Magdalene (44 page)

He charged out of the chair and away from
me, out of the kitchen, stalked down the hall to the foyer, wiping
his hands down his face, then stalked back. Back and forth, back
and forth, pacing. Muttering names and “that makes sense,” and
“that one, too.”

“Oh, I see,” I called out. “It was all an
intellectual exercise for you, or maybe a spiritual one. All
theory, no reality.”

He stopped and glared at me. Pointed at me.
“You should’ve thought of this.”

“You’re an adult!” I snarled, rising. “You
could’ve asked. You just didn’t want to know.”

“How many?” he growled.

“Men or women?”

His nostrils flared. “Total.”

“A hundred and sixty-four. Congratulations!
Now servicing number one hundred and sixty-five!”

“Cassandra—”

“Don’t. Don’t you
dare
make this an
issue now, Hollander. I have asked you, every step of the way,
if
you’re okay with it,
why
you’re okay with it, and
you gave me all these high-minded Jesus answers and I took you at
your word!” I was screaming. “
Why
would I think you were
lying?”

“I wasn’t lying!” he roared. “I— It
was—”

“What, I wasn’t in your face enough? I
waited for a whole forty-five minutes into our first date to tell
you? Should I have walked into your conference room and said, ‘Hi.
I’m Cassie St. James. In case you didn’t know, I used to fuck
people for money. Let’s get started with this reorganization!’?
Everybody else knew, including
your
best friend who hired me
for the job. Why didn’t
you
know? Why didn’t he tell you?
And are your people so incompetent they couldn’t have rebuilt a
good portion of my client list on their own?
My
people got
your
sexual history!”

“You could’ve given it to me!”

“You never asked!”

“Yes, I di—” He stopped, his chest heaving,
bowed his head to stare at the floor and rifle through his
memory.

“You asked for test results and I sent
them,” I said low, furious. “If you had also asked me for my client
list, I would have given it to you.”

His head popped up to look at me as if to
catch me out in a lie. “On our
second
date? Why?”

“So this,” I screamed, stabbing the point of
my steak knife into the table, “wouldn’t happen! I
trusted
you not to do this. I tried to make sure you understood exactly
what my being a prostitute actually meant. You. Did. Not. Want. To.
Know. And I was too fucking blind to see what you were doing or I
would’ve shoved it in your face at the very beginning.”

“Would you have given it to any other man
who’d asked?”

“Of course not!”

“I didn’t think so. So why would I ask? Why
would I assume
I
was special, considering you were angry
enough to walk out on me?”

“Why wouldn’t you
try
? You didn’t get
where you are by playing it safe!” I stormed toward him then
brushed past him. “Screw the list. Call your lawyer. I’m calling
mine. Yay us. We made it a whole ten days.”

“NO!”

I turned and walked backward. “Why not? I
fucked you. You fucked me. There. I got what I wanted, you got what
you wanted, and you can walk away with your conscience clear
because you married me to do it.
Solemnized—
sanctified
—fornication.” I got to the library,
stepped over the threshold, slammed the d—

“Don’t you
dare
shut that door on
me,” Mitch snarled, his big hand splayed out over the wood, keeping
it from moving an inch, much less slamming. I stood there and
stared at him, captivated. Anger and lust were bound up in the
tension in his big body, and God help me, I wanted him to fuck me
right then, but this was too important.

“You like bad girls,” I murmured. “But not
too
bad. Just bad enough for your comfort zone. Forgivable
ones.
Redeemable
ones. It was okay as long as it was all
rhetoric and you could hide behind
Bishop
Hollander, acting
as my confessor—”

“I AM NOT YOUR CONFESSOR!”

“No,” I shot back. “The man standing in
front of me, pissed off, yelling at me,
jealous
as
hell
—
He
isn’t.
That
guy,
you
,
brilliant and powerful CEO of Hollander Steelworks, savior of the
US steel industry—
You
.
You
are my lover.
Bishop
Hollander is my confessor, the easygoing guy I was
dating who couldn’t be shocked, but never asked for the list
because he didn’t want to know details, just that I was repentant
or...something. And he thought I deserved forgiveness or absolution
or whatever you people call it. Did he
never
understand that
I AM NOT REPENTANT?!”

He opened his mouth, but I pointed at him.
“Don’t you say one more fucking word until I’m done.”

He shut it.

“Let me tell you something, Hollander. You
married a
really
bad girl. I have done things you can’t
imagine, things you don’t even know exist, things I
like
that I will
never
ask you to do—and some things you
can’t
do because you’re not a woman. And I’ve done them with
people you know.

“But
you
, the King of Steel— You want
the same things they did. You want me to take you there and
Bishop
Hollander—God’s low-level project manager—hates that.
You can’t decide who you are. Are you virtuous or are you depraved?
Does our marriage cover everything as long it stays between us, or
are some things still taboo? How far can you go and still be
virtuous? Are you a god or are you a man?

“I don’t want a god in bed with me,
Hollander. I don’t want
God
there, either. I want the King
of Steel in bed next to me,
in
me, and I’ll be damned if I
stick around to watch you turn back into
Bishop
Hollander
when you come in the front door.”

His jaw ground. “I want that list,
Cassandra.”

“You may have a divorce instead.”

“Absolutely not.”

That stopped me. He was enraged over the
reality now that he had names and faces to go with this nebulous
idea of “high-dollar call girl,” but wouldn’t let me go?

“You’re not going anywhere except wherever
you have your black book stashed.”

“Fuck you.
I
don’t jump on your
command.”

“I’ll sue you if you leave me.”

My mouth dropped open and my pussy
contracted with lust. “Sue me?” I laughed. “What the hell for?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Do you doubt me?”

I stared right back at him. “And I will
countersue. You want Cold War II? I’ll give it to you. Mutually
assured financial destruction. The entire money sector will buy
tickets and popcorn to watch you and me slug it out until we’re
both broke.” I approached him then, but he stood firm when I
punched my finger into his sternum. “And then,” I whispered as I
pressed my body against him, pressed my mouth to his chin, “we’ll
come home to our little shack and laugh at them while we make
love.”

He took the bait, but still he held
something back from me in the night, even as angry as he was.

He lazed in bed the next morning watching me
dress in old jeans and one of his rugby shirts. God, how could I be
so sore? I was no virgin. To anything.

“May I come with you?”

I’d expected that. “No. I’m not going to let
you know where I keep it. Not even Nigel knows. You’re just going
to have to trust me to bring you back a complete and unabridged
copy.”

“I do.”

I looked at him sharply. “Who’s speaking?
King or bishop?”

“Both,” he muttered.

“Who did I have sex with all night?”

His mouth tightened and he looked up at the
ceiling. “King.”

“So I was right. His majesty wants to keep
his mistress, but the bishop wants to redeem the bad girl.”

His jaw clenched.

“Who are you, Mitch?”

He said nothing for a second or two. Then
sighed. “I’m a blue-collar union steel worker and a failed
missionary.”

I looked at him then. Really looked, because
I knew he was thinking far beyond our pissing match.

“Everything’s a fight for you, isn’t
it?”

He snorted and gestured at me. “Go read your
own history, lady.”

That made me laugh, and I lay back down in
bed to snuggle up to him. “I like fighting with you.”

“I...like it, too.” I knew that. “You
understand. You can— You catch it and throw it back at me.
Distilled.” He paused. “I’ve never had that.” I knew that too.

“And that lets you decompress.”

“Yeah.” He paused. Kissed my forehead.
“Thank you,” he whispered.

“Any time. I won’t be back until tomorrow
evening.”

“Okay.”

“You still don’t want to know, do you?”

He gulped. “No. But I have to. I’ll have to
change how I do business with these people. I can’t do that without
knowing who they are. I’m— I should’ve asked you for it up front.
You were right. I didn’t want to see it.”

“Because you knew you would know these
people.”

He nodded.

“And his majesty the King of Steel wanted me
and he wasn’t about to let
Bishop
Hollander talk him out of
going after what he wanted.”

“Yes.”

Before I left, I felt the need to inform him
that his golf partner, whom he was to meet in an hour to discuss
the home décor and jewelry line of products, was on my list.

Mitch groaned and pinched the bridge of his
nose. “But,” I said as I sat on the bed to pull on my old running
shoes. “He’s not territorial or the jealous type. He’s totally live
and let live. He had three other mistresses besides me and his
wife, and all five of us are different races and sizes. His problem
is he’s insatiable and needs lots of variety. His wife is very
understanding, but of course, he wore her out, so ‘grateful’ would
be a better word.”

“Good to know,” Mitch mumbled.

“You’d be surprised how many men are like
that.”

“You’d be surprised that I
do
know
how many men are like that.”

“Ah.”

“And women. Thirteen years. I’ve heard it
all.” I looked at him speculatively, and he held up a hand. “I’m
not your confessor. I don’t want to be. If you tell me, it has to
be because you trust me or you’re teaching me or both.”

“You keep
Bishop
Hollander out of
this bed completely, then. Preferably out of the house.”

He sighed. “I’ll try.”

He caught my wrist as I walked by the bed,
and I looked down at him, naked, beautiful. Serious.

“I love you, Cassandra.”

It took me almost four hours to get to
Baltimore, to a small community credit union in a seedy part of
town. I retrieved the boxes of files I had stashed in four separate
safe deposit boxes, asked for directions to the nearest Kinko’s,
and left.

I copied every piece of paper in those
files; it would take Mitch hours to get through it all and when he
was done, he’d know every detail and dirty little secret of some of
the most powerful people in the world.

I barely made it back to the credit union
before five. I was at their door by eight the next morning to
retrieve it all for the last time and close my account. Then I set
out for a bank in Manassas, Virginia.

All that driving gave me time to think, but
I didn’t want to.

Mitch would be the only other person who
would have ever seen these records, but it was only fair.

None of my clients knew I’d kept complete
dossiers on each of them, or rather,
how
complete, until I’d
finished destroying a few lives. People said things in the heat of
the moment, in the afterglow of a session with a sexually
accomplished, seemingly sympathetic and not-terribly-clever or
interested woman. They also talked on their phones in front of “the
help” and especially when “the help” had left the room for any
reason.

I had wired The Bordello with the most
sensitive recording equipment on the market. When the girls were at
school and I had no clients or classes, I transcribed every sound
file myself, painstakingly, learning how to type on a freeware
program.

When I could afford it, I’d hired
investigators to find out more with clues based on my transcripts.
Yes, I knew how to protect myself: from disease, pregnancy,
blackmail, extortion, financial ruin, arrest.

Assassination.

I sighed, feeling some guilt at having
dragged Mitch into the dark well of my life, but it had seemed so
simple at the time. Innocent. Of all the people I’d ever
investigated, Mitch was the only one whose background squared with
the way he lived his life, with honor and integrity, who had no
deep, dark secrets. Thus, I had no qualms about entrusting him with
it.

It didn’t matter now anyway. He wouldn’t let
me go without a fight.

I love you, Cassandra.

My eyes watered and I sniffled, and no
wonder: Everything was starting to bloom. My eyes leaked all
afternoon.

Yet another bank. Yet another random set of
four of the biggest safe deposit boxes they had. Yet another road
trip to relocate my records, as I did periodically anyway.

Mitch met me when I drove onto the estate
that night and his mouth dropped open when I popped the trunk to
reveal four bankers boxes full of files.

“State secrets,” I said matter-of-factly.
“Career-destroying confessions. Peccadilloes. Business deals clean
and dirty. Insider trading, fraud, deceit, murder. I’m sure you’re
actually friends with some of these people, so be very careful
about what you choose to read. If you only want the list of names,
this is it.” I handed him two sheets of paper stapled together.
“You are the only other person besides me who will have read this.
I am trusting you with my life.”