An entire penthouse devoted to one man's pleasure-an evil man's death! But what a death for Martin Veeland, the wheelchair invalid millionaire whose insatiable appetites constantly looked for something new in sin and depravity, was finally close to the last chapter in his evil life. Surrounded by Francine, gorgeous, voluptuous-Yvonne, eager to please whether with man or woman, hand or whip-Jack Thorne, too rich at too early an age and eager for wealth beyond his wildest dreams-and the entire household staff whose one aim was to see that the old man died in ecstasy-and soon! It was a stage set for passion too explosive to witness, lust too base to excuse, a sin-fantasy too impossible to be believed. But it was happening, happening to all of them as the old man rocked in his chair of death and screamed at them for morel
CHAPTER ONE
The bar was on the East Side, the sort of place that calls itself "Cocktail Lounge" instead of "Bar and Grill." It had subtle lighting, original lithographs on the wall by people like Utrillo and Dufy, and a well-dressed, sophisticated clientele that didn't mind paying a buck and a half for a dry martini.
I was looking at some of the clientele how.
And she was looking right back at me, with a sizzling bedroom look in her smoky hazel eyes.
She had an East Side look too. The kind who calls herself "mistress" instead of "tramp," or maybe "call gir!" instead of "whore." You know, a girl with style. She was about twenty-three at the outside, so there was still the bloom of youth to go with her sophistication. Her hair was red, but not carrotty, not brick-colored. It was a deep auburn, and it had a glossy sheen to it that made it seem as though she were wearing a coronet, a coronet of radiantly beautiful hair.
The eyes, as I said, were smoky hazel. And they were alive. Mischief played in them, and intelligence, and slyness, and sheer spreadlegged hip-pumping sensuality.
The rest of the face was elegant to match. Full, pouting lips, a strong chin, dimpled cheeks. Skin like velvet, I was willing to bet. Then a long neck blending into a lovely body. At least, I was willing to bet it was lovely. She was wearing a tailored suit, ultra chic but not at all revealing. I could make out the swells of very adequate breasts underneath, and she had her legs crossed to show off stockinged calves that attained a high degree of perfection. I felt a sudden ache in my groin, and knew that before I got very much older I was going to have to get that tailored suit off her, to put my hands on the sleek mounds of her breasts and the taut flesh of her buttocks.
I had to do it. Not just that I wanted to do it. I had to. A compulsion. An obsession.
As a rule, I get what I want. When it becomes compulsive, I always get it.
I stood in the doorway of the cocktail lounge for a long moment, enjoying the electricity that was passing between us, the girl with the hazel eyes and the auburn hair and the green suit, and me, the tall guy with the shoulders and the Brooks Brothers outfit.
She was smiling.
She was saying Yes with her eyes.
She was saying, Come get to know me and come take me to bed, whoever you are. My breasts are yours. My buttocks are yours. My thighs are yours. My-
I walked toward her. She was alone at a table, with a pinkish cocktail in front of her. There was no wedding band on her finger. She was free, unencumbered. A pro, I wondered? You saw a lot of them in this neighborhood. At the moment, I didn't give a damn. If she were a pro, I'd pay the price. A hundred, two hundred, five, what did money mean to me right now?
She was still smiling as I drew near. I leaned over her, smelling the sweet perfume of her, savoring the aroma of that sleek lovely head of glistening hair.
"Hello," I said.
"Hello."
"Are you waiting for someone?"
"Yes," she said.
"Oh. That's too bad, because I was looking for someone to celebrate with."
"You're the one I was waiting for," she said. "Sit down, Jack."
"You know me?"
"Everybody in Manhattan knows Jack Thome," she said. "Sit down. Have a drink with me."
I was taken off balance. I slid out a chair, slipped onto it. Close up, she was even more beautiful than I had thought when I saw her across the room. And she knew my name. And she had a voice that matched the rest of her, low and throaty and seductive. My pulse throbbed for her. I felt a surge of impatience.
I didn't want to go through all the complicated rigmarole that society prescribes before you can get into bed with a girl. I didn't want to buy her drinks and hold her hand and whisper sweet nothings. I felt the urge, and I knew that she did, so why not bring the evening to its destined close right here and now?
No, that's not how it's done, I told myself. You can't just say hello to a girl you don't know, and then prong her on a tabletop in a 53rd Street cocktail lounge. You've got to make the right gestures, and then take her to the right place, with soft music and dim lights.
I said, "What have you been drinking?"
"Bacardis."
"Want to switch to champagne?" "If you like, Jack."
"I told you, I've got something to celebrate. Champagne is what you celebrate things with."
"What do you want to celebrate?" she asked me.
"A killing in the market"
She nodded. "Champagne, then. By all means. Champagne, Jack. The only thing."
She pushed her half-finished Bacardi away. I crooked a finger at a red-jacketed waiter and asked him to bring us a tenth of Piper Heidsieck '53.
I said, "So you saw that article about me? Is that how you knew my name?"
She shrugged. "I saw the article. It was very flattering, I thought. Did you really make a million dollars in the market last year, Jack?"
"Time dreamed that one up," I said.
"It wasn't true?"
"I don't really know. I won't know how I did last year until my accountant tells me. He hasn't told me yet."
"And this year is off to a good start?" she asked.
I nodded. "A very good start."
The champagne arrived. We lifted our glasses. As she started to touch hers to mine, I drew my glass away and said, "You've got me at a disadvantage."
"How so?"
"You know all about me. I don't even know your name," I said.
"Francine. Francine Delvoise." She pronounced the last name in the American way, Delvoys.
We clinked glasses lightly. The champagne caressed my tongue. She smiled at me.
I felt all tension ebb away.
It had been a good day. A damned good day by anybody's standards. I had picked up a thousand shares of a two-bit electronics company on the Curb at 104 that morning, a couple of hours before a fat government defense contract had happened to be announced. Not luck. Good connections. The stock had climbed all day on wave after wave of buying. I had sold out, half an hour before the close, at 16%. That was a profit of something over $6,000 between eleven in the morning and three in the afternoon. The nice thing was that I had staked only $500 of my own money in the deal. The rest was leverage, borrowed money. Not a bad return on my investment. The only thing I mildly regretted was not having had enough courage to buy ten thousand shares, once I knew the news.
A good deal in the afternoon.
And now Francine in the evening.
She said, "Tell me about your killing in the market today, Jack."
I told her. When I got to the name of the company, she smiled and said, "I know someone else who bought quite a lot of that stock. Several months ago."
"Oh?" Several months ago, the stock had been selling at 4. If he had held on till today, he had quadrupled his money. "Does he still have it?"
"I imagine he sold it today," she said. "He's very smart that way."
"Who is he?"
"A friend of mine," she said lazily. "You'll meet him sooner or later."
I felt her stockinged foot caressing my ankle under the table. My blood pressure started to rise. I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes after five. The evening was still young.
"What are you doing for dinner tonight, Francine?"
"I'm free."
"Not any more. Dinner for two at Le Pavilion?"
"Why not?"
"Why not," I said.
I crooked another finger at the waiter and had him bring me a telephone. He plugged it into a jack in the wall, and I dialed Le Pavilion to make reservations. The urbane Gallic voice at the other end told me I'd be welcome any time after six.
"Quarter to seven," I said.
The waiter took the phone away, and I went back to studying Francine. After half an hour of conversation, I still only knew two things about her: that her name was Francine, and that she was the most beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on.
The champagne was just about gone when the second or third most beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on swept into the lounge. Her name was Diane, and she and I had had a brief and tempestuous affair about a year before. She was accompanied, now, by a tall, blank-faced Ivy League type, but the moment she saw me she came sweeping over.
"Darling!" she cried.
Francine looked up and saw a tall blonde with a bouffant hairdo sweeping down on me. I saw Francine's face freeze into a mask of icy politeness.
Diane was wearing a peekaboo gown that put most of her bosom on display. I remembered the way those big, heavy bowls of flesh had stood out from her body like melons, and now there they were, dangling in my face, bared almost to the nipple. "Darling!" she cried again. "How wonderful to see you, Jack! It's been so long! I read the article in Time. They didn't do justice to you. You're a much more fabulous person than they said."
"You always had a high opinion of me, Diane," I said uncomfortably. Why this harpie had to come barging in to shatter the mood Francine and I had been building, I didn't know, except that perhaps it had been decided somewhere on high that my day had been too perfect, and needed some botching along the way.
Diane stood there with her big breasts all but tumbling out of her gown, and I saw her giving Francine a fishy look. Then Diane pointed to her Ivy League escort and said, "Jack, I want you to meet Bradford Coleman IV. Brad, Jack Thorne, the famous Wall Street specttlator. And this is his friend, ah-"
Diane paused. Francine smiled sweetly and said, "Ingeborg Klotch."
"Ingeborg Klotch," Diane said, with a venomous glare at Francine. "What a charming name. Are you Swedish, Ingeborg?"
"Ukrainian," Francine said. "But I've been in this country for years and years."
"I'm sure you have," Diane sizzled. "Well, we won't interrupt your charming tete-a-tete any longer. Come along, Brad. So good to see you again, Jack. So wonderful to meet you, Ingeborg."
They zoomed off to the far side of the bar. I felt cold trickles of perspiration down my sides. I wondered what I had ever seen in that phony witch Diane. I knew the answer, too: a pair of breasts big enough to fill my hands, and legs that would fly open like clockwork when you pressed the right buttons. Diane had served my purpose. She had kept my bed warm at a time when I needed her. But I resented the way she had come sucking up to me now that she had read in a magazine how much money I was making.
I said to Francine, "Let's get out of here."
"Right."
I left a twenty on the table and we headed for the door. Although it was March, New York was having one of its strange fits of premature spring, and neither of us had an overcoat. The weather had been way up in the 70's all week, making the sap run and young men's fancies lightly turn.
I hailed a cab.
When we were inside, I let my hand rest lightly on Francine's thigh. She didn't move it.
"Who was that girl?" she asked.
"Someone I used to know."
"She seemed very unpleasant."
"She was just jealous," I said. "She saw me with someone even better-looking than she was, and knew that she had no chance to get started with me again. Which made her angry, because she had underestimated me the" last time."
"When was that?"
"Last winter."
"Before your run of luck in the market?"
"Exactly. I was operating on borrowed money then, and she knew it. She figured I was heading for a fall, and so she cleared out. Then I hit it lucky. She's probably been cursing herself ever since."
We arrived at Le Pavilion. It hadn't been much of a taxi ride, just a few blocks, but I hadn't been in the mood to walk. We were early, so they seated us in the lounge, and we had vermouth cassis to see us through till dinnertime. The air of expensive elegance all around us was just what I needed to recapture the mood Diane had broken.
It was a good mood. Two of us, boy and girl. Both young, relatively speaking. I was still on the best side of thirty, and she hadn't left twenty-two far behind. Both of us well dressed and good-looking. Both of us obviously well heeled. Spring. Young love.
Sex. Raw, bloody, unsophisticated sex to follow this oh-so-sophisticated East Side afternoon.
A good image. The best. Money, charm, sophistication, sex. Can you beat it?
So we sat there holding hands and looking into each other's eyes and smiling; and being quietly grateful that we had happened to run into each other today. Finally they told us we could go to our table.
Notwithstanding this being one of the half dozen greatest restaurants of the world, we both ate light-not to economize, but just to keep from feeling logy and overstuffed afterward, for we both had to be at the top of our respective forms for the encounter that would certainly follow. Francine had caviar, I had oysters. We skipped soup. Sole meuniere, accompanied by a crystal-clear demi of Montrachet '57. Cheese and coffee, no calorific souffle or crepe suzette.
A light meal. And I lightly left two twenties and a ten to pay for it.
We emerged into the balmy evening air. Miraculousy, the temperature was still way up there in the seventies. Had there ever been a lovelier March night in New York? Was there ever better weather for being young and newly rich and having a gorgeous auburn-haired girl on your arm?
"Where do we go?" I asked.
"My place."
"Where's that?"
"Fifth Avenue in the 90V she said. "You'll like the place."
"You live alone?"
"Oh, no," she said. "Not at all."
She didn't elaborate. I held up a finger and a taxi came drifting over to the curb. We got in, she gave the address, and off we went.
We headed west to Fifth, then straight up Fifth, past the old masions and the sleek new co-op apartment houses that have muscled their way in. Up we went, past the glowing mushroom that was the Guggenheim Museum, and the taxi came to a halt a few blocks to the north. The meter said one-forty. I found two-fifty, hand it over. Easy come, easy go. The cabbie tipped his cap to me and we got out.
The building was one of the old Fifth Avenue apartment houses, a heavy building with plenty of ornamentation, not one of these slim new sexless apartment houses. A bevy of doormen bowed to us as we walked into the dark, splendid lobby, with its fireplaces and its paintings on the walls. We entered a massive elevator.
"Good evening, Miss Delvoise," the elevator man said humbly.
"Good evening, Jimmy. Penthouse, please."
I wondered vaguely how come, if the elevator man knew Francine's name, she had to give him the floor she was going to. I found out a bit later.
We got out. The elevator opened directly into a lush foyer, and Francine slipped a key in, admitting us.
The place was like a museum.
It was a triplex apartment, for one. I saw stairs going down, and when I peered down the stairwell I saw that they went down two flights.
Everything was draperies and crystal chandeliers and antiques. Medieval carvings, and paintings that might have been by Rembrandt's uncle, and little slim statuettes, and crossed swords on the wall, and a suit of armor. We swept on through the living room and into another room lined with books.
"All three floors are like this." Francine said casually. "Martin is a great collector."
"Martin?"
"Martin Veeland," she said.
I blinked. Martin Veeland was a name out of Wall Street's past-a man who had sold out at the top in '29, bought back at the bottom in '32, and made himself a multi-millionaire thereby. But I thought he had died long ago.
"You told me you lived here," I said. "I do."
"But if this is Martin Veeland's place-"
"It is. I live here too. He keeps me. Come, I'll show you around."
She took me by the hand. I was stunned, numbed, partly by the Renaissance opulence of this magnificent apartment, partly by the calmly casual way she had said, he keeps me. Those three words had slit right through me. Veeland had to be seventy years old, at least.
At least.
Old enough to be her grandfather.
Well, maybe that's why she needs to pick up handsome strangers, I thought.
"This is the library," she said. "Over there, a First Folio Shakespeare. And here-the Caxton Bible. Martin owned a Gutenberg Bible once too, did you know that? But he gave it away. To some college or other. He's always giving things away. Martin's a very generous man. That painting up there's a Van Eyck. Martin collects Flemish painters. He's got a Rogier van der Weyden downstairs in his bedroom, and a couple of little Breughels, and a Bosch. Come. I'll show you the stained glass window."
She led me from room to room, in and out of treasure-house after treasure-house. The place was a museum indeed, a palatial apartment filled with the riches of the past. There must have been seven or eight rooms on that floor alone.
"What's downstairs?" I asked.
"On the second floor are the living quarters for the servants. My bedroom's there also. Martin's rooms are on the bottom floor. Each floor has its own separate entrance. 17, 18, and Penthouse. This is the penthouse. There's a terrace, you see. Come downstairs."
She took me down to the middle floor of the triplex. It was just as lavish, though perhaps not so much of a museum. The furnishings were more modern down here. As we passed through a long corridor, I heard a creaking sound in the floor, and then a man stepped out and peered at me.
He wasn't Martin Veeland. He was a man in his early thirties, very tall, very grim and sinister-looking in his dark serge suit. He seemed to be all eyebrows and cheekbones, and a shadowy stubble covered his lean cheeks. He gave me a cold look, and moved on without a word.
She shrugged. "What of it? Martin doesn't own me, he just keeps me. I'm allowed to live my own life." She opened a door. "This is my bedroom."
CHAPTER TWO
It was a room bigger than any living room, and I have a big living room. The furniture was impressive, too-antique, heavily carved. The bed was actually a four-poster. A wide one, too. It could sleep two comfortably, or even sleep three if the threesome didn't mind snuggling up close.
Francine closed the door.
Then she spun around to face me, and the next moment she was in my arms.
She was good to hold. She was tall, five-six or so, and I didn't have to stoop too far from my six-one to kiss her. Her lips rose, full and moist and red, and I put mine down over them. I felt her tongue probing against mine, and then it slipped deep into my mouth. My arms locked around her. I could feel the hard masses of her breasts pressing into me, and the sweet smell of that shining auburn hair was almost dizzying.
When I let go of her, she was panting and looked deliciously rumpled, and the smoky look in her hazel eyes was doubled m spades.
I helped her out of her suit-jacket. Underneath, she wore a simple white silk blouse, tautly straining to contain the twin thrusts of her breasts. I dropped the jacket on the couch along one wall. She loosened my tie, took my jacket off, started to unbutton my shirt while I did the same to her blouse.
I won the race. She shrugged out of her blouse. Her face was flushed, her eyes were beckoning me on with a sensual gleam. I let my hands rest for a moment on the cups of her white bra, then reached around back fumbled with the hooks, and got the bra off her.
She was naked to the waist. She stepped back to give me a better view.
The view was breath-taking.
She had breasts that belonged on a statue, not on a living human being. Human beings are supposed to have flaws, and these breasts were perfect. They were high and round, big but not sloppy, standing away from her body as though the law of gravity had been repealed about ten minutes ago. She must have had fantastic muscles holding them up and out like that.
Her breasts were high and firm and round, and the nipples were small and dark, set in the middle of two smooth aureoles about as big as twenty-five-cent pieces. The nipples were standing up, away from her, on the outcurve of those two fabulous breasts.
I came slowly over to her, and bent forward, and touched one bare breast reverently. It was satiny, and cool to the touch. I lifted it and put my lips to the hard little nipple, and Francine made a gasping sound of pleasure.. She knotted her fingers into my hair and pressed my head against her.
Without lifting my head from her breast, I finished undressing her. I found the zipper of her skirt, and drew it down, and pulled the skirt off her. She had a half-slip under that, and I tugged it off her, and she stepped out of it. I kept kissing that nipple, with my left hand cupping the firm globe that was the other breast.
I slipped my hand up the back of her thigh, up under her panties, and felt the cool silkiness of her buttocks. And I started to tremble with sheer admiration. I had never had much trouble persuading women to make love with me, and I had had my share, maybe more than my share of good-looking girls. But Francine was more than just "good-looking." Francine was unique, Francine was perfection itself, and perfection is always a frightening thing.
I had to pay homage to it.
I pulled her panties off. She was still wearing stockings and a garter belt, but I left them on. Lifting my head from her breast, I sank to my knees, cupping her buttocks in my hands and pressing my face to her, while she stroked my hair in a loving, grateful way.
I worshipped at the shrine for a few minutes. Then she gently lifted me to my feet and finished undressing me. When I was naked, I knelt again, opened her garters, took the stockings off, then the garter belt. Not a stitch covered her.
She moved to turn off the light.
"Wait," I said. "Let me look at you."
She paused. I eyed her, in profile, my heart hammering at the beauty of her out-jutting breasts and her sloping buttocks. She had a light tan, all over-no bikini-stripes across breasts and middle, but an even tawniness. And the auburn hair, I could see without a doubt, was natural, and not a product of some artful little Third Avenue swish of a hairdresser.
She switched off the light. At the same moment I switched on a lamp. With someone as beautiful as Francine, it's blasphemy to make love in the dark. You have to be able to look as well as caress.
She came to me, and our naked bodies merged in a long embrace, and then we went to the bed together, to the big four-poster. She turned back the ornate coverlet and we slipped between the cool sheets.
There was nothing cool about her body just then. It was warm, very warm. She squirrelled down under the sheet, and then I felt her eager lips on me, and I trembled with the joy of it. I moved around and lifted my face to her, kissing her gently.
For a long while we lay entangled that way. It might have been three minutes, it might have been thirty, but it seemed like a long while.
Then, with one accord, we parted and rearranged ourselves in the bed. I was ready, and I touched her and knew that she was ready too.
I was glad the light was still on. I looked at her, and her eyes were wide open, and she was smiling at me with her eyes. No fear in those eyes, as you sometimes get when you go to bed with a girl for the first time. No doubts. No little niggling fears about pregnancy. No qualms. Just a smile of welcome, a smile that was telling me, Come on in, friend. I went in.
The lithe slimness of her was beneath me, and for a long moment afterward neither of us moved. It was just so good to be like this, her body under mine, the two of us joined in the most intimate connection two human beings can have.
We lay there simply savoring the idea of being linked this way for a few minutes.
Then we decided to see where we could go from here.
She began to move, slowly, at first, little eddying movements of her hips. I held back, because the busy actions of her hips had brought me perilously close a few minutes earlier, and I didn't want to turn the whole thing into a premature fiasco. So I steeled myself and didn't let myself feel any sensation, until after another moment or two I had control over myself again and could proceed with confidence.
Meanwhile Francine was quietly going wild beneath me.
I felt the palpitations of her, heard the steadily heavier breathing. Then she seized my head, forced it down on her breasts, and I took one of her breasts to my lips. I drew my knees up under me, cupped her buttocks, lifted, and took advantage of the changed angle to move deeply to her.
She moaned.
I though for a moment that I had gone too deep, that I had hurt her. But then she moaned again, and I knew it was a cry of pleasure, wrung from the depths.
Her ecstasies were beginning. They came accompanied by sobbing sounds, and strange heaves of the body, and wild twists and starts that almost separated the link of our bodies, and then a wild motion that sent furious shafts of excitement through me.
I felt the urgency starting in her, and I rode upward with it, but something told me that this was not the kind of girl who had one trip to joyland and quit cold, so I restrained myself, not following her all the way. Sure enough, she made it over the top, and even at the height of her passionate writhing she managed to gasp out, "Wait-wait for the next one, Jack-"
I waited.
I waited till she had gone to joyland and come back again. My body was aching, and there was a dull pain in the pit of my belly, and I wanted desperately to reach fulfillment. But either you give a girl what she wants, or else you don't get involved in the first place. My nerves were strung taut, but I held on, while Francine rested for a moment or two, and then I felt her fingers stroking my back, and suddenly they were digging into the flesh of my buttocks and she was urging me on, spurring me to the heights.
Up, up, up.
Higher.
Faster.
She was coming right along with me, and this time was to the last the way a hurricane is to a spring breeze. Her face was distorted with ecstasy, and her breath was a hot raging gale in my ear, and her body rippled as though currents of electricity were passing through it.
There was no question of my holding back now. I had to go all the way, to surrender to the onrushing sweep. I gave in, and I felt all strength go out of me as though my backbone had suddenly been whisked away.
While I was going through this, Francine was lost in some private ecstasy of her own. But we came back together at the very final moment, and reached the peak of our fulfillment together.
I was dead. I was drained. I was shot.
Francine was looking up at me and smiling, and there were tears of fulfillment in her eyes.
I kissed her, but there was no emotion left in me, and it was just a brotherly kiss. She stroked my cheek in a sisterly way. We had pushed the covers off, but now after our fierce exercise we were both sweating and likely to get a chill, so Francine pulled the covers back over us.
I nestled against her breasts.
I was at peace with the world. I had pulled off a successful coup in the stock market today, I had had dinner at the best restaurant in New York and one of the, best in the world, and I had just made love brilliantly to a girl who was surely one of the ten loveliest members of her sex since Helen of Troy. What more, I wondered, could a man reasonably expect out of one day?
Nothing.
Not a damn thing.
I found a nipple near my lips, and I lightly kissed it. But without passion. I had the feeling that, after what Francine and I had just done, it would take a month for my batteries to recharge. I was wrong.
I slipped into a light doze, half-awake, half-asleep, and perhaps a couple of hours crept by that way. The next thing I knew, I felt a powerful desire, the familiar throbbing rigidly. I came back to full consciousness and realized why.
Francine was down at the other end of the bed again. She was curled up in a little ball, with her head in my lap.
I reached down and put my hands over her breasts and drew her up to my end of the bed. She looked at me and smiled, and I nodded.
I rolled over onto my back. Like I said, I was tired.
I lifted my knees to form a seat for her. Her buttocks were soft against my thighs, and she took my hands and put them up over the swaying globes of her breasts. I opened my eyes and looked up, and saw the sleek sheen of her unmussed hair, and she was more beautiful than ever, unbelievably beautiful.
She began to move, rocking back and forth, lifting herself and lowering herself, going through a whole routine of love.
She had real skill.
It couldn't have been the septuagenarian Martin Veeland who had taught her all this, either.
She did things with her body that most girls don't even know can be done. Each quivering contraction sent eddying pleasure running through me, and I trembled and broke into a cold sweat, and gripped her breasts tighter and tighter. Then she was moving faster, with a kind of panicky urgency, and I felt her full weight descending on me again and again, and I caressed the soft tips of her breasts, and she whimpered, and was caught by an ecstasy of her own making that send her body into swift vibration. I tuned in on her wave length, found the rhythm, pulsed with it, probing to the depths of her.
It didn't take long.
It wasn't an explosion like the last one. It was more like a swelling wave, rolling in from the sea. It rolled over her first, then over me, and even after I had subsided she was still going on, but only for a while. Then she stretched out flat on top of me, and I felt her breasts pressing down. I let my hands rest gently on her buttocks and inhaled the fragrance of her hair.
She hadn't said much, not even at the most intimate moments. Most girls will start getting sentimental. They'll cry out "I love you" even to perfect strangers, because it seems like the right thing to do. But none of that from Francine. She had been all but wordless.
Now she said, "How was I?"
"Fabulous. Beyond words."
"Am I really good?"
"Do you need to be told?" I asked.
"Sometimes. Sometimes-"
"You're a mysterious girl, Francine."
"I know."
"How long have you been living here?"
"A long time."
"Two weeks? That can be a long time sometimes," I said.
She laughed and brushed my cheek with her long eyelashes. "I've been here seven and a half years," she said.
"I don't believe that. You can't be old enough to have been living with Veeland for-"
"Seven and a half years. I mean it, Jack."
"How is it possible? You aren't a day over 23."
"I'll be 23 next month."
"That means you came here when-" I sat up as the arithmetic of it hit home. "When you were only fifteen and a half!"
"That's right," she said calmly.
"But-but-what is this man Veeland to you? Your guardian?"
"I told you. He keeps me."
"What does that mean?" I demanded.
"What does it usually mean?" she countered.
"No," I said. "No, I can't believe that. Not when you were only fifteen-"
"His demands aren't great, Jack. He's an old man, and he hasn't been well."
I felt a foul taste in my mouth. The thought of a man in his sixties deflowering a fifteen-year-old Francine made me physically sick. For a long moment I trembled in a cold sweat. I looked at her. She was sitting up, and her breasts jutted forward with impudent beauty. I pictured her at the age of fifteen, just as beautiful, but younger, more innocent, less worldly. And a wrinkled, potbellied old man topping her fair body with his own, clutching her swelling young breasts in his gnarled claws-
"How? How did it happen, Francine?"
"My parents were dead. I needed a guardian."
"And Veeland-"
"He heard about me. He invited me to come live with him. Not quite as an adopted daughter. To be a comfort for his old age. I understood. I got the message, I was very aware of things, even then."
"And you've been here ever since?"
She nodded.
"Sleeping with him?"
"When he wants me to."
"And the rest of the time?"
She shrugged. "I'm free to do as I please."
"It doesn't make him jealous, knowing you bring younger men back here to go to bed with you?"
Her smile was almost unreadable. "He likes it," she said. "It fascinates him."
"You tell him about it?"
"Always."
"In detail?"
"Sometimes."
I got out of bed. Naked, I walked to the window and stared out, across Fifth Avenue, across Central Park. It was still an hour or more till dawn. The sky was black.
Francine came over to me. She pressed against me. I could feel the tips of her breasts in my back, the flatness of her belly against my buttocks. She ran her hand through the hair on my chest, "Angry with me?" she asked.
"Not angry. Just-bewildered."
"Poor Jack. I didn't mean to bewilder you," She turned me around, and I saw the numbing beauty of her again, the high, pointed breasts, the sweep of her body down to the flaring hips and inviting loins. Her nakedness burned me like a firebrand thrust in my eyes.
"Why are you so beautiful?" I whispered.
"I can't help it. It's my curse." She laughed strangely. Slipping away from me, she padded across the room and took a quilted housecoat from a closet. I had one last look at the twin loveliness of her buttocks, and then her nakedness was hidden from me.
"Get dressed," she said.
"Why? Do I have to leave?"
"No. But Martin wants to meet you."
"When?"
I looked at my watch. "It's only a quarter to six in the morning, Francine."
She nodded. "He gets up at five, every morning. You're a man he's long wanted to meet. Put your clothes on and I'll take you down to him."
I was more mystified than ever at the strange setup I had wandered into. A speculator of bygone days, a man I thought was dead, keeping as his mistress the most beautiful girl in the universe, and wanting to meet me? In the full knowledge that I had just gone to bed with her?
Mine not to reason why. I gave up trying to figure out the answers. I looked around for my clothes, which were scattered hither and yon throughout the room, and began to dress.
When I was finished, Francine came over to me and straightened my tie. Leaning against me, she kissed me playfully, and I quivered again at the feel of her breasts against me.
"Don't be afraid of him," she said. "He's really old dear."
She took my hand and led me out of the room.
CHAPTER THREE
Down a corridor we went, and then down a sweeping grand staircase that could have graced the palace of a Venetian doge. The chandelier at the head of the stairs was so brilliant that it seemed to glow with a light of its own, even in the darkness.
We passed through a room the size of a small football field, lined from ceiling to floor with shelves containing gold leather-bound books, and continued down a corridor very much like the one on the floor above, until we came to a door that was half closed.
"Martin?" Francine called. "Martin, I've got some company to see you. May we come in?" She spoke in the loud, clear voice that you use when addressing the slightly deaf.
"Yes, of course, Francine. Come in! Come in!" The reply from within was high-pitched and quavering, with a hollowness to it that I found peculiarly unpleasant. It was like a voice from the tomb.
Francine turned to me and whispered, "Relax and don't look so apprehensive. He doesn't bite."
"Give me a kiss for luck."
"I-oh, all right."
She lifted her arms. I whisked my hand down the front of her sumptuous gown and the buttons gave way, revealing the tawny globes of her breasts and the fantastic sculpturing of her body. I pulled her up against me, clamped one hand over her left breast and the other around her shoulders, and covered her mouth with mine, moving my tongue deep between her lips. We kissed for a long moment, and I wondered where I found all the passion after what Francine had given me during the night.
After a moment we parted. Francine was panting, and she had a look of pure animal desire in her eyes. She grinned encouragingly at me and belted up her gown.
"Let's go in," she said, smoothing her auburn hair.
I nudged open the door. Inside was a room that looked more of a museum than any of the others. It was literally crammed with objects d'art-oriental jade carvings, a glass case of swords and spears, another one of archaic muskets, medieval tapestries, filigreed mirrors, Chinese scrolls, green Egyptian statuettes of cats and goddesses, ancient Greek vases in black and red, and, above the bed-another four-poster-a magnificent lemish portrait that would have graced the Metropolitan.
In the welter of art I overlooked the man, at first. Then I saw him, on my second sweeping glance around the room. He was seated in a wheel chair behind a table that was piled high with manuscripts and old expensive finely-bound books.
He was old too.
Ancient.
If Francine had told me that Martin Veeland was three hundred years old, I would have believed her. His skin was like parchment, white and wrinkled and delicate. There was no flesh on his face. The cheekbones protruded like knife-blades. His eyes, infinitely old, infinitely wise, lay hooded in pouches of loose skin. His lips were thin and harsh, and the hands that lay in his lap were spidery, long-fingered, almost grotesque in their leanness. Age had chiseled all the fat off this man.
So far as I knew, he was only in his seventies. But he seemed as old as the pyramids.
Francine said, "Martin, this is Jack Thorne. Remember, you read about him in-"
"Of course I remember," he said, cutting her off with a thin, peremptory snap. "Time Magazine. The second January issue, business and finance section, left-hand side of the page. I'm sorry that I can't give you the page number I'm getting old, I'm afraid. But not senile yet, young lady. Not just yet." He began to roll the wheel chair toward me. "How do you do, Thorne? Sorry I can't get out of this damned chair, but-"
He held a hand out toward me. Helplessly, like a character in someone else's dream, I reached down and took it. I was afraid that the fragile bones would crush to powder if I did more than touch the hand, but to my surprise his grip was a strong one, as strong as that of a man my age. He held my hand in that unexpectedly powerful grip for a long moment, while his cold eyes drilled into mine. I was half groggy from my night with Francine, and in no shape at all for this kind of meeting.
He said, "Heard a lot about you, Thorne. Quite the plunger, I hear."
"I've had some luck."
"It isn't luck!" he burst out. "Never say that! You know you're lying. I know it. Luck has only a little bit to do with it. It's guts, Thorne. Guts and brains and shrewdness. Luck helps, but don't ever tell me it's the main thing. Me, of all people. Well? Was it just luck that made you a millionaire before you're thirty?"
I grinned, liking him more from moment to moment. "Of course not. But most people resent it when someone tells them how smart he is."
"I despise false modesty, Thorne. I made three hundred million speculating in the market, and I didn't do it with luck. You won't be able to do as well in today's market, but you'll get along-unless false modesty corrodes your brain and makes you start thinking it is only luck. Have some cognac, Thorne."
I gaped at him. Cognac, at six in the morning?
He hadn't asked me to have some. He had told me to have some. While I stood there thinking of something to say, he wheeled his chair around vigorously and took two glasses and a dusty bottle from a shelf.
I looked helplessly at Francine and whispered, "Do I have to?"
"He hates to drink alone. Don't cross him."
"You can drink with him."
"No. I don't count."
Veeland wheeled round again. He handed me a snifter that was half full and said, "My own special reserve. Bottled in 1933 after seventy years in the cask. I've still got a case or two left. I sometimes think it's the only thing that keeps me alive."
I put the snifter to my lips, and I knew what he meant. Even at six in the morning, this stuff was ambrosia of the gods. I beamed at Veeland, and he beamed back at me. Francine had drawn off to one side, as though not part of this colloquy at all.
"Well?" Veeland said.
"It's amazing stuff. I envy you."
He shrugged. "I'll never live to drink the whole case. Francine, give him two bottles when he leaves."
My eyes widened. "No, I couldn't think of-"
"Please. My pleasure. Do you play cards, Thorne?"
"Yes."
"Clear the table, Francine. Get a chair for Mr. Thorne."
Francine went to work like any housewench. As she bent to pick up the stack of books on the table, her gown dropped open, and one full, glowing breast was visible for an instant. Veeland saw it, but he took no more apparent interest in the sight than he would have if she had displayed her elbow.
The table was cleared. Francine got me a chair, and I sat facing Veeland. He took a deck of antique cards from a drawer.
"Do you know how to play Sodomato?" he asked.
"I've never heard of it," I said.
"It's a Florentine game," he said. "Seventeenth century. It's a simple thing to learn. Here: I'll teach you, and then well play."
He was right; it was a simple thing to learn. I have a knack for learning new card games, anyway. It took him no more than two or three minutes to teach me the fundamentals, and then he dealt the elegant, oversized cards out The game was a kind of solitaire for two, with certain subtleties that I only half grasped at the moment, but basically not hard to play.
As we played-with Francine standing by in silence-Veeland said, "How long have you been playing the market, Thorne?"
"For five years. But the first four were just practice. I didn't put any serious money into it until a year ago December."
"And in the fifteen months since then, you've done quite well?"
"Quite."
"I made my first million when I was 25," he said. "You can't match that, can you?"
"I was 28."
"It's harder nowadays. Probably you had to waste a couple of vital years in the armed services. Eh?"
"Two years."
"So your accomplishment nearly parallels mine," he said. "I see a kindred spirit across the table from me. A man who understands the game of 'money. Tell me, Thorne: why don't you pick up your chips?"
"What?"
"You're worth more than a million. You ought to be able to invest that well enough to bring you an income of $50,000 a year. You can live on that. Why rish any more of your capital?"
"I'm too young to go on the shelf," I said.
A scraggly eyebrow raised. "You could devote yourself to travel-the arts-winesmanship-"
"Not yet," I said. "There's time to retire twenty years from now. I'm still having fun making money."
"But suppose you lose?" he asked. "Suppose your skill deserts you-your luck changes, you might say-and you find yourself penniless five years from now?"
"I'll start over," I said. "I started from scratch once. There's no reason why I can't do it again." I put my ace down over his king. "And I win the first hand."
"So you do, so you do," he mused. "Some more cognac, Thorne?"
"I'm still nursing the first snifter," I said as I dealt the cards.
"Where did you meet Francine?" he asked me.
"In a cocktail lounge. She was alone and so was I. I bought her some champagne."
"And she brought you home. She's beautiful, isn't she, Thorne?"
I had fallen into the game of pretending Francine wasn't in the room. "The most beautiful girl I've ever known," I said with fervor.
"And in bed? She's good in bed, isn't she, Thorne?"
His eyes transfixed mine, and I knew it was pointless to lie. "Yes," I said quietly. "Exceptionally good."
He chuckled. "How I envy you your youth. To put your arms around her naked body-to press your lips to hers-and not to feel her shudder-I" His laugh was sinister. "She does shudder, Thorne. Whenever I touch her. They say a woman always love the man who takes her virginity, and perhaps she does love me, in her way. But not physically. I can't blame her. I'm not pretty any more. There's a thought for you. Fifty years ago I was a big strapping hulk like you. And time turned me into this. It'll happen to you, Thorne. All my millions couldn't buy youth for me. You'll see."
"It's a long time off, for me. I don't think much about such things."
I drained the cognac snifter. Veeland signalled, and Francine poured me a refill. I felt as though she were filling the glass with the old man's very blood. As I raised the glass to my lips, he topped my row of queens with a flurry of kings and said, "I think the second hand is mine."
I checked my unplayed cards for aces, 'found none, and nodded. "You've got me. Deal again."
He dealt the cards. "Where do you live?" he asked.
"Beekman Place. I have a six-room apartment."
"Which costs you some $500 a month?"
"$575."
"Where'd you live before that?"
"East 86th. Three rooms, $250 a month."
"When did you move?"
"A year ago," I said.
"In other words, you were living beyond your means at the last place?"
"Somewhat."
"But not now?"
"No," I said. "Not now. But I may move again one of these days."
"Would you like an apartment like this one?"
"It's a palace," I told him.
"Guess at the rent."
"I can't."
"Guess anyway."
"Five thousand a month."
"Fifteen thousand," he said. "But worth it, I think. We have 30 rooms here. And not small rooms, either. You would have trouble finding apartments like this today. But not when I moved in. That was in 1932. Places of this sort were going begging. I got this one for $650 a month. But they have kept on raising the rents. When it reached $15,000 I had had enough. I bought the building. Now I pay rent to my own corporation."
My hand shook a little as I played the cards. Fifteen grand a month in rent-that was three hundred thou a year. Just for rent. Rich was rich, all right. I was still only a piddler. But, then, I was sitting across the table from one of the richest men in the world, a man whose personal fortune was on Rockefeller or Van-derbilt scale. Besides, he was much older than I was. Who knew where I'd stop?
I concentrated on the card game. Suddenly it seemed very important for me to win this, the rubber match. Veeland went on talking, while I said little and played hard. The stacks of cards in front of me began to grow as I won point after point.
But then the tide started to turn. Veeland was putting down his cards with those big, spidery hands, and in no time at all he had won back most of his losses.
Then he made a slip. I saw him cheating.
I don't know if he saw me see him move the card. My first temptation was to yell "Aha." and pounce on him with my accusation. But I held back. Let the old man have his crooked triumph, if it meant that much to him.
It was a valuable lesson to me. How do you get to be as rich as Martin Veeland?
You needed guts, brains, shrewdness. You needed luck.
And it also helped to cheat a little.
The game ended soon after. He had beaten me, squarely if not fairly, and I congratulated him on his skill, trying to keep any note of cynicism out of my voice. He smiled and said, "You play very well for a beginner, Thorne. Given practice you should be able to beat me every time. I can see why you do so well m the market." He rolled his chair away from the table.
I stood up. Dawn had come over New York while we played, and the sky over Fifth Avenue was streaked with red. Insufficient sleep made my eyes sting, but I did not feel at all sleepy, only keyed up.
Veeland said, "What stock did you play most recently, Thorne?"
"Automation Technology," I said. "On the American Exchange."
"Yes. I know. I picked up a parcel of that at 4, in the early winter. Had quite a run, didn't it?"
"Closed near 17 today."
"Did it? How nice. I sold out just at the close. 5,000 shares. A small transaction, but on these thinly held stocks you simply can't deal in quantity. It would throw the price out of line if you bought or sold any real quantity of a stock like that."
I said nothing. His dinky little transaction had brought him a profit of something like $62,000 in a couple of months. A mere bagatelle for him, a way to pass the time. I guess his idea of a decent quantity of stock was a thousand shares of IBM. But I wouldn't let him put me down.
I said, "Do you have any tips for a young man who wants to make a killing fast, Mr. Veeland? What stock do you favor next?"
His expression was a hooded one. "None," he said. "I'm selling steel short, if you must know."
I blinked. Selling steel short? The way it looked to me, steel was about to break out of a year-long trough and go sky high. Was he kidding me? Was he trying to get me to make a costly mistake? Or was this one of his intuitive hunches, that would add a few millions more to his pile?
I didn't know. Logic and reason told me to ignore the tip, that it made no sense to short steel just now. But if I did, and he was right, I'd stand to make a fortune. And if he were only leading me down the garden path, I could get hurt badly inside of a month.
Veeland looked up and said, "Well? Do you think I'm doing the wise thing?"
"Well, the trend in steel seemed up, but maybe,-"
"Maybe you're wrong and I'm right? Is that it?"
"I don't know, Mr. Veeland."
"Neither do I, Thorne, neither do I. It's all a game, a great big game. I've played the game well, and I've won, because I'll die a rich man. So far you've played well too. I wish you luck. Will you be my guest here for dinner tomorrow night, Thorne?"
"Well-"
"I beg of you, don't refuse."
I hesitated. I had a date for tomorrow with a promising brunette I had been after for a couple of weeks. But I knew I had no choice. If Martin Veeland wanted me to be his dinner guest, how could I, a mere mortal, refuse?
"All right," I said. "I'd be delighted. At what time?"
"Seven," he said. "Formal dress, if it's not too much trouble. After dinner well have some entertainment, perhaps. I'll see you then."
He picked up one of his old books and opened it. I realized I had been dismissed. Francine gestured toward the door, and we went out.
In the hallway, she said, "You made a good impression on him."
"How can you tell?"
"You beat him at that stupid card game of his. Only one other person's ever beaten him, and that's Lloyd, the secretary. And Martin despises Lloyd as a person. Nobody else ever beats him. And he had to cheat to win, in the last hand."
"I know."
"Thank you for not saying anything. He hates to be reminded that he's slipping." Francine walked me into another room, a small one lined with Chinese porcelains in glass display cases. "What did you think of Urn, Jack?"
"A fabulous character. I wish I'd known him in his prime."
"They say he wasn't very interesting then. Just a money-making machine. But he went into semi-retirement around 1940, and he's been able to cultivate other interests."
"So I see. Including you."
"Including me," she said.
She threw herself against me with sudden yearning. I met her fierce assault and took her into my arms. She kissed me.
She kissed me with her mouth and her tongue, with her breasts and her thighs, with her body pressing against my own. I opened her robe and put my hands inside, and squeezed the ripe firm flesh of her buttocks, and nibbled the side of her throat, and took one downy earlobe into my mouth. She gasped and flattened herself against me, her body trembling with desire.
"I need you, Jack," she whispered. "Right now. Again. I'm on fire, can't you see that?"
"Where can we go?"
"Right here. Right here."
Already she was fumbling with me. I looked around in alarm and managed to kick the door of the room closed. I didn't know how many other people there might be wandering around this huge triplex, and I didn't want to be interrupted at a crueial moment.
Francine was panting with panicky urgency. She had me backed up against the wall, now, and she threw open her gown, revealing her naked loveliness.
She literally climbed on me. There was no place to sit down in the room, so I put my hands one under each thigh and lifted her, and she locked herself around me, and I shifted my hands so that they supported her by the firm globes of her buttocks.
Our lovemaking this time was short but violent, a series of quick movements that led rapidily to a powerful fulfillment for both of us, in the same moment. I held her for a minute more afterward, while my metabolism readjusted itself. When I let her down, I felt a little dizzy. She closed her gown and beamed at me.
"I needed that," she said.
"Always glad to oblige," I said, with a flippancy that I regretted right away. But she didn't look bothered. She squeezed my hand, and led me out of the room.
"I'll see you tomorrow night," she said. "At seven sharp."
"At seven," I repeated. "Sharp."
We had one more quick kiss, and then she conducted me to the elevator. She vanished before it came.
I rode downstairs in silence, crossed through the ornate lobby, stepped outside.
It was morning. A bright, sunny morning.
"Taxi," I said.
CHAPTER FOUR
As I got into the cab, I realized that Francine had forgotten to give me the promised two bottles of the old man's cognac, and that I had forgotten to ask. I didn't get out of the cab and go rushing back upstairs to claim them. They'd still be there the next time I was. Anyway, I felt queasy about accepting them.
I nestled back against the cab's cushions and tried to stay awake until I got home. It was pushing eight o'clock when I turned the key in my apartment.
I went straight to the bedroom. I took all of my clothes off and dropped them in a heap. I flipped the "disconnect" switch on my telephone so my broker wouldn't be able to roust me from bed at eleven in the morning.
I got into bed.
I dosed my eyes.
I slept.
It was the soundest sleep of my fife. It was as though I had flipped a "disconnect" switch in my brain the moment I touched the pillow. I didn't even take time to think back on my strange adventure of the night before. Meet a lovely girl, bang her three times, play cards with one of the riches men in the world and get invited to dinner the next night-I didn't even stop to think about it all.
I just slept. Dreamlessly. Soundly.
When I woke, it was four in the afternoon, which meant I had missed a complete day on the market. Not that I cared. I didn't have any important irons in the fire, right now. I was sitting with a big cash position, waiting to see where I'd be best advised to put my money next.
I reached across and phoned my broker, Sid.
"You take a day off?" he asked me.
"Sort of. I miss anything?"
"Your hot automation thing of yesterday sold off four points," he said. "You got out just in time."
"It's the story of my life," I said. "What did steel do today?"
"Strong," he said. "You interested?"
"I don't know," I told him. "I thought I might sell short."
"That some kind of joke, Jack?"
"I'm not sure. You hear any talk about steel?"
"Yeah," he said. "It's going up. And you want to short it?"
"I told you, I'm not sure. What happened to DuPont today?"
"Off two and a quarter."
"And Westinghouse?"
"Off a half."
"Ampex?"
"Up one."
"Okay," I said. "I'll phone you tomorrow. Meanwhile I think I'll stay in cash for another couple days. Till I see which way the wind's blowing."
"Any way you like, Jack. Just don't do anything hasty on the steels. I wouldn't want to see your luck start to change."
"Yeah," I said. "Oh-Sid?"
"Huh?"
"You know anything about Martin Veeland?"
"Veeland? Sure. He was a big speculator back in the thirties. Must have made half a billion. I hear he died a few years ago."
"You hear wrong. I met him yesterday, and I'm having dinner with him tonight. I just wondered if you could fill me in on his background."
"Hell, I don't know. He's the guy who sold out in '29 at the top, and bought back in at the bottom in '32 and '33."
"I know that much. What stocks did he make Ms big plays in?"
"Well, I know he bought a lot of Dupont for practically nickels. And that he cleaned up in '29 by selling RCA short when it was up in the stratosphere.
More than that I can't say. I didn't even know the guy was alive."
I rang off. A shower and shave made me feel a little more human. The next step was to get on the phone again, dial Flo, the chick I was dating tonight, and explain to her that I had come down with a bad case of creeping orchiditis and couldn't possibly accommodate her.
It went off better than I figured. She was calm enough about accepting a rain-check. I promised to get in touch with her toward the weekend.
It was now nearly five o'clock. I felt out of whack with the universe, not having had breakfast yet with a dinner engagement coming up in about two hours. A mug of orange juice, some toast, and a lot of black coffee got me more or less back on people time again. I killed time around the apartment until half past six, then dressed-black tie, as requested-and went downstairs to get myself a cab.
Francine hadn't specified which of the three floors I was supposed to ask for in the elevator. But it wasn't necessary. As I got into the elevator, the operator said, "Good evening, sir. To see Mr. Veeland?"
"That's right."
He nodded and closed the door, and up we went, op up up, stopping at the bottom-most of Veeland's three floors. I stopped for a moment in the foyer, adjusting my bow tie, and then rang the bell.
The secretary, Lloyd Robinson, answered. He was wearing a tux too, and he bowed at me somewhat Prus-sianly and said, in a black bass voice, "Won't you come in, Mr. Thorne?"
I went in.
Robinson ushered me to a room I hadn't seen before, a sumptuous salon decorated with what looked like Watteau murals, including some on the ceiling Veeland and Francine were waiting for me there. Veeland had dressed up for the occasion, donning not only a formal tuxedo but three or four medals that glittered in his lapel. And Francine was ravishing. She looked so lovely that it made me sick. She was wearing a Paris gown of some diaphanous material that swirled around her like a cloud of powdered diamond, a setting for her gem-like beauty. Her hair gleamed as it had not gleamed before, and her breasts were thrust upward and outward by her gown, two deep fleshy bowls that made me dizzy to behold them-especially when she leaned forward in a kind of welcoming curtsy.
"You are very punctual," Veeland said in that sepulchral voice of his. "Did you have a pleasant day?"
"A very pleasant day," I said. "I relaxed at home. Waiting until tonight."
"We will have a cocktail," he announced. "Then dinner will be served in the dining room. Lloyd, will you get Mr. Thorne a drink?"
Lloyd looked inquiringly at me. "Sherry," I said.
"Fino or cream?"
"Fino."
He bowed again, practically clicking his heels, and disappeared through a side door. When he returned, he was bearing a tray carrying not one but three glasses of sherry. He gave one to Francine, then one to me, finally one to his employer.
Veeland lifted his glass with a steady hand. "To a delightful evening," he said.
I sipped the sherry. It was light and clear and perfect, with that faintly nutty flavor that marks a good fino. On the second sip, I decided that this was the best sherry I had ever tasted, and I said so.
Veeland enjoyed having his liquor praised. "Again, my own special reserve. I have a case shipped from Jerez every year at Christmas. It comes from the private stock of a very close friend of mine in Spain." He glanced at Francine. "Did you give him the cognac last night?"
"No-I forgot."
"I'm sorry. After dinner, Mr. Thorne, I'll take you to my wine closet. You shall have two of the cognac and two of the sherry."
"I'm very grateful," I said.
I found it bard to keep my eyes off. Francine. She was radiant in her gown, a sight of almost frightening perfection of beauty, the Hope Diamond of sex. Memories of last night came flooding back. Francine, naked and palpitating, her breasts rising and falling with excitement. Francine with her head in my lap, her mouth doing fantastic things. Francine's buttocks taut in my grasp, Francine's body joined to mine, Francine, Francine, Francine.
Francine.
He keeps me, she had said. I pictured Veeland deflowering her, seven and a half years ago. He must have been an old man even then. Had he managed the job successfully? Did he need help? Could he do it at all, or was he living some kind of fantasy life in which he bestrode Francine five times a week in his dreams?
I sipped my sherry. Veeland was talking, telling me about the murals in the room, but I hardly listened. My eyes wandered. The murals were pastoral scenes, nymphs and satyrs, some of the nymphs almost as lovely as Francine, but not quite.
Not quite.
I put down the drink, the glass empty.
"Another?" Veeland asked.
"Not unless everyone else-"
He smiled. "I usually have only one before dinner. Shall we eat?"
Without waiting, he swung his wheel chair around and led us out of the room. Francine came up alongside me. Her hand sought mine, squeezed it. I could smell the wonderful fragrance of her, and as I looked down at her I could see all but the lower third of her breasts. She smiled at me.
"Don't refuse him anything tonight," she said. "Even if he asks some-unusual favors."
"Such as?"
"Never mind now. Just be good to him. Give him what he wants."
She wouldn't elaborate. I shrugged and followed the fast-moving wheel chair. Veeland led us into a dining room of imposing size, with a massive, heavily carved table in the middle of the room. He rolled his chair into place at the head of the table, and indicated that Francine and I were to sit at his left and right, facing one another.
Everything about that dining room was superb. The tablecloth was fine as gossamer, the silverware was massy sterling, the dishes were china of the first quality. And Francine was across the table from me. I looked at her and her breasts looked back at me, and there was the tug of desire in my loins.
Veeland lifted his hand ever so slowly and a maid entered the room bearing a tray.
The maid was an ornament in herself. She was a blonde, in her middle twenties. The bleakness of a maid's uniform couldn't begin to conceal the voluptuousness of her breasts, the lush fullness of her buttocks. Her face had a trace of coarseness about it, which explained why she was a serving-maid and not a showgirl, but there was no denying the sensuality of her body. For a worn-out old man Veeland certainly had high appreciation of feminine beauty.
The maid approached. I took a quick look at the way her breasts stretched the front of her uniform taut, and then I looked away, not wanting to be caught peeking at the servants. She put a plate of caviar down before me, another in front of Francine, one in front of Veeland.
Veeland signalled again and Lloyd stepped forward, carrying a bottle of wine. It was a white wine, a Grand Chablis, dry as bone. And the caviar was the finest beluga, probably flown in from the Black Sea five hours ago. There were three ounces of it on each plate-at a probable price of $8 an ounce. Rich is rich, I thought again, pondering the kind of wealth that let you serve $25 appetizers to dinner guests.
The caviar was followed by soup, some sort of turtle soup with a cheese crust. Since the Chablis was finished, the estimable Lloyd brought us a half bottle of Haut Brion Blac to accompany our soup.
A fish course followed-turbot, I think-and we washed it down with the rest of the Haut Brion. All through the meal, Veeland had been talking, eating, and drinking steadily-reminiscing about the old days in Wall Street, before FDR and the New Deal had taken all the fun out of the game by toughening up the rules. I had to admire his gusto for living. He was nothing but a little shrunken old cripple of seventy-five or eighty, but here he was eating like a horse, drinking like a Falstaff, and carrying on conversation with his mental faculties absolutely unimpaired. Would I be able to do as well at his age?
It was main dish time. On covered plates came Scotch Grouse, and a bottle of Chateau Margaux 1918 to accompany it. Yes, 1918. Veeland looked sadly at the bottle and said, "I bought ten cases of the '18, in 1926. Paid a pretty penny for them, too. If I had waited a few years, I could have saved a pile. Do you know James Briarleigh?"
"I've heard the name."
"His son's a broker, now. I mean the old man. He had one of the finest wine cellars this side of the Atlantic. Killed himself in '30, and the family was left bankrupt. Had to sell off all the wine. I picked up another five cases of the Margaux '18 for what amounted to fifty cents a bottle. And hundreds of other great wines. I paid cash down, you see-that was the important thing, in '30. Cash down $25,00 cash for the wine, and it was worth at least ten times that, if not more. But who else had cash in 1930?" He smiled and tapped the bottle. "There aren't many of these left, now. I don't open them often. Do you have a wine cellar, Thorne?"
"I keep some. I don't eat at home very often."
"No matter. You should be putting them away. Thirty years from now, you'll regret not having laid down a hundred cases of '59 wines."
"Perhaps."
"No perhaps about it," he snapped testily. "You'll regret it. And there'll be no purchasing them then, not at any price. Put your money into wine, Thorne. Mark my word. You'll live to be grateful to yourself for it."
As I sipped the '18, I could see what he meant. I made a mental note to call a wine seller in the morning. Now that I had the capital, this was the time to start buying. Not rare old wines, but new wine, that would get rare while I aged with it.
The grouse was delicious. So was the souffle that followed it, though I was starting to get full. Francine, I noticed, was leaving half her food untouched. Veeland, though, was belting it away as though he had the digestion of an ox.
We reached the last course. Cheese, coffee, and cognac-not the heavenly cognac of last night, which was obviously reserved for infrequent occasions, but a superb 60-year-old grande champagne that could hardly be sneered at. I sat back, bloated, after what had been the finest meal of my life. It was half past nine. We hadn't rushed, but we had put away a colossal quantity of food and wine in the last two hours.
After a while, we left the dining room. Veeland said, "I'm sure you can use some exercise to walk off the meal. What if I show you around, let you see some of my treasures? Does that interest you?"
"Very much," I said, though it would have interested me much more to have gone off and climbed into the hay with Francine.
And so I got the tour. The works. He rolled on from room to room, telling me how he had bought this item from J.P. Morgan, and that one from John D. Rockefeller, Junior, and this other one from Frick, and on and on. It was quite a collection, ten or twenty million dollars' worth of museum pieces right here, and he hinted at much more in storage or out on loan to public institutions.
Francine kept right along with us. From time to time she would twine her fingers into mine. Once, while Veeland had his back to us describing the fine points of a mosaic from Pompeii, Francine playfully passed her hand over the front of my trousers. A few minutes later I took a little squeeze of her breasts. We were like two school kids getting in little feels every time teacher looked in some other direction.
I wondered how the evening would wind up. If Veeland got up at five in the morning, he'd have to go to sleep early. Maybe, I thought hopefully, he'd sack out by ten or ten-fifteen. I couldn't wait to get my hands on Francine again, and something beside my hands.
But my chance was coming. Little did I know.
One hint came when we passed through the library, and he said, "Let me show you something interesting." He took down a portfolio. "These are Japanese erotic prints. By some of the greatest masters. Hiroshige, Klyonobu, Utamaro. In the West all that is known are the picturesque prints of these artists, the views of Mt. Fuji, the rain storm scenes. We know nothing of their darker side. Here. Look. You and Francine."
He shoved the portfolio at us, and we turned the pages, while he watched us with a peculiar glow on his ace. They were incredible prints. For one thing, they were incredibly filthy. They made stag films look like Mickey Mouse cartoons. The prints showed the act of love in a myriad of positions and styles. In every case, the couple was slewed around at a strange angle to give a maximum view of their genital organs.
And those organs were exaggerated and distorted grotesquely. The artists had seemed to take a perverse pleasure in turning sex into a nightmare act. Yet there was such subtle artistry of line and color about these prints that it was almost possible to overlook how pornographic they were.
We leafed through twenty or so, and were only part way through the book. The presentation of so much sex had started to grow boring through sheer repeated shock, and I made as if to hand the book back to Veeland.
But he said, "No, go on. Look at the rest of them. You may never get another chance to see these. You too, Francine." .
He was enjoying it. I felt embarrassed for Francine-somehow I was prudish enough to think that it was strongly obscene for an old man to watch a young couple as they leafed through work of this sort. Francine's face was a study in serenity, though. She appeared neither embarrassed nor upset, nor moved or stirred in any way by what she was seeing. She knew how to keep a cool exterior.
After a trip through the whole book, I closed it and handed it back. I was in a cold sweat.
"What did you think?" Veeland asked.
"Powerful. Too powerful, maybe."
"Every educated Japanese has a collection of these prints," Veeland said. "Some even mount them on the walls of their home. They amuse the children."
He put the portfolio back on its shelf and wheeled out. I glanced at Francine.
She whispered, "It excites him to do things like that."
"That's what I figured."
Little did I know what else excited him.
"Now to the wine closet," he said, scampering ahead in his wheel chair.
It wasn't a closet except relatively; in most Manhattan apartments, it would have been considered a room. It was filled with wine and liquor, thousands of bottles, a dizzying array. I feared that Veeland would insist on dragging me through it on a guided tour, pointing out each exceptional bottle in his collection, reminiscing on how he came to obtain it. But he spared me the details. He had Francine pick out two bottles of the cognac, two of the sherry, and we left.
He wheeled down the hall and stopped in front of a door. It turned out to be the door of an elevator. I had wondered how a man in a wheel chair got around in a triplex apartment, and now I knew.
The three of us got in. Up we went, up to the middle floor of the triplex. We followed him down a corridor, and then, suddenly, into the room that I recognized as Francine's bedroom.
Francine took my hand and squeezed it suddenly.
Veeland smiled broadly, showing yellowed teeth. "Here we are, children. The bedroom. There is the bed. Go. Amuse yourselves. Make, love like the handsome young creatures you are."
He wheeled back against the wall and folded his arms as though he planned to stay right here and watch.
CHAPTER FIVE
I looked at him blankly. T didn't get the bit at all. Did he plan to watch? Was it all some kind of joke? He had a benign expression on his face, as though he had just settled down in his box at Philharmonic Hall to take in a symphony concert.
While I stood there, Francine came up to me and pressed herself against me. The fragrance of her perfume and of her body dazzled and overpowered me.
In a soft, barely audible voice she said, "Do what he wants, Jack."
"You mean-make love? In front of him?"
"Yes."
"This is insane, Francine."
"He wants it. He needs it, Jack. It excites him. Please-I know it's offbeat, but don't thwart him. He's an old man and he's a rich man. Let him have what he wants from us."
I stared at her. "You're as crazy as he is."
"Please, Jack. I beg you-"
"You mean you bring guys up here all the time," I asked, "so you can stage little circuses for the old man?"
Color made her cheeks blaze. But she didn't answer my question directly. She simply clung to me, flattening the globes of her breasts out against me, and moving her hips from side to side to draw the front of her body across my already responding maleness.
"Will you?" she whispered.
"It's-it's the filthiest thing I ever heard, Francine."
"Do it for me. You won't regret it. It'll be well worth your while."
Over at the side of the room Veeland, as though growing impatient for the start of the show, clapped his withered hands together and said, "Well? Let's have a beginning, now, children. It's getting late."
"Please, Jack!" Francine whispered fiercely. I looked down and saw the tears in her eyes.
I hesitated.
I didn't want to be the plaything of an old "man's whims. Even a rich old man like Martin Veeland. I had a sense of pride. I wasn't just a male whore who could be bought with a fine dinner and two bottles of cognac and two bottles of sherry.
But there was Francine, and she wanted me to do it, and she clung to me, her body a warm sensual thing that made me tingle all over.
I couldn't resist her.
I put my hands on her breasts. I felt the soft but firm flesh yield as my fingertips dug in. Desperately, I forced myself to blank out that part of my mind that was aware of Martin Veeland's beady, watching eyes in the corner. I told myself that I was alone with Francine, and that I was going to make love to her, and that our lovemaking was going to be an Event.
I began to undress her.
I unwound the yards of gauze that formed the mantle of her gown, and put it aside. I found the zipper and drew it down, and she showed me how to get the gown off her, and I took it off.
Underneath she wore a curious bra that supported only the undersides of her breasts. I unsnapped it, and away it came, her breasts tumbling out free, those astonishing breasts that arched high and proud out of her chest, the nipples standing up tall.
Her breasts rose and fell in gathering excitement. She was wearing nothing but panties, a garter belt, and stockings, now. I knelt as though to undo the stockings, but she shook her head and said, "No. Not yet. Let me undress you first, Jack."
She helped me out of my tuxedo, putting everything carefully aside. When I was down to my shorts, I began to feel uneasy about things. We were getting to the serious stage. Francine held me tight and kissed me, and then started to slide down my body, taking my shorts with me.
I felt her mouth close on me.
I caught my breath as shivers of excitement ran through me. I stood there, naked, stroking the auburn splendor of her hair as she knelt in front of me. After a few moment I bent, put my hands over her breasts, and lifted her to her feet. Then it was my turn to ' kneel.
I rolled the panties down over the flaring hips.
I put my lips to the sweet indentation of her navel, and she giggled as my tongue tickled her. Then I moved lower, and there was a sudden indrawn gasp of pleasure as I reached home base.
Then I undid her garters, took the stockings off, then the garter belt.
We were both as naked as the day we had come into the world. But substantially better developed.
I picked her up in my arms, one arm around her shoulders and the other on her buttocks, and carried her to the bed. By this time I had managed to forget completely that, we had an audience. I was at full mast, throbbing with desire, and I couldn't have cared less even if we had been doing it in Macy's window.
My hands roamed her body, cupping breasts and buttocks, then trailing over the silken flesh of her thighs. Playfully, she teased me, refusing my questing fingers admission. But only for a few minutes. I knocked and she opened the gates for me.
.Francine moaned in delight. She arched her back, twisting and turning on the bed.
I kissed one of her breasts. I caressed the stiff nipple, gently, not wanting to mar the perfection of that incredible boob.
She straddled my throat and I buried by face in her.
Then she turned over me, her eyes misty and slitted, and said, "Now, Jack. Now I"
She received me eagerly, with a cry of joy deep in her throat and a wriggle of her hips that drove me to the depths of her. She arched her back, high off the bed, and I pressed forward, and I felt the inward quivering of her. I worked my hands under her, grasping her taut-stretched buttocks, lifting her higher, stirring her, working her.
I trembled, feeling myself getting close to the finish line, and let myself go slack. For the next few minutes Francine did all the work. She churned and twisted and writhed and pivoted while I held back. Then I felt her entire body quiver, heaving like the ocean at high tide, and I knew that the moment of her ecstasy was upon her.
I held nothing back.
I drove and lifted and drove again, wondering vaguely if the intensity of my attack could be hurting her, but whatever she was feeling must have been the opposite of pain, because she met each movement of mine with a counterthrust of equal savagery. It was one-two, and I heard my own harsh ragged breathing and felt the cold sweat starting to burst out all over me, and she went zooming up the stratosphere, dragging me along with her. Right at the height I dug my teeth lightly into her shoulder and crushed her in my arms and pressed down hard, and there was the soaring deliciousness of fulfillment. Then I dropped down on her breasts, half unconscious from my exertions and from the sheer impact of our joy. I closed my eyes.
I figured I'd rest a little while, ten or fifteen minutes maybe, and then I'd help her on to her next peak, because I knew from the night before that she wasn't the sort of girl who called it quits after one.
But I didn't get the chance. Moments after our love-making had ended, I felt Francine wriggling out of my arms. I tried to hold her. Nobody likes to be left alone in the cold right then.
"Francine-"
But she slipped away. Groggily, I opened my eyes to see what was going on. Reality hit me hard.
I saw a naked Francine padding across the room. Veeland was practically popping out of his wheel chair. His fleshless face was flushed and sweaty, and his eyes held a new sparkle in them. And he had thrown off the lap-robe that usually covered him.
I stared for one shocked moment. I saw Francine standing over him, facing him. Her back was to me, and I saw the stunning beauty of her buttocks and thighs, and then as I watched in horror she clambered onto the wheel chair, lowering herself to the waiting, eager Veeland.
He cackled in delight. One of his wrinkled claws fastened itself on the jutting nude loveliness of her breasts. The other reached around in back to clamp down on her buttocks. I could see that spidery hand extending across Francine's body as she lowered herself to him.
Her body began to move rhythmically.
Veeland responded by making the most horrible sounds I had ever heard-a dry, ratcheting kind of gasp, something like sticks breaking, dry sticks. And he wheezed with pleasure. I could see his knees sticking out, and there was Francine, pink and flushed and naked, making love to him in the position best suited for old men who are confined to wheel chairs.
I felt sick with shock.
The evening had turned into a nightmare. One of those crazy Japanese erotic prints had come to life, it seemed, and I was living it.
I turned and buried my face in the pillow of Francine's bed. But that was no good, because I could still hear the sounds they were making, the old man's blasphemous gasps of pleasure. Worse, Francine was gasping too. She was enjoying it. She was having on his lap the second peak that I might have been giving her instead.
I couldn't stand it.
I had to get out, away from them, away from those sounds, away from the two-backed beast in the wheel chair, away, away!
I didn't stop to put on my clothes. I leaped up and rushed out of the room, out into the hall stark naked.
It was crowded out there.
Lloyd Robinson, the secretary, was standing outside the door, and with him was that bosomy blonde maid, still in her uniform. There was a third person there, a lean, dark complexioned little man who, from his uniform, was apparently the chef who had engineered tonight's fabulous meal. The three of them, waiting in the hall, were apparently listening to hear the sounds of their employer's pleasure.
I came exploding out of the room like a whirlwind, and they scattered in surprise.
Feeling more than ever like a character out of somebody else's bad dream, I bowled my way stark naked through them, blushing furiously, and ran into the first room I came to, slamming the door behind me. It turned out to be the little room with the Chinese porcelain collection, and recklessly I dropped my bare butt onto an antique chair of some sort and buried my face in my hands.
What kind of a madhouse had I wandered into?
And how had I ever let Francine talk me into taking part in this-this orgy?
I sat there a long moment, wondering how in hell's name I was going to get my clothes and get out of here. Then there was a knock at the door.
"Who is it?" I said as calmly as I could.
"Yvonne. The maid," came a cheery, English-sounding voice. "May I come in?"
"I'm naked."
"I understand. May I come in?"
She seemed insistent. Well, if she didn't mind seeing, I certainly didn't mind showing. I told her to come in.
There was an interested gleam in her eyes as they ranged down my six-feet-one of hairy nakedness. I took in the full thrust of her breasts against her tight maid's uniform. It seemed the height of insanity for the two of us to be standing here, her in uniform, me naked, with these Chinese porcelains leering at us out of their cabinets.
She said, "Was something wrong?"
"Just get me my clothes. Let me clear out"
"I'm sorry. I can't go into the Master's room while he's with Francine."
"I don't feel like standing around in the raw. And I'm damned if I'll go back in there."
"I'll get you one of Lloyd's dressing-gowns," she said with a smile. "Are you terribly shocked by all this?"
"I wasn't expecting it"
"I thought Francine would have warned you."
"Does this kind of thing go on all the time here?"
Yvonne grinned. "As often as the Master's strength permits. In-various combinations. You'll see. The Master is quite taken with you, you know. You'd be a fool to do anything rash like leaving. He said this morning that he thinks of you as a son."
"He's got a strange way of treating his children, then."
"He can't live forever," Yvonne said smugly. "He has no heirs. Wouldn't you like to be cut in? Now be smart, Mr. Thorne." Her eyes travelled over my body again. "I hope you stay. I wouldn't mind a go at you myself."
"Not now," I told her. "Get me that dressing-gown, will you? I'll catch pneumonia."
She winked, jabbed her breasts at me, then turned and went out with a provocative wiggle of her hips. I realized she had excited me. My state hadn't subsided when she returned a moment later, carrying a dressing-gown. She was aware of it too.
She handed me the gown and sashayed up close. Compared to Francine, she was a dray-horse to an Arabian steed, but there was still plenty of appeal in that jutting bosom. I shook my head.
"Some other time, Yvonne."
"Right-o. I'm sure it won't be long."
I slipped into the gown and went out into the hall. Lloyd and the little chef were loafing outside the door. I didn't hear any of the gasping sounds any longer. Lloyd smiled at me bleakly. A moment later, the door opened, and Francine stepped out. She was still naked, and flushed and rosy all over. She didn't seem bothered at showing her body to Lloyd and the chef, nor were they especially interested in it. I got the impression that the various members of this household were very much accustomed to nakedness.
She said, "It's over. He's asleep. Take him down-staris and put him to bed."
Lloyd nodded. He went into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. A moment passed, and then he emerged, pushing the wheel chair. Veeland was asleep, with a happy smile on his face. The lap-robe was back in place.
I watched the strange procession-Yvonne, Lloyd, and the chef-as they headed the wheel chair up the hall to the elevator. Then I went into the bedroom.
Francine sat on the edge of the bed, looking tired and rumpled. Her hair was dishevelled and she was slumped wearily forward, so that for the first time her breasts seemed to sag a little. She looked up at me.
"Well?" she said. "What's your reaction?"
"I don't know what to say."
"Disgusted? Shocked? Repelled?"
"A little."
"I don't blame you. But you did your bit. The old man was very pleased with your performance."
"I'm glad to hear it," I said bitterly. I looked around for my clothes. Francine turned to me, her breasts rising as she stretched out her arm, "Don't go," she said.
"Why not?"
"Stay the night. What's left of it. Sleep here with me, Jack."
I looked down at her and felt sudden revulsion. If I crawled into her bed, I would be expected to make love to her. And I didn't want to, not with the old man's lust still warm on her.
I shook my head. "I'm going to go."
She sprang up, putting her arms around me. She opened the gown so I could feel the warmth of her nakedness against me. "Jack, please, don't hate me for this. I can't help myself. It's what I have to do."
"Make love to a man three times your age? For God's sake, why? Why not just pack up and clear out?"
"I-can't. I owe him too much."
"That's fantastic. He's ruined your chances to have a normal life. You don't owe him anything."
"He's given me security, a comfortable existence, anything I wanted."
"Material things. But what has it done to your soul, Francine? To climb aboard a wrinkled old man like that."
"What has it done? Am I neurotic? Twitchy? I'm surviving it somehow."
"It isn't normal."
She shrugged. "He'll die in another year or two.
FD inherit a hundred million dollars or so. It's a good enough wage for what IVe been doing."
"Is it-always the way it was tonight?" I asked.
She nodded. "He needs to see others do it, to excite him. Some nights it's Lloyd and me, some nights it's a guest and me, some nights it's-other combinations. He watches, and then he does. At first he would watch two others make love, and then he would make love with me. But in the last few years he's preferred to have me do it first with someone else-then with me."
I stared at her, beginning to see the enormity of the deeds that had been committed in this place. To take a girl barely past fifteen and initiate her into this kind of stuff was worse than criminal. And Francine had had seven and a half years of being Martin Vee-land's mistress. It was a wonder she was still sane.
She tugged at me. "Stay with me tonight, Jack!"
"I-don't want to."
"Do you hate me now?"
"I couldn't hate you, Francine. I-I pity you, though."
"I don't want your pity. I don't need it. I'm happy, can you understand that?"
"I don't believe you."
"I am!" she insisted. But she was lying, and both of us knew it.
Tears began to well from her eyes. In a hollow, choked voice she said, "All right, so it's a disgusting life. But it'll be over soon. I'm making an old man happy, and I'll get my reward. If I'm a tramp, at least I'm getting a good price for it Stay with me, Jack. Please."
I couldn't refuse her. I let my borrowed gown slip to the floor, and switched out the light. Francine drew me into bed. Her lips went to mine.
I no longer felt disgust toward her. The fact that her body had been impaled on Martin Veeland's didn't trouble me. She was lonely, and a little frightened, and she wanted me, and I wanted her.
This time our lovemaking had none of the feverish passion of earlier about it. We simply came together, let our bodies join and moved in slow thrusts until a gentle fulfillment stole over us both. I cupped Francine's breasts lightly and closed my eyes.
She said, "Martin is very fond of you. He'd like you to come here often. Will you?"
"To take part in the orgies?"
"Yes. Will you come again?"
"I don't know."
"Say you will, Jack. Otherwise-otherwise I'll only have to find someone else to take your place. And I don't want to do that. If I have to do these things, I want to do them with you. Can you believe that, Jack?"
"I believe it."
"And will you come here again? For me? Knowing what you know now about this place?"
"Yes," I said. "I'll come here again."
"You don't know how much I love you," she whispered.
I kissed each soft nipple gently. She made a kind of purring sound. I slipped off into sleep.
My dreams were strange-but no stranger than the realities I had just experienced.
CHAPTER SIX
I didn't see Veeland in the morning. It was mat when I woke, and I used Francine's shower. She used it with me, and there was some playful stuff while we soaped each other up. After one tense little moment when it looked like I had lost the soap completely, we dried off and came out.
Yvonne served us breakfast. It was strange having breakfast in a tux, but that was how it went. I cleared out of the place at half past ten, my four bottles in a package under my arm. Francine told me she'd be in touch with me in a day or so.
I was home a little before eleven, and out of my monkey suit and into working clothes-slacks and a shirt. It was time to make a little money, just to keep my hand in. I never go into brokerage offices or down to Wall Street itself. I do all my business by phone. It's the only way to stay sane and keep the infection of moneymaking from spreading through your whole system.
I phoned my broker. Sid has a guy who reads quotes to me, and I had him read off the morning's performance of three or four stocks that I was interested in-plus the steels. The market was up about five points, and steel was particularly strong. I listened to the quotes for a few minutes, then started doing arithmetic on a pad.
"Okay," I said finally. "Pick up 500 Dynamics for me. 200 Westinghouse. 100 Allis-Chalmers." I went on through the rest of the rigmarole, setting stop points so I'd be sold out if any of my stocks turned around, giving him instructions on what to do if anything had a move. When I was all finished, I said, "Short 100 Big Steel."
"Short steel?" he repeated.
"You heard me. What's the matter? You think I'm nuts or something?"
"100 Steel short," he said. "Yes, Mr. Thorne. I'll get right with it."
"Make sure you keep in touch."
I put the phone down.
Funny thing. I had just tossed about $30,000 into the market almost on the spur of the moment. Two years ago, $30,000 was about twice my entire capital. Today it represented nothing more than a typical morning's outlay.
I was still uneasy about the steel. Veeland might only have been joking with me to see how gullible I was. Well, it wouldn't cost me much to find out. I bad put a stop to my short sale, so if steel rose instead of fell I'd only lose $300 plus commissions. Of course, I hadn't risked much, but I didn't know how far to follow Veeland's tip.
I proceeded to brush the market from my mind. I got on the phone and dialed Flo, whom I had had to beg off from the night before.
"Can I collect that rain check tonight?" I asked hot.
"Sure, Jack. Delighted."
"Dinner for two," I said. "Then what about a quiet evening chez moi!"
"Suits me. What time for dinner?"
"Half past six," I said. "I'll pick you up at your place."
Any other time, I would have felt exultant. Flo's readiness to come over to my apartment indicated that she was willing to sleep with me, and I had been pursuing that particular goal since I had met her at a party two weeks before. But it was a hollow triumph now. I wasn't interested in Flo except as a time-passer.
I wanted Francine.
But Francine hadn't told me to come over, tonight. She said she'd "get in touch." Whatever that meant. I was at liberty tonight. Did she have some other date? Or was this her night to sit at home reading Shakespeare to the old man? Did she sleep with Lloyd on Thursday nights? I was beside myself. I wanted to be with her, not with Flo. But I couldn't have Francine tonight. I would settle for Flo gracefully enough.
The day ebbed away lazily. I read for a while, spent some time on the phone with a wine merchant, played some records, mixed a martini or two.
Around three o'clock, Sid's flunkey called back with some market news. Dynamics was up 24 on the day, Westinghouse had sagged Y%, Allis-Chalmers was up
"What about steel?" I asked, and held my breath.
"It was off about two points a little while ago, but it got half a point back."
"Okay," I said. "Sell Westinghouse and Dynamics. Hold Allis-Chalmers till tomorrow. And short another hundred steel."
I felt better. I had dropped some small change on Westinghouse, made almost four hundred on Dynamics and a hundred fifty on Allis-Chalmers, and steel was reacting the way Veeland had said it would. Not a bad day's work, in a modest way. My pattern over the last fifteen months had been to pick up five hundred to a thousand bucks a day in quick small trades, and once or twice a month to make a bigger haul, twenty grand and up. The bigger hauls take patience, and that involves strain. There's no trick in picking a stock in the morning and selling it for a couple hundred bucks' profit in the afternoon. But to nurture a deal for five or six months, through thick and thin, takes endurance. My biggest haul had come that way, though-a profit of a hundred grand on an investment of only fifty grand, which on a percentage basis is pretty good. But you can't find a stock that will triple on you every day.
The minion phoned back after the close to tell me that steel had rallied, then had fallen back at the final trade. A trend, or a fluke, I wondered? Already I had a couple hundred bucks' profit. I debated telling him to cover my short first thing in the morning, decided against it. I would wait and see.
I entered the day's transactions in my notebook and shut up shop. Another day, another dollar. Trading in the market beats working any day. Show me the job that nets you a million a year.
Time for pleasure, now.
Time for Flo.
I picked her up at her Sutton Place apartment at half past six on the dot. In the innocent days B.F., meaning Before Francine, I would have said that Flo was a fabulous dish. Now that I had a yardstick to judge her by, though, the best I could say was she was a good-looking kid but nothing special in comparison to Francine.
She was okay, though. A willowy brunette, around 25, with wide, alert eyes, full lips, and an excellent figure. On our last date she had let me get her bra off, and I had found no fault whatsoever with her breasts. They were round and high and firm, and good to touch.
Flo obviously believed in doing things progressively. At the party where we met, we had done nothing but exchange witty badinage. On our first date, three days later, she had allowed a modest amount of kissing. On the second date, a bit of breast-squeezing. On the third date, some buttock-fondling, and a hand or two pressed down the front of her dress in the region of her crotch.
Three dates and I hadn't even touched bare flesh. It seemed like a high-school way of doing things, but I was sufficiently interested to carry the pursuit on a little further. On our fourth date, as I said, she let me get her bra open and my hands on her breasts. This was the fifth date.
If I didn't score, it was going to be the last. I had made up my mind about that even before Francine entered the picture.
From the moment I rang the doorbell, though. I knew this evening was going to go well. She greeted me with a kiss, a real kiss. In my vocabulary kisses aren't real unless they're open-mouthed. But Flo gave me three inches of warm tongue and I knew I was in like Flynn.
I peeled myself away from her and said, "All set to go?"
"As set as set can be."
"The chariot awaits," I told her.
There was a cab running up time in front of the house. We clambered in, and off we went to a place called Dominick's, which manages to be elegant and solid at the same time, with the best charcoal-broiled steaks on the East Coast.
Flo looked highly ornamental. She was wearing a bright red dress that went well with her jet-black hair. Her skin was very pale, and plenty of it was showing above the double-U of her dress. I remembered those full, heavy breasts from last time, and my mouth watered slightly at the thought of getting the whole deal tonight.
We had cocktails.
We talked.
We talked about the stock market for a while, and when it bored me we shifted the topic of conversation to her job. Flo worked for an art gallery specializing in pre-Columbian statuary, a gallery that I had bought one or two little items from. She didn't know a hell of a lot about pre-Columbian statuary, but neither did most of the people who patronized the gallery, so everything was all right. And Flo could be very funny when she described the clientele.
We did away with steaks, polished off desert, and cleared out.
"You still in the mood to go to my place?" I asked cautiously.
"A hundred and three per cent."
"Away we go, then."
A taxi whisked us across town, an elevator whisked us upward, and I ushered Flor into my humble abode. She proceeded to kick off her shoes and make herself thoroughly at home, browsing through my library and putting a record on and exploring the knickknacks while I mixed the drinks.
It was going to be a perfectly standard bachelor-style evening. I could see that now.
Soft lights.
Soft music.
Drinks.
And then beddy-bye.
I had been working this routine for ten years now, and it hardly ever failed me. But it was starting to seem a little mechanical, a little dull. Everything going like clockwork. And a long procession of girls. I tried to remember the last year's assortment, but no faces came to mind. Just crotches. The image crossed my mind's eye a bunch of naked girls with eager legs and misty blurs where their faces should be.
Flo was about to join that entourage.
Mechanical as the routine is, there's always a certain excitement about undressing a girl for the first time. It's like reading somebody else's mail or listening in on a party line. You're about to become party to some one else's most intimate secrets. If she has freckles on her buttocks, you'll know. If she's built sideways instead of the usual way, you'll know that too. All barriers drop away. I find that exciting, all the time, even though somehow most of the girls turn out to be pretty much like all the others in the long run.
We had drinks.
We danced cheek to cheek.
We had some more drinks.
We mooned out on the terrace.
We listened to my Charlie Parker records.
We listened to some Stravinsky.
We opened a bottle of chianti.
We opened Flo's bra and put my hands inside.
We opened my clothes and put her hands inside.
We looked at each other and nodded.
And we reached the understanding that most people in our position eventually reach. We were going to ball. Flo was about to become Number Umpteen Hundred Sixty on my list, and I was about to become Number Twenty or so on hers.
A nice grown-up kind of evening.
I got the red dress off her, and the slip. I got her bra off, and the stockings, and the panties, and the garter belt. With each garment that I removed, some of her mystery vanished. The fun came in unwrapping the package, while she lay there smiling up at me as though this were her first time and she was all agog. Once I got the wrappings off, I made the usual unsurprising discovery that she was built like all the rest. She had breasts, two of them, big and nice, with one nipple for each breast. She had a navel. She had hips. She had buttocks, two of them. The part of her anatomy that was the main object of my desire looked like five hundred other such parts that I had seen. It wasn't on sideways, or even at a slant.
Still, she was a pretty picture, very pale white, with nipples of coral red, and a jet-black triangle for contrast down below. When I had finished undressing her, she started in on me.
I'm afraid there were no surprises for her, either. My organs were of the usual size and shape and number, and I had to admit she had to admit she had probably seen their like on numerous earlier occasions. If she was like every other red blooded American girl of her generation, she had probably lost her virginity somewhere around age seventeen. In the intervening eight years she had certainly been laid no less frequently than four times a year, and probably a lot more often than that. So I held no surprises for her.
The anatomy part was over.
But there was still the main event. And here was where the variation came in. Stripped down, most people are pretty much alike to the eye-but they don't perform the same way in bed. And therein lay the fascination of going to bed with a number of different people. To hear one girl say "Oooh" where another one would say "aha" has a charm of its own. It is interesting to sack out with slow-arousing girls who pose a challenge, and it is interesting to sack out with high-voltage types who fight up the moment you touch them below the belt. There are girls who prefer frontsies and girls who prefer backsies. And some who prefer mouthsies, for that matter.
For a girl, I guess there's plenty of opportunity for variety, too. The guy who lasts for hours, and the guy who goes off like a firecracker. The rough brute and the suave seducer. The limp-wristed type and the hairy-chested type.
Flo and I went about it in time-honored ways. There was a certain amount of Freud-approved foreplay. There was the employment of certain techniques or oral stimulation that are no doubt considered perverse in the more strait-laced parts of Iowa and Vermont. There was the proper amount of stroking of breasts and nibbling of thigs and squeezing of buttocks and such.
There were words, too. Flo was a talker.
Flo thought it behooved her to say things like, "That's the most wonderful feeling in the world, Jack," and "I've never experienced a thrill like that before," and then even-God help me-"Jack, darling, Jack, lover, Jack, Jack, oh, I love you, Jack, Jack."
She stretched back and made panting sounds as though she were in pain. I gave her a jiffy diagnosis and decided the problem was a cavity that needed filling. I filled it for her.
Without benefit of Novocaine.
She made a little soft sound as I slipped into place. Her body undulated, and she wriggled to accept as much of me as was anatomically possible. Words of love kept escaping her lips, so to save myself the embarrassment of having to listen I put my mouth over hers and inserted my tongue where it would do the most good.
Plugged at hither and thither, poor Flo had no choice but to go into ecstasies, which she did in a properly passionate way.
If I sound cold-blooded in describing all this, it's because I felt cold-blooded while I was doing ft. I kept thinking about how silly sex is, what an utterly foolish routine to make so much fuss about. The grinding of meat into meat-is that what makes the world go round? A petty shaking of the hips, a ramming of the pelvis? A shudder and a sob.
Sex sounds pretty horrible when you start dissecting it that way. And that was the sort of mood I was in. All manner of strange thoughts wandered through my mind while I industriously flogged away at Flo's receptive body.
In a funny way Flo was the beneficiary of all this. I was so far removed from what was going on that I felt hardly any sensation, and so I was under no compulsion to reach my climax. Instead, quite calmly, I carried on and on, a million miles away, and gave Flo the advantage of being able to reach any number of peaks.
Which she did.
The first couple seemed like phonies, but after that it was strictly the real thing, with teary eyes and all. I rode her with gusto. I probed the warm well of her body, wondering vaguely how many men had ploughed this pasture before me, and what she was going to tell her husband on her ultimate wedding night. I savored, in a detached way, the squeals of ecstasy that were escaping her from time to time.
And then boredom got the better of me. A. backscuttling mood came over me, and I came over her. I whisked myself free of her and tipped her over on her belly before she knew what was happening to her. "Jack, what are you-"
I leaned down on the soft rounds of her buttocks.
"-doing?"
I slid home.
She yelped, she squirmed and thrashed and tried to get free, but I held her down, and conquered her inch by grim inch. It was obvious that she had never done this before, and just as obvious that it horrified her to within an inch of her life. Which was, perhaps, where I reached.
"Get off me!" she shouted.
"Just-a-minute," I said. "You had your fun and now-let me have mine-
I grunted and gasped and wheezed. And the next moment there was the warm explosion inside me. I felt Flo go rigid.
I clung to her for a few minutes after it was over, pressing against her warm cozy buttocks while I caught my breath. Then I left her.
She turned over immediately and glared at me. "You lousy pervert!" she said
"Strong words, dearest."
"Is that the way you always treat girls?"
"It was the first time in years. A sudden inspiration, a passing whim."
She glowered. She was smoldering, furious. Maybe that was a routine she only indulged in on the sixth date. Or maybe her Mama had warned her never to let a boy do That to her. She hadn't enjoyed it, clearly.
She was looking around for her clothes.
I said, "Don't be angry, honeybun. After all, you might have gotten pregnant the other way."
"No," she said, starting to sob. "You think I'm a dope? You lousy pervert !"
"Please, baby. Don't be angry with me."
She had her bra back on, and was looking around for her panties. I got up and went to her, and gathered her in, and rubbed the satiny niceness of her bare buttocks, and whispered little soft words of apology to her. I could see that she was debating whether or not to forgive me for my perversity.
For a moment it looked like Yes. I put my mouth on hers and her lips started to open. Then she clamped them shut again, pried my hands off her buttocks, and said, "I'm getting out of here."
"Don't ruin a lovely friendship."
"You're the one who ruined it. Call a cab for me. Don't bother to take me home."
I watched her dress. But the mood of detachment stole over me again. I had offended her, and thereby done myself out of many interesting lays in the months to come, but I didn't even care.
To hell with her.
I had Francine, didn't I?
I bade Flo a chaste good night, thanked her for having been so cooperative-up to a point-and expressed the pious wish that she'd forgive me and allow me her favors once again. She scowled and walked out in a huff.
I found my address-book and inked out her name. A pity, but at least I had had some amusement from her tonight before the blowup.
I gathered the full ash trays and the empty bottles, and dumped them.
I got into bed.
I dreamed pleasant dreams of Francine.
CHAPTER SEVEN
For the next couple of days, I had nothing but dreams of Francine to see me through. I didn't hear from her again until Friday night, by which time steel had dropped, I was short a total of 500 shares, and I had made a good chunk of money, at least on paper, as a result of the tip Veeland had given me. It hadn't made any sense to sell steel short, but who was I to argue with results?
Francine called and said, "We'd like you to come over tonight, if you're free."
"For dinner?"
"No. It's Pierre's night off."
"Pierre?"
"The chef."
"Oh. I see. Okay, what time?"
"Eight-thirty, say?"
"How about the two of us having dinner together first?" I suggested.
She thought about it for a moment. "No," she said finally. "I can't. Martin would have to eat alone. He doesn't like that."
"Such loyalty. Touching."
"He calls the tune, Jack."
"So I gather. Okay. See you at half past eight, then. What's on the agenda for tonight, by the way? Am I going to be the main event again?"
"You'll see."
"Meaning what?"
"You'll see," she said. "Curiosity killed the cat, remember."
She blew me a kiss and hung up. Shrugging, I realized that I was up against a very calculating cookie. Francine didn't let herself get pushed around, and she didn't divulge a syllable more than she wanted to divulge. I had to admire that trait in her, even though it sometimes left me mystified-such as right now.
It was quarter past six. I dressed and had a light dinner at the Italian restaurant on my corner, strolled around in the pleasant Spring twilight for a while, and got into a cab in time to reach Veeland's Fifth Avenue triplex at the appointed hour.
Lloyd Robinson opened the door for me, and bowed with his standard graveyard brand of dignity. I nodded to him and walked in.
"The Master's in the library," Lloyd informed me.
He was paying me the high compliment of assuming that I knew my way around the twisting maze of corridors after just two visits. I didn't, but Lloyd had disappeared, and a trial-anderror process got me to the library before too long.
Veeland was holding court in his wheel chair. He was dressed in an elaborate brocade smoking jacket, and he was sipping cognac, and both Francine and Yvonne were with him, one seated at either side. Their get-up was a trifle startling. Both girls were wearing diaphanous, gauzy robes that made them look like two of the three Graces from Botticelli's painting. The robes were not precisely opaque, and I caught hints of swelling breasts here, flaring hips there, on both girls. Francine's auburn tresses were as impeccably coiffed as ever, but Yvonne had let down her long blonde hair to form loose, silky cascades that completely altered her appearance. The coarse, cheeky serving-wench expression had vanished from her face, and she looked downright ethereal with that glistening blonde hair tumbling to her shoulders that way.
Veeland favored me with his death-warmed-over smile and said, "So good to see you again, Thorne. Always a pleasure to have you here."
I looked him straight in the eye. "I'm glad to be here," I said.
I wasn't. I felt uncomfortable. The last time, he had turned me into a male whore for his amusement, and I still felt the humiliation of it. Instead of being a person of my own, I had been reduced to the rank of a clown, a juggler to entertain the Master. It had all happened effortlessly enough, but it rankled in me. I hoped he had enjoyed my performance, at least.
He offered me some cognac-not the special reserve, again-and we talked. The conversation didn't touch on the extraordinary performance he had had me stage last time. It was as though that was a closed chapter. No, he talked about the stock market, about the performance of steel in particular, and he beamed in pleasure, as though to reward me for being a good little disciple, when I told him that on his advice I had gone short 500 shares.
Then he indulged in what was obviously one of his favorite indoor sports-reminiscing about the Good Old Days on Wall Street, the days before the S.E.C. had spoiled all the fun. He told me about one particularly harrowing bear raid that he had been involved in back in '27 on one of the short-lived motor companies of the day.
"It was really skyrocketing for a while, you see, and everyone was making a pile. But then it started to slip as profits were taken." He sipped his cognac thoughtfully. "Between July and September, it dropped from 155 to 112. We decided to goose it along a little, so we got in there and sold short as hard as we could. You could do that, you know, back then-sell short in a declining market. Inside of a week the seven of us were short 60,000 shares and we had knocked the price down to 95. The general public got scared and figured the stock was going to fall right through the cellar, so they began selling too, dumping every share they had. On October 1st, it was 86. By the 15th, it was down to 63. We covered our short sale for a 59-point profit-three and a half million bucks. Then we turned right around and bought 100,000 shares at prices from 66 to 70. By November, the stock was selling over 100 again, and we sold out for another four million in profits. My share of the deal was just over one and a quarter million between September and November. And naturally I did the whole thing on margin. I only had to put up a few thousand dollars of my own money." He sighed. "They don't let you do things like that any more. They've taken all the joy out of trading in Wall Street."
"I don't know," I said. "It's still possible to make money. I'm the proof of that."
"But it's harder, my boy, ever so much harder. And duller. You can't control events. You simply have to outguess them. More cognac?"
"Please," I said.
He gestured, and Yvonne rose to fill my glass. Her breasts glinted interestingly within the gauzy robe, swaying heavily from side to side as she bent over my glass. Throughout this whole conversation the two girls had been sitting mutely, as though they were just ornamental statues the old man liked to surround himself with.
But they had a part to play in tonight's activities, and I soon discovered what it was.
Veeland said, "All this talk of the old days depresses me, I'm afraid. It reminds me of how old I am. Do you know that I'm seventy-four, Thorne? I might die any minute. Or live another twenty years. Old John D. Rockefeller-the first one-lived to be 98. I'm not as rich as he was, so maybe I'll go at 95. My father died when he was 91. And he was vigorous right to the end." He seemed to he rambling, talking without point. "I'm still pretty strong," he went on. "Just this damn stroke that paralyzed my legs, or I'd be out and around like a youngster. I can still cut the mustard, Thorne. Even if I need a little help now. I'm not so virile as I used to be, but there aren't many men my age who can carry on like I do. I had a baby when I was 61. A bastard. Never bad a legitimate child in my life, but at least twenty bastards. 61, Thorne. How's that for an old man? Maybe even had some kids since. I don't know. You never can tell."
He shook his head as if to clear it of the cobwebs of senility that were creeping in on him.
Then he looked at me strangely and said, "You ever see two girls humping, Thorne?"
And suddenly I realized what kind of entertainment he had planned for himself tonight.
I shot a startled glance at Yvonne and Francine, got no clues from their unreadable faces, and said vaguely, "Well, once when I was in Paris-"
"Quite a show, isn't it?" he cackled. "A real humdinger. I get a charge out of it, Thorne, a tremendous charge. Yvonne and Francine here, they've kindly consented to put on a little show for us tonight. I thought you'd be amused by it, A man of the world like you, Thorne, you must enjoy the finer things. A kindred spirit. We have a damned lot in common, boy. I wish I had met you twenty years ago, when I still bad my health. We could have gone all over the world together, living it up." He turned to Yvonne and Francine. "Open the couch," he said.
There was a couch facing us, and at his command Yvonne rose and unfolded it. It was one of those hide-abed things, and it expanded into a double bed, with sheets already on it. Veeland drew in his breath in anticipation. He beckoned to me, and I turned my chair around so that I was at his side, facing the couch.
"Go on," he said to the girls. "I'm waiting. Let's see some action."
I realized I was holding my breath tensely. Francine and Yvonne stood by the side of the bed, facing each other. They looked nervous and ill at ease. Francine reached out, caught the hem of Yvonne's gown, and started to lift it. Up over her shins and knees, then up to bare soft milk-white thighs. Up the gauzy gown rose, and I could now see the two heavy jutting mounds of Yvonne's breasts. Then the gown came over the girl's head, and Yvonne stood there in all her blonde nudity.
A faint blush spread over the upper part of her body. Her nipples were very red against the paleness the her breasts, and they were sticking up stiffly, swollen turrets jutting from the outcurving fleshy globes.
Yvonne now drew Francine's gown off, and both girls stood naked by the side of the bed. I compared them. Yvonne was chunkier, less elegant. Her breasts were bigger than Francine's, but they didn't have the same graceful lift. Her buttocks were fuller, too, and dimpled. Yvonne was a gloriously endowed girl, abundant and full, but there was no doubt that 100 judges out of 100 would pick the slimmer Francine as the more attractive woman. Francine was a thoroughbred. Mere mammary meat is not the be-all of beauty. Francine's breasts were not only of breathtaking size but of stunning shape. Yvonne had a peasant's breastiness about her, but by the time she was forty she'd be just a big-uddered, fat-buttocked slob.
The two girls hesitated a moment.
Then they moved close to one another and tumbled down in a heap on the bed.
I had been lying to Veeland: I had never seen two girls doing it before. Frankly, I hadn't even wanted to. I had been curious, of course, but not to the point where I actually wanted to spy. I knew that such things could be arranged for money, but I had better things to do with my money.
Now, though, I watched in cold fascination.
They were kissing each other's breasts. First Yvonne put each of Francine's breasts to her lips, one at a time, tonguing the nipple, then drawing the breast into her mouth. I could see Yvonne's cheeks going hollow as she sucked at Francine's breasts. Mentally, I put myself in Yvonne's place, and my heart began to beat faster, color started to come to my cheeks.
Then it was Francine caressing Yvonne's breasts, while Yvonne's hands wandered to the nether regions of Francine's lovely body, capering over buttocks and thighs. Sweat was making both girls' skin look shiny now.
They squirmed on the bed. Yvonne had her knee between Francine's thighs, and Francine was pumping back and forth in obvious excitement. They had their lips pressed together, and though I wasn't able to tell, I was certain that tongue was touching tongue. Yvonne's heavy breasts were pressed nipple to nipple against Francine's.
They were going about this like experts. They knew just how to arouse each other.
They had obviously done this plenty of times past.
It was strange to watch. I was developing a full set of emotional entanglements with Francine-call it love if you like-and it was weird to watch the girl who meant most to me in the world writhing and panting in the arms of a voluptuous blonde.
I glanced to my left Veeland was breathing hard, and his gaze was fixed and glassy.
I looked back at the girls. They had shifted position again, 180 degrees. Now they were pointing in opposite directions on the bed, which made it neatly possible for them to do what dykes do to one another, both at the same time. I saw Yvonne bright and sweaty as she brought her mouth down over the V of Francine's loins, and up at the other end of the bed Francine was providing the same favor for the busty blonde.
I won't try to reproduce the sounds that the two of them produced. All I know is that it was disgusting, revolting, and yet, at the same time, strangely exciting, one of the most searingly erotic things I had ever witnessed in my life. The girls' bodies were bent, making the flesh of their buttocks pull taut, and the sight of those curving buttocks and those burrowing lips aroused me to a fury of lust. Legs were waving in the air as excitement grew in them. Francine was completely hidden now, or almost so; I could see her auburn hair down near Yvonne's ankles, and her legs waving beyond Yvonne's blonde locks, but the entire middle part of her body was hidden under Yvonne.
Then they switched over, and it was Yvonne who was on the bottom. I watched Francine crawl down Yvonne's body, breasts downward, stopping when she reached the maid's midsection. , Yvonne trembled in pleasure.
Veeland breathed more hoarsely.
I clenched my teeth and watched despite myself.
Time came for another shift of position. Now they were in the position of two heterosexual lovers, Francine on her back, Yvonne lying on top of her and thrusting with her hips, moving her body against Francine's.
I listened to the gasping sounds of pleasure coming from the girls on the bed.
Breasts flattened against straining, thrusting breasts. Pale white legs intertwined with tanned, tawny ones. Lips sought lips. Arms hugged soft flesh tight and close.
This wasn't any performance. They were enjoying what they were doing.
The sounds coming from Francine's throat were the same sort of sounds she had made at the height of her ecstasies with me. And I heard Yvonne gasping too, her breath coming in little bursts as ecstasy racked her.
For long minutes they clashed in amorous warfare on the bed, rolling over and over, pumping and thrusting and rubbing and squirming. Then Francine gave a long sobbing sound of completion, and a moment later Yvonne joined her, with a banshee wail of satisfaction that must have waked the dead twenty miles away.
It was over.
But what had ended was just the first act. The moment the two girls dropped against the pillow, slumped and wearied from their strenuous lovemaking, Veeland clapped his hands imperiously.
"Francine!" he called. "Come here. To me, Francine. Here!"
And she came to him.
She was obviously exhausted, but she got off the bed like an obedient pet, and came staggering over to where we sat. Her eyes were wild and her face was flushed, and her hair was disheveled. Sweat made her body gleam. I could see little red spots on her body where Yvonne's teeth had gently nicked her, on her breasts, her thighs, the base of her belly.
She looked like someone who had been drugged. She was breathing hard, her perfect breasts going up and down in steady rhythm.
Veeland looked like a madman. His eyes were even wilder than Francine's, and he seemed on fire with passion. He threw the lap-robe to the floor, and for one horrible moment I could see the upraised staff of his senile lust. Then Francine, moving like a zombie, came forward and clambered onto the wheel chair, lowering herself into place as she had done the other time.
Veeland sighed with pleasure.
I looked away. They were moving, already in the rhythm of it.
As for Yvonne, she hadn't budged. She lay on the bed, sprawled out on her back, panting from her exertions. I rose unsteadily from my chair, confused and bewildered by the intensity of the things I had witnessed.
Yvonne lifted her head. She smiled at me and beckoned me toward the bed.
"Come here, dearie," she whispered. "Let's have a go at it, shall we?"
Her heavy breasts swayed sensuously. She sat up and parted her legs, splitting them in a gesture of striking obscenity.
I was drawn to her as though by a magnet. I was caught up completely in the wild frenzy of the moment. Behind me, Veeland was making hoarse grunting sounds. I looked around and saw Francine still straddling him, her body moving in a steady rocking motion.
I looked back at the bed.
Yvonne was still beckoning to me.
I came toward her, my brain whirling. Yvonne smiled at me.
"That's it, dearie. A girl's fun to do it with, but there's still nothing like a man. Francine just got me warm. It's up to you to finish the job."
I kicked off my shoes.
I dropped down on the bed.
Yvonne's lips rose to meet mine. She kissed hard, tongue first, and I felt the pressure of her teeth en-circuling my lips, and I put my hands on her breasts, fingertips digging into the soft fleshy swells of them. The nipples pressed like pebbles into my palms.
She didn't need any preliminaries, I saw. She was on fire, in urgent need.
I felt her hand touching me.
Guiding me.
Her body rose. She made a hoarse moaning sound, and lifted her buttocks away from the mattress. Our bodies joined. And Yvonne went wild.
CHAPTER EIGHT
What words do you use to describe an absolutely unique experience? Fantastic? Fabulous?
No, those Madison Avenue words don't do justice to the situation. They pale. They shrivel before my recollection of what it was like to be topping Yvonne at that precise moment.
The best I can do is say that it was an absolutely unique experience, and let it go at that.
In a sense every climax is an absolutely unique experience. No two girls go about it the same way.
But Yvonne was unique beyond that kind of uniqueness. She went absolutely berserk. Ever see a frog twitch insanely when a live wire is touched to an important nerve? I felt as though I had rammed a live wire into Yvonne.
She squirmed. She writhed. She screamed. It was the banshee wail of half an hour ago with Francine, only raised to the fourth power.
She lifted her body and dropped it again, her buttocks drumming against the mattress. She quivered. She shook. She drew her breath in in a series of strangled-sounding gasps. She pounded her fists against my back, and dug her heels into the muscles of my calves, and bit down with murderous intent into my shoulder.
She throbbed and shook. She quaked and convulsed. I thought she was going clear out of her mind. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I reached my own miserable little climax, but she must have been too preoccupied to notice it, and to tell the truth I was so absorbed with what she was doing that I hardly noticed it myself.
The eruption continued even after I subsided. The whole thing lasted maybe eight or ten minutes, beginning the precise instant I joined her, and continuing with rising vigor until some inner restraint snapped and Yvonne went over the crest.
She made a tired little whooshing sound and stopped moving, all at once. It was as though the button had been pushed and she had shut off. She went limp beneath me, her head lolling. She was bushed, and no wonder. So was I. It had been exhausting just to cling to her while she was going through those gyrations.
She stroked my cheeks. "There's a good one," she murmured. "I like you. You know how to give a girl a good time."
I hefted her heavy breasts and felt the throbbing of her heart behind them. "Are you always this-strenuous?" I asked her.
"Lord, yes. I really have myself a good time, when I'm given the chance. Old Mr. Veeland, he sometimes uses me, but he doesn't get me worked up enough. Yon, now-oh, Lordie!"
She kissed me.
All over.
But I was by no means ready for more sport of the same description. I sat up and looked around, just in time to see Francine leaving the satisfied figure of Martin Veeland.
He certainly looked like a happy old bird. His eyes were closed, and his cheeks were rosy, and his head was lolling back against the frame of the wheel chair. He was wearing a goofy smile.
Francine walked to the doorway. I followed her with my eyes. Despite Yvonne and the show she had just put on for me, I was irresistibly excited by Francine. I stared at her, enjoying the trim line of her back and buttocks as she stood in the hallway talking to Lloyd Robinson, telling him to come collect the old man and put him to bed.
My throat was dry. The sight of Francine's nakedness hit me in a very special way. Yvonne noticed it, and I could see her frown a little, as though she couldn't understand why she wasn't as interesting to me as Francine.
Lloyd came in and wheeled Veeland out. Francine closed the library door and came padding softly over to the bed. I looked up at her. She was a poem in flesh, her breasts rising high and full. She was so beautiful I wanted to cry, it hurt that much to look at her.
Yvonne, lying at my side, said, "Well? How was he tonight?"
"Very energetic," Francine said.
"But not energetic enough, the old blighter! He survived it."
"Quiet, Yvonne."
"Oh, we might as well tell him," Yvonne said with a shrug. "He's okay."
Francine glanced warily at me. I wondered what they were talking about.
Then Francine sat down next to me, crossing her legs. I reached out automatically, putting my arm around her and resting my hand on the gentle round of her belly. So that Yvonne would not feel slighted, I curved the other hand over the bulging fullness of her breasts.
Francine said, "Can we trust you to keep your mouth shut, Jack?"
"About what?"
"About something that isn't exactly illegal, but certainly isn't kosher. And something that you stand to profit from very much. Along with the rest of us."
"Such as?" I asked.
Francine said, after studying me for a long moment of silence, "There's a conspiracy here in this house. Do you want to join it?"
"What kind of conspiracy?"
"To kill the old man," she said.
I sat op bolt upright, pulling my hands away from both of them. "Wait a sec," I snapped. "I don't want any part of murder, Francine."
"This isn't murder. It's killing."
"The distinction," I said, "seems a little too subtle for me to grasp."
Yvonne cut in. "She means we're trying to love him to death," she said with a cheerful laugh.
Francine nodded. "That's it We're hoping that hell get so excited that he'll have an attack and die. He's already had a serious heart attack, yon know. Not to mention his strokes."
"And we're all in his will," Yvonne said. "Even you, you know."
"Me?" I said, thunderstruck. "But he hasn't even known me a week. He-"
"He wrote a codicil on Thursday," Francine said. "He dictated it to Lloyd, and Yvonne and I witnessed it. He's cutting you in for one fifth of his estate."
I gasped. A fifth of his estate might be as much as a hundred million dollars, which would make the money I had sweated out of Wall Street look like a heap of nickels, and not a very big heap at that.
"Cutting me in? Why?"
"He likes you," Francine said. "He thinks of you as a son. And he needed a fifth person to cut into his will. Lloyd, Yvonne, Pierre, and I have each been in for twenty percent for years. There used to be a chauffeur, but after Martin had the stroke, he let the chauffeur go, gave him fifty thousand as a bonus, and cut him out of the will. Now yon came along, and Martin's giving you the chauffeur's cut The trouble is, he may live another twenty years, Just as he said tonight. And that's plenty of time for him to lose interest in all of us, and find new favorites. So we've got to make sure he doesn't last too much longer."
I blinked. I felt dazed. Things had been happening much too fast for me.
I was still a little shell-shocked from the effects of Yvonne's activities. Not to mention the little performance she and Francine had put on earlier.
Now Francine was telling me that I had suddenly become an heir to many millions. And that all I had to do to guarantee collecting it was to make myself an accomplice to murder.
I said slowly, "How long have you been trying to kill him?"
"Three months. It was Lloyd's idea," Francine said.
Trust that slab-jawed ghoul to come up with an idea like this, I thought.
"Why not just slip some arsenic into his brandy?" I suggested.
Francine shook her head. "There's always an autopsy when a man that rich dies. It can't be foul play of any kind. But if he gets overexcited during sex, how can they blame us? We can't force him to calm down, after all. If he insists on overstraining himself-"
"I see," I said coolly.
"That's why we've been staging these little shows for him. We encourage him. He's been much more active sexually in the last few months than before. He used to want me two or three times a month; now he's living it up a couple of times a week. And we do our best to excite him. We don't spare him at all."
"But he has the bad grace to go on living, is that it?" I said sarcastically.
Francine nodded. "He's a tough old bird."
"He's only 74," I pointed out. "It may take you nine or ten years to finish him off."
I looked at them with mingled horror and fascination. No wonder they were so eager to take part in perverted sex acts of all kinds. No wonder these two non-lesbian girls had been so energetic in hugging each other and kissing and dyking it up. They were all too willing to amuse the old man and hope to excite him into a fatal frenzy.
I felt sorry for old Veeland.
He didn't deserve this kind of treatment. Even though I stood to benefit by it, I regretted the idea of helping him to die. He was a survivor from an earlier Wall Street era, one of the last of the great speculators. To come to this kind of end, a finish plotted by money-hungry servants-no, it wasn't right.
But yet-
Half a billion dollars split five ways comes to quite a pile of dough.
And I could see their point of view. Five years from now, Veeland might have taken a new mistress, gotten himself a new maid. He liked them young, and in five years Francine would be 28. He might decide to start over with another 15-year-old. And cut Francine off with a piddling fifty grand, as he had done with the chauffeur.
So they wanted to get rid of him now, while the will still read the way they liked it to read.
They wouldn't outrightly murder him. They would just love him to death.
And I was invited in.
Francine said, "Will you cooperate?"
"How?" I asked.
"By encouraging him," she said. "Leading him on. Suggesting new pleasures to him. We have to be restrained, to do what he wants, never to suggest anything on our own. But you have a different status. You're not part of the household. You're his friend. Hell listen to your ideas. You ought to be able to dream up things that'll arouse his interest. We can get him really worked up, with your help. And then-bingo." She made a vivid face, corpse-like, tongue thrust out one corner of her mouth, to illustrate what she wanted to happen to old Veeland.
I ran my tongue around my lips. "You don't believe in letting nature take its course, huh?"
"We can't afford to," Francine answered. "Are you with us?"
"If I say no?" I said.
"Then we'll have to get along without you, that's all. But we'd rather have you with us than against us. It'll be simpler all around."
I thought that one over for a moment, and decided that nothing I could say or do would save Veeland from his fate, so I might as well go along.
"Okay," I said. "Count me in."
Both girls beamed at me.
Then they decided to show their gratitude in a more earthy way.
Before I met Francine, my love life was a comparatively simple thing, I might even say an unsophisticated thing. That is to say, I had had love, plenty of it, but none of the fancier twists such as I had been exposed to in the last few days. I was too busy making money and investing it to spend much time in the more fanciful regions of sex. I was content if, three or four times a week, I could persuade some reasonably attractive chick to climb into the sack with me for an hour or so of fun.
I certainly hadn't gone in for multiple excursions to pleasureville, or public shackups, or any other such frills and fancies.
In particular I had never been to bed with two girls at the same time. I wasn't even sure how such things were carried out, since I didn't think there were any men around who were anatomically equipped to service two females at the same time.
But now I found out how it was done.
Francine and Yvonne came swarming up over me. They operated as a slick team, and it was obvious that they had worked this particular gambit on more than one occasion in the not too distant past.
Quite suddenly they were both lying on top of me. Francine was curled up across my chest, with her lips plastered to mine. I put my hands on her breasts and held them. At the same moment I felt a delicious sensation further to the south, as Yvonne's active lips came into play.
I rose to the occasion.
I hefted Francine up high, and pulled Yvonne into place down yonder. Then I applied stimulation of one type at Point A and of another at Point B and enjoyed the delightful sensation of having not one but two palpitating wenches on me.
Yvonne started to go through her routine again. I let her get about halfway through it, and then, as deftly as though I had been practicing it for years, I slipped myself away from her and to Francine, while continuing Yvonne with my hand. Yvonne didn't appear to know the difference, so far as her reactions went, while Francine was oh, so appreciative.
It was a pity Veeland wasn't here to watch. If I have to say so myself, it was a truly masterly performance. There we were, the three of us twisting and tangling on the bed, and old Jack Thorne gliding in and out of warm femininity with a professional touch, I kept those two girls hopping.
The inevitable happened, and it happened to happen while I was attached to Francine. But by that time I had seen each girl through a cozy series of ecstastic responses and we were all pleasantly flushed.
They collapsed in a heap atop me. A breast was inches from my mouth-at that angle it looked like one of Francine's, but I couldn't be sure-and I kissed it. Francine giggled. I reached out, found two meaty buttocks within range, and clamped my fingers into them.
We-rested.
We rested until these two witches found their libidos risins again. Unfortunately, I was in no condition to satisfy them just then, having been through quite a lot already in the evening. So they did what seems obvious enough, and turned to each other again.
I lay at one side of the bed and watched them. It was an encore of their earlier performance, although not quite so passionate, because they had been through quite a lot during the evening too. But they squirmed and slithered around pleasantly, giving one another a fair share of entertainment And me, too.
As I watched them, my own virility reasserted itself, a Utile to my own surprise. I didn't know I had it in me. And a moment later I-didn't have it in me. Francine did.
Have you ever made a people sandwich? No, neither had I, not until that precise instant. But it came as a sudden happy inspiration.
Yvonne was on the bottom and Francine was stretched out on top of her, and the two of them were enjoying their mutual delight. I watched Francine's pretty pink buttocks rising and falling for a few moments, and then the inspiration for the people sandwich struck me.
I got with them. I flowered myself full length to Francine, who was face down with Yvonne. The bed groaned a little, but Yvonne only laughed in pleasure as my weight packed on her. And so, approaching from the south, as it were, I stormed the fortress. While Francine continued to rollick atop Yvonne.
A people sandwich.-
Lucky Francine.
We kept it up for a few minutes, and then Yvonne gave a mighty convulsive heave and wriggled out from underneath. She scrambled around to the side and flopped down on me as I lay with Francine. I felt Yvonne's soft breasts against my back, her belly on my buttocks, and by dint of some arm-twisting I slipped a hand up to her thighs and off the three of us went on a new round.
Oh, let me tell you, we rang the changes, all right. Our party went on merrilly for another half hour, long after anything meant anything. We were just scrabbling around for the sheer hell of it toward the end.
Gradually I began to lose interest. Or, to put it more accurately, I began to lose the capacity to continue. Enough becomes enough, even with two insatiable wenches like these. I wriggled free of them, clamped one hand on Francine's breasts and one hand on Yvonne's smooth bottom, emitted a sigh of complete content, and promptly fell asleep.
It didn't last. Half an hour of shut-eye and I was awake again. My overstrained nerves obviously weren't going to stop humming now. I was past the point of sleep.
I slipped out of the bed. Francine and Yvonne automatically closed ranks, sliding together and putting their arms around each other. But there was nothing sexual about it; they were just huddling together in sleep.
It was three in the morning. I found my clothes and got into them. The two girls slept, peaceful as babes. I tiptoed over to them and kissed them each. Francine smiled in her sleep. Yvonne made a purring sound.
I sighed. It had been an exhausting evening. I couldn't see how Martin Veeland stood a chance in the world of surviving the attentions of those two. Hell, it had almost killed me.
I stepped out into the hall, closing the library door behind me. As I did so, a figure emerged from another room down the way.
It was Lloyd Robinson, the cadaverous secretary.
"You all through?" he asked me.
"Damn right I am."
"Want to step in here for a second?"
I shrugged. What I wanted to do was to go home and get some rest, but another few minutes wouldn't kill me. I followed Lloyd into a room I hadn't seen before, a little cubbyhole with a desk and table, obviously the room he did his secretarying in.
"Drink?" he asked.
"Why not?"
He poured some rum into two glasses, handed me one. I studied him. He was certainly a sinister type, with those jagged cheekbones and beetling brows. He loomed up high above me, at least six-three or four.
"Did the girls explain the deal to you?" he asked, I nodded.
"And will you go along?"
"Yes," I said.
"Good. I'm glad to hear you'll play ball, Thorne. We can all stand to make a pile out of this. But we can't waste too much more time on the job."
"Why do you say that?" I asked.
Lloyd shrugged. "The slice of the pie may get thinner if we wait much longer."
"How come?"
He tossed me a letter. "Mr. Veelanci's buying himself a new girl friend," he said. "Read that and you'll understand the picture."
CHAPTER NINE
I unfolded it, and out popped a photograph. I looked at it. It was a glossy 3x5 color print, of a girl in a bikini. A lot of girl, and not very much bikini. She was naked except for two ridiculous strips of cloth, across breasts and loins.
She looked young. But well-endowed. Her face had the half-formed, inexperienced look of a teen-ager, with pouty lips and blank eyes and a mechanical grin. But there was nothing half-formed about her body Her waist was narrow, her hips wide, flaring, her legs strong but curvy. She seemed tremendously alive, tremendously vibrant and vigorous, from her curling golden hair down to her feet. She was holding a beach-ball, and laughing into the camera, and I could see rippling blue water behind her.
I put the photo aside and turned to the letter.
It was addressed to "Dear Martin," and it read like the kind of letter a caliph of Baghdad might have received from one of his harem talent scouts. The gist of it was that there was this girl-Lois Baker-down in St. Petersburg, fifteen years old and of remarkable beauty, as the picture testified. Her parents were dead and she lived with a grandfather, who was short of cash and not unwilling to make a deal. Lois was allegedly a virgin, but willing and eager to learn, and she understood fully the terms of the proposed deal. All Veeland had to do was send a certified check for $10,000 to the grandfather, and deposit $5000 more in a bank account in Lois' own name, and the undersigned, somebody named Nathanson, would have her on a plane bound for New York within the hour.
I looked up. "Who's this Nathanson?"
"One of the old man's pimps," Lloyd said. "He used to have dozens of them. Old Wall Street cronies who had run into hard times and needed to pick up an extra buck. Five years ago the old man cut most of them off the payroll because Francine served all his needs."
"Then how come this new deal?"
"Mr. Veeland was getting a little bored with Francine and Yvonne," Lloyd said. "He had me write to Nathanson to see what he could dig up. Nathanson's the one who sold him Francine, you see. The same kind of deal exactly, even the same age girl."
"And is Veeland buying this one?"
Instead of answering, Lloyd took two checks from his desk and showed them to me. A check for ten grand made out to Homer E. Baker, and one for five grand made out to Lois Baker. He looked grim.
"When does all this happen?" I asked.
"I've got to get the checks certified Monday morning when the banks open. They'll reach Florida on Tuesday, I guess. And we can expect Lois on our hands as of Thursday or thereabouts."
"Do Yvonne and Francine know?"
"Not yet. I didn't want to upset them until it was all definite. Mr. Veeland signed the checks just before you got here tonight. So it's definite now. I'll tell them in the morning."
I shrugged. "So it'll be a six-way cot instead of five way. What of it? You can't tell the difference between ninety million and a hundred million, can you?"
"That's not the point. If he takes a real fancy to this girl, he might cut Francine and Yvonne off. He's done that before, with other mistresses. I've been with him twelve years. There was a mistress before Francine, a gorgeous girl-she got shown the door with twenty grand the week after Francine arrived." Robinson shook his head. "But it's not only Francine and Yvonne who are in danger. It's you and me and Pierre too."
"How?"
"Suppose he takes a real fancy to this Lois. Enough of a fancy to marry her. And make her the sole heir to his whole pile."
"He didn't marry Francine when she came," I pointed out.
"That was seven years ago, and he was a healthy man for his age, then. Now he isn't. He might drop dead at any minute, and he knows it. Men in his position sometimes take it into their heads to do strange things. Like getting married. His last wife died thirty years ago. He might just feel like leaving a young widow behind."
"He wouldn't cut us off completely even so," I said.
"Maybe not. He'd leave us fifty thousand or so apiece, maybe."
"Or maybe a million. He's got plenty."
"What's a million if you can have ninety or a hundred million?" Lloyd asked me, and there was the naked light of greed in his eyes.
I didn't answer that. I looked down at the color photo and felt a tingle of lust run through my vitals. The kid Veeland was buying was quite a dish. Raw and unformed, maybe, but the potential was tremendous. Veeland might indeed do something rash under the spell of young Lois.
"What do you suggest?" I asked.
In a slow voice Lloyd said, "That we see to it that Lois reaches town just in time for the funeral. One way or the other."
I was in a bleak, depressed mood as I left the triplex, about four that morning, and headed for home. Part of my depression was sheer physical exhaustion: I had been through a marathon of sex that night, and it had left its mark on the state of my nervous system.
But there was a deeper reason for feeling troubled. Here it was Saturday, and I had virtually agreed to help see Martin Veeland into his grave, by fair means or foul, before next Thursday.
I had no reason to hate Veeland. I liked the old man, admired his shrewdness enormously, and had every desire to see him live to a hundred. Except for the trifling fact that I stood to inherit a goodly number of millions if he died with his will unchanged.
Maybe.
I bad only the words of the conspirators to assure me that I was in the will at all. For all I knew, they were snowing me to buy my cooperation-and then I'd find myself out in the cold when the will was read, without any way of striking back at them to collect my share. I didn't want to get involved in murder to make someone else rich, after all.
Well, that was an aspect of the situation I'd simply have to take on faith. I couldn't very well ask to be shown the will.
By the time I reached my apartment, I had arrived at one solution to my dilemma. The simplest thing to do, I reasoned, would be to get aboard a plane and head for Bermuda on a sudden "business trip." Then I could sit it out down there for the next week or ten days. If Veeland died on schedule, it would be without my help-but I'd collect my due share.
Then I decided that that was a coward's way out. You can't let yourself funk a deal like that. Either I cooperated wholeheartedly in doing the old guy in, or else I went straight to him and warned him of the danger-but just sitting on my hands and letting things happen ran counter to my whole philosophy.
I didn't know what to do.
I didn't want to be a murderer, or even an accomplice.
But I didn't want a hundred million dollars to slip through my hands, either.
When I got into bed, I lay tossing and turning for a long while, too fatigued and too keyed-up to sleep. I found myself working out rationalizations that would allow me to take part cheerily in the old man's undoing. I pointed out to myself that we wouldn't be "murdering" him in the sense of splitting his skull with a hatchet. We'd just be catering to his sexual whims, and no jury would convict us if it happened that he died of sheer joy.
I pointed out to myself that Veeland had already lived a long, full life, and wouldn't miss his remaining few years if we snuffed him out.
I pointed out to myself that I could use the money.
I pointed out to myself that with Veeland out of the way I would have Francine all to my own.
I pointed out to myself that Veeland was going to die anyway, naturally, in the next few years, and so why not help him to die now, when it would benefit me the most?
I worked out a whole collection of little arguments along this line, but I still wasn't convinced. It was a revelation to me to discover that I still had some scruples after all, that I was boggling at the idea of hastening the old codger's demise even though I stood to become rich beyond all dreams thereby.
I fell asleep still undecided.
When I woke, it was mid-afternoon and I had a headache, and the world didn't seem any simpler to me than it had when I hit the sack. A long, long shower solved nothing. Neither did a tall glass of orange juice. Neither did the shot of vodka that I added to the orange juice when I was halfway to the bottom. It was Saturday.
The loneliest night in the week.
I hadn't made any arrangements for the evening. Somehow, I had assumed I'd be spending it with Francine. But nothing along that line materialized. We had a don't-call-me-I'll-call-you relationship, and she didn't call. I didn't even know her phone number.
It was just as well that I had slept away half the day. The stock market isn't open on Saturdays any more, and I would have spent the whole day chewing my nails and methodically lowering the level in the vodka bottle if I had been awake.
I waited around the apartment until almost seven. No call from Francine.
Feeling miserably alone and pretty confused about things, I dressed to go out for dinner. I hate having dinner alone. But nobody, not even a well-heeled, highly eligible bachelor like myself, can scrape up a worthwhile Saturday night date at seven o'clock on Saturday night. Nobody but the dogs can be had so late in the day, and I didn't much want a dog.
The idea of having a posh meal all alone depressed me even further. So I went out to a modest little hash joint on Second Avenue and had my first $1.75 dinner since striking it rich. Then I went for a walk. The mild weather was holding.
I let my feet take me where they wanted to, and they took me westward, toward Fifth Avenue, and northward, toward the Veeland apartment. It was a walk of a couple of miles, and I didn't seriously intend to walk all the way up there, but before I knew it I was at 75th and Fifth, and it was just a brief hike the rest of the way.
Could I just drop in unannounced?
I was a "friend" of the old man's, Francine had said. But how far did friendship extend?
I was torn. I wanted to go up there and see Francine, hold her in my arms, caress her lovely breasts. But I didn't want to go back and help murder the old man some more.
I stopped dead on 76th Street.
I struggled with myself, debating whether to go up there or not. And decided against it. It was cowardice, I guess: I was hoping not to have to be around when they finally did the old man in.
Swinging around, I began walking back down Fifth Avenue at a fast clip. I wasn't pleased with my decision, because I knew it represented a backing-down. But I couldn't help myself.
The loneliness closed in again as I crossed 72nd Street heading southward. I felt as though New York were a desert island tonight, and I was roaming it in total solitude. I couldn't bear the idea of spending the rest of the night this way.
So I was forced to a last resort. I did what the well-heeled young New Yorker will do when he finds himself at a loose end for company.
I went to one of the public phone booths on the corner of 72nd and Madison, and called me a call girl.
Her name was Cheri. At least, that's what she called herself. I had made use of her twice before, both on similar hung-up occasions, not recently. I put a dime in the slot and rang her up.
I didn't talk to her, of course. She was out making her rounds. I dialed her answering service instead, and was greeted with professional crispness, and said, "I'd like to leave a message for Cheri."
"Yes, sir?"
"Tell her that Jack Thorne would like to see her, at any time that's convenient between now and, oh, three in the morning." I gave my address, in case she had misplaced it, and headed for home.
The way the system works, the call girl phones her answering service a couple of times a night, and picks up the address of her next few clients. Then she scoots around town in cabs to make her rounds. Most of her business is done in a fairly narrow geographical area, anyway-bounded by 44th street, on the south, 72nd Street on the north, the East River on the east, and Fifth Avenue on the west. I was smack in the middle of that area.
I fixed a pitcher of martinis, sampled one, paid a few bills, and killed some time in front of the television set. Then, at twenty past eleven-two and a half hours after I had placed the call-there was a buzz at the door and there stood Cheri.
"Hi, Jack!" she chortled.
I kissed her. "You look more beautiful than ever, my sweet."
She stepped inside. She did look beautiful. Not Francine-type beauty, but not far from it. Blonde hair, done up in an elegant beehive that somehow withstood the night's tousling. Fine, delicate features. A good body, lean but stacked. Live, alert eyes sparking with intelligence-Cheri told me she was a Radcliffe girl, and I believed her. And beautiful clothes. She also told me that she spent upward of $5,000 a year on her wardrobe, and I believed that too.
We got the unpleasantness over with right at the outset. I handed her an envelope containing two fifty-dollar bills, and she popped it into her purse discreetly, without opening it Then I said, "How long can you stay here?"
"You're my last stop tonight," she said, flashing the dazzling smile. "Though if you don't mind I'll check my answering service in about an hour. If nothing turns up, I'll stay the night. Okay?"
"I'm not arguing," I said.
Cheri's rate system is very simple. She gets a hundred bucks a throw, flat rate, and undertakes to deliver at least an hour's cuddling for that price, more on a slow night. She isn't mercenary. She never lets herself earn more than $500 a night, and the fifth John of the night gets as much of her time as he wants. I gathered that I was the third or fourth of the night; she was interested in taking on one more client before calling it quites, but she wasn't too terribly interested if nobody wanted her.
Her gross income is on the order of $100,000 a year, all of it untaxed. But the overhead is substantial-a pile of dough for clothes, a daily visit to the beauty parlor, upkeep of an expensive apartment for entertaining special guests, an abortion or two every year, and stuff like that. Even so, she probably had sixty or seventy thou left after all expenses, and this she salted away in blue-chip investments against the day, eight or ten years from now, when she no longer looked quite so dazzling and no longer commanded the same rate. Nothing's sadder than a call girl who has to turn into a common tramp. Cheri wouldn't have that fate. She'd retire and clip coupons at the age of 35, and, like many of her tribe, would probably marry some wealthy playboy type who might even have been one of her clients.
We didn't rush. I poured her a martini, had one myself, and we settled down-fully dressed-on the couch. And talked about the stock market. Cheri wanted some advice about her stocks. She owned some utility stocks in which she had big paper profits, and she was thinking of cashing in and switching to a real estate company. What did I think of the idea? I thought the idea was fine, and told her so. "Real estate's a big thing now, and that's one of the best-managed companies. You won't go wrong taking those profits."
"Thanks, Jack. Tell you what-if your advice turns out okay, I'll go away with you for a weekend. On the house. Deal?"
"Sure," I said. "Deal. Kiss?"
"Kiss," she said.
She turned to me with open mouth.
The secret of Cheri's success is that there's nothing commercialized about her techniques. Every time she makes love to a client, she gives him the impression that it's the real thing, that she's passionately, desperately, madly in love with him and only him.
That was the way she kissed me now, with a swoop of tongue and an arch of back. I opened her bolero jacket and unbuttoned her blouse and found the proud hills of her boobs, and played with them in pleasant ways.
We kissed for a long while. Then we graduated to more grown-up games. Then we undressed. Cheri travels light-she does without things like slips and panties and brassieres, since her body doesn't need support and such odds and ends only get in the way of romance-and in a moment or two I had skinned all the clothes off her, and there she was, lean and supple and breasty and naked on the couch, helping me get down to cases in turn.
Cheri's body was admirable. Wide at the shoulder, stunningly waspish at the waist, wide at the hip. Her breasts were not large, but they were high and firm and sweet to the touch. Her skin was like velvet, thanks to those daily visits to the beauty salons. Every imperfection was pumiced away, and she was a creature without blemish. As I looked down at her, I had no way of telling that she had been in the carnal embrace of two or three other guys already this evening. She looked as fresh and unspoiled as a virgin, though considerably more eager.
She reached for me and gathered me in.
I snuggled against the warmth of her, tonguing those fine breasts, enjoying the fragrance of her. Cheri differed from most of her profession in that generally she enjoyed her work. Give her a client with a halfway competent approach to the job of making love, and she would respond with gorgeous unfaked peaks every time.
As sfie responded now.
We kissed and petted for a while, and then she opened for me, like a flower opening its petals to the sun, and I admired the exquisite beauty of that particular flower, which was indeed a flower among flowers, and then I slipped to her and immediately felt very much less lonely.
She gave me of her well-developed best. Because she knew I appreciated such things, she went through her whole repertoire, creating some delightful effects. Together, with a sense of artistic accomplishment, we built toward the climax, and when it happened my hands were full of her tender buttocks and her lips were pressed tight to mine and our breaths mingled in shared ecstasy, and it was so nice that it didn't even seem as though I was paying for it.
I felt calm and relaxed. Still with her, bounded by her thighs, I pillowed against her breasts and rested, and she stroked my hair gently, and now and then gave me a little tickling quiver with those fabulous muscles.
She brushed my cheek with her long golden eyelashes.
My desires started to return, ten minutes after the conclusion of the first round. Then the phone rang.
My first notion was to let it go on ringing. Wouldn't you, if you're lying in the arms of a golden goddess of sex and are about to start another toboggan-ride down that wonderful slippery slope?
But then I thought it was Francine who might be (ailing, and my whole frame of mind changed.
"Excuse me a sec," I said regretfully, and slipped free of Cheri. With an over-the-shoulder smile at the pink-and-gold nakedness of her as she lay sprawled in delectable spread-legged abandon on the bed, I went outside and picked up the hall extension, "Jack? This is Francine."
"Hello. What's-"
"You've got to come right over here, Jack. Right this minute."
"What happened?"
"Nothing, yet. But get right in a cab."
"What's going on?"
"It's Lloyd. He's going to murder Mr. Veeland. Actually murder him. You've got to come stop him or we'll all go to the chair!"
I scowled into the phone. "All right," I said. "I'll be right over. I'm on my way."
CHAPTER TEN
It was my lousy luck to be called out on an emergency just when I had the delightful services of Cheri for all night.
But I didn't try to find excuses for not going. I put down the phone and went back into the bedroom and said, "Rough break. I've got to go."
"Your grandmother die or something?"
"I've got to go to the bedside of a sick friend," I said. "It's sort of an emergency. I'm sorry about this, Cheri, but-"
"You're sorry? You're not the only one. Do you have to go?" she purred, stretching out her arms toward me. .
I eyed her round, swaying breasts and satiny thighs, and there was a dryness in my throat. It would be oh so easy to decide not to go, and to fling myself down onto Cheri's perfumed charms in gleeful abandon.
But I couldn't.
Francine had asked me to come. I couldn't let Francine down. Anyone else, yes. Francine, no.
I shook my head sadly and said, "Sorry. I've got to go, Cheri."
"Should I wait here for you to come back?"
Another temptation. But I said, "You'd better not. I might be away for hours."
She looked at me with a trace of suspicion in her big blue eyes, but didn't say anything. Resignedly, she climbed out of bed and went into the bathroom to tidy herself up, while I got dressed. She came padding out a few minutes later and looked around for her clothes. I walked over to her, lightly caressed her saucy buttocks, then took each of her breasts in one hand, holding them so that the nipples protruded between my fingers. I gently kissed each rosy little turret.
"Some other time, Cheri," I told her.
"Sure. You know I'm always glad to see you. You don't have to pay me, Jack. I'll take it out in market tips."
We laughed, and then she got dressed, and it was like a cloud passing across the sun when she pulled her dress up over her slim nakedness. Then we left. It was less than fifteen minutes since Francine had called-about two in the morning now.
Finding cabs in Manhattan at two in the morning is less of a problem than someone from out of town might think. I put Cheri aboard one cab, clambered into another myself, and headed for Fifth Avenue.
On the way over it occurred to me that T was doing a damned foolish thing. If the murder had already taken place, I wouldn't be serving any purpose by showing np on the scene of the crime. And if Lloyd did the old man in after I got there, I'd needlessly make myself an accomplice before the fact. Any sane person would have nuzzled back into the bed and into the fair Cheri, and to hell with rescue trips in the middle of the night.
But I wasn't sane, not where Francine was concerned. And, having already sent Cheri on her way, I figured I might as well see what I could do about saving the old man from a bludgeoning.
The cab pulled up out front. I tossed the cabbie a couple of wadded bills and ran into the building. The elevator operator smiled knowingly at me. I was getting to be a familiar sight around here. He took me upstairs without my asking, and let me out on the bottommost of Veeland's three floors.
I rang.
I waited for what seemed like an uncomfortably long time. Then I heard footsteps, and a moment later the door was thrown open and I was looking at Francine.
She was wearing a transparent pink shortie nightgown, minus the panties that usually go with such outfits. The top alone came down to mid-hip, and the effect was outrageously erotic.
"Am I too late?" I asked.
"Not yet. Thank God you came, though. I don't know how much longer Yvonne and I could hold them off"
"What's been going on?"
"Loyld and Pierre were drinking all evening. They decided to kill the old man. You heard about the new girl who's coming?"
"Lloyd told me last night."
"We were talking about it all day. The two of them decided there was no longer any time to waste."
We were hurrying through the halls toward the old man's bedroom. As we entered his wing of the apartment, a strange sight came into view:
Yvonne, stark bare naked, holding a kitchen knife at least a foot long in her hand. She had her back to the door that led to Veeland's bedroom suite. And she was holding both Robinson and the little chef, Pierre, at bay, making a jabbing motion every time they drew near her.
It was fantastic to behold-this big, bosomy blonde, every square inch of her pink skin showing. Her hair was in a net, and she looked as though she had been getting ready for sleep when trouble started. Pierre and Lloyd were scowling at her, circling round and round trying to slip through her guard. I saw their scowls deepen as they noticed me. There was a long slash on Pierre's forearm, shallow but bloody, that told of an apparent thwarted attempt to get past her.
"What the hell's going on here?" I said in a low voice.
Lloyd glowered at me, then pointed at the bedroom. "He's in there asleep. We've got to finish him off, right away!"
"You out of your minds?" I asked.
"When that girl gets here, it'll be the end for all of us," Lloyd said hoarsely. "Mr. Veeland's been talking about her all day. He can't wait He's having his banker in Florida deliver the checks first thing in the morning, and the girl will be on the noon jet north."
"And where do you expect to get by killing him?" I asked. "You can't spend your millions in Sing Sing, Robinson."
"Don't worry," he said with a cocky, drunken grin. "We've got it all figured out, Pierre and me."
"How?"
"Well force him to write a suicide note. And then to take a dozen of his heart pills. The stimulation will kill him, and who's to know it was a forced suicide?"
"Why should he commit suicide, though?" I asked. "With a brand new mistress on the way, does it make sense for a man to kill himself?"
"Yes," Lloyd said. "The gimmick is that he's afraid of proving impotent when the girl arrives. To spare himself the humiliation, he kills himself. Only this blonde witch won't let us in to his room. It's foolproof, Thorne. You see that, don't you? You'll tell her to step aside, won't you?"
I looked at Yvonne, knife held high, big breasts rising and falling proudly. "No," I said. "I won't"
"Damn you, Thorne-"
"Get to bed," I told him. "When you sober up you'll see what a cockeyed idea all this is. Go on-get to bed, Robinson."
He looked daggers at me.
Then he came plunging forward.
He was big, and he was agile, but he was also very drunk. He aimed a wild swing at my head, missed, and I cracked my first punch into his chest right over the breastbone. He sagged and made a little coughing sound, and I hit him again, my fist sinking deep into his belly. He doubled up and spun away from me, and I hit him a third time, a glancing shot on the side of his ribcage near his heart.
He folded and dropped heavily to the carpet, yellowish oozing vomit coming from his mouth.
I looked around. Pierre was trying to jump Yvonne, but the little Frenchman was a foot shorter than she was, and it was like a dog trying to leap a bear. One of his stubby hands was clutching the heavy mound of her breast, and he was reaching high for the knife, which Yvonne was holding in the air.
"Let go of my bosom," she was saying. "You filthy little Frog bugger, let go of me or I'll cut your throat, so help me I will! Ow! He's hurting me! Get him away or I'll stab him, I will!"
I came up behind him and locked my forearm around his throat, squeezing inward until I felt his Adam's apple give. He made a glokking sound and let go of Yvonne. I dragged him back a few steps. I didn't want to hurt him-he was too good a chef for that-but I had to show him who was boss. I strangled him gently until his knees went out from under him, and then I lowered him to the carpet next to Lloyd. The two of them made little moaning sounds.
I looked at Yvonne. She was inspecting her left breast worriedly, prodding the great swell of it gingerly with her fingertips.
"You all right?" I asked.
"More or less. Little bugger kept squeezing and squeezing-" She grimaced, brandished the knife at him. "You lousy frog, I ought to cut 'em right off you! Serve you a lesson!"
"Shh!" Francine broke in suddenly.
"What is it?"
"Mr. Veeland! He's up!"
Sure enough, sounds were coming from the master bedroom. Veeland was calling sleepily.
Francine ordered everyone to be quiet, then tiptoed in, leaving the door open. I heard Veeland say, in a hollow voice, "What's all the noise out there?"
"Nothing important, Martin. We're having a little party and it must have gotten a bit too lively. Jack's here."
"Jack? Jack Thorne?"
"Yes. He came over a little while ago."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"You were sleeping so soundly."
"Get me up. By all means, get me up!" Veeland ordered her. "You know I like him. Take me out to him."
We had to do something to cover up. I gestured brusquely with my hand, telling Robinson and Pierre to get themselves out of sight fast. All the murderousness had been knocked out of them, and they rose to their feet and went slinking away, looking at me ruefully. I told Yvonne to put the knife away, and she headed for the kitchen, her bare buttocks jiggling pleasantly as she walked.
A few moments later, Francine-still clad in her skimpy nightie-emerged from the bedroom, wheeling a pajamaed Veeland.
He held out his hand to me. "Thorne! So you came without telling me, eh?"
"It was my idea," Francine said quickly. "I felt Eke having company."
Veeland beamed. He dry-washed his hands and said, "Good, good. I wasn't sleepy anyway. Well have a party. The four of us, Thorne. Did they tell you? A delectable young girl, fifteen, a virgin. Coming from Florida to join us. We can have such interesting times, that way. But tonight it will be just the four of us."
Francine said, "We had a party last night, Martin. Do you think-another one so soon-"
I shot her a bewildered glance. Had she changed her strategy? Why warn him against over extending himself, if the idea was to sex him to death.
But she winked at me. And Veeland said, "Don't tell me how often I can enjoy myself, Francine! H I'm in the mood, you can't stop me!"
I understood. She had just been using reverse psychology-warning him to take it easy, knowing that it would spur him on to greater exertions.
The four of us went into the library, Yvonne naked, Francine wearing the shortie nightgown that made her look nuder than naked. Veeland called for brandy, and Yvonne scuttled away to get him some. She returned with four snifters and a bottle. She poured his drink first, and as she handed it to him his withered claw snaked around her body, cupping the buttocks, slipping to her legs. She stood by, patient as a statue, while he caressed her, the long bony fingers closing now on a nipple, now on a plump handful of buttock.
His face was an unreadable mask. He was smiling, but it was a far-off smile. I wondered how much he knew about the plan to kill him.
He said, "Bend over, my child."
Yvonne bent, and he took first one breast, then the other to his lips while grasping the firm flesh of her buttocks. He drew her down onto his lap. I wondered how his frail bones could support voluptuous, big-bodied Yvonne, who must have weighed at least one-forty and maybe more. But he bore her weight with ease.
Francine and I stood by, ignored, as Veeland played with the maid. And forced her to play with him. Any revulsion Yvonne may have felt was skillfully concealed, as she bent over him, paying him the homage he desired.
But displeasure grew on his face.
He did not respond to Yvonne's expert ministrations, and he began to realize that he was no longer young enough to make love on two successive nights. He looked around at us, and, with an impatient gesture of his hand, said to me, "Embrace her. Amuse her. Get out of your clothes, Thorne! Embrace her!"
So once again I was reduced to a jackal's role. But I couldn't argue. Quickly, I got out of my clothes, and, naked, drew Francine's warmth against me. The hard points of her breasts were hot and sharp against me, and she put her thighs to mine, her lips to mine, her body to mine.
But Veeland wasn't getting anywhere. Yvonne continued to work at him, but his scowl grew deeper.
He ordered us around like slaves, telling us what positions to assume, what to do. Nothing seemed to arouse his flagging desires.
It was eerie, to be doing things at another's command. I tost all sense of making love to Francine. I was just a puppet, going through a prescribed routine of thrusts and jabs as another pulled the strings. Francine was the same, as was Yvonne.
Three puppets.
Three slaves.
"Maybe you'd be better off going back to bed and resting," Francine said sweetly but devilishly. "Perhaps tomorrow you'll be more-"
"No!" he snapped. "I know what you're thinking, but I won't let you put me on the shelf, Francine. Not yet! There's plenty of life in me still." He was breathing hard, but from anger, not from arousal. "I'll show you. I'm just a little tired tonight, but another few minutes-" He paused, then said, "Get dressed, Francine. Undress for me. Go on. Hurry, girl!"
She shot a glance at me, shrugged and went out of the room. There was a temporary respite. Yvonne climbed down from the old man's lap, and took a seat casually on the ottoman near him. I looked at her nakedness and my body throbbed with want. had no trouble feeling desire, even though I had made love once already this evening, with Cheri, and who knew how many times the night before. But I was young, and ready to go a dozen times a week, while Veeland was old, and that made all the difference.
Francine returned.
She was fully dressed, wearing an elaborate, costly gown. She looked radiantly beautiful. Motioning to me to one side, she came up to Veeland and curtsied in front of him, the bow displaying her full, firm breasts.
Partial nudity is often more exciting than the complete thing. And that was what Veeland was trying now.
He ordered Francine to strip.
She took off her clothes with the grace and skill of a professional stripper, with the nude Yvonne helping her. I watched, my desires becoming more powerful with each moment, until I ached and throbbed mercilessly and longed for a chance to bury my sword in either Francine or Yvonne and satisfy the lusts that raged in me.
But I had to wait, wait for Veeland.
Off came Francine's gown. Underneath, she wore a slip, then a totally superfluous corset. Off they came, while she slyly made eyes at Veeland, danced closer to him, tempting him, then moved away.
Now she was down to a bra, a strapless that thrust the magnificent globes of her breasts up almost to her chin, and panties and a garter-belt.
She danced dazzingly, teasingly. Off came the bra, one cup at a time. First one dark nipple, then the other, perked out. She tossed the bra to one side. Clad in black garter-belt, panties, and long blue-black nylons, she moved toward Veeland again.
"Help me with my panties," she purred sensuously.
His eager, trembling hands reached out. The clawed fingers hooked into the waistband of the panties, drew them down. Down over ripe, lush hips, down past the shadowed eye of her navel, down, down until the first curling wisps of auburn were visible. Down, down, baring the upper rounds of her dimpled buttocks.
He drew the panties off her, and passed his hand over her soft thighs. She laughed gaily and drew back, still teasing him.
Watching, I was suffering agonies I had never known before. She was incredibly attractive this way, with the garter-belt cutting into her soft flesh and forming a kind of a frame for her swelling buttocks and inviting loins. The stockings, beginning a foot from her crotch, shaped the beauty of her thighs and calves. My throat was dry. Looking down, I was startled by the intensity of my need. Blood coursed through swollen distended veins.
But this show was not intended for me at all. I was incidental, and so far as Veeland was concerned I could stand here and throb all night, until he was ready to take his pleasure.
And he wasn't ready yet.
Francine twisted and undulated, showing him now her taut buttocks framed by the garter belt, now pivoting to wave her thighs and belly at him. Yvonne did her best, kneeling by the wheel chair, working over the old man with lips and fingers.
Nothing was happening. Age was paying its price. He had reached his limit, and until his batteries recharged he simply was unable to do anything.
I wondered how long it would be before he admitted the sad truth to himself. He seemed stubbornly inclined to make the three of us perform till doomsday, if necessary, before he would give up.
But gloom darkened his face. Francine's gyrations were having no effect on him, and neither were Yvonne's ministrations. Scowling, he dug his hands into Yvonne's soft flesh, and gazed moodily at Francine, and finally he said, in a hoarse, clotted voice, "All right. We're getting nowhere this way."
Francine straightened up, panting, sweat rolling down her breasts. She rubbed the palms of her hands along the tops of her stockings and said, "Shall I take you back to your bedroom, Martin?"
"No," he cried, and it was almost a scream of despair. "No, we aren't giving up yet. Yvonne-get me the whip, Yvonne. The whip!"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Yvonne slipped from the room. Veeland leaned back in his wheel chair, closing his eyes. I stared blankly at Francine. What the hell was this, I wondered? A whip? What next?
Francine wore a Mona Lisa smile. She leaned against a bookshelf, arms folded across her bare breasts. Her eyes looked dreamy and far-away.
Moments later, Yvonne returned.
With the whip.
It was short and stubby-a thick handle, about eighteen inches long, and three feet of what looked like cowhide attached to it I held the thick butt in my hand, letting the whip dangle loosely.
Veeland opened his eyes. "Go ahead." he said. "Use the whip on Francine."
I moistened my lips. "Listen, Mr. Veeland maybe we'd better call it quits right here. I have to draw the line at-"
"Use the whip on me, Jack," Francine said in a remote, strange voice.
She turned to me, her breasts rising and falling evenly, and stood with hands on her hips, legs slightly parted. The near-nakedness of her, hidden only by the stockings and garter-belt, inflamed me even more. Her eyes were on the staff of my desire, and she was smiling in that odd way.
"Go on," she whispered huskily. "Whip me! Beat me, Jack!"
Veeland nodded. "Don't be afraid of hurting her, Thorne. You won't do any permanent damage. And she enjoys being whipped. Both of them do. And I enjoy watching it. And you'll enjoy doing it, mark my words."
All eyes were on me, Veeland's beady, expectant ones, Yvonne's wide, excited ones, Francine's slitted, mysterious ones.
I hefted the whip.
I cracked it experimentally in the air.
I gave it what seemed like a professional flick of the wrist, and it exploded in the air like a firecracker. I flicked it again, getting the leverage of it, and the sound was even louder.
"Go on," Veeland murmured. "Now use it on her."
T looked at Francine. In a low voice I said, "Francine, I don't want to hurt you."
"Don't worry about me. Do as he wants. I won't die from it."
I lifted the whip.
She turned sideways, so that her profile was displayed both to me and to Veeland.
And then it began, naked man whipping near-naked girl, while Veeland watched eagerly.
I muffed the first shot. I chickened at the last moment and reined in my wrist, and the whip cracked harmlessly in the air inches from the outcurving swell of Francine's bare buttocks. Veeland hissed in annoyance, and Francine shook her head at me.
The second shot connected.
The whip shot out and curled itself lovingly around both cheeks of Francine's buttocks, and there was a loud cracking sound. As the whip fell back, I could see a livid white line spring up across her buttocks and rapidly turn an angry red. A muscle flickered in Francine's cheek, but otherwise she gave no indication that she was in pain.
"Again!" Veeland cried.
Reluctantly, I swung the whip again. The thong cracked into her just where her buttock tapered into the upper part of her thigh. The blow swung her partway around, so that both her buttocks faced me, and with a swiftness that took even me by surprise, I whipped her again. This time it was a really savage blow, whicking up between her thighs to land on the most delicate part of her body. She cringed and staggered forward a few steps.
"Francine!" I cried.
"Hit me again!" she said hoarsely.
I brought the whip up. Determined to avoid another agonizer like the last one, I aimed higher, brought the lash down on her back. Again the blow spun her halfway around; I struck again, this time landing across her right breast, leaving a red mark just below the jutting nipple.
I looked at Veeland. His eyes were glassy, hynotically fixed on the scene. He was panting. He was getting aroused.
As for me, my passions were getting near the point of explosion. I had been under more or less continuous stimulation for the past hour, and I couldn't hold out much more.
Especially with this whipping thing going on.
Because I was discovering-to my own horror, shock, and revulsion-that I was getting a tremendous thrill out of bringing that whip down again and again on Francine's lovely body.
She was dancing to the tune of the whip, now. Her nylons were shredding to tatters as the whip landed on her calves, then on her thighs just above the knee. Another shot caught her across the belly, the tip of the lash snaking downward over her left hip. She whirled around and I put another line down the other side, making a big red X across her hips. A third shot took her at the V of her loins, and she whimpered in pain, but still managed, flush-faced, to smile at me and beckoning the whip on.
Sweat oiled her body, now.; I whipped her breasts twice, the second time laying the whip over the nipple. For the first time, I drew blood. Her eyes widened and she made a little hissing sound of mingled pleasure and pain. Turning, she presented her buttocks to me again, and I added new lines of red to the earlier ones, now beginning to fade.
She crouched, and I whipped her shoulders, whipped the back of her neck. I was terrified that I might put out one of her eyes as my frenzy grew. Round and round she turned, presenting each part of her body to me at a time, and I spared none.
Her flesh glowed ruddily with the marks of the whip.
Naked man whipping naked girl. High overhead rose my arm, and down, down came the cracking whip, across her shoulders, her breasts, her thighs, her buttocks, her legs, assaulting the sanctuary of her. At her ankles. Her calves. A whipslash ran rignt across her midsection, orbiting her navel.
I heard Veeland wheezing and choking behind me, going wild with passion now as the excitement took hold of him finally.
"The whip!" he cried. "Give me the whip!"
I was hesitant about handing it to him, because I was fully caught up in the madness of the moment and wanted to go on, wielding it myself, cutting and slashing and maiming and giving pain to the person I most loved in all the world. But he gestured impatiently, scowling at me.
"The whip, Thorne! I want the whip I"
"Give it to him," Francine whispered. I advanced toward him and handed him the whip, butt-end first. For a moment I thought he intended to whip me, but his fancies didn't extend in that direction, instead, he took Yvonne by the hand-she was standing next to his wheel chair-and thrust her forward
"On your knees!" he hissed at her. "Bend over! Thorne, hold her! She can't hold still when she gets whipped!"
I came forward. Yvonne had already assumed the position-down on her knees and the palms of her hands, with her buttocks, taut-stretched, upraised to face the man in the wheel chair.
At Veeland's direction, I stood so that her neck was locked between my knees. I reached down, clamping my hands over her heavy breasts, holding her tight.
Veeland raised the whip.
And brought it down.
He wielded it like a ringmaster. The cracking sound it made was as a hydrogen bomb, compared to the sounds I had been able to produce. A line of redness sprang up across the lush fullness of Yvonne's buttocks.
Again.
Yvonne quivered. I felt the reflex go shivering through her entire body, as she rocked and bucked against me and tried to move away. The whip lashed the other cheek this time, and she shuddered.
"Hold her, Thorne!" Veeland screamed. "Don't let her get loose!"
I held her.
The whip descended again, and she cried out in terrible agony and strained her considerable strength against mine. But I held her firm, squeezing her breasts tightly and planting my feet flat on the carpet.
Again.
Again an outcry ol pain and a shudder sweeping her body.
Veeland was like a maniac, now. He cracked the whip over her back, her buttocks, the backs of her thighs. He spared no exposed surface. He was flaying her. Droplets of blood stained the thong now. Her back and buttocks were crisscrossed with little cuts.
Tiring now of the thong, Veeland gathered it up and reversed the whip, using the butt. He slammed it against the quivering flesh of Yvonne's buttocks. I felt sick, sick with revulsion as I watched. But, though Yvonne was whimpering and crying out in pain, she had given up trying to break loose, and seemed to be thrusting her buttocks ever more eagerly toward the whip.
What was this strange magic of the whip, I wondered? What power had it had to make me enjoy whipping Francine so much? What power did it have to persuade these girls to give themselves willingly up to a murderous whipping? How could actions like these revive a sick old man's banked fires of lust?
I didn't know. I just held Yvonne and shivered with desire and waited until the old man's frenzies had reached the point where he could toss aside the whip.
That point was coming now.
Yvonne couldn't take much more. I was dreadfully afraid that in another moment he would shove her aside and call for Francine to be put under the whip-Francine who right now was leaning dazedly against the wall, recovering from the torments I had inflicted.
But no. Veeland was through whipping.
He was ready for love now.
He threw the whip to the floor and said, "Let her up, Thorne."
Yvonne got unsteadily to her feet. Her face and breasts were very pale, and she looked dizzy, dazed. Tenderly she put a hand to her buttocks.
Veeland beckoned to her. "To me, Yvonne! To mel Hurry!" he cried in a lust-thickened croak.
She nodded like a sleepwalker and turned, displaying her maimed and bloody back and buttocks to me aa she advanced to the wheel chair.
She scrambled into position on the old man's lap, and I heard his bestial gasp of pleasure as he finally was able to enjoy her.
I turned away.
Now, at last, I could satisfy my own desires, having done the job Veeland had required of me.
I turned to Francine and took her in my arms. "Did I hurt you?" I whispered. "I'll be all right."
"I didn't mean to hit you in some of those places, Francine. I got carried away."
"I understand I know how it can be."
"Forgive me?"
"There's nothing to forgive you for. You did what I wanted you to do Jack, I-I love you, do you know that? I love you very much."
"I love you, Francine," I whispered passionately, aware of the grotesque surroundings under which this declaration of love was being made.
Her body pressed against me She was warm from the whipping, her whole body flushed and I ran my hands over her whipped flesh, feeling the bruises and welts Thank God I hadn't made any cuts, at least I didn't want to mar the perfection of her body in any way.
Her lips went hungrily to mine. Her tongue was like a dart of fire leaping into my mouth. I cupped her breasts and gripped the rock-hard nipples. She pressed her body against me, grinding her naked loins against mine, inflaming me to fever pitch.
We relaxed for a moment before going on.
I said, "Does this happen often? With the whips, I mean?"
"This is the first time in months."
"Have you been whipped often?"
"No, usually it's Yvonne. Some of the times he had Lloyd whip me."
I scowled in murderous jealousy, realizing that if Lloyd had been allowed to crash whips down on Francine's naked body, Lloyd had also been allowed to penetrate her with the sword of his lusts, while Veeland looked on in amusement, just as he had looked on when I took her. For some reason the realization made me furious, though it should not have come as any surprise to me, knowing how things worked in this weird household.
"He gets a kick out of seeing people whipped, doesn't he?" I asked.
"Of course. And of whipping himself. Didn't you enjoy it when you whipped me?"
"In a strange, abnormal way-yes."
"It's not so strange. Every man enjoys whipping naked women. Every real man. And every real woman enjoys being whipped. Men who don't have the guts to whip a woman are usually swishes. And the only women who don't like a man to be really rough on them are dykes. Haven't you known that, Jack?"
"I never thought much about it."
"It's true," she said. "Kiss me again."
I didn't need a second invitation I kissed her, and squeezed her breasts, and drew her body against me, savoring the feel of it.
Then I led her to the couch.
She put her hand on me, stroking me tenderly, sympathizing with me for the pain I must be enduring in my over-stimulation. I bit down on my lip as her soft fingers tightened, and moved back and forth gently, slowly at first, then more rapidly.
Catching my breath, I said, "No-don't do that, Francine."
"Why not? Don't you enjoy it?"
"I enjoy it too much. I'm-very close to the finish, though. And I want it to be the real thing-with you-"
She smiled, understanding what I meant.
She turned to me, opened to me.
She drew me down.
I took her, driving deep to the center of her. Her body trembled with delight as I joined her.
I knew that I couldn't make it last long this time. I had been forced to experience too much in the last eighty minutes. I was on fire, and I couldn't hold back, couldn't go through the loving routine of foreplay that a woman should have.
But Francine was on fire too.
The whipping, her nakedness, the strip act-that had all served as foreplay for her. And so, the moment I took her, she responded with a quiver and a gasp and her body moved ecstatically against mine. I bore down, flattening her into the couch, nailing her against it, driving, driving hard, probing deep, and she arched her back, bending her body into a bow, making it easier for me, and I felt the flame of excitement, the blaze of it as I stirred her, and stirred again, and then my entire body shook with an uncontrollable spasm of delight, and there was the first jolt of fulfillment, and Francine trembling and matching me spasm for spasm, jolt for burning jolt, her body heaving and bucking, engulfing me in fire, rising as though to swallow not just one part but all of me, drinking me in, that inner mouth voracious, fantastically demanding, and I met all its demands.
The explosion hit us simultaneously.
We went rigid. We held tight.
Together we gyrated through the waltz of lust, the waltz that rapidly became a polka and then a wild, furious orgiastic dance.
Higher we mounted, and higher, and time seemed to stand still, so that our pleasures, which actually lasted no more than a handful of seconds, appeared to be enduring for hour upon hour.
I held my breath and felt blood flash before my eyes as I discharged the pent-up lusts of the evening into her willingly receptive body. She clutched me tight, nails raking the skin of my back, and whimpered, "Jack, Jack, darling, Jack-oh! Oh! OH!"
The a long wordless moaning sigh.
Then bliss.
I held her tight, pressing my lips to her breasts, covering her with kisses that were no longer kisses of passion but simply kisses of affection, which is an entirely different thing Now, for the first time in the last few minutes, I could take time to listen to what was happening elsewhere in the room.
Veeland and Yvonne were in the last throes of their ecstasies on the wheel chair.
I heard the familiar sounds of Yvonne's tumultuous fulfillment, and the revolting gasping croaks of Veeland's delight. I turned, looked over my shoulder, saw Yvonne jouncing around berserkly atop Veeland, while his withered knees did a demon's dance and his long fingers clutched the bloody whiteness of her back.
Then he made a different sound-a thick, rasping, choking sound, a sound that I had never heard him make before.
"Yvonne!" he cried.
Suddenly I saw Yvonne go tumbling back, head first, off his lap and onto the floor. At first I though something had happened to Yvonne, that she had fainted or even had a heart attack during the paroxysms of her pleasure. But, after landing heavily on her buttock with her legs sprawling in the air, she rolled over and started to get dazedly to her feet. Nothing was wrong with her.
It was the old man.
Veeland, unbelievably, had risen from his wheel chair He stood on bent knees, clawing at the air, his face livid, his lips working soundlessly. He seemed to be trying to lift one foot, to take a step forward.
Then he fell forward heavily.
Yvonne caught him, cushioning him against the softness of her nudity as he toppled. Frail as he was, the force of his body, falling as a dead weight, nearly knocked her over. She staggered, braced herself, propped him up, tried to ease him back toward the wheel chair.
I slipped free of Francine's body and we raced across the room to the wheel chair. I caught Yvonne and Veeland both, helping her support him. The old man looked like a statue, frozen solid.
"He's dead!" Yvonne cried wildly.
"No," Francine said, somehow calm in all the confusion. "He's still breathing. He isn't dead. He's had another stroke, though. I think he's paralyzed. But he isn't dead!"
CHAPTER TWELVE
Martin Veeland was alive. But just barely. His body was rigid, his eyes unblinking, glassy. Only the slow rise and fall of his ribcage told us that life still nickered in the frail body.
Yvonne was saying, "He seemed to be having a good time, right up till the end. Then he began making funny noises and thrashing around in the wheel chair. And all of a sudden, up he gets, dumps me right on my bum-I was so surprised I fell right off him! Imagine him standing up in that chair, and him paralyzed for so long!"
"Now he's paralyzed a lot worse," I said, as I carried him into the bedroom. Francine had gone to phone Veeland's doctor. Robinson and Pierre had appeared and were staring at him in a shifty-eyed, speculative way.
"You think hell live?" Lloyd asked me.
"Who knows?" I said.
Lloyd said, "If he doesn't-"
I put a finger to my lips. Turning my back on the rigid figure in the bed, I said in a low voice, "He may be paralyzed, but that doesn't mean he can't hear. Don't go shooting your mouth off in front of him. Why don't both of you just clear out?"
They took the hint. A moment later, Francine appeared, still naked except for the garter belt and for the tatters of nylons clinging to her legs. "I reached the doctor, "she said. "Hell be here in half an hour, maybe less. He says not to disturb him at all."
I nodded. "Okay. Let's start getting this place back to normal, then. The first thing is to hide that damned whip. Then get into some nightclothes. I don't want the doctor to find a bunch of bare women running around here when he comes."
Yvonne and Francine scurried off to find robes. They both looked worried about Veeland, which I found somehow paradoxical. They had both been scheming to kill him in just the way he had had his stroke-but now that they had what they wanted, or nearly, they both appeared depressed and remorseful.
I went back into the library and found my clothes. I got dressed, then went looking for the girls. I found them both in Yvonne's room. Francine was wearing a robe, but Yvonne was stretched out. nude on the bed, and Francine was sponging off the cuts the whip had made on her back and buttocks.
"Are you hurt badly?" I asked her.
She shrugged. "Just sliced up a bit Wouldn't want them to get infected. Might leave scars, and that wouldn't be so good, would it?"
"I don't suppose it would," I admitted, eyeing the lush valleys and hills of Yvonne's buttocks. A crazy impulse came over me-to put my lips to those two mounds of tempting meat and kiss the blood away from her cuts. But I fought the idea back. There had already been more than enough perversity in this house tonight.
Francine dabbed delicately at the cuts, which were shallow and not serious, but many in number. My eyes travelled from the naked Yvonne to Francine, slim and lovely in her robe, and I remembered the words of passion and love that we had exchanged at the height of our ecstasies, before the old man's stroke.
Had she meant what she said? Or had they just been words wrung from her lips by the excitement of the moment? I didn't know. I didn't even know if I had meant what I had told her. What did it mean, to say, "I love you," anyway? I had told plenty of girls I loved them, because it was expected of me. It was the false coin you had to pay if you wanted to get a girl into your bed. You didn't have to mean it; you almost never did. But now I had told Francine I loved her. No emotional bribes had been necessary to make love to her. That being the case, why had I said it? Out of guilt? Or because I really did love her-meaning that I couldn't live without her?
I said, "We'd better get our story straight before the doctor comes."
"What are we going to tell him?" Francine asked.
I frowned. "Let's say we were having a little party. The three of us, Yvonne and me and you. And that the old man woke up and decided he wanted to come out and join us. You went in and got him, and he had a couple of drinks with us, and got into an amorous mood. He put his arms around Yvonne and started kissing her, but the excitement was too much for him, and he had a stroke. That's almost the truth, anyway."
"Except for the whip," Francine said.
"And a few other little details," Yvonne put m.
Shrugging, I said, "What should we do? Tell the doctor the whole story? Show him your backside, Yvonne? Let him know what was really going on here? Don't be silly. Why stir up a scandal? He'll accuse us right away of trying to excite the old man to death."
"Suppose Martin comes to and tells him the truth?" Francine asked.
"One, I don't think he'd be fool enough to do it. Two, he may not come to." There was the sound of a buzzer outside. "Three, the doctor's here. Get some clothes on, Yvonne. Don't let him see those whip-marks, whatever you do."
Francine and I went out to answer the buzz.
The doctor's name was Merrick, and he was a small, wiry man with a ferret's nose and a weasel's eyes. He seemed tense and keyed-up, and very much annoyed at being called out a couple of hours before dawn to attend a patient. From the cut of his clothes and the size of the star sapphire in his ring, I gathered that his practice was a highly lucrative one, probably reaching into six figures. Six-figure men bate to be whistled out of bed to do a job, even if they do happen to be doctors.
But he knew his stuff He went straight in to see Veeland, and be proceeded to carry out a battery of tests on the paralyzed man, testing his foot-reflexes and then other reflexes higher up. He took his temperature, checked his blood pressure, sampled his blood, and finally gave him an injection.
"Neophyrin, vitamins, and glucose," he explained, looking up as he rammed the syringe home. "It'll ease him a little."
We stepped outside the sickroom. Merrick said, "What happened, now?"
Francine told him, in a straightforward, unvarnished way, editing out only the more sordid details of the orgy, like the whipping and the actual lovemaking Dr. Merrick shook his head throughout the recital, his trimmed mustache twitching in growing annoyance.
"The old fool," he muttered. "Not enough sense to quit pinching a pretty girl's behind when he's sick. Well, he'll pay the price now."
"How is he, doctor?" Francine asked.
"Sick. Very sick. Both legs paralyzed, and his left arm. And probably the speech centers too, though we won't know that till he returns to consciousness. The odds are hell never leave his bed again. Or do any more pinching. Hell just be a human vegetable-able to think, able to understand what's being said to him, but unable to talk, to have any kind of normal life."
I shuddered. "Can he live long that way?"
"Sometimes they linger for years," Merrick said. "It depends on how much damage the hemorrhage did.
Since it didn't kill him outright, I suspect he'll be able to pull through for a while longer. A week, a month, a year-who knows? At his age, there's no way of predicting. He's tough, but this isn't his first stroke. The next one will finish him, I'm afraid."
The doctored gathered his things, wrote out a simple diet for Veeland, and prepared to leave, saying that he assumed Veeland would want round-the-clock nurse service, and that he would arrange for it in the morning.
Then he left, telling us to keep in touch with him if there were any changes in the old man's condition before the nurse arrived. The time was quarter to five. Veeland seemed to be sleeping peacefully enough, but the twisted and contorted expression of his lips told clearly of the extent of the facial paralysis. The entire left side of his face was drawn up tightly into a weird and ugly grimace.
Francine and I returned to the library where Veeland had had his stroke. There, we were joined by Yvonne, and then by Robinson and Pierre.
I said, "Well, you're likely to be reading his will before much longer."
"How much time does the doctor give him?" Lloyd wanted to know.
I repeated Merrick's words. "He might go at any time. Or he might linger for a while."
Francine laughed hollowly. "You know, for months I've been waiting for this day. And now that it's here, I don't feel at all jubilant. Just-sad. And guilty. I helped drive him to what happened tonight."
"Stop talking like that," Lloyd snapped at her. "You wanted to inherit as bad as we did. And now you'll cash in. A hundred million bucks all your own, Francine. And you, Yvonne. And Pierre. And me. And even you, Thorne, though Christ knows why you deserve it."
"Without him none of us would be getting a cent," Yvonne said. "You should have seen him using the whip tonight. He got the old man so excited it was marvelous. He's the one responsible."
She smiled at me as though I ought to be proud of my handiwork. But it was anything but cheering to reflect that I had been one of the key figures in the little drama that had just taken place. I knew what Francine meant when she talked about guilt. Less money-hungry people would never have permitted Veeland to excite himself like that. We would have had a sense of responsibility, and forced him to go back to bed and stop carrying on. But no: we had to encourage him, knowing damned well what the outcome was likely to be.
And now he was a miserable total paralytic, and perhaps would die in a short while, and we would inherit vast sums of money. And I was depressed about the whole thing.
"At least we saved ouselves in one way," Lloyd remarked. "If he's paralyzed, he won't be able to dictate a new will. He can't cut us out when the Florida girl arrives on Monday."
"He may not even live to see her," Yvonne commented.
"Suppose he does," I said. "He can always dictate a new will in the presence of witnesses."
"Even if the witnesses are the very people he's cutting off?" Lloyd asked. "He wouldn't have the guts to try that Besides, why would he want to do that? He won't be at all interested in the new kid now. He's just a vegetable. We're safe. The money will be split five ways and no more."
I couldn't abide hanging around this pack of ghouls any longer. The two men seemed rapturous at the idea of inheriting without any cut in their share. Yvonne, too, was enthusiastic. Francine's mood was different, a mood of mingled excitement and guilt.
I didn't want to leave the apartment until the nurse had arrived. The way events were going, it wouldn't be inconceivable for Lloyd and Pierre to go into the sickroom and slap the last spark of life out of Martin Vee-land's body if I gave them half a chance.
I turned and walked out of the room.
I wandered down to the end of the hallway and stood in the little room housing the porcelain collection, looking out the window as dawn rose over Fifth Avenue. I felt tired and drained and miserable.
There were footsteps behind me. I looked around and saw Francine enter the room after me, and close the door.
She pulled open the belt of her robe. I saw her breasts, saw the fading but still visible marks of the whipping I had given her.
I went to her. I put my hands over her breasts, drawing comfort in my fatigue from those two warm fleshy globes.
She looked up at me and smiled. "I just wanted to tell you again that I love you," she said.
I kissed her. I slipped my arms under her robe, and held her tight, grasped her buttocks, her waist.
"I love you too," I whispered.
The nurse showed up a little after nine that morning. She was in her fifties, formidably fat and tremendously efficient. It turned out that she was the same day nurse who had taken care of Veeland after his last stroke, the one that had confined him to the wheel chair. She took charge of the situation at once, and it was quite clear that so long as she was on the scene, she would be the undisputed boss of the household.
Which was perfectly all right.
She put Yvonne to work on the bedpan detail, and had Pierre devote his Gallic talents to preparing some mush for Veeland's breakfast. He had regained consciousness about the time the nurse arrived, but he still seemed groggy, and couldn't speak. He didn't even try. He stared at us out of beady, glittering eyes, his face rigid and immobile, and after a moment closed his eyes again.
The nurse, Mrs. Preston, sent us all out of the room. She would handle the situation herself.
I was tired, and I wanted some sleep. It seemed as though a million years had gone by since I had said goodnight to Cheri and headed for the Veeland place.
I drew Francine aside, and said, "Let's clear out of here for a while."
"Where?"
"Anywhere. Central Park. We'll take a long walk. Or we can go to the museum. Or just go up to my place and sit around reading the Sunday papers. Anything to get out of here."
She shook her head. "I can't leave him now, Jack."
"Why not? Mrs. Preston doesn't need you."
"That's not the point. Suppose he got worse? Suppose he called for me and found out I had gone for a walk in Central Park?"
"I thought you were in a hurry to see him dead," I said cruelly. "Why all this concern about him?"
Her lips tightened. "Because he's still alive," she said, obviously stung by my words. "I've got an obligation to him. Regardless of my part in what took place here last night. I've got to serve him."
"I can't figure you out, Francine."
"Maybe you'd better not try," she said crisply. "Just go. Take that walk in the park by yourself. Come hack here when you feel like it"
I nodded. I had to get out. The muggy atmosphere of impending death seemed to hang over this giant apartment, and it was making me sick.
I cleared out.
I took a cab back to my place, and spent the morning leafing through the Sunday Times, without a word of what I read sinking in. I tossed the paper away. Fatigue was overcoming me. My eyes were red and raw, and there was a throbbing pain back of my forehead. I thought of taking a sedative, then thought better of it and simply lay down for a nap.
Once again, I was too tired to fall asleep immediately. First I thought. About last night. About my whip falling on Francine's trembling breasts and taut buttocks. About Yvonne, naked and full-bodied, making love obscenely to the dried-out old man. About the horrible moment when the half-naked Veeland had risen from the wheel chair and tottered forward before dropping.
Again and again, my thoughts returned to the whip, and to the perverse pleasure I had experienced while wielding it. There was a tightness in my groin and a dryness in my throat as I mentally relived those moments. I had hurt Francine, yes. Hurt her seriously, caused her great pain. But she hadn't minded She had welcomed the blows, begged me for more. And I had obliged her. And then she had responded with furious passion in the sex embrace afterward.
What was wrong with me?
With her?
Why had the whip hyponotized us so?
No matter why. It had happened. The four of us, Francine and I, Yvonne and Veeland, had been caught up in the excitement of the whip, had danced a dance of pain and blood and sex, that now ( may have ended with fatal consequences for the old man.
I love Francine, I thought.
That thought was even stranger than the memory of the whipping. Love a girl who has been the mistress of an old man since she was fifteen? A girl who has slept with many men under many circumstances? A girl who had made love to other women, who had been loved in return? Who had been whipped, and who shuddered in perverse delight at the whipping.
What kind of girl was Francine?
And how could I possibly love her?
I didn't know the answers. Whore she might be. and masochist, and lesbian, and even murderess-but yet she was Francine, and she was beautiful beyond all words, and there was an unbelievable underlying core of innocence that drew me to her despite the roster of her sins.
And I loved her.
And I fell asleep telling myself that I loved her.
The hours passed, and I slept, and then the phone rang, hauling me up from a drugged slumber. "Hello?" I said groggily. "Jack, this is Francine."
I was awake immediately. "What happened? Did he die?"
"He's still alive. He's conscious and trying to communicate. He can't talk, but he's trying to write something with his good hand., A message of some kind. So far all he's written is your name. You'd better come right over here."
"I'm on my way," I said.
I shook the cobwebs of sleep from my brain and got off the bed, and out of my rumpled clothes into a different outfit. It was five in the afternoon, so I had slept most of Sunday away. I seemed to be falling into the habit of sleeping all day and orgifying all night, though with Veeland out of the picture that routine was probably due for some alterations.
I took a cab over to Veeland's place for what seemed Eke the umpteenth time that week. Yvonne-fully dressed, wearing her maid's uniform, let me in.
"How is he?" I asked.
"He seems to be a lot better. But still paralyzed, and can't talk."
I followed her to the bedroom. Everybody was there-the nurse, and the doctor, and Lloyd, and Francine.
And Veeland.
They were all clustered around him. He was propped op in bed, looking like a waxen image of himself, and a poor likeness at that. He held a pencil in his right hand-he was normally left-handed-and he was painstakingly printing something, one letter at a time. Discarded sheets of paper on the floor lay in a heap. I picked one up, looked at it. The spidery scrawl made no sense at all; I saw my name at the top, but then a lot of jumbled scribbling. Apparently the effort of forming letters was still too much for his numbed, damaged brain.
When he saw me animation came into his eyes, and he moved his lips, trying to talk. All that came out was something like, "Guh-guh-guh-"
Francine was studying the message he had just completed. She looked up.
"I think I understand it," she announced. "He's saying that we mustn't forget the new girl who's coming up from Florida tomorrow. That he wants you, Jack, to go to the airport tomorrow afternoon to pick her up. Is that right, Martin? Wave the pencil in the air if I've read it properly."
All eyes turned on him.
He was waving the pencil with all the energy there was left in him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
You had to hand it to him. At a time like that, with death's door gaping wide for him, all he could think of was his new mistress, and all he could tell us was to be sure not to forget to pick her up and bring her to him. What use she could be to him, in his present condition, didn't seem to occur to him. All that mattered was that she was his, bought and paid for, and he wanted her.
And he wanted me to go get her. That struck me as odd, though I didn't say anything. I didn't work for him. Why not send Lloyd Robinson to run the errand instead? Why me?
Well, I wasn't going to refuse. Obviously someone had to meet the poor kid at the airport, and if Martin Veeland wanted me to go, well, I was going to go, without stopping to argue about it. It was the least I could do. You don't refuse dying requests from men who are worth half a billion dollars.
The effort of getting the message across to him had exhausted him. He sank back against the pillow, face leathery and gray, eyes fixed and bloodshot, and a cold sweat stippled his forehead. The nurse shooed us all out of the room and prepared to give him an injection-some Luminal to put him to sleep for a while, so he could regain the energy he had burned while frantically trying to scribble a note.
In the corridor, Francine said to me, "He never gives up. Even on his deathbed he thinks about sex."
I shrugged. "Maybe it isn't sex. After all, there's this kid arriving on a plane, coming into a strange city. If he hadn't reminded us, we'd just have let her sit around the airport till she rotted. Of course we have to bring her here."
"What are we going to do with her?" Yvonne asked.
"That's up to the old man," I said. "He'll probably want her to live here. If he dies, we'll buy her a return ticket to St. Petersburg and send her on her way. She'll have had a vacation in New York and have made five grand toward her college education, so she shouldn't have any kicks coming."
"And if he doesn't die right away?" Francine asked.
"Then she stays here. That's what he bought her for, isn't it?"
"The same way he bought me," Francine said bitterly. "There are times when I'm glad he's crippled now. And other times-"
I drew Francine aside. "Will you come away from here with me? Spend the night at my place?"
"I told you, Jack. I can't leave him."
"Even with the nurse here?"
"Even with the nurse here."
I frowned. "Well, then, can I stay here with yon?"
"Of course," she said softly.
Pierre prepared dinner for everybody-nothing sumptuous, but a Parisian chef can't help creating masterpieces even when he's just throwing odds and ends together. Lloyd got some wine out for us all; in deference to the old man, he stayed away from the rare stuff, and we put away a couple of bottles of cheap Beaujolais to go with Pierre's beef stew. The night nurse had come on by this time, and seemed to have no need of any of us.
We sat around in the library until half past ten, Francine and Yvonne and I. Pierre and Lloyd had already gotten the idea that I didn't enjoy their company, and they had taken themselves off to one of the other floors of the apartment, I think to amuse themselves with maids from one of the other apartments in the building.
Around half past ten, I stood up, looked at Francine, and said, "I think it's bedtime."
"Are you staying here?" Yvonne asked, "Yes."
"In Francine's room?"
"That's right."
She smiled wistfully. "Do you mind if I-join you?"
I lifted an eyebrow thoughtfully. Somehow, the idea of more orgies repelled me right now. There had been enough perversity and exotic eroticism the last couple of nights to last for a while. I simply wanted to hold Francine in my arms, to kiss her, to make love to her the way most men make love to most women. Without any audience, and without any third parties in the bed.
As gently as I could, I said, "Not tonight, Yvonne. All right?"
"All right," she said. "I understand."
She smiled at us both, as though giving us her blessing, and went off alone to her bedroom. I squeezed Francine's hand, and she squeezed back.
Then we went to her room.
There were no whips tonight. Not even any offbeat sex practices, strange positions, or other erotic eccentricities. We did it in the time-honored way, Francine accepting my weight and meeting the thrust of my body with an answering thrust of her own.
There are times when simplicity is the greatest of virtues. Tonight was one of them.
We brought our lovemaking to a mutually satisfactory conclusion, and then, locked in each other's arms, drifted off together to a deep, sound sleep.
Monday.
The long weekend was finally over.
Francine and I woke about eight. I pulled back the covers and studied the nakedness of her, and kissed her coral-tipped nipples, and listened to her giggle, and planted a kiss on each satin-smooth thigh, and then one over her navel.
She reached for me and drew me down.
It was forty minutes more before we got out of bed. I felt like a goddamn honeymooner.
She was reluctant to let go of me. "Stay in bed," she purred.
I shook my head smilingly. "Sorry. Busy day ahead. I've got errands to run, some money to make. Be seeing you later."
I showered and dressed and cleared out. First stop was my apartment, where I phoned the airline and discovered that the jet bearing Lois was due to arrive at Idlewild at 3:08 that afternoon. Which gave me plenty of time to do some money-making.
The market opened at ten, as usual. At ten after ten, I was on the phone, finding out what was happening to steel. Steel was downtrending, I was told. It had opened down 5-8 from Friday's close.
That didn't hurt a bit. Every time the price dropped by a buck a share, I made five hundred bucks. Down ten and I'd make five grand. And so it went.
"Sell another 200 short if there's an uptick," I said.
Then we rattled through my other commitments. I bought and sold and bought some more, sold a little, juggled the account around. By the time I was finished I had closed out four speculations, three favorably and one at a small loss, for an overall profit of $15,000. I had bought into a couple of new situations. And I had sold some more steel.
But when I looked at the day's transactions as I atered them in my book, I had to admit that they were pretty small potatoes. I thought I was a big shot because I made ten or twenty grand a week dabbling in the market. Sure, it sounds like a lot. Plenty of worthwhile people don't make twenty grand a year, for God's sake.
Then I stopped and soberly thought about what would happen if I inherited a hundred million bucks. Even assuming estate taxes and whatnot took half, I'd still be coming home with fifty million dollars.
That's $50,000,000.00.
You can't gasp that kind of sum easily. The best way to do it is to figure out how much interest it would bring in if you invested it all in nice, safe, secure blue chip securities yielding 5% per annum.
$50,000,000 at 5% per annum gives you $2,500,000 a year in yield.
$2,500,000 a year is roughly $50,000 a week.
That brought the thing down to concrete terms. Possession of a boodle of that size would give you-without having to lift a finger to earn it-ten thousand bucks a day, every Monday through Friday, Christmas and New Years' included. Not bad, not bad at all. It takes some doing to spend fifty grand a week. And you could spend right down to the last kopeck of it, knowing that next week there'd be another fifty grand coming along as sure as death and taxes.-
I did some more arithmetic.
I figured out what would happen if you invested only half the pile in blue chips at 5%. That would give you a steady income and $25,000 every week for speculative situations so that it brought you an income of 20% a year. That would be no trick-I was doing a lot better than that, in fact.
20% a year on $25,000,000 comes to a cool $5,000,-000 more-or a hundred grand a week. Which added to the safe, sure twenty-five grand that the blue chips were bringing in, came to a not very modest sum of better than $15,000 a day, and even after taxes that would be a goodly amount. Especially if an expert accountant arranged a lot of tax-shelter deals to cushion the blow.
Yes, I did a lot of fancy arithmetic that day. The time passed splendidly as I worked out my potential income after I had inherited my share of Veeland's fortune. And then of course Francine would be inheriting an equal sum, and I would ask her to marry me, but we'd keep our money separate to make life simple, and-
You can take it from there.
It was a feverish day of fantasy. I converted my income per annum into so many fleets of Rolls Royces, so many tons of caviar, so many swimming pools full of Piper Heidseick. Quite a day.
And then it was mid-afternoon, and it was time to go out to Idlewild and pick up Martin Veeland's latest little plaything.
I hopped a cab. It got me out to Idlewild by quarter of three, at the nominal sum of $5 including tip. The time was coming, I told myself, when I could use fivers for handkerchiefs and throw them away after each sneeze.
I made my way through the maze of different buildings at Idlewild, got to the Eastern Airlines arrivals section, and settled down to wait for the 3:08 jet from Florida.
The 3:08 jet hove into sight exactly at 3:08. The wonders of modern technology never cease. It came swooping up to the ramp, a big silver bird with gleaming wings and shiny jet-pods, and came to a halt.
People started getting off.
I summoned up my memory of the color photo Robinson had showed me of Lois Baker. The curling golden hair, the stunning figure, the immature face with the girlish look in the eyes. Of course, the photo had shown a girl in a bikini, so I'd have to compensate for that in scanning the arrivals.
One girl had me fooled for a moment-a blonde, travelling alone, whd seemed to fill the bill. But as she came through the gate I saw the look of experience on her face, and realized she was a good eight or ten years older than the girl in the photo.
And then she came along.
She was like the breath of spring. As glamorous as the photo, and then some. Golden curls gleaming in the pale March sun, proud young breasts jutting out sensationally against the straining fabric of her white blouse-yes, this was the one. She was carrying a little flight bag, and looking around in confusion at the milling throngs within the gate.
I cut across to her.
"Lois?" I called. "Lois?"
She looked at me blankly. "Yes?"
"Lois Baker?"
She nodded. "Did you come to meet me?" she asked. "Yes," I said. "My name's Jack Thorne. I'm a friend of Martin Veeland's. He sent me to meet you." I led her to one side and looked at her closely.
Shame house
She was middling tall, about five-five, and deeply tanned. And close up she looked a little less innocent than in that photo. Perhaps it had been taken five or six months ago. Girls grow up fast, when they're in their middle teens, and she could have learned a lot about life in those few months, especially if she realized that she had been sold like a prize heifer to a degenerate old multimillionaire.
She said, "I thought Mr. Veeland would meet me at the airport himself."
I shrugged. "He's very sick and couldn't come. So he sent me instead."
"Sick?"
"He had a stroke Saturday night. He's paralyzed. I'm afraid he won't live too much longer."
She didn't look moved. There was something embittered and sullen about her-like any slave would look. She said, "Is he very old?"
"Seventy-four."
"They told me he was very old. And decrepit."
"He's a lot more decrepit than that, now," I said.
"What does he want a girl my age for?"
"Company," I lied. "Why did you accept the deal?"
"I didn't have any choice," she said in a flat, empty voice. "I needed the money. My grandfather said he was a very rich man, and that if he died while I was living with him, I'd get a million dollars."
I felt sorry for her. I made up my mind that, if Veeland died without leaving this kid anything, I would personally see to it that she got a million bucks-out of my share, if necessary. What would a million matter to me? I'd be making millions a year. I could spare one.
I said, "Come on, let's get a drink while we're waiting for your baggage. Then I'll take you out to your new home. It's quite a fabulous place."
She looked at me in surprise. "You can't buy me a drink. I'm only fifteen, remember?"
I had clean overlooked that. I just wasn't used to being in the company of kids any more. But, I told myself grimly, if she was old enough to put out for Martin Veeland, old enough to submit her bare tender young buttocks to his whip and to submit her loins to his lust, she was old enough to have a drink in the State of New York, and to hell with the licensing laws.
"Come on," I said. "They never ask a girl her age if she's with someone who looks old enough. Let's go have a quick cocktail."
I led her into the nearest cocktail lounge and sat her down at a table. She had tremendous raw beauty about her, I thought. At this age she didn't know how to use her glamour, and so there she sat with her eyes big and wide, and her breasts hanging out in front, and her lips parted but innocent.
A waitress who looked anything but innocent came up to us, gave Lois a fishy look, and said, "What'll it be, folks?"
I looked at Lois. She said, "What do you recommend, Mr. Thorne?" in a high-pitched, kiddy-voice.
The waitress looked even more puzzled. I said evenly, "Give my friend a bacardi, and a dry martini for me."
The waitress took another look at Lois and headed off.
Lois said, "She knows I'm under age."
"She took the order, didn't she? Relax. This is New York. People will treat you like an adult if you act like one."
The drinks arrived. Lois sniffed hers, found it not unpleasant, sipped it, smiled shyly. "It's good," she said.
"Glad you like it," I grinned. I felt the atmosphere clearing up. She was a good kid. I felt a little bit like an uncle. And I rejoiced, for the first time, that Martin Veeland was paralyzed. Because it meant he Couldn't lay a finger on this girl. Oh, maybe a finger, but he couldn't lay anything else. Which was fine. Even if she weren't a virgin, she was still pretty green, and I didn't want her to be debauched by a dirty old man.
The way Francine, at the same age, had been debauched by the same dirty old man.
We finished our drinks, and she looked flushed and pretty, and I think she wanted another one. But in my new protective role as her adopted uncle I didn't intend to sit here getting her loaded. Before she could angle for a refill, I said, "Let's go get your luggage and get out of here. It's twenty of four. If we kill much more time, we'll get caught in rush hour trraffic."
She had come with one single, pathetic, lonely suitcase, plus her flight bag. I corralled it and hailed a cab, and off we went to the wilds of darkest Manhattan. She didn't talk much on the trip. The next time she spoke was when we were getting out of the cab on Fifth Avenue.
"What park is that?" she asked. "Central Park."
"Do they have swimming there? I love to swim."
I had to tell her that Central Park wasn't a swimming-type park, and she looked disappointed. This was the sort of girl who was at home on a sandy beach, and she wouldn't thrive in New York. Winter alone would kill her, if she lasted here that long.
We went upstairs.
Her eyes got wider and wider as she saw the lobby, the elevator, and finally the baroque magnificence of Martin Veeland's apartment. Francine came out to greet us. She was dressed in a simple suit, but she looked radiant, and she embraced Lois like a newfound sister.
"I'm Francine," she said. "I'm so glad to meet you. I want you to be happy here, Lois."
Lois just looked puzzled at finding another attractive female in the household, and her puzzlement grew greater when Yvonne, wearing her maid's uniform, appeared. For her part, Francine seemed to be going all nnt to welcome the newcomer. There was no trace of jealousy. I could tell that Francine saw in Lois herself of seven years ago, and there was a tremendous bond of sympathy linking them. I liked Francine all the more when I saw her reaction to the potential young rival.
"Can I see Mr. Veeland?" Lois asked.
Francine nodded. "He's up and eager to meet you. I'll take you to him."
The four of us-Francine, Yvonne, Lois, and I-went down the hall to the sickroom. The nurse was with the old man as we entered.
Lois stiffened a little as she saw him. I don't think she had expected him to look so cadaverous, so sickly, so old.
Velanci's reaction was a vivid one too. The only part of him that moved was his eyes, and they lit up. I could see him looking the girl over from head to toe, mentally undressing her. His faded eyes glistened with new life as he took in the contours of her breasts and thighs and flaring hips beneath her girlish dress.
He waved his arm around.
"Guh-guh-" he said, with effort.
"He wants to write a note," the nurse said. She put a pencil into his hand, and held the note pad up so he could write on it.
He had obviously had practice since his first attempt the night before, because there was no waste paper this time. He printed each letter, taking infinite pains with it to make it legible.
I craned my neck to look at what he had written.
It said, "NURSE GO AWAY."
She frowned. "I shouldn't leave him," she said.
"He wants it," Francine said. "You'd best go."
"All right. I'll be in my room, if there's any trouble," the nurse said, and bustled out, clearly peeved at getting ejected.
But she left. That was the point.
When half a billion dollars speaks, you listen.
Even when it mumbles and drools.
Veeland was still waving the pencil around. Francine picked up the notepad and held it up for him. This time, he wrote a considerably longer note, almost a voluminous one compared to the three words of the first one.
Finally, exhausted, he let the pencil drop. Francine looked at the pad, frowned, and handed it to me.
The note was addressed to me. It said, JACK-UNDRESS LOIS. MAKE LOVE TO. I WANT TO WATCH. DON'T THWART ME.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
"No," I said hotly. "No I won't do it. I flatly refuse."
I saw the old man's eyes staring at me, reproachfully, as if to say, How can you refuse a dying man a request like this?
I stared back at him.
It was insane.
It was absurd.
It was disgusting. He continued to stare at me. "No," T said. "No, Martin. Out of the question."
"Guh-" he said. "Guh-guh-puh-puh-"
He struggled to form the word, and then, miraculously, he did form it. "Please," he said, faintly, hoarsely, unmistakably.
"What does he want you to do?" Lois asked me. "It's what he wants us to do," I said. I handed her the note.
She stared at it, blinking in surprise. "You mean-right in front of him?"
"Right in front of him," I said grimly.
"Puh-puh-please," he rasped. It was the only word he could say. The fingers of his one good hand trembled violently.
Francine said softly to me, "I think you'd better do it, Jack."
"Are you crazy? She's only fifteen!"
"So was I, Jack. And she knows the terms under which she was brought here."
"She was brought here to be the old man's mistress," I said. "But she doesn't know anything about public displays of sex. Of being taken in front of other people. I can't do this, Francine."
"I think you ought to. Martin is begging you."
"Suppose he begged me to jump out the window?" I retorted. "For Christ's sake, where do I draw the line, Francine?"
Lois said, "If he wants it all that badly-I guess we could do it for him-"
I looked at her in amazement. "Are you serious?"
She nodded. "I may be a kid, but I'm not a stupid kid. I was brought here to amuse Mr. Veeland. Well, he's in no shape for me to amuse him directly, but he wants it another way. If he wants, I think we ought to do it, just like Francine says."
I was thunderstruck. Where was the innocence, the dewy-eyed virginal child? She was just as twisted as the rest of them.
She wanted to do it.
Who was I to say no, now? I was only a puppet like all the rest. Martin Veeland still pulled the strings, paralyzed though he was, and we jerked and leaped about at his whims.
Lois was willing to make the sacrifice of her modesty for the old man. I was elected to play the role opposite her. While Francine and Yvonne stood by and observed, I supposed?
Willy-nilly, I was drawn into it. Already, Yvonne was opening out the couch facing his bed, and Francine was propping him up so he would have a better look at the action. It was all dream-like, unreal to me. I went over to Lois and said in a low voice, "Have you ever-gone all the way before?"
"Half a dozen times. With some guys from the neighborhood."
So much for innocence and virginity, I thought bleakly.
I said, "Do you enjoy it?"
"Sure I do."
"And you want to make it with me?"
"Of course. You're very handsome, Mr. Thorne. Jack. The handsomest man I know."
"You don't mind making it in front of-him?"
"It's peculiar, I guess. But I don't care. I'll just pretend he isn't watching."
A very cooperative girl, this Lois. She would go far in her chosen line of work. I had misjudged her about two hundred per cent, evidently My pity for her fled. She knew what sort of deal she was getting into. She had known all along.
"Okay," I said, a little roughly. "We might as well get it over with, then."
I took her by the band.
I led her to the couch.
I sat her down and began to undress her.
Off came her blouse, and her shoes, and then her skirt, and the little half-slip she had underneath it. Already, the contours of her firm, lithe young body were starting to excite me. Yvonne and Francine had drawn off to one side, unobtrusively, out of the way I didn't look at the man in the bed, but I could hear his rough, harsh, irregular breathing.
I undid her bra, and then I gasped at the perfection of her breasts. They were twin marvels, high and almost completely round, with small virginal-looking nipples, nut brown, sitting high up on the tanned spheres. My hands quivered a little as I reached out to cup her breasts. Lois smiled, an insipid smile, a kiddy smile, as my fingers dug into her love-flesh.
I caressed her bosom for a moment, rolling the breasts around, twisting them, squeezing them Lois began to get excited. She rubbed her thighs together, moved from side to side, began to touch me.
I got the panties off her.
Then the garter belt and the stockings.
She was nude now.
I stood her up, displaying her to the old man as I embraced her. Her body was bursting, throbbing with youthful vigor. Not a sag anywhere, not a crease, not a wrinkle, not a blemish. Everything tanned an even brown. And everything just as it ought to be. Flawless. Tremendous.
She was just a baby, though. Her body was the equal of Francine's-which was saying a lot-but Francine managed to appear a hundred times as sexually magnetic, because Francine knew how to hold herself, how to smile, how to breathe, how to wink.
Lois would learn all those arts in time. She was still young. But right now she was just so much raw material.
Even though she had admitted not being a virgin, I held back from completing the act. I let her undress me, and then we settled down on the couch, and I touched her full, taut buttocks, and ran my hands down her legs, and across the flat swell of her belly, and played with her breasts some more, taking them to my lips, and then I kissed her. I'll say this for her, she knew how to kiss. She didn't need pointers there.
She was getting eager fast, breathing hard, eyes turning to little slits. I brought her along slowly, wanting her to get the most from it. Behind me, on the bed, old Veeland was panting in steadily mounting excitement.
Sudden passion inflamed me.
I took her, and she was able to receive me, to hold me to the utmost. I listened to her harsh breathing as our bodies started to move on the couch.
She didn't seem to move freely. I understood why: all her romance had been in the back seats of automobiles, and she was used to cramped, cockeyed positions. She didn't know how to take advantage of room.
I showed her.
I worked and stirred her, and she gasped and throbbed and closed her eyes and let her lips droop slackly, and then she began to twist and writhe, to lift her buttocks up and drop them again, to wrench around and twitch as the real excitement got through to her.
I rode right along with her, cool and calm, the experienced man indoctrinating the almost-inexperienced girl.
She wept, she sighed, she tore her hair. She leaped and bounced, her breasts doing a wild dance of their own until I imprisoned them in my eager hands. The moment of fulfillment was coming now, and I had delayed for hers, and I felt it beginning, a deep throbbing tremor somewhere in the heart of her, rising to the surface, her heart drumming so loud I could hear it, and then it was happening, she was undergoing a convulsive earthquake.
And then I heard the sounds.
The sounds Martin Veeland was making-"Guh guh-guh-"
For the first time since I had undressed Lois, I looked back to see what was happening.
Martine Veeland was trying to rise. He was struggling with his paralysis, trying to conquer it from sheer force of will. Veins stood out on his forehead and along his withered throat as he desperately fought the invisible hand that was holding him down. And, as he fought, he cried out in anger. He wanted Lois. He wanted to stride from his bed, push me aside, and fall upon her tender, full-breasted young nakedness.
But he couldn't.
He couldn't get up, and the realization was killing him. He was trapped, a prisoner in his own body, while feverish thoughts of lust whirled in his brain.
"Guh-guh-"
He strained, almost broke free.
Then fell back.
Blood flooded into his cheeks. His eyes bulged as though they were about to explode. Veins pulsed in his throat.
"Guh-"
He fell back, limply, relaxed now, against the pillow. His right hand clutched feebly at the coverlet for a moment, then was still.
"I'll go get the nurse!" Yvonne cried, and started to run out of the room.
With a quickness that surprised me, I leaped up from Lois' prostrate nudity and bounded over to cut Yvonne off. "Wait a second," I snapped. "Give us a chance to get dressed, will you?"
"But-but the Master-"
"I don't think there's any need to hurry for the nurse," I said. I looked around the room-at Lois, at Veeland, slumped in the bed; at Francine, bending over him.
Francine slowly shook her head.
I'd been right.
Martin Veeland was dead.
Lois and I got dressed, hurriedly, and when we were decent again Yvonne fetched the nurse. She only confirmed Francine's opinion. Veeland had had another stroke, and it had finished him. Glibly, I explained that it had come upon him suddenly, while the rest of us were talking. The nurse didn't seem suspicious.
She sent for Merrick, who wrote out the death certificate, and then notified the police and the newspapers. When a man of Veeland's importance dies, the newspapers find out about it anyway, so Merrick was simply being cooperative.
I felt tired and upset. Not so much about his death, because that had been inevitable. But it does something to you when you're forced to pull away from a girl in the very moment of climax. By rights, I should have had some time to cling to Lois, to kiss and fondle her afterward. I hadn't, and my nervous system rebelled at the incompletion of it.
Still, it had been memorable. That girl was going to be a magnificent lay some day. Not long, either But not for me. I was twice her age, and I knew I would never lay a hand on her again. I had been lucky enough to have her once, to put my tongue in her mouth and to hold the tanned globes of her breasts and buttocks in my hands, but that was that. Lois belonged to the younger generation, and not to me.
But Francine, now-
Francine was free. She was no longer Martin Veeland's slave. I could-and would-ask her to be my wife.
But not in the moment of his death. I had to wait for a more appropriate time.
The next few days brought us a series of surprises, of the nastiest kind. The lawyers and the moneymen began to descend on us to take stock of Martin Vee-land's estate. One thing became quite clear at the outset: there wasn't going to be any five hundred million dollars to divide. The sum had strictly been a pipe dream. Whatever we would get, it would be substantially less.
The will was opened for probate, and it turned out to be just as Francine told me. There were a few small charitable bequests, and the rest of the estate was divided equally between Robinson, Pierre, Yvonne, and Francine-with a codicil cutting me in for one-fifth.
But what estate, though?
All we knew were percentages. Percentages of how much?
The first jolt came when an art dealer presented an unpaid bill for $383,000.
Then one of Veeland's stockbrokers-he had many of them-informed us that there was a deficit of $250,000 in Veeland's margin account, and would the estate kindly pony up?
A bank official displayed a note, signed by Veeland, for $1,040,000. Payable on demand, and he was demanding it right now.
By the fifth day after Veeland's death, the picture was starting to get painfully clear. He had plenty of assets, of the non-liquid kind. His art collection was conservatively valued at twenty million dollars, his real estate holdings here and there around the country were carried on tax rolls at a hundred million or so, and miscellaneous property added another ten million. Not bad.
But his cash position was pretty lousy. He had been speculating in the market right up to the end, but he had lost his touch. I went through his records and was appalled to see the story-10,000 shares of Dupont, sold at a loss of $280,000. 5,000 shares of IBM, sold at a loss of $350,000. 20,000 shares of Texas Instruments, sold at a loss of almost a million dollars.
He had picked good stocks at the critically wrong time, and he had ridden them down hill, getting off at the lows. He had made the amateur's mistake, and it had cost him heavily, all in the last eighteen months. He had dropped millions, millions upon millions.
By the end of the first week, it was no longer a question of how many millions of dollars we would each inherit. It was more a matter of would there by anything left, after we had satisfied the creditors.
The money men had a meeting. They added up columns on both sides.
They concluded that Veeland, at the time of his death, had had liquid assets, meaning cash and negotiable securities, worth $27,500,000.
He had non-liquid assets valued at about $125,000,000.
He had unpaid debts, including back income tax assessments, totalling-hold your hats-$118,500,000. Of that sum, the U.S. Government was in for the biggest slice, including millions of dollars in interest and penalties. As his market savvy had deserted himself, Veeland had simply stopped paying taxes, figuring that he'd catch up when he won back some of his losses. But he never did catch up, and we were stuck picking up the pieces and trying to fit them together.
The first thing that happened was a liquidation of his liquid assets. About $26,000,000 was realized, and the Government grabbed it before anyone could whistle. That left the Veeland estate only some $100,000,000 in debt.
The executors started to unload the non-liquid stuff.
This was a slow job. The books, the antiques, the wines-these things had to be peddled in the New York market, by private treaty or public auction. Dribs and drabs came in-ten grand here, twenty grand there-and the money was prompdy assigned to the creditors.
There were some strokes of good luck. A motel in Texas, valued at $2,500,000, was sold for twice that. But that was balanced by the forced dumping of the porcelain collection, valued at a couple of million, for a couple of hundred thousand. So sorry, the auctioneer told us. The market for rare porcelain just wasn't what it used to be.
Somehow, the creditors got paid off, within a year after Veeland's death. At first it looked as though there would even be a million or two left over for the heirs to divide, but then the lawyers began cutting themselves in for their fee. Somehow, when they all got through, the estate of Martin Veeland amounted to $67,453.21.
We held a meeting. The lawyers presented each of us our checks. Robinson looked at his as though he felt like tearing it up. Yvonne dabbed at her eyes. Pierre scowled and muttered blasphemies in French.
Eleven grand apiece. Instead of a hundred million.
As we left the lawyers' office, I said, "You know what I'm going to do with my check? I'm going to endorse it over to Lois Baker and mail it down to her in Florida."
Francine nodded. "I'll do the same. She'll need the money for college. She can use it more than either of us."
I smiled. "Somehow, I doubt that that kid will ever see the inside of a college. But she can use the money, I agree. And we don't need it."
Francine laughed. "And to think we were figuring on a hundred million apiece."
"Well, don't complain. We're doing okay as it is, baby."
That we were. I had had a particularly good run of luck in the market in the past year. I wasn't just a speculator any more. I had obtained control of several middle-sized corporations, and the money was pouring in faster than I could bank it.
But I did inherit one thing from Martin Veeland. Something very important.
Francine.
I guess I should have mentioned that we were married six months after Veeland's death. We live a nice, simple millionaire's life-Jamaica in the winter, the Riviera in the summer, an apartment in the city and a home in the suburbs, dinner at Le Pavilion, the works. But we don't carry on the way some millionaires do. Our orgifying days are all in the past, a closed chapter. We use our sexual talents on one another exclusively. Francine wanted to hire Yvonne as a maid, but I could guess at what would happen if we did, and so I helped her get a good job with some other well-to-do types.
To date I've been faithful to Francine, and I have every reason to think she's been faithful to me. We're very happy, and we keep the bedsprings creaking And next January we're expecting a son and heir, or at least a daughter and heiress.
Oh, yes. That deal in steel. I closed out my short sale a couple of weeks after Veeland's death. My net profit on the transaction was pleasant $119,000, which was something else I was indebted to him for.
A funny thing, though. I looked through Veeland's account books just to see how he had done in steel. Very strange indeed. He had given me the tip, all right. But so far as I could tell, he hadn't sold a single share short himself.
