What’s-Your-Name—oh yes, Carr Mackay, Mister Justine himself. Well, look here, Carr, I got a deskful of girls at my office in this building and they’re needing attention. Let’s shoot up and have a look.”
Right away my hopelessly naive imagination flashed me a vivid picture of a desk swarming inside with girls about five or six inches high. They weren’t dressed—my imagination never dresses girls except for special effects after long thought—but these looked as if they had been modeled from the drawings of Heinrich Kley or Mahlon Elaine. Literal vest-pocket Venuses, saucy and active. Right now they were attempting a mass escape from the desk, using a couple of nail files for saws, and they’d already cut some trap doors between the drawers so they could circulate around. One group was improvising a blowtorch from an atomizer and lighter fluid. Another was trying to turn a key from the inside, using tweezers for a wrench. And they were tearing down and defacing small signs, big to them, which read
YOU BELONG TO DR. EMIL SLYKER.
My mind, which looks down at my imagination and refuses to associate with it, was studying Dr. Slyker and also making sure that I behaved outwardly like a worshipful fan, a would-be Devil’s apprentice. This approach, helped by the alcohol, seemed to be relaxing him into the frame of mind I wanted him to have—one of boastful condescension. Slyker was a plump gut of a man with a perpetually sucking mouth, in his early fifties, faircomplexioned, blond, balding, with the power-lines around his eyes and at the corners of the nostrils. Over it all he wore the ready-for-photographers mask that is a sure sign its wearer is on the Big Time. Eyes weak, as shown by the dark glasses, but forever peering for someone to strip or cow. His hearing bad too, for that matter, as he didn’t catch the barman approaching and started a little when he saw the white rag reaching out toward the spill from his drink. Emil Slyker,“doctor”courtesy of some European universities and a crust like blued steel, movie columnist, pumper of the last ounce of prestige out of that ashcan word “psychologist,” psychic researcher several mysterious rumored jumps ahead of Wilhelm Reich with his orgone and Rhine with his ESP, psychological consultant to starlets blazing into stars and other ladies in the bucks, and a particularly expert disher-out of that goulash of psychoanalysis, mysticism and magic that is the chef-d’oeuvre of our era. And, I was assuming, a particularly successful blackmailer. A stinker to be taken very seriously.
My real purpose in contacting Slyker, of which I hoped he hadn’t got an inkling yet, was to offer him enough money to sink a small luxury liner in exchange for a sheaf of documents he was using to blackmail Evelyn Cordew, current pick-of-the-pantheon among our sex goddesses. I was working for another film star, Jeff Crain, Evelyn’s ex-husband, but not “ex” when it came to the protective urge. Jeff said that Slyker refused to bite on the direct approach, that he was so paranoid in his suspiciousness as to be psychotic, and that I would have to make friends with him first. Friends with a paranoid!
So in pursuit of this doubtful and dangerous distinction, there I was at the Countersign Club, nodding respectfully happy acquiescence to the Master’s suggestion and asking tentatively, “Girls needing attention?”
He gave me his whoremaster, keeper-of-the-keys grin and said, “Sure, women need attention whatever form they’re in. They’re like pearls in a vault, they grow dull and fade unless they have regular contact with warm human flesh. Drink up.” He gulped half of what was left of his martini—the puddle had been blotted up meantime and the black surface reburnished— and we made off without any fuss over checks or tabs; I had expected him to stick me with the former at least, but evidently I wasn’t enough of an acolyte yet to be granted that honor.
It fitted
Right away my hopelessly naive imagination flashed me a vivid picture of a desk swarming inside with girls about five or six inches high. They weren’t dressed—my imagination never dresses girls except for special effects after long thought—but these looked as if they had been modeled from the drawings of Heinrich Kley or Mahlon Elaine. Literal vest-pocket Venuses, saucy and active. Right now they were attempting a mass escape from the desk, using a couple of nail files for saws, and they’d already cut some trap doors between the drawers so they could circulate around. One group was improvising a blowtorch from an atomizer and lighter fluid. Another was trying to turn a key from the inside, using tweezers for a wrench. And they were tearing down and defacing small signs, big to them, which read
YOU BELONG TO DR. EMIL SLYKER.
My mind, which looks down at my imagination and refuses to associate with it, was studying Dr. Slyker and also making sure that I behaved outwardly like a worshipful fan, a would-be Devil’s apprentice. This approach, helped by the alcohol, seemed to be relaxing him into the frame of mind I wanted him to have—one of boastful condescension. Slyker was a plump gut of a man with a perpetually sucking mouth, in his early fifties, faircomplexioned, blond, balding, with the power-lines around his eyes and at the corners of the nostrils. Over it all he wore the ready-for-photographers mask that is a sure sign its wearer is on the Big Time. Eyes weak, as shown by the dark glasses, but forever peering for someone to strip or cow. His hearing bad too, for that matter, as he didn’t catch the barman approaching and started a little when he saw the white rag reaching out toward the spill from his drink. Emil Slyker,“doctor”courtesy of some European universities and a crust like blued steel, movie columnist, pumper of the last ounce of prestige out of that ashcan word “psychologist,” psychic researcher several mysterious rumored jumps ahead of Wilhelm Reich with his orgone and Rhine with his ESP, psychological consultant to starlets blazing into stars and other ladies in the bucks, and a particularly expert disher-out of that goulash of psychoanalysis, mysticism and magic that is the chef-d’oeuvre of our era. And, I was assuming, a particularly successful blackmailer. A stinker to be taken very seriously.
My real purpose in contacting Slyker, of which I hoped he hadn’t got an inkling yet, was to offer him enough money to sink a small luxury liner in exchange for a sheaf of documents he was using to blackmail Evelyn Cordew, current pick-of-the-pantheon among our sex goddesses. I was working for another film star, Jeff Crain, Evelyn’s ex-husband, but not “ex” when it came to the protective urge. Jeff said that Slyker refused to bite on the direct approach, that he was so paranoid in his suspiciousness as to be psychotic, and that I would have to make friends with him first. Friends with a paranoid!
So in pursuit of this doubtful and dangerous distinction, there I was at the Countersign Club, nodding respectfully happy acquiescence to the Master’s suggestion and asking tentatively, “Girls needing attention?”
He gave me his whoremaster, keeper-of-the-keys grin and said, “Sure, women need attention whatever form they’re in. They’re like pearls in a vault, they grow dull and fade unless they have regular contact with warm human flesh. Drink up.” He gulped half of what was left of his martini—the puddle had been blotted up meantime and the black surface reburnished— and we made off without any fuss over checks or tabs; I had expected him to stick me with the former at least, but evidently I wasn’t enough of an acolyte yet to be granted that honor.
It fitted
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