Along the hallway significant bronze statues stood on plinths and elegant sideboards held matched pairs of large Satsuma vases.
If Aspasia was what it claimed to be, every cliché of bordello décor had been avoided. An atmosphere of refined taste and high style allowed the members to satisfy extreme desires while imagining themselves to be superior to the hoi polloi who lived in flyover country or went to the wrong universities or to none at all.
From Overton, she knew that the ground floor had apartments for the security men, common rooms, a kitchen, and other spaces. But the truth of the place would be found on the second floor, where each girl had a suite of her own.
Two grand staircases lay beyond the foyer, one to the right ascending to the east wing, one to the left ascending to the west wing. Limestone treads and risers. Intricate bronze balustrades. The marble-clad walls of each staircase featured niches in which stood larger-than-life-size figures of the goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome: Venus, Aphrodite, Proserpina, Ceres….
Jane stood in the silence at the bottom of the stairs, gazing up into the higher silence, and felt that this elaborate brothel was in fact a mausoleum, where dreams and hopes came to be entombed. She didn’t want to go farther. She thought of the lab mice parading in lockstep, and she wondered if, by learning more about Shenneck and his conspirators, she would discover something so monstrous that it would be difficult to see the future past it.
There had been corruption in every civilization since time immemorial. If the corruption was of the heart, the culture could think its way to health with great effort. If the corruption was of the mind, it was more difficult to feel a way toward recovery, for the heart was a deceiver. If both mind and heart were riddled with malignancies—what then?
In the end, she had no choice.
Jane climbed the stairs.
The second-floor hallway was at least twelve feet wide and no less sumptuously finished than the spaces downstairs.
According to Overton, there were ten suites on the second floor—five in the east wing, five here in the west. Beside each door, in an ornate gold-leafed frame, hung a portrait of the girl who occupied the suite beyond. The portrait was a photo processed by computer to look like a high-quality oil painting, and the space within the frame was a large flat-screen display, not a canvas.
In the event that the girl was currently with another club member or otherwise indisposed, the screen would be blank, as though some art thief had cut the canvas out of the frame. In this wing of the house, two frames lacked portraits.
If extreme desires were at the moment being satisfied, no sound of pleasure or pain escaped from any suite into the hallway.
She stopped before a portrait of a stunning Eurasian beauty posed in a Chinese side chair with an elaborately carved rosewood back depicting dragons in conflict. The girl wore red-silk pajamas with a white-carnation motif along one side. Over her left breast, the flower bloomed in a state of early dissolution, spilling snowy petals down the side of the blouse and along one silken pant leg.
Jane turned the knob, and the door proved to be automated, swinging open of its own power. No less than four inches thick. Its weight must have been formidable, making its automation necessary.
She stepped into a foyer decorated in tasteful Shanghai Deco, paneled in honey-colored wood with ebony accents, and otherwise restricted to a color palette of silver and sapphire-blue.
When the door closed softly behind her, a brief sucking sound issued from it, as if it seated in an airtight seal.
Jane felt not as if she had moved from a hallway to a room, but as if she had stepped into a vessel from another world and was about to have an encounter with something so alien that she would never be the same.
7
* * *
BEYOND THE FOYER lay a living room in which sat the girl in the portrait, wearing the red pajamas with a deflowering chrysanthemum, posed in the dragon chair.
Jane had thought the computer must have idealized the woman’s beauty as it also restyled the photograph into a faux oil painting. But she proved no less beautiful and perhaps even more stunning than the picture could convey, in her early to mid-twenties.
She smiled and rose from the chair and stood not in the boldly seductive pose of a prostitute, not even with the cultured and genteel knowing air of a courtesan, but with her arms at her sides and her head ever-so-slightly bowed, wings of shoulder-length ink-black hair framing her delicate face, almost as a well-mannered child would stand in hope of a parent’s praise. Her dark-eyed stare was direct yet somehow shy, and when she spoke, her voice seemed ten years younger than she and sincere rather than practiced.
“Good evening. I’m so happy you could visit me.”
The girl had seen the pistol that Jane held at her side, but she exhibited no alarm or even the slightest interest, as if it was not for her to judge or even wonder about what a visitor brought into this suite.
“May I bring you a cocktail? Perhaps tea or coffee?”
“No,” Jane said. And then, “No, thank you. What is your name?”
The girl tilted her head, and her smile sweetened. “What would you like my name to be?”
“Whatever it really is.”
Their voices were subdued not only because they spoke softly but also because the walls seemed to absorb sound, as if lined with soundproofing akin to that in radio-station broadcast booths.
The girl nodded. “You may call me LuLing.” Whatever her name might be, it was not LuLing. “And what may I call you?”
“What would you like my name to be?”
“May I call you Phoebe?”
“Why Phoebe?” Jane wondered.
“In Greek it means bright and shining,” said LuLing, and ducked her head shyly. “Would you enjoy music, Phoebe?”
Moving past her toward the nearest window, Jane said, “Not just yet. Could we first…talk for a little while?”
“That would be lovely,” said LuLing.
Jane rapped a knuckle against a pane of glass. The window seemed to be exceptionally deep, triple-pane at least.
“Will you join me on the sofa?” asked LuLing.
The girl sat with her legs drawn up under her, one arm extended gracefully along the back of the sofa.
Jane sat a few feet from LuLing and put the pistol on the cushion at her side, not between them.
“It is a special pleasure when a lady visits me,” said LuLing.
Jane had wondered if the club restricted membership to men, but evidently that wasn’t the case. “I suppose it doesn’t happen often.”
“Not often enough. Girl fun is special fun. You are quite lovely, Phoebe.”
“I’m not in your league.”
“You are as modest as you are lovely.”
“How long have you…been here, LuLing?”
The girl’s smile didn’t freeze exactly, but it was tempered with puzzlement. “There is no time here. We have no clocks. We have stepped out of the world, out of time. It is sweet here.”
“But you must know how long it’s been. A month? Three months?”
“We must not talk time. Time is the enemy of all good things.”
“Do you ever think about leaving this place?” Jane asked.
LuLing raised her eyebrows. “Why ever would I want to leave? What is out there other than ugliness and loneliness and horror?”
The woman’s conversation did not quite seem canned, but there was a quality of conditioning in her every gesture and response. As genuine as she sounded with her adolescent voice, as sincere as her every expression seemed to be, there was something about her so unreal as to be almost extraterrestrial.
8
* * *
AS BORISOVICH PUTS DOWN a hand of cards totaling less than ten, thus ending the game, the enunciator reports on an inappropriate question that a member has put to one of the girls. The enunciator isn’t privy to the conversations in the upstairs suites, but it receives from the girls those questions and phrases that have been deemed to be potential breaches of protocol. In this case: Do you ever think about leaving this place?