The Silken Baroness Contract by Philip Atlee

Author:Philip Atlee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

As I stepped onto the terrace, removing my Siva head, a servant came hurrying out to hand me a towel with the Lacerda crest woven into it. The huge sala inside was on three levels, separated by Moorish arches and filled with heavily-carved, baroque furniture. Another servant came up, bowing, and I took a glass of champagne from his tray. The same crest was fired into the crystal, and I reflected that Don Juan must be very strong on ancestors.

Preston was not in sight, and I could not locate Hilevi’s honey-blonde head. Not that they were needed; the rooms were packed with chatteing and laughing guests, and the air was beginning to haze with smoke. The elaborate costumes were partially soaked, and their ambivalent wearers were beginning to discard parts of them, so that they seemed to be strange dolls falling apart. Wigs came off to reveal crew-cuts, and the big male-appearing dolls unzipped and unhooked and developed astonishing curvatures. The strange company stood and sprawled and yammered with arms linked, and made pettish gestures, like a crop of sports grown under a green moon.

Don Juan stood with his back to an enormous stone fireplace, his hands behind him. He was a chunky, dapper man with curling black hair, a proud wedge of a nose, and he alone was not in costume. Or perhaps he was. He wore a dark suit and subdued tie, and a waistcoat of dull figured silver. He was surrounded by a group of partially-disrobed sycophants, and he kept nodding and smiling slightly at their talk, but his dark eyes were flickering constantly. They passed over me, came back, and he stepped away from the fireplace.

His coterie would have moved with him, but the slight smile came again. He murmured, and they fell away. Carrying a goblet in one gray-gloved hand, he moved through the crowd to stand before me.

“Señor Malloy,” he said, bowing slightly, “it was good of you to come. You were, perhaps, more impressive in your other head.”

“Quite right. I suspect that I am going downhill in my reincarnations.” Don Juan smiled; up close, the dark hair was thinning. He was in his middle fifties. “Mr. Preston assured me I would not be intruding,” I added.

“Do not concern yourself,” he shrugged. “My guest list on the island is somewhat limited, true, but then there are Philistines everywhere, n’est-ce pas?”

“True.”

“I understand you read our Lope de Vega, and the Machado brothers?” The intense little man was making party-talk; he lifted his right hand slightly, and a servant hurried over with another drink for me. It happened so smoothly I thought that this particular servant must be deputed to follow him around.

“I am a voracious reader, Señor Lacerda. With de Vega, I am trying to figure out how he turned out such an enormous body of work before computers were invented.”

“It is astonishing, isn’t it? But perhaps like some of the Dutch and Italian painters, he had a horde of human computers and only roughed in the outlines himself, to be filled up by them later.

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