by Mike Leon
“Fedosov?” the man in the bathrobe asks. Dmitry does not know him. He is no Russian, as his inflection is very American, maybe from New Jersey. Dmitry nods as the stranger extends his hand for shaking. “Danny Velour.” Danny Velour has a strong grip and leathery skin. “Are you sure you weren’t followed?”
“Yes.” The question was a paranoid one, and Dmitry answers it with dismissive quickness. There were hardly any other vehicles on the road out this far from the city at night. He would have noticed if the same car was tagging along behind him for the whole two hour drive. “What is this place?”
Velour’s chuckle is a little bit unhinged and obviously forced. “It used to be a dude ranch, believe it or not. Shut down in the 60s. Then LGC acquired it for…” Velour’s eyebrow raises almost to the crown of his head. “...what we do.” His proud smile is positively magical.
“I see.” Dmitry doesn’t see though. That answered absolutely nothing.
“You don’t know what we do, do you?”
“No.”
“I was told to bring this container here alone. No questions asked.”
Velour laughs again. He sounds like a bad game show host. “Let’s open it up.” He waves back to the house and whistles loudly. “Boys!” Velour pulls a rattling ring of keys from his bathrobe and approaches the back end of the semi. “Be ready when I open the container.”
Three men join them from inside the house. They have pistols, nightsticks, and one has a hunting rifle—the kind of weapons most useful for maintaining a prison.
Dmitry watches as Velour pops the key into the lock and it snaps open for him to remove. Then he lifts and turns each of the handles to undo the cams which hold the right side door closed. The instant he begins to pull the door open, it suddenly flies the rest of the way, ripping loose from Velour’s hand and swinging wide until it flaps against the full extension of its hinges.
A small woman darts from the open container with no account for the fact that it is elevated atop the semi-trailer. She tumbles forward yelping and squealing into Velour’s arms. He presses her to the blacktop at his feet as she shouts in a language Dmitry does not know.
“Always one that tries to fight,” Velour chuckles as he slams the callused and cracked flesh he calls his knuckles into her jaw. The girl is left sprawled out on the pavement, motionless, her eyes wide-open like the dead.
“Pizdet,” Dmitry says. He lurks forward to get a better look at the prone body. “Did you just punch her to death?”
“Meh,” Velour says, waving him away. “She’ll wake up later with a headache. Probably. If not, we have a back-ho.” He turns back to the open trailer door and shouts into the darkness beyond. One of the others shines a flashlight into the container to illuminate the faces inside.
The container is filled with women. There are more than a dozen of them, short and emaciated. None look older than twenty. They avert their eyes from the flashlight’s beam as it moves across their frightened faces. Bags and crumpled clothes litter the floor with empty wrappers from packaged foods.
“Come on out!” Velour shouts aggressively while motioning for them to come toward him. “Slowly.” They don’t seem to understand his words, only his aggressive hand motions, and only with much trepidation.
The rifleman orders the women into the house in Russian, then something that sounds like Czech, then Spanish. At least one of them doesn’t understand. Another refuses to go and someone zaps her with a genuine high voltage cattle prod. That gets them all moving.
“You want to see what we do?” Velour says, as he picks up the unconscious woman and slings her over his shoulders. “It’ll be a few minutes while the guys sweep out the container anyway. Come on. Follow me.”
Dmitry decides very quickly that it is safe for him to go. If this was all a setup for a hit, they would have shot him in the driveway. So he follows Velour into the house behind the line of girls.
The inside of the house is not without charm. The lighting is incandescent and the walls are papered with yellow patterns that would be called ugly or vintage depending on who is describing them.
“Lock ‘em up nice and tight, boys,” Velour says as the women proceed through the front room of the mansion and down a dark staircase into the cellar. “No cookies ‘til the ladies are secure. Anders, I’m talking to you. Keep it in your pants for ten minutes. Ten minutes is all I ask.” He passes the woman he carries over to the one called Anders and looks back to Dmitry. “You ready to see how the sausage gets made?”
Dmitry follows Velour away from the rest of the group, up a winding staircase to the second floor. At the top of the steps he sees the first affirmation that what transpires in this place is far beyond anything he expected. At the top of the steps, a woman is lying in a dog cage, naked except for a spiked leather collar and leash which hangs through the little bars of the cage onto the carpet. She raises her head slightly to look at Dmitry, and then sets it back down next to her bowl of water.
“Don’t mind her,” Velour says. “She’s been a bad dog. Bad.” He continues past the cage and pushes open a door. On the other side, reality goes away and is replaced with some kind of freak show circus act the likes of which Dmitry has never seen.
Before he notices any of the much stranger things in the bedroom ahead, he notices the bundle of thick black cables taped to the floor. Velour is careful to step over them. The cables are connected to two bulky video cameras mounted on tripods on either side of the door. Behind one of the cameras is a pasty little hairball of a man with gargantuan greasy glasses and a ball cap. He picks his nose indifferently. In front of the cameras is a round bed with bright red sheets. In the middle of the bed is a woman, face down, bound and gagged. She is tiny and frail, with a long mess of black hair and almond skin. Her hands and feet are affixed to a wooden yoke and the grey bottom of her underwear points at one of the cameras like a cannon. Before he can begin to interpret what he’s seeing, Dmitry is impeded by a wall of man at least as big as Vlad and far more intimidating, mostly due to the gimp mask that covers his entire head. His face is like a featureless black slate with only a zipper for a mouth and two goggle eyes. The rest of his rippling and oiled body is covered only by a man thong and some leather chaps.
“Fedosov, this is Engine,” Velour says as he sits down in a cloth folding chair next to the unmanned camera. “My top performer.” Dmitry holds out a hand for Engine to shake, but the big gimp only stares blankly down at him, so Dmitry lowers his hand back to his side. “Now where were we?”
“We were just getting to the main event,” says the dingy cameraman.
“You make porn here?” Dmitry says.
Velour grimaces like someone just blew a chili fart in his face. “No! I don’t want to hear the P word,” he whines. “What we do here is real art. Now let’s get this show on the road. The client wants this thing by Saturday!”
The cameraman shrugs. “We’re rolling.” Engine is not spurred to action by any of this.
“Engine, you’re up for the money shot,” Velour says. “Come on. I-think-I-can. I-think-I-can.”
Engine moves out of Dmitry’s way and steps over to the bed. He yanks down their bound captive’s underwear then winds up and spanks her bare flesh so hard that her entire body jolts forward. Then Engine unbuckles the strap of the ball gag stuffing her mouth and throws the implement aside. For the first time, Dmitry is able to linger on her face to see how scared she is. He makes the mistake of eye contact, and she begins whimpering at him in Spanish as Engine walks away to a nearby dresser.
“¡Ayúdeme!” she cries. “No quiero a morir!” It has been decades since Dmitry’s high school Spanish classes, and he has only wild guesses what she’s saying, but it definitely isn’t that she’s having the time of her life and wants to stay here even longer.
“What is this?” Dmitry says. Velour holds up a finger, accompanied by an angry look and no words. A quick glance the other direction results in an eyeful of the cameraman slowly stroking his
erect penis. Dmitry turns back just in time to see Engine picking up the
can’t believe what he just saw. It was wretched. Awful. No word he knows in English or Russian can even begin to describe the horror. Not even Hitler deserved to die that way.
“You’re making snuff movies!” Dmitry barks.
“I really don’t like that word either,” Velour says. “It just sounds so exploitative. It isn’t 1985. This isn’t a VHS slipcase. This transcends the twenty-first century in film. We’re so far ahead of the rest of them they can’t even fathom. Who out there do you think even believes something like this is going on in the real world? Movies where they really kill somebody? It’s just an urban legend, right? Wrong! It’s us! We are the monsters. We ARE horror. We are the movie. Life imitating art imitating life imitating art. It’s all happening right here!”
“You’re buying girls from Volchenko just to do this?” Dmitry feels like he could barf. He has an urge to pull the M&P Shield he keeps strapped to his ankle and start shooting. Hope for the best.
“Oh, no no no no no no no. I’m not buying anything. I am the auteur. I produce a vision and that vision can be shared for a price—a very high price.”
“You sell the films.”
“I can’t believe Volchenko didn’t tell you about this. This is a huge income stream for him. I don’t take a lens cap off for less than seven figures. You throw down serious coin or you walk. We shot a million dollar tape for Volchenko this afternoon. Special request. Bam. In the can. In the bank account. She was hot too. A real screamer! Am I right?” Velour puts his hand up for Engine and the huge leather daddy gives him a resounding high five.
“Who is it for?” Dmitry asks, awaiting the answer with equal parts excitement and dread.
Velour smirks dismissively as he leans back in his seat to reach for something on the dresser behind his camera. “Everything’s through a broker. He’s very tight. No names. Off shore accounts. Yadda yadda. You know how all that works. And here’s your cut.” Velour passes Dmitry a pink striped bag with the gold logo of Victoria’s Secret embossed along the side. The bag is surprisingly heavy.
“What is this?” Dmitry says as he pulls the string handles apart to peer inside at a pile of rubber banded bills.
“It’s fifty thousand dollars in a Victoria’s Secret bag. Is the bag weird for you? I might have a grocery bag somewhere. It’s just we go through a ton of lingerie around here with all the ripping and the blood. You like cigars? I like to smoke a stogie when I wrap a shoot. Follow me.” As they leave the bedroom, Engine is wrapping the corpse of the South American girl in a clear plastic shower curtain.
Dmitry follows Velour to a concrete breezeway along the rear of the house, where he accepts a cigar out of politeness, and to help calm his nerves. He hasn’t smoked one of these things in years. Velour is rambling about cigar quality, but Dmitry hears only every third word or so. The thought of all those women caged up in the basement keeps turning his stomach.
“I don’t know what all the fuss is about Cubans,” Velour says. “They used to be something, but anymore you can get the same quality from a Nicaraguan or Columbian.”
“Where do they come from?”
“Nicaragua and Columbia.”
“I mean the girls.”
“Oh. Mostly Eastern Europe. That’s where Volchenko has the most pull. But they could come from anywhere life is cheap: Mexico, Ghana, Detroit. You put up some signs in the slums, maybe a classified ad that you’re looking for models, and they’ll come running. They think they’re too good to work in a factory. You know the type if you’ve been in L.A. long. Girls with nothing but a tight ass and more dreams than it’s worth. I think I save them in a way.”
Dmitry chokes out some cigar fumes. “You save them? How is that?”
“They’re doe-eyed and stupid. Pretty, but not enough for a cover shoot or anything. No rich daddy to get them connected. You know what happens to chicks like that. They end up whoring and doing the shit you guys sell until it kills them. Now, I take these girls that would have been nothing, that would have just rotted dead in the ground, and I make them more alive than you and I will ever be. I make them into stars. Each one of them gets to be Mansfield or Monroe. They get to live forever. Some people would kill for that.”
Some people do.
Two handlers pass them pushing a wheelbarrow down the breezeway containing the curtain wrapped body and some other effects. Velour shouts after them as they wheel out into the grass away from the main house, toward the thick surrounding woodlands. “Hey watch your step out there!” The men chuckle back at him. He shakes his head. “Booby traps all along the perimeter. Absolutely vicious. You don’t want to have an accident. A saw a Slovakian chick gnaw her foot off to get out of a bear trap last winter. She made it half a mile before she bled out. You a Lakers fan?” Velour asks.
“Who isn’t?” Dmitry makes it through the rest of the conversation nodding and pretending he has more than a passing interest in the NBA. When he has finished his cigar, he walks around the house, collects the emptied out truck and drives it back down through the front gate and away from LGC Properties.
He is far down the interstate, far from that place, when he dumps the money out on the bench seat beside him. He has to see it, all of it, as if some part of him still denies that the money is real, denies that any of this has happened. He won’t touch the bills. The paper seems somehow contaminated, like food that has been carried through a public restroom. Nothing dirty physically contacted it, and yet it seems polluted simply by the nearness.
Dmitry doesn’t want to look at the money anymore. He diverts his attention briefly to his watch even though he does not care what time it is. He just wants to look at anything else. The watch, a Rolex Daytona worth fifteen thousand dollars, feels like the grime encrusted hand of some hobo grasping his wrist. His pants feel slick like oil all the way down the legs. His underwear is sticky and moist. His shirt has the texture of deep fried chicken.
He smashes his foot down on the brake and the truck comes to a wailing halt on the brim.
Dmitry wastes no time shoving his way out the door. He runs half blind into the darkness, stumbling down the steep ditch that lines the side of the road. He lands on his elbows, in a pit of gravel and weeds. He pushes forward into the dark, into tall grass that whips at his knees.
“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Fuck fuck fuck,” is all he can say in his head or aloud. He pulls off his shirt, tearing the buttons to get it away, get it off. He crumples the greasy disgusting piece of cloth in his hands and stuffs it to his face and screams. “FFFuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccckkkk!”
He screams it over and over for close to an hour. He doesn’t know the faces of the dead, but that makes it worse. Instead of hardened adults, he sees them all as innocent children. Baby sisters were murdered while he was circling his boat with a WaveRunner™. Doe-eyed daughters were strangled while he watched his giant Samsung Super AMOLED™ TV in his luxury apartment. Beloved granddaughters will never be seen again because Engine drilled holes in their skulls while Dmitry was snorting cocaine from a high-class escort’s waxed anus. Little girls with nothing and no one were dismembered as he shopped for thousand thread-count sheets.
When he can’t scream anymore, he throws the shirt aside and reaches for his cell phone. It is like holding a dried turd to his face.
“Max,” he says. “I need to talk to you.”
INT. BLACK OMEN - NIGHT
Sid enters the Black Omen with a single-minded intensity unusual even for him. He flashes a fake identification at the doorman and continues down the long entry corridor, past a voluptuous blond spinning tasseled pasties on the lonely riser by the door. He enters the main bulk of the club beyond the hallway and scans the room for a face he knows.
The Black Omen is a dimly lit place, which seems paradoxical as it hinders the primary activity that occurs within its walls: looking at naked women. The walls and fixtures are black or deep blue and most of the upholstery i
s dark leather. Ultraviolet lighting is abundant here, and big cloud shaped splotches glow brightly on Sid’s grey and white camouflage pants as he approaches the bar.
“Hi,” says the bartender. Jessica is her name. She’s a tall and stringy girl with long and shiny brown hair under a cowboy hat. She’s beautiful, like all of the women here, but Sid doesn’t care about that now.
“Jessica,” he says.
“How do you know my name?” Jessica says, looking at him through a squint of attempted recognition. He’s spoken to her twice before. Sid remembers both instances and can repeat the conversations verbatim if asked, but Jessica doesn’t have his flawless memory. “Oh wait. You’re Lily’s boyfriend!”
“I’m not her boyfriend,” Sid says. Nobody is Lily’s boyfriend and no one ever will be again.
“Oh,” she stutters. “Uh, I like your pants. They’re all glow-ey!”
“I’m looking for Yvonne,” Sid says. “Where is she?”
“She’s here. You know she spells it with a Y? So isn’t it Yavonne then? I don’t get it…”
“Where is she?”
Jessica points him to a rear corner of the club and a dancer using the back end of her skin-tight booty shorts to smear the sunglasses of a pudgy looking elderly man seated in a chair behind her. She runs lengthy bright red fingernails through her epic mane of fluffy brown hair as she turns up from the floor. Sid can see the make-up caked remains of a fading eye bruise as he gets closer.
Sid stops up against her face as she twerks in her patron’s lap. She stops gyrating and leans backward defensively. “Volchenko,” Sid says. “Where is he?”