Chapter 5
But it was a long way from being beddy-bye time in Manhattan. That busy, high-strung borough was just getting toward the peak of the evening. Fred Markell and his loving wife Janet snoozed on and on in their snug suburban love-nest. Some twenty miles away, in a different but equally posh suburb, Jack Donovan and his ever-loving were also wrapped in the arms of Morpheus.
But Manhattan was still swinging.
Particularly a blonde chick named Anita.
Let's follow Anita around for a while. Let's see her make her rounds. It's instructive, because Anita was typical of a whole slew of young, bosomy wenches then at their busiest in the high-living isle of Manhattan.
We last saw her at five minutes after ten, waving a cheery goodbye to Fred Markell, whom she had just loved, to his extreme satisfaction. She closed the room door gently behind her, walked down the plush, brightly carpeted corridor to the elevator, pushed the button, and moments later was being whizzed at a high speed toward the lobby.
It was eight and a half minutes after ten when she emerged on East Fifty-Second Street, after a leisurely stroll past the gleaming jewelry and perfume displays in the hotel lobby. Anita had some time to kill, now. Her next appointment was at eleven o'clock, on 69th Street near Fifth Avenue. So she had the better part of an hour to use up.
She strolled slowly northward, walking with the fluid grace that endeared her to so many men. She was in a good mood. She knew she had pleased her latest client, Freddy, and that made her feel good. She liked to please men. She liked to make them tingle all over. Especially, she liked to have them telephone her for repeated appointments. A call girl needs a regular clientele. She doesn't like to have to depend on new trade all the time. She likes to have a hard core of steady, dependable, well-heeled Johns who can be counted upon to make use of her services twice a month at the very least.
After all, Anita knew that she was at the peak of her earning capacity now She was twenty years old, and she would stay twenty years old for the next seven months The bloom of youth was still upon her. She hadn't grown hard and flinty-eyed.
She knew that she could manage to keep her fresh, buoyant, youthful look for perhaps three more years. She had already been in the life nearly two years, and everyone agreed that five years was just about the limit for a girl's youth. After that, a kind of whorishness rapidly set in, and there was nothing she could do about H.
So Anita knew that right now she was in the greatest demand she'd ever have. She was young and lovely, and men would eagerly pay $25 a tumble for her, $100 for all night, with extras for specialties.
That time wouldn't last forever, she knew.
From age twenty-five to age thirty she could depend on a different kind of appeal. Not the dewy-eyed, almost virginal appeal she had now, but a more sophisticated, a more brittle kind of lure. During those years, if she was lucky, she could command pretty much the same sort of rate she was getting now.
But after thirty things would change.
Then she would be an old tramp, and it would start to show. She would have to cut her rates, to go in more for rough trade and way-out specialties. If all went well, she would still be drawing $15 a toss, $50 for all night when she was thirty-five, but pickings would get leaner and leaner, unless she had found herself a rich daddy along the way. And after thirty-five-
Anita didn't look that far ahead. She firmly planned to be retired by the time she reached the Serutan brigade. She knew a couple of old tramps, one who was forty-six and still pounding the pavements, she was determined not to end up that way. She wanted to be independently wealthy by the time that day came. So Anita was thrifty. Anita saved. Anita kept one eye cocked firmly on the future.
Anita understood thrift. She had it all worked out. Her income was in the neighborhood of $25,000 a year, cash. She didn't pay any income taxes-why pay tax on something that was illegal to begin with?-and so she only had her overhead to contend with.
The overhead was considerable. There was her wardrobe, which had to be the best and latest of everything. There was the expense of hairdressers. There was rent on her stylish East Side apartment. There was food and entertainment, of course, and sundry expenses, and a certain amount of reserve to be kept against the possibility of needing an operation some day.
Even so, Anita found that she only needed about half her income to live on. The rest got socked away. $12,000 a year going into savings would give her close to $150,000 by the time she was thirty, and that was a nice little nut to retire on. Invested smartly-and her clientele numbered a few topnotch brokers who were helping her put the money where it would thrive-she could count on a steady income of maybe $7,000 a year, without having to work. By turning a trick now and then, she could pick up a few grand more, and that would be enough to let her live comfortably, free from all economic security.
It was a wonderful dream. It was worth getting made twenty times a week to work toward a dream like that.
Anita sauntered up Third Avenue. At 58th Street, she came to a bar she knew, a respectable place where she could go in and have a drink without complications.
Buying a drink in Manhattan pub is more difficult for a prostitute than most outsiders would imagine. Some bars including most of the high-class ones, simply will not admit an unescorted woman. In other bars, walking in unescorted meant that Anita would be subjected to twenty propositions in the next fifteen minutes, since it was understood that the only reason a girl would go into a bar alone was to make a pick-up.
Anita never made pick-ups in bars. She thought it was vulgar and sleazy. She did all her business by telephone, using word-of-mouth to spread her fame. So when she went into a bar, it was for the simple and uncomplicated purpose of buying a drink.
Which meant there were only a certain few reliable bars that she could enter without fear of difficulties.
This was one of them. The clientele tended to be high-level and sedate, and the place was clean, and nobody made passes at unescorted girls. Anita went in.
She smiled at Lonnie, the night bartender. Lonnie smiled at her.
"How's tricks, kid?"
"No complaints."
"Got some time to run into the back room with me for a quickie, Anita?"
She smiled at the bartender's feeble joke. Lonnie was an abnormal, and boasted that he had never touched a woman's bare body in his life. She was the only woman he liked to talk to, because he knew he was in no danger from her.
Anita said, "Negroni, Lonnie."
He winked at her. "Sorry. All out of campari tonight."
"Run next door and borrow some, then." He produced the bottle. "Only kidding, keed."
"Big joker."
He mixed the bitter cocktail. Anita sipped it slowly, keeping an eye on the glowing clock behind the bar. It was half past ten, now. She still had lots of time. She finished the cocktail, left a dollar and a half on the counter, winked at the barkeep, and went out.
The temperature had dropped a little in the past fifteen minutes. A chilly wind was blowing down Third Avenue out of the Bronx. Anita pulled her jacket a little more tightly around her. Winter was on its way, she thought in annoyance, and wondered if she could find a sugar daddy who would take her down to the Caribbean for a while. She had worked that gambit last year, going off for two and half blissful weeks in Jamaica in dead of winter as the hired companion of a balding, paunchy, just-divorced sweater manufacturer named Feldstein. A pity she couldn't swing the same deal again this year. But Feldstein was dead, cut down by a cerebral hemorrhage while working a double play with two of Anita's pals in an East Side hotel room. Anita had heard the story the next day. At least Feldstein had died the way a man ought to, succumbing to a stroke after his sixth round of the night. But that sure put the kibosh on another trip to Jamaica when winter came rolling in.
At 65th and Third, Anita halted in front of a shadowy figure lurking in the doorway of a bank. She recognized the other woman-an aging call girl named Tammie, who had lost her figure and had come upon hard times. Tammie shivered in the doorway, a thin, pallid figure. She was only thirty-two, but she had gone to the well a few thousand times too often, and signs of wear showed in her face, in her eyes. She looked fifty.
"How's it going?" Anita asked.
"Lousy. I turned one trick tonight, around seven. A stinking ten bucks. Since then nothing. Just a chill from this goddamn wind."
Anita shrugged. "Maybe your luck'll change. The night's not over yet."
Tammie spat wearily. "My luck's never gonna change, kiddo. If I had a pair of boobs like yours, I'd make out. But look at me. Just look at me."
Tammie threw open her jacket. Her blouse was open, underneath, she wore no bra. For a moment the street-lamp gleamed brilliantly on Tammie's breasts, small, dangling, pale, out-curved breasts, shrunken and fallen. An old woman's breasts, and she was still young. Anita had to struggle to keep from showing her disgust.
Tammie covered herself again.
Anita said, "You'll catch cold."
"If I'm lucky I'll get pneumonia and die. If Pm lucky. I envy you, Anita. Big boobs like yours. The men must fall all over themselves for you." The tone changed from a bitter one to a wheedling one. "Say, look, Anita, you think you could let me have five, just for a couple of days?"
"Sure," Anita said. "Here."
She thrust a bill at Tammie, managed a pale smile, and walked on. Anita never refused when some unhappy prostitute asked for a small handout. What the hell, she figured she didn't need the money that badly, and the donation was a kind of offering to the gods of whoredom, a gift to ensure that the same thing wouldn't happen to her. Not that Anita seriously thought it would. Tammie had told stories of her own girlhood, ten, fifteen years ago-endless parties, high on pot and sneaky pete, getting made twenty, thirty times a night, taking on whole gangs, whole men's clubs. And, of course, spending the money as fast as she made it, sometimes faster. Small wonder she had ended up on Crud Street. I won't let it happen to me, Anita thought-
She walked on.
It was a quarter to eleven, now. A few minutes later she was at the corner of 69th and Third, and she walked eastward through the silent streets, across Lexington, across Park, across Madison, until finally she was drawing close to Fifth Avenue. She knew these streets well. Her clientele came almost entirely from the area bounded by 72nd Street on the north, 47th Street on the south, the East River Drive on the east, and Fifth Avenue on the west. That was where the money lived, in New York City, and Anita was strictly a carriage-trade item.
Her trick for eleven o'clock was at the home of a gentleman named J. Edward Coleridge, who happened to be a very important vice-president at one of New York City's most important commercial banks. He was one of Anita's regulars. He was fifty-seven years old, a tall, strapping man who looked a little younger than he actually was. His hair was iron-gray, his eyes were steely and firm. He drew $37,000 a year in salary from the bank, and had a private income of about twice that much more, derived from investments his grandfather had made sixty years before. J. Edward Coleridge had no economic need to work, and never had. He worked because it was his family's tradition to work, and not merely to sit around clipping coupons.
He lived in a four-story town house that had belonged to his father before him. It was a magnificent dwelling, which he knew he could sell on a week's notice for $200,000 and up. It contained a magnificent library of rare books, none of which J. Edward Coleridge had ever read, and a fine collection of mounted rhinoceros, tiger, and buffalo heads, none of which J. Edward Coleridge had been directly responsible for killing, and sumptuous Florentine furniture, and a great many paintings by minor Old Masters, and even one or two Monets and Renoirs.
J. Edward Coleridge lived alone. That is, unless you considered his various servants, which he never did. He had been married-at the age of twenty-three, to a lovely virgin from a socially prominent family-but the marriage had been quietly annulled ten years later, and since that time J. Edward Coleridge had been without mate. Which is not to say that he had been without sex, of course.
He had had a series of call girls. Every few years, he required a new one, since his tastes changed. The J. Edward Coleridge record was held by a girl named Jessica, who had been his concubine from August, 1937 through May, 1943, and who now, married to a leading New York business man and beginning to grow portly as she entered her fifties, could be seen on display in prominent boxes at the Metropolitan Opera and at Philharmonic Hall.
Anita had been servicing J. Edward Coleridge for eleven months now. She had taken over the account from a girl named Ellen, who had given up the life to become the permanent mistress of a Swiss jeweler. Every Friday night at eleven, without fail, Anita appeared at the town house on East 69th Street, and performed the specific act which J. Edward Coleridge required of her. For this, he gave her $30, always paying her with new, crisp ten-dollar bills that looked as though they had been run off earlier that day. He represented fifteen hundred cookies a year to her, cash on the line and she went out of her way to please him.
Now Anita rang the bell. It was one minute to eleven, the witching hour so far as J. Edward Coleridge was concerned. The door opened almost immediately, as though Coleridge's butler had been waiting behind it, which probably had been the case.
The butler looked almost as much like a rich banker as J. Edward Coleridge himself did. He smiled frostily at Anita and said, "Come in. The master is expecting you."
"Where is he, Lloyds?"
"In the library, as usual. Shall I escort you?"
"It's all right. I know my way by now."
Anita moved through the gloom of the old house, up to the top floor, where the library was located. There was an elevator, but it was so aged and creaky that Anita was afraid of it, and she always walked.
The library was a magnificent room, sixty feet long, twenty feet wide, with windows fifteen feet high. It was lined with books-fifteenth through nineteenth century, nothing later-and with curios-Egyptian mummy cases, Chinese scrolls, Japanese swords.
"Good evening, Anita," J. Edward Coleridge said solemnly.
"Hello, Mr. Coleridge."
He smiled at her, in his reserved, austere way. Anita beamed at him. He stood in the middle of the huge room, his arms folded. He was wearing a sumptuous Japanese silk kimono, another of his heirlooms.
He nodded toward a chair. "All your things are ready, as usual."
"Shall we begin right now, Mr. Coleridge?"
"Right now," he said.
When she was here, Anita never wasted time on small talk, on any of the little professional tricks she employed with other clients. They were all wasted on him. J. Edward Coleridge was all business.
He watched her coldly as she undressed. In a moment, she was nude before him, and his hard eyes glittered as they passed over the heavy mounds of her breasts, the flatness of her belly, the pink, youthful voluptuousness of her buttocks.
Anita let him stare at her for a few moments. Then she began to get into her costume.
She wore the same costume every time. It was a hand-me-down from her predecessor, and for all she knew it had been worn by all of J. Edward Coleridge's women from Jessica on. It was a rather strange costume. It consisted of a one-piece bra and corselet arrangement. Holes had been cut in the bra to let her nipples poke through. The heavy black corselet fit tightly around her body, almost like a suit of armor. It ended abruptly, and was cut sharply in the back to leave the plump cheeks of her buttocks bare.
She also wore a pair of black mesh stockings which she fastened to the straps of the corselet. The area between the middle of her thighs and the beginning of her waist was thus left completely nude, as were her nipples, while the rest of her torso was imprisoned in the tight-fitting corselet. She slipped into it. Then she turned, presenting her back to J. Edward Coleridge, who approached her, rested his hands a moment on her bare buttocks, and then laced the stays in as tightly as she could bear it
"How is it?" he asked her.
"Just right."
"Very well," he said.
He shrugged off his kimono. His get-up underneath was even more grotesque than hers. He wore tight rubber stockings, all the way up his thighs. Around his middle he had wound a coil of thick twine, pulling it so tight that it cut into the flesh. Anita had never seen him without the coil of twine, but she was sure that over the years he had developed gouges there. He was surely fantastically uncomfortable in his strange rig. Aside from the stockings and the coil of rope, he was completely naked.
Gravely, he handed her a whip.
The night's routine was about to begin.
The whip was a flexible cane, two feet long, to one end of which several strips of leather had been mounted. Anita gripped it tightly. J. Edward Coleridge turned away from her, and she lifted the whip high and brought it down across his bare back.
Whack!
Whick!
Smack!
His back was crisscrossed with the marks of thousands of whippings over thirty years. Anita coldly flayed him some more, taking a cruel relish in the way the leather thongs cut into the calloused skin. He winced, and gasped, and shook as she punished him, whipping not only his back and shoulders but his buttocks too, and his arms, and the backs of his legs.
It went on for fifteen minutes, until Anita's arm ached and her body was covered with sweat. Some nights he took twenty or even thirty minutes of whipping, never even whimpering as she blazed away. But tonight was one of the shorter turns.
"All right," he said finally. "Now give me the whip, Anita."
She handed it to him and turned her back. "Bend over," he ordered.
She did so. Her bare buttocks, beneath the cutting edge of the corselet, went taut. She held her breath. Some nights he could be really violent, other times he was content simply to crack the whip at her without even touching her.
Suddenly, as it always did, his icy Wall Street reserve cracked, and from his mouth came a stream of wild accusations.
"Witch! Tramp! Tart!"
With each word, he brought the whip up and flicked it down. The first two blows hit the floor near Anita's feet; the third whicked glancingly across the bare, quivering flesh of her buttocks; the fourth did not touch her; the fifth nicked her again. Her body was her fortune, and she had made it clear right at the outset that he couldn't be allowed to mar her or scar her in any way, and so far he had kept his word. But she never knew when he would run wild with the whip and draw blood from her tender buttocks.
She continued to assume the position, and he continued to whip her. Most of his blows hit the floor, or else landed on the stout back of her corselet, where she was unable to feel them. Only four or five times did he actually strike her on the buttocks, and then not painfully.
Finally came the sound she was waiting for: the sound of the whip-handle landing on the floor as he discarded it. She turned, and in the same gesture pivoted and sank to the floor, her legs sprawled.
J. Edward Coleridge stood above her, and for the first time that evening his desire rose. For it was only when this grim farce was acted out that he became potent at all. Unless Anita immediately received him when he was ready, the act of passion became impossible for him.
He threw himself upon her.
For a long moment their bodies thrashed on the floor, the marble cold against Anita's bare, beaten buttocks. He jammed tight against her, thrusting with fury and fierce energy, and there was the strange grating sound of his coiled twine scratching against her corselet, a sound that always reminded Anita of two crickets mating, and then suddenly he gasped and clung to her tightly and put his mouth over one of the nipples jutting through the corselet, and with quick ecstasy his body went rigid and Anita felt his fulfillment, and then it was over, and he rose from her and donned his kimono and went out of the room without a word.
Anita waited. A moment later he returned, and there was the smell of liquor on his breath now, for he always gulped a drink of brandy when he went out of the room He helped her off with the corselet. He passed his hands lightly over her as she stood nude before him. He gently kissed each rigid little nipple.
He smiled. "Thank you," he said. "Until next Friday-"
He left the room again. Anita dressed, aware that he was watching through a hidden peepole as she covered her nudity. When she was fully dressed, she left, and on the way out the butler handed her three brand new ten-dollar bills. It was just midnight.
Anita had one more trick to turn that evening, in a room at the Waldorf-Astoria, at one. She stopped off for another drink before arriving, and took care of the $25 job with her usual professional dispatch. It was an advertising man from out of town, an ordinary guy with no special ways of making love, for which she was grateful after her session with J. Edward Coleridge.
After her night's work was completed, at two that morning, Anita journeyed on to a bar on East 53rd, near Fifth, where she could be pretty sure of making a pickup.
What's that? Anita never made pick-ups in bars, you thought?
She never made them for professional purposes. She never picked up men in bars.
But women were a different thing entirely. Anita slept with men for money, but she slept with women for pleasure. And the bar on East 53rd Street was a bar frequented by Lesbian call girls, who go there after their night's work is done to pick up a sleeping partner.
Anita had no trouble finding one, of course. She was young and beautiful and in demand.
You knew she was a Lesbian, didn't you? Most call girls are. When sleeping with men becomes a way of life, you have to turn somewhere else for kicks. And Anita was a typical call girl. Anita liked other call girls.
On this typical night, Anita picked up a girl named Louise, a sultry brunette with a 40-inch bosom and swivel hips. They went to Anita's place and had themselves a ball.
While Suburbia slept.