Private Midnight

by Kris Saknussemm

  Genevieve was seated in a chair made of cattle horns and hide. She had cornrows in her black sheeny hair and a nutmeg tint to her skin. But I knew it was her. She was dressed in a corset of what looked like hyena fur, with wet leather caramel boots up to her thighs, with one of her Arabian Nights cigarettes in a long silver holder, writing with a quill pen in a vellum daybook. Beside her was another chair. Plastic. Form-molded in the shape of a naked woman. In between was an acrylic plinth with a round bowl on top. Inside the bowl skirted two goldfish.

  “Thank you, Mutza,” she murmured to the scar-faced African. “Put the mermaid in the rock garden. I have a rock garden behind the house, Sunny, composed of gallstones from my devoted admirers over the years. Your humble offering will fit in nicely.”

  It galled me to think she knew where the mermaid came from. Even trumped up the way she was, she was all truffles and caviar—tweezers and rubber tubing. I tried to relax. Then I noticed a table-sized guillotine.

  “I think you’re drinking again. Over near the parcheesi table.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Then why don’t you have a look at my gallery in the alcove. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  I felt like a beetle exploring the geometry of a firelog. The “gallery” contained a host of vanities—all featuring a suggestion of her face as I first saw it that blood sun evening what seemed like a lifetime ago. A section of tapestry showed a comet streaking over a group of peasants gathered outside a fortress. She stood at the edge of the moat. There was a watercolor of her and some European fop in a lace collar with a brindle whippet—and an engraving of her standing with some British officer in what looked like the Zulu Wars. Then a daguerreotype of her and the Indian Chief Geronimo … the cagey old warrior neutered and domesticated in a black top hat at the wheel of a Model T. In other photos she was posed with men like Sigmund Freud, Einstein, Babe Ruth, John D. Rockefeller and President Warren G. Harding.

  In still others, that had been made to look like society page shots, she was wearing a taffeta gown with a smashed and frail Judy Garland and a debonair James Mason at the Hollywood premiere of A Star is Born … drinking with Broadway Joe Namath in a tight cashmere sweater … clubbing with a heavily medicated Andy Warhol in a floor length mohair coat.

  From Niagara Falls to Negril, her image appeared, in and out of time. World’s Fairs, state funerals, tickertape parades and art happenings. There was even what purported to be a portrait of her signed by Picasso. It reminded me of the not so fun mirrors of Funland. But like everything she did, the illusions were well done. I ambled back into the main room to investigate her reading material.

  Whole shelves were devoted to esoteric and erotic art—and the erotic arts. Love potions. Deviant practices. Bondage and fetishisms. Then there were rows of medical texts. Anatomies, physiology, clinical neurology, the effects of captivity on behavior—as well as two well-referred-to works called Essential Psychopharmacology and The Combat Surgery Emergency Handbook. And of course, bless her black heart, she had good old DSM. But by far and away, the largest portion was devoted to magic and the occult. From phrenology to astrology, the Cabala—and a vast subsection devoted to alchemy.

  “Find anything interesting?” she queried, putting away her pen and ink, and blowing on the last page.

  “What’s all this alchemy stuff?”

  “I’ve been involved with alchemy for several hundred years,” she replied. “And I’ve achieved no little success. But the art is complex. Even for me.”

  “It looks like a lot of gibberish to me,” I told her. Her queen-throughout-the-ages act was starting to really irritate me—or scare me beyond all bounds.

  She laughed. “One of the more believable explanations regarding the origin of the word ‘gibberish’ links it to Geber or Jabbir, an 8th-century Arabian alchemist, who disguised his teachings in an intricate terminology that only the initiated could understand. I found him very entertaining and wonderful in bed.”

  “You’ve got a lot of … uh … interests,” I said, blowing her off.

  “I do,” she agreed. “Under various pseudonyms I’ve recently written a monograph on the Costa Rican poison dart frog and designed an ultrasonic pain field generator which has attracted the attention of both the CIA and NASA. Last year the Pittsburgh Symphony performed a symphony I composed and another piece is being presented in Hamburg.”

  I was about to fire something back when an object on the table between us caught my attention. It was only about eight inches high—an enameled and satin-covered egg-shaped ornament with a duck-like bill.

  “Tap on it gently,” Genevieve said.

  When I did, a remarkable transformation occurred. The enamel and satin finished exterior shed itself to reveal an armored plating. Stage by stage, the armored panels broke away and folded in. The interior sections were all ingeniously hinged pieces that seemed to endlessly unfold to form finally, a winged dragon of great majesty and ferocity. There was no mechanical process at work that I could discern, and the creature which emerged was unaccountably large relative to the initial egg.

  “A gift from the 18th century,” she said without expression. “One of the master artisans of Bavaria. There’s no metal at all used inside. Each of the internal pieces was derived from the artist’s own fingernails, saved, carved and polished after being melded together in an arcane process he invented. It’s the only one of its kind. It took him his whole life to make—and has the doubly unusual capability of retracting or re-enfolding itself, and will do so soon, of its own accord. Now come sit down with me.”

  I crossed over and sat down on the naked plastic woman—which squeaked beneath me. There was an oil painting on the wall opposite, filled with dark, sinuous shapes. I knew it was an erotic scene of sorts, but it was hard to tell exactly what the figures were doing, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  Genevieve blew a smoke ring, then plunged the cherry of the cigarette into the softness of her thigh. I squawked in spite of myself.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” she smiled, as the smell of burnt flesh rose. “It’s just my way of regaining clarity. Beethoven, it’s said, would refresh his attention by thrusting his hands into ice cold water. Houdini, who could escape from almost anything except his own impotence, would swallow and regurgitate a tiny key.”

  “I usually just hit myself in the head with a big hammer,” I said frowning.

  “A big hammer? Like the one Jake hurled into the sheetrock? Well, you may need it. Because I want to discuss with you the issue of muliebrity.”

  “What’s that? I’ve never heard that word.” Jesus, she could play me.

  “I’m not surprised,” she answered, as the dragon began to close in on itself. “It’s the female equivalent of virility—the measure of female sexual potency and allure.”

  Where in hell she was steering me this time? Just the mention of the sheetrock got me spinning. She knew that.

  “Love is love and fun is fun. But it is always so quiet when the goldfish die,” she said with dark eyes aglow. “Do you know who said that?”

  “Not a clue,” I confessed. “Hugh Hefner on a rough morning?”

  “Ernest Hemingway. One of my favorite writers. A macho man and closet homosexual.” Then in one fluid motion, she reached over to the globe of water and plucked one of the goldfish from its gentle swim and tossed it on the floor at our feet.

  “Why are you always hectoring me?” I asked, noticing the dragon had folded itself all the way back into the egg.

  “Would you prefer to be rogered?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, Sunny,” she chuckled contemptuously. “I’m just breaking you down to build you up! We know what’s drawn you to me, but that’s what’s drawn me to you. That you have so much to break down—and so much to build with once the last wall collapses. Now get down on your knees and lick that goldfish up off the floor.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” she said with deadly politeness.<
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  “What if I said no?” I balked.

  She brought her right boot heel smashing down. “I believe you just did.”

  I glanced at the smear of fish on the floor. “You didn’t—I mean why …?”

  She looked up at me. Into me. With eyes full of beheadings and pageants.

  “All the pharaohs, kings, queens, emperors and sultans of consequence have understood that the most satisfying entertainments are those that come at the expense of other people,” she said. “Bread and circuses. You like them, Sunny. You go to a football game. You don’t feel diminished—you feel the players are well rewarded for performing for you. Your ticket buys you the illusion of temporary, sanitized and beneficent ownership.”

  “Why can’t they win for me then?” I grunted, trying to ignore the crushed fish. God, a little hint of ebony made her irresistible.

  “That would spoil the suspense, which is the real pleasure you’re leveraging. You would quickly lose interest. But you know from your police experience that sporting events are rigged all the time. Horse races, boxing matches. Falco and Ernie understood that very well. Money is the most obvious means of grading and therefore degrading other people. Sex is the most primal.”

  “What about violence?” I inquired, beginning to feel ready for some.

  “Sex is a special kind of violence—and money is an abstraction of both,” she answered. “Sex and money combined is the basis for almost all violence in the sense that you mean. Take the conflict between fundamentalist Islam and the West. You think religion’s driving it? Hardly! Land and oil—in other words, money. But most importantly, how men and women behave. Radical Muslims fear a shift in the paradigm of dominance and submission in their culture.”

  “You’re not saying women are in control—in the West?” Suddenly I could feel her fascinating me again. Fastening onto my mind. Changing and distorting everything.

  “Control is the most misunderstood word in existence,” she replied. “I don’t say women are in control in American society. But neither are men. There are priorities, inhibitions, prohibitions, enticements and rewards. There is no control. What’s at issue is dominance—and yes, I do say women are dominant.”

  “Then why aren’t there more female executives or political leaders?” I inquired, more than a little surprised by the line she was taking. It kind of snapped me out of my own spin.

  “Whether it’s the CEO of the Frontier Bank or the President of the United States, these are merely titles. They’re like boxes or containers.”

  She savored that last word and I flashed on Mr. Tanaka and his “program.”

  “You see the individuals occupying the containers and ignore the containers—the real nature of the power. You perceive positions of authority, forgetting that the authority isn’t inherent in the position—it’s been assigned to it by an elaborately negotiated process. The positions themselves can be divested of import.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” I said, although she was certainly leading me.

  “The alpha dog in a pack isn’t elected like a team captain or a candidate,” she answered. “Humans don’t like to think too directly about the natural order of the wild—and yet can’t escape it. So they’ve developed ways to quarantine and euphemize it. The Law of the Wild is modified through compromise, cooperation and often corruption—which makes the positions of authority you’re thinking about actually ways of limiting and managing power, rather than a license to deploy it.”

  “Put something in a box so you know where to find it?”

  “Or a cage. I think of societal institutions in terms of game reserves or zoos. True, there are more males on display. But that is so they exert less influence in the wild. There is less wild. Modern society overall is synonymous with the feminization of the species. That’s the whole point of society.”

  “Boy, my first wife Joan wouldn’t have agreed with that one bit,” I shrugged, thinking back to the chingazos we used to have. “She felt that women were completely oppressed.”

  For just a moment then it was like we were having some adult discussion after a foreign film at some espresso joint. But it wasn’t.

  “Many women believe that,” Genevieve agreed. “Of course, claiming oppression has always been a good way of gaining more power. And even genuinely feeling oppressed still isn’t any proof of actually being oppressed, especially not by some cohesive force in a systematic way. I’d never give males so much credit.”

  “I get that,” I nodded, coming back.

  “I call a spade a shovel, Sunny,” she shrugged. “And I’m very democratic in my disdain. I said women exert more dominance than they like to admit. They just don’t have the courage to be open about it and take responsibility for it. Motherhood, for instance, is the most ubiquitous and unquestioned form of domination there is.”

  It was the first time I’d ever heard some hint of private emotion in her voice.

  “So, now you have it in for mothers,” I grumped, trying to picture what kind of mother and father—what kind of upbringing she might’ve had. I couldn’t. Maybe the expression on my face betrayed my thoughts because she gave out a lilting laugh.

  “Don’t be so serious, my dear. Haven’t you ever played a game or had a debate with a female? Or has it been just rote sex and arguments with a few drinks in between?”

  “Mostly drinks and arguments … with some sex on the side,” I answered, wondering how true that really was. Too true probably.

  “Well, you need to have the sensuality of your mind awakened for what lies ahead, sweet Sunny,” she continued. “So, we together are going to explore the matter of seduction versus violence … the seductive nature of violence … and the subtle but potent violence of seduction.”

  She pointed the remote at the oil painting. The murky erotic scene disappeared, as if the whole thing including the frame had been only a detailed projection from behind. That section of the wall was now blank and sketched onto it appeared stick figures in charcoal, red and ochre, surrounded by the outlines of hands and primitive silhouettes of beasts. Deer, antelope.

  “Consider this scenario from the deep past,” she said, as the central humanlike figures came alive to her words.

  “Male and female mates are confronted by a larger, aggressive male. What do they do? The male alone cannot defeat the stranger. The female is physically weaker than both of the males, but working with her mate, the contest would at least be more equal. Do husband and wife take up arms together and try to defeat the intruder?”

  “I guess that depends on if they have kids, or if the female’s pregnant,” I said.

  “Let’s say they don’t. How do you imagine this ancestral scene playing out?”

  “I think if the smaller guy can’t talk or bluff his way out of it—and if they can’t run away—he’s in bad shape. He’s either going to get killed or be driven off and the bigger, stronger guy is going to get the female,” I answered.

  “Get the female,” she repeated. “Does the female join in and help her mate fight?”

  The figures seemed to freeze as if awaiting direction.

  “It’s possible but I wouldn’t bet on it,” I replied. “I think the female makes the decision that the stranger might win whether she takes part or not, and she figures she might get better treatment from the victor if she doesn’t attack him. Maybe even pretend to like him—let him have his way. If he’s not a pig, then maybe she’s better off than she was before. Less likely to be attacked again. If he’s really bad news, she’d do better waiting until the dust settles and killing him when he’s asleep. He can’t be on guard all the time.”

  “So, the female who was to be gotten becomes the getter. Very interesting. The physically weakest, apparently most vulnerable figure in the scenario actually holds the balance of power.”

  The stick figures bowed and receded into the wall, taking the horned beasts with them.

  “Now we’ll play another game,” she smiled.

  HE KEPT
SMILING. “SAY YOU’RE CONDUCTING AN investigation. Your search warrant—which you too often didn’t worry about—allows you to examine one room of a single occupant apartment. Your goal is to conclude whether a woman or a man is living there at the moment. Which room do you choose?”

  “The bathroom,” I answered automatically, feeling a twinge of phantom limb pain about the job. The Precinct. I even missed the Captain for a moment.

  “Why?”

  “Because the place could be sublet. The stuff on the walls, the furnishings could belong to someone else. What’s in the bathroom—at least the most visible stuff—will tell you who’s living there right then.”

  “So, you’d inspect the toiletries?” she prodded.

  “I’d check the kinds of products—the amount of products. I’d toss the waste basket. I’d look at the shower drain for hair. Prescription medicines. Birth control. Magazines. Powder. The look and feel of the room. The smell.”

  “Tell me. If someone wanted to be deceptive, which would be easier—for a man to make it look like a woman was living in an apartment, or for a woman to make it look like a man?”

  “Are we talking gay or straight? A butch woman or an effeminate man? Secondly, who’s doing the inspection? A woman would see something different than a man. And are they gay or straight? A well-trained dog would be much harder to fool either way. A full-scale Forensics sweep would be definitive—and from experience would tell you what the dog already knew.”

  “Let’s say it’s you, on your own, with your own senses and prejudices,” she answered.

  “Is the apartment empty or full to start with?” I asked.

  “That’s another thing I like about you, Sunny. Your sense of detail. Let’s say the place is empty to begin with—and that we’re dealing with heterosexuals.”

  “Then I think it would be easier for a woman to make it look like a man lived there. If it was full, the other way around.”

  “Why is that?”

  “If the place was empty, a woman could furnish it simply and sparsely and then plant some obviously masculine items. A few clothes and shoes. Cologne. Men’s shaving cream. A girlie magazine. Maybe some sporting equipment. Leave the toilet seat up. A man would have more things to buy to create the illusion. A woman would have more clothes, more products in the bathroom and more personal items. In a pinch, a woman could get away with a fairly minimalist set with a few key things in position. I think a man would need more props—and that means it would be easier to go wrong.”