Night Magic (9 page)

“How many do you count?” Emily asked.

“Six,” said Michael.

“No, seven,” Dazz said. “There’s a girl in the upper left corner—you can just see her head bobbing up every now and then.”

Silence fell for about a minute. Then Dazz said, “Oh, Jesus,” and ran to the telephone, dialed, spoke. “Hey, Otto, your outdoor porn show is terrific. Sure, I can see it from here. Everyone can see it. All of Seventy-second Street can see it. Fucking all over the front of the karate parlor.” Doubled up with laughter, he listened for a short while, then hung up. “He’s showing his movies on a sheet hung in his front window. It’s projecting right through the sheet and across the street. Let’s go, kids, unless you want to…”

“We’re coming,” Emily said. Leaning against Michael as they gazed down at the frenzied, flailing bodies materialized like ghosts in rut on the building wall, she slipped two fingers inside his shirt, running them down behind the waistband of his pants. “Do you know what you want to do after the party?” she asked, her breath hot in his ear. “If you don’t, I have a plan.”

H
E WAS CALLED THE
Lis doré,
the “Gilded Lily,” an appellation resulting as much from his own personal lifestyle and peculiar magnetism as from his fondness for that particular flower. The word “fabulous,” in all its connotations—incredible, marvelous, exaggerated—best described the character and career of the man known as Samir Abdel-Noor. After nearly twenty years in New York, he and his elaborate establishment off Sutton Place, overlooking the East River, had become legendary in sophisticated circles, and stories about his background and personal history varied widely, both in degree of truth and in dramatic content.

It was an established fact that his family were Egyptians of extraordinary means. His sister, Syrie, for whom Sami felt a rare fondness amounting to obsession, died in the early seventies, and shortly after this tragedy, a scandal—a murder committed in one of his apartments—cast a further shadow over his life. He found himself under familial, if not legal, indictment; was provided with a considerable, not to say princely, sum of money; and told to quietly get lost. He arrived in New York with a generous complement of servants and installed them and himself in the Sutton Place house, where, already corpulent, he soon ate and drank himself into obesity, spent prodigally, entertained lavishly but joylessly, and maintained a steady turnover in the coteries of parasites that surrounded him.

As time passed, Sami suffered increasingly from digestive complications that prevented him from fully utilizing his marbled and gilded bathroom facilities for up to a week at a time. This complaint of constipation, added to a long list of other ailments, kept doctors of several specialties in almost constant attendance. Used to entertaining, Sami had not given up the notion that his house should provide the finest food and drink in the city, to say nothing of the most captivating diversions, but now he did not descend—or condescend—to share in them; more often than not he let joy reign unconfined below, while abovestairs he kept to his bed, in rich and lustrous striped pajamas, eating cream pastries and watching game shows on television, attended by Gilbert, as he called his disreputable-looking Arab body servant.

Beyond large quantities of food and television and such personal indulgences as an encyclopedic variety of exotic drugs, he derived greatest satisfaction from the idea of communicating with his dead sister, Syrie, whose loss had left him grief-stricken and whose absence, after more than twenty years, he still felt keenly. He never gave up hope of establishing some line of communication with her, and to this end he had consulted a long list of mediums, spiritualists, clairvoyants, and other seers in the city.

He was now on terms of some intimacy with a certain Beulah Wales, an obstreperous woman of Southern extraction, whose occult powers allegedly enabled her to put her rich client in touch with his departed sister by summoning up the spirit of one Alfred Jenks (born: Denver, Colorado, 1882; deceased: Denver, Colorado, 1909; cause of death: rheumatic fever) and thus bridging the gap to the astral plane, where both the said Jenks and Syrie Abdel-Noor currently resided. In addition to this absorbing pursuit, Samir had been giving thought to the condition of his own immortal soul and investigating the vast array of available religions with the attitude of a discriminating consumer for whom the sky’s the limit. Born a Muslim, he had practiced nothing akin to devotion since attaining his majority; now, however, he busied himself by probing the tenets of numerous sects and faiths, looking for something not even he himself could articulate. He was, in short, “searching.”

So it was that his guests included those of many and varied persuasions, all of whom were committed to proselytizing in the hope of enlarging their memberships, and who therefore readily accepted the invitations. As did a great many other people. These extremely mixed gatherings, though informal in style, took on the aura of chic East Side soirees, and no one, least of all the host himself, ever knew who might be found in attendance. Tonight, plagued by his eighth consecutive day without a bowel movement, he didn’t much care.

When Jack Dazzario arrived, accompanied by Emily and Michael, the door to the Sutton Place house was opened even before the bell could be sounded, and was shut at once behind them, as if to fend off the humid heat. Dazz presented a folded, printed card to a doorman, and they passed through the dark vestibule into a large, cool, oval hallway, where a dim chandelier dripped glittering prisms. A large round marble-topped table stood before them, and on it a giant vase filled with an enormous arrangement of tropical lilies. The servant stood beside the wide, draped entrance to their left, waited for their approach, then silently withdrew. They stepped through the portal.

The room was a large, high-ceilinged, softly-lit, cool velvety half-world where guests floated like so many wraiths, indolent, dreamlike. Groups clustered in all corners, sprawled on low, wide, comfortable furniture, here washed in bright laughter, there sunk in quiet conversation. No one, including the waiter passing with a tray of drinks and the uniformed maid emptying ashtrays, paid any attention to the newcomers in the doorway. Wine-colored brocade above mahogany wainscoting covered the walls, which were further embellished with giant tapestries and paintings in baroque gold frames, which hung by thick tasseled ropes from a picture molding high overhead. In the center of the room rested a round, tufted-velvet Belle Epoque settee. There was a profusion of flowers in vases, palms in pots, flora in general.

No matter what was the occasion or who were the guests, everything here was calculated to appeal to the senses: the sound of water flowing in rivulets, recorded music not readily identifiable but exotic in nature, heavy incense filtering through the refrigerated air. It was as if this place, with its softness and dimness and coolness, had been specially constructed as a protest against any sort of reality, a magic world where one might pursue fancies, act out fantasies, indulge private vices, all to the furthest extreme. Temperature, lighting, sound, scent all combined to produce an instant feeling of lethargy, of luxurious and indolent ease, of sensuousness that might challenge the proclivities of a pasha.

In the manner of such parties, the guests had formed various splinter groups, according to their particular acquaintanceships or desires. Beyond a panel of open grillwork stood a fashionable lot that might have been assembled to pose for an advertisement for expensive scotch: women with burnished coiffures, flashing bracelets and rings, and silky shimmering apparel that draped gracefully as they drooped and lounged, smoking long cigarettes and conversing with several males of a similar well-dressed type, bearing the sheen of striven-for elegance, talking in hushed tones punctuated with occasional bursts of mirth, while illuminating devices of undisclosed origin changed them, full face and profile, from red to amber to blue and back again, but never cast upon them any sort of natural light. In the opposite corner clustered six or eight members of the Hare Krishnas, looking as if they had been encamped there since the seventies, limp in spite of the cool air, pathetically shorn like so many lambs.

Through a gilded archway, in a candlelit alcove, on a carved high-backed chair, sat a corpulent woman of fifty, with bright red lips and heavily made-up eyes, engaged in serious conversation with a rapt young man perched on a stool close beside her, while people crowded around on either side leaned about her in auditory attitudes. She seemed to be holding court, blinking rapidly as though surprised by her own utterances, her heavy rings idly tinkling against the stones of her pendant earrings; occasionally one hand strayed to her breast, where either through distraction or by contrivance she hooked her middle finger in the scalloped edge of her bodice. Glittering ornaments on her bare shoulders clasped her gown, which fell in long folds to her gold kid sandals, exaggerating rather than hiding her considerable girth. Several curls artfully escaped from the turbanlike wrapping on her head, giving her the look of Madame de Staël masquerading as a sibyl. Her soft, slurring voice betrayed her Southern origins.

Dazz, Emily, and Michael moved slowly through yet another open doorway into a room where a buffet had been arranged on a pair of long tables lit by ornate silver, many-branched candelabra. Rows of silver-plated dishes shaped like the hulls of galleons offered a variety of hot foods giving off a profusion of odors—curry, garlic, unrecognizable spices—and towering between the candelabra on each table was a giant three-tiered silver tower laden with fruit. Grapes hung in clusters from its lip.

“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die, die, die.” They looked up to see the Southern lady, plump, round-faced, turbaned, helping herself liberally at the end of one table. She beamed at them, her bright, tiny, china-blue eyes dancing, and licked two fingers with a smack. “Don’t be shy, folks, just dig in, there’s plenty more where that came from.” Holding her plate high, she picked up silverware and snapped out a napkin, which she proceeded to tuck in her bosom while occupying a gilt chair too small by far for her bulk. “Damask,” she said, mopping her damp chest. “Don’t find any paper napkins ’round here.” Again she beamed, the flesh of her cheeks causing the blue of her eyes almost to disappear. She had ensconced herself near a pair of French doors that gave onto a large terrace, where guests mingled in the shadows amid points of candlelight, and beyond bulked the swooping, filigree arches of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, festooned with ropes of white lights.

Michael’s eyes were wrenched away from the heaped tables by the sound of Dazz’s voice. “Emily Chang, Michael Hawke, meet Miss Beulah Wales of Atlanta, Georgia. Miss Wales is a very good friend of our generous host.”

“Why, Jack, what attractive friends you have,” she exclaimed, watching Emily’s slender, outstretched hand disappear into her own. “Are you all artists too?”

“Yes,” said Dazz; “No,” said Emily; “Hunger artists,” said Michael, all at the same time. Emily laughed, a husky ripple of merriment that Michael loved to provoke. “Emily’s a virtuoso flute player, and Michael’s a master magician,” Dazz explained. Emily demurred modestly, Michael looked distractedly at the tables.

The fat lady’s little blue eyes sparkled. “How extremely interesting,” she said, mercilessly emphasizing the stressed syllables. “I want to hear more after you get yourselves some food.”

They gladly dedicated themselves to the task of loading their plates. With a conspiratorial look on her elfin features, Emily tilted her head sideways and winked at Michael across the table, as if they were raiding some rich, forbidden pantry. He grinned at her in frank admiration. Plates filled, they sat, the three of them, on a small sofa off slightly to one side of the room, eating enthusiastically while the party surged on in ever-changing waves around them.

Beulah Wales bobbed her head at them in convivial approval, then rose, tugging her chair, and plunked it down next to Michael. Her bright, earnest eyes seemed even smaller and bluer than before. Sniffing dismissively at the saffron-robed Hare Krishnas, who were now lining up at the buffet, she said, “They’d best make hay while the sun shines, they won’t be about the premises too much longer.” She rested a damp hand confidentially on Michael’s knee. “Mr. Abdel-Noor, our absent host, was contemplating a journey to India, to visit with their Swami. The poor man’s looking for his sister, I know, but go all the way to
India
? All those
filthy
cities? And his sister’s here all the time, all the time, I tell him.”

“I thought his sister was dead,” Emily said.

“She is, honey, as a doornail. But Samir wants to talk to her. They were real close, Sami and Syrie. That’s why you see me about.” She leaned forward, putting a finger alongside her nose and gazing briefly at each of them in turn. “We—are—
delving.
”

Emily rolled her eyes, thinking the terrace might not be a bad idea; Dazz was busy evaluating potential nude models; but Michael was interested. “So you’re trying to put Samir in touch with his sister?” he asked.

“Honey, you’re a delight, that’s exactly what I’m doing. It’s a question of reaching the Other Side, that’s to say, the astral plane. Samir’s got no need to mess with those skinheads. He just feels the lure of the East, being from there himself. I think those kids remind him of home.”

“And where is our host this evening?” Michael inquired.

She gave him an incredulous look. “Why, honey, he’s upstairs. He doesn’t come down. He just likes to know there’s a party going on, but he
don’t
come
down.
Samir’s got the dreadfuls.” Her listeners’ faces showed curiosity but not enlightenment. “It’s a chronic condition, well,
almost
chronic. He’s constipated.” She looked briefly from one to the other to make certain her words had had their effect. “Poor man, he suffers so.” She leaned against the padded back of her chair, amused at a temporarily private thought. “It’s terrible to laugh, poor Samir, but—I must tell you, it’s too funny to keep, if you young folks won’t mind a lady using one tiny four-letter word?” Briefly she awaited their acquiescence, then plunged on. “Poor Samir. We were sitting right there, in that very room, and you take a look around and guess how much cash’s hanging on those walls or that you’re walking on with those rugs, and he says to me, ‘Boo’—he calls me Boo—‘I am a very rich man, I am known on three continents, there is nothing I cannot have, when I go to the opera I wear a fortune in jewels, there is not a restaurant in the world at which I cannot have the best table, and I would give it all up for one good, healthy shit!’”