Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“Tsk, tsk!” Danny was looking Puckish again. “You clearly need Queer Eye help. You do know what that is?”

“I do have a television set in there.”

“A feeble beginning, but well-intended. I must see this Disaster Zone. I must . . . choreograph a more positive future from your rather bleak past.”

“It didn’t feel bleak when I was in it.”

“It never does. Let me help you. I’m afraid my dear Temple isn’t happy anymore, and I desperately want someone to be happy just now.” Danny looked down, mumbled. “I was . . . am . . . one of those unsung subjects of newspaper stories these days. The perfect altar boy. So perfect that my parish priest molested me.”

“My God, Danny, I am so sorry.”

“We are all sorry.” Danny invoked his dancer’s posture again, as much a ritual as any religious rite.

Matt knew the bitter truth that what he had spent half his life believing in had been twisted to serve carnal self-interest. It made him doubt his vocation, his gender, his past.

“Let me help you,” Danny was saying. “It restores my faith a little, to see a nice naive virginal heterosexual ex-priest like you flailing around trying to be both honest and sexual. You don’t know what a rare bird you are.”

Matt didn’t know what to say.

“I just hope that Temple appreciates that, and I mean to see that she does. For both your sakes.”

The Russians Are

Coming

The only thing wrong with working for a mega hotel was the meetings. Lots and lots of meetings.

Temple supposed some PR persons enjoyed numbing their rears until they could hear the cellulite piling on underneath them, but she liked to be on her toes in more ways than one. There were always so many chiefs at meetings that the foot soldiers spent all their time deferring to rank instead of getting anything done.

Which was why she was a freelancer.

At least the operations meeting room at the New Millennium was spectacular: a huge, black-marble-topped conference table, brushed stainless-steel chairs upholstered in black leather. A shrimp-colored marble floor. Every chair had a wireless silver flat-screen computer in front of it, the screen as big as a place mat and the sleek keyboard the size of a videotape.

No ashtrays. No cups of coffee or glasses of water or booze. No chitchat.

Around the perimeter were honest-to-God, gray-flannel vertical blinds that could be operated from the computer keyboards, Randy had said, to cast shadows in various shades of gray.

Pete Wayans, the hotel’s operations manager, was a beefy middle-aged guy wearing wire-framed half-glasses that looked like a pair of tsetse flies posed on a hippo snout.

He stood in front of the giant plasma TV, narrating the exhibition layout and contents while the same scenario played on their individual computers.

Temple tapped in notes and observations (on the eerily silent toy keyboard), like her fellow attendees. And they were all fellows. This was when she began to seriously lament her blond dye job at the Teen Idol reality TV show. She couldn’t yet testify that blondes had more fun (although it was beginning to look like it).

Dang! She’d typed in “Matt blond” instead of matte black to describe her idea for an invitation card.

Temple backspaced to erase the error, aka Freudian slip, noticing that the men in her vicinity all noticed her retreat. Blondes attracted much closer examination, she’d discovered, which Temple didn’t welcome. At half an inch per month, it would take almost a year for her natural coppery red color to reach its usual below-the-ear-length. She didn’t know if she could take the stress that long.

Wayans droned on, but the computer show was so spectacular and self-explanatory that it didn’t matter what he said or didn’t say.

Essentially the exhibition would funnel guests up a circular ramp of paintings hanging between bullet-proof Lexan-plastic display cases sparkling with court dress, jewels, furniture, and precious artifacts of every conceivable type, ending in a translucent onion dome apex, where Czar Alexander’s scepter could be displayed upright on a block of rock crystal, like the Sword in the Stone from Arthurian legends.

A close-up of the scepter revealed a silver and gold rod circled by a lacework of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and pearls twining its two-foot length. The crowning orb held a yellow diamond of three hundred and sixty-five carats. It was called the Calendar Diamond, for the days of the year.

As Wayans read the laundry list of the pieces: jewels and their weights and history and values, Temple found her mind drawn back to the Sword in the Stone analogy.

Set an object up as a modern-day Sword in the Stone and what do you get? Something a lot of people might compete to unseat. Of course, Temple thought like a crook—she was the significant other of a world-class magician and had undone a few crooks of her own.

Pete Wayans thought like a hotel mogul with the artiest state-of-the-art-security system and the hottest high-class act in town.