An Après-Kidnapping Dinner

An Après-Kidnapping Dinner
excerpted from the unpublished novel, The Sissy's Tango

          LaCroix drove for almost two hours before reaching a small airstrip completely surrounded by woods in the Appalachian Mountains. The Sissy’s DC9 was parked at the extreme edge of one end of the short runway.

          The limousine emerged from a narrow dirt road — little more than a widened path — on one side of the strip and drove along the runway to the airplane’s forward entrance. The door opened and the airstair folded down.

          Glickman led the way up into the plane, followed by Eloise, her legs a bit rubbery, holding tightly to her kids. Pernik followed, but stopped at the head of the airstair, turned around, and pulled his gun back out from under his jacket. LaCroix drove the limo into a small cleared space off the runway some distance from the plane, got out, and ran back across the grass strip to board. As he approached the plane Pernik removed the silencer from his gun and put it in a pocket, then raised the barrel, aimed carefully holding the gun with both hands, and fired one shot. It struck its target and the limo exploded.

          Inside the forward cabin of the plane, Annamaria was helping Robbie and Dianne — who were tired, bored, hungry, and grouchy — to the milk and snacks she had waiting ready for them. They were each holding a stuffed animal that Annamaria had already given them. Glickman helped Eloise into her seat and then went off behind Pernik through a galley area into the cockpit. LaCroix pulled up the airstair, secured the door shut behind him, and went off through a bulkhead doorway into the aft section of the plane. With sleepy Dianne on her hip, Annamaria buckled Robbie into a big, comfortable-looking seat with his snack on a tray beside him. The engines started up.

          Going calmly about her chores, Annamaria engaged herself with the children through some nanny-chatter: “Hurry up just a teeny bit, now, we’re about to take off. ... There, baby. Boy, weren’t you thirsty? ... Yep, I’ll show you where the bathroom is after we’re in the air. ... More milk, Robbie? ... There you are ...”

          Eloise stared hollowly out the window at the burning limo. Still holding Dianne, Annamaria slipped into a seat and buckled herself in. The plane accelerated down the strip and took off with little room to spare, barely clearing the trees.

          As soon as the plane made altitude Annamaria unbuckled herself, got up, and put drowsy Dianne into a large bassinette attached to the forward bulkhead. Then she unbuckled Eloise, who seemed a bit woozy and disoriented. With a kind smile, she said, “Well, we made it up into the air once again. That Carlo might be creepier than a snake, but he can fly this thing just like ringin’ a bell.” She turned her attentions to the children while continuing to talk to Eloise. “You have to get up now, Mrs Kholinsky. Your dinner’ll be in the central cabin, just aft from this one. I’ll watch over your little ones as if they were my own.”

          Eloise obediently rose and discreetly stretched. She looked questioningly at Annamaria as she tried to collect herself.

          In a reassuring tone, Annamaria told her, “You’ll be treated as an honored guest, if you’ll let yourself be. Now, go — The Sissy’s anxious to meet you.”

          Almost to herself, Eloise repeated, “The Sissy.”

          “The boss. The man what am. The dude in charge.”

          Eloise turned and walked slowly toward the door through the bulkhead into the central cabin.

          The central cabin hit Eloise’s tired eyes with an initial blow of sensory overload. The Sissy had redone its decor to resemble an eccentrically aristocratic Victorian dining-parlor reflecting his eclectic tastes. Every square centimeter was spotless and perfectly polished. LaCroix, who had been standing by the door to the forward cabin, slipped out behind Eloise as she’d entered, securing the door behind him.

          The Sissy was standing to one side of a small, expensively-set dining table, looking every bit as sumptuous as his setting. He was got up in a nearly floor-length lavender dressing gown in something of a mandarin style — embroidered in needlepoint with stylized dragons in gold thread — purple velour trousers, white velvet slippers, and a white silk scarf knotted loosely around his neck. He held a crystal pony glass containing a pale brown liquid. He carefully set his glass down on a doily-covered occasional table and gushed forward to greet Eloise, extending both of his plump, manicured, bejewelled hands to her.

          “Mrs Kholinsky! Mrs Kholinsky! So wonderful to see you! I’m so relieved that you arrived safely!” He took both her hands in his and kissed them. “Oh, please, please may I address you as Eloise? Don’t deny me, I beg of you! Eloise is such a poetic name — you simply must give me your permission ...”

          Eloise, determinedly regaining something of her composure but only partially concealing her fear, smiled with a weak try at graciousness and nodded her assent.

          “Oh, divine! And you simply must call me Maurice!” His hands fluttered in a show of camp embarrassment. “Oh, dear — foolish me! I’ve forgotten! We haven’t properly introduced ourselves, have we? I must be getting old. No, that couldn’t be it ...”

          He put an arm around her in an intimate fashion, resting his hand on the uncovered part of her shoulder, and led her across the cabin to a small settee.

          “I guess I’m such a silly,” he gushed on, “but it honestly seems as if we’ve been intime for literally ages!” Eloise sat. “But of course you don’t know me at all! My true baptismal name, dear Eloise, presented me by my sainted mother, is Maurice D’Artagnan Albritton, but you must call me Maurice, or I’ll be positively destroyed!”

          Eloise, her poise slowly returning from somewhere, fixed an icily dignified smile onto her face and forced her voice to be as aristocratically gracious as she could manage: “Of course. Maurice.”

          The Sissy stood there and simpered with his entire body, his hands aflutter. “Oh divine! How truly divine! We’re on a first-name basis already! It’s a dream come true!”

          Staring into her eyes, he plucked his cordial from the table and sipped, a naughty-little-boy look on his seedy face. Eloise, keeping her smile bravely fixed, let her eyes stray from his face to his glass. Catching her hint, he fluttered in an affectation of embarrassment:

          “Gracious, Eloise, forgive me! You have me so dazzled that I forgot my manners as a host!” He turned toward a sideboard with racks bristling with bottles of cordials and crystal stemware. “Please allow me to serve you an aperitif, my dear. I’m enjoying Drambuie, myself, but of course you certainly ...”

          “Drambuie would be delightful. After all, it has been a long and rather trying day for me ...”

          “Indeed. Indeed. Most people simply don’t know, do they?”

          “How could they?”

          “Oh, how, indeed?”, The Sissy agreed, ceremoniously opening the Drambuie bottle and pouring. He minced back to Eloise and handed her the well-filled glass. “Here you are, dearest Eloise.”

          Eloise said, “Thank you, uh, Maurice,” and immediately took a long, slow swallow, not giving him a chance to offer a toast, then threw her head back and closed her eyes tightly, savoring the drink’s effects.

          The Sissy picked up his own drink without looking at it, his face a travesty of the half-worshipful look of a teen-age girl with a crush. Eloise brought her eyes back down and opened them to catch this on his face. She looked away. He simpered and minced across the cabin to a velvet cord hanging from the dropped ceiling, which he pulled.

          “But you must be positively famished!” He swished back to her. “Here ...” He helped her to her feet and escorted her to the table. “Our dinner will be served in just a moment. You are, I hope, in the mood for some soft-shelled crabs à la meunière?”

          LaCroix cleared away the dessert plates from The Sissy’s airplane dining table. Eloise and The Sissy were sitting back in their chairs with the last of the champagne. Eloise, bleary but wary, smoked a cigarette. The Sissy squeezed his hankie to his nose and sighed.

          “You know, Eloise — when first your dossier revealed to me what a transcendentally exquisite lady it was going to be my privilege to abduct, I felt a thrill within me unlike any in my previous experience.”

          LaCroix eased silently back to the forward cabin and secured the door behind him. The Sissy gushed on:

          “Such beauty! Such grace! Such panache! Such ineffable taste in your choice of apparel! — I must confess that I have since puberty possessed a truly spiritual affinity for the lines of an empire waistline and decolletage —”

          “You flatter me too much, Maurice.”

          “— And,” he simpered, “such a figure! Flatter you too much? That would be impossible! You flatter yourself without saying a word!” He gestured toward her neckline. “Your taste is perfect for such sumptuous beauty, such truly divine voluptuousness!”

          Eloise’s hand flew involuntarily to her throat, failing dismally to cover her chest. “Maurice!”

          Quickly, the Sissy grasped her hand gently but firmly and guided it back to the tabletop. Fluttering, he said, “No-no-no, my dear! You mustn’t be defensive with me. You mustn’t be self-conscious.”

          He lay his hand oh-so-lightly on the exposed upper part of one of her breasts. Speaking with a show of seriousness and sincerity, he said, “You have such an exceptionally marvelous bosom and such a graceful cleavage. They exist to be admired. And you won’t convince me it’s not a source of pride for you, however secret.”

          He softly stroked the cool flesh on the top of first one breast, then the other. Eloise managed to sense his touch with detachment — she was of course aware that it was repulsive, that he was repulsive, but through strength of will that surprised her she was able to stay focused on viewing this repulsiveness as just another factor of the situation with which she had no choice but to deal.

          “Then I won’t try to,” she said.

          Still stroking, he said softly, “You won’t be offended, I pray, if I take the liberty to confess to having spent any number of blissful hours over the past two months or so mooning over your photographs like a schoolboy, a hopeless slave, masturbating myself shamelessly to ecstasy.”