The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

“And YES, Johan Thoms. You have one.”

She bit her bottom lip, just to the left, and slowly blinked.

Johan was reduced to rubble. Luckily, his groin also felt like a chunk of masonry.

Herb yelled for more drinks and asked the new guests if they would care to join him. Johan pondered, for the sake of his performance, whether he should further imbibe. He wanted to file this in his memory for later perusal.

“Yes, please, actually. I’ll take a bourbon sour, Herb. Thank you,” said Johan.

Bill yelled to a passing waiter, “Make that two, please.” He glanced to the right to see Lorelei removing her hand.

Perfect, Bill thought, and he winked at his pal.

Generous to a fault, Srna demanded more champagne, and then he continued his tête-à-tête with Bill on Serbian expansionist policy.

Meanwhile, there was a more important agenda on a different Eastern Front. To Cartwright’s right, Lorelei was twitching in her seat. She rubbed Johan’s bare shin with her warm foot.

Later, Johan only recalled noting his own gratitude toward Srna for allowing the obvious frisson to flourish.

The next thing he knew, he was alone with Lorelei. He was kissing her, up against giant wrought-iron gates leading to a darkened courtyard. Darkened, but for the softest of yellow lights coming from two or three windows on different floors.

Fade-out.

The next thing he recalled, they were in an elevator, black trestle closing behind them.

Fade-out.

A knock on the door and two glasses of champagne, with a strawberry in each flute, entered on a solid silver platter, followed by the night porter, all beady eyes and a center parting. The room was luxury.

Fade-out.

A relaxed, naked Lorelei facing him on her back on the bed, head nearest to him, as he staggered off to urinate. She smiled at him as he left the room. He recalled that he had remembered to raise the toilet seat before he’d peed.

(His father had drilled it into him to put the seat back down afterward, in case the female in question were married. For if she were and the seat were left raised, then there would be one malicious, vengeance-seeking husband hiding in the closet for his next visit, clutching a saber—precisely the one thing one would not want to meet in a state of undress and/or arousal.)

In the bathroom, his erection had posed a problem. He did not want to miss the bowl and piss all over her floor, though it was more likely to hit the back of the wall six feet up right now.

He considered doing a handstand and giggled to himself.

In his dorm he had perfected the art of knowing exactly where to stand with a full-blown one (adjacent to the gray-cracking porcelain sink). As he started to urinate and turgidity decreased, he would slowly inch forward, shuffling, in order to maintain bull’s-eye into the center of the bowl. Now, he would have to replicate this skill in a bathroom of untried dimensions.

“Bang on!” he whispered.

Not a drop even touched the porcelain as he smiled at the splashing: he had been a real success in the bathroom. But he could not recall much about what had happened in the bedroom.

These were his main recollections of his first evening with Lorelei Ribeiro. Johan Thoms was still very much a boy.

* * *

The following three days, Lorelei’s last in Sarajevo, were spent in the confines of her suite. Lorelei and Johan ventured into the old town for just one dinner, into an unseasonably chilly evening.

Their venue that night became their restaurant of choice whenever Lorelei would return to this, Johan’s city. Taberne Parioli—named after the hamlet in Italy where the owner had met and fallen in love with his wife in the winter of ’89—was, it seemed, a place for young chaps looking to impress their belles. It had only six tables. Three of these adorned the ivy-covered balcony, from which the patrons were able to acknowledge some of their fellow burgers of the old town and ignore the rest down a long unwelcoming Balkan nose. The owners loved their cuisine and never looked down any sort of nose at anyone. Johan recalled fondly the owner’s wife, her generosity, her love of providing for her extended family of satisfied guests, bringing out the desire-fused dishes created by her beau, who perpetually and profusely sweated away in the back of the establishment.

“Are you frightened of me?” Lorelei had asked out of the blue.

There had been a split-second pause before Johan offered, “No, why?”

On their first anniversary, back at the same spot, equally out of the blue, he would admit, “Yes, of course, I was.”

She laughed at him. She had, of course, known.

Back in the President, supplies of food, coffee, and other liquid refreshment were delivered to the vast mahogany writing desk in her suite.

This was a novel experience for both of them. Johan was not used to spending the next day, never mind three days, with a conquest, though he hardly saw Lorelei as a conquest—more as a monumental work in progress.

For Lorelei, this was the first time since her husband had perished that she had slept with a man. A woman, yes, but not a man.

These details had come to light as Johan had gradually wound down over the days to talk at ease with her and had become almost himself. As his nerves had dissipated, Lorelei had found him increasingly charming, funny, and intelligent. She had laughed.

It would be twelve months, however, before she actually realized that Johan had not been circumcised, for she would never see anything but a turgid member. In her presence it would always be thus. They say the Queen of England perceives and therefore believes that the world smells of fresh paint, for there is always some poor sod twenty yards in front of her with a brush and a large pot, slapping it on at velocity. So it was (sort of) with Lorelei and Johan.

* * *

Srna was to have accompanied Lorelei back to Vienna, but he had gone back one day earlier than planned (but only once he was convinced that Lorelei had wanted to stay in Sarajevo). Always the gent, Srna reassured her that none of this would be mentioned in Austria. She trusted him implicitly. He had prepaid her departure with a bank draft from the American embassy, allowing her to simply stroll and saunter out of the President as she wished. This she knew how to do.

Johan accompanied her to the station and threatened to get on the train with her. She joked and called him “a stupid boy,” though she was confident that he could be groomed—and that soon they would share a great love (which, according to the hyperbolic Cartwright, was “to make Krakatoa look like an abbey candle”).

The train door closed, the whistle blew, and she was gone, to the north.

Six (#ulink_77155bf2-ea84-5339-bef9-a7bc8486a412)

A Sweet Deity of Debauchery (#ulink_77155bf2-ea84-5339-bef9-a7bc8486a412)

Moreover, the Lord said, because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet.

—Isaiah 3:1

June 16, 1913

Johan lay horizontal on his favorite window ledge in his chambers, with a hefty Egyptian cushion behind his bulbous head, soaking in volume three of the Kama Sutra. The sun turned his face a soft brown.

Three slow, light, effeminate knocks landed on his door. It was not the day for the cleaner to mop his floors. Johan jumped down and glided gently to open the door. He was met by a vision of shocking-pink cuffs, pale skin, thinning reddish hair, and bulging green eyes.

The Count stood five foot eight in his stacked-heeled, perpetually new shoes. He was just months from his fortieth birthday, and his most time-consuming pastime, aside from learning Eastern religions, was attempting to maintain his youth. Sadly for him, his hedonistic lifestyle did not dovetail with his efforts. (“My ying is outweighing my yang again,” he said.) This did not stop his being pampered by an array of bemused stylists and fledgling pedicurists more suited to Cleopatra than a Teutonic twentieth-century count.

The visitor held out an elevated and angled hand.

“The Fifteenth Count of Kaunitz. I think it’s fifteen. To the rescue.”