the faulty scribes of memory, he honestly couldn’t recall the last time he’d been laid; and self-pleasuring—a miserable tonic for the palsied and lame—had been but a limp handshake for as long as he could remember.
In the end, drink became his favorite friend, and the tang not of flesh but of Schweppes and Bombay gin all but came alive on his tongue a half block before he arrived at the palace gate.
Amazing what anticipating a stiff one can do for you, how it can tease with a single imaginary scent. After all, look what poured out of Proust after tasting a simple madeleine. Birk figured the juniper flourish of gin might serve him equally well, if he ever picked up the pen again. He supposed he could give the world of letters a real boost, if he were of such a mind; they were in need of his reserves.
Meanwhile, his driver, sweat spilling off his back in disgustingly swollen streams, brought the rickshaw to Birk’s destination. But the man had the ill grace to pant like a cart dog. A tip, a tip, that’s what he wants. Well, fuck me.
Birk groaned loudly as he lifted his calcium-sapped bones from the thinly padded seat. He paid and even tipped handsomely, leaving the little native smiling. But then all those rickshaw drivers in Saigon had flashed rows of betel-stained teeth before blowing you straight to hell.
“Rick Birk,” he announced dramatically in his sonorous voice at the palace gate, giving an imperious flick of his hand to the guard. His name ought to have guaranteed admission. But this slack-skinned brown man wasn’t impressed. Almost as bad, he wore what could plausibly have been a bunny suit. The one-piece design seemed more appropriate for toddler wear; it was the color of cheap Easter eggs and had epaulets as large and floppy as rabbit ears. The man raised his hand to keep Birk at bay. Then he entered a gaudily decorated guardhouse with a pink roof, turquoise door, and glass so old and heat-stricken it looked like it would shatter if you sneezed. Birk watched him place a call on a landline. After a few moments he nodded and hung up before returning to send Birk, without escort, to the towering porte cochere where another bunny-suited brown bugger opened the door to the palace’s impressively large reception room.
A wonderfully lithe Indian woman in a red sari led the reporter up a winding staircase to the minister’s office. The rear view was enticing as the rounded cheeks of her bottom glanced temptingly against the shiny fabric. Never had Birk felt so strongly that youth was wasted on the young. What he wouldn’t give to be thirty-five again, with a broad, brilliant smile. Back in the long ago, women like Miss Sari had led him on just such a meandering path to their bedrooms in just such a flirty manner. Just once more, for God’s sake.
At least she was eye candy. The minister’s office lacked all appeal. The walls were white and stark, no more encumbered with style or flourish than the sapped religion they believed in. Wait, he spotted a crescent and a star, and some mumbo-jumbo lettering that might have been Maldivian in origin—or from the moon, for all Birk knew or cared. These Muslims were a boorish lot, positively thirteenth century.
Another look around was a cause for real grief: not a drop of gin. No tonic. Not even a single lonely lime in the minister’s office. Water? She offered him water? Whales shit in water.
“The new austerity?” he asked Sari archly, who might have been a secular holdover in her sleek red dress. But she didn’t favor him with so much as a smile as she left.
Birk was old school enough to carry a silver flask neatly curved to fit an aging gent’s not-so-nimble frame. And as soon as the door shut behind his comely escort, he nipped the elixir that he loved so much.
He’d no sooner felt the gin’s first soothing effects when Minister of Defense Hassan Darby entered, a short man with a long beard and the faltering steps of a rickets-stricken midget. His excessively large brown suit didn’t help, cuffs overrunning his wrists like starving tribesmen laying siege to the gates of a refugee camp.
“Mr. Birk. So sorry to keep you waiting. It seems we have so many luminaries today that I have only ten minutes for you.”
“Luminaries?” It didn’t pass Birk unnoticed that he hadn’t been included in that breath,