Dance with the Dragon by David Hagberg Page A

him?”
    She took a moment to answer, and when she did she hung her head, the gesture almost theatrical. “It was about a week or so after I first saw him that I started doing lap dances for him in one of the private rooms.”
    “I assume that he paid you for those sessions, and you had to share the money with your boss.”
    She nodded. “But then I fell in love with him,” she said. “He was kind and gentle, and he had a good sense of humor.”
    “You knew that he was married,” McGarvey said.
    She nodded again. “It’s why we never could go to his place. And my apartment was a dump, so we had to use the club.” She smiled with the memory. “It was perfect at first. He liked to watch me dance, and afterward we would make love.” She looked up. “He was a sweet man. I’m going to miss him.”
    “I’ll bet you are,” McGarvey said.
    “It wasn’t like that,” she replied softly. “I loved him.”
    “He gave you money for the dancing. Did he pay you for the sex?”
    Her eyes suddenly filled. “I was in love with him. And I think that he was in love with me.”
    “But he gave you money,” McGarvey persisted. He was almost certain where this was going now, and he was disgusted. Updegraf had recruited her by playing the role of the perfect gentleman, and it would have been easy for a woman in Shahrzad’s state to believe in him. “I want to be clear on this point before we continue.”
    She glanced at Rencke and Perry, who were offering no help. “He knew that I wanted to go north, and he promised to help me.”
    “In exchange for what?” McGarvey asked. They were finally coming to the point. “I mean other than the dancing and the sex.”
    This time she managed to take a drink with a steady hand, and McGarvey had to admire her resilience and her ability to compose herself. She must have been a dream come true for Updegraf, who was a field officer with at least as much ambition to make his mark as Perry. The girl was not only bright and beautiful, but also vulnerable, willing to do whatever the man she’d fallen in love with told her to do.
    Yet there was more than just that. He could see in her eyes that she was embarrassed by some of what she was telling them, and she had to look away. And he could see it in the way she held herself, as if it had been so long since she had truly relaxed, and perhaps shared a laugh with a friend, that she had no idea that such a thing was even possible.
    Solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence. We all bore the burdens at one point or another. McGarvey’s was in the early morning hours, when he would awaken from his dreams bathed in sweat. Sometimes Katy would be awake, and she would hold him until his heart stopped pounding. But most of the time she was sound asleep and he would be alone. Shahrzad never had someone to hold her close, and tell her that she was loved, and be telling the truth.
    “It was a Thursday night when the club usually wasn’t so busy that I had to sit with too many other customers, when Louis and I went back to our room and I started to dance for him,” she started. “He wasn’t himself that night. He was watching me, but I don’t think that he was really seeing me, you know.”
    Rencke nodded, encouraging her to continue.
    “It was the same when we made love. It was as if he wasn’t there with me. He was someplace else. And it hurt. I thought that it was probably the beginning of the end for us, which made me really sad. Like I said, I was in love with him, and for goodness’ sake, I thought he was in love with me. But right then I wasn’t so sure.
    “Afterward when we got dressed he liked to have a cigarette and a bottle of champagne. I had never smoked before, but I smoked with him. Because of him.” She was looking inward now. “I don’t think he realized that I was making little sacrifices like that for him.” She shrugged. “But it didn’t matter as long as we were together.”
    “And he was paying you so that you