• Home

The Stripper

Posted on November 17, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

He rubbed his eyes with a satisfaction so great he wanted to find a metaphor for it. It had been a long hard day and his back had been threatening to freeze into a rictus of pain at several points during the series of meetings he had been party to. It was such a pleasure for him to simply be able to lie back in bed and rub his eyes he wanted to just keep doing it while the strain of the day eased out of his back and disappeared into that netherworld from which it would reappear when he had worked too hard or paid too little attention to his posture. When he was done rubbing his eyes he opened them and after the initial popping of flashbulbs that signaled the contact of the lights in the room with his sensitive eyes he took a moment to stare at her.

If she didn’t know better she would have believed that he was rubbing his eyes because he could not believe that a woman as hot as her was in his bedroom. But she knew better so she figured the little shit had simply got something in his eye and she hoped it stayed there for a while.

There were no tears in his eyes so there definitely wasn’t an eyelash or insolent piece of dirt irritating his delicate peepers. No, he had just enjoyed the act of rubbing his eyes as a prelude to enjoying the act of looking at her. The stripper; a woman who had recently taken her kit off in front of a roomful of appreciative strangers and then asked him to buy her a drink. After all these years it still surprised him when an attractive woman asked him that.

He was not attractive in the conventional sense.  No well-defined cheekbones, his eyes weren’t mysterious and his eyebrows were in desperate need of taming. He didn’t exercise and he wasn’t very tall but still the women knew he had something they wanted. His name was Habib and what he lacked in good looks he made up for with financial solvency. Since he was eighteen he had turned around sick businesses. He believed that profiting from oil alone was an insult to his intelligence so he took a (relatively) small amount of money out of the profits from the family’s core oil business and invested in sick businesses that ranged from football team franchises to a small family-owned enterprise making handcrafted shoes for men. In each and every case he turned the business around so that his small investment had quadrupled within the first ten years. And that was only from the businesses the world knew about.

It is conventional wisdom among the truly successful that trading in commodities and services is a sure fire way to make enough money to live comfortably for the rest of a person’s life. It is through influencing policy and dictating the lay of a land that a person becomes truly powerful. In that respect as well, Habib had started small, learnt quickly from his mistakes and shown a real talent for power-mongering. He was responsible for bloodless coups in most of the little African countries that dotted the continent and played important parts in the in-bound and outwards routing of everything from oil to food and livestock across the continent. He played his cards right, made his friends well and bided his time for the grand gesture that would seal his position at the table for the big boys in the biggest, most unseen act of puppetry ever orchestrated.

Living the type of life he did, Habib did not grudge himself the simple pleasures whenever they became available. Like lying back in a comfortable bed and rubbing his eyes or looking at an incredibly beautiful woman prepare to do pleasurable things to him simply because he looked powerful.

“What are you in the mood for sugar?” she purred. He sighed and waved his bejeweled finger in the general vicinity of her torso, “You realise I have already seen it all?”

She smiled, “Seeing is not believing my little man. You are still unaware of what I can do with…” she ran a languid hand down the front of her body and tossed her hair for added effect, “all this.”

His eyebrows rose even though his expression remained unchanged, “And do you propose to show me?”

“Would be a waste of a walk to your hotel suite otherwise, wouldn’t it?”

“Too much talking young lady.”

“A man who likes to get down to business. Nice. I know what’s in it for you but what’s in it for me?”

“How much money would you like?”

“Money, I’ve got. What else can you offer?”

“I doubt you have money like I have money my dear. Or else you wouldn’t have asked me to buy you a drink.”

“You never know why a girl does the things she does. We are called women for a reason. The amount of money is only of value to men as a substitute measure for penis size anyway.”

He smiled an unpleasant smile, “I hope you use that mouth for something other than talking little girl. I wouldn’t like to think I made a mistake by inviting you to spend an evening with me.”

She was already tugging on the zipper that ran from neck to hem as he spoke.  With the dress wide open to reveal her nakedness in a frank way totally at odds with the dramatic revelations of her performance on stage, she cut an impossibly fit figure. His eyebrows began to knit in displeasure, a displeasure that turned to surprise when he saw the slim but clearly sharp blade that swung into view when the dress fell open. His eyes opened wide, as did his mouth and that’s where she sank the flexible but powerful tongue of steel. Right through the soft tissue in his mouth, down his throat and past the carotid artery that gave like a high tension hose slashed by a lumberjack’s axe to twitch wildly on the ground. Habib was dead before he hit the beautifully white sheets.

The suite would go unreserved for sixteen months after word of the anonymous yet gruesome death got out. Way before his body was discovered and security staff began scanning security camera footage to find an image of his assassin, she was gone. Not just physically from the scene of the ‘crime’ but also from the record books that had maintained her identity as Collette the Australian Stripper.

Collette was never seen or heard from again. A girl who worked with her for the seven months she had spent establishing her cover thought she saw her one night at the bar in The Bellagio. She just as quickly convinced herself that she had imagined it because Collette was blonde, busty and tanned whereas the woman drinking Bellinis alone at the bar was thin, dark-haired and whiter than a ghost in the moonlight. The girl once known as Collette saw her ex-colleague too and she was tempted to acknowledge her with a toast or a wave but she knew what a bad idea that was so she made her exit as quickly as she could.

No word of Habib’s death ever got out because no government claimed him as their own. In her last known whereabouts, the girl known as Collette was playing flute in the Paris metro, waiting for a scary lesbian assassin named Marta to notice her. Any day soon she would have to go where she hadn’t been since her days of sexual experimentation as a college freshman.

Comments