His
worship Cass Tamburlaine looked at his aging Movado Serio wristwatch—the only
thing he had on—and both cursed and yearned for his tardy mistress, Joy
Pommery.
“Three a.m.” he muttered.
Just then came a courteous, token knock at
his office door, followed by the softy plushy sound of the door opening out
heavily across the sea of broadloom, and into the room strode the very Joy
Pommery he had so summarily summoned from her sleep. From his supine opposition, all Cass could see were her
finely-crafted ankles and the hem of her soft creamy linen skirt.
“What is the matter with you, Cass?” she
asked, “except,” she added, glancing at his up-periscope, “for the
never-to-be-appeased distention of your favourite organ?”
Cass looked crestfallen.
“I need you,” he told her as poignantly as
he could manage it.
“Oh for godssake, Cass, you don’t need me,
you need an icepack!”
Cass moaned,
“Get up off the carpet,” Joy told him.
He struggled to his feet.
“And put your clothes back on!”
“Don’t be efficient,” muttered Cass,
pulling on his boxer shorts and squirming into his Extra-large Ralph Lauren
chinos. “I’m running a fever and
I’m suffering from an outsized randiness that you’ve been no help at all
with….”
Joy smirked.
“Well, Cass,” she said, “being jerked out
of bed by the telephone at two o’clock in the morning and roughly summoned to
your office isn’t exactly this girl’s dream of foreplay!”
“…and I can’t sleep…”
“You’ve never been able to sleep. Not since I’ve known you.”
“But it’s getting worse every day.”
“You’re getting worse every day,” said Joy, handing him his
pink Hugo Boss shirt. “Why don’t
you concentrate more on your mayoralty duties and less on the rich,
ever-shifting modalities of your hypochondria?”
“It’s not hypochondria,” Cass told her, in
what she thought was an oddly furtive voce. “The fact is,” he said, his voice dropped now to a hoarse whisper,
“somebody’s trying to kill me.”
This struck Joy as funny.
“Now Cass, who would want to do that? Surely
among the hundreds of thousands of people in this city who hate your guts,
there isn’t any one particular party that’d be prepared to go that far?”
“There are lots of such parties,” said
Cass disconsolately.
“Yes, this is a party town,” laughed Joy.
“I’m serious, Joy. I’m worried.”
“Well, the fact is, nobody can investigate
yet, Cass,” said Joy, picking up Cass’s Gucci Sporting Lace-up Booties from the
carpet, “because so far, there’s no body!”
“Let’s hope there won’t be,” Cass replied,
falling back into his chair and stretching himself out of shape trying to pull
on his black silk socks.
“How about we get some breakfast?” asked
Joy. “That won’t kill you. Especially if you pass on your usual
platter of eggs and bacon and go with a nice, benign, egg-white omelette.”
“I’m a tumescent guy, Joy,” Cass told her,
throwing his cashmere overcoat cape-like over his shoulders and closing his
office door, “I need a provocative breakfast, something big and thrilling.”
“You need a psychiatrist, your worship,”
said Joy, bounding after him down the corridor to the elevator.
