The Last Manly Man (14 page)

I was on my own.

While I waited for Jason to come by at noon, as we'd arranged the evening before, I made some calls on Sally's cell phone. The escort Charlotte hadn't called me, so I dialed up one of the call-girl sources to see if she could track down possible Charlottes and beep me with the info.

Next I called the women's conference, but the office wouldn't tell me which hotel Dr. Karen Keyes was staying in.

“According to the schedule, she's hosting a fund-raising tea at a restaurant called the Sad Marquis this afternoon, two
P.M.
It's a hundred dollars a head. You might be able to speak with her there,” said the chirpy woman in the conference office.

Had to get a weapon. Though Mike was a big believer in guns, I'm not good with guns and felt I was better served with some odd, seemingly innocuous weapon. That gave me the element of surprise. The pepper spray wouldn't surprise the thugs if they came back, and it was too small in any event. The honey water and squirt gun idea still appealed to me, though it was more a delayed justice weapon, like the poison ivy in my window boxes. The honey water might not attract any bees at the time it was applied, but it might later. That wasn't going to be effective under the present circumstances.

Just about anything can be turned into a weapon if it falls into my hands, and I blame this on my father, a weekend inventor, who taught me how to spot the hidden menace in things, then died before he had a chance to teach me how to thwart it. I did pick up a few tips about how to turn a menace to one's own advantage though. A potato peeler, a glue gun, an Epilady hair removal system, an eyelash curler, all were weaponry.

The problem was finding a really
effective
weapon. Finally, I opted for a combination of a camera flash attachment, to stun and blind, and pepper spray, to hurt.

Promptly at noon someone buzzed.

“It's Jason,” I heard, and I let him into the building. But when I got the knock at my door and looked through the peephole, I saw instead a woman in full makeup with short dark hair—à la Louise Brooks—in a long-sleeved, pink and yellow dress.

“Who is it?” I sang, sticking my eye to the peephole.

“Jason,” said the woman.

It was his voice.

I opened the door.

“What the hell?” I said.

“I'm in deep disguise,” he said.

“Come on in. You look great. But don't you get tired of wearing makeup and high heels and playing to men's sexual objectification fantasies?”

He ignored this.

“You're going out dressed like that?” he said.

I was in a simple summer dress.

“I'd dress like a man, but I can't pull it off with these boobs,” I said.

“Well, I'm not going out with you recognizable like that. Do you have a wig?”

“No.”

“Scarf? Hat? Where's your closet?”

“In here,” I said, taking him into the bedroom. “Are you gay?” I asked, as he plowed through my wardrobe.

“Your generation just loves to label, doesn't it? No, I'm not. Here, this scarf will work. And this hat.”

By the time he was finished, my hair was wrapped in a scarf and covered with a big hat. I was taller than he was, and had bigger feet, and I noted with some distress that he had succeeded in making me look like a man—in drag.

“What did Dewey say?” I asked.

“He said that he met with two men involved in the bonobo project. They wanted out of the project, they hated the people they were working for. One of them was a guy named Hufnagel. He found Dewey via the Internet. The other was a guy named Bondir, nickname Frenchie.”

“Bondir is dead. He's the guy who washed ashore in Coney Island. The French police say he died fifteen years ago. We'd better go. Let me get my weaponry.”

“I have a gun,” Jason said.

“Where?”

“Holster strapped to my inner thigh.”

“Would you use it?”

“If I had to,” he said without hesitation. “In strict self-defense.”

“All the same, I'm going to bring my pepper spray. And my camera flash attachment,” I said.

“Where are we going?”

“A fund-raiser at the Sad Marquis.”

Where better for women's righters to meet than the Sad Marquis, across from the World of Beauty Multicultural Unisex Salon on West Twenty-third Street. The Sad Marquis is a tongue-in-cheek, S&M-theme eatery where you can get grilled chicken over field greens, raspberry mousse in a chocolate shoe, and for a few extra bucks they'll spank a man at your table. I kid you not. According to a bit I heard on the news, it had been doing a booming business with women at the conference, and not only because of the discount coupon enclosed in their registration packet.

I'd been by the Sad Marquis before, and seen the news coverage on it when it opened, but I'd never been inside. The windows were blackened, to heighten the “taboo” of it, though this wasn't real S&M, but a watered-down version for the tourist trade. As far as theme restaurants go though, this one beat the heck out of Planet Hollywood, no pun intended. The place was painted black with the occasional splash of red here and there. All the wait staff were in black leather, of course, and a hostess in a leather cat suit led us to our table, which was next to one of several cages around the dining area, each holding a giddy feminist. Other giddy women took pictures.

A handsome young man wearing nothing but a leather G-string approached us.

“Hello, my name is Anton, and I'm not worthy to serve you,” he said, and went into a recitation of the drink specials. A plate of hors d'oeuvres, vegetarian or mixed, was included with the price of our admission.

“Mixed, please,” I ordered, more to vex Jason than anything else.

“Vegetarian,” Jason said in a whispered falsetto. “You promised, no meat around me.”

“Vegetarian,” I corrected to the waiter.

“Thank you,” Jason said.

“Just for the record, are there any members of the animal kingdom you don't like? Other than omnivorous people?”

“I wouldn't even kill a fly,” he said.

“You don't kill flies? You just … let them hang around?”

“We keep nothing around that they can eat.”

“So … they eat out. They're someone else's problem. Like mine. I have to kill your share of flies too.”

“You are a bloodthirsty woman.…”

“What about snakes? If you confronted a cobra and had to either kill it or be killed …”

“Well, in self-defense. But when was the last time you had to defend yourself against a cow, for example?”

“There's a cow in Ohio who tracks, captures, and eats chickens,” I said.

“So?”

“Neither here nor there. Just thought of it.”

“I'm beginning to wonder if you and I are on the same side,” Jason said.

“Me too,” I said.

As Edgar Rice Burroughs said, it is remarkable how quickly friendships are formed in the midst of a common jeopardy. But I could sympathize. It's a tough job being a pharisee in a world full of publicans and sinners—the work is never done.

One of the event organizers said a quick hello and dropped an information packet on our table before running off to the next one. In it was a glossy pamphlet about the Diogenes Project and some press clips.

The already dim lights went down and a spotlight went up over a podium in front of a screen. A short, dark-haired woman decked out in Prada walked up and blew into the mike. I recognized her. It was Belle Hondo, a maverick globo-feminist who wears makeup and had chastised some of her hard-core feminist sisters the years before in a big Op-Ed piece for “spending too much time and energy obsessing over Barbie's unnatural figure while there are millions of poor women in the third world being treated like soulless chattel.”

“Can you hear me?” she asked.

“Yes,” the audience said.

“I'm glad to see so many women here today,” Hondo said. “We've all heard the stories of how feminism is dead, how we no longer have clear leadership or purpose, how feminists today are like the carpetbaggers after the Civil War.”

There was some light booing, and a voice in the back said, “We're not dead, we're just resting.”

Hondo continued. “We haven't won the war, but we've won most of the big battles. The country is tired of fighting and wants to get on with Reconstruction now.”

Only a third of the women at the conference called themselves feminists, she pointed out, and every feminist seemed to define the word feminist differently. But while card-carrying feminism was in decline, Western women continued to gain power and prosper overall.

“What we have lacked is a guiding vision to lead us forward. Dr. Karen Keyes has a vision, a bonobo utopia. I think you too will be inspired by the example of these remarkable animals and by Dr. Keyes,” she said, and then gave a précis of Dr. Karen Keyes's career—a doctor of zoology
and
anthropology, who had devoted her life, like Jane Goodall, to observing and preserving African chimps in their own environment, specializing in the bonobos for the last ten.

“Please join me in a warm welcome for Dr. Karen Keyes.”

A tall, pretty woman with short, curly blond hair, freakishly large blue eyes, and the face of a cherub stepped up to the podium.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, and cut right to the chase. “Bonobos are a female-dominated chimp society centered largely in the jungles of the country formerly known as Zaire. Their DNA differs from ours by just one percent. They are our closest primate cousins. And they are the horniest chimps in the world.”

When the hoots and hollers quieted down, Keyes went on about the threats facing the bonobos and their diminished numbers—“less than twenty thousand of them left in Africa, and we're losing scores every day. And now I'd like to introduce them.” Then the spotlight went down and the film began.

Horniest chimps in the world might seem like a hard claim to quantify, but it was a well-deserved accolade for these noble beasts. According to the film, these chimps have sex an average of eight times a day, hetero, homo, and mono, to resolve conflict, to obtain food, and just plain for fun, and we saw plenty of it in brilliant color on the screen. When aroused, the bonobos' genitalia became very red and pronounced. They made a lot of noise.

This was the new vision of feminism, female rule maintained with a lot of noisy sex? Come to think of it, it was a pretty winning recruitment pitch. It beat the hell out of “a woman without a man was like a fish without a bicycle,” or the anti-sex feminists' dictum that all heterosexual sex was a form of rape.

The bonobos were the last large mammal to be discovered, we heard, in 1929. They have longer legs than other chimps and often walk erect. They part their hair in the middle.

“Bonobos French-kiss, they grin, they laugh, and are a bunch of happy, peace-loving chimps,” said Keyes's voice on the film.

After the film ended, Keyes took a few questions.

“How do the male bonobos like this arrangement?” someone asked.

“The bonobo males are interesting,” Dr. Keyes said. “They don't mind being dominated by females because the females have sex with them. A lot. And they have peace within their community. It's the external threats we have to worry about—civil wars, poachers, encroaching civilization, deforestation, pollution, hungry people who hunt them for food. All these things threaten the bonobo population, and other chimps. A few zoos have small bonobo populations but we want to preserve them in their natural environment.”

After Keyes exhorted the crowd to give generously, she stepped down from the podium and was surrounded by interested women. Jason and I waited for a moment for the crowd to thin and then approached her.

“Dr. Keyes,” I said. “I'm Robin Hudson. This is … Jason.”

“I'm in disguise,” he whispered.

She was not at all surprised by this. “Ms. Hudson,” she said. “I've been quite anxious to talk to you but your staff wouldn't put my calls through. Let me finish up here, then perhaps we can go somewhere to talk.”

Right after she left, Jason said, “Excuse me, I have to go to the … ladies' room.”

While he went off and Keyes courted rich women, I hung at the bar. Suddenly, I felt a terrible chill run up my spine and was moved to look toward the door. That's when I saw De-Witt, standing near the door, scanning the room with narrowed eyes. Her eyes caught mine for a second, but she didn't recognize me in my Tallulah Bankhead getup, which, I thought then, was probably a good thing, since she'd tear a strip out of my hide for not returning her interview tapes. I looked away, and when I looked again, she was gone.

CHAPTER TEN

When Keyes returned, the three of us slipped away in the limo the conference had provided for her.

“I'm heading over to the Jackson Hotel and Convention Center,” she said. “Where should I drop you?”

“I'm heading toward east Midtown, the All News Network,” I said.

“Have you heard from my friend Dewey?” she asked.

“Sort of,” I said.

“Where is he? What do you know?”

“He was beaten after meeting with a man or men who knew where the bonobos are.…” Jason began.

“Is he still alive?”

“Yes. He's in a coma, slips in and out of consciousness, Mostly out,” Jason said.

“One of the men Dewey allegedly met, a Frenchman named Luc Bondir, is dead now. Another is missing. I am pretty perplexed about what is going on, so I can't tell you much more than that,” I said. “Why did you call me originally?”

“Dewey had contacted me just before I left Kinshasa to come to New York and told me you'd been asking questions. He wanted to know if you had contacted me.”

“Do you know what questions I was asking and who I asked?”

“I'm pretty sure Dewey heard this from one of the scientists he'd made contact with. I don't know anything more about it. Dewey was kind of secretive, a lone ranger.”