his fingertip twice and held the thing to his ear and said, “Cat.” It was a command, not telephone manners. “Call Camacho—right now. I want him in my office ASAP.”
19
The Whore
Magdalena woke up in a hypnopompic state. Something was stroking her. It caused no alarm, however, just a semiconscious bewilderment amidst her struggle to turn her lights on. By the time it slid up her mons pubis and her abdomen and began dwelling upon the nipple of her left breast, she had put it all together in a picture, even though her eyes remained closed. She and Sergei lay naked in his outsized bed in his great duplex in Sunny Isles—and she couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe a man his age could regenerate over and over, before they had finally gone to sleep. Now she opened her eyes, and with a single glance at the gap where a set of almost comically magnificent curtains came together, she could tell it was still black out. They couldn’t have been asleep more than a couple of hours—and obviously he was ready to go at it again. The Korolyov Museum of Art… She was in bed with a famous Russian oligarch. Todo el mundo knew who he was and how handsome he was. His body impinged upon hers, and his hand was stroking her here… and there… and there and there and there, and she despaired. She was a whore for the Korolyov Museum of Art in the body of an oligarch, an alien who spoke English with a heavy accent. But then the tips of her breasts became erect on their own, and the flood in her loins washed morals, despair, and all other abstract assessments away in a cloud of some sort of divine cologne of his. Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was eagerly swallowing it swallowing it swallowing it with the saddle’s own lips and maw—all this without a word. But then he began moaning and punctuating the moans with an occasional faux-agonized exclamation in Russian. It sounded like “Zhyss katineee!” He was amazing. He seemed to be able to last forever, so long that sounds finally came from her lips involuntarily… “Ah… ah… ahh… ahhh… Ahhhhhhh” as she climaxed over and over… When at last he was just lying next to her, she was able to think again. The clock on his bedside table said 5:05 a.m. Was she a whore? No! This was the modern sequence of love!—of romance! If anything, he was crazy about her. He was ready to love her to death. He couldn’t get enough of her, which meant herself, too, her spirit, her uniqueness as a person, her soul. Just looking at her, wanting her, yielding himself totally to her, wanting to have her every waking moment—and unwaking moment, too, obviously—Dios mío, she was so tired, so exhausted, she wanted to submerge herself in sleep—but then she had a vision of breakfast with him. Maybe they would be in terry cloth robes. He had some luxurious terry cloth robes hanging in the bathroom… the two of them having breakfast at a little table, looking out at the ocean, looking at each other, talking languorously, laughing at little things, their entire beings suffused with the sweetness, the dreaminess made possibly by, yes, carnal divine feelings that are the… the… the distillation of things that cannot be expressed in mere words, this perfect yielding to—¡Dios mío! what was that?!—P l i n g pling pling p l i n g p l i n g p l i n g pling pling p l i n g p l i n g p l i n g pling pling p l i n g p l i n g pling pling p l i n g p l i n g—Sergei rolled over and reached toward his bedside table—toward his iPhone. The music was his phone’s soft and soothing ring P l i n g pling pling p l i n g p l i n g p l i n g p l i n g pling pling—and she knew that music… but from where?… Ahh! from many years ago! Twice her mother had taken her at Christmastime to a ballet for children. What was it called? All she could think of was “The Dance of the Sugar Thumbs”… but that couldn’t be it—“The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”! That’s what it was!