The Pleasure Quartet (27 page)

The scent of the nearby ocean was different here from in Rio, a subtle divergence in the marine atmosphere and its attendant balance of spices and rotting floral notes. It carried with it a remote hint of intoxication, of unknown danger.

‘Enjoying the fresh air?’

Noah was nursing his beer, the cool glass of the bottle in the palm of his hand. It was Jerry, the sound guy. Once the equipment had been properly set up, he was free to roam. Dana had apparently hooked up with one of the local venue staff and probably wouldn’t be joining them.

‘Yes.’

‘One of the barmen told me where the action is in town. A bunch of us are heading out. Fancy tagging along?’

It was either that or hanging around for hours, which Noah didn’t feel like doing, so he agreed to go exploring the Recife night life more out of boredom than actual curiosity.

The evening soon became a blur of cabs, sharply lit strips bedecked by gaudy bar lights and palm trees, rooms full of shadows and repetitive background disco muzak, and the increasingly drunken behaviour of his companions, until the impromptu group Noah had joined reached the stage where it was made up of completely different folk than those he had set off with. He’d rapidly switched over to mineral water or apple juice, but even so felt as if he was already beginning to hear distinct words in Portuguese behind the shifting swarm of sounds following him from place to place.

The next club they hit saw them scrutinised by heavy-set doormen before they were allowed in. The long corridor was a haven of darkness, leading to a dance floor where shadows moved to the sound of music he couldn’t recognise. A glitterball hung forlornly from the low ceiling but was unlit.

The melody playing was slow, melancholy, at times dissonant, the barely there silhouettes of the dancers on the floor ahead of him a murky low-key symphony of movements.

The others in his improvised group continued past, seeking out the bar which was in an adjoining room. Noah noticed a wooden bench against the far wall and sat himself down, captivated by the slow-motion swirl of the shadow-dancers. His eyes were not yet accustomed to the low light.

He was wondering what the hell he was doing here. He should have remained in London. He resolved to fly back and not follow the tour beyond Rio. Put this mistake behind him. A strong sense of lassitude began weighing on his shoulders, months of built-up adrenaline draining away and leaving a huge void.

The fog cloaking the activities on the dance floor began to clear, the shapes moving to the rhythm becoming sharper in the improving gloom, fuzzy silhouettes like puppets on strings more often than not out of sync with the classic seventies disco tunes being pumped from the speakers. Noah felt out of his element.

He dug a finger into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a pack of mints and dropped a couple into his mouth, awakening his dry throat.

Lithe, tanned girls twirling in one corner, their colourful floral-print dresses shimmering in place, while their burly, equally tanned male partners guided them with hands on hips, creeping as close to the girls’ respective arses as they were allowed. Nearer to the centre of the dance floor, an older couple, a mixture of spasmodic jerks and smoother patterns. Teenagers, would-be hipsters, locals and tourists. It was Recife, it was Brazil, but it could have been anywhere. Europe, the American Midwest. Just an old-fashioned club aimed at tourists, with old-fashioned music which meant nothing to him, didn’t speak to his heart by a long distance.

The metronomic beat of the ersatz Giorgio Moroder tune came to a close. There was a brief aeon of silence and the next piece of music came streaming through. Which Noah recognised. David Bowie’s
Cat People
song ‘Putting Out Fire’. A song that always gave him the shivers.

Unsettled by the break in the beat, half of the dancers present retreated to the shadows, heading out of the room towards the bar or lingering aimlessly until a further frenetic track might be unleashed by the unseen deejay. Those who remained stood in place, shimmying quietly, adapting to the both sensuous and ominous tone of the song.

Further back, Noah caught a glimpse of movement that seemed to move along to the music with clockwork precision, espousing its shape with uncanny exactitude and drop-dead eroticism. He squinted.

Undulating like a horizontal wave. Not just one dancer, nor a couple. All in black and initially awkward to make out as they blended into the matt darkness of the background.

Three.

Two men, both in tight black T-shirts and jeans. Tall. Solidly built. Mountains of muscles. Brown arms rippling, spider-like, around their prey. Between them, the shape of a smaller woman, dwarfed by their mass, sandwiched betwixt their bodies, pressed, squeezed. The three-headed shivering beast sliding effortlessly across the dull shine of the dance floor, oblivious to the other dancers, onlookers, the world surrounding them, lost in the deep meanders of the music, dancing themselves into a trance.

Her face mostly shielded from his gaze by the consuming embrace of the men’s powerful arms, the woman was also clad in black. It looked like a simple dress that ended high above her knees and also bared her shoulders. She wore flat ballet pumps and her tan was paler than her cohorts’, betraying a more delicate shade of original skin. She appeared unsteady on her feet, supported by the men, guided by them, abdicating all control to her partners.

Noah kept on watching them intently, drawn to the hieratic quality of their movements and the animal sensuality emanating from their grouping.

One of the men’s hands lingered on the woman’s buttocks in a sign of ownership which she did not protest.

Her face was buried into the chest of the other dancer, his bulk enveloping her, concealing her face and hair, just a sliver of the soft cushion of her cheeks peering out from the composition that Noah kept on peering at with fascination. Flushed?

She swayed to the
Cat People
song.

The world retreated. Noah imagined he was in a cocoon, isolated from the club and its activities, miraculously linked to the vibrant bubble in which the three dancers he was contemplating were similarly held captive.

The trio, turning slowly in place, like a figurine in an antique music box.

The man’s roving hand now alighted from her backside and stealthily slid downwards, catching hold of the edge of the dress and pulled it upwards, revealing an expanse of thigh, and then dived up towards her crotch. She didn’t appear to be wearing any underwear, or maybe just had on a wisp-thin thong, as the straight line bisecting her arse was briefly glimpsed before the dark material of her dress dropped down again, the man’s hand still busy underneath its defenceless barrier. All the while, her other partner had grabbed her hair at the back of her neck and was now pulling her face towards his lips, mashing himself against her, his tongue no doubt now breaching the hill of her lips and sweeping across her mouth.

Her hair.

A blinding flash of red, as one of the dim disco lamps dotting the ceiling washed its weak light across the woman’s head.

Noah felt a knot form in his stomach.

But the clarity faded as the lamp’s thin cone of light moved to another corner of the floor, leaving a patch of darkness in its stead and the woman’s mass of hair was again obscured from his view amid a blur of slow movement.

Noah was still glued to the bench but tempted to get up and move across the floor to get a better glimpse of the dancers. The woman. But there were too few people around and he would have stood out like a sore thumb, unveiled as too much of a voyeur as the trio’s movements slowed almost to a halt, and hands and mouths continued their frenzied covert activity.

Noah held his breath for a moment, feeling quite uncertain, vulnerable even.

The whispered electronic chords of the Bowie song faded into the distance, and a Daft Punk anthem took over. As other dancers rejoined the floor, the private trio had remained immobile, too busy in embrace, like a frozen statue of flesh, of bodies so close they could not be separated from each other.

The invidious sensation of dread and exhilaration washing over Noah persisted.

He was willing the dancers to part, move sideways, cease their increasingly fevered fumblings so he could see their features better, distinguish them individually. The men rapacious and predatory, cloaking the female equation of the trio in their grasp like an unresisting prey.

Was he the only one present captivated by them? The other couples on the dance floor shook to the repetitive beat and swirled around like clockwork figures, oblivious of the simmering sexual heat emanating in their midst, partly obscuring Noah’s visibility. Some further tracks followed, an unrelenting succession of staccato beat box and electronic echoes. As the activity on the floor grew more animated, Noah’s view was restricted further. He blinked and, suddenly, the self-absorbed trio was now standing all the way by the opposite wall, the woman’s face mashed against the hard surface, the two men, towering above her, forcing themselves against her, their hands openly fingering her, her hair sweeping down to her shoulders, a mass of messy curls in flame-red shades punctured by the irregular attack of the flickering disco lights.

Noah rose.

Even if it meant embarrassing himself badly, he had to get closer, see her face.

As he did so, the burly men finally loosened their grip on the woman, stepped back and one of them, the taller, took her by the hand while his acolyte grasped her waist and they pulled her away in the opposite direction. She dragged her feet, as if unwilling to follow them, but they were stronger. Was she drunk? Fully conscious? Noah began to question what it was that he had witnessed, if the woman had consented to her captors’ attentions. If he should intervene.

He dodged staggering dancers as he crossed the floor towards the departing trio who were making their way in the direction of one of the exits.

The door that they had walked through almost slammed back in his face. He turned the handle.

The alley at the back of the club was a maelstrom of darkness after the planetarium of flashing lights inside. The sounds reached him before his eyes could adjust and make anything out.

‘No . . . please . . .’

Noah looked in the direction that the plaintive female voice was coming from.

The two men and the woman were standing against a pockmarked wall, towering rubbish bins and black plastic refuse bags piled up by their side. She appeared unsteady on her feet. Her short dress was pulled up to her waist, her midriff exposed. One of the men was holding her by her hair, attempting to push her down to her knees, and she was resisting. The other man was in the process of unthreading his belt.

Her knees buckled and as she resignedly lowered herself down. A flash of light from a nearby window illuminated her face before it was again drowned in the obscurity of the humid night air.

Noah’s throat froze. He felt himself unable to breathe.

It was unmistakable.

The woman’s face.

All the photos he had spent hours contemplating.

Summer Zahova.

It was her.

There was no doubt in his mind.

At the same time, he couldn’t help himself staring at her bared middle, the pale shape of her thighs and the smooth revealed landscape of her private delta, and everything fell into place in his mind: superimposing the memory of the infamous photographs from the sauna on this new reality, matching images, body, the geometry of her curves, lines, the subtle cut of her slit . . .

He had found her.

But this was no mock porn scenario where the maiden in supposed distress would later get to her feet and assure the rolling cameras that it was all a game and how much she had enjoyed herself.

‘Hey . . .’ He hadn’t even realised he had opened his mouth.

Both men looked round towards him, hostile, self-assured. Summer remained immobile, her eyes lowered, knees half bent, frozen in uncertain motion.

‘What?’

For a moment, Noah briefly believed they were about to rush towards him and summarily beat him up on the spot for having interrupted their fun, when it occurred to him that the taller of the two men had actually responded in English. American-accented.

‘Sorry, guys,’ he continued. ‘But I get the feeling the lady is not quite certain if this is all to her taste.’

‘And what’s it to you?’

Noah hadn’t been in a fight since schooldays and knew he was in no shape to overcome the two brickhouse-like men facing him.

They stepped forward, leaving Summer, indifferent, where she half stood.

‘Just saying . . .’

‘You a friend of hers?’

‘No . . .’

‘She’s been game from the outset,’ the other man said. ‘Just another cheap slut on the pull . . .’

‘Maybe.’ Noah was treading dangerous ground, he knew.

Just one wrong word and he could well end up in a Brazilian hospital, or worse, and Summer would be left raped in this dubious alleyway.

Why wasn’t she saying anything or attempting to flee while he engaged the men in conversation? Was she drugged?

Fortunately, the Americans appeared as uncertain as he as to where this confrontation might lead.

‘Say,’ one of them said. ‘Care to join us? I’m pretty sure she won’t object . . . Hasn’t to anything so far . . . Not much, at any rate.’ He grinned and looked back at Summer, who failed to respond. ‘Maybe you have a room somewhere. We haven’t a place of our own, just on shore leave . . .’

Noah was frantically trying to think on his feet.

‘How much?’

The two men looked at him with surprise on their face.

‘I’ll pay you for her,’ Noah continued. He knew how absurd it was, but he couldn’t think of anything else. Maybe the allure of cash would overcome the certainty of a drunken fuck.

The American sailors turned towards each other, contemplating the possibility.

All the while, Summer looked on, silent. She’d pulled her black dress down to her thighs and was no longer as exposed. Observing them. The possible transaction.

Noah always carried a fair amount of cash. Whenever he was travelling, he always retained the currency he had been using in any particular country, though for safety’s sake he kept it situated in various places over his person and had to pull a bunch of notes from a selection of pockets of both jacket and jeans as well as his wallet. Adding up his dollars, pounds and euros, he had enough to convince them to hand Summer over to him. They settled for much less than he had expected. Bills in hand and a wide smirk on their lips, the men faded down the dark corridor of the alley, leaving him with Summer.