Читать книгу The Jade Butterfly - Jeffrey Round - Страница 9

Dangerous Liaisons

They left the strip club and caught a cab down to the financial district, dense and brooding, just a few blocks north of the harbour. A hub of traffic and commuter activity overlying fifteen tangled kilometres of underground shopping by day, it is eerily deserted at night. Walking alone here after dark has proved dangerous, but mostly to the unwary. Fog can crowd in unexpectedly. Footsteps echo on pavement in imitation of Jack the Ripper’s London, silently admonishing: Beware! Beware! Those too drunk or naive to register the warning have ended up mugged or worse. Clubbers trip home in pairs and trios here. Your mother was right: there’s safety in numbers.

Dan gazed out the window as the taxi slid along, sleek and predatory, a lone wolf cut loose from the pack. They paused at the intersection of Richmond and Peter Streets. Ren slipped the driver a few bills from a wad of cash as they exited.

There was no hotel in sight.

“It is nice to walk at night,” he said, to Dan’s questioning look as they stood together on the curb.

They came upon a cabal of kids at the next intersection. The smell of weed drifted toward them, the air rich with the fug-heavy sweetness. The group skeedaddled as the pair approached, two mature men looking very out of place in after-hours clubland.

Dan followed Ren’s lead. Their talk was desultory. Ren’s English was better than acceptable, Dan’s Mandarin negligible. On the whole the silence between them felt comfortable, not awkward. Dan put it down to the fact they both had something other than conversation in mind. That was all right, as far as he was concerned. No need for pretence. It was far too long since he’d spent time with a man with nothing more than pleasure on the agenda. Ren fit the bill perfectly.

Dan was just beginning to think he’d misunderstood their destination when they rounded a darkened corner near the Air Canada Centre. He was momentarily surprised to see where they’d ended up. Long before lending his name to a highly successful hotel chain, Saint Germain was a penurious, sixth-century bishop known for his work with the poor. Canonized two centuries after his death, he was said to be as virtuous and austere as they came, a tireless reformer of peasants and royalty alike, setting all and sundry on the path of righteousness. So hardworking and generous was he that his monks once rebelled for fear he might give away everything he owned. The boutique hotels that bore his name, while equally fastidious, would never have welcomed the poor within their hallowed halls where a penthouse might cost upwards of a thousand dollars a throw. Dan had never spent the night here, but he knew this was fancy stuff. He was just starting to wonder what his pick-up did for a living, about to upgrade Ren from successful Taiwanese businessman to visiting Thai royalty, or even absconding drug lord, when they turned in at the demure, understated entrance.

A neatly dressed concierge glanced up discreetly. Dan caught the man’s discerning gaze, registering them as Guest and Riffraff. Too late, he thought of his black jeans and chequered-shirt street wear. A second later, the man’s face was a cipher. Whether he approved of early-morning trysts of the homosexual variety, or of any tryst at all, whether he was a proponent of the mixing of the races or an ardent admirer of Himmler’s Final Solution was impossible to discern from his expression. No doubt, stashed somewhere deep in the vaults of the hotel was a mission statement dispensed to the staff in foreboding tones, outlining inappropriate fraternizing with the clientele and duly signed in blood. He’d probably been trained to memorize the face of each guest and admonished never to disturb them, no matter the hour, their states of dress or sobriety or, least of all, the company they kept. Anyone who could afford to stay at the Hôtel Le Saint-Germain could well afford the price of discretion.

Ren gave the man a curt nod then headed for the elevators, producing a pass card that made the doors whoosh open and shut again with minimal noise and maximal ease. The elevator gleamed like the inside of a diamond, mirrors positioned above and below, a self-referential little world designed with the professional voyeur or narcissist in mind. The ride was silent and smooth, as though nothing existed outside those walls. They could have been aboard a shuttle heading into deep space. It should have prepared Dan for the ostentation lying ahead. In fact, it was deceptive.

The doors opened onto a hallway that glowed quietly in a low light. Everything spoke of elegant understatement rather than flashy opulence. It was as if Germain’s saintly austerity had rubbed off on the hotel’s designers. Narrow rosewood shelves lined the walls at discreet intervals, with polished green apples set into slots in groupings of sixes and sevens. Real-life design motifs, each perfect and unblemished. Waxy tropical flowers, newly opened, thronged on side tables, spotlit in slender shafts of radiance like captive moonlight. All was hushed, solemn, and serene.

Dan followed Ren to room 1101. A binary code. In mathematicians’ lingo, that was akin to a religious experience. Another swipe of the passkey and they entered what seemed a church’s velvety interior. A more impressionable man might have knelt and genuflected. A wall of windows overlooking the lake resembled a giant mural where a freighter moved slowly, inexorably in the distance, passing out of the harbour and on to its destiny.

A final slicing of the passkey activated a relay of overhead pin-spots. The room was immaculate, a monk’s cell designed for maximum comfort and efficiency. A wide bed had been tucked into a corner, like a ship at berth. An imposing black-and-white photo, oversized and mounted above, showed an athlete straining to achieve, biceps pumping and legs piston-like as he strove for glory or perfection.

The glass cubicle rising like a decompression airlock at the room’s centre was its most surprising feature. Transparent on three of four sides, the shower’s blackout blinds could be operated from within for decency or raised to allow the voyeur pleasure from without. Your partner could lie in bed observing, waiting for the pivotal moment to strip down and join in, both of you watching the city go about its to-ings and fro-ings as you washed away your cares, your sins, or just the dirt of everyday living. All of this designed to bring you one step closer to the immaculate state of a sixth-century monk who wanted nothing more than to give away everything he owned, divesting himself of the constraints of the material world. Not too shabby, Dan thought.

He turned. Ren stood behind him, watching Dan watching the harbour. They moved slowly, like ships attempting a coupling for ease of boarding, Ren’s body tight and compact, Dan’s hard and expansive. Thighs grazed, arms held. Lips met with sudden force. Not in comradeship, but hunger. Dan sensed a man starved for sex. The kiss ended and they pulled apart, regrouping for a counterattack. Dan felt as though he might become absorbed by this man’s need if he weren’t careful.

Ren put a hand to Dan’s face. Fingers closed over his eyelids, traced the outline of the scar that angled down his temple like caught lightning, given to him by his father when he was late coming home from school at the age of ten. The hand retreated and Dan opened his eyes again. Ren cocked his head, a grin transforming his features.

“You are a tough man, I think.”

“Yeah,” Dan said. “I am a tough man.” Right now I am anything you want me to be, he thought.

He reached out to touch Ren’s chest. A reptilian reflex twisted the hand up and aside. Dan felt the pain, his wrist pinned against the wall behind him. He didn’t resist, curious to see what else this game presaged.

Ren’s lips twitched, perfectly formed half moons joined by a silver thread. His breath was fragrant, a surprising rose garden at midnight.

“What you like to do to your lovers?”

Dan shook his head, denying the burning pain in his wrist. “Not to. With.”

Ren tightened his grip. The half moons crumpled, turned cruel. “No, tough man. What you like to do to them.”

Dan leaned forward.

“I like —” their lips met and parted again “— to kiss … to intoxicate them.”

A tingling in Dan’s groin said this was going to be one of those rare sexual encounters that would make all his synapses come alive. An energy transfer, pure animal magnetism. This was the beginning of real sex, not just a simulacrum of pleasure. Deep and devastating. A dance through fire. A shedding of defences, shattering and annihilating. He’d experienced it a handful of times before. It was like giving yourself up to the soft caress of Death and seeing where it led. All the while knowing you were doomed, no matter where it took you.

His hands slid down Ren’s abdomen, strayed along a waistband, slipped inside. A quickening of desire as his fingers crept into the warm cleft behind. Ren’s hand stole up to Dan’s throat. They stood, combatants armed to the death, each waiting for the other to strike the fatal blow.

Dan felt his breathing constricted, surprised to find himself lifted off the ground, his back pressed into the smooth wood behind him. Sparkles outlined his vision as he encountered that brief separation of reality and unreality that presaged the beginnings of a blackout. Entering a new realm of experience. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what lay on the other side. If Ren didn’t release his grip soon … Dan raised his leg and kneed him in the groin, sending him reeling across the room.

Ren fell to the floor and lay there, looking pleased.

“Tough man,” he said, his eyes glittering with satisfaction. “I like you.”

Dan pulled him up and pressed him against the wall, yanking his shirttails free from his trousers. He knelt, pressed his mouth against Ren’s tensed belly, licking his way up to the pectorals, hard and smooth, the nipples like dark opals on a field of amber.

An erection strained Ren’s briefs, hard and fat. Well-dressed men were always dirtiest out of their clothes, Dan knew. There was something about an expensively tailored businessman that melted before his rough-and-tumble appearance. A sweaty T-shirt peeled over taut muscle charged the eagerness of a manor lord sneaking off to the stables for a brief romp with the stable boy under cover of darkness, slipping away at break of dawn with bits of straw clinging to his back and in his hair.

In the light, a gash gleamed across Ren’s thigh, the wound healed long ago. It was startling, like a worm revealed at the heart of a perfect rose. Before he could examine it further, Ren’s hands pushed him aside, forcing Dan’s face into his crotch.

Dan struggled to his feet. Together, they stumbled to the bed. Silk sheets, an Aladdin’s boudoir. No surprise there, Dan told himself as they tumbled down and over the ersatz stage. Inhibitions quickly gave way to feelings of euphoria that might otherwise have taken a great deal of alcohol to achieve. They slipped aside those restraints, pressed flesh against flesh, as daring lapsed into daring.

Dan was pleased by his lovemate’s body, a superb machine, its movements smooth and piston-like. Caught in the wall mirror, Ren’s dreamy eyes suggested a lineage of cultivated excess, a descent from opium eaters. This was a man born for pleasure, but one who knew how to trigger it in return, gauging the smallest seismic tremors to leave his partner trembling.

The condoms lay nestled inside a bedside drawer, a small stack encased in an ebony box. Dan expected no less from such a man. He ripped the package open with his teeth and spat out the wrapper.

Ren lay on his back looking up, his torso taut with the raggedness of his breathing. Dan shook his head.

“Not here,” he said, yanking him up and splaying him before the window.

Nerves jangling, Dan gripped Ren from behind and eased himself in. Ren tightened, twisting to experience all that Dan offered, as though his sensory antennae had been set to maximum.

When they finished, Dan peeled off the condom and let it fall to the floor with a soft plop. As far as he was concerned, rich men taking a brief detour from their family life should be able to afford discreet valets and chambermaids as well as discretionary concierges. If they couldn’t, then they shouldn’t be out playing around after dark.

A clock built into the headboard read 3:33 a.m. He’d have to dispense with the stagey shower. Maybe save it for another time.

“That’s what I like to do to my lovers,” he said, pulling on his pants and grabbing for his shirt.

“I like you, tough man,” Ren said.

“I’ll leave you my number.” Dan reached into his wallet and extracted a card.

Ren took the card and placed it on the bedside table without looking at it. There was a glazed look in his eyes. He was unlikely to call, Dan knew. Having served his purpose, he would quickly be forgotten — discarded like the used condom. Ren would soon be flying back to wherever he came from, returning to the wife and children and quiet suburban home waiting for him in whatever country he’d left.

Ren walked him to the door, standing in the soft light. His muscles gleamed with sweat, quivering softly like a racehorse after a particularly well-run race. There was no goodbye kiss, as Dan knew there wouldn’t be. Kissing was for arousal, not comradely communing or a parting thanks, no matter how well done the job.

A brief nod, the barest acknowledgement of what had transpired between them, and the door clicked shut. In the hallway, Dan grasped an apple, hefted it from the slot and bit into the tart sweetness, the juice running down his chin. A clanking alerted him. At the far end of the hall, a man with a cart was replacing the green apples with white pears. Of course, wealth had its rewards. It was only then that he realized he still had no idea what Ren did for a living.

Downstairs the desk clerk looked up, barely noting his passage through the lobby. Dan exited the shushing doors and wandered home through the misty streets, marvelling at the city’s stillness, as pleased with his recent conquest as any teenager on a first date. Little wondering where it all might be heading.