It must be gratifying to see a girl you recently planned to torture to death light up with joy at the sight of you. He grinned so big I could see the insides of his ears. “I can do that,” he said, nodding. “I don’t see a problem in the world with that. Everybody here be nice people, we just motor out of here and,” in mid-sentence his face changed instantly to total rage and he was bellowing “nobody be gettin’ crazy!”
It got even quieter in the Parlor. I could see one uniform cop (female), a couple of Marines, and three or four football players, all of whom looked dangerously close to having had enough of this shit. I remembered the moment in the alley, when I had been afraid that Travis was going to kill Lady Sally. I was tired of nice people being in danger because of me.
“Oh, I don’t t’ink anyvun here iss crazy,” Ralph Von Wau Wau said slowly and distinctly.
It should have worked. When you are addressed by an attack dog with bared teeth and flattened ears, you generally lose your train of thought. But Travis must have been flying—he took it in stride, and there was never a second when he could have been jumped. All he did was grin again. “Tell you one thing, Rin Tin Tin: you crazy enough to come at me, you one dead son of a bitch.” They stared hard at each other, baring their teeth.
Ralph dropped his eyes—
“Hostage,” Travis said. “We need a hostage and then noobody’ll bother us.”
Inspiration came from Heaven. “Get that bald guy with the ears, Trav honey; they all like him.”
He nodded approval and aimed his gun at Charles. “Head for the door, Curly,” he said. “Don’t fret: once we get a few blocks with nobody following, we turn you loose. Come on, Baby Love, we gone.”
I moved to join him.
“Konban mangetsu ga mirareru-hazu-da,” Lady Sally called out.
“Say what?” Travis said.
I pointed at her, then rotated my finger against my forehead. “High,” I explained.
“Bikkuri-suru-na,” she said softly. “Keihô ga hasse-rareta.”
“Hey, burn that pig-Latin shit,” Travis ordered suspiciously.
She shut up. “High,” I said again, hoping she got the pun. I hate puns. “The hell with her, lover, let’s go!”
He nodded again and grabbed my wrist firmly. We followed Charles through swinging doors into a reception area. Travis paused in the doorway, thrust me through ahead of him. “Almost forgot,” he muttered. “I owe that bitch for bustin’ my damn nose.” He turned and took a dead bead on Lady Sally’s impassive face, steadying his wrist with his left hand.
I was caught leaning the wrong way. I wound up to punch him above the elbow, knowing I was going to be too late—
—and a dozen men and women stepped calmly and instantly into the line of fire.
Others joined them within seconds. They all stared fearlessly at Big Travis. He held his stance for several long seconds…then pointed the muzzle at the ceiling. “Fuck it,” he said, and backed through the doors. As they swung shut he reclaimed my right wrist with his left hand and waved to Charles to open the outer door.
Then it closed behind us, and suddenly we were back in Brooklyn. It was a warm night. I smelled the streets for the first time in days, heard city-sound whispering in the distance, and over it the pounding of my pulse. I mustn’t get caught leaning again. If I was lucky, I’d get a single, split-second opportunity…
Six feet from the door, Charles stopped and began undressing.
Travis made no comment until his sportscoat and tie were on the sidewalk and he was halfway through unbuttoning his shirt. “What is wrong with you, fool?” he said then. “You want to die?”
Charles took the undershirt off with his shirt, dropped them both. “Not in these trousers,” he said, and unzipped them.
Travis giggled, moved so that he could keep an eye on the door, and watched as Charles dropped pants and shorts, and managed to step out of them and his shoes and socks without using his hands. A milkman couldn’t have done it faster.
“What you figure to do?” Travis asked, smiling broadly now. “Sneak up on me while I’m tryin’ to find your pecker?”
For reply, Charles changed.
And for the second damn time, it didn’t work.
Oh, it affected Travis, all right. A man can be so stoned that he doesn’t find a talking dog disturbing—but a werewolf transformation at arm’s length is a different proposition. He gasped loudly, gaped satisfactorily, and turned to stone while Charles’s body rippled and contorted. He would have been a perfect sitting duck target, except for one thing: among the muscles which turned to stone were the ones in his left hand. The one which held my right wrist.
If I tried to free my hand, or reach across his body and get to his gun with my left hand, I would break the spell. If I hit him, he’d probably pull the trigger. I didn’t know if werebeagles were vulnerable only to silver bullets like werewolves were supposed to be—and once the change was complete, and Travis realized he was facing not a wolf but a beagle, he would start shooting. I decided my move, pitiful as it was, was to go for the gun: it would give Charles a chance to attack while Travis was shooting me. I tensed—
Then I remembered Lady Sally’s last words—don’t worry; the alarm has been given—and made the instant, intuitive decision to believe that she knew what she was talking about. I relaxed, waited to see what would happen.
And close to two hundred pounds of fighting female landed on Big Travis’s shoulders with both feet.
Of course—Mary, who eavesdropped on everything in Lady Sally’s House, had said, “I’m on my way,” and then never showed up. Instead she had positioned herself at a window overlooking the front door. Any move I’d made would have screwed her up.
The gun went flying and he let go of my wrist as he went down. The shattered collarbone made him scream, but it cut off short as his face smacked the pavement. When the dust settled, Mary was seated on his shoulder blades, facing forward. Blood oozed from his nose and mouth and one eye; as I watched, it stopped. Mary put two fingers to the side of his neck, being careful to avoid the blood. “Doornail,” she said with satisfaction. She got up nimbly and checked her jeans for stains. “Nice set-up, Mo. You played it just right.”
It took me a few seconds to get my voice working. “My pleasure. I always thought Mary rose up into Heaven.”
“An ungrounded Assumption,” she said.
Charles, change complete, waddled forward on his four stubby legs, lifted one, and expressed an opinion—whether of Travis or Mary’s pun I couldn’t say. The former, probably, judging by his aim.
The front door banged open and Lady Sally came out the door fast and low with a shotgun in her hands, closely followed by Phillip, Doctor Kate, Robin, and others. The cop and Marines were among them, also displaying firearms now; there must be a gun-check in the reception area. “Film at eleven,” Mary called to them, and they slowed and lowered their weapons.
Lady Sally approached me slowly, putting the safety back on her scattergun. She looked me in the eye. “Are you all right?”
I looked down at the fresh warm corpse of what had, until some forty-eight hours ago, been my favorite pet tiger. My lover. My owner. I had been smarter…and he more cunning. I was horrified to discover how much I would miss him.
“Yes,” I said, “but oh, I have been so stupid,” and on “oh” the tears spilled over and ran down my face. So many tears tonight…
She embraced me, and I felt Mary’s big strong hand on my shoulder. “Step into my office,” Lady Sally said, and led me past the crowd at the door and back into her House with her arm around me.
Back in her office she offered me a drink. I didn’t turn it down to win points; I already felt smashed. “How did you know I spoke Japanese?” I asked.
“You said you were an Army brat. And your obi is tied correctly. I took a chance.”
“Oh. Yeah. I spent the last half of junior high in Tokyo.”
“Is that where the bad thing happened?”
> I looked up at her. “You know about that?”
She shook her head. “Only that it happened. Not what it is. I’m not a mind-reader, child.”
I snorted. “So you say.”
She said nothing.
“Yeah, it was in Tokyo. My real mother died when I was born. When I was nine, Daddy married again. Captain Phyllis Langerhut. She was clever, very smart. I adored her from nine to twelve. I called her Mom. And I had a terrific crush on her best friend, Sergeant Alice. They were both terrific female role models. Strong, tough, independent. Dashing, you know? On my twelfth birthday, while Daddy was off in the States, they made their move. You know what they say about women in the Army? Well, once in a while it’s true. And once in a very long while, they’re aggressive pedophiles, too. Alice had talked Mom…Phyllis into marrying Daddy so they could have access to me. Like I say, they were clever. They knew about power. I hated it and enjoyed it. So I belonged to them from twelve to about thirteen and a half. Then I told Daddy. And pretty soon Sergeant Alice was dead and Daddy was dead and Phyllis was dishonorably discharged and I was in an institution. After a month I cut a new door in it, and I met the Professor on the Greyhound platform at Port Authority. I started out roping for him, and by the time I quit him I was telling the tale and even running the store sometimes. He was the first man I ever…” I broke off. “You don’t care about all this soap opera.”
Lady Sally was looking at me strangely. “On the contrary,” she said. “I am interested in everything about my employees.”
I spent the next couple of years learning Lady Sally’s House from top to bottom. Or rather the other way around. I spent the first year working in the kitchen, the laundry, maintenance, housekeeping, and Lady Sally’s office, all of which are located in the basement. Then I moved upstairs and worked reception at each of the four entrances, and toward the end of the year I put in some time spelling Mary in the Snoop Room on the top floor. During all this time I was completing high school; the dean of the night school program gave me credit for a completely mythical freshman and sophomore year, on the basis of my test scores and because I had been doing very well in the genius program when I’d left junior high school; the fact that he was a regular client at Lady Sally’s House was irrelevant. Meanwhile I was taking daily classes in The Art between shifts, from Phillip and Mary and others, and for the last six months I was allowed to sit in on Lady Sally’s weekend master classes.
And on my eighteenth birthday, six years to the day since I had decided once and for all that I was utterly worthless, I became an Artist.
Just lucky, I guess.
BOOK TWO
REVOLVER
CHAPTER 4
REPEAT BUSINESS
Have you ever been to a party that was so much fun, you didn’t particularly care if you found a lover there or not? And still had the warm feeling that you probably would, a skilled and gentle guy, without fuss or anxiety before the night was through? And that meanwhile there were ideas to be stalked, songs to be sung, belly-laughs to be shared? Have you been so blessed?
That’s how much fun it is in Lady Sally’s Parlor most nights of the week.
Skillful interior decoration permits half a dozen different parties to be going on simultaneously, in separate “interactional nodes” shaped largely by furniture arrangement. But the parlor is, in the end, one large open room, so if merriment insists on being contagious, an epidemic can flare up at any time. The two major focuses of infection generally seem to be the piano in the northeast corner, and the fireplace across the room in the west wall. (Hardly anyone stays at the bar longer than it takes to get served: turning your back to a room like that just doesn’t seem to make sense.)
One rainy night in late summer I was sitting with a group of about twenty, watching Marie dance in the cleared space near the piano, when I became aware that a word-game was spreading rapidly from the fireplace area and threatening the rest of the Parlor.
It takes a lot to divert my attention from Marie when she’s dancing. She doesn’t do it often. She is a client in her late thirties, and if she were eight inches shorter she could dance anywhere on Earth that she wanted. As things are, she’s unemployable except as a choreographer. (The growth spurt came after she had studied dance from six to sixteen.) I would leave a very warm bed at the rumor that Marie was thinking of dancing a few steps, and wouldn’t be surprised if my bedmate beat me downstairs. She was moving lazily, hypnotically, to a solo sax that came from concealed speakers, and I was paying full attention.
But I was also a sucker for word-games, even ones that incorporate punning. This one seemed to consist of finding variants on, “If a lawyer gets disbarred, then—”
“—then a female-to-male transsexual is disbra’d,” I heard Sleepy Jim say. Jim was a paperback editor; he was always good with words. It was partly his strong voice that drew my attention. Funny guys are my favorite clients. “And dismayed,” he added.
“—and dismissed and dispersed,” his wife Joanie riposted quickly. “And a male-to-female transsexual fish gets deboned.” She got a smattering of applause.
“—and they both get dismounted and delayed for a while!” he volleyed, drawing cheers and laughter. “A traveling salesman is decommissioned—”
“And a hairstylist is distressed and departed,” Marie said without appearing to leave her dance trance.
That made it okay for me to share my attention too. “A preacher could get deflocked,” I offered, but it turned out that someone had used that one already. “Uh—let’s see…I suppose a person that had to give up eating chili would be deflated? And disgusted? And distinct?” That brought a chorus of protests (“Distinctly disgusting!”), but was deemed acceptable.
Father Newman jumped in. He never goes upstairs or into the Bower, of course, but he’s been a regular in the Parlor for over a decade. When asked why, he always says, “I came to Lady Sally’s House out of curiosity, looking for sin. I haven’t found any yet, but I’m a patient man.” He’s officiated at a couple of weddings in that parlor. “Not many people know,” he boomed in that hearty pulpit voice “that, whenever a national embassy is torn down—”
“—it becomes disconsolate!” four or five people finished, Lady Sally herself among them. “All right, darlings,” she went on in her delightful bogus Oxonian accent, “let’s make this interesting. Form a circle and pass it round, elimination style, and the last one standing gets an hour upstairs with me.”
There was a general intake of breath. Male and female. Then a vague circle began forming, artists and clients alike. Twice a month Lady Sally gives well-attended master classes in The Art, for both men and women, and we compete to be chosen for demonstrators—despite the fact that only three of us are within twenty years of her apparent age (which may or may not be within twenty years of her calendar age). Happy is the rare client who is invited upstairs by the mistress of the House; few ever give up hope.
“Father, if you win, we’ll pray together,” she added demurely. “Lord Highpockets, perhaps you would care to serve?”
Lady Sally always called anyone whose name she couldn’t come up with Lord This or Lady That: the client addressed was a stringbean guitar player named Jake, another of my favorite clients. “Well,” he drawled, “I spent most of my school years wishing I could be detested and degraded—”
And we were off and running.
I knew I had no chance—no one did, with Jake and Sleepy Jim in the room—but I tried anyway. Oh, I could have had half an hour of Lady Sally’s time, in or out of bed, just by going to her and telling her I needed it. But when you win her in a contest, she makes you feel…well, rewarded, somehow. But as I expected, on my third turn I came up empty.
When it’s your turn in one of these Parlor games, you have an unspecified time in which to take your shot. Then, after an interval inversely proportional to your skill, someone will say, “Five!” If enough others join in on “Four,” the countdown proceeds to zero. If not, there’s another
pause until someone says, “Four,” and waits for corroboration on “Three.” The system allows the crowd to give weaker players a break, and I usually got all the time I needed—but that night I knew the extra time wouldn’t help; I started to resign.
And noticed a guy in my field of vision furtively gesturing. He kept discreetly making the classic sign of the female shape with his hands, and then grimacing ferociously. Finally I got it. “A model gets disfigured,” I blurted, and the deal passed on.
He sat beside me. I recognized him vaguely; he’d never been a client of mine, but I’d seen him around. Slender, forties, well-dressed and nondescript. One of those shy-looking guys. I couldn’t recall his House name. “Thanks,” I said in a prison-yard whisper.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have helped,” he murmured back. “Now you’ll want to stay—and I’d really like to go upstairs with you. Like, right away.”
I looked around and mentally shrugged. Honor was satisfied, and he looked acceptable. “I’m flattered. I guess I’d always rather be a prize than win one. What’s your name, stranger?”
“Colt.”
No House name sounds weird to you after a while. We once had a Cherokee client named He Wears Funny Hats, called Hats for short. (Never wore a hat, oddly enough.)
After considerable thought and consultation with my brother and sister artists, I had selected “Sherry” as my own House name (firmly resisting the suggestion that I spell it with a terminal i; I was vaguely afraid that some drunken night I would dot the i with a little heart). I had always liked my milk name—Maureen—but I had to admit it was not a great name for a courtesan. Besides, everyone at Lady Sally’s House gets a House name, artists and clients alike: only Sally knows everyone’s real moniker, an eccentricity that many clients appreciate. I picked “Sherry” because Juicy Lucy said the word meant “a little tart, a little sweet, intended to be delicately sipped.” (And managed to make me blush for the first time in ages.)
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