"I'm going to fall!" I wailed, swinging on the rope ladder, my eyes screwed shut to avoid looking down into the abyss. "I have vertigo!"
"Go ahead and fall," Lulu urged. I looked up in amazement, trying to understand why my friend should be encouraging me to break every bone in my body, but the enormous skirt of Lulu's wedding dress ballooned around my face and I had to content myself with a spectacular view of her long and beautiful legs. "The whole floor is a trampoline, darling," Lulu explained. "Look!" She threw herself into space. I screamed and averted my eyes but a moment later I was staring in disbelief as Lulu sailed up again like a helium balloon, grabbed my ankle, and pulled me off to join her in double suicide and, oh no, the floor is jumping up fast to meet my skull and I'm about to hear a sickening crunch, but, wait, I'm hitting something that's soft and spongy and wheee... off we go again and this is definitely fun...
A few bounces later, I confidently climbed up to the little eyrie where Stash and Anastasia were lounging, drinks in their hands and drugs in their veins. Lulu swung over on a trapeze, demurely tucking the train of her dress under her as she joined us on the cushioned platform. Vines grew luxuriantly up the padded walls of the hollowed out seven floors of what had once been an apartment building in the center of Berlin, now the exclusive club Liana. Blaring rock music was almost drowned out by the incessant screeching of thousands of exotic birds flying around freely, nibbling peanuts and diamond-studded earlobes. Young hermaphrodites in skin-tight purple leather trousers and canary yellow tanktops sailed across the atrium at different altitudes, cavorting mischievously in mid-air, joyously jabbing one another with hypodermic syringes, flirting outrageously, spilling their drinks, squealing ecstatically, in a playful pandemonium of sex and drugs. Like decadent gods, we reclined above, watching their antics in benevolent boredom, shooting up now and again.
"Stasi!" a young blonde exquisite shrilled as she rode by on the hairy back of her simian companion, catching sight of Anastasia. A few moments later the blonde cutie joined us without the gorilla. I was glad: the ape's jaw had reminded me disagreeably of Rasputin, who, I uneasily remembered, might also be in Berlin.
"Don't call me `Stasi'," Anastasia said crossly, letting herself be pecked thrice on the cheek. "You know I hate it. What are you doing in Berlin, Pipi?"
"Oh, Ludi doesn't want me hanging around in Himmelsberg while he lies dying. He says it's too ghoulish." Pipi looked around at Stash and Nasty curiously.
"Olympia von G and T." Anastasia kept the introductions brief. "My latest stepmother."
"The last." Pipi smiled contentedly, licking her lips. "The doctors think Ludi should be dead by Christmas."
"Quite the canary that ate the cat, aren't you? Will the lawyers let us sell Himmelsberg?"
"No, Nasty." Pipi pouted. "They say the castle has to stay in the family. It will go to Ulo. Should I send him around to see you one of these days?"
"It's too much bother," Anastasia replied indifferently.
"But he wants to see you so much!" Pipi protested. "He boasts about his mother to all his little friends. He even has a poster on his wall from that beautiful scene in Gomorrah where you're making love to Albertine. He wants to be a lesbian when he grows up."
Anastasia frowned. "How old is Ulo now?"
"Isn't she terrible?" Pipi appealed in delighted horror. "How can you not know how old your own son is? He will be thirteen in December. Axel wants to have a big party."
"He has so much to celebrate," Nasty said nastily. "My father's death and our son's coming of age. Too bad I won't be there."
"Who's Axel?" Lulu asked.
"Axel von Schadenfreude. The father of my son Ulrich," Anastasia explained. "Axel should have been jailed for life for raping me but the judge was too frightened and my father in his charming old-fashioned way decided that I should marry Axel instead. And so I was a wife at fifteen and a mother at sixteen and I would have been dead at seventeen if Werner Lichtfinder hadn't offered me a small part in Ship of Fools."
"Ludi was so disappointed the other day when he heard about Lichtfinder's overdose," Pipi piped up. "Can you imagine, after all these years, Ludi still wanted to kill Lichtfinder for making you an actress."
"I can imagine anything about my father. Whom will you marry when he dies?"
"I can't decide." Pipi wriggled her bare shoulders. "Max von Hohenstaufen keeps coming around, to sit with his cousin at his deathbed, he says, but then he pats me all over with his clammy hands and makes big eyes and heaves these heavy sighs and he looks exactly like a walrus."
"My poor child," Nasty said, caressing Pipi's neck. "Far better to be a widow than to marry that oaf. My father may be a child molester and a snob and I hope they have arranged a special hell in which he burns forever, but at least he has style. Isn't there anyone else?"
Pipi bit her lower lip and looked down bashfully. "I met this gorgeous Sicilian at Prince Niou's wedding in Tokyo last week..."
"You knew Prince Niou at Oxford, didn't you?" Lulu asked me.
"Only by sight," I answered. "Hard to miss with all those bodyguards around. He dresses like a gangster. I used to see him sometimes at Murasaki's little bridge parties."
"Murasaki? You know Murasaki no Shikibu?" Pipi seemed to notice my existence for the first time. I sighed. The name game was in full swing now. I knew the ropes.
"We had the same tutor at Oxford," I replied tersely.
"Murasaki was at Prince Niou's wedding as well," Pipi said, nodding meaningfully. "Is she going to marry his older brother?"
"I hope not." I yawned. Nasty indolently offered me a little gold spoon heaped high with a crystalline white powder. A quiet tingle of pleasure rolled through me as I wiped my nose. "Murasaki has resisted marrying the crown prince for so many years now. It would be such a waste if she finally gives in."
"They're both terribly intelligent, aren't they?" Pipi sniffled, her greedy little nostrils trying to hold in a hill of koke.
"Murasaki is charming. That's all that really matters." I shrugged my shoulders and stared at the silvery sheen of the needle Nasty had planted high in the shadow of a long shapely thigh. "I don't know Prince Suzaku at all but how can one take him seriously? He's interested in baby toads."
"What does he do to them?" Nasty asked, her eyes glittering. She licked a droplet of blood from the tip of the syringe.
"He splashes about in their breeding slime. And then he writes monographs about it." I shook my head wonderingly and lit up a rock of krak. "Some people will do anything for thrills."
"This Sicilian I met at the wedding, Luciano..."
"Luciano Shinola?" I interrupted delightedly. "He used to hang out with all those Japanese royals. What is he doing now?"
"Do you know him? He told me that he worked for some Japanese company that made robots."
"What's the name of the company?"
Pipi screwed up her eyes and pretended to think. "Tamato? My husband owns lots of shares. Luciano said that everything in the factory was painted bright orange. Personally, I prefer hot pink. Anyway, Luciano said that it was a big scandal in Japan that Prince Niou was getting married before his older brother," Pipi breathed confidentially through her goldfish mouth. "Is it true that Prince Suzaku proposed to Murasaki on a tennis court when they were first introduced?" Pipi heaved a gusty sigh. "A handsome young prince sweating all over you, oh, it's so romantic..."
"He proposes to all his tennis partners. And they all refuse to marry him. Quite right, too," I replied firmly. "No decent Japanese girl wants to marry a Korean."
Pipi turned to Anastasia. "Nasty, what are you on? Can I have some?"
Anastasia shook her head. "No, Pipi. This drug is not for little girls. Shoot some heroine instead."
"I'm almost twenty-one," Pipi pouted. "And I'm bored with heroine. I need a new drug."
"How long have you been married, Pipi?" Lulu asked.
"My father married her three years ago," Anastasia answered for Pipi. "His seventh virgin." Nasty chucked Pipi under the chin. Her hand slithered down Pipi's throat and idly fondled a little breast. "But you think you've outlasted old Bluebeard, don't you, liebchen?"
"Nasty, be nice," Pipi moaned complaisantly. Nasty pulled her hand away and brought out a banana from her handbag. I snorted out a cloud of koke. It was the largest banana I had ever seen in my life. And it was red.
"Where did you get that?"
"From Stash," Nasty replied, peeling the banana. "We were having trouble shooting a scene today. King David's dance in the temple wasn't obscene enough and we had to do three takes. So Stash coldly reminded us that we were all monkeys. And he gave everyone a banana. So that we could get in touch with our basic instincts." Nasty looked at me with smoldering eyes. She put the tip of the banana between her full lips and slowly stuffed its enormous length into her mouth. Her sharp white teeth severed the pulpy flesh in one clean bite. I gulped, watching the banana slide down her lovely throat. I felt like a rabbit being shown its fate by a pedagogically inclined boa constrictor.
"Imported from Madagascar for the apes at the zoo," Stash said gently. "Was it good?"
"Delicious." Anastasia daintily wiped her mouth with a stained scrap of lace. She threw the banana skin into space and rose, beckoning to me with an imperious finger. "Come, little baboon. Time to return to the menagerie. Very well, Pipi, you may come along with us if you really want, but then don't go crying to Daddy. Lulu, happy honeymoon. Stash, return soon. I want to finish this damn movie."
"I'll write you a postcard from Venice, darlings," Lulu murmured dreamily. She blew me a kiss. "Have fun, angel! Is that man who was following you still there?"
I looked down. Amidst the fluorescent throngs of happy puppets a patch of drab beige stood out. I heard a thin unhappy scream. As we clambered down the rope ladder, I saw the middle-aged man in the beige trench coat writhing in anguish on the spongy floor, clutching his leg helplessly, weeping. A group of young degenerates danced around him, opening their mouths in mock surprise, grabbing at the air, slipping and falling, bouncing off the floor, imitating his wails, nudging and winking at one another before erupting in a fresh spasm of hysterical giggles. A twisted red object lay under the man's foot. It looked like a banana skin.
Anastasia turned to me and smiled widely. I restrained a shudder and smiled back. I was beginning to enjoy the libertine lifestyle: I was learning how to fall.
