A little ink more or less

19.

“So you’re really a virgin?” Katrine asked, sitting on the counter and leaning forward, with her head on her hand and her elbow on her knee like the Thinker.

“Yeah,” Diana said, unzipping her $700 salmon satin-weave velour miniskirt and folding it up carefully before putting it down on the downbelow’s kitchen table. Castle leaned against the wall, arms folded, watching her undress and ticking off her wardrobe in imaginary pop-ups. Where the skirt had been, she was left wearing a low-rise cotton thong that cost $80 because the color, Vanilla Peach, was licensed from a Japanese fashion boutique that trafficked in nothing but clothing concepts and proprietary shades. Her T-shirt looked like a standard-issue Joy Division T-shirt circa 1987, tricked out with some gold thread and surgical tears that gave him occasional flashes of pale orange bra strap against the spray-on tan of her skin. Up close, she looked less plastic than on television, and had aged in that way that was always startling, like a year wasn’t so much a unit of time as it was a remix: Castle hadn’t seen her in person since he and Rachael met her backstage at one of her concerts, when her star was still rising, somewhere several steps beyond Tiffany but still a far cry from Mariah. “Haven’t you listened to my music?”

Katrine shook her head and shrugged. “I always get you confused with Mandy Moore.”

“She’s the blonde-turned-brunette, I’m the blonde-turned-redhead.” That’s what it was that looked so different about her: her Marilyn blonde hair had gone Tori red, and something like glitter had been sprayed lightly on her cheeks and upper arms — and thighs, Castle saw, inspecting them from across the room — as mock freckles.

“Okay,” Katrine said, continuing the game of place-the-celebrity, “Did you do that video with the snake?”

“Which snake?”

“The giant white snake? That you were like dancing with? It was draped around your shoulders, like a fur stole. There was this pyramid, and a disco floor with the squares that change colors.”

“Oh motherfuck, no, that Vegas shit is trashy. I did the video where the black snake slithered around my thighs while I was sitting on the broken toilet. You know, ‘Let Yourself Happen’? With the big bonsai tree growing out of the back of the toilet tank, you know? And the color was all washed out?” She grabbed one of the old wooden chairs from the table and sat on it, crooking her legs and leaning backwards, her expression going suddenly near-vacant, hollow, her posture carefully awkward. “I was all like that? I had a pink teddy on, and this sort of Dirrty eye makeup, David Fincher directed the video.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I saw that one.”

“I did,” Castle said, and Diana turned around in the chair like she’d just remembered he was there. “It was too Fiona Apple for you. I was afraid you were going to get too skinny, all ribs and sincerity.”

“Fuck that,” she said, “I can’t risk my tits. Every time I wear something low-cut on a magazine cover, I sell an extra fifty thousand units.”

“Speaking of which.”

“Yeah,” Katrine said, “let’s see the rack. That’s what caught my eye when your video came on, and when Castle said you were a virgin –”

“Yeah,” Diana said. “I know, I rock the virgin whore. That gets people so hot. Which video was it?”

“The Peter Pan one where you did that whole choreographed dance thing wearing the playing cards?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I hated that outfit, but it came out pretty nice, with the Lost Boys and the part where I’m Tinkerbell and all.”

“Playing cards are Alice in Wonderland, though,” Castle said. “Katrine, would you take her shirt off?”

“Damn straight,” Katrine said, and Diana’s eyes widened a little when Katrine hopped off the counter and tugged the Joy Division shirt up. The pop star took it off the rest of the way, and then came into her own altogether, smiling first at Katrine and then at Castle as she reached behind her, her shoulders and the exposed tops of her breasts dotted with those fake glittering freckles as she unhooked her bra and slid it down. Her breasts looked younger than she did, or maybe that was Castle’s memory playing tricks with him. But even though he knew she’d just turned nineteen, he would have sworn the tits belonged to a sixteen year old, soft and pleasantly awkward, “pretty” more than “hot,” tits you could more easily imagine fondling under a sweater or sucking through a swimsuit than coming on.

But at the same time, there was something majestic about them, something mystical and amazing. They were –

“Shit,” Katrine said. “They look — famous.”

That was it. It was like he’d known the shape of them so well from two platinum albums, dozens of magazine covers, and God knows how many billboards, that rouged cleavage pouting at him from so many places for the last four years, that he had developed some internal sense of what they’d look like bare: and seeing them now, not in some movie where lighting plumped them up and a puffer kept the nipples erect despite the heat of the studio lights, or in an airbrushed pictorial, actually seeing them in the flesh, with the marks along the underside where the wire of the bra had pressed, and the way her nipples were soft and somehow plump, pink and somehow lip-like — seeing them like that, it was more real, it was hyper-real, and despite his nigh-immunity to starstruckness he was hit by the sudden and extremely erotic awareness of just how motherfucking famous these tits were. One of the two or three most famous pairs of never-seen-naked tits on the planet.

“Not bad,” he rasped, his throat dry, and he hated, really hated, the satisfied look Diana had. She ran her hands over them, less smugly than she did in her videos when they were clothed and painted, more like she was just waking up her skin, letting the slightly cool air of the downbelow prick it. “We still have a deal?”

The girl looked nervous for a minute. “Just you, right? I mean, if Katrine wants to make out with us, that’s totally cool, she’s hot. I made out with Pink a couple times. But dildos and things like that, strap-ons, that’s not for me. And if you want to do my ass, tell me first for Christ’s sake, don’t play the ‘oh, it was an accident’ card.”

“I don’t need your ass,” he said, and she actually looked hurt. “Either way, it’s just me. Katrine’s just going to watch while I fuck you. If you bleed, if you’re really a virgin, you get the whole million. Otherwise it’s just halfsies.”

“Yeah,” Diana said. “Okay. And again, the big thing here is, this never leaves. I mean, no photos, nothing. I don’t need to deal with a sex tape situation.”

“Not a problem,” Castle said, and unbuttoned his jeans as Diana got off the chair and started to kneel in front of him. “What’re you doing?”

“Don’t you want me to suck it first? I’ve had a lot of practice.”

He snorted. “Get the fuck up. I didn’t rent your mouth, I rented your pussy.” I bought your blood.

What struck him wasn’t the hurt look on her face, but how much he enjoyed it and how expertly she melted it. How many times had she taken verbal abuse — maybe more for all he knew — from managers, agents, producers, no-name little record company doodads? If he hadn’t been looking at her, he never would have seen that mixture of shock and pain hit her before neutral perkiness replaced it. He hoped Katrine had caught the look too: maybe she’d see his point, that there were so many ways to have fun with people without having to kill them, ways they’d be grateful for, ways that could even help them. The money Diana would get today would be under the table, cash, money agents and managers and lovers and parents couldn’t touch. If she was smart, it would still be there when her tits remembered her gravity and her buying public decided a 25 year old pop star was six years too old to be interesting.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Right here? Do you want to go in the living room, or — a bedroom, or –”

“Here’s good.” He and Katrine had watched the closed-circuit monitors for awhile, and most of the downbelow’s kitchen was off-camera. It might have been miked, but nothing would show up on film. “Just bend over the table.”

Katrine walked over to her and stroked the back of her neck before pushing her head down towards the table’s surface. Diana’s arms shot out in a protective stance, and there she was, bent over, the thong dividing her ass into two halves that were somehow more appealing than her tits or the prospect of her virginity. It was an ass that hadn’t had implants and wasn’t sculpted to look like it had — an ass she hadn’t made a career out of, and probably couldn’t have. But it was a good ass. The creases in her skin where ass met legs were like eyelashes, and the fact that she didn’t have the smooth, featureless tone of a good porn star brought that reality home again. She had the ass of a girl who was still young enough to get away with eating too much pizza, a girl who shook her tits with a troupe of backup dancers behind her, and had spent too long on her feet at one photo shoot after another.

This was the kind of ass they brought in when they wanted an ass double in a movie. It was a believable ass, a vivid ass.

Diana stood rigid, but didn’t seem nervous as he pushed the thong down and had her step out of it, reaching between her legs to play with her ass first, and then her pussy, finding her just barely wet. He gave her ass a slap and unbuttoned his jeans, pushing himself against her, but he wasn’t hard enough yet, and smacked her ass again, hard enough that she yipped in surprise.

“Virgins are such fucking trouble,” he said, starting to get pissed, and grabbed her ass, kneading it roughly, digging his nails in. “Katrine, why don’t you suck her tits, get her ready.”

“You got it,” Katrine said, and started to bend over the table, but stopped, pulling a chair up and sitting down instead. “Grab my chair, Diana,” she said. “Bend over this way instead. He can watch me suck your tits while he fucks you.”

Diana nodded, and Castle watched the reflection of her face pass across Katrine’s eyes as the call girl grabbed the pop star’s breast and pulled the nipple a few times, dragging it down with her thumb before pressing her face into the flesh and sucking. Katrine wasn’t putting on a show, and Castle could barely see what she was doing as parts of her face dis- and reappeared.

“How do you like her?” he asked, still toying with Diana, feeling that platinum album skin and the small, obstinate bumps where her glued-on freckles were. He reached around, squeezing the girl’s breast and pushing it harder against Katrine’s mouth.

“Mmm,” was all Katrine offered in response, and Diana gasped a small, dainty, practiced gasp that became a squirrelish moan when Kat’s teeth bit down. The moan got cut off when Katrine kissed her, sloppily, hungrily, and catching Katrine’s eye was all Castle needed to get hard. There was a stark, naked, raw hunger in those eyes, and something in him resonated with it with whip-crack suddenness.

He pushed Diana’s hips forward and down a little and shoved himself into her. She was as tight as he could have imagined, and she groaned into Katrine’s mouth as he fucked her quickly and coldly. What was turning him on wasn’t the pop star on his cock — it was the power, and he knew it. The fact that he’d bought this and could buy more. The fact that he could turn his will into a magnet, and draw what he wanted to hand.

He grunted as he fucked her with fast, jerking thrusts, rubbing her ass against him, making sure to plunge in as far and as deep as he could, and when he pulled out after he came, his cock was wet but there wasn’t any blood. Katrine giggled at the sight, and the high-pitched, strained sound of her was like a familiarly-scented breeze.

“Virgin popstar, huh Diana?” he asked.

Diana looked at him over her shoulder, and moved in a way he guessed would have been a shrug in some other position. “Sometimes — sometimes there’s no blood, you know, your first time? And — maybe you didn’t try hard enough. Maybe you didn’t get it in — OHH!”

Katrine had bitten down on her breast, a few inches north of nipple, hard enough for there to still be blood on her teeth when she pulled away.

“Well there you go,” Castle said, pulling his jeans back up and reaching into his pocket for the wad of ridiculously large-denominated bills. “The full million if you bleed. Go clean yourself up.”

Diana made a noise like she was stifling something, and waddled ginger-footed to the bathroom without bothering to grab her clothes. Castle saw the look on Katrine’s face as she watched the girl leave, and grabbed her, pushing her down on the kitchen table and fucking her right there, fast and hard, both of them hissing, a hand bunching up the girl’s miniskirt, flecks of blood on both their mouths.

#

Samantha,

As I write this, I have been away from Domino only one night, but I miss my home and my love already. I suppose by the time the letter reaches you I shall have been gone three days: so treble the sentiments here expressed, accordingly. It strikes me, though — this, our first significant time apart since the fortnight you spent with your mother when Clarissa was born — as an excellent time for our relationship to mature, and to refine our live in each other’s absence. I am reminded of the many aged couples I have encountered, as I’m sure you have as well: the ones who have grown comfortable with each other, like lip readers.

I hope, then, that you take this instruction as all that it is: the advice, the direction, of a man who loves you well, who hopes to love you until we both are in our ancient years, and who is himself some handful of years older than you.

First, you should wear your hair differently. I have enclosed, as illustration, a photograph of my late sister when she was your age, shortly before she passed on. Mia was ever clever when it came to feminine matters of the head: hairstyles, hats, other such adornments, all these things were her tools. You have not, I think, the proper face for a hat except on those occasions when one is necessitated for practical concerns. But your hair could do with some seeing to.

I would like you to adjust your habits where cosmetics are concerned, and again I refer you to the photograph. Take special note of the way the cheekbones are accentuated, the eyes made brighter and more clever-looking, instead of dull and washed-off as yours sometimes do at the end of a weary day. You are a beautiful woman whose beauty need not leave you because of clumsy handling.

I have sent under separate cover a writ to hire a seamstress to adjust several dresses for you which I believe would suit your coloration and frame. The dresses in question are in the third floor wardrobe room, in the north closet, portioned aside from the others.

This concludes my remarks concerning the adjustment of your appearance.

As to your comportment. When we met you were a fine young woman, and “young” was an emphasized word in that phrase. You are certainly not old, and should something befall me, you would still be of reasonably marriageable age without being unfairly marked as “a widow.” But nevertheless, you are also a mother long-recovered from childbirth. You are young but uninnocent, in no way which scandals you.

It behooves you to act accordingly, do you not think so? As children, when first we become aware of sex, we imagine the day when we handle it with confidence — and by the same token, we somehow assume that those elders we actually know (to wit, our parents, aunts, uncles, and those other folk who are a full generation ahead of us) have put sex behind them, as we have ourselves put the things of our young childhoods aside.

What do we imagine of that intervening time? Of that sexual envelope, bound by fear and inexperience on one side and wrinkled disinterest on the other?

Confidence. Delight without excess. Free access. Frank discussion. Masterful skill.

My darling, we are in that envelope. Whatever occurs to us when we become those “old folk” who seemed so untouchably distant when we were very young, we are not only adults now in name and license, but in experience. You have raised a fine daughter for me. You have been a fine wife. But we have had no more children, and I know this upsets you, as you know I am not untouched by it.

Perhaps we must adjust our bedtime behavior, then. I wish you to speak more frankly about how you feel when we are having sex. I wish — though you may think this counter-productive — to explore sex more beyond its procreative process. There is a wild, untamed thing within you, and I think you fear being shamed by it. Do not be, my dear. Unleash it. Revel in it. Be proud of your heart and your desires.

I have a good deal of business to attend to, Samantha, and much of it will distract me, perhaps trouble me, which is why I write you now: this all, I think, is ample food for thought in the coming months. Perhaps it will come to pass that we will have another child, or two, or three — perhaps we will even leave Domino for some country home as you used to talk of, or return to Alabama.

Call me superstitious, dear, but please dispose of this letter after you have read it.

Your loving husband,

Michael

#

“I would so fuck Michael,” Katrine said, curling up on the bed and giggling a little as she read to Castle from one of the boxes of letters.

“Yeah?” he asked, thinking that from the photographs he’d seen, he’d be more than happy to fuck Mia. Not despite the fact that she was crazy but because of it, at least in part. Chicks like that could be amazing in bed. Sometimes they were terrible: all neurosis and hang-ups, or micromanagers. But he was pretty sure that hadn’t been the case with Mia.

“Oh yeah. A guy like that, who’s so — definite? So strong? Fuck yes. I like the bad boy thing. I can almost picture the way his eyes would look as he told me to — I don’t know — to use a different fork or something. Kind of like your eyes are looking now.”

He held up a finger. “Shh. The hold music just stopped, I think –”

“Hi Castle,” Ricky Tremaine said on the other end. “Sorry for the wait, I’d gone downstairs to Au Bon Pain.”

“No problem,” Castle said, and for a moment the mention of that faux upscale mall mainstay made him ache. He used to get their tomato soup — he couldn’t remember when, but he remembered the smell of it, like the fast-food version — in a good way, somehow — of the slow-roasted tomato soups he’d get in the North End. And there was this carrot cake muffin or something, that was surprisingly good.

“Anyway, thanks for returning my call. I’ve got some info for you — I faxed you a bunch of it, and I think McCall gave you the gist of that.”

“Yeah, about the Van Der Lindens?” Castle asked. Katrine was curled up like a cat on the bed, watching him, and it distracted him too much to listen — he waved a hand at her and wandered into the hallway and back upstairs to the kitchen.

“Right, the basics. I’ve got some more on that, and on Copland, the guy who built Domino. Where you want me to start?”

“At the beginning. Start with Domino.”

“All right, Copland was a small-time hustler — Florida land scams, the wallet trick, real basic Sting type stuff — who hit it big when Prohibition came and he lucked into a few Canadian connections who’d supply him with whiskey if he could unload it fast enough. He had some close calls, but it looks like he managed them — he was the Boston guy for New York Jimmy Gatz, who in turn was one of Capone’s New York guys, all right?”

“Yeah, okay, gangsters.” Castle poured himself a Scotch and grabbed a Twinkie from the open box in the living room, pacing back and forth down the hallway from reflected side to original side.

“Bootleggers first, gangsters by necessity. I don’t think Copland ever got bloody, and New York Jimmy was never tagged with anything worse than aggravated assault over some chick — he died in a hit and run that might’ve been mob-related and sloppy, or just plain sloppy. But Copland, anyway, Copland isn’t Boston’s Big Man, you understand, but he’s still raking in the dough.”

“So he built Domino?”

“Yeah. Guess his wife had this thing, wanted to be part of polite society, what the fuck ever. They’d been living in a brownstone, a nice place, but it was still in the city, so it was shit as far as she was concerned. He’s definitely the one responsible for the initial construction of your special basements there. He had a hidden basement for stashing whiskey, French wine, cash, probably guns. Rumor had it he had more than that, too.”

“What’s that mean?”

“No idea. That’s what I got. That he had some kind of ‘bootlegger’s helper’ stashed in the basement.”

“All right, go on.” The light over the front door still blazed red, small and unobtrusive unless you looked for it, indicating whatever alarm systems, whatever precautions, Jonathan had employed to keep him in the house were still live. And probably always would be. Castle stared at it, glared at it, willing it to blink green-for-go.

“Copland got pinched, his wife put Domino up for sale, he got out on a plea, divorced her, and sold it himself to Van Der Linden, who immediately hired some serious construction crews. Place was held up and cordoned off for months, and the workers were all brought in from out of state.”

“He didn’t want them talking.”

“That’s what it sounds like. The story was that they were repairing structural flaws, but it’s bullshit. You had that forensics engineer in, right?”

“Yeah, he said the basic structure of the downbelow was in place before most of it got around to being built.”

“Exactly. Sounds like Van Der Linden finished what Copland started. First he doubled the size of the house by reflecting it, and then he carved out the rest of the downbelow.”

“All right. All right. Well, listen, what else can you tell me about the Van Der Lindens? I know Mia and the father died in the house fire — what about the mother?”

“Grace Mickelson Van Der Linden. Boston Irish. Not poor, but not exactly rich, either — her mother was the first of her family born in America, and both sides of her family were in law enforcement and civil service. Corrupt, probably.”

“How’d she die?”

“Fell down the stairs. Broke her neck.”

“Sounds suspicious. When and where?”

“Family home. Not long after Michael got married, it looks like. Same week his daughter was born.”

“Huh. Any idea who was in the house with her?”

“Mia was. The usual servants, but they knew better than to say anything. They knew what had happened to the maid’s cousin, and the boy from town. They knew better than to cross Mia, knew no one walked away from fucking with a Van Der Linden.”

Castle frowned and stuffed half of the Twinkie in his mouth, chewing and swallowing before asking, “You’re saying you think Mia killed her mother?” He could imagine it, the way she talked. Getting pissed at Michael for having a baby that wasn’t hers. All that angry energy and no place to put it, and conditioned not to direct it at him, forced to turn her hate for him back into love.

“I’m saying who cares who killed the bitch,” and Ricky’s voice was perfectly calm but no less sneering for its stillness. “Who the fuck cares who killed some needless woman decades ago? Let’s talk about more recent cases, Castle.”

“What’re you talking about, Ricky?”

“Let’s talk about who killed Rachael Abrams and those surrogate bitches. Let’s talk about who killed Lamont Pasmore, Piero Strabo, Philip Ramsey, Giacomo Baroni. Let’s talk about Katrine.”

Castle’s throat went dry. “Who is this?”

“Let’s talk about scorpions in the stovetops, Sebastian. About the worms that crawl out when you lift the mask up. You want to ask me about my mother? About my mother? My mother was a cunt I crawled out of, a cunt who kept twitching long after her purpose was served, like a chicken after slaughter. You want to ask me about my sister? You want to fuck my sister, Sebastian, is that what you want? You want to stick your little cock in her hole and wiggle it around? She’d just laugh at you, toy with you. You’d never be more than a moment’s amusement for Mia. You’d never even get her attention. Mia’s special. Her cunt was always tight, her breasts always firm, her mouth tasted like honey and black coffee.”

Castle pulled the phone away and looked at the display, but everything looked kosher: Ricky Tremaine, the Caller ID readout said, and the seconds kept ticking in the length-of-call tab. “The fuck are you pulling?”

“Castle?” Ricky asked, and his voice sounded cautious now, slightly alarmed. “Are you there?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’m here.”

“The connection seemed to drop out for a minute.” But from the tone of Ricky’s voice, Castle didn’t think the connection had dropped at all. “What were we talking about?”

“The circus,” Castle said without thinking, and the voice on the other end — the other end of something — laughed a sharp laugh, like you hear at dinner parties when the men go into another room to smoke cigars and pick presidents. “Who the fuck is this?” The answer got cut off by the sound of something falling, something being dropped — from all over the house. Like when you drop a hardcover book, held flat, onto an uncarpeted floor. “What? What was that?”

“This is the circus,” the voice said, and it didn’t sound a thing like Ricky — it sounded like a Beacon Hill accent, a Boston Brahmin accent, cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and diamond necklaces glittering at luncheon clubs. “This is Domino. This is the downbelow.”

The light fell odd and broken around him, and the small crescent-shaped windows carved into the top of the front door had gone silver like mirrors, showing nothing but his own pale reflection. The windows in the living rooms were the same, and at the end of the hallway. Long picture windows that should have shown bright green grass, a wall of hedges, sunlight — greens and yellows, bits of blue — showed nothing but the furniture, his face, himself, like Domino had folded itself over him.

“Welcome to the circus, Sebastian,” the voice said, and the light over the door turned blindingly emerald green. “You don’t ever have to go home again.”