Hôtel des Âmes Perdues
The scent and smoke and sweat of the casino were intoxicating to her.
The little black nothing that she wore as she cruised the mezzanine above the high stakes tables cost more than most of the men back on the twenty franc tables made over the course of a year. A night with her would cost them twice that again.
She wore her grace and beauty deftly, classically, and drew stares from men, and even women, like a corpse in the sun draws flies. Hôtel des Âmes Perdues was her stalking ground, and she was its largest indigenous predator.
The music that droned in the background, hidden behind the banter and buzz of a dozen languages, the clanging of glasses, and the rustle of cards and chips, pumped through her senses like blood.
Des yeux qui font baisser les miens,
Un rire qui se perd sur sa bouche—
Voilà le portrait sans retouche
De l'homme auquel j'appartiens.
The wall opposite the gaming was sheer glass that looked into the hotel's main swimming pool below the waterline. The well-lit, crystal clear water contained rich, hardened bodies fed well by the best personal trainers and surgeons that money could buy. She knew that the hotel actually recruited and paid some of those trim bathers to keep the eye candy at a premium for the gamblers and bar flies whose gazes seldom wandered too far from the great human aquarium. She knew this just as she knew that for the right price, these men and women would be made available to the rooms of the high stakes players. The knowledge was well-earned, for she had spent time in that warm water years ago…what felt to be a lifetime ago.
Initially, she had been watching three sheiks that were on Table Twelve, and silently cursed herself for not going with the blonde hair this evening. The Arabs always rolled over liked jewel-encrusted tortoises when confronted with golden tresses. One of the men caught her gaze, and gave her a knowledgeable smile in return. Yes, she decided, there was some potential there.
Two young and pretty American actors loudly ruled Table Seven. They were thick as thieves and were the flavour of the moment at Cannes, but they were also ostentatious and annoying as only nouveau riche Yanks could be. One of them, the light-haired one who'd made a splash in a gladiator film, had tried to awkwardly approach her earlier in the evening, and she'd rebuked him curtly. Maybe on a slow night, she could have been tempted, but the smoke-filled pool on this side of glass was teaming with fish this evening, and she would eat well.
There had been a man at the baccarat tables earlier who'd caught her interest. She'd watched him play a conservative game for the most of three hours, and he eventually walked with more than what he'd brought, a rare trick. His French had been excellent, and it had taken her awhile to discern that he was English. He was handsome, but not terribly so; the sort of looks that could blend into a crowd. He had a cruel mouth, and a scarred face, but there was something magnetic about him as well. It was as if he, like herself, was in his environment under the chandelier-fed light of Hôtel des Âmes Perdues, and in complete control. She'd never approached, because she could tell that he was not that type of man that would have to pay, but when he'd left an hour earlier, she'd felt a pang as he'd collected his markers and cashed in his chips.
She was facing Table Twelve once again, both hands resting on the mezzanine' s bar rail, resigned to the smiling sheik when a voice came from the shadows behind her.
"We seem to have a similar taste in men this evening," the Englishman's voice said as she turned to face the silhouette of a man sitting in a deep lounge chair against the back wall, a smouldering cigarette in his right hand. "I was going to ask you to move, so that you would not be blocking my view, but I just didn't have the heart."
She blushed deeply for a moment, and then damned herself silently for feeling like a school girl.
"You enjoy watching men then?" she asked, wanted to take the man down a few notches.
The man drew slowly on the cigarette, the ember tip glowing, and she could feel his eyes upon her, appraising her, and doing little to hide his considerations.
"I watch men for work," he said matter-of-factly. "What I do for play is entirely different. If you cared to join me for a drink, we could talk about work and play as long as you like."
Des nuits d'amour à plus finir,
Un grand bonheur qui prend sa place,
Les ennuis, les chagrins s'effacent,
Heureux, heureux à en mourir.
She thought for a moment, looking back over her shoulder at the men at the gaming tables, the faceless men that were there night after night feeding their desires. Then she turned back to the cruel-faced man who sat alone in the dark, and moved forward to join him.
Their love-making was not a sane thing; it was violent and fractured, intense and unyielding.
She dragged her nails across the silk skin of the sheets, arching her body to meet his as his rough caresses drove her back down again and again. There were gasps as she found something that she thought lost to the years of callousness, a sea of forgotten faces.
As they lay there sometime deep into the morning, she let her eyes crawl over him in the dim light which was intermittently highlighted by the glowing ember of his never ending chain of cigarettes. His body was a hardened piece of stone that was covered in an ocean of scars, a testament to a life of pain that she could understand all too readily.
"Why do you do what you do?" she asked.
"I would think that would be abundantly clear after the last few hours," he quipped.
She playfully struck out, backhanding his exposed flesh with a slap.
"You know what I mean, you fool. The men you hunt; is it for God, or money, or revenge..."
"Or duty," he added.
"Or because you just enjoy it?" she finished.
"Or maybe I'm just a bit like you," he said. "Just going through the motions, hoping to rediscover what it was that made it all so rightous when I was young."
"Are you calling me a "whore?"" she said with feigned indignation.
"No," he answered. "But I sure as Hell think that I may be."
She thought on this a moment, and decided that she did not like the melancholy bent their banter had assumed.
"Then come be my whore," she said as she climbed atop him once again.