It had been a while since William Winter-Webster had last been to a gentleman’s club. It must have been a hare-brained stag do for a friend half a decade earlier. He had no clear recollections of the night, probably for a good reason. He did not, however, ever remember seeing a gentleman’s club that looked like this one.
He stood outside in the freezing drizzle and pocketed the business card that had led him here. The coastal wind accelerated the tiny little pinpricks of ice to murderous velocity, and he had to hold on to the sides of the hood of his fishtail parka the northerner had gifted him. He must have looked like a junkie, hanging about in this seedy part of town in weather like this, in the middle of the night.
The yellow limestone brick building had been abandoned for some time, judging by the vintage of the graffiti on the boarded-up windows. Wint looked up and down the street that ran perpendicular to the Brighton Beach boardwalk where, even despite the weather, flocks of drunk men and women, curiously segregated by gender, walked from bar to bar, looking for groups of the opposite sex. The side street where Wint stood, shivering, was completely devoid of people. The dilapidated building occupied the entire street, a few blocks’ worth, up to the traffic intersection in the distance, where traffic lights cast a hazy red, yellow, and then green hue into the misty night.
Underneath the club’s neon sign, above a pair of massive classical style double doors, Wint could still read the original purpose of the building: PUBLIC LIBRARY. Now, the flickering purple neon sign spelled out its new name: Niceland.
He knocked on the door. He had come here as soon as he arrived in Brighton in the morning, but of course, strip clubs didn’t open until late. He squeezed his cheap Casio watch to activate the backlight of the digital screen. Nearly midnight.
The door opened inwards with some effort. He expected to see a big, mean bouncer greet him with a suspicious stare, sniff and a frisk. Instead, the heavy door had been pulled open by a diminutive woman, in her forties perhaps, wearing a frilly dress.
“Welcome to Niceland”, she said, chirpily. “Do come on in, it’s raining you know!”
Inside, Wint brushed off droplets of water from his weatherproof parka and looked around. His eyes adjusted to the low light, even compared to the streetlit murkiness of the outside. Given the derelict look of the exterior, Wint had expected the usual flotsam and jetsam of squatter life: mattresses, empty bottles, crack pipes… he had never been to a squat in his life, so he didn’t really know what to expect. Instead, the space was clean, and looked exactly like what it had been designed to be, the entrance hallway to a public library. What set it apart from most libraries was the candlelight intimacy, and the low bass sound that boomed through the second set of inner doors at top of a small staircase.
“The cover charge is twenty quid, but there is no drinks minimum”, said the frilly dress lady. “Cash or card, love?”
“I’m here to see Hanna”, Wint said, like he had been told to.
The lady pursed her lips and squinted her eyes in consideration. “I’ll be sure to let her know”, she said. “Now, cash or card?”
Having paid half of his earthly possessions — he hadn’t carried much cash with him that morning, and the rest had vanished along with the northerner and the suitcase thief, who Wint surmised must have been colluding with each other — Wint was shown to the main lounge. The space was circular and centred around a massive electric chandelier above a bar that had clearly once been the librarian’s desk. The club was surprisingly popular given the quietude of the street outside, with multiple raucous groups of men chatting up scantily clad girls, many of them bare-breasted or wearing a small tassel or flower on each. Few lone men sat there, each at their own table, nursing a drink, leering at the girls who danced in spotlights pointed at the deep alcoves between the roman columns that circled the walls. Wint joined the category of lone men and sat in the booth he surmised provided the most privacy.
“Hanna will be with you when she’s ready”, said the lady who’d shown him to the table.
Though the space was unorthodox, Wint was glad to note that the basic method of operation of strip clubs hadn’t changed since he’d last to been to one. Tits, asses, booze. He thought about getting a drink, but though he’d better save his few remaining pounds. Maybe just one? His nerves were flaring up again.
Why had he been brought to this place? It certainly didn’t look like the kind of place Ada frequented. Hanna, whoever she was, must have been yet another security measure in the ridiculous operation of getting him to her. Ada had always been a little on the paranoid end — thus her involvement in the Bitcoin project that had led them to meet in the first place — but this was a bit much. It was extra, as Merida would invariably say, thought Wint, and wondered if he’d used the word correctly this time.
He looked at one of the girls dancing on the marble platform closest to him. She was shaking herself to the tune of the music. A deep bass backbone ran through the song straight into his gut. He listened to the lyrics of hoarse, loosely enunciating singer. “Drip drip. Splash.” Not the greatest work of poetry, but the music was absolutely dripping with sex. Though he wasn’t here for the entertainment, walking into a place like this still gave him a thrill. Feeling the song penetrate his body and watching the nearly naked dark-skinned woman gyrating in front of him, he couldn’t help feeling aroused.
He tapped the tabletop with his fingers along to the rhythmic music. The contrast of his natural reaction to nude women and the gravity of the purpose of his visit made him feel very uncomfortable. He hoped the girl he was watching wasn’t Hanna, because he wasn’t sure he could keep his eyes where they belonged —
“William!”
He looked up at the form standing next to his table. Shit. All the remaining blood left his brain and pooled around his groin.
“Ada…” He couldn’t believe his eyes. For seven years he had dreamed of this moment, and not once had it occurred in a strip club in an abandoned library on the south coast on England. And she… did she look… happy to see him?
Ada grabbed Wint’s hand and pulled him up from his booth. He had forgotten what a strong a woman she was! She brought him in to a warm, friendly embrace that lasted for at least twice as long as Wint would allow with anyone else, but once it was over, felt all too short. They stood in the dim, booming space and looked at each other. “It is so good to see you!”, said Ada. “It’s been a very long time!” Since they had seen each other last, her Estonian accent had faded away almost entirely in favour of neutral international intonation, but her speech still retained the rigid grammatical correctness of the written word, common with people who spoke English as a second language learned from books rather than social immersion.
They sat down, looking at each other. Wint wasn’t sure what she was seeing. Was it a man with a pleasant, nice-to-see-you-too smile, or a gargoyle with an macabre expression horror and shock?
What Wint saw was the same Ada Effram he’d met, loved and lost, yet there was something substantially different to her. Nearly a decade younger than Wint, she was now in her mid-thirties, and age had rounded her out. It had done that to him too, Wint supposed, but with her, the rounding effect of years had made her more feminine. Six-foot tall and broad-shouldered, she had always been physically a little cumbersome, and her lean frame had erred on the side of lanky rather than slender. There was an unfortunate tendency among some Eastern European women to start off as elegant gazelles, and after a certain age shrivel into the shape of a potato. For Ada, the age had done the exact opposite. Wint thought the striking contrast of the curly, asymmetric shock of bleached hair atop her shaved sides and the dark lipstick that looked almost black in the shadowy club made her look better than ever.
It might have been his inadvertent state of physical arousal, or the distraction of the obscene American rap music blasting from the club’s speakers, but for the moment the language center of Wint’s brain had shut down and all he could muster was a: “Damn!”
Ada laughed and punched him in the shoulder, hard. “How have you been, William?”
She seemed to be genuinely happy to see him! His tension melted away. He’d been worried for nothing — water under the bridge.
“Good!”, Wint started. But then he remembered that when Ada, being Estonian, asked you how you were, she expected you to answer truthfully, and not with the usual automated English reply. “Well, it’s been an interesting few years…”
She listened to him recount the highlights of the last few years. He cherry-picked the few good things: his second book had sold well (purely on the back his award-winning debut, the follow-up had been a critical failure, a part he chose to leave out); his promotion to the editor of the paper (by virtue of the previous editor quitting in fit of rage, also omitted); the details of the project he was now working on (which he had barely started). He peppered his narrative with a few self-deprecating details about working for a Silicon Valley dunce, and having to deal with the insubordination of his subordinates. He didn’t mention the bad dates, nor did he say anything about his mother’s condition — she was a sensitive topic between them, and while he trusted Ada to have sympathy for the woman’s premature dementia, he didn’t want to mar the amiable reunion with conflict.
“Anyway, Ada. I’m here for a reason.”
Quizzically, Ada looked at him. “Yes?”
“Well, do you remember ehh… before… when I interviewed you for that article.”
“I do.” She looked serious.
He was broaching a sensitive topic. He didn’t want to dredge up any painful memories, but he had come this far, and he needed to give her context. He raised his hand and placed it on hers, feeling her sharp knuckles against his palm.
“Do you remember how you installed a bitcoin miner or my computer?”
She didn’t respond. All of a sudden, she looked distant. Her body was still there, but it was as if she wasn’t there at all.
“Anyway, I ran that miner…” He stopped mid-sentence.
Ada’s face scrunched up towards the middle of her face. She rubbed the bridge of her nose violently and bit her teeth together hard. He could see the tendons in her neck stiffen.
“Ada… what is…?”
“YOU!”, she snapped. There was so much fury in her gaze. He could see tears of rage welling up in her eyes.
He didn’t know what to say. The silence lasted for a long time, she alternating between shaking her head, biting her lip, and sending him vicious looks. Wint didn’t know what was about to come, he just needed to wait and let her come out with it. Whatever it was, he was sure he deserved it.
She flattened both of her hands on the glass tabletop and looked at her fingernails. She addressed her hands, not lifting her eyes to meet his when she spoke.
“Seven years, William. I don’t see you for seven years, and then they tell me you want to see me.” Her voice was was strained. Holding back a scream must have taken every bit of energy she had. “I’m happy. I think, it’ll be nice to see my old friend William again. We had good times once, didn’t we. Then, no ‘hello’. No, ‘how are you’. Just, ‘my bitcoin’. Let me guess, you have discovered that Bitcoin is now very very valuable, and you have come to cash out.”
When she put it like that, Wint could see why she was upset. “I’m sorry. Ada, shit… I wasn’t thinking…”
She lowered her head and rested her face on top of her hands on the table. His weak apology hung in the air in between them.
“I mm mmh mhhmhmhhh mm hm”, she said to her hands. It was impossible to hear what she was saying over the music.
“Excuse me?”
She lifted her head, her eyes leaving black moist blots of eyeliner on her hands.
“I am so disappointed in you, William.”
The words sliced clean through him. This was straight out of one his nightmares where their reunion goes bad. Except it was worse, because she was on his good side, until he messed it up, again. How history repeated itself.
He didn’t know what to do. Situations like this weren’t his forte.
“Ada… You look fantastic.”
If a look could kill.
They sat there, in quiet, or as quiet as you could get in a club with a bottom-heavy sound system and acoustics created for quiet study of books.
“Fine. How much is it?”, Ada asked, finally.
“Twelve thousand.” He knows she’s agreeing to help him just to get rid of him, and it’s a punch in his gut.
She raised her eyebrows. They were darker than her bleached hair and gave her a stern, powerful look.
“And you want to know when to sell?”
“No, I need to find them. I can’t find the wallet.”
For a moment, he thought she would laugh. She scrunched up her face again and pulled her lips tight, baring her upper teeth. This was the face of anger that could not be contained.
“You bloody idiots!”, she exploded. “It’s not enough that you have to ruin the whole project completely, but you can’t even keep onto it. What is the point of giving you a secure and stable store of value if you can’t be trusted to handle it.”
“Ruined…”, Wint was confused. “How did I…?”
“Yes, you! Men! You dumb pieces of shit. You’re so greedy and so hung up on… power. Your speculation has ruined the whole currency. What good is a currency that’s worth ten thousand today and none tomorrow! The whole point of the project was to take power away from the banks, and now every finance bitch on CNBC is telling people to buy, buy, buy. Once the value corrects back to the normal curve, everyone will have lost their money and trust. It will take us ten more years to convince people it could be real. Did you not learn anything I taught you?”
“Uhh…” Wint didn’t see why he was being blamed. He had never bought a single coin.
Ada could see he wasn’t following. “And you — that is the price it takes to come and see me? After years! Twelve thousand pieces of silver? What is that… hundred… two hundred million?”
“Two”, Wint confirmed.
“What? One hundred million wasn’t enough for you? I guess so, since I didn’t see you here last week.”
“No, it’s not like that Ada —”
“You are a piece of shit, Wint.”
Being called by his preferred name hurt when it came from her mouth, more so than being called a piece of shit. There was always something caring about the way she said his full name, William. Other than his mother, she was the only one who did, it was her special name for him, but now he had been relegated back being just Wint. Not an enviable position.
“— you and all men, all bunch of weak little bitches.”
Wint felt cornered. This conversation had become an assault on him, and there was nowhere for him to escape. His pride has been dented. Like a cornered animal, he lashed out, irrationally, sending specks of spittle from his lips: “Men? Look at you —”, broadly waving his arm around pointing to the nude girls mingling, dancing, gyrating, twerking, “— don’t talk to me about bitches.”
His argument was nonsensical, and he knew it. He had immediately gone for his lowest blow, knowing misogyny was the one thing she couldn’t stand, swiftly proving her point about men.
She knew she was being baited, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
“And what, exactly, is wrong with sex work?”, she asked with mock sincerity. “Don’t think I didn’t feel your sad boner when I hugged you. Blargh!”, she feigned nausea. “The girls run this place as a co-op. They split the money, no men involved. Cash money. They are in control of their fates. Are you?”
She carried on. “I remember you waxing poetic about the power of words to stimulate the intellect and manipulate minds. These girls can stimulate your body and manipulate you nature. Which is more powerful?”
“Frankly, Wint, this whore versus madonna bullshit is below you —”
She was distracted by one of the girls running past them to the back room with their tassels bouncing. Another one followed, with short little steps in her stripper heels.
Ada grabbed the girl’s arm and stopped on her way. “What’s going on, Leah?”
“Troubles”, said the girl, nodding towards the entrance where three rough looking men had walked into the lounge and were looking around for something — or someone.
A short asian girl, with long black hair and black wiry lingerie approached the men. She hadn’t read the tone of the situation and was clearly hoping to seat them and get them to buy a round of drinks.
The shortest of the troublemakers, a squat tank of a man in a black bomber jacket, grabbed the asian girl by the mouth with one hand and pinched her breast with another. She screamed, and he threw her down to the floor and moved further into the room, scanning the punters. Another of the men circled the central bar clockwise. The third stayed at the door.
“Oh hell”, Ada said and bounced from her seat. She moved unbelievably fast, and in ten paces she had reached the bar in the middle of the room. The girl behind the bar handed her a small black rectangle, about the size of an iPhone, but thicker. Ada grabbed a bottle of gin from behind the bar and, seeing the taller of the men coming, approached him.
A split second before his eyes fix on her, she morphs her gait into the lascivious strip club strut the club’s girls put on for the punters.
“Heeyyy love”, she croons, holding the bottle out towards the man as if offering to pour him a drink. Their eyes are at level. He is measuring her tall frame from head to toe, trying to make sense of her. As soon as she gets within two steps of him, she swings her other hand and jabs the black rectangle into his neck. The man spasms, drops, and hits his head on the corner of the bar counter with a blow Wint can hear from across the room over the boom of the music.
Without hesitation or a wasted second, Ada turns around on the heels of her boots and circles around the bar until she reaches the squat leather-jacketed man. The man sees her coming and grabs the hand holding her tazer, trying to wrangle it from her. He is stronger than she is, but her arms are longer, and she’s able to extricate herself enough to get a bit of distance. She smashes the bottle of gin over the man’s head, who, momentarily dumbfounded, lets go of her hand for long enough for her to stun him straight in his gin-soaked face with the tazer. He’s already going down, but she keeps the charge going until he falls to the floor, immobile. A slight wisp of smoke rises from the black spider-like burn mark on the man’s face.
Wint, completely stupefied, watches as the third man who has been guarding the door pulls out a black handgun and aims it at Ada. The man sort of looks like Wint: shaved, stubbly hair, small paunch under a black t-shirt and black puffer vest. He points the gun twenty degrees upwards before he fires off a shot, missing Ada’s head by a few meters above and hitting the balcony of the library atrium.
The panic is imminent. The punters who have been either too drunk or too busy ogling the girls to notice the earlier commotion are now alert. They begin to dash for the door.
The gunman points his weapon in the air and fires two more shots into the ceiling, spraying chalk dust on his on bald head. He doesn’t seem to care.
“Everybody. Stop! Right! Now!” People tend to obey the man with the gun, and they do this time as well. Wint is still sitting in the booth in the corner of the room. He wants to hide under the table, but he’s transfixed at the man’s gun. He’s seen firearms before — shooting clay pigeons, wielded by the police, being carried by Taleban terrorists he’s interviewed — but he’s never had one used to threaten his life before.
“Turn this fookin’ ruckus off, will ye”, the man yells. The girl behind the bar shuffles over to the sound mixer in her high heels and turns off the music.
The sudden quiet screams in Wint’s ears. His head hurts again.
“All right ye fuckers! I only want one thing and we can get all out of here safe and sound.”
Where’s the man from? Wint can’t quite place him. Irish, maybe?
Wint looks around. Where did Ada go?
I’m lookin’ fer a —”, the man extends out his free arm and squints at a piece of paper. “— I’m lookin’ fer a William Webster.”