Des Leuves

As layers of heavy cotton and velvet drapes in hues of beige and maroon line the walls, lit by hooded candles and fragranced with oud and frankinscence, it feels like 1930s Saigon, and the lazy house band reek of whiskey and smack, as their singer slurs and stumbles her way through a medley of mangled lounge classics, rendered virtually unrecognisable through the thick fog of intoxication.

The champagne cocktails arrive just before the soft-shell crab, and the bearded Kuwaitis at the next table suruptitiously exchange between them the identical briefcases at their feet. Immediately one cuffs his to his wrist and fumbles in his traditional garb for a primitive-looking cellphone on which he starts to make a call. The other finishes his tea and stands up to leave, the revolver underneath his his robes still clearly visible in the muted lighting. Suited bodyguards, previously unidentifiable amongst the early evening diners gregariously enjoying $1000 meals, rise from adjacent tables to flank him as he makes his way through the bar, and escort him to an awaiting Mercedes, opening the door for him and splitting up into two anonymous black Range Rovers idling at the curb.

The vehicles are, in fact, hired, the men actors, the revolver is fake, and the briefcases empty - an elaborate charade to draw attention from the two already innocuous gentlemen drunkenly brokering vast geo-political power over dim-sum in the dark of the farthest corner of the restaurant. In between bites of steamed buns, half a million citizens of a recently established city-state on the Pacific Rim are casually doomed to brutal genocide - one of whom was, unbeknownst to these individuals, due to go on to invent a zero-point energy device which would have changed the course of human civilisation in profound and sensational ways, until he was massacred on the edge of a Metropolis which bordered a small, man-made lake. Carp swam there, the water stained with the blood of thousands of unwilling combatants. The city would fall into ruin and an empire was birthed, hundreds of years into a future which would never come to pass, destiny and fate splintering and forking like an infinitely complex and vivd dream behind Zabdiel’s weighty eyelids, as he began to come round and notice his surroundings. One of the gentlemen spills a drop of soy sauce onto his tie, and a chain of events is set into motion which will culminate in a botched suicide attempt. He curses, and later that night he sobs at a movie showing on pay-per-view in his hotel room. The prostitute asleep beside him doesn’t notice the stain on his tie until she leaves late the next morning.

“Want some more valium?”, he had said. “Yes, you do.”

“Does nothing”, she replied, donning the bauta mask which hid her pronounced brow and cheekbones, and deep brown eyes.

“Take two. More.”

“Ok. Why? I thought we weren’t sleeping.”

“I am looking to take advantage of you”, he deadpanned.

“And you want to finish the coke.”

“At some point, yes.”

Twenty milligrams of diazepam had long-since stopped being effective rape-fantasy material - his usual kink, and one for which he regularly paid a significant premium - and had indeed stopped working at all without something to potentiate it, so he dosed her with thorazine. He was pleased to remove most of her underwear, set up the camera and tripod, and be able to play with her wilting carapace as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Making a few minutes’ footage available via his channel on a tube site at $140 per download had earned him over $20,000 revenue within 24 hours a week previous.

He talked clean-dirty to the lithe, half-asleep brunette teen, still wearing thousand -dollar suspenders he had bought for her and had delivered to his hotel from a store downtown earlier that day.

“You might enjoy a rum and coke now, my sweet, but soon you’ll be asking for Chairman’s Reserve and full-sugar Coke from a glass bottle. And you’ll ask for a squeeze of lime in that, and call it a Cuba Libra instead. Knowing cocktail recipes is a luxury of age too. Learning to recognise the finer things in life is something that will come to delight you. I mean, I like to stay up and party, but I never used to appreciate brushed Egyptian cotton with an eight hundred plus thread count like I do now…” he narrated, as he penetrated her immobile asshole, glistening with massage oil in the artificial light.

As Lindy uncoiled, her exquisite serpentine form whipping him in the rib cage, Zabdiel awoke with a start, at which he emitted a loud yelp, drawing the attention of diners at adjacent tables. Seated in the corner of the darkened restaurant, both dressed head-to-tail in black, and sporting matching, voluminous black sunglasses, behind which they both clearly displayed the sedative properties of the contents of the medicine cabinet at her modest 4th floor apartment on the Rue Villeneuve in Paris’ 12ieme arrondissement, Lindy immediately recognised the signs that he had landed just moments earlier, a vibration signalling incoming text messages on their respective phones which she kept safely in her purse providing instant confirmation, were it needed.

A waiter brought two Hemingway Diaquiris and removed their empties, seconds before Zabdiel’s upper body slumped forward, his head cushioned against the blow to the table by an ornately folded serviette.

“Zab, f’fuck’s…” Lindy spat, rendering him upright once again by sinking her fangs into a knot in his hair and wrenching him backwards, eliciting another pained cry, and more attention from their fellow patrons at the Restaurante Des Leuves.

“What the f..?”

“HONEY!”, she shrieked into his ear, off which his shades hung, inelegantly crooked.

“I’m awake”, he mumbled, straightening his eyewear, and shaking himself free of the vignette rendered for him in searing detail as he traversed time and space, a hallucinatory in-flight movie, the soundtrack to which was collapsing to a finale as the house band acknowledged the smattering of applause to which they were afforded before downing their instruments and staggering through the heavy drapes which hung at the back of their modest stage.

“You know where you are?”

“Remind me”, he replied, as he picked up his drink and downed it in one gulp. He gazed at the elegant profile of his companion as if noticing her reptilian form for the first time, softly lit in the candlelight. Unsteadily he replaced his glass.

“You look beautiful”, he offered, as his partner went to open the small, chic clutch which sat beside her, paused for a moment, glanced up at him, smiled demurely, and gently flicked her tongue across his cheek.

“Des Leuves - table 153”, she hissed, and returned to rifling through the contents of her modest purse to retrieve their respective phones.

“Paris, baby,” she continued without looking up. She nudged towards him an unfamiliar phone, which nevertheless unlocked itself as he placed a finger on the solitary button on its face. He checked the messages on the encrypted platform he used for such communiques, the most recent being from Eduardo, consisting solely of an address in the city.

“You know it?”, he asked Lindy, herself reading an identical message on her own device. She nodded.

“So do you”, she said.