Garin. At least he seemed to be done with her semi-coerced services as escort. That was a relief, too. She hadn’t really been able to enjoy the cruise anyway….
To what extent Garin would consider she had returned his favor was an open question. But then, so was Garin. He had off-handedly explained that he had felt compelled to act when a little girl broke away to try to rejoin her mother, from whom she’d been separated. “Don’t think it was a good deed on my part,” he’d assured her. “I was simply worried that, once the hijackers started shooting, they wouldn’t stop.”
It was entirely plausible but she didn’t believe it for a minute. Sitting in her own living room she still wasn’t sure what to believe. Sometimes Garin seemed an embodiment of evil. Sometimes he seemed merely to be totally selfish—and she had seen enough authentic evil not to buy into the currently dominant wisdom that the two were one and the same. Many of the worst monsters she’d met believed what they thought was right so selflessly that they didn’t care how many people they had to kill for their own good.
Sometimes Garin seemed almost chivalrous. She suspected that was illusion, too.
But she didn’t know. I don’t know anything where Garin’s concerned, she thought. Except that our destinies are entwined, and going to stay that way so long as I carry the sword.
The TV switched to show a man with one of those boyish-gone-middle-aged hardcase faces under a crewcut the color of a steam iron. The screen identified him as spokesman for the Cruise Line International Association. She guessed he was about to very earnestly, and with great sincerity, lie across his bow tie about how the cruise lines would never, ever pay hush-money to terrorists.
She’d had enough. She turned off the television and picked up a recent copy of The Journal of Forbidden Archaeology. Thumbing to an article on crystal skulls, she began to read.
MEETINGS WITH the Chasing History’s Monsters staff ate up Annja’s afternoon. Her producer, Doug Morrell, had been in fine form, flitting around the meeting room like a butterfly.
“I don’t really think,” Annja found herself saying at one point, “that we need to address the issue of whether the Loch Ness Monster is actually a shipwrecked alien from a water world.” Although he gets credit for unusual imagination for that one, she thought.
“GIRLFRIEND,” Clarice Hartung said, leaning forward over the table, “I don’t see how you manage to eat that much and stay that slim.”
Annja chewed the mouthful she had bitten out of the specialty of the house—a prime rib sandwich, blood-rare, on toasted sourdough, with just a touch of horseradish—and shrugged. “I mostly seem to have trouble keeping weight on,” she said.
Clarice shook her head in mock despair. She was a production assistant on Chasing History’s Monsters. She had milk-chocolate skin, a cloud of reddish-brown hair that was more curly than frizzy, big dark brown eyes and a wide smile. “I’d kill for a problem like that.”
“You look great,” Annja said, taking a bite of pickle.
“For a full-figured woman, you mean?” Clarice said.
“No. Seriously.” To Annja’s eyes her friend was no more than pleasingly padded. Certainly not fat. And even Kristie Chatham might envy the décolletage threatening Clarice’s Caesar salad from her golden-tan blouse. Had Kristie ever deigned to notice lowly production assistants.
Annja thought of saying as much. It just wasn’t her. She could think catty. But she seldom voiced it.
“It’s the starch,” Mindy Llewellyn said.
“Say what?” Clarice asked, in the middle of taking a bite from her roll.
“Your problem is the amount of starch you eat,” Mindy said. She was a somewhat hyper young woman, with ash-blond hair hanging straight to frame a gamine face with big blue eyes. She did makeup for several shows, including Chasing History’s Monsters.
The closest thing Annja had to real friends on the show, the pair had prevailed on her to accompany them to Corrigan’s, an Irish pub near the studios and consequently favored by the crew—although not, for the most part, the on-air talent—for a bite to eat after the production meeting. “To decompress from Doug,” as Clarice put it.
Annja found it a pleasant enough place, with its dark-stained wood paneling, muted Celtic music and the prints on the walls, most of which seemed to celebrate not just leprechauns but worldwide specimens of what alt. archaeo, Annja’s favorite newsgroup, liked to call “the fairy faith.”
“Girl, I don’t even want to be as thin as you,” Clarice said. Mindy was toothpick-thin. Annja worried a little about her health.
Mindy shrugged. “I never seem to have much appetite,” she said. She had ordered a salad, too, and a mineral water. She picked at one and sipped at the other. “But if you’re really concerned about your weight, you want to stop obsessing on fat and start looking at the amount of starch you eat. Take those fat-free yogurts you’re always snacking on. Have you looked at their contents?”
“Hey, they’re healthy,” Clarice said.
“Are they? They have the same amount of calories as the normal, full-fat yogurt. What they replace the fat with is starch.”
“But carbohydrates are brain food.”
“If you sit on your brains. Some are okay, but starches go straight to your blood sugar. And your hips. Like that roll. And the croutons.”
Clarice looked at the roll, frowned and replaced it on the bread plate. “Are you trying to rob me of my simple pleasures in life?”
“I’m just saying,” Mindy said. She shifted restlessly on the booth seat where she sat next to Annja.
Clarice sighed. “Well, the truth is, I worry about our Annja spending too many nights alone on her couch with museum samples and moldy manuscripts,” she said. “You’re going to turn into a mummy, girl. And not the kind that goes with a daddy.”
“Too bad the only bones you’re handling are long dead,” Mindy said. She snickered. “I can’t believe I said that.”
Annja favored them with an exasperated half scowl. “Thanks so much for your votes of confidence. You sure know how to give a woman confidence in her own sexuality.”
“Oh, you’ve got loads of sexuality, Annja,” Mindy said. “Men throw themselves at you like moths at a flame. And you swat them like moths.”
“I think it’s more like they smash their little antennaed moth heads in against the glass wall of her apparent indifference,” Clarice said.
“I am not indifferent!”
Clarice smiled an extra wide “trapped ya” smile. “You’re right,” she said. “The word is oblivious.”
Mindy’s skinny butt bounced on the bench. “Good one!”
Annja sat back and crossed her arms. “I’m so glad we had this time together,” she said.
“Oh, don’t take it so hard, Annja,” Mindy said. “We tease you because we love you.”
“And we wish you’d give some nice man a chance to.”
Annja sighed. She’d given some a chance. But they had a tendency to not stick around.
Or to die.
But she couldn’t tell her friends that. Even though