The rest of the time was spent going over my responsibilities again in this operation. It was to be almost identical to how they–rather, we, since I was now just another American spy, apparently–had suborned and blackmailed Chao. I was just fortuitous, I suppose, that they found that the agent being sent was as bent a top as Chao had been.
The first thing I did the next day when I was conscious and mobile again was send a note to Benjie Reyes, accepting his offer and hoping that I could be taken from the casino without giving anyone notice or seeing me go. Dropping off the face of the earth like this was a big risk, I knew, especially since I was still highly suspicious that Reyes wasn’t being completely honest with me about the offer. But I was more afraid of Winterberry and being sucked down into U.S. intelligence operations that were more than I could handle and that, in the end, would chew me up and spit me out, destroyed, without an ounce of remorse.
The drive to the airport in the capital city of Phnom Penh took four-and-a half hours. I rode in a black Mercedes sedan, sitting in the front seat beside one of Reyes’s bodyguards as driver. Reyes sat alone in the back. We were followed by a military-style transport truck, with a canvas top over the cargo area. I only got a glimpse in the back of that as I was being escorted to the Mercedes. The cargo was people.
When we boarded the private airplane at the airport, I saw that there were some thirty Asians–both men and women. They sat in the larger compartment at the back. The two other bodyguards who had fucked me in Reyes’s suite sat with them. They must have been in the cargo truck for the drive to the airport. It was a shock to my system to see that they cradled machineguns as if the Asians needed guarded. Reyes had told me that they all had employment contracts and had wanted to go to the Philippines.
I sat in more luxury at the front of the plane with Reyes and the bodyguard who had driven the Mercedes. That bodyguard was packing a gun in an armpit holster. I had signed a contract too. Was I really free here, though?
After we took off, Reyes pointed to a large plastic case taking up a spare seat. “That’s your medical supplies if you need them in flight. Remember that your duties include doctoring any of the other passengers if they need it.”
“I remember,” I said. Those services weren’t called on during the flight, but I had, in fact, had concerns when I saw the Thai and Cambodian people entering at the back. They didn’t all look like the healthiest lot. Most them also looked a bit spaced out and apprehensive. It did cross my mind that someone had already given them something to keep them quiet and under control.
Over the next couple of weeks in the Philippines, at the larger and more luxurious hotel casino, The Waterfront, in Cebu City, I increasingly got clued into what was going on here, although the extent of it, as it affected me, didn’t hit me until the very end. In the meantime, though, I found the entertainment to be done at the Cebu casino was as raunchy at it had been in Poipet and that I was becoming addicted to the attention it gave me and the adulation it afforded my body. There would become a time that men didn’t lust after my body. My stint at the casino in Cebu City wasn’t that time.
* * * *
The entertainment complex at the Riverfront Cebu City Casino had the backstage area as its hub, with the theaters radiating off it in different directions. For a 3:00 a.m. show, an anything goes raunchy performance, I was on for a solo dance at the smallest of the venues, a room holding no more than a hundred men, standing and packed together, that had a raised runway running out from the backstage hub to a small, circular platform in the center of the room. The platform was big enough for a single performer to stand in the middle of it and not be able to be touched by the hands reaching out over the platform from all sides. I was loaded for “bare”–a gold lamé thong, with a matching halter top. A black mesh athletic T fit snugly over my torso. I had a gold captain’s hat on my head and gold wristbands. On my feet were my trustee black-leather boots that I’d worn all the way from Chicago.
Chicago was a long time ago for me. This was no more evident than that now I dipped into the drugs. I regularly smoked the form of pot they grew here in the Philippines, and I’d snorted a line or two of coke more than once, usually to be able to face and open my legs for some ugly, obese Asian businessman after an evening show. And then there were the pills. I didn’t always know what was in the pills. I just knew that they gave me a high to give my best in a dance and a strip and a fuck. And on nights like this there were those that gave me an erection that lasted hours and others that protected me from the effects of whatever dicks found their way inside me after–or during–a dance.
The music came up out in the theater, the house lights came down, and the spot lights were trained on where I would make my entrance. The last thing I did before bursting out on the walkway was to let myself be folded into the embrace of the big-dicked Russian stage manager, Slava, a bear of a redheaded, hirsute bull. Our lips locked, and, with that kiss, Slava transferred the pills that would put me up into the stratosphere for this dance. Drugs, of course, were against the law here and loosely monitored at the casino. Sometimes the authorities had someone checking backstage. The pill transfer method was not uncommon, but Slava had established himself as my fuckmaster among those working backstage.
The pills kicked in immediately as I strutted out and down the walkway, moving slowly, to let those of the seventy or eighty men packed into the theater who were bunched along the walkway an opportunity to reach out and touch my boots. The tipping started here, too, bills being stuffed into the top of my boots as I walked slowly enough to collect all coming my way. I had paused at the top of the runway briefly, to salute and acknowledge the cat calls and whistles. Here the striptease was started. I lifted the gold captain’s hat in salute and sailed it out into the audience. The men cheered. As I strutted back up the runway toward the curtain, the wristbands came off and went out over the men, who scrambled for them.
The music was loud, a bump and grind, and the spotlights were frenetic, both in pulsing, all of them trained on my perfect, oiled body as I walked, and in the changing of colors. As exciting as this was for the patrons, the drug-induced cacophony of sound and flashing colors in my brain were so much more vivid. I was in heaven. All of the men were focused on me–on my beautiful body–and cheering me on to “Take it all off.” I was the center of adoring, lust-filled attention. I loved it; I was walking on the clouds.
The crowd gasped as I did a couple of cartwheels back up the runaway toward the center, showing that my being muscled up didn’t negate my dexterity and flexibility.