AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The Brit didn’t mind. Slumming, roughing it, enhanced the manly intimacy and esprit de corps that the organization had been formed to engender. Besides, as they all knew, discretion was entirely necessary.
The building where they finally pulled to the curb was at Lenox Avenue and 145th Street, in front of a subway pit for the 3 train. It was a broad, three-story prewar structure that probably had once been a luxurious apartment house. Now its high windows were sealed with cinder blocks and its once-grand arched doorway held an ugly spray-painted steel shutter.
The Brit, who had just been elected an executive director at the IMF, gazed up at the curious structure. Having briefly flirted with becoming an architect at Warwick before coming to his senses, he detected a golden-mean, Parthenon-like quality in the well-constructed building, slightly wider than it was tall. He also picked up a faint flavor of French classical style in the building’s quoins and the porthole-like oculus window beneath its open cornice. It made one think of ruins, he thought. Of rituals.
Something stirred deep in the pit of his empty stomach. Might the French aspect of the location denote tonight’s fare? he wondered, licking his thin lips. Was there a little haute cuisine on the menu tonight? Hmmmm. It was always a surprise, per club rule, and the anticipation was killing him.
“I hate to admit it, but you nailed the venue this time,” the Brit said, turning toward the financier sitting directly behind him. “This is like coming upon a temple in the middle of a jungle.”
The tall American hedge fund owner smiled as he patted the driver on the shoulder.
“Don’t thank me. It was Alberto who found it, of course.”
The Brit, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, smiled at the hulking chauffeur, Alberto Witherspoon, beside him. Alberto smiled back, a twinkle in his brown eyes as he nodded proudly.
“Least I could do,” he said.
The Brit had heard all about Alberto. The story was that the handsome, six-foot-four-inch gentle-seeming black man from Oakland had once been a bodyguard to the infamous cult leader Jim Jones. He’d been there from the early days when Jones was still a darling of political figures like First Lady Rosalynn Carter, California governor Jerry Brown, and gay rights activist Harvey Milk. Alberto had been off on a supply run when Jones had persuaded the nine hundred Americans who had signed up for his socialist agrarian paradise in Guyana to raise a glass of cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Or at least that was what the deviant claimed, thought the Brit. One could only happily imagine the kinds of unholy things the not-so-gentle giant had seen and done.
CHAPTER 2
THE BRIT WATCHED AS Alberto gazed up and down the darkened street, listening to the police radio in the drink holder. The placard he removed from his jacket and placed on the dash denoted the car as on official NYPD business.
The Brit shook his head and smiled gleefully at the official-looking document. It looked real, it probably was real. The financier was supposed to have connections virtually everywhere.
That was what he loved about this club, the Brit thought as Alberto handed him a flashlight. Its reach was something altogether new. Literally nothing was prohibited. There was nothing they couldn’t do.
A clatter of steel from the subway pit sounded like some far-off torture in a dungeon as they crossed the deserted sidewalk to the building’s steel-shuttered entrance. Before he unlocked the gate, Alberto set down the large suitcase he had taken from the crossover’s trunk. Then he rattled the gate up and lifted the case again.
The first thing the Brit noticed was that it smelled like fire inside—rich, fragrant wood smoke. He thought of rituals again as he looked up at the cracked, blistered black walls and ceiling in the beam of his flashlight. Marble steps appeared in the light, an iron balustrade heading up.
Everything was set up on the third floor in a large room broom-swept of rubble. The grill was top-of-the-line and massive, its stainless steel gleaming from the moonlight that fell in through a ragged basketball-size hole in the ceiling. Beside the grill was a large sheet of thick plastic, rattling in the cold wind that came in with the moonlight.
The Brit thought it looked like a dinner setup at one of the high-end safaris his wife had dragged him to in Botswana. Nothing but the best, he thought, accepting a warmed brandy glass from Alberto as he took his seat.
“That’s not what I think it is, is it?” the Brit said as Alberto brought over a dark, heart-shaped bottle and poured a careful measure.
“I remembered how much you liked the Courvoisier last month in Tokyo, so I thought I’d blow the dust off some of the Jenssen Arcana I received for my fortieth,” the financier said as he leaned back in his chair and lit a cigar.
“That was incredibly thoughtful of you. I mean that,” the Brit said, touched. He took a sip of the fifty-five-hundred-dollar-a-bottle hundred-year-old brandy.
“I have incredible respect for you, Martin. The others don’t seem to fully appreciate what I’ve set up here as much as you. You get it. I can’t explain how important that is to me,” the financier said as Alberto tied on a simple white chef’s apron and fired the grill to preheat.
The financier passed over some Ecstasy and then a large bag of coke. As the excellent drugs started to work their glittery magic, there was a squeak, and Alberto was rolling over an empty gurney he’d produced from the shadowed corner of the room.
When Alberto brought over the suitcase, the Brit’s stomach churned again deliciously. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end as a heady cocktail of narcotic- and alcohol-enhanced emotions swirled through him. Anticipation, joy, fear.
He swallowed as Alberto slowly zipped open the suitcase and took out what was in it. Though he knew what was coming, the Brit watched as the brandy in his hand wavered, and his eyes almost bugged out of his head. The dust between his feet darkened in coinlike shapes where the expensive liquor splattered upon the floor.
This was far better than the Marquis de Sade he had slavered over after lights-out at Beau Soleil, he thought, gazing on the stunning scene before him. Better even than the parties he had attended in Libya that time with the sultan. For so many years, he had wrestled with what he was. Now, with the help of his comrades, he could finally accept it, relish it, worship it, as the thing that made him truly superior to other men.
This is real, the Brit thought, making eye contact with the bound, wide-awake, nude young woman A
lberto easily lifted above his head.
Dear me, this is so very, very real.
