Plaything: Volume One (2 page)

I shrugged my shoulders, let the tension slip from my body. I moved across the room a little to keep Alistair in the corner of my eye. For a long time no one spoke. The old man slowly deflated.

“I am dying, Robert,” he said at last, measuring each word as if to utter them was to concede mortality. “I have a week left to live, maybe two. Certainly no more than that.”

I said nothing. The old man narrowed his eyes and tilted his head as if trying to see me from a different angle.

“I summoned you here because I have a proposition,” he said.

I shook my head, clenched my jaw until my teeth ached. “No,” I said.

The old man held up a hand. “You haven’t heard…”

“No,” I said again. “I don’t care. I’m done with this family – done with the lies, the deals, the…”

“You should listen,” the old man said softly, and it was the tone of his voice that filled me with sudden fear, for the threat implied was unmistakable. I felt myself turn cold and a chill of loathing crept down the length of my spine. The protest died in the back of my throat.

The old man nodded. He reached for the cigar box again. He turned it around to face me in the gesture of an offer. I shook my head. The old man selected a cigar, clipped the end and then puffed quietly until the tip began to glow and fresh smoke coiled towards the ceiling. He dropped down into the chair behind the desk and sighed a sound of weary exhaustion.

I waited. The old man made me wait a very long time.

“You’ve done well for yourself,” he said finally, puncturing the words with little thrusts of the cigar as if he wished it were a dagger. “You’ve made yourself quite a fortune in shipping.”

I nodded. It was true. Over the past five years my companies, and the investments I had made, had reaped fantastic returns. I was a self-made wealthy man.

“And you are about to land the biggest contract of them all, I understand,” he went on, but now his voice had become sly and conspiratorial. I felt myself tense and the hairs at the nape of my neck bristled with alarm.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said flatly.

The old man mocked me with a rattle of a laugh. He threw back his head and the sound of his voice seemed to reverberate off the walls. But when he looked back at me again there was no trace of humor in his expression.

“The Navy contract!” he spat suddenly. In an instant he had changed and there was venom in his eyes. “The one you are about to be handed.”

I felt my heart literally stop. No one – absolutely no one – knew about that contract. The deal was wrapped in so many layers of secrecy that only half a dozen men in the world had any idea of my bid, or that I was just days away from being awarded the tender to oversee the building of three new Navy aircraft carriers – a contract worth billions of dollars.

The old man studied my face and then nodded slowly, knowingly. He got back out of the chair and crushed the cigar out into an ashtray.

“Yes,” he said softly. “I know about the contract, Robert,” he drew himself up to his full height and came slowly from behind the desk until we were standing toe-to-toe in the middle of the room. He was much smaller than me, made frail and withered by age and disease, but still his eyes blazed with smouldering resentment that he could not disguise – that he flaunted.

“But the deal is off,” he said coldly. “I’ve put an end to it.”

White hot rage washed over me, and then gut-swooping dread. I had millions of dollars invested in the bidding process. I had spent two years working on the deal. There were thousands of man-hours tied up in this contract. I was straddling the razor’s edge between ruin and financial triumph.

“What do you mean?” I asked slowly.

“I mean I’ve blocked your tender,” the old man grinned. His thin parched lips split into a reptilian smile. “It cost me everything in bribes… but it was worth it.”

“To ruin me?” I was appalled.

“To destroy you!” the old man’s hatred finally erupted and boiled over. Color blotched his face into angry bruises, and a froth of spittle bubbled at the corner of his mouth. He was trembling, his bony fists clenched. His eyes blazed with wicked malice. “To destroy you forever!”

“Why?” I asked in a stunned whisper. “Can you possibly hate me that much?”

“Yes!” the old man raged. “I hate you for what you did to Alistair. What you made him into.”

“I didn’t make him into the perverted, pampered piece of slime he is today,” I said loudly for Alistair to hear. “You made him that way.”

“You made him weak!” the old man fumed. He was swaying on his feet. His skin turned the color of ash. “He couldn’t compete with you! You were too good, too fast, too strong, too smart.” He stopped suddenly and gasped for breath. There was a crumpled handkerchief in his hand. He dabbed at his mouth and the cloth came away spattered in fresh crimson drops of blood. “He became bitter and cruel. The shadow you cast left him vicious… and cowardly.”

We both turned back to where Alistair sat. He was glaring at me with naked malevolence. He made to get up from the chair but the old man swatted him back down with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Stay there, you fool,” his voice was thick with contempt. “You’ll just get beaten up again. Besides, we don’t use our fists, do we?” It was a rhetorical question. Alistair’s face froze for a moment and then his expression began to turn smug. There was a wicked little glint in his eyes. “No,” the old man went on. He brought his eyes back to me like he was swinging the twin barrels of a shotgun onto a target. He licked his lips. “We don’t fight like brutes – not with our fists. We fight with much more powerful weapons. Like the weaknesses of men… be those weaknesses money… women…” he shrugged his shoulders and his voice drifted into a moment of wistful silence and then came back stronger and almost fervent. “The things that corrupt men are the weapons we wield,” he said. “And that’s how I have your tender for the Navy carriers all locked up, Robert.”

I took a deep breath and drew myself up stiffly. “I’ll fight you,” I said and tried to put conviction into every word. “I’ll go all the way to the top. I’ll call for an enquiry…”

The old man shook his head in rueful admonishment. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he waggled a withered finger at me. “It might just be the men at the very top that I have corrupted.” He turned and went back to his desk. He pulled open a drawer and threw a sheath of papers onto the desk top. “The last thing people who have secrets want is an enquiry that leaves no stone unturned,” the old man went on. “Especially when it is their very own secrets that are hiding under the stones.”

I felt one of my legs buckle and for an instant the breath caught in my throat at the implied enormity of the old man’s conspiracy. The stiffness went from by body and I heard a croak in my voice.

“What do you want?”

The old man nodded and then smiled his triumph. “I knew you would see it my way.” With the forefinger and thumb of one hand he picked up the papers from the desk and dropped them into a wastepaper basket as if the pages were soiled.

He looked up, regarding me from under the wrinkled folds of his ancient brow.

“I want you to train a woman,” he said, talking in the careful tone of voice that adults use to coax a child away from a busy street corner. “I want you to teach this woman to submit herself sexually.”

I shook my head in incredulous confusion. “
What?
Why?”

The old man shrugged. “Because that’s what I want. If you complete the task to my satisfaction, you will get your tender for the Navy contract approved. You have my word on it.”

My senses were reeling. I felt myself sway on the balls of my feet. “You don’t need me to train women for you,” I fumed. “You already have Alistair for that.”

“Yes,” the old man agreed mildly. “And he’s very good at it. In fact, it’s the only thing he is good at – the only thing he is better than you at.”

I saw it then – the understanding came through the haze and fog of my confusion and became clear.

“Is that what this is about?” I said. “You want to see me beaten?”

“Yes!” the old man hissed. “I want to see Alistair beat you! I want him to know what it is like to be a winner – for just once in his life. I want to see him as a man before I die, even if it costs me everything. I want to see you destroyed, and I want him to be the one who destroys you!”

I shook my head. It was the bizarre madness of an evil mind; an evil old man.

“It won’t prove anything,” I said hollowly.

“Maybe not to you,” he agreed. “But it will to him. It will prove that he is better than you. It will prove that he knows women better than you – knows how to train them to willingly obey by unlocking the secrets of their mind and body.” The old man paused for one last theatrical moment. “The power over women…” he said it like it was some eternal mystery. “It’s what every real man wants.”

“And you think that if I fail to train this person, it will prove that Alistair knows more about women than me?”

“That’s what it will prove to him,” the old man corrected pointedly. “And that’s all that matters. He will see you fail, and then the shadow you have cast over him all his life will be lifted. He will be free of the burden of needing to compete with you.”

“You’re crazy,” I said softly.

The old man smiled and tapped his temple. “Crazy like a fox,” he said. He held out a hand. He was trembling. “Do we have a deal?”

I balked. I felt like a trapped animal that had been cornered. I could see no escape, but still my mind thrashed desperately. “Is this the woman you want me to train?” I turned and pointed to the young blonde girl who had led me into the room. She was standing meekly beside the leather chair.

The old man laughed. “She’s already trained,” he chuckled. “We keep her around the house for amusement. There’s always someone who wants to be entertained by a pretty thing with a willing mind mouth and body.”

I flashed a glance at Alistair then. He was slouching in the big leather chair, his eyes sparkling with ruthless malice as he stared back at me. As if to taunt, his hand went possessively beneath the hem of the young girl’s slip and a moment later she shuffled her feet apart dutifully. Alistair’s hand drifted between her legs and the girl’s lips parted. I saw the trace of a painful wince flash across her face. It was there for just a second, camouflaged and concealed so quickly that it might have been my imagination. He was fondling her absently, his fingers busy between the folds of her sex while she stood motionless. His eyes remained locked on mine and it was as if the girl were a way for him to display is prowess. When he was finished, he seized her wrist and she fell to her knees before him with a muffled gasp. Alistair snapped his fingers and the girl tugged obediently at the zipper of his trousers.

“Power,” Alistair mouthed the word to me across the room like a silent dare. He flicked his eyes down to the girl’s bobbing head and then back at me. He slumped in the chair and sighed contentedly as the soft sucking sounds of the girl’s mouth gave evidence of her eagerness to give pleasure.

I felt a flash of cold revulsion and turned back to the old man. He was watching the girl. His eyes met mine and he shrugged. “Like I said,” he repeated. “There’s always someone who needs to be entertained and Alistair has….
A peculiar appetite
…” he put meaning into the words and let them hang in the air for a long moment.

I screwed my eyes shut and felt the world spinning off its axis. A giddy vertigo of nausea overwhelmed me. At last I opened my eyes. “Answer three questions honestly,” I insisted… “and then you will have your deal.”

The old man nodded.

“First. I want to know are you truly going to die within the next two weeks?”

“Yes,” the old man said and I could see the truth of his answer in the shadow that passed like a cloud behind his eyes. “I can have the doctors confirm it for you if you want confirmation.”

I shook my head brusquely. I held up two fingers. “Who is this woman you want me to train?”

The old man started to answer and then stopped himself. He went to the door and called down the hallway. I heard a murmur of voices and then he came back, closing the door quietly behind him. “She has been sent for,” he said. “Her name is Amy. She was to be sent to a Saudi client but the gentleman found her ‘abrasive’,” the old man said the word like it caused him grief. “So she has been returned to us at great expense and considerable embarrassment to our reputation,” he added. “She needs to be retrained and made more pliant to a man’s needs,” he plucked at each word like they should be delicately chosen.

I could hear faint footsteps coming down the hallway, muffled by the sound of the thick carpet.

“How long have I got?”

“A week,” the old man said. “Seven days is all the doctors have given me, so that’s all the time I am giving you, Robert. Teach this woman to be obedient and to live on her knees – or you will die on your feet, broke and ruined.”

I grunted. I had come back to Hell, and made a deal with the Devil.

In the background, I heard Alistair groan softly as he erupted between the young blonde’s lips, and then the library door was flung open and old Albert the doorman stood on the threshold. He was breathing hard, his face twisted with strain. He had a silver chain in his hand. At the end of the chain was a naked woman.