Then the figure disappeared entirely: Malissa had entered a white rotunda: vine-cloaked pillars supporting a dome enclosing marble benches, statues, a fountain—a sheet of diamonds under the omnipotent sun.
Malissa despised being ruled by anything, even anger. It was her burgeoning rage at Albert she had fled. She must command even her own savagery.
Her eyes widened: She saw the coiled thing moving: a snake almost touching her feet! No—it was Bravo’s whip! Suddenly it was withdrawn with a crack like a bullet. Malissa faced Bravo.
“I didn’t expect you,” Malissa said coldly. “I saw you only moments earlier with Karen.”
“She went to her room to rest, she’s very weak,” Bravo’s words accused Malissa vaguely.
“Richard has an exhilarating effect on her; he’ll . . . revive her,” Malissa said cunningly.
“Karen doesn’t need Richard,” Bravo said.
“Doesn’t she?” Malissa flashed. “I don’t really see you replacing Richard.”
By Bravo’s look—which Malissa studied—and her silence, she knew what she had suspected: Bravo desired Karen, yes, that was obvious all along; but the desire was still to be consummated, if ever. The last words entered her mind like flung weapons to be honed for future use. Karen and Bravo. Bravo’s notorious sadistic affairs. . . . But Karen? The beautiful young woman who had become Richard’s third wife. Once she had glowed radiantly. Only for Richard? Karen and Bravo. Karen. Inconceivable. Could it be that Karen had mysteriously tapped in Bravo a pool of . . . gentleness? . . . If so, Bravo was infinitely vulnerable! Malissa’s mind arranged these thoughts automatically, exploring for all its possible weaknesses a country soon to be assaulted.
The white hypnotic sun ruled the ocean of sky. The smell of wild roses was heavy and sweet.
Malissa’s fingers prepared the words: “You followed me, Bravo. What do you want?” she asked.
Bravo stood before her. “The black ring,” she said.
“Don’t be foolish. Why should I give it to you?” The ring coiled on Malissa’s hand almost the length of her finger, a wound snake choking a black pearl.
“Because it’s the ring you got from the prince for introducing him to Savannah when— . . .”
“When you wanted her!” Malissa recalled her deliberate triumph over Bravo.
Bravo said it casually, so that the horror, shaping slowly, was more intense; she said: “There’s a scorpion on your shoulder, Malissa.”
Malissa’s body froze.
“Richard’s son told us they’re fatal,” Bravo went on. “But they never strike unless they’re taunted. You have to force them to sting. But you know all about that, Malissa; you’ve been here often before.”
Malissa glanced at her shoulder. She saw it: its yellowish outline. She felt it there, quivering. Even now, threatened by deadly poison, her façade remained composed. It was her hands—still—which conveyed fear.
“I’ll drive it away with my whip!” Bravo offered, moving back, her hand rising to lash with the whip.
“No,” Malissa said, trying not to breathe.
“You’re right, I might just succeed in aggravating it; and it would certainly sting and kill you. . . . How fitting, Malissa! A scorpion—perhaps like me a double scorpion. The lower path of death— . . .” she mocked.
Malissa’s neck began to ache.
Bravo moved farther back, as if to abandon her. Suddenly, she spun around; and her whip snapped toward Malissa’s shoulder. “Oh, I missed,” she said smiling, “and I never do—unless I want to.”
The yellowish thing trembled on Malissa’s shoulder. “Don’t taunt it.” She felt it advancing lightly toward her neck. The yellowish form erect now, poised to strike, she knew.
“Why shouldn’t I taunt it?—after how you pimped—. . . .”
Malissa squeezed the words: “You . . . wouldn’t . . . want . . . Savannah . . . she’s . . . a . . . virgin.”
“The legendary virgin. Exactly why I wanted her. . . . Now tell me about the transfusions, Malissa!” she barked. “What was it you stopped Albert from telling!”
“He lied. . . . The scorpion—remove it.”
“Why don’t you brush it off?”
“I can’t see it any more.”
Bravo leaned over Malissa’s shoulder. Then she blew tauntingly, barely, on the thing. “I think it’s becoming agitated! It’s raised its tail! It’s ready to sting, Malissa! . . . The ring!” she commanded.
“Brush the scorpion away!”
“The ring now!" Bravo demanded ferociously, the butt of her whip ready to prod the yellow thing.
Her shoulders rigid, Malissa removed the black ring.
Bravo took it triumphantly.
She stepped back. She raised her whip. “I’ll try it again,” she said coldly. “If I miss again— . . .”
Malissa’s hands were dead.
Bravo’s arm came back, the whip uncoiled swiftly.
Crack!
Malissa felt the sudden breath of the whip’s tip. The thing on her shoulder was gone. She saw it pinioned to the tip of Bravo’s whip.
Bravo was studying it. “It wasn’t a scorpion at all,” she said mockingly. “Just a small yellow leaf.” She held the leaf toward Malissa. “Look, Malissa, it wasn’t a scorpion at all.”
“You knew it all along.” Malissa tried to smile, to deny the other’s victory.
Bravo dropped the black ring at Malissa’s feet—and she laughed loudly in the woman’s face.
Behind the blue glasses, Malissa’s eyes spilled with anger. But the mask continued to smile, containing the rage in order.
Bravo’s laughter plunged into an ocean of hatred.
6
Blood, death. Blue remembered: The black throne-bed. He lay naked with the Blue Woman. The others knelt, chanting, at their feet. The black rosary about his neck, the cross inverted. The star on the stretched blue rubber. “I was tripping with Satan, man,” he said to the priest, studying his reaction.
A shaft of crystal sun spilled into the alcove like something thrust there from heaven. Clinging like a lavender shroud over the trees, a vine cast a purple filigreed shadow at their feet.
“You know, man, dropping acid,” Blue clarified. “L-S-D.” He paused, ready to seize the priest’s withheld reaction. “That stands for: Lord Save the Devil.”
“You’re deliberately being blasphemous!” the priest said angrily.
“Blasphemous! What the hell’s that, man?” said Blue. His face was a vicissitude of reflections projected from within onto the surface of his face, like quickly changing slides.
“I won’t listen if you persist— . . .” The priest made a motion to move.
“No!” Blue reached out urgently with his hand. “Wait. I have to tell you— . . .” The features of Cam’s face, remembered, seemed suddenly superimposed on those of the handsome young priest. “Cam— . . .” Only when the priest responded did he realize he had spoken the name aloud.
“Who is Cam?” Jeremy asked.
“Who? . . . Oh, someone,” said Blue.
The shadows darkened in the intense afternoon, like the gray screen that separates confessor and confessee, a secure boundary.
“The tattoo,” Blue said. A disorientation?—the way his mind shifted as quickly as his moody expressions, without transition. Or was it rather a shifting clarity about himself?—not a blurred focus so much as a prismatic view of himself? “I went to a seer in the Hollywood hills, a client. That was before— . . . I had just begun to work for Mr Stuart. The man looked at my hand. He outlined an inverted star on it with his finger.” (Ringed, bony.) “His fingernails were red.”
Red fingernails clawing at a swollen stomach. In the priest’s mind, that image faded into: The white flesh of grasping fingers clinging to him, to be pulled from death. He looked away from the dark-blue eyes and up at the sky, seeking its crystal purity, azure without a smear.
“The man said I carried death and violence: He saw the inverted star of
Satan on my hand,” Blue said softly.
“A superstition,” the priest insisted quickly. “And the mark is incomplete without the ram’s head.” An echo of his own voice. Its tone. It was suddenly as if he had begun to defend Blue of a crime not yet charged.
“Yeah, the ram’s head,” Blue said. “What that man said—it freaked me out,” he continued. “I went to a tattoo shop soon after. I heard myself tell the man, ‘I want an elaborate inverted star tattooed on my cock.’” His eyes were blue magnets. “But I changed my mind: On my ankle, I told him. Diggit, man,” he said slowly, as if trying to understand his own story, “I wanted the mark of Satan to show. . . .”
“Like a warning—or a threat,” the priest heard himself say.
“Yeah! I even started going barefoot. But I also like wanted to hide it— . . .”
“Like a confession,” the priest said.
Blue covered the tattoo with his other foot. “No. Yes,” he said vaguely. “Then it became like an added trademark: I already had the blue rubbers.” The kaleidoscope of his mind shifted: “I started in a gas-station head; a man picked me up on a street, he blew me in a pay head, I let him for ten bucks.” The navy-blue eyes glared accusingly at the priest.
“Now you feel guilty,” Jeremy said. The words echoed, false sounds, in his ears: rehearsed, stock, artificial, borrowed from a world which had no relation to this one.
“Guilty! For that?” Blue laughed. “Man, you’re putting me on!” The smile pounced on his face from somewhere outside of him; the rest of his face was somber. “I could tell you things—black things, man— . . .”
The priest’s mind thundered with questions, but they remained unasked, although it was as if—and was this the reason he did not ask them?—Blue wanted to be questioned. About the ritual of evil? No. The real evil; and what was it?
“Diggit: Then I met Mr Stuart,” Blue continued. “Right away I became his most popular— . . .”
“Prostitute,” the priest contained a flowing anger.
“Whore,” Blue said coldly. “Men, women. . . . I never wanted any of them, they wanted me. But I needed them to want me. That’s what made me hard, someone else’s righteous desire of me. I felt only contempt for them, man. Diggit: I could do anything I wanted, and they took it, that’s how heavy they grooved on me. One dude—diggit—I wouldn’t even let him touch me, and he paid— . . . Before I started tripping with— . . .” his voice faded. “But it was never enough,” he mumbled, shaking his head.
“The drug?”
“What drug, man?”
“The acid.”
“Acid? Oh—uh, acid. No, man. Sex. Diggit: It was never enough. Mr Stuart didn’t know that I had begun to cruise the streets, the beaches. Nothing was enough.” “Your body was sated. But your soul was starved.” Again the priest’s words were like entities, pulled, ready—cold—from within him.
“No,” Blue said peremptorily. “Diggit, man, I needed constantly to feel loved— . . .”
“Desired!” the priest heard himself shout.
The shadows in the alcove were like gray ice in the shaft of light.
“It’s the same thing!” Blue shouted back. Then he said softly: “The blue rubbers. A client had them made for me, he grooved seeing them on me. They became my trademark. I’d leave them with my customers, that proved they’d been with me. Then—uh—then— . . . What? Oh, when I had the mark put on my ankle, I had it put on the blue rubbers, too.” He paused, frowned. His mind darted: “The Blue Woman. Sometimes she called herself the dark virgin, but she was a nympho. She was beautiful— . . . She heard about me, she went looking for me in that crazy silver Packard of hers, asking about me. See, I carried the mark, and she knew. We’d sit naked on the black throne before the others. All I wore was— . . .” (The black rosary and—. . .) “. . .—the blue rubber.”
“And so the tattoo ended up where you originally wanted it,” Jeremy said with abrupt anger.
Blue reacted in surprise, jolted by the realization. “Yeah, it ended up on my cock,” he said fiercely. “I fucked people, with death.”
Footsteps. The priest saw Malissa moving toward the house along another path. Bravo’s raucous laughter still pursued her.
Malissa did not glance back. The black ring was again on her finger. She entered the house, the domed hall.
In a light-blue dress—like that of a Greek goddess—Savannah was descending the stairway.
Synonymous with power, her beauty was her total identity. Her life was a series of seasons made possible by it. It was purchased like a precious stone, by the highest bidder. Rather, it was rented: Savannah belonged to no one but herself; to be otherwise would render her unfaithful to herself. But it was not only her legendary beauty that made her perhaps the most sought after and expensive woman in the world. It was, also, the enunciated cult of her purity: Her beauty was flawless because it was pure. That was her proclaimed doctrine. And purity was her vaunted virginity. No one could dispute it: not the rulers, millionaires, the most powerful men in the world—they purchased only the company of her beauty.
Facing Malissa, Savannah paused on the stairs.
Bravo had entered the house. Seeing Savannah, her laughter stopped.
Then: Snap!
Bravo’s whip snaked expertly through the air, almost singeing Savannah’s flesh.
Malissa knew: And so the wound, the longing to conquer Savannah, was still alive. Would it then be through Savannah? Or through Karen? Finally through whom would she ultimately destroy Bravo?
Savannah’s face registered no outrage. To do so might mar the perfection of its features. Calmly she continued her descent down the stairs.
Again Bravo brought her hand back. The whip lashed in a threatening “S.”
Snap!
This time it almost kissed Savannah’s bare shoulder.
Still no reaction.
Snap!
The tip of the whip breathed against Savannah’s breasts.
Snap!
The whip clutched the flimsy dress—and, pulled back, it split it along the front. The dress fell at Savannah’s feet, a soft blue cloud. Savannah stood naked, exposed nipples like rouged circles on her breasts. Unperturbed, she walked to Bravo. She stood before her and smiled. Then she said huskily:
“Hello, Bravo.’’
“Superb theater!” Malissa passed judgment on the scene between the two women.
Calmly, Savannah turned from Bravo and walked back up the stairs, slowly.
Slapping her thigh with the coiled whip, Bravo rushed up the opposite flight; along the hall. Without knocking—softly—she opened a door into a shaded, pastel-hued bedroom.
The room seemed an extension of Karen, who stood with her back to the door. She stared down at fragile flowers, like powderpuffs, on a table. She touched one, it dissolved like a breath. She withdrew her hand in surprise.
“Once they’re cut, you can’t touch them,’’ said the voice at the door.
“Oh, Bravo, you startled me.”
“You left the door open,” said Bravo.
“I hate locked doors.” (The key opened the locked door, the two women were not aware—until the scream.)
“You’re pensive,” said Bravo.
“To face Richard, after so long— . . .”
Bravo slammed the door. Now she stood in back of Karen, the whip firmly against her own chest as if to protect the other woman from anything, even an invisible assault. “The first time I saw you—you were already married but you were alone, remember, Karen?—I wanted to protect you,” Bravo confessed; her deep voice mellowed incongruously, forming foreign words. “You seemed so— . . . pure, so helpless in your purity.”
Pure. Thoughts burst like a fragmented rocket in Karen’s mind: “There’s your purity!” The woman’s head was raised from between the other’s spread legs. “Karen, baby! Baby Karen! Baby, baby— . . . Oh, God! You bastard!” She said: “What is there to protect me from now?”
“Whatever threat
ens you,” said Bravo. “I’d kill— . . .”
“You’re too vengeful,” Karen said.
“I’m like the scorpions on this island—deadly. I strike when taunted. . . . We can take the boat back now,” she said with abrupt urgency. She longed to stroke the woman’s hair.
“I have to see him,” Karen insisted.
Bravo struck the table with her whip, a harsh period to the conversation. The flowers disintegrated into a film of white petals on the table. Still behind Karen, Bravo moved her hand over the other’s head, as if finally to touch the beautiful hair. She withdrew it.
She had never yet touched Karen, that way. Toward her, Bravo experienced a new feeling which confused her. Not the familiar sadistic yearnings to conquer the most beautiful women—and she had always succeeded, except with Savannah. No, with Karen, there was a tenderness she dared not name.
She leaned forward. Still without touching her, she mimed the kissing of her hair.
The three were caught in an emotional pool: Tarah, Mark, Joja. A silent tense triangle before the lifeless stage, black figures on it like anonymous death. It was Mark who shattered the mood: He moved out of the room, the house. Moments later Joja turned from the empty stage. Nodding at Tarah, she left the room too.
Through the window, Tarah watched Mark. He stood by the pool now, poised to join his own image floating on the water’s surface. Tarah thought of Gable. If she had not taken him away, from Richard, from this island, this world, Gable would be like— . . . There was something profoundly sinister about Mark, beautiful as he was. Now she saw him lying on a bench beside the pool, which lapped into the island like a tongue from the sea.
He faced the sun, his body stretched sensually. His eyes were closed.
Now Tarah saw Joja advancing toward the boy.
Joja stood over him, studying him. The hair on his legs. It shone like golden dust on the brown body.
He drew one leg up, lazily. His eyes remained closed.
“Mark!” Joja called rashly.
He sat up, propped on one elbow.
The lengthening silence demanded she fill it. But she did not know what to say, had forgotten the words of this strange role. Finally: “Why did your father bring us all here?” The words surprised her; she had merely reached into her mind, and the first coherent order of words available was the one she had formed, the question Tarah had asked her.