As the senior secretary Yang later learned, the agent’s assistant deleted Suandi’s messages immediately, mistaking them for spam. The manager’s assistant moved the messages to a folder marked “Potential Stalkers.” The accountant’s assistant was admitted to rehab before reading the email. Suandi checked his inbox faithfully each morning in eager hopes of a response from Stone’s handlers, but was invariably disappointed; and under constant pressure from Rajaputra, who kept expecting the actress to show up for dinner, he finally broke down and asked for Yang’s help.
The Sharon Stone who arrived by small plane shortly before the onset of the monsoon season was, admittedly, a few pounds heavier than Rajaputra would have guessed from her movie appearances. On the other hand, her hair was even blonder; she looked refreshingly young and smooth, as though her very skin were made of freshly molded latex; and she responded with a white, toothy smile to his overtures from the first night onward, joining him in his curiously outdated water-bed after minimal cajoling. She admired his mahogany headboard carved with intertwined pythons.
And she assured him that the discrepancy between her real-life and film physiques was entirely normal and a matter of clever special effects, for no actress, she said—speaking upside down through her outstretched legs in a downward-facing-dog pose—could actually be as thin as the tricks of cinematography made her seem.
She practiced yoga every morning. Rajaputra admired her thigh muscles.
The billionaire’s English, learned at a British school in Hong Kong, had an Oxbridge flavor. Despite this he was far from fluent and there were many words he did not know; much American slang went right over his head, and to compound the problem Sharon Stone often spoke far too fast. But it was pleasant to immerse himself in the cascade of words, and what he did not understand in her utterances he glossed over, unwilling to admit there were gaping holes in his vocabulary. For this reason he and Sharon Stone did not always comprehend each other perfectly, but acted as though they did.
And while his assumption was that Sharon Stone had come to stay—and a date for their sumptuous wedding should be set sooner rather than later—the look-alike had in fact been hired by Yang for a period of not more than three weeks while the Las Vegas show she danced in was on hiatus. She was always glad to moonlight as Stone, for playing the part entertained her and the money was often good; in this instance the money had been excellent, the seats first-class, the location exotic, and—an unexpected perk—the guy for once halfway good-looking.
He took her to meet Komo on the second morning but offered no introduction as they walked through the gardens, for he wished it to be a complete surprise.
She had been only vaguely aware of the incident at the Los Angeles Zoo. A strip club and two bachelor parties had engaged her services in the weeks thereafter to do stage send-ups of it. On one memorable occasion she had played a nude Stone in high heels, talking and laughing on her cell phone as her husband (also nude) thrashed back and forth in the background in the grips of what looked like an alligator. All of this was juvenile and none of it made much sense; but then, she had not been hired as a drama critic.
And that was long ago now. She had never seen a Komodo dragon in person—in fact, she had never even seen a picture of one—and while Suandi and Yang had warned her solemnly that she must always remain in character, the sight of Komo came as such a shock that she forgot. He was gobbling a fresh kill; his mouth and jaw were covered in blood. The fawn eviscerated beside him bore a striking resemblance to Bambi. And just as Sharon Stone and Rajaputra loomed over his wall, Komo pulled from Bambi a long string of intestines, holding them in his mouth and shaking them vigorously back and forth to expel the inedible matter within. Blood and feculence spattered onto the dirt.
Rajaputra could hardly have known that a seminal incident of Sharon Stone’s childhood, which she later revealed to Yang and me, had involved her father, a methaddicted salesman who split his time between Reno and Twentynine Palms, disemboweling her mother’s yappy Pomeranian with a broken bread knife. The sight of the fawn and the dragon struck a terrible blow.
“Oh my God!” screamed Sharon Stone, and turned away. “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!”
As she collapsed against a pillar sobbing, Rajaputra stood by uselessly, wearing a frozen grimace. Having almost zero capacity for empathy, he was not a born nurturer. Finally a young maid who had been working a few feet away came to lead Sharon Stone to a lawn chair, where she patted and stroked the showgirl’s shoulder softly to calm her down.
Komo himself, whose hearing and vision were both poor but whose sense of smell could pick out a dead bird five miles away, went on eating mechanically in a state of some befuddlement, possibly disoriented by the heady scent of Sharon Stone’s midpriced perfume.
Rajaputra had believed the lizard would please Sharon Stone, indicating a commitment on his part to her personal heritage. Watching her cry on the lawn chair, however, pretty face in her hands, shoulders and breasts heaving, he was unsure. She was a woman, after all, and women were famously weak in the face of gore and violence. She was divorced now from the Jewish media tycoon whom Komo had so righteously wounded three years before; Rajaputra had thought this would distance her, perhaps even allow her to see in the lizard a kind of cheerful ally against all the Jews; but clearly she was still petrified of the monster.
For her part, Sharon
