The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Maxim Jakubowski

by Maxim Jakubowski

  Once you’ve swum in one pool, it’s easy to navigate in its counterpart. I knew what to do and what not to do. I’d never much been encumbered by rules and regulations, or morality anyway.

  So, now I’m the man in the bar whose face you can never see or remember, watching the world go by. Your average, anonymous contract killer.

  Killing off what is left of the night.

  The woman glances my way, but she visibly doesn’t note my presence, her gaze passing straight through me and likely alighting on some passer-by walking outside, turning the corner on a slow journey to Chinatown just a mile or so away to the East. Her eyes are rimmed with too much kohl; doesn’t suit her, makes her look older than she is. She looks away, her indifference returning. Her partner lights another cigarette while the attendant refills his cup of coffee.

  I tried to recall the eyes of the other woman earlier this evening. The younger one. What colour were they? I couldn’t. Much of what took place did so in darkness, an oppressive penumbra in which I had played the leading, murderous role. There had been a haunting quality in those eyes when she had pleaded for her life. She had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Damn!

  “My name is Sarah,” she had said, looking towards me with a sadness full of resignation, as if she already knew I could not be swayed. There are rules in this unholy game which must not be ignored. And even though Sarah was not a player, she was instinctively aware of the fact.

  I had not responded immediately.

  “I will do anything you wish me to,” she had continued. “Or rather you can do anything to me you want. Anything.”

  Maybe it was what she saw in my eyes that made her plead such things. I have heard it said they are grey, steely and unfeeling. When I shave and examine my features in the mirror, I see no such thing. Eyes are just eyes. They convey nothing.

  The body of the man who had summoned her to this hotel room for use is sprawled just a few feet away on the carpeted floor, stone cold dead. One bullet had sufficed. It seldom takes more; don’t believe what you see in the movies. Killing a man with a gun is simplicity itself if you know where to aim and have a steady hand and the advantage of surprise. I’d been given a few photos of him when I had accepted the assignment and had followed him from his office as a realtor in Beverly Hills (no doubt a cover, but that wasn’t my concern) to this rococo hotel downtown with a fascinating over-the-top decor that blended equal doses of terracotta Mexican colours with Indian artefacts and monstrously sized potted plants throughout its dark lobby area. He’d parked his Chevy in a lot at the back of the hotel, which had given me time enough to move ahead and innocently share the elevator with him up to his floor. He hadn’t even given me a look. I’d jumped him just as he was opening the door to his room. As the lock clicked I’d put the gun to his head and sharply shoved against his shoulders and forced him into the room.

  It took me a second or so to take it all in. The young woman sitting on the bed adjusting her stockings, looking up at me and the man barging through the door. The way her mouth formed an O of surprise. He was just about to say something in protest when I pressed the trigger, and the muffled sound of the weapon’s silencer interrupted the nature morte of the scene that was so quickly unfolding. He slumped to his knees, and then almost in slow motion to the hotel room floor, his limbs spreading incongruously across the target, his face three quarters burying itself into the lush softness of the carpet.

  Her mouth returned to its normal thin-lipped shape and she froze on the spot, no doubt a million emotions, questions and fear spreading through her body.

  The hit was clean. There wasn’t even that much blood, yet.

  I looked at her again.

  Our eyes locked.

  A torrent of communication surging through the darkened, pastel room in the utter stillness of the late afternoon. All things unsaid but sadly clear in both our minds.

  Witnesses have no rights.

  This was when she told me her name. In a forlorn bid to humanise herself. To make me rethink my resolve.

  I didn’t respond, just stood there, my legs now straddling the inert body of my designated victim.

  “You can have me,” she continued. “I won’t say anything. Please.”

  She didn’t look like a whore. Not a cheap one at any rate. Maybe a girlfriend, or another man’s wife he was enjoying on the side? That’s what hotel rooms are for, isn’t it? Her two piece suit had a conservative cut, only spoiled by the fact that the skirt had been hoisted up to mid-thigh as she had been straightening the line of her stockings as we had entered the room. The upper, uncovered half of her thigh was creamy, white, almost virginal, above the darker, flesh coloured fabric of the hold up stocking.

  No garter belt, I couldn’t help noticing.

  “Will you let me go?” she asked quietly, as if she no longer even believed it could happen.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied.

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  She lowered her eyes.

  I felt sad. There is no enjoyment to be found in killing innocents. I am not a sadist.

  “Now?” she enquired, seemingly resigned to her fate.

  I walked up to the bed where she was sitting.

  Looked down at her.

  “A waste, I know,” as if apologising.

  “Yes,” she agreed, her voice a thin sliver escaping from her mouth, touching the very root of my heart, or was it my stomach? Sometimes, emotions affect me in curious physical ways.

  All of a sudden, I wanted to ask her so many questions. Who she was, why she was here, the nature of her relationship with the dead man? I wanted to know her. But I knew it was impossible. I didn’t have the time.

  Her name was Sarah. That was all I was allowed to know.

  “Get up,” I ordered.

  She rose from the edge of the hotel bed, and stood, her gloved hands by her side. She was shorter than I’d expected.

  She looked towards me, waiting for further instructions, a veil of sadness drifting across her pale face.

  “Had he paid you in advance?” I asked her.

  She blushed. I wasn’t sure if this was caused by embarrassment or anger.

  It made her look quite beautiful, though. Her cheeks an attenuated shade of pink that served to emphasise the sharp delineation of her cheekbones.

  “With him,” she answered, “it had nothing to do with money. Absolutely nothing.”

  “Love?” I continued.

  “No. Nor lust either,” she said.

  When I stopped responding, she brazenly straightened out her whole body, almost growing by an inch or so as her back snapped into position.

  “You just wouldn’t understand,” she said defiantly. “Not in a month of Sundays.”

  No, I couldn’t.

  “Undress,” I asked her.

  She obeyed unconditionally, and it wasn’t out of fear, I knew.

  Like many women when they shed their clothing, she began by the bottom. She unzipped the invisible fastening on the right side of her skirt and the light fabric of the garment slid to the floor where she elegantly stepped out of it. She wasn’t wearing any undergarments and her plump mound was shaven totally smooth, which just took my breath away. She allowed me a minute of oppressive silence to collect my thoughts and drink in the vision of her obscene nudity, just standing there in stockinged legs and nothing else.

  Her sexual slit was a straight line gash from which no inner or outer labia protruded, like a raw wound, a scar that hypnotised me. I couldn’t help but stare at it.

  Then she quickly shed the rest of her clothes, the suit jacket, the opaque black cotton blouse and a small, and somewhat unnecessary brassiere, which then revealed slight dark-nippled breast I could cup in one hand, delicate hills in the porcelain landscape of her body.

  I kept on peering at her.

  Once I had taken in her prominent sexual characteristics, I quickly noted that the whole geography of her body was dotted with s
mall bruises. These blemishes travelled across a whole spectrum of colours from dark, almost blue to brown and pale yellow as the skin had begun repairing itself.

  These bruises had been created over a period of time; there was no way they could have happened on the same occasion.

  “Turn round.”

  She did so, with elfin grace.

  The bruises also generously populated her back, prominently spread across her thighs, with even redder lines, like the forgotten remnants of whip lashes or continued caning, crisscrossing her slightly androgynous buttocks.

  In the small of her back, there was the tattoo of a Chinese ideogram, which I was unable to recognise. I should have asked her, but I didn’t.

  I had a million questions for Sarah, but none could make the tortuous journey from my brain cells to my lips.

  “Touch me.”

  It was her turn to give orders.

  Hesitantly, I moved an arm forward, brushed my fingers against one of her shoulders. Her skin felt damp. But electric. I slowly moved upwards, sliding my fingers through her short ash blonde hair. Like a journey through silk.

  I noted one of the more prominent bruises on her body, a soiled few square inches of skin between her navel and her cunt where the skin had almost broken and still waltzed between dark tones of black and a borderline crater of yellow. I touched her there. The softness was divine. I perversely pressed harder.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  “No,” she replied.

  My fingers lingered over the flatness of her lower stomach, bathing in the nearby heat emanating in concentric circles from her sexual opening outwards. The pink gash was short and as straight as ruler, highlighted by her depilation. I’d seen shaven mounds in magazines and dubious films, but this was the first I’d come across in real life.

  “Did he beat you?”

  “Not him,” Sarah said. “Others.”

  “More than one?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see,” that was all I could prosaically say in the circumstance.

  “I don’t mind,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “You can, too, if you so wish.”

  “I’m not that sort of guy.”

  “How do you know?” she responded, with the bare hint of a smile on her lips, as she glanced over at the body by the door.

  “I just know,” I answered.

  “But you can still fuck me,” Sarah suggested. “I’m available, I’m here, I’m yours for the taking, any way you wish. I won’t scream.”

  As she said that, all my imagination could conjure was the image of her being punched and whipped by other men, while she kept her silence and tears rolled down her cheeks.

  How could she enjoy it, I wondered?

  “You know I can’t,” I said. Then added, “But I like what I see. Really.”

  She sighed.

  “Do it now, then.”

  But I knew I couldn’t shoot her. Not like this. Not after seeing the wonder and questions of her nude body, feeling the tremor of life and softness coursing through her skin, the unknown history buried inside her soft Southern voice.

  If I shot her, it would be showing her total disrespect, assimilating her to that piece of shit now dripping dark blood over there by the door on the hotel room flooring.

  She deserved better.

  I nodded to her, indicating the window that opened on South Figueroa Boulevard. Her eyes questioned me silently. I blinked once and she understood.

  The flight of her naked body through the air was not unlike the dance of a butterfly in the summer breeze, weightless and beautiful, as she swam towards the ground in seeming less slow motion, fluttering her invisible wings, the bruises like a kaleidoscope of colours inked across her white skin, floating, smiling.

  I looked away before she hit the ground.

  I am waiting for the long California night to end so I can catch the first flight back, wasting the remaining hours of darkness in an almost empty bar called Phillies. The couple across from me are still communicating in total silence.

  Not long to go.

  I have a bit of a cramp, a muscle giving me grief in my right shoulder, maybe caused by the recoil of the gun earlier. I must be getting older, no longer absorbing the reverse shock wave in my gun arm. I shift imperceptibly in the high stall and across my shoulder I see a man outside in the street sketching on a pad. For him, I suppose, we must be in an eerie pool of light and an image worth remembering, just anonymous shapes in a composition of light and darkness. He is quite tall and balding, an imposing Patrician man.

  As I turn around a bit more to look in his eyes, the artist draws a final line on his pad and, satisfied, closes it and begins to walk away, almost immediately melting into the night’s surroundings.

  I adjust my position, take another sip from my glass of Coke.

  Edward Hopper was smiling.

  The Rise and Fall of the Burlesque Empire

  Maxim Jakubowski

  It could be that in another life I sold my soul to the devil.

  And what is happening to me now is just a form of punishment, a kind of torture inflicted on me in some indeterminate circle of hell where I must be stewing.

  There is no other explanation.

  I have the gift of time travel.

  But I can’t control it.

  I am randomly taken to places and times. In a loop that is nothing less than infernal, things happen to me that claw into the sheer fabric of my heart and soul and diminish me with every journey, eating me away like a rat gnawing at my stomach. And on and on it goes and somehow, something inside of me assures me it will never cease and the terrible pain will endure forever because I am not allow to die.

  In my sleep, I was transported to Times Square.

  I knew it wasn’t a dream. I could smell the street, sense the vibrancy of Manhattan, touch people, eat, do things you cannot achieve in your sleep. The smell of the hamburger and hot dog stands, the blissfully soft touch of women’s bare skin, the sensation of thin urban rain peppering my hair, oh no, I was certainly awake. More than awake, in fact.

  It was the heyday of Times Square when New York was both decadent and joyous, a period I could only recognize from film clips and photographs as my first actual visit to the city hadn’t actually occurred until much later when I was in my 30s. A newspaper headline on a corner stand confirmed to me it was the time of the Rosenbergs’ trial. In real life, I had then just been a small boy in short trousers.

  One moment, I was tossing between my sheets, the next I was standing on the corner of Broadway and 45th Street, drinking in the sight of oversize limousines and sports cars racing south and passers-by gazing in wonder at the neon jungle surrounding us.

  Somehow I took it all in my stride; unlike the naked Schwarzenegger cum Terminator from the movies, I was fully clothed. My left hand searched for my inside jacket pocket and found a roll of green bills and coins. At least, I would not have to beg.

  I have never been much of a tourist, so after an hour or so of walking around exploring this New York of memories my mind was already wandering. I hadn’t even travelled more than four blocks in any direction from my point of arrival, as if a curse of some sort would break out should I venture too far, and I was literally a prisoner of 42nd Street and its wonderful excesses.

  A brightly lit theatre marquee caught my attention advertising “the Original Burlesque Extravaganza”, featuring women’s exotic names I had at some time or another come across in books or articles: Lili St. Cyr, Bettie Page, Tempest Storm, Blaze Starr. I doubted they were the real article, but my curiosity was piqued. I parted with a couple of dollar notes and walked in. There was even a two-sided programme sheet I was handed by a bored looking commissionaire in a frayed uniform before I entered the auditorium. Which confirmed the show was a homage to Bettie Page, Blaze Starr and others and did not in fact feature the actual legends.

  The spectacle was all I could have hoped for: blissfully over the top and bo
isterous, comic, colourful. True, the show had little in common with burlesque’s origins, with a lack of fat comedians tossing out New Jersey jokes and warming up the audience prior to the arrival of the dancers in their attires of feathers, divine lingerie and layers of flimsy fabric in every shade of the rainbow. But there was a Master of Ceremony, a thin, nervous guy who looked a little like Lenny Bruce without the sweaty drugged pallor. No doubt a stand-up slumming here between gigs, perfecting his scorn like a precursor to his Bob Fosse Cabaret future counterpart. But the thin audience – the small theatre could at most hold a hundred or so punters and was barely a third full – blanked him totally, visibly here just for the gals.

  It was fun. Most of the dancers didn’t take themselves seriously and even attained, in part, a level of performance art in their crafty disrobing and dancing act, balancing props and knowing smiles, teasing the anorexic crowd with a twinkle in their eyes or an occasional thrust just on the right side of vulgarity. There was a Carmen Miranda look-alike whose scratched record kept on jumping on the turntable behind the small stage so her juggling plastic bananas were always that little bit out of sync; and then there was the dark-haired would-be biker girl, whose labyrinth of zips kept on getting stuck as she manoeuvred herself out of her leather gear and sported an unbelievable number of layers of black underwear under her tight trousers; or again, the regal Claudia from Germany, as the M.C. introduced her, she of the thunder thighs and red hair like fire who shook her arse with the best of them, and even winked at me as she turned her head halfway through her set. Or maybe it had been a speck of dust.

  I counted five dancers in all. But strangely enough, no blondes. Was it an early hint that the devil was playing games with me? Or just me hankering for forbidden fruit?