He knew I was hooked, because once I hesitated he turned away from me with a mincing shrug, as if to say: you missed your chance. Where is she? I said, seizing his twig-thin arm. He cocked his head down the street and I followed him, suddenly as witless as an idiot, out of the throng. The road emptied as we walked; the red lights gave way to gloom, and then to darkness. If I asked him where we were going once I asked him a dozen times; he chose not to answer, until we reached a narrow door in a narrow house down some razor-thin street. We’re here, he announced, as though the hovel were the Palace of Versailles.
Up two flights in the otherwise empty house there was a room with a black door. He pressed me to it. It was locked.
“See,” he invited, “She’s inside.”
“It’s locked,” I replied. My heart was fit to burst: she was near, for certain, I knew she was near.
“See,” he said again, and pointed to a tiny hole in the panel of the door. I devoured the light through it, pushing my eye towards her through the tiny hole.
The squalid interior was empty, except for a mattress and Jacqueline. She lay spread-eagled, her wrists and ankles bound to rough posts set in the bare floor at the four corners of the mattress.
“Who did this?” I demanded, not taking my eye from her nakedness.
“She asks,” he replied. “It is her desire. She asks.” She had heard my voice; she cranked up her head with some difficulty and stared directly at the door. When she looked at me all the hairs rose on my head, I swear it, in welcome, and swayed at her command.
“Oliver,” she said.
“Jacqueline.” I pressed the word to the wood with a kiss.
Her body was seething, her shaved sex opening and closing like some exquisite plant, purple and lilac and rose.
“Let me in,” I said to Koos.
“You will not survive one night with her.”
“Let me in.”
“She is expensive,” he warned.
“How much do you want?”
“Everything you have. The shirt off your back, your money, your jewellery; then she is yours.”
I wanted to beat the door down, or break his nicotine stained fingers one by one until he gave me the key. He knew what I was thinking.
“The key is hidden,” he said, “And the door is strong. You must pay, Mr Vassi. You want to pay.”
It was true. I wanted to pay.
“You want to give me all you have ever owned, all you have ever been. You want to go to her with nothing to claim you back. I know this. It”s how they all go to her.”
“All? Are there many?”
“She is insatiable,” he said, without relish. It wasn’t a pimp’s boast: it was his pain, I saw that clearly. “I am always finding more for her, and burying them.”
Burying them.
That, I suppose, is Koos’ function; he disposes of the dead. And he will get his lacquered hands on me after tonight; he will fetch me off her when I am dry and useless to her, and find some pit, some canal, some furnace to lose me in. The thought isn’t particularly attractive.
Yet here I am with all the money I could raise from selling my few remaining possessions on the table in front of me, my dignity gone, my life hanging on a thread, waiting for a pimp and a key.
It’s well dark now, and he’s late. But I think he is obliged to come. Not for the money, he probably has few requirements beyond his heroin and his mascara. He will come to do business with me because she demands it and he is in thrall to her, every bit as much as I am. Oh, he will come. Of course he will come.
Well, I think that is sufficient.
This is my testimony. I have no time to re-read it now. His footsteps are on the stairs (he limps) and I must go with him. This I leave to whoever finds it, to use as they think fit. By morning I shall be dead, and happy. Believe it.”