Diamond Shadows
Julian read it over slowly, a few times.
This piece of trash you think belongs to you, but just so you know, I used it too. You haven't got much time.
Farrington.
P.S. He's been programmed to return to me, so I don't have to keep his body locked up. I got his mind, and no one else has the key. Go ahead, try. You're next. Get ready. You'll like it.
Robertson stood in the doorway insisting he had to wait there for a reply after Julian read the note, which he had handed him like a Western Union boy.
Come in, boy, come in, Julian said, I've read the message. Now I have to write the answer to it. It'll take a minute. I'll scribble the reply and you may return with it, but no need to wait in the hall. Come, have a coffee or some tea, while I answer the note. He took Robertson by the arm and Robertson did not resist. Drained of all affect, he was a mobile catatonic.
Julian knew it was as tough as it looked. Robertson was very far away, and this zombie in his place was totally under alien control.
Even if he managed to restrain the body, Julian understood, he would not possess Robertson's mind without breaking through something, and if it was too forceful, he would not rescue Robertson from the limbo of his captivity. He would only destroy the essence of his friend, of his beloved.
Sit, Julian invited Robertson, while I respond.
Robertson sat at a right angle to Julian. Julian opened a drawer in his writing table and took out his stationery and also a silver chain with a flashing diamond on its end.
Holding it high before his eyes for Robertson to see, he began an induction.
Robertson swung his eyes this way and that way, mechanically, impervious.
Julian put the diamond chain back in his pocket.
Let me offer you some tea before you go, he said, and placed a cup before him. Its pungent odor steamed up to Robertson's nostrils and his lips were drawn to the rim,. He took a sip. He slumped and his head fell backwards.
Julian knew that if he were to save him, he would have to make Robertson a captive. Until he could penetrate into his essence where they knew each other eternally! -- and bring Robertson back to himself. It was Orpheus' quest; he knew what he was up against.
You're a very unlikely Eurydice, Julian said to an unconscious Robertson. But so it is.
The room in which Julian installed Robertson had windows higher than either of them could reach and were barred. The door locked with a key from the outside, and Robertson had a shackle fastened to his left ankle, from which a chain extended from either a fixture fastened to the floor or another to the wall by the bed.
The melodramatics, Robertson, I must endure to have a few moments alone with you! It is absurd, Julian said, kissing the boy who was bound immobilized to the bed as he made love to him.
He had used a whip in order to get to this condition of docility.
After he had woken and found himself chained, Robertson bellowed wildly and scrimmaged on his chain tearing at it this way and that in an unsuccessful effort to disengage himself and flee to a place where an inner compulsion as pressing as his own heart was urging him to return, to Master Farrington's studio. He was yelping and panting like a hound.
It was by employing actual physical pain that Julian, gradually, apparently weaned Robertson away from the spell that had robbed him of himself. He had never before had to exercise physical force to command, control, or dominate someone. Charm and technique had been enough.
But Robertson was something else and pain might reach into places where charm could not go.
Aunt Morgan was always good for advice, and Julian made an appointment to visit her on rue Marboeuf, off the Champs Elysees, which had been vulgarized beyond recognition by American franchises and French capitalists. The Communist menace in architecture lay in the dour regimentation of concrete and in the heavy heart Communist architecture represented. The Capitalist menace to architecture lies in the unimpeded commerce of vanity, vulgarity and inauthenticity architecture is required to serve.
I don't want to hear another word about that, Aunt Morgan said in her husky whisper. There are real problems here and you'd better be ready for surprises.
I don't want surprises, Julian said, as if good spirits could protect him.
Be that as it may, you are in the grip of forces that have no intention of loosening their grip, and they are confident that their intentions for you will entirely supplant your own.
Are you trying to frighten me, Morgan?
Don't omit my honorific, Julian. You should be frightened.
What would you have me do?
Stash the both of you away for awhile.
Away?
Hiding.
Hiding?
Now don't go being naughty and changing meanings on me. This is serious. I mean: go into hiding.
Where?
I have an apartment in the south. Very bourgeois, but it will do well enough for you.
At this Aunt Morgan rang and Bella, the graceful servant from Sri Lanka, was instructed to give M. Julian the keys to the Orangerie.
Robertson drugged and disguised as an old, crippled woman, Julian got him in a wheel chair to the Gare de Lyon where they took the TGV to Grenoble; there in Aunt Morgan's house in the hills to sequester him and attempt to reach him.
The last, yes. The last. It was only because he feared something was going to happen that I did get to see him. But he never arrived. I spoke to Francisco by phone. They never arrived. No one has any idea where they are. Now we must do something Milford, and quickly.
Aunt Morgan, what on earth are you thinking of?
I don't know. That's why I want your help.
I don't know even where to start.
Well, you must.
If I must, I must, Milford said with mock resignation. But give me a few days to try to figure things out.
A few days! Aunt Morgan declaimed.
Let me be, Aunt Morgan. If I will be of any use it depends on you to let me be as I am. The creator spirit never fails me when I wait for it.
And he had done a great deal of waiting in the last few years that had put a damper on his spirit.
Aunt Morgan knew that and became less relentless for the moment.
Hays Milford was an antique dealer, not a distributor or a seller but a dealer who sought and bought and sold pieces of furniture he liked. The store on the Ille Saint-Louis had a black sign with fine gold lettering, Hays Milford & Taylor.
Taylor was dead now, nearly four years already. Robbie Taylor whom he met wandering through Edinburgh for some inexplicable reason to rev him up for a monograph on Carlyle he was writing for the Journal of Nineteenth Century English Thought.
Dead, like so many others.
Ou sont les neiges?
Milford opened the shop early the next day.
I haven't tried hypnosis for years.
He stopped by the door. Through the antique wavy glass he saw the Seine.
He wondered if he could still do it or if he had gotten rusty beyond repair.
When Josquin the shop-boy arrived at ten fifteen, Milford knew exactly what he needed to do.
Leave the bills. Come I want to show you an antique pendant from the seventeenth century.
He hadn't lost the knack. Josquin sat slumped forward in the chair. Following one order after another, his eyes opened, his back straightened, he stood, he spoke. Each act was performed on command and reflected Milford's wishes rather than his.
Milford looked at the well wrought gangly figure before him in faded American jeans and a loose black tee-shirt, which he removed on command, and remained bare-chested, for he had begun to feel how warm it was in the back of the store.
I've told you many times, Josquin, how exquisite you are. But it is always true. Of all the pieces I've collected, it would be with you I should be loath to part. For everything else, the money would compensate, but not for you, mon cher, not for you. It is not your surplus value that draws me to you but your breath, your skin, your chest, your nipples, that lovely cock that stands so tall when I call upon you for service.
Milford crouched before him, not like he was kneeling or bowing, but like a craftsman inspecting the work; he took hold of the lad's balls and began to lick them, and then took them in his mouth and with his tongue outlined the spheroid sensitivities held within their satiny sac.
And then the point of his tongue was circling the slit on the glans, and then it was encompassing the whole crown of the cock, and then was pulling more of the shaft down into him and then was kissing it with his throat.
He continued the boy's training like this until he knew from the tension of his body that Josquin had entirely surrendered himself and was swamped by expanding love for him. Then he brought the boy to explosion, and the fire of his semen burst inside his throat and made him, too, momentarily, dissociate from terrestrial definition and enter the realms of lucid fragmentation where the self dissolves into bliss.
There was a rapping at the front door despite its being locked and a sign reading, Closed for Private Reasons until Further Notice. And then he heard a key turn. It could only be Aunt Morgan. She had a key, and there, indeed, she was.
Milford, at a time like this^Ågood morning Josquin^Åwhen matters of life and death confront us. He is beautiful though, isn't he?
Thank you, Aunt Morgan.
What have you done to him now?
A simple trance.
What I can't figure is why you don't leave the poor boy alone. He's crazy about you when he's in his own head. What more do you need?
I'm surprised at you Aunt Morgan! After the life you've led.
Well, perhaps, but that's something else. We really must do something. Get him -- she said pointing at Josquin with the mauve and rose fan that always accompanied her -- into some kind of functioning condition, will you, and let's then be about our business.
Part V
Farrington's orders had been to recover Robertson. The family was not at all happy with his disappearance. It made them anxious. Focused themselves exclusively on the acquisition and maintenance of power and dominance, as they were, they expected the move against Robertson's interest in the family empire to be disconcerting, but they never imagined that it could injure him in ways other than those which might affect them had they been bested in a deal. He had transformed defeat into a romance. He had not come to negotiate some from of living from them, gotten himself locked into their orbit. He had disappeared, just gone off, into the sunset, as it were, with another man. It was unacceptable, too dangerous.
On the other hand, the way things had worked out was not altogether inauspicious. That Robertson was unstable and homosexual actually could provide good cover for any action which might face SEC investigation or independent audit. Robertson was a perfect fall guy and if he were not loose and unaccounted for but nicely secured in say a perfectly pleasant psychiatric institution, on call, as it were, well...that would be quite appropriate given the unfortunate circumstances.
Farrington, for his part, became too excited by his assignment. He had his own agenda, and while it included securing Robertson, it was motivated not by the emolument contingent upon successful execution of his mission, nor by fidelity to his employers, but by personal revenge for having been bested erotically when Julian wrested control of Robertson away from him so effortlessly the night the Bentley broke down.
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