Rake

by Scott Phillips

  “This Krysmopompas fellow, you have any idea who he is?”

  “No, and I’m sorry I didn’t mention it to you when you debriefed me, it was something I suddenly recalled yesterday afternoon. I meant to call you and fill you in, I really did.”

  He grilled me for a while and I invented a few small details that seemed to please him.

  “I’m surprised you have so much time to spend on a simple assault and battery,” I said.

  “As I told you before, the divisionnaire’s wife is a big fan. And don’t assume that yours is an isolated case,” he said. “Was there any context to this Krysmopompas comment? Did he indicate whether Krysmopompas was a group, or perhaps just a nom de crime he’d dreamed up?”

  “Nothing like that, sir,” I said, “just the word.”

  “It’s a funny word. I’m surprised you remembered it, having only heard it once. Are you sure you got it right?” He was quite friendly in his interrogation, nothing insinuating about it. I was making little mental notes the whole time in case I ever got to play a cop.

  “I’m an actor, Captain, accustomed to memorizing quickly and exactly. What’s it mean, anyway?”

  “We’re working on that now,” he said.

  •••

  Late in the day I smuggled Esmée down to see her husband, and Fred damn near swallowed his chewing gum at the sight of her.

  “Let’s have a look,” she said.

  “Are you sure you want him seeing you?”

  “Who cares? He’s good as dead.”

  This didn’t go over very well with Fred, who was still laboring under the misconception that somehow this was going to end with Claude free and bearing us no ill will. I was a bit ashamed at my capacity for self-delusion, which had allowed me to entertain that same absurd notion until disabused of it by Esmée’s coldhearted but absolutely logical and undeniable dissection of the situation. I suppose on some unconscious level I knew from the moment I brought the statue down on his head that at some point I was going to have to finish him off, and oddly enough the notion that I would have to serve as Claude’s executioner came as a relief, now that Esmée was in the loop.

  As Fred sputtered an incomprehensible protest, I opened the massive door to the meat locker. The stench from within was eye-watering, but Esmée stood impassive in the doorway and stared at her husband with one eyebrow arched and one hand on her beautiful hip.

  Still bound to his chair, stripped now to his boxer shorts and undershirt, hair disheveled and face black and blue (from a number of falls he’d taken while trying to sleep sitting up), dried spittle caked on his chin, he looked up at Esmée. At first his eyes showed confusion, then hope, and finally hatred and rage as he understood that she was not there for purposes of ransom or rescue. He snarled unintelligibly through the ball gag and strained ineffectively against the ropes, which I now saw that Fred had tightened too far; his hands were a dull shade of purple.

  “I told you that fucking ball gag was too big,” she said to him. “Not too comfortable for long-term wear, is it?”

  He was roaring so fiercely I began to fear he was going to choke on his own saliva, struggling so hard I thought he might break the solid old wooden chair.

  “I’d kiss you,” she said, “but you smell like shit, dear.” She turned to me. “Better shut him in again. The sight of me is going to give him a heart attack, and the police are going to expect a proper execution-style slaying from the likes of Krysmopompas.”

  That was when Claude first turned his attention to me. After a momentary escalation of his rage, he started laughing, at least as far as that was possible with an enormous blue rubber ball in his mouth.

  “What were you thinking, Claude?” she asked. “Trying to kill him on Friday the thirteenth? Don’t you know that’s an unlucky day?” Then she pulled me to her and kissed me, and while I normally would have shown poor Claude some consideration by stopping there, there was something about Esmée that made me follow her lead, and pretty soon we were practically dry-humping right there in front of him. Then, laughing, she slammed the meat locker door shut.

  “That was fun,” she said.

  “I hadn’t realized before that you actually disliked him,” I said. “I thought you just had a wandering eye.”

  “I’ve hated him since before we were married. I can’t wait to kill him.”

  That was when I noticed that Fred was softly weeping at his keyboard. “I don’t want to kill him.”

  “No choice now, old chum,” I said. “He knows us.”

  “You don’t understand. I’ve taken care of him. Fed him. Cleaned up his messes. I’m a little bit attached to him.”

  “For God’s sake, he’s not a baby bird you rescued,” Esmée said. “He’s an arms dealer, responsible for the deaths of a hundred thousand innocents.”

  Fred nodded, eyes down. Poor guy was lonely, and here I’d provided him with someone to take care of, and suddenly I was yanking that person away to be shot, just like Old Yeller. I remembered now somewhat shamefacedly that I’d promised to get him laid and then ignored my duty as a friend.

  “Say, Esmée, you don’t happen to know any attractive gals who might want to hook up with a talented young writer about to hit the big time?”

  She looked him over and shrugged. “If a guy’s in show business, most girls will fuck anybody. Sure, I’ll set him up with somebody.”

  Fred was looking a little better. “Actually, I’m thirty-two, not all that young.”

  And then Annick stepped in out of the darkness of the old abandoned kitchen, shocked and, I think, a little angry at the sight of Esmée. “What the fuck is she doing here?”

  “Didn’t expect to see me, did you, dear?” Esmée said with a smile that frightened me more than her suggestion of marriage had.

  “Has he seen her?” Annick wanted to know.

  “He has,” I said.

  “Then he’s a dead man, isn’t he?”

  “Looks that way from my perspective.”

  Annick let out a long, deep breath, half of angry frustration and half of resignation. “This is going to open me up to all kinds of weird emotional shit with Bruno,” she said.

  “So don’t tell him,” Esmée suggested with a shrug.

  •••

  That night I brought Ginny out to dinner with Casselini, the director, and suggested he might want to cast her in the small but crucial role of Esmeralda, the peasant girl who helps my character hide the arms while he’s being chased by a neo-Nazi biker gang in the employ of the mad art collector. Casselini couldn’t stop staring at Ginny’s tits, provocatively displayed as they were in a combination of Miracle Bra and low-necked top. Professional that she was, his attentions bothered her not a whit.

  “Like ’em?” she asked. “They’re real. If you want we could go into the bathroom and have a squeeze.”

  “That’s probably not such a great idea,” I told her, though Casselini seemed quite keen on it.

  “Why not?” she said. “You said you fucked that network lady in a restaurant crapper, and I bet that was a nicer place than this.”

  I had to allow that both her points were well taken, and between courses she got up and went to the ladies’ room. After a decent interval Casselini did the same, and five minutes later they were both back at the table.

  I listened to him rhapsodize about her beauty for the rest of the dinner, and we agreed that she was perfect for the role. She gave him the password for free entry and downloads on her site, as well as her cell number.

  We walked back to her hotel again. I wasn’t normally that much into the long after-dinner promenades, but with Ginny it was just about the only way to have a conversation that wasn’t postcoital, since the minute you entered a room alone with her was usually her signal that the fucking was to commence.

  “Did you get a chance to look at the site?”

  “I did. Very impressive. You’re making good coin?”

  “You have no idea. Monthly memberships, day pa
sses, automatic rebilling. Plus I’ve got three clip sites where guys who don’t want to join up can just pay for individual downloads.”

  “Three clip sites?”

  “One’s me with guys, one’s me with guys and gals, the other I’m a dominatrix.”

  “You? Really?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised. I’m a pretty good actress, you said so yourself.”

  We were stopped by a pair of young men, autograph seekers, and to my surprise it wasn’t mine but hers they wanted.

  “Please,” one of them said in perfect English. “Let your bush grow back.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s what the market demands at the moment.”

  The other one agreed. “Bald pussy is for squares. And your bush is so perfect and blond.”

  “Try an experiment,” the first one said. “Do a series wearing a merkin and see how sales go.”

  “I just may do that. Thanks for the input, fellas.”

  She kissed each of them on the cheek and they were on their way. “What’s a merkin?” I asked.

  “Pubic wig. From back in the days when people’s body hair used to fall out from smallpox and they didn’t want their lovers to know they’d had it.”

  We walked for a minute or two in silence, and then she asked me if something was bothering me.

  “Just wondering how a couple of French kids knew a word in English that I didn’t. And an Elizabethan one at that.”

  •••

  The desk clerk at the hotel was very excited to see us. “The manager on duty before me made a grave error in judgment,” he said. “I’m afraid, madame, he allowed your husband access to your suite.”

  For a moment Ginny was stupefied, then alarmed. “My husband? I don’t have a husband anymore.”

  “He had a valid American passport, listing you as his spouse. The manager in question will be in a great deal of trouble for this.”

  “There’s no point to that,” I said. “It was an honest mistake. The question is, what do we do now? Call the police?”

  “It would be a delicate matter,” the night clerk said. “Potentially embarrassing for the hotel.”

  “Why don’t you go up there and tell him to take a flying fuck at the moon,” she said to me. “He’s a shrimp, you could take him on easy.”

  I looked at the night clerk seeking his approval. He nodded, though he looked far from certain that this was actually the best plan.

  •••

  She was staying on the seventh floor in a suite fit for royalty. I slid the card into the lock and it clicked open, then swung the door quietly open. I heard the sound of a shower running and what sounded like a woman singing to herself. Had this ex-husband actually had the balls to bring a woman up to Ginny’s room? I supposed, though, once you’ve been married to a porn star your notions of propriety probably change somewhat.

  Cautiously I moved into the suite’s front room, and as I rounded the corner I came face-to-face with a tall woman, heavily made up, wearing a dressing gown with a towel wrapped Lana Turner–like in a turban around her hair. Gathering the front of the dressing gown protectively together, she let loose a shriek loud enough to draw my hands to my ears, and then she punched me.

  To say I wasn’t expecting the punch is one thing; it’s quite another to express my surprise at its force. It was, without a doubt, a man’s fist, and when I hit back I assumed I was hitting a man. What makeup came off on my fist revealed a fine skein of whiskers on a strong jaw, and when he was down I kicked him hard in the jaw, which didn’t stop him. He lunged for my throat and plunged both thumbs into my trachea, and I thought he might be strong enough to choke me into unconsciousness.

  So I went for his left eye, one thumb on the nasal corner and the other at the distal. As soon as I applied the smallest amount of pressure he screamed at the pain—a very male sound, compared with the shriek my entry had provoked—and rolled off of me.

  “You son of a bitch,” he said, and I knew that voice right away. The dressing gown was open now to reveal a pair of panties and matching bra, both of which I recognized as Ginny’s, the turban lay wet on the floor, and he sprinted for the front door and bolted down the hall to the stairwell. There wasn’t any point in chasing him; I didn’t want him arrested anyway. Even underneath the exaggerated makeup I now recognized him, and I had plans for him.

  •••

  “You never told me you were married to David Steinke,” I said when I got Ginny up to the room.

  “Yeah, it didn’t last long. Kind of a mistake. He didn’t like me doing the vids with other guys, just wanted me to make them with him. Problem was the ones he wanted to do were just too damn kinky.”

  “Some of the ones I saw were pretty far out.”

  “Yeah, but his were real specific kinks most guys don’t share. Rubber glove fetish, diaper play, that kind of shit. I mean, there’s a market for everything, but I’m in porn to make money, not satisfy some obscure niche for the kind of weirdos who don’t even get off on regular porn.”

  “By the way, he made off with your dressing gown and a matching set of bra and panties.”

  “By ‘made off with,’ I assume you mean ‘ran away wearing’?”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “Huh. For him cross-dressing is usually a prelude to either fisting or some serious scat-play, so it’s a good thing you chased him off.”

  “You know how you might reach him if you needed to?”

  “Probably,” she said. “Why?”

  “No reason.”

  •••

  Having been treated to a hero’s repertoire of arcane sexual favors from a very grateful Ginny, I left the hotel and, wearing a cap and dark glasses and carrying a newspaper, got onto the Métro.

  I was standing across a lady with one clouded, milky eye and a cane and who looked too old to be out and about that late. She reminded me of my great-grandmother who died when I was five, a dear old soul who always smelled of violets and tooth decay and who thought the sun shone out my little ass. She seemed ancient to me, and I suppose she must have been past ninety when she finally went. The sudden memory of her holding me in her lap and handing me a hard candy wrapped in cellophane made me chuckle, which drew the attention of the old lady across the aisle from me.

  “Filth,” she said, little flecks of spit flying from her false teeth. “Pervert.”

  I looked around to see who she was talking about. Was she referring to me, or to Dr. Crandall Taylor, or had she mistaken me, with my dark glasses and baseball cap with its bill pulled down, for Satan or his emissary?

  “You there,” she said, fixing her milky gaze on me. “You heard me. I know all about you and your filthy, filthy games. People like you ruin this life for decent folk like me and Raymond.”

  I looked away, hoping whatever her particular brand of crazy was would allow her to fix her rage on someone else, but she kept it up until she got off at Poissonières. As she struggled to get onto the platform before the closing of the doors I heard her say, “Yes, Raymond, I told the dirty little bastard.”

  •••

  I got out at Pigalle, crossed the square, and mounted the rue Germain Pilon. As I reached the top someone called out to me.

  “Want a date?” rasped a feminine voice trying desperately to rise above its unmistakably masculine natural register. Across from me stood a streetwalker who looked like Yaphet Kotto in drag.

  “Thanks anyway,” I said, wondering why tonight seemed to be drag queen night in Paris and wondering also who exactly constituted the clientele for his genre of hooker. There was a market for any kind, I supposed; there used to be a block—maybe there still is—at the south end of the rue St. Denis where all the whores were over sixty; one or two of them were quite elegant ladies, but most were weather-beaten alcoholics catering to the poorest, most indigent of johns. I remember passing through on my way to the Les Halles RER station one day, I must have been about twenty, when someone hissed at me.

  “Je
une homme!” An obese crone of seventy-odd years was leering at me from a doorway. “Viens voir!” Then she hiked up her skirt to reveal an immense, ancient salt-and-pepper bush above a pair of chalky thighs, withered and dimpled. When I failed to approach, she tilted her head down at her crotch and grinned, nodding. “Viens voir!” Though I declined the invitation, I have no doubt that she did a lively trade on the whole.

  •••

  I said earlier I wasn’t going to complain about being a celebrity, and I’m not, but here’s where I point out that this is one of those situations where it complicates things. In L.A. you just go to the store and say, “I’d like a gun, please, and some armor-piercing bullets, and throw in one of those maps to the Stars’ Homes while you’re at it,” and no one bats an eye. In Paris you have to know someone who knows someone, and if you’re famous then it’s damned hard for word not to get around that you bought a gun.

  I should have had Fred do it, but he was busy taking care of Claude, and I was impatient for the script to be finished. Anyway, on the Place des Abbesses I found the café Balthazar had mentioned, and at the bar I ordered a Kanterbräu and asked for Gégé.

  “Never heard of him,” the bartender said.

  “I’m a friend of Balthazar’s.”

  “I don’t know any Balthazar.”

  I could understand his reluctance to help. Here was a guy with a baseball cap and dark glasses—indoors, at midnight—and a foreign accent, asking for someone who does a brisk trade in various sorts of illegal merchandise in your place of business. He must have taken me for some sort of cop, and reluctant though I was to drop my cover, I took off my shades for a moment.

  “I’m not a cop,” I said. “More like a doctor.”

  Recognizing me, he nodded and poured me a beer. “Okay. Balthazar said you might come by. I’m Gégé. What you need?”

  “Something for protection.”

  “I got it.” He yelled at a young man in a black waiter’s vest who was sweeping around the pinball machine. “Ahmed, watch the bar for a minute.”