Edge Play X Read Free Page A

government. It was how we found out
Eliot Spitzer was seeing call girls.”
    “I’m not a call girl.”
    “That may be,” he said, “but we
explored some of these deposits, and we saw that you happen to have, over the
course of several years now, many deposits that are suspicious.”
    “I want a lawyer,” she said.
    “You aren’t being charged with a
crime,” he told her.
    “If you want to question me about
this, I want a lawyer present.”
    He smiled at her, a smile her mother
would have called the smile of the devil, the same smile used by snake-oil
salesmen, televangelists, and politicians. “You aren’t going to have a lawyer,
and you are going to answer my questions.”
    “Look,” she said, “I am not a
dominatrix by trade. I’m an artist. Many men I have seen have given me gifts.
Some of them gave me jewelry, others gave me money. Have you ever given a woman
you liked a gift?” The man didn’t respond.
    “Did you know that there is an amount
that the IRS has established, above which a gift must be claimed?”
    “Then why isn’t the IRS talking to me?”
    “We’ll get to that,” he said. “Tell
me, what do you do for a living?”
    “I just told you. I’m an artist, a
painter.”
    “You happen to live very well for a
painter. Aren’t most artists starving?”
      “When my mother died I inherited half of her
estate.”
    “And your brother inherited the other
half, but it all went up in smoke, didn’t it?”  
    “I work here and there as I need to,”
she explained.  
    “As a dominatrix. A dominatrix named
X.”
    Anger was spreading through her body,
permeating it, where it emanated from she wasn’t quite sure but it was
somewhere in her belly or her heart, and she felt its heat rising up into her
throat.  
    “Look, I don’t charge men for what I
do. I do it to them because I like it, because they like it.”
    “But they give you money.”
    “They give me gifts. Tributes.”  
    “A tribute,” he began, “is not so much
of a gift, is it, but an expected payment, an obligation, the kind of thing one
country pays to another. The payment acknowledges their subjugation, and they
wouldn’t pay it if they didn’t have to, would they? Call it whatever you want,
but we both know that it is really just a payment for services.”
    “You don’t understand,” she told him,
“I am not a dominatrix for hire. I don’t go to a dungeon for work. These are
men I have had relationships with, and a few of them happened to be men of
means.”
    “Men who happened to
give you a lot of money.”
    “They treated me well. I treated them well.”
    “They treated you well for treating them cruelly.”
    The timbre of his voice dug into
her—there was a subdued cruelty and insult in his every word.
    “I treated them how they wanted to be
treated,” she said before lighting herself another cigarette. “Men are allowed
to give anything to their wives. Some people think that marriage is a form of
prostitution. But I told you once and I’ll tell you again, I’m not a call girl,
nor am I a dominatrix for hire.”
    “But you did take their money,
sometimes in amounts that should have been claimed to the government. You
really shouldn’t have let them write you checks, you know.”
    X smoked her cigarette and looked him
in the eye. “Did you know that some men actually enjoy it when a woman takes
their money? I have witnessed men get hard just watching me remove the money
from their wallet.”  
    The explicit nature of her statement
did not bother her, and it didn’t seem to bother him, either.
    She took her last drag and blew the
smoke towards his face. “Why don’t you tell me why the CIA is talking to me and not the IRS ?”
    There was a drawn out silence and she
shrank from it, afraid of what she would hear.
    “We need to enlist your services,”
Simeon said.
    “I told you that I’m not for hire,” X
returned.
    Simeon stood up from his chair at the
table, and again X noticed the gun