“So what happened?”
“When I got to San Francisco, I went there immediately. I mean, of course, after I checked into the Mark Hopkins and changed clothes, and after I went by the Harvard Club. But as soon as humanly possible.”
“And she wasn’t there? So what? They change jobs all the time.”
“I’m well aware of that,” Matthew said. It came to his attention then that the two jeroboams of Piper Heidsieck ’48 from which he and Boris had been sipping were empty. He summoned the manager.
“I would like some whiskey,” he said. “I am in no mood at all to drink nothing but champagne.”
“Either am I,” Boris said. “Bring us each a bottle or two of whiskey.”
“As I was saying,” Matthew went on, “I thought it was simply a case of her having accepted another position. So I got in touch with her agent, and he told me that he had no idea where she was, that shortly after I had seen her, she had simply vanished from the face of the earth.”
“You suspect foul play?”
“I checked that out, too. She has not been hospitalized, arrested, or gone to that great runway in the sky.”
Boris thought of one more possibility, but kept it to himself in deference to his friend’s sensitivities.
“Neither,” Matthew said, making Boris wonder if Matthew was reading his mind, “has she taken out a marriage licence. I checked that, too.”
“Well, is there any way I can help?”
“I did think you might have some idea how I should proceed, Boris. You’re more experienced in these matters than I am.”
“My experience, little buddy, is in running away from women, not after them.”
“You have no suggestion to offer?”
“Indeed I do,” Boris said as the waiter appeared with two half-gallons of Old Highland Dew Straight Scotch Whiskey. “Drink hearty.”
“What else is there to do?” Matthew said, reaching for his half-gallon. “Betsy Boobs is lost to me forever.”
At two the next afternoon, Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov was wakened from a sound sleep by a strangely annoying sound, part buzzing and part ringing.
“What in the hell is that awful noise?” he inquired rather loudly. There was no answer. After a moment, he recalled that he was quite alone in Paris, the miserable little camel jockey having run off to San Francisco with his cercle intime the moment his back was turned.
He groaned mightily and then sat up in bed. The dawn, as they say, came.
“It’s the goddamned telephone,” he announced. “That’s what it is.” He wondered, aloud, why no one had the common decency to answer it, and only moments afterward recalled, again, that he was deserted and quite alone and that, among other horrors, he was faced with the very real prospect of having to answer his own telephone. God alone, he mused, knows what fool is on the other end of the line, daring to disturb the rest of the world’s greatest opera singer.
He picked up the telephone.
“Is this Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, also known as El Noil Snoil the Magnificent?”
“Who wants to know?”
“This is the San Francisco, California, overseas operator, sir. I have a call for the guy with all those funny names from some nut who says he’s calling for the Sheikh of Abzug. I was tempted to hang up on him, but I figured, what the hell, Ma Bell can use the money.”
“Put him on,” Boris said.
“It’s collect, honey,” the operator said.
“Then it must be Abdullah,” Boris said.* “Hey, Abdullah, how they hanging?”
(* From this point on, the conversation was carried on in Abzugian. It has been translated into English for those readers unfamiliar with that language, and also because no known type face is available for the printing of Abzugian, which consists in the main of grunts, wheezes, snorts, and a belch-like sound of exclamation.)
“I am afraid that I have been a bad boy again, El Noil Snoil,” His Royal Highness said.
“What now, Abdullah?”
“At first things went well. I saw your sister, and then I played poker with Radar and his friends.”
“You didn’t lose your temper again, did you, Abdullah? I told you it was a no-no to use your scimitar on people just because you lose.”
“I was winning,” His Royal Highness replied. “That makes the source of the difficulty.”
“What difficulty?”
“I laid a full house—aces over three kings—on the table, and as you taught me, El Noil Snoil, I recited the sacred, time-honored words, ‘Read ’em and weep, you bastards’—and then the skinny little gentleman was suddenly stricken with a very bad cough.”
“What skinny little gentleman?”
“A person named Colonel Whiley.”
“Well, some guys are good losers and some aren’t. My experience has been that if you scratch a colonel, you get a lousy loser. So what?”
“Well, the other gentlemen, two doctors, were very upset about the whole thing, and they called for an ambulance and carried him away.”
“Sometimes there are no lengths to which colonels will not go to get out of paying up, Abdullah,” Boris philosophized. “But on the other hand, maybe he was sick. The question is, why tell me?”
“It is a sacred Abzugian custom, El Noil Snoil, that when someone falls ill at your table, you care for him.”
“That wasn’t your table, it was Radar’s,” Boris replied.
“But my aces over kings made him sick,” the sheikh countered. “It is therefore my responsibility. And I can’t find Radar.”
“Where are you1?”
“In a small set of rooms in someplace called the Mark Hopkins,” the sheikh replied.
“Well, don’t worry about it,” Boris replied. “I will personally handle everything.”
“You will?”
“Yes, I will. I’ll get in touch with Hassan and have him pay the little guy’s bill. What was that name again?”
“Whiley.”
“My advice to you is to come back to Paris,” Boris said.
“I could not do that until this matter is resolved.”
“Whatever you say, Abdullah,” Boris replied. “I’ll get back to you.”
“If I am not here, you may reach me at one of the local temples,” the Sheikh said.
“Local temples?”
“There is this place called Sadie Shapiro’s Strip Joint,” the sheikh said. “I have rented it, girls and all, for as long as I will be here.”
“I seem to have heard that name someplace before,” Boris said. “It sounds very nice, Abdullah, and if I hadn’t pushed myself to the very edge of exhaustion giving my artistic all to the Russian masses, I might even join you. But I need my rest. Have a good time.”
“Mud in your eye, my friend,” the sheikh said, courteously closing the conversation in English. The phone went dead.
Boris looked at the telephone a moment, and then dialed a number from memory.
“The Embassy of His Most Islamic Majesty, the Sheikh of Hussid,” a foreign-sounding voice answered.
“This is Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov,” Boris said. “I have just had a telephone call from San Francisco. I want you to get in touch with Prince Hassan, and tell him that Abdullah, his royal nibs, made somebody sick at a poker game, and that he’d better pay his bill. Got that?” He did not wait for a reply. He dropped the phone on its hook.
“God, the sacrifices I make every day for my fellow man!” he said.
He closed his eyes. In a moment, he was sound asleep again, his snores causing the crystal pendants on the chandeliers to rattle softly.
Chapter Six
Prince, who slept on an enormous red goatskin hassock (which had previously been in the harem of the Sheikh of Abzug, where Boris had seen it, admired it, and been made a present of it) placed near the foot of his master’s bed, suddenly sat up, perked up his ears, moved with grace from the hassock to the side of the bed, and lapped his master’s face with an en
ormous sandpapery tongue.
Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, feeling Prince’s loving, abrasive tongue on his face, woke with a groan and swung a massive fist at the dog, who nimbly avoided it, and then playfully pulled the covers off his master with his teeth.
“That’s all I need!” Boris said. He thought that over. “What I really need is a cold shower!” he added. “Early to bed and early to rise, as I always say!”
Moving with exquisite care, so as not to disturb his brain (which was apparently rolling around inside his cranium like a bowling ball), he rose from his bed, and, supporting himself by holding onto the wall, made his way to the bath.
The bathroom had been a little gift to the world’s greatest opera singer from His Royal Highness, Sheikh Abdullah ben Abzug. Where Boris had previously had to make do with a tub, a shower, a sink, and what the British call a w.c., like the rest of us, as a result of the sheikh’s little gift he now had a sunken tub fifteen feet by twenty feet, from the center of which rose a gold-plated statue of a naked lady astride a dolphin. A stream from the dolphin’s mouth served as the tub’s source of water, the temperature and flow of which could be controlled by raising and lowering controls cleverly concealed in (more accurately, perhaps, disguised as) the naked lady’s most obvious anatomical characteristics.
The walls and ceiling of the room were covered by etched mirrors; the etchings had been executed by a Czech émigré to the United States who had chosen as his theme the last days of the Pompeian baths. Separate rooms, hidden behind mirrored doors, provided access to water closets and other plumbing apparati. There were three such facilities—one for men, one for ladies, and one reserved for Boris. In this last, the apparati were somewhat oversized and were placed somewhat higher off the ground than is normal.
There were a sauna and a massage table too, of course. Taking a leaf from the Japanese notebook on comfort while bathing, a shower stall, with separate drainage facilities and eight shower heads, was off to one side.
Taps set into one wall of the bathroom dispensed beer, wine, soda water, and the bather’s choice of Scotch, bourbon, cognac, or gin. A gold-plated object patterned after a Venetian funeral urn circulated iced water to cool champagne bottles. (The glasses, of course, as a safety measure, were all plastic. A rack to dispense them, à la Dixie cups, was mounted to the side of the taps.)
Boris reached the bathroom and stepped inside. Steeling himself for the effort, he stripped out of his silken dressing gown. He put his arms out to his sides, took a deep breath, and rushed to the bathtub, intending to enter the pool in a swan-dive. In his condition, unfortunately, his sense of balance was a bit off, and he entered the water sidewards. An enormous wave washed over the sides of the tub, splashed against the mirrored walls, and receded. The automatic water-level and temperature sensing controls were fooled by the wave, and the dolphin’s mouth began to spit out a thick stream of water.
Boris came to the surface. The shock had brought him partly, but not entirely, to his senses. He floated quietly in the tub, grimacing at the noise of Prince’s barking. Prince didn’t like his master to leave him, but neither did he like the water. While he made up his mind what to do about it, he barked excitedly. The sound reverberated painfully off the mirrored walls and against Boris’ eardrums.
Finally, choosing the side of loyalty over personal comfort, Prince leapt with a great bound into the tub, and swam (rather ungracefully, it must be reported) toward his beloved master.
Boris felt the splash and raised his head.
“Get out of my bathtub, you stupid mutt!” he bellowed.
In both exhaling and moving around, the singer lost buoyancy. He sank beneath the lightly scented waters of his tub. In a moment, he bobbed up again. Prince was standing up in the shallow end of the tub, looking at him with boundless love, his huge tail splashing water with each swing. And then Boris saw something else.
“What the hell?” Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov said. He shook his head as if to clear a mirage from his vision, and looked again at the corner of the bathroom in which the eight-headed shower stall stood. The apparition, or whatever it was, was still there. Standing under the flowing water of the shower was a rather handsome young man, quite naked. The index finger of his right hand was extended, and with it he poked in rapt fascination at his lower abdomen, about four inches above the junction of his legs.
“Who the hell are you?” Boris demanded. “And what are you doing in my bathroom? And stop whatever obscene gesture it is you’re making! Prince is still a pup!”
“Good morning, Cher Maestro!” the young man said, in rather oddly accented French. “I trust you slept well?”
At that moment, one of the mirrored doors opening onto the bathroom opened. A rather chubby female face, the kind that generally accompanies the body of females described by those friends and relatives who wish to pair them off with unsuspected new acquaintances as “a barrel of laughs,” appeared at the edge of the door, said “Ooops!” and “Excuse me,” and finally (and somewhat reluctantly, Boris thought) withdrew.
“Who the hell was that?” Boris asked. “And how dare she peer into my bathroom?”
“That’s Imogene,” the naked young man said. He poked again at his abdomen.
“I hope she saw what you’re doing,” Boris said. “Perhaps it will scare her away.” He thought about that a moment, and changed his mind. “On second thought, it will probably drive her wild. So knock it off!”
He collected, as well as he was able, his thoughts. For the first time, he remembered that he had met Matthew Q. Framingham the previous evening.
“Framingham!” he bellowed, in the same voice that had less than twenty-four hours before caused the crystal pendants in the chandeliers of the Bolshoi Opera to rattle.
In the dining room of the apartment, Mr. Matthew Q. Framingham, who had chosen to retire for the evening under the Louis XVI dining table Boris had borrowed from the Palace of Versailles, was suddenly brought from a deep sleep by Boris’ voice. He sat up as if someone had applied a cattle prod to his rear. Since the distance from his waist to the top of his head was greater than the distance between the floor and the bottom of the table, this served to give him a nasty crack on the head. As quickly as he had sat up, he lay down again, quite unconscious.
When there was no answer to his first summons, or his second, or his third, Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov rose from his bath like a surfacing whale, wrapped a towel around his loins, and stalked through the apartment. As he passed through the dining room, he saw Matthew Q. Framingham’s size 12 D black wingtips sticking out from under the table. He reached down and grabbed both of them, pulling Mr. Framingham into sight.
“It’ll do you no good to try to hide under there, you overgrown stripper freak!” he said, somewhat petulantly. “What have you done to me? How come there’s a naked man in my bathroom and a fat lady named Imogene staring shamelessly at me while I bathe?”
Matthew Q. Framingham, who was unconscious, of course did not reply.
“My God!” Boris said. “He’s dead!”
Matthew Q. Framingham groaned.
“If not dead, then dying!” Boris corrected himself. He snatched the telephone from the serving table and dialed a number.
“The Embassy of His Most Islamic Majesty, the Sheikh of Hussid,” a voice with a British accent said.
“This is Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov,” the singer said. “Is that you, Omar?”
“Good afternoon, Maestro,” the charge d’affaires said. “How may I be of service?”
“Get your ass in high gear,” Boris replied. “Get over here with an ambulance and the best medical attention you can find.”
“I hear and obey, Maestro,” the Charge d’Affaires replied. “Where is here?”
“My apartment,” Boris said. “Hurry!” He slammed the phone down in its cradle. Then he bent over Matthew Q. Framingham and rather tenderly picked him up and carried him into his bedroom. He laid him gently on
the bed.
“Whatever happened is obviously your fault, not mine,” Boris said to the unconscious figure. “However, if you really do croak, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Is something wrong, Maestro?” the young man asked, coming into the room. He had a towel wrapped around his middle.
“I think he’s dying,” Boris said.
The young man went quickly to Matthew Q. I Framingham and put his ear to his chest.
“What the hell are you doing?” Boris asked.
“His heart seems all right,” the young man said
“Are you a doctor?”
“In the monastery of St. Igor, I was sometimes permitted to help the medical brothers in their work," the young man said.
Matthew groaned again. And there came, ever so faintly, the sound of sirens.
“Hi, there!” the lady named Imogene said. “Can I help?”
“Get out!” Boris shouted. “Can’t you recognize a death bed when you see one?”
The sound of both the approaching sirens and Matthew’s groans grew louder. And finally, as the sound of the sirens suddenly died (indicating that siren-bearing vehicles had reached their destination) and the sound of running feet on the steps could be heard, Matthew Q. Framingham opened one eye. He saw Boris standing over him and closed it.
“At the risk of being thought an unappreciative guest, old chap, I really do wish you would go away and come back later,” he said. “I am in no condition whatever to attempt to get out of bed, much less to continue our revelry.”
There was the sound of knocking at the apartment door, and Boris rushed to it.
Sheikh Omar ben Abdullah, charge d’affaires of the Royal Hussidic Embassy, stood, somewhat out of breath, at the door, accompanied by two rather distinguished-looking French gentlemen in their middle years. Behind them stood four ambulance attendants bearing a stretcher.
“Are you all right, Maestro?” the charge d’affaires asked with deep concern. “If anything happens to you while His Royal Highness is gone, he will never forgive me.”
“Forgive you? He’d cut your head off, that’s what he’d do! But it’s not me. It’s my dear and good friend Matthew Q. Framingham. He’s in there.” He pointed to the bedroom door. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Who are these guys?”
MASH 11 MASH Goes To San Francisco Page 8
