Strings

by Dickson, Allison M.

  You know, you could always just go back to your room, get your money, and have the time of your life. Maybe you leave richer, likely you wind up dead, but man, what a way to go, right?

  “What can I get for ya, Michelangelo?”

  Ramón looked up to see the bartender standing in front of him, towel slung over one shoulder. She was cute. Round face, blonde hair cut into one of those asymmetrical jobs a lot of women got these days. She looked about Alejandro’s age, though it was sometimes tough to tell with women who knew how to paint on a good face, and this one did. Black eyeliner, red lips and all.

  “Michelangelo?”

  She pointed to his weak attempt at origami. “Just admiring your little sculpture there.”

  “Oh. Something cheap on tap.”

  “You got it, high roller.” She grabbed a tumbler and pulled the lever marked Budweiser. He hated the stuff, but like most things about America, it wasn’t meant to be savored. It was a single purpose tonic to be chugged by the quart.

  She laid down a new napkin, sprinkled some salt on it from a nearby shaker, and set down the glass of beer.

  “That to make the napkin taste good?” he asked.

  “Little trick my granny taught me. Keeps your napkin from sticking to the glass.”

  He grunted. “Guess I’m not too old to learn new things after all.” He took a long swig of the beer.

  “You wanna pay for this one or keep it open?”

  Ramón reached into his pocket and pulled out his one remaining ten. “I’ll take as many as that will buy me.”

  She laughed. He liked the cynical edge it had. “That’ll get you three. Two if you want to leave a decent tip to a hard working college student.”

  He tipped his glass to her and grinned. “To higher education, it is.”

  “Good man.” She walked away to the other man sitting at the end. “Cashing out, Carl?”

  “Yeah, guess I should. The Missus is gonna have my goose cooked when I get home, regardless.”

  “Buy her some flowers on the way,” she said.

  “Shoot. First thing she’ll ask me is how much I paid for ’em. Don’t worry. I’ll take it like a man. I’ll see you tomorrow, Jessie.” He stood up, his shoulders stooped like a man who’s hunched over a lot of cards in his day. Ramón knew the posture well. Too well.

  “Bet you see a lot of that in here,” Ramón said after the man shuffled off.

  She looked at him. “You have no idea. I think I should probably put part-time debt counselor on my resume.”

  Ramón nodded and continued drinking his beer.

  “So what’s your name?” she asked.

  “Ra—Hermann.”

  “Nice to meet you, Rahermann. Guess you just heard my name. Jessie.”

  “Sorry, I meant Hermann.”

  “Hey, it’s all right if you don’t want to use your real name. Lots of people are somebody else here.”

  “Fair enough. So are you really Jessie, then?”

  “If I told you that, it would defeat the purpose.” She gave a coy look Ramón could almost swear was flirtatious, but for the fact she was probably the same way with every man who walked in here. He was used to seeing those looks from the girls at the Weeping Willow, too. He’d learned over the years there was something about him that made younger women feel comfortable. Maybe it was the dumb jokes he used to tell them to lighten the mood when he had to drive them somewhere they didn’t want to go. He wished he knew what it was now, because he would get rid of it. Any other time, it was a gift, but now it was a curse. This girl would remember him if asked.

  “What are you going to school for?” he asked. He couldn’t help it. Small talk was his thing, and since he was already here, he might as well make the best of it.

  “I want to be President someday. Barring that, a humble medical tech. Either or.”

  “I’d take the med job.”

  She sighed and started wiping glasses with her towel. “Good call. Nobody likes the President. Doesn’t matter how good you are. Half the country will always hate you just because you’re wearing the wrong label.”

  “Probably wouldn’t be doing it right if they all liked you.”

  Ramón drained his beer, and Jessie immediately began to pour him his next one. She set it down in front of him. “So what’s your story, Hermann? What brings you to AC? Got some money you’re trying to lose?”

  “Isn’t that why anybody comes here?”

  “You wouldn’t believe some of the stories I’ve heard. But there’s something different about you. I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  The way she was looking at him right now made him feel wrong. Oh so wrong. But oh so right. She was engaging in a skillful dance, and he was letting her lead. It was stupid, but he needed a little stupid right now, and the beer was hitting him just right. It took his mind off his dismal situation.

  “I left my old job recently. Came here to find new work, but it turns out my former employer is complicating things.”

  “That sucks. Who did you work for?”

  He looked at her, really looked at her for the first time since they started talking. She was younger than he originally guessed. Her eyes told all. A young girl who thought she was world wise. Maybe she had a kid. Yeah, that must have been it. How else to explain the later than average start to pursuing a bland tech degree? Working in a bar where strange men regularly came in to flirt with her and spill out their woes on a fog of alcohol breath probably made her feel confident. Wanted. But none of it changed the fact that she was just a kid with a limited worldview. She didn’t have the wounded-bordering-on-dead look of an indentured working girl. She didn’t have frown lines. Not yet.

  “I worked for the worst people anybody could ever work for, and I think that’s all I’m going to say about that.” He drained his beer, set down the glass, and stood up. “Hope the college money helps.”

  “And another man of mystery just drifts in and out of my life.” She grinned and picked up his glass, depositing it into a tub behind the bar.

  Just walk away, old man. Walk away. Don’t do what you’re thinking of doing. Like a practiced limo driver, he put up a partition between the voice and himself. “How old are you? I know it’s rude to ask a woman this, but I’m curious.”

  “Damn right it’s rude. Lucky for you, I’m not as vain as I look. Thirty-four. Can I guess yours?”

  “Sure.”

  She looked him up and down, and Ramón suddenly felt self-conscious about everything. The girl was older than he thought she was, a couple years older than Alejandro. She was still a kid by his standards—still young enough to be his kid. But maybe her smarts and dry sense of humor weren’t just an act. There was something more to her. She reminded him a bit of someone. Someone he didn’t want to think of.

  Nina.

  “I’m imagining you with hair,” Jessie said. “Men with shaved heads always look a few years younger. But I’m going to say . . . fifty-four.”

  He felt a tingle at the base of his spine, like she’d looked right into him and pushed a button that few people ever saw. “Good guess. Must be from working so close to a casino. Maybe I should take you out to the roulette table.”

  “Maybe you should take me out to lunch. I’m off in an hour.”

  Jesus, she was direct. The voice of reason in his head was pounding on the divider he’d put up, telling him to knock this shit off and get his head back in the game, he was in the same building as the woman he’d robbed and tried to kill, and he should be a hundred miles away from here right now, not contemplating a date with a bartender who was still a girl.

  “I just need to run back to my motel room for a bit. Should I meet you back here?”

  “I’ll meet you outside on the boardwalk. Don’t keep me waiting too long, though. I’m going to be hungry.”

  Chapter 12

  Madam in the Mirror

  She carefully applied her makeup before the mirror in Benny Rosen’s enormous bathroom. The place
was ridiculous in all the right and wrong ways. Heated marble floors, a tub deep and wide enough to fit an Olympic swim team comfortably, a big flat screen television mounted at an appropriate viewing distance. There was a toilet and a bidet, naturally, showerheads nearly two feet wide, a towel warmer, and a wine fridge in an adjacent closet.

  The Madam had lived in apartments half the size of this one room. In fact, she was sure it was nearly as big as her living quarters at the Weeping Willow.

  She hated ostentatious displays of wealth. It ran counter to how her family had always done things, which was to buy what you need, but don’t show off about it. Keep your best things under wraps so people can always underestimate you. That had been Dante’s credo, anyway . . . But she loved this room, despite that lifetime of conditioning. She also hated how she was getting stupid over a man, but she loved how he made her feel. It was a real push and pull of opposing forces going on inside her head, and it made her feel more alive than she had in years.

  The last two weeks had been a fog of sex, food, and pillowtalk planning. After they made love—during which she came at least once, for crying out loud—he would come in here and draw a hot bath for her before showering and dressing and heading back downstairs to his office. A few hours later, he would call down to the kitchen for lunch to be sent up to the apartment, where he’d join her and then follow it up with another voracious fuck session. Same for dinner. Same for dessert and late night snacks. Rinse and repeat, until Clayton would take her home for the next day or two to keep up appearances with Victor. She’d taken to telling him she was spending time at their place in Montauk, so she could recover from the shooting in seclusion. It gave her the air of being even more depressed about her condition than she actually was, and Victor didn’t ask questions. Frankly, Benny was doing a lot to keep her brother too busy with some new Chinese gambling venture to wonder about her, which was just fine with the Madam.

  As long as she remained Quasimodo hiding out in the bell tower, everything would work out just fine.

  “Give him the illusion he still has full control of you and the brothel,” Benny had said. “Make yourself invisible to him. Everything will work itself out soon enough.” He’d had three meetings with Victor, and they were close to making a deal. Apparently, Victor was suitably impressed with the money that would be flowing in from overseas. Too bad he was never going to see a real dime of it. Benny was treating it as nothing more than a transfer of assets. “Once construction begins on the resort in Shanghai, we won’t need him anymore,” he’d said. “We’ll send him over there to oversee the groundbreaking and shake a few hands, and he won’t make it back. Tragedies happen all the time on construction sites. Especially in China. And all that money he took from you will be right back where it belongs.”

  Victor, of course, never said a word to her about any of it when he visited. Not that he would. He had no idea she was sharing a bed with his new business partner and privy to everything coming down the pipeline. The Madam, who had lived most of her life in the shadows, was comfortable enough remaining mum, even if it meant the iron fist with which she once ruled the Weeping Willow had grown soft. The little piece of the kingdom Victor had seen fit to give her was no longer enough. She’d washed her hands of it, leaving his men to run the place in her stead. They were undoubtedly dipping their wicks free of charge, but what did she care?

  At some point, the girls would start to revolt. Perhaps they would even escape once they realized the temporary management was not exactly temporary. She hoped they would, if only to make things more difficult for Victor. He came by when she was in town to look in on her. Or, more appropriately, to make sure she was still helpless and alone, something she found increasingly difficult to fake, but she was able to manage with enough Valium in her bloodstream. Thankfully, he kept his dick in his pants. With the thought of a new empire weighing heavily on his mind, Victor’s appetite for rape had all but vanished.

  “You must appear as desperate as possible,” Benny said. “He should contemplate ending you.”

  “What if he actually does end me?”

  He kissed her head and pulled her closer. “I’ll never let that happen, darling Contessa. It’s all part of the plan. Do you trust me?”

  No would have been her first answer. The only man she ever trusted was dead, and if Dante had appeared before her right then, she would have revoked that trust for all the power he’d left in his son’s hands. Losing her face and her hidden fortune had shaken her foundations deeply, making her more emotionally vulnerable than she’d ever been previously. Ramón and Victor took away everything in one fell swoop, leaving her a bloody and penniless heap, but Benny was building her back up, caring for her the way a kind Samaritan might nurse a wounded animal back to health. But it was more than that. They were a good match out of bed as well as in. She’d known before she ever thought of sleeping with him they would make a powerful duo. He could never know everything, especially regarding her true lineage with Victor. It would spoil his appetite for her, and she couldn’t handle that sort of blow. Not again. Not this time. The Madam wasn’t one to examine her feelings too closely, however. She merely acknowledged their presence and decided they had changed sufficiently enough to tell him yes, she did trust him.

  And after she told him, they made love for hours, and with each passing orgasm, she felt less and less shocked that such a small man with unassuming looks could make her feel almost feral with passion. All she had to do now was be patient and wait for all of Benny’s carefully laid plans to fall into place. For once, take a back seat and let someone else steer her to her desired destination.

  She stopped in the middle of putting another layer of powder over the welts on her face and neck. They were nearly healed, and she was confident they would be completely gone after a few months. Unfortunately, that was the least of her worries where recovery was concerned. She looked down at the wasted half of her chest, still bandaged. Unlike her face and teeth and even her missing eye, she still had trouble accepting what had happened to her breast. Necessity forced her several days ago to get up the gumption to change the dressings herself, and while the damage wasn’t as horrible as she imagined, it was still pretty damn bad. The flesh looked almost melted in places, and the aureole was nearly gone but for a half-moon of pink on the bottom. Genetics hadn’t seen fit to gift her with a lot of beauty in the looks department, but she’d once been proud of her breasts. They weren’t very big, but they were symmetrical and perky, even as she passed into her forties. Now it looked as if some fraudulent doctor in a third-world country had given her a shoddy mastectomy. Benny hadn’t minded. He gave her one intact breast all the attention in the world, even kissing the uncovered areas around her damaged one with tenderness.

  He didn’t dare offer to get her plastic surgery, knowing it would only hurt her if he was the first to bring it up. Benny was a perceptive man. But his careful and loving attention didn’t replace her destroyed pride. Her revulsion. No makeup would fix this, and even if she did get cosmetic surgery to repair the worst of it, she would die with these scars on her body. And even if she awoke one morning miraculously whole again, face, tits, and all, it wouldn’t erase the reality that yet another man had humiliated her. Had taken what was hers.

  Her one remaining eye glared out of a face made dull and cakey from the attempts to cover up her shame with expensive powder and foundation. This wasn’t right. All the years, all the careful planning, and that fucking spic had taken everything with the pull of a trigger. And he was out there somewhere, right now, enjoying his spoils. She imagined him drinking a piña colada on the beach in some tin shack Mexican town, watching the waves rolling in and laughing. Laughing at her, laughing at how he’d finally gotten one over on that ruthless bitch at the Weeping Willow. The one who had even offered to make him a partner. Because wasn’t that what happened when you took a man for a partner? How stupid could she be?

  Her rage, bubbling just beneath the surface ever since she awoke
to find she could only see the world through one side of her face, finally erupted. She screamed, throwing the makeup compact at the mirror. To her astonishment, the hard plastic knocked out a chip of the glass, from which several large cracks immediately branched into dozens of tiny ones, fracturing her reflection for a brief second before the whole works came down in a rain of shards.

  She turned around in time to feel several tiny pieces fly out and nick her naked back. All the better to match the scars on my face. She could have easily lost her other eye if she’d been a millisecond slower. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Finish the job so she’d never have to look at herself again. Or maybe she could pick up one of the biggest shards right now and slice her wrists or throat with it, like one of her girls had done. Rosie, the smart-mouthed little chola who went into the Ballas house and came out with her mind broken into about as many pieces as the mirror in Benny Rosen’s bathroom. That had been an expensive cleanup. Not the body—one of Victor’s specialists disposed of the girl and mopped up all the blood without a word. But the Madam paid dearly that night when Victor came for a visit. He didn’t like wasting the talent of his men “cleaning up whore blood,” he’d said. She shuddered when she remembered how he’d tied her up, how he’d choked her until he came. She could have died, would have preferred it. If only his ancient pecker had been a little longer on the draw.

  No, she refused to check out early. Not before she could see Victor lose everything. She intended to make that happen, with or without Benny’s help.

  After her heart slowed to its normal pace, she carefully stood up and put on her robe, avoiding the pieces of mirror littering the marble floor like a broken disco ball. Benny would be upstairs soon. He would be expecting lunch and a nice fuck, but the Madam’s appetite had changed.

  ***

  She was flipping through a magazine, not really reading it, when he came in and made his usual dash to the bathroom. A second later, she heard his surprised shouts from the other side of the door, and he came dashing out into the living room.