The Deceivers (2 page)

“Pull over, I'm getting off.” I had to tell the driver twice before he understood.

He started yapping about the fare. I pulled dollar bills out of my pocket and gave them to him and hurried away. American dollars were more welcome than Cambodian currency.

Another police car came down the street behind me.

I was in front of a boom-boom joint with large plate-glass windows that showcased provocatively dressed women and girls lounging on couches. A pulsating lipstick red sign flashed “La Petite Khmer.” Khmer was the ancient name of the Cambodian people.

I took a deep breath and stepped into the whorehouse.

2

I was immediately assaulted by the warm scent of sweet tropical fruit—apparently the perfume of choice.

Brightly lit, the room had flashy neon signs of palm trees, coconuts, and posters of hula girls on the walls. How the Hawaiian posters made it from Honolulu to the wall of a whorehouse in Phnom Penh surely was a tale to be told.

The walls were stark white and so were the couches—when the sun was up, you'd need sunglasses to navigate the room. I'm sure no one thought about the fact that white was the color of purity.

Petite young women wearing bright pastel shorts and tops glittering with red sequin trim lounged on the snow white couches and looked like Christmas ornaments from an “Adults Only” store.

My movie perception of what a house of prostitution should look like included crystal chandeliers, round red velvet couches, and erotic women in elegant evening dresses. This place was a faked orgasm—stark commercialism under racks of white lights that exposed its dark heart, cheap sex, and not a few roaches.

The “girls”—a generic word for prostitutes of any age—were all chips off the same block. None looked over thirty to me and most appeared to be in their late teens to early twenties. Some wore short-shorts with bras and spiked heels; others, cowboy boots and light cotton skirts that barely covered their crotch area.

I instantly felt sorry for them. When I saw people who were downtrodden for reasons out of their control, a phrase my mother often used would come to me:
But for the Grace of God go any of us.

A matron with a big cheesy smile as sincere as a time-share salesman welcomed me.

“Come, come, come, everyone welcome. Have beautiful partner for you.”

She made a grand, sweeping hand gesture at the roomful of young women who stared at me with limp eyes and professional smiles.

“Boom-boom for short time, boom-boom for long time, very good boom-boom—”

“No boom-boom.” I nodded at a sign that advertised massages. “A massage, I want a massage.”

“Good massage.” She gestured at a girl dressed in bra and shorts with lacy frill and black patent spike heels. “Boom-boom for short—”

“A massage. I'm in a hurry.”

What I wanted was out of the bright room with its large windows facing the street and into a back room where I could hide.

The matron waved us toward a door down the hallway. “Good massage. Boom-boom, too.”

Her English was obviously limited to what was necessary for the business at hand.

I followed the girl down a hallway and into a room that was low budget basic: a double bed, a Chinese screen with a towel tossed over it, a small wood basin with a pitcher of water beside it. Too bare and plain even for a Motel 6.

A curtained window faced the street. I pushed the drape apart just enough to get a look outside. Two police officers on foot, maybe the ones I'd seen earlier, stood by a police car stopped in the middle of the street and were talking to the driver.

I hoped I wasn't the subject of their conversation.

I turned around and found the girl had removed her bra to expose small, erect mounds of breasts.

She couldn't have been more than eighteen or nineteen. No doubt a “mature woman” in her occupation considering that the country was notorious for having prostitutes in their early teens.

She stared at me, uneasy, her features passive, but her eyes wondering. I wasn't acting like a typical customer. Besides men, straight and lesbian women also came to Phnom Penh looking for action, paying for sex when they failed to hook up with other tourists who were birds of a feather, but their body language didn't have the hunted animal look that I had.

“Boom-boom” with a woman may have just been another paying customer in a day's work for this girl.

“Boom-boom?” the girl asked.

I shook my head and made like I was rubbing myself. “Massage.”

The girl pointed at the white towel draped over a Chinese screen. I needed to get the massage or the girl would get suspicious. I stepped behind the screen and disrobed and wrapped the towel around me. The towel was thin but looked reasonably clean.

Knowing I needed to keep the girl on my side since I was acting strange, I took a twenty-dollar bill out of my handbag and gave it to her.

“Good massage,” I said.

She nodded at a sign on the wall and rattled off something in Cambodian. It had the word “massage” in big letters and words in smaller print underneath. I gave it a quick glance but my first concern was the sheet on the bed. It looked reasonably clean, no stains that hinted at recent activity. I still didn't like the idea of lying on it but it was better than going back outside.

Lying facedown, I left the towel draped over my bottom half and kept my handbag beside me.

I twisted to tell her to go ahead and found she'd taken off her shoes and was slipping out of her shorts, leaving only a thin thong that barely covered her pubic area.

“We have a communications problem,” I said.

She gave me another puzzled look.

I rubbed my side. “Just massage. No boom-boom.”

She nodded but I had no idea if she understood. I wondered if she knew how to give a therapeutic massage … or only the kind that men got off on.

I raised up enough to pantomime again, rubbing myself. “You understand, massage.”

The girl nodded vigorously and said something again that I didn't understand. She gestured at the sign on the wall again.

“Yes, good massage,” I said.

I forced myself to lie still, resisting the urge to run to the window and peek out or stick my head out the door to see if the police were coming down the hallway. As her hands touched my skin, my tense muscles contracted with spasms.

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 …