want to include me. I can show you around. Shez and I are business partners. Where is he?"
"Shez is male?" Grizelle sounded both surprised and condescending.
She eyed the polished chrome, copper, and gold metallic walls and shelves of semiprecious stone jars. A similar display of gilded wine bottles topped an ebony-and-turquoise bar on another wall.
"I should have guessed," she added.
"I wouldn't call Shez a 'girly man' to his face," I warned her.
Looking around without engaging my reflections too much, I saw a surprisingly modest space, part bar and part boutique, just as I'd envisioned, but unattended. I smelled the pine, sesame, and almond oils used in Shezmou's potions, though not the castor oil, thank goodness. Methought Chez Shez needed a more fashion-forward signature scent. Time for that later.
Then a glass-beaded curtain behind the counter shimmied and remained swaying like a belly dancer's skirt at the entrance of a slight young woman wearing nothing more than a mahogany spray tan, a tissue-thin strapless white-linen sheath, and an Urban Decay "smoky eye" to die for.
The curtains' colored beads echoed the red, blue, and green glass on wide ancient Egyptian collars. Their gentle clicking reminded me of the waist-circling, oversize rosaries the older nuns at Our Lady of the Lake convent school had worn ... and the sound of the millions of flesh-eating beetles occupying the Karnak underworld.
"Are you Mr. Mou's one p.m. appointments?" the girl asked. Her eye-whites dazzled as her focus darted between all three of us.
Mr. Mou? Irma interjected. The quick start-up forced our foreign friend Shezmou to employ one of the dimmer bulbs on the marquee.
I was inclined to cut the young woman slack. She was barely twenty, not a ripe old lady of twenty-four like me.
"Mr. Souci?" she inquired hopefully, nailing the only man in the room.
"At your service," he said smoothly. He knew no other way to deliver a line to a female. "You can call me 'San.'"
Oh, please! Irma was hopping annoyed, and so was I. The girl was going into standing swoon mode at one glimpse of Sansouci's deep-set green eyes and one sentence from his even deeper hypnotic voice. Vampire, dearie, and the kind that feeds on women.
"Ms. ... Gray Zelle?" She next fastened a hopeful hazel eye on me, since I looked a lot less dangerous than Grizelle.
I stepped politely aside.
The young woman took one look at Grizelle's haughty carnivore expression and fastened her gaze on me again for dear life. "And you are?"
"Ms. Street, but you can call me Delilah. What's your name?"
"Fawn Schwartz."
"Well, Fawn, I am Mr. Mou's silent partner."
"You're, uh, talking."
"'Silent partner' is a business expression. Shez wants to see me first. Alone. Trust me."
Sansouci raised an eyebrow. Grizelle lifted a sneering upper lip to showcase her carnivore canines. I was glad to ditch the pair when Fawn parted the clicking curtains and I ducked through. Irma and I.
The shop front looks promising but could use some hipper upgrades, she told me.
At this point, merchandising was hardly my main concern. If Christophe, aka Snow, and Cicereau were battling for an interest in Chez Shez, I wanted to make sure they had to deal with me, which both would loathe. I had a feeling the real silent partner in this setup would like that just fine.
The fluorescent-lit manufacturing area was much bigger than the storefront. Shezmou was working his grape press, the sinewy arm and back muscles of his cinnamon-hued torso gleaming with enough sweat to put him in a well-oiled Mr. Universe contest. Given the new female option of women ogling men these twenty-first-century days, as a product front man he was a Name Brand born.
At the click of the bead curtains his bewigged head turned. He gave the huge cheesecloth wad of grapes one last wring and wiped his reddened hands on a piece of white linen. One would be reminded of an ancient housewife, if one wished to commit suicide and say so.
"You are welcome," he addressed me, "O Deliverer of Shezmou, to my house of fine wines and oils. Thus Delilah has wrought, and I, Shezmou, deliver, reversing our roles as my own nature must also move from wine to balm, and eternal death to eternal life."
Gods require lots of wordy preamble, so I just smiled and nodded.
If I hadn't noticed that Shezmou's twenty-foot incised image on a Karnak Hotel subterranean pillar included actual wrist and ankle chains to keep him inanimate, Shez wouldn't have been freed from millennia of bondage. His captivity had ensured that the