Deathwish World

half a dozen office girls.' She took her lower lip in her perfect teeth. 'Some of them are quite darling.'

There was a knock at the door and a man with the look of a well-tanned European, somewhere in his mid- thirties sauntered through. He wore his red hair in a young athlete's crew cut and his dark blue eyes seemed out of place in his dark complexion. There was an easygoing sardonic quality in his smile. 'Sheila,' he said, 'you are looking particularly Brunhildic today. Have you been butchering male chauvinists with your broadsword again?'

The secretary of the Central Committee snorted at that and said, 'Where the hell have you been, Jerry? I've been trying to get in touch with you for weeks.'

'Reclusing,' he told her easily. 'Haven't you heard? I am currently labeled the world's wealthiest recluse and also its most eligible bachelor. Want to get married? Oops, no, of course not.'

Sheila snorted again and said, 'This is Lee Garrett. She's to be my new secretary. Lee, Mr. Jeremiah Auburn. Mr. Auburn is a member of the Central Committee; its youngest, by the way. How he ever got into its membership is a mystery to me.'

'Mind how you speak to your superiors, Ms. Duff-Roberts,' he said amiably. And then, as he shook hands with Lee, 'Wizard, we meet again.'

Lee wrinkled her forehead. 'I… I've heard about you, Mr. Auburn, but where did we ever meet? I'm sure that I would recall.'

A glint of laughter came into his eyes. 'It's an old ploy of mine. I'm terrible at remembering people and women become so distressed when I don't recall their faces, particularly if I

once spent a long weekend with them in the Bahamas, or Hawaii, or wherever, that I say, 'Wizard, we meet again,' just to be sure.' He headed for an elaborate Florentine cabinet, which turned out to be a disguised bar.

'How good of you, Jerry,' Sheila said sarcastically. 'It must be distressing to be such a ladykiller.'

'A distress you'd love to share,' he said over his shoulder. And then, 'Hmmm, perhaps you do.'

'I hope you worry about that a lot,' Sheila said, obviously well used to his banter.

He called, 'Anybody else up to a bit of guzzle? I just checked. It's twelve, so you won't be considered a morning lush.'

Sheila asked for Scotch but Lee shook her head, still uneasy. Somehow, this man seemed familiar; possibly it was his voice, but she knew that she'd never seen him. There wasn't a woman in the world who could meet Jerry Auburn and forget about it. The leading light of the rocket set for a decade, he had suddenly reversed his engines and disappeared from sight, in the tradition of Howard Hughes. From time to time he would pop up in the news but largely he was, as he had said, a recluse. Lee couldn't imagine him being a member of the World Club, much less of its Central Committee.

He brought Sheila's drink back to her, held up his own darkish brandy and water, and said, 'Cheers, Sheila, old chum-pal. A new secretary, eh? What happened to the ultra-efficient Pamela?'

'I'm sure you'll leam all about it,' she said, and sipped. 'Lee just came in today.'

'Wizard,' Jerry Auburn said, looking Lee over again. He made with a mock leer. 'You certainly pick them, Sheila.'

Sheila didn't disguise her impatience at that. 'Attractiveness and poise are requirements of employees who must meet the public, the news media, and so forth, Mr. Auburn. As you very well know.'

He finished the drink in one fell swoop and looked at his chronometer. 'This is as good an opportunity as any for me to become acquainted with our beauteous Ms. Garrett. Are you available for lunch, ah, Lee?'

'Why,' she said, 'I haven't even seen my rooms yet, but

I'm not really tired and we didn't eat on the shuttle from Paris.'

'Wizard,' he said. 'Then with Sheila's permission, I'll whisk you off.'

'I'll see you later this afternoon, dear,' Sheila told her. 'Don't forget about the, uh, party this evening, if you change your mind.'

Out in the hall, as they walked toward the staircase, Jerry Auburn grinned and said, 'Has Sheila already invited you to one of her versions of the partousT'

She looked up at him from the side of her eyes. 'Yes.'

'I went to one once. They're rather in the far-out line—in the Roman tradition of Nero. Not my cup of tea. I love ladies one at a time and I don't like boys at all. And I'll leave the building of horizontal pyramids to the pharaohs. Must've been unhealthy; they're all dead, I notice.'

She laughed. 'We seem to share similar ideas,' she told him, before realizing that he might misinterpret that.

He chuckled and took her arm as they began to descend the stairs without saying anything further on the subject of sex.

The pages at the door came hurriedly to attention as Jeremiah Auburn approached, as did the guards with their halberds.

There was a beautiful sportster at the curb, one of the extreme models from Bucharest. Lee was moderately surprised when he ushered her to it and saw her seated on the passenger side. 'You have permission to drive your own car in Rome?' she said.

'Ranking members of the World Club have their prerogatives, Lee. Having our central headquarters here is a feather in the caps of the city fathers. They turned over the Palazzo Colonna to us about ten years ago. Do you know Rome? Any preferences on where to eat?'

'I haven't been here for years. I'll leave it to you.'

'Wizard, let's say the Hostaria dell'Orso. I believe it's supposed to be the oldest restaurant in town. Dante used to live in the building.'

He turned the corner and sped down the Via Battisti in the direction of the looming monstrosity that was the monument to Vittorio Emanuele.

As they passed it, Lee shook her head. 'Imagine leveling several acres of the Roman forum to erect that thing.'

'My sentiments exactly,' he said. 'So, you're to be Sheila's new secretary. Did she give you her song and dance about the dream?'

Lee looked over at him in some surprise. 'She made rather a moving appeal for the goals of the World Club, a stable society in which most of history's problems would be solved.'

Jerry laughed softly. 'Did she discuss her final solution to the women's rights problem?'

'Why, no. She asked how I stood on the question but we didn't go very far into it.'

He said, 'I suspect her goal is the reestablishment of a matrilineal society. Get Sheila a bit into her cups and she begins to point out that women predominate numerically in the world but for all practical purposes are ignored in its governing. For instance, we've never had a female president of the United States. I suspect that Sheila wouldn't object to taking the job.' He grinned again. 'I can just see a whole cabinet of lesbians.'

Lee said, confused, 'But what does motivate the Central Committee, if not what Sheila calls the dream?'

He shot a look over at her, even as he maneuvered through the narrow streets. 'Did our good Sheila tell you anything about the composition of the Central Comitttee?'

'No, not yet. Aside from you, she mentioned Grace Cabot-Hudson.'

'And what do you know about Grace?'

'Not much, really. Isn't she supposed to be the richest woman in the world?'

'Uh huh. And what do you know about me?'

'Well, aside from the news media nonsense, not much. Oh, yes, I've heard that you were possibly the richest man in the world.'

Jerry laughed outright. 'Harrington Chase would hate you for that.'

'You mean that anti-semitic Texan who supports those ultra-right wing organizations. Good heavens, what has he got to do with it?'

'Harrington's a member of the Central Committee, my dear. So is Mendel Amschel, for that matter, which sometimes drives poor Harrington up the wall.'

'The Viennese banker? He's another one that's sometimes called the richest man. Why should Mr. Chase object to him?'

'If you count his whole family, Mendel may control more wealth than anyone else. The irony is that while he's a Jew, I doubt if he's religious at all. Ah, here we are.'

The Hostaria dell'Orso was located in a medieval palace, elegant and very