Knife Edge

Knife Edge - chapter 3

                                                                      CHAPTER THREE

The queue for the Heaven’s Gate presentation at the Plaza Hotel had built up early. The audience was made up, predominantly, of well heeled, middle aged women. Some had already had extensive experience of nips, tucks and liposuction techniques; others were looking at the whole business of plastic surgery, or body remodelling, for the first time. All, including the sprinkling of paunchy, sun dried, men in the queue, had one thing in common.

They had all bought the message that they could be made to look more beautiful, more lithe, more attractive and youthful by paying the exorbitant fees charged by the practitioners of this new age art. To live forever seemed to be the insatiable need and desire of the times.

No practitioner had achieved more insider fame and notoriety than Thomas Startz. He had become the Svengali of plastic surgeons and his well marketed clinic, Heaven’s Gate, was the chicest place to go, and be seen to go, to find the miracle all his customers desired; beauty created by the sharp blade of technology. Startz had accomplished this by a combination of technical skill; an understated but penetrative and effective marketing campaign; his own personal charisma and the good fortune to have as a sister one of the most beautiful women in America.

But there was another ingredient that made all the difference between Startz’s business success and every other competent plastic surgeon in California. There was the mystery of his past and of his relationship with his much younger sister, Holly.

There were rumours that they were not even brother and sister, but something much more intimate. Their public appearances gave all the indications of a relationship based on an attraction, which was more erotic than that of mere siblings. Startz would only say that he was born in Zurich and had spent the majority of his life in Europe before emigrating to the U.S. Holly’s personal history was even harder to pin down. She claimed to have been born in France but there was no evidence of this. As far as the public was concerned, the first anyone heard about either Startz was when the suave and persuasive Thomas bought an exclusive property in Bel Air and converted it into the most advanced body sculpture clinic in the world. No one knew where he or the money had come from but they soon knew where he was going. When he introduced the transcendentally beautiful Holly to the world after showing photographs of her before surgery, it catapulted Thomas into the super league and turned Holly into the most photographed model in America.

Holly Startz was the American dream made flesh. A pretty but unpretentious looking girl had been transformed into male America’s wettest dream and had turned women into wrecks of physical envy.

At the height of her fame, a well-publicised drugs problem cut short Holly’s front page career. By the time she had recovered and was clean, she had been superseded by a new wave of nubile beauties. Still, she remained a symbol of the American dream despite the years that had passed. She was the single most cited female American icon as far as women in their early thirties and upwards were concerned. And Thomas Startz played her to the hilt. Both led very private existences interspersed with carefully orchestrated bursts of publicity. Thomas Startz had never married and was at least twelve years older than Holly, probably more. No trace of their backgrounds had ever been found by the curious journalists for whom they exercised a continual fascination.

Right now, Startz was gazing out of the window of his private suite in the Plaza, preparing to meet the faithful. Behind him, Holly was putting the final touches to her make up. She was tall, as tall as her brother, with a figure shaped by surgery and exercise. Her face was still alluring, with the large limpid eyes that jumped out of magazine covers and she still had the figure of a Barbie doll.