The Deadly Pearl Page 3

  She was crying too. Silently, her eyes filled with fear and ignorance. She backed into the wall, continuing to press against it, still moving, even though she couldn’t go any farther.

  Sand shook his head sadly. He sighed.

  Foster’s hell hadn’t ended tonight. The girl wasn’t his daughter. Her hands dropped to her lap, and Sand saw her buck teeth and bleeding mouth. “Please, oh, please, don’t hit me anymore! Please. …”

  She wasn’t Rochelle Foster.

  She cringed, her voice going soft. “Please,” she begged.

  Fifteen years old, and this is all she’s got to show for it, thought Sand.

  Chapter 3

  JENNIFER AND $300,000

  “LIKE IT?”

  “Natural fine, baby, it’s natural fine,” said Pearl, rubbing his red silk handkerchief up and down the black ivory sword cane. He was pleased with its brightness and the blades. Yeah, that’s right, Jim, two blades. A sword, and at the other end, a knife with a ten-inch blade. Far-fucking-out. Both hidden away most cleverly. Dig it. Baby, I’m so pleased, I’m ’bout to leap outside my skin.”

  Her laughter was warm and friendly. “Don’t do that, love. Ladies present, you know?”

  Pearl leaned closer to the woman, his lips brushing her cheek, making her smile again. “MMMMmmmm. Good taste, and you taste good, too.”

  She bowed her frosted blond head, her left hand touching her full breasts in a gesture of maidenly modesty. “Kind sir, we thank you.”

  She was thirty and beautiful, a blond Englishwoman named Jennifer Paisley, and Pearl’s partner. She was good at what she did. What she did was to arrange the sale of teen-age girls to customers outside of America.

  Like Pearl, business was business with Jennifer. She was shrewd, deeply sensual, and a lesbian. Pearl kidded her about that, but not too much and not too often. Just as she would sometimes use his given name, Harold Van Gant. Each, however, knew when the kidding had to stop.

  And each stopped. Business was business, and money was money. They needed each other. Pearl furnished the girls, the heroin, hooking the girls on dope when it would help a sale and stomping their asses when it meant money to him. It was also his job to get them ready for shipment.

  Jennifer Paisley made the international contacts, set up delivery dates, times, and places, and made the decision on which currency foreign buyers would pay in. She had brought Pearl into the international white slave trade, and it had been a profitable arrangement for them both.

  She sat in Pearl’s opulent penthouse watching him beam over the gift she had brought with her to New York an hour ago. It had cost her two hundred dollars from a London fence specializing in antiques. Pearl collected sword canes. His collection of fifty was neither a whim nor an indulgence.

  Pearl was an excellent fencer, with years of study under a champion sixty-year-old Hungarian fencing master. As always, the pimp wanted only the best. His lessons were private ones at one hundred dollars an hour. His teacher, Niklos, was impressed by his speed, timing, and quick reactions, but for reasons he never quite understood, he despised Pearl as a man.

  Jennifer Paisley, however, had not flown from London just to see her business partner smile at a sword cane. She was here to discuss the biggest business deal the two of them had ever put together in six years.

  Two separate deliveries of teen-age girls, to be completed three days from now. Total: $300,000.

  The first deal called for five white teen-age girls, American, no younger than twelve, no older than sixteen. All blonds. No more than two to be on heroin. Price: $20,000 per girl.

  The customer was a sadistic Arabian oil sheik whose sexual practices had killed twelve girls over the years. He ruled his small country with the tyranny of a child bossing a playpen and his personal fortune was estimated at five billion dollars.

  The estimates were wrong. It was more.

  The sheik’s passion for American teen-age girls had not slowed down at sixty-two years of age, and neither had his cruelty. His ideas on female beauty came from American movies he ran constantly in his palace. His ideas on sex and cruelty were his own.

  In London Jennifer had talked the sheik’s representative into paying for a small extra—two kilos of heroin to be used on the girls. It made submission a certainty and total compliance inevitable. Pearl would furnish the “extra” at a cost of fifty thousand dollars per kilo, a price higher than current street level, but no more than a nickel when you have over five billion dollars and you want to keep the goodwill of those furnishing what you crave most highly.

  For Pearl and Jennifer, it was a $200,000 score. The additional $100,000 would come from the Chavez brothers, who wanted ten girls at $10,000 each for their South American whorehouses.

  Jennifer Paisley’s left thumb rubbed the hard surface of the plain gold wedding band she wore, while the fingers of her right hand twirled the thin stem of a silver wine goblet half-filled with a cool, green vermouth. Small nervous gestures, but each one controlled. Jet travel made her a little nervous. That, plus the thought of making $300,000 four days from now.

  The wedding band kept some men away. Other men were pushed back by her soft refusals, which were whatever they had to be—polite or devastating.

  She sipped the cool liquid, her tongue seeking out the alcohol hidden in the sweetness. Ghastly stuff, but Pearl’s bad taste thought it was class, and she went along with it. She managed to sip at the one-half goblet for over an hour.

  Her intelligent green eyes swept the penthouse. You’re shrewd, Pearl, my darling, street-smart, and cunning as a fox. But only a pimp could exist with this monumental bad taste of silver goblets, orange fur rugs, red brick walls, and paintings so horrible that they could only have come out of someone swallowing a laxative, then sitting bare-ass on the canvas.

  Business. That’s where Pearl excelled. It had begun six years ago, with Jennifer being asked by certain London politicians to set up a sex scandal in New York around a member of England’s delegation to the United Nations.

  Use American teen-age girls and get pictures and tape recordings, had been the specific orders.

  She had flown to New York, checked with several call girls in town working diplomatic circles on both sides of the Atlantic, and come up with Pearl’s name.

  Pearl had delivered. The UN delegate had been set up nicely, so nicely that he had insisted on taking the pair of fourteen-year-old girls back to his English country estate. Three weeks later, the fifty-six-year-old diplomat resigned under threats of blackmail, and a man more suitable to the people who had paid Jennifer Paisley went to the UN in his place.

  She was paid extremely well, and shared part of it with Pearl. It was the large amount of money, $100,000, and the high level on which she had worked that showed her what the future could be in a world that hated America but loved American hamburgers, movies, records, and fresh-faced young girls. When she told Pearl what they might do together, he smiled and said, “Yeah, let’s get down to it.”

  They had. Six years together, strictly business, partners on a cash basis only. Pearl had looked at her lush body, blond hair, and beautiful face, then sighed. “What a waste, baby, but money is money, and I can always get what you ain’t about to give me.” So much for hitting on her sexually.

  He was hip to her scene; she had told him, only because telling him would make their business arrangement easier. Yes, she was a lesbian, had been all of her life, and had gone to jail for it. Three years of hell.

  She was seventeen and had been caught with the fourteen-year-old daughter of a British Lord, a member of Parliament. The daughter, a tramp who since she was nine had been enjoying sex with boys, men, girls, and animals, had screamed, cried, and lied when she and Jennifer had been discovered in the daughter’s room.

  “She forced me! Her fault, Daddy. I fought against her, but …” Daddy had believed daughter, even though he suspected she was lying. A frightened, naïve Jennifer, on a weekend invitation to the girl’s home, had been a
n easy victim of upper-class power.

  She had learned the hard way about British life, that it doesn’t matter what you do so long as it’s not done in public.

  Three years in jail. No girls’ reformatory, no probation, but jail. The politically powerful father of the teen-age slut had wanted to make an example of Jennifer, calling her “perverted, destructive, evil, and a danger to every young girl in the realm of our beloved country.”

  Three years of food with roaches crawling in it, of beatings by psychotic inmates, of being forced into homosexual relationships with stronger, older, ugly women inmates for self-protection, of loneliness, of having her parents show up on visiting days and sadly shake their heads from side to side, and in the end, to have her beloved father killed in a car crash as he drove to see her in prison.

  A year later, did her mother die of a broken heart? Jennifer didn’t know. All she knew was that her mother grew old suddenly and swiftly after Dad’s death. The prison authorities let her out to attend both funerals, then brought her back again. Six hours of freedom in three years.

  Jennifer hated that fourteen-year-old lying bitch, and in the end she was grateful for this hate, for it kept her alive during those three years of degradation.

  Once out of prison, bitter and frightened, she had drifted. Waitress, a bad typist, and finally a prostitute, earning money and giving no satisfaction for it. Soon she had switched from working on her back to finding jobs for other women who wanted to do that.

  But her hate for that fourteen-year-old girl burned white-hot. Which was why her deal with Pearl gave Jennifer more than money. It gave her revenge and a chance to give back what she had been given during three years in prison. Forced sexual slavery of others paid for what she had endured from seventeen to twenty.

  Sure, she more or less knew what Pearl did to the girls, but the two of them rarely discussed it. Heroin addiction. Killing. So what? Let him handle that. Jennifer knew that the girls they sold rarely lived long. She just didn’t care. No one cared about her when she was dumped in jail, and she wasn’t about to forget that.

  She was thirty years old, and she wasn’t about to forget those three years.

  She knew Pearl’s story—his “game,” as he called it. Born in North Carolina, a black with a monstrous ego, a hustler, and a cunning, cruel man. Petty thievery, holding up crap games, and pimping, all at the age of seventeen.

  And never a record, something Pearl was immensely proud of. Chicago, Detroit, and finally New York. Still pimping, but refining it, practicing the Mafia tactic of insulating himself, of having men do his work, putting them out in front of him, never going near the girls except when necessary. Investing his money in legitimate business. Men and girls working for him in several cities.

  And drifting easily into killing. “Settling the problem,” he called it. Fine by her. She could live with killing the girls, provided she didn’t have to do it or see it done. That was the civilized way, the twentieth-century way. Press a button, and someone dies on the other side of the world; but keep on eating your breakfast, because as long as you don’t see it happen, you don’t get disturbed by it.

  Pearl and Jennifer Paisley. A lucrative business partnership.

  She set her silver goblet down on top of a glass-covered black wooden bar. “Pearl, my love, I do have two strong fellows with me, but I would be grateful for help from you when we collect our money this week.”

  Three days from now a Panamanian ship would be ready to leave New York with the sheik’s five girls, sail down to Panama, then transfer the girls to an Arabian ship. The $200,000 would be handed over in New York as the girls and the heroin were taken on board.

  “I’m not worried about the sheik, even though two of his men will be there, in addition to the ship’s crew. It’s the Chavez brothers who give me a fright, however.”

  Pearl pulled the sword from the cane slowly, lovingly, his eyes on its two-and-one-half-foot blade. His eyes were on the blade and his back to Jennifer when he spoke. “Don’t sweat it, sweet stuff. Couple brothers will be with you when you meet up with the sheik of Araby and git our bread. Chink will be one of them, and he knows what’s shakin’.”

  He turned to face her, and her eyes blinked quickly at the light reflected from the steel blade. His quickness frightened her, but she controlled her momentary fear. Only her clenched right fist indicated she was disturbed, but she relaxed and opened her hand.

  “Them Chavezes is another thing altogether. That’s gonna be handled differently. Don’t you sweat it none; sweet Pearl is here, so have no fear.”

  Without warning, he tossed the red silk handkerchief in the air with his left hand, and as it floated softly toward the thick orange fur rug, his sword hand seemed to flick at it almost casually. She heard the sharp whisk sound and saw the two halves of the red cloth silently land on the orange carpet.

  His mouth gave her a gentle smile, but his eyes weren’t smiling at all. She smiled nervously, then moved to cover her fear with laughter. “Bravo, my cavalier. Bravo.”

  Pearl smiled more, his eyes pleased at even her light comment on his swordsmanship.

  The Chavez brothers. Victor and Benito.

  Four days from now, they would be in New York to buy ten girls for $100,000.

  From the sheik, $200,000; $100,000 from Victor and Benito Chavez—$300,000 four days from now. But the Chavez brothers could be trouble. They had to be watched very carefully.

  They were from Argentina, feared even by the violent underworld of that nation. They owned a string of whorehouses in four South American countries, and it was strongly rumored that few of the women working for them ever left their employ alive.

  Their whorehouses were different. Sexual hellholes located in mining areas and in the isolation of huge plantations, places where women were so rare that even a woman of seventy would be gang-raped and her throat cut.

  These were places where men worked for pennies a day, virtual prisoners, slave labor that had to be subdued any way possible. The easiest ways were dope, liquor, and women. But no woman wanted to submit her body to dozens of men made cruel and insensitive by back-breaking labor in lonely, hard jungle areas.

  The Chavez brothers, working with the secret connivance of top government officials owning hidden interests in the mines and plantations, bought or enticed aging whores to travel to these isolated areas. When that didn’t work, they kidnapped women, using brutality and narcotics to enslave them.

  South American property owners craved huge profits, and they didn’t care how they got them. That meant slave labor willing to work hard for next to nothing, a tradition brought to that continent by Spain and still very much alive today. An evening in a cheap whorehouse, where women were under constant guard to prevent any of them from escaping, was an important factor in keeping workers content.

  And so the Chavez brothers—wealthy, powerful, feared—had friends in high places. This gave them even more power, making them unpredictable in their cruelty.

  Fresh young faces. That’s what they needed to keep hundreds of men working hard. The kind of fresh young faces seen in movies. Light-skinned women, younger and prettier than the aging, syphilitic whores and ugly Indian women the men were growing tired of.

  So Victor and his psychotic younger brother, Benny, were coming to New York to buy eight white American teen-agers, and for one important foreman in charge of an eight-hundred-man work force belonging to an Argentinian millionaire, two American black girls. That was his preference. None of the girls to be over seventeen.

  Whores kept men working to produce wealth for others.

  For the girls, the trip to South America was nothing like the travel brochures promised. For them it would be a living death—beatings, mass rapes, drugs, and for the fortunate, suicide. Into hell and eventually into an unmarked grave in a South American jungle.

  The Chavez brothers were coming to New York in four days to exchange $100,000 for ten teen-age girls, delivery of their merchandise and pay
ment of the money to be made on board the ship Lágrimas Negras.

  A $300,000 total. A goddamn big score.

  “How you meet them Chavezes, baby?”

  “Business, Pearl, my love. They were in London on holiday and required the services of some of my older girls. Must say the two of them were beasts. Sent them four girls, and two of the girls had to see a doctor afterward. I charged them double on account of that little episode. It was while we were ironing out the details of the surcharge that they mentioned their specific needs for South America.”

  Pearl laughed. He was holding the knife from the sword cane in his left hand, the sword in his right. He touched them together gently, pleased with the small sound of blade touching blade. “Hard dudes. They say how many men they bringin’ with them?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, disciplined and careful not to wrinkle her face any more than need be. Appearances counted in business, especially in her line of work. “No. But, lord, I do shudder when I’m around them. Benny. He’s not all there.” She touched her head gently with a finger to show what she meant.

  “Yeah, well, be glad you’re not gonna be on that boat when it pulls out.”

  “I’d swallow the anchor and leap overboard before I let that happen.”

  Pearl laughed. “Believe you might, baby, believe you might just do that li’l thing. Anyway, I got somethin’ for you, somethin’ you got a taste for. Hey, come on out here, y’all.”

  Pearl shouted once. That was enough.

  The door to one of the penthouse rooms opened, and two sixteen-year-old white girls stepped out. They could have been twins. Each had short hair dyed silver, and each wore blue eye shadow surrounding the entire eye and stretching along the side of the temple until it almost touched the hair.

  The girls wore short dresses of thin silverlike metal, and as they hurried toward Pearl, the dresses shimmered and shone with the pale blue light from the penthouse ceiling and the orange of the thick fur rug.

  They rushed to him, reaching him and throwing their arms around him. “Hey, ladies, hey, cool it.” He laughed, an arm around each one. The girls kissed him on the cheek, then turned to look at Jennifer. She slid off the bar stool, and her eyes appraised them quickly, carefully. Her breathing was a little faster, and she felt warm.