You whore of cities, where even the lakes are artificial, and eternal neon fades the sunlight; where the souvenir shops purvey revolvers and blackjacks and gas grenades, so that the trembling tourist may take away a keepsake of the fair town; where even lust is false, bowing meekly under the rigid control of disease. Only the whores are honest here. They do not pretend to enjoy it.
I walk down The Reepersbahn. It is raining. The rain is light and interferes in no way with the life on this street. The doormen lurk a bit farther back under their awnings, that is all. I walk past nightclubs and bars, souvenir shops and strip clubs. A seaman stands, hands jammed in pockets, gazing fondly at a flick knife in a display case. He wants that knife. A whore stands in a doorway and gazes less fondly at the seaman. She does not want him; turns her false smile towards a more prosperous tourist. The tourist is genuine. He trembles and anticipates, he is thrilled by the proximity of a woman of the streets, engulfed in the seething tempo of a city of easy virtue. His lips quiver and he struggles with himself on the scales of learned behavior. He wants that whore, he sees himself as an international playboy, a man of the world accepting sophisticated pleasures as his due. But he is genuine. He is stuck to his past and his present as securely as a butterfly pinned on a display board, and he walks on with his shoulders sagging. He will return to his sordid hotel (with all modern conveniences) and his thin-lipped wife; return like an iron filing to the magnet of his existence, and regret forever the lost opportunity in a depraved world that is foreign to him. The whore turns to me. I look prosperous. I look virile, perhaps, but that is of no import. Her faded smile echoes the neon lights that flash above her. They flash in alternating colors, red and green, and her complexion changes like a chameleon stranded on a revolving chess board, bewildered and helpless. She, too, is stranded, but it is difficult to feel pity. She is only a reptile with flickering tongue, awaiting her prey. I walk on past.
The footpath is crowded and pedestrians overflow into the road, ignoring the arrogant horns of motorcars. The drivers retaliate by mounting the curbs, brushing humanity aside on their fenders. A storm trooper type policeman cannot be bothered to direct this traffic, he is waiting for more serious, more punishable, offenses, and his revolver and billy have become a part of his body as surely as though they had been grafted on. Perhaps soon, in our age of transplants, this will happen and nature's mutations will lose their race with man's insanity.
I have time to kill, and stop for a drink. The club is heavy with smoke and the waitress wears a topless dress. Her breasts are mammoth with tilting nipples, and when she leans over my table to place my drink before me one nipple (it was the right nipple) hung down like over-ripe fruit, awaiting the plucking. She can be plucked. She says as much with her eyes. But, like over-ripe fruit, she will soon rot. I pay her and she walks away, her ample bottom gyrating like twin balloons beneath her tight skirt.
There is a telephone on the table. It rings in a moment, and I am not surprised. I have been here before. I lift the receiver and wait.
"Do you speak English?" The voice is low and sexy, well controlled and very appropriate.
"Quite well," I say.
"Ah, that is good," she says. She says it in the same way she will say the same words when she has feigned an orgasm.
"That is very good. I like the English tongue." (I wonder if there are hidden meanings in this reference, I become very conscious of my own tongue.) "It is good for love, English. The words so well express the passion and the act." She sighs, thinking of this act. "I am a schoolmistress," she says. "In the daytime I teach at the school, I teach the young girls to speak English, to use the tongue properly in forming the words. They are good pupils, these young girls. I am a good teacher, as well. Perhaps you would be instructed? A refresher course? I am three tables to your right. The blonde in the green dress with the green eyes. Look at me and perhaps you would like me to join you?"
I look. She is blonde, although hardly a schoolmistress. She continues to speak into the telephone as I look at her, and it is an eerie, unreal sensation. She holds the phone close to her mouth, as though caressing it, and her tongue plays over her heavy lower lip.
"I do everything," she says. "Whatever you like."
I say nothing and she lowers the receiver and looks at me, open and direct. Her tongue continues to dart like a little pink animal, playing the rodent that she wishes me to hunt; peering from the burrow into which she hopes I will pursue the flickering creature, driving it deeper with powerful lunges of my hunting horn until it surrenders and coils about me in moist warmth, drawing my strength away until the hunter becomes the hunted, the hunting horn is blown and the chase is over, ended in volcanic eruption and she will drink the fruits of victory.
I am tempted. She will be expensive. I shake my head and lower the phone, cutting her query in mid-sentence. A moment later she is talking to another table, another telephone and another customer. She has better luck with him, he is middle-aged and heavy. They leave together but she will be back directly. If she is good, he will not return, for that is the paradox-the good ones satisfy, and leave no need for immediate future returns, while the bad ones get their overtime because they are inefficient. That is the way of commerce.
I finish my drink and leave. The sky is darker and the neon brighter in contrast, quivering in the mist of rain. I wonder if I should have gone with that whore. There is still time before I meet Stella, and I do not know if I will sleep with Stella. She has married since I saw her last. I could have slept with her then, but I chose her sister instead. They were not whores, although it was not love, either. Just a momentary joining of our lives and a linking of our loins on the tilting ground of lust. But Stella has summoned me to Hamburg and I have come. Who knows?
I walk up a dark side street and pause before the alley of whores. There is a sign at the gate prohibiting minors, but the gate is open. Perhaps the alley is no longer fashionable and the proper people go to Eros Center. I prefer the alley, a touch of the conservative, a man who calls Istanbul Constantinople. Or Byzantium for true class. I go through the gate and into the alley. It looks much like any alley at first glance, but for the windowshoppers. It is dark without neon, a welcome change. Then the eyes adjust and the difference becomes apparent. Along each side of the narrow strip there are lighted windows at ground level, and in each window sits a woman. They wear flimsy negligees and nightgowns, and have absolutely no expression. I stroll along, undecided, looking in each window as I pass. The women vary. They are tall and short, fat and thin, blonde and dark, but they have one point in common, one denominator by which they are classified. They have no expression.
When I was young I walked this alley for the first time. I was filled with the bursting need unique to youth, the consuming desire to screw the world, and I could not resist these wares displayed before me. I was like the seaman lusting after the flick knife, but I had money to buy. I did not get past the first window; bought the first woman I saw, took her, came out and found the woman next door more desirable; bought her and found the third woman more splendid still. Each time I tried to leave the alley I found a woman I felt I must have. I followed a staggering course down that alley, weak-kneed as I crossed from side to side and window to window, and I emptied my wallet as I emptied my loins. But I was young. Now I choose to be selective. I transverse the alley, looking in each window, eliminating some and adding others to my short list. I hesitate before a dark-skinned beauty, then decide on a Nordic type. My desire is mild, for I know these Hamburg whores. They are poor value for money. This one is blonde and long of leg, and would be pretty had her face been mobile. The features are regular but carved of ice. Her eyes stare through me, I do not exist until I have paid for her, and then for a brief while I will be her life, although her mind will be elsewhere, a mind as cold as her face. Perhap she has a lover who can set her afire and does not pay her. Perhaps she has been frozen so long that she is cold to the core now, and there is no kindling to be fired. I do not know and do not care, she will suit my purpose. I have time to kill.
I inspect her body. She wears a transparent nightgown, open to the navel. Her navel is flat, shallow, but her breasts are heavy globes that roll into deep cleavage at the inner circumference, before swelling away beneath the gown where the nipples are erect, massaged by the silk into hard peaks. Her waist is small and her legs are splendid, muscular like a dancer's. Perhaps she had been a dancer before she became a whore.
I tap on the glass.
For a moment it seems she will ignore me, but that is part of the game. Then she gets up, uncoiling like a feline creature before the fireside, and leaves the window. She does not yawn, but give the impression of yawning. A moment later the door beside the window opens, and she stands aside for me to enter. My arm brushes across her breast and I can feel the imprint of the hard nfpple. She does not speak. She leads the way down an unlighted corridor which opens out into a courtyard. The windows are only a front, a Hollywood prop, and the workshops are in back, little closed cubicles around the open courtyard. It is rather like a maze and adds a touch of the exotic, for what it is worth. She leads me to her own workshop and closes the door behind us. The room is small and warm, the whore is tall and cold.
"You must pay first," she says. She speaks in English. How do whores know a customer's language? Some instinct that enables them to prosper, perhaps? Survival of the species? Or has long experience enabled them to identify the minor national traits?
I say, "How much, my dear?"
"Thirty marks. First, please."
I give her thirty marks. She places it on the dresser.
"You like drink first? Brandy? Champagne? We have drink first, eh?"
"No thank you."
"I work better if I have drink."
"Be my guest," I tell her.
She opens the door. It is routine and a crone is already standing there with a bottle and glasses. The whore takes a glass and drains whatever the dubious contents is. The crone lurches in and juts a claw out, palm upwards and fingers hooked. Most likely the crone had been a whore in her day, but now she is only a crone. No more. I pay her for the drink and she leaves.
"You undress now," the whore says. She shrugs the gown from her shoulders, and her loins arch towards me. I start to draw my necktie down.
"No. Leave the top on. Just undress on the bottom, please."
I take my trousers off. I am not aroused yet, my member rises at half mast. She looks clinically at it.
"Here. Get down here," she says. She motions at the flat couch. I sit on it and stare at her belly. She is a real blonde, the triangle at the vee of her thighs is golden. She stands with her feet widespread and looks down at me. She seems angry that I am not erect.
"You like top play first?"
"Absolutely."
"Give me ten more marks."
"Take it from my pocket," I say, nodding at my trousers on the back of a chair.
"What you think I am? I cannot go in your pants. You think I am a thief?"
"Assuredly not. I trust you."
"You give me ten more marks. We play then."
I sigh and get up, give her the money and sit down again. She puts the ten mark note with the other money and comes to the couch. She does not sit, she perches, as though it was not worthwhile to get comfortable. She draws one leg up and leans over me.
"Lie," she says.
I stretch out on the couch, my hands behind my head. It is curious, looking down at her across the expanse of white shirt and striped necktie. Curious and very temporal.
She places one hand on me, tentatively. The shaft tightens and begins to swell. Her fingers are light and expert. She runs the fingertips up and down, stroking, and then her hand tightens and she begins to pull and jerk. She watches the process closely, her head bent and her golden hair falling over her face and down to brush against my rising member. She seems quite fascinated in what she is doing, totally interested in plying her trade. I reach down to touch her, but she clamps her thighs together and my fingers are halted at the barricade of her pubic hair. She wants nothing from me. Perhaps accepting pleasure would make her feel like a whore.
Her hand moves faster, accelerating and changing gears as my piston rises and falls. She shifts into top gear and the engine hums. I can feel the vibration running down into the belly, carried through the motor mounts from piston to camshaft. I try to slow the process.
"Come," she says. "Come now. Come, come, come. You take too long. You come now. I want it."
"I want more than your hand," I tell her.
She glares at me. But there is an etiquette involved, and within her class she is bound to it. She lowers her head again until her lips are brushing me. Her tongue slides out, across the glans. Then her lips part and descend, taking me deeply within her mouth. She holds me there, her mouth sucking greedily, while her hand jerks rapidly, sliding up to her mouth and then, slower, descending until it reaches the base of my shaft. Her mouth does little, her hand does much. I want to stop her, to demand value of her body, but the thrill has begun. There is no emotion, it is purely physical, but it is strong. It catches me up in the rhythm. My hips begin to rise in sympathetic vibration, I press upwards as her hand descends, withdraw as her hand rises. The passion has centered deep in my loins and begins to swell to the bursting point.
"Come, come, come," she chants, her voice muffled, speaking with her mouth full. That is not part of her etiquette. She is German and efficient. She has methods of achieving the necessary end. But it is a pleasant torture, and I hold back as long as I can. It is not long. I look down at her, staring at her mouth, seen through a haze of golden hair, her lips curled outwards around the circumference. I feel her teeth against the glans, her tongue coiled at the tip, twined around me. A cold, disinterested mouth, and I feel the urge to defile it, to fill it with my ejaculation. I let the feeling come, no longer holding back, and she can feel the surge begin to climb along the length of my penis. Her hand is working at top speed, her mouth steadies me in position, nothing more. And then the bursting begins, flowing upwards in powerful floods and spurting free. Again and again I burst in her mouth, and her eyes are still without expression. There would be no way to tell that her mouth and throat were being deluged with my sperm, had I not felt it spew forth.
I am finished.
I sink back on the couch. She moves from me. She wipes me with a tissue and my pudendum begins to recede and diminish. I watch her cross the room and spit in the sink; rinse her mouth with water.
"Done. Finished. You leave now," she says.
She already has the robe on; is waiting to return to her window. I pull my trousers on and leave. We do not say goodbye and I do not even know her name. It is exactly what I expected, for this is Hamburg and she is a Hamburg whore, and that's how things are there....
CHAPTER ONE
I met Stella in the designated bar at the appointed hour. She was sitting at the bar, her legs crossed. She had not changed much in the few years since I had last seen her. She was still very desirable, and she reminded me of her sister. I took the stool beside her.
"Well, John, how are you?" she asked.
"I persevere, Stella. And you?"
She shrugged and smiled. She had a pleasant smile with a touch of sadness at the corners. Her eyes were large and dark under long lashes, her hair fashionably tousled. She wore a black dress that left her shoulders bare. I was sorry she was married. I bought her a drink and the barman looked appreciatively down the front of her dress. I looked at him and he went away, wiping idly at the polished bar.
"I expect you thought it curious that I asked you to meet me here?"
"Curious? Not really. Interesting, perhaps."
"I'm married, you know."
"I've heard."
She sipped her drink. Her legs were still crossed and I could see a large expanse of ivory thigh. She seemed to be considering how to pursue the conversation.
"How's Christine?" I asked, filling the hiatus.
"I don't know. That's why I wanted to see you, John." I waited.
"I want you to find her."
"Where has she gone?"
"I'm not sure."
"Is she in trouble?"
"Perhaps. Her letters have stopped. You know Christine, of course. She could be in trouble without knowing it."
I nodded. My mind turned toward the past. Yes, I knew Christine, all right. I knew some of the manifold facets of that beautiful and amoral woman, a great deal of the pleasure she could give a man, and some of the agony that had to follow. A woman of paradox, determined to get some undetermined goal, wanting to be loved but incapable of fidelity, forced to behave in an abandoned fashion by some devil within her, even when she had no desire to act that way. I thought I had loved her once, although with the natural defenses of retrospect I knew it had been merely passion. I had contemplated marrying her, knowing even at the time that she would be an unfaithful wife, not because she did not love me but because she was incapable of being otherwise. She was a creature driven by dark passions over which she had no control, and which she had long before stopped trying to control, yielding to the whim of the moment and the passion of the night. I looked down into my glass, and saw the ghost of her form drowning in the alcohol, and her sister stared at me and perhaps knew what I was thinking; what images memory projected into the liquid mirror before me.
Hunting recollections of hot nights of passion and love, her magnificent body damp with sweat and drenched with the lubrications of our love; sharp pictures of her hair wildly tossed in the wind as we drove dark country roads with the top down on the motorcar and a bottle of wine as a stirrup cup; a hint of her voice as she whispered in my ear at the moment of our synallagmatic orgasms, or laughed with pure innocent delight when we strolled through Tivoli on one memorable Danish weekend. But there were other memories, deeper in the liquid, darker and shadier because they were painful to recall, but still there demanding to rise bloated to the surface to come up like some monstrous creature from the depths and wreak havoc among the fragile little vessels of my mind. There came a fleeting, flowing echo of Christine screaming at me in intoxcated anger, a muted and mournful sound of a deserted room gathering the noise of a dark street at the window, while I sat alone and drank a bottle of whiskey, waiting for her to come and knowing she would not; a bleak and stark chiaroscuro of a wretched room where I stood at the door, my heart rebelling and my blood pounding, as I looked at the rumpled bed upon which Christine lay, widespread, her body open, her head thrown back in carnal delight, purling like a cat and grinding in slippery sensuality, the naked man above her sweating, a lank lock of hair falling across his brow as he grunted with each stroke, entering deeply into the body that belonged to me, while his comrade stood at the foot of the bed, awaiting his turn and observing the grim gyrations of this horizontal gavotte-grim to me, inspiring to him, as he worked his organ up and down in his hand, preparing himself for the luscious delights before him. Then, a sudden, savage memory, too fast and furious to be seen in other than a whole, of his face turned in shock and surprise as I entered the room, his hand coming up to ward off the blow, a broken cry from a shattered throat as he collapsed across the bed, his body falling diagonally over Christine as she continued, oblivious to all else, to work her hips even as her lover twisted and faced his doom.
As yes. I knew Christine....
I drained the liquid mirror and swallowed those recollections, driving them from my mind to their lair deep in my belly. They would rise again, in time....
"You're quiet, John."
"I'm strong and silent."
I managed a smile and bought another round. Stella placed her hand over mine on the bar.
"It's good to see you again. Once ... I thought once ... but I had the misfortune of having a beautiful sister." She looked sad with that little twisted grin.
"Will you help me find her, John?"
"What could I do? Even if I found her, she leads her own life. You know that. She wouldn't come home because I asked her to."
"But if you could just find out if she is all right, if she needs help, even if she is alive...."
"I could do that much. But where would I begin?"
"I have her last letters. Six months ago, from Paris. I have her address there, although my letters have been returned since. I hate to ask you, John. I suppose you have better things to do. I haven't much money...."
"Not for money, Stella. Not money. Is everything for money in this city?"
"Not everything. Not me. Isn't that remarkable? I've lived here all my life, and never once have I sold my body? It must be a record."
"Christine did, you know," I said, feeling some bitter urge to speak of that. "She whored and took the money, although not for money's sake. It was a thrill."
"Yes, I know."
The bitterness swelled like expanding gas. "Oh well," I said. "Another slice off a cut loaf."
"Don't, John."
"Sorry."
Her hand was still on mine; her fingers pressed mine.
"I should have chosen you, Stella."
"For the moment?"
"Perhaps."
"It's not too late for that."
"Your husband?"
"He knows I'm meeting you. An old friend. He knows I want you to look for Christine. And if there are things he doesn't know ... well, so much for that. He eats too much and he works too hard and he's only my husband."
"You sound like Christine," I said.
"Perhaps I should have been more like Christine. After all, she had you."
"But she threw it away."
"Not that much like Christine," Stella said.
We left the bar and walked for a little distance through the rain. We held hands. Whores watched us pass with idle eyes and a few gentlemen appraised Stella and wondered how much I was paying her. Once, in rage, I had thrown money on Christine's naked belly to pay for the love she had given me. Christine had taken it and bought a hat. It had greatly amused her. Oh, I had paid for Christine, for the eternal moments of shuddering bliss as my sperm poured into her body. Two men had died across her in payment.
Or was it, perhaps, those two men who had paid? Perhaps it was worth it. Unlike the alley whores, Christine was value for money.
"Did you bring her letters?" I asked.
"In my handbag. The letters and her diary. The diary ... you may not want to read it. It mentions some places that she wanted to go, that was why I brought it. But it mentions other things. You, as well. Do as you like with it."
I nodded.
"I think she really loved you, John. It's just that she was driven by some internal force, she had no free will. Do you believe in free will?"
"I don't know."
"If I go back to your hotel with you, John, is that my free choice? Or am I forced to, channelled by all the past events of my life and directed by the atoms dancing in my molecules?"
I turned and faced her on the crowded street. This was Hamburg, and the pedestrians brushed past with only a glance as I encircled her waist and drew her belly up tight to mine. She looked very much like Christine, and my episode with the whore had left a nagging need for proper release. I could feel the soft round swell of her stomach cushion the hardening of my organ. She looked up with wide eyes and an open, honest face.
"Let's go now, John," she said.
"You're sure?"
"Of course. I'm a woman."
Yes, she was a woman. She wasn't Christine, but she was as close to Christine as any other woman could be. And she was honest. She knew why I wanted her; knew what thoughts were involved in the rise of desire, knew what I would be pretending when I closed my eyes and slid into her vagina.
"We'll go now," I said.
I drew away from her. The front of my trousers, as though reluctant to break the contact, protruded outwards in rather spectacular relief, and a prostitute displaying her wares in a doorway smiled as she noticed. It was the first genuine expression I had seen on a Hamburg whore.
Perhaps there is hope and salvation yet....
From the window of my hotel room, one could look out over the expanse of gaudy lights criss-crossing the city. The window opened on a minuscule terrace with a wrought-iron railing. Stella stood there while I made us a drink, and I brought it out to her. The wind was fresh and the rain had stopped. She took a sip and began to unfasten her dress. The zipper glided down the side.
"I've always wanted to undress like this, at an open window where anyone walking past might see me. I want to at home, but my nerve fails. But since I'm about to become a fallen woman anyway, I might as well satisfy those little perverted twists."
She turned so that I could help her raise the dress. I drew it over her head. She wore a black brassiere cut low, so that her nipples peeked out rather timidly, as though they wanted to emerge but hesitated. Her panties were black as well, a little dark triangle across her firm, flat hips, transected by the straps of her garter belt. I unfastened her brassiere and took it off; held it dangling at my side as I looked at her. She turned around slowly, giving me the pleasure of seeing her from all angles. Her breasts were small and firm, perfectly formed cones capped with taut dark nipples. She leaned back, her hands on the railing behind her and her belly thrust forward and upward. The breeze played through her hair and stroked her flesh.
"Slowly, John," she whispered. "Step by step."
"Step by step," I said.
I bent to her, taking one nipple into my mouth, running my tongue over the ridged flesh and then gently sinking my teeth in at the base. Stella squrmed and moaned. Her shoulders switched from side to side. I went slowly, alternating from side to side, until both nipples were swollen like little rockets, as though they were trying to blast off and fly away from their smooth white launching pads, to soar like arrows into space, towards the destination of my mouth, the galaxy of oral delight. And my body echoed that metaphor, my member was poised and ready for the take off and the scanners of my passion were revolving, the radar was seeking the references of the target, taking a fix on the latitude and longitude of those crossed garter belts. But mine was a rocket of war, and it carried an explosive warhead. A militant rocket, it resented the restrictions of its cover and sought to burst from the person of my clothing.
Stella took pity on its plight.
Her hands moved down, slowly, and my trousers leaped as my engine sensed her approach with some obscure radar system with which it was equipped, bat-like, to enable it to navigate in the darkest caverns, the most intricate mazes of her body, flying unerring by to the spot where it was bound to deposit its load.
She unzipped my trousers and reached in. Her hand was delicate and soft, exploring and finding, and she drew me out and held me in her palm. With her free hand she unfastened my belt and my trousers dropped. I stepped out of them without leaving her grasp.
"You're big," she said.
And, upon the compliment, I became bigger. Such is masculine nature.
"I've never had a man as big as you," she said. "I hope I can manage it." She was smiling and the little twist of sadness had left the curl of her lips.
"I'm sure you'll succeed," I said. "It might be necessary to try, try again, of course."
"And again and again."
She held me in both hands now, just holding, not manipulating. One hand gently lifted the expanded weight of my bollocks while the other held the ramrod straight shaft, fingers running straight down the large vein, and the swollen purple head resting in her palm. Her hand looked very small.
I took my jacket and shirt off and she held me all the while, then nestled against my chest.
"I like hair on a man's chest," she said. "My husband is smooth. I hate his chest."
She kissed my shoulders; her lips slid down, leaving a moist track down my stomach, curling the dark hairs in their wake. For a moment she sank to her knees and placed her hands on my hips; gazed at my surging sex in awe, then gently kissed the tip; drew back again to observe the results.
"I never kiss my husband there," she said. "I did it to a man that way, once. Before I was married. I enjoyed it. I like to see the reaction my mouth causes, I like to feel it and taste it. But never with my husband. I'd like to with you, John. Just a little."
Her words inspired my rising need every bit as much as her caress. A fleck of foam emerged, bubbling up as a prelude to what was to follow, and ran slowly down the division of my knob. Stella stared at it, her body throbbing and her eyes burning, then drew close and lapped it up with her tongue. Her throat worked as she swallowed and she closed her eyes. She moaned in pleasure. I ran my hand through her hair and waited, determined to make it as long and slow as she chose despite the inferno that roared within me.
She rose from her knees and leaned against the railing again. Her hips rotated an invitation and I drew her panties down. They stretched over the width of her hips and then slid freely down her legs. She raised one foot and I pulled them off; left them coiled around the other ankle as I looked up the converging slopes of her thighs. Her legs parted, as though forced open by the heat of my gaze. She was open and ready for love, the petals curled like pink flowers opening in the morning dew. She put her hand behind my head and urged me forward gently, not demanding but surrendering to this caress, and as my tongue probed up the portals an electric tremor passed through her, darting along every fiber and nerve of her being and shooting out into me; joining us in that circuit.
"I can't wait, John," she said.
I rose up, very close, so that my member came up between her legs, unerringly following the proper course. It pressed against her, I was balanced on bent knees and taut calves, and my hands went behind her to enclose her tight little buttocks and raise her to her toes. My fingers dipped into the crevice between the globes and ran down to the slippery area beneath. She was gasping and panting now, arms about my neck and belly heaving.
"Slowly," I said.
"Oh God. Now. I'm empty, John. I want to be filled, I want to feel you spread me wide open, feel you split me in two...."
I pressed upwards another fraction of an inch. Her body opened further, encompassing the tip of my turgid tool. I could feel the heat pour from her like a tropical swamp, her loins were a world of their own with a seething climate and a heavy musky atmosphere, a world covered with thick matted forests under which lay the softly rolling land and the deep tunnelled canyons. It was a world that had been discovered, but never properly investigated, a magic land awaiting a full search, an expedition to the interior. I sent my intrepid explorer venturing a further inch into the unknown, and the world trembled in its orbit, as though some cosmic explosion had rocked it with new gravity.
"Please, John. I can't stand it. I'll burst."
She tried to lower her loins over me, but I held her up with my hands, fingers digging into her bottom and the backs of her thighs. A hurried mission is an ill-advised mission, and I intended to make this search a thorough one. I waited, at that level of penetration, until the explorer had established a secure outpost and sent a wireless message back to me that all was well. Yes, all was well. He was ready to press on as soon as the order was received.
I raised up another full inch. Her lips strained around me and then snapped closed with muscular elasticity, and my outpost had advanced beyond the frontier, my advance scout had entered the unknown and now only the supply line linked him with the base of operations. The supply line was steady and reliable, inflexible now, and could only be broken when all the supplies had been sent and received. The messages continued to dart along the veins, keeping contact in rhythmic vibrations like jungle drums.
"I want it all!" Stella said. Her eyes flashed, almost in anger at this temporary deprivation. Earth tremors moved the world beyond my furthest outpost, and I sent my frontiersman to investigate. He moved on with caution towards the quake. Stella reached down and clasped the supply line, trying to cram it up with undue haste and trying to wiggle down on it at the same instant. She succeeded in taking another inch before I stopped her. We were halfway to the core now, and it was time to send another report.
The message came throbbing back to me. A splendid land had been discovered, rich in oil and spices, fertile and warm and well irrigated, and beyond the outpost further riches lay waiting to be tapped. The natives were not hostile and caution no longer seemed advisable.
Stella was half mad with need. She beat at my shoulder with one tiny fist and pulled at my groin with the other hand. Her face shifted from side to side in violent rotation and her teeth sank into her lower lip.
"I can't wait!" she said. "I'm going to come."
My legs braced, my thighs tightened, and I pushed up and in, all the way, until our worlds collided in their orbits, our mounds pressed together, the forest of hairs entwining, and there were no more secrets to be discovered. My advance guard was at the very center, and I swivelled my hips to enable him to look to all sides. The fires raged around him, he bucked and jolted like a nervous stallion. But he was there, the flag was raised and he had claimed this land for me-mine to exploit as I chose. The road was built and I retreated back along it to the very portals, paused as Stella whimpered, and then sent him sliding up again. Her soft inner body parted easily before the spearhead and then closed gently behind it, snugly fitting the pipeline, soft friction rubbing every burning inch It was involuntary, she did not know what she was doing now, she was beyond rational thought and only her loins were aware, only her sex functioned.
I felt her come.
Subtly and delicately the texture and contour of the land changed as the liquid seeped out. I plunged in once more, full stroke and strong, farther than ever until I collided against the end of her world.
Supplies! cried my brave observer.
And the pipeline did not fail him, the supplies rushed along the tubes, pouring upwards and then spurting out with a force that sent a recoil rocking backwards into my scrotum. My knees went soft, as though my very skeleton had been sent bursting from me in that orgasm, and perhaps my brain itself had been ejaculated, for there were no thoughts to fill the void of release.
Later, moments or minutes, when sanity had returned, I carried Stella in and placed her gently on the bed. I lay beside her while she fondled me and murmured soft words of emotion against my body. We made love again, less violently, a gentle giving and taking of pleasure and motion. Our bodies were fitted like adjacent pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, we might have been cut from interlocking templates. It was very good and completely mutual, and I do not think I flatter myself out of proporton when I say it was a better woman who returned to her husband that night.
After Stella had left I made myself a tall brandy and soda and sat by the window. She told me she wanted to see me again, soon, but we made no definite plans and perhaps we both understood that what had been splendid for one memorable night would not be the same again, that nothing is constant and many things of value have been hopelessly lost in the ebb and flow of continuation. We might meet again, in time. It might be good again. But I didn't think of that then. I held Christine's diary in my hand, staring at the Morocco cover, afraid to open it. Her diary was Pandora's box for me, and I was terrified of the monsters that would come flying out if I opened it. Presently I made another drink, and told myself it would be all right if I avoided the entries that had been made during the time I had been with her. Such is the foolish pride of man, to deceive himself that his rationalization is ample cushion against the bumps of emotion, or that his will power is mighty enough to avoid the pages which most concern him. I knew better, but told myself differently. There was rationalization. I had promised to try to find her. I could not neglect the clues of her autobiography, for fear of the messages that the lines would have for me. And it had been a long time ago. It seemed long. I made a third drink and sat again. The rain had started falling once more, big soft drops that seemed to hang suspended for a while before they tapped at my wndow. Gentle raindrops, tapping politely. Perhaps they wanted to come in where it was warm and dry. I was slightly drunk by then.
I opened the diary....
EXTRACTS FROM CHRISTINE'S DIARY May 1
I think Mother knows I have been sleeping with Hans. She has been looking at me in that funny way and asking lots of questions about what we do when we go out. I don't care if she suspects, though. After all, I'm fourteen years old and I ought to have some rights. Hans was talking about taking me to Munich with him for the festival, but I don't know if I'll go. He's so very jealous. He said he'd be afraid to have me with him in a strange city because I might run off and leave him. I might too. Ha ha. He is a better lover than Johann or Klaus, that is when we are actually doing it, but afterwards he is so sentimental and maudlin. I despise his emotions. I do not see why physical love must be attached to feelings. Other than the way it feels when they stick it up me, of course. Johann was better in that way, he was very polite and proper when he wanted it, but as soon as he had it he looked at me as though I were a slut and marched away. Men are certainly strange.
May 2
Hans took me to the woods today. He is still going on about marrying me in a few years, but I will never marry him. I told him so, too, and then I thought he was going to cry. He was angry, but that didn't last long. Only until we were sitting down in the bushes and he started fooling around, then he got all loving again. It was nice out in the woods, though. I lay back and looked at the blue sky through a framework of branches while Hans pushed his fingers in and out for a long time. He made me come two or three times and then when he took his tool out I told him I didn't need it because his fingers had been better. I was feeling devilish. And poor Hans was desperate. He looked so funny and silly, sitting there with that old thing standing upright and looking neglected. I let him suffer for a while, and then I did it with my hand. I honestly did not feel like having him put it in me today. Maybe I'm tiring of Hans. Perhaps I shall find someone new soon. It was all right doing it with my hand, though. I liked to see it happen. It shot straight up in the air about a yard and splashed all over his legs. He tried to get me to take it in my mouth, too, but I wouldn't. The idea is appealing, but not with Hans.
May 3
I had a long talk with Irma this afternoon. I never realized that she was as wicked as I. She told me all about her boyfriend and what they do together in the most sordid detail. She even takes him in her mouth. She said that it tastes good. So, of course, I lied and told her that I liked it too, although I haven't tried it yet. But Irma is two years older than I, so I have time. Soon, I think. There is a new boy at school who looks quite palatable. I don't know his name yet, but that doesn't matter. A thorn by any other name will prick as sweet, ha ha.
May 5
Didn't have a chance to write last night because I was too tired. A funny thing happened. I was coming home from Irma's and I saw Hans waiting on the front steps, so I sneaked around the back because I didn't feel like talking to him. Well, I was walking quietly so he wouldn't hear me, and when I got to the back porch I saw Stella and her boyfriend. They didn't hear me at first, and I saw his hand was up under her skirt. I could see the skirt move, so I guess he was fingering her. She blushed scarlet when she saw me and he began to stutter. He's a dolt, I'm sure Stella can do better. Maybe he has a nice weapon, though, because there was the most extraordinary lump in his trousers. I wonder if he is screwing her. It's hard to think of my sister getting it, really.
Another funny thing happened, too, while I was at Irma's. Her parents were out and we were all alone in the house, in her room, and she started talking about men again but this time she talked differently and said how she didn't really like men and how women were much nicer company and things like that. Then she took all her clothes off on the pretext of changing, but she was in no hurry to put the other clothes on and sat beside me completely naked. She has the largest breasts, much larger than mine. Of course, she's two years older. And mine are firmer. But she sat there for a long time and she kept turning towards me suddenly, while she was talking, so that her nipples would touch my arm. I'm beginning to wonder about Irma. Maybe she really is wicked.
May 6
Hans came over to Irma's looking for me. I had her tell him I wasn't there, but he hung around outside. I asked Irma if she wanted to have him come in and give it to both of us and told her I wouldn't be jealous, but she said no. I guess she isn't really very wicked. If her boyfriend came I'd jump at the chance. I was thinking it might be fun to watch someone, even Hans, make love to Irma. I've never watched it. The thought does not lack a certain appeal. I was thinking about how Irma looked naked, too. There is something fascinating about the female body. If my suspicions are right, I think I might let Irma show me how two women do it. But I don't know how to bring the subject up.
Anyway, nothing happened and she didn't take her clothes off again, so I waited until Hans left and then I went home alone. I regretted it later, though, because I haven't had it in a few days and as soon as I got in bed I discovered I was hot. And as soon as I started fingering myself, Stella came in and turned the lights on. God it was frustrating. It seemed to take her hours to get undressed and brush her hair, and all the while my pussy was burning up. I couldn't do anything except sort of stroke it with my fingertips, because Stella might have noticed. It isn't that I'd be ashamed if she caught me playing with myself, it's just that I wouldn't want her to think I didn't have a man to do it for me. Not after I caught her getting her boyfriend's fingers jammed up there. I noticed what a nice body Stella has, too, and had the most depraved thoughts. I am certainly a wicked girl. I wonder if you can have incest between two people of the same sex.
May 7
I woke up this morning with a fire in my belly. I had to finger myself until I came three times before I could get out of bed. Then I went over to Hans! He was very glum and accused me of avoiding him, but I was in no mood for his little tantrums and I just opened his fly and took his tool out right while he was talking. It certainly surprised him. His mother was walking around in the other room and he kept looking toward the door all wide-eyed while I jerked him up nice and hard, and then I knelt in the chair right on top of him and began pumping myself off on it. Hans didn't know what to do. It was so funny! It felt too good for him to make me stop, but he was so nervous about his mother that he couldn't come. Anyway, after I'd had all I wanted I just got off and walked out. Just left him there with a hard-on, looking stupid.
May 8
I told Irma what I did to Hans and she laughed and laughed. Then she stopped laughing and said something about how a fellow like Hans did not know the proper way to bring pleasure to a body like mine. Well, I asked her what the proper way was and she shrugged and mumbled something, then a little later she asked if he ever did it to me with his mouth. So I looked right at her and asked, all wide-eyed and innocent like, "You mean the way Lesbians do it?" And she blushed. We didn't do anything, but I'll bet Irma would like to. I'd like to try it, too. It might be fun. I wish I could think of some way to get it started.
May 9
I noticed the new boy staring at me today. I was sitting with my legs sort of open and I saw him pretending to be crouching over a book and trying to look up my skirt. So I pulled my knees up and gave him a good look, then when he looked up I smiled at him so he would know it was intentional. I must remember not to wear any panties tomorrow. Later I stopped at Irma's and told her about it and then, clever little devil that I am, I asked her if she would help me by sitting across the room while I raised my legs and tell me what position afforded the best view. She seemed a little nervous about it, but she sat down and I took my panties off and got in a chair and pulled my knees up. I asked her if she could see it and she said there were too many shadows, so I flung my legs wide open and pulled my skirt up to my waist and let her have a good long look. She was fairly drooling so I'm pretty sure about her now. But there's no hurry, I think I'll let her stew for a few days, now that I know I can have it anytime.
May 10
Well, it happened today. I enjoyed it, too. It was a new sensation, not at all the same as a man. Irma asked me back to her place after school and I knew what she had in mind. It was pretty obvious. But I pretended innocence and let her hem and haw and start talking about men again. Funny how she starts talking about men when what she really wants is women. She was sitting beside me, sort of curled on the floor while I sat on the bed, and I drew one leg up so she could look up my skirt. She talked about this and that and I got impatient, and then I had a splendid idea. I just reached down and began playing with myself. She gaped at me but I acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world, talking to her like nothing was happening and all the while pushing two fingers right up my pussy. I wasn't wearing any panties, of course. After a few minutes of this, Irma asked what I was doing, and I told her I was hot and had to finger myself to get relief since there was no one else there to help me. Well, she gulped and blushed and then she looked right up my crotch and said, "I could do it for you, Christine. If you wanted me to. Not that I'm funny like that, or anything, but I mean just if it might feel nicer to have me do it."
So I said I'd never thought of that, and asked her if she had ever done that to another girl, and she sort of nodded and put her hand on me. She knew just how to do it, I'll say that for her. She found the little button right away and began to roll it in her fingers while she used her other hand to rub the lips. It was much nicer than when Hans did it. I came pretty soon, but I pretended I hadn't because I didn't want her to stop. But all the while she kept spoiling it by talking about how it wasn't really wrong to do this, and how it was just doing me a favor and that she wasn't really a Lesbian. So I said, "If it isn't wrong, maybe we could do some other things, too. Would you like me to play with you at the same time?" That made her so hot I thought she'd burst. She couldn't get her clothes off fast enough. So I took all my clothes off too and we locked the door and lay down on the bed. Irma wanted to kiss me and hold me, but I wasn't interested in that, that was too much like Hans telling me he loved me, so I turned around in the opposite direction. "We can touch each other better this way," I told her. She began fingering me again and shifting her hips around. I never saw a woman's sex up close before, except when I looked at myself in the mirror while I played with it. They are fascinating, all intricate and delicate. No wonder men like to sick heir tools up here. I touched her with one finger and the lips spread open instantly and juice began to run down her legs. That made me even hotter than before. I was so hot that even her fingers weren't enough for me, I wanted to do something absolutely depraved and perverted, the worst thing I could think of. I spread her lips open and saw the dark inner flesh all flecked with froth and foam and it looked so good that before I really knew what I intended to do, I put my mouth on her and sucked the juice out. It was so hot it scalded my throat. It was good. I bet it tastes beter than a man's come. It didn't take very long to learn how to do it, either. The best way, I think, is to hold the lips apart with your fingers and stick your tongue way up and lick the sides, then when it starts to pour out you put your lips there and suck it up. Anyway, that seemed best to me, and Irma loved it. I was so wrapped up in licking and sucking that I didn't realize she was licking me too until I started to come again. Then I knelt right over her face and let it flow down her throat. I never came so much before, I'll bet I came almost two hundred grams before it stopped. We did it twice more before I went home, too. I'm glad I found out how much fun it is. I didn't brush my teeth tonght, because I want to still be able to taste it when I go to bed. I'm going to finger myself. I wish I was a contortionist, so that I could get my mouth between my legs. I tried it. I can't. That's a shame, because then I wouldn't ever need anyone else to help me come.
May 11
I am very wicked. I told Hans all about what happened with Irma. I couldn't resist the chance to see his face. It was so funny. He called me the foulest names but it didn't make me mad because it was amusing. I said, "Don't you want to kiss me and see what Irma tastes like?" Ha ha. Later I began to wonder if he might be angry enough to tell my mother....
CHAPTER TWO
I was no longer drunk.
I closed the diary with a soft thud-soft like the muted thudding somewhere within the complex of my sensations. So much for willpower, I had opened that book and read the first page in her childish scrawl and been unable to desist. Those words had been written-I calculated-some twelve years before, and could have no bearing on my search, even though they might provide insight into the tangled patterns of Christine's life. Not much. They did not go back far enough, the malformation of her emotions must have taken place long before. But did that matter to me now? I suppose, in a way, it did, for the young girl who had written those pages was the same woman I had loved at a later time. She had not changed ... no more than experience changes one. I doubted there was anything new for Christine to discover, now. Perhaps that was why she had abandoned her diary. I mused in such a manner, deliberately avoiding thoughts of the content, unable to read any more at that time. I felt physically exhausted. Christine, in all ways, was exhausting, and that quality had carried through in her writing.
And I had promsed Stella I would search for her.
God help me.
CHAPTER THREE
Paris, when gaiety is gone and the flowers bow their brilliant heads in sympathy with a gnarled vendor of chestnuts. The sidewalk cafes are full, but the customers are waxen turning jaded eyes towards a Gypsy leading a black bear across the Pont St. Michel. Paris had changed. The mood and the feeling were no longer the same, although the women, like Notre Dame, were timeless in beauty and awesome in their self-assurance. I look at them as they walk past, and they return the gaze with equal candor, perhaps a touch of superiority. But I do not want them. I look at the finely molded thighs and taut buttocks with approval and appraisal but without desire.
I had arrived in the early morning with mist above the river and below the climbing streets. I had arranged my hotel room and then left, without unpacking, to cross to the Left Bank and walk, avoiding the issue and the reason for my presence there. But the reason follows me. I can hear its footsteps, like echoes of my own, treading doggedly behind me. I cannot lose it. Perhaps it is activated by a homing device I carry, the diary in my pocket. But I cannot throw the diary away, any more than I can forget its presence next to my side or the early entry I had read in Hamburg two days before. Opposite urges have rent my resolution since, some dark perversion pleads with me to open that infamous book again, to turn to the later pages and read the entries she made during the time when I loved her. I want very much to experience the pleasure and pain of seeing myself characterized in her handwriting, but I am afraid. It will hurt if I read that she never loved me-and it will hurt far, far more if I read that she did love me and that she could have still been mine but that I had lost her through some act or decision of my own. There will be a great deal of pain within those leather covers.
Presently I tire of walking. Paris is different and I am different. I turn back toward my hotel and quicken my pace in determination. The reason has trouble keeping up with me, now that I am walking rapidly. It misses its footing and stumbles behind me. I cross the bridge. The Seine ripples with wind and wedges of light, and fishermen are lined up along the railings, immobile and faceless, frozen with some arcane patience beneath their caps. They never catch a fish. I understand these fishermen-I know it is possible to seek the impossible, to lure the darting fish of happiness with an unbaited hook....
My suitcase is on the bed. I open it, and there are Christine's letters, scattered over my shirts. I take the diary from my pocket and place it with the letters, and then I regard them and try to decide which course my search should take, what chronology will be most effective. I look at the postmarks and select the most recent, some six months before. I slide the thin blue paper, heavy with adumbrated agony. Stella has warned me, but that was unnecessary, for I know the way Christine's mind will have guided her pen. I open the letter and look at the neat script, modified from the early scrawl of her diary, more worldly and sophisticated, although the letters have the same formation, as though the thread of her life could be followed there if one knew the hidden meanings in the ink.
I read the letter.
CHRISTINE'S LETTER TO STELLA
Bistro las Bas 10, rue de-
Dear Stella, I know you are worried about me-your last letter was tense with unwritten worry-but there is no need. Not at this stage. Nothing can happen to me that has not happened before. Nothing. And if I could imagine something so dreadful that I had not experienced it, I should promptly seek it, because that, as you know, is how I am. But my letters must serve only to increase your worries, because I can only write you about what I am doing and have done. It would be far better not to correspond. I make up my mind that I will write only a light and friendly letter, but as soon as I begin, my fingers seem to acquire a will of their own, and I am powerless against the urge toward confession. Is that the word? Is it confession when there is no feeling of guilt? Or perhaps merely another form of the exhibitionism you know so well? That desire to shock and offend by displaying my own depravity? Did I ever tell you that I had the most consuming urge to seduce your husband on your wedding night? That is much the same thing. God knows I had no physical desire for him; it was just the concept of such a wicked thing. Fortunately, I did not have the chance, or I might have yielded-I know damned well I would have, as far as that goes. And I can just imagine his face-my God, that round, stuffy, Teutonic face with the perpetual bead of sweat on his lip-I can imagine how his expression would change and break up under the onslaught of conflictng emotions. His eyes would have burned when I showed him my body, and at the same time his lips would have twisted in conservative scorn. He would have hated me and he would have despised himself, but he would have screwed me. Would you have been angry? Or would it have made you passionate? But see-already I find myself deliberately testifying to my degradation. I love it.
But back to the present, Stella. I told you about Andre? I am no longer lving with him. I must say that I grew to rather enjoy the jealous beatings he delt me, I really think that was the only thing that kept me with him for so many weeks. It wasn't the pain, I didn't enjoy that, but there was the most delicious sensation of being wanted-being desired so much that he might even kill me, and being helpless beneath his fists. I think he might have killed me soon. I have a small scar on my cheek from the last beating-nothing hideous, I fancy it adds to my mystery. And after the beatings, there was the love. It was quite spectacular, the more he struck me the harder his weapon became. He always took his clothes off to beat me, you know. He claimed it was to keep from ruining them with my blood, but I doubt that was the reason, somehow. And I have a theory that there is only so much hardness in a man's body, because by the time his organ was as hard as it could be, his fists seemed to soften-he would still strike me as hard, but his knuckles seemed to grow loose and spongy. That may have been illusion, of course, because I was growing soft and spongy at the same time. I could feel myself open wide and begin to flow. Sometimes he would strike me right there, between the legs, and that made me even hotter.
He always demanded that I beg for mercy and forgiveness, but I never did. I just kept telling him about this man or that man, whichever one it had been prior to the beating in point. And then, when he couldn't stand it any longer, he would pounce on me and ram it in all the way. God, it was just like a bar of steel, I would be transfixed, squirming on him; and he would just hold it all the way in without pumping or moving at all, and he would come that way, through pure inspiration. That is the one moment I regret leaving, and I've even considered going back to him just to get that again. But I don't think I shall. I am living with a new man now. He is not like Andre, although in his way he is even worse, he treats me worse, although he doesn't beat me. He's impotent, too. Can you imagine me living with a man who can't screw? I would never have believed it, myself. But it isn't a physical inability, it's some strange psychological quirk. He can come all right; he just can't manage to come in the proper place. As soon as he puts it in me, it grows limp. It's a terrible blow to my ego but a delightful challenge at the same time. Someday he will manage it, and then, I fear, I will no longer find him the slightest bit interesting.
His name is Honore and he owns a bistro, a shady place where a good many villains congregate, dark, evil-looking men with furtive eyes. It's rather infamous, which is why I went there, of course. I made Andre take me. And I hadn't really intended to get involved, either. Villains are so moralistic, really. I've always found them very conservative in bed, just bang bang bang and go to sleep, and quite shocked if a woman does something different. But Andre and I went there and sat at a table drinking whiskey and watching the show. It was very sexy. The girls were such terrible dancers that they had to be lewd in order to make any sort of act. After two or three poor attempts at stripping, they put on a tableau, three or four naked women caressing each other under the feeble guise of an interpretive dance. I was rather intoxicated by then, and of course I am always intrigued by women's bodies-some sort of combination of Lesbian tendencies and narcissistic certainty that my own body is better than theirs.
Poor Andre could see I was getting excited, and he practically begged me to leave but I just drank some more and then, before I really even considered it, I had got up and walked to the stage. Everyone was surprised, and some of the customers began to laugh and clap, although the strippers all glared at me because I was so much prettier, and when I started to dance no one even glanced at them.
I danced really well. I was just drunk enough to be loose, and of course, I have no inhibitions, drunk or sober. I stripped all my clothes off and swiveled my hips, looking right across the room and at Andre all the time. He was almost in tears, and his fists were clenched tightly.
It made me excited to see him in that state, and I wanted to do even more, so I walked down from the stage and stopped by a gentleman sitting at the bar. He gulped and blinked and didn't know what to do. I began to run my hands over him. The whole room was quiet as a graveyard, the musicians had stopped playing, and everyone was watching me as though they were all mesmerized. They were all waiting for the climax. So I got down on my knees and opened the man's fly and drew his toy out. It began to throb and twitch, and he looked amazed and horrified but didn't try to stop me. I pulled him until he was stiff, and then I slid my mouth over him. It was wonderful, doing that with all those people watching me.
I would have done it until he shot, too, but Andre ruined it. He jumped up and came rushing at me and kicked me and struck the man I was sucking. I'm not sure what happened after that, but I saw two or three of the villains holding Andre while someone else was punching him. There was a lot of blood, and I think they hurt him pretty badly, but I just sat there stark naked and kept laughing. It all seemed very funny. I guess I passed out during the scuffle, because I can't remember leaving the bar or anything until I found myself on a couch in the owner's office, and there was Honore standing over me. He's dark and rather handsome, looks Italian although he swears he's pure French.
He said, "Do you realize, madam, that you have caused great havoc in my establishment and deprived me of a considerable amount of custom?"
That's just what he said, dry and calm as could be.
So I said, "I'm frightfully sorry, sir. Is there any way I can make it up to you?"
And he said, "Only in that I shall have the pleasure of punishing you for such extraordinary behavior."
Well, of course, I thought he was another one like Andre and he was going to beat me or whip me until he became too excited to bear it, and I didn't mind that. I told him that I deserved to be punished and waited for him to hit me, but instead he knelt on the edge of the couch and opened his trousers.
I asked, "Is the punishment to fit the crime?"
"That might be poetic," he said.
Then he dragged his tool out. It was enormous. Quite the biggest I've ever seen, I believe, but it wasn't hard. It just hung there like an elephant's trunk. I must have stared in awe at it. I couldn't take my eyes off such a monster, even soft it was longer than a normal man's erection. I could hardly wait for him to get excited so that I could see what spectacular proportions it would swell to, and I put my hand on it to jerk him up, but he took my hand away and held it in his own hand. The head swung down a good twenty centimeters below his index finger, a huge triangular knob, dark purple with a wide opening.
And then he began to whip me with it.
Oh, it was beautiful. He raised it and slapped it down across my face. It felt so heavy. I closed my eyes and squirmed, and he kept slapping me with it, time after time, across the eyes and nose and lips. I opened my mouth to take him in, but he was too fast, just smacking me and swinging away before I could get him. He must have whipped me for a good ten minutes that way, until I was writhing with need, and then suddenly, without ever getting hard, he shot all over my face. My mouth was open and the first spurt burst right down my throat, and he just kept erupting, all over my face and in my eyes and in my hair and down my breasts.
When he finally stopped I licked my lips and ran my hands over my cheeks and breasts and gathered all the cream up and then licked it off my hands. Then I raised up and licked the rivers off the shaft of his tool and sucked the pools off his testicles and drew my lips over that huge purple knob until it was clean and glistening.
Honore stood up then and tucked the monster back in his trousers as calm as though he were putting his comb away, then asked me if I would like him to get a taxi to take me home. I told him I didn't want to go home. And that was that.
I'm living with him now in his apartment above the club. We have never made love in the normal way. Sometimes it gets almost erect-and God, how big it is!-but it never stays hard if he tries to put it up my hole. It might be just as well, because God knows if I could take it. He might split me wide-open. I am not doing without it, however, because Honore takes enormous pleasure in giving me to all and sundry. I've already had all the musicians and a good many of the customers and one of the showgirls. Honore likes to sit and watch while they give it to me, then he whips me afterward until he ejaculates.
When I was with the other woman he couldn't bear to wait. I was on top of her and we were rubbing our crotches together, and he jumped up and began to whip me on the bottom and between the legs, and after about four strokes he came all over both of us. He's very perverted. Sometimes I think he's even worse than I am. The only thing wrong with the relationship is that I can't shock him. Everything I do is all right with him, and I can't even have the pleasure of confessing I've been unfaithful to a man who gives me away anyway. There's no way to make him angry or even to shame him.
Yesterday, we were sitting at a sidewalk cafe in the morning, a very public place, and I got an idea that perhaps he would not be so matter-of-fact under those circumstances. I was wearing a light summer dress, and I reached down and drew the hem up and began to finger myself right there at the table, without saying a word, drinking my aperitif with my other hand all the while. All the customers looked, but they could hardly believe it-they all seemed to think they were imagining it because it was so inconceivable. I had my hand inside my panties, of course, and I suppose they all thought I just had an itch or something. And then I came, and a trickle of juice ran out from my panties and halfway down the inside of my thigh. They knew what I'd been doing then, all right, but Honore didn't even blink.
He simply took the table napkin and reached over politely and wiped the juice off, then finished his drink. So I don't suppose that anything will ever shock him. A pity.
I'm writing later now. Honore came in and interrupted me before, he had two friends screw me. One was rather good, too, very gallant, he made a polite little bow and kissed me between the legs when he was finished. The other one was too fast. But then I guess he got too excited watching the first one have me, so I mustn't misjudge him. I've read what I wrote before, and now that I've been well screwed and am no longer hot it seems terribly shocking. I almost decided not to post it to you, but then I started thinking how you would react, and so I guess I'll send it after all. In fact, thinking of how shocked you'll be, I'm getting hot again already.
I wish you would let your husband read this letter and write and tell me what he said afterward. Or better yet, what he did to you when you got in bed that night. It is inconceivable, of course, that a Teutonic husband would ever dream of doing anything before bedtime. That would be much too wicked for him.
Well, this will bring you up to date on the downfall of your younger sister. But don't worry about me. As you can see, there can't be any lower to descend.
Yours, Christine
P.S. Honore is speaking of purchasing a dog.
A big dog, an Alsatian or Doberman. Honestly, sometmes I really think he is even worse than I. Still, what a splendid idea....
CHAPTER FOUR
The Bistro la Bas is a dark and squalid place in a dark and squalid arrondissement. It is on a narrow cobbled street that winds up gradually between grim buildings defying the sunlight. A red-and-white-striped awning protrudes above the entrance, grimy and tattered at the edges, a pitiful attempt at Parisian decor. The door is open, but the interior is dim, and I cannot see inside. The windows are curtained with dirt, and a trash can overflows in the alley at the side.
I stand across the street, regarding the dark doorway across the barrier of a solitary shaft of sunlight that has managed to penetrate and angles cross the rough cobblestones. I do not stand out. I am no foreign tourist, and I blend and melt into this dark district. I wear a roll-neck sweater and heavy walking boots with metal-capped toes, and I am aware of the image of hardness that this dress adds to my hardened and battered face. It is intentional-it will draw no attention other than possible acceptance in this place and disinterested respect. I have never felt much physical fear, but I know it might not be wise to enter this place upon this mission without anticipating difficulties. I am able to handle difficulties. I have learned that in the bestial existence mankind leads, a second prize is of no value.
If Christine is there, I intend to take her away, and my attempt will not be the pitiful gesture of a grief-stricken man such as Andre must have been. I can appreciate his feelings and emotions as he sat there, watching the woman he loved (and of course, he must have loved her, for it was Christine) reduce his possessive rights to a farcical jumble of pain, but I am unable to identify with him. The ability to identify has been misplaced somewhere in the tangled forest of my personality. I do not need it, for I can act without it. What we do is the thing that matters-why we do it is nothing.
Down the inclined street, a huddle of Algerians jabber together. A woman of the streets passes them, making her rounds. They look at her with Arabian eyes, and she raises her head in proud disdain. She does not vend her body to Arabs. But she cannot resist the force of habit, and she grinds her bottom in a sensual rotation so that they will see the value of her wares. She is a true whore. She must display through pride, if nothing else, and I think I wish her good fortune. For it will not be long before she no longer has value to display, when her pride will molder and she will no longer reject Algerians but will sink into the alley and sell herself standing against the stone walls to anyone who has a few francs to squander on a whore whose beauty has departed. I wonder if Christine will fade and subside in the same manner, or will she bloom in depravity, will she grow more beautiful as she wallows in the fertilizer of lust?
The whore draws abreast of me. I am not Algerian, and she regards me. She keeps her head high, because she is still arrogant and defensive, but she will purvey her loins to me. I shake my head politely, and she proceeds, crosses the street, her hips swaying.
A man emerges from the subterranean depths of the bistro. An evil man with uncertain legs, his complexion tinted from the vat. He blinks, his head rotating as though on a swivel, and then sets off in pursuit of the whore, walking with the studied sobriety of the drunkard. He will overtake the woman of easy virtue; they will bargain and go to whatever foul den she uses to ply her wares. He will be too drunk to ejaculate and they will argue, shrill and coarse voices in a sweat-dampened bed. One of them will yield, she will allow him more time or he will leave, his loins still surging with the unreleased semen, but his phallus hanging as limply from his torso as his head hangs from his sagging shoulders.
Or possibly an alternative-perhaps neither will yield, he will be enflamed with alcoholic lust and rage, his knife will appear (he must have a knife, he has the face of a man who bears a knife) and then it will disappear, sliding easily into her soft, used body.
I came near killing Christine once. The image comes back, and I can feel her smooth neck within my big hands, see her eyes, taunting and daring me, feeling no fear at all because death would be nothing more than a new adventure for her. I do not like to recall that time. I decide there is no sense in waiting any longer.
I transverse the street and am sucked into the Stygian depths of the Bistro.
It is a forlorn place.
An English-style bar curves along one wall, marred and charred with the extinguishing of a million caporals, and half a dozen small tables with classic checkered tableclothes are scattered at random about the floor. The stage is elevated at the back, but there is no show-in progress at this hour. Several men drink at the bar, and a few others talk in low, conspiratorial whispers at the tables, planning petty crimes and vile excess. No one looks at me, because it is not a place to look at strangers.
Everyone looks very villainous indeed. Looking at the stage, I can see Christine exhibiting herself there, a concrete image that does not fade until I shake my head.
It is the gesture of a loin, the shaking of the head, and some of the customers look at me then, looking for a challenge and not understanding that I have merely shaken off a ghost. They look, but they do not speak and they keep respect, possible respect, well molded on their faces. It is their instinct. A leopard looks at a lion but stays clear, and a man who has a knife stays back from a stranger who may have a gun. And who shakes his head without being drunk. I crass to the bar.
The barman has a flat nose and a curled ear and has obviously done a bit. He moves down the bar and looks at me with that look reserved for foreigners.
I say, "Brandy."
He says, "The good brandy or the cheap brandy?"
"It emerges from the same cask," I tell him, just to establish the tone of our relationship, and the barman laughs because he understands all this. He slides a glass across the wood and fills it.
"A man named Honore," I say. The barman stares.
I sip the brandy and it is not bad at all.
"He owns this den of vice."
"That is possible."
"A word with him."
"That, too, is possible."
"Where?"
"At the moment, he is engaged."
"I shall wait."
The barman is big, he shrugs like an avalanche, and he is wondering if my face is perhaps more battered than his; if so, whether that implies more or less ability. But I am so cold, and my hand is vast around the brandy glass, and he will not ask the question. I drink again and a door opens beside the stage. A girl comes out. She is slender, and her face is wasted and lined beyond her years, but she has kept her body well. She knows this and wears a black leotard and dark mesh stockings. Her waist is narrow, her breasts jutting, the nipples outlined.
"And now, perhaps, he is no longer engaged," the barman says, and he laughs. The girl looks at us. She comes across the floor, barefoot and lithe, feline and sensual. She stands beside me in a cloud of cheap perfume, looks up at me from the tops of her eyes. She has gray eyes and dark hair, high cheekbones and a wide mouth. She would have been quite remarkable at one time.
"A drink for me?" she asks. I am watching the door from which she emerged.
"I am not a whore," she tells me.
"I am not surprised to hear that," I say. I gesture and the barman pours her pernod. She adds water, and urine-yellow clouds it to the hue of a pale Mediterranean dawn. She swirls the glass.
"He wishes to see Honore," the barman says.
"Is it about me?" she asks.
I shake my head. A curious look passes across her eyes. It is not quite disappointment.
A man comes out of the doorway. He is dark and looks Italian, and I am sure it is the man Christine has described. The barman gestures behind me, because Honore lets his dark eyes slide up and down over me. I am tall, and it is a long way up and down, but he does not hurry the inspection. He comes toward me, and I put a cigarette in my mouth, strike my lighter, retain the lighter in my right hand. It is a gold Du Pont, very heavy, and can be useful for more than flame. There is tenseness in the air, heavier than the stale tobacco smoke, a pulsing leitmotif in this place.
"Yes?" Honore asks.
"Honore?" I ask him.
"At your service. Possibly."
His eyes are amused, and I know he is a brave man; might have been a good man.
"Is Christine here?"
Honore does not react, but the girl blinks, and her expression alternates like a neon sign, flashing between annoyance and hope.
"Well?"
"Who are you, my friend?"
"Yes, a friend. A friend of Christine. From the past."
"That seems un-likely. When Christine leaves, she leaves no friends behind. She takes a great deal with her and leaves very little."
Yes, he knew Christine all right.
"She has gone?" I ask.
"Yes. I fear I have joined her past. Perhaps we are comrades in her foreign legion?"
"Perhaps. Do you know where she has gone?"
"Come to my office."
I nod.
"Will you require me?" the girl asks. Honore smiles at her. "Ah my insatiable little flower," he says, but he does not answer her question. He leads the way across the room and through the doorway. I see the couch Christine had written of, see, for a moment, her image gyrating upon it, beneath the lash of his manhood's failure, and again it is necessary to make that leonine shake of the head. Her ghost dissolves and Honore perches on the corner of his desk, one well-talored leg swinging.
"It is painful to talk of this," he says. "But you will understand, you must feel the same."
I put the Du Pont back in my pocket.
"I loved her, of course," he says.
"Of course."
He smiles, shrugs. His leg swings like a pendulum, keeping his emotions in balance.
"She departed two months ago. There was no warning. One bright morning she was gone. It would have been easier had it been a day dismal with rain. But there was yellow sunlight on the floor and she was not there. I know where she went and with whom, although it is doubtful she will still be there. She is mobile. I contemplated going after her, but it was an absurd thought."
"Is she well?"
"She is ... Christine. 'Well'? Such prosaic qualifications do not apply to her. She is a most unusual woman, and one must form a unique set of values to use.
"She loved you," he went on. "More than she loved me, I think. I know who you are, she has described you to me many times. Very graphically. That was one of her amusements, of course, to tell me about you while I was with her. But she spoke with a depth greater than the game. She loved you of a certainty. Had you appeared here before Christine departed, I should have killed you ... with a certain amount of regret, of course, since it would be like klling my shadow. But in self-defense, I would have killed you. Now it is not necessary, and it is a sense of comradeship I feel. You are a part of me now, John. It is John, of course? Yes, of course, there cannot be many men with a face and a size such as you possess. A part of me. When I was with Christine it was so often you who filled her and who drew the juices from her loins. Perhaps I owe you a debt of gratitude for that."
He stops speaking and looks at his polished shoe. I am steady as a stone, but there is a great inner turmoil, a trembling with this knowledge that she had not forgotten me-even that she had used me to stimulate the passion of another, had spoken of me, even as her lips parted to allow his semen to flood her mouth.
"She came here one night," he says.
"I know. She wrote a letter to her sister, describing the details of that night."
Honore arches an eyebrow.
"All of it?"
"Enough so I can imagine little more."
"To her sister? Ah, who else but Christine could conceive of such a letter? She mentioned my ... unusual methods, of course. I expect I should feel the shame of perversion, faced with the man whom she loved in a different fashion. But I am a true pervert, I am not embarrassed by what is normal for me. I never made love to Christine ... until one night, one memorable night, I managed it. It was just once, and I succeeded before I realized I was doing it. I was very pleased. I imagined it would bring us closer together. But apparently it had the opposite effect. I became normal to her, and Christine despises normality, and so she left me. She had scored her victory over my inability, and the game was ended."
He shows a sad smile. "It is a terrible thing, being unable to make love. It is far worse, now than I had never known, like the man born blind what the sensation can aspire to. Much better that I had never known, like the man born blind who can only wonder in idle curiosity what sight is."
I do not know what to say to this man and we look at one another. The door opens, and the slender girl looks in, her face bright with inquiry.
"A friend?" she asks.
"Not, I think, that kind."
She looks disappointed.
"Nymphomaniacal," Honore says to me. "I attract the type, despite-or perhaps because of-the fact that I am personally useless to them. Still, these things can be arranged."
Now the question has shifted from her face to his. The girl senses this, moves closer.
"Would you care to have her, my friend? Indulge in the little game my whims necessitate?"
"If it pleases you." I say.
"It would please her. Me? Who knows?"
"Yes?" the girl asks.
Honore nods.
She strokes my arm. There is an odor of musk mingled with her perfume now, I know her body is opening in anticipation. Her fingers squeeze my bicep, move slowly down, brush over my hip, and settle, fluttering like a bird, upon my manhood. A purely physical desire comes to me, I begin to grow under her touch. This pleases her and she strokes me.
"I want to take it out," she says.
Honore nods again.
She unfastens my belt and opens my trousers. My organ seizes the opportunity for freedom, breaks from the confinement of clothing, and spring free, semi-erect in her hand. She holds it from beneath, so that she may look at it, and coaxes it to rise further, while her other hand cups my testicles with gentle pressure. Her mouth is open, her eyes narrowed. Her expression is one of absolute fascination, complete absorption with this machine which she manpulates. She slides the skin back and gazes longingly at the head; rubs her thumb over the glans and sighs as I tighten with the friction. Suddenly, yielding to the impulse, she closes her fingers around the shaft and begins to jerk rapidly back and forth, until I am rigid and throbbing.
"Tell me, Honore," she whispers. "Tell me what to do to him...."
"First you must take your clothes off," he says.
"Yes, yes, he must see my body," she cries, but her hands are reluctant to leave me; she draws me after her, and my loins arch forward. I place my hands behind me on the desk for support as my knees turn liquid. Then she moves away and takes her leotard off with quick motions. She wears nothing beneath; she stands before me in dark mesh stockings and nothing more, the dark triangle-of her pubic hair forming a geometrically pleasing angle with the tops of the stockings. Her waist is tiny, but her belly is firm and rounded and she thrusts it out toward me, thighs parted and knees bent, so that I can see the top of the wet crevice.
"Look at me," she says.
She places her finger in the crevice and slides it along. She opens further at this self-caress, her clitoris in a taut knot. Her finger dips in all the way and then emerges, slippery with her juice. She regards the finger with burning eyes; brings it up to her mouth and sucks it, drinking her own oily juice, gulping with ecstatic delight.
"Ah, I taste so good," she whispers. "I love to taste myself. Does it make you hot to see me do this?"
It does. Honore, too, is affected. He has moved from the desk and stands watching us, one hand pressed against his own organ. It forms an enormous bulge in his trousers.
"What can I do?" she asks.
"What do you want to do?"
"I want to fuck him."
Honore smiles and nods.
She moves to me and her hands begin darting over my clothing. I step from my trousers as she draws my sweater up; pulls it over my head.
"Ah, so big. Good. And hair on the chest, I like that. A man with hair is better. Sometimes I close my eyes and pretend it is not a man, but a great, hairy ape. I should like to have an ape make love to me, crush me in his mighty arms and shoot his bestial load inside my belly. Oh, I can't bear it, I must have you inside me!"
She draws me toward the couch, presses me down upon it and bends over to take my penis in her hands again. She treats it tenderly, worshiping it with soft caress, until it stands above my belly like a beacon. Her hips move, she squirms with heat, but a conflict rages in her desires, she wants to take me instantly and, at the same time, wants to make it last forever. She kneels beside me, legs open so that I may look up at her entrance. It is wide-open, the lips unfolded in welcome, the delicate inner flesh flecked with foam.
Her finger intrudes again, and I watch it push upward, watch the flesh suck in and up. She pulls it out and offers it to me, and I take her finger in my mouth, licking her lubrication. She moans and lowers her torso toward my face. I raise my head, let my tongue press out to touch her. I lick her clitoris, and she leaps with the electric sensation and presses down so that my face is buried in the swamp. I eagerly probe with my tongue, my lips drawing the furled flesh into my mouth, and she fingers the tip as I suck her.
Then she shifts from me; straddles me and bends down to lick my lips and mouth, taking her juice back again. Her hips descend until they cover me, and my knob is pressed against the opening.
"Shall I take him inside me?" she asks.
Honore stands over us. He nods. He has opened his trousers now, his member is in his hand. It is vast, as Christine wrote. It is not erect, but it is monstrous. He moves his hand up and down the quivering shaft.
The girl pushes down on me. She descends all the way, the length of my rod in one slow motion, and our torsos are tight together with her belly impaled on the throbbing pillar. She holds it there, at the full penetration, and shudders; she rotates her hips but does not move upward. She wants me as far up as I can be. I press up with my hips, feel a tingle begin in my belly, swirl through my testicles, and begin to creep up the shaft until it reaches the knob in surging heat.
"What are you doing?" Honore asks, and his voice comes from a great distance.
"Oh, oh ... I'm fucking him."
"Is it good?"
"Good, good. I love it."
"What does it feel like?"
"Big ... and hot and hard. So big and hard and swelling inside me. Way up inside my belly. I want him to shoot there, I want him to come so hard it goes all the way up and runs out my mouth. Oh, oh. I can feel it start to seep out. Just a trickle, hot as lava."
The girl is mad with lust. She straightens over me, sitting on me, her slender torso upright and her knees drawn up along my sides. She shakes her head from side to side, dark hair flowing like curtains across her features, and her teeth sink into her lower lip. She cups her breasts with one hand, alternating, running her thumbs across the nipples, and reaches behind her with the other hand to hold my scrotum, squeezing as though she wishes to force the sperm to come spurting out.
"Ah, his balls are full," she says. "I can feel how hard and full they are with come. He's going to give me a bellyful, he's going to flood me."
Suddenly she grows rigid. She groans and whimpers, and I know she is at the moment of orgasm. I feel the muscles of her vessel constrict around my organ, and then I feel them go soft and wet as the liquid seeps from the walls and dissolves, running down my shaft. The knowledge and the feeling enflame me, and I can contain myself no longer. I let the floodgates go, and my semen roars upward and bursts from me in terrible hydraulic pressure. Again and again the stream balloons inside her, and she is wild with acceptance, moaning and squirming.
"Burning," she whimpers. "Filling me up, drowning me. I can taste it. It's all through my body, it's running through my veins. I'll die, it's so much. But I want more!"
I give her more. I give it all to her. Her muscles work on me, drawing the last drop out as if she is possessed of a tight mouth within her vagina.
And now she has it all.
That arcane internal maw has ceased its nursing, it has swallowed my offering, and now I feel it retract, like a cat that has emptied its milk dish, to lick its lips in purring contentment. My member is released from he grasp and begins to recede, slowly, as if it fears the satisfied mouth may strike again. I do not move. I let my organ retreat of its own accord.
The girl's head drops. She reels with exhaustion, her own vitality has been drained as she emptied my loins. Her shoulders droop forward, and the dark tapestry of her hair brushes like raven wings across he sweat-dotted brow. Her eyes are closed, then open once more as a slow smile begins to etch itself in lines beside her lips. She is satisfied, it is a smile of satiation, but there is more there; something hints of further feeling. She turns this smile on Honore.
"I was bad," she says, her voice very small.
"Yes. Very bad."
"I did a terrible thing. I cheated on you. I took another man deep in my body. I can still feel him there, still feel the residue of his lust."
I can feel her again. A new, different excitement is at work within her body, and her passage tenses around me once again. But she does not attempt to contain me, she slides away and her knees brush over my hip as she lowers herself to the floor.
Honore moves closer.
He still holds his organ in his hand, and Christine has not overstated his bulk. He is still limp, although beginning to pulsate and twitch. He stands over the girl, and she rocks back on her haunches, raises one hand in a gesture, half supplication and half groping for him. He moves his hand, and its enormous burden swings upward, the head rearing like a hooded cobra warning a trespasser from its terrain. The girl is frozen, she attempts to reach out for him but her hand is open, the palm tuned outward to ward him off.
"Are you sorry?" he asks.
Her lips tremble, she does not speak.
"Are you sorry? Do you regret your sin?"
"No!" she cries. "No, T liked it, I loved it, it was wicked and evil and I wallowed in it!"
And the snake strikes, it darts out with blinding speed, claims its victim in serpentine quickness as it uncoils into her unprotected face. She moans. It lashes out again. She falls back against the edge of the couch, the attack is short of her throat and the fangless head whips against her soft breast. The serpent is mad with the kill now, again and again it darts out, it bangs its hideous triangular snout against her face, her throat, between her breasts, her nipples, and the head grows larger with each stroke, the color changing from dull purple to angry red. The girl writhes and groans beneath the living lash. Honore's hand moves faster, and a peristaltic propulsion begins to work along the shaft, carrying the cobra's venom with it and spurting it out suddenly into her face.
Honore closes his eyes.
The girl gasps, sighs, taking her pleasure in acting the object of debasement.
I look, my eyes riveted to this remarkable tableau, my own need expelled previously and able to see it without passion, uncluttered and unfrilled by desire. There is humor there, but there is more beyond humor, some touch of the grotesque and some distant twinge of horror.
I do not deliberately think of Christine, the same values do not apply to her, but I know that he has attempted to mold this girl in Christine's image, an attempt that bore the seeds of failure in its very conception. And I know he will continue in this barren effort, unable to cast off the disease she has infected him with, the germs of her memory that flow through his bloodstream and devour his brain.
I sit up. Honore appears quite unconcerned, he has taken a silk handerchief from his pocket and wipes himself, folds his member back into his trousers.
"You will excuse my little quirks?" Honore asks.
"Of course."
He shrugs and smiles, very matter-of-fact. "A gentleman is often forced to resort to the absurd. I can imagine how ludicrous it must appear to a disinterested third party."
I am pulling my clothes back on. The girl has climbed onto the couch and lies, face down, whimpering. She is having a climax, untouched, unaided even by the caress of her own hand, inspired merely by the demoniac arousal of her mind. Honore goes to his desk.
"You wish to know where she has gone?" he says, as if our previous conversation had been uninterrupted.
"Yes."
"You are foolish to pursue her, my friend." He opens a drawer, takes out a slip of paper. "Her trail leads in a constant descent. But you are welcome to what I know. This is the man who took her from me. As I mentioned, I had planned to go after her and bring her back-even, I fancy, to destroy her if she refused to return. To that extent had she bent my reason. And so I have his name and address. I introduced them, of course-allowed him to take Christine in my presence-but it was just one of many such affairs, I could not know at the time what her whims would lead to. Ah, but that was just before I finally succeeded in making love to her, so I don't expect it was this man's charm that drew her from me. Although he had charm, I believe. He is Greek, young and lusty, in complete contrast to myself-a self-confident young man he was, and I wonder how long it took her to destroy all vestiges of that."
He hands me the paper.
I glance at it. The man's name is Gregorios Melas, the address is in Athens.
Honore is watching me. "It is a long way," he says.
I shrug. He is right, of course. A wise man would foresake this pursuit, I have done what I could to the point of reason, Stella will expect little more (as though I were really doing this for Stella, do I deceive myself this much?) and will not expect me to dedicate my life to the pursuit of Christine. And yet, life demands a cause. The bulk of humanity has its cause tailor-made. They must spend their lives in staying alive, earning a living, perhaps aspiring to advance a-long the false superstructure of a social scale.
I have no need of this and yet must have something. My total existence has for too long been a meaningless drifting from place to place, toward no goal and forced by no compulsion other than boredom, changing time and place as easily as I change the living creatures whose lives I pass through.
I might have chosen a goal, even though it would be false. I might have determined to follow the grand prix races through the cities of the circuit, forcing myself to develop an interest in high-speed engines and human reflexes, or I might have decided to follow the bulls through the corridas of Iberia, learning the graceful motions, first by meaningless name, merely recognizing the stages of the drama, and then, with acquaintance, knowing them by feeling, so that nomenclature is unnecessary and I drink rough red wine from a skin, sitting with hooded eyes in the brilliant sunlight and losing my ego for the moment to the spectacle.
But these things do not appeal to me. Nothing appeals, but something is required, and I may as well follow the phantom of Christine through the carnal knots of her travels, not seeking a moment of truth, not searching for a climax, but content with being presented with my next destination so that I do not have to use my decision in petty war with ennui. Man's free will deserves a far more noble opponent....
The girl has fallen into slumber, one leg trailing to the floor. Honore asks, "Will you follow?"
"Yes," I say.
"Good fortune."
We smile. We have a shade of understanding.
Suddenly Honore looks embarrassed. His dark eyes waver from me, he is forced to assume position at the edge of his desk once more, swinging his leg and observing his foot as the polished shoe catches darts of reflection. He has just permitted me to witness him perform an act of perversion that, if nothing more, testifies to a failure of normal manhood and potency-has done this before me without the slightest hesitation, wihout any shame or embarrassment or regard. And now something has made him uneasy. It seems remarkable, and yet I know what he is going to say.
"If you do find her ... when you find her...."
I cannot help him. I wait.
Honore is absorbed in contemplating his shoe.
"Simply tell her-if you will...." He loses this dubious combat; looks up with a smile, the embarrassment gone because it has conquered his desire.
"What I mean to say is, give her my regards."
Such is the way she affects men, such is the state in which she leaves them, broken, in her wake. A tidal wave of a woman. And here I am, carried along in the currents of her passing, swept on now toward the cradle of democracy.
Ah well, Christine is democratic.
CHAPTER FIVE
Athens in the fragrant night.
Is it at a taverna on an open terrace overhung with trees. The tables are full, and there are laughter and ouzo, olives and goat's milk cheese. I drink Metaxa with respect and moderation and absorb the atmosphere of the Plaka, a mood of curious paradox, something of electricity that has relaxed gracefully to a mere trickle, although retaining the ability to crackle and burn
This is an old residential district, although not ancient, and the streets wind in sigmoidal meanderings with terraced steps along the footpaths, balconies and red tiled roofs angled at levels above one another, a plexus of soothed nerve endings that form a central terminal for the ganglia of that massive organism, humanity. Chemical imblance does not exist here, although a modern city-planning commissioner might be driven to the depths of despair and frustration, and children run laughing through the maze of tables where adults drink laughing; where even the resinous wine seems to tinkle with laughter in the metal mugs.
The Acropolis looms up behind, haughty above the Attican plain and majestic in its disdain for the modern city that has flowed out on vermicular pseudopods of progress. This is a city with a fifth dimension, a city that must exist on dual levels of time, and the ancient must tolerate the present without noticing it, as the aristocrat must tolerate the dustman if he is to avoid wallowing in his own filth. This tolerance is not difficult here at the frontiers of Europe, the starting point and the finish line combined, and I find it pleasant to forget the present and imagine I am sitting here in a golden age of philosophy and charm and freedom (and even of hemlock, if such must be) when the gravest hazard was the threat of Sparta, and it was a love-hate relation, necessary because man must compete against himself or natural selection and external disaster will account for the species.
These are not sad thoughts, however; they are objective reflections that occur in a place where there is no pressure to confine them. I am objective, I think as a man but not as a species, perhaps my mind (as opposed to brain) has made the dynamic evolutionary leap that our tar-sier ancestors made those eons ago, while the minds of my fellowmen are still raging saurians within those thick mammalian skulls, growing larger with each generation and needing to range farther and farther to find their prey. Perhaps these mental monsters, these terrible lizards of awareness, have roamed to the crossroads, the ice age of the ego, where evolutionary decision must be inexorably made. Man will be extinct, a fossil to be studied by the next inheritors-or man will be God.
But not a sad thought, although sober, and sobriety is in league with that devil boredom. I drink Metaxa and find that the demon cannot hold his own in a contest of the cups. He struggles, he is a relentless antagonist, but his capacity lies in other fields, and I drink him to the ground and sit alone. I sit alone by choice, but to some it seems unnatural, and a shadow falls across my table.
I look up. A tourist stands there. I know he is a tourist, for he wears a flowered shirt and bears a camera on a cord around his neck. He is middle-aged but wears his hair very short, aspiring to youth, an athletic image deformed by his paunch. Behind him stands his wife, a pretty woman but nervous, this is a foreign land.
"May we join you?" asks the man.
I am courteous. I nod. He draws out a chair and holds it for his wife, and she perches on the edge. Her skirt is short, perhaps shorter than she would have worn in her own element. When they are alone in their luxury hotel, the man may upbraid her for her lack of modesty, but in public he smiles in proprietary confidence at her naked thighs. They are a pair, they resist all eternal attack together.
"You aren't Greek, are you?" he asks.
I say no.
"Neither am I," he says, achieving a certain classic height of unnecessary exposition. The waiter comes, and the man fumbles with speech, torn between his lack of knowledge and his desire to appear worldly.
"Some of that Greek wine stuff, you know," he says, worldly as a nun. The waiter comprehends, goes to fill the order.
"Name's Johnson," says the tourist. "Sam Johnson, from Detroit. This is the little woman, Hazel."
He sticks his hand out. It hangs there like the limb of a rotten tree, I do not know what to do with it. Then I understand and join my own hand with it. We exchange a firm handshake, solidifying our bond as tourists surrounded by savages. Hazel puts her hand out too, timidly, a woman who is never sure if a handshake is required. I take her hand and am surprised to feel the subtle warmth of the pressure. Perhaps I have misjudged this woman.
Sam beams upon us, leaning back with one thumb in his belt, and says, "Been here long? We just arrived today. 'Course, we been here before. Travel a lot, we do. Like I said to Hazel, we can afford the good life, so why should I slave away when I can hire someone else to do the work? Eh? I worked like a pig when I was young and now I want to enjoy it. Hazel's lucky there, she's younger than I am, she's enjoying this good life without having to work for it. Not that I begrudge her that, no sir. I want my little woman to be happy. I'm very liberal that way. I don't mean I'm a Liberal, don't get me wrong, I've always been a Republican, what I mean is I'm liberal in my outlook on life, see? I think a person should be able to do what he wants, long as he isn't a Communist. All these ideas about
-you know, moral standards and all that shit
-well, I don't believe in them. You get my point?"
This man winks at me. I am not at all sure that I get his point, the idea is so completely out of context with his appearance. I do not answer. His wife is regarding me with eyes that have widened in sexy loss of innocence.
"I mean, you take ... well, take wife swapping. Now, I don't see anything wrong with that. Lots of men would, they'd be jealous just thinking their wives would submit to it. But I think it's sort of keeping a marriage together, myself. It's lots better than having one of them clandestine affairs, it's honest, you see?"
"Absolutely," I tell him.
"You married?"
"No."
"That's a shame. I guess maybe you got to be married to understand these things. Can't very well wife swap if you ain't got a wife, ha ha ha. But I'm liberal, if my wife sees a man she likes the look of, I don't mind if she goes with him even if he hasn't got a wife to return the favor. That's being real liberal."
The waiter brings wine. Sam is sweating now, beads of moisture coat his brow and upper lip. He gulps the cool wine and his Adam's apple works furiously. I wonder if it took him a great deal of effort to make his obvious offer or whether he is nervous now because my eyes have remained blank. He looks at Hazel. She is inscrutable, she will not let her pride be exposed until she sees which way the battle is going. I have no desire to hurt her, I pretend to be confused and resort to my cup.
"They got a toilet here?" Sam asks.
"Inside," I tell him.
He rises, lumbers off toward the entrance, veering around the tables like a harpooned whale among the ships.
"You aren't interested, are you?" Hazel says.
Ah, it wasn't her pride she was holding back, it was merely seemly modesty in her spouse's presence.
"I am preoccupied with deep thought," I say.
"I noticed you when we were passing by before," she says. "I wanted to stop then, but my husband was determined to take a photograph of the Acropolis. He has a compulsion to photograph every thing he sees. In fact, I sometimes doubt he ever sees anything except through the lens of his camera. But we all have our own compulsions, I suppose. I have a compulsion to sleep with any man who appeals to me."
"And does your husband photograph such charming pieces of local scenery?"
She laughs. She is well balanced. "He never has. I think he'd like to, but he's embarrassed to suggest it."
She places her hand on my knee. The fingers move, tauntingly walking up toward my groin. "You aren't embarrassed?"
"No," I say.
"You simply don't want me?"
"Not at the moment."
"Later? I can come to you if you like."
"Perhaps. Without the camera. I have no aspirations to photographic immortality."
Sam is returning, smiling at us across the sea of crowded tables; coming slowly, to give us time.
Hazel leans forward, her breasts are firm beneath her cotton dress, she wears no brassiere. I see the full globes press together, rolling into a deep crevice above the neckline. Her flesh is tanned and smooth, it appeals to my tactile senses. She whispers the name of their hotel to me, a star hotel on Constitution Square.
"Come tonight," she says, and her hand moves up the last vital degree and rests, for a moment, upon my crotch. Then she has withdrawn. The assignation is arranged and she is once more the bewildered tourist depending on her husband to protect her from alien ways of life.
"You two getting along okay?" Sam asks, resuming his seat.
"Of course, dear."
I am wondering if I will accept the offer. It is not a thing I can decide beforehand. I have something else I must do first. I excuse myself.
"See you around, huh?" Sam says.
"Undoubtedly."
His wife shows me a meaningful glance, wide-eyed as she looks at my face and then lowering her lids slowly as the eyes descend and fix overtly upon my trousers. I smile and move away, down the stone steps. Dark side streets twist away in confusion, Oriental music twangs toward an infinity of twinkling stars. I pause at the foot of the steps and glance back, my gaze drawn as surely as Lot's wife toward her crumbling Sodom.
Hazel is looking at the Greek waiter and Sam is looking at Hazel. They are both smiling. Perhaps they are happy people. I walk on.
CHAPTER SIX
Gregorios Melas lives in a modern apartment building on one of those parallel streets leading north from the university, and I have committed the address to memory. I walk down from the Plaka, where there are no roads for motorcars, and hail a taxi. It is a huge American car with battered fenders, and the driver makes full use of its size and armored might as he storms disdainfully across the paths of lesser European cars. We move through the modern city now, momentary jungles of neon nightlife, and on to the dark but straight streets of recent structure. I get out of the taxi and pay him; walk up to Gregorios' building. The front door is open, and I ignore the row of bells, enter, and walk down carpeted halls to a self-service elevator. The building is not all that modern, the elevator is a cage supported on open and rather slender cables. They respond sluggishly, drawing me up to the floor of his apartment, and I walk down the corridor on tense legs and pause before the door I know is his.
There is no hesistation, no preparation as there was before the Bistro la Bas. I am not preparing myself for a physical encounter, but I feel an emotional tautness. Christine may be behind this door, may open it herself, even, and I cannot predict what feelings will savage me.
But I knock.
The door is unlatched; it swings inward at the touch of my knuckles, and I walk in. It is a large flat of overstuffed comfort but there is no one in sight. This is not a time for formality, I cross the room and open a door in the opposite wall. It is the bedroom, and it too is empty. The bed is unmade, a woman's nightgown trails in a filmy cloud to the floor. Christine did not wear nightgowns when I knew her, but Christine is a woman of constant change. I move to the bed, lift the delicate silk garment to my face to inhale, knowing I will recognize any lingering trace of her perfume. There is none. I let the gown flutter back to the bed, watching with my eyes while my thoughts are elsewhere; wondering whether I should wait here or return later.
I hear the front door open again. Footsteps enter, soft and timid. "Gregorios?" a woman's voice calls.
I move back to the door and look out. A woman is taking her coat off, standing beside the couch. She does not notice me, and I study her face, intrigued by the pain that is ingrained on her countenance.
She is tall. Her hair is black, her complexion dark, her eyes darker, wide-set eyes under long curved lashes that would be inordinately attractive did they not glisten with the damp of impending tears. Her mouth, too, is affected, the corners turn downward, it will be only a moment before the remains of composure crumble. Her tautly curved body trembles with racking sobs of anguish. I am drawn to her, affected by her obvious unhappiness as much as by her splendid proportions. But the proportions are the captors of my gaze.
She wears a white dress in nice contrast with her dark arms and thighs; as she sits, unaware of my presence, the hem rises and I look upon the firmly packed flesh of the inner leg, catch a breathtaking glimpse of a triangle of silk at the junction of her legs.
I walk into the room.
The girl's eyes widen in surprise. She leaps to her feet and stands facing me, obviously confused.
"Good evening," I say in English.
"Good evening," she says, as though following a formula. "Are you a friend of Gregorios?"
I do not deny this.
"Do you know where he is?"
"No. I just arrived. The door was open. I was looking for him."
"Oh," she says, with failing hope. She sinks back to the couch. "I thought perhaps you knew where he was. He has not been home for three days, I have heard that he is drunk constantly now and in the company of loose women. If only I could talk to him...."
"Who are you?" I ask. I sit on the arm of the couch.
"Angele. I am Gregorios' betrothed. At least, I was, until this happened. Perhaps you have heard him speak of me?"
"I-I do not know him, really. I came about the German girl." I know this may not be wise, but I cannot toy with the pain Angele feels.
Her face clouds, those magnificent eyes flash in anger and scorn. "Then I have nothing to say to you. Please leave me, you have no right here."
"You don't understand. I have come to take her away from your fiance, Angele. Perhaps you can help me."
The anger recedes, but she shakes her head violently. Ebony hair coils at her dusky neck. "It is too late," she whispers. "She has already abandoned him. She left weeks ago, and left him a ruined man. I love him, I will do anything for him, but I cannot help him. He is dying with memory of that evil woman."
I place my hand on her shoulder, her emotions are a solid object filling the room.
"I would have been willing to give him up," she says. "I love him enough to let him go, even. But she broke him and ruined him, and then she left. And now he wants no one and nothing. He will die for love of that whore."
My hand strokes her shoulder tenderly, without design, and I am surprised when she tilts her head so that her cheek rests on my hand.
"You are very sympathetic," she whispers.
I move from the arm to sit beside her, and she rests her head against my shoulder.
"I should like to tell you something," Angele says. "To make a confession."
I listen.
"I am a virgin," she says. "Perhaps this will surprise you, but it is not unusual in my country. A girl saves her ultimate gift for marriage here, if she is not a bad girl. I have loved Gregorios for two years now, but I have never surrendered my maidenhead to him. And tonight, driven by grief, I wondered if that might not be the way to get him back, to make him forget that evil whore. I came here tonight prepared to let him have his way with me. And, once I had determined to surrender, the idea was of tremendous excitement, I came burning with desire stimulated by the anticipation. And now he is not here, and the fire must go unquenched."
I can feel the fire. Her body seethes beside me, a glowing ember of dark gold in the dimly lighted room. I do not tell her what I know, that once any man has known Christine, no gift, no matter how unsoiled, can weaken his memory of her carnal delights.
"Must it?" I say.
She slides her eyes up to me.
"You would extinguish it?" she asks. "That pleases me. I am pleased to know I am desirable to a man. But I will not give myself to you, it is a thing I must save for Gregorios and if he rejects it then it must die of its own accord, snuffed out when no fuel is left."
I am disappointed; I draw away from her but she follows, turning so that the fullness of her breast is flattened over my biceps.
"And yet, there are other things," she whispers. "I wish to remain a virgin, but if you want me-if you can share the lesser pleasures...."
I drew her into my arms, and my hand slides down her dress, fingers thrusting beneath the cotton material; faltering at the top of her brassiere for a moment as they grope their way under and then settle on her naked breast. Her nipple is large, and it becomes larger, extending in a hard point against my palm as my fingers sink into the full globe. I squeeze the delicious flesh for a long time, and she grinds against me, eyes closed, breath starting to come heavily. Then I draw my hand upward and take her nipple between thumb and fingers, rolling it until it explodes with need.
"I want you to undress me," she whispers.
She turns her back, offering me the line of buttons down the back of her dress. My large fingers are clumsy, I tear one button, but she doesn't care. Her shoulders squirm and rotate as her back comes into view, through the long triangle of her parting dress, bisected by the strap of her brassiere. She raises her bottom, and I slide the dress off, let it float to the floor, a ghost of forgotten reluctance to haunt us from the carpet. She wears no garter belt or stockings, she swings her legs up and curls them under her, facing me again, wanting me to look at her; posing, one arm up, the hand behind her head, mingling with the mane of pitch-black hair. Her torso is long, a thin gentle taper from slender waist to the twin globes of her breasts and, lower, sweeping out to the flat width of her hips. Her panties are tiny bikinis, I can see the hypothenuse of the triangle formed by her pubic hair above the elastic band, tiny wisps of dark curls protruding. Below, through the transparency, I can trace the continuation of the darkness to the apex where her thighs roll together.
She likes my eyes to trace this secret path, she shivers and prickles under the darts of my vision. Her hand moves down from behind her head, and I notice the dark glen at her unshaven armpit as she reaches back, elbow raised, deftly unfastening the clasp. The brassiere falls away, the cups retaining the spherical shape in fond memory of their lush prisoners, and her breasts are free, rolling heavily but firmly, standing out like balloons against her chest. The nipples are rigid and taut, tilted insolently upward.
She arches her back, and I willingly bend to her. My tongue presses out eagerly, delving. The end passes over her tips, and they become enflamed. I tease her, alternating and brushing lightly over each pink nipple until she seethes and simmers, and then I take them into my mouth and use my lips to draw the heat away. The heat moves to me, my own molecules begin the rapid dance of incandescence, shining with the thermal lights of lust.
Angele moans. She raises up, careful not to pull her breasts away, and slides the panties down. I see her flip them from her foot as she settles back, cupping her hands beneath the mounds and pressing them together in offering. My own need is patient. I suckle for an eternity of sparkling moments, until at last she draws away.
"You, too, must be naked," she says.
I obey, stripping my clothes hurriedly while she stares at me. Then we are both naked, and there is a field of magnetic force tugging at us.
We clash together. Her fingernails are marking my shoulders and neck, my hands are bruising her buttocks and hips, and our mouths gravitate together, lips parted, feeling the hardness of teeth beneath the softness of flesh, tongues lashing and coiling from her mouth to mine. I bear down on her, and she is on her back, one knee raised. Her lips form a channel around my tongue, and I let the tip play over the roof of her mouth. We are melting in our mutual lust.
I press my hips between her legs.
"No," she murmurs, speaking with my tongue still in her mouth, the words squeezing out thickly. "No, you must not do that. There are other ways. Please."
Her head turns away then, her teeth are in her lip as she struggles for control. I will not force her, I draw back and leave a space between our loins. My organ is standing bolt upright along my belly, quivering.
Angele takes me in her hand. Her fingers slide up and down in delicious friction, her other hand caresses the pulsing head. I think this is the other way she has spoken of, and arch my hips to give my eruption to this caress. But her hand slows, halts, she holds me motionless.
"I would love it," she whispers, her knees under her once more. Her belly comes against mine, rounded and soft, and she holds my member between her thighs. It slides along the juicy slit, parting the outer lips around it. "Please do not do it, I could not resist you."
I jerk my hips back and forth. My tool burrows through the swamp. I do not let it dive but force it to glide at the surface. The contact sends sensation flaring through her body, she jerks and bucks, holding me between her thighs.
Suddenly her eyes are open wide, wide. She is startled, amazed at the height of her sensual peak. She falls back from me, legs spread wide and knees drawn up along her sides.
"I'm coming," she gasps. "Take it!"
I lower my face to her. Silken thighs brush over my cheeks, I see her face above the convexity of her lower belly, my mouth presses on her and she opens to it, the lips spreading to offer the internal intricacies. I suck at her with a desperate hunger, my face buried, the scent of her body overwhelming, like the resin wine of her sunbaked land, and I become intoxicated with the fruity vintage of this moist vineyard. My fingers dip in, opening the path for my tongue, I would press my whole head in if I could.
She pushes me back. I have sampled the produce of her chateau and thirst for more, but she swivels about, turning face down and jutting her ass up, the cheeks like inverted valentines hovering over her arched back. Her head is lowered, her cheek rests on the cushions.
"That was not fair," she whispers. "You, too, must have such delight. This way, the Greek way."
Her delightful bottom sways in invitation.
"I don't want to hurt you," I say.
"Give it to me!" she cries.
It is not a command to be ignored. I place my hands upon the cheeks and spread them. The tight dark entrance is exposed. I bend to it and let my tongue squirm in, lubricating the passageway as I sample this wine of a different vintage. She wiggles, moaning and gasping, switching her bottom back and forth and swiveling her hips. She is ready. She is more than ready, she can wait no longer for the entrance to be forced, already the inferno is in danger of faltering for need of attention.
I take my organ in my hand and position it against the tiny well. She feels the contact and stops moving, waits with bated breath.
I push my hips forward in a tentative attack upon the battlements. The defenders resist, but there is no hurry, I can mount a second attack against the fortress. I poise to plunge again, and Angele arches herself higher in expectation; whimpers as I send the ten scouts of my hands probing down the slopes of the hillocks. One scout gains entry, forcing the gates, and I send the heavy infantry into the gap with reckless abandon. The spearhead of the charge smashes home, plowing through the defense with inexorable momentum.
She does not surrender yet. The defense closes behind my heavy brigade, trapping it within the passageway. But it cannot cut off the force that follows, pressing the vanguard before it slowly and remorselessly. The tunnel weakens, the walls dampen and grow soft, spread outward while maintaining their pressure. And then it is unconditional surrender, my striking force has reached the heart of the structure and captured it. Angele moans with pain, and then the sound gadually changes, softens to a purr of pleasure.
"Ah, yes, so," she whispers.
My hands spread her cheeks apart, my eyes stare with wonder at the linking point. The shaft is huge and throbbing and hard as steel, and yet it pushes easily and miraculously into the tight little buttonhole.
The pain is gone now, Angele pulls her knees closer to her lowered head and hikes her bottom even higher, welcoming the full extent of every thrust, until my testicles are firmly pressed into the juicy crevice between her legs, and my pubic hair mats against her buttocks. She is made with desire, and I can feel the tenseness as she fights for control, trying to delay her clmax to coincide with my own. I pump into her with quicker rhythm as I feel the turmoil begin to build up. My hand slips down over her hip, around her arched thigh, and delves between her legs from the front, seeking and finding the tiny protuberance, rolling it in my fingers until it sticks out rigid and taut from the moist wound behind it. The sensation is delicious and delirious. I jam two fingers up her hot, wet moat and can feel my organ moving on the other side of the thin partition.
"I am hungry!" Angele cries.
And her need, expressed so, is a stimulation as great as the tactile sensation, adds to it and brings my loins to the boil. For a moment I bubble, and then I am too hot and the transformation takes place, the boiling liquid becomes steam, and the steam roars out of the tube under the immense pressure of release.
Angele feels me come, cries out like an animal in heat and lets all restraint go, lets her own climax follow upon mine. My fingers are still in her, and I can feel the surging flood swell within the opposite passage, feel the wall between become turgid as it expands to accept the boiling torrent, while it yields up its own moisture from the other side. Her whole body seems to have melted, there are no muscles and no organs, nothing but this increasing whirlpool of lava swirling in her belly and in her loins.
She sinks away from me; I draw back and slowly my weapon emerges, until the head snaps out with a pop from the tiny hole. My knees are weak, I am forced to sit. Angele is moaning against the cushions. She babbles in Greek, forgetting where she is and who I am. Then she remembers.
"God," she says. "All the gods. You are Zeus and Apollo and Hermes in one, embodied in one anthropomorphic penis; you come from Olympus to fill my belly with nectar and ambrosia, to make me immortal with the seed of the gods!"
She twists about and rests her head on my lap in dutiful worship.
I smile. It was my pleasure.
"And thank you for not doing the other. I was so hot I couldn't have stopped you. But I am still a virgin. I am still undefiled for Gregorios."
And I smile in wonder at the logic the Greeks have inherited from Socrates....
We are dressed and there is a sound at the door. Angele looks startled, glances down at herself, as though to see if our bout of passion had left any physical marks upon her. The door opens and a young man stands blinking at us.
"Gregorios," she says, and moves to him.
He is drunk. He weaves as she throws her arms around his neck, looks over her shoulder at me, speaks in Greek to Angele, and nods at her reply. She helps him across the room and he sinks upon the couch. I notice a dark stain upon the cushions, but he is too far in his cups to notice anything.
"So you've come for Christine, have you?" he says.
"To speak with her."
"She isn't here."
I nod.
"She left me. I hate her."
Angele is beside him, running her fingers through his matted hair. Her mouth brushes his ear, I cannot tell if she is kissing him or whispering to him.
"Do you know where she is?" I ask.
Gregorios shrugs, as though he doesn't care.
"Tell him," Angele says. "Forget about her. I've come to you, Gregorios. I love you, I want to be with you. I'll do anything you ask, let you do anything to me...."
He turns to stare at her.
"Anything," she says. "I decided tonight. If you don't want me, then why should I save myself for another? There can never be another. You can have me, whether you wish to keep me or not. Without you there is nothing of value to be preserved, and why should I bear it with me to the grave?"
Gregorios puts his arm around her waist, and she snuggles against him.
"I'll go," I say. "She left with an Englishman," Gregorios says, speaking carefully so that intoxication will not add to the difficulties of a foreign tongue. "Where did they go?"
"He lives in the islands. Hydra. He is an art-tist, a corrupt man. George Blackshaw, his name is. I hope you will kill him. Or her."
I move to the door. I look back as I leave. Angele is holding Gregorios in her arms, her lips are moving over his throat and neck; she purrs with desire. I go out and close the door softly.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In the sweltering morning, I stand upon the quay at Piraeus and gaze out at the Saronic Gulf I have come on the clattering train and purchased my ticket on the first boat that will stop at Hydra. The docks are loud and alive, shimmering in the haze of heat. Rough fishermen and sweating tourists tramp past me; a tourist politely stops a fisherman and asks if he may photograph him. Local color with which to bore his neighbors. The fisherman laughs, is photographed, and the tourist gives him one drachma for his trouble. The fisherman laughs more. But he pockets the drachma, he keeps the proper balance between pride and practicality; moves on to his boat. There are many boats of all sizes and all nations, clustered here upon the commerce of the world. Small wooden vessels bobble high in the water, giant freighters squat like solemn monsters with limp flags in the still air. The ferry approaches with an unnecessary horn like the mating call of an extinct dragon, and the queue begins advancing from the sun shelter. I follow.
I do not welcome the prospect of a three-hour passage, and I have forgotten to buy a newspaper to read. But I have Christine's diary in my pocket, and perhaps I did not really forget the newspaper. I intend to read the entries she made while I was with her. I am afraid of what I will read, but it is something I must do. I know one thing-I know that whatever she has written will be the truth. Christine does not lie, she is honest with herself and knows her true emotions. And it is those emotions I fear.
It is a rough vessel, and the decks are crowded with passengers. I find a coil of rope where I can sit apart from the crush. The boat starts slowly, cautiously, like a large land animal first daring to venture into the water; finds that it can swim and increases speed. The quay moves away behind us and the Aegean is flat ahead, as blue as water can be and lined with tiny white ripples pretending to be waves. The sky echoes the blue, without a trace of cloud or mist, and sends brilliant shafts down to glare upon the wooden deck. We are out beyond the other ships. A ferry passes in the opposite direction, and people line the rails to wave, sharing the adventure of the sea.
I am slightly dizzy with the heat and motion. I am aware of the weight of the diary in my pocket but hesitate, look around me, seeking distraction.
Three English girls have taken seats on the rail opposite. I look at them idly, aware of the type. I play the game of prediction, although I do not intend to find out whether my assumptions are true. I decide that they are office secretaries from Manchester on an economic holiday, possibly hitchhiking. Anyway, that is the type. Two are wearing shorts and halters, the third wears a flowered dress. The shorts are very short indeed, and the dress is, if anything, shorter. That is how Englsh girls are. I have found that there is nothing as loose-moraled as an English girl in a foreign land. They are no pillars of virtue in England, either, as far as that goes. But something about their particular form of lewdness is tremendously exciting. I think it is the air of wickedness they affect. A Swedish girl will do anything and knows it is perfectly normal, but an English girl will do anything thinking it is depraved.
They become aware of my gaze, and all three smile at me. The girl in the dress is the prettiest, she has a toothpaste-ad smile and magnificent legs. The legs are not together, and I can see her panties, a little wedge of pink silk. She knows that I can see them, she wants me to see them. Her companions are annoyed because they did not wear dresses. Perhaps the three have made a small wager on which one can seduce me. And quite possibly, one of them will succeed. But, at the moment, I am not interested. I take the diary from my pocket and open it. The pages blur in the sunlight, a trickle of sweat slides into my eye. The English girl shrug and look a-way, and I turn the pages without reading anything until I come to the time in which I have such heart-constricting interest.
The ink dances in the brilliant glare.
I read.
EXTRACTS FROM CHRISTINE'S DIARY August 3
I don't really know how to write this. I am experiencing a totally new sensation-new to me, that is, although I think I recognize the symptoms from having delved into badly written romantic novels. I think I am in love with John. Even as I write such a phrase, I feel that this book will snap shut in doubled-up laughter at the preposterous idea that I could be in love. And yet I don't know what else it can be. It's certainly not sexual desire. I'm well acquainted with that, and although I feel strongly attracted in the physical sense, the feeling I have goes further than that. I want to be with him, even when there will be no opportunity to make love, and I can't remember ever feeling that way about any of the men I've screwed (which must be a record of some sort, although I've lost track of how many I must have averaged, three a week for the last few years). I'm a bit frightened by this emotion I must confess. I loathe the thought of wantng a man to the point where he could hurt me. Physical desire never reaches those peaks, but I can foresee the possibility of being hurt by John. I must keep a tight rein on his curious emotion until I see exactly how powerful it is.
August 11
I took John to that little glen in the woods where I used to go when I was a child. Fond memories of that, in retrospect, but when we were there I could only think of him. I couldn't keep my hands off him, couldn't wait. I pulled him down behind some bushes just behind that perfectly straight line of pine trees that have always seemed so Prussian to me. There was a family picnicking on the other side, not ten yards away from us, and I could hear them talking and their kids playing, but that didn't stop me. I th ink it made me more excited, if anything. I just had to have him, to possess him at that instant It wasn't that I was unusually hot, I wasn't in any hurry to come, I just felt this uncontrollable urge to have him. I made him sit down beside me and unzipped his trousers and drew his cock out. Then I just held it and looked at it and talked to it. I told it how much I loved it, and I'd swear it could understand me, it began to jump and throb and cock up as if it were listening to what I said.
It's so big. There's a huge dark vein running down the bottom all the way to his balls, and I got fascinated looking at this. With all the joints I've had in my mouth, I never really studied one before. I suppose I was always too impatient to suck it. But it's different with John, I want to know what every inch of his body is like. I'm not selfish with him, I'd be willing to make him come without having a climax myself, even. Although that wouldn't really be possible, because I know I'd come myself just watching him shoot.
Anyway, I must have just looked at him for ten or fifteen minutes before I did anything else. I know exactly what it's like, I can picture it right now, standing up like an arrogant cannon above its mountings. I love them, too, big and solid when he gets hot and they start to fill up with sperm. And the head! I go into raptures just thinking about it. The skin is so smooth, and yet it is so hard, and when I rub my thumb across the glans the tip opens up and I can look right down the inside of the shaft; right down there where his beautiful come is starting to boil.
John was nervous because there were other people so close. But he didn't say anything. He was so hot. I gave the shaft a little squeeze, not pumping it but just closing my hand, and one big frothy drop came pushing out of the tip and ran down the bottom of the head. I watched it run all the way down to his balls, and then I couldn't restrain myself, I just had to take it on the tip of my tongue and taste it. It drove me mad. I've swallowed a good many liters of come in my life, and I sucked John off the first night we met, but when you get a whole mouthful at once it sort of loses the taste. It's like eating too much food or drinking too much alcohol-the palate becomes numbed and you are unable to appreciate the delicate flavor the way a connoisseur would. But this single drop was different. I was like a wine taster with his tiny sip. I rolled it on my tongue and savored all the different levels of taste and texture, and then I let it slide down my throat very slowly. I could feel it afterward, too, like a tiny glowing nugget in my stomach.
It made John so passionate, watching this, that more began to run out and the whole top was all frothy. It looked like pink ice cream with whipped cream on top, and when I ran my tongue across it left trails through the foam.
John wanted to put it in me then, but I told him I just wanted to pet him for a long while. I think he was surprised to find that I thought this way. Perhaps he doesn't know how deeply I feel about him. But anyway, he leaned back on his elbows and let me play with him as long as I wanted, and all the while the cream kept running out of him.
Finally I pulled him on me, and his cock slid right in without any help from our hands, just as if it knew where it belonged; which burrow it lived in. He only had to pump a few times before he shot.
I thought he'd never stop coming. I've never felt so much juice in me at one time, even that night when I fucked seven men behind the wagon at the carnival. He just came and came and came; if sperm was lighter than air I'd have floated right up over the trees like a balloon. And that would have shocked that staid middle-class family at their picnic, to see a woman drift over them with her legs open and a trail of cream pouring out!
I was coming all the time myself, too, but nothing like John was. It almost scared me, I was afraid that something had come unstuck in his system and that he had already emptied his testicles and was shooting blood and guts and maybe even his brains up me. But he was all right later, although he couldn't walk for quite a while.
August 7
Today was the first time I've had another man since I met John, and it makes me even more sure that I love him. I don't know if I planned it as a test, but thinking back I suppose that is so; that I wanted to screw someone else to see if I still enjoyed it. Anyway, it was a young American serviceman and he tried to pick me up outside one of those loud bars, asked if I wanted a drink.
I ignored him and walked past, and then I had a sudden inspiration and went back and said, "I don't want a drink. Do you want a fuck?" I thought he'd faint. But he recovered pretty well, all smiles and leers, so I brought him back to my place and gave him the full treatment. He was pretty adequate and willing enough, and I enjoyed the feeling of having him inside me, but I was conscious all the while that it wasn't John, that it was no more than just an object to cause the necessary friction inside me.
Afterward, it was very funny. He got dressed and I walked him to the door, and then he stood there with his hat in his hands, twisting it and looking very embarrassed and very American. I asked him what the matter was, and he said, "Well, ma'am, I don't know how much to give you." He thought I was a prostitute! I was absolutely delighted. I think I'd like to try my hand at whoring someday.
August 8
I'd planned to tell John about that American, but I didn't. I wanted to-I wanted to see how he would react-but I was afraid he'd be hurt. This is all very unusual. I guess this is what love is like. But I can't tell John that I love him, either. I can tell him I love to make love to him, but that is a different thing. There must be something lacking in me. Perhaps I have an inferiority complex, am afraid to let my defenses down. And yet I know that I would like nothing more than to spend the rest of my life with John.
John stayed the night. We only made love once, but while he slept I kissed him and licked him all over. I felt very feline. I even kissed his feet. But I didn't tell him that.
August 12
I haven't been able to write for the last few days. I've been in Copenhagen with John. I think it has been the most pleasant few days of my life. We did silly little things like stroll through Tivoli holding hands, just like any young lovers. John told me that he loved me. I think he does. I wouldn't want to hurt him, and I don't want him to hurt me, and I'm afraid of what might happen. The last few days have been almost too idyllic, and I'm afraid that something will happen now. Such a level of perfection can't be maintained.
I must make a decision, must decide whether I will marry John or leave him. And if I marry him, I must destroy all the dark impulses of my mind; I must be willing to belong to him completely. It will be difficult.
August 13 (morning) I was right.
We had been too happy. Last night we had our first real fight. I don't even know what it was about. I expect it was my fault. I know I drank too much and got feeling independent, and I suppose John had too much to drink too and started feeling possessive. Then, too, I have been worried about something like this happening, and in some twisted mental gyration I suppose I deliberately caused it, to get it over with, to face up to it. I'm not sure. My recollections are hazy.
I know I got up and began doing a dance by myself in some nightclub, and I remember John telling me to sit down and stop being a drunken slut. That made me angry, although I don't know plete slut. We had a loud argument, and he left why since I'm the first to admit that I'm a com-me. But I went home alone. This amazes me. It's completely out of character for me, drunk and angry and abandoned, to go home alone. I could have taken my pick of the men in the nightclub, but I didn't. So even this confirms the fact that I'm in love.
I'm sitting by the window now. I have a terrible hangover, and the sun is shining. I hope John will come over this morning. I'm determined to tell him that I'm sorry, the frst apology I have ever made in my life.
August 14 (evening) John didn't come.
I suppose he's furious with me. Or perhaps he's waiting at his place for me. I should go to him, of course. It was my fault, and I can't really expect him to come until I've apologized. But still, if he really loves me, he will.
August 15
John didn't come today, either.
It's still quite early. I'm going out, I'm making this entry now in case I'm too drunk to write later. I must confess that I am in agony, a combination of remorse and loneliness. But I have determined not to crawl to him. He should have come by now. If he really loved me he would have come.
August 16
Something happened last night that will be engraved forever on my mind. I cannot write about it-it would be too dangerous to put on record. Besides, I will never need a written record of that terrible night. I know now that John loved me madly, that no man could have committed the act he did without being driven by rage of a broken heart. But the knowledge comes too late, and I have no one to blame but myself-my own stupidity and misguided anger; my own monstrous choice of a means to avenge my hurt. I will never see him again. I only hope and pray that he will escape the consequences.
September 8
I have been unable to continue this journal. I have tried several times, but find it impossible to write in the same book in which I have recorded those precious few moments of love. Since John disappeared I have tried to resume my former way of life-tried to plunge into carnal forgetfulness in an even more abandoned fashion. I have refused no man, no group of men, but I feel little. I close my eyes and try to imagine it is John, but this does not work. It does not feel the same. I believe I have cried his name several times, while other men have been loving me. I know I did once, at least, and felt his penis shrivel up as a result. It didn't matter. Not to me. I come when I am screwed, and that feels good, it brings physical relief, but it is no different than when I do it with my finger. It is masturbation, using a man instead of my hand. I don't know what I will do, now. I suppose, in time, I will forget him. But I am not even sure I wish to forget him. Perhaps the memory is worth the pain. At least, as long as I remember, I will know that at one time, for a few short days, I was human.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I close the book. There are no further entries. As I stare at the closed cover I cannot describe my feelings, my sense of total loss defies expression. It overwhelms reality, and I am no longer seated upon a coil of rope on that crowded boat; I am in a world of the past. But this phantom world gradually fades, for phantoms do not exist, and I look up to see the three English girls giggling and staring at me. They are staring at the front of my trousers, and I am perplexed. I glance down, to find that I have achieved an enormous erection. My body has responded automatically to the vivid pictures my mind formed from the diary. My mind was occupied with grief and loss and remorse, but my body was the animal and did not need the stimulation of the brain.
The girl in the flowered dress speaks. "Eh, luv-you'd best be doing something about that dirty great lump in your trousers," she says.
Her companions giggle and look at my face to see how I will react. They see my face. They see the despair that has molded it. They stop laughing in abrupt confusion and look away, nervous, uncomprehending. And I look out across that level expanse of azure sea and hope, with a longing that is almost supernatural, that Christine will be waiting on that little island....
CHAPTER NINE
O Hydra, brave little island that defied the Turkish hoards, do you hold a welcome for me? Is this the end of my odyssey? Is there a mighty bow to bend, a never-ending tapestry awaiting on this heroic rock? Or will it be no more than another stage in these tortured wanderings whence the antagonistic seas will blow me from my course?
I stand at the rail and look at the mass o rock rising from the sea. It seems barren an( deserted, aloof and arrogant. And then the ship angles across the rock, and the town slides into view, hidden until the last moment by the steep walls of the natural harbor, built around the harbor and up the slopes on the hills. The old mansions, somber relics of an age when billowing sails brought ships laden with chests of gold squat staidly behind the ancient walls to right and left of the harbor. Behind them, sliding up and down the hills, are the geometric white cubes o the town, stretching down to the color and clamor of the waterfront. It seems a gay and happy place; my hopes are raised. The town is small, it will not be difficult to find her, and now, now that I know the truth, it will not be difficult to forgive her anything. If only she is there .
There is a hotel of sorts on the waterfront I have a room with a narrow cot and without running water. It will do. I leave my luggage in the room and walk down stone steps to the cafe that serves as the reception room. The waiter is the receptionist, I have given him a tip and he smiles politely, as befits the native of an islam that, in a single generation, bloomed with wealth and glory and then sank into peaceful oblivion.
"Is there an Englishman named Blackshaw living in the town?" I ask him.
He grins. "Ah, Blackshaw, of course. A great artist. I think he is a great artist, he has money. And women."
"Is there a German girl with him?"
He frowns. He does not like Germans, although women are apart from national judgments. He says, "There are many women who visit him. I am not sure which are German."
I describe Christine. His face lightens. "Ah, you mean Christine," he says. He knows her, of course. I should have had the sense to ask for her by name; to realize that wherever Christine might go, she would be known.
"Yes, Christine."
"A marvelous woman. Of great beauty. She came to the cafe several times. I have not seen her for several days, perhaps she is still here."
"Where does Blackshaw live?"
He gives me directions. Blackshaw lives in one of the old mansions southwest of the harbor.
And now again, I hesitate. I have become a creature of indecision, I rush to draw near my goal and then, confused and doubtful, I falter. In Paris, I walked beside the Seine, in Athens I sat in a taverna, and now, on this tiny barren rock, I wander aimlessly up steep steps and through narrow streets between flat walls of blinding white, broken occasionally with a jarring suddenness by a window of stained glass or a portal of cyprus wood polished with antiquity. I emerge from a passage so narrow that I must turn my shoulders, into a courtyard where men sit drinking at rough tables under the gnarled olive trees. They smile and laugh, offer me wine, knowing the foreigner just enough to want to know him more, not enough so that they treat him with scorn.
But slowly my footsteps lead me toward my goal. My feet are not hesitant, my body knows what my mind is afraid of. I emerge from the cubes of houses and find myself on a rising path beside the sea. The cliffs drop down upon my right into the sea, a line of breakers pretends fierce rage, but it is not the stuff of Grecian tragedy, it is the mild attack of a playful woman. I walk along the path, past a stall selling meat on skewers, and find myself paralleling the ancient wall atop the cliffs, passing rusted cannons that have waited a century in metallic patience for the Turkish ships that did not come. The sheer cliffs ease and level, and I am walking above an open-topped cafe where tourists sit under umbrellas. I glance down, catch a glimpse of lithe motion, a woman moving in the shadow of the wall, and lean over. I feel it must be Christine, but it is not. It is a stranger, blonde, her bikini brief, and from my vantage point above her I can see her nipples, tucked into the top. She looks up and smiles, and I move on.
The trail becomes rougher now, and the sea is rougher at the foot of the rock. Far below me a pebble beach eats a crescent into the hills and people sunbathe in discomfort, shifting in annoyance on the stones. No sandy beaches for this island, but the women in their bright bikinis brave discomfort for the sake of tanned flesh and titillated observers.
And now I am at Blackshaw's mansion.
The exterior is grim and severe; it is old and of considerable charm. Christine would appreciate a place of this nature, her taste is good. I approach the door and wonder what I will say to whoever opens it; I even hope that Christine herself may stand behind that dark wooden door. There is a brass doorknocker, I let it drop and wait. No one comes. I lift it again and bring it down with force.
After a moment the door opens. A girl smiles at me.
It is not Christine.
And she is naked.
"Hello there," she says.
She does not seem aware of her lack of clothing, or perhaps she is merely aware of the magnificence of her body. Her breasts are enormous, too large for her narrow torso but not bowed under their extraordinary weight; they stand in upright globes of ivory flesh. The sun has not tinted this girl's skin. Her hips angle outward abruptly and then glide down into heavy, molded thighs, joining at the tip of her mound, which is a veritable jungle of pubic hair, stretching almost to her navel. The dark hair creates an astonishing chiaroscuro with her flesh. She leans against the doorframe with one raised arm and gazes at me with a quizzical expression.
"Is something wrong?" she asks.
"You seem to be naked," I say.
"Certainly. What did you expect."
"It would appear there are elements in this I don't fully comprehend."
She laughs. "I'm modeling for George. Naturally, I have to undress, since he only paints nudes."
"I should have guessed. I must have a low mind."
Now she giggles. "Did you want to see George, then?"
"Yes. Very much."
She stands aside to let me enter. The doorway is large, and yet somehow she manages to press her belly against me as I pass through. I give her the benefit of the doubt, supposing her to be clumsy, rather than lewd. As she closes the door, I look around the room. There is grandeur of former years here, huge mirrors in gilded frames, a chandelier of Venetian glass, an oil painting that I don't recognize but that bears the somber hues of Holland, a chest of carved oak with polished locks. It is a long corridor, doors open off both sides and at the far end. The far door is ajar and shows a wedge of light.
"Are you a model too?" the girl asks.
"No."
"A pity. You should be. George would love to paint someone as big as you."
She is leaning back against the closed door; makes no effort to show me to the proper room.
"Is Christine here?" I ask casually.
"Who? Oh, that German bitch, you mean. No, she's gone off somewhere. Don't tell me she invited you."
"Not exactly."
"George will know where she went, I expect. He's busy at the moment, though. We'd better not disturb him while he's workng. He gets very temperamental."
"I thought you were posing for him."
"Well, I'm just waiting my turn. George does specialized work, sort of four-dimensional in a way. His paintings have an element of time, as well as form. It's a new technique he's developing, he says. Anyway, it's pretty tiring on the models, so we have to take turns. You can watch him work, if you like, if you don't bother him."
Her eyes are dancing with unholy glee; a shaft of foreshadowing pierces me. But I nod agreement, and she turns and leads the way down the corridor, her firm buttocks bouncing in invitation. We go to the door at the end, and she presses a forefinger to her lips and pushes it silently open. Then she studies my face as I look into the room. It is a studio, the roof is open to the sunlight, and the sun witnesses an extraordinary scene. I see it as a whole, and it takes a moment to get the individual parts in context.
Blackshaw stands at his easel in the corner. He is naked. He holds a pallet of color in his left hand, but he does not have a brush. Instead he holds his penis in his right hand, and as I look he is dipping the tip on the pallet; rubbing it in the vermillion. Then his hips shift, his back arches, and he applies this curious vehicle of color to the canvas. He wipes the tip about and looks, is satisfied, applies the penis to the pallet once more.
His models are posed before him. A man and a woman. The woman wears a toga, but it is torn back from her loins and she is positioned with her hands on the floor, her buttocks thrust high. Behind her stands the man, wearing the head of a minotaur, horns flaring, as he pushes his belly against her raised bottom. His organ is in her to the hilt, but he is not moving. They are not having intercourse, they are posing for this mythical tableau.
"See what I mean?" the girl whispers. "A model can't be expected to do that all day."
"Quite," I tell her.
"For God's sake, be still," Blackshaw says.
"Sorry," the minotaur mumbles. "But it's damned hard to stand here with my prick up this juicy slit and not do anything about it."
Blackshaw glowers upon him. His member is in his hand, a daub of burnt sienna on the head. I can see he is suffering the frustration of art. The minotaur stamps his foot, for all the world like a bull.
"I can't help it," he yelps, and his loins withdraw, poise, then crash into the woman. A smile quivers over her lips, and Blackshaw curses; she is supposed to be in fear and dread of this monster's sperm, the smile will not do. But now the modeling has become a mockery, the woman too is moving, humping her bottom to meet the minotaur's bestial blows. Blackshaw sighs and drops his phallic paintbrush. It dangles, dripping color. The minotaur roars as he releases a flood of taurine fluid into her labyinth.
"Oh, damn," says Blackshaw.
Blackshaw notices me. He frowns. "Who is that?" he asks the girl beside me.
She shrugs.
Then his face brightens, he looks me up and down. "I say, are you a model?" he asks. "Sorry."
"But of course, dear boy. I can see it now. With a build like yours-why, who else but Hercules? The labors of Hercules, seducing the sirens. Artist's license, of course."
He is excited. His eyes narrow as he pictures this new masterpiece. His paintbrush twitches.
"I didn't come for that," I tell him. "I'm looking for Christine."
"Ah, Christine. What a splendid subject she was."
"Where is she?"
"Too bad she's gone. She would have been the perfect counterpart for Hercules. I can see it now...."
"Do you know where she has gone?" I ask again.
"Yes, I know."
"Will you tell me?"
"Perhaps. I might. If you will agree to allow me to portray you in this heroic role."
I place my hand on his shoulder and close my fingers slightly. Blackshaw winces. But then he smiles.
"It's only fair to warn you," he says. "There is a touch of the masochist about me. It's quite impossible to force information from a man who appreciates pain."
I struggle against an urge to hurt him.
"She only left a few days ago. I'm sure you will be able to catch up with her. But I won't give you the information unless you agree. That is only fair play, dear boy."
"And it might be fun, too," says the girl who ushered me into this curious den of artistic licentiousness.
"Well? You have nothing to lose. You won't be able to get a ship from here until morning, anyway, so why should you refuse the offer?"
He has a point. I am no exhibitionist, but neither am I modest. The girl is desirable. The other model has approached, she is colored by the sun to the shade of a well-smoked meerschaum pipe, in contrast to the ivory flesh of the first girl. Her thighs glisten with moisture, and she draws the toga off so that she, too, is naked. The minotaur has taken a seat, the bull's horns are still flaring but his horn of manhood has faltered through usage and has shrunk to minuscule proportions. Both girls crowd around me eagerly, with proper devotion to their vocation. Blackshaw has sensed my resolve weakening.
"Would you care to see my portrait of Christine as Leda being wooed by Zeus as a swan?" he says. He moves toward a stack of canvases in the corner. I do not want to see this, but the idea draws me like a magnet. I follow. Blackshaw discards paintings, tossing them carelessly aside in a flat tableau of naked and contorted flesh. I recognize the two naked women who are standing behind me in various positions and postures. Then Blackshaw has found the picture he seeks and holds it up for my perusal.
The likeness is unmistakable, Blackshaw obviously saw fit to use a more prosaic brush in dealing with Christine and has captured something of her beauty. She is on her back, her legs raised and open. Her head is thrown back and a blissful smile turns her lips. Between her legs crouches the swan, a man wearing gigantic feathered wings and sparse feathers stuck at random over his naked body; a cluster of feathers replacing his pubic hair. His knees are bent, his organ juts from the snowy plumage, seekiner a warmer nest. He has not quite entered Christine at the moment portrayed, the knob is just brushing against the opening, and her lips have moistened and opened, as though to draw him in with a will of their own. Her hand is extended, about to grasp him and pull him into her yearning nest. How long did this flightless mockery of a waterfowl restrain himself? How long could any living creature with warm blood pulsing in his organ keep himself poised at the portals of her body before he was compelled to thrust into the burning delights? And how long could Christine bear to have him brushing at the gates before she was forced to pull him in? It seemed impossible that they could have held this position long enough for the artist to capture the scene.
Blackshaw seems to read my thoughts.
"It was most difficult," he says. "I had three men working in rotaton; alternating every three or four minutes, actually. There's something about Christine that makes it impossible to delay the climax. One fellow tried and managed to keep from entering her, but then, without any friction at all, he just shot all over her belly. The first spurt carried all the way up to her face. Its to her credit that she didn't even flinch, however. That girl can take more stick than a brood mare."
I turn away, my emotions a medley composed of disgust and desire, the pain of seeing her portrayed in this depraved manner mingling with the passion of stimulation and jealousy. I can feel the hot blood begin to rush to my gentalia; see the two girls watching the results with smiles that are hardly Giacondian.
"Well?" Blackshaw asks?. "Do you agree?"
I nodded. All else aside, I have to find relief for my carnal need.
"Oh, Hercules," says the ivory woman.
"Our hero," says the meerschaum nymph.
"It will be my masterpiece," says Blackshaw
A lionskin is thrown over my shoulders, the forepaws hanging down and the head tossed back. I wear nothing else. I carry the club in my right hand, over my shoulder, and my left fist is on my hip. It is a classic Herculean posture, arrogant and disdainful as befits the son of Zeus, the illicit offspring of God's nocturnal visitation to mortal woman. And mortal women cluster about me, playing sirens with flowers woven in their hair.
Blackshaw has not yet begun to paint. He is waiting, watching, anticipating a moment when we will be intermingled in a position that will be a stroke of genuis.
"This will be the greatest labor of Hercules," he says. "Proceed, make him labor."
They are kneeling before me, seductive and smiling. I have learned their names now. The ivory girl with the enormous breasts is Judith; the meerschaum girl with the trim flanks is Anne. They are accustomed to working together, there is a cordial competition between them, to see who will manage first to destroy the artistic postures, to inspire a need that will not be restrained by the necessity of composition.
"Nectar, O Hercules," says Judith.
She offers me a wineskin. It is not nectar, but it is good. I drink with abandon, allowing a stream of ruby liquid to run down my chin, drinking as a god should drink. The wine splatters at my feet, and Anne bends, runs her tongue over my arch, licking the liquid from my foot. She raises her face, smiling, and I pour a thin shaft of wine upon her. It splashes in her face, she opens her mouth to catch it, licks her lips eager-ly. Red streams pour down her throat, between her breasts, dividing beneath the upright cones and following twin courses down her flat belly, curling at her navel and passing on to vanish in the tangled pubic glen. She cups her hands beneath her breasts and holds them upright and together so that the wine stream becomes subterranean river passing through her cleavage. It slows the torrent, a mere rivulet emerges, and when she releases the pressure and her breasts separate it is like an earth tremor freeing the restricted sea; the red flood set her belly awash and drenches the forest beneath. Her hand slides down to this sopping jungle, her fingers slide through the soaking paths and pass through the gully beneath. A tropical storm, a rainy season in a seething climate, where even the moisture is unable to cool the burning surface, where the land is so hot the downfall rises in steam.
Anne's thirst is contagious.
Judith buries her face in my chest, drinking the wine that flows there. I pour more down my torso, and it flows to her waiting lips. She does not consume it all, a stream escapes her mouth and runs down my belly; she pursues it, lips carried along the damp winebed like soft driftwood, until she overtakes the cascade at the junction of my thighs. Her face is pressed to me, she burrows against the mound of hair. Her head turns from side to side, I feel her lips part, her tongue flare like a branding iron, moving down again as she follows the peninsula of my penis. The shaft grows fat, it begins to rise. The head twitches and expands, and her mouth covers it. She sucks eagerly, her cheeks draw in, and I can see the outline of my member pressed in a bulge against the fragile flesh.
Anne joins her. Anne's hand is behind me, her fingers probing between the taut cheeks of my bottom, one finger seeking entrance. Her face presses beside her campanion's, she is greedy, she wants her share of this heroic banquet. Judith is willing to share; slowly she draws her lips away from me, until the glans emerges, departing reluctantly from those caressing lips, springing free, only to be captured by Anne's questing mouth and drawn into the moist cavern once more. Judith seeks other pastures for her carnal grazing. Her tongue slides over my testicles, works up the bulging vein until she is kissing the shaft at the point where it merges with Anne's mouth. They kiss each other, with my knob between, their tongues entwining, moving back and forth from mouth to mouth, across the barrier of my organ. I am trembling; my knees grow weak, I am no Hercules to persevere without fatigue, and this Hydra which attacks me cannot be conquered. Each time I sever a head, another head springs at me, weakening me more in direct ratio as it builds my power to uncon-tainable heights.
Judith is heaving with desire. Anne will not yield the delicacy, and Judith, mad with her need, begins to kiss my belly, my thighs, moves behind me and spreads my cheeks with her hands, sends her tongue exploring between, returns to lap once more at the pulsating pillar. The dual mouthing has me at a fever pitch, delirious with the sensation. My loins begin to pump back and forth, stroking into Anne's mouth, following this unerring course through the sliding resistance of Judith's lips. It is a thrill upon two tiers, the sensation along the shaft as it passes through damp friction and the greater sensation at the glans as it enters the cavern. My scrotum swells with the weight of its burden, a weight too heavy to be borne, a pressure too condensed to be contained.
Hercules yields.
I come with the power of the gods.
Anne gasps, her cheeks moving, drawing in and then expanding. Judith places her hand behind Anne's head, holds her there at the fount, drinking of the dark knowledge of the oracle. Again and again the release surges from me, as from the bottomless cup that even mighty Thor was unable to drain. Anne's throat works, gulping eagerly, accepting and willingly giving passage to the omnipotent upheavel. But it is too much for her. She is unable to take it all. Her mouth moves away, allowing the last spurt to leap unrestricted into the air and descend upon her belly. The boiling froth runs from her lips, following the previous course of the wine.
Judith springs to her aid. She draws Anne to her, and their lips meet, separate. Anne bends over Judith, they kiss with parted lips, and Anne lets the excess run from her mouth into Judith's. Now Judith is gulping in the flood, even shared it is too great for these vessels to contain, although they eagerly make the attempt.
I stagger, even a son of Zeus may have a mo-menary failing of his power. The girls part, smiling blissfully, contentedly, their lips flecked with foam and their eyes dulled with a shocked dizziness. I lower my club and lean upon it for support as my knees turn to liquid, and my organic club bows down, drained and reduced.
But I must recover my power.
There is more than a single task in the labors of Hercules....
If these women be sirens, then it is upon the rocks of Lesbos that they perch, enticing sailors to their shipwrecked demise; enticing men by their mutual caresses, their abnormal love. It is their panting and their sighing, their moaning and gasping, that forms the eerie and irresistible call that draws the helpless sailor to crash upon their rocky shores. I am lured toward them, perhaps to be turned into a swine by some arcane mystic charm; a swine, rooting in the carnal pens of passion, devouring the swill of sensation and wallowing in the mud of manhood's needs. I watch them, and my ship is carried inexorably toward the dangers, pushed on with billowing sails before the wind of wanton lust and sent hurtling before the sensual seas, the tidal waves that bear me arise from an internal gravity. My mast strains under the force, slowly it raises up once more with unfurled sails, welcoming the impending impact, standing proudly away from the flat deck of my loins in potent figurehead.
The girls are lying together on the floor. Judith holds the wineskin; she raises it and tilts it so that the sparkling stream cascades onto her bosom. She presses her shoulders back, jutting her Olympian breasts forward and upward, and Anne moves to them, sends her tongue on a quest between the heaving mounds, down and beneath, seeking the dark moisture, then slipping upward to the peaks and taking the rigid nipples between her lips. The nipples rise like islands above the wine-dark seas, and Anne finds refuge upon them, moving from one to the other like a marooned mermaid. The nipples stretch upward, welcoming enclosure and sending darts of feeling passing back through their rounded bearers; back through the boiling bloodstream to the depot in her loins where, in the end, all sensation must wait to embark.
Judith still holds the wineskin. She is lost in her emotions, hardly knowing what she does as she tilts it again, letting the fermented fruit of the vine catarac over her belly and thighs.
Ann moves down, lips trailing over flat belly until she is nursing at the vee of wine-stained thighs. Judith pours more wine, it runs between her legs, filling the open crevice, and Anne lets her tongue press out; licks the wine away from the unfurled petals and presses her lips against the vessel to drink of the dregs; dregs that are no longer pure wine but have been joined by the musky fluids of Judith's own wine press.
I can wait no longer.
I move behind Anne. She is unaware of me, unconcerned by male presence, lost in the female magic of her companion's loins. I press myself against her, and her body opens, grasps at me like a beast of prey and draws me in like a whirlpool drawing a broken ship. I plunge into those swirling depths and hear Anne gasp, the sound muffled against Judith's flowing canyon. I stroke and thrust, heavy and hard, and Anne's slight body bucks and rocks against the pressure. She is like a ship of war, in which a cannon has burst its mooring and runs wild upon the gun-deck. She floats, but the careering cannon is shattering her ribs, her decks, her gunwales. She is shipping water, the pumps are working in reverse, drawing more fluid into the hold. And still she continues her oral caress, blindly seeking Judith's torrents to add to her own and mine.
Judith heaves upward. Her hands clamp in Anne's hair, her thighs tighten, and her belly ripples. She holds the posture, buttocks raised from the floor, tense and taut as she pours her release out through the wine-stained flower. And then she sinks down, limp and spent and moaning.
But Anne is insatiable. She has drained her companion and still she wants more. The vessel is emptied, and still her lips draw remorselessly at it, still she seeks further fluid from this dry urn, pleading and cajoling with tongue and mouth for further drink.
I feel the approaching storm, I do not wish to share her attentions at the moment of the deluge. My hands fasten on her slender hips, attempting to pull her away, but she is deceptively strong. I cannot draw her back from the pubic glen in which her tongue cavorts. Judith is the earth, and Anne is Antaeus, drawing her limitless strength from the contact. But I know how Hercules vanquished Antaeus. I rise up on trembling knees, my hands pass beneath her belly, and the fingers dig into the soft flesh. I lift. Her weight resists, then yields, and I raise her from the floor. Her face clings, she is still reluctant to leave the dark mound that nurses her, her legs are in the air, her torso forms an angle, only her mouth retains the contact to the last instant.
And then I have her, the earth no longer sustains her and she yields to me. She straightens, her narrow back rises to arch against my chest, and her legs entwine with mine, the ankles hooking behind my knees. Her arms come up, reach behind her head, and lock on my shoulders. She squirms, and I raise and lower her upon my upright mast. Her weight assists the descent, the penetration is absolute, buried to the hilt. Her taut bottom moves up and down over my belly, muscles constricting. She has forgotten Judith now, lost in the fury her corridor contains.
Again and again I lift her to the peak, until only the knob remains within, and then let her slide slowly down the enormous pillar. She whines at the crest, desperate, pleading for the descent; whimpers as the descent comes, and she feels her body spread around the spear that pierces her so deeply. I slow the tempo. Now that I have achieved the goal, I am in no hurry to finish. But Anne is filled with urgency. I can feel her burrow slacken as the fluid pours from the walls, then tighten once more as her internal muscles begin to contract, twitching and tightening so that none of the friction is lost.
Judith sits up, her eyes glassy, and stares at us without comprehension for a moment. She does not realize where or when she was separated from the contact. And then the scene is impressed upon her, she sees and comprehends, crawls forward on her hands and knees until she is crouched before Anne's undulating torso. She has come to return that caress, to drink in her turn of the carnal fruits. I feel her breath, hot as a desert breeze as it wafts over my testicles. And then her lips are there, hotter still, sucking at my rod as it emerges, then drawing at Anne's spreading petals as I sink once more into the delightful tunnel.
The contact is dual again, and again the double sensation brings me to the pinnacle; again they work in unison to bring the climax.
I press her down upon me at the very moment when my fluid rises fiercely up the shaft and spurts out. The ejaculation is enormous, I can feel her whole body being lifted on the hydraulic pressure.
But even there at her core it is not safe, for Judith is a robber of banks. As Anne drank the wine from her, so she drinks my wine from Anne, this stronger, thicker wine which pours in torrents, stickily gluing Judith's lips to us; binding her with all the unbreakable force of her hunger.
I lift Anne and set her gently on her feet. Her legs fail, she drops down, sitting with raised knees, head back and eyes closed. Judith crawls toward her, dazed again, like a lemming following the fatal course its instincts decree, burying herself still again in the pungent oasis.
I stager back and lean against the wall. I am weak, exhausted.
Blackshaw waits, anticipating, his eyes gleaming, for he knows that the tasks of Hercules may be impossible but that the attempt must be made; that I will try the next labor with renewed vigor, join the struggle with willing strength. What awaits me? What will the next impossible mission be? Perhaps the sixth of the labors, the cleansing of the Augean stables ... the dwelling of thousands of beasts, uncleaned for thirty years, for which I must divert the river to wash them clean. I look at the prostrate girls. I regard those stables between their thighs, and already the method seems clear; already I am aware of the river that is once more building up, the river I will divert into them....
CHAPTER TEN
I am intoxicated. I am drunk with wine an dizzy with excess. I sit in a wooden chair, . hands limp upon the arms and my naked legs ex tended. I do not know how long I have been sitting here, there have been moments of blackness coming between sharp instants of vivid awareness. I know that considerable time has elapsed but it seems of little importance. The labors have been successfully completed and portrayed, and I look with blurred vision at the crude canvas. Blackshaw has included the time continuum in his work, has portrayed all the labors as if they were simultaneous. I see myself in the center of the canvas, a crude likeness posed in the initial position, the club over my shoulder and my other hand upon my hip, the loinskin upon my shoulders. But he has stolen a theme from the Hydra, has pictured me with manifold phalli sprouting from my loins; a formidable phalanx of phalli, extended in all directions and thrusting into all conceivable orifices, while the opponents set against the mythical half-god cluster at the periphery of the canvas. I squint, befuddled by drink and numbed by expended sexual energy.
There I see the Nemean lion, rising on its hindquarters behind a Judith who kneels before one of the many members. She has taken the erect organ into her mouth, and the lion has taken her from the rear, as lions do. His forepaws are on her flanks, drawing her back onto his huge penis, leaving lines of blood where his claws have sunk through the pale flesh-blood the same hue as the triangular head that extends from the hairy shaft.
And there, in another corner, the Erymanthian boar is rooting with his tusks at Anne's burrow as she handles another of the organs with loving hands.
The stag of Ceryiiea rears up in the background, his golden antlers transformed to rampant copulatory organs, whilst above his head soar the Stymphalian birds, and around the border stampede the man-eating mares of Diomedes and the oxen of Geryon, preparing to mate against the laws of nature. Hippolyte is there, her solitary breast pressed into one of the mouths of Cerberus, as his second mouth laps at her crotch and his third arches on extended neck to her anus.
I gaze in befuddlement at this work, thinking for a moment that Blackshaw has neglected the eleventh labor, and then I see that it, too, is represented, for the testicles that the dozen divided penes share are the fabled golden apples of the Hesperides, gleaming in their golden shafts of reflection as they send their semen coursing through a dozen channels and into a dozen apertures.
My two companions are as exhausted as I. I become aware of them, sitting at my feet. They, too, regard the painting studiously.
"Do I really look that ecstatic when I take it in my mouth?" Judith asks, gazing at one of the many images of herself.
"Absolutely, darling," says Anne.
"But my slot isn't really that big, is it?" Judith asks, looking at the lion's tremendous erection.
"It stretches considerably, dear," says Anne, with a wicked laugh.
I lapse once more into the haze of unreality; awaken to the sound of music and voices. Someone has started a record player. Grecian music winds its Oriental path through the rooms. There are people standing about, drinking and talking, dancing and laughing. A girl is looking at me with a smile. I recognize her as the English girl from the boat, she has managed to find her way unerringly to the scene that will most appeal to her.
One of her companions is dancing with a thin, dark fellow. She has taken the top of her bikini off so that her breasts are naked against his smooth chest and she wears only the tiny bottom, which has drawn up into a narrow band between her legs. It is not a swimsuit designed to permit exercise. I notice her pubic hair on either side of the indrawn crotchpiece. The man dances with his left hand low on her back. As I watch the fingers slide lower, over the mounds of her buttocks and in between, dipping in pursuit of the vanishing wisp of cloth. I do not notice the third girl, the one who wore a flowered dress, but I can imagine what task has kept her from the festivities.
I sleep again a slumber filled with dancing dreams and nightmare images. My eyes open upon the blue morning.
Memories of the night are hazy, it takes time to recall where I am and what I have done. I am stiff, I creak as I move from the hard chair. I am the first awake, the others are recovering in sleep. I stretch and grimace. My flesh is sticky with sweat and slime. A feeling of disgust that is unique for me comes seeping slowly in. It is not disgust with any particular action or deed but a total nausea created of the combination of what I have done and the recollection of how much I enjoyed it. I feel depraved. I must rid myself of this residue, cleanse my body. I stagger from the studio and down the dark hallway, stop at the door, remembering that I am naked, and then shrug. At this stage, it would be ridiculous to feel a need for covering.
I go out and walk down the rocky path to the sea, treading lightly on hard stones. It is early, there is no one else about, and the path leads to a rocky and secluded bay where the sea laps hungrily at the shore without transition between. I walk out upon the irregularly spaced rocks, balance on the last for a moment, then plunge into the cool water.
I surface and gulp the air. My hair lies flat over my brow, my skin tingles. I feel renewed and refreshed, all the bitter taste of depravity washed from me by the azure waters. I dive again, twist about beneath the surface and swim back toward the rocks, marveling at the intricate designs the water has carved from the stone. I notice two unique pillars of pale rock and swim toward them, intrigued by the formation. They do not look like rocks.
They are not rocks.
I pause, one hand resting on the bottom, and look through the watery world at a pair of shapely legs; I let myself drift up to the surface and see the girl. It is the English girl whose absence I noted in my drunken stupor. She is standing in the shallow water, her legs widespread for balance, the surface lapping midway up her thighs. Her flesh is dry, she has not yet immersed herself in the water. It ripples around her legs and leaves them glistening. She smiles at me. "Good morning," she says. "Good morning."
"I saw you leave. I like to take an early-morning dip myself, after a night of sin." She laughs. "I saw you last night, too, but you were asleep. It seems you managed to take care of that bulge in your trousers."
I dogpaddle toward her and stand up. We face one another, my skin is tingling from the chilly sea. She looks at me, her eyes moving downward.
"I arrived too late to assist you," she says. "I was rather sorry about that. It looked like a very nice bulge."
"It is renewable," I say, and even as I speak I feel my member begin to quiver. It is often so after a night of sexual excess, it would appear that the body grows accustomed to overusage, and an addict grows accustomed to drugs and needs an ever-increasing dose.
"I like making love in the water," the girl says. "It makes to seem so clean."
Then, laughing, she dives and disappears for a moment beneath the surface; emerges a-gain, her skin sparkling in the morning sun. She swims toward a semicircle of rocks that jut above the surface, forming a natural seat. She turns and rests against it, shoulders and arms on the stone and body floating and bobbing. I swim after her, enter this natural harbor and glide to the docks, resting my head on her belly. I feel like a ship that has come to its moorings after a night of dark and ferocious storm. But when a ship has reached its berth, it must be unloaded, its cargo winched away.
"What's your name?" she asks, stroking my hair. I do not answer the question, I recall the game of prediction.
"Where are you from?" I ask.
She looks surprised. "Manchester," she says
"What do you do in Manchester?"
Her brow wrinkles. "I'm a secretary."
She doesn't know why I smile.
"Don't you have a boyfriend in Manchester?"
"Of course. I'm engaged to a boy. But what has that to do with us? After all, I'm on holiday. My two friends and I have hitchhiked all the way from Calais, and I didn't come all that way just to spend my time writing postcards to my boyfriend. What he doesn't know won't hurt him."
She peers at me as I chuckle. Her hand moves through my hair and down to my shoulder. I let my body rise up, floating face down, buoyant and light, while beneath my midriff I can feel the keel of my body tighten, the protuberance straightening me in the water like some curious ventral fin.
"What's so humorous?" she asks.
"Fate, my dear. Circumstance and prediction. The predictability of coincidence."
"Are you laughing at me, then?"
"Ah, far from it, my little Anglo angel. You are, shall we say, exactly what I anticipated."
"Eh?"
"But I fear my affliction has returned."
"Your what?"
"To use terms within your grasp, the bloody great lump in my trousers. Although my trousers are conspicuous in their absence, at the moment."
"Oh. You mean you have a touch of the horn, then?"
"Beautifully stated, my dear." I push myself forward with a gentle pressure of the feet and slide more securely into the harbor of her thighs.
"That feels nice," she says. "Indeed it does."
"You want to put that in me?"
"It might be a pleasant thought."
"You can if you want to."
"I assumed as much."
"Say, before you do, I don't want you to think I let every Tom, Dick, and Harry poke me. Or every Tom's hairy dick, ha ha ha. But I mean, I'm on holiday, so what a girl does on holiday doesn't really count. I mean, not really. It's not like I was a tramp or anything. I'm a good girl when I'm home. I never slept with more than three or four boys, and I was always going steady with them. I want you to know that."
"No other thought would have crossed my mind for a solitary fleeting moment."
"Well, that's all right then, luv."
I place my hands beside her hips on the rocks and draw myself closer, sheltered by her thighs. My prow nudges up against the berth it seeks.
"You know a girl can't get in the puddin' club if she does it in the water?" she remarks.
It is not my place to disillusion her. And who knows? Perhaps she is right.
"So you can shoot in me if you like." She raises up, her shoulders scrape on the wet stone. "I mean, you don't have to worry about it."
I press against her. The water has washed away the lubricating oils, she is dry and tight. I have to pull myself up with force before I nudge into the bay. She squirms, aiding me, and bites her lip at the unoiled friction. Her pubic hair scrapes me irritatingly, but it is small annoyance at such a moment. I press harder, and the resistance gives way, allowing me to rasp all the way in, and then the walls of this cove begin to secrete and it becomes slippery and moist. I am relaxed, only my penis is rigid, I allow my body to rock gently on the water, let the sea do the work for me. There is no urgency and no need for haste. The girl feels the same. After all, she is on holiday, the pell-mell rush of the working day in England is forgotten, she can relax in the sun and the surf. She, too, lets the water move her, so that we are floating and hobbling in slow and steady counterpoint. The motion carries us against the rocks for an instant, then draws us away until there is no support. We start to sink and then are carried back to the firm stone again.
I am filled with a dozen sensations. There is the gently increasing desire in my belly, but it is not a solitary and all-consuming need now. There are others, not as strong but forming a pleasant and relaxed background. The sun burns on my back, the water lifts comfortably, the rock scrapes my shoulder, a tiny fish nibbles curiously at my toes; I kick and he darts off, a blur of color. I smell the freshness of her body mingling with the freshness of the sea and the musk of her yoni blending with the salty scent of the shore. Everything combines, all these various sensations become one whole, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
I am not copulating with an English secretary of limited genius; rather, I am performing an act of total and absolute submission to nature, obeying the laws of fecundity, unspoiled and simple and complete. I feel an integral part of nature, of humanity but even more than humanity, a part of all the world and all existence, an evolved member of life itself whose lines of descent go unbroken through the eons to that distant day when the first intrepid creature dared to crawl from the primordial slime and call itself life. I let the mother of life, the sea, perform this act for me; rock me gently toward the conclusion in her own sweet time. And perhaps, although she cannot express it or contain the abstract thought necessary, perhaps this girl feels something of the same sensation, for she closes her eyes and does not move of her own will; gives herself also back to the waters of life. The world swirls about us in a dome of blue, we are beyond even this now, a part of the eternal cosmos.
And now my climax approaches.
Even now, with the tingling beginning to build, I do not feel the need to drive into her; still am I content to let the gentle aquatic motion bring completion. I feel it begin, feel the slow tide ebb from me. It does not burst in wild ejaculation, it comes in accord with the gentle motion that has summoned it, flowing down my tubes slowly; leaving my body not in surging spurts, but in a steady and flowing stream, unbroken, without ebb and flux, without eruption and pause, without peaks and valleys of energetic cascades. Slowly, and for a long time, I merely melt into this woman, until my substance has become hers and she is filled with me; filled to overflowing, and I look in dazed wonder through the washing waters and see the fluid seep back from her opening; see a wisp of froth float away on the surface, winding through the sea like a cloud through the sky.
It is without a peak of sensation, but it is constant and it is enormous, and I feel that the waters of the Aegean must have been raised considerably by my contribution.
The girl hauls herself up on the rocks; sits, knees apart, staring down at the vee of her thighs. Fluid pours from her into the water and she shakes her head in wonder.
"Christ," she says. "I've never been filled to overflowing before. I never saw so much spunk at one time. It's coming out of me like a waterfall."
She strokes herself tenderly. The wonderment dissolves and she laughs harshly, breaking the spell that has bound me to her and to all things. The links to existence have been struck off, and the carnal chain is all that remains.
I twist in the water and swim away.
Blackshaw is still sleepng.
He is stretched out on the floor, unshaven and filthy, his hair wild and his nostrils dilated and flaring. A girl sleeps by his feet, curled up with her arms around her knees. I nudge him with my foot, and he stirs, opens an eye that flames as red as though the lid were a door, opening upon a furnace in his brain. The lid slides down again.
"Leave me alone," he croaks.
"Christine. Where has she gone?"
"God, I can't think. Let me alone. Later."
"Now," I say.
I nudge him again, harder. He groans.
"Is there no peace for the weary artist?"
"Not until you answer me."
For a moment I think he has slipped back into sleep; then his eyes strain open once more under the unbearable weight of the lids. He sits up, moaning and groaning, and claps a hand to his forehead. I grasp him by the biceps and haul him to his feet, where he stands uncertain and weaving.
"Where has she gone? And when?"
"Just a few days ago. I forget, a few days. She left a note, I'll show you...."
He staggers toward the corridor, supporting himself by leaning against the wall, goes down the hallway to the first adjoining room, and enters. It appears to be a study, there is a massive desk. He goes behind it, winces as his gaze falls upon a decanter of alcoholic beverage, opens a drawer, and fumbles through various notes and papers and envelopes. He separates a sheet of white paper and holds it out to me, then sinks slowly to his knees and into slumber once more, his head resting on the desk and his body curled on the floor. I glance at the paper, recognize Christine's handwriting, and fold it again, I do not wish to read it there; I go back to the studio and find my clothing scattered about the floor. No one has awakened yet. I dress quickly and go back down the hallway to the door, into the bright daylight.
The English secretary is walking up from the water, still naked. She smiles and waves when she sees me, does not understand why I left so abruptly when our dalliance was ended. I nod and walk off, following the path in the other direction, back toward the town. The girl stands by the mansion, gazing after me for a moment, then shrugs and goes in.
I return to my hotel and read Christine's note.
CHRISTINE'S NOTE TO BLACKSHAW
Dear George, I'm leaving this morning. Gordon has agreed to take me with him to his next stop-Tangier, I believe. Anyway, that is where we will wind up eventually. I don't really care much for Gordon, but his yacht is rather splendid, isn't it? I won't take the painting you promised me, since you may well change your mind about it after I'm gone, but if you still wish me to have it you can send it in care of the Yacht Club at Tangier. If I've left by then, Gordon will forward it to me.
Please try not to feel too bad about my departure, George. I really was fond of you, and the arrangement was fine as long as we kept it light. But when you told me you would be willing to, as you sad, "renounce my life of depravity for you," I knew it was time to go. You didn't understand me, of course. Did you think I was fond of you even though you were a wastrel? Surely you must have realized it was because of, not in spite of, your debauchery? I was able to lose myself in your life of absurd unreality for a short time, to forget myself in the midst of profligacy and among the unique set of moral codes you have set up under some vague banner of artistic license.
But don't misunderstand me here-I was not led astray by you, I didn't come in innocence and depart abandoned to vice and corruption. I was certainly as wicked as you when we met, and probably more so. You, after all, do have your curious set of floundering morals, while I was dedicated to nothing but degradation. That has become my cause. I seek it. I'm like an alcoholic, and depravity is my drink. The only way to drown my troubles is by submerging them in the carnal slime.
Something happened to me once, I lost someone whom I really loved; lost him not through fate or circumstance or hazard, but through my own flagitious behavior. I acted true to my grossly evil nature, even though I did not really want to, simply because that was my instinct, and it cost me the only thing I've ever wanted. So the reaction? Normal, perhaps? To sink further into the muck because it was that muck that destroyed my happiness.
But still, this is no concern of yours, and I have no need to apologize for what I am. I apologize for nothing more than the fact that I leave you now, without warning and without having the grace to explain this to you in person. But it's easier so. Try not to be too sorry, and don't worry about me.
Poor Gorden has fallen under my spell and is absolutely in my power. He will do anything I say, although God knows there's little enough I want from him. Unless, perhaps, a change-something totally new for me. I have been considering this. I have always been dominant, and I wonder if it might be amusing to become subservient-to place myself completely in the power of a man, to renounce my own free will and become a mindless object, existing solely to do the bidding of another creature. Not Gordon, of course-he's much too weak and much too intelligent and civilized-but some barbaric man who would not understand what I was doing, let alone why I chose to do it. I must consider this.
The idea came to me when Gordon was telling us how the white-slavery racket is being run in modern times. Were you sober enough to remember that? How it is all quasi-legal and the girls sign contracts and everything. Something of that nature has enormous appeal, the very idea of summing one's surrender up in a symbolic single act, such as putting my signature on such a document, sums up the feeling I am speaking of. I know it would be thrilling. It would be intensely exciting just to touch the pen to the paper and hesitate, knowing that it would take but a moment to commit myself. But of course, this would take a great deal of deliberation beforehand, because from what Gordon said, once a girl has signed the contract she cannot easily get out of it if she changes her mind, and I know that I would change my mind as soon as the novelty began to wear off. I will consider it, however.
I haven't mentioned it to Gordon yet, of course. He would-will-might be shocked.
But of course, poor Gordon believes he is saving me by taking me away from you. He believes that the little unmentionable scene in the hills by the ruins of the monastery was all your doing. I've told him that it was my fault, my own desire, but he is unable to believe that a woman could be so depraved. And-would you believe it?-when I recall that scene from an objective point of view, it seems hard for me to believe it myself. With all the evil and wicked things I have done in my life, I think that is perhaps the worst of all. And still, even thinking this, I recall it with a certain feeling of stimulaton and exctement. My God, George, sometimes I terrify myself. I am some hideous festering wound on the flesh of human nature, and yet, like all infected sores, I continue to fight against a cure; I am immune to the antibiotics of morality.
But this is silly. I must leave now. You have my permission to hate me or to forget me, but never to regret losing me.
Christine
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I stare at a cross of white chalk.
I am lost in a dimension of my own, and this white chalk is in the external world, I see it but it does not register. I hear an impatient voice addressing me, creeping across the vast distance of the counter; I force reality to seep back to my mind. It is the customs officer, telling me to pass on. The chalk mark is the permission he has scratched upon the side of my suitcase, and now he peers at me suspiciously because I stand leaning on the counter and do not move. I take my suitcase and walk on out of the customs shed into the North African light.
Half a dozen young Arabs surround me instantly, sharp-eyed young men in Western clothing, offering to sell me kief and lead me to women, volunteering their services as guides or, if such is my inclination, lovers. I brush past them, and they snarl at my back. The ancient Dakota that brought me is taxiing down the runway; I can swear that I see nuts and bolts and shards of Scotch Tape dropping from the wings, but perhaps this is a trick of my fatigue. The pilot was a Spainiard and maneuvered the archaic aircraft with the flare of a matador, lending strength to my theory that all Spanish pilots are frustrated bullfighters. But I have arrived, and that is what matters. I am one step closer to Christine, and even my last-minute hesitation is lost now, now that I know her feelings with the sharp, cold knowledge of a blade between my shoulders.
I walk on to the line of taxicabs and choose one whose driver wears a djellabai and a fez; I tell him to take me to the docks. He removes the fez to scratch at his woolly hair in confusion. He cannot understand why I have just arrived at the airport and wish to be transported to the docks. He asks if I want to go to a hotel. I tell him the waterfront. He says that his uncle owns a hotel, very good and cheap. I tell him to take me to the docks. He shrugs and starts the engine, and the old motorcar vibrates in neutral while he asks if I am sure that I want to go to the docks. I am very tired and close my eyes, explain I am headed for the Yacht Club. Surprisingly, he comprehends this, although there is some confusion over why I should have been at the airport to begin with. The motorcar begins to move, the vibration lessening as the speed increases. The driver is more adept with his horn than with the steering wheel, prefers to warn obstacles aside rather than turn around them. But his is not a unique approach, the other drivers have a similar technique, and motorcars rush headlong at one another in the geometrical center of the road, both hooting raucously and defiantly, like charging saurians defending their territories, only to veer aside at the last instant.
It is exciting to be in Tangier once more. It is no longer the divided city of intrigue that I once found admirable, but vestiges remain; memories of a better era cling, as eternal as the scent of mint tea, the trim mustache of a pimp. We move down rue Alexandre to the Place de France, circle the colorful central square of the new town, and shoot off, as if governed by centrifugal force, down toward the Big Zocco along a street lined with symphonies of color, gift shops displaying embossed slippers of red and gold, Arabic carpets from Fez, heavy bangles from the High Atlas, ornamental daggers and flintlock rifles manufactured yesterday and sold as antiques. The big market behind us, we travel through the old town, the colors change, the buildings are white in contrast to the Mediterranean, which appears now before us.
We screech to a stop at the gates. Another customs officer emerges from his cubicle and approaches the taxi. He wears white gloves and a black scowl, peers in at me while the driver jabbers at him. He seems to have some difficulty in understanding why I have transversed the town without stopping, his comprehension is akin to that of my driver. But he, too, understands what the Yacht Club is and makes another chalk mark on my suitcase. He waves us on.
I enter the low, flat building that houses the club. I have been there before, although the barman has changed. I had once lived with a woman who frequented this club, believing it Ho be Tangier's upper society. Perhaps it was.
I think of her fleetingly as I enter the club, but I cannot even remember her name. I knew her long before I knew Christine, and it is not important.
Only one thing is of importance to me now.
I stand at the bar, and the barman comes down slowly, a young Moroccan who is learning what passes for dignity from foreigners who pass for humanity. His mustache is carefully trimmed, and his fingernails are clean and filed square. His jacket is immaculate, and his hair is cut square at the back. I dislike him intensely; would admire him considerably more were he selling his sister in the Casbah.
"Gordan. A man named Gordon," I say.
He purses his lips.
I cannot delay; take a ten-dirham note from my pocket and placed it on the bar.
"That will not be necessary, sir," he sneers.
"Gordon," I say, with tight jaws.
"Commander Gordon, you mean?"
"Gordon. A man with a yacht who is a member here." I am very carefully restrained, violence comes easily to me but I bind it with the chains of a greater need.
"Yes, I know the commander," says the barman. He strokes his mustache with a forefinger. Then his arrogant eyes, which have been blinded by his own image, seem to look into my own eyes for the first time. The arrogance is gone. An Arabian knows the eyes of a man who can kill.
He points out through the window. "There. The cabin cruiser." He wavers his finger. "That is Commander Gordon sitting on deck. Right there, sir."
I move toward the door. The barman does not pocket the ten-dirham note until I have left the building, but he will. I cross the wooden planking and stand beside Gordon's cruiser. It is a splendid vessel capable of navigating oceans but not so large that it is gross and unmanageable. I would be interested in this ship if I had not more pressing interests.
"Gordon," I say.
The man looks up, cannot focus on me. I realize that he is very drunk, indeed. He has a classic appearance, a handlebar mustache and weathered complexion; wears a captain's hat of the sort one purchases at a souvenir shop, which is permissible if one is, indeed, a captain.
"Who are you? Can't see you. Come a-board."
I grasp the brass rail and step onto the deck.
"Don't believe I know you," he says.
There is a bottle of gin beside his deck chair. There is not much gin in it.
"Christine," I tell him. "I'm looking for Christine."
"Not here, my boy. Gone away." He sighs; fumbles for his glass and tips it to his lips. He does not realize it is empty.
"Where has she gone?"
"Away. Gone forever. Naughty, naughty girl, Christine. I thought she was a good girl who had been led astray, but found out I was wrong. Naughty girl."
"Where has she gone? For God's sake, listen to me."
"Gone off to be naughty. Gone to join a harem. I was going to marry her. Told her so. Told her I loved her even more than I loved my ship. But she went away. Never see her again, no use looking now. Get drunk and forget her. I was wrong, you know. I should love my ship more, she won't run off on me. Good ship, naughty Christine."
"Tell me where," I say, my frustration like a living creature raging within my guts. I am helpless, the man is too drunk to understand me. He knows I have asked a question; peers at me, frowning; fails to comprehend.
"Met her in the Greek Islands, you know. She was with a fella I know. Bit of a rogue, really. Artist chap, name of Blackshaw. All sorts of money but doesn't have a ship. Money came from trade, I expect. No proper sense of values. Thought he was leading her astray. Poor old Blackshaw, misjudged him. Can never tell about these things. Soon as I saw her, said to myself, 'I should save this girl from loss of virtue.' But I was too late, wish I'd never met her. Do you know her? Splendid specimen. Magnificent. Got the old fires stoked in the boilers, I say. Thought I was too old for that sort of stuff. Quite a shock to find I wasn't."
I wait. He lifts the empty glass again, thinks he is drinking. I look toward the galley, wondering if coffee will help.
"If you had seen what I saw by that old monastery...." Gordon says, and his words nail me to the deck. What happened in those dark Hellenic hills that even Christine found herself shocked by? Gordon shakes his head, the cap slips down over one eye. It doesn't matter, he is too drunk to see. His eyes are focused on distant rocky shores where they witnessed something that brought new fire to his aging loins.
"Ever been on those Greek Islands, my boy?" he asks. "Never knew they had black religious rites there, did you? Neither did I, point of fact. Shocked, I was. Thought Christine had been led astray. First night I met her, actually. Tagged along with old Blackshaw, thought it might prove amusing. Didn't know they were vampires. Christine is a vampire. Bet you didn't know that, did you? Didn't know what to do, just stood there looking at it."
He stares at me, seeing it again.
"Little girl, couldn't have been more than twelve. Looked frightened, didn't understand what was going on. Little boy, about the same age. Looked scared too. Looked like the girl. Maybe he was her brother, don't know." He peers at me. "You think he might have been her brother? Seems to make it worse, if he was her brother. Little touch of the old incest. Lot of Greeks. Fisherman and some old boy in a cowl, looked like a monk. Chanted in a funny tongue, sprinkled water and burned incense. Eerie. Thought it was all just a joke. Christine was being initiated into their group. Thought it was a load of the old balderdash Blackshaw had cooked up for her. Then it started. Couldn't move. Couldn't stop them, just watched. Forgot I was an Englishman. Was in the Baltic, you know. Escort. Saw combat and never flinched. But I couldn't do a thing that night. They made the girl lie down, and Christine had to kneel between her legs and put her mouth on her. Right on the old quim. Just like a terrier shaking a rat, she went at it. I believe she actually enjoyed it. Then she did the same thing to the young lad, got him all worked up.
"All the while this fella in the cowl was sprinkling them and chanting incantations, and all the Greeks were kneeling there watching. No sense of shame. But that wasn't the worst of it. After Christine got this lad excited, they put the lad on the girl-I think it might have been his sister, don't know for certain-and Christine put his old tallywhacker right up the girl. Lots of blood. Blood all over her thighs and belly. And Christine drank it up just like a proper vampire. Lapped it up like a cat with a bowl of milk. Virgin's blood. Must have some significance. Made me sick, though. Had to go off and vomit.
"All finished when I got back, the girl looked half-dead, had bites and tooth marks all over her belly and legs, bleeding from those as well. Sort of crying, she was, not out loud, just sort of whimpering and sobbing. The lad was in shock, too. Remember his big white eyes in the dark. Like little moons. They had to fashion a stretcher to carry the girl home. Don't know if she lived, even. Never want to see anything like that again. Fight the old Hun any time. Fight the Russians or the Chinamen. Fight the Yanks. But I don't ever want to see that again...."
His eyes close against vision, and Commander Gordon slips from his deck chair and sprawls on the deck. I look at him, and then I look behind me, lean over the polished railing, and look at the water. I watch the water with extreme concentration and think of nothing deeper than the depths of that harbor....
Commander Gordon flutters back to consciousness.
I have carried him into the cabin and poured a quart of black coffee down him; immersed his head in cold water and shaken him in modified rage-modified, for I do not rage at him, he cannot help the state he is in, Christine has full responsbility for this.
His eyes open. There is more awareness in them now. "Who are you?" he asks.
"A friend of Christine."
"Oh, yes. I seem to remember...." He blinks, passes a hand across his brow. "I say, was I babbling?"
"What?"
"I seem to recall chatting away when I was in my cups. Talking a load of old rubbish about Christine. None of it true, of course. The vivid imaginaton of a heartbroken old drunkard. You know?"
I say nothing.
"Funny how a fella will imagine the most frightful things when Bacchus has him captive, eh what?"
"You didn't say anything," I tell him. "What? Nothing? Was I talking to anyone else?"
I have pity for Gordon. "No. No, you were muttering something, but you were too drunk to express it. I couldn't understand you."
"Ah. Yes, yes. Just as well. Can't even remember what it was now. Of no importance, I expect."
"I'm looking for Christine. You said something about her going to a harem."
"That, I fear, is the truth." He hangs his head sadly, an old sailing vessel stranded in the calm.
"But where? Tell me where she's gone."
"Too late, my boy. I tried to stop her. She tricked me, you know. Got me talking about these things. Got the address out of me. I couldn't believe she was serious, thought it was all a joke. Or a thrill. That she didn't realize how serious it was. To late now. She's already signed the contract. She's gone now."
"But where, man? For God's sake, where?"
"Where? Why south, of course. Down to the Sahara. She left with the local agent as soon as the contracts were signed. Gone down to the High Atlas. There's a stop-off point there. Fellas from the south will come up to meet them. Nothing we can do about it now. Last girl tried to break the contract was found floating at Cape Spartel, horribly mutilated. She'd been raped by half of North Africa, from the state of her. Then had her belly sliced open, her breasts cut off and stuffed inside, then sewed back up. While she was alive. Not a pleasant thought. Nothing we can do."
I stare at him across the galley table.
"She's mad, you know. Insane. Her life of vile depravity has deranged her mind. And I loved her." There are tears at the corners of his eyes.
"And you let her go?" I ask.
"I couldn't stop her. You know Christine. I would have done anything for her, but I could not stop her."
He is right, of course. Only I might stop her, and I am too late. The trail has ended here, in this town that once knew intrigue and survives on the food of the past.
Or has it ended yet? Is there one last link to the chain of hope?
"This stop-off point-do you know where it is?"
Gordon nods.
"Could she still be there?"
He calculates, says, "Quite possibly. They won't move her until night, of course. They have to cross a border, and these contracts aren't really legal, of course. Don't really know why they have them signed. Some curious quirk of the Arabian mind, I expect. Makes them think it's all arranged at the other end. Barbaric people, probably can't read anyway. So I imagine she will be at the stop-off point until evening. But that's no good. You can't get there in time, and if you could you would only endanger her life. And certainly end your own. So, my boy, the best thing we can do is have a drop of gin and forget her."
I am taut with urgency. I know Morocco well, I know how to move fast, and I do not know danger as a sensation to be avoided. I am aware of my body, my muscles and sinews all alive and tingling, an internal energy waiting to be expended.
"Is there a telephone there?" I ask. It is not necessary, but it may help. If I can let her know, if she can cause some delay, an hour or two....
"There is, as a matter-of-fact. Necessary so that their agent at this end can notify them, of course."
"Do you know the number? Quickly, man!"
"Not off hand. I can get it easily enough. But isn't that rather mauldin? Phoning to say farewell forever to a woman who has ruined countless lives while progressing toward her own sordid destiny?"
"Not yet. Not yet. Move!"
"You're mad," he says. "You can't do anything for her now. They'll kill her if you try."
"Perhaps. And I'd rather she were dead."
He looks at me. He understands this, to my amazement. But then, after all, he fought in the Baltic. It is not death that frightens this broken old seafarer.
"Come into the club," he tells me. "I'll make the connection for you."
There are two telephones. Gordon uses one, struggling with the incompetence of the system, arguing with an operator who is not mentally equipped to manage a long-distance call. But Gordon has served his time in England, he understands about telephones that do not function. He shouts in French and howls in English, curses with the flavor of the salty sea, until the reluctant modern machinery of a land that dwells in the past is cowed and bowed. The wires hum over the distance, sending their call down to the wild mountains that border on the endless expanse of sand-the trackless sands that will separate me forever from happiness. But I do not dwell on this time. Time for sorrow after failure, now it is time for quickness, motion upon which hope may feed. Hope is no eater of carrion, it feeds on living emotion. And I am a banquet overflow-i ing with this feast.
Gordon nods at me, the receiver at his ear. The call is gong through.
"Marrakech," I say. "How far?"
"About 600 kilometers. Roughly, by road."
"And the Atlas. The place where Christine will be?"
"Another-oh, say another 100 kilometers from Marrakech. Decent road. Do it in two hours.
But there's no flight from here to Marrakech, have to fly to Casablanca. Get a flight from there. Takes time, always these infernal delays. Planes always breaking down. Maroc Airways buys the planes that BEA and BOAC scrap. Hear they did, anyhow. Never fly, myself. Never thought a man should fly. God wanted him to fly, he'd had given him wings. 'Course, I don't believe in God, either, so where are you?"
He shouts into the phone again, urging haste.
"Steve's Bar. Rue Amerique du Sud. Does Steve still run it?"
"Certainly. What else would old Steve do? Good man, Steve. Knows the angles, gets things done."
"Precisely," I say, and move to the other phone.
Steve answers at the first ring, shouting into the phone in Russian. Sometimes he shouts in Spanish, sometimes in Bulgarian, but he always shouts.
"Steve. John here."
"Who?"
I tell him who I am.
"Good Lord. Are you back in Tangier? Get around here and get drunk, for God's sake."
"Listen. This is urgent."
Steve listens. He is not a man who normally listens, but he knows me. I believe he is fond of me, but he knows me.
"I need a plane. Charter, private, it doesn't matter. In an hour. Can it be done?"
There is silence from the other end of the buzzing wire. Steve is calculating. "Of course, John," he says. "Anything can be done."
"Whatever it costs...."
"Don't be absurd," says Steve, and I am thankful that in a changing world, some constants remain.
"Right. Now. Is it possible to get a parachute? Full rig?"
"Not in an hour. I shouldn't think so. I can try. What's the game?"
"High stakes. Forget the parachute, arrange a car to meet me at Marrakech. I want to leave within the hour. I have to. Fix it."
"It's fixed," Steve says.
"Right. And, Steve ... Thanks."
"Don't be absurd," says the unchanging man from my past.
I hang the phone up, turn to Gordon, feel my heart leap, stag-like, its antlers crushing against my ribs, as he signals that the connection has been made....
PHONE CONVERSATION-TANGIER-HIGH ATLAS
Christine: Yes. Yes, who is this? Gordon: It's the commander, my dear. I-Christine: You shouldn't have phoned me. I can't really talk, they don't understand English but they're looking suspicious. I'm a little afraid of them.
Gordon: Hold on a moment, my dear. There's someone else here to talk to you.
Christine: I can't. I'll have to hang up.
John: Christine.
Christine: Who? John? John?
John: That's right.
Christine: Oh, John. Where are you?
John: Tangier. Listen carefully.
Christine: I'm listening. They don't know the call is for me. No one speaks English here, they wanted me to interpret.
John: I'm coming for you.
Christine: John, there isn't time.
John: There's time, baby. I'll be there before dark. Stay where you are, get sick, do anything.
Just a few hours. Just give me a few hours.
Christine: Yes, yes. I'll try. Oh, John, I never thought I'd hear your voice again. John, I love you.
John: That's why I'm coming.
Christine: Do you ... do you still want me, John?
John: I'm coming, baby.
Christine: You don't know. I've changed. I'm worse than before. John, I've done things-things that ... if you knew the things I've done, you wouldn't-
John: I know everything you've done. Maybe, just maybe, I even know why. I'll be there, baby. Christine: John. Oh, John. I want you to know ... if you don't get here in time, John, I want you to know that-
The connection is broken at the High Atlas end. John (voice muffled, no longer speaking into the telephone) : Oh God. If they hurt her. I'll-
CHAPTER TWELVE
Gradually the land changes below us. I have read that Africa begins at the Pyrenees, but this is not true. Europe ends at the Sahara. And I look down past the angle of the wing and watch the gradual beginnings of the transition, watch the visible and physical changes as one continent becomes another. I let myself become caught up in this idle observation, let my mind dwell on it to philosophical depths. It is a harmless pastime, it keeps my thoughts from raging with futility and bursting with frustration, from seething with all the possibilities that would carry me to the very brink of madness. And I must not let my mind hurtle over that black abyss. I must be sane, I must be more sane than I have ever been, with cold, cruel sanity, for where the madman rages, the sane man succeeds.
The pilot is a Frenchman of considerable flair and class. He glances at me from time to time but does not attempt conversation. He has alert eyes and a scar on his cheek; perhaps he knows enough to feel a sympathetic vibration from my jangling nerves. He does not speak until the High Atlas are there before us and the red city of Marrakech is circling below. Then he touches my arm.
"We have arrived," he says. I nod.
The plane descends, circling like a great bird of prey.
"You have been paid?" I ask.
"Monsieur Steve has arranged it."
"And the motorcar will be waiting?"
"Certanly. That, too, is arranged. I have been instructed, and paid"-he smiles at this with flashing teeth-"to give you whatever assistance you may require."
"There is nothing more."
"Ah. I thought not. I can see by your eyes, monsieur, that you prefer to fly solo."
The pilot stands beside the motorcar. It is an AC Cobra, small and very, very quick. It is not a motorcar one would expect to find in Morocco, let alone to hire, and I wonder, idly and vaguely, how Steve can manage such things. But he has lived here a long time, such things can be done. I sit behind the wheel and take a moment to study the dashboard; a moment that may save many moments later. The pilot is smoking a cigar and holds his flight helmet in the crook of his elbow.
"Good fortune," he says.
I manage to smile at him. I think my teeth show as my lips draw back, but it is a smile for all that. I start the motorcar and drive off, and the pilot watches me go, his tall and slender figure diminishing behind me.
Gordon has drawn me a map. It will not be difficult to find this place. I feel that I could find it without guidance; as though I would be drawn toward it by irresistible gravity. But I am sane. Still sane. I do not trust to instinct, I regard the map from time to time, checking against various landmarks.
The car is monstrously fast. It was made for an English-speaking market, the speedometer registers in miles per hour, and the needle approaches 140 while there is still space between pedal and floorboards. I do not press it beyond this speed. This is fast enough, my timing is good, I will arrive before it is too late at this speed and will not take the unnecessary risk of an accident. The car is light behind, it fishtails and skids as it corners, but the steering is precise, the suspension good, I know I can handle it all right. I feel a part of this snarling mechanical monster, this small canivore whose speed and power belie its dimensions. The accelerator is an extension of my foot, the steering wheel is grafted to my fingers, the car is my ally in haste, my companion and friend who aids me in this quest.
The road narrows and rises, the air becomes cooler, I am in the mountains. Cliffs rise to the left, the road breaks abruptly away to the right, past a slender wooden guardrail. Giant trees expand in the mountain air on the heavily wooded peaks. Tiny Arab villages flash past, too fast to be seen, a blur of squat structures like prairie-dog towns. I scream up behind a bus, the road is too narrow to pass, the bus totters at the very edge of the precipice; brown faces with noses flattened against the glass stare from the rear window. I downshift and brake, slow, come within feet of the bus, curse at the delay with a violence that would be willing to see that multitude of passengers go tumbling over the cliff in order to clear the road for my passage. I follow for yards that seem like light-years, and I jam the pedal down. The car explodes with acceleration, my back is pressed to the seat, the near-side wheels are raised on the mountain wall, and the chassis sits at an impossible angle, moving too fast to tilt. I level off, the bus is already twenty yards behind me, the tail end of the car snakes savagely and squares away, and once more I hurtle toward ... what?
I am there.
I brake and slow; pull the Cobra off the road and into a copse of trees, back and turn, leaving it facing the road, ready to spring once more to life. I have confidence in this car, if I can regain it again, nothing that moves on the surface of the land will overtake me. Overtake us. It must be us, for I will not return alone. But I still have sanity with me.
The building perches at the crest of a mountain, set well back from the road. It is larger, of European construction, and might in former days have been a colonial hotel. I am in time, the sun is low but has not set. The slanting shafts of gold light the highest peaks and the tallest trees, gild them in fiery light. But the building is nestled well down in the shadows of the surrounding trees and rocks, crouched forbiddingly in the undergrowth. I walk up the road and then angle off, approach the house from the side. There is no one in sight. I move onto the veranda, stepping over the railing, and walk very quietly to the door. I find that there is no door, merely a doorway with rusted and broken hinges in the jamb.
I pause. This is my final hesitation. I assure myself I am cold and sane, and then I enter.
There is one man in the entrance. He stands behind a counter, a remnant of those former days when guests came here without signing contracts for their souls. He wears a djellaba and blinks at me in surprise. He does not move as I cross to the counter and lean upon it with one flat, steady hand.
"Where is the girl?" I ask. "What girl?" he says.
Deception or violence? It is a difficult de-cison, a hard judgment to make.
"I've come from the commander," I say. We speak in French, he seems to have difficulty with the language and I am counting on his confusion. "The girl has left certain unfinished business that must be clarified. I must receive her instructions before she is taken away."
"Ah. I see. I did not know that. The girl has made trouble. She had refused to leave, perhaps she was waiting for this business of which you speak?"
"Perhaps."
"I do not know this commander. But perhaps it is all right. Mustapha is with her at the moment. He tells her what the consequences are if she refuses to go with him." The man smiles. It is not the smile of a sadist, there is no sadism in a race where cruelty is normality. He motions toward the stairway. "The room on the right," he says. "You may make her understand that she must go now?"
"She will leave directly," I tell him, and then my hand has come from the counter, still flat and open, and the edge breaks his throat like the stroke of a scimitar. He makes no sound, for he no longer possess vocal cords, his larynx is shattered. His head snaps back, then comes forward, his face smacking onto the counter. I raise my hand again, thumb at the perpendicular angle that tightens the tendons. Perhaps this is a good man, he does not seem wicked, he is merely a part of a way of life that is not mine; perhaps he has a wife and children and does not beat his burro. Perhaps. But my sanity does not contain the capacity for morality, and I bring my hand down on the base of his skull, and now he is nothing; now he is a lump of meat awaiting decomposition, and I need not concern myself with that.
I go up the stairs on my toes. The stairs are old, they creak, but not much. I move down the hall to the door on the right. This entrance is possessed of a door, and the door is closed. But it is as old as the stairs. I raise my foot, I am wearing my heavy walking boots, and when my leg extends the door is gone, it comes from the hinges and hurls into the room. I go in behind it.
But even my fighting instincts can be stunned into a moment of immobility at this sight. Christine is there.
She is suspended from a cord in the center of the room. The cord is secured to the ceiling and tied to her thumbs, and she hangs by her thumbs. She is naked. All her weight pulls down on those fragile joints, and her face is drawn in agony. Two men in djellabas stand beside her, turn in amazement as the door crashes in. One man holds a whip. The tip is divided into three strands weighted with lead, and these strands are thick with blood. Christine's back is crossed with a hundred tiny lines where the whip has divided the golden flesh; the skin peels back from these wounds, and where one red line has crossed another, the blood has bubbled out. As I stare in horror, a dark drop oozes out, slides slowly and heavily down her hip, down her thigh, breaks free and drops to the floor with a soft sound.
Christine opens her eyes. She is conscious, I wish to God she were not but she is, she has felt this pain. She sees me, and hope lights her face.
"John...." she says.
I start to move.
"Hold!" someone says.
I stop. There are three men in the room, the third beyond my range of vision, seated against the wall, a gross toad in Western dress seated on a wooden chair, from where he has been observing and enjoying the torture.
And this man has a gun.
The gun is leveled at me. Again there is the necessity for decision. It is not a gun of heavy caliber, I think I can take his bullet and live long enough to take his life, but there are two others, and if I die, Christine too will die.
I stop and do not move.
"Who are you, and why have you come here?" he asks.
"I've come for the girl. I'm taking her."
"Admirable self-deception," he says. He smiles. His tongue, like his belly, is that of a toad. It flashes over his lips. He moves the gun for emphasis.
"In a way, you are correct," he says. "You will leave with the girl. To wherever Allah sees fit to place you."
"Oh God," Christine says. "Don't hurt him. I'll go with you. Anything. Let him go."
"I tire of this. It was a tiring journey to come here. I do not like to make journeys for nothing. You are useless to us now, woman. If you will attempt to break your contract, I cannot deliver you. My customers have faith in my judgment. But perhaps it is not really for nothing. There remains the pleasure of inflicting pain." He keeps the gun on me and glances at his companions. "Everything is under control. You may proceed with the torture. It may give an added flavor to this pleasure, knowing that her man is forced to observe it." His laugh emerges like a reptile, curling in loathsome folds around the room.
The man with the whip says something in Arabic.
Mustapha raises his eyebrows. "Yes, that might be even more amusing. Yes, I think it might, indeed. I grant permission, I will take my own slight pleasure from regarding this gentleman while you do it."
The two men in djellabas grin, and then they are no longer in djellabas. They throw them off and pull down their baggy pants, moving in unison like trained animals. They are wiry and dark as they stand naked on either side of Christine. They reach out and touch her, brown fingers prodding into her soft flesh, poking at buttocks and belly and thighs. She moans, her body swinging and rotating as they fondle her. The feel of her foreign white flesh excites them, they jabber and laugh. Their organs begin to fill with pulsing blood, starting to rear up in readiness. I know I will not be able to bear this, and yet I am unable to look away, unable to close my eyes on this scene which will break my mind. I am fascinated, mesmerized, fixed in paralysis before the horror of what I see.
"I have money," I say.
"Fine. I will take it after you are deceased."
The gun is steady on my belly; he watches me, and I watch this terrible tableau beginning before me.
One man has forced his hand between her thighs, crouches down so that he may look at Christine's secret flesh. His finger runs over her, the filthy ragged nail digging into the soft lips, then plunging up her channel to the full extent. His eyes are wide, his mouth open. He shoves his finger up and down, in and out, twists it about inside her passage. His companion closes thumb and forefinger over the pink tip of her clitoris, squeezing and rolling it, yanks suddenly, with force, and giggles as she cries out. This is great sport. He pulls harder, and the sensitive flesh extends. Christine buries her teeth in her lip, blood runs down her chin. She tries not to make any sound. The first man has his four fingers up her now, is ramming them up and down. His hand becomes sticky as her corridor tries to lubricate against this rough friction. The second man abandons her clitoris, begins to pull at her nipples. They have both reached a fever of urgency.
"Are you watching carefully?" Mustapha asks, his eyes ablaze with his own brand of excitement. "You must watch, my friend. It is the last time you will see this woman in the throes of love."
Now the first man can wait no longer. His hands have explored her, he is ready. He grasps his penis in his hand, pumps it vigorously. A drop of fluid runs out, and he grins, wipes it on her thigh, a listening track. He raises on his toes. Christine's feet dangle inches from the floor, the height is just right for his purpose. His knees bend, then raise him, and with his hand he guides his throbbing member between her legs. He is well endowed, and the wide, flat head forces its passage up her carnal envelope. His knees relax, tense, relax again as he drives up into her, lifting her so that with each withdrawal, she drops again with her full weight on her thumbs. She is brave, my Christine. She makes no sound, although the agony is on her contorted face.
And then she speaks. She speaks to me, controlling her voice with unimaginable willpower, keeping all vestiges of her pain from the words and attempting to lessen my agony by her levity.
"This is the first time I've ever been raped, John," she says. "Isn't that remarkable?"
And the Arab heaves his throbling joint upward again, so that her teeth close once more on her bleeding lip. He is pumping into her like a machine now, a piston gone mad and out of control, his lean hips jerking with savage force. His hands clamp over her hipbones, and, as he thrusts upward, he attempts to draw her down upon his shaft, increases the tension on her thumbs and arms.
His companion is urging him to haste, a-waiting his turn. He holds his penis in both hands, shaking and pumping it in his frenzy, moving it up and down in masturbation and then forcing himself to cease, not willing to waste upon the floor what he will be able to deposit in Christine's white body. He moves around behind her, suddenly realizes that it is not necessary to wait, that there is another opening, vacant and awaiting his entry.
He moves in behind her, spreads her taut cheeks with his hands, and rests his knob against the tiny hole. He wraps his arms around her waist in his gasping urgency and slowly begins to force his tool up the anal passage. Christine gasps, unable to contain herself at this new pain. Her legs flail about, trying to reduce the pressure in some new position, but merely bringing more strain on her arms. There is no way to reduce that terrible pressure at her haunches. Inexorably, inch by inch, the huge shaft pushes into her, the fat spearhead vanishes within her body, the throbbing column follows until it has burrowed as deeply as its great length will permit.
And now these foul creatures work in unison, driving upward simultaneously, adding the new friction of their penis rubbing together through the thin partition. Christine is crying out now in jerking sobs, gasping each time they plunge into her depths and screaming each time their withdrawal lets her weight slam down on the cords. Her agony adds a dimension to their carnal pleasure, they are fascinated by the mortal pain they inflict. But despite their excitement, it seems that their climaxes will never come.
The man at her front rears his head back, strikes like a snake, sinking his stained teeth into her nipple. Blood runs down his chin, he gnaws at her voraciously. He moves faster still, this oral stimulus has brought him to the peak. His legs tremble, I can sense the upheaval starting in his loins, I see him gasp as his abominable slime spurts upward into her painracked body.
He drops back. His load is spent, his tool slides from her and droops, and his loathsome juice pours from her crevice in stringy shards of cream. He whimpers with the extent of his expenditure.
But his comrade is still there. He slashes his hips faster, missing the added friction now that her vagina is not stuffed with seething flesh. Christine bounces on his upturned belly, he clasps his testicles and squeezes, as though he would force the sperm out with manual pressure. He is mad with his arousal; suddenly he springs upon her back, clinging to her shoulders with arms and teeth and wrapping his feet a-round her thighs, hooking the heels into her crotch.
The added weight is too much for her arms. I wince as I hear the thumbs break and the shoulders pop from the sockets. Her head drops. Mercifully, she has passed out. But still this caricature of humanity clings like a monkey to her back, his loins driving, until his carnal burden can no longer be borne and spurts from him. He whines like an animal and drops from her, lands nimbly on hands and knees beneath her and looks up with a grimace of satisfied need as his sperm bubbles out of the tortured canal.
And now I am no longer sane. The gun that can stop me now has not been forged, the force that may stay my hand does not exist, the bullet has never left the mold that will still the raging madness in my veins, my organs, my soul.
I turn my tormented eyes upon Mustapha.
He is looking toward the others. He says, "Enough! Don't kill her yet. I think perhaps it would he amusing to let the camel fuck her before she dies."
He turns to see how I react to this. And I react. I leap like a panther on legs like coiled springs. I feel an impact at my shoulder, too high-the sting of a mosquito, no more-and then the man's soft bulk is beneath me, the shattered wood of the chair splintered around us, my right hand clasped upon the wrist that holds the gun. I close my hand and feel his wrist bones press against the fat flesh. My knees are on either side of his torso, he cannot move, he stares up at me with fear in his eyes, whimpering. I twist his hand away and try to raise my left arm, but the insect's sting was more powerful than I thought. My left arm hangs limp. I do not need my left arm. There is but one thing I need. Revenge.
I drag his arm upward, bending the wrist back. His free hand strikes at me, but I do not feel it. I transfer his wrist to my mouth, closing my teeth firmly, feeling the flesh separate and the bones offer a moment of resistance before they shatter in my jaws. The gun dangles from his limp finger, brushes against my shoulder. I have freed my right arm, and now I raise it a-cross my chest. The hard callused heel is pointed down, level with his face, and I let him look at it, let him stare at this remorseless engine of execution. His eyes are pinned to my hand, he is unable to look away-must stare at his destruction as surely as I stared at Christine's agony.
My hand descends. Mustapha's nose no longer exists, it has become a flat smear across his fat cheeks. The hand is up once more. His mouth opens to scream, and his teeth cave in beneath my blow. I hear his companions behind me. No, I have not forgotten those mockeries of mankind.
I remove the gun from his broken hand and turn across his quivering body. The two men are coming at me. They have knives, but they are sentenced to die; judgment has been passed in the courts of my brain, and the executioner is ready. They halt, stumble backward as they see the gun come up. One holds his hand out, palm toward me, a gesture that begs for mercy-and a hand that dug into Christine's innermost flesh. The other darts toward the door, off-balance and scrambling, his knee scraping against the floor-a knee that had hooked around her suspended body.
He reaches the door, and I shoot him in the kneecap. The caliber is small but sufficient. His knee bursts, and he is down. He cries out in pain and terror, his companion mouths, but no sound emerges from his dry throat. I look at him, look into his eyes, so that he will know, and then I shoot him low down in the belly. The slug jack-knifes him, he falls in a sitting posture on the floor. He screams, and it turns to a gurgle; blood clogs his mouth.
They are still alive. All three are still alive, although they are immobile. I have no time to finish that now, Christine is still suspended, and I turn to her, take one of the fallen knives and cut the cord, let her settle gently into my arms.
Her beautiful face rocks backward, her hair spreads over my chest. I kiss her face, her throat; I speak to her, but she does not reply. She is alive, she breathes and her breath is warm, but I know she is dying. Her broken arms dangle at an impossible angle, and her thighs are covered with blood. I must not let her die in this room of her torment, and I carry her out and down the hall, enter another room, and lay her gently on a pallet in the corner. Her eyes open.
"John?" she says, unbelievingly. "It's all right. It's all right now."
"Those men...?"
"Dead," I say. This is not strictly true, but it is no more than a chronological error.
"Oh my darling," she says. She moves, she is attempting to throw her arms around me; winces with the burning pain at her sockets. "I cannot move my arms," she says.
"They'll heal. Don't worry, everything will be all right now."
"It's not that. I wanted to hold you. John, I'm dying. I'm dying now. I can feel death in me. It's cold, John. I'm not afraid to die, but hold me. Let me die in your arms."
I hold her gently. Her pain is enormous, but she smiles at me with bloody lips. She moves her head against me, raises her lips for my kiss. Her lips are salty with blood, but they are her lips. I have never forgotten how they feel, and feel them again now.
She knows I have forgiven her, that all her sins have been absolved and, in her last moment of life, she has received the obliteration of guilt, the ointment of absolution, the valediction of my kiss.
I cling to her.
And she is dead.
I stand in the center of the room. I remember that other room. I look at Christine's body, pale and still in the dim light, but I do not look long. There is no good in that. I walk slowly back to the first room, slipping the gun into my pocket as I do. I have one of the knives. And God knows, the Arab does not have sole claim to slow death.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I sit on a stool at Steve's Bar, drinking a brandy. It does not taste like brandy, but I drink it and the barman refills my glass. Presently Steve returns. He has been sending a wire to Stella.
It was a difficult telegram to compose. Steve does not mention where he has been, has asked me no questions, although perhaps he deciphers the runic scars on my body, the hieromancy of my heart. He takes a seat beside me.
He says, "Had you better be leaving the country soon?"
He keeps all inflection from his tone as he says this.
I do not answer, because I do not care. I have not considered it. I have avoided consideration. I shrug, so he knows I have not ignored him, a token to courtesy. We drink some more brandy. A voice, dimly familiar, intrudes.
"Say," says the voice. "Aren't you the fella we were talking to in Athens?"
I look at this voice. It is Sam, the eternal tourist from Detroit. Hazel stands behind him with a wifely smile. Sam moves to the bar beside me, claps me on the back, motions for Hazel to approach, the granting of husbandly permission. Steve gazes at these people in dumb horror.
Hazel stands beside me, whispers at my ear. "I waited all night for you at the hotel in Athens," she tells me. "I was very disappointed. I should think you owe me an evening."
"That's right," Sam says, making an abortive attempt at a whisper. His throat is not capable of whispering. "The little woman was very disappointed when you didn't show up. Had a bottle of good brandy waiting, too. The real stuff. French."
I close my eyes. There is a tight band restricting my head. It is too tight.
"Well, anyway, a bit of luck running into you here, eh? I told you we traveled a lot," Sam says.
"Please go away," I say, very, very politely.
Hazel stiffens. She is affronted. She walks with squared shoulders to the door and stands waiting for her husband. Sam glowers at me.
"Say, what in hell's the matter with you, mister?" he asks me. He is pale with anger. He doesn't know what true anger is, and I ignore him.
"I said, what's wrong with you? Don't you like women? You some sort of freak?"
Ah, Sam. There was a time when you would have repented words of that nature. But it was a time long ago. So long ago that I cannot remember it, in ages past when I carried a welter burden of human feelings in my body, when there were emotions and sensations and pinnacles of passion and pride lurking there, where now there is the black void of eternity itself.
