Beneath the Neon Egg (24 page)

He has worked up a sweat walking, and his feet are chilled, his mouth dry, belly empty. He goes into a steak house by the Town Hall Square, Hereford Beefstouw, and is shown to a table by a smiling blonde waitress. He slips off his Burberry, and the waitress smiles at him as though she cares deeply for his welfare and asks if he would like to start with a drink, and while he waits for his vodka, blows his nose and warms the frosted lenses of his glasses, he knows that for the time it takes him to eat, to drink his vodka and his wine, he has a purpose, he has a place to be, an appetite to still, and the loneliness will stay outside on the cold dark streets. He has his hour in this warmth, yet knowing it is but an hour, even two if he stretches it with dessert, coffee, brandy, knowing already that it will end, will end soon, that he will pay the waitress, her smile will fade, he will sling on his coat again, and his full belly will grow heavy as he crosses the restaurant floor to the door, steps out again into the night with nothing, nowhere, nobody awaiting him.

He thinks perhaps this is why people hold together a broken marriage for as long as they can, the sense of
this
waiting for them outside, the sense of this and the fear they will only do the same thing again anyway, make the same mistake, end in the same ill-understood trap framed by their own ill-understood character.
You must want to be alone,
he says to himself.
You do. You always did. You must have
.

An image of Liselotte rises into his thoughts, her smiling face, her warm gaze on him, her sparkling amber eyes. Is it really hopeless? Does it have to be?

The waitress brings his steak and Cabernet and it is perfect.

“I hope it tastes,” she says, and he smiles, nods, tips back the last of his vodka. The beef in his mouth is succulent, the Cabernet silky on his tongue. Cheese afterward, Gorgonzola on warm baguette, two radishes and another glass of Cab.

“Dessert?”

“Something light, perhaps.”

“We have a delightful fresh sorbet with liqueur.”

Coffee. Brandy. Check. Plastic card on the white table cloth. A few crowns extra for service beyond the call, and she is smiling warmly as she helps him on with his trenchcoat, her hand even grazes his shoulder, as though she cannot resist touching him once, cannot bear to let him go without some special tiny intimacy between them.
Orchestration of cynicism
, he thinks.
Or just good business. Good relations
.

The moment always comes.

The door at his back again. The cold night, darker now, streets emptier, for in the meantime the wanderers have gone where they were headed. He stands there now with a scrap of meat between his teeth and does not know what to do with himself until it is time. A bar. But he has to keep his head at least a bit clear. See if any of his old drinking companions are about. At the Palæ, the Bo-Bi, the White Lamb, Rosengaardens Bodega, Charlie’s. But anyway, tonight is different. Tonight he has something he must do.

He looks at his watch. Almost time.

Circling around past the parliament, he crosses the Marble Bridge, dodges across through a gap in the traffic flowing out of Amager, and comes up behind the Royal Theater. Just off Kongens Nytorv, he stops outside the door with the brass plate that says

SATIN CLUB

10:00 P
.M. TO
4:00 A
.M.

RING BELL
.

His thumb presses the brass button, and he waits. A woman opens the door, smiling skeptically.

“Yes?” she asks.

She is not young, late forties perhaps. She wears a low-cut blouse, but her face is ordinary, the little makeup she wears is tastefully applied.

“May I come in?”

He follows her through a foyer, glimpses a bar through the curtain at the other end. He heads for it.

“Hey?” she calls to him. “It costs two hundred crowns to go in there.”

“Can I pay with a card?”

“Of course. Let me take your coat.”

The bar is dark and not crowded. A few men sit at tables or on stools around the oval bar, facing the dance floor. Colored lights flash on the floor, and one whole wall is a series of nine large TV screens on which a variety of scenes flicker. He takes a seat at the end of the bar, facing directly onto the abandoned dance floor. Off to the side, he notices three or four women who stand talking near a disco cabin. The woman who let him in is talking to one of them, a younger woman wearing a gray miniskirt and black silk blouse and stockings. Her hair is long and black and her face is beautiful, even-featured, full-lipped, dark-eyed. She is looking respectfully into the face of the older woman speaking to her. She strokes the older woman’s arm as she speaks. Then the older woman caresses her cheeks with both her palms, runs one palm along her hip, kisses her lightly on the lips, returns to the bar where Bluett sits.

Apparently she doubles as the barmaid. She serves him a vodka. “Would you like me to hold your card . . .” She looks at the card. “. . . Mr. Bluett?”

“Sure.” He wants her to see his name. “Are you the manager?”

She nods.

“Those are very beautiful women.”

“Yes, and they are very talented dancers.”

“They just dance?”

“It is up to the customers if they want to buy them a drink and talk. If you want to go upstairs and talk, you buy a bottle of champagne, and then you talk. What happens then is between the two of you.”

“How much does that cost?”

She glances at him, his tie. Her pale blue eyes chill him despite her easy manner. “The champagne costs one thousand crowns. Then what happens is between you and her. It is a free world. A woman’s body is her own to decide upon.”

He sips his drink, watches her. There is music playing, Sade, singing about the secrets of the soul, about giving it up, letting it all go, about surrender, surrendering love.

Bluett asks, “Do you have facilities for, uhm, special desires?”

“Of course,” she says, and her smile is almost tender beneath the pale blue eyes. “The cellar is also fully equipped with special rooms. Would you like to talk with someone?”

“Not just yet,” he says. “I’d really like to see some of the girls dance.”

She tells him that Tanya comes on in just a few minutes and points at his glass. A question: Refill? He nods, swivels on the stool just as Prince begins to sing over the sound system, grumbling out words to a background of horns and guitar, and he sees Tanya is the woman in the gray miniskirt. Her clothes are not vulgar but elegant, as are her movements as she dances in the flickering lights, alone on the empty dance floor in the near-empty room. This is just for him.

Bluett fills his mouth with liquor, and Prince sings
sexy mother fucker
as Tanya dances.
Sexy sexy, sexy
 . . . Then her blouse is on the floor and he sees a tattoo at the top of her shoulder. She dances near to where he sits, a yard away, watching him as she unhooks her bra and flings it away, dances left, right in front of him, turns away abruptly and presses up against the wall of TV screens, which he begins to notice.

Each screen features a different act or body part, and Tanya’s flat outstretched palms glide down those she can reach as she presses up against the wall. On one screen is a naked woman going down on a naked woman, on another a woman going down on a naked man, on yet another a woman in stiletto heels whipping a naked man . . .

Then the dancing woman reaches down and removes her skirt, and there is another tattoo, a flower just above her buttock, and now she dances wearing nothing but one stocking. She dances well, keeping from the borders of vulgarity. Finally she is naked. She rolls on the floor, springs up and, staring full at Bluett, she walks briskly in time to the music across the length of the dance floor toward him, her long black hair swaying across her breasts.

She stops in front of him, not a foot away, staring into his eyes. His breath catches. Her body is flawless, so beautiful,
so fucking sexy
. And what is behind her eyes? In her mind? What is she thinking? Or is she pure instinct, the hypnotist collector? Then she turns her face away and abruptly whips her head so her hair slashes across the distance between them. It lashes his cheek lightly, just as the music ends, and she is retreating without a glance back, gathering her clothes to disappear behind the disco booth.

Bluett turns back to the bar, dry in the mouth. The hostess stands there at a discreet distance, but close enough for contact.

“Some dancer,” he says, though he hardly has enough breath to speak. He feels the pressure between his legs as some alien presence.

The manager smiles. “We’re lucky to have her. She is one of our best. Shall I ask if she wishes to speak with you?” In her smile he sees that tenderness again, which does not match the glint of power in her eyes.

“No. Thanks. Not yet.” He lifts his feet from the rungs of the stool to inflict his will on his body, orders another vodka, trying to think of a way forward that will not be a giveaway. Sade’s voice comes on singing about what she can see in the shadow of a man’s eyes, and as Bluett sits watching the space beside the disco booth, in the flickering light from the TV screens and the ceiling he sees her there. He recognizes her at once, in the next moment feels doubt, but no, it
is
her, he knows for certain, she is the woman he saw with Sam, the woman who stood on the street beneath Bluett’s window the day after Sam died, the woman smiling arrogantly in the photograph in Sam’s box of secrets. Svetlana Krylova. With revulsion he feels the pressure returning, understands the power here that undid Sam, that could soften the will, blur boundaries, draw a person through unknown doors.

“Now
she
is beautiful,” he says to the hostess. “
She
is beautiful.”

“You like? You want to talk to her?”

“I would like that very much.”

“She is very special.”

“I would love to see her dance.”

“She no longer dances out here, but if you wish to talk to her, I will ask for you. It is not any man she will talk to. Or dance for.”

Now Sade is singing about surendering love again, as he watches the hostess cross through the flickering lights past the TV screens, wondering what he will say when Svetlana Krylova comes to him. He trusts he will know. Perhaps he will say nothing, simply talk, pay for her time, see what information he might turn to his use. He doesn’t know what he hopes to achieve, whether he can expect to be any match for her, a woman who lives by treachery, a woman with her power. But he wants her to know his name because then she will know he knows what she has done. And where he can find her. And he wants her to know that. Wants her to know he will not forget it. For a short black instant he sees his thumbs at her throat, her eyes captured in the moment before death, realizing it is the end. No. He knows he is incapable of that. Something else. But what? Be still. Watch. Listen.

He sees the hostess by the booth touch Svetlana Krylova’s shoulder and speak to her. There is deference in the hostess’s posture now, respect. She gestures toward the bar where Bluett sits smiling through the smoky colored lights at them. He can read the sudden tensing of Svetlana Krylova’s body, knows he has already been made.

The hostess returns, no sign of uncertainty or reversal in her eyes, on her thin lips. Despite himself, Bluett wonders how it would be with her, realizes how far across the threshold he has come. She steps behind the bar. “She is not available. Would you like to talk to another girl? Tanya?”

“I have a weakness for Russian women.”

“Who has said that she is Russian?”

“It’s so clear when you got this thing for them.”

“Really?” She eyes him. “Well, there is another Russian girl who will dance in a little while . . .”

“I have a weakness for that one.”

Her smile now is without even fake tenderness, her eyes unyielding. She takes the glass with his AmEx from the shelf behind her and inserts the card into the slot of the little credit card terminal. “Perhaps you should settle your bill now, Mr. Bluett,” she says. Her tone falls at his name, her glance directs his to the disco booth where a tall, thick, bearded man stands looking toward them.

Bluett takes in the size of the man, the hard set of his face, and fear opens in his belly, fear and hatred, but the hatred has nowhere to go, only retreat.

He looks at the check. “First time I ever paid fifty bucks for four centiliters of vodka.”

“Our clients do not ask the prize,” the woman says. “If you have money troubles, you should have asked about the prizes first.”

“You take the prize all right,” he says. “You take the bloody biscuit.” And draws a line through the gratuity block on the credit card slip, signs it, pockets his card, drains the last of his vodka and melted ice.

Sade is singing again about a love that feels like paradise as he stands by the cloakroom counter and someone he has not seen before, a young blond man with a hard mouth, passes his coat across to him, staring at him.

The lyrics, the echo of the silken voice float through his mind as he steps out into the cold again.
Like paradise
. He buttons his collar to the throat and passes beneath the overhang on the street behind the Royal Theater. Sade’s words and the bongos echo in his mind as he walks, and then he hears footsteps from across the street, voices that alert his city caution.