The Secret

by Harold Robbins

  The number of stores grew. By late in 1991 there were a hundred eighteen stores and national coverage. The line had broadened immensely. I didn’t like it, and my father didn’t like it, but the line of sado-masochistic merchandise we offered became a big profit center, as Sal had insisted it would.

  Besides handcuffs and leg irons and thumb cuffs and toe cuffs, blindfolds and gags, cock rings and spreader bars, we sold an assortment of whips, including riding crops and cat-o’-nine-tails.

  The cat-o’-nine-tails was especially popular. Since it was not a single-strand whip, it did not usually cut the way a whip was all too likely to do. Users could develop a skill for using it, causing just enough pain to be sensual without risking injury. The flat strands landed across the naked buttocks or across the shoulders, spreading the impact over six inches or more of flesh, causing pain and raising welts, yet not cutting the skin, drawing blood, or making scars. Though some men took whippings, most of the victims were women, and they were more likely to show bruises on their wrists from tugging on their cuffs than they were to show welts.

  Personally, I couldn’t imagine buying and using cats or whips or crops. Vicky liked to be chained, but she would not have submitted to flogging—and I would not have flogged her. But—the world has all kinds of people. I tried not to be judgmental.

  “You’re naive, kid,” Sal told me. “It’s a kinky world, like it or not. Hey, you wanta see this kind of stuff in use? I can take you and show you.”

  He did. One night he took me to an establishment in Brooklyn. It was an ordinary-looking bar on the ground floor, though occupied by more gays and transvestites than was ordinary. He spoke to the bartender, who called out the manager. Sal handed the man a couple of bills, and he led us along a hallway to a door that looked like the door to a supplies closet but was the entrance to the cellar under the bar.

  It was a cellar: damp and dark, with brick floors and walls. It was divided into six or seven medium-size rooms. The manager took us to one of those rooms.

  A naked man hung by his wrists from the ceiling. He could have stood, actually, but his knees had buckled, and so he hung. His ankles were chained together. He was gagged with a rubber ball strapped in his mouth. Short, narrow straps were buckled around his cock. A dog chain some eight feet long was clipped to one of those straps.

  He was being “disciplined” by a dominatrix who wore a motorcycle cap with white bill and a pair of knee-high boots, and that was all. She held the chain, and as we walked in she gave a yank on it. The guy grunted deep in his throat.

  “Stand up!” she barked. “Stand up, you bastard.”

  He straightened his knees and stood.

  She handed the chain to a man standing with his back to the wall. This guy didn’t work there. He was a spectator, the same as I was. There were maybe ten of us, men and women.

  “Don’t pull too hard. We don’t want to pull it off.”

  The man gave it a tentative pull, just enough to elicit a moan.

  The dominatrix picked up a cat-o’-nine-tails. “Want a whack?” she asked.

  “Uhmm-huhmm,” the guy muttered through the rubber ball. He seemed to be begging for it.

  She didn’t pretend. She spread her legs, brought the cat back across her shoulder, and gave the man a backhand lash across his butt. The sound of the impact of leather on flesh was sickening. A choking scream was stifled by the rubber ball.

  “Want some more?”

  He was crying, but he grunted an affirmative and nodded his head. She obliged him.

  Well … the same kind of thing was going on in two other rooms. Spectators watched in dumb fascination. Whatever I might think of what I was seeing, these people were turned on by it; and I knew some of them were wondering if they could take it, or if they should volunteer.

  A mannish-looking redheaded girl was being flogged by another woman. Her back and butt were criss-crossed with red welts.

  “Lovers,” the manager said. “They take turns. Next week Wilma will be doing the flogging, and Carla will be taking it.” I could believe it. Carla’s back and butt showed white scars.

  As we left, a lovely blond girl was being led in handcuffs toward one of the rooms.

  “A lot of those people watching will get ideas from what they’re seeing,” Sal told me. “They’ll go home and make a lot of sore butts.”

  In fact, we got a letter about how people used the cat.

  Dear Sirs,

  I thought you might like to read a story about how my husband and I use our cat-o’-nine-tails. Weekends we watch a lot of TV football. He likes it more than I do, and we’ve found a great way to make sure it’s not boring for me.

  What we do is bet on one of the Saturday college games, one of the Sunday pro games, and the Monday night pro game. We pick our teams. Whenever my team scores, my husband has to give me five dollars for every point scored. A field goal costs him $15, and a touchdown with extra point costs him $35. I’m building one hell of a Christmas fund.

  But I have to take a whack from the cat for every point his team scores. For a field goal I have to take 3 across the shoulders. For a touchdown with extra point I get seven across my bottom. This makes the games a hell of a lot more interesting. You can imagine me rooting for my team’s defense!

  Notre Dame didn’t score at all Saturday, so I got off with nothing. But on Monday night he had the Vikes, and they scored 42! With the 17 whacks I’d taken Sunday afternoon, I didn’t sit down comfortably until about Thursday.

  We like your handcuffs too, and I wear them during the games.

  I don’t know what we’ll do after the football season is over. Basketball scores are too high. Baseball we can work out.

  Sincerely,

  Matty L.

  It was my suggestion that we publish a catalog and mail it widely. Frederick’s of Hollywood did. Victoria’s Secret did. So did a few other merchants of erotic merchandise, some of them sleazy. They knew what they were doing, though, even the sleazeballs. Their catalogs were printed on slick paper, and the finest color reproduction was used.

  We didn’t list everything. In point of fact, we couldn’t have. We selected about two dozen of our best items, had them photographed on handsome models by professional photographers, and listed them in the catalog. We flew models to Paris and London and to beaches in the Caribbean. We spared little expense on this catalog. It was erotic and classy and won widespread attention.

  For the best example, we offered a black fishnet teddy trimmed with black satin, with attached garters, to be worn with lace-top fishnet stockings. We pictured it with black panties, but obviously they were optional. Black, patent-leather, stiletto-heel shoes completed the outfit. We used two models to show this set. They were twins, and one seemed to be looking out from a mirror—except that she was reaching out and beginning to embrace her sister.

  In the month after the catalog was mailed, we sold 35,786 of the teddies and almost as many of the stockings. Just 10,449 of the customers who ordered the teddy also ordered the panties. The shoes sold for $149, and we sold just 8,337 pairs.

  Other merchandise offered in the catalog also sold well. Catalog selling was a whole new line of business.

  From that point on, I received a salary as a director—$40,000 per annum for my part-time participation.

  My partner share of the firm’s income drew me $54,000 from Gottsman, Scheck & Shapiro.

  If I had been taken in by Hale & Dorr, I wouldn’t have been doing that well.

  * * *

  Roger Middleton, our director from Allied Chemical Bank, lived in Greenwich as Vicky and I did—though in what was called Back Country, a far spiffier neighborhood than ours in Riverside.

  He and his wife invited Vicky and me to dinner. Catherine was by now old enough to be left with a baby-sitter, so we accepted the invitation gratefully and showed up at seven on a Saturday evening at an Edwardian stone house that would have been called a mansion anywhere else but Greenwich.

  We sat down
on the stone-paved terrace for cocktails, and after a little discussion about the weather and so on, Roger remarked, “Well, the three of us make almost a quorum of the Gazelle board of directors.”

  His wife, Ariana—a tall, slender, blond woman with prominent teeth—was unable to conceal her skepticism over inviting into her home an upwardly mobile New York Jew whose family business was intimate undergarments and a woman who was as connected as a person could get.

  Roger quickly made it plain that he had not invited us simply to be social. He had something on his mind.

  “How much attention have you given,” he asked, “to our suppliers? I mean, are you aware of who makes our merchandise?”

  “We’ve got a very wide variety of suppliers,” I said. “Most of our merchandise is, in fact, made for us on special orders.”

  “Much of it by Charlie Han,” said Roger. “Or by friends of his.”

  I nodded. “And you are going to tell me he’s a sweatshop operator. Actually, Charlie owns no shops at all anymore. He takes contracts for merchandise and subcontracts to others.”

  “Yes, and those subcontractors subcontract to still others. They try to build a barrier of insulation between the sweatshops and the ultimate seller of the goods. But that barrier is being broken. New York State inspectors and federal inspectors are tracing the line from sweatshop to seller.”

  Ariana joined the conversation. I was to learn that she was an anti-sweatshop activist. She was on a crusade and had influenced Roger to join her. “They violate every law on the books,” she said. “Wages and hours, sanitary conditions, immigration … The only way to enforce the laws effectively is to trace the merchandise up the line to the ultimate retailer. And that’s the tack that’s going to be taken.”

  “Are you saying we’re liable to criminal prosecution?”

  “It’s possible,” said Roger. “Of course we can always defend on the rationale that we didn’t know about working conditions at the manufacturing end.”

  “Okay.”

  “But how much bad publicity can we take? The news media will savage us. They don’t much like our line of business anyway.”

  He was right. Before long Kathie Lee Gifford would be savaged, and her line was not erotic lingerie and S-M devices.

  “I’ll take the matter up with my father,” I said.

  * * *

  “You think I’m dumb?” my father asked irritably when I raised the subject. We were having dinner in Vicky’s and my house in Greenwich. Our Connecticut address had not ceased to annoy him. I knew by then how he had vetoed a prep school for me, and he thought our home in the Riverside section of Greenwich was no suitable place for his son, much less for Vittoria Castellano Lucchese Cooper. (One evening when we were grilling steaks over charcoal on the patio—this was an enterprise he scorned, since he believed that Peter Luger’s Steak House was the only place where you could get a steak really cooked right—he took note of the friendly wave of a neighbor and asked, “Y’think he’ll wave hello when he finds out who you are?”)

  “You’ve never seen a sweatshop, have you? Well, I have, but I can’t take you to see one because we don’t have anything to do with them anymore. New York wages-and-hours laws? New York sanitary laws? New York fire laws? U.S. immigration laws? None of that has anything to do with us. Hey. The handcuffs and stuff like that are made in this country, in little factories that meet every requirement of those laws you’re talking about. Hell, police departments buy the same things from the same shops, and so do the FBI and federal marshals. I figured out the dangers in dealing with sweatshops a long time ago. Hey, Melissa, pull off your panties and hand them here.”

  The ever-complaisant Melissa reached beneath the table, pulled off her G-string panties, and handed them to my father.

  He stared at the label, then handed them to me. The label read:

  CHEEKS

  Made in U.S.A.

  Exclusively for Cheeks

  “‘Made in U.S.A.,’” he said. “Now, where in the U.S.A. you figure?”

  I shook my head. I knew he was driving at something significant, but I couldn’t imagine what.

  “Okay. Made on the Island of Saipan, part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas … a United States protectorate. That’s way-the-hell out in the Pacific, and I don’t know what kind of conditions their workers work under—except this, except that I know they work under the laws of the Commonwealth. What’s more, the U.S. granted their legislature the right to make their own immigration laws, so their workers don’t need green cards. They sell stuff cheap, and there’s no import tax.”

  “It’s stretching things a little to say this stuff is made in the U.S.A.,” Vicky said wryly as she squinted at the label.

  “Folks like that good ol’ ‘Made in U.S.A.’ label,” my father said, smiling slyly. “Hey, Vicky, if you don’t mind, let’s see what label you’re wearing.”

  Vicky glanced at me. Since she could pull down her panties under the table, she did and handed them to me. That label read:

  CHEEKS

  Made in Hong Kong

  Exclusively for Cheeks

  My father glanced at the label. “See? We don’t deal in sweatshop merchandise. Everything we import is perfectly legal under the laws of its place of origin.”

  “Legal, maybe,” I said. “But when word gets out that girls and women work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for thirty cents an hour—which sometimes isn’t even paid—and live in filthy barracks under armed guard, like prisoners in a reformatory, the publicity may be ruinous.”

  “Son, you worry too much,” he said.

  * * *

  Three weeks after that evening, our bedside telephone rang after two in the morning.

  I picked it up, and at first I couldn’t imagine who was on the line. All I could hear was uncontrolled sobbing. A voice tried to break through, and I realized it was my father.

  I couldn’t understand his words at first. Then I did. “Melissa is dead!”

  I drove to New York. Vicky would follow after she arranged for a baby-sitter.

  He had wakened to go to the bathroom and had returned to bed to discover that Melissa was not breathing. She had suffered a sudden, massive brain hemorrhage.

  It was almost as if he had suffered it himself. My father would never again be the same.

  43

  It was Vicky who conceived the idea of our flying out to Saipan, then down to Hong Kong, to see if sweatshop conditions were as bad as Ariana Middleton said they were—so bad as to risk our becoming involved in a damaging scandal. Actually, what she had in mind was that my father should spend two or three weeks away from home, to help him recover from the loss of Melissa. Traveling to such an outlandishly remote place as Saipan, then to so exotic a place as Hong Kong, would claim all his attention for a while.

  He and I were alone together for more time than we had ever been since my mother died, and I learned more about my father than I had ever known before.

  He told me how his Uncle Harry had stolen his girlfriend Kitty Benson and married her. He told me how Harry had stolen the money from his parents’ life-insurance policies. He told me about rebuilding Jeeps in Paris.

  I asked him about my mother.

  “Well … you have to understand it was tough times in Europe. Even after I got to Paris, after the war had moved on north, I saw girls scrounging in garbage cans for scraps of food. I mean regular girls, trying to go to school and so on. Your Aunt Therèse had let a Kraut soldier feed her and had suffered painful consequences. Your mother made her living the best way she could. Yes, she danced nude. The first time I ever saw her she was naked and gorgeous, and I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. But there was no funny business on the side. We shared an apartment. At first that was just because it was the only way we could afford such nice digs. Then—well, you know.”

  During the flight I told him that Vicky was pregnant again. “You’ve got to stop that,” he said to me rather gruf
fly. “She’s too old for it. You’ll kill her.”

  “I offered to have a vasectomy,” I said. “She wouldn’t hear of it, said I was too young. But she had her tubes tied.”

  “You listen to what she says. She’s got good sense. I knew when I introduced you to her that she’d be good for you.”

  “I’ll always be grateful that you introduced me to her.”

  “Okay. So don’t mess around. It was all right to mess around with Tinkerbell, but don’t you do it with Vicky.”

  “I never have.”

  “I messed around on Melissa once. I regret it more than anything that’s ever happened to me except your mother’s death.”

  The travel was a burden on me, let alone on my father. Too many hours in the air, even if we did go first class. We spent one night in Tokyo, which was no great privilege, and then flew down to Saipan.

  Sweatshop conditions there were worse than Ariana Middleton had described. Or so we assumed, since we were denied access to the shops where goods that would have our label sewn in were manufactured. The shops were surrounded by barbed wire, as were the barracks where the workers lived—young women, many from the Philippines, others from wherever work was scarce. Sweatshops. In New York, temperatures usually did not rise much above eighty. On Saipan they rose as high as a hundred ten and sometimes higher.

  But we stayed in a luxurious modern hotel, comfortably air-conditioned, and took a late-afternoon dip in a pool shaded by palms and other tropical vegetation. We could have strolled on a white-sand beach.

  I was conscious of the island’s history, all but invisible now. It had been a League of Nations mandate, assigned to Japan. The Japanese had fortified it heavily. United States forces had blasted it from the air and from the sea, had come ashore, and had killed the tens of thousands of Japanese in its bunkers. I remembered TV documentaries showing flame throwers filling bunkers with fire, then seeing burning Japanese running out. I could not remember the numbers but knew that very many young Americans had died taking Saipan.