Ranulph Fiennes - Killer Elite

Studies of the travelos’ clients say that over half go only once in their lives to “see what it is like” and are put off for good. The majority of the rest are “normal” citizens-plumbers, professors and office workers-happily married with happy children. They appear merely to be pursuing their hidden fantasies despite the knowledge that they are entering the body of a man who, high on drugs and unwashed, has just received many other clients among the discarded condoms and beer cans of the same copse. Why they thrill to the false, pumped-up breasts, the body odor and the baritone voice with its heavily accented Portuguese, remains a mystery to the milieu. How to explain the nonstop supply of clients and the ever-increasing attractions of this outside theater of sodomy is not the job of the local police, the Brigade Mondaine.

Davies parked at the curb behind two other cars and right beside the waste bin that marked Pia’s habitual site. He had not long to wait. A small man-a town clerk, Davies decided-in a rumpled brown suit and thick spectacles, emerged from the bushes and made for his car, fumbling with the key. Pia followed, wearing a black mini-petticoat that concealed little. Her blond hair was cropped urchin-style, and Davies felt himself roused despite the dictates of common sense.

Pia leaned against the waste bin. Davies’s window was down. He could clearly see Pia’s maleness and smell the mix of sweat, cheap aftershave and the afterodor of previous clients. She had a pretty smile.

“How much?” Davies asked.

“It’s one hundred francs.”

“But if I-”

She cut him off. “Anything extra is fifty more francs.” Davies nodded. He locked the car and followed her into the bushes.

Afterward he told her, truthfully, it was the first time for him. Her French was only a little better than his, so he kept his sentences short and spoke slowly.

“You are very beautiful,” he said.

She seemed to like his flattery, but already she was showing signs of impatience. Perhaps she was losing a customer. He took the plunge. “Here is an extra two thousand francs, Pia. You’re unlikely to have another twenty clients tonight, so let’s go to a nightclub of your choice for an hour or two. I have a special proposition to make you. Good money is possible.”

Pia was of course interested. She fetched a chic mackintosh and calf boots from a carry-all in the shrubbery.

“Where are you living?” she asked.

“In a motel in town,” Davies told her.

“We go there. I do not like nightclubs.”

This suited Davies. He stopped off at a bar to buy whiskey and cheese biscuits.

In the car Pia unwound a bit. She was, Davies soon realized, a desperately unhappy person. Every Sunday she prayed at the church in Pigalle dedicated to Saint Rita, who, in Brazil, is the Patron Saint of the Hopeless. She was homesick for her parents in a shantytown in Sao Paulo. Much of her savings was spent each winter on a two-month trip back to Brazil.

“I like to buy myself pretty clothes,” she laughed; a quick, masculine noise.

Vice in the Bois, thought Davies, must be a hideous, tortured misery for these people. Why do they do it? he wondered. It can’t be for money. To alleviate her black moods Pia took alcohol, cocaine and marijuana. She craved the love of a real relationship, but she knew men never fall in love with travelos. Some of her Bois friends had committed suicide from despair. All professional travelos have the regular hormone treatment, silicone operations and expensive weekly hair removal necessary to prevent reversion to visible masculinity. Life consists of the taunts of voyeurs, the fear of murder by weirdos or mugging by one of the many Bois predators, the dubious pleasure of twenty or more possibly diseased clients per night in all weather, and the never-ending cost of unnatural medical inputs. Since there is no way of saving money the only apparent gain is the ability to remain a transsexual.

They chatted together in the tiny motel room for three hours. Pia understood that Davies wanted her to entertain an important customer in the Bois the following Tuesday night. If the man failed to turn up, she would still be paid by Davies and they would try again on successive Tuesdays. She looked at a photograph of the judge until she was certain she would recognize him. She also memorized the details of his Citroen. She accepted Davies’s assurances that she would be able to ply her trade on the agreed-upon night or nights at the prime Bois site that he had described to her, for the normal occupants would be well paid to accept her temporary presence there.

Davies took Pia back to her lodgings not long before dawn, but first he drove her to the chosen site and together they walked into the forest to a section of loose undergrowth unlittered by the ubiquitous condoms of the well-used patches.

Excited at the prospect of major earnings in the near future and grasping the half-empty whiskey bottle, Pia waved fondly at the departing Davies.

The judge slipped into his astrakhan overcoat and looked about his office close to the Ile de la Cite. He was a careful man and cheated on his wife with the same attention to detail as he handled his cases. Nothing was left to chance. From time to time he did work for the security service and not all of it was savory. For many reasons it was wise to be circumspect.

In the underground car park he selected the keys to the old Citroen ID19. Only the attendant knew about the Citroen and he was tipped to the eyebrows. The world in general, and certainly his family, associated the judge only with his black Alfa-Romeo. But he still felt a sliver of unease. Despite the many threats he had received over the years he was never able to ignore open hostility and the woman last month had been especially venomous. He had put the three brothers from Marseilles away for life for murder and conspiracy to blackmail. Quite which one the woman belonged to was uncertain, but he remembered her beetle-black eyes above the mink coat and the intensity of her brittle scream: “You bastard. You destroy his life. Now I destroy yours.” He made an effort to forget her, to concentrate on the sharp pleasures of the immediate future.

Two years ago, driving home through the Bois de Boulogne in the early morning, the judge had chanced to pass a teenage transvestite named Zita. Whether it was his mood at the time, the flux of the moon, or merely the effect of his headlights on her cheekbones and thighs, he did not bother to ponder. She possessed a magnificent body, pert little breasts and ash-blond, shoulder-length hair. He later discovered that Zita alternated a wardrobe of ten wigs, but by then he was hooked.

His table of Rotarian colleagues met on Tuesday evenings for nine months of the year, and since the judge had never looked at another woman, his wife in their well-appointed flat in La Muette, was not suspicious. He developed a routine. Once away from the office he exchanged his astrakhan for the scruffy flasher’s mac and cloth cap that lived in the Citroen. Thus transformed, he felt safe from recognition in the Bois and titillated by the touch of the bizarre, the forbidden, that enhanced the whole procedure.

He ceased to be bothered by middle-age feelings of rusting away. Life was no longer a mundane groove. Should he be discovered in pursuit of his perversion, his career and his marriage would not survive the shock. He savored, indeed nurtured, the risk in much the same way as a climber relishes a dizzy void.

Fearing the darker, less accessible parts of the Bois, the judge habitually cruised the main thoroughfares, especially the northern end of the Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi. He invariably chose tall, fair transvestites, a hangover perhaps from Zita, who had killed herself in a public lavatory not long after introducing him to the dubious pleasures of the Bois. He grew to love the alien smell of the earth and the sounds of the forest as he pounded away in the scrub. To the judge, sex without the Bois soon became like strawberries without cream.