Strip Poker

by Lisa Lawrence

  Janet’s a trusting, caring soul, and she allows too many unstable characters on the outside to get in.”

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

  “I mean you’re better off looking at her friends. If any good can come out of this, I hope it teaches her to be more discerning.”

  I needed him to spell it out clearer than that, so I said, “A minute ago, I heard you telling Janet she ought to go make nice with somebody. Seems to me you’ve cleaned up a lot of her messes.”

  “She’s my colleague,” he said tightly.

  “But you don’t like her personal life affecting your work together,” I prompted.

  The flint in his voice was getting sharper. “I don’t especially like people who can’t control their passions, no.”

  “Anybody ever get a little too passionate?”

  He laughed mirthlessly at that one and replied, “Last year, at another function like this one, Janet was the recipient of an award instead of handing one out. Two hundred pounds a plate, a major deal. It was the first time there was a whiff in the air that Boddington wanted to retire in Pretoria, and Janet might be considered. She was off again, on again with her actor boy-toy, and that week they were off. And guess who gets himself worked up and insists on seeing her that night?”

  “I take it there was a scene.”

  “Not irreparable, but you could hear a loud male voice behind the closed door, and then one of the catering staff had to go and fetch Janet. Well! She had to walk out during one of the speeches, which meant everyone saw her leave and could get an idea of what was going on. It was the first time I ever chewed her out. I said your personal life is your own affair, but if you want me to schmooze for you and help you get this, you can’t have this teenage shit going on. It’s not professional. It’s stupid, really. She started using him on her dates because she couldn’t go to functions with me.”

  “No?” I asked.

  “No.” He held up his gold wedding band for my inspection. “It wouldn’t look good at all. My wife hates political functions so 99 per cent of the time I go stag. You wouldn’t think so, but Neil Kenan simplified her life with his presence—in the beginning. Once people hear he’s an actor, they assume he’s a bit of amusing fluff for her, and all the speculation on her amours goes out the window. No poking around to see if she’s having an affair with a married MP.”

  “I did hear they’re rather combustible, her and Neil,” I remarked.

  “I try not to know. I will say she can do a lot better. She has done better. It’s her own fault, really, she expects men to be exclusive with her when she goes off and…”

  He stopped. Too late.

  “I know about all that,” I put in. “I’m checking every one of them out.”

  “Good,” he answered. “My money, it’s one of them.”

  “You don’t approve, but you’re still very loyal to her,” I commented.

  He looked directly at me, and for once, the reflection in the specs gave me a clear view. His eyes looked very small behind the lenses.

  “You know,” he said, “you hear all this psychological rubbish about strong black women, this crap about how black women are pushy in the office, or how black men can be Mama’s boys, and I get the snickers now and then. You’ll find ten per cent of even this crowd think I’m emasculated. Janet’s been my boss, and her good fortune has meant my good fortune. She is a great manager, full stop. She’s a great statesperson, full stop. And when you’re working with someone with her level of charisma and her vitality, you want to work with her. For her. And you allow certain liberties. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for Janet.”

  Interesting, I thought.

  Before I could ask him a follow-up, he looked past me and frowned. “I’ll have to catch up with you later, Teresa.”

  As he moved off, I saw the reason for his retreat. Theodore Owolabi glided up to me with a cautious smile carved into his thick salt-and-pepper beard. A dark-skinned Nigerian-born activist, Theodore had been leading the fight on a whole range of causes, from his own people getting smeared with a bad reputation over notorious credit fraud rings to his push years ago for Britain to accept more refugees from Rwanda. He and I knew each other from the Sudan appeals, and he had come over to say hello—to me. Not to Anthony. No love lost there, but Theo had never been a big fan of Janet Marshall.

  “You’re keeping strange company these days, Teresa,” he laughed, and he kissed me on the cheek in greeting.

  “My God, you know, I haven’t seen you for ages until tonight. Where’ve you been? I get rumours about you doing a courier run to Chicago, and then you ended up getting chased down to New Orleans by drug dealers…?”

  “They were counterfeiters. That was a few months ago, Theo. Your grapevine needs tending.”

  “I guess so!” he laughed. “At least you’re all right. I hope your client didn’t pay you in funny money.”

  “Cute, Theo.”

  “Tell me what happened with all this!” he implored.

  But before I could roll out the tale, there was a stir in the crowd, and people turned to watch the host of the award ceremonies. We stood and listened to the usual self-congratulatory stuff, a couple of statuettes were handed out, and then Janet Marshall was introduced to give an award for business in the international community or some such thing.

  She started talking about Africa, and standing next to me, Theo leaned in to whisper in my ear, “This is rich. When she took her turn as Treasurer of the Africa-Caribbean Unity League last year, we hit her up for its contribution to Darfur. Can’t spare it, but there’s money for victims of Hurricane Ivan in Jamaica and the Caymans.”

  “Theo, you can’t twist the facts like that,” I chided him. “You used to bitch they weren’t giving enough. Now you’re rewriting history so that they didn’t give anything at all.”

  “They did hardly give anything at all.”

  “The issue’s the proportion, Theo. It’s shit like this that made me stop coming to the meetings. And if I remember correctly, she played messenger, and she was out of town for the executive committee vote.”

  He didn’t tackle that one, merely rolling his eyes. I let it go and turned my attention back to Janet at the podium. Her speech was hitting all the politically correct notes about the trendy topic of Corporate Social Responsibility and how black entrepreneurs should lead the way. Then she segued into a scathing attack on big multinationals that are still messing around with the natural resource wealth of African nations.

  “The conflict diamond business that put Sierra Leone on the front pages has not gone away,” she told the audience. “The Coltan trade that’s behind thousands murdered, raped and turned into slaves in the Congo has not gone away. Is it any wonder that we saw genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region last year when the world ignored how oil cartels got into bed in the past with the regime in Khartoum? Black power means economic power, and economic power is becoming increasingly vital for our very survival, whether we live in Brixton or Botswana.”

  “Sellout,” muttered Theo.

  I looked at him sharply.

  “She is,” he insisted. “Labour’s girl in Pretoria? Please.”

  “You’re out of line,” I told him. I wanted to demand why when somebody finally opens a door for one of us and we decide to step through it, it’s selling out? I wanted to argue that if Janet accepted the position, it would be one more of us seen. But then Theo saw Janet Marshall one way, and I was beginning to see another.

  “I think,” said Theo, “I ought to go get myself a drink.” And off he went.

  It was a few minutes later when Janet and I drifted over to each other.

  “How are you doing?”

  I was direct. “A little concerned. Anthony Boulet swung by to say that he would help any way he can.”

  “Why is that a problem?” asked Janet. “Anthony was on my staff when I was an MP, and he followed me into the CRE. I’ve known him for fifteen years, and he’s been my rock. I tru
st him implicitly. In fact, he was there when the blackmail note arrived, so of course, I confided in him.”

  “But it wasn’t necessary to disclose to him what I’m doing,” I pointed out. “The less people know, the better, so that I can do my job.”

  “Anthony’s very discreet.”

  “So are you—but you still told him.”

  She muttered an apology and repeated her line about Anthony’s discretion, and then one of the other speakers hailed her across the room, and I let her go. Perhaps I was making too much of it, but then I remembered something Janet had told me from the very beginning—a fact that had unveiled something else, something that Janet had chosen not to tell me. And cast her and someone else in a whole different light. My concern grew. And I realized I had come tonight with my expectations far too low. I had found a whole new suspect.

  5

  Another poker game was coming up, but I was getting more action away from the table. On Thursday, Daniel Giradeau called Helena—my “sponsor” at that first game—to try to get hold of me, and I passed along my mobile number. Giradeau was something of an enigma to me, which I thought pretty rare with Americans, because usually what you see is what you get. He had been charming at the table, but a little reserved, lots of cautious bets, and his target for the night seemed to have been Ayako. Now he was taking an interest in me.

  Hmmm…Lionel was into collecting. Neil said he enjoyed the chase, while George Westlake wanted to court me and make me his rebound girl. It made me wonder if Giradeau would come up with something else.

  Men wanted me. Publishers didn’t. Another rejection letter from one of the big London houses—I won’t tell you which one, but let’s just say that when magic wands became fashionable, this publisher jumped onboard the trend with five different imitators. That same Thursday Giradeau was looking for me, I was in my flat, with Stevie Wonder’s Definitive Collection cranked up full for “Uptight” and ripping open an envelope with a printed return address.

  A while back during my wanderings I got what I thought was a nifty idea for a girl detective series for kids. My readers would be—oh, I don’t know, eight to eleven or so. Instead of being an orphaned alien or a magician or just one of those Enid Blyton clones, my plucky little heroine would be a Third World girl of an unspecified locale who first lives in a refugee camp and later in a resettled village of her people. She and her helpers would go looking for a friend who had disappeared or maybe foil a couple of black marketeers—adventures like that. I thought I had a winner because I could remember being intensely curious when I was a kid about how people on the other side of the world lived, and I was absolutely sure they were doing more important stuff than me. Certainly their lives were more immediate.

  I don’t know why I suddenly thought of writing a kids’ book. It’s not as if I was getting broody or had a child of my own, but the impulse grabbed me. I had an idea, and no one had ever told me I couldn’t be a writer so…And I read that a good number of these children’s authors were eccentric, single and sometimes misanthropic types, so I figured with my lifestyle, hey, I was entitled to join the club. I got a friend of a friend, Roxanne, a talented graphic artist, to do illustrations for it.

  The pictures for my little masterpiece were really something. Mostly pen and ink with provocative watercolour washes of sandy brown and ochre. If you met Roxanne, you couldn’t imagine the lady coming up with these ethereal images. She’s this buxom white woman in her thirties in a tank top and torn jeans who’s usually bent over her drafting table cluttered with paints, her airbrush gun, a gigantic ashtray with a mountainous heap of chain-smoked butts, and her foot is often twitching in time to blaring Gwen Stefani.

  “I love this,” I remember saying when I held up one of her finished compositions.

  “What?”

  “I said I love this,” I shouted, pointing to the little girl drawn against golden hills.

  “Hey, if the little fuckers don’t like it, they have no bloody taste!” she giggled. Earthy girl, Roxanne.

  Of course, it wasn’t really up to the kids, but adults in offices thinking they understand what kids like. So far, no hits. Usually I got letterhead with the stock response of “your work is not appropriate to our needs.” On the letter I opened to Stevie Wonder in the background, someone had scrawled in pencil in the margin in a feminine hand: “This would be terribly dark in tone for children.” I thought: what world do you live in, sister?

  Well, Dr. Seuss got rejection slips. So did that guy who wrote Where the Wild Things Are, I’m sure of it. They wrote weird stuff, certainly weirder than a girl who solves small mysteries in a refugee camp.

  I crumpled the rejection letter and tossed it in the rubbish. Time to put away childish things. For the moment.

  If George Westlake was Jermyn Street conservative blues and browns, Daniel Giradeau was Versace colour. He moved in a slow, graceful way, the way I’d seen trained dancers walk, almost in a languid manner. Neil, being an actor, had that grace, but Neil spoke with his hands, and he had a model’s ease with his posture and his gait. Giradeau didn’t seem to put any effort into it, floating up to you like he was on one of those airport moving sidewalks.

  He took me to dinner in the ballroom of the Pantheon Hotel, the runner-up choice on Brook Street for those who thought Claridge’s was too steep. The folks at the Pantheon had imitated their more famous neighbour’s Art Deco style, right down to ripping off artist Dale Chihuly’s chandelier design. Good steak. Not sure about the company. I knew I couldn’t warm to Daniel Giradeau right away when I asked what made him decide to become an architect, and he told me he’d got excited by the profession when he read The Fountainhead at thirteen.

  “You don’t strike me as the scientific type, Teresa.”

  “You want thick specs and my hair in a tight bun?”

  “Not what I meant,” he laughed.

  “You’re not what I expect of an architect either,” I replied.

  “What did you expect?”

  “Oh, whenever I see architects interviewed on television, they seem to have their heads in the clouds, talking about light and air like physics professors. Or they come across as very meat-and-potatoes practical types, like engineers. You’re very shy about your work.”

  “I could show you the site, but there’s nothing but a hole there. For now. I could always show my blueprints.”

  “Like I would understand them,” I smiled.

  “Fair’s fair,” he answered. “I was a whiz at calculus in school, but I couldn’t handle chemistry to save my life…. Something tells me you’re not a lab jockey. You like the deal-making side of the science, don’t you? That is what your company does, right? Venture capital start-ups? Incubators?”

  “You mean the investment term, not the actual—”

  “No, not actual incubators,” he laughed. “That’s what turns you on, doesn’t it? The deals.”

  I was guarded. “I suppose, yeah.”

  He looked at me, smile frozen on his handsome features, perhaps waiting for me to expand on my answer. I popped a last bite of steak in my mouth and chewed away, leaving him with silence.

  “That was good,” he muttered, and as the waiter took the last of the plates and melted into the back shadows of the restaurant, he reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a joint. He lit up and had a toke then passed it to me. Couldn’t believe it. Not because I don’t indulge but because of how brazen he was in lighting up here—and in assuming I would be cool with it.

  “I’ll wait for a bit,” I told him. “It was a nice meal.”

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  He reached down where I couldn’t see and then rested a long jewellery case on the white tablecloth. He nudged it across for me to open.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s for you.”

  I opened it. Lying there was an Elsa Paretti snake necklace from Tiffany’s, 18-carat gold and worth close to £4,000.

  “What’s it for?”

/>   He smiled. “Nothing.”

  “Just like that? You always so generous?”

  “If it has to be about something, okay…Suppose I told you it’s yours if you’ll just slip off your panties right now and do as I say.”

  “Suppose I told you that you’ve made a terrible mistake,” I shot back, trying to keep my voice light. “Just because I play strip poker doesn’t mean I’m a whore.”

  “I didn’t say you were,” he replied coolly. “It’s a gift—”

  “Right. In exchange for—”

  “In exchange for nothing,” he interrupted. “I did say nothing. You pushed the issue, and I made a bad joke. Have it. Go ahead. I think I know why you come to the games, and it’s the reason why I expected you to take your panties off. Not because of some bauble.”

  “Oh, really? And why is that?”

  He took another drag on the joint, and as he finished, I put my hand out to let him know I wanted a hit. It was good stuff, and I quickly got a buzz. It took some of the edge off this verbal jousting.

  “To answer that,” he said, “let me first tell you what I see. I see an incredibly gorgeous young woman who because of her work was obviously a high achiever during her university years. She’s a demon in the gym and knows how to defend herself. Your hands—you have lovely hands, but your knuckles are pronounced, and that comes from hitting things—bags, boards, whatever. You’re used to competition. You’re used to telling men what you want when you want it. But you never experimented much sexually in the past, and now you want to try new things, take a few risks. You want to be told what to do for a change. It’s exciting not being in control.”

  “Boy, do you have the wrong number,” I laughed.

  “I don’t think so. I’m offering very different services to what you might expect of the others.”

  Still laughing, I replied, “Services? Huh. Let me tell you what I see, Daniel. I see a guy who knows that bragging he’s got ‘ten good inches’ won’t cut it so he figures a come-on that he ‘knows me so well’ will get him between my legs instead. You’re still treating me like a whore.”