A shockwave of anxiety rocked the group. The ministers sensed discord, the visitors felt fear. Each camp affected a momentary deafness, yet, as though driven by some instinctive force, they moved protectively toward their own kind until the room was divided into two logjams. All except Daphne, too pissed to perceive impending doom, too unversed to comprehend that his words had the power of thumbscrews. I sprang to her side, snared her traveling bag. She said, “What’re you doing, Juddie?”

I strode to the King, a parade of one, eyes unaverted, carrying the thick batch of eight-by-ten glossies. “See, O King, what a jewel I’ve found for you,” I said, trying to sound like Derek in one of those Biblical nosebleeds, dialogue out of Cecil B. DeMille. He’ll never buy it, I told myself. I’ll be the first to die.

I thrust out a deck of maybe a hundred glossies. The King took them and stared at the first. I had the temerity to lean over his shoulder, and together we studied the oeuvre of Daphne Titsworth.

There were nudes, full frontal and profile; half nudes, bottomless and topless; close-ups of clit and scut, even of her face with the hot, hungry eyes, the gaping mouth, the lolling tongue. There were shots of her back, of her belly, of her ear for God’s sake. She was a little old vehicle of prurience, yet the intensity of her dedication to posturing lust made it kind of funny.

But not to the King. A ruttish nerve began to throb at his temple.

“Look at her, there, across the room,” I said in a pimpy voice, “a gift any king would envy. A movie star.”

He looked, pulling his eyes reluctantly from the pictures, and I went to Daphne and led her to the throne. They smiled lewdly at each other. I breathed a croupy sigh of relief, having somehow steered Valerie through the crisis, and stemmed the tide of spoliation. That was, I hoped, the end of it, but it was far from a certainty. In this alien land, where passion and violence were capriciously and uncompromisingly entwined, who could predict what tomorrow would bring? The King was at the moment enthusiastically occupied with his movie star, but how long before he switched preferences or, such being his polygamous bent, wanted them both?

So the plaguey coda of a king’s inconstancy stretched far into the night, long after the bash was over. We had been shown, Val and I, to our pied ô deux. It smelled of a thousand rotty seepages. I rolled and tossed on the bed of septicemic rat skins, listening to the scurry of paw pads in the bush. A bird flew into our nest, squawking as if he owned it. Valerie stirred, turning to face me in the bright pallor of moonlight.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s a beautiful bird.”

“Terrible voice.”