by Kim Newman
Arriving in Istanbul between the coming of talking pictures and the Wall Street Crash, he had drifted into the restaurant trade, turning a particularly vile brothel into a fashionable nightclub. He hired singers who actually could sing, rather than belly-dancers renowned only for their ability to pleasure simultaneously an inordinate number of patrons, and he replaced the group of criminals, cripples, degenerates and relics who had served as an orchestra with genuine musicians from Paris, London and New Orleans. Finally, he had struck an exclusive deal with Turkey's leading importer of American phonograph records, so that his club would introduce the latest Cole Porter or Irving Berlin song to Istanbul weeks before the Fred Astaire or Paul Whiteman versions became available.
It started to rain, and he began to feel as if vinegar were being pissed into his open wounds. Perhaps he had not outgrown pain after all. The entrails piled on his empty belly must be steaming. Somewhere above, but quite near, he heard music. It was Victor Young and His Orchestra with The Boswell Sisters, performing 'I Found a Million Dollar Baby in a Five and Ten Cent Store'. He stopped crawling, and feeling came back to his misaligned elbows. He tossed his head, and the bloody flap lifted from his face and fell more or less in its proper place. He looked down at himself. He was already covered with flies, and a scraggy monkey, a refugee from some street act, was picking at one of his ankles. It looked hungry enough to forget it was supposed to be a herbivore.
As usual, he had got bored with an easy life, and expanded his operations. He had never entirely taken his establishment out of the business of procuring, and he soon rekindled his taste for the marketing of human flesh. He imported girls, and boys, from Greece, Egypt, various Balkan pretend countries, India, China, even the Socialist Workers' Utopia across the Black Sea. Then, he found his aquaintances became useful in furthering a varied trade in foods, drugs, armaments, icons, rare books, general contraband and murder. Money had always bored him, but his interests also enabled him to build up a fortune in the simplest, least tangible, most negotiable currency in the world - information.
Stiffening his back for the purpose, he sat up suddenly. He dragged his arms from behind him and deposited his hands in his lap. He brushed the dirt and flies off his coiled bowels and pressed the functional mass back into his body. He reached for the cummerbund that had been torn off him during his murder, and wrapped it tightly about his midriff, easing shut the wound that had disembowelled him. His insides realigned themselves, itching and burning by turns. He felt ready to use his arms again and reached for the monkey.
At first, he had dealt only with a mountain of a colonel in the Turkish Secret Police, supplying him with interesting tit-bits about the many foreign nationals who passed through his club. Then, he had delicately approached, in turn, the local representatives of Germany, Russia and Great Britain. There would be yet another war eventually, and Turkey was in such an odd spot on the map. Squeezed between three troubled continents and theoretically neutral, it was naturally at the centre of all manner of legitimate and illegitimate merchant and refugee activities, and the site of diplomacy and espionage on a scale he had not seen since his dealings with the papacy in the 14th century. It had eased the tedium to see the nations of humankind scheme and plot against one another, and to be able to take a hand in the shaping of the War that would change everything again.
The monkey's meagre meat and brief flare of dreamstuff helped, and he was able unsteadily to stand up. He smoothed his forehead and scalp over his skull, and tore away the dead tatters that clung to his cheekbones and neck. They had cut off his genitals and stamped them into the dirt. That was supposed to be a warning to his associates. It did not concern him much. Thorough his assailants might have been, but they had also shown a typically human lack of imagination in their treatment of him. After so many centuries of torture and violence, he would have thought that men would become practised in the artistry of feeding. But no, the race was still saddeningly small-minded.
He had been amused by the opportunity to juggle with the interests of so many nations and individuals, and had capriciously exploited the situation. Once he had denounced an innocent American tobacco trader as a dangerous enemy spy to the Nazis and the Soviets, and doubled his money by accepting two commissions to arrange his assassination. But someone or other had discovered one of his duplicities, or taken offence at one of his transactions, and had paid a gang of waterfront knifemen to drag him into this alley and ruin him.
Soon, he would be whole again. Then, his murderers would be his meat and drink. And he would find out who had employed them and feed off him. Then there would be the War, and wars were what he liked best of all. Europe would be a killing ground for a while, a banquet for the Kind. Then, he thought, he might go back to the United States. He had the feeling, listening to the torch songs of that nation on his Victrola, that America was about to become the most interesting country on the globe. The Old World was using itself up fast. There was life for the taking beyond the Atlantic, and a vitality which could feed him for decades.
In an upstairs window, a girl appeared. She was not beautiful, but she was not fat and disgusting either. She saw him as a stranger loitering in the dark alley below and routinely exposed her breasts to him.
He stepped into the light, and looked up at her. She did not scream. In her mind, she said she had seen worse.
'That's what you think,' he said out loud in the wrong language, one she did not understand. Through exposed and bloody teeth, he began to serenade her.
'Say it's only a paper moon,' he sang, 'Sailing over a cardboard sea, but it wouldn't be make believe if you believed in me…'
Fascinated, she remained in the window, waiting for him to come up to her. She was his instantly. He saw her entire life, from birth to this moment. Roumanian originally, Macha Igescu was seventeen years old, working for Demetrios Malacou. She loved him because he beat her less than her last protector, never more than once a week. She had had two babies - both sold by Malacou to strangers - and her dreams were befogged by the poppy smoke. She was neanng the end of her professional life. Malacou, she knew, would dump her for that plump-titted Arab bitch, and she would be sold on into some dark dormitory to do her work chained to a cot.
He promised himself that he would find Malacou and kill him for Macha. He would not feed off the pimp; he would just open his throat and let him empty. After all, he was going to owe Macha for his life.
Latching his fingerhooks into the crumbling stonework, he began his climb…
ELEVEN
IN BREWER STREET, all the sex shops had identical notices up in their windows. A Merry Christmas to All Our Customers. The season of goodwill to all men gets everywhere. Anne wondered whether the girls in the Live Erotic Nude Bed Show had to wear Santa Claus hats and reindeer antlers. Weary shop assistants had been busy hanging paper lanterns from the rubberwear, and winding silvery tinsel through displays of sex aids. In a centrally-heated style shop, customers got to choose between purple and turquoise trenchcoats, assisted by young girls with cycle shorts and partially-shaven heads. A record store had a cardboard cut-out of Derek Douane, the teenage ex-choirboy who had inflicted 'Christmas Caroline' on the human race. Anne hurried past his fixed smile, trying not to think of the burbling, thought-destroying tune that could get into your brain and settle for hours. The traffic was snarled, and bike messengers were gleefully whizzing their way through the gridlocked maze of personalised numberplate limousines and delivery vans. In New York, this would occasion a din of honked horns, but the British drivers just sat and fumed in their tincans, waiting for the world to get better. Outside a Chinese take-away, three pigeons pecked determinedly at a splash of frozen sick.
A wino with black toes poking through his mangled trainers aimed himself at her. He skittered through the Christmas-shopping crowds like a pinball, bouncing off walls, lampposts and people, his shaky eyes fixed on her. The grubby hand was already coming out, and the ritual phrase was working its way down from the speech ce
ntres of his brain to the spirits-slurred tongue.
'Excuse me,' she said, before he could get it out, 'Could you spare ten pence for a cup of coffee?'
Usually, derelicts retreated in astonishment at this tactic, but the Soho wino was a hardier breed.
'Fuck you, sister,' he coughed at her through black and broken teeth, 'and the horse you rode in on.'
She sidestepped him, and walked on rapidly. She was not happy with her behaviour. She had done pieces on homelessness. She ought to have more sympathy.
'I fought in three world wars for you,' the tramp shouted at her back. She wished Mace was legal in this country.
The capital was turning into a Third World city, she thought. At every central London subway station, there were begging kids, shivering in several layers of clothes, a pleading message printed in biro on a piece of cardboard. Less aggressive than the alky pan-handlers, the kids were even more depressing, fiercely ashamed of their situation, never meeting the eyes of the passersby. The tramp she had dodged was one of the old-style bums, the last of the Summer winos, and was most likely feeling the pinch. With younger, less stereotypically derelict, not obviously cracked people sleeping rough and trying to get into the spare change business, the old and alcoholic would be pushed out of their place in the begging order. The street population was expanding, as more and more people fell through the gaps in the welfare state's safety net. There were ways to get by, but none of them were pleasant, or safe. Soon, London would be just Tijuana, Bangkok or Casablanca with a lousy climate.
The Club Des Esseintes was difficult to find, but she guessed that it was supposed to be. There was a nostalgia shop at the address listed in Judi's diary, with a passport photographer's and a French model agency upstairs. The plaque was screwed to a wall papered many times over with posters for rock gigs and albums. A group called Faster Pussycat, frozen in mid-scream, dominated the pasted-and-torn collage. She had to look at the wall for a full minute before she found the sign. Someone had scraped a hole in Neneh Cherry's midriff so the words were still visible.
PRIVATE CLUB - WALK DOWN. And in the corner, in little curlicue letters, Des Esseintes.
The shop was full of faded magazines displayed in racks, piles of movie posters and boxes of still photographs. The major display was a selection of one-sheets for films about Santa Claus. In one, the cheery old gentleman was brandishing a bloody hatchet over a naked girl. The ad line boasted 'it's a ho-ho-ho-horror!' You better watch out, Anne thought. Someone had driven a dagger smeared with stage blood through a smiling cut-out of Dudley Moore dressed as an elf. Phil Sector's Christmas Album was coming through the shop's speakers, 'Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)' by Darlene Love. At least that was an improvement on Derek Douane. 'Do you have any material on Caroline Munro,' a foreign customer was asking a bored attendant, 'or Rosanna Podesta?' Anne looked around the shop and found the stairwell behind an impressive array of Japanese warrior robots.
The spiral staircase was black, and the walls bright scarlet, but the well was lit only by one bare bulb at the top. Anne went down into the darkness. The stairs fed her into a corridor, dimly lit by imitation candles in electric sconces. The walls were blood red, the floor herringbone-tiled and polished. There were unrecognisable portraits of men in periwigs hanging between the candles. The Marquis de Sade, she supposed, and intimate friends.
A level below the street, she could no longer hear Darlene Love. Instead, there was the tinkle of musak. She recognised the tune and almost laughed. 'You Always Hurt the One You Love.'
The first serious obstacle stood at the end of the corridor, ominous in a black leather hood. His axe did not look like a prop, and there was a coiled bullwhip in his belt. He was wearing polished boots and lumpy tights, with his chest - muscle just running to meat - bare. Anne thought he was unlikely to be impressed by her NUJ card.
She wanted to go home and forget about the whole thing.
Suddenly, she was one of a crowd. Six or seven people had come down behind her, and she walked down the corridor with them, trying to seem at ease. They looked like an ordinary lunchtime group, office workers out for a Christmas drink. The executioner bowed and opened a pair of double doors, admitting them into a cellar bar. Evidently, he recognised some of the club's regular patrons. Anne was swept inside with them. She noticed one young businessman buckling a studded dog collar around his neck.
There had been a sign above the doors. The Inferno Lounge. She had expected a vaulted torture chamber in Hammer Films style, but, at first sight, the room was more impressive. Three walls and the ceiling were covered with a fairly expert mural in imitation of Hieronymous Bosch. Damned souls wriggled, turned in on themselves in the corners, pierced by water pipes near the ceiling.
The furnishings were black, with occasional silver and scarlet highlights. The only light came from a rank of glowing bar heaters and from the many television monitors, which were perched on high shelves above the bar and around the walls, or set into the tables like video games. Under the musak was the muted sound of whipping and slapping and yelping. There was also the rumble of something that sounded like vast underground machinery, grinding away behind the walls.
Anne climbed onto a stool at the bar, and looked around at the customers. There were a few young women in already-dated punk outfits, including one girl with green hair catnapping upright a few stools down, but most of the people in the Inferno Lounge were conservatively-dressed men. Young to middle-aged white collar types, with briefcases and newspapers. The Mail and the Telegraph. Mostly, they sat alone, watching the televisions and ignoring their drinks.
Anne wondered which, if any, of these people, was N? She did not know whether Judi was meeting a friend, or a… she gulped mentally… or a customer. N could have been anyone, including someone on the staff rather than among the clientele.
Up on the monitors, Anne saw an array of sharp video images. An over-aged schoolgirl, complete with braids and ankle socks, taking her knickers down for a cane-brandishing headmaster. A W.P.C. masturbating furiously with a truncheon. Two bored naked women ineptly flogging a tethered third party. An academic explaining the precise uses of a set of antique nipple clamps.
Anne tried to imagine Judi here, to imagine her talking with the other girls, or with the men. She had specialised in receiving pain, Anne knew, not in giving it. She would have had to determine which was any given client's preference. Looking at a thin blond young man in a business suit, while trying not to seem as if she was looking, she wondered whether he liked to hurt or be hurt. He had almost colourless eyes, and was ghost-pale in the videolight. He reminded her of Constable Barry Erskine, the Batterer. She imagined him making fists, and using them on a girl's face. On Judi's face. Again, Anne wanted to leave, but knew she had taken it too far to just go home…
'You can't just sit here, you know,' someone said, 'you'll have to buy a drink.'
The barman looked like a functionary of the Spanish Inquisition, in black robes, picked out with an assorted batch of mystical symbols. Otherwise, he could have been serving in any other unfriendly pub in town.
'Oh,' said Anne, 'perrier.'
The barman exhumed a green bottle. When he unscrewed the cap, there was the faintest ghost of a carbonated fizz. He poured into a tall glass.
'Ice and lemon?'
'Please.'
He picked up the fruit slice and single lump with a wicked-looking pair of hooked tongs, and dropped them in her drink.
'Four pounds fifty,' he said. She hesitated. 'Remember, no one comes here to drink.'
She handed over a five, and received no change. She let the matter drop. She wished she had given the money to the wino out on the street. At least, he would be able to get drunk out of it.
Shit, what a hole.
Some of the young women were approaching the newcomers, pouting and trying to seem masterful. Even to Anne, it was obvious that the working girls were unable to take all this seriously. The thin blond dropped to his knees and licked a g
irl's creaking boot, his tongue probing the cracks in the leather. She had guessed wrong about him: he was into M, not S. When he looked up, the girl's face was set like a school pantomime version of the Wicked Stepmother, but otherwise she just looked ordinary and tired. The would-be slave kept dropping pound coins into her boot-tops. That must get uncomfortable.
Casually, Anne began her Nancy Drew act. 'Has Judi been in recently?'
'What's all this Judi stuff today?' asked the barman. 'Has she just won the Miss Popularity award?'
Anne pounced, a little too quickly.
'Has anyone else been looking for her?'
'Nina,' the barman said, looking around. It was difficult in the gloom to make anyone out.
Nina? N?
Anne looked around too. The barman had ignored the green-haired girl, so she was out. Which of the others could Nina be?
Anne turned back to the barman, and found that he was, for the first time, looking carefully at her. She knew he was realising that he had never seen her before. She glanced at the doors. The executioner was standing by them.
'You're curious,' the barman told her. 'Open your handbag, love. Let's see your membership card.'
The executioner was coming over now. Nancy Drew had failed. She would have to start being Clint Eastwood instead, and she did not think she was really up to it.
'Eric,' the barman called the executioner, 'we have a trespasser who needs prosecuting.'
These people, she knew, were good at pain. That was how they made their living.
She dashed her perrier into the barman's eyes, and snatched his ice tongs. Eric did not move too fast. She hoped he could not see a thing in his Batman cowl. At school, she had not been a quarterback, but she had not been a cheerleader either. She slammed painfully into the executioner, but he did not fall over.
She grabbed for his mask and pushed it. The eyeholes were now over his forehead. She backed off, but he still managed to hit her hand away before falling over his whip and sprawling on the floor.
