Strange Flesh (26 page)

“Some douchebag comes in here with a camera, and we find him somewhere he’s not supposed to be, he’ll be lucky if he just gets tossed out. Very lucky.”

Well, aren’t you the tough guy?

In my research on the family business, I’d found out that when his parents divorced, Benito’s mother raised him in Newport Beach, California, about as far away from Ozone Park as you can get. After his father died, the porn elements of the Mondano empire had been carefully extricated from his other shady pursuits and given over to non-Syndicate professionals. I’ll bet anyone with pungent connections had been warned to stay clear. Thus, Exotica was preserved until Benito was ready to take the helm.

So despite his affectations, this guy has about the same level of authentic Mafia upbringing that I do.

“You mean he might get arrested?”

He squints, testing my words for sarcasm, but then just shrugs it off. “We handle our own business here. If he’s still making a scene once he’s off my property, maybe the cops show up.”

“What was he shooting?”

Mondano’s eyes sweep across the three sirens pole-humping on different stages and then settle on me to inquire whether I’m actually blind or just stupid.

“So he wasn’t trying to plant a hidden camera to record, say . . . you?”

Mondano sneers. “
Paisan
. . .” I want to tell him what this word actually means. “That’s real flattering. Maybe the kid, your friend, was a fruit. But if so, there are many better places for him in this city.”

“But maybe he was interested in you for other reasons.”

He shakes his head as though I’ve suggested the schools chancellor is going to mandate Stripperobics for P.E. classes.

I point at the picture. “Billy is working on a game that may have some connection to Triple E.” I wait for a response, but he just stares at me. I try, “So you’re not involved in any kind of game that he’s producing?”

“The only game I play is the simplest one there is: You give me money, I show you naked girls. You crank it until you get off. Game over. Everybody wins. Why would I want to play a different one?”

“Maybe you wouldn’t. But you’re in the media business. A lot of companies use 3D worlds for promotions that—”

“You know, you remind me a lot of this fucking guy.” He points at Billy’s photo.

“How’s that?”

“You both talk like you’re broadcasting from Neptune.”

I smile. “Fair enough. Do you remember what he said to make you think that?”

“Yeah. He said something like, the fruits from my plains would dissolve into smoke and ashes. As I said, we don’t really serve fruits here. And because of that pussy Bloomberg, there’s no smoking either.” He smiles at me, fishing for acknowledgment of his wit.

“Huh. What do you think that meant?”

“It meant that he was a fucking lunatic.”

“Have you seen him since then?”

“If I had, he’d be real easy to find now.”

“How’s that?”

“He’d be in the ICU over at Roosevelt.”

He accompanies this statement with a practiced glower, implying that question time is over, unless I’m looking to warm up the hospital bed reserved for Billy. I want to laugh, but taking in the guys he’s recruited as bouncers makes me think that maybe Benito’s resurrected his father’s violent business culture. One’s sense of legacy can burn hot.

I thank him for his time and leave the bottle.

A
mobbed-up pornographer represents perfectly the twin obsessions of humanity: sex and violence. But while certainly of a piece with the Sadean content of
Savant
, Mondano’s precise role is unclear. Maybe he’s supposed to serve as inspiration for Billy’s players.

Though they don’t seem to need much prompting. The next morning I find this blog post from Blue_Bella, a doyenne of cyber-kink chroniclers:

As with
NeoRazi
, Billy’s courting a blitzkrieg of lawsuits. And if Blue_ Bella’s
Savant
source is right, even worse is yet to come. But her sniffy reaction to his February comment felt like a non sequitur. Maybe there’s more to it. Something that makes her relate his words to the Fever.

The case during which I first heard rumors of the Pyrexians featured a lot of obscure code names and references to sinister groups. Some of these shared a particularly dire profile, and we thought they might all be
aliases for the same imaginary entity. The Burning Lads, the Wetmen, the Febrillians.

Something about that last one seems related. “Febrile” is another word for “feverish,” but it also shares a linguistic connection with the month February. I look it up: the Latin word for fever, “
febris,
” refers to the purging of the body through sweat. Our second month’s name derives from an ancient Roman purification festival called Februa.

Flipping back through my Reno case files, I find correspondence among some wealthy collectors of rare etchings depicting brutal child murders. They discuss an apocryphal club of Victorian eroticists called the Februarian Society of Ring and Rod. This was the oldest extant allusion to such a group we found in our investigations. The association’s name was mysterious though. The best my team could come up with was that it derived from various pagan religions’ propensity to sacrifice children on leap days.

Blue_Bella’s post implies that Billy wants to exploit his players’ interest in evil cabals by convincing them that the Pyrexians are somehow involved with Château de Silling after all. I guess my target has done his research on traffic in black-market media, and in his game world, this group’s aliases don’t refer to an abstract state of erotic fever, but rather to Sade’s
120 Days
. February, of course, being the month in which the most horrific atrocities are perpetrated in Silling’s dungeon.

Whatever Billy’s ultimate aims are, he must know that he doesn’t really have any control over what his players do. We’re already seeing them turn from naughty exhibitionism toward real violence.

What’s the point of all this? Why convene this dangerous game?

It seems unlikely I’ll learn the answer by passively watching it unfold. I’m going to have to really start playing along with him.

When I called my friend Adrian Paulson, he suggested we get together at one of these secret through-the-phone-booth bars. Why New Yorkers, otherwise inviolable in their self-regard, submit to jumping through such hoops for a cocktail, I’ll never understand. In this case, his choice is made even more eccentric by demanding I meet him there at noon, when the place is certainly closed.

And yet the trick door opens at my push. He’s sitting alone at a booth cut into the amber-lit cellar. Seeing my arrival, he stomps forward and lifts me into a fearsome bear hug that makes my spine crackle. He follows that with a kiss on the mouth before I’m able to extract myself from his grasp. Adrian is a big, blond Minnesotan who took up highly decadent ways after fleeing a stark Lutheran upbringing. The most apt description of him I remember from school was “the Viking drag queen.” Not so much for his fashion sense but for the fact that he oozed this quality of pansexual theater. Also a certain amount of violence. He was the only person I knew in college who both wore ascots and got into brawls. Now he’s the closest thing to a porn baron I know.

He found himself at loose ends after Boom 1.0 collapsed and decided to turn his web skills toward documenting the thing he cared most about: sex. His site could have ended up a worthless pornado trap, but he brought an edgy intellectual style to Compleat-jerk.com and somehow developed a loyal readership.

Since the last time I saw him, he’s shaved his head, grown a blond devil’s beard, and has a runic tattoo spiraling up his neck. He sports a black Armani suit, so I guess business isn’t too terrible. Adrian grins and waggles his eyebrows under purple-tinted wraparounds.

He gives me a three-syllable “Dude” and then asks, “How’s the cock-lodoccus?”

“Nearing extinction. Thanks for meeting me.”

“Been way too long.” Adrian reels off a string of what sounds like Creole French to the guy waxing the floor. He stops pressing on his buffing machine and hustles to the bar, returning moments later with a gigantic tropical drink decked with a Calder mobile of fruit for Adrian and a double bourbon for me. Adrian tongues a cherry.

“So, Ade, how’s business?”

“Business? This is art, brah. If it were business, I’d jab this skewer into my brain and then set myself on fire.”

“Why’s that?”

“The pirates, man. We spend all day thinking of interesting substances to rub on our ‘photo interns’ and ten seconds after they’re posted to our premium section, I find torrents of them all over creation. Our customers are good loyal hand jockeys, but it’s getting to be a lot to ask . . . The
personals section, now, that’s booming. Even though those Craigslist fuckers are cutting into it. ’Course we do a good job of finding some real freaks that make the network valuable. Ooh, and we’ve started flavors.”

“Flavors?”

“The one we just put in beta is Rednekkid.com. If I see another shot of a girl in a hayloft pouring buttermilk on herself I swear I’ll—well, I’ll probably call her like the last one. But I’m getting close to being tired of it.”

“But you’re still making videos?”

“Everyone and their stepchildren are making videos. That’s another problem.”

“Ever do anything on commission?”

He grins. “Pryyyycie! I hadn’t figured you for someone with such refined requirements. You having trouble explaining something complicated to your honey?”