‘Very good,’ said Morton. Then, ‘Would you care for that cup of coffee, sir?’
‘Coffee?’ frowned the President. ‘Who said anything about coffee? Get me a drink.’
*
It was nine-twenty at night in England. The Defence Secretary was in his office at the House of Commons when the telephone rang and his secretary told him that he was wanted at No. 10. He crushed out his Fribourg & Treyer cigarette, and said, under his breath, ‘Damn.’
He walked up Whitehall accompanied by his PPS Dick Mallard and a plain-clothes officer from Scotland Yard whom Dick always called ‘Old Stoneface.’ It was a warm May evening, ideal for walking, although the streets were unusually quiet. The Defence Secretary remembered that tonight was the first showing on British television of The Return of the Jedi. He thought that there was something rather ironic about a population threatened with real thermonuclear war spending their evening watching a fantasy about war in space. It was rather like sitting at a Beethoven concert, listening to a tape of the same music on a Sony Walkman.
They were admitted through the glossy black door of No. 10 into the grey-painted entrance hall, with its marble fireplace and its black and white checked floor. The Prime Minister’s Private Parliamentary Secretary came fussing through from the corridor, his hands flapping like a haberdasher, and said, ‘She’s waiting for you upstairs, sir.’
‘Old Stoneface’ waited behind. He would probably go into the kitchen for a cup of tea with five sugars. The Defence Secretary ran his hand through his hair to clear it away from his eyes as he followed the PPS up the main staircase, which was lined all the way up with oil paintings of past Prime Ministers. Then they went through to the Prime Minister’s study, a large room decorated in Adam green, with small 18th-century landscape paintings hung between the three tall windows which overlooked the garden.
The lamps were lit; the Prime Minister sat at her green leather-topped desk, wearing her reading-glasses. Sitting in one of the sagging crimson velvet chairs, large-faced and rangy and showing a great deal of pale and furry shin, was General Sir Walter Fawkes, chief of the general staff.
‘Hallo, Malcolm,’ the Prime Minister said, in a distracted voice, as the Defence Secretary came in. He drew one of the Queen Anne armchairs across the carpet, so that he could sit nearer to her. He didn’t know that his habit of moving any piece of furniture before he sat in it was intensely irritating to her; and that it was all she could do not to snap at him.
‘Prime Minister,’ said the Defence Secretary, formally. Then he nodded to General Fawkes, and said, ‘Sir Walter.’
The Prime Minister took off her spectacles and laid them on the desk in front of her. ‘We’ve received official confirmation of GRINGO,’ she said. ‘So far, no specific date has been set, but the Americans have promised to let us know within twenty-four hours.’
‘You can start Cornflower, then?’ the Defence Secretary asked General Fawkes. General Fawkes cleared his throat like a Vickers machine-gun, and nearly managed to say something in reply.
‘Any word from the Russians?’ the Defence Secretary wanted to know.
‘Not unless your people have heard anything. But it appears that Castro has at last agreed to stand down and hold a free election, under United Nations supervision, in return for a number of guarantees for his personal protection, and increased investment in Cuban agriculture from US federal funds.’
‘So, we’re ready to go at last,’ said the Defence Secretary, unnecessarily.
‘What mostly concerns me at the moment is the industrial situation here at home,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘The miners don’t vote until tomorrow, but all the indications are that this time, Grange will get a yes. I’ve just heard from Patrick that the railwaymen are considering strike action, starting on Monday; and that the dockers are refusing to discuss their pay offer until the middle of next week.’
‘You’re not suggesting that the strikes have anything to do with GRINGO?’
The Prime Minister lifted her head. In the lamplight, the Defence Secretary could see how tired she looked; how much the events of the past year had aged her. Being an unwilling party to the dismembering of the world had dimmed so much of that political sparkle; worn down so much of that administrative abrasiveness. Fie thought of all those hours of aggressive negotiation in Brussels, when she had argued and fought and browbeaten their EEC partners into lowering Britain’s contributions. Now, within the space of a few days, the EEC would be swept away, and all of that struggle would be meaningless.
General Fawkes made an explosive noise and swung his furry leg backwards and forwards. The Prime Minister said, ‘AR7 have some evidence that the miners’ and the dockers’ strikes were co-ordinated, and that they were somehow initiated by an instruction from outside.’ AR7 was the codename for the government’s anti-union team: last year, its members had successfully managed to bring the power-workers’ strike to an end by exposing corruption within the union committee, and they had infiltrated almost every major left-wing union, right up to executive level.
‘I think perhaps I’d better have a chat with Hubert Vaudrey about that,’ said the Defence Secretary. ‘The last thing we want is to find out that GRINGO has some unforeseen effects.’ He did not have to spell out what he meant by “unforeseen effects”. The British government’s dependence on the United States during the Copenhagen negotiations was far greater than the Prime Minister would have liked, and right from the very beginning, when GRINGO had first been mooted, at least three of her ministers had protested violently about being excluded from the final discussions. One minister had resigned, citing ill-health; a second had found himself involved in a lurid scandal with a pregnant librarian. The third had promised to keep quiet, but it had been made abundantly clear to him that his days in the Cabinet were numbered.
‘There’s one more thing,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘Chancellor Kress has called twice today, expressing concern at the continued strategic positioning of the Soviet Army, and asking again why our administrative staff seem to be doing so much moving around. I think we have managed to satisfy him that our administrative activity is in direct response to the Soviet level of military manoeuvring, but I cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is that not one word about GRINGO or Cornflower reaches any of our allies.’
She spoke that last word, “allies”, with scarcely any emphasis at all. It was a bitter word for her to have to say; particularly since she had always believed so deeply in the Western alliance. She hoped to God that she would have the strength and the clarity of purpose to continue as Prime Minister once GRINGO was all over.
The Defence Secretary jotted a note on a small leather-covered Cartier pad, then tucked his fountain-pen back in his pocket. ‘Jolly good,’ he said, at last, then looked up. ‘We’d better start clearing the decks, hadn’t we? Getting ourselves shipshape?’
General Fawkes grumbled and snorted again, and let out a fusillade of coughs. The Defence Secretary often thought that General Fawkes had reached his position of eminence in the Army by never saying anything with which anyone could either agree or disagree: his entire conversation consisted of inarticulate but military-sounding explosions.
There was a polite knock at the door. It was the house manager. He said, ‘Excuse me. Prime Minister. Tea?’
*
Four hours later, just as dusk began to cling around the warehouses and riverside buildings of New York’s West Village, Esther Modena alighted from a taxi at the intersection of 13th Street and Ninth Avenue. The cabbie didn’t take his eyes off her once as she paid him his fare: he knew what kind of a place it was that she had asked him to take her to. Outside, the triangular building looked shabby and commercial; inside, it was the location of the Hellfire Club, the most notorious of all New York’s sex clubs, a sado-masochistic rendezvous which was supposed to make the celebrated Plato’s Retreat look like a parent-teacher meeting.
‘You wearing anything?’ asked the cabbie at last, un
able to contain himself, as he counted out Esther’s change.
Esther looked down at her simple dove-grey dress.
‘Underneath, I mean,’ said the cabbie. ‘Someone told me you people ride around the city with no underwear, or just chains or something.’
Esther gave him a half-sloping smile. ‘I’m not one of them,’ she told the cabbie. ‘I’m just visiting.’
‘Scares the living shit out of me,’ said the cabbie, and drove off.
Esther crossed the pavement, and then cautiously stepped into the club’s run-down entrance, watched with unrelenting curiosity by two pale-faced men in T-shirts, both of which were printed with the message ONLY AN ANIMAL COULD UNDERSTAND. One of the men said, ‘Hi,’ but Esther ignored him. Rock’n roll throbbed out of the door as if the building itself were a lewd and voracious beast, and the music was the urgent sound of its heart.
She had argued with Wally when he had asked her to meet him here. She had said, desperately, ‘Wally, I just don’t like those kind of places.’
‘You’ve never been in one. How do you know?’ he had repeated, over and over. And in the end, she had agreed, simply because he had refused to meet her anywhere else. She had to admit that it made good sense, in a perverse kind of a way. It was well away from Washington; it was a locale where she, at least, was completely unknown; and it was crowded. It was also pre-eminently the sort of place where nobody asked any questions and nobody wanted to know who you were or where you came from.
On the ground floor, there was a crowded leather bar, where sulky young men with dyed heads and shaven scalps were sitting on stools, drinking beer and watching themselves with unswerving fascination in the darkly-tinted mirror behind the bottles of liquor. One of them glanced at Esther, and nodded her wordlessly towards a narrow brown-carpeted staircase that led down to the basement. She stumbled down,’ almost losing her footing. At the bottom of the stairs, there was a huge man with a Mr T hairstyle and spiked leather gauntlets, his belly bulging over tight black leather jeans. Next to him, sitting cross-legged on a gilt chair, was a white-faced woman with bright orange hair, bare-breasted, her waist clinched impossibly tight by a red leather corset. Esther had never seen such high heels on anybody, anywhere: they were as long and red as daggers.
The huge man said, ‘Fifteen bucks, cash, and sign the waiver.’
Esther paid him, and scribbled her signature on the Xeroxed form that said that she was not a policewoman or an undercover agent, and that she would not gamble or take drugs on the premises. Then the man lifted the beaded curtain for her, and she stepped apprehensively into the club.
It was dark and sweaty in there, and jostling with people. The cinderblock walls were painted black, and the only illumination came from red, green and blue light bulbs. On the opposite side, there was a bar, behind which a naked man was serving drinks in plastic cups. In the middle of the room, a tall woman wearing nothing but thigh-length vinyl boots was standing in conversation with a middle-aged man in pink stockings and garter-belt. Around the woman’s wrist was a manacle, from which a long silver chain ran. On the other end of the chain, collared like a dog, stood a young naked boy, no more than 16 or 17 years old, handsome but vacant-eyed. A muscular black man was standing not far away, his thighs tensed, masturbating, involved in nothing but his own feelings.
Esther’s mouth went dry with alarm. Yet what was going on down here in the club was more incongruous than dangerous. A portly grey-haired man walked past in a green mini-skirt, and as he passed she saw that he had a long cucumber protruding from his backside. The sight was so absurd that she felt strangely relieved, as if she were no longer threatened.
She slowly edged her way around the perimeter of the club. In the far corner, a young blonde girl with a figure as slim as a boy was kneeling on the floor, persistently sucking at the cock of a thin, vague-looking 40-year-old man. Esther stared at them for a moment, and a short fat girl whose naked body was trussed up tight in thin black leather laces said, helpfully, ‘That’s her father. They come down here two or three times a month. Sometimes the mother comes too, and they do it together.’
A preppie-looking boy in Nike shorts and track-shoes came up to Esther and said, ‘Are you submissive? Do you smoke? Do you want to see my scrotum ring? I had it made specially in Thailand.’
Esther tried to smile, and shook her head. She couldn’t see Wally anywhere, and she was beginning to feel claustrophobic and panicky. Everywhere she moved there were sweaty bellies and bare buttocks and men and women with rings through their nipples and tattooes on their backs and chains between their legs.
She was just about to give it up and leave when someone touched her gently on the shoulder and said, ‘Don’t turn around. It’s me. Listen, I have some red-hot information for you. But it has to pay more than two hundred and fifty. It’s red-hot.’
Esther started to turn, but Wally moved behind her so that she couldn’t see him. ‘How much?’ she asked.
‘A thousand.’
‘I can’t do it. Not a thousand.’
‘I drove here, that cost me plenty.’
‘I could never get you a thousand,’ Esther told him. ‘I’m sorry.’
Wally said, in that odd monotone of his, ‘This information is hot. This is world-class information. I promise you, Esther, this is worth every penny. In fact, it’s worth five thousand, I know lots of people would pay me five thousand for this information.’
Esther took a breath. She seemed to be able to breathe in nothing but the smell of stale sweat and leather. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘the two-fifty is guaranteed. I’ll see what I can do to get you more.’
‘I don’t know,’ Wally demurred.
‘Wally, it’s the best I can do. I’m just not authorized to offer you that kind of money.’
She turned around. Wally was standing just behind her, wearing nothing but black leather shorts, black socks, and grubby white plimsolls. He was a thin-faced man with thinning mousy-brown hair, a bulbous nose, and one of those expressions that looks like a water-colour painting left out in the rain; indeterminate, blurry, and anxious.
‘All right,’ he said, at last. ‘Okay. You win. But see what you can do, right? This trip has put me right out of pocket.’
‘You were coming to New York anyway, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, but that isn’t the point.’
Esther waited for a moment. Beside her, she heard the tall woman say, ‘I have this recurring fantasy of having my breasts nailed to the seat of a wooden chair.’ The preppie-looking boy was telling a bored girl in red satin all about his scrotum ring. ‘Do you want to see it? It’s real silver.’
Wally said, ‘There’s a booth over there, with a glory-hole. Go stand in the booth. They’ll be starting a show in a minute or two; while it’s on, put your ear to the hole and listen. I’m only going to say it once.’
Esther would have paid a thousand dollars simply to get out of the Hellfire Club, but she nodded, and pushed her way through the crush of naked and half-naked bodies until she reached the booth. There was a circular hole in the chipboard wall, halfway down. The idea seemed to be that a man could push his penis through the hole, to invite the ministrations of any passing stranger, male or female, who happened to be interested.
She waited three or four minutes, impatient and afraid. Two or three times she was approached by wandering men, who said, ‘How about it?’ in a flippant, half-hopeless way, and when she shook her head, wandered off again, bemused, but apparently not angry at being rejected.
Abruptly, the rock music was changed to a scratchy tape of Indian drumming, and a dazzling white light illuminated the middle of the club’s floor. A tall fierce woman with a black crew-cut came dancing out into the light, jut-jawed and broad-shouldered, with big pendulous breasts that bounced as she danced. She wore black rubber stockings right up to the top of her thighs, and a silver-chain belt that ran tightly around her waist and then down between her legs, cleaving deep into the black bush of her pubic
hair. There was whistling and applause as she danced sinuously around the club, snarling and hissing from time to time at the men who were standing watching her, jiggling themselves in submissive delight. Esther lowered her eyes for a moment, scarcely able to believe that any of this was real, and that she was really Esther Modena, on a Thursday night in New York City.
Now two muscular men in studded belts came out, dragging between them a thinner man, naked and bound, whose head was covered by a tight rubber hood. There was a circular valve in the hood where the man’s mouth was, which showed that he had an inflatable rubber gag inside his mouth. He could neither hear, nor see, nor speak.
The man was roughly spreadeagled by his two burly guards against the far wall of the club. The tall crew-cut woman danced across to a side-table, and danced back again, holding up a heavy metal-headed hammer, and four eight-inch nails. The preppie-looking man, who was leaning against the side of Esther’s booth, said, ‘You want to watch this, they do it twice a week. It still makes me shudder.’
Esther prayed that Wally would hurry. She didn’t know how much more of this she could take. She saw the crew-cut woman approach the spreadeagled man, and position one of the nails in the palm of his left hand, which was firmly held against the wall by one of his two muscular guards. Esther closed her eyes. There was a brisk knocking noise, in time with the Indian drums. An excited moaning rippled around the club. Esther opened her eyes again, and saw the crew-cut woman position another nail, this time in the man’s right hand. The left hand had been nailed tight against the cinder-block. There was no blood, but Esther felt a surge of nausea. If Wally didn’t come in thirty seconds flat, she was going to leave.
The crew-cut woman squatted down in front of the spread-eagled man. Esther glimpsed the bright chain that cut tight between her big white buttocks. She heard more hammering, but she couldn’t watch any more. ‘His scrotum, right between the balls,’ whispered the preppie-looking man, licking his lips.
Sacrifice Page 18
