Satisfied by her performance so far, Santaclara pulled her up to her feet by the metal leash, almost choking her in the process, ordered her to raise her arms and attached her wrists to a pair of metal links fixed to the cellar’s ceiling. With the spread bar still holding her long legs wide apart, Cornelia was now like a picture of crucifixion. Fortunately for her, the improvised dungeon did not appear to have a wooden cross or nails.
Now she was standing, the weights attached to her parts grew heavier and ever more excruciating and an involuntary tear of pain streamed down her cheek. Observing this, the man cruelly smiled, pleased with his performance and her reaction to it so far.
“Good girl,” he said.
And then punched her hard in the pit of her stomach. Cornelia exhaled violently and was unable to draw breath for a moment or even bend in reaction, totally immobilised as she was, which made the impact of his fist even worse. It would leave a bad bruise, she knew. Oh, how he would be made to pay her back for all this when the time came. But first she must play along, as distasteful as it was proving, and find more about the network he was involved in.
Santaclara walked away and out of the cellar, not saying a word, steps echoing on the stone, leaving her alone for a short while. This allowed her to regain her composure and concentrate on banishing the pain. She tried to disconnect but there was an undertow of want still playing with her cunt. There was no way she could suppress it.
When he returned, no doubt suitably refreshed, the smell of cigarette smoke on his breath, Cornelia felt like shouting at him under the ball gag to fuck her then, fuck me now. But he smirked, observing her needy expression and calmly denied her that pleasure. This was edge play.
The games continued. The man certainly had a fertile imagination and a clear-cut talent for keeping her on the thresholds of pain and pleasure combined holding back on any sort of reward or personal gratification until she was almost mentally begging for relief or further humiliation.
By the time he tired, Cornelia could hardly hold herself together, physically or mentally, and when he untied her and loosened her bonds, one limb at a time, she couldn’t help herself from collapsing into his expectant arms, which he held aloft anticipating her fall.
“There, there,” he remarked. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Cornelia tried to say something in some vain form of defiance, but her throat was too dry.
“Let’s take you upstairs, where you can relax a bit, have a sip of water, put something on, Marti. I like you: you have attitude, pride. You know you could have asked me to stop at any given time, but you didn’t. You seemed determined to test your limits.”
“You have no idea of my limits,” she spat out, straightening herself and forcing herself to raise one leg and then another to demonstrate she could walk up the stairs unaided. His hand playfully caressed her sore, marked buttocks as he walked behind her.
“But you enjoyed it, didn’t you?” he asked. “You were visibly in the zone. So wonderfully wet.”
She glanced down at her thighs. She had leaked badly, dried secretions of lust like snail trails marbling her pale white skin.
There was no way she could even deny that she had found pleasure in the pain, in the experience.
“It was… fascinating,” she said, fumbling for the right word.
“A most interesting way of putting it, I’d say.” They were now back on the ground floor of the house. He guided her to a large bedroom and pointed out the en-suite bathroom.
“You can clean yourself up there, my dear. Do join me afterwards in the study. I think we might have a lot to talk about. But take your time. I’m sure you have a lot to reflect on.”
She had found a white bathrobe and wrapped it around her weary body. Tiptoed on bare feet back to the living areas. Santaclara was sipping a cognac in the study. There was classical music playing. She recognised the melody, but couldn’t name it. She had always been a rock ’n roll sort of gal. He offered her a glass. Cornelia downed it in one gulp.
“Made you thirsty, hasn’t it?” Enrico pointed out and poured her another glass full. This time, Cornelia slowed down, brought it to her nose and sniffed, inhaling the drink’s harsh sweetness. She took a deep breath and then tipped the glass to her lips, allowing the burning liquid to swirl around her mouth before it continued its obligatory way down to her throat, soon warming her whole body.
“It’s good cognac,” she said.
“Vintage” he said. “Only the best.”
Cornelia sat on the leather sofa, finally able to relax, as if landing after a long flight, nerves no longer tingling but in a pleasurable, serene state of satori.
“You came through that really well,” the man facing her said.
“Was it a test?” Cornelia enquired.
“You could call it that.”
“Tell me more,” she asked.
“Women like you interest me.”
“Not just for sex, you mean?”
“Precisely,” he said.
“Is that why you didn’t fuck me? It would have been fine with me, I wouldn’t have minded in the slightest.”
“Any slut can provide sex,” Enrico continued. “Or any foolish girl who thinks being submissive is just an expression of love, worshipping her master and all that, read the usual books once too often and opens her leg out of sheer romantic instinct. One should never trust a book.”
“It’s true. I am not romantic, by a long way,” Cornelia confirmed.
“You have inner strength, Marti. You are evidently in possession of a fierce intelligence. You understand it’s not all about the meat of bodies, holes and penetration. Pleasure can turn out to be so much more. On a higher plane.”
“I suppose so.”
“So why did you engineer our meeting?” Santaclara suddenly asked her.
“Engineer?”
“Don’t take me for a fool,” he said. ‘An attractive young woman like you doesn’t throw herself at a man so readily. Let alone allow herself to be used as you have been. I’d rather you came clean. Now.” There was a hint of threat in his tone of voice.
“I was at the Chandelles the other day when that man was killed.”
“Really?” A worried look spread across his features as he absorbed the new information.
“Someone took me there, a guy I sometimes go out with back in the States. He’d read about the place in a guide book on Paris sex spots. Just as we were about to leave, there was this commotion. We were in a private room, across from where it happened. The man I was with was unaware of what had occurred, but I had gone to powder my nose between scenes and noticed all the staff running around in a mild state of panic. I saw you giving out orders. It’s just that the next morning, and the following days, there was just nothing in the papers or on the news. I was just curious, you know.”
“So you thought you’d arrange to meet me?”
“Well, yes. A right little Nancy Drew and all that, there must be a reason it was all hushed up, no?” She sketched a pleading smile.
“Are you sure you wish to know?”
“Well, you might say I’ve gone to great lengths to find out, no?”
“So you have. But you know what they say about curiosity, don’t you?”
“Enlighten me.”
She learnt that the man who was killed at the Chandelles club was a long established acquaintance of Santaclara and his associates. A group of them were actually the true owners of the establishment, although this was concealed through a series of dummy companies through which other more conventional businesses were also funnelled in order to muddy fiscal waters. It could be said that what they were engaged in was not actually illegal, even though in the eyes of many it could be seen as morally dubious. The men had all met through their frequentation of BDSM circles and tastes for domination.
Initially they lurked on the Internet in a variety of adult chat forums where they had advertised themselves as a group of dominant men offering women the opportunit
y to partake and be the objects of group sex, gang bangs even, on a purely anonymous, discreet and safe basis. It was surprising how many had proven interested and found the courage to go through with the events which normally took place in hotel rooms or the specially-appointed cellar of one of the men’s houses or the basement of another’s high-street fashion store. The open invitation had attracted women of all ages and social status, from nurses to doctors, teachers to bank executives and, more appetisingly, even school girls or students.
As Santaclara carefully pointed out, the women came willingly. There was no money involved at this stage, so it couldn’t be said that prostitution was involved. Why they attended voluntarily and offered themselves knowingly to a group of unknown men for such prolonged episodes of sexual exploitation and degradation was between the women and their conscience. Nymphomania, overbearing curiosity, a longing for submission both psychological and physical, it wasn’t for the men to reason why. Most of the women satisfied their urges, unnatural or not, and some would even return for more, become regulars of sorts, who would then graduate to open air parties in semi-public places, dogging excursions and, once the Chandelles was acquired by the main instigators of the group, to special events organised there to which outsiders were invited, after careful screening.
“Charming” Cornelia remarked.
“It’s what they wanted. They were never forced to participate,” Enrico pointed out again. “Things were always made very clear to them from the outset. It was their decision alone to become involved. On every occasion a new girl agreed to be fully used in the manner we had explicitly explained to her, she would meet every single member of the evening’s group at the hotel bar for drinks before we would go up to the room. Until she had crossed the door into the bedroom, she always had the opportunity to pull out. A few did. We accepted that, and that would then be the end of the matter.”
After the group’s activities expanded into selected exclusive evenings at the swing club, their reputation quickly grew. They were not offering professionals, whores, but normal women who, in order to satisfy their sexual needs, proved eminently willing and available for even the wildest, or even perverse, occasions. The women were never paid, although from a certain stage onwards the new punters they collected did; after all, the club had to earn its keep, didn’t it?
“And what happened to women once they had satisfied their lust and were no longer of interest to the group? Surely, it wasn’t possible for them to go on doing this for ever. Everyone has limits, and anyway wasn’t fresh meat always needed? It’s like a vicious circle, a conveyor belt, no?” Cornelia enquired.
“Exactly,” Santaclara said. “You’ve put your finger on it. That’s where the problems began.”
A member of the initial group had got it into his head that, after they had tired of certain women, maybe he could keep on exploiting them for profit, rather than discard them with relative elegance and kindness as had previously happened. Well, they had been well groomed and he felt it would be wasteful not to recycle them, so to speak.
“How?” Cornelia asked.
Santaclara frowned. The whole matter was evidently quite distasteful to him, although all the other activities he had been discussing did not present him with any problem, it appeared.
The bad man in question had somehow made a connection with a network through which women were traded from country to country, mostly to wealthy collectors. A lot of money was involved. He was beginning to funnel some of the women through that dubious pipeline.
“Sounds like slave trading to me,” Cornelia remarked.
“Maybe. But he was clever. He was one of the best groomers in the group. Had always been the best of us at discovering new girls, not only on the Internet, sometimes he’d pick them up in the street, in bars. He had a way, a je ne sais quoi, which always succeeded in convincing the women in question they were acting of their own free will. He could spot them, as if there were something written on their forehead that said ‘submissive’ or just naive. After the women grew tired, after their initial thrill had exhausted itself, he was very good at talking them into risking the next step.”
“Selling them?”
“Yes.”
So, Cornelia noted, the sordid puzzle was all now coming together.
“Who ordered his death?”
“He was becoming something of an embarrassment. He had left us no alternatives.”
No wonder they had hushed up the kill and disposed of the body with no unwarranted publicity. What a nest of vipers she had dipped her toes into.
“Who? Your group?”
“Not just us. His activities were becoming too public. He supplied girls to the network, but also double-crossed them when convenient and traded with Arabs. That was a step too far for everyone. We can’t condone white slavery.”
“How delicate of you.”
“Some of us hold important positions in business and even government. We have connections. We made contact with the network he had been dealing with. Explained the problem we were facing to them. We all agreed something had to be done to curtail his activities once and for all. We sanctioned the action but they organised the particulars.”
“I see.”
“I don’t know who they used or how. But it happened quickly. Very professional, I must say.”
Cornelia repressed a small grin.
“So that’s what I caught a glimpse of,” she said. “What a story. And whoever did the job left no clues or witnesses.”
“Actually there was a witness. Most unfortunate,” Santaclara said. “A young Italian woman the man in question had brought along to the club that night for some form of further initiation. We knew nothing of her; he’d probably picked her up shortly before. She’d been living with him for some weeks but he hadn’t yet introduced her to any of us.”
“What happened to her?”
“In the confusion, she slipped out of the club. Went on the run. Probably scared out of her wits. We don’t know her name. She stole some of the man’s files but tried to dispose of them in a railway station, in all likelihood as she was leaving the country. A friend in the police retrieved the papers for us, so no harm was done.”
“Are you or the network still looking for the Italian girl?”
“We aren’t, but I understand people in the network are concerned she might have caught a sight of the killer they employed for the job. However, that’s no concern to us.”
Cornelia felt a tinge of disappointment. She’d reconstructed the whole story, but she was nowhere nearer finding Giulia or getting Ivan’s clients off her backs. This was yet another dead end. There would be no point getting Santaclara to spill further beans. Her problem was now back in the States.
Santaclara poured her another glass.
“So what am I to do with you, young lady?” he asked.
LIFT ME UP
JACK AND ELEONORA CHECKED out of the Barcelona hotel just off Diagonal and hailed a cab which took them to the principal railway station where they boarded the local train going down the coast.
Forty minutes later they had arrived in Sitges. A popular beach resort which they both associated, albeit for somewhat different reasons, with Giulia. The tourist season was coming to an end, and already many of the restaurants facing the promenade were closed, shutters up for the winter, and the main stand which sold ice-creams, waffles, sweets in all colours and churroswas boarded up. The locals and visitors from the city paraded up and down the long walk until midnight. The first thing they noticed was the sheer number of pregnant women around. By next summer, there would be a logjam of prams and buggies joining the late night ramblers here.
Jack’s gaze was distant as they walked towards the gothic promontory formed by the old town fortifications from Napoleonic times, which separated the main shore from the San Sebastian area and, a stone’s throw beyond, the new leisureport. Between the cemetery on the hill and the port stood a rocky area where new apartments were being built all over the
hills all the way to the railway line which bisected the town. Further up a succession of small beaches lay, a trio of narrow coves harbouring one of the town’s gay beaches as well as an unpoliced one where nudity was tolerated.
“You are very pensive,” Eleonora remarked.
“I know,” he answered, emerging from his private thoughts.
She looked up at him. Guessed.
“It’s here you came with her, isn’t it?” she asked even as she knew the answer. “That’s why she kept on mentioning Sitges in her letters to me.”
Jack nodded.
“She’s like an invisible third person in our relationship, isn’t she?” Eleonora pointed out. They were now descending the narrow stone steps separating the beach area from the recentlydeveloped pleasure harbour which was self-enclosed, and where the hotel they had booked into was situated.
“Same hotel?” she asked.
“Actually, no. We stayed in a small place in the town itself. All the places overlooking the sea were full. It was a very short notice trip for both of us.”
“How you say, it’s a small mercy,” Eleonora remarked.
They silently took the lift to the second floor, both too tired to walk up the stairs after walking miles that day. The windows of the long corridor at the back of the hotel looked onto a wall of rocks, where the cliff had been carved into to create space for the construction of the hotel, loose stones held back by a curtain of barbed wire.
After boiling some water for coffee, they settled on the balcony overlooking the marina port where a geometrical jungle of small boats spread out, some already mothballed for the coming colder season. Further out on the jetty wall, wild cats roamed. Muzak crept through the air as the parade of restaurants below their balcony came to life.
“Where do you want to eat?” Jack asked. “In the port or should we walk back into town? Whatever suits you best.”
It was as good a way as any other to break the rising blanket of silences that was beginning to separate them. Eleonora didn’t respond. Jack persisted.
I Was Waiting for You Page 12