Edge Play X (2 page)

I
don’t want to hurt you
, he had
said. The words turned over again and again in her head.
 
Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt me, she
thought, but he would
.
He would hurt
me.

He sat down at the table and told her
to join him.
 

“Are you hungry?” he asked, and she
nodded her head yes, staring at the floor, not wanting to look at him, ashamed
somehow to admit her hunger and to have had to urinate as he watched. She
wasn’t sure how much time had passed since the morning, but it was enough that
her stomach was empty and uncomfortable. It gave out an angry growl.

Immediately after she had confessed to
her hunger, another suited man brought in a tray of food which he placed on the
table in front of her. A plastic lid covered the plate, making it resemble
hospital food. A small plastic cup of apple juice sat at the corner of the
tray. She put a straw into it and sucked down most of the liquid in just a few
gulps, suddenly aware of her thirst. Next, the woman lifted the cover from the
plate, revealing a stuffed chicken breast, asparagus, and a baked potato with
sour cream. A chocolate chip cookie sat next to the plate, and she picked this
up and took a bite. They had only given her plastic silverware which she picked
up and used to eat the hot food on her plate and quiet her growling belly.

When she finished the food, the man
took the tray and put it next to the television. The woman watched him do this
through narrow eyes, trying to make sense of this strange man. There was
violence within him—that much she was certain of. But the reason why he had
kidnapped her, the motives behind why he had struck her and then fed her, these
things eluded her. Why the cruelty and then the kindness? A rage burned up
inside her when she realized that she could not understand the man’s motives,
might never really, even if he might ultimately try to explain them.

“Would you like a beer?” he asked. “A
glass of wine, perhaps?”

She was surprised that the man was offering
her alcohol, but after only a moment of hesitation, she told him, “A beer, and
a cigarette would be nice, too.”

“I didn’t know you smoked,” her
kidnapper said.

“I don’t, usually,” the woman
answered, not wanting to tell him that it had been almost five years since she
had smoked a cigarette, that such a long period of time had passed where she
had been free from the addiction, a period almost spotless with the exclusion
of the dozens or so she had smoked after her mother had died. The woman had
decided to request one because she recognized the possibility that the man
sitting with her had every intention of killing her after he had gotten
whatever it was he wanted.

The man who had brought her tray in shortly
before again entered the room with a large plastic cup filled with beer, a
drink which he put onto the table in front of the woman along with a brand-new
pack of Camel Lights. The suited man handed a lighter to her kidnapper before
picking up the tray by the television and leaving again.

“You take a drink first,” she said,
wanting the man to prove that the drink wasn’t drugged, worried that after a
few sips that she’d be unconscious on the floor.

The man picked up the beer and took a
long gulp.

“It’s not drugged,” he said.
 

Believing him, the woman took a sip
from the beer, a beer that tasted like heaven, a beer better than other beers
somehow, a taste improved by her need for it, by her thought that perhaps this
will be the last beer of her life, the last beer before these men torture her
and rape her and kill her or sell her into some kind of modern day slavery. She
pounded the pack onto her palm before opening the cellophane, pulling away the
silver liner over the cigarettes and tossing it onto the table. The woman
removed a cigarette and put it between her lips: it was like seeing a long-lost
friend, having that cigarette between her lips. The man, lighter in hand,
leaned over and lit it, and she took a couple long puffs before flicking the
ashes onto the floor.
 
She worked on the
beer and he sat there silently as she did so.

“It isn’t polite to stare,” she said
to him. He had dark, nearly black hair, and olive skin, which made his blue
eyes stand out even more. Looked like one of the black Irish.
 

“Would you like another?” he asked her
when she finished her drink.

“No,” she said as she snuffed the
cigarette out on the bottom of her shoe, sending ashes cascading onto the
carpet beneath. “But I would appreciate it if you would tell me who you are and
what I am doing here.”

*

“I am sorry that we had to get you
here in the way that we did,” he began. “Some relationships start,” he paused
to search for the word, “awkwardly.”
 

They sat for a leaden minute in
silence. Finally, she asked, “Who are you?”

The man turned over the folder on the
table, and the woman spotted her full name, her Christian name as her mother
would have said, printed on a neat label on the tab.

“You may call me Simeon,” the man
answered, finally.

She told him, “I see that you know who
I am.”

“Yes,” he said. “We know who you
are.”
 
Simeon opened the folder.
“Although from what I understand, you prefer to be called ‘X’.”

She was surprised that he had that
knowledge, surprised to hear the name coming out of his mouth. Only a select
group of people had ever called her X.

“That is a name I am referred to in
certain circumstances.”

“Look,” he said, “we don’t need to
beat around the bush, do we?” He turned over the pages in the folder until he
arrived at a photo of her in full dominatrix costume. She had absolutely no
idea how he had gotten the photograph of her dressed so. “We know what you do
for a living.”

X took the photo from the folder and
examined it for a moment, trying to remember the last time that she had worn
that particular ensemble. “Who is ‘we’?”

“We,” he said, nodding his head toward
the other room behind the two-way mirror, “are the Central Intelligence
Agency.”

X felt a sense of relief then, and a
wave of comfort came over her as she decided that the likelihood of them killing
her had just shrunken significantly.

“Show me your badge.”

“
CIA
agents don’t carry badges. But I’ll show you the
identification I use to get into headquarters.” He pulled out a laminated I.D.
card and showed it to her. X held it up and examined the
holographics
.
“Suffice it to say that my name is Officer Ryan Simeon, and that I am an
Operations Officer. We are also known as Case Officers. Our work is undercover
and both official and non-official.”

The agent flipped a few more pages in
the folder until he came to one with X’s name and bank transactions on it. A
few of them were highlighted.

“You see, we noticed some interesting
deposits in your bank account. Most people don’t know that certain deposits
trigger specific alerts to the federal government. It was how we found out
Eliot Spitzer was seeing call girls.”

“I’m not a call girl.”

“That may be,” he said, “but we
explored some of these deposits, and we saw that you happen to have, over the
course of several years now, many deposits that are suspicious.”

“I want a lawyer,” she said.

“You aren’t being charged with a
crime,” he told her.

“If you want to question me about
this, I want a lawyer present.”

He smiled at her, a smile her mother
would have called the smile of the devil, the same smile used by snake-oil
salesmen, televangelists, and politicians. “You aren’t going to have a lawyer,
and you are going to answer my questions.”

“Look,” she said, “I am not a
dominatrix by trade. I’m an artist. Many men I have seen have given me gifts.
Some of them gave me jewelry, others gave me money. Have you ever given a woman
you liked a gift?” The man didn’t respond.

“Did you know that there is an amount
that the
IRS
has established, above which a gift must be claimed?”

“Then why isn’t the
IRS
talking to me?”

“We’ll get to that,” he said. “Tell
me, what do you do for a living?”

“I just told you. I’m an artist, a
painter.”

“You happen to live very well for a
painter. Aren’t most artists starving?”

 
“When my mother died I inherited half of her
estate.”

“And your brother inherited the other
half, but it all went up in smoke, didn’t it?”
 

“I work here and there as I need to,”
she explained.
 

“As a dominatrix. A dominatrix named
X.”

Anger was spreading through her body,
permeating it, where it emanated from she wasn’t quite sure but it was
somewhere in her belly or her heart, and she felt its heat rising up into her
throat.
 

“Look, I don’t charge men for what I
do. I do it to them because I like it, because they like it.”

“But they give you money.”

“They give me gifts. Tributes.”
 

“A tribute,” he began, “is not so much
of a gift, is it, but an expected payment, an obligation, the kind of thing one
country pays to another. The payment acknowledges their subjugation, and they
wouldn’t pay it if they didn’t have to, would they? Call it whatever you want,
but we both know that it is really just a payment for services.”

“You don’t understand,” she told him,
“I am not a dominatrix for hire. I don’t go to a dungeon for work. These are
men I have had relationships with, and a few of them happened to be men of
means.”

“Men who happened to
give you a lot of money.”

“They treated me well. I treated them well.”

“They treated you well for treating them cruelly.”

The timbre of his voice dug into
her—there was a subdued cruelty and insult in his every word.

“I treated them how they wanted to be
treated,” she said before lighting herself another cigarette. “Men are allowed
to give anything to their wives. Some people think that marriage is a form of
prostitution. But I told you once and I’ll tell you again, I’m not a call girl,
nor am I a dominatrix for hire.”

“But you did take their money,
sometimes in amounts that should have been claimed to the government. You
really shouldn’t have let them write you checks, you know.”

X smoked her cigarette and looked him
in the eye. “Did you know that some men actually enjoy it when a woman takes
their money? I have witnessed men get hard just watching me remove the money
from their wallet.”
 

The explicit nature of her statement
did not bother her, and it didn’t seem to bother him, either.

She took her last drag and blew the
smoke towards his face. “Why don’t you tell me why the
CIA
is talking to me and not the
IRS
?”

There was a drawn out silence and she
shrank from it, afraid of what she would hear.

“We need to enlist your services,”
Simeon said.

“I told you that I’m not for hire,” X
returned.

Simeon stood up from his chair at the
table, and again X noticed the gun in the holster on his flank. Was he the kind
of man who could empty the clip without a blink?

“I want you to see something,” he said
as he turned on the television in the room.

The television started to play footage
of a man getting into a private plane, exiting a limousine, and outside of what
appeared to be an incredible mansion.

“Do you recognize that man?” Simeon
asked.

“He looks vaguely familiar.”

“Well,” he said, flipping off the
television, “let me tell you about him. I’ll just tell you a little bit about
him. His name is Terry Compton and he is a very rich man, wealthier than you
could ever imagine. He has billions of dollars. The man has more money than
some small countries. He got wealthy from hedge funds, investment banks,
insider trading, real estate, and a plethora of financial deals that would be
above your head.”

“Could you tell me what time it is?” X
asked.

Simeon looked at his watch. “It’s
9:30.”

“Morning or
evening?”

“Evening. Why do you want to know?” he
said.

“I haven’t seen natural daylight since
you took me.”

“Let’s not get off the subject.”

“I don’t know that man.”

“We know.”

“Then why are we discussing him? Why
did you bring me here?”

Simeon sat on the edge of the bureau
and told X to sit on the bed, which she did. X didn’t want to look him in the
face, but he seemed to know what she was doing.