Charlie’s expression, by contrast, surprised me. He glowed with satisfaction, a man relishing his control over the crowd. He watched the audience and seldom bothered to look at Neylan. Not that she cared. She flopped backward and forward, shook her coins, and reached around to caress the back of Sam’s neck. Some members of the audience gasped, but most cheered as Neylan tried to seduce Sam with her dance. Crunch, of course, joined in.
I wondered what the fish saw as they peered through their walls. With our burkas, red fezzes, and be-coined boobs quivering out of control, we must have been a curious sight. I half expected the little monsters to stop swimming and press their fish faces up against the glass for a better view. They seemed agitated. The parade of controlled circles had given way to perturbed bursts of motion. They zigzagged around the aquarium in quick flashes, as though trying to catch the light flickering from Neylan’s blinding bikini.
Eventually, Neylan and Crunch chased Sam’s self-restraint. She rose from her chair, snatched a pink chiffon scarf from a nearby friend, and sashayed into the human ring like a gypsy. Sam reached the scarf around the outside of Crunch’s leg and pulled it through the inside of his crotch. With a coquettish expression and a roll of her shoulder, she mouthed words no one heard but we all understood:
Oh my.
From somewhere in the crowd a voice bellowed, “Take it off.”
The guests, captains of finance and bedrocks of philanthropy, cast their inhibitions aside. Charlie’s parade of stiff drinks, from martinis to fruity rum concoctions, had taken control. “Take it off ” became the universal, audience-wide
chant, though it was unclear who was to disrobe—Neylan in her coins, Crunch in his sequins, or Sam in her cabbage outfit.
Charlie had disappeared from the spotlight and was nowhere to be seen. Odd. It was not like him to step aside. But he had created another masterpiece, and I suspected he was about to unveil his coup de grâce. It would be just like Charlie to emerge from the shadows wearing the robes of an oil sheikh. The image made me smile.
For no particular reason I noticed Great Bangs. Her eyes shone wide with anguish, her face a mix of horror and bewilderment. I looked over at the dancers, thinking their performance had generated the distress. The three wiggled their butts and bellies, hardly the cause of such anxiety. I returned to Great Bangs, and it became clear. She was not staring at the dancers. She was staring at the Giant Ocean Tank.
And she screamed.
CHAPTER THREE
Great Bangs’s panicked shrieks snapped my head back to the Giant Ocean Tank, and I saw the most curious thing. Charlie. Fat, waddling Charlie, framed against the Horse-eye Jack, the Sergeant Major, and the other toothy sea monsters searching for adventure in their monotonous confines. They inspected him and darted away. Their agitated motions reflected light throughout the tank and made me forget the flashes from Neylan’s dazzling coins. The living coral reef, home to sea barracudas and moray eels, loomed large and bizarre just behind him.
Only, Charlie wasn’t standing outside the tank. He thrashed deep inside it, underwater and engulfed by the briny liquid. He flailed. He struggled. As he gasped for oxygen, air belched from his mouth and bubbled toward the tank’s surface. Charlie beat his arms futilely, desperate to break free from the synthetic sea’s drowning clutches.
Stunned, I tried to yell, “Get out,” but my vocal cords failed. What was he doing? Five minutes earlier, I thought Charlie had disappeared to change. He was not wearing the robes of an oil sheikh, though. Nor had he donned a swimsuit. He was still wearing his tux. The jacket and fez had disappeared. The starchy stiffness of his shirt had given way to the water’s wavy motion.
A rope, knotted at Charlie’s right ankle, stretched from an industrial
stainless-steel trolley. It looked like a caterer’s serving table. Only now, the trolley served as a makeshift anchor. It pulled Charlie down, down, down, dragging him inexorably toward the sandy floor of the Giant Ocean Tank. This spectacle was no stunt. Something had gone bad. Way bad.
Though I had lost my voice, Great Bangs never lost hers. “Do something!” she bellowed. Her screech cut through all the din of the great room: over the band, over the crowd, and over the penguins. Great Bangs pointed toward Charlie with one hand. She covered her mouth with the other. The screams burst through her fingers. She screamed and screamed and screamed.
The revelry stopped. Charlie’s drunken guests turned away from Neylan and Crunch and searched for the source of Great Bangs’s distress. Her outsized blasts had given birth to a stadium wave. It took only seconds for the crowd to focus on the Giant Ocean Tank.
The band stopped playing. Neylan stopped jiggling. Crunch stopped clowning. And Sam froze. We were five hundred strong. We were five hundred united in horror, watching without believing. Even the penguins stopped yammering. Perhaps they sensed the anguish of their alpha male. He reigned supreme no more.
Charlie sank deeper and deeper, his breath running out. The stainless-steel cart grazed a Sand Tiger, which sent the shark surging through the water, its tail whipping furiously left and right. Through the water and glass, Charlie’s face looked pudgy and bloated. His expression howled for help.
I scanned the crowd for a member of the staff and found a woman wearing the aquarium’s blue-gray uniform. Pale and thin, she looked more helpless than the rest of us.
Instinctively, I muscled through the crush of gawking people. They rubbernecked. The surreal vision, Charlie Kelemen sinking to the bottom of the Giant Ocean Tank, paralyzed them. I cut left and dashed along a concrete path that spiraled to the tank’s surface. Five seconds had elapsed since Great Bangs’s first scream. It seemed like five lifetimes.
Do something,
I told myself. A half step behind, Alex Romanov joined my pursuit. We had no idea what we were chasing. We had no time to think.
Charlie sank ever more. Over my shoulder I saw Romanov stop and spread his hands out against the glass. He stretched them wide and peered
up into the unforgiving abyss, trying to decide what next. For a moment he looked like he’d been crucified. But we needed more than a religious gesture from a hedge fund manager to save Charlie. I felt powerless. I started running up the path again, drawn to the tank’s surface. It was the only point of entry. It was the only place to fish Charlie out.
As Charlie plunged, he blinked in my direction without comprehension. Panic and waning oxygen wrecked his reasoning. I saw him look at Romanov, and just for a second Charlie appeared to regain his senses. He stopped thrashing. His face turned resolute. He wrestled with the knots that secured the cord to his ankle. But his movements remained jerky, his struggles in vain. I noticed plumes of red liquid billowing from his arms and the tops of his hands. They spread in eerie red-chocolate clouds that fouled the otherwise clear water. I wondered how he had cut himself.
It all happened lightning fast. I raced up the pathway, racking my brain for a solution. Romanov drew level with Charlie, who had grown frustrated from his losing battle against time and knots. He no longer controlled his lungs. My best friend, the man who had saved me, edged closer toward his own death.
Water can be so refreshing. The way it cleanses cotton mouth after too much liquor. The way it rinses off the salt and perspiration from 120-mile bike rides.
But water can be damning and unfamiliar. As water passes the larynx, drawn by alveoli panicking from the lack of oxygen, some victims cough or swallow the fluid. They cannot fight their natural instinct to breathe. The body’s desperate confusion, driven by the need for air when only water is available, leads to laryngospasm. The larynx and throat constrict, preventing any more water from filling the lungs. Or air. Nothing is worse than drowning.
So they say.
Charlie flapped his arms desperately with gasps of violent motion. Against the cart’s weight, he made no headway toward the surface. He floundered without hope. His wild, lashing gesticulations only scared the fish.
Some of the fish.
The Sand Tigers did not scare. Far from it. Charlie’s frenzy aroused them. The cloud of blood whetted their hunger. It stoked their lust for food and revived their visceral instinct to kill. The aquarium’s biologists still had no antidote for the vital fluid’s opiate impact.
A seven-foot Sand Tiger whizzed through the water. She lunged at Charlie’s arm, three thousand teeth crunching and snapping and gnawing even before contact. She hit. She turned and twisted, working to wrench Charlie’s limb from his body.
Carcharias taurus
failed. But that arm hung uselessly at his side. A new plume of blood poured from his body.
The crowd gasped. Someone shouted, “Call nine-one-one.”
A second shark, almost nine feet in length, barreled into my hapless friend. Clearly in pain, Charlie surprised me. He fought back, oblivious to the rows of serrated teeth. He bludgeoned the shark’s gills with his good arm. He threw hammer punches, again and again. The bloody spectacle, man versus shark, immobilized Romanov and me. We stopped running.
The Sand Tiger shot away in a herky-jerky motion. Sharks feel blows to their gills the way men feel kicks to their balls. The first shark, the seven-footer, attacked again and avenged her mate. She whisked through the water, opened her mouth wide, and slammed into Charlie’s stomach. His gut was a fat, juicy target of massive opportunity. Then she retreated, smug and victorious.
Something chunky and red flopped through the white shreds of Charlie’s shirt. The mangled gobs looked vital. Intestines, kidney, liver, maybe all three, I couldn’t be sure. Charlie reached for the clumps and tried to push them back inside. He moved in slow motion, suffering from a lack of either oxygen or blood. The wound disappeared in the clouds, his life pouring into the water.
From outside the tank I recognized agony. Bile welled inside my throat. And I dry-retched. The crowd screamed, men and women alike, everyone horrified by what they saw. Someone puked the real thing. A sickly smell filled my nostrils, making me dry-retch even more.
The third shark, the biggest of the three, blasted through the water like a guided torpedo. The sight stopped me dead in my tracks. I forgot the nearby nausea. The Sand Tiger held his mouth high and wide, a wizened old veteran of feeding frenzies. His urine-yellow eyes flashed absolute evil. All the guests in the hall froze like deer in the headlights.
He struck.
Charlie’s magnificent, humongous head disappeared. Gone. The same beefy belfry that had spawned all the self-deprecating jokes about Cossack ancestors. Gone. The shark’s wide jaws crowned Charlie’s cranium with ease. Gone.
Without breaking stroke, the shark shot forward, leaving extension cords of vertebrae and arteries where head and neck had once been. He gnashed and gnawed. He chewed the skull with reckless abandon, the way a dog savages a bone. Charlie’s remains descended to the base of the Great Ocean Tank under the weight of the attached food cart. The other two sharks circled back and struck the headless torso again and again.
I dry-retched. Someone cacked over the backs of the crowd. It must have been a woman. Burkas would have checked the spew from men.
Deep inside the tank, Charlie’s severed arm sank to the sandy base. A moray eel, hidden in that beautiful if man-made coral reef, shot out and pulled the arm into its cave. The eel, an ugly fish with a spiny-toothed sucker mouth and skin resembling snot, struck repeatedly at the hand. Between assaults, Charlie’s wedding ring flickered in the light.
I scanned the halls for Sam. No luck. She was lost somewhere in the panicking swarm, somewhere among the stench of fear and vomit shrouding the aquarium.
CHAPTER FOUR
Over the weekend Charlie’s bizarre death made every newscast in the country. CNN. Fox. You name it. One guest had taken a camera phone to the party and, with remarkable presence of mind, taped the feeding frenzy. All day Saturday and all day Sunday, I heard: “An unsettling story from Boston. Charlie Kelemen, noted philanthropist and member of the hedge fund community, was eaten Friday night by three sharks at the New England Aquarium. Film at eleven.”
It got worse. Some jerk uploaded the clip onto YouTube, where it immediately became a “featured video.” By 3:47 P.M. on Sunday there were 450,467 hits. One was mine. Alone in my condo on Central Park West, I brooded over the horrific images. They were almost impossible to believe, and I found myself flipping to a happier collage of memories.
There was that black-tie benefit held in the Waldorf last January.
“Listen up,” Charlie commanded his dinner partners. “I want to know who pees in the shower.” With mock gravity he raised his right hand, as though to swear an oath, and poured a fabulous Côtes du Rhône with his left. He
gazed into every face around the table. His big, brown eyes goaded us with a look that said,
You can tell me
.
The weight of Charlie’s playful stare produced results. One stunning young divorcée, with enough cleavage to bury that bottle of wine, revealed, “I’m Jane, and I pee in the shower.”
Almost on cue, the handsome investment banker to her right confessed, “I’m Henry. And I pee in the shower.” It started a chain reaction around the table.
