Power Games

by Victoria Fox

  Now she was shagging around? There was a surprise. Tawny was the dime-a-dip bicycle of the fashion circuit. It never occurred to Jacob that he was precisely the same thing, because surely you needed tits for that.

  After a spot of detective work he found she had hooked up with some croupier she had brought home as a souvenir from Vegas. What did that guy have that Jacob didn’t? Fuck all was the answer.

  Jeez, who hadn’t had Tawny Lascelles?

  He hadn’t, and it pissed him the hell off.

  ‘You wanna skip this joint?’ the brunette purred. ‘We’re sisters, y’know …’

  As the trio staggered out of The Red, Jacob spotted a face he knew, registering even through his drunken fog because the face was out of kilter. Awell-known face, and it shouldn’t have been there—one of Donald Silvers’ sons, Gianluca, yeah, that was his name. The guy was partying amid a circle of admiring males. Jacob hadn’t known he was gay. He wouldn’t mind banging that sister Angela though.

  Outside, the BMW was humming. The girls were on him like a rash all the way back. One of them sealed the privacy screen, whipped his cock out and embarked on a frantic and for the most part unerotic hand job. Jacob encouraged her to turn her attentions to the blonde. Within seconds both girls were topless, fondling and licking each other, and now the blonde was on his dick and this time it was slower, softer, her palms cupping his balls. He lay back, transfixed, and let them make him come.

  It was a blur getting out of the car and up to the bedroom, his suit pants half done up. A truck drove past and the brunette flashed her breasts, giggling as Jacob bundled her inside. There was a package in the hall from his assistant, with a scribbled note: MAIL FROM OFFICE. He tore it open, the girls shedding his clothes, and discarded a heap of junk, including the photograph he had promised to sign for a fan who had won his company at the Boston gala: a cute redhead who had flirted with him the entire meal, let him squeeze her tits and then refused to put out.

  The black envelope piqued his interest. He opened it.

  ‘Come along, big boy,’ whispered the blonde, enticing him upstairs. ‘You got any candy cane? We’re gonna go all night …’

  The gold lettering swam before his eyes. Jacob squinted at it, swaying slightly on the stairwell, and started to laugh. What was this, some big party? With Kevin Chase and fat old Senator Corrigan and that evil Brit reporter everyone hated …?

  And …

  Jacob peered closer, just as the brunette grabbed his tie and yanked him towards the bedroom. There was her name, embossed, the forbidden fruit:

  Tawny Lascelles.

  She of the long legs, cute ass and dirty lip …

  Tossing the invite aside, he flung the sisters onto the sheets and ripped off their clothes, stripping them naked and wrenching their legs apart. A pair of perfectly trimmed muffs, one fair, one dark, greeted him. Checking surreptitiously that the tiny red light was steadily blinking in the corner of the room, Jacob dipped his head to each in turn until they melted like ice cream on his tongue.

  The party was a done deal.

  Tawny was going—and in that case so was he.

  25

  The Midwest

  There was no question that Mitch Corrigan would accept the invitation.

  If he didn’t escape soon, he would suffocate.

  Standing in the office of his sumptuous aristocratic-style manor, Mitch put his hands in his pockets. Melinda had loved this place on sight but it would never feel like home to him. How could it? Since the night of the event—August 4, 2012: it would be forever scorched onto his memory—he could regard it as nothing but an elaborate trap. They had found him: it didn’t matter if it was in a castle or a craphole.

  Mitch’s study walls were plastered with photographs. Snaps of his time as a movie star seemed an important reminder at least from his wife’s point of view, and a gallery of famous directors and producers adorned the space. Mitch frowned in at his own face, searching for a clue. It was like looking at the image of a dead person.

  One picture caught his eye and held it. It had been at the start of the political campaign and they had been testing the waters with a string of appearances. This was a workshop at a secondary school: ten years ago now? Mitch had lectured the kids on Great American Opportunities, the Land Where Dreams Came True.

  He hadn’t thought of the boy in years.

  Now, in the background of the photograph, he absorbed the tall, dark-eyed vision, standing apart from the rest of the group. Heard the boy’s trembling stammer.

  Something about him was ghostly. So set aside was he that he appeared superimposed, incongruous, the kid who didn’t belong …

  The sound of Melinda’s footsteps in the hallway made him jump.

  Glossy as a Barbie doll, preened and primed as a prize greyhound, Melinda Corrigan was the model Senator’s Wife. She would be the model First Lady.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she asked curtly. ‘The babysitter’s arrived.’

  Mitch nodded. Friday night and the bi-annual Stewarts Dinner had assailed them again. The ritual, at its heart a competition between the women for which could out-chef the other, was hosted in turn between Mandy and Melinda. Mitch’s part was to guffaw at his neighbour Gary’s jokes while comparing notes on lawnmowers and whether or not Gary should install a gym in his garage.

  ‘You’re dragging your heels over the presidency bid,’ Melinda said on the way over. Of course, he should have known she would go straight for the jugular.

  ‘We’re working on it.’ He lifted a hand to smooth his toupee.

  ‘Especially after that embarrassment on America Tonight.’ Her heels scissored the drive. ‘I bet Oliver’s thanking God you got the summons to Salimanta.’

  Mitch preferred not to consider his disastrous appearance with Jerry Gersham. Oliver’s ministrations had been kind, but not without sharp edges.

  Throughout the Stewarts’ meal his wife ate without appetite, her tight pink mouth lacerating tiny forkfuls and her eyes trained miserably on the table. Mitch, too, was struggling to swallow the elaborate smorgasbord. Mandy’s melting cheese balls sat like lumps of coal in his stomach. Gary droned on, quaffing beer after beer.

  ‘Melinda, that is a pretty dress,’ commented Mandy, dolloping more fish tartare onto Mitch’s plate. ‘Very … figure-hugging.’

  ‘Oscar de la Renta,’ said Melinda through pursed lips.

  ‘Marked down?’

  ‘Oh no … But, darling, did I see your shoes on the sale rail at TJ Maxx?’

  And so on. The only merciful thing about conversing with Gary was that Gary rarely asked a jot about politics. With his bulging biceps and blank expression, Mitch’s neighbour sailed through life without worrying about much except where his next protein shake was coming from. A threatened revision of gun laws, or, as Gary put it, ‘those chumps taking a dump on my constitutional rights’, was the only topic in which he took any interest. Gary had several shotguns scattered about the house, something Mandy found ‘so manly’—and here Melinda would shoot her husband a caustic glance—and deemed the protection of his homestead a top priority.

  ‘How are the kids?’ Mandy asked Melinda, presenting a platter of satay chicken before retracting it with an, ‘Oops! Not if we’re watching our weight …’

  ‘Fine,’ threw back Melinda. ‘This house must be so quiet without any of your own. You know, for all the hassle I wouldn’t trade it for the world—the mess, the noise, the laughter, someone to care for you when you’re old …’

  Mandy glanced away, tears in her eyes. Delicately, Melinda put her cutlery together, the food scooped cleverly to one side and buried beneath a serviette.

  As Gary steered the conversation onto safer ground, Mitch looked grimly around the table. Suburbia: the graveyard of America. People going about their lives like androids. As if a chip was removed, as if the community had been lobotomised. The planet was being colonised, one unsuspecting neighbourhood at a time.

  It was how he knew that Veroli was
no hoax.

  Signor Rossetti’s arrest confirmed it. That was how conspiracy worked. Cover the truth, conceal the prize, tell the world it was nonsense—but Mitch knew the truth.

  Was Mitch’s name safe? Rossetti and his wife were the only people who knew he had been there. He had to pray it was. If this ever got out, he was better off dead.

  Afterwards, at home, Melinda went straight to bed.

  Close to midnight Mitch joined her. His wife lay next to him, stiff as a board. He was about to drift into uneasy slumber when, with a sinking heart, he perceived her moving across the mattress towards him. She began to kiss his back, slowly moving lower … Mitch tensed. His dick twitched, disorientated, as if being woken from a long dormancy. They hadn’t touched each other since Washington.

  ‘Let’s try, Mitch,’ she whispered. ‘Please, let’s try …’ Her touch explored. It was on his ass now, squeezing his buttock. Her hand dipped inside his nightshirt. He could feel her nails on his bare skin. Her breath quickened as she fingered the trail of hair running from the small of his back into the crevice between his cheeks.

  In a flash she was there, applying the slightest pressure to the place that had been violated—before, like a toxic worm, she wriggled inside.

  Mitch yelped in shock and bounced from the bed.

  ‘You used to like it!’ Melinda cried desperately.

  Staggering blindly, he bolted from the room.

  They craved his ass! They craved it just as they had craved it last time. When they had hovered above his house and filled his bedroom with sickly green light, and next he knew he’d been powerless to move, laid face down on a cold hard slab, their strange shapes looming and their long fingers pointing, and then …

  Their probes, rising from beneath …

  Mitch reeled down the hall. Inside the guest suite, he slammed the door, backing up against the wall, anything to keep his ass out of sight.

  Whimpering, he sank to the floor.

  It was hours before he got any sleep.

  Melinda waited until three a.m. It was torture, the nagging sensation demanding to be sated. In the house opposite, Gary’s light was still on.

  Bingo.

  She padded across the courtyard. A sliver of gold escaped from beneath the patio shutters. Gary was waiting. Silently, he led her to the downstairs bathroom.

  ‘Screw me,’ Melinda instructed, once the door was closed. ‘Right now.’

  Gary didn’t need to be asked twice. It was their usual role-play, the thrill of each other’s bodies matched only by that of being discovered. Melinda arranged herself against the sink, her ass against the porcelain bowl with its neat rows of Lancôme soaps and Elizabeth Arden hand creams, and hitched up her silk robe. Her breath came tangled in short, desperate gasps. ‘Take me,’ she begged. ‘Do it hard!’

  Gary’s mouth slammed against hers, his tongue tracing her teeth. She fumbled into his pyjamas and freed his eager dick. It was smaller than her husband’s, but was stiff to bursting, the thick shaft pumping through her hands as she worked him into a sweat. She felt no guilt. She never had, even the first time. Mitch had shown her no interest in months: they were acquaintances these days, enduring a marriage of convenience. She had toughened her heart against it. No more tears.

  Peeling off her gown, Melinda revealed the nipple-less negligee she had shopped for that morning. Gary’s hungry grin descended on the peepholes, lapping like a kitten as his fingers searched below, up her quivering thighs and towards her drenched heat. At once he was on his knees, his tongue exploring the place between Melinda’s legs that had been shut to these attentions for so long she feared it might have been cobwebbed. She ground against his lips, squealing as his tongue dissolved inside her, grabbing and pulling tufts of his hair as she fought half-heartedly to stifle her moans. Lace ripped as it met the angle of her knees. Gary grabbed one ankle and planted it on his shoulder, her slipper skating off and falling down his back.

  ‘Hurry,’ she rasped, ‘we haven’t got long …’

  Obligingly he lifted her and turned her to the wall. Melinda’s breasts crushed against the cool bathroom tiles and Gary reached to tear what little material there was still covering her. A moment’s pause, the proficient slit of a packet, before he plunged victoriously into her, his palms gripping and lifting her pert white butt as he marvelled at how yielding she was, so unlike his neurotic wife who slept listening to ‘Sounds of the Rainforest’ and wearing a facemask and just as well a cage around her privates.

  Melinda began to shriek, prompting Gary to slam a hand across her mouth, which she bit and gasped against, thrashing out her pleas for him to ride her faster, deeper, harder. She clutched the rim of the basin, watching the bathroom door and almost praying Mitch would open it; that he would witness her like this, with Gary, naked and wanton and still all woman! What would he do? What would he say?

  The thought of it made her come. ‘I’m there!’ she garbled, smothered by her lover’s hand. In an explosion she fell against the wall. Gary climaxed in tandem, pulsing through her, his shuddering chest hot and sticky as it sank against her back.

  It was an efficient exchange. Gary pulled up his pants. Melinda corrected her nightie and fastened her robe. She smoothed her hair.

  Gary went to reopen the patio doors. In a moment, she would follow. For now it gave her pleasure to stand in Mandy’s bathroom, surveying her enemy’s anti-ageing face products and miniature bottle of prescription Xanax. Melinda consulted herself in the mirror. She appeared flushed and healthy, easily ten years younger. Her kind of anti-ageing was a different cream altogether. He waved her through.

  A brief kiss and she prowled back to the mansion.

  26

  Venice

  Celeste Cavalieri received her envelope a week later. She was surprised that anyone should have obtained the Venice address, since she kept it private. She was returning from the mercato when accosted by the elderly lady who lived downstairs.

  ‘Per voi, senora,’ said the woman, holding out a letter.

  ‘Grazie. Mi scusi.’ Celeste thanked her and hurried upstairs.

  Inside the apartment, Carl was waiting. Celeste’s heart plummeted. Her boyfriend was short, his skin pockmarked from a youthful bout of acne. His cropped hair was slick. Annoyance glowed in his eyes like the embers of a dying fire. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘To the market.’

  He consulted his watch. ‘For an hour?’

  ‘It’s raining. I got held up.’

  For a second she thought he was going to hit her, but at the last moment he reached behind her and locked the apartment door. ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  She gripped the black and gold envelope. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  ‘It’s addressed to me.’

  ‘I said let me see.’

  She passed it over. Carl’s thumb tore the seal and a card slid out. He read it.

  ‘What does it say?’ she asked, as he folded the card out of sight.

  ‘Property agents.’ He was lying.

  ‘Can I look?’

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ She swallowed. ‘It’s just I want to look.’

  ‘We don’t always get what we want, Celeste.’

  She shouldn’t push it. All the warning signs were there. The way Carl’s voice jumped a couple of notes; the muscle that twitched in his neck. He didn’t try to be cruel; it was that she made him be cruel. He didn’t mean it when he lost his temper.

  He went to the trash can, opened the lid and tore the letter into quarters.

  Celeste charged towards him. He caught her wrists. His aftershave was strong, catching the back of her throat, and a fleck of spittle flew in her eye.

  ‘When are you going to listen to what I say?’ he breathed, grabbing a clump of hair and pulling hard so she screamed in pain. He pushed her head down to the stove. Click-click-click and the ignition lit. Blue flames sprang up close
to her face. ‘Let go!’ she managed. ‘Please! Let me go.’

  ‘You know I have to teach you these lessons, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know you give me no choice.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know you have to learn, and this is for your own good.’

  ‘I know.’

  He released her. She stumbled back from the flames, hands to her eyes, and the tears rushed quick and strong, but she held them in with all her might.

  ‘I’m glad that’s settled,’ said Carl. He flicked on the kettle. ‘Aren’t you?’

  He went to bed. Their altercations drained him, he said.

  Celeste peeled off cold clothes and towelled her hair. She dragged on an over-sized wool sweater and curled up at the window to watch the deluge.

  From here she could glimpse the Rialto Bridge, its stone passage mottled and dank. How she loved Venice: it was her refuge, a maze of concealed spaces, attics and cellars, shadows and shuttered rooms and places to hide, the city its own island, cut adrift from the world. Today, it was awash with rain. When the weather turned, it became a labyrinth submerged, the canals running high, the cobbled streets seething with tourists and the café awnings battered by the downpour. Rushing across the Piazza San Marco had been like skating on a liquid rink. Pigeons scattered from the silver ground and the dimmed glitter of the basilica shone molten in the pools.

  This was the closest thing she had to home. Growing up, her parents had been eternal nomads, her French mother an artist, her Italian father a dealer, and neither contented with staying in one place. Friends were left behind and schools abandoned.

  She had met Carl almost six years ago now, when he moved into her building. Whenever she returned from a trip she would find flowers waiting, a bottle of wine or a box of pralines—and then, on one occasion, an invitation to dinner. Carl had taken her to the Riva degli Schiavoni where they had eaten mussels and drank champagne.