I drifted from table to table, turning down two offers of drinks and one rude offer to “mix the blood” out in a car. I could handle it. With all the wildness going on, you had to expect there’d be fools who assumed every girl who came out tonight would be slack.
I could see how the mainstream press could be shut out of the games for the elite, but I was surprised that nothing of this had leaked out and been covered by The New Nation or The Voice. There were bound to be critics who would come out of the woodwork to say this would give us all a bad name, did nothing to improve the stereotypes of either black men or women, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. From what Helena had told me of the underground white strip rummy and poker games up in Newcastle and Nottingham, this was fairly tame. Another lost opportunity for the media because the hosts were linked with organized crime and had brought in Russian immigrant prostitutes.
Here, I couldn’t help but think these people were playing with fire, given the lack of screening processes (I did see one or two guys using condoms, but there were plenty of others who didn’t). But I could say one thing for the club, the atmosphere and spirit of the strip dominoes was a hell of a lot more fun and spirited than the “aren’t we so clever” smugness of the Primrose Hill crowd. Here was my kind celebrating their sexuality—they didn’t think they were fooling anyone by getting away with a dirty little secret.
I slowly made my way to what looked like the table with the most boisterous crowd. And there she was, the lead suggested by Helena. She was named Shondi, a light-skinned mixed-race girl with her hair in cornrows, but no one was paying attention to her hair at the moment. She was completely naked except for ankle socks and trainers, a layer of girlish baby fat around her belly and hips. I made her for no more than perhaps twenty-three. The men looking on were wide-eyed over her generous breasts jiggling as she lay on her back, her teeth gritted as she squeezed her man’s ass cheeks, urging him to go faster as he pumped her hard.
He was a muscular guy with bulging biceps, keeping his import Yankees baseball cap on all the while he fucked her, and though the thickness and girth of him made a few of the women gasp and whisper to each other, the couple didn’t look very sexually compatible. He pulled himself all the way out, grinning as he showed off for the ladies and then plunged into her again so roughly, it looked like he had hurt her a bit. She was muttering something to him that I couldn’t hear, and the expression on her face made me sure it was a complaint. He didn’t make any effort to accommodate her. He kept at his steady pace, doing the jackhammer, and now I got a clue.
He’s afraid he’ll look like he can’t last in front of his pals, I thought. He was another Lionel in a way, but then things turned ugly.
He ducked his head down to suck on one of her breasts, and she let out a small yelp and pushed him off. A wet, purple bruise was left behind, and he made another wolfish grin. No more playing. He kissed her smooth light-skinned stomach in apology, and then he bit her again. Now Shondi glared at him. She shoved him hard so that he popped loose and slapped him on the chest, and she moved to swing her legs out and get off the table.
The guy lost it and barked, “Bitch!” as he grabbed her arm to pull her back, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. An amateur sex show turning into rape before our very eyes. He had her pinned down on the table by one arm, her left hand sinking her nails into his chest and then trying to rake his face, all the while his other hand trying to force her legs back open.
About now, you’d be asking yourself—just as I was—where the hell are the bouncers? Not paying attention, that’s for sure. And the cheers and shouts over mutually consenting players sounded almost indistinguishable from the sick catcalls of “Fuck her!” and the cries of outrage over this attack.
The big bruiser’s mates formed a cordon to keep two of the bouncers back, and I knew they couldn’t see what was going on or how bad it was.
Meanwhile, a couple of girls with their dates squared off with his other buddies, trying to reach Shondi to pull her out from under this thug. It was turning into a melee.
Shit like this is how I get myself into trouble. I don’t know how I do it, whether it’s rebel brigades in Africa or art fraud in Switzerland, but I seem to show up just when the party’s getting started.
I stepped politely forward with my glass in hand, saying pardon me, excuse me, as if I only wanted to get by, and you’d be surprised at how often an unassuming posture like that works. I handed my white wine to a girl next to me and asked, “Can you hold this for me for a second, please?” And she dumbly obeyed, and then I moved in right up to the game table.
“Hello,” I said to Mr. Thug.
Distracted and confused. Too surreal for him by half.
And then I performed a haito, a haymaker-like blow with the knife-edge of my hand, straight into his temple and staggered him.
Shondi looked in mute shock from me to him, came to her senses, and scuttled free. Still nude but at least another witness now, she watched as Mr. Thug fell more than slid off the table at the opposite end and stormed up to me. His mates were doing their job of keeping the bouncers at bay, but they had shoved their way in enough to get an idea of what was going on, while the rest of the crowd instinctively shrank back from this naked bull.
The fact that he was in his birthday suit somehow made him more intimidating. Bizarre, I know, but true, because you saw every defined chunk of his washboard, every cut of his pecs, and now that he was standing up, I saw he was a towering six foot three. Only the tight sheath of the latex condom on his thing making him appear ridiculous. Shit, the boy hadn’t even lost his hard-on yet.
Well, I thought, we can fix that.
“You fucking c—”
He didn’t get to finish his obscenity. I saw his left arm rise in slow motion to do a boxer-style jab to my face, and my knee was up a millisecond before he even propelled half his arm extension.
Folks probably assumed I’d kick him in the testicles, but I was going for his belly instead. Part of my shoe caught the tip of his penis, and I’ll bet that stung plenty. Mind you, not as much as his rib cage collapsing on him.
He folded and crumpled to the hard cement floor, stained with beer and cigarettes, and as his buddies turned, the security guys broke through and started yanking the fool up under his arms. Now more bouncers rushed over as reinforcements, better late than ever.
“Holy shit!” somebody yelled.
“You see that? Fucking incredible, man.”
So now a sweating, naked girl was walking over to me, looking a bit sore and uncomfortable. She hugged me impulsively and said, “Oh, my God, thank you! Some guys just can’t take a hint, can they? I’m Shondi.”
“Teresa.”
“Let me get cleaned up here and dressed, and I am going to buy you a big drink! Maybe five of them!”
Saving her wasn’t the icebreaker I had planned, I thought, but so much the better. She came back, giggling to cover her wounded nerves, telling me “Nuff respect!” and waving to a couple of stools at the bar.
She was something. Her girlfriends hovered around her, protective and concerned, and if it had been me, I probably would have taken them up on getting a ride home. Out of that place in a flash, taking stock of how I got into that mess. Not her. I suppose to her credit, she didn’t milk the incident for sympathy, and I was astonished that she could still bat her eyes flirtatiously at one or two guys floating past, still clinging to the image of her exposed bootylicious form in their heads. I told her so.
“Fuck the rest of ’em here,” she declared, taking a long sip of her Zombie. “I’m not going to play victim for any of these fools. If I walk out of here now, it looks like he’s got me scared even after what you did. No way! And you just know there are some hypocrites here who are going to say, well, she has it coming if she’s going to play that skank game. But those bitches, they sure like to watch. They’ll call you a whore, but they don’t look away. You want another?”
I shook my head. I was barely ha
lfway through the first drink she’d bought me. “I don’t know if I’d have the guts for a crowd this big,” I said.
Her eyes sparkled with fresh interest, and she smiled warmly. “Aha! So you’ve gone neon, but just with the white folks.”
When she caught me recognising the lingo, she knew she was onto me. It was my first clue she had a brain as well as a backside. She high-fived me and said yeah, she still played the South Kensington and Knightsbridge poker games once in a while, but more often these days she came out to the clubs here in Finsbury Park, in Brixton or even Wealdstone, where she kept it real.
“Hey, the thing for me is having them see me,” she confided. “It is the most amazing turn-on. They are cheering me and just waiting for me to show ’em my goodies, and it is so liberating! I come like I’m going to explode. The bigger, the better crowd, baby!”
“I’m just getting into it,” I said. “Went up to this house in Primrose Hill, and it could have been great, but I didn’t do too well.”
She nudged me. “You lost, yeah?” she giggled. “I hope he was cute, at least. What did you have to do?”
“Four of a kind to a full house, and he wants 69, but he comes in my mouth before he even gets me going,” I whined.
“Oh, man, I hate that—”
“Yeah, he was a real dud,” I said. “Leon or Lionel or something.”
“Lionel?”
And I thought, here we go. It was oh, my God, that’s amazing, the guy’s my ex-boyfriend, and no, really? Yeah, and let me tell you, he was always shit in bed. Selfish, self-centred, couldn’t go down on you to save his life. Said he didn’t really like it.
“But what can I say?” She shrugged. “I was with him for two years, and he introduced me to the games. I think that’s why I stayed with him as long as I did, because he didn’t mind me getting it elsewhere, which meant I didn’t pay so much attention to his lousy performance. It wasn’t even the sex, really, that made me break up with him.”
“Oh?”
She grimaced at the memory of it and said, “Nah. He was a cheap bastard. Didn’t know how to be a real man and take care of a girl, you know? I knew what he was making, and the jewellery he bought me—when he bought it for me—was trash. Like, what do you think I am? If I’m going to be your woman, let’s see you take out your wallet.”
I nodded politely and kept my mouth shut. I never understand girls like this, and I don’t think I ever will. In a few brief exchanges, I got her life story and knew what she was about. The daughter of a white liberal oncologist who married a black nursing supervisor, an upscale family that had moved into Notting Hill long before the neighbourhood reflected more diversity or even became fashionable because of movie titles. Trust fund kid.
Instead of rebelling against comfort as I did, she had embraced the whole package. This girl would never hold a job for longer than six months in her life, progressing only from real daddy to sugar-daddy, trading up until fading looks forced her to settle. And she took me for a kindred spirit.
“I mean, like, look at you,” she went on. “You’re way too fine for this place—”
“I don’t know about that,” I laughed.
“Your clothes, the way you move—”
“You’re sweet.”
“Lionel doesn’t deserve either of us. Cheap, selfish, and he’s got no morals, man.”
“No morals?” She’d lost me.
She had that irritating habit of younger people whose tone makes everything lilt and go up like asking a question.
“Well, duh, baby, he works for a mining company? I went home to visit my folks, yeah, and Daddy had on this programme about mining in Africa being used to, like, sift stuff out of riverbeds or dig in these abandoned mines? They’re killing all these gorillas down there. They chop down the trees for charcoal, right? So then they need huts, so they, like, cut down the bamboo, and the gorillas need the bamboo to eat. Then they kill the gorillas for meat and their hides. And they mention all these companies, and one of them was Lionel’s. So I’m with him again, and I go, ‘How can you work for a place that does this shit? It’s our people’s parks and stuff.’ And he gives me this rubbish about how it’s no different to some big company needing cattle for beef and cutting down the rainforest, and hey, are you gonna stop eating burgers?”
She took a breath only to order another round. “And I go, ‘Come on, when’s the last time you saw me eat that shit?’ and he goes, ‘Well, what do you mean our people? Your father’s white.’ That’s when I lost my temper. I mean, do I need that? I just said, ‘I—am—outta here.’”
“Too right,” I said, and then I had to bring her back on topic. I didn’t care about how the less-than-lovebirds broke up, what I wanted to know was—
“I say ‘go older, go with the deeper pockets,’” Shondi went on. “My man now? He can’t get me off, but he doesn’t mind me playing. Or he doesn’t know, same diff.” She laughed in self-congratulation, and I jumped in.
“It’s horrible about this mining stuff you’re talking about,” I started. “What were they mining anyway?”
I was already thinking conflict diamonds. My mind played hopscotch, trying to connect the dots. Conflict diamonds. Black market. South Africa? But no, it didn’t fit. The South African government was doing its best to stop any illegal traffic in conflict diamonds passing through places like Sierra Leone and Angola. And even if you were cynical about London’s stance on embargoes and other UN-sponsored steps to curb the trade, it had made its position clear. Okay, so what about a deal gone bad involving Lionel? Even if true, that explained someone’s motivation to threaten him but not Janet.
And gorillas? I never heard of gorillas being threatened with extinction near diamond mines.
“No, it wasn’t diamonds,” said Shondi. She dismissed the subject with a wave of her swizzle stick. “It was something else, it was…Oh, shit, I can’t remember. Down in Africa, but it really pissed me off at the time, you know? People should care about stuff like that. Like, I have a conscience, and I was willing to break up with him over it.”
Like Dr. Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And maybe a case of blackmail over sex is just blackmail over sex.
I checked out Lionel’s career anyway. Yes, he was one of the vice-presidents at Buccaneer Cape Mining, and he did economic risk analysis of new acquisition territories. A quick jaunt over to Blackwell’s business bookshop and The Economist bookshop, and I soon had a rough idea of what that meant. Flipping open Risk Management for Mine Planning, my eyes fell on a paragraph that informed me: “The siting of an underground mine’s headworks, for instance, could affect a range of investment factors. Locating mineral processing facilities at the mine, or transporting the ore for processing elsewhere, could change the hazards and risks associated with both these operations. Choosing open cut or underground mining technology illustrates the differences in the potential and range of risk impacts to financial commitment. Issues such as mining sequence and optimal mining duration could also markedly affect environmental risk, which in turn requires careful negotiation with government authorities and public relations initiatives to secure optimum exploitation.”
This little tome could sure take the buzz out of a caffeine high.
I went up to St. Pancras to visit the British Library. First I hit the company’s archived bios of senior executives, and working with Lionel’s start date I cross-referenced this with back issues in The Financial Times and other papers. It only took me a little while to find a classified that gave Lionel’s original job description in full. It would be unfair to call him a glorified bean counter, but his degree from the London School of Economics had earned him a comfy chair where others went out and did field reports, and he sat back and assessed whether it was worthwhile to go dig or sift or whatever the hell their miners did in pockets of Costa Rica, Australia and central Africa.
For a moment, my interest was caught by the fact that he not only assessed his own company’s potential acquisitio
ns, he also kept a watchful eye on what competitors were doing in the same countries. Had they already drained the well? Were they onto something big where his company ought to be looking? Were they able to grease a few palms better than say, Orpheocon, which had mining operations as well as oil?
In a way, Shondi was right in that wherever these gorillas were that were getting evicted and made into Kong burgers, Lionel had some say over whether it was worth the green light for Buccaneer Cape to move in. Shondi would probably have another fit if she knew the exotic birds of Costa Rica were probably in just as much danger from what his company was doing. But all of this didn’t help me much. If Buccaneer Cape Mining was a corporate villain the way some folks thought of Starbucks or McDonald’s, that still wasn’t Lionel.
I made a note that he was required to travel frequently. Since he was in charge of the analysis reports, he flew down with the bosses every so often to these countries to deal with government, any environmental pressure groups or co-venture partners. If somebody got nervous, the suits would point to Lionel and say, “Well, our expert will tell you…”
But unless an Australian politician didn’t like what the firm was doing with bauxite and held him personally responsible, I had a dead end. Lionel and Janet had slept together, but they had nothing to do with each other professionally. If Janet won the plum of the High Commission in Pretoria, that should be fine with Buccaneer, since the conglomerate had no mining concerns in South Africa.
I remembered George Westlake and Lionel off by themselves far more than Lionel drinking with the other guys. I couldn’t see how they would have business together, since Westlake wasn’t in mining but in luxury resorts. Still, they had looked pretty chummy.
“Let me guess,” I said to Helena back at the house in Richmond. “It was Westlake who introduced him to the games.”
“Actually, it was the other way around.”
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