Harold Mitchell

Women who perform with animals

CHAPTER ONE

Strange things sometimes happen in the subway mouths… City subway mouths gaping as though ready to eat the next erstwhile commuter. This was a fact that gnawed at the uneasy mind of Lenny Morgan as she waited in the shadows for Boss Carl.

It was a peculiar meeting place.

She had answered his advertisement with some trepidation, for he had wanted an exotic dancer. Lenny Morgan was just about the most exotic dancer in New York. She mixed her more artistic activities with occasional high-class prostitution, of course. It would seem that she was well-enough fixed, in her leather maxi-coat and expensive shoes, well enough established not to seek any other employment. Seems is not always enough… she had all the money and leisure she needed, but she had caught the disease of the grasping city.

Lenny Morgan was a woman who wanted more.

She wanted to conquer… she wanted to be a star. That was why she had answered Boss Carl's ad. Everyone knew Boss Carl. He had all the bread, all the connections. If he chose, he could make his cleaning lady into a sex symbol.

"Well," Lenny Morgan mused, "I ain't no damned cleaning lady…"

She was interrupted in her apostrophe to herself by a shadow that fell across the pavement before her lovely booted feet. It was a shadow of great bulk; the shadow of a hulking figure in a trench coat with the collar turned up…

Her eyes rose hesitantly, timidly. She had never seen Boss Carl before… it seemed to be a somehow apocalyptic experience, as if she would never again be the same… as if the sight of him would tear some virginal membrane from her consciousness forever.

His face was shockingly pale, with a stubble of dark beard that had apparently escaped the cleansing stroke of a razor for more than a week. He scowled at her and allowed a merciless laugh to spill from his thick lips.

"I… I… I am Lenny Morgan?" she spoke as though asking permission to exist. It seemed that Boss Carl could have denied her identity at that moment and she would slowly disappear, dissolving into the grime and murk of the Metropolitan Transit System.