From the Tales of Saint Anthony, the Johnny Holiday Mysteries
These short stories follow the lives of people who populate the fictional city of Saint Anthony (Minneapolis, Minnesota), and make their appearance in the first Johnny Holiday novel, The...
Celene set down the long-stemmed silver pipe, balancing it in the glass bowl on top of the end table. She watched a thin stream of sweet-smoke curl upward from the burning cherry and waver in the shafts of light beaming through the prismatic diamonds and triangles of the leaded glass windows of the posh hotel.
The opium had her seeing everything in shades of purple, she felt the whole room moving with the curling smoke to the haunting sounds of a Mississippi blues-guitar playing on the gramophone.
The Melody was hypnotic.
Celene admired her body in the mirror, stroking her sweet cream flesh barely concealed by the thin silk of her under-garments, garter belt and stockings. Her lingerie matched that of the woman resting on the chaise lounge beside her sipping from a tumbler of absinthe; Celene admired her figure and her friends, and these outfits that were intended to draw attention to their curves, rather than conceal them.
They were playing at being courtesans, debauched libertines, and Celene loved it.
The green genie will be dancing soon, she thought to herself as she watched Dr. Johnson busy about the adjoining parlor: adjusting the lights and preparing a roll of film for one of his cameras.
The doctor was a professor of antiquities, not a pornographer, but the pictures he would be taking of them tonight would be bold enough to make a sailor blush, Celene thought to herself as she giggled and sipped from her own glass of the milky white liquid.
"Ingrid," she said to the woman, "Will you call your girl to come over and do our make-up...I want my hair dressed as well. I want everything to be perfect for these photographs tonight."
The woman she was speaking to, the woman who was not Ingrid, but was in fact Ingrid's twin sister Helga, stammered an excuse regarding why she could not, and this excuse-making told Celene two things: first, that Ingrid's assistant, the beautiful Angela Guthrie would not be coming over to play with them, which made Celene angry. The second thing it told her was that the woman calling herself Ingrid was not who she said she was, and the confirmation of this delighted the young woman.
Something unexpected would happen tonight, the debutant concluded.
Celene had heard about Helga Magnusson, though she had not enjoyed the pleasure of her company and Ingrid rarely spoke of her, though Dr. Johnson had told her somethings, more importantly her brother-in-law had told her more.
Bjorn Elmquist, was married to Celene's older sister, Amelie, but he had once been in love with Helga, who was herself married, though estranged from, the most notorious gangster in Saint Anthony...a giant named Karl Thorrson.
Celene was pleased with herself for discovering the ruse; it promised to make the rest of the evening very exciting for her. Helga was up to something and Celene loved a surprise.
The woman wasn't here merely to put on a charade. There could be no good reason for that, and from what Celene had been told, she believed that Helga was not the type of woman who would be interested in the kinds of frivolity that Celene had been enjoying with Helga's twin sister and the tall-ostrich-like professor.
Celene was high on her concoction of opium and absinthe; she was well on her way to drunkenness, and because of this she was having a difficult time discerning what Helga's motive might be, but this much was certain: Helga was glowing with the light of woman intent on doing something bold, something reckless...and it looked to Celene very much like revenge.
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