Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

I did not enter directly the suite whose brass plate proclaimed it “Charlene,” but instead stepped through an innocuous unmarked door and into a connecting changing room. There I doffed my gown and donned a bandeau top across my full bosom and a loin cloth around my broad hips, leaving most of my honey-coloured skin bare. I let down my long chestnut hair, and stepped through to where my client awaited.

Frederick Law Olmstead had accumulated fifty-five years of life at this date. The famed architect, known to the nation primarily for his magnificent design of New York’s Central Park, boasted a large head bald across the crown, a wild crop of facial hair, and a penetrating expression betokening a certain wisdom and insight into the ways of the world, as well as hinting at burning creative instincts. His supervisory work in the field had kept him moderately fit, although he had not entirely escaped a certain paunchiness of middle-age.

Now he sat, naked and waist-deep in a capacious ceramic footed trough steaming with soapy, jasmine-scented water, puffing on a cigar and looking already well advanced on the road to relaxation and forgetful of his vocational cares, even before my ministrations.

Olmstead had been my client since the Palace opened, and we were on familiar terms. He evidently found me a congenial bath partner, and I had to confess that I had become more than professionally enamoured of him. He had always treated me with kindness and respect and a liberal generosity.

“Ah, Charlie, you’re a sight for weary eyes! Join me, dear. I need to disburden myself of the day’s headaches.”

I slipped gracefully into the tub, sliding up all slippery into his embrace, and Olmstead began to soliloquize me. I kept mum yet receptive.

“This newest project of mine is a bugger, Charlie. Turning a swamp into a park! Sheer insanity. The Fens were never meant to be other than a flood plain or tidal estuary. And yet somehow the city wants me to convert them to made lands, a pleasure pavilion for the masses, part of what they’re already calling my ‘Emerald Necklace.’ Can you fathom what’s involved in such a project? Not only do I have to contend with the waters of the Charles, but also those of Muddy River and Stony Brook, which likewise feed into that acreage. I’m going to have to erect dams and pumps, then drain and grade, before layering in an entire maze of culverts and sewers. Truck in gravel and soil, landscape the whole shebang— So much of this city is made land already, hundreds of acres reclaimed from a primeval bog. The civic fathers imagine they can wrest any parcel they desire from the aboriginal waters. Mayor Prince and his whole Vault cabal are dead set on this project. But this time their reach exceeds their grasp. It’s a mad folly, I tell you!”

Olmstead paused, puffing on his cigar, then said with altered tone, “Yet if it could be done—what a triumph!”

I felt proud of Olmstead’s ambition and fervour. Intuiting that he had expended his verbal anxiety, I said, “If anyone is capable of accomplishing such a feat, Frederick, it’s you. But you must return to the project tomorrow with a relaxed mind and body. Enough speech. Allow me to do my job now.”

Willingly, Olmstead stubbed out his cigar in a wrought-iron tub-side appliance. I secured a cake of lanolin-rich lilac soap and began thickly to lather up my own form with graceful motions, all the while allowing the ends of my wet hair to drape sensuously about Olmstead like enticing tendrils.

When I had attained a sufficient soapy slickness, I commenced to apply my rich body as an active wash-cloth across his whole frame.

I understand that in far-off Nippon there is a class of women known as geishas , whose professional practices resemble what we Naiads at the Palace deliver. But how Professor Fluvius ever came to know of them, in order to use as models for his business, I cannot say.

Because the business of the Palace continued round the clock, and some of us must perforce tend the evening shift, the third-floor communal sleeping suite for us Naiads held only four of us at midnight: myself, Lara, Minnie and Lila. It were best to picture us, lounging drowsily on our respective feather mattresses, as four Graces, hued in the sequence above-named: honey, olive, alabaster and tea.

We chattered for a while of gossipy inconsequentials, as any women will, before Lila said, “I see that our newest employee has already been assigned a laboratory.”

How quickly news travelled in this aqueous environment, like scent to a shark!

“Do you mean Dr. Baruch?” asked Lara, batting her thick eyelashes. “I wouldn’t mind being his assistant. It would make a nice change from the soap-and-slither routine with the high muck-a-mucks.”

Minnie asked, “What’s the nature of his work?”

“Rumour has it he’s crafting some kind of purgative for the rubes,” responded Lila.

Lara pulled a face. “I shouldn’t care to help in that case, lest he need a subject for his trials.”

I did not add any details from my own stock of overheard information. The thoughts of the payment I owed Usk in return for that data were too discouraging.

Pretty soon after this, my sisters fell asleep, allowing me to slip out without needing to respond to any inquiries about my late-night errands.

The same elevator that had delivered me from street-level to the second-floor now took me from third to lowest cellar. Here I entered a phantasmagorical, almost inhuman world.

The sub-basement held all the apparati that allowed the Palace to function. I felt much like an animalcule venturing into a human’s guts.

Congeries of brass pipes of all dimensions, from pencil-thin to barrel-thick, threaded the space, producing a veritable labyrinth. Some pipes leaked steam; some were frosted with condensation. Valves and dials and taps proliferated. The pipes led into and out of huge rivet-studded reservoirs, from which escaped various floral and mineral scents.

Beyond this initial impression of tubular matrices loomed the many boilers, giant radiant Molochs, each one fed and stoked by its own patented “automatic fireman” apparatus, which fed coal in from vast bins at a steady clip, obviating the need for human tenders.

Indeed, Professor Fluvius’s early boast—to render the Baths of Caracalla insignificant—appeared fulfilled.

I began to perspire. Vertigo assailed me. I felt incredibly distant from all the sources of my strength, amidst this controlled industrial chaos. Usk had said the southwest corner was his lair. But which direction was which?

I wandered for what seemed like ages, meeting no one in this sterile factory, before glimpsing, beneath a large, wall-mounted mechanical message-board affair, a tumbled heap of bedclothes. As I approached, I noted that the message-board was of the type found in Newport mansions, by means of which masters could communicate with distant servants through the medium of dropped or rotated printed discs. This must be how Profesor Fluvius summoned Usk at need.

The musty midden of bedclothes stirred and out of the stained regalia rose Usk. To my horror and disgust, he was utterly naked, his powerful, hirsute twisted limbs such a contrast to the well-formed appearance of Olmstead or my other clients.

Usk conferred a look of randy appreciation on me, a favour which I could easily have foregone.

“Ah, beauty steps down into the gutter. I am glad you made it unnecessary for me to communicate with the Professor. He’s got too many pressing matters on his mind. Big doings, big doings. If you only knew…”

Usk seemed to want to disclose some secret to me, but I did not pursue his bait, for fear of a hook within. So he continued.

“It’s a kindness to spare ol’ Fluvius any knowledge of your trifling indiscretions. Howsomever, you are not here for us to discuss our mutual master. Sit down, sit down, join me on my humble pallet!”