The More I Know Men, the More I Love Dogs

By Fabienne Villette

The More I Know Men, the More I Love Dogs, tells the heartbreaking story of one woman's struggle against poverty, abuse, prostitution, organised crime, and the men who used and exploited her throughout her life.

Escaping the neglect and poverty of her rural upbringing in France, Chantal runs away to Paris as a teenager, only to become trapped in a life of prostitution.

When her best friend, Lara, a trans-sexual, is murdered, she tried to start a new way of life on the Costa del Sol, only to find herself caught in a web of timeshare sharks, con-men, and finally ends up married to an East End drug baron.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jun 11, 2007
• ISBN: 9781490721453

Fabienne Villette

Fabienne Villette is French. She now lives and works in Marbella as a successful film producer for Versatile Films. She is now dedicated to writing novels and screen plays. Her current projects include a trilogy for young adults based on myths and legends of the Basque county.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

It was the middle of the afternoon, and the woman who worked under the name of Madame Mao was still waiting for her English visitor.

A thin snow had begun falling out in the street and down over the lanes of Pigalle. The small neon sign below the second-floor window had already been lit by its time switch and the huddle of La Butte Montmartre and the Sacre Coeur were now barely visible to her through its glare.

As for their previous meetings, she sat under the window with her notes held up to the cold light. She was going over the order of what she would say, adding names and place-names between the lines, with a fine pen, determined, that nothing should be left out.

As was her habit, she had not yet switched on the lights in the small office. This way she could look down, unseen, to the stretch of street leading to the door of the block. When she saw her visitor, she would have time to put on her shoes, and make a rapid top-to-toe inspection of herself in the tall mirror, perhaps touching up her make-up to bring out the grey-green of her eyes.

A couple of years back, but in much kinder light, she had still been able to fancy that there had been more than an echo of Sophie Marceau in Bel Phégor about her open, sensible face. But now, always dressed in a black trouser-suit, with her severe new bob, she knew she passed easily for one of the growing number of businesswomen, in their early to mid forties, who had come to take advantage of the lower rents for shops and studios on this side of the Ninth Arrondissement. As a woman who had made her living catching and holding male attention, she had found having to move about unnoticed an unexpected relief.

She was practised enough by now to finish in the bathroom and still reach the entry phone before the caller felt the need to ring a second time: it was three steps in from the window, then one stride back over the loose parquet to the door. The office, like most in the area, was no more than thirty metres square, a converted deux-pieces flat, only lightly modernised. On the shelf over the sofa she had put two Monet reproductions (Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe, and Regates a Argenteuil), and a tall pot for the fresh flowers she bought on the days her English visitor called. The fan-heater had been contributed by one of the other two Madame Maos, sullen, untalkative Algerians from the north of the city who worked the night shifts to supplement their family benefits. They were the ones who left behind full ashtrays in the mornings.

The name came with the job, and had been inherited from the previous owners, and probably from the owners before that. A name was an agency’s only secure asset, and it was what Mono, one of her old clients, had been paying for when he had bought her into the business as a partner, after she had returned to the city with nothing.

Customers who came into town only every six months, or so, quickly forgot, or lost, phone numbers. But names were remembered and passed on, and this was a name that seemed to stick with the out-of-towners, partly, no doubt, because it had only one syllable, but also due to its distinct inappropriateness.

When she was not taking calls, she had other jobs to do. She was kept busy maintaining the standing ads in the back pages of the tourist magazines-the kind that were left out at the better hotels-and updating the website or the details of the girls in their books. There was always a quick turnover of girls: every week at least one of the Eastern Europeans would drop out of sight, or another would introduce a friend.

Most of the Easterners were Romanian, Ukrainian or Bulgarian, earnest and pale. Most of them were in their early twenties, with large families back home, which had to be fed. They claimed to be from Holland or Italy or whichever country they had been trafficked to, and where they had picked up some of the local language before buying themselves out. The agency never knowingly took on ‘pre-owned’ girls. They were too much trouble. But who could tell? The Easterners showed their papers, but these were usually bought illegally and probably still being paid for. But then, few had ever asked about her real name, and when they gave theirs, these were usually false too.

As the days had passed and the winter had hardened, she had found a strange peace in being surrounded by so much flimsy pretence. Like a poorly acted play where the characters’ actions and ultimate fate remain matters of indifference.

She lifted her head from her notebook and swept her eyes over the small but cosy office once more. She liked to make sure that everything was neat and ready. She smiled when her eyes came into direct contact with a framed photograph that she had left on top of her wooden desk. The black and white print, in its silver frame, had been taken just last spring, in front of the Eiffel Tower. It showed a happy and smiling Madame Mao, whose arms were protectively and amorously encircling the waist of a very tall, dark, and strikingly handsome man-also in his early to mid-forties. The few privileged customers that came to see her were all too ready to comment on how handsome the couple looked, and how well suited they seemed for each other. She heaved a sigh, feeling for the gold, heart shaped locket that hung from a gold chain around her neck, and peeked once more through the curtains.

Now she could see the hunched figure of her visitor begin to turn the corner of the street. She had chosen this hour for their meetings, as it was the slowest, with few calls and rarely any passing trade.

Although the snow had thinned, she still felt the sharp cold through the pane. It was going to be a cold night! Down on the street, the junkies and the hardier travesties were already out among the shop fronts, their crombies unbuttoned to reveal fluorescent thongs and corsets in the half-light. Past them a group of German tourists, led by their guide, were filing down to catch the early show at the Moulin Rouge, young couples mostly, holding hands, and the Nicole Kidman fans wearing their period-style cloaks.

The rest of the street had changed little in the thirteen years she had been away. It still had the strip of peep shows, with their touts working the thin crowds. Then there was the cheese shop, which supplied the local restaurants, and the flower-seller, who was making up a bridal bouquet in the window as her visitor passed. At the end of the row was the secondhand bookshop where she had bought a battered copy of The Diary of Anne Frank on her eighteenth birthday. Opposite, on the corner, the small café-now re-named-where she had got drunk with Lara only the week before her body had been found in the Bois de Boulogne.

The flats on the first floors above the shops had been done up, and many now rented out to foreign corporate clients. But the upper storeys were never lit up, and still seemed to be unoccupied.

As the buzzer sounded, just once, politely and unemphatically-she found herself, without quite remembering how, moving away from the window, opening the door and standing in wait out on the landing.

The Englishwoman climbed the stairs slowly, as was her way. Her laptop, and last week’s texts, wrapped in double plastic bags against the snow. She was wearing brown ankle boots; similar to those she had worn on her previous visits, but with the toes stained to a darker brown by the wet. She hung her sealskin trench coat over the shower, as usual, even though it wasn’t visibly dripping. Looking harassed, but content with it-as only an Englishwoman can-she settled at her place behind the wooden desk, the fan-heater already in place at the foot of the chair.

The advertisement that Madame Mao had placed on the Minitel, for a ‘ghost-writer’, had used the slang term ‘negre’ and so she had been surprised that her only respondent had been English. After their first meeting, however, she had known instinctively that this was a woman she could trust.

The Englishwoman had the flushed cheeks and easily startled eyes of a true country girl. She had told her, just minutes into their first meeting, that she and her artist husband had been ‘doing up’ barns in Normandy for the last fifteen years.

Madame Mao had felt compelled to reciprocate, and explained to the Englishwoman why she needed a ghost-writer:

I feel the need to put everything down on paper, she had said. That way, if my story is read, it may give hope to other women that have been in a similar situation. Maybe then, they might find the courage to fight back.

I would like to tell them, she continued, "that there is hope, that there is light at the end of the tunnel and that they should not despair"

These last two weeks they had followed the same simple routine. She would lie back on the couch, the tape-recorder on the shelf above her head and the phone down on the floor beside her, in case any work calls came through. As she talked, sometimes from her notes, the woman would occasionally prompt her for more details and for explanations, but less than she’d expected, her scurrying typing hardly audible on the keys.

She had hoped to feel more secure, lighter, now that she had managed to get so much down on tape, and in print. But she did not. She knew she was still easy meat to those she had last run from. As the sessions progressed a new vulnerability had been born in her, what she had forced herself to remember seemed to fly off, like freewheeling forms in space, outside her direct control.

She breathed in, and gripped the edges of the couch.

I don’t know where to start today, she said.

But even as she spoke these words, she did.

CHAPTER 1

That morning in the villa followed the pattern Chantal had, for the last few days found increasingly difficult to break. The bedroom faced east, and, although the brocade curtains were thick, the Mediterranean brightness woke her much earlier than she would have liked. She rested her head against the warm pillows and squinted her eyes against the increasing light that entered the room.

She heaved a sigh and stretched her arms high above her head. She smiled and felt from under the covers her legs being gently spread open. She arched her lower back and moaned in anticipation of what was to come and softly caressed her bare breasts and her erect nipples. She wanted to enjoy the moment and wanted to forget her day ahead; that way she could relax the cold knots of anxiety in her shoulders, which would not ease away until she had showered and taken her first Clonazepam after breakfast.

Her problems were much the same as they had always been. She had a lover who was avoiding her, and she still didn’t know why; a controlling husband whom she must avoid more if she wanted to have any life of her own, and an ex-lover whose demands for money she would not be able to avoid much longer.

Put like this, her problems sounded not so unusual, but until she had worked out how to get him his latest instalment, she still had that daily strain of stringing James along. It was easier to avoid him when her husband Harry was around the house of course, but then the risks were all the greater if she let him get too desperate. With Harry around so much it was becoming ever more difficult to get through to Kelly and make up. Then there was the party for her fortieth birthday still to be planned, but she would avoid thoughts of that until she felt she had earned them.

When she had first moved in with Harry, her favourite mornings had been those when she had slept through until ten-thirty or eleven, and had been so slow about getting up that she had used up half the day before having to face his latest whims and tempers. But over the last months she’d never once managed to get back to sleep, even when taking her Clonazepam on an empty stomach, and so had trained herself to use this time to plan. She couldn’t, for the moment, devise a lasting solution to her problems, but was determined that at least the day ahead should not cause them to worsen.

If she did not leave a slight gap between the thick curtains the room quickly became airless, and in the band of brightening light, she could already make out distant but familiar shapes. The Roman-tile roofs of the neighbouring villas on the hill, and further below, the bridge on the bypass around Marbella old town.

Harry reminded her almost daily, that these, exclusive plots, higher up along the border of the Sierra Blanca nature reserve, now changed hands for upwards of three million Euro. But somehow she had never found the view inspiring. The sea was hardly visible, through the clusters of building-cranes, and the windbreaks over the pools of lower villas. The other houses in their lane were empty, summer homes. And most in the row below were owned by the same type of self-made men as her ‘husband’-how artificial, it still felt, calling him that. Most of them had good reasons for not residing in their countries of origin.

Despite the pomp of the neo-Moorish and Italianate gateways and driveways, large areas of the hill were still without street names or house numbers. The few tarmac roads hadn’t been kept up, and the local street maps didn’t reach out that far (their post still had to be delivered to rented boxes in town) and amid all the showiness there was the sense of solitariness.

The glare between the curtains was lighting up the walls and ceiling now. The room, with its white cornices, central ceiling rose, and pale pink walls, was cluttered with Second-Empire-style banquettes and fluffy chaise longues. It seemed to have been designed to appeal to a teenage girl with cripplingly romantic taste.

Though it was the practice in Marbella to buy larger houses fully furnished, Harry insisted that he had the room decorated especially for her. But, she knew from Kelly, whose agency had often been asked up to value the house, that it had not been changed for a long time.

Perhaps, she thought, the previous occupant had been frequently ill: only the expectation of many visitors would seem to explain all the seats around the walls.

A couple of times, when Harry had been away and they had used the bed, Kelly had said it reminded her of pictures of the bedroom of William Randolph Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, in San Simeon castle. But this was only to make her feel better; it didn’t look a bit like that really.

She would have preferred the clean lines and sharp angles of modern furniture, something without memories, but she hadn’t yet worked out a way of persuading Harry to re-decorate without rousing his temper.

She lifted her head slightly from the pillows and looked down at the tanned and beautifully well muscled body of Tiago, her young gardener.

Do you like it? he said.

Hmm, you know I do, Tiago, you know that I love being fucked so early in the morning. You’re the best wake-up call that a woman could have. Imagine Tiago, women worldwide being woken up by a gorgeous guy between their legs, instead of a buzzing alarm clock. She laughed.

Tiago lifted his head from between Chantal’s thighs and smiled at her broadly. She curled her fingers around his thick locks of dark wavy hair and pushed his mouth back against the softness of her wet mound. As she felt his tongue flickering like a butterfly over the soft folds of her skin and against her clitoris, she tightened her legs around his neck once more. After a few minutes of sheer lust, she let out a long, loud moan. Her body quivered for what seemed like a millennium under the expert and agile tongue of the young man. Sexually satisfied, she let her head flop deep into the pillows.

Mmmmm, she said lightly, "You’ve really proved yourself last night, you know?

Proved what? asked Tiago, whose full name was Santiago.

What I always suspected. Teased Chantal.

And what’s that? asked Tiago.

That young guys are very eager, that they can last for hours and… and, that they’ll try anything and everything… Chantal said with a smile. But it only works if they have a willing and uninhibited partner!

Well, Tiago said, clearly proud of having made her climax again, I have come to the conclusion that it is true also what they say about wiser women. He lifted and fondled her buttocks, keen for more of Chantal’s warm and sensual body.

And what do they say about such women? she asked, amused by his desire to please her again.

Well, you know. That you’re like a premier-cru, the longer you rest, the better you taste, Tiago said. Yum, yum!. He laughed and plunged his face once more between her thighs, and Chantal arched her back once more.

Oh! God Tiago, you’re making me so wet, moaned Chantal. You’re going to make me come again… No! Wait, please, stop. Tiago, fuck me. fuck me right now. I. I want to feel your cock deep inside me… " Chantal moaned.

Her muscles now aching and exhausted by her non-stop night of passion, Chantal looked down at Tiago. He had reappeared from under the covers and was now teasing her dark pink nipples with his tongue. He lifted his body slightly, staring deep into her eyes and with a grin he thrust himself deep inside her with a grunting intensity.

Her young gardener-who nurtured her splendid garden so lovingly on a daily basis had, for the last few months, also tended to her every amorous whim. This, naturally, was without Kelly’s or Harry’s knowledge!

Perhaps, Chantal thought, she was Marie Antoinette and Tiago was her cake, and she deserved him. She gorged on him when her hormones were playing up, and knew she would throw him away when she became bored. As she kept telling herself, there were plenty of fish in the sea and she enjoyed fishing. And variety, as Lara had told her once, was the essence of life.

Men and women, Chantal thought, were similar in a lot of ways. They were simply looking to get laid, and nothing else. Chantal knew that she was a cheat and could not keep to only one lover. But Tiago was insatiable. She loved the way he fucked her. He had the biggest cock she had ever seen in her life, and he knew how to use it. Only he and Kelly knew how to really make her scream!

Over the last few hours he had taken her in every conceivable position that her flexible body allowed, and now he was thrusting his throbbing cock inside her as if there was no tomorrow.

Harry had once bought a copy of the Kama Sutra for her, on one of his trips abroad. It had languished in her bedside cabinet for some time, and throughout the past night she and Tiago had been diligently working their way through it, page by page.

You could pay me a million dollars, and there’s no way on earth that I would try any of these positions with Harry. Chantal said. Everything hangs down, it’s sickening! I cannot stand the sight of him, or his limp cock, anymore. Anyway, she sneered, "he is so fucking fat, he can only just manage the missionary position and this is hard work, I’m telling you"

Your husband reminds me of one of the Gorillas in that movie, a few years ago. Remember the movie? . . . It was called Gorillas in the clouds, I think. Tiago said.

What gorilla, what movie are you talking about Tiago?

The one… the one with that tall actress from the Alien’s movie… you know, Sigou… Sigarney… Sigar… something, you know?

Chantal thought for a moment.

"Tiago you silly boy, it’s not gorillas in the clouds, the movie was called ‘Gorillas in the Mist.’" She laughed.

Whatever! Your husband looks like one of these fucking gorillas anyway-more hair on his body than you and I together have on our heads. I don’t know how you can do it. Tiago said, shaking his head.

Do what? asked Chantal.

Let that fat fuck touch you. Tiago said with a sarcastic edge.

Come on Tiago, you seem like a bright young man. Why do you think that someone like me would let such a revolting little man like Harry fuck me. Come on, stop teasing will you.

Dinero, dinero, dinero! Tiago laughed.

Yep! You’re bloody right there Tiago. Mr. Harry Carter, ex-con, drug dealer, full time crook and whatever, equals Mr. Moneybags. I’m certainly not with that fat bastard, because of great sex that is for sure. That is the reason why you are in my bed anyway. Chantal said, beaming.

You allow me in your bed because of my big shiny rod. Tiago joked.

Of course, why else? Tiago. You are the only guy that I know who does not mind going down on a woman without complaining about his jaws aching. You are definitely worth the risk.

And remember Tiago, women are very good liars, they can pretend to be happy, can fake orgasms whenever they wish and can make a man hear what he wants to hear! They can make them reach into their wallets against just the promise of a blow-job or a shag. Women my dear Tiago, can be as cunning, as tough and as ruthless as most men.

Men should not underestimate the all-girl-power, if you know what I mean? In my case, the old hairy gorilla is only passing by, like ships that pass in the night. He will have to do for a while, at least until I can get my hands on all his worldly goods, but most of all on his fat wallet! Right?

Money! My dear, sweet, gorgeous, sexy looking Tiago, is the only reason why I got married to that fat bastard in the first place. Anyway, Chantal said, "that’s why I made sure to always cross his path when I worked in Timeshare. I was told that he had an eye for beautiful women, so