by Paul Slatter
It was a tough decision.
He started the engine and put the seat back to the right position and pulled away, cruising past half a million dollars worth of cars. Their bodyguard-lookout was fast asleep with his mouth open in the front seat of the Mercedes. The big guy with the Hawaiian shirt there now, standing with his back to the window.
Basil reached the massage parlour, which specialized in feet, and parked right out front on Burrard Street. He walked in, heard the lady on the desk to the right of the door tell him he was early, and signalled to her that he was going to use the toilet. Then with a quick look over his shoulder, he carried on past the lavatory and sneaked a peek through the wicker fence put up so as the clients could relax in privacy while they had their feet rubbed and listened to the whale music.
Maio was there on the end, working away on some guy’s right leg which was lying on her lap and looked bigger than her entire body. Her delicate little fingers rubbing up and down the calf and then between the fat flaky toes of this overweight guy with psoriasis. Fuck that looks gross, Basil thought, as he looked at the man sitting there in the big comfy chair almost asleep with his mouth open. He stepped back, thinking as he walked towards the toilet that there was no way he was going to let her near his feet now, not after the way she’d been digging her thumbs into that guy’s open sores. What he’d do was make an excuse and say he’d changed his mind and needed a back massage instead, then he’d get her to bring him some tea, but what he’d do was have her drink it for him and be the nice guy and sit there in his undies and give her a break like he used to do for Kaio.
As he arrived back at the counter, he said to the lady, “Can I change my mind and have a massage instead? You see, I think I’ve pulled my back at work,” which wasn’t actually a lie after all the mucking about he’d been doing with the seat in the rental car.
The woman behind the desk saying straight back, “No massage, too late, you book feet, yes?”
“Yeah,” Basil said and followed it up with, “but you see I hurt my back on the way here.”
“You book feet, with Maio. You want other girl do back?”
No, he didn’t—unless she was hot. But from what he’d seen so far, Maio was the cream of the crop for the moment down at Happy Feet.
A half hour later he was sitting there with his trousers rolled up to his knees in the same seat the fat guy with psoriasis had been sitting five minutes before and he was certain he could smell the man’s dribble and BO on the pillow. Maio looked up at him smiling as she rubbed oil into his calf then all over his feet and toes. She liked him coming to see her again, seeing the unconscious smile he always gave when his eyes were closed and she gave him a little bit extra. She wondered if he had a little dick like the guy her sister had told her about. The one who used to come see her all the time when she’d worked there a year before. Basil at the same time wondering what kind of sterilization lotion they used on their hands in between foot rubs. Then as it had many times before the sensation of her hands took over as she moved from his right foot to the left, her delicate but firm fingers melting away all thoughts and concerns of disease as quick as a sailor’s mind emptied the moment he stepped though the doorway of a whorehouse.
Maio pouring on the oil as she rubbed and squeezed her way around Basil’s feet, releasing magic from her little bottle and squirting it all over his toes, then getting one foot in each hand and squeezing all of her fingers between each of his toes, she began rubbing all the oil into the curved underside of his arches with her thumbs as she went. Basil closing his eyes again in ecstasy and whimpering as she did, hoping it would never end and wondering whether they taught this trick in foot massage school in Tokyo.
Then opening his eyes again, he saw Chendrill sitting next to him on the other comfy chair looking right at him. The big fucker sitting there in his flowery Hawaiian smiling. Chendrill asked, “That looks nice, you enjoying it?”
As quick as a flash, Basil panicked and like a rat caught in the larder he was up and trying for the door as his feet slipped around beneath him on the shiny tiled flooring.
Chendrill watched as he slithered about, saying, “If you’re going to try and run for it you better put your shoes and socks on first. Either that or sit back down and let the girl finish. Then once she’s done you can tell me what you’re after.”
**********
At first Alla didn’t know where she was as she woke in a daze in her hospital bed. The sound of traffic in the distance being similar to back home on the outskirts of Moscow. Back east, where cars were driven hard and fast and some by men looking for her—or others like her—stopping on impulse as the sudden urge in their groins took over their senses and rational thought. No, this wasn’t home, this wasn’t the morning sun that came in low from across the Russian steppes, crashing through the faded curtains and drying the black mold on the walls that made her clothes smell. These walls where she lay now were white and lined with soft pastel, and there were tubes in her arms and Dennis was sitting in a comfy chair next to the bed sleeping.
Then she moved her feet and everything came rushing back. She said quietly, as she looked to him, her voice almost a whisper, “Dennis?”
Dennis opened his eyes and looked at his wife. She lay there looking beautiful, with her hair like ragged straw and her make up gone. Seeing the drip in her arm and the wires tug as she tried to move to touch her legs, she heard him say softly, “Stay still love, stay still.”
He moved to her, pulling himself from the recliner that felt so nice, and touched her hand as she looked at him through her newly formed tears. How had he found her, she wondered. She had left him to be with the man who had money and little sense. She said, “Dennis, I can move my feet, I can feel the skin on my legs.”
And seeing his smile as she felt his skin as she touched him, she said, “I’m sorry Dennis.”
Then she lied straight after, saying, “I did it for us.”
“I can only hope this is true,” Dennis replied as he looked at the floor.
Then he heard himself say, “I’ll do better for you from now on Alla. I promise this.” But just how he would do it he really did not know.
How had she done it? he thought. He already knew she’d arrived at the reception in the early hours with a bag full of cash. He looked up, stared at her porcelain skin, and saw the faint hair he loved on the top of her forearm as it laid outside of the sheet.
Then before he could speak, she asked, “How did you find me?”
“I know people,” was all he said. And he did know people, once upon a time he’d been wealthy, successful, and respected. And it was this respect that had earned the call from an old colleague who’d once worked on the front desk at his surgery. She liked him, seeing him there in his white coat at the top of his game. Now though she had called and let him know that this wife of his, of whom she had been so jealous, had just been operated on under mysterious circumstances.
“Oh?” Alla said, still feeling groggy, but not caring because she could feel the warmth of her blood flowing through her legs again.
Then she asked, “Has that guy with the diamond been around?”
He hadn’t. Dennis shook his head and asked straight out, “Did he bring you here and pay for this?”
Alla said back, “No, I came on my own with the money. It was a gift, he wanted, he said, to surprise you, and all he wanted was for me to go to the hockey with him so he could show off.” Then after the briefest of pauses she said, “Dennis, he meant nothing to me. If someone offers a gift of health, of being able to stand and walk, it’s impossible to turn down. You have to understand that? You are the man I love.”
Dennis understood, kind of. But there were still unanswered questions.
He closed his eyes for a second then opening them again asked, “How am I to know if you were going to come back, you know, with the way you’ve been before?”
Alla let go of his hand and reached up, touching his face gently as he leaned in to her
. She said, “Dennis, I know I could have been better, I could, I really could. I had my reasons though, I had some growing up to do and the reasons mostly revolved around my brother, but all the time I was away from you, in my heart I never left. I was always with you. I acted stupid yes, but I’m young and I see it now, everyone acts stupid in their life at some point and I’m no different, except my stupidity ended up getting me hurt. Dennis, I know I’ll walk again and that man, that idiot, whoever he was, was sent from God above. He came to us for a reason, he gave us the financial head start to get us here so as we can get on with our lives again. You’ll have your licence back soon love, we’ll make sure of this and we’ll be on our way back and we can get away from here love, go up north like you said and spend time in the snow and have a small house and make love on Sunday afternoons and at night when you’re away from the surgery. We can be together properly. Truth is there’s only two things I want in life now Dennis, to walk again and to be with you and have children.”
Dennis looked down to see the newly formed tears in her eyes and said gently, “That’s three things Alla.”
Alla stared up at him, squeezing his hand, and smiled as she carried on, “I’m sorry, I’m just mixed up, I’ve got my words and numbers jumbled like I do.”
But she hadn’t jumbled and mixed up anything, except the truth, because of the three things she’d said she wanted in life, only the first were true and her empty words so tender and so full of love and hope that had come after were, as usual, nothing more than deceit.
Chapter Nine
Basil sat there with his feet back up again on Maio’s lap and felt her hands rub into the soft bits between his toes the grit the oil had collected during his attempted escape. It was a different kind of interrogation this one, he thought, not quite the same as the ones you see in the movies where the guy would be tied to a chair or an overhead pipe and be taking a beating from some big guy who had not listened at school.
Chendrill sitting there next to him with his feet up on the lap of another girl from Japan who Basil didn’t fancy because he thought she had a funny chin. Chendrill saying, “We all have jobs to do and the best thing for you to do is let me delete the pictures I’ve got of you with your eyes closed so you can carry on doing yours. After all, no one wants anyone to get fired.”
Basil kept quiet, wishing he’d stayed sitting outside the shitty house Chendrill had been in. What pictures did this big guy have? he thought. What had he been doing wrong? He was just having a foot massage. He looked at the clock on the wall that let the girls know it was time to start wiping the oil off. It was 9:30 in the evening and he had yet to file a report. After all, he was entitled to his own time, he had his own life, no one could deny him that. But what if the pictures did end up in the office of someone who mattered? What if they stayed with him for his entire career, coming up every time he looked for a promotion and he had to answer questions about how and why he had his eyes closed and mouth open? There was nothing bad, but people had a tendency to make anything bad—especially in the world of border security services. He said in a whisper, “Why would I get fired—I’m just sitting here?”
“Because you’re supposed to be watching me and I’m sitting next to you whilst you get your feet rubbed.”
“Yeah, it’s called doing my job, I’m undercover remember?”
Good point, Chendrill thought. He said, “Yeah but usually when you’re undercover, you’re not asleep with dribble coming out of your mouth, I’ve worked undercover as well you know, I am a detective after all, but you know that already don’t you?”
Used to be, Basil thought, but kept his mouth shut and said instead, “Why don’t you just let me walk out of here and we can forget we ever met?”
“Why would I do that?” Chendrill said straight back.
“Because I’m the only one who knows you’re running drugs across the border and holed up in that shitty house on the East Side.”
“Really?”
“Yep,” Basil said back, nodding, “you’re drone fucked up and you had to steal the border guard’s car to get your ass back here, because you were on some sort of deadline.”
That one took Chendrill by surprise, the guy being half right. How the fuck could the guy have known that, unless they’d managed to get a finger print or a photo, but that was almost impossible.
He said as cool as a cucumber taken straight from the fridge, “You reckon eh?” Basil nodded with a grin and looked at Maio so as he could feel cool, then he heard Chendrill ask, “And I’ve got a drone?”
“Not anymore so you’d better go buy a lawn mower.”
Chendrill laughed. What the fuck was this guy going on about? It was a good one, the guy out there on his own following Chendrill about like he must have been for a while, putting two and two together and getting three.
He said, “Who told you about my drone then?”
Basil chancing it and bullshitting, saying straight back, “We picked it up on a listening post, and it led us to you.”
Chendrill laughed, thinking, what a crock. He said, “The post on 205th Street?”
Basil smiled, laughing to himself and lying as he closed his eyes and said, “Yep.”
Chendrill laid back and closed his eyes for a moment also, taking a second to feel the Japanese girl’s fingers as they dug into the balls of his feet. Then he said, “Maybe you should just go fuck yourself with these little fantasies and theories you’ve concocted and start thinking about your career. And once you’ve done that, you can tell me who it was who gave you my name in the first place.”
********
Mazzi Hegan was having fun, despite his head still being sore. Not that he’d ever been shy of having fun before in his life, but this time it felt different and was different. Slave was taking a new direction in heading into movies and he was ready to accept change as it came. For not accepting change brought with it complacency and with complacency came death. Now though, he’d made friends with this great guy and found himself introduced into a totally different club scene, one where the sexy women weren’t guys who were taller than him, but girls his new friend Einer just happened to know and who just happened to like fucking and sucking Einer’s dick—which was exactly what one of these girls had been doing while in a crazy drunken stupor only ten minutes before.
Now though she was riding some other cool guy she didn’t know and had just met. The woman looking at the man’s tight stomach and chest, feeling his cock slipping in and out of her as she leaned down and licked the inside of his ear. This girl feeling the guy buck and fuck her as she eased off him. Then, feeling him all the way in, she pushed back down again on him, stretching her spine and her neck back so she could look at the art work on the ceiling and so Mazzi Hegan could look at her titties with her nipples all hard and wonder what the fuck he was doing—but enjoying it just the same, just like Einer had told him he would.
Mazzi liked the girl’s skin which was almost as soft as his, liked the natural moistness of her pussy and the way it ran along his cock and onto his stomach and dripped down around his balls. He liked her hair and the way its layers fell back into place and her perky tits jiggled as she moved whilst he pounded her hard. But then he came, and as soon as the shiver had run its course though his body, down his legs and out the tips of his pedicured toes, he hated himself.
Oh my God, Mazzi Hegan thought as he headed for the bathroom, locked the door, and started to cry as he looked at himself in the mirror. Saying out loud in the faintest of whispers, “What have I done, oh my God, what have I done?”
Then he heard the girl on the other side of the door saying to him through its carved wood, “Hey baby, can I come in, I need to pee.”
Mazzi Hegan spun around to look at his oversized toilet and felt the woman’s sticky juices going cold and stinky around his cock. Mazzi in a panic saying, “Hang on please.”
“I need to pee!” she said.
In a fluster, Mazzi wiped his eyes, then, still naked
, he took a towel made from the finest Turkish cotton from the bar and opened the door to see the girl rush in and squat down over his toilet and spray piss like an elephant into the bowl just below the rim, she looked up at him at the same time and said, “God you really got me going there, I loved it when you ate me out.”
Mazzi then remembered that he’d done just that, laying there all drunk and high on E, her squatting above him naked as she rubbed her wet vagina across his lips. She finished messing up the toilet and began to wipe herself with a tissue and asked. “You want to do that to me again?”
He didn’t and it was a while before he’d gotten her out of the bathroom, her there what seemed like only moments before, still naked trying to seduce Mazzi, getting close, pushing her tits into him, as he unconsciously wrapped himself in all the towels he’d picked up in Istanbul. Mazzi being unnaturally polite as she began getting all cozy and trying to kiss his lips as he tried not to puke. But she was out of the bathroom and away from his bedroom now, walking down the corridor calling out to Mazzi’s friend Einer about how she’d just taken Mazzi’s girl cherry while Mazzi sat with his knees up on the bathroom floor with its under tile heating, feeling violated and crying again as he wondered what the fuck had just happened.
An hour later, after he’d heard the same woman come again, then giggle after as she and Einer fucked, both Einer and the woman had gone. Mazzi having showered three times had yet to leave the bathroom, the man still sitting in the same spot, hearing them leave and her calling out her goodbyes through a locked door as Mazzi stayed quiet and heard her say, “Let’s do it again sometime.”
**********
It was just after ten in the morning the next day and just after Chendrill had gotten out of the shower when Sebastian had called and told Chendrill there was an emergency at the office. Chendrill getting up earlier in the morning with his feet feeling good but wondering now if this loan shark had been around again bothering Sebastian and how it was Ditcon had discovered he had crossed the U.S. Canadian border illegally a few nights back. Basil having let him know everything and giving away his secrets in exchange for Chendrill keeping the pictures of him getting his toes rubbed to himself. That and a half promise from Chendrill that he’d keep his ear to the ground for anything which might just lead to something big.
