by Robert Brown
Now Heinrich had to look the part. He returned to central Amsterdam to Warmoesstraat, where he had seen a bunch of porn and fetish shops. He walked along the narrow lane, flanked by tall historic buildings. A few hundred years ago it had been a neighborhood for rich merchants and shopkeepers. Now it was the heart of the city’s fetish industry. Mannequins in leather and bondage gear stood in the shop windows. Windowless bars sported rainbow flags and a flag Heinrich didn’t recognize. It had black and blue stripes and a red heart in the corner. He looked it up on his phone and found it was the leather pride flag.
“You learn something new every day,” he said with a chuckle.
He entered a likely looking shop and wandered along an aisle filled with fetish gear. The smell of leather and rubber filled his nostrils.
Rubber? Yes, there were entire suits of rubber there, mostly black but some in bright pastel colors. Gas masks, too, including one with a big funnel attached to the mouth. Heinrich decided he wouldn’t look that one up on the Internet.
As he studied a studded leather harness, one of the attendants approached him—a muscular Dutch guy in a form-fitting black shirt and leather pants. “Can I help you?” he asked in English.
“Yeah, um, I’m looking for some S&M gear.”
“New to the scene?”
“Is it obvious?”
The guy laughed. “Yes. Don’t worry, we all have to start somewhere. There’s a good bar just down the street that has a fetish night every Saturday.”
The way he said it, and the eye contact he was holding, told Heinrich that this wasn’t his kind of bar.
“I’m straight,” Heinrich said, feeling oddly ridiculous.
The shop attendant shrugged. “Nobody’s perfect.”
Heinrich laughed. “All right, bud. How about you fix me up with some gear.”
“Dom or sub?”
“Dom. Definitely.”
“Mmm, I like the way you said that. Now, this harness you’re looking at isn’t what you want. See these metal rings on the neck and back? Those are for leashes.”
“Oh. No leashes.”
“This would be better.” He pulled out a leather vest. “You wear it without a shirt underneath it, to show off your chest. You look like you work out.”
“I’m a boxer.”
“Cool. I do Greco-Roman wrestling.”
Heinrich wasn’t sure if he was joking. “What about pants?”
“Well, if you insist. Leather. These should fit. And this belt with the studs would look good with it. You’ll need boots, too.”
Heinrich picked up a pair of leather, spiked wristbands. “These would match the belt,” he said.
And be useful as weapons.
“Those are perfect! You’re getting the hang of it.”
“How about one of those caps?” Heinrich asked, pointing to black leather caps, each of which had a glossy brim and a high peak in front.
“Oh no. Those are Muir caps. Everyone will think you’re gay. Unless that’s what …”
“Skip the cap. I could use a whip, though.”
The attendant ushered him over to a long rack of whips of all sizes. Heinrich was tempted by a long, thick bullwhip that looked like it could do some serious damage but decided it wouldn’t work well in any cramped interior spaces. Instead, he chose a heavy cat o’ nine tails. It had a flexible rope handle about a foot long, tipped with nine cords about a foot-and-a-half long. Each ended in a knot.
He hefted it, testing the weight. He wouldn’t want to face one of these in a fight. People actually got turned on by getting hit with one of these?
“I better try this stuff on,” Heinrich said. He had quite an armful.
“The changing rooms are at the back of the store. Don’t worry. Nobody will try to come in with you.”
I wasn’t worried about that before, but I am now.
Luckily, the shop attendant didn’t try his chances, and Heinrich found a pair of leather pants that fit him. He put on the belt, the boots, the vest, and the wristbands, and he held the whip.
Heinrich walked out of the changing room feeling conspicuous and more than a bit embarrassed. It didn’t help that a pair of Japanese tourists snapped his picture.
The attendant came up to him. “You look like a completely different person.”
He pointed at a mirror. Heinrich took a good look at himself. He looked … weird.
“Welcome to your new life,” said the attendant with a smile.
“Ring it up. I’ll take it all.”
“You sure? It’s quite a lot to spend for a first-timer.”
“That’s OK, a Baptist minister is paying for it.”
The attendant laughed.
“I’m not joking,” Heinrich said.
“I didn’t think you were. You’re not the first religious guy I’ve met who beats up his minister.”
Heinrich changed back into his street clothes and set down his credit card, thinking about how the card company would sell his purchase information to God-knows-who. He’d be getting some interesting targeted advertising for a while.
The attendant put everything in two large bags, then wrote his name and number on the back of the shop’s business card. “If your minister doesn’t satisfy you, call me. I’ll show you the town.”
“I gave a KLM stewardess my number. She never called me back.”
The attendant gave him a steamy gaze. “I’ll call you back.”
“Sorry, bud. But thanks for the help.”
Wish you could help me with this case, Heinrich thought. Because if I don’t find Johan at this party, I don’t have any other leads.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The club turned out to be a refurbished warehouse on the edge of the port district. Heinrich arrived at ten, when the doors opened. After struggling to decide whether to show up in his gear or to wear street clothes and hope there’d be some sort of private dressing room at the club, he decided he’d be embarrassed either way. The best he could do was put it off, so he strolled up to the blank metal door on the windowless façade wearing his street clothes and carrying his BDSM gear in a duffel bag.
He pressed the buzzer beside the door. A dull throbbing of House music came from within.
The door buzzed and clicked open. Heinrich entered a front room with a closed door in front of him and a counter with a thick window to his right. Posters from fetish parties adorned the walls. The Dutch man at the counter asked for his ticket.
Biniam had sent it to him, and he’d printed it, flushing as the guy at the print shop had stared at the picture on it: a woman in stiletto heels walking on a man’s back.
The guy at this counter didn’t stare. Heinrich decided it would take a lot to make him stare.
“Do you have a changing room?” Heinrich asked in Dutch. He had made sure to look up the word for “changing room.”
“Male, female, or other?”
Heinrich blinked. On the off chance that Casey showed up, where would she be?
“Other.”
What am I getting myself into?
“Second door on the right,” the guy at the counter said in English.
“Thank you,” Heinrich said. He hated it when people switched to English to be polite. It was so insulting. How the hell was he going to learn the language if he wasn’t immersed in it?
The inner door buzzed. As Heinrich opened it, thudding electronic music assaulted his ears. He sneered. What was this shit? Fake music made by computer programmers sampling tracks made by real musicians. And the damn stuff just wouldn’t go away. It had been going strong since the Nineties.
He remembered the musical revolutions of New York City in the Seventies and Eighties. Punk. Hip Hop. Those had changed the musical landscape with real innovation and real talent. This electronic crap did nothing but steal from better artists.
A short passageway opened up to a dance floor on his left. To his right, the hall ran for a little way. Three doors were embedded in it. One had a generic symbol of
a man, like on bathrooms the world over. The one at the end had a female symbol, although someone had used a marker to draw a whip in the figure’s hand. The door between them was covered with little flags, yin-yang images, and weird symbols that Heinrich couldn’t begin to decipher.
He took phots of a couple of the symbols and flags and put them through an image search app on his phone. They turned out to signify genders he didn’t know existed. One was gender nonconforming, which meant that someone looked like a particular gender but didn’t act the way society said they should. Heinrich shrugged. Didn’t that depend on whom you hung out with? Then there was “Transfeminine,” in which a male partially identified as female. “Transmasculine” was a woman who identified partially as male. Heinrich blinked. So, they were talking about flamers and butch dykes. Those had been around forever. Why did they need a new label? He also learned that someone who didn’t want to put a label on their gender could choose “Neither”—although that also counted as a label.
All these, he found, were recognized by Facebook, which allowed its members to pick from among dozens of genders. He wondered if anyone recognized the existence of these genders besides a few people on the Internet and Facebook.
Heinrich suddenly felt very old. It seemed the world was always changing, and not for the better. Gentrification had all but ruined the city he loved, and words were taking on new meanings like never before. He didn’t see the point of all these labels. Was being queer or bi not edgy enough anymore?
Some angry words in Dutch made him turn. A pot-bellied guy with a thick beard, wearing nothing but a giant pair of diapers, glowered at him. Heinrich took a step back. Those diapers were oddly intimidating.
After a second, he remembered himself. Turning on his best Clueless Tourist Grin, he said in English, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Dutch.”
The guy’s frown deepened as he switched to English. “No photos here.”
“Oh, sorry. It’s my first time.” Heinrich hurried into the changing room before the oversized baby could respond.
The crowd he found inside the changing room wasn’t any better. In front of a row of lockers, a couple of men and several women were changing from street clothes into different kinds of fetish gear. A dangerously thin man with one side of his head shaved and the other dyed bright red was pulling on, with skeletal arms, a pair of sequined pants. A hefty woman was strapping herself into a leather outfit that was almost a match for Heinrich’s own, except she had opted for the bullwhip. Another woman, completely naked, was trying to untangle some sort of garment. Heinrich didn’t see what it was because he was hypnotized by the dozens of piercings all over her body. One was a nose ring from which a pair of thin gold chains ran down to nipple piercings. She had other piercings as well. Everywhere.
The woman noticed him staring and snapped something angry in Dutch.
“Sorry,” he replied in English. “I was just admiring your piercings.”
She switched to heavily accented English. “Well, you don’t have to stare.”
“My bad.” Heinrich went to a locker and started undressing.
“The men’s locker room is down the hallway,” Ms. Piercings snapped.
“Don’t assume someone’s gender!” Ms. Bullwhip told her. Several others nodded their heads and frowned at the piercings woman.
“This is supposed to be a safe space,” said a woman dressed in rubber.
With all these spikes and whips, I’m not feeling very safe, Heinrich thought.
“I’m gender fluid,” Heinrich said. “I feel more like a man today but not one hundred percent.”
Holy crap, I’m getting good at this, he thought.
“All right,” Ms. Piercings conceded, “but you don’t have to stare rape me. You can be a man without the patriarchy.”
Heinrich didn’t respond because he didn’t entirely understand what she had just said. If she didn’t want to be stared at, why did she have all that metal shit on her body? And how did looking at someone count as rape?
Heinrich changed as quickly as he could, donning all his leather gear and giving his cat o’ nine tails a few experimental flicks. Oddly, the memory of Arizona flicking an imaginary whip while she reenacted her movie scenes entered his mind. His stomach turned.
Let’s find Johan, find the girl, and get the hell out of this damn city, Heinrich told himself.
The locker had a key with a rubber strap that he could tie around his wrist. Once all his stuff was secure, he turned to go. Ms. Bullwhip walked into the hall just as he did.
“Sorry about that back there,” she said in English.
“I’m used to it.”
“Evi’s had some bad experiences with men and gets triggered sometimes.”
“Sorry to hear that.” They walked down the hall toward the main room. A few others in leather and rubber shouldered past.
“I’m Britt,” said the woman, extending her hand and raising her voice to be heard.
“I’m Mark,” Heinrich said, taking it. “Nice whip. I wanted one of those but I figured I’d have trouble wielding it in enclosed spaces.”
“It takes practice,” she said, smiling. “Not something a newbie can pick up overnight.”
“Why do you think I’m a newbie?”
Britt laughed and pinched his cheek. “It’s like you have a neon sign over your head.”
Heinrich blushed. This place was weirding him out. Things got worse when they reached the end of the hallway and entered a large disco.
On a raised dance floor, a few people gyrated to the regular beat thudding out of six-foot-tall speakers. In the four corners of the dance floor were stages set a couple of feet higher up. Two were empty, while on a third, a man clad in head-to-toe leather was setting up some sort of table with restraints. On the fourth was a cage in which a nude woman danced.
As Heinrich’s eyes adjusted to the light, he saw that all around the dance floor were other areas for sex or whatever these people did. Manacles hung from the support pillars, and a few tables with restraints at each corner were in full view. Beyond the dance floor, Heinrich saw a large, arched doorway leading into the darkness.
“What’s in there?” Heinrich asked, pointing.
“The dark room,” Britt answered. “It’s for more intense sessions. Not for newbies. Come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”
They walked up to a long bar. Beside it stood a tall cage from which a fat woman hung suspended by her wrists. She had cellulite along her heavy thighs, which her thong only accentuated. Heinrich glanced at her face. She looked embarrassed, hollow. The sight tugged at his heart. For the thousandth time, he wondered why people did this. Most of these people didn’t look horny. They looked either defeated or angry. Britt was one of the few people here who looked truly at ease.
A brick wall of a bartender covered in tattoos took their order—beers for both of them—and they sat on a pair of stools next to the hanging woman. Britt didn’t even glance at her.
“So, how did you get into the scene?” she asked.
“Just sort of fell into it through some acquaintances of mine.”
“You said you were gender fluid. Are you versatile as well?”
A gay guy he had once boxed with had told him that “versatile” meant a guy who would be either top or bottom. Heinrich had no idea if the meaning was the same in this scene but he decided to play it safe.
“No, I’m not versatile.”
Britt shrugged. “That’s too bad. I wanted to show you the ropes.” She caught his eye. After a moment, they both laughed.
“Maybe we should show somebody else the ropes,” Heinrich said.
Britt raised her beer. “I’ll drink to that.”
And drink she did. She downed that beer like a pro, then let out a loud belch. At first Heinrich took this as a sign that she was a drinker, but she didn’t order another. Instead, they chatted about Amsterdam and the BDSM scene. Heinrich found Britt easy to talk to. Despite their surroundings, she seemed surprisingly
normal and well-adjusted.
As they talked, Heinrich’s gazed roved over the room. It was quickly filling up. Another of the platforms was being used for some sort of whipping display. The smack of leather on flesh could be heard over the powerful music. Heinrich caught a glimpse of red lines crisscrossing someone’s back, then quickly looked elsewhere, only to see a nearby table where a naked man was strapped. Ms. Piercings from the changing room was pouring hot wax on his groin.
“You ever hear of 666 Entertainment?” Heinrich asked Britt.
Her features hardened. “Yes. Why?”
Heinrich tried to act innocent. “Oh, I met some guy on Warmoesstraat who said they were hiring actors for their movies. Said I could be a star.”
Britt put a hand on his knee. The tender gesture amid all this posturing and consensual pain took him aback. “You don’t want to go with those guys. There are a lot of sickos in this scene ready to take advantage of a newbie like you.”
Heinrich feigned worry. “What do they do?”
“They’ve been around for a while and they’ve been pretty successful. Live streams, movies, club nights, all sorts of stuff. They’re big on the devil theme. That doesn’t really interest me. It sells big in Catholic countries but I’m an atheist so it doesn’t turn me on. Their scenes were always good, though. Hot actors and actresses and really professional setups.”
“So why don’t you like them?”
“They’ve changed their focus recently. They’ve been getting a lot of competition from bigger porn companies moving into the BDSM market. It’s a growing market and these big companies can buy more talent and better production value than 666 Entertainment can. So 666 moved into areas the bigger companies won’t touch.”
“Like what?”
“Hardcore abuse. Blood. And Cut and Paste.”
“Cut and Paste? What, like surgery?”
Britt shook her head, her face looking like she had just tasted something bitter. “No, cutting out one image and pasting it onto the scene of another. They use it to get around certain laws.”