“—what I said. You’re rude. Gimme your mother’s phone number! I’m gonna tell her on you!”
“Whattaya gonna do—get Putin to slip an isotope into my cappuccino?”
As covertly as possible, Fleischmann lowered his hand to the crotch of his pants and tried to scratch the itch of his herpes pustules. He could never do it covertly enough to fool Magdalena, however. Every two minutes at least, Fleischmann shot one of his sixty-three-year-old looks at her… pregnant with meaning… and lust. Norman’s diagnosis was that they were one and the same. The meaning was… lust. The very sight of a gorgeous girl like her was live pornography for a porn addict like Fleischmann… better than a strip club. Gross as they might be, Magdalena loved those looks. Those pregnant lustful looks she commanded from every sort of man—she loved it, loved it, loved it. First they looked at her face—Norman said her knowing lips insinuated ecstasy, even when she didn’t have the faintest smile. Then they looked at her breasts—her somehow perfect breasts. She was aware of it all the time! Then she would see them searching her crotch… expecting to find what, in God’s name?
All the old men in this wriggling infestation of maggots… if she cared to walk up and down and cock her hips before them… their riches… they’d melt! They dreamed of… depositing them into… her.
It was as if one of those storybook fairies children love so much had waved her wand over Miami… and—Wanderflash!—turned it into Miami Basel… The spell lasted no more than one week, one magical week every December… when the Miami Basel “art fair” went up in the Miami Convention Center… and swells from all over the United States, England, Europe, Japan, even Malaysia, even China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, even South Africa, todo el mundo, came down from the sky in swarms of private planes… to buy expensive contemporary art… or to see the swells buying it… to immerse themselves in their mental atmosphere of art and money… to breathe the same air they did… in short, to be where things are happening… until the fairy waved her wand again a week later and—Wanderflash!—they disappeared… the art from all over the world, the private planes from all over the world, the swell people who had descended from the sky from all over the world, and—poof!—every trace of sophistication and worldliness was gone.
At this very moment, however, all these creatures remained under the fairy’s spell.
Miami Basel wouldn’t open to the public until the day after tomorrow… but to those in the know, those on the inside, Miami Basel had already been a riot of cocktail receptions, dinner parties, after-parties, covert cocaine huddles, inflamed catting around for going-on three days. Almost anywhere they were likely to enjoy a nice little status boost from the presence of celebrities—movie, music, TV, fashion, even sports celebrities—who knew nothing about art and didn’t have time to care. All they wanted was to be… where things were happening. For them and for the insiders, Miami Basel would be over the moment the first foot of the first clueless member of the general public touched the premises.
Magdalena would have remained clueless herself without Maurice Fleischmann. She had never even heard of Miami Basel until Maurice invited her, along with Norman, to the fair… at Norman’s prodding. Socializing with a patient was very much frowned upon in psychiatric practice. The psychiatrist’s effectiveness depended in no small part upon his assuming a godly stance far above the patient’s place in the world, no matter what it might be. The patient must be dependent upon his paid god, not the other way around. But Norman had Maurice mesmerized. He thought his “recovery” from his “disease” depended entirely upon Norman, in spite of the fact—or maybe because of the fact—that Norman kept telling him that he was not suffering from a disease but a weakness. For his part, Maurice felt rather special taking Norman around, because Norman was on television a lot and was seen by so many people in Miami as a celebrity. Nobody would suspect that Fleischmann was Norman’s patient. They were two well-known men who traveled in the same circles, at the same altitude. What could be remarkable about that?
Every day Fleischmann and his driver, a little Ecuadorian named Felipe, had picked up Norman and Magdalena from the Lincoln Suites, after Norman’s last appointment, in a big black Escalade SUV with dark-tinted windows. The first stop,