Chapter 27 Just the Middleman
Just the Middleman
Tribeca was ideal for ordering forty-five-dollar seared scallops, spotting celebrities swathed in sunglasses and flipped-up hoodies, and marveling at the brick and cast-iron industrial aesthetic of converted historic warehouses.
And fire escapes.
Evan loved fire escapes.
They were like escalators designed for breaking and entering.
He pattered up three flights, the soles of his Original S.W.A.T.s finding easy traction on the mesh latticework of the steel-grated steps.
The final rise delivered him to a brief balcony softened with artificial grass and backed by a massive window shedding bleary late-morning light into a soaring architectural loft.
A sleek translucent blind the color of aged bamboo dimmed the lazy sun for the man working inside.
Facing away, he slouched on a low modern couch aimed at a massive wall flickering with light from a projector, shoulders rippling as he presumably typed on a cordless keyboard in his lap.
One foot was propped atop the hardware tower of a high-powered rig as he clacked away at the computer desktop cast upon the giant screen of white paint.
A door of dark-tinted glass, unlocked here seventy feet above the bustling sidewalk, let into the loft.
When Evan turned the chunky handle to enter, he could hear screaming music barely muffled by the giant padded headphones clamped around Manny Llorente’s head.
Aggressive guitar licks, piercing sync, raw vocals with voiceless uvular fricatives and harsh consonant clusters signaled Neue Deutsche H?rte.
Evan had heard plenty of the German heavy-metal offshoot when he’d tracked a cell of National Socialist Underground nail-bomb engineers through Eastern European clubs, leaving them garroted in cocaine-dusted toilet stalls.
He swung the door behind him, a moderate slam that went unnoticed.
Manny stayed hunched forward over his keyboard, head bopping.
Even from behind, it was clear that he’d put on some weight since his driver’s-license picture, his body softened from luxury.
His hair had thinned, not enough to turn the side part into a comb-over yet, but it would get there soon enough.
Scattered haphazardly among expensive, soulless furnishings were bizarre props.
A latex-lined coffin. Wooden pillories, the holes for head and hands burnished with use.
A flattened space-saver vacuum storage bag the width of an upright piano.
A black lacquer credenza supported mounds of papers, a cluster of Solventry overnight envelopes, and a metal tray with a jumble of flash drives.
Next to it stretched a lineup of industrial-size paper and multimedia shredders.
The walls held weighty framed art-ish photographs of orgasmic females, red lips parted wantonly to receive, black-and-white bellies contoured like landscapes, detached torsos buttoned with tight nipples.
The daylight, even muted, turned the wall-high projected desktop into a mirror of golden light. But when Evan eased forward, the glow shifted into clarity, images coming visible.
His breath kept on steady as ever. Instead, he felt the hitch in his heart.
The wall was tiled with living windows, dozens upon dozens arrayed in a video grid, each square writhing and pulsing.
His vision glazed to take it in as a unified blob, a squirming bed of sucking and pumping and throbbing and spitting, a barnyard muddle.
There was nothing coy or erotic or even sexual about it, just humans burrowed down into debasement, reduced to their barest existential function, base hedonism expressed to the surface and lit with unforgiving brightness.
Every imaginable version was on display and some unimaginable ones as well, siblings and stepmoms, frenzied mobs pounding around the nucleus of a nearly obscured form, suffocating girls vacuum-sealed inside storage bags, writhing like gaffed fish.
The anatomy was distorted, impossibly swollen and cinched, contorted and defiled, reduced to digital squares and sent roaring algorithmically into the wild.
Evan’s pupils contracted, the vision made horrifyingly specific.
For an instant he felt as if he were standing upside down on the ceiling of another world, the shafted projection an inversion of the stained-glass glow of Anca’s church, the mosaicked likenesses a perversion of the icon panels of the ecclesiastical partition.
A horror-image swam into his mind, that pogo-stick depression in the extant patch of carpet in that dingy subterranean fuck pad—one foot of a tripod.
A tripod to hold a video camera.
They had recorded it.
Her.
They had recorded her.
And propagated her debasement to the world.
Bile clawed up his throat. He could practically feel the give of Manny’s soft neck within his clenched hands, the crackling yield of the trachea’s cartilage rings.
Before it was done Evan would tilt the head back and stare down into the fading light of Manny’s eyes so he would fear judgment in his dying breath.
And yet. A promise had been extracted from Evan.
His fingers had tensed in anticipation, tendons aching with flexed restraint. He’d floated forward to stand just behind Manny. Those plush headphones disgorged the tinny scream of metal rock, an orchestral swell beneath the fiendish riot of the forever footage.
Each video had a logo watermark, a zesty font proclaiming: Young Tail Productionz!
Username YngTl69 coaxed to prurient elongation.
Manny shifted abruptly on the couch and slung his headphones down around his neck. He toggled a button on the keyboard and snapped a headset on, mic floating by his mouth. “You got the Manny Man.”
A pause.
“Wut?” Another pause as he listened to the caller.
“She got chlamydia and gonorrhea?” A snort.
Then: “Yeah, I suppose I do think it’s funny.
Lookit, these girls know they get whatever’s coming when they submit to the pony.
Which shoot was it?” Beat. “Those guys? They claim they test every month, but it’s a high-risk biz.
Shit happens on high-risk gigs. Just ask offshore welders and elevator mechanics.
” He listened briefly. “Well, that’s what the triple cocktail’s for, right?
No one likes to see condoms, bro. It’s a turnoff.
Plus, I mean, you wanna live or you wanna live scared?
” He drummed his fingertips atop his head.
“I’m not getting involved. She’s a grown-up. Tell her to act like one.”
Manny disconnected the call, flung the headset onto the couch beside him.
He nudged up the volume on the computer, myriad audio tracks playing over one another, a cacophony of tongues: Once you go white, baby, it’s all right.
It’s as big as my arm. Put it across your face.
Now take it. You want more? Yeah baby, gimme more.
Moans of pain. Slapping. Sounds of feigned pleasure giving way to gagging.
Manny’s fingertips fluttered across the keyboard, bringing one video to the fore.
Using an editing tool, he blurred out the man’s face but kept the woman’s.
In one of the background clips Evan spotted the pink couch from the ratty subterranean apartment, bowed under the weight of a half dozen undulating forms.
His rage simmered, reached boiling point.
He said, “Excuse me.”
Manny started as if cattle-prodded, jerking around on the couch and nearly toppling off. “What the hell? Who are you? How’d you get in here?”
Evan said, “Mute the videos.”
Manny grabbed the keyboard, dropped it, picked it up again, punched at it panickily. The loft went blissfully silent.
“Bro, look, whatever you want, you can have. I got plenty of everything and hookups for everything else.” Manny’s voice quavered, the tone entirely different from the one he’d used on the call. “Just … chill, okay? Let’s keep it cool.” His forearm twitched.
“Two days ago you rented an apartment for a pack of young men to rape a woman and record it for you.”
“What? Rape? I don’t do rape. I mean, not real rape.”
“And yet that is what happened. So you could post it as entertainment. And make money.”
“Money? You want money? You can have whatever I made from it. Or whatever else.”
Evan held unremitting eye contact until Manny wilted on the couch. “What then?” he said in a little-boy voice. “Why are you here?”
“For answers.”
“But I don’t know anything. I mean, it’s just a business model. It’s just a—”
Evan lifted his hand slightly and Manny froze.
“This instant is a dividing line,” Evan said. “Between life as you know it. And what is to come.”
Manny’s mouth stretched wide, clown-like.
He tried to talk but his voice came hoarse.
Cleared his throat. “I’m not sure what answers you want but I’m just the middleman.
I’m the money guy, bro, a producer, a little editing.
I just clean up what’s already happened, give people what they want.
I don’t do any of this”—his hand swept to indicate the muted projections—“I just monetize it. That’s all I am. A middleman.”
Evan’s gaze lifted. The visuals flew at him, a woodchipper spout into his eyes.
He imagined this man sitting here taking this in around the clock for weeks, months, years.
He imagined it barging into the heads of countless people of all generations, setting their expectations, morphing their brains.
Millions of participants, some even willing. Legion more consumers.
He took in Manny once more. His mouth held that perverse widened shape of terror, verging on a sob. The lower lip had curled over, dimpling the chin. Evan heard an echo of the tough-guy dialogue Manny had tried on over the phone: These girls know they get whatever’s coming.
“It’s so hard,” Evan said, “acting like you’re a man. Hoping no one else will see.”
Manny’s mouth pulsed. The word came out half formed. “What?”
“What happens when your bluff gets called.”