Diamond Shadows
Harriet Robertson was fuming.
It's way outta control. What is it supposed to mean? -- Will forgo wages and keep the prisoners. What is he talking about?
She tossed the telegram on Seth's desk.
Calmly, Harriet, I will deal with it.
The way you always do, ineptly.
Now that's just not fair.
I don't give a shit about being fair, the bejeweled matron hissed. I expect to be obeyed when I give instructions, and I expect to get the results I want and not to see things go haywire.
This explosion of irascibility, as it always did, brought Juniper, the toy poodle she always carried at her breast, to a sympathetic frenzy and the dog began barking a series of high decibel shrieks.
Now now, Juniper, it's alright. She set him down and he scampered into the corner where a pewter water dish was set and lapped with a frenzy.
O for chrissake Harriet, must it always be so melodramatic?
Melodramatic! Smithers, this is real drama, big drama, and you as a lawyer ought to love that it's big drama, so don't bitch at me. That big drama pays for your Chinese mahogany desk and your hand-tied Persian carpets, and it won't continue to do so if I don't have it to give you. So at least now, goddamn it, you can try to earn it.
What exactly do you see as the problem, Harriet?
There is none...yet. And I don't want yet to arrive. But that bloody fool driver you hired originally to keep an eye on Robertson is bringing yet closer than it need be with his stupid erotic kidnappings, of all things! Said with her palms raised to the alabaster ceiling with the molded plaster garland forming an ellipse around the crystal chandelier dependent from a fluted mound inverted like a stalactite. My economic future, or if I'm ever imprisoned when some zealous prosecutor wants to make some point -- all this is yoked to his madness, his perversion.
What do you want to do?
Buy him off.
Buy him off?
Buy him off!
Smithers did not have difficulty getting into the chateau.
He was admitted by the guard at the gate without hesitation, and Farrington sat opposite him drinking tea, totally at ease. There was no cat and mouse game to be played in some as yet unconfessed negotiation. Farrington volunteered before Smithers even asked that Julian and Robertson were there. He told Smithers how he had driven them there in a cab from the SNCF station where he had picked them up. He set a trap and they walked right into it.
Not at all, Farrington interrupted Smithers as he attempted to introduce his business by apologizing for this intrusion. Nothing to excuse. I'm happy to listen to any propositions. First, however, perhaps you will allow me to play the host and offer you something to drink, perhaps some fine Irish whiskey.
He was in fine form himself and was chewing the propriety of his words with a wicked anticipation of ultimate possession. Smithers realized somewhere deep within his wooden soul that something threatening hovered about him. But he struggled to assert his professional demeanor.
As partial as I am to fine spirits, he responded after momentary abstraction, I think we must first accomplish our business.
You don't think I'd take advantage of you now, Smithers, do you.
With you Farrington, one never knows what to think. But it is always better to stay on the safe side.
And which side is that now?
You can't get away with this.
You can do better than that.
It's human slavery. It's trafficking in human beings. It's the 21st century, for the Lord's sake.
For the Lord's sake! Now don't let it excite you so. Perhaps you'd like some tea.
Smithers was not to be distracted, however.
They are two human beings. We don't hold people against their will or subvert their consciousness, or make them not remember who they are.
We don't? was Farrington's only retort.
Smithers looked at him without answering.
Who they were was exactly what the problem came down to. Where they were was not a problem and Farrington was pleased to show them to Smithers.
But what they were! Two dogs, chained round the neck to an iron pole in a courtyard hemmed in by an antique stone wall. Once undoubtedly a medieval hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden of the sort beginning with Guillaume de Loris so dear to allegorists, and now -- having been covered over with concrete -- still able to serve in emblematic capacity as the type of barrenness, of boredom, of pain, of imprisonment.
There, Farrington indicated the naked dog-men lying flat on their sides on the concrete in the sun, tongues distended with thirst -- indicated them by tossing meal-bones at them, one or two hitting them, thus bestirring them, but most flying outside the circumference within which their chains let them range, and they strained like Tantalus for the impossible pleasure, for they were lean with hunger.
Then Farrington took up a hose lying near by, turned the faucet on and aimed a rather sharp spray at them.
The dog-men jumped around both trying to avoid the percussive force of the hose and yet to get the peripheral spray, for it was hot on the pavement in the sun. When Farrington shut the hose, they lay back down on the wet stone.
Farrington, you bastard, Smithers exclaimed.
Smithers, you hypocrite, Farrington returned grabbing Smithers' hardon standing stiff beneath his loose trousers. Perhaps you'd like to be one of my dogs, too.
The men walked about the yard. Farrington was sucking on a pipe and trying to appear judicious. Smithers half dazed and not able to understand why trotted beside him.
Julian sniffed and panted and his tongue hung out of his mouth and he licked the water in the puddles on the wet concrete.
As on a day when the sky is filled with clouds and the sun does not appear to the eye of a man walking despondently through the gray and dreary streets of a city, engaged in tasks that give him no pleasure, even though the sun is present in the sky in precisely the same spot it would be in were there no cloud blanket covering it and eyes on earth, consequently, might see the world revealed in a dazzling brightness, so Julian's mind shone behind a grayed-out awareness.
For Robertson sleep had come like a great dreamless hollow where the continuous high pitch of a frequency made him wiry and high strung. All his mind had been turned into sound, and his behavior had been stripped of awareness and was simply a tropic response to the ringing noises in his ears that his mind had become.
Farrington had, when he picked them up at the station, sealed them off in the backseat of his cab by means of a sliding window like the ones in New York City cabs, but generally absent from cabs in Paris or Grenoble, and let a gentle and soporific air circulate, and they fell asleep.
When they were conscious, as it were, again, they found themselves stripped naked, wrists bound, ankles too. They were suspended thus immobilized from beams in an old barn piled with fresh hay.
Farrington walked between them dressed like an English Country Squire in brown and yellow tweeds. He wore under his jacket a pineapple yellow cable knit sleeveless sweater, low cut for the display of a wide green silk four in hand embossed with silver bullwhips and hunting horns. His high leather boots gleamed and he wore jodhpurs. He carried a silver-headed riding crop in one hand. He patted Warm Bread, the horse stabled there.
Tomorrow, he said, chucking Julian and Roberson under their chins and rubbing their throats, we shall enjoy an old English fox hunt through these French hill.
The devil if he didn't mean what he said, and they couldn't resist but followed him the next afternoon as he unfastened them, opened the door and, himself upon horseback, had them running exes and circles through the fields and woods nearby.
Robertson leaped on fours like a stag in the mountain, the lithe grace of the body expressing the absence of mind. Physically Julian was a force of nature, and his mind was not clogged with a dog mind, but he allowed dog mind to live inside his mind as he watched it. It was like immunizing himself, taking a small dose of poison in order not to be poisoned so that he could know what the poison was, for if he were ever to restore Robertson, he would have to know the specifics of his disease.
He knew. He knew. It was nothing but a cloud of unknowing, a capacity to get lost, to dissolve in another. He became hard when he thought of it.
They had been dogs for several days, entranced by a vulgar rendition of Circe or Comus. But Julian was like Ulysses in Polyphemous' cave, banking everything on a scheme.
Julian felt, as he was puzzling this out, Robertson's breath on his neck. He had loped over to Julian and was pushing him with his head off his side and onto his knees, and grasping Julian's thighs with his knees began pounding jerkingly in and out of him going all the way up his ass each time, bring his own head and knees nearer each other.
Look at that, now, Farrington said. Ain't they the cutest. You know the dogs the way they get hot to hump. It's so natural, lacking in pretentious. No dignity gets in their way of what they want to do. Look at the way that bitch is trembling all over.
But that bitch's trembling, Julian's trembling, Julian experienced it like being showered with the points of a dancing golden light, and it made him tremble to his very fiber. There was no humiliation for him in what was humiliating in Farrington's mind, and to receive Robertson's wonderful cock up his ass was the delight of his life, so this captivity was bliss. What he still wanted to feel inside was the return of Robertson's living spirit.
To hunt that spirit down, retrieve, and free it, that is why he allowed himself to become a dog.
Julian lay panting.
Robertson raised his right leg and urinated on the pole they were chained to.
Smithers accepted Farrington's offer to spend the night at the chateau.
Harriet, meanwhile, was becoming impatient, not having heard from Smithers for two days, and was nonplussed when he did not answer his portable.
She paced up and down the long reception salon in her apartment on François Premier, chain-smoking Gitanes.
Aunt Morgan had determined that the only thing they could do was get down to Grenoble themselves and seek until they found because all discreet inquiries they'd so far made indicated pretty strongly that Julian and Robertson had gotten off the train at Grenoble.
She therefore took Milford by the collar and Josquin by the scruff of the neck and carried them off with her.
Arriving at the Orangerie, Aunt Morgan quickly got to work. Julian had told her enough before he disappeared that by a process of triangulation, she pretty comfortably assumed that, if indeed, Julian and Robertson had been kidnapped, it would have been at the Robertson family's instigation, and she knew about their chateau in the foothills.
I'm not sure if what we're doing is wise, Milford complained as they sat with a plate of cheeses and a bowl of fruit at the end of dinner.
Now don't be a scared ninny, Milford. You can stay here if you like and Josquin and I will go by ourselves.
No, no, Milford relented. I want to be in on it, but I can't help feeling misgivings.
Stuff and nonsense, Aunt Morgan huffed. And then, If we are to begin, I must change, and twenty minutes later, that powerful woman returned, no heels, skirt, blouse, jewelry, make up or long auburn hair, but a rugged man she was, jeans, boots, a tight black t-shirt over a chest, well-wrought but flat nevertheless. Close cropped sandy brown hair. And she was hung. The jeans let you see that.
Morgan, Milford exclaimed, I haven't seen you like this in twenty years.
A lady does, Milford, what the time requires.
Josquin was agog; his cock stiffening with wonder at this wonderful transformation.
If you two sweethearts can re-direct your enthusiasm, we may yet do some good.
They both smiled and snapped to, for in truth it was difficult to turn your gaze away from him.
Morgan pulled the Mercedes into the Cellar on the Hillside, a restaurant somewhat higher up the mountainside than the Townsend chateau. Morgan had known Josef, an Austrian, when he was a hustler in the Marais. Now he'd gone off with a boy he'd met in Barcelona. Together they ran this place and lived a healthful, gay, and bucolic life.
From that higher vantage, through binoculars, Milford surveyed the scene below.
Dear, dear, oh dear, he suddenly ejaculated. My blushes.
What is it Milford? Morgan demanded.
Milford handed him the binoculars.
The iron gate in the wall opened without squeaking when they entered. Without hesitation Morgan walked up to the two dog-men who were lying beside each other on the ground, bent at the knees and a extended a palm to each creature, and after the dog-men had tongued it and buried their faces in it, he affectionately caressed their muzzles and gently whispered, Good boys, quietly now.
Milford stayed at the wheel in the car. Josquin followed Morgan, carrying a chain cutter. He went to work sundering the dog-men from their moorings as Morgan whispered to them. And then they were free and followed Morgan as he lead them to the Mercedes waiting on the road, and off they shot as Farrington ran into the yard to curse the damage they'd wrought. Some of his anger shot out of him and he felt calmer, however, after he knocked Smithers down, who had come running out after him to see what was amiss. He got off several sharp kicks; he felt vindicated.
Smithers shuddered with a secret and a guilty bliss.
Aunt Morgan, back in Paris, had once again become herself. Milford and Josquin were spending their time in the store and taking long lunches in cafés along the Seine. Smithers had simply disappeared from the legal circles at the Palace of Justice, but had become a great source of gossip. And Harriet was furious, always furious. She had had her guesses, and she'd been right. The little nimby needed a Master. He deserved his pathetic fate. She got almost as much pleasure in his degradation as she would have had it been she who had caused it. But Robertson was loose. And that was not as she would have wanted it.
But how loose he was, she could not know, for he was still flinging himself into great orgies of dog-humping Julian.
The Guilty Dominator -- movies are better than ever.
Aunt Morgan was leafing through Le Monde and keeping Josquin immobilized with a steady stream of words, talk that was making his mind blank and his head sleepy.
I don't know what Milford sees in it. Well, well, come on Josquin. Come out of it. Frankly I like you better when you're wide awake.
The boy stirred, blinked his eyes and opened them, and Aunt Morgan noted the light in the boy's dark brown eyes and the pretty nipples on his smooth torso.
Do you want to make love to me, Josquin?
I want to dress like you.
You say that again, I'll slap your fanny.
And I'll slap yours back, he laughed.
Oh, ho, a democrat, she said, taking him by the hair and forcing him to his knees in front of her.
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