“It bought the agency a little more time. But only a little. More officials were becoming aware of what was really going on. Tweensland was an international enterprise and pressure was being applied by other countries. I didn’t want to be around when it came crashing down, so I made certain preparations. A good thing, too. Because —”
“Because the shit hit the fan,” I said. “When Elena helped that American girl, Cristy, to get out.”
“Yes. That was a big mistake.”
“Whose? Elena’s or Cristy’s?”
“Tweensland’s. They shouldn’t have used Cristy. An American? People care about Americans. You can fuck Ukranian girls, Georgians, Latvians, Albanians, Kazakh, Serbs, Poles, no problem. But you put one American girl in front of the camera, you’ve dug your own grave. She was pretty, she was popular with subscribers—but it was a big, big mistake.”
“But you don’t consider what happened Elena’s fault.”
“
“She thinks you’re angry at her.”
“I’m not.”
“She thinks you hate her. That you want to hurt her.”
She smiled sadly.
“Not at all. I’d like to help her if she’d let me. But instead she steals from me. Steals information I need that’s very private. Very, very private. Information that’s worth a lot of money, but only if it remains private.”
She sat a minute not saying anything, then stood and walked around to my side of the desk. Leaning over me, she asked, “Do you know why I’ve told you this, Payton? All my dark secrets?”
I hazarded a guess. “Because you’re going to kill me?”
She laughed huskily and shook her head. The sound filtered through the blades of her hair, languid and low.
“I don’t kill men. I have other means.” She leaned closer, including me within her silky aperture of hair. My immersion in her fragrance was a sweet asphyxiation.
“There are better ways,” she whispered. “Ways more favorable to both parties, more… agreeable. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I wooden. I mean, I wood. I—” I shut up. She had eyes.
She had more than eyes. Her lips on my lips.
Coming up for breath, she smiled down on me with that kinked-up joker’s grin I’d just been tasting. Strands of her hair caught in my chin stubble like Velcro.
She said, “I’m sure that together, you and I, we can come to terms of mutual, mutual—”
I pulled her back down before she went reaching for my Roget’s Thesaurus.
She might’ve just been auditioning me to take the place so recently vacated by Paul Windmann. A new front man for her operation, another not-quite-honest someone, maybe less ambitious than the last one, who’d apparently struck out on his own before getting struck down. She might have been fitting me for a suit of stripes or a burial suit. But right at that moment I didn’t care.
She’d seduced Eastern Bloc government officials at age fourteen—what chance did I stand at resisting her at twenty-two? So why fight it? Make love, not war. And how.
She raised her arms and I lifted her blouse up and over her head. I had her turn around. I placed one hand on the back of her neck where her silky hair grew low, starting at the top nub of her vertebra.
My hands traveled forward and my fingers traced along the edge of her breasts, down her ribs, across her belly, around her back. Her buttocks tensed and she rolled round. Her face was flushed.
She laid her hands on my shoulders and shoved me down like I was the plunger of a detonator wired to high explosives.
My mouth slid along her belly while my hands went beneath her skirt and felt her thighs and her bare buttocks. She wasn’t wearing panties. She’d come prepared, if that was the right word for it. Screw it, I was beyond words.
My fingers and mouth found her and we were lost in our separate and joint pursuit.
In a few minutes, I knew she liked me at least a little. Much of it could’ve been faked for motives of her own, or maybe just out of habit. But some things couldn’t be faked. I was sopping wet with her.
She raised my head by the hair and looked me in the eyes.
“I want to see you.”
And she did.
And so did the neighbors across the street because we never got around to drawing the curtains.
Naked on my daybed a quarter-hour later, sticky and sweaty and sated, she finally told me how she’d gotten out of her country.
“I blackmailed one of the officials I’d met with and convinced him it was in his best interest to rush through a student visa for me. I came to America, bringing with me a laptop I’d stolen from Raphe. It had copies of all his files, all the business information about Tweensland. That’s when I decided to start my own company, Rauth Realty—and for capital I contacted some of the website’s former customers to request their help.”
It was the strangest pillow talk I’d ever been party to. She told me how she’d started shaking down the website’s former customers. It wasn’t so easy. She had to research them first, find the ones with the most to lose, updating their records with current addresses by going through their local newspapers in the library or online. Then she’d had to contact them.
“My English was not very good, so it was hard. But in time, it got better. And it was even a little fun,” she said, and laughed to herself, her pert breasts jiggling. “The
“Soon I had enough money in an online bank account to start going to classes to learn the language better and reduce my accent. I was in America now. Here surface is everything. I came up with the name ‘Sayre Rauth.’ I hired Paul Windmann. I rented the townhouse.”
“Sounds like everything was going peachy. So what went wrong?”
“Elena,” she said.
“What about Elena?”
“I saw her. Just one day on the street. I was surprised —I look very different than I used to, but she…she looks the same. I followed her. She was living on First Street then; the place she is now on Avenue C is new. I found the name she was using and the name of the man she was living with. I ran a credit check on them and what do you think I found?”
“Lots of debt?”
“The opposite. A joint savings account they had totaling over seventy thousand dollars.”
I whistled.
She nodded.
I said, “So naturally you wondered where that money had come from. Were you afraid she was running the same set-up as you, shaking down former customers?”
“It crossed my mind.”
“That would really screw everything up, wouldn’t it?” I said. “After all, the whole point of blackmail is exclusivity, the promise that no one else in the world knows. If more than one person knows the secret, why pay up?”
A quote from Benjamin Franklin popped into my head:
Sayre nodded. “As you say, if it was true. I needed to know. So I contacted her. Politely, I swear to you. But she was spooked, started making threats. And then the robbery.”
She propped herself up on an elbow and pulled some strands of hair out of her mouth.
She asked, “How much money would you need to live on for the rest of your life?”
“The rest of my life? Darlin’, the way today is shaping up, probably what I got in my pockets right now.”
“I’m being serious.”
So was I, but I’d play her game of what-if if she wanted. Only problem was: all far-reaching numbers are
