Cat in a Quicksilver Caper

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Matt felt uneasy, unsure quite how to take openly and obviously gay men like Danny. The church’s longtime “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy had put it crosier-deep in unaddressed issues about gay and pedophile priests. Who could hurl the first stone?

  Matt the priest had been heroically virginal, playing by all the ancient rules. He was heterosexual, but he couldn’t disown his non-hetero seminary peers. Or non-seminary non-heterosexuals. Dogma was one thing. Real life was a lot more complicated, including his.

  “How are you doing?” he asked Danny. Carefully.

  “Rotten. Why else would I have asked you over?”

  Matt didn’t mention his own resemblance to Danny’s recently dead significant other, Simon. He understood the need to clutch at a lost past. He still felt uncomfortable acting as a stand-in for a dead man, but his job wasn’t his own ease. Only the ease of others.

  “Drink?” Danny asked.

  Danny Dove was a sophisticated man. The toast of the Las Vegas Strip. A world-class choreographer. The best of his generation. Today, at high noon, he held his cocktail glass like Captain Hook had hoisted his metal claw. Part of him, but hated.

  “Yeah,” Matt needed to roll with Danny’s needs before he could fully understand and address them.

  “I always knew you were all right.” Danny headed for the cocktail cart.

  Well, no. Matt had not always been all right, but he was getting there.

  “To our mutual friend Temple,” Danny said, lifting his glass. “She tried to help.” He bowed his head over a major piece of Baccarat crystal.

  Sometimes people needed the Eucharist. Sometimes some people needed St. Glenlivet more.

  “I’m not sure why you called me,” Matt said.

  “Raised Catholic, what else?”

  “I’m not a priest anymore.”

  “No, but . . . you feel like one, only as freaked out as I am.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  “And. You look like Simon. You have his innocence. That’s what got him killed. Innocence. Tell me how to live in a world without innocence.”

  “I can’t. I can’t live in it either.”

  Danny sat, hard, on a white leather sofa. The whole house was a Big White Set from a thirties movie. Matt realized that anyone who didn’t fit into Here and Now invariably harked back to There and Then.

  “I need a counselor,” Danny said. “I’ll go crazy with Simon gone like this. I’ll hurt someone, probably myself. I was raised Catholic, did you know?”

  Danny had repeated himself, but Matt said no.

  “If you guys don’t accept me, where’ll I go now?

  “I accept you.”

  “But do they accept you?”

  “Maybe not. I haven’t asked yet.”

  “So, you ask? You leave it up to them?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You’re supposed to be sure! You’re the goddamned religious nut.”

  Matt held back a glib answer. Pain was a powerful force. Was he a freak, as Danny and Simon had felt in their own small, painful world? And if not, what was he?

  Everyone wanted to be part of something.

  He wanted to be part of Temple’s world. Part of that was Danny. A bigger part of that was what he felt for her, no matter what.

  “So . . . Temple,” Danny said as if reading his mind. “You like her.”

  “You could say that.”

  “I can help you with that.”

  And then Matt understood that the best thing for Danny right now was helping someone, in his view, worse off than he was. Like Matt himself. “How?”

  “Lord! You don’t have the slightest idea about dealing with women.”

  And a gay guy did? Maybe.

  “So how far has it gone?” Danny was asking.

  “I’m up against the great Max Kinsella.”

  “Know about him. True love . . . and then love on the run. Temple’s a girl who likes to set her spikes into a groove and stay there.”

  Matt sipped the expensive Scotch from the expensive glass. It tasted sharp and stung him.

  “She’s loyal beyond belief,” he said.

  Danny nodded. “You didn’t get what I said. She’s loyal. She’d go to the wall for me. Did.” He looked down so Matt wouldn’t see the tears in his eyes. “But she’s like a lot of women. Stability, security is Job One. She’s not getting that from Max anymore.”

  “It’s not his fault,” Matt the ever honest heard himself say.

  Danny laughed a little. “You do need a Cyrano de Bergerac to speak for you, pal, if you’re going to keep apologizing for your romantic rival.”

  “I’m only trying to be fair.”

  “You know the old saying: nothing’s fair in love and war.”

  “Then neither of them should be that way.”

  Danny rolled his eyes. He was looking decidedly perkier. “ ‘Shouldn’t’ is a delusion. ‘Is’ is. That’s what you mean by the word ‘is.’ ”

  “What should I do?”

  “Depends on what you’ve done.”

  Matt sat back. Took a real sip of Scotch, then leaned back on the white leather couch, which was actually quite comfortable, and told him.

  “I took her out on a surprise dinner date. The dinner wasn’t a surprise, the date part was.”

  “Sounds good. Someplace expensive?”

  “Someplace very cheap.”

  Even as Danny frowned, Matt went on. He described the drive to the desert. The corsage; the taped dance music from the era of Temple’s prom night. The lights of Las Vegas like an aurora borealis in the distance.

  Danny kept nodding so often he forgot to drink. “Outstanding. You don’t look that inspired.”

  “Temple did the same thing for me, months ago. I was just a copycat.”

  “Hmmm. Your relationship goes back that far?’

  “I wouldn’t call it a ‘relationship.’ ”

  “The hell it isn’t! Where have you been all your life? In a seminary, that’s right. So, it went . . . well?”

  Matt steeled himself for candor. “Yeah. I guess you could say we . . . made out. I proposed—”

  “Oh, my God! Too soon. Disaster.”

  “I proposed,” Matt repeated a bit stiffly, “that we could have a civil marriage.”

  “Why on earth would an ex-priest do that? That’s a mortal sin anyway. Totally unrecognized by the church. Almost as bad as that horrible religious-political-social bugaboo ‘gay marriage.’ ”

  “Temple had said that—modern women, and I suppose non-Catholic women, want—she did say this, but it’s not as hard-bitten as it sounds . . . ‘free samples.’ ”

  It had been hard for Matt to report this, but if he was going to do any good as a counselor he had to reveal his own feet of clay.

  Danny practically rolled on the floor laughing.

  Matt sat stunned.

  “Oh, my God!” The tears welling in Danny’s eyes now had been undammed by laughter, not sorrow. “What a magnificently naive counterplay. You made the girl put her money where her mouth was. What’d she say?”

  “That she’d have to think about it.”

  “Blessed are the pure of heart. They will drive you crazy.”

  “Are you saying I blew it? Or not?”

  “Not! Temple is not stupid. She realizes what a risk you’re taking to offer her that out. So . . . where are you two star-crossed lovebirds now?”

  “I don’t know,” Matt said. “I haven’t seen her since.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s only been a couple of days. Our paths haven’t crossed, and I don’t feel right about pressuring her.”

  “Pressure her.” Danny set his drink, half-drunk, aside. His blue eyes were clear now, not blurred, and he leaped up, like someone who thought best on his feet. Which a choreographer did.

  “You’re right,” he told Matt. “Max Kinsella is one hell of a rival. He could be frozen in a block of ice in a river, like some Arctic Houdini, and no one
would take their eyes off him or take any bets on him not coming out of the coffin and walking on water and eloping with the girl to Monte Carlo.”

  Matt didn’t see how that was supposed to make him feel better, but Danny apparently thought this was a pep talk.

  “Okay,” Danny said. “You grooved in the desert. What’s the next step?”

  “She tells me what she thinks about my offer?”

  “No! You’re right not to approach her. Next. You make her wonder what you’re up to. Next.”

  “Talking to you?”

  “No. Wait! Right! Yes. That’s brilliant.” Danny was directing a show now: Romeo and Juliet at the Rialto. “Keep her guessing. You’re neighbors at the Circle Ritz, right?”

  “Right. Actually, I rent the unit above hers. And Max’s.”

  “Forget Max! If you can’t, she can’t. That’s a highly cool place. She must be aware of you right on top of her, excuse the expression.”

  Matt blushed. Must have been the alcohol.

  “So. What’s your place like?” Danny alit on the couch again.

  Matt eyed the palatial surroundings. “Plain. I haven’t had much time or inclination to buy stuff. Decorating wasn’t necessary in the rectory.”

  “You have anything the slightest bit hip in your place?”

  “Only the red suede Vladimir Kagan sofa Temple found at the Goodwill and browbeat me into buying.”

  “Vladimir Kagan? Fifties suede? Simon would have killed for that.”

  Neither could find any right words to say for a couple of minutes.

  Then Danny lifted his head, assuming the dancer’s ramrod posture even though he was only sitting, not standing on a stage.

  “And the bedroom? Don’t blush, my boy, this is serious business.”

  “A disaster. Empty. What I was used to.”

  “Tsk, tsk!” Danny was looking Puckish again. “You clearly need Queer Eye help. You do know what that is?”

  “I do have a television set in there.”

  “A feeble beginning, but well-intended. I must see this Disaster Zone. I must . . . choreograph a more positive future from your rather bleak past.”

  “It didn’t feel bleak when I was in it.”

  “It never does. Let me help you. I’m afraid my dear Temple isn’t happy anymore, and I desperately want someone to be happy just now.” Danny looked down, mumbled. “I was . . . am . . . one of those unsung subjects of newspaper stories these days. The perfect altar boy. So perfect that my parish priest molested me.”

  “My God, Danny, I am so sorry.”

  “We are all sorry.” Danny invoked his dancer’s posture again, as much a ritual as any religious rite.

  Matt knew the bitter truth that what he had spent half his life believing in had been twisted to serve carnal self-interest. It made him doubt his vocation, his gender, his past.

  “Let me help you,” Danny was saying. “It restores my faith a little, to see a nice naive virginal heterosexual ex-priest like you flailing around trying to be both honest and sexual. You don’t know what a rare bird you are.”

  Matt didn’t know what to say.

  “I just hope that Temple appreciates that, and I mean to see that she does. For both your sakes.”

  The Russians Are

  Coming

  The only thing wrong with working for a mega hotel was the meetings. Lots and lots of meetings.

  Temple supposed some PR persons enjoyed numbing their rears until they could hear the cellulite piling on underneath them, but she liked to be on her toes in more ways than one. There were always so many chiefs at meetings that the foot soldiers spent all their time deferring to rank instead of getting anything done.

  Which was why she was a freelancer.

  At least the operations meeting room at the New Millennium was spectacular: a huge, black-marble-topped conference table, brushed stainless-steel chairs upholstered in black leather. A shrimp-colored marble floor. Every chair had a wireless silver flat-screen computer in front of it, the screen as big as a place mat and the sleek keyboard the size of a videotape.

  No ashtrays. No cups of coffee or glasses of water or booze. No chitchat.

  Around the perimeter were honest-to-God, gray-flannel vertical blinds that could be operated from the computer keyboards, Randy had said, to cast shadows in various shades of gray.

  Pete Wayans, the hotel’s operations manager, was a beefy middle-aged guy wearing wire-framed half-glasses that looked like a pair of tsetse flies posed on a hippo snout.

  He stood in front of the giant plasma TV, narrating the exhibition layout and contents while the same scenario played on their individual computers.

  Temple tapped in notes and observations (on the eerily silent toy keyboard), like her fellow attendees. And they were all fellows. This was when she began to seriously lament her blond dye job at the Teen Idol reality TV show. She couldn’t yet testify that blondes had more fun (although it was beginning to look like it).

  Dang! She’d typed in “Matt blond” instead of matte black to describe her idea for an invitation card.

  Temple backspaced to erase the error, aka Freudian slip, noticing that the men in her vicinity all noticed her retreat. Blondes attracted much closer examination, she’d discovered, which Temple didn’t welcome. At half an inch per month, it would take almost a year for her natural coppery red color to reach its usual below-the-ear-length. She didn’t know if she could take the stress that long.

  Wayans droned on, but the computer show was so spectacular and self-explanatory that it didn’t matter what he said or didn’t say.

  Essentially the exhibition would funnel guests up a circular ramp of paintings hanging between bullet-proof Lexan-plastic display cases sparkling with court dress, jewels, furniture, and precious artifacts of every conceivable type, ending in a translucent onion dome apex, where Czar Alexander’s scepter could be displayed upright on a block of rock crystal, like the Sword in the Stone from Arthurian legends.

  A close-up of the scepter revealed a silver and gold rod circled by a lacework of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and pearls twining its two-foot length. The crowning orb held a yellow diamond of three hundred and sixty-five carats. It was called the Calendar Diamond, for the days of the year.

  As Wayans read the laundry list of the pieces: jewels and their weights and history and values, Temple found her mind drawn back to the Sword in the Stone analogy.

  Set an object up as a modern-day Sword in the Stone and what do you get? Something a lot of people might compete to unseat. Of course, Temple thought like a crook—she was the significant other of a world-class magician and had undone a few crooks of her own.

  Pete Wayans thought like a hotel mogul with the artiest state-of-the-art-security system and the hottest high-class act in town.

  Then he got to the good part. On Temple’s screen, multiplied by sixteen around the table, the viewpoint swooped above the scepter to show a life-size jewel-enlaced human figure spinning slowly in the gallery’s upper blackness.

  It was a woman wearing a headdress that duplicated the scepter’s daggerlike lines, her arms close to her lithe body, straight legs crossed at the ankles and arched into one sharp point, like a ballerina’s toes, her head straining upward on a long swanlike neck.

  Temple had seen acrobats at the Cirque du Soleil spinning like this by their teeth, but not invisibly and not—here her blood ran cold, just like in the cliché, and Temple hated clichés—with a white-painted face with exaggerated features drawn in Oriental shades of black and blushing crimson as in a Chinese opera.

  Before Temple could fully register who this scepter sylph was, a huge male figure came striding out of the darkness, booted, caped, and wearing a dark tiger-pattern mask that covered his entire head.

  At a gesture of his gloved hand, the scepter woman sank lower, like a spider on an invisible web. Lower, lower, turning faster and faster, a blur now. A flick of the magician’s wrist, and a glittering web of empty cloth floated down, te
nting the onion dome in a lacy cobweb.

  Everybody applauded the stunning effect.

  Everybody except Temple. She wasn’t surprised, of course, to see the Cloaked Conjuror appear. He headlined at the New Millennium, after all.

  What had shocked the accumulating cellulite off her behind was seeing the made-up countenance of a magician who’d done her—and Max, and Midnight Louie—wrong, and had never been seen again. Shangri-La, last glimpsed several months ago at the Opium Den, a low-end casino off the Strip.

  As part of her disappearing act, this woman had stolen Temple’s almost-engagement ring from Max right on stage. The only time Temple had been called out of a Las Vegas audience to do an onstage turn had almost cost her, and Louie, their lives.

  Max needed to know about this . . . pronto!

  Friendly Fire

  “What is she doing here?”

  Max’s annoyed tone roused Garry Randolph from the humble task of coiling a rubber snake of electrical cord in one corner of the New Millennium’s exhibition area scaffolding, fifteen feet above the construction-littered floor.

  This place wasn’t just a room, that was for sure.

  The whir of power drills backgrounded their conversation. A faint miasma of sanded Spackle dusted their workmen’s white jumpsuits a whiter shade of pale.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said Garry, who once had performed as Gandolph the Great.

  “Two,” Max said grimly, looking up, and then back down again. “The worst part is that they’ve both seen me, one more than the other.”

  Gandolph followed Max’s quick flick of eyelashes both up and down.

  Up, the problem was obvious. A lithe figure in pale tights and leotard was cavorting like the Sugar Plum Fairy on a distant tightrope invisible against the flat black ceiling of the museum-to-be.

  “I don’t know where Shangri-La came from,” Garry admitted, “but I know you had an unpleasant run-in with her months ago—”

  “More than one, and the last one way too recently,” Max interrupted, looping his own length of cable into the tight coil of a striking cobra.

  Garry eyed his one-time apprentice at both magic and counterterrorism work. The painter’s cap hid Max’s thick dark hair. Spackle dusted the arched Faustian eyebrows. His eyes were their natural blue. He expertly hunched his four inches over six feet into a droop-shouldered stance that kept him from literally standing out in a crowd, rather like Sherlock Holmes on a stakeout.