Thanking his assistant in fluent Thai, he switched to English: “Hello, Teresa, how are you?”
I heard the remnants of his Thames Estuary accent. Jeff Lee had always been something. He had a degree from the London School of Economics and could have done anything, but I suppose he found some doors closed for him “back home,” and judging from his surroundings, he had made the right choice.
“I liked the welcoming committee,” I said.
It took him a second. He laughed and replied, “Oh! Good, good. Hey, if you can’t get properly laid in Bangkok, I think the civic pride is wounded.”
“You have anybody serious these days?” I asked politely.
He rolled his eyes. “Teresa, I have no time for all that. Yeah, yeah, Anna used to give me that same look.”
Anna. It was time to get down to business.
“I’m so sorry, Jeff. Tell me what happened. And what you need.”
He looked at me a moment, then pulled out a drawer of his desk. “You’ll want to see these.”
He tossed a manila envelope across the blotter, then turned his back on me, facing the window. “I don’t want to look at them. Once was enough. I threw up.”
I could see why. Contained inside were photos of Anna, and my own stomach churned. Sweet Jesus. It wasn’t that she was dead in the shots; she looked very much alive—a lovely Chinese girl with short bangs, my good friend. My friend, nude, with her arms bound behind her back, her small golden breasts exposed and her body shiny with perspiration. Someone had arranged a warped, ingenious way of spreading her legs, bound by cords leading in different directions. A rather rude, long, and vividly red dildo was half out of her vagina.
In one shot, she was blindfolded (it said something, though I don’t know what, that her captor had chosen the blindfold to be the same scarlet as the phallus). What disturbed me more was that I could see the red in her cheeks from being slapped. A welt was rising on the corner of her mouth. It must have been just the beginning—
“Was there a ransom demand?” I asked, my voice soft.
He turned and looked perplexed for an instant. “No, no, she wasn’t kidnapped—as far as I’ve been able to learn anything myself.”
I was confused. “But…?” I ended my question with a gesture to the photos, their white backing facing out to spare him the ghastly sight.
“Some sick fuck sent me these!” he snapped.
“Yes, I got that part, that’s ob—”
“Teresa, they’re saying she died in a drug buy! That she died with a gun in her hand, trying to shake down some bloody dealer! No way! She wasn’t an addict or anything like that.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I cut in. “Back up. You show me these and now you’re saying…Look, take me through it slowly.”
I sat down and listened patiently as he reconstructed what he knew, telling me part of it and showing me news clippings to fill in the blanks. His eyes glistened with tears, but he wasn’t parading his grief to impress me. I knew he was barely holding on, a young man normally so proud and in control, rendered helpless.
He didn’t have much. Anna had died in Brooklyn. She was found with an armor-piercing round making a huge hole in her belly, a stomach wound that would have been excruciatingly painful before she bled to death in a filthy alley. The guy she supposedly tried to shake down was an ex-con, twenty-five, Hispanic, in and out of psychiatric institutions as well as prison, with a black gym bag full of crystal meth. He had died as well that night. One of the tabloids had made much out of how Anna was provocatively dressed: black leather jacket over a short black half-T, black mini, and thigh-high black boots, no underwear.
Lee passed me a Polaroid shot, a close-up of what looked like a tattoo. There were symbols I didn’t recognize, not that I knew anything about tats. My girlfriends who have them usually go for more conservative choices like a rose or, if they’re white, those Celtic designs. Never liked them myself, never ever wanted one.
“They found this on her inner thigh,” he said. “I paid for the laser treatment to have it removed. We had Anna cremated, but still…I didn’t want that mark on her before…you know, we…”
I looked at him questioningly.
“It’s Thai characters,” he explained. “It means, ‘I live for death,’ but that’s not what Thai gangs use over here—it’s borrowed from a Vietnamese gang. Don’t you see? Some clown must have assumed she was Thai because she mentioned that I lived here, so he went and cooked that up. The needlework is fresh, days old if even that! This was all staged.”
I couldn’t reach that conclusion yet. And I didn’t understand those photos of her trussed up and hurt yet Anna winding up dead in a dark alley.
“Anna was a massage therapist, for God’s sake!” I said. “What could she have been into that would make someone want to kill her? Who was she running with and what was she doing in America?”
“I don’t know! She was getting into some weird scenes.”
“What do you mean?”
“You remember Craig, her boyfriend for a while?”
“Never got to meet him,” I said.
“He got her into this black BDSM group—leather, cuffs, and chains. It was when she started hanging around with those people that—”
“Hold it,” I snapped. “Be careful where you go with this.”
“Teresa, they like edgy shit that’s—”
I tried to stay calm. “Who’s ‘they,’ Jeff? Who are ‘those people’? If you’re going to pull out this whole ‘blacks and Africans are more promiscuous’ shit, you’d better remember where we are, right?”
“I’m not saying that—”
“I hope not,” I went on, “because we are in one of the top cities for buying children for sex play, and how twisted is that?”
“It is a mostly black group, Teresa,” he insisted gently.
“Well, it certainly isn’t all black if she got to join.”
“No,” he relented.
“So why even mention it?”
“Sorry.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment, trying to cut him a bit of slack. Sometimes people used identifiers in the most unconscious but stupidly careless ways, the force of bad habits. Maybe I was being oversensitive too, when he meant “those people”—as in “those into kink.”
So the photos of her nude and bound didn’t suggest a kidnapping.
Then presumably she had voluntarily let herself be photographed like this.
Poor Lee. His sister was dead, and someone had psychologically assaulted him by sending these pictures, forcing him to think even for the briefest second about the private sexuality of his own sister—to confront certain truths about her he didn’t want to know or shouldn’t have to know. That she could have actually liked being slapped around a little or might have got off being photographed in the most lewd fashion.
Yeah, that would disturb the hell out of me too.
“What do you know about this group?” I finally asked. “How could you even know whether there are a lot of black people in it or not?”
He looked embarrassed. “I sent a couple of guys I know back home to talk to Craig about it.”
“You what?”
He put his hands up, saying quickly, “They didn’t hurt him. Honestly!”
“But I’m sure your guys were persuasive,” I said sarcastically. “Now tell me how you’re any different from any other organized-crime thug, Jeff!”
“This is my sister, Teresa! I didn’t know what else to do. You were off on a job somewhere, and he was the last guy who was close to her. Anna mentioned this group once to a cousin of ours in an e-mail, said he got her into it. Her boyfriend, Craig. He was working in America for a while on a contract, and she flew over to visit him there. That’s when it started.”
“So if your guys spoke to him in London…?”
“Craig says he finished his job for the Americans and flew home. He dropped out of the group, but she stayed with it. He says she needed more and more t
hrills. Called her sick.”
“And?”
Lee frowned. “Craig says it’s more like a cult than a club—that my guys would never find it. Very exclusive. No white guys, no Asian guys, but girls of every color of the rainbow—only dudes who are black. There’s supposed to be this big philosophy behind it that it ‘empowers’ black men. The group thinks black men are the sexual supreme, and they have to learn how to dominate women as the first step to taking back family power and financial power. Whatever! He also said they’ve got money—lots of it.”
“So this group is into something else,” I said. “But they don’t like all the attention on their sexual games.”
I saw his face cloud, not understanding what I meant.
“They staged a gunfight to offer the cops the furthest thing from sex play.” I flipped to one of the photos to make sure and then slid it back into the envelope. “Anna is wearing a choker in this shot, red silk with a diamond. When you claimed the body, you found ligature bruises on her neck, didn’t you?”
“Y-yes.”
“I’m sorry, Jeff,” I offered. “She was into autoerotic asphyxiation too. Had these bad guys given it a thought, they could have made it look like she died accidentally while doing this to herself. But it’s natural they try to come up with something a hundred eighty degrees away from kink—because that’s where they feel vulnerable.”
“But she did die in the alley, Teresa. The cops and their forensics people know that much.”
“Yeah,” I said softly, nodding. “Yeah, I know. I think sex got her in with whoever this was, but it might not be sex that was behind her murder. Can’t be sure yet. I mean, how could she offend these guys? What are their limits? Could be something else entirely that set them off.”
His eyes flashed me a warning. “You’re not suggesting she was a druggie? No way!”
“No, I’m not suggesting that. That’s what they want everyone to think.”
“So you’re sure it’s a ‘they’ too?”
“Don’t look so surprised,” I told him. “Listen, I think this drug-deal-alley business was a panic scenario, but it’s still a conspiracy that was behind her death. To dig up this Hispanic guy who died with her took research. And I don’t think one fellow alone could coerce Anna into an alley and then set up that dealer—all while making sure she didn’t bolt! I can’t be sure of the psychology, but if I have to make a guess, I think they’re pretty smug with themselves right now. When the police found the kinky stuff, they thought it was irrelevant. Police see drugs, they think drugs. So Anna’s killers think they’re in the clear. They want to taunt you. If they brag among themselves, it’s a closed circle—no fun in that. They want someone else to know they got away with it.”
“They’re wrong,” he said, his voice flat and dead.
I watched him pull out another drawer, and when his hand slapped down on the blotter there was a plastic click under his palm.
“Here. Corporate credit card in your name. There’s a hefty limit on it, plenty for your expenses, but don’t go crazy, okay? I’ve already made a transfer into your account for payment. It should show up by the time you’re back in the UK.”
He showed me the deposit slip, and I tried to keep my eyes from popping. Yeah, I’d be comfortable on this for a while. It almost made me feel guilty, since I felt honor-bound to investigate Anna’s death as her friend. But I had been cleaned out lately and wouldn’t have been able to afford even a cheap flight to New York.
“Is there anything else you need to do the job?” he asked.
I pointed to his computer. “You got broadband on that thing?”
“Of course.”
“Let me on it,” I said. “You may want to get a cup of tea. You won’t like the sites I have to look at.”
He said I was right and that he was going for a walk.
It didn’t take long to find all kinds of links related to black BDSM. I couldn’t even be sure that Lee’s information was good and that this organization was made up mostly of black people with maybe a few token white or Asian girls in the mix. He said it was exclusive, and if you want to stay exclusive, you don’t keep a website. Just like the ultra-chic club that doesn’t have a sign out front, everything word of mouth.
I Googled away because I needed to start research somewhere, and I also had to reassure my client that I would get cracking.
I wasn’t terribly surprised at the number of black BDSM sites. Master Hines, Master Tain’s, Master Vincent’s, pansexual conferences, Ebony Doms and Panthers’ Leather, Master Dred who’d create BDSM furniture for you, Sistas who ruled and plenty of chocolate that thundered. Sites for just looking at pics of sisters tied up, like Black Girls Bound and Ebony Bondage. Then there was Dark Connections, which had historical overviews, personals, links, whatever you needed. But all of this was surface-skimming, a tourist view without a third dimension. Okay, remind yourself what you got so far.
The crime-scene forensics, except for a couple of details, don’t matter. All the stuff about the crystal meth, how Anna was dressed, who the Hispanic guy was—that’s all smoke screen, I told myself. Staged, just as Lee insisted.
We know Anna liked getting tied up. We have hearsay chatter that she wanted more and more thrills. And the old marks on her throat suggest she was a gasper.
We know she and her boyfriend broke up. He went home to London. Anna stayed in New York with this group.
We can infer that Anna stumbled onto something big, something the group didn’t want her to know. So they killed her and then staged her death scene.
We know somebody in that group is one smug bastard, wanting Lee to know he got away with it.
And beyond that? We don’t know much else.
The truth was that my job couldn’t really start until I was back home in London and interviewing Anna’s boyfriend, Craig, for my own answers.
I also knew even then that this world, one where Anna got her kicks and which she must have completely understood, was one that baffled me, and I would need to infiltrate it nevertheless. I had witnessed and played in some weird fads, and all too recently I had been lying on the green felt of a poker table, making it while others watched. But I knew next to nothing about the BDSM world.
I knew that what they did they apparently called “scenes,” and all the “Master” and “Slave” talk from books and movies struck me as a bit silly. Hey, I think of myself as mostly straight, but there are certain girls I like, certain things I like. I sure as hell was never going to like what they call water sports (ewwww!), and I couldn’t understand pain. At least I didn’t understand it yet.
It scared me to think I might.
It scared me to think I could possibly grow to like it, whether dishing it out or, worse, taking it.
But what I had never told anybody, what I had to admit to myself no matter how uncomfortable, was another insight I learned when I investigated the whole craze of strip poker games sweeping the posh set last year in London. Without going into details, I had what I call my “revelation of rope.” I’d never been so vulnerable.
I came more times than I can count.
The truth. The truth is I have an exhibitionistic streak.
The truth is that I was ready for new revelations of vulnerability.
Breathe. I love how people say it to you like it’s a conscious choice. It takes you a second to realize it can be in many contexts. Breathe to remind yourself you’re living. Breathe to slow down. Breathe because you’ve stopped in panic, fear, surprise, whatever. So. Breathe. Focus on your breathing.
I had called Busaba and Keith to come out and play—our first transition from me as escort client to friend—and after showing me a couple of the sights, they asked if I wanted to try practicing meditation. “I bet you lead a plenty stressful life,” Keith observed in a teasing voice. Well, not so much—only when rent is due or when people are trying to kill me. Okay, stop thinking and just breathe.
So here I was in Wat Mahathat, an eighteenth-c
entury temple that goes back even before the founding of Bangkok. Shaved-headed monks in their brilliant orange robes walked in a barefoot line through the compound, and the three of us sat cross-legged in front of a golden Buddha, trying to empty our minds. And I did my best to stop fidgeting.
I loved the informality of it. The faithful come and go as they please, no severely hard church pews, no images to inspire crushing guilt. When you think about it, the depiction of a smiling fellow, just sitting calmly and thinking (or not thinking too much if you want to get technical), has got to be one of the most sublime accessible images in world religion.
Stop thinking. Just breathe.
I felt Busaba’s tiny fingers push gently on my spine to correct my posture. A smile flickered on her lips, and then she was back to her own concentration. No rebuke in this quiet place, no holding on to regrets or problems. People told me they walk out and feel refreshed after they go to temple. Faintly, I heard Keith a few feet away recite under his breath what I took for a Buddhist sutra (scripture) in Thai. I sat and relaxed, letting thoughts float in and out, and gradually I felt more alert, my peripheral vision opening up like curtains drawn on a picture window.
But more than this, I was feeling a wave of gratitude for this gift from my new friends. Here, have a little piece of serenity, just for a few minutes, in this beautiful place.
We walked out hand in hand, the three of us, and half an hour later as we stole into a narrow market street, empty of shoppers, Busaba suddenly turned, her hands lifting my top and expertly pushing up one brassiere cup, her lips sucking my nipple. I felt Keith’s large hand steal under the waistband of my pants, digging down until he reached my core. Breathe. Oh, yes, breathe and breathe faster.
Three nights in Bangkok—into the third night. Jeff Lee took me out to a sumptuous Thai dinner in a place somewhere near…God, I don’t know, I can’t even pronounce the districts. I can get around Paris, London, Chicago, parts of Africa, but Bangkok baffled me. The restaurant had a twenty-foot ceiling, and we had this postcard view of temple spires across the river.
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