Stolen Lives

by Jassy Mackenzie

  “Have you forgotten you have a job to do, Eunice?” The man’s voice hissed in her ear. His breath smelled rank, rotten. “One last job, before you run away.”

  Eunice froze, unable to reply, terrified to do so much as nod.

  “Your little girl would not want you to let me down. I promise you that.”

  Then he coughed. His wiry body convulsed against hers and the action drove the blade deeper into her skin. Something warm and liquid landed on Eunice’s sleeve and for a horror-filled moment she thought he’d sliced an artery open, sentencing her to a swift and bloody death.

  Then, as he turned her roughly round and pushed her down the passage ahead of him, she saw another crimson gob on her shoulder. Had her captor coughed up the blood?

  That thought stopped her in her tracks, but he shoved her forward again.

  With the blade jabbing at her throat and his fingers crushing her lips against her teeth, Eunice stumbled towards the brightly lit dining room where she knew her child would be busy packing her homework away. All she could think, through her haze of panic, was that, if he allowed her to speak again, she was going to start begging.

  Don’t hurt my little girl. I will do whatever you want me to. And, dear God, please don’t use your knife on me.

  26

  Jade hadn’t been into Midrand for a while, so she was surprised to see a huge concrete flyover had sprung up, seemingly overnight, next to the main road. David told her it was part of the new Gautrain network.

  Heads & Tails was in a small shopping centre just opposite the entrance to the Randjesfontein racehorse-training complex. Jade guessed that its location was only too convenient for the trainers and owners in the male-dominated world of racing.

  A massive sign was lit up by pink and blue neon lights, the ampersand cleverly manipulated to look like the silhouette of a naked woman bending over. A security guard manned the gateway, and beyond it a large car park was already three-quarters full.

  Three Mercedes Benz minibuses were parked next to the gate, all with tinted windows. Two of them were custom-painted in red and gold with the naked female logo on the side and the legend “Heads & Tails—Mobile Entertainment.”

  The third was plain white. Waiting for a paint job, perhaps? Or, more probably, used for those events where it would not be wise to arrive in a vehicle loudly advertising exotic dancers.

  David parked, muttering something about people milking cash cows.

  They made their way to the entrance, following a man who walked rather furtively inside after glancing behind him as if expecting people to be looking on in disapproval.

  At the door a blank-faced receptionist dressed in bunny ears and a low-cut black jacket asked them for a surprisingly hefty cover charge.

  “That’ll keep the riff-raff out,” David said.

  Looking at the bouncer standing with his back to the wall, Jade guessed he’d do an even better job of keeping unwanted guests away. The man’s shoulders were so massive and bull-like that she thought he must have to turn sideways to get through doorways. He was dressed in black from head to toe, with a shaven head, a bleached goatee and narrowed, aggressive eyes.

  She insisted on paying for both of them. After all, she wasn’t exactly short of cash, thanks to Pamela.

  They walked through a metal detector and were patted down: David by a large, unsmiling man and Jade by an equally humourless woman. Then a blonde hostess dressed in six-inch stiletto-heeled boots, shiny tights and matching red hotpants and bikini top escorted them down the well-lit passage.

  “Welcome to Heads & Tails,” she said. Her tone was friendly and her smile welcoming, but her greeting was directed only at David. Her eyes flicked over Jade as if she didn’t exist. From the thick sound of her accent, Jade thought she might recently have taken the bus from one of the small Afrikaans-speaking towns on the platteland. A pretty girl, rebelling against the confines of her sheltered rural life and leaving to seek her fortune here in the big, bad city of gold.

  The main seating area was huge, with ranks of tables arranged in a giant semi-circle around a raised stage. The tables were occupied mostly by men, and a surprising proportion of them were on their own.

  The lighting was subdued in a dull, reddish, slightly shabby way, and a Beyoncé song was playing at a volume just too loud to allow for comfortable conversation. The table the blonde hostess showed them to, flanked by two leather armchairs, was small but sturdy. Thick wooden legs, a firm top, not a hint of a wobble. Jade could see why, because next door to them a long-haired woman in black lacy underwear and impossibly high heels was preparing for a table dance. At least Jade supposed that was why a uniformed cleaning lady had removed all the bottles and glasses, and was spraying the table’s surface with disinfectant.

  In the meantime, the dancer sat on the customer’s lap with her arms around his neck.

  “Isn’t there a no-touching rule in these places?” she asked David.

  “Applies to the customers only, I guess,” he said. “Not the dancers. They need to work the guys, get them excited, persuade them to shell out for the extras.”

  Jade watched the woman step onto the table and crouch open-legged, slowly easing her bra straps off her shoulder, rotating her hips from side to side in time to the music.

  The man on the sofa was spellbound. He was so intent on the dancer that Jade was sure he wouldn’t notice if the building started falling down.

  “You’re not supposed to watch another table’s show,” David shouted, pulling his chair closer to hers. “It’s considered bad etiquette.”

  “How do you know?” Jade retorted. “I thought you’d never been to one of these places.”

  David grinned. “I told you I’d done raids back in Durban. Some of the customers used to get quite chatty while I was taking down their details.”

  A waitress in a similar black outfit and bunny ears handed them menus. Jade went for a sparkling water and David, after some deliberation, ordered a Coke.

  Boy, did they know how to party.

  “What else did the customers tell you?” Jade asked.

  “They vehemently denied having sex with any of the ladies.”

  “Were they telling the truth? Or was it a case of protesting too much?”

  “In some of the places I raided back then, it definitely wasn’t the truth. But this strip club doesn’t look like it’s set up for sex on the side. I don’t know how it used to be, but I guess Terence must have cleaned up his act after his arrest.”

  “How would you know the difference?”

  “Look around you.”

  Jade surveyed the gigantic room. The dancer next door to them was completely naked now. She was sitting on the table with her legs splayed, an ankle on each of her customer’s shoulders. He seemed to be enjoying the view. On the big stage three dancers in skimpy red and gold outfits were performing a sequence that, predictably enough, involved taking their clothes off. To her left was the entrance to a passage. According to the neon sign above it, this was the Tunnel of Pleasure.

  Down the corridor she could see a number of booths with glass sides with clear and frosted stripes on them and plastic curtains in front. Another large, grim-looking bouncer stood near the booths. Jade watched a dancer leading a rather dazed-looking man by the hand past the bouncer and into one of the booths. Then the dancer closed the curtain and the pair disappeared from view.

  “There.” David pointed in the direction of her gaze. “That’s what makes me think that sex isn’t on the menu at a place like this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can see what’s going on. Not everything, of course, but you can see enough to know what’s happening through those strips of clear glass on the sides. That means the girl can’t offer any extras, and more importantly, the man can’t take advantage. That happens a lot more often than the ladies offering sex, I’ve been told.”

  “Rape? Inside those booths?”

  “Not inside those. But you get other places th
at have booths with solid walls. Some of them even have lockable doors. When I used to raid these joints, those were a clear warning sign. Inside those rooms anything could be going on, and probably was.”

  “What about the dancers meeting up with the men after hours? That must happen.”

  David nodded. “Yup. I think it happens from time to time. But it’s strongly discouraged, of course. And these dancers earn good money, Jadey. They don’t need to supplement their income and, trust me, they don’t want to lose their jobs.”

  “Shagging the owner doesn’t count, I suppose.”

  David’s face lit up as he smiled. “That probably counts in their favour.”

  “Where do they come from?” Jade asked, glancing around the room again.

  David shrugged. “The waitress sounded Eastern European, so I should check if she has a permit to work here. That girl at the door was definitely Afrikaans. And there’s one black dancer there, on the stage.”

  “Sorry,” Jade said. “I didn’t mean it literally. I meant how do they find such particular types of woman to work here? They’re all young, good-looking, with long hair and good bodies and big breasts. Like clones, Stepford wives. Or, in this case, Stepford strippers.”

  “The breasts aren’t real.”

  “Did the customers tell you that, too?” Jade asked slyly.

  David’s grin widened and he shook his head.

  “I guess it’s the money,” Jade said. “I see what you’re saying. If I wasn’t rigidly obeying strip-club etiquette, I’d tell you to look over there, at that table in the corner. Those are hundred-rand notes those guys are sticking into that woman’s g-string.”

  “A lot of money moves around here. That’s for sure.”

  Jade stabbed with the straw at the slice of lemon in her sparkling water, thinking of the sportscars gleaming in the garages at Pamela’s Sandown home.

  “Do you think money was the reason for torturing Terence?”

  The song ended, and her words sounded oddly loud in the brief moment of quietness.

  “I dunno,” David said. “We’d have to answer the question your dad always told me to ask. Who benefits?”

  Jade sighed. “Pamela benefits. That’s the problem.”

  Scattered applause signalled that the dance on the stage was finished. The girls left through a curtained side exit, carrying their discarded outfits bunched up in their hands, their heads held high and their taut buttocks twitching as they walked.

  A minute later, Jade spotted them again, exiting through a side door into a corridor that she now saw led to the Ladies’ room. They’d already put their costumes on again. A reverse-Houdini act behind the curtain, she supposed.

  “Where are you off to?” David asked as she pushed her chair back.

  “I’m going to see if I can have a chat.”

  She walked towards the exit, aware that a number of men had turned to watch her go. In a place like this, she guessed any woman was fair game. Even if they were wearing tightly belted blue jeans and hadn’t spent as long on their hair as they should have done.

  She pushed open the squeaky door of the Ladies’ room. The tang of soap and disinfectant filled the small space. There was no sign of the dancers. Only one cubicle was occupied, and as she watched, a waitress made a hurried exit.

  Jade glanced at herself in the mirror as she followed the waitress out, noticing that she seemed to have aged alarmingly in the unforgiving glare of the fluorescent ceiling light.

  The door squeaked again as it closed behind her.

  Where had the dancers gone?

  Turning away from the main hall, where she could hear the throbbing disco blare of yet another Beyoncé song starting up, she headed in the other direction. The door at the end of the corridor stood ajar. The smell of cigarette smoke wafted towards her, and she could hear low voices.

  She walked outside, and the three dancers fell silent and turned as one to look at her, glowing cigarettes held in their French-manicured fingers.

  They stood in a small yard under a bright outside light. The unglamorous backside of Heads & Tails. Uneven paving, a low brick wall doing a bad job of concealing a jumbled array of dustbins, and a steel grating covering a foul-smelling drain.

  Up close, and in this glaring light, illusions were also stripped away. She could see crow’s feet around the nearest girl’s eyes, fine lines around her mouth, a darker strip along the roots of her blonde hair. Her make-up was heavy, her tan a fake bronze.

  “Hello, ladies,” Jade said neutrally.

  They stared back at her, their gazes suspicious and far from friendly.

  “Hi,” the blonde said. She drew deeply on her cigarette, puckering her lips around the filter in a way that Jade guessed would have instantly doubled her tips, had any men been watching.

  “I was hoping to have a chat with one of you. You see, my boyfriend and I came here to see what this place is all about.” Her first words, and she was already telling lies. David, her boyfriend? If only.

  The blonde said nothing in reply; just watched her.

  “My younger sister is thinking of applying for a job here.” Another lie. And the wrong thing to say, she knew that immediately. The girls all stiffened and exchanged glances. The blonde flashed another look at her—a quick up-and-down assessment. Was Jade’s younger sister going to prove to be a threat?

  “Jobs here are not easy to get,” the blonde snapped.

  The brunette standing opposite her, a tall, willowy girl with multiple piercings in her ears, shook her head in agreement. “They’re not looking for dancers at the moment. She can come in for an interview, but I’m telling you, the chances aren’t good.

  Especially this time of year. It’s winter in Europe now, and there’ll be a lot of girls from over there coming to work the summer season here. Does your sister have any experience?”

  “No.”

  “Then definitely not,” the blonde said emphatically. “Tammy only hires experienced girls.” She adjusted a strap on her tiny outfit. The night was still warm enough for her to be comfortable standing outside wearing virtually nothing. God knows what they did in winter.

  “Tammy?” Jade asked.

  “Tammy Jordaan. The owner’s daughter. She runs this branch. She makes all the decisions. You see, this place is the top of the range.”

  “Safe,” the brunette nodded. “And upmarket.”

  “That too,” the blonde said. She dropped her smouldering cigarette butt onto the tiles and crushed it with the tip of her stiletto-heeled shoe. “Clean. No rough types. No fights. And strict rules. You’re not asked to do anything except dance. Most other places, the girls have to do a lot more than that.”

  “Where’s the owner?” Jade asked.

  The blonde shrugged. “In and out. He’s busy opening a new branch in Fourways.”

  She didn’t know what had happened to Terence, that was clear to Jade.

  “I’ve heard stories about the bosses at these places dating the workers,” Jade said. “Is that a problem here?”

  The blonde exchanged another glance with her friends.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “There’s Crystal, though.” The words were spoken by the black woman standing in the shadows, who until then had remained silent.

  The brunette glared at her. “That’s different,” she said. “They’re, like, an item, you know. That’s not the same as messing around.”

  “Anyway, back to work, I guess.” The blonde gave her a tight smile, and made as if to move past her.

  “Thanks for your help … ” Jade gave her a questioning glance.

  “Opal’s my name.”

  A stage name, Jade assumed.

  The brunette smoothed her hair back. “Amber,” she said.

  “I am Ebony,” the black dancer offered.

  Crystal, Opal, Amber and Ebony.

  She’d always wondered what her own name would be useful for, and now, at last, she knew.

  “Pleased to meet y
ou all,” she said. “I’m Jade.”

  27

  “I think there’s something wrong with me,” David said, when she returned. He was sitting in solitary splendour, glancing from time to time in the direction of the Ladies’ room.

  “Why?”

  “Nobody’s come near me since you left. Nobody’s even looked in my direction. The dancers are draping themselves over all the other customers like wet rags.”

  “What about the waitress?” Jade asked. “Did you ask her if she was legal?”

  “She hasn’t been back. Not even to find out if I want another drink.” He indicated his empty glass. “I don’t want a drink, I want to get the bloody bill. And I can’t get the bloody bill if nobody will look at me.”

  “More strip-club etiquette, I should imagine.” Jade drained her water. “If a man arrives with a woman, do not pay him any attention while she is absent from the table, or you will get your eyes gouged out when she returns.” She waved a hand to summon the waitress.

  Jade scrabbled in her wallet for cash while David produced his police id and asked the young woman if she was working here legally.

  “Oh, yes,” she replied, smiling. “I have lived here for seven years now. I am a South African citizen. Nobody gets employed here unless they have a valid South African identity, or else a proper work permit. You are welcome to check with our admin office.”

  She waved a hand in the general direction of the exit door.

  “Right, then.” Pre-empting Jade’s attempts to pay, David slid a twenty-rand note and a handful of silver into the leather folder that the waitress had brought. “Are we finished here?”

  As they left, Jade saw the waitress quickly prepare the table for the small group of men waiting at the bar. The place was packed full now, loud and pumping. They walked back down the corridor, past the bouncer at the door, and headed for the car.