“Who?” said Marlene.
“Robinson. I think he must have been in one of the little rooms off the corridor there, behind the door. Now he’s over in the corner under the windows.” Marlene looked. There was a man standing in the corner, leaning against the wall. He was wearing a dark suit and tie and a white shirt, but Marlene could not make out his face.
The woman in the black grandma outfit was putting Mr. Panty Hose through his paces under the spot, but Mary-Jane was obviously a hard act to follow. The circle of watchers grew more diffuse. Marlene moved away from it, pulling Wolfe along.
She said, “Look, why don’t you go and get a drink downstairs?” and at his doubtful grimace, added, “Wolfe, I can take care of myself, and besides, if you’re not around I can try my flagging charms on the bozo. And you can look for the lovely Virginia Wooten.”
Wolfe shrugged and walked off, a good soldier. Marlene removed her leather jacket and walked toward Robinson’s corner, dragging her jacket behind her. She walked slowly, thrusting out her breasts in the leather bra and rolling her hips, although the spikes on her boots did most of the rolling for her.
She walked to the wall of covered windows, took a turn in front of Robinson, walked to the other end of the room, and then walked back, slowly. When she was a few paces away from him, she could see that he was looking at her. She turned and started to stroll away again when he spoke.
“Trailing your cloak?”
She stopped and faced him.
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she said.
“Do I know you?” Odd, Marlene thought. It was dim and she was heavily made up, so perhaps he really hadn’t recognized her. Or maybe this was part of the game. She decided to play it out.
“I don’t think so. But I always make it a point at any gathering to approach the most interesting-looking man in any room.”
“And why am I that?” he asked, smiling now.
“Well, for one thing, you’re not dressed up. How come, I wonder.”
“But I am dressed up,” he replied, spreading his arms and posing ironically. “This is a dominance and submission party, and I’m wearing the most dominant possible costume-a blue pinstripe, custom-made Savile Row suit, with accessories to match. This sort of suit rules the world.”
“I take your point. But that’s not very playful, is it? The leather, the little whips that don’t do any damage, the domination skits over there-it’s supposed to show it’s all fantasy.”
“I suppose so. Actually, all of that’s not particularly interesting to me.”
“Oh, no? Why not?”
“Because I take domination seriously,” he said. He stopped smiling and stared hard into her eyes, in the manner of Mandrake the Magician.
Marlene burst out laughing, and as she did she saw something truly dangerous pass across his eyes, but only for an instant, before he remembered and turned the charm back on.
It was considerable charm, Marlene thought, or rather, felt: the man had a remarkably powerful sexual aura, of the type often possessed by extremely nasty men. It was one of God’s little jokes, this, and Marlene had seen it played out innumerable times in her professional life. In fact, it might be said that it was nearly the source of her professional life. Not that she was immune to it herself; rather the opposite, to tell the truth. My, she thought, he is an attractive devil, and knows it too. She wanted to kick him in the groin. She wanted to bite that gorgeous mouth.
Smiling again (and the bastard knew just what she was thinking, he’d seen it before), he said, “So, there aren’t any interesting men where you come from, and so you drive in from … where is it? … Forest Hills? Valley Stream?”
“Ozone Park,” said Marlene coolly, naming her actual birthplace, a low-rent Queens district.
“Ozone Park!” repeated Robinson in a tone of mock amazement. “And what do we do out in Ozone Park? Help hubby run the brake shop?”
“Something like that.”
“Then you should fit in quite well with the … Asperians. Actually, it could involve some upward mobility for you. Play your cards right, and you might even get to urinate on an assistant bank manager. Would you like that, Queensie?”
Marlene regarded him with sick fascination. He didn’t recognize her. Instead, he was being casually, effortlessly cruel in a way that would have been devastating to the woman he thought she was. Marlene had met any number of awful people in her life, including some that could have eaten Vincent Robinson as a canape, but as an exemplar of that much misused category “sadist,” this guy took the palm. And still the attraction was there.
She asked, “If this is such a low joint, why’re you here?”
“Oh, one occasionally finds a rough diamond, a seeker after something a little more intense than those S-M sitcoms we just saw. And they make rooms available for more, ah, advanced practices. For a price.” He reached out his finger slowly and flicked a leather lace that dangled from the center of her brassiere, where the two cups met.
“Actually, I’m about to rejoin my party,” he said. “If you promise not to be shocked, you can come along.”
“I’m not easily shocked,” said Marlene, and thought, God, what a dumb thing to say! It’s exactly what some girl from Ozone Park would say.
“How nice for you,” Robinson said. He actually curled his lip when he said it. Then he walked rapidly away, leaving Marlene to hobble behind him on her ridiculous heels, feeling unbearably stupid. Which was the point, of course.
Robinson strode through the door from which the various “performers” had emerged, Marlene following, and then entered a dimly lit hallway lined with closed doors. He went into one of them, leaving the door open.
The man’s face was the first thing Marlene saw, staring out of the darkness of the little room, hanging in space like a jack o’lantern. His mouth was stuffed with some sort of elaborate medieval-looking gag, a wooden apparatus with complicated straps that distorted his face, which otherwise was twisted in either pain or ecstasy or perhaps both combined. His short dark hair was sticking up, stiff with sweat, and a thin trickle of black blood depended from his lower lip. She entered the room, and someone behind her swung the door closed.
In a few moments her eyes had adjusted to the light, which came from four huge black candles stuck in their own grease onto the old, splintery floor. The man, she saw, was naked, and he was hanging facedown and spread-eagled from padded cuffs tied to his wrists and ankles and affixed to chains, rigid with tension, that extended up to the four corners of the ceiling. He was moving rhythmically in short swings, and at each swing he grunted. She could hear the breath whistling in his nostrils and another sound from farther back, to the same beat.
There was a woman standing behind him, between his legs. She had both hands sunk deep into the flesh of his buttocks, deep enough to draw blood, and she was using this grip to heave him onto the huge ivory phallus that was attached to her groin by a sculpted, thick black leather harness.
Remarkably, Marlene’s first thought when she registered what was happening was that the woman had a much better outfit than she herself did. It was a leather corset, laced up the front, and elaborately layered with black and red panels, into which had been set little relief sculptures in ivory and polished metal-skulls, and swastikas, and gargoyles-and the part of it that covered her small breasts was cut away to reveal her nipples. These were pierced with silver rings, from which long red velvet tassels depended. The woman was wearing a half-mask too, also in laminated leather, decorated with the appropriate domination designs and bearing a crest of black plumes. Despite the mask, Marlene could see, from the staring collarbones, the tight-tendoned neck, the sharp, small chin and the tight scarlet-painted mouth, that the woman was Ginnie Wooten.
She looked deeper into the room. Robinson was sitting at ease in a wooden armchair with his legs crossed. Behind him were ranged several people, all standing, including, Marlene was interested to note, the Mary-Jane from before. Robinson looked at Marlene and raised a mocking eyebrow. She cleared her throat heavily and said, “Okay, I’m shocked.”