who isn't a gorgeous specimen, expertly mounted on the lighted platform to be examined by thousands of hands and eyes. In the beginning I used to go to the important auctions myself. It wasn't only the pleasure picking what I wanted from these fledglings -- and no matter how much private training they've had they are fledglings until we train them -- it was the excitement of the auction itself.
After all, no matter how well a slave is prepared, the auction is a cataclysm for him or her. There is a lot of trembling, the free flow of tears, and the frightening aloneness of the naked slave on the carefully lighted pedestal, all that delicious tension and suffering displayed as exquisitely as a work of art. It's every bit as good as any Club entertainment that I ever worked out. For hours you drift about the huge, carpeted preview room, just looking about. The walls are always painted in soothing colours: vermillion or robin's-egg blue. The lighting is perfect. And the champagne is delicious. And there's no distracting music. The rhythm is the beat of your heart. You can touch and feel the candidates as you inspect them, asking a question now and then of those who are mercilessly ungagged. (Voice trained, we call it. It means trained never to speak except when spoken to, never to express the slightest preference or wish). And occasionally the other trainers draw your attention to a fine specimen, maybe one they don't think they can afford themselves.
Now and then there is a gathering of buyers around some extraordinary beauty who is being made to assume a dozen or so revealing positions, respond to a dozen commands. I have never bothered to paddle or strap a slave at an auction preview. There are others only too willing if you just wait and watch. And the few blows dealt on the block itself at the moment of bidding can tell you all you need to know. And you hear so much gratuitous wisdom: this slave marks much too easily, you'll never get your money's worth, and this skin feels kitten soft but it's very resilient, or small breasts like that are really the best. It's an education all right if you can keep away from the champagne. But the really fine trainers reveal little of themselves or the poor shuddering victims they examine. A really fine trainer can learn all he wants by slipping up to a slave and closing his or her hand very suddenly on the back of the slave's neck.
And no small part of the fun is seeing the other trainers who come from all over the world. Gods and goddesses they seem sometimes, slipping out of those black limousines lined up before the doors -- everywhere that brand of high fashion that seems luxuriously friable: threadbare denim and open-down-the-front shirts in the thinnest Indian cotton, the off-the-shoulder silk blouse that is about to fall apart. Savaged hair and dagger nails. Or the colder, three-piece-black-suit aristocrats with the square, silver-rimmed glasses, and the perfectly combed short hair. A babble of languages, (though the international language for slaves has pretty much been established as English) and the special imprint of a dozen different nationalities on what is almost invariably an air of command. Even in the sweet-faced ones, the seemingly innocent ones, there is underneath the air of command. I know trainers when I see them in other places. I have spotted them everywhere from the dirty little pavilion in the Valley of the Kings at Luxor to the veranda of the Grand Hotel Olaffson in Port au Prince.
There are dead giveaways like the broad black leather watchbands and the high heels you could never find in an ordinary shop. And the way that they undress with their eyes every good-looking man or woman in the room. Everyone is a potential naked slave to you once you become a trainer. And you carry with you an aura of supercharged sensuality that is almost impossible to shake off. The naked backs of women's knees, the little crease where a bare arm presses against the body, the way a man's shirt stretches across his chest when he puts his hands in his pockets, the movement of a waiter's hips as he bends to retrieve a napkin from the floor: you can see all that everywhere you go, feeling that perpetual low hum of excitement. All the world is a pleasure club. But there is a