“Perhaps I was too judgmental,” McMahon admitted sheepishly.
“To what do I owe this pleasure, my prince?” McMahon asked nervously.
McMahon was still belly-down on the rack—his joints screaming with pain—and he had to crane his neck up in order to see the TV screen.
“You’ve been ridiculing my life and lifestyle for some time now,” the portly terrorist financier, Kamal ad-Din, said. Lounging luxuriously on a big circular bed with red satin sheets, he was surrounded by the three embarrassingly young girls in skimpy negligees. “I thought it was time we met.”
“I’m glad to meet you,” McMahon said a little shakily.
“We’ll see about that,” Marika whispered under her breath.
The monitor filled with a prerecorded close-up of Danny McMahon. His grin was half leer, half sneer, and he was delivering a bitingly satiric TV monologue. Raza muted the sound, so the prince could comment on Danny’s act.
“During one of your HBO Specials,” Prince Kamal explained, “you said some very ugly things about me. You said, among other things, I’d ‘fuck anything.’”
Raza turned the sound on, and on the screen Danny McMahon—with eyes blazing and grin glinting—was saying:
“Prince Kamal’ll fuck anything: Hair, hips, pits or lips. Eight to eighty, blind, crippled or crazy. He’s fucked cops, firemen and Indian chiefs in war bonnets—the whole YMCA.” The TV audience roared with laughter, and McMahon said after quieting them down: “If America still made Model Ts and Stanley Steamers, he’d fuck them too.”
“Then you made fun of Kamal’s weight problem,” Raza said, shaking her head with disapproval and freezing the screen. “Yes, he struggles with weight control, but that is not a laughing matter. It should be a cause for sympathy. Instead you called him ‘a living, breathing dirigible’ and ‘human hippo.’ You said he couldn’t ride horses because he’d ‘kill a Clydesdale.’ He’d even ‘demolish a dromedary.’ You said his couturier was ‘Omar the Circus-Tent Maker.’”
“In one monologue, you said Kamal’s hat size was ‘extra watermelon’!” Marika roared.
“You even ridiculed his mother’s weight,” Raza said
“You said she ‘won the Miss Goodyear Blimp Look-Alike Contest twenty years running’!” Marika shouted, outraged.
“The poor woman!” Raza said.
“Cr—u—u—u—e—l!!!” Marika said.
“Hurtful, Mr. McMahon,” Raza said. “Your remarks were cutting, uncalled-for, unnecessary.”
Marika ran another clip from one of McMahon’s comic monologues. McMahon was saying:
“Their sainted Islamist leader and financier, Kamal ad-Din, has an idiot wind blowing through his brain from one end of Dar al-Islam to the other. He claims he’s a Muslim, but in truth, he’s their high priest of psychopathia sexualis. To that obese imbecile, floggings, stonings, amputations and decapitations aren’t atrocities. They’re Islamist foreplay! And as for the suicide bombers, whom Kamal so enthusiastically bankrolls with his ill-gotten billions, they are craven maniacs and sadistic halfwits just like Kamal himself … only not as fucking fat!”
“You called our beloved leader Kamal the Camel!” Raza fulminated.
“The Muslim Moby Dick!!!” Marika exploded.
“You once shouted at his photograph,” Raza yelled at the top of her lungs, “HEY, DUMBO, WHERE’S YOUR TRUNK???”
“Your country, on the other hand, has spent the last two decades bulldozing its way through our Mideast,” Marika said, serious and reasonable, “flattening everything in its path, yet you smirk and sneer at our culture, when, in fact, you have wreaked far more carnage and chaos here than ISIS, al Qaeda, the TTP and the old Soviet Union put together.”
“Perhaps I was too judgmental,” McMahon admitted sheepishly.
“Perhaps you were,” Marika said, removing the riding crop from under her arm. Grabbing both ends, she again bent it over 250 degrees. Turning to Raza, she said. “And perhaps that is why we are here, Sister-Friend, to teach Mr. McMahon the error of his ways. But it’s my turn now.”
He caught the blur of motion just over his shoulder, and again the horsewhip whistled through the air and slashed his ass.
Through the fog of tears and pain, he could hear the raucous, booming guffaws of Prince Kamal; the demented wailing laughter of Tariq al-Omari, who’d just entered the room, clearly eager to watch the spectacle to come; Marika’s high, tinkling, melodious chortles; and Raza’s loud unwavering count as she announced in sequence the numbered strokes.
“ONE!”
Crack!
“TWO!”
Crack!
“THREE!”
Crack!
After the thirty-third blows he blacked out and gratefully lost count.