Strip Poker

by Lisa Lawrence

  The oil executive looked at him blankly. “What village?” Thinking better of it, he said, “Look, Mr….? Let me guess. UNICEF? Christian Aid? Well, whoever you are, I’m not interested in politics. If these people you’re talking about are on concession land then I can’t say I feel terribly sorry for them. Well and good that they go! And if they’re not, then I can hardly be expected to express concern over something that is outside our corporate responsibilities.”

  “This guy was out when they had the public relations course,” I whispered.

  Simon glanced at me, his face reflecting my own loathing for the man. He stood up in the Jeep, leaned his elbows on the windshield. Doing his best to keep a lid on his simmering indignation.

  “Right. We’ll try a different tack. Could you at least tell me, since you’re here, whether we can expect more Murahaliin swooping in for your ‘protection’?”

  The Orpheocon man thought this was a scream. Chuckling away, he said, “You know it occurs to me that if I say yes, there are more on their way, I’m doing your precious villagers a favour, aren’t I? They’re packed already, I suppose.”

  I tugged on Simon’s arm. “Let’s just get out of here and join the convoy.”

  “In a minute,” said Simon.

  He gestured to one of his friends sitting behind me in the Jeep to hand him the old, rusting Kalashnikov rifle. I watched Simon raise the machine gun with nonchalant grace, and before anyone could do anything, there was a jackhammer rumble that was deafening, and an angry red blotch erupted in the chest of the Orpheocon executive. He didn’t die like in the movies—he merely fell in a lifeless heap in the dirt.

  I panicked and foolishly grabbed at the rifle, my hand pulling back with my mild yelp from the still-hot muzzle.

  “Are you insane?” I yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Under my voice, I could hear rifles being cocked on both sides. I hadn’t seen the guns Simon’s pals had brought along. I hadn’t a clue that the Nuba in the Range Rover had come armed as well.

  A Mexican standoff, African style.

  The Arabs faced us with better American weapons, but there were more Nuba with more guns, and if things got worse they were going to lose this bout. And all I could think was: Jesus, Simon’s killed us. Whoever wins, those Arabs will pick us off first.

  “Why did you do that?” I demanded.

  But Simon ignored me. He jumped out of the car and brandished the rifle at the Murahaliin, telling them in Arabic, “You go back now and tell your bosses at the company their concession out here has been revoked!”

  I followed him out of the Jeep, but I didn’t know what to do.

  The Murahaliin said nothing. After a moment in which I thought my heart was going to beat its way out of my chest, the Arabs turned with their sour faces, muttering “abid,” and jumped into the Humvee. Simon was already returning to the Jeep. I grabbed his arm.

  “What was that?”

  “That was the answer,” he shot back, his voice angry. His blood was up just as much as mine. “That was surgery.”

  “That was incredibly stupid,” I snapped. “Shit, you murdered him!”

  “Come on, Teresa. You’re the last person I would expect to complain! For Christ’s sake, Orpheocon hires the Murahaliin. Chevron used to hire the Murahaliin! You had Total over here for the French doing—”

  “I know the facts,” I cut in. “And what you just did makes you one more white man thinking he can solve our fucking problems! For God’s sake, Simon, can’t you see there’s going to be a massive reprisal for this? We could have just sent him on his way! We could have driven them off, we—”

  “So I went one better.”

  “What is this?” I demanded. “You want to feel good about yourself with that soldier-of-fortune shit? Did you get your rocks off?”

  “I removed one of the bloodsuckers,” he replied. “Maybe if we shoot enough of them, the companies will back out of their concessions, and the regime will have to think twice.”

  “Doubtful,” I muttered.

  There seemed little point in arguing anymore. I was the only one standing by the side of the car, holding everyone up. I took my old spot on the passenger side, and Simon drove us back to the safe territory.

  I could never look at him the same way again. Not because I thought killing the oil executive was necessarily wrong. He was a bastard profiteer who thought he was invulnerable, immune from the ravages the Khartoum regime and his company inflicted here. He was mistaken. But Simon had shot him down without hesitation and so ruthlessly that I saw now he was capable of practically anything.

  And I questioned his motives. I had thought he had “matured” past the usual White Man’s Burden nonsense that “well-intentioned” aid workers came over with, having their little relief-work martyrdom, getting their kicks over exotica and then heading home. I thought he was struggling towards finding a role where he could be useful. And now I saw I was mistaken. He was a shopper like all the others, and he’d merely been looking for something different.

  I stayed with the Nuba for a couple of months after that episode and gradually made my way back into the north, taking a flight home to London. Mutual friends who visited Sudan told me Simon did a complete amateur mercenary gig with the rebel SPLA for a little while, and then he, too, fled the country, sneaking across the Ethiopian border and having the cheek to walk into a British consulate to ask for help. I suspect his vanity got a mild thrill out of all the rumours and stories circulating about him, but he dropped off my personal radar.

  And, come to think of it, I didn’t play cards again with anyone for three years.

  1

  Stretch limos don’t normally impress me. Except I wouldn’t think you could get a full-size massage table in one. Goes to show you how good my depth perception is. The legs were sawed off like those of a stool, but I was high enough to look through the tinted windows at all the kids smoking pot and the frustrated map readers at the Eros fountain in Piccadilly. I was lying on my back, nude, which was okay by me because Fitz was naked as well, kneeling at the end of the table, cradling my right foot in one hand.

  He had spent the last forty minutes reducing me to a pliant mass of soft flesh, practically every muscle in my body relaxed while the whole limo smelled like lavender and a couple of other massage oils. Alicia Keys’s new album was playing on the portable stereo. And there was Fitz, nut-brown biceps flexing and swelling as his fingers worked the ball of my foot, that wide chest of his falling and rising with each breath. When he inched his way forward on one knee, I looked at the vanity mirror he had propped up and got a terrific view of his ass in the reflection.

  He smiled down at me, warm brown eyes and flashing white teeth framed by his funky dreads. I had this honey glaze from the oil on my dark skin, and he was getting this polish sheen of sweat from his efforts. My eyes kept straying to his long, thick dick that kept insistently pointing north. Fitz and I don’t have much of a relationship. Sure, we sleep together regularly, but he’s more like…I don’t know, sexual comfort food.

  As the car made its wide turn onto Regent Street like a sea barge, I glanced down and thought: I’m gonna have to do something soon about that gorgeous cock. Only I was a little busy. His right hand kneading my toes, while his left was working the lubed-up dildo in my pussy, and I heard his voice say gently over the music, “Hey, I don’t think I ever showed you this trick. Doesn’t work on everyone, but…”

  That tiny buzzing sound of the dildo motor as he plunged it in deeper just as the pad of his thumb pressed hard on this point (don’t ask me where the hell it is!) in the arch of my foot. And then I was spontaneously, violently, coming. “Shit! Oh, shit, Fitz, do that again, baby!”

  My head fell back against the cushioned headpiece of the massage table, my back arching, and I was clawing at the white sheet. I told him hoarsely that I thought we better close the sunroof. They’d probably hear me out there in Oxford Circus.

  And then my mobile rang.<
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  I was going to ignore it. Fitz was ignoring it. He sent me into another small convulsion and as I floated down from the high, that damn phone kept ringing on and on, and I saw the number on the caller ID. Helena.

  Fitz worked for my friend Helena Willoughby these days. He was with me tonight “on loan” as a way to get me to do a favour for her. I wasn’t sure what the favour was going to be, but I was certain it would be a bit dodgy. Of course, if I really wanted or needed to see Fitz, I could call him up any time I liked, but it was Helena who tossed in the frills—what she liked to call “OTT TLC.” Over-the-top tender loving care. The limo, the champagne on ice with the Belgian chocolates I loved, not to mention the chocolate-coloured man I could just eat up as well. Seeing Fitz as a “client” made things less complicated, and if Helena wanted to pick up the tab, hey, why not? I could always say no.

  “Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!”

  Oh, I was pretty far from saying no.

  That damn phone.

  “Teresa?”

  “Helena, your timing absolutely sucks.”

  Evil giggling at the other end. “Sounds like you’re having a good time. Can I count on you?”

  “You know it’s going to cost you more than a couple of foot rubs.”

  I expected her to wind me up further with how he was rubbing more than my feet, but she turned serious. In fact, I could hear a trace of fear in her voice. She was doing her best to keep the tone light, but she was deeply troubled.

  “Cost is no object, really. When you guys finish up, can you come out to the house?”

  “Listen, honey, if it’s that bad, I’ll swing over now—”

  “No, no,” she said briskly. Long nervous breath down through the line. “An hour or two will be fine. I appreciate it, I really do. And you’ll be handsomely compensated. Teresa…?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I haven’t, um, seen you for a while,” she said carefully. “You kept yourself up, haven’t you?”

  I laughed in disbelief into the phone. “What?”

  “I mean you still work out, don’t you?”

  I checked myself out in the mirror for Helena’s sake. Damn her for making me self-conscious about my body. Had I kept myself up? Mmmmm, yes. I saw a young woman closing in on thirty but not showing it too much, I hoped. My legs were still long and toned. I always thought my ass was a little too big, but hey, why was she asking me this? The neck. You start to show age in the neck and around the eyes, don’t you? Jesus, she was making me paranoid.

  “Helena, why don’t you ask Fitz for his opinion when we come in?”

  “I’m sorry, darling.” A quick goodbye, and then she rang off.

  “She wants me to come out to the house,” I told Fitz, my fingertips reaching for his still-hard penis, “but we have some time. You know any other pressure points like that one?”

  Helena lived out in Richmond-upon-Thames, in a five-bedroom house that was twenty minutes’ walk from the rail station and ten minutes’ drive from the park. She was always destined to be out there or somewhere in SW land, bred from oh-so-respectable middle-tier Knightsbridge stock. The surprise was that her mortgage payments came from good-looking hunks taking out London’s female rich and elite, women in their late thirties, forties and fifties. The guys took the ladies to dinner, to premieres and to galas and sometimes to bed. Helena probably ran the most successful male escort agency for “straight dates” in London.

  I came to know her because I was initially a friend of her sister Susan. It was that “interesting” period of my life, as I call it, when I dropped out of Uni at Oxford and thoroughly pissed off my family. I was looking for ways to make money that didn’t involve long stretches of boredom. Susan put me onto Helena, about ten or fifteen years older than us, who needed someone to do a bit of snooping on a competitor. Long story with a couple of ugly details, but let’s just say the guy from the Met who wanted his kickback ended up being bounced from the force.

  Since Helena and I had hit it off, we socialised now and then. And she asked me if I knew any guys who were reasonably intelligent, could conduct themselves well and would be discreet enough for her business. The pay was good, and a “date” for an evening didn’t necessarily imply sex. That was always negotiated beforehand very, very carefully, and Helena expected her cut. At the time, my fling was winding down with Fitz. I knew he had a dream of opening his own massage centre one day that would offer Swedish, Shiatsu, aromatherapy—you get the idea. Banks don’t always care for tall black men coming in and asking for business loans. Hell, banks don’t like anybody. If he could get his stake together, good luck to him.

  So Fitz went off to work for Helena, and I moved on to other jobs. I’ve been an international courier, spending my nights on red-eye flights back and forth to Chicago. I did a bit of work in Geneva trying to help another friend sell modern art through her gallery (that’s the one that paid for brief gracious living in the Nuba Mountains). And when the appraisals got a bit shady I was asked to look into that, too. Little by little over time, I’ve wound up earning my keep by solving unpleasant little problems for people. Sometimes all of London looks like it’s on the fiddle or has a small secret business going on to get around Inland Revenue.

  Helena’s trouble came along at the right moment. Rent was due soon on my flat in Earl’s Court, and if I didn’t have anything else, I would have to temp again at a media clipping service (yecchh) or at a reception desk (double-yecchh) or scrounge from my friend Richard to lead a few classes at his women’s self-defence and kickboxing school, but that would only be good for a few trips to Sainsbury’s. So naturally I was prepared to accept Helena’s chore. Only the first rule of business is: never show your client how eagerly you want them.

  Fitz hadn’t quite learned that one yet. As the limo left Hammersmith and snaked its way towards Chiswick and onto North Sheen, he filled me in one smooth, delicious stroke….

  Helena kept her house on a permanent yellow alert of show home display, the lights always on as the estate agents advised you, not a grain of dirt on the white carpet, the upholstery of the couches always looking shampooed, not simply brushed. Her sister Susan told me she was a regular addict of shows like House Doctor and Ideal Home on Sky. And yet I know there was no agency sign on the front, and she wouldn’t want to put this gem on the market.

  She had this thing for “themes” for each room, one done in Japanese style, one with African masks, her kitchen dripping with Art Deco chrome. All I could think was that she went to this trouble because her client base and her social set were indistinguishable—with the few exceptions of unrespectable middle-class types like me.

  She must have been pretty anxious. As the limo slid into the driveway, she was waiting at the threshold. Helena’s an attractive blonde wearing her hair short these days. With her green eyes and her full curvy figure, she had been approached years ago to become an escort herself, which is how she got the idea for her business. Someone asked her once why she didn’t recruit girls since the demand was higher for female escorts. “Yes, that’s true, but I want a quiet life,” she said airily. “Men will unzip their flies in a minute when they think they’re owed something. With my business, the boys drop ’em on command. With girls, you have to give them a reason or a high enough price to open their legs, and after a while, they convince themselves they don’t need me to book them dates.”

  Once upon a time, she had apparently raised hell with the RADA types and a bunch of Sloanies. She still liked her fun. For her, the best fun was the kind that made her money.

  Fitz opened the car door for me like a true gentleman, and I stepped out in my little black cocktail number that I hadn’t worn for more than thirty seconds with him. As his hand chivalrously touched the small of my back, I could still feel the light glaze of the oil on my skin, and I don’t know why I felt mildly embarrassed when Helena had set the whole thing up. I whispered to Fitz that he’d missed a couple of buttons on his shirt, and he and Helena traded a look.
/>   “Would you like a drink?” she asked politely.

  I said no, still a bit tipsy from the champagne. Fitz went ahead and had a rum and Coke. His work for the evening was done. We made some small talk about Congestion charges and appalling train service and how my gallery friend out in Geneva was doing, then the lull told us we should get down to business.

  “Okay, I’m here, honey. What’s the problem?”

  “It’s like this,” she said, casting a wary eye at Fitz.

  If he knew what was going on, he wasn’t in any position to help. He took a hint and switched on the telly, finding the football channel in seconds flat. Helena focused on me.

  “Teresa, how good are you at cards?”

  I looked blankly at her. Gin rummy? Solitaire? It was Solitaire when my parents took my brother and me on a trip to France. Helena offered a patient, amused smile. “No, not those games.”

  We abandoned Fitz to Manchester United while we went into her study. She’d had this room done in Italian motif, dark wood antiques and Grand Tour prints of Venice on the walls. Her computer stuff, though, was state of the art.

  We watched the Windows XP logo come on, then Helena tapped an icon, and a box opened with streaming video. I’m a tech-illiterate, but I was fascinated for a couple of seconds by the incredible resolution of the picture. She tapped another key, and the image became full-size, as good as looking at any television. I watched people sitting at a round green table, little chips in the centre. The sound, however, wasn’t fantastic—like listening to voices picked up through closed-circuit television, which this sort of was.

  “Call.”

  “Three queens and a pair of fours.”

  “Very nice, but I believe a straight flush beats a full house—”

  “Web cameras in each room,” explained Helena. “We recorded this last weekend.”

  She tapped a couple more keys for a pull-down menu, and now we saw multiple boxes, multiple images. I peered over her shoulder. With a “May I?” gesture, I clicked the mouse to bring up the green table again.

  Yes, that’s what I thought I saw. The people playing cards were dressed in very chic and handsome clothes, but a couple of them weren’t dressed at all. Laughter rang around the table as the cards were turned over. A brunette in her thirties peeled her jumper off over her head, revealing a set of luscious milky breasts underneath. No bra. She had obviously come to the game with more enthusiasm than clothes.