The Deceivers (30 page)

The villa overlooked Hong Kong harbor. The view alone had to be worth millions. I wondered if she'd inherited the estate from Illya … or had simply taken squatter's rights when word came that he had been terminated with prejudice.

Nadia left her other guests and floated over to greet me. “What a lovely dress. They make such good knockoffs in Hong Kong, don't they?”

Bitch.

The only way to handle a biting dog was with a kick, so I raised my eyebrows and smiled innocently. “Dresses, antiquities, boobs, lips, asses, you can buy anything fake here. Maybe even good manners.”

Lav chuckled at my remark, but Nadia just smiled and went off to greet another arrival. It didn't faze her one bit.

I let Lav lead me down to the courtyard. It was surrounded on three sides by wings of the house and was elevated above the level of a swimming pool. Standing on the tiled floor, I had a view of the lights on the harbor and Kowloon beyond.

The effect was stunning. So was the guest list.

The crowd in the courtyard could have been selected from the United Nations—every color, race, and culture was represented. Lav pointed out an oil rich sheikh, an Indian film producer, an African statesman, and a British dot.com auction house founder who looked so young he was still fighting acne.

The only thing these people seemed to have in common was their age—mostly mid-thirties but made up to look even younger, and rich.

The women wore more jewelry than clothing. The men dressed out of magazine ads but lacked the smug, chic Euro-trash look of those thin, dark, unshaven male models that magazine advertisers always preferred. Mostly they looked like accountants and computer nerds dressing like male models.

A hot crowd: Yuppies, Generation X or Y or whatever they were calling them … young, ambitious, well educated … all with money or faking it. Many of them had that smug look of prep school types whose biggest accomplishment in life was cashing checks from the family trust.

The party quickly got interesting as the courtyard got darker and the touching got more personal.

Lav took me to the edge of the partygoers and introduced me to a skinny young man who was a CEO of a nanotech firm—whatever that was. The guy looked way too young for me unless he was looking for a one-night stand. I must have aroused his motherly instincts because he quickly melted away with a young woman wearing glittering jewels.

I did a double take at her outfit.
Just jewels
—
no clothing
. The lights in the courtyard had gone down, the music was way up, people in the darkness were becoming a blur around me, but the young woman's platinum blond hair and bare white flesh glowed in the dark.

As I looked around, I noticed there were more glows in the dark. It was funny to see the servants scrambling to collect all the clothes being tossed.

Women and men … naked … dancing bare ass.

A naked couple brushed by me, dancing. His feet were on the floor, but her legs were wrapped around his hips. They were conjoined at more than the hip.

Okay
. I was a modern woman. I'd seen men and women without their clothes on before. It wasn't new. I'd explored a few naked bodies of both sexes of my own in my short time on Earth. But I'd never been to a party like this where everyone took off their clothes.

I seemed to be one of the few people who hadn't stripped.

The party scene seemed so … sixties … flower children, sexual revolution, daisy chains, wife swapping, group sex, swingers, UC Berkeley students protesting the war and their hypercritical parents by having sex in the streets.

Things had apparently changed over the past decade as I ran with an older, moneyed crowd that could afford seven-figure art. Lust and perversion in my social milieu was private … or at least exhibited with no more than three or four getting together to swing.

Nadia's party scene was into open and obvious perversion. From the embraces I saw, people weren't being particular about who—or what—they nibbled on.

The music picked up a beat—electronic dance music with a persistent, repetitive beat. Psytrance music—morphing, throbbing melody, a succession of single tones that sucked you in physically and mentally.

A rave party. That's how I thought of it. The music was a little different, the people a little older and a lot richer, but the effect was the same except that the sex was more overt than when I went to college.

Lav was suddenly by my side. He handed me a drink.

“Nice party,” he said.

“Looks more like an orgy to me.”

He shrugged. I wasn't sure if he understood or just didn't care.

Glow sticks and fire pois came alive. The glow sticks looked like the swords used in
Star Wars
movies. They weren't much different than what I remembered from college. The fire poi were pots of fire on short chains. A flammable material like cotton soaked in kerosene or lighter fluid was used for the fire. When the pois were swung, startling fire images were created.

The drink Lav gave me was also giving me a glow. It went down smoothly, but I soon felt its effect from head to toe. People around me seemed to be moving faster, the shapes were becoming more of a blur in the darkness that was only broken by the swinging lights and fire.

The psychedelic images of light and fire helped focus your mind away from other people, the visual images capturing the mind so it could relax and not think about anything as the music hypnotized you.

Despite the strange surroundings, I felt myself relaxing into a euphoric bliss.

I was in a strange house, strange city, and among strangers who were acting out their sexual passions and perversions in public darkness and I was totally content. Apprehensions and anxiety about Jimmy Cheung and international art fakery melted away in the euphoric fires created by the psychedelic music and whatever was in the drink.

Seeing all the naked flesh around me made my clothes feel cumbersome. I had this terrible urge to take it all off.

Good God, where had my inhibitions gone?

It occurred to me that my drink had been spiked, but at the moment I didn't care. I swayed to the music, feeling completely at peace with the world.

Lav's voice came from behind me and I felt his presence as his arms went around me. He whispered in my ear, “You're flowing with it, that's good.”

His warm breath on my neck gave me goose bumps.

“You put something in my drink,” I said.

“We all go through life afraid of what people will think. Now you can be your real self.”

Then it hit me. Ecstasy. The “secret” ingredient in her perfume—along with tiger penis—that got it banned. Ecstasy made you feel more in harmony with other people, welcoming whatever they did. And that included their sexual preferences. Pleasing others was part of it. Not only arousing passions, but having a love and unity that connected you with others.

I leaned back against him, feeling his strong arms wrap around me.

“You've got the glow,” he said.

Yes, I had the glow.

My mind left my body and floated above the party. With the swirling light I could see everyone had now shed their clothes and their inhibitions.

Some guy once told me as we were making love that human beings were the only animals who had sex face-to-face. I'm sure there were positions here tonight that animals hadn't even attempted.

A fire poi dancer appeared in front of me creating psychedelic images with swinging fire chains.

I couldn't move as my clothes started coming off. I wasn't physically paralyzed, my body still swayed with the music, but I was enraptured by a sense of well-being. I didn't stop Lav as he took off my clothing. If this big handsome Russian wanted to take off my clothes, if it gave him pleasure, then I wanted to do whatever pleased him.

My bra came off and he lifted me in the air and pulled off my panties.

The fire poi whirled around and around, leaving a fantastic trail of fire in its wake that seemed to stand still in midair.

Lav's huge hands were warm as they cupped my breasts. He pressed his bare skin against mine. Somewhere along the line he had taken off his clothes.

I felt his hard erection slip in between my legs from behind. I started giggling. Tiger cock.

Someone stepped in between me and the swirling fire display.

Nadia.

Like the other women, she was only wearing jewelry. She squeezed my breasts and kissed me on the mouth, pushing her tongue in, eager and hungry.

I rode the sensuous wave after wave of pleasure as her tongue started moving between my mouth and my nipples. With Nadia sucking me and Lav now pumping his cock inside me, my body exploded in sexual ecstasy.

33

I woke up naked in bed the following morning. Alone. But I knew I'd had company: A white Egyptian cotton robe, my purse, and clothes—freshly laundered—were laid out for me, along with a pot of hot coffee, croissants, butter and jams.

I struggled out of bed, showered, and dressed, then grabbed a cup of coffee and went hunting for Nadia and Lav. Before I left the room, I called a taxi. I didn't want to be at their mercy for a ride back to my hotel.

They were having breakfast and Bloody Marys by the pool. Naturally there was no mention of last night's activities. Like the Mafia dons say when they order a hit on an old family friend, it's just business.

“The pieces are in there,” Nadia said. “I figured you'd want some privacy.”

She pointed to a small poolside tent put up to keep the sun off of food items during pool parties. So much for privacy—the entire front of the tent was open.

I could see artifacts on a table.

One thing she could rely on—with a tiny clutch bag and skintight dress, I wasn't likely to walk off with anything.

“Where did Illya get the pieces?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. From a man.”

“A dealer? At auction or a private sale?”

“I don't know. Private. Illya did nothing public. He would have killed me for selling the Siva at a public auction in New York. Never let anyone know what you're doing, he always said.”

“You have no idea at all?” I asked.

“Why is it so important? I have the pieces. You say you have a buyer. Do we have a deal or not?”

I almost broke out laughing.

“Nadia, I know you want to sell and I want to make money, but my buyer isn't a fool. With the scandal over the Siva, we have to come up with an ownership history so I can give the buyer a provenance that satisfies him even if we all know it's bullshit. Can you tell me anything about how Illya got the pieces?”

I shot Lav a glance, hoping he could add something to the conversation, but his face remained impassive.

She pursed her fat collagen lips. Blower's lips, a friend of mine would call her type—and he wasn't referring to blowing up balloons.

“Petrol,” she said.

“Petrol? As in oil and gas?”

“Illya made money in petrol. Developing fields. The pieces had something to do with that.”

“I don't understand. What's the connection between a business deal in petrol and art?”

“Illya wasn't an ordinary businessman,” Lav said. “What he did was not only secret to the rest of the world, but to those around him. If competitors found out he was making a deal that would make him big money, they would kill him and do the deal themselves.”

“What kind of deal was it?”

“Petrol,” Nadia said. “That's all we know. He was working something with petrol. Making a revolution.”

“A revolution? Where?”

“I don't know.” Nadia flapped her hand in the direction of the world at large. “Out there somewhere.”

All I got from Lav was a shake of his head.

I assumed that Illya's “secret” development deals with petrol probably involved bribing government officials to get oil rights—the kind of corruption that was rampant in third world countries. But why would someone give Illya art? Bribes work the other way.

“What do you think the pieces represented in the deal?” I asked Lav.

“Who knows? Illya knew how to make money. That's all he knew how to do. The only art he cared about was the shape of a woman's body and even that took second place to the figures printed on money. He wasn't a collector, he didn't care about art. He wanted to make money.”

It was about as clear in my head as what happened last night when I was making psytrance love.

“Undeveloped,” Nadia said.

“Come again?”

“I remember hearing Illya talking to someone about petrol and the pieces. They were talking about a petrol field that hadn't been developed yet.” She raised a hand to block my next question. “That's all I know. None of it matters. I have the pieces, you have a buyer. Look at the pieces. Make an offer.”

I walked over to examine the artifacts. It didn't surprise me that all three were images from Hindu mythology. Or that one was an obvious fake.

The fake was a statue of the god Hari-Hara. Unlike the Roman god Janus, which had duplicate faces on the same head, Hari-Hara had two different faces: Vishnu, also called Hari, and Siva, called Hara. The effect was called syncretic in art because it was a union of opposing personalities—Vishnu's visage was peaceful and mild because he was worshipped as the protector and preserver of the world and the restorer of moral order, while Siva's countenance was more dynamic because he could be a destroyer and wrathful avenger.

Made of sandstone, about thirty inches high and also mounted on a slab of sandstone, the Hari-Hara had two arms and a broken foot. Despite the typical breakage, it was a magnificent piece that predated the high Angkor period by several centuries, much rarer than an Apsaras or Siva. But I knew instantly it was a fake: I'd seen the original in the Royal Museum in Phnom Penh.

Taksin's work was astonishing. I was surprised though that I couldn't find what I had come to think of as his signature, the little half-moon shape.