The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors

by Jonathan Santlofer

  The barbarian, as always, used her in degrading, painful ways, beating her once he was too spent to respond to her touch. At the beginning, the horror of the hours with him had filled her mind completely, other thoughts staggering and unable to breathe under the weight. Now harsh experience had taught her what to expect. Now, while with him, she was able to remove part of herself, a precious, untouched part, from this blank-walled room and his heavy, sweating flesh. As he panted and groaned, she returned to the city of her childhood, to the perfumed rooms, the delicate silk-string music and the cool breeze wafting through the shaded walkways of the palace garden.

  He rolled away finally and lay on his back breathing hard. She scuttled to the far side of the bed, knowing better than to touch him at this point. Eventually he heaved a satisfied sigh, and sat. That was her signal and she rose fast, stifling a groan, standing straight only with effort. He recalled punching her; maybe he’d broken a rib. He didn’t care about that but he was annoyed when he saw he must have socked her in the jaw, too: Her lip was broken and bleeding. Damn. He liked their faces perfect.

  Pressing away awareness of the new pain in her side, she crossed to the table and brought him the glass bottle as she had learned to do. Sometimes he forced her to drink from it also, which could be both blessing and curse. She disliked the taste of the gold liquid and she hated the path it scorched from her lips through her chest; but a few swallows could ease the agony, both in her body and in her heart.

  He slugged back some whiskey, waving her off the bed, making her stand so he could survey her pale skin. He played his private game of measuring the fading of the yellow-green bruises and guessing where the purple ones would be blooming. A swollen crimson line glowed on her side already. Damn, that rib might actually be broken. She stood, biting her lip, trying to control her breathing, and once more he had to admire her: He didn’t know if he could have taken what she took, day after day. But what choice did she have? Bought by his trafficker on the streets of some filthy city half a world away, smuggled through places she’d never heard of by a route she didn’t know, she had no reality here, she didn’t exist. No one missed her, no one was searching. She couldn’t escape from this locked basement room with its single window high in the wall. She wouldn’t try: The trafficker had made clear to her—graphically clear—what would happen to her father and young sisters back home if she did. No, locked in this room, her only hope was to please him, marking time, waiting and hoping for a future that would never come. He’d kill her in the end, like all the others. He could kill her now, this very minute, if he wanted; that thought made him laugh and then laugh harder as he saw her scared eyes widen.

  She crushed down a shiver as she stood, fire burning her side, fear stabbing her heart when she heard his laugh. She tried to show him nothing, holding herself perfectly still, her back straight, her chin lifted and her hands quiet as she’d been taught at the court of her father.

  He considered killing her, and he considered screwing her again. “Nah,” he said in English, knowing she couldn’t understand, “I’m through for the day. That okay with you? You want more?” He watched her struggle with herself, understanding she’d been asked a question, not sure whether her response should be a nod or a headshake, knowing the wrong choice would bring a kick, a blow. Finally, she nodded. He cackled. “Nope, you bitch, you’re lying.” He slapped her, but not hard enough to knock her over, though she staggered before she stood straight again. He thought about clocking her another one, but the hell with it. Boy, she’d really drained him. He marked the whiskey label, stood and pulled on his clothes. When she’d first arrived he used to take the bottle with him. Now he marked the level and left it because she’d learned that whiskey dulled the pain. He knew it would sit on the table all day calling to her and she wouldn’t dare take a drink.

  She remained standing straight and still after the barbarian left. Often he threw the door open suddenly, having not really gone away at all; or, after many hours, he returned. If he found her lying down, on the bed or even the floor, he would beat her again. He was a cruel man, her barbarian husband, subtle and pitiless. But once dark had fallen, he would not return. Then she was permitted to move, to eat the food he’d left her—its aroma filled the room and made her light-headed, but she didn’t dare taste it yet—to attend to her other bodily functions, and to sleep. So she stood and she waited for dark, watching through the high window the light changing on the pink flowers of the cherry tree. In the gardens of her father’s palace, the cherries must also be in bloom.

  He chuckled to himself as he climbed the basement stairs, recalling her bewildered horror those first days as the rules of her new life became clear to her. She’d had trouble comprehending that she wasn’t allowed to eat, to piss, to curl into a ball under the blankets and weep boo-hoo until after the sun went down. She did catch on, though, and after the first week he never found the food touched or the bed warm, no carpet impressions on her silken skin, no matter how long he’d made her stand. Once it was dark, he left her alone: Fair’s fair, after all. And he had a life to live. Openings, benefits, and parties to go to. He couldn’t give her all his attention. It wouldn’t be right.

  Finally the sky behind the cherry blossoms turned a deep cobalt, the color of her father’s formal robes. She forced herself to wait unmoving until the first star appeared, though the barbarian rarely returned this late. Once she saw the pinpoint gleam through the branches, she breathed deeply, and stretched very slowly, wincing at the new fire in her side. She moved carefully to the sink, where she washed in hot water, cleansing herself of the barbarian’s touch and his smell. Only then did she pull the blanket from the bed, wrap her naked body in it, and, cross-legged on the floor, begin to eat.

  As he dressed for dinner he reflected on the problem he’d been putting off. The trafficker would be back soon, in fact should have been here a few days ago. He’d be bringing half a dozen girls to choose from. He wasn’t nearly done with this one yet. But the trafficker was following instructions and would want to be paid. He purely hated the idea of paying for something he wasn’t going to use.

  Having eaten—heavy, unaccustomed food, which she nevertheless forced herself to devour completely as she thought back to the delicate rice and fish of her childhood—she climbed into the bed and lay on her back, staring at the cherry tree now gray against the black sky. The light in the room where she was kept never went out, but was never bright. Weak and dull, it left shadows in the corners. In the palace, sunlight streamed through the windows, and along the roofed walkways cool shade enveloped her as, with her sisters, she ran and laughed. In the perpetual twilight in which she lived now, she thought of those days, and slept.

  Well, he’d made his decision. He’d like to have kept this one longer. She got him seriously worked up; and he very much wanted to find her breaking point, a challenge he’d never been faced with before. But novelty had always been a turn-on for him, too, and there was the fact that whatever was coming in he was going to have to pay for anyway. He had an odd feeling, also, that the memory of this one might be even more exciting when he had another in front of him than the reality of her was now. Too bad, a bit of a waste: But tomorrow, she would go.

  The new pain in her side woke her, again and again. Breathing grew agonizing as the night went on. The injury throbbed when she lay still and stabbed her when she moved. The thought of her barbarian husband’s weight crushing her, of the rhythmic pounding of his grunting pleasure—of his smile when he saw the hot and swollen wound—was terrifying. She understood: It was, finally, unbearable.

  He canceled meetings, made sure his schedule was clear most of the day. He’d take as long as he wanted with her, since it was the last time; and then there’d be the messy part. He’d gotten it down to a routine: knees on her chest, thumbs on her neck, press, release, let her gasp and cough and think she was going to live; press, release, again, until finally, no release (except for him, usually, at that moment), then the shovel, the
orchard; but it still always took longer than he expected.

  She awoke at daybreak, as she always had in her father’s palace. Although she couldn’t hear it, birds would be calling in the cherry trees, creatures stirring in the undergrowth, new life starting on a new day. The thought cheered her as she washed, allowing herself to wish, just briefly, for a cup of the fragrant tea with which she used to begin the morning. Then she prepared the bed and went to the door. She would be standing when he came in.

  He finished a leisurely breakfast, trying to remember where he’d gotten this coffee, because it was damn good. He collected a few things he hadn’t used with her yet, because it usually took a girl a couple of days to recover from them before she was any good again. But she wasn’t going to have to recover, was she?

  The sun had not fully risen when she took her post. He had never arrived this early. But she did not want to be surprised by him.

  He unlocked the upper door, closed it behind him, and trotted down the stairs, humming. He almost pocketed the key, then decided to make her hold it in her hand the whole time. He’d done that to others before. It nearly drove them mad.

  She stood, awaiting him. It might be hours; but it might be this next minute. Pain and fear had taught her well over these last weeks. The new fire in her side was a distraction, but she crushed any thought of it. She could stand, motionless, for a very long time.

  Now the basement hallway, now the lower door. He turned the key and stopped for a moment, savoring the delicious knowledge that she’d be standing naked, facing the door, waiting as she had been, he knew, for hours. He tasted her fear as she heard the click of the lock and he could barely stand the thrill.

  She heard the key turn in the lock. She drew a slow, deep breath to calm her heart. He didn’t enter immediately. This was his way sometimes, to increase her fright; but he never waited long.

  He swung the door open.

  She wasn’t there.

  She wasn’t standing and the curled form under the blankets flooded him with fury. Seeing nothing but that mound, and in it her disobedience, her defiance, her pride and hate, he charged blindly toward it. He howled, reaching clawlike for the bed. He’d tear her apart.

  As he bent to the bed she stepped from behind the door, arms raised. She swung with all her power, crashing the bottle onto the back of his head. It broke in a shower of glass and gold liquid. He staggered but did not fall, and turned to her, eyes wild. Wielding the shattered remains of the bottle like a dagger, she sliced it once across his throat, and again the other way, and again a third time, because she wanted to be sure.

  The hate in her eyes was a raging inferno; the sight of it made him shake with desire. The moist heat of his own blood cascading down his chest was the most glorious sensation he’d ever known. He stirred and swelled and died erect.

  She pushed the barbarian’s body to the floor and felt through the tangled blankets for the key. He’d had it in his hand and she picked it from the bed, glad she would not have to search his clothing, to touch him again. She went to the sink and, one last time, washed the reek of the barbarian from her skin. Pulling the blue blanket from the bed, wrapping it around herself like a robe, she walked calmly through the door and up the stairs. The barbarian had been destroyed. Now she could return to her father’s kingdom.

  “Whoa!” The coroner’s man stopped at the door. “Someone made a mess outta him, huh?”

  “We were about to close in, too,” the detective said glumly. “Wish we’d been faster.”

  “Why? Someone sorry he’s dead?”

  “The opposite. Dead’s too good. Look at this place.”

  The coroner’s man did, taking in the wall-hung chains, the leather whip, the high, barred window. “What’s the story?”

  “Bastard was buying girls.”

  “Buying?”

  The detective shrugged. “Illegals, from overseas. Sold by Mom and Dad to feed the rest of the family. We took up a trafficker a few days ago, that’s who gave him up. Girls thought they’d hit the jackpot, that they were coming here as mail-order brides.”

  “Jesus.”

  “There was any justice,” the detective said, “this bastard would be spending the rest of a long, long life with bastards bigger, meaner, and with nothing to lose.”

  “So who got to him?”

  “No idea.” The detective heard a patrolman call him from above. He said, “You don’t need me, right?”

  The coroner’s man snapped on his gloves. “Nope. Go ahead.”

  The patrolman met the detective at the top of the stairs. By his ashen face the detective understood they’d found their killer. He knew what had happened even before the patrolman led him to the bruised and naked body hanging by a blanket noose from a branch of the blossoming cherry tree.

  Her father’s garden was as beautiful as in her memory. Her sisters laughed and ran to her, the youngest carrying a robe of cobalt silk. She wrapped herself in it and, together, to the strains of silk-string music, they walked through the brilliant sunlight to the cool shadowed walkway that led to the gates of the palace.

  Ben & Andrea & Evelyn & Ben

  JONATHAN SANTLOFER

  Friday

  BEN DRAPES HIS sport jacket across his lap. His shirt is sticking to him, the train hot and airless, cigarette smoke, including his own, making it hard to breathe. He’s switched trains at Jamaica and the older train, which is cramped and has no air conditioning, sits on the tracks for ten minutes, Ben thinking about his walk to AndiAnn where he will spend his day with the dress designer and pattern makers, cutters and sewers, his job to make sure everything is on schedule and ready to be shipped to retailers while Morty deals with the buyers; Morty, who wears three-hundred-dollar suits and a gold pinky ring and calls the buyers darling and everyone else bastard and lives in the Forest Hills apartment he used to share with Andrea’s dead mother, which is three times the size of the split-level he bought for his favorite daughter. Ben liked their Greenwich Village walk-up even with the dining room serving as a room for their kid, but how could he refuse Andrea the “better life” her father offered even if it meant commuting an hour each way and living in a house he only gets to use on weekends?

  He runs a hand through his thick, dark hair, just starting to gray at the temples. There is a woman sitting across from him, his age, maybe a year or two younger, thirty-one or -two, knees almost touching his, hair up in a French knot, stockings on her legs. He pictures clips and snaps as he watches her drag red-lacquered fingernails along her collarbone then play with a gold crucifix between the V of her breasts, a wedding ring on her finger. She lifts her eyes from her newspaper—headline: ANDREA DORIA SINKS OFF NANTUCKET—and they exchange a look. He crushes his cigarette into the tiny ashtray and when the train hurtles underground and everything goes black he leans forward, slides his hand up her leg and into her panties and hears her gasp over the sound of rattling train tracks and she opens her legs a bit wider. When the lights flash on, the woman drops the newspaper into her lap and Ben slips his hand out and as the train pulls into the station they exchange one last look before she gets up, adjusts her skirt, and disappears into the crowd.

  Outside, Ben can’t remember how he got here. He brings his hand to his nose, presses fingertips against nostrils, proof of what just happened. He moves with the throng of commuters up Seventh Avenue, the air hot and thick.

  The Neiman Marcus buyer, a hard fortysomething blonde from Dallas, is in the showroom when he gets there, Morty saying, “Darling this, darling that—” He nods at Ben, who is fifteen minutes late, and Ben doesn’t bother to say the train sat at the Jamaica station with engine trouble and no air conditioning because Morty won’t care.

  The in-house model pivots for the Neiman Marcus buyer. Ben knows she will do this two dozen times in two dozen outfits. She disappears behind a screen to change but Ben does not hang around even though the showroom is deliciously frigid, the air conditioner cranked up to high.

  In the back,
Ben guesses it’s close to ninety. He nods at the young women bent over sewing machines making samples, two older ones hand sewing sequins and beads. He arranges his jacket onto his chair, his desk tucked into the back corner where a fan whirls hot dirty air in through an alley window. He loosens his tie, makes a call to order fabric—the new polyesters that are becoming the thing—then goes to see Max, the patternmaker, who has stripped down to his sweat-stained tee, and from there to see Artie, the fag dress designer, who Ben likes because he’s nasty and funny and hates Morty almost as much as he does. He spends longer than necessary discussing hemlines and cruise wear, about which he cares nothing, because Artie has the only air-conditioned office.

  At lunchtime he eats a tuna on rye at his desk and Andrea calls to say she has invited the neighbors for a barbecue.

  “Why?” he asks.

  “Why not?” she says.

  Ben can think of a dozen reasons but says nothing and it’s not just the fact that he has been sweating all morning and would prefer not to sweat over a barbecue.

  “I bought steaks,” she says.

  Ben hangs up and then, like a movie on an endless loop, makes more calls, confers with Max and Artie, checks the beadwork on a cocktail dress, and is back on the train sniffing at his fingertips, the smell of the woman with the French knot and gold crucifix still there, or is it the tuna he had for lunch?

  Ben slathers A-1 onto the steaks. He’s had no time to change or shower, his shirt sticking to him, a corny apron that Stevie by way of Andrea got him for Father’s Day tied around his waist: DAD, KING OF THE GRILL.