Everywhere he goes he has enablers, rabbateurs who corral vulnerable, fertile, helpless young women for his entertainment, his amusement, his consumption. And he is hungry all the time, the Wizard, sometimes seeing three different girls a day. Massages, that’s what he pays them for. Have you ever given a massage, sweetie? And then you see how far they will go once you’re naked on the table. If you roll over and lower the sheet. If you put their hand on it, force their heads down.
There is a woman in Los Angeles who keeps a database of prospects, updated weekly with social media links—actress and model wannabes mostly, but also artists—tattooed girls with nipple piercings and daddy issues. The key is to identify girls with trauma in their past, girls with self-esteem issues, eating disorders. Victims, in other words. In San Francisco he has the Troll, a high school boy he pays handsomely, who charms, seduces, and bribes young girls to come to the Wizard’s parties. He has invested in a European modeling agency to feed him girls when he is abroad—Paris, Denmark, Barcelona. On the island, his handlers recruit poor girls from Barbados to sail over on his yacht. They’re curvier than his normal girls—fatter in the toilet, which is what the Wizard calls women’s bottoms—but you can do just about anything to them if you donate enough money to the local police. This is what wealth buys on Planet Earth in the twenty-first century. Freedom. From accountability, from prosecution, from rules. Freedom from morality, from equality, from justice.
Wheels up from SFO at 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time means a landing time in Marfa, Texas, around 9:00 p.m. Central Time. They eat lobster on the plane, Hunan style, with a tofu lo mein prepared by his West Coast chef. It is Mobley, his majordomo, Astrid Prefontaine—a former It-girl, society-page regular, who was his “girlfriend” for a time and now serves as his normalizer, which is how he describes her to rich friends who wonder how E.L. always gets such top-shelf pussy.
“Astrid,” he tells them, “normalizes me. She brings the girls in, makes them feel at home. Let’s all have dinner, she says, or E.L. wants you to come out to the Hamptons. And then, when we’re on the sofa watching a movie, she’ll put her hand in the girl’s lap or kiss her on the cheek. See, girls know that men are predators. We’ve got that feral glint in the eye. But the doe of the species, their own kind, well, they don’t know how to process a woman taking advantage. They freeze up. I could show you six different scientific papers I funded. If a woman does it, it must be okay. And once they get it in their head that what’s going on can’t be threatening, then Astrid pulls me in—so that even if there’s discomfort, it doesn’t trump the feeling that yeah, maybe things are weird, but not dangerous.”
Also on the plane are the Orci brothers—Pete, the pilot; Liam, Mobley’s samurai; and Boaz, the fixer who can make any problem disappear. The current problem is Mobley’s personal assistant, Katie, eighteen, whom Astrid and E.L. have been grooming for weeks now. Katie is a painter wannabe with Big Dreams of New York Celebrity, and a girl with dreams can be overpowered. First you buy a few paintings; then you tell her you want to invest in her future, maybe give her a fellowship, a year painting in peace at one of your properties. Then, isolated, you make things physical. Have you ever given a massage? You write her a check if she gets too bent out of shape, or threaten to bury her artistically. Power is a zero-sum game. Nobody has a little. It’s all or none. And the Wizard is all powerful, a sorcerer of global renown, a man of supernatural hypnotism and charm, like a shuckling cobra that mesmerizes you with his eyes.
Katie’s real name is Bathsheba DeWitt, an appellation that has always felt to her like the call sign of a Florida panhandle stripper. She fits the victim profile perfectly—overbearing father, absent mother. Developed early. Started her period at twelve. She was seduced by her math teacher when she was just fifteen, after a long campaign of notes and calls ending in her deflowering in the back of his Volkswagen. Violent men seem especially attracted to her. Maybe it’s her size, five foot one, skinny, and curvy. Or the fact that, despite it all, she still believes in things like love and respect.
It’s her first time on a private jet. Mobley watches her study her food, the dry Pinot Grigio he poured her. She seems frozen, overwhelmed by the weightless splendor. He watches her turn and look out the window at the world flying by below, a world she hopes to conquer one day, and shit, doesn’t it seem like she’s off to a rocket start? Across from her, Astrid raises her glass, smiles. Her lipstick is pale, tasteful.
“To Katie,” she says.
Mobley smiles, raises his glass.
“To Katie.”
He leans forward, clinks his glass against hers. Katie blushes, holding her wine self-consciously. It’s clear she can’t believe her luck. She clinks glasses with Astrid, then Mobley, then puts down her glass. Astrid frowns.
“It’s bad luck if you don’t drink,” she says. So Katie lifts her glass again and takes a small sip, then a bigger one, a feeling of sophistication swelling inside her, as if this drink, this plane, their attention, has opened the door to a secret world, a world filled with hidden knowledge and access. Somehow Katie has threaded the needle of her shitty childhood and adolescent punching bagocity to land this unbelievable opportunity. For a moment she feels the hot swell of pride. When life gives you lemons, she thinks.