Strip Poker

by Lisa Lawrence

  “Really?”

  “Well, as you can probably tell, I didn’t want Lionel at my games like Neil or, say, Raymond. I think he learned of the circuit through a work acquaintance—he’s never there as one of my escorts. And I think he needed Westlake for something or other in business, and instead of the usual nightclub and cigar scene, he thought he’d score points by ushering him into this ‘secret world.’ Georgie is clever, rich, cultured, but he’s come out of a divorce where he’s lost his onetime trophy wife, and now for the first time in fifteen years, he has to know how to start conversations with women. Believe it or not, he’s never had a mistress, didn’t sow any wild oats, and doesn’t have a wide frame of reference when it comes to sex—until the games.”

  Hmmm. Interesting. I carried around one of those spiral notebooks you can pick up at Paperchase, and inside, I had scribbled down the names of the game players I’d met: Lionel, Neil, Gary Cahill, Daniel Giradeau, Vivian, Ayako…Now I pulled it out and jotted a star and another question mark next to Westlake’s name.

  And still no second note from the blackmailer—not to Lionel, not to Janet.

  The next afternoon, I was up a rock. Literally. I had my belay device, my spring-loaded camming tool—one of those hammerlike adjustable thingies to fit into cracks—plus the whole harness and helmet. I must have been quite a sight panting halfway up this artificial peak with its convenient and not-so-convenient holds and nooks. It’s a pretty well kitted-out climbing gym, and the only drag is that you have to take yourself all the way out to Sutton to use it—less of a problem recently, mind you, with all my hanging around Helena’s place in nearby Richmond.

  I do this once in a while. I’m crazy. I’m absolutely scared of heights, and since I hate having fear of any kind, this is my own “tough love” therapy to get over it. I’m sure the gym owners and coaches still put me in the “novice” category because I’ve only ascended this rock maybe half a dozen times without chickening out, but that’s good enough for me. Funny thing is when I’m climbing—and I don’t know about other people—I’m not really looking around, I’m just slogging away when I’m into it.

  Or when my mind’s on something else. Like the case.

  When I came out of my near scrapes and adventures in Sudan, one of my friends shook her head and told me, “Girl, you got to get yourself a hobby.” With down time in jets, at home in my flat between contracts and catastrophes, with all the empty silent spaces between the notes, I could see she was right. What I could not see was me becoming one of those women who starts gardening. Or having a collection of…I don’t know, something. I know how to cook for up to three people, and that’s as far as I’m willing to dare with measuring cups. I can sew if I have to, but you won’t find any knitting needles in my place. Please shoot me if I ever get hooked on EastEnders.

  Teresa, my love, I admitted to myself, you need something to occupy your mind and your time—something you won’t mind dropping for the next gig, the next nosing-around job, the next flight. So I’ve done my best to acquire some extracurricular activities, to round myself out as a person.

  Like scrambling up a rock.

  “But these things you do,” someone observed, “they’re just more skills you’re arming yourself with to prepare for your next gallivanting adventure, your next ‘Teresa crusade.’”

  Fair comment, I guess. Learning to climb rocks because God knows where I’ll be next time and just what I would have to climb. Maybe it’s why I’d thrown myself into the strip poker case so willingly, so enthusiastically. I could rationalize to myself all this sleeping around. Climbing, learning to shoot when I was over in America, taking refresher courses in first aid, and okay, Teresa, yes, you have permission now to get it on with these guys even though you know there are other ways to learn what you’re after. You can take a break. You can play.

  That comment about arming myself? It was made by the paunchy sixty-seven-year-old gentleman below me at the moment. He was playing belayer, holding the rope and my safety in his hands. “Lowering,” he called up. And down I came like a panto fairy on a wire, shoes touching stone and kicking off again, glancing down at him once and thinking: Man, stick to the three-piece pinstripe jobs, Walter, because that grey track suit does nothing for you. Course, it was my fault he was dressed like that, since I’d recruited him into my suburban mountaineering fantasy.

  We have this game, Walter and I. He calls ahead to say he’ll be in London and knows he should visit me, and we both pretend he’s not checking up on me for my father. One of the most esteemed academics out in Oxford and a longtime family friend, I grew up completely buying he was Santa Claus for five Christmases with that salt-and-pepper beard of his.

  “Your turn,” I said, as I unhooked my gear and wiped my brow with the back of my forearm.

  He let out a noise that was between a grunt and a chortle to let me know that’ll be the day and then added, “Miracle that you roped me into this…just to hold your rope.”

  “That’s very clever.”

  “Thank you,” he answered, looking like a dignified bulldog.

  Walter’s got one of those deep bass black man voices that could give James Earl Jones a run for his money. When I was sixteen and very obnoxious while we were living in America for a while, my brother and I used to get him to say, “This is CNN.” Then we’d collapse in hysterics. Walter didn’t have a clue, but my dad knew what was going on and threw his ball of rubber bands at us.

  “I did offer cocktails,” Walter reminded me now. “In lieu of.”

  “This is exercise,” I said. “Works the muscles, not the liver. Come on, if you’re weren’t here, how exciting would your day get?”

  “I don’t expect coming in for the occasional exhibit appraisal for the Ashmolean to be a cliffhanger, darling—sorry for the pun. Speaking of which, no one’s trying to kill you these days, are they?”

  “You know that only happens when I go abroad,” I lied as I reached for my water bottle. “How’s Auntie June?”

  “The same. She’s well.”

  Funny. I stopped calling him “Uncle Walter” when I was about twelve, but his wife will always be Auntie June for me.

  “How’s my dad? Did he ever go out with that lady doctor Auntie June tried to fix him up with?”

  Walter shook his jowls, ruffled. He had been sent on a mission, and he was supposed to be gathering intelligence, not giving it away. “First,” he sputtered, making a big comical show of being offended, “She does not try to ‘fix’ your father up—”

  “Yes, she does, and you help,” I said, kissing him on the cheek. I scooped up my towel and mopped my forehead.

  “And second,” he tried again.

  “And second,” I interrupted smoothly, “it’s okay. Mum’s been gone how long now? Walter, would you please tell my dad…I don’t know, in whatever tactful way you want to do it, that it’s okay now. He shouldn’t be rattling around that big house all by himself.”

  “He has his work. Like you.”

  I shot him a look. I was being oversensitive, but—

  “You know I had to go,” I said quietly. “I planned it before she even started to…Before she got ill.”

  Walter nodded, and a sad, apologetic smile cut into his neatly trimmed beard. “I am not your judge, little girl. And I do not want the job, thank you very much. I do think all that…atmosphere a while back was because you went to Africa so soon after. I think he would have preferred you stay close. For a while. Oh, he’s past that anyway, Teresa. He worries about you, we all do.”

  “Isaac doesn’t,” I said.

  “Yes, well,” murmured Walter, “your brother’s planning a hostile takeover of Brazil next week. I have trouble keeping up with his ventures.”

  I knew Walter cared about Isaac as much as me, but he always used a tone for my big bro’s wheelings and dealings that made it sound like Isaac was navigating a legal tightrope. His ventures. Jeez. In truth, my brother is a hell of a lot more legit than I’ve ever bee
n, knowing how to sweet-talk the banks or foundations for his next import start-up, the next flash music video he’s directing for a friend, his next restaurant investment.

  Growing up and watching our father tread the choppy political waters at the university and how our mum faced pig-ignorance all through the NHS in her nursing supervisor positions, my brother and I both decided early we’d never suffer working nine-to-five for The Man. Isaac was my first hero that way, proving you could go out and do something creative—or at least interesting—to put groceries on the table. And in retrospect, big brother spoiled me. Having seen his example, I could never settle for a boyfriend or partner who was an accountant or systems analyst, who was screamingly dull but “stable.”

  Course, I don’t think Mum would have been able to handle the shock of what I was prepared to do to cash Helena’s cheques—not that I’d have advertised it to her if she were still with us.

  “Teresa, darling,” she told me once, “if you act like a lady, they will still say you’re putting on airs and all kinds of things, but act like one anyway—not for them, but for yourself.”

  We clashed inevitably over her ideas and mine of what a lady was today. My modern definition included being able to kick butt now and then, and it meant planning trips to remote places “unescorted.” I admit there were times when I relished shocking her. I could never shock my father—he seemed to wisely concede from the time I was eight years old that I was untameable. Mums never give up. I don’t know what it is with mothers and daughters anyway, since my brother Isaac laughed and told me, “If you don’t want her lecturing you on these guys and how many there are, and how serious you are about them, stop bringing them home and introducing them!” Isaac learned from the time he was in Uni to keep a tight lid on his romantic entanglements. But my mum was my oldest confidante.

  God, I miss her.

  And now we’re all scattered. Isaac always fighting jet lag, me in London, Dad in Oxford, still so reticent that he has to send out an “operative” to see how I’m doing. If I called him, he wouldn’t tell me how he is, he’d tell me of his disappointment in the latest crop of students, how his book is coming along, and ironically, gossip about his pal Walter’s latest run-in with the Board and his narrow escape—a scandal Walter could tell me right here if he were inclined. Well, I’ll make the call anyway, I told myself, right after I wrap up this case—after, so that I don’t have to come right out and lie to my own father about what I was working on. I knew I should call Isaac, too, but there was some truth in what Walter was saying about my brother. If I remembered his last email correctly, he really was in Brazil.

  When we had changed and found each other again in the lobby, Walter had a spark of mischief in his eye as we walked to his car. “I’ve often thought, as I watched you grow up, Teresa, that you’re just irresponsible enough to make a brilliant tenured professor.”

  “I never graduated,” I reminded him.

  “But if you had, if you had gone all the way, I’m saying you’d have been brilliant,” he insisted, enjoying his fantasy. “You’d never be in class. You don’t care what other people think, so you wouldn’t care whether they learn or not. But you can talk certain powers that be into funding all kinds of sabbaticals and expeditions. Sounds like many of the successful infamous profs I happen to know.”

  “Dad’s never been like that,” I argued. “Neither have you.”

  “Well, when we started, we were naïve,” joked Walter. “We wanted to teach. Then our virtues simply became bad habits.”

  I laughed and told him, “I’ve never had a virtue long enough to make it a habit.”

  Me as a professor? I’d get my ass fired for seducing the first hunky student who walked into my lecture theatre. And I’d probably do it out of an instinctive urge to rescue myself from that life.

  It was two days after my drink with Shondi that I got confirmation that Lionel’s ears were burning. It stood to reason that someone might get curious about me and check out my background, and in this great new age of the Internet, all they had to do was go online and see if this company existed with a corporate website. I was counting on that.

  A friend of mine’s an accomplished website designer, and the night after the first poker game when Helena sprang her fantastic cover story on me as much as everyone else, I got on the phone and quickly enlisted him to create a whole site for “my” venture capital firm, Aslan Biosciences (okay, yes, I loved the Narnia books as a little girl). The site had links for info, corporate history, etc. Much of the stuff my pal cribbed from actual respectable sites, rewriting here and there to make it just different enough, but it all added up to a nice camouflage blind.

  There was only one useful bit of information in there, and that was the phone number for general inquiries—it was, in fact, a second ex-directory line Helena kept in the house unknown to her escort customers. An 020 8 number her PA and receptionist, Wendy, would answer with “Aslan Biosciences…Oh, Miss Knight isn’t in at the moment, can I take a message?”

  I was to be phoned immediately in case anyone came snooping around.

  And Lionel did.

  He wanted to meet me for lunch. I thought I’d better not make it too easy for him, so I had the receptionist phone back to say tomorrow wouldn’t do. How about next Tuesday then? Pick a time, he’d told her. He had cleared his schedule for me.

  My, my, I thought, the boy’s got a lot on his mind. No, he couldn’t swing by my office, especially since I didn’t really have an office at all (for the cover story’s website, I had picked out a random floor of an office block over on Bishopsgate—it was mostly corporate leaseholds, so no one would be the wiser). No, I’d better come to him. He accepted that easily as I thought he would, since even he couldn’t be so dim as to think a woman would invite a casual sex partner to her work environment. Tuesday, it was.

  No sooner had I finished putting Lionel on ice than Helena’s PA rang to tell me that George Westlake was trying to get hold of me. Unlike my last pigeon, I saw no reason to keep the man dangling.

  “Hi, George, it’s Teresa Knight returning your call. What can I do for you?”

  “Teresa, hi!” I heard the pleased excitement in his voice. It was somewhat flattering. “I, um, was hoping we could meet for coffee this weekend. Saturday perhaps?”

  “George,” I said playfully, “are you asking me out on a date?”

  In retrospect, this was pretty duh. I don’t know why I didn’t anticipate this from one of them. I’d just assumed the guys who went to the strip poker games wouldn’t be interested in seeing the women outside the circuit, not when they could win them sexually at the table. Helena had said that Westlake was rather taken with me.

  “Not really a date as such,” he answered, sounding a bit lame. Meanwhile I’m thinking: yep, he wants a date. “More like a small favour.”

  “I hope I keep my clothes on for this favour,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, certainly!” He said it so quickly that I figured he was sincere.

  “Okay, you’re on.” He had me intrigued.

  I was surprised at his choice of venue. I suppose I shouldn’t have been since he was in the hospitality business, but I hadn’t expected a white guy in his fifties to pick a spot that good. Yeah, yeah, I know—I’m an age snob. Put away the lawsuit, I’m learning.

  George Westlake waited for me outside a café I was familiar with near Oxford Street, wearing black Dockers and a dark silk shirt open at the neck with the sleeves rolled up on his forearms. He looked…Well, he looked damn good. I remembered him at the game in his pinstripe power suit with the glittering cuff links and the diamond tie pin, and while yes, I had seen this man stripped to the waist and his build was holding up, seeing him in casual wear cast him in a different light. It took ten, no, fifteen years off him. I didn’t normally go for older guys, especially white older guys, but he actually looked quite attractive to me today.

  I was in crisp, almost paint-on new jeans and a blue halter for the warm weathe
r, clunking along in my open-toed shoes from Debenhams. George and I traded appraising looks and smiled at each other.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said. “Why don’t we get a table inside near the window?”

  Café Depardieu is one of those over-consciously hip places that are amusing for a while and then have to re-invent themselves after six months like a nightclub. Its current identity sported a framed movie poster of its namesake back when he did his turn as Cyrano, and there were ceramic sculpture goats for decoration and a wall with a pop art collage of photos from the Vichy regime of WW2. Whoever had decorated the place clearly also wanted to direct music videos. On the stereo was vintage Ella.

  We ordered our coffee and talked about pointless things for a minute or two. I spun fabulous lies about where I lived (a flat in St. John’s Wood, yeah, I wish), what my work was like (stem cells, remember, talk about stem cells) and my family background (an only child—invoking my dream at twelve years old).

  I saw that we would discuss almost anything except the spectacle of me naked and going down on Lionel Young, or Westlake laying down a straight to avoid Vivian getting his trousers off. Strip poker? Oh, no. “First rule about Fight Club is…”

  He was telling me all about the Turks and Caicos when I reached out and took his hand in mine and said warmly, “What is this favour you wanted to ask?”

  He made an embarrassed laugh and said, “It’s ridiculous really. I—um—well, you might know that I’m divorced.”

  I sure hoped he wasn’t about to ask me to be his trophy companion on some convention holiday.

  “My wife and I split a couple of years ago, very ugly break-up—anyway that’s beside the point.”

  “I’d heard, yeah.”

  “I have a daughter, Candice. She’s turning nineteen next week, and I haven’t bought any of her birthday presents yet. And I could use a bit of female help.”

  So. George Westlake was recruiting me to play personal shopper.

  “Don’t you have any female friends who could help you with this?” I asked. “Don’t get me wrong, George, I don’t mind helping but…”