Chapter 17

Late September, 2005

Tue., Sept. 27, 5:01 p.m., Place d’Armes Hotel

His right brain just wouldn’t shut up. That creative hemisphere had been on fire for the better part of a month, the days since the atrocious hurricane. Karl Cerullo’s right-sided neurons were firing like they hadn’t since he lived in Germany in the latter part of the nineteenth century, of this he was sure.

He had been avoiding this issue for, well, decades, apparently, but no more. The aftermath of the hurricane gave him hope; yes, he had succumbed to the bottle since sometime before men flew into outer space, and yes, he had eliminated the seventies from his memory as a result. And all of that was the fault, at least in some way, of one man, Nikolai Valentino, the bane of both Karl’s original and extended existences.

Since the storm had pretty much wiped out most modern conveniences, cell phones, hell, land lines, power for much of the city (although they had some very advanced generators to make sure that didn’t happen here at the hotel), taxis, drinkable water (the hotel has its own purification plant for just such an occasion), and last, but not least, entertainment. New Orleans is renowned around the world for being one of the few places where the entertainment carries on throughout the day, into evening and well past dawn. Fun crap to do is the one thing that has dampened Karl’s spirits, but at the same time, it has given him time to ponder the most important task in his life: getting rid of Nikolai Valentino. The right brain, bored from lack of entertainment, like a couch potato deprived of television, has suddenly come to life. Unfortunately, until now, it hadn’t produced any plausible plans for ridding Karl’s life of his appendix, the aforementioned Mr. Stalin, that is, until now. Now, maybe, just maybe, he might be able to free himself from the overbearing and, most importantly, boring tyranny of the great Valentino beast.

The plan has everything to do with linens, a particular brand of linens through which Nikolai, and via collective, the rest of the residents of the Place d’Armes draw their wealth. Valentino linens uses a particular and, it must be said, although it’s marketed as natural, completely synthetic fabric known as SynthaLester. This fabric holds the key to undermining Nikolai and removing his God-forsaken presence from the face of this planet, for the second time, although this time it will be once and for all.

The only real problem with the plan is that it requires someone with an acute fashion sense, something Karl Cerullo finds himself bereft. But he is confident, if he looks hard enough, he will find the right person, this fashion visionary, so that he can pull off his plan and rid the world of Josef Stalin forever.


Saturday, March 30, 1981

Sat., Mar. 30, 1981, 1:28 p.m., Audubon Zoo

“Sunshine, what do you want for dinner?”

“Fish.”

“Fish?”

“Something with fish in it.”

“Really?”

“A fish like substance.”


Monday, September 23 (and vicinity), 2007

Sat., Sept. 21, 12:20 GMT, Stamford Bridge, Fulham Road, London, England

Didier hadn’t scored an own goal, that being a goal in his own team’s net, in years, maybe even since before he moved from France to London. Having scored two own goals in a matter of fifteen minutes is something akin to lightning striking twice in the same spot, a feat that supposed to be statistically impossible.

His goalkeeper, Petr Cech, stands shaking his head at Didier, holding up his hands as if to say, “What is going on?”

Didier looks to the sideline. His manager has his face buried in his own pair of hands. In the corner of the field nearest the travelling fans, the Manchester United team are celebrating, their arms raised high in joy. The score is now two in their favor, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle for the men of Chelsea to overcome; such is the strength of their bitter rivals, the Red Devils from Manchester, that even this early in the game, a two goal deficit means near-certain doom. And everybody on the pitch has one man to thank for this, and his name is Didier Drogba.

What makes the two own goals so obscene is the fact that the only time Drogba is near enough his own goal to score against his own team, with Didier being a striker whose proliferation of goals into the opposing net is unmatched in all of English football, is when there is a corner kick or a similar set piece to defend. So far in this game, there have only been two of these, both ending in a similar result.

Didier is both dizzy and sick to his stomach with an empty, cramping sensation, almost like the onset of a particularly nasty food poisoning incident. In his peripheral vision, he senses the ire of his teammates, the same men with whom he has fought for the club on countless occasions; now their eyes glare accusingly, as if to say that, somehow, Didier had planned all along to thwart their attempt to win the championship by handing their closest rivals this match, and with it, the bounty of the three points in the league table. They sense a traitor in their midst, and although Didier is nothing of the sort, right now, there is little that he can do to dissuade his teammates from feeling that he is, in fact, in league with the enemy.

Just then, as he can feel like he might actually vomit, right there on the pitch, he feels an arm on his shoulder. It is the team captain, John Terry.

“Drogs,” Terry says in his ear, “get your head up. We’ve just been a bit snake bit is all, lad.”

Didier is still shaking his head, his senses numbed by the deafening silence of the home supporters and the shrill shrieks from the visiting fans.

“Come on, mate, let’s get on with it. It’s only a couple of goals. Hell, I bet you get the trick today. What’s a three goal night for a guy with your amazing brand of skill? It’s a walk in the park, if you ask me.”

This perks Didier up a touch. “Thanks, John,” he says, shaking hands with his captain.

“Don’t thank me, just show these manure bastards we’re the bosses of this pitch. Right mate?”


Mon., Sept. 23, 1:22 p.m., 341 Octavia

The last couple of months or so have been rather fruitful for Arthur Cole in his velvet Elvis enterprise. Ever since Luigi showed him how he could successfully pull off a denial of service attack by first locating his bidding enemy and then cutting off his enemy’s ability to hit the internet at the crucial time, that time being the last couple of minutes before the closing of the auction, he has won the last ten velvet Elvis auctions that have come up on E-bay. His primary opponent, someone with the handle “IC9,” an obvious nod to Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Art realized early on in his battles with his faceless foe, has since moved his base of operations, after a couple of failed attempts to stay online and win the auctions, from the Ivory Coast in Africa to London, England. Luigi figured this was because IC9 had erroneously figured that the rather fragile internet infrastructure in Africa was causing him to drop connections and that London, with its modern telecommunications, would be a better location from which to bid for these precious velvet Elvis prints. The denial of service attacks, in fact, were more vicious and effective because of the improved infrastructure, and Art was now completely in control of the worldwide online velvet Elvis market.

Earlier tonight, he had won his tenth Velvis.

The first, he hung on his wall right next to the Budweiser clock. The second and third he used to decorate the walls of his relatively unadorned office. Four through nine sat in a pile in the corner of his office, eagerly awaiting number ten to join them.

Mon., Sept. 23, 1:24 p.m., 343 Octavia

“So, what you’re trying to say is, the only way to make a proper screwdriver is with a lot of oranges and a lot of blenders.”

“That is precisely what I am saying.”

Sunshine glances around her kitchen, a room now strewn with discarded orange pulp and peels covering ever surface available, even the top of the refrigerator, she notices, as a large peel is dangling from the door of the freezer compartment. There are little chunks of orange bits throughout Archibald’s feathers, also in her hair, she is sure. Little drops of screwdriver cling to the ceiling above the blenders, a few dropping to the floor or the aforementioned surfaces or the blenders themselves as gravity works its magic. “Again, why do we not use the blender covers?”

“Sunshine, it’s all about aeration. Without the proper amount of oxygen, the orange juice and vodka can’t connect in a way that is magical, in a manner that merges both the sucrose of the juice and the grains of the alcohol, a marriage that results in mixological utopia.”

“Well it makes quite a mess if you ask me.”

“Anything really worthwhile in life requires one to sully a bit, and fresh squeezed screwdrivers are no exception.”

Mon., Sept. 23, 1:53 p.m., 725 Constantinople

It’s a bit early in the day for Luigi to be up and about—he struggles to make sense of the characters on his computer’s monitor. They are, at once, random and somehow with a pattern, words, perhaps, or, better yet, entire paragraphs. The coming into focus of Luigi’s monitor happens, albeit slowly.

He and Ishtar, his partner in crime, literally, up in Louisville, KY, are to try today, upon some unsuspecting person or company—Luigi cares not, really, his head is pounding to the rhythm of the Vanilla Ice version of Pressure by Queen, and it would hurt his brain too much to remember… and remember it does, that the Vanilla Ice’s version is called Ice, Ice Baby, but, of course, the bass line is the exact same, to the exact same as the noises in his head, Freddie or Vanilla be damned. Da, da, da, da-da-da, da.

He must move Queen or Vanilla Ice away, as he and Ishtar have been working some stuff; today, they (Ishtar will do the actual heist. All of Luigi’s work was done ahead of time.) will liberate ten-thousand dollars from a Russian oil tycoon, and they’ll do it in a matter of nano-seconds. Just who this person is matters not to Luigi, just that his money is vulnerable and, as Ishtar had put it, ready for penetration like a virginal Catholic. And, Ishtar said, she’s a prostitute, and doesn’t even know it. Legs spread in a perfect V, just ready for the first occupation of flesh to help her lose her religion.

Such is the security, Ishtar said, of the aforementioned Russian billionaire’s virtual, soon to not be so virtual money.

“Fuck them if they don’t have an answer,” Ishtar had said.

What is an answer?

Then a thought occurs to Luigi. He needs a fish-like substance.

What?

It occurs to him again. Luigi needs a fish-like substance.

Hangovers can dilute a man’s sanity with the constant ebb and flow manner of a tide. Even though he realizes his hangover is controlling the voices in his head, he cannot make it go away. Luigi needs a fish-like substance.

Chapter 16

Tue., Sept. 27, 4:18 p.m., 341 Octavia

With the storm approaching in late August, Arthur Cole decided at the last minute that staying in New Orleans would probably be a bad idea, so he had hightailed it his uncle’s house, a man known as Big Al, in Baton Rouge, along with four other people he didn’t know previously. Whenever Big Al would take off to work, he left the five of them to sit around the living room and watch CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, or whomever was broadcasting the most depressing news that day. Their city was demolished, under water, its remaining inhabitants descending into mass stupidity. The other four people were Tom and Sally from Lakeview and Grant and Mindy from Arabi. Both couples were middle aged, with their three or four children between them scattered around the country at various colleges, all having left New Orleans, thankfully, just a week or so before the storm. Both couples were relatively sure after only a day or two that their houses had been completely inundated. Art was pretty sure his house was dry, but with reports of tornados during the storm and mass looting in its wake, nothing could be taken for granted.

Worst of all, anybody with a 504 area code cell phone was holding a useless piece of electronics, that is until the text messages started working a few days later. Tom, Sally, Grant and Mindy wanted desperately to get in touch with their kids to let them know they had escaped all right, but they couldn’t call out on their cell phones, and even calls from Big Al’s landline were useless, because the kids all had 504 phones. Thankfully, the modern science of email saved the day. But once they had contacted their kids, there was nothing else for Tom, Sally, Grant, Mindy and the mildly interested observer, Arthur Cole, could really do, except watch the news and shop for some new replacement clothes. Pretty much everybody had brought the equivalent of an overnight bag, thoroughly expecting to be home at the most two days after the storm made landfall. The flooding of the city made the prospect of returning rather difficult.

The heavy drinking kind of snuck up on everybody. It would start with somebody offering to go up to the store to pick up some margarita ingredients to “lift everyone’s spirits,” and eventually devolved to the whole group travelling daily to the store to buy just about anything and everything they could possibly find to make every concoction imaginable.

After a few days, a rule started. There would be no drinking before noon because, well, that was just too depressing. So the mornings would begin early enough, as nobody could really sleep with the uncertainty; the middle aged folks were usually up by seven and Art could only manage to keep himself in bed until eight or eight-thirty at the latest. Sally turned out to be a tremendous chef who kept everybody full and happy, particularly at breakfast. The hunger curves of everybody in the house waned so precipitously during the day that everybody pretty much fended for themselves food-wise after the morning meal. After breakfast, the clock watching began. It was an unwritten rule that if somebody was sitting in the living room watching CNN at 12:02 p.m. and didn’t realize noon had come and gone, it was incumbent upon the person who had noticed the passage of the magic hour to make the unencumbered person a drink.

Sure, it was possible to go outside, travel around Baton Rouge a bit, but only if you had packed for the day, as Baton Rouge had doubled its population overnight, making its already bad traffic situation something akin to spectators lining up for entrance to the Super Bowl. During the day, Baton Rouge had become a parking lot, so if you wanted to go anywhere, you would literally pack a cooler with food and beverages and not plan on being home until after sunset. Thankfully, the grocery and liquor store were just down the street, so no major intersections needed to be crossed. But a simple thing, like a trip to the movie theater just two miles away, could take as long as three hours, or in movie hours, it would take a movie and a half to get there. So, for the most part, the refugees at Big Al’s empty nest stayed put.

Sometime around the third week of their captivity, with the possibility that Hurricane Rita might also make landfall in New Orleans, things began to get a little more harried. Although Rita did make a turn west and eventually hit the Lake Charles area, the damage was done; nerves weren’t frayed, they were incinerated. Grant was the first to lose it. When the possibility of Rita hitting New Orleans was first announced, it was right after breakfast, and Grant went straight for the liquor cabinet.

“What about the noon rule?” a concerned Mindy asked her husband.

“It’s noon somewhere.”


Today, now that he has a home with a land line, Arthur thinks it would be the right thing to do to call Uncle Al and thank him for his hospitality, without which, he might have spent the last month or so holed up in a gymnasium somewhere, a prospect too terrifying to even consider. At Christmastime, Big Al will have an especially nice gift from his nephew under the tree.


Sat., Mar. 30, 1981, 1:02 p.m., Audubon Zoo, Lizard Exhibit

(eyes wide open): I like the way it licks itself.

(eyes normal size): Well, it’s supposed to do that. It’s a lizard.

(eyes wide open): Yeah, but daddy…

(eyes normal size): Yes?

(eyes wide open): It’s not supposed to be able to do that.

(eyes normal size): Do what?

(eyes wide open): Do that.

(eyes normal size): I’m not seeing what you’re seeing.

(eyes wide open): You have to use your per-priphferal vision.

(eyes normal size): Peripheral.

(eyes wide open): Yeah, that.

(eyes normal size): Okay, so what are you seeing?

(eyes wide open): It’s like a cartoon, you know, with one of those balloons.

(eyes normal size): Balloons?

(eyes wide open): Yeah. To tell you what they are saying.

(eyes normal size): I see. Like a sentence.

(eyes wide open): Or a thought, but yeah, daddy, like a sentence.

(eyes normal size): Like a sentence?

(eyes wide open): Yeah, daddy. It’s a like a comic book.

(eyes normal size): I didn’t think you like comic books.

(eyes wide open): Well I don’t, duh. But I know what they look like.

(eyes normal size): And…

(eyes wide open): And there’s one right there, one the side of that lizard.

(eyes normal size): I don’t see it.

(eyes wide open): Well it’s there. You’re probably too old.

(eyes normal size): Yes, you’re probably right, Sunshine.

(eyes wide open): Not that you’re old or anything, daddy.

(eyes normal size): That’s very sweet of you.

(eyes wide open): Well, I’m six, so I can say things like that.

(eyes normal size): Yes, you are.

(eyes wide open): But you’re probably too old to see what it says.

(eyes normal size): Well, I’m all ears.

(eyes wide open): What?

(eyes normal size): That means I’m listening to what you have to say.

(eyes wide open): Oh.

(eyes normal size): So?

(eyes wide open): Well…

(eyes normal size): Yes?

(eyes wide open): The sign on the side of the lizard, in the balloon…

(eyes normal size): Yes?

(eyes wide open): You’re going to think I’m a little girl.

(eyes normal size): Well, you are a little girl.

(eyes wide open): I am a little girl, but I’m not seeing little girl stuff, is all.

(eyes normal size): What do you mean?

(eyes wide open): I mean, I’m not making this up.

(eyes normal size): Of course you’re not.

(eyes wide open): Stop paternizing me.

(eyes normal size): Patronizing.

(eyes wide open): Right, patronizing.

(eyes normal size): Sorry.

(eyes wide open): It’s okay, because you’d have to be …patronizing me if you don’t see it, because, of course, you’re too old to see it. Not to say that you’re old or anything, daddy. Just, well I can see it, I guess because I’m a kid and all.

(eyes normal size): Well, you’ve piqued my curiosity. What is it that’s in this comic book balloon on the side of this lizard?

(eyes wide open, leaning in for a closer look): It’s kind of hard to read. All the letters are small and kind of smushed up together.

(eyes normal size):

(eyes wide open): It says Alexander Haig is not the President.

(eyes normal size, chuckling): Well, that’s right, Sunshine. He’s the Secretary of State. I didn’t know they had you studying politics at your age.

(eyes wide open): We don’t study politics, daddy.

(eyes normal size): You don’t?

(eyes wide open): Nope. But we’ve been working on subtraction and I’m starting to get the hang of it.

(eyes normal size): Oh. Well, does it say anything else?

(eyes wide open, leaning in again): It says… okay, here’s the whole message. I can see it now. It says President Reagan will get shot, and Alexander Haig is not the President.

(eyes squinting): That’s not a funny thing to joke about, Sunshine.

(eyes wide open): I’m just reading what’s on the lizard.

(eyes normal size): Well then I think we’ve seen enough of mister lizard here. Come along, Sunshine.

(eyes drooping): Wait, there’s another balloon.

(eyes aggravated): Sunshine…

(eyes wide open): Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president and the secretary of state, in that order, and should the president decide he wants to transfer the helm to the vice president, he will do so. As of now, I am in control here, in the White House, pending the return of the vice president and in close touch with him. If something came up, I would check with him, of course.

(eyes normal size, blinking): What?

(eyes wide open): What?

(eyes squinting): What did you just say?

(eyes rolling): I said we can leave the lizard if you really want.

(eyes squinting, blinking faster): Who, what, Sunshine?

(eyes rolling): Come on, daddy, let’s go.