You rascal. Really, you shouldn’t have.”
“So you do remember.”
“You thought I’d forget my first collection? It’s like forgetting your first time under the knife.” Vietti gazed at Maya, deeply intrigued. “Where did you find her?”
“She’s my new student.”
Vietti very gently touched Maya’s jawline with one black-gloved fingertip. He plucked once at the end of a trailing length of her wig, and gave a quick adjusting tug at her shoulder seam. He laughed delightedly.
After ten seconds or so of hearty laughter, Vietti’s cheeks flushed patchily and there were odd aquatic gurglings beneath the suit. Vietti put his left hand to his midriff, winced, wriggled a bit on the deep internal hooks of his life support. Then he examined a wrist-fan and sketched at the membrane with his forefinger.
“Let’s put her on the catwalk tonight,” he said. “A show in Roma is always such chaos anyway. And really, this is too cute.”
“You mustn’t, Giancarlo. That’s costume plastic, it’s a knockoff.”
“I know this garment is your little joke on me, but we can get that fixed. Can she walk?”
“She can walk a little.”
“She’s very young, they’ll forgive her if she can’t walk.” Vietti looked at her, expectantly. “The name?”
“Maya.”
“Little Maya, I have a very good crew here. Let me put you in their hands. Can you walk in front of all these shiny people? They are terribly old, and they all have silly spex and too much money.” Vietti winked at her, a leaden pretense of camaraderie across the awful gulf of a century.
“Sure I can.” Perfectly happy and confident.
Vietti gazed at Novak limpidly. “And Josef—a few little pictures for me. For my little corner of the net.”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” said Novak. “I haven’t brought the proper gear.”
“Josef, for old times’ sake. You can use Madracki’s gear, Madracki’s a poseur, he’s an idiot, he owes me the favor anyway.”
“I’m all out of practice with couture. Really, it takes everything I have these days just to photograph an eggshell, a spiderweb.… ”
“Josef, after you took the trouble to dress her! Don’t be coy. The face is awful, it’s true, that’s little-girl makeup, vivid kitsch for kids, but we can see to the face. And the wig’s a disaster.… But she’s so sexy, Josef! Everyone was so very sexy in the twenties. Even I was sexy then.” Vietti sighed nostalgically. “You remember how sexy I was?”
“When you’re young, even the moon and stars are sexy.”
“Ah, but people died so young in the twenties, so everyone was sexy then, everything was always so sexy. Even AIDS was sexy in the twenties. I don’t have a single sexy thing in this collection, your little girl can be my sexy thing tonight, it’ll be fun. Barbara will see to it.” Vietti flapped his wrist-fans shut and clapped his hands. “Barbara!”
“You’re very lucky,” Novak told Maya, very quietly. “He wants to like you. Don’t disappoint us.”
She whispered back. “He’s not going to pay me, is he? I can do this as long as I don’t get paid.”
“I’ll look after that,” Novak assured her. “Be brave.”
Barbara was a senior Vietti assistant. Barbara had the accent of West End London, and the broad features and kinked black hair of a West Indian, combined with the painterly peaches-and-cream complexion of a Pre- Raphaelite lass on a canvas. Barbara was sober and efficient and dressed as beautifully as a ranking diplomat. Barbara was eighty years old.
Barbara took Maya into the cosmetic studio, which was crowded with male models. Ten or so stunningly beautiful men, in various states of partial dress, sat before brilliantly lit videomirrors, chattering, flexing biceps and quadriceps, methodically primping.
“This is Philippe, he’ll look after you now,” said Barbara, and she put Maya into a red support chair at the elbow of the cosmetician. Philippe was a small man with a tiny pinched mouth and brilliantined blond hair and enormous spex. Philippe took one look at her, blurted a horrified, “Oh dear no,” and sent off for spatulas and cleansing cream and adhesive towels and powerbrushes and a red alert for the hairdresser.
The two nearest models were having a chat. “Have you seen Tomi tonight? He’s bulked. He’s really bulked.”
“It’s the grandkid thing,” said a second model. “I mean, you get over having the kid, but when the kid has a kid, I dunno.”
“How’s your new house, Brandon?”
“So far so good, but we shouldn’t have drilled that deep in a seismic area. It’s got me all worried.”
“No, you got it made now, you and Bobby can seal it off, set up some hermetic germware, some very sweet discretion way down deep there, really, I’m green with envy.” The model examined his videomirror. The screen showed him an image without reversal. “Do my eyelids look okay?”
“You had them tucked again?”
“No, something new this time.”
“Adrian, the eyelids never looked better. Seriously.”
“Thanks. Did I tell you I enlisted in the army?”
“You’re kidding.” Effortlessly Brandon bent double and placed his palms flat on the floor. He went into a handstand, then flexed his elbows methodically. His muscular legs, toes pointed at the ceiling like a high-diver’s, looked as solid as cast bronze.
“Well,” said Adrian, “my medical’s running pretty high, and civil support, well, they’re a bunch of dirty finks. Aren’t they? But the armed forces! I mean, modern society—seriously—there has to be real authority! Somewhere on the far side of all these civilian broads, there have to be some serious guys willing to kick butts and take names. Capisci?”
Brandon curled into an effortless backflip. He examined his washboard abdomen in the mirror, frowned, and found a reactive girdle. “How long are you in for?”
“Five years.”
“No problem, you could do a five-year enlistment on your head.” Brandon adjusted the girdle, which sealed tight with a violent sucking sound. “You got through the army physical and everything?”
“Sure, they love me. They put me in the officer corps.”
“They didn’t mind the prostate thing?”
“The prostate thing is history, the prostate’s very fresh and crunchy now. I’m doing weekends at a guard base in Cairo.” Adrian stopped suddenly. “Philippe, what are you doing to that poor kid’s eyebrows?”
“I’m in a hurry,” Philippe complained.
“That’s a period dress. You gotta do period eyebrows for this little girl, twenties eyebrows. You can’t just pluck her out like she was Veruzhina on the rampage or something, this is an ingenue look.” Adrian patted Maya’s forearm with fatherly aplomb. “Haven’t seen you around, kid. First time with Giancarlo?”
“Yes, it is. First time ever with anybody.”
“Oh Brandon, listen to that, she’s American.”
“Are you guys American, too?” she said.
“Sure,” smiled Adrian, “Europeans love the primal American male, big shoulders, upholstered, dumb as rocks, can’t hardly talk, what’s not to like?”
“They like us virile,” said Brandon. “They pay real well for virile. You gotta pay for virile, because the upkeep on virile is murder.” He laughed.
“You have very acid pores, sweetie,” Philippe told her with deep concern. “Have you been bathing in mold?”
“Just once.”
“You should. You really should! I’ve got a strain of cultured aspergillus that would do wonders for you. I need to move your hairline and depilate your upper lip. This may hurt a little.”
Tweezers plucked, brushes whirred, greases soaked, powders reacted and settled. In thirty minutes all the men were meticulously dressed. Some of them were taking their turns outside.
Philippe showed her the new face.
She had been through many facials before, all kinds of facials, decades of facials. Most had been entirely
