“How long does the test result take?” I asked him.
“Ten minutes. We have a lab on the premises.”
I barely believed it. Back when Liz was still alive, I’d bought a life insurance policy and thus had an AIDS test. The results had taken a few days at the least. “I’ve never heard of a test that’s so fast—”
“The common test is the ELISA test and then, if that tests out positive, the retest is done with the Western blot,” the technician said. “But we’re way ahead. We’re using the SUDS. Only a few private practice doctors are using it yet.”
“Who actually tests the blood? Looks under the microscope, or whatever?”
“I do.”
“What’s your training?” I asked suspiciously.
“Well, after my Ph.D.,” he said, looking up from the blood sample, “I worked with the CDC in Atlanta for five years—I can describe that, if you’d like.”
While we waited for the results, the Chairman showed me the steam room and sauna. “A lot of fellows don’t have time for mistresses,” the Chairman explained, “and they . . . hhrrrmmm, and they really don’t need the trouble. Oh, the trouble they can be! I had a girl once who . . . well, it’s a long story. But a mistress can be a hell of a lot of trouble. Geez, I need that rum. We keep the membership here at twenty-five, see. It’s very quiet that way. Ahhhhrrrm-ahh. Excuse me. The rule is that you have to be fifty years old to join, though guests may be younger. A few fellows wanted to let their sons come here so we wrote that into the rules. The annual dues are up to about a hundred thousand. That doesn’t include usage fees. Only a couple of new spots open up each year, usually when somebody dies. Membership is by invitation only. We all know each other.”
He showed me a small lap pool and exercise area. A few men sat at the far end with drinks. The Chairman gave them a regular nod when they looked in our direction. Every surface was as clean as an operating room. Then he pointed to a hall of doorways.
“The rooms are back there. I’ve been happy with the club’s management, actually. They bring in ten new girls a year. Each girl works a few nights a week. They don’t get run down. They get paid quite well, so that there’s no reason to do any other work. They get to know us, know what we want. Sometimes it’s only a rubdown or a swim . . . some of the older fellows just want a little help getting into the sauna.” He chuckled, indicating he was different from them. “That’s all they’re up to at their age. We’ve got one fellow who’s almost ninety. Remarkable.”
The attendant found us and nodded at me.
“You’re all set, sir,” he said, like a valet parking cars at a restaurant.
The Chairman and I returned to the locker room and he showed me where the guests’ cubicles were. I was given to understand that I should change into the laundered robe. This I did, though not without the usual misgivings and modesty. I was embarrassed by appearing before some strange woman. And, as if we were at a public beach house somewhere on Long Island, the Hamptons say, I worriedly stuffed my watch and wallet into my smelly socks, thinking as I always did that a prospective thief might think twice before rooting through them.
A minute later the Chairman emerged wearing a towel. His tan was current and a number of small Band-Aids were adhered to his shoulders and chest—more skin cancers removed, no doubt. His back sprouted a thicket of gray hair and his legs were bandy in the way of older men.
At that moment a surprisingly beautiful Asian woman in a white robe appeared and took the Chairman’s hand. Her matter-of-fact manner shocked me. She possessed a slender body, almost like a child’s, and could have been Thai or Filipina or some rarer mixture of races. She whispered coyly in the Chairman’s ear. They were not strangers, not at all, and she led him down the hall.
And, while I stood there awkwardly, Miss Najibullah appeared, also unusually attractive, with dark skin and very long black hair and a strong nose and forehead. I guessed that she was twenty-two, at most. She led me to one of the doors in the hallway and shut the door. The room contained a wet bar and an oversized massage table whose height could be varied.
“Where’re you from?” I said, to break the silence.
“I come from Afghanistan.”
Her accent was very thick. She’d probably been in the United States only a few months, her looks creating a new destiny.
“I am tired of the fighting so I come here. Please.” She gave a graceful flourish of her small hand, “You lie down here first.”
I lay down on my stomach, letting her rub my shoulders.
“Very tight,” she said. “You are very tight.”
“Yes.”
“Now, here,” the woman whispered, her hair falling across my neck. She turned me onto my back. I passed inspection. At first I figured I wouldn’t do it. She was ever so slightly aloof. This was business. No doubt the Chairman had chosen the other woman for a reason. But I changed my mind. She was available to me. This is a word with wide possibilities. She did as I instructed, one thing and then another. I was not a pig, but I made use of the opportunity. Liz would have been disgusted yet also understanding. The woman’s muscle tone in her buttocks and stomach was superb. Quite marvelous.
Later. Miss Najibullah asked me if there was anything more she could do for me and I thanked her and said no. She left. No doubt the tip was built into the fee. I put on my robe and floated out the door into the hallway. I listened at the other doors. The chrome handles were nonlocking, I noted, probably to protect the women from being trapped inside with one of their clients. In the hallway I approached a naked man in his fifties wearing sandals and a fogged pair of glasses. I recognized him as the youngest son of the city’s wealthiest real estate mogul, now a senile man in his nineties. He was rather short and fat, and his skin was the color of broiled ham, with a froth of reddish gray pubic hair. Beneath the tiny button of his penis, a set of bull’s testicles flopped from one corpulent thigh to the other in the dropped, loose way of older men.
“Miss Pearl?” he cried out in a lost, boyish voice, barely seeing me as we passed each other. “Miss Pearl?”
I moved down the corridor.
“Send that down here, honey,” came the Chairman’s voice from behind one of the doors, the sound of it weighted by the throaty, indulgent quality of a man lying on his back. “—uh, thank you, honey, that feels nice. Send that right down here. Yes, there . . . that’s very—very good, don’t want to spill my rum, yes there, bring that down here to daddy.” He laughed deliriously. “Here . . . mmmn, mmmn!—there’s a hundred for you. All right then . . . let me put another—aah . . . yes, that’s mmm, mmmn. That’s another hundred. Two hundred in ten seconds, you can get some nice shoes.”
She answered murmurously, too softly for me to understand.
“Now, this one,” the Chairman grunted. “I’m—hey, I’m going to hold it—a little tight, sweetie, bring that down to daddy, bring that down! . . . very tight! . . . a little . . . mmmmmn, mmmnn, ha, mmmn, very very nice, what’s that come to? Eighteen hundred? We can—uh! that’s good . . . my drink there, thank you . . . it’s a fine, fine night, quite an evening, quite a pleasure . . . now come get this one . . .”
They were doing something with one-hundred-dollar bills. I tiptoed in my towel toward the locker room and took a long, hot shower. A few minutes later I was nearly dressed when the Chairman came back into the locker room. I looked up to see him at the urinal, wearing the maroon robe. He stood in front of the white procelain, waiting patiently for the urine to arrive, with yet another new drink set on the top of the urinal, a cigarette stuck in his mouth, thinking that he was alone. His back was to me and he spoke to himself and hummed, with no variation in tone, no attempt at music, instead making an odd vibration as if someone had hooked up a low current to the fillings in his old ruined teeth. “ . . . aah, the bastards, the frolicking bastards, hhrrrrnmmmm . . . noncallable bonds will kill all of us, hrnmmn and the mummhermmhum . . .” I could see from his eyes that he was inspecting his penis, evaluating
it with interest, as if hoping it might do a trick for him. Or perhaps he looked at it with gratitude for recent accomplishments. A vein of blue smoke spiraled upward from his cigarette as the crack of his mouth kept moving. “. . . ah hmmmum, she’s a woman who likes a nice pair of shoes, a pair of shmmmn . . . the Greeks were geniuses, they sent messengers to bring the news of the war . . . hummmrrmmm . . . geniuses, tactical—” Then he lifted his head instinctively, as if a cool draft had reached him, and he turned around. There I was, the young man, already knotting my tie.
“What? You?” he asked with sudden vulnerability, as if he had seen a terror, his voice echoing loudly in the marble bathroom. “What? Done so fast, are you?”
I said nothing. He must have had ten or fifteen drinks since we’d gotten on the train hours earlier. I didn’t see how he could be standing.
“Ahh, of course, it’s all quite . . . they picked you, they decided you’re the messenger,” the Chairman exclaimed boozily, his eyes bloodshot and glassy, “—I can see that, aaahhmmm . . . they think you can tell me something the others can’t . . . don’t think I don’t know that, knew it the minute—saw the danger immediately . . .” He rocked forward on his feet, perhaps in danger of falling over. “Well that’s very good . . . hmmmn . . . I know the news, I mean, I know it, right? . . . you seem like a decent fellow, you spoke to the senator quite . . . but I expected that . . . such . . . they can send a hundred fellows! It’ll never work. It’s too big, never been done . . . the language differences, the computers, the debt load. Terrible. Full of terrors. I’ve put in almost fifty years . . . young fellows like you don’t know terror. They might be fooling with you fellows, ever think of that?” He paused. His eyes drilled into me as hard as he could. “What if they have the Japanese banks waiting in the wings? DaiIchi Kangyo Bank? With assets of half a trillion dollars? Or Sumitomo Bank or Sanwa Bank? Did you know that the seven largest banks in the world are all Japanese? Don’t believe they don’t have any money . . . the smart fellows pulled out before the markets in Tokyo crashed . . . sitting on billions, they’ll buy this company, Mr. Jack Whitman, man of no terrors . . . those suckers will come up with fifty billion . . . they’ll simply buy us, me, and . . . so—” He lurched crazily, caught himself. “So go get your winged sandals because I’m—no . . .” The Chairman stumbled, grabbed the urinal for support. “Don’t try even . . . don’t even try to talk me into anything . . . I can be a nasty son of a—I’ll fuck up you, I’ll fuck up Morrison, I’ll—there!—” He looked down into the urinal again and realized he had been pissing. “There it is!”
The Chairman cinched his robe, spat his cigarette butt on the floor as if he imagined himself to be a young tough, and weaved heavily out the door back the way he had come. I stood on the wet, marble floor trying to remember his angry, drunken words of warning and noticed that he hadn’t bothered to flush the urinal, as if his golden liquid were a mark of himself too valuable to ever be flushed away.
FIVE
I CANNOT THINK WITHOUT COFFEE AND EARLY THE NEXT morning I stood in front of my house in a blue suit and green tie drinking my third cup of it, trying unsuccessfully to wrap my mind around what had happened the previous evening with the Chairman. My head hurt from lack of sleep and I stood there dazed and vaguely anxious. The tulips had only just bloomed victoriously—red as blood. A couple of scrubbed fifth-graders skipped by on their way to Berkeley-Carroll, the neighborhood private school where my daughter would have gone, about ten thousand bucks a year. It occurred to me that the Chairman had deliberately taken me to his club. But why? To demonstrate his virility? To intimidate me? I was going to have to start anticipating his manipulations. A trio of homeless men advanced down the street, one pushing a shopping cart loaded down with cans and scraps and any number of things. They knew the garbage truck schedules and did their best scavenging on streets due to be collected. Then the phone rang inside.
“Who is this woman?” Ahmed yelled when I picked up. “No! I don’t want to know, there is no time for talk. I just want you to get here as fast as you can. Somebody tore all the hell out of my building! My foreman has called me two minutes ago and said the door to the building was open—”
“Wait, wait, where are Dolores and Maria?” I interrupted in confusion.
“I do not know! Something has happened. They might be here! It is a very big building—”
“You can’t find them?”
There was a pause. “If there is a problem, my friend,” Ahmed answered slowly, menace in his voice, “you are going to solve it, not me.”
“Wait a minute, Ahmed—”
“Just get here as fast—” And he hung up on himself.
When I arrived, Ahmed stood in front of the building in all his sleek brutishness, pacing about in a shimmery Italian suit and holding a woman’s shoe. Dolores’s shoe. His workmen stood off to one side; clearly no labor had begun and the men dared not penetrate his agitated rage. He looked up and saw me. “Finally!” he growled, and in that moment I knew our friendship of more than fifteen years was over, for despite the fact that Ahmed and I used to carry each other piggyback in the grueling soccer drills our coaches devised for us, suddenly we were again and forever strangers to each other.
He took me by the collar of my coat and threw me up against the wall. “Listen, you motherfucker! I have just found out that the door to my building was open for five hours last night! Anybody and his crackhead motherfucker brother could have stolen my equipment! I have got millions of dollars of other people’s money involved here.” Flecks of spit hit my face. “Something has gone wrong and it is your fault! I do not know where that woman is and if she is even alive. But she better not be in my building! If she is dead in there now, that is not where her body is going to be found. Understand that, Jack? Got that?” His face was in mine and I could see the fine lacework of pink veins in his eyes. “So what you and I are going to do, right now, and fuck your big-time corporate meetings, is we are going up there, up to find out what it is has happened, just you and me.”
And with that he shoved me inside the iron doorway to the building, pulled a gate shut, and fiddled a key. I was locked in. He turned toward his men. “Sanjay and Boktu, come here.”
The small dark man with coal-black eyes and hair whom I had seen before—the translator, and one of the other men, a skinny stoop-shouldered man of about forty whose entire facial expression was distilled in wrinkled worry about his eyes, stepped forward from the group of men. I watched from inside the gate.
“We need to look for Dolores and Maria,” I called anxiously. “Let’s go!”
But Ahmed was running the show. With Sanjay translating, apparently in a Hindu dialect, he interrogated the older man.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“Mr. Ahmed, Boktu say he is just doing his job checking every hour on every floor and he was standing outside to smoke and he had locked the gate and some man came up to him and started to talk—” The other man interrupted in his worried voice, waving his dry brown hands. “And he say that they went across the street to have just one gin drink. The man was buying the drinks—”
Ahmed hurled a piece of lumber against the wall. “You will ask him why a poor man will drink gin in a bar while he is being paid to protect my property!”
There was some more insistent explanation and clarification and translating but here the chronology was somewhat lost to the watchman, because the next thing he knew, he said, he was lying in an alleyway nearby, his arms tied around his back, his keys gone, a bread delivery truck on its morning rounds honking in the dawn light for him to move. The man stuttered something more.
“He is very sorry,” Sanjay explained, “he gives his word—”
“You will tell him he is fired and that I will not pay his last paycheck,” Ahmed replied with dispatch, waving his hands in disgust. The translator relayed this message and the older man immediately fell to his feet and began to beg Ahmed, putting his hands around his legs in a death grip of
terror. He took handfuls of dirt and put them in his mouth. He wept.
I felt nothing but fury. “Ahmed!” I screamed. “We need to look for Dolores and Maria—they could be hurt, they could be—”
Sanjay continued translating for Ahmed in a lilting Indian accent. “Boktu say he does not have any money and that he has five little children. He begs for your mercy upon him. He say he did not know there was the madam in the building.”
Ahmed scuffed his feet from the man’s grasp. “You will tell him that his begging disgraces him as a father and as a man.”
“You are the boss,” Sanjay said, “but I believe that this is too much punishment.”
“You will tell him my last words or you will be fired too.”
The translation was made and Boktu stiffened—his dignity now no longer a liability to him—and stood and strode quickly away. Meanwhile Ahmed had grabbed the iron gate that kept me in.
“Lock this behind me and nobody comes in or out of here until we come back down,” Ahmed ordered his other men. “If the police come, tell them you don’t have the key and have to call me to get it. Then you call my house and I won’t be there and you say you don’t know what to do. Sanjay, you come.”
Then, pushing me toward the dusty gloom of the interior, he continued. “You are responsible for this man who loses his job, Jack, not me! He has never had a bad night. I am firing him because I must, as a message to the other men, but it is something you have caused.” We plunged down a narrow corridor. Immense iron steam pipes ran along one side, their jackets of asbestos insulation torn and damaged, the dangerous fibers piled in drifts on the floor. “Do you know how big my building is?” Ahmed glared at me.
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