“Fine, Murray. I hope I’ll never need your help, but thanks anyway. Good-bye now, I’ve got work to do.” Murray the Mover left, and I straightened up my studio for the coming night’s business.
Life was well organized and ran smoothly for the next couple of months, although my job at the mission was even less agreeable than that at the consulate. I was made to feel like an “office foreigner,” even though I could speak their language. And sometimes they would lapse into a national dialect to exclude me from conversations. Still, the atmosphere didn’t bother me too much, as my professional night life was becoming more important, more active, and more profitable than the day job.
I could even manage to run home during lunch hours and turn a couple of tricks in my studio, or sometimes Madeleine or even Georgette would call up and ask me could I handle a midday quickie.
Madeleine especially liked me to do her freak, bondage, slaves-and-masters scenes, which is when I got into the whips. These paid more than the straight clients, but they were a lot more time-consuming, and I would ask Madeleine to try to give me advance notice so I could at least wear the appropriate clothing, such as a leather jacket or skirt, black turtleneck sweater, or something else tough- or vicious-looking, and save the time of changing in the lunch hour.
One thing I liked about doing jobs for Madeleine was the discreet way she asked me on the office phones. “Xaviera, I’ve got a Scotch meaning $50 customer] or a champagne [meaning $100]; will you be available for a drink around noon or one P.M.?’
She would often crack up because she had never known a little secretary who made a few hundred extra dollars a week in her lunch hours. The idea of running down and performing a complex slave scene amused her even more.
However, some of my customers were not so diplomatic when they called up, which is what led to the beginning of the end at my new job. My biggest problem at the mission turned out to be the aging spinster switchboard operator, who, I later learned, listened in on all my calls. And some of them weren’t what one would call very subtle. “Xaviera,” they would say, “I want to get laid at one P.M. Meet you at your house. Okay?”
The fifty-year-old spinster didn’t suspect it was for money, and started spreading the talk that Mademoiselle Xaviera was “the greatest courtisane of the mission permanente de Nations Unies. Scandale! Horrible!”
I sensed imminent disaster in the air and figured the only way to save my head was to seduce the horny little ambassador. If the heat really was on, it would help to have him on my side.
On a Friday afternoon the bespectacled little ambassador came to my place for drinks and, in his mind, a slow Continental-type love scene. But I couldn’t spare the time for romance that day because a couple of stockbrokers were expected around seven P.M.
I poured the ambassador a cognac and sat him on the sofa. “Xaviera,” he began, “how long I have dreamed of this moment.” As he launched on a tale of romance, and desire, I removed his coat, tie, shirt, and shoes, and by the time he got around to how he was going to gently kiss my hair, my ears, my throat – ad nauseum – he was clad only in his birthday suit.
I quickly made love to him, giving him my best efforts, considering the time available. He must have enjoyed it, because for the next couple of weeks, as I sat on his knee taking dictation, he would ask me, “Xaviera, are you free for an hour after work?” He would have had cardiac arrest if I told him I was rarely free these days, but I didn’t charge him, so he didn’t know the truth. “Oh, Mr. Ambassador,” I would answer, “you’re invited to my place this evening at six P.M.”
Things, however, were getting so unfriendly at the office that soon not even his intervention could help me. Certain staff members, whipped along by the narrow-minded spinster who was by now getting wise, demanded an investigation into my ability to dress so well on a secretary’s salary, and the meaning of all the “obscene” phone calls.
One morning when I breezed into work my desk had been opened and my little address books, which I stupidly kept in the office, had been commandeered. So, within three months of starting at the mission, my legitimate life as a secretary was over forever.
6. SHAKEDOWN
I was still working at the United Nations mission when I discovered what a vicious racket there is in New York in blackmailing vulnerable girls and married women who might try to make a little extra money in prostitution. These blackmailers are even more dangerous to part-time hookers than the police.
I was living in my new studio apartment in the low East Fifties when the blackmailers, who had obviously been watching me for some time, paid me a call.
It was a raw, cold evening toward the end of November when I came home from the office and found an envelope stuck under my door. My first thought, when I opened the door and stooped down to pick up the envelope, was that it was a rent notice from the landlord. It was only two weeks since that hood moving man, Murray, had put my furniture in the apartment, and as yet I had not paid any rent besides the deposit.
My name was written on the envelope in very scribbly, more or less childish, uncontrolled handwriting, and with a pencil, not a pen. I opened the envelope as I walked in and took my coat off. And all of a sudden an intuitive feeling told me that this little envelope contained dangerous news for me.
Only one thing came out of the envelope – a Polaroid picture, which shocked me tremendously. Someone had put the pictures, which Mac the so-called cop, who I later learned was a phony, stole from my old apartment, into a group and took this Polaroid shot of them. There I was in one photo sucking a huge cock, and in the others, playing with myself. There was no letter with the pictures.
I was badly scared and immediately ran out of the apartment and took the elevator down to the lobby. I went up to the doorman on duty and said to him, “Listen, I’m in trouble.” I trusted this doorman. He was a kind of fatherly type, a father image to me.
He knew I was hooking, of course, but I was paying him off. I didn’t show him the picture or tell him exactly what had happened. I just said that some person came up to my apartment and put an envelope under the door which shouldn’t have been put there.
“Did you see anyone going up unannounced?” I asked.
The doorman scratched his head and finally said, “Let me think. Yes, now that you ask me, I remember seeing a young guy this afternoon. I thought he must be drunk or doped up. I don’t know what those kids take nowadays, but he couldn’t walk straight. He needed a shave, his clothes were dirty and ragged.” The doorman frowned to himself. “He, was a young punk with long stringy blond hair hanging in his face, and he said he had something to deliver to you.”
The doorman grinned now. “He mispronounced your name something awful, so I told him I’d take the message to you. But he said he wanted to deliver it himself, and he would just push it under your door. So finally I let him go up.”
I couldn’t think of anyone who answered the description, but I thanked the doorman, gave him five dollars, and went back to my apartment. I knew this was no joke, and as though to confirm this thought, the telephone rang. The voice on the other end was heavy with that low-class New York accent. It said, “Miss Xaviera?”
I knew the call was to do with the pictures. “Yes,” I whispered.
“So, Miss Xaviera, I hope you found your little letter.”
“Yes,” I said, trying to stop my voice from quivering.
“Miss Xaviera, we want you to think our proposition over seriously, and we want an answer by Wednesday. In fact, we are going to call you tomorrow night at seven.” This was already Monday. “We want you to have five thousand dollars ready for us, or else…”
Upon which I said, “What do you mean? Five thousand dollars for this little picture?”