No, I decided. The patrols here had a lived in look. I was pretty sure this was their regular security.
Hoping that things wouldn’t play out that way, I drove four blocks away, parked, hailed a cab and had the taxi drop me at the club. I couldn’t risk that the guards would have a list of all of the tag numbers of regular members.
With my Wayfarers on and just enough indolent slouch in my walk, I strolled past the gate and entered through the massive front doors. They had a doorman in a tuxedo right inside. He was roughly the size of Godzilla and I had to lean back to look up at him. He gave me a quick up-and-down appraisal and shifted to stand between me and the door.
“May I help you, sir?”
I pulled the card out and held it up between two fingers. “Been a long day,” I said casually, “and I hear a martini calling to me.”
He was well-trained. His scowl became an agreeable smile and he stepped aside to allow me access to a key-swipe station mounted to one side of a second set of doors. I kept a bland smile on my face but held my breath as I fitted the card into the slot and swiped it.
The little red light on the station blinked from red to green. There was a faint click behind the door, and the doorman’s smile became less artificial and more genuine. He pushed the door open for me.
“Have a glorious evening, sir,” he said.
“Count on it,” I assured him as I stepped through the doors and entered the belly of the beast.
The club was pretty much as you’d expect. It was shadowy as a closet, an effect insured by low-wattage indirect lights and lots of dark wood. The motif was, apparently, early dungeon. Wrought iron fixtures, low couches, rough stone walls, rich draperies hung from brass rods. As I passed one of these I glanced at it and then gave it a double-take. What I first thought was a hunting scene of mounted riders, a dog pack and a bunch of frightened deer was actually something a lot less enchanting. The riders all wore burgundy-colored robes, the dogs looked half-starved and ravenous, and the ‘prey’ were men and women scurrying on all fours. Naked, some with antlers tied to their heads. The tapestry was old and woven from thick, rich threads, so it was hard to tell much about the people on all fours…except that the more I stared at them the younger they all looked.
I said, very softly, “Uh oh.”
I made myself turn away from the tapestry to study the room.
There were probably forty men in there. Most of them were dressed in expensive suits. A few had loosened their ties; a few others wore Polo shirts like mine. None of the customers were women. This was clearly a men’s club. Not sure I’d go as far as ‘gentlemen’, though.
The wait-staff were women of a type. Busty, leggy, barely dressed and very young. If any of them was older than nineteen then I was the Tsar of Russia.
I wondered how many of them were even eighteen.
For a few seconds I debated short-cutting this whole thing by making a call to the cops and Child Protection Services. Maybe the press, too. Blow it open. Pedophilia is not a popular crime, not for the common guy on the street. People will sometimes look the other way if politicians or white collar criminals run money scams, or take kick-backs, but when it comes to sex with kids, my fellow citizens have a very admirable tendency toward pitchforks and torches. Look what happened with Penn State. Look what’s happening with all those priests.
But what could I prove?
I mean, right here, right now, what could I prove? That there are possibly underage girls showing their breasts and serving drinks? The news might like that, but I doubted I could get a warrant happening.
And if Bambi was here, then it might encourage the bad guys to dispose of any evidence. That girl was evidence.
So I drifted through the place and pretended to be a part of the debauch. I obtained a drink as protective coloration. I exchanged a few words with other ‘members’. We talked sports, we talked politics. We talked stocks and investments.
Nobody mentioned Moloch. Nobody mentioned dead girls.
I noticed that nobody used names. They didn’t offer or ask names.
There was a small stage at the far end of the cavernous main room. When I’d come in, a redhead was beginning a veil dance. She discarded about a dozen of them until she was stark naked. There was some mild applause and she gathered up the gossamer scraps and trotted lightly off. Then the lights changed and I saw a lot of the men shift their attention more seriously to the stage. Two women came out. Twins with masses of blond hair. They wore stylized bullfighter costumes. Then a pair of very large Latinos came out, both of them wearing bull horns. A small band began playing dramatic bullfight music, and the foursome launched into a variation of the paso doble. But instead of the man acting as bullfighter and the woman, with her swirling skirts, acting as his cape, the men were the bulls and the women the toreadors. They were all pretty good dancers and for a moment I thought that this was a surprising bit of real art in this place. But then the horns of the bulls caught on pieces of the women’s costumes. With each lunge and twist the clothing was torn away, gradually revealing a lot of flesh and turning the women from bullfighters to helpless victims. The bullish men began stripping away sections of their costumes, particularly their pants. I saw where this was going and turned away. I like sex as much as the next four guys, but the theme of this had rolled down hill into a presentation of female defeat and use. I wanted no part of that.
There was a wooden apron that ran around the outside of the main room, with several hallways and doors leading off from there. As the action onstage grew more heated and the club’s members became more focused upon it, I faded to the back and began looking for a door I could open.
Movement to my left made me pause and I saw one of the men get up and walk toward the back of the big room. He threw a few glances over his shoulder at the increasingly X-rated action on stage, but I got the impression he was leaving. He didn’t head for the door, though. Instead he made for a hallway that cut off out of sight on the far corner. A few seconds later another man followed. And another.
It wasn’t an exodus. Only a small percentage of the customers vanished down that hallway. The rest were staring with total attention at the sweaty spectacle on the stage. The timing of it all seemed odd to me. That many guys couldn’t need to use the bathroom at the same time; an assumption supported by the fact that the men didn’t return. As I moseyed nonchalantly in that direction I could see that there was another guard just inside the mouth of the hallway, and beyond him was a door with the same key-swipe station as outside.
If I had spider sense it would have been tingling.
I watched a couple of guys to see what the routine was. They approached the hall, flashed something to the guard, then swiped their keycard and passed through the locked door. It took me three or four times before I realized that all they were showing was their red cards. Nice.
I waited for a moment when no one else was heading that way and I stepped into the hallway, flashed my red card, got a terse nod from the guard, swiped my card, and stepped through the doorway.
That easy.
As soon as I was inside I met a second security guard. He was even bigger than the Godzilla at the front door. Where do they get these guys? Thugs’R’Us?
He smiled at me. “Good evening, brother.”
Since I didn’t know what else to say, I returned his smile as I walked over to him. “Am I late? Have they started yet?”