MICK SACHATONE, THE ANARCHIST multimillionaire, didn’t live in a glitzy neighborhood of multimillionaires because he never wanted to have to explain the origins of his wealth to the tax authorities. When you make it in cash, you live without flash.
He laundered enough income to justify a spacious four-bedroom, two-story house of no architectural distinction in a clean and pleasant upper-middle-class neighborhood in Sherman Oaks.
Only a handful of Mick’s most trusted customers of long standing knew his address. Mostly he transacted business on public beaches and in public parks, coffee shops, and churches.
Without stopping at the garage in Santa Monica to change from his Robin Goodfellow costume into his regular-guy clothes and yellow slicker, Corky went directly from Jack Trotter’s funky digs in Malibu to Sherman Oaks. Thanks to Queeg von Hindenburg, collector of broken porcelains, Corky’s schedule was screwed up. He had much yet to do on this most important but fast-vanishing day of his life.
He parked in the driveway and ran a few quick steps through the rain to the cover of the front porch.
Mick’s voice came from an intercom speaker beside the bell push, [436] “Be right there,” and Mick Sachatone himself came to the door with unusual alacrity. Sometimes, you had to wait here on the porch two or three minutes, or longer, between when Mick spoke to you via the intercom and when he greeted you in person, so routinely preoccupied was he with work or with other interests.
As usual when at home, Mick was barefoot and dressed in pajamas. Today the jammies were red, decorated with images of the cartoon character Bart Simpson. Mick bought some peejays off the rack but had others custom tailored.
Even before Mick had achieved puberty, he had been enchanted by the story of Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy. Hef had discovered a way to grow up, be a success, and yet remain a big child, indulging any whim or desire to whatever degree he wished, making of his life one long party, living more days than not in pajamas.
Mick, who worked mostly at home, owned more than 150 pairs of peejays. He slept in the nude but sported pajamas during the day.
He considered himself an acolyte of Hef. A mini-Hef. Mick was forty-two going on thirteen.
“Hey, Cork, super-hip threads,” Mick declared when he opened the door and saw Corky dressed as Robin Goodfellow.
This might have sounded like mockery to a stranger; but Mick’s friends knew that he had long ago stopped picking up new slang in an effort to be more in the Hef groove.
“Sorry I’m late,” Corky said, stepping inside.
“No sweat, my man. I’d run this pad clockless if I could.”
The living room contained as little furniture as necessary. The plush sofa, plump armchairs, footstools, coffee table, end tables, and lamps had been bought as a set at a warehouse outlet. The quality was good; but everything had been chosen for comfort, not for looks.
Mick had no pretensions. In spite of his wealth, he remained a man of simple if sometimes obsessive needs.
The primary decor statement in Casa Sachatone had nothing to do with furniture or art. Except for a suite of work rooms that Mick had [437] added to the original structure, all but two walls in the house were lined with shelves on which were stored a collection of thousands of pornographic videotapes and DVDs. Shelves had even been added to the stairwell and hallway walls.
Mick preferred videotapes to DVDs because the cassettes came in boxes with wide, colorful spines that blazed with obscene titles and sometimes with hard-core photographs. The effect was of one continuous erotic mosaic that flowed from end to end and top to bottom of the residence, achieving almost psychedelic impact.
Only the work wing, this living room, and the master bedroom contained any furniture. Other chambers, including the dining room, were not merely lined with videocassettes but were filled with aisles of shelves, as in a library.
Mick ate all his meals either at his computer or in bed: lots of microwave dinners, as well as home-delivery pizza and Chinese.
Of the two walls not fitted with floor-to-ceiling shelves, one was here in the living room. This space had been reserved for four big top-of-the-line plasma-screen TVs and associated equipment. The other such wall was in the bedroom.
A pair of plasma screens hung side by side, and a second pair hung side by side above the first. A DVD player and a videocassette machine served each screen; that equipment, plus eight speakers and associated amplifiers were racked in low cabinets under the screens.
Mick could run four movies simultaneously and switch, as whim struck him, from one soundtrack to the other. Or he could—and often did—play all four soundtracks simultaneously.
Usually when you stepped into the Sachatone living room, you were greeted by a rude symphony of sighs, grunts, groans, squeals, squeaks, hisses, and cries of pleasure, by whispered and growled obscenities, and by a rhythmic rush of heavy breathing in one degree of urgency or another. With eyes closed, you could almost believe that you were in a riotously inhabited jungle, albeit a jungle in which all the tropical species were simultaneously copulating.
[438] This afternoon, sound accompanied none of the four porn films. Mick had muted all of them.
“Janelle was so special,” Mick said tenderly, nodding toward the video wall, referring to his lost girlfriend. “One cool swingin’ chick.”
Although his Bart Simpson pajamas might seem frivolous, Mick dwelt in a somber memorial mood. All four screens featured classics from Janelle’s extensive filmography.
Pointing to the upper-right-hand screen in the four-screen stack, Mick said, “That thing she’s doing right there, no one—no one—ever did that in film before or since.”
“I doubt anyone else could,” Corky said, because the eye-popping trick in which Janelle was vigorously engaged involved her legendary flexibility, for which perhaps she alone among all humanity carried the necessary gene.
Referring to his gal’s costars in the upper-right-hand video, Mick said, “Those four guys love her. See that? Every one of those guys just loves her. Men loved Janelle. She was truly groovy.”
Mick’s voice swelled with wistful longing. In spite of all his Hefnerian hipness, he had a sentimental streak.
“I just got back from Trotter’s in Malibu,” Corky revealed.
“You kill the son of a bitch yet?”
“Not yet. You know I need him for a while.”
“Oh, look at that.”
“She’s really something.”
“You’d think that would hurt.”
“Maybe it did,” Corky said.
“Janelle said no, it was fun.”
“She do a lot of stretching exercises?”
“Her work was stretching exercises. You will kill him?”
“Promised you, didn’t I?”
“I expected to grow old with her,” Mick said.
“Really?”
“Well, older, anyway.”
[439] “I shot up his current collection of porcelains.”
“Expensive?”
“Lladro.”
“Will you torture him before you kill him?”
“Sure.”
“You’re a good friend, Cork. You’re a pal.”
“Well, we go back a long way.”
“More than twenty years,” Mick said.
“The world was a worse place then,” Corky said, meaning from an anarchist’s point of view.
“A lot has fallen apart in our time,” Mick agreed. “But not as fast as we dreamed it would when we were crazy kids.”
They smiled at each other.
Had they been different men, they might have hugged.
Instead, Mick said, ............