“Will you stay?” she asked quietly.
I knew that any argument would strike her as just more noise she could not bear. It would clang like cymbals, only add lo the mindless cacophony she was so desperate to escape.
And so I said, “All right.”
With no further word, she swallowed the pills two at a time, washing them down with quick sips of vodka.
“I don’t know what to say to you, Veronica,” I told her when she took the last of them and put down the glass.
She curled under my arm. “Say what I said to Douglas,” she told me. “In the end it’s all anyone can offer.”
“What did you say to him?” I asked softly.
“I’m here.”
I drew my arm tightly around her. “I’m here,” I said.
She snuggled in more closely. “Yes.”
“And so you stayed?” my friend asked.
I nodded.
“And she… ?”
“In about an hour,” I told him. “Then I dressed and walked the streets until I finally came here.”
“So right now she’s…”
“Gone,” I said quickly, and suddenly imagined her sitting in the park across from the bar, still and silent.
“You couldn’t stop her?”
“With what?” I asked. “I had nothing to offer.” I glanced out the front window of the bar. “And besides,” I added, “for a truly dangerous woman, a man is never the answer. That’s what makes her dangerous. At least, to us.”
My friend looked at me oddly. “So what are you going to do now?” he asked.
At the far end of the park a young couple was screaming at each other, the woman’s fist in the air, the man shaking his head in violent confusion. I could imagine Veronica turning from them, walking silently away.
“I’m going to keep quiet,” I answered. “For a very long time.”
Then I got to my feet and walked out into the whirling city. The usual dissonance engulfed me, all the chaos and disarray, but I felt no need to add my own inchoate discord to the rest.
It was a strangely sweet feeling, I realized as I turned and headed home, embracing silence.
From deep within her enveloping calm, Veronica offered me her final words.
I know.
2005
ANDREW KLAVAN
HER LORD AND MASTER
Andrew Klavan (1954-) was born in New York City, the son of popular radio disc jockey and talk show host Gene Klavan. He received a business degree from the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to the New York area to work as a news writer, reporter, book reviewer, and mystery novelist. His first novel, Face of the Earth (1980), was published when he was twenty-six, three years after it was completed. He has gone on to write more than twenty additional novels of mystery, crime, horror (The Uncanny, 1998), psychological suspense (Man and Wife, 2001), and, most recently, international terror (Empire of Lies, 2008). He has been nominated for four Edgar Allan Poe Awards by the Mystery Writers of America, winning twice: for Mrs. White (1983), coauthored with his brother, the novelist and playwright Laurence Klavan, under the pseudonym Margaret Tracy; and The Rain (1988), under the pseudonym Keith Peterson. He was also nominated for Best Novel for Don’t Say a Word (1991) and for Best Short Story for “Her Lord and Master” (2005). Stephen King once described him as “the most original American novelist of crime and suspense since Cornell Woolrich.” Klavan adapted his novel True Crime (1995) for a film of the same title that starred and was directed by Clint Eastwood in 1999. Two years later he wrote the screenplay for Don’t Say a Word, which starred Michael Douglas. He also wrote the screenplay for Simon Brett’s A Shock to the System (1990).
“Her Lord and Master” was written many years before it was published, his agent refusing to submit it because of its controversial subject matter. It was first published in the anthology Dangerous Women (New York: Mysterious Press, 2005), and was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2006.
It was obvious she’d killed him, but only I knew why. I’d been Jim’s friend, and he’d told me everything. It was a shocking story in its way. I found it shocking, at any rate. More than once, when he confided in me, I’d felt the sweat gathering under my collar, on my chest. Goose bumps, and what in a more decorous age we would have called a “stirring in the loins.” Nowadays, of course, we’re supposed to be able to talk about these things, about anything, in fact. There are so many books and movies and television shows claiming to shatter “the last taboo” that you’d think we were in danger of running out of them.
Well, let’s see. Let’s just see.
Jim and Susan knew each other at work, and began a relationship after an office party, standard stuff. Jim was Vice President in charge of Entertainment at one of the larger radio networks.
“I don’t know what my job is,” he used to say, “but by gum I must be doing it.” Susan was an Assistant Manager in Personnel, which meant she was the secretary in charge of scheduling.
Jim was a tallish, elegant Harvard grad, thirty-five. On the job, he had a slow, thoughtful manner, a way of appearing to consider every word he spoke. Plus a way of boring into your eyes when you spoke, as if every neuron he had was engaged in whatever tedious matter you’d brought before him. After hours, thankfully, he became more satirical, more sardonic. To be honest, I think he considered most people little better than idiots. Which makes him a cockeyed optimist, if you ask me.
Susan was sharp, dark, energetic, in her twenties. A little thin and beaky in the face for my taste, but pretty enough with long, straight, black, black hair. Plus she had a fine figure, small and compact and gracefully, meltingly round at breast and hip. Her attitude was aggressive, funny, challenging: You gonna take me as I am, pal, or what? Which I think disguised a certain defensiveness about her Queens background, her education, maybe even her intelligence. In any case, she could put a charge in your morning, striding by in a short skirt, or drawing her hair from her mouth with one long nail. A Watercooler Fuck, was the general male consensus. In those sociological debates in which gentlemen are prone to discuss how their various female colleagues and acquaintances should be coupled with, Susan was usually voted the girl you’d like to shove against the watercooler and take standing up with the overnight cleaning crew vacuuming down the hall.
So at a party one February at which we celebrated the launch and certain failure of some new moronic management scheme or other, we watched with glee and envy as Jim and Susan stood together, talked together, and eventually left together. And eventually slept together. We didn’t watch that part, but I heard all about it later.
I’m a news editor, thirty-eight, once divorced, seven years, two months and sixteen days ago. Sexually, I think I’ve pretty much been around the block. But we’ve all pretty much been around l he block these days. They probably ought to widen the lanes around the block to ease the traffic. So, at first, what Jim was telling me brought no more than a mild glaze of lust to my eyes, not to mention the thin line of drool running unattended from the corner of my mouth.
She liked it rough. That’s the story. Now it can be told. Our Susan enjoyed the occasional smack with her rumpty-tumpty. Jim, God love him, seemed somewhat disconcerted by this at first. He’d been around the block too, of course, but it was a block in a more sedate neighborhood. And I guess maybe he’d missed that particular address.
Apparently, when they went back to his apartment, Susan had presented Jim with the belt to his terrycloth bathrobe and said, “Tie me.” Jim managed to follow these simple instructions and also the ones about grabbing her black, black hair in his fist and forcing her mouth down on what I will politely assume to be his throbbing tumescence. The smacking part came later, after he’d hurled her bellyward onto his bed and was ramming into her from behind. This, too, at her specific request.