The complexities of the modern world all too frequently blind us to the simple truths handed down to us by our fathers. In a high-pressure society we are or we appear to be coddled by quasi-benevolent organizations, social security services, insurance societies, state and federal bodies, from the moment of our birth until the day we die. We are entered for schools and colleges before we can speak; we are protected from accidents and illnesses by our policies; we are assured of a cosseted old age by pensions and annuities; the police shelter us from the actions of malefactors . . . and at the end, even bur funerals and headstones are probably taken care of by some well-meaning association or other. To be sure, we pay for these attentions, either in the form of taxes or premiums or some other levy on our incomes.
But situations can arise, unfortunately, in which money, the modern deity, can be of little or no use and at such times we realize to our cost the value of the one most precious thing that the comforts of the consumer society have taken from us: self-sufficiency. It was as long ago as the sixteenth century that Shakespeare put into the mouth of Polonius that most valuable of all parental advice to the young, This above all, to thine own self be true!
The truth of this almost naive maxim is nowhere better illustrated than in The Flaming Vengeance. In this suspense-filled fable of our times, author Paul T. Scott places a young American couple in an apparently idyllic situation in a society comfortingly similar to their own on holiday in the south of France.
But, through what appears to be a series of accidents, they become involved in a drama not of their own making . . . and in a position where the normal benefits of civilization are of no use to them. The police are helpless, the Consular authorities are powerless to assist There are no rules framed to take care of their particular problem and it is up to them to fight their own way out of their difficulty. Which is where the fatal flaws in their own nature show up; for Tom Stacy intelligent though he is, is basically weak, and his wife Helen though not really a bad girl is never content with what she has got. For her, the grass on the other side of the fence is always greener.
It is only after Helen has been forced to come to terms with the deficiencies in her own character and the fundamental truth that lies behind them and Tom has at last arrived at the truth that in the end every man is responsible for himself, that the young couple are able to fight their way out of the moral morass into which they have fallen.
But this cannot happen before they have been involved in as spine-chilling and violent a mixture of rape, suspense and violence as can ever have bewildered an innocent man and his wife!
-The Publishers
CHAPTER ONE
The blonde whore withdrew her ovaled lips from Tom Stacey's rapidly deflating penis and scrambled off the bed to spit into the bidet. Her ass-cheeks, blued with veins in the harsh light of the hotel room, wobbled above her scuffed white thigh-boots as she walked. The slack bulges of her breasts swayed beneath the sweater pulled up under her armpits.
Through the mists of liquor fogging his brain, Stacey watched her with a mixture of exasperation and disgust. He knew it had been a mistake even before her too-expert hands had unzipped his fly. Now, his lust only partially satisfied, he was still mad at his wife, madder yet with himself and thirty dollars worse off in the bargain! Apart from which, his head had begun to ache.
Sprawled nakedly on the cheap sheets, he reached for cigarettes in the pocket of his pants thrown carelessly over the chair beside the bed. Probing with a forefinger inside the crumpled packet, he found that it was empty. "Fuck!" Tom Stacey said with feeling.
"Qu'est-ce que tu veux, cheri?" the whore said, without turning around, "What d'you want?"
"Cigarette," Stacey growled.
Ah! J'en at pas!" the blonde said automatically. "I don't have any. But there is a tabac at the bar on the comer." She pulled down her sweater, ran a comb through the dark-rooted platinum hair and reached for her skirt.
Bitch! Stacey thought furiously. Stingy fucking bitch! He had seen a full pack of cigarettes in her purse when she stuffed his money in among the wad of bills already there. She'd been quick to grab his dough before anything happened; now it was all over; she wouldn't part with one lousy cigarette in return! Well, it served him right for thinking he could get any satisfaction out of a whore! He eyed the flabby curve of the woman's belly with distaste as she wriggled the waistband of her tight skirt up past the sparsely curling triangle of dark hair at her loins and on over her hips. It was the first time he had ever been with a prostitute . . .and he was damned if he'd want to try it again--!
Stacey was American, twenty-four years old, three-fourths of the way through a one-month vacation with his wife Helen at Nice, on the French Riviera. There had been bad days before, but today was the big daddy of them all! Right from the moment when Helen had ogled that greasy-looking gigolo from the next apartment over their morning coffee, things had gone from bad to worse. By the time they left the casino at
Cannes just before midnight, after he had won all that money, they had scarcely been speaking. She'd really behaved disgracefully with that smart-assed, nose talking Englishman at the next table! The cab ride back to Nice had passed in frigid silence. But the row had flared up again as soon as they were inside the rented holiday apartment. Finally, when it had gotten to shouting abuse, Tom had flung out in a temper and drunk himself into a state of bitter resentment in a bar just off the Promenade des Anglais, the boardwalk of Nice.
Tipsy as he was, though, he couldn't for the life of him think now why he had fancied this faded blonde when she had approached him in the shadows of the Rue Halevy! He supposed if he was honest with himself that it was because, despite the too-tight skirt and shabby boots, despite the brazenly outlined nipples thrusting out the cheap sweater between the edges of the vulgar fur jacket, the woman in some way resembled an older, more jaded Helen. Certainly, his response had been immediate he had felt his cock lengthen and stiffen against the material of his pants as soon as the painted lips opened and the throaty voice uttered its promises of lustful abandon in the gloom! But now (he thought with a wry smile, as he slipped his arms into his shirtsleeves) the boot, scuffed or not, was on the other foot he couldn't get out of there fast enough! Hurriedly, he pulled on the rest of his clothes and left.
"See you again, honey!" the woman said perfunctorily at the door.
Like fuck you will! Stacey thought to himself as he ran down the stairs. Mad at my wife or not, you won't catch me coming within a mile of this crummy hotel again!
Ten minutes later, standing beside two burly men in overalls at the cigarette kiosk in an all-night bar, he was wishing he had paid more attention to the maze of narrow streets leading from the hotel back to the Rue Halevy. His gold Dupont lighter, a birthday present from Helen two weeks before, wasn't in his pants pocket where he was sure he had left it. An unlit cigarette between his lips, he slapped with increasing dismay at his hip pocket, his jacket, the other side of his pants. But the lighter was gone!
Jesus! It must have fallen on the carpet in that goddamn hotel room when he yanked his pants off the chair to find his cigarettes! He'd have to go on back there and get it. Helen would never forgive him if it was lost!
Fuming, he hurried out and retraced his steps. He hated the idea of confronting the iron-faced harridan behind the hotel desk . . . some other couple could be entwined on that bed now . . . maybe the blonde bitch had found the lighter and pocketed it.. . but anything was better than facing Helen without it. He walked a block north, turned left, took the second on the right and found himself in an unlit cul-de-sac face to face with a row of trash cans. Shit! He'd taken the wrong turn. It must have been the third on the right! . . .
He stopped in the next street and looked up at the narrow facades of the tall shuttered buildings. There'd been a lighted sign outside the hotel. He could see three hotel signs from where he stood, but they were all unlit. Was this after all the right street? Hesitating, he heard over the rooftops the sound of waves breaking along the shingle beach below the Promenade des Anglais. Somewhere off to his left an auto horn blared stridently. He turned and walked back to the intersection. Maybe he should have gone two blocks north before he turned . . .
Back in the first street, he heard the sound of footsteps over the noise of the sea. He swung around. It was only the two workmen he had seen in the bar, strolling home along the empty sidewalk.
Turning left again, he strode to the second intersection and stared along a short street leading to a small place glittering with cars parked under a lamp standard. Leaves glinted in the light as a puff of wind stirred the trees in the square. There wasn't a hotel to be seen.
Cursing, Stacey retraced his steps yet again. The place must be off that first street! Maybe they had put the light out; it must be after three o'clock. He would try just once more. If he couldn't identify the hotel . . . well, he would just have to get up early and go on out and buy himself another lighter. After all, he had money now! He paused, looking down a narrow alley. That could be a short-cut. It should lead him out just before the cul-de-sac with the trash cans. He hurried down the entry, his footsteps echoing off the high blank walls.
Just before he reached the lighted street beyond, two silhouettes appeared at the end of the alley. He saw with some surprise that it was the same two workmen he had noticed before. That was odd he had thought they were going the other way. He squeezed close to the wall to allow them to pass.
As they drew level with him, one of the men lurched and stumbled against him, his elbow digging painfully into Stacey's side. Tom opened his mouth to protest . . . but before he could utter a word, the other pivoted on his heel and punched him viciously on the side of the head.
Taken completely by surprise, Stacey reeled back and his skull cracked against the wall. Pain flamed behind his eyes as he fought to clear his head. But, before he knew what was happening, the first man had brought his knee up into the young American's groin and his companion had clubbed him savagely again on the jaw with a fist that felt like a battering ram.
Stacey's breath exploded from his lungs in an agonized gasp as pangs of insupportable anguish stabbed his belly and a monstrous iron door slammed somewhere inside his head. Staggering away from the wall, he fought his way through the whirling showers of colored lights blinding his eyes and swung clumsily at the nearer man. His fist collided with solid flesh and he heard a grunt more of surprise than pain to his left. The next moment, the whole of the right side of his head erupted in a blast of searing torment as the edge of a ham-like hand thudded with brutal force into his neck just below the ear.
Automatically, Stacey covered his head with his arms, striving desperately to regain command of his senses as blows now rained pitilessly on him from both sides. He opened his mouth to scream for help but the shout was stifled into a choking gasp by a jack-hammer punch that sank mercilessly into his solar plexus. He tried frenziedly to twist away from the remorseless assault of his attackers. Heavy hands slammed him back against the wall, plucked his arms away from his face and fisted him repeatedly with unremitting fury. Blood poured from his nose and trickled warmly down his chin from the corner of his split lip. A heart-stopping blow to the ribs smashed him to the wall and made the world stand still. From a long way away he heard the savage thud of steel-hard knuckles on flesh and bone, the trampling of feet, the hoarse breathing of his adversaries, and a voice his own sobbing out entreaties that were choked by the blood in his nose and mouth before they were uttered.
Buffeted like a helpless punching bag between the two fiercely swinging attackers, Stacey summoned up the last vestiges of his draining strength and tried to break away and run. As he thrust blindly past the brutally pistoning fists, his feet were kicked neatly from under him and he crashed heavily to the cobbles with a violence that knocked the remaining breath from his tortured lungs.
Before he could move, rough hands seized him and hauled him upright again. Cowering with abject terror, his teeth chattering in his lacerated jaw, he babbled incoherently as they began battering him anew, "No, no, no! . . . Please! . . . Aaaagh! . . . Don't Uuuugh!. . . Please don't Aiiieee!"
His arms had dropped uselessly to his sides, his head flopped this way and that like a rag doll's under their ferocious onslaught, the blood soaking his shirt front now splashed heavily to the ground under the impact of each cruel blow.
Finally, he went down again in a limp tangle of limbs. This time they made no attempt to raise him up but moved in with their booted feet.
Stacey's ears were filled with a thunderous roaring as flashes of agony flamed through the red mists filling the universe at each savage kick into his defenseless body. His stomach heaved and he vomited noisily on the cold stones. He lost control of his sphincters and evacuated himself as urine jetted hotly from his penis and flooded his bruised loins. And then, as a steel-capped toe smashed with stunning force against the bone behind his ear, the cobbled alleyway split open into an abyss of fathomless black into which he pitched.
As he fell slowly into the dark, like a rerun movie the events of that fateful evening reassembled themselves precisely in his mind . . .
* * *
. . . . Luxurious drapes and a deep pile carpet muffled the sounds of excitement around the high-stakes roulette table in the gaming room of the casino. Impassively, the croupier pushed out his rake and slid another pile of chips towards the young American sitting at the far end of the checkered green cloth. It was the third time running that he had won!
Tom Stacey sorted the red white and blue disks into neat towers behind his trembling hands and strove to conceal the satisfaction that was sending butterflies fluttering through his stomach. It wasn't the fact that he was winning quite a lot of money that excited him though it would be useful enough, for God's sakes! .but the fact that the system was working out.
Tom was a mathematician on a two-year postgraduate course at Oxford, England. He'd played around with this idea of his for months, but this was the first time he'd had the opportunity to put it into practice. And it seemed that the thing worked! It wasn't a system that would ever enable him to break the bank like the legendary man in Monte Carlo. But, once it got going, it should ensure a more than healthy return on the amount he was prepared to stake. The trouble was that it required a great deal of concentration, being predicated on a balance of probabilities operating within the laws of chance and of mathematics. The latter he knew; the former had to be observed in action, remembered and evaluated.
There are a number of methods of playing roulette that should and often do result in an overall profit for the gambler. . . providing he is not too greedy, has unlimited patience, a cool head, and plenty of time and capital. Among the best known is the "doubling-up" System, whereby the player automatically doubles his stake for the next throw each time he loses, so that when at last he does win, as sometime he must, he recoups all the money he had lost on the unlucky throws as well as the expected profit on the winner. The disadvantage of this method is that the gambler must be prepared to stand a run of bad luck that may last through several entire sessions by which time the required stake is many, many times the amount of the original wager. It also disobeys that golden rule of other systems or casual play: that when you have lost the amount you can comfortably afford to lose at any given session, you quit.
Tom Stacey scorned such pedestrian efforts. They were for the very rich or the very poor -those Riviera inhabitants who eked out their limited pensions by spending unlimited hours at the tables cautiously venturing planned amounts in the low-stakes rooms. His system relied for its effect on big stakes and knowing exactly when not to play. And this came from the exercise of mathematical skill in interpreting the run of previous throws. His last win had come from an odd number, red, between 19 and 28 and divisible by three. He must sit out the next four spins of the wheel.
Staring over the piles of chips behind his linked hands, he was amused to notice how many of the eager faces around the table were watching him how many followed his example and refrained from placing a bet! You only had to win a couple of times and half the players were copying your every move! In a world where luck was God, anything done by a man on a winning streak could be interpreted by the superstitious as a good omen. Such unscientific thinking must be a godsend for the operators of crooked tables in small-time gambling houses, he thought they only had to "plant" one or two accomplices as players, furnish them with a couple of fixed wins . . . and then clean up when everyone followed the "plants" by placing high stakes on numbers the operators knew were going to lose!
"Faites vos jeux. Messieurs, Dames," the croupier intoned. "Place your bets please, ladies and gentlemen." And then, as the last wagers -with a final glance at Stacey were pushed into place on the baize cloth "Men ne va plus.. . "
The wheel spun. The metal ball, flipped expertly into the rotating saucer by the croupier's thumb, hopped and clattered among the numbered pockets as they sped past. The crowd of expensively dressed men and women gathered three deep behind the gamblers lucky enough to be seated at the table, craned forward as the wheel slowed and stopped and the ball, after a final run up the polished side, dropped into one of the holes.
"Le Seize, " the croupier announced, leaning out with his rake. "Number Sixteen wins . . . "
As the gasps of disappointment and pleasure died away, Stacey twisted his head to look for his wife Helen among the spectators. Helen was twenty-three years old, blonde and curvaceous a voluptuously sensual young woman whose wide mouth and candid blue eyes somehow belied the promise implicit in the enticing bulges of her full, wide-set, uptilted breasts, the smoothly sculpted hollow of her slender waist, and the ripely contoured swell of her hips. She was looking like a million dollars tonight, Stacey thought, with the plain black cocktail dress setting off the rich curves of her body to perfection and the swathes of transparent black organza veiling her bare arms and shoulders accentuating the creamy whiteness of her skin. No wonder all the men turned to look at her as they came in! It was too bad, though, that she was quite so susceptible to the admiration of other men . . .
Stacey sighed, thinking of the row they'd had over the guy in the next apartment. It had lasted almost all day, and Helen hadn't been entirely mollified by his open enthusiasm for the way she looked tonight. He had been right just the same, he thought. Hell, a man had a right to expect his wife not to make eyes at every punk who was looking for an easy lay! But Helen didn't see it that way. Maybe the sight of the money he was winning would cheer her up it would certainly make a hell of a difference to the rest of their vacation!
"Faites vos jeux, Messieurs, Dames.. . "
Biting his lip, Stacey scanned the crowd for the black cocktail dress, the familiar bell of burnished blonde hair. She'd been right behind him a moment ago. Where in hell had she got to now? She'd been away for over a half hour earlier in the evening and now she'd vanished again! He breathed heavily with exasperation. She knew damned well he had to concentrate like crazy to make this system work! Why couldn't she stick beside him and save him the worry of eternally wondering what she was up to?
"Le Vingt-huit! Twenty-eight wins.. . "
It wasn't that there was any real harm in Helen, Stacey reflected; she'd never dream of carrying anything through, or going off with some other guy. It was just that she was a natural flirt. She was constitutionally incapable of resisting flattery, however crudely expressed. She couldn't help reacting to the physical appreciation of other men . . . any men. Plus the fact that she didn't take the serious things of life quite seriously enough sometimes.
"Place your bets, please . . . "
Take this evening, for instance. Helen had been excited at the idea of coming to the casino at Cannes. She had exclaimed aloud with delight as the cab carried them along the Croisette, that glittering esplanade jammed by luxury autos and strolling crowds, with long lines of bone-white hotels and modem apartment blocks on one side of the palm-fringed carriageway and the golden pathway of a reflected moon across the sea on the other. But she had gotten mad as soon as he suggested playing the tables. "Couldn't you forget your damned mathematics for once?" she had protested angrily. "I want to dance . . . I want to hear music. Let's have some fun. for God's sakes!"
"But, honey, the whole idea of coming here-"
"We're supposed to be on holiday, aren't we?" Helen demanded hotly.
"Sure we are. That's why I want to try out this system and make some money so that we can "
"Damn the money!" Helen cried. "Holidays are for living, Tom! You're so bound up in your theories, you forget there's practice too! . . . "
"Le Trois! Number Three!"
Stacey started. He had almost missed the croupier calling out the winning number! If he flunked out on one, the whole schedule for the evening was wrecked and he'd have to quit! Suddenly, he stiffened. He had caught sight of Helen among the crowd around the next table. She was talking to a tall man in white pants and a blue blazer, her wide eyes sparkling under the crystal chandelier. Stacey had noticed him before a tanned Englishman with patent leather hair and a neat mustache over the flamboyant silk scarf he wore carelessly tucked into the open collar of his shirt . . . the kind of drawling dilettante Tom couldn't abide! He gritted his teeth as his wife looked demurely down and then smiled brazenly up into the stranger's face. He heard her throaty laugh as the Englishman murmured something into her ear.
"Faites vos jeux. Messieurs, Dames! Place your bets, please!"
Stacey was furious. Of all places to choose to behave like that! She had to show off in front of a complete stranger while he was doing his damnedest to earn them some money, sweating his guts out over the lousy roulette table so that she could have a second cognac after her dinner, buy another evening sweater from that boutique in the Rue du Paradis, maybe even stay an extra week in that crummy apartment that cost them so much!
She couldn't just stay quietly behind him, giving him the moral support he needed to concentrate; she had to gallivant off and leave him to wonder miserably what the hell she was up to now! She had to bitch up the whole deal just because she couldn't wait to have what she called "fun" . . . which in this case seemed to mean making sheep's eyes at some goddamn remittance man who looked as though he had stepped right out of a 1930 movie! Glaring across the room, he tried unsuccessfully to catch Helen's eye himself. But she was too engrossed in her companion to notice. Laying a hand on the Englishman's arm, she flicked a glance at Tom's table and shrugged her lovely shoulders. The Englishman looked over and laughed. Stacy was so angry that he almost choked.
"Faites vos jeux, Messieurs, Dames Place your bets, please!"
The angry young American jumped. Jesus! The croupier was calling the next throw! This was the one Tom was supposed to play. But what number had come up last time? He must have been so mad at Helen that he had missed it! He simply hadn't heard the winning number called! Yet it was imperative that he should know; he's got to know because the placing of his stake depended on it. "What came up last time?" he asked the woman sitting on his left.
"I don't know. Three, I think." She was busy sorting out her chips.
"No, that was the time before. Do you know?" he demanded urgently of the man on the other side.
"Know what, Monsieur?"
"The winning number last time. What was it?"
"Oh. let me see. Twenty-seven, was it? No, seventeen. That's it, Seventeen."
"It was not!" a fat woman behind him protested. "It was twelve! You know it was twelve, Charles. Don't you remember: . . "
In desperation, Stacey turned to ask the croupier. But the man held up his hand for silence as he watched the bets being placed around the table. The American was in a quandary. His system called for a very large bet to be placed on a square paying off very short odds no more than one for one, or evens. It was what he called the Sustainer, which he played every half dozen times he wagered to bolster up his capital. If the last number had been seventeen, then he should place his chips on the square marked Impair, odd numbers, betting that another odd number would come up. But if it had been twelve, then his chips should be on Pair, even numbers. And he had to bet, or give up playing for the evening for the system relied on a continuous effort.
Stacy was sweating. He could feel the beads of perspiration breaking out on his skin, dewing his upper lip and brow. With shaking hands he separated his piles of chips in two equal halves and pushed one, representing nearly twelve hundred dollars, towards the center of the table. He had a fifty-fifty chance of winning . . . but had the last number really been the even twelve or had it been an odd seventeen? He called to the croupier again, but the man shook his head and opened his mouth to announce, "Rien ne va plus!"
In the nick of time Tom, followed by several more gamblers who had been watching him anxiously, shoved his chips onto impair.
The wheel spun. The fickle ball skipped and shuddered over the whirling numbers.
"Encore le Vingt-huit!" the croupier said as it swung slowly to rest. "Twenty-eight again! Evens!"
Stacey's face was black with rage as his stake was raked away amid sighs of disappointment around the table. He swept the remaining chips into one hand, pushed back his chair and got to his feet. It was useless to go on now; the system was busted for tonight! He still had almost twelve hundred dollars in hand . . . but it would have been three thousand six hundred if he hadn't flunked out that last throw! And the worst thing of all was that he didn't know if his failure was due to a fault in the system or the fact that he'd missed that all-important last number!
Scowling, he strode across to the table where
Helen was still chatting amiably to the stranger in the white pants and blazer. "Why hello, honey," she cried, swinging around to meet him. "Are you through already? Tom, I'd like to have you meet "
"Haven't you done enough for one night?" he interrupted brusquely, seizing her roughly by the elbow and dragging her away. "Come on. We're getting out of here!"
"Oh, I say! Look here!" the Englishman began mildly. "I mean to say there's no need to get shirty . . . " but the American couple were already halfway to the double doors leading to the stairway.
"Tom Stacey!" the angry blonde protested furiously as she was hustled down the red-carpeted steps. "I've never been so humiliated in my whole life! What's the matter with you, for God's sakes? What's gotten into you tonight? You're behaving like the biggest boor there ever was! What did you have to go and do that for? Just as I was "
"Go and get your coat," Stacey said rudely.
She stared at his flushed face and knitted brow, compressed her lips, and then flung away indignantly towards the ladies' powder room. Stacey cashed in his chips, stuffed the bills in his wallet, and sank two large scotch-on-the-rocks at the bar before he went out to the foyer to collect her and have the doorman call them a cab. She was staring icily out across the parked cars at the glittering chain of lights charting the course of the Croisette as it swept around the bay and out towards the dim bulk of the Esterel massif humping itself against the stars. And she refused to say a word to him the whole way home along the scintillating coast.
But, as soon as they were alone in their rented apartment near the airport on the outskirts of Nice, the quarrel broke out again with renewed fury.
"You're just a selfish, pompous, opinionated square!" Helen cried when he tried to explain why he had been so angry with her at the casino. "All you think of is money, money, money -and trying to prove how clever you are! You're so busy showing everyone how big your brain is, you forget you have a body, too! You've forgotten how to live, that's the trouble with you!"
"Selfish?" Tom shouted. "I guess it isn't selfish to leave me on my own wondering what the hell's happened to you when I'm trying to concentrate, is it? It isn't selfish to fuck off on your own "
"There's no need to use language like that!" Helen interrupted.
"It seems the only suitable kind to describe your behavior tonight!"
"Just what d'you mean by that, Tom Stacey?"
"As for forgetting I have a body, that's one thing nobody can accuse you of, I must say! And you take damned good care nobody else can forget it, either! Just so long as it's a man who's leering at your tits!" Like many weak people, Stacey took refuge in exaggeration when he had lost his temper.
"How dare you!" Helen stormed. "How dare you speak to me like that!"
"Flaunting yourself in front of any two-bit gigolo you see . . . "
"Stop it! Stop it! I won't listen to another word."
"Going off on your own for almost an hour and showing me up in front of all those folks . . . Where did you get to, anyway, earlier in the evening?"
"That's my business. I'm certainly not going to tell you!"
"I'm not surprised!" Tom yelled. "I guess you wouldn't dare to! You behave like a . . . like a . . . like some cheap little . . . " He paused, at a loss for words, choking with wrath.
"Go on!" his wife raged tearfully. "Go on -why don't you say it? Call me names! Insult me! Tell me I'm no better than a whore! Call me a tramp! That's how you treat me anyway!"
"And you haven't even the guts to go through with it! When it comes down to it, you're nothing more than a goddamn tease! There are better whores out there in the streets "
"Then go get yourself one!" Helen flashed. "Your pockets are stuffed with bills you won on your precious system. Go buy yourself a woman worthy of yourself, big shot!"
He stood in the middle of the room, his fists clenching and unclenching by his sides, his chest heaving with anger. "Okay," he snarled, "I'm going on out and do just that!"
Turning on his heel, he strode from the apartment as she flung herself on the davenport in a storm of tears. An hour later, his mind fogged with the liquor he had downed in half a dozen bars, he found himself face to face with the blonde in the Rue Halevy . . .
* * *
. . . The two thugs in the alleyway stood panting over Tom Stacey's unconscious body and blew on their smarting knuckles. "Think that'll keep him out for long enough?" he muttered. "We'll need at least an hour to do the job properly." It was the first time either of them had spoken since the attack had begun.
His companion insinuated the toe of one boot under the young American's hip and flipped him limply over onto his back. Stacey's battered bloody face stared sightlessly up at them in the wan light reflected from the street lamp at the far end of the alley. The second man bent down and thumbed back a swollen eyelid. "Should do," he said tersely. "I'll give him one more just in case!"
Grasping the unconscious man's head by the ears, he cracked it viciously down on the cobbled surface of the entry. The impact of skull on stone rang hollowly in the confined space. Stacey's eyes rolled upwards until only the whites showed. His body twitched once and then lay still.
"Right," the first man said. "Let's get hold of the stuff and take a powder."
Yanking open the fallen man's jacket, he fished out billfold, passport, wallet and papers, stuffing them all into his own pockets. Then, turning the body over again, he emptied the pants pockets of loose change, keys and anything else that was in them. Finally, he pried off Stacey's wedding ring and unstrapped the watch from his wrist. "That's it!" he said.
The second man guffawed. "Tell you what," he suggested. "Take him a bit longer to make it if he was stark-ass, don't you think?"
"Bully for you!" the tall man said. "Up you come, me beauty!"
Hauling up the limp body, they stripped off jacket, pants, tie, shirt, jockey shorts, shoes and socks, and then dumped the young American naked in the shadows of a doorway further up the alley. Even in the gloom, the bruises and lacerations and livid weals marking his battered flesh showed up darkly against the pale glimmer of the unconscious man's skin.
For a moment, the two men stood staring down at him. Then the taller one jerked his head and they moved off quietly towards the lighted street. At the corner of the alley they paused, looking to left and right. Except for the shadow of a cat streaking across the sidewalk, the street was deserted.
They crept along to the cul-de-sac and stuffed Stacey's clothes into one of the trash-cans. Then, smoothing down their overalls, they strode purposefully off towards the sound of breaking waves beyond the Promenade des Anglais.
CHAPTER TWO
Helen Stacey lay on her back in the rented bed and stared at the lights of passing traffic reflected on the ceiling. Quarreling always exhausted her and now she was exhausted by weeping as well. But tired as she was, she was unable to sleep: the events of the evening kept on passing and re-passing in front of her eyes. Really, Tom was so absurd sometimes! She didn't particularly blame him for losing his temper, nor even for some of the bitter and hurtful things he had said. She was mature enough to realize that all couples must have the occasional row: there had to be a safety valve through which the aggressions and resentments they "were too inhibited to admit in normal conversation could escape. Indeed sometimes a quarrel was the only way a husband or wife could find out that some trait or habit of which they were totally unaware was bugging their partner. You could almost say they were beneficial . . . despite the anger and exhaustion at the time. But Tom was incapable of taking such a realistic view: with him it had to be for real! When a bad mood took possession of him he just didn't know when or where to stop!
He didn't know when to start either, Helen thought ruefully. That was his trouble: he just wasn't positive enough. In his social life and in his private life particularly in his sex life, she reflected with a sigh he seemed to lack that dynamism that characterized the successful man. That characterized A Man, she corrected herself. She supposed she must admit that he was fundamentally weak . . . and like most weak men, he only became violent and aggressive when he was totally in the wrong! But she loved him, and she was prepared to accept all that. She could take it just so long as he loved her back. Yet. . . Oh, dear! At times it could be frustrating when he turned into a mean sonofabitch the way he had tonight!
If only . . . if only . . . well, if only he was a little more sensitive to her own moods, for instance. Surely he could have seen tonight that all she was waiting for was for him to take charge of the situation, tell her to shut up, and throw her down on this bed? She wanted to be made love to, that was all! Surely that was natural enough? Couldn't he see that her reaction to his bad temper, her own aggression, was simply a subconscious way of the woman in her demanding to be subjugated by the male in him? Didn't he sense that she wanted to be made love to, that she was craving mentally, she corrected herself again to be fucked? She wanted to feel a long throbbing shaft of male hardness sliding far up into her belly! She wanted to feel a man's thick rigid cock plowing back and forth in her hotly quivering pussy until the penis jerked and expanded and spewed its wonderful white-hot load and started the stars of her own orgasm showering down around her!
Was that so very wrong? Even Tom could hardly think so! But the trouble was, he couldn't see her need when it was thrust right under his nose . . . and even if he did (she had to admit), he wasn't exactly everyone's idea of the demon lover! For his lack of positiveness was balanced by an equal want of adventurousness. He didn't seem to realize that, nice though it was to be fucked in the normal way, a girl might sometimes want something a little more . . . well, unusual It wouldn't matter so much if the normal way, for him, was something more violent and effective! But he was really only a beginner in bed. Most times it was Helen herself who had to take the initiative, to show him the way, to make up for his own lack of force.
She sighed again. Even if she did that, he'd get it wrong, like as not! He was a genius at misinterpreting her actions! Look at what happened tonight.. .
It was stupid of Tom to get all uptight just because she'd got bored watching his damned system at work and tried to find a little fun someplace else. All that talk about spoiling his concentration was a blind, and he knew it: the reason for his anger was jealousy, plain and simple! And if only he realized it was crazy to have gotten jealous over that nice Englishman What was his name? Roger somebody. Roger Hodge? Roger Lodge? who was only chatting to her because she looked lonely. He had been so considerate and so nice, asking all about Tom and herself in a friendly, compassionate way. He hadn't even made the beginning of a pass.
If only Tom knew it, he'd have had far more cause to be jealous over what she was doing or rather thinking during the time she was out of the casino, the hour she'd refused to tell him about. Half dreaming, she recreated the scene in her mind.
She'd gone out on to the steps in back of the building and seen that there was some kind of show being put on below. A wooden platform had been erected on the sand and there were a couple of greased wrestlers performing for the benefit of the holidaymakers grouped around it. Helen caught her breath as she saw their muscular bodies shining in the light pouring down on to the shore from the huge windows of the casino. Beyond them, the moon silvered the waves rolling in from the Mediterranean and the forest of masts rocking gently to the swell in the old harbor traced lines of darkness against the floodlit waterfront on the far side of the port.
She knew that wrestling bouts were always fixed, even rehearsed, in advance but she had no interest in which of the fighters won the contest: she was content merely to observe and enjoy the straining tension of male flesh as each of them grappled and heaved and threw in an attempt to gain the advantage. They were both big men a tanned, Nordic-looking guy with straw-colored hair, and a husky Nubian whose black skin glistened in the reflected luminescence. Fascinated. Helen drifted down the steps and approached the platform as though her legs were carrying her there of their own volition.
The wrestlers had been circling around with their hands on one another's shoulders, striving to obtain a commanding grip. Suddenly the Nubian darted forward, planted one black leg in front of him, and threw the blonde man over his hip and on to the boards with a crash that shook the platform. Before the fallen blonde could squirm out of the way, he was smashed to the floor as the other leaped astride his back and pulled up one of his arms in a crippling lock.
From her position at the side of the ring, Helen stared up between the blonde's spread legs at the tautly bulging strip of pale blue nylon tightly sheathing his loins. The oiled skin shivered with highlights as the muscles contracted and the legs twitched. Flattening his adversary's hips to the floor, the black man's powerful haunches tensed against the stretched red satin of his slip as he cruelly increased the pressure of the lock. In a trance-like daze of fascination, the excited American girl moved around the ring until she was opposite the pinioned blonde's head. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in a grimace of agony, the sweat started on his forehead as he strove desperately to break the grip that was paralyzing his arm. Beyond his painfully contorted face, the ridged muscles of the Nubian's black belly heaved in and out above the huge bulge of his penis thrusting out the satin between his ham-like thighs.
There was a sudden convulsion of the half-naked bodies on the platform, a threshing of limbs as flesh slid greasily over flesh . . . and now it was the Nubian who was face-down on the boards with the triumphant blonde straddling his waist as he seized the recumbent black's ankles and tucked them under his armpits. Then, lowering himself slowly until he was sitting astride the Nubian's shoulders, he bent the other man's body into an agonizing arc.
Her eyes wide, Helen felt her breath coming in quick little gasps as she gazed at the combatants. The Nubian's bowed pelvis was only a few inches from her face; she could sec the wiry black pubic hairs curling around the elasticized leg-bands of his mini-slip. Above the soft pouch of his testicles, flattened by the tightly stretched material, the outline of an enormous thick cock thrust out the red satin. Despite herself, she began imagining how he would look if he was totally naked . . . and felt with a thrill of horror a sudden wet warmth between her own thighs. God, she was actually getting turned on by the sight of two wrestlers on the beach!
Groaning with agony as the remorseless pressure on his shrieking back, belly and thigh muscles reached an intolerable point, the Nubian beat frantically on the boards with the palm of one hand to indicate that he conceded the round. Two minutes later, to the ironic cheers of the crowd, they had started another.
After two or three throws which looked and sounded more spectacular than they really were, the blonde took a running leap at the black man, twisted in mid air, and shot his feet out to connect with a sickening thud against his adversary's midriff. The black collapsed in a heap on the floor but he was up again immediately like a rubber ball, his hard forearm streaking out to catch the white man across the throat. The blonde staggered and almost fell and then reeled back to subside to the boards under a hail of blows delivered to the side and back of his neck with the steel-hard flat of the Nubian's great hand. The crowd booed its disapproval.
Helen's breath was coming faster and faster, her breasts rose and fell in arousal under the black dress, the hot wetness up between her legs was trickling down one thigh. Now the wrestlers were splayed out on the floor again, locked wrist to wrist and toe to toe, their greased bodies straining and heaving in a parody of the sexual act. Gaping up between their spread thighs, the lustfully aroused blonde girl feasted her eyes on the twin bulges of their mashed genitals, the blue and the red, wondering how it would feel to be the blonde guy with the sweating muscular weight of that powerful black body hammering you into the ground!
Dear God! she thought guiltily She must get out of this right now, before she disgraced herself by cumming on the beach in front of all these people! She must go on back in that casino and drag Tom away from that lousy roulette table so that he could take her home and smash her down with his own body into the bed . . .
Now, lying tearfully between sleep and waking in that same bed some hours later, she wondered where the hell Tom was and what he was doing. Would he really have picked up some whore and fucked her the way he threatened before he flung out of the apartment? No he hadn't got the guts! He'd moon around from bar to bar, getting drunker and drunker, until finally he'd reel home in the early hours to pass out and ask her forgiveness tomorrow morning! She knew she'd seen it all before!
All the same, she wished he was here now, drunk or not. Without realizing it, her hand had strayed down to the softly curling pussy hair mantling her loins as she recalled the scene that had excited her so much behind the casino. Her probing fingers had unconsciously parted the tender hair-fringed lips of her cunt and her middle finger had sunk teasingly into the moistly heated crevice between her legs. Now her thumb was grazing against the already erect bud of her clitoris, sending shivers of anticipation flickering through her loins as her wetly throbbing vagina flowered open under her hand.
She started suddenly, hearing a noise in the apartment. Was Tom back already? Opening her eyes, she stared up at the reflected light on the ceiling. A shadow had just passed across it. What the hell was he doing, coming in through the French windows from the balcony? She stiffened and turned her head on the pillow. Hadn't there been two shadows . . .
"Tom?" she murmured sleepily and then stifled a cry of horror as she saw the silhouettes of two men standing just inside the room.
They were wearing identical black shirts, white ties, and black pin-stripe suits. There were gloves on their hands and broad-brimmed black velour hats on their heads. A white silk scarf, covering the nose and the lower half of the face, was knotted behind each neck. The taller of the two carried a revolver with an extremely short barrel. "Okay, kid," he said softly, raising the weapon until it pointed directly at the terrified blonde in the bed, "keep quiet and nothing will happen. Make one single sound and it could be real nasty!"
For one wild moment Helen thought she must be in the middle of a TV serial; the intruders looked like every cheap French or American crook you ever saw in a movie! But this was for real . . . there was something about the stubby pistol and the way it was held that carried conviction; she was staring wide-eyed straight into the yawning hole at the end of the barrel and it looked enormous! If the gloved finger curled around the trigger were to exert the tiniest pressure, the slug at the far end of that tunnel would come roaring out and smash her into oblivion! She'd probably never even hear the sound of the report, just see for a hundredth of a second the blast of flame before the world dissolved forever into blackness and she pushed the thought from her and sat convulsively up in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin.
"Please," she whimpered, her voice shrill with terror, "please don't hurt me! If it's money you want, we I don't have much here, but "
"Shuddup!" the taller man snapped, motioning impatiently with the gun. "Get goin', " he added, jerking his head at his companion. The shorter man nodded and moved into the room. He picked up Helen's purse from the dressing-table, shook the contents onto the polished top, and picked out her billfold, passport and traveler's checks. Then he pulled a folded plastic carrier from an inside pocket, shook it out, and dropped the items one by one inside.
"Oh no! Please! Please!" the frightened girl cried. "We don't have very much! We've no more money in France! There are rich people in the block; don't take all we have! Why don't you go see them, and "
She broke off with a squeal of alarm as the tall man stepped forward and slapped her viciously across the face with his free hand. "I thought I told you to shuddup!" he growled. "Come on over here and help me stop this bitch yappin'. "
His companion dumped the carrier on a chair and obediently approached the bed. The tall man leaned down and stripped the covers off with a single savage tug. Helen started back with a gasp of alarm, her full breasts trembling beneath the semi-transparent black 'nightgown she wore. "Roll over on your tits and put your hands behind your back," the man with the gun snarled.
Shuddering with fear, the panic-stricken blonde complied.
The shorter man seized her wrists and held them in an iron grip as the other tossed the gun onto the bed, produced a length of cord from his pants pocket, and bound her hands tightly and expertly together. Then, fishing out another piece of rope, he lashed her arms above the elbow. Pinioned and helpless, she lay sobbing into the pillow.
The intruders grabbed hold of her shoulders and twisted her over so that she was lying on her back with her bound arms beneath her, the circulation already tingling in her veins as the cruel cords bit into her soft flesh. "Open your mouth," the tall man said.
Helen stared wildly up at the two pairs of eyes glittering between the white silk masks and the pulled-down hat brims, searching for some sign of mercy or pity in their depths, trying desperately to reach out with her mind and appeal to whatever sense of honor or decency these men might possess. She found none. The eyes gazed implacably and coldly back at her as the leader abstracted from another pocket a bath sponge and a roll of three-inch adhesive plaster.
"Please, please, please," the shivering young wife babbled fearfully, "leave me alone . . . I won't say anymore; I promise! Don't . . . please!"
The taller man slapped her again once, twice, three times with the flat of his hand and the back, the gloved fingers raising livid weals on her ashen cheeks.
"Aaaaaagh!" she screamed in a muffled voice. "Ohhhh! Aiiiieeee!"
"Open . . . your fuckin'. . . mouth . . . you little bitch!" the intruder rasped, punctuating each phrase with another slap. "Or I'll beat. . . the shit . . . outa you!"
Her teeth chattering with terror, Helen finally opened her shaking jaws wide. At once her tormentor jammed the sponge in between her gaping lips, ripped a length of plaster from the roll, and sealed her mouth with it. Tearing off three more strips, he crisscrossed the first piece with another two and then bound the last from one cheek, down under her chin, and up onto the cheek on the other side of her face, smoothing them roughly into place with the palm of one hard hand. "Now maybe we can get on with the job!" he growled.
Helplessly bound and gagged, her mouth and jaws immovably fixed by the plaster, the shivering girl choked convulsively behind the suffocating sponge and stared tearfully up at her captors, completely at their mercy. A stifled moan forced itself past the cruel gag as she shifted her position on the bed, trying to ease the pins-and-needles shooting through her arms.
The two hoods turned their backs on her without another look. Picking up the carrier, they turned the apartment over systematically, sweeping into it Helen's rings, clips, brooches and gold watch from the dressing table, their two cameras, Tom's binoculars, a Japanese transistor radio, a pocket-size cassette tape machine, even the electric shaver from the bathroom. By the time they had finished, every article of value had gone, and the tears were flowing unchecked from the captive blonde's brimming eyes.
On their way back to the French windows, the taller of the two men stopped by the bed and said, "One more thing and that's it." Together they rolled the helpless young wife over onto her face again and dragged the platinum ring from her wedding finger. Helen moaned in hopeless protest behind the gag and squirmed her bound body on the bed in a vain attempt to escape this last humiliation. But it was useless; they had stropped her of everything of value that she possessed!
Her struggles had caused the hem of her nightgown to ride up over her hips. The tall man stared for a moment at the lusciously contoured smooth white half-moons of her buttocks quivering spasmodically beneath the black garment. Behind the silk scarf his tongue came out and licked his lips. "Jesus!" he muttered hoarsely. "I wonder. . . ? "
"What is it, pal?" the other asked.
"I was just wonderin'. . . " the tall man shot his cuff and looked at his watch. "Hell, why not? We might as well! Now I come to think of it, I imagine a piece of tail right now!"
"You mean we should . . . ? "
"Why not? You'll never have it so easy again, boy!" the tall man took hold of the bound girl's shoulders and twisted her onto her back once more. "Take a look at that raw material!" he said, reaching down to yank the flimsy nightgown even further up her trembling body and exposed the silky curls of golden pussy hair nestling in the naked triangle up between her thighs. Helen jerked and cringed away from his touch as she felt the cool air of the room play suddenly on her exposed genitals.
"Christ! What a pussy!" the shorter man said softly. Suddenly, he peeled off one glove and clapped his hand lewdly over her quivering pubic mound. She flinched and tried vainly to writhe her pelvis away from his lascivious touch as his hard fingers sank between the quivering lips of her defenselessly exposed cunt. Again a muffled groan forced itself past the gag as the realization of what they were going to do flooded her terrified mind. "Hey, whaddya know!" the hood exclaimed suddenly. "The little bitch is wet already! What kind of hot piece have we got here?"
"Wet?" the tall one said. He took off his glove and pawed the helpless blonde. "Right! What d'you suppose goes on? There ain't no man in here that I can see; she can't be havin' it off with some guy while her old man's away, can she?"
"Naw! The sexy little bitch has been finger-fuckin' herself, that's what! Seems to me we ought to take advantage of it, seein' the road's been prepared as you might say! How's about takin' her together, you in the front and me in the back?"
The taller man shook his head. "When I get it, I like it all to myself. We'll draw lots for it."
"Come again?"
Chuckling coarsely behind his mask, the first man leaned down with his forefinger and thumb extended. Helen jerked galvanically and gave a stifled shriek as two twinges of fire flamed across her lower belly. He had plucked two hairs out of her pussy by the roots! She had never felt so helpless and humiliated in her life!
With one of the curling blonde hairs between the finger and thumb of each hand, the hood extended his arms towards his companion. "Draw!" he said tersely.
The other guffawed. "I get it! Who wins -short or long?"
"Shortest has her first."
The second man hesitated, and then reached for the hair grasped in the intruder's gloved hand. They moved to the window to compare them, and the tall hood chuckled again and said: "Mine's longest! Away you go then!" He moved a chair from the dressing-table to the bedside and lowered himself on to it. "I'll sit here. I like to watch their eyes!" he explained.
Petrified with horror at the idea of the brutal and indecent ravishment they were proposing, Helen's eyes flickered wildly from one to the other of her two sadistic captors. The seated man was already staring at her in lewd anticipation; she could see the shape of his rapidly hardening cock thrusting out the material of his pants leg as his eyes glittered salaciously above the white mask. Breathing hoarsely with lustful excitement, his companion was shrugging off his jacket and unzipping his fly with shaking fingers.
The terrified blonde captive gazed fearfully towards the end of the bed as he pushed his pants down his hairy legs and stepped out of them. The iron-hard shape of his penis, jutting out below his belly like the shaft of a heavy blunt spear, was stretching the striped cotton of his shorts towards her in a menacing cone. A spreading spot of seminal fluid had already darkened the thin material and gleamed oily at its tip.
She caught her breath with a thrill of horror as he stripped off the shorts and his cock sprang into view, long and hard and stiff, its underside marbled with veins above the sperm-bloated testicles bunched in their hairy sac below. Desperately, she flexed her bound arms beneath her and tried to twist her pelvis aside as he kneeled up on the bed and seized her fearfully trembling thighs. But he was too strong for her. He wrenched her legs brutally apart so that she was held immovably spread-eagled on her back on the rumpled sheets. Then, chuckling lustfully, he stretched his thumbs and slowly pried apart the cringing little pussy lips, exposing the delicate coral slit of her cunt to his leering gaze. A moment later the brutally bound young wife gurgled with terror as he reached out and ripped the flimsy nightgown away from her lushly ripened breasts with a single powerful jerk. She was naked and defenseless under his obscenely prying hands!
Jamming his knees in between her naked thighs, he began to caress the whole throbbing length of the petrified blonde's moistly revealed vaginal furrow, from the golden triangle of her pubic mound to the tiny puckered ring of her anus nestling between the quivering cheeks of her ass. He ran his fingers tantalizingly over the vee of blonde hairs mantling her loins, pinching and tweaking the sensitive flesh below, so that her swollen cuntal lips were dragged upwards towards her belly. He passed his hand lewdly up and down the trembling vaginal flesh and sank his fingers down between the flanges of her already wetly seeping cunt, finally thumbing them apart again to expose the heated red depths of her pussy. Then, holding her hotly throbbing cunt splayed wide apart with one forefinger and thumb, he began systematically to massage the sensitive knob of throbbing tissue with his other hand.
Helen was past all resistance. Terror-stricken by the bizarre appearance of the brutal hoodlum kneeling between her cruelly spread legs with his visibly pulsing cock swaying above her defenseless genitals while his upper half was still clothed, masked, and even hatted, she moaned softly behind the gag. shifting her head hopelessly from side to side on the pillows as his calloused fingertips probed and explored her secret parts. Overcome with revulsion at the brutal assault she was suffering and with self-disgust at the shameful revelation of her own erotic play before the thieves' arrival she was beyond any feeling but hopeless despair. But there was one final degradation she had still to endure: as the obscenely stroking fingers of the masked man lewdly pried and teased her inner flesh, she felt with a thrill of additional horror a tiny spark of rekindled excitement stir involuntarily in her loins!
She tensed, trying desperately to blot out from her mind the repulsive thought. But her body, already aroused a short while before by her own thrusting fingers while imagining the wrestlers on the beach, refused to obey . . . and the depraved fingers of her ravisher continued remorselessly to caress, massage and tweak her erect little clitoris, causing it to quiver and throb and swell into a nerve center of pulsing excitement once more. The spark grew into a flame and the flame, fanned by the knowledge of her own helplessness and a curious, almost masochistic pleasure in the idea that she was bound and gagged, a defenseless toy for these two strangers to use as they wished, spread rapidly into an uncontrollable fire. Her pinioned thighs began to twitch and shudder. Tiny tremors shivered the soft flesh of her belly. The taut rubbery nipples on her breasts thrust themselves achingly towards the ceiling as her chest began to rise and fall and her breathing quickened. Soon her whole body was jerking spasmodically as she fought to quench the inferno of unwanted desire that was consuming her.
The kneeling crook watched with increasing excitement the effects of his maneuvers. Tiny pearls of moisture appeared along the inner lips of Helen's cunt, beading the hairs that fringed her splayed pussy. Licking his lips in anticipation behind the mask, he trailed his fingers down the slit, working the damp secretion into the folded flesh until the whole gaping pink opening was glistening wetly under his plundering hand.
Leaning back on his naked heels, he began to stroke his own cock, his fingers skimming rapidly up and down the rigid white shaft of male flesh as he plunged the thumb of his other hand deep into the hot pulsing folds of the gagged blonde's cunt.
Then suddenly he brought thumb and forefinger together and opened them wide again, splaying the lips of her vagina as he bent forward and brought the bulging rubbery head of his penis up to the wet hair fringing her pussy.
Helen raised her head and gazed terror-stricken past her trembling breasts, down the smoothly contoured length of her naked body, at the long throbbing rod of malt-hardness that was threatening to invade her secret flesh. As the intruder shuffled backwards on the bed, edging his knees down the insides of her spread thighs, she was unable to drag her eyes away from the pulsating instrument that was lowering itself inch by inch towards the defenseless crevice up between her legs. And the worst thing of all she was forced to admit it as she allowed her head to drop back on the pillows was that she wanted it! Wanted it all! Wanted both of them! Filled with horror and shame at the betrayal of her body under the ravisher's obscenely manipulating hands, sickened by the thought of his fleshy raping cudgel that was only seconds away from ripping into her quaking belly in grotesque violation, she nevertheless wanted it! She cringed in terror at the thought, but she had to have his long hard cock inside her! As though she was under some kind of spell, she found herself lifting her pelvis, searching with her hungrily throbbing cunt for his penis that was going to plow searingly into her own cock-hungry furrow!
Half in ecstasy, half in apprehension, she moaned behind the stifling sponge crammed into her mouth and held there by the torturing adhesive tape. She raised her head again and stared mesmerized at the black hairs on the backs of her violator's fingers as he guided his lust-bloated cock-head towards her expectant pussy. For a moment it nosed there as a stallion's might, nuzzling at the pink flanges of wetly folded flesh, poking gently between them . . . and even as she mentally cried out in her anguish no, no, no! You mustn't! Please don't do it to me! Please she found that she was grinding her loins frantically upwards to meet the invading penis and get its long throbbing length inside her.
With a gasping exhalation of breath, the man flicked his hips forward, forcing the chunky blood-engorged head an inch inside the hotly throbbing lips of Helen's cunt, brutally expanding the swollen rubbery flesh until she thought in her desperation that it must tear apart. She gave a stifled scream.
The penis penetrated another painful inch. The defenseless blonde dropped her head back on the pillows and groaned behind the gag, rolling frenziedly from side to side on her bound arms as she tried to free her legs from the ruthless knees forcing them apart, trying to kick free of the inhuman impalement that she now realized with a shudder of fear was more than she could take . . far more!
She was certain her cuntal lips were tearing. The pain was almost unbearable, racking her belly with twinges of fire as he sank the long hard shaft of flesh further and further, forcing the sensitive walls of her vagina to give way before its relentless advance. She hadn't realized, panting with lustful abandon a few moments before, just how big the man's penis was!
As the obscenely pulsating instrument buried itself still deeper up inside her agonized cuntal flesh, her head flailed wildly from side to side and a choked cry forced itself past the sponge jamming her jaws apart.
"Mmmmmmmmmmmmm! Ooooooooogh!"
The raping hood moaned with desire and fell heavily forward along the tied-up blonde's helpless body. His hot breath gusted into her contorted, tape-plastered face. His hands insinuated themselves under her thrashing hips and cupped the milk-white globes of her soft warm buttocks, pinching and squeezing as he began to fuck into her with long thrusting strokes, grinding his pelvis down hard against the softness of her belly.
Opening her tear-filled eyes, Helen tried to hold his gaze, hoping desperately that some vestige of decency might remain in his lust-drugged mind, some trace of mercy to which she might wordlessly appeal. But the eyes above the silk mask were unfocused; the passion-crazed intruder was aware of nothing but the tight throbbing grip of the raped girl's cunt sliding so thrillingly up and down his thick rigid cock.
The brutally skewered young wife's mind raced in agonized circles as she tried to accustom herself to the horrendous length of the monster penis crushing her inner organs every time his pelvis smashed down against her hips. She quaked spasmodically as the great pulsing shaft plunged like a jack-hammer up into her tortured belly. He was ramming it home with body-jolting force on every downstroke now. God, it would burst through into her throat if he went any further! It was ripping her soul from her body and then devouring it as he flexed the huge bulbous head, gulping it away in mouthfuls of depraved sensuality!
He flexed the mushroomed head again, and Helen groaned uncontrollably deep inside, her teeth clenching on the gagging sponge.
"Mmmmmmmmuuuugggghhhh!"
For a moment the man stopped, watching her averted face as her hotly throbbing passage gradually grew accustomed to the unnatural length of his raping cock plowing into it. His eyes narrowed as a leering, lustful smile spread over the face hidden by the scarf. Then he began a slow revolving movement with his hips, grinding the oversize instrument further up into her wetly quivering pussy as she squirmed and struggled beneath him.
His harsh breathing quickened, billowing out the silk covering his mouth and nose as the sperm-inflated sac of his balls swung crazily against the wetly heated crevice of her ass. And then suddenly he began a racking saw-like motion in and out of her tortured young cunt, thrusting his long cock pitilessly down from the crest of each maddening withdrawal to tear into her nakedly defenseless belly. Yet the pain was miraculously receding now . . . and Helen began once more to experience that strange sensation of forbidden, tingling joy seeping insidiously through her helpless body. She had wondered how it would feel to be under one of those dreamy wrestlers well now she knew! Only this time the man on top had no tightly stretched strip of elasticized nylon cupping his steaming cock and balls: this time his cum-filled balls were bouncing against her ass-cheeks and the lust-expanded shaft of male hardness was buried far up in her own cunt! The outrage and debasement of her most secret parts by the man pinning down her nakedly spread-eagled body was arousing unexpected and lascivious sensations of delight which surged unbidden through her trembling nerves. Her own hips began unconsciously to gyrate in abandoned harmony with the increasing speed of the lubricated shaft pistoning into her.
And then, just as she was about to admit to her confused mind the lewd and forbidden delights flooding out in all directions from her ravaged loins, she sensed an abrupt crescendo in her despoiler's movements. The scarf was sucked violently against his open mouth as he gasped in great lungfuls of air; the pounding of his hips grew sporadic; his muscled belly shuddered and contracted as she felt the head of his skewering penis buried deep in her throbbing vagina begin to heave and expand against the tight clasp of her inner flesh.
It wasn't the most soul-shattering orgasm she had ever felt within herself but it was enough to goad the devils of frustration and desire into a wild dance along her trembling nerves. As the staccato pulsing of the crook's penis gradually subsided, the lustfully aroused blonde tried desperately to stem the squirting flood of semen by grinding her seething loins tight up against his pelvis but the movement itself defeated her purpose: the sucking grasp of her cunt milked the deflating organ clean, drawing out the final drops of his white-hot load to gurgle deep within the distended walls of her impatiently steaming pussy.
The naked young wife was left rolling from side lo side in an abandon of obscenely triggered passion as the rapist collapsed across her writhing body and lay spent, panting hoarsely with his eyes closed and his absurd hat knocked askew on his head.
The tears rolling down the pinioned young wife's cheeks now were tears of frustration! Forgotten were the horrors of her bestial rape and degradation, forgotten the fears at her brutal and savage violation, forgotten the humiliation and shame engendered by their discovery that she had been erotically stimulating herself before their arrival. All she could think of now was cock . . . the long hard violently thrusting cock that only a moment before had been sending such shudders of lewd delight through her quaking frame; the replacement she wanted plowing into her wetly flaming pussy now. now, now . . .
And then suddenly, as her head rolled wildly from side to side in the agony of denial, her eyes fell on the occupant of the chair beside the bed. Of course! There was another man! In her ecstasy of forbidden delight she had forgotten: she had been transported far away from the rented bedroom, the quarrel at the casino, the circumstances of her rape! But there had been two wrestlers . . . and now there were two men!
She stared fascinated at the taller crook in the chair. Wildly aroused by the sight of his companion fucking into her, he had exposed his huge cock and he was rubbing the loose foreskin expertly up and down the rigidly expanding staff, exposing the purplish, bulbously inflated head as he massaged the thick pole of flesh into an even greater hardness.
As if they were pulled on wires, Helen's knees jerked up towards her heaving chest. Her pelvis arched convulsively off the bed, offering the splayed lips of her plundered cunt to his leering gaze as his companion pushed himself upright, the long limp tube of his exhausted penis dragging itself wetly away from her with an obscene sucking squelch to leave a milky trail of sperm across her thigh. "Jesus," he panted, "that's a tight one in there, pal!"
"God, how the little bitch screws!" the taller man breathed as he stripped off his pants and shorts and moved to the foot of the bed. "You got room for one more in there. Shorty?"
"By my guest!" Shorty said with a coarse laugh. He levered himself off the bed and reached for his own pants as the tall man stood staring down at the frantically squirming hips of the bound and gagged blonde.
"All right, doll," the tall man said softly. "If Shorty here has the longest prick in the business, mine's the thickest! By the time I've fucked the shit outa you, that hot little pussy should be ready for anythin'! "
Helen stared speechlessly at the massively throbbing cudgel he held in his milking hand. It was true: the tall man's cock wasn't as long as the raping staff that had so recently been setting her belly on fire but it was the thickest, most fearsome bulk of iron-hard male flesh she had ever seen: the fingers and thumb of his massaging hand barely met around its veined and monstrously pulsating girth! For a moment, despite the demons of unassuaged lust dancing lewdly along her veins, the captive blonde shivered with apprehension.
Then the tall man threw aside his hat and leaped onto the bed, the clipped hairs of his bared head iron gray in the diffuse light. He spread her drawn-up knees even further apart and then, gasping hoarsely with passion, he reached down and guided the chunky blood-engorged head of his huge penis straight into the gaping opening of Helen's greedily yearning cunt, his lean and powerful body smashing a deep groan from behind her gagged lips as he rammed his hotly pulsating shaft as deep as it would plunge into her clasping little pussy. His balls smacked heavily into the crevice between her buttocks, his hard muscled stomach boring cruelly into the yielding softness of her belly.
Helen strained her loins against him, wanting him even deeper, wanting him still further up inside her insanely quivering cunt. But as the abnormally thick staff forced the distended flesh of her vaginal passage in rippling waves of pain before it, a spasm of agony shot through her naked loins, a pain so unbearable that for a moment she forgot the ecstasy of her abandon and screamed wildly against the sponge jamming her open mouth.
"Mmmmmm mmmmmmmmmmmmm!" she gargled. "Urrrrrrrggghhh!"
She squirmed with all her strength to evade the bestial impalement. Her naked ass-cheeks writhed furiously under his grasping hands and her legs jerked out straight and then locked behind his back in an attempt to widen her cuntal passage and ease his penetration. But her anguished struggles served only to wedge the thickly gleaming cock more securely in her tortured cunt. It was as though a monstrous battering-ram was being remorselessly hammered between the splayed lips of her pussy and up into her belly! She was hopelessly skewered on the brutally thick fleshiness of that raping pole she had wanted so much only seconds before.
Panting wildly, the bucking thief began to fuck rhythmically in and out of the hotly clasping folds of Helen's dilated young cunt, plowing the inflamed spear of his lust-thickened cock again and again into the brutally ravished tightness of her vagina. Her blonde hair flailed whip-like on the pillows in helpless subjugation as the tempo of his pistoning hips increased and his huge penis pistoned on and on up into her savagely stretched pussy. Her mind was adrift on a sea of pain and passion. The flesh of her ripe young buttocks shuddered uncontrollably under the pressure of his hard fingers. The soft bulge of her belly trembled convulsively every time her agonizingly splayed thighs were buffeted by another fierce thrust of the intruder's raping hips.
Pounded into total submission by the hot pulsing cock ramming up into her cruelly distended cunt, the helpless young wife groaned afresh with every vicious stroke. But the agony and the humiliation were rapidly being submerged again by the whirling sensations of forbidden pleasure as her tingling loins accustomed themselves to the alien thickness wedging itself into them. The shame of lying so helplessly bound and gagged on her own bed while they used her body, one after the Other, like a whore's the masochistic thrill of feeling them satisfy in her their brutal male lust was arousing in her a storm of wanton passion she didn't know she possessed! There was no doubt about it: pain and pleasure, shame and ecstasy, had become inextricably mixed in her reeling mind!
Abruptly her last remaining defenses crumbled and she began mumbling and howling insanely through the gag in lustful abandon as the pistoning rod of male hardness drew out the pink fleshy lips of her tight little cunt and then shoved them fiercely back up into her belly with each demonic thrust. Oh God! Oh God! It was unendurable . . . it was intolerable . . . it was so delicious! If the brutally invading shaft splatted into her loins and set her secret flesh on fire for much longer, she was going to cum . . . she knew she was!
The madly fucking hood felt his heart pumping wildly in his chest. His breath jetted faster and faster through his nose as she pounded her hips savagely back against him, gargling her lust aloud through the gag. The little bitch was going out of her mind! He couldn't remember when he'd seen a broad so hot! Jesus, it was as much as he could do to keep up with her! . . .
Helen was writhing so violently that she was almost throwing him off her! Her tingling body was at the crest of the wave! It didn't matter what they did to her now she was going to cum at any moment!
Sensing that the violated blonde was about to peak, the tall man plunged his stone-hard cock into her fire-filled cunt with redoubled fury, brutally splaying her lushly rounded buttocks apart as he fucked faster and faster into her clasping young cunt. And suddenly he felt her stiffen and shudder.
"Mmmmmmmmm? Mmmmmmmmm! Eeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuugh!" she screamed in a demented, muffled wail and then her sensually ripened body arched up off the bed, bucking and threshing and jerking in a crescendo of intolerable delight as her orgasm tremored insanely through her with the force of a tropical tempest!
The wild churning of her lust-inflamed body triggered off the raping intruder's own climax. He raised his masked head to bellow out a gasping cry of release. His hips shuddered convulsively forward, ramming his skewering shaft even deeper up into the naked American girl's belly as the throbbing head of his huge cock exploded in the tightly convulsing depths of her vise-like pussy. Scalding squirts of his sperm jetted far up into the ravished blonde's vaginal passage, and she moaned in mindless ecstasy with each fresh spurt of his white-hot semen.
For a long moment he held her cruelly there, impaled on his wildly jerking penis as he ejaculated his churning cum in forceful gushes up into her quivering belly. Then he thrust violently down on her spread thighs and pushed himself exhaustedly away from her, his deflated, cum-covered shaft pulling free of her plundered hole with a wet sluicing sound that echoed in the now silent room.
"Christ, that was good!" he muttered as he pulled on his shorts and pants, and clapped the hat back on his head. "But we got to leave you now, sweetie. We got business to attend to!"
His companion, who had been lounging against the wall beside the bed, watching, chuckled obscenely. "Thanks for the uh -hospitality, kid!" he said with an ironic bow. "And thanks for the loot as well!"
He picked up the plastic carrier bulging with stolen goods and raised one hand in a mock salute. "Be seein' you again sometime I hope!" he leered.
Together the two crooks gave a last look around the plundered apartment and then moved silently out of the bedroom and into the hallway. A moment later the twice-raped girl heard the snap and click of the front door being opened and closed. Cruelly bound and gagged on the bed in the empty room, her ravished body still shuddering from the violence of her debauch, she was left helplessly alone in the dark.
CHAPTER THREE
The sun shone brightly over the Bay of Angels but there was a chill wind blowing inshore from Corsica, whipping the glittering blue sea into whitecaps that broke choppily along the shingle beach. It had rained earlier in the morning, and there were still patches of damp pockmarking the wide paving of the Promenade des Anglais. White-coated waiters hurried to dismantle the striped umbrellas shielding the cafe tables as the freshening breeze flapped awnings all along the sea-front and tossed the branches of palm trees lining the center reservation of the roadway. Helen Stacey and her husband were sitting morosely over coffee and orange juice outside a bar beside the Palais de la Mediterranee. The twin disasters of Tom's mugging and the burglary of the apartment had left them destitute.
Stacey stared resentfully at a group of sunbathers who had been driven off the beach by the wind and were now waiting for a gap in the flow of Mercedes, Alfa Romeos, Cadillacs and Rolls Royces so that they could cross the street and seek the shelter of their hotels. "Just our damned luck," he said bitterly, "that I should get held up and robbed the very same night that some sonofabitch decides to do the lousy apartment!"
"Oh darling," Helen said, "there's no point going on and on about it! The thing is what are we going to do?"
He shrugged hopelessly. "Search me!" he said.
The police who had brought him home just after dawn in a borrowed cloak to find Helen still hysterically bound and gagged on the bed had been sympathetic but unhelpful. It was a terrible thing, but it happened sometimes to visitors who ventured into the side streets late at night. Unfortunately crimes of violence were on the increase in Nice as everywhere else. Naturally they would circularize the details of the outrage, but.. . The Brigadier raised his shoulders in a Gallic shrug. There were well-established channels through which professionals could dispose of stolen passports and traveler's checks; doubtless those of Monsieur and Madame would already have been suitably altered. Nevertheless every effort would be made to recover their property. A list of the items missing from the apartment had already been issued to jewelers and second-hand stores. But he would be failing in his duty if he held out much hope that they could be found. Naturally he would contact them immediately if there was any definite news. But immediately. Perhaps in a week or ten days.. .
The smooth young man at the American
Consulate off the Boulevard Victor Hugo had been equally sympathetic but scarcely more helpful. They would, of course, make representations to the proper authorities. It was a scandal that such things could happen to United States citizens in France and what an unhappy coincidence that both of them should have been the victims of such brutal assaults on the same evening! But he could assure them that the French police were most efficient and most cooperative. Everything possible would be done.
So far as the theft of all their money and valuables was concerned there was not much that could be done. It was unfortunate, but the hands of the Consulate staff were tied. They were not but definitely not allowed to advance money to citizens in distress. If they did although of course, Mr. and Mrs. Stacey were in an entirely different class he was sure they'd appreciate that they would be inundated with every hippy and drop-out who fancied a free holiday at his government's expense. Nevertheless a rule was a rule. He was sure they'd understand.
New passports could, of course, be issued to them, since the police confirmed that theirs had genuinely been stolen. The Consulate would be happy to settle the bill at the St. Roch Hospital, where Tom's injuries had been treated. But more than that they could not do. The only suggestion the young man could offer was that they should apply to be repatriated. The means existed whereby, on surrender of their new passports, the Consulate could arrange to fly them back to the United States. The passports would be returned as soon as the money for the fares was refunded back home.
"But Jesus," Tom burst out, "I don't want to go back home right now! I'm working in London, for God's sakes! Besides, I don't have any funds in the United States and neither of us have any relatives there who could help."
The young man spread his beautifully manicured hands in a gesture of resignation. In that case, he was afraid there was nothing they could do. The regulations only provided for single passages to New York. But they must not hesitate to call again if there was anything, anything at all, they needed. The Consulate was there to help, after all . .
Under the palms outside the glaring white building, Tom and Helen compared notes. The only money they had in the world was a ten-franc note that Helen had found stuffed into the pocket of a jacket hanging in the closet. The bill was worth about two dollars. They decided to spend it having breakfast on the Promenade des Anglais.
For awhile they sipped their coffee in silence. Helen was pale but composed. Tom was a sorry sight. His nose was swollen, his lips cut and bruised; one of his eyes was purple and half closed behind his dark glasses; his body was a mass of aches and pains. Although naturally distressed and outraged at the discovery of his ravished wife in the plundered apartment, typically enough his sympathy had been tempered by fury at the loss of all their money and possessions.. . and as the gravity of their situation, penniless and alone in a foreign country with no means of obtaining help, was gradually borne in on him, he was more and more inclined to blame Helen for the whole thing. After all. he reasoned, if she hadn't behaved the way she did at the casino in Cannes, there would have been no quarrel, he wouldn't have left the apartment in a rage, and neither of them would have been robbed!
Indignant at his lack of sensitivity, Helen at first relapsed into a mood of suppressed fury, but finally the seriousness of their plight drew them together, and the shared calamity succeeded where human relations failed: united by the common bond of disaster, they sat in mutual sympathy and stared at their cold coffee, unheeding the gay crowds thronging the windy promenade, wondering what in hell they were going to do . . .
They had been silent for several minutes, each of them sunk in gloomy reflection, when a tall man at the next table lowered his copy of Nice-Matin and exclaimed: "I say! Fancy seeing you two here! It's a small world, isn't it?" It was the Englishman Helen had met at the casino.
Helen gave an exclamation of pleasure and swung around in her chair. Tom muttered, "Oh, for Christ's sake!" in a tone of audible disgust and stared resolutely out past the traffic! jamming the roadway towards the angry sea. But: the Englishman was not to be put off. "What a piece of luck!" he exclaimed, laying down the paper and sliding across into the seat next to Helen's. "May I join you? You don't mind . . . ? Good Lord! Whatever happened to you, old: chap?" He had suddenly caught sight of the marks on Tom's averted face. '
"I cut myself shaving," Stacey replied without turning around.
"Oh Tom!" Helen was reproachful. "You must forgive him: he had a terrible experience last night," she explained with an exaggeratedly wide smile at the newcomer. "He was beaten up. and robbed in an alley."
"Beaten up and.. . ? I say! That's a bit strong! Here in Nice?" The Englishman sounded incredulous. "I mean I could understand it if you said Marseille, but. . . How did it happen? And where?"
"He thought he'd like to see a spot of night life late-night life." Helen couldn't resist turning the knife. "Didn't you, darling?"
Tom's surly reply was lost in the grinding of gears as the traffic jerked slowly forward for ten yards and then came to standstill again. A Boeing 727 taking off from the airport at the far end of the Promenade shot into view over the threshing palms and arrowed up into the sky with a howl of jets under full boost. TM
Englishman was making sympathetic noises.
"And that's not all," Helen said with forced brightness. "While he was hitting those hoodlums' fists with his poor head, our apartment was broken into and robbed too, and I was.. . I was . . . well, it wasn't a very pleasant night for either of us, I can tell you!"
"Good God! What rotten luck! But you don't mean to tell me that they. . . that you were . . . ? "
"It wasn't very nice," Helen said again. And then, with a brave attempt at gaiety: "But what am I thinking of you haven't really met my husband, have you?" She caught Tom's eye and held it with a level, warning stare. "Darling, I'd like to have you meet Mr. Roger --? "
"Todd," their new acquaintance supplied with a smile. "Roger Molegate Todd. How d'you do?" He held out his hand across the table.
Faced with his wife's uncompromising gaze and the other's ready smile, Tom could hardly refuse to shake hands. "Stacey. Glad to know you," he mumbled untruthfully. He disliked the Englishman even more today than he had last night. The man's lean, tanned face was creased in just the right places. His David Niven moustache was brushed crisply outwards. His keen blue eyes twinkled as brightly as the highlights on his immaculate iron-gray hair. With his spotless white pants, his alligator belt and the razor-sharp creases on his violet Pierre Cardin shirt, he looked like one of those improbably well-groomed sophisticates advertising Scotch whiskey or imported shoes on the glossy pages of Esquire. Even if he hadn't been bruised, battered and penniless, Tom Stacey knew that he would still have felt clumsy, unkempt and boorish in Todd's presence.
"You've had your fill of bad luck, I must say," the Englishman commiserated. "Fancy all that happening on the same night! I do hope neither of yon was badly hurt?"
"It's not so much that," Helen wailed. "But we're stuck here without a cent!" She brushed aside an angry exclamation from her husband and went on: "We lost everything money, traveler's checks, passports, air tickets, everything. There isn't even anything we can' sell. Those burglars stripped the apartment. They even took my wedding ring. Tom's too, if it comes to that. And all his money and papers and his gold cigarette lighter, didn't they darling?"
"I'm sure Mr. Todd doesn't want to hear all about our misfortune," Tom said.
"Not at all," The Englishman said politely. "You must be insured, though?"
"The usual traveler's insurance," Helen said. "But you know how long that takes to come through! It's what we do now that matters. People sympathize with robbery victims, but they never think of how they manage to get by after -"
"Helen!" Tom interrupted. "There's no need to -"
"Couldn't you cable home for more funds?" Todd suggested helpfully.
"We have no folks in the United States," Helen said impulsively. "We don't have much money, to be honest. Tom's doing research and lecturing at Oxford. We . . . what we brought with us was all we had. Until Tom's next pay check at the beginning of the semester." She shook her head, brushed away a tear from her eye and burst out: "I just don't know what we're going to do . . . "
"Look, honey, I told you . . . that's our worry!" Tom growled.
Todd was staring absently at Helen's empty coffee cup. He traced the pattern of a flower woven into the orange linen tablecloth with one manicured finger and then looked up suddenly, his eyes creasing into a frank smile: "One doesn't want to butt in on other people's affairs," he said. "But well, I hope it doesn't sound frightfully presumptuous and all that I mean to say, far be it from em to dash in where the great old angels fear to tread . . . " He paused and looked unseeingly across the street. For once there was a lull in the traffic. The sun had gone in and suddenly the whitecaps beyond the promenade looked menacing and gray.
"You were going to say. . . ? " Helen prompted gently.
Todd looked acutely embarrassed. "The fact is.. . well, I don't know if you'd be at all interested. But as a matter-of-fact, I'm in a bit of hole myself. It occurred to me that perhaps we could do each other a favor. I mean you could do a little service for me and earn some cash for yourselves at the same time. If you were at all interested, that is. And it would incidentally mean a free passage back to England for you into the bargain."
"Oh, but that's wonderful!" Helen began eagerly, when her husband cut brusquely across her. "Thanks," he said ungraciously, "but I guess we can manage on our own. It's kind of you, just the same."
"Tom! How can you be so stupid!" the girl cried angrily. Her blue eyes were glinting and there was a spot of high color on each cheek. She turned deliberately to the Englishman and laid a hand on his arm. "Of course we'd be delighted to hear your proposition, Mr. Todd." Flashing a warning glance at Stacey, she added: "Just what did you have in mind?"
Todd looked over his shoulder. Most of the holidaymakers had left the beach now and the tables around them were crowded. "If you don't mind," he said in a low voice, "it is rather confidential. You never know who's listening, what? Look here why don't you come on out to my place and I can explain in all there. It's not far. We're at Villefranche, just around the corner."
Helen raised questioning eyebrows at her husband. He shrugged. "What the hell! What else is there to do, for God's sakes?"
Todd ignored his unfriendly tone, "Splendid!" he said heartily, picking up their tab from under Helen's saucer. "No, let me, please! I insist!" Signaling for a waiter, he paid the bill and shepherded them out on to the sidewalk and around to the drive-in in front of the massive portico of the Palais de la Mediterranee. He summoned the uniformed attendant with an imperious wave of his hand and then turned suddenly to Helen. "I say, you don't by any chance happen to have a ten-franc note on you, do you?"
"Why surely," the young blonde said at once. Reaching into her pocket, she handed over the only bill they had, the last of their worldly wealth.
"What the hell did you want to do that for?" Tom muttered fiercely as Todd took the bill and presented it to the doorman with a few words of instruction. "Have you gone crazy or something? You know perfectly well that's all we have!"
"Will you quit fighting?" Helen whispered angrily. "You're supposed to be a gambler don't you even know when you're on to a good thing? Haven't you learned yet that you have to spend some to get some? Now just keep quiet and let me handle this, will you?"
Stacey was still grumbling to himself when the attendant returned with Todd's automobile, a gleaming white Jaguar XJ sedan. Naturally it had to be a Jaguar, the discomfited young American thought bitterly to himself. And, of course, it would be white!
Todd handed Helen courteously into the passenger seat, slid behind the wheel, and closed the heavy custom-built door. Tom climbed in back and sank into the luxurious embrace of the padded black leather seat. The doorman held up the traffic and saluted . . . and the Jaguar shot away along the Promenade des Anglais with a barely discernible purr of its powerful motor.
They turned right, threaded their way through a maze of back streets in the area where Tom had been attacked the previous night, circled the magenta Italianate colonnades of the Place Massena, shot past the rows of power boats lining the port, and sped up the long hill leading to the Moyenne Corniche with a discreet bellow of the Jaguar's exhausts. Todd drove fast and expertly, winding the heavy car through the dense pre-lunch traffic as though it had been a bicycle. The bastard! Tom Stacey thought enviously in the back seat. He would have to drive like a professional in addition to everything else.
They left the cornice just after Villefranche and climbed a narrow zigzag road snaking up the mountainside. Soon Todd turned into a quiet residential street lined with tall cypress hedges behind which huge green-shuttered villas looked out over the sea. At the far end he braked in front of a pair of high wrought-iron gates and gave two staccato blasts on his horn. The electrically operated gates swung silently open, and he drove through into a courtyard surrounded by orange trees and tamarisk and bougainvillea. The house was long and low, a white, flat-roofed crescent cantilevered out over the slope of the hill. Todd helped Helen out of the car and led them past a three-car garage where two burly men in overalls washing a Mercedes sedan drew discreetly back as they came into view, and on into the cool shadows of a marble-floored hallway.
The rooms were large and airy, the pale walls hung with bizarre abstract canvasses whose gaudy colors complemented the severe blacks and whites of the steel-and-leather Italian furniture. As they passed through open french windows and came out onto the terrace, Helen exclaimed aloud with delight. "Oh my!" she cried. "But that's beautiful.'"
The sun had come out again. Beyond the wide terrace with its low chairs and parasol pines and its urns of scarlet geraniums, a low wall bright with begonias and zinnias and petunias separated them from the aching blue of an Olympic-size pool. Below this, the flaming orange heads of bronze-leaved cannas lilies punctuated a plantation of oleanders. And then the land dropped down in a series of stepped terraces planted with olive trees and vines towards the leaping line of the coast.
Far below, ant-sized automobiles glittered along the narrow ribbon of road skirting the crowded waterfront of Villefranche harbor. On the far side of the bay, the lizard-head of Cap Ferrdt, its wooded prominences hiding the homes of millionaires and movie stars, lay along the rumpled azure sheet of the ocean. Helen was watching a tiny arrowhead of foam charting the course of a speedboat across the blue water. "It's beautiful!" she breathed again.
Todd shaded his eyes with one hand and looked out towards the long line of cloud smudging the horizon. "Yes, it's not a bad view," he said judiciously. "On a clear day, you can see Corsica."
Settling them in chairs around the pool, he rang a small hand-bell and ordered dry martinis from an Arab butler in a white coat who appeared from a side entrance to the house. It was very hot in the bright sunlight. They were sheltered from the breeze tossing the olive trees on the terraces below and the heat tremored the air above the banks of red and white and yellow flowers surrounding the pool. Somewhere off to one side a man in faded blue overalls was adjusting a sprinkler watering a rose garden.
"I'll get right down to the point," Todd said as soon as the drinks had been served. "The fact is, as I said, I'm in a bit of a hole. It all began a few months ago when I bought a caravan a trailer, I think you call it in America. Cheers! Here's to better luck next time!" He raised his glass, sipped appreciatively, nodded, and then went on:
"Now I don't know if you know the rules here, but if you bring a car or a trailer into the country, you're only allowed to keep it here six months in any one year. If you keep it longer than that, you have to pay duty on it and the duty can be pretty steep, as much as forty to fifty percent of the value of the vehicle, plus an added value tax of another twenty percent on top of that. You probably know that you can also buy a car or a trailer in a country without paying tax on it again if you take it out in less than six months."
"You mean you get it on export?" Helen ventured.
"Exactly. Well, this trailer was bought on export in Italy. And pretty damned expensive it was, I can tell you. Even without tax it set me back over six thousand dollars! If I keep it here, it'll still cost another five thousand in taxes alone!"
Despite his ill-humor, Tom whistled. "Six thousand dollars! That must be some trailer!" he exclaimed.
"Yes, it's luxury job. As you can imagine, the duty on it here would come high. But I never intended it to stay here: it's destined to go to my place in England. We have a small estate in Hertfordshire just for weekends, you know. Actually we live in London."
Stacey looked wonderingly around at the house, the pool, the immaculately kept garden.
"A place in London, a place in Hertfordshire, did you say? and this? You own this too?" The guy must really be loaded, he thought enviously.
Todd nodded. "One does like a bit of privacy," he said vaguely. "The point is, the bloody trailer's been here six months already -all but a few days. If it's not out of France by the end of the week, the bastards are going to drop on me for another five thousand dollars!"
"Why don't you take it back to England then?" Tom asked.
"I was due to. We'd made all arrangements to leave today, actually. But unfortunately my wife's fallen ill." He jerked his head towards the house. "I can't leave her, the way site is. And unless I can find some other way of getting the bloody trailer out, I'm stuck!"
Helen was sitting on the edge of her chair, her eyes shining, "is that the proposition . . . are you suggesting . . . do you mean you'd like us to take it for you?" she asked breathlessly. "Is that it?"
Todd grinned and drained his glass. "Hole in one! That's a bright girl! Look cards on the table, what? You're in a hole, stony broke. I'm in a hole, wanting to avoid paying duty. If you'll drive the trailer back to the old country, I'll pay all expenses, provide a car to tow it, and give you five hundred dollars cash in addition half now and half when you deliver it in England. You can put it on the cross-Channel ferry and take it to Oxford or wherever you're going, and
I'll arrange to have someone pick it up from you there and pay you the balance. What do you say?" He rose to his feet, grinned quizzically down at them, and added: "Think it over. I'll just go and see about some more drinks."
Tactfully, instead of ringing the bell, he strode back towards the house to give the order.
The two young Americans looked at each other. "What did I tell you?" Helen said triumphantly. "I knew he'd be good for us!"
Tom shook his head. "I don't like it," he said decisively.
His wife stared at him. "Don't like it?" she echoed unbelievingly. "Tom Stacey, have you gone crazy or something? An hour ago we were in despair. We didn't know how we'd ever get out of this mess. Now here we are: a fairy godmother presents us with an out on a plate plus five hundred dollars in cash! and all you can say is you don't like it!" Her blue eyes were flashing with indignation.
Tom sniffed. "Fairy maybe. I'm not so sure about the godmother."
"Tom!"
"I don't care. I don't like the guy," her husband persisted doggedly. "He's too well-dressed, too damned smooth altogether. I don't trust him. And he's too goddamn familiar with you too!"
"Aha!" Helen gave a short sarcastic laugh. "Now we're getting some place! What you mean is, you're jealous! Isn't that it?"
"Certainly not. I don't have to be jealous of that kind of creep! I just don't think he's on the level, is all. The trailer's probably stolen. I've heard of guys offering students money to drive hot cars between England and the Continent. The poor bastards think they're on to a good thing some ready cash and a free holiday into the bargain. Then when the cops catch up with them and the car turns out to have been stolen, the guy who's hired them has disappeared and the poor mug takes the rap!"
Helen shook her blonde head and sighed. "Oh, Tom!" she said, waving her arm at the luxury villa, the pool, the oleander trees. "D'you really think a man with all this is going to bother. . . ? "
"He could have rented the place," Tom pointed out. "We only have his word for it that he owns it or the trailer."
"You only have my word for it that I was tied up and raped and the apartment robbed! I only have yours that you were mugged! For God's sakes, you have to believe something. Why should you think -"
"Because the guy's too damned plausible, that's why. And because he's offering us too much money, if you want to know!"
"Too much . . . ? You're out of your mind! It's worth it to him!"
"I don't see why."
"Like I told you just now you have to spend some to get some. If we sleep in the trailer what are his expenses going to be? The gasoline, our food for a couple of days, the fares to get us across the English Channel with the car and trailer.. . a hundred dollars top weight! Plus five hundred to us, that's six hundred in all. Anyone would pay that to save several thousand surely you can see that? It's just good business!"
"If he's so goddamn rich, why does a mere five thousand worry him so much?" Tom demanded.
"He's probably rich because he worries about small amounts!"
"Anyway," the dubious young American said, switching his attack to another line, "even if the trailer and the car are not stolen, he's probably setting us up as some kind of patsies."
"Patsies? What kind of expression is that?"
"You know perfectly well what I mean," Tom said angrily. "Maybe we'd unknowingly be smuggling stolen jewels. Maybe there's gold bullion or undeclared diamonds hidden some place in that caravan. It's the same routine but the goods are different, that's all. If we make it, he collects the stuff without having taken any risk: if we're caught, he knows nothing about it. I tell you I don't want any part of it!"
Helen compressed her lips and stared out to sea. The speedboat, returning to Villefranche for lunch, had left a broad crescent of white across the glittering blue surface of the water. "You can do as you like," she said levelly. "but I'm going to accept his offer, and that's all there is to it!"
Her husband opened his mouth to protest and then broke off short with a smothered curse as Todd, followed by the Arab butler carrying a tray, springheeled down towards them from the terrace. "Well what do you say?" the Englishman smiled. "Have you decided?"
"What's the catch?" Tom asked rudely.
"Catch, old man?" Todd's eyebrows rose in puzzlement. "I'm afraid I'm not quite with you. The only possible trouble you could have and I'd have it, too, if I were taking the bloody thing
is backing it up, and getting the trailer past the British customs without paying duty. But that's why you can be of such use to me; as Americans, you'll be treated as foreign tourists
and you have the right to take it in! If there is any trouble . . . well, you just leave the bally thing at Dover, and I'll pay the duty and collect it when my wife and I come over. At least I'll have saved the French tax, which is the whole aim of the operation after all!"
Before Tom could say anything else, Helen leaned forward and laid her hand once more on the Englishman's sleeve. "Mr. Todd," she said with a sweet smile, "we're both very grateful to you and we shall be most happy to accept your kind offer. . . ! "
CHAPTER FOUR
They picked up the trailer at Marseille. A specialized cabinetmaker had been carrying out certain modifications to the built-in sycamore and teak furniture, Todd told them. There were no wood craftsmen good enough to do the job in Nice. He collected Tom and Helen from their apartment early in the morning and drove them over himself in the Jaguar before lunch.
It was a clear hot day with a thin veil of cirrus cloud teased out immensely high up in the western half of the blue sky. As Todd threaded the big car with practiced ease through the dense holiday traffic choking the tree-lined Route Nationate skirting the bare ridge of the Massif des Maures, a wind sprang up. The Mistral, that strong, dry current of air that roars down the Rhone valley and fans out among the parallel mountain chains of Provence, had begun to blow. By the time they dropped down from the jagged white limestone outcrops serrating the skyline to the northeast of Marseille, the branches of the parasol pines on either side of the road were tossing angrily and the harsh rattling of the cicadas ebbed and flowed like the breaking of waves on a stony shore.
The trailer was in a yard attached to a sawmill on the outskirts of the city. Helen caught her breath with astonishment when she saw it. It was immense as wide as the law permitted for towing on a highway, and longer than any caravan she had ever seen. There were wide windows beneath the pitched, chalet-type roof and double doors taking up most of the squared-off rear end. Inside, the trailer was palatial. The doors led into a spacious lounge fitted with television, hi-fi, built-in bookshelves, a desk, a collapsible dining table and half a dozen luxurious leather armchairs screwed to the floor through the wall-to-wall carpet. Behind a hatchway in the bulkhead they could see an ultra-modern kitchen equipped with deep-freeze, washing machine, cooker, double sink, and a glittering array of pans in stainless steel. Beyond this again were a miniature shower-room and toilet and three surprisingly large sleeping cubicles, one double and two single, each provided with sliding door closets and built-in dressing-tables. All the furniture was teak and the paneling throughout the trailer was in greenish-gray sycamore. "My God!" Helen breathed. "No wonder you're anxious to avoid paying duty on this!"
Todd smiled. "They've done it pretty well, haven't they?" he said. "You should have seen the original Italian paneling. Some kind of varnished pine, I think. It was ghastly! Like an Alpine holiday hotel!"
He led them into the kitchen and explained: "The water tanks are in the roof. There should be enough to last you the journey. The batteries for the lights, the TV. the vacuum cleaner, the dish-washer and so on are up there too. Cooking's by gas there are two 14-kilo bottles of butane under here and the water's heated automatically when you turn the faucet. You'll find plenty of food in the freezer and there's a liquor cabinet in the lounge."
Outside again, he showed them the car they were to tow it with a Mercedes 350 sedan with heavy-duty tires. "You'll find she swings about a bit with all that weight behind," he told Tom. "And I'm afraid the steering'll be somewhat light especially with the Mistral blowing like this. But those tires cut down the wander a bit you should be able to average a pretty fair sixty or so, especially along the auto route."
"Thanks," the young man said. "I guess we shall be able to manage okay. You seem to have thought of everything." He was in a better mood today after a good night's sleep and the comforting feel of two hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket.
"There is one other thing.. . " Todd hesitated, looking strangely unsure of himself for once. "The fact is, I have a little confession to make." He looked dubiously at the two young Americans and then went on: "I told you the trailer had to be out of the country by the end of the week. Actually the six months is already up: it expired a couple of days ago. But you shouldn't have any trouble," he continued hurriedly. "I mean to say as long as it's not seen down here, where it's known, nobody's going to know are they? They don't circularize the whole bloody country just in case one caravan that ought to have gone is still here!"
"Will we have any trouble with the French customs at Calais when we put it on the boat?" Tom asked. He knew there had to be a catch somewhere. If this was all it was. he was relieved rather than angry.
"No, no. Absolutely not. The customs people never check when you're leaving a country, do they? You don't even go through customs."
"That's right," Stacey admitted.
"No the only possible flap would be if you ran into a spot check somewhere along the way. They have motorcycle squads the French customs. I mean and they do occasionally set up a road block and ask for papers when they see foreign vehicles."
"What do we do if we get caught in one of those?"
"Show them the papers they're in the bureau in the lounge. If they turn nasty, explain you're driving it for a friend . . . and call me. If the worst comes to the worst I'll simply get in the Jag and tool up the motorway to pay the bloody duty. The thing is, though, I've been tipped off by certain er business connections: I know where these checks are likely to be. Most of them are on by-roads. They figure that people trying to put one over on the authorities are going to be as inconspicuous as possible, to take the lesser-known routes . . . and that's where they hope to nab them! If you do the obvious and breeze straight on up the great old auto route, you should be right as rain. In any case I've made out a route card for you, avoiding all the known checks. It's most important that you keep exactly to this route." Todd paused to allow his words to sink in and then repeated emphatically: "Most important!"
A little later, after a few final instructions from the Englishman, the Mercedes was backed up to the huge trailer by a mechanic, tire-pressures were checked on the caravan's four wheels, Tom and Helen packed their baggage into the back of the car . . . and they were away.
* * *
By the time it was nearly dusk that they stopped for the night in a huge lay-by near not far from Valence, the Mistral had scoured the last vestiges of cloud from the sky. The bright blue overhead as they swept northward through Avignon and Orange and Montelimar was now shading from a curious green-gray color to a burnished brass on the horizon. And the wind. which had been buffeting the Mercedes and its cumbersome load exasperatingly all the way along the turnpike, was blowing more strongly than ever. Among the cars and trailers parked along the crowded slope of the grassy space, doors shut with a slam, plucked clothes dragged as the holidaymakers crossed the crisp gravel walks leading to the wash-houses, olives and pines bent, and every shutter and window and blindcord knocked and rattled and creaked and moaned under its relentless pressure.
The wind blew steadily as Tom and Helen transferred their baggage from the Mercedes to the trailer. It hurled itself gustily against the caravan sides as they prepared their meal. It was blustering and surging around the site and yammering one of the double doors as they ate and drank. And it howled on as the lights in the trailers on either side of them were extinguished one by one.
Then, just before midnight, quite suddenly it stopped.
Helen was sitting on the big double bunk with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of cognac in the other. Her freshly brushed hair tumbled over her shoulders in a golden cascade. Her lustily ripened breasts and the smooth contours of her sensually swelling body showed tantalizingly through the gauzy folds of a sheer black nightgown. She was beginning to enjoy the trip. They had had quite a lot of wine to drink with their meal and she was slightly tipsy. It would be fun to sink back on those downy pillows and let her senses take over when Tom came in. It was kind of cute to be all alone in the trailer in the middle of all those other folks and yet completely cut off from them . . . quite romantic really! Shifting her satiny thighs on the sheets, she stubbed her cigarette and tried not to think too much about the wrestlers on the beach and the two hoodlums who had raped her in the apartment two nights ago. It was shameful, the way she had turned on . . . in fact she'd rather not think about it! She needed the consolation of Tom's arms around her, the satisfying feeling of Tom's warmly pulsating cock rammed far up into her belly, to blot out the memory of that strangely disturbing experience . . .
But where in hell was he? He'd gone out to the wash-house as she was taking her shower, saying that he wanted to check something in the Mercedes on the way back. Probably he was tinkering with the motor. She smiled affectionately. Men were like that!
Pushing herself upright, she went through into the lounge, poured herself another cognac, selected a record of instrumental oldies from the rack, and put it on the turntable of the hi-fi with the volume turned low. Then, taking her glass with her, she returned to the bedroom and lay down to light another cigarette.
Ten minutes later, she got up and switched off the lights in the lounge. The hi-fi was playing a dreamy string arrangement of "Stardust." She went back to the bed and lit her third cigarette. Her fingers were drumming impatiently on the covers. It was strangely silent now the wind had dropped.
The hi-fi switched to "As Time Goes By".
It was a quarter of one when Helen angrily yanked open the driver's door of the Mercedes. Tom was slumped in the seat poring over columns of penciled calculations in the dim light of the map-reading lamp. He started guiltily as the cold air blew in on him through the open door.
"Tom Stacey!" his wife exclaimed furiously. "What the hell are you doing here? D'you know what time it is? I thought you said you were coming to bed!"
His jaw dropped open and his eyes widened as he cringed back before her rage. "Gee, honey," he stammered. "I'm sorry. I-I-I didn't realize how fast the time . . . I mean I didn't think . . . "
"It's almost one o'clock!"
"No! Really? Hell, I'm real sorry to have kept you up. But you see there was this new slant I suddenly got on the System . . . It came to me while I was in the wash-house . . . I just thought I'd run over a few figures and I. . . dammit, I guess I didn't notice the time! You should have gone to bed."
"I did. But it just so happens I prefer to go there with my husband! You can play about all you like with your goddamn system during the day. But it's night-time now and I'm your wife
remember?" The angry blonde's voice was icy. Reluctantly Tom stuffed the pencil and papers in the glove compartment and switched off the light. "Okay, okay," he mumbled. "I'll come right now."
Ten minutes later he had showered and gotten into his pajamas and lay on his back on the double bunk, the covers pulled up to his chin, ready to sleep. Helen stood by the side of the bed, her third cognac in her hand and her eyes stormy. "I just can't see why you're so mad, honey," Tom complained. "What are you on about, for God's sakes? Okay, I forget the time
but there's no harm done surely? I mean what's so bad about-"
"Bad?" the angry blonde repeated scornfully. "We come on a holiday to the South of France. You spend all your time worrying about that damned system until finally the lousy thing lands us in one hell of a hole. When we're saved by a miracle and we find ourselves all nice and cozy again, I make you a good dinner and we drink some. Back to the romantic bit, I think -so I fix myself up and turn down the lights while you go to the washroom. I put sweet music on the hi-fi. I mix myself a drink and I wait . . . and I wait and I wait and I wait. So where's Tom Stacey the demon lover?"
"Aw, Helen sweetie, look-"
"All on his lonesome out in the auto working on that goddamn system again!" his wife cried accusingly. "I guess he prefers a pencil and paper and a column of stinking figures to the figure of his loving wife!" She paused and then said pleadingly: "Don't you care for me at all, Tom?"
Abruptly she put down the cognac glass and stripped the nightgown from her sensually ripened body, exposing the subtle curves of her back and hips, the tautly swelling profile of one lush breast, to his astonished gaze. "Christ!" he thought. "She's really going!"
He wished she'd lay off him and let him get some sleep. They had a long drive tomorrow.
"Sure I care for you, baby." he protested. "Of course I do. I love you, you know that. But I just don't get it. I said I was sorry about forgetting the time. What else did I do wrong? What am I supposed to do?"
"Do?" his wife echoed. "What are you supposed to do? Well, for a start you're supposed to do me! That's one of the reasons people get married, so they tell me! Just occasionally as a change from gambling or going out after whores or getting mugged or working out mathematical figures late at night in an automobile or something a husband is supposed to do his wife! Like I mean he's supposed to make love to her. Why d'you suppose I put on that sexy nightgown I just tore off? Why d'you think I turned the lights low and put sweet music on the hi-fi? Why have I been trying to get you to bed since half after eleven . . . and why was I mad when you didn't make it?" she was breathing hard, her full, wide-set breasts heaving, the rose-colored buds of her nipples spiked out on their rounded tips.
Tom was staring at her. "Are you telling me . . . all that routine . . . all those things you just said . . . you mean you were just-"
She swung to face him, her whole body trembling with frustration and anger, the soft flesh of her belly shaking above the gold curls of pussy hair. "Do you want me to spell it out for you?" she demanded. "I want you to take me to bed and fuck me, Tom! . . . Eff-you-see-kay . . . fuck! You remember the word?"
"And all that stuff you just told me . . . the lights and the music and all that . . . you mean you went through that so maybe I'd get horny and . . . ? "
"Yes!" Helen cried in shameless desperation. "Yes. yes, yes!"
"I'll be damned!" Tom was amazed. Hell, there was no telling what a girl was thinking sometimes! He wondered if he would ever understand his beautiful blonde wife.
With a sudden movement, the girl leaned down and stripped the covers off her husband. The next moment she had crawled on to the bunk beside him and twined her arms and legs around him, her desire for his body flaming anew in the depths of her hotly throbbing belly. Tom was embarrassed. He supposed he should be getting real horny, watching this voluptuous and sensual woman, his own wife, strip herself naked before him, exposing her full sensuous breasts and cunt to his gaze before she crept into his arms. But somehow it seemed difficult for him to generate any real excitement these days. He knew he had been holding back lately, of course, denying himself and her partly because of preoccupation with his work, more recently because of his enthusiasm to perfect the system she appeared to resent so much, and last night because they were too damned worried about the mess they had gotten into to think of anything else. Yet there was another factor which complicated the matter: the attitude of Helen herself.
For, oddly enough, his reaction to his wife's heated overtures was always exactly the opposite to what she intended: he turned off!
Could it be that Helen's overt advances were robbing him of a prerogative the ancient right of the male to see himself in the role of the pursuer? Hell though (he thought honestly), he hadn't exactly been doing too much pursuing lately, had he? No, but the theory could still hold good. Maybe, not being a very aggressive or truculent or even positive guy socially, he needed a touch of fox-and-hounds in his private life! First, though, the hound had to want to catch the fox . . .
As the sex-hungry blonde nestled her erotically demanding body into his arms, she lifted her lips to him to be kissed. Obediently, his head came down to hers and he searched for her mouth, found it, and kissed her tenderly. He sure was one hell of a lucky guy to have such a seductive girl for a wife!
The kiss it was almost reverent wasn't the kind that Helen craved. She didn't want to be up there on a pedestal, being worshipped! She wanted to be down on the floor with the wrestlers . . . down with the masked men who came on her in the night and thrust their scorching she put the forbidden thought from her with a shiver. But the emotion it had engendered was still there: she wanted a deep, scalding kiss from her husband . . . a real sex kiss . . . a probing, masterful kiss that would lead to something more than the light being switched off and Tom snoring by her side! She wanted it to lead to something all right, she thought fiercely. She wanted it to lead to a long, hard, jackhammering cock spearing up relentlessly into her belly, a stiff, bulging and finally squirting cock fucking deep into her hotly hungering vagina!
Avidly, her moist pink tongue darted into his mouth, questing, exploring, probing . . . the way she wanted his penis thrusting up into her searing loins!
At last, as she stabbed her tongue rhythmically in and out of Tom's mouth, her efforts were rewarded. He began to suck gently on its wetly trembling length. Helen moaned her pleasure wantonly up into his throat. Finally his own tongue insinuated itself between her lips and she knew, with a tingling thrill of lustful arousal, that he was becoming interested. Interested enough to want to make love to her? No, the hell with that, she thought savagely . . . to fuck her, the way a real man should!
Brazenly, knowing what she wanted and ready to go now to any lengths to get it, further than she had ever gone before if necessary, she slid a bold hand down inside the waist of her husband's pajamas, groping for what she hoped would be his already hardened cock. Her fingers had to reach further than she expected . . . she found and touched and she was disappointed.
Tom's penis lay soft and flaccid down his thigh. Nothing she had done yet had succeeded in arousing him! Once again the images of the half-naked, straining wrestlers locked together, of the brutal rapists who had skewered her one after the other two nights ago, flooded her mind. God, she raved to herself, what do I have to do to get my own husband hard enough to fuck me?
With frantic fingers, she milked the length of his limp shaft, trying desperately to bring it to vibrant throbbing life under her hand. Nothing happened: the rubbery rod of warm flesh lay lifeless and inert in her massaging grasp.
Helen drew a deep breath. She had set up all the props of a seduction scene; she had pleaded with Tom to make love to her; yet neither these actions nor the warm proximity of her own yearning body, the lascivious probing of her lewdly inquiring tongue, had been enough to Bake his penis respond. Very well evidently more extreme measures were called for! She would do her best to bring them into play. For Tom was going to get an erection tonight or she would die in the attempt! . . .
The lustfully panting blonde knew exactly what she was going to do. Yes, damn it, this time she would go through with it! Desperate situations called for desperate remedies wasn't that what they said? She'd thought of it often enough before, with a secret thrill of forbidden excitement she seemed to be kind of hooked on forbidden excitements just now, she reflected as a fleeting picture of the wrestlers' tightly bulging slips flashed across her mind! But somehow she had never gotten around to putting this particular thought into action. I've never done it before! she mused with a sudden surge of panic. Supposing he. . . suppose it turns him off? Suppose I don't do it right?. . . or he thinks it's perverted?
Strange new sensations of erotic arousal flamed through the frustrated young wife's loins as she tremblingly envisaged the salacious thing she was going to do. She withdrew her lips from her husband's and shifted her position on the bunk to kneel beside his half-stripped body. In one hand she still grasped the heavy limp tube of his lifeless cock.
Tom smiled weakly at her. "Darling.. . I-I-I'm real sorry . . . I guess I must be tired o something. I don't know what's the matter with me. Maybe it's the after effects of the other night or something . . . " His voice tailed of ineffectually as he thought: Goddamn! She really hot for me! She's crazy for it! And I can even raise a hard-on to take care of her! I mm be getting old or something: I'm in real bat shape!
But Helen was smiling at him. Her lips were trembling. "Honey," she whispered, "I'm going to do it to you . . . I often wanted to, but this time I'm going to do it to see if I can make i come up hard! So you can fuck me with it! You do want to, don't you?"
He stared at her blankly. "Do it to me?" he echoed. "But you just said I was supposed to-Of course I want to, but what do you mean?"
"I want to . . . use my mouth . . . on you. want to . . . to lick you and . . . and suck you . . . down there. And kiss you and.. . . " Her voice, faint and quavering at first, suddenly strengthened as she added boldly: "I want to suck your cock!"
He was so surprised that his own mouth dropped open. He couldn't believe his ears! It was a thing he'd often thought of sometimes after Helen had gone to sleep and he was lying awake wondering why sex never exactly came up to the descriptions in the books and stories -but it had never occurred to him that she'd go for such a way-out idea. "Y-y-you mean you really want.. . you, really want . . . you'd actually do that?" he asked incredulously yet already he sensed a throbbing lurch animating the inert shaft of flesh in her hot hand.
"Yes," she whispered excitedly. "Yes, yes, yes . . . that's what I want to do. If you'd like me to. Because I want you so much . . . " Her bands were scrabbling uninhibitedly at his pajama cord. Frantically she hauled the striped pants down his legs and off as he tore the top from his body and flung it aside. If he'd like her to! Like her to? Jesus! He needed no second invitation for a deal like that!
Hoisting himself into the middle of the bed, he raised his head to stare down in trembling expectation as he spread his legs and his naked wife crawled between them and reached again for the now rapidly hardening shaft of his cock. She held it upright in her slender hand, staring at it as though to strengthen her determination. "Oh God . . . Tom honey . . . I want to do it right.. ,to make it good for you!" she breathed, flexing the muscles of her fingers, working the loose foreskin back with her thumb to reveal the pink and as yet unbloated head of his penis.
I Gasping with excitement, he levered himself up on his elbows and tilted his hips so that the lust-thickening pole of flesh speared up towards her eager face. At the same time her other hand instinctively went under his raised buttocks to grope for his balls. She cradled and caressed the softly crinkled scrotal sac, lifting and massaging the heavy sperm-packed glands with gentle fingers. Tom, suddenly acutely aware of the crawling lift of his testicles that signaled the heightening of sexual arousal, panted with lustful anticipation.
Slowly the lewdly hunched young wife lowered her head, her wetly glistening lips pursed to kiss the satiny flesh of his cock-head, where a tiny pearl of seminal fluid was already gleaming. Tom jerked involuntarily at the searing contact of her wetly heated lips with his sensitive flesh. Instantly, more blood surged through the veins of his penis and it began slowly to pulse into full erection.
Christ, but this was out of this world! he thought wildly. And aloud he gasped: "Oh God!. . . Oh God!. . . Start sucking on it, honey! Start sucking!. . . "
Helen's honey-smooth mouth slipped hotly over the blood-engorged cock-head, her moistly ovaled lips enclosing the mushroom-shaped tip in a soft warmth that sent frenzied thrill rippling outwards from his groin. Inside her mouth, her tongue swirled, circling in with licking darts around the stiffly throbbing shaft.
As the obscenely sucking blonde shook with excitement at the salacious novelty of the lewd thing she was doing, Tom's long hardened cock jerked in her mouth and he felt in his balls the tingle of complete readiness. He was astonished at the rapidity with which his formerly limp rod had come suddenly alive between her lips! God, but it felt good! It was fantastic! Far-far better titan that whore and her phony moans the other night.
Helen held the rigid shaft of his pulsating cock with one hand as she continued caressingly to knead his balls with the other, her fingers feather-gentle around the cum-swollen glands buoyed up in their hairy sac. At the same time, overcoming her initial hesitancy, she began to suck on the lust-hardened pole of male flesh in earnest, milking the plank-stiff rod in a steady, drawing rhythm as her head moved experimentally up and down on him with her lips wetly clasped around the throbbing instrument like a hotly clinging cunt. Gradually, she began to take more and more of his long, pulsating length into her mouth and throat. She was surprised she could do it so easily . . .
Tom was aware that she was trying to stuff the twirling tip of her tongue into the wetly seeping slit at the top of his penis. The hand caressing his balls was removed. In the excitement of his newfound ecstasy, he wondered what she would do to him next. Tensing his loins, he thrust his rigidly throbbing hardness up into those hungrily ovaled lips, moaning softly in his throat as his hips began of their own accord to move in rhythmic counterpoint to her bobbing head, fucking his cock in and out of his wife's beautiful lust-contorted face. He was in a trance of erotic rapture; he had never before experienced such intense sensual satisfaction.
He gave himself up totally to the enjoyment of Helen's voraciously sucking mouth, feeling the acceleration of her moving head and the increase in the pressure exerted by her lips as his penis pulsed to even greater hardness. She plunged her mouth fierce down the rigid staff and then clamping her lips still more firmly around the quivering flesh drew tantalizingly back with agonizing slowness, final caressing lick of the sensitive glans swelling the lust-inflated head to an almost unbearable tenseness on each out-stroke. It was sending him out of his mind!
Christ! he thought. There's nothing like there really isn't! Her mouth's as smooth a sweet as warm molasses, as clinging as a cunt! How long's she going to go on? Will she suck me all the way? Until I cum? The obscene thought made him tremble with inner excitement. Got. if only she would! That'd feel great. . . to shoot it right into her mouth . . . to have her swallow my load!
Slaving over his loins, her face he noticed suddenly had altered. She seemed to be some kind of sexual rapture of her own; her eyes were closed and her breath was jetting through her nostrils in short jerky spurts. Then, as he looked beyond, down past the firmly round breasts dancing nakedly beneath her pumping torso, he saw that her other hand was working rhythmically at her golden, hair-covered vagina . . . So that's where the other hand went, he thought! She's finger-fucking her own cunt! Maybe she II suck me until I cum . . . and finger herself until she does too!
Ever more intensely, the overpowering sensations of lust raced through him as he arched his loins up towards the soft moist warmth of her mouth. He gazed in trance-like fascination at the golden cascade of shining hair tumbling over his naked thighs, sweeping whip-like across his quivering flesh with each movement of her head. Impulsively he reached out and grasped two of the long strands, using them like reins to guide her tightly ovaled lips up and down the wetly pistoning length of his cock. He watched with obscene delight, thrusting his loins ever more forcefully up into her mouth and throat, how a little ring of the soft pink inside flesh of her lips was pulled out on each upstroke and then stuffed back into her mouth as she slid down over his hardened shaft again on the downstroke. Her cheeks were hollowing in and out as she sucked voraciously on his lust-thickened cock. God, he wanted it to go on forever but he knew it couldn't: already he could feel the searing birth of his coming orgasm pulsating in his balls!
He could sense his explosive ejaculation into her softly sucking mouth approaching with every stroke. It wouldn't be long before he shot his white-hot load of sperm deep into that greedily working mouth! The sweet agony of sensation building deep within him was concentrated in the lust-bloated head of his rigid cock . . . he could feel it pulsing, expanding and swelling with each throbbing jerk as her teasing tongue licked crazily at the super-sensitive skin. In the depths of his balls his sperm was surging against the entrance to his long fleshy rod . . . demanding release!
"Oooooooooohhhhhh!" he groaned. "Oh God! That's so . . . Oh, Helen my darling! . . . Oh, honey, that's sa gooooooooood! . . . Keep on sucking! . . . Suck me, suck me until I cum!"
Over the wetly sluicing noise of Tom's cock sliding in and out of her tightly clasping mouth, the slavering blonde heard his words. She panicked. She was only sucking him as a means to an end . . . to get him hard enough to fuck her! She had to have that wonderfully rigid thick cock rammed deep into her cunt! If she waited a moment longer, it would be too late . . . If she wanted to have it and she had to have it! she must move fast!
Wrenching her hair from Tom's grasp, she kneeled suddenly upright, her mouth plopping away from his long hard penis, leaving it standing up stiff and straight above his heaving belly, glistening wet with her saliva.
"What the hell.. . ? " he began angrily. But his lust-inflamed blonde wife was already moving. She flung herself forward, up and over him, her full curving thighs straddling his hips as she reached down to grip that thick throbbing cock and guide it straight into her hotly seething cunt. With wild abandon, she dropped her widespread vaginal slit down on him, cleaving herself savagely on his rock-hard spearing shaft as she forced her love-starved little cunt to absorb the whole of its length in one forceful plunge.
"Aaaaaaaaggggh!" She cried out sharply, half in pain and half in satisfaction, as her husband's long thick penis slid all the way up into her warmly welcoming pussy to scrape against the sensitive tip of her cervix. Her blue eyes were glazed with passion, her face a study in animal desire as she began lewdly grinding her sweating buttocks down against his hips, fucking up and down above him, sliding her wetly clasping cunt up and down the steely shaft. . . fucking him . . . fucking herself for all she was worth. The reversal of their roles, as she dominated her husband, didn't bother her: she wanted cock and she was getting cock! That was all that mattered!
As for Tom, he had forgotten all about the foxes and hounds, the role of the male, and his own previous fears and doubts about his own virility: this was the most fabulous fuck he had ever had and he wanted it to go on forever! Faster and faster his nakedly kneeling blonde wife rode him, the wildness of her abandon knowing no limits, stroking furiously up and down the thick lengthy pole of her husband's rigid penis, rising and falling in her invisible stirrups until he began to buck his hips up against her, trying to match the tempo of her shamelessly pounding loins as they slammed down again and again against his thighs.
"Yes, yes, yesssssssssss!" she panted. "That's it! Harder.. . harder . . . faster! Fuck deeper into my cunt! Fuck me, you bastard! . . . Aaaaaaaggggghhhh!"
Then, with breathtaking suddenness she began her soaring ascent towards climax, spiraling to the dizzy heights of orgasmic release. She was moaning incessantly, straining to cum as she threshed violently from side to side on his long skewering cock, stirring it into the seething basin of her hips. She was in an agony of lustful rapture, her beautiful young face contorted and her eyes glazed.
The wrestlers, the rapers, every erotic dream she had ever had, and the steaming reality of that pistoning cock in her belly coalesced into a single pulverizing image as she screamed: "Oh no! Oh no! I'm going to cum! I'm going to cum! I'm cum-cuummmmmiiinnnngg!" And all at once she was launched into a timeless space where nothing existed but the ecstatically surging explosion of her orgasm. Convulsively, her naked body shuddered in successive spasms as the crashing waves of her release buffeted her with shattering force. She was dimly aware of her own voice moaning out her delight over
Tom's harsh and labored breathing . . . and then she found she had collapsed over him, not realizing where she was.
Beneath her, the now wildly aroused young American was stalled, unable to complete his own orgasm as she had stopped moving and her body lay heavily across his hips. Desperately he attempted to force his cock up into the exhausted blonde's wetly clasping cuntal sheath, whose hot quivering lips were still clenched around his rock-hard and painfully aching penis. But she was too much of a dead-weight for him to move. Yet he had to cum too . . . he had to! He's been so nearly there!
Using his legs for leverage, he wrapped his arms tightly around her and rolled the girl on to her back, so that he was now in the upper position but still cradled between her firmly tapered thighs. Then slowly he raised himself above her sated body, grasped her knees and spread them wide, and finally pushed them back towards her chest. He shoved his forearms into the angles of her flexed knees and leaned down hard, mashing Helen's thighs down on the fullness of her sensually quivering breasts so that the entire plane of her cunt, the whole hair-covered vaginal furrow, was vulnerable and open to his attack.
Then he began to fuck into her hot little pussy like an insane man.
Beneath the pounding of her husband's cock, Helen was almost mindless with erotic joy. This was the way she had always wanted it.. . this was the way it should be! Images of the hot male loins of the rapers, the writhing torso of the black wrestler crushing her down, faded and died to be replaced by the three-dimensional actuality of Tom's lewdly contorted face gasping passionately between her obscenely splayed thighs. And she knew that she would cum again! She knew it! Already she could feel it beginning a galvanic shuddering deep in her quivering belly! Oh God!. . . Oh God!. . .
Helen began to convulse in her second orgasm almost at the same instant that her husband began to spew his pent-up sperm far up into the lasciviously milking walls of her vagina. He cried aloud in ecstasy as his thickly exploding penis started a wild staccato jerking deep inside her clasping young pussy, his white-hot semen jetting from his pulsating cock-head to sear far up into Helen's scalding cunt in seemingly never-ending spurts.
He rammed his pelvis against the backs of her shuddering upraised thighs in one final bone-jarring lunge and then lay panting between them as a groan of exhausted satisfaction tore itself from between his trembling lips.
"Ooooooooooh shit!" was all he managed to gasp. "Oh Jesus! Oh fuck! Oh daaaaaaaaarling, that was really something!. . . "
His frantically climaxing blonde wife was still jerking out the spasms of her second orgasm. If anything it was even more intense than the first.. . for the mental rapture of knowing that it had been provoked by a real fuck, by the long and hard and manfully pistoning cock of her own husband, was sending her out of her mind.
"Aaaaaaaaaggghhh!" she sobbed. "I'm cumming! I'm cumming again! I'm Aaaaaiiiiieeeeeee!"
And then for a long time there was no sound in the trailer but the gradually subsiding gasps of two over-taxed pairs of lungs. A fly settled on the back of Tom's calf and then flew away again. A gust of wind stammered the frames of the big windows as the Mistral began to agitate the trees once more. Outside, a swarthy man with a cap pulled down over his eyes took his ear away from the thin paneled side of the caravan and stole away into the dark with a secretive smile.
In the lounge, the hi-fi switched to "It Had To Be You"
CHAPTER FIVE
It was soon after breakfast the following day that things began to go wrong. Had Tom and Helen Stacey known just how wrong that was going to be, they would have left the Mercedes and its expensive trailer in the lay-by and thumbed a ride back to London without a backward glance!
They started early. The wind had lessened, but although it never reached the furious force of the previous night it was still strong enough, gusting into the car head-on as they drove northwards up the narrowing valley of the Rhone, to cut down their speed and tug disagreeably at the steering. The police check at the pay station just before the turnpike ran downhill to the spectacular reach on which Vienne is situated came -almost as a relief to Tom, who found it took all his concentration and most of his strength to keep the heavy trailer straight on the road.
They had just handed the punched ticket to the attendant in the toll booth and were waiting for the computer-actuated till to calculate how much they owed when a motorcycle cop in a white crash hat, boots and a black leather riding suit motioned them to draw into the wide parking lot on the far side of the peage spanning the two carriageways. Tom reached through the window for his change, the warning lights in front of the Mercedes changed from red to green, the striped barrier pole rose on its counterweight and he maneuvered the car and its trailer through the narrow passageway to turn right into the lot.
The cop and his companion, standing by gleaming Honda machines raised on their kick-stands, signaled him to pull up by a dark blue Peugeot police wagon with a fishing-rod aerial curved over its roof and a knot of uniformed men grouped around it. They were not, the American was relieved to see, customs police but ordinary Gendarmerie de la Route.
An officer stepped forward, saluted, and asked them politely enough to get out of the car and show their papers. He passed over their temporary passports and the car and caravan documents without comment but then, as they waited impatiently in the chilly wind, he led a team of four men into the interior of the trailer. One of them carried a black box with an attachment that looked like a miniature mine-detector; another was loaded with equipment that Tom was unable to identify. They were in the caravan for a full half hour. He couldn't see what they were doing, but he listened with increasing puzzlement and suspicion to the sounds of their progress. So far as he could make out they were examining every drawer, every closet, every pot and pan and container in the vehicle. Judging by the occasional tapping noises that came to his ear, the search extended to the actual bodywork of the trailer.
Finally however they emerged and made a cursory examination of two valises Tom and Helen had left in the trunk of the Mercedes. Then the officer handed back all the papers and told them they could go. "It's none of my business," he added, "but I suppose you know this caravan should have been out of the country nearly a week ago?"
"It was a case of illness," Tom explained, striving desperately not to blush. "We're on our way to England now."
The policeman nodded. "Make sure you don't hang about," he advised. "I'll have to make a note of the fact, but as you're on the way I guess you'll hear no more about it. But I can't say that my colleagues of the customs police would take such a lenient view if you happened to be stopped by them."
Tom thanked him, climbed into the driving seat, and started the motor. "What's the aim of the operation, if I may ask? I mean all this.. . " He gestured towards the search team, who were already flagging down a huge articulated truck with Dutch plates.
"Just a routine check," the officer said vaguely, saluting and waving them back on to the roadway.
"Routine my ass!" Tom said coarsely as he shifted into fourth and sped down the hill towards the river and Vienne. "Those guys were looking for something. . . something specific if you ask me."
"Maybe they were but it wasn't something specific to his wife "replied. "They were giving that truck the treatment as we left. And I saw another being waved away before us while you were paying the toll. Anyway, darling, if you had any doubts about Mr. Todd's motives they should have gone by now."
"Come again?"
"You were worried that we might innocently be smuggling or something, remember? Well, if there had been anything, those men would have found it, wouldn't they? The search should put your mind at rest!"
"Ye-es, I guess you're right at that," Tom said dubiously. But there was still a note of puzzlement in his voice.
On the far side of Lyons which they bypassed via an exasperatingly complicated suburban route according to Todd's instructions they rejoined the auto route. And at the Villefranche-sur-Saone pay station they were held up for another twenty minutes by a precisely similar check . . . except that this time the officer in charge made no reference to the fact that the trailer had been in France more than six months. By the time they got going again, Tom was seething with impatience.
His ill-humor was increased when they stopped for coffee at a Restoroute motel south of Macon. They locked the Mercedes and the trailer in the vast parking lot and crossed the twin ribbons of the turnpike by a covered footway leading to the modernistic concrete and glass cafeteria. The wind had dropped and the sun shone from a blue sky scattered with fleecy clouds whose shadows browsed among the rectangular vineyards of the Beaujolais escarpment to the west. Behind them, to the east, the broad shallow waters of the Saone flowed through lush farmlands punctuated by honey-colored buildings sheltered in clumps of osier and willow.
The self-service cafeteria was crowded. Tourists, truck drivers, traveling salesmen and French holidaymakers jammed the railed-off passageway approaching the counter and thronged the vinyl-topped tables in a chattering, gesticulating mob. By the time Tom returned with two slopping cups of indifferent coffee and a couple of croissants, Helen was in conversation with two Frenchmen a swarthy Marseillais with a cap pulled down over his eyes, and a stout, flashy man who wore a black shirt and a wide white tie with his gray gabardine sport pants. Tom set the cups down and scowled as he took his seat.
The two strangers were talkative and inquisitive. The jealous young American contented himself with grunts and monosyllabic replies to their questions. Where were they going? What were they driving? How did they find French roads and French drivers? Had they enjoyed their vacation? Didn't they think the Belgians had the worst road manners in Europe? Wasn't this because until recently there had been no driving test to pass in that country before one qualified for a license? But Helen, displaying her usual inability to resist male attention, was smiling and bright, laughing flirtatiously at the openly expressed admiration of the two men. By the time they returned to the Mercedes, her husband had relapsed into a sulky silence. "Jesus, honey," he growled when she complained, "can't you lay off anything wearing pants even two-bit creeps like that?"
The voluptuous blonde sighed as she settled back in the reclining passenger seat. "Oh Tom," she murmured, "you just don't understand, do you? They were only trying to be friendly after all!"
The double ribbon of blacktop curved ahead of them through the rich undulating countryside of Burgundy. Slip roads leading to the world-famous wine towns Nuits-St.-Georges, Meursault, Chambolle-Musigny, Beaune -approached and fell behind the singing heavy-duty tires of the speeding Mercedes. It was lunch-time and the turnpike was temporarily deserted when a huge American sedan roared up behind them and pulled out to overtake. Tom was hitting ninety kilometers an hour about 55 miles per hour and the trailer was swaying a little on the macadam. The big car slowed momentarily as it drew level and then the driver swung the wheel over far too soon, cutting in suicidally directly in front of the Mercedes, his bulging fenders fractions of an inch away from the German car's offside headlamp.
"You stupid bastard!" Tom shouted, standing on the brake pedal and wrenching the wheel to the right in a desperate attempt to avoid a collision.
Unable to compensate for the sudden ferocious pressure at such a speed, the Mercedes' brakes locked. Anchored at the rear by the weight of the huge trailer, the car slewed sideways across the road with a shriek of tortured rubber. Car and caravan jack-knifed, sliding locked together across the hard shoulder and on to a strip of rough grass at the side of the auto route, where they careened over the bumpy ground in a shower of clods and small stones to come finally to rest with the Mercedes' front wheels half way up a shrub-covered bank. The sedan accelerated away in a cloud of blue smoke and disappeared over a rise.
"Jesus Christ!" Stacey raved. "What kind of idiot driving is that! We were lucky not to be killed! You saw who it was, didn't you?" His hands were shaking.
Helen looked at him and nodded dumbly. It had only been a glimpse but it had been enough: the driver's pulled-down cap and the black shirt and white tie of his companion had been unmistakable. The sedan was driven by the two men they had met in the cafeteria . . .
"I suppose that was just trying to be friendly too!" Tom went on furiously. "Bastards! I'd have a fucking apology to make to the Belgians if it wasn't for one thing."
"What's that, honey?" Helen asked in a low voice. She was still shocked from the narrowness of their escape.
"I'm not a hundred per cent certain, but I'm pretty damned sure that was deliberate a cold-blooded attempt to force us off the road," he said grimly.
"But, Tom, why . . . ? I mean whatever reason could they . . . ? "
He shrugged angrily. "Search me. I hate to say 'I told you so', but I've been suspicious of this whole goddamn trip from the beginning." He got out of the car miraculously it was undamaged checked that the trailer coupling still worked, climbed in again, re-started the stalled motor, and drove slowly out on to the roadway.
They were just north of Chalon-sur-Saone when the driver of the sedan made his second attempt.
Tom had been keeping an anxious eye on the out-rigged rear-view mirror that permitted him to see behind the vast bulk of the trailer, and he spotted the big auto as it crawled out from the shelter of a tree-shaded parking area after they had passed and gave chase.
For some miles it tucked in invisibly immediately behind the caravan, and then, as the auto route ran out across a shallow dip in the land on an embankment, it came menacingly into sight again and began to put on speed. Tom tightened his hands on the wheel and glanced ahead. They were doing just over seventy miles per hour. In front of them a gasoline truck and trailer had just trundled into the overtaking lane to pass a slow-moving freight truck and this was in turn about to be overtaken in the high-speed outside lane by a Citroen DS which had pulled out behind a battered little Renault chugging along obstinately in the center lane with an entire French family inside.
He sucked in his breath with alarm. The driver of the sedan had chosen his place well. There was no escape ahead and if they were forced off the road here they would roll down that forty-foot embankment with lethal results . . .
The sedan roared level with a sudden burst of speed and once again the swarthy driver executed his murderous maneuver, swinging wide and then swerving the heavy car viciously in towards the Mercedes's offside. But this time Stacey was ready for him. If there was one thing he could do really well, it was handle an automobile: in his undergraduate days he had been the local dragster and beach-buggy champion in California.
He was already braking before the sedan was alongside using the hand lever so that the attackers would not be tipped-off by the telltale blaze of brake-lights. The man in the cap therefore miscalculated slightly and overshot . . . and Tom, instead of hauling the Mercedes and its trailer in towards the embankment as expected, wrenched the wheel violently to the left and pulled out behind the hurtling sedan, the heavy steel bumper of his car slamming into the nearside rear quarter of the sedan as it shot past.
The pile-up that followed took only a few seconds, but every stage of it was indelibly imprinted on Tom Stacey's memory forever as clearly as a series of graphic movie stills.
The speeding sedan, lurching suddenly under the shattering crosswise impact, dipped on its soft springs and instantly turned over. It crashed heavily on to its roof and rose like a rubber ball again into the air to sail end over end with horrifying inevitability into the side of the little Renault. The French car literally exploded apart, strewing occupants and baggage all over the road as the two wrecked vehicles, inextricably tangled together, burst into flames and smashed at sixty miles an hour into the back of the huge freight truck.
The truck driver felt the sudden staggering impact from behind and instinctively slammed on his powerful air brakes and, as the gasoline tanker forged ahead in the middle lane, the heavy freight trailer, coupled to the blazing wreckage of the two cars, jackknifed and skidded sideways to slam into the gasoline tanker with thunderous force.
With an ear-splitting scream of tortured steel, the two juggernauts hurtled apart and tipped over on to their sides, completely blocking the roadway. Thousands of gallons of gasoline gurgled from the ruptured reservoir of the tanker and instantly ignited with a Whoomp! that sounded like the explosion of a miniature atom bomb. Within tenths of a second the northbound half of the auto route and the embankment below it were bathed in a holocaust of flame a hundred feet high.
Wrestling furiously with the bucking wheel, Tom Stacey hauled the Mercedes and its trailer across the grass strip of the center divider and turned so he was heading in the opposite direction. Then he slammed on his brakes and jumped out of the car. On the far side of the inferno, the ashen-faced driver of the Citroen was sprinting back towards the catastrophe, and traffic was already squealing to a halt on the southbound carriageway. In less than a minute fifty people ringed the blaze . . . but there was nothing they could do: the heat was too intense for anyone to approach within a hundred feet of the giant flames.
Below a huge column of black smoke bellying in stifling waves from the surface of the burning chemical, the roadway looked like an air-raid set from a horror film. A fat woman with a broken leg and a dreadful wound in her scalp one of the occupants of the Renault, lay face down among the burst packages and ripped suitcases which had been hurled from the car. Beyond her a headless baby twitched convulsively in a pool of blood gleaming stickily on the macadam. By the grass verge a middle-aged man still holding an open map sprawled apparently uninjured on his back, his knees jackknifing rhythmically up into his belly as he screamed hysterically into the sky. The drivers of the two trucks had leapt immediately from their wrecked cabs and fled from the hell of fire comsuming their vehicles. From the white-hot tangle of incandescent steel and wood and plastic that was all the remained of the Renault and the sedan, a terrible odor of roasting flesh drifted out to join the acrid fumes of the blazing chemical.
And then, unbelievably, a moving figure, its face a mask of blood, its hair smoking, its black shirt and white tie licked by flame, flopped grotesquely from the wreck into the sea of fire. It rose to its knees, arms flapping wildly, screamed shrilly, fell to the ground, attempted to rise again and then arched into a shriveled cinder as a new gush of gasoline flamed around it and hid it from view.
As the aghast onlookers flooded forward to help the injured, Tom Stacey fell on to his knees in a dumb of bushes and vomited.
He was still trembling, his white face dewed with perspiration, an hour later when at last they were allowed to resume their journey.
Ambulances, salvage tenders, fire department trucks and police wagons had been at the scene of the disaster within a few minutes, but there were interminable questions to ask, depositions to take, names and addresses to note and anyway the northbound lanes were totally blocked by the wreckage of the two heavies. It was impossible to get cranes to them before the fire had been quenched, and the fire chief calculated that the volatile fluid from the split gasoline tanks would continue to re-ignite from the heat alone for at least another hour or two. It was impossible, moreover, to direct traffic from the huge jam that had built up behind the accident across the center reservation and make an emergency one-way lane on the other carriageway: half the roadway there was already under repair. Finally auto route maintenance men arrived in an orange truck and opened a pair of wire mesh service gates two hundred yards back down the road. Police then directed the long queue of vehicles along a track that led across fields to the old highway linking Chalon with the north. "You can rejoin the auto route at the next entry point, at Chagny," the cop waving them on to the main road said. "Your tickets will still be valid."
Wearied by the incessant questions of the police, shocked beyond measure by the horror of the accident, too bewildered to discuss the murderous action from which it had resulted, Tom and Helen drove in silence. And then, when the shaking of his hands had grown so severe that he could scarcely hold the wheel, Stacey gasped: "Honey, I've got to stop. I need a drink! I can't go another yard. Let's pull up here we have to fill up with gas anyway." He nodded towards a service station at the side of the road beyond which there was an auberge displaying a neon-lit Routiers sign.
"I guess we should try to get some lunch too," Helen said tremulously, "though I can't say I have much of an appetite right now."
As Tom pulled the car and trailer thankfully out of the nose-to-tail line of slow-moving traffic and braked in front of the pumps, an attendant stood staring at them with an expression of stupefied astonishment on his face. "My God," he stammered, "how could you possibly . . . that is to say, how have you . . . I mean how did you manage to use a whole tank full of gas in less than an hour?"
"What are you talking about?" Stacey demanded irritably.
"You!" the attendant said. "You filled up to the brim a while ago. My partner attended to you. You must have a leak; you couldn't have used up twenty gallons of gas in that time!"
Tom stared at him. "I was never here before in my life," he said.
"But I saw you . . . at least I didn't see you. I was busy with another customer. But I saw the car and trailer. I couldn't mistake them!"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Tom said uneasily. "Where is this partner of yours?"
"He's off duty now, having his lunch."
The American shrugged and shook his head. "I don't get it," he said. "Please fill the tank: it's empty, as you can see." But then, when the Mercedes had been refueled and they were crawling from the gas station to the adjacent auberge, Helen suddenly caught her husband's arm. "Darling look!" she exclaimed in amazement. "What an extraordinary thing!"
He stared in the direction of her pointing finger. Beyond the lines of trucks and rows of cars glittering in the sunny parking lot, a trailer was moving slowly out, seeking a gap in the long line of vehicles choking the highway. It was a huge caravan, a four-wheeler with squared-off ends and a pitched, chalet-type roof an identical model to their own!
What was more remarkable was that it was being towed by an identical car: a beige Mercedes 350 sedan.
The lot was too big for them to see the driver and his companion clearly but they could make out the figure of a man. And beside him sat a voluptuously curved girl with shoulder-length blonde hair!
"Christ!" Tom exclaimed. "What the hell.. . ? "
And then suddenly he turned urgently to her and said: "Honey what's the registration number of this buggy? Do you remember the plates?"
"I should," Helen said tiredly. "I've given it to the cops often enough today! It's 77152.RT.06."
The back of the trailer was just disappearing into the traffic queue. Before it jerked forward along the highway they were able to make out the letters and figures chromed on to its license plates.
It too was registered 77152.RT.06 . . .
CHAPTER SIX
The coincidence of seeing an identical car and trailer with a similar driver and passenger would have been suspicious enough. But the fact that both sets of vehicles carried the same license plates was the clincher: evidently Tom and Helen Stacey had become embroiled in some kind of conspiracy. But what? What was the aim of the operation? Why should anyone want to duplicate an eye-catching caravan and its tow-car at the very moment that it was advisable to keep them under cover as much as possible? Was Todd knowingly involved in the deception? If so, what could he possibly be hoping to gain from it.. . ? The unanswerable questions proliferated into a maze of bewilderment from which it was difficult to find an exit.
Tom, his mathematician's curiosity aroused, was all for giving chase right away in an attempt to solve at least part of the riddle: if they could catch the mysterious "ringer" caravan, they would see who was driving it maybe make a direct approach and ask them what the hell! But Helen, for once the more prudent of the two, strongly disagreed. She wanted simply to carry out their instructions, to rejoin the auto route, complete the journey and collect the cash. "You know we need that money," she urged. "Those police checks proved that we're not carrying any contraband or ferrying a hot car or anything like that. If Mr. Todd's got some deal going involving another trailer like ours, that's his business. Not ours. You can worry out some tricky answer if you like after we've got the damned thing to England, handed it over, and put that two hundred and fifty dollars in our pockets."
"But, honey -"
"There can't be anything crooked that involves us," Helen interrupted. "Can't you see, Tom? The police would already have tumbled to it if there was."
'There's got to be something crooked," her husband protested. "It stands to reason. For one thing, at least one set of those license plates must be false. You can't deny that!"
"Anyway," Helen said, switching the angle of her attack the way women do when they see a point scored against them, "it would be crazy, absolutely crazy to think of chasing them now."
"I don't see why. What other time could we chase them?"
"Because you've got to get some food inside you," the anxious blonde said, ignoring the latter part of his remark. "It's less than two days since you were savagely beaten up. You're still shocked from that dreadful accident. You have to relax and you have to eat or you'll crack up. Come on, Tom! I insist."
"But we'll never catch them if we let them go now. We -"
"I said I insisted. We can ask along the route which way they went. After all, it's not the kind of trailer nobody notices, is it?" Reluctantly her husband agreed and they went in to the auberge.
There were two burly truck-drivers in blue overalls at the only free table they could find. Tom and Helen had ordered their meal and were discussing the accident in low voices when they were surprised to hear themselves addressed by the larger man in a rich Cockney accent. "Goin' far?" he enquired with a grin. "Americans, ain't you?"
"Yeah," Tom said. "I . . . we're going to England. Taking a trailer back for a friend."
"A trailer?"
"Caravan. We've been on Holiday in Nice. His wife's sick, so we're taking it back for him."
"Very nice too," the Cockney said. He laughed. "When you said a trailer I thought you meant the kind of thing we got. Me and my mate 'ave to lug a forty-bloody-tonner all the way up to perishin' Liverpool and that's no joke, I can tell you! It's bad enough with a 'van, the way these Froggies drive, but with our kind of lorry . . . " He broke off and shook his head. "It's murder!"
"Sooner you than me!" Tom said with a smile.
"Too right, mate. I 'ad a kind of idea you didn't look like no long-distance truck driver," the man said with a wink to his friend.
"Where have you come from?" Helen asked the second man, her blue eyes resting appreciatively on his thick neck and the muscles bulging powerfully through his turned-up shirtsleeves.
"Marseille. Taking a load of machine parts up north so that some bleedin' capitalist can put 'is name on 'em and then re-export 'em from bloody Liverpool to your country at twice the price! But that's big business, ain't it."
"Do you have to keep a schedule?" Tom asked. "I mean, do you have to put the truck on certain ship at a certain time or do they leave that to you?"
"Too bloody right we do!" the first driver said. "Every hour we're late, that's a bit docked off of our pay."
"It must make it difficult when the traffic's like this." the young American said, nodding out the window at the jammed highway.
"It ain't too bad on your actual freeways," the second man put in. "You can go from Marseille to bloody Lille without comin' orf 'em includin' gay Paree now they finished that ring road. Pity abaht that: I imagine a night of the old Ooh-la-la!" He leered across the table at Helen, his bright little eyes glittering at the girl's tautly up-thrust breasts where they stretched the thin white linen of her shirt. She colored and glanced nervously sideways at Tom. But he was busy serving soup from a huge tureen brought by the overworked waitress.
"Once you're on your ordinary main roads, though." the first man went on, "it's bloody hell and no mistake. It's bad enough, that last
'undred miles between Lille and the flamin' coast but down 'ere . . . " He shook his head again and repeated: "Bloody Hell!"
"We wouldn't be on this fuckin' road," the second man said. "Ooh! Pardon me. Miss! We wouldn't be 'ere if it wasn't for some soddin' pile-up a couple of miles back there. Did you seed it?"
"Er yes, we did," Tom said. "We were on the turnpike, too."
"Six dead, includin' a baby," the first driver announced. "Pore little bleeder! I dunno 'ow many injured. At least four, they said. Two trucks and two cars written orf and a whole bloody tank full of gasoline on fire!" He snorted with derision. "Bloody Frog drivers!" he said.
'They said they was improvin' the stand all over, now the bleedin' Common Market's in operation," his mate remarked in disgust. "Some fuckin'. . . oops . . . sorry, Ma'am."
Soon afterwards, the two truck-drivers called for their bill and left. Tom and Helen finished their soup, shared an omelet, and swallowed a cup of scalding coffee, and hurried back to the Mercedes.
The traffic had thinned out a little now, as the jam from the auto route was gradually absorbed into the normal flow of the highway. A few miles further on, after the long downhill grade to Chagny, they came to a shallow valley where the main road to Paris forked away from the route to Dijon. A hundred yards away, white lettering on huge blue signs signaled a slip road; leading back to the auto route. As they went through to a temporary halt just before the intersection, Tom saw a gendarme directing the traffic looking at them with surprise. On an impulse, he rolled down the window and leaned out. "Excuse me," he called. "I'm looking for a friend a man driving a car and trailer exactly like this. Did you see them pass this way, by any chance?"
"But yes, Monsieur." The gendarme saluted. "About a half-hour ago. A Mercedes sedan, beige, with a remorque behind, very long, possessed of a top shaped so." He steepled his fingertips into the shape of a roof. "You didn't see which road they took."
"Yes, indeed. They went straight on up "National Six the Paris road: a precisely similar ensemble. . . even to the beautiful blonde lady" He saluted again and smiled at Helen with Gallic courtesy.
"That settles it," Tom said, thanking the man and driving past the slip road that led back to the auto route despite his wife's protests. "But Tom you know we're supposed to keep to the turnpike! Mr. Todd was most insistent. Let's for God's sakes do what we're being paid to do and forget the rest. Suppose we turn into one of those checks the customs checks, I mean? He'll have to pay up and it'll be all our fault. We'll lose that money and -"
"The hell with the money," Tom growled. "I'm going on and catch up that damned trailer if it's the last thing I do! I want to know what's going on around here!"
The first part of his remark was very nearly prophetic They traveled northwest across the Cote d'Or hills throughout the remainder of the afternoon, stopping frequently to ask traffic pops, gas station attendants, and roadside fruit piers if they had seen the "friend" with the similar caravan. Sometimes they drew blank, but more often than not they were rewarded with a positive answer: it seemed clear that the ringer was heading for Paris. Tom crowded on the speed and gradually the gap between the two Mercedes narrowed: at first replies put that mysterious trailer a half hour ahead, then twenty minutes, then a quarter of an hour, and finally only ten minutes. Traffic was still heavy. Tom being unable to shake off one huge truck in particular which was driving hard behind the cumbersome caravan. Then, just before dusk, they crossed the last ridge before the road plunged down the long grade leading to the valley of the Yonne, he gave a cry of excitement and pointed off to the right, "Look there they are!" he exclaimed triumphantly.
Helen stared. Isolated amongst huge rolling fields of corn, an old farmhouse stood half hidden by a clump of trees at the end of a path leading off the road. And half in, half out of the tall brush was the unmistakable back of a large trailer exactly like their own . . .
Tom braked and pulled into a graveled space at the side of the road. The truck roared past and disappeared around a bend in the highway, followed by a string of cars. And then for a moment there was a lull in the traffic. He climbed out of the Mercedes and walked back towards the track. "Where are you going" Helen called.
"Just to have a look," Tom called back. "You stay where you are."
"Not on your life!" She opened the door and ran after him. "God knows what kind of a mess you'll get into if I'm not with you!"
Warily, they walked up the track. The other
Mercedes with their license plates was parked in front of a dilapidated stone building with steep, moss-grown slopes of roof slanting down to its low, shuttered windows. The car and the trailer behind it were empty. Beyond, the shafts of an ancient cart showed through the doors of a barn which hung drunkenly open. There was a somber air of decay about the place. Weeds grew tall around the rutted yard and choked neglected beds beneath the windows. There were tiles missing from the barn roof. Great patches of plaster had peeled away from the walls of the house, and most of the mortar between the stones had been eroded away. Helen shivered. "What a spooky dump!" she murmured. "Let's go on back to the car and forget it. What are you aiming to do here anyway?"
"Locate the people who were driving that Merc and ask 'em what the hell," Tom said firmly. "If they're straight, they should be as interested as we are to find there's another just like it. If not . . . " He shrugged. "We'll have to play it by ear."
She looked out through a gap in the trees surrounding the farm. Beyond the corn, standing still as death in the windless evening, the rolling countryside fell away. Like some primeval groundswell, the waves of downland receded West by crest, to break, blue with distance, in the great bowl of Burgundy. Many miles to the southwest, they could still see the Beaujolais escarpment rearing against the horizon, where the sun was setting behind a bank of violet clouds "It gives me the creeps here," she complained "There aren't even any birds singing!"
Tom took her arm and led her around the house. "We'll just see if there's anyone on the other side," he soothed. They turned the corner of the building and shouldered their way through damp, unkempt shrubbery.
On the far side of the bushes, two men stood outside a ruined porch.
They had revolvers in their hands pointing straight at the American couple. It was the two truck-drivers they had seen at the auberge.
"Bit orf yer route, mate, ain't yer?" the taller man said evenly.
"What the hell do you mean?" Tom blustered. "Put that those guns away. What are you playing at, for God's sakes? How did you get here?"
"Followed you, if you want to know. Just keepin' tracks, like. 'Avin' a bit of a shufti around, are we?"
"My God!" Helen exclaimed suddenly. "The truck . . . that truck that was following us all the way . . . "
The driver chuckled. " 'Slight. Smart little piece, ain't you? Like I said, we was keepin' tabs on you and your old man. So when you decided to come orf yer proper route, we tagged along. An' then when we see all them questions you asked on the way well, we guessed you'd rumbled. Soon as you stopped 'ere, we parked the old flivver rahnd the corner and nipped acorst a field to cut your orf, like."
"But but why?" Tom stammered. "I don't understand . . . "
"We'll see about that, won't we?" the second man said menacingly. "Strikes me you understand a fuckin' sight too much for your bloody health, mate! Still, we'll see what 'is Nibs 'as to say abaht that. Inside, you."
"I'm damned if I will," Tom said hotly. "You've no right to -"
"Them guns is loaded," the first man said mildly. "Nobody'd notice a couple of shots around 'ere. It's kind of isolated. Anyway, even if they did, they'd think it was some Frog farmer after the bleedin' crows. Shoot anything that moves, those buggers will!" The two separate clicks as the safety catches were thumbed off sounded unnaturally loud in the still air.
"All right, all right," Stacey said hastily. "We're coming!" Nervously taking Helen by the elbow, he walked towards the porch.
Prodded by the wicked-looking barrels of the two men's guns, the young Americans went past a weather-beaten door and along a dank stone-flagged passageway. The sound of voices from an inner room ceased abruptly as the drivers pushed Tom and Helen through into a kind of lounge scattered with broken-down furniture in the middle of which a rickety table supported an oil lamp whose pale glow dispelled the fast-falling dusk.
"Good God! What the devil are you doing here?"
The moustache had been shaved off and the hair was now dyed as dark as Tom's own, but there could be no mistaking that accent. "His Nibs," the man the two truck-drivers answered to, was none other than Roger Todd!
Behind him, her slender nylon-clad legs provocatively crossed to show twin bulges of ripely contoured thigh, a pretty blonde girl with thin, sadistic lips lolled negligently on a battered davenport.
"Sorry, guv," the taller of the drivers apologized. "We was followin' these birds as instructed but they left the route and tailed you 'ere. We found 'em snoopin' around in the shrubbery, so we thought we better bring 'em in."
"Left the bally route, did they?" Todd echoed. "Followed us here, did you say? By jove, you two youngsters'll have a bit of explaining to do, won't you? What have you got to say for yourselves?" The voice was as asinine as ever, but somehow there seemed to be a note of underlying menace in it now.
"I don't know what all the fuss is about," Tom said sullenly. "We saw a car and trailer exactly like ours yours with the same license plates. Naturally we were curious, so we followed it up. We'd no idea it was yours too."
"Hadn't you indeed?" Todd said softly.
"Certainly not. Even if we had . . . What the hell's the idea of all the drama with the guns? And, come to think of it, why the disguise?"
"Tom, surely that's Mr. Todd's business?" Helen put in.
"It's certainly none of yours," Todd said to Stacey. "I told you I was most emphatic about it on no account to diverge from the route I gave you. What d'you think you're being paid for? Why did you disobey me?"
"There was an accident. The auto route was blocked. The police directed us to the highway. There was nothing else we could do."
"You could bloody well 'ave gorn back to it at Chagny," one of the drivers said. "The way the cops told you. But no you 'ave to poke your bleedin' nose in where it's not wanted. Perishin' yanks!"
"Chagny." Todd said reflectively. "I suppose you saw us at lunch, is that it? And you couldn't keep your curiosity in check. Didn't your mother ever tell you, Mr. Stacey, that curiosity killed the cat?" He paused a moment and then added slowly: "Or was it just curiosity?"
For a moment there was silence in the dusky room. A branch tapped against one of the dusty leaded panes of the window in a sudden gust of wind. The blonde on the davenport gazed quizzically at the flustered American couple, her slitted almond eyes glinting mischievously in the lamplight. "You think it was more than curiosity, Roger?" she enquired in a low husky voice. She had a slight but attractive French accent.
"I intend to find out, Claudine," Todd said. And then, very quietly to Tom: "How much are they paying you?"
"P-p-paying me?" Stacey stammered. "I don't know what you mean. Who?"
"The Perrottas. How much are they paying you to turn?"
"I tell you I don't know what the hell you're talking about. I never heard of the . . . who did you say?"
The Englishman compressed his lips. "I don't have time to bandy words," he said between his teeth. "Tell me, or it'll be the worse for you."
"How many more times do I have to -Aaaarrrgh!" Stacey broke off with a gasp of agony as Todd nodded to the two drivers and they whirled on him as one man and sank their fists into the pit of his stomach. While Helen screamed shrilly, her hands flying to her mouth, the two Cockneys seized her husband's buckling form and slammed him on his back on the table. One threw himself across the struggling American's legs; the other dragged his arms brutally above his head so that he was agonizingly stretched, as defenseless as a piece of meat on a slab.
Todd moved across the room and looked down at him. "Now look, old chap," he said reasonably, "these two excellent fellows will be saved a great deal of trouble and you, incidentally, will be saved a great deal of pain -if you'll just be sensible and tell me what I want to know."
"I don't . . . know what you . . . mean," Tom gasped.
The Englishman sighed. He nodded his head at the drivers once more. The man lying across Stacey's legs bunched his fist and hammered it savagely into Tom's belly . . . once, twice, three times, four times, the brutal blows pounded into the sensitive muscles already tautly extended from the position Stacey was held in. The breath was driven from the pinioned man's lungs with the first violent punch. Strange gargling howls choked from his open mouth as his spasming diaphragm muscles, paralyzed by the ferocious assault on his unprotected abdomen, vainly tried to draw air back into his lungs. His head threshed from side to side between his cruelly stretched arms; his hips arched up and down in a frenzied tattoo against the table as the merciless beating went on.
Finally the driver, panting, gave up. Todd lit a cigarette and blew the smoke into Tom's contorted, tear-wet, saliva-streaked face. "Tell me what I want to know," he repeated evenly. "Why are you spying on us? Who's paying you? Is is the Perrottas? How much did they give you?"
Jolt after jolt of agony was flaming through Tom's savaged belly. The air creaked back into his lungs as he rolled his head hopelessly to one side and moaned: ". . . told you. We saw the caravan . . . we were curious . . . that's all. Nobody's paying us."
"And the Perrottas?"
"I don't know.. . I never heard of-" He sucked in his breath with a gasp as the man across his legs, at a signal from Todd, reached out one of his great hands and started to grope around Tom's crotch. His thick, probing fingers located the American's penis beneath the tightly stretched material of his pants, felt beneath it, and then as the man gave a grunt of satisfaction curled around the soft bulge of his testicles. Tom gritted his teeth and groaned deep in his chest. He knew what was coming.
Abruptly the hard fingers tightened around the super-sensitive glands in their softly crinkled sac. Grinning evilly, the truck driver flexed his muscles and squeezed. Stacey's body stiffened and jerked against the weight of his captors as an intolerable wave of excruciating pain scythed through his loins and raged up into his tortured belly. His mouth opened wider still and an anguished scream burst from his writhing lips as the pitiless pressure on his balls steadily increased.
"No, no, no," he babbled. "Aaaaaaaaaaaah! . . . Don't, don't . . . p I e e e e e e e e a se ! Stop it . . . Aiiiiiiiieeeeeeee! . . . Arrrrggggggh! . . . I tell you I don't know -Uuuuurrrrrrgggghh!. . .
"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! You monsters! Let him go. Can't you see he doesn't know what you're talking about?" Helen shrieked, hurling herself at the driver's back and beating ineffectually at his broad shoulders with her fists. She broke off with a gasp as a thin hard hand slapped her so viciously across the face that the tears spurted instantly from her eyes. The girl Claudine had leaped tigerishly from the davenport and attacked her from behind. "Shut up, you little bitch!" she hissed venomously. "If you utter another word, I'll have your nipples cut off with a razor!"
Appalled by such a threat, the terrified American girl fell back and watched aghast the continued brutalization of her husband.
As the driver alternately relaxed and then mercilessly tightened his grasp on Tom's balls, the helpless young man bucked and threshed against the imprisoning hands in shuddering convulsions of agony. It felt as though the great blade of a giant harrow was plowing up through his loins and rending his bowels asunder. Waves and shafts and spasms of a pain so insufferable that he could never have dreamed it existed speared through every nerve and vein of his body like bolts of lightning. The world had vanished into a crimson maelstrom of agony. His flailing head beat on the wooden table top as his arching torso jerked galvanically in time with the insupportable attack on his testicles. He had lost all sense of time and place and he was uttering a continuous gurgling scream that echoed around the walls of the seedy room.
Todd and the French girl were standing side by side watching his convulsed face with detached interest. Claudine's eyes were shining and the sharp points of her breasts rose and fell excitedly beneath her blue cashmere sweater. At last, seeing that the tortured American was not going to give out any information, Todd said: "All right. That's enough."
At once the two drivers relinquished their holds and rose from the table. Stacey's knees jerked up into his belly and he rolled on to his side and then dropped face downward on to the floor, where he squirmed and convulsed his hips up off the tiles like a caterpillar hurrying for home. "If physical pain doesn't do the trick, we'll see what a touch of the old mental agony can do," Todd resumed pleasantly. And then, turning to the horrified Helen, he added: "So sorry to inconvenience you, my dear, but I'm afraid the next part of the entertainment's going to come from you."
"W-w-w-what are you going to do?" stammered the frightened blonde.
"We're not going to do anything," Todd replied. "It's what you're going to do that counts."
"I d-d-don't understand."
"Since the application of pain to his own person won't make your husband see reason, we'll see what effect the humiliation of your own charming body will have on him," the Englishman said.
The helpless young wife stared at him uncomprehendingly.
"For a start," Todd explained, "we're going to make you suck the cocks of these two gentlemen here."
Helen gasped aloud as her face crimsoned with indignation. My God! They were going to make her do . . . what she had done to her husband last night.. . for only the very first time! This time though, it wouldn't be Tom; it would be these two dreadful leering bullies whose disgusting penises she would be forced to take right into her mouth and suck! She shuddered. "I won't!" she cried frantically. "I won't! I won't! You can't make me!"
Todd smiled a wintry smile. "Try me," he said thinly.
Helen backed away with a small squeal of alarm as he motioned the taller of the two drivers forward. How could she ever have thought this repulsive Englishman, this suave upper-class phony, attractive? Surely she should have seen at once that there was something fake about him, about the whole deal he proposed? God knows what kind of a mess they had gotten themselves into now . . .
Watched by the lasciviously smiling Claudine, Todd himself, and his leering companion, the driver was slowly unzipping the fly of his pants. The terrified blonde gazed in fascinated horror as he splayed the material apart to reveal the rigidly pulsating length of his long erect penis. Gradually, he pulled the throbbing shaft free, the veined pink rod with its purplish bulbous tip standing out like the blade of a heavy, blunt spear.. . a spear that was destined to plunge home into the wet warm cavern of her own mouth!
"Anyway," Todd said conversationally, "nobody's suggesting that you'll be made to do it. You're going to do it of your own free will."
"Never!"
"All right, you chaps," Todd said without looking up. "You know what to do."
The drivers, one with his stiffly upstanding penis wagging obscenely from the open fly of his pants, moved purposefully forward and seized the writhing form of Tom from under the table. The American youth was in a terrible state, his head slumped on his chest, his hands pressed frenziedly to his brutalized genitals. His shirt was dark with vomit and there was a rash of perspiration dewing his battered face. In the lamplight, a long trail of spittle swayed floor-wards from his open mouth.
They propped him up against the wall and then the one with the open fly swaggered back to Helen. Todd and the French girl moved swiftly towards her at the same time, seizing her by the arms and forcing her down on to her knees so that her terrified face was only inches away from that lewdly jutting cock. "Go on, duckie," the driver chuckled, thrusting the obscenely pulsating shaft at her mouth. "Suck!"
Pressing her lips tightly together, Helen turned her face away and shook her blonde head violently.
"All right," Claudine spat, tightening her grip cruelly on the kneeling young wife's arm, "let the bastard have it!"
As Tom raised his head to stare dazedly at the room and its occupants, the driver steadying him against the wall drew back his clenched fist. At the same time, Todd and the girl reached down to grasp the back of Helen's shirt; with one sudden movement they ripped it violently outwards so that the buttons tore off and the garment, with the brassiere beneath it, split open to expose her shoulders and the lushly swelling mounds of her naked breasts. Tom opened his mouth to croak an agonized protest but instead his breath exploded in a grunt of agony as the driver slammed a paralyzing blow to his solar plexus.
Immediately afterwards, slowly, almost caressingly, the man brought up his knee into the injured American's groin, grinding it there so that Tom's painfully inflamed testicles grated intolerably against his pelvic bone. Tom's mouth opened wider and animal noises forced themselves from it. The driver lowered his knee and jerked it up again harder this time. Stacey screamed a shrill inhuman howl that rose up the scale as his tormentor kneed with increasing force into his pain-filled balls.
Helen's eyes were wide with horror. Her hands, unmindful of her nakedness, had flown to her cheeks. "Stop!" she screamed. "Please stop! . . . I'll do it! I'll do it! I'll do anything . . . only stop hurting him . . . ! "
Todd exhaled a sigh of satisfaction. "Jolly good show!" he exclaimed, rather as though he had just witnessed the serving of an ace in a tennis match. "You see, my dear I told you nobody would force you." And then to the driver: "Well done, Ben. Keep him propped up. will you: I want the fellow to see."
Half groaning, half crying, the brutalized young American lolled against Ben's steadying hand to watch with unbelieving horror-struck eyes the oral rape of his seductive young wife. He shuddered as the truck-driver arched his pelvis forward to thrust his nakedly pulsing cock at her lips. A strangled cry burst from his throat as she instinctively turned away with a tremor of disgust . . . and then once again he doubled up. retching, as Ben brought up that savage punishing knee.
Helen's eyes flew open at his new scream of agony as the bone thudded jarringly against his agonized testicles. Desperately, to save him any further torture, she snatched at the other man's hotly throbbing penis and guided it towards her fear-quivering mouth.
Trembling with shame and revulsion, she stared at the blood-engorged head and the veined rigidity of the thick shaft where it speared out from the gaping fly of the man's pants. The harsh material of the overalls creaked slightly as he tensed his hips in preparation for the first exciting contact with her soft warm lips. And then suddenly his palms were pressed hard against her ears and he was dragging her beautiful face towards him as the lust-thickened cock crushed through her wetly parted lips and into the warm moistness of her mouth. She could feel with a shudder of repulsion the hugeness of it sliding up the length of her tongue and filling her mouth completely with its thick fleshy hardness.
Kneeling in abject humiliation before her violator, her breasts stripped cruelly bare and her naked arms held sadistically behind her by her captors, Helen struggled mentally against the obscene rape of her lips. She closed her eyes to shut out the vision of the four faces reveling in her shame; to shut out the sight of her husband, beaten and submissive, forced with anguished eyes to witness her debasement. She felt numb with despair, empty of all sensation except disgust. From a long way away, she heard the harsh voice of her ravisher: "Go on, you dirty little whore! Suck! Let's 'ave a spot of perishin' action down there, doll! Suck . . . suck . . . suck!"
Dully, the half-naked young wife complied: she was conditioned to obey now for fear of the dreadful things that might happen to Tom if she didn't . . . and for fear of the pain she herself might suffer if these inhuman monsters began to brutalize her. Claudine's vicious threat about cutting her nipples off with a razor was too fresh in her mind for her to forget it.. .
Her lips began slowly to nibble at the rigid shaft of hard male flesh thrusting into her as she spluttered and coughed at the lewd and unnatural invasion of her mouth. She tried to think of other things to wipe from her mind what she was being forced to do but it was impossible. The warmly pulsating penis fucking in and out of her violated mouth was stretching her jaws cruelly wide. The man's sperm-swollen testicles, which had escaped from the confining sheath of denim at his groin, were bouncing softly against her chin. And there was an odor of stale masculine sweat around his genitals that filled her nostrils with a constant reminder of the depraved and sadistic debauch she was suffering.
Claudine had been staring fascinated at the sight of the driver's cock disappearing into the lip-pursed whiteness of Helen's face. Now still keeping hold of the girl's arm, she leaned down and unbuttoned the waistband of the slaving blonde's skirt, thrusting the skirt down over the luscious swell of her hips to reveal the sheer white nylon panties sheathing her trembling loins. Helen was now kneeling in total submission, naked before her ravishers except for the rumple of garments around her thighs. She moaned through the gagging bulk of the stranger's hotly throbbing cock in her mouth, shivering with fearful anticipation as she felt Claudine's fingers haul down the flimsy nylon strip and probe lewdly into the furrow between her buttocks. The French girl's fingers lingered there for a moment and then trailed salaciously out and over her hips to the softly quivering curve of her belly in front. For a little while they fondled the ripely jiggling mounds of the American girl's breasts as they danced on her pumping torso.. . only to burrow with breath-catching suddenness down into the vee of golden pubic hair mantling the kneeling girl's pussy.
Jerking wildly at the unexpected contact with her secret genitals. Helen continued to work in a daze at the command of the driver's hands, licking and sucking as he forced her to follow slave-like with her lips his every lunge into the soft shelter of her distended mouth. The saliva flooding around her tongue was becoming sticky from the emissions of seminal fluid wetly seeping from the throbbing tip of his penis. She could feel his hips writhing and straining beyond her bobbing head as though he was in the grip of some convulsive seizure. His long hard fingers were entangled in her hair, forcing her ovaled mouth up and down over the end of his thrusting fleshy instrument as if it was a cunt into which he was grinding the full fury of his animal lust.
Whimpering piteously deep in her throat, she squirmed her hips in a vain attempt to evade the lewdly exploring fingertips of Claudine, which had now parted the hair-fringed fleshy lips of her cunt and insinuated themselves into her moistly heated vaginal passage. Leaning forward as she kneeled, hoping to escape the girl's plundering hand, she succeeded only in exposing the bud-like shaft of her clitoris. The French girl's breath quickened as she felt the throbbing button of flesh against her fingertips, and she began a maddening rotary motion of her hand, sending waves of indecent sensation flaming outward through Helen's loins to war with the tremors of disgust shaking her frame at the cruelly pistoning penis stuffing her mouth.
She could feel the hot pulsing shaft stretching and expanding between her cheeks, filling every last crevice of her mouth as the driver's breathing too became harsh and uneven. Moaning helplessly as it skewered hard down towards her tonsils, she sucked wildly in an attempt to end the intolerable rape of her lips as quickly as possible. If she wanted it to end -and if she wanted to avoid the forbidden flickers of unwelcome desire now setting her veins afire through the expert manipulations of Claudine's massaging fingers it was the only thing to do . . . She had never felt so utterly debauched and debased in her life.
Abruptly the driver jerked as though he had received an electric shock and ground his powerful hips tight into Helen's face, sinking the full length of his long hard cock deep down in her gasping throat. As she fought for breath his wildly jerking penis erupted in the warm wet interior of her sucking mouth. Incoherent sounds of profanity streamed from her violator's lips as his thick heated sperm squirted into her mouth like the galvanic spurting of a torrent through a storm drain. Helen sucked and swallowed, sucked and swallowed, her cheeks inflating and deflating as she gulped down the acrid scalding fluid to keep from choking before the anguished eyes of her helpless husband.
It seemed to go on forever, the staccato pumping of the driver's ejaculating penis into her mouth as her nose was crushed against the wiry pubic hair framed by the fly of his pants and her loins were subjected to the intolerably exciting assault of Claudine's lewdly probing fingers. But at last the gagging cock gave a final convulsive jerk and softened beneath her swirling tongue. A moment later, the tube of male flesh oozed from between her cum-smeared lips, and she tried to sit back on her heels as the driver stepped back with a grunt of satisfaction.
"Shit!" Claudine exclaimed harshly, her invading hand pressing even more tightly into Helen's splayed cunt. "Just as it was getting interesting. You're not going to leave it there, are you Roger?"
"Certainly not," Todd replied. "At least I don't think so. Have you anything to say, Stacey?"
Tom was crying like a baby. The sight of his beautiful young wife's complete humiliation had broken him totally. "How many times do I have to tell you, you bastard? . . . I don't know," he sobbed.
"Shall I give 'im the works again, guv?" the driver propping him up asked hopefully.
Todd shook his head. "The psychological approach seems to be more effective," he said.
"Eh? 'Ow's that?"
"It works better if he sees someone else getting the treatment. By the time this young lady has satisfied you and me.. . and I think Claudine might like to have a go at her sweet little cunt too . . . he may be ready to talk. If not, we can always er fuck the subject. The great old roger, don't you know! For the moment. Shorty, let Ben take your place and dive in yourself."
"Shorty!" Helen exclaimed in spite of herself. "But surely that was . . . ? " Yes she couldn't be mistaken: it was the one name they had let slip . that awful night when they had come to the apartment. . . She gasped aloud as realization flooded overwhelmingly into her mind, illuminating so much that had been dark in an instantaneous flash. "It was you two who burgled our apartment, wasn't it?" she demanded accusingly. "The other night?"
"Hole in one!" Todd grinned. "I told you she was a smart girl."
"But . . . but . . . " Helen was still puzzled. "I don't understand . . . the voices.. . I thought they were Americans . . . ? "
"Ben and Shorty were on the bally stage once," Todd explained. "Character parts, don't you know. They could be French if it was necessary. Or even bloody Arabs. Very useful fellows!"
Tom was staring unbelievingly at the two drivers. "My God," he choked. "And the . . . the two hoods who . . . the men who mugged me in the alley? . . . "
"Right again," Todd smirked with a wink at Claudine.
"The whole thing was a set-up, wasn't it?" the kneeling blonde pursued, forgetful for a moment of her own debased position. "You saw Tom winning that money at the casino and . . . and you deliberately planned to have us both robbed on the same night so that we'd be left without a cent! So that you could rely on us to jump at any offer you made! You knew perfectly well we'd agree when you made that oh-so-generous offer because you'd fixed it that way already! . . . "
"You know a sight too bloody much, darling," Todd said. "What we're after now is your story. You've guessed or been told my end of the show. It's about time you let me in to your secret. What about it?"
"But why . . . ? Why should you want two complete strangers to be forced into a position where you could persuade them to drive your damned caravan to England?" Helen demanded, ignoring his question.
"Maybe I'll tell you if you tell me what I want to know."
"How can we convince you?" the nakedly kneeling blonde cried desperately with a helpless look at her husband as he sagged weakly against the wall. "There isn't anything to tell. Truly . . . there isn't, there isn't!"
The Englishman compressed his lips. "We'll see, won't we?" he said nastily. "Do you still refuse to talk, Stacey?"
Tom groaned and shook his head in hopeless frustration. Not knowing the answers to their captor's meaningless questions, they were powerless to stop the senseless cruelty of their tormentors.
"Very well," Todd said. "On with the great old show. Shorty produce that rod of iron you keep in your undershorts, and get going!"
With fear-filled eyes, Helen Stacey watched the burly truck-driver as he fumbled with the zipper at his bulging crotch and, smiling lustfully, strode towards her . . .
CHAPTER SEVEN
By midnight the mystery had been solved. After Helen had been forced to climax the brutal Shorty and then Todd himself, Claudine excited out of her mind by the multiple oral rape of the helpless young blonde had stripped off her linen pants to bare her sparsely hair-covered pussy and insisted that the captive girl should suck her too. The fact that even this final debasement and degradation produced no information either from Helen or her beaten, horrified husband almost convinced Todd that the American couple were telling the truth: his questions were remaining unanswered not through stubbornness or loyalty to some other employer but simply because they really didn't know! Ironically enough, though, it was Tom who inadvertently supplied the key to the riddle.
He had, for the tenth time, in a fit of weakly impotent rage, burst out that the only reason he followed Todd's trailer was because he happened to be curious when he saw it . . . and that the only reason he saw it was because of the accident on the auto route. And then for the first time he had begun to speak wildly of the causes of the pile-up itself. It was at this moment that the Englishman had cut him short.
"Just a minute!" Todd rapped. "These chaps you say tried to force you off the road -describe them."
They had tied Tom into a chair, roping his ankles to the legs and dragging his arms over the back to lash them cruelly there. He sagged exhaustedly against his bonds, his dulled eyes watching the obscene tableau in the center of the room, where Ben and Shorty held his naked wife spread-eagled on her back on the table while Claudine, aflame with lustful desire, straddled her tearstained face as she furiously undulated her hips to take her seething cunt to and fro across Helen's reluctantly sucking mouth. "I don't know." he mumbled. "Flashily dressed . . . a fat guy with a black shirt and a white tie . . . a little dark punk with a cap pulled over his eyes. They were both killed in the crash . . . "
"And they were driving . . . ? "
"A big American sedan. An Olds, I think it was."
Todd whistled. "Vergano and Rasimi," he said to Ben, ignoring the two naked women threshing and writhing on the table. "Perrotta's men from bloody Marseille." He went to a side table and poured himself half a tumbler of cognac. He had been drinking heavily ever since Claudine had started her oral rape of the helpless American girl. "It shows they're on to us," he said thickly. "And it shows the bloody scheme would have worked if only this young bugger'd done what he was told!"
He swung around to stare at the table, his eyes glinting lasciviously as the French girl orgasmed, her head thrown back to utter a shrill whinnying cry as her belly shuddered and convulsed, grinding the wetly glistening lips of her splayed cunt savagely down on Helen's obediently lapping tongue.
Later, convinced of the American couple's innocence now, he became alcoholically boastful and the whole story came out.
The excuse of the duty payable on the trailer was pure fabrication. If the customs police caught up with him, he would simply pay up. The truth was that Todd was in the drug racket. A huge consignment of heroin had arrived at Marseille from Beirut and just as this shipment, worth over seven hundred thousand dollars, was due to be transferred to London he had heard through the grapevine that both the police and a rival gang bent on hijacking the goods en route had been tipped off. . .
Seeing Tom and Helen at the casino in Cannes, he had dreamed up the idea of using them as decoys, as setting them up as patsies. Before he could be sure they would fall in with his plan, though, it had to be arranged that they were completely destitute . . . and he knew from his conversation with Helen that they had no means beyond the money they had with them. So once the burglary of the apartment and the mugging of Tom had been successfully carried out, their acceptance of his "offer of help" was a foregone conclusion. Then, while they innocently drove a "clean" trailer up the most obvious route and drew off the pursuit, he would himself drive a similar caravan with the heroin concealed behind its paneling along the minor roads.
The fact that the rival gang led by the notorious Perrotta brothers had twice attempted to force the trailer off the road, plus the fact that they had twice been the subject of special police searches, proved the validity of Todd's thinking. But now there was a complication; because of the accident and Tom's pigheadedness the two trailers were together -and apart from watchful police patrols there were still the remaining members of the gang, not least the brutally efficient brothers themselves, to contend with . . .
"So what's the form, guv? What are we gonna do?" Shorty asked.
"Grab a couple of hours beauty sleep," Todd said, waving his half-full brandy glass, "and then split up again. Ben you drive the 'hot' trailer. Skirt Paris to the west. Take her through Versailles and then head for Amiens, Albert, Doullens and St. Pol. We'll get back on the old auto route and go swanning up to bloody Lille as originally planned."
"Who's goin' to drive?" Ben enquired.
"Why Mr. Stacey here: he's been paid for it." Todd said. "Oh yes, old chap, you will," cutting short a mumble of protest from the battered young American "because you see we shall have a hostage. Shorty and Claudine and me. We shall be right behind you, keeping her a prisoner in the great old 'van, just to make sure that you keep to the straight and narrow this time!"
"Beauty sleep, eh?" Shorty leered with a sidelong glance at the sobbing figure of Helen. "I could do with a basinful of that, since there's a perishin' beauty to hand, as you might say. Come on, mate Ben and me and the guv'nor's got these two birds to attend to. But you ain't got no place with us. You must be tired and all. It's time for sleepy-byes!"
Loosening the ropes around Stacey, he hauled him suddenly to his feet and slammed a murderous right to the point of the unsuspecting American's jaw. As Claudine, Todd and Ben dragged the screaming Helen towards the stairs, Stacey pitched over backwards as if he had been pole-axed and crashed to the floor with a thump that shook the house.
* * *
They left at dawn. Ben, who had driven Tom's trailer up to the farm the previous evening, went first with the "hot" caravan. Fifteen minutes later, Shorty clattered down the stairs to rouse Tom, who was snoring on the floor beside the sitting-room table, the same spot where he had fallen four hours before. "Come on, mate time to get be'ind the bloody wheel," the Cockney said, shaking him roughly by the shoulder. The stench of liquor was heavy on the driver's breath. God knew what further sexual atrocities they had practiced on the defenseless Helen while he was unconscious, the young American thought bitterly as he stumbled out to the Mercedes.
Wearily, he slid into the driving seat. His whole body ached and throbbed. His savagely punished stomach muscles were unbearably tender and there was a gnawing pain in his lower belly that flamed through his loins like shafts of fire every time the movement of his legs shifted his brutalized testicles. Catching sight of his own face in the mirror as Todd, Shorty and Claudine hustled a weeping Helen from the ruined farm, he reflected with a wry smile that he himself looked more of a villain than any of them! One side of his jaw was swollen. He still had a black eye. And there were bruises and lacerations encrusted with darkly dried blood marking most of his face.
His sobbing blonde wife cast him an anguished glance as her captors thrust her up the steps and into the trailer. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her cheeks pale. The hands holding together the tattered edges of her ripped shirt were trembling.
Tom gritted his teeth, listened to some last-minute instructions from Todd, and drove slowly down the track and out on to the road. With Helen helplessly imprisoned in the caravan, completely at the mercy of the three ruthless racketeers behind him, there was nothing else he could do.
They rejoined the auto route at Melun and headed for the ring-road circling Paris.
Inside the trailer, once they had gotten used to the bucking motion of its progress, Todd, Shorty and the French girl relaxed in the armchairs in the lounge. Helen was cowering against the partition blanking off the kitchen section.
Todd jerked open the door of the liquor cabinet and looked up at her. "I say, old girl, you look a bit ropey like that," he observed. "Did you transfer your duds to the 'van before you started?"
"My . . . duds?" the frightened blonde faltered.
"Your gear. . . the things you wear," he explained. "If you ask me, it wouldn't be a bad idea to change into something a little less er revealing. Just in case anyone sees us, don't you know. I'd hate anyone to get the wrong impression!"
"Oh," Helen said shakily. "Yes, we did. We . . . they're in the closet in the bedroom."
"Well, why don't you tool on in there and change into something fresh?" the Englishman suggested. "Here you look in pretty bad shape, I must say! Have a smoke. Steady the great old nerves, eh?" He held out a Hat gold case packed with cigarettes.
Dully, she took one, accepted a light, and went through into the sleeping quarters as Todd drew the drapes over the big windows and began to pour out drinks.
As she slowly pulled off the shredded remnants of her clothes, she looked curiously at herself in the full-length mirror screwed to the closet door. There were bruises on her wrists and upper arms where she had been held by Todd and Claudine while she was forced to suck the two drivers. The bluish marks of cruelly grasping fingers mottled the tender flesh of her full high-set breasts. And down the soft slope of her belly were the parallel scratches made by the French girl's nails when, during the hell of the night, she had . . . Helen shuddered and put the memory from her mind. She took a deep drag of the cigarette to try and still the trembling of her hands.
Even so, she thought, puffing furiously, it was astonishing how little it really showed considering the amount of mauling she had suffered after they had taken her drunkenly to bed. She shivered, inhaled another lungful of smoke, and pulled open one of the closet drawers. It was barely daylight and the pale sky over the gray countryside receding through the back window of the trailer gave no hint of the weather to come. It seemed warm just the same: she would choose something that was light and loose something that would hide as much of her as possible. The last thing she wanted was to excite the lust of Todd or his men again! For the third time she sucked on the cigarette.
It had a curiously aromatic flavor quite nice really, but different from the Luckies she and Tom habitually smoked. Perhaps it was Turkish or a special English blend? She examined the paper to see if the maker's name was stamped on it. but the ribbed white substance was bare.
Smoking it down to a stub, she pawed through the garments in the drawer. She was holding a voluminous linen smock up against her naked body to see the effect in the mirror when a small sound caused her to raise her eyes . . . to stare straight into the reflected image of Shorty, who was standing behind her in the doorway with an evil smirk on his face.
She opened her mouth and screamed as he stepped forward, seized her bare arm and dragged her towards the lounge.
Claudine and Todd were sitting forward on their chairs, half-full glasses in their hands, their eyes bright with anticipation. Shorty thrust Helen into the center of the room and slid shut the door. She stood naked before them, her head hanging with shame, a hot flush of embarrassment darkening her face. "What more do you want of me?" she asked in a low voice. "Don't you ever have enough?"
"Enough's as good as a feast, they used to say," Todd quipped. "But we haven't had breakfast yet and we're still hungry! Besides -got to while away the bloody journey somehow.
With the sadistically smiling Claudine, he rose to his feet. And then, as the three of them began methodically stripping off their clothes, Helen burst into tears and hid her face in her hands, pitiful incoherent pleadings forced their muffled way through her clenched fingers as her naked shoulders quivered and her chest heaved with racking sobs. "Don't," she sobbed. "Not again . . . please! Please let me go . . . Don't do it to me again! . . . "
The trailer lurched suddenly as Tom. invisible in the Mercedes towing them, was forced to brake violently half way around a curve. With her hands hiding her eyes. Helen was unprepared and off balance. She staggered, fell against an armchair, and stumbled to the floor. At once Todd and Shorty, naked and hairy, leaped on her and threw her on her back. Kneeling behind her, Todd seized her wrists and stretched her arms above her head while Shorty grabbed her ankles and hauled her legs brutally apart. She lay naked and defenseless before them, spread-eagled and open, as cruelly stretched as a victim on a medieval torture rack!
Shuddering afresh with terror, she gazed wild-eyed from face to pitiless face as they: stared lasciviously at the quivering white mounds of her breasts, the softly trembling bulge of her young belly, and the golden nest of pussy hair nestling between her lewdly splayed legs. Dear God, there was nothing she could do against three of them! Shut away in the speeding trailer as her husband unknowingly drove it northwards towards Paris, she was utterly alone and at their mercy! Stretched helpless on the throbbing floor, she lay listening to the rumble of wheels beneath her, the hiss of tires on the asphalt, and the distant exhaust-note of the Mercedes as she closed her eyes and prayed for strength.
Abruptly she opened them again as an alien, touch on her flesh drew an involuntary gasp from her trembling lips. Claudine was kneeling between her spread thighs pawing obscenely at the soft flesh of her belly with slender red-nailed hands!
"Very nice! Ve-ery nice indeed!" the naked French blonde said tauntingly. "Last night in the dark it was difficult to tell besides, we were a little drunk by then. Roger, you really must get the electric light for that farm!" She moved one hand lewdly upwards to caress the fullness of one of Helen's quivering breasts. "As for you, darling, you have a choice either you can cooperate and we shall have so much fun, all of us, or you can try and fight us, and only the three of us will have fun. It's up to you, but I think perhaps you may play ball especially after that cigarette."
"Cig-cig-cigarette . . . ? " Helen faltered.
"Finest quality Hash," Todd chuckled above her head. "Imported from the Lebanon by yours truly. Guaranteed not to mark or scar! Warranted non-addictive!"
The nakedly spread-eagled blonde almost screamed aloud. My God no wonder that cigarette had tasted unusual! It had been packed with Hashish Marijuana it was what they called a joint! And she had innocently dragged the drugged smoke deeply into her lungs . . . she had puffed it right down to the stub! These unscrupulous villains had deliberately allowed her to inhale the narcotic aphrodisiac so that she would be an easier prey, so that she would fall in pore readily with their bestial demands! Already she could feel a curious swimming sensation invading her limbs, lightening their weight and swirling up into her reeling brain. And there was nothing she could do about it; it was already too late . . . the bitter tears welled up into her eyes and splashed down her cheeks to the carpeted floor.
She froze in horror as Claudine's red-nailed hands teased down the trembling contours of her body to linger caressingly among the sparse hairs silkily mantling her vaginal mound. The very thought of this woman once again touching her secret parts filled her with revulsion.
"Before you fuck her," the French girl crooned, raising her head to stare at Todd and Shorty, "I think I ought to open up the road, hein?"
"Fire away, sweetheart," Todd said. "Get her nice and wet."
The blonde French girl's taut, bud-like breasts were heaving with excitement, the nipples spiked out hard and erect. For a moment she feasted her eyes on the vision of the helpless captive's shuddering, down-covered loins and then her head sank slowly towards Helen's shamelessly exposed vaginal slit.
As the realization of what Claudine was about to do hit her, a despairing groan forced its way past the defenseless American girl's lips. She would have nothing left! Naked, drugged and helpless, she would be plundered of every last vestige of decency! Last night she had been forced to give them pleasure "forced" with no thought of satisfying her. Now, they were going to force pleasures on her unwanted pleasures. Oh God, she would respond; she knew she would!
A convulsive spasm jerked the blonde American wife's thigh and belly muscles as she felt the cool moistness of the French girl's lips pressing into the tender sensitive flesh of her abdomen. She tried to cringe away from the touch, but the sudden wet contact sent an unexpected and inexplicable chill of delight racing the length of her spine. The demoralizing effect of the drug was beginning to work! She felt the red lips trace tantalizingly downwards to the crease at the top of her thigh as Claudine's thumbs spread the yellow pussy hair fringing her cunt. . . and then, without warning, the French girl's tongue laced snake-like into the moistly quivering slit of her vagina, sending an unwanted shudder rippling through her loins at the electrifying shock of its tip brushing her clitoris.
"Oh no . . . please," she groaned "You . . . must . . . not . . . aaaggghhh!"
She forced her head up from the floor, her eyes wide with abject horror, to see that her ravisher too had lifted her head and was grinning up at her between her nakedly upstanding breasts. Over the French girl's shoulder. Shorty leered salaciously as he held her legs obscenely apart. . . and above her head, she knew Todd would be staring down at her contorted face with that detached interest she found so repellent. Defenseless and vulnerable, she lay sacrificed before them, her humiliation complete.
Claudine rested her thumbs on the warmly quivering flanges of Helen's tight little cunt. With a slow torturing outward movement, she drew the interfolded pink lips apart to expose the dark moist furrow between them . . . and then, with a lustful groan, she dropped her head and buried the full length of her slippery tongue over again in the hotly throbbing tunnel of Helen's pussy.
The pinioned blonde jerked convulsively, a whimpering moan escaping from deep in her chest. Her buttocks ground hard down on to the carpet in an attempt to escape the maddening assault on her secret flesh. She shivered uncontrollably as Claudine drew, with a liquid suck of her lips, the tiny erect bud of her clitori wetly up into her hot mouth.
It can't be happening to me . . . it can V. . . it can't. . . ! the cruelly spread-eagled young wife groaned over and over to herself, her head falling back to the floor and twisting frenziedly from side to side as the French girl's face rocked in greedy feast between her legs and the tongue fucked in and out of her involuntarily dilating cunt. Yet in spite of her terror and revulsion at this depraved attack on her exposed loins, those now-familiar wisps of forbidden pleasure were again beginning to purl deep down in her belly. Aided by the conscience-suppressing drug coursing through her system, her sensually awakening body was finally forcing her to admit what she strove so hard to deny that the idea of violence coupled with brutal sex triggered off some psychological reaction that left her free, if only she would allow it, to exult actually exult in the rape of her own body . . . to find some obscure but shattering pleasure in the fact that she was helplessly pinioned by two men intent on raping her while a girl she had never seen before plundered her genitals with a ravishing tongue!
And suddenly that tongue arrowed forward, burrowing so far up into her hotly straining young cunt that shock spiraled crazily up her spine to the base of her skull . . . to burst there like a signal rocket, showering hot stars of lust over her whole body. Her loins thrust involuntarily up, burying the flickering tongue to its root. Fire was rapidly replacing fear within her as the practiced lips of the sucking blonde assailed her quivering genitals. Dear God, what was happening to her? She had never felt so lewdly wanton in her whole life! ' Through drug-blurred eyes, she saw Claudine's nod of assent, felt the hands grasping her arms and legs release their grip as her own hands dropped to hook talon-like into the blonde tresses of the French girl slavering at her loins. A low moan escaped from her throat as she clutched Claudine's head tightly to her. grinding her hungrily pulsating cunt savagely up into the other girl's face. But God Almighty what she was doing was no longer enough! The demons of unwanted lust were dancing with ever-increasing fury about the shuddering pink edges of Helen's seething cunt: again the familiar thought raged through her she wanted cock! And nothing but cock would do!
No sooner had the wish formed in her dazed mind than it was satisfied. Suddenly Claudine's head was no longer at her loins: instead, Helen's passion-crazed eyes saw the kneeling figure of Todd, his hair-covered chest heaving with lustful excitement, his long and massively erect penis jutting from his pelvis like the trunk of some giant tree. She shivered with momentary apprehension. The veins marbling the underside of it were gnarled and hard; the puce-colored sperm-bloated head was already protruding wickedly from the stretched foreskin. All at once she was afraid. He was going to plunge that iron-hard rod of flesh deep into the trembling depths of her vagina! She was going to be raped again!. . . But the very thought of that huge cock plowing into her own vulnerable belly despite her frantic attempts to keep it out stimulated a strange masochistic thrill which shuddered through her to the roots of her being.
Submissive as a sacrifice, she waited as Claudine seized her wrists and forced them back over her head, thrusting her down brutally on the floor as she was stretched into her former position. At the same time Shorty grabbed her ankles again and jerked her shuddering legs viciously apart.
Kneeling between her splayed thighs, Todd massaged the loose skin of his penis savagely up and down the shaft. Supporting his weight with one hand, he leaned forward and guided the bulbous head, now wetly glistening with seminal fluid, towards the gaping hair-fringed lips of the apprehensive blonde's cunt. As the hard rubbery tip nudged against the sensitive folds of flesh, the captive girl jerked and twitched, moaning out her desperation as her mind told her to resist and she tried fruitlessly to free her wrists and ankles from her captors' grasp.
Smiling maliciously, Todd inserted the blood-engorged head of his throbbing cock between the moistly glistening lips . . . and pushed.
Helen's cunt, already slippery with her own excited secretions and saliva from Claudine's slavering mouth, smoothly accepted the tip of the rigidly massive staff. But when two inches of the hotly throbbing cudgel were buried within the ridged and trembling walls of her vagina, the raped blonde suddenly screamed. Todd's cock was bigger than any she had felt before, and pain blazed through her loins as it skewered its way in. Her belly felt as though it was being torn apart.
Drawing a deep breath, the Englishman flexed his hips and thrust downwards with all his strength. "Aaaaaaggggggghhhhhh I"
The violated young wife screamed again, threshing wildly from side to side as the demons temporarily retreated and she writhed her own hips in a vain attempt to evade the brutal impalement that was sending tongues of flame searing through her flesh. But her struggles served only to imbed his lust-thickened hardness more deeply in the tight hot tunnel of her cunt.
For the third time she screamed, as Todd, with a final lunge, rammed the whole stiff length of his cock far up into her womb. But the cry was less wild than before. As the racketeer began a slow, teasing, in-and-out rocking movement of his hips, dipping and withdrawing the rigid staff of his cock, she became gradually acclimatized to the alien pole of flesh wedging apart the dilating walls of her vagina.
Claudine's breath was hissing between her teeth. "Go on, Rog!" she urged fiercely. "Give it to her! Fuck it into her! Stick that big cock of yours so far up the little bitch that she can taste it!"
Panting with lustful excitement, the Englishman increased the speed and power of his thrusts. His pelvis thudded rhythmically down against Helen's loins, his thick rigid penis plowing in and out of her ravaged pussy as her spread-eagled body jerked and shuddered under the fury of his assault. Slowly the mewling sobs tearing from her laboring lungs altered in tone. Once more the strange flickers of shameless arousal stabbed through her nerves with mounting intensity. Her wetly throbbing cunt was aflame with wanton desire as Todd pounded his raping cock with ever-increasing violence into the scalding depths of her belly. The humiliations, the shame, the beating of her husband, the trick that had been played on them, the bestial violations she had suffered and was suffering all were forgotten in the thrill of that jack-hammering staff of lust-thickened male hardness pumping relentlessly into her cunt. The sole thought left in her drug-dimmed and passion-crazed mind was that it must go on forever and ever. . .
She had even forgotten they were in a trailer, the lurching, swaying movement of the floor as they swung around curves and dropped down steep grades somehow accorded with the floating sensations swirling through her fogged brain. She hardly noticed when Todd stopped his remorseless pounding, forced his arms beneath her shoulders and, crushing her tightly to him, rolled over on to his back so that she was now lying face down along the length of his muscular body with her legs trailing limply outside of his. She lay limply on him, her marijuana-dimmed mind struggling vainly to strike a balance between the compulsive craving gnawing at her loins and the alarm bells of her conscience ringing wildly. No, no, no!
It was only when a weight descended heavily on her back as Claudine straddled her naked form and sat down facing Shorty that some inkling of the vile thing they were going to do percolated through to her consciousness. The fear became a certainty as the French girl seized her buttocks and splayed them brutally apart, revealing the tiny puckered ring of Helen's anus to the lustful gaze of the truck driver between her spread legs. "There you are," Claudine panted. "Stuff it in there. Shorty! Stick that great prick of yours up her ass! Bugger her! Shove it in! She'll love it!"
As the full realization of the bestial indecent ravishment they were proposing burst on her horrified mind, the drugged young wife struggled frantically between Todd and the French girl, trying desperately to squirm away from the cruel hands prying her ass-cheeks apart. "NO!" she cried, attempting to free her head and shoulders from the Englishman's grasp. "No, no, no . . . not that! . . . Please, please . . . Don't do it to me there! . . . Please!"
But there was nothing she could do against their combined strength. She stared wide-eyed with horror into Todd's cool gaze as Claudine bent forward and deposited a mouthful of saliva on the tightly puckering anal ring nestling in between her naked ass-cheeks. A moment later, chuckling lasciviously, Shorty had planted his knees on the inside of Todd's legs and forced Helen's thighs even further apart. Grinning at Claudine, he rammed his forefinger brutally into the wrinkled circle of the captive blonde's anus.
Helen shrieked aloud as his raping finger mercilessly plowed into her unprotected rectal passage and ground viciously in the warm rubbery depths of her rectum, widening and stretching the little opening in preparation for the more violent penetration she knew must come.
Snatching his finger away, the driver pulled back the foreskin sheathing his thick cock and aimed the smooth acorned head directly at her defensively cringing anus. Then, lowering himself slowly as Claudine edged back towards the pinioned girl's shoulders, he crammed the thick hard staff of his penis into the crevice of Helen's helplessly quivering ass. Splaying the quaking half-moons apart again with his own hands, he levered himself up on his elbows, and guided his stone-hard cock straight at her saliva-coated anus.
"Aaaiiieeef" Helen screamed as his huge pole of lust-hardened flesh pressed relentlessly up between her wide-held buttocks. "No! No! No! . . . Please don't! . . . " And her hips began a wild threshing from side to side in a futile attempt to evade the imminent skewering. But Shorty and Claudine between them were too strong for her. As Todd arched his hips off the floor to raise the helpless blonde's pelvis more conveniently for Shorty's attack, the brutal truck driver battered his merciless instrument forward with increasing power. Suddenly, his bloated cock-head popped through the elastic-anal ring as the tightly resisting opening of the writhing girl's anus stretched and then folded inward under the attack.
'"Uuuuuuuuggghhh!" The impaled blonde screamed again as she felt the first brutal thrust up into her plundered rectum, gasping at the effect of the blinding pain that seared like a rusty lance through her defenseless loins. Shorty lunged again and sank his hotly throbbing shaft halfway to the hilt. The girl howled once more, her legs flailing wildly on either side of him as she strove to escape the inhuman impalement that was setting her belly on fire again. Her ass-cheeks jerked and twisted beneath his weight, trying to throw him off but her struggles only worsened her position; every time she bucked and squirmed, she skewered herself further and further up Todd's plank-stiff cock ramming into her cunt from below. At last she gave a long sobbing moan as Shorty's long thickened penis slid the final inch up into the hot buttery depths of her rectum and his balls smacked heavily against her stretched cuntal lips and the stump of Todd's cock already buried there. Claudine expelled her breath in a sigh of lustful satisfaction. "All right, now you can fuck her both of you!" she said hoarsely.
"Gawd! It's tighter'n bloody hell back here!" Shorty growled. "Reckon I'll have to move abaht a bit to widen the bleedin' road!" Chortling obscenely, he started fucking into the ravished blonde's rectum with powerful sodomizing strokes as Todd began to slam his angry penis furiously up into her clasping young cunt again from below. The lust-thickened rods of male flesh skewered on and on into her jerking loins and soon, panting heavily with the mounting excitement of their depraved attack, they were buffeting her rhythmically between them like a sack of softly resilient foam rubber, their thick rigid penises fucking into her belly like alternating pistons.
A nd the feeling was changing now changing from pain to something else. . . something dark and mysterious and exciting. The opposition of pleasure was haunting her.
Suddenly the violated young wife reared up convulsively between them, throwing the unprepared Claudine off her shoulders, her mouth opening to emit a long wailing cry of subservience and shame which somehow translated itself into a groan overlaid with a note of passionate pleading.
But she wasn't pleading for them to stop! She wanted them to go on . . . harder and harder! The drug-dimmed mists fogging her mind had momentarily cleared with the pain of her sodomization and in that sudden moment of clarity she came to terms with the unacceptable, the dreadful fact she had striven so hard to suppress; now that the twinges of agony had subsided, she knew that the wild sensations flaming outward from her plundered loins and ravaging her nerves were sensations of desire!
The low whining moans gargling in her throat altered to gasping groans of pleasure. Her hips started thrusting backwards to meet the plunging strokes of Shorty's cock crammed into the tautly stretched opening of her distended anus, and then forward again to engulf the whole thick length of Todd's hotly throbbing penis within the wet clasp of her cunt. Her entire body undulated frenziedly between the two men and her rounded ass-cheeks began a lascivious gyrating movement of their own. squirming in abandoned circles between their two impaling shafts as she sought to get more, more, more!
"Ooooooooggghhh!" she chanted in time with their pile-driving thrusts. "Aaagghhh . . . Ohhhhhhh! . . . Uuuggh!"
Her eyes stared wildly and unseeingly at Todd's lust-contorted face below as her ecstatically convulsed body bucked and jerked under their twin assault. Her head flailed from side to side as they plunged mercilessly into her loins, on and on in time with their jackhammer thrusts into her warmly welcoming cunt and anus. More and more frenzied the three of them became, heaving and groaning and writhing on the caravan floor with ever-increasing fury as the wantonly excited French girl beside them savagely finger-fucked herself and their grunts of animal desire mingled with the obscene suck and slap of flesh on naked flesh in a wild crescendo of abandon.
Helen hardly noticed when they turned ber over again so that now the Englishman was fucking into her seething cunt from on top and Shorty was thrusting up into her dilated anus from underneath. When Claudine hauled her quivering torso out sideways from beneath their sweating chests and lowered her own wetly gaping loins to the lust-crazed young wife's face, Helen's greedily open mouth was ready to suck at the hotly throbbing folds of the French girl's succulent cunt. Oh God, she thought! I could fuck like this forever!
For a little while longer, the obscene foursome threshed on the swaying trailer floor and then Claudine, driven out of her mind at the sight of the double rape of Helen and further inflamed by the girl's heated tongue flickering so eagerly around the super-sensitive bud of her clitoris, gave a shuddering cry and orgasmed. Ramming her wildly quivering pussy down against the captive's slaving lips, she clamped her thighs vise-like about Helen's ears, threw back her head, and shouted her orgasm aloud as her bucking pelvis shuddered in galvanic spasms and her cuntal juices flooded over the American girl's chin.
Helen herself was next. Wrenching her head from between Claudine's trembling legs, she stiffened between the pounding bodies of Todd and Shorty. "Oh God, oh God, oh God!" she screeched. "I'm going to cum . . . yes, I'm going to cum! . . . Oh God, I'm cumming. I'm cumming . . . Fuck me! Screw me! Oh God -keep on you bastards . . . Ohhhhhhhhhh!"
Borne up on the irresistible wave of her climax, the blood thundering in her ears drowning the drumming of the trailer's wheels, she sobbed out an orgasm that seemed as if it would never end, begging and pleading with them to go on and on and on.
Excitement flared wildly within the two men. Sensing their total conquest of the frantically jerking blonde's mind and body, her total dependence on them of whom she had previously been so contemptuous they both plunged savagely forward at the same time, embedding their suddenly furiously ejaculating cocks deep in her quaking cunt and anus. . . pumping their creamy, white-hot sperm far up into her heaving belly in gush after gush of lewd delight.
When at last the hoarse gasping cries of release had subsided, when finally the grasping clutch of Helen's plundered genitals had sucked the last drop of sperm from their now deflated cocks, after the four of them had collapsed in a satiated tangle on the floor, they lay for a long time in exhausted silence as the trailer, driven by the unsuspecting Tom, rolled steadily northwards.
Sometime later, they clambered to their feet and began to dress themselves. Helen, her mind an inferno of mixed emotions, slunk back to the bedroom without looking at them and began rummaging in the closet again.
Todd had just reopened the liquor cabinet when there was a shrill squeal of brakes. The trailer lurched, swung sickeningly sideways, and then ground to a squealing halt, hurling them violently forward to crash in a heap against the wall.
The Englishman picked himself up and leaped to the window. "Good Christ!" he shouted angrily. "What the devil's going on?"
Through the curtain he had just pulled aside, they could see a section of country lane. Above the steep banks, tall trees shielded off the sky. The trailer and the Mercedes were slewed across a wide grass embankment, and in front of them, astonishingly, the sister caravan and its car were in a similar position!
Beyond, an old blue van which had caused the sudden stop by backing out of a farm gateway was completely blocking the road . . . and from its open doors poured half a dozen men with guns in their hands.
Profiting from Todd's inattention, Tom had left the prescribed route to follow the "hot" trailer only to run with it into what looked suspiciously like an ambush!
CHAPTER EIGHT
"My God," Todd yelled. "It's the Perrotta gang! Quick Shorty, get the guns. I don't know what the hell we're doing here, but they must have rambled the deception. Let's go help Ben."
"Wouldn't it be safer to stay in this one?" Claudine asked.
"What and risk losing eight hundred grand to those buggers? Bo me a favor, darling! The first thing is to protect the stuff."
The van had pulled back into the gateway and its occupants had fanned out and concealed themselves in the hedgerow across the road. The trailer and the Mercedes had jackknifed across the road so that the rear doors of the caravan were half facing the nearer bank and shielded from their view. Todd opened them cautiously, took one of the two revolvers Shorty was holding out, and dropped to the ground. "We're hidden until we reach the front of the van," he whispered. "If we bend low enough, we can use the Merc for cover after that and then there's only ten yards to go before we're in the shelter of the other van. We'll nip across one by one."
Tip-toeing across the grass, he led the way, followed by a trembling Claudine, with Shorty hustling the bewildered Helen along in the rear. When they reached the front of the trailer, he held up a finger for silence, crouched down, and sprinted past the Mercedes towards the other caravan. The door of the car opened as he ran past and Tom, who had been sheltering beneath the fascia, crawled to the ground and followed him. As the two men ran across the open space separating them from Ben's trailer, the reports of three heavy caliber pistols roared into the silence of the country lane. A slug spanged off the fender of the Mercedes; another ricocheted off a stone under their flying feet and whined menacingly into the distance. From the trees overhead, a flock of crows flapped into the air, cawing angrily.
Todd halted, panting, in the shelter of the second trailer. "I don't know what the fuck you think you were doing," he muttered furiously. "But you're in this up to the neck now. Get on in there and see if you can help Ben." As Stacey opened the door and slid thankfully inside, the Englishman flattened himself behind the corner of the trailer, peered warily around it, and loosed off a shot at the opposite hedgerow. A shadowy figure ducked hastily down behind the bushes as Claudine, zigzagging from side to side, ran madly across the gap. At the same time, another gun spat fire from the front of the trailer. Ben was giving them covering fire.
Six shots rang out when Shorty and Helen made their frantic dash. The terrified girl felt the blonde hair on the nape of her neck stir as something like an angry bee ripped through the air just behind her. An instant later the truck-driver took a wild step sideways, staggered, and almost fell forward into the shelter of the trailer. As Todd hurried them through the door, Shorty stumbled to his knees and had to be manhandled in.
"Bastards got me," he groaned as he collapsed on the trailer floor. Through the white-knuckled fingers of his left hand, which he had pressed to his ribs just below his heart, blood welled in thick scarlet drops to stain the carpet.
Todd picked him up and lowered him gently into an armchair. "Take it easy," he said tightly. "We'll fix it as soon as we've seen these buggers off." As he spoke another fusillade burst from the far side of the road. Glass exploded into the room as one of the caravan's big windows shattered, and the paneling splintered in several places as the steel-jacketed slugs ripped through the thin walls. Cursing, Ben dropped to his knees, poked his gun through the jagged hole in the window, and emptied the chambers in the direction of the opposite hedgerow.
"Keep down below the furniture," Todd rapped to the others. "It should be thick enough to cushion the bullets." He bent double, moved into the kitchen section, knocked the glass from the window with the barrel of his revolver, and began firing methodically across the road. Among the crackle of answering shots a sudden cry rang out and there was a threshing among the bushes lining the bank.
Tom, Helen, and the French girl, crouching fearfully on the floor, raised frightened faces as the woodwork of the trailer splintered again in a dozen places. Small circles of daylight showed through the rents in the paneling where the slugs had drilled their way in. Behind them. Shorty breathed stertorously in the chair, his head slumped on his chest, his open mouth bizarrely frosted with blood-flecked foam. From under his crimsoned hand, a spreading stain soaked steadily through his clothes and into the stickily glistening material covering the chair.
For a seeming eternity, the exchange of shots went on. The pattern of holes peppering the caravan walls increased in size. The glazing of the windows had all disappeared and the floor was littered with shards of broken glass. Once there was a heart-stopping clatter as a slug displaced one of the pans hanging on the kitchen wall and brought several more clanging into the stainless steel sink. Seconds later a brandy bottle standing on the liquor cabinet erupted in fragments and drenched them all with splashes of alcohol. Kneeling behind the gaping window, Ben turned a sweating face towards the kitchen and panted: "I'm out of ammo, guv. You got any more?"
Todd's face was pale. "Last box," he said tautly, tossing a square cardboard package through into the lounge. The carton fell on top of the built-in bookcases beneath the window, just out of the driver's reach. As he half rose to grab it, four or five shots rang out simultaneously from outside. Ben jerked upright and then slammed over on his back as though he had been floored by a giant fist. Three bullets had smashed into the side of his face at the same time, killing him instantly. From the gory horror of his shattered skull, a single eye stared sightlessly at the ceiling through the mess of pulped flesh and whitely shining splinters of bone. Beside it, a fountain of blood pumped for a moment into the air from its companion socket in diminishing spurts.
The two girls screamed and Tom Stacey gulped hard to keep from vomiting. In the chair, Shorty was past caring: the blood frothing through his open mouth from his punctured lung bubbled grotesquely into the silence. Todd crawled through from the kitchen and retrieved the carton of ammunition, recharging his revolver with shaking hands. "The odds are too is: strong," he said hoarsely. "There's at least four of them left probably five. Once they realize we're two short, they'll rush us and that'll be the bloody end. The only thing to do is take 'em from the side. I'm going to slip out the back and crawl around to the front of the Merc. Claudine, you come with me."
Handing the French girl the revolver dropped by Ben, he nodded to Tom and Helen and silently opened the caravan door. A moment later, he snuffled out on his hands and knees and dropped into the grassy space between the caravan and the bank, reaching up to help Claudine down after him. The door clicked shut after them.
Several minutes passed, punctuated by desultory shots from the Perrotta gang across the road. The breathing of the wounded driver in the chair grew shallower. A tumbler on the liquor cabinet shivered into fragments as a stray slug whined through the shattered window. It was only when the motor of the Mercedes attached to the other trailer burst into life with a roar that Stacey realized they had been double-crossed . . .
"My God!" he shouted. "The bastards! . . . They're pulling out and leaving us!" Worming his way to the door, he reached up his hand and tried the catch. The door was locked from the outside!
Todd and the girl, faced with overwhelming odds, had decided to sacrifice the priceless cargo in the besieged trailer to the hijackers and get away with life and liberty while there was still time leaving the two helpless young Americans, unarmed and alone, at the mercy of the gangsters! Locked in from behind, menaced by the guns of the ruthless racketeers beyond the open windows in front, they wouldn't have a chance!
The motor of the Mercedes rose to a scream. There was a screech of tortured rubber overlaid with a brisk crackle of revolver fire as the car and trailer wheeled around in a tight U-turn and raced back the way they had come . . . and then Helen, who was peering fearfully over the sill of the kitchen window, breathed in a whispered scream: "Tom! They're crossing the road four of them! They must realize we have no guns. They're going to rush the trailer like he said! . . . " She paused and then added tearfully: "Couldn't we just give ourselves up tell them the truth and let them have the damned drugs if they'll let us go?"
He shook his head. "Be your age, darling," he said wearily. "There are two men dead . . . and poor old Shorty won't last long. There'll be murder charges some place, sometime. And we're witnesses. D'you really think they'd let us get away alive when we could testify against them and finger them for taking the drugs as well?"
"But what are we going to do?"
He shook his head despairingly. Absently feeling his pockets in case there might be a knife, a bottle-opener, some absurd article that he could use as a weapon in a last hopeless attempt to defend himself and his young wife, his fingers encountered a rectangular hardness in the bottom corner of his jacket. Unbelievingly, he put his hand in his pocket. There was a hole in the lining . . . and through it was the gold Dupont cigarette lighter, the one he thought he had left at the whore's hotel in Nice!
And at the sudden familiar touch an idea flashed into his mind. He looked frantically around the trailer: it was identical to the one they had been towing, even to the bottles in the liquor cabinet.
"Darling they re trying the doors! There's one at each end!" Helen's voice was a muffled shriek.
Suddenly Stacey was calm. "Don't worry," he said. "Get back. . . crouch down behind Shorty's armchair . . . and leave it to me."
With wondering eyes she obeyed. Never before had she heard him with so much authority in his voice, or sounding so sure of himself. She watched as Tom crawled through into the kitchen section and stationed himself behind the partition. There was a blast of gunfire at each end of the trailer and the two end doors crashed inwards simultaneously, followed by the heavy tramp of feet.
He knew where everything was. Seizing the heavy bottle of butane gas from under the sink, he wrenched free the rubber tube connecting it to the cooker, turned the pressure wheel to the full "on" position and clicked the newly-found lighter where the gas hissed from the open end of the lead.
A long blue flame shot viciously from the nozzle of the tube, searing the paneled wall as he picked up the bottle and tucked it under one arm. Then, holding the flaming lead in front of him, he stepped into the passageway.
A dark, heavy-set man with an evil face and a gun in his hand was standing at the entrance to the bedroom. Stacey swung towards him, spraying fire like a gardener doctoring roses with insecticide. The six-foot jet of flame caught the surprised intruder full in the face. He gave an animal howl as the spray of fiercely burning gas blazed into his eyes, dropped his gun as his hands flew uselessly up to protect himself, and slumped to the floor with charred flesh peeling from his naked cheekbones as his eyebrows, hair and shirt erupted suddenly into a smoking inferno.
A shot roared thunderously in the confined space of the caravan. Stacey whirled to meet the second invader, the fiery jet scorching an erratic line of black along the wall as he turned. The man was standing at the far end of the lounge. The gun in his raised hand spat fire again as the murderous flame reached for him. A slug whined off the metal bottle under Tom's arm and splintered the woodwork . . . and then the hoodlum was caught full in the deadly blast of the burning gas.
He screamed shrilly as the searing blue spray played agonizingly across his chest, clawing at his jacket as the light material erupted in a fountain of flame, his head flailing uselessly from side to side as Tom played the killer jet upwards towards his face. Before he had collapsed, a writhing human torch, to the floor, Stacey was at the window, flushed with his success, aiming the burning gas at the third man crouched by the side of the trailer. As he played the six-foot jet over the gangster's back there was a cry of alarm from Helen behind him. Waiting only to see the man roll frenziedly away, beating ineffectually at the flames licking him from head to toe, Tom swung around. The heat from the incinerated gangsters' bodies had set the trailer on fire and the lounge was full of smoke.
"It's okay, it's okay," he choked. "This is our out!"
Squirting the jet for the last time around the lock securing the door opposite the bank, he charged through the crackling flames and planted the heel of one foot squarely beneath the catch. The seared lock burst outwards and the door crashed open.
The whole floor was alight now, and the sudden inrush of air fanned the flames into a fury. Thrusting his terrified wife ahead of him, Stacey jumped through into the open air as the trailer erupted in a blaze of fire that enveloped it from end to end and sent a huge column of black smoke towering into the afternoon sky. Seconds later, they were scrambling through the bushes lining the bank and sprinting for their lives across the plowed field above it.
Before they had gone a hundred yards, the menacing crackle of flames was drowned by the approaching see-saw scream of a riot squad patrol wagon. Evidently the local inhabitants, alerted by the sounds of gunfire, had called the police . . .
As the fleeing couple drew up panting in the shade of a tree on the far side of the field, Helen took Tom's arm and squeezed it. Her eyes were shining. "Darling," she said breathlessly, "Oh, darling you were fabulous!"
* * *
Later, hitching a ride to Calais in the back of a farmer's ramshackle old truck, Tom suddenly took his young wife's arm and pointed ahead. "Look!" he said triumphantly.
By the side of the road, a long trailer with a pitched roof was drawn up behind a beige Mercedes 350. In front of it was a dark blue police Peugeot. Behind it were half a dozen
Honda motorcycles. And all around it were men in uniform, shouting and gesticulating. As they passed, they caught a glimpse of Todd and Claudine, in handcuffs, being led into the back of a black Maria parked by the verge.
"But . . . but.. . I don't understand," Helen said wonderingly. "What can have happened?"
"I guess I can tell you," Tom said grimly with an odd, secretive smile. "I don't go for being made a fool of, you see. And two can play at Todd's kind of game. When they all thought I was unconscious last night, I came to and played 'possum. Then when you'd all . . . gone upstairs . . . I slipped out and . . . " He began laughing.
"But, darling, what did you do?"
"They were all parked by the farmhouse," Stacey said. "I simply changed trailers."
Helen gasped. "You . . . you mean . . . ? "
"Since they were identical, once I'd transferred our clothes and things from one to the other, nobody'd notice the difference. Todd thought Ben was driving the 'hot' one and he was in the 'clean' trailer. But in fact it was the other way around: the drugs were hidden in the caravan we were in today."
"And when he escaped, thinking he'd left the heroin to the other gang . . . ? "
"He was unknowingly carrying it with him. And now he's been caught red-handed with it . . . which serves the bastard right!"
For the second time, the voluptuous blonde squeezed her husband's arm and looked at him with adoring eyes. "I think you're fabulous!" she repeated.
Later still, when he insisted on squandering some of the remains of their two hundred and fifty dollars on a private two-berth cabin for the
Channel crossing from Calais to Dover, the girl complained. "But it isn't worth it!" she protested. "It only takes an hour and fifty minutes for the whole voyage, for God's sakes!"
Seizing her arm in a firm grip he lowered his lips to her ear. "Just keep your goddamn mouth shut in future when I'm giving orders," he whispered fiercely. "An hour and fifty minutes that's just about enough time to screw your silly little ass off and show you what a bed's really for! And baby, if I ever catch you making eyes at other men again, I'll lick that ass of yours until it barks like a box."
She closed her eyes and shivered in delight. "Darling . . . you're fabulous." And she followed meekly as he led the way downstairs to their bed . . .
