Eighty Days Blue (11 page)

He let out a deep sigh.

‘Come,' he said, nodding to Summer.

She unfroze.

‘Lick me clean,' he said.

He tasted of oysters and horseradish and every sin under
the
sun. She was desperately hungry again. Rang the toll for her waistline.

They left the House of Blues on Decatur just before midnight. The band had been good and Summer had imagined herself on stage with them, improvising around their riffs on her violin. It had been months since she'd played anything of a non-classical nature, something improvised, variations, natural. She missed that freedom now that she was part of an orchestra.

The crowds had spilled out across the pavement outside the venue. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Dominik in conversation with a bystander, a tall guy with a seersucker jacket and jeans full of strategically placed holes and black leather winkle-pickers. Surely he's not buying drugs, Summer thought. That wasn't Dominik's style.

The two men parted, but she couldn't help seeing them shake hands and a few green notes passing between them.

‘Who was that?' she asked as Dominik walked over to join her.

‘A local. I needed some information.'

She recognised that glint in his eyes. She'd witnessed it before.

They found a cab on Canal Street, and Dominik whispered the destination to the driver. Summer was feeling drowsy after the deceptively strong cocktails she'd sampled at the club while listening to the music. After a few blocks, she briefly closed her eyes, only to open them again and see they had crossed Bourbon Street well beyond the point they had often reached on previous evening strolls and were now entering a zone of relative darkness in comparison to the
well-lit
thoroughfares she had so far been accustomed to tramping through.

The cab finally came to a halt in front of an anonymous building with a steel gate. Dominik paid the driver, and as the car began to disappear in the distance, Summer felt the weight of the silence landing on her shoulders. This was all so unlike New Orleans. There was a dimly lit buzzer to the right of the door, which Dominik pressed. The electronic mechanism of the gate clicked and he pushed the door open.

They were now in a large courtyard, with a perimeter of smaller buildings surrounding it.

‘Those were the slave quarters,' Dominik said, pointing at the outlying units. ‘Many years ago, of course.' He took hold of Summer's hand and led her towards the central building, which loomed out of the darkness and was visibly much larger than the others, a three-storey structure with a wooden veranda, a set of white stairs leading to the porch. Slivers of light peered through the sides of some of the downstairs and first-floor windows.

They walked up the steps and the front door opened. A large, shaven-headed black man wearing an impeccable tuxedo simultaneously greeted them and checked them out. Having passed his scrutiny, they were ushered into the building. On a low-slung table by the stairs that led to the upper levels of the house was a tray with high-stemmed glasses. The imposing greeter poured them champagne and asked them to wait before disappearing through a side door.

‘What is this place?' Summer asked, sipping her glass. It was good champagne. Dominik didn't partake.

‘A strip club, actually, but a rather private one.'

‘A strip club?'

‘A very exclusive one,' Dominik added. ‘There was a time when anything went in New Orleans, but over the years, things have become both commercialised and tamer. Strip joints on Bourbon Street used to be bottomless, but these days that's no longer the case. They only disrobe as far as G-strings and knickers. It's also become tawdry, exploitative. This place, I'm told, is the right thing.'

‘Where anything goes?' Summer suggested, her flesh tingling with familiar desire.

‘Exactly.'

‘I've attended burlesque shows before,' Summer said, ‘and enjoyed them. I just hope it's not too tacky,' she added.

‘I've been told it's not,' Dominik said.

A woman approached. She wore a white carnival mask, and her hair was coal-black, falling to her shoulders like a cloak of silk. Her dress clung to her body, a long-sleeved red velvet gown of vintage provenance, which only bared her neck and a strikingly thin pair of ankles over perilous platform shoes.

‘I'm your hostess for the evening. This way, please,' she said, and pointed to the stairs.

If there was one thing Dominik hated, it was vulgarity. He was hoping tonight would not prove an embarrassment.

The tables at which the guests had been seated formed a half-circle facing an improvised stage no larger than a boxing ring. There were fifty spectators at most, and Dominik noted that, apart from Summer and him, there were only three other couples in the audience. Each table kept to itself, barely glancing at the others present.

First, there was darkness, then a white spotlight shining like hellfire on the centre of the improvised stage, then for
the
space of an eye-blink total darkness again, immediately followed by the light flashing on once more and a young woman standing at the heart of the newly created sun, an apparition from nowhere.

She was majestically tall, her head a haloed jungle of yellow-blonde Medusa-like curls, her skin like alabaster. All she wore was an impossibly thin cotton robe that was almost transparent in the fierceness of the spotlight shining on her and that highlighted the doll-like fragility of her waist and the endless avenues of her long legs. She was barefoot.

At first, she was motionless, like a statue, while the spectators caught their breath.

Then there was a faint buzz as the sound system was switched on, with an indistinct blanket of static sound.

‘My name is Luba,' they heard the whisper. A Russian accent, a bedroom voice. The sound system surrounded them and it felt to everyone present as if the pre-recorded voice was a personal gift, for their ears only. Dominik felt Summer's hand abandoning her glass and gripping his thigh under the tablecloth. The woman was stunning, as was the sheer theatricality of the event.

Then the music began.

Classical. An impressionistic cascade of soft, delicate notes that reminded Dominik of the sea, and the shimmering surface of troubled waters.

‘Debussy,' Summer said quietly.

Luba came to life. An eye blinked; a shoulder moved imperceptibly; one foot lifted off the floor; a hand shifted, fingers unfurling like flowers blooming.

Luba danced with the grace of a trained ballerina and the calculated provocation of a whore, seemingly totally
unaware
of her audience, as if the art of undressing and teasing was something essentially private that she was doing just for herself, a personal journey to the heart of her pleasure.

‘She's in the zone,' Summer whispered to Dominik, both of them entranced by the performer.

Quickly Luba slipped out of the flimsy garment she had been wearing. The fierceness of the spotlight in which she allowed herself to remain captive made her appear whiter than white, the sole touch of colour the delicate pink shade of the nipples of her firm, small breasts and the barely there demarcations of her smooth genitalia, her body pouring like milk through the tremulous melodies of the French composer. Dominik couldn't help noting the small tattoo she displayed barely an inch from her cunt, a small blue flower, or maybe it was a miniature image of an improbable gun, the image seemed to change with every movement of her body before he could focus fully on it. Why would she sport the tracing of a gun there, etched deep into her skin, where her flesh was at its most secret? he wondered.

He knew so little of the lives of others.

But thirsted for it.

What could Luba's story be?

Summer's fingers grazing against the hard knot now tenting his trousers snapped him back to reality. Even she was turned on by the performance.

The Russian dancer contorted into impossible positions with the elegance of a dove in flight, impervious to the amount of intimacy she displayed in the process with such liberal abandon, the puckered light brown circle of her arsehole, the nacreous pink of her inside depths when she was in a spread-eagled position or in athletic movement.
Her
face remained ever impassive, majestic in her detachment, superior.

Dominik recognised the final chords of the Debussy piece nearing and sighed, regretful this performance could not go on for ever. Summer's fingers lingered and he could feel the beat of her heart through the heat of her fingertips. He leaned towards her, brought his lips to her ear.

‘One day, maybe I'll ask you to go on a stage and display yourself in such a wanton and beautiful way, Summer. Would you like that?'

The heat visibly rose to her cheeks as words tried to pass her lips but were unable to do so; a rushing herd of emotions clearly bubbled inside her. That was answer enough for Dominik.

As the terminal strains of the music faded and Luba's movements slowed in unison, her back straightening, her legs coming together again, her arse cheeks tightening and firming up, out of the corner of his eye, Dominik noticed the hostess in the mask and the flaming velvet dress making her way back towards the stage and approaching the dancer just as Luba finally came to a standstill and reverted to a living statue.

The spotlight abruptly disappeared, plunging the small stage back into pitch darkness.

None of the other spectators at the other tables was showing any sign of moving. The performance maybe wasn't over.

The sound system came alive again. ‘Show your appreciation for Luba,' a female voice said, breaking the spell, and the scattered spectators began to applaud the performance, slowly at first, then louder when a small silhouette tiptoed back onto the stage.

It was Luba. The dancer.

She was now draped in a leopard-print robe, the shape of her body obscured, and so much smaller than she had appeared in the dazzling glow of the central spotlight.

‘She looks tiny now,' Summer remarked.

‘How's your dancing?' Dominik asked her.

‘Not a patch on hers,' Summer said.

‘I'd like to see you dance.'

‘I'm clumsy. I've no sense of rhythm, or grace.'

‘I'm sure you'd be great. You're a musician. It's in your blood, no?'

‘You'd be surprised.'

Dominik took a sip from his drink. The sounds of Ravel's trancelike ‘Boléro' were being piped through the loud speakers as background music, muted, distant. He wondered whether there was to be another performer, or whether the enigmatic Luba would make a return appearance.

He looked Summer in the eyes and knew. Yes. That was it.

The familiar surge of power raced through his heart.

‘It was actually quite beautiful,' Summer finally said. ‘Not what I expected. I was afraid it might turn out to be somewhat sordid. Not at all.'

She picked up her champagne glass.

The hostess walked by their table. ‘I hope you enjoyed the show?' she asked.

‘Indeed,' Dominik blurted out. He was at a loss for words.

‘We only employ out-of-town artists,' she said. ‘Mostly Russians. They are so well bred. Lovely bone structure,' she added. ‘Local girls don't have the same finesse. Luba, for instance, looks so at ease with her nakedness.'

‘So is my companion here,' Dominik remarked, nodding towards Summer. ‘Remarkably at ease.' It just came out, as if the devil made him say the words, cementing his earlier thoughts about Summer dancing.

‘And quite beautiful too, I have no doubt,' said the older woman in the red dress, examining Summer with renewed interest.

He couldn't resist it. ‘Do you agree to private hires?'

‘It could be arranged,' the hostess said.

‘Tomorrow maybe? After the New Year celebrations?'

Summer was shifting uncomfortably in her chair. Most of the other spectators were already drifting away.

‘We have a dinner booked for the turn of the year, but could be here at one o'clock, say?' Dominik suggested.

‘That would work well,' the woman said. ‘How much of an audience would you require?' she asked Dominik.

‘Like tonight. Not too large. Intimate. Discreet, of course.'

The hostess turned towards Summer. ‘And you are willing to play, madam? You realise the choice is yours?'

Summer's knuckles were gripping the edge of the table. She averted her eyes from Dominik's. ‘Yes,' she said, as firmly as she could.

‘Just a dance or . . . more?' the older woman asked Dominik.

‘What would . . . “more” consist of?' he queried.

‘You are a man of imagination. I would leave that to your appreciation,' the woman said with a suggestive smile.

Dominik considered. ‘I think just dancing,' he finally said with a sideways glance at Summer's pale features.

Summer held her breath.

‘Our artists also perform privately,' she said. ‘Might that be of interest?'

Summer's heart was now beating wildly, the initial fear subsiding and a new strain of nervousness invading her system.

‘I think I would just like to see my companion dance,' Dominik concluded. ‘On this stage,' he nodded.

‘Good,' the woman said. ‘Might we discuss particulars, then?'

She indicated to Dominik that they should walk a few steps away, out of Summer's hearing, to agree the finances.

The negotiation was a short one and Summer noticed Dominik handing over one of his credit cards and the hostess passing it through a small handheld terminal.

Once the transaction had been settled, the hostess in the red velvet dress walked with them down the stairs.

‘We will supply Madam's outfit for the occasion,' she said. ‘I'm confident we can present her with a varied choice of garments that will fit her most exquisitely. We shall have a full hour to spare until we present her to our public, so there will be an opportunity to adjust a stitch here or there if necessary.'