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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Mystery
- Subject: Art / Music / Theater / Dance
- Published: 10/10/2013
A CASE OF COMPOSITION - Part 1 of 2
Born 1969, M, from Herten, NRW, Germany.jpg)
A CASE OF COMPOSITION
- a short story version of a novel in progress
I started working on the book in 2007. The short story is recent.
William Todd, sipping on his fifth brandy that night, sat in King Cole’s Bar. Munching on a salad and digesting a roll, the recent quarrel with his partner made everything in his stomach turn into clay. It all seemed cheap. Useless.
Gerald Brown’s lyricist and the second part of Broadway’s number one musical team went to King Cole’s in order to come up with good ideas for a new show. Liz Smith went just to see if he was in there and then there would be column in next day’s newspaper. She had first set the standard for calling him an Errol Flynn look-alike. Gerald then became Michael Caine. When a show flopped it became “the Flynn/Caine Mutiny”. If it was hit, it was a “Robin Hood–like rescue”.
The young, straight bachelor William taunted the gay, tied-up Gerald. A German dancer named Tim Schneider, who got to dance in all Todd and Brown shows despite his limited talent, enjoyed Gerald’s sensual company for many years, lived at the couple’s ranch, where the maid Rosita on orders kept a serious look out over Tim’s increasing drinking habits.
Of course, Liz Smith said that William Todd was gay. William always tried to disprove this to the press by being seen with a different dishy blonde at every reception. He tried to spread the word about his own erect manhood by being a womanizer. So, in more ways than one William was like the old Robin Hood interpreter. He drank, he had another mistress every week and he fought with his colleagues.
That day, the womanizer William, also known as Errol Flynn, was between women. The visit to the bar had been completely spontaneous and had been triggered by a ferocious fight between the lyricist and the composer over something as silly as a pen.
The pen that triggered the battle had been a gift from William’s ex-girlfriend, a famous Broadway singer named Marilyn Jones. She was celebrated as the new Patti LuPone and was now playing Fantine in Les Miserables on Broadway. Anything involving Marilyn was painful to the author.
William and Marilyn had broken up years ago after Marilyn’s wild and quite extravagant sex affair with William’s accountant in the couple’s own bedroom.
“Do my broad and you’ll never ever do my red tape!”
These were the lyricist’s famous last words after storming out onto the street and never dating Marilyn again.
Marilyn claimed to have had sex with the man because of having been neglected. William had never forgiven Marilyn, although he still loved her and they kept on phoning each other regardless of their former hatred. It was a difficult situation.
The pen was still a lucky charm and a sign of William’s confusion. William signed every contract with that pen and he wanted to have it with when he wrote every autograph.
Well, that evening the unthinkable happened. It was gone.
He had phoned Marilyn from Gerald’s Park Avenue flat that evening to discuss her participation in the new Todd and Brown show An Orchid Washed Ashore, a show about a rich widow that fell in love with a black servant and caused massive racial controversy in 1950’s Maryland. Marilyn was up for the role of the widow Jennifer.
As always, nervous William forgot the pen in Gerald’s immense study. It lay there on Gerald’s massive mahogany desk under Gerald’s massive reproduction of Rubens’ masterpiece from 1625 of Maria of Medici’s arrival on shore.
When William went back to Gerald’s music room, the composer was sitting by his white Steinway grand piano. He was punching some keys on his keyboard connected composition computer programme. It was a version of the lead song It will never be the Same from the upcoming show An Orchid Washed Ashore. The song was Jennifer’s hymn and was intended to show off Marilyn’s three octave range. It had about three different tempis and was written in four different keys. The problem was that William and Gerald had completely different views on how the song should end.
William said that it should segue into tender love scene with a low note and a pianissimo dynamic. Gerald, being the true British Elgar and Holst and Britten fan he was, felt that the scene really should end with a loud high G on a forte high note. Nobody coming to a musical would want to hear the title song end softly sung by the star.
The tense atmosphere became fighting, when Gerald suggested they sign Cameron MacIntosh’s contract for eventual CD – releases. Gerald called him a boring git for being so dependant on something as trivial as a pen.
William insisted he could only sign the contract with his pen. Gerald told him that he couldn’t let Marilyn go. How could he, Gerald answered? He was working with her all the time and so the memories were always there. They should get another soprano. William answered that if they dropped his ex-girlfriend Marilyn as a leading lady, Cameron would also drop his part of the deal.
The quarrel reached a climax when the two neurotic artists claimed not being able to work under these conditions. It all ended with William throwing foul words over Gerald’s massive amount of baroque art on the walls, telling him that Gerald wasn’t just gay. He was in love with fat ladies, because his hefty mother had raised him to become a sissy.
Gerald took an expensive Venetian vase and threw it against the penthouse door. It closed behind William as he stood in the hallway outside. He kept looking at the large black and white photos of gay icons like Celine Dion and Marlene Dietrich that hung in the white corridor. He stopped at Maria Callas and then turned around to speak with Gerald, but overheard Gerald talking to himself that William was an untalented, homophobic, secret fag with penis covet.
So, William stepped into his Rolls and drove to the bar.
It took him four more beers and a whiskey to roll on home.
William ended up drinking a bottle of rosé and falling asleep while Bogey told Bergman that he was looking at her kid and called her a sweetheart. William dreamt really weird dreams.
At eleven o’clock the next morning, the phone rang and woke the author up. William felt little trolls dancing the merengue in his shorts and spitting chilli on his cucumber.
To William’s sad realization, it was their lawyer George Markstein. A Jewish guy from Brooklyn looked like Jason Alexander in Seinfeld. He took care of their legal affairs from his office on 7th Avenue and kept on arriving at every important meeting to add a little official flair to the engagement.
“Did I wake you up?” George laughed at the other end. “You sound like you were humped by jellyfish in a tank of whiskey.”
“Not far from the truth” William giggled. “I got very drunk last night after enjoying a screaming row with the gay version of Michael Crawford.”
“Hey, Crawford is gay,” the lawyer continued matter-of-fact. “Gerald make trouble again? Did he throw any old rave reviews of yours at you again? Can I make money on this?”
I chuckled. “Uhmm, no. It was about a pen.”
George paused. “A pen? What is this?” The small New York Jew started squirting jokes like a Queens version of the three mousequeteers. “So you throw pens at each other? Is this a new act of yours? Wait a second, this is a new show, right? The Pen – a great new show by Todd and Brown. Sorry, Brown and Todd.”
“Knock it off, man” I said. “It was painful yesterday.” I sighed. “I am a little nervous about his reaction.”
George said that when he had come to Gerald’s penthouse that morning to deliver a contract Gerald had already disappeared, leaving a note behind him taped to his penthouse door. It simply alleged that he needed a vacation and left all responsibility to his partner William Todd and their mutual lawyer George Markstein. What was strange was that the writing wasn’t his, but the autograph was.
Quickly, still feeling dizzy from all the booze, William got dressed reeking of after shave and sweat and walked over to the penthouse where George was waiting.
All the way up in the elevator William had the nauseous feeling of being stuck in a time warp. Seeing what was going on, it turned into a heavy slaughter mystery.
George had been right. The letter had been written by someone else. It was untypical for Gerald to let anyone else do anything for him, because he would be obsessive about control. Letting an unknown stranger take care of something as personal as a letter was almost impossible.
George and William checked Gerald’s last phone calls. He had called their agent Marvin Klein, Marilyn, Cameron MacIntosh’s office and Tim Schneider at the ranch. The last call this morning had been at 9:02 to a bar named The Russian Drag Queen in Greenwich Village. It was open all hours gay club where Gerald often went to eat, hear new singers or look at art.
The owner, a man from St. Petersburg named Vladimir Fomenko, said that Gerald had called the tavern at nine this morning and spoken to a temporarily regular customer Russian named Sergei Karpoff. The gentleman had been eating breakfast at that time of the morning, whilst living at The George Brent Hotel on Fifth Avenue. If William wanted more information, he better come himself and bring a bottle of Ararat Brandy and some Gauloises cigarettes.
It was strange to hear someone ask for booze in order to give information. There was obviously something else going on here.
William and George knew when they were being bribed, but William insisted that he wanted to find out what this was about. George didn’t like it at all, but had to tag along. They called all the other people that Gerald had telephoned this morning and not even his boyfriend Tim knew that he had been planning on going away. So, something must have happened at 9:02 that morning. Something that triggered Sergei Karpoff to come over to Gerald and convince him to leave. But what?
George insisted on coming with him and William couldn’t say he was unhappy about that.
William went to his favourite booze retailer and got the brandy, but the cigarettes were a different matter. They had been banned in the U.S. and so getting a pack was difficult. Finally, William found a whole bunch of packs in lower Manhattan in a discount store.
George really thought William was crazy. Here was this famous guy, who spent all day looking for cigarettes. Did anybody care?
The bar they arrived at in the village two hours later was very glitzy and trashy. It was the perfect place for an upper ten gay like Gerald. Convincing Fomenko to actually tell them what had happened this morning was not easy. The man Gerald had spoken to this morning had probably been a member of the Russian art mafia. He could not promise that this was true, but Fomenko was an art collector himself and all they had been talking about for the last two weeks was art. There was huge, surging reproduction market in Russia at the moment and at the fore front was an international smuggler named Mishka Jolesh.
Gerald had met Sergei Karpoff at an art fair that Fomenko had arranged in his bar two weeks ago. The composer was very interested in reproductions and bought two Rubens copies. Karpoff asked him about one of the paintings and tried to convince him that he could buy it for a higher price.
Gerald was adamant. This got the two men to talking and it became obvious that Karpoff was more than sexually interested in Gerald, but also that he had a hidden agenda: getting him into bed and then grabbing a hold of the artwork.
There was an instant where Gerald was eating breakfast with Karpoff and mentioned something about special reproduction of Raphael’s School of Athens. Apparently, something clicked in Karpoff. He had been serving them breakfast when they started talking very passionately about a Canadian reproduction. Karpoff was all ears and extremely interested in seeing the reproduction by a certain Raphael expert from Ontario.
Fomenko couldn’t really say what they had been talking about, only that Karpoff had been very agitated when he left in a hurry this morning to go see Gerald. He said: “I’m gonna get that son-of-a-bitch.”
That made Fomenko actually agree to tell William the truth when he called. Only for a price, however. The Russian art mafia were efficient and their methods were very prompt.
William and George left the bar for The George Brent Hotel in a hurry after hearing Fomenko’s wild stories. When they arrived, they had apparently just missed Karpoff and Gerald. They had left for JFK airport just minutes ago.
A car chase began that took the writer and the counsellor to the Aeroflot counter of the airport.
Yes, Gerald and Sergei had bought a ticket. No, William and George could not buy one. The flight was full. Was there another flight to Russia? No, in two hours there was a flight to Moscow.
William and George tried to convince the law enforcement that this was a constabulary matter and that a man had been kidnapped. Had the matter been registered? Was the man really kidnapped or was it a question of opinion? No, this was just a suspected kidnapping matter and hadn’t yet evolved. It was, however, a kidnapping, because they were dealing with a heavy neurotic that rarely left the U.S. anymore. Meanwhile, Karpoff was getting away.
By the time George had convinced the police chief of the airport to go after the kidnapper, the plane with Karpoff and Gerald had probably already lifted off the ground. They maintained that they were people of prominence and needed exceptional attention. To this the security officers responded that they knew who William and Gerald were, but that this didn’t change the law.
After checking the countless other planes leaving for Russia, they discovered that Karpoff had bought ten tickets and there was no way of knowing which plane he was taking.
They ran through the airport to find out where the man was who had abducted Gerald, but it was all to no avail. Karpoff had disappeared. One of them five planes that was flying to one of the cities in Russia might carry Gerald and Sergei Karpoff.
The airport security department immediately called the airports in Russia in order to notify the authorities. The effect was close to zero. No one had seen anyone even resembling the two men.
The next step was obvious: go to the police.
The chief of the Central Park Precinct had an uncanny and very politically correct name: Thomas Jefferson. This man was the namesake of America’s third president, the 19th century author of the declaration of independence. However, the latter Jefferson would fight for more proper equal rights than the earlier man. They stood before a black man with a very wide smile and a huge body, who told them that they were dealing with a special brand of a Russian art mafia that stole and reproduced art. These were international thieves that searched for reproductions world wide and sold them on black markets.
Their official agenda, in the form of a Russian art dealer named Mishka Jolesh, consisted of St. Petersburg’s most prominent art gallery. Jolesh had as well been so clever about the art smuggling business that he could not be caught. The mafia boss had been smuggling diamonds inside art for years. Interpol had found out only by coincidence and now the entire world of espionage and secrecy was out to reveal Mishka’s massive conglomerate of crime.
Chief Jefferson’s guess was that Gerald by mistake somehow had acquired an art work with hidden diamonds built into the canvas. That was usually the place they kept the jewellery.
In some rare cases diamonds were embedded into the painting itself. These paintings were priceless.
William remembered that Gerald and he had bought an art work from a Polish artist in Austin. His name had been Janusz Kimilski. Gerald had apparently already bought many of his paintings, considering him the world’s greatest reproductive artist. Gerald had been very hurt when William laughed at this comment.
The thing was that Janusz Kimilski sold equally many reproductions to the Russian dealers that he came across at Vladimir Fomenko’s bar The Russian Drag Queen in Greenwich Village. It seemed that, without even finding out, Gerald had come in the line of fire. He was in the middle of a fierce mafia war. He was a virginal middle man, if you will, in a slaughter.
Jefferson supposed that Kimilski was one of the leading operatives in Jolesh’s opposing mafia team. He painted for Mishka and then partook in searching for the same art that entailed expensive diamonds. These artworks with frames entailing stolen jewellery had by mistake been sold to many buyers.
Now two opposing groups were trying to trace these lost paintings with Gerald’s help. What in fact had happened on that day was that Gerald had somehow found out, maybe by e-mail or telephone, where the art had landed or which buyer had the paintings.
Sergei Karpoff did find out and rushed over to get Gerald and fly
with him to Russia. Jefferson was sure that Karpoff and Gerald were
already criss-crossing the globe trying to found the lost treasure. The problem was that Gerald already knew too much and had to tag along. He couldn’t be killed just yet. His knowledge was his saving grace.
The C.I.A. was told about the episode and William was told that nothing could be done to stop him from going to Russia to find Gerald. He just had to know that he was endangering himself in going there, if he did. The C.I.A. would probably take him into custody if he got in their way.
George urged William to stay put, but William knew where he belonged. A week later William flew alone to St. Petersburg. He checked into the famous Grand Hotel. It was, even by his wealthy standards, the most luxurious hotel that he had seen.
Built in the 1820s and housing rather Tolstoy worthy rooms, it had been the home to George Bernard Shaw, Maxim Gorky and Tchaikovsky. It looked like a palace and the red carpets lined the floors. The restaurant had the best caviar in the city. The hotel had ballrooms with chandeliers.
He walked into his suite, threw the keys on the table and turned on the TV. The first thing he checked were the rooms. He called room service and ordered dinner and soon enough a very nice young porter came and said that even in Russia they had heard of him and there were several people that wanted his autograph.
William was flattered and gave the man some signed photos of himself and then went back to his TV with his food.
He had finished his third glass of Krim Sekt, when a knock came on the door. William urged not to open. He was going on a hunt tomorrow for Mishka Jolesh and was going to try to find Gerald. He needed a rest.
The knock on the door came again and so, irritated, he left his film and his salmon with caviar to open the door.
Outside a dishy brunette in a glitzy white dress met his eye. She introduced herself as Olinka and told him that she had been sent by an anonymous admirer of his that worked in the hotel. Olinka was a regular escort girl here and this man had decided to treat him to a nice evening with a gorgeous lady, knowing that he was a connoisseur of sweet ladies.
Thinking nothing of it, William invited Olinka in and ordered some more champagne. They must’ve talked for over an hour about Russian culture and American wines when Olinka suddenly began stripping naked. She was completely nude, when she began taking off William’s clothing and treated him to the most intense and glorious sexual night of his life. She had him perform from every possible position and insert his gender into every possible nook and cranny. Every hole was filled, every sperm was counted.
They had slept in each other’s arms up until the wee hours of the morning, when Olinka left the bed to fetch some more sparkling wine. She returned to toast to his glorious and quite long manhood, but as he drank up the contents of the glass everything went black and William found himself falling asleep and losing control.
His loss of nerve was too vast to place in what kind of a dispatch he was, but he knew that he was lying down. His cheek was pressed against a padded surface and it felt uncomfortable.
He managed to open his eyes and what he saw was the back of a car seat. He had no idea who was sitting there in front, but voices from somewhere were faint and spoke in a strange language. It wasn’t Russian. French? Portugese?
The car was moving. The car seemed new, but he guessed this to be a van, because the voices were too distant to be right close by. The carriage was new, so my conclusion was that my kidnappers were well-to-do.
What was my last memory? he had been in bed with Olinka and she had brought him the bubblies. He had drunken it and… Oh, God. The Martini. She had drugged him. How did he get here?
They must’ve smuggled him out, faked a seizure or pretended to be doctors or something.
God only knew where he was.
He tried to move and then realized there was resistance.
He was tied with his hands behind his back. It was a thick rope and thick tape that held his hands together. Coughing, William realized that something was in his mouth. A cloth. Boy, they had stuffed an old rag into his mouth and taped it shut.
The feds had been right. These guys were professional killers.
The drivers were listening to music.
Bon Jovi. Then Cindy Lauper. Boyz 2 Men, MC Hammer. Europe. Dire Straits. They were fans of 80’s harmony. William must’ve laid there for a half hour listening to the music.
The guys began talking again, when one of them turned down the stereo. They blabbered something unintelligible.
William tried listening to their conversation.
It was French. He was in a car with two Frenchmen.
This certainly was international crime. Was he in France?
From what he could tell the topic was sports. William’s French was not too good, but the guy had spoken about a goal and a centre and the Spanish being slow.
Next, he saw a female hand with long red nails reach for my face. He didn’t have the time to see who the hand belonged to. The only thing he felt was that cloth in his face with a very odd smell. It was a chemical substance that reminded me of his high school days in chemistry class.
He inhaled the perfume of chloroform, recognizing the nail polish and the diamond rings on that hand before he fell asleep.
The last song he heard was the car radio producing tones by the Talking Heads. It was an old song.
They were singing: “We’re on the road to nowhere.”
The next time he woke up he was in a plane.
This time he was not tied up and taped together.
There was a bar right across from where he was sitting and Olinka was there mixing a drink. He sat up and shook his head, trying to shake off the headache he had. Olinka turned around and smiled, happy to see him awake. She walked over to him, gave him a long tongue kiss and told him that she would get her boss.
Her boss? Was this Jolesh?
A small, white haired man with a white dinner jacket came in through the door of another cabin. He sported a red scarf in his upper pocket and a flowery silk scarf around his neck. He looked like Noel Coward and walked like Liberace.
He seemed happy to see William, but William asked him why he had been brought here. He was told that his life had been saved.
The man introduced himself as Henri Rosseau and he was an art collector and wine merchant with the biggest wine company in the south of France. His personal mission was to capture Jolesh and destroy The Velvet Rose, which was the name of the underground organization that was destroying the art world. Rosseau loved art too much for that kind of thing to happen. Jolesh was turning the whole Russian fine art trade into a Saturday fairground of pervert smuggling and unclean thievery.
He had known Jolesh himself when he had been working in a vernissage in Paris. Somehow, Mishka began commuting with the mafia and soon enough he was one of them.
Then William politely asked why his life had been saved. Rosseau took a long look at Olinka and then said that he knew that he could get William with a pretty woman. Olinka was told to seduce William and then put sleeping inducements into his drink. Mishka had found out that William was in town and the C.I.A. had obviously not found out when he was going to strike.
Before he did, Rosseau wanted to avoid him being shot by some mafia bounty hunter. Rosseau was rich and with his assets he had staged a mock ambulance rescue with Olinka as a good friend that paid his bill and took his luggage along.
The ambulance drove to Rosseau private plane and off to the south of France, where a real plan would be laid out to capture Jolesh and rescue Gerald.
Where was Gerald? Was he not in Russia?
A CASE OF COMPOSITION - Part 1 of 2(Charles E.J. Moulton)
A CASE OF COMPOSITION
- a short story version of a novel in progress
I started working on the book in 2007. The short story is recent.
William Todd, sipping on his fifth brandy that night, sat in King Cole’s Bar. Munching on a salad and digesting a roll, the recent quarrel with his partner made everything in his stomach turn into clay. It all seemed cheap. Useless.
Gerald Brown’s lyricist and the second part of Broadway’s number one musical team went to King Cole’s in order to come up with good ideas for a new show. Liz Smith went just to see if he was in there and then there would be column in next day’s newspaper. She had first set the standard for calling him an Errol Flynn look-alike. Gerald then became Michael Caine. When a show flopped it became “the Flynn/Caine Mutiny”. If it was hit, it was a “Robin Hood–like rescue”.
The young, straight bachelor William taunted the gay, tied-up Gerald. A German dancer named Tim Schneider, who got to dance in all Todd and Brown shows despite his limited talent, enjoyed Gerald’s sensual company for many years, lived at the couple’s ranch, where the maid Rosita on orders kept a serious look out over Tim’s increasing drinking habits.
Of course, Liz Smith said that William Todd was gay. William always tried to disprove this to the press by being seen with a different dishy blonde at every reception. He tried to spread the word about his own erect manhood by being a womanizer. So, in more ways than one William was like the old Robin Hood interpreter. He drank, he had another mistress every week and he fought with his colleagues.
That day, the womanizer William, also known as Errol Flynn, was between women. The visit to the bar had been completely spontaneous and had been triggered by a ferocious fight between the lyricist and the composer over something as silly as a pen.
The pen that triggered the battle had been a gift from William’s ex-girlfriend, a famous Broadway singer named Marilyn Jones. She was celebrated as the new Patti LuPone and was now playing Fantine in Les Miserables on Broadway. Anything involving Marilyn was painful to the author.
William and Marilyn had broken up years ago after Marilyn’s wild and quite extravagant sex affair with William’s accountant in the couple’s own bedroom.
“Do my broad and you’ll never ever do my red tape!”
These were the lyricist’s famous last words after storming out onto the street and never dating Marilyn again.
Marilyn claimed to have had sex with the man because of having been neglected. William had never forgiven Marilyn, although he still loved her and they kept on phoning each other regardless of their former hatred. It was a difficult situation.
The pen was still a lucky charm and a sign of William’s confusion. William signed every contract with that pen and he wanted to have it with when he wrote every autograph.
Well, that evening the unthinkable happened. It was gone.
He had phoned Marilyn from Gerald’s Park Avenue flat that evening to discuss her participation in the new Todd and Brown show An Orchid Washed Ashore, a show about a rich widow that fell in love with a black servant and caused massive racial controversy in 1950’s Maryland. Marilyn was up for the role of the widow Jennifer.
As always, nervous William forgot the pen in Gerald’s immense study. It lay there on Gerald’s massive mahogany desk under Gerald’s massive reproduction of Rubens’ masterpiece from 1625 of Maria of Medici’s arrival on shore.
When William went back to Gerald’s music room, the composer was sitting by his white Steinway grand piano. He was punching some keys on his keyboard connected composition computer programme. It was a version of the lead song It will never be the Same from the upcoming show An Orchid Washed Ashore. The song was Jennifer’s hymn and was intended to show off Marilyn’s three octave range. It had about three different tempis and was written in four different keys. The problem was that William and Gerald had completely different views on how the song should end.
William said that it should segue into tender love scene with a low note and a pianissimo dynamic. Gerald, being the true British Elgar and Holst and Britten fan he was, felt that the scene really should end with a loud high G on a forte high note. Nobody coming to a musical would want to hear the title song end softly sung by the star.
The tense atmosphere became fighting, when Gerald suggested they sign Cameron MacIntosh’s contract for eventual CD – releases. Gerald called him a boring git for being so dependant on something as trivial as a pen.
William insisted he could only sign the contract with his pen. Gerald told him that he couldn’t let Marilyn go. How could he, Gerald answered? He was working with her all the time and so the memories were always there. They should get another soprano. William answered that if they dropped his ex-girlfriend Marilyn as a leading lady, Cameron would also drop his part of the deal.
The quarrel reached a climax when the two neurotic artists claimed not being able to work under these conditions. It all ended with William throwing foul words over Gerald’s massive amount of baroque art on the walls, telling him that Gerald wasn’t just gay. He was in love with fat ladies, because his hefty mother had raised him to become a sissy.
Gerald took an expensive Venetian vase and threw it against the penthouse door. It closed behind William as he stood in the hallway outside. He kept looking at the large black and white photos of gay icons like Celine Dion and Marlene Dietrich that hung in the white corridor. He stopped at Maria Callas and then turned around to speak with Gerald, but overheard Gerald talking to himself that William was an untalented, homophobic, secret fag with penis covet.
So, William stepped into his Rolls and drove to the bar.
It took him four more beers and a whiskey to roll on home.
William ended up drinking a bottle of rosé and falling asleep while Bogey told Bergman that he was looking at her kid and called her a sweetheart. William dreamt really weird dreams.
At eleven o’clock the next morning, the phone rang and woke the author up. William felt little trolls dancing the merengue in his shorts and spitting chilli on his cucumber.
To William’s sad realization, it was their lawyer George Markstein. A Jewish guy from Brooklyn looked like Jason Alexander in Seinfeld. He took care of their legal affairs from his office on 7th Avenue and kept on arriving at every important meeting to add a little official flair to the engagement.
“Did I wake you up?” George laughed at the other end. “You sound like you were humped by jellyfish in a tank of whiskey.”
“Not far from the truth” William giggled. “I got very drunk last night after enjoying a screaming row with the gay version of Michael Crawford.”
“Hey, Crawford is gay,” the lawyer continued matter-of-fact. “Gerald make trouble again? Did he throw any old rave reviews of yours at you again? Can I make money on this?”
I chuckled. “Uhmm, no. It was about a pen.”
George paused. “A pen? What is this?” The small New York Jew started squirting jokes like a Queens version of the three mousequeteers. “So you throw pens at each other? Is this a new act of yours? Wait a second, this is a new show, right? The Pen – a great new show by Todd and Brown. Sorry, Brown and Todd.”
“Knock it off, man” I said. “It was painful yesterday.” I sighed. “I am a little nervous about his reaction.”
George said that when he had come to Gerald’s penthouse that morning to deliver a contract Gerald had already disappeared, leaving a note behind him taped to his penthouse door. It simply alleged that he needed a vacation and left all responsibility to his partner William Todd and their mutual lawyer George Markstein. What was strange was that the writing wasn’t his, but the autograph was.
Quickly, still feeling dizzy from all the booze, William got dressed reeking of after shave and sweat and walked over to the penthouse where George was waiting.
All the way up in the elevator William had the nauseous feeling of being stuck in a time warp. Seeing what was going on, it turned into a heavy slaughter mystery.
George had been right. The letter had been written by someone else. It was untypical for Gerald to let anyone else do anything for him, because he would be obsessive about control. Letting an unknown stranger take care of something as personal as a letter was almost impossible.
George and William checked Gerald’s last phone calls. He had called their agent Marvin Klein, Marilyn, Cameron MacIntosh’s office and Tim Schneider at the ranch. The last call this morning had been at 9:02 to a bar named The Russian Drag Queen in Greenwich Village. It was open all hours gay club where Gerald often went to eat, hear new singers or look at art.
The owner, a man from St. Petersburg named Vladimir Fomenko, said that Gerald had called the tavern at nine this morning and spoken to a temporarily regular customer Russian named Sergei Karpoff. The gentleman had been eating breakfast at that time of the morning, whilst living at The George Brent Hotel on Fifth Avenue. If William wanted more information, he better come himself and bring a bottle of Ararat Brandy and some Gauloises cigarettes.
It was strange to hear someone ask for booze in order to give information. There was obviously something else going on here.
William and George knew when they were being bribed, but William insisted that he wanted to find out what this was about. George didn’t like it at all, but had to tag along. They called all the other people that Gerald had telephoned this morning and not even his boyfriend Tim knew that he had been planning on going away. So, something must have happened at 9:02 that morning. Something that triggered Sergei Karpoff to come over to Gerald and convince him to leave. But what?
George insisted on coming with him and William couldn’t say he was unhappy about that.
William went to his favourite booze retailer and got the brandy, but the cigarettes were a different matter. They had been banned in the U.S. and so getting a pack was difficult. Finally, William found a whole bunch of packs in lower Manhattan in a discount store.
George really thought William was crazy. Here was this famous guy, who spent all day looking for cigarettes. Did anybody care?
The bar they arrived at in the village two hours later was very glitzy and trashy. It was the perfect place for an upper ten gay like Gerald. Convincing Fomenko to actually tell them what had happened this morning was not easy. The man Gerald had spoken to this morning had probably been a member of the Russian art mafia. He could not promise that this was true, but Fomenko was an art collector himself and all they had been talking about for the last two weeks was art. There was huge, surging reproduction market in Russia at the moment and at the fore front was an international smuggler named Mishka Jolesh.
Gerald had met Sergei Karpoff at an art fair that Fomenko had arranged in his bar two weeks ago. The composer was very interested in reproductions and bought two Rubens copies. Karpoff asked him about one of the paintings and tried to convince him that he could buy it for a higher price.
Gerald was adamant. This got the two men to talking and it became obvious that Karpoff was more than sexually interested in Gerald, but also that he had a hidden agenda: getting him into bed and then grabbing a hold of the artwork.
There was an instant where Gerald was eating breakfast with Karpoff and mentioned something about special reproduction of Raphael’s School of Athens. Apparently, something clicked in Karpoff. He had been serving them breakfast when they started talking very passionately about a Canadian reproduction. Karpoff was all ears and extremely interested in seeing the reproduction by a certain Raphael expert from Ontario.
Fomenko couldn’t really say what they had been talking about, only that Karpoff had been very agitated when he left in a hurry this morning to go see Gerald. He said: “I’m gonna get that son-of-a-bitch.”
That made Fomenko actually agree to tell William the truth when he called. Only for a price, however. The Russian art mafia were efficient and their methods were very prompt.
William and George left the bar for The George Brent Hotel in a hurry after hearing Fomenko’s wild stories. When they arrived, they had apparently just missed Karpoff and Gerald. They had left for JFK airport just minutes ago.
A car chase began that took the writer and the counsellor to the Aeroflot counter of the airport.
Yes, Gerald and Sergei had bought a ticket. No, William and George could not buy one. The flight was full. Was there another flight to Russia? No, in two hours there was a flight to Moscow.
William and George tried to convince the law enforcement that this was a constabulary matter and that a man had been kidnapped. Had the matter been registered? Was the man really kidnapped or was it a question of opinion? No, this was just a suspected kidnapping matter and hadn’t yet evolved. It was, however, a kidnapping, because they were dealing with a heavy neurotic that rarely left the U.S. anymore. Meanwhile, Karpoff was getting away.
By the time George had convinced the police chief of the airport to go after the kidnapper, the plane with Karpoff and Gerald had probably already lifted off the ground. They maintained that they were people of prominence and needed exceptional attention. To this the security officers responded that they knew who William and Gerald were, but that this didn’t change the law.
After checking the countless other planes leaving for Russia, they discovered that Karpoff had bought ten tickets and there was no way of knowing which plane he was taking.
They ran through the airport to find out where the man was who had abducted Gerald, but it was all to no avail. Karpoff had disappeared. One of them five planes that was flying to one of the cities in Russia might carry Gerald and Sergei Karpoff.
The airport security department immediately called the airports in Russia in order to notify the authorities. The effect was close to zero. No one had seen anyone even resembling the two men.
The next step was obvious: go to the police.
The chief of the Central Park Precinct had an uncanny and very politically correct name: Thomas Jefferson. This man was the namesake of America’s third president, the 19th century author of the declaration of independence. However, the latter Jefferson would fight for more proper equal rights than the earlier man. They stood before a black man with a very wide smile and a huge body, who told them that they were dealing with a special brand of a Russian art mafia that stole and reproduced art. These were international thieves that searched for reproductions world wide and sold them on black markets.
Their official agenda, in the form of a Russian art dealer named Mishka Jolesh, consisted of St. Petersburg’s most prominent art gallery. Jolesh had as well been so clever about the art smuggling business that he could not be caught. The mafia boss had been smuggling diamonds inside art for years. Interpol had found out only by coincidence and now the entire world of espionage and secrecy was out to reveal Mishka’s massive conglomerate of crime.
Chief Jefferson’s guess was that Gerald by mistake somehow had acquired an art work with hidden diamonds built into the canvas. That was usually the place they kept the jewellery.
In some rare cases diamonds were embedded into the painting itself. These paintings were priceless.
William remembered that Gerald and he had bought an art work from a Polish artist in Austin. His name had been Janusz Kimilski. Gerald had apparently already bought many of his paintings, considering him the world’s greatest reproductive artist. Gerald had been very hurt when William laughed at this comment.
The thing was that Janusz Kimilski sold equally many reproductions to the Russian dealers that he came across at Vladimir Fomenko’s bar The Russian Drag Queen in Greenwich Village. It seemed that, without even finding out, Gerald had come in the line of fire. He was in the middle of a fierce mafia war. He was a virginal middle man, if you will, in a slaughter.
Jefferson supposed that Kimilski was one of the leading operatives in Jolesh’s opposing mafia team. He painted for Mishka and then partook in searching for the same art that entailed expensive diamonds. These artworks with frames entailing stolen jewellery had by mistake been sold to many buyers.
Now two opposing groups were trying to trace these lost paintings with Gerald’s help. What in fact had happened on that day was that Gerald had somehow found out, maybe by e-mail or telephone, where the art had landed or which buyer had the paintings.
Sergei Karpoff did find out and rushed over to get Gerald and fly
with him to Russia. Jefferson was sure that Karpoff and Gerald were
already criss-crossing the globe trying to found the lost treasure. The problem was that Gerald already knew too much and had to tag along. He couldn’t be killed just yet. His knowledge was his saving grace.
The C.I.A. was told about the episode and William was told that nothing could be done to stop him from going to Russia to find Gerald. He just had to know that he was endangering himself in going there, if he did. The C.I.A. would probably take him into custody if he got in their way.
George urged William to stay put, but William knew where he belonged. A week later William flew alone to St. Petersburg. He checked into the famous Grand Hotel. It was, even by his wealthy standards, the most luxurious hotel that he had seen.
Built in the 1820s and housing rather Tolstoy worthy rooms, it had been the home to George Bernard Shaw, Maxim Gorky and Tchaikovsky. It looked like a palace and the red carpets lined the floors. The restaurant had the best caviar in the city. The hotel had ballrooms with chandeliers.
He walked into his suite, threw the keys on the table and turned on the TV. The first thing he checked were the rooms. He called room service and ordered dinner and soon enough a very nice young porter came and said that even in Russia they had heard of him and there were several people that wanted his autograph.
William was flattered and gave the man some signed photos of himself and then went back to his TV with his food.
He had finished his third glass of Krim Sekt, when a knock came on the door. William urged not to open. He was going on a hunt tomorrow for Mishka Jolesh and was going to try to find Gerald. He needed a rest.
The knock on the door came again and so, irritated, he left his film and his salmon with caviar to open the door.
Outside a dishy brunette in a glitzy white dress met his eye. She introduced herself as Olinka and told him that she had been sent by an anonymous admirer of his that worked in the hotel. Olinka was a regular escort girl here and this man had decided to treat him to a nice evening with a gorgeous lady, knowing that he was a connoisseur of sweet ladies.
Thinking nothing of it, William invited Olinka in and ordered some more champagne. They must’ve talked for over an hour about Russian culture and American wines when Olinka suddenly began stripping naked. She was completely nude, when she began taking off William’s clothing and treated him to the most intense and glorious sexual night of his life. She had him perform from every possible position and insert his gender into every possible nook and cranny. Every hole was filled, every sperm was counted.
They had slept in each other’s arms up until the wee hours of the morning, when Olinka left the bed to fetch some more sparkling wine. She returned to toast to his glorious and quite long manhood, but as he drank up the contents of the glass everything went black and William found himself falling asleep and losing control.
His loss of nerve was too vast to place in what kind of a dispatch he was, but he knew that he was lying down. His cheek was pressed against a padded surface and it felt uncomfortable.
He managed to open his eyes and what he saw was the back of a car seat. He had no idea who was sitting there in front, but voices from somewhere were faint and spoke in a strange language. It wasn’t Russian. French? Portugese?
The car was moving. The car seemed new, but he guessed this to be a van, because the voices were too distant to be right close by. The carriage was new, so my conclusion was that my kidnappers were well-to-do.
What was my last memory? he had been in bed with Olinka and she had brought him the bubblies. He had drunken it and… Oh, God. The Martini. She had drugged him. How did he get here?
They must’ve smuggled him out, faked a seizure or pretended to be doctors or something.
God only knew where he was.
He tried to move and then realized there was resistance.
He was tied with his hands behind his back. It was a thick rope and thick tape that held his hands together. Coughing, William realized that something was in his mouth. A cloth. Boy, they had stuffed an old rag into his mouth and taped it shut.
The feds had been right. These guys were professional killers.
The drivers were listening to music.
Bon Jovi. Then Cindy Lauper. Boyz 2 Men, MC Hammer. Europe. Dire Straits. They were fans of 80’s harmony. William must’ve laid there for a half hour listening to the music.
The guys began talking again, when one of them turned down the stereo. They blabbered something unintelligible.
William tried listening to their conversation.
It was French. He was in a car with two Frenchmen.
This certainly was international crime. Was he in France?
From what he could tell the topic was sports. William’s French was not too good, but the guy had spoken about a goal and a centre and the Spanish being slow.
Next, he saw a female hand with long red nails reach for my face. He didn’t have the time to see who the hand belonged to. The only thing he felt was that cloth in his face with a very odd smell. It was a chemical substance that reminded me of his high school days in chemistry class.
He inhaled the perfume of chloroform, recognizing the nail polish and the diamond rings on that hand before he fell asleep.
The last song he heard was the car radio producing tones by the Talking Heads. It was an old song.
They were singing: “We’re on the road to nowhere.”
The next time he woke up he was in a plane.
This time he was not tied up and taped together.
There was a bar right across from where he was sitting and Olinka was there mixing a drink. He sat up and shook his head, trying to shake off the headache he had. Olinka turned around and smiled, happy to see him awake. She walked over to him, gave him a long tongue kiss and told him that she would get her boss.
Her boss? Was this Jolesh?
A small, white haired man with a white dinner jacket came in through the door of another cabin. He sported a red scarf in his upper pocket and a flowery silk scarf around his neck. He looked like Noel Coward and walked like Liberace.
He seemed happy to see William, but William asked him why he had been brought here. He was told that his life had been saved.
The man introduced himself as Henri Rosseau and he was an art collector and wine merchant with the biggest wine company in the south of France. His personal mission was to capture Jolesh and destroy The Velvet Rose, which was the name of the underground organization that was destroying the art world. Rosseau loved art too much for that kind of thing to happen. Jolesh was turning the whole Russian fine art trade into a Saturday fairground of pervert smuggling and unclean thievery.
He had known Jolesh himself when he had been working in a vernissage in Paris. Somehow, Mishka began commuting with the mafia and soon enough he was one of them.
Then William politely asked why his life had been saved. Rosseau took a long look at Olinka and then said that he knew that he could get William with a pretty woman. Olinka was told to seduce William and then put sleeping inducements into his drink. Mishka had found out that William was in town and the C.I.A. had obviously not found out when he was going to strike.
Before he did, Rosseau wanted to avoid him being shot by some mafia bounty hunter. Rosseau was rich and with his assets he had staged a mock ambulance rescue with Olinka as a good friend that paid his bill and took his luggage along.
The ambulance drove to Rosseau private plane and off to the south of France, where a real plan would be laid out to capture Jolesh and rescue Gerald.
Where was Gerald? Was he not in Russia?
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