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Sundara was still emanating pure Kama Sutra when we took our seats. Lamont Friedman, sitting halfway around the circular table from her, jerked and quivered when her eyes met his, and stared at her with ferocious intensity while muscles twitched wildly in his long narrow neck. Meanwhile, in a more restrained but no less intense way, Friedman’s companion of the evening, Ms. Yarber, was also giving Sundara the stare.
Friedman. He was about twenty-nine, weirdly thin, maybe 2.3 meters tall, with a bulging Adam’s apple and crazy exophthalmic eyes; a dense mass of kinky brown hair engulfed his head like some woolly creature from another planet that was attacking him. He had come out of Harvard with a reputation for monetary sorcery and, after going to Wall Street when he was nineteen, had become the head magus of a band of spaced-out financiers calling themselves Asgard Equities, which through a series of lightning coups — option-pumping, feigned tenders, double straddles, and a lot of other techniques I but dimly comprehend — had within five years gained control of a billion-dollar corporate empire with extensive holdings on every continent but Antarctica. (And it would not amaze me to learn that Asgard held the customs-collection franchise for McMurdo Sound.)
Ms. Yarber was a small blond person, thirty or so, lean and a trifle hard-faced, energetic, quick-eyed, thin-lipped. Her hair, boyishly short, fell in sparse bangs over her high inquisitive forehead. She wore not much face makeup, only a faint line of blue around her mouth, and her clothes were austere — a straw-colored jerkin and a straight, simple brown knee-length skirt. The effect was restrained and even ascetic, but, I had noticed as we sat down, she had neatly balanced her prevailingly asexual image with one stu
And so to di
By the time the speechmaking began, about half past nine, a ritual within the ritual was unfolding: Lamont Friedman was flashing almost desperate signals of desire at Sundara, and Catalina Yarber, though she was obviously also drawn to Sundara, had in a cool unemotional nonverbal way offered herself to me.
As the master of ceremonies — Lombroso, managing brilliantly to be elegant and coarse at the same time — went into the core of his routine, alternating derisive pokes at the most distinguished members of the party present in the room with obligatory threnodies to the traditional martyrs Roosevelt, Ke
“He has a bad case of horn, I’d say.”
“I thought geniuses were supposed to be more subtle.”
“Perhaps he thinks the least subtle approach is the most subtle approach,” I suggested.
“Well, I think he’s being adolescent.”
“Too bad for him, then.”
“Oh, no,” Sundara said. “I find him attractive. Weird but not repellent, you know? Almost fascinating.”
“Then the direct approach is working for him. See? He is a genius.”
Sundara laughed. “Yarber’s after you. Is she a genius, too?”
“I think it’s really you she wants, love. It’s called the indirect approach.”
“What do you want to do?”
I shrugged. “It’s up to you.”
“I’m for it. How do you feel about Yarber?”
“Much energy there, is my guess.”
“Mine too. Four-group tonight, then?”
“Why not,” I said, just as Lombroso sent the audience into deafening merriment with an elaborately polyethnic-perverse climax to his introduction to Paul Qui
We gave the mayor a standing ovation, neatly choreographed by Haig Mardikian from the dais. Resuming my seat, I sent Catalina Yarber a body-language telegram that brought dots of color to her pale cheeks. She gri
Qui
And so on, a splendid vision of the era ahead. Noble rhetoric, especially from a mayor of New York, traditionally more concerned with the problems of the school system and the agitation of the civil-service unions than with the destiny of mankind. It would have been easy to dismiss the speech as mere pretty bombast; but no, impossible, it held significance beyond its theme, for what we were hearing was the first trumpet call of a would-be world leader. There he stood, looking half a meter taller than he was, face flushed, eyes bright, arms folded in that characteristic pose of force in repose, hitting us with those clarion phrases: