The Consummata

There were modest wet bars hugging opposite walls. I was about to order from the pretty little Latin bartender, who was in a black leather bikini outlined in silver studs, when I squinted through the smoky semi- darkness and realized who she was.

“Hiya, Gaita,” I said to her. “What’s a nice girl like you...? Skip it.”

“I have been watching you.” Her lush mouth was painted blood red, a moist glowing thing that surrounded her amused smile. “You do not stay long to look at the women as they play their games.”

“Not my thing,” I said. “I was worried about you, kid. I thought maybe Halaquez or his people had grabbed you.”

She shook her head. She got me a beer without my asking for it, waited on another guest, and when we were alone again said, “No, this is just a job I took.”

That was vague, but I didn’t push it. “Gaita, is he here? Have you spotted him? Is Jaimie Halaquez here?”

But she was looking past me at something else.

Someone else.

“There she is, senor,” she said. “The legend. The living legend.”

I turned and at once I saw her...

...moving through the ballroom with regal grace, floating like a ghost, and yet commanding attention and respect and even subservience, a dominatrix of stunning beauty and power, entirely in black, tall (but then those tightly-laced knee-high gladiator boots with the impossibly high heels contributed to the effect), in a latex gown, floor length but snapped open at the top of her sheer-dark-stockinged thighs, long black latex gloves almost to her bare shoulders, her face concealed by a mask that revealed little more than red lips and chin, with little devil horns, blonde hair spilling out onto her shoulders from under the mask.

The Consummata.

“Christ,” I said admiringly. “She looks like the Catwoman in the old Batman funny books.”

Gaita arched an eyebrow. “They say she has been around forever, senor. But does she look it? No. She is timeless. She is ageless.”

Was Gaita making fun of me? There was something mocking in her tone. Or was there? With that ever- pounding, blaring grindhouse jazz, I couldn’t tell.

My eyes were on the Consummata, who was moving slowly around her kingdom, legs flashing out of the floor-length gown, as she nodded to those subjects who dared to acknowledge her with a glance.

“Never mind her,” I said, and turned my head halfway so Gaita could hear me. “Is he here, doll? Is Halaquez here?”

“He is,” she said. Now her tone was cold. “Not long before you came in, his number came up.”

“His number is up all right,” I said. “Do you know which private room he’s in?”

“No. Only the Consummata does. You will have to deal with her.”

I shrugged. “You know what they say. You want something done, see the top man.”

So I waited till our masked hostess had made her circuit and came near where I stood at the bar, and I stepped behind her. There was enough fog and smoke to conceal the fact that I was holding the point of a very sharp knife to the base of her back.

Because of her heels, we were on the same level when I leaned in to whisper: “Pain as fantasy is one thing, Connie. But you won’t dig the real thing. Take me to Jaimie Halaquez...now.”

The hooded head nodded.

I couldn’t walk behind her like that and not attract attention, so I fell in at her side. She knew I had the knife, which I palmed, and her sideways glance and the resulting up-tilt of her chin made me think she could sense I was truly dangerous.

So together we exited the ballroom, right past a security guy, and were in that hallway off of which the private sessions were conducted behind closed doors. None of the security staff spoke to her, but they all watched her close—she was clearly the boss.

Only the guy guarding the last door on the other end of the hall said anything, when the masked woman reached for the doorknob.

“Mistress,” he said, and it sounded silly because he was another of the burr-headed Marine types, “you do know there is a session in progress.”

She merely nodded, and went on in, and I followed her.

What we saw was the best tableau yet, and the only one that I found really entertaining.

In a fairly small room otherwise stripped bare, Jaimie Halaquez was on his knees on the carpeted floor, wearing only black latex skivvies, and his hands were cuffed behind him and a ball-gag was in his mouth. His back was red and bleeding here and there, laced with maybe a dozen slashes thanks to a thin-lashed metal-tipped whip in the hands of a black-corseted young woman with very short dark hair. She had spike heels and sheer dark stockings and the familiar trappings of the Consummata’s craft. But like Gaita, she was a Latin girl.

Apparently Jaimie preferred to be beaten by his own kind.

He looked over his shoulder at us as the Consummata came in first, and swiveled around to gaze up at her like a praying man seeing a vision of the Madonna. He seemed delighted, seeing her, perhaps thinking he’d get special attention now from that fabled dominatrix.

He was half-right.

Then he saw me, and his eyes reflected a level of fear to which those play-acting girls in the ballroom could only aspire.

In her low, throaty tone, the Consummata said to her helper, “You may go,” and the little Latin chick rolled up her whip and vamoosed.

I grabbed Halaquez by the arm and hauled him to his bare feet.

“I’m taking this clown with me,” I said to my reluctant hostess. “It can be messy, or you can walk us out, and nobody gets hurt who didn’t pay to be.”

Halaquez, that big bad man, was shaking like he was freezing. Suddenly being in handcuffs and ankle chains wasn’t a good time.

The eyes in the mask holes narrowed, and the Consummata raised a “shush” finger to her lips. Without asking permission, she went to the door, cracked it open, and—before I could do a damn thing about it—she said, “Turn off machine number six. Right now.”

The security guy out there said, “Yes, mistress.”

She shut the door, turned to me and pulled off the mask. The blonde hair went with it, a wig that was part of the getup. She shook her head and the dark hair fell into place.

And I got it.

I understood.

The Consummata was no one woman, rather a character used in the spy game by our side over the years to entrap sick bastards like Halaquez and to ensnare important people with kinks in their make-up who could be interrogated and blackmailed and generally manipulated, because the hidden cameras feeding video-tape (“Turn off machine number six”) would provide the CIA with leverage the likes of which old J. Edgar Hoover himself might envy.

“I told you I was deep cover,” Kim whispered.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“You could walk away,” Kim said, “and let us handle Halaquez in our own way.”

“What,” I said, “and put this bastard back on the Company chessboard, to play more double-agent games? I intend to deliver him to the people he betrayed!”

Her gloved fists were on her latex-clad hips. “We have interrogators who make Consummata-type torture look like the playtime it is. We have truth-inducing drugs and deprivation techniques and psychological manipulation that can—”

“The only thing in this fucking skull worth knowing,” I said, and slapped Halaquez alongside the head, “is the name of the traitor in the Little Havana ranks. And they will get that out of him, and deal with it, just fine. Trust me, my love.”