Power & Beauty (17 page)

I gotta be honest: Part of me felt proud that I had been able to go through with it. Part of me was proud that I hadn’t panicked. But another part of me was ashamed of being proud. Pride and shame lived together in the same compartment inside my head. I tried to close the door to that compartment, but it was hard. Taking psych, I began to see how the mind can play with itself—how you can keep certain doors closed. After class, I talked to Professor Severina and asked her lots of questions about human behavior.

“That book you gave us about family,” I said, “is always talking about the huge influence of the mother and father. But it doesn’t talk about what happens when the father dies young, when there is no father.”

“The dynamic changes,” she said. “It changes radically. Many times the young boy will seek out a substitute father.”

“And will the substitute dad have as much influence as the dad?”

“Most definitely,” said Professor Severina. “Often even more influence. The fatherless boy is so eager for a strong male figure that, in embracing a role model, his vulnerability is extreme. He’s looking for strength, pure and simple. That strength can have a positive character, or in the case of young boys attracted to gangs, the strength is brutally negative.”

The phrase “brutally negative” stuck with me. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. During these talks with Professor Severina I was beginning to see my own mind from the outside. That made me understand myself more. Maybe the act of killing wasn’t the real me. Maybe it was something I did in response to this role model. Or because of “peer pressure.” “Peer pressure” was another term Mrs. Severina used in describing why certain kids become violent. Their nature isn’t violent, but the cool kids are violent, and they want to be cool. I knew enough gangbangers back in the ATL to realize that this was true. It was a way to conform.

In contrast, I was seeing how the pros working for Holly were anything but conformists. They were conforming in their dress—they looked like lady bankers. They were conforming in their talk—they spoke like lady lawyers. They were dignified, they were polite, they looked like they obeyed all the rules of society, but when I got to know them, I saw that they were really rebels. They hated normal society. Take Lisa.

Lisa wasn’t her real name. Most of the girls changed their names. They changed their whole histories. They reinvented themselves. If they had really grown up in Iowa, they’d say they grew up in Connecticut. Lisa said she grew up in England, but she really grew up in Brooklyn. A vocal coach taught her an English accent. I was there the first day Lisa came in the office applying for an escort job.

Holly had me in on all the interviews. She was training me to see who was real and who wasn’t. The training was fascinating because usually the girl who was
not
real—the one who could act and look the part of a classy career woman, not a hooker—got the job.

Lisa wanted the job real bad. She was honest. She began by saying that as a girl in Brooklyn she dreamed of being an actress. She thought that was possible because she was beautiful. Her dad was Puerto Rican and her mom Irish. She had reddish hair and blue eyes and skin the color of dark gold. Right after high school, when she was eighteen, both her parents died—her dad got killed in a freak accident in his construction job and her mom got cancer. She was all alone and needed money. She worked as a waitress. She moved to Manhattan, where she found roommates in an ad. She secured an acting teacher, looked for agents, and tried out for parts. Nothing happened.

She talked about dating. The goal of every guy was to fuck her. She had seen that ever since she was fifteen or sixteen. That was nothing new. But when she got older, she expected more. Instead of getting more, though, she got less. She saw that if a guy took her out for a nice meal, he expected return payment in the form of pussy. That made her mad. The whole system set up by society made her mad. If she didn’t give up the pussy, the guy flew into a rage. It was crazy, it was frustrating, and she wanted nothing to do with it.

She thought about modeling. She met a photographer who took a bunch of pictures of her. He praised her to the sky, but then he made a move. He’d get her work only if she gave him pussy. It was the same thing. For a while she thought her beauty would get her somewhere in the theater. No such luck. The apartment she shared was turning into a condo and she needed another place to live. The restaurant where she worked had lost its lease. With no job, she was down to her last dollar and had nowhere to live. By chance, a director who had auditioned her kept her cell number and called. He didn’t want her in a play, but he did want her in bed. She went out with him to a cool restaurant in Tribeca. Afterward he asked her over to his brownstone. The guy owned the whole building. She slept with him that night and in the morning told him the truth—that she needed a place to stay. Could she stay for a day or two until she found a job? He said no. That’s when she decided that if she was going to get fucked, she was going to get paid.

I liked Lisa and so did Holly. We liked her because she didn’t hold back anything. “She understands herself,” Holly said after Lisa had left. “She sees into her own mind.”

When Holly wasn’t sure about the credibility of a client, she had me talk to him on the phone or meet him in person. This was interesting as hell. I’d dress up in a suit, a vest, and a $150 silk tie. I felt like I was running a corporation. I’d meet a guy in the bar, say, of the Four Seasons Hotel, on Fifty-Seventh Street just off Park Avenue, where the cheapest room goes for $1,100 a night. One time there was a guy in his fifties, an overweight, balding, happy-go-lucky guy. His name was Harper. He said that he wanted a complete evening—dinner and a show followed by jazz at the Blue Note downtown. He wanted to make sure his date liked the theater and appreciated jazz. He wanted to talk about jazz. I told him that I didn’t know the musical tastes of all of our escorts, but I assured him that they were charming and cultured. He liked hearing that. There was a gleam in his eye. He was willing to pay the going rate—fifteen thousand—for an all-nighter. I was ready to close the deal when I saw the waitress walk by with a tray of drinks. He tried to do it subtly, but I saw him stick out his foot so she tripped over it. The drinks went flying. I saw that same gleam in his eye; he tried to hide a smile, but he couldn’t. In spite of his apologies, he enjoyed the whole thing. I figured the guy got off on humiliating women. I told Holly to forget about him. When I explained why, she agreed and said I was catching on.

I caught on so quickly that Holly turned the New York office over to me while she opened up escort services in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and, yes, Miami. The woman was a whiz. She didn’t believe in advertising of any kind. Not even on the Internet. She called the Internet too public. “Darling,” she said, “any two-bit hooker can set up an escort service on the web. But that’s so crass, so terribly available. The truly exclusive services must be just that—exclusive. That means word-of-mouth only.”

Holly’s primary job was generating word-of-mouth. She developed a national network by cultivating the powerful. A captain of industry, a U.S. senator, a world-famous athlete—she knew how to connect to these people. Part of her pitch was the fact that her agency had no presence on the Internet. Absolute discretion was the key. She’d show up at exclusive parties. She met these men at a time when, more than ever, they were worried about being caught. She didn’t use e-mail or texts. She talked to you face-to-face. In New York, she had me talk to the customers the same way. We went old-school—in-person meetings, no electronic traces, and of course cash only.

One client was a brotha in his forties who’d gone to the Wharton School of Business. He owned his own ad agency and had heard about us through a client of his. We met for drinks at the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue. That same night George Clooney was at the bar with friends. The brotha started telling me about his wife. After their second child, the sex stopped. He tried convincing her it was her marital duty. She wasn’t buying. He got into porn but porn didn’t satisfy him. He snuck out to titty bars but they made him feel cheap. He started secret dating but that got complicated. He got caught lying about being single. Talking chicks into pussy was hard work. He wanted to relax. He was willing to pay big bucks for a nooner—that meant a blow job and quick fuck. He turned out to be one of our steadiest customers. And no trouble. The guy had great manners.

I was getting good at psych and liking it. I was feeling strong. I was feeling confident. I was feeling really good about myself. Holly Windsor never held back the compliments. “Sweetheart,” she said, “you understand subtlety. You yourself have a subtle mind for this, the most subtle of businesses. A successful month is one during which no complaints are registered and no news is made. We aim for a drama-free business. In fact, during these past six months or so that your subtle presence has been part of the agency, we have experienced no drama. I salute your subtlety, darling, and look forward to seeing it grow as the days fly by.”

On a day that should have been a red-letter celebration—my twenty-first birthday—I took a subtle approach. I didn’t tell anyone. Slim called from Atlanta, but that was it. I knew, of course, that Beauty knew, because her birthday was only a week away, but I didn’t expect to hear from her—and didn’t. The pressure of school and work had taken up most of the space in my head. There was always a special place for Beauty, though. I couldn’t deny that because she still appeared in my dreams two or three times a week. We met in my dreams. When Professor Severina said that dreams represented suppressed desires, I thought of Beauty.

The more I got into the job at the Holly Windsor Agency, the more I got into my psych course. The two went together. I was doing psychology day and night. In fact, I decided to major in psychology. I loved looking at people’s minds from different angles. Now I could see why, without a dad, I had clung so closely to my mom. I could see why, without a father figure, Slim made such a deep impression on me. When Professor Severina talked about posttraumatic periods in people’s lives, I thought about that period after Moms had died. I wondered how long that period had gone on—if it was still going on. When I interviewed the ladies wanting to be escorts—and man, you can’t believe how many women out there wanted the job—I heard plenty about their traumas. A couple of them had been raped. One had been beaten by a boyfriend. Another had run away from home at eighteen because her stepfather had tried to mess with her. This one woman from California who was prettier than Halle Berry and couldn’t have been older than twenty-five said she had been married three times. Her first marriage, to a preacher, happened when she was sixteen—and with her mother’s approval. The preacher was rich.

I got good at understanding who could handle the job and who couldn’t. Not that I didn’t make mistakes. I thought Betty Langston would be perfect at the job. Great shape, sunny personality, no interest in romantic entanglements. She just needed money to complete law school and this was the easiest way. But after spending two nights with the head of a big Wall Street brokerage firm, she called to say she’d fallen in love with the guy.

“How does he feel?” I asked.

“The same, Power. He’s ready to leave his wife.”

“Stand by,” I said. “I need to discuss this with Holly.”

Holly was in Seattle, setting up her newest office.

“Disaster,” she said. “Disaster with a capital D. And I don’t have to tell you why, do I, darling?”

“Confusion of love and lust.”

“Exactly. This poor dame is cruising for a bruising. And if she gets hurt, she’ll pass the pain on to us.”

“So what do I do?”

“Fire her. Tell her she’s through. Do it now.”

“And what about him? He’s one of our better clients.”

“Call him and tell him that the little lady has become emotionally involved and, as responsible and discreet agents, we must ask her to withdraw from our organization. We do this to protect our clients. He’ll appreciate it. And he’ll also have the option to pursue her on his own or drop her.”

He dropped her. A week later, Betty was crying to me about how he had disappeared. She wanted her job back. In saying no, I was gentle but firm. The parade of women who came through our office—at any time, the Holly Windsor Agency handled twenty active escorts in New York alone—never failed to fascinate me. I had learned from Sugar not to sample the merchandise, and, oddly enough, I wasn’t tempted, not even by the more gorgeous women, maybe because none of them was Beauty. Even the smartest wasn’t as smart as Beauty. Even the prettiest wasn’t as pretty. I looked on these ladies with interest but not desire. Desire would mess me up. I also got to see what desire had done to many of the clients I met. They were addicted to escorts like junkies addicted to smack. Some guys had to have four different escorts in the same week. Others were risking financial ruin just to pay our crazy prices. These guys were out of control. I didn’t want to be out of control. I wanted to learn more about the human mind. I thought about Irv’s mind, Sugar’s mind, Slim’s mind, and the amazing mind of Holly Windsor.

A Quiet Place in the City

T
he months flew by. Life fell into a routine. And then it happened.

It happened in the one place where it never should have happened. It happened over the one weekend when I felt happy about getting off the grid. Professor Severina was going to a four-day conference in Boston and asked me if I could house-sit. Her regular house sitter had the flu and my teacher’s two dogs and cat needed care. I was happy to help. I was also happy when my cell phone went on the blink. I’d get it fixed, but I’d wait till Monday. That meant no one could reach me. It felt good to be unreachable, especially as I sat in the place that I called my refuge.

It was where I went practically every night and every morning, in between work and before and after classes. It was where I put my mind at ease, sat and drank a glass of wine or a caffe latte, or just kicked back and listened to a gifted brotha play gentle jazz on his acoustic guitar. It was a combination café/bar/coffee shop nestled in between an office building and an art gallery. I went in the first time because of its name—A Quiet Place in the City. I was looking for quiet. I loved how the walls were covered with cushiony fabrics and the floors covered with thick carpets. The noise of New York was never to my liking. New York restaurants and bars stuck with a policy of “the louder the better.” The racket of people talking was supposed to indicate that this was a hot spot for business deals and romantic hookups. After work, that was exactly what I wanted to get away from. So I loved A Quiet Place. I felt safe there. I felt centered. Fact is, two months before I had kept my twenty-first birthday quiet and spent it there alone. Never in a million years would I have guessed that A Quiet Place was where my life would change forever.

Funny how life deceives you. Life looks like it’s giving you a rhythm, a reason and a rhyme. Life seems to be making sense. Things seem to be settling down. I had a new sense of self-assurance and self-knowledge.

After a long day at the Holly Windsor Agency, I settled down at A Quiet Place in the City. It was beautiful sitting there by the window and looking out on lower Broadway. People rushing by. Traffic fierce. Cool fall weather. After living in the city nine months I was beginning to understand what Slim was wanting for me. Slim wanted me to see how Irv Wasserman operated. He operated subtly; in the end, he didn’t trust anyone. Slim wanted to see what I’d become under the influence of Sugar—a guy consumed by ego and deadly drugs. And finally Slim wanted me to see how a brilliant woman like Holly Windsor brought balance to business—by cutting out the emotions.

I thought I had cut out the emotions. I thought I was ready, after this time in New York, to go back to Atlanta and work with Slim. When I arrived in the city, I thought fate was bringing me closer to Beauty, but I soon realized that no one really knows what the fuck fate has in store. Then here comes Holly Windsor with her view on life. I knew that Holly Windsor was, in her own way, a psychologist herself. She read people right. She especially read women right. And she read me right. She knew I could be taught. She saw that I listened. She picked up on the fact that the girls could trust me—and so could the clients. She ran around the country setting up operations while I held down the fort in the most important city in the world. That made me feel important. It was a quiet feeling, though. I didn’t have to talk about it. Didn’t have to tell anyone. The escorts respected me because I didn’t hit on them and made sure that their clients were cool. The clients respected me because I made sure their escorts were cool. Holly was happy because the office was running smoothly. My life was running smoothly. I got A’s on my psych tests and wrote a paper on ego defenses that Professor Severina called “insightful.” The spelling and grammar could have been better, but she said that my ideas made sense. Everything was starting to make sense, especially sitting there in A Quiet Place in the City.

A Quiet Place had the right atmosphere to let me look back a little. I thought about Irv and Evelyn Meadows, the woman who shot him; I thought about Irv’s crazy daughter, Judy, and her boyfriend, Dwayne, who got murdered; I thought about John Mackey, the consigliere killed in a car wreck; I thought of Sugar and Yuko and Mi and how Mi got shot by Gigante and how I stabbed Gigante to death. All those thoughts were noise in my head. Here, though, the thoughts drifted away while the brotha played his soft jazz guitar. Several students in A Quiet Place were working on their laptops in easy chairs. Two women, sitting at the wine bar, spoke in a quiet whisper. I think they were Chinese. A tall Dominican dude who I recognized from my psych class sat across from me, took out his iPad, and disappeared into cyberspace. I was gonna check my e-mail but decided instead to lose myself in the chords of the quiet guitar. The world was at peace.

And then I felt my phone vibrate against my thigh. At first I was pissed that the thing was working again. There went my escape. I didn’t bother to answer the phone, but it kept buzzing until I got fed up, fished it out of my pocket, and glanced at the caller ID to see who was calling. It was a New York City exchange. I didn’t recognize the number. Something told me to ignore the call, but something else told me to answer. I remember feeling that something was really wrong. So I answered the call. That’s when I heard a voice I hadn’t heard in five years. My heart started hammering. My throat went dry.

“Power,” said Beauty, “Slim’s gone crazy. Last week he had Dre murdered. Today Wanda Washington is missing, and I think he’s killed her. He’s killing anyone close to him, just like he killed Moms.”

At first I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t process the information. It took me a while to say, “I don’t believe it. That’s not right. That can’t be right. Are you sure? How can you be sure?”

“Call anyone you know in Atlanta and they’ll tell you. Dre’s gone. Wanda’s gone, and you’re next, Power. You gotta start running.”

“To where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you?” I asked.

“I’m here in New York.”

“I gotta see you, Beauty.”

“I’m afraid, Power. I’m really afraid.”