Messi@ (23 page)

“Who you been hangin' with?” Martin kissed her on both cheeks and sat down at the little table.

“Amelia Earhart, Ovid, Saint Teresa … you know.”

“Always the bookworm.”

Dedette caught her up on his life, which was exactly the same as always. He went to parties and fashion shows, wrote for the paper, changed clothes, and went dancing every night. Had nine girlfriends but couldn't remember all their names.

It was almost lunchtime. Dedette said, “What do you say we grab a bite and a drink down Decatur way?”

“We could, Dedette, but I warn you. I don't do flesh anymore. I neither eat nor touch it.”

“What, you give it to the angels now,
cher?
”

“You might say that, sir.”

It seemed to Felicity that Martin Dedette had been sent to her by providence. In her briefcase was a manila envelope containing a complete set of Mullin prints. She had addressed the envelope to
Our Mirror
, the sleaziest of the tabloids.
Our Mirror
was a fearless and filthy weekly that had been sued countless times. Everyone read it. Felicity had weighed the envelope and put stamps on it. She had thought long and hard about whom she could entrust with the package, but no one had seemed quite right. And now here was Dedette. Gullible, charming, obedient Dedette.

On their way to lunch, Felicity explained to Martin that Miles had taken the keys to her body with him to the other world. While this wasn't entirely accurate, she did feel that way most of the time. The few occasions on which she had allowed penetration she had thought of herself as a witness rather than as a participant. Her spirit was infinitely more promiscuous than her flesh.

The park across Decatur was a Shade shantytown of cardboard shacks. A group of Shades lay on the sidewalk directly in their path. Martin and Felicity stepped gingerly around them so as not to upset an odd-looking altar composed of dog food cans, driftwood, petrified half-eaten beignets, and a cross glued together from mirror shards.

“Hey, wanna see us spell ‘Fuck'?” called one of them.

Martin quickened his step but Felicity slowed down. “Yeah,” she said. She felt clean and powerful. Queen of the underworld.

There was a howl of approving laughter from the Shades. The one who had spoken leapt to his feet and offered them a spot in the circle on top of some old cardboard.

“You can't be serious.” Martin was distressed.

But Felicity had already sat down and crossed her legs. “I never heard them talk. I thought they had a vow of silence or something. Sit, Dedette.”

Reluctantly, Martin Dedette, fashion editor, crouched down next to her. He pulled up his pants so as not to upset the perfect crease.

The Shades began to leap about like movie Indians, shedding their rags. Four of them, two boys and two girls, arranged themselves naked around Felicity and Martin. Their tattoos became oddly congruent. The faceless bodies tattood on their skin leaned sadly on one another like a fresco of the damned. The Shade who had first spoken took Felicity's hand and guided it over the surface of the four bellies, just below the navels. Her fingers deciphered the short text before she had actually seen it:
F-U-C-K
. Each of them had a letter incised there.

“What else does it say?” asked Felicity, enjoying the lightly scarred surfaces at her fingertips. “I like brailling,” she said, making up a verb.

More Shades came over and arranged themselves in a pattern that Felicity touch-read as:
F-U-C-K T-H-I-S W-O-R-L-D T-H-E T-R-U-E O-N-E C-O-M-E-S
.

“Who's the True One?” Felicity whispered, overcome by the earnest warmth of all the young bodies stilled there in such ritual yearning.

“You are! You are!” The Shades broke off and started dancing around them.

“For chrissakes, Felicity!” said Martin, getting up.

“Oh, don't be such a fuddy-duddy! Don't you believe that I'm the One? Dance, Dedette, dance!” She rose, taking off her jacket, and joined the circle, twirling around and around until she collapsed on the ground laughing. And she still wasn't done.

“Let me teach you something, Martin Dedette …”

“Listen,” she said to the Shade who had first spoken to her. “You've done everything, right?”

“Everything,” he said sadly.

“Drugs, right? Sex, right?”

To each question the boy nodded yes and got sadder.

“Burnt,” he said. “Totally burnt, man. Done it all. Where is the One?”

“Okay, you've done it all, but have you ever seen a sheep?”

“A sheep?”

“Yeah, a sheep.”

The boy thought about this and then looked around. Several of them shrugged.

“No, I guess not.”

“How many of you never saw a sheep?”

Nearly all raised their hands.

“How many of you never ate a mango?”

Nearly all the shadow children raised their hands.

“You ain't done shit,” said Felicity. “When you've seen a sheep and eaten a mango, preferably at the same time, you come tell me you done everything!”

Felicity rose and brushed the dirt off her butt. It was only with great reluctance and after receiving a hug from each Shade that Felicity finally parted. She thought she felt their fleas jumping on her. Bourgeois bitch, she admonished herself. Jesus hugged the lepers.

To his credit, Martin was still waiting when she got up to go.

“Doesn't this beat lunch?” Felicity was glowing.

She walked buoyantly alongside the inexplicably morose M. Dedette. When they had safely crossed the street, he led her to the bar at Sbisa. After a double shot of Drambuie, his natural elegance and worldly ease reasserted themselves.

“God, Felicity, you'd do anything.”

“You should know, Martin. I did it with you.”

Felicity laughed and leaned back in her seat.

“Martin, I want you to do me a favor.”

“Teach you how to swim? Reverse revirgination? Anything.”

“It's serious.” Felicity took the manila envelope out of her briefcase. “I'm involved in a tricky case. Would you mail this envelope if you don't hear from me by tomorrow afternoon?”

“Christ, Felix. Somebody gonna kill you?”

“I don't think so. It's just insurance.”

“And what do I get for being a good boy?”

Felicity gave him a frankly obscene look, licking her upper lip suggestively. “I'll put my tongue stud in for you.”

Martin Dedette, who thought of himself as worldly and unflappable, blushed. Even he knew what the pierced used their tongues for.

“Well, what do you say we visit with the Shades some more, wealthy Saracen?”

“There is no way, darling, I'm going back there. You're on your own. And by the way, what were you teaching me back there?”

“Innocence, Martin. Have
you
ever seen a sheep?”

Felicity found it difficult to explain what happened next, or why. Martin made some joke and whispered the punch line into her ear, tickling something in there. A dark funnel that began there wended its way into her chest and made her warm all over. Blame it on her ear; she always had an excessively sensitive drum. Suffice it to say that they found themselves back at her apartment with a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon, sitting on her bed.

Martin did have a long, brown body with dark nipples that Felicity fell on greedily. He undressed her with assurance, peeling off her jeans without a hitch and lifting her blouse as easily as blowing a feather. He didn't snag himself in her belly-button ring as she half expected him to, but licked it instead, passing his tongue expertly through it. He took long enough with her ring for her bristly pubis to catch fire, and when he passed from the ring to the groove at the top of her cunt, she squeezed her thighs together hard. Her effort was no match for Martin's nimble tongue. He found her clitoris quickly and pushed it in and out of its hood as if playing with a tiny monk. Felicity surrendered to his ministrations.

The thick bow of Martin's cock felt silky and delicious when Felicity put it in her mouth. She found the heavy knob with its slit lubricated by a drop of semen indescribably sweet.

It would have been a completely adequate experience if everything had ended here. But Martin was determined to complete the program by the book. He turned her around suddenly and lay on top of her. The heaviness of his body awakened in Felicity a strong urge to escape. She did not like being pinned down and tried to get out. Martin took this for just another twist in their love play and forced her thighs open with his hand. She moved her head from side to side to escape his mouth, which locked forcefully on her lips. Felicity wasn't sure when he entered her, but she felt suddenly suspended, impaled on the mast of a sinking ship that was her own body. She became vacant, leaving her body behind on the bed like a discarded coat. From that point on, it became only a matter of watching for the end, which came swiftly and seared her with an abundant stickiness.

It hadn't been Martin's fault, and Felicity tried to smile while she extricated herself from under his sweaty flesh. Martin looked pretty smug sprawled there, and it took her a good quarter of an hour before she persuaded him to get dressed.

“I have to go now. I really do,” Martin mumbled, as if it had been his own idea.

Poor, poor dandy. After he left, Felicity showered at length and had another drink. Something was happening to her. When she'd been a kid, she sometimes looked quickly sideways and glimpsed some fairy or elf scramble away. She had to be really fast to catch them. Some such thing was going on now. Felicity sensed that the thick, wet air was full of quick, fishtailing presences just waiting for her to see them.

Alas, there was business to tend to. She would forget the whole episode and get on with the real stuff. She thought fondly of the Shades, who were so purposely asexual. It dawned on her that they might be of some help for what lay ahead.

Chapter Fourteen

Wherein Gala Keria, hostess of
Gal Gal
Hamazal, surprises and shocks all of Israel. The scholars discuss the burning question of the Messiah
.

Andrea and the scholars, upon their return from sightseeing, were met at the the convent door by Sister Maria.

“Have you heard the terrible news?” she asked, hurrying to help them out of their coats.

Through each mind flashed a different idea, but the images had one thing in common: death. This was, after all, Israel. War and terrorism had made death a familiar occurrence. In addition to that basic concern, at least three of them thought:
Armageddon
. This was, after all, Jerusalem. The valley of Megiddo was a stone's throw away.

More nuns appeared behind Sister Maria, and all started talking at once, making it difficult to understand just what had happened.

“The rabbis have taken her to the chamber of the bad books!” one nun blurted.

Another declared, “The American took her to be his slave!”

Finally, the good sisters slowed down sufficiently to make some sense. Gala Keria was missing, possibly kidnapped! The news bulletins broadcast on Israeli television and radio relayed the contents of an E-mail message to
Gal Gal
's producer, apparently from Gala:
The Fates may use the Wheel, but the Wheel will roll away!
This cryptic message stimulated everyone to heights of speculation.

“They say that she was taken by the devil to turn the wheel that will set the date for the End Times,” speculated weary Sister Rodica, her voice touched by hysteria.

“They say that Hamas is holding her!” Sister Maria was both more realistic and politically aware.

Hamas had been increasing its campaign of political terror; there were explosions nearly every day. Only two streets away on Haik Efraim, a terrorist had blown himself up in a movie theater, killing fifty people. But kidnapping was not one of their tactics. Muslim martyrs preferred going up in a blaze, clutching their key to heaven.

Sometimes, after an explosion, only this key remained intact. Sister Maria had seen one pictured in the newspaper: a bronze key with small teeth on which the suicide's imam had scratched in Arabic the word
HEAVEN
.

Another sister had just returned from the city, where she had read the headline of a tabloid in a kiosk claiming,
American Billionaire Kidnaps Second “Wheel” Hostess
.

The first had been Kashmir Birani, hostess of the Indian
Wheel of Fortune
—
Kismet Chakkar
—who had vanished in the city of New Orleans five years before. The tabloid claimed that the billionaire responsible was no other than Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb and the American Star Wars project. Sister Rodica, for one, believed it. She had been a little doubtful when she read that most members of the United States Senate, the leading figures in the Knesset, and all the pope's advisers were aliens from the planet Pluto. That was difficult, but this was easy. The man who made the bomb had to be the devil. That he'd kidnapped a woman loved by everyone was not at all surprising. The tabloid went on to say that Dr. Teller may even have kidnapped Vanna White herself and replaced her with an impostor.

The
Gal Gal
producers announced a reward of 3 million shekels (about $1 million) for Gala Keria's safe return. But no kidnappers came forward to claim the prize. And there was no follow-up to the cryptic E-mail. In an effort to maintain public awareness of her absence,
Gal Gal Hamazal
announced that, for the next few days, they would alternate reruns with new shows hosted by different girls. They called on young Israeli women to try for the job if they felt sufficiently qualified.

Andrea thought about going to the television station and offering herself as Gala's replacement. During the festive Christmas Eve dinner, the guests had attempted to discover the deeper reasons for the world's fascination with
Wheel of Fortune
. After Gala's disappearance, all sorts of statistics had been compiled. It turned out that most people on earth were watching a local version of
Wheel of Fortune
at least once a week. At the end of the twentieth century,
Wheel of Fortune
was the most-watched television show on earth.