Chapter 78: The Price of Everything
Ostrowski let the cigar smoke curl toward the ceiling before he spoke. The number came out of him slow, the way a man spits out a tooth he has decided he no longer needs.
"Six hundred per head. FOB Hamburg. Terms in gold."
Anna kept her face still and reached for the mineral water in front of her. She did not drink it. She just held it, letting the condensation wet her fingers, and looked at him across the mahogany table with the mild expression of a woman reading a bad menu.
"Two hundred," she said.
The word sat in the room. Emily, beside her, kept her eyes on her folder and did not move. Below the porthole the Mediterranean turned black and silver, and somewhere down on the lower deck a deckhand's laughter drifted up and died.
Ostrowski laughed too. It was a good laugh, German and heavy, and it did not reach his eyes. He rolled the cigar between his fingers and studied its ash as if it had said something interesting.
"Two hundred. Madame Duval trains them for four years before she sells one. Four. Finishing schools, languages, surgery where the file warrants it. And you sit in my suite and offer two hundred."
"I offer two hundred for a product I have not verified," Anna said. "You are selling me a legend, Herr Ostrowski. Legends are cheap. Women are not. Show me the merchandise and we can talk about four."
He set the cigar down in the crystal ashtray and leaned back. His chair creaked. His hands came together over his stomach, rings catching the low light, and for a long moment he said nothing at all. The suite smelled of leather and oak polish and, under it, the sour-sweet trace of cocaine that had been done here before them and would be done here after.
"Verification," he repeated. "Yes. That is the correct instinct. I would think less of you if you did not ask."
He stood. He crossed to the steel-and-glass cabinet built into the mahogany paneling, and when he opened it Anna saw crystal decanters, a scale of brushed steel, and a small leather case with a row of syringes laid out like surgical instruments. He took down the case and the scale and set them on the table between them.
"But first," he said, "let us discuss what verification means. In my business and, I suspect, in Hector's, a man does not buy a car he has not driven. A man does not buy a horse he has not ridden. And a man certainly does not pay four hundred per head for conditioned merchandise when the woman doing the negotiating brings with her two very beautiful colleagues and tells me they are only here for the finances."
Emily's pen stopped moving against the paper.
"You brought them as proof of quality," Ostrowski went on. "Duval did the same in 1987. She brought me Lisl. I rode Lisl. I bought forty head that night." He smiled, and it was an old man's smile, patient and awful. "So. Two hundred fifty, and I will tell you how we verify."
Anna uncrossed her legs and recrossed them slowly. "How."
"You sample mine, I sample yours." He tapped the table once with a ringed finger. "Fair trade. I will have one of the merchandise brought up, whoever you like from the manifest, and you may do what you wish with her to judge the conditioning. And in exchange I will have a sample of yours."
"Ours are staff," Anna said. "Not for sale."
"Then yours are expensive staff." He pulled a folding knife from his jacket, flicked it open, and trimmed the ash off his cigar with two economical strokes. "Everything is for sale, Fräulein. You know that better than I do, or you would not be here. So let me put it plainly. Two hundred fifty per head, and I sample one of your women. Tonight. Here."
"And if we refuse?"
"Then we are at three hundred, and we spend tomorrow being polite at Duval's villa, and I suspect Hector would rather not pay three hundred when two fifty sat on this table tonight."
Emily spoke for the first time. Her voice was even, but her hand had gone very still on the folder. "And what exactly would sampling mean?"
Ostrowski looked at her the way a man looks at a wine list. "What it has always meant. I will use her. Thoroughly. And she will demonstrate her training while I do it, because that is the part I am actually buying." He reached into the cabinet again and came back with a small bottle and a shallow spoon. "And because this is Monte Carlo and I am not an animal, we will make an evening of it. You sample my merchandise. I sample yours. We do the first line together, and whatever the ladies decide about the needle is between them and God."
Anna looked at Emily. It was a long look, and it carried the whole weight of the flight from Vancouver, the instructions written in Hector's own hand, the line at the bottom that said close the deal, whatever it costs, it will not come out of your share.
Emily looked back. Then she closed her folder, squared its edges against the table, and turned to face Ostrowski with her chin up.
"I'm the financial side," she said. "I don't negotiate."
"Then you are not negotiating," Ostrowski said, and set the spoon down beside the scale.
Anna let the silence run three full seconds. Then she opened her clutch, took out her own small kit, and laid it on the table next to his: a fold of toot, a short straw, and one syringe of tar-black heroin, cached exactly for this.
"Two hundred fifty is workable," she said, "if the sample is satisfactory. Emily stays with me. And you go first, Herr Ostrowski, because I want to see what your coke does to your manners."
Ostrowski laughed again, and this time his eyes came with it. He poured two lines on the mirror-top of the low table, long and clean, and slid it across the mahogany toward her. "Duval sent me worse negotiators," he said. "She sent me prettier ones, but worse."
Emily reached across before Anna could move. She picked up the rolled hundred-euro note from the low table and looked at the line on the mirror, white and sharp as a paper cut.
"Financial side," she said. "I verify the product."
She bent. The straw pressed to her nostril and she drew the line in one long pull, head tipped, hair falling back from her face. The coke bit into her sinuses like glass dust and her eyes watered and she straightened too fast, blinking, throat working.
"Good," Ostrowski said. He watched her the way he watched the ash on his cigar. "The chin comes up. The shoulders come back. In thirty seconds you will want to talk, and in forty-five you will want to be touched. That is the product, Fräulein. That is what Duval sells and what your principal proposes to buy at two fifty."
Emily's heart was climbing already, a hard bright climb. She wiped the corner of her nose with one knuckle and sat back down and crossed her legs. "It's decent," she said. "Your turn."
Ostrowski chuckled, took the note from her fingers, and did his own line with a practiced tilt, then sat breathing through his open mouth with the spoon still in his other hand. His face went ruddy and alive. "So," he said. "Emily. That is the name Anna used on the phone. Have you ever been sampled, Emily?"
Anna's hand came down flat on the table. "The sample goes the way I say it goes, and it goes after we've seen your merchandise. Not before."
"Of course, of course." He waved the spoon. "Order of operations. But understand, when I sample, I sample like a buyer at a horse auction. I look at the teeth. I put weight on the saddle. I check the gaits at a walk and a trot and a gallop." He tapped the ashtray. "Bring up Katja."
He pressed a brass bell on the paneling and a deckhand appeared at the door, took a low word from him, and vanished. Anna laid the short straw down in front of her and did her own line from the mirror's edge, neat and fast, and felt the cold go up the back of her skull and settle behind her eyes like a held breath.
Emily talked to fill the interval, because she wanted to talk, because the coke told her talking was power. "Your manifest says twelve head. Eleven women and one file marked pending. Hamburg, four years of Duval training, surgery where warranted. At two fifty that's three million for twelve. Hector's ledger prices a Duval-trained woman at retail, on her own, at seven to nine. Your margin is ours. We're not buying women, Herr Ostrowski. We're buying your discount."
"And there it is." Ostrowski's eyes glittered, wet and bright. "Forty-five seconds. I told you." He turned to Anna. "I like this one. When you finish sampling Katja, I will take my time with her."
The door opened. The woman who came in was tall, dark-haired, barefoot, wearing a white silk slip and nothing else, and she walked the length of the suite like a runway, stopped three feet from the table, and sank to her knees with her hands folded behind her neck and her eyes lowered. No hesitation. No flicker. The movement had the smoothness of something rehearsed for years.
"Katja was a bank clerk in Bremen," Ostrowski said. "Nine years ago. She speaks four languages now. Ask her anything."
Anna looked down at her. "Stand up. Turn around. Slowly."
Katja rose, turned, her slip riding up over the curve of her ass, and Anna saw the lack of underwear, the shaved smoothness, and, at the small of the girl's back, an old scar, pale and precise.
"She was resistant the first year," Ostrowski said, reading Anna's look. "Duval's methods were developed on resistant ones. That is why the Fifth Module costs what it costs."
Emily's mouth had gone dry despite everything. "What's the Fifth Module?"
Ostrowski smiled and let the question sit. "Katja. Show them what four years buys." He unbuckled his belt with one hand, casual as a man taking off a watch, and Anna understood that the verification had started, whether she authorized it or not, and that stopping it now would cost more than three hundred per head.
Katja crossed the floor on her knees.
Anna slid her hand under the table and found Emily's wrist and squeezed it once, hard, a signal they'd agreed on in the car. Watch. Learn. Sell.
Emily watched. She watched Katja take Ostrowski's cock in her mouth with unhurried, expert thoroughness, the whole length of him swallowed to the root on the first pass, no gag, no flinch, just the slow wet politics of a woman who had been trained the way a pianist is trained. His hand came down on her dark hair and guided the rhythm and she matched it instantly, deeper, faster, her throat making small clipped sounds around him.
"Note the mouth," he said, conversational, the cigar still smoldering in the ashtray. "No teeth. Ever. Four years to unlearn teeth. Note the breathing through the nose, the position of the hands." Katja's hands were laced behind her own back while she worked. "She could bite. She chooses not to. That choice is the merchandise."
"Debase yourself quietly," Anna said to Katja, not cruelly, and the girl's eyes flicked up, and there was something behind the conditioning, deep down, a flat animal patience. Anna filed it away.
Emily's pulse was hammering in her throat and her cunt was starting to ache, the coke doing what Ostrowski said it would, wanting touch, wanting to be in the middle of whatever happened next in this mahogany room. She shifted in her chair and pressed her thighs together and hated herself for it and did not stop watching.
Ostrowski groaned, pulled out of Katja's mouth by the hair, and tipped her face up. "Good. Now on the table. Face down, head toward our guests."
Katja climbed onto the low mahogany table, between the mirror and the lines and the crystal, and lay down on her stomach and arched her back and looked over her shoulder at Ostrowski with her mouth open, waiting, an instrument in its case.
"The sample," he said, stroking himself slowly, looking at Emily with wet bright eyes. "Katja demonstrates conditioning. Then you and I discuss your girl. Is it you, Emily, or do you have someone else on the manifest?"
Emily opened her mouth to say she'd have to call, and the coke answered for her.
"Me," she heard herself say. "You're sampling me."
Anna's grip on her wrist went to iron. Emily looked at her.
"The deal closes tonight or Duval's villa is theater," Emily said, low. "Hector's line, Anna. Whatever it costs."
Anna let go of her wrist. She took the syringe of black tar heroin from her clutch and laid it on the table next to Katja's hip, deliberate, visible.
"Then she goes first," Anna said. "And I watch every second. And if she says the word toro, you stop, and you still pay two fifty."
Ostrowski's smile widened, and he nodded once, and set the spoon down beside the syringe.
Katja spread her own cheeks with both hands, a small practiced motion, and Ostrowski moved onto the table behind her. He spat into his palm, worked it over himself twice, and pressed the fat head of his cock against the tight pucker of her asshole without ceremony.
"Note this also," he said. "She does not tighten. She opens."
He pushed. The head went in past the ring of muscle with one slow, grinding stroke, and Katja's breath left her in a controlled hiss, her fingers still prying herself open for him, her face turned toward Anna with the same lowered eyes. Then he gripped her hips and drove in to the root, hard, his pelvis slapping against the smooth skin of her ass, and the table jumped and the lines on the mirror shivered.
"Cock in her ass, and look at her." He set up a heavy rhythm, each stroke bottoming out, the obscene wet slap of it filling the mahogany suite. "Nine years ago she bit a gendarme in Hamburg. Tonight she takes a stranger's cock up her ass in front of two witnesses and her pulse does not rise. Duval calls this the fourth module. Docility under duress."
Katja's cunt, exposed below where he stretched her wide, was flushed and wet, and Emily saw it, saw that the girl's body answered the assault whether or not her mind was in the room. Her own thighs were slick now, her clit throbbing against the seam of her trousers, the coke turning every sound in the room tactile. Ostrowski's balls swung and hit the girl's soaked slit on every stroke, and each impact made Katja's breath catch in a small clipped sound, the same sound she'd made around his cock.
"She's wet," Emily said. She meant it as data. It came out rough.
"Of course she is." Ostrowski hooked a ringed finger into the corner of Katja's mouth and pulled her head back, arching her throat, fucking her harder. "The conditioning does not kill the body's responses. It turns them over to the handler. She comes when I tell her she comes. Watch."
He reached around and pressed two fingers hard against Katja's clit and said, "Now," and the girl's whole body seized, a shudder rolling up through her belly and her shoulders, her mouth open, a low animal sound escaping around his finger, her cunt clenching visibly around nothing while his cock kept hammering her ass. No build-up. Command, climax. The syringe of tar-black heroin sat untouched six inches from her straining hip.
Anna had not moved. She had not touched herself, though the coke was crawling down her spine and her nipples were hard against the lace of her bra. She watched Katja's orgasm the way she watched everything, as inventory. Four years. Surgery. A woman who came on command in four languages. At two fifty per head it was cheap, and the cheapness was the trap, because somewhere in this operation was a Fifth Module priced like a nuclear secret.
Ostrowski pulled out of her ass with a wet sound, stripped the condom off, none, he'd used none, and came across Katja's lower back in three thick ropes, white against her skin, breathing hard through his nose. Katja stayed flat on the table, dripping, waiting for the word that would release her from position.
"Verdammt," he said, satisfied, tucking himself away. "Nine years and she still milks like the first night. Now."
He pointed at the spoon and the lighter that had appeared beside it without Emily noticing him place them.
"Your turn to verify, Fräulein Anna. Katja, clean yourself and kneel by the door. You will be needed again." The girl rose on trembling legs, wiped her back with the proffered silk scarf, and obeyed, her face still perfectly smooth.
Anna took the spoon. "Two fifty contingent," she said, lighting under it. "And the sample of mine happens under my terms. Condom. No marks above the collarbone. Nothing in her veins but what she chooses."
"Negotiable, negotiable." He waved the cigar. "The heroin or nothing?"
"The heroin. Chased, not mainlined. I push it, you watch." Anna loaded the spoon from the syringe, tar dissolving grey in the flame, and drew it up into a fresh rig. She looked at Emily across the table and held her eyes and said nothing, because the question had already been asked in the car, over the Atlantic, and answered.
Emily took off her jacket and folded it over the back of the chair. "Where do you want me?"
Ostrowski's face went bright and greedy. "Wherever Anna puts you, and wherever I can reach. The chaise. On your side, facing the room. I want to see your face while it takes you."
Emily stretched out on the leather chaise. Her hands were steady and her heart was not. Anna knelt beside her, tourniquet already around the thinner arm, the left, the one that healed clean, and found the vein in the crook of Emily's elbow with a fingertip.
"Say it," Anna murmured, so low only Emily heard.
"Toro means stop," Emily said. "I know."
The needle slid in. The plunger went down slow, half the barrel, chased with the spoon's residue, and Emily felt it enter her like a warm hand closing around the base of her skull. The room softened. Ostrowski's bulk across from her became bearable, then pleasant, then irrelevant, a shape adjacent to the itch spreading out from her arm into her chest and her groin and her fingertips.
"Her pupils," Ostrowski said, delighted, leaning in. "Look at her pupils, Anna. Pinpoints. She's done this before. How many times?"
"Enough," Anna said.
"That is not nothing, you understand." He rolled his cigar ash. "A woman who already has the habit is cheaper to keep. It is practically a discount. Two hundred fifty, contingent on my sample, and I will make the sample good." He stood and began unbuckling his belt a second time, unhurried, while Katja waited by the door and the ashtray smoked and the black Mediterranean lay still below the portholes. "On your back, Emily. Knees up. Anna, sit where I can see both of your faces. I buy conditioned merchandise, but I test free women too. It is how I know what the conditioning is worth."
Emily pulled her knees up and felt the heroin take her voice somewhere down at the bottom of her chest, and reached down between her own thighs, spreading herself open with two fingers, wet and bare and burning.
"Condom," Anna said, and held one out on her open palm, and did not blink until he took it.
Ostrowski rolled the condom down over himself with the efficiency of a man who had done it in front of buyers before, and knelt on the chaise between Emily's raised knees. He pressed the blunt head against her slit and dragged it up once, slow, coating himself in the wet that the coke and the heroin had pulled out of her.
"Still a free woman," he said, looking at Anna. "Free women grip. Let us see."
He pushed in. Emily's mouth opened and nothing came out of it. Her cunt stretched around the thickness of him, inch by inch, until his hips pressed flush against hers and his balls settled heavy against her ass. The heroin had made her body soft and slow and honest, and the burn of being filled that wide came through the warmth like a bright thread, pain and pleasure braided so tight she couldn't have told them apart.
"Good God," she breathed.
"Nine inches and four years of Duval graduates in that look." He pulled out to the head and drove back in, hard, and the chaise creaked under them. "But this is not conditioning. This is a woman who chose to be here, on my table, for a price. That is the best product in the world, Fräulein. Do you know why?"
Emily shook her head. Her tits shook with it, and his eyes dropped to them.
"Because she is expensive." He set a rhythm, deep grinding strokes, his thumb finding her clit and pressing flat against it. "Everything free is worthless. Everything for sale has a number. Give me your number, Emily."
"Two hundred fifty," she gasped, hips rising to meet him without her permission, her cunt clenching around his cock on every stroke. "Contingent."
"On my satisfaction." He fucked her harder, the wet slap of it loud in the suite, his fingers digging into the meat of her thigh. "Then satisfy me. Come on my cock when I tell you, the way Katja did, and I will know Hector's people understand what they are buying."
Anna watched from the chair, one hand resting on the arm of it, the other holding a fresh line of coke on the mirror's edge she had no intention of doing yet. She watched Ostrowski's fat ass piston between Emily's thighs and Emily's face go slack and open, the pinpoints of her pupils swimming.
"Now," Ostrowski said.
Emily came. It tore through her, a long rolling clench of her whole pelvis, her back arching off the leather, a raw sound ripped out of her that had no language in it. Her cunt milked at him in wave after wave, and he rode it out, groaning, slowing his strokes to feel every pulse.
"There." He pulled out, still sheathed, still hard, and stood over her with his chest shining with sweat. "There is my sample."
Katja, kneeling by the door in her white slip, brought a warm cloth without being told. Emily lay gasping on the chaise, her dress rucked to her waist, her thighs trembling, and the girl cleaned the mess off her skin with gentle, practiced hands and never once looked her in the eye.
Ostrowski buckled his belt and walked to the walnut cabinet and took down a decanter and three small glasses. He poured without asking anyone.
"Two hundred fifty per head," he said. "FOB Hamburg. Gold, as I said. Twelve head, three million, and I will eat the freight to your airstrip. The contract is drafted by Duval's people tomorrow. The first lot flies within the month." He handed a glass to Anna, then held a second one out to Emily, who had not yet sat up.
Emily pushed herself upright on the leather, blinking, and took the glass. "You accept."
"I accept." He raised his own glass an inch. "Because you negotiated like professionals, because your girl came when I told her to, which is a joke, a very good joke, and because you will sign an exclusivity rider giving Hector's house sole rights to my production outside Europe. That rider is not negotiable and you will find it in the contract."
Anna took the glass and did not drink. "The Fifth Module is not in the contract."
"No." He smiled and settled back into his chair behind the desk. "The Fifth Module is not for sale. Not at three million. Not at thirty."
"Then I'm buying a car with the hood welded shut."
"You are buying the car at a third of its worth, Fräulein, because the hood is welded shut." He lit a fresh cigar off the stub of the old one. "The Module is not a drug, not a surgery, not a machine. It is a person. One person. Duval keeps her on the estate and she is fifty-one years old and is the key to all the women of Module 5. Women of the upper class and the aristocracy and ultra high end escorts and movie and tv stars. Women who only need to be trained for a month. It does not produce the docility of Module 4 and is more natural but does instilll in them the love of pleasing and pleasuring in any way the buyer desires. Of course they all come already addicted to cigarettes and alcohol and drugs. "
Anna set her glass down on the mahogany. "Then the price of the Module is a different conversation."
"It is a conversation over a different table, and you are not dressed for it." He leaned forward, rings clacking on the wood, wet bright eyes going from her to Emily, still breathing hard on the chaise with her dress around her waist. "Finish the three million first. Take delivery of the twelve. Study them, if your principal's trainer is as good as her reputation, let her take one apart down to the screws. She will learn what the Fourth Module is and she will learn it well. And then, when you come back to this table with a number with more digits, I will introduce you to the woman behind the Module. Her name is Sasha. That is all I will say tonight, and I am drunk and high and generous, so do not test how long that lasts."
Emily sat up fully and pulled her dress down over her thighs. Her hand shook a little, the heroin and the orgasm leaving her loose and slow, and she reached for her folder anyway, because she was who she was. "Sole rights. Exclusivity. That's a give."
"It is the give that pays for the discount," Ostrowski said. "Duval gives me the same and has for thirty years."
Anna looked at Emily across the suite. Emily gave one small nod, the nod they'd agreed on in the car, the one that meant the numbers work.
"Sole rights," Anna said. "With one amendment. The reconditioning clause. When our first lot arrives, we inspect within the first hour of landing, before housing, before any of your handlers speak to them. That goes in the contract tomorrow or there is no contract."
Ostrowski chewed on that, cigar smoke leaking from the corner of his mouth. Then he laughed, short and heavy, and knocked ash into the crystal tray.
"The first hour. Duval used to demand the first hour. I wondered where she learned it." He stubbed the cigar out and extended his ringed hand across the mahogany. "Done. Now drink, Fräulein. You have bought twelve women tonight and your friend has earned the sorest morning of her life, and the pool deck is open until dawn, and Katja has not been released yet."
Anna set her glass down untouched. "Then I want to meet her. Sasha. Tonight."
The name landed in the suite like a dropped glass. Ostrowski's smile went away entirely, and for the first time since Nice he looked older.
"I'm not flying twelve women across the Atlantic on a car with a welded hood and a driver I've never met. The three million closes tonight. Sasha is the next conversation, and the next conversation starts now, on this deck, because I don't leave this boat with nothing."
Emily pulled her dress straight and sat forward, the heroin haze burning off her the way it did when numbers appeared. "He's not going to like being woken."
"He's not going to be asked." Anna turned back to Ostrowski. "Call Duval. Or I call Hector, and Hector calls Duval, and I don't know what your thirty years look like after that."
Ostrowski took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at it for a long moment. Then he laughed, low, without much of anything in it. "Duval used to tell me you Americans have no manners. She was wrong. You have exactly one manner, and it works." He reached for the phone on the desk, an old black handset, and dialed three digits.
"Frau Duval. Forgive the hour." A pause. His eyes came up to Anna. "No. Not the tour. The guest wants Sasha." The silence stretched. His jaw worked. "Yes. Both of them. Now." Another pause, longer. "Understood." He set the handset down.
"She says launch, thirty minutes, the villa. Sasha is awake. Sasha is always awake at this hour, she says, which I did not need to know." He stood, straightening his jacket. "You understand what you're walking into. Sasha does not sell. Sasha buys. Or she sends you away. And if she sends you away, Duval sends you away, and the three million sits on the table until it grows cold."
"Then I'll be polite," Anna said, "and I'll still ask."
"Katja." Ostrowski snapped his fingers once and the woman by the door rose. "Dress the guests' faces. Powder, mouth, the eyes. They are meeting the Module's keeper, not me." He looked Anna up and down. "And take my advice. Do not shake her hand unless she offers it. She considers touch a transaction."
The launch crossed the black water with the moon behind the clouds now, and the villa came up out of the dark, low and wide, shuttered, a single lamp burning above a sea door. Duval herself waited on the stone steps in a robe the color of her hair, silver, no makeup, no warmth.
"You cost me a night's sleep," she said. "I've been told that is your talent."
"You were told correctly," Anna said.
Duval studied her for a moment, then almost smiled. "Ostrowski was right about one thing. You are not dressed for this conversation. Neither of you. Sasha won't care. Come."
They followed her through a stone corridor that smelled of salt and beeswax into a long room with a fire burning low and one woman sitting in a wingback chair with a cigarette and a glass of something amber on the table beside her. Sasha was fifty-one, beautiful , beautifully made up and a beautiful body with C-cup breasts and shoulder length blonde hair and eyes the flat pale color of northern water. She did not rise. She did not offer her hand.
Anna thought she looked familiar and should know her.
"Sit," she said. "You wanted to meet me. Here I am. Now tell me the interesting part, which is why."
"The Module," Anna said. "I want to buy it."
Sasha drew on the cigarette and let the smoke sit in her mouth before releasing it. "The Module is not merchandise. The Module is me. You cannot buy me because I do not come with a price. I come with terms."
"I'm listening."
"You have a trainer." Sasha’s eyes moved to Emily, then back. "The American ex-convict. Allison. I read the trade journals of this industry, yes, we have them, I was in the industry once. She breaks women in three weeks and sells them at corpse markup. She is a hammer. I have nothing to teach a hammer and a hammer has nothing to learn from me." She tapped ash into a crystal dish. "My women are not broken. Broken women require maintenance. Maintenance is expensive and maintenance is visible. My women are installed."
"Installed," Emily repeated.
"A word from electronics. You put a component into a device and the device does not know it was altered. It runs. It runs beautifully. It runs and it believes the running is its own idea." Sasha drank, small, unhurried. "That is the Fifth Module. It takes a month because I do not touch them harder than they ask to be touched. They arrive aristocrats and they leave aristocrats, addicted to cigarettes and alcohol and whatever powder I put in their coffee, and they leave loving to please, and no one, not their husbands, not their analysts, not their own mothers, ever sees a seam. Duval charges nine hundred a head for them and the waiting list is four years."
Anna kept her voice level. "Your terms."
"I do not train for strangers. I train for houses. So you bring me your house. Your trainer spends forty days on my estate watching me work, hands off, the way you keep your girl off your lots. She learns the Module or she does not, that is her problem, she is a hammer and I have my doubts." The pale eyes came up sharp. "And I take one of your women. Not one of your lots. One of your free ones. The one who came when she was told to come, tonight, on the yacht, I heard about it already, Monte Carlo hears everything by the fire's second log." She looked at Emily.
Emily's stomach dropped through the heroin and the orgasm both. "Me."
"Or her principal sends someone else and I wait." Sasha ground the cigarette out with terrible patience. "One month. Your woman on my estate, installed, the way I install anyone who consents to a month. She signs nothing, she is paid nothing, she leaves when the month ends, and whatever is left in her when she leaves is your house's problem and your house's asset. If she learns the 5th Module then I will supply the highest quality women and you save money by installing the Module yourselves instead of us. That is the term. There is no second term."
Duval said, from the doorway, "I told you. She buys."
Anna looked at Emily across the low fire, at the pinpoints still swelling in her pupils, at the folder she'd carried from Vancouver that suddenly weighed nothing at all.
"I didn't say yes yet," Emily said.
"No," Sasha agreed, pouring herself a second glass without asking anyone. "But you didn't say no, and you're still sitting down, and the interesting part is that your hand is on the folder instead of the door."
Emily looked at her own hand on the folder. It was true. She had been holding it like a shield and it had become a bookmark.
"The terms," she said. "Say them again. All of them. Slowly."
Sasha refilled her glass without hurrying, and the amber caught the firelight. "One month on my estate. You come as a guest, not a lot. No collars, no contracts, no needles in your veins unless you ask for them, and you will ask for them, they always do, but the asking is the point. You eat with me. You work with me. You watch me install, and I install you, because I do not teach by lecture. I teach by doing." She set the bottle down. "You leave on day thirty whether you want to or not."
"And if I want to leave on day ten?"
"You won't." Sasha said it the way a woman says the tide comes in. "But the door is not locked. Duval will tell you that no one has ever used it."
Duval, from the doorway, gave the smallest shrug. It confirmed nothing.
"And the forty days for Allison." Anna leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "Same estate? Same month?"
"Two students at once is a class, and I do not teach classes." Sasha shook her head once, blonde hair swinging in the bob. "The American comes after. If your girl completes the month and your house still wants the Module, I will look at the hammer then. Maybe I will teach her to be a scalpel. Maybe I will send her home and bill you nothing for the disappointment." Her pale eyes went back to Emily. "But that is autumn's problem. Tonight's problem is you."
Emily felt the heroin underneath everything, warm and thick, and the coke above it, thin and bright, and between the two of them her own voice came out steadier than her pulse. "What does installing actually involve?"
"Everything that installing always involves." Sasha smiled for the first time, and the smile was worse than the flatness. "You will not be hurt harder than you ask. You will be delighted more than you can imagine. You will smoke when I hand you cigarettes and you will drink what I pour and by week three you will understand that pleasing is not submission, pleasing is the highest form of power, and you will have been doing it your whole life without knowing it was a skill." She crossed one long pale leg over the other. "I have installed two hundred and eleven women since 1979. Movie stars. Princesses. The wife of a man you have heard of and the daughter of a man you have not. Not one has ever complained, and not one has ever left."
"And the addiction."
"Comes with the finish, like varnish." Sasha flicked her fingers. "Cigarettes, yes. Alcohol, moderate. A powder of my own blend in the morning coffee. You will arrive a woman who can stop any day and you will leave one who has decided, pleasantly and permanently, not to stop. That is what your house is buying, Fräulein. Certainty of appetite."
Anna turned her head. "Emily."
"I heard the terms." Emily stood. Her legs were unsteady under the dress and she let the dress settle and did not let anything else settle. "Thirty days. Door unlocked. I watch you work and you work on me."
"Yes."
"And in exchange, Allison gets her forty days after, and the Module comes home to our house if I learn it. And your women keep shipping at two fifty through Hamburg."
"Through Hamburg, gold, the rider, all of it." Sasha lifted her glass a half inch. "You are repeating the deal back to me like a banker."
"I verify the product." Emily heard the coke make her grin, sharp and wrong. "You're the product."
For a moment the fire popped and nothing else happened. Then Sasha laughed, low and genuinely, and put the glass down, and even Duval's shoulders moved in the doorway.
"Oh, I like this one better than the hammer," Sasha said. "She can stay."
"I'm not asking your permission to be likable." Emily pulled the folder open, took out the pen she'd carried eleven hours, and wrote on the back page of the manifest: Thirty days. Estate of S. Voluntary. No contract. Her handwriting was nearly straight. She tore the page out and held it out across the low fire. "This isn't a signature. It's a bookmark. So neither of us pretends later that tonight was anything but drunk and high and expensive."
Sasha took the paper, read it, and did not burn it. She folded it once and slid it into the breast of the wingback chair, under the leather piping, where it disappeared. "Better than a signature. A signature is a seam." She stood for the first time, and she was taller than Emily had calculated, and she crossed to the window and pulled the cord on the shutters, and the night came in over the Mediterranean, black and salt-smelling. "You leave in the morning. Duval will drive you to the estate herself. You will pack nothing. Everything you need is provided and it is all better than what you brought."
"Nothing," Emily repeated.
"Nothing. The first thing I remove is always the luggage." Sasha looked her over once, the way Ostrowski had looked at the wine list, but slower, cataloguing. "You will get your phone back on day thirty. You will get your name back on day thirty. For the month you are called the same thing I call all of them."
"Which is?"
"Come," Sasha said, and Emily's body answered before her mind did, one half-step forward, and Sasha smiled the second smile of the evening. "You will learn the answer to that in the first week. Anna. Take her back to the yacht. Sleep. At eight, Duval's car. And tell Ostrowski the three million is approved as of tonight, since I am the Module and the Module approves."
Anna stood, collected Emily's jacket from the chair, and held it out. Emily took it and did not put it on.
Outside on the stone steps the cold hit like water. The launch idled below, its running lights doubled in the black harbor, and Ostrowski's yacht glowed across the water like a lit cliff. Emily stood on the top step and looked down at the boat that was supposed to carry her back to Vancouver in three days and understood that it would carry her back alone.
"You didn't call Hector," Anna said beside her. "You didn't even suggest calling Hector."
"I'm the financial side." Emily started down the steps. "I closed the account."
Anna caught her arm at the bottom. "Thirty days. No phone. No contact. Emma will want to know."
"Then tell her in three days, on the other side of an ocean, with the deal signed." Emily pulled her arm free, gently, and looked back up at the shuttered villa, at the one lamp burning above the sea door. "And tell Allison to start her forty days ready to be a scalpel. Because I just met one, and she's fifty-one, and she's beautiful, and she folds your bookmarks into her chair instead of burning them, and that's the most frightening thing I've seen since the day I walked into Hector's foyer."
The launch driver opened the rail for them. Emily stepped down into the boat and sat, and the engine turned over, and the villa slid backward into the dark. Sasha's shadow crossed the lamp once, a tall silhouette behind the shutter slats, watching them go, and then the shutter closed and the lamp went out and the only light left on the coast was the diamonds of Monte Carlo, burning all night, needing nothing.
The launch reached the yacht's boarding stair at a quarter past three. Neither of them slept. Anna poured vodka into two fresh tumblers before the cabin door was shut, and Emily kicked her heels off and sat on the bunk with her dress still rucked, holding out her arm without a word.
Anna tied off, loaded a full barrel this time, and pushed it slow. The warmth climbed Emily's arm and she sagged back against the pillow, and Anna did her own dose kneeling on the floor with her elbow over the bunk's edge, watching Emily watch her.
"Five hours," Anna said, checking her watch. "Then eight o'clock comes whether we like it or not."
"Then waste none of it."
Anna pulled her dress over her head and dropped it on the floor and climbed onto the bunk over her. Her mouth went to Emily's throat, then her collarbone, then down, teeth dragging over the swell of her tit until Emily arched. Anna sucked one nipple deep, wet and loud, rolling the other between her fingers hard enough to make Emily hiss, and her hand slid down the flat of Emily's stomach and into the wet heat between her legs, two fingers pushing straight in, no teasing.
"Fuck," Emily gasped, hips lifting off the mattress. "Again. Like the plane."
Anna fucked her with her fingers, hard, fast, the heel of her hand grinding against her clit on every stroke, the slap of it filling the small cabin. Emily's thighs shook, her tits bouncing with the rhythm, and she clawed at Anna's back and came in two minutes, a ragged cry muffled against Anna's shoulder, cunt clamping down and gushing over Anna's hand.
Anna didn't stop. She worked her through it and kept working, a third finger, then four, stretching her, and Emily bucked and swore and grabbed the bunk rail. When Anna's thumb pressed her clit and all four fingers drove deep at once, Emily screamed into the pillow and came again, harder, her whole body shaking, slick running down her ass onto the sheet.
They drank between rounds, straight from the bottle. At some point Emily pushed Anna onto her back and went down on her, spread her open with her thumbs and licked her slow from hole to clit, then sealed her mouth over the swollen bud and hummed. Anna's fingers twisted in her hair, hips rising, and she came with a low guttural sound, thighs clamped around Emily's ears, grinding against her mouth through every pulse.
Then they used the strap Anna had packed in the leather case, Anna on her knees at the bunk's edge while Emily drove the harness into her from behind, one hand fisted in the black hair, the other smearing coke onto her own gums between strokes. The cabin smelled of vodka and sex and cordite-sweet powder. Somewhere in the fourth hour they lost the count of orgasms. In the fifth hour they lay tangled and sweating, the bottle half-empty, and slept like the dead until the steward's knock at seven forty.
Morning came in grey and mean through the porthole. Emily sat up with her skull throbbing and reached for the vodka before the coffee. They finished a half bottle each, sitting on the bunk's edge in silence, passing it back and forth, and then Anna turned the shower on hot.
The steam filled the small stall and they fucked in it, Emily braced against the tile with the water hammering her back while Anna knelt and ate her out under the spray, fingers curling up inside her, tongue flat and relentless on her clit until Emily's knees buckled and she had to grip the rail not to fall. Anna stood, spit on her hand, and worked her over with her fingers one last time, fast and filthy, until Emily came again with her forehead pressed to the wet tile, whimpering, done.
They did each other's hair and makeup at the mirror, powder over the hollows, dark mouth, the eyes sharp, exactly as Katja had dressed them for Sasha. Then the rigs. Anna found Emily's vein on the first try, femoral this time, the thigh smooth and blue under the towel, and pushed a modest dose, enough to sand the edges off the morning without dulling the numbers. Emily returned it, elbow crease, and Anna's shoulders dropped and her mouth softened and she said, "Good batch," and lit a cigarette off the cabin lighter.
Duval's car was waiting at the quay at eight. The Mercedes wound up the coast road through olive terraces and dry stone walls, and the estate rose out of the hills an hour later, low white walls, cypress, a courtyard with a fountain that didn't run. Sasha waited under the arcade in cream trousers and a white shirt, cigarette in a long holder, looking like money that had never once needed to prove it.
"Duval says you slept four hours," she said.
"Five," Emily said.
"Fraulein Anna." Sasha's pale eyes moved past her. "You are not staying. Which is unfortunate, because you are not finished either."
Anna frowned. "Meaning what?"
"Meaning while your colleague learns the Module, you will sample the merchandise. My merchandise. The estate has clients, and clients require entertainment of a certain caliber, and it would be a waste to leave you idle. You will sit at my table, drink my wine, and take my women as I assign them, and you will report to your house what four years of Module 4 feels like from the receiving end. Consider it field research." Sasha drew on the holder, unhurried. "You tested Ostrowski's sample on the yacht. Now you will test mine for a month. It is not negotiable, and Duval has already agreed."
Anna looked at Emily. Emily, grey-faced and beautiful in the morning light, gave the smallest nod, the car nod.
"Fine," Anna said. "Then while I'm sampling, let me raise something. We've been thinking about expanding our client base. Hector's buyers top out at a certain tier. What we need are names above it. Kings' courts, old families, people who'd never touch a catalogue." She let the pause sit. "Do you have Module 5 young girls available? Finished product, ready to place?"
Sasha's face didn't move, but the holder paused halfway to her mouth, and that was the tell.
"You want to sell my young girls to your clients while you buy my method."
"I want to buy your surplus," Anna said. "You have a four-year waiting list. Waiting lists are lost revenue. Some of those clients would pay triple through Hamburg for a woman installed by the Module herself, delivered under your seal. We'd place them. discreetly, at the top of the market, and your name never appears."
The cigarette burned in its holder. Somewhere behind the arcade a door opened and closed, and a woman's laugh drifted across the courtyard, warm and unforced.
"You negotiate like your colleague closes," Sasha said at last. "It is almost a compliment." She turned and walked toward the shaded door, and did not look back. "Bring your figures to dinner. Not before. And Anna, the first merchandise samples tonight. Wear the black."
Emily was driven to the guest wing in silence, and Anna was left alone under the arcade with her cigarette and the sound of the dead fountain.
A woman appeared at two o'clock, or a woman-shaped version of two o'clock, because Anna's watch had been taken at the door with her phone and her lighter. The woman was perhaps thirty, dark-haired, dressed in dove grey, and she moved the way the photographs in Emma's folder had promised, smooth, gliding, nothing wasted.
"You are Fräulein Anna." Not a question. "I am called Lise. Sasha asks that you rest until six. The pool is warm. There is wine at the cabana. At six you dress, at seven you dine with her, and at nine you will be introduced to your first evening's companion."
"Companion." Anna let the word sit. "Just one?"
"One each night. Sasha believes in courses." Lise's mouth curved without warmth. "The wine is a Pinot from the estate slopes. You will like it. Everyone likes it, which is the first lesson of this place, and it is free."
The pool was warm. The wine was extraordinary. Anna swam fifteen laps, drank half a bottle in the shallow end, and thought about the flat pale eyes in the firelight and what it meant that Sasha had paused the cigarette holder. Surplus. Waiting lists. Triple through Hamburg. The numbers stacked themselves while she floated, and she let them, because numbers were the one drug that never needed a vein.
At seven she wore the black, the dress from the garment bag, cut to the sternum, and sat at a long table on a terrace lit by citronella lamps. Sasha at the head, Duval to her left, Anna midway down, and eight guests, none of whom were introduced by name. The food was simple and perfect. The wine kept arriving. Sasha talked about nothing, frescoes, the failings of modern yachts, the correct ripeness of figs, and the nothing was the point. Every guest at the table was performing ease, and Anna watched the performance the way she watched ledgers, for the errors.
One error, and it was hers. At the fig course she caught herself looking at the woman seated across from her, a blonde with expensive shoulders and a wedding ring like a small chandelier, and the woman was looking back, and the look had weight to it.
"You see," Sasha said, not loudly, to the table at large, "what I mean about appetite. It recognizes itself."
At nine, Lise came to Anna's room. She did not come alone. She brought the blonde from the table, changed into a silk slip the color of cream, her ring left behind somewhere, her perfume changed from dinner's amber to something greener.
"Marta," Lise said. "Fourth Module, four years installed. She has your evening. Sasha's instruction: do not perform for her. She is here to show you, not to serve you. There is a distinction. You will understand it by morning." Lise left, and the door did not lock, and Anna noted that the way she noted everything in this place.
Marta crossed the room without hurry and stopped an arm's length away. "You may touch me anywhere," she said. "I prefer it. The clients who ask permission first are the ones who take all night and enjoy nothing."
"Is that the training talking?"
"That is me talking." The blue eyes were clear, unhurried, no fear in them and no emptiness either, which was the unsettling part. "The training is why I am calm. The me is why I am good. Sasha separates those. Most houses do not bother."
Anna reached out and took her jaw in one hand, tilted her face up, and kissed her. Marta's mouth opened under hers, tongue meeting tongue, and her hands went to the back of Anna's dress and found the zipper and drew it down in one motion, no fumbling, the ease of a woman who had undone a thousand dresses in this room or ones like it. The black silk dropped. Anna stood in nothing else, because the house had provided nothing else, and Marta stepped back to look at her.
"You're beautiful," Marta said. "And you smell of cocaine and vodka and the pool. Good. I like a woman who arrives honest."
"Get on the bed."
Marta went, lying back along the pillows, and Anna followed, pushing her knees apart, the cream silk riding up to her hips. No underwear. She was bare and already flushed, lips swollen dark, and Anna bent and dragged her tongue up the whole length of her slit, slow, savoring, tasting salt and something faintly sweet underneath, the powder in the morning coffee maybe, the varnish. Marta's breath caught and then steadied, deliberately steadied, and Anna smiled against her cunt and sealed her mouth over her clit and sucked hard enough to make the steadiness fail.
"Oh, fuck," Marta gasped, hips rising. "Harder. Please. The clients are always so gentle at first and it's torture."
Anna gave it to her. She sucked her clit in rhythm, two fingers driving into her and curling against the front wall, fucking her fast, the wet sounds of it filling the room. Marta's back arched, her tits straining the silk, her hands fisting the sheets, and she came in ninety seconds, a sharp cry and a long clenching pulse around Anna's fingers, slick flooding her palm.
Anna didn't stop. She worked her through it and into another, slower, drawing it out until Marta was whimpering and pushing at her own thigh. Then she crawled up her body, kissing her so she could taste herself, and Marta kissed back open-mouthed and hungry, hand sliding between them to find Anna's cunt, fingers spreading the wet there.
"Your turn," Marta murmured. "On your back. Sasha said I'm to show you, not serve you. This is what she means."
Anna lay back and Marta went down the bed and put her face between her legs, and it was not the awkward enthusiasm of a house girl. It was expert and patient and relentless, tongue flat and slow at first, building, two fingers sliding in and finding the spot on the first try, and Anna's hips came off the mattress within a minute. The heroin from the morning was a distant warmth, the wine a hum, and the mouth on her clit was the whole world, and she grabbed Marta's hair and fucked up against her face and came hard, crying out, thighs clamping around the blonde's ears.
They went again, and again. Anna on her knees with Marta's tongue in her from behind, then Marta straddling her face, grinding down on her mouth while Anna fucked her with four fingers, and somewhere past midnight they lay tangled and damp, and Marta lit two cigarettes from the room's lighter and handed one over.
"So," Anna said, taking the smoke. "The Module."
Marta laughed, low, smoke leaking out. "Sasha said you'd ask by the first night. The answer is no, and the second answer is that you'll understand why that's the answer by day twenty."
"Try me."
Marta rolled onto her side and looked at her, close, in the lamplight. "What do you remember of the last hour? Not the sex. The hour before, the wine, the dinner, the woman across the table."
Anna thought back and found the memory soft-edged, pleasant, filed away, and could not say when the edge had gone soft.
"That," Marta said, and stubbed the cigarette out. "That's the Module. Sleep. Tomorrow you meet the second course."
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.