The Ayatollah's Money
Page 69
Chapter 69 – Final Preparations
Five days after creating their respective disguises of College of Charleston student and pizza delivery man, Priss and Lewy stood in front of Hablibi and their boss in the $1,100 a night suite. The Colonel and the diplomat couldn’t believe their eyes. The two assassins had grown five inch long beards in the five days simply by not shaving twice a day with their pocketknives, as they had done since arriving in this Islamic-god forsaken country. America has great hookers and fine tequila, but when it comes to the Big Akbar, it sucks. With the addition of ten pounds of facial hair, their disguises were complete. Both were confident they could sit down to dinner with Jinny, the guy who’d stripped them naked in the public park, and he’d never recognize them.
The Colonel said to Priss, “I dig the Wanna Make It, Sugar? hat, and the clothes look right, and the beard completely hides your face, but I’m not sure you look exactly like a College of Charleston student. They’re all so white and fluffy and clean and, and, American.” With the last word he spit on the two inch thick synthetic hotel room carpeting made in Omaha. “You don’t fit that description.”
Priss was ready for this critique, and said, “Boss, I’m the diversity element. All these schools are striving for cultural diversity no matter how discriminatory the policy is they create to achieve that goal. If they want a hirsute individual of slightly advanced years, I’m it. I'm the one that contributes life experiences to the campus environment. And, I’m a grad student, a guy who’s been in the real world for a while, slugging it out with the competition, now going back to get a degree that will advance me to the management level.”
The Colonel wasn’t sure about this stuff, and looked at the diplomat for guidance. Hablibi said, “That’s sounds fine, Priss, except that your life experiences consist of guerilla training camps in the Iranian desert and the mountaintops of Pakistan, learning to kill just by looking at someone. I’m not sure that’s exactly what the college here is looking for in terms of cultural diversity.” He thought for a minute and added, “And I’m not sure how many of the clean, white, and fluffy coeds are going to want to snuggle up against that beard of yours with the intent of joining the rest of the female population of this shithole in losing that which we, Allah be Praised, value most highly, the sacred state of holy virginity.”
The Colonel jumped in to defend his soldier, saying, “He’s not here to snuggle up to American tramps. He’s here to inflict justice on them, and especially on the one big tramp, the Laleh bitch.”
He turned his gaze to Lewy and said, “You look good, either as a pizza guy or a plumber. That’s smart, doubling up on your disguise potentialities.” He looked at Hablibi for confirmation, and got a fist pump, so he said, “Go forth, both of you. Find out what’s going on in that theater place, and when their event will happen.”
The soldiers about-faced and left the suite, at which point The Colonel asked the diplomat, “What time the girls coming?”
Priss and Lewy looked at each other in the elevator down to the lobby, and could tell they were of one mind: let’s do it, now. Let’s get inside the theater and reconnoiter the battlefield. As the doors opened, they bumped fists and headed up King Street to Angelonis, where they ordered five large meat-lovers pizzas. While they waited for their props, Lewy asked, “You got your taser?” Priss took the iPhone out of his College of Charleston backpack and held it up. “You figured out how to make the taser thing work?”
Priss said, “Not yet, but we don’t need it today. I’ll have it figured out by the time we do the final assault.” Then he asked, “You got the Desert fucking Eagle?”
Lewy reached into his backpack and pulled the huge gun out just as the counter clerk brought the stack of boxes to their table. He looked at the gun, thought for a few seconds, and said, “These are on the house. Enjoy,” and walked back behind the counter.
Lewy said, “I hope things are that easy during the assault.”
With that, they walked around the corner to John Street, checked that their hats were positioned slightly crooked on their heads and their beards were fluffed out, and looked at the doors of The Hall. Both of them were tempted to turn around, head down the alley and pig out on the pizzas, but they steeled their resolve and entered the rear of the theater. The David Holmes music was blasting, Jinny was with Laleh and Gwen in the back offices, Shim was in the balcony rewriting the scene in which George and Wegs go to bed for the first time, Sody was with the actors and the stunt guys on stage going over a rescue sequence, Monique was trying to persuade Roger to start drinking wine from the Languedoc (he was a snob and only drank Bordeaux), and Gale sat in the middle of the theater, relentlessly thinking she should have had the starring role opposite Clooney, not that nothing of a little girl, Renee Zellweger.
The assassins walked down the center aisle, taking this all in, winging it and hoping for the best. When they reached the seats near Gale, Priss, in his best fake southern accent, said, “How y’alls doing today? We come with the pizzas y’all ordered.”
Gale looked at them, processed and said, “Y’all ain’t from 'round here, are y’all?” This made the boys nervous, Lewy ready to pull the 50 caliber Desert fucking Eagle and start blasting, but they called on their Assassination Corps training, and maintained control. The smell of the four meat-lovers pizzas distracted Gale from the delivery guys, and she reached into her purse for her wallet. She pulled a hundred dollar bill and handed it to Priss, who, being the intellectual assassin, felt inspired.
He said, “Ma’am, we are here at the college in the theater department, him learning acting and me learning directing, on an exchange program from Greece, and we’ve never been in a theater like this during a rehearsal, and we’re done delivering pizzas for the day, and, can we stay here quiet and watch?”
Gale didn’t think either of them would get very far in Hollywood with those Adirondack style loggers beards, that not being the current style among the La La beautiful people, but she said, “Sure, have a seat.” She didn’t want to hang around them, particularly, her being a beautiful person of the highest order, and carried the stack of boxes up to the stage, where she set three of them on a table and took the last one back to the office. Priss and Lewy breathed a sigh of relief, not having to wield the phone taser or the gun in anger, and settled into the darkness to watch. Which they did, for the next three hours.
At the end of the three hours they snuck out of the theater in the darkness and headed straight for Angelonis, where they ordered a pitcher of beer. Beer wasn’t in the same class as tequila, they had discovered that right away, but they needed something to decompress with while they talked, and besides, they had gotten into the habit of saving the tequila as an adjunct to their romps with the hookers. They both knocked back a glass, poured another one, and looked across the table at each other. They couldn’t believe what they had seen and heard in The Hall. Priss said, “My mind is blown. How can that be? How can that have happened to us?”
Lewy said, “I don’t know, but I do know that Allah himself is watching over us and making this incredible thing happen in the way it is. It is his wish that we redeem the honor of his way and our culture from the attack upon it unleashed by the Laleh bitch. It is he who has stuck this arrow in our quiver and provided us with the means to wreck destruction on the infidels. There is no other explanation.”
Priss nodded and drank more beer. To think that here, in Charleston, art was imitating life. The reality was that a traitor had stolen money from The Ayatollah, and fled to the land of iniquity. The righteous had tracked her to her den and were poised to exact vengeance of the highest order. And now, they discover the traitor engaged in a filmy play with that very story as the plot. They had watched and listened to Sody work with the actors and walk through scene after scene in which assassins attacked the thief in her lair. They had watched the two Italians and the Greek, in full assassin costume, enter the The Hall and en
gage the traitor and her protector in battle. They had seen how the filmy play was done partly on stage, partly out in the theater, and partly on film projected on the screen. The entire thing was wild, and they'd never anything like it. But the direction by Sody was so well done that they understood and followed the story perfectly.
They finished the pitcher and ordered another one in celebration. They high tened across the table, knowing now how they would enter into the final conflict.