The Final Veil: Who had kidnapped America's favorite belly dancer?

by Pat Powers

The question in her mind as she sat there on the toilet and stared into the darkness, was what did they really want with her? What little she knew about kidnappings was that the kidnappers generally had some specific goals -- rape, murder, extortion, political pressure, child custody disputes, things like that.

  This one felt kind of political. All that blather about the patriarchy and so forth sounded feminist. And the blather about spiritual advisers sounded like Moral Majority types. Who the hell were these people?

  And beneath it all, April thought resentfully that she was not political. She really was not. Had never voted. Did not care who was in power. Her feeling was that the people who held political power, and who cared about it, were so totally clueless about how lives were actually lived that she had never considered politics relevant enough to think about, much less act on. You just voted for whoever seemed least likely to put you in jail just for being you, which for April seemed to be mostly "none of the above."

  Still, she understood that others might think she was political, and have political feelings about her. She knew that some feminists and some conservatives disliked her on general principles, but hell, political people disliked all sorts of people on general principles, but it never really got to bloodshed or anything like that in the U.S. Maybe places like South America and Eastern Europe where getting rich and getting laid weren't nearly so important as hating people.

  But apparently even in America, there were people who were Eastern European in outlook.

  When she finished with her business on the commode, April found she could wipe herself. It wasn't easy, but she could do it. Her chain clanked against the base of the commode as she scrabbled her feet to get traction as she worked. The leather strap dug cruelly into her belly and hips and she pulled down with her cuffed hands, pulling on the strap and the link at the small of her back.

  It was hard, but April did a thorough job, because she was sure that Janice had sat on the commode wearing the harness with the cuffs linked to them behind her back, and wiped herself, because that was exactly the sort of thing a proper bondage mistress would do. So Janice would know exactly what could be done while harnessed and cuffed like that.

  Finally, she slumped forward to signal that she was through. She was sure Janice had watched her, though how closely she'd been watched, she had no idea.

  In a moment, she felt the commode move slightly, and heard the sound of flushing.

  "Time to get up," said Janice from her left, and she felt Janice's hands on her arm. April toyed with the idea of resisting Janice to see what would happen, but she was so freaked about the nonconsensual way she'd been treated that she didn't have any nerve for it. They had kidnapped her, a desperate thing to do. They might also seriously injure her or kill her for reasons she couldn't understand, with little or no provocation.

  Once she had a better idea who she was dealing with, she might try something, but for now she would do as she was told.

  The strange thing was, the nonconsensual nature of what was being done to her had completely destroyed April's natural submissiveness. Ordinarily it was her instinct, and her pleasure, to obey while in bondage. But the only thing April wanted to do was get away from these people. She would resist, fight and escape them if at all possible.

  "Feeding time now," said Janice. "We're going to keep your meals light to minimize bathroom problems. You won't be doing much dancing, so you're not likely to be very hungry anyway. Do eat and drink, though, there won't be much in the way of between-meal snacks."

  Janice walked April a short distance and then forced her to her knees. She unbuckled a strap and the wiffle ball gag was suddenly out of April's mouth. April moved her lips and jaws, restoring feeling to muscles long gone numb. April liked being gagged, and with practice had learned to wear a gag without discomfort for a day at a time. But it took practice, and working up to, to get to that point. This had been abrupt and nonconsensual.

  Janice gently forced April's head down into a bowl.

  "Feed, slavegirl," said Janice. "You know the drill."

  April did know the drill. Her hands were still bound behind her back and would stay that way while she ate. She lowered her head to the bowl and expertly scooped every bit of food out of it with her tongue. It was a fairly tasty vegetable mash. She was more used to what the gals liked to call "Pantie Helper" which was typically a rice-a-roni dish with some hamburger in it.

  At a meet, if the masters wanted to have fun, they'd serve their slavegirls spaghetti with very runny tomato sauce or beef stroganoff, and then have them clean each others' faces off with their tongues.

  There had been times when she had eaten almost every meal kneeling naked in front of a bowl on the floor with her hands tied behind her back. After she finished the food, and it didn't take long, she moved her head to either side of the bowl, looking blindly for the bowl she knew must be there. It was there, a water bowl, full of cool water. She was glad to have that, she'd gotten dehydrated.

  After she finished the water, Janice tied the wiffle ball gag in place. Then April felt Janice's hand on her shoulder again.

  "Sorry, no dessert," said Janice. She helped April to her feet and then retied her in the same spreadeagle she had been tied in before.

  "That'll be it for a couple of hours," said Janice. We'll give you a break to think about what you've heard so far."

  Chapter 13

  Where the Dance Leads You

  After I dropped Pulazzi off at MOP headquarters, I dialed up Andrew Thomson's number. He had some news for me. I'd given him the names of the Alfalfans that the Animal Woman had given me, and he had traced them all. One was a student, and might be anywhere, two were working at steady jobs, and I should be able to reach them pretty easily at their job site.

  I gave Thomson Betty Furnsome's name and the name of Mopus Deim and asked him to dig up what he could on it.

  "I've heard of them," Thomson said. "Some of the more conspiracy-minded paranoid hacker sites consider them an arm of the Illuminati."

  "Right," I said. "Do me a favor and weed out the stuff from the conspiracy-minded paranoid hacker sites, unless that's all you can find."

  "Sure," said Thomson, slightly miffed. He liked the paranoid hacker sites. Sometimes they were right about some things. But Thomson admitted they were mostly wrong about everything.

  I bade good-bye to Thomson and headed over to MacKesson Enterprises, where Sandy Wrathbottom worked. It was a big distribution firm, the sort that's so big the people at the top periodically had to ask their underlings what it was they were distributing. Wrathbottom didn't rate an office in the rabbit warren that was its administrative headquarters. She just had a cubicle. I was ushered to a tiny meeting room, so small that when you pulled the obligatory overstuffed chairs out from under the table, they banged against the wall. True, the table could seat ten, but the room felt so cramped that you couldn't imagine even one person being comfortable in it. And of course there were stacks of papers and such in the corners to add to the general crampedness.

  "What can I do for you, Mr. Bowman?" Wrathbottom asked. She was a round-faced brunette whose hair hung in curly ringlets. She wore granny glasses, giving her a vaguely retro 60s look. She looked composed and relaxed. She obviously had no idea why I was there.

  "I'm John Bowman, I'm a private investigator looking into the disappearance of a woman named April Dancer," I said, watching her carefully as I spoke.

  She was good. She was very good. But the name "April Dancer" registered, and was quickly concealed.

  "OK," said Wrathbottom. "What's that got to do with me?"

  "I understand that you are a member of a dance troupe called the Sisters of the Sands, and of a political group called the ALFALFANs," I said. "I wanted to ask you a few questions about them."

  I avoided the term "lesbian" because I didn't want to get her defenses up any more than necessary. A lot of people would have used the term as an accusation.

  Wrathbottom was clearly taken aback by
what I'd said. She was good, though. She stalled.

  "What does any of that have to do with April Dancer?" she asked, without admitting to membership in either group.

  "We have evidence indicating that April was kidnapped," I said. "We think some ALFALFANs may have been involved in her kidnapping."

  "I haven't kidnapped anyone, and neither has anyone I know," Wrathbottom said calmly. But I thought she was lying. About what, or why, I wasn't sure.

  "OK, let me put all my cards on the table here," I said. "I have been hired to find Dancer by some of her Gorean friends. Now, I am not a police officer, and I can't compel you to talk to me. But because I'm not a police officer, I have some advantages I can offer you. Chief among them being that I don't have to find or arrest a guilty party. My sole interest here is April's safe return. If her captors get away, that's fine with me, so long as April is OK."

  "Can't help you," Wrathbottom responded.

  "I think you can," I said. "In any event, the person you need to help is you, not me. The cops are going to be following the same trail I'm following, and it's going to lead them to you, just like it led me to you. And what they are going to figure is that you're a co-conspirator in April's kidnapping, which means you face the same kind of jail time that the people who actually did it will face. Years of time in prison, Sandy."

  "If I or anyone I knew had been involved in a kidnapping, I'd be worried," Wrathbottom said. "If police officers ask me about this, I'll just have to tell them the same thing I told you." Which was a lie. She was worried. But was it just the ordinary worry anyone would have at having some stranger representing himself as a private investigator threaten her with the prospect of jail time, or was it a guilty worry about the law closing in?

  I decided to give her some cover and see if she would use it. "OK, let's say you do not know anything about April's disappearance, and don't know of anyone being involved in it," I said.

  "That's what I AM saying," Wrathbottom said.

  "Can you think of any ALFALFANs who might be likely to have kidnapped her?" I asked. "I'm not asking you to say they DID kidnap her, only that they MIGHT have?"

  "Oh, come on," said Wrathbottom. "I can't think of anyone who is a kidnapper, or likely to be one."

  "Look, we know a group of people kidnapped April," I said. "We know the ALFALFANs are a group that split off from the ALFANs because they didn't feel the ALFAN's were action-oriented enough. And we know the ALFANs were angry at April, at least some of them were. They wrote some very nasty emails to her."

  "Sounds like you ought to be investigating the ALFANs," said Wrathbottom. "They're the ones writing the emails, right?"

  "Oh, the ALFANs are being investigated," I said. (I was sure the Atlanta cops would give them a good going-over.) "But we think the ALFANs are mostly talk, like you do. The most they'd do is picket April's performances or demonstrate against the Goreans, if they were so moved. But we've heard that you guys have made more, shall we say, concrete plans to oppose the patriarchy. We've even heard that at one time, you planned to break into a women's prison."

  "Where did you hear that?" Wrathbottom asked, as if I had told her they'd planned to liberate all the Gronski beasts on the planet Neptune.

  "I'm not at liberty to name my sources," I said. (Because she didn't have a name.)

  "It was Sylvia Zygmonska, wasn't it?" Wrathbottom asked.

  "I've never heard of Sylvia Zygmonska," I said honestly. (Probably the Animal's real name. You learn something new every day.) "In any event, the point is that if your group is willing to do something as, um, ambitious as breaking into a women's prison, then a little thing like kidnapping a dancer seems easy by comparison."

  Wrathbottom was digging information out of me, but that was OK, there were things I wanted her to know.

  "Oh, the whole thing is ridiculous," Wrathbottom lied. "Maybe at some late-night bull session, somebody might have said why don't we break into a women's prison and free the inmates and expose how horrible conditions there are. But that's a long way from making concrete plans to do it."

  "I heard you did just that," I said, to keep the pressure on. "We know that your dances guide your actions, where did your dances guide you, if not to kidnap April?"

  "Somebody has laid a grade-A load of bull on you," said Wrathbottom coolly. "We talk to make decisions, just like anybody else. It's true out dancing influences us. But not in that way. The dance guides our spirits to what's beautiful and true within us. We respond naturally to that as human beings. It makes us better, more capable human beings. It doesn't make us kidnappers."

  "It has made you suspects in this investigation," I said. "Where were you day before yesterday at around 3:30 in the afternoon?"

  "Here at work," said Wrathbottom calmly. She was definitely not lying. She had been at work. She had been seen by many co-workers, who would say so. That didn't mean she hadn't been involved in April's kidnapping, only that she hadn't been one of those who physically took her.

  "Don't think that because you weren't personally responsible for grabbing April, that you aren't liable for the criminal penalties for doing so," I said. "You could go to jail for years."

  "If I had been involved in kidnapping her, yes," said Wrathbottom. "But I haven't."

  A few minutes later, I was standing in a corridor elsewhere in the MacKesson Enterprises rabbit warren, talking with Andrew Thomson on my cell phone.

  "I want you to bug the living hell out of that Sandy Wrathbottom woman on the ALFALFAN list," I said. "Phone, email, the works. I want you to get with Frank Plunkett on this, he's good with phone taps. I just talked to Wrathbottom, I'm sure she's up to something, but I don't know what it is."

  "I'm assuming this is under the usual authority and with the usual safeguards," Andrew said. By "usual authority" he meant "no legal authority whatsoever" and by "usual safeguards" he meant making damn sure he didn't leave any traces that led to him or me.

  "You assume correctly," I said. "Also, get on the trail of one Sylvia Zygmonska. Z-Y-G-M-O-N-S-K-A. She's not a suspect, she's one of my sources, but I only just now learned her name, and I want to find out if she's bogus or not, and if she is bogus, in what way."

  "You really should ask them their names, John," said Andrew.

  "She actually doesn't have one at present," I said.

  "Say what?" Andrew asked.

  "She has given up her name," I said. "It's long story. Tell you later, I've got stuff to do."

  "All right," said Andrew. "But you WILL tell me later."

  After I hung up on Andrew I called Peachtree Protective Services, and arranged to have a tail put on Wrathbottom. They had a couple of very good ops and I asked for one by name and got her. Tails were pricey, but I had a feeling Wrathbottom was worth following. And Jeff could easily foot the bill.

  Chapter 14

  She'd blown through the glass ceiling before it had a chance to set

  I got in my van and pulled up the data on Mopus Diem that Andrew had uploaded to my email address. I saved the attachments to my disk, then read them for a time. I put in a call to Furnsome's place and after some hassling, got an agreement to see her within an hour or so.

  Things were rolling. Furnsome's place was in Alpharetta. Roswell and Alpharetta lay next to each other and during a period of prolonged economic growth, both cities had annexed land so aggressively that in many areas it was genuinely difficult to tell who was living in what city. There was a straight, half mile-long stretch of road where you could drive into and out of the two cities two or three times each. Made it hard to find people, sometimes.

  Furnsome was hard to find if you weren't connected. She'd been a very big deal with Coke in the 70s, one of those early pre-feminist execs who nonetheless blazed trails for a lot of other women. She had also made a huge pile of money with Coke, and through some wise investments that were almost certainly under-the-table payments from Coke. She had actually gotten far enough up in the hierarchy at Coke that the big boys had to share som
e of the spoils with her. Apparently, she'd blown through the glass ceiling before it had a chance to set.

  The entrance to Furnsome's home was marked only by a mailbox with a street number. There was a screen of trees on either side of it, a screen so dense it didn't look like a driveway, which was probably why a small sign labeled "Private Drive" sat in the yard.

  The drive was very private, it meandered through a beautiful landscape of trees, neatly trimmed grass and a small pond. It led eventually to a building that had a vaguely Frank Lloyd Wright look to it, solid geometrical forms that seemed to rise out of the landscape. I was a little surprised. I had been expecting one of those cookie-cutter Old South Mansionoids that moneyed people tended to like in Atlanta.

  There were southern touches: honeysuckle and hibiscus climbing trellises at various strategic points, and a large magnolia spread its waxy blossoms in the front yard. I parked my van next to an SUV that was bigger than my van was and walked up to the bowered doorway that fronted the driveway.

  A middle-aged woman opened the door for me, an actual ladies' maid by her appearance. She escorted me to a study filled with old books that were probably mostly just for show but there were a couple of shelves of books that looked kinda used. I didn't have time to check out the titles, because Furnsome was already sitting in a chair waiting for me.

  I sat down in a chair opposite Furnsome. She was not what I had expected. I had expected some worn-out business nun with bags under her eyes you could stuff a thong in, cigarette-smoke wrinkles and a hardness to her eyes that would put a diamond drill to shame.

  Instead, I saw a cute little granny lady. She had gray hair she wore in a bob, a round face, a button nose and blue eyes that had a definite note of merriment to them. She had fine, thin lips, the kind that were pointy at the end, with wrinkles that indicated she could smile easily, or frown easily.

  Strangest of all, she was short, very short. Less than five feet tall, I'd say. She looked like an aged elf. She wore a set of denim overall and a peasant blouse T-shirt kind of thing. No jewelry.