“Can I whisper why in your ear?”
“Of course.”
She did so.
“I understand your anger, my daughter,” the archbishop said. “But that doesn’t excuse the violence.”
“I guess that means I can’t turn the pervert into an ice sculpture, either,” Murov said.
“No, you can’t,” the archbishop said.
“Your Grace,” Agrafina said, “I confess that I am a FAMOTORC—”
“What the hell is that?” Castillo asked.
“Fallen Away Member of the Orthodox Russian Church,” Sweaty said. “Now shut up, my beloved heathen, while we Christians deal with this.”
“But I seem to recall, Your Grace, that bearing false witness is a sin,” Agrafina went on.
“Yes, my daughter, it is.”
“Well, that sonofabitch certainly bore—beared?—false witness against me. I just have to swallow that?”
“What would you suggest, my daughter? Since I’m not going to permit you, no matter how far you’ve fallen from Holy Mother Church, to either kill him or turn him into an ice sculpture.”
“I have a suggestion,” Aleksandr Pevsner said. “First thing in the morning, I’ll take him out on the Czarina of the Gulf and put him with the Cubans.”
“What Cubans are those, my son?” the archbishop asked.
“The ones the Cuban DGI doesn’t know that I know they sneaked onto my ship.”
“I don’t understand, my son,” the archbishop said.
“What I plan to do, Your Grace,” Pevsner said, “when we’re five or ten miles offshore, and they have finished restoring the ladies’ restrooms to a suitably pristine condition, is gather the Cubans on the fantail, tell them I know who they are, and ask them how well they can swim.”
“That’s okay with me insofar as ol’ Hockey Puck is concerned,” Agrafina said. “But it seems a little tough on the Cubans.”
“Not to worry, my daughter,” the archbishop said, “I am not going to permit my son Aleksandr to drown twenty-four Cubans.”
“What if I put them in lifeboats, give them plenty of Aqua Mexicana to drink, and make them row back here?”
The archbishop considered that thoughtfully for a moment, and then said, “That’d work for me.”
“Thank you, Your Grace,” Pevsner said. “Take both those clowns down to the Czarina of the Gulf.”
“You’re an evil man, Aleksandr Pevsner,” Charley Castillo said.
“Thank you. I like to think so,” Pevsner replied.
—