Even through the glass I could recognize that familiar spaniel look they all have of “Beat me up, hit me, please,” like a faithful dog.

In order to tease him I gave Nicky another smack on his ass, and the whip made a swishing noise that made this window-shopper get all shook up.

Then I got the bright idea that if I was investing so much money in the new instruments of bondage and torture, I should assure myself of at least one customer, so I walked outside and stood alongside him pretending to study the umbrella display.

I happened to be dressed appropriately as a master that day, with black pants, black turtleneck sweater, and my hair in a severe upswept style, and the combination of me and the manacles drove him to speak to me.

“You handle that whip so beautifully,” he said in Hungarian-accented English. “I bet you could do a lot with it to make people happy.”

“If you think I could make you happy, please allow me to try,” I answered.

“That I would just love,” he glowed. “Where can I find you, and when will I come?”

“Come at six P.M. sharp,” I ordered, because with slaves there is never an approximate time. They are always punctual because of the need to be obedient. I handed him my card, and he nodded and walked away.

As expected, the window-shopper arrived on the stroke of six, all sad-eyed and full of expectancy. That night I tried out everything in my new goodie bag, which he loved so much he became a regular slave until he moved away from New York a year and a half later.

A freak, no matter how he was first acquired, usually becomes a faithful one-master slave. I have even kept obscene phone-callers on the line, freaked them out, and turned them into regular and profitable clients.

My ability to spot a freak is uncanny. I can recognize a freak in any environment, and often before he knows it himself, because I can read eyes the way palmists read hands.

This happened on the beach in Puerto Rico with a famous New York city disc jockey I’ll call William H. Robinson, who definitely had a masochistic tendency, but had never acknowledged it, probably out of fear that the reality might either disgust or addict him.

Robinson was wearing dark glasses when we were introduced, and as we stood talking at the water’s edge, I could feel those freaky vibrations, so I asked him to take the shades off.

“I want to see your eyes, because in the eyes of a human being lies his soul,” I told him.

He unsuspectingly took the glasses off, and straight away I said, “I bet you’re a masochist.”

The disc jockey’s reaction was startling. I had really hit a nerve. His whole casual attitude changed, and at once he became afraid of me.

To win back his confidence I told him the truth about myself, and he was shocked all over again, but it made him confess something he had never told anyone in his life, including, and especially, his nice Jewish wife.

For years he has had a recurring dream, and he starts the story this way. “As I get off the air, I see myself dialing the telephone number of a woman in black, whose face I can’t see, but she has a mane of black hair.

“She wants me to come to her at a certain hour, but I never seem able to complete the phone call, because my fingers keep slipping out of the dial.

“All the while I know she will be furious with me because I am unpunctual, and when I finally reach her house, an hour late, I deserve punishment and humiliation.”

The woman in black, he continues, orders him to come to her on his knees, but suddenly he is on one of those amusement-park crazy roads where you take two steps back to every step forward.

Somehow in the illogic of the dream he is in bondage, his knees hurt badly, and when he finally reaches the woman, who is sitting on a tall stool in a room shaped like a bowling alley, she is talking sexy on the phone to other people, but she yells obscenities and laughs and spits at him.

“On your feet, slave,” she orders, and ties him firmly in bondage and beats him, at which point he wakes up sweating beside his little wife, who accuses him of talking to his mistress in his sleep.

By now, Robinson told me, he was secretly distressed and getting desperate. Should he go on suffering this masochistic anguish, or would participating in a real scene rid him of the nightmare?

At this point I looked at my watch and discovered I was late for an appointment myself, so I told him to call me in my hotel room that afternoon and I would try to help him out.

Robinson and I were staying in the same hotel, and in the middle of the afternoon my phone rang. He wanted to know if I had thought about his problem.

“Yes, I have,” I said, and started spinning him a long fantasy over the phone of how he would get shipwrecked and rescued by naked islanders, only to discover too late they were cannibals who would cook him and eat him.

I could tell the story was freaking him out as his heavy breathing came through the phone. “Hang up and came straight to my room,” I ordered him, just like the woman in black.

He arrived wearing only his bathrobe, and was at such a pitch that all I had to do was touch him lightly with my hand on his thigh, and he climaxed.

The freak world of make-believe is so delicate and sensitive that the essential mood can be shattered by the least lapse in reality. Therefore, the fantasy you spin, the clothes you wear, and the atmosphere you create are absolutely important.

Early in my career as a practicing master I welcomed to my house a man who called himself Marco Polo, who was in fact a famous public personage who makes speeches at the Waldorf and has his picture in the Times.

When this man walked into my living room I was looking very feminine, wearing a diaphanous nightgown, my hair hanging demurely to my shoulders. “You’re not the type of woman I expected to see,” he said, backing off. “You couldn’t freak me out.”

“Perhaps if you will be patient for a little while I could find you a woman who could freak you out,” I said, and slowly, as he made himself comfortable in the armchair, I faded into the bedroom and came back wearing a black leather outfit, with fishnet stockings, and my hair in a severe pulled-back style.

The transformation was for him perfect, and immediately he was reassured. For half an hour we sat in the living room discussing what was his hang-up, and our plan to satisfy it. Marco Polo described to me a set of symptoms that were familiar with many successful and powerful men.

As absolute ruler in his corporation, he manipulates the men beneath him like a puppeteer. However, this daytime domineering makes him feel insecure, and as a balance to reality, he craves being submissive. These powerful men become slaves to release the tension of running other people’s lives.

Having recognized Marco Polo’s preference, I suggested the bedroom, which was prepared with flickering candles and black lights to create a spooky atmosphere, and once inside, his uptight living-room manner disappeared; instead, he became very freaky.

Marco Polo’s desire is to make you believe he is some kind of docile animal, and he needs first to be talked into a different world – which is the mentally exhausting part of it. It can take more than an hour, gradually and convincingly getting him into his fantasy world while dressing him with wigs, makeup, handcuffs, and leg irons. I then add a blindfold, which is something I invented to increase the thrill of fear and humiliation. To masochists the feeling of being in bondage and blindfolded as well can be compared to the classic double ecstasy.

While doing all this I talk about the ocean, the huge white-capped waves, the fishermen in their boats, and this beautiful mermaid. At this point my roommate, Mary Jo, assists me to lay him down on the bed with his head facing the wrong end. We bind his legs together in hospital bandages, make him a tail, and tell him he is that mermaid.