Irresistible Impulse (25 page)

“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.”

At the sound of her voice, Ginnie Wooten stopped thrusting and looked up. She peered at Marlene through the eye holes in her mask and did a slow-motion double-take. Pointing an accusing finger, she snarled, “What the fuck is
she
doing here?”

Robinson seemed mildly surprised at the reaction.

“She’s a tourist, Ginnie. What’s the problem?”

But Ginnie pulled back, staggering, the dildo coming free with a wet, disgusting noise, and stepped around the swinging man’s legs. She was clearly drugged and seemed to have difficulty keeping her feet. The thing sticking out in front of her groin made eccentric little circles. Marlene felt a laugh bubbling up in her. With difficulty she suppressed it, until the suspended gentleman started trying to look over his shoulder while making inarticulate but puzzled noises through his gag. Then Marlene began to laugh, and once started, she couldn’t stop.

This had an effect on the assembly. Robinson stood up, an annoyed look on his face. Ginnie screamed a curse and took a step toward Marlene. She shouted, “She’s that fucking detective my sister hired. About the—about the—”

“Shut up, Ginnie!” Robinson snarled. For the first time his face showed something other than contemptuous disdain, a slight furrowing of the broad forehead.

Ginnie did not. “She’s—she’s … investigating … you don’t understand … the fucking bitch is … my sister …”

Robinson backhanded her across the face, a solid, meaty blow that knocked her off her six-inch spikes. An interested noise issued from several of the observers. As she fell she grabbed vainly for one of the chains supporting the naked man and started him gyrating like a carnival ride out of control. His muffled cries grew louder and more frantic. Marlene had to lean against the wall to recover. Tears ran from her eyes, and when she wiped them, her hand came away with smeared mascara.

Ginnie was wailing on the floor. Robinson knelt over her and grasped one of her nipple rings. He was saying something in a hissing voice. Marlene could not make out what it was. He twisted the ring cruelly. Ginnie screamed and writhed, kicking her legs against the floor. The other members of the group gathered around, leaning close like a bunch of relatives around a new baby. Marlene chose that moment to slip away, blowing a kiss at the wildly grimacing face of the hanging man.

She found Wolfe in the bar.

“No sign of her,” he said.

“You’ve been asking the wrong people. I found her.”

“And?”

“Oh, I think it’s definitely them. Robinson didn’t make me, but she did. I must have made an impression. She was zonked on something, and she almost gave it up. Robinson had to practically knock her out to keep her quiet. Let’s get out of here.”

“Urn, your, uh”—he gestured to her face—“is all smeared.”

“I know. I was laughing so hard it ran.”

He gave her an odd look but said nothing more as they left the club. The next thing he did say, as they approached his car, was “Oh, shit!”

Marlene looked up, startled, and saw that two youths had the door of Wolfe’s car open. Wolfe yelled and ran toward them, Marlene following at a totter, cursing the over-long heels. One of the youths saw Wolfe coming and shouted, and the other one slid like an otter from under the dash, holding the stereo unit. They both took off, track shoes flashing under the streetlights, with Wolfe right after them. Marlene called out once and then gave up as they vanished down First Street, heading toward the Lower East Side. She sighed and lit a cigarette, leaning on Wolfe’s car. She doubted he would catch them in his new engineer boots.

After a cigarette plus ten minutes worth of waiting, Marlene began to feel stiff and chilled. The rain had stopped, but it was damp and the air was misty, making rings around the streetlights and softening the neon of the signs. She thought of calling a cab, but it was not much more than a half mile to home and the weather was ideal for a brisk midnight walk through the city. And she was armed.

East Houston Street was still jumping, of course: cruising cars and cabs were hissing in numbers down the broad, wet street, and the sidewalks were thick with little knots of people, mostly young and looking for a good time. Dressed as she was, Marlene got numerous offers from carloads of young men from Jersey, but nobody gave her any trouble.

She turned south on Mulberry Street. Passing Old St. Patrick’s, she paused at the steps to tighten and retie the laces of her boots, which, she had discovered, had been designed for walking on faces rather than sidewalks. Finished, her eye was attracted to something moving within the shadows of the Gothic archway. A man, in a long black coat: she could tell he was watching her. She tensed, and then relaxed when the man moved slightly and she saw the faint flash of white at his neck. A priest. But not Father Raymond—he was not the sort to be standing in the doorways of churches at midnight.

Intrigued, Marlene waved and called out, “Good evening, Father!”

The priest waved back and stepped forward into the light from the street lamp. He was a blocky man, not tall, about fifty, his dark hair in a vaguely European-looking brush cut. His face was an Irish one of the bony and beaky rather than the smooth, pug-nosed type, with the eyes shadowed under bushy eyebrows.

Marlene smiled up at him and he smiled back. She took a crumpled pack of Marlboros and lit one. There was something about strolling down a night street on a damp night that called out for ciggies, and she decided to invest one of her rationed daily half pack in the experience.

“Ah,” said the priest, “here I was yearning for a cigarette and not wanting to go back to the rectory.”

Marlene held out the pack and her Zippo. The priest walked down the steps and took them, lit up, inhaled gratefully. “A filthy habit,” he said. He had pale blue eyes that seemed colorless under the orange sodium light. They were intelligent eyes, she thought, yet with a sliding-away quality that masked considerable pain.

“You’re new at Old St. Pat’s,” Marlene observed. She recognized his voice, of course.

He gave her an appraising look, taking in her costume. “A parishioner, are you?”

“A regular communicant,” said Marlene. She held out her hand. “Marlene Ciampi.”

He took it. “Michael Dugan.” He paused. “So. What brings you down Mulberry Street on a fine soft night like this?”

“It’s a long story, Father. I’m just walking home from … I guess you could say work.” She saw his expression change to one of pastoral concern and quickly added, “I’m a private detective, Father. I was at a sadomasochistic club as part of an investigation.”

A grin flashed across his face that took twenty years off it. He chuckled. “Allow me to compliment you on your disguise. A sadomasochistic club, hm? I’ve always wondered what such places were like.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You know,
homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto?
”

They smiled and exchanged a little Catholic moment, dense with information about each other. Of course she would understand the tag, hence educated in a very good convent school; he could quote Terence with a perfect accent, hence almost certainly a Jesuit elaborately overeducated for a curacy in a poky city parish.

She said, “Believe me, Father, you wouldn’t want to have anything to do with S-M clubs.”

“No,” he said reflectively, as if he had been seriously considering it. “No, I suppose you’re right. Although some would say that I’m already in one.”