Cockpit (29 page)

He had never married, but for several years had lived with a former stewardess whom he had provided with a substantial bank account. She had recently left him for another man. I knew I could use this man to great advantage without his even knowing I existed.

During the time I was employed by the law firm, I came across a woman named Veronika. Her skin was too pale, her hair too fine, her nose too short. She was almost flat-chested, and her hands and feet were too large for her body. But she was striking nevertheless. Her broad smile, graceful bearing and engaging accent made up for her deficiencies. Like an actress who never lets down her guard, her every movement and gesture was studied and controlled.

I learned that she was Belgian and, although only in her early twenties, had been divorced twice. Her first husband had been a Belgian count three times her age, sickly and impoverished. She had come to America with the few thousand dollars she got from the divorce and quickly became the mistress of a well-known theatrical agent.

To allay his wife’s suspicions, the agent arranged for Veronika to marry his teen-aged nephew. While the marriage lasted, the agent developed the habit of lending Veronika to close associates or top clients. He did nothing to forward the movie career with which he had initially enticed her. When Veronika finally became a U.S. citizen, she divorced the nephew and broke with the agent. Finding herself alone, with little money and a bad reputation, she made her debut as the star performer of the wet set, a group of men with odd sexual inclinations.

I called her for a date. Names of mutual acquaintances were not even necessary. Sitting across from her after a dinner in her apartment, I came directly to the point. I told her I knew a lot about her. She had been clever
enough to transform her plainness to beauty, I said, but as her youth faded, it would take more and more time and money to maintain the masquerade. I warned her that now was the time to provide for her future.

Because I liked her, I said, and because I had selected her for a certain role in my life, I was willing to help her, if she followed my advice. I knew of a man she could marry. He was rich and tolerable. In return, she would make herself unconditionally available to me sexually, whenever I needed her. She would have to be prepared for, and always accept, any number of additional partners that I might provide myself or procure through her. Her emotions were of no interest to me, but her availability was imperative.

I advised her that our relationship would continue as long as she had any connection with the wealthy bachelor. I cautioned her that I had direct access to this man’s private life and thus would be able to keep track of her at all times without her being aware of it.

I then told her that I had already entered into similar relationships with three women. I admitted that two of them had reneged on my contract. I showed Veronika newspaper clippings that detailed their bizarre fates. One of them had married a well-to-do stockbroker. In the second year of their marriage, after they had returned from dining out one evening, she began complaining of headaches and abdominal pains and of alternate burning and numbness in her feet and hands. Their doctor was away for the weekend and his young associate came to see her. He prescribed a sedative. The numbness in her hands and feet persisted; her fingers and toes swelled and reddened, then blackened and shriveled. She was hospitalized and her condition diagnosed as acute gangrenous poisoning caused by eating a fungus-infected product. Her toes and fingers had to be amputated. No foul play was suspected.

The second woman had married a restaurateur. Several years after her marriage, a stranger came to the door carrying
a dead poodle he claimed to have found outside her gates. Distraught by the death of her pet, she was stammering her thanks when the man drew an aerosol can from a bag and sprayed her with an acid that hideously scarred her face and breasts. No motive was ever established and the man was never found. The third woman was still happily married. I emphasized the fact that she had never broken her agreement with me.

I gave Veronika a dossier on her future husband and twenty-four hours to decide. If she was interested, I said, she would have to start changing her life immediately. She must disconnect her phone, cancel all her charge accounts, break the lease on her apartment, sell her car and tell her few friends she was moving without a forwarding address.

To prove that I was serious, I showed her enough cash to keep her more than comfortable for a year and assured her it would be hers as soon as she agreed to my offer. Three hours later, she called to accept.

In a few weeks, she obtained her new driver’s license and a passport that had just been issued in the name I had chosen for her. I also had opened savings and checking accounts for her and applied for several credit cards in her new name. But I warned her that a careful investigator could still discover her real identity.

Veronika immediately left for Vail and hired a ski instructor. Since she had learned to ski as a child, I expected her to progress rapidly. After only a month of lessons, she had placed third in an intermediate competition.

Her call stimulated my fantasies. I imagined flying to Vail to see her. In my improvised dream-scenario, I check into a hotel across the street from hers. The next morning I discover where Veronika’s lesson is to be held and in the afternoon I rent skis and boots. I arrive at the cable car station wearing my ski boots and carrying my skis but still dressed in a business suit and silk tie. I wait until Veronika and the instructor arrive in his sports car. He takes their
skis from the rack and together they walk toward the cable car.

Veronika is dressed in a skin-tight white outfit with yellow side stripes. Its glossy surface gleams in the light. Her face is deeply tanned, her hair soft and shiny.

I don’t wait for them but take the gondola that is just leaving. On the top of the mountain, I put on my skis and wait. Veronika and the instructor get out of the next gondola, step into their skis, and start down the slope, with the instructor slightly ahead. I follow Veronika, admiring her grace. When the instructor is far ahead, I pass her and come to an abrupt stop in her path. Barely missing me, she halts angrily.

She does not recognize me behind my goggles and assumes that the stranger in a suit and tie is a clumsy novice. Just as she turns, I call her by her former name. She stops short. I remove my glasses and she recognizes me. Before she has a chance to speak, I tell her that I very much wanted to see her ski during her last days in Vail, but that I’ll leave her alone because she does not attract me on the slopes as much as she does in the city.

I turn away and ski down the mountain at full speed. She attempts to follow but I disappear from sight. Farther down the mountain, I spot the instructor waiting for Veronika. I ski across the backs of his skis and race away. He is livid and asks Veronika if she saw the clown in street clothes who almost ran into him.

When Veronika returned from Vail, I telephoned the bachelor’s personal secretary, pretending to be a European supplier. She told me her boss was staying at a private chalet in the French Alps, and gave me the name of a hotel nearby, where he picked up mail and messages.

Two days later, I escorted Veronika to the airport and, as we walked through the departure lounge, I noticed that all the men in the room turned to stare at her. In a few days she called from abroad. She had already set up a date with
the bachelor, after attracting his attention during a ski competition. In a couple of weeks, she telephoned to tell me she had become the bachelor’s lover and was about to fly to Chile to ski with him. She advised me to keep an eye on the society pages. In a month, he married her.

Following her marriage, Veronika and I began to talk regularly on the phone. Before the year was out, the calls had become a catalogue of her complaints. She claimed that she found her duties as wife and hostess increasingly tedious; she was exhausted by the ceaseless travel to the same few places, she said. She was sick of her life and sick of her husband. I commiserated with her.

Despite her disenchantment, Veronika had hired a press agent to establish her reputation as an international celebrity, and her photographs began appearing regularly in fashion magazines and society columns. She was shown attending a ballet class in Leningrad. She was photographed beside an antique car in Rhode Island and dancing at an after-hours bar with a celebrated rock star. A well-paid society photographer caught her skiing with the Shah, or reasonably within the vicinity of his person, and there was even a photograph of her in a tailored cloth coat visiting a Harlem orphanage. She disclosed in a TV interview that she was working on an autobiographical novel.

During the second year of her marriage, she came to see me only six out of the fifteen times I summoned her. On three of these occasions, she stopped on her way to another appointment, staying only an hour or two. The third year, she visited me only twice, and both times she refused to participate in what I prepared for the two of us. After that, whenever I called using my own name or voice, her secretary would dismiss me with a transparent excuse.

I decided to confront her at her apartment building. As she came out, I approached and embraced her like an old friend. Kissing her cheek, I whispered that if she didn’t go with me she would regret it. An attendant brought her car.
I got in next to her and gave her the address of one of my apartments she had never visited. As she drove, I told her about a young call girl who had been with me the day before. The girl reminded me of her, I said, because they were both common hustlers.

The girl told me, I continued, that although she tried to select as clients only well-behaved men, she still had had her share of accidents and arrests. One of her customers, she said, had kept her in his apartment bound and gagged for two days, while he ate, slept and watched TV. He abused her during the commercials.

Another time, a middle-aged businessman had approached her in a hotel lobby. He invited her to join some other girls and his business associates at a party he was giving out of town. He appeared respectable, and when he offered her in advance twice what she would normally make in a night, she agreed to go. He had rented an entire motel, and within an hour his chauffeur-driven limousine had reached it. There, the men gave her and the other hired girls plenty of food and drinks, then asked them to put on a show in which they made love to each other and to their employers. By midnight, additional men had arrived. The night was turning out to be more than the girls had bargained for, and they demanded to be taken back to town. Instead, the men raped and beat them. When she was too exhausted to respond, they forced whiskey down her throat and ice cubes and pep pills up her rectum. Then she was gang-raped again.

At dawn, the men took money and costume jewelry from the girls. Then they dragged them into cars and dumped them in the woods. After crawling for two hours, the girls reached the highway, where they were picked up by the state patrol for vagrancy and prostitution and kept in jail overnight. The girl told me that she had lost several pounds. Still, she wasn’t complaining, she said. Every profession had its risks and hers was no exception.

When I finished the story, Veronika made no comment. She turned on the radio and kept on driving.

We parked her car a few blocks from my building. I took her arm to guide her toward the elevator, but she pulled away.

Inside my apartment, I drew the curtains and turned on the lights. Even before she could put down her purse, I shoved her into a heavy armchair, bound her to it with electrical cords and taped her mouth shut. She strained against the chair, and her terrified eyes followed my every move as I filled a disposable syringe with colorless fluid.

I squatted beside her, removed one of her shoes and rolled down her pantyhose. Holding her leg fast between my knees, I found a vein near her ankle, dabbed the skin with alcohol and carefully pierced the vein with the needle. I slowly squeezed the fluid into the vein, then removed the needle and disinfected the area again. After pulling her pantyhose back up and replacing her shoe on her foot, I sat down across from her and waited. Not knowing what to expect increased her dread, and she trembled and cried.

Had it never occurred to her, I asked, that the man who was now her husband had paid me to find a girl of a certain type he could marry and that she was that girl? Was she stupid enough to believe that I would let her forget her personal debt to me or that she could abort our relationship when it pleased her to do so?

I planned to leave her bound in my apartment, I said; I would be back in less than an hour, I told her, but if, for some reason, I did not show up, and accidents do happen, I hoped her last thoughts would be of me.

Turning off the lights and drawing the soundproof curtains behind me, I left the apartment. I locked all three locks and walked out from the building through a side entrance. I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me to a run-down section of the city. He was surprised I wanted to go there and asked again for the address. When we arrived,
I told him to follow me in his cab as I walked along the derelict-littered streets. I finally settled on three men, two blacks and a white, who swayed as they staggered, as if their knees were about to buckle. Their bodies were covered with lesions and carbuncles. They all appeared to be middle-aged.

I took each of them aside, flashed some bills and said I was willing to pay twice that amount for two hours of his time. All he had to do was come to my place, where my girlfriend was ready for a bad boy she had dreamed about but had never had. Short of killing or crippling her, he could do anything he wanted to her, and I would be taking pictures of whatever he did. The photos, I said, were just for her and me, to excite us when we were alone. The men looked at me in disbelief, and when I asked how often they had been paid to screw a lovely young girl they giggled like pubescent boys. I handed each of them a cash down-payment, and they got in the taxi with me. In the rear-view mirror, I caught the driver’s disapproving glance.