Refracted Crystal: Diamonds and Desire (6 page)

“Until you ended up with a good old Catholic girl, eh?”

He snorted at this, but said nothing. Nonetheless, she could see that his attitude had begun to relax. “Maximilian and I were close for a while,” he remarked, “but that was a long time ago.”

“Really?” she asked.

He nodded. “He gave me some useful advice when I started out, but... things haven’t turned out so well since.”

Something about his tone warned her not to pursue this topic, so for a while they made small talk. The pressure inside Kris, however, refused to go away, and eventually she began to address what was really on her mind.

“When you came home today,” she said at last, “I was looking something up.”

“Yes?” he said, looking up from his dessert. “What was it?”

She nodded. “I was... I was looking for information on Victor’s.”

Daniel’s face darkened at this and he placed his spoon down on the table. For a moment, Kris chewed her lip nervously and stared at him. Her anxiety was caused more by the fact that he was obviously under some stress that he didn’t want to share than by fear of offending him: for her, this was important, and she also knew that the longer she left it the more difficult it would become to clear the air.

“I wish Felix had kept his goddamn mouth shut,” Daniel said tetchily.

She nodded. “Me too. But he didn’t.”

“Can we leave this?” he asked. “Some other time, perhaps. When I’m less tired.”

Kris shrugged. “If you want. But... but it won’t go away, you know.”

At this he sat in absolute silence for a moment, his shoulders hunched up and his eyes looking over her shoulder towards the door, as though in that instant he wished to be a thousand miles away. Then, without warning, he sighed and the tension drained away from him. Shaking his head and looking down towards his napkin, he raised it to his lips and dabbed them before lifting his eyes and looking directly at her. Where she had expected anger she saw instead a kind of resignation.

“You’re right,” he said at last. “It won’t. I’ll tell you all about bloody Victor’s, but first there are two things you need to understand: first, it has been a long time since I’ve ever been there. Two years before I met you, I think, was the last time. The second thing you should know: I have no sense of my... experiences there as anything other than a mistake.” As he spoke, his eyes never wavered from hers, and the expression on his face was more open and calm than she had anticipated. She had thought this would be a painful process to draw him out of himself, but then a strange thought occurred to her: Daniel may have thought himself immune to the Catholic instincts that had once driven her, but he could still be motivated by a desire for confession.

As such, she said nothing. She could sit and wait for a very long time, listening patiently for when he was ready to speak. Daniel ordered coffee and then, while it was being brought to them, began to speak, quietly and firmly.

“It must be nearly a decade since I first went to Victor’s. It’s kind of... exclusive. Invitation only. Basically, I guess you could call it a gentleman’s club, but frankly its services... well, you can guess the kind of services on offer.” He shrugged. “I don’t want to tell you everything. Actually, I’m not sure I can remember
everything
. I spent a fair bit of time repressing some of those thoughts, and I don’t really have a huge amount of time for that psychobabble crap: a few things really are better left off where well buried.”

He paused as the waitress placed the coffee on the table, smiling at her and waiting for her to depart before continuing.

“Anyway, for a while I kind of became addicted to Victor’s. A man can get almost anything he wants there, other than perhaps the things that really matter. I’ve heard rumours you can get
anything
you want there if your tastes are so inclined, but I was never tempted by that. A bit of cocaine, a lot of sex, beautiful women.” He shrugged. “You don’t really need to know the details. That was a long time ago.”

Kris nodded her head. Nonetheless, she could not help but observe: “Maria told me you had taken her there.”

He looked pained by this. “Yes, that’s true. She... she was rather into it all. I think it fulfilled some juvenile fantasy of what she thought living rich and dangerously consisted of. To be honest, ‘juvenile fantasy’ just about sums up Victor’s to me. I was angry, destructive—self-destructive as much as anything. Victor’s served a need, for a while. But then... then it all seemed hollow, pointless.”

He shrugged. “By the end, it was as much a way of sealing a few business arrangements. You would sign a deal, take a client there, let them... enjoy themselves. Because it was so hard to get in most clients would think you had moved heaven and earth to show you just how much they were appreciated, but to be honest I think pretty much the majority of what was on offer could be found in most high class strip clubs or brothels, and any Wall Street trader can tell you where to find enough coke to enjoy yourself—or something harder if you need it.”

Kris did not interrupt, but as he seemed to be musing on unwelcome thoughts there was one question that she felt she had to ask as he took a sip of his coffee. “And for the... minority of what was on offer?”

He placed his cup down on the table and looked at her with a fixed expression, for a moment as closed to her as he had ever been. At last, barely moving his lips and speaking in a low voice: “If you’re rich and it can be bought, well... everything’s for sale.”

Kris nodded again at this. She frowned a little, pondering the next question that was going through her mind, wondering whether she should ask it. Daniel watched her, then said: “Before you ask, I never asked anyone who was unwilling, and while I’m not proud of what I did, aside from filling my nose full of coke at one point in my life, I never did anything illegal.”

Suddenly she realised that she had not been breathing and so let the air out of her lungs with a grateful rush. His eyes had never left her face, and he continued: “I have never lied to you, you know. I may not tell you everything, but I don’t lie. Not to you.” He laughed, somewhat humourlessly and for a second his eyes flickered away from her, to hide a sense of pain inside himself. “Damn it, I take stupid pride on never lying to anyone, and a few of those fuckers deserve every damn lie I can think of.” His eyes returned to hers again. “But to you—never.”

She nodded once more at this. They were both quiet for a moment, sipping coffee and thinking, their minds running along parallel lines but not quite meeting. At last, Kris remarked: “You said that you have to be invited to attend. Did this Maximilian Roth invite you?”

Daniel almost spat out a mouthful of coffee as he laughed. “Max Roth? You’re kidding me!” He had almost shouted and some people looked in their direction, smiling when they saw his laughter. He shook his head and chuckled to himself for a few moments. “No,” he replied at last. “There might be other Roths there, but not Maximilian.”

“So who did invite you?”

He paused for a moment, his eyes gazing off as he searched his memory. “God,” he said at last, very quietly. “I had almost forgotten. Some oilman, a Texan named... now, what was his name? Harry K. Grant, I think. Utterly forgettable.” He shook his head at this, and Kris watched him as he was wandering through some not entirely pleasant memories. Part of her hated to do this, to make him recall a past he so obviously wished to forget, but it was important. In less than two weeks, this man would be her husband and she wanted—she
needed
—to understand him more completely than ever.

“I want to go there,” she said at last in a low voice that only he could hear.

His eyes flicked straight back to hers and he looked directly at her for a while, not speaking. His gaze was not harsh or angry, but it was strangely cold, as though evaluating something. At last he nodded.

“I’m not surprised,” he said at last. “Are you sure? This really is my past you’re dredging up, you know.”

“I know, and I’m sorry to do it,” she said, speaking honestly. “But... but I just want to know.”

“Let me think about it,” he replied. “Please, give me that. Just a couple of days.”

It took him five days to finally agree to visiting Victor's. For the first, he refused to say anything about it and Kris knew better than to push him again. On the second and the third days, he tried to talk her out of it, revealing various salacious details which, if they were intended to put her off only made her more curious. On the fourth day he relented, making arrangements to take her to Victor’s the following evening.

Kris found herself strangely excited at the prospect. In her mind, she had built up a considerable fantasy around Victor’s, some palatial underground pleasure palace, full of sickening and depraved practices that would have looked more at home on the set of a Bond movie. When Frank finally dropped them off beside a fairly nondescript door the other side of Manhattan, she was shaking with anticipation at the thought of what she would find beyond.

She had dressed very conservatively—Daniel had been very insistent on that—in a long dress that covered her from her neck to her ankles. The fabric was luscious, certainly, but Kris did have the feeling that she was being arrayed in something that was closer to a Burka than anything else. The short coat across her shoulders was more revealing but, on a night as warm as this, she had refused anything heavier.

Daniel himself was dressed in a neat, dark suit and tie. “No jeans policy,” he had said with a wink, then shrugged at the lameness of his joke. As they climbed out of the car, however, Kris felt butterflies in her stomach. Her sickness had not particularly affected her over the past few days, but that morning nervous anxiety and plain, old fashioned excitement had hit her again.

“It really is... well, there’s not a lot going on here,” Kris said as she looked around the street. Some distance away, she could see elegantly dressed couples walking along the sidewalk, but there was not even much traffic in this part of town. “I would have expected a bouncer at least.”

Daniel smiled humourlessly at this. “If you don’t have the right access, you don’t get through that door,” he told her. “I did make a discreet inquiry as to my own... status. Part of me hopes this will be the shortest night out you’ll ever experience.”

As he spoke, for the first time she noticed that there was a pad against the door, apparently made of glass and shining with a very faint glow. Daniel paused in front of it and then, slightly reluctantly, raised his hand and placed it on the panel. She heard a very audible click in the door and Daniel’s expression became suddenly unreadable.

For a few seconds he simply stood there, unmoving. Kris thought she was going to burst and almost pushed past him, but he lifted his arm and turned the handle, opening the doorway into a low-lit corridor beyond. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” he said to Kris, his mouth smiling slightly but his eyes completely flat.

At the end of the corridor they finally saw a bouncer, a large, black man who, for once, was taller than Daniel and clearly more powerfully built, with a wire connected to his ear. He did not acknowledge them at all and Daniel ignored him, instead moving to a desk where a stunningly beautiful Asian woman was seated next to a flat screen. “Ah, Mister Stone,” she said, looking at the screen. “We haven’t seen you in a long time. And you have brought a guest, I see. Would you care to sign for her?”

The woman really was ravishing, dressed in a traditional Chinese style silk dress that appeared incredibly demure. As Kris came closer, however, she saw that it was cut so short that her thighs were exposed, her legs long and lithe. For a second, Kris felt intensely jealous and wished to back out of the whole stupid plan, particularly when the woman looked up at Daniel with an appreciative look. Two things stopped her, however.

First, the woman’s gaze was so clearly mercenary that it almost made her want to laugh—an approximation of desire that was ridiculously over the top. In addition, as Daniel picked up the pen he utterly ignored her, not as a deliberate rebuff, Kris suspected, but because he had wrapped himself up in an armour that no one was going to penetrate this evening. This in turn made her wonder whether they should go, for his sake more than hers, but she knew that her curiosity had not been sated enough yet.

When the woman transferred her gaze to Kris, her expression was extremely cool. “Property?” she asked, looking back at Daniel. He shook his head.

“Ms...” she glanced down briefly at the sheet Daniel had signed, “Avelar, I hope that you enjoy your time with us. Would you require a private room together?”

“No,” Daniel replied. “Ms Avelar simply wishes to experience Victor’s for herself.”

At this, the woman tilted her head sideways. “I hope it lives up to your expectations,” she said.

Kris held onto Daniel’s hand as he led her through another door. Beyond, she was a little disappointed to see a rather small dance floor with barely a handful of people, mainly women, dancing on the central floor and groups of women seated at tables and at a bar. The whole place was underwhelming to say the least, with loud techno music blaring away.

“Is that it?” she asked at last. Daniel, sensing that she spoke rather than hearing her, turned to face her.

“Is that it?” she repeated, lifting herself up on tip toe and almost shouting in his ear. This reminded her of a rather poor provincial disco and she was rather disappointed at the atmosphere of the place.