Atom Bomb Angel

6

Harry Slan stared through the hairs on his plump belly at the thick black bush of the strong German girl, and at her taut stomach, the muscles of which rippled as the stomach contracted and expanded, and then he stared up at her huge breasts that swung down to his face and then up to the heavens, as she rode up and down his diminutive but rigid organ. She held his wrists in a pincer grip against the mattress, and gritted her teeth in a maniacal smile. Although it was only the last week of September, behind her clenched-shut eyes she was working out her Christmas shopping list for her boyfriend, her three sisters, her brother and her two ex-husbands.

Harry Slan thrust for all he was worth, pushing his tiny circumcized stump deep inside that black patch; he was excited, very excited, for he knew he was driving her wild with ecstasy. He pulled down, then thrust deeper still inside her. She groaned with delight; he sweated with pleasure.

She had just decided that Griselda, her youngest sister, a keen cook, would like a nice casserole dish; yes, she remembered Griselda’s embarrassment at having to serve up a veal stew in a tin saucepan when she had last been to dinner. Unthinkingly, she contracted her pelvis tightly and gave it two sharp gyrations. Before Slan could do anything about it, he found he was coming for the second time since he had arrived on the boat. Uttering a noise not unlike that of a man losing his foot-hold on the roof of a house, he fell back into the soft bedding.

Eva snapped out of her shopping list just in time to notice and add some finishing touches. As he sank back, she caressed his brow. ‘Wonderful,’ she whispered into his ear, ‘I came so many times, so many times.’

Slan beamed with delight. Not once in all the forty-eight years of his life, could he remember having come twice in one hour. Then he remembered where he was, and leaned his head over to look at his watch. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘I’ll have to start getting ready for dinner.’

Eva stayed on top of him. ‘Don’t worry darling, Deke is not a punctual man. Relax, we have plenty of time.’

Slan looked up into her eyes. He was completely and utterly exhausted, but he was determined to make the most of every minute. Tonight, he was going to set a record that was going to make every man back at the American Fossilized Corporation’s Adamsville, Ohio, plant goddam eat his fucking heart out.

Unbeknown to Slan, eleven men in eleven cabins similar to his own, on the Chanson II at this very moment, were receiving a not dissimilar treatment. The only thing that singled him out, at this particular moment, was that his host, Deke Sleder, was watching his every action on the twenty-six-inch Bang and Olufsen colour television screen in his private state room, while the video-recorder rolled steadily on.

During the long weekend that was just beginning, each of the eleven men in turn would be recorded — and not for posterity — on the same Betamax that rolled away now, each performing acts much the same, some more imaginative, some more lazy, as those in which Harry Slan currently wallowed; each with a beautiful girl, stark naked, or clad in anything they fancied, from a morris-dancing costume to a lifebelt. Like Harry Slan, each of these eleven men was reasonably happily married. Each too worked, in some capacity, at senior management level, in their country’s nuclear energy industry. One of the men came from England, two from France, two from Spain, five came from the USA and one from Canada.

In the cabin next to Harry Slan was a man who had never been very successful with women. He had taken out a few before he had met the one who was to become his wife, but he had never got anywhere near seducing them, much as, timid though he was, he would have liked to. Marriage provided a sex life that he supposed was adequate, not that his wife was ever the whore in the bedroom he had read that good wives were supposed to be. There was something in particular which had begun as mild curiosity, but had been slowly turning into an obsession as the years went by: his wife was fair-haired; he wanted to know what it would be like to make love to a dark-haired woman. For the past twenty-one years, every remotely attractive woman who smiled at him, unwittingly sent him reeling into an erotic fantasy. One day, he had been promising himself, he would take off to Shepherd Market, and buy himself an hour or two with one, but he knew, that when it came to it, he would not have the courage.

But now, finally, his fantasy had come true; he was lying naked on a bed, on top of an equally naked raven-haired woman. She was more beautiful than anyone he had ever dared to hope he might conquer. And here she was, naked in bed with him, on a paradise boat in a paradise port on a balmy late-summer’s evening, a million miles away from his home, from his wife, from, he thought happily, any possible chance of being found out. Like Harry Slan, he too had wondered why he had been invited; but right now, he didn’t give a damn. He opened his eyes to look at her, to reassure himself that she was real, that his dream had come true; that he was finally — after all the years of dreaming — making love to a dark-haired woman. His name was Horace Whalley. Whalley wasn’t under any suspicion the night I made a routine search of his office, and the search was no more and no less thorough than the search I made that week of half the other offices of the staff of the Atomic Energy Authority. But the letter of invitation from Deke Sleder to spend a long weekend on his boat, earned Whalley his position between the glass slides under the Maximilian Flynn microscope. Deke Sleder might have been on Cosmopolitan’s ‘ten sexiest men in the world’ list; he was on quite a different list in the files of British Intelligence.