LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘Watch me.’ Gustav shakes out a key and shoves it into the door with a decisive rasp. ‘You know perfectly well that I deal best in situations where I have the advantage.’

      ‘We know you’re here, Pierre!’ I call out as the door swings stickily open. I’m still clinging on to the last vestiges of hope that a couple of seconds’ warning will keep him on my side.

      There is no answer. Gustav pushes away from me into the warm, musky darkness.

      So this is the love nest.

      I hover by the door, waiting for Pierre to show himself. I fear that instead of admitting to Gustav that he tried to seduce me, and that in any case I rebuffed him, he’ll stand there, gloating over the feather and all the havoc it’s caused. How he danced with me in Venice. How eager I was. How far he got. How far he wanted to go.

      I feel the sour draught from the stairwell licking across my face as I wait in the dark entrance of the flat. I’m a trespasser. If I go inside, the rip tide will suck me back to that night. How can I ever explain my dirty excitement, how I relished the roughness of this strange, silent faux Gustav, how I lifted my skirts for him, opened my legs, his breeches open to display the extent of his excitement, that peacock feather dancing above my head, how I was begging for it, oh, how close we came to destroying everything?

      Gustav is crashing about somewhere in the flat. I venture inside and feel my way down a hallway. An internal door gives as I fall against it, and a light switches on.

      I’m standing in a black-painted bedroom strewn with clothes and shoes and belts, as if someone has just upended a suitcase. There are no pictures on the walls. Only a series of red-lacquer-framed mirrors. The ceiling is also totally mirrored. A black-painted carved bed dominates the space. It’s unmade, with scarlet pillows dented and punched and scarlet satin covers slipping off the mattress as if someone has just woken up and thrown them back. Hanging off the posts are handcuffs, whips, long chiffon scarves, executioner-style leather masks and muzzles as well as bejewelled and feathered Venetian masks.

      There’s a scent in the air, but it’s not Pierre’s heavy, headachy scent, which I would know anywhere. It’s floral, with an exotic eastern tang of lemongrass and something else. The nostril-pricking aroma of female excitement. Gustav will be able to smell it, too. Maybe even recognise it.

      I stare at the bed and remember what Pierre told me about this very room. As we sipped those strong fig cocktails in the Gramercy Hotel, he described the scene nearly six years ago when Gustav found his wife sitting on his brother’s face – just as she had threatened to do if Gustav ever crossed her – and threw them both out. After a few days in a London hotel, Pierre and Margot had come to New York and lived in this flat. She had kept him here for six months, tied most of the time to this very bed.

      A draught of cold air rushes over my face. The thick curtains billow and I cross the carpet strewn with discarded underwear and stockings. But as I lean out to shut the window, the night air clutches at me. The hot, cluttered room behind me is shoving at my back, urging me to plunge into the dirty alleyway below.

      Don’t be ridiculous. Polly’s in my head again. It’s not haunted. It’s just a bachelor bedroom done out with a tasteless penchant for Chinese brothel motifs. Which is odd, given Pierre’s a designer—

      Well, it feels haunted to me. I close the window and lean my forehead on the glass. I miss Polly. I wish she was right here, like when we were kids, telling me what to do next.

      There’s a tiny creaking sound. The door to the double wardrobe, painted in shiny red lacquer, is half open. I go to push it shut, but an internal light flicks on.

      I expect to see a jumble of Pierre’s trademark leather jackets and jeans hanging there, but instead there’s a rail of immaculate men’s shirts, arranged through the colour spectrum from jaunty pink through deep blue to snowy white. Each sleeve has a sharply ironed crease and is buttoned to the neck.

      The clean laundry smell of starch contrasts with the sluttish mess and manky scent of the rest of the room. The shirts sway under my fingers on their smooth wooden hangers. The last one is a white dress shirt, such as you would wear for a wedding, and as I separate it from the others I see that a silver grey cravat is tied round the wing collar, fastened with a simple silver pin.

      It glistens in the light dancing from the tasselled lampshade above my head. I can’t resist pulling the shirt closer to look at the tiepin.

      This doesn’t belong to Pierre. Because engraved on it are the entwined initials GL.

      ‘My brother has obviously moved some of his dancers in here. Two or three, judging by all this paraphernalia. So it’s group sex he’s into now!’ Gustav calls from up the hall. ‘None of his stuff is in evidence, but there’s knickers, make-up, theatrical costumes everywhere. The place is a tip.’

      Where have I seen those initials before? I know they stand for Gustav Levi, but where have I seen that style of engraving? I turn the pin over, and a cold hand claws at my heart.

      Across the back is the tiny inscription M and G. Forever.

      Gustav is in the corridor, muttering something about a wasted journey, but I can’t move. This is the loving inscription from a bride to a groom, promising permanence. Encapsulated in those curly silver words is their relationship, their marriage, their life. When he was her groom. Not mine.

      Everything Gustav has told me about her, the things Pierre told me about Margot and what she did to him with her whips and handcuffs; it all comes back to me. Those deep voices merging with story after story, trapping me in this overheated, over-furnished, stinking reminder of Margot Levi and the sexual power she had over both the Levi brothers.

      When she had reduced Gustav to a debauched, diminished figure after five abusive years of marriage, Margot took Pierre. Her willing, besotted prisoner. She was the cougar. He was nineteen, easy meat. He’d lusted after her all the time she was married to his brother, fantasised about her when he heard them moaning in the night, and when at last he had her to himself, he probably thought it was for ever too.

       PL and GL.

      I let the shirt nestle back softly against its fellows and close the cupboard. I step backwards and fall back on to the bed. Margot was insatiable, Pierre told me. She couldn’t get enough of him. She would straddle him, or get him to take her from behind, several times a day, tying him, whipping him, drugging him either with dope to make him hornier or Viagra to make him harder, teaching him everything she knew about her world of punishment and pain, the world she once shared with Gustav.

       GL.

      Pierre couldn’t resist tormenting me with the notion that Margot’s particular brand of poison still flowed in Gustav’s veins, too. That after living with, and being married to, a mesmerising, demanding dominatrix like her, no woman would ever be enough for him.

      The woman they both loved once writhed on this bed. I can see her black hair twisting like wire, the nodules of her spine flexing as she knelt up, impaling herself on the hard length of her sex slave. GL, or PL.

      It’s the same image that tortured me in the chalet in Lugano where Gustav took me last winter. I blundered into Margot’s boudoir, thinking it had been cleared, but her stuff was everywhere. Her leather basque and boots invited me to try them on. Her collection of whips hung on their hooks, ready to deliver punishment. In my confusion that day I thought I might become stronger by dressing myself up in Margot’s clothes and in a way I did because, although Gustav went mad with anger when he found me, the anger turned, very quickly, into lust, and that’s the night when he first fucked me.

      I know where I’ve seen those initials before. I yank open the wardrobe again. The same style of engraving was on the silver cufflink I found in the master bathroom in Lugano. Gustav declared that a cufflink without its pair was worse than useless. He told me that he had disposed of it, along with every other gift from Margot.

      I snatch at the sleeve of the white dress shirt. One cuff is unfolded and bare. Fastened

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