said under her breath as she crawled out from under the covers and stood up. Her heart was hammering away. She had never felt more humiliated in her life. Sergei’s sadistic chess master at Gogol’s was nothing compared to the Master himself. For a moment she stood stock-still. In a wall mirror she could see a beautiful girl standing there stark naked in a huge over-elegant bedroom decorated in what was meant to be a grand manner but wound up looking more fussy and finicky than anything else… with its swags and antique chairs and chests and a fleet of deep-purple draperies pulled back by ridiculous gold-embroidered pulls into velvet folds as deep as a creek. That naked girl in the mirror looked more like a little whore than any girl she had ever beheld, and now the slut was supposed to gather up her cheap, trashy, puta-cutie clothes and get the hell out of here… now that she’s been consumed like a soufflé or cigar, and Vladimir… has instructions to throw the trash out.
In the bathroom there were so many mirrors the little bitch could see her bare whore’s ass and boobs from every conceivable angle. Fortunately, she had worn Amélia’s simple black dress for last night… yeah, so simple it was open in front down to here in a wide V… and sure, she could make her exit by daylight inconspicuously, since people could only see the inner halves of her boobs, and each nipple would be covered by a ribbon’s width of the dress’s black faux-silk cloth.
The pumps on her feet were scooped low and made of black satin with heels as high as they came, and they came very high this year. She looked like a tower of sex on tiptoes. Oh, well, no reason not to top it all off with some rake-a-cheek raspberry lipstick… and enough black eyeshadow to make her eyes look like a pair of glistening orbs floating upon a pair of concupiscent mascara pools.
She put her Big handbag over her shoulder, this year’s Big, of course, made of the very best black faux-python. She was about to walk out of the room, concentrating on how to contain her resentment of that robot with the shaved head, Vladimir, and enervated and humiliated by what he knew about her night and this morning… ::::::Sergei! You really are a bastard! You know that?:::::: She swore she would let him know that if she were ever so unfortunate as to run into him again. ::::::How could you possibly let those two Russian aborigines into the room?:::::: Was that perversity? No, it was worse than that. He had gotten what he wanted. He had fucked her. So now she was just a piece of equipment lying around. And what does a piece of equipment care about how things look? Since when have pieces of equipment started having a moral sense that picks up feelings such as modesty?… Or, to put it another way, since when have whores started to feel like anything more than whores?
Now Magdalena was really angry. She noticed the newspaper lying on the floor by the chair where Sergei had sat down to read it. She picked it up and scanned the lower half-a-page he had been reading… in the Herald’s Section C, “Arts and Entertainment.”
Most of it was taken up by an article with a headline topped by a small, dense line of type in all-capital letters: REALIST SPEAKS OUT.
It began, “If laughs could kill, every prominent modern artist from Picasso to Peter Doig would have died in a pile this week on the floor of the Wynwood studio of a member of the most endangered species in the entire art world: a realist painter.
“Big, hearty, belly-laughing Russian-born Igor Drukovich is not the best-known artist in Miami, but he might be the most colorful.”
Magdalena wondered ::::::“Belly-laughing?” What does it mean, “belly-laughing”?:::::: buzz… buzz… buzz… she read on. This Drukovich keeps tossing down shots of some vodka concoction he’s dreamed up. Now he’s saying, “Picasso can’t draw”… If he, Drukovich couldn’t draw any better than Picasso, he’d start a new movement and call it Cubism… And what was that supposed to mean? She didn’t pause to figure it out… buzz… buzz… buzz… three Russian artists she’d never heard of… Mal-a-who?… At least she’d heard of Picasso… Whoever wrote this thing obviously thinks all this art and culture stuff is just fascinating… Magdalena glanced at the byline… John Smith… Dios mío… that same name