Eighty Days Amber (10 page)

I knew that America being America, it was relatively common to own a gun. But not one like this. Chey’s gun, like almost everything else he owned, looked expensive. It was sleek, steel grey, recently polished and easily accessible in the top right-hand drawer of his desk where most people would keep the things that they used most often, their spare pens and paper clips, perhaps a diary. Not a lethal weapon.

I might have invented excuses for him, pretended that he kept it as protection against burglars, if I hadn’t then found the silencer alongside. I’d never seen one before, other than on television, but the long, slim, metal attachment could not be anything else. And no one uses a silencer for protection. A person defending their own home would surely want to make as much noise as possible to alert the neighbours to call for aid. Only the hunters needed silencers, not the hunted. The people with something to hide. Like Chey.

I pieced it all together.

The lies. The long and unexplained absences. His association with Lev. His wardrobe of ill-matching outfits with no particular style, designer suits hanging alongside athletics team sweatshirts advertising universities I knew he hadn’t attended. All the money, the bribery, the expensive lifestyle and business meetings held in odd locations all over
the city. The locked drawers. The papers on his desk in a myriad of languages, notes written in his hand in much more complex Russian than he purported to speak.

He was some kind of gangster. Of what sort I didn’t know, drugs or weapons or something worse. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to know. I’d seen enough Hollywood films and knew enough about the black market from the boys who made a living selling nylons and cigarettes to young Russian girls to realise that the more you knew, the more likely you were to end up floating in the Neva River, or, in my case, the Hudson.

I should have rolled the drawer shut right then and walked away but Chey’s gun called to me like a siren song, deadly and beautiful, and my hands slipped into the drawer and stroked the length of hard silver before any rational thought could pipe up to tell me to leave, to run, to pretend that I had never seen it.

It slipped into my hands as though it was made for me, the barrel as sleek and svelte as the body of a woman and the trigger just begging to be touched, held, caressed.

I held the gun with my arms straight out in front like I had seen in so many action films and paced through the house, spinning one way and then another, pirouetting suddenly to turn and aim at an imaginary enemy. I caught sight of myself in the bedroom mirror, where I had last stood and observed myself trussed up in his pony harness, before we’d had sex in his office. Right alongside the drawer with the gun in it.

My pose was confident. Arms fully extended, elbows locked, abdominal muscles tensed, eyes gleaming in an expression halfway between lust and violence.

At that moment, I felt as though I understood him at last.

The animal in him, the attraction to danger, the survival urge inside that overpowered every other instinct even when it meant hurting the people who loved us.

Then the pain hit me like a fist, with anger gearing up behind it for a second blow.

A ball of hurt, upset and betrayal grew deep in my belly, and then flew through my limbs and down the barrel of the gun.

I swung.

Lifted my arms.

And fired.

There was a loud bang. And then a smash, and a crash, as the glass front of his forty-inch flat-screen TV shattered onto the floor. I reeled backwards across the room as my shoulder nearly blew straight out of its socket from the sheer force of the cartridge moving through the barrel.

My ears were ringing. So much for the silencer, and all the movies I’d watched that had promised nothing more than a barely audible ‘phut’. The sound of the shot alone had reverberated like an avalanche through the apartment building and in my imagination, must surely have roused all the neighbours, not to mention the shattering of the TV screen over Chey’s polished wooden floors.

I wasn’t going to wait around to provide an explanation, to Chey, to the neighbours, to the police or to anyone, and in doing so, reveal the fact that I was now aware of his secret. The authorities might think that I was an accomplice. Chey’s enemies, of which he no doubt had many or else he would have no need for weapons, might think I was their enemy also. His friends might think that I had
information that made me dangerous. Chey himself might think that I had discovered some secret that I couldn’t be allowed to keep.

And so I fled.

Gathering all of my possessions into the tote bag that he had bought for me to keep my work things tidy, I disappeared onto the streets. I always felt safest when surrounded by people, so I walked towards the bustle of Times Square and Midtown. I knew that I would be invisible amongst the tourists and commuters that packed like sardines onto the sidewalk, all moving in silent rhythm, faces transfixed on the surrounding screens playing their ceaseless procession of music clips and adverts, hands busy tapping into smartphones or fiddling with other gadgetry and no one paying the slightest attention to me.

At first, I was too afraid to be upset, or even angry.

Each footstep too close to my own, the clang of metal on stone as a dog raced by, its lead scraping the sidewalk and its owner struggling to keep up, the honk of horns as the yellow cabs vied for space on the surrounding streets made my pulse race and the blood hum in my veins.

I stopped to buy a cold drink and a bag of pretzels from a street vendor so that I would have something to do with my shaking hands, then I found a vacant bench to sit on and consider my options.

My insides were in turmoil, every nerve, muscle and sinew coiled and ready to spring, as though I was permanently waiting for the next beat in a song that was stuck on pause. My thoughts scattered like pigeons in the wind, tears streaked down my cheeks as my sadness mixed with anger and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to punch him or kiss him.

So this was how it felt to have a broken heart.

I tossed a piece of pretzel onto the sidewalk in front of me and ground it into dust beneath my shoe, imagining all the things that I would shout at Chey if I had the opportunity to tell him exactly what I thought of him, how much better off I would be without him, how little I needed him.

But moments later I would remember all the things that I had loved about him, and my heart would break all over again.

A kid with a purple Mohawk flew past on a yellow skateboard and spat, nearly hitting my leg with his spittle. I yelled an obscenity in Russian at him and he laughed and rolled away to join his friends, all of them smiling encouragement at him and yelling back at me.

This added provocation mixed with the nugget of fury that had settled in my chest and it grew and grew, overtaking my hurt and my broken heartedness and reminding me of the present and my new reality. I had no Chey to call on. I was on my own, and the first thing that I needed was a safe place to stay tonight where I could plan what to do next.

Blanca was the first person I thought to call.

The only person.

She was the lead hostess at the Grand, and the woman that I felt the most affinity with. Perhaps because she was also Eastern European and had left her homeland behind for New York. Most of the other girls at Sweet Lola’s and the Grand were American, and I had little in common with them. Selma and Santi hailed from Mexico and Gina was from Argentina, but they were new and had barely spoken a word to me and I to them. I supposed I ought to make more of an effort to be friendly but I saw little point when others
were not inclined to be friendly to me, and when most of them didn’t last more than a handful of shifts anyway.

Blanca appeared on the doorstep as I approached her loft apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, not too far from my old quarters in Queens, but much more upmarket. She did okay for herself, I thought, as she showed me through to the kitchen with its shiny stainless-steel fittings and the airy living room adjacent where I would be sleeping on a fold-out couch. Probably scooped off some of the dancers’ tips as well as her own wage and the house fare that the other girls paid for each set. But, as far as I was concerned, she was worth every penny, for making sure the Grand kept its upmarket feel and not lowering standards as the other bars in the area had done for the sake of cheap girls and easy money.

It was the first time I’d seen her outside of work, where she usually dressed in long, flowing gowns with her ample cleavage displayed like two plump white bread rolls begging to be taken into a willing mouth.

Today she was wearing a pair of jeans and a plain white blouse, her auburn hair scooped up into a loose bun on top of her head. She was about the same height as me, but in contrast with my thinness, Blanca had a full-figured, ample form. I guessed she was in her thirties. I knew that she had danced for years at the Grand before taking over as the girls’ supervisor, and it showed; her figure was round in all the right places but also firm and meaty and when she turned to show me around the apartment my eyes drifted down to admire her buttocks, perky and wonderfully fleshy, sculpted tight beneath the denim fabric of her trousers.

As I watched Blanca’s arse sway with each step, it occurred to me that I might have another option besides
men. My relationship with the male species had always been a matter of give and take. One asset exchanged for another. A matter of rational calculation, cold hard logic. Romance, sure, but more than that was the matter of survival, of sex in exchange for safety and comfort. Not that I didn’t like the sex. But even that was a transaction, my body for his, one orgasm granted in return for another experienced.

Maybe it would be different with women. Less of a power trip and more of a meeting of equals.

For the first few nights, I distracted myself from the pain with a mixture of fury and lust, remembering all the ways that Chey had hurt me and all the reasons that I had to hate him, or by wondering about Blanca’s voluptuous body standing nude under the hiss of the shower water in her tiny bathroom, questioning whether her nipples stood erect parting the flow of the droplets that ran over her skin as she massaged herself with soap, and whether her pussy was still shaved like a dancer’s or if she had allowed her hair to return, covering her inner secrets like a curtain. I would ease myself to sleep by slipping my hand under the thin blanket and caressing my own smooth mound until an orgasm sent me to my dreams happy and light headed quicker than any drug.

But Blanca didn’t give me any reason to think that she returned my affections, and her arse remained firmly zipped into her jeans for the duration of my stay. Worse still, I wasn’t the only girl that she provided a refuge for, and I was soon sharing the fold-out couch with Dee-Dee, a Jamaican girl who had just arrived in New York City and walked straight into the arms of a Lev or a Barry who had upgraded her to Blanca once they realised that she had some rhythm
in her long legs and breasts good enough to appear in a lingerie catalogue.

With the sleeping Dee-Dee snoring alongside me and her thick limbs taking up most of the bed, my episodes of nightly self-pleasuring disappeared and my dreams turned darker, full of bullets and steel barrels that I pictured in all different forms. Sometimes I was inside the gun, dancing like a Bond girl, sometimes the gun was pressed to my forehead with Chey holding the trigger, and sometimes it was inside me, the icy length of the Sieg Sauer filling me to capacity and leaving me at the edge of a climax that was both terrible and immense in its pleasure.

Trying to keep the thoughts of Chey out of my head and the subsequent pain out of my heart was like trying to dam a river with clay. Certain to fail. I still missed him, although I tried to pretend that I didn’t. Missed his mind, missed his company, missed his hard body and his cock and all of the wonderful things that he did to me on the rare nights that he was home.

It was painful to know we lived in the same city and that, at any moment, our paths could cross. On the street, in a bar, anywhere. I kept away from both the Meatpacking District and Chey’s apartment, as well as the Upper East Side where the clubs he knew I had worked in were situated. I knew that if I came across him, I might not be strong enough to resist his attraction and I would listen to any old hoary story that he might conjure up to justify his periodic absences when we had been together, and the presence of the gun in the drawer.

Part of me begged for the opportunity of a fortuitous encounter, however unlikely the chances were in such a vast
place as Manhattan, while the more sensible side of me feared such a thing happening and the way I might react.

Chey was under my skin.

He knew I liked to spend much of my leisure time browsing in bookshops, and in particular Shakespeare & Co on Broadway where the staff didn’t mind my hanging around and casually flitting from book to book reading a page here and a page there before normally settling an hour or more later for a cheap paperback. So I had to avoid the store and moved my allegiances to the Strand where I could lose myself in the heavy crowds. Moving between the aisles and floors or leafing through volumes there, I would sometime feel the gaze of someone looking enquiringly at my back, and every single time I thought it would be Chey, and, heart buzzing, I would turn round only to find it was just another man attracted by my looks and unaccustomed to seeing a foreign-looking blonde in a bookstore who didn’t fit the identikit pattern of female readers.

A couple of months went by and Blanca informed me that there had been no sign of Chey at either of the clubs attempting to track me down and that maybe I should return to work. Possibly, with a few weeks at places down on Long Island or out in New Jersey first, to get my dancing mojo back into gear and allay my nervousness at performing again in the city.

I agreed and began to peruse realtor’s lists and windows with the thought of finding myself a small place to live, a rental, maybe in the West Village. Alone. I wanted my own space, the opportunity to think, lounge, slob at will, and the past weeks staying at Blanca’s with her and the revolving door of other dancers with whom I had little in common was beginning to prove tiresome. The conversation was
limited and I was growing weary of being asked to share some of my clothes and, invariably, make-up with them at the slightest opportunity. I needed breathing space.