Burn

by Nevada Barr

  Anna went first, Mackie sticking so close to her heels that she bumped him when she walked.

  The attached room was set up as a theater. A full-sized screen was on the far wall, and sumptuous leather couches formed three arced rows in front of it. Maybe the club preferred leather because it could be wiped clean of effluvia. The only light came from the screen. Several couples lolled and watched the porn, but there was little interest or action. Undoubtedly voyeurs didn’t come to the Chance to watch what they could get on their computers at home.

  “Not promising,” Anna whispered and wondered what would be promising. A room full of toys and dolls? The sound of little feet scampering between sexual athletes? Surely that sort of thing would not be in the open. The women in the library might like leather and whips and home décor, but Anna guessed they would go ballistic if they saw little girls being abused.

  Closing her eyes against the actors going through the motions with disquietingly bored expressions on their faces, Anna called up images of the back of the building where the boys had chased Dougie. If Dougie’s door and that of the Chance shared the same structure, the building was a block deep and comparatively narrow. It was possible Dougie worked at the Bonne Chance as a bouncer or bartender—or whatever else perverts do as a day job. From what she’d seen of the club employees, Dougie wouldn’t have a front job. He was too uncouth. There didn’t seem to be a kitchen on the premises, so cook and dishwasher were out. That left cleaning or stocking liquor for the bar. There would be other jobs in an establishment this large, but Anna didn’t picture the yellow jacket in management or laundry. The thought triggered a memory, Candy’s pssst-chunk. Could it have been industrial steam irons ironing the many sheets a place like this might go through in a day? She shelved the thought for later.

  Taking Jordan’s hand, she pulled him close. Their noses inches apart, she whispered, “Let’s take a walk into the bowels; see how deep the club goes, if there’s another building behind it, or if it runs the length of the block.”

  Jordan nodded. “You want I should take the dog for a while?”

  “No.” Anna wanted the dog as close as possible. Mackie’s innocence and loyalty were her talismans against the curse of finding herself totally disgusted with the race to which she nominally belonged.

  They traversed the library toward the dark opening to what they assumed was the rest of the club. The fornicating couple had reached the moaning stage, and their observers, the drooling stage. One dominatrix was gone. Now that Anna thought of it, they might share decorating tips, or which whips were the best, but, given their proclivities, it would be tough for them to work or play well together.

  The remaining dominatrix was allowing a woman, who hadn’t been in the room earlier, to kneel in front of her and respectfully stroke her inner thighs.

  Reminding herself it was okay to look, that they were doing it in public for a reason, Anna quelled the unpleasant feeling one gets when a guest fails to lock the bathroom door and sidled past to the dark doorway.

  It opened into a hall. Walls, ceiling, and floor were painted black. Down the middle of this fun-house darkness ran a skinny carpet in harlequin black and white. To the left were half a dozen or more door ways obscured, or partially obscured, by heavy red drapes. Between each pair of the curtained entrances a wall sconce. The bulbs in the shape of the Statue of Liberty’s torch, emitted enough light to pick up the crimson highlights and make the white squares on the carpet shine. The glow was pronounced enough that they might have been black lights.

  The carpet was thick, and she and Jordan made no noise despite Anna’s stiletto heels. The curtained rooms were mere alcoves, large enough to hold a double mattress covered in a white sheet. Several of the curtains were closed for privacy, but a majority were completely or partially open. The insides of the cubicles were lit with smaller wall sconces in the shape of seashells and giving off a flattering peach-colored light.

  Anything flattering was a boon. Most of the patrons of the Bonne Chance weren’t the sort of people one would cross the street to see naked. At a guess, the average age was midforties to midfifties, with a spackling of thirty-somethings. Anna saw no one who looked to be in his or her twenties. Body types were the kind filling the streets and malls on any given day: a lot of plump, a lot of bald, and a lot of gravity dragging things from pert to ponderous.

  Mardi Gras was over and Jazz Fest yet to come, so the city wasn’t as crowded with tourists as it sometimes was, but still the club was doing a good business. Passing the alcoves, Anna grew tired of views of a personal nature, but there was no relief to the other side.

  There a doorway opened onto a room with salmon-colored lockers floor to ceiling, the kind one might find in old high schools. In the middle was a swing made of straps of leather woven into a seat and affixed to a chain hanging from the ceiling. A long black cord hung down next to it with a black box the size of a paperback book at its end. In the middle of the box was a toggle switch.

  “If that’s not for adjusting the height, I don’t even want to know what it does,” Anna whispered as they stopped. Jordan grunted. Mackie whined. Anna picked him up. She didn’t want him to get anything on his paws, then lick them.

  Beyond the swing were three doorways, one to the left and two, side by side, directly in front of them. Those were closed; Anna couldn’t see what lay beyond the other.

  “This way?” Anna asked.

  “We’ll come back if we have to,” Jordan said and walked away. With the dog and Star’s fancy shoes, Anna had to hurry to catch up. She didn’t relish being left alone. It wasn’t fear, exactly. Except for being in various states of undress and/or masks and costumes and having public sex in groups, the people seemed well behaved and ordinary. There wasn’t any doubt in her mind that the nice young people downstairs would let her out should she wish, nor did she really think she would catch some icky disease from the air. Mostly she felt like a stranger in a strange land, a fish out of water, a bull in a china shop, a rube in the big city, a park ranger in a sex club. It made her want to stay with her own kind, even if that kind happened to be a dog and a woman whose personality had been co-opted by an imaginary gutter punk.

  She caught up with Jordan and fell into step beside him.

  Beyond the locker-room-cum-swing-set were two rooms, each easily twenty by thirty feet and each paved in one gigantic mattress. Viewing windows were set into the walls so those in the hall might watch the events. Inside, groups and couples squirmed about amid cast-off bits of clothing, some hardy souls moving from group to group in hopes of joining in.

  Past what, for lack of a better term, Anna mentally dubbed the orgy rooms were four more curtained cubicles, then a dead end. A wall of brick, painted flat black, ascended into the gloom.

  “Shit,” Jordan said. He balled his fists and uttered a low feral growl as if about to physically attack the brick and mortar.

  Anna grabbed his arm, jockeying Mackie aside to do it. “We’ve got a few more places to look—the doors leading out of the locker room. We do that, if there’s nothing, we go to plan B.” Whatever that was.

  For a minute she didn’t think Jordan could hear her past the white-hot noise in his brain, and she braced to make a run for freedom with the dog if he snapped and brought the Chance’s muscle down on them. His fists stayed white-knuckled, but he nodded, a sharp jerking down of the chin. When Anna started back past the orgy rooms and the fornication alcoves, he followed stiffly, moving as if the heat of his anger had partially welded his joints.

  Clothes might not make the man, but they could certainly unmake him or, in this case, her. In the strappy high heels, no good for running or kicking, the dress built only to fall off at the least provocation, and the cascade of hair just begging to be grabbed by others or blind its wearer, Anna felt more helpless than had she gotten in the party mood and gone naked. It was no wonder women did a fairly rotten job of defending themselves. Not only were they smaller and less muscular by design, but they were
willing collaborators in the bondage of fashion. Anna longed for boots and jeans and a good solid shirt: armor against the world.

  The leather swing was now occupied by an ample woman in a cat mask and green high-tops being serviced by a geeky bald man in thick glasses.

  Murmuring, “Excuse me, pardon us,” Anna squeezed between them and the lockers to reach the far doors.

  “Cute dog!” said the cat mask.

  “Thank you,” Anna said politely and pushed on. With nothing between people but air, good manners seemed a necessity.

  The archway they’d noted to the right of the two doors opened into a smallish room that had been convincingly transformed into a medieval torture chamber. The walls were of stone the color of a stormy sky. Iron rings and belt restraints and chains were affixed to them. Opposite the archway was a rack the Catholic Inquisition would have been proud to own. Shackled to the rack was a naked man, a little fleshy around the belly but not too ugly by modern standards. The missing dominatrix was running her long acrylic fingernails down the side of his chest, leaving welts, but no blood, as he groaned with . . . pleasure? Pain? Whatever.

  As Anna and Jordan entered, the man opened eyes bleary and bloodshot with sex or booze. “Cute dog,” he said.

  This time Anna didn’t thank him. Backing into Jordan, the heel of her stiletto grinding into something softer than the floor, she turned to the other doors.

  “They’re locked,” the naked, shackled masochist called helpfully.

  Beside each was a keypad for the code.

  Anna and Jordan stared at them as if they would tell them something, then, simultaneously, turned away, squeezed back around baldy and the cat-woman, and retreated to the far side of the hallway. Ducking into an unoccupied fornication alcove, Anna waited till Jordan joined her, then pulled the heavy drape closed.

  Jordan dropped onto the edge of the low mattress, his knees up around his ears and his face in his hands. “What now?” he said.

  “We wait and watch,” Anna replied. The dog struggled, and she set him on the mattress next to his master/mistress. “Don’t let Mackie lick up anything, okay?”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Anna took the first watch, squatting on the edge of the mattress, wishing her dress covered more of her behind, keeping an eye on the doors adjacent to the torture chamber. Couples came and went in the swing. Clothes became scarcer as the night wore on. Groups became more common. The level of hilarity rose with the blood alcohol content.

  The doors with the electronic combination locks stayed closed.

  Every twenty minutes she and Jordan switched off, more to have something to do than because they needed to stay alert for this particular assignment. Though there had been long hours and less sleep—at least on Jordan’s part—than was ideal, neither of them felt any inclination to rest.

  Several times revelers wanted to “join their party,” and several times they were invited to join others. As far as Anna was concerned, these were not temptations but interruptions.

  Finally, near three in the morning, the door nearest the torture chamber opened. Jordan was on watch and hissed at Anna to join him. A woman squeezed through the door and closed it carefully behind her. She was dressed in an ankle-length gray dress of muslin or linen and wearing black boots. The dress’s neckline was high and finished in a Peter Pan collar. The sleeves came down to her knuckles. Her hair was pulled back into a neat bun. Juxtaposed with the rest of the denizens of the Chance, she looked like a nun.

  The gray sister didn’t come any farther into the club than necessary but turned immediately to the second door, punched in the code, and slipped through, disappearing from sight.

  “What do you suppose that was about?” Jordan asked when they’d returned to their alcove.

  “The outfit?”

  “The whole thing.”

  Anna didn’t know. Shoulder to shoulder with him on the mattress, she mulled the uneventful arrival and departure over in her tired mind. “The clothes—could be the governess Candy described. Remember? A lady that didn’t get pretty clothes?”

  “Could be,” Jordan said.

  No, Anna thought. It was Clare, or partly Clare. A hysterical edge was cutting through Jordan’s armor. Mackie whined and rose from where he’d lain collapsed for the better part of the night to walk over and drop his chin on his mistress’s knee.

  They sat like that, man/woman, woman and dog, until the second of the two locked doors opened and the governess reappeared, this time with an armload of paper towels. Juggling the loose rolls, she began punching numbers into the keypad by the door from which she had first emerged.

  Before Anna could make any decisions, Jordan was on his feet, Mackie spilling unceremoniously onto the floor, and through the locker room. Scrambling up as quickly as she could in four-inch heels, Anna followed, afraid he—or Clare—was about to get them thrown out, if not arrested.

  It was Clare, she was sure; Jordan wasn’t as good an actor as his hostess. “Allow me,” Anna heard Clare murmur with just a trace of highly educated drawl in her voice. “Looks like you’ve got yourself an armful.” Such was the graciousness the actor had pulled around her, Anna would have sworn the chosen costume of Jordan became quite debonair, a kind oil man from central Texas out of his league in Sin City.

  Anna hung back, poised uncomfortably between a very large, very naked woman in the leather swing and the grunting little man, naked but for a porkpie hat, between her ample thighs. The lady in the swing opened her eyes, cupped a breast in one hand, and, offering it to Anna, said, “Care to join in?”

  “No thanks,” Anna said distractedly. “I’ve already eaten.”

  Smiling, laden with paper towel rolls, the governess was thanking Jordan and backing awkwardly through the door he held for her. Then she was gone, and Jordan still had the toe of his shoe between door and jamb. He jerked his chin at Anna, and, before she had a chance to weigh in on the advisability of rushing unarmed and ignorant into a black stairwell leading to Dougie’s lair, he was gone as well, and the door was swinging shut. Running, she grabbed it and slipped through, Mackie, dragging Jordan’s belt, at her heels.

  After the strange dark opulence of the sex club, the utter utility of the stairwell had the effect of a cool breeze on a hot day. The single most stultifying thing about the club had been its sheer banality. The desultory sexual gluttony had had about it a tedium that made the revelers—if such they could be called—seem to be merely naked people so weighed down with ennui that even the forbidden was a chore.

  The metal and concrete of industrial stairs, with work lights in metal cages, seemed positively life-affirming in contrast. Anna breathed deeply, but she didn’t move. Jordan, despite his rush in, was still as well. Metal treads were wonderful instruments for making noise. Both in leather-soled shoes, and Anna in heels, the timpani of their descent would have alerted the governess.

  Jordan picked up Mackie, lest his claws clack on the tread, and they waited until they heard the door at the bottom open and shut. Then they waited another minute to make sure the governess had cleared the area—in hopes the governess had cleared the area.

  Jordan, still holding the dog, started to descend.

  “Shoes,” Anna said. Both removed their shoes. For Anna it was a blessing as well as a precaution. She didn’t bother to try to talk Jordan—or Clare, or whoever was driving the exhausted malnourished body at the moment—into waiting to make this assault until they were better prepared. She wouldn’t be heard, and she wasn’t interested in wasting breath she might need in the near future.

  In bare and stockinged feet they descended. There were no windows and no doors. The stairs ended less than a flight down at a plain gray metal door like that above. Jordan grabbed the knob as if he were about to storm whatever battlements lay beyond.

  “Stop!” Anna murmured. His hand twitched and his shoulder muscles spasmed, but he managed to keep himself in check. “Let me,” she suggested and shouldered by before he could change his min
d and barge in.

  As she turned the knob slowly, she heard him setting the dog down. “Not locked,” she whispered and eased the door open a crack. Mackie put his nose to it and Anna her eye. What she could see of the room was clear of human occupants. Opening the door wider, she slipped in. Mack and Jordan followed. The door clicked closed behind them. Like those upstairs, it had a combination pad to one side. “Did it lock?” Anna demanded.

  Jordan tried it. “Locked.”

  “Well, that’s just peachy,” Anna fumed and turned to look at the room they must now deal with. It was long and narrow. At one end were racks of clothing; at the other, mirrors and hat stands with a collection of top hats and cloth caps. All of it was for men, and all of it looked as if it had been fashionable in the Victorian era. The hats were tall and flared slightly at the top, the coats and trousers and vests were dark and staid-looking, the white shirts had detached collars, and there was a rack of cravats by the mirrors with pins of various kinds in them.

  “It’s a theatrical dressing room,” Clare said. Anna turned to look at her. It was definitely Clare. As uncanny as it was—or as canny an actor as Clare Sullivan was—it was as if she and Jordan were, in fact, two different individuals, and only a fool or a blind man would mistake one for the other.

  “Storage room?” Anna asked. “Mardi Gras costumes? This is a big costume town.”

  “No. Nothing is protected, no plastic, no mothballs. These are being used. Look.” Clare crossed to the dressing table and held up a brush with hairs in it. She opened the top drawer, and there were perhaps a dozen more brushes, each wrapped in plastic so the next user wouldn’t have to worry about hygiene.

  “The photograph,” Anna remembered aloud.

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Clare said. “The man whose lap Candy was sitting on, the man who’s now chief of police, was dressed in an outfit like these.” Mackie had moved to the door in the far wall of the room and was sniffing at the frame. He scratched once, whined softly, and looked back over his furry shoulder at Clare.