“Go right ahead, don’t stand on formality.”
I made it a double, then turned around. Lotte was standing in the doorway, a cocktail in one hand. She was wearing a full-length wine red satin evening gown that almost covered the ropy network of veins and wrinkles around her neck and a diamond necklace that could have fed half of Queens for six weeks. She was a tiny woman, just a shade over five feet, somewhere in her late fifties, her hair died an expensive but unconvincing platinum, the ravaged face set off by two of the coldest eyes I’d ever seen. They’d fascinated me from our first meeting because they never once seemed to blink; I remember reading that snake’s eyes were like that, which didn’t seem an unlikely comparison.
“You’re looking well, Lotte,” I lied, but her eyes stayed dead as ever.
“The Professor showed me a sketch last night.” Her voice was soft but grating just the same, sibilant as a sudden hiss in the high grass. “I think I’ve seen him.”
They probably had a deal set up already, Lotte would want at least a third of the 5,000 marks to cooperate. Not that I was very optimistic she had anything to cooperate with, but I might as well go through the motions.
“Is he a regular of yours?”
“No, he’s only been here two or three times.” Her face stayed curiously immobile as she talked, even the thin red lips didn’t seem to move. I’d heard somebody had thrown acid in her face years ago and all the skin grafts had made the flesh stiff and masklike. “Actually, he met one of my girls in the park on her free time, he followed her back here. He didn’t even know what the place was. He didn’t like it.”
“He didn’t like it? Why did he pick her up in the first place?”
She took a long sip from her cocktail, the tongue flitting daintily back and forth into the amber liquid.
“He was a talk freak. We get a few like that, he’d just sit in her room and talk to her. Once he took her out for a walk and some ice cream but he had to pay extra for that.”
“Nothing else?”
“Not a filing. I watched through the peephole Once or twice, he’d just sit there talking. Not even dirty.” She shook her sleek fan of phony hair in bewilderment.
“Did you overhear any of their conversation?”
“Just nonsense stuff, once he was telling her some kind of fairy tale I think. Crazy. But his money was good, that’s my only concern.”
“How did he pay? Cash, check?”
“We don’t take checks here, even from regulars. He paid cash.”
“Did he ever give his name?”
“It wouldn’t have meant much if he did, but come to think of it, no, he didn’t. He might have told the kid though.”
“What’s her name?”
“Penny, a pretty good worker. I bought her down South somewhere, but she never had an accent.”
“I’d like to speak to her.”
“Of course you would. The Professor said you were paying two thousand marks reward for information.”
The Professor wasn’t so dumb, after all.
“That’s right, two thousand. If there’s anything to this I’ll arrange a share for you.”
She waved her hand dismissively, some of the cocktail sloshing onto the carpet.
“I make twenty-five hundred marks in one hour here. But there is something you could help me with.” She sat her drink down on an ormolu encrusted sideboard and motioned me toward the door. “Come with me.”
Halfway down the corridor she stopped in front of a door and pressed a button above the lock. A window-like panel slid back to reveal the interior of a room.
“Two-way mirrors. It’s standard, so I can check up on what’s going on, see the clients aren’t overstaying their time, that kind of thing. The peepers like it too. Here, take a look.”
I wasn’t particularly interested in the proceedings at Lotte’s but I walked up and looked over her shoulder. The room was outfitted like a child’s playroom, replete with a large dollhouse, shelves of stuffed animals, a miniature fourposter bed replete with canopy and an assortment of toys. A ribbon-festooned swing was suspended from the ceiling and a little pigtailed girl of eight or nine was riding it, dressed in a fnlly pinafore frock, white socks and shiny patent leather shoes. She was swinging furiously, traversing the length of the room with each arc, and a skinny guy wearing nothing but his socks was whipping her hard each time she passed him. He was laughing a lot and seemed to be enjoying himself, although there wasn’t much of an erection to show for his labors. The kid didn’t look too happy though. She was screaming all the time and the back of her white dress was soaked red with blood. I turned around to Lotte.
“So?”
“So he pays four thousand marks per session, and I could get ten times that if I had some Slavs. We got a house doctor here, he says all the kid can stand is an hour, and she’s not good for a week after that, we have to dope her up and keep her in bed. And on top of that the client is frustrated because he can’t let himself go all the way. He gets his real jollies beating them half to death and then strangling them at the end, the only way he can get it up. We have a lot like that, the Giles de Rais syndrome the doc calls it, whatever that is. But apart from the non-mortality clause in the kid’s contract I can’t throw her away in a one-night stand, she’s got another ten years of earning power between her legs. So I’m screwed, I’m only getting half my potential fee from clients like him.”
I couldn’t see what all this had to do with me.
“Look Lotte, I sympathize with your business problems, but…”
“You’re going to be more than sympathetic, you’re going to do something about them. If you want to talk with Penny.”
So that was it.
“If your protection’s off I’ll check with the precinct…”
“No, no, it’s not that. What I need is Slavs, expendables, at least a half dozen a month, boys and girls between six and fourteen. I can get up to thirty thousand for one fatal session, that adds up to almost two hundred thousand a month. I’ll cut you in for ten percent, plus whatever information you can get out of Penny, so long as you fix it with the breeders.”
So now I was a pimp. All part of life’s rich pageant.
“Look Lotte, if all the VIPs you get here can’t square it why do you think I can? They’ve got a strict regional quota system, particularly the kids, they keep them on the farms for breeding till they’re over eighteen. There’s no reason they’d make an exception for me.”
She lit a pastel colored cigarette and blew a cloud of perfumed smoke in my direction.
“That’s where you’re wrong. I asked around after the Professor showed me the sketch, and my contacts say you’re involved in something big. A letter of authorization from Heydrich himself, I heard mentioned.”
That shit Callender, he’d spread it through half the force by now. Come to think of it, though, I could do just about anything I wanted with that goddamned thing. Except, possibly, stay alive.