Also in plain sight was a sleek young man garbed in the traditional style of an artist from the Quartier Latin about 1890—floppy beret over his left ear, smock with a huge bright bow at the neck, and tapered check trousers ending in high-sided boots. In deference to the original image he was affecting there were three or four stripes of random colour on the hem of the smock supposed to represent smears of paint, but they were entirely symbolic. He was as sterile and designed as the girls beside him.
One could see no further into the premises from the street than the partition against which the girls were ranged, a changeochrome surface flowing with impermanent colours weighted to favour the girls’ costumes.
He marched in, wondering with casual amusement how long it would take those eager, alert, welcoming expressions to dissolve.
* * *
Guinevere sensed that something was wrong before anyone had a chance to tell her. There was normally a particular kind of quiet buzz from the body of the shop, a variable but never-ceasing susurrus accompanying the gentle relaxing music that oozed on to the air from dozens of hidden speakers. A false note entered it, and she looked up, head cocked on one side, from the list of final preparations she was making against tonight’s party.
Half-convinced she had been misled, she activated the internal scanners and looked over the main salon. Screened by floor-to-ceiling curtains of imperviflex, the clients sat or lay enjoying the luxy atmosphere while their imperfections were soaked, or filed, or painted away. Mrs. Djabalah in Post 38 was requiring slightly more than the conventional services from her masseuse again, Guinevere noticed with resignation, and scribbled herself a memo to surcharge the bill by a hundred per cent. So long as the girl herself didn’t complain—and there was something rather magnificent about the Djabalah woman’s six feet two of statuesque ebony …
She took a long shot down the central passageway separating the posts and caught a glimpse of a commotion near the entrance. Abruptly alarmed—if that could be seen from the street it had to be stopped now—she switched to the storefront viewers.
At the same moment a nervous voice whispered from the intercom, “Gwinnie, there’s the most awful man down here shouting at us. I think he’s drunk. And he niffs like a whole barrel of whaledreck. Can you blast off and cope with him?”
Guinevere told him crisply. “I’m on my way.”
But she spared time for one rapid survey of her appearance in the mirror.
She found the intruder confronting Danny-boy, her chief usher—him of the Parisian artist’s smock—and growling belligerently. Fortunately, to call it “shouting” was an exaggertion, so the customers in even the nearest posts were unlikely to have noticed anything wrong. Moreover the blonde member of the come-hither team had shown enough presence of mind to move the changeochrome partition so it screened the disgusting stranger from outside.
He was a hulking man, well over six feet, and probably strong in spite of his revolting condition. His hair hung in lank strands all over his collar and merged into a beard and moustache that might as well never have been trimmed, but served as a soup-filter and catch-all for scraps of food. There was a singed indentation in the right lower edge of the moustache as though from smoking hand-rolled joints to the last fraction of a roach. His sweaterette had once been red but was now patched, smeared and streaked with other colours, and if his slax had ever fitted him that must have been years ago; now the waistband had given up struggling against the encroachment of his belly. His feet were planted four-square on her lovely hand-inlaid floor in things that might have been loafers but now were incrustations of garbage totally concealing any fabric that might separate dirt from skin.
He broke off his tirade at Guinevere’s approach. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “You must be Steely Gwin from Port of Sin—I’ve heard such a lot about you! I even wrote a poem about you once. Just a second … Ah yes—‘Girls made up by Guinevere Steel Look a treat but are lousy to feel. She turns meat that was cute Into plasticised fruit With the juices locked under the peel.’ One of those shiggies called you Danny-boy, didn’t she?” he added to the quaking usher. “That should make you feel right at home, then. Limericks are Irish too.” He hee-hawed with laughter and rocked on his heels.
“Want to hear another? ‘If you fancy a shiggy and seize her, And find she’s as cold as Teresa, She isn’t a freak, It’s because the Beautique—’”
Guinevere said with all the dignity she could command, “What do you want in here?”
“Whatinole do you think I want? One of your window-display dummies?” He gestured with black-tipped fingers at the cowering come-hither girls. “Thanks, if I need an inflatable masturbator I’ll build my own. Ah, whatinole do you think somebody wants who comes into a place like this?”
“You must be drunk or orbiting,” Guinevere snapped. “I don’t believe you know where you are.” She cast a nervous glance at the wall-clock. The current hour’s appointments were nearly up, and if the clients were to emerge and see this revolting specimen blocking their exit … “Danny-boy, you’ll have to call the police. I don’t see anything else for it.”
“What for?” the stranger demanded in an aggrieved tone. “What do I do? All I want is to be beautified.”
“To be what?” Guinevere said. Her breath ran out on the third word. “You must be insane! We don’t accept male clients anyway, let alone—let alone objects like you!”
“No?” The intruder took a threatening pace closer to her. “New York State Code provisions on discrimination, any commercial establishment offering a service to the general public and declining to accept a prospective client on racial, linguistic, religious or sexual grounds shall forthwith have its licence revoked!”
Belatedly Guinevere realised that the man neither spoke nor acted as she felt would match his appearance.
“In any case I know perfectly well you don’t discriminate. Apart from Danny-boy—and you’re not going to tell me he doesn’t get you to help him with that impeccable surface sheen!—my old beddy Doll Clark has been coming here for years and he still has his balls. What do you want I should do? Come back in a kilt wagging my hips?”
Guinevere said, with a faint sensation of unreality as though someone had slipped her a cap of Yaginol, “I can ask for proof of ability to pay, at least. And if you could meet my rates you wouldn’t be walking around stinking like”—she borrowed Danny-boy’s simile because it was definitive—“a whole barrel of whaledreck!”
“Oh, if credit is all that’s eating on you—!” The stranger made a face. “Here!”
He reached inside his sweaterette and produced a thick wad of documents. Flipping through them like a dealer riffling a new deck of cards, he extracted one and held it out.
“That do?”
“Hold it so I can read it,” Guinevere snapped. “I don’t want to touch it, or you.”
She looked. It was a bank credit authorisation good for a thousand dollars at sight of bearer. But that wasn’t what shook her to the core. It was the name neatly printed across the bottom, under the picture of a much younger man with his moustache and beard trimmed into Louis-Napoleon elegance.
“But he’s dead!” she said faintly. “Danny-boy! Surely Chad C. Mulligan is dead!”
“Who?” Danny-boy looked blank for a moment. Then: “Did you say Chad Mulligan?”
“Dead?” said the filthy stranger. “Christ, no. And if you make me stand around much longer I’ll prove it conclusively. Come on, come on!”