"Nobody's Perfect" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westlake Donald E)

Chapter 13

"I wonder if you've heard this one, Sheikh," Prince Elector Otto Orfizzi of Tuscan-Bavaria called across the table, his round-red-apple face thrust out among the candles.

"I should think I probably had," Sheikh Rama el-Rama el-Rama El responded, and turned to Laura Bathing to say, "Have you been in London recently?"

"Not for a year or so. Oops."

The Sheikh blandly watched her sop up red wine with her most recent napkin, while the black hand and white-clad arm of their host's serving boy reached through between them to pick up the shards of wine glass. "I was there two weeks ago," the Sheikh said.

"Watch out, you clumsy fool!" Laura shrieked at the servant. "You'll get glass in my meat!"

"I was buying a house in Belgravia," the Sheikh went on, unperturbed. His softly oiled chuckle came and went. "The poor English," he said pleasantly. "They can't afford their own capital any more, you know. They're all living in Woking and Hendon."

The Prince Elector, meanwhile, was trying to tell his joke to Lotte deCharraiveuneuirauville, who was ignoring him while grimly watching her husband, MuMu, thrust himself upon cosmetics heiress and frump Martha Whoopley. "What I've always felt about St. Louis," MuMu was saying, "is that it's somehow more real than most of the places I know. Do you feel that?"

Martha Whoopley used her tongue to clear brussels sprouts into her cheek pouches, then said, "More real? How d'ya mean?"

"After all the flitter of New York, Deauville, Paris, Rome–" MuMu gestured gracefully, candlelight sparkling on his rings and bracelets, a fraction of his collection. "All of this," he summed up. "Isn't it somehow more, more, oh I don't know, more real to get back to St. Louis?"

"I don't think it's more real," Martha said. She shoved a lot of French bread into her mouth and went on talking. "I grew up there. I always thought it stunk."

"But you still live there."

"I keep a house out by the plant. You've got to keep your eye on those manager people."

Film star and environmental activist Lance Sheath, a rugged escarpment at Martha's right, leaned toward her with his virile confidentiality, saying in the deep voice that had thrilled billions, "You oughta spend some time in Los Angeles. Get to know the future."

"We have a packaging facility in Los Angeles," Martha told him. "Out in Encino. I don't like it much out there. All that white stucco hurts my eyes."

Prince Otto was finishing his joke to whoever would listen. It concerned a Jewish woman checking in at the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, asking for bellboys to get the luggage from the car, and then requesting a wheelchair for her husband. "'Of course,'" said the desk clerk," concluded the Prince. "'I'm terribly sorry, can't your husband walk?' 'He can,' said the woman, 'but thank God he doesn't have to.'"

While the Prince laughed heartily at his own joke, Chauncey's mind delivered him, intact, a variant beginning, "A sheikh's wife enters the Dorchester Hotel in London–" and ending, "'He can,' said the woman, 'but thank Allah he doesn't have to.'" Should he wait ten minutes or so, and then straight faced tell that variant? No; revenge enough was already under way.

Meanwhile, Mavis Orfizzi was clutching her own bony breast in assumed horror at her husband's gaucherie. "I can't stand it any more," she cried, for the benefit of the table at large, and surged to her feet, knocking over her chair, and so upstaging Laura Bathing that one gave off screeching at Thomas Jefferson, the serving boy, and gaped in astonishment. "Otto," Mavis announced over the other guests' heads, "you are as clumsy and oafish at table as you are in bed."

"In bed?" demanded the Prince Elector, stung out of his raconteur's role, "I'm afraid to touch you in bed for fear of cutting myself," he declared.

"I can't stand it!" Mavis cried out, but then, apparently realizing she'd become reduced to repeating herself, she clutched her brow with both hands, screamed, "No more!" and fled the room.

Her intent didn't occur to Chauncey until, in the astounded hush at the table following her exit, all at once be heard from afar the busy whirr of machinery. Elevator machinery. "No!" he cried, half rising from his seat, arm stretching out toward the doorway through which the damned posturing woman had made her melodramatic exit. But it was too late. Too late. Arm dropping to his side, Chauncey sagged back into his chair, and from the distance the sound of whirring stopped.