Chapter Five

Lizzy Caprica sat with the erect posture of the trained dancer in her make up station in the back of The Trojan Horse. The other dancers chattered among themselves but their conversation washed over her. She studied her face in the cracked mirror. Said nothing. Thought nothing.

In her station, between the neatly arrayed jars and tubes and brushes, there was a small framed photograph of a white Hindu goddess dancing. Surrounded by leering demons with multiple arms reaching out at her. The goddess’s face was still and serene.

Lizzy studied her face.

Like a broken gong, be still, be silent.

The steady bass and drum beat from ZZ Tops Legs filtered through the thin walls.

Lizzy stood up, her red satin robe open over her sleek body, her breasts high and proud, the ripped line of her belly, the low cut of her thong.

Smiled, licked at her red lipstick, a dart of her pink tongue.

It was time.

***

She opened with Christina Aguilera’s Dirty.

Her regulars lined the runway. Her following seemed to grow every night, and Lance T., the owner, liked to half-joke that he’d have to open a new club just for Lizzy. When he said that, she just smiled, said nothing.

She was a quiet woman when it came to words.

She let her body talk.

Her customers loved to watch her enter. She’d stand, still and small, in the deep part of the stage, while the DJ set up her CD and announced her: “…and here she is, Ms. Lizzy!”

She liked how Christina led into the song, and her body followed it, she dropped the red satin dressing gown in a bloody pool at her feet, threw back her shoulders and flung her long hair like a red wing across her milk white skin, strutted out and kicked into her routine, carefully choreographed with the help of her friend Katey, a professional ballerina…sexy, hot, jazzy, but with lots of kicks and bends to show off her long limbs -- and everything else she had.

Classy, her customers said.

Hot as fucking hell.

They liked how she smiled, but never said anything, never came out to mix with the customers on the floor, never did any lap dances or specials that they knew of. It made each of them feel that when they slipped a one or a five or a ten or a hundred into her thong, that it was from him alone to her alone, and that was the substance of her fantasy, what she sold there every night, the fantasy that when she danced, she danced for each one of them alone.

And she did.

Alone in her head, consumed with music and the rhythm of her body, Lizzy Caprica moved in a world of her own; a world where each gesture of her limb, each thrust of her hips, was an offering to something unseen, something she offered up to a Spirit or a God that was silent as she was, a Spirit that watched her dance, white in the bright lights on the black stage, surrounded by leering men thrusting money at her.

Sometimes when she danced, she would make brief eye contact, just a heart beat’s worth, if there was a particular customer who acted with more decorum, or had a hint of gentleness about him, or sometimes if it was just someone she didn’t recognize.

Like now.

Into Get Busy, a Jean Paul piece, and a glimpse of a long white face, vulpine, and she knew that word, could spell it, use it in a sentence, narrow slitted eyes and just the briefest glimpse of it sent a chill through her, a chill that cut through her sweat warm body, raised goose bumps on her belly, a warning chill, one she was all too familiar with.

At the break, she waved over Kai Song, the Chinese bouncer, and said, “In the back, the big guy, blond hair combed straight back?”

“I see him, Lizzy. Problem with him?” Kai said, his perfectly round and bald head gleaming with sweat.

“I don’t like him.”

Kai tilted his head, a bowling ball in the gutter. It was unusual for the silent beauty, as he thought of her, to speak at all, and he could not ever recall her saying anything about any of the customers.

“I look at him, Lizzy. I tell you what I think.”

“Thank you, Kai.”

Kai moved through the crowd, parting sweaty men like the rod of Moses parted the Red Sea. He looked fat, was not. He stopped ten feet from the table where the big man whose looked bothered Lizzy sat.

This one could be trouble.

Big. At least six feet two inches, maybe more. Two hundred plus, but no fat on him -- broad shoulders cutting down to a lean waist and hips, big hands like spading shovels resting on either side of a half-drinken bottle of Negro Modelo, a small plate with extra wedges of lime beside it. It was the face that bothered him. Long, pointed at the jaw, pale skin with pale blond hair, a long old scar beside the left eye, cold blue eyes.

The eyes were the problem.

Cold, yes. But more than that.

Empty.

Something stirring deep in the back.

Like Lizzy’s eyes, Kai thought.

But mean.

“How you?” Kai said. “Everything all right?”

The man’s thick blond hair was combed straight back like a skull cap. Long. Greasy with some kind of jel. He took his time answering Kai, no expression on his face.

“I am fine. Thank you.”

Accent. Russian, central European, something Slavic.

“We want everybody happy. No problems.”

“No problems from me, my friend. Is there a problem?”

Kai bristled, just a bit. Nothing that the untrained eye would see passed between the two of them, but the lack of fear and due respect from the Russian sent a message, loud and clear.

“No problems. We like it that way. Have a good time.”

Kai stalked away, but at an angle where he could watch the man in the corner of his eye.

He wanted to keep his eye on that one.

Kai went to the dancer’s door, nodded to his Hispanic counter-part Diaz, a spiderweb tattooed across his face, posted beside the door. Went in, stood behind Lizzy who touched her lips with a gloss brush.

“Stay away from that one, Ms. Lizzy,” Kai said. “Tonight, I walk you to your car, maybe follow you home.”

Lizzy’s blue eyes met Kai’s black-brown eyes in the mirror. “He’s a bad man, isn’t he?”

“Very bad, I think. We watch him.”

“Thank you, Kai.”

Kai whispered into his headset terse instructions; a member of the security staff was to keep an eye on the Russian at Table 22 at all times, rotate in and out. Kai himself went back out, stood with his back against the wall to one side of the dancer’s runway, and stared at the Russian, who met his eyes with indifference, and then turned his attention to the next dancer.

A very bad man, Kai thought. A man who hated women but hid it. A dangerous man in a place like this.

 

 

Interlude

There are several varieties of the dark breed of men.

There are some who nurse a hidden rage against women -- maybe something born from their relationships with their mothers, maybe something dark that chose that particular vehicle of flesh to incarnate in -- it comes out in bitterness and resentment sometimes, that women have something that men want, and maybe they hate themselves for being so weak as to want that thing…or maybe it’s because in the face of Every Woman they see That One Woman that did them wrong or harm once upon a time…

You can find that particular dark breed hanging out in porn shops, where they gravitate to the real heavy duty S+M, taking sex tours to Eastern Europe, the new Thailand -- sex clubs and strip clubs, and cruising the streets where prostitutes stroll.

Rough sex leads to violence, rape, and sometimes, murder.

It’s a track as steady and predictable as the arc of a falling star.

Or a fallen angel.

They are dark men, and women in that world learn to sense them, to see past the careful façade the dark men build around them to hide their intention, their desires, their lusts.

It’s a survival skill.