CHAPTER THIRTEEN

     “My God!”

     Just at the moment, Coal Blackstone was grateful for her martinis, though a second glance at the death threat letter sent earlier that day to Mayor Cass Tamburlaine’s office surprised her enough to put her off Chef Leroy Didier’s soufflé—which the waiter had just set before her.  She looked at Joy Pommery in some alarm.

     “And you say he’s been getting these for some time?”

     “For three or four days now, yes,” Joy replied.

     “And are they all as unsettling as this one?”

     “They’ve been getting steadily…more elaborate.  And each one is different.  They must have taken hours and hours to make.”

     Coal looked again at the note.  Where she might have expected obscenity, blood, gore and intimations of mayhem, spelled out in letters roughly cut from magazines and glued onto the page, what she was looking at instead was a dazzlingly conceived and queasily competent watercolor painting of a fallen angel—drawn and painted in an exalted high renaissance style, as if it had been limned by Raphael himself.  But while the painting offered a creepy virtuosity, the message was about par for death threats: “Hey fat Mayor Tamberlane…”

     Coal looked up.  “I see he spells Cass’s name incorrectly.”

     Joy nodded.

     And then she read the rest of it.  “You are an Incompetent Side of Beef and you will soon Hanging on a Hook, Making your own Gravy!”

     “Very nice,” she said, handing the sheet of paper back to Joy.  “Charming.  Have you contacted the police?”

     “No.  And Cass doesn’t want to.  Not yet anyhow.  It would all get out for sure and within hours, this fucking Old Master painting—she waved the pretty Fallen Angel at Coal—would be gracing the front page of the Toronto Sun.”

     “I hate to say so,” said Coal, taking a sip from her third martini, “but I suspect there are lots of people who’d be rooting for Raphael here.”

     “I know,” Joy sighed.  “But what do you think Cass should do?”

     “Nothing for the moment,” said Coal.

     “But do you think this Raphael, as you call him, is dangerous?”

     “Oh absolutely.”

     “So what’s the next step?”

     “Well, I think I’ll pay a call on His Worship.”

     “You’ll find he’s really pretty spooked about these notes,” said Joy.
    “So am I,” replied Coal.

        

                

CHAPTER TWELVE:

 

     Michael Moskos was sufficiently passionate about contemporary art that it caused him something like anguish to attend exhibition openings.  There were only a few galleries for which he had any respect anyhow.  On this particular Thursday night, he had made his way to one of them, impelled there by a long-standing friendship with the artist, a swaggering, amusingly arrogant, fiercely defensive painter named Rubel Force.

     By the time Michael got to the Lucy Crater Gallery, there were already a couple of hundred absurdly young people milling about—none of whom Michael knew—all of them laughing too loud, leaning out like starving baby birds for more wine, fiercely jabbing toothpicks into tiny cubes of putty-coloured cheese and exerting great care not to be caught gazing, even for an outlaw moment, upon any of Rubel’s pictures.

     Which consisted, for this exhibition, of exhaustingly detailed paintings of crumpled balls of cellophane, which, in the course of their crumpling, had come to look sort of like various creatures—a frog, a fish, a deer, a spermatozoa—and were therefore painted that way.  The name of each cello-creature, just in case its shape didn’t tell the story, was neatly lettered in black paint across the bottom of each painting.

     Michael spotted Rubel at the far side of the room, deep in conversation—or, more likely—deep in a desperate avoidance of conversation, with a massive young woman in overalls and nothing else who, ignoring all gallery remonstrances to the contrary, was dragging around with her, on a leash, an ugly little dog, shaped like a bottle brush. 

     “Michael the Big Writer!” shouted Bliss Carmen—for indeed it was Bliss Carmen loudly holding forth to a now considerably diminished Rubel Force—“come and meet Rubel!”

     “Hello Bliss.  Yes, I know Rubel.  We go way back,” he told her as he and the beleagered painter shook hands. 

     “Nice show,” he said to his friend.

     “Thanks,” said Rubel, looking around for some means of escape from Bliss’s volubility.  “Excuse me, I think I see Knox, and I’d better go say hello.”  And he trundled gratefully away.

     Knox Penworth was the art critic for The Globe & Mail.  He wasn’t as much a writer as he was a party animal, thought Michael, but he was sort of the only art critic in town.  Michael never read his stuff.

     “So,” boomed Bliss, “how’s Zorba?”

     “Who?” asked Michael.

     “You, dummy,” laughed Bliss. 

Michael regretted ever telling her he was half Greek.

     “What are you doing here, Bliss?”

     “Me?  I love art.  And I’ve gut a lot of artist friends.  See that guy over by the wall—keeping to himself?  That’s my pal, Homer Rubik.”

     Michael looked, and was astonished to see that Homer Rubik was the guy who was sitting across from him on the subway only a few days before—the guy struggling through Angels & Demons.  The feral reader!

     “He’s an artist too?”

     “Oh sure, a really great artist,” thundered Bliss.  You want to meet him?”

     “Oh well…no…not right now….” 

But Bliss was already gesturing wildly to Homer, insisting, in unmistakably imperative sign language, that he join them.

     Homer came slouching up.  He didn’t seem to recognize Michael—for which Michael was grateful.

     “Homer is a classical artist!” Bliss announced.

     “Which means what exactly?” asked Michael.

     “It means he draws and paints like Raphael or Michelangelo!” Bliss told him.  She turned to Homer.  “Isn’t that right?”

     Homer emitted a sort of low growl and finally nodded his head.

     “Yeh.”

     “How do you manage that?” Michael asked.

     “I took a course at night school.”

     “What kind of a course?”

     “Old Master Drawing and Painting,” Homer told him.

     “You like all that high renaissance material, do you?” asked Michael.

     “What?” said Homer.

     “Oh you know…frescoes and popes and….”

     “I like doing things properly,” said Homer abruptly.  “I’m reading this book right now about a bunch of renaissance guys called the Illuminati and how they kill some popes who don’t believe in them. “

     A tiny shudder ran down Michael’s spine.

     “What’s the name of the book?”

     “I don’t remember book names,” Homer replied, swaying from one foot to the other and looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Something about demons.”

        

TORONTO: CHAPTER ELEVEN

     Coal Blackstone nosed her black, 2001 Plymouth Prowler into the parking lot near Didier and, with the reluctance she always felt in parting with the car, even for a short time, gave the keys to the teenaged parking attendant.  “Be careful with it,” she told him, “or the two of us will be having a very serious talk a couple of hours from now.”

     “Absolutely, ma’am,” the young man replied, dazzled equally by the beauty of both the fiercely sleek car and its sleekly beautiful owner.  “You can depend on me.”

     “I hope so.”

     The waiter at Didier seated them with the sort of elaborate fake deference Coal hated, presented them with menus, and then scurried off to fetch water, rolls, butter—talismans of the Gustatory Preliminary.  After which task, he then skulked about near their table until the two women simultaneously betrayed expressions that meant decisions had been reached.

     “Would you like to hear about tonight’s specials?” he asked them, a tad late in the game.

     “No” said Coal.  She hated the pseudo-lyricism of food descriptions.  “To begin with, bring us a couple of martinis.”

     “Very dry, yes?”

     Coal glared at him. 

     “Surely nothing else is really a martini,” she informed him curtly.  She turned then to Joy, who was feeling a little marginalized by Coal’s sense of command.  “The service here is, as you can see…well, rather trying,” Coal told Joy, “but the food is lovely.”

     The waiter was back with the drinks.

     “Did I ask you if you wanted to hear Chef Leroy’s special’s for tonight?

     “Yes, you did,” Coal replied crisply.

     “And I actually think we’ve decided,” Joy told him, with what Coal felt was an undeserved smile, which served to soften the moment by a little.

     “And so what can I get you?”

     “You can get us both cheese souffles,” said Coal.  “And before that, you can bring us a mushroom terrine to share.”  She turned to Joy.  “We don’t really want wine do we?  I’d just like to drink martinis.”

     Joy nodded her assent.

     “Very good, ladies,” said the waiter and disappeared.

     “Ladies?” said Coal to Joy.

     “I guess he couldn’t say ‘very good, Women’,” replied Joy, with a half-hearted smile.

     “I wish he hadn’t said anything at all,” replied Coal.  “But,” she continued, smiling at Joy and squeezing her hand briefly, “enough about him.  What about you?”

     “Well, as you guessed earlier, back at the studio, it’s Cass.  I’m getting a bit concerned about him.”

     “To tell you the truth,” said Coal, taking the always clarifying first sip of her icy martini, “we’re all a bit concerned about him.  He is the mayor, after all.  And, if you don’t mind my saying so, a rather peculiar mayor at that.”

     “I know,” said Joy wearily.  “And he’s peculiar in lots of ways, not just politically.”

     “Is he?”

     “Decidedly.  The reason I wanted to talk to you, though, is that lately he’s been getting death threats.”

     “I guess it would be tasteless if I told you I wasn’t surprised.”

     “Tasteless, but understandable.  Nobody likes him, Coal.”

     “Except you.”

     “For some reason I can’t figure out, yes, I do like him somehow.”

     “He needs you?”

     “I don’t think he knows I’m alive.”

     Coal finished her first drink and flagged the waiter to bring two more.

     “That doesn’t sound like something you’d say, Joy.  You’re not a masochist.”

     “I never have been.”

     “And you mustn’t start now,” said Coal.  “But how do these death threats you mentioned come?  On the phone?  By letter?”

     “There have been notes.”

     “Have you seen any of them?”

     “I have one here,” said Joy, rummaging in her bag.    “This is more or less typical of the ones I’ve looked at.”

     She was about to hand the sheet of paper across the table to Coal—and hesitated.  “It’s pretty weird,” she said.

     “They always are,” Coal told her, taking the paper from Joy. 

     Then she looked at it.

     “My god!” she said.

    

CHAPTER 10:

     Coal Blackstone was posed, dainty as a daffodil, in front of a huge studio fan, happily withstanding the artificial wind that lifted and torqued the pale yellow muslin Tom Ford cocktail dress she was wearing, when one of Lincoln Ford’s studio assistants bustled in to tell her there was someone waiting to see her.

     “Now?” she asked the girl.

     “In gale-force winds?” smiled Linc.

     “She said it was very important.”

     “Alright.”

     Someone turned off the fan and everything drooped back to normal.  Studio attendants carefully divested Coal of her sunrise-coloured dress, replacing it with a shimmering black satin robe that she hastily belted around her nakedness.  Coal was curious about who would intrude so decisively into a photo-session.

     It was Joy Pommery.

     “Hello,” said Coal gaily.  “What brings you to this windswept Garden of Eden this morning?  Anything wrong?”

     Joy had known Coal Blackstone for a couple of years now and they were almost friends.  Coal rather enjoyed Joy’s tendency to be efficient about her emotions—she was, after all, the resident psychotherapist for a large, absurdly successful Toronto-based advertising agency called A.D. Inc.—and had always been curious about the degree to which she could make carefully planned, highly deliberated forays even into the mostly bleak terrain of her private life whenever she felt the need to. 

     For her part, Joy admired—as everyone did—Coal’s dark, smouldering beauty and her faultless poise.  Just at the moment, though, it was something else about Coal Blackstone that Joy was seeking out.  It had to do with the rumors she had heard about Coal’s more than casual interest in the labyrinthine ways of the criminal mind.  

     Coal wasn’t anything as banal and as earthbound as a private detective, or even something as predictable as an amateur sleuth.  But she did continue to demonstrate an abiding fascination for the machinations of the darkly bizarre, for understanding the shape of outlaw behaviours, for providing some startling and revealing excavations of motives and meanings behind psychotic enactments of every kind.  

     The police might normally have found Coal’s rummaging around in crime to be both annoying and interfering, if she hadn’t consistently proved herself so damned helpful to them.  As Chief of Police Victor Grommet had once said to her, “You know, Coal, you’d be a real scorpion in my shoe if you weren’t so fucking useful sometimes.”  Coal had thanked him, both for his tender admission and for the elegance with which he had stated it. 

     “I hate to bother you during a shoot, Coal,” said Joy, “but I’d really like to talk to you about something that’s sort of worrying me.”

     “Of course, Joy,” said Coal.  “What is it?  Something about the Mayor?”

     “Yes.”

     “You know, I simply can’t fathom what it is you find so compelling about the portly Lord Tamburlaine,” said Coal.  “I find him sort of off-putting.”

     “So do I,” Joy admitted—with a trace of relief at being able to say so.

     “So??” asked Coal.

     “It’s complicated” said Joy.

     “Like everything else.  Okay, why don’t we meet for a drink or an early dinner later today?  This is clearly not the place to discuss anything of any importance.”

     “Wonderful.  Thanks, Coal.  Where and when?”

     “How about Didier at 8 tonight?”

     “Where is it?” Joy asked.

     “You don’t know Didier?  Oh, you’ll like it.  It’s up on Yonge Street, just a bit north of Bloor.”

     “Great,” said Joy. “See you tonight.”

     “Wait till you taste chef Leroy’s soufflé!”

     “It’s good?”

     “It’s to die for!”

     “Please, Coal.  Don’t say anything like that.”

CHAPTER NINE:

     Homer Rubik watched Michael exit the subway and then returned to wrestling with Angels & Demons.  Michael had got off at Keele.  His own station, Runnymede, was just a few stops later.  He just had time to read one more paragraph.   

     Homer had a job as a cook at a fast food restaurant and right now he was on his way to work.  Work was the preparation of a hundred breakfasts.  Bacon and eggs.  Bacon and sausage.  BLTs.  Toasted Westerns.  Pancakes.  Toast and coffee.  Toast and tea.  Coffee and Danish.  Muffins.   Then at 11:30, work shifted slightly to become the preparation of a hundred lunches.  Hamburgers and Cheeseburgers.  Fries.  Home fries.  Grilled cheese sandwiches.  BLTs.  Chicken salad sandwiches.  Ham and cheese sandwiches.   Fish and chips.  Meat Loaf.  Liver and Onions—which nobody ever ordered.  Strip loin steaks—which also nobody ordered.   

     There were two soups—a daily soup, which was always the same and seemed to have something to do with chicken and rice, and a more or less eternally available tomato soup—red as a stoplight and thin as water.  Homer didn’t of course make the soups.  They were brought in. 

     There were a few desserts listed on the blackboard: rice pudding, jello, and slices of rapidly mineralizing pies—coconut cream, cherry and blueberry.  They didn’t sell many desserts.  A rice pudding sometimes.  An occasional dish of rubbery jello.  The pies were left to fossilize.

     Homer hated food.  The greasy-spoon standards were all he was really capable of making.  He was glad the place didn’t offer French toast or crepes or anything weird and fussy like that.  He’d have been dismissed.

     The subway sighed into the Runnymede station.  Homer slipped his book into his briefcase and lumbered towards the door.  The clock on the platform read 6:45 a.m.   In five minutes he’d be firing up the grill.  It’d be hot as hell in the kitchen.  At 7am the place would open, and he’d start cooking.  By 3:30pm, the end of his shift, he’d have cooked six times his own weight of the stuff.  His stomach churned at the thought of it.  And he had the same thought every morning.

     Homer didn’t have any friends at the diner.  The Italian guy who owned the place hated him and found crude but effective ways to demonstrate his distaste for him.   There was a cop who came in sometimes.  Officer Sweetman.  Brice Sweetman.  He just had a coffee, never anything to eat.  He’d wave at Homer, standing over his turgid grill like a cloudbank rising up over a hot, stagnant lake.

     “Hi Homer, how’s it goin’?  Cooking up a storm?”

     Homer tried to grin but the grin sort of twisted and hurt his face.

     “Oh yeh.  Cookin’ all the time!”

    “But,” officer Sweetman observed acutely, “not at the moment.”

     Homer looked down at his quiet, congealing grill.

     “Not just at this exact moment, no,” Homer replied.

Just then the door opened and a hefty young woman came blustering in, dragging a small bottlebrush dog behind her.  She picked up the dog, scooped up a candy bar from the rack beside the cash register, tore off the paper and shoved it into the dog’s face.

     “Your lucky day, Fish!” she boomed.  “A Crispy Crunch bar!”

     Homer grinned at her.

     “Hi Bliss!”

     “Howdy Chef,” she replied.  “What’s special today?  Aside from the fact that I’m patronizing this crummy joint in the first place?”

     “How about breakfast?”

     “A brilliant idea,” Bliss guffawed.  “I never would have thought of that!”

     “So do you want some?”

     “Sure,” said Bliss. “Lots of it.”

     Fish, having wolfed down his Crispy Crunch bar, turned and, cocking his back leg, pissed copiously against the counter stool where Officer Sweetman was sitting with his coffee. 

     “You shouldn’t let him do that,” he said to Bliss.

     “Oh for Chrissake, Brice,” Bliss told him, “he missed your pant leg, didn’t he!” 

     Officer Sweetman looked to see.  Fish growled at him.

     “You realize you’re going to end up in jail some day, don’t you, Bliss?

     Bliss laughed.

     “Are you kidding?  I’m going to end up running for Mayor some day!”

     Homer looked up from his frying bacon.

     “Right after the current Mayor is totally finished with the job, right Bliss?” he asked her.

     She grinned at him and also at Officer Sweetman.

     “Or even before that,” she told them.

CHAPTER EIGHT:

     It was already dawn.  Michael had left Bliss Carmen alone with her third slice of carrot cake at the all-night restaurant they had found on Bloor Street near the Spadina subway—Bliss’s home base—and was now on the subway, on his way to the apartment he had rented on the second floor of a Victorian house on Indian Road, not far from High Park.  

     He was making desultory attempts to read the scruffy old Penguin copy of Sartre’s The Age of Reason he always had with him.  He had resolved to read through Sartre’s whole Roads to Freedom trilogy, subway ride by subway ride.

     But he grew increasingly distracted by the guy sitting across the aisle.  He was distracted because there was something feral about him. 

     Perhaps not really, probably not really, but he was hunched and furtive and had small prune-pit eyes in a spreading, flaccid face, and a mean little mouth, tight as a dog’s anus.

     He was sitting directly opposite Michael and he, too, was contending with a book.  As he concentrated on his page, which happened only sporadically, he pursed his mouth into a tense little knot.  His eyes, almost lost in the uninflectable vastness of his face, grew somehow smaller and as dense as almonds.  He skulked and scowled over his book, as he were a dog just given an old bone.  His book seemed not so much a prize as simply a possession.  He acted as if he didn’t really want it very much, but now that he had it, well goddammit, he was going to keep it very close to him.

     Michael was curious about what he was reading—he was always curious about what people were reading—and leaned and shifted in his seat in order to try to spot the cover.  The man seemed somehow to know that Michael would do this, and looked up angrily, his eyes narrowing, his eyebrows raised, quickened by something like alarm.  He was like a hungry animal maniacally guarding its kill. 

     Michael quickly pretended to be looking at something else, and, partially mollified, the man returned to the agon of his book. 

     Intent, now, upon knowing what the feral man was reading, Michael tried once again to see past his beefy fists to see the cover.  The man looked up again quickly, just as Michael had craned his neck to get a better view.

     “What do you think of the Mayor?” he asked Michael abruptly, roughly, putting the book on the sear, cover down.        

     Michael was taken aback.

     “The Mayor?”

     “Yeh, the fat guy, that Tamburlaine.”

     “I don’t know.  I don’t really think about the mayor much,” said Michael.

     “Oh yeh?  Well, I do.  All the time.  The Mayor is gravy.”

     “Gravy?”

     The man stared at Michael malevolently, knotting his features, tightening his mouth even further.  His eyes grew hard and yellow as dried peas. 

     “Gravy.  And potatoes.” Then he uttered something like a growl.

     The train was slowing down.  Michael decided to get off no matter what the stop was.  He turned once more to look back at the feral reader.  He could see the book cover now.  It was Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons.

     The man met his gaze.

     “Meat,” he said again to Michael.  “And gravy.”

CHAPTER SEVEN:

  Coal Blackstone woke up, yawned and stretched her ivory arms towards the shafts of sunlight falling onto her bed from the balcony window.  Then she tossed off the duvet, and, lying happily naked in the golden light, stretched her endless legs in the same direction—but only one at a time.  It was her own form of lazy, supine tai-chi, and while she had few illusions about its efficacy as a set of spiritual exercises, it felt good enough for her to do it every morning—if she were alone—upon awakening.
     There was no photo session today and she was free, as far as a supermodel can ever be deemed free.
    “Linc?” she called out.  “Is there coffee?”
    “Soon,” came a masculine voice from down the hall.  “Can’t you smell it?”
     “I’m too busy yawning and stretching,” Coal answered abstractly.  “One activity at a time!”
     Linc smiled to himself as he poured espresso into two tiny cups, each bearing a silkscreened photo on its side of a Man Ray eye—with spidery eyelashes.  He was always amused by Coal’s perpetual meldings of discipline and torpor.  He loved how she made lassitude seem both graceful and purposeful. 
     Coal’s real name was Collette Blackstone, but she had renamed herself Coal when it began to seem to her, in the course of growing up, that her dark hair was steadily getting blacker and blacker—so black that it flashed vivid blue highlights in the sun. 
     And it wasn’t just the hair either.  Frankly, she had never thought of herself as the Colette type.  Certainly not the Gigi type.
By the time she had decided, at age seventeen, to permit one of her older, eager suitors to divest her of her virginity—which flowery task she felt he had accomplished clumsily and with unseemly haste—she was already quite far advanced into the careful, highly deliberate repositioning of herself that would soon make her one of the leading fashion models on two continents.    
     Linc had been with her for a year now, each of them a partner in a shape-shifting relationship that was elastic enough to accommodate their sometimes being lovers and their sometimes being just business associates.  It was usually week-on, week-off.  This week they were business associates.
     Although his last name really was Ford, Linc’s actual first name had been Gerald, and even though he knew perfectly well that nobody now remembered the brief and awkward tenure of the American president Gerald Ford, he still disliked the name sufficiently to have changed it to Linc—short for “Lincoln.  Lincoln Ford.  He liked it alright now, with the juxtaposition of the upscale “Lincoln” and the populist “Ford.”  And anyhow it was a good name for a fashion photographer.  He couldn’t imagine Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar or even Toronto Life’s Fashion commissioning a suite of photographs from anyone named Gerald Ford.
     “Linc, I need that coffee or I’m going to expire!”
    “Keep your shirt off,” laughed Linc, “I’m just bringing it now.” 
     Linc put the tiny cups on a small pink Limoges tray they kept specifically for that purpose.  Two fiercely strong expressos and four delicate McIntosh shortbreads—two apiece.  He then sat on the edge of the bed and watched Coal as she took a sip of the coffee and nibbled, dainty as a rabbit, at a biscuit.
     She glanced at him.  “You’re not actually gazing upon my maidenly nakedness, are you Linc—not after all this time?”
     “Time has nothing to do with it,” he grinned.  “And yes, I was.”   

CHAPTER SIX

     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.  

CHAPTER FIVE:

 

     At the very same moment that Bliss Carmen had been reassuring Michael there was no reason to be afraid of the Mayor (or a whole raft of other things she had named), the Mayor himself—his Worship, Cass Tamburlaine—was lying on his back, stretched out on the dove-grey, wall-to-wall, deep-pile carpeting that made his office feel like a soft, mushy parking lot. 

     A stack of Racing Forms supported his head.  He had felt feverish and so had hastily, almost frantically, pulled off his tie and had stripped off his shirt.  Which gave him the appearance, from the waist up, of a fallen Sumo wrestler.  Perspiration glistened on his swollen body like basting on a turkey.

     It was one o’clock in the morning.  The city out the window looked almost as bright now as it would have been at noon.  There’s no goddamned night anymore, thought Cass.  Only round-the-clock glare. 

     He stared at the ceiling and discerned, in the indeterminate patterning of the figured plaster work, the bone-white image of Joy’s face.

     Joy Pommery had been Cass’s mistress for six months now.  He liked her.  He called her Joy Pomegranate.  She had a thin, ferrety face, wide boyish shoulders, remarkably persistent breasts and the strong, willowy legs of a tennis player or a tightrope walker.  He found her a perfectly adequate partner, if not perpetually thrilling.

     His Worship was feeling more feverish by the moment.  Clambering to his feet—no small undertaking—he reeled to his desk and phoned Joy.

     “It’s Cass.  Can you come to my office?”

     “What now?  Cass, it’s almost 2 am,” said Joy.

     “I know I know.  Listen I don’t ask much of you.”

     “Alright.  I’ll be there in half an hour.”

     Cass hung up the phone.  Then he struggled out of his trousers, peeled off his socks and shucked down his shorts.  Unfortunately, he didn’t feel any cooler.

     But he did feel satisfyingly virile.  Being naked in his office always aroused him.  He bobbed over to the window and looked out.  There were the standard noises in the dark, scarcely discernable through the sandwiched layers of industrial glass: distant streetcars, the vibration of subways, the howl of a passing ambulance, dissolute car horns.  He bobbed back to his desk and, feeling disinclined—and physiologically unprepared—to sit in his cavernous leather chair, lay down on his back again on the sea of carpet.  He looked like a fleshy submarine with its periscope up.

    “I wish she’d hurry,” he said out loud.

      

CHAPTER FOUR:

 

     “A young woman got on the subway today,” Tom tells his wife Violet and a couple named Pretty and Oscar with whom they’re having dinner. “She was a rather hefty girl and she has this crooked little dog with her on a leash, and she’s carrying this big white box, which obviously has a cake in it”.

     “How did you know it was a cake?” Pretty asks.

     “It was a cake,” Tom says.  “There’s a certain kind of bakery box, you know? White cardboard.”

     “With bakery string,” adds Violet.

     “Anyway, it’s rush hour and the subway car is packed solid and this big burly girl is beginning to get pushed and jostled and she seems to be growing very protective of this cake.  She’s holding it as delicately as she can, as if it’s a time bomb…”

     “Or a baby”, says Violet.

     “But people keep bumping into it anyhow.  At one point you can hear this dry ‘thunk!’ sound which was probably a chunk of the icing breaking off and falling to the bottom of the box…”

     “One of those big, hard turquoise roses”, Violet suggests.

     “Yeh, that’s what it sounded like,” Tom says.

     “The kind you can break a tooth on,” adds Oscar.

      “And then, a minute or two later,” Tom continues, “there’s another cracking sound and now the box rattles when the girl transfers it to her other hand, and just as she thinks he’s finally got it pretty well defended, a couple of teenage kids get on, and they shove each other around and yell and of course they smash right into the big girl’s box, first denting it and then knocking it completely out of her grasp and onto the floor of the subway car.  And what do you think happens after that?” Tom asks his wife and their friends.

     “She screams.  Curses?” Violet suggests.

     “Weeps?” asks Pretty.

     “Nope, just the opposite!” says Tom, with something like triumph in his voice.  “She stoops down and slowly picks up the box, tightens her grip on the weird little dog’s leash, looks around at all the other subway riders—who are staring at her now as if she’s from Mars—raises the box over her head, and hurls it with all her might the full length of the subway car!!  Just as the box bounces to a stop at the other end, spilling out the remains of her cake onto the feet of the rush hour passengers and showering bits of icing all over everybody, the train pulls into a station.  The girl backs towards the opening door.  “Take it then!” she screams.  TAKE it!!”  And then backs out onto the platform, pulling the dog after her as the doors close.”

     “And that’s it?” Asks Oscar, intensely engaged up until now with his Crème Caramel.

     “Yes, that’s it”, says Tom.

     “Good story”, says Oscar, spooning up the last of the caramelized sugar in his dish.

     “I wish I’d been there,” says Violet wistfully.  “Me too,” says Pretty. 

     “Well, I was there”, says Tom, “and it was no friggin picnic.”