“A DIGITAL KUMQUAT”
EXOTIC HYPER-SEXUAL PSYCHODYNAMICS FOR BORED RICH PEOPLE
(And revealing... The Samarkandian Wonderfruit Sex Confection)
by Incognito 2011
Published by Interdeq. Copyright YieldQWest 2011
Smashwords Edition
“For lust of knowing what should not be known,
we took the golden road to Samarkand.”
James Elroy Flecker
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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“A Digital Kumquat”
the best film...
…never made.
by Incognito 2011
(Translated from the French original text)
To: DJ/MP3 Playlist/Soundtrack Ed.,
Suggested music list, in story sequence order:
(Title/Production Design Sequence) Ebudae, by Enya
1. Pavanne, by Gabriel Fauré
2. Gregorian Chant – Veni Creator Spiritus, by Monks of Stift-Heiligenkreutz
3. Breathe, by Schiller feat. September
4. Bette Davis Eyes, Gwyneth Paltrow
5. At The End, by iiO
6. Carrera 2, by Three Drives
7. Let The Light Shine In, Darren Tate vs Jono Grant
8. Little Lies, by Fleetwood Mac
9. Piano Sonata No.3 in B minor, Op. 58 – Largo, by Fryderyk Chopin
10. Madagascar, by Art of Trance
11. Carly's Song, by Enigma
12. Gypsy, by Fleetwood Mac
13. Mercury & Solace, by BT feat. Jan Johnston
14. I See Right Through To You, DJ Encore feat. Engelina
15. Andromeda, by Chicane
16. Yala Habibi, by Sabu & Arabian Fantasy (Bellydance SuperStars)
17. If You Want Me, by Michael Woods feat. Imogen Bailey
18. 4 a.m., by Kaskade
19. Take Me Away, by Symphony of Strings
20. Book Of Days, by Enya
21. Ebudae, by Enya
22. Diving Faces, by Liquid Child
23. Still Rain, by Benz & MD
24. Falls Apart, Sugar Ray
25. Breathe, by Schiller feat. September
26. Headlights On The Parade, by The Blue Nile
27. A Thousand Miles, by Vanessa Carlton
28. The Emergency, by BT
29. Never Be The Same Again, Melanie C
30. This Love, by Craig Armstrong feat. Liz Fraser
31. Password Session, by The Connection Machine
*The front cover should be read to: 0. Friday Coffee, by Mango
(The experience of reading this work is enhanced by listening to the above suggested audio tracks.)
“A DIGITAL KUMQUAT”
a story by Incognito 2011
Cast:
Arms Dealer
French Commando
Dr. Vladek Zyzek
Principal Female Character - 'Karla Danvers/Ms. Marvel,' Karla Karaman-Chimay, 'Xenara'
French Government Ministerial Liaison
Monk
Marc Jarvis
Birkov
'Zini'
Table Of Contents
Prologue – The Pavanne By Fauré; An Entrance
Amuse Bouche
What Does Sophistication Mean?
Entrance To The Subtle World
“...Suddenly
Debriefing – Tell Me Lies...
The Velvet Underground – Gypsy
“OF THE MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS – OF HIS PALACE AND GARDENS
HOW THE OLD MAN USED TO TRAIN HIS ASSASSINS
HOW THE OLD MAN CAME TO HIS END
The Monk's Wine Suppers
The Brazier & The Secret Of The Silk
“...The Brazier
The Secret Of The Silk...”
The Art
The Secret Of The Samarkandian Wonderfruit (The Garden Of Aida)
The Meaning Of Sophistication “All Power Corrupts, Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely” Lord Acton
Bernard-Henri Levy And Teilhard de Chardin – The Night Of The Ultra-Men
The Shee'nie Mea'th
Extraordinary, Very Extraordinary Rendition
The Portmanteau, Fold-Out Section
The Elaborate Constellations Of The Human Mind
Epilogue – Listening For The Poker Neutrino
Prologue – The Pavanne By Fauré; An Entrance
(Music track 1.)
The long shallow-degree curved road swooped gently away into autumnal-leaved thin forest stands between small farmlets and then travelled gradually deeper into a thick gorse brush-filled heavier forest of chestnut trees, and then into even more heavily-wooded still, fir-tree forested tight valleys.
Inside the low squashed down cabin of the cream-coloured supercar, the occupant peered into the twin tunnel-cones of bright halogen light projected half a mile forward into the night's and the fir-tree forest's darkness. He quickly caught and slid past a slow low-loader hauling a number of cut down young fir-trees for the coming new yule-tide. The automotive he drove was almost two million dollars of carbon fibre and hi-tech engine and mechanicals designed by a company called Polyphonic Digital for Citroen, the famous French sui generis of European, and indeed of world, motor car technology.
Light spatters of raindrops hit the sapphire crystal planar glass windscreen, first one or two droplets and then flurries in handfuls and then a constant and uniform light rain. The swishing tyres and the rain were the most audible sounds. The engine was almost soundless. Occasionally a deep burble, and a blow-off valve sound down the extractor system and exhausts, reached into the quiet cabin at a matching point in time to a gear change, or several automated gear changes in quick succession.
*
Out of the glove compartment, the driver extracted a tiny, very compact earpiece and pitot tube-style wireless voice communicator. ...The prior agreed protocol was brief and simple: if the other's marionette was imminently likely to harm or even lethally endanger yours, you could communicate directly with the 'enemy soldier,' and order him to 'stand down' and hold him off from causing serious harm.
In utterly wild and colourful juxtaposition to everything else, lay a crisp, sharp-edged, bright shiny Marvel Comics early 1940's original Ms. Marvel edition comic book – its wildly sexual hyper-manic front cover face upwards - on the passenger's seat next to the driver.
After a while the car came up to the entrance of a private road turnoff, with its huge black wrought iron gate, chained and padlock-closed, in the middle between two bookend concrete segments of old wall on either side. It was still raining fluently. He waited ten or twenty seconds and then sounded the quad array of klaxon horns. Their harmonized sounds seemed thin and echoey in the dark and rainy forest atmosphere and were quickly sucked away into the night's obfuscating vacuum.
(Music track 2.)
Presently a man in a monk's habit strode purposefully to the gate and unlocked the padlock and drew the chain away deftly. He ran back to one side in the still falling rain as the two halves of the iron gate swung back smoothly behind him through the function of some hidden mechanism. He signalled with an exaggerated arm movement for the car to come in and briskly the cream-coloured supercar passed through the gates and then snaked swiftly down the private road.
Amuse Bouche
(Music track 3.)
The polly perch is an extremely exotic and involved torture technique. In practice not well-understood by many, it was once referred to in an ITC-produced and widely-released film made in 1984 based on a real-life story – 'The Evil That Men Do.' The specifically malicious form of the technique itself was invented truly into the modern idiom by the dictator Rafael Trujillo Molina's head of security, and elaborated from various original Caribbean slaver's customary styles and habits and methods of bondage of potentially resistive human cargo.
Human experience in the complete history of Mankind is very vast and nothing if not complicated. And it is difficult to separate much of that indeed which makes humans unique - human invention and inventiveness - from a genius that is already at its core characteristically partially 'diabolic' in the sense of obscene, in what it is prepared to include in its scope of things possible.
A martini is hardly that much less of an elaboration of an obscene coersive technique if suppressing supervailing inhibitory layers of the will is the mere objective...
The danger of real perversion, is very implicit in the acts of those who are by no means innocent in purposing but only sexual themes inside the superficial forms of human tortures.
The girl whose cunt was exposed beneath the sophistication of the polly perch was losing fluids from the sustentacular cells and olfactory membranes in her mouth and nose. Saliva was building and occasionally dripping in a long line from her mouth to the floor. Unlike the completely malicious form of the perch, she was not suspended fully into the air, part of her lower back being propped up onto a very large well-padded purple satin brocade pillow on the ground. Capsaicin-loaded chemicals rubbed into the soft underarches of her feet were absorbed slowly into the bloodstream and transported up the legs and throughout the body. A secondary side-effect was a raising of the surface temperature and the initiation of a bitter salty strongly-odored sweat from the apocrine glands under her arms. The darker inguinal hairs around her genitals were lightly beaded with sweat and glinted in the glittery hot glare of the small stage luminaires focused purposefully onto her body. A male arm in a midnight blue skin-tight IonX compression material sleeve came close up to her face and sprayed aerosol ice gas at her mouth and nostrils, which flared as she recoiled with a vigorous shaking of her head.
“Now try again,” ordered the sonorous voice. “-has she been treading in an oak barrel of arbequina, hojiblanca, or picual. What type is that on her panties...” The arm dangled black lace panties in front of her face. Suddenly the lights all went off and the panties' lace filigree-work glowed luminescent green in the darkness. “Smells like jalapenos.” She gurgled.
“Hello penis?! I don't think so.” He said menacingly, from a position standing behind her head. He knelt and - from her position that was already flipped over and virtually inverted - he pushed her further forward – or backward, as it in fact was. That is, until she was even further upside down under the perch with the back of her head pressing very deeply into the thick billowing purple cushion.
What Does Sophistication Mean?
(No music track.)
The greatest sources of wealth, progress, and enhancement of human life in the last few hundred years have been the truly great revolutions that involved the entire mass of the world's human population – the agricultural revolution, and the industrial revolution. In spite of the contemporary cultural ideology of the individual's importance and primacy, individualism has not served to enhance the lives of people in economic generality. Television and the crass media themselves seem like revolutions too, but they are not. Television - and the crass media generally - pushes the propaganda of responsible rights and accountable freedoms, and enshrines the cult of celebrity identity as a thematic alter of worship upon which to sacrifice, but it too finds it necessary to exploit volume and commoditization in order to make money for its own economic justification – to exist at all.
Industrial technology is altruistic. Competitive self-interest is decadent.
Fascism is about the concentration of too much power and an uncontrolled appetite at the apex – and in finality, desuetude.
Individual consumption of excessive production – the private manifesto of the tyrant.
What is the meaning of the social elite? It is the power strata all disguising their need to destroy each other at the first chance by deceptively dressing in gay designers' yin-biased, if complicated, couture.
The Present Age is a function of the dilemma between the individual minds of the human population, and the avaricious self-serving individual genius of only a few humans - its politics is the outcome of the unequal balance of forces between incoherent mass mind and willful individual mentalities. The Satanic genius works by using the power of volumes combined with the efficiency of commodity; fewer basic needs multiplied across bigger populations. Everything is cheaper to produce, yet nothing complex is wanted or desired. The mechanism for achieving this has of course widely come to be known as 'dumbing down,' but it inadequately explains the process itself. The real process used is the supplying of ever-increasing amounts of fundamental flavours – saltiness, sweetness, sourness... A point is reached where the taste-buds know nothing subtle at all and the brain requires only more grossness for a fleeting satisfaction of an ever-present neediness.
The 'Present Age' mind is subconsciously very needy. And incapable of quick manoeuvre. It is convinced by the propaganda of the Age that its achievements whether on paper or in substance are real and of merit. But all they are, are iterations of the de-sophistication process; the dumbing down process. The Age invalidates everything else under a tidal wave of opinionated critique from professional presenters, and the necessarily blistering critique of a monolithic megalith called modern academia. Its genius is quite successful.
Sophistication. This is a more temperamental thing to see. Too far on the extreme edges of the spectrum and ultraviolet vagueness is all that can be conveyed, if not actually communicated.
The palette of a person's tastes must be broad enough and sensitive enough to claim the subtleties. And the differences. And the changes. The turning moments, the swirling phases.
To start to compare and contrast the contemporary individual with the truly sophisticated person we need but make short outlined descriptions of the one of them to develop the bas-relief background for the whole subject to come into view: the ordinary contemporary individual is in reality quite socially gauche. The said-to-be social graces of the best of them are affected, spurious, and simplistic. They are 'cartoonographic,' and not even caricatures. They smile bleached white capped teeth interminably as if for glossy magazine photographs always about to be taken and 'zshuzsh' their words because of over-sized enamel molars, and copy phrases from Cary Grant films. They die from lethal drugs regularly.
To depict the sophisticated individual is slightly less easy since their subtleties often go unnoticed to all but the most cunning and perceptive. The contemporary mindset is not so socially aware as to be able to pick up every nuance. Though who then, is the socially sophisticated playing to? Who knows...
...However let us draw a broad picture, a moving picture, an episode in a filmic roman-a-clef, of the sophisticated life. Of course, such a life must needs be ahead of the contemporary world line, ahead 'of the curve,' as they say. Such a story must strike one as more than a little strange, of course, from the standpoint of the ordinary contemporary life and the normal contemporary world in which we have lived in this past fifty years. And yes, of course, this story marks a change...
And so we begin it here.
Entrance To The Subtle World
(No music track.)
This Paris restaurant only politicians and ambassadors and moguls dined at. There was a long long advanced booking period, maybe eight months at least. Those people who could afford to go to very expensive restaurants regularly – like politicians and ambassadors and moguls - could afford to have standing bookings there and that is why that type went there. But that in any case was the prevailing law of the entire Cosmos everywhere: overcome a particular threshold and you can get to go to a special place; get into a next level.
In one of the secluded crushed purple velvet banquette alcoves, there was a man in a Balmain-style white-spotted dark tie, and double-breasted suit, sitting leaning forward and speaking in low urgent tones to another broad-foreheaded man, dressed in an extremely dark tawny-brown shade of plum cashmere tight-waisted, hard shouldered suit, with barely-visible golden threaded arabesque interests on the lapels.
Waiters bearing highly polished silver presses on a wheeled side-table came up and went through the ritual of squeezing the pigeon's blood out so it could be ladled onto the galantine.
The conservative-dressed man had stopped speaking; with one hand palm open. The other one shook his head almost unnoticeably and picked up a knife and tapped the side of his burgundy glass very lightly.
“No.” He said, with finality. His voice had a thin, reedy, almost slightly orgasmic tone. “You bring the best Special Services Commando that the military has, and I will set against him a local ballet school premier danseuse that I will train within three weeks,” he said with what seemed like high sarcasm. And then he smiled.
*
(Music track 1.)
The long shallow-degree curved road swooped gently away into autumnal-leaved thin forest stands between small farmlets and then travelled gradually deeper into a thick gorse brush-filled heavier forest of chestnut trees, and then into even more heavily-wooded still, fir-tree forested tight valleys.
Inside the low squashed down cabin of the cream-coloured supercar the occupant peered into the twin tunnel-cones of bright halogen light projected half a mile forward into the night's and the fir-tree forest's darkness. He quickly caught and slid past a slow low-loader hauling a number of cut down young fir-trees for the coming new yule-tide. The automotive he drove was almost two million dollars of carbon fibre and hi-tech engine and mechanicals designed by a company called Polyphonic Digital for Citroen, the famous French sui generis of European, and indeed of world, motor car technology.
Light spatters of raindrops hit the sapphire crystal planar glass windscreen, first one or two droplets and then flurries in handfuls and then a constant and uniform light rain. The swishing tyres and the rain were the most audible sounds. The engine was almost soundless. Occasionally a deep burble, and a blow-off valve sound down the extractor system and exhausts, reached into the quiet cabin at a matching point in time to a gear change, or several automated gear changes in quick succession.
Out of the glove compartment, the driver extracted a tiny, very compact earpiece and pitot tube-style wireless voice communicator. ...The prior agreed protocol was brief and simple: if the other's puppet was imminently likely to harm or even lethally endanger yours, you could communicate directly with the 'enemy soldier,' and order him to 'stand down' and hold him off from causing serious harm.
In utterly wild and colourful juxtaposition to everything else, lay a sharp-edged, bright shiny Marvel Comics early 1940's original Ms. Marvel edition comic book – its wildly sexual hyper-manic front cover face upwards - on the passenger's seat next to the driver.
After a while the car came up to the entrance of a private road turnoff with its huge black wrought iron gate, chained and padlock-closed, in the middle between two bookend concrete segments of old wall on either side. It was still raining fluently. He waited ten or twenty seconds and then sounded the quad array of klaxon horns. Their harmonized sounds seemed thin and echoey in the dark and rainy forest atmosphere and were quickly sucked away into the night's obfuscating vacuum.
(Music track 2.)
Presently a man in a monk's habit strode purposefully to the gate and unlocked the padlock and drew the chain away deftly. He ran back to one side in the still falling rain as the two halves of the iron gate swung back smoothly behind him through the function of some hidden mechanism. He signalled with an exaggerated arm movement for the car to come in and briskly the cream-coloured supercar passed through the gates and then snaked swiftly down the private road.
There was a hermitage – an old monastery residence structure – at the end of about 800 metres of the private road.
*
(Music track 4.)
She had been many times on a stage or in a performance though this was not entirely like any performance she had been in before.
It's most obvious odd feature, as a performance per se, was that there appeared to be no audience, and no camera crew – or at least none that could be observed to be clearly present.
Nevertheless she knew her instructions and knew how to carry them out to the letter. In the first place this was an unusual engagement of course, but she was also a special type of person – almost unique in many key ways. She came from a family of professional circus performers, though in the modern era. They played in the Cirque de Soleil mostly now although they had at one time owned a real olden days-style circus which was still around in a form and did cut-back routines and exhibitions at small regional venues. Most week-days she studied classical ballet and dance because it was a solid foundation of form and movement for any serious performer. She was also a strength gymnast who could do adagio acts and some stage tricks too. In fact the source of the family's capital large enough to start and own a real circus was that someone back down the generations was the popularly famous if factually somewhat mythical through deliberate suppression, Monaco 'cat' jewel thief. And yet, obvious public history being what it is, certainly it cannot relate the whole truth. Even via myth. And that was that the family ancestry were Austrian royal court bodyguards given the task at some critical moment in their history, of confidential money laundering, tax evasion and secreting the personal private wealth of kings and princes away from the grubby hands of the petty bourgeoisie and the conspiring proletariat. Of course to this day the stupid public thinks that aristocrats 'lost' their money and jewels to an almost supernatural 'cat' burglar; and of course also, often strangely enough at the same time that they had built up some enormous debt at a gaming table, or then at some other times, in the face of a military tyrant enforcing the natural rights of his invasion... There was always that coincident vulnerability caused in truth by the overall decline of the feudal-system world of the era that was now reaching its end.
Not aligned to the tyrants, no longer with obvious and open royal patrons, the family walked in the world that is the half-lit, or, as some French also say le non dit. Down into the present era of the aspirational middle classes, they were never the first name of choice for any regular role in society because of the fear the middle classes have of anyone who may own their secrets, and of course especially their sexual ones!
Yet they were not the demimondaines they were often assumed to be, though they orbited in the same circle of that infamously well-founded twilight party/midnight party society. Though even the demimonde in its day was only ever wicked and glorious and replete with the appearance of beautiful people, due to the extreme over-balance of ultra wealth, in the hands only of the very few, at the very top, of the by-then too-pampered aristocracy. It was the economic moral system of the Moon flower, in the teeming, prolific Tropics. The demimonde is not the truth of glamour; not la vérité! It never was!
...She could not have ever received a real role in the national ballet, capable and competent though that she was. She was suspect. In the first place she did not need the amphetamines or the adrenaline shots that the lower ranks of the corps de ballet relied on, peopled by the children of the worldly ambassadorial strata parents, or the foreign doctors' children or the banksters' useless kids. She had no pull with the sponsors and foundation and trust benefactors. And the assumed possible source of her independent wealth was, of course, a red light in every way. Actors' and performers' agents assumed she would sleep with them for money or for roles, as in any case did the virtual entirety of the mercantile modern aspirational class of human being, who must have lived in the luminous glow of the gross presupposition that money bought all things that there were, on god's good earth.
Enough of money and you don't have to buy the Pope – you could be the Pope!
Enough of it and you might certainly become the President of the United States. In this philosophy any lust would therefore be logically available to be exercised to its polar moment of inertia, as it were, through the simple means of just money offered. But of course this is not a true philosophy. It never was. It is the Diabolical Lie and it is a false philosophy, however it is the motivating fantasy of the middle classes.
Some things are not easy to understand. Sex, dance, and music are all linked. And performance and sex are words used interchangeably even by psychologists. Of course money is a real force in every walk of life but there is a thing in this life that is rarely seen but exists all the same: there is the extremely successful Wall Street futures trader who leaves his life behind, of the computer screen and the office and the condominium – and even his wife and family too – for the simplicitude of a Benedictine monastery. People formerly at the top of all walks of life in fact are commonly there... Along with the most ordinary. Physicists, mathematicians - as well as farmers.
In life there exists a sort of person whose performance in the bedroom for instance, or on the gymnastics floor, or in the back seat of some luxury car is simply a fact of their innate abilities, and not linked in any way to the commercial demands for performance, that money presumes upon all seekers of it otherwise, in a money exchange situation. The top exponents of sex, dance, and music are innately simply that, and they have as little interest in money as they do in the ever-present presumptuous mercantile demanders of no innate personality themselves, or ability, or attraction, who assume performance and quality is created and derived necessarily always by money. Money of course has little consequence upon people's innate abilities, or their original natures, and nor can it. By example, some futures trader, who is at heart a practical mathematician - enthralled by the attraction of orderly mental processes and logical problem solving and number theory, can gain as much intellectual satisfaction from singing Gregorian Chants and thinking about religious philosophy as he may gain from seeing the dollar-profit outcome of his daily trading – nay – a lot more satisfaction. The development of a skill, and the education of a personal philosophy and the culture and cultivation of an art – any art – is about strong personal will matched to an innate potential. And certainly it is about knowledge and experience too.
If you take, by example again, some publicly famous and glamorous identity, they are often not sexy, rich or brilliant at the beginning before the peak of their career, in spite of early signs of natural potential. But because we all live too much in the world of Hollywood entertainment, and in the world of popular magazines informing our ideas, we assume only that there is a celebrity of one kind or another, that possesses ideal sexiness, or physical beauty or musicality. Whereas in fact, the greatest of all those who possess such qualities, are the utterly non-commercial, the unknown superstar who will never be publicly known at all – whose self-discipline to cultivate certain qualities whether glamorous or admirable or breathtaking, exciting, entertaining, engaging, charming, or sexual or intellectual, is utterly not driven by money at all but essentially by the actual ideal alone, of the motivating quality that is involved. For otherwise, the result and consequence of any such efforts will have been to have cultivated the art of the making of money, rather than the substance of the quality of the thing being sought. And that is why so much of celebrity is illusory, insubstantial. The outer surface looks like one thing, and the inside substance cannot meet the promise of the outer appearance. Yet though of course the outer appearance is cleverly enough construed in the modern world, effectively by the commercial needs of the mass media... Which would not be able to exist if they could not do this. They can make anyone look like something special.
However in real life, there are those things that look like those things that appear in the movies, and both are them in the substance inside as well as out. Clearly enough we all know there are real criminals, and real spiritual vampires, and the really sick and the really insane too. And whilst you might believe there are Olympic athletes and Tour De France bike riders and golf professionals and so on, who are of physical substance something -, these are no more or less today than the Hollywood illusion too. Arguably in fact the real existence of the corrupted, ugly and the defective is truly multitudinous! Also the deceiving and the superficial. But the rare that is, is very rare indeed. There is far far less of the good and the beautiful and the substantial and the complete and the integrated than of anything else.
...But though rare now there will be more and more in the future because of the modern evolved scientific capacity of Mankind - to filter and encapsulate key information, and to communicate and to store data and knowledge, and to test ideas and to super learn with technology, and to have better systems and greater efficiency across all technical and developmental fronts; and to acquire things from across the entire globe and from all the cultures and ideas and beliefs from all over the whole world. Mankind will progress.
Even now there are those, some, few – in whose studio or loft apartments are the unpop, pop culture works of Chris Carter, Francis Lawrence, David Naylor... (Whose names are easily on the lips of those who live there.) For therein truly lies the peak human animal – at its intelligent, its cultural, its physical, peak. Un-celebrity. Un-known. The deflowering of the video-clip and the flowering of the video-clip high art... And essentially, real.
*
(Music track 5.)
She walked through the very narrow monastery corridors and passages in jeans and pistachio-coloured cashmere pullover, carrying a large black soft alcantara Hedgren sports equipment bag over one shoulder, and a wooden case like a fly fishing rod case in her right hand. She was wearing a big-dialed black neoprene and nylon Casio electronic watch on her left wrist.
There were small new retro-design gas lights on the walls throwing just enough light to make the place as though Gothicly dull-lit. It was completely sparse everywhere with a few rustic wooden pieces of furniture lying here and there: such as a long refectory table in one small hall, and one or two long-backed hard wood chairs positioned against a wall at distant intervals. Through regularly spaced-apart but small windows she could see outside that it had almost stopped raining now with only very light gusts of thin drops falling in swirls almost as if they could have been a form of early snow.
She came to the monk's cell with its open doorway and its three-small-step-down entrance. There was a small HD digital video camera placed on the window-sill recording everything.
Inside she was greeted silently by a man of about fifty or sixty in a woollen brown monk's habit. In fact he really was a monk. And the whole place was really a monk's hermitage.
The man spread his hands out to signify the table on which she should lay down her equipage. He helped her as she took off the shoulder bag and placed it onto the table. She handed the wooden case to the monk who placed that down on the edge of his simple bed. She unzipped the equipment bag and opened it.
Slipping off her Nike runners, she undid her jeans' side-buttons and started to take them off looking up ironically into the monk's eyes as she did so. He did not react in any way and she continued undressing completely. She was not wearing panties under the tight jeans.
In the equipment bag there was the most stunning black silk underwear, which she put on.
There was a skin-tight dark purple matador's leggings. A satin tunic of gold, and a black and crimson embroidered matador coat. She put all this on and finally there was a short cape of black linen fully lined with crimson silk. There was no hat though, like there would have been for a genuine matador. In fact all the clothing was designer couturier highest fashion, fitted by custom private order fitters, over the weeks earlier at a very private salon in Faubourg Saint Germain, where once in history resided the Princesse Karaman-Chimay. ...Also the beautiful and glamorous wealthy patron the Comtesse Greffulhe; and where walked the earliest fathers of style, her cousin Robert Montesquieue, together with Beau Brummel. ...Also in the bag, there was a pair of patent leather slip-on shoes like kung fu slippers and she put these on too. And the thinnest, tightest, lavender filoselle gloves.
Next she extracted a shiny silver metallic arm-brace which she clasped onto her left forearm and click-fitted a further device onto her upper left arm.
The monk was studying her intently and she signalled him to hand her the wooden case - which he leant over and did - still without speaking. The closest anything he knew about matadors was from Garland Jeffreys' Matador and the Velvet Underground days, not the more up-to-date Sexuality form and style of the killing art. How fortuitous, he thought, that he was going to be able to make a copy of everything from the video camera for himself too, since he had an extra SD card... She lay the case onto the small table and snapped open the brass closing clasps and lifted the lid. Inside, on a bed of dark burgundy plush, lay a small, two foot or so, Pooley and Co. steel rapier with ornamental pommel and gold and braid enhancements and an Italian-style escallop hand guard. She extracted the sword and lay it across a forearm like a professional fencer would to examine and admire it. It was indeed a very beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Eventually she strapped this onto the outside of the lower part of her right leg with the use of the accompanying leather calf-girth sheath and strap.
The final item was what looked like a pair of hi-tech surfer's sunglasses with mp3 ear pods for music to be played through. These she flipped open and placed onto the top of her head but at the same time with their side-pieces clasping down firmly, the attached moveable articulated ear pods fitting inside her ears.
The Casio watch blipped an alarm and she nodded to the monk that she was ready to go. He made the sign of the cross towards her and she turned and walked out of the room and back down the long narrow hallway.
*
Outside, in a courtyard enclosed on all four sides by a ten foot tall concrete wall, and bathed in floodlights, there was a single figure standing, dressed in all-black commando pants and black roll-neck pullover and standard black heavy duty cross-country/trail shoes. He carried a small black H&K MP13 high tech personal defense weapon, with its brown leather strap slung over his right shoulder and his right hand around the grip. He had a wireless communicator earpiece in his right ear and pitot-tube microphone held securely near to the side of his mouth with the latest neck half-brace type nylon-clad titanium wire pincer grips.
Away to one side there was a sudden snorting and shuffling from behind the wall-high wooden planked twin leaved doors on the left wall of the courtyard. The doors shook and banged when the animal behind them was forced forward against the heavy wooden planks. The doors slowly swung open inwards into the courtyard and the big black bull in clouds of body heat and mist propped and then stepped forward and danced a short charge around a distance of the walled perimeter.
*
The monk in his cell was joined by the man who had arrived in the expensive car. The video camera was still positioned on its tiny tripod on the window-sill but now pointing outwards. The monk acknowledged this new visitor and then beckoned him to take over control of the camera. The man raised his eyebrows questioningly. The monk joined his hands together in a prayer action and motioned with his head indicating he would go to another part of the building. It was time for vespers. He would not alter the daily routine of his order. The man now behind the camera nodded in understanding.
The monk held up a small SD-memory card and signed that it was one copy of two cards with the video record of the earlier events. With a very subtle raise of an eyebrow he signalled a rather esoteric and worldly detail. And then he left silently.
In another part of the hermitage the monk entered a small misericord. In here there was a velvet covered chaise longue and a small peachwood side table on which lay a large glass jug of clear water and a plain decanter of red burgundy wine. There was a bowl of that-day's fresh bread, and a small plate of cheese and butter, both covered with linen cloths. And there was another chair, a high-backed armchair also covered in velvet, but turned around and facing away from the rest of the room, facing into the heavy drapes drawn across bay windows. A small, ornamental potted kumquat plant, with a half-a-dozen bright yellow-orange fruit adorning the dwarf-ish dark-green leaved and white skiny twigged shrub, rested on a ceramic drainage catchplate set on the bare polished wood ground, hard up against the velvet drapes. Traditionally, this was a place for a monk, say, with an ailment, such as a painful limp, to rest.