Eighty Days Yellow (33 page)

He couldn’t bring himself to blame her. He didn’t care for her either.

Dominik pulled the condom off and buckled up his trousers, glancing back at Jasper on his way out the door, ready to reassure the escort that he could carry on with Charlotte if he wished, his contract to Dominik had been fulfilled. But Jasper was on the bed, embracing Charlotte before Dominik had even managed to leave the bedroom, and within a few minutes he could hear them, breathlessly at it.

As he passed through her living room, he glanced around. He was acutely aware that Summer had never invited him into her home, the final redoubt of her privacy. Charlotte had no such qualms; she was an entertainer and had guests of all descriptions over to visit regularly. Her apartment was virtually bare, quite a large room but just the one couch, swing seat and a Mac and office space in the corner. She had a large kitchen bench, which boasted one of the more expensive models of coffee machine. Antipodeans were so fussy about their espressos and flat whites, fussier even than the Italians, who practically invented the stuff.

Dominik noticed a light winking on top of the coffee machine. Could it be? No. Surely not. He approached for a closer look.

It was Charlotte’s phone, lying on its side and set to video mode. It was recording.

Dominik picked it up, stopped the recording, rewound. She had filmed the scene, or at least the part of it that occurred in the living room. The impudent bitch.

It was a strange sensation, watching himself on film. If he had ever happened to be copulating in a room with a mirror, and had caught a glimpse of his own expression in the act, Dominik had always looked away. He had no wish to observe himself fucking.

Charlotte had managed to catch most of the action. She had aimed the camera into the middle of the living-room floor, not over onto the sofa, or in the bedroom. She had guessed where the action would be likely to take place. Perhaps he had not been so mysterious, or surprising, after all.

Dominik erased the film and placed the camera carefully back into position, leaving the record button off. She might notice, of course, that it had been tampered with, but these sorts of devices often cut out of their own accord. It was a better alternative than filming himself walking away from the camera. He collected his jacket from where it lay across the arm of the sofa. He had paid the escort already, so that part was organised. Any additional cost that he might think to charge, for whatever activity took place after Dominik left, was Charlotte’s problem.

Then it hit him. What else had she filmed?

He walked back to the coffee machine, picked up Charlotte’s phone and scrolled through the saved videos. They were sorted in date order. One of them was the date of the last evening he had spent with Summer, before their fight in the coffee shop. The night that he had shaved her, that Jasper had fucked her, in his presence.

Dominik pressed ‘play’ with a heavy heart. The picture was small but clear. Charlotte had indeed filmed Jasper and Summer having sex. Had she known what would happen? Paid him to do it? Organised the whole thing? The camera must have been fixed between the cushions of the couch, or balanced on the window ledge above, perhaps. The angle had captured Summer’s face, her expression caught between pleasure and pain. Perhaps the escort’s cock had been too big for her. Once or twice she glanced behind her. Was she looking for him, for Dominik?

He played the tape over and over, unable to wrench himself away from the spectacle that Charlotte had recorded, without Summer’s consent, he was sure. He pressed a few buttons, sent the recording to his email address, then deleted it from Charlotte’s phone and placed the device carefully back again. Not that he would care if she realised she had been discovered. He didn’t ever wish to see Charlotte again.

Dominik walked out of the door without a glance behind him.

It was late evening now. He slid behind the wheel of his BMW and took a breath before expertly backing out of his parking space. The road had been nearly empty when he arrived, but was now jammed with cars, all the residents of Charlotte’s peaceful street having returned to their homes for the evening. He had been locked in, another BMW ahead of him and one behind. Three in a row. The last thing he needed was to take out one of their head- or tail-lights.

Dominik stared into the windows of the houses as he drove slowly towards the main thoroughfare, where he would find the A41 and head up Finchley Road towards Hampstead. He watched the lights glowing in bedrooms and living rooms, saw a slim silhouetted shape, a woman he guessed, glance out onto the street and then pull a pair of curtains together.

Thoughts of Summer still flooded his mind, the image of her looking back at him over her shoulder, as Jasper filled her, ran through his mind on repeat as he negotiated the odd car coming the other way on the narrow avenue and barely avoided a cat, racing to safety on the other side.

He wondered, idly, if Charlotte’s house was the only home entertaining the less-usual pleasures tonight, or if suburban men and women throughout the neighbourhood were busy indulging in, hiding from or covering up secrets of their own.

Back home, he quickly slipped out of his clothes and collapsed on his bed, not even bothering to shower.

He had a review deadline in the morning.

13

A Man and a Girl

Victor’s call came the following day.

‘Summer?’

‘Yes?’

‘Be ready in an hour. A car will be coming to collect you at midday.’

He hung up the phone without waiting for me to reply.

I responded to his call in much the same way as I had responded to his other calls, like a wind-up toy soldier that had been set on a path from which I now seemed incapable of moving away.

A slave register? The idea was absurd; it couldn’t be true. Soon, I thought, I would wake up and find this had all been a dream.

Still, I showered and shaved carefully, as Victor had ordered. I didn’t want to give him any motivation to step in and do it for me. With a razor in hand, I did not think he would be as gentle as Dominik had been.

Dominik. Would he call me? My heart ached at the thought of him. He would understand all of this. They shared a similar core, Victor and Dominik, but Victor was so very different. Dominik didn’t want to break me, or be served mindlessly. He wanted something more. He wanted me to choose him.

The car arrived, another enormous, sleek machine with tinted windows, the sort that you would see in mafia movies. I didn’t bother to look out of the windows, follow our journey to see in which direction Victor was taking me this time. Another anonymous address, another improvised dungeon. What did it matter? I’d chosen to go. I wouldn’t need to call the police to report my own kidnapping.

My phone vibrated in my purse, its buzz barely audible over the purr of the engine. I had a constant and terrible fear that Victor would call during a rehearsal, so I always had it set to vibrate or silent mode. The conductors or orchestra managers would be furious if the screech of a mobile phone interrupted one of our performances, even more so if Victor asked me to report immediately and I felt obliged to set down my violin and follow his summons.

I began to fish through my purse for my phone, to check who had rung. Was it Dominik? My fingers froze in fear. Did Victor have cameras installed in here? A microphone so that he might hear any call that I made? I leaned forward, trying to catch a glimpse of my chauffeur, but my view was obscured by the pane of glass separating the back and front seats of the vehicle. The driver might even be Victor; that was exactly the kind of trick he would get a kick out of playing.

The car began to slow, and through the dark-glass window I could see Victor’s squat form appear on the pavement. So he wasn’t the driver. Any moment now my door would swing open: there was no time to call, to send a text message, to even check if it was Dominik who had rung. All I could do was hold my thumb over the off button so that it wouldn’t vibrate again and alert Victor to the fact that we were in touch.

I could only hope that Dominik, if it was him, would keep trying, and that at some point during whatever bizarre scenario it was that Victor had planned this time, I would find a way to reach him.

Victor pulled the passenger door open and offered his hand to me. I took it, allowed him to assist me out of the car. Was this what I had fallen to? Ironically, the idea of Victor helping me out of the back seat, like some ridiculous creature unable to stand up on its own, offended me more than the sexual acts that he had subjected me to, that I had submitted to. I wanted to rise up, tower over him and push him down onto the pavement, but I didn’t, I couldn’t. I just took his hand and followed him meekly.

We had arrived at his loft in Tribeca. It had been transformed, for this event, into a harem of sorts. The whole thing was like a parody, ornate cushions everywhere, bits of colourful, flimsy chiffon draped all over the ceilings. Men and women, the mistresses and masters, decked out in outfits that they seemed to think signalled their ‘rank’, but which I found patently ridiculous.

‘Lower your head, slave,’ Victor hissed into my ear. I complied, but with a thrill of satisfaction. So I seemed too confident, with my head up and shoulders back. Good.

Victor removed my purse from my shoulder.

‘Strip!’ he commanded.

My small rebellion had evidently angered him. I removed my dress and handed it to him. I was not wearing anything underneath. What was the point? I could almost elegantly slip out of a dress, but I felt so foolish wriggling out of a pair of knickers that I just left them off these days.

‘You will have no need of possessions here,’ he said, taking the dress away and setting it to one side, along with my purse.

Thank God I had left my violin at home. My arms felt empty without the case to hold on to, but at least my Bailly was safe. I was terrified that Victor would see how attached I was to the violin and try to destroy it. I didn’t think he could break me in any other way, but taking my violin away would probably do it.

With my head down, I could see only the floor and catch glimpses of the other characters in the room. I listened carefully to as many snippets of conversation as I could pick up.

‘She’s Victor’s latest catch,’ said a small, dark-haired woman, stretched out lazily among the cushions nearest to me. I could just catch a vision of her out of the corner of my eye. She was made up like a 1940s movie star, sporting vivid red lipstick and a chic bob.

‘Sure looks feisty,’ her companion replied, a tall, lean man with a thin moustache that just grazed his lip, like something he had forgotten to wash off in the shower.

‘Victor will find a way to break her. He always does.’

I watched carefully as Victor placed my purse, with my phone in it, and my dress, away in his drinks cabinet. He locked the door with a tiny key, which he placed in his pocket.

Then he turned back to me, a triumphant smile spreading across his face from ear to ear.

‘Tonight, the preparations begin. The ceremony will be held tomorrow.’

Oh, Dominik, I thought, casting a sideways glance towards the cabinet where my phone was locked away. Where are you?

Dominik was aware that Chris had always been a close friend of Summer’s. They had known each other since she had arrived in London from New Zealand. Both were musicians, and she had also on occasion helped out on fiddle with his small rock group. Nevertheless, it had never occurred to him to contact Chris after Summer had so suddenly vanished. Of course he had made attempts to contact her, but her phone number was dead, and when he visited the flat in Whitechapel where she lived, the landlord had angrily responded that she had left without legal notice and grumbled offensively about it.

Maybe something inside him, his pride, his pain, had prevented him from investigating further.

Never before had he felt so mixed up about a woman.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t made herself available to him and willingly consented to his games and the often left-of-field sexual activities they both were visibly into, but the fact he had always sensed that she was holding back. Controlling her core of darkness, topping him from below in ways he couldn’t quite understand.

So when Chris called him out of the blue, he was taken aback. Couldn’t she call him herself?

‘In New York?’ he queried.

‘Yes, that’s what I said.’

‘And what did she want?’

‘How the fuck should I know? To tell you where she is, I suppose. As her mate, I ain’t at all happy about this, you know,’ Chris said, his irritation growing with every word. ‘All her problems seemed to begin when she met you, so I can assure you you’re not my flavour of the month, Dominik. And if I had something to say in the matter, I’d rather she kept well clear of you.’

Dominik processed all the information, phone to his ear, eyes darting across the study where he had taken the call as he had been drafting a book review for an academic journal. The nearby bed was strewn with books and papers.

‘Is she OK?’ he asked Chris.

‘No, she isn’t, to be bluntly honest about it. She’s having bad problems. That’s all I know. She wouldn’t tell me more. Just said to get in touch with you and let you know where she was.’

New York, a city he had always loved and which had become a Sargasso Sea of memories of women and affairs past. Images flooded back in a rush: the Algonquin Hotel and its tiny rooms with antique furniture in which you couldn’t swing a cat, let alone spank a willing arse; the Oyster Bar below Grand Central Station; the Iroquois Hotel, where the rooms were larger but more shady chic in spirit and it was not an uncommon occurrence to see the odd cockroach sprint across the wall. He recalled a Taste of Sushi on 13th Street, where the Japanese food had been a revelation but the toilets stank of the Middle Ages and would never pass a British Health and Safety inspection; Le Trapeze Club in the Flatiron District, where he had taken Pamela, the banker from Boston, and watched her indulge in her deepest fantasies; the Gershwin Hotel right next door, where his room had a Picasso image daubed across the wall behind the bed that he couldn’t escape seeing on every occasion he’d fucked a companion there in the missionary position and inevitably raised his head. New York, New York.