Chapter 1

Of all the strip clubs in the world, I walked into hers.

I had just finished touring, promoting my new book, and was finally taking some well-deserved vacation time. It was my first vacation in years, and I was finally going to see the pyramids. Growing up in the twenty-first century, I don’t know if you can fully appreciate my fascination with Ancient Egyptian culture – I mean, it’s not even taught in schools anymore, not even in the universities. But my dad used to collect silly little trinkets – papyrus, busts of the pharaohs, and, I don’t know, I guess it got me really interested in it all.

Anyway, the last stop on my tour had been in Tuscany, and from there I caught a plane out to West Africa and was due fly to Cairo tomorrow morning. I had a room at the Hyatt but I was feeling lonely and wanted to be around other people. There was an ad in my hotel room – among others – for the Femme Nu, the best strip club in all of Africa (or so the ad said), so I figured I’d go check it out.

I had just bought a beer and barely had time to sit down when I found myself face to face – er, face to breast, rather – with the most spectacular pair I have ever seen. I’ve never been really good at guessing cup sizes, but I’d say these were probably a B+, and at that they were practically bursting through the tiny bra that just barely contained enough material to cover the nipples. A tight white sweater, like the kind Catholic schoolgirls wear in men’s fantasies, lay open down to the girl’s sternum, accentuating her perfectly round, healthy breasts. The sweater was short enough that it also revealed her midriff, and the accompanying skirt sat so low on her hips that you could tell the girl had had a bikini wax recently. The prospect of seeing her lips if you looked closely enough was definitely appealing, but not nearly as appealing as those breasts. They couldn’t have looked better if they had been gift-wrapped.

The owner of the world’s most perfect bosom was trying to tell me something; at least, words were coming out of her mouth. I don’t think she was saying anything intelligible, though. I looked up at the face anyway just to make sure she wasn’t telling me I had stolen her seat or something, and then went back to staring at those tits. She was still talking.

Look, I understand that a lot of men go to strip clubs because they’re lonely, because they want a girl to talk to – or rather, they want a girl to talk to them, tell them how great they are – and for whatever reason they just can’t find a normal girl who’s got the patience, or the inclination, that any good stripper learns if she stays in the business long enough, to make a guy feel like he really is as incredible as he wants to believe he is. And trust me, strippers, escorts, call girls and the really classy hookers know how to stroke a man’s ego. That’s what they get paid for; not sex.

Take for example this guy I used to know: A couple of times a month he’d hire a girl for the night or for the whole weekend, take her up to his place in the mountains and just talk all weekend long. All the local girls knew him, and used to vie for the privilege of spending the night with him. Once he brought one of his favorite girls up to his place for a month, let her have complete run of the house, bought her whatever she wanted, took her to all his social engagements, and never once laid a finger on her. And this guy wasn’t any kind of pervert or anything, or one of those sad repressed types who’s so afraid of sex he can’t even admit that he’s attracted to a girl. He just liked talking to girls that weren’t easily offended.