A Doll's Foot

Chapter 15

"IT'S A GOOD THING HE WOKE UP," Beatrice said. She was in the passenger seat of the Fiat, with the other two girls behind her. The back of the morgue van was occupied now by Andre, with Marie beside him administering IV.

"Maybe," Rachel said. "I feel, like, I don't know. Unfulfilled? I was really getting into it."

"You would never have pulled it off. With no lube? You know, it's not like a dildo. A real prick will squish if you're too tight. And then what?"

"I had plenty of lube." In fact, she was still dripping. Of course everyone had wanted to leave at once, everyone had wanted to pee before they hit the road, one toilet in the women's rest room, so they had gone off to pee in the woods. She hadn't been able to clean herself up. It was getting sticky.

"Well, maybe you can go visit him in the hospital and give it a try."

"It wouldn't be the same."

"Maybe you could get the nurses to come watch."

That from Beatrice was enough to make Rachel blush. "What about you? In the restaurant? You chose a spot where everyone could see you. With mirrors, even."

"You know what they say," Marissa drawled. "It takes one to know one."

Beatrice was trying to come up with a retort when Rocco's phone buzzed.

"Answer that." He handed it to his sister.

"

Ciao

? This is Melanie. He's busy driving. You work for who? Oh, of course. Tonight? We're on our way back to the Cape. We were at a funeral but the guy woke up in the middle of it."

"Who is that?" Rocco asked.

"It's someone who works for the sheikh. His abeed."

"Male?"

"So it would seem. Maybe a eunuch?"

"What does he want."

"The sheikh has arrived. We are to be on the yacht by six this evening. Well, not all of us. Just me and Risa."

"Tell him you can't go without me."

"Okay. Rocco says he has to come along. What? Only if we get to watch."

"What was that all about?"

"He says you can come along if he gets to fuck you. I guess he's not a eunuch."

"No way."

"How much? I'll let him know."

"Twenty thousand euros. For the evening. Another twenty if we do some other stuff."

"What? What kind of other stuff?"

"He didn't say. I guess we'll find out when we get there. Wait, he sent a text message with a link.

Dio mio

!"

"Let me see." Marissa reached forward to grab the phone. "We've done some of that stuff." It was a BDSM site. "Tell him no permanent marks." She scrolled down more. "I'm okay with drinking piss but I'm not swallowing any shit. How about you?"

"Maybe a little. If it's my own, or yours. Hey Rachel, want to join us?"

"I have to work tonight."

"Yeah, I bet you do. Who knows? Maybe they'll let Andre out of the hospital and he and his buddies will come over for a celebration dinner."

"I'd like that."

"You never saw what's on his back."

"A tattoo of a woman squatting to give birth."

"Gross."

"It's worse. She's got a head coming out of one hole and shit out of the other."

"Oh. That happens. My mother works as a midwife. I used to help her."

"Oh."

"Sometimes we get our beef on the hoof coming to the hotel and I help prepare it."

"You mean like, slaughter it?"

"Yep."

"Maybe you should come with us tonight, after all."

"I really do need to work. In fact, I should be there now." She pulled out her phone. "Hi, this is Rachel. I got tied up going to a funeral. I'll be there in..."

"Forty-five minutes," Rocco said.

"Forty-five minutes. Okay. Okay. Sorry."

"Are you in trouble?"

"No. Elise is covering for me. But I absolutely need to show up tonight."

"What do you think happened? To Andre? That he woke up again?"

"I'd like to see his forehead," Rocco said. "Where the hole was."

"Was?"

"I was recording everything. Take a look on my phone."

Sure enough, there was a video, showing Andre sitting up. Backing up some, Rachel naked in front of the coffin. "Stop that," she said. She loved the way she looked, breasts jutting out, the nipples so erect they were ready to burst, her body gleaming.

"You look really hot," Marissa said. "Literally," she added with a giggle. "You should put that pic on your menu."

"I'm right there in person. What's the point?" But Rachel was rubbing herself, looking at that image.

"Back it up some more," Rocco said. "To when that woman came in."

"That woman? It was Anna. You of all people should know what she looks like. You fucked the bitch enough."

"Maybe he never looked at her face," Marissa said.

"This woman was older looking. Haggard looking."

"If you were hiding, had your foot chopped off, maybe you'd look older too."

"She obviously wasn't hiding today. She was right there. And why would she get her foot chopped off?"

"When those men came after Nestor," Rachel said, "they kept finding him. Like he had a micro chip tag like dogs get. How did they find us on the beach twice? No watch, no phone, no jewelry. But there they were. The boat, too, it kept coming after us like it could see us, even in the seaweed."

"You think Anna had something like that in her foot? Why wouldn't she just get it taken out? Not chop off the whole foot."

"If it's so small you can't find it? If she's not sure where it is? If she doesn't have time to find out?"

"Or maybe someone abducted her, and chopped it off so she couldn't be traced. Or it was booby trapped."

"Okay," Beatrice said. "So Anna leaves us, she gets in a car, she loses the foot somehow, and someone or something loses track of her."

"And they send Nestor to find out what happened to her," Marissa added.

"Shit. Double shit." Beatrice started to cry. "I can't believe Nestor is one of the bad guys."

"I can't either," Rachel said. "Even though he was really rough with me. And I saw him kill three people just like as that, as if it were nothing. He did give me some money though." She had never actually looked in her purse to see how much. "

Mon Dieu

!" There were only four bills rolled together, but each one was for 500 euros.

"Rachel, do you think that everyone who fucks you is a nice person?"

"Most of them are jerks. Losers. I mean, if you're at a swinger resort, who's going to be desperate enough to need to fuck the wait staff?"

"You're very pretty. Very sexy," Rocco said.

"Well there is that. I suppose."

"Tasty, too," Beatrice added.

"So if you two really do the culinary school this year, are you going to sign up to be a waitress next summer? At

La Cornichonnerie

? Actually, you could start this summer. That's what I did. I needed the money to get through the first year of school."

"I don't know," Marissa said. "It looks like it would be fun for a week, and after that not so much so."

"It's not like that. It grows on you. One night there was a bunch of guys, maybe eight of them, I don't think they were even guests, they just came in for dinner, and each time I came back to their table, one of them would rent me, not even for the full five minutes. It was like a point of honor that they could finish faster than that."

"Do you ever go to the sex rooms at the resort? Or to the swinger beach?"

"No. I wouldn't do that alone, and Elise and I don't have the same day off. Besides..."

"What?"

"They're all so old."

"That doesn't bother you if they're in the restaurant?"

"It's different. So you just came here? What were you doing before?"

There was a minute or two of uncomfortable silence. "Risa and I were in school. In secondary school." Beatrice was careful to add that, just in case Rachel had missed it the first time. That "getting old" remark still stung.

"And you?" That was addressed to Rocco.

"I was attending university." Which was only partially true. He had finished his degree a few years ago. "I have a degree in computer science."

"And you came here to look for a job? Why not in Italy?"

"There are no jobs in Italy," Beatrice said. "People get out of university and come back to live in their parents' basement."

"It's not like that. It's true I was living at home, but I had my band, and then we started to make a lot of money from the videos. There wasn't much else to do during the pandemic. I didn't want to move out while the girls were in high school."

"While the girls were in high school? For how long?"

"Four years. That's when we started to do the videos. It's easy to get fake id," Beatrice said. "We already had them so we could get into nightclubs. Everyone in the school had them. We were over fourteen, that's old enough to fuck in Italy. Just not to drink in a bar."

"Then he started talking to Anna. I thought she was just another fan."

"I met her in a chatroom," Rocco said. "She was different. Special. She was the one who showed me where to find things on the dark web. She took an interest in us. Not just sexual, although she was a fan. She kept saying she wanted to do a show with us but she was in Russia or Ukraine or somewhere and she was attached to someone powerful and she was taking a risk even doing the chat room. And I was saying how I was stuck as long as the girls were still in school. Then last year she said her situation had changed and she was in Switzerland and could she come visit us and do a show. But I told her I didn't think that would work. Then she said she had found an apartment here at the Cape and she wanted to find roommates for it, and maybe she could find something for us to do along with the videos. As long as we would agree to do shows with her. I had no idea what we were getting into. I mean, the girl I was chatting with looked pretty enough, but who knows if that's really her. It could have been some old policeman ready to lock us up."

"So we came here to check it out," Marissa said. "Early spring, I guess. What else were we going to do? We didn't have the grades to get into university. Rocco didn't have the grades to get an IT job. But she could get us those things. She had a nice apartment. We did a couple of shows with her in them while we were here and they were okay. So why not? What else were we going to do?"

"So here you are."

"Yep, here we are."

"My mother was so relieved," Marissa said. "She could tell everyone that Risa is going off to culinary school in the fall. Out of the house. Doing something respectable."

That was enough to send Rachel into a fit of giggles.

"I never liked her," Beatrice said. "The conniving little bitch. She was just trying to get rid of us and have Rocco to herself. And the cats. We were going to have to live in a dorm at the culinary school, once that started. Something about school rules for first year students."

"It's true," Rachel said. "Of course Elise and I were able to get a room together, so it wasn't a problem. No pets though."

"Boyfriends?"

"You don't have time for boyfriends. Elise had one for a while."

"You weren't jealous?"

"The times she stayed the night with him."

"What are we supposed to do to get ready? Are we getting dinner there?"

"He said it would better to come on an empty stomach. Empty bowels."

"That doesn't sound promising. What about clothes?"

"Hang on I'll text him." Beatrice pecked at her phone. "He says the yacht is docked at the marina inside the nudist resort so we might as well come over that way."

"What is that supposed to mean? Through the resort? Or dressed for the resort?"

She pecked away again. "Both. We won't be needing clothes once we get on board, so it doesn't matter what we wear over." There was a pause. "He says everyone on the yacht is a fan so we might as well come naked."

"How many?"

Beatrice's thumbs went flying yet again. "He says there are twenty or so."

"All guys? They all get to fuck us?"

More flying thumbs. "He says that's up to the sheikh. If we come on the yacht we do what the sheikh says to do."

"Or?"

"He's says we either show up or we don't. But let him know now so he can make other arrangements."

"Tell him it will be fifty thousand euros," Rocco said.

"He says he'll go sixty if we give him three days, unconditional. He's texting us the contract now. Shit. What do you think, Risa? If we set foot on the ship, they can do anything that doesn't leave permanent marks or damage."

"Tell him we get half now."

"He says we need to sign first."

"Okay, but we're not showing up if the money doesn't." She scrawled her finger over the phone screen and handed it back to Beatrice, who did the same and hit the reply button.

"What about me?" Rocco asked.

"You weren't on the contract. I guess you can show up and see if they let you on board. Maybe sign a waiver then. Or you can stay home and feed the cats.

Dio mio!

Rachel, can you feed the cats for us? "

"Sure. No problem."

"We're here." Rocco pulled up in front of the resort so Rachel could scamper off, then turned into the parking lot for the apartment building. "We've got a half hour."

"That'll give me time to feed the cats. Oh shit! I meant to give a key to Rachel, in case we don't get back tonight. Maybe I can catch her."

"Well, leave your dress here. We'll meet you at the terrace."

"We're going there naked?"

"Why not? Anything we're wearing will just be sweaty by the time we get there."

"I'll bring over a razor," Risa said. "If you want to touch up."

"You'll feed the cats? Okay. Take my purse too. We'll leave everything here except Rocco's burner phone." Beatrice pried her dress off and ran off in pursuit of Rachel. Sure enough, she was drenched in sweat just getting across the hot pavement of the parking lot and street, then shivering in the air conditioning when she got into the lobby of the hotel.

"I'm looking for Rachel." It was the same girl who had checked her bag, when, just two nights ago? In her elegant evening attire. Now her hair was matted, she was dripping sweat onto the polished tile floor, the refection of which was reminding her she really needed to touch up her shaving before they met the sheikh.

"She just went in the restaurant." The girl waved that direction without a hint of interest. Then added, "she was telling me you were heading to the culinary school in the fall?"

"That's the plan."

"So you might be working in the restaurant next summer?"

"Could be."

"In the kitchen?"

"Wait staff sounds like more fun."

"I'm sure you'll enjoy it."

What was that supposed to mean? That Beatrice would like it because she was nothing but a cheap whore? Which wasn't true if tonight was any indication. Thirty thousand euros. Well, ten thousand each if they split it three ways. She was a very expensive high class escort. And what about the desk clerk? Like all the hotel staff she wasn't wearing much, just a little skirt that made it quite obvious there were no panties underneath it. Was she on the menu? Beatrice was looking for a card when Rachel came running over to the desk.

"Bea! What's up?"

"The key. To feed the cats." \

"Where are the others?"

"At the apartment. Getting ready. I'm meeting them at the terrace. I figured I could rinse off there."

"Oh." Rachel was giving her the once over. "Edna, do you have one of those courtesy kits?" She opened it to show to Beatrice. "Shampoo, comb. Razor." She gave a pointed look at Beatrice's groin. Lifted up an arm to check the armpit. The girl behind the desk was trying to keep straight face.

"Thanks. You're a sweetheart." Beatrice managed a weak smile. She gathered up enough dignity to give Rachel a little kiss of appreciation, and went off the terrace, trying not to burst into tears of humiliation. She was sure she could hear the other girls laughing as she retreated.

She was still trying to work the pathetic little comb through the tangles when Rocco and Marissa arrived. It was, according to the clock on the far wall of the dining area, ten minutes to six. They just about had time to get to the marina. Of course, then they'd have to locate the yacht, but it was going to one of the three or four very large ones, twice the size of the typical craft docked there. It was a longer walk to get to those big ones. They were out on the pier with the river cruise boats. It was getting close to six, it was further out than they had thought. They were walking faster and faster, like in school when they weren't allowed to run in the halls, then they actually were running, which Beatrice and Rocco really were not built to do in the nude.

"What the fuck?" There was a ship that took up an entire side of the pier. "I didn't know they were running ocean cruises into the Cape."

"It's the sheikh's yacht."

"With a crew of twenty? More like fifty if you ask me." Beatrice was having a sinking sensation.

"Maybe mostly women."

They slowed to a walk to try to catch their breath and make a more dignified entrance. They were drenched in sweat from the run, and whatever attempts they had made to comb their hair were no longer evident. Beatrice had not had time to put on makeup, which was just as well, because the mascara Marissa had used was dripping down her cheeks.

There was, of course, a guard at the booth that blocked the gangway. A guard who did not look like he belonged on the yacht of an Arab sheikh, no turban or scimitar or puffy trousers or pointy shoes. A guard who looked Slavic, maybe Russian, maybe like Andre minus most of the kilos and tats, dressed in guard style in dark shirt and trousers. A guard who did not seem impressed by their appearance.

"

Ceci c'est un yacht privé.

" His French was hard to understand, some sort of African creole variant, with an Eastern European accent on top of it. He continued in heavily accented English. "This is a private yacht. The cruises are on the other side of the pier. But you'll need to put some clothes on."

"We're here on business. The sheikh hired us for the evening."

"Really. Usually the ladies he chooses to employ show up in limousines wearing lovely evening gowns. Famous ladies. Ladies who adorn the red carpet at major awards events."

"We

are

famous," Beatrice said. "We're stars on OnlyFans. He's one of our big fans. He's been trying to get us to do a private show for him for a few months."

"Really. Your name?"

"Melanie. Or Beatrice."

"And you?"

"Marissa. Or Trish."

The guard poked at his phone. "Okay, I see you two have signed a contract. I hope you know what you're getting into."

"We already have thirty thousand euros, in advance."

"Look," the guard gave a sigh, "once you go over that gangway you're at our mercy. Understand? Your bodies are at our disposal."

"No permanent damage. That's what's in the contract," Beatrice said. "Right?"

The guard gave a shrug and tapped at his phone. again "Very well. You'll have to leave your shoes with me." Even though they were now completely naked he ran a metal detector over their bodies. "I guess I can skip the cavity search. They'll do that quite thoroughly once you get on board. Go on. You first." He gave Beatrice a little nudge.

"What about me?" Rocco asked.

"You? You're not on the contract."

"The abeed said he could come along as long as he could fuck him."

The guard scratched his head trying to sort that out. "Who will be doing the fucking?"

"The abeed. I guess anyone else who's interested."

"Just a moment." The guard tapped his phone. "Yeah, sir, sorry to bother you. Yeah the girls are here, they look really hot." Beatrice gave him a thumbs up and a smile. "There's this guy with them, maybe he's their pimp, says he wants to come along. You did? Okay, send it and I'll have him sign it."

He handed the phone Rocco. "It's the same contract as for the girls. But you'll need to leave your bag, and the shoes. Okay honey, get going." He gave Beatrice a little slap on the rump.

The gangway was hot, made of grated metal. Difficult to walk on in bare feet. She limped up it to the deck of the ship, where more guards were waiting. One of them was holding a cattle prod. Not a good sign. "Don't put up any resistance." He pressed it against her belly as another guard grabbed her arms from behind.