Private Demons

by Robert Masello

  From here and there in the room, Hallie could hear other switches being wielded, along with yelps and laughter.

  “Swinburne was a connoisseur of birching,” Kwan explained, over the blasting music. “There's pleasure, you know, in pain.”

  “No, I don't know,” Hallie said flatly. In the light that poured from the dance floor, she could see Kwan's eyes, behind the blue lenses, glittering with a strange kind of delight.

  The male dancers, apparently at last roused to rebellion, straightened up, ripped off their short jackets—

  “Bum freezers, we called those at Eton,” Kwan offered.

  —and were left wearing only their white ties and G-strings. A whole new dance routine ensued, during the course of which the pretty maids lost all of their own outfits, with the exception of aprons, caps, and G-strings even smaller than the men's. The music slowed down, to one of those antique Bee-Gees ballads, and each pair of dancers managed to perform a wildly salacious duet. Hallie was mildly surprised at the girls going topless; she didn't think this sort of stuff went on outside places like the Pussycat Lounge or the Poodle Club.

  But the crowd around her sure seemed to be eating it up.

  Duncan Kwan kept filling her glass and glancing over at her with quite blatant intentions. She considered just getting up and going—she'd gotten as much information, such as it was, out of Kwan as she was likely to—but leaving just now presented a couple of difficulties. For one, she wasn't sure she could pick her way through the nearly blackened room, and for another, she doubted she'd be able to find Lisa to tell her she was going. And last but not least, she remained kind of curious about what would happen next. She didn't want to bring Lucien an incomplete account, she told herself.

  What happened next turned out to be the lambada, a dance perfectly calculated to fling the maids’ aprons up and away; the sequined G-strings they wore underneath were so slight they were tough to spot. The women whirled around the dance floor on long legs, their bare breasts gleaming in the light of the overhead spots. The men bent them over, nearly double, their hands sliding down over the women's buttocks.

  Duncan was tapping his switch on the table with excitement.

  And then it appeared to be time for turnabout. The music abruptly changed its rhythm again, becoming slower and more sensual, the guitars replaced by a scorching sax. The men lined the chairs up and sat down with their legs spread. The women, after a bit of choreographed demurral, consented to lie down across their laps. Once mere, their heads hanging down toward the floor, their feet kicking daintily in the air, they were spanked, loudly, and in unison by the men.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Duncan was muttering under his breath.

  There were several more cries from around the room, and Hallie thought she saw, off in one corner, a pretty young woman sprawled across one of the tables, her skirt up and a switch raised above it.

  The maids stood up, and presented their reddened backsides to the crowd. Then, while looking over their shoulders, they slipped a finger under their G-strings, simultaneously snapped them loose, and tossed them out among the tables. One of them sailed over Hallie's head and was grabbed from the air by a man behind her.

  “Now it gets better,” Duncan said.

  Better?

  The one maid still wearing her cap finally threw that too; then all three of them sidled over behind the men, who were standing in front of their chairs, arms folded across their well-muscled chests. Each woman wrapped one leg around a man, and ran it suggestively up and down his body. Hallie knew that this wasn't just part of the dance routine because, to her amazement, the men started to show signs of very real arousal. The couple in the middle, not ten feet away from where she was sitting, were saying something to each other, and smiling; their words were, of course, completely inaudible beneath the music. But their activities were perfectly clear. The woman had wrapped her arms around his neck, and with her knee was rubbing his crotch; she looked over at the other two couples, who were now doing the same. Hallie got the idea there was some kind of contest going on, and it didn't take much to figure out how they were going to judge the winner.

  Was this stuff legal, she thought, away from Forty-second Street?

  Percy Renwick sauntered back onto the dance floor, looking at a stopwatch he held in one hand. “Thirty seconds more!” he called out while the music pounded and the women rubbed; one of them slipped a hand around to the front of her partner, and fondled the pouch of his G-string. Percy noticed, shouted, “Foul!” and with one of the little switches batted her hand away.

  Duncan applauded his attentiveness. He looked over at Hallie again, to see if she was enjoying all this as much as he was. “This is the part we have to pay them extra for. Some of them like to think they're artistes,” he said, with a contemptuous little laugh. “But they all do it.”

  Percy shouted, “Fifteen seconds!” and the women clung to the men even harder, clawing their chests with their long fingernails, nudging their groins alive with their knees, licking their ears; the rule, Hallie gathered, was no direct manual stimulation to the crotch. But anything else seemed to be okay.

  “Five!”

  The guy in the middle looked to Hallie like he couldn't wait even that long; he was almost ready to burst out of his G-string.

  Percy completed the countdown, with many of the people in the room joining in, then held up the stopwatch and called, “Time!”

  There was a spontaneous round of applause, coupled with hooting, jeering, and the swish of the sticks here and there around the room. The girl who'd been sprawled across a table was up again now, and rubbing her sore rear end. Percy called for everyone's attention, and after the commotion had somewhat subsided, said, “Remember—we judge not only on size, but on resilience, stature, and general aesthetic appeal. Ladies?” He turned to the three couples, and waved the stick in his hand. The women suddenly snapped off the men's G-strings, and let their organs spring free.

  Hallie couldn't believe it.

  The three men stood stark naked, except for the white ties around their necks; Percy, like a sergeant performing a troop inspection, went up to each in turn, and with the stick delicately lifted each cock—all were erect—for the approval of the onlookers. With the man in the middle, whose organ was unusually thick and hard, he used the stick to press it down, and then release it, several times; this seemed to be a real crowd-pleaser.

  After he'd inspected all three, the ladies were allowed to reach around and further stimulate the men. Percy reminded everyone that the winning couple, “in keeping with the eleemosynary policies of the Swinburne Society, will receive, in cash, and skimmed directly off the top of this evening's receipts, the munificent sum of five hundred dollars. Are we ready, do you think, to make the final judgment?”

  There was a last-minute flurry of jerking and stroking on the part of the maids; Kwan poured the remaining drops of the champagne into his own glass, then turned the bottle over in the bucket.

  Percy stepped up to the third man in line, touched his tumescent organ with the end of the stick. There was a smattering of applause, and one sharp whistle. But nothing overpowering.

  Then he crossed over to the first man in line, and did the same; and this time, there was a much louder and more sustained cheer from the crowd.

  But clearly, Percy already knew who the winner would have to be.

  Pointing his switch to the crotch of the man in the middle, he stood aside and let the applause and approval crash like waves over the dance floor. The woman behind the man took her hand away, and let Percy use the switch to make the cock bob up and down. Kwan was banging his hands together the way Hallie imagined a rabid opera fan might applaud for Placido Domingo. The whole thing had become positively surreal.

  “I think,” announced Percy, “that we have a winner!”

  For the first time, the man in the middle smiled, and seemed to let out his breath. His partner squeezed her arms around his neck, and impulsively kissed him on the cheek.r />
  Percy raised an eyebrow, and said to her, “Oh, I think we can do better than that, can't we? For five hundred dollars?”

  Percy pointed his stick toward the back of the room, where the sound booth was located, and a moment later the music came up again—at a nearly ear-splitting level.

  The three naked maids grabbed the flimsy wooden chairs, brought them to the front of the dance floor, and then knelt on them. Hallie knew—but still couldn't believe—what was about to come next. The men took up their positions behind them, put their hands on the women's raised hips, and—

  Hallie pushed her chair away from the table, jamming the fingers of a man behind her.

  “Watch it, goddamn you!” she heard him complain.

  “What are you doing?” Kwan said. “Where do you think you're going?”

  Snatching her purse up, she barged through the clutter of tables and chairs, and up the steps to the bar area; Lisa was easy to spot in her bright red mini. “You coming?” Hallie called to her.

  “You bet.”

  Hallie saw her disengage a proprietary arm of Carlo Guardi—it was one of the many social skills models had to learn early—and pick her way through the crowd of merry Swinburnians.

  “Can you believe that?” Lisa said, as they hurried toward the coat check.

  “I'm not sure I want to,” Hallie replied over her shoulder.

  They turned their stubs over to the attendant—no one else was leaving—and waited while she dug their coats out. Kwan, still carrying his stick, appeared around the corner; Guardi showed up too.

  “Where would you like to go now?” Carlo crooned, as if they had all planned, all along, to go on from here. “I know a place—very quiet, very intimate—”

  “Very unlikely,” Lisa interrupted.

  The attendant laid their coats across the sill of the little half-door she was stationed behind. Hallie wedged two dollars into the slot.

  “Hallie,” Kwan said, taking hold of her elbow, “I don't think we've finished yet.”

  “Finished what?”

  “Becoming acquainted.” He smiled suggestively. “The Pleiades has a back room where it's easier to talk, mingle, and . . . do other things.” He touched the side of his nose. “It's the purest you've ever known. You'll be very glad you stayed.”

  Hallie pulled her arms through the sleeves of her coat. “My mother always told me to just say no.”

  “But you don't still listen to your mother, do you?” He slipped the end of the stick into the open flap of her coat.

  “Yes, sugar, I do,” she said, in her sweetest, down-home accent. “ ‘Cause Momma knew all about scuzz like you.” Reaching down, she extricated the stick, snapped it in two, and let the pieces fall to the floor. “Now you go on back inside and get yourself a new stick. And this time, why don't you see if you can't get one that's a little harder than that?”

  Lisa laughed, and the coat-check girl smiled; Hallie headed straight for the door, and got it open before the bouncer could. There was a cab idling right outside.

  Lisa and Hallie jumped in, looked at each other with disbelief, and then laughed in total amazement.

  “Are you hungry?” Lisa asked. “Believe it or not, I'm starved.”

  “Me too.”

  “The Odeon?”

  “Sure.” She told the cabbie where to go. “But if one guy so much as says hello, he's a dead man.”

  “Then you may want this,” Lisa said, solemnly handing Hallie her switch.

  CHAPTER

  16

  In honor of Lucien's return, Simone cracked a smile, gone as unexpectedly as it had appeared, before taking a chair across from his desk and catching him up on the business that had accumulated in his absence. There was a great deal of it; the most pressing matters had been forwarded to him by Epstein, but there were still dozens of other proposals, transactions, contracts that needed his undivided attention in New York. In a separate folder, she had enclosed all of the social and persona] invitations—to charity balls, fund-raisers, art openings, and cultural events—that had come in over the past week or so. Word of his huge donation to the Asia Museum of New York had increased these offers exponentially.

  While Lucien and Simone went over the paperwork, and the entries that had already been programmed by Simone into his desk computer, Phil Epstein waited impatiently by the door. It was always like this when Calais had been away; things piled up, and every vice-president and department head was itching to get at him alone—even for five minutes—to clear up one urgent problem or another. Epstein, as the veritable chief of staff, had the unenviable duty of holding them at bay, juggling all of their various demands, and deciding who and what needed to come to Calais's personal attention. At times, he felt like a traffic cop in Times Square on New Year's Eve.

  But fortunately, his own time with Calais was sacrosanct, and everyone knew not to disturb them. For a company as large and diverse as L.C. Carriers, Inc., the executive ranks were relatively thin, and close to the top of the pyramid they were almost non-existent; Calais himself made all the decisions, and when he consulted with anyone, it was likely to be Epstein or, curiously, Simone, a woman whose loyalty and probity he absolutely trusted.

  Flipping her steno pad closed, Simone now gathered up some of the papers Lucien had signed, left plenty of others neatly stacked on his desk, and left Calais to Epstein. On her way out, she closed the door.

  To Epstein, he looked vaguely troubled. There was a faint scar on his cheek, which he'd already refused to talk about, and a faraway look in his eye. Epstein wondered exactly what had happened in Thailand and London.

  “I see the Sembawang Yard has promised the work on the hydraulics systems will be finished by the end of the month,” Lucien said. “Have we got a cargo lined up?”

  “Yes, I talked to Koto Baharu on Tuesday, and they agreed to delay, for a one-percent reduction in our base rate, the next LNG shipment. In two weeks, we'll have the new ship neatly incorporated into the fleet schedule and completing all the remaining business originally contracted for the Garuda. Apart from the loss of the ship itself, and the cost of the cleanup, the loss has been pretty well contained.”

  “What about the underwriting breakdown from Morgan at Lloyd's?”

  “That's not so good.”

  “I know.”

  “It's workable, but in the meantime, I've been shopping around a little, and in another few days, I think we may be able to come up with something better.”

  “Contact Schultz in Bonn.”

  “Schultz? His bank doesn't do this sort of thing.”

  “They haven't . . . but my sense is, they will. They've just been waiting for the right opportunity.”

  “To get their feet wet?” Epstein said, hazarding a small joke.

  Lucien smiled. “I hope not. I hope their feet stay perfectly dry. But I think they can be persuaded.”

  Epstein made a note of it. Lucien's suggestions, no matter how unlikely they might at first appear, had an uncanny way of working out.

  They went on to a catalog of other business matters. Lucien okayed the expansion plans for the bauxite mines in Jamaica, asked to see some cost projections for the Brazilian potash fields, and rejected out of hand several partnership offerings; he liked to do things his own way, with only himself to answer to. When much of the backlog had been cleared, Lucien swiveled his chair to face the windows and told Epstein the general outline, and tenor, of his meeting with Lord Sykes in London. He did not mention his suspicion that Sykes wanted Gold Prow as a pipeline for drugs from the Golden Triangle; that was something only he, Lucien, needed to know. “Have you been able to establish how Sykes got those five thousand shares before our people even were aware of them?”

  Epstein shook his head. “I've gone over and over it with Yoshi in Tokyo, and it seems the whole thing was basically done as a private transaction. Whoever sold them had already reached a private agreement with Sykes, and they never came onto the market in the usual way.”

&
nbsp; “But who?”

  “There's no telling.”

  “And A.C.S.? Beyond their base in Taiwan, what do we know about them?”

  Epstein hated to come up short, and twice in a row, but he had to admit the wall of secrecy around A.C.S., Limited, was also insurmountable. “We can't even find out what the initials stand for.”

  Lucien did know one thing: No mere produce exporter needed to observe that kind of security. Most of them were only too happy to wheel and deal and talk to anyone. For most of them, profits were pretty slim.

  “All right,” Lucien said. “Keep working on it.” He rubbed his eyes, and gazed out over the choppy waters of the New York harbor. He longed to get home, go down to the subterranean pool, meditate . . . and consult with Mandy. There were things he wanted her to see.

  But first he knew there were other appointments to keep: Mancini about a new bioremediation technique to be used in any future spills, Newton about some problems in press relations; Winifred Flint the English reporter, was apparently on Newton's case, and he wanted to know what to do about her. “You said not to blow her off,” Newton reminded Lucien during their conference later that afternoon. “So what do you want me to do with her?”

  “Tell her I'll see her myself,” Lucien said. “Tomorrow, late in the day. She knows, or guesses, more than all the rest of them put together. As long as we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear from her.”

  Newton, looking as if he didn't agree, went along with the order nonetheless.

  “Tell Simone to schedule her in,” Lucien said, “on your way out.”

  He turned his chair full to the windows, and Newton took the hint.

  “And tell Simone,” Lucien added as Newton left, “to have Hun bring the car around.”

  Left alone for the first time in many hours, Lucien let himself dissolve into his chair; the tension had been building for weeks, ever since the attack on the Garuda. His journey to Asia and England had only increased his sense of impending danger; he felt as if the pieces of a great mystery were gradually being revealed to him, but in a totally haphazard and unclear fashion. It was up to him to put it all together, and to do it before the mystery engulfed him too . . . along, if he wasn't careful, with Hallie.