America is just beginning to discover Women's Lib--something the gals in Holland have known all about for a thousand years.
It's no state secret that the girls in Amsterdam are the freest in the world and that nowhere else in the world can a man find so many kinds of pleasures.
"Girls In a Thousand Windows" is the fascinating account of what happens when a young American inherits the buildings containing a number of the choicest store fronts in Amsterdam's Red Light District whose windows are occupied by the city's choicest girls.
* * *
PART ONE: In Which An Up-Tight Furniture Executive Discovers Sex-Dutch Style
CHAPTER ONE
The intercom buzzed as Mark pried Sally Kirkland's thighs apart and pulled his weary cock from her hungry cunt. He crawled from the couch.
"Don't go yet," she purred, her green eyes heavy.
"We made it twice," he said. "I'm only human."
"Let me get you in the mood," Sally said as she ran the tip of her wet tongue over her teeth. "I'll bet my lips and tongue can... "
"No," he mumbled.
He snatched up his clothes and started dressing. It was inevitable in his constantly horny state that he would give in to Sally's daily invitations to screw. But he told himself he had been stupid to do it in his office at the Brockton Furniture Company.
Sally sat up lazily. "You know, Mr. Rogers, I dig balling you, but you're kind of square. I mean, you just want to do it one way. And you turned pale every time I mentioned giving you head or you going down on me."
Mark pulled up his slacks. He glanced at Sally's long, curving body and there was a slight swelling of his cock. He cursed himself and fumbled into his shirt.
"Don't worry, Mr. Rogers," Sally said, and she stood up and stretched her magnificent body. "I'll flee back to the typing pool before your secretary goes crazy with that buzzer. Yes, and I'll use the private door to your office, just like I did when I came in."
Mark finished dressing. He paced the thick brown carpet while Sally squirmed into her tight red dress. She crossed over and kissed his cheek. He waited until she moved from the private door at the rear of the office, then hurried to the other door and flicked the lock.
The buzzer sounded again. He stepped toward his desk. Stopped. He had been stupid to screw a girl from the typing pool right in his office. He had to learn to do without sex--sooner or later it would lead to disaster.
The buzzer wouldn't stop now. He grimaced, then mashed a button.
"Yes, Mrs. Anderson? I told you I didn't want to be disturbed."
"I know, Mr. Rogers." Her voice as always sounded tired, motherlike. "But Miss Brockton insisted I get through to you."
"Put her on."
"Oh, she's here at the plant. She's been waiting to see you for nearly a quarter of an hour, Mr. Rogers."
"Send her in," he said. Suddenly, he remembered Sally's last kiss. He jerked out his handkerchief and rubbed furiously at the spot her lips had grazed.
The door opened. Mark pivoted and moved to greet Martha Brockton. But it was Julie, Martha's sister.
"Shouldn't you be home packing?" he asked. "What time is your flight?"
"That's what I want to talk to you about, Mark." She used the little-girl voice she saved for occasions when she wanted something very badly.
"We've been through all that," Mark snapped.
"Damn it, it's your fault that instead of having a swinging trip to Europe alone, I'm going to be stuck with your old-maid aunt. Holland, in the name of God! Windmills and wooden shoes and tulips."
"You're only eighteen, Julie," he said. "Your family wouldn't have let you go to Europe if it hadn't been for my aunt's invitation to look after you."
She started to speak. Checked herself. Mark could tell how angry she was. On the verge of throwing one of her crying temper tantrums. Julie was as spoiled as her older sister. Her usually beautiful, innocent face wasn't so pretty now. It was twisted, the cheeks flushed, the big blue eyes narrowed.
Julie stepped closer. She brushed a strand of blond hair from her forehead. "Look, Mark"--the child's voice but with a strange, arousing tilt--"can't we make some kind of deal? You tell my family I'm to stay with your aunt. And you tell your aunt I'm not coming, see? If you do this for me, I'll do anything for you in return."
Mark stared at her. What in hell did she have in mind? She seemed almost sexy the way she talked. Her dress was much shorter than usual, showing her sleek golden thighs. But it was ridiculous to think of Julie in sexual terms.
Like Martha, Julie might be wild when it came to drinking too much or driving too fast or taking pills or spending money. But he knew only too well that when it came to sex, the Brockton girls were puritanical as hell.
"It's out of the question," Mark said. "Now you better hurry home or you'll miss your flight, Julie. I'm certain you'll find Holland interesting enough, even with Aunt Lillian along."
"Damn you," Julie said. Her eyes were blazing. "Just when I'm about to break away from my family, escape to Europe, your long-lost aunt pops up and ruins everything."
"You wouldn't break away from the family, Julie. You like having money too much." Despite his association with the Brocktons, sometimes he was unable to stop his long-nurtured resentment toward pampered rich kids who had everything handed to them.
"Me! You're the one who's trying to get into the family, Mark. You're the one without a penny, except what you get for running the factory."
"That's not quite true, Julie. You forget that Aunt Lillian is giving me some substantial property in Amsterdam. So I'm not hurting for money."
"Don't kid me," she said, snorting a laugh. "You want the kind of money the Brocktons have, and the social background. That's the only damn reason you have for marrying Martha. They may not see through you. But I do. I know all about you."
"What do you mean?" he asked, too quickly. Could she possibly know about Sally?
"Forget it. Go on and marry my up-tight sister. I won't do anything--I won't be here, anyway. And you're right; I like having money. I hate working a dumb office job. But somehow I'll break away, Mark, and be able to say to hell with my family's money."
Julie stormed from the office, her buttocks wiggling inside her tight skirt. She slammed the door so hard pictures on the wall shifted position.
He sank into the chair behind the cluttered desk. He lit a cigarette and relaxed against the soft leather.
Thank God the little bitch was off to Amsterdam. She was the one person who might have screwed up his plans --marriage into the prestige and fortune of the Brockton family. Not bad for a boy whose father was a barber, a boy who quit school at sixteen to, take a job loading trucks. His mother would be damn proud of him--and as he thought of her he saw her severe look of disapproval. Guiltily, he thought of Sally.
His luck was running good with Martha. And there had been that out-of-nowhere letter from an aunt he didn't even know was alive.
You're my only living relative. Aunt Lillian had written. And I'm well-fixed financially and want you to have your inheritance while you're still a young man. I'm sixty-six but feel I'll live till I'm a hundred.
Half a dozen houses in Amsterdam, on a canal. Aunt Lillian had said the houses were full and the rents quite lucrative.
Mark leaned forward. He mashed the cigarette out, then shuffled some papers on his desk and smiled to himself.
CHAPTER TWO
Mark worked through lunch and had Mrs. Anderson bring him a sandwich and a container of coffee. He left strict orders he was not to be disturbed.
As he took the last swallow of tepid, cardboard-tasting coffee, Martha burst into the office in a way that reminded him he would always be subjected to her temper and her whims.
"Men can be such bastards," she said as Mark stood up and came around the desk.
"What happened?" He stared at the neat, compact body which made her seem more like the younger sister. Small, tight buttocks and small breasts, and a beautiful young face highlighted by green eyes with flecks of brown.
What kind of nipples? he wondered suddenly.
She shook her head. "One of the former prostitutes I've been counseling had a visit from an old boyfriend. A pimp, darling, though I hate to say it. And she's back on the streets. I had such high hopes for her. And a good job lined up in a laundry."
"But generally, the work has been going well, hasn't it?" Mark asked without interest.
"Oh, I suppose so," Martha said, and began rattling on about another girl, only eighteen, whom she had personally saved from a terrible fate, making sure her pimp went to jail. The girl was now working in a factory, and though she wasn't quite happy yet, weekly sessions of counseling were making inroads into her adjustment problems...
Martha droned on and Mark thought again of her breasts, hidden behind a rather severe blue blouse. He knew they were small and firm. He had never touched them, not even through a blouse. A couple of times when they were kissing she had startled him by letting his tongue wander into her mouth. But that was the extent of her sexual daring.
To Martha, sex was a scourge. It particularly disturbed her strong feeling of women's generally second-class citizenship, of being dominated by men and humiliated and subjected by sex. In her fury and her passion of abstinence she had organized some society friends and used her university degree in sociology to throw herself into the task of reforming the city's prostitutes. And seeking a jail sentence for any man who contributed to that prostitution, whether he was a pimp or a customer.
"... thinking of having the reformed prostitutes join in an attack on the hotels and houses, do the job the police ignore and take hatchets and smash the filthy places into a thousand pieces... " Mark forced a smile, nodded in agreement. He glanced idly around the room, wondering how he could change the subject.
He sucked in his breath. What was that under the edge of the couch? Black? Yes, Jesus, Sally's panties. Mark looked at Martha. Back at the couch. The stupid bitch had forgotten to put them on. Or left them off on purpose.
Mark started backing toward the couch. Flesh was drawn tight across his forehead. His temples throbbed.
"By the way," Martha said. "We're having dinner with the Carsons tonight. Virginia phoned a few minutes ago. Wear your new suit, Mark. You look so handsome in it. And the tie I gave you last week."
She turned as Mark's legs hit the couch. He sat down quickly, awkwardly, trying to place his legs in front of where he remembered the panties were.
"Sure, Martha. Did Julie get off all right?"
"Mother and Daddy took her out to the airport," Martha said. "I assume everything went well. She wasn't happy about being watched over by your Aunt Lillian. Mark, is something wrong?" She was glancing down at his legs.
He bolted up but kept his rigid legs in the same place. He scolded himself about sitting down while Martha was standing. She was very conscious of social graces, and he was always careful not to slip and reveal his background.
"Just a little tired," he said. "You know, I have a feeling Julie will find things so dull and slow in Holland that she'll come back in a couple of weeks."
They talked more of Julie, then of some plans for their wedding. Martha said she had a garden club meeting. She pecked his cheek and turned for the door.
Before she took two steps the door opened and Mr. and Mrs. Brockton came in.
"My baby, off alone to a place like Europe," Mrs. Brockton wailed. She was a heavy woman in her mid-fifties, with blue-grey hair and lines of neat, powdered wrinkles in her round face.
"Thank God Mark's aunt is there to take care of her," Mr. Brockton said. His slim body and unlined face were vivid contrasts with his wife's. He brushed a hand through brushcut grey hair, took out a cigar, and put it back in his pocket. "Seems a generous woman, your aunt. Quite solid. The kind of responsible person a girl like Julie needs to look after her. You know, son"--Mark smiled slightly as he recalled Mr. Brockton had started calling him son only after Aunt Lillian gave him the houses-- "for a long time I've been thinking of expanding our operations into the European field. Definite market there for our kind of quality furniture, and people have money to spend there now--money they didn't have a few years ago."
"Sounds like a good idea, sir," Mark said.
"If you plan to go over there to inspect your new property in the next few weeks, perhaps I could go along and we could make it a business trip. Might even bring the girls with me."
"That would be fine, sir," Mark said, trying to shift his weight while still concealing the panties.
The Brocktons all left then, Martha lingering behind to peck at Mark's lip, adjust his tie, brush lint from his coat.
As the door closed Mark cracked his knuckles. Exhaled. He stepped from the couch. He bent down and scooped up the small piece of black silk. What in hell could he do with the damn panties? He glanced around. His desk. A filing cabinet. Finally he shook his head and shoved the panties into a pocket.
Mark sat down. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. His hand slid into the pocket and brushed the silk. His nostrils flared. The sexual fantasies he had submerged for the past few years surged over his consciousness. His cock stirred slightly against the tightness of his pants.
His mind's eye saw girl after girl, and he was going down on them, them on him, a lovely girl with blond hair was straddling his face, and he was struggling. He was screwing a slim girl in the ass, some girl was somehow screwing him in the ass...
He opened his eyes and jumped up. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. Fumbled out a cigarette and lit it. Christ, he thought he was past all that.
He dug sex, and had had many girls in his time. But nothing that wasn't normal. Normal for people like him. Like his father. His mother.
He leaned forward and started working on a pile of invoices.
Five minutes later the cable arrived: DUTCH LAW MAKES IT NECESSARY YOU FLY TO AMSTERDAM IMMEDIATELY FOR TRANSFER OF PROPERTY--LOVE, AUNT LILLIAN.
CHAPTER THREE
On a bright winter morning a week later Mark walked from a hotel off the Leidesplein in Amsterdam and hailed a taxi. He hadn't been able to get in touch with his aunt and had decided to visit the houses. The idea excited him and he thought how in another week, when the Brocktons arrived, he would greet them as a property owner.
Mark climbed into the taxi and slammed the door. "I want to go to the"--he studied the address on the card-- "to the Oude Zijds Achterburgwal," he said slowly, thankful that nearly everyone in Amsterdam spoke English.
The taxi driver, a fat man with a moustache, turned and nodded. "Ah, the special pleasures of Amsterdam," he said.
Special pleasures of Amsterdam? Mark had no idea what the man meant. To hell with it, he told himself as they drove away. He settled back and thought what his aunt had written earlier: The houses are on a lovely canal, lovely examples of seventeenth century architecture, a high period of art and architecture in Holland.
The sky was blue with dots of clouds; tree limbs, stark and brittle, cast eerie shadows along canals named Keizersgracht, Heregracht and Single. They drove onto a street called the Rokin, along the Amstel River.
The houses were narrow and quaint. But Mark saw no windmills, no wooden shoes, no tulips. He did see many girls in miniskirts--beautiful girls with blond hair and fair skin.
The driver turned onto another canal and stopped at a narrow bridge. "This is the canal you want. What number do you want?"
Mark told him. "How far along the canal is that?"
"Only a few blocks," the driver said.
"I'll walk."
Mark paid the man and climbed from the taxi. He walked slowly, his excitement building. He passed a house with a picture window and saw a lovely young girl in a psychedelic-patterned miniskirt and knee-length leather boots. He guessed it was a boutique, like the ones he had seen in Greenwich Village during his layover in New York City.
Another house. Another picture window. Another girl, a tall, big-breasted brunette in tight red slacks. She was hardly the type to work in a boutique.
Another window in the same house--a redhead in a short red skirt, obviously wearing no bra from the way her nipples poked against her tight white sweater. Mark stopped. He looked across the canal and saw more girls in more windows.
Something was wrong. Some of those girls looked like prostitutes and surely, in any case, all these places weren't boutiques.
Prostitutes? He stumbled on the cobblestone sidewalk. Impossible, he told himself. He glanced at a sign across the canal: SEX MUSEUM. And another one further up: SEX THEATRE.
On a corner he paused and stared at a sign: SEX SHOP. In the windows were books and pamphlets of girls with legs spread wide to show huge cunts. Girls in leather outfits, holding whips. An actual leather whip. A cat-o'-nine-tails. A leather headpiece of some kind, with thin slits for breathing. And many kinds of condoms with knobs, with feathers, some shaped like the head of an animal. Vibrators. And a large dildo.
Mark's legs were weak and though a cold wind sliced I against him and made him shiver, his face was burning.
His own houses were near now. Then he was at the first house. He stopped dead.
Julie Brockton was smiling down at him as she sat! posed on a straight-backed chair in a window. She wore a tight green micro-dress and white, patterned stockings. The dress was pulled so high over her sleek thighs he got a hint of tiny green panties.
Mark cracked his knuckles. Pulled in his breath. This wasn't real. He hadn't really inherited whorehouses. And that girl only looked like little Julie.
She stood up and motioned with her hand. It was Julie. Mark dragged himself across the sidewalk and up a short flight of steps. Julie opened a door and stepped aside as Mark walked past her.
"What in hell are you doing here?" Mark asked as he! glanced around the small room: narrow bed, short chest of drawers, another door, floor lamp. And a large transistor radio blasting out rock music.
"Why, I'm working," she said. "Oh, Mark, Aunt Lillian has been wonderful to me. I've found a way to be financially independent and not have to depend on my family or work in a stupid office... " People on the sidewalk were looking in and Mark blushed as he saw some men smiling and pointing at Julie.
"Close the curtains," he snarled.
Julie closed the curtains and switched on the floor lamp that bathed her in soft light, accentuating with shadows the flow of her lush body. The breasts were larger than Mark remembered, and large nipples pressed against the thin green material. She wore no bra. The wide cord stockings hugged her tapered legs, and ended a couple of inches below the dress, leaving a strip of golden skin visible.
Julie caught Mark staring and her taunting smile angered him. And, he realized with horror, his cock was starting to swell.
"You're a damn prostitute," he blurted. "Christ, your family will kill you. Me. My aunt. Where is my aunt? How in hell could she let you work here?"
"Aunt Lillian encouraged it," Julie said. "I mean, I dig balling, so why not get paid for it?"
"Balling? You never talked like that back home. What's happened to you, Julie? I thought you and Martha were alike."
Her laugh was harsh, strange coming from the soft, damp lips. "That prude? I tried to let you know I was different, Mark. Several times. Like just before I left, in your office, when I offered to do anything if you'd cool the aunt deal. Shit, baby, am I glad you didn't take up the offer. Otherwise I'd never have met Aunt Lillian."
"Julie, your whole family is coming here in a few days," Mark said.
She shrugged. "So? I'm eighteen. Legal age in Holland, baby. They can't touch me. I'm my own girl now and I don't have to lead a double life like I did at home."
"Goddamn it, I own this house," he said. "I'll evict you. And all the other whores in my houses."
"And lose all that money? Do you have any idea how much you make on each window, Mark?"
"To hell with the money. You and rest of the girls are going. Today!"
"I can get you to change your mind, Mark," Julie said, and flowed across the floor, young and liquid, bathed in shadows. The radio blared heavy rock that tore into Mark's gut.
"What in hell are you doing?" he asked.
He stiffened, knowing damn well what she was doing. And so did his cock, which surged against his pants, the knob already sensitive as it rubbed the material.
"Since you're the landlord, this won't cost you a guilder," Julie purred.
She molded her body against his and he could feel the outline of her enormous cunt against his stiff cock. Her breasts mashed into his chest and she dug sharp nails into his neck.
"No," he mumbled.
His lips were smothered by a wet, sucking kiss, and her tongue slithered through the lips to lash at the roof of his mouth.
He tore roughly from her embrace, gasping for breath. His lips felt they had been singed by her kiss. His cock ached with the pain of sharp, unbearable excitement.
"This is insane," he said. "What's happened to you, Julie?"
She glanced down at the rigid shaft of flesh poking against his pants. "It's obvious what's happening to you, baby. You must be one horny bastard, going with that iceberg, Martha."
Anger soared through Mark's body, anger mingled with sexual intensity that caused his cock to jerk for release. His legs felt rubbery. Julie had gotten to him badly. And she knew it. He stepped back.
"Look, I'd like to ball you, baby," Julie said. "I'd enjoy seeing what you're like. But I am a working girl. And this is costing me money."
"We're both getting out of here," Mark said and realized how uncertain his words sounded. His cock strained in its confinement. Even swallowing was difficult as he looked at the ripe body nearly bursting from the green dress. The blue eyes were teasing and fiery.
"Maybe you don't dig straight balling," she said. "Maybe there's something else you dig, some dark side to you, Mark. I've learned some way-out sex tricks in the few days I've been here. Usually, they cost many guilders, but for you, landlord, everything is free. But we've got to hurry."
Mark took her hand abruptly and jerked her to the door. But she pulled free, wincing against the obvious pain.
"You bastard, you hurt me," she whined.
"I'm getting out of here," he said. "And after today, so are you."
"Then split." She stalked over and flung the curtains open.
The bulge in Mark's pants made it difficult to walk, but he moved stiff-legged out of the door and started down the steps. He was so sexually aroused his nipples ached.
CHAPTER FOUR
Halfway down, Mark ran into a heavy-set woman with red-dyed hair and sparkling blue eyes.
"Mark, honey," she said. She hugged him. "I'd know you anywhere."
"Aunt Lillian?" His cock shriveled.
"I got your cable too late to meet you and thought you might hurry over here to see the houses," she said. "My, you are a big, handsome stud, honey. Steel-grey eyes. And that nose. Broken in a fight, I'll bet."
"Playing football."
"And those dimples. Oh, hello, Julie. How is business?"
"Not too good," Julie said, standing in the door.
"Well, Mark, what do you think of your future sister-j in-law?" Aunt Lillian asked. "She's taken to whoring like a pig to shit. What do you think of these window-houses?; Met any of the other girls yet? There's some swell hunks of pussy working these windows, honey. Make lots of money." She laughed, a deep-throated laugh that made: her wrinkled chin bob.
"Aunt Lillian, I had no idea you were giving me a-- well--a bunch of whorehouses," he said.
"Didn't I mention that? Well, now you know. Let me tell you I flopped on my ass many a time to get houses like these."
"You were a prostitute?" He swallowed. Hard. His throat was as dry as sandpaper. He glanced around at Julie. She had shifted her weight to one leg so that the dress was drawn tighter across her rounded buttocks. And she had a sullen, resentful--actually evil--look that, combined with her youthful beauty and blue eyes, made her face a masterwork of erotica.
"Sure, honey," Aunt Lillian was saying as he turned his back to her. "They didn't come any better or any higher-priced than old Lillian. Why, I remember one time when your mama and I were whoring down in New Orleans, and we got drunk... "
"My mother? Not my mother."
"Oh, that was when she was young. Before she married that tight-assed barber. Guess you had a different idea about her."
"Talk about tight-assed," Julie said.
"Christ, stop talking like that, Julie," Mark said.
"See what I mean, Aunt Lillian?" Julie said. "And my whole family is going to be here soon, he says. Mother, father and my sister, Martha."
"Maybe Martha would like a window for herself," Aunt Lillian said. "Or your mama. How old is she? I worked past fifty. There might have been snow on the roof but there was still fire in the furnace. I still turn a few tricks."
She threw her head back and laughed and Mark heard Julie laughing behind him.
"What do you think, Mark?" Julie asked. "Would Martha like a window? Or maybe my mother?"
"Let's go inside," Mark said, "and talk. Yes, we must have a long, serious talk about this situation."
"Sure, honey," Aunt Lillian said.
Julie stepped back and Mark walked into the room, followed by his aunt. Julie closed the door.
Mark glanced out the window and saw two old ladies pointing at them and laughing.
"They must think we're up to something wild, with three people," Julie said.
"Pull the curtains again," Mark said.
Julie pivoted, swinging her ass in a provocative gesture, the dress so tight Mark could make out the bands of the bikini panties. His cock shot to hardness. Julie drew the curtains across the window.
"Well, what about it, honey?" Aunt Lillian asked. "You think Martha or her mama would want a window?"
"My God, they come from a wealthy and socially prominent family," Mark said.
"Well, we won't tell nobody in Amsterdam about their background," Aunt Lillian said. "We got a girl right here next door comes from an old English family, but she does okay for herself."
"That's not what I mean, Aunt Lillian," Mark said. "They dislike anything having to do with prostitution. Martha spends three days a week doing social work with prostitutes. She believes very strongly in the rights of women. Of their not being exploited because they're women, not being used or owned or humiliated by men."
"How about you and Martha?" Julie asked. "How does my sister feel about a woman owning, using, and humiliating a man, Mark?"
Goddamn snotty bitch, Mark said to himself. His face was red with more anger--no, it was more embarrassment. Harsh words choked in his dry throat.
"Well, that's what's so good about having a window," Aunt Lillian said. "No being hassled or being owned by a pimp or a madame. Every girl is strictly her own boss. Does damn well what she wants to and when she wants to, and all she has to do is pay rent. That sure as hell ought to impress Martha, shouldn't it, honey?"
"I don't think so," Mark said. "My God, this whole situation is impossible. Julie's family mustn't find out about this, Aunt Lillian. They'd never forgive me. They'd ruin me if they had the slightest idea of what Julie's been doing. Julie leaves this place today. Right now."
"I won't leave," Julie said, and tossed her blond hair defiantly. "And damn it, Mark, this wasting time is costing me money. If you're going to take up my time this way, then you ought to pay me after all. Or cut the rent I owe for today."
"You don't owe me anything," Mark said. "Rent here won't be a problem for you any more. When I get my hands on these houses, they'll no longer be whorehouses; I can promise you that."
"What's that, Mark?" Aunt Lillian asked. "You want to throw all these girls out? And give up the windows? You have any idea how much money comes in from these windows? Why, each girl pays sixty guilders for her shift. That's about seventeen dollars for a shift for each window. And there's at least two shifts of girls each day. That's thirty-five dollars just for one window. If a building's got, say, half a dozen windows, why, that's over two hundred dollars a day."
"That's a lot of money," Mark muttered, stunned by the realization of just how much money he could make.
But it was nothing compared to the fortune into which he was about to marry. And it would fling him back into the lower depths of society from which he had crawled so long and so hard.
"Honey, the girls will see you have a good time," Aunt Lillian said. "Why, you got every kind of girl you ever dreamed of, can do every sexual trick you ever imagined. And lots you never even thought of."
"I don't intend to keep these places as whorehouses," Mark said. "And I intend to get Julie out of here." He realized how up-tight, how pompous he sounded. And his stiff cock made this posture rather ridiculous.
"Oh, Aunt Lillian, don't let him do that," Julie said.
"Now listen here, Mark," Aunt Lillian said. "These houses don't belong to you yet. If you keep up this attitude, they're not going to, either. I insist on that condition. That you keep them as window-houses. Lord God, with money like you make, you never have to work another day in your life. And you got all that good-looking pussy on the hoof for whatever you feel like doing."
"Let me talk to him alone, Aunt Lillian," Julie said.
"Okay, Julie. Why don't you two drop over to my place about seven. We'll go out somewhere good, for Indonesian food. Maybe by that time you can talk some sense into his head, honey."
"Listen--" Mark said, but broke the sentence off.
His aunt walked out. Julie shut the door and locked it.
Mark tried to make a move toward the door, but some- thing deep inside his gut tightened. His cock swelled. He could not move, and his mind fought his body. An odd, fierce feeling overwhelmed him. His mind capitulated and began to swirl with fantasies of wallowing his mouth all over Julie's body, everywhere... then he was begging Julie.
Julie spread her legs. Her startling blue eyes bored into Mark and he gasped with the weakening feeling that she knew exactly what he was thinking.
"All right, Mark." She took a step toward him. "What have you always dreamed of doing to a woman? Or having her do to you? Don't be afraid. Get out of your puritan bag, baby. I'm game for anything."
Suddenly she reached down. She took the bottom of her dress and jerked the green material from her body and threw it to the floor.
Mark found it impossible to speak. He could not move, except for the throbbing, rigid cock imprisoned in his pants.
Julie took another step. She held him fixed with her blue eyes as though she were a bird of prey. The eyes released him. Finally and automatically, without will, his gaze tore down over the huge, uptilted breasts crowned with enormous brown nipples to the patch of green silk against which bulged--large and damp--her cunt.
CHAPTER FIVE
Julie's fingers slid up her thighs to the bottom rim of the green panties. A long nail scratched across the damp tantalizing bulge, doing a tiny dance that made Mark's cock throb.
"Would you like to take them off, baby?" she asked. "Go on, touch me. Touch my panties if you like. Or kiss them or do what you want, Mark. Just do it up front. I can tell by the way you're looking how much you're hung up "
"No," Mark snapped, the single word nearly sticking in a throat raw as sandpaper.
He jerked his eyes from the finger on the wet silk and then quickly from the wide burning eyes that seemed to strip not only his clothes and flesh but his soul. This eighteen-year-old-girl must know everything, everything he had blocked all these years, this snotty, rich, spoiled girl His cock swelled. The knob seemed to have been touched by something electric. It was raw and sensitive. He felt like an idiot with his pompous thoughts. Hatred for this girl burned through him. His cock strained.
It seemed an eternity since he had spoken his single word, since Julie had talked of her panties, since his aunt had left them alone. He was soaked in sweat.
Julie moved a step. His body tightened. Street noises filtered into the hot room. Rock music died: "Radio Luxemburg English service" someone was saying in clipped, BBC-English. Each nerve end of Mark's body seemed exposed, jerked cruelly to the surface by Julie's blue eyes, by the music made by her sharp nail across the green silk.
The Rolling Stones were singing "Sympathy for the Devil." From far away came the absurd sound of a carousel. Julie moved forward. Mark felt his legs were growing into the floor.
It was fear--absolute, unashamed fear--that clutched at his stomach because he knew that here in this small room with this girl he could give in to years of sublimation, go crazy with her body, become prey to all his depraved longings.
And totally fuck up his plans for the Brockton money and social position.
This sent a chill down to his cock and it wilted slightly. Then he was remembering an image of his mother and father, of a time in school when he had done something and been caught by the teacher, of a time when he was caught masturbating...
He grunted when Julie touched his cock. It jumped to a rigid hardness that jolted a sharp pain through his groin.
He shoved her hand away angrily. "Don't do that," he barked, his throat reluctant to let words pass.
"Shit, baby, what's freaking you out? What are you afraid of? You are capable of balling me, I assume. I mean, you do have a hardon. Do you know what to do with it?" She was rather casually removing her stockings.
Mark's face blazed. He felt power in his muscles. She wasn't the first snotty society bitch whose condescending attitude he'd screwed away.
Mark grabbed Julie and slammed her body against his. He cupped her rounded, panty-clad buttocks. The damp heat of her cunt seemed to gnaw through his pants and his cock strained with a new kind of intensity.
"You're hurting me," she whined, all confidence gone. It was the little-girl voice Mark remembered.
He ignored her struggles and dug his fingers into the buttocks as he mashed a savage kiss against her mouth. He'd show this little bitch what a hardon was for--and when he finished she'd be sore and whimpering for more. She'd probably never had a real man, just society boys in her hometown and the kind of men here that had to pay for sex.
Julie's body went rigid and she made no response to his crushing kiss. Her huge bare breasts shoved against his chest, the enormous nipples digging--somehow burning --into his chest. And her cunt aroused his cock, tormenting his screaming instrument so badly he realized he was making whining noises.
He pried his tongue through her reluctant lips and squeezed the delicious buttocks, his hands delighting in the slick softness of panties drawn so tightly over the smooth, rounded flesh.
His body tingled with excitement which fevered him and tightened his cock with an exquisite ache of desperation. Julie still did not respond, might have been dead but for her breathing and the definitely alive glow and grasp of her cunt through the panties.
A finger of fear soared with the excitement through his body as he twisted the kiss and squeezed her buttocks.
Julie wasn't doing a thing and yet she was arousing him to this point of total desperation. His kiss and his hands and his body seemed to have no effect at all. The apprehension exploded as he realized just-how much he was being aroused by rubbing her panties, by having her cunt burn at him through her panties.
Julie's words came back: "Would you like to take them off, baby? Go on, touch me. Touch my panties if you like. Or kiss them, or do what you want, Mark. Just do it up front. I can tell by the way you're looking how much you're hung up... " He jerked his hands from the buttocks as though stung and stepped from her body. At this instant, seemingly primed to his withdrawal, Julie's rigid body melted and her blue eyes blazed with a lazy, confident sexuality.
She molded herself against him. Her body was firm yet somehow liquid, was hot and squirming, the breasts mashing into his chest.
And that cunt was hotter and wetter and bigger somehow. He gasped. She was pulsating and his balls tightened as though wire had drawn them painfully together.
Her nails cut into his neck. Sudden points of pain tightened his nipples just as her breasts ground over them. The nails dug deeper.
"So you like it rough, baby?" The words were a challenge, yet one with no anger, even rather friendly--definitely provocative.
Julie bit his lower lip and he gasped with the pain. He tasted blood.
"You bitch," he started, moving to shove her away. But he said nothing, did nothing.
Soft lips caressed the bite. Her tongue licked softly while her fingers soothed the scratches on his neck. He was stiff. He moaned as his cock throbbed into her panty-clad cunt. Her breasts shoved harder against his taut nipples.
Julie's first kiss was soft, probing. She pulled her lips away an instant to lick at his lips. Her second kiss was twisting and wet, a sucking kiss that caused him to gasp for breath. Her tongue slithered into his mouth and lazily lashed his tongue-tip, then the roof of his mouth.
In a frenzy of lust, he grasped her buttocks again. He cupped the mounds and pulled her body tighter against his. He returned the kiss, his tongue lashing hers. He grunted out ragged breath--felt his hot breath on Julie's cheek. An animal fury consumed his body in a mindless surge of lust he could not control, did not want to control.
His mind was a useless part of him now and he was directed only by his senses. And his cock. He lifted Julie from the floor by her squirming buttocks and walked awkwardly to the bed.
They fell onto the hard mattress and she grunted with his weight, but it did not interrupt the intensity of her kiss, the movement of her fingers, the pulsating of her cunt.
Mark went berserk with her breasts, wallowing his face in the heaving, velvety flesh. He licked. He sucked. He buried his face in the tight channel between the breasts, a damp, scalding channel which he kissed and tongued.
He was startled that her large brown nipples were soft. He took one in his frantic lips. He sucked. He tongued. He nuzzled with his teeth. He snorted like a demon.
He did not remember tearing her panties off.
But he held the remnants of ripped green silk in a tightly clutched fist as she spread her thighs. She bit and tongued his ear.
He dropped the torn panties and fell over her body. Her flesh was like firm honey. He skated a hand over her flat, undulating stomach. He rubbed shaking fingers down to stroke damp thighs, to touch the thick mound of wet, tangled hair.
He tentatively touched the large puffed lips beneath the hair. A shock of thrill cut through his body. He pulled the fingers away, and shoved the warm, moist thighs further apart.
Through all this he slowly realized he had not removed his clothes.
They were plastered to his body. Julie raised up on one elbow to help him out of his clothes. He tried to tear them off.
"Easy, baby," she purred.
Mark threw his shorts to the floor. He shoved Julie down and took his rigid, throbbing cock in his hand. He rubbed the cock across a sleek, sweating thigh. He whimpered at the sensation.
He paused with his cock at the mound of hair and inviting lips. Thoughts blurred his mind and tormented his senses. Julie's hand joined his on the cock. He jumped.
He rammed hard. His cock did not penetrate the tight passage.
"Easy, don't hurt me," she said, with an edge to her voice.
He ignored her. He shoved again. He couldn't quite get it in, but the touch of the lips fired him with white-hot lust. That sensation of the lips. He snorted out breath. He wanted to touch the lips. Bend down and...
He shoved again. His cock slid into the vise-like passage that was already pulsating. - Julie seemed to move a hundred ways at once. She twisted and undulated in unbelievable motions as he started working desperately with her. He grasped her damp, quivering buttocks.
The tight, hot muscles of her cunt ground against his pumping cock, squeezing out rhythms he had never known in a woman. Her nails coursed his back and buttocks. They were harsh. Then gentle. Her teeth nibbled the soft lobes of his ears. Her tongue laved his ear.
Mark grunted and whined and pounded savagely. She met his every stroke. His every twist and motion.
His release built quickly deep in his loins. Built and surged with a savage ecstasy that seemed to rip raw flesh all along the inside of his cock as it poured in.
He pounded a final time, then collapsed on Julie's sweating body.
Her body fell still except for her breathing--not particularly heavy breathing he realized as he fought for breath.
"Now what?" She sounded bored.
"Let me get my breath and we'll go again," he said.
"Oh, not right now, baby," she muttered and rather roughly shoved at him. "Not like that."
He rolled over and she scrambled up. Her body was dripping sweat, but otherwise gave no sign of the love-making. She took two steps. Pivoted. The blue eyes narrowed and she started to speak.
But she did not. She turned. Again hesitated. When she turned a second time, her face was soft, her smile tender. She stepped to the bed and leaned down. Her lips brushed his. She backed away.
"Look, Mark," she said. "I know we didn't like each other. Maybe still don't. But let's try to be friends. Okay? I've come to like your aunt very much. At least give yourself time to think before you do something drastic about these houses."
He had difficulty looking from her naked glistening body, from the obscene lips and tangled blond hair. Houses? His aunt?
Jesus, he snapped at himself. This is Julie Brockton. He sat up and his nostrils flared. His mind raced. But no thoughts struck clearly enough for him to speak. He could only remember that this little bitch--who could well decide his entire future--had just screwed him better than any woman he had ever known.
And obviously he had not satisfied her. Now she was being sweet. Sweet, hell. Patronizing.
His mind cleared. The sole thoughts of survival and ambition came through and he told himself to calm everything until he had time to think and plan. He had acted stupidly with her. Now he'd tell her anything she wanted to hear, until he decided what to do.
"Sure, let's be friends," he said as he stood up. He hoped the sarcasm didn't seep too strongly into his words.
She was sliding the torn panties up her legs. He found it difficult to concentrate on dressing and not stare at the green silk being stretched over the buttocks. On each cheek a damp spot wet the panties.
He cursed his cock as it tightened. He turned from Julie and told himself grimly that no matter what he decided, he sure as hell wouldn't let the little bitch get to him sexually again.
* * *
PART TWO: In Which Mark Collides With Sin And Degradation-And Says Again: Not My Mother
CHAPTER SIX
As they started down the steps Julie, took Mark's hand. He pulled it away. The touch of her fingers had shot his already aroused cock to new hardness and he was angered at her ability to excite him by the simplest touch.
"Man, are you strung out," she said. She shook her head.
He didn't trust himself to speak and felt angrier as he stared down at her ass swishing in the tight skirt.
Stupid, he told himself. He was just turned around by all the travel, by being in a strange city, by being caught up in the sudden disaster of owning whorehouses in which his fiancee's little sister worked.
Julie had stopped after a few steps. She was looking back at a window in the house. Mark glanced over his shoulder.
The girl in the window was tall and slim. A halo of black hair framed a beautiful pale face. She sat on a chair. Her long white legs were bare, her slender thighs inviting beneath a short black skirt. Her eyes were large and black and contained pure evil. "That's Jill, the English girl your aunt mentioned," Julie said. "Like to meet her? And the rest of the girls? Oh, I see Carla's busy, so you'll have to wait for her."
Mark looked at another window and saw a short, stacked girl. She had shaggy blond hair. She was talking to a man with a beard. She turned to the window--saw Julie and smiled and waved--and closed the curtain.
"I don't want to meet any of them," Mark said.
But his cock had reared up at the sight of Jill, at the sudden and forbidding thought of what those black eyes might promise. And Carla's face had been some contrast: a round, healthy face, quite pretty, with blue eyes. Her skin, even from this distance, seemed as smooth as thick cream.
"Stop snapping at me, damn it," Julie said. "If you want to be enemies, baby, that's okay with me."
Mark warned himself to cool things. "I'm sorry, Julie. I won't act like a bastard again."
He forced a smile and felt his face muscles would crack with the strain of the hypocrisy. As they moved on he to. k her hand. Gave it a squeeze. His cock rose. His breath came heavier. His heart pounded.
More windows. Girls posed. Sex shops. It was all so obvious and open here. There was no sense of guilt or shame at all. Proper people would be shocked and angered by all this sin and degradation.
They crossed an old bridge. A thin breeze whistled through dark, brittle tree limbs. It chilled Mark. The sky had greyed with clouds. A few large, soft snowflakes were falling.
A flake landed on his cheek and Julie smiled and leaned up and licked it away. The touch of her hot, damp tongue, even in so innocent a gesture, fired his loins. He breathed anger at her, at himself. At his shameless cock.
She led him down a narrow street lined with windows at ground level. He swore he would make Julie pay, that somehow he would get his hands on the houses before the Brocktons arrived. And "de-whore" the damn places.
He stumbled on the cobblestones as they crossed a street. Another canal down another street. They walked along the canal.
Yet just thinking about his situation made it seem nearly impossible. It would take a miracle. But he had pulled himself up from the gutter by working miracles.
He'd de-whore the fucking houses and cool things with the Brocktons and get the hell out of this place and back to the United States where he belonged. Where sin and degradation were kept in their proper places.
"I could really use something good and strong to drink," Julie said.
He glanced down. Broad, delicate snowflakes decorated her blond hair. Something good and strong to drink. He laughed to himself because he knew she meant some kind of fey cocktail such as Martha liked. A grasshopper. Or a Manhattan. Or a Brandy Alexander. Or a Golden Dream. She'd drink too many too quickly and get drunk and silly.
"Sure, so could I," he reminded himself to say.
"Well, here we are," Julie said.
They stopped in front of a red brick house. On each side were window houses. Whores posed in the windows. His rich aunt still lived in this sinful part of town. Stupid old bitch.
He followed Julie up the steps, forcing himself to avoid staring at the buttocks. She rang a bell. Snow fell heavier. He heard the carousel, gay lilting music cut by a short shrill blast from a ship's horn.
So little Julie wanted something strong to drink. He would get her, and his aunt, drunk. That shouldn't be too difficult for a real drinker like him. An old lady and a teenage society girl.
Then at least he'd be on top of things and feel confident. He would wipe Julie's condescending smugness from her face. He would find where she was vulnerable. Some way to manipulate her, force her to bend to his will. And he would find his aunt's weaknesses so he could get the houses from her and get the whores out.
He had clawed his way up more than one notch by being able to outdrink anyone he had ever met.
And damn it, outfuck anyone. He'd show this little girl and this old lady they were hardly in his league.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The door was opened by a tall Arab in a tweed jacket. He wore a turban. His smile showed a gold tooth.
"Hello, Julie," he said. "And you must be Mark. I am Ahmed, Lillian's butler."
"Hi, Ahmed," Julie said as the man extended his hand to Mark.
Mark pumped it reluctantly. He disliked such vulgar familiarity in a servant.
As they walked into a short hall and Ahmed closed the door behind them Aunt Lillian came waddling from a doorway framed by--Christ, framed by two small marble statues of people fucking. Mark took another step. Two. No, only one statue of a man and a woman, but one of two women.
Aunt Lillian's red hair hung around her shoulders. She wore a tight-fitting, jade-green dress and a string of pearls. She held a tall glass in a hand heavy with many rings. Her blue eyes had lost some of their sparkle. Mark realized she might be a little drunk.
"Mark, honey," she bellowed and embraced him with a force that nearly knocked him from his feet. He sucked in his breath and inhaled strong perfume that disgusted him.
"My long-lost nephew," she cooed. "And Julie. You come right on in here and have a drink. Snowing, I see. Well, the booze will warm you up in no time. We won't go out for dinner. We'll eat right here."
Aunt Lillian led the way back through the door as she took a deep swallow from the glass. Mark entered the room and realized Ahmed had disappeared.
The room. Mark stopped and his mouth fell open. It was a long room with thick, rust-colored rugs over the hardwood floor. Heavy, dark furniture was brightened by red needlepoint coverings on couches, pillows and chair bottoms. Beams ran the length of the room, a couple of feet below the ceiling.
And on the walls, all the walls, everywhere, were paintings and etchings and prints and drawings of naked women, with pubic hair often showing. Vividly. And men and women fucking. And Christ, not just from the front. Paintings in gold-leafed frames. Obviously expensive.
And some were of naked men. Cocks showing. Sometimes hard. Men were, yes, fucking men. And there were women with women. And women with... It was--with animals.
Mark blushed. He stumbled across the rugs. Blushed deeper. He thought of not only having the Brocktons find out about Julie and the window-houses, but coming here to meet his aunt.
"For tea," he had told Martha and Mrs. Brockton. They had beamed as he told them of his aunt's mentioning an extensive collection of paintings.
Martha liked art. In posing as at least somewhat cultured and educated, he had had to fake an interest, too. And endure Martha's attempts to educate him further.
"What are you drinking, Julie, honey?" Aunt Lillian asked.
"The usual," Julie said.
Mark looked from the painting as he reached the other end of the enormous room. There was a fireplace big enough to walk into, with a roaring fire. On one side was a piano whose top was covered with pictures in gold and silver frames.
Imbedded in the wall on the other side was a tall, square slab of grey marble with two spigots. Beside the marble was an ornately carved bar filled with bottles and glasses.
"And what about you, Mark?" Aunt Lillian asked. "I visually drink Scotch."
"What brand?"
"Johnny Walker. Black Label."
"Mark, why don't you try some gin?" Julie asked. She had plopped down in an overstuffed chair and didn't seem to mind that her skirt was riding high on her thighs.
"I don't drink gin," he said. He wondered how she took her gin. Like Martha? In some kind of sweet fruit juice? With half a dozen cherries floating on top? Sipped through a long, red-and-white-striped straw?
"Oh, but this is different," Julie said. "It's Dutch gin. It's called genever. I really dig it."
"Sure, I'll try some, if you insist," he said. He turned to his aunt. "What are those spigots for?"
"Why, one's genever," she said. "The other one is Heineken's beer."
"You've got gin on tap?"
"Sure, honey. It's such a pain in the ass to keep opening bottles all day and night."
"Jesus," he muttered.
His aunt had taken two tall glasses and dropped a cube of ice into each. Now she was filling them with gin from the spigot. And not leaving much room for a mixer. Not leaving any room, he realized with a start. Christ, they were filled to the top.
She handed one glass to Julie, one to Mark.
"Beer chaser, as usual, Julie?"
"Sure," Julie said. She took a deep swallow of the gin and smiled. Another deep swallow. And another. She was drinking it like milk.
"How about you, Mark?" Aunt Lillian asked. "Beer chaser?"
He hesitated, then nodded. He wouldn't let the little bitch outdo him. Not when it came to drinking.
Aunt Lillian handed them each a tall glass of beer with a big head of foam. She poured herself a fresh gin and a beer.
Mark slugged the gin down, He nearly gagged. It rode in his throat, backing up in his mouth. It tasted like straight alcohol. The stuff must be one hundred fifty proof, he told himself. He got the terrible swallow down finally and drank from the beer. It was good.
He glanced around at his aunt. And at Julie, whose skirt was even higher. Nearly up to the torn panties. Mark cursed the sudden bulge of his cock.
He realized they had each finished half the!; gin. A haze of foam coated Julie's lips. He remembered her damp, searing kisses.
"Dutch gin takes a little getting used to," Aunt Lillian said. "Took Julie two whole days before she could get more than half a dozen glasses down. You two hungry? Here, I'll have Ahmed bring us something to eat."
She stepped to the fireplace. She picked up a small hammer. Mark stared. It was in the shape of a cock. She struck something on the mantle and there was a loud clanging sound. Mark stepped closer. My God, she had struck two enormous brass balls on the mantle.
"What do you think of my gong, honey?" she asked. "Like to keep the set around to remind me of what's really important. After all, the world swings by its balls."
She laughed and tilted her glass. Julie laughed. She spread her thighs wider and drank her gin in a long swallow. Mark's cheeks flushed.
"Let me get us another round of drinks and then I'll tell you about that time in New Orleans, Mark," Aunt Lillian said. "When your mama and I was whoring in the French Quarter and got drunk and climbed the Christmas tree in the lobby of the Monteleon Hotel."
"Not my mother," Mark blurted, trying too late to check the words as he remembered he'd said the same stupid thing earlier.
Julie laughed. She shook her head. Aunt Lillian laughed. Mark's whole body tensed with anger. He didn't let anyone laugh at him. Not ever.
But he could think of nothing to say. His legs were rubbery. And his cock was straining against his pants. It was pointing like a bird dog at the hint of green panties between Julie's open thighs.
Mark poured down a swallow of gin and choked.
CHAPTER EIGHT
An hour later Mark sat in a brown chair whose red needlepoint seat he had discovered detailed an explicit scene of oral love between a man and a woman.
"Sixty-nine, honey," his aunt had said. "Guess it's in the nature of women to take up needlepoint when they start getting older and can't get the juices flowing as easily as they used to."
"My mother needlepoints," Julie had said as she laughed and drank the murderous gin. "Scenes of quaint cottages and birds in trees."
Finally, he switched to Scotch. He was on his third, no, his fourth glass. He shook his head and told himself for the tenth time he could not possibly be drunk. Julie and his aunt were drinking the gin and beer. He had been wrong when he came in and thought his aunt was drunk. She might as well have been drinking Coke for all the effect it had on her.
"You ready for another round, honey?" his aunt asked as she pulled herself to her feet.
"No, not yet," Mark muttered. He licked his lips and tasted that hot sauce on those fish Ahmed had brought them.
Ahmed. The son of bitch, Mark mumbled to himself. He poured down the beer. It seeped over his lower lip and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
He realized Julie was staring at him. He looked from the wide blue eyes. But not without getting a glance at the breasts heaving against her dress, at the bare thighs that were driving him crazy. Did his drunkenness show? How in hell could this old lady and this girl outdrink him this way?
He straightened up on the chair. He was determined to put them under the table--just as he had planned when they started. He had never met anyone who could outdrink him. Not since he started clawing his way out of the gutter and used alcohol and his rugged good looks and sex to climb up...
His eyes had again found Julie's body. His tingling cock mocked his thoughts of strength and ruthlessness.
Ahmed, he thought again. That bastard. How could his aunt let herself be degraded in such a way by some Arab.
"A Moroccan, sir," Ahmed had said in his pompous, too-perfect English as he served the fish from a silver try, then proceeded, in front of everybody, to pat Aunt Lillian on the ass. "I am not an Arab. I am indeed a Moslem, but a Berber. There is as much difference between an Arab and a Berber as between, say, an Irishman and a Greek."
What the hell did he care about the difference, Mark asked himself. That was one change he would somehow force his aunt to make. Get rid of that slimy Arab before the Brocktons arrived.
Christ. The Brocktons. They would insist on meeting his aunt. And Aunt Lillian, of course, would insist on entertaining them.
He did not feel very well. Not at all. He felt somewhat as though he was drowning.
He tried to drown the already drowning feeling with beer. He had the feeling his life was passing in front of him here in his aunt's absurd, obscene house. He actually glanced over his shoulder with the sudden, ridiculous thought Martha was looking at him.
He remembered her attitude about whores. And sex.
And public indecency. And private indecency. He blushed. Nearly choked on the Scotch. Blushed hotter. Julie and Aunt Lillian were staring at him.
He had the odd, debilitating feeling he remembered from childhood, when his mother caught him doing something that was naughty. Or worse, paralyzing him with a look when he was just thinking of something naughty.
"Are you okay, Mark?" Julie asked.
"Sure," he said. "Just having a little trouble adjusting to this difference in time." Sure. That was the perfect excuse. Jet-lag. Six, seven hours difference in time, but his body-clock the same as back home. "Guess it will take me a couple of days to adjust," he added eagerly.
Julie nodded. "It took me that long. I don't see how people who fly back and forth across the Atlantic adjust. You know. Businessmen and diplomats. And pilots. I had this KLM pilot just yesterday. Real cute and awfully sweet. We went down on each other and then he apologized for being exhausted and we got to talking about jet-lag while he paid me."
Julie's casual attitude infuriated Mark. He bolted up and steadied himself.
"What kind of man has to pay for sex?" he blurted.
"Oh, honey, are you still getting all up-tight about whoring? Aunt Lillian asked. "I just don't know about you and those houses. Julie, the way you two came in here I thought you had screwed and worked things out back there. Didn't he come around about the houses, honey? I'd think a big stud like him would be such a sex-hungry animal he'd love whores and screwing and all."
"Hardly," Julie said. "He got it up and he wanted to ball. But when it came to actually balling... " She bit the sentence off. "We didn't settle anything, Aunt Lillian. I was hoping he might like me more and get out of his puritan bag and admit what he really wanted and begin to understand... "
"Damn it, stop talking about me as though I wasn't here," Mark said. "Or like I was a child who didn't understand."
"Do you understand?" Julie asked. She stood up. "And as for being a child... "
"Now, now," Aunt Lillian said. "Nothing serious to spoil our first party. This can all wait until tomorrow. Julie, Mark must be surprised, after all. He's tired. We have to give him time to adjust, honey. And Mark, we got involved with eating and drinking and all and I forgot to tell you about your mama and me and that Christmas tree."
"How about some music, Aunt Lillian?" Julie asked.
"Now, that's what this party needs, Julie," Aunt Lillian said. She waddled over to a huge stereo set and dropped on several records.
She turned. "Now, Mark, about that Christmas tree. Say, you been to New Orleans lately?"
"I've never been there."
"Well, fellow here a couple of months ago from Baton Rouge, he told me Felix's gone fancy now, got a whole restaurant. But when your mama and I were peddling, Felix's wasn't nothing but an oyster bar, the best in the French Quarter."
"What in hell does that have to do with a story about a Christmas tree?" Mark asked. Blood pounded at his temples.
Music blasted. Guitars twanged and someone was singing a hillbilly song in a nasal whine he remembered from childhood. It was a kind of music he associated with being poor and uncultured. He detested it.
"Oh, you got the new bluegrass record," Julie said.
"Just arrived on the airplane today," Aunt Lillian said. "Listen to that guitar. Fiddle will be coming in soon. And a mandolin."
Mark remembered something Martha had once said: "Country music makes my blood go cold. It's so crude and typical of people who live on the wrong side of the tracks."
"And what about the Johnny Cash album?" Julie asked.
"That's coming up next," Aunt Lillian said. "Now, Mark, about that Christmas tree. Well, honey, the oysters have to do with the story because we stopped in Felix's to get twelve dozen on our way back to the hotel, after these midgets picked us up on Bourbon Street... " Mark nearly choked on a swallow of beer. "Midgets? With you? And my mother? Midgets?"
"Honey, midgets got to make it, too," Aunt Lillian said. "And they are not little all over, if you know what I mean."
"But midgets!" He realized he was nearly shouting.
"Now, Mark, there are good midgets and bad midgets," Aunt Lillian said. "You can't lump them all together. These here were good midgets. And good spenders. Not poor. Now I wouldn't rightly have taken up with a poor midget in them days, seeing as how I was peddling my ass for money. They were fine midgets all around. Not like that dwarf your mama got involved with in New York. He was the meanest bastard pound for pound I ever saw. Don't blame her for locking him in the cat-carrying case and taking him out and leaving him on that garbage barge. Did I ever tell you about that cat, honey? Why, your mama had him trained, well now, did you ever feel a cat's tongue on your cock? Just put some milk on that cock and... "
"What about the Christmas tree?" Mark screamed.
He hated his aunt for talking about his mother, but the Christmas tree was better than dwarfs and cats. His mother! Damn this perverted old bitch. He'd somehow get his hands on her houses. Somehow get those filthy whores out. Somehow...
Guitars and mandolins and fiddles and banjos tore at his tensed body.
"I've never balled a dwarf," Julie said, in a matter-of-fact voice. "Or a midget. Once, in high school, I went with this awfully short boy, just over five feet tall. He was good at balling and really great with his tongue."
"Well, these midgets weren't nothing with their tongues, though they was okay, but they had pair of cocks on them that would make you proud, Mark. I assume he had a good one, Julie. Really hung."
"Oh, its big enough," Julie said. "Bigger than average."
Mark could have strangled both of them. And his cock.
Just hearing Julie talk about it made his shaft of flesh rear up further and rub against his pants.
He told himself he'd masturbate before he'd respond to Julie sexually again. Stupid, his cock seemed to scream. He was responding to her. He had to have a piece of ass --and soon. Even if he had to buy it. Hell, he'd never had to buy a piece of ass. And he wouldn't start now.
He cursed the loud, whining music. He cursed the guitars. And remembered he owned--or nearly owned-- whorehouses. He wouldn't have to pay. Anything not to want Julie.
No! He just wanted to get away from this perverse madhouse. This music. This filthy talk about his mother. This depraved teenage society bitch.
He was losing his sanity. He really was. He had to get out. He tried to move. He stumbled. Jesus, he was drunk. He didn't dare move.
CHAPTER NINE
Julie and his aunt had been talking about the size of cocks and now his aunt turned once more to him as someone sang about a blue-eyed girl in a souped-up Ford.
"About that Christmas tree," his aunt said. "We got these twelve dozen oysters and started back to the hotel, where the midgets were staying."
"What were the oysters for?" Julie asked.
Damn her for asking, Mark said to himself. He couldn't stand to have his aunt describe how his mother let some filthy midget lick oysters off her body.
"Well, we was going to put them on the midgets and lick them off," Aunt Lillian said.
Mark felt sick. He was afraid he would collapse. He could go out and waste every midget in Amsterdam. He tasted beer and Scotch and genever and piquant fish. The fire was too hot.
He just wanted out. But he doubted he could make the door. And then he'd have to find a taxi. Maybe he could lie down in one of his aunt's bedrooms.
No. He snapped himself back to full consciousness. He would collapse on the spot before he'd let these two know they'd outdrunk him. And it wasn't just the drinking. It really was the jet-lag. And these stories about his very own mother.
"... were getting playful as we entered the hotel lobby," his Aunt was saying. "And ass-grabbing. Guess we were all a little shit-faced. Went into the Carousel Bar for a drink before going upstairs. That's some bar, honey. Goes round, just like a carousel. Helps you right on along getting drunk."
"Oh, that sounds great, Aunt Lillian," Julie said.
Mark looked at her face and wondered how she could stay sober. Her cheeks were a little red, though. And her eyes were not so clear. Hell, maybe she was drunk and just doing a good job of covering it up. This made him feel much better and he even ventured a small drink of beer.
The music was softer. A plaintive song about a lost dog. Real cornball, cheap smaltz, he told himself.
The doorbell rang. He heard footsteps in the hall. The front door opened. There were voices he couldn't understand. One of them was a female's.
More footsteps. The door opened. A short, slim girl came in, followed by Ahmed.
"Hello, Greta," Aunt Lillian said. "Come right on over here and get yourself something to drink, honey. How are you enjoying your day off?"
"I am well," Greta said. "And I hope you are, also, Aunt Lillian." Her voice was whisper-like, her English proper but accented heavily. Each word was hesitant, as though she was afraid. Her movements were also hesitant.
"Hi," Julie said.
"Hello, Julie," Greta said. "And is this him? The nephew of Aunt Lillian who will own our windows?"
"Yes, this is my nephew, Mark," Aunt Lillian said. "Mark, meet Greta. She rents one of our windows."
Greta walked to Mark. Stopped. Looked up at him. Her brown eyes were shy, almost fearful. And strangely moist. And sexy as hell.
Her face was somewhat angular and very lovely, with a mouth that was a bit small, yet fit her small proportions. Her red hair was short, almost like a boy's. She wore a heavy blue coat and it was impossible to see what her body looked like.
She stuck out her small hand. "I am pleased to meet you, Mark," she said as they shook hands. "I hope we get along as well as I have gotten along with your aunt."
Ahmed was taking off her coat. Mark realized he should say something. Sober up, he warned himself. "I'm sure we will," he mumbled.
Her body was small, her breasts making little contour against her powder-blue dress. Her ass was slim, tight. It stuck out too far for her neat body--and far enough to be provocative.
"I do not care for a drink, Aunt Lillian," she said. "Is Ahmed free? I am to go to a concert of the chamber music in one hour and twenty minutes and I do not have too much time."
"Yes, he's free, Greta," Aunt Lillian said. "He's been waiting for you."
Greta nodded at Mark and smiled shyly. She turned and followed Ahmed from the room.
The three of them drank silently and the guitars got louder and Mark looked at Julie. She was definitely getting drunk. And so was Aunt Lillian.
This made him feel better. Even when she again mentioned the oysters and midgets and his mother. The guitars were softer. The beer went down easier. But he only took one small swallow of the Scotch.
He had just thought of Greta and Ahmed and wondered what she had wanted with the Arab when a faint scream cut into his gut.
"My God," he said. "Was that Greta? What in hell's happening to her?"
"When she works, she has to be careful about showing too much feeling, about letting herself go," Julie said. "Like all of us. She can dig things to a point. But there are some things girl won't let a John do, baby. Greta has some problems she doesn't dare work out with customers. So she's working them out with Ahmed."
"I don't understand," Mark said.
"She's forcing herself to submit to something she might not like," Julie said. "But she will like it--I'm sure. I didn't like it at first. Hurt like crazy. But man, there are sexy nerve ends that won't wait. And beside the pain, there's getting out of the humiliation bag, the feeling you're being degraded. Greta's got some problems, but she's got the guts to work them out, Mark."
"What in hell are you talking about, Julie?" He didn't like the way she looked at him as she talked. He had the feeling again those blue eyes were probing deep.
"Ahmed's balling her in the ass," Julie said.
"Christ! I still don't understand."
"Then ask her," Julie said. "She'll tell you. She doesn't mind talking about it. You really should talk to her, Mark. She might could help you. I have a feeling you two might have a lot in common."
Another scream slammed into Mark. He drained his beer. He avoided the blue eyes.
A flood of uneasiness--of sheer fear--overwhelmed him. He wanted out. Now. No matter what.
"I'm a little sick," he blurted. He set his glasses down. "Jet-lag's got me." The laugh he tried caught in his throat.
"Why don't you. go upstairs and lie down?" Aunt Lillian asked.
"No," he said. "No." He started for the door. Each heavy step was an effort.
"I'll call you a taxi, honey," his aunt said.
"No, I'll get one," he said. Would he never reach the door? "I'll see you both later. Don't worry. I'll be okay when I get some rest."
"Hope you feel better," Julie called.
He crossed the deep, soft rugs in the endless room. Dirty paintings glared down at him. With all that pubic hair. Guitars screamed into his ears. His head was swimming.
And his cock ached with desire.
Loud grunts spurred him along. Each one shot directly to his suffering, extended cock.
He finally made it outside. He struggled along in the snow. Four awesome blocks away, after nearly lurching into a canal, he found a taxi. He collapsed in the back seat and gave the driver the name of his hotel.
* * *
PART THREE: In Which Mark Gets Hungover, Anxious, Guilty, Horny, Morally Indignant Over Greta's Ass And Some Marbles-And Very, Very Wet
CHAPTER TEN
Mark did not find out about the long-distance calls until the next evening when he finally dragged himself from bed.
It took him half an hour to fumble his way through a shower during which his uncertain hands turned the wrong knob and he nearly scalded himself. He dropped the soap half a dozen times and slipped twice. Three times he dropped his toothbrush.
The buttons on his shirt seemed slippery, and nearly impossible to slide into the small, elusive holes.
All this time his stomach rolled as though filled with heavy, wet sand. His head pounded with a dull ache. There was a taste in his mouth that toothpaste and mouthwash could not even begin to erase.
He looked at himself in the mirror. He ran his hand across his chin. He needed a shave. But he wouldn't dare risk using a razor in this condition. Genever. Scotch. Beer. Spiced fish. He nearly gagged.
He opened the door and paused as his mind reconstructed the whole day. There had been Julie. Instantly his cock, the only part of his suffering body that had any life at all, began to creep to full length.
His aunt. The window-houses. That drinking session and the hillbilly music and those stories about his mother. That snotty Arab. And that strange little whore who went upstairs with the Arab. And that cream-skinned girl in the window. And that pale, wicked-looking English girl.
He staggered down the hall to the elevators. What in hell was he doing with people like that? People from some kind of freak show. Depraved. Perverse. He remembered his vow that he .would change things. And still get the houses from his aunt. His stomach didn't take the sudden descent too well. He was thinking about the Brocktons as he crossed the lobby.
And he realized with relief how much easier everything would be if they didn't come to Amsterdam. Yes, he'd think up some reason to keep them from coming. He handed his key to the desk clerk.
"The call from America came through again several times today, sir," the clerk said. "But you left word last night that you were not to be disturbed."
"Call? What call from America?" His stomach tightened.
"Why, last night I told you about the call from the United States, sir. Here. I have the number." Mark took the slip of paper with unsteady hands. Naturally, it was the Brockton's number...
He swallowed hard as he unfolded the paper. It was not the Brockton's number. It was the number of a New York hotel. Jesus, had they decided to come early? "Are you well, sir?" the clerk asked. "You look a little pale."
"Just had too much to drink last night," Mark mumbled. "Too much genever."
The clerk smiled. "Yes, many Americans find our gin difficult at first."
Mark hated his condescending sympathy. "I doubt if I'll drink it again," he snapped.
"Will you have something to eat now, sir? A table has been reserved for you."
The thought of eating started the sand to grinding in his stomach. "I didn't ask that a table be reserved for me, did I?"
"You said you wished a table when you woke up," the clerk said. "If you prefer, you can eat in your room, however."
"No, the dining room is fine," Mark said. He knew he would feel better if he forced himself to eat something.
"To the right, through the double doors," the clerk said.
Mark headed for the dining room. He hated clerks in expensive hotels and waiters in exclusive restaurants. He had the uneasy feeling they could see right through him, despite his money and his clothes and the manners he had so carefully acquired.
Yes, he would get something down. Then he would call the Brocktons and somehow stop their coming to Amsterdam.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mark paced the floor in the main post office off the Dam Square behind the Royal Palace. The enormous room was cold and beyond the windows he saw the snowfall was heavier. Wind rattled the panes.
"There is still no answer on your call to New York," the man behind the counter said. "The hotel informs us that the party is out. They left a message they will return shortly and that it is urgent you reach them by telephone."
"Fine," Mark said. "Thank you."
He pivoted. Urgent, he thought as he crossed the room. He passed lines of people buying stamps and mailing packages, went past a small tidy newsstand which had on display copies of the Paris Herald-Tribune, Time and Newsweek. He paused in front of the revolving door. He buttoned his coat.
Nervous energy had cut through the hangover and driven him from the hotel when he couldn't complete his first call. Now the energy pushed him again and he shoved the door and stepped into the snow. He walked down slippery steps and across the street. As the light changed a trolley clanged dangerously close.
The wind in the large, open Dam Square was murderous. The snow cut at his nose and his stiff, aching ears. He walked aimlessly.
Aimlessly, hell, he admitted to himself. He hailed a taxi. He was headed for the window-houses.
Not for sex, he nearly shouted down to his stirring cock. To be tough. And resolve something with Julie. Get her out of that window, just in case the Brockton's came. And resolve something with my aunt. Trick her in some way. Get those houses. Get those whores out.
The taxi stopped, sliding on ice. Mark walked carefully over the slick sidewalk. He put his hand on the handle. "Mark!"
He turned to the sound of the girl's voice. It was Greta. She was bundled up in her big blue coat. Her short-cropped red hair glistened with wet snow. Something warm coursed his body.
"Yes? How are you today, Greta?" Why did he have trouble speaking? Could his hangover be that bad?
"Are you going to your houses?" she asked. "If so, we could share the taxi, if you don't mind. I'm just going to work."
No you're not, baby. Mark wanted to say. Not ever again in my houses. But instead he found himself staring at her face. He was aroused by her seething sexuality, yet charmed by her warm honest smile and the mechanical way she walked. Moved. Talked. Did everything.
"Yes, I'm going over there," he said. He opened the door.
"They are not really far from the Dam," she said as she climbed in. "We could walk. But I am already late for missing my usual trolley. I cannot afford to lose any more minutes from the time I pay for my window."
"Is the rent too high?" he snapped. It was a stupid attempt at being sarcastic and disapproving.
It was stupid since Greta turned him on so quickly. His cock was swelling as he sat beside her. His whole damn hangover-ridden body was beginning to throb with sexual excitement. Throb because of the whore who had let an Arab fuck her in the ass.
Greta leaned forward and gave the driver the address.
Mark realized he could not possibly have pronounced it without reading it syllable by syllable from the card on which it was written.
Greta sat back. She shook her head and brushed a small hand through her wet hair. She looked at him then. Her lovely face was serious, the brown eyes, as yesterday, shy and slightly moist.
"The rent is high," she said. She nodded for emphasis. "But your houses are in the best location on any canal. So I earn much more. There are higher rents on the canal. Your Aunt Lillian has been quite fair, I believe. I have investigated and thought all this out. Yes, the rents are high, but I think fair."
"That is a good location," the cab driver said.
Mark glanced at the man. He resented his statement. But his resentment was tempered by embarrassment at having this perfect stranger know he owned whorehouses. And know he was sharing the taxi with a whore.
"I was for a time on a small street on the side," Greta said. "The rent was much lower, but I earned far less money. And the building was cheap and the walls thin and one could hear what happened in other rooms. My customers did not like that. And neither did I. In my profession, it is not good for the sounds to be heard. There are some things that should remain private between a man and a woman."
The cab driver nodded. "Yes, that is correct, Miss. I have been in the houses with thin walls. I prefer the older, more substantial houses along the canal. Though for a working man like me, the girls in those windows, young girls like you, Miss, are expensive."
Mark could not believe the conversation was real. He bristled with anger. Yet he had no idea what to say. How could he tell them to shut up?
He kept imagining Martha's face. Mr. Brockton's. Mrs. Brockton's. All their proper society friends at the country club.
"But I have seen you, have I not?" Greta asked.
The man turned a corner slowly, waited for two old women to work their way across the street through the now. Now they drove down a canal, window-houses on each side.
"Yes, I came to your window," the man said. "Though I am only a taxi driver, I like the best, Miss. Better to go less often and have the best than to go every night to some cheap, older woman."
"You visited me one month ago," Greta said abruptly. She leaned forward. "You stayed for one half-hour, did you not? And before you went to the bed and made love to me you rolled marbles on the floor and had me pick them up with my ass, did you not?"
"Yes, Miss, that is correct," the man said.
My God, the driver was depraved, Mark told himself. How had he, by sheer coincidence, gotten into the taxi of a sexual freak? The bastard should be locked up. And this bitch had obviously used her ass to pick up his marbles.
And Christ, why was the image of Greta's bare, tight little ass picking up marbles making him warm, pushing his pulse faster, causing his loins to tighten? And his cock to shove against his pants?
The depraved driver was slowing down. Mark felt like dragging the son of a bitch out and busting him in the mouth. Martha was right. Men who went to whores were as guilty as the whores. Guiltier. Making a young girl like this use her ass to pick up marbles!
"Men seem to like my ass very much," Greta said. From her clipped, deliberate tone she might as well have been talking about how much men liked her eyes. Or the way she cooked. "Well, we are at my house. I must begin my work. Your name is Hans, is it not?"
"Yes, my name is Hans," he said. "And you are Greta. You see, I remember. I had planned to visit you again when I had the money. But my youngest girl has been ill and the insurance did not cover all of the medicine."
"How old is your little girl?" Greta asked.
"She is six," Hans said. "Her name is Liesbeth."
"I hope Liesbeth is soon well once again," Greta said. "Come and visit my window tomorrow if you can, Hans. I remember that you were gentle with me--despite your size. I will make an arrangement with you, if you like, while Liesbeth is ill. You meet me at the trolley each day and bring me in the snow to my window, and you may visit me for one half of what I would normally charge."
This was like something out of a grade-B movie, Mark snorted to himself. The whore with a heart of gold. The sick daughter of the working man.
He remembered Greta and Ahmed. The screams and grunts. What in hell kind of girl was she? Obviously sick. Depraved.
He told himself he missed a girl like Martha, even if she was a frigid bitch. But his cock pointed toward Greta. It ached against his tight pants.
He sat up abruptly. Self-hatred slammed away the arousement. His cock wilted in the fury of his anger at himself. And the driver. And Greta.
They had been talking and making arrangements as though to meet for a casual drink. He glared at Hans. At Greta. He saw Julie in her window.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Julie was sitting on a chair. She wore a black leather micro-dress that accentuated her bare thighs. And there were girls in the other windows. His damn windows. He saw Jill. And Carla. And girls he didn't know. And next door a heavy, dark-haired girl was pulling the curtain and talking over her shoulder to a man in a--Christ--in a policeman's uniform.
"Now, Mark, we must share the cost of this taxi ride," Greta said. "Mark, your eyes. Your cheeks. Why do you turn red and look at me in so strange a way, as though you were angry with me?"
"No charge today," the taxi driver said. He was smiling and this stoked Mark's anger. Hans had a moustache and Mark disliked men with moustaches.
He pulled a wad of paper money from his pocket. He tore off a bill and shoved it at Hans. "I'll pay," he snapped.
"No," Hans said. He smiled deeper. "After all, you own the window which I will visit."
"You won't be visiting my window," -Mark said. He threw the bill onto the front seat. "And this little bitch won't be sitting in my window, you bastard."
The smile snapped from Hans' face. "You are a gentleman. You should not call Greta a word like that. You must give her an apology."
"This filthy whore?" Mark realized he was shouting. He felt worse from the hangover. His body was weak with anger. He could not believe his cock was swelling.
A lone tear ran down Greta's cheek, which was red. "Why do you dislike me?" she asked. Her voice was barely a whisper. "Why do you say such terrible things to me, Mark? How have I offended you? If you do not want me, I will not work any longer in your window."
"I will make you apologize," Hans said. He opened his door.
"Screw you," Mark said to Greta. He turned and shoved his door open and unbuttoned his coat. "I'll mash your face in," he shouted at Hans.
One thing that growing up in the slums had taught him was how to fight. He hadn't forgotten that. He would show this depraved, middle-aged taxi driver what it meant to mess with Mark Rogers.
Mark climbed from the car. He was practically snarling. His muscles were tensed. His body was coiled. His hands were fists, ready to double up.
His feet hit ice. He lost his balance. He slid. Fell. Hit the pavement and hurt his knee. Snow lashed his face. He gripped a tree and climbed up. Pain shot from his knee. His pants were ripped.
A wave of abject terror swept his body as he looked at Hans. The bastard was huge. Sitting, he had seemed normal. But he was easily six-and-half-feet tall. His fists looked like sledge-hammers.
Mark heard the carousel music. It was the only sound --except for his heavy breathing.
"Tell the lady you didn't mean those words," Hans said.
Greta was getting out of the taxi. Her cheeks were wet with tears. "No, Hans. Do not hurt him. He is simply a frustrated and pitiful American. I will not work in his window."
"I don't need your damn help," Mark said. He bit down the fear. The hangover, the humiliation, the anger had built to explosive proportions. He doubled his hands into fists.
Mark lunged at Hans. His foot hit the same patch of ice. He yelped like a small animal as he flew backward. He fell over the low iron railing and plunged into the freezing water of the canal.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mark sank stonelike. He flailed helplessly in his heavy coat. A shock of terrible cold soaked his feverish body. He hit bottom and shot up. He shivered. Pieces of sharp wood were slamming against his face.
He bobbed to the surface. He saw blurs on the bank. He fought to stay on top of the water. To move. To swim. But his heavy clothes hindered his efforts. He heard a babble of shouts. Lights flashed on. People were running.
He started to sink once more. He thrashed in the freezing water. Stayed on top. Larger pieces of wood hurt his face.
Hans was tugging off his coat, walking toward the canal. But it was Greta who tore her coat off and plunged into the water. She moved quickly, expertly. She reached him in an instant.
"Do not panic," she said. "The water is not deep. You can not swim in that coat. Give your arm to me."
He obeyed instinctively. He fought back the panic. He gasped and got a mouthful of putrid water. He shivered so hard his whole body shook.
Greta was pulling him slowly toward the bank. Hans jumped into the canal. He took two giant steps, bent down and scooped up Mark in one arm and Greta in the other and moved them to the bank, where he set them down gently.
Mark collapsed on the snow-covered sidewalk. People were gathering around. More sounds of people running. The carousel in the distance. Shouts. He was freezing. His knee ached.
And his face hurt. He touched his cheek. Sticky. He was bleeding. His eye ached. Felt puffy and hot.
"Mark, what happened?" It was Julie. He did not look up. "My Lord, Mark. Greta, are you okay? What happened?"
Greta was crying and Hans was holding her. She was talking to Julie in English, and to the people standing around in Dutch.
Mark got to his knees. Chill shook his aching body. His knee stung in the snow. He glanced up into hostile faces. He climbed to his feet. In the windows he saw girls in slips and panties and men in shorts staring down at him.
Hans took a step toward him. Greta pulled at Hans' arm. He turned away, and wrapped his coat around Greta. They walked across the street.
"Can you walk?" Julie asked. "Get inside before you catch pneumonia."
She put her hand on his arm but he pulled away and nearly fell. A strange cold was chilling his rigid cock. People were no longer angry. They were laughing. His face, though he shivered, felt as if it had been baked in an oven.
"I can walk," he said, with as much dignity as he could manage. "I don't need you to take care of me."
"You need all the help you can get, baby," she said. "Now get inside, you pompous bastard. Your aunt will have your ass when I tell her about Greta."
"To hell with my aunt," he said, mustering not only dignity but courage. He was freezing. His teeth were chattering. How could his cock be so hot and so cold? He looked at the people. He hated them. They laughed louder. Pointed.
He moved with slow, very careful steps behind Julie.
She stopped. A policeman ran up. He was zipping his pants. It was the one he had seen in the window.
"Has this drunken American caused trouble in the house?" he asked Julie.
"I'm not drunk," Mark said. "That ape of a cab-driver "
"If you are not drunk, then you are a sexual pervert," the policeman said.
"Me?" Mark yelled. "Me? What in hell are you talking about? I'm surrounded by sick sex and whores and you call me a pervert."
"Shut up, Mark," Julie said. "You've already made a fool out of yourself and now you're going to get arrested."
"There are laws against such things in Holland," he said, taking out a notebook. His face showed disgust. "Perhaps you do such things in public in America, but here it is strictly forbidden. For people such as you there are hospitals."
"Let me get him inside," Julie said.
"I can take care of myself," Mark shouted.
"Then zip your fly," she said, "before you freeze your prick off."
He glanced down. His cock was exposed. People laughed louder. Even the policeman was laughing now. He had put away his notebook.
Mark tried to shove his cock back through the rip. It would not go. It stung badly when he touched it. He jerked his hand away.
He pulled his water-soaked coat across his lap, hunched over and ran awkwardly for the house. Laughter followed him. As he darted up the steps he saw the evil-looking English girl laughing.
He made the door to Julie's room and bolted inside as she came up the steps behind him.
Hans and Greta were sitting on the floor in front of the heater. They were both naked. Rock music blasted from the radio.
Neither spoke. They just glanced at him, then turned away. There was a girl on the bed. The pretty, wholesome-looking one he had seen in the window. Carla. She looked at him without expression.
Mark collapsed on the opposite end of the bed. He hesitated, then got his pants open and tried to gently shove his cock inside. It was more flaccid. It stung so badly, however, he had to let it hang out.
It was reddish. He had the sudden, terrible idea he had frostbite. Of the cock? How did you treat frostbite of the cock? Jesus, he had heard of cases of extreme frostbite of the hands and feet when amputation was necessary.
Amputation! Terminal frostbite of the cock? His cock shriveled. Sharp pain spread into his loins. He doubled up and grunted sharply.
Julie walked in. There was a Chinese boy behind her, with a bottle in each hand. And another girl. And the policeman, with the heavy-set girl. And beyond them all, across the steps, Mark got a glimpse of Jill looking at him through the cracked door of her room. She wore thigh-length black boots and tiny black panties and she carried a riding crop". On the bed was a naked man. She looked away. The door closed.
Julie was sitting down beside him. He glanced down at her bare thighs beneath the leather skirt before looking into her blue eyes.
"Get out of those clothes," she said. "Carla, can you get the heater from your room? He's going to catch pneumonia unless he gets out of these clothes and gets dry and warm. Come on, Mark. Get undressed."
She pulled his overcoat off roughly and threw it into a corner. The Chinese boy had opened the bottles. He handed one to Hans and one to Mark. Mark took a deep swallow. It was brandy and burned wonderfully all through his body. He drank again. And again.
Julie took a swallow and handed the bottle back to the boy who drank and passed it to the policeman.
The music was louder. But over it he heard a scream from next door. He thought of Jill. The boots. The panties. The riding crop.
Julie was undressing him, and none too gently. He started to protest. But there was not one drop of protest left. Not one ounce of energy. He just ached. Everywhere. Especially his eye. And his cock.
Julie had him down to his shorts when Carla returned with her space heater. Carla plugged the heater in and its warmth, and two more swallows of brandy, took his chill away.
When Julie moved her hand to his shorts, he stiffened. He was going to be naked in front of all these people. For some reason he shivered with shame. He resisted Julie's hand.
She pulled her hand away and shook her head.
"What is the matter?" Carla asked.
"He's too up-tight to get naked," Julie said. "After parading his prick in front of half of Amsterdam, it can't much matter now."
Mark blushed. "My cock hurts," he whined. "I'm afraid it's frostbitten, Julie. I was afraid you'd hurt it."
"Oh, you poor thing," Carla said. "Let me take your shorts off. I won't hurt you. If your cock is indeed bitten by the frost it must be warmed quickly."
Mark gasped at the touch of her soft fingers on his stomach. He looked at the way her gigantic breasts shoved against her tight blouse. She did not wear a bra. Her nipples were long. Quite long. Blood throbbed at his temples.
Her face did look cream-smooth. And her fingers felt like thick cream as they gently worked his shorts down. The fingers tenderly tantalized his sensitive thighs. Spasms of excitement jerked through his body.
Her eyes were the deepest blue he had ever seen. Her pretty face looked so healthy--so wholesome and concerned. The hint of a pink tongue showed between her lips.
Her hair smelled as though it had just been washed.
Carla was so young and clean, and yet she was a whore He was naked. His cock was hard. The man across the hall screamed. The Beatles sang from the radio. People were kissing and drinking, and talking in Dutch.
He was drinking from the bottle. Again and again. His vision was a little blurred., Carla had her arm around him. She was stroking his thighs and softly kissing his ear.
Someone was pulling the curtain. More people came in. He drank brandy. Carla's finger slid against his aching cock. The pain was quick and sharp.
He passed out.
* * *
PART FOUR: In Which Mark Spends The Most Incredible Night Of His Life In Julie's Window-Room-And Stumbles Into A Dawn That Promises-Martha Brockton?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mark woke up slowly. First he heard the din of noise. Music. Talking. Laughing. And grunts and groans and sounds of sex. And he was grunting and groaning and something warm and soft and delicious was rubbing up and down his rigid, sex-primed cock...
His eyes snapped open. He sat bolt upright. He closed his eyes and blinked and opened them and still did not believe what he saw.
Naked bodies writhing on the floor, on the bed. Bodies everywhere. Sweating, glistening bodies. Cocks and breasts and asses and nipples and lips and tongues. Kissing and sucking and screwing.
His body came fully alive and he felt Carla's naked body. She lay against him, her huge breasts rubbing his arm. She was stroking his dancing cock.
"I have not hurt you again, have I?" she asked. She rubbed a lone finger over the unbearably aroused head of his cock. He gasped at the shock of painful arousal the finger brought.
"No," he said weakly. He collapsed against her hot, lush body.
"I thought to warm your cock and remove the danger of frostbite while you slept, in case there was more pain,", she purred into his ear.
Her tongue smothered the ear, her wet lips sucked the ear, her sharp teeth bit the lobes. A hand tickled his chest and twisted the thick hair. The lone finger scratched his cock.
"Do you like me, Mark? Please show some response. Do you not wish to kiss me? To hold my body? I am warm, Mark. I will keep you warm. Do not be afraid."
The eyes were magic-blue. Deep blue. Innocent yet arousing in their purity. He stroked her creamy cheeks, ran a finger across eager, open lips of a damp, velvety texture.
Mark twisted in Carla's arms and smothered a sucking kiss against the lips. She opened her mouth wide. She shoved her long, pink tongue into his mouth. It slid against his tongue-tip, then tickled the roof of his mouth in movements that made him squirm and whimper.
His cock seemed hard as steel, yet responded to each touch as if it were the softest, most delicate piece of flesh on earth. It was ready to screech in its new-found language, to explode with sublime, aching excitement.
Christ, she could kiss. She twisted her lips, tongued him, gnawed his tongue-tip to combine dots of sharp pain with the soft lash of her tongue.
Her hands roamed his body to tickle and stroke, the nails raking out small trails that hurt tender skin yet inflamed each place they touched. Pain everywhere, and his eye really hurt. And so did his cheek. And his knee. But all the pain added to his soaring excitement.
His hands found her breasts and he cupped and squeezed the heavy mounds. Enormous. Yet pointed proudly upward. Firm, sleek young breasts. Slick and warm with the sweat of her arousal. He could feel her racing heart.
He kneaded the breasts, rubbed the flesh with pumping motions. He pulled from her sucking lips and kissed down to the breasts. He whined and writhed as he licked the scalding mounds. Carla dug nails into his neck as he j lashed his tongue insatiably across the breasts.
His cock tightened, and throbbed. His balls hurt. He sucked a long hard nipple and his body spasmed in a delirium of excitement. He tongued and bit the firm nipple and twisted it with his teeth. Carla gasped. Her body hunched.
He lowered his head and licked her flat stomach, tongued her small, shallow navel.
"Oh, yes, darling," she gasped as she stretched out her short, squirming body.
Mark squeezed her breasts. He twisted them roughly and pulled at the nipples. He wallowed his flushed face across her jerking stomach. He licked sweat off. He hunched with the throbbing of his miserable cock.
His lips moved lower. Carla dug her hands into his hair. He heard the other grunts and groans in the room.
His hand slid over her damp, satiny thigh. She whimpered. He slid the hand further up to rub at her sparse mound of silky, wet hair. Through the hair to the small, sticky lips. Carla thrashed and made sounds deep in her throat.
They matched the rumbling, nearly inhuman sounds in his own throat as he moved his face down. He kissed the thighs. Licked. Hair brushed his face. He sucked in his breath. Then came the perfumed but musty smell of Carla's damp sexual excitement. The smell scalded his nostrils like acid.
Extreme desire and sudden disgust ripped through his body. He jerked his face from her writhing body.
"Don't stop," she moaned.
He looked up past her breasts to the narrowed, heavy blue eyes. Her cheeks were beet-red.
Mark scrambled up. He fought for breath.
"Why?" she gasped. "Why did you stop?" Do you want us to do it together? To each other? Yes, I would like that."
"No," Mark panted. Each breath still brought a bit of the musty smell. He hated the smell. But Jesus, it aroused him in a terrifying way.
Carla stared at him. She seemed to be studying him. "I see," she said finally. She had caught her breath. "I understand--because I am a whore. I remember what you said to Greta."
"No." It was a feeble protest.
"It is okay," she said. "Do you wish to make love to me? No?"
Yes, I want to, formed in Mark's mind. I want you, Carla. I want to kiss and possess every part of your body.
But he could not get the words out. The grunting and groaning were getting to him. He could smell sex throughout the room. Sex and sweat. It was too hot. His desire began to ebb. His cock shrank. He hurt. God, he hurt. Was he being punished for almost giving in?
Damp, heavy sex smell. He tasted the brandy. Heat seemed to flow in waves. Bodies heaved. Writhed. Rock music grew louder.
"No?" She nodded. "I am not angry for the way you feel, Mark. I understand. I only pity you. Yes, I do. You are a man who lives his life buttoned up. Others may dislike you. I do not. I liked you. I am a whore. Even a whore can have feelings, Mark. Even a whore can give you pleasure. And I am not being proud when I say you would have stopped even if I was not a whore. That is true. You are afraid of yourself. You should have the courage to admit it. I could unzip you, Mark, and make your carefully protected feelings move as I wish."
He sat rigidly through her little speech. He was held by the bottomless blue eyes--the healthy, wholesome beauty of her sexuality. This whore. So young. So smooth. She was clean. He had stopped. And not because she was a whore.
"You're fighting so hard to contain yourself you will burst if you do not find release," she said. "If one of the others gets to you, they can make you suffer, my proud American. You have suffered enough for one night."
"Listen," he croaked just as she slid onto the floor.
With surprising strength, she moved his thighs apart. His cock snapped to hardness. Her nails dug into the soft flesh of his thighs and held them apart.
"No," he said. It was barely a whisper. His body was frantic with desire.
He whined as her lips brushed the knob of his cock. He dug his fingers into her silky hair, pulled sharply as her mouth enclosed the head of his cock.
"Oh, Christ," he screamed.
The lips slid lower. Sucked. Kissed. He whimpered. He writhed. He tossed his head. She sucked slowly. Sucked expertly. There was just enough cutting of her sharp teeth on the knob to run pain with the pleasure up and down the rigid shaft. The sensation made him delirious.
One of her hands gathered hair on his chest. She twisted the hair. He jerked at the faint pain. Her other hand tickled his balls to a tightness so keen his knees jerked. She slid the hand beneath him as she sucked faster. Her tongue lashed the knob.
A slice of sharp nail seared up his buttocks. He screamed. She mashed her mouth tighter over his cock. Too tight. He couldn't stand it. He snorted out his breath. She sucked faster. Her mouth seemed ready to boil. Faster. Her tongue punished his maddened knob.
She pulled her lips away. The blue eyes were mocking. "Shall I quit? How well can you control yourself now, Mark?"
"No, please don't," he begged. His body raged with the agony of betrayal. His loins slid into an agony of desire. "Please, Carla, please don't stop. I'll do anything."
She lowered her head and began to suck and lick again. His climax built deep in his loins. It began to soar. He hunched at her sucking mouth. Tore at her hair. He gritted his teeth. He bit his own shoulder, smothering his whimpers.
The climax. He jumped with the force of the sharp release, then shivered at the sensation.
Mark fell against the wall. He fought for breath. Carla pulled from his withered cock. Her lovely face was sickly white. Her eyes had narrowed again. Sweat ran in rivulets over her cheeks and spilled down onto her breasts.
She looked at him a moment then turned away. She reached around and found a bottle of brandy and took a swallow. Another. She handed him the bottle.
He nearly choked on the first swallow. It tasted metallic in his dry throat. He fought it down. The second swallow was easier. It made him feel better. So did the third.
Mark's eyes closed. He heard Carla scramble and move away.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The rising hum of groans and grunts over the rock music brought Mark back to consciousness. He opened his eyes. His vision was blurred. He saw what seemed an endless mass of naked bodies writhing, twisting, pounding.
He closed his eyes. Opened them. Shook his head.
It wasn't real. Climaxing had jerked him back to reality. And he did not believe he now sat naked amid this scene.
There must be two dozen people fucking in the small, hot room. And not just fucking. He leaned forward.
The policeman and the heavy-set girl were in a sixty-nine position. Two girls in a corner were kissing, one lying on top of the other and hunching vigorously as though a man.
The sight disgusted Mark. Yet it aroused him. The girls were young and attractive.
Was that... ? Yes, it was Greta. That monster of a taxi driver was pounding away on top of her. And Jesus. There were marbles all over the floor.
And that English girl, Jill. She was straddling the face of some man. She wore tall, black boots.
Disgusting! Mark found the brandy and drank. The most disgusting thing he had ever seen. No one had any shame. They were all performing right in front of each other.
He was hot. Felt sticky. His stomach was churning. He wanted to get out.
He hurt. God, he hurt. His soft cock was pulsing pain. His eye was swollen. His knee ached. He felt his cheek. A finger traced a thin outline of dried blood.
He glanced at a sharp sound. It was Julie--on the other end of the bed. The Chinese boy was fucking her. She was twisting and humping her body. Her beautiful face was contorted into the erotic ugliness of passion.
Martha's own sister with a Chinese boy!
Cheap whore, he snorted to himself. He drank the brandy. He felt like pulling that Oriental bastard off Julie and busting her.
To hell with her, he told himself. He drank more brandy. Sweat stung his eyes. He brushed at his face with the back of his hand.
When he glanced back at Julie he saw beyond her that the door was partially open. Carla was standing in a small bathroom. She was masturbating!
He looked away. The most disgusting thing he had ever seen. A woman doing that! And to think he had kissed her and let her use her mouth on him!
A tangle of bodies in the middle of the room moved. A couple rolled away. What was that beneath them? Christ, another couple. Some huge woman. On her knees. And some son of a bitch was fucking her in the ass.
Mark nearly dropped the brandy. It was Ahmed fucking his Aunt Lillian in the ass! He looked away. Slid to the edge of the bed. He wondered where his clothes were.
He was getting out of here and to hell with Julie and his perverse aunt--with an Arab, in God's name--and all her money and all her houses.
And to hell with the Brocktons!
The Brocktons?
Something strong and cold gripped Mark. He could easily give up the houses. But he must have been here for hours. What if it was too late to stop the Brocktons from coming?
He had to get to a phone. He shoved himself up. His legs could barely hold his weight. He weaved back. Caught himself with a hand on the wall. Another slug of brandy steadied him a little.
"Mark, honey!"
He looked around. Aunt Lillian was stumbling to her feet, pulling a green slip over the huge ass that had just been violated by an Arab.
"Bet you never been to a party like this here one," she said as she picked her way through the writhing couples. "Lord, when I found out what all had happened I said to Julie, 'Honey, all rent's canceled today. Let's close up shop and have us a party and somehow everything will work out.' " Everything that happened? He remembered Greta. Then he reminded himself he didn't have to worry about his aunt if he didn't want the houses. But he did want the houses, wanted the wealth and security and position that owning property could give.
"That Ahmed," she said. "Now, honey, there's an ass-fucker for you. Them Moslems know a thing or two about sex. They like it every way, of course. But give a Moslem an ass to fuck and he's happy as a pig in shit." She laughed. "Don't guess I should say pig. Them Moslems aren't much for pigs."
"Aunt Lillian," Mark said through gritted teeth. "How in hell can you enjoy having someone do that to you? It must hurt like hell. And it's so humiliating. Have you reached the point where that's the only way you can get a man? Let some Arab take you in the ass?"
"Ahmed's not an Arab, honey," she said. "Now, he explained all that. He's a Berber."
"O.K.! Arab. Berber. What difference does it make? It's what you let them do that counts."
She shook her head. "Julie's right, honey. You are uptight about sex. Didn't you listen to anything she said in my house? I imagine you don't have any experience with that kind of sex, Mark, so you're just blowing off steam about morality and that crap. Don't you know nothing's humiliating unless you think it is? Honey, you're talking awfully high-falutin' for a man caught with his prick out in public. A man who just got sucked off and is standing here now naked as a jaybird."
Mark glanced down at his cock. It had actually begun to stiffen. Its one eye seemed to mock him.
"How in hell would I know anything about screwing in the ass?" he snorted. His words were underlined with indignation. "I'm not queer."
"Maybe you are," Aunt Lillian said. "I mean, in a different kind of way. Not homosexual. You sure got something wrong far as sex is concerned. That will all change when you spend more time here. I saw you with Carla. You weren't so up-tight when she was sucking you off. And I see how you look at Julie. Good thing she likes you, honey. The way you're hung up on her, she could turn you every way but loose."
The groans were louder. His legs were rubbery. He heard Julie snorting. The bed was jerking. Queer? Something wrong sexually? His depraved aunt saw everything and everybody in her own image.
Look at her now--that ridiculous slip, huge body, hair dyed red, eyes heavy, as though drugged. Face wrinkled. She looked her age.
What was happening to him? To his iron-firm strength and self-confidence? How had he let himself wind up in this sordid situation? With a cock he should name Benedict Arnold? This whole Amsterdam experience had had some terrible effect on him. No one he had met respected him. No one thought him tough or brave or clever. They all thought he was the sexual freak!
And a comic character! If he detached himself and looked on what had happened to him it would mostly be absurd. Humorous. Degrading. He heard the laughter deep in his ears--the people outside when he discovered his cock was sticking out. Deep in his ears... deep in his brain... etched there as though it would never go away.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He and his aunt had been staring at each other. He realized it could have been minutes.
"I don't intend to spend more time around here," he said with all the moral scorn and self-dignity that could be harnessed by a man standing naked in the middle of an orgy.
"You got two strains in you, honey," Aunt Lillian said. "You got a strong puritanical streak from your daddy, of course. But you got both sides of your mother. She loved to raise hell, flop on her-ass. Wallow in sex. But she always had that other part of her. It finally came out and she run off and married that barber. And then she got all shriveled up like a prune, Mark."
"I'm hardly shriveled up like a prune, just because I know the difference between healthy, normal sex and this kind of depravity."
Aunt Lillian did not seem to hear him. "Did I ever tell you about the .time in San Francisco when I broke the West Coast record for giving the most guys their rocks in the shortest time? I never told you about that? Well, honey, this here ship comes in. Been out for weeks and the sailors were the horniest bastards you ever saw. Well, we got to drinking and working out prices. And they got to telling about a whore down in San Diego who took on the whole crew a couple of months earlier, and set a record for speed. And they took up a pot and said, in addition to what each man paid, they'd give me a hundred dollars if I could break her record. Now, honey, maybe you don't know what a hundred used to mean... "
"Hell, I know what a hundred dollars means," Mark said. "You forget, I grew up poor." He realized his teeth were clenched. His body was drawn up so tight he felt it would burst apart if someone touched him.
"Anyway, we all went upstairs and I got to thinking quick. Mark, I took those boys five at a time. One in the pussy. One in the ass. One in the mouth. One in each hand. I broke that San Diego whore's record by over an hour. They put up a bronze plaque in that room. Fancy-looking thing. That was years ago. Wonder if it's still there."
"Aunt Lillian, I've got to talk to you. Don't you see how wrong this all is? We could change the houses. Make them respectable. Not places for this kind of sordid, shameful... Aaaaaaaaah!"
A fingernail slid up Mark's arm. His body twitched as though touched by an electric prod. He pivoted.
Julie was smiling up at him.
"You a little tense, Mark?" she asked in a playful voice. "Would you like a turn with me? I'm sorry we had a fight earlier. I'm in a good mood now. Good and sexy. And drunk. When I'm working I have to kind of cool things. But now I'm loose and grooving. And maybe this time you will be, too. Let yourself go, baby."
"Go is right," Mark said, forcing himself not to look at the naked, open body of a girl who had made love to a Chinese boy. "Right out of here."
Julie laughed. "Better get dressed first, baby. It's cold outside. And Mark. This time, try to keep your prick inside your pants."
Aunt Lillian threw back her head and laughed. Mark blushed with shame and anger. He glared at Julie. How could one little girl be such a combination of youthful beauty and sheer lust?
He looked at her luscious breasts, still glistening from her lovemaking. Down to her cunt. The lips protruded between the damp, curly hair.
He licked his lips. Caught himself and panicked at the fantasies that began to flood his weary, uncertain mind. He remembered his weakness with Carla.
"Do it if you want to," Julie said, all soft and gentle and understanding. "We can go next door. Into a room of our own, Mark. Jill's in here." She raised up, whispered into his ear. "I cooled the Greta bit with Aunt Lillian. But you hurt her. Please go apologize to her. Then we can go into Jill's room... "
"I'm getting out of here," Mark said.
Julie shrugged. She yawned, her breasts rising. Mark glanced across the room. Ahmed was getting to his knees. He beckoned to Julie.
And Jesus, the bitch was going to him. Going to that Arab.
Mark found his clothes. He had trouble getting dressed. Twice he stopped for brandy. He felt like a spastic as he tied his shoes.
His aunt had wandered away. Carla had come from the bathroom. She looked at him but said nothing. He stood up. He couldn't find his overcoat. To hell with it. He felt like setting fire to this hellhole of sin and degradation. Carla had moved to the bed. She and the Chinese boy were kissing. He was fondling her breasts.
As he reached for the doorknob he heard a grunt. He looked around. Julie was on her knees on the floor. Ahmed was guiding an enormous cock into her ass.
She grunted again. Then purred. She twisted her head around. Her face wore an expression of pure animal pleasure. She looked at Mark. She licked her lips. Then she stuck out her tongue.
Mark snatched the door open. Walked out and slammed it. Dawn. He gulped in fresh air.
He stormed down the steps. But only three. His legs weren't up to the indignant exit. He could barely walk. He really ached. He was cold without his overcoat.
He told himself he would go back to his hotel and call the Brocktons. Then he would have a long, hot shower and wash off all this filth. He had just been weak. Even perhaps a comic figure. But he was still the same man whose strength and ruthlessness and independence had propelled him to the threshold of the Brockton wealth and social position.
He reached the bottom step and stopped abruptly. Martha Brockton was climbing out of a taxi.
* * *
PART FIVE: In Which Mark Discovers That He Is Hardly Master Of His Fate And Soul-And As For His Cock-
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
"Oh, Mark, darling," Martha called.
She wore a fur coat that nearly screamed expensive. She crossed the icy street with steps that said dignity. Self-control. Moral Superiority.
Mark took one hesitant step that said panic.
Five more. He could move no further. From the house came a grunt that tore into him like a shot.
"Mark, what in the world has happened to you?" Martha asked. "You look simply frightful. And where have you been? Didn't you get our messages to call?"
"I'm sick, Martha," Mark said. The whining tone of his voice startled him. But he wasn't wrong in saying he was sick. "I, well, I was in an accident, Martha. Got banged up. Haven't been to the doctor yet."
She came to him. "You poor dear. We must get you to a doctor right away. Your eye is puffed and it's turning a terrible color. And your cheek is all cut. And your pants are torn at the knee." She pecked his lips.
Pants. Torn. Mark stiffened. Jesus, his cock had found the hole. It was creeping out. He whined like a child. He didn't even have his overcoat on. If Martha looked down he was dead.
"Oh, dear, you're groaning," she said. "You must feel awful. We'll get you to a doctor, dear. Mother and Daddy were simply exhausted and went right to bed. But I want- ed to see you. When you weren't in the hotel I knew, at this time of day, you'd be either here at your houses or at your aunt's."
Houses? He forced a smile. Made himself look around. All the windows were empty. Curtains drawn. Thank God it was dawn. No, Christ, there was one whore in a window across the canal. A tall blond. Didn't the bitch ever sleep?
His cock had crept out further. He doubled over slightly while trying to keep the upper part of his body rigid.
"My houses. Yes, well, when you're a landlord you have to be out at all hours of the night. Ha ha."
With all the willpower he could muster, he tried to force his instrument to wilt, to creep back inside. It did not budge, though it was cold. He kept thinking of Julie. The cock glowed with excitement.
"And where is little Julie? Is she still angry about being stuck with your old-maid aunt?"
"Little Julie is fine, Martha. Ha ha."
"Has she adjusted well to Amsterdam?"
"Oh, yes, one could safely say little Julie has adjusted well to Amsterdam."
There was a loud grunt from the house.
"What in the world was that, Mark? Why, it came from that house behind us. The one you just came from."
"The pipes," he said desperately. "That's why I'm here. Something wrong with the hot water heater. Making awful noises. Disturbing the neighbors."
"Why, it is awful, dear. It sounded nearly human."
"Oh, Ahmed! Oh, my God. More. More." Julie's voice was loud.
"That's Julie," Martha said. "What's Julie doing in there, Mark? She sounded as though she's in pain."
"No, no," Mark said. Subtly, he tried to wiggle his lower body, to work his cock back through the hole. No luck. His legs weren't really buckling with, fear. Well, they were buckling with something.
"Yes, that's Julie in there," he said. "Did I say no? I meant, yes. Why, she's staying there. Of course. My aunt had some unexpected company. So we put Julie here. She's just having a nightmare. She's been having a lot of nightmares. Talks in her sleep, Martha."
"But you said she'd adjusted."
His teeth were chattering. There was another loud grunt. Someone shouted in Dutch. Thank God it was in Dutch.
"Well, she's mostly adjusted," he said, his mind racing for the right words. Any words. "This is a strange place. This foreign country. She's been having a little trouble sleeping. You know. Jet-lag. Seven hour time difference. That kind of thing."
"She said something about an Ahmed, Mark. That's an Arab name. Surely you and your aunt haven't let little Julie become acquainted with people like Arabs. And why was she shouting his name like that? And saying, 'more, more'?"
"Not Arab. Berber. I mean, well, ha ha, Martha. Why? Well, one day this Arab man tried to talk to her on the street and it frightened her. She hasn't gotten over it yet. Why did she shout, 'more'? What she actually shouted was, well, what she shouted was Mahr. Yes, Mahr. He's an important official in the Dutch government. Julie met him. And naturally when this Arab man scared her, she called out for help from the one official she knew. She keeps repeating the incident in her nightmares."
"Poor dear. I'm going right in there and surprise her and see that she's okay."
"Ha ha, Martha. No, I don't think you should do that." Oh, Jesus. His cock was getting bigger. He stared at Martha's stern face, at the firm green eyes with flecks of brown. He tried to will the cock down. It would not move. "You see, the doctor said the worst thing in the world was to disturb her while she was sleeping. Even if she is having nightmares."
"Doctor? Her condition is serious enough that you called a doctor, Mark? Why didn't you let us know?"
"No, it's not serious, Martha. Not at all. I just wanted to be sure. She simply needs rest. Lots of rest. And not to be disturbed. No, definitely not to be disturbed while sleeping. Absolutely not."
"Well, I guess the doctor knows best. My, your aunt was right. They certainly are handsome old houses. All with picture windows. A nice modern touch, Mark. Who occupies the houses, dear?"
"Who occupies the houses, Martha?" His cock was freezing now. It was shivering. What could he do? She was bound to look down. If he took a step he was ruined. But he had to get Martha out of here before someone came out.
"Yes, dear," she said. "The houses. Who lives in them? Are the tenants nice people? Our kind of people? Oh, I'm sure they are, or you'd never have put little Julie into one of them."
"Oh, yes, the people are very nice, Martha. They are, well, yes, they are definitely Julie's kind of people. And they're all quite fond of her. Well... " The blond across the street was sitting down. She was propping her feet up on the window sill. Christ, it looked as though she wore no panties. Snow started falling.
"Well, Martha," he said. "All the people don't exactly live here. Actually, you see, what these places are, well, they're actually boutiques."
"Boutiques? All of these houses? These beautiful old houses? And why in the world would Julie be staying in a boutique?"
"Why? Yes, well, it's because Julie is actually working in one of these boutiques, Martha. I was against the idea. And so was Aunt Lillian. But Julie insisted on working and paying her own way."
"Julie insisted on working? Why, she's always hated the idea of working. Mother and Daddy will be glad to hear that. And I'm sure it's an exclusive type of boutique.
The very best. But I don't know about her living in the shop, dear."
"It's just temporary. Until she moves back to my aunt's. Aren't you exhausted? Shouldn't we be getting back to the hotel? Aren't you hungry? And cold? I'm freezing."
His cock was wilting a little. It was so cold that as it fell limp a sharp pain tore through it. Mark gasped.
"Why, dear, what's wrong? You sound like one of your water pipes." She laughed lightly. "We must have your eye and your face and your knee looked at. You are cold. Why, your teeth are chattering. Can we find a competent doctor at the hotel?"
"I'm sure we can," he mumbled.
The cock was down now, cold and aching. Almost completely inside his pants. Just the miserable head poking out.
He thought of Carla's tongue. Mistake, he screamed at himself. The cock stiffened a little. Thoughts of Julie's cunt. Oh God, it was coming out again.
He tried to think of something so unsexy it would wither the thing. A thought of--of--of Mrs. Brockton's bare, wrinkled, sagging breasts, of her flabby ass. The cock crawled gladly back inside his pants. "And how is your Aunt Lillian?" Martha asked. "Still spry and active as ever, Mark?"
"Oh, Aunt Lillian's still spry," he said. "Yes, Aunt Lillian is still active, Martha."
"We're all looking forward to meeting her, Mark. And seeing her home. And her collection of paintings."
"Oh, she's looking forward to meeting you. And your parents. Now, let's get out of this cold, Martha. I really am freezing."
"You shouldn't be out without an overcoat, Mark. Where is your nice new overcoat? The one I picked out for you before you left."
"At the hotel," he said. "I left in such a hurry. Worried about the pipes. About Julie. Come on, please. Let's go."
Would they be able to find a taxi this time of the morning? His teeth had started chattering again. She took his arm. They moved away. He congratulated himself on getting out of this one without being caught.
Martha stopped. "Why, isn't this a taxi? But there's no one in it."
It was the taxi he and Greta had come in. His mind flashed to the huge taxi driver. Greta. The marbles. Her tight ass picking up marbles. His cock stirred. He cursed it.
Julie's ass. That bastard Ahmed. Her ass. Christ, it was lovely. And her thighs. And her cunt. He was losing his sanity. He couldn't stop the images. A shocking thought of sinking to his knees in front of Julie. Or behind her.
"Mark? Are you all right, darling? I was saying there's no driver in here. Perhaps you could go back to your house and phone for a taxi."
"What? Go back? Phone? No. I wouldn't want to take a chance on disturbing little Julie. We'll just walk up here to the next big street and I'm sure we'll find a taxi."
Martha had stopped again. She was looking across the canal. The big blond was standing up. Stretching. Pulling that very short slip very high. No, she wore no panties.
"Simply disgusting," Martha said. "And in a nice neighborhood like this. Mark, dear, you must call the police and report that disgraceful woman. What if Julie should look out the window and see a disgusting sight like that?"
"I can call the police from the hotel," Mark said. He took her arm. Snow fell harder. He shivered.
"Perhaps there will be one on the big street, where we find a taxi," she said.
They took a couple of steps. She stopped. "Mark, what is the situation in Amsterdam concerning prostitution?"
"The situation?" His blood chilled. And not from the cold. "Prostitution? Why, Martha, how in the world would I know such a thing?" He tugged at her arm. She did not move.
"Of course you wouldn't know anything, dear," she said. "Oh, I don't guess you know about our success back home, do you? With the prostitutes? It happened the day after you left."
"No," he said. Sharp, small snowflakes sliced across his face.
"We couldn't get the police to take proper action in one section of town where there were actual houses of prostitution," she said. "So I got some of my girl friends and we bought hatchets and marched on the terrible district. We invaded those evil houses and broke all the windows and all the mirrors and chopped down doors and chopped up furniture. I can tell you it will be a while before they use those houses for immoral and degrading purposes such as prostitution."
"Great," Mark muttered.
"And we made sure the men paid, darling," she said. "We recognized a number of the men. Why, they were prominent men, Mark. Not at all the kind of depraved scum and filth you think would go to prostitutes. We printed a newsletter about what we had done. And we named each man we found in the houses."
A door slammed.
Mark looked over his shoulder. The policeman was coming down the steps. He was buttoning his jacket.
"Why, Mark, there's a policeman," Martha said.
"I think he's actually a fireman," Mark suggested.
"No, I'm quite certain he's a policeman," she insisted. But dear, he's coming from the same door you did. Where Julie is. Mark, what does that mean?"
Mark's words choked in his throat. The policeman was walking straight toward them.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
"I want to register a complaint," Martha said firmly as the policeman stopped in front of them. "About an absolutely disgraceful example of public exhibition."
The policeman touched his hand to his cap. "Please," he said. "I speak some English. But you must talk more slowly. I do not understand."
He looked from Martha and seemed to see Mark for the first time. He smiled broadly. "Ah, the nephew of Aunt Lillian. The friend of Julie. The man I misjudged."
He laughed, a wicked, suggestive laugh that chilled Mark's blood further. His teeth chattered harder. The snow was stinging his cut cheek.
"Why were you coming from that door?" Martha asked, seeming to forget the blond in the window. "What about Julie? Is something wrong? Is Julie in some kind of trouble? Mark, why was this policeman in there with Julie?"
"Of course nothing's wrong," Mark said. "We've, got to go, Martha. We've got to get out of this cold."
"Certainly nothing is wrong with Julie," the policeman said. "She is perhaps exhausted." He laughed. "I wish I was still so young. And had so much strength and endurance. No, I think she is only exhausted. I know I am. And I must be on duty again today. Perhaps it is as much the brandy, eh?" He nudged Mark in the ribs with his elbow.
"Ah, that Aunt Lillian is some woman. She is still going strong."
"Your aunt is in there? You didn't tell me that, Mark. And what about Julie and brandy?"
"Oh, didn't I tell you that Aunt Lillian was in there? Well, certainly she's in there. She wouldn't leave poor Julie alone, Martha. And the brandy? Well, it's the custom in foreign countries to give brandy when people have difficulty sleeping."
"Well, Dr. Marcus back home wouldn't prescribe such a thing," she said. "But I still do not understand why this policeman was in there with Julie."
"The Arab," Mark said. He realized most of this was going over the policeman's head. He reminded himself to talk fast. "Of course, Martha. Naturally we complained to the police about the Arab trying to talk to Julie. He was just following up the complaint and making certain Julie hadn't been disturbed again."
"At dawn?" Martha asked.
"Arab?" the policeman said. "Ah, the Arab. Ahmed. Even as I left the room, Julie was... " Mark lunged desperately against the policeman. "How clumsy of me," he apologized. "Guess I'm still weak from the accident."
"It is nothing," the policeman said. "I must go now. And get what rest I can before I go on duty again."
"Just a minute," Martha said. "I want to make a complaint, officer. Just look over in that window across the canal."
The policeman looked. Mark's temples tightened. He looked. The window was empty.
"Oh, dear," Martha said. "She's gone."
"Yes?" the policeman asked. "I see nothing."
Mark laughed. "There is nothing to see. Well, good night. Or I should say, good morning?"
The policeman said good morning. He touched his hand to his cap again, then turned and walked away slowly. The snow fell heavier. Mark's nose felt like a lump of ice.
"Come on, Martha," he insisted.
"I'm certain we should have made the complaint anyway," Martha said.
"You can't do things like that in a foreign country," Mark said. "It's not like being in the United States, Martha. It's not up to us to enforce Dutch law. And Dutch morals." He knew it was a mistake even as he said it.
"Morality is morality," Martha said. "And it's our duty to enforce morality anywhere we find ourselves. Especially when it concerns something as disgusting as a nearly naked woman exposing herself in a window. Or prostitution."
"Yes, of course," he said. "How stupid of me to forget. I really am feeling awful, Martha. Can't we go? That accident left me pretty shaky."
"You poor dear," she said. She pecked his cheek again. He got a hint of her bra-encased breasts against his chest. His cock acknowledged the hint with a slight tingling feeling, but nothing more. "Yes, we must get you back to the hotel, and find a competent doctor. Why, you haven't really told me about the accident, Mark. What happened?"
Christ, Martha seemed rooted to the spot, as though some magical power held her there. Held them both there in front of this cursed house. In all his scheming, planning, clawing and climbing nothing like this had ever happened. He would have everything with the Brockton's set-up. The end of his struggle. Then that letter from his aunt. He felt the victim of some plot. Scheming, planning, clawing and climbing seemed of no use.
"The accident?" She had been staring at him when he hesitated to speak. Jesus, his body felt like jelly. He might start shaking, jellylike, at any moment. "Yes, well, it wasn't that serious, Martha. Just this stupid taxi driver. It wasn't really the, well, the actual accident in which I got hurt. It was when I fell into the canal as a result, and got hit with these pieces of wood, and... " God, he was babbling, fumbling with the words. He had told her too much.
"You fell into the canal? It's a wonder you didn't catch pneumonia, Mark."
"I may, if we don't get out of this damn cold, Martha."
"We must go," she said. "You're right. I keep forgetting I have on a coat and you don't. I do hate to leave without at least looking in on poor Julie, though."
"Martha, please." The jelly was going to shake. He might cry. He felt so bad physically he could screech at the top of his voice. He couldn't handle things any longer.
She took his hand. His fingers were nearly brittle with cold. Her fingers laced his, and pain shot up his digits. But she moved. At least she had taken a step away from the house. Two. Three.
"Mark!"
The word might have been a bullet. It struck him that hard. They had made four steps from disaster. Martha had turned. He turned.
It was Carla. She was carrying his overcoat.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
"Mark," Martha said. "That girl came from the same door. Just how many people are in that boutique taking care of Julie? And at this time of the morning."
"I think she came from the other door, just across the steps," he said feebly.
He watched Carla walk to them as though he stared at his very doom approaching. His hair was wet with snow.
His nose and ears ached. His lips were blue. Lips. Carla's lips: a flash-thought of this girl sucking his cock The faithless shaft of flesh hardened. Mark made a remarkable movement of his lower body to twist it from the hole it obviously sought. It grew to stiffness straining for the hole, as though to reach for Carla's lips. Strained like a flower growing toward the sunlight.
"You forgot your coat," Carla said. "You could get sick out in this snow with no coat."
Mark took the coat. Carla's cheeks were still a bright red. Strawberries with cream, he told himself. Stupid thing to think. He had a lot of strange thoughts this unlikely morning, he realized. Crazy thoughts, almost poetic. Pure crap, the kind of stupid, fey things he despised.
"Thank you very much," he said. He put the coat on. He knew he should say something else. He had no idea what to say. He knew he should hustle Martha away from this girl who had sucked his cock. The jelly, he felt, would not move now. His instrument rubbed his pants. It nearly hummed with sizzling excitement.
" No one else spoke. There was simply a lot of looking at each other. Mark could not speak. Yet he stood poised to break off anything Carla might start to say--about Julie, or the house, or sex.
"Do you work there, too?" Martha asked. She shook her head briskly, brushed snow from her hair.
"Yes," Carla said. "You resemble Julie. Are you her sister?"
"Yes," Martha said. "How is Julie? Oh, my name is Martha Brockton." She extended her hand. Carla shook it.
The hand of a whore, Mark realized. He might have laughed at the idea. It was funny. Funny as a graveyard.
"And I am Carla Gelder. Do you not wish to see your sister? Have you not just arrived in Amsterdam?"
"Carla," Mark said sharply. He sought her eyes. She looked at him. His eyes pleaded, begged without hesitation. Begged this girl he had refused to screw, this girl who had sucked him off, this girl he had left burning with excitement.
"Oh, yes, I do want to see Julie," Martha said. Had she seen the exchange between their eyes? Mark could not tell. "But Mark said she was asleep and should not be disturbed. I had no idea there was an army in there with her."
"But the doctor said she should not be disturbed," Mark said, directing the words at Carla.
"Yes, the doctor said she should not be disturbed," Carla said. The blue eyes narrowed as they looked at Mark. There was no friendliness or warmth in them. "Now I must go home. I am very tired."
She turned and walked away. Mark sighed with relief.
"Well, she certainly left us abruptly," Martha said. "And she seemed so polite at first."
"Well, you never can tell about these foreigners," Mark said. "And you heard what she said about the doctor."
"Mark, you told me you left your overcoat in the hotel," Martha said abruptly.
"Oh, did I? I'm just a little rattled, Martha. The water pipes. Julie. The accident. Your arrival. Let's go back to the hotel. A good sleep will do us both good. Later we can see Julie. With your mother and father."
He looked across the canal. The blond was in the window again. And down the street was another girl in another window. Two men were sweeping the street. A car was passing. Jesus, the city was coming to life. And with it, the whores.
"No, Mark," she said. "I insist we look in on Julie now. We don't have to disturb her, darling. But with so many people running in and out, our presence can't make much difference. And I can meet your aunt."
"Martha, you must listen to me," he pleaded. Fear even reached his cock. It shrank. "You must trust me. I know what's best for little Julie. And I'm sick. Sick as a dog." Couldn't he even sneeze? It would seem a man who was weak and pain-wracked enough to collapse in the snow could at least sneeze to show he was sick.
She smiled. "I know you mean well, dear. But you are a man. Some things I know better. Mother and Daddy would never forgive me if I didn't at least look in to see how she's sleeping."
"Martha, I've missed you," he blurted. "I'm so glad you're here." He put his arms on her shoulders and kissed her lips softly. Anything to stall, to give him a chance to think of something that would keep Martha from the house.
"And I've missed you, darling," she said. She smiled and put her hands on his shoulders. "It seems an eternity since we've been together."
"I love you," he said, and kissed her once more--a longer, more passionate kiss.
"Yes, darling, I love you, too." She returned the kiss as she slid her hands down to turn up the collar of his coat.
His heart was going berserk. His brain whirled. But no distinct thoughts came out. Across the canal two men were standing on the sidewalk looking up at the blond.
"I want to be alone with you, Martha," he said. He kissed her cheek. It was cold. He kissed her nose. It was cold. "Let's go somewhere and have coffee and just, well, just hold hands and talk about our future and our funeral."
"Funeral?"
"Wedding, I mean. Ha ha." Funeral was far more likely. He kissed her mouth again, twisted the kiss.
She pulled away. "Why, Mark, it's unlike you to kiss me in such a way. And in public, darling. You know how I feel about any display of affection in public, dear."
"Then let's go somewhere private." His voice had arched up sharply with his desperation.
"Of course, Mark. Just as soon as we look in on Julie."
He knew that firmness in her voice. She had made up her mind--there would be no changing her.
"But I want to talk of our future," he said. "Our future, Martha."
"Yes, our future, dear," she said sweetly. "It's limitless."
She took his arm and they moved back toward the house. Our future, he mumbled to himself. It's about sixty seconds.
They reached the steps. Started up. He heard grunts and groans. They were the steps to a scaffold and he might as well have been blindfolded. The noose waited at the top and this girl dragged him up another step.
No noose was necessary. Already he felt as though he was a dead man.
* * *
PART SIX: In Which Mark Comes Quickly to Life-And Finds His Future Depends On A Girl With A--- A What Up Her Rear End
CHAPTER TWENTY
"My, but those pipes make the strangest noises," Martha said. "Quite obscene, nearly human noises. I'm surprised Julie can sleep."
They reached the top step. Disaster poured adrenalin into Mark's system. He rallied. His mind cleared.
Martha had stepped toward the door to Julie's room. Mark took her arm firmly. He steered her to the other door, the one to Jill's room. The one that must be empty.
"It's this door," he insisted.
She stopped. "I'm quite sure everyone came from the other door," she said.
He looked into her flecked eyes with all the determination and certainty he could muster. "No, they came from here. I should know Martha. You're just tired after the long flight."
Mark shoved the door open. He hustled Martha inside. The room was empty. He shut the door quickly.
"But this room is empty," she said. "Where's Julie? And your Aunt Lillian?"
"They must have gone next door," Mark said.
"Mark, this doesn't make any sense at all," Martha said. There was danger in the green eyes. "Now just where is Julie? And what kind of room is this, if I may ask? It hardly looks like a boutique."
"No, obviously this isn't a boutique," he said. "What this is, Martha, well, this is the dressing room. That's it. Obviously a boutique must have a dressing room."
She looked around. "I must say it's a rather tacky dressing room. And what about Julie?"
"You sit down on the bed, Martha," he said. "And I'll go get little Julie and bring her in here so you can see her."
"Well, why in the world can't I go with you? If Julie is supposed to get her sleep and not be disturbed under any circumstances, why is she parading around at dawn?"
"I know best," he said. "And I think it would be too much of a shock for the poor child to see you abruptly. I think I should gently let her know you're here. We don't want to shock her, Martha. Now, you just sit down on the bed and relax."
"Why is there a bed in the dressing room?" she asked.
Sounds filtered in from next door. The damn room was cold and he heard a distant horn and thought of the city coming to life. And with it the girls in a thousand windows.
Martha had lowered herself tentatively to the bed. She sat primly on the edge, her hands in her lap.
Mark hated her at this moment. She handled him as though he functioned on strings. He was at her beck and call, lying and pandering, being her clown, or her handsome, well-dressed stud. One she could display in public. And dress as though he was a doll. But a stud--she never wanted one physically. Jesus, when they were married, what kind of sex life would they have?
She looked up at him. The green eyes were burning. "Didn't you hear my question?" she asked. There was anger in her voice. "What's wrong with you, Mark? Even your accident can't explain your strange behavior. I asked you why there is a bed in the dressing room?"
The strings tightened. Dance, idiot, he told himself. Perform for the lady and her money and her social position and her furniture company.
"That's simple enough," he said. "Sometimes the women get tired when they're shopping, Martha. The elder women. Yes, they often need to lie down. All those elder women."
"Dear, why would all those elder women shop in a boutique?" she asked. There was impatience with the anger. And a tone that made it clear she thought his explanation not only unsatisfactory but rather stupid.
"With their daughters," he said. "All right, now I'll go get Julie and bring her back here." He was surprised to detect anger in his voice as well. Careful, he warned himself.
She stood up and crossed the room. Mark's eyes followed her tidy steps to the straight-backed chair in front of the window. She picked up a... a whip of some kind. A wicked-looking thing with a long handle and a couple of dozen leather thongs.
"And what is this?" she asked. "This, well, this whip."
"Whip? Whip, Martha?" He crossed the room and pulled it from her hand. "You do have a vivid imagination, darling."
"Then just what is it, Mark?"
"What is it, Martha? Why, that's perfectly obvious."
"Yes, dear?"
"It's... a duster, Martha. Of course, to dust the furniture." He swished the instrument at the chair. The window sill. "The Dutch are very clean people. And no place, no home or shop, would be caught without its duster."
"It's the strangest-looking duster I've ever seen," she said.
"It's a foreign duster," he said as he took her arm and gently but firmly led her back to the bed. "They're a little slow to adopt American ways. But I'm sure that next time you come to Amsterdam the Dutch will be using dusters just like we have in the United States."
She refused to sit. He could tell her eyes were carefully picking the room apart, piece by piece. What was in that cabinet? He didn't dare consider the possibility that she might look. And through the other door? Surely it was a bathroom. But what might be in there?
And what was that under the bed? That wasn't really a pair of... of handcuffs? What in the world would Jill want with handcuffs?
Blood coursed through his body. He swallowed hard. He remembered the man on the bed. And if Jill used whips and riding crops, she might well use handcuffs. But why would a man want to make himself helpless? Put himself totally at the mercy of a slim, dark-haired, pale-skinned young girl? With wicked, taunting eyes?
His cock lurched for the hole. He twisted his lower body and blocked its surge. He wrapped his coat around himself. The cock was hard. His loins glowed with excitement.
"Why did you make that funny movement with your body?" Martha asked.
"I'm cold," he said. Could he somehow get the handcuffs? There was no way. She "did have her back to the bed. Perhaps she wouldn't look under the bed. He could only hope.
"Will you please get Julie, Mark?" she asked. "Sure, right away," he said. He smiled and backed to ,the door.
He had trouble turning the knob, but he got outside. He stood at the top of the steps between the two rooms.
All he had to do now to save himself was talk Julie into seeing Martha. And playing a role. Everything was fine, except that his entire future now rested on the whims of a girl he had left writhing on the floor--with a Berber.
Arab, damn it. He took a deep breath and turned to the door to Julie's room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Having been out a few minutes he was again shocked to stand amid the groaning, sweating, writhing couples. Some were resting, talking, drinking. But others went at sex as if they had just started. Mark had the idea of an absurd sexual relay, in which some of the couples screwed, and others rested. Then the rested ones went at it again and the ones that had been screwing paused to relax and talk and drink.
At least someone had turned down the radio. And the grunting and groaning weren't quite so loud. He could tell Martha he had done a good job of fixing the pipes.
His mind was slipping. What was it he had thought earlier? That if anything else happened they might find him running down the street shouting.
And that was before Martha arrived. Now he might shout, or even screech his way down the streets. But he wouldn't be running. He would be on his hands and knees.
No one spoke to him. Or even looked at him. Greta and Hans were quiet and still, naked in each other's arms. Carla was hunching to the Chinese boy's assault.
And Aunt Lillian was prostrate in a corner. So she did have a limit to her endurance after all.
But where was Julie? He took a step. Was that her behind the chair, by the window? Behind those two obscene girls who were using their mouths on each other? Those two lovely, young girls who had so disgusted him by doing lesbian things?
His cock rubbed against his pants. It was so sensitive with desire even the soft material aroused it. Aroused, hell! It was insane with desire. He might hold out longer than his cock. Perhaps it would go berserk first. Perhaps it would run screeching down the street ahead of him. Lurching and spurting and frightening people. Perhaps it would be arrested.
But officer, I can't be held responsible for the actions of the cock, sir. I have no control over it. It's not really a part of me. It doesn't accept my values, my moral standards...
He found a bottle of brandy and drank deeply. Remember strength and ruthlessness and cunning, he screamed at himself. Master of fate and soul.
It was no use. He was only desperate. Nothing more. He had no self-confidence left. The scene with Martha had finished that off. Though he had so far avoided disaster.
Now he must face Julie. He was stalling on that. He drank brandy. Smelled sex. And brandy. And sweat. He felt sticky again. Dirty.
Someone whined. It was Carla. That Chinese boy was making some strange, obscene movements with her. Oriental sex perversion. She seemed to love every twist.
One more drink of brandy and he would confront Julie. He made it a long swallow. He could stall no longer. Martha might get impatient and burst in at any moment.
Martha Brockton? In this room? Well, you see, Martha, Julie got to feeling much better, and this is a way these foreigners have of treating nightmares, and no, of course not, he's just bending over her so he can stick a medical instrument up and determine if she's got...
Julie gasped and snapped him to reality. Or what reality he could find in the room. He stepped over the two girls and shoved the chair aside.
Ahmed was still going at her ass. His eyes were closed. He held her breasts. She was twisting, hunching to the steady thrusts. Her eyes were closed also. Her lips were thin, tightly shut. There was no color in her face. Her hair was a mess.
He sank to his knees. Her breathing was inhuman. She seemed delirious. What must it feel like to reach that point sexually? Or be able to transport someone else there?
Her eyes opened. She was obviously startled to see him staring at her. She recovered quickly and greeted him with a little smile.
"Julie, I've got to talk to you," he said. His cock was really going. It grew harder. It throbbed. His balls hurt. He could not endure being this close to her while she was this aroused sexually. While this bastard took her in the ass. He did not know which was worse, his excitement or his anger.
"Not now," she mumbled. She moaned. Thrashed her head. "Leave me alone. Go away, you bastard. You had your chance."
"I don't want to talk about sex," he said.
You do. You do, his cock seemed to scream.
"Go away," she repeated. She snorted out her breath. She hunched faster. Rolled her head as though insane. There was a pool on the floor from the sweat that cascaded from her face.
"Martha's here," he blurted. "Your sister. She's in Jill's room, Julie. Julie? Please."
Julie whimpered. "Martha? Here? Jill's room? Good. Bring her in. You two sexual dynamos should liven up the orgy."
"Julie, please stop and listen to me," he begged. "Julie. I'm sorry for the way I've acted. For all the stupid things I've said and done. Please go in and see Martha and tell her you're working in a boutique and pretend you're the same sister she knows. Julie? I'll do anything."
"Ummmmmm," she said. "Go away. Oh God, Ahmed. Do it like that. Oh, yes. That way. Oh God."
"Julie. Julie? Just listen to me a minute. You don't understand. Martha might come in here at any minute. Please take that thing out of your ass and listen to me."
She groaned and writhed. He could nearly feel the fever of her excitement. His cock had inched toward the hole. He shifted and blocked it.
The Lord is my shepherd... He hadn't thought of that line since he was a child. Perhaps prayer was all that was left. He was on his knees in front of the girl on whom his entire future depended.
Mark Rogers had clawed his way nearly to the top. As his hand reached for the top rung he found himself pleading with a teenage girl to "de-cock" her ass. Perhaps it was his obituary.
He got up. The game was lost. He stumbled across the room. He paused at the door, getting up the courage to face Martha. But there was no courage left.
He reached for the handle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Someone called his name and he turned and saw Julie getting to her feet. Ahmed was lying back on the floor, his arm across his face.
Hope was reborn. Julie was coming toward him. His cock stiffened.
"What about Martha?" she asked. "I don't know why I should care, you crummy bastard."
"She's next door," he started. "In Jill's room."
He stopped talking as she came to him. Naked and slick with moisture, breasts glistening, thighs sleek and golden, her body flowing liquid, her cunt inviting as it peeked through the mess of blond hair...
"Yes, okay, she's next door. I assume you want me to get dressed and go in there and lie through my teeth, Mark."
He made a small, animal sound deep in his throat. His temples tightened. She stood in front of him with her breath pouring out, heaving the heavy breasts, stood where he could reach out and touch her. Stroke her. Kiss her.
"Mark? Why are you looking at me like that, baby?" She glanced down. She laughed. "Oh, you do have a hard-on, don't you? Well, you'll have to find some other girl. I'm not in the mood for you now. What about Martha?"
Martha? The word tempered his excitement. He realized he had started moving his hands slowly toward Julie's buttocks. He dropped the hands to his sides and started telling Julie what had happened with Martha.
"And what if I do go in there and lie and pull it off?" Julie asked. "She'll only find out tomorrow. Or the next day. My God, be a man, Mark. Break free. Stop degrading yourself just to marry Martha."
"Just do this for me, Julie," he said. "Please. If we can pull this off and get her out of here, somehow I'll work everything else out. Will you?"
"Why should I?"
"There's no reason why you should," he said quietly. "I have no right to ask you, Julie. You're just my only hope."
"You have changed," she said. "Gotten rid of some of that snotty arrogance. Okay. What if I play the game? What do I get in return?"
"I'll do anything for you," he said. "Anything you want, Julie. I'll begin by apologizing to Greta."
"That's a good beginning," she said and lazily scratched her thigh. She tensed and yawned. Relaxed again. Each movement of her lush body caused his loins to tighten, his cock to surge against his pants. "Will you do something for me? Anything I ask? No matter what?"
"Anything," he said. He wondered how long it had been since he left Martha. She would be furious.
"How do I know you'll keep your word?"
"I keep my word," he said. "You should know that."
"Okay, Mark. It's a deal. Let me get into the bathroom. I'll put something on and meet you next door. It might be fun, playing a game this way with Martha."
He watched her move slowly, leisurely to the bathroom and stared at the roll of her rounded buttocks, the flare of her hips. She closed the door.
Greta. He'd tell her he was sorry and then beat it back over to Martha. He started across the room and realized he had become accustomed to the orgy now, to the groaning and screwing, to the heat and the smells. What was happening to him.
Something stirred in the corner. He stopped. It was Aunt Lillian. She was trying without much success to get up. Her eyes were puffed and bloodshot. She squinted.
"Mark, honey," she bellowed. "My little nephew. Come right on over here, honey, and give me a hug. And honey, see if you can't scare up a bottle on the way over."
To hell with Greta and the apology. If he had to pacify Aunt Lillian he wouldn't have time for her now. He found a bottle and handed it to his aunt.
She drank the brandy and it spilled over her chin. "Lord, I'm not the girl I once was," she gasped as she put the bottle down. "Glad you came back, honey. I got to make some kind of decision about these houses, Mark. Here, give me your hand and help me up."
He extended his hand and she took it, but instead of helping her up he found himself being pulled down. He fell against her and then dropped to the floor. He tried to get up, but she had his arm and would not let go. For a lady of her age she had some grip.
"Honey, did I ever tell you about the time your mama and I were peddling our pussies in San Francisco and we met these two real elegant gentlemen right on top of Nob Hill and got to drinking and decided to take a ride on the cable car before going up to the hotel room to screw and the men got to kissing us and playing with out tits and all and we got turned on and so did the brakeman and he got a hand under my skirt and we started down the hill, right through red lights, with bras and shorts and panties flying out, and a general fucking commenced right there going, Lord, ninety miles an hour, and... " Mark snatched up the brandy and shoved it at her. She stopped talking and drank. He tried to twist free. The wrinkled, ringed hand held him like a band of steel.
And who was that getting to her feet on the other side of the room? Jill? He hadn't even noticed her. She had on those tall boots. And she was dressing.
"Aunt Lillian, let me go!"
"I don't think I ever finished telling you about the time your mama and I climbed the Christmas tree in the Monteleon Hotel."
"Aunt Lillian, please. Let me go." He tore at the fingers. They might as well have been rooted into his arm.
Jill was dressed. And walking toward the door. With the riding crop in her hand.
"Jill," he called. She did not stop and walked slowly to the door as Mark got to his feet, tugging and tearing at his aunt's hand.
"That was one big Christmas tree," Aunt Lillian was babbling. "And you'll never guess what your mama and I found way up near the top, honey."
"Jill," he called. "Julie. Help." Jill was disappearing out the door.
"Aunt Lillian! Aunt Lillian!" He got a finger up. Another. A third. One wrinkled finger held him. His heart pounded.
"And then there was that time in Texas at the chicken-breeders convention when we were taking on half a dozen big-time chicken-breeders right in this model henhouse they was showing off, and somehow all these chickens got loose, and honey, you talk about a mess... " He got the finger loose and scrambled away from his aunt. Uncertain legs took him to the door and he snatched it open and lurched across to the door Jill was just closing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Jill and Martha were shaking hands as Mark entered the room and he saw the questioning and highly critical look in Martha's eyes as she stared at the outfit Jill was wearing and the riding crop Jill was holding.
"So you met little Jill," he said. "And Jill, you met Martha. How nice."
"I heard you calling me, but wanted you in here," Jill said. The black eyes were unbearable. "I knew you'd come to me. As for this other girl... "
"This is Martha Brockton," Mark said. "You just met her, just this minute, Jill, and didn't she tell you she's Julie's sister and the only reason she's here is to see little Julie, sick, innocent little Julie who works in the boutique."
"What is that riding crop for, if I may ask," Martha said. "And what do you mean you wanted Mark in here and what do you mean about his coming to you. And where is Julie?"
"The riding crop?" Mark asked. "Why, Martha, that's quite simple. Isn't it, Jill? Yes, well, Jill just came back from horseback riding."
"At dawn?" Martha asked.
"The English are quite big on horseback riding, Martha," Mark said. "And Jill is English. They pick up the old riding crop and put on the tall, black leather boots and go climb on a horse every chance they get."
"One might say I was riding," Jill said, smiling at Mark, holding him in an agony of uncertainty. "Yes, every chance I get I take up the riding crop. And get astride... a willing animal."
"What are you doing at the boutique this time of morning?" Martha asked. "Do you work here, too? And stay here? Mark you're keeping something from me. Something strange is going on. I'm going next door and find out what has happened to Julie."
"Nothing has happened to Julie," Mark said. Oh God, Jill was smiling deeper.
The door opened: Julie.
"Oh, you poor dear," Martha wailed and flew across the room. She embraced Julie. "That horrible Arab. You must have had a dreadful experience. But it's okay now. Mother and Daddy and I are here to take care of our baby."
Julie smiled at Mark and Jill. And motioned for Jill to leave. Jill hesitated. She gave Mark a look that made him flush. It said: You will come to me. She left without speaking to Martha.
f "What did that English girl mean, Mark?" Martha asked. "About you coming to her and all that?"
"Oh, she was going to model some clothes for Mark," Julie said. "He was going to buy you something really mod and wild and surprise you, but you got here early."
"That's an awfully sweet thought," Martha said. "But I'm afraid I couldn't possibly wear that kind of clothes. And your outfit, dear. You definitely can't go around in something made out of leather."
"It's the latest mod thing," Julie said. "It's in all the boutiques. But I suppose you're right, Martha." She was using her innocent, little-girl voice and playing her role to the hilt.
She and Martha moved to the bed and talked. Julie did and said everything perfectly. And after five minutes she put her hand to her head.
"I might have a touch of fever," she said. "I think I better go back to bed. Would you two mind running along and letting me get some sleep? We can have an absolutely super day tomorrow, with Mother and Daddy. I'll come to the hotel when I get up."
Martha touched her forehead. "My, you are warm. Those nightmares must be terrible to leave you so hot. Now you take two aspirin before you go to sleep."
"I will," Julie said. "And don't you worry about me. I'll be just fine, Martha. And feel really great tomorrow. I mean later today, when I see you in the hotel."
Julie and Martha hugged again. Mark took Martha's hand and led her outside. So he had pulled it off after all. Now if he could just get Martha past the girls in the windows everything would be fine and he could get back to the hotel and collapse. In his fear and anxiety he had forgotten his physical misery, and it came flooding back to him now as he started down the steps.
They had reached the sidewalk when Julie came running out. She called to him in her most innocent, helpless and childlike voice.
"What is it?" he asked. She was overplaying the act a little.
"I don't have any aspirin," she wailed. "Mark, could you go to the pharmacy and get me some?"
"Of course, dear, we'll both go," Martha said.
"It doesn't open for an hour," Julie said. "Martha, you must be exhausted after your long flight. Why don't you go back to the hotel? Mark can wait here and get them for me when the pharmacy opens. I insist now, Martha. Or I won't take them."
The little bitch. He felt awful. He hurt in places he didn't know he had. Both of them had forgotten his eye and his cheek and his knee.
"I am tired," Martha said. "But I don't know, Julie. Well, okay. If Mark doesn't mind. He can just put me into a taxi and... Isn't that one coming down the street? Yes. I'll just get that one. Things have sort of caught up with me. I'll see you both later."
She waved at the slowly moving taxi and ran out to the street. There were girls in windows but Mark felt too bad to care. He trudged slowly up the steps.
"Why in hell did you pull that stunt?" he asked.
"I wanted you alone, baby," she said. "I did what you asked me to. Now it's your turn to do something for me. Wait in Jill's room. I'll be right in."
"What do you have in mind?" he asked. His knees were weak. He had promised to do anything. And to do it in Jill's room meant it had to do with sex!
"Does it matter?" she asked. "Or will you go back on your word?"
"I'll keep my word," he said. If he crossed her she would refuse to keep up the facade. He would keep his word. Within reason, of course.
"What color panties do you groove on the most, baby?"
"What?" His cock tightened. He went warm. "What do you mean?"
"I've got a couple of extra pair in my room," she said. The blue eyes were taunting, teasing. "Is there one color you prefer, Mark? I mean, baby, you're fixing to find out just why you freak out on panties. And just how much. I'll bring a couple of pair. And don't look like that, Mark. It won't kill you. Just strip away some of your bullshit about yourself."
"Now, listen... " he said. But he did not finish the sentence.
She left him there. And he stood, telling himself she was depraved. He wouldn't even think about doing what she had implied, and if she thought he would lower himself to that kind of sex, no matter what he had promised...
* * *
PART SEVEN: In Which Mark Is Forced To Take A Tour Beneath The Leather And Silk-
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Mark paced the room. Where was Julie, he asked himself angrily. He must have been in here ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. For two cents he'd leave and say to hell with all of it.
Even his rigid cock. But he had given her his word. And he needed her further help. And besides...
He stopped. Why keep up his self-image? He had been through enough since his arrival in Amsterdam to know he had only a limited picture of himself. There were many aspects to his makeup that were bubbling just below the surface and he had struggled with all his intensity and all his being for years to keep them from boiling over.
He was obsessed with Julie. Dangerously obsessed. He might as well admit that to himself. The idea of any kind of sex with her excited him almost beyond endurance.
He went into the small bathroom and ran cold water and splashed it on his face. The eye looked awful, all swollen and purple-black. There was a thin scab across his cheek. He needed a shave.
Back in the room he paced again. Stopped. Sat on the chair. Got up. Not only was he coming apart emotionally, but also physically. It all seemed to tie neatly together in some way he did not fully understand.
He looked around. Under the bed. The handcuffs were still there. He thought of Jill, but pushed her from his mind and saw images of Julie's naked, ripe body.
The son of a whore, that's what he was. A whore who had posed as a straight-laced, puritanical woman. Son of a woman who had, in her day, licked oysters from the bodies of midgets, climbed Christmas trees in hotel lobbies to find God-knows-what, screwed on a run-away trolley and taken on chicken-breeders in some kind of orgy.
What if Martha found out? Julie knew--knew everything. He had to make sure she did not tell her family. Okay, so he had to admit he had lived with a false idea of his true nature, and maybe he would give in to his sexual whims and live some kind of secret life and maybe he was even absurd and comic at times. But he still wanted to many Martha. No matter what. He wouldn't be the only bastard to have a respectable marriage and live on a sub-rosa sex life.
What was at the top of that Christmas tree in the hotel lobby?
Why should he care, he asked himself. It was an absurd story. He had hated his aunt for telling it and had fought hearing it. Now he was actually curious about it.
His aunt--he'd have to make damn sure she didn't get anywhere near the Brocktons. And he'd also keep them.
Julie came in. She wore the same black leather outfit, and she carried a couple of pairs of panties in her hand. Mark's pulse raced. She was locking the door. He had told himself he was obsessed with her, and should give in to his sexual whims and lead a double life. But now she was here and he didn't think he could go through with things, couldn't wallow in a kind of sex that had always been anathema. He couldn't.
"Sorry to be so long," she said. "But Aunt Lillian got hold of me and insisted on telling a couple of stories. And then I wanted to take my time and get very, very clean for you, Mark, so at least you wouldn't freak out over that. I scrubbed away all the sex from all the other people. You don't have that rationalization for avoiding your--what should we call it--your confrontation with, well, with what you really dig, baby."
She threw the panties on the bed. His eyes followed the flutter of black and white silk. He had the feeling he remembered from going into the operating room to have his appendix out, that nameless dread when you knew everything would be okay, knew the operation was necessary, yet hovered on a kind of panic.
"Mark, you look like a cornered animal," she said. "It's not going to be bad, baby. It's just a mind-freak you're going through. Your prick is eager enough."
His cock throbbed against his pants. Eager was an insufficient word. He took a step toward her, toward the luscious body straining against soft black leather. The skirt was very short and its dark color accentuated the golden thighs. Soft firm flesh of a teenage girl and its secret, intimate parts barely hidden by leather and beneath the leather and against the forbidden flesh would be silk...
And the silk might now be slightly moist. And what color would it be? His nostrils flared. He managed another step. Why had these ideas always excited him so? And so repelled him? He remembered that time back in high school when he dated the daughter of the prominent surgeon and parked with her and petted and though even then girls threw themselves at him, this one didn't--what was her name? Yes, Pamela. And she had blond hair and she would never screw him, only pet and let him fondle her expensive silk panties, and he hated being poor...
He had blocked that memory all these years and now he stared at Julie's body and it flooded him. He felt the panic surge and weaken his knees. All his physical aches accentuated and he told himself he felt terrible and just wanted to get the hell out of here and get back to the hotel and go to bed.
Julie took a step. "What are you thinking, Mark? Talk to me, baby."
"Why do you want to do this?" he asked. "I know I said I'd do anything, but obviously I didn't mean this kind of thing, Julie."
"Don't you want to?" she asked. "You do, Mark. And how bad can it be? I mean, if it's that terrible once you do it, that's simple enough. If you really don't dig it, if you really hate it, just don't do it again. But that's not what freaks you out, baby. You're terrified you'll love it."
"It?" What do you mean by it? We've just talked around what you want me to do. Just some talk of panties. What in hell do you want? And damn it, why? To see me suffer? To try and humiliate me? Maybe I deserve it for the way I've acted. I guess I do. But what pleasure will you get out of it, Julie?" He realized his speech had accelerated so fast he had nearly run the words together.
"What will I get out of it?" she asked. She unbuttoned the top button of the dress. Very slowly. "Well, Mark, I really dig sex and like to experience all kinds of sexy things. New things. And I've never done anything quite like what I have in mind for us, baby." Another button. A finger tracing a third but pulling away. "And I guess, to be honest, I'll enjoy making you pay the dues, Mark. I've got more than a little of the bitch in me. But, in all honesty, baby, I think you need what's going to happen, need to see how you react, need to see if you dig it, need to get out of all your sex bags and be whatever you are, and get away from those bad mind trips that wrack you so terribly."
"Hell, I can't understand half of what you say," he snapped. "All that hippie talk about bags and trips. Okay, I really like you physically, Julie. Maybe I'm obsessed with you and certainly I've held back, haven't let myself go with you, sexually. I want to make love to you. Very, very much, Julie. I want to screw you and let myself go as I've never done with any woman." God, his balls hurt and he was hot. Yes, that was what he really wanted with Julie, to lose himself in her body and really explode while making love to her.
"This is beginning to look like a bad play," Julie said.
"We're both standing here posturing and making speeches."
"OK, Julie, let's get everything straight," he said. "Then no more talk. I've admitted how much I want you. For me, that isn't easy to admit. I'm frankly scared of letting myself really go with you when we make love. But I will. I promise. I don't think I could control myself, in any case." Not likely, his primed and hardened cock insisted.
"More talk, baby," Julie said. "This is my game, Mark. I'm going to have it my way. Either you keep your word, or you don't. That's up to you. If you don't, no more playacting with my family."
"Shit, no more talk," he said.
He stepped to Julie and put his arms around her. He gasped at the feel of her body molded against his. He slid his hands down and pumped at the leather-clad buttocks and his cock stiffened more, pressed between them, hurt and tightened as it felt the contour of her cunt.
He kissed her ears and her cheeks--licked the smooth, warm flesh. "I want you, I want you," he moaned.
His lips sought her mouth as his hands squeezed and felt the outline of her bikini panties.
Julie twisted her face away. She reached around and tore his hands from her buttocks and stepped back. The firm, mocking look on her face was frightening.
"Take my dress off," she said.
"Sure," he said. He had trouble with the buttons. But he got the dress off. Julie stood in tiny black panties and a black bra that could barely contain her magnificent breasts. His cock found the hole in his pants and surged free. He didn't care.
He reached to remove her bra. She shook her head and stepped back. "Not yet," she said. "And put your prick up."
"What difference does it make... "
"It makes a lot of difference, baby," she said, "because you aren't going to need it for what I have in mind."
"But I thought... "
"You think too damn much," Julie said. There was danger in the blue eyes. "Now put your prick up. You're just stalling. You know perfectly well by now what I intend for you to do."
"No, I'm not sure," he said. "Anyway, it will all be a part of making love, no matter what I have to do first."
"Oh, shit, Mark," Julie hissed. "And I thought you had really started to change. We are not going to make love." She spaced each word carefully. "You are not going to ball me. You are going to find out for once what it means to have the woman, and not you, be the satisfied one. Have you ever thought what it means to leave a woman unsatisfied, Mark? I'll bet a lot of women have made love to you and left frustrated, my big, handsome stud."
Christ, her voice was lethal. He had thought he could go through with her demands, even the stuff with the panties, if it led to making love. He wouldn't let his mind form a clear thought of what she actually meant. His cock seemed to know.
"You're talking in circles," he muttered, finding a spark of rebellion. "And I'm not... "
"Damn you," she said. "I should kick myself for having any feeling for you at all. Now you listen to me, Mark Rogers. Either you shove your prick inside your pants and get down on your knees and start kissing my panties. Either do that, without one more word, or get out of here. And this is just going to be the beginning. Your lips and tongue are going on a tour of my body, Mark. Every part. Front and back. Wet and nasty, if you see it that way. Do you understand that? Shall I spell it out further, baby?"
He could leave. Anything would be better than subjecting himself to what she demanded. He did glance at the door.
Then he sank to his knees in front of her. He got his cock inside his pants. Julie took a step. Another. His face was only inches from the black panties bulging with the shape of her cunt...
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Mark had hesitated for two full minutes when Julie put her hands on his head. He stiffened. His lips trembled slightly; his breathing was erratic. The smell aroused him. He stared at the black silk as though it were a crystal ball through which he gazed at all the girls he fantasized, all the way back to Pamela.
"It will be okay, baby," she said gently. But her hands shoved.
He twisted his face slightly and it struck a thigh. He whimpered and began to kiss and lick the .thigh wildly, rubbing his face up and down. His hands were tight fists. His blood pounded. His loins ached. He licked around the rim of silk. Kissed the other thigh. Back up to tongue her navel and lick her stomach.
Julie's strong hands forced his head down. She stepped forward, shoving her panties against his face. He whimpered and tried to pull away, but she held him and his face was smothered by the soft silk and, through it, her huge cunt.
The sensation of the silk over thick hair and large lips was too much. He whined and fought for breath and screamed to himself that he was stupid to let this little girl hold him and force him this way.
"Make love to them," Julie said. Her voice seemed far away.
His cock was a pitiful shaft of agonized, raw flesh. His knee hurt. He couldn't breathe. He was stopping this.
But he did not. Julie held him there and he opened his mouth, hesitated a final time then kissed the panties and shoved his tongue against the silk. The sensation made him grunt. Julie began to undulate her body, grinding the panties against his face as he licked and kissed and sucked, fighting to get closer to the lips, to the smell that was driving him crazy. He, too, began to undulate.
He heard terrible sounds and realized he was making them. His tongue lashed the silk and found dampness. He kissed and sucked so hard he gagged.
He tried to pull away. "That's enough," he said. His breathing and pounding heart frightened him, as did the way he had lost control.
"That was just the beginning," Julie said. "That was just a couple of minutes, baby."
"No, no more," he gasped.
But he offered no resistance to her hands. She said: "Another twenty or thirty minutes, at least." And then he was smothering his face against the silk, finding new dampness and sucking at the bulge with deep-throated gasping noises.
* * *
Half an hour later, Julie stepped back and Mark collapsed on the floor, hacking out his breath. The muscles of his mouth were sore and he had hurt his neck in his frenzied twisting to get at the panties. And not just the front, as she had said. She had at one point twirled around and he had mouthed and licked her buttocks through the silk.
The panties were damp all over and he had not been able to tell how much was his saliva and how much was sweat and how much was the moisture of her sexual excitement.
She had gotten excited, and torn her bra off and played with her breasts and nipples with one hand while holding his head with the other.
His excitement had reached the point where acute pain shot through his balls and spasms wracked his body.
He sat on the floor, his head down, and faced the truth of his being: he was hardly a stud. He went to such lengths to be ruthless and aggressive with women to mask his own sexual fears and weaknesses. He was a sexual masochist, who had just reached the zenith of his sexual life by worshiping the panty-covered cunt of a teenage girl, and all his life he had wanted to do this to beautiful, young girls.
"Don't feel bad, baby," Julie said. "And Mark--don't think about it. Don't make it worse by mind-freaking. And Mark. Mark?"
He looked up at Julie, standing a couple of feet away, her weight on one leg. She had turned the panties down a fold and he saw hairs sticking out.
"Julie, I can't do any more," he said. "You don't know how this has torn me up. Okay. I've always wanted to. But do you know what it does to me to have to admit it?" He had to stop for breath. He shivered. His forehead felt like someone had stretched the flesh on a rack. His balls hurt the way they did many years ago when he petted heavily, but didn't have intercourse.
"Did you dig it, baby?" she asked. "Be honest. Did it give you pleasure?"
He nodded wearily.
"That's what counts, Mark," she said. "That you enjoyed it. And that you got your enjoyment without making anyone else suffer. All you're fighting now is the guilt, baby."
"I'm fighting to keep some remnant of self-respect," he said. "I was on top of everything when I came to Amsterdam. A complete, self-confident person. Now I can only see myself as a sexual freak, a masochist, someone people laugh at. I have nothing left. Except the remote possibility that I might still marry Martha."
"Bullshit!" Julie said. She turned the panties down a little, to reveal more hair. "Stop groveling in your self-pity. It's just another aspect of your puritan bag, baby. You had nothing when you came to Amsterdam, Mark. A hollow, desperate, calculating life. That wasn't the real you. You had to strip away those layers of protective crap to get to what you really are."
"Spare me the lecture," he said. "You sound like your sister, analyzing people in psychological terms, talking about a person in some egg-head way, mixed with that hippie shit. Martha shapes the lives of hookers in her hometown, shaping them in her own image as though she was something holy, and Julie shapes the lives of men in Amsterdam. Hobbies for bored, rich, pampered society girls."
"You're right," she said. "I was lecturing. The debate is over. I'm worked up, Mark. My nipples are tingling. My clit is practically simmering. Do you want another session with a fresh pair of panties? Maybe the white ones. Or do you want to go right on to my naked pussy? That's a tour you'll remember a long time."
"I can't," he said. "Let me screw you, Julie. Please. I'll do anything you ask. But just let me screw you. My God, don't make me beg any more. I can't stand the idea of begging."
The panties went down further. He saw the lips and the tangle of short, damp hairs. She wasn't going to have any mercy.
"Julie, I've learned a lot about myself because of you," he blurted, trying to stall. "It's important that I talk about it with you, important that I try to put everything together."
"No chance, baby," she said. "Later, I'll be tender and understanding and as helpful as I can be. Right now you're just a mouth and tongue. And your only importance to me is to do a lot of eating. I'm going to sit down and you're going to fall to my pussy. Or you're going to leave and I'm going to get someone in the other room to finish the job. I really don't care, Mark. You're hardly that good with your mouth, baby."
The panties came off and she pivoted and swished her buttocks excessively as she moved to the bed. She sat down on the narrow bed and spread her thighs wide. Mark gazed with his mouth open as her cunt was displayed for him.
It was the largest he had ever seen, and those damp, open lips where all he had ever fantasized and feared and hopelessly, secretly imagined licking and kissing. All the way back to Pamela, who made him realize how he was poor white trash, who he remembered now enjoyed his misery in petting, who shrugged off his desperate please-go-all-the-way urgings with a disdaining: "Nice girls don't do that kind of thing, Mark."
He would have sold his soul to worship Pamela's neat little cunt; he would have kissed it. Would have sold the soul a thousand times to make love to that society girl he knew he could never have. But he had only parked and petted and begged and given the soul away for nothing, merely to gain the privilege of stroking the expensive, lace-trimmed panties. And to be driven with a blinding lust to blot out the memory and denounce anything sexual that wasn't "decent" and to go on to a string of girls attracted by his body and his looks and to derive pleasure from their wanting him.
"I'm waiting, Mark," Julie said. "We'll talk later. And you'll have a long time to think things out." She was circling a nipple with a finger and writhing her body slightly. "But you've got about ten seconds to get over here, baby."
Mark crawled across the room, ignoring the pain in his knee. There was a haze of moisture on Julie's slim thighs. Her stomach was heaving. As he got to the bed she hunched her cunt up, and the tip of her tongue traced her lips.
And a slender finger mockingly traced the other lips, then pulled away. She settled back lazily. Her cheeks were flushed. She took quick, deep gasps of breath.
Mark looked into the open cunt, leaned forward, caught the tormenting hint of smell. He put his hands on her thighs and squeezed slightly. The flesh was slick and warm.
Closer. Slowly. His cock was in a state of torment, pressed between his pants and his body. He paused. Her hands dug into his hair. They were not gentle as they twisted.
He grunted as his mouth reached the hairs. They tickled his face, his nose. He hesitated and breathed deeply several times. Julie roughly tugged his head.
His lips brushed the lips of the cunt and a withering slash of excitement agonized his loins. He licked the lips, sucked, rubbed his face up and down, wallowed his face in the soft, scalding dampness.
He kissed and tongued between the lips and he found the clit and made Julie arch up sharply when he took the button of flesh in his lips. He cupped her buttocks and hunched his body like a madman, making sounds that came from deep in his gut.
Julie slammed her cunt hard against his mouth and twisted his hair. She locked her thighs about his head, enclosing him in a prison of flesh. He fought to breathe and found only her body. Without mercy, she rocked her thighs about his head and he abandoned himself to Julie's sensual pleasure, suffered the vise-like thighs and sharp nails, suffered the torment of his loins, suffered the pulsating lips and the hair that stuck in his mouth, suffered the heat and thicker moisture, and the increasing soreness of his frantic jaw muscles...
It was a suffering of total ecstasy.
* * *
PART EIGHT: In Which Mark Continues The Tour Beneath The Silk-As He Tours Amsterdam With The Brocktons
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Brocktons marveled over painting after painting in the seemingly endless rooms of the Rijksmuseum. Mark dragged himself after them, feigning enthusiasm for painters with names like Ruysdael and Steen and Bol and Maes. Julie joined in their enthusiasm and hardly spoke to Mark, and then only in her gushing, back-home little-girl tone as she continued to play the role she had promised Mark.
And play it she did. How could this sweet, art-oriented little girl with blond hair and blue eyes be the same girl whose cunt he had licked and sucked for eternity, just a few hours earlier?
Not a word had been spoken after he began to use his mouth on her. The only sounds were their grunts and groans, and he had finally left her sprawled out on the bed, and staggered back to the hotel. He was far too aroused sexually and torn apart emotionally to even think. Bed was all he thought and he had crashed onto the bed like a giant tree falling in the forest.
A deep sleep followed--but not for long. All the Brocktons, including cheerful, bouncy Julie, descended on his room with two doctors, a bag of medicine, half a dozen maps and guidebooks and a tray of coffee, rolls and butter.
While the doctors looked him over and dabbed stinging things at his knee and eye and cheek, Julie and Martha held his coffee cup and hand-fed him bits of bread and butter.
In fixing his cheek one of the doctors had him open his mouth wide and the pain had made him gasp and remember why the muscles were sore. He had sought Julie's eyes. But she did not look at him.
They let him get dressed and insisted on meeting Aunt Lillian, and seeing the houses. Julie lied him out of that This was followed by what he soon decided was the fastest, most exhaustive tour of Amsterdam ever undertaken. They had visited the Rembrandthuis and a diamond cutter and the Anne Frank House and some churches and two small museums and now the never-ending Rijksmu-seum, which Martha called one of the two or three greatest museums in the world.
As they stood in front of the gigantic Rembrandt called "Night Watch" Julie did look at him in a definite and intimate way that caused his cock to tighten so quickly he did an awkward dance to shift his legs and keep the bulge from showing.
The Brocktons were discussing the painting, which depicted the members of an Amsterdam Civil Guard company in 1642, assembled for a parade to honor the arrival of Maria de Medici.
"Not only is it great art," Mrs. Brockton said, as she studied the painting with her head cocked and a finger against the neat wrinkles of her chin, "but it's also strong and orderly, full of decorum, of moral superiority."
"Yes, my dear, it is extraordinary in that respect," Mr. Brockton said. He had taken a cigar from his pocket, fingered it anxiously then shoved it back. as though remembering he could not smoke in the museum. "I wonder if we could get a reproduction for the conference room in the plant. It depicts those qualities of tradition and orderliness that underline the Brockton way of doing things."
Martha stepped closer to "Night Watch". "Just seeing a magnificent painting like this gives one a moral uplift.
It's as though Rembrandt himself was reaching through the years to say to the Brocktons that our way is the right way, that there must always be tradition and a time-proven, moderate method of living one's life. Don't you agree, Mark?"
"Of course," he muttered.
"Bullshit!" Julie mumbled quietly. The Brocktons obviously did not hear her.
"One might say the painting embodies all those qualities one finds in Amsterdam itself," Mark got out, and saw Julie shaking her head. "Sober, moderate, dependable, hard-working, moral, reliable."
"Let's get closer so we can study the detail of these remarkable men's faces," Mr. Brockton said. The three of them stepped forward together, as though choreographed.
"I can't take this crap any more, baby," Julie whispered. "I dig Rembrandt, but not my family's idea of his art. Let's get away from them."
"Julie, I don't know," he said.
"They won't miss us," she said. "They're hypnotized by the idea of Rembrandt speaking through the years to them."
"Where can we go?" he asked. "To another room of paintings?"
"I've had my fill of art for today," Julie said. "Oh, mother? Daddy? Martha?"
There was no reply from the Brocktons. "I told you," Julie said.
Mark followed her across the room, glancing over his shoulder. The Brocktons, for all the life they showed, might have been part of the museum's works.
"We'll find some place," Julie said. "I think I remember something a couple of galleries back."
"Some place? What kind of place, Julie? Look, I need to talk to you, Julie. About, you know, this morning. And about being alone with you again, to really let myself go with you. And make love. I'll even use my mouth on you. I have to admit I did enjoy it, though it tore me up emotionally and made me feel depraved and weak. Yes, I need to talk to you and make everything okay by screwing."
She stopped abruptly. "Stop whining like that," she said. There was an edge to her voice. Her blue eyes were hardly those of a little girl now. "I'm not Martha. You don't have to go through that crap with me, Mark. That's part of your masochism, that groveling in front of Martha. And Mother and Daddy. God, we're making pretty little speeches again. No more of that now. Come on."
He followed her again, through two more rooms of paintings. She stopped in front of a canvas-covered scaffold where workmen were repairing plaster in the ceiling. It was empty.
"We can go behind here, baby," she said.
"Behind there? Why?" He had difficulty swallowing.
"Obviously to discuss the decorum and moral superiority of the Brockton family as depicted in seventeenth century Dutch painting," she said. The eyes held mischief. Her faint smile taunted him.
"We can discuss those anywhere," he said. "Julie, what are you thinking? What do you have in mind?" His cock knew.
"What I have in mind is for you to go down on me again, baby," she said. The tip of her tongue was provocative as it flicked at her lips.
"Go down on you? Here? In the Rijksmuseum? I will do that to you again." His throat was tight. His blood raced. "But as a part of screwing you." He warned himself to lower his voice, remembering that most people understood English.
"Here," she said. "Either you go down on me any time and any place I want, Mark, or I will stop playing the game with my family."
"But in a museum? Christ, what if we're caught? Julie, it was hard enough to do it back in Jill's room. But I couldn't possibly do that in some place like a museum. Behind a flimsy piece of canvas."
"You'll dig it," she said, in her cheerful voice. "If you see it as a put-down, baby, doing it here would give the whole thing a different edge." The cheer left her voice. Now she spoke in a seductive tone heavy with the anticipation of forbidden pleasure. "And so will I. Just for a little while. Not like this morning. Oh, Mark, use your tongue more on my clit."
"Julie, please," he pleaded. "This is insane. The workmen could come back at any minute. Someone will see us go under there. Someone will hear us."
She smiled deeply. "Then don't slurp and grunt so much, baby."
"Later in my hotel room or in your room I'll do anything, but Jesus, not behind that canvas."
She began to inch her skirt up. "Then right here, Mark," she said, calmly. "This should make a story to rival some of your Aunt Lillian's tales."
"No," he said. He glanced around, then bolted behind the canvas.
Julie walked back leisurely. It was dim beneath the canvas but light filtered through in streaks, sectioning Julie's body in shadows that highlighted her breasts and thighs.
"I don't believe I'm doing this," Mark whispered. Through a crack in the canvas he saw people only a few yards away.
"This might be the real you, Mark," she said as she tugged her skirt up.
He stared at the slice of light on the thighs. At the white bikini panties and their precious bulge. "The real me? Getting down on my knees in the national museum of Holland to use my mouth on a girl? And not even make love to her? The real me?" He continued to look at the panties, a flash of excitement tightening his loins, his head nearly swimming in the anticipation and dread.
"Mark, you've got to realize you have your aunt's absurdity," she said. Her finger traced the top rim of the silk. "I think you're going to become a sexual madman, baby. I kind of sensed this in you at first, through all that I'm-tough-and-moral-and-a-stud shit. Guess that's why I liked you. Well? Are your eyes full? Then open your mouth."
He got to his knees and fell too quickly to the floor. His sore knee! He felt a bit uneasy in the stomach and realized he was developing one of those late-developing hangovers.
Julie moved closer, holding her skirt up with one hand. Her breathing was heavier. So was his. He adjusted his body to take the pressure off his stiff cock.
"Stop staring and get busy," Julie said. "Shit, you think and brood too much, Mark. You were mind-freaking yourself again, weren't you?"
"You wouldn't believe what I was thinking," he said. He moved his head forward. Brushed the silk and felt the bulge and groaned. He put his hands on her thighs.
"I'd believe anything," she said, sucking in her breath as his tongue dug against the panties, seeking the lips. "But not now. Take the panties off, Mark. We don't have time for them now. Hurry. You're the one that's worried about being caught."
Mark skinned the panties down her thighs and legs. She stepped out of them. Spread her thighs. Stepped hard against his face, smothering his nose and mouth in the sticky heat of her vagina. He gagged and felt a shudder of revulsion, mingled with a stab of desire so acute he whimpered.
What kind of man was he, he asked himself as he began to kiss and lick. What kind of self-degrading, perverted...
The rebellion ended as quickly as it had begun. Her hands dug into his hair. She hunched her body harshly against his frantic mouth.
He warned himself not to grunt. Not to make any noise. What did it matter? He mashed his face harder, drove his tongue deep into the tight, contracting passage and felt Julie stiffen.
"The clit," she mumbled.
He found the clit and tongued and sucked, grasping her writhing buttocks. She wrapped a leg around his neck to lock his face to her body.
As before, the shame and suffering were only small parts of a strange kind of ecstasy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
For three days and nights Mark--with Julie's invaluable help--maintained the facade. They told the Brocktons that Aunt Lillian had been called out of town to the sickbed of an old friend who was a nun in Italy.
"Aunt Lillian seriously considered taking the vows herself," Julie had added. Mark had to take her aside and warn her that she was going too far.
Yet a little later she could not resist saying: "And on the way back from Italy, Aunt Lillian is going to stop off in Germany to visit an orphanage to which she gives a lot of money."
"We really don't know anything about your family, Mark," Mr. Brockton had said then. "Except it must be a very good one. Tragedy that your aunt is your only living relative. I assume her wealth is inherited."
"Of course," Julie said. Mark had pleaded with her not to reveal his true background. She had replied quite sweetly that she would do anything he wanted with her family--so long as his mouth continued the erotic tour.
Continue whenever she wanted. At any time. At any unlikely place. And there was no time she didn't want his mouth. And no place in Amsterdam deterred her, no matter how absurd. Or the risk.
He gave in completely. He even stopped begging her to make love. He would gladly have gone to a whore for sex.
But he was almost never alone and when he was he collapsed and grabbed what sleep he could. His balls stayed tight and uncomfortable. His cock stayed constantly hard, making it difficult for him to walk and causing him to make sudden steps and twists that startled the Brocktons and amused Julie.
Inside the Rembrandthuis, while the Brocktons examined sketches by Rembrandt and discussed the exact reproduction of a seventeenth century house, Julie found a small closet and she and Mark spent a quarter hour among the mops, brooms and buckets.
At the Heineken Brewery, during the guided tour, Julie pulled Mark behind an enormous, bubbling vat and he knelt dutifully, thinking some worker would find them. But they got away with it.
And so it went--both tours. Behind any cover they could find, Mark and Julie went through their routine, and in front of the Brocktons they played the game and kept the Brocktons too busy to get inquisitive.
They did demand to see his houses. But he and Julie stalled them in an all-night cabaret--which they did not like--and got them to the houses at dawn. The street was whore-less and by then the Brocktons were too exhausted to notice much.
"You'll still never get away with it," Julie said on the third night in his hotel room, as they waited for her family to change clothes.
But Mark felt more confident. "I've come up with a plan," he said. "They would have been suspicious if I had hustled them out of town the minute they got here. But one of the reasons for your family's visit was business. So. I'm going to fake a big business deal that will send them flying back home, counting the dollars. They won't be able to resist this."
"Then?" she asked. She was curled up on the bed, sipping a Coke.
"The way the deal works, you see, is that I'll stay here for a while," he said. When they came up he had expected her to pull up the skirt. But she had not mentioned sex. In fact, all day she had been rather distracted and much less interested in her sensual pleasure.
"You've got it all worked out again, haven't you?" She asked. "Get my family out before they discover the truth. That way you can still marry Martha, and the Brockton wealth and social position. And you'll say to Aunt Lillian, after my family is gone: Sure, I want the window-houses and all that money. And you've gotten out of your sex bag and you're perfectly willing to lead a double life, and what do you know? You'll even have Martha's little sister for your sexual pleasure. You've really got it made, baby. Congratulations."
Christ, she had him figured to the letter. It all seemed so perfect. After three days of success, even simple.
"Okay, I've got it worked out," he said. "What's wrong with that?"
"It means you haven't really changed," she said. She got up and drained the Coke, making a slurping noise. "Still scheming, lying, shoving back your real nature. Well, baby, don't think it's all going to be so neat. Good luck with my damn family. But little Julie's little pussy just shut its doors to you, Mark. For good."
"Julie, I'm really hung up on you," he said. "Once your family leaves, we can work something out. With the sex. But I've come to like you for far more than sex."
"You're really good at getting that sincerity into your voice," she said. "You never did apologize to Greta. Never said a word to her. Don't you feel hollow? Doesn't this kind of using people, feeling nothing for them, nothing real, doesn't this get to you?"
The phone rang. Thank God, he told himself as he snatched up the receiver. He had to think of some way quick to get to Julie.
"Hello," he barked.
"Mark, honey, where you and Julie been keeping yourselves?" Aunt Lillian asked. Her words were slurred. She was drunk.
"We've been busy," he said. "Julie's been, well, showing me Amsterdam. That's right."
"One of the girls at the houses said something about her folks being here."
"Oh, no. No. They had to postpone their trip. Something came up. Sorry I haven't seen you for a few days. Look, why don't we have dinner tomorrow night? I still haven't eaten in an Indonesian restaurant."
"That sounds fine," Aunt Lillian said. "With Julie, too, honey. Have I got something to show you two. Did I ever tell you about that time your mama and I were whoring down in Los Angeles and met this big-shot Hollywood producer who was doing this picture about the Romans? All kind of fancy chariot races. Didn't I ever tell you about that, Mark?"
"No, you didn't," he said. "Tell me tomorrow night. We'll have plenty of time to talk then. I've got to go now."
"Well, this big-shot producer found out I liked horses and one night after we been partying and fucking and all, he took me out to the studio and, Lord, if he didn't give me one of them big, fancy chariots. And two horses. I learned to drive it real good. Came to love them horses. Lost the whole works when I was on my way down to see that Latin American dictator and the banana boat sank."
"Yes, that's very interesting," Mark said. Julie had a murderous gleam in her eyes and the Brocktons might burst in at any minute. He just needed one day to put his plan into effect. Tomorrow night he really could dine with his aunt, and sew up the inheritance, and be free of the Brocktons.
"Well, yesterday I was larking about the streets and I come on this antique shop, more of a junk shop, really, and what do you think they had for sale? Lord, a chariot, just like the one I used to have. And I rushed in and bought it and today I got me a brace of beautiful horses, and I can't wait to take you and Julie for a ride, and... "
"Yes, I can't wait for you to give us a ride," he said.
"I'm sure Julie will be excited, too. I'll see you tomorrow night, Aunt Lillian. Goodbye now."
He hung up before she could speak again. So much for his drunk Aunt. Now he had to deal with Julie.
"Does Aunt Lillian want to take us for a ride?" she asked. "Does she have a new car?"
"Hardly. Aunt Lillian has a new chariot. And two horses."
"A horse-drawn chariot?" Julie laughed. "Why, that's wonderful, Mark. I can't wait to take a ride."
"I can wait," he said wearily. He didn't feel too good. His physical condition and the strain were catching up with him again. "Julie, just let me hustle your family out of Amsterdam. I promise you things will work out between us. I have changed. But I can't give up everything at once. Part of the old Mark was a real part. Just help me one more day, and I'll do anything you want."
"I'll help you one more day," she said. "And I don't want you to do anything for me. Except get out of my life, Mark. You can only have one Brockton sister. Take Martha, with wealth and social position and the coldest pussy south of the Arctic--or take Julie. The teenage whore. No money or social position. Young. And something of a spoiled bitch. Maybe no bargain. Well, we continue to make pretty speeches at each other, don't we, Mark? Shit, I hate talking. Let's go find out what's keeping my family."
"That's right, no talking," he said hastily. "On the way down I'll tell you about my plan."
"If you so much as mention your plan I'll walk out on you," she said.
She tossed her head back and stormed from the room, her ass swishing beautifully in the fury of her movement.
Mark's wretched cock strained pitifully toward the ass. The cock wilted slowly, as though it knew it had lost-- perhaps forever--the one thing it had most wanted.
What stunned Mark was that his whole being seemed to feel the same way about Julie. She was gone. He knew in that instant how little a part of his obsession with her sex played.
He left his room in a state of depression.
* * *
PART NINE: In Which Mark, Brutally Assaulted And Then Trapped By His Own Cock, Sees His Destiny Lurching Down The Damrak
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
"Fine work, son," Mr. Brockton said. "Here I come to Amsterdam and get so involved in sightseeing I completely neglect business. Oh, that was some surprise this afternoon when you introduced me to Mr. Burgem. I can't tell you how impressed I am with your work, Mark. This will mean a handsome bonus for you."
They were sitting in the outdoor cafe of a large restaurant on the Damrak. It was glass-enclosed on three sides, with the front open. Half a dozen heaters kept it well warmed. It was seven in the evening.
A beautiful evening, Mark told himself. Even the cold weather and snow had let up, and the temperature had moderated.
"It was fine work," Mrs. Brockton said. She sipped her tea and patted her mouth with a napkin. "I do hate to leave Amsterdam so abruptly, though. And without getting to meet your Aunt Lillian and see her art collection."
"We'll come back," Mr. Brockton said. He took a deep puff of his cigar. "I still want to see about expanding our operations into this market. But for a deal as lucrative as the one Mr. Burgem proposes, it's worth rushing home. I well understand his insisting on viewing our plant and our products before finalizing the deal. And since he's going to be in the United States for the next two days, it works out perfectly."
Perfectly, Mark told himself. How simple it had been to go to an agency and hire an out-of-work actor to portray Mr. Burgem, who was constructing several thousand units of upper middle-class housing in Rotterdam. Completely furnished. And he could not find the type of furniture, at the right price, anywhere in Europe.
The Brocktons would rush home. Mr. Burgem would cable he had had to call his trip off at the last minute. Then Mark, remaining in Holland, would "discover" Mr. Burgem led a completely sordid life of drugs, alcohol and bizarre sex. The Brocktons would not touch him. They'd thank Mark for saving them from a deal with such a person, even though it cost them money.
"And he looked so respectable, so solid, so moral," Mark could hear Mr. Brockton saying.
"What could be keeping the girls?" Mrs. Brockton asked as she looked at her watch.
"Yes, we should be leaving for the airport soon," Mr. Brockton said. He puffed the cigar and Mark thought how absolutely pompous and self-righteous the old bastard was.
"Oh, here they come," Mrs. Brockton said. "Oh, dear."
Martha was walking furiously several steps in front of Julie. And Mark guessed why. Julie was wearing her black leather micro-dress. And knee-length black leather boots.
All the depression he had swallowed down with the success of his plan with the Brocktons swelled up at the sight of Julie. His heart screamed that he wanted her. Just minutes, he thought. Minutes and the Brocktons would be gone and he would have Martha. And somehow he would salvage things with Julie.
"Will you look at the outfit your daughter is wearing in public?" Martha fumed as she sat. "I tried to tell her in a nice way in that boutique that our kind of people didn't wear that kind of thing. And now, when I demanded that she go back and change clothes, do you know what she said? She told me I should stick something in my mouth and it would make me see things in a different way."
Julie sat beside Mark. "I wanted to tell her she should stick a prick in her damn mouth," she whispered into his ear. "But I didn't. I cooled it for you, Mark."
Julie was in a good mood. A dangerously good mood. Her moods had alternated sharply all' day and had kept Mark on edge. Surely she wouldn't screw him up here at the last minute. Surely.
"I think working in that boutique is a mistake," Mrs. Brockton said. "Happy as I am that you finally want to do something, dear. But it's obviously having a bad influence on you. And there's not only yourself to consider, Julie. You could cast a bad reflection on Mark and his Aunt Lillian. Why, what would Mark think of his future sister-in-law being seen in a dress that actually shows her thighs in public?"
Mark saw Julie fighting back a laugh.
"Shall I get a taxi for you?" he asked. Minutes. Just minutes now. "Wouldn't want to miss your flight."
"We must settle this issue of Julie and the boutique," Martha said. "Or Julie just might not be allowed to stay here in Holland. Isn't that right, Mother and Daddy?"
"Your sister is right, Julie," Mr. Brockton said. "What's that? I'd really rather they didn't serve that kind of person in a respectable establishment like this. Can't they go to their own cafes, and be with their own kind?"
Two midgets had taken the next table. Julie fought back another laugh. This infuriated Martha. She began to talk in a mock whisper to her mother and father, detailing threats to Julie if she didn't promise right now that she would give up her boutique job and not be seen in public dressed that way again.
"You'll never do it, baby," Julie said into Mark's ear. Her breath was damp and warm and got a quick response from his cock. Christ, was it hard!
"I'll do it," he told her, leaning away from the Brocktons.
"Last night I thought you might and I got angry and depressed," she said. "But today I remembered that you're crossed with your Aunt Lillian's absurdity. It's going to motivate the rest of your life, Mark. And touch anyone that gets involved with you. Even my family. God only knows what will happen, but this new-despite-him-self-Mark won't bring it off."
"And what are you two whispering about?" Martha asked. "We can still get you on that flight, Julie, dear. Unless you quit that boutique. I didn't want to mention it. But that morning, when I took the taxi, I saw a couple of other women exhibiting themselves. I didn't want to let myself think the neighborhood was going to seed. You'll have to change that, Mark. And in the meantime, little Julie simply can't... "
"Can't live beneath the dignity of the truth as revealed by Rembrandt speaking through the years to the dignified and moral Brocktons?" Julie asked.
Mark yelped and sat upright. Julie had put her hand over his cock.
A hurried glance assured him the Brocktons hadn't seen the hand. But his yelp had startled them.
Julie leaned closer and whispered again, this time letting the tip of her tongue tickle out words. "Your cock and I have made a secret agreement, baby," she said. "Oh, all right, I won't give you away this late in the game, you poor bastard."
"Mark, what's happening to you?" Martha asked sternly. "Why did you make that dreadful noise? And what is going on between you and Julie? And why are you bobbing up and down in that disgraceful manner?"
"Bobbing up and down?" Christ, he was. His whole lower body was going crazy. Strange, sharp sensations tore through his balls and up his cock. And it continued its assault against him.
"Well?" Martha asked. Those ice-green eyes judged him so severely and condemned him so completely he felt he might cry on the spot. Mr. and Mrs. Brockton sat primly and sternly, their lips tight, their noses slightly up. That one yelp, that bobbing up and down, put him beyond the Brockton limit. Their snake-cruel eyes demanded: What kind of person would behave like that in public? His cock demanded: What kind of person would give up Julie for Martha.
He could not suppress a whimper that came right on up his throat and made those six terrible eyes look at each other, then back at him.
Minutes. Seconds, maybe. He wasn't a depraved, cunt-eating comic figure with an insatiable and vicious cock. He was really the tough, confident, calculating and morally temperate Mark Rogers who left America with his firm, invincible hand on the top rung...
"It's easy to explain!" Christ, his voice was high as a choirboy's. "Morality, Mr. Brockton," he got out in a lower voice. "Moderation in all things. 'Night Watch.' Does that make sense? No? Why did I yelp and whimper and bob up and down? I got this incredibly vivid sense of --propriety. Yes, it's a delayed reaction from the strong effect all those proper, dignified men in 'Night Watch' had on me." It wasn't working. He couldn't even remember what he had said. And Jesus, he had started to bob up and down again.
Julie smiled. Deeper. She laughed and put her hand over her mouth. But she could not contain the laugh. It infuriated Mark.
"Couldn't you have waited, you little bitch?" he asked.
"How dare you use such a word with Julie," Martha said.
"I'm sorry, baby," Julie said. "All this desperate effort to play the game with my family. All your pose of morality and propriety and decorum." She laughed harder. "Oh, you poor bastard."
"Julie!" Mrs. Brockton said. "Our kind of people--" Julie brushed tears from her eyes. "Mother, our kind of people are fixing to have the experience of their lives." She turned to Mark. "I wasn't laughing at you. Not at what you said or did, baby. You've been so strung out you haven't looked at the street. There." She pointed. "Half a block down."
All eyes followed Julie's finger.
In one panic-driven instant he saw and rejected, his mind telegraphing the error of his eyes: That was not really a huge, red-headed woman lurching down the street, a bottle in each hand, singing "The Bastard King of England" at the top of a voice that could be heard in Rotterdam.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
"Disgusting," Mrs. Brockton said. "I'd heard that terrible noise but wouldn't let myself believe it was real. And I do think the woman is American."
Mark realized he had heard the singing, also. And totally blocked it from his consciousness. He glanced around. If he said he had to run to the bathroom, maybe she would go right on by. She didn't know the Brocktons. But there was Julie.
"I've got to go to the bathroom," Mark squeaked. "And so does little Julie."
He shoved his chair back. Julie didn't move.
"Mark, she's seen us," Julie said. "Besides, you could hardly run for your life in your condition."
His eyes tore down. His condition? Christ, that bulge couldn't all be his cock. Could it? It looked so large it might tilt him over if he tried to stand.
"Imagine such a thing happening in a city like Amsterdam," Mr. Brockton said. He mashed out his cigar.
"What is she singing?" Martha asked. "We really should get little Julie out of here before she hears that terrible song."
This brought a deep laugh from Julie. And to his total surprise, Mark laughed, too. The laugh choked quickly in his throat at the six-eyed reprimand that was turned on him. He whimpered as Aunt Lillian roared out a verse about the Bastard King's testicles hanging down to his knees.
Both he and Julie glanced at his own testicles. Julie laughed. Mark whimpered again. His aunt had stopped a few feet from them. She was drinking from one of the bottles. Far away Mark heard the carousel music.
"I'm leaving," Martha said. "I refuse to be subjected to this kind of indignity by a drunken, disgusting old woman."
"Why, she's looking right at us," Mrs. Brockton said uneasily.
The three Brocktons got up in unison, as though they'd been rehearsing. Mark started to rise, then remembered his cock. Aunt Lillian pulled the bottle from her lips, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and fixed Mark with a sloppy, drunken smile. He sat rooted to the chair, trapped by his cock, and realized his lips were moving.
"God Almighty," Aunt Lillian roared. "Am I glad to run into you two. I was afraid you'd fallen in the canal again. Damn it to hell, I left the new chariot at home tonight. Afraid I'd be too shit-faced to handle them horses."
The Brocktons were looking from Aunt Lillian to Mark with machine precision.
"I want the bill," Mr. Brockton said. "Where is the waiter? Julie. Get up this instant. We're postponing our flight until tomorrow morning and settling this affair about your working in the boutique, and your scandalous behavior in general. And wipe that smile off your face, young lady."
"Lillian!" someone called.
The two midgets were getting up and running over to his aunt.
"Bert! Harry! I'll be a cross-eyed mother-fucker! I haven't seen you boys in years. Not since Mark's mama and I were peddling our pussies on Bourbon Street and climbed that Christmas tree in the Monteleon Hotel."
"Lillian?" Martha asked, as Aunt Lillian picked up a midget in each arm and hugged and kissed them. "I simply do not believe the implication of what this woman has just said."
Aunt Lillian put the midgets down and handed each a bottle. "This calls for a party. Where's the waiter? Otto, get your fat ass out here and bring us some whiskey."
The waiter appeared from nowhere. "Lillian! What can I do for you? Whiskey? Yes, right away. And genever? Of course. If I had known you were friends of these American tourists... "
"Hell, I don't know this three with their noses in the air," she said. "But this here is my nephew, Mark."
All the muscle and bone seemed to plunge at once from Mark's body. The Brocktons' collective anger, indignation and repulsion iced the spineless mass that was left.
"You, you," Martha started, her words unable to match the fury that was raging in her brain. "You will pay for this, Mark Rogers. I promise you that. Julie, get away from him this instant. Don't you realize this wretched woman is his Aunt Lillian!" Something dropped in Martha's furious face. "But you know Aunt Lillian. You were staying with her. She owns the houses where... "
"Julie, honey," Aunt Lillian said as she collapsed in a chair which shook with her weight. "Everybody has missed you. When you going back to your window and peddle the best-looking pussy in Amsterdam?"
The programmed Brocktons went pale at the same instant. Mrs. Brockton grabbed the back of a chair for support. They looked at each other but seemed unable to speak. Otto and two other waiters were bringing out Scotch, genever, Heineken's, silver buckets of ice, mixers and glasses.
"Lillian, you haven't changed a bit," Bert said.
"That was some night in the French Quarter," Harry said. "And this is your sister's son, huh? Whatever happened to her, Lillian? She could drink and party, that girl.
And fuck 'til the cows came home. You remember us buying the oysters, and you and your sister getting us up in the Christmas tree, and licking them off us. And you remember what we found up in the top of that tree?"
"Why, Harry, my sister off and kind of went crazy," Aunt Lillian said as she took a full glass of genever from Otto. "Went out and married this barber. After that, wasn't no more high living. Lord, two years after she got married, she didn't have a pot to pee in."
"You can consider yourself no longer employed by the Brockton Furniture Company," Mr. Brockton said, straightening himself.
"To think I have been engaged to white trash," Martha hissed. "To think I let your lips touch mine. Trash, that's what you are, Mark Rogers. Trash." Her voice had risen and she was on the verge of hysteria.
"What's wrong with the skinny bitch?" Aunt Lillian asked. "Give her something to drink. And shut her up. Or throw her out. And what's wrong with you, honey?" She turned to Mr. Brockton. "Ain't they hanging too good?" She reached over and patted his balls. Mr. Brockton screamed and jumped. Julie burst out laughing again. Mark laughed despite himself. Again the laugh died in his tightened throat.
Julie was taking a drink from Otto. Martha rushed over and knocked the glass from her hand. It crashed onto the floor.
"Don't you take their filthy whiskey," Martha screamed. Her face was red. "And you stop laughing. Do you know what this filthy old woman just did to your father?"
Martha shrieked and grabbed Julie's arm. "You've been taking drugs. You're depraved. My own sister."
Julie jerked her arm free. "Keep your hands off me," she said.
"It's not true," Mrs. Brockton said in a feeble voice.
"Is it? I don't understand all the words. Did this woman say my little girl has been--has been--working as a --as a prostitute?"
"Say, you must be Julie's folks," Aunt Lillian roared. "Why, Mark told me you weren't coming. What's all this crap you folks putting out? We'll have us a party. Get good and drunk. Do a little miscellaneous fucking. Martha, honey, you ever licked oysters off a midget's balls?"
Martha stepped back and shrieked.
"Guess that means no," Aunt Lillian mumbled.
Mark took a Scotch from Otto. He poured it down. It fell to his knotted stomach like a weight. His lips were quivering. He could take no more. All courage failed. He would crawl to Mr. Brockton on his hands and knees and beg for his job back. And he would beg Martha, lie to her, blame Aunt Lillian. Julie. What was that Martha had said about drugs? Yes. That was it.
"Please listen to me." His voice sounded horrible. "Please. Mr. Brockton. Martha. You were right about drugs. Julie and I have been helpless. Drugged. At this terrible woman's mercy. My Aunt Lillian? My aunt? The nun's friend? The orphans' helper? She's telling you these terrible stories, because... "
"Shut up, you spineless bastard," Julie shouted. "Don't you have any courage, any self-respect? How can you grovel in front of them like this? Why fight what you really are, Mark? Don't I matter? Don't you have any idea how I feel about you?"
Mark turned on Julie as he bolted up. "This is all your fault, you little bitch. You just want to see me ruined. I do have courage. And self-respect. And dignity. I'm an important executive in a large furniture company. I'm temperate and morally upright, just like the men in 'Night Watch.' Julie's eyes narrowed. "I'm through with you, Mark. I swear to God I will never... " She shook her head. The eyes widened. Sparkled. "Why am I getting angry, baby?
You and I are going to end up together, because we're both touched with absurdity and because we're both freaked out about sex, and because your cock and I have this secret understanding."
His cock. It was swelling. Julie patted the instrument and he could swear it purred like a pet.
"You touched... " Martha shouted. "You actually put your hands right down there. Mother. Daddy. Did you see what our baby did? This lower-class monster and his aunt have ruined a Brockton."
"I'm getting sick and tired of all this shit," Aunt Lillian said. "Otto, throw these three bastards out. I like to think of myself as a gentle and tolerant woman. But nobody messes with my partying or my fucking."
Otto and the other waiters shoved the Brocktons out onto the sidewalk. A crowd had gathered.
"I'm Arnold Brockton," Mr. Brockton shouted. "I will see that each of you is punished severely for this. I am going directly to the American Embassy. You'll all know the wrath of the Brocktons. And the American government. You'll never work for another furniture company, Mark Rogers. And I think I can safely promise you that when I get back home you will no longer be a member of my club. Julie. Get over here this instant, young lady. I'm taking you back to America and putting you in the hands of a competent psychiatrist."
"Shut up, daddy," Julie said. "You're not going to do anything with me. I'm eighteen. Legal age in Holland. And don't threaten to cut me off. I don't want your money. I'm quite happy on what I make as a whore."
"But dear," Mrs. Brockton said. "This could mean they won't let you make your debut next Christmas."
"You will not continue to work as a prostitute," Martha said. "I will see to that. In fact, I will see about all those filthy houses. And I'm not through with you, Mark. I'm not through telling you just exactly what kind of trash you are."
Mark snatched up another Scotch and drank it. This one went down much easier. Something seemed to pass from his body. The muscle and bone were there again. He glanced at Julie and smiled.
And then he laughed, the first open, uncontrolled laugh he could ever remember. And Julie laughed. And Aunt Lillian laughed. Bert and Harry laughed, and Otto and the waiters, and the people standing around the Brocktons.
Mark realized how right Julie had been. What a relief it was to be just absurd. And comic. And horny. And the son of a midget-licking whore.
The Brocktons pushed their way through the crowd and stalked down the Damrak. Mark and Julie took up full glasses. And the party started in earnest.
* * *
PART TEN: In Which Mark Discovers The Party Was A Little Early-But The Brocktons' Wrath Is Turned To... What?... Not The Brocktons....
CHAPTER THIRTY
The party was unlike anything Mark had ever seen. It lasted three days and nights. Those seventy-two hours completed Mark's metamorphosis.
On the fourth day he awoke in Julie's arms, in a room in Aunt Lillian's house, and as she slept he stroked her silky hair tenderly and tried to remember just what had happened. He found he liked to laugh. Even at himself. Especially at himself.
The party had moved from the cafe to a cellar tavern and from there to Aunt Lillian's, picking up people and momentum as it went along. Including all the girls from Aunt Lillian's windows--his windows, he reminded himself. Somehow during those three days Aunt Lillian had found enough clarity of mind to call in her lawyer and transfer the property to him.
After a point--and a great deal of Scotch--things were a little hazy. He did remember racing around the Amsterdam streets in Aunt Lillian's chariot. And he and Julie unhitching one of the horses and riding it into the living room. Were they naked when they did that? Yes. Then that was after Bert and Harry had one hundred oysters sent in.
Yes. And after all the people in the living room formed a human sexual chain, with somebody doing something to the next person, and the chain stretched around the room twice. He recalled some dark-haired, dimpled girl from one of his windows had formed a link by sucking his cock and be had forged a link by licking that six-foot blond he had seen that morning with Martha...
But surely he wasn't right in remembering that the horse was part of the chain. Was he?
He laughed softly. Julie stirred, but she did not wake up. His cock rubbed against her warm buttocks and there was a glimmer of life. But only a glimmer. A night of sex with Julie had completed the party, and his cock was so overworked he couldn't even get the hint of a hardon.
Those hours with Julie. They had talked out and worked out what was left of his sex bag, as Julie called it. With a laugh. And he did remember what happened with her. That was all quite clear in his mind and he enjoyed recalling it in detail.
There was a knock. "You two decent?" Aunt Lillian called. "Don't know why I ask." She shoved the door open and came in. "I hate that word 'decent' and don't guess by now we hardly got anything to hide from each other."
Julie was rubbing her eyes. She looked up at Mark. Leaned up and brushed a kiss against his lips.
"Is something wrong, Aunt Lillian?" Mark asked.
"Honey, I'm afraid so," she said. "I just had a call from the lawyer. It seems Julie's folks didn't go back after all. They went out and hired a couple of expensive and high-falutin' lawyers and seems they found some kind of loophole in my title to the houses, Mark. They going to cause trouble. Lord, my houses. A life's work. Well, you better get dressed We got to go down to the lawyer's office."
"My houses," Mark mumbled. He shoved the cover away. "Those bastards."
Julie caught his arm. "Calm down, baby," she said. "Everything will work out. Haven't you come to accept the fact that if anyone, including my family, messes with Aunt Lillian or you or me they're going to end up in an absurd situation they can't handle. Besides, you know how horny I am when I wake up."
"I couldn't possibly," Mark said. "My cock is limp as a noodle, baby."
"You forget that your cock and I have a secret agreement," she said. "Come over here. You'll be surprised."
She spread her thighs. Wider. Opened those luscious lips. He went over. He was surprised. His cock brushed the mound of damp hair and hardened.
"But the poor thing will have to wait, Mark," she said. "Remember what we decided. Every time before we make love you have to do as much kissing and licking as I want."
"I didn't forget," he said, forgetting lawyers and threats and Brocktons as he scrambled down to press his lips against her eager, open vagina. His cock didn't mind at all, he knew. Its turn would come and by then Julie would be so hot and frantic that her pulsating, scalding cunt would welcome the cock.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It took two days of court hearings, but, in the end, Aunt Lillian--and Mark--kept undisputed title to the houses. This brought another party, of celebration, though much shorter. And smaller. No human sex chains. Or oysters. Or horses.
Still the Brocktons did not give up. Mrs. Brockton apparently went to a lot of churches and did a great deal of praying. Mr. Brockton alternated between threatening long-distance calls to government officials in Washington, D.C., and walking up and down menacingly in front of Aunt Lillian's. Mark found out that the American Embassy had quietly but sternly informed him its function was diplomatic and had nothing to do with the complaints of American citizens abroad. He was sent to the American Consulate where he did not see the Consul General. Or the Vice-Consul. But a junior officer. A very junior officer who suggested he not get involved in Dutch matters and told him further that Julie was indeed of legal age in Holland and there was nothing he could do so long as she wished to stay.
Mark found out because a few hours after Mr. Brockton's meeting with the junior officer, he and Mrs. Brockton and Martha were walking down another window-house-lined-canal and making threats to everyone they met. And who should they meet, coming from a house, but the officer. Mr. Brockton went into such a rage he was almost arrested, to the great delight of the girls leaning from the windows. The story spread all over the neighborhood. And eventually reached Aunt Lillian's.
Julie kept telling Mark not to worry, that her family could do nothing. Deep down in his absurd heart he knew she was right, and yet he could not erase his uneasiness. Not so much for Mr. and Mrs. Brockton, but for Martha. He knew her too well. When convinced she was morally right, she never gave up.
Mark did not have much time to brood. Julie kept him busy in bed. And Aunt Lillian and Ahmed and Bert and Harry kept him busy partying.
* * *
One snowy afternoon the three Brocktons confronted Mark and Julie on the street and tried a crying, please-forgive-us-but-come-back-to-us routine with Julie. Julie got a good laugh out of it.
At times, Mark and Julie spent the night in her old room, which they had not rented. It added a poignancy to their sex, and in the room Mark took Julie in the ass for the first time. The first session with her, but not his first. That had been with Greta. She accepted his fumbling apology, during which he had actually cried, as though a deeply hidden and true remorse poured out in a way he had never experienced. They had talked of their problems, and experiencing that which they had so feared, and finding they liked it.
"I like a man to be rough with me," Greta had said in her shy, accented English. "And to take me in the ass. But only rough to a point. Not too far. And to really want me and protect me, and, of course, I could never reveal this to my customers. With them I am quite in command. Except Hans, who visits regularly. He is very large and very strong and very gentle. Liesbeth is well now. I am glad we are friends, Mark. I want to work in your window. I am happy for you. And for Julie. Will you now please take me in the ass? And then you can use your mouth on me. And make love."
He found her ass painfully tight at first. And quite hot. He did not think he liked it. But the pain passed and the tightness became pleasure as the muscles worked him up to a screaming point of excitement. He discovered the tightness let him fuck a long, long time without finishing.
Greta's cunt was small and surrounded by tangled red hair. Its smallness and tightness intrigued his tongue and lips and aroused him to a frenzy. Greta locked her legs around his neck and kept him there a long time before they made love.
Greta's cunt was on his mind the afternoon he learned that Martha had begun sermonizing to the prostitutes along the canal, barging into their rooms and trying to get them to talk, trying to use her psychological and sociological methods on them, the way she had back home.
After two days, Carla came in to tell Mark and Julie that the whores of Amsterdam had not responded like the whores back home.
"Many only laughed," Carla said. "A few got angry. A girl around the corner slapped her. A girl across the canal set her dog on Martha. Julie, I think your sister has truly learned the whores here do not wish to give up their work and find employment in laundries."
An hour later, with Julie's permission, Mark more than made up for the time he had worked Carla up and refused to use his mouth on her. They had already talked and he had apologized. But he felt he should do this. His cock readily agreed.
She left claw marks on the walls. He realized he was getting good with his mouth. And much better with his cock.
"We'll have a good life, baby," Julie said at the end of the week, as they lay in bed in her room. "Just like in a storybook. Plenty of money from the windows. Plenty of sex. Plenty of parties. By the way, tomorrow night Aunt Lillian is throwing a farewell party for Bert and Harry."
"I guess you're right, baby," he said, and nuzzled her shoulder. "I guess that last hysterical threat from Martha was just desperate. Something to save face after Jill chased her down the street with the leather thongs and she fell into the canal."
"Forget her," Julie said. "Let's think of something to break up the party tomorrow night."
"Let's quit thinking and talking and do something wild and different," Mark said.
He slid down and tongued a large, brown nipple. She writhed and dug her fingers into his hair.
"Isn't someone knocking?" he muttered.
"Yes, but forget them," Julie said.
The knock was louder. "Mark! Julie!" It was Jill. She sounded desperate.
Cursing all the way, Mark stumbled to the door.
"What's so important?" he growled.
"They're marching through the Dam Square," Jill said. "Dozens of them. With hatchets. And torches. And kerosene."
"What do you mean?" Mark asked.
"Julie's sister," Jill said. "And her friends from America. I'm certain they're headed here."
"Quick, run get Aunt Lillian," Mark said. "And the police."
When be closed the door he saw that Julie was already dressing. "It will be okay," she said. She smiled but there was no conviction in it.
"Sure, our absurdity will save us," Mark said.
But this time he did not believe it and in his mind's eye he saw the shambles of his window-houses.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Mark and Julie stood in the snow in front of his houses. They could not yet see Martha and her friends, but they could hear them. They were singing Onward Christian Soldiers.
Jill came running back, gasping for breath. "I could not find a policeman," she said. "Your aunt was naked on her living room floor with the two midgets. When I told her what was happening, she seemed to lose her mind. She began to shout and run in a circle. Then she ran out into the snow. Naked. With the two naked midgets behind her."
"My poor aunt," Mark said. "So she finally ran into a situation she couldn't handle. Well, what could she do? What can any of us do? Except with the police. Christ, go find a phone and call the police. They're our only hope, Jill."
She ran away again. Julie took Mark's arm. He could tell she was frightened. The singing was louder. People were looking from windows. Carla ran out. And Greta. And the other girls. Mark told them what was happening. They all agreed to resist.
Two minutes later Martha and the girls turned the corner a block up and started for the houses. Mark and Julie and the whores formed a thin, ragged line in the snow.
All of the marching girls wore full-length fur coats. Expensive coats. They looked awesome, this debutante brigade that had already wrecked one town's whorehouses. Their hatchets and torches and kerosene would make quick work of his houses. The police could not possibly arrive in time. He was lost.
The Brocktons had won after all. He would have no income. What could he do? Send Julie out to work in someone else's window?
A hundred yards away the girls quickened their pace. Tanks couldn't stop them, Mark told himself. Julie had been wrong. This would be a case where Martha's kind of militant puritanism won out over their sex and their absurdity.
"Don't try to resist them," Mark said to the whores. "You'll only get hurt. It's hopeless. There are far too many of them. They're on a holy crusade no power on earth could stop."
There was a galloping sound behind Mark. The girls were ten yards away. Martha carried a hatchet and a torch. The whores retreated.
The galloping was louder. Mark turned.
The horses and chariot materialized through the snow.
And in the chariot was naked, wrinkled Aunt Lillian, holding the reins in one hand and a long whip in the other. Beside her stood a naked Bert and on his shoulders a naked Harry. In Harry's hand was the nozzle of an enormous fire-extinguisher.
Martha and her brigade stopped.
"No naked old whore can deter us," Martha cried. "Forward."
They moved again. About two steps. Then the strong stream of foam from the fire-extinguisher tore into Martha and the front rank and Aunt Lillian's whip left a swirling mass of fur.
The girls screamed and broke ranks as Aunt Lillian whirled expertly and charged again. Foam knocked girls down, coated them with white, stung them. The whip left awesome marks and ruined the lifetime work of many an innocent mink.
Girls ran aimlessly. They screeched. Torches fell to the snow. Hatchets were dropped. Kerosene was abandoned to slosh down and explode in flame.
Some girls in their panic and foam-blindness plunged into the canal and thrashed in their fur coats like a pack of beavers. Others tried to make it up steps into houses, only to fall prey to angry whores who ripped off their coats and clothes and committed sexual indecencies against their untouched debutante bodies. There were sirens in the distance.
Martha tried to crawl away in the snow. Julie and Carla and Greta caught her as the first police car arrived. They carried her up the steps and into Julie's room.
"You'll wish the police had gotten you when I'm finished," Julie said.
Mark saw more police arrive. More sirens in the distance. He turned and trotted up the steps. As he reached the door, Jill came running up.
He found that the girls had Martha down on the bed. They had stripped her naked.
"Look, what are you going to do?" he asked as he closed the door. "Don't get carried away."
"Don't interfere," Julie snapped.
"Let me go," Martha screamed, struggling futilely against half a dozen hands. "You whores. I don't let whores touch me."
Mark took a step. He stopped. Why should he care what happened to the bitch?
"Leave her alone with me for a few minutes," Jill said. The black eyes glowed with anticipation. "I will go and get the handcuffs and the whip and some instruments that will make the bitch find ways to beg."
"No," Julie said. "I have something quite different in mind. I don't believe anyone could be so opposed to sex. Unless she was covering up something she feared in herself. Martha, dear, we whores, being professionals at arousing people sexually, are going to see just how hot we can get you."
"Oh, my God," Martha said. She struggled with renewed fury. Jill moved to the bed.
"Leave us alone, Mark," Julie said.
"Okay," he said. "But I doubt if you'll be able to defrost her. I should know."
He watched hands and lips spread over Martha's slim, jerking body. Lips took the nipples. Fingers stroked the thighs, And the breasts. A tongue tantalized an amazingly large vagina. Another.
"No, no," Martha was screaming as Mark opened the door. "No, don't do that with your tongue. I hate it. I can't stand it."
He walked slowly down the steps. Policemen were dragging girls from the canal. Wresting their shivering, violated bodies from the grasp of whores. Photographers were taking pictures.
Aunt Lillian stood in her chariot a few yards away. She wore a policeman's coat. Bert and Harry wore another.
"Mark, honey," she called: "Come on over here and get yourself a drink." She reached down and produced a bottle of genever.
Mark walked over. He drank. Passed the bottle to a policeman who drank and passed it on.
She got the bottle back, took a swallow and started telling a story about the time she made love on horseback while fleeing a sheriff's posse in Oklahoma.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Four hours later Mark sat on the edge of the bed in Jill's room. The girls wouldn't let him in the other room, He was worried now about what was going on. Frequent groans and grunts increased his anxiety.
Finally the door opened. But it wasn't Julie. It was Jill. Her face was drained. Her black hair was in tangles. Her skirt was hanging on by one button.
"What in hell is happening?" he asked as he stood up. "If it takes you this long to get her hot, why don't you admit defeat?"
"Defeat?" Jill asked. She laughed. "It took us about ten minutes to have that bitch writhing in heat, Mark. In half an hour she was delirious with sexual excitement. I've never seen anyone that hot."
"Christ," Mark said. "Martha Brockton? Writhing in sexual excitement?"
"We kept teasing her," Jill said. "Wouldn't let her finish. I'm good at that, baby. I can take someone to just that point and then stop, before' they climax. I like that. Better than whipping someone. That was one of the things I had in mind for you, ducky."
"For me?" he asked.
"When I thought you'd want my kind of sadism, Mark," she said. "But you weren't that kind of masochist. You're not really a masochist at all." She said it like a condemnation. "You just like to do a little eating and worshiping a girl sensually before making love. Too bad. I'd have dug having you helpless on the bed. But I'm glad for you and Julie."
"Sorry to disappoint you," he said. "Now what about Martha?"
"So we teased her and kept her at fever pitch a long time," Jill said. "Made her beg. Can that bitch beg? I wanted to continue. But Julie and the other girls got softhearted. Julie even sixty-nined with her to let her finish. But she wasn't satisfied. She wanted us all. Then she found out we had a dildo. And she couldn't get enough of that. And then we let her go to the window. I think she's taken on seventeen men so far."
"Jesus," Mark said. "Martha Brockton?"
"Mark? I'd like you just once."
"Sorry, baby," Mark said. "I'm not interested in your brand of pleasure."
"It can be any brand you like," she said. "I asked Julie. She said she wouldn't mind. Just this once."
Her hand moved and the one button was undone and the skirt dropped to the floor. She wore no panties. Her cunt was completely covered by a jungle of silky black hair. Its contrast with the death-pale flesh was erotic as hell.
Mark's cock approved in a quick surge. "I dig the suffering side of sex," Jill said. "I mean, I dig it the most. But I like everything else. And I'm good at everything else, Mark. See if you don't agree."
Mark moved to Jill as a loud grunt tore from Julie's room. He put his hands on Jill's tight buttocks and his cock rubbed the thick mat of hair. Though his body sparkled with excitement and Jill's lips sucked an expert kiss into his mouth, he heard that carousel and wondered what in hell Aunt Lillian and his mother and Bert and Harry had found in the top of that Christmas tree.
"I'm so ashamed," Martha wailed as she walked between Mark and Julie. "I've always been afraid of being discovered. And since sex made me so miserable I decided it must make all women miserable and must be wrong. Oh God, what am I going to do?"
They turned a corner. "Fuck a lot," Julie said. "You don't have to hide and masturbate in fear half a dozen times a day now."
"But I have a position to maintain in the community," Martha said. "I might be unable to control myself sexually when I'm touched between my thighs, or on my nipples, or my breasts, but I do still believe in decorum and morality.
Julie stopped. "Martha, you're not ever going to be the same again, baby. That other life is over. Playing with yourself just won't make it for you now. So what's the problem? You're young and attractive and you can ball anyone you want."
"But what will Mother and Daddy say, Julie?" she asked. "They look up to me so. To my standards of behavior. I'll never be able to face them."
They started walking again. "Julie's right," Mark said. "You'll never be able to go back to your old life. Christ, I should know. It's too bad about your parents. But you have your own life to lead."
"I will have to have sex,- won't I?" Martha asked. There was anticipation in her voice. "I'll simply have to lie to Mother and Daddy and spare them the truth. Oh, Julie, do you think this Ahmed will like me? Be willing to do sexual things with me? All over? Everywhere? Oh, Mother and Daddy must never know I'm intimately involved with an Arab."
"Berber," Mark said as they stopped in front of Aunt Lillian's house.
"That's funny," Julie said. "The door is wide open."
They went inside. The door to the living room was open also. They were halfway across the room--Martha glancing around in disbelief at the art^-when they heard a sound behind a couch. A hand flopped up. Another sound.
"You old bastard," Aunt Lillian said. "You really know how to handle that thing, don't you?"
Her head appeared. She looked around and saw them.
"We'll leave," Mark said. "Martha wanted to see Ahmed, but obviously he's busy."
"This ain't Ahmed," Aunt Lillian said.
"Bert?" Julie asked. "Harry?"
"Get up, you old stud," Aunt Lillian roared. "No man who just fucked me is going to hide his face." The top of a grey head appeared. "Daddy?" Martha screamed. Julie and Mark laughed together.
Mr. Brockton climbed up. He held a pair of pants in front of his cock.
"Uh, Mark," he said in his professional Brockton voice. "I was a bit hasty the other day. In relation to your employment. Uh, son, I've decided to remain in Amsterdam, on business, permanently. I want you to escort the girls home. And I'm going to appoint you executive vice-president, in full charge of operations. And Mark. Julie. Martha. You've caught me in a rather indiscreet position. Don't say anything to Mother. It would kill her. Martha, don't condemn me too harshly."
"Condemn you?" Martha said. "Daddy, I came over here to, well, to have sexual relations with Ahmed, Aunt Lillian's butler."
"Didn't Ahmed let you in?" Aunt Lillian asked. "I wonder where he is. I heard the doorbell half an hour ago. But now that I think about it, he didn't bring anybody in."
"The front door was wide open," Mark said.
"I hope nothing's wrong," Aunt Lillian said.
They all followed her from the room, Mr. Brockton struggling into his pants. Aunt Lillian led them upstairs. She called Ahmed. There was no answer.
The first three rooms were empty. The door to the fourth was closed. From inside came muffled noises. Aunt Lillian flung the door open.
Ahmed looked around from the woman whose ass ha was assaulting. The woman turned her head.
"Mother!" Martha screamed.
* * *
PART ELEVEN: In Which Mark And Julie And The Others Take a Leisurely Stroll Among The Whores, Each Of Their Stories At a Happy End-But Where Is Martha....?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
"The Dutch government has been most helpful in assisting the move of our plant to Amsterdam," Mr. Brockton said. He patted his wife's ass. She smiled sweetly.
"I really dig our new calliope, baby," Julie said. She kissed Mark's cheek, then waved at a blond girl in a window.
"So do I," Mark said, as he glanced at the huge calliope being wheeled down the street beside them. On its top moved figures in gold and silver, playing drums and trumpets. "As a kid I guess my happiest moments were spent on the carousel."
"Ahmed, honey, you got to cut those fingernails if you're going to be grabbing me that way," Aunt Lillian said. "No happier music on earth than carousel music."
"Carousel music reminds me of the Carousel Bar," Mark said. "And that reminds me of that Christmas tree in the Monteleon Hotel. Just what in hell did you find up in that Christmas tree, Aunt Lillian?"
"Lord, didn't I ever finish that story, honey?" she asked. "Why, we found the merkin at the top of that tree."
"What's a merkin?" Julie asked.
"That's a pubic hair wig," Aunt Lillian said. "Why, if we hadn't found the merkin we never would have met the Hungarian countess. And her Eskimo lover. Didn't I ever tell you that story? Well, he got drunk and hid her merkin in the Christmas tree and then couldn't remember where it was. Expensive thing. Made from the hair of albino virgins. She was so happy to get it back, she invited the whole lot of us, your mama and me, and Bert and Harry, to visit her on her plantation up near Lafayette. But you know that story. I told you that one. How we had this roaring time with the countess and got lost on our way back to New Orleans and wound up going down this bayou with these Cajun encyclopedia salesmen and that led to the orgy at the turkey farm run by that one-eyed Chinese Baptist preacher I must have told you about... "
They all looked up and waved at Martha, who sat on a straight-backed chair in Julie's old window, her slim legs spread wide and her black leather micro-dress pulled high enough to show she wore no panties!
