“Why should that impress Helê?’
“Oh … I heard she hasn’t had a quiet life. She don’t have to work with Duncan, yeah? But she comes in sometime and sees how he treats the rest of us—prick. Give her bad memories, I bet.’
Hmmm…Something else to mull over. Bad memories of what?
As one of the editors, I had access to the raw footage files and to the production schedules, the slate for which girl was acting in what, even the scripts. But I had yet to find anything that tied Antunes to these nastier DVDs. I would soon direct my first whole feature, which meant I would be out of the office and less able to snoop around for Hodd. Luckily, I was at the studio one afternoon to witness a strange scene.
To help me prepare for directing the picture, Luis had me learn a storyboarding program and outline some additional sequences, so that he could get more of an idea of how I would shoot. “It’ll help you a lot,’ he advised me. “Duncan claims he’s got a shoot all worked out in his head, but I know he makes it up as he goes along. Learn from his mistakes.’ I liked his consideration and his good common sense. So after fiddling around with the program and coming up with a few ideas, I put them on a DVD and went down the hall to hand it in to him.
There was shouting from his office. Perhaps the argument had erupted so quickly that he hadn’t thought to close the door. That didn’t help me much, because everyone in there spoke Portuguese.
There were two men, one a thin guy in his mid-thirties with bleached blond hair and neatly defined stubble on his chin, and another who was heavyset, with a black beard and too much gel in his hair. Both kept their raincoats on, both spoke in quiet but firm voices, while Luis—very irate over something—pointed towards his computer screen. I was too far away and the angle of the monitor too oblique to know what the issue was.
I didn’t let them see me. The room we used as a film library was next door, so I ducked in there. I had no idea what I’d say I was looking for if Luis got suspicious or someone else walked in, and since I wasn’t about to be fluent in Portuguese in the next fifteen seconds, it didn’t make much sense. But hey, I’m a snoop. I’ll ask you what you’re reading on the train. If you let me use your bathroom, I’ll check your medicine cabinet.
Luis made a heavy sigh, as if whatever they were talking about had no resolution, and then he ushered them to the foyer.
Go fast. Go very, very fast. I sneaked into his office and made a beeline for the computer. The screensaver was up, but I tapped a key, expecting to see something like a financial statement or another document. But all that was there was an e-mail in Portuguese with a jpeg photo of a young girl.
She was in her twenties, with light-brown skin and shoulder-length curly hair. Pretty—but not smiling. The casual shot looked like it was taken in another sunny exotic location, in a hotel room or something, light spilling in from a balcony. The girl was nude, kneeling on a bed, and there was nothing sensual, let alone sexual at all in her pose, her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes down. If she had been allowed to cover her breasts, I’m sure she would have.
I wasn’t convinced Luis had been yelling because of this photo, but he had clearly made a reference to it with the two men.
No time to copy the jpeg or the e-mail for myself. But I could check his calendar. He didn’t oblige me with a name conveniently written, but he’d scribbled down an address in Richmond. He had put it below six o’clock, suggesting that’s when he’d head over there. Good, so would I. I’d made sure lately to have a new rental car, one none of the staff had seen, on the off chance I needed to tail someone (the car billed to Hodd, of course).
I ducked out and went back to my own desk just in time for Luis to pass me in the hall. I made a little idiotic wave out of nervousness and thought: smooth, girl, very smooth.
Boy, he looked preoccupied.
I wished I could have jumped in the car and followed those two guests of his, but I was supposed to be doing my “job.’ I gave Luis about thirty seconds, then returned to his office with my storyboard concepts.
Luis pounded the drywall as I walked in with the DVD.
“Sorry!’ I turned on my heel to leave.
“Oh, Teresa, no, no,’ he said quickly, looking at me with a genuine apology in his eyes. “This is terrible, having a tantrum in front of an employee, Jesus, I’m—’
“It’s okay, it’s okay—’
“No, really—’
“Is there anything I can do to help?’ I asked.
He fell into a chair and put his feet up, laughing. “Are you a spy?’
“Excuse me?’
“For Channel Four or the BBC,’ he said. “Maybe you’re a producer undercover—one who will rescue me with money and send me overseas for projects.’
“I don’t think I’m following at all.’
He clapped his thigh wearily and said, “It’s okay. It’s just… corporate stuff. The company that financed me here is starting a documentary division back home in Rio de Janeiro.’
“Oh. I see.’ No, you don’t.
“I don’t think I was supposed to find out, but I did,’ Luis went on. “I get included on these group e-mails about budgets and accounting and such rubbish. When I called the bean counters, they were very bad at lying and told me what was happening. But of course, I am not deemed qualified to run this division! I have won so many festival awards for short nonfiction films, but of course, those don’t count!’
“I thought you liked what you do here.’
Luis looked astonished that I could be so naïve. “It’s a business, Teresa. I try to bring style, I try to give these films purpose and quality, but I do not delude myself. Yes—yes, they pay very well, but it’s not why I came to this country. I had to set up shop for, well, other reasons.’
He sat brooding for a moment and then erupted again with fresh indignation. “I know why they are doing this! Oh, I know, all right. They want to be respectable now. But they know I am a cash cow for them in London! So they won’t have me produce real films, oh, no! It is cheaper to pay some spotty-faced student director in Rio, thrilled to have his first job, than to fully commit to experienced talent, to products that will compel people, that will make it onto television or into theaters!’
I wasn’t quite sure how to answer this. “Right, but… nothing to say you can’t do a documentary here, is there? Don’t you have corporate authority over what features you choose to do?’
He grimaced at this, a nod of acknowledgment like a surrender. “It’s complicated, Teresa. You know, if I wanted to, I could kill their first project in a heartbeat. Just stop it in its tracks by letting the right people know who they’re dealing with. The porn merchants who would like to be big documentary makers! What a farce!’
“What is their first project?’ I asked.
He laughed derisively again and waved his hand. “No, no! I shouldn’t say so much. I have to remember that at least we have jobs here. If I become stupid, they might close this operation out of spite, put everyone on the street. That’s no good.’
“You can’t give me a hint?’ I laughed, trying not to make it look like I was digging.
Luis smiled. “Let us just say, it is one hundred and eighty degrees from what we do here.’
That was obscure enough for me to shrug and give up for now. Whatever it was, I sensed I’d better not push. On the screen, the young nude woman was still staring out at us.
“Pretty girl.’
“Oh, yes,’ he said absently, barely glancing at the shot. He closed the window down, and then he was asking me about the storyboards.
♦
The time in the day planner came, and I thought I was wasting my time when Luis picked up Helê—perhaps I had just stumbled onto an address for an innocent social evening with friends. But no, my instincts were right. Something else was going on. They came to the front door of a large mansion, and the man who answered didn’t invite them in. What was this all about?
Sitting in the rented car as close a
s I dared park, I couldn’t hear much, but a female voice from inside the house was crying. I caught an all too brief glimpse of curly shoulder-length hair, a face about Helê‘s age. Was it the girl in the jpeg from this afternoon? I couldn’t see her properly. And I couldn’t tell if the young woman was sobbing over Helê showing up or if she wanted something from her.
Luis wasn’t upset the way he was with his two visitors. He kept talking to this man in a quiet gentle tone, and I recalled the initial tactics he had used to handle Duncan McCullough in the office. His arm restrained Helê, who wanted to reach the woman, and then the door slammed closed. The Portuguese couple got back into their BMW, headed home, and that was it.
I steered the car onto the A305. I could still hear those desperate sobs from that girl inside the house.
3
Two days later, I was out at the climbing gym in Sutton, working out this completely insane stunt I had in mind to have my stars go at it in harness twenty feet off the ground.
Mind you, I wasn’t sure it was safe or would look good (it might just look comical, but that could be fun, too). Hence, me up a rope. I still had my clothes on, but the gym was due to close in fifteen minutes, and then I planned to use myself as a guinea pig to see if naked women looked good dangling against a climbing wall. I had asked Fitz—usually up for a dare—to come out with me but he turned me down, the big poop.
I was armed with one of the smaller cameras to check the logistics, since you would have three people suspended, and fortunately, my instructor didn’t care if I filmed him at the moment, my left hand hanging on, my other holding the camera. That was when Hodd walked into the gym, dressed in one of his mortician suits, and called up to me.
I let myself down, astonished he took this chance of blowing my cover. Luis and other staff at Silky Pictures knew I was here. Hodd anticipated my protest and drawled: “I know what you’re about to say, but we’re not so stupid that we don’t check the terrain before we make contact.’
Fair enough. And I was, after all, right on the other side of Greater London.
“You haven’t made a report in weeks,’ complained Hodd.
“There’s been nothing to report. You can’t really expect I’d make a breakthrough this early.’
To mollify him, I described the argument I’d witnessed between Luis and his visitors, plus what he had told me.
“Interesting,’ Hodd muttered. “But they could have argued over where to go to lunch, for all you know. And you don’t know what this documentary is about?’
“No.’
“Could be nothing. Could be important.’
“Want to tell me, please, what’s really going on and what you’re after?’
“Sorry, no.’
My client still didn’t trust me, and that lack of trust cut both ways. I held back describing the peculiar confron tation between Luis and Helê and the house-owner in Richmond.
Maybe it was wrong, but I was starting to feel possessive about this case. I was concerned that if I offered those details, Hodd and his team would move in to stay on top of that aspect, and the whole thing would be pulled out of my hands without my ever knowing what was going on. Screw that.
“See if you can find out more on this documentary nonsense,’ Hodd was saying. “Have you acclimatized?’
“You know, Hodd, you could simply ask if I’m getting on, if I fit in there now. You talk like you’re a Jesuit hit man for the Inquisition.’
Hodd’s face lit up, and the corners of his thin mouth twitched. I think he was about to make his very first joke. “Don’t be ridiculous, Miss Knight. That presumes you’d know how to make a confession.’
“Hodd, I have a rope here. Why don’t you guess what I’m thinking you can do with it?’
“Just get answers, please. And soon.’
♦
A week later, I was enjoying Luis and Helê‘s hospitality again, not in a bar this time but in their mansion in Twickenham. A party for the Silky Pictures staff.
“We work hard, we play hard, and we get men hard,’ said Duncan, thinking himself very clever. As if he were a third host. I watched the glazed eyes and slow drift away from him. He was a wallflower for much of the evening.
The actresses danced in the living room, and the editors and camera guys, like so many Star Trek geeks, sat around one of the house’s many TV sets, picking apart the bad edits in classic porn shoots. Helê, I was told, had decorated the place, and it looked a little earnest in its middle-class touches, the safest art prints on the walls, a white couch my mother would have loved. A cheerful black Labrador panted and loped around the house, eager to be petted by each and every guest. Nice dog.
I wandered around as my head nodded to the pop tunes, the ground floor and others totally wired to carry the music. Luis kept a professional editing suite in the basement, and I was curious to see it. But first I popped into his study. I was lucky that a couple of interesting tidbits were pushed back in a drawer of his desk. Luis had been noticeably cooler to Duncan than usual, and now I got a sense of perhaps why.
He had a phone bill for Duncan’s extension in the office, and our abrasive director had been racking up a number of calls to Rio de Janeiro. A note in black pen read: Duncan, these are coming out of your pay!—L. But Luis had done more than scribble off a complaint. He had made a photocopy for himself and circled one or two numbers, putting question marks next to them.
Luis was investigating his own employee.
If you’re pissed off about long-distance calls, you go ahead and present the bill. Luis wanted to know who Duncan was calling and what for.
And wrapped with an elastic band, also with a Post-It note marked with an accusatory scrawl of DUNCAN, were a couple of the Ladrão DVDs.
He knows about them, I thought.
I was becoming even more convinced MI6 was after the wrong guy.
Underneath the two DVDs wrapped together was a printout, a big blowup of a still photo, presumably from one of these two films. And it was a peculiar choice. The shot looked like an orgy scene, several white guys screwing mixed-race girls, some of the bodies still blurry, and for the briefest of instants the camera had paused at a sliding window door in the background.
The picture didn’t look like it came from filming in a house. It was more like a boat—I could see a blue waterline beyond what seemed to be a rail. Luis had scribbled across the page a time index for this particular frame in the footage.
Why?
I’m terrible at math but for some reason I have a good memory for a sequence of digits. I made myself memorize the two film titles and the time index code, because I was pushing my luck to dig around in my handbag for a note -paper and pen. Better get out of there.
I left the study, made a big show of joining one of the conversations in the kitchen, and then, bored, went looking for this impressive, state-of-the-art editing suite. I found an extra bathroom and a guest bedroom, and then I pushed open a door, thinking this must be the place—
And gave a sharp yelp. There was Luis seated in front of the big screen monitor, watching the latest footage I’d edited, his shirt open and his trousers down around his ankles. He was panting hard, rocking a little as if unraveled by his own drives, and Helê, crouched down and just in her bra, was fondling his balls as he gripped his cock, both of them watching the playback.
Luis looked so vulnerable as he masturbated, his body pale and strangely boyish. His chest was flat and smooth, his cock a long, thin pole. His face wore an expression of desperate need to get off. Helê was powerfully erotic, her breasts swelling out of the bra cups, a tuft of stray fur, her natural brown shade, glistening in the light between her legs as she leaned in on her knees. She sucked him halfway in with a greedy gulp, letting out an “Mmmm …’ Thoroughly enjoying going down on her man. All of this, this intensely intimate moment between husband and wife, I caught in a glimpse, and then I was shutting the door and saying excuse me, rushing away in embarrassment.
Only as I hu
rried off, I tripped over one of their Labrador’s chew toys and fell face-first, splat onto the rug. I must have cried out in pain, because Helê was quickly beside me, asking me if I was all right. Luis knelt down as well, looking acutely embarrassed, trousers zipped up but his belt still undone, his crotch still bulging with his half-erection.
“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry—’
“No, it’s okay, are you all right?’
They came out, I know, because they wanted to follow me. They wanted to include me.
I had their dog’s toy in my hand, and feeling ridiculous, I made a nervous laugh and said, “Well, I must get back to the lab…’
My face was very close to Helê‘s and suddenly there was a spark, a shared thought. She stroked my hair. I reached out and felt her man’s cock through the cotton barrier, my eyes on Helê, a little unsure how she’d react.
She unzipped and took him out, yanking down his underwear.
Helê‘s mouth covered mine, her soft tongue pushing in, a brief hesitancy then a delighted curiosity. I reached around and unclasped her bra, feeling a freed breast even as I gripped Luis’s cock in my other hand. We could hear the anxious wails of the footage in the edit room, and she eased me down, still kissing me as Luis pulled off my trousers and panties. There was a group consent, the three of us retreating quickly into the guest bedroom, Helê having the presence of mind to lock the door.
It had been a long time since I’d had a ménage à trois, and I was probably the most hesitant. I felt pleasantly overwhelmed, suddenly in the middle of this embrace on the guest bed between the two of them, Helê‘s small hands cupping my breasts and kneading my thick nipples, thrilled with the tight curls of my pubic hair, kissing me and whispering how I smelled wonderful. Her body was the most toned I’d ever seen with a female lover. There was something about her athleticism, and the almost androgynous, underdeveloped musculature of Luis’s frame that made me feel free and young, not weighed down by recent relationship failure. Luis’s hands slipped from behind me to feel my tits, his mouth on my neck, kissing down my back. Femi nine fingers began to work a rhythm on my clitoris, two fingers sliding inside me.
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