The Deceivers Read online

  Relaxing wasn’t an option, but I tried to smother my panic and think about what I’d say if the police suddenly barged in and started questioning me in Cambodian. Do they rape women in Cambodian jails, I wondered. In a country where human life counted for so little and young girls supported families by spreading their legs, it didn’t seem likely that these cops would respect a woman’s body.

  Would they understand if I asked for the American embassy? Would they care even if they understood?

  Jesus.

  The girl applied a light coat of warm oil as her hands glided over me. The oil had the same tropical fruit smell as the lobby, but it wasn’t an unpleasant scent. The warm, gentle touch felt good. Rather than kneading my back, her fingers danced, delicate strokes on my naked skin.

  Surprised and relieved that she could actually do a massage, I closed my eyes and tried to relax. If the police came in, maybe I’d just act sleepy. Yeah, that would fool them. Just keep my eyes shut as they jerked me off the bed and did whatever they do to a woman who just killed a man.

  The girl’s hands were really quite wonderful, moving smoothly from my shoulders down to the small of my back and up again, barely touching my skin even when applying oil. The spasms stopped as the tension in my back faded, but my jaw was still tight as I listened for sounds of police boots in the corridor.

  How do I get myself into these things?

  This wasn’t the first time in my life that I found myself in a foreign country and in danger … but it never should have happened again. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice … shame on me. I walked into it with both eyes wide closed. It was my fault, no one else’s. Bait was put out and I jumped for it. I should be home in my Manhattan apartment with my feet up, watching the evening news, not making the news in a small, poor, corrupt country on the other side of the world.

  The country still had millions of land mines left over from decades of war and I felt as if I’d stepped on one.

  The girl pulled the towel off of me as she worked my tush with a little more firmness. Some people didn’t like having their bodies touched, but I loved massages. When I was in the money, I had several a week. The soothing rhythmic kneading always helped me relax and think; besides, getting my rear end and thighs worked was serious business as cellulite built up and things started a southern drift.

  The girl’s hands moved to the inside of my thighs and flowed down below my knees to the soles of my feet. I gave a little sigh as she worked her thumbs into the bottom of my feet. Reflexology on the feet and hands was supposed to relieve stress and promote healing to other areas of the body.

  She said something in Cambodian and signaled me with her hand to turn over and I rolled to lie faceup.

  Her thong was gone, exposing a neatly trimmed sheath of fine pubic hair, as shiny as the coat of a black cat. She was completely naked now.

  “Just massage,” I warned her.

  The girl bobbed her head and pointed at the sign as she spoke. Again I only caught the word “massage,” but I hoped she understood. It was hot and humid in the room, not surprising since it was a tropical country. Maybe taking off her clothes was her way to cool off.

  I closed my eyes again and tried to tune out my fears that the police were going to kick open the door at any moment.

  Each passing minute gave me a little more hope that I wasn’t going to be arrested, that the only thing between me and safety was a taxi ride to my hotel to pick up my passport before the cabbie dropped me at the airport and I took the next flight that went anywhere out of Cambodia.

  She applied oil to my face, gently caressing my forehead and temples, moving down to my cheeks, working the tension in my jaw area with the delicate tips of her fingers before she moved down to my neck. The fluid strokes were comforting, but didn’t calm my brain. You don’t soothe away death with a gentle caress.

  Art and money … the sources of all my troubles. A love of art and the desire to have material things. Art was number one in my heart. Whether artists created their works yesterday or a thousand years ago, they imbued it with an essence from their own human spirit. That spirit shined and touched our hearts and minds when we viewed it. I’ve never stood in the Louvre and gazed at the Venus de Milo without getting goose bumps. That feeling wouldn’t come if it was just a piece of cold, dead marble. I got that same feeling when I looked at other exquisite works of art.

  Artifacts from ancient times were wonders to me, cultural treasures that had to be protected from the ravages of time and people. Protecting them wasn’t always easy. Because of their priceless rarity, they not only roused greed in people, but a desire bordering on lust, sometimes powerful enough to incite murder. I know from personal experience how many of the seven deadly sins these priceless objects wrought.

  At times like this I wondered why I hadn’t become a lawyer or doctor, even a nun—anything to have kept from getting involved in the international game of art where billionaires called the shots and the only rule was that anything went when they wanted a museum piece.

  I really screwed up my life. If there was only one pile of poop in the world, I’d find it and step in it. And there’d be a land mine under it.

  The girl’s fingers trickled down the outside of my thighs while her other hand danced on my abdomen. It felt good …

  Her palm gracefully slid over my genitals at the same time she squeezed my breast. I froze. My eyes snapped open.

  She used that massage phrase again and bobbed her head at the sign she’d indicated earlier. I followed her gaze. The sign was a mishmash of languages. Besides the Cambodian one, I recognized French, English, and German.

  The English version said a massage was $5. Under it in small print: “Exotic Massage $10.”

  I had paid twice over for an exotic massage. I didn’t need a translation to realize what “exotic” meant.

  The girl caressed the tip of my nipple and it immediately got hard.

  Her other hand cradled my pubic area, her fingers stroking the erogenous zone in an up-and-down fluid motion, brushing over my clit.

  I’d read somewhere that straight women didn’t have the same prejudice about having sex with other women that straight men did about having sex with other men … it’s just that in general women preferred men for cultural and reproduction reasons.

  It sounded like something a man had thought up—probably one who got off watching two women making love.

  Good Lord—here I was in a foreign country, on the run from the police, getting stroked by a teenage prostitute in a whorehouse.

  And my nipples got hard.

  I am truly a damaged person.

  NEW YORK

  Two Weeks Earlier

  3

  Rainy days and Mondays always get me down played in my head as I came out of a grocery store and into a downpour. The Carpenters’s song summed up my feelings. Rainy days made me melancholy even though the city always smelled cleaner afterward, a layer of urban rot washed away. But now that I was back to struggling for basics after ten years of hard work and success, rain made me a little glum and dispirited. Maybe because it forced me to stay in my little postage-stamp apartment and stare at the four walls most of the time.

  I thought about that attitude as I came out of the store and found the sprinkle that had been coming down when I went in was now a downpour. Nothing negative in my life, was my new mantra. Rain or shine, I was going to have a positive attitude. I wasn’t going to let anything keep me down; not the rain, the song, or the bitter turns my life had taken. I’m not down, I’m just on my way up from scraping bottom …

  But broke and out of work were understatements. Crash and burn better described my situation. I had been the head curator for a small, very rich museum. I lost my big paying job, my park-view penthouse, and all the social-economic accoutrements of having “made it” when I innocently got swept into a crooked art purchase for the museum.

  Being “not guilty” didn’t count after I paid over fifty million dollars for
a Babylonian piece that turned out to have been looted during the sack of the Baghdad museum when American forces entered the city. The dead bodies that started popping up in the wake of the purchase didn’t help, either.

  I made it once and I’d be back on top again. I’d have to work even harder than I did the first time, but I wasn’t afraid of hard work. When opportunity arose, I’d grab it. My father used to say that a great lesson in life was never to be a standing target but to roll with the punches life threw. That’s what I was doing now—rolling with the punches so I could get back on my feet.

  “I can take it!” I told the rain. That was my expression of the power of positive thinking. I could make things happen, but I had to keep myself in a good place.

  Despite my positive thoughts and the good luck crystal I’d bought in a Chinese herb shop, things were still pretty shitty. Broke and desperate were words I wanted to drop from my internal résumé.

  The grocery store was four blocks from my apartment, but New York blocks could be as long as football fields—and they stretched out twice as long when it was cold, windy, or wet. Just what I needed when I’d been ecologically conscious, choosing paper over plastic. Not a good choice for walking in the rain—a paper bag became biodegradable real fast when it got soaking wet.

  As I struggled against wind, rain, and the wrath of the gods I’d offended—I was so beaten down, it had to be from divine retribution—I tried to keep my groceries from slipping out of the disintegrating bag.

  Besides thinking positive about getting back what I’d lost, I’d been thinking green lately, too, trying to do something for the planet. I guess the wake-up call for me were the stories of seals and polar bears starving and drowning because arctic ice was melting from global warming—while “global warming deniers” were racking in huge fees from polluters. So I’d bought nonfat organic milk in a glass bottle rather than plastic, but now its weight threatened to carry it through the bottom of the wet bag and break at my feet, taking with it my seven-grain bread, turkey bacon, and free-range eggs.

  Strapped for money, I still bought high-end food for breakfast. I figured it balanced out the cheap fast food I had for dinner and the crackers and cheese I had for lunch. I hated cooking—for one. Cooking was only fun when I had a man and a bottle of wine to share it with.

  When I fell from grace with the haughty world of New York art, none of my friends or associates threw me a lifeline, but I guess that said more about me than them. On gloom and doom rainy days I sat in my apartment and wondered how things would be now if I had just done things a little bit different … and told myself to learn from my mistakes because soon I would be right up there again.

  I wore a lightweight, hooded raincoat rather than carry an umbrella. That left the paper bag exposed, so I hurried, passing street vendors who were frantically covering books, hot dogs, and hot—as in pirated—fashion jeans, CDs, and DVDs.

  The mixture of races, clashes of cultures, and street people hawking everything from designer brand purses—knockoffs, of course—to peanuts and hot pretzels gave some New York neighborhoods an exotic third world ambiance. Close your eyes, listen to raised voices speaking a Babel of tongues and the angry honking of car horns, and you could imagine yourself in Beirut. Sadly, the sounds of emergency sirens and threats of terrorist bombs sometimes also gave the great city the feel of Beirut.

  As usual, every taxi that went by had its roof emblem off, signaling that it was occupied or off-duty. In New York you could step off almost any curb and taxis fought for you … unless it was raining. Then the mysterious happened and taxis were more likely to run you down than stop—or they simply vanished from the streets.

  Maybe it had something to do with quantum physics or that stuff called dark matter that astronomers now say we’re all swimming in. Not that I had to worry about it. These days my means of transportation were my feet and the subway, a far cry from a few months ago when I paid more for parking my car each month than I do for rent on my current studio walk-up.

  By the time I reached my building, I had the bottle of milk in one coat pocket, eggs in another, and everything else in the wet bag clutched to my chest.

  My landlord came down the front steps to the street as I hurried up. He gave me a smirk that said things could be better for me if I was “nicer” to him. I gave him a small, polite smile. He didn’t bother turning back to open the building door for me. Bastard.

  I had already bounced a rent check with him and I’d only had the place for three months. Not a clever move.

  Vaguely southern Mediterranean in looks, he had the bald head, thick neck, and petroleum-barrel torso of a professional wrestler on one of those TV shows where men brutalized each other in a ring while the crowd roared for more blood. He didn’t need to pump up on steroids because he was naturally a big, hairy ape.

  He looked at me as if I were a piece of meat to pound with his dick.

  That image came as I scrambled to cover the bounced check, hocking a wristwatch for $900 that had cost me $11,000.

  Now I was desperately short of things to hock. Which created another perverse thought: How many weeks—days?—of apartment occupancy could I “buy” if I gave him a blow job?

  Jesus—what a repulsive thought, but it popped into my head as I climbed the interior stairs to my apartment. It wasn’t the sort of thing that a man would think about. And I’d gulp down Drano before I did anything like that—at least I hoped I would.

  But whichever way I went, bleeding wrists or lying down with a swine, I wouldn’t be the first woman who did something repulsive in desperation. Or the first man, for that matter, though it was easier for a man in one respect: A bed at the homeless shelter for him doesn’t come with a fear of getting raped.

  Think positive …

  I put away the groceries and stood by my window, staring down at the street below, not really seeing anything, just watching the hypnotic rain glide down, trying not to think about the mistakes I’d made and the wrong turns I’d taken.

  Another line from that Carpenters’s song played in my head: Feelin’ like I don’t belong …

  I didn’t belong to anyone; no husband, lover, significant other. No family, not even a job where I could relate to others for eight hours a day. Twists and turns and bumps, losing control and going into a spin around dangerous curves, that’s what my life seemed to have become the last few months. Just about everything had changed.

  I wasn’t just broke, I was lonely and broke. I hadn’t had a date for so long, the battery had run down in my vibrator. I sighed just thinking about the money I used to spend, the things I used to have, the lovers I once enjoyed …

  Just keep thinking positive and roll with the punches.

  My cell phone rang. I started to hit receive and stopped because I didn’t recognize the calling number. Better that it went into voice mail. I had a new address and new phone number, but I was still getting hassled by bill collectors. The CIA could learn things from these people. I had to dodge one coming into my building yesterday. The woman had called me a “deadbeat” loud enough to be heard in the Bronx. I rushed into the building, embarrassed. There were some things I could confront and control with as much courage as a 125-pound woman could muster … but knowing I owed debts that I couldn’t pay wasn’t one of them.

  I had scribbled “Deceased—Return to Sender” on collection notice envelopes now for weeks, but it hadn’t fooled anyone.

  I checked voice mail and my suspicion was right. A Mrs. Garcia wanted me to give her a call so she could arrange a special repayment plan for my Saks bill. She made it sound like I was getting in on the ground floor of a golden opportunity. The woman should be selling penny stocks.

  I already knew from experience that the tenor of the calls got nastier as time went on.

  Those TV ads where the bankruptcy lawyer with the shiny polyester suit and toothy crocodile smile says he can get the hounds off your back were beginning to look better every day.

  Being a dea
dbeat hadn’t been my plan and wasn’t the way I thought of myself. Things had just gone to hell for me in the proverbial handbasket. Real fast. Like slipping down the side of a glacier into a smoking volcano.

  I’d come to the big city out of college full of dreams and drive and had spent a decade working myself up from a fifth-floor studio walk-up to a penthouse in the Museum Mile area on the haughty Upper East Side.

  Now I was back in a small apartment. Smaller than my last bedroom. Gone were my designer-furnished penthouse with a view of Central Park, my $85,000 Jaguar, and my walk-in closets full of designer labels. Hell, I lived in a walk-in closet.

  Gone was my black American Express Card, too. You got one by invitation only. I’d heard that the card was usually offered only to people charging $150,000 or more a year. To me, the card was my diploma from the School of Hard Knocks that said I had made it. I felt worse about losing it than my sports car.

  Materialistic? Sure. And not “green” of me. It was only a piece of plastic and plastic was the nonbiodegradable bane of the world, the stuff that would still be around choking the environment ten thousand years from now, indestructible “artifacts” revealing our artificial souls to archaeologists who have computer chips for hearts and brains.

  I was really in a confused mental state, vacillating between wanting to save the world for baby seals to wishing I still had a credit card that permitted a person to buy a ridiculously priced sealskin purse …

  Christ, sometimes it felt like my thoughts were ricocheting in my head, one minute desperate to do anything to be back on top, the next worrying about the health of the planet. I was still suffering aftershocks from the collapse of my career. It didn’t just come to an end—a Category Five hurricane roared through my life.

  Still, I couldn’t walk away from antiquities. These fragile remnants from past civilizations, often the only remembrances of millions of people who had lived and loved and created great works of beauty, were a part of me, in my blood even before college. When I was a little girl I had a stack of books next to my bed on the history of art from my father’s personal collection. I leafed through those books, staring at the gold, marble, bronze, and jade works created by people dead a millennium.