Paradise (The Erotic Adventures of Sophia Durant)

by O. L. Casper

  The reclusive American billionaire Mark Stafford has made no official statements to date. Mr. Stafford accrued his substantial fortune in hedge fund management and derivatives trading, which Forbes Magazine estimated at $2.6 billion (£1.7 billion) in 2011. His firm, Stafford Capital Group, operates primarily out of Jacksonville, Florida. His education does not extend beyond a high school diploma, yet he entered the Wall Street arena at an early age and with little help quickly earned one of the larger hedge fund and derivatives based fortunes in the world. His marriage to Mrs. Gardner in 2009 was followed by a marked decrease in his involvement in the financial markets. It has been speculated this was due in good part to the devastating blow the worldwide markets took in 2008. Mrs. Gardner was a devoted mother to the couple’s seven month old daughter. She is survived also by her mother and father, Dorothy S. Gardner and Damian P. Gardner. She held a bachelor’s degree in communications from San Francisco State University, which she pursued a brief career in before marrying Mr. Stafford in 2009. Her interests reportedly included botany, literature, and backgammon.

  Sophia Durant’s Diary

  August 17, St. Augustine, Florida

  I stood by a stream in a private burial ground surrounded by thick foliage and palms. The stream ran about two hundred feet before it cut through a small beach and met the Atlantic. There were only about twenty people in attendance. I remember neither how I got there, nor how I departed. I do remember, head pounding with headache, the blue canopy of sky through the trees above us, wondering how I could make time go quicker to get through the dreadful experience hence in haste. Next thing I remember is the casket arriving, a beautiful oak box with silver trim that was opened once before it was lowered into the ground forever. Stafford looked upon the body of Isabella Gardner, tears in his eyes. He buckled at the knees. A friend stopped him from crumbling to the ground completely. I looked into the box too, before it was closed. I saw a dress that matched the afternoon sky, and I looked at the face. I saw a pale face, with that golden hair spread round it. I wondered at the remarkable transformation from what the body must’ve looked like after being found at the bottom of the sea to this. For an instant I replayed the vision of her maggot-filled eye sockets in the depths. In a momentary change of thought I saw something far more disturbing; my head on her body. This was the last image to register in mind before they shut the casket and lowered it. The horror.

  Stafford stood up again, looked across at me with one of those little boy looks. For the first time my heart went out to him. Tears came to my eyes in the same way the suffocating pain entered my heart, with force and immediacy. Seeing my tears, Stafford nodded in some kind of mad approval. I couldn’t bear the morbid condescension and looked away. Perhaps this was not what it was at all, but that’s how I took it. Looking back I don’t know what possessed me, certainly there was no rhyme or reason and I cannot really account for my actions. That may sound like a way of avoiding responsibility and perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, it is. But I was not conscious of it at the time. Thinking on it now is like watching someone else, not me. Memory of the funeral is patchy at best.

  The chaotic days following the death of Isabella blurred at breakneck pace like a movie shot all in time lapse photography. Always feeling on the verge of collapse as I had not had a good night’s sleep in a few days, I floated from place to place experiencing odd hallucinations. Sometimes I would believe I stepped into a van only to get out of a sports car and vice versa. Sometimes I believed it was midday only to step outside, find it dark out, and check my smartphone only to find it to be a couple hours before dawn. During this time period I was taking 800 mg of ibuprofen every few hours to counter the headaches, which probably resulted mainly from dehydration and lack of sleep.

  After eventually getting solid sleep and good hydration, I found my will had left me and I was caught in a cloud between two worlds, pulled up toward the ultimate liberation of total detachment and down, simultaneously, toward the solemn pits of hell by ghosts, fear, and wild emotions I didn’t have the strength to face.

  Sophia Durant’s Diary

  August 26, St. Augustine, Florida

  In the mind’s eye I see Stafford standing alone on a cliff edge, looming over the ocean, waves crashing below, lightning striking in the background, wind blowing in his hair. I see it like a movie, the camera sweeps in from afar in an epic tracking shot. Stafford furls his brow, looking into the distance.

  A day after the funeral I met Julie in a coffee shop on Hypolita Street in the historic part of St. Augustine. I sat down at a table near the street outside, as Julie went in to order, and looked at the surrounding rock walls and palms. It could have been a street in an old part of Paris, the only differences being the weather and the sound of the languages spoken around me. I watched Julie order. I checked out her long legs, which were exposed from the knee where her socks ended all the way up to the bottom of the buttocks where the short shorts came down to, pockets hanging lower than the jean fabric. She had a deep tan on her muscular thighs. I studied her figure in the checkered, button down shirt, which honestly looked more like a tablecloth than a shirt. She cut an exquisite figure, and, turning round to face me with two cups, I saw the divine face, angular in places and soft in places.

  She sat across from me in silence as I watched her, the brilliance of the sun-bleached street blazing behind her, forming a kind of halo around her. She possessed a gravitational charisma on par with any of the great actresses of the day.

  Breaking the silence she said, “You look amazing.”

  “So do you.”

  “So where do we start?” she asked quietly with a sort of conspiratorial appeal.

  She leaned in. I didn’t speak right away so she went on.

  “You’ve been away so long, you’re a different person. I can see it in your eyes.”

  “I don’t know where to begin. I’ve seen so many strange things. A whole new world opened up. Sometimes I thought I would never make it back. I thought I’d die there and all we’d have were sweet memories.”

  “So dramatic. Like the dramatic silence in your emails. What was going on? What was such that you couldn’t talk about in electronic communication? Some sort of mischief, no doubt—of the illicit kind, probably.”

  I hesitated, looked down. Inwardly I was silent too, my mind filled with the clip-clopping of passing horses on some historic tour. I looked up and caught in my gaze the top hat of an old man in a horse-pulled carriage. I looked at the coffee in my cup, watched the spiral it seemed to form as it swirled round and round. I searched for any diversion.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” I said at last. Almost stuttering.

  “Come to the point,” Julie commanded.

  She was beautiful even when forceful. I looked away from her.

  I kept drawing a blank, so I just started talking.

  “I…Stafford…I…we…” I stumbled on before she cut me off.

  “You little home-wrecker. You’re in love with the billionaire—” She gasped. “And…you’ve slept with him.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  I started blushing.

  “Details.”

  I looked to the side and shook my head in dismay.

  “I don’t know what to say. Yes, it’s true.”

  “Good for you. For sleeping with him. Not for falling in love. Bad on you for that. I’m envious.”

  “I’ll always love you more, and I always loved you first.”

  “Whatever. Does he return your feelings?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re that sure of yourself.”

  “It’s not that. It’s that I…I…”

  I was embarrassed to admit that I had eavesdropped, but there was no way around it.

  “I couldn’t help it. Certain things made me curious. So I spied on him.”

  Silence descended upon the table. The rush and whirl of the sound of the crowd that had faded into the background came to the fore. I felt ashamed of wha
t I ‘d done. If I hadn’t snooped, I reasoned, my whole view of Stafford and that situation would be held in a much better light. I would be far more comfortable. But then I would be unaware of the lurking danger. Better to be aware, I thought.

  “You spied on him?”

  I couldn’t tell if it was disapproval or admiration in her voice.

  “I did.”

  “How?”

  “I wire-tapped his phone, copied all his emails, the entire contents of his hard drive—actually I get updates on all that stuff daily.”

  “Sounds illegal.”

  “It is.”

  After some silence she said, “Finally, being a computer nerd paid off. Well done, missy.”

  “Stop talking out of your butt and tell me what you really think.”

  “I don’t know what to say—don’t get caught? Really, how did you get the balls to do something like that?”

  “I made the decision, somewhere along the line—I’m not sure when—I was going to live life all the way up regardless of the consequence. So fuck it, I did it.”

  “The real question is why?”

  “At first I was mostly curious about his business. Little by little I saw that some things didn’t add up. I was trying to fit the picture together by his offhand remarks and those of others. It just didn’t fit. My appetite for details was whetted, my curiosity sparked. I did what I had to do to find things out. I still don’t have much of a picture. I don’t really know what business he’s in. But I’ll find out.”

  “Wait…he’s not in stocks.”

  “Hedge funds and derivatives—no, he’s not in either.”

  “Interesting. Well, you know how the saying goes—behind every great fortune is a great crime. Or something like that.”

  “Definitely the case with Mark Stafford.”

  “And you’re fucking him.”

  She said this more for her benefit than anyone else’s.

  “Mmm.”

  I looked away not quite knowing what to say.

  “Are you in deep?”

  “My heads swimming, thoughts a blur. I don’t really know. Can’t make heads or tails of it now.”

  “You’re in over your head. Never had feelings like this before, right?”

  “Yes, but not in the way you might think.”

  “Explain.”

  She crossed her arms, cocked her head.

  “Yeah, there are amorous feelings.” I discounted. “But he exists on such another level than I do or anyone else I know. He’s floating in the clouds. Who knows what he thinks ever. He’s an enigma. And no, I don’t mean a kind of mystery that’s attractive. Honestly it’s much the opposite, quite repulsive. He’s an insanely compulsive liar. Lies so well I haven’t yet learned how to distinguish when he’s telling the truth or lying without fact checking afterward. But listen to this…”

  I lowered my voice and leaned in.

  “I’m pretty sure he has people killed.”

  She made a mocking gasp, then threw her head back and laughed joyfully. Seeing my seriousness, she regained composure.

  “How? You saw him order an execution.”

  “Not quite, but almost. The circumstantial evidence is there. I just have to connect the dots between what I witnessed, and emails and phone calls I have recorded, but have yet to listen to.”

  “What kind of racket is it? What’s he into?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is it’s not hedge funds and derivatives. I have a list of code words he uses in his calls and messages.”

  “Rattle some off,” she said with what sounded like disbelief.

  I began to realize how ludicrous I must have sounded. It didn’t bother me at all. Explaining everything to her was getting a weight of my chest as much as it was clarifying the whole situation for me.

  “Let’s see—Zippos, bubblegum sticks, tennis rackets, Borises...the list goes on.”

  “Let’s see if I can help. What are some of the others?”

  “I don’t know…red hornets, frogs, Anita Ekbergs—”

  “She’s a movie star, right?”

  “She was. I think she’s dead.”

  “What are the others?”

  “Candy and king cobras are all I got left.”

  “Hmm, what connection is there between all those disparate elements?” she thought aloud.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, let’s think of it in terms of this: what are the illicit trades we can think of? Which one would these terms more likely fit?”

  “I’ve thought about it like that.”

  “And…?”

  “I got nothing. Illegal arms, drugs, prostitution, some kind of gambling, rigging foreign elections for personal economic gain, international financial fraud, subverting funds from natural resources in third-world countries, human trafficking, cyber crime…I couldn’t narrow it down.”

  “That is a long list.”

  “And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Much more than I would have gotten.”

  “So how would you narrow that down, for starters?”

  “Sorry, we’ll come back to that—my mind keeps springing back to something else. How did you get involved with this…epic criminal? I mean, obviously you’re unbelievably gorgeous, exude massive sex appeal, come off with the confidence of a goddess…”

  She couldn’t conceal a smile any longer.

  “Now you’ve gone unhinged. The confidence of a goddess—let’s be serious.”

  “Okay, you got me. But you do come off with confidence. Now more than ever. However, back to the topic at hand.”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  “How did the relationship—the intime relationship—with Stafford come to be?”

  “Intime—French, impressive.”

  “I’ve taken to your habit of expressing yourself in French when you feel the English language isn’t expressive enough.”

  “I got that from Anna Karenina.”

  “A great book I couldn’t get through the first fifty pages of. But never mind. The fucking—how did it start?”

  “Right. I saw him at my interview. The chemistry was, I thought, explosive. But then I thought it was just me. Till our next meeting. He seemed into me. Stafford came by himself to tell me we were all going to the Bahamas the next day because some urgent business had arisen.”

  “Then you knew…”

  “But I still doubted.”

  “Tell me about the ignition point.”

  “Right,” I said as I looked off trying to come up with the words to paint the picture. “Wow—long story short: we exchanged numbers one morning after coffee. This was my idea. I had an ulterior motif—to follow him to find out what his urgent meeting was about. I used his phone to track his position. I snuck up on him, observed the meeting from distance. There were seriously armed guards, AK-47s, et cetera. It all took place in a secluded cove. I watched someone take a beating.”

  “This is how you found out about the potential killing?”

  “Not at this meeting, but at another. I’ll come to that. When I left the first meeting his cavalcade caught up to me on the road. He followed me to a restaurant in a tiny seaside hamlet called Governor’s Harbour. We had a conversation that started with paranoia on my part; fear that he might have seen me on the cove. He sent his car on ahead and rode back with me. We touched hands briefly on the ride back. There was a spark. It was then that I knew. But I was still unsure of his thoughts.

  “That night he took me to a special lagoon with several waterfalls. It was like nothing I’d seen even in a movie. Confident or stupid at that point, I don’t know which, I stripped naked in full view of Stafford and got in the water. That’s when all the fucking started.”

  I didn’t know how else to say it.

  “Big dick?”

  I smiled.

  “He know how to use it?”

  I looked at her.

  “Sex for four hours straight. Longer. Expanding bubbles of pure
ecstasy. I can’t even describe it. And weird visions or hallucinations. I’m not sure which.”

  “Sounds like he knows what he’s doing.”

  “Yeah. Not to mention he’s some kind of cultist. Into the ancient Egyptian and pagan religions. He mixes it into his sex life and probably other parts of his life I’m not aware of.”

  “Sounds like a hard man to know.”

  “Complex, yes. Sophisticated—shows some signs of it. Not sure really.”

  “Fascinating, definitely. So you’ve told me all you’ve discovered more or less in relation to what he does.”

  “More or less.”

  I slipped a thumb drive across the table.

  “I want you to take this. It’s got a copy of my diary up to this point. Just don’t transmit it over the internet at all.”

  “You think he might spy on you?”

  “Yes. Him or someone working for him or God knows who else. He takes certain security precautions, which means he’s definitely aware of the ways in which he can be spied on. This in turn leads me to believe he may spy on others digitally. Especially his employees as well as those he’s in business with. Of course I’ve taken precautions to ensure that he won’t be able to spy on anything I don’t want him to.”

  “Of course.”

  She pocketed the thumb drive.

  “I’ll be interested to know what you think of it.”

  “I’ll be sure to let you know. Do you think we’re being watched now? Or our conversation recorded from the mics on our phones?”

  “No. Highly unlikely.”

  She paused, looked deep into my eyes.

  “Come home with me tonight.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “You’re meeting him tonight.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You are. You’re taking her place.”

  “That’s an awful thing to say.”

  “It’s a true thing to say.”

  She leaned back with a smile, rocking her chair back, hinging on the two hind legs.

  “If it is, it’s something I won’t admit to myself.”