The Lure (14 page)

Before Noel could think what it all reminded him of, he was swept up from behind by Rick, Jimmy, and the others and slid into the glass-walled corridors of the Window Wall. The floor graded up to a circular portal with glass doors etched with Art Deco silvering. The beat was stronger, the music closer.

Rick gathered his guests at a silver ticket booth, like those in an old-fashioned cinema, greeted the employees by name, called out, “Eight with me.” Through that set of doors, the corridor curved left.

“Coats everyone!” Jimmy commanded.

They milled around in the corridor while he disappeared with their outerwear. Noel felt oddly relaxed but slightly dazed.

“Nostrils!” Rick said, brandishing a tiny spoon of cocaine. “Now the other one. Fine.”

On top of the grass—a mellow high like strong wine to Noel—the cocaine added a sudden alertness, a slight distancing effect. Not at all unpleasant, he decided, though rather subtle for such an expensive drug.

He was being instructed to put the coat check in his wallet or some equally safe place.

Grabbed by Jimmy on one side, Rick on the other, Noel felt himself propelled around another bend of glass-walled corridor into a huge, arched, mirrored entranceway. The music and lights struck him like an electric force.

“Ooooh eeee! Let’s party!” someone shouted.

Noel was half lifted off the floor, floated across carpeting past mirrors, hanging globes, mobiles, paintings hung on wires, statues on pedestals, all bathed in a constantly changing wash of lighting, and thrust into the middle of the swirling, chaotic dance.

In the twenties and thirties, the Window Wall had been one of Lower Broadway’s largest and most popular department stores. You entered through a half dozen incurving foyers into one of several small, circular lobbies that sloped to a mezzanine surrounding the huge four-story main floor. Escalators curved gently down into the central space from another, partially open level, two stories above.

When it was renovated, the inside of the building was totally gutted except for the dozen circular pillars that tapered gracefully to the distant ceiling, now wrapped in Mylar for maximum reflection and refraction. Also retained from the original construction were all the curved-block-glass walls that had once surrounded offices, cosmetics counters, and rest rooms. Some of these were only waist-high, others a story tall, forming semicircular bars, or enclosing more than a score of living-room-sized lounge areas on the mezzanine level. The largest and most striking block-glass wall dominated the ground-floor dance area, jutting out ten feet above it like a medieval balcony, set with sliding windows usually kept open by the disc jockey and lighting engineer who worked their electronic magic from this booth.

Up the long escalators was Mirror City, featuring French cuisine and staffed by a dozen chefs who had once worked in uptown restaurants with names found in society columns and the fancier guidebooks. Part of the restaurant was enclosed by the serpentine walls of glass blocks, part of it open, overhanging the dance floor, screened by opaque floor-to-ceiling baffles to subdue the music and partying below. Across the open area, opposite Mirror City, were more lounges, most of them dimly lighted for slide shows and feature movies. In one lounge, cabaret acts performed; another held a piano bar.

The floor above was closed, except to employees, and consisted of offices and storage space, as did part of the floor beneath the dance area. Here were the huge bathroom lounges, decorated like the rest of Window Wall in Art Deco style, and equipped with showers, saunas, steam baths, and changing cubicles. Surrounding these were a half dozen smaller rooms, almost caves, where pornographic movies flickered on a wall and figures engaged in slow, almost silent sex on the sofas and pillows strewn across carpeted floors.

This deep-pile carpeting was repeated in slightly varying shades everywhere in Window Wall, except the huge central dance area—a slightly raised hardwood floor. The carpeting was complemented by furniture in rich, soft fabrics: chairs, sofas, steel-and-glass coffee tables that might have come from a Park Avenue duplex. Hundreds of palm trees in ceramic tubs dotted the lounge areas, sometimes half circling small gardens with marble fountains and stands of exotic flowers. More flowers—huge, sensual, perfumy calla lilies—were set in tall vases, scattered randomly about the place. As were various contemporary sculptures, prints, graphics, watercolors. Two huge curved murals in the restaurant were signed by artists so prominent even Noel had heard of them. Mirrors were everywhere, in all sizes, reflecting the subtle, ever-changing colored lighting. The omnipresent glass-block walls were like disconnected sections of a labyrinth.

The discotheque must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to renovate and furnish, thousands per week just to keep in plants and fresh flowers.

But even more astounding was the crowd Window Wall offered. Hundreds of men with sweat-glistening, shirtless torsos held each other tightly on the dance floor, grinding into each other’s bodies, whirling, stomping, shouting with animal pleasure. Gorgeous, long-legged women in scanty disco outfits—halter tops and sheer slacks—their arms around each other’s shoulders, or waists, stood together in doorways smoking marijuana, kissing deeply as their limbs slowly intertwined. White, black, and Latino straight couples, as at home as anyone else, grasped each other in a sensual connection by placing a finger in each other’s mouths, or hooked in a belt loop.

The lights changed constantly, more slowly in the lounges, but intense, jabbing, frenetic around the dance area. Shadows. Half-glimpsed profiles. Silhouettes. Hands reaching out to stroke your cheek. Bodies sliding past so close you felt not only their touch but their heat. A caress at the crotch. A bump from behind which turned into a slow grind, then was gone. A swift, airy brush of lips on the nape from someone who faded into the crowd when you turned to look. A reptilian tongue flicking out of the mouth of a heavily cosmeticized woman close to your ear. The sudden grasp of your shoulder, and the instant apology as the muscular giant who’d done it realized you weren’t the person. His cornstalk hair matted with sweat, perspiration glittering on his pectorals, now pink, now crimson, now lavender as the lights shifted.

And the beat, the constant, steady, relentless dance beat you could just lay back into and trip out with, slowly, slowly, effortlessly, until you weren’t even there anymore but off, off, tripping…

“It’s the lights,” her voice said softly.

Noel realized he’d been smelling roses.

“The lights hypnotize. And the music, of course.”

Her voice came from somewhere close by. He heard her hair swoosh and slowly opened his eyes.

The shock of rose attar. A tumble of hair so black and glossy and thick you wanted to touch it to test its density. The caress of her voice once more.

“The music, yes. And you, too, my darling, tonight.” The voice stopped, rising to a breathtaking caress, her accent soft as the Seine threading through the Rive Gauche.

When he opened his eyes again, she was gone.

Noel staggered to his feet, took a minute to get his balance, felt immediately better, looked around the lounge area to see who she was and where she’d gone. Unable to find her, he went over to the nearest bar.

“Honnn-nneee! You look wasted!”

It was that girl from Rick and Jimmy’s, whatever her name was, standing right near him, shaking and shimmying as though she had a tiny motor hidden away in her pelvis and couldn’t find the switch to turn it off. Behind her were Rick and Jimmy.

“Glad you came?” Rick asked.

“I’m not sure,” Noel said. He shook his head, trying to clear it. But he really felt a great deal better than he was letting on. He’d gotten over the peak of his drugs this evening and was slowly descending again, able to handle it.

“Well,
I’m
sure,” Jimmy said. “You were on that dance floor for almost an hour without a break. We had to pull you off before you killed us from exhaustion.”

“Release a lot of tension?” Rick asked.

“I suppose so.”

“How do you like the club?”

“I’ve never been in anything like it.”

“There isn’t anything like it.”

“Not true,” Jimmy corrected. “There’s Clouds. That’s uptown.”

“Yeah, but we couldn’t fuck on the dance floor up at Clouds,” Rick said.

“We don’t fuck on the dance floor here.”

“But we could if we wanted to,” Rick insisted.

Jimmy made a grimace, then turned to Noel. “You see the dipshit I have to put up with? Men I like. It’s the male ego I can’t stand.”

“You have exactly the same ego,” Rick challenged.

“That’s the problem!”

“And the fun,” Rick came back, hugging Jimmy, eager to please him. They hesitated, then began to kiss. Noel watched them a minute, then turned around to the long bar, embarrassed. Somehow he never really believed Rick did this, though he had always assumed it. It was weird, seeing it. Weird.

He turned fully around, facing out toward the dance floor, past a mirrored portal like the one they’d come through into the Window Wall. Silhouettes of couples were pressed against the portal’s mirrored walls, holding each other close, kissing. Most of the couples were men: a few mixed. Unlike the Grip, this was the heart of Loomis’s metaphorical jungle. Mr. X’s turf. Enemy territory.

The attar of roses again.

Noel turned to see where it was coming from. There were no flowers nearby, only flowing Boston ferns hung everywhere over the bar.

“Hey, are you guys going to boogie?” Wendy asked.

“Not now,” Jimmy said, his words half smothered by necking.

The smell of roses, still. And now the hair, too, unmistakably the same hair passing by Noel. Her voice, too, although it took him a second or two to be certain, and he couldn’t hear what she was saying to the young man she was walking with.

Noel kept his place, but shifted his position until he could follow them around the curve of the bar, where they stopped, surrounded by dangling fronds of fern. The man merely leaned over the top of the bar, and a bartender was there, taking his order.

Meanwhile, the woman turned and gazed at Noel, and as she did one hand went up to brush the dark hair away from her face. Her dark eyes said,
Go on, admire me, I know I’m beautiful,
before she half turned away, toward her companion, showing Noel the high slim shoulders bared to a low V, emerging out of her high, small buttocks.

She was talking to the man, very close to him, but he looked at Noel instead, until their drinks were set in front of them. Noel stared back at the lucky man with the sultry, slim European beauty at his side. Just right, he thought to himself; visually, exactly the right companion for her, this sturdy, young strawberry blond with the tiny, well-cropped mustache, the cleancut features, the deep-set, almost Slavically angled eyes. The two of them might be models for an expensive brandy advertisement in some glossy, overpriced magazine.

Drawn to her, Noel couldn’t take his eyes off the pair, even though the man was now intensely glaring—as if to warn him off.

“You like that type?” someone asked behind Noel.

“What type?” he asked, turning enough to see the voice belonged to Miguel, Vega’s friend and sex partner from the Grip.

“The Decadent WASP Type. The sharecropper’s kid making good.”

“Is that what she is?” As he said it, Noel realized what a stupid slip it was. Miguel arched one eyebrow and pointedly said:

“That’s what
he
is. Or what he’d like to think he is.”

“You know him?” Noel asked, hoping to undo the damage.

“He’s on the scene,” Miguel said enigmatically, leaning against Noel in a way that made him take half a step back.

“Are they always together?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes he’s alone.” Miguel still didn’t seem convinced. He went on to say, “She’s Alana De Vijt. A big model. Several hundred bucks an hour. He’s Eric the Red. You’ve heard of Eric the Red, haven’t you?” A challenge.

“Can’t say I have. I’m from out of town, remember?”

“A lot of guys from Frisco know Eric. He’s one of the city’s hottest dominants. Probably the best-known sado in the country.”

“He looks like an insurance salesman,” Noel said.

“Very clean-cut,” Miguel agreed. “But hot. H.O.T.”

Several people came between Noel and the couple. He was sure Miguel was lying about them. The man had clearly not liked Noel looking at his woman. Where were Jimmy and Chaffee? Gone. Dancing probably.

“You really never heard of Eric the Red?” Miguel insisted.

Noel didn’t like Miguel, nor the nasty way the question was asked.

“Sure. His son, Leif, discovered New Foundland in the eleventh century.”

“I thought you was on the scene in Frisco?” Miguel went on.

“A little.”

“I thought you were. Buddy said you were. He said you worked in a hot, hot place out there. The Slot. On Sixteenth Street. Didn’t you work there? Huh? Huh?”

That sounded like a trap. Noel began to think fast.

“So what?” Noel challenged back, fighting down panic.

“Or maybe you had a lover out there?”