The light was fading as the lads approached the Old Sultan’s Palace. The Old Sultan of Byzantium was rumored to have been an ally of Kubla Khan himself. Centuries before, he had positioned his harem of two hundred or more nubile women here. Back in 1575, by order of the Sultan (buyurultus), the girls lived only with the city’s eunuchs, the best physician in the land, and His Highness himself. Here, he decreed his own, albeit slightly less grandiose, Xanadu.
“Pah! It was just a fad and a fashion among these sultan chaps. Bloody show-offs,” Bill said.
* * *
They walked along the stony driveway up to the mansion. Johan felt they were entering a bygone age, that time was standing still for them, as it does when one is nineteen. The clatter of the loose stones under their Oxford brogues invited them into a different world, and offered the promise of being an adult.
This was their time, for this was (metaphorically) the Saturday lunchtime of their youth. They cast no shadow.
That evening, the Old Sultan’s Palace heaved under a weighty Moorish mystery. Weird attracted exquisite in a perpetual wave of self-fueling cosines and logarithms. The palace remains to this day a venue of staggering beauty, full of time-slip corridors, medieval arches, and cul-de-sacs where amazed visitors’ pocket watches stop.
They were drawn to the yellow lights through the grandiose Persian arches on the rear lawn. An energy emanated from there, and given the nature of energies, archways, and lights, boys are duty bound to inspect.
Billy whittled on half philosophically, half rhetorically, in Johan’s ear.
“But, Thoms, old bean. If a man says something in a forest, and a woman is not there to hear it, is he still wrong?”
No answer.
On the other side of the arch, a party was in full flow. Black ties and white tuxedos, white and black evening dresses, and waiters. Johan tried to put his finger on the energy as they entered the fray.
“Keep your pecker up.”
“Keep YOUR pecker out.”
This was their routine as they telepathically divided to conquer.
Johan heard few Bosnian or even European accents. Most of the party-goers, he realized, were Americans. There seemed to be something distinct about this party, something which he could not quite identify. Was it their New World energy, with their modern haircuts, their lack of walrus mustaches and beards?
Perhaps it was the more modern music or a strange dance he had never seen before. Or was it the stench of wealth which pervaded the air?
Or was it . . . Holy Jesus . . . was it the most absolute beauty with whom he found himself faced?
Seconds of silence ticked by. If absolute zero is minus 273 degrees Celsius, then this was an absolute silence. The absolute of that silence was equaled only by the absolute of the blackness in her eyes.
Her lips were a scarlet sofa in an ivory palace.
Johan’s embarrassing lack of words was broken by the familiar voice of Professor Tiberius Novac. The rest of the world had continued while Johan had disappeared into his cataleptic trance. Worse than that, the woman had simply stared at this fool.
He sort of heard the prof’s words, nudging the stem of his cerebral cortex.
“Johan Thoms! My boy! What an absolute pleasure! What brings you to a party for the American ambassador? Do you know him, my boy? You ARE a dark horse, aren’t you!” A gentle tap to the shin from the outside of his tutor’s well-polished dress shoe was not enough. The dusky beauty suppressed a laugh.
“But who is SHE?” blurted Johan, totally forgetting his place, stumbling in and out of his body.
“She? She? She? Who is she? The cat’s mother?” corrected Tiberius. The same tutor who had been run ragged in a literary discussion by Johan not three days before was now correcting the scholar’s usually impeccable manners.
She, it transpired, was an American living in Vienna, the widow of a diplomat who had found a watery grave with the Titanic the previous year, one of the unfortunates forced to listen to the band play.
She seemed to be in her late twenties perhaps early thirties, and possessed a hypnotic beauty that would take young Johan tens of years to absorb. The experienced coyness of her initial smile, the way her front teeth half bit into the side of her nether lip, her perfectly measured handshake, revealed everything Johan needed to see, but hid enough to make his deviant blood boil.
“Lorelei, please meet Johan Thoms. Johan, this is Lorelei Ribeiro, with the American embassy in Vienna.”
“Yes, errrm, it is, isn’t it?” Johan mumbled as he struggled for breath.
His member did, however, show signs of life.
He caught himself staring at her small chest. Lorelei Ribeiro caught him and smiled to herself. He felt like he had been struck. It was a vision of love, wearing boxing gloves! (This Venus’s grandfather, he would learn later, had been a renowned pugilist back in the States.)
“Ermmmm. Hello, Lorelei,” he managed.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Johan Thoms, I am sure. And who is your friend?” she added. He glanced down at his tentlike crotch before he realized she was referring to someone else.
“Oh yes, of course, this is William Cartwright,” who had appeared at Johan’s shoulder.
“Bill, this is . . . ermmm . . . Lorelei, Mrs. Ribeiro from the Vienna embassy . . . in America.”
Johan’s next fifteen minutes were a blur, and even if he had wanted to (and he had wanted to, he assured Ernest) he could not for the life of him recall the conversation, or even if he had been part of one, or whether he had been in a trance. All he could recall was taking a trip into the noirish eyes of the woman in front of him.
Later, when he asked her to remind him (or, more accurately, to inform him) of the content of their first discussion, Lorelei would giggle, and mercilessly tease him by telling him a completely different version of events every time, with that wicked glint in her eye.
He was aware he had been impaired by a couple of ales. And what does alcohol do, other than have the effect of a truth serum?
He noticed that Professor Tiberius Novac moved slightly to his right to leave these two to their own devices. He could be quite devious (what Bill would have described as “mauve”) at times, but he was fond of his protégé. Novac had been grabbed by some desperate old battle-ax from the British Consul, after a bit of Balkan rough in her bed. She clung to him like a barnacle to a tugboat, had eyebrows like a couple of baby raccoons in awkward repose, and danced like a giraffe with the staggers. This had made surveillance on Johan difficult. When his student pressed him afterward for details, he struggled to offer anything really substantial, for he, too, had swallowed some gin, as one had to in order to face the aging beast from London.
(“She had a face like a blind cobbler’s thumb,” he admitted to Johan later. “But, my boy, was she a cracker with the gaslight out!”)
* * *
By the time he came around, Johan had lost Lorelei.
He sought Novac, but the English vulturette was circling, craving her pound of flesh—or more, if her luck was in. Novac was inching backward, avoiding her cabbagey breath.
Cartwright staggered toward Johan from the crowd.
“Did you see her?” Johan whispered.
His spirit had been kidnapped.
“What are you talking about?” His eyes widened. “Please don’t tell me you have been hooked? I thought you were made of finer stuff, old bean!”
“I blew it.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!”
Professor