Claudine (27 page)

“What do you mean?”

His face grew serious. “You’re a beautiful woman and no doubt were an adorable child. A little blond angel. Isn’t that why your adoptive mother chose you out of all those other dismal children?”

“How did you . . .”

“Perhaps the man involved loved you. You only see the harm because you don’t have the full picture. You have no idea what his feelings were.”

“When did you find out about me? Who told you?”

He smiled sympathetically. “The past is not so easily hidden my dear. What do you recall about that man?”

She had difficulty forming her next words. “Only his terrible eyes.”

“There may be an explanation for that. He wore a surgical mask. He had to. Tuberculosis was rife among the children.”

The years fell away. She stared at his black eyes, and remembered. Her stomach convulsed in fear. The man who offered her pearl necklaces, who chatted about Newport history, whose fingers had probed her most private parts—was her torturer. Her gaze fell on his wineglass. He hadn’t tasted so much as a drop.

Her chair tipped over as she lurched to her feet. She grabbed her glass by the stem. The remnants of her wine spattered the white tablecloth like drops of blood. She smashed the rim.

Her reaction caught him by surprise. He’d only half risen when she came at him with the spear of glass. He threw his
hands up and the shard sliced the fleshy base of his thumb. She jabbed again and cut into his upper arm. He swore and grabbed a napkin to staunch the welling blood.

She ran for the door.

She’d almost reached it when her legs turned to sponge and she fell heavily to the floor. Her heart felt tight; her lips numb. She tried to crawl on her hands and knees but only moved a few inches before she flopped on her stomach. Ferrer stood over her. She craned her neck; gaped at him. His figure seemed to enlarge and then blend slowly with all the other objects in the room into wavering strands of color. The color modified, became one flat screen of gray. He said something to her. She had no idea what the sounds meant.

CHAPTER
30

Maria felt as though she were being carried through water in slow motion. She thought she heard doors opening and shutting, had a sense of descending. She entered a sphere of bright white light. She wondered idly whether she’d died and this was the entrance to heaven.

She was much closer to hell. Her arms and legs were jerked roughly away from her sides, her hands and feet tethered to some structure that kept her upright, with her toes barely touching the floor. It took all her strength to raise her head. She heard heavy footsteps receding; a door bang closed.

Her stomach cramped as the drug wore off, scorching her throat with wine and bile. Hardened leather straps bit at her wrists and ankles as she tried to twist away from them. When her vision cleared and she could focus better, she saw a tiled floor and windowless walls. Another apparatus sat directly in her line of vision; a scaffold with diagonal braces called a Saint
Augustine’s cross; chains and straps hung from it. Beside it an assortment of sexual aids, a variety of dildos, anal balls, harnesses and rings lay on a counter. Placed near a sink was a trolley with a groove running around its circumference, reminding her of the morgue tables she’d seen on TV. Piled in one corner on the counter were her tablet, bag and suitcase. Ferrer had removed all evidence to show she’d ever been upstairs.

She tried to scream. It came out more like a croak. Her legs were so tightly bound she could only shift them a few inches, and she realized her dress was ripped along the side seam to the waist in order to allow her legs to be pried apart. From somewhere behind her she heard a key turning in the lock. She let her head droop again and feigned unconsciousness.

“She’s still out.” Victor’s voice.

“Shouldn’t be,” Ferrer replied. “Get the needle and stick it in her pubis; that will rouse her.”

Maria opened her eyes. Ferrer stood before her naked and smiling. He wore only boots. A crude bandage was wrapped around his hand and upper arm.

He dropped something metallic on the counter and walked closer to her. “Ah,” Ferrer said. “I presumed you were faking. You’re good at that sort of thing, aren’t you?”

“Where am I?” Her speech was slurred a little from the drug.

“Still in Newport. I must confess to a little lie. The original owner who built the summerhouse I showed you earlier did not cease his orgies. He took them underground. My establishment here is a kind of gentlemen’s club for men who seek clandestine pleasures and require complete discretion. They are connoisseurs of sexuality. Little is forbidden these days, but some practices
still require secrecy. I make a fine bit of money off their proclivities. Not very much different from your source of income.”

“I don’t hurt people.”

“If there’s hurt, as you call it, only the lewd and immoral need fear it. Degraded women who have only themselves to blame.”

“Like me, you mean?” She stared at him defiantly.

“Yes, my dear, exactly like you.”

“How did you find me after all these years?”

“When I came to this country eighteen years ago, I tried to find you but I didn’t know your adoptive mother’s surname—your adoption records were sealed. At Siret you were listed simply as Maria, so neither did I know your birth name, Lantos. It was only when one of the members of our club befriended his next-door neighbor that I learned where you were and what had become of you.”

Maria shivered with fear. Keep him talking and distracted, she thought. Try to buy some time. “You mean Charles Hock. He’s sitting in jail now for assault and first-degree murder.”

Ferrer laughed. “Oh yes! The
other
Romanian prostitute. Her resemblance to you was remarkable. When he brought her here we had a delightful time. Hock is a man of awful appetites; but that just makes him easy to manipulate. He was quite willing to do anything I asked. All he demanded in return was a tiny taste of the infamous Claudine he’d heard so much about. How could I deny him that? Now the police have him in custody and I’m not even on their radar. It’s ended very well, I think.”

“And what makes you believe he hasn’t told the police about your dungeon here? Tried to bargain with them? That’s the first thing I’d do.”

Ferrer pulled up a high stool and dragged it toward her. He stopped about five feet away and perched on it. His flaccid penis drooped between his thighs. “He has two daughters, one at Cornell, the other at Berkeley. Apparently he does have some redeeming features, because he places a higher value on their lives than revealing anything about me or our club.”

“And how did you escape having any redeeming features at all?”

He chuckled. “My girl, the time for idle talk is over. You were kind enough to stay for an additional evening. It’s wasting away. Victor wants a sample before I send him upstairs. You see, I’m not so far gone that I’m not willing to share.”

Maria retched at the thought of Victor’s fat fingers touching her. She twisted her right wrist, made her hand as narrow as possible to see if she could wriggle out of the bindings. The bonds held firm.

“There’s no point in squirming. It’s not attractive.” Ferrer looked past her and beckoned with a crooked finger.

She could hear Victor approach her from behind: the slap of his bare feet on the tile, and the sound of his fat thighs rubbing together as he waddled toward her. He yanked her dress up to her shoulders. A cold blade brushed her hip. Victor used shears to cut through one leg of her panties, then yanked the tattered briefs down to her ankle. Ferrer’s eyes glittered at the sight.

Victor’s fingers, plush like sausages, examined every inch of her, every hollow, every orifice. His tongue followed the trail of his fingers. She shuddered every time his fingers and mouth touched her skin.

He moved around to her front. She spit in his face. Ferrer laughed at her feeble attempt to defend herself. Victor rubbed
his face on her stomach to wipe the spit off. He sucked first one, then the other nipple. She tried to twist her body away, but that only excited him more. He raised his head and sucked the flesh underneath her jaw, leaving an angry red mark on her skin.

He opened his mouth to flick his red tongue over her lips. Maria kept her lips firmly closed, and wrenched her head sideways. She bit the top of his ear. He shook his head like a wet dog and yelled. She clamped down even harder and tasted blood. He plowed his fist into her stomach. Her belly crumpled with the pain. Maria shrieked; it felt as though something had broken inside her.

“That’s enough, Victor; you’ve had your taste. Give us some privacy now.”

When the door closed behind Victor, Ferrer continued: “I’d have left you alone, you know, if only I’d discovered that my little angel had grown to become an honest woman. Married perhaps, with children to her credit. Not a whore.”

“Get your disgusting carcass away from me!” She panted in an effort to recover her breath after the blow.

“You find me repugnant, my dear, but surely you’ve endured others you don’t care for. I understand you’ll take anyone. You only have one measure for your partners—dollar bills.”

He selected one of the glass dildos with wicked-looking spines and ridges that was lying on the counter. He kicked away the stool and approached her, gripping her neck and jaw with his left hand, pressing them painfully to the side. She struggled for air. It felt as though he was crushing her windpipe.

With his right hand he shoved his fore and middle fingers into her anus. The delicate tissue burned. Maria tried furiously to shake him off but the restraints held her fast. Ferrer took his
hand from her neck and, grasping the glass dildo, stuck it into her slit, roughly pushing it all the way up. Her belly, still aching from the blow, spasmed.

“You’re a pig. A pedophile.”

He ignored her taunts. Instead, he focused on her reaction to the molestation with the dildo; it made him hard. “It’s my desire to relive the memory of our early encounters. I was your first, Maria. Nothing matched your purity. And I shall be your last as well. Alpha and Omega, an act of perfect harmony.”

Maria’s heart seized. She knew perfectly well what he meant. She would die in this room. One slight hope remained. She fought through her panic and tried to concentrate. “This isn’t how it was at all. You were masked so I couldn’t see your face. Just your eyes. You’re old. You’re getting senile and your memory’s failing you.”

The flush in his face told her that her words had bruised him. She was desperate to shake him up, keep him off-kilter.

“Well, we shall have to make do with less than perfect circumstances, won’t we?”

She tried one more time. “I had only one hand tied to the crib, not two, and nothing on. They’d taken my clothes away from me.”

“We can easily rectify that.” Ferrer scooped up the shears from the mat where Victor had dropped them and cut off the rest of her dress, letting it and the scissors fall back to the mat. He undid the buckle securing her right hand to the leather bond. She shook it furiously to regain some feeling.

“It couldn’t be you want that hand free to do some damage to me?” he said. “How transparent your thoughts are.” He gripped her lower arm and squeezed. Maria clenched her teeth, tried to
mentally move away from the blazing pain. A fine bone snapped. A fire roared up her arm and she screamed. She was barely able to see for the stars of pain in her eyes.

“I am not too old to forget that we loved,” he said.

“It was torture, not love.”

“And one last touch.” He picked up the scissors, walked over to the counter behind the trolley, opened a drawer, extracted a roll of gauze and cut off a long length. He returned to her side and began wrapping it around her head to bind her mouth. “I fear those teeth,” he said.

He bent his head and caught her breast in his mouth, rubbed himself up against her sex, his breath becoming jerky with his arousal.

It took a supreme effort of will to raise her hand. Tears coursed down her face as the grating edges of broken bone sent out a volley of hurt with every move. She tried to flex her fingers and found she could. Another agonizing jolt of pain hit her as she forced her hand higher, praying that Ferrer, so intent on molesting her, would not notice. With great effort, she pinched her earring, slipped it from her earlobe and, using her index finger, loosed the tiny clasp to extend the thin gold shaft it concealed.

When Ferrer began to force himself inside her, she urinated on him. “You bitch,” he swore, jerking his head up to glare at her. For an instant, as he tilted his head back to glare at her, his neck was fully exposed. She plunged the needle point of the gold shaft into the throbbing vein at his throat. The earring dangled absurdly from his neck.

His brittle eyes turned black with shock. He put a hand up to his throat, took it away and stared at the smears of blood on his fingertips. “What did you do?”

She whimpered beneath the gauze. “Paid you back.”

She didn’t know whether the words registered in his brain, for his blood had already carried the drug to every organ, infiltrating every cell like a hidden enemy. He crumpled to the floor.

With waning strength she managed to free her good hand. She used it to release the leather straps binding her ankles and rip off the gauze binding her mouth. Ferrer had collapsed on top of her torn dress. She kicked him over and pulled the garment away, wrapped it around her as best she could, swept her shoes up from where they’d fallen. She pulled the earring from his neck and folded it inside the crumpled gauze, then ran to get her cell phone from her bag. She frantically punched in 911 and swore when she saw there was no connection. She threw her cell phone and tablet into her bag, grabbed the shears. Not a very effective weapon but all she had. She yanked the door handle and almost cried in frustration. It was locked.

CHAPTER
31

Maria glanced around the room wildly. She recalled Ferrer stopping near the counter when he came in for the second time. He’d put his keys down. She rushed over and snatched them up. Her entire body quaked at the thought that Victor might walk in at any moment. She had no defense this time. When they first began working together, Andrei had given the earring to her as a final fail-safe if her life was ever in danger. The tiny spear on her earring carried only one lethal dose; it couldn’t be used again.