by JP Delaney
“First up,” Frank says, “he’s smart.” He’s writing HIGH IQ on his board.
“Same here,” Dr. Latham says. “Claire, that’s your first overlap.”
“And interested in all that decadent crap.”
Dr. Latham nods. “Here too.”
Obediently, I write down HIGH IQ and BAUDELAIRE. Soon my board is covered in words, and Dr. Latham comes over to circle the ones that matter most.
“So this is the essence of your character,” she’s saying. “The weaknesses he’ll be drawn to. NAÏVE, to appeal to his need for control. DAMAGED, to appeal to his predatory instincts. SECRETIVE, to arouse his curiosity…” Her pen squeaks across the shiny plastic.
“If he’s such a controller, why would he risk getting involved with Claire?” Frank objects.
“Because he’s lonely. He’ll be all too aware he’s crossed a threshold that separates him from other men. If I’m right, he’ll welcome the opportunity to connect with someone who seems to share his predilections.”
“As a playmate? Or a potential victim?”
“I’m not sure he sees a distinction,” Dr. Latham says.
“I think he does,” I say slowly.
They both look at me.
“That night in the bar, Patrick talked about how Baudelaire divided women into two types—the Vénus Blanche and the Vénus Noire,” I say. “Apparently Baudelaire liked to tell the White Venus about the things he did with the Black Venus—almost as if he wanted her approval. And you said it’s prostitutes our killer usually targets. Maybe what he really wants is someone to share all this with—all these terrible things he’s done to other women. Someone he can be honest with.”
Dr. Latham points the end of her marker at me.
“That’s good,” she says. “That’s very good, Claire.”
On my board, with a flourish, she writes down SOULMATE.
22
Welcome to Necropolis.com.
This is a members-only adult website for those whose fantasies include power exchange and domination. It contains material offensive to the vast majority. We do not apologize for what we are, but we do warn you not to enter if such content is not for you.
I sign up, wait while the computer submits my form. Minutes later, there’s a ping. My membership activation.
Earlier, Dr. Latham handed me a slip of paper. “Today’s assignment is this website. Find out everything you can about the people who visit these places. Talk to them, Claire. See if you can figure out what makes them tick.”
“Won’t they want to talk back?”
“Of course. You’ll have to start thinking about your own backstory.” Dr. Latham glanced at her watch. “I’ll come by later, see how you’re getting on.”
I type my password into a login screen, and I’m in. The site’s divided into different sections: “Photos,” “Fantasies,” “Forums.” A message appears:
Since you’re new, why not create a profile? Read what some other new members have said, or go directly to the forums and say hello.
What to put? I find myself wishing Dr. Latham were there to help. Then I realize the psychologist is deliberately letting me do this alone. Taking my first baby steps into the character we’re creating.
>>Hi. My name is Claire. I’m twenty-five years old, British, and I live in NYC.
I take a deep breath.
>>I don’t know if I would ever have the courage to explore my fantasies for real. But I would love to share experiences, dreams, and thoughts with other members.
Within moments I have three replies.
>>Hi Claire. Like the photo?
I watch, wincing, as a picture downloads. It’s gross. But in truth it’s so obviously fake that it’s barely more threatening than a cartoon.
>>Not really.
The second reply is more detailed. The writer—who calls himself The Beast—wants me to know that he would like to strangle me. He wants to hear me beg for mercy. He wants to hear me beg for more. I type:
>>I seem to do a lot of talking for someone who’s choking to death.
I type. The third reply says:
>>Leave her alone, you idiots. Claire, why don’t you tell us what brought you to the site?
An hour later, I’ve made new friends: Victor, who sent that third reply, Carrie, The Brat, Beethoven, and The Marquis.
>>In BDSM, elegance is everything. There’s no satisfaction in trussing up a submissive like a steer and booting them in the stomach. To the accomplished top, half the pleasure lies in selecting a posture or activity in which the slightest movement will produce exquisite suffering.
That’s Beethoven. Carrie adds:
>>Absolutely. One of my favorite toys is a simple plank of wood, turned edge-on and raised just a couple of inches too high to comfortably stand astride. My bottom has to get on the very tips of her toes to straddle it.
I type:
>>“My bottom”? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.
Victor responds:
>> She doesn’t mean part of her anatomy, Claire. She’s talking about her submissive partner.
This is a world as jargon-ridden as acting, I’m discovering. The acronyms alone are making my head spin. CP, CBT, YMMV. I’ve plucked up the courage to ask about some, though discovering that YMMV means “Your Mileage May Vary” hasn’t actually clarified matters.
As for the conversations about neck snaps, Wartenberg wheels, top space, and pony play, I’m floundering.
Carrie says:
>>Your innocence is delicious, Claire. Sure you wouldn’t like to meet up IRL?
Victor intervenes.
>>Leave her be, Carrie. Claire is with us this evening purely as a curious observer.
I find myself quite liking Victor. He seems to have appointed himself my guide to this strange new underworld.
>>Sort of, try before you buy?
That’s Carrie, sneering at me. I type back:
>>More like, look before you leap. And actually, I’m not entirely new to this. Someone I knew and loved was into it in a big way—but I was very young. Too young, I guess.
Even as I type it, I know this is good; that the “Claire” Patrick will meet should have such a past.
>> Where’d he go, Claire?
>>Unfortunately, he died before he could show me much.
A tragic past. Which makes me both attracted to this world, but also on some level repelled by it.
Dr. Latham was right. Slowly, this is bringing who I need to be into greater focus. No longer just a list of attributes on a whiteboard, but a living, breathing person.
* * *
—
It’s past midnight when I log off. My eyes are gritty and my wrists ache from typing.
Going past Dr. Latham’s open door, I hear her call my name. She’s at her desk, surrounded by paperwork.
“You’re working late, Claire.”
“You too.”
“I have something for you.” She holds up an envelope. “We don’t pay overtime. But we do pay. Your first week’s salary.”
“Is it a check? Only I don’t have a U.S. bank account—”
“We know. Don’t worry, it’s cash.”
As I take the envelope I glance down at her screen. She quickly minimizes the document she’s working on, but not before I’ve glimpsed its title.
Claire Wright. Psychological Profile.
23
Who are you?
My name is Claire Wright.
Where do you come from?
I was born in Ferry Springs, near Boise. My father died in a car crash that killed four people when I was ten. He’d been driving. My mother never remarried. I guess I’ve always had a thing for older men, for interesting authority figures who can teach me about the world.
Go on.
I had the usual high school boyfriends, lost my virgin
ity when I was fifteen…After that, sex came easily. I hung out with some pretty wild-seeming guys. But they were never really all that wild, underneath. Then, at college, I had an affair with one of my teachers. He was married.
What was his name?
Mr. Fairbank.
You didn’t use your lover’s first name?
Sorry. Eliot. Eliot Fairbank. That was when I discovered I had a darker side, a part of me that wanted to be pushed to go further than I’d ever been before. We couldn’t be together as much as we’d have liked, so he used to write me stuff…fantasies. He’d send them by email, usually, or leave them in my mailbox.
Good, Claire. What happened to him?
His wife found one of the emails on his computer. She took it straight to the dean.
And how did you feel about that?
Elated. I thought once he’d been fired and had left his wife, there’d be nothing to stop us getting together. But he couldn’t handle it—knowing that everyone knew about him and me. He…He killed himself. But not before he’d sent me one last email.
Which said what?
He wanted me to join him. To do it together. A suicide pact.
But you didn’t.
I was tempted. But I never really felt the shame he felt. I’d thought he was the strong one, the one who’d help me break out of those small-town boundaries…Turns out it was me leading him astray, not the other way around.
And then?
I traveled. With hindsight, I suppose I was running away from a situation that had spun out of control.
You were running? Or you were searching?
A bit of both, I guess. No—probably more searching.
And what were you searching for?
I don’t know. But I’m still curious…I guess I need a guide.
Don’t say that. That’s too overt. He’ll see your potential for himself. Now, one more time: Who are you?
24
“Today,” Kathryn Latham says, “we’re going to analyze a scene. A crime scene, that is.” She flashes yet more images onto a screen. “I’m going to walk you through one of the murders in detail.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Why?” she echoes, surprised. “So you understand exactly what this man is capable of, of course.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“It’s called background briefing, Claire. It’s called giving the agent the tools to do her job—”
I sigh. “I know my job. And it’s called acting. That’s my area of expertise. You need to stop thinking of me as an undercover agent and start thinking of me as a character. Don’t you get this? How can it possibly help me to go on a date with this man if I’m constantly thinking how he might have stabbed some poor woman through the heart or whatever? My character needs to believe I’m out with a nice guy—someone I’m intrigued by, who I find attractive, who I could imagine having a relationship with.”
Dr. Latham thinks. “Do you find Patrick attractive, Claire?”
“Yes,” I say after a brief pause. “I do.”
“Well, then. I would say no great acting skill is required.” Dr. Latham returns to her grisly photographs. “This first image was—”
“I have to see the gray.”
She turns back to me, an inquiring expression on her face.
“That’s what Henry—the ex-cop I worked with—used to call it,” I explain. “He told me, when you’re undercover, you have to believe in whatever the people you’re infiltrating believe in. Otherwise, they can sense it.”
“Henry the ex-cop isn’t running this operation. I am. And believe me, I want you jumpy. Because jumpy means safe.”
“Then it won’t work.” I hesitate, then say in a rush, “Look, for all you say you’re objective about this, you’re clearly already convinced Patrick’s a killer. How is that even ethical? You’re like some director who announces on the first day of rehearsal that such-and-such is the real villain, or the play is actually all about totalitarianism. It’s bad practice—it makes everything one-dimensional. I can’t work that way. I need to believe in who I am, and to do that I need to believe in who he is. And if that means telling you to shut up sometimes…Well, too bad.”
I stop, partly because I’ve said my piece and partly because I have a strange sensation that, all through this little outburst, Dr. Latham wasn’t really listening to me. She was studying me. Like a casting director, giving me marks out of ten.
“Okay.” She nods. “We’ll do this your way. See the gray, Claire, if you think it helps. No more murder stuff.” Her voice hardens. “But in every other respect, I’m in charge. Got that?”
She clicks the remote and the screen goes black.
“Thank you,” I say, a little surprised.
I can’t help remembering that other thing Henry the ex-cop used to say. Some guys, the gray takes hold of them, and they can’t make it let go.
25
Along with everything else, I’m learning about Baudelaire.
The Vénus Blanche and Vénus Noire have names now: Apollonie Sabatier and Jeanne Duval. The one pale-skinned, graceful, and so regal her admirers nicknamed her “La Presidente”; the other a half-Creole dancer who prostituted herself when the poet was too poor to provide for the two of them. Apollonie’s salon was at the center of nineteenth-century Parisian intellectual life: She numbered Balzac, Flaubert, and Victor Hugo among her admirers. But it was Jeanne to whom Baudelaire returned, year after year. He infected her with syphilis. She got him addicted to opium. Two damaged characters, yoked together by poverty and obsession.
“Baudelaire sent the poems to Apollonie Sabatier over a number of years, anonymously,” Dr. Latham says. “When Les Fleurs du Mal was finally published, under his own name, Apollonie obviously discovered who had written them. But there was a twist. The book was seized by the authorities. Thirteen of the poems, including six he had written about her, were censored, and Baudelaire was put on trial for obscenity. Baudelaire went to Apollonie and asked if she’d use her connections to help him. If she did, she was unsuccessful—most of the banned poems remained banned—but in the aftermath of the trial Baudelaire finally got to sleep with his White Venus. No one knows exactly what happened that night. The only clue is a letter of rejection he sent her a few days later, saying he had a horror of passion, because he knew all too well the abominations into which it could tempt him.”
“You think Patrick might be the same? That he’ll be suspicious of intimacy, because it might lead him to reveal himself?”
“I’m sure of it. You need to show him you’re not put off by the darkness you sense in him. That, on the contrary, you’re intrigued by it. That you can match him, horror for horror.”
“How do I do that?”
She hesitates, then indicates the book where it lies between us.
“The poems. Patrick clearly responded to something in them, speaking to him across the centuries. So now they speak to you too. The poems are your way in, Claire.”
* * *
—
She’s had my hospital records sent over from the UK.
“You weren’t trying particularly hard,” she says dismissively, glancing through the faxed pages. “Three relatively shallow lateral incisions in the left cubital fossa. It probably looked dramatic. But it would have taken you hours to bleed out. A classic cry for help by a confused hormonal teenager.”
“It felt rather more than that at the time.”
“I’m sure it did.” She looks up at me, her eyes shrewd. “Use that, Claire. Not the self-harm, of course, but the intensity that led to it. He has to sense the instability behind the pretty face. The darkness. He has to know you’re an outsider. Just as he is.”
* * *
—
Frank comes to the apartment building to pick me up, as he does most mornings now. I go down to meet him, but he stops me at
the lobby.
“You need to pack a bag, Claire. You won’t be coming back here after today.”
“Where am I going?”
“Kathryn wants you somewhere more consistent with your backstory. We’ve had a decorator work on something.”
“A decorator? I’m going up in the world.”
I wake Jess, raiding her closet for emergency supplies. Frank’s drummed into me the need for absolute secrecy, so all she knows is that I’m doing something for the police. I’ve given her the money from Kathryn and told her not to try to contact me, or to approach me if she sees me in the street.
“Look after yourself,” she says anxiously. “Don’t let these people freak you out.”
“I won’t.” Flicking through her underwear, I see her gun, gleaming amid the lace and cotton. Just for a moment, I’m tempted to ask if I can take it.
But of course I can’t. And anyway, I’ll have Frank and his team. They’ll always be close to me, listening in.
“Break a leg,” Jess says, jumping out of bed and enfolding me in a hug. I hug her back, suddenly unwilling to let go.
* * *
—
Frank insists on carrying my bag to the car. We go north, to East Harlem. Cheap enough that someone like me could afford to live there, but only a short distance from Patrick’s workplace, Columbia University.
We pull up in front of a crumbling 1960s development. Parts of this area have been gentrified recently, Frank tells me.