Against Nature

by Casey Barrett

  “She seemed to be taking it well.”

  Cass gave me a glare. “You shouldn’t have provoked her like that,” she said. “I told you not to say anything. We’re lucky she wasn’t armed. She often is.”

  I shrugged, dug into the avocado, egg, and cheese. “I didn’t like the way she was speaking to you.”

  “Yeah, well, you could have gotten us both shot.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Next time will probably be the last time,” she said. “I hate that tough-guy routine.”

  “Apologies, now back to the emails,” I said. “How do you propose we open them? You have any idea what his passwords could be? Any chance he might have written them down somewhere?”

  “Doubtful,” she said. “Victor prided himself on his memory. I can’t see him writing down passwords. That would defeat the purpose. I could make some educated guesses, but we don’t want the account disabled after too many wrong tries. That would just make things more difficult when we ask for help.”

  “Who do you suggest we ask? Any old hacker friends?”

  “Like I was saying, every company has its own procedure for recovering the data of the dead. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, they all have slightly different policies. Victor used Gmail and iCloud for everything, so I looked into those two. Apple’s policy is just one paragraph, claiming that all content on a person’s iCloud account is terminated and deleted upon death. Pretty harsh if you think about it, all those endless family photos that so many folks have stored there. They have a support section that says it can help, so maybe they’re not wiping everything out the second they see a death certificate, but going through Apple seems like a long shot.”

  “But Google seems easier?”

  “For an authorized representative, yes,” she said. Cass reached over and helped herself to my grapefruit juice. She drained half of it and set it down without apology. “They have a two-part process where representatives of the deceased can submit a bunch of info and then wait for a case review to see if you can proceed to step two, where I guess they take a closer look into the person requesting the emails and determine whether or not to release everything. The whole process can take a few months.”

  “You’re willing to wait a few months for that?” I asked. “And how are you an authorized representative? Unless you were married without mentioning it.”

  “We weren’t, and no, I’m not. We’d need Susie to help us. Which is unlikely, but we may not have to go through the front door.”

  Cass’s dark eyes lit. She helped herself to the rest of my juice. The corners of her mouth turned up as she drank. Setting it down, she licked her top lip and said, “I think I know someone who can help us.”

  “Old client of yours?” I asked.

  “Old colleague,” she said. “At the Chamber. Girl named Natalie Shaw. Went by Mistress Nikita. She was a really talented domme, a natural. She whipped her way through NYU, majoring in computer science. I was sort of her mentor at the dungeon. We used to session together sometimes, when slaves wanted two at once. Anyway, when she graduated, she got a job at Google and moved out west. She works in their security department. Nat was always obsessed with cybersecurity and privacy. She would always say we had no clue how vulnerable we were, how easy it was to find anyone’s so-called ‘private’ data. We haven’t stayed in touch, but I think she might be willing to help.”

  “What would you tell her?” I asked. “You think this girl would risk her career at Google just to help a former fellow dominatrix?”

  “I would tell her the truth, Duck,” she said. “And yes, I do. You don’t understand the bonds that can form in a dungeon.”

  “And what would that truth be?”

  She paused. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled and exhaled.

  “That I was in love,” she said. “The truth is that I was in love with someone and he died, and I don’t think it was an accident or a suicide. And now I want to find out what happened to him. Natalie will understand that. Mistresses know how hard it is. After you’ve spent enough time in a dungeon, the thought of a real relationship, even the concept of love, can seem impossible.”

  I gulped at my coffee to wash away the sting of her statement. Cass, in love . . . Now heartbroken, she’d whistled for her loyal bird dog to help her investigate. I set down my cup and stared at the second half of my wrap. I wanted a drink, and another after that. I wanted to launch myself on a three-day bender and come out of it to find myself abandoned, alone with only myself to blame for the pain. Cass excused herself and slid from her seat. As she walked to the ladies’ room in the back, I watched the eyes of other diners follow her. I slipped my phone from my pocket and regarded the backlog of messages awaiting my attention. I ignored the voice mails. I’m unable to understand why anyone leaves them anymore. Listening to them has become a tedious anachronism. I looked at my texts. The number 13 was lit in the red bubble at the upper right of the green icon. A handful were from past clients, curious about my reappearance in the Post; there was some badgering from Roy Perry, looking for a comment; one from detective Lea Miller, telling me to take care of myself; and to my surprise, one from Juliette Cohen.

  Are you ok? Saw the news.

  I wrote her back at once: Can I come see you?

  I saw the ellipses appear in her reply box. I saw Cass returning, and tried to shield the screen. She sat back down and glanced at my phone just as Juliette’s reply came through:

  I don’t know if that’s a good idea....

  “That your lady friend?” she asked.

  I didn’t look up. Typed: Please. I’d really like to see you and Stevie. Been a crazy few days. Then, after hitting SEND, I added: I’m sorry.

  I set the phone facedown next to my plate and motioned to the redhead for the check. I felt Cass watching me.

  “So, what’s your plan for today?” she asked. “Gonna go grovel for your lady’s forgiveness?”

  The irritation in her voice gave me a dose of satisfaction. I didn’t think she was capable of jealousy, but she wouldn’t like someone else holding my leash.

  “Maybe. I’d like to see her,” I said. “And her son. They’re worried about me, after seeing the news.”

  “You should.”

  “What’s your plan?”

  “I’m gonna see if I can reach Natalie, see what we can do about these emails. Then I thought I’d stop by the Chamber. It’s been a while. I feel like I should say hello to Rebecca.”

  Rebecca was the head domina and owner of the Chamber. Cass’s ostensible boss, though I knew all mistresses worked on a freelance basis, giving a cut to the house for use of the various dungeon rooms. I also knew Cass had been the most popular mistress Rebecca ever had. She would be welcomed back with open leather-clad arms.

  “Maybe you can book a few sessions while you’re at it,” I said.

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Easy money.”

  “There’s nothing easy about it,” she said. “But I know a few gentlemen who might be glad to see me.”

  “I’m sure the line is long.”

  Cass shook her head, stood, and left me with the check as the redhead cleared my plate. She offered a sympathetic smile, asked if I’d like anything else.

  “Do you have any serenity?” I asked.

  “Is that a drink?”

  “I wish,” I said. “How about the wisdom to know the difference?”

  But she didn’t get it. I watched her smile fade.

  “Never mind. Could I have a mojito?”

  The redhead nodded and retreated while I watched Cass walk out the door without looking back.

  I looked at my phone to find a reply from Juliette: Okay. Come over around 2. We should talk before Stevie gets home from school.

  I said I’d see her then. I salivated at the thought of my coming cocktail, considered the odds of staying sober until then. If only for Stevie’s sake, I told myself this would be my only beverage of the day, at least until nigh
t fell. But my hands would be idle for another few hours and the devil was already dancing in my head.

  Chapter 12

  The day was brisk and blue, with wisps of clouds in Rorschach patterns above the buildings. Pollen burst from tree buds and tortured the allergic. I stood at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 16th Street behind two young women moaning about the season. One sneezed in rapid succession, covering her face with a black-sleeved blouse, while the other, dressed dimly for the weather, hugged her bare arms and stared at the blue sky and sighed how she couldn’t wait until summer.

  I crossed over to the west side with no destination in mind. There was a massage parlor halfway down the block that advertised table showers and body scrubs on a sidewalk placard. Euphemisms for “hand jobs,” not that anyone cared. Houses of various forms of prostitution existed on every block in this city. “New York values,” said a failed Republican presidential candidate as he knelt before Goldman partners for interest-free loans to fund his hate-filled campaign. The city had a generous heart, too generous for some. It was a place where everyone could be honest about desire. It required only the will to knock on the right doors. Transactions were a given, some more up front than others. As long as the parties were consenting and of age, I didn’t have a problem with any of it. I’d never understand the men who longed to be whipped and wounded and pissed on by Cass and her fellow dommes, but I had my own issues with masochism to deal with. They just didn’t happen to be quite so literal or fetishized.

  The memory of Carl Kruger’s impaled body came back to me as I passed through the Village. The javelin forced through his trachea as he lay on the sticky barroom floor. After I was knocked out, how had it gone down? Carl would have put up a fight. He was not a man to stand down and accept his fate. Was he forced to the ground at gunpoint? Did the murderer have an accomplice? Why was I spared?

  Despite our brief volley of pint-throwing violence, I liked the man. Under different circumstances there could have been a hazy raised-glass friendship, nights drank away at Kruger’s with wife Uli pouring and Carl laughing along to his loud music behind the bar. There was a bravery to him, an honesty, that shone through. Here was someone with demons to match my own, and he was fighting the good fight. He rose from the abyss, found someone to love, found a measure of peace and prosperity. Until a nosy, has-been journalist turned up with his striking lady friend and started asking questions about his past. Victor Wingate had muddied the long-still waters of his memory, got him talking about criminals—child abusers—that never paid for their crimes.

  I turned south and walked down Seventh Avenue with One World Trade filling the sky at the bottom of the island. The replacement to the Twin Towers offended me at first, with its lost potential for greatness and its heavy-handed symbolism, peaking at 1,776 feet. The city could have delivered something iconic, worthy of sharing world’s greatest skyline with the Empire State and the Chrysler, the Woolworth and the Flatiron. Instead it sent up another bland monolith of glass and steel. But there was something about its simplicity, the long triangular symmetries, and the way the sun lit the glass and blended it into blue spring days. I kept moving toward it without realizing where I was headed. It wasn’t until my legs turned right on West 4th and took a left on Cornelia Street that I became conscious of my destination.

  Charlie McKay’s former home was a block farther, on Leroy Street. I hadn’t gone near it in the twenty months since I was tortured there. I’d been a part of horrors inside that house that would never heal. Two of us emerged alive, and two more were left dead I seldom thought of Madeline McKay any longer. I tried not to envision her post-traumatic sufferings since she escaped her brother. When I thought of her, I pictured an illusion that I knew would never materialize: Madeline healed and happy on a beach somewhere, smiling in the sun, as the warmth soothed her scars. I didn’t care to conjure the more likely reality, of a young woman forever shattered, who would turn back to drugs and reckless sex to numb a past she could never get over.

  I stood across the street, facing the house, not daring to step closer. The façade had been altered since I last saw it. The ivy that covered the front was gone now. The front door, garage, and windows were now period appropriate, the modern design stripped away. I approved of the changes. I hoped the inside had been gutted as well. Charlie’s taste, minor among his many evils, was horrendous. The soulless white décor spoke to the vacancy inside him. I remembered the floating stairs, the modern art, the blade slicing down my face, the teeth of the bolt cutters wrapped around my Achilles, and the sound of Charlie’s grunt as he pressed them together and snapped my tendon apart.

  The panic of PTSD rose inside me. I felt the anxiety bubbling, wished I had some Xanies to swallow. My eyes scanned for an open bar down the block. The need to pour whiskey on the circuits was consuming me. I searched the faces of passersby; the paranoia was returning. There was someone following me. I was sure of it. There was someone tracking me and waiting for the right moment to strike. There’s no such thing as paranoia, I reminded myself. The voices are real and so is the presence behind you. It’s all true. I explained this once to my therapist. She replied that I’d reached the height of the disorder.

  I saw movement behind the second-floor windows of the house. An older woman peered out of the diamond panes. For a moment I mistook her for Margaret McKay, the mother who set it all in motion by hiring me to find her daughter. Could she have moved into her dead son’s home, where such sibling horrors unfolded? No, impossible, the woman looking down at me was not her. Just another well-dressed wealthy lady with a face-lift and a fine-looking ivory dress, there was hardly any resemblance beyond the checkmarks of class. A look of concern crossed her face as she gazed down at me. Concern shifted to fear as I held her eye contact. A phone appeared in her hand and she tapped at the screen and held it to her ear. She turned her back and moved from the window. I blinked, tried to bring myself back. My pulse was pumping, sweat leapt from my forehead. The block spun. I thought for a moment I might faint. I sat down on the nearest stoop, put my head between my knees, and closed my eyes. Just breathe. Go home, lie down, take three Xanies, this will pass. You should never have come here. I realized that a cop would soon be rolling down the block in response to her call. I forced myself to stand, staggered south. I needed to lose the hellhounds on my trail.

  I wove through the maze of the West Village, where the numbers disappear and the city grid shifts off center. I’ve never lived anywhere but Manhattan in my life and I can still get lost in this pocket of streets. It was still before noon and all the bars I passed were closed. A blessing, I knew, but I could always find somewhere that was serving, or wave down a cab and head home and drink myself into a soothing stupor. Something stopped me. It was Stevie, I supposed, and Juliette. My only tether to sanity—an eight-year-old kid who probably didn’t want to see me, and his mother, whose affection had now turned to pity. I would stay sober for them today, even if it meant risking a breakdown on the sidewalk. Every half block or so I glanced back and searched the faces of pedestrians, the make of the cars, certain that I would recognize something. Paranoia was a protective instinct, a survival mechanism. It was only a disorder if there was no one coming for you. And there always was.

  I must have walked for an hour or so before I found myself turned around and back on Sixth Avenue, facing Uptown. The IFC movie theater was on the west side of the street across from the West 4th subway stop. The façade advertised a retrospective of contemporary Japanese cinema. I chose a documentary about a famed sushi restaurant in a Tokyo subway station. I remembered reading a review, three or four stars, but I didn’t care about its content. It started in ten minutes and its running time was an hour and twenty-three. Enough to kill the remainder of the afternoon, keep me away from bottles, and get me to the Cohen apartment, sober, by two p.m.

  The film sucked me in. The master sushi chef toiled in his ten-seat subterranean temple of fish, spurning bigger, more profitable opportunities, and instead dev
oted his life to excellence and simplicity. He was described as a shokunin—someone who has embraced the persistent pursuit of perfection in his art. His apprenticeships for aspiring sushi chefs took a decade.

  I envied that purity of purpose, remembered it from another time, my interrupted childhood as a swimmer. I was good too, fast enough for whispers of Olympic potential. I cared about little else, nothing beyond faster times and moving up the rankings, and pleasing my own master—my coach, Teddy Marks. But then came the fall: my father’s disgrace and imprisonment, the overnight identity shift from rich to poor, moving with my mother from the Upper East Side brownstone to that Lower East Side tenement.

  Mom tried to drink away the disorientation. She succeeded. She drowned in the bathtub during my last year of high school, an empty bottle of Popov vodka by the tub. I found myself annoyed by the chef’s sons in the film, conflicted by the pressure to succeed the patriarch. Poor boys, heirs to a master, their worries revolved around the temperature of rice, or how long to massage an octopus.

  But at least the anxiety settled. The fear subsided, the paranoia wasn’t quite so consuming. I felt a certain pride in handling the symptoms without self-destruction for once. I could have reached for the booze and the pills and erased the panic in a fog of oblivion. Instead I had taken a long walk and watched a fine film. Now I could see Juliette and her son with a clear head, without shame.

  The denouement was wrapping up. The master chef summed it up for his oldest son, groomed to take over for his father: “He just needs to do it for the rest of his life,” he said. I straightened in my seat. I remember exhaling, with something like peace of mind. Then my theory about paranoia and its nonexistence was proven true.

  I sensed movement in the seat behind me. Before I could turn, a strong arm wrapped around my eyes and yanked my head back. I felt the edge of a knife press into my neck. I resisted and felt the blade break skin.

  “Miss me?” he asked.

  His voice was hot and close in my ear. I didn’t dare kick the seats or shout for help. I’d have a severed carotid artery and three or four minutes before I bled out on the theater floor. My assailant would race for a side exit and may or may not escape, but it wouldn’t matter. One deep cut and I’d be done. So I listened.