“How many lashes will she get?” Kamal asked as the girl bucked and bobbed on the post like a deranged marionette jerked around by an insane puppet master.
“Relax,” Raza whispered to him. “There’s plenty more to watch. She’s sentenced to 1,000 lashes, which are to be delivered 100 at a time.”
A third of the way through the girl’s ordeal, a commotion broke out a hundred feet to Raza’s right. Instinctively, she turned to watch, automatically recording it. Two crowds were forming. She knew what had been scheduled for that time and quickly walked over to film those two exhibitions as well.
“No, don’t stop,” Kamal said, begging her not to take her camera-glasses off the flogging.
“No, my prince,” Raza said. “This will be even better. You have to see it. This is one of your favorites.”
“It’s not—?” Kamal asked. “Is it—?”
“They don’t call this place ‘Chop Chop Square’ for nothing, baby.”
One black-robed man and a white-robed woman were being forced to their knees—one in front of a stone block, the other some twenty feet to his right.
Yes, it was happening.
Another black-robed torturer came forward wielding not a sword, but a terrifyingly sharp knife almost three feet in length.
The first victim’s wrist was being shackled to a thick, heavy eyehook screwed into the block. Three men held the kneeling man by his arms and shoulders in front of the stone, his wrist now firmly fastened to the eyehook.
“What’s his crime?” Kamal asked.
“The clerics said he was a thief,” Raza said.
“Was he?” Kamal asked.
“Who knows?” Raza said with infinite hauteur. “They’re clerics.” Her imperious sneer spoke volumes.
The torturer was now repeating the four required invocations.
“Inna lillaahi wa innaa ilayhi raaji’oon!”
“La hawla wala quwata illa billah!”
“SubhanAllahi azim wa bihamdi!”
“Rahimullah!”
After each prayer, the crowd, which now numbered in the hundreds, responded with ecstatic screams.
The torturer then amputated the man’s hand at the wrist with a swift, single blow.
While the crowd roared, he continued on to his next prisoner—twenty feet away—without looking back, and Raza followed him.
“This new and final prisoner is a seventeen-year-old girl,” Raza explained.
“What was her crime?” Kamal asked.
“She was a servant, and she killed her employer.”
“Did she give a reason?”
“He beat, raped and imprisoned her,” Raza said, “all the while refusing to pay or release her.”
“If she was a servant girl,” Kamal said, “she was obviously not a Saudi.”
“Of course not,” Raza said scornfully. “She worked for a living.”
Kamal laughed raucously at Raza’s joke.
“She came from Jakarta,” Raza added.
“Which means she has no rights here at all,” Kamal said.
“Nor should it be otherwise,” Raza said.
But now the presiding black-robed cleric was again offering up the same benisons that the previous prisoners had received.
“Inna lillaahi wa innaa ilayhi raaji’oon!”
“La hawla wala quwata illa billah!”
“SubhanAllahi azim wa bihamdi!”
“Rahimullah!”
The mob’s excitation was ear-cracking.
The executioner’s swing was level and exact.
The young woman’s head tumbled from her shoulders and struck the granite square with a sickening whommppp!
Blood hemorrhaged from her severed neck as if out of a high-pressure hose.
In her camera-glasses’ “Hangout Screen,” Raza could see the prince sprawled supine on his bed, shrieking and howling as if all the damned souls in hell were inside of him, fighting to escape. His arms were buried under his robe, and his enormous porcine body shuddered spasmodically, almost seismically.
She dreaded to think what preposterous perversions incited his crazed convulsions.
PART I
Hot? You want hot? Raza’s got a body that would make the Pope … butt-kick Mother Teresa through a stained-glass ten-story Vatican window!
—Danny McMahon
1
“The show must go on…”
—Jules Meredith
Jules Meredith stood next to Danny McMahon in the wings of the 44th Street Theater. They were about to record his weekly TV talk show, in which his guests would discuss the week’s major news stories, often with a comedic/satiric slant.
Catching her reflection in a backstage full-length free-standing mirror, Jules felt momentarily embarrassed by her black five-inch, shoot-the-wounded, take-no-prisoners spike heels, her matching minidress and her garishly crimson lipstick, all of which her publisher had emphatically insisted on.
“This is show business, Jules,” her hard-nosed, terminally cynical publisher, David Williams, had explained to her on the phone. She had told him that she’d wanted something modest, but he had demurred, explaining exactly how the publicity department wanted her dressed and made up.
Publicity wanted Jules … hot.
“We want you looking hotter than the hinges of hell,” the head of the company had told her. “We want you putting on that shiny carmine-crimson-vermillion lipstick that McMahon always tells his audience he loves so much.”
Jules knew that to be a fact. Danny had said it to her once:
“I would love just to be there and watch you put it on … slowly. That would be so fucking hot!” He also once said to her: “Since you have the longest, most luscious, most lascivious legs I’ve ever seen on a living creature, you should always show them off to their maximal advantage. What are you anyway? Part giraffe? Your legs have legs. They start from your fucking armpits and go all the way to China, which, as we know, is a … long way down.”
But her publisher was the one who’d dropped the hammer and forced her to look like a Hollywood harlot. Williams had ordered Danny’s stylists to darken her eyes, racoon-style, then trowel on the mascara until her lashes looked like ebony rake prongs. The stylist also fluffed out Jules’s jet-black hair, flung it over her right shoulder and halfway down her chest. To Jules’s horror, her micromini and killer spikes screamed hooker chic. She looked as if she’d just finished hustling tricks on the Great White Way or in the midtown hotel bars.
“Consider your wardrobe and makeup ‘the terms of your employment,’” her publisher had emphatically explained.
Ah hell, maybe he was right.
She was pitching her new book and had it fixed firmly under one arm. The publisher claimed he’d leveraged his firstborn to get her that extortionate mid-seven-figure advance her agent had insisted on, so Jules was determined to sell the hell out of it. She struggled to promote a stage smile, but in the mirror, it seemed to her more wolfish leer than grin.
She turned to study McMahon. He was meticulously attired in a tight-fitting black Savile Row suit, a white silk shirt with an Oxford collar and a dazzling silk tie, red as fresh-flowing blood.
The two friends wordlessly studied the audience. At least half of them were in their late teens and early twenties.
“You get a big college crowd, Danny,” Jules finally said.
“I do a lot of stand-up at universities. They’re my bread and butter.”
“Those kids look angry though,” Jules said.
“They have a lot to be angry about,” Danny said.
“They’re starting their careers with mid- to upper-five figures of college debt,” Jules said, nodding her agreement. “And the jobs they’re staring at are mostly boring as shit.”
“Welcome to the real world, kids,” McMahon said.
“You’re a hard man, Danny.”
“Yeah, I know. Makes you wonder why so many right-wingers do my show, doesn’t it?”
“Why do they, an
yway? You eviscerate them verbally, and that lynch mob you call an audience thunders hatred and insults at them at every turn.”
“All the while brandishing torches, pitchforks, chicken feathers and boiling tar,” Danny said, grinning.
“Your guests want their face time,” Jules said, stating the obvious.
“You got it, kid,” McMahon said, grinning. “Most of my guests will do anything to get on the tube. Even you.”
“But I have a reason,” Jules said. “I have a book to flog and a contract to honor.”
“And a world to save?”
“That too.”
“And you’ll do anything to spend time with me.”
“I love you, Danny, and that is no lie. I’ll hang with you anytime you want. But if I didn’t have a book to peddle, no power on this planet could get me on your show.”
“You’re different,” McMahon said, “but most of the clowns that do my show would rather be abused than ignored.”
Nodding her agreement, Jules studied the crowd. She estimated McMahon had 2,000 bodies out there tonight. There were some well-dressed suburbanites, but mostly they were rowdy college kids in outrageous T-shirts emblazoned with slogans insulting the rich, ridiculing the politically conservative or baiting the modest with shocking sexual taunts. One young busty girl in the front row had on a white T-shirt with a big sloppy taco on it and the caption in big black letters:
“IF GOD HADN’T MEANT MAN TO EAT PUSSY, HE WOULDN’T HAVE MADE IT LOOK LIKE A TACO.”
Some wore T-shirts celebrating alcohol: “HELP ME. I FELL ON THE FLOOR AND CAN’T FIND MY BEER.” “TEN REASONS WHY A BEER IS BETTER THAN A WOMAN.” (The ten reasons, unfortunately, were too small for Jules to read.) “I FEAR NO BEER!”
One young woman, however, was not dressed like a rowdy collegiate. She looked to be of Middle Eastern descent and sat in the front row. She had a thick waist-length mane of jet-black hair and wore a short yellow dress that highlighted some astonishingly abundant décolletage. Her shapely legs were crossed, and her stiletto heels bobbed up and down. Her wide generous lips were colored a bright sinful scarlet—the exact shade Jules was wearing—the hue that Jules’s publisher had ordered her to wear because McMahon claimed it drove him … nuts. The woman had dark wide-set eyes that glinted malevolently, and her lips seemed permanently curled into a wicked half sneer, half smile.
Jules glanced at her friend and noticed he was staring at her too.
“Well, Danny,” Jules said, nodding toward the woman and paraphrasing the old Elvis Presley song, “‘if you’re looking for trouble, you’ve come to the right place.’”
“Have I ever. Any idea who she is?”
“All the hell and high water you’ve been looking for your whole life long,” Jules said.
“And, thank you, God,” McMahon said, “for bringing it to me.”
“I’m not kidding,” Jules said. “That one’s trouble.”
“Then trouble’s my middle name.”
“Watch it, boy,” Jules said. “I’ve seen her face before. I just can’t place it. I can’t say where.”
“And I tell you that face has ‘I Want Big Bad Dan’ written all over it.”
“All my warning lights are blinking five-alarm fire-engine red with their sirens wailing and the rack lights flashing.”
“So’s Big Dan’s Lust-o-meter.”
“Okay, fine. But listen, Mr. Gonads-for-Brains, don’t come crying to me when the shit hits the fan and you’re bleeding from every pore.”
“Never happen. I’m a TV celebrity. I got the power of the political/entertainment/media establishment backing me up.”
“When you end up facedown—your dick in the dirt and your ass in the wind—just don’t blame me.”
“Big Dan is never out for the count,” McMahon said. “I’m going to whale on that poor girl like she stole something.”
“She looks like she could be Muslim.”
“Then I’ll convert her to the path of righteousness for my own name’s sake,” McMahon said.
“Which is?”
“Big Bad Dan.”
“You’re insane,” Jules said.
“Only one thing could change my mind. You could take her place.”
Jules treated her old friend to a hard sharp laugh. “Never happen.”
“Why is it you won’t give me a shot?”
“You’re always buried alive under mountains of women. Why would I want to share you at the bottom of that pile?”
“‘I’ll change, I swear,’” McMahon said, quoting Dylan.
“You don’t need me. You have women circling over you like flights stacked up over LaGuardia.”
“Maybe they know something you don’t know.”
“I only know one thing: The show must go on, and they’re cuing up the teleprompter for your monologue. Go get ’em, Danny Boy.”
“To be continued.”
Danny McMahon threw back his shoulders, pumped up his chest and swaggered out onto the stage—the baddest stud duck on the pond, the cockiest rooster in Chickentown.
2
“I hope Putilov drops daisy cutters on the UN.”
—President J. T. Tower
Dark of night on the top floor of J. T. Tower’s needle-thin skyscraper in New York City. At 59th Street and 2nd Avenue, one hundred stories up, the penthouse offered its owner, James T. Tower, also President of the United States, a 360-degree view of New York City. He was presently facing south and staring out over Midtown, the Village, Wall Street, even the new Freedom Tower—formerly the World Trade Center—as well as the tugs, barges and ferries plying New York Harbor. He could even discern the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in the dim distance. Like the boats and buildings, they too were brilliantly illuminated.
“Now you can’t tell me this apartment doesn’t have the best view in the whole goddamn world,” Brenda Tower, J. T.’s older sister, said.
President Tower stared at her a long moment, then grunted:
“Jules Meredith, my eternal journalistic naysayer, probably can.”
“Fuck Jules Meredith,” his sister said.
Brenda Tower was seated in an overstuffed blond leather armchair directly across from her brother, who was slumped at the end of a matching couch. On her right was a circular polished oak end table upon which sat a liter bottle of Rémy 100-year-old Napoléon cognac, a square cut-glass ash-tray and a large, hammered-silver cigarette holder—bearing the initials B. C. in black gothic type—containing two packs of Gauloises Blues. Alongside it was a matching initialed sterling-silver lighter. The woman was drinking brandy and smoking. She was always drinking brandy and smoking.
Decked out in a slinky black silk cocktail dress and ebony heels, she wore no jewelry. Slender of build, her thick shoulder-length hair was colored a tasteful lemon blond. Some of the most discreet, distinguished and exorbitantly expensive cosmetic surgeons on earth had artfully sculpted her exquisitely shaped facial features, most notably her high angular cheekbones. She consequently appeared at least fifteen years younger than her sixty-six years. Highly photogenic, she was routinely referred to by the fashion magazines as “a timeless beauty” and continually commented on her “patrician elegance.” Most people, upon meeting her, confirmed that assessment.
Unless, of course, they looked into her eyes.
Granite-hard and glacier-cold, they discouraged intimacy, and she had few, if any, friends outside of her brother. Nor were the eyes misleading. Bitterly cynical, innately misanthropic, she neither sought nor wanted people’s friendship; she mocked their opinions and cruelly spurned all but the most intrepid of lovers. Men often mistook her habitual disdain for all things male as presumptive evidence of lesbianism. In truth, Brenda Tower scorned most forms of physical and emotional contact regardless of gender.
“Jules Meredith says my needle towers are some kind of international criminal conspiracy,” her brother said.
“Since when do you care what some hack reporter says?” Brenda a
sked with an indifferent shrug.
“That’s what John D. Rockefeller said about Ida Tarbell, the so-called hack reporter whose History of the Standard Oil Company brought his business empire down around his ears.”
“Jules Meredith isn’t Ida Tarbell.”
“Really?” Tower said. “Listen to what she wrote on the New York Times op-ed page this morning:”
* * *
Tower’s last real estate development coup, which he had finalized just before his ascension to the U.S. presidency, was his erection of a half dozen one-hundred-story New York City needle towers. Each of them is a mere forty-six feet on edge, which, given their heights of over one thousand feet, makes them inherently unstable. These vertiginous, hideously dangerous eyesores are nothing more than another ugly example of J. T. Tower once again erecting monuments to his greed and hubris, a further flaunting of his ill-gotten riches and monstrous megalomania.
He calls these six eyesores “J. T.’s Towers of Power.” He should have called them “Edifices of Avarice,” since his company demands $40 million apiece for the condos, $150 million for the penthouses. Most purchases are made in cash, and virtually all of their purchasers buy them anonymously through shell companies. ISIS, al Qaeda, the New United Islamist Front and the Sinaloa drug cartels could be buying Tower’s condos, and no one would know. Paying that much untraceable clandestine cash for real estate certainly suggests criminal activity. (Some would say such transactions are “presumptive evidence of criminal activity.”) Otherwise why would his purchasers hide their identities and the source of their questionable currency? Tower’s customers are truly members of that disreputable elite that Theodore Roosevelt called “the criminal rich” and the “malefactors of great wealth.”
The people who buy Tower’s condos and penthouses don’t love New York City. They don’t even live in it. They’re just parking their foul-smelling lucre in J. T.’s odious abodes, so they can visit their money once every year or two and look down their noses at the rest of the city’s inhabitants.
The Evil That Men Do Page 2