“It isn’t polite to stare,” she said to him. He had dark, nearly black hair, and olive skin, which made his blue eyes stand out even more. Looked like one of the black Irish.
“Would you like another?” he asked her when she finished her drink.
“No,” she said as she snuffed the cigarette out on the bottom of her shoe, sending ashes cascading onto the carpet beneath. “But I would appreciate it if you would tell me who you are and what I am doing here.”
*
“I am sorry that we had to get you here in the way that we did,” he began. “Some relationships start,” he paused to search for the word, “awkwardly.”
They sat for a leaden minute in silence. Finally, she asked, “Who are you?”
The man turned over the folder on the table, and the woman spotted her full name, her Christian name as her mother would have said, printed on a neat label on the tab.
“You may call me Simeon,” the man answered, finally.
She told him, “I see that you know who I am.”
“Yes,” he said. “We know who you are.” Simeon opened the folder. “Although from what I understand, you prefer to be called ‘X’.”
She was surprised that he had that knowledge, surprised to hear the name coming out of his mouth. Only a select group of people had ever called her X.
“That is a name I am referred to in certain circumstances.”
“Look,” he said, “we don’t need to beat around the bush, do we?” He turned over the pages in the folder until he arrived at a photo of her in full dominatrix costume. She had absolutely no idea how he had gotten the photograph of her dressed so. “We know what you do for a living.”
X took the photo from the folder and examined it for a moment, trying to remember the last time that she had worn that particular ensemble. “Who is ‘we’?”
“We,” he said, nodding his head toward the other room behind the two-way mirror, “are the Central Intelligence Agency.”
X felt a sense of relief then, and a wave of comfort came over her as she decided that the likelihood of them killing her had just shrunken significantly.
“Show me your badge.”
“CIA agents don’t carry badges. But I’ll show you the identification I use to get into headquarters.” He pulled out a laminated I.D. card and showed it to her. X held it up and examined the holographics. “Suffice it to say that my name is Officer Ryan Simeon, and that I am an Operations Officer. We are also known as Case Officers. Our work is undercover and both official and non-official.”
The agent flipped a few more pages in the folder until he came to one with X’s name and bank transactions on it. A few of them were highlighted.
“You see, we noticed some interesting deposits in your bank account. Most people don’t know that certain deposits trigger specific alerts to the federal government. It was how we found out Eliot Spitzer was seeing call girls.”
“I’m not a call girl.”
“That may be,” he said, “but we explored some of these deposits, and we saw that you happen to have, over the course of several years now, many deposits that are suspicious.”
“I want a lawyer,” she said.
“You aren’t being charged with a crime,” he told her.
“If you want to question me about this, I want a lawyer present.”
He smiled at her, a smile her mother would have called the smile of the devil, the same smile used by snake-oil salesmen, televangelists, and politicians. “You aren’t going to have a lawyer, and you are going to answer my questions.”
“Look,” she said, “I am not a dominatrix by trade. I’m an artist. Many men I have seen have given me gifts. Some of them gave me jewelry, others gave me money. Have you ever given a woman you liked a gift?” The man didn’t respond.
“Did you know that there is an amount that the IRS has established, above which a gift must be claimed?”
“Then why isn’t the IRS talking to me?”
“We’ll get to that,” he said. “Tell me, what do you do for a living?”
“I just told you. I’m an artist, a painter.”
“You happen to live very well for a painter. Aren’t most artists starving?”
“When my mother died I inherited half of her estate.”
“And your brother inherited the other half, but it all went up in smoke, didn’t it?”
“I work here and there as I need to,” she explained.
“As a dominatrix. A dominatrix named X.”
Anger was spreading through her body, permeating it, where it emanated from she wasn’t quite sure but it was somewhere in her belly or her heart, and she felt its heat rising up into her throat.
“Look, I don’t charge men for what I do. I do it to them because I like it, because they like it.”
“But they give you money.”
“They give me gifts. Tributes.”
“A tribute,” he began, “is not so much of a gift, is it, but an expected payment, an obligation, the kind of thing one country pays to another. The payment acknowledges their subjugation, and they wouldn’t pay it if they didn’t have to, would they? Call it whatever you want, but we both know that it is really just a payment for services.”
“You don’t understand,” she told him, “I am not a dominatrix for hire. I don’t go to a dungeon for work. These are men I have had relationships with, and a few of them happened to be men of means.”
“Men who happened to give you a lot of money.”
“They treated me well. I treated them well.”
“They treated you well for treating them cruelly.”
The timbre of his voice dug into her—there was a subdued cruelty and insult in his every word.
“I treated them how they wanted to be treated,” she said before lighting herself another cigarette. “Men are allowed to give anything to their wives. Some people think that marriage is a form of prostitution. But I told you once and I’ll tell you again, I’m not a call girl, nor am I a dominatrix for hire.”
“But you did take their money, sometimes in amounts that should have been claimed to the government. You really shouldn’t have let them write you checks, you know.”
X smoked her cigarette and looked him in the eye. “Did you know that some men actually enjoy it when a woman takes their money? I have witnessed men get hard just watching me remove the money from their wallet.”
The explicit nature of her statement did not bother her, and it didn’t seem to bother him, either.
She took her last drag and blew the smoke towards his face. “Why don’t you tell me why the CIA is talking to me and not the IRS?”
There was a drawn out silence and she shrank from it, afraid of what she would hear.
“We need to enlist your services,” Simeon said.
“I told you that I’m not for hire,” X returned.
Simeon stood up from his chair at the table, and again X noticed the gun in the holster on his flank. Was he the kind of man who could empty the clip without a blink?
“I want you to see something,” he said as he turned on the television in the room.
The television started to play footage of a man getting into a private plane, exiting a limousine, and outside of what appeared to be an incredible mansion.
“Do you recognize that man?” Simeon asked.
“He looks vaguely familiar.”
“Well,” he said, flipping off the television, “let me tell you about him. I’ll just tell you a little bit about him. His name is Terry Compton and he is a very rich man, wealthier than you could ever imagine. He has billions of dollars. The man has more money than some small countries. He got wealthy from hedge funds, investment banks, insider trading, real estate, and a plethora of financial deals that would be above your head.”
“Could you tell me what time it is?” X asked.
Simeon looked at his watch. “It’s 9:30.”
“Morning or evening?”
“Evening. Why do you wa
nt to know?” he said.
“I haven’t seen natural daylight since you took me.”
“Let’s not get off the subject.”
“I don’t know that man.”
“We know.”
“Then why are we discussing him? Why did you bring me here?”
Simeon sat on the edge of the bureau and told X to sit on the bed, which she did. X didn’t want to look him in the face, but he seemed to know what she was doing.
“Look at me,” he said, and X complied. “This man, Terry Compton, has a certain taste for being dominated. He also happens to like art and artists. The man has a large art gallery in his house and a collection worth over $200 million. He never goes to dungeons and he has background checks done on all the women he sees. We need a woman he would like, someone authentic, a woman who isn’t doing it because of the money but because it is in her nature. He’d be able to sniff out a fake.”
“I don’t know what you don’t understand,” X argued, “I’m not for sale. I’m not for hire. You’ll have to find someone else.”
Simeon took a few steps toward her until he was within arms reach. Again, she looked at the floor, diverting her eyes from him, but he grabbed her chin and tilted it up, forcing her into his gaze. “It’s this simple,” he said, “you are going to dominate him.”
X slapped his hand away from her face and stood up from the bed. “Don’t touch me like that,” she ordered, not used to men disobeying her. “Nobody touches me like that.”
“Turn around,” he commanded.
“No.”
They were in a game of wills, but X had played that game before, and almost always, she came out on top, but the men X played with didn’t usually carry guns.
Simeon put his hand on the gun in his holster.
“Oh, you’re a big man now, eh? Got your hand on your big gun. What are you going to do? Shoot me? What did the Beatles say? Happiness is a warm gun? Do you think they were really talking about a gun?”
Simeon slapped her across the face, knocking her teeth together and making her head throb.
“I’m not fucking around!” he yelled.
X put her hand to her cheek. She tasted blood in her mouth. Then, resolutely, X lifted up her hand and slapped him back. He took her abuse unflinchingly. His only reaction was that he furrowed his brow.
“I need assistance,” he said to the mirror.
X lifted her knee towards his groin, but he shifted his legs so that she was only able to hit his outer thigh. Simeon tackled her onto the bed as the other man entered the fake hotel room. With full force, Simeon grabbed her arm, twisted it around her back, and pushed her face into the soft covers of the bed.
“Give me a pair of cuffs!” Simeon shouted, and the man handed him a set. “You’re making me do this! I hope you see that!” he said as he cuffed X’s hands behind her back again.
He grabbed her arms and turned her around so that she was sitting on the edge of the bed again.
“You’re bruising me,” X said.
Simeon raised his hand as if he was going to backhand her, and when X flinched, he laughed. Then the man leaned down and whispered in her ear, “I like it when you flinch. It lets me know that you understand who is in control. And the bruises, think of them as something to remember me by. Every time you look at them, you can think of me.”
He pulled away from her then, peering into her almond eyes, measuring her reaction to his comments, but before he could stand, X spit in his face. Gingerly, he picked a tissue out of a box on the bureau behind him and wiped off her sputum from his cheek and nose.
The other man stood next to Simeon, waiting for his command. “You can go,” Simeon told him, and the man exited.
Simeon leaned on the dresser. “I told you that I don’t want to hurt you. I want you to do as you are told. I want you to stop fighting me. I’m going to reason with you.”
“Why don’t you open the curtains and we can watch the stars,” X said. “I love to watch the stars.”
He pulled open the curtains, revealing the plain wall behind it as if to spite her.
Simeon continued, “I want to tell you about this man. There is a purpose to why we brought you here. We have reason to believe that Terry Compton has been involved in arms deals. Specifically, he has been funding the movement of artillery through the Middle East. There are all sorts of shady monetary transfers and secretive meetings in foreign countries.”
“What does a dominatrix have to do with arms deals?”
“We need somebody to get inside,” he said, “plant bugs, note who his business partners are. Make it so that we can blackmail him if we need to.”
X shook her head and laughed at her situation. “Listen. Just go find a pretty young CIA agent, I’ll teach her what to do, and that will be the end of it. It isn’t that difficult once you know what a particular man likes.” Absently, X stared at the flowers on the bedspread.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “We had an agent inside.”
“And?”
“We found her dead.”
“What?”
“We found her dead body. You don’t want to know what he did to her.”
But X did want to know what he did to her.
“Then why don’t you prosecute him for murder? Why don’t you bring him up on charges?”
“We only had circumstantial evidence,” he said.
“Most cases go forward on circumstantial evidence,” X responded, remembering how her long-dead father, a lawyer, had said that once at the dinner table.
“That may be true,” he said, “but we have our reasons.”
X guessed that the truth was that they didn’t bring Compton up on charges because they wanted to find out who he was dealing with, what kind of network he was involved in, and that arresting him for murder would leave those questions unanswered.
“So you want me to dominate a man who is a murderer? A man who killed his last Domme? You must be kidding.”
Simeon walked over to the round table and picked up the folder. “We aren’t sure if he killed her or if he had her killed. There is a possibility that he had nothing to do with the agent’s death. But do you realize that we have enough evidence to send you to jail?”
“What did he do to your agent?”
Simeon had a faraway look in his eyes as if remembering the events. “We found her,” he started, “in an abandoned building with a nail through the base of her skull.”
X thought about the savageness of such a crime. She had heard about men in Eastern Europe occasionally doing the same thing to prostitutes. “Then send me to jail,” she said. “Bring me up on charges. I’ll get a good lawyer and either get off your charges or plead down and just serve a little amount of time. Going to jail sounds better than getting murdered.”
Simeon flipped through the folder he held.
“You’ve had an interesting life. Went to Catholic school until you were 11-years-old. Your mother had been a model in Europe. She dated famous photographers. Father died when you were ten. You had a partial scholarship to college, but in college, you attended meetings of a subsidiary group of an international socialist organization. You have a brother, Daniel. That’s a nice name. Biblical. Daniel, the dreamer. Daniel, the junkie.”
“So what? I have a brother. I have a past.” X thought then that Daniel was all she had left now.
“He’s a drug addict, a junkie.”
She corrected him, “He was a junkie. He went to rehab. He doesn’t use anymore.”
“It’s like being an alcoholic, though, isn’t it, being a junkie? Once a junkie, always a junkie.”
She said, “I just talked to him. He’s clean. He gets tested for drugs. They come up clean every time.”
X remembered how she and her mother had once driven Daniel to rehab as he sat in the back of the van smoking heroin off a sheet of aluminum foil, chasing the dragon as it is called. “I can’t believe this is my last tray,” he had kept muttering.
; “He’ll go to jail if he tests positive, won’t he?” Simeon asked, taunting her.
“What are you implying? Just be a man and spit it out,” she commanded.
Simeon kneeled down next to her, so close that she could see his pores, could see the stray hairs of his eyebrows and the subtle ring of amber around his pupils. X could see that he was serious.
“You don’t want him to go to jail, do you? One dirty test and he’s back in the slammer. Or,” he mused, “there is always the possibility that you could just disappear. Lots of people just disappear every year, a whole multitude of them. It’s this simple. You are going to dominate Compton. You are going to do as you are told. You don’t have a choice.” He noticed the disdain on her face and then continued, “Life is an illusion of choice. The more boxes of cereals in the aisle, the less we feel we are slaves.”
“What will you do with me after you get your information or whatever it is you want me to do?”
He stood up and ran his hand over her cheek that he had slapped. “We’ll give you immunity to any prosecution regarding your finances.”
“And?”
“We’ll leave your brother alone. Of course, there would be a certain amount of compensation involved.”
“How much?”
“Seven-hundred-and-fifty thousand dollars.” X thought of the threat they had made to her and to her brother, of how she would be dominating a man who could very well be a murderer.
“I want two-and-a-half million,” X retorted, not believing she would get it.
“I thought you weren’t for sale,” he said.
“I’m not for sale. Now we are just discussing the restitution that I should be entitled to.”
“I’ll have to discuss it with my superiors.”
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