Chapter 2 -- Watching the Duel and the Discipline.
EVA
A Thursday in May 2045, three days before the paintball gun shootout northeast of Hamburg. Larry Lee Lewis, known as the "Killer," met with Eva Verte, an attractive, shapely woman with black hair, ghostly pale skin and bright red lipstick, in a small coffee shop in Hamburg's St. Joseph neighborhood just north of the Reeperbahn.
Eva, 32 years old, was born in Paris but has been living in Hamburg since Marcon's presidency ended, and everyone in Paris took early retirement. Verte was the wife of a member of the Bundestag, Sarah Opfer, who committed suicide after being disclosed as participating in BDSM activities with leaders of Germany's right-wing party, Alternative für Deutschland.
After greetings, getting coffee and sitting down, Eva explained that she manages a company that handles export and import arrangements with England. These arrangements had become more complicated owing to new paperwork cause by Scottish and Welsh independence and a myriad of new EU requirements.
Killer explained that he wanted to talk a bit about Lena Fesch because she was involved in a magazine investigation about a contest he was helping to run. Killer had heard Eva knew a lot about Fesch and might have reason to tell him something he should know before his employer went too far in allowing Fesch access to his business affairs.
"And your contests involve paintball gun fights? That is an odd sporting event," Eva said.
"The company president, ELvis Wallace, who most people call Neck, created the contests. The contestants can make a lot of money. The main purpose from the company's point of view is to obtain women who will provide sexual services on ships travelling in the Mississippi Basin and the Gulf of Mexico. Neck has explained that we need contests that could be played by women that most men who might patronize a boat featuring sex will find very attractive. A women's sumo wrestling tournament would not work for this purpose even if it would be a worthwhile sporting event. Only women considered highly attractive to typical boat customers are invited to compete. We have paintball duels, fencing, and there is talk of adding tennis."
"That's funny; I just took up fencing. I was told it was good exercise."
"Frau Verte, I don't think you'd want to compete in our fencing tournament until you are very confident that you are very good. Both the rewards and penalties for participating in our contests are substantial."
Eva came to the point, "Mr. Lewis, I am still not sure why you looked me up or why I agreed to meet with you unless it is simply that you are so handsome and charming. You say you are interested in Lena Fesch and probably heard that I had a grudge against her relating to Sarah Opfer's death a decade ago. Yes, at the time of Sarah's death, I mouthed off that Lena caused Sarah to take her own life, but I was very upset and looking for someone other than myself to blame. Lena could have been more discreet. One could even say it was a sort of betrayal for Lena to say anything about activities in the Club all three of us were in. But Lena was young and did not disclose much about Sarah. Sarah certainly did not kill herself just because of the hint Lena provided that led to the discovery of Sarah's little vice.
"The fact Sarah liked to be tied up, teased, whipped and have sex in bondage would have hardly even been considered an indiscretion in itself. This is Germany. It was worse when someone, not Lena, disclosed that Sarah had revealed internal Linke party discussions to show off, but Sarah would not even have lost her seat for that.
"Afterward, it was obvious Sarah suffered from young adult-onset schizophrenia. I suspected she was sick when she started telling me how she would disclose how many of the leading CDU and SPD politicians were in the pay of some mysterious Jewish Hungarian Trillionaire. As I determined after I read much of what was in her diary after she hung herself, Sarah thought there were voices in her head implanted in her while she nodded off during some speech. The voices were trying to get her to jump off the Reichstag's viewing platform onto the Bundestag's floor. The last words in her diary were, "No, they'll never take me alive", written in blood.
"I have long ago forgiven Lena for the indiscretion in the article, and even the Club has forgiven her, although many think she is nuts for other reasons, or at least think she is very ego driven and foolhardy almost to the point of being suicidal. One can't help but respect much of her daring work as an investigative reporter even if one always senses her mixed motives. Although Lena has some rivals, she's generally considered the most daring and successful investigative journalist in Europe since Günter Wallraff.
"It's mainly how she uses her beauty and sexual powers that has made her especially controversial."
"I heard a little about her escapade in Brazil," Lewis said.
"That's part of what's crazy about Lena; she goes after silly little scandals and misconduct the same way she goes after massive frauds, kidnappings, treason, rape and murder. True, she first became prominent by writing a relatively innocuous article about BDSM in Hamburg which was sort of like discovering there is a tower in Paris. But then she did incredible work, going to Bulgaria, pretending to be a local woman who only spoke Bulgarian and was looking for work as a housemaid in Germany. Lena learned enough Bulgarian to fool Romanian thugs who were too entranced with her looks to ask the right questions. She worked for weeks as a prostitute after she was forced to work in an underground brothel in Frankfurt.
"Lena made no effort to hide the fact that she'd had sex with dozens of criminals and brothel customers in order to get the story and mentioned in passing she'd gotten an abortion after disclosing the operation. A lot of the details as to how she fooled the criminals and how she arranged to be rescued are known only to Lena, but while in the brothel, she left enough breadcrumbs to be found and for the whole operation to be crashed and 34 women to be freed. After that, Lena was compared to Nellie Bly."
"Who is Nellie Bly?"
"Because of my acquaintance with Lena, I read up on investigative journalists like Wallraff. Bly was the pen name of a woman who faked insanity in order to expose the mistreatment of the insane in New York mental hospitals. While what Lena did was in some ways similar to what Bly did, there were naturally a lot of sneering remarks about what Lena had done that were never directed at Bly. In truth, many of those who sneered the most knew Lena from the Club. Her name in the Club is Mutige Schlampe, which means 'brave slut' if you don't know the German."
"I have certainly heard the word Schlampe frequently while visiting Hamburg," Killer said. "You know Lena well?"
"Let's just say that I have touched her most intimate places many times." Eva smiled slightly and continued, "After exposing the sex slave ring, Lena went on to find corruption among the windmill maintenance companies, which was good work, but then used all her feminine charms to bring down the Mayor of Lübeck, who was only guilty of using a bit of city money to spend on escorts. Of course, Lena had pretended to be an escort, and arguably the Mayor was entrapped as it was never proven he'd used city money to pay anyone but Lena. Lena charged a very high rate as an escort.
"Lena investigated accusations that women were being raped during the Russian civil war by getting raped Novgorod and almost murdered herself. Then there was a Bundeswehr general who disclosed how poor German air defenses were and an Education Minister of Lower Saxony who also fell for Lena's charms and revealed that she and another minister were taking money from government contractors.
"Lena did a tour of Berlin strip clubs and brothels, as a stripper and escort of course, but did not learn anything anyone did not already know. She nonetheless wrote a very charming article about her experience that showed that she had had a wonderful time."
"It does seem that she enjoys parts of her job a bit too much." Killer said. I have not studied the subject like you, but I think most investigative reporters don't fuck with everyone they fuck up,
"It seems Lena almost always does," Eva said. "And she springs something totally new every four or five months."
