler offered the gloomy, unresponsive bodyguard a drink, and the six foot man became slightly less abrasive. The owner of the yacht added that Tiffany could stay onboard the ‘Lady Moura’.
“Give me five minutes,” said Clarity.
Eve closed the door, leaving Anton holding a drink. Bartleby gave Clarity a GPS locator, a small chip slightly larger than a round battery.
“It´s magnetic, place it against the aluminum hull of the ‘Lady Moura’, we´ll track you from a distance of a day or so. Tell Bartleby the boat´s repaired and tell your friend to call Oleanne inquiring to know when the baby shower is taking place, and saying that she´d like to be a nymphe de pave for Oleanne, it´s one notch higher than the pussy liner in Oleanne hierarchy, and it may be the current category of my girlfriend Fay. And don´t tell Bartleby you´re calling Oleanne, we want him thinking he knows more than we do.” He handed her the empty bottle brought from Bartleby´s boat. “Place this empty bottle back on the bar shelf of the ‘Lady Moura’.”
“Do you have the warped bottle of gin f
or Bartleby?”
“No, but tell him yes, that I´ll give it to him when the Shawab stops interfering with my liquor delivery schedule with retailers and yacht owners cruising the British Virgin Islands. We´ll deliver a package to Bartleby tomorrow, once we´re off the radar of the ‘Lady Moura’.”
As she headed back to the ‘Lady Moura’, Clarity placed the tracking chip carefully on the bow of the ‘Lady Moura’, inside the opening of the anchor. Impossible to find. It was clear to Clarity that in operative terms, the 'baby' was the transaction, a large volume of some type of merchandise, but what was the merchandise, the gift for the baby, the baby shower itself, and where and when was it taking place?
Clarity was intrigued by Bartleby´s insistence that Tiffany stay on board the ‘Lady Moura’. She walked past the deck where they´d had dinner and reached the raucous area of the piña colada fountain, by the small pool. Bartleby was flirting with Flower to catch the attention of Tiffany. He wasn´t happy to learn that Clarity wasn´t bringing the bottle of warped gin, and he offered Flower a second piña colada to put aside his grudge, reaching for Belina, telling her she would be the next Sugar Baby after Flower. Tiffany, the woman who had shown her a photograph of the Lady Fortuna minted bar, walked towards Clarity.
“Have you been thinking about being an initiate?”
“I keep thinking about the gold, why is the Lady Fortuna bar made of gold?”
“The real meaning of the gold of Lady Fortuna is the transmuted sexual energy that reaches the head, with feelings of bliss for hours. It´s the real gold of the alchemists throughout the ages, and the reason Bartleby likes to be with me, he knows I´m an initiate. It´s also dangerous, which is why you don´t hear much of it.” Transmutation, thought Clarity, another word to look up with the decryptor. Tiffany added that Bartleby had heard of the Mysteries through Oleanne, having overheard a conversation by one of the owners, Cassandra Scafarel. He didn´t use the pussy liners often, only when he came from his Tambrera office in Puerto Rico to the British Virgin Islands for a long weekend, or during his yearly vacation from work. Oleanne had considered offering a high priced version of the Mysteries to clients, but they had abandoned the idea, letting Scafarel offer her own version of them through her Church of the Holy Flower, with a front disguised as a service to sell beauty lotion, the beauty lotion known as Elony.
“Do you want to be with Bartleby though for something so personal and intimate as high sex?”
“It´s not easy to find a man who wants to be an initiate,” said Tiffany, “Sam could plausibly add a spiritual dimension to his way of thinking, I sense that, but it's not easy to bring that part of him to the surface. Any man can be a potential initiate, even someone as self centered with a corporate outlook as him.”