(Schodt – Angel No. 8 Original Mix. Music begins @ here).
Kate Kane looked downwards quizzically at her dresser, the redoubtable Raldi M'Raldi - the highly modern English-raised and educated, Sudanese private couture and bespoke fashion expert.
“Are you sure?” She asked.
“Oh yes.” He replied with supreme confidence.
“But are you sure,” she re-iterated, quietly saying in her mind: but is he sure...
There he was, kneeling and adjusting her super-900's barathea trouser legs around the tops of her bespoke Chelsea boots.
“Shouldn't they be opera pumps? Or Oxford's? I like from Corthay's or someone – I know Pierre. I can get something from him flown in overnight.”
“Oh no. Not for this -” Raldi waved his hands around her body with his typical affected flourish style. “For this,” he explained. “we are delivering a classical, strict, proper, and very brutally pure and authentic formal look, with some seriously educated individual self-expression. An allowable twist, let us say. Though only likely to be known so by the aficionado.”
Why did he have to say 'brutal' like that, she thought. And place such a heavy stress on the word.
“Ms. Kane, are you comfortable in these?”
“Yes, yes. Very. They're very comfortable. I could dance all night in them. Lol.”
“Well.” He stood up with satisfaction and stood erect to his full height. Again the open handed, palms-up flourish around the general target. “Self-tied, ivory Marcella bat-wing bow. Ivory Marcella Marol custom fitted shirt with real Paspaley Australian mother-of-pearl buttons – the best in the world. Black jacket with grosgrain lapel facing. I have been able to acquire the necessary bullet-proof carbon nano-fibre insert panels from Garrison Bespoke in Canada. Don't be tempted to undo your tie, letting it hang there over your unbuttoned shirt like in those imbecilic 'glamour' magazine pictures...
“Silk barathea pants with twin silk stripes down sides...” He said next, breathily.
“And... Opera cloak... Opera cloak with tick-blood ombre silk lining. Front and back all made from the very latest out of your late father's laboratories - carbon nano-fibre advanced milspec Fullerene. Weighs nothing, floats in the breeze, flame-proof, heat-proof, bullet-proof, blast-proof.”
Raldi M'Raldi placed his artist's hands around Kate Kane's taught waist, and moved them as if to smooth something crumpled down around her upper hips. “Cummerbund. In pitch-black satin.”
“Why cummerbund? Why not braces – you said this was classical and authentic.”
“Because, Ms. Kane, the so-called guest of honour, our good friend Sheikh Umar al-Kadhi, is a dedicated follower of the likes of extremist ideologues such as Maulana Maududi, and Sayed Qutb, and he thinks it's funny that today's Western folk don't understand the implication of submission that a belt or braces indicates, in the Muslim world. And that is why you will be adopting the admiralty 'sea-rig' East-Asian variation, of satin cummerbund. You make sure you let him see your cummerbund. Take your card out of it or something and give it to him or take his card and place it in the folds making sure that he sees you do it.”
“Hmph.” Was all she could think of responding.
“The Chelsea boot,” he finally added, pretty much as a gratuitous afterthought. “As you know, is not in fact a male shoe – that is to say, a shoe made for males exactly – in the first place... That is, originally. For after all, it was bespoke designed and made by Sparkes-Hall for Queen Victoria.”
*
La Cav was the most exclusive restaurant in New York. Totally unlike all the other prestige places –, the Michelin 3-star places, the famous traditional names, the Hotel flagship fine dining establishments that are spoken about in the media.
La Cav did not do nouvelle cuisine, nor any of the latest fad dishes of celebrity chefs from Paris or anywhere else. La Cav did Brillat Savarin. Not Brillat-Savarin the cheese; but Brillat-Savarin the man. It did actual food.
It wasn't dark inside, it wasn't brightly-lit either; it was the same ombre idea as the lining of Kate Kane's opera cape.
And if you yourself didn't shine in there like an astral gleaming thing you would get lost within the shadows.
She remembered what Raldi M'Raldi had said at the start: 'the most elevated, austere, unforgiving, and defining type of attire is the formal dressing regime for men – and it is also, though few know it, the pinnacle of style refinement for women. It's the one place woman cannot simply get away with being beautiful or naturally attractive in order to blur over their often quite slipshod dressing habits and unsubtle cosmetic sense. Every facial crease will be seen, and if not born from character of life experience, and merely a worn expression, then the overall impression will be of someone dulled-down. Not a hair can be permitted out-of-place in the wrong way. It can be 'out of place' but not in the wrong way. There is a right way.'
Kate Kane had dark fiery red hair, almost charred cherry black, with deep bronze and Burgundy wine in different parts; in glints from arcs of sweeping strands.
And naturally blue eyes like Tiffany Tanzanite crystals.
Integrated in the fabric of her tuxedo Kate Kane had very advanced 'wearables' - those supreme modern high technology trinkets, but these ones developed by own, and her late, father. He had owned a milspec research and development company for a number of years and then retired to work on a vague idea he had formed at the very beginning of his career, to do with energy coherence augmenting, and nano-vectors on a micro-frequency level. The idea came from the acoustic weapons his laboratory had been working on, when he suddenly had a epiphany that in fact all sensory systems were a kind of two-way street: mechanical sensing, and perception. It was never just only mechanical. The results were not always purely externally mechanically-determined.
He thought that if you could adjust the human neural networks by introducing ultra and infra level carrier frequency energies into those sense-associated networks in the brain, then you might be able to have them learn to respond to signals via micro-data patterns augmented by the carrier waves that would otherwise and normally never even be sensed by a human being because they wouldn't reach the necessary thresholds of energy and stimulus.
And he found that you could. And that it applied across all of the senses: sound, light, thermal energy, vestibular, electromagnetic, touch, olfactory sense.
Kate Kane had been the first experimental subject, as it were, and now, she not only could have the assistance of wearable technology that augmented her senses mechanically, but indeed her brain and mind were themselves tuned to expanded levels as the result of using those augmentations.
Yes of course she had money. But way more significantly than that, her father had begun to engage with the most advanced acoustic engineers in the commercial world, people like the world's leading professional DJ's and their studio and stage acoustics engineers, and she had met people who dove-tailed neatly into the direction her father's work had been taking him. And neatly also into the lifestyle that in any case suited her own personality. And they knew so much, these types of people...
Who they were, what they were, who they answered to didn't really matter to Kate – she really liked the English DJ woman with the shock of blonde hair, for instance... She always had some plan or other to do something next. And what else was there in life for a wealthy heiress but a cool other woman to play with and get involved in escapades with. Or 'plans' at any rate.
*
Sheikh al-Kadhi's people had carefully targeted their prey. She would be wined, and dined, caught off guard, then whisked away in a long black limousine, and raped and maybe even never ever heard from ever again. That's what Umar – Sheikh al-Kadhi - did. That's the kind of thing he did. He owned many people in Washington. His Saudi money bought what was for sale, and then he 'did things' to what he had bought.
His standard instructions to his people were explicit – get only the daughters of wealthy, powerful, successful people. There were many people in upper class circles, even in official government, ambassadorial, and security agency, circles who knew about Umar. Producers and agents of major celebrities and touring performers knew about Umar. Umar wasn't even the only one who did the type of thing he did, but he was certainly one of the most smug about it.
And he had the most vicious, hardened, personal bodyguards and security men around him all the time.
As for the individual himself, he was superficially urbane, well-mannered, softly-spoken, seemingly courteous and even generous – so he made it appear. In fact, of course, Sheikh al-Kadhi was nothing but a psychopathic serial killer.
*
Kate Kane walked unhurriedly up the steps of the American neoclassical architecture-styled building which housed La Cav.
Susan Regier, the twenty-four year old blonde daughter of a wealthy advertising agency executive, had just gone up the steps a few moments earlier, alone, not squired, wearing a little black dress under a diamond black mink. She was quickly waved through at the reception desk by the Oriental-looking Private Reservation service. Kate Kane thought the 'Oriental look' thing was probably some homage to Chanel's Chinois Paris siecle.
Kate Kane, on the other hand, was stuck standing in front of the Reception desk with even New York staff suffering a moment's pause as they decided what they were going to do - in their bewilderment - over her apparent acute vortex breaching of the gender codes for formal white tie...
An older Maitre-d' stepped from out of shadows in the tangential vestibule and quickly waved her in with furrowed brows aimed at the Reception staff.
Apart from the fact that there were already unisex urinals in the establishment, he knew it wasn't a traditional dress code violation in any case.
