Tenderloin

by LD Marr

  “Right,” I said.

  To show my compliance, I looked him straight in the eyes. I saw and felt a cold, flat deadness there. The promise of death. It chilled me, but the coldness somehow strengthened me too.

  I have to go with him tonight! I told myself. But I need to get rid of Stella first.

  “So I looked at you, and I said ‘thank you,’” I said to Claude, still staring into his dead eyes. “But I see you’re busy with Stella here, and Steve said he’d take me for sushi. So I need to get back over there. In case he thinks I’m ditching him, or he finds someone else. You know what I mean?”

  I looked down the bar at Steve. Against my directions, he looked at me and waved. And he wasn’t wearing his hat.

  In answer to my question, Claude squeezed my arm hard and pulled me toward him.

  “Ouch!” I shouted, but I didn’t resist.

  “You don’t leave with someone else when you have plans to leave with me!” he snarled.

  “What?” Stella spoke up.

  She put a drunken hand on Claude’s shoulder and shook it a little.

  “You said you were going to take me tonight, Claude!” Stella insisted.

  “That’s what I thought too,” I said. “Stella’s with you. I don’t want to butt in. That’s all. And I already promised Steve.”

  Claude’s face was so close to mine that I could smell his breath—alcohol, minty mouthwash, and another sharp metallic odor that made me want to vomit. And I knew that I would have vomited if something else wasn’t there with me. Pushing my normal reactions and behavior aside, so I could do this.

  He shook off Olivia’s hand and grabbed my other arm even tighter. This time, although it was painful, I didn’t shout or make any complaint, but I could feel bruises forming. I was supposed to be drunk and feeling no pain, so I acted that way.

  I blinked as if confused.

  “Huh?” I said. “I don’t get it.”

  “I’ll make it clear then,” said Claude in a voice of pure, unveiled menace.

  I felt Stella stiffen on the stool next to him.

  “When I invite you and you agree, you don’t leave with someone else. Ever. You’re going with me tonight.”

  Claude let go of my arms and turned his cold stare on Stella.

  “Scram,” he said to her in the same iced-dead voice. “I’ll get you next time.”

  With drink in hand, Stella climbed down from her barstool. She glared up at me from six inches shorter.

  “You bitch! I had him, and you messed up my thing. What the hell are you doing in here anyway? You’re supposed to be a drug counselor? Think you’re better than me? Well, I got you fired, so there!” said Stella.

  “Myrna’s a drug counselor. Did you know that?” she asked Claude.

  He laughed.

  “Couldn’t stay away from the stuff, huh?” he asked me.

  I smiled back at him.

  “I hope you’ve got some,” I said.

  Then I turned back to Stella.

  “You need to get the hell out of here. You need to get off the drugs and booze, and I don’t want to see you in here again. Ever!” I spoke in my most threatening voice, even though my threat was empty.

  But maybe Stella didn’t take it that way. Her eyes grew wide and fearful as she looked back and forth between the two of us. I saw the reflection of two very dangerous people in her eyes. I remembered the needles I carried in my bra.

  Maybe she’s right about me too, I thought.

  “Hypocrite!” Stella shouted in my face.

  She stepped back a few feet, spat on the ground in front of me, and rushed away into the crowd.

  “Cat fight. I love it,” said Claude.

  He looked at me with something predatory in his otherwise empty eyes.

  “I’m getting hungry. Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “Sure. I could use something now,” I said. “After that crap.”

  I sniffed.

  “You’ve got drugs, right?” I asked him. “Coke? “

  “I’ve got everything,” he answered. “Just not in here.”

  “Great!” I said. “You’re the man!”

  Claude stood up to leave, and I dropped my untouched drink on the bar.

  He grabbed one of my arms again and guided me toward the door. His grip wasn’t painful now, but I was locked into it.

  As we passed through the crowd, I looked again at the red-traced dancers in my mind. Their forms began to thin and twist. Their faces stretched out, and mouths and eyes opened wide, moaning.

  The images stretched and thinned even more, joining together and merging toward Claude like a backward-curving wave that poured into him. By the time we reached the door, there was nothing but him. But I felt them now. Inside him. Devoured by him.

  I really need to talk to Gorg about this when it’s all over, I told myself.

  ⌛

  Outside it had turned bitter cold. I’d lined my heavy coat with a thick hoodie, but only thin stretch pants covered my legs. Still with a grip on my arm, Claude strode along fast without speaking. I kept up, and the fast movement warmed me somewhat. But I didn’t care. I felt the cold, but it didn’t bother me. Somehow I was separate from it. A witness.

  All I cared about was getting to where we were going. And now that was guaranteed. The thrill of victory soared inside me, but I didn’t let it show. I kept up my whiny persona.

  “Where are we going? Tavern on the Green? Chez Chez?” I mentioned the most expensive restaurants I knew. Restaurants I was sure Steve wouldn’t go to.

  “Those places?” said Claude with scorn in his voice. “No. I told you last night I’m taking you for a real meal. With meat. Real meat. At my place.”

  “Wow! You’re going to cook for me?” I asked him.

  My astonishment was real.

  “No. Are you that stupid?” he said. “I wouldn’t cook for some chick I grabbed in the Tenderloin. I’m taking you to the community where I live. A lot of people have apartments there. Rich people. There’s a restaurant. With a chef and staff. Real food. Your first real meal and your last real meal.”

  I pretended not to notice the ominous sound of that.

  “Cool!” I said. “But if you’re so rich, why are we walking? Aren’t we going to take a car?”

  He squeezed my arm hard.

  Training me? I wondered.

  “It’s only a few blocks to the subway. Aren’t you in good enough shape to make the walk?” Claude asked.

  By now, we were half way to the Bowery station. We reached the end of the block. Not waiting for the light to change, Claude pulled me out in the street to cross. I didn’t resist.

  “Sure, I’m in great shape,” I bragged. “I just thought a rich guy like you would have a car, that’s all.”

  “Of course I have a car. I’ve got lots of cars. Beautiful cars like you’ve never seen,” said Claude. “But I don’t take the kids I pick up at the club in my cars,” he said. “No way.”

  “OK. Whatever,” I said. “I can walk. No problem.”

  “Yeah. All that dancing at the club keeps you in shape. That’s why I like to get kids from the club. Just the right age—ripe—and they’re not all skin and bones. At least they’ve got some meat on them,” said Claude.

  He loosened his tight grip on me and started feeling up and down my arm.

  “Hey. You’ve got a little muscle there. I like that,” he said. “What’s that from? Working out?”

  “No. I helped lift boxes at my job almost every day,” I said. “Boxes of food and office supplies. I helped because I was the youngest.”

  “Good for me. Good for me,” he said with a chuckle.

  We reached the entrance to the subway and began the descent into its harsh, ugly depths.

  As we walked down the stairs, I heard moans coming for everywhere. I looked over at Claude, but he didn’t show any sign of hearing anything. The moaning voices seemed to flow toward him and circle him like a tornado of sound.


  I stood next to Claude at the door etched in the concrete wedge under the stairs. There was no handle, and I wondered how we’d get in.

  Claude reached up a gloved hand and pushed against the door shape. It gave inward slightly and then sprang open a few inches as if on springs.

  The first time I’d seen Claude come out of this door, what looked like blood had flowed out. Now I saw streams of red flowing back in. Flowing in through the cracked open door and into Claude himself.

  In those streams, I saw forms and faces, and the moaning sounds grew even louder. I felt despair and need in those moans. As I watched, some of the faces looked back at me. Intense looks that, again, seemed to demand something.

  My resolve strengthened.

  I will, I heard myself saying to them in my mind. I will.

  Even though, again, I wasn’t sure what I was promising.

  Claude pulled the door open just wide enough to go through. Then he tightened his grip on my arm and pulled me into a pool of blackness lit only by the narrowing strip of light that came through the closing door behind us.

  The door thumped shut, and we stood in complete darkness. I wondered why I wasn’t terrified.

  I felt Claude move, waving an arm in the air. There was a small click sound, and a dim light glowed from above us. I looked up to see a beaded metal cord dangling from an uncovered bulb. Its dim glare showed me that we stood on a small bare wedge at the top of a flight of stairs that led down to another door.

  Claude pulled me down the stairs to the next door. He reached out a hand to the numbered keypad above its handle, and again time—his time—slowed to a crawl.

  I knew that it was critical for me to watch him and memorize the numbers he entered, and I did. He typed twelve numbers in all. It took a minute or more for him to press each key in my time. The slowed time allowed me to repeat the numbers over and over in my head, adding each new one and repeating the sequence over and over again.

  Something told me to add musical notes to each one, to create a melody, so I did. Finally, I had the entire twelve numbers memorized as a song. I played the song over and over in my mind while Claude opened the door.

  Ever so slowly in time that still crawled, light beamed through the door’s expanding opening. A bright but soft and gentle glow. I glimpsed clean, fresh colors, but I didn’t know what I was seeing.

  By the time Claude had pulled me through this next door, I’d replayed the door code numbers set to music in my head at least a hundred times. Just when I felt confident that I had it burned into memory, time sped up to normal.

  ⌛

  The door behind us closed without a sound, and I looked around. We stood in what looked like another train station, but everything was high tech, clean, and modern. Even more modern than the graffiti-resistant subway cars from the 1980s that contrasted so sharply with the stations they rode through. Built in the early twentieth century and almost never retrofitted.

  Here, instead of a narrow and worn concrete island between car tracks, we stood on spotless low-pile carpet. A two-sided upholstered couch in deeper lavender squatted in the middle of this wide island between tracks. The walls and arched ceiling displayed a natural sand pattern. Unlike everything aboveground in New York, these colors showed no signs of fading or graying with dirt.

  The long tubular car parked to one side of us was even more of an oddity. Instead of a rectangular metal box that ran on open electric tracks, this transparent tube sat inside another open tube with no visible tracks to run on. Shining metal showed behind the transparent car and inside the circular opening that was its track.

  The sight of this alternate reality shocked me. So it easy for me to stay in the character of a spaced-out club girl. My mouth opened wide, and I twisted in Claude’s grasp to look around.

  “What the heck is all this?” I asked him.

  He laughed down at me.

  “This is part of the subway system,” he said. “The better part.”

  “I’ve never heard there was a better part. I’ve never seen this station on TV,” I said.

  “Of course not,” said Claude. “Only the better people know about the better part and get to use it.”

  “Huh?” I said, truly confused.

  “You’re lucky you get to use it this one time,” he said. “Now get in.”

  Claude shoved me toward the opening in the side of the tube car, and I obediently walked in. More low-pile carpet in light periwinkle blue softened our steps. We sat next to each other on a long aisle of deeper blue upholstered seats that faced the opening. Cushioned armrests separated each seat.

  I felt the waft of a gentle breeze on the exposed skin of my face and neck. I breathed in, and the air smelled faintly of lavender. Now that we weren’t in the smoke-filled club or outside, I could also smell Claude’s expensive cologne too. And his own personal scent under that. I was sure he bathed regularly, but I experienced his musky, slightly metallic odor as unclean and decayed.

  The same nausea that would normally make me vomit felt muffled inside me. It was there, but I didn’t react. Instead, I stared out at the station through the transparent wall of the tube car.

  “What kind of train is this?” I asked Claude.

  He reached over and pressed a circular button on the arm rest between us.

  “This isn’t a train. It’s a vacuum car,” Claude answered just as, without any jolts or bumps, the car moved forward into the hole in the wall ahead.

  When we were inside the enclosed tubular space, I felt the car pick up speed. The lighting dimmed a bit, but it was still bright enough to see inside the car. The metal walls outside the transparent tube showed as a flowing, rippling black.

  There were no seatbelts, but a light pressure pushed me down in my seat. Just enough to not be uncomfortable.

  The strangeness of all this made me question my sanity, but I didn’t think it was all in my mind this time.

  While I peppered him with questions, Claude stared at the stream of black waves in front of him.

  “Where did this come from?” I asked. “Why doesn’t anyone know about it? If we have this technology, why don’t we have these tubes in the regular subway instead of the rundown, falling-apart trains?”

  “Yeah, right,” said Claude.

  He laughed at me again, but I just stared back at him waiting for his explanation.

  “This tech has been around for a hundred years, but it’s expensive,” he said. “People like you can’t pay for it. And the people with the money aren’t going to spend it on you, obviously. They keep this transportation system for themselves. You people would just trash it up like you did with the old subways.”

  “People like me? I never trashed the subway!” I denied.

  “Yeah, you. The masses,” he said. “And yes, you did. Those old subways got messed up from so many people using them. Not to mention the graffiti, vandalism, and people peeing in them. The rich people in the old days made the mistake of paying for that whole train system. But now they’ve learned their lesson, and they keep their money for themselves.”

  “I thought our taxes pay for trains and transportation,” I said.

  “No. Your taxes go to pay the people in power. They decide how they want to spend it, not you people,” said Claude.

  He laughed at me again, and I thought about this information for a moment. I wondered if what he said was true, but my main concern now was to find out what had happened to Chloe, Laz, and the others.

  Does what he’s telling me have anything to do with their disappearance? I wondered.

  My awareness of Laz as a spot in the distance grew closer as we whooshed along to wherever we were going.

  Are rich people having this guy kidnap teens for sex slaves? I wondered now.

  That seemed like the obvious answer, but I knew on my new level of thinking that there was more to it than that.

  I turned to look up at Claude’s broad fleshy face. In this light, his shin was shiny and somewhat moist. A line o
f pale skin showed at his hairline just beneath his black hair.

  Makeup? Hair dye or a wig? I wondered.

  But I was already certain he was the same man who was in the video with Chloe. I had to get as much information out of him as I could.

  “So where are we going?” I asked. “How long will it take?”

  “Not that far. Just to DC,” Claude answered.

  “DC? Washington DC?” I asked.

  “Right,” said Claude. “It’s only about 225 miles, so we’ll be there in a little over ten minutes. They could make this trip faster if they wanted to. It’s kind of a drag, but this line only goes a thousand miles an hour. The other lines across continent and across planet go up to 4000 miles an hour—now that’s speed!”

  I stared up at him in open-mouthed surprise, trying to digest what he was telling me. That seemed like the reaction he expected.

  “Yeah, I know. I know. This is all a big shock to you. Wait till you see where we’re going. Then you’ll really be shocked. You have no idea,” he said with another deep chuckle.

  “Why don’t you tell me about it now, so I’ll be less shocked,” I suggested.

  “Sure. What the hell,” he said.

  Claude paused for a moment before speaking as if deciding what to tell me. I looked up at him expectantly, waiting. Finally he spoke.

  “Well, I’m sure you know that everyone with enough money lives in underground bunkers now. To keep away from the bad air, radiation, and ultraviolet rays up on the surface. And in case there’s more nuclear wars,” Claude began.

  “Sure. Everyone knows that,” I said.

  “Right. But what you people who live aboveground know is only a small part of what’s going on under the ground,” he said.

  “Really?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  “There’s whole cities down there now, that’s what,” said Claude. “Cities and transportation systems. A new, separate world for them. For us. All shiny and new. A whole new society. Kept secret from you ground crawlers.”

  My eyes grew wide.

  Could this really be true? I wondered.