Field of Mars (15 page)

‘Here you are, sir,' Yuri said and guided them to their own booth. The only illumination came from a ring of candles that stood like red spikes in sconces around the room, and a shaded red light that illuminated a stage in the centre.

The stage was really a low bed upon which two women were making love to a third who had been bound to the corner posts. She was groaning enthusiastically, her back arching each time the woman between her legs inserted a black dildo that Ryzhkov thought was improbably large. Every few strokes the woman at her head moved so that the bound woman would have to put her mouth to her vulva, then the two tormentors would kiss.

He felt Vera's hands unbuttoning the fly of his trousers. ‘We have to make this look good,' she said.

‘Look . . .'

‘No, you
look
—' and she pushed him out in the booth so that he could see his neighbours. ‘That's what being Black is; you sit in the shadows and you get to watch . . . you can watch them—' In the booth beside them an older man was being serviced by a woman whose head was bobbing up and down between his legs. He looked over and took his hand out of her hair and gave a desultory wave to Ryzhkov. Momentarily distracted, the woman looked up from her work and smiled briefly.

‘Or you can look at our other distinguished neighbours—' She pulled him now so that he was nearly on top of her, leaning out of the booth so that he could see into the booth on the other side. Two women this time, who sat impassively, watching the show.

‘Well, maybe not them . . .' Vera laughed and turned back to the stage. ‘I used to do . . . something like that,' she said quietly, and then turned to Ryzhkov. Her face, he thought, had become unbelievably cold. He couldn't understand it, how someone with such a smile, someone so beautiful could be . . . so hard. With eyes like granite. She had poured him a glass of champagne. It was from a good bottle, white stripe with ice crystals, the same as the girls onstage were drinking when they got thirsty.

‘So, let's drink to
art
,' Vera said and forced his glass to his mouth. He obeyed. ‘This is what ballerinas do when they can't get work at the Marinsky.'

‘I want to get out of here, have a look around.'

‘Not so fast, we're play-acting now. You're here for a good time, remember. Besides neither of them would come back here. If you want the old one there are other places to go.'

‘What other places?'

‘The children don't live here, they're all hired in. The old one would be a regular somewhere, some place that caters to . . . gentlemen of particular tastes.' She was right against him again. He heaved a great sigh, tried to move away from her but her hand was inside his trousers. ‘Don't think I'm doing this for you,' she said. Her voice was angry, challenging. ‘You could drop dead right now and I'd laugh about it.'

A sudden screaming caused both of them to look back to the stage, the girls gyrating to a prolonged triple orgasm. There was a smattering of applause from the booths around the room. The women got up, began to untie their companion.

‘Skol,' Vera said very quietly, lifting her glass to the women stretching their tired bodies.

‘All right, let's go,' Ryzhkov said to her. This was crazy, he thought.

‘Oh, no,' she said, and now she was on top of him, her legs straddling him, holding him down on the couch, her fingers gripping him tightly, dangerously. ‘We're not going. You paid a lot of money for this, right? We're not going anywhere until you get what you came for, right?'

‘We're going.' Ryzhkov pushed her off, stood up and hit his head on the top of the booth. He saw that Vera was crying now. The kohl had run down her cheeks in two great black streaks.

‘You don't know what you're missing.' Suddenly she was sobbing.

‘Get up. Tell them I'm disgusted, tell them we need a room, tell them anything, make something up,' he growled and pulled her to her feet.

‘You don't own me,' she slipped out of his grip and struck at him, but he only took the blow and grabbed her arm and twisted it behind her and jerked her away from the booth. They stumbled up the aisle, knocking over the little table and the bucket of champagne. The two women were still sitting there, they didn't even look up.

‘Didn't you like it? Didn't you have a good time?' Vera was saying behind him as he tugged her around the booths. The next act was taking the stage, men with overdeveloped muscles dressed in leather. ‘Don't mind him . . . he always gets this way . . .' she was apologizing to the couples as they staggered down the aisle. He jerked her closer to him and they reached the curtains. He pulled them aside, there was a locked door there and he pounded on it.

‘Now, you've spoiled everything,' she was muttering behind him. ‘You've been a very impolite audience member.'

‘Shut up,' he said, angry now, his face grown cold and hot all at the same time.

The door was suddenly flung open and Yuri stood there glaring at them in the red light. ‘What's the bother in here—'

‘He wants to show me what a stud he is, we need to go upstairs, and he's ready right now, so . . .'

‘You're supposed to reserve for those, you know that.'

‘It's not going to take that long. We'll take the Iron Room.'

‘Hurry up then, I don't know if there's anyone up there or not.'

Yuri took them along a corridor towards the wing of the building. Even the windows on the stairs were all painted over and he could still see traces of the old Apollo Bindery, warnings against smoking painted on the wall.

At the top of the landing they went through a door and he saw that the end of the corridor had been blocked off with a stage flat with a false door to hide it. There was an electric lift opposite them and a kiosk. The lights were low and red.

‘Anything open? Doesn't have to be for long,' Yuri growled at the girl sitting there.

‘Iron Room?' Vera giggled.

‘I've got a two-o'clock, that's only fifteen minutes.' ‘Plenty of time,' Yuri said, giving Ryzhkov a look. ‘And tell him to be a nice boy, eh?'

‘He's under a lot of stress. It's the competition in his industry, after all one brush is much like any other—' But the big man was already gone, headed back to his post at the theatre.

‘The Iron Room, it is,' the girl said, and they turned and headed down the hall.

Ryzhkov tried to match up the doorways with the windows as he remembered them from the map he'd had Vera draw and from his memory of the view from the lane. The Iron Room was at the end of the hallway.

It was where Lvova had begun her last night. ‘I've seen you before, yes?' Vera said to the girl.

‘Nikki. I thought I'd seen you too.'

‘I worked here sometimes.'

‘That's right, now I—'

‘Hey, what about the Blue Room, anyone in here?' Vera interrupted. They had stopped halfway down the hall. The door was painted with blue clouds and little rays of sunshine. Down by the floor there was a landscape with ponies.

‘They just got in there and they've got it all night, I think.'

‘Oh, too bad. He'd love that,' Vera said, pouting. ‘Here we are . . .' The girl stopped before a door that was clad in metal plates. She had to lean against it to push it open.

‘Wonderful, you've been so sweet,' Vera said and touched her fingers to the girl's cheek.

The room was long and wide. At one time it must have been a rather pleasant office. Now the windows were curtained with gauze and heavy blinds. The opposite wall had been decorated with implements of torture; everything was leather, metal, and curtained in black velvet.

There was a series of chairs and trapezes that were suspended from the ceiling, and a leather-covered table with stirrups that looked like something one might find in a hospital. The carpet had been replaced with rubber matting in a circle extending six feet around the base of the table.

‘Do we have to make this look good too?' Ryzhkov said dryly.

‘You're the detective,' she said, walking past him towards the table.

‘So this is where she was?'

Vera only nodded. Ryzhkov looked around. There were a hundred ways someone could die in that room.

‘The small man was watching, I think. There's always somewhere . . . back here.' She reached down and pulled on a fitting in the wall. ‘Yes . . . In here.'

Ryzhkov walked into what he imagined used to be a manager's private washroom and closet. He felt on the wall for a switch and a dim red light came on. Halfway down the inside wall was a curtain and a high stool. A sliding window had been built into the wall. Ryzhkov sat in the seat and slid back the window. It gave him a perfect view of the table. Vera came into view, turned and looked at him. ‘You can hear everything too, right?'

He looked up and saw that there was a fabric covered hole cut in the wall.

‘Yes,' he said. He sat there for a few moments more watching her standing there beside the table. The red light shone harshly on her cheekbones and the curve of her mouth. He knew that she was only looking at a mark on the wall, that she couldn't see his face. She reached out and put one hand on the cold metal of the stirrup. ‘Time's running out,' she said.

He felt his way out of the dimly-lit closet and back out into the centre of the Iron Room. ‘Any other special features?'

‘There's a balcony. The small one could have been waiting out there. Or maybe they could have been doing it together, but . . . I don't think so.'

‘She was killed in here, then.'

‘Yes.'

‘So . . . then you saw the small one . . .'

‘. . . take her out and they went into the Blue Room . . . that's why I stopped there.'

‘All right, let's go.'

‘There's someone in there now.'

‘That's their problem.'

‘Hey—' But Ryzhkov was already out the door and into the hallway, knocking on doors and calling out ‘Fire!' in a panicky voice abandoning his American persona. Down at the lift he saw the hostess turn and look at him.

‘Fire!' he screamed at the girl, and simultaneously threw his weight against the door to the Blue Room. He stepped back across the hall and ran against the door a second time and it exploded off its hinges. The room had been decorated like the inside of a cloud; a mattress had been sculpted like a giant puffy pillow, and stars and sunrays beamed down from lights that were concealed behind the draperies. On the cloud-bed a naked woman was reading to an elderly man who was masturbating. They both jumped up as Ryzhkov tumbled in to their room. ‘Get out,' he said to the woman who dashed past him and collided with Vera. The old man shrank back against the headboard and cupped his hands over his genitals. Ryzhkov grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him across the room. ‘This whole place is burning down! Run!' he screamed, and watched the man scrabble around for his clothing and make a dash into the hallway.

The window was in front of him. He could see where it had been repaired. Painted clouds covered all of the window frame except where the new wood had been inserted. Slowly, as if in a dream he walked towards the window and undid the latch. He pushed the window open and leaned out. On the ledge there were glass fragments, a sprinkle of sawdust the glaziers had left behind. No blood. No marks on the sill. No fingernail scratches on the wall. No traces of a struggle. Almost no traces of the crime, just a window that had been repaired before the weather changed.

And now he saw, halfway up the wall, a smudged, nearly invisible palm-print, left on the glossy paint when someone must have braced themselves against the wall, leaning out to see what was happening in the street below.

He felt his throat tighten, almost as if he were choking. Managed to control it, looked at the hand-print and finally held up his own hand to blot it out. He couldn't, not quite.

‘You're really running out of time, now,' Vera said.

She was standing there at the threshold; from somewhere she had found another bottle of champagne and was cradling it against her chest. She turned and looked at someone Ryzhkov couldn't see coming down the hall. ‘I think he must have had a little too much to drink—' she said just as Yuri came through the doorway.

‘Madame Hillé likes her clients to have some manners—'

The Blue Room wasn't very big and the floor was soft and lumpy. He met Yuri as he rushed forward, colliding in the centre of the room with a knee that missed and an uppercut that just bounced off. Then he was suddenly spinning around with Yuri's heavy hand on his shoulder. He tried reaching for his knife before he remembered that he hadn't brought it along in his formal clothes, and then something flashed beside his ear and there was a high-pitched ringing that came from everywhere and nowhere.

He was in and out of consciousness after that. The hallway was a red and black blur. He found himself seizing on the details, as if noticing the seams in the carpet, the filigree on the lampshades, would help him regain his balance. An old naked man was cursing him, and the first thing he saw closely enough to appreciate was the heavy newel post at the bottom of the stairs. How did he ever get down so quickly, he wondered. And from a long distance away he could hear Vera's voice— ‘Yes, these Americans are very direct, but as far as imagination goes . . .'

And then they were outside, stumbling on the courtyard stones. He kept trying to find his non-existent knife, and through it all came the sound of Vera laughing at him.

‘
And don't come back
,' he heard Yuri calling from a great distance.

Out on the street it was suddenly too complicated to figure out the history of their escape. He sat there on the limestone and looked up; Vera was walking along the kerbing, in a kind of dancing, skipping pattern. Balancing on one foot and then hopping to another, singing to herself. She had the champagne in both hands and when she got to where he was sitting in the gutter she slowly poured it over his head.