Aurora could smell a cop a city block away. She didn’t trust those three “clients” who had persistently phoned and insisted on coming over even though I tried to discourage them. We had been having a stag party earlier and now just a friendly social gathering. On their third call, around midnight, I finally allowed them to come up.
As soon as they came through the door, Aurora reacted like a gazelle downwind of a jackal. My instincts also signaled caution. The little swarthy man with the moustache sure looked like a john, and he was shaking in his shoes. The second one looked like a crook, and these days cops and crooks often look alike, so I couldn’t be sure. But it was the third one, a tall man, who looked most like a cop.
“As a matter of routine,” I said to them politely, “would you mind showing me some identification.” The one with the moustache shook some more, and he and thugface looked toward the tall one, and he pulled a wallet from his pocket with only four of the dozen plastic compartments occupied. None of them contained credit cards. Cops can’t afford credit cards. I didn’t like it. I looked toward Aurora, who was staring down at the tall man’s feet.
I followed her gaze. Rubber soles! The sure mark of a policeman. The cop followed our eyes, too, and knew that we knew. The bluff was up. “Okay, everybody, this is a raid,” he said, and flashed a badge. “You’re all under arrest for being on premises used for prostitution.”
As if on cue, the front door opened, and in walked the big plainclothes policeman I recognized as the one they call Scarface. “Good evening, Miss Hollander,” he said, leering at me; “I told you we would get you again.”
Eight uniformed cops stormed through the front door and started turning the place over like a pancake. But the scene that followed was more like a Keystone Comedy than an efficient police raid.
Bureaus were turned inside out, and men started loading everything that wasn’t nailed down into a trolley. My childhood love letters, family photo albums, and even my collection of cookbooks were stuffed aboard. “Let me have those back,” I asked the cop standing guard over the trolley, “unless you plan on making some delicious Dutch pea soup down at the station.” What’d he do? He shook his head, and refused to release my cookbooks.
Booze that I had bought from a customer, trading one girl for one case, was taken. Cigarettes bought duty-free in the Dutch islands were also taken. None of this worried me. What was worrying me were my valuable black book of customer listings and cash book standing on an open shelf. The last time the police took these I had to buy them back under the table. This time I decided to steal them back.
The cop guarding the trolley looked like a horny guy (and men are always men), so I pulled out a collection of pornographic pictures from a drawer. “Hey, look at these,” I said, handing him the pictures. In a minute or two this ape gets so juiced up he calls the others over. And they obliged by gathering around the pictures, soon making obscene comments about them. But I certainly didn’t mind because this allowed me to take a few steps behind them and remove my customer book and cash records from the shelf.
I managed to quickly throw the book of names into a hall closet under an empty carton, and from the cash book I tore out all the pages recording my business affairs and then threw it on the trolley to avert suspicion. Since nobody was bothering me, I was able to slip into my bedroom, where I stuffed the pages under the wall-to-wall bedroom rug – which I always leave untacked in one corner. I also slid one thousand dollars in cash under the rug, because if those hyenas find money, they usually say there was none and keep it.
Just then a big cop came out of the bedroom with a folder of bamboo cigarette papers in his hand. “Okay, where do you keep the pot? We know you have some.”
“I don’t have any in the house,” I lied. “I never use drugs.” As he disappeared into the bedroom, I whisked the plastic bag of marijuana out of the hall closet, rushed into the bathroom, and emptied it down the toilet.
Nobody was watching the bathroom, so I went back and forth like a kidney patient getting rid of damning evidence.
Then I saw a uniformed cop who was trying to act as though he were working go to the hall closet with a flashlight. He began going through things and was getting dangerously close to the carton that concealed the big black book.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said, and gently shoved him away from the open door, “my mirror is inside this door, and I have to fix my hair.” The cop walked back into the bedroom, where his colleagues were now congregated, looking for pot.
As nobody was guarding the front door, two of the girls and the maid decided to split.
“Okay, everybody, let’s go,” a big detective said, coming out of the bedroom. He did a head count and found that three girls were missing.
“Where are those cunts?” he asked, with his hand raised, threatening to strike me. “I’ll break their fucking legs when I find them.”
“I have no idea where they could be,” I said evenly. The girls had strolled to freedom via the front door, and had calmly ridden the elevator to safety.
The police arrested everyone, including poor Calvin, and took everyone but me down to the 17th Precinct. I was left alone in my apartment with the three plainclothesmen who first raided my place. The phones kept ringing – customers wanting to come over. The cops answered all the calls and made rough jokes. That would be the last time those johns called me.
My house was a mess, yet they overlooked my goody bag. I was lucky not to have to replace it. Those leg irons and handcuffs so carefully collected, and the rare cat-o’-nine-tails the masochists love to feel bite their flesh. My slaves were saved.
The boys from the precinct had a ball cutting all my telephone wires, four telephones in my bedroom, four in the living room. Finally they took me down to the station house. But not before I went into the bedroom and got the money I’d hidden. It was about three in the morning when I joined the others being fingerprinted. The newspaper reporters were milling around outside the station house.
It would be a fine story for the sensation-hungry press. Seven girls, six men arrested.
At the station house the policemen gave us coffee and doughnuts. They let us lie down on tables and get a little sleep, and even switched off the glaring neon lights in the ceiling. Calvin was lying beside Aurora, who’d been his date, on one table. She used her big pocketbook for a pillow. Calvin was still being a sweet pussycat, not giving anyone trouble, but that bastard lieutenant had to give his name out in the press. Calvin is the president of a big company in the Midwest. I can imagine what he thinks of Fun City now. A family, a career, ruined for half an hour of pleasure.
Takis and I were lying beside each other on another table, my head on his shoulder. And now I was horny, by God, was I ever horny. What is the matter with me?
Takis grew a nice hardon, and I caressed him when I thought nobody was looking. But why give a damn anyway? They couldn’t arrest us again.
In a few hours we woke up stiff and tired. The police had a television set turned on to the morning news. They brought us more coffee and doughnuts. We watched, and there were the girls walking out of my house. Everyone’s name on television. “Madam Xaviera’s house was raided last night. She was considered to be the queen of the call girls and exchanged girls and customers all over Europe.” Wow! At least they made me look good.
At eight A.M. after the morning news, we were told we would be taken to the Tombs and warned that there were reporters waiting outside. We all wanted to disguise ourselves somehow. Flavia painted a big black moustache under her nose with an eyebrow pencil, put her hair up with a rubber band, and put on her head a civilian porkpie hat she had managed to lift from one of the policemen.