Archive Note: The cover to this title indicates the writer was "Anonymous." On the inside title page, the writer was identified as Paul Little.
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"My maid would bless you every night in her prayers if you gave her sanctuary here, Your Excellency. And I-I would be more than grateful. You would give me new life and make me a woman again after what the Turks have done to me. To feel that a man of my own country is thinking of me and having me at his side, that would purge my flesh from the blemishes those monsters left upon it. Oh, you do not know how grateful I can be, Your Excellency!" And then to his enchantment, the golden-haired actress sank on her knees before him and, winding her pink-skinned arms around him, pressed a kiss upon his dressing gown.
CHAPTER 1
It was a wind-swept, stormy day in early January in the year 1915, in the Turkish port of Gelibolu, near the neck of the Gallipoli Peninsula, which extends some sixty miles to the southwest between the Aegean Sea and the Dardanelles. In the seaport's best hotel, the Karambula, Colonel Ahmet Ceydet was enjoying himself with his chiefs of staff. Captain Celal Druyla and First Lieutenant Hostein Konya. The inseparable trio had gone through military academy together, and were nearly the same age, the colonel being thirty-two to his companions' twenty-eight and thirty, respectively. Valor in the campaign against the Armenians three years earlier had gained Ahmet Ceydet his colonelcy. First Lieutenant Hostein Konya might well have had his captain's bars had it not been for an unfortunate political blunder six months previously, when he had put down a skirmish of Armenian guerrillas and, after putting the men to the sword, had the women raped and then tortured. One of these women had been a captive of the Armenians, herself a loyal Turkish wife of a spy whose counsel was valuable to the Turkish War Ministry. And since the first lieutenant himself had enjoyed the carnal pleasures of this luckless female, he had been demoted from a captaincy won in the field only two days earlier, and would most likely end his military career with no higher rank than he had now.
At the moment, however, neither he nor his fellow officers had much concern for their military future. Colonel Ahmet Ceydet had been alerted to hold his force near the town because rumors had come to the Turkish high command that the Allies might be planning a surprise attack. It was not yet known where they would strike, but it was well advised to be ready.
As gusts of wind rattled the shutters and the chairs beside the stone-topped tables that had been abandoned outside, the colonel, a gaunt-faced, wiry man with a waxed, curling mustache and cold cruel eyes, raised his glass of good red Grecian wine. "To the end of this stupid war," he growled, "so that we may go back to the glorious days of hunting down those Armenian and Bulgar pigs and hear them squeal at the end of our lances!"
"May it be so written in the Koran," Captain Celal Druyla heartily agreed, clinking his glass against his senior officer's. "And to the many gazelles of those two wretched races who will try to outrun our hardy soldiers-may the fleetest and the fairest of them be reserved for the three of us, good friend!"
"I will drink to that," First Lieutenant Hostein Konya sighed, remembering his own tactical blunder. "Only this time I may ask to see more credentials."
"Bah," the colonel laughed as he gulped down his wine, then lit a long Albanian cigarette, "the best credentials are when the woman is naked and under the bastinado. She will soon tell you what race she belongs to and whether she is a spy."
"That's true enough. But how, by the thousand private hells of Shaitan, was I to know that the big-titted, wailing bitch I took into that room near the church was the wife of one of our own spies?" The lieutenant raised his eyes to the ceiling self-pityingly.
"Courage, comrade. We won't be stationed here forever, you know. Once this threat of an attack-which I personally don't think is going to happen-becomes just idle talk, we'll go back after the Armenians. There are still enough traitors near our headquarters to chase down and to question." The colonel grinned as he poured himself another glass of wine.
There was a knock at the door of the private dining room that the three officers had commandeered. Colonel Ahmet Ceydet frowned and called out, "Enter!"
A burly, bearded Turkish sergeant-major appeared, smartly saluting and standing stiff at attention. "Well, Kemal? What's so important that you have to interfere with our dinner?"
"Begging the colonel's pardon, two of my men have just found some woman skulking around. She has a room at this hotel and they found her on another floor, looking into a linen closet."
"Maybe the bitch has the curse of the moon upon her and ran out of towels," First Lieutenant Hostein Konya bawdily suggested.
"No, Lieutenant," the sergeant-major respectfully corrected. "She's an Englishwoman."
"What the devil! Here, in this hotel?" Colonel
Ahmet Ceydet abruptly rose, knocking over his wineglass.
"My men, of course, asked her for her papers, and I myself have just questioned the manager of this flea-bitten hole. He says that she is married to a Turk-or was, since she is now a widow. They lived in Gelibolu before the war, but she claims her house was taken by the government for taxes. She hasn't too much money, and the owner of this hovel has let her stay on out of charity. That's her story, Colonel."
"Well, let's see this paragon, then. An Englishwoman married to a Turk-there's a strange mating in bed. I've heard that Englishwomen are cold," Captain Celal Druyla spoke up as he lit a cigar.
"Shall I bring her in here, Colonel?"
"Of course, you idiot! And bring my dog whip too. If the bitch isn't what she seems, we'll have some sport, eh, comrades?" Colonel Ahmet Ceydet glanced at his two subalterns, who eagerly nodded.
CHAPTER 2
The bearded Turkish sergeant-major knocked respectfully at the door of the dining room, then opened it without waiting for an answer and stepped to one side. Two burly privates entered, holding between them, their hands grasping her wrists behind her back, a stunningly beautiful blond woman of about twenty-eight. The sergeant-major saluted smartly, then approached the table where the three officers lolled at their ease. Quickly he handed the gaunt-faced Colonel Ahmet Ceydet, a short leather dog whip, with heavy stock handle and tapering lash that had been neatly coiled. Then, saluting again, he stepped to one side as the two soldiers forced the English woman towards the table where the officers stared appraisingly at her.
The colonel stared lengthily and coldly at the handsome blond captive, who was between the two soldiers. Their hands gripped her elbows as she fumed, her cheeks scarlet with indignation. At last she burst out impetuously: "If you speak English, Colonel, will you kindly have your men let me go? They are hurting my arms!"
"But of course, noble lady," he chuckled sarcastically, and spat out a word in Turkish, and the soldiers at once released the attractive captive. "Now if you'll be good enough to tell me your name, Madame? As you see, I speak excellent English. But my sergeant-major tells me that you were married to one of my countrymen."
"That's so. My name is Gwendoline Aszar, which was, of course, my married name. My husband was Hamil Aszar, who worked for the Ministry of War."
"I am told also that you claim your house was taken by the Turkish Government for taxes."
"And that is also true, Colonel! My husband was dismissed from his post because some lying woman, who must have been in the pay of the Greeks, denounced him as a traitor. A judgment was made against him, and so our house was seized. The owner of this hotel has been kind enough to let me stay on, and sometimes I help his daughter with her English lessons and supervise the kitchen, in return for my keep."
"A very touching story," Colonel Ahmet Ceydet sneered. "First I must ask you for your papers, Madame Aszar."
The blonde woman thrust one hand into the bodice of her dress and drew forth her passport, which she presented to the Turkish officer in command. He examined it carefully, studied her picture and then scrutinized her with narrowed eyes. "It appears to be in order, Madame Aszar," he finally declared. "But there are certain aspects of your story that do not satisfy me. For example, my sergeant-major told me that he found you looking through the linen closet. Now why would you do that? Also, how is it that your room appears to be on a different floor from that on which you were found?"
"I-I can explain that, Colonel," Gwendoline Aszar faltered. "The maid had forgotten to make up my room, and I wished more towels, so that I might take a bath."
"I see. But then why did you not go to the linen closet on the floor where your room is located, Madame Aszar?" he pursued.
"There-there weren't any towels there, Colonel."
"Hmm. Hussein!" the bearded sergeant-major smartly saluted. "Go to the other linen closet and see whether Madame Aszar has been telling us the truth and be quick about it, you dog!"
"You-you don't take the word of a woman who's married to one of your own people?" Gwendoline Aszar nervously faltered.
"Madame Aszar, this is wartime. I assure you I take no one's word except that which comes from my superiors. We are stationed here expecting a possible attack from those British swine-may they burn in the everlasting fire in Shaitan's worst section of hell!-and after all, you are English yourself."
"Yes, but I married Hamil Aszar in 1911, long before the war, Excellency," the handsome widow protested.
"So you say. Passports have been known to be forged, and although this seems to be quite in order, it may have been tampered with. Ah, Hussein, what did you find?"
"That, your Excellency, the other linen closet is packed to the very top with towels!" the sergeant-major exclaimed, rendering an obsequious salute.
"You see, Madame Aszar? We have caught you in the first lie. And now, I want the truth. What were you looking for in that other closet? Quickly, we have ways of making you speak!"
"You would dare to threaten me? I will complain to His Majesty himself."
"Our beloved Sultan would, before listening to your plea, first have you given the bastinado, Madame Aszar," Colonel Ceydet mockingly interposed. "And I shall follow his illustrious example. Hussein, strip this woman naked and stretch her out over that table near the wall. Hold her down by the wrists, you dog, and don't let go of her or you yourself may take her place on the table!"
"No! You shan't! I protest this indignity! You have no right, I am a Turkish citizen by marriage!"
"A marriage dissolved by death, and I suppose that your husband was truly a traitor as accused. At any rate, we shall learn more of your interesting life, or perhaps double life-when you have had a little taste of the whip, Madame Aszar!" The colonel abruptly rose.
Gwendoline Aszar turned to flee but the bearded sergeant-major had already seized her by a wrist. With his other hand, laughing greedily, he ripped the bodice of her long, flowing, full-skirted cotton dress down to her waist and then, even as she struggled and twisted and tried to kick, adroitly ripped away the camisole.
With a shriek of mortification, she tried to huddle her free arm over her panting, magnificent naked titties. They were perched high on her carnation-satiny chest, round and full, libidinously tempting with their brownish-coral aureolas and the pert buds centered in those love-circles. Her pale blond hair was fixed in a thick pompadour, giving her an imposing and yet utterly feminine look. The sergeant-major now proceeded to rip away the dress and then busied himself with the corset, while she began to cry out tearfully and to strike at him with her fists. Laughingly, he ignored her plight as he did her futile defense, and in a few moments the corset was ripped away and Gwendoline Aszar found herself naked, except for her tan-colored cotton stockings held up high on her long, sleek thighs with elastic garters, and her laced shoes, made of fashionable black leather.
The thick bush, brownish and very curly, which hid her pussy, the smooth belly with its wide shallow dimple to mark the navel, and the lasciviously upstanding plump hillocks of her bare behind made the three officers stare at her with glittering eyes and flushed cheeks. Weeping hysterically, Gwendoline Aszar bent over, huddling one arm against her panting breasts, and clapping the other hand over the thick bush of her cunthole. The sergeant-major eyed his commanding officer with a leering smile, awaiting orders. Colonel Ahmet Ceydet made an impatient gesture: "To the table with that bitch, I told you, Hussein, or I'll have your stripes!"
"At once, Excellency! Come along, you English whore," Hussein jeered. Seizing Gwendoline Aszar with both wrists, he dragged her towards the rectangular table near the door and flung her down on her belly, then crouched down at the head of the table as he seized her wrists in a viselike grasp. Meanwhile, Colonel Ceydet had picked up the dog whip and uncoiled it in the air with a vicious, hissing stroke as he slowly walked over towards the table.
Gwendoline Aszar, her dark-blue eyes wide and blurred with tears and terror, uttered a shriek: "Oh, heavens, don't beat me! I've done nothing, I told you the truth! Oh, have pity on my shame, have pity, I'm only a weak helpless woman, don't hurt me!"
"With a bottom like yours, you English bitch, you were made for the whip," the colonel mocked. "And when you are inclined to tell the truth, I may listen to you. Till then, you shall be treated like the bitch you are, with this good dog whip!" With that, raising his arm, he brought the leather lash down, furiously striking both hindquarters over the tops of the summits and drawing a piercing shriek from the beautiful naked sufferer, whose legs began to kick wildly as she squirmed back and forth on the table, jerking at her gripped wrists.
The second lash followed, an inch below the angrily darkening weal left by the first stroke. Her cry was even more agonized, and she swerved and twisted her hips violently, rubbing her calves together in a mad flurry of flailing limbs. Her face turned back to him, her eyes blinded by tears: "Ahhrr! Oh, spare me, oh, have mercy, I've done nothing, I'm telling you the truth!"
"So you say," he taunted. The lash fell for the third time, following the horizontal pattern of the first two strokes, and imparted a new, violently crimson streak directly across the ripest curves of her shuddering bottom summits. Hardly had her shriek died away when he visited her bottom with a rapidly applied pair of lashes, these again leaping over both shuddering, contracting globes and adding two parallel lines of burning suffering to her tender naked flesh.
"Eeeowwwoouuuu! Aiiii! Oh! Mercy, for the love of heaven, mercy, Colonel! I did tell you the truth, I did! Oh how it tears and hurts and cuts me, mercy!" Gwendoline Aszar screamed.
Panting, gasping for breath, her eyes fearfully fixed on his upraised arm, she began to whimper and to grind herself against the table as she strove to diminish the luscious opulence of the so vulnerable target presented to that tapering short leather whip. Greedily enjoying her suffering, the other two officers had placed themselves near their superior, their eyes fixed on her streaked bare behind, watching how the cheeks spasmodically clenched, only to expand and bare the shadowy sinuosity of the anal groove.
Again his arm flailed down, but this time it sent the whip right down the tender, narrow crease that separated her shuddering bottom-cheeks. Mad with agony, her head tilting back, her mouth gaping, her voice hoarse with prolonged shrieks, Gwendoline Aszar began to kick her legs this way and that, allowing all three men the exquisite glimpse of the pink lips of her cunt, framed by the muff of brown love hair.
At this moment, there was a knock at the door. Colonel Ahmet Ceydet, with a vile oath, whirled and bellowed, "Come in, and it had better be for a good reason!"
The door opened and one of the two soldiers who had brought in the hysterically weeping, naked victim respectfully saluted. "How dare you interrupt me? Didn't I tell you I was not to be disturbed?" the colonel thundered.
"Forgive me, your Excellency, but I've just found this, and I thought it might be important," the soldier stammered, again saluting, as he came forward and handed a neatly folded envelope to the Turkish commander.
Tucking the whip under his armpit, Colonel Ceydet unfolded the envelope and drew out a single thin piece of paper that he, in turn, unfolded and scanned. "So, Madame Aszar," he said jubilantly, "you were trying to hide this, I've no doubt.
It's a letter to you from the Greek Embassy in Constantinople, and it is signed by someone using the letter 'N' who apparently commissions you to report our activities here and to furnish this fellow with news of our maneuvers. So you are a spy for the Greeks now, are you, Madame Aszar? As I've no doubt your late husband was!"
"I-I can explain, Y-Your Ex-Excellency," Gwendoline Aszar sobbingly fought for breath, as she turned her distorted, filled-with-tears face towards the cruel, cadaverous-looking Turkish commander. "I-it-it's true that it was from a Greek official, but I had planned to tell the Turkish High Command about it and to send back false reports to Constantinople."
"And you expect me to believe that obvious lie? You say it to save your skin. No, I will not accept it. Well, now, Private, since you are here, make yourself useful. Grab the lady's ankles and squat down like your sergeant-major is doing and hold them tight. I'm going to thrash the truth out of her!"
"Oh, no, don't whip me anymore, oh, my heaven, it's horrible. I am telling you the truth, I swear it on the Koran!" the naked English woman wailed as she saw her executioner brandish the tapering leather thong and lift it high over her clenching, naked bottom globes.
Again the whip came down, biting into the tender crease that separated her huddled buttocks, attacking the most intimate parts of her naked body. Gwendoline Aszar shrieked like a demented soul, her head tilting back till the cords of her neck stood out as if made of marble, her mouth gaping, her eyes bulging, and then her body shook and twisted on the table till it clattered with her frenzied effort to break loose.
"You still persist in lying to me?" he thundered as he applied still another lash to that selfsame, exquisitely tender spot.
"Arrrhhwweeee!-Have m-mercy, oh my heaven, oh, I am suffering, I am dying, Aiiiajjrrr!" The naked sufferer's cries were hoarse and almost unintelligible, broken with agony as she was.
He paused a moment and then applied a backhanded cut of the whip on the top of her left hip down across the sinuous crevice that led to her asshole, striking the base of the right buttock in a savage blow. Once again, Gwendoline Aszar's body jerked convulsively on the table, and then her hips rose up and swerved madly from side to side as if to shake off the infamous, burning sting of the lash. Her cunthole gaped, and the officers, as well as the private gripping her ankles and staring up at her like one who has just seen paradise for the first time, fixed her with avid gazes, drinking in her beauty under the lash.
"Turn her over, you two!" Colonel Ceydet ordered in a thick, lustful voice.
It was done, and now the naked woman cringed and twisted frantically, her naked titties rising and falling with violent turbulence, as she saw the hellish whip rise slowly over her bosom: "Ahhh-oh heaven, not there, not there, I'm only a woman, only a helpless woman, not there!" she hysterically implored.
With a sinister crack, the dog whip leaped down to bite against both panting naked turrets, just above the nipples. Gwendoline Aszar lifted her head from the table, her eyes mad with indescribable torment, and a long, frenzied shriek tore from her panting throat. Again he struck, and again, and then a fourth time over her belly and finally a blow that bit across the tops of her inner thighs and stung the pouting pink lips of her vulva as well.
It was all the private and the sergeant-major could do to keep her down, for she thrashed with all her strength, sweat oozing down her sides from her tufted armpits, her eyes insane with torment, her mouth gaping in cry upon cry, her belly and titties heaving spasmodically.
"May Shaitan take me if this whore has not given me an appetite for pussy!" the Turkish commander sniggered. "Konya, a favor of you, man!"
"Anything, my colonel!" the tall, lean first lieutenant chuckled.
"Well, then, help this soldier with the bitch's legs. Each of you, hold an ankle and draw her legs wide for me. Since she was married, so she says, to one of our countrymen, she will relish a Turkish prick all the more! And then you, my second in command, good Druyla, shall follow me between those plump thighs of hers!"
"With the greatest of pleasure, Excellency," the younger Captain sniggered as he unbuttoned his trousers and bared an elongated, hard-veined prick already throbbing with longing.
The private and the first lieutenant crouched at the foot of the table, each taking hold of one of Gwendoline Aszar's slim-stockinged ankles and dragging them apart so as to straddle her lewdly. The sergeant-major tightened his grip on both of her wrists, enviously wishing that he might have his own share of the lust-spoils.
Colonel Ceydet exposed his ramrod, made another sign, and the unfortunate woman's legs were dragged forward till her gaping pink cunt was at the very edge of the table and thus easily within access.
Stepping between her straddled legs, the whip still in his right hand, the colonel at once thrust himself between the twitching petals of her gaping vulva and at the same time brought the lash down diagonally over her heaving titties. A wild shriek ensued and once again her naked body squirmed and jerked and wriggled over the table.
"Shaitan's bowels, but the bitch's cunt is tight!" the colonel swore as he thrust himself slowly, obdurately home to the very hilt. Gwendoline Aszar's head rolled back and forth, her eyes bulging and glassy, and fitful tremors shook her body on the table.
His eyes feasted on the livid welts left by the whip on the magnificent carnation-pink-tinted sheath of her bare skin. They whetted his lust, as he plowed back and forth inside her tightening sheath, till at last he drenched her with his copious tribute.
Then, contemptuously drawing himself out, he moved back and over to the side of the table, gesturing to the captain to replace him.
Gwendoline Aszar shrieked again, "Oh, no, not anymore, oh, kill me instead!"
"Are you ready to tell the truth yet, bitch?" Colonel Ceydet demanded hoarsely.
"I-I did spy for the Greeks, yes, but oh, heaven, don't kill me, spare me, I'll do anything!" she whimpered.
"I may make use of you, since you have a certain attractiveness," he said slowly. "But you will spy for us and not the Greeks. You'll do it to save your life, or else I'll have you crucified, head downwards, on the shore. There will be crabs when the tides come in and you'll die slowly."
"No, oh heaven, please no! I'll do anything for you, I'll spy, anything!" she babbled.
"Good. And you'll have to convince your Greek master, especially this 'N' whoever he may be, that you're still on their side, you understand me? Otherwise you'll be useless to us. And just to make sure that you'll work valiantly, you're going to service us now, the four of us. Take her, Captain!"
"Gladly, Excellency," the younger captain grinned crookedly, his hands reaching out to cup and squeeze her panting titties. Captain Druyla arched his loins and thrust his swollen ramrod into the moist, stickied cavern of Gwendoline Aszar's already violated cunthole.
Then he began to fuck her, violently and rapidly, his fingers mauling and pinching and squeezing her panting titties, while she writhed and sobbed and groaned aloud in shame and suffering.
And when he had finished with her, it was the turn of the first lieutenant while the captain himself held one of her slim ankles.
And then, to his inordinate delight, the bearded sergeant-major was invited to enjoy the half-fainting, sprawled and whimpering captive.
Only the private, the lowliest unit of all in this high echelon of Turkish command, remained unrequited. But when he was at last given the order to drag the swooning, naked victim back to her room to be put under lock and key, he and his companion, the very same two who had brought her into this private dining room, dragged her back to her room and, locking the door, proceeded to fuck and bugger her while gagging her with a towel and warning her not to dare tell their colonel or far worse torture would be her lot!
CHAPTER 3
Turkey had fallen upon evil days, and the glory of the Ottoman Empire was now but a bitter memory in the minds of the Turkish zea lots under their ineffectual and dissolute sultan, Mohammed V. That not-so-illustrious namesake of the great Ottoman conqueror (who had been Mohammed II and who had stormed Constantinople after a fifty-one-day siege to complete his conquest of the Byzantine Empire) had succeeded to the Turkish throne in 1909, after the Young Turkish Revolution had deposed his brother, Abdul Hamid II. But it was Enver Pasha who held the actual control.
Enver Pasha, born in 1881, was the Turkish general who had been so prominent in the Young Turk Revolution. While vacillating Mohammed V delighted himself with his harem as well as with his handsome, hairless and complacent young boys, and all the ceremonials of a glittering Oriental court, Enver Pasha behind the scenes amassed virtually dictatorial powers. But his lust for power, compared with the profligate vices and parasitical self-pampering of his Sultan was, ironically, to end in 1922 when he was killed while leading an anti-
Soviet expedition in Bokhara. That death, history records, hardly balanced the scales for the almost criminal errors he had made in leading his nation into one disaster after another.
Turkey had been a mighty nation, composed of Russian Turkey and European Turkey, until the ill-fated Balkan Wars of 1912-13. The result of those border conflicts was to expel the Turks from all of their European holdings except Constantinople. In 1913, the territorial settlement made by the Great Powers disappointed Serbia, which was cut off from the Adriatic by the creation of the independent Albania. Serbia at once demanded that Albania yield up the larger part of Macedonia, which led to the brief Second Balkan War. In this one, Rumania-and Turkey's ancient enemy, Greece-united with Turkey and Serbia against Bulgaria, which was defeated and lost territory to all its enemies in the Treaty of Bucharest. These two wars heightened nationalism and led the way to the terrible events at Sarajevo, which was to precipitate even worse.
The French-loving, perfumed and dandified Mohammed V had hoped that Turkey would emerge valorously in this global war, so that his people might forget the disastrous loss of Tripoli to the Italians in 1912, as well as the loss of face and territory that had taken place with the Balkan wars. But if Mohammed V was vacillating, Constantine I of Greece assuredly shared that same equivocating, indecisive frame of mind. For centuries, Greece had been the enemy of Turkey, and the ravaging of Greek women, the raiding of Grecian coastal towns by warrior Turks, had sent thousands of men, women and children into the Turkish slave marts. Constantine I secretly hoped for the crushing defeat of that enemy in this great global conflagration, but, as we shall see, in his own ambitious aims to win the favor of his people, he was to betray the Allied cause.
It was the 10th of January and the weather was pleasant and sunny in the great, historic city of Constantinople. Not far from the Kariye Mosque, which contained a magnificent restoration of Byzantine mosaics and frescoes, a dapper little man with bowler hat, waxed moustache and porcine face walked briskly towards the gate in the middle of a huge iron grille surrounding a two-story house that boasted one of the most beautiful gardens in the city. It was the house of Nadja Askir, a raven-haired, olive-skinned beauty who did not look her thirty-two years, but who in that relatively short time had lived an incredible lifetime of vice, depravity and treachery.
Nadja Askir had lost her virginity at the age of twelve to her own brother, who, a year later, discovering her liaison with a wealthy married man, had threatened to tell her father. The amoral young girl had gone to a pharmacist, an elderly man whose lechery turned him towards girls hardly out of puberty, and bribed him with her body to secure the deadly drug of torza, a dried grayish powder made from certain poisonous mushrooms that grew along the lower slopes of mountains. Then she invited her brother to a sweet shop and, when his attention was distracted, put the powder into his lemonade. Two days later he died in horrible convulsions. The physician declared that it must have been some virus like typhus, contracted in something the boy had eaten or drunk. For torza left hardly any trace in the system once it had accomplished its lethal work.
This early crime had convinced the young girl that she was destined for even greater things. When her married lover tired of her, she sent an anonymous note to the man's wife, who promptly had him waylaid by thugs on a deserted little street one night. A few days later, Nadja purposely arranged a meeting between herself and the handsome widow, feigning a wish to share the woman's mourning because of her own tragic loss. When the widow demanded to know what Nadja meant, the artful girl weepingly confessed that the dead man had lured her into a hotel room some months before and brutally raped and beaten her, warning her to silence lest her throat be cut.
Compassionately, the widow consoled Nadja Askir, and so that consolation initiated the vicious young brunette into the mystic joys of lesbianism. When her parents died, she was only sixteen, and by then the mistress of a colonel in the Turkish Army. When he left her for another woman, Nadja poisoned him the same way she had disposed of her brother, looting his villa of money and jewels that she hid in the vault of a little bank not far from her own home.
Her parents' wealth enabled her to live as she chose, and she sold their house to acquire the magnificently ornate two-story house in which she still resided. Since her tastes were bisexual, she had enjoyed, at her whim, both virile men and submissive females, for she had found it an exquisite pleasure to sadistically dominate those of her own sex.
She had no love for her own country, since it was in the midst of turmoil and revolution. Shrewd and unscrupulous, she married a Turkish diplomat, a man of fifty-six, and contrived to shorten his life to three brief years by dint of plying him with her seductive, lascivious body and with rich food and drink until his heart stopped.
As the widow of a prominent Turkish diplomat, Nadja Askir occupied a place without suspicion in the very heart of Turkey. In the fall of 1911, she made a trip to Athens, where she visited Kyros Anapolous, one of the highest ranking Greek intelligence officers. She foresaw that Turkey would soon be involved in a major struggle for existence, and that it would be defeated. She believed that Greece would be joined by the Allies, and that she could be of invaluable service, since her house was open to many Turkish officials and high-ranking army officers. She set her price, a staggering figure in drachmas, and it was agreed that she would receive several small installments during her service for the Greeks, the bulk of the payment to be made when and if the expected war ended with the defeat of Turkey and the ascension of Greece to the status of world power once again.
The little man who was visiting her this afternoon in January was Kemil Chorkar. He was not quite fifty, a confirmed bachelor with an insatiable taste for young girls and a sadistic penchant for torture and the lash. Nadja had met him at a reception given at the Turkish War Ministry some few months ago and had determined to entrap him through his carnal desires so that she could extract from him those secrets that might be of extreme value to her Greek employers.
Opening the gate, then closing it with meticulous care, Kemil Chorkar walked up the five stone steps to the small porch of the house and took hold of the gleaming brass knocker, which was shaped like a crescent, a further touch of patriotism to convince the authorities that Nadja Askir was loyal to her native land. After a moment, the door was opened by a charming young Egyptian girl, who could not have been more than seventeen, with a short black skirt that scarcely reached her dimpled knees, a pretty lace cap perched atop her head, setting off the short bobbed bangs of glossy black hair that rivaled the luster of that of her own imperious mistress. She wore black clockwork silk hose that caressed her softly rounded thighs and firm, beautifully muscled calves, and high-heeled pumps. She curtsied low before the pompous little diplomat.
"Madame Askir expects you, Excellency," she murmured in flawless Turkish. "I shall show you the way."
Kemil Chorkar had often admired the voluptuous charms of Fazida, and he let her go ahead of him while his eyes feasted on the smoothly undulating curves of her sleek young calves and the elegant, tantalizing shiftings of a pair of impudently firm bottom globes against which her skirt clung with an almost obscene caress.
She led him down the hallway to the very last room on the right-hand side, which was Nadja's own bedroom, knocked discreetly, and then opened the door for him and stepped deferentially back.
Kemil Chorkar caught his breath and his eyes glittered. The room was vast, and at the right was a huge, low double bed, canopied, and with filmy net curtains to enclose it. To his left was a teakwood boudoir table with oval-shaped mirror in the middle framed with gold leaf. On a low chaise lounge Nadja lay, clad only in a flaming orange silk negligee and glistening black leather pumps with spike heels. Her right knee was upraised and the folds of the negligee fell away almost to the crotch to expose the wonderful warm olive-satiny sheen of her exquisitely modeled bare leg. He coughed, flushed, inclined his head, and approached.
"A great pleasure, Madame Askir. It was gracious of you to invite me, but I thought-"
"Just because it is afternoon I should be fully dressed, dear Kemil?" she laughed huskily and gestured to a low, upholstered footstool beside her on which he took his place, looking a little self-conscious.
Fazida still remained on the threshold, awaiting orders. He glanced back at her, and Nadja's smoldering black eyes narrowed, her insolently small ripe mouth curving in a cunning smile of understanding. She understood that Kemil Chorkar coveted this girl, who was her lesbian slave and would do anything for her. Fazida Kaldos had been born in Cairo, where her father had been an antique dealer. Unhappily, two years ago, he had offended the government with a speech at his club attacking the policy of the Sudan. As punishment, he had been brought to the palace, stripped naked and given the bastinado and forced to confess his government activities to the last iota, and then strangled with a bowstring. His buxom wife, forty-two and still sensually enticing, had been sent to the soldier's brothel after having been stripped naked, tied by the ankles from ceiling pulley ropes and flogged by half a dozen soldiers with their belts to induce her to accept voluntary concubinage to them.
Fazida herself had been arrested at the same time as her mother, and brought to the private quarters of Major Eban Hassar, who planned to make her his mistress. But fate had taken a hand in favor of Nadja Askir; one of her lovers was the Turkish minister to Egypt, who chanced to be in Cairo at that very time and who had an engagement with Major Hassar. When the Egyptian officer boasted of his conquest-to-be, the Turkish official slyly suggested a bribe of gold and, as further substitution and compensation, an equally attractive girl who happened to be his own bed partner and household servant, a Berber girl of sixteen who was a particular expert in the art of Frenching a virile prick.
The major had willingly made the trade, and the Turkish official had taken Fazida back to Constantinople, where he had made Nadja a present of the lovely virgin. In return for this favor, Nadja granted the minister a night of unbridled passion in her own bedroom and then allowed him to take to his villa for a memorable week of lust, a young, meek, dark-brown haired Circassian girl of nineteen of whom she had already tired.
Fazida, who had an abhorrence of men after having been forced by a young lieutenant on the major's staff to watch her mother's flogging and subsequent mass-fucking by the soldiers, was tearfully grateful to this exotic beauty who had saved her from such a dire fate. Nadja lost no time in initiating Fazida into the delights of gamahuching, pussy rubbing and all the other devious little games that ardent Sapphists play. She had installed Fazida as her personal maid and paid her a magnificent salary, but in turn extracted from the devoted slave girl the pledge that Fazida would yield her body to whatever man (or woman) her mistress indicated in order to obtain the vital information that Nadja Askir sought in her treacherous liaison with the Greeks.
Invariably, when the lovely young Egyptian girl submitted to the lustful and sometimes sadistic embraces of this or that important official or officer, it took all of her courage to yield and often also weakened her blind devotion to the cruel Turkish. When that occurred, Nadja would tenderly console Fazida with several nights of the most exquisite lesbian fulfillment.
Thus it would be this afternoon.
"You want the girl, Kemil?" she lazily drawled as she reached for a nougat in the little silver box placed on the tabouret within reach of her jeweled, slim hand.
"I would be a liar if I said no, beautiful Nadja," the pompous little diplomat hoarsely retorted.
"Well then, she will be yours after you and I have had our little talk. Fazida!"
"Mistress?" the beautiful young Egyptian girl bowed her head, tears beginning to sting her lovely dark brown eyes.
"You will go upstairs into the blue room and prepare yourself. His Excellency will join you in a short time. Be very good to him. He is one of my dearest friends," Nadja Askir coldly decreed.
Fazida stiffened, bit her lips, and stared longingly at her cruel mistress, but the latter returned that appealing look with so insolent and cruel a glare that Fazida, with a soft sob, nodded and left the bedroom, closing the door softly behind her.
"You are much too kind, dear Nadja!"Kemil Chorkar blurted, taking out a perfumed silk handkerchief and mopping his perspiring forehead. "What is it you wish to know?"
"Do you honestly think, Kemil, that the Greeks will enter this war?"
"I very much doubt it, my dearest Nadja. Their king is a weakling, a man who sits astride the fence and lets his neighbors battle to the death, not wishing to be involved. He insists on neutrality-bah! what a stupid word! I know that the Allies have counted on him, but believe me, my beautiful Nadja, they count in vain. I should not be surprised if one day his son Alexander should sit upon the throne. A younger man can feel the passions more than one who is afraid because he is growing old."
"And you, dear Kemil?" she uttered a gurgling little laugh, "Your passions seem unabated despite your years."
"Oh, come, you embarrass me!" he turned a furious crimson and again mopped his forehead. "Every man has his little foibles."
"Surely. And I respect yours because you are my dear friend and my most trusted confidante. Now one more question, Kemil. Are the Turks arming the Dardanelles?"
"I believe they are. I know that the very capable Colonel Ahmet Ceydet is in command of the garrison at Gelibu. At the moment, I should say it is doubtful that the Allies would think of storming the Dardanelles, but one never knows what the enemy will do. Those accursed English dogs, without imagination!"
"That is true, again. But you have imagination enough for all Turkey, dear, wise Kemil. And this garrison is strong at Gelibu?"
"Very. Two thousand soldiers, hand picked troops. There are no fortifications, as of yet, for there is no need. If the Allies came, it would, of course, be by sea, and there would be ample time to prepare a warm reception for them."
"It is as I thought. Ah, if only my husband were still alive, or better still, if I were only a man and could take part in this war to put Turkey back in her rightful place among the nations!" Nadja Askir fervently declared as she extended her soft hand for the diplomat to kiss.
CHAPTER 4
Kemil Chorkar closed the door of the bedroom, his face mottled with his furiously rising desire, his lips wet and quivering as he moved down the hallway to the elegantly carpeted staircase leading to the second floor. He did not hurry, because as a voluptuary he knew only too well the vicious twinges of Tantalus and how prolongation augmented virility and inventiveness.
He did not find it at all suspicious that this beautiful and desirable widow of a Turkish official had questioned him about the war campaign. Everyone in Constantinople knew her patriotism, her devotion to the cause of Turkey, a nation that had lost face after so glorious a past as the dominating force of the mighty Ottoman Empire. As for himself, he despised the Greeks as much as he did the English. The Allies would hardly attempt an expedition in Salonica to force King Constantine to come over to their side, and he was certain it would be as futile as all the diplomatic maneuvers thus far had been.
He came at last to the end of the corridor and stopped at the door to his left. It was painted blue, a soft azure that reminded him of the peaceful
Mediterranean on which, some fifteen years ago, he had spent a month cruising on his yacht with a magnificently sensual young actress from Alexandria.
He preferred his women under twenty, but Zulima, though twenty-four, had played the role of little girl so admirably that he had not once been jaded. She had loved to have him pretend to be her stern, inexorable father sentencing her to the whip for her naughty deeds, and had come to him dressed in a child's frock, her legs bare, her dainty feet thrust into sandals, a ribbon in her hair and her face humble and fearful. She had struggled with him as he tried to draw her across his lap, pleading with him in childish terms, exactly as a little girl might, to spare her. With what joy, with what pounding of the heart and the pulses, he had lifted the skimpy frock to find her naked underneath, the round, plump, tightly-spaced cheeks of her behind, spasmodically contracting in instinctive fear and shame!
He had begun her punishment by spanking her with the flat of his hand, until she had begun to sob and to squirm lasciviously over his lap. Then he had made her kiss the little dog whip lying on the arm of the little upholstered chair that he had seated himself upon, and then he had inflicted twenty slowly applied lashes over her flaming bottom until she had at last implored him to fuck her, calling him father and herself his naughty little girl who would do anything for her father if only he would spare her poor body any more of the awful whip!
These burning memories and many others filled his mind now as he put his hand to the knob of the blue door. Zulima was dead, only a short year after she had given him one of the most exciting experiences of his entire life. She had married some old roud' in order to save the fortunes of her impoverished family (at the time he himself was not so rich as he was now and could not give her that security she longed for), and her old, jealous husband had killed her and her student lover a few months later when he had come upon them together locked in fornicatory embrace on his own bed.
True, he might have married her and saved her that misfortune. Yet Kemil Chorkar, once he tasted all that a girl could give, cast her away like a juiceless husk, for there were so many thousands of fresh, delicious, virginal girls in the world whom he longed to savor, and life was so infernally short for the doing of it.
He drew a deep breath, and opened the door, then closed it and locked it behind him. The only light came from an oil lamp on a little table at the very back of the room. The walls were painted blue, as was the ceiling, and the carpeting was blue, as well. The low, wide bed that Fazida lay on had blue sheets. And she wore a costume of a harem girl, with diaphanous net veil over her face, a skirt of the same material and jeweled sandals. Her beautiful, round, widely spaced, firm young titties were bare, and she had touched the pouting nipple-buds with blue kohl so that they stood out like lascivious tidbits to be sucked and nibbled exactly as one might do with the Turkish halvados, a bluish honey-paste of which he was inordinately fond.
His beady eyes glittered as he approached the bed observing that she had placed silver cuffs on her wrists, connected with a short silver chain. It was an imaginative setting worthy of his beloved
Nadja, indeed! A young virgin, shackled, her loins still hidden, but her virginal titties exposed to his appraising eyes-it was perfect! And on the table beside the bed lay a short, thick-handled 'kurbash,' with its flat leather thong about two feet long and two inches wide and shaped in a demi-circle at the end. It did not break the skin, but its noise against the naked flesh was salaciously pleasing to his sadistic senses, as was the broad, brightly angry pattern it would inflict on Fazida's golden-hued bare skin.
Nadja Askir had coached her slave well for the role she was to play with Kemil Chorkar. Fazida's eyes were misty with tears, and inwardly she shrank with loathing at the sight of this pompous, fat little man whose thick lips were wet and quivering as he neared her. She waited for him to speak, her heart beating quickly, making those magnificent naked titties rise and fall with an erratic motion.
"How very charming!" His voice was thick with furious lust. "You are my new slave. Why have they shackled you, Fazida?"
"Because, master, I would not let them bring me here to you. I am a good girl, no man has ever lain with me, and I would rather die than let you touch me."
"You are brave to speak that way, you pretty little bitch. But never fear, I'll make you change your vows. Ah, I see the slavers have left a kurbash for your new master. They understand you, as I do. Very well. We shall see who is victorious-the rebellious little slave or her master."
He took off his coat, removed the florid cravat, and then meticulously unbuttoned his silk shirt, leaving all three on a straight-backed chair with a blue velvet upholstered seat near the bed. He walked slowly over to the night table and picked up the kurbash, weighed it in his hand, swished the broad, flat thong in the air several times. Fazida stared at it with a hopeless resignation that belied the trembling of her lips and the sudden dilation of her delicately fluted nostrils.
"Are you going to let me fuck you like a good little girl?" his voice was harsh and shuddering now.
"N-no, master, I'd rather die. I want to go to my betrothed, for he alone shall have me."
"You little fool, he'll never come to you again. You are a slave here in Constantinople, and he is back in Egypt. A last time, will you do all the things I tell you to? Will you take my prick out and hold it between those lovely titties of yours and then place it tenderly between those lovely legs and urge it sweetly into that hairy slit?"
"Oh, never! I would rather die!" she vehemently exclaimed, shrinking back on the bed and clasping her hands, holding them up to him in a kind of poignant entreaty.
He chuckled and licked his lips again, and then, his face hardening and his eyes narrowing, lifted the kurbash and swept it across her panting titties. Fazida's shriek of pain was in no way feigned; trying to rub her streaked titties with her soft little belly, she buried her face in a thick cushion.
"That is even better," he chuckled lewdly. The kurbash rose and fell, three violent times without pause, and the angry, sonorous CRACKKK as the leather band clung across Fazida's tensing, round, firm bottom-cheeks made his prick throb with ferocious agony.
In her anguish, the young Egyptian girl dug her teeth into the cushion to muffle her cries, her body jerking fitfully with the three furious strokes. He paused a moment, seeing how angrily streaked the soft golden-tan skin of her buttocks had become from just this initiatory assault of the lash.
"Listen, you Egyptian bitch," he bent over her, his voice thick and trembling with sadistic gloating. "Before I'm through with you, you're going to crawl to me on your knees, do you hear me? You're going to ask me for the privilege and the honor of taking my prick out of my pants, yes, and rubbing it between those big fine titties of yours, my fine girl! You're going to ask me to put it into your little backhole, and then you're going to lick it clean and get me ready again to fuck you. Do you understand me?"
"Oh, no, I'd never do anything like that!" Fazida moaned into the cushion.
His face was twisted with a rut as he lifted the whip and brought it down savagely and diagonally over her shuddering, gauzily veiled posterior. The young girl jerked convulsively, her face lifted from the cushion, her eyes wide and blinded with tears. A choking groan escaped her, and then again she buried her face in the cushion and clenched the blue velvet with her teeth.
Now the kurbash darted over her smooth, naked upper back, marring the smoothness and the golden-tan sheen with a broad blazing red band. Again at the waist, and a third time over the tops of her squirming hips, each lash drawing an agonized, muffled cry of pain from the beautiful young Egyptian slave girl.
"I'm going to thrash you until the skin of your ass is taken away, you bitch," he promised grimly. "I wont spare you until you beg me to do all those nice things, do you understand? Well, last chance.. . "
But Fazida, knowing only too well her part in all this, and fearing even worse torment from her despotic mistress if she should fail to satisfy all his sadistic moods, only shook her head and steeled herself to bear the brunt of his infernal violence.
Kemil Chorkar feasted his eyes on the squirming, sobbing young Egyptian girl's supple body. Her sporadic movements under the kurbash excited him to the utmost, and he paused, lowering the whip to the floor, to unbutton the fly of his immaculately pressed black silk trousers, to liberate his swollen, thick, dark-veined cock.
"Your father is waiting, little bitch. Are you still going to disobey him?" he demanded in a voice heavy with rut.
"Oh, I cant. Please, anything else, but not that, D-Daddy," the girl gasped, tears dribbling down her cheeks. Dominated by her fear as well as her devotion to the sultry Nadja, she nonetheless was suffering under the kurbash. Moreover, the piggish, fat Turkish diplomat revolted her, for she understood quite well what he meant to do to her once she played out his farce to its odious end. It was only by concentrating on her imperious mistress that she made herself go on with the unholy little game.
"So!" he hissed, his lips drawn back in a rictus of gloating delight, "My naughty little girl wants to be stubborn, eh? I'm going to make your little ass as hot as the deepest pit in Shaitan's most abominable hell, see if I do not, little Fazida!"
With this, he raised the whip, and the Egyptian girl, with a whimpering sob, flattened herself, hiding her face in her hands and tightening the muscles of her behind beneath the gauzy harem skirt. The whip descended with a sickening, smacking sound, clinging to the girl's behind salaciously. Fazida could not suppress the shriek of pain that tore from her young throat, nor keep herself from twisting her tear-stained, contorted face back over one smooth, dimpled shoulder to appeal for mercy-although she knew she must not utter those forbidden words.
Twice more he struck, each time diagonally across her bottom, and her hips bounded and jerked and swerved under the ferocious burning of this diabolical whip that had the propensity of inflaming the nerves as it did the skin, but, in the hands of an expert, not breaking the latter nor leaving permanent marks. Yet Fazida had the sensation that her bottom was being cruelly scorched, and the cumulative pangs from each successive lash that visited her succulent nether rotundities made her claw at the sheets and bite the cushion into which she pressed her tear-wet face.
Again he paused, panting and sweating, fumbling for a handkerchief in the rear pocket of his trousers and mopping his damp brow. Fazida, choking back her sobs, her body twitching uncontrollably, sprawled before him. He ground his teeth, shuddering with excited lust as he felt the savage pulsations of his rigid prick. Again, he lifted the kurbash and brought it down with all his strength, straight down the shadowy, mysterious grove between her lovely, rounded bottom globes. The gauzy veil was no protection; a frenzied cry, prolonged and agonized, resounded, and the Egyptian girl plunged her hands back to rub the wounded region, her face twisted around to implore mercy, her teeth chattering, her nostrils dilating and shrinking in an utter excess of suffering.
"Oh, D-Daddy, oh please.. .I can't stand it.. .I want to be good.. .but I can't.. .not that way. Oh please have pity.. .have pity on your little girl!"
She dared greatly in propounding so swift a termination to her martyrdom, but fortunately for Fazida, Kemil Chorkar was too much dominated by his frenzied rut to regret this importunity.
"So at last you come to your senses, my daughter?" he rasped. "Prove it, then! On your knees, strip yourself bare, beg for my forgiveness by sucking your father's cock and begging him to fuck you!"
The beautiful young lesbian at once obeyed; swaying unsteadily as she rose, she tore away the diaphanous skirt and flung herself down on her knees before him. The ugly red welts of the kurbash were darkening on the tanned skin of her behind and thighs as well as over her back and across her panting titties where the first lash had visited its excoriating kiss. She clutched the back of his thighs, she put her trembling lips to the swollen, obscenely taut head of his prick, and began to suck slavishly. Playfully, he flicked the kurbash over her smoothly hollowed back, her sides, the edges of her hips, delighting in making her squirm and twist as she crouched there in a pose of the most abject servility. Her little whimpering moans were muffled by the object that she now took into her mouth, bulging out her cheeks, her eyes wide and shadowed with pain and revulsion commingled. And then at last, when he pushed her head away with a hoarse "That's enough, bitch!" she raised her face to him and stammered:
"Please, D-Daddy, I beg you to fuck your little girl, give your little daughter that great hard cock inside her naughty little cunt!"
It was the language that Nadja Askir had taught her the night before, coached her and rehearsed her in. It was ideally calculated to arouse all the bestial desires of the Turkish diplomat, and it did indeed.
With a roar of triumph, Kemil Chorkar gripped her whip-streaked titties, forced her back upon the thick rug on the floor, and drove his turgid prick against the black-tufted apex of her mound of love. The soft lips yielded to the ravaging weapon, and Fazida uttered a choking sob and turned her face away to blot out this cruel, swinish expression. Yet, at the same time, her thighs and arms tightly locked around him, to cushion and cradle him to this fuck. He went at her like a bull, buffeting her mercilessly, and she groaned. In his ego, he believed that he was drawing her toward his own climax, but fortunately for the girl, his self-control had already been attenuated by the flogging. And so after a few short but atrocious moments for poor Fazida, he thrust himself a last time into her tight, warm nook and, his fingers cruelly pinching her panting titties, shot forth his bubbling drench.
CHAPTER 5
It was nightfall of the same day and Nadja Askir, perfumed and bathed, and having dined well and drunk much Turkish wine, lay on her chaise lounge clad only in a red satin peignoir, her feet bare, the toenails lacquered a sensual purple. Fazida knelt beside her mistress, and she, too, was all but naked, wearing only sandals and a kind of gossamer silk tunic with narrow straps that descended to her upper thighs. She, too, had been bathed and perfumed, and Nadja's Amazonian Negress housekeeper, Zarida, a magnificent ebony-skinned woman of thirty-five, nearly six feet tall, with majestic titties, bottom and thighs, had herself salved Fazida's whip welts.
"He spoke highly of you, my little one," Nadja said tenderly as she caressed the girl's black hair. "The fat old pig is useful to us. And this information must go to Devros Papagoulas, as swiftly as possible. Chorkar feels that the Allies will invade Salonica and force doddering Constantine into war on the side of the Allies. Somehow, Devros must convince the King that he must agree to this alliance. The accursed Turks will destroy Greece if the war goes over to them and the Huns."
"What of the English woman in Gelibolu?" the Egyptian girl inquired.
Nadja Askir frowned, left off stroking Fazida's hair and reached for a bonbon in a silver box on a little table to her left.
As she munched it, she thoughtfully pondered a moment before replying, "I've had no word of her for at least a week. Through our friend Devros in the Embassy, a letter was sent to her three weeks ago urging her to take notice of the Turkish garrison and to report back, by any means she could, what strength it had."
"But if the letter should fall into the hands of the Turks?" Fazida looked up, her dark eyes fearful.
"It could do no harm, of course, except to poor Gwendoline," the sultry Turkish beauty retorted with a shrug of her exquisite shoulders. "It was signed simply by my own initial, little one, and Gwendoline is aware, as are all those who work for me, that they must risk something in order to gain what they do. Money, fine clothes, and either a man of their choice or, of course, a tender, sympathetic girl like yourself, little one."
"I understand, mistress. But it terrifies me to think of what those cruel soldiers might do to that lovely woman if they capture her."
"Do not feel sorry for her, Fazida. Even when she was lying in my arms last summer, I could sense that her passions drew her towards more brutal sex. Besides, they won't kill her. She's much too lovely and desirable. At worst they'll send her to some brothel where she can have all the men she needs to service her. But enough of such silly talk, my darling. When this stupid war is over with, Fazida, you and I will leave Turkey and perhaps go back to the Upper Nile where you were born, and where there is beauty and peace, and the desert joins the rich green fields and there is mystery for the contemplation of the soul."
"I-I hope so, beloved mistress. I am so afraid of all these men. I see how they look at me, and this afternoon-" Fazida's voice broke and again she buried her face in her hands.
"Hush, little one. It had to be done and you were only the vessel of usage. He did not touch your spirit, and the few marks he left on that lovely behind of yours will soon fade and be forgotten, my sweet Fazida. Come, let me console you, my lovely child. I will soon make you forget him and all such."
And with this, Nadja Askir opened her peignoir and revealed all the sumptuous splendor of her nakedness. Fazida rose with a glad little cry, dropping her tunic, and in a few moments the two naked women were locked in each other's arms, and still later, with Fazida's soft lips pressing against Nadja's black-furred mound and Nadja's own sensual lips raining stinging little kisses on Fazida's soft young cunt, the two houris achieved their stairway to a paradise beyond the guns and the shambles and the horrors of man-made war.
CHAPTER 6
Major Hakim Istefan scowled at the sheaf of papers on his desk, lit a long Turkish cigarette, and shuffled through them. He was forty-nine, lean, and weather-beaten, his head was bald and a supercilious black moustache adorned his thin upper lip. His ears were almost those of a faun-close to his skull, and his eyes were dark and hollow, his nose hawk-like. His slanting cheekbones gave him an Oriental mien, and indeed his grandfather had married a savage and passionate Tartar girl from Irkutsk while on vacation in that desolate terrain.
He was one of the most dreaded men in Constantinople, and not without reason. For Major Hakim Istefan was secret Chief of Intelligence, somewhat more than a glorified police chief of the city, and with far more martial powers. As a boy of fourteen, he had been a smuggler in the Balkans, joined the Turkish Army at twenty, suffered the ignominy of being whipped through the barracks while holding on to a gun butt and drawn along the double row of jeering soldiers by two corporals, while sticks, batons, switches, and leather belts slashed at his back and wiry shoulders.
Yet, just three years later, he had been appointed lieutenant of a small Turkish garrison in Munimez, about hundred miles to the north-west of Constantinople. There, against a secret attack by the Greek federalist troops, he had distinguished himself with such valor, as well as butchery, that he had been promoted to the rank of major. And although he still held the same military title more than twenty years later, the mere mention of his name was enough to send a shiver of terror through the bodies of those on whom he preyed.
The two Balkan wars had helped him distinguish himself as an active counteragent against Greek, Armenian, and Serbian spies who infiltrated into Constantinople to learn the strength of the Turks. The squat gray building on Rasouli Street housed his well-trained staff, and, in the cellar, isolation cells and torture chambers. One must remember that, except for the area south of Bulgaria and east of Greece on the European continent, Turkey lies in Asia, occupying the peninsula of Asia Minor, across the Black Sea from Russia and across the Mediterranean from Egypt. Its locale thus partakes of many Oriental influences and for centuries the people of the Orient have been noted for their methods of coercional persuasion, to use a euphemistic term.
But Major Hakim Istefan, apart from his own cruel Tartar blood, had still another reason for his sadistic persecution of all luckless victims who were brought into his luxuriously furnished private office at the back of the first floor of this building. He was impotent, and he had been rendered so by a woman.
At the age of twenty-nine, having already cut a swath among the maidenheads of many a beautiful girl in the villages where he was stationed, the tall, cadaverous-looking Turkish Intelligence head had fallen in love for the first time. It had been with a lovely Greek girl of nineteen from Delphi.
In that mystic and ancient city where once the fabulous oracle was consulted by the great and the near-great to learn the will of destiny, there was perhaps an ironic paraphrase of the legend when Irenee Vespegalos consented to wed the tall young officer.
Her face was a cameo-like oval, slim as a reed, with white skin like marble. Her voice was soft and gentle, her eyes deep blue like the Mediterranean, and she seemed permeated by the most docile and naive nature.
But what Hakim Istefan did not remember was that, three years before, while engaged in a mountain skirmish with marauding guerillas he had stabbed a slim blond young man in mountaineer's costume who had crept into his camp and tried to assassinate him. And that young man had been the brother of Irenee Vespegalos.
Major Hakim Istefan did not learn this until his wedding night, and it had very nearly cost him his life. He had taken the virginity of his beautiful young bride, consoled her tears and fallen asleep with a smile on his face, triumphantly glorying in the proof of his manhood that appeared on the blood-stained sheets that had been hung outside his bridal tent to proclaim that the union had been consummated.
He woke with a sudden pain lacerating him. Blinking his eyes, he saw his gentle bride kneeling before him, the bloody knife in her hand. She had stabbed him in the side as he lay naked and defenseless.
"Filthy Turkish pig! Butcher! Rapist and defiler of honest women!" she spat at him. "You do not remember the man you killed in the mountains, the one who came into your camp to rid the world of your loathsome presence. But he was my brother. And tonight I avenge him!"
With this, she made another lunge at his heart, but Major Hakim Istefan rolled over onto his side and escaped the blow. He seized Irenee's wrist and tried to wring the knife from her, but in a last hysterical gesture of unbounded hatred for him, she wrenched her wrist free and slashed at his cock. The sweeping blow cut off his testicles and very nearly damaged his scrotum. His shrieks of agony brought his orderly into the tent. The latter, seeing what had happened, struck Irenee on the head with the butt of his revolver, then disarmed her. But from that night forth, Major Hakim Istefan could never again bury his hitherto invincible weapon in the tight, warm sheath of a passionate cunt; and he hated all women with the helpless fury of a man who was once their lord and master and had become an object of derision.
No one had ever dared to laugh or mock his powerlessness. He had other ways of gratifying his brooding, inimical hatred and lust. When he saw an aristocratic young woman strung up by the thumbs with her bare toes a scant inch from the wooden planks of the floor, heard her babbling hysterically for mercy and saw her twist her contorted face over her shoulder to watch Sergeant Bekir's arm raise the leather whip, when he saw her body jerk under the lash and saw the welts spreading on her tender flesh, then his depraved and thwarted instincts of passion were more than satisfied.
Few women ever left his office after having once gone in there, for usually they left via the back door into a van that transported them to a house of ill fame. This if they were lucky, to be sure. There were many women who prayed for death and were not given that boon of mercy in the cellar torture chambers of the ominous-looking building on Rasouli Street.
And of all the women who came before him for this or that reason, suspect as spies, as prostitutes who had not bothered to consult with the police to take out a license, as thieves or smugglers, he hated Greek women most of all. The ancient feud between those two countries lived in Major Istefan. And there were times when, directing the torture or himself applying it in one of the special cells in that damp cellar, he would imagine that the naked girl or woman wriggling and twisting and shrieking before him was the reincarnation of his faithless, traitorous Irenee.
To be sure, Constantinople, with its mixture of Oriental and European culture, such as the superlative Adbulla Effendi Restaurant on the main street, the ancient Byzantine hippodrome, Constantinople's oldest church known as St. Irene, and the fabulous Yerebatan Cisterns, had long attracted cosmopolitan tourists from all over the world. Even in those days before the Austrian archduke was murdered at Sarejevo, his own work had been complex enough, ferreting out smugglers, international jewel thieves, brigands of all species, and conniving females who sought to gain entrance into the inner circles of the army and the diplomatic corps so that their price might set high on their bodies and they might turn another quiet profit when they blackmailed their casual lovers.
But now his work was intensified, for every beautiful woman was a potential spy, to his mind, just as she was a faithless, shameless whore when the necessity arose for it. He would not indeed, have credited the fat, complacent, fifty-year-old favorite wife of the Sultan with honesty or honor just because she was a female because she could, if it so suited her, deceive and betray her own Exalted Lord.
Unlike the Sultan, Major Hakim Istefan believed in nothing so merciful as the bowstring, or the sack into which a faithless wife could be sewn and hurled into the Bosphorus. He infinitely preferred the subtle and devious apparatus that he had had installed as soon as he had been given his new assignment and rank. It meant that in this entire teeming city, he alone might have an aristocratic woman undress before him in her shame, and defying her protests.
He might have her ravaged before his eyes or buggered by the lowliest of his soldiers. And he could draw from her the most abject, pitiful babblings of mercy, offering to do anything in the world to stop the kiss of the bastinado, the piercing of her tender flesh in the most intimate regions by sharp, heated bamboo splints, or the nipping of her vulva and nipples with a pair of silver sugar tongs-a bridal gift from Irenee herself.
That treacherous bitch had had a jeweler engrave her initials on those tongs, and whenever he used them, he stared at the tiny amethysts that spelled the initials of her maiden name, and remembered. And when the victim before him would writhe and shriek an inhuman, prolonged cry, his lips twisted and his eyes grew bleak with remembered hate.
Irenee had paid him back for his loss of manhood by the degradation of her own womanhood. He had her staked out naked, between four heavy wooden stakes in front of his tent, her legs straddled widely and a sharp pointed wooden post planted under her belly to compel her to arch her loins and bottom to avoid impalement.
Indeed, the ancient sultans of Turkey had favored impalement as capital punishment for traitors. But theirs was perhaps more spectacular: lifting a man or woman up and then down so the spiked post entered the rectum. Then the hands and legs would be bound with yielding cords,ingeniously contrived so that gradually they would impale themselves upon the fatal stake. But death would be long and unspeakably terrible in coming.
At his order, Irenee had been buggered by twenty of his strongest soldiers, all privates. Then she had been given the bastinado on her heels and tender soles. After that she had been smeared with honey so that the heat of the day brought flies. She had turned her face towards his tent and implored death, but that would have been too easy. His subaltern had been ordered to drive the flies away and to wipe off the honey with a wet cloth. Then she was whipped on her buttocks and between the legs until she fainted. And after that, she was ravished by a dozen men who thrust their stiff cocks into her bloodied, whip-lacerated vulva until the agony and her own weakness slowly forced her down upon the pointed stake. She did not die until dawn of the next day, and he lay on his couch gloating over her cries and incoherent, maddened entreaties.
The Sultan himself had given Major Hakim Istefan an ivory-handled riding crop made of suppie, polished white leather as a mark of favor, for the first month of the war, as a reward for having brought to justice a dangerous Greek spy and his mistress. The woman had been so exceptionally beautiful that, before she had been executed, she had been blindfolded and stripped naked, and the Sultan himself entered her cell and fucked and buggered her.
But there was a nest of spies operating out of Constantinople and he felt they were mainly Greeks who sought to learn by their perfidious ways what the Turkish army intended doing about the Dardanelles. Distrusting Greece as he did as the result of his fatal marriage, the Turkish Intelligence head firmly believed that the Greeks might go over to the Allies and help them in an offensive that would destroy Turkey or at least divert all naval and military forces to the Dardanelles, and thus leave Constantinople itself vulnerable. From time to time, he had been given reports that attractive young women had been interrogated at small army posts not far from the Dardanelles and Gelibou, but thus far there had been nothing to lead him to their master. That master must be a man, he believed, for those women who had been interrogated had been able to keep silent under even the most hideous tortures and had died without revealing the identity of 'N.' Could it be Nicholas Estofari, the fat grain merchant who had made such lavish gifts to the Sultan so as toingratiate himself at the palace? It was possible. The fat old fool was notorious for his whoring, but Major Hakim Istefan somehow could not believe that a man like that could have surrounded himself with such faithful and stoic young beauties who would die rather than reveal the name of their master.
No, it must be someone else, someone who knew almost from the War Ministry itself, what was being planned. A traitor in the higher echelons was more dangerous, for he was certain to be on the best of terms with the highest officials, and perhaps even the Sultan himself.
He lifted the riding crop and slashed it down at the offending papers. Then there was a knock at the door, and Sergeant Gruila Bekir entered and smartly saluted.
Sergeant Gruila Bekir was his chief torturer and interrogator. The man was squat, nearly bald, and almost toothless. But, at fifty, he was still as redoubtable a cocksmith as he had been when he was a boy. The man was a rogue and ought to have been hanged a thousand times over, but he was invaluable to his master; in the guerrilla warfare in the Balkans he had twice saved the life of Major Hakim Istefan. More than that, he knew how to procure an attractive female who might give the tortured intelligence head a few hours of diversion, for, although Major Hakim Istefan could no longer fuck, he could amuse himself with his lips and his cruel talon-like fingers, or force the handle of his riding crop into the quaking cunt or the shuddering bottom hole of a haughty beauty.
Or again, he could force her under that same whip to crouch between his legs and to lick at his disfigured, incomplete prick, the insides of his thighs and his bottom hole, and to wallow in the degradation that succeeded in giving him such triumph as he could still enjoy from the treacherous bitches.
"Well, idiot," he growled, but the noncommissioned officer grinned, understanding that his cruel master thus revealed a kind of special fondness for him.
"Excellency Major, a really choice piece this afternoon! Bedrack just brought her in."
"Ah! Tell me about her. It's been a tiring day and I'm in need of a little vacation. So are you, and you would play Zeus to Europa, I'll be bound."
"The major is very clever, but he knows that his sergeant has little schooling and therefore cannot always understand his fine terms," the sergeant grinned to show his nearly toothless gums.
"No matter. But to fully educate you, Bekir, Zeus is the Greek name given to the king of the gods in the olden days. And Europa was a beautiful girl at the riverbank whom the god desired. So he transformed himself into a bull, Bekir, and fucked her. There! Do you understand that?"
"Oh, yes, yes, Excellency Major!" the sergeant cackled, bobbing his bald head repeatedly. "Very good!"
"Now, go on with your story. What about this choice morsel Bedrack has brought to us? What's her name, what's she accused of, and and what do you propose to do to her? You know I value your opinions in these matters."
"She's nice, very nice, and with big breasts and such an ass, Excellency," Sergeant Bekir's pudgy hands described fantastic circles in the air. "Her name is Nicea Korolos, Excellency. She claims to be from Athens, only she doesn't have a passport, and when Bedrack went to the Hotel George to check on her papers, her maid was very impertinent with him and slapped his face for daring to question her mistress."
"And then?"
"He had them both taken in, Excellency."
"Two of them, eh? You will tell Bedrack I'm going to give him corporal's stripes for bringing in such fine merchandise, and for being so thoughtful, and you'll stand him a drink tonight, at least that. Now let's have these two bitches in and we'll see what to do with them. Is your whip hand as eager as ever?"
"Surely, Excellency Major! Good hard whip on bare ass. That'll teach the bitches not to come to Constantinople and fool with us, won't it, Excellency Major?"
A few moments later, two deliciously attractive young women were led in by the grinning private who had taken it upon himself to arrest them and bring them in because their papers were not in order. He saluted his superior officer, turned on his heel and disappeared, and the fat bald sergeant ambled forward to stand between the two as they stared across Major Hakim Istefan's cluttered desk.
Nicea Korolos was an enchanting beauty of about twenty-seven. Her pale golden hair was coiffed in a loose knot at the back of her head, leaving her ears bare and her forehead displayed in all its high-arching purity. She had a dainty, aquiline nose, a soft, sweet mouth, and large blue eyes.
"I am an actress from Athens, and this is my maid, Euphrosyne Sapiros, who is also from Athens," she said indignantly. "I was to give a performance tonight at Medea, but, because of this silly war, half of my baggage has been lost in transit. Undoubtedly, my passport and other papers are in it. But I assure you that if you make inquiry, at the Nogelu Theater and ask of the manager, Mr. Antonescu, he will tell you exactly who I am! This is an indignity and I protest it! We Greeks have nothing to do with this war, and I have come here to entertain the people of your barbaric country."
"Gently, Nicea, gently," he chuckled, enjoying the look of indignation that sparkled in her eyes and the color that flamed in her cheeks at the use of her first name. "Anyone can walk in here and claim she is the wife of the Sultan, but then she has to prove it. This Antonescu, he is an oily character who ought to have been hanged long ago. However, to relieve your anxiety and to prove to you that we are not quite so barbaric as you think I am going to send one of my men over to the theater to find him. Meanwhile, you will wait in a special little room that we provide for strangers, until, of course, your identity is established. After that, of course, you will have permission to go. Bekir!"
"Sir?"
"Escort these ladies to the waiting chamber."
The fat, bald, toothless sergeant grinned. The two attractive women, exchanging a fearful glance, dubiously followed him. He led them down the stairs to the damp cellar, along whose corridor there were cells and even more ominous-looking heavy metal doors that opened into torture chambers. When he reached the end of the corridor, he took out a key and opened one of the metal doors, shoved them into the cell, slammed the door, and turned the key in the lock behind them with a guffaw of salacious laughter. It would be dark inside, but the bitches would soon discover what delightful little furnishings were there for their benefit!
An hour later, Private Dostri Bedrack knocked at the major's office, was admitted and confided to the cadaverous-looking sadist that the manager of the theater understood that a young Greek woman purportedly Nicea Korolos was to appear tonight at the theater, but he did not recognize her by sight, having had only some correspondence from her agent in Athens.
Moreover, he hastened to agree, that in view of wartime vigilance essential to the safety of the city, it would not be wise to permit an unknown and unidentified female to appear before a Turkish audience. This answer was precisely what Major Hakim Istefan had anticipated, for he had a dossier on Antonescu, who had been engaged in illicit smuggling several years ago and could at any time be brought in for interrogation and sentence. The theater manager was therefore only too eager to sacrifice the welfare of these two women in order to save his own skin.
"Let us pay a little visit to the ladies, who must be quite lonely by now and quite ready to have a visitor, eh?" he said to his sergeant, as he rose from his desk and strode toward the door.
The fat sergeant grinned and winked. "I was thinking that myself, Major! Which one do you want yourself?"
"I'll take the so-called lady, Bekir. You may have the maid. And this time I think I will wield the whip myself. And let us pose them in an interesting way. She says she's from the theater? Well then, she will appreciate a theatrical setting, I'm sure."
A few moments later, Sergeant Bekir unlocked the metal door at the end of the cellar corridor. In his hand was a pine torch, which he at once thrust into the iron bracket just inside the cell. There was a simultaneous cry of terror and surprise, as the two young women beheld their surroundings for the first time.
It was a windowless room with a low ceiling, perhaps the size of a large living room. The walls and the floor themselves were damp, and at certain times of the year, through the crumbling mortar near the corners of the walls, rats were known to enter. Major Hakim Istefan recalled as his brooding eyes swiftly swept over the room, how, six months ago, an aristocratic Turkish woman who had actually been a Greek spy and who had been shot by a firing squad the following morning, had clung to his booted legs, groveling on her knees, babbling that she would fuck him or suck him or anything, just so he took her out of this cell and away from the horrible rats. He accepted her offer, of course, but he had left her there all night and instructed Sergeant Bekir to toss in bits of food certain to attract the hungry rodents.
Several rusted iron rings had been set in the wall here and there, and there was a heavy wooden pillory far to the right, which could be used as a whipping post. In the center of the room, a heavy wooden ladder rose at an angle to meet with an upright round post to which it was fixed. Three sets of buckling straps were attached to the ladder, for it was a flogging ladder. There was also a low pair of stocks with a heavy round footstool in front of them, and this was for the bastinado. However, it could also be used for flogging the back or buttocks, depending on how the victim was placed. For the bastinado, the victim was placed seated on the stool, with her ankles locked in the clamp-holes of the lower frame, her bare feet thus out-thrust and straddled on the other side.
A thin, supple bamboo rod, or sometimes an acacia switch, was then used to flog the soles and the heels. Then again, for a simple flogging, she would be seated on the stool, but with her neck engaged in the upper middle yoke hole and her wrists clamped in two smaller holes at the sides, with her ankles equally pinioned. To further the torment, bits of gravel, thorns, and pebbles and other uncomfortable substances could be placed upon the surface of the stool.
But hardly had the two women comprehended the significance of their surroundings than their eyes lit upon a panoply of whips, thongs, straps, and rods on the wall, exactly to the left of the door.
"How dare you keep us in a place like this!" the pale golden-haired actress indignantly exclaimed, her voice trembling with anger and shame. "I am not used to this sort of treatment! I shall complain to the Greek Ambassador!"
"You have my permission to do this, Nicea, but only after I have released you. It appears that the manager of the theater where you were going to give your performance for us barbaric Turks cannot identify you. And, being a true Turkish patriot at wartime, he feels as I do that your presence might incite some unpleasant incidents. Besides, it is much too convenient to invent a story of lost luggage. We shall try our best, Sergeant Bekir and I, to obtain more specific details on your background. We'll start with your maid, this little Euphrosyne. She is really very pretty and tasty. I wonder, Nicea, if you've tasted her?"
For a moment, the lovely, sensitive-featured blond woman did not quite comprehend the lascivious meaning of her interlocutor; then, her cheeks flaming, she stepped back and said in a low, shaking voice, "You are an abominable beast to dare say such a thing to two helpless women, no matter who they may be!"
"Now that is very theatrical, Nicea. But I much prefer my own brand of theatrics. Bekir, make Euphrosyne comfortable, will you?"
Euphrosyne Sapiros uttered a cry of terror as the fat, bald sergeant advanced toward her, licking his fleshy lips, an unmistakable lustful glitter in his beady eyes. She was about twenty, tall and slim, but with a stunningly contrasting pair of full, round high-perched titties and a magnificently rounded, upstandingly contoured behind which even her petticoats and thick dress did not conceal.
The sergeant seized her by one wrist and doubled it behind her back, making her bend over with a shriek of pain, and first began to rip off her dress and then petticoats.
"I protest! You've no right! We're not criminals, do you understand?" Nicea cried out to the sadistic officer. "Let her go! She's done nothing!"
"It's amusing how often maids know so much more about their mistresses than their mistresses themselves. Leave her stockings and her panties on, for the time being. Eh, Bekir, that's good. Now let's see-I think on the ladder and on her back."
"On her back, Excellency Major?" the fat sergeant demanded dumbfoundedly.
"Yes, you idiot, I know what I'm doing, even though you don't," the officer snapped.
The weeping black-haired girl tried vainly to cover the thick bush of her cunt and to hide her magnificently ivory-tinted titties with their wide, pale-coral love circles and pouting buds, but in a few moments the sergeant had forced her towards the ladder, with her back against the rungs, swiftly corded her ankles, lashed another cord around her waist, and finally, standing on a higher footstool nearby, bound her wrists high above her head. Her eyes enormous with terror, tears running down her cheeks, her titties rising and falling rapidly, the helpless girl sobbed out:
"Oh, mistress, what are they going to do to me? I'm a good girl. I've done nothing wrong. Oh, please tell them!"
Major Hakim Istefan made another sign with his hand and the sergeant seized the beautiful golden-haired actress. She cried out angrily, tried to slap him, to knee him and to twist out of his grasp, but Bekir struck her a glancing blow against the cheek with his heavy fist, dazing her.
By the time she had recovered, she found herself standing against the wall opposite the door, her arms above her head and tied to one of the solid metal rings, stripped down to only her corset, stockings, and shoes. Her naked breasts, proud, young, widely-spaced soft pink-tinted pears were exposed to the greedy eyes of her two tormentors.
Sergeant Bekir strode to the panoply of whips and after some hesitation took down a plaited leather whip about two feet long, it's final tip an additional two inches in length, being made of about six tiny narrow strips of tanned goatskin. The short, heavy handle clutched in his right hand, he moved slowly back towards the ladder and Euphrosyne writhed and shrieked trying to free herself.
"Oh, mistress, mistress! He's going to whip me! Oh, don't let him, I'm so afraid. Oh, please, let me go. I've done nothing!"
"Excellency Major?" the sergeant turned to his satanic master for orders.
"Amuse yourself, Bekir, but not too hard with that whip. Flick me those nice big titties and that belly. See if you can dart the tip of that whip right into the sweet little belly button, and a few times on the insides of those fine thighs, and a few more into that furry cunt of hers. Perhaps it'll make her hot for your prick, Bekir."
"You vile, shabby, ignoble creature! How dare you treat poor Euphrosyne this way. I demand you send for the Greek Ambassador at once! This is unjust, and you've no right to do this to us!" Nicea screamed.
"Gently, Nicea. Your turn will come soon enough. And if I'm wrong, you will have all my apologies and I'm sure Sergeant Bekir can find some ointment for the little marks left on your pretty maid. Besides, if you haven't already tried her, you'll have your chance. You can console each other, you might say," Major Hakim Istefan drawled, savoring the torment of the two helpless victims.
His eyes feasted on their revealed charms, and he preferred the sensitive, older woman who showed him thus far only her titties. She would show a great deal more before this day was done.
Sergeant Bekir planted himself about two feet away from the ladder, facing the dark-haired weeping young maid and playfully flicked the whip out to touch her collarbone. Her eyes rolled madly. She tugged at her bonds and tried to flatten herself more than ever against the wooden ladder.
"My, how she's afraid of it, Excellency," the sergeant grinned with an obscene cackle. "I'll warm her up, though. Don't you fear."
So saying, he drew back the whip and deftly flicked Euphrosyne's right nipple, and she twisted herself as much as her bonds would allow, babbling entreaties of mercy. But already the whip had risen and then shot out again, and the other nipple this time felt the savage kiss of the thin strips of goatskin.
Her body seemed to jump, but the solid ladder held her tightly to its caresses. Mad with pain and shame, desperately trying to close her thighs, for she could see the sergeant's eyes fixed on her virgin cunt, Euphrosyne uselessly supplicated for mercy. For fully half an hour the sadistic Turkish Intelligence Head allowed this subordinate to ply the whip over the maid's creamy nakedness.
At times, it flicked lightly, with an intimation of more stinging kisses to come, touching the navel, the abdomen, the pubic hair, into the soft pouting pink lips of Euphrosyne's cunt itself. Then, giving her no time to prepare herself or understand where the lash would next fall or with what strength, Sergeant Bekir directed the whip in a diagonal cut over her belly, or across both naked titties, to leave fiery welts that drew harrowing cries of indescribable agony from the shuddering, half-fainting brunette maid.
"Now, perhaps you'll tell us a little more about yourself, my dear girl," Major Hakim Istefan lit a cigar and approached the shuddering, welted body of his victim.
The smell of sweat and of urine-the urine of fear-was intoxicating for him, and he approached as closely as he could, staring at her breasts, her contorted, tear-drenched face, the chattering teeth and the flaring nostrils. Then he extended the hot end of the cigar towards the bush of her cunt.
"Quickly!" he snarled.
Euphrosyne's eyes were hypnotically fixed to the red glow of the tip of the lit cigar. With all her strength, she tried to back herself into the ladder, and then babbled hysterically, "I'm just her maid, it's true! She's an actress. I worked with her for two years and she's a fine, generous woman. I can tell you nothing else."
"Perhaps we've made a mistake, Bekir," the
Major turned to his subordinate with a look of deceptive ingenuousness.
"That would be too bad, Major." 'Yes. But on the other hand, we have no great love for Greeks here. If she's a great actress, we would have heard of her long before this, eh, sergeant? But I don't think she is because she hasn't convinced me yet that she is one. So all Greece will lose is two pretty girls, and they will do much better here amusing our soldiers, don't you agree?"
"Oh, surely, Excellency Major," the fat, bald noncommissioned officer sniggered. i think it's time for the mistress to console the maid, Bekir. Help her to do that." Major Hakim Istefan leaned to whisper in his sergeant's ear and the sergeant, with a bellow of laughter, at once responded.
"Excellency Major, why, that's a wonderful idea, that is. I wish I'd thought of it myself. At once, Excellency Major."
Casting aside his whip, the fat sergeant approached the wall against which Nicea was tethered. Unfastening her wrists, he brutally ripped off her corset, although she tried to strike at him with her little fists.
Frenzied with shame, beseeching her satanic tormentor to call the Greek Ambassador, to spare her, she was dragged to the ladder and forced upon it. Sergeant Bekir thrust her forward so that her titties and cunt rubbed against Euphrosyne's. Meanwhile, the Major aided him in tethering the two women together in this salacious tableau that was to end in enforced lesbianism under the lash.
"There, now the two of them can console each other, eh, Bekir? And hand me the whip this time," Major Hakim Istefan commanded.
Nicea turned her face back over her shoulder and cried out hoarsely, "It's filthy, it's inhuman! You coward, you cruel, horrid beast to shame us so! You'll pay for this. You wait and see if you don't! The Greek Ambassador will prove who I am."
"But first you must prove who he is, sweetheart," the Turkish officer sarcastically rejoined.
Then, raising his arm, he sent the whip whistling across the young blond woman's slender back. She caught her breath and writhed, gritting her teeth, determined not to make an outcry to give him satisfaction. But even that convulsive movement had ground her titties and cunt against her maid's; and, at the same movement, revolted by this contact, Euphrosyne jerked her body backward.
Waiting for this, the major regaled her with a furious backhanded stroke that leaped the thong over both her jutting round bottom globes and drew an agonized scream from the aristocratic young beauty.
"Now you've had a taste of it, my darling Nicea," he chuckled thickly. "I'd advise you to commune with Euphrosyne. You can distract yourself that way, you know, and the whip will be a kind of delight for you. Besides, I'm sure, with a figure like Euphrosyne has, you've probably tried that nasty little game in bed at night, you Greek whore!"
His eyes narrowing to pinpoints of glittering, cruel light, his lips twisted, he began to whip the young actress. Using the full force of the thong, he struck horizontally over her bottom from the tops of her hips to the base, and then varied the torture for a few moments by flicking the thin strands against the small of her back, her shoulder blades, and her neck, and even around to bite at the outer curves of her panting titties.
Her voice became hoarse and slurred with the shrill cries of agony that the lash, so expertly wielded, wrenched from her. Panting, sweating, babbling incoherent entreaties, Nicea could no longer control the movements of her naked body. Each time the whip fell, she lunged forward and ground her cunt against her maid's. She felt Euphrosyne's titties against her as the burning kiss of the whip added a new welt and yet another to her soft pink flesh and produced a new, lascivious, involuntary contortion. .
"I'll flay the skin off your ass, Nicea, if you don't start to rub your cunt against Euphrosyne's and make her come," the Major snarled.
Again the lash cracked wickedly as it wrapped around the ripest center of the young Greek actress's bottom. With a wild shriek of agony, she cast aside all prudery and pride and, her mouth fused with her maid's, began lasciviously to rub and squirm herself, while Euphrosyne wept and moaned and finally began to imitate her mistress.
And when at last both women were drawn to orgasm, under the infernal persuasion of the lash, Major Hakim Istefan flung it aside and ordered the sergeant to hand him his ivory-handled riding crop. Then, prying open Nicea's welted bottom-cheeks, he thrust the ivory-handle in as far as it would go. Then he made another sign, and the half-fainting, golden-haired young woman was taken down from the ladder and her wrists tied above her to one of the wall rings, but this time with her face to the wall and with the obscene emergence of the riding crop sticking out of her asshole.
Mounting a footstool, the sergeant, unbuttoning his trousers, liberated his enormous, thick prick and began to prod Euphrosyne's furry cunthole. The girl shrieked desperately, even imploring her mistress for help. But there was to be none for her. And as the Head of Turkish Intelligence watched, his face flushed, his eyes sparkling, fat, bald Sergeant Bekir fucked the naked young maid, exclaiming triumphantly, "She's a virgin, Excellency Major! And by the bowels of Shaitan, she's tight as the very devil!"
And when he had finished with the weeping girl, he moved over to the wall. There, haggard and trembling, her body drenched with sweat and with tears, Nicea understood what was in store for her. But the whip had broken her courage, and she did not even rebel as the fat sergeant, a hand on one of her titties, the other used to pry open the lips of her cunt, inserted his greased weapon and crammed home to the very hilt. Here again, he triumphantly announced, "But this one isn't a virgin, Excellency Major, though she's tight as the very devil! I'll loosen you up, you blond bitch!"
His hands pressed against his crotch, his eyes dark and brooding, Major Hakim Istefan watched the brutal rape of the two Greek women. And when Nicea, her head bowed, her titties rising and falling convulsively, sagged in her bonds, he turned to his assistant.
"Let's go get some sleep and then a good dinner, Bekir. Then we can come back and see just how talkative these bitches are going to be."
CHAPTER 7
In the marble-columned hallway of the magnificent mansion occupied by Kyros Anapolous, a lovely, sandy-haired young English girl was trying her best to persuade the non-English speaking liveried flunky that it was a matter of life or death to see his master. He continued to shake his head, to fold his arms over his chest, and to stare through her as if she did not exist. Penny Elston stamped her foot with vexation: "You stupid creature, cant you get it through your thick head that I simply must see Mr. Anapolous?" she cried in exasperation.
There was a magnificent marble stairway leading to the second floor, and as she looked up, she saw a lean, bald man with an enormous mustache, clad only in dressing gown, pajamas, and slippers, descending.
"Oh, please!" she entreated, "wont you tell this person that I just must see him? I've had such a terrible time getting to Athens and he's my only hope!"
"You need not raise your voice, young woman," the mustachioed man said in perfect English. He uttered a curt order in Greek and the flunky immediately turned to him, bowed and left the immense lobby of this ornate mansion. Meanwhile, the man in the dressing gown continued his methodical descent of the marble stairs and now confronted Penny Elston.
"And who are you?" he asked coldly.
"My name is Penny Elston, and I'm here to see Mr. Anapolous. It's about my sister, Gwendoline."
"Gwendoline?" the man repeated without a trace of recognition in either his voice or his features. "You must enlighten me, Miss. And where do you come from?"
"All the way from London," the lovely sandy-haired young woman feverishly exclaimed, "and it's taken nearly two months to come here. I had a letter that got through the blockade, from Gwendoline, and she said she was working for Greek intelligence. I had a very dear friend make inquiries and I was told that Mr. Anapolous was the man I must see. Can you take me to him?"
"I am Kyros Anapolous, Miss Elston. Will you follow me? Have you had breakfast?"
The young woman shook her head and made an inpatient gesture. "All I want to know is what happened to Gwendoline. I don't know how she got mixed up in this dreadful affair, so many thousands of miles away from home-"
"Quietly, please. A few of my servants understand English, and I do not wish my affairs to be discussed in their presence. Come along."
He turned his back on her and began again to ascend the stairway. Penny Elston, with a sigh, followed behind him.
She was twenty-three, her sandy-hued hair styled in a very prim and oblong bun at the back of her head. Her face was a charming oval, with lovely, widely spaced, quite large and expressive eyes, a dainty somewhat snub nose, and a full, generous sweet mouth. She was about five feet five inches in height, her figure supple and her breasts small, but beautifully firm and rounded. Her hips and buttocks, however, were magnificently opulent, though without excess, and her fine, delicate pink-and-white complexion would have been the envy of the world's most famous beauties.
Kyros Anapolous led the way down the left-hand corridor from the landing, and gesturing for her to go ahead of him, ushered her into his sitting room. It adjoined his bedroom by a door that remained open, and Penny, nervously glancing around, caught a fleeting glimpse of an enormous bed with four posts and a canopy that dominated the luxuriously furnished room.
He gestured her to a seat, then took up a little silver bell from the tabouret beside his armchair and rang it three times. A fat, jovial, liveried valet entered the room and bowed to his master. "Joseph, coffee and pastry for my guest, and for me a glass of ouzo."
As the valet bowed and left the room, Kyros Anapolous turned to the overwrought young woman. "Have you tried our national liqueur, Miss Elston? It has the flavor of anise and is very sweet. I drink it in your honor."
"Oh, please, Mr. Anapolous, please tell what you know about Gwendoline!"
His eyes were those of a basilisk, heavy-lidded, and his mouth was thin and small, that of the true sadist. He stared at her coldly, and Penny Elston felt her flesh crawl at the merciless and cynical appraisal she read in his gaze.
"You have said the name of Gwendoline, Miss
Elston. It is an English name, true enough, but you must enlighten me. I do not recognize it."
"But surely you must, Mr. Anapolous. She married a Turkish diplomat, Hamil Aszar."
"I fail to understand why you should come to me in Athens to inquire after a woman who has married one of our enemies. Although Greece is not at war, and will maintain neutral throughout this senseless conflict, if you know anything at all of our national history, Miss Elston, you must know that Turks and Greeks are as oil and fire."
"Yes, yes, I know. But please! You see, Mr. Anapolous, my father died a few years ago and my mother has been quite ill. I'm Gwendoline's younger sister. She met this man almost five years ago, when she was on a trip with me through the Mediterranean. My parents were with us then, and Hamil Aszar was on the same ship. My parents didn't want her to marry, but she was always capable of winding them around her little finger. And she hasn't been back to England since."
"This is a touching story, Miss Elston, but still I fail to see how it concerns me."
"But it must! I was telling you downstairs that there was a letter that came through the blockade two months ago. Gwendoline wrote me that her husband had died over a year ago and that she was left almost penniless. She went to Constantinople and she met someone there, though she didn't mention that person's name. What she did say was that this woman-it was a woman, that's all I can tell you-sent her to Athens to see you, Mr. Anapolous. And that you gave her an assignment to work as a spy against the Turks in the Dardanelles."
"Oh, yes. Now I begin to remember. Ah, here is your refreshment. Please enjoy yourself." The fat valet had returned with the tray. He set it down on a little table in front of Penny Elston, gestured for her to help herself from the tray of rich Greek pastry, then poured out the strong black coffee and gestured to her again to learn her preference for cream and sugar, which she declined with a shake of her head. Then he handed his master a little brandy glass filled with the liqueur and, once again bowing obsequiously, left the room, closing the door softly behind him.
Leaning forward, clasping her hands in her lap, her face pale, Penny Elston urged, "Then you do remember, Mr. Anapolous. Oh, please, what has become of her? I know the history of the Greeks and the Turks, because we learned it in school. I know the Turks are cruel people. If they found out she was spying for the Greeks, even though she had married a Turk, I don't even dare think of what they'd do to her. Can't you tell me what happened to her, or the name of that woman in Constantinople who sent her to you? Maybe I could go see her and find out."
"Your concern for your sister is indeed touching, Miss Elston. It must have taken a great deal of courage for you to make this trip, and I can imagine how difficult it was for you."
"My mother is in a hospital with an incurable illness. She talks only of Gwendoline, and I have no one else left in the world, and I love her so that I had to come," Penny Elston replied with a choking little sob.
"You may set your mind at rest, young woman. It was ingenious that your sister fell in love with a Turkish diplomat. As such, she would have immunity. And if she is in the Dardanelles, be sure that she has already established her own cover and can explain her presence there. Perhaps she poses as a widow who wishes to remain where she and her husband had their happiest hours. Yes, I am quite sure that's what it must be."
"I-I would like to be near her if I could. I was always so fond of her, even though she was older and was always the favorite at home. I've got no one, and this terrible war-oh goodness, if I could only do something to help."
"I sympathize with your feelings, and I commend them. As I have told you, Greece is neutral in this struggle. But we will defend ourselves against the Turks, our ancient enemy, you may depend on that. That is why your sister is undoubtedly seeking to learn the strength of the Turkish fortifications that guard the straits. I have no doubt that the English and the French will one day strike there in the hope of rejoining the Russian forces through the Black Sea. But our beloved King Constantine will not let the land of the Parthenon and the Acropolis be trampled by the feet of foreign soldiers who would enslave us, too, in their own way."
"I know nothing of politics or of war, Mr. Anapolous. I know only that I want to be with my sister and help her if I can."
"Let me think a moment. Would you be willing to share her life, then?"
"You mean-as a spy?"
"Yes, it's as simple as that. But you speak neither Greek nor Turkish, so you could hardly be valuable there."
"On the contrary, Mr. Anapolous, I do speak Turkish-not too well, but enough to be understood and to understand. At first, Gwendoline hoped that we might all be together in England. But her husband preferred to remain in Constantinople, and so she would send me long letters, urging me to buy a Turkish dictionary and study so that one day I could spend my summer vacation with them. I don't know why, but I did study, and I can speak it."
"Excellent! It is possible we may use your services. And, of course, you will be paid."
"I don't care about the money. But-what would I have to do as a spy?"
"Just what your sister is doing, Miss Elston. Learn the strength of the Turkish fortifications. If they are kept occupied watching the straits, they will have little time left for crossing our borders, raping our women, enslaving our young men. Also, should the Allies attempt a landing at the Dardanelles, you could get word to our agent in Constantinople, who would relay it at once to our War Ministry."
"If it would help England, yes. And I think Gwendoline would want that too."
"Of course she would. And that is why she is a spy for us and not the Turks. But how courageous are you?"
"I-I don't know."
"If, let us say, you were captured by the Turks and interrogated, and perhaps threatened with a whipping, could you remain silent?"
Penny Elston blushed and lowered her eyes. "I-I hadn't thought of that. I-well, I wouldn't be a traitor to my country, no matter what happened."
His basilisk-like eyes came again and considered her, and once again Penny Elston shivered as if cold fingers had touched her naked flesh.
"I may test you," he said curtly. "So far, you have shown me no documents to prove that you are who you say you are. You might, for all I know, even be a Turkish spy. I admit the possibility is remote, but it exists. This is war and we wait here in our neutral country, as vigilant as any nation at war and perhaps more so because we don't want to be drawn into it. So I must question you severely. Do you understand?"
"I-I've got papers to show-and my passport." She opened her purse and showed him her papers. He glanced casually at them, then handed them back.
"They seem to be quite legitimate. But I am more interested in the possibility of employing you, if I help you reach your sister."
"I am so grateful!"
"Doubtless you would be. But let's go back to what I have proposed to you, this hypothetical possibility. Let us say that you were captured by a Turkish officer, and questioned, and that he was not satisfied with your story. That he decided to have one of his men give you the whip to loosen your tongue. How, I wonder, would a gently bred English girl like you react to that?"
"I-I just don't know. I'd manage. I guess I'm as brave as anyone. I guess everyone can stand a certain amount of pain." Penny Elston shrugged helplessly.
"Very well, Miss Elston." He downed his glass of ouzo at a gulp, and rose. "I will help you find your sister on one condition only. That you accept at my hand a trial whipping, which will answer for me the question to which I must have an answer-whether or not you are capable of enduring some moderate pain in the event of your capture. I will tell you this much-the Turks admire bravery in the female as well as in the male. If things should go badly and you should be put to the question, your courage might help convince them, where your lies and forged papers would not. Do you follow me?"
"I-I think so. You-you mean you-you w-want to-" her throat was suddenly dry.
"Here and now, Miss Elston. I propose to tie you to a whipping frame and apply the whip exactly as a Turkish officer might do. It will not be overly severe, you have my assurance, not beyond what I think your healthy young strength is capable of enduring. If you fail the test, I shall not help you. If you pass, I shall send you at once to Constantinople with credentials to my agent there. What do you say, Miss Elston?" He glanced at his wristwatch and frowned. "I have exactly half an hour before I must depart for an audience with the Minister of State."
Penny Elston rose, feeling her legs tremble beneath her. Her face was scarlet as she murmured, lowering her eyes, "If that's the only way I can get to Gwendoline, the answer is yes. I'm ready, Mr. Anapolous."
It was not the answer she wanted to give but she could think of nothing else to do.
Very pale now, her heart beating erratically, Penny Elston followed Kyros Anapolous into his bedroom-not without a furtive glance at the enormous, canopied, four-postered bed that dominated it-and thence through a narrow door, which he unlocked. He moved silently behind her, closing and locking this door, the key of which he dropped back into his dressing gown. Her eyes widened, and she put her hand to her mouth in a reflex of apprehension, which she was powerless to suppress.
It was a windowless room, but with a rather high ceiling. The stone floor was bare and of gray marble, hewn from a quarry not far from the immortal Parthenon. But what filled her with a nameless fear most of all, was that there were mirrors covering the stone walls on every side, and in the center of this curious chamber, there rose a strange whipping-frame.
A round metal pole was fixed into the middle of the floor, rising about ten feet. The frame itself, also made of iron, was shaped like a broad cross, and there were soldered, locking gyves at each arm, with another set at the base of the vertical piece, designed for the wrists and ankles of the victim. At the very top of this cross-like frame, a grooved ring fitted onto the upright pole. A windlass at the base of this pole permitted the raising or the lowering of the frame. At this moment, the cross-piece lay flat on the floor. To the left of the frame, against the mirrored wall, was a kind of metal filing cabinet, and to the right was a low, heavy black leather-padded couch. There was no other door to this room except the one by which Penny Elston had just entered.
Her throat was suddenly dry and her heart beat even more rapidly, as she perceived that Kyros Anapolous was standing beside her, an enigmatic expression on his face. Irrelevantly, she thought that his mustache was grotesque, even anarchistic, for it seemed more fitting to be adorning the lip of some English pub owner or bartender, being what might be described as a walrus style. Together with his bald head, hollow eyes and thin mouth, it was so incongruous as to cause her even more apprehension.
"You understand, Miss Elston, that you submit yourself of your own volition," his voice was dry and impersonal. "It is in the interest of an experiment, for it is the only way I can be sure I can trust you on so vital a mission. Emotion and sentiment have no place in war, and they are dangerous flaws for the enemy to detect and exploit, believe me. Indeed, if your sister had not made so excellent a marriage, from the Turkish viewpoint, I should never have permitted her to work for me. You English are mawkish sentimentalists, I fear, and it may cost you the war."
"Please, Mr. Anapolous, I-I don't want a lecture on politics, just let's get this over with," Penny Elston tried to keep her voice cool, but nonetheless it trembled. She stared again at the whipping frame and she bit her lower lip. Her only recollection of punishment as a child had been when once she spilled jam on her mother's best tablecloth and her mother had smacked her bottom through her clothes. It hadn't hurt so much as shamed her, and there had been really no pain, none to remember. But the mere physical existence of this room and its singular aura of a combined captivity, with an even more suggestive voyeurism, began to make her tremble and to feel beads of sweat on her forehead and in her armpits.
"As you wish, Miss Elston. You will undress down to your undergarments, I will then place you on the frame and fasten you appropriately," he replied.
She was about to speak, but reflected that it would be useless. Yet the fact that she was still a virgin troubled her as she realized that this compliance would entail the revelation of her person in the most intimate dishabille. Nevertheless, thinking of her dying mother and of the latter's anguished appeal to her to find Gwendoline, she drew strength in her resolution. Slowly, turning slightly away from the silent, brooding head of Greek Intelligence, she unfastened her dress and drew it off, then stood irresolutely a moment.
"Drop it to the floor, it is of no consequence," his dry voice urged.
She did so, then, her cheeks reddening as she caught sight of herself in the mirrored wall, began to remove both petticoats. They fell in a coquettish froth of white batiste with flouncy lace trim, about her slim ankles, elegantly sheathed in gray silk stockings, which clambered along the sinuously highest curves to sheath her gracefully slender but very womanly thighs, to the middle. As she kicked the petticoats away, she again caught sight of herself in the mirrored wall to her left, and her blushes deepened. A pink silk camisole covered her white corset, which pressed just under her titties and tightly snugged the spacious, broad ovals of her bottom-cheeks, its white elastic tabs hooking to the tops of her hose. The only other veil to her modesty was a pair of white batiste panties, whose legs ended just where her stockings did and were worn over her corset. She hesitated now, believing that she had certainly shamed herself enough and evidenced her willingness to this man who filled her with such instinctive distrust and abhorrence. Only the thought of being reunited with Gwendoline quelled the feverish urge to turn and run from this room.
"Your corset, too, if you please, Miss Elston. It covers your buttocks, and be very sure that the Turks, when they question a female, will apply the whip there most of all." His voice broke the thunderous silence that engulfed her, made her start and utter a faint, "Ohh, m-must I?"
"Indeed you must. It would not be realistic otherwise," he assured her.
Yet this posed an almost imponderable dilemma. In order to remove the corset that hooked down her left side, she would be obliged to remove her panties and thus disclose to him and assuredly to the mirrors all around, the most intimate parts of her virgin body. Even while she pondered this anguishing problem, his voice flogged her with its impatience: "If you will please be quick, Miss Elston. My appointment is waiting!"
With a deep breath, turning still more away from him, in the ingenuous attempt to conceal herself as much as possible, and of course forgetting that the mirror would reflect back to him what she revealed, Penny Elston unfastened her panties and dragged them down to her upper thighs. Clenching her thighs together to diminish the rather prominently plump mound of Venus with its surprisingly thick, curly fronds of dark-brown pubic hair, she attacked the hooks and eyes of the corset with fingers that could not help trembling. Squirming a little and furious with herself for prolonging this embarrassing moment, encountering some mild resistance from several of the hooks, she at last loosened the sheath and that, too, dropped to the floor beside her other discarded garments. Then, very hastily, she dragged up her panties and fastened them into place.
"And now if you will go there and lie down on your stomach on the frame, stretching out your arms in a cross, I myself will prepare you, Miss Elston," Kyros Anapolous declared. His voice still retained its harsh, impersonal insolence, but she was almost grateful for it, as she moved quickly forward, and, not without an apprehensive shudder, extended herself along the iron whipping frame. She closed her eyes as she heard him approach, tried not to be aware that he knelt beside her, taking first her right wrist, touching a little spring-lock in the shackle to open it, thrusting her wrist inside and then locking it tightly shut into place-so tightly that she gasped aloud. A moment later, she found her other wrist embraced in the cold, tightly confining shackle on the other arm of the cross. Then each of her ankles was subjected to the same treatment. The iron frame was cold and its vertical piece was as wide as her own body. She began to shiver, and she could hear the thudding of her heart as he moved to the windlass and began to turn it with an angry creaking sound. Slowly, she felt herself hoisted aloft, rising inch by inch until at last the creaking stopped and the frame had reached the top of the pole, presenting her at a forty-five degree angle.
She had never been so conscious of her body as now, her panties tightly hugging the much too bountifully fleshed hillocks of her behind, the camisole plastered tightly against her small, shuddering, heaving titties, against the exquisitely hollowed column of her smooth back. She was conscious of the trickling sweat in her distended armpits now, as drops rivuleted slowly down her quivering sides. She opened her eyes, found that she could lift her head without restraint, and saw herself reflected back from the mirrored wall opposite her. Then she uttered her first stifled cry of fear.
Kyros Anapolous had gone to the metal cabinet, opened it to reveal a number of diverse whips, straps, and other singular implements affixed by hooks inside, at the top of this storage container. At the bottom, she could detect a pile of unfamiliar devices, but there were pear gags, punishment helmets, restraint bridles and bits, handcuffs with short chains and ankle manacles of the same fashion, together with buckling leather straps of all sizes and thicknesses. He now turned to her, and in his right hand brandished a braided leather whip, its handle of double thickness and about four inches in length that the tapering thong about of three feet in length was fitted. At the very end, the thong was ingeniously cut and shaped into three thin, narrow, pointed tips.
She turned her head back over her left shoulder to watch his approach, her eyes dilated and shadowed by her understandable terror. The muscles of her bottom tightened, and she tried to close her thighs, but found it impossible. Stationing himself at her left, he now announced, "I am going to give you twenty lashes, Miss Elston. It is a moderate punishment and I shall not cut the skin. You may, of course, cry all you like-this chamber is soundproofed and the servants will not hear you. But if you ask for mercy before the final stroke, I fear you will not be made of the stuff that those in my employment need. It is understood?"
Her teeth had begun to chatter and a cold, gnawing anguish grew in her bowels and vitals as summoning her waning courage, she gasped out, "Y-yes, only please g-g-get it over quickly, I beseech you!"
He did not answer. Instead, to her horror, he approached, tucking the whip under his left arm. Then she felt his lean fingers attack the waistband of her panties. With all her might, she pressed her loins against the iron frame and cried out, "Oh no! Don't you dare! For heaven's sake, I agreed to be whipped, not to be naked-spare me that, at least, Mr. Anapolous!"
"The Turks would not spare your praiseworthy modesty, Miss Elston, believe me, they would not. No, it must be on the bare flesh, since that alone will enable me to see that I do not mar your delicate skin." There was almost a sneer in his voice at this last.
Grinding her teeth together, her face furiously reddened, Penny Elston closed her eyes and gasped, "Oh God, my poor Gwendoline! Then hurry, Mr. Anapolous, do be quick, otherwise I don't think I can stand it!"
"Of course. Arch yourself a little away from the frame, so that I don't tear this pretty garment," he said, with a mocking politeness that seemed more horrible under the circumstances.
With a groan, she obeyed. Then she felt her panties being tugged down, husked from the promontories of her behind, down just to the tops of her shuddering thighs, whose straddle prevented the complete descent of this, the final veil to her virginal modesty.
His eyes blazed with a perverse desire at the sight of the exquisitely pink-and-white bottom, the ripely oval globes convulsively tightening as she desperately sought to hide from him the most sacrosanct parts of her body. Penny Elston was not only a virgin, but her one brief love affair had been halted by the death in action of her fianc' a month after the English had entered the war. He had been a rather sensitive, intellectual, would-be architect, intending one day to take over his father's highly renowned firm in London. At twenty-five he had felt it his patriotic duty to enlist and had been granted a commission as lieutenant. A few weeks later he was dead in No Man's Land, having led his men into a withering attack by an entrenched German contingent three times the English strength.
She had known him since her school days, and he had been gentle and poetic, talking over his plans to be one day, if God willed it, another Christopher Wren, to build churches and beautiful airy homes where people might worship life as well as God. They had talked of books and music and poetry, and only when he had gone off to battle had he really kissed her, as his hands held her tightly to him in perhaps an unconscious presentiment that he would never again so hold and so kiss her. He had never seen her like this-never. No man ever had.
Bowing her head and closing her eyes, she burst into choking sobs that she sought to suppress. She could feel the cold iron frame against her tender body, belly, her loins, her upper thighs. And then, suddenly, the voice of her cynical executioner pierced through the anguish and the bitter memories: "Are you ready, Miss Elston? I am going to begin."
"Ohh, yes,-oh, hurry-oh, do hurry-I-ohhh-hahhhrrr! Ohh God, God!"
Her feverishly poignant entreaty to him to hasten the flogging was suddenly broken off and her voice rose in a shrill scream. His arm had risen and then descended. The braided leather whip had swept across her satiny naked hips.
The brutal shock of it had startled her, but almost instantly had come the burning waves of pain, attacking her tender flesh and sensitive nerves. Her body jerked on the cold iron frame and her face turned back, her eyes enormous and sparkling with tears.
"That's one!" he announced, as he again raised the lash.
With a choking gasp, Penny Elston turned her face around and closed her eyes again, digging her fingernails into her palms and pressing her body with all her might against the unyielding iron of the whipping frame. She felt the angry, relentless throbbing in her bottom where that first, atrociously painful cut had fallen, and on the pink-and-white satiny epidermis, there already rose an angry, obscene stigma of the lash.
There was an agonizing pause now, and even as she turned her flushed, tautened face back over her shoulder, Kyros Anapolous coldly informed her, "It may prove a helpful distraction, Miss Elston, for you to count the strokes aloud. There will be, as I told you, twenty."
"Why-yes-only, please hurry-oh God, I've never felt anything like this in all my life-one, then! Oh hurry, please do!" she heard herself gasping, and then she closed her eyes and turned her face back and tensed herself. The mirrors were too obscene and they added to her torment, the terrible throbbing where that first cruel lash had clung across her palpitating flesh.
The whip rose again slowly, as the Greek Intelligence head contemplated the magnificent pink-and-white sheened posterior proffered to the lash. The pearl-gray stockings seemed a second skin over the elegant contours of her beautiful long legs, and like a true connoisseur of sensuality, he admired the visual nuances-the trembling of her thighs and calves, the play of the muscles of her shoulders and back, the twisting of her slim fingers as she readied herself for another blow.
Then, with a wicked hiss and crack, the thong darted across her bottom just an inch below the mark left by the first stroke. He had not yet used the diabolically stinging tips of the whip, reserving this for the finale. All the same, Penny Elston's body jerked convulsively against the whipping frame, her head tilted back and her eyes huge and glistening with tears. She called out in a choking voice: "Two! Oh, God, only two, oh, it's awful, Mr. Anapolous!"
Now it seemed to Penny Elston that she could feel two blazing, scorching bands of blistering fire across the tops of her luscious hips. Her posture was shameful, she became still more aware because of the pain. Before, she had been concerned mainly with pressing herself tightly against the frame to conceal her womanhood, and trying desperately to clench her thighs and the cheeks of her behind so that this man could not view the mysteries of her voluptuous, young virgin body. But the pain was so agonizing, so new, and she was so unprepared for it that she found her body jerking fitfully, arching away from the metal surface that was harsh and cold and unyielding, as if to offer herself to her executioner-a thought that was intolerable and horrifying to her chastest instincts.
It was the waiting that was so abominable, and this shameful, almost childlike pose, with her panties tucked down and chafing uncomfortably at the tops of her straddled thighs to expose the part of her person that until this moment no man had ever seen. If only she had been allowed to keep her panties on, she could have been much braver. Penny Elston knew. She blinked her eyes to clear the tears from them, and at that moment the third blow fell, continuing the parallel descent from hips to bottom with expertly cruel precision. As the thong clung tenaciously to the upper summits, crossing them both with another bright red weal, she swerved her hips this way and that, and her pussy mound ground against the cold metal of the frame. Once again her head tilted back, her nostrils dilated and her mouth opened in a shrill, agonized cry of "Threeeee! Ohh, God, give me strength, oh give me strength!"
Kyros Anapolous considered the shuddering young beauty on the whipping frame, his eyes pinpoints of sadistic joy. He licked his lips and took a long, ardent breath, feeling his crotch tingle and ache with the awakening of rut. He turned to study the reflections on the walls, enjoying an even greater voyeuristic pleasure from those reflections, while the tethered victim groaned softly, bowing her head and digging her fingernails into her palms while she waited hopelessly and with increasing terror of spirit for the annihilating agony of the lash.
The whip came, but only after a prolonged pause that taunted all her nerves and made her stomach churn with a kind of sick nausea. For even pain was better than this tortuous lingering suspense, especially because her flesh burned and shrank from the previous infliction of the whip and thus taught her in advance what new boundaries of endurance it would call upon her to raise. It struck once more in the same methodical pattern, horizontally striping both buttocks just an inch from the ripest curves of all, and Penny Elston flattened her belly, then ground herself lasciviously-unconscious though this manner was, and one that was impelled by the fiery torture that clawed her tender, virgin flesh-as she cried out hoarsely: "Ahrrr! Oh, four, four, oh, it is dreadful, it tears and rips me, oh, God, give me strength for it!"
"Amen to that, Miss Elston," was his sarcastic rejoinder. "Your cries are most convincing and I believe that the Turks will see in you only a helpless, perhaps ill-advised captive, rather than a spy. But let us continue, then, for I assure you they will not leave off with four lashes should they catch you and put you to the question."
No sooner had he ended that sentence, than the braided thong descended for the fifth time, biting precisely over the fullest, most lasciviously ripened curves of Penny Elston's bottom ovals. Once again, her body jerked like a puppet dangled on a string, and once more her posterior seemed to lurch outwards as if begging for a new kiss of that ferocious lash. Her face turned from side to side, her eyes huge and blinded with tears that slowly trickled down her cheeks. Her mouth gaped in a wordless cry and then, sobbingly, as her body pressed back against the iron frame, her head bowed again and she moaned, "Ohh, oh, Lord in heaven, f-five!"
She did not see that in the mirrors, the specter-like, sardonic figure of her executioner was made the more obscenely terrifying by the rigid emergence of his prick against the folds of the neatly tied dressing gown. And then the atrocious moments of waiting, while she fought for breath, tried to shift herself to a less irritating posture but could not budge except to rub her belly and cunt against the cold, merciless iron surface of the frame.
The sixth lash descended, perhaps about half an inch from the previous welt. It was so painful that it took her breath away, and then she shrieked: "Aiiiii! Six-six! Oh, God in heaven, six! Oh, please hurry, in the name of mercy, because it's terrible for me!" Her body lunged back against the frame, and she could hear the metallic clatter and she could feel the bruising shock of the cold against her belly and her loins, against the panting globes of her titties. Sweat was beading her sides now, and her armpits were dank with it, as was her forehead. Her lips were trembling convulsively and her teeth had begun to chatter. She closed her eyes once again, as she fought for breath and for strength.
The seventh blow fell. It excoriated the lower summits, the whip clinging to the naked nether globes even as they contracted violently in a defensive reaction. Her body seemed to jump, her hips to swerve and to twist, and the palpitation of her bare behind continued long after the whip had fallen to the floor and had been drawn back and poised ready to strike anew. Despairingly, she called out the count, bursting into tears and bowing her head. Kyros Anapolous waited, his prick now at savagely full erection, his livid eyes laving the blazingly striped, young, naked bottom before him across which seven darkening red welts marred the velvety-satin perfection of her carnation-tinted bare skin. He allowed her a moment to control her sobs and to tighten her muscles again, and when he watched her slowly lift her face and saw her body quiver with the breath she took, he stepped forward and applied the lash for the eighth time, biting home over the base of her shuddering, naked seat.
"Ahowwwohhhh! Ohh, my God, oh, my God, have mercy on me! Eight, eight, Mr. Anapolous. Oh, do hurry, I shall faint, it is so terrible. Oh, have pity on me!" she cried hysterically.
"Am I to understand that you are begging me for mercy, Miss Elston?" he sneered.
Penny Elston groaned and sobbed, then slowly shook her head and forced a tremulous, "No-n-nooo. But do hurry, please. I implore you."
The ninth lash was even slower in coming, and she turned her face back over her shoulder again to entreat him. But even as she did so, she saw the braided thong swinging out toward her, and she uttered a shriek and clutched herself frantically against the whipping frame. But she could do nothing to escape the fury and the knowledge of the thong as it clung just over the tops of her thighs, just slightly over where the fucked-down drawers tautly bit against her shaking thighs. And once again her body leaped to its bidding, her hips lunging and twisting, her bottom-cheeks yawning and contracting, heedless of what they displayed in the ungovernable anguish that the lash had summoned through her pride and modesty and courage.
All she could tell herself as she readied herself for the next cut was that there were eleven lashes left, and yet her bottom seemed so tender, so welted already, and the burning, throbbing anguish so overpowering that she did not know where he could whip her anymore or how she could bear it if he did.
But the braided thong answered her questions after a pause that she thought an eternity and that was in reality thirty seconds, clacking with an obscene, voracious sound just a little higher than the last stroke, and yet-for Kyros Anapolous was a master of the lash-without merging into a previous stigma on her shuddering inflamed flesh. Where the whip had kissed, the skin seemed to be roughened and chafed, for the coruscation of the thong pinched and drew the blood more quickly to the surface than the flat strap would have done. She jerked at the wrist strings with all her might, her head fell back, and, her eyes fixing on the ceiling, she cried in a hoarse voice, "Oh, it's ten! Only half done with, oh, dear God, how can I bear the rest of it?"
He took out a cigarette from a silver case in the pocket of his dressing gown, struck a match and lit it, the whip again tucked under his left arm. He savored the strong, pungent aroma of the tobacco for it whetted all his senses; the visual and the aural had already been salaciously aroused, the throbbing ache in his prick and balls added a new dimension to his impending rut. Refined and perverse, a wealthy bachelor who had never sought the conventions of marriage but who maintained a Cretan girl of seventeen in his fashionable apartment at the other end of Athens, Kyros Anapolous was more than grateful for his country's neutrality in a state of war surrounding it, for it had increased his powers, giving him virtual "carte blanche" to question suspicious characters who might be in Athens to plot against his kind. Privately, he thought Constantine an idiot, a vacillating fool who, like the proverbial ostrich, stuck his head in the sand to avoid reality. But it did not matter so long as he himself could profit. And now he was profiting and would profit still more.
He flicked off the ashes of the cigarette, and, at the same time, retrieving the whip from under his left arm, raised it and struck. But this time he directed it with the flick of the wrist that made the pointed tips at the very end bite hard against the edge of Penny Elston's right hip. Her cry was deafening, wordless, and her hips lunged in the most libidinous manner conceivable as, turning her head back over her shoulder, she cried out, "Oh, that was the worst of all! It tears, it rips me! Oh, dear God, eleven, eleven! Give me strength, it is martyrdom for a poor, defenseless woman!"
"I assure you, Miss Elston, that I am laying on the lash with moderate vigor," was his cynical retort. "The Turks prefer to use the kurbash or the stick-a supple and flexible stick when they give the bastinado. Have you ever felt a stick biting against your naked feet, Miss Elston?"
"No."
"Then you are indeed fortunate. It would be almost the difference between a kiss and a murderous blow. Nine lashes are left. Have courage!"
With this, he flicked the whip again and this time the tips cracked wickedly against the top of Penny Elston's left hip. Again she shrieked, and again her body jerked and twisted, her head falling back as she screamed out, "Twelve! Oh, let it be over soon, before I faint away. Oh, please, Mr. Anapolous, you don't know how it hurts me, how it tears and rips me to pieces. Oh, dear God, oh, Gwendoline-it's for you, only for you!"
"I must warn you," he broke into her pitiful sobbing as, pressed against the whipping frame, her head bowed, her face bathed in tears, Penny Elston sought to recover her nearly-fled courage and strength, "that at this point, not having forced the truth from your unwilling lips, the interrogating Turkish officer would undoubtedly increase the sentence to thirty lashes. Prepare yourself, then. This may hurt a little more."
"Oh, no! Just a minute-oh, please, give me-just a minute more, Mr, Anapolous, let me rest a minute, please!"
"He would not let you rest. No, I'm afraid I must continue in the interest of our scientific experiment, shall we say?"
Once again the whip cut short her sobbing plea for just a moment's delay, and this time it darted out diagonally, the tips of the thong stinging into her left side, just above the hipbone, the braided thong itself wedding to the shuddering, opulent contours of both oval bottom globes.
Her cry was deafening, clamorous, and she wrenched her wrists, rubbed her cunt against the iron frame, turned her face restlessly from side to side as she shrieked out "EEEYEEOWWWOUU-UUU!! ! Oh, God, oh, God, thirteen-only seven more-oh, hurry it up, Mr. Anapolous, hurry and let it be over!"
Another torturing pause was in store for her. Whimpering, her body bathed in agony-sweat, her tears streaming down her flushed cheeks, Penny Elston squirmed feverishly on the cold iron frame, as Kyros Anapolous slowly lifted the whip, his eyes devouring the violently marked escutcheon of her magnificent, naked behind. And then he struck again, drawing the tips of the lash against her ribs this time, as the thong continued its diagonal adhesion to her naked flesh, making a fiery, agonizing X with the mark left by the last cut.
"Ahhohhhahhrrrr! Fourteen! Oh, merciful power, let it be worth this torture, let me see my dear sister again, oh, dear power in Heaven!" Penny shrieked.
He moved forward now, breathing heavily, his eyes blazing. Once again tucking the whip under his arm he seized hold of the panties and ripped them off completely. Penny uttered a shriek of pain and terror.
"What are you going to do now? Why do you tear them off me? Please-wh-wh-whip me quickly, let it be over, Mr. Anapolous!"
"This is going to hurt very much now," he warned her as he resumed his stance.
Casting out the whip as a fisherman casts his line, he now flicked it up dexterously; the tapered, pointed tips at the end of the whip leaped up between her straddled legs and attacked the gaping pink crevice of her virginal cunthole.
"EEEEOWWWWOUUUU!! ! ! Oh, not there, not there, not there, in the name of dear holy powers, not there! Fifteen! Oh, mercy, mercy, I can't stand it!"
"Be careful now, you must not ask for mercy. Don't you recall what I told you? All of this will be in vain and you will not see your sister until after the war is over," he warned, his voice thick with greedy anticipation.
Penny's head turned restlessly from side to side. Convulsive sobs made her shoulders heave as she muttered almost unintelligibly, "Ohh-yes-I must see her-oh, my poor Gwendoline-oh, let it be over-I'll take the rest, but do hurry, oh, please hurry! Oh, how it cut and hurt me there-not there again-oh, please give it to me over my seat, but not there again, Mr. Anapolous!"
But with a fiendish, mocking cruelty, he again flicked out the lash and swept it up between her quaking thighs, sending the tips darting home to the most vulnerable spot of all. Her body seemed to leap in its gyves, her head fell back, her eyes rolling to the whites, her teeth chattered in a hoarse, inhuman shriek as she wrenched in her bonds and twisted her body back and forth as if masturbating.
"Ohhharrrrhhhheowwwwwaiiiiiii!! ! Oh, God, oh, God, I'm only a woman-have mercy-oh, dear powers in heaven-the pain-seventeen! Oh, please hurry, do it quickly, finish it before I die!"
The next two lashes swept viciously and with a loud, obscene smack over the plum summits of Penny Elston's furiously discolored bottom cheeks. Her shrieks and tears redoubled, though at last she managed to count, and then there was only one left But with an infernal purpose, he let that lash flick up between her straddled thighs again and nip her pussy with the tips, making her wrench and twist, mad with the delirium of pain that assailed her.
Then, casting the whip to the floor, he doffed his dressing gown and unbuttoned his pajama bottoms to let emerge the turgid weapon of his prick.
"And now, Miss Elston, your final test. For an amateur, you have acquitted yourself rather bravely. But, again, the Turkish officer would not be content with giving you pain, he would humiliate you and degrade you as well. You must bear this, also, therefore," he hoarsely announced.
With this, he moved to the windlass, squatted and lowered the frame till her bottom was lowered and delivered at more of an angle. Then, his hands against her naked sides, he lowered himself over her, his stiff prick probing the clenching, trembling, violently welted bottom globes. Penny Elston uttered a wild shriek and tried to twist herself away, to contract all her muscles. But his passions were overpowering and she was too weakened by the torment she had sustained, to defend herself for long. Now his hands seized the pouting inner edges of those fiery-streaked bottom ovals, yawned them apart and then dug his prick relentlessly against the furtive, crinkly little rosette of her virgin asshole.
In vain, she shrieked and pleaded, but Kyros Anapolous paid her no heed. Grunting like an animal in rut, he inexorably drove in the head of his spear, felt the clampings of her sphincter muscles, thrilled to the deafening shrieks and the babbled entreaties of her prayers, until at last he felt himself housed within the humid tight cavern of her asshole.
Then he began to bottom-fuck her, his hands gripping her sides, digging in with a savoring sadism that was incited and inflamed by her shrieks and tears.
"Yes-you English bitch-what a tight asshole you have-yes, that's how the Turks would deal with one like you-how tight you are there-how good it is for my prick-now, you stupid, naive bitch, you shall be reunited with your sister Gwendoline," he rasped. Then the crisis seized him, and with a bellow of triumph he stiffened and shot his spunk deep into the rectal cavern of his beautiful, almost fainting victim.
CHAPTER 8
Devros Papagoulas, the Greek Ambassador in Constantinople, was a small man in stature, not more than five feet six inches. At forty-seven, thanks to several upheavals in his life, he had become desolate and cynical, particularly over his assignment in the very heart of a country so accursed by his own deeply rooted sympathies and animosities. He had risen to diplomatic fame about twelve years ago by decoding a Serbian secret message sent to the Turks, which, had it been made known to the world at the time, might well have precipitated an aggrandized Balkan war far more bloody and long-drawn-out than the two short skirmishes that had taken place in 1912 and 1913. At that time, he had been simply a diplomatic "aide de camp" stationed at a small city near the Serbian border. His reward by a grateful Greek government had been the appointment as ambassador plenipotentiary to Armenia, another country that had been virtually decimated by the barbaric Turks.
There he had met a magnificently beautiful black-haired, brown-skinned Armenian girl, married her and had two little girls by her. But the
Serbians, who had never quite forgiven his coup in discovering their secret plot to inflame the Near East, had sent hired assassins, who had strangled his little girls and, after torturing and raping his beautiful wife, forced her, under torments such as plucking off her fingernails and toenails with steel pliers and holding a lighted cigarette to her nipples and cunt, to write a suicidal note and then take poison. It had taken him six months to learn that Najigelda had been murdered and her daughters with her, and that the Serbs had used Turkish mercenaries to accomplish that heinous crime.
He had come to hate the government of his native country as much as the Turks and the Serbs, and when the war began about a year ago, he had dreamed of coming somehow to England or to France and living out the rest of his days in peace. That was why he was so fervent a believer in the alliance between King Constantine and the Allies, often using the vacillating monarch to give "carte blanche" to Allied troops and battleships across Salonica and the Straits to counteract the boldly ambitious land grabbing of the Turks, and the Serbs.
But for the past three years, King Constantine, annoyed at his repeated warnings, like those of unpopular Cassandra of mythological times, had sent him to Constantinople-that meant banishment from the Greek court-and as much as intimated that he was not to continue on the irritating theme. However, Devros Papagoulas had decided on one bold stroke for his own future and, as he patriotically believed, for the well-being of his beloved native Greece. Thus he had organized, backed by his own money and his own cunning, an espionage ring, and he had worked in conjunction with Nadja Askir, after learning she had sympathy for the Greeks and none for her own country. All he had worried about was that, despite her apparent Greek sympathies, she was sensual, extravagant and corruptible; she was greedy for money and the fine things it could buy, and inordinately selfish.
He knew by what lustful means she had managed to enlist and coerce many an attractive girl into his service, and he closed his eyes to it. What worried him also was the dogged and shrewd menace of Major Hakim Istefan, whose own physical tragedy he knew and that, he also understood, drove the sadistic Turkish Intelligence head to fiendish reprisals against those unfortunate captives luckless enough to fall into his hands. What he had not counted on was that Major Istefan's cruelty could corrupt an intensely loyal Greek patriot into serving the Turkish cause, and thus defeat all his ingenious planning to force his king onto the side of the Allies, who represented the only salvation for all of Europe.
Devros Papagoulas, however, had an Achilles heel, and it was for beautiful, submissive women. His own beautiful Armenian wife had been proud and fierce and passionate, almost too much for him, and the past years had saddened and vitiated his earlier forthright manhood. Though he lived alone with a valet, cook and chauffeur in an elegant white house on Demetrios Place, he at times disguised himself and visited one of the expensive bordellos on the outskirts of Constantinople. There he procured for the night the services of usually two girls and sometimes as many as three or four, preferably under twenty years of age. And he amused himself with such innocuous sexual games as spanking their bare bottoms and then, after forcing them to commit lesbian acts upon one another, French him until he was ready to engage anyone who took his imagine, for the supreme act of coitus.
Major Hakim Istefan had, unbeknown to the Greek ambassador, compiled a rather lengthy dossier on Devros Papagoulas that included many of his foibles and all of his past history. On the file folder he had marked in Turkish "suspicious and dangerous." And when at times he grew more vigilant than ever over the number of Greek spies coming to Constantinople to betray his Sultan, he would have recourse to that file and read it and reread it and ponder. For he was certain that this loyal Greek who had so much reason to hate Turks as well as Serbs would always be inimical to Turkey and, perhaps even beyond the limit of his own diplomatic powers, contrive harmful plots against the Supreme Porte (the ancient name given the capital city of the Ottoman Empire when Turkey believed that it ruled the world.)
It was a Friday afternoon in late January, and Devros Papagoulas, having finished dictating a dozen important letters to be sent to King Constantine and other powerful Greek ministers, dismissed his effeminate-looking male secretary, Peter Klirostos with an impatient gesture. The youth was twenty-six, black-haired, sleek and perfumed, a thoroughly contemptible specimen, but a superb transcriber and a model of decorum as an employee. He knew the youth to be living with a swarthy Greek sailor, and he told himself that he must not be so critical in wartime, not only because efficient help was difficult to find, especially here at the veryjieart of Turkey, but also because the passion of his young secretary for a man was a classic Greek heritage coming down from the days of Alcibiades. But in those days, he sadly reflected, Greece had its own glory and Turkey was dwindled by comparison. Today it was just the reverse, and so perhaps these frailties of mankind depressed him the more.
He had retired to his bedroom for a nap, and told himself that perhaps tonight he might visit Emir Hakut, the elegant brothel whose proprietress was a tall, Amazonian Sicilian woman in her early forties, who hated the Turks as much as he, and who had done much to preserve his identity and protect him from the secret police of Major Istefan when he frequented her establishment. It had been two weeks since he had visited her, and his loins had that pleasant tingle of anticipation that a man enjoys when he begins to think of squirming, reddening young female bottoms and the sound of soft plaints, tears and the stammered-out-entreaties to be merciful, and of eventual self-surrender. He had begun to drowse, and he was seeing himself seated tailor-fashion, naked except for linen drawers, a cup of Greek wine in his hand and a cigar between his lips, watching two gold-skinned Circassian girls, just out of puberty, performing a sixty-nine, while a third girl lay on her belly between his legs and prodded her tongue delicately against his bulging prick, but without taking it out of his drawers. Then there was a knock at his door, and he swore violently and sat up: "Who the devil is it?"
"Sergios, master." It was his pompous, fifty-year-old valet.
"Don't you realize you fool, I want to take a nap. Didn't I tell you not to disturb me until five?"
"Yes, master, but there are two young women here to beseech an interview with you. They are Greeks and they have been held by the Turkish police until just this morning, Excellency."
His eyes widened. "A moment then, Sergios," he decreed as he swung himself out of bed, thrust his feet into slippers and, since it was his custom to sleep or nap naked, hurriedly donned a red satin dressing gown that he took care to button and to belt tightly.
The valet ushered two women, one a pale, golden-haired, blue-eyed beauty, the other, younger, tall, slim and black-haired.
"May I be of service?" the Greek ambassador inquired.
The golden-haired women advanced, glanced back at the valet and then stammered, "Sir, are you truly the Greek Ambassador? It is imperative that we speak to him and with no one else. May we be alone?"
"Of course. You may go, thank you, Sergios. Now, do not distress yourselves, I am truly appointed by King Constantine to represent his nation here in Constantinople. My house is sanctuary for all Greeks, and thus you have immunity as you would in a church. You may be at ease."
"Thank you, you are most kind, Mr. Ambassador," the pale, golden-haired woman said, and then burst into tears. Meanwhile the black-haired younger woman began to weep also, and Devros Papagoulas felt embarrassed.
"Please, please try to control yourselves, my dear ladies," he urged. "Might I have my valet bring you refreshments?"
"Oh, no, Your Excellency!" the blond woman shook her head. "But it is like having a nightmare over with, to find ourselves at last at the Greek Embassy. My poor maid Euphrosyne and I have only just escaped from the clutches of those ferocious, barbaric Turks. Oh, may they be delivered to the very fires of hell when this war is ended!"
"Amen to that!" Devros Papagoulas heartily agreed. "Come now, seat yourselves and tell me your story. How can I help you? Do you wish to return to Athens? It is possible with a passport signed by me to get you through the Turkish lines. Fortunately, Greece is still neutral and the Turks will not delay any Greek citizen wishing to return to his or her homeland."
"I'm not sure, Your Excellency. I think they would stop us at the border all the same, even with a passport from you. They think we are spies. I am Nicea Korolos, an actress, and this is my maid Euphrosyne Sapiros. We have been the prisoners of Major Hakim Istefan for a terrible week. It is a miracle that we are still alive."
"But I don't understand, ladies."
"You see, Your Excellency, we had come, my maid and I, to give a performance of Medea at the Nogelu Theater. We were staying at the Hotel George, and some soldiers came to inspect our passports. Unhappily, they were lost with some of our baggage, and they still have not been recovered. So I urged Major Istefan to talk to Mr. Antonescu. Only he couldn't identify us and so-and so-oh, dear God in Heaven!" At this, Nicea Korolos covered her face with her hands and her shoulders heaved with choking sobs. The black-haired younger maid also began to weep even more poignantly, trying to comfort her mistress at the same time.
Devros Papagoulas scowled with rage. Here was still another illustration of how these accursed savages treated decent Greeks. And yet the King of Greece sat on his throne and hemmed and hawed and refused to go to battle against them, refused to exterminate every mother's son of these torturing, raping, pirates and brigands. The whole nation ought to be swallowed up into the Bosphorus!
"But if you do not wish to return to Athens, my dear Miss Korolos, and you, Miss Sapiros, I really don't know how I can serve you. Be sure that the passports I would sign for you would be recognized by the Turkish border officials. And I myself will call this Major Hakim Istefan to make certain that you are not again arrested and subjected to such atrocities," he suggested.
"Do you know what they did to us?" Nicea Korolos asked in a choking, trembling voice. "Show him, my poor darling Euphrosyne!"
Devros Papagoulas gasped as the tall, black-haired young woman suddenly unbuttoned the bodice of her black cotton dress, wrenched it from her and then, unhooking her skirt, opened it and let it slither down her long, sleek thighs. The full, round, high perched globes of her titties with their wide, pale coral aureoles and dark nipples were stigmatized with purplish little welts, black and blue splotches. Her ivory skin was all the more exciting in all contrast. The thick bush of her cunt drew his eyes as a magnet draws steel, and he saw that her belly as well as the inside of her thighs were streaked with whip marks. And then she turned, covering her face with her hands, passively letting him explore her body with his gaze. The buttocks and thighs and calves as well as the back and shoulders were equally marked.
"God in heaven!" he ejaculated, his voice thickening with a lust he could not suppress, just as his prick had begun to throb and ache at the sight of that slim beauty. "Those monsters, those abominations out of hell! And only because you had lost your passports!"
"They treated me no better, Your Excellency. Look!" Nicea Korolos whimpered. Unlike her maid's dress, which was sectioned in two parts, the golden-haired actress' gown was a single piece, with an excessively full skirt. Stooping, she rolled up the hems and then tugged it up from the waist and flung it on the floor. And she too, was naked, but for sandals. He uttered a cry, his eyes glittering; for even though he abhorred the brutal violence of those whom he considered his mortal enemy, he was still prey to the lascivious temptation of these two young beauties, the more so because he had been continent for nearly two full weeks.
The pink-sheened beauty of Nicea Korolos' skin was in contrast with the ivory, creamy warmth of her maid's. The widely spaced pear-shaped globes of her breasts were even more exquisitely chiseled, seemingly more feminine because of their gentleness against the bold jut of young Euphrosyne's love-gourds. His eyes feasted on the dimpled belly and then the dark golden bush of pussy-hair. Her breasts, too, had had the whip, as had her belly and thighs. And then she turned, her arms in a cross, her head high, even though she sobbed and the tears ran down her cheeks, to show him the crisscross pattern of dark-bluish welts on her bare behind and on her thighs, her back and shoulders.
"They gave us the bastinado on our feet, both of us, Your Excellency," she said as she turned towards him, heedless of her nakedness and making no attempt to shield her cunt and titties from his blazing eyes. "Thank God it was three days ago, or we would not be able to walk today. And as if all this were not enough, my poor maid and I, we were both-were both-"
Then at last she bowed her head, covered her face with her hands and wept hysterically.
"They ravished you?" his voice was trembling and almost raucous with overwhelming lust.
The brunette maid nodded as she hurried to her mistress, gathered her to her breast and began to kiss her forehead, her cheeks, her eyelids, her hair. Thus before his eyes, Devros Papagoulas had the most exquisitely libidinous lesbian tableau he could have wished for, one that surpassed in its psychological and emotional overtones any that the Emir Hakut could have provided.
"L-ladies, do let me have some new clothing brought to you. I do not wish to offend you by seeing you like this-I understand-those vile monsters-those lecherous beasts! But how can I serve you?"
"Your Excellency, while we were in prison yesterday afternoon, Major Istefan interviewed us for the last time and said we were free to go. But he warned us not to approach any Greek official and said that he would have us shadowed by his own spies and secret police. We-we learned something, Euphrosyne and I, and we think it of great military importance. Perhaps it will help defeat those abominable and brutal beasts who shamed and tortured my poor maid and I so vilely!" Nicea Korolos sobbingly exclaimed.
But Devros Papagoulas had hurried to his closet and found two robes akin to his own but of different colors. They were, to be exact, made of the finest satin and he was wont to wear them when he frequented his expensive Turkish brothel, where, clad only in that, he would allow himself to be excited by the winding and squirming naked bodies of the young prostitutes in their Sapphic games, to milk him of his spunk.
"Here, put these on! Now I insist that you take some coffee and pastry. And you will stay the night. My house is large and has many empty rooms. I will find some way to help you, never fear. Greece does not forget her children," he declared, his voice shaking.
"Your Excellency is too kind," the pale, golden-haired actress sobbed as he helped her into the dressing gown. She turned towards him as he did this, and his hand brushed against one of her soft, pink-skinned titties. He had to bite his lips to resist the urge to fall upon her, so exquisite was the touch of her warm young flesh. And equally so with Euphrosyne, who put her arms behind her back and let him draw the sleeves of the gown onto her ivory-tinted body, where again his fingers brushed the living gourds of her strong young body. His face was flushed and his voice was trembling as he strode across the room to a bell rope and pulled it twice to summon Sergios. And when the valet came, he ordered refreshments curtly, closed the door and turned back to the two beauties.
"You say you have learned something of a military nature while you were imprisoned by that butcher, that assassin. Tell me! There are ways of getting couriers through the Turkish lines. As ambassador with the full rank of plenipotentiary, I have but to put a document or a letter into a pouch and it is sealed. If any Turkish dog dared open it, it would be construed as an act of war."
"The Turkish forces are withdrawing from the Dardanelles, Your Excellency," Nicea Korolos said in a low, trembling voice as she seated herself on the couch with Euphrosyne beside her. Her arm went tenderly around the young brunette's shoulders and her other hand patted Euphrosyne's tearstained cheek. "They believe the attack will come from the land, through Salonica. They expect the Greeks to join the Allies and to turn against them from that direction, on their way to a rendezvous with the Russian troops, near the Black Sea."
"But this is incredible! I would not have guessed it. I would have thought that the Turks would have fortified the Dardanelles for a possible attack from the sea by British and American warships," he said wonderingly.
Nicea Korolos shook her golden head. "I know very little of war, Your Excellency, but I would have guessed as much myself. But it seems that this beast of a major bragged to us that very soon the Greeks would be destroyed because the Turks plan to invade at the first sign of help to the Allies. And so they have no fear of the Dardanelles."
"You are certain of this?"
"Yes. The two of us were being were being-oh, it's too horrible to relate-but I must, to make sure that it is not still happening, not still that dreadful nightmare!" Nicea Korolos dramatically exclaimed. Her eyes staring beyond him, her cheeks flaming, she went on in a quivering voice, "Major Istefan had had us tied together, naked, as you saw us now, facing each other, with our hands dragged high above our heads and corded to the peak of a metal triangle. Our legs were stretched apart and out ankles fixed the same way, and a rope had been tied around our waists. Two of his soldiers, one a horrible fat sergeant, were whipping us to make us-to make us-you can guess what depravity those fiends desired to see us do-when a high-ranking officer entered the dungeon where we were being tortured, and talked with Major Istefan. And I heard him say that orders had just come from the Ministry of War to relieve the garrison at Gelibolu by at least two-thirds of its present force and to divert them to the Greek border and to Salonica. And while we were crying out and begging for mercy, Major Istefan lit a cigarette and came up to taunt us."
"The infernal beast, if he were before me now, I would plunge a knife into his black heart!" Devros Papagoulas hoarsely panted.
"No, Your Excellency, I would do the deed," Nicea Korolos corrected. "After what he did to both of us, I owe him that debt. But, as I was saying, he touched our bodies with the cigarette while he had the two men lower their whips so that he could jeer and mock us. And then he told us that our beloved land of Greece would soon be a vassal of the Turks and that woman like ourselves would be the concubines and the slaves of their Turkish masters. And then, and then-oh, I would to God I could forget what they did next!"
Devros Papagoulas was torn between his fierce patriotism and his venal lust. In his mind's eye, he was picturing the fate of these beauties, remembering how they had been naked before him just a few moment ago, seeing their bodies bound on the triangle, jerking and squirming under the whips, grinding pussies together, their panting titties mashing, until at last they were constrained out of sheer torture, to girlfuck. How thrilling, how maddeningly exciting it must have been to have watched such a spectacle, and in the same moment, he cursed himself for such thoughts, horrified that he could sexually enjoy the suffering of these two fine, young Greek women who had such valorous courage as to emerge alive from the hands of the Turks.
"What you have told me is of tremendous importance, Miss Korolos. I will do more than get the message to Athens. I will arrange to have it forwarded to the British and French high commands. In my opinion, if a fleet of Allied warships could bomb the Dardanelles, with the diminished Turkish garrison not to be feared, it is very likely that English and French troops could be landed and strike at Turkey from the underbelly. This war could very well be over in six months. I am deeply grateful to you, as all Greece will be. No, knowing how King Constantine prefers to remain neutral and thinks nothing of his nation's honor, I will exceed my duties and my powers."
"May God bless your Excellency," Nicea Korolos sobbed. "Will you not employ us here as your servants? I too, feel as you do, and I think we could never reach Athens. That terrible major would have us stabbed or poisoned or strangled, even under safe escort, if we tried to go back to Athens."
"Of course. As it happens, I have need of another secretary and certainly someone to help with the household chores-perhaps your maid would not mind-"
"Euphrosyne would bless you every night in her prayers, if you gave her sanctuary here, Your
Excellency. And I-I would be more than grateful. You would give me new life and make me a woman again, after what the Turks have done to me. To feel that a man of my own country is thinking of me and having me at his side, that would purge my flesh from the blemishes those monsters left upon it. Oh, you do not know how grateful I can be, Your Excellency!" And then to his enchanted stratification, the golden-haired actress sank on her knees before him and, winding her pink-skinned arms around him, pressed a kiss upon his dressing gown.
CHAPTER 9
Devros Papagoulas, Greek Ambassador to Turkey in Constantinople, had determined to bypass the nominal head of Greek Intelligence in Athens, Kyros Anapolous. Although he was aware that this sardonic and quite patriotic official was sincerely loyal to the Greek cause, he had an even less obvious Achilles heel than that of his lecherous enthusiasm for young females. It was a matter of his own prestige and self-importance that had led him to form theingenious espionage ring of attractive young woman who, coached by Nadja Askir in the very heart of the Turkish stronghold in Constantinople, spied on the Turks for the cause of Greek liberation from their Ottoman oppressors. To be sure, the function of an ambassador never entailed the responsibility of a spy ring, and it should have been within the province of Kyros Anapolous instead; but his own burning ambition to have vengeance on the Turks and the Serbs for what had happened to him in the past led the Greek Ambassador into a mortal error that was to result in, not the shortening of the war as he had so ide-alistically dreamed, but its torturing prolongation and the decimation of many lives, among those being counted innumerable of his own countrymen and women.. .
Because he was an amateur in espionage, in spite of his proficiency in the diplomatic channels of his country, Devros Papagoulas had made the fatal mistake of taking the story of those whom he found sympathetic to him, at face value, without intensive and exhaustive verification, and so he had taken Nicea and Euphrosyne into his ornate house as secretarial aide and maid respectively, having seen their naked bodies with the marks of Turkish torture upon them and being convinced that they had been heinously wronged by that race whom he hated above all others in the world.
What he never guessed was that the infernally clever Major Hakim Istefan had turned the beautiful pale golden-haired Greek actress and her brunette maid into fear-ridden tools of his own shaping, whom he intended to use in the most treacherous manner so as to create confusion and blundering within the Greek ranks of the pro-Allied forces who even now were petitioning weak King Constantine to throw his lot in with the British and the French and allow immediate passage of Allied troops into Salonica with official monarchical aid and blessing.
But Major Hakim Istefan had effected a subtle checkmate, all through the coincidental happenstance of two lost passports and some baggage. For Nicea and Euphrosyne, her maid, were exactly what they had said they were, an actress visiting Constantinople and a maid in her entourage. But because they had lost their passports and because the ambitious head of Turkish Intelligence wished to prove his valor and his loyalty to his Sultan, he had interrogated them, lusted for their beauty, and kept them seven days and nights in the dungeon where he had whipped, tortured, ravished, and buggered them, until, to escape further agony, they had both hysterically agreed to do whatever he commanded.
Then he had commanded them to go to the Greek Ambassador in Constantinople, revealing exactly what had been done to them, throwing themselves on the Greek Ambassador's mercy and offering themselves as hostages or as virtual slaves, to escape further punishment. And then, while they had been tortured, he had had a false, but authentically dressed, officer enter the dungeon during the ordeal and discuss openly with him a feigned plan of war, whereby the Turkish garrison of Gallipoli (known by its old Turkish name of Gelibolu) would be diminished in strength so that the Allies might bombard it and seek to land troops.
He had threatened them with the most brutal tortures, and so poor Nicea and Euphrosyne had been convinced that their only hope lay in betraying their own country-though of course they did not know in their turn that the 'vital information' that the false officer had discussed with their tormentor was actually spurious.
Major Hakim Istefan had a final session with his two dominated creatures-for such they were-this very morning before releasing them and directing them to go at once to the elegant mansion of the Greek Ambassador. "Don't ask questions, my lovelies," he had grinned sardonically. "I have spies everywhere. If you dare betray me, you can expect that in little more than twenty-four hours you will be back in my hands. And it will be not just the whip nor my men who enjoy your naked charms, oh, no. I will have you put in a cage with rats, I will tie you above an impalement stake, with greased cords holding you up and slipping inch by inch to lower you down until the sharp, razor-like tips press against your bottoms. I will have hot needles thrust under your toenails and your fingernails. You will pray for death a thousand times before it comes, my lovely ones. So now, Nicea, you who are an actress capable of Medea and convincing us barbarian Turks of your grandeur, go play your greatest role! I have told you what the Ambassador is-he is a lustful, weak man who loves young girls. Make yourselves particularly young and seductive. Win him to you with your bodies, and you will be safe. After the war, I may be grateful enough to pay you much gold and then you can have your own little theater."
And the sensitive young actress, who had never before experienced violence, had endured a week of the most unspeakable indignities, pain, and suffering, degraded and debased, used by men, her throat hoarse with shrieks of intolerable agony. To escape a renewal of that, she had abjectly sworn to do anything Major Hakim Istefan demanded, and so had her young maid, who had even less courage under torture.
This very night, while Devros Papagoulas paced in his bedroom, smoking cigarette after cigarette, determining how best to reach the Allies with the incredible news that the Turks were drawing back from the Dardanelles, there was a knock at his door. He had decided to defer his visit to the Emir Hakut. Somehow, even those professional beauties there could not rival the loveliness of those naked women who now dwelt in his house and under his official diplomatic protection. He found himself lusting for Nicea and for her young maid, Euphrosyne. He almost found himself wishing that he had been the one to wield the lash on those two, writhing, naked bodies, glistening with sweat, devouring their cries and pleas and tears, feeling his prick grow monstrous till he became the veritable master of all women throughout the world. For the sadist experiences such a surge of ego and grandeur, of self-esteem, that he becomes a virtual god with the power of life and death. Let his hand but flick forth the lash, and then sobbing tears of the beautiful naked girl beseech him to have mercy; another turn of his hand, and a young virgin offers her maidenhead without shame or compunction. It was immorality in the flesh, and it racked him with a lust such as he had never before experienced.
His heart beat rapidly as he tugged on his dressing gown and went to the door, opened it carefully. He saw the cameo-like face of the golden-haired young actress, Nicea, and he felt the sweet agony of desire, and the hopeful yearning that she had come to him of her own accord. "Miss Korolos-is there anything wrong?" he hoarsely gasped.
"Oh, no-please, do let me come in-please, Your Excellency!" she whispered.
There was a subtle hint of perfume to her, and since he had put on only the small night lamp beside his bed, the room was filled with shadows. She entered, and he closed the door, his pulses hammering, smitten with her loveliness in these shadows, because she was the golden wraith of his secret desire.
He turned to face her, and his eyes widened to see that she wore only a shapeless, sleeveless white silk gown, her feet bare, a gown that his valet Sergios had found for her in a closet in one of the many guest rooms of the large ambassadorial mansion. The soft pink satin of her naked arms and shoulders and lovely slim throat excited him, and so did the perfume that emanated to him from her bare skin. "Miss Korolos," he repeated, "what may I do for you?"
"I couldn't sleep-oh, Mr. Papagoulas, I had to be sure that I was still awake and that it wasn't a dream, that I was away from that terrible prison. You can't believe what they did to me, those horrible men, that jeering and vicious Major Istefan!" she murmured vibrantly as she stepped closer to him, put her hands on his shoulders. "Am I really safe? Are you going to give me work and keep me safe from the war?"
"If-if you wish, Miss Korolos-"
"Call me Nicea, please, Devros," she breathed. And then tears welling into her lovely eyes, she kissed him slowly on the mouth.
His hands moved from her shoulders down her slim hollowed back to the promontories of her bottom, and he heard her catch her breath, and then felt her press herself lasciviously against him as if appealing to him for the gift of his manhood to restore her womanhood, sullied by the barbarous Turks.
"Nicea, my lovely, Nicea-I want you," he heard himself muttering. "Those brutes-to mark that lovely body of yours, that soft pink flesh-I'll avenge you-they will be destroyed, all of them, and you shall have your vengeance when Greece is strong again and one of the great nations."
"But it's shameless of me to act like this, Your Excellency, for I have no right to come to you with my woes and my misery," she whispered. Nonetheless her fingers stroked his cheeks, and her body still pressed enticingly against him. He could feel his prick growing strong and savage against the crotch of the dressing gown, and he wanted more than anything else in the world to fuck her. But she wasn't one of those Turkish whores who could play a part, she was a sophisticated cultured Greek woman from Athens, an actress, a sensitive and beautiful creature. And he mustn't spoil this.
He hardly heard the door open again, and he did not see Euphrosyne slip inside, close the door and bolt it. And Euphrosyne wore only one of his dressing gowns, loosely belted and buttoned, so that glimpses of her ivory skin showed alluringly through the folds as well as the mysterious black triangular bush of her cunt. And she too, was barefooted. And she had come to be a handmaiden also.
"I couldn't sleep," Nicea repeated. "I had to tell you how grateful I am, and to show you my gratitude. Oh, please, Devros-oh, let me call you that, let me serve you, let me be your little-slave girl.. .and little Euphrosyne wishes to be yours, too, for you have saved us from the Turks! Do what you will with us, because you are Greek like us, and you know affection and tenderness as well as lust, but they know only cruelty and torture. Love us, dear Devros, and let us earn our freedom here in your house!"
And then the miracle was happening. Bemused, bewitched, his senses reeling from the attack of her perfume, from the soft, moist smell of her naked flesh, he felt her slim fingers undo the belt, undo the buttons, pull the robe down and let it fall to the floor, and reveal his male nakedness before her. And then he saw Euphrosyne at last, kneeling beside him, her arms clinging, 'round his bare leg and her lips brushing his thigh. He was shaken by savage lust and he drove his fingernails into his palms as he watched Nicea husk off the sleeveless gown and let it flutter to the floor and be naked before him. And the dark gold thatch of her bush and the gently swelling globes of titties and the warm pink-satiny belly became a new world for him, in which there was all and only the taste and the sense and the smell and the ecstasy of flesh and all else was driven out.
"But I'm not a seducer-" he stammered thickly, wrestling with his conscience for the final moment, "I'm not here to take advantage of you, please Miss Korolos, I can't." He felt as though he were taking advantage of a lovely maiden and harming her if he touched her.
Like a rock, he stood, his conscience beating at him and belaboring him. Yet, the soft hands, working softly at his flesh were slowly drawing him away from his strong conscience and into the growing feelings of lust that were abounding throughout his body.
He felt himself beginning to tremble with anticipation of the delights and desires to come, if only he could soothe his strict conscience.
"Please," he continued, "don't do this. I cannot take much more. Please." Yet, he felt her fingers continue to work at his flesh, slowly massaging his thigh and edging nearer and nearer toward his slowly rising cock.
But Euphrosyne, beauteous in her lush nakedness, continued to work her fingers across his flesh, pinching and nipping his skin with her fingertips. Her very persistence was slowly winning him over to lust from his stern consciousness to duty.
Now, as she stood back from him, he could see all of her beautiful body. Slowly he ran his eyes down the slim length of her whole body, taking in her curvaceous dimensions.
From her pale and luminous face, framed with her long and loose black hair, down her long swanlike throat and including her wide but slim shoulders, his eyes ran. But he didn't stop there.
His eyes continued down her precisely shaped and rounded breasts, resting on the dark and swollen tips that trembled in the pale and flickering light. He noted the firmness of her perfect titties, their globular shape and the independent way they stood erect.
He also could see the lash marks and the other wounds on her otherwise perfect flesh. It galled him horribly to see her lavish body so cruelly mistreated and raped. Yet, he could visualize himself so clearly doing the same thing to her. And enjoying it as well.
The thought made his cock stiffen with overwhelming desires that almost broke loose in that instant, releasing his tremendous potential for lust. But he restrained himself barely in time, holding his growing desires in limited check.
However, he could not stop the thundering of his heart, nor the quickening of his" already racing pulses. His flesh popped with beads of sweat that ran down, especially on his face, in traceable lines of liquid, mingling and flowing together.
Euphrosyne could feel the waves of desire as they tortured his handsome body. Through her sensitive hands, she felt his trembling and overheated flesh. She gave her mistress a quick and knowing nod.
His eyes engulfed her straight-lined black triangle, seeing the lavishness of her heavy muff and the beginnings of the stark black tails as they curved down around between her thighs, disappearing. In contrast to her pale flesh, her muff stood out noticeably.
He desired to touch her flesh, yet, he couldn't just yet. "Ladies, I beg of you. Don't do this. Miss Korolos, Miss Sapiros, you mustn't do this, there is no need-as ambassador it's within my duty to serve you as Greek citizens."
"Oh, no, it's not just duty, it's gratitude and desire, Devros," Nicea murmured, her soft arm linked round his neck, and now her right hand brushed his belly, descending to the stiff, aching ramrod of his prick. "After those terrible nights, forced by the Turks to accept their filthiest and most disgusting acts of lust, can you not guess that I, who am so proud of my femininity, need a man who is good and decent to love me and to restore the purity that I once had? Don't you understand that, Devros?"
And now her fingers took hold of his prick, drawing back the foreskin, pinching the shaft until the thousand and one aching and throbbing vibrations of his muscles nearly drove him frenzied with a tumultuous exultance in being male. He clutched her buttocks, and his teeth sank into her shoulder, and his tongue rubbed the soft, moist, perfumed skin, as her arm tightened round his neck, and even as her brunette maid began to stroke his buttocks. Now his mouth fused to hers, and he drew her to him possessively, mashing her bush against his aching prick.
"It's madness-I shouldn't take advantage of you-there's no need for this, but how beautiful you both are-how desirable and alluring-I've never known such beauty-yes, yes, I want you both!" he gasped.
Nicea moved with him to the bed, and Euphrosyne rose and followed them. He seated himself on the edge, staring, incredulously, up at his pale golden-haired, pink-skinned goddess who had come to him out of the night and into his dreams that were now reality.
"Would it help you if you punished us, dear Devros?" Nicea whispered, as she bent towards him, the gently tilting globes of her titties dangling out like eager fruits for his plucking. "We are shameless, both of us, but then it is the Turks who have taught us that. I, who once believed that love was conversation between man and woman and wine and poetry and music and the sunlight, now remember only the dark, damp dungeon and the whip and the jeering oaths and the filthy, bawdy and degrading words of those beasts who used me. And I was forced to watch poor Euphrosyne servicing those filthy dogs, while I waited my own turn, amusing those heartless monsters with my jerking and twisting under the whip and the instruments of torture they used upon me. My scars are not yet healed, but I wish to be purged of them within me. Punish me, then, dear Devros, but take my gift, and make me whole again!"
And with this, to his consternated amazement, she laid her naked body across his lap, clasped her hands as if in prayer, and bowed her head and whispered throatily, "Beat me, thrash me, punish me for being so shameless, but don't send me away!"
Almost automatically, his left arm curved round her slim waist, and he felt his right palm glide over the warm quivering cheeks of her behind. He lifted his eyes and saw the naked, brunette, Euphrosyne, cupping her breasts and standing with blushing face, awaiting his demands on her. He raised his right hand and began to spank, and the sonorous smacks made all the perverse hours he spent in the Turkish brothel reborn anew, and this was but a slut he had bought for his own lustful pleasure. A body that could be whipped and posed and manipulated to service his needs and nothing more!
The spanks became more frequent and harsher. Nicea groaned and sobbed gently, squirming lasciviously over his lap, until at last the furry thatch of her cunthole began to rub against his aching prickhead. He felt the blood coagulating in his veins, felt molten fire race along his thighs and through his balls. And then he seized her by her hips, and lifted her and flung her onto the bed, and himself upon her. With a guttural cry, he thrust his prick deep into the soft cavern of her cunt, and even as her arms and legs wound,'round him, and even as her lips and tongue fused to his, he felt Euphrosyne kneel upon the bed beside him, squeeze his buttocks, and then slip a dainty finger against his asshole and begin to prod.
And then there was nothing except the night, and the soft gurgling laughter of two passionate and yielding women, and there were moments when he did not know whom it was he had fucked nor whom it was he commanded to lick his body, and to gouge her fingers into his tenderest parts, and to bring him wine, and then to take the other's place beneath him, with her mouth upon his prick to restore it to vitality once more.
CHAPTER 10
The very next morning after the Greek Ambassador had tasted the pleasures of a harem with the pale golden-haired actress Nicea Korolos and her brunette maid Euphrosyne Sapiros, he dictated to his effeminate secretary a terse dispatch addressed in code to the British War Ministry, in London. It urged an immediate attack upon the Dardanelles, in view of the depleted Turkish forces stationed at Gelibolu. Further, it stated his own personal intention to appeal directly to King Constantine or, failing that, to the people of the Allies to support Greece in the bitter struggle against her ancient enemy, the power-lusting Turks.
As soon as the simpering young secretary had prepared the dispatch and it had been approved, Devros Papagoulas affixed his own personal seal, cheerfully folded the document and put it into a special envelope that he in turn put into a leather pouch to be handed to the courier. But this dispatch would go not to Athens and thence to England; instead, it would be telegraphed by a secret agent of the Greek Ambassador in the little Turkish village of Sedolfu, some forty miles to the south of Constantinople.
The courier was shadowed by two of Major Hakim Istefan's most trusted soldiers, disguised as laborers. They followed the courier to the stable behind the elegant mansion of the Greek Ambassador, watched him mount a fine white stallion and set off in the direction of Sedolfu. Then one of them hurried to a stable two blocks away, mounted a superb Arabian mare, and took off after the courier, while the other went back to report to the head of Turkish Intelligence.
"Excellent!" Major Istefan chuckled as he rubbed his hands with glee. "That Greek lecher has taken the bait and swallowed it all. I have long known of the wireless telegraph he had established on Sedolfu, and he would use it only now if it were a matter of utmost urgency. In my opinion, it is an appeal to the British dogs to visit our lovely Straits. Well, we shall be ready for them. I regret having allowed him to enjoy those two Greek bitches, but when this war is over-and it will be soon-we shall have all the Greek virgins and the matrons and the whores to choose from, never fear."
Meanwhile, lovely, sandy-haired Penny Elston, the sister of Gwendoline Aszar, after having bravely submitted to a flogging and then buggering from the crafty head of Greek Intelligence, Kyros Anapolous, had been sent by him to the house of Nadja Askir in Constantinople. Kyros Anapolous had given her a Greek passport and a letter with his own seal declaring that, as the sister of the wife of a dead Turkish officer, he would appreciate all courtesies being extended to her on her visit to Constantinople for the purpose of being reunited with her sister.
Since Greece was not at war with Turkey, Penny had little difficulty crossing the Turkish border towards that magnificent city that would one day be renamed Istanbul, but that still stood as a legend of what had once been first the capital of the Byzantine Empire and then the very heart of Islam. And since, as she had herself told Kyros Anapolous, she spoke sufficient Turkish to be understood, she was most cordially treated. Yet out of mere routine in time of war, a record was kept of her entry into Turkey, and within twenty-four hours it had arrived at the office of the sadistic Major Hakim Istefan.
"An English girl who has come from Athens, here to Constantinople to find her sister, who was in turn married to a dead Turkish officer," he repeated slowly as he glanced up at the fat Sergeant Bekir. "Now that has a strange sound to it, eh, Bekir?"
And thus it was that Nicolu Bedrack, a tall, mustached, and hook nosed young man in his late twenties who was perfectly enchanted with his corporal's stripes, went at once to the Hotel Ketyrna where Penny Elston was residing during her stay in Constantinople. Since all visitors to Turkey were required to declare their place of residence for at least a week and then report any changes to the Turkish police, it was a simple matter to determine Penny Elston's whereabouts.
At the hotel, the day clerk was insolent until Corporal Bedrack showed him a wallet containing an identification card signed by the dreaded Major Hakim Istefan himself. Thereafter, he practically babbled all he knew. "Oh, certainly, Corporal, now I recall! But she has gone out. Of course she did not tell a mere clerk where she intended to go."
"I know that, you idiot, but think carefully now, or I'll have you taken to Rasouli Street and you will feel the bastinado on the soles of your feet until the bamboo rod is shredded!" Corporal Bedrack warned.
The clerk paled and cowered behind the counter. "Wait-I think-yes, now I'm sure of it. She engaged a carriage, and she set out to the north."
"That's better. Now tell me, as you recall, did she take any luggage with her?"
"Oh, no! Of that I'm certain. Besides, you can see on the register yourself, she intends to stay at least another two days."
"Well, my friend, you've saved yourself the bastinado. Now all I need to do is to find the driver of that carriage and learn where the little bitch went wandering. Who could she know in Constantinople that would take her to her sister? Never mind."
Some few minutes later, for only the cost of a cup of strong black Turkish coffee sweetened with a little raki and a cake of rice pilaf (rice cooked with currants, pine nuts and spices), Corporal Bedrack had learned that the old man had taken Penny Elston to a house on Tarabya Street, that he had waited to see if she was at the proper destination, had seen her admitted by a lovely, dark-haired girl and then had driven away. To be sure, he could take the worthy corporal there. And so it was that Corporal Bedrack came upon the house of Nadja Askir and, having a slightly better intelligence than his lowly rank implied, made inquiries of the storekeepers on the street, to discover the names and the background of this magnificent and alluring widow whose love for Turkey was unquestioned.
"Nadja Askir," Major Hakim Istefan slowly repeated, as if savoring the name. "Now this is most interesting. Why would a woman who professes her love for our beloved Sultan-may he live a thousand years!-know what possibly could have become of the widow of a Turkish officer? Furthermore, why should this attractive English Miss journey all the way from London in wartime to Athens and thence here unless there were a matter of espionage concerned?"
"Now there you lose me, Excellency Major."
"Never mind, there's no time to give you a lesson on how itching pussies attract one another. Let us have Miss Penny Elston tracked down by Lieutenant Istvan Kredi. He's a wizard when it comes to shadowing a suspect without giving himself away. Let's follow her and then, after she has left that house on Tarabya Street, we shall pay Nadja Askir a little visit."
He glanced at his wristwatch, then yawned. "I'm in need of a diversion. And it's almost time for afternoon coffee and cakes. But I think I'd have a better appetite for them, Gruila, if we had a bit of fun, just a sort of practice run, you might say, for the charming Nadja Askir. Isn't there a little dark-haired bitch waiting to be questioned, the girl that you brought in the other day? What's her name?"
"Oh, yes, Excellency Major. But she's really harmless, in my opinion. She's a chambermaid at the Hotel Rigalti. And the only thing we have on her is a complaint from one of the guests that she tried to steal a passport so that she could leave Constantinople and go back to her native Armenia."
"Well now, we mustn't let that happen. For centuries, Turkish men have been fucking the
Armenian girls and I'm the last one to want to stop such a delightful custom. Come along."
A few minutes later, in one of the torture cells, a seventeen-year-old dark brown-haired Armenian girl, naked except for the long hair that fell nearly to her waist, tied upside down on a St. Andrew's cross, was shriekingly protesting her innocence of any wrongdoing as the grinning fat sergeant whipped the insides of her thighs with a switch made from a split bamboo rod, and Major Hakim Istefan, stripped to his drawers and sandals, squatted before the head of the agonized girl, and, applying his silver sugar tongs that his faithless wife had given him, pinched the pouting nipples of her titties.
CHAPTER ll
Askir had questioned Penny Elston at great length, and, satisfied that the girl was who she claimed herself to be, told her that her sister Gwendoline was at last report stationed at the Karambula Hotel in Gelibolu. The passport and introductory letter that Kyros Anapolous had given her in Athens would, Nadja Askir assured the sandy-haired young beauty, get her safely through the Turkish lines to that seaport. In return for that information, Nadja Askir urged Penny to try to learn the approximate strength of the Turkish forces along her way, but warned her against writing anything down that might be seized as evidence against her, in the event that she were interrogated by Turkish Intelligence officials: "All you need do, my dear, is try to remember as much as you can. For instance, if you are stopped at the Dorfarg, about twenty miles from Gelibolu, you will see many tents set up as temporary quarters for Turkish troops. Remember only how many tents you see, because that will give our contact a very good idea of the exact number of men held there in reserve. And may you and your sister find happiness together! I will see to it that one of my good friends here in Constantinople takes you on to that meeting. You will travel by horse drawn carriage and, to lessen any suspicions of the border guards, I will send along presents to the Turkish soldiers at Gelibolu. It will show that you have great sympathy for them and that, despite being English, you share your sister's loyalty, since after all she did marry a Turkish officer."
And thus it was that Penny Elston set forth in a carriage drawn by two swift horses and driven by an old man who had been paid much gold by Nadja Askir to convey many other beautiful young spies to the vantage places where they were to work in gleaning information to be used, not for the Turks, but against them. And many of these women had already fallen into the hands of Major Hakim Istefan.
Already, of course, the secret agent whom the sadistic chief of Turkish Intelligence had sent to follow Penny was on the trail and observed the carriage passing out of the eastern gate of Constantinople and taking the long road that would lead to Gelibolu. Once he was certain of her destination, he stopped at the headquarters of a Turkish border patrol some twenty miles outside the city, and sent a wireless telegraph message off to the commander of Turkish forces at Gelibolu to advise him that the sister of Gwendoline Aszar was journeying to meet her. That message was received by none other than Colonel Ahmet Ceydet, who had already captured Gwendoline and put her to the torture.. .
A gruff Turkish sergeant halted the carriage at the outskirts of Gelibolu and demanded Penny Elston's papers. The attractive, sandy-haired young woman strove to control her composure, for thus far she had passed through all the Turkish lines with a minimum of difficulty, thanks to the passport and the letter of authorization given her in Athens. But the sergeant, gesticulating to the old driver, indicated that Penny was to come with him, which the driver interpreted in his halting and thickly accented English. She smiled and thanked the old man, then descended from the carriage.
He took her towards the hotel where a bearded sergeant-major relieved him of his prisoner. He grinned at Penny, who shrank back from the lecherous glow in his dark eyes: "Come English lady," he said gutturally, "we know why you are here. And you will find your sister waiting for you, as well as our commander, Colonel Ceydet, who also awaits you with great eagerness!"
Seizing Penny Elston by the wrist, he unceremoniously led her into the lobby of the hotel and up the steps to the second floor, thence to the very end of the left-hand corridor. He knocked at the door and was told to enter. Penny Elston uttered a cry of horror, but the bearded sergeant-major stepped behind her and shoved her forward into the large double room, then closed and locked the door behind him.
Colonel Ahmet Ceydet lolled on the bed, naked except for his boots. In his right hand he held a short leather dog whip, and was amusing himself by flicking the naked, welted, shuddering body of Gwendoline Aszar, who lay on her side, her wrists bound behind her back and her ankles also corded.
Penny stared with horror at her weeping sister, who sat up, her pale blond hair falling over one tearstained cheek and panting naked titties. There were whip marks on Gwendoline's magnificent titties as there were on her belly and thighs and back and bottom, and there were dark purplish bruises where the fingers of the none-too-gentle Turkish soldiers had pinched and gouged and clutched her. After she had first been reserved for the delectation of Colonel Ceydet and his staff, she had spent two days and two nights in the soldiers' barracks, and only today had been returned to the hotel when Colonel Ceydet had received a message from Constantinople. Her dark-circled haggard eyes, her shuddering stigmatized nakedness, told Penny more than words could, what an atrocious ordeal she had endured.
As Colonel Ceydet slowly approached, his stiff prick bobbing between his hairy legs, uncoiling the dog whip and satanically grinning at his new prey, Penny Elston stepped back, her eyes frantically scanning the room in some desperate hope of escape. She saw a curved dagger with a jewelled handle thrust into the sergeant-major's belt, and seized it. With an oath, Hussein struck at her with his fist, but Penny Elston managed to thrust the blade home in his chest. He uttered a gurgling cry and slumped down on his knees, and then toppled onto the floor. With a shriek, Penny seized the door knob and tried to open it, but in vain.
And then the dog whip slashed across her back, and as she cried out, Colonel Ceydet seized her by the waist, twisted her, 'round and flung her to the floor. "You English bitch, you've murdered my best noncommissioned officer!" he snarled. "And now I think you will take off your clothes!"
"I wont! Kill me, because I'd kill you if I could, you filthy beast!" Penny Elston spat into his face. For she wished now a swift and merciful death, hoping to enrage him enough to kill both her and her sister at once.
His face blackened with rage, but as he wiped the spittle off with his sleeve, he smiled cruelly: "Very ingenious, I congratulate you! But in the days of the martyrs, the noble Romans were not fooled!"
Then, turning to the groveling Gwendoline Aszar, he slashed her across the shoulders with the dog whip and commanded, "Take it into your mouth and suck it lovingly."
And as Penny watched, transfixed with horror, the trembling, haggard, brutalized older woman obeyed, amid the uproarious jeers and salacious exhortations of the eagerly watching soldiers.
When at last he had ejaculated his spunk into her mouth and forced her to swallow every drop, he commanded, "Let this bitch run the gauntlet!"
At his sign, two corporals emerged from the ranks ran towards the naked, weeping Gwendoline Aszar, and dragged her back. Her wrists were bound to a gun butt, and one of the corporals seized the barrel and dragged her, stumbling, whimpering, through the rows of soldiers who turned on each side to form a gauntlet. The thin steel ramrods of their rifles, their belts, and, for the non-commissioned officers, their leather dog whips, fell with sickening cracks and whistling thuds upon her bottom, thighs, back and shoulders, and her maddened shrieks were deafening. Penny wrenched herself at her bonds, crying out to the satanic colonel, "Kill us and have done with it, you butcher! Kill us, kill us!"
Fazida uttered a cry of terror when, having opened the door of her mistress' house in answer to the persistent ringing of the doorbell, she saw the sardonic face of Major Hakim Istefan and, beside him, the fat bald Sergeant Gruila Bekir.
"Bring your mistress here, quickly, you little Egyptian bitch," Major Istefan commanded.
Fazida hurried to the room of her raven-haired mistress, almost paralyzed with terror. Nadja Askir trembled and paled, but then, collecting herself, tried to soothe the lovely young Egyptian girl.
Then, hastily exchanging her negligee for lace-trimmed drawers and a silk camisole, and tugging a red silk dress over her voluptuous body, thrusting her bare feet into elegantly gleaming black-leather high-heeled pumps, Nadja Askir went downstairs to welcome her uninvited guests.
"What have I done?" she demanded of them.
"I think you know, Madame Askir. You are the mysterious 'N' whose letter was found in the possession of one Gwendoline Aszar in Gelibolu. A few days ago, you sent a certain Penny Elston on to join her sister, this very same Gwendoline Aszar. You and Devros Papagoulas have been working together, and he, the supposedly esteemed Greek Ambassador to our nation, have sought only to betray us to our enemies. Come along!"
Nadja Askir turned very pale and recoiled. Then she darted her left hand into the bodice of her dress, for inside the camisole, just above the left breast, she had sewn a capsule of lethal poison, to have ready on hand should some crisis arise. But Sergeant Bekir, anticipating her every movement, twisted her wrist viciously and she sank down on one knee with a cry of pain.
"Oh no, Nadja," Major Hakim Istefan leaned down to smirk at her. "It won't be that easy!"
Major Hakim Istefan, naked but for his boots, the ivory-handled riding crop gripped between his sinewy hands, smiled at the shuddering captive. In the brazier to her left, Sergeant Bekir was heating a long branding iron. "Well now, little Nadja, quite comfortable? You see why we had no need for refreshments. Your body is far tastier. Are you ready to confess?"
So saying, he stepped back, raised the ivory-handled riding crop and slashed it down over the exact centers of both tensing, distended naked olive-satiny bottom-ovals.
Nadja's head rose, and a hoarse shriek was wrenched from her, her body vibrated and jerked, and the excruciating pain of the cords that had already made her toes and fingers swell from the lack of circulation was intensified. On the warm olive of her naked skin, the angrily red welt of the first stroke appeared. A second lash, just below it, and then a third just above it, were added to allow the sadistic Turkish officer to delegate over the lascivious contrast between the kisses of the whip and the unmarred warmth of Nadja Askir's bare skin. Each lash drew a piercing cry from her, and she could not control the sporadic writhing of her naked body suspended in the air.
"Then you confess to being 'N'? "
"Oh, yes-anything-but make an end of it-be quick about it-let me die now!"
"You will die when and how I desire, not before. And now you shall pleasure me a little while the iron heats in the brazier." So saying, he tugged down his drawers and revealed his mutilated penis. Then, the fingers of his left hand twisting in Nadja Askir's tumbled, disheveled raven tresses, he yanked up her face and snarled, "Lick and suck, you Greek whore! It was a bitch like you who destroyed my manhood, but you shall avenge it.
You, who prefer to lie with women in your scented bed, will know what it is to gratify a Turk!"
He made a sign, and Sergeant Bekir lifted the branding iron, already white-hot, and approached. With a cackling little laugh, the fat, bald, toothless non-commissioned officer lightly brushed the left sole of Nadja Askir's bare foot. An inhuman shriek at once reverberated in the dungeon, and the haughty widow wildly thrust out her tongue and began to lick her interrogator's incomplete genitals.
When he had sated himself with her craven and hysterical homage, he made her suck Sergeant Bekir and drink down the bubbling jet while he himself, taking the branding iron, touched here and there the squirming naked feet, the heels, the ankles and the calves of the maddened victim.
And then he had the sergeant bugger Nadja Askir, standing between her straddled legs, gripping the cheeks of her welted bottom, yawning them apart so that his virile weapon might sheath itself in the tight bumhole of the unfortunate, hysterical and supplicating captive while she was obliged once more to kiss and lick and suck Major Istefan's ruined manhood.
Nadja Askir, who had been lesbian by preference, and spy out of greed, was to linger a month in the bowels of the earth in this same dungeon, servicing Major Istefan and his entire staff until, at last, one day, unable longer to bear the humiliation and agony of her Turkish tortures, she managed to smash an earthen bowl in which her food had been brought, and, taking one of the shards, opened her wrists and found death at last.
