Chapter X Confession

 

 We walked to the next door on the same corridor. Valentina did not even bother to knock; she pushed the door open.

  Inside, a man was swinging in a harness suspended from the ceiling. I was quite startled. He was hooded and dressed in a leather cloak. I noticed no eye slits in his hood. The poor guy was in total darkness. Around him stalked a woman in black lace, mocking him and insulting him. She carried a whip. The room included the kind of adult furniture that normally appeared at fetish parties I had attended. There was a wooden trestle structure covered by a cushion, a number of stools and raised punishment benches, stocks for the head and arms and a second diagonal cross. One of the walls was covered with artistically arranged instruments of torture. There were whips, some with metal beads, straps, canes, studded belts, floggers, pincers, metal and material handcuffs, restraints of various kinds and various instruments for sexual excess. It reminded me in a way of the lavish armoury hall in Hampton Court Palace, where the walls are lined beautifully and symmetrically with muskets, swords and pikes. Another wall contained paintings of flagellants, male and female victims of knouting and imagined scenes of monastic penitence orgies. A third wall had a large mirror in which the mysterious suspended figure and its tormentor could be clearly seen.

Despite the mask over her eyes I recognized the dominatrix by her hair, her bouncy breasts and her generous mouth. It was Ludmila. That mouth smiled in our direction but she placed an upright finger over her lips.

Valentina led me silently across the torture chamber to a second room behind the wall with the mirror. She shut the door and put on the light. It was a dark murky light and I needed a few minutes for my eyes to adjust. Immediately I spotted a large window with a panoramic view of the room we had just left. Obviously the big mirror I had seen before was double-sided. There was a microphone installed giving us all the sounds from the other room. 

“Who is he?” I whispered.

Valentina smiled. “An old friend. I couldn’t possibly tell you who he is. If it were you, would you want me to give your name to anyone who sees you in that video trailer, naughty English boy?”

I was seething with rage at this fresh taunt. I was determined to have my revenge in good time, especially as I needed to find out more about who Valentina was and why she was acting out this strange role.

I looked around the room we had just entered. It was obviously an inner sanctum of pleasure with padded walls apart from the mirror window. There were 3 monitors showing the goings on in 3 different places. One was the room bathed in red light where I had seen the Chinese girl being tortured. The second was the front entrance hall. The third monitor showed a different room with some naked people, male and female, frisking about in a large Jacuzzi.

As I got more accustomed to the light I observed a small mini-bar and a couch with a couple of comfortable seats in the room. Also there was a beautifully carved traditional kneeling stool with a raised arm-rest. Next to it was a table with a half-finished bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, paper towels, an opera glass with a pearl handle and a few carelessly abandoned instruments of correction. I was momentarily drawn by the sight of a primitive birch which I had not seen in close up before. I had seen these bundles of pain used in the Russian art-house film “Of Freaks and Men” and I had been impressed. I held Valentina tightly round the waist as we watched the proceedings in the other room for about three minutes. Then I switched off the sound and the cavorting of the body was now taking place in a mysterious silence like in an old silent film. After another few minutes I closed the curtain covering the mirror. Now we were truly alone. It was hot in there. I took off my jacket and helped Valentina by unzipping her PVC costume. Underneath her skin was sweaty but that was hardly surprising. I kissed her beguilingly. This time she turned her face round to receive my kiss.

I still held Valentina close by the waist as I tilted her face towards me and kissed her full on her lips. With our faces still glued together I moved our bodies together in the direction of the kneeling stool and her body followed willy-nilly. Her outfit began slipping off. I moved quickly now. I detached myself from the kiss and pushed her body onto the kneeling stool with her arms over the wooden rest. I held her down, my lips pressed against the back of her neck, evincing a long shushing sound to calm her. She was trapped by my body into a kneeling position on the stool.

As she was about to protest I covered her mouth with a second long kiss. I drew back from that kiss and said rather, perhaps uncharacteristically, crudely, “You have just a gorgeous arse; let us celebrate it properly.”

“Petya, don’t be naughty,” she said flirtatiously. Then suddenly a note of alarm entered her voice. “Now don’t do anything silly.”

 “Valentina, tell me what is going on.” I shook her. “Who made that film?” I shook her again. She snarled back at me. “How did you end up at the Pinkerton Plaza presentation?” I shook her again. She laughed. She continued laughing, almost as if she were forcing herself to laugh.

 I just lost my self-control and hit her on the cheek. I had never ever done something like that before to anyone, let alone a pretty female. But I was really really mad... and frightened.

She smiled at me defiantly.

 “You’ve got to tell me the truth, you bitch.” I think I must have roared this at her. I was stunned by my own anger and by what I had done.

“Let me go this instant!” she ordered me. She was sensing my hesitation.

For a moment I thought that I would lose the impetus. Then I eyed the instrument behind her and remembered my original intention. I had enough residual anger in me to plough on. “Answer me. Tell me the truth and I will let you go,” I said more quietly.

I picked up the bundle of birch twigs and swished it through the air. This was going to be a new experience for me as much as for Valentina, I thought.

She sensed the danger. “I don’t know about the film,” she blurted out. Seeing me shake my head she added quickly, “And our meeting at the site visit was just coincidence, Peter. I was surprised to see you.”

“Wrong answer! Try again!” Driven now by cold anger I seized the zip at the back of her PVC suit and pulled it down with one sweep from the back of her neck to her curvaceous bottom. Her cheeks popped out of their plastic cocoon, like white peaches from a shopping bag. I let my eye play momentarily with her exposed white back and white bum. This was now my battlefield on which I was going to concentrate my assault. Lust and the thrill of the chase now drove me as much as my anger. I was no better than Smallbridge.

I brought the bundle of sprigs crashing with all my might against her posterior. 

This time she yelled. Her white bottom had taken on a bright red hue straight away. It had reddened with one blow over a large area but each branch made its own cut. There were some purple streaks visible over the red background.

“Now, let’s have that answer again! How did you get the job with Pinkerton?”

“Petya, stop it. I can’t tell you. Now let me go!”

“Give me an answer!” With another loud swish I cut the bundle again against her exposed red bum. To my horror I saw the birch twigs draw blood. Horror indeed, but also fascination.

“No! You bastard. Stop it!”

I whacked her again.

I swung the birch rods again, again and again as they landed on her rump with a thud. Perhaps about three times. I was not used to birches and it showed. Twig ends began flying around the room. She shouted out curses in Russian and then begged me to let her go. She was roaring at me to stop. She seemed to struggle against my holding her down, but her struggle seemed strangely half-hearted in contrast to her curses and intakes of breath as he winced from the pain. “Boli, boli,” she shouted in Russian.

“Then answer me. Who are you doing this for?”

“Peter, I can’t tell you!  I mean, I don’t know.”

“That’s a lie!” My anger was slowly draining but I hit her once more. But the birch twigs were fraying at the edges, with bits of birch flying in every direction. There was blood on the twigs and even some spots of her blood on my shirt.

Though her body shuddered at the blow, she had stopped struggling. She lay in the kneeling position on the bench as if waiting for the inevitability of another strike.

 “Petya, stop it. I can’t tell you. Now let me go!”

“Please give me an answer!” I was not threatening now, just pleading.

There was no answer. After an initial kick she lay supine and still again. The blood trickled silently from her cuts.

I paused and then I held the twigs against her behind and waited.

“OK but please let me go,” she said more calmly. “You won’t find out that way. I know you are angry but don't hit me again.”

“Valentina, you’ve lied to me.” I said more in sorrow than anger, “You’ve made fun of me, you’ve led me on a dance, and now you’re trying to blackmail me as well.”

I smote her again but more as a formality than as an act of punishment. Just to show that I could if I would.

“OK. OK. Finished?” she asked me impudently. “Can I get up now?”

She was as tough as nails, I thought. I rested and laid the bundle of birch twigs on the table. I let her head up and loosened my grip.

“Peter, I was hired to watch you from the very beginning. Both I and Ludmila.”

“By who?”

“Peter, please, let me get up.”

By then I had released her and she slowly and gingerly stood up holding her behind tightly. She let go and looked at her hands. They had small rivulets of blood imprinted on them. She seemed a little startled at that. She looked around, picked up the paper towels and the bottle of whisky and poured some of the contents on to her hands. I watched her in fascination when after a pregnant pause she applied her hands to her wounds. She winced with pain and cursed again. For a moment she looked at me reprovingly and with a mocking smile as she shook her head. Then she reached for the bottle and did it a second time.

She cuddled up against me and kissed me on the cheek. “I'm sorry Petya. I will tell you what I can.” She passed me the paper towels. I held her to me as relieved probably as she was.

She carried on speaking in a standing position, leaning slightly against me. I pressed the towels in turn against her wounds.

“It’s a long story. We are part of a group. We all work for a powerful man, the Big Boss.”

“Who?”

“The Boss. His name is not important.”

“It is to me. Let me guess. Yakov Sheremovsky?”

“He’s the Boss, that’s all,” she said quickly. “There is just so much I can tell you, but I just can’t give names. It’s too dangerous, even for you.”

I sensed now that despite some reservations she really was going to tell me something.

She took my hand and placed it gently on her rear. Slowly I started caressing the bruised cheeks under her direction. She snuggled up to me.

“It started in the Civic Centre. You didn’t see me probably,” she continued, “but Ludmila and I were at the count.”

“The count?”

“Yes, you know, election night.”

“In the Civic Centre?” I repeated in astonishment.

“Well our team of girls had been hired by your Council to join those counting the votes. Apparently they were short of volunteers from their own staff. Don’t be surprised. I am a mathematician,” she laughed. “It was great fun. In the meantime, we were told to keep an eye on you. Ted Grayson and Emil Kapacek we knew already. However we were told that you were a man to watch. You could be important.”

“Me??”

“Yes, you!”

“But why? And who told you?”

“Peter, sometimes you are a man and you are clever. Sometimes you are a baby and you are naïve.”

“I still do not understand”.

“We were told that your support was important for the Pinkerton Plaza project and that you would be a new person in the picture but still quite experienced.”

“I see.” I said incredulously. I was amazed because at the time of the election count a year before I had not even heard of Pinkerton Plaza.

“I have also noticed that your English is very good; almost impeccable. Yet in the night club you pretended that you could hardly speak English at all.”

“Well a girl can’t give away all her secrets at once. She would lose all sense of mystery. Most men in night clubs feel frightened of an intelligent and eloquent woman. They love a woman with an exotic accent and poor English so that they can feel superior to her. In a night club the men think they have power over the women, and the women let them think that. It is all part of the game.”

“Very interesting. OK, Valentina, so who pointed me out?”

“Is that really important? One of the Big Boss’s people. Another Russian henchman. The Boss has a big organization here. Ludmila and I are a small (how you say it?) - a small cock in a big machine.”  

I laughed. “A small COG in a big machine,” I corrected her.

“That’s what I said, a small cock,” she said with slight irritation. I shrugged my shoulders in amused resignation. Perhaps her English was not quite that perfect after all?

“Once we knew you had been elected a Councillor,” she continued, “your friend Emil told us and said that you would probably be going to “Pinks”. We rang our immediate supervisor and he told us to go to the club and work as waitresses around you. We knew anyway that the club was owned by one of the subsidiary companies of the Boss, so we were not surprised when the club manager told us to do whatever we wanted as soon as we got there. We spotted Emil and your other friend, Chris, and the rest you know.”

“Not really. You already knew Emil and Chris?”

“We know that Chris has been adviser to the Boss’s architect over the Plaza project. We also knew we had support from Emil and from Ted Grayson. No, don’t ask me how I know this, and why. I do     not know all the secrets. But we knew that they were already our people; people we trusted. You were new, however. I had to get friendly with you.”

“Thank you very much.” I felt used and deflated. Then I looked at this beautiful woman who had been seducing me in the last week and now paying such a bloody price for it and felt important again.

”Why you?”

“Well, Ludmila and I are not bimbos. We both attend London University. Ludmila is a scientist. She is good at chemistry. I am a mathematician. Do I look like a mathematician? You should see me with my glasses. Then I am very sexy,” she laughed.

“Valentina, you are always sexy. Especially when you are naughty and need to be punished. And I knew you were very bright. But what has this mathematics got to do with my role in the Council.”

“Oh, you are so naïve. Still such a baby. Yes, we are students. But you know how expensive university studies are in England? Especially in London. High fees for foreign students. Very expensive. You understand now…” she looked at me pleadingly, as if she begged me not to enlarge on this matter.

“So you earn some money as society girls? As escorts?” I did not want to use the word “prostitutes”. “To pay for your studies?”

“Yes, escorts. But we are not prostitutes,” she suddenly stated with great ferocity. I was glad I had not used that word.

“Methinks she doth protest too much,” I thought. I decided not to make such value judgements aloud, as I was anxious to hear more about the Plaza project and my own supposed role in it.

“Yes, Ludmila and I had to choose who would go after you. We argued, and I won!”

She had been seeking to arouse me with her hand movements as she talked but with remarkable resilience I had halted her hand in order to concentrate on what she was telling me.“Very flattering. What did you do? You drew straws? You tossed a coin?”

“How do you know that?”, she said surprised. “Yes, I won. Best of three.”

I wished now I had not asked for that detail. I felt deflated again.

“Go on!” I said, to suppress my annoyance.

“Well you know I was very pleased to meet you. Especially when I saw how kinky you were. Sado-maso, you know. Very popular in Russia. Men and women both like it. You like to give good spanking. You like to get good spanking. You are a naughty boy. Me, I like that too. So I like you.”

I ignored the embarrassing connotations of this and ploughed on. “So what happened? You were supposed to keep up contact with me?”

 “Yes, but I give you my card. And you do not call me. My bosses were not happy with this. They say they will punish us. Stop our money. Then we were given other tasks. Now we are told to come to the meeting on the Pinkerton site and we are told to mingle with guests and make them happy. Especially with alcohol. But we must make sure that all the Committee members will support the scheme. Also they wanted to thank you for what you had done already.”

“How were they going to thank me, exactly?”

“Well,” Valentina looked at me with a certain embarrassed shyness. “I was going to be the thank you. Is that a good thank you, darling?”

“You would sleep with somebody just for this project!?”

I disliked this turn of events. I already knew a good deal more than I wanted to.

“No, Petya, please. You are making this very difficult. Don’t be angry. I like you so much anyway. I really do. And you are so cruel to me and so indifferent. I do not do this for them. And I am NOT a prostitute.”

I mused over this. After all, I thought, here she was in a strange country, exploited and therefore exploiting, doing as best as she could. She was probably the pride of some god forsaken town in Belarus, Russia’s dirt poor small neighbour. How could I judge her? And she was so delicious and sexy, especially when she was being alternatively naughty and then contrite. That was just spell-binding. I had a great temptation to take her there and then, bleeding bottom and all.

 “How much longer can we stay here?” I asked, suddenly aware of our surroundings.

“My flat is on the floor above,” she said. “If you are ready, we go upstairs, and I will tell you the rest.”

“You live here? In this…?” I was lost for a word to describe this hedonistic palace of torture. “In this House of Shame? On your own?”

“No, not on my own. There are four of us Russian girls living here. There are advantages and we all have our own bedroom up there. It’s a big house.”

We drew back the curtain over the mirror to reveal that the body in black was still hanging there. Ludmila and another girl had removed most of the clothes of the hanging figure and his sex was now well established as was the paunch immediately above it. Someone had tied a thin rope tightly around his genitals which was attached at the other end to a remote control model racing car. One of the girls was operating the car so that whenever it reached the outer range of the length of the rope it began to yank and dig in on his crown jewels. The other girl was still taunting him about the size of his manhood.

We crept past this merry assemblage and Valentina exchanged a quick silent nod with Ludmila. Then we slipped back into the corridor and up the stairs.

There was a communal kitchen with a fridge/freezer and a sitting room upstairs which served four separate small bedrooms. The communal room looked very sane and sensible with no sexy pictures on the wall, just a Russian winter landscape reproduction and some posters for Aeroflot, a perfume ad and another poster for a Russian tourist board. There was a mirror over the mantelpiece though the old chimney entrance was blocked in with a radiator. There was a computer, also books in Russian on the mantelpiece including a 5 volume encyclopaedia and some erotic picture books, including an illustrated Kama Sutra with commentaries in Cyrillic script. 

Valentina led me into her bedroom, which had a double bed which more than filled the small room, a built-in wardrobe, a table and chair and a wash basin. Quite Spartan. There was a beautiful icon of the Black Madonna of Somewhere or Other over the bed against the wall. I sat on the chair and she rested her sore behind on the soft bed.

“Tea, coffee, whisky, vodka?” she asked. She motioned to me to get the vodka from one of the shelves in the wardrobe along with a couple of glasses.

“Shouldn’t this be in a fridge?” I asked.

“Well in a freezer, actually. You know vodka can only be held in a freezer. It will not freeze up. If it does then it is not proper vodka. I took it out this afternoon, so it will still be a little cold”

“Not cold enough. I’ll have the whisky.”

I carried the vodka bottle back to the freezer in the other room and in the meantime Valentina poured me out a whisky and then one for herself. Forgetting herself she bounced back on to her own bed and then just as suddenly bounced back up, grabbing her behind and wincing with pain.

“Shit, that hurt! I’ve forgotten that you are the Spanking Councillor.”

She slipped out of her cat suit, gave me some paper towels and a tub of some aqueous lubricant. “Can you please rub this in gently, you beast.” She turned over on the bed, exposing her flaming and lacerated behind. “You whipped me, so now make it better,” she ordered. “Gently, gently!” she stressed as I took up her offer a little too excitedly.

The “beast” smiled, quite flattered by her description. I was ready to listen to her story now, as I ever so gently, rubbed her behind.