Satin Dreams (25 page)

La Chaîne

The Warp

Fourteen

The taxi careened through the black winter night and into the Bois de Boulogne, the big wooded park on the west side of Paris. In the daytime, the “Bois” was a landscape of joggers, picnickers, and nannies watching the children of Paris’s Yuppies, the
bon chic-bon genre
. At night the park resembled the last circles of Dante’s
Inferno
, a depthless fresco of leafless woods and the harrowing figures of prostitutes, picked out by the headlights of passing cars.
 

Alix stared into the dark woods as the taxi wound through the park. To judge from the living apparitions in wigs and skimpy miniskirts, neither the freezing weather nor the fact that it was Christmas Eve hampered their business.
 

Karim leaned forward to the glass partition to shout something to the driver.
 

She tugged at his sleeve. “You have to tell me what’s wrong. Look, where are we going?”
 

He turned to her with a glazed look. “The princess, she adores you. She will do anything you say. Only you can get her out of there.” He raked his fingers through his curly dark hair. “Besides, they won’t let me in.”
 

“Let you in
where
?” Alix knew now she should have stopped long enough to call someone. She thought of Christopher Forbes, in London, and how she could have used his help at this moment. “Karim, please—if the princess is in trouble, you’ve got to tell me what it is. Better than you’ve been doing!”
 

The taxi was passing an open area in the woods. The car’s headlights picked out a figure at curbside that was too tall and muscular to be a woman, though it was wearing a leather miniskirt, high heels, skimpy tank top, and a huge blond wig. Alix turned in her seat, mouth open, as the figure slowly rotated to follow her stare. The transvestite, smiling garishly, was holding a fully decorated, table-size Christmas tree in one hairy hand.
 

“Why does she do this,” Karim moaned, “when she has everything?” He bent his head, cradling it against his hands on the back of the driver’s seat, despairingly. “She is young, beautiful, she has much money, her father is a prince, very powerful. Yet she takes drugs.”
 

Alix had suspected as much. She suddenly experienced a terrible sinking feeling.
Poor Karim
. He’d picked the wrong person to ask for help. Alix knew herself well enough by now to admit she wasn’t a fighter; she was a person who ran away from problems.
 

“Karim, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any experience with something like this.” The words made her wince; they sounded so cowardly. “I think you’d better find somebody else.”
 

He gave her a distracted look. “She’s in this place. It’s where the young ones go. I always follow her, in case she should need me, even though I know they make fun of me. Tonight one of her friends came out and saw me waiting in the street and said I’d better get her. He was not in such good condition himself.”
 

Alix stared at him helplessly; Karim evidently thought he was making himself clear.
 

The taxi now passed through the modern apartment towers of suburban west Paris. Karim motioned to the driver to go straight ahead.
 

“But when I tried to go in, they told me, ‘It’s being taken care of.’ That’s what they said.” Alix saw the terrible hopelessness in his eyes. “‘It’s being taken care of.’ She’s in there, and I can’t get to her.” His voice cracked. “I know something’s wrong—something very bad. Then I thought of you. Oh, Mademoiselle Alix, they will let you in!”
 

“Karim, it’s Christmas Eve, I just came from—from a party.” Frustrated, Alix tried to explain she probably couldn’t help him. “Look, shouldn’t we call her father? The prince should—”
 

“
No!
” He looked agitated. “No, she doesn’t want that!”
 

“How do you know what she wants? Have you seen her?”
 

He set his lips grimly. “Wait,” he told her. “We are almost there.”
 

The suburbs west of Paris had the sleek look of Miami or Beverly Hills. The cab pulled up to the front of a glassed-in lobby of a tall apartment building. Karim threw open the door and dragged Alix out of the taxi before it had rolled to a full stop.
 

“You will help me, won’t you?” Although she resisted, he pushed her through the doors. “You are American,” he said desperately, “they won’t stop you.”
 

They burst through the revolving glass doors, Alix in a dark suit, and the tall Arab boy in his jeans and ski jacket. A uniformed doorman moved across the lobby quickly to intercept them. But Karim sidestepped, pushing Alix in front of him deftly.
 

A uniformed male receptionist stood up quickly from behind a marble-topped counter. Alix felt his instant appraisal.
 

Karim was at her back, pushing her like a battering ram to clear the way. Alix gave them a terrified smile. She’d never stormed an apartment building lobby before. But then she’d never had to.
 

The receptionist snatched up the telephone as he called to them, “Are you cleared to enter?”
 

Ignoring him, they stepped into the elevator. He was dialing as he shouted, “Wait a minute, are you the ones they called?”
 

The elevator doors closed. Alix sagged against the far wall, staring at Karim. “Do you,” she gasped, “know where we’re going?”
 

He punched the top row of buttons rapidly. “A little. My people, North Africans, work in these apartment buildings all over Paris. Everyone,” he added ominously, “knows this place.”
 

The elevator rose to the penthouse level. When the doors opened they found themselves looking out at a garden one would find in the country instead of a Paris apartment building: a terrace dotted with small potted tress and iron furniture, a grassy lawn. A wooden bridge led over an artificial pond to a full-sized Roman villa, complete with double oak doors and red tile roof. They were twenty-five stories up from the street.
 

Karim’s hand in the small of her back guided Alix forward. She was remembering stories of a part of Paris hidden but whispered about; stories circulated in Paris’s college communities of unbelievable places for things which Alix, immersed in her music, had never been particularly interested. Not even the gossip. She could see, now, as she stumbled slightly in her haste to look around, it was probably true.
 

According to the rumors, there was a Japanese house somewhere. And a Roman villa. Private clubs. Where one came to do the unspeakable things even an ultra-liberal society only whispered about. It sounded preposterous. What could people do that wasn’t permitted these days? Especially in Paris?
 

They practically ran over the little wooden bridge. Karim jumped ahead of her to jerk open the villa’s red painted doors. “Hurry, hurry!” He looked at her, wild-eyed. “Don’t be afraid.”
 

Alix was speechless. Afraid? She fought down an impulse to turn around and run as the doors banged open into an entrance hall that was a reproduction of one of the houses that had been unearthed in the volcano-buried town of Pompeii. Alix recognized it from photographs.
 

Nineteenth-century archaeologists hadn’t known what to do with the murals that decorated the walls of the bordellos in Pompeii’s red light district. The second half of the twentieth century had no such problems. Running around four walls of the entrance hall were copies of the original murals graphically depicting what one could get for one’s money in a whorehouse in ancient Rome.
 

Karim made a low, wolfish growl in his throat. Alix could hardly drag her eyes away from a scene of two Roman noblemen holding a slave boy while a third sodomized him. Around them the nervy, obtrusive sound of fifties progressive jazz doodled from a sound system.
 

She was not so much frightened as stunned. The music pouring from hidden speakers was intended to cover other noises that Alix found just as nerve-wracking as the pornographic murals. She distinctly heard someone crying in pain.
 

“Karim, what are we—”
 

“Open doors,” he said hoarsely. “Just open them.” He started down a hallway. “We have to find her.”
 

A muffled voice shrieked from a nearby room; it was someone pleading for someone to stop. The hair rose on Alix’s arms and the back of her head. “I don’t think I can do this.” She recognized panic in her own voice. “What
is
this place?”
 

“A club.” He tried a door. It was locked.
 

“A club?” She clutched at him with both hands. “A club for what? Karim, someone will find us here, what will we say? What kind of a—”
 

He shook her off. “It’s a club for sex.”
 

A woman in a gold metallic evening gown and horn-rimmed glasses appeared at the end of the corridor, coming quickly toward them. She gave Alix a sharp, questioning look over her spectacles, displaying a definite managerial air in spite of the revealing evening dress.
 

“Listen to me, she can’t come here again,” the woman hissed in French. “It’s too unmanageable when they are like this. Who are you?” she demanded of Karim.
 

The tall boy braced himself, but before he could answer she turned away. “I have told her friends that, too, because they cannot control themselves. I swear to you, this is the last time. I am tired of having to call to ask someone to come and get her.”
 

The woman strode ahead. They had to hustle to keep up with her. A boy carrying towels popped out of a room to their right, darted to the other wall and flattened himself against it, looking startled. A voice was begging, “No, no, no,” behind a door as they passed. Then a hair-raising scream, and male laughter. The woman in the gold evening dress slapped the closed door with her hand, and the noises stopped.
 

Alix stumbled after her, trapped in a nightmare. She supposed she accepted that such places existed; she’d just never thought much about it. She was being engulfed by a feeling that she was going deeper and deeper into a decadent world, a horrifying place of no return. She gripped Karim’s arm so tightly her fingers ached. Damn Princess Jackie! Alix suddenly hated the troubled teenager with a vehemence that shocked her.
 

The woman stopped at the end of the corridor, pushed open a door, and stood aside to let them through.
 

“They came in a group, these kids. They brought her with them, otherwise she wouldn’t be here. I said last time I wouldn’t tolerate her in that condition.” She shrugged bitterly. “But what can you do to keep them out, when their parents are clients, too?”
 

The room was a glass chamber; mirrors covered the walls and ceiling. Empty tables and straight-backed chairs were gathered around a ransacked bed. Alix’s first impression, because of the mirrors, was that the room was full of people, but there were only a youth in a bellhop’s uniform, and a middle-aged woman who seemed to be a maid. They were busy scooping up objects from the floor and the bed, and throwing them into a cardboard box.
 

Princess Jacqueline Medivani, her leggy body nude from the waist down, was sprawled on the bed.
 

Karim gave a hoarse cry and rushed to her.
 

The woman in the evening gown looked disapproving. “You’ve got a car, haven’t you?” she asked Alix.
 

The maid and the boy left hurriedly, not meeting their eyes. Kneeling on the disordered bed, Karim took the princess’s wrist between his fingers, looking for a pulse.
 

“My God, what happened?” Alix cried. The Arab boy was almost sobbing over the inert girl in his arms. “She’s not
dead
, is she?”
 

The woman in the gold dress looked Alix up and down, scornfully. “Don’t be stupid. Would I call you to come get her if she was?” She started after the maid and the boy. “Just be quick, and get her out of here.”
 

The door closed. Alix swayed, dizzy with revulsion and fright. She could not escape the harsh reality, boldly multiplied. She saw herself dressed in a blue wool suit and coat for a party at the Sorbonne, and Karim with the naked body of Princess Jacqueline Medivani in his arms reflecting crazily like some hideous
cinéma vérité
.
 

“Is she alive?” Alix repeated stupidly.
 

“Yes.” The Arab boy tenderly brushed the princess’s short black hair back from her forehead. He crooned, “I know where she goes. I follow her in case she needs me, like this.”
 

He followed her.
The idea of Karim tracking Princess Jackie like a faithful watchdog all over Paris made Alix want to scream. The princess had rolled to one side. Her blood-stained bare bottom was exposed.
 

Alix stared, feeling sick. “Karim, what have they been
doing
?”