We're not told what Gris did the day after his rendezvous in the limousine, only that the second evening, and the evening after that, go very similarly to the first - there's a half-hour delay, the girls are always "strangely tired and wan," and give him beseeching looks when Ters (evil laugh) drives them away when Gris is done. The third girl in particular takes an extra half-hour to be "convinced" and is crying when Gris "meets" her, but he reasons that "she had just worn herself out in the eagerness of waiting."
Gris does try to get the caravans - nine o'clock night caravans, I guess - rescheduled so there's no camels and donkeys peeping on him, but Ters (evil laugh) explains that Ahmed arranged for the animals to hide the car. Gris is otherwise satisfied, and so doesn't complain.
Contented, I knew that I was really a hit amongst hits! Every night, that same beseeching look. These women must be going absolutely insane over me.
But the morning after the third night, something happens to take Gris' happy away. One of his staff-beating goons asks if Gris will be keeping to his schedule, and Gris suddenly realizes that his safe is almost empty! He gets dressed, grabs his gun, gets in his limo, and has Ters (evil laugh) drive him to Afyon for a bank run so he get his weekly million-lira allowance. But there's a problem - the teller calls up Mudur Zengin at Istanbul, who informs Gris that his "concubine" is still making purchases on his credit card. This in turn means that Gris' allowance will shrink as Zengin adjusts his investments to compensate.
So Gris curses the Countess - "(Bleep), (bleep), (bleep), (bleep), (bleep) that Krak!" - but authorizes the payment, because he's too terrified to talk to her about the not-so-magical credit cards, and more importantly "if I went to Istanbul I would miss a night of ecstasy." In the end he has to make do with only four nights' worth of lira.
Gris tries to talk with - well, Ahmed is "the taxi driver" again - about if maybe they could spend less money on hookups, possibly by reusing one of those girls from before since they seemed oh-so-enamored with Gris. But the taxi driver "refuses to cheapen [Gris'] delight" and describes how each girl has now been given their dowries and married off. The mention of marriage turns Gris "ice cold," and that combined with the taxi driver's proposal to cut back to one girl a week makes Gris panic and throw another two hundred thousand at him for that night's girl.
If Mission Earth were a movie - and God help us all if Hollywood gets so desperate for ideas that they turn to this crap for a script - at this point we'd get a montage of desperate women screaming "O Allah!" from the back of Gris' limo.
And so the nights flowed on. Woman after woman. All a half hour late. All tired at the start. All soon desperate and clawing. All soon screaming "Allah." And all of them looking pleadingly away out the window as they drove away.
The days? Not worth mentioning. Heller and Krak have been defeated by the power of sadness, remember? Presumably our hero antagonist sits staring at a wall with a blank expression on his face, until nine o'clock rolls around for some frenzied sex in the back seat of his land train.
My calls at the bank had to become more frequent. The allowance got reduced to six hundred and then to four hundred. And finally I was calling the bank every day.
Gris is now spending one million, four hundred thousand lira a week on women, while Krak keeps buying flowers and theater tickets in New York. Gris demands two hundred thousand lira a night, even if it eats into his capital, and ignores his banker's suggestion to come to Istanbul and invest another million dollars so he can spend without threatening his capital. Gris, true to form, decides he can't spare the time from from his busy schedule of waiting for nine o' clock and hangs up.
So if you're wondering how we can start the book by adding $250 million to the villain's accounts without it impacting the main plot whatsoever, this is it. Have the bad guy blow it all on whores.
Not done with that montage, either.
And so the days passed, with, oh, those lovely nights. A new woman every time! Fat and thin, tall and short, but all of them all woman! At first every one seemed totally limp, but soon enough they were frantic. All they ever said was "O Allah!" and "I'm drowning!" But not even curious animals could distract me from my duty.
And every night, without exception, when they were driven away by the evilly-laughing Ters, they had the same beseeching look.
Gotta wonder here - is Gris' all-consuming lust a product of his psychiatric training? The author's not hitting us over the head with it though, Gris isn't talking about how his lizard brain demands nightly sex or anything. Maybe it's the result of the cellological experiments that gave him his unnatural genitalia? Either way, I bet some branch of science is to blame, even if the author has missed another chance for "satire."
I hadn't realized how the time was passing until I saw a bud on a shrub one day. Was it actually moving into spring?
So... Heller arrived on Earth in time to enroll at the start of the fall semester at the local college, somewhere around late August or early September, yeah? We're now leaving winter for spring, which would be March? April? Just how many months has our nefarious bad guy wasted doing nothing but (bleeping) girls?
But believe it or not, Gris squandering his fortune and totally neglecting to monitor his foes can't continue indefinitely.
Suddenly, without any slightest forehint
"Or at least not any forehint that I was intelligent enough to notice."
forehint,
Also, not a word.
forehint, my dearest dreams turned into horror, my connections disconnected into a tangle of terror and my whole life came unstuck. All in the torture of slow-motion like you see a proud building coming down to land at last in a heap of shuddering rubble.
Fate had only been toying with me. And with the planet.
Oh man. After the whirlwind excitement of the last few chapters, I don't know if my heart can take it. Tune in next part as we check on the hero for the first time in ages, launch the Deadly Crobe, and learn the terrible secret behind Gris' tumbles in the backseat of his limo.
Back to Part Thirty-Nine, Chapter Seven
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