Escargot, no...

NO ESCARGOT

By J. B. Pravda

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CHAPTER ONE: SALVADOR
Casinos are timekillers; there is no time as it's measured by the
plebes----more like Dali figured, folding over into itself like
remembrance of disintegrating moments.

Security at the high tech palacios de las vegas was almost too easy; no
more eyeballing at least with bloodshot retinas; the ratpack couldn't
knock over a Seven=Eleven, much less pull off an oceans 11 job in the
newly digitized bubbles of aleatory activity now constituting adult
Disney in the desert.

Anyway, the risk was no longer the mob or some Senator but terror. The
West was hollowed out and taxidermied with its own aqua vitae, and
whatever was surplus---plenty---was invested in emerging markets, the
argot of the new mercantilism careening down its own fast track loop of
unbalanced free trade.

Another realm filled with objet d'art was more suited to his
transcultural sensibilities; the Getty was a new mecca for dilettantes
and discerners and the new longterm Dali exhibit was a coup for the
curator who happened to be at the top of his personal agenda; he had
actually persuaded the elitism-is-art clique in charge to revamp their
approach, having secured the personage of Senor Dali himself while with
the feds made his current contractual assignment especially
simpatico.

A private reception for the sultan of something was in the planning
stages for next month and the details were far beyond anything Cad had
endured with the foreign details of the Bureau. He was sure that the
rumor of airlifted camels was for his benefit, although he had once
seen this done by Khadafi while visiting Australia, but that was for a
camel race in the outback (won incidentally by a Mongolian prince who
chewed tobacco and wore spurs).

Dali had once been commisioned to do a mural in the huge casino at the
Sahara; when he insisted upon replicating the Sistine Chapel
surrounding the chandeliers in Cubist style the deal was out (but Cad
had won the treatment sketches in a card game and they were now
priceless).

Chapter Two: Operation Guernica?

Nostradamus had known Franco on the mobius (sunset)strip of time
clutching the fasces of the fanatic. He had put Spain asunder in a way
the weather and Elizabeth I had never done. From the Inquisition to the
experimental Stukkas from the Reich, the Jewish-inspired and led
communists never had it so rough in one place on the map.

The unofficial Opec-style meeting was held sub rosa via no-name envoys
too ludicrous and reknowned as gamblers and idlers to be seriously
surveilled in a rented hacienda owned by cousin of Juan Carlos himself.
The winner of the Aussie race was even there, fronting as he sometimes
did for his old Russian masters.

The Confederation oil reserves were long known to exceed by a factor of
at least 5 all the middle eastern reserves ever pumped. Thanks to IMF
and its related meliorist cousins and deal-making BP the Ruskies had
ample ways and means of extracting and refining their crude, which they
were prepared to dump onto the market where the Japs, et.al. would que
up to get their predatorily priced petrol with their newly devalued
currencies----should the Arabs not behave and finish the job begun by
Franco's friends in Europe.

"Have the invitations all been RSVP'd?" whispered Javier Janson, the
Cuban host.

"Si, Senor J., every Hollywood Hebe on Planet Hollywood will be in
attendance; the 'Dali Deal' was simply too tempting!" replied Danton,
head of the operation.

His specialty was black market art and through a labyrinthe of insiders
in both St. Petersburgs and even in the ownership family he had
arranged for Dali's most acclaimed works to be donated to the Getty in
the names of these select menshes.

With 75 million Muslims within its confederated borders and another
billion or so worldwide pissed off at the pan American cultural virus
this was going to be a Stalinist wet dream in the name of the grouchy
Marx.

Chapter Three: Snail Trail

Cad was in Vegas at a Fibbie golf charity thing and had holed out with
his 5 handicap early; he paid a visit to Hal Linsky at the newest
pyramid on the sand.

"You son of a gun, how the Hell are you?" screeched Hal's banshee of a
secretary on Cad's entrance.

"Nec spe, nec metu, sister Sanchez" Cad intoned in unassuming
conversational Latin.

Cadduceus Marchand was Jim Brown with the dulcimer rasp of Black Moses
himself for a mouthpiece.

"Is that the King's Spanish, mi hermano?" she puzzled. Gentleman he
was, agreeing fraudulently, while cleverly translating "No hope of
having you, no fear of losing you, or words to that effect."

After a humid reddish besso Cad was escorted to Hal's cavernous office
in the very apex of the four sided glass tribute to silicon and kitsch.
The place was one way glass on all compass points and was as sui
generis as its two occupants (Rita had left).

"welcome to my Rubik's cube, sorta" belched Hal; "The New Agers swear
by it; shit, we'll never grow old and all the while achieve total
consciousness, blah, blah, blah...."

"I bring you Greetings from the Orion System, Siriusly" Cad pronounced;
he and Linsky had a truly melded-mind thing when it came to divining
the bathos of Vegas in particular and modernity in general.

" I've heard of the apex but this is ridiculous; makes the Dali ceiling
deal look positively medieval", posited Cadd.

"Yeah, and with all these former heavy players with bedsheets of the
vertical variety deadbeating their markers I may find myself on the
freight elevator to the nadir, and I don't mean Ralph!" Hal
bemused.

For the last few years the world was awash in barrelhead oil; OPEC was
a seventies acid flashback, the acid having long since neutralized by
the end of the USSR's ability to administer poison pills to
capitalism's endemically weak immune system. Cash was no longer a
tsunami, more like an IV drip; it was essentially the cache of former
wealth/royal status which propped up the negotiability of their high
rolling illiquidity. In the case of the Asians, well just ask your
local realtor/resort keeper in Maui about paying the rent.

"This family values stuff has changed this town but you know that its
the penthouse that drives the stock" Hal whined.

"I don't get it; the word I have is that the dudes of the dunes are
acquiring for cash some high-end canvass and flat donating it to the
Getty ; now I know that he was an oilman, but these are takers not
givers especially to each other" Cadd mused.

"Look,let's get some lunch; my new chef is Cordon Bleu, or Red or
White..." chortled Hal; "I prefer black myself..."chided Cadd.

"His specialty is escargot."

Chapter Four: When There's Danger All About

LA is the DisneyWorld of subcultures, Hispanic rightly laying claim to
that which it had possessed, named, long before the Viking-descended
Anglos had come and usurped the vast Spanish-held arroyos, vegas and
altos of what is now the US West coast to St. Francis' latitude to
Diego the saintly's Mission; from the nevadas to and through the situs
of Body of Christ, Tejas; into the place of the arizonas----sedona,
down through the vast empty mesas, which, nevertheless, the Anglos
needed for their jigsaw puzzle's completion which they had had the
cojones to seemingly legitimize with the argot of aggression---Destino
Manifesto.

Alfredo and all other mestizos knew this for a code phrase for the rape
and theft which are at the core of actions taken because they can be.
The palestinos, as he called them, were his hermanos in the
struggle.

The old man, John Paul---the Pope of Naptha, as he was now
caricatured---had employed many servants all over the world; he was
particularly fond of the Baranque family, its eldest male member having
been his valet--and procurer--for thirty years; his family of seven had
always had secure employ with the dynastic Getty, and Fredo, a man of
57 had been so fixed for most of his life since he was 16. The Popa had
even sponsored his education at Berkeley, the boy having shown
remarkable affinity for the art world in which he had been immersed on
an almost daily basis in the caverns of the superbly appointed public
places of entertainment in the Getty manses; his degree had come in art
history, with an emphasis on the work of Spaniards, seeming so very
natural to one of Castillian heritage, as well as Apache on his
maternal side. He had even influenced the acquisition of many pieces in
the world class eclectic collection.

It was on an artworld excursion to the Posta Vechhia that he was
approached by; an old classmate during a seminar on Spanish born
artists there. Owned by Getty it was well known to Alfredo and he was
co-host of the gathering, feted by none other than El Popa's own chef
Maria Chirieletti.

Alfredo had had many lovers but never married, preferring to invest his
energies in the cultural artscene. He had done his thesis on Dali, not
the obvious choice Picasso, as he was captivated by the dominant
thematic of impotence and guilt suffusing Salvador's work. In his
researches as a student he was struck by the flaccidity and suffering
of the flesh surreally embodied--and disembodied--in the work of Dali.
His cultural sensibility was piqued by his discovery that surrealism
had been allied with Stalinism, holding up the terror they found in
cultural matters. Holding Lenin up as morally unassailable,
Freud,Trotsky and their Jewish cohorts were rejected as viral agents of
that timeless hegemonic cultural conspiracy. Baronque was hooked when
he had learned that the surrealists of France, the leadership, had
commissioned but two political images and they were both by Dali. He
had been captivated by "The Enigma of William Tell" with its
intricately amalgamated face of Lenin.

A Lebanese woman of Maronite and Muslim parents, Salome had been a
citizen of the world thanks to her wealthy father, a distant relative
of the ruling family of South Yemen. While steeped in the liberral arts
and notoriously areligious, she had also studied at the Hermitage in
St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad. It was widely known that she
had been the paramour of Primakov, Mr. KGB and now Prime Minister of
oligarchic Russia.

Her amorous attentions were now, however, focused upon the vulnerable
Alfredo Baranque, a most willing victim.

Chapter 6: Awakened At A Wake