Beauty and the bug

A LOT OF THINGS (AND PEOPLE) WERE BUGGING THE MAN FROM O.R.G.Y.

Steve Victor should have bugged out of the caper at the start, when a sunkissed beauty insisted on seducing him in a palm tree. He surely should have cut the tape that hound him to the case when a gorgeous guide led him to the utter depths of depravity in Paris. Certainly he would have liked to erase all record of what happened between him and a blond bombshell with a friendly dog in the Alps. But by the time he fully realized the danger that threatened him, Steve Victor had plunged in too far to withdraw. . .

BEAUTY AND THE BUG

TED MARK

1975

Orthography corrections by 11-0-11

Annotations by 11-0-11

2018

Chapter One

Deposed President of the United States Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson¹ was the furthest thing from my mind that sun-balmy day on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Bikinis took precedence over Chief Executives, ex and otherwise. My eyes were filling my thoughts with one bikini in particular, one that was stuffed to overflowing with a Latin redhead.

She was flopping around on a surfboard in the Caribbean surf. It was obvious that the redhead had neither the expertise nor the desire to ride the surf correctly. She was hitting it energetically, but without much style.

That was okay. She had enough natural class to make up for it. Plus the fact that every time her body slapped down, the overstuffed bikini lost a point or two in the battle for concealment.

Panties riding down here . . . bra-top sliding over there . . . bottoms jerking away from plump posterior . . . top-cup expelling a breast like an overripe papaya tipped with one flawless jungle-berry . . . cloth triangle falling away from bright red pubic curls. . . . The bikini had a large job to handle! And the way she was bouncing around, it just couldn’t cover everything. So I stared. . . .

Given the circumstances, all those who still think my mind should have been on former Prez Nick Dickson might as well stop reading right now. This is the wrong book for you. Try Little Women.

As for me, back to the redhead! . . .

She was on the tall side—about five-eight—but all the accessories fit her limousine body like they’d been designed by Cadillac. The headlights would have been oversized on a smaller model, but they were just right for her -- set high, fastened firmly in place, styled to round out the sleek silhouette. The tail assembly, or rear end, moved so smoothly that it looked as if it could purr—built-in shocks guaranteeing a smooth ride over the roughest terrain, a well-rounded trunk designed to follow the curves at any speed, tight spring action making sure that the tail section would always ride high. Graceful as tail fins, her legs were sturdy without being stocky, tapering to slenderness without being skinny, muscular without being masculine. Add plushly upholstered hips, a slimline waist, and under the triangle of bikini the hillock of a Mound of Venus as haughty as a Rolls Boyce radiator cap. Every other model on the beach looked like a dune buggy by comparison.

Yep, she looked expensive. She’d take premium fuel—vintage champagne, no doubt -- and she wouldn’t be cheap to run. No doubt about it, she was the kind of high-powered creampuff to give a man his own personal energy crisis!

Did that thought—energy crisis² —remind me of former President Dickson? It did not! My mind stayed firmly on the bikinied senorita.

If I said that while her body was sensational, it was really her face that attracted me most, there are those who would call me a liar. They’d be right. I’d be lying. With a torso like hers, the visage had to be noticed second. Still, it was a better than okay countenance. Like the rest of her, it featured a golden-tan complexion. High cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and a strong bone structure attested to a Spanish or Indian heritage—or, more likely, a combination of both. The eyes were cobalt colored -- dark blue-gray-black -- in stark contrast to her long red hair. The hair itself also contrasted sharply with her olive skin. (A light complexion is the usual complement to red hair.) The redness of the tresses was so deep as to be almost maroon, and was flecked with yellow-gold.

Her nose was full without being large, Incan or Castilian, arrogant, with nostrils that flared when she was angry-or aroused. There was a cruel down-line to her mouth, softened by full lips and a dimple on one cheek, rendered intriguing by small, sharp, very white teeth. Her jaw was strong, but rounded to softness. And she carried her head on a neck so long and graceful that, despite its lack of milky Patrician coloring, it could only be described as aristocratic.

Still, taken as a whole, there was a nice, earthy peasant quality about her voluptuous body that more than offset any hint of the coolness of aristocracy. Musk! Even from a distance, I’d have bet her perfume would be heavy with it. Musk! The aroma of lovemaking

Contemplating such an aroma, give me one good reason why I should have turned my thoughts to Tricky Nicky³ as our beloved former Chief Executive was sometimes called.

Business?

No, I was attending strictly to business with my appraisal of the surf-splashing siren in (well, at least half in) the bikini. That was my business. Women. Men. Sex. And all the ramifications arising from their interactions.

I should have mentioned it before. I'm Steve Victor, the Man from O.R.G.Y. The acronym stands for the Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth.

No apologies! Between the Puritans and the perplexed, somebody has to provide some common-sense advice to young people in the area of sex. Basically I’m a researcher, but the books—like this one—that grow out of my research do provide information for youth. Not much morality perhaps, but truth. Which, I tell myself, is a start.

However, it’s the research—the sex surveys I conduct under the auspices of the various foundations which pay extremely well for them—that is my primary activity. O.R.G.Y., you see, is strictly a one-man operation. And the man is me, Steve Victor.

I wasn’t working on a sex survey at the moment. The truth is I wasn’t working on much of anything, and hadn’t been for some time. You might say I was on a vacation—an enforced vacation.

So my phantasizing of the surfer was a sort of busman’s holiday. If you were in my business, you’d take busmen’s holidays too. Particularly if the bus was a Cadillac like this redhead!

I’d just gotten out of a foreign model -- “just” being about a week before. Her name was Leila. Made in Arabia-originally—and in many another corner of the world since. A pint-sized nymphet with a giant-size appetite for sensuality, Leila had gone from harem to Women’s Lib via a villa on Paradise Island provided by an ever-grateful sheikh⁴ .

But Leila’s story is no part of this narrative—except as it explains my situation. On the beach -- that was my situation in three concise words. Liberated Leila had used me as a sex object (fair enough, considering my history) and then discarded me like an empty corn husk. (Well, I wasn’t quite empty; not quite.) She had simply packed her bags, closed up the villa, and left Paradise, leaving me temporarily homeless and penniless (the Paradise Island Casino had swallowed up my green stuff like a rabbit in a cabbage patch) -- on the beach!

Besides being hungry, my ego was bruised. The Man from O.R.G.Y. being dumped for the sake of variety! That laugh you hear is Kinsey in his grave. I needed something (Oops! sorry, Leila! sorry, Gloria Steinem⁵ ! I mean someone!) to restore my faith in the old Victor virility and attractiveness. The redhead looked superqualified for the job.

Ambling down to the surf, I waded in up to my waist. I ducked agilely as she came flopping in on her surfboard, sprawled across it on her belly, her half- bared derriere glistening in the sunlight. She was riding a small wave and it broke just before she reached me. Seeing me scramble to get out of her way, she swerved and then stood up, holding the surfboard. Sorry, she said to me, just being polite, and started to go back toward the incoming waves again.

“Do you fuck?” I asked her before she could quite turn away.

She froze as if debating whether or not to complete her turn away from me. Then, deliberately, she swiveled back and faced me. She set the surfboard down flat on the water in front of me and held it in place by spreading the fingers of one hand so that the fingertips rested lightly on top of it. “What did you say?” she inquired.

She spoke English without any trace of an accent. Yet, close-up, the Spanish-Indian cast of her features was even more pronounced. And she looked even younger than she had before -- late teens perhaps, certainly no more than early twenties. A yummy age!

“Do you fuck?” I repeated.

“That’s what I thought you said.” She considered the question. “That’s a really gross way to approach someone,” she decided.

“Oh, I don’t know. We live in a very frank age.” I smiled engagingly. “Do you?”

“What-—?” She was momentarily confused.

“Fuck,” I reminded her. “Do you fuck?”

“I could slap your face.”

“You could.”

“Or I could answer your question.”

“That’s my choice.”

‘She looked at me and laughed. She had a really intriguing laugh. It was deep and hearty, but there was something very sensual about it too. Maybe it was the way her full lips spread to reveal those pearl-like white teeth. Or maybe it was the way the teeth parted so her pointy red tongue could dart out and back.

Now the redhead composed herself. Her features became serious, the faint but cruel down-line of her mouth reasserting itself. When she spoke again, it was poker-face, deadpan. “Would you repeat the question, please?”

“Why? You know what it is.”

“I Want to hear you say it again. Please.”

“Do you fuck?”

“Sometimes.” She looked me straight in the eye. “Sometimes I do.” And then she laughed again, as heartily as before. “And sometimes I don’t.” She picked up her surfboard, turned abruptly, and dived with it into an oncoming wave.

That might have been the end of it. I never was sure whether or not she intended it to be. But the Caribbean was on my side.

As I stood there cursing myself for what was certainly my lack of suavity, the wave she’d dived into swelled and tossed her and the surfboard skyward. Then the water pulled back out from under her. She came down on the wet sand in a tangle of arms and legs. The surfboard descended after her, smacking her on the side of the head. The surf rolled back in, covering her.

It took me a minute to react. I didn't give it much thought, but I sort of expected her to stand back up. When she didn’t, it dawned on me that something was wrong.

The receding surf had washed her out a few feet, and now she was lying face down in the water. When I reached her, water was trickling out of her mouth and nostrils. She was unconscious.

I picked her up in my arms and carried her up on the shore. It was doubtful that she could have swallowed enough water in such a short time to drown, but I couldn’t take the chance. I knelt over her and gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

The blow she’d received must have been only a glancing one. She regained consciousness while my lips were still pressed to hers, sucking only a small amount of water from her lungs. She misunderstood what was happening. Her knee came up hard, catching me in the groin. I collapsed backward onto the sand.

“When I decide!” she snarled. “Not when you or any other man does!”

“Don’t worry,” I groaned. “I’ll never rape anybody again.”

“I’m glad to see you’ve learned your lesson.”

“I haven’t learned anything. I’ll just never be able to!”

“Isn’t that too bad?” Sarcasm laid on with a snow shovel.

“I wasn’t trying to rape you!” Finally I remembered to say it.

“Oh, no? Then what were you doing?”

I explained.

She felt the side of her head. “Ouch!” I couldn’t see the lump there, but evidently she could feel it. Her doubts gave way in the face of this evidence. “I guess I owe you an apology,” she said in a very small voice.

Actually, the pain in my crotch had subsided by this time. But the Machiavelli inside me said there was no point in letting her know that. “Ohhh!” I groaned.

“Does it still hurt a lot?” she wanted to know. Her voice was husky with sympathy now.

“The pain is indescribable!” That was true, since I wasn’t feeling any pain now.

“I’d better help you home,” she suggested. “You should lie down.”

“I don’t have any home,” I confessed.

“What do you mean? You must live somewhere.”

I groaned again to keep from explaining that the “somewhere” I lived was on the beach.

“Well, never mind. You can come to my place and rest there. It’s just up the beach.” She pointed.

“Maybe we can put some ointment on the bruise to ease the pain.”

Now wasn’t that a superb humanitarian idea? Florence Nightingale herself couldn’t have come up with a suggestion more to my liking. Senorita Red had just the nursing qualities I was looking for to soothe my aching genitalia—especially since the ache was lust rather than pain.

Her “shack”—that’s what she called it—was on a low hill overlooking the sea. A comfortably sprawling ranch house, its decor was simple but expensive. Its grounds were surrounded by a high wall. Behind it was a swimming pool, a building housing a sauna and steam bath, a tennis court, and stables.

“How come you don’t swim here?” I asked her, indicating the pool.

“No good for surfing.”

“Don’t get insulted, but you don’t seem to be much of a surfer.”

“I’m just learning. Teaching myself.” She led me into a sort of den that was furnished in ultra-modern style—inkblots and pretzel chairs, Kandinsky and the Danes. “Make yourself comfortable.” She indicated a couch styled for the comfort of a boa constrictor. “I'll just get something to put on your—umm -- bruise. I’ll be right back.”

“That was fast.” I’d barely had time to study the problem of fitting my haunches into some section of the sofa’s contours when she returned.

“I just had to get it from the bathroom. Here, you put it on yourself while I go in the den and make us some drinks.”

Dashed hopes! “It’s awfully tender. Couldn’t you put it on for me?” I tried.

“Oh, no.” She laughed indulgently. “Besides"—she felt the bump on her head and winced --“I need a drink to anesthetize this. I’m going to make myself a martini. What will you have?”

“Scotch on the rocks, if you have it.”

“I have it. Soda? Water?”

“Just Scotch and Scotch, on the rocks.”

She left to make the drinks. I looked at the bottle she’d given me. Some sort of salve. What the hell, it couldn’t hurt. I pushed down my bathing trunks, dipped my fingertips into the bottle, scooped out a liberal amount of the jellylike substance, and spread it over my genitals. The directions said to knead the affflicted area, to massage it until the ointment had been well absorbed by the skin. They said the patient would recognize that this had been accomplished by the feeling of relaxing warmth which would spread over the part of the body to which the salve was applied.

I kneaded. The warmth spread. Far from relaxing Old Lucifer, however, the combination of massage and mounting heat made him stand stiffly at attention. I stared down at him in some dismay. Even if I pulled up my bathing trunks, they’d never hide his rigidity. It was one thing—and maybe not too cool a one at that—to ask a strange girl if she’d like to have sex; it was quite another thing to come charging at her with one’s lance at full tilt. If she’d reacted violently to my attempts at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, what might she not do if confronted by Old Lucifer frothing—so to speak -- at the mouth?

Standing up, I whacked Lucifer over the head hard. I figured pain would make him retreat. But he sprang right back up again, snarling.

It was a contest of wills. I rapped him again. He quivered with indignation, but showed no signs of weakening. I slapped him back and forth several times with my hand.

“Do you mind not masturbating all over my Rya rug?”

I don’t know how long she’d been standing in the doorway watching me. Her tone was judgmental, but her cobalt eyes were smoldering. She was holding two drinks, one in each hand. She forgot to offer me one of them.

“I wasn’t masturba-” I started to deny.

“When I was a little girl growing up in various South American cities, there were street urchins I wasn’t supposed to play with, and they had a phrase they used which I never understood. It obviously referred to something very obscene, but it only confused me. Only when I grew up did I understand the meaning.”

“What was the phrase?”

“ ‘Beat your meat,’ ” she told me. “Of course it loses something in the translation from Spanish.”

“But not much,” I observed. “Look, I wasn’t masturbating, or ‘beating my meat’ if you prefer. I was simply trying to reduce the rigidity induced in my sex organ by the ointment you gave me.”

“My! How clinical we are all of a sudden—‘rigidity’ . . . ‘sex organ.’ . . .”

“All right then! I was trying to uncock my cock!”

“A cockamamic thought.” She smiled.

“You’re cockeyed!” I was getting mad.

“It’s hard -- diffficult, that is—not to be with it staring me right in the face. . . . And that question you asked me when we met in the surf . . . what makes you so cocksure?”

“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” I crowed. I whacked Old Lucifer back and forth in earnest to show her what.

“You mean it really is a cockfight?”

“Damn right! Cock-a-doodle-doo!”

“Sit down,” she told me. “I think I can help you.” I sat down.

“Put your hands at your sides.”

I put my hands at my sides. My root stuck up from the pubic hair like a palm tree pointing skyward from the underbrush.

She walked over to me. She stopped in front of me and smiled down-—at me or Lucifer, I wasn’t sure. And then she overturned my Scotch and Scotch on the rocks in my lap.

I jumped up with the shock of the sudden cold. Lucifer dived down from the same cause. I sat back down again, decently flaccid.

“You can pull your trunks back up.”

Nice of her to give me permission. I stuffed everything back inside my bathing trunks.

“I’ll make you another drink.”

This time I went with her. The study was more traditionally—and comfortably—furnished. We settled down with our drinks side by side on a small contemporary couch, or, as it’s called, a loveseat.

(A loveseat? Why do they call it that? It’s too short to make love on. Just right for the preliminaries though.)

The redhead gulped her martini. She wasn’t, I could tell, much of a drinker. Still, she’d had a disturbing day what with being knocked unconscious, almost drowning, mistakenly thinking she was being assaulted by a would-be rapist, and now finding herself alone with a masochistic exhibitionist. So she drank it fast. I was still working on my first Scotch when she downed half her second martini at a gulp.

“Keep that up and you’ll pass out,” I advised her.

“Three,” she said. “I can take three. Four knocks me out, but three is okay. Three relaxes me.” She drained her second martini. “Three makes me sexy.” She giggled.

“Have another drink,” I suggested.

She was a little unsteady on her luscious legs as she crossed back over to the bar. “Three does for me what salve did for you.” She giggled again. “Have another salve,” she mimicked me. She poured gin and vermouth into a shaker, dumped in some ice and shook the mixture violently.

Everything shook. The bar; the bikini; the brazen, bronze-topped breasts; the beautiful bottom. Everything shook.

“You’ll bruise the gin,” I told her. “You’re supposed to stir it gently, not shake it to death.”

“What’s the matter? Don’t you dig S-M?” She kept shaking.

I raised a mental eyebrow. “S-M” is swingers’—usually married swingers—-code talk for “sado-masochism.” Sexy as she was, she didn’t look old enough or experienced enough to have gone that route.

She must have ESPd my thoughts. “I read a lot,” she explained. “You can relax. I don’t even own a pair of spiked heels, and there’s nary a whip on the premises.” She poured the bruised gin and vermouth from the shaker into a glass, drank off about half the glass, and awarded herself a dividend with what was left in the shaker.

“Do you know why I drink?” she asked. The question was rhetorical. She didn’t wait for me to answer it. “Because my old man has this thing about grass. That’s why. The lengths he goes to, to keep me and Mary Jane apart! You wouldn’t believe it! But booze? Why, that’s the American way! You never saw a more indulgent daddy when it comes to liquor. Yessir! That’s the American way!”

“I didn’t think you were American,” I told her. “At least not from the U.S.,” I amended.

“Well I’m not. But I’m of the U.S.” She giggled. “Half, anyway. Half of me is as of the U.S. as apple pie.” She finished the third drink, dividend and all. “You’re cute.” She changed the subject. “Fresh, too,” she remembered. “The way you came on hack at the beach. That question!” She rolled her cobalt eyes. “Tell me, do you have much success with that approach?” The red curls tossed about her naked shoulders.

“Well, here I am.” I spread my hands and grinned.

“Still cocksure.” She walked to the loveseat and stood over me, looking down. “But maybe you’re all just talk. I mean, you haven’t even made a pass at me yet.”

There are days when I don’t have to be hit over the head with a baker’s dozen of bricks. I got a hand on each of her cushy, warm hips and pulled her down to me. Her mouth was like hot, damp velvet. Her tongue was on a short spring, and it was sharp and burning and a little carefree and spicy with martini. It was a long, exploratory kiss, and the message it sent had Old Lucifer rearing up in his paddock again.

She opened her eyes and noticed. She giggled a little breathlessly. “You should really get yourself a looser pair of trunks,” she advised me.

I was as far from being embarrassed as I was from thinking about former U.S. President Nicholas Dickson. If the kiss had been ultra-warm, the promise it conveyed had been torrid. I drew her back so that she was seated on my lap across the loveseat and went back for seconds.

This time her thighs burned against the throbbing of imprisoned Lucifer. Her sharp little teeth punctured my lower lip like a quick series of hypodermic injections. Her nails dug into my bare shoulders and then clawed their way up my neck to my ear.

I slid my hand down to the skimpy bikini top over her large breasts. My fingertips grazed the material over the wide aureole and the large, extended nipple. She gasped and the nipple hardened even more. Her hot thighs started to move rhythmically over my lap, clenching and unclenching around Old Lucifer.

She twisted around so that her chin rested on my shoulder. The red hair tickled as it cascaded down one of my arms. She pressed both her bikinied breasts against my chest hard. I could feel the nipples digging into my flesh. Then she eased up the pressure and maneuvered her breasts until her nipples—sti1l technically covered—were pressed against my naked ones. She scrunched her nipples into mine.

When the redhead leaned back, her cobalt eyes were dancing a bit drunkenly as they looked into mine. The kiss this time was softer, more tender, deeper, and not quite so wild. Lucifer stopped prancing quite so much and flexed a solid, rocklike muscle.

The kiss over, I slid my mouth down to her long neck. I kissed the little pulse beating at the base of it. Then my lips descended farther down until they rested at the top of the deep cleavage separating her bikinied breasts.

As my tongue dipped into the cleavage, she gasped. She murmured something in Spanish that I didn’t quite catch. She reached behind her and pulled the flimsy ribbon holding the top of her bikini in place. It fell away from one of her breasts, just sort of hanging off the tip of the other one. Then she dug her nails into my cheek, forcing my mouth to the exposed nipple.

The nipple was hard as it popped between my lips. Long and hot, it prodded my tongue with a variety of sensual sensations. The flesh of the breast itself was soft as marshmallow by comparison. As she became more excited, the redhead kept trying to cram more and more of it into my mouth, but there was no way—much as I might have liked to—that I could encompass it all.

All this oral activity was causing Lucifer to strain against the confines of my bathing trunks more and more violently. I saw no reason not to release him. But when I did, the redhead jumped up abruptly and backed away from me.

“What’s the matter?”

“Not here,” she panted.

She had a point. As I observed before, the loveseat, while fine as a deicer, wasn’t designed for comfortable lovemaking. But then such things are comparative, and I couldn’t have guessed what she had in store for me. When she led me from the room, I assumed we were headed for another room -- one with a bed in it.

With the liberated woman of today, one should never make assumptions. Where she led me was outdoors. It was night now, and the tropical moon was full. Its rays caught the swaying of the palm trees in the evening breeze.

I sighed to myself. She was a romantic. We were, it seems, going to make it under the stars. I looked forward to sifting sand from the seams of my sitter.

But it was to be worse than that. Romance! Bah! Give me a mattress every time! When it comes to the great outdoors, I’m the Scrooge of lovemaking. Pastoral! Humbug!

I spied a spot that looked a little more grassy and a little less sandy than most of the general terrain. I made a grab for the redhead, intending to tumble her there. But she slipped free of me and scampered away.

“Where are you going?” I hustled after her.

“You’ll see.” She kept moving, just out of reach. The moon rays lent a golden sheen to the blood-red tips of her nipples. The lower part of her bikini, still precariously in place, was a yellow-green blur in the moonlight.

I had to hike up my own trunks to keep pace with her. Lucifer, although having abated from my exertions, was still poking them out of shape as I jogged after the girl. He revived somewhat as she halted, her large, naked round breasts swelling in the starlight as she panted.

She’d stopped at a clearing a little down the beach from her house. One side of the clearing was bounded by the wall surrounding the property. One side merged into the beach and ran down to where the waves lapped at the shore. The other two sides were made up of low sand dunes with tufts of grass and weeds growing spottily over them. There was a tall, straight palm tree stretching skyward in the center of the clearing.

It was only natural that I figured that one of the dunes would be our bed while the palm leaves high above would serve as its canopy. Only natural, but wrong again! The locale the redhead had in mind was a little more bizarre than that.

When she had her breath back, she headed straight for the palm tree. While I watched open-mouthed, she started to shinny up the trunk. She climbed like a native boy, using her knees to grip the smooth tree trunk and keep her from sliding back down.

She was about eight feet off the ground when she paused and looked clown at me. I was still standing at the base of the tree, staring up at her. “What are you waiting for?” she wanted to know.

“Climbing a palm tree wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” I told her frankly.

“I know exactly what you had in mind,” she assured me. “Come on.”

What the hell? I started climbing. She waited until the top of my head bumped the cushion of her bobbing behind, and then she resumed her upward journey. I followed, staring up at the bikinied derriere undulating in the moonlight. Besides its attraction, I figured I’d probably be better oil if I didn’t look down.

About halfway to the top, she paused again, this time to rest. My head slammed into that sponge-rubber bottom rather hard. “Ouch!” She reached down and rubbed the point of impact. “Watch where you’re going!”

“Blow your horn when you’re going to make a short stop,” I advised her.

“Vulgar!” She wiggled her hovering bottom at me sassily.

“Listen.” I decided to raise the question that was on my mind. “What happens when we reach the top?”

“We make love.”

“On top of a palm tree?”

“That’s right.”

“But we’re liable to fall out,” I protested.

“Of course. That’s what makes it fun.”

“People could break their necks falling from that height.”

“It’s the risk that makes it so exciting.” She started climbing again.

Hell! It was as far down to the ground now as it was up to the top! I climbed after her.

About six feet from the top, she stopped for another breather. I took the opportunity to resume the conversation. “What’s wrong with just plain sex?” I asked. “Why isn't just that exciting enough?”

“A person has to have variety,” she told me.

“I know fifty-three verifiable positions,” I told her, “and not one of them requires a palm tree.”

“Ahh! They’re all just variations of the man on top or the woman on top,” she snorted.

“That makes fifty-five. . . . And also there’s manual, oral, anal, S-M, dildoes, and all sorts of other things. And you don’t have to climb a palm tree for them either.”

“Biologically men and women are limited,” she told me. “I’m just facing that. You have to look for variety in other ways.”

“Variety in partners,” I suggested.

“Men aren’t that different, one from the other,” she informed me.

I felt put down. Why not? I was put down. “Maybe I’ll surprise you,” I suggested.

“I doubt it.” She started climbing again.

“If you feel that way, why make it with me at all?” I huffed as I scrambled up the tree after her.

“I didn’t say I thought you’d disappoint me. I just said I didn’t think you’d surprise me.”

Well, I supposed that was something. When a guy’s conceit is that he’s the Man from O.R.G.Y., there are bound to be times when he’s taken down a peg or two. Still, I was determined to give this experience everything that O.R.G.Y. had taught me.

The one thing it hadn’t taught me was how to do that while trying to maintain my balance in the down-bending fronds atop a palm tree! The redhead, on the other hand, was as agile and supple as a monkey. Unhurriedly drawing off that last vestige of bikini she acted as if she had both cheeks of her luscious bottom planted firmly on terra firma, instead of maybe seventy-five feet off the ground.

She spread herself out across the fronds as if they were a mattress. She hooked one arm around the trunk of the tree. With her other hand she managed to pluck a coconut. She cracked it against the trunk and then held the gourd over her and poured the milk over her breasts. “Lick it off,” she suggested.

Even if I was plenty shaky, Lucifer had no fear of heights. Watching a rivulet of coconut milk form in the gully of the wide aureole surrounding one of her nipples, I became aware that Lucifer was already recovering from the long climb. Hanging on to the tree trunk, I bent my head to her bosom and licked the sweet milk of the tropical fruit.

I licked it from the deep crevice running between her breasts. I sucked it from those pink aureoles with their hardening, tomato-red tips. I sipped it from the well of her moonlight-winking navel. I bent lower to catch a few drops sparkling around the twisting, purple-lipped entrance to her tunnel of love.

That was a mistake. One of the fronds gave under me. I grabbed out wildly and just managed to get a secure grip on a handful of palm leaves to stop myself from falling out of the tree. My other hand was no longer fastened around the trunk. My mouth, however, was fastened to the target it had been seeking. And my teeth were snagged in the triangle of red curls over it.

Her hands closed over the top of my head, each of them hooking into one ear as if my skull was a bowling ball. Her eyes were closed now and she was moaning. With my mouth where she wanted it, she was oblivious to my precarious position. All she was interested in was guiding my head back and forth so that my lips and tongue maintained maximum pressure on her swollen, aroused clitty.

At this point I wasn’t sure whether I was hanging on by my teeth, her fingertips (in my ears), or the shaky grip I had on the palm leaves. Also, there was one other possibility. Quite independently of me, Lucifer had found a knothole in the trunk of the palm tree and burrowed into it. Perhaps it was his rigidity that was keeping me from falling out of the tree.

As it turned out, that wasn’t it. The redhead, writhing frantically-—and precariously-now removed her middle fingers from one ear and made a grab for Old Lucifer. She plucked him cleanly from the knothole and proceeded to squeeze, caress, and yank him in a way that had the old devil rearing up on the cloven hoofs of his hind legs. When the wind did something to our bower, there was a scrambling of position and Lucifer ended up first -- briefly -- at her hungry lips, and then lodged between her plump, panting, narrowly and deeply divided, breasts. He slid in and out of the cleavage, happy as a lark wintering at Palm Springs all expenses paid.

My hands were holding on to Red’s bottom. My feet were dangling out of the palm tree. My brain was undergoing a schizophrenic split, torn between the thrills of our lovemaking and the fear of making a permanent dent in the soil of Paradise Island far below.

Another gust of wind had me scrambling again. This time the position I attained was somewhat more secure. I was on the very top of the palm tree, the redhead spread out under me, the two of us supported fairly firmly by the mesh of fronds.

This was more like it. Our mouths fastened on each other. My fingertips stroked the quivering tips of her breasts. With my other hand I reached under her and squeezed her burning bottom.

Old Lucifer made his presence known, knocking at the gates to her female Paradise. The portals, soft, dewy, palpitating, drew him in and made him welcome. Their pliability made him arrogant. He charged up the glovefinger-like alley, battering the delicate flesh walls, heedless of his impact. Once he’d reached the mouth of the womb, however, he became more wily.

Now the scrotal sac was bouncing against those purplish portals. Old Lucifer rose up and established a rhythmic motion like a corkscrew. His base maintained contact with the stiff little clitty, rubbing over it with each spiral movement.

Those cobalt eyes were staring up at me unseeing now. The red hair was blowing wildly in the wind. Her breasts were straining, nipples long and quivering, flesh hot and rippling. She was laughing low in her throat, uncontrollably, the laugh half a moan. Her hips were moving like the hips of a wind-up hula-dancer doll. Her thighs were clenched around me feverishly. Her sponge-rubber bottom was bouncing. And her Tunnel of Love was moving with my corkscrew rhythm, sucking Old Lucifer deep, clutching him, lips pluckering around his base, pulling at him deep inside her.

Her laughter mounted and grew louder. It trilled from the top of the palm tree and echoed in the tropical night. The wind carried it out over the surf and away. . . .

Old Lucifer could contain himself no longer. I rose up and plunged deep, deep into her. She thrust up to meet me, her laugh hysterical now. Together we came, rolling over the fronds, the height forgotten now, the peril a matter of no concern.

I pumped it all into her, and she took it all, all I could give her, sucking, demanding the last drop. It lasted a long time for both of us, she drinking it up deep inside her, writhing and laughing, me emptying the pump, shooting every bit of the hot cream, emptying myself and enjoying the raunchy ecstasy of every second of it.

“Wow!” she started to say when it was over. “That was really some -”

She never got to complete the sentence. The sudden mutual relaxation of our bodily tension had once again caused our bower to shift out from under us. This time my stomach did a flip-flop as I felt us suddenly falling. Locked in each other’s arms, we slipped from the embrace of the palm fronds and into the empty night.

It would have made for a really romantic ending, I suppose. If you like Romeo and Juliet, that is. Personally, I’ve always figured a live lover is a lot better off than a star-crossed one.

Luckily, my preference was realizable. As we fell, I grabbed out blindly with one hand and latched onto the bottommost frond of the bower of the palm tree. My other arm was holding the redhead, and she had both her arms and both her legs wrapped around me. Just at that moment-—wouldn’t you know it?-the moon went behind a cloudbank and the night around us turned pitch black.

We dangled. The socket of my arm felt like it was being stretched in opposite directions by two herds of elephants. As for the arm itself—if I lived through this, it figured to come out about a yard longer than its mate. I’d be able to scratch my knees without bending!

The redhead saved the day. Swinging from me like a pendulum, she worked up enough of an arc to manage to lock her legs around the trunk of the palm tree. She let go of me, made a grab, and then her arms were wrapped around it too. Relieved of her weight, I was able to chin myself back up far enough to pull myself along the fronds hand over hand until I also reached the trunk.

With the redhead leading the way, both naked, we climbed down the tree. It was harder than climbing up had been because it was pitch black now. It seemed a long, long time before I felt my feet touch the ground.

Just as I took the first step away from the tree, I heard the redhead scream. There were the sounds of a scuffle. A man cursed. Another man told him to shut up. It seemed as if my girl was being assaulted. I turned toward the sounds to go to her aid.

Something came down over my head. It was as if a large sack had been thrown over me. “As if,” hell! A large sack had been thrown over me! I thrashed about inside it, all tangled up.

“Not too hard, boyo,” a voice said.

Something that felt like a blackjack bounced off my shoulder.

“Begorrah! ’Tis clumsy you are.” The same Irish brogue. “Let me be afther doin’ it right now!”

This time the blackjack bounced off my skull. It got as dark inside my head as it was inside the sack. I sailed off peacefully to never-never land.

The last thing I thought of before I slipped into unconsciousness was not former President of the United States Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson!

Chapter Two

Not so many years ago there was a popular syndicated cartoon strip called Silly Milly. One of the running gags, as I recall, involved a character who had been swallowed by a whale. Milly would pry open the whale’s mouth, peer inside, and yell down, “How is it in there?” And the answer would come floating back up: “Very dark!”

That’s how it was when I woke up inside the sack. Very dark. When I opened my eyes it was exactly the same. Very dark.

My head ached. It took me a minute to separate the throbbing from the throbbing underneath me. That vibration, I figured out, came from the engine of a boat. Judging by its closeness, I was in the hold. From the sound, it was a medium-powered craft, the kind that can sleep maybe eight people. The way the water was slapping at the hull, it was moving along at a pretty fast clip.

Footsteps. Coming closer. And then a voice.

“Open the sack. Let’s have a look at her and make sure you didn’t bash her skull in.”

“Si, señor.”

The sack was opened and I came popping out as eagerly as a jack-in-the-box springing free of the box. A light show assaulted my unready eyeballs. It was a minute before the lightning stopped crackling around my retina.

“You dumbhead!” The first voice again. “What the hell is this? Where’s the girl!”

“No comprendo, amigo! No—”

My pinball eyes stopped hitting the flashing light bumpers and settled into their sockets. The first speaker came into focus. He was a large black man, a Bahamian, judging by the lilt to his voice.

“Don’t give me that spic jive!” he snapped.

The second man, a light-skinned Cuban, shrugged. A third man, white, with a face like the losing side of an Irish donnybrook, spoke. “Sure and it was dark as the soul of an Orangeman,” he told the black leader.

“I don’t want any spic jive, and I don’t want any mick jive either!” The Bahamian glared at the two of them. Then he turned to me. He towered over me. Also he had a very large revolver in his hand. “Now who are you?” he demanded. “And what’s your connection with the chick?”

“I’m Steve Victor.” I smiled winningly. “I’m a friend of the family.”

“Don’t you wise-ass me, whitey! Save that jive and lay it on the NAACP when you get back to Yankee land! Now give!”

“I gave at the office,” I murmured.

“If you get back to Yankee land!” he amended. “So start talking!”

Start talking? What was I supposed to say? Recite Langston Hughes, maybe? I was saved from having to decide by a sudden commotion above deck. It was punctuated by the sound of gunfire and the sudden, sharp listing of the boat as a shell exploded in the water just to starboard.

“Put him back in the sack. We’ll get it out of him later.” The Bahamian was already heading up the ladder to the deck as he called out the instructions over his shoulder.

The Cuban kept me covered while the Irishman stuffed me back into the sack and tied it closed again. I heard their retreating footsteps as they too climbed the ladder. Then I was alone, back in the sack. How was it in there?

Very dark!

Just the thing to clean out your ears. Mine were operating at peak efficiency. And all that they were hearing added up to the sounds of violence.

First it was the rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire punctuated by the occasional loud plop of what I took to be a small- to medium-size shell hitting the water. Then there were shouts and curses, some from a distance which seemed to be decreasing as they grew louder, others from above deck, directly over my head. Finally, there was the sound of close-quarter gunfire over my head, and scuffling, and the splash of bodies hitting the water.

Relative silence. Then, after what seemed a very long time, the sack was opened again and I was released. I found myself facing a whole new cast of characters.

However, they were singing the same old refrain:

“What the hell is this?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Yeah, who the hell is he?”

“Where the hell’s the girl?”

They had guns. Some of them pointed them at me hesitantly as if not sure whether it was necessary to cover me or not. Others scratched their heads and looked at each other, rephrasing the questions they'd already asked.

They simmered down when a small man in a business suit came down to the hold and looked me over. He didn’t know what to make of me either, but at least he seemed to have the authority to make some sort of decision. “We’ll bring him in,” he told the others. “Let Upstairs decide what to do with him. We don’t have the girl, and he’s better than nothing.”

“Did they get away with the girl?” someone asked.

“We don’t know.”

I could have told them that the other group had never had her, but when I realized they were going to keep me down in the hold under guard, it sort of squelched any feelings I might have had of wanting to cooperate with them. My guard was strictly tongue-tied. The only conversation I had for the next few hours was between me and me.

When the engine stopped, I realized we’d reached our destination. The small man came down again. Obeying his instructions, two other men blindfolded me and led me up the ladder to the deck. The blindfold made it obvious that they didn’t want me to know where I was being taken.

Naturally this realization made me even more curious. I put my mind to work. The deck under my feet was replaced by a rickety wooden dock, and then sand. I could hear a breeze rustling palm trees. We were still in the Caribbean. The air was cool on my face, no touch of sun. It was still night.

The air was cool on my naked genitals as well. I’d lost my bathing trunks in the palm tree, and when they’d released me from the sack, my new captors hadn’t bothered to cover my nudity. There must not be any strangers around to see me since a blind man in the buff would have been sure to arouse comment. Our landing place, therefore, must be secluded.

We mounted steps. Some sort of porch, or veranda. A pause. A door was opened. There was an exchange of low voices. I was led inside. Another door, an inner room. Pressure on my shoulders to make me sit. I sat. Cheap leatherette iced my scrotum.

The blindfold was removed. I blinked. The small man from the boat was sitting at the other end of the leatherette couch. Another guy, with a gun, leaned back on a chair to one side of me, keeping me covered. Across from me a light-skinned black man with salt-and-pepper gray hair sat behind a desk. He seemed to be the superior of the small man from the boat; he seemed to be in charge.

“Where’s the girl?” The black man came directly to the point. He was talking to me. He had a broad Boston accent.

“Before I answer any questions, I have a request,” I announced.

“You’re in no position to make any requests!” he informed me firmly.

“I m in a position to make this one,” I told him.

“What do you want?”

“I’d like to borrow a jockstrap from one of you fellows.”

His thin lips twitched into a repressed smile. There was the flash of a dimple on his black cheek. He switched an intercom on his desk and told somebody to dig up a pair of pants and a shirt for me.

Then came the questions. Most of them meant nothing to me, and I couldn’t answer them. I told the truth about what I did know. Why not? I had nothing to hide even though my interrogator wouldn’t tell me who he represented, or Why he was questioning me.

The Bostonian black seemed relieved to learn that my abductors had grabbed me instead of the girl. He seemed intrigued when I told him who I was in answer to one of his more casual questions. “Steve Victor, the Man from O.R.G.Y.?” was his response. He obviously recognized my name.

“It’s always nice to meet a fan.” I lowered my eyes modestly.

He leaned back in his chair and studied me. He seemed to be going over something in his mind. “You’re going to be our guest for a while, Mr. Victor,” he announced.

As it turned out, the “guest” facilities weren’t exactly first class. I spent the next day or so in a small basement room with a primitive john adjoining it. Room Service was right outside my door, and heavily armed. The cuisine ran to native fish and banana oil.

At the end of that time, I was escorted back to the room in which the original interview with the black man had taken place. He awaited me there. He was not alone. There was another man there with him.

“Sonofabitch!”

I recognized the second man. I’d have known him anywhere. The epithet that had escaped my lips was as much my identification of him as an exclamation of surprise at meeting him here.

Charles Putnam!

“Sonofabitch!” I repeated it, leaving no doubt this time that I was addressing Putnam.

He ignored it. “Would you leave us alone please?” he courteously asked the black man with the salt-and-pepper hair.

“Of course.” The black man left us.

Putnam surveyed me with some distaste, drumming his fingers on the desk top. I looked back at him with similar feelings, unintimidated. Our paths had crossed before; I don’t know how many times.

Charles Putnam was a top-ranking, murkily defined official in the U.S. government. He had something to do with the State Department, something to do with the Foreign Service, and something to do with the coordination of diplomacy with Intelligence. All this gave him access to the services of the CIA, the Secret Service, the FBI, and other espionage and counterespionage organizations connected with the government. Administrations came and went, but Putnam remained, seeming to grow in secret stature and in the power he wielded. He had been involved in and survived the Bay of Pigs, the Southeast Asian incursions, Watergate, and other fiascos. He was ruthless in his dedication to his country and selfless in the sacrifice of his personal life to the national purpose.

I have never been able to decide whether he personified the inevitable evil of nationalism or the highest ideals of patriotism in a democracy. It was on the latter grounds that he had recruited me, from time to time, sometimes unwillingly, into his service. On those grounds, and with the sweetening of an extremely high fee paid by the taxpayers. Still, neither fee nor patriotism had ever convinced me that cooperation inevitably required me to lay my life on the line—the only life I have, that is. Which is why I was not too happy to see him at this time. I needed money and I knew I’d be tempted. My connection with O.R.G.Y. had made me valuable to him in the past, and I had a hunch he was out to recruit me again now. So I looked at him with a jaundiced eye.

Looking at Charles Putnam was always unsettling. Somehow, he was always out of focus. He was middle-aged and had steel-gray hair and gray eyes. His face was square and his body was square and athletic. He wore gray suits, conservative, and he must have had a closetful of them over the years, each the same as the other. His personality was just as gray as his looks.

“Just how much do you know about Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson?” Putnam asked for openers.

“What everybody knows.”

That was no small amount. Nick Dickson had been in public life for over thirty years. He’d been a congressman, a senator, a vice-president, and a President of the United States. He’d made history by the way in which he’d become an ex-President of the United States. (Not that it had actually been proved that either he, his elected vice-president, or any member of the presidential stall ever stole anything that was nailed down.)

“Let me add to your knowledge.” Putnam sucked his teeth, and then went on, picking his words carefully, “You didn’t know, I’m sure, that Dickson is currently living on an island right here in the Caribbean.”

I admitted I hadn’t known that.

“The island is owned by Dickson’s long-time friend and confidant, the multimillionaire PeePee Rococco⁶ .” (I knew without Putnam’s telling me that Rococco’s first name was pronounced the way it sounded. He’d been christened “Pepe,” but his older brother had consistently and accurately called him PeePee when he was a baby; the name had stayed with him through adulthood.) “Dickson’s family is there with him,” Putnam continued. “Rococco flies in and out regularly. The Prussian Siamese twins are there too.” (This referred to Dickson's former chief White House aides, a heel-clicking, crewcut, monocled pair of beefeaters named Hans Katzenjammer und Fritz Jammerkatzen⁷ . . . or was it Fritz Katzenjammer and Hans Jammerkatzen? . . . or maybe Hans Katzenkatzen und Fritz Jammerjammer? . .

“What about the other German?” I was curious. “Is he there too?”

“You obviously don’t read the papers, Mr. Victor.” Putnam was disapproving. “Of course Dr. Heinrich Bussinger⁸ isn’t there. He’s just been appointed to a high government post, so he’s out of favor with Dickson.

“A high government post? Appointed?” I was confused. “But what post could Bussinger be appointed to that would be higher than secretary of state?"

“Premier.”

“Of the United States?”

“Of course not. Of Russia. He’s been appointed premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics⁹ .”

“But how could he be? He’s an American.”

“A naturalized American!” Putnam pointed out. “And now he’s a naturalized Russian.”

“That’s carrying détente too far!” I decided. “And isn’t it dangerous to our country? With everything that Bussinger must know about the U.S. government, couldn’t he do a lot of harm as Premier of the Russians?”

“Yes.” Putnam agreed. “And even more dangerous is his knowledge of Nicholas Dickson and the uses to which he might put that knowledge.” Putnam scowled. “I’m going to have to be very honest with you, Mr. Victor. We’re afraid that under Bussinger’s guidance the Russians will try to buy Nick Dickson!”

“Well,” I granted, “he’s sure shown he can be bought.”

“Precisely. And picture if you will, Mr. Victor, just what the Russians might be getting for their money. The propaganda value alone! Think of a former U.S. President describing the inequities of the democratic-capitalist system to the commie countries and the Third World. Think of the effect on the morale at home where the scandals of his administration have already rocked the nation to its very foundations.”

“And think of the military secrets he might sell them,” I remembered.

“No use worrying about that,” Putnam told me. “Bussinger leaked them to the Russians a long time ago and blamed it on the Pentagon. Or was it vice versa?”

“I think it was the Joint Chiefs who stole that information,” I recalled. “The administration promoted the admiral—or whatever he was—responsible to keep him from leaking the stuff to the New York Times.”

“That’s right,” Putnam confirmed. “The Pentagon always knew the New York Times was a bigger threat than the Kremlin.” He made a wry face. “But we’re off the subject. The problem isn’t Bussinger so much as it is Dickson himself. And not just that he might sell out to the Russians, either. He’s also been Ping-Ponging on the q.t. with the Red Chinese. Our information is he’s dickering over a deal to tell them our top secret diplomatic arrangements with the South Vietnamese, the Indians, and the Russians. Do you know what that could do, Mr. Victor? That could plunge the world into atomic war!”

“Don’t blame me,” I told him. “I voted Democratic.”

“He could tell the Chinese where our missile installations are!”

“I thought that Bussinger—”

“He’s working for the Russians, Mr. Victor. Please try to keep it straight.”

“Sorry.”

“There are some higher ups-—” Charles Putnam got back on the track “—in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Intelligence Agencies who favor assassination as a means of dealing with former President Dickson. But they’ve been outvoted since such a solution is not viable for a number of reasons. Chief among these is that assassinating Dickson would compromise his successor, President Cadillac¹⁰ , beyond the ability of his shaky administration to survive. Dickson, you see, has a safe-deposit box which contains information that is damning to President Cadillac. With realistic paranoia, Dickson has served notice on the Chief Executive that if he should meet an untimely end, the contents of the safe deposit box will be forwarded to the Washington Post.”

“Politics makes absurd bedfellows!” I remarked. “But if Cadillac is so vulnerable, why did Dickson appoint him as vice-president -- his successor in effect — in the first place?”

“You wouldn’t expect Nick Dickson to appoint somebody he didn't have something on, would you?” Putnam asked scathingly. “Anyway,” he continued, “despite Cadillac’s vulnerability, there is still a strong faction involving many intelligence agents—CIA operatives in particular—who are determined to eliminate Dickson regardless of the official policy. You see, Dickson has let it be known that he’s writing his memoirs, and the infrastructure of the military intelligence community is afraid it won’t be able to survive his revelations of their secret operations in Southeast Asia. Incidentally, he may or may not be serious about the memoirs. They may just be a bludgeon to blackmail certain people. But either way there’s a real threat to his life from the I-spy fellows.”

It was just about then that I began to have a hazy idea of what Putnam might be leading up to where I was concerned. “Whoa!” I tried to head him off at the pass.

“Nor is that the only threat.” He galloped right around me. “There’s also an open contract on Dickson.

“The Mafia?” Momentarily I was too surprised to stay wary.

“That’s our information. Bought and paid for by a group of top executives in the buttermilk industry. When he was in office Dickson had a cozy arrangement with these boys regarding price supports. They skimmed the cream off the buttermilk and poured it straight into his reelection campaign fund. And Dickson hasn’t stopped milking the buttermilk cow since leaving office. Only now the buttermilk tycoons are paying for a diffferent reason. Dickson, as you know, is now immune from government prosecution for any illegal acts he may have committed while in office. But the people who bribed him aren’t immune from prosecution. There’s nothing to stop him from testifying against them. If he did, the heads of six billion-dollar buttermilk corporations could go to jail. So they keep paying, and he keeps squeezing the buttermilk cow.”

“He must be squeezing a little too hard if the Mafia has a contract,” I realized. “Is anybody else trying to kill him?”

“There was a recent attempt on Dickson’s life. The evidence indicates that it was by one of three women who are on the island with him. Or, perhaps, by all three acting in concert.”

“You mean one of these women tried to murder him?”

“We think so. Yes.”

“How?” I wanted to know.

“An attempt was made to strangle Dickson in his sleep with a sanitary napkin belt. It was an old belt and the elastic had worn out. He woke and struggled and his assailant fled. It was dark in the room and the only thing he was sure of was that the perpetrator was a woman.”

“But couldn’t it be any woman? Why one of a specific trio?”

“These three ladies, all middle-aged, are the only females on the island that wear that particular device. The other women there use more modern methods.”

“And you think they might have been acting together in a conspiracy to kill Dickson?"

“That’s one theory. Yes. You see, the three ladies have become very close since coming to the island.”

“Who are these women?” I asked.

“Marsha Twitchell¹¹ for one,” Putnam told me.

“Mouthy Marsha? How come Dickson has her, of all people, on the island with him?”

“Marsha Twitchell knows about more closets with skeletons than any woman in public life since Lucretia Borgia. And she’s got a direct phone wire to every major gossip columnist in Washington and New York. If Dickson has her where he can keep an eye on her, that’s to his advantage. The question is, having already been snatched and held incommunicado by Dickson’s goons once, why should she want to stay in such proximity to him? The answer may have to do with the fact that she blames Dickson’s manipulation of her husband while he was in the cabinet for the breakup of her marriage. A southern vendetta, from everything we know of the lady, just might be her style.”

“To the extent of murder?” I was dubious.

“We can’t rule it out. She’s not been too—umm -- stable since her marriage went on the rocks. Hard as it is to believe, she really did love that ex-husband of hers.”

“It’s hard to believe,” I agreed. And it was. Don Twitchell¹² had been about as unlovable a man as had ever corkscrewed his way through American politics. Backed to the wall, he’d used the ploy of ridiculing his wife to get off the hook with the media time after time. He looked like a mackerel left in cream sauce too long, and the various scandals associated with him smelled even more fishy than Twitchell looked.

“The second woman,” Putnam continued, “is Dotty Whiskers¹³ , the former lobbyist for I.L.L. You’re familiar with the affair¹⁴ , of course?”

“Sure.” Anybody who could read was familiar with the “I.L.L. Affair.” The papers had had a field day with it. It was one of the more outrageous matters which led to the deposing of President Dickson.

The facts were simple. The International Licorice & Lollipop Company, in reality a monster holding corporation, had faced an antitrust suit by the Justice Department which asked the court to force I.L.L. to divest itself of one of its most profitable subsidiaries (the result of a recent merger which was of itself of questionable legality), the Hotfoot Incendiary Insurance Company. The suit was settled out of court, the Justice Department charges were dropped, and I.L.L. was allowed to retain Hotfoot Incendiary. Around the same time a pledge of $400,000 to help finance Nick Dickson’s reelection was made by I.L.L. to his party’s fund raisers. Subsequently, a muckraking columnist had printed an I.L.L. interoffice memo spelling out that the antitrust suit had been dropped in exchange for the campaign contribution. The memo indicated that both President Dickson and his attorney general at the time, Don Twitchell, had personally negotiated the deal. It was signed by I.L.L. lobbyist Dotty Whiskers.

She denounced the memo as a fake. But between the time it surfaced and the denounciation, Dotty Whiskers was kidnapped by a special presidential “se- curity” group known as “the Flushers” and held incommunicado in a remote nursing home in the Northwest. Conveniently, but perhaps truly, the experience had affected her both physically and mentally. She never had been able to testify about the I.L.L. affair.

“The story that’s been handed out,” Putnam said, “is that Dotty Whiskers is on the island for R and R.”

“ ‘R and R’?”

“Rest and Rehabilitation. To get her health back. Also—and this part of the story isn’t handed out—it’s been secretly arranged for her to receive some sort of healthy pension.”

“From I.L.L.?”

“Definitely not. Dickson, you see, is using her to maintain his hold over I.L.L. Who actually is paying her the pension is a secret so carefully concealed that even we haven’t been able to trace the money to its source.”

“Are you telling me that the former President of the United States is actually blackmailing I.L.L. executives by threatening to unmuzzle Dotty Whiskers?”

“Of course not. Did I ever use the word ‘blackmail,’ Mr. Victor?”

“No, but you implied—”

“I implied nothing.”

“Is Dickson really that hard up for dough?” I refused to play games with Putnam.

“Money doesn’t enter into it, Mr. Victor.”

“Well if he doesn’t want money from the I.L.L. brass, what does he want?”

“The name of the game is ‘Power,’ Mr. Victor. In politics that’s even more desirable than money. Dotty Whiskers knows where many an I.L.L. body is buried. That makes her an excellent lever for Dickson with one of the largest business conglomerates in the world.”

“Okay. So that’s why she’s being taken care of. But why would she want to bite the hand that’s feeding her? Why would she want to murder Dickson?”

“Revenge, perhaps. Her health is shattered; he’s responsible for ruining her life in a sense. It’s difficult to pin down a motive, but she’s definitely a suspect.”

“And the third woman?” I asked.

“Rosalie Forest¹⁵ .”

“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed. “True-blue Rosalie, the faithful Forest? Dickson’s Aunt Tom? Why, the word is that Rosalie Forest is to secretaries what cocker spaniels are to canines. And the Dickson hand isn’t all she’d lick if circumstances dictated.”

“She is the epitome of loyalty in private secretaries,” Putnam granted.

“And the epitome of convenient inefficiency,” I remembered. “The loosest foot in Washington.”

“Well,” Putnam was philosophical about it, “if a slip of the lip can sink a ship of state, then why shouldn’t a slip of the foot serve to buoy one up?”

“Because an eighteen-minute gap on a tape is more of a booboo than a buoy,” I reminded him. '

“Perhaps her foot fell asleep.”

“Sure. And perhaps Marie Antoinette’s neck just happened to get in the way of the guillotine. But it cut what they wanted it to cut.”

“You're a cynic, Mr. Victor.”

“Yeah. So the faithful Rosalie is still Dickson’s secretary,” I mused.

“Privately he complains that she’s slowed down with age and he’d like to replace her. But publicly he’s stuck with her.”

“And why would she want to kill Dickson?”

“We don’t know that she does,” Putnam admitted. “All that ties her in as a suspect is the sanitary belt. That and the fact that she’s become very friendly with Dotty Whiskers and Marsha Twitchell and may have fallen under their influence, which is hostile to Dickson. Also, quite recently, after having perhaps one cocktail too many, Rosalie Forest was overheard making an uncharacteristically anti-Dickson remark.”

“If that were a crime, forty-seven percent of the people would be in jail by the latest Harris poll.”

Putnam shrugged it off. “There’s another threat to Dickson,” he informed me. “It comes from D.O.P.E.”

That surprised me. I’d thought that Nick Dickson, despite his having lost the Presidency, was still D.O.P.E.’s fair-haired boy. Publicly they’d stuck by him through the thickest of the evidence and the thinnest of his excuses. Indeed, if Dickson still had a political base left, then D.O.P.E. was it.

The initials stood for Destroy Obscenity! Pornogra- phy! Erotica! Originally, that had been the cause which brought D.O.P.E. into existence. But over the years their interests had widened and their political involvement had increased. While they were still anti-porno, they now managed to tie their cause into an anti-rad-lib posture that encompassed such issues as the energy crisis (they blamed the Jews), school busing (they favored running over the blacks with the buses), long hair (they’d sponsored a constitutional amendment to forcibly shave and shear hippies), and fluoridation (they were pro-tooth decay). In the interests of maintaining their original crusade, they blamed obscenity, pornography, and erotica on Jews, blacks, hippies, and dentists.

Nick Dickson had won their fealty early-on by disowning the results of his predecessor’s Presidential Commission on Pornography (they’d found it non- harmful). Through the years he’d come surprisingly close to echoing D.O.P.E.’s extreme-right-wing view. And now they canonized him in their literature as a martyr fallen in the struggle against perfidious communism -- Russian, Chinese, and homegrown. He, in turn, upheld most of their positions and every now and again spoke kind words about them.

“Why would D.O.P.E. want to harm Nick Dickson?” I asked Putnam.

“One explanation is that Dickson dead would have more propaganda value to them than Dickson alive. They could blame the radicals for assassinating him and use it as an excuse to force President Cadillac into a full-blown purge.”

“Who else is after Dickson?” I asked.

“We think that’s all.”

“You think?”

“We can’t be sure. There are so many unsavory facets to Dickson’s career that it’s hard to rule out anybody who might have a conceivable reason to either want him dead, or want to buy him. There is one concrete threat, but we don’t know who’s behind it.”

I said nothing. I waited patiently for him to explain. I was damned if I was going to make even a slight commitment by soliciting information.

“We intercepted and decoded a message to an agent. We don’t know who sent the message or who the agent was working for, except that he wasn’t working for us. This agent was to proceed to Rococco’s island where he would be contacted and given instructions by someone identified as ‘Insecticide.’ Ac- cording to these instructions he would either kill, kidnap, or buy former President Dickson. We’re not sure which. The agent died before he could tell us that.”

“Your goons were a little too enthusiastic,” I guessed.

“It happens.” Putnam shrugged. The shrug expressed it all. The stakes were high, involving a whole nation of people; an individual life was cheap; torture was sometimes necessary; the game wasn’t for girl scouts. “The thing is,” he continued, “that this ‘Insecticide’ is someone very close to Dickson, someone in his entourage. But we don’t know who. It’s crucial that we find out before ‘Insecticide’ can act. And that’s where you come in.”

Here it came! I steeled myself for nay-saying. I told myself to remember to accentuate the negative. I stared at Putnam without speaking. But there was “no-no” in my eyes!

“Mr. Victor, we must have someone on the scene to protect Dickson and to watch him. He has to be kept alive and he has to be kept from compromising the government. We need someone to blow ‘Insecticides’ cover. For obvious reasons, we can't use our usual operatives.”

“One of those obvious reasons,” I observed, “being that you can’t trust your own agents not to decide to eliminate Dickson themselves.”

“I’m afraid that’s true, Mr. Victor.”

“So you want me to pretend to be the agent you canceled and find out who ‘Insecticide’ is.”

“That’s right, Mr. Victor.” Putnam’s lip curled a sixteenth of an inch in an expression that passed as a smile with him.

“I won't do it.”

“Mr. Victor, your country—”

I made an impolite noise.

“Money, Mr. Victor? I can assure you that -”

I needed money all right, but I needed to stay alive more. He’d sucked me in on that basis on more than one occasion, and where had it gotten me? I always ended up broke again. I shook my head firmly.

He mentioned a figure.

I shook my head less firmly.

He upped the figure.

I got a sudden kink in my neck; it wouldn’t move from side to side.

He added to it again.

Slowly, Without my willing it, my head moved up and down.

“Then it’s settled.” His mouth spread in what was supposed to be a Smile.

“One question,” I said then. “Just how do I get myself hired as Dickson’s bodyguard?”

“You’ve already been hired,” Putnam told me. “Or, I should say, the man you’re going to become has been hired.”

“The man who was supposed to contact ‘Insecticide,’ ” I guessed. “The agent your goons erased. You want me to impersonate him.”

“That’s right.”

“But how did he manage to get himself hired as Dickson’s bodyguard?”

“He came very highly recommended.” Putnam passed me an envelope. It was unsealed, the flap tucked inside it.

I removed a letter from the envelope. It was a letter of recommendation confirming a previous letter which had evidently already been delivered. It identified the bearer as one Karl Powers. It was addressed to Dickson and signed by Roger Algerpulp¹⁶ .

I didn’t need Putnam to tell me that Roger Algerpulp, next to PeePee Rococco, was the nearest thing to a friend that former President Dickson had. Algerpulp had developed and patented a deodorizer that had taken him from a small chemical laboratory in the Bronx to a mansion on the banks of the Hudson River. He was a self-made multimillionaire. An ultra-conservative, he had hired Nick Dickson’s law firm to represent his toilet-and-armpit neutralizing business at a time when Dickson was between government jobs. The two saw eye to eye, and were frequent fishing and golfing companions. A letter from Algerpulp was the very highest recommendation one could have had to Dickson.

“Is Algerpulp mixed up with this ‘Insecticide’ business?” '

“We’re not sure,” Putnam told me. “If the enemy agent we killed really was Karl Powers, then Algerpulp would be implicated. But the Karl Powers he recommended may not have been the same man. The original Karl Powers may have been wasted and the man we wasted may have been an imposter.”

“And now you want me to impersonate the imposter.” My head was spinning. “It all sounds very confusing,” I told Putnam.

“ ‘If my answers sound confusing, I think they are confusing because the questions are confusing, and the situation is confusing, and I’m not in a position to clarify,’ ” Putnam quoted blandly.

I grinned. The quote, which summed up the mess which had resulted in Dickson’s removal from office, was the famous statement by which his press secretary, Don Zigzag¹⁷ , had fended off all questions put by newspaper reporters. It was the classic non-answer. “Is that it?” I started to get to my feet.

“Not quite.” Putnam held up a hand. “Do you remember quite a few years back when Dickson was vice-president he took a trip to South America?” he asked me.

“Sure. They threw rocks at him. Spit on him too. Maybe they knew something then that we only found out later.”

“Something else happened to Dickson on that particular trip.”

I looked at Putnam questioningly.

“The president of that particular country was named Alvarez.” Putnam stopped talking, obviously waiting to see if I’d respond.

I looked at him blankly.

“Alvarez had a problem. He was sterile. He was incapable of fathering a child. Someone suggested artificial insemination as a possible answer to his desire to have a son and heir. But Alvarez was a very proud man. He didn’t want just any seed to sprout into his offspring. He wanted a Presidential Seed. Through his ambassador in Washington, he had this request conveyed to the President of the United States. He was offering substantial concessions to mineral rights in his country in exchange for a presidential contribution to his own personal sperm bank. The President at that time, unfortunately, was quite along in years, had health problems of his own, and was unable to fulfill President Alvarez’s request. But he did offer the services of his vice-president-Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson—and, with some cutting back of the mineral rights granted to U.S. companies, the offer was accepted. That was the real reason for Dickson’s trip.”

To make a drop at the sperm bank,” I summed up to show I understood.

“Yes. Only, as perhaps might have been expected of Dickson—who after all had two daughters of his own-—the contract was not quite fulfilled. Fate, or nature, or genetics, or whatever took a hand, and Alvarez’s wife was delivered some nine months later of a baby girl.”

“Alvarez was a male chauvinist pig and he wasn’t happy,” I guessed.

“Right. He was so unhappy that he nationalized all the American companies operating in his country. He was so unhappy that he divorced his luckless wife. He was so unhappy that he exiled her and the female infant from his country.”

“He really was a male chauvinist pig!”

“Quite. The woman, incidentally, was herself the daughter of a wealthy landowner of noble Castilian descent and his wife, an Indian who traced her proud heritage back to the Inca emperors. Inst after Dickson left the White House, the mother was killed in a rockslrde. The daughter, grown now, turned up on Rococco’s island. I gather she may have threatened to tell Dickson’s wife, Natalie, who her father was. Dickson had kept the incident from his wife, you see.

In order to keep the girl quiet, Dickson hired her as a secretary to help Rosalie Forest. Recently the girl took a vacation on Paradise Island. The daughter’s name is Alicia Alvarez.” Once again Putnam stopped talking abruptly and looked at me as if waiting for some reaction.

Once again I returned his look blankly. “So?”

“Alicia. Alvarez,” he informed me, “is the young lady you were in the palm tree with, Mr. Victor.”

So that was why Putnam had sought me out! Why me? Alicia Alvarez! That was why me!

I was in like Flynn¹⁸ with the President’s daughter!

Chapter Three

I hadn’t known her name. She hadn't known mine. We had gotten around to making love, but somehow we’d neglected the formalities.

Lucky. If I had told her my name, the next time we met I’d have had to conjure up some fancy explanations. Because Steve Victor wasn’t the name I was going under now. From here on in, I was Karl Powers.

“Karl Powers.” A cautious chipmunk smile appeared below the ski-slope nose of former President of the United States Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson. “Karl. I’ve always found that Americans of German descent make [expletive deleted]¹⁹ good subordinates.” It was meant to be a compliment of sorts. “That’s one thing I want to make perfectly clear: my high regard for Americans of German descent as superior [expletive removed] lickers.”

This was the first time in my life I’d ever been this close to an American President — ex or otherwise. Dickson came across every bit as blah in person as he did in the media. It was unfortunate for him. The American public is quick to forgive dishonest politicians if they have charisma. But a politician-thief without charisma is like champagne without bubbles: it doesn’t intoxicate, it just turns your stomach.

Dickson in person was Dickson shrunk—a direction he had ill been able to afford to take. He’d developed a nervous tic in one cheek since leaving office; it flicked regularly like a traffic blinker light. He had a healthy Caribbean tan, but his personality overwhelmed it, turning it beige to match the rest of his image. He was playing with a Yo-Yo, dropping and retrieving it in tempo with his tic.

“However, let me say this—” The ex-President’s tone changed. “You are late, Karl. [Expletive deleted] yes! You were supposed to be here yesterday.” He looked at me, tic working, Yo-Yo bobbing, obviously waiting for some explanation of my tardiness.

In Dickson's lexicon, I guessed, Americans of German descent, excellent subordinates that they are, are never late. “Transportation difficulties,” I improvised. “Energy crisis. Gasoline shortage. Odd-numbered plate, even-numbered day. Alternate-side-of-the-street parking, eight A.M. to eleven, one P.M. to four. No tank-topping. No-fault auto insurance. Safety emission standards. Low mileage.” Etcetera. . . .

“Arab blackmail.” Dickson nodded his head understandingly. “Up the oil-depletion allowance.”

The door to his office-den opened. I turned my head and found myself looking straight at the left breast of Alicia Alvarez, Dickson’s secret daughter. It was not so much covered as Saran-wrapped by a silken blouse of some sort.

“Alicia, this [characterization omitted] is Karl Powers.” Dickson introduced me arrogantly. “Karl’s my new bodyguard. Old Rodge Applesauce recommended him.” What passed for a chuckle crossed his lips as he purposely garbled his crony’s name. “Miss Alvarez,” he told me, straight-faced now, “is my confidential secretary.”

“How do you do?”

“Nice to meet you.”

I took my cue from Alicia and we both played it as if we’d never laid eyes-—or anything else—on each other before. That was fine with me. It would have been difficult explaining to Dickson how we came to know each other. Particularly since I was supposedly in the Bronx with Roger Algerpulp at the time we’d met. But then perhaps it would have been just as tough for Alicia to explain.

However, Alicia wasn’t altogether as cool as she seemed. Her left nipple—still on a level with my eyes—twanged to hardness against the silk and quivered at me nostalgically. I gave it a quick wink back to show I hadn’t forgotten.

“One minor matter and two major ones, Mr. President,” she told Dickson now.

Dickson, I would learn very quickly, insisted on the use of the title. Protocol was hazy on whether he was entitled to it after leaving offfice. But no one on PeePee Rococco’s island was likely to question Dickson’s preference.

“[Unintelligible]! Let’s get the minor one out of the way first,” Dickson decided.

“It’s Miss Forest --”

“Rosalie [characterization deleted],” Dickson sighed. “At least Checkers had the decency to die when his usefulness was over.” He looked wistful. “What’s bugging Rosalie now? Strike that! I mean what’s bothering Rosalie now?”

“She complains she has nothing to do. And she walks around muttering that I’m usurping her position.”

“Give her some old Hubert Humphrey tapes to transcribe. That should keep her busy. Maybe even lull her to sleep.” Another would-be chuckle.

“Hubert who?” Alicia wanted to know.

“Humphrey. You’ll find him in the miscellaneous file along with those [characterization deleted] Miller and Eagleton.”

“Okay, pa.”

Dickson’s eyes shifted warningly from me to Alicia and back.

“Pa-Pa-Pa-resident Dickson,” Alicia amended quickly and smoothly.

“Is Rosalie still hanging around with the other two [adjective omitted] crones?” Dickson wanted to know.

“They make soup together every night in a big kettle.”

“And that isn’t all they’re brewing.” It was hard to tell whether Dickson’s look was paranoid or merely normally furtive. “You tell Hans und Fritz²⁰ to maintain surveillance on those three [expletive deleted] .”

“I’ll tell Mr. Katzenjammer and Mr. Jammerkatzen.” Alicia made a note in longhand.

“No! You dumb [unintelligible]! Pay attention! Tell Mr. Jammerkatzen und Mr. Katzenjammer!”

“Sorry, sir.” Alicia corrected her notation.

“Or is it Jammerjammer und Katzenkatzen?”

“Perhaps if they didn’t both have crew cuts, Mr. President, it wouldn’t be so hard to tell them apart. Maybe if either Hans or Fritz let his hair grow long --”

“Alicia! There will be no long-haired hippies in my administration! Next thing, you’ll be suggesting one of them resort to plastic surgery to remove his [adjective omitted] dueling scar.”

“Sorry again, Mr. President.”

“What else, Alicia?” he asked.

“There’s a top priority, rush-rush communication from President Cadillac marked ‘DICKSON EYES ONLY.’ ”

“What does it say?”

“It’s marked ‘EYES ONLY,’ sir.”

“Alicia, you’re not some [adjective omitted] yeoman in the navy! What the [expletive deleted] does it say?”

“President Cadillac wants to know where you left the key to the Chief Executive john.”

“He does, does he?”

“ ‘Immediate reply URGENT,’ he says. ‘URGENT,’ in caps.

“Does the [characterization deleted] think I took the key?”

“He doesn’t say, sir.”

“But that’s what he [expletive deleted]-a-well implies, isn’t it?”

“The message could be read that way, Mr. President.”

“I have said it before!” Dickson thumped the desk top. “And I will say it again!” More thumps. “‘I am not a crook!’ ”

“President Cadillac says the machinery of government is at a standstill pending the finding of the key to the Chief Executive john,” Alicia told him in a monotone, not letting her voice take sides on the issue.

“Then he will soon find out what I found out. When the machinery of government grinds to a standstill, efficiency reaches its highest peak.”

I was reminded of a book from my childhood. Alice in Watergate—something like that.

“Shall I answer President Cadillac that you haven’t got the key?” Alicia wanted to know.

“Did I say that?” Dickson’s eyes narrowed slyly. “I neither said I have the key, nor did I say I do not have the key. Such information is classified. It is a matter of executive privilege. After a thorough investigation of the constitutional issues involved and the matter of presidential prerogative, a determination will be made by an impartial panel of experts selected by me as to the relevancy or irrelevancy of the location of the key to the investigation into said key being launched by that publicity-seeking ingrate, President Cadillac.”

“Shall I reply, then, that any prior statements regarding the key—as to whether you have direct knowledge of its whereabouts or not—are no longer operative?”

“Have that [adjective omitted] press secretary of mine—what’s his name?—”

“Don Zigzag.”

“Yes. Have Don Zigzag leak a statement to that effect to the [expletive deleted] Washington Post or the [expletive deleted] New York Times. If there’s an adverse reaction, the [characterization omitted] can always deny it.”

“Mr. Zigzag’s credibility is sinking. He may be a little reluctant to—-”

“If the [expletive deleted] gives you any trouble, just give him a shove! Or kick him. Believe me, he likes it. He loves to grovel.”

“And do you wish me to reply to President Cadillac confidentially?”

“Unless I make a mistake on this thing, the way I analyze it, and I have stayed deliberately away from it, but I think I can sense what it is. The way I analyze the thing, this matter of the Chief Executive john being locked and President Cadillac not having the key, I can certainly appreciate his problem and you can tell that [characterization deleted]-eating [expletive omitted] Cadillac that I said he should look up the transcript of the tape for April fourteenth for solace. Something Katzenjammer, or Jammerkatzen—one of them—-said. It will give Cadillac something to look forward to.”

(Later on, I myself looked up the quote to which Dickson referred. It read as follows: “A guy that’s been constipated for eight months and all of a sudden was able to take a crap is going to enjoy it.” So much for President-to-President advice.)

“Meanwhile—” Dickson was still talking “—let him use the potty like he did when he was vice-president. If it was good enough for Elvis Greco, it’s good enough for that [characterization omitted] Cadillac.”

Elvis Greco²¹ had twice been elected Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson’s vice-president. Shortly after his second election he had resigned from office and Cadillac had been appointed vice-president in his place. If, for years, Jack Benny²² had been known as the comedian’s comedian because of his superb timing, Elvis Greco had similarly been known as the politician’s politician for his loyalty, obedience, and hatchet work. But, as it turned out, the pol’s pol really shone as the thief’s thief. While Dickson had been ripping off the Department of Internal Revenue, Elvis Greco had held court in his vice-presidential office for a procession of bribe bearers stretching all the way back from Wash1ngton to Baltimore. True, El Greco had resigned under a cloud, but no pol of such high rank had ever sailed out of office before with his pockets jingling quite so merrily. Publicly President Dickson had refused to comment on the embarrassment Vice-President Greco had caused his administration; but privately he had been heard to mutter: “Beware of Greeks baring gifts.”

Now, Dickson’s mention of Elvis Greco brought Alicia to the third matter she’d come to discuss with him. “There’s also an urgent wire from former Vice-President Greco,” she told him.

“What does that Greek [expletive deleted] want?”

“He’s at Hank Nostalgia’s estate in Palm Beach. He wants to know if you’d be interested in doing six weeks in Vegas as third man of a trio composed of Mr. Nostalgia, himself, and you. The repertoire would consist of old Andrews Sisters songs and Mr. Nostalgia is dickering to get Guy Lombardo to back up the trio.”

For those under forty, Hank Nostalgia, now in his sixties, was once the singing idol of millions of swooning teen-agers. The Andrews Sisters had been three not very pretty girls with three not very good voices who had sung many not very good songs on the home front during the Second World War. (Sometimes they had gone on tours to entertain the troops, an atrocity against our GIs which should have been—but wasn’t—investigated at Nuremburg.) Guy Lombardo was a bandleader of whom it had been said: “He’s the kind of old-timer who gives geriatrics a bad name.”

“Is there a guaranteed percentage?” Dickson was interested in the prospective booking.

“According to Vice-President Greco, Mr. Nostalgia assures him that the Mafia will insure it.”

“The Mafia is [not intelligible]. Also the Mafia can be counted on to [inaudible]. In dealing with the Mafia [material not related to presidential actions deleted] and the Mafia never squawked about the Cambodian bombing. So, to sum up the best interests of everybody concerned, the offer appears to be as sound as the U.S. dollar,” Dickson pronounced.

“A helluva lot sounder,” I muttered under my breath.

“What billing?” Dickson wanted to know.

“Mr. Nostalgia will get top billing. You and Elvis Greco will share second billing.”

“[Expletive removed]! That’s not fair! I’m President of the United States!”

“You were President of the United States,” Alicia reminded him. “And do you know how many gold records Hank Nostalgia has cut?”

“[Expletive deleted], I’m not objecting to Hank Nostalgia’s billing. [Expletive removed], he’s Mr. Big. But I think I should get top billing over El Greco. I’ve got a much better voice than that Creek [characterization deleted] !”

“Should I write him to that effect? Or would you rather discuss it with him yourself? In his wire he says he’d like to come and visit you.”

“[Expletive removed]! I don’t want that mother-[expletive deleted] coming here. PeePee will have a [expletive deleted]-fit! Do you know what it costs to feed that army that travels with Greco?”

The “army” to which Dickson referred was Greco’s contingent of bodyguards. Greco, after having been forced out of office, had prevailed upon President Dickson (who was still President at that time) to supply him at taxpayers’ expense with a covey of Secret Service agents to accompany him wherever he went. Some picky congressmen had taken umbrage at this when the cost of protecting ex-Veep Greco had soared toward the million-dollar mark. Some snide tongues even opined that while Greco might be worth that much to the taxpayers dead (in future savings), it certainly wasn’t worth anything like that to keep him alive. Finally the Treasury Department had refused to pay the Secret Service bill. Not wanting to go unprotected, Greco had hired his own protection. The rumor was that they’d been recruited through the Mafia.

“I’ll tell him the island’s been quarantined because of German measles,” Alicia suggested. “That should keep him away.”

“All right. But don’t tell Hans und Fritz about it. I wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“If that’s all, Alicia, would you show Mr. Powers to his quarters so he can take a [expletive removed] before dinner?”

"“Shouldn’t I stay here with you?” I inquired, conscious of my bodyguard duties.

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll lock myself in. The windows, you’ll notice, are barred. This room is maximum security. I’ll see you at dinner, Karl.” Dickson bent back to his Yo-Yo; I’d been dismissed.

I followed Alicia from the room. She led the way down a long, rather narrow hallway. There was enough room for me to walk abreast of her, but her stride was so quick that I would have had to trot to catch up. I was damned if I was going to do that. I was miffed. It was one thing to act as if we’d never met in front of Dickson. But now that we were alone, it was downright insulting of the redhead not to acknowledge our mutual past.

Sore about this, just as we approached a turn in the hall, I reached out and grabassed Alicia, my hand squeezing a robust rump under a knee-length, very tight black velvet skirt. (Dickson, I would learn later, did not allow the women in his entourage to wear either slacks or mini-skirts. Thus did he ensure their femininity while maintaining their womanly decorum. Fem Lib might have taken umbrage, but then Nick Dickson was not exactly a proponent of women’s rights.) Alicia jumped into the hallway turn. Following right behind her, I came upon a scene of tangled female limbs, twisted nylons, and tantalizing undies. Alicia had collided with two girls coming from the opposite direction—one a blonde, the other a brunette -- and the three of them had gone down in an intertwined heap.

The blonde first: She was small, a bit over five feet tall I would guess, but compact and extremely well proportioned. She looked even smaller next to Alicia, but then the Spanish redhead was a tall girl. The blonde was wearing—Honest! -- a gingham dress which reached to half-calf (when it wasn’t up around her neck, which it was now) and was cut square and low at the bodice. Her hair was worn in short pigtails which didn’t quite reach to her shoulders. She had a pug nose and freckles sprinkled her face. Her breasts, under the gingham and peeping out on top, were shaped like pine cones although they were somewhat larger and looked much softer. Their halfmoon tops were pink-and-white—a lighter color than the blush now covering her perky cheeks. Her legs, incidentally, were a bit fleshy in the thigh, but otherwise lusciously shaped. From those thighs, and from the rounded jut of her hips, I extrapolated a delicious derriere—although she was sitting on it and I couldn’t tell for sure. All in all she looked like a combination of very early Debbie Reynolds and even earlier Doris Day -- all that subsurface sex appeal that made the 19505 so subliminally sensual, if you know what I mean; the Hollywood version of good, clean, American female fucking material.

And now for our #2 sex object, the brunette: Slim and aquiline are the two adjectives which best catch her essence. Her body was slender, almost serpentine in its suppleness; her face was aquiline in that odd, almond-eyed way Modigliani portrayed his female models. She wore what was known in the early ’6os as a “sack dress.” Snug around bodice, hips, and bottom, and loose at the waist, it reached to below her knees except when she stretched, at which times it rose to mid-thigh with her movements. At the moment, tangled with Alicia and the blonde, she was stretching in at least six different directions, and long, supple legs were visible along with a slim but finely etched behind encased in treacherous bikini panties. Also, the way the material of the “sack” tightened over her breasts, I would have bet she wasn’t wearing a bra under it. The bosom the material outlined was too large for her slim frame, but I leave such discrepancies for the purists to carp at. Skinny girls with big breasts have always been a turn-on for me. And the material—-some kind of thin linen, I think—also revealed that she had long, pointy nipples tapering upward from her large, long breasts. She was writhing like a snake in her efforts to extricate herself from the tangle with Alicia and the blonde -- or perhaps to keep from extricating herself from the tangle with Alicia and the blonde.

Finally the three of them, with a hand from me, regained their feet. Alicia was either reluctant to introduce me or still angry at the way I’d pinched her; I couldn’t be sure which. But in the end she gave way before the awkward silence. “Karl Powers, President Dickson’s new bodyguard,” she told them. The blonde’s name was Karen, the brunette’s Brett. Either Alicia didn’t mention their last names, or I didn’t catch them.

When the pair had passed on down the hall and we were alone, I voiced my curiosity to Alicia. She wasn’t exactly a font of information, but she did clue me in on a couple of pertinent facts. Firstly, both girls had originally come to Rococco’s island with Heinrich Bussinger (back in his pre-marriage days) who had absent-mindedly neglected to take them with him when he left. They’d been there ever since, and the fact that Bussinger had since defected to the Russians didn’t seem to make them any less welcome. The only thing required of them was that they conform to Dickson’s dress code. Alicia also told me that they had the room next to mine and we shared the bathroom between the two rooms. If I thought that was interesting when Alicia told me, I had no idea how soon it was going to be a matter of downright fascination to me.

“How soon” was determined accidentally, after Alicia left me off at my room, while I was undressing. I had taken off my pants, folded them along the crease, and was holding them by the cuffs preparatory to hanging them up, when—-as I might have anticipated—my wallet fell out of my pocket and my loose change scattered over the floor. I hung up the pants and retrieved the wallet and change. I thought I had it all, when I spied a stray coin on the rug near the door to the bathroom. I squatted on my haunches, picked it up, started to straighten up, and cracked the left temple of my forehead solidly on the knob of the bathroom door.

I saw stars. There was a painful throbbing. I stayed in a squatting position and laid my temple against the cool, soothing metallic plate holding the doorknob. After awhile the stars went away and the throbbing subsided. I opened my eyes. And that’s when I saw the opening of the scene that was to hold me for the next half hour or so.

One of my eyes, when I opened it, was on a level with the keyhole of the bathroom door. It was an old-fashioned door, and the keyhole was quite large. Large enough, indeed, to comfortably frame all of my popping eye.

What was making it pop was the sight of Karen, the petite blonde to whom Alicia had introduced me in the hallway, sitting on the edge of the large, old-fashioned bathtub with the square neckline of her gingham dress pulled down so that her naked breasts hung out over it. Her brassiere was draped over the washbasin. Her panties—demure and fully cut -- were down around her ankles. She was playing with her breasts, fondling them, cupping them, teasing the nipples.

About Karen's breasts— As I mentioned before, they were shaped like pine cones, but larger. Freed of encumbrance now, they were revealed as much larger. They were a rich pink color -- as if she had been sunbathing in the nude, and hers was the kind of skin that didn’t tan but reddened. Her nipples, not very pronounced, were lost in the extremely wide aureoles which tipped the upsweep of her breasts. The aureoles were a darker pink shade than the breasts themselves and looked almost purplish against the swelling flesh surrounding them.

As Karen played with her breasts, she was staring straight ahead. At first I thought it was merely a vacant stare, a mindless tribute to her preoccupation with the sensations her hands were arousing in her breasts. Then I realized that she was staring at something.

There was a mirror on the back of the door between my room and the bathroom. I guessed it because there was a similar mirror on the back of the door between the girls’ room and the bathroom and I could see into it through the keyhole. Indeed, it gave me a side view of Karen which showed the side curve of her breast to titillating advantage.

And what was Karen staring at? It wasn’t hard to figure out when I looked straight ahead through the keyhole myself. The keyhole was about on a level with the top of the bathtub. Looking straight ahead, I was looking right up Karen’s gingham dress past peach-colored thighs to a honey-blonde triangle, surprisingly white vagina lips and the cutest little half-inch clitty you ever saw. The clitty was rigid and twanging up and down all by itself without being touched.

It was the sight of the clitty moving independently that way that made me aware that my jockey shorts were once again becoming too small for me. As the Man from O.R.G.Y., I was certainly no run-of-the-mill peeping tom; so I often told myself; my voyeurism was dictated by the necessity for research in my profession. Now, eye still glued to the keyhole, I pulled off my jockey shorts. I took myself in hand and kept looking. So much for professional objectivity!

Karen was staring into the mirror up her own dress at her well-oiled and pulsating sex organs, as steadfastly as I was peering through the keyhole. Now she cupped one breast and raised it as high as she could; she bent her neck; her tongue stretched out and the tip of it slowly circled the wide, pink-purplish aureole. After awhile she switched breasts and repeated the maneuver with the other one. By way of response her behind moved up and down on the edge of the tub; her knees moved wider apart; the muscles in her fleshy thighs flexed and unflexed rhythmically; her clitty throbbed, moving up and down between the ivory lips guarding the entrance to her love tunnel.

With an effort of will, I kept my fist from moving back and forth over the stiff shaft it was clutching. I had to readjust the angle of my eye vis-a-vis the keyhole as Karen now slid down to the carpeted bathroom floor and stretched out there. She also shifted around, evidently looking for the best angle to watch herself in the mirror.

The blonde settled for a position on her side. One of her hands kept caressing her breast tips. The other one reached around behind her and pushed up the gingham dress in back. She fumbled for a moment, and then an audible moan of satisfaction escaped her lips.

By looking in the other mirror, the one on the girl’s door opposite my keyhole, I could see what Karen was up to back there. The derriere I’d imagined earlier, in the hallway, wasn’t up to the real thing. Pink like the rest of her, Karen’s bottom was round and symmetrical as a cannonball, springy as a gamboling young antelope, and with a cleft as neatly drawn as the equator. Halfway along that equatorial line, Karen had inserted a middle finger to the second knuckle.

Shifting my gaze back from the mirror to Karen herself, I could see the efffect that pumping middle finger was having. The gingham dress had ridden well up in front now, and I could see that the milk-white lips of her vagina were straining wide apart so that her clitoris was now completely exposed to view in all its pulsing length. The clitty had deepened now to a purplish color and it was longer than it had been—or perhaps it was just that more of it was visible because of the gaping lips.

Old Lucifer reared up in my hand as if with a mind of his own and a determination to crash between those invitingly agape portals. I reined him in and kept looking.

Karen’s middle finger was going like a piston now, driving her into a frenzy with its prodding of her anus. Her other hand, four fingers held close together, thumb opposing, was plucking at one of her pink-purple aureoles as if determined to root out the still invisible nipple buried there. Her plumpish, peach-colored thighs slapped together with an audible “squish-squish” sound. Above them I could see the raw red flesh inside her vagina as its ivory lips stayed opened wide to allow the berserk clitty plenty of room to go through its tricks.

Suddenly, Karen dropped everything. One hand let go of her breast, the other withdrew from her anal passage, and they met above her hand-slapping thighs. For a minute it looked like she was trying to cram the fingers of both of them between those creamy vagina lips.

The clitty was lost to sight behind the prying fingers. Then Karen started to grunt. (Yes, grunt; there’s no other word for the sounds she made; squeal might be a more delicate description, but grunt is more accurate.) The sounds went on while her thighs went “squish-squish,” and her bottom thumped on the bathroom carpeting, and the pink-purple aureole tips of her breasts (still no visible nipples) jerked back and forth toward the ceiling. Finally her whole body tensed; the aureoles held still except for a skyward quiver; her peach-colored bottom poised clear of the floor; her hands dug in so that the knuckles whitened; the grunting stopped to be replaced by a deep, shallow gasping. She stayed that way for what seemed like a long time, and then her body seemed all at once to relax. She sighed. Her eyes closed.

I watched her lie there for a moment, and had just about decided that the show was over and I might as well leave the keyhole when there was a light tapping at the other bathroom door, the one leading to the girls’ room. “Karen?” a girl’s voice called out questioningly. “Can I come in a minute?”

Karen scrambled silently to her feet, pulled the gingham dress back up over her naked breasts, and smoothed it down over her legs. “Come ahead, Brett,” she answered.

Brett, her brunette roommate, entered the bathroom. “Could I run a tub for myself while you’re finishing up in here?” she inquired of Karen.

“I was going to take a bath myself.”

“Oh?” Brett’s tone wondered what Karen had been doing in here all this time, but she didn’t put the question in words.

“Do you think there’s time before dinner for both of us to soak a little?” Karen asked.

“Afraid not. Unless --”

“Unless?”

“Unless we share the tub.”

“Why not?” Karen grinned that All-American Girl grin.

“Why not indeed?” Brett smiled back. She started the tub running and then went back into their room, vanishing from sight. A half-minute later her voice called from there. “Put some bubble-bath in the water if you like,” she suggested.

Karen poured some flakes into the tub. I saw the water, about a quarter of the way up the sides of the tub, start to form a rich froth. Karen took off her dress and tossed it through the open doorway into their room. Naked she was a peach-sunned bundle of compact pulchritude, her freckles and pug nose just a bit out of whack with the uninhibited sexuality she’d indulged in before.

Brett entered again. She’d taken off her sack dress and the bikini panties she’d been wearing under it and put on a loose-fitting robe of some kind of thin cotton material which proved to be transparent when she stood with the light behind her. The light from their room, I was happy to notice, was behind her. “Get into the tub and I’ll lather you up,” she suggested to Karen.

The blonde eased her fundament into the tub, squealing as the warm water lapped at it. Finally she settled down, her pine-cone breasts floating amongst the bubbles on top of the water. She leaned forward and they dipped into the bubbles like twin kittens dipping their noses into a saucer of warm milk. Brett lathered a washcloth and started laving Karen’s back.

Standing, with the light still behind her as she bent over Karen, the sinuous brunette presented a very sensual picture herself. Her legs were clearly visible, thanks to the light shining through the smock and between them. A rather long mane of blue-black pubic hair was also visible, curling around the insides of her slender, lightly muscled thighs. As she twisted over Karen, her tubular breasts swayed—oversized and long -- the pointy nipples clearly visible.

“Why don’t you get in?” Karen inquired as she leaned back after Brett had finished soaping her.

Brett slipped out of the smock. I had an unobstructed view of slim hips, slender but enticingly sculpted behind, thickly furred vagina, and oversized long breasts with long, maroon nipples. The nipples, which seemed permanently stiffened, sprang out of the milk-white breasts themselves; what aureoles there may have been had not enough pigmentation to show up against her breast flesh. Her bottom was also snow-white in a bikini design. The rest of her, including her Modigliani face, was a deep, golden tan -- striking with her blue-black hair and almond-shaped green eyes.

Facing each other in the tub now, the two girls made a pretty picture. Blondeness contrasted with brunette appeal, pigtails versus a long, loose mane like an inky cloud. Petite, well-rounded pulchritude, pink as a baby’s bottom, bosomed like twin balloons, but demurely non-nippled, vied with the streamlined sleekness of tanned limbs moving lasciviously, and alabaster white breasts, large and tubular and almost obscene in the way their long nipples strained to rigidity and pointed. It was The Girl Next Door coupled with the witchy bitch-vamp of legend, a dusky Circe smoldering on the rocks—or, rather, in the tub.

I started to smolder, too, as Karen reached out, lifted one of Brett’s oversized breasts in one hand, and proceeded to soap it with the other. The blonde was thorough. She lathered the palm of her hand and kept rubbing the foam over the long, hard nipple. Brett made small waves in the tub by way of response.

When Karen was through with the lingering process of soaping the second breast, Brett leaned across the tub and kissed her. Karen made no complaint; it obviously wasn’t the first time the two girls had kissed; it also obviously wasn’t the first time they’d done a lot more than kiss. I wondered if the bathtub was their usual trysting place.

The girls lips moved a little away from each other and their tongues flicked out-—Karen’s thick and pink; Brett’s slimmer, pointed, a deeper shade of red-—and the tips dueled with each other. Brett’s hand was busy under the water, between Karen’s legs, doing something I couldn’t see. Karen responded by picking up a sponge on a long handle and inserting it under the water between Brett’s supple thighs. Brett slid backward until her chin was resting on the water and her body arched so that I was able to see the long mane of blue-black pubic hair rising to the surface of the tub. The sponge had parted it and was moving like a piston.

Deliberately, carefully, Brett lifted one of her tubular breasts out of the water and rinsed the bubbles and soapsuds from it. When it was clean—the maroon nipple rigid and shiny—she held it up and motioned to Karen. The blonde shifted position in the tub, rising to her knees and bent over Brett. Karen’s own pink bosom bobbled over the water as her mouth dipped down to capture the breast tip offered it.

Brett reached out and her hands closed over the plump cheeks of Karen’s behind. As the blonde kissed and licked and sucked the brunette’s nipple, Brett pinched and squeezed and scratched the now-writhing bottom. All this activity caused stormy seas in the bathtub now, and the bubbly water was sloshing over the sides onto the carpeting.

After a long time Karen stood up in the tub. Brett kept playing with her rear, her fingers moving boldly between the reddened cheeks now, as Karen rinsed the soapsuds from the area of her groin. Karen's cute little clitty was up again, straining and purplish, the vagina lips framing it white and trembling.

Brett raised her head. She buried her mouth between Karens fleshy thighs. The blonde’s knees bent as she settled over Brett, blocking out her face completely. Her rear, still impaled by Brett’s probing finger, moved as if there was an electric vibrator inside it. I could clearly hear the sounds of Brett sucking, licking, and gulping from her position between Karen’s legs.

The brunette pulled away before Karen could come. She scrambled to her feet and both girls got out of the tub. Brett s nipples were magnified by the soap bubbles on the tips of them. The length of her curly pubic hair had been parted to reveal long lips at the entrance to her vagina. They were a deeper maroon color than her nipples. Her long clitoris, aroused, was a lighter shade. It kept appearing and disappearing between the quivering vagina lips.

Brett stood there a moment while Karen sat on the edge of the tub and buried her face in the pubic sporran. I could see the blonde’s pink tongue moving back and forth with the pumping of the clitty. Brett’s hands moved over her own breasts while this was going on, pinching the nipples hard, flopping first one and then the other breast up and down the way a man might heft a limp penis he was trying to bring to rigidity. Her sculpted behind, long and sleek, moved with a long, drawn-out rhythm as she pressed her clitty to Karen’s mouth and then withdrew it.

As I watched, Old Lucifer was moving with a will of his own. His raw, red head was bulging, his one eye frothing. And the inside of my fist was getting slippery.

Brett pushed Karen away, bent down, and kissed her on the mouth. They embraced and sank to the carpeted floor together. Brett’s long nipples pushed into the pink aureoles of Karen’s breasts for all the world like miniature penises trying to invade virgin vaginas. Their legs entwined. The long, blue-black beard between Brett’s legs fanned out over Karen’s groin, the dark tendrils entwining with the blonde triangle.

Stretched out on the bathroom carpeting, their flesh still slippery with the soapy water, froth still clinging to their breasts in places, soapsuds running down their limbs and slicking the crevices of their sex organs, the two girls clung together in an orgy of erotic lovemaking. Their mouths darted over one another, tongues flicking, lips sucking. Their hands moved from breasts to behinds to quivering crotches. Their fingers investigated each others orifices at length, probing twisting, pumping. Their legs opened and closed like two pairs of synchronized scissors. Their vaginas meshed; their clitties twanged against each other.

It was hot in the bathroom, and they were perspiring. So was I. And the closer they came to orgasm, the closer I came to coming.

Karen began to grunt again with the onrush of her climax. Brett laughed a harsh, strained, excited trill of laughter. Their bodies tensed against each other. They climaxed.

So did I. I came with a mighty gush. It knocked me off balance. I grabbed the doorknob for support. It gave under my hand. I tumbled into the bathroom, penis spurting like an eruption from Old Faithful.

I landed on top of the girls. The three of us finished our orgasms together. Who says three’s a crowd?

Of course they were surprised. They were also -- when they comprehended my state—interested. There’s no telling what might have happened with the three of us if not for the fact that just then there was the sound of three loud, distinct rifle shots.

They were followed by a scream—Alicia. I was still scrambling into my pants when the scream turned into recognizable words. “The President!” she yelled. “The President!” And she kept on repeating it. “The President!”

I raced down the corridor to the office where I’d left Nick Dickson. The door was open. Alicia stood in the doorway, still moaning “The President!” and pointing.

She was pointing at a body sprawled out on the rug. It was Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson. There was evidence of a shower of broken glass over the desk where he’d been sitting.

The shots had come through the window. High powered rifle, I guessed. Telescopic sight. But who had fired it?

“Insecticide?”

Chapter Four

Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson wasn’t dead. He’d merely fainted. From fear, I supposed.

“ ‘I am not a crook!’ ” Such were his first words when he recovered consciousness. “Let there be no mistake about that. I am not a crook!” he repeated. The tic in his eye blinked the traffic on its way.

None of the three shots had so much as grazed his ski-slope nose. “Insecticide”-- if indeed it was “Insecticide” who was responsible—-was evidently a lousy marksman. Dickson was alive and quoting himself.

“I am not a crook!” Dickson groaned again.

“My father is not a crook!” Dickson’s family, concerned, had congregated in the doorway. The speaker was his brunette daughter, Muley, so nicknamed because of her stubborn loyalty to her father. “I lived with the man for over twenty years and never did I miss so much as one penny from my piggy bank. ‘Honesty’ is my father’s middle name!”

“No, dear. ‘Swillhouse’ is his middle name,” Muley’s mother, Natalie Dickson (known to the tabloid reading public as “Nat”) corrected her daughter.

“The man is a tower of strength!” Pisha Dickson, Nick and Nat’s other daughter announced, eyes picking up a shine from her sleek, Clairol-blonde hair. “He should be an inspiration to us all. He doesn’t know the meaning of fear!”

“The hell you say!” Nick Dickson muttered through chattering teeth. “If somebody shot at you, sister, you’d be plenty [expletive deleted] scared. Let me make that one thing perfectly clear!”

“Remember what you always say, dear,” Nat Dickson chirruped brightly. “ ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ ”

“Did I say that?" Dickson was pleased with himself.

“Yes, dear.”

“I certainly have a knack with words, a facility for the catchy phrase.”

“Oh, yes, daddy!” Nat reassured him. “ ‘Come let us reason together,’ ” she quoted.

“Said that too, did I?” Dickson was definitely perking up.

“’Ask not what your country can do to you, but what you can do to your country!’”

“How’s that again?” Dickson looked puzzled.

“It’s ‘for’ you, mummy,” Muley corrected Nat.

“And ‘for’ your country,” Pisha added.

“I’m sorry, daddy.” Nat was contrite.

“Doesn't matter.” Dickson was magnanimous. “What’s important is that I said it.”

The stroking, I judged, could go on forever. This was as good a time for me to interrupt as any. “If you think you’ll be all right for a little while, Mr. President,” I said respectfully, “I’d like to go outside and have a look around the grounds. Maybe I can get a clue as to the identity of your would-be assassin.”

“Go ahead, Karl.” He waved me on my way. “But ‘don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!’ ” he called after me.

Nat, Pisha, and Muley applauded.

Outside, dusk was floating down on the dying rays of a Caribbean sunset. I crossed the walled-in grounds of Rococco’s estate to the area from which I judged the shots had come. Taking a turn at a grove of palm trees, I was greeted by a rifle butt bouncing off my solar plexus.

“Oof!” I said, the best I could do by way of returning the greeting.

“Sure an’ don’t you know you're out-o’-bounds here, boyo?”

The voice was familiar. As it emerged into the half-light of dusk, so was the face. It took me a minute to remember where we’d met before. Then I had it

“You’re the Irishman who was on the boat,” I managed to grunt.

He peered at me in the darkness. Then he snapped his fingers. “The bucko in the sack!” He gave me a spotty grin, spotty due to his missing one or two frontish teeth. “Sure an’ I've not forgotten you.”

“Since we’re such old sailing buddies,” I reminded him, “would you mind getting that gun out of my midriff?” I put my hand on the barrel to push the gun away. The barrel was still hot. It had been recently fired. The gun was a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight.

Despite my attempt to separate myself from it, the rifle didn’t move from its painfully prodding perch. “Now you should know better than to be handing out blarney to an Irishman,” my captor told me. “Just what are you doin’ out here, anyway? Answer me fast now, boyo. I feel a twitch comin’ on my trigger finger.”

I answered him all right. Before his twitch could twang the trigger, I tightened my grip on the rifle barrel and tugged. At the same time I brought my knee up into his groin.

“Oof!” It was his turn.

I gave him no chance to recover. I delivered a karate chop to his Adam’s apple. He went down, purple and gasping. Before he could hit the ground I tapped his skull with the rifle barrel, using just enough clout to put him to sleep for a convenient while.

“Sean? Amigo?” The Spanish-accented voice came from the underbrush off to my left.

I faded into the palm grove and waited. A moment later another figure emerged into the clearing. He was the light-skinned Cuban who’d been with the Irishman on the boat. I stuck Sean’s gun into his back and told him to drop the firearm he was carrying. Like Sean’s it was a high-powered job with a telescopic sight.

He dropped it—right on my foot, putting all his weight into it. The sudden pain shooting up my leg was so intense that I almost dropped the rifle I’d taken from Sean. Almost, but not quite. I’m the vindictive type. Instead of dropping Sean’s gun, I clouted the Cuban over the head with it. He fell to the ground beside Sean, out just as cold as the Irishman was.

I picked up the Cuban’s rifle. I broke it open. There was a clip in the chamber. One bullet had been fired. I sniffed the barrel. Recently fired.

That accounted for two of the potshots taken at Dickson. It wasn’t too hard for me to make an educated guess as to the origin of the third shot. Somewhere around here was a black Bahamian with an ingrained prejudice against ofays.

“Hold it right there, Snow White!”

I’d completed three-quarters of a three-hundred-sixty-degree turn meant to ferret him out when his voice sounded from behind me. “First Sleepy and Dopey.” I indicated the two unconscious forms on the ground. “And now my old friend Grumpy. You’d be a sight for sore eyes if I could see you.”

“I’m Bashful.” He corrected me. “Drop those guns first, and then maybe I’ll drop my magic cloak of in- visibility.”

I dropped the guns.

“Okay, Snow White, your Prince has come.” He stepped around in front of me, kicking the two guns out of my reach. He was holding a rifle of the same make and model.

“I’m gonna file a complaint with my Fairy Godmother,” I told him. “You still look like Grumpy to me.

“Once upon a time,” he pointed out, “there was an Enchanted Forest which was strictly off limits to ofay ogres such as you, Snow White. Now if I was to ask my mirror-mirror-on-the-wall how come you to be here, what answer do you s’pose I’d get?”

“I’m Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson’s bodyguard.”

“And I’m the White Knight. Come on, honky, you can do better than that. I’ll give you three.” He cocked the rifle.

“It’s true!”

“One . . .”

“I really am Dickson’s bodyguard!”

“Two . . .”

“Check me out before you do anything drastic!”

“Three!”

I dived sideways and the bullet zinged past my earlobe. One silly millimeter closer and I’d have been halfway to a pair of pierced ears. As it was, the breeze ruffled my sideburns.

The Bahamian swiveled to fire again. I came up with an overripe coconut and lobbed it at him. He ducked. It missed. But it delayed his aiming the rifle effectively again.

I took advantage of the delay. My plunge was for his feet, intending to knock them out from under him. He avoided it so smoothly as to make me think fleeting racist thoughts about “natural rhythm.” He tap-danced “Swanee River” over my face.

The options were limited. I bit his ankle. My choppers dug for marrow. The maneuver didn't improve race relations.

He tried for a high kick to my nose. I stuck my proboscis into my armpit by way of defense. What with all the exercise I was getting, my deodorant was let- ting me down. Also, I’d had to wrench my teeth loose from his foot. That left it free to stomp out a George M. Cohan medley on the back of my neck. I saw stars and stripes. Then I only saw stars. The show ended with a blackout.

My ears opened up before my eyes. I had no idea how long I’d been out. I felt a mattress under my back. Also there was no Caribbean breeze ruffling the air. I was indoors, on a bed, or a sofa of some kind.

“Why not just off him?” The Bahamian’s voice.

“Not until we find out where he fits in.” A new speaker, one I hadn’t heard before.

They were arguing, I realized, about my fate. I couldn’t help taking sides. My cheering section was all-out for the new boy.

I opened my eyes. The Bahamian was looking black thunder at me. Behind him the Irishman and the Cuban were passing a bottle of Mercurochrome back and forth and tending to their wounds. No help there. I turned my attention to the new man in the room.

He was in his fifties, well-built, outdoorsy-looking with a deep tan and I’d guess good muscle tone, a Latin cast to his features. Now he saw that I’d regained consciousness. “Who are you?” He put the question bluntly.

“Karl Powers.” I remembered to answer with my alias. “Who are you?”

“PeePee Rococco.” His proud tone demanded at the very least a tug at the old forelock.

My forelock remained untugged. “I’m President Dickson’s bodyguard,” I announced, figuring that brazening it out was my best shot in the circumstances. “And these men have been interfering with my doing my duty.”

Much hostile murmurs in Gaelic, Cuban-accented Spanish, and Bahamian patois. Rococco gestured them to silence. “These men are guards in my employ,” he informed me. “Their job is to guard my property against intruders. You were trespassing. Also you assaulted them. I would be perfectly within my rights in having you shot.”

“But kind of shaky legally.” I gave him a sick grin. I didn’t want to be shot. I hadn’t done my Christmas shopping yet. For 1997.

“Legally?” He looked at me as if I’d just won the Oscar for Fool of the Year.

I remembered to whom I was talking. PeePee Rococco. Legalities weren’t part of his lexicon. This was the man who’d guided various brothers and nephews of the President into the receiving of Las Vegas moneys from a well-known recluse millionaire bent on bending the antimonopoly laws²³ . This was the man who’d okayed the deposit of vast sums of laundered money in the bank he controlled, a bank, it might be added, which operated without competition thanks to government antitrust decisions in its favor. And this was the man who’d brought the Mafia under the benificence of the Presidency itself! Legally? Shee-it! I accepted the dunce cap.

“Whitey here was with that Alicia when we went to snatch her,” the Bahamian informed Rococco.

“Now that’s interesting.” Rococco spared me an Arctic smile. “And does President Dickson know that?”

The way he said it I realized that he knew that Alicia was Dickson’s daughter. “Well, uh, no.” I had to admit it.

“And if he learned of it, what do you think he would do?”

“Fire me.”

“Very good.” Rococco awarded me a gold star. “We don’t have to worry about Mr. Powers,” he assured his henchmen. “He has his little secrets from the President, just as we do.”

“Except that yours aren’t so little,” I reminded him. “These three goons of yours tried to bump off Dickson. That’s not exactly in the same class with - umm - dating his secretary.”

“Dating?” The hee-haw came from the Bahamian. “That was sure ’nuf some plain-an’-fancy dating you was up to in that palm tree, Mister Charlie!”

“Dickson’s secretary?” Rococco reminded me that we both knew better. He paused, letting that sink in, and then he continued. “As for these gentlemen shooting at my old friend Nick, Why what proof do you have?”

“Three rifle bullets that will match up with the three guns they were carrying.”

“Really?” Rococco was wide-eyed. “But these guards don’t carry rifles. Show Mr. Powers your weapons, gentlemen.”

Each of them held up a submachine gun.

“You see, Mr. Powers? And if you were to go to Nicholas with such a fantastic story, who do you think he would believe? You, the man who seduced his -- umm—secretary? Or me, his friend and mentor of some twenty years?”

“Column B,” I admitted, defeated.

“That’s right, Mr. Powers.”

“I still say we should waste him!” Fee-fi-fo-fum! The Bahamian smelled the blood of an ofay-man.

“Sure an’ that’s me preference too!” The Irishman must have noticed my black-and-tan socks.

“Si! Kill him!” The Cuban agreed.

“Oh, no. He would only be replaced. And possibly by someone a lot less amenable to working with us.”

Rococco chipped off another one of his iceberg smiles.

“Mr. Powers will continue working for President Dickson and he will stay out of our way while he’s doing it. He has no choice. Isn’t that so, Mr. Powers?”

“That’s so,” I agreed, crossing my fingers behind my eyeballs.

“You can go now, Mr. Powers.” Rococco waved me away. Why not? He was sure he had me in his hip pocket.

I left. Evidently they’d held me in some sort of guest house on the other side of the grounds from the main building. The two structures were a little more than a mile apart. Heading back, I had a lot to think about.

What was Rococco’s game? First his gorillas had tried to put the snatch on Dickson’s illegitimate daughter. Then they had tried to kill Dickson himself. Or had they? Somehow I couldn’t believe those three were such bad shots. Could they have missed him on purpose? Had they only been trying to scare Dickson? If so, then what was the purpose? Was there a connection with “Insecticide?” My guess was that only Rococco knew the answers.

I was following a sort of path through the carefully arranged shrubbery which sculpted the grounds. Rounding a bend, I came to a halt in astonishment. Three crones were bent over a cauldron, stirring it with large ladles.

They hadn’t seen me. I stepped back into the shadows to be sure they wouldn’t. However. I recognized them. I’d seen their pictures in the papers often enough during the period which preceded the leaving of offfice by Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson.

The most familiar was Rosalie Forest, Dickson’s one-time Girl Friday, famed far and wide for her heavy foot on the tape-recorder gas pedal. She stopped stirring long enough to hold up a little doll with a ski-slope nose and stick a pin in it. Stirring beside her was Dotty Whiskers, former I.L.L. lobbyist, kidnap victim of the four “Flushers”²⁴ (Katzenjammer, Jammerkatzen, Rosenkrantz, and Guildenstern²⁵ ), and living testimonial to modern medicine’s ability to cause and cure disabling coronary ailments as political expediency dictated. Mrs. Whiskers was shredding some papers— presumably “politically sensitive documents”-- into the fire under the cauldron. Just to keep from getting out of practice, I imagined. The third hag—a little less haggish than the other two -- Was Marsha Twitchell, a southern belle wrung out once too often, former wife of Big Don, Dixie mush-mouth hooked up by a permanent hotline to the gossip columns of the nation. Every so often Marsha stopped stirring long enough to jot down a few notes for the book she was writing. According to Paw Chitlin, her New York lawyer-cum-agent, these memoirs would be “critical” of her husband’s “judgment in remaining loyal and protecting the President.” Would Dickson ever let her get the manuscript off the island?

“Double, double, spoils and trouble,” Rosalie Forest singsonged as she stirred the cauldron. “I gave him the best years of my life,” she added, sticking in another pin.

“Memos burn and Congress bubble,” Dotty Whiskers cackled. “An honest politician is one who, when he’s bought, he stays bought!” She shredded some toilet paper. “Nick Dickson is not an honest politician!”

“Says he’s not a crook,” Rosalie Forest reminded her.

“Sure!” Dotty Whiskers cackled again. “And let me make one thing perfectly clear: Jesse James was only trying to investigate if any of his subordinates were robbing the railroad.”

“Got him by his groiny stubble!” incanted Marsha Twitchell in her magno1ia-’n’-Coca-Cola drawl. “Big Don used to say ‘Lawsy-and-Order,’ and shut mah telephone and hold me prisonah in mah own house and all to protec’ that Tricky Nickie Dickson²⁶ . Y’all know they use to be law pahtnehs? Law-and-Ordeh pahtnehs! Why Tricky Nickie had Big Don handlin’ moah bugs than a houn’ dawg with fleas!” She jotted down another note on the margin of her manuscript.

My eye was caught by metal glinting in the shrubbery behind the kettle. Carefully, I circled the witchy trio and reached the glittering objects from behind. The glint came from three high-powered rifles with telescopic sights. Each of them was warm, as though recently fired. I examined them. One bullet was missing from the clip of each.

What the hell?

I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to find that the Bahamian had crept up behind me. He gestured. I looked where he’d indicated and saw PeePee Rococco waiting in the underbrush. I made my way over to him.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“I think those three fired the shots at Dickson,” he whispered back.

“How come you think that now? What about the bullets your men fired?”

“I didn’t know it when last we met, but since then I've questioned them. They didn’t shoot at Dickson. They merely responded to shots fired at the house from this general direction.”

I stared at him, wondering whether to believe him, or not. “Are you telling me that you thought your men shot at Dickson and that was okay with you, but now you find out they were shooting to protect him and that’s okay with you too?”

“I didn’t have to tell you, Mr. Powers.” There was a petulant note in his voice, like that of a little boy wrongly accused of stealing his father’s stash of hash. He faced away then, his underlings facing away with him.

Confusion rained, soggying up my brain. Just who had fired the three shots at Dickson? Could I even be sure that the three rifles in the underbrush belonged to the three witches? For all I knew, they might be the same three rifles Rococco’s hoods had been packing before. He might even have had them planted here now just to muddy up my thinking.

“We had better stop stirring now.” Rosalie Forest spoke. “Dinner will be soon. We have to get this soup up there in time for it.” The three of them each managed to get a grip on the big kettle and started hauling it toward the main building.

I was right behind them. I circled around to the front of the structure, entered, and went straight up to President Dickson’s rooms. He was waiting for me. We went down to dinner together.

“Did you find out anything, Karl?” he asked me as we descended the staircase.

“Could be,” I told him. “Don’t eat the soup,” I added.

“I don’t care for any [expletive deleted] soup,” he told the serving girl when we were seated at table. “Let there be no mistake about that.”

“But we-all made it ’specially foah you, sugah,” Marsha Twitchell coaxed him. “Didn’t we, girls?”

“I have a memo to that effect, Mr. President,” Dotty Whiskers assured him maliciously. “Unshredded,” she added.

“Aft er all my loyal years to have even my soup cast aside,” Rosalie Forest sniveled.

Dickson, however, held firm. He passed the soup by.

A steaming pot-roast was brought in. It had been sliced with a precision worthy of a work of art. Dickson studied it with admiration. “My compliments to the chef, he told the serving girl. “Tell the fat Jap I want to see him personally.” As the girl went out, he turned to me. “This fat Jap cook I got used to work for Elvis Greco. But something that big-mouthed [characterization omitted] Greek said offended him, and he quit. So I hired him at the White House.”

“What did Mr. Greco say that offended him?” I asked.

“Search me. Maybe one of those Polack jokes the Veep likes to tell. I don’t know, though -” President Dickson scratched his head. “This fellow doesn’t look Polish.”

I could see that for myself as a stout Oriental entered the room. He accepted Dickson’s compliments on the pot roast impassively. Then he thanked him a bit flatly and returned to the kitchen.

“Have some [expletive omitted] pot roast, Karl.” The President indicated for the serving girl to hold the platter for me.

“You first, Mr. President.”

“No, you first, Karl.”

“But I insist, Mr. President.”

“No! I insist, Karl!”

It was an impasse. “Why do you insist, Mr. President?” I inquired.

I live with the constant threat of assassination, Karl. This [expletive omitted] may be poisoned Now its a matter of executive privilege to have you taste the pot roast first.”

“Mr. President,” I reasoned desperately, “suppose the meat is poisoned. Suppose I taste it. Suppose it kills me. Then who would there be to protect you if that happened?”

“You have a point there, Karl. On the other hand, if I taste it and it kills me, who will there be for you, to protect? You’ll be out of a [unintelligible] job, Karl.

“I have a suggestion, Mr. President. Let's let a third party taste the meat.”

“A very good idea, Karl. But who?” Dickson surveyed the table.

“I ate the soup!” Rosalie Forest ruled herself out.

“It gave me the runs!” Dotty Whiskers bolted the table.

“Ah have always been dependent on the kindness of columnists.” Marsha Twitchell batted her eyes warningly.

Dickson’s eyes moved on around the table to his wife, Nat. “Remember what you said, darling, when they forced you to abdicate,” she reminded him. “’I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love.’ ”

Dickson’s gaze continued past Nat to daughter Muley. “Daddy! Daddy! You’ve been more than a father to me,” she warbled. “You’ve been more than a dad. You’re the best pal I had . . .”

“We want Dickson!” Pisha turned a handspring the length of the table. “Fight, team, fight!

“Dickson uber alles!” Hans und Fritz saluted in chorus.

At last Nicholas Dickson’s gaze came to rest at the very foot of the table. A pudgy young man sat there quivering and sweating. Dickson’s finger pointed at him, singling him out. ”

“Who do you think should taste the meat, Don? Dickson asked squinting at the head of the pin about to impale the fly.

“No comment!” Don Zigzag’s voice was shrill.

“How about you, Don?”

“That statement is inoperative!” Zigzag cringed and pleaded.

“Watch him hang there, twisting slowly, slowly in the wind!” Fritz leered.

“Taste the [expletive deleted] pot roast, Don.” Dickson smiled like a razor blade. “That’s an order.”

“I wish I was back in Disneyland!” Don Zigzag moaned. But he obediently tasted the pot roast. A moment later he fell to the floor, writhing. “It’s poisoned,” he gasped. “I’m going to die.”

“Nonsense, Don.” Dickson was reassuring. “We both know there’s no limit to the amount of mistreatment you can stand. That’s why you’re so valuable to me. Just shove your finger down your throat like always, and by morning, you’ll be good as new.”

“Yes, Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. President.” Don Zigzag shoved his finger down his throat. “God bless you, Mr. President.”

“Karl.” The former President turned to me. “Perhaps you’d better have a talk with that fat slant.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

I went out to the kitchen. I was too late. The Japanese chef was on his knees in front of the oven. He clutched an electric knife by the hilt in both hands. “I go to join my honorable ancestors!” he announced. He pressed the button activating the knife and plunged the throbbing twin blades deep into his midsection.

That’s what comes from seeing too many World War Two movies on the “Late Show,” I reflected. “Who put you up to this?” I asked as the two vibrating blades cut deeper into his middle.

“Hara-kiri seals my lips!” With a final thrust he finished the job. The electric knife gave a last little whir and was silent. The secret of who was behind his poison attempt on the life of the former President died with him.

I went back into the dining room and told them what had happened. It sort of put a damper on the rest of dinner. Until the dessert, that is.

“You’ll never guess what it is, daddy.” Nat Dickson gave her husband her broadest 4-H grin.

“Now let me see-—” Dickson pondered coyly.

“Guess, daddy, guess!” Pisha and Muley chorused, clapping their hands.

“Apple pie,” Dickson teased, knowing better.

“It’s as American as apple pie, daddy,” Pisha told him.

“But it isn’t apple pie,” Muley added.

“Guess again! Guess again!” Nat Dickson liked this game they were playing. It was even more fun than “Beat the Clock.”

“Could it be . . . [Dickson paused, a politician’s pause, building the suspense] could it be . . . ice cream?” he guessed finally.

“You peeked, daddy!” Nat was almost tearful at the idea of the game ending so soon. “You went and bugged the kitchen!”

“Not my father!” Muley defended him stoutly. “My father would never do anything like that. I’ve lived with the man for over twenty years, and he’s never bugged the kitchen even once to my knowledge.”

“But what kind, daddy?” Once again Pisha tried to save the day with her instinct for public relations. “What kind of ice cream?”

“I’m not the first President to bug his own kitchen!” Nick Dickson was still brooding over Nat’s accusation. “Johnson, Truman, Lincoln . . .”

“I don’t think they had bugs in Lincoln’s day, Mr. President,” Rosalie Forest reminded him.

“Lincoln used to sneak into the pantry and eavesdrop!” Dickson told her. “[Expletive deleted]! That’s a well-known historical fact!”

“What kind of ice cream, daddy?” Pisha was still trying to protect his image.

“Strawberry,” Dickson guessed.

“No, daddy,” Nat Dickson giggled delightedly.

“Vanilla.”

“You’re getting warm, daddy.”

“Blueberry, mother. It must be blueberry!”

“Wrong, daddy. You’re wrong.” Nat Dickson was as exuberant as a cheerleader after a touchdown—albeit an aging cheerleader. Its not strawberry. It’s not vanilla. And it’s not blueberry.”

“You mean to say it’s not red white and/or blue, mother? “ Dickson was mock-shocked.

”It’s as American as red, white and blue, daddy,” Pisha assured him.

But it isn’t red and it isn’t white, and it isn’t blue,” Muley added.

“I’ll give you a hint, daddy.” Nat Dickson winked a Doris Pay wink, feminine but pure. “It’s your favorite flavor!

“[Expletive deleted], no!” Dickson beamed.

“Yes!” Nat, Muley, and Pisha chorused.

“It s not-—”

“It is!” they assured him, banners flying.

My favorite,” Dickson mused. “As American as apple pie, as American as red, white, and blue. . . . Then it must be -” He paused dramatically again.

‘Yes! Yes! Nat and Muley couldn’t restrain Pisha from turning a cartwheel.

“Macadamia nut!” Dickson held up both hands clasped together and shook them, still the champ.

Somewhere a brass band played a Sousa march. “Thats right, daddy! You guessed! You guessed!” His wife and two daughters were beside themselves with delight.

But for Dickson the game was over now. “Let the record show that I guessed it, my favorite all-American ice cream, macadamia nut. And now I am ready to eat it. Let there be no doubt about that.”

Nat Dickson signaled the serving girl. She hurried out to the kitchen. A moment later she reappeared with a large bowl.

Once the bowl had contained a large mound of macadamia nut ice cream carefully sculpted into a replica of the S.S. Titanic. But the sculptured ice cream was more than half melted now, and the Titanic had all but sunk. Somewhere a ship’s orchestra played “Nearer My God to Thee.”

“Who scuttled my ship?” Nick Dickson demanded to know.

“We waited too long, daddy,” Nat told him sadly. “It just melted right out from under us.”

“I leave that kind of talk to the purveyors of doom and gloom,” Dickson reminded her. “My faith and the faith of millions of silent Americans remains unshaken.” So saying he started slurping up the Titanic ice cream with a soup spoon. “As sound as the economy,” he was heard to mutter over the molten mess. “As sound as the American economy. . . .”

After dinner the Dickson family and friends and bodyguard (myself being included) adjourned to a large screening room. We were going to be shown a new hit movie, The Excretist²⁷ .

We sat down. The lights went out. The screen lit up. Duke Wayne made a heartfelt appeal for the Watergate Memorial Fund. Hans und Fritz, in Marine Corps dress uniforms, passed among us with red, white, and blue donation cans. Under Dickson's watchful gaze, we all contributed. (Somewhere Will Rogers²⁸ turned over in his grave.)

Alicia settled down in the seat next to me. She passed me a bag of popcorn. The feature began.

As the credits faded away, the camera came up on an old rabbi (Orthodox) excavating an archeological digs somewhere in Egypt. The rabbi’s shovel hit something: an artifact; with much visible excitement, he extricated it. A close-up of the artifact: it was a large political poster. On one side was a picture which bore a striking resemblance to Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson; under it was the identification: Attila The Hun. On the other side of the placard, in large capital letters, were the words BRING US TOGETHER AGAIN! The rabbi lifted his yarmulke and scratched his head, disturbed. Obviously something was very wrong.

The scene switched to a political rally in Washington, D.C. There was a long shot of a little girl waving a sign. It was the same poster as in the previous scene except the name Nicholas Swillhouse Dickson now appeared under the photograph. There was a close-up of the little girl staring at the picture. Slowly her expression changed from one of sweet innocence to the one of sly, cynical cunning on the face in the picture.

On the rally platform, high-level Dicksonites had gathered to pay homage. The little girl intruded on them. “You’re all going to be bugged!” she screamed at them hysterically. She cackled shrilly. She lifted one leg and urinated on Don Zigzag whose fixed smile never changed. The little girl’s mother, horrified, pushed up and yanked her daughter from the platform.

Now there was a series of scenes designed to demonstrate that the little girl had been possessed by a demon. There was a graphic close-up of her vomiting. (I passed the bag of popcorn back to Alicia.) The gush of vomit filled the screen. (Alicia dumped the popcorn onto the floor and herself upchucked into the empty bag.) A Niagara of diarrhea cascaded in Cinemascope. (Alicia tried to pass me the popcorn bag.) A Red Sea of menstrual flow washed over the wide screen in living color. (I refused to take the puke-filled popcorn bag.) Finally, steaming piles of human excrement vied with turds in the process of elimination to fill the eyes of the audience.

“[Expletive deleted]! That’s what I call art!” an awed voice pronounced in the darkness of the screening room.

About now, in the movie, the little girl’s mother was starting to get a little bit concerned. Cleaning the little gir1’s room was becoming a problem. So mama called in a local young rabbi (Reformed) for help.

The rabbi found the little girl ramming a mezuzah up her anal cavity. “Like this you masturbate?” he asked, a twinkle in his eye, trying to gain her confidence by showing what a hip young rabbi he really was.

“You get your kicks your way, and I’ll get mine my way,” the little girl told him in a deep voice that sounded like Nick Dickson with a German accent and a bad cold.

“You’re making an awful mess of your hemorrhoids.” The young rabbi called the carnage to her attention.

There was a long close-up of the disgusting mess. (Several people in the screening room threw up into their popcorn bags. A stewardess on loan from Pan Am passed among them murmuring words of comfort.)

“What’s wrong with my little girl?” the worried mother was asking the rabbi now.

“She’s possessed,” he told her.

“I was afraid of that. What can be done about it?”

“I’m afraid that demon is going to have to come out.”

“You mean—!”

“Yes.” The young rabbi nodded his head seriously. “I’m going to have to call in ‘The Excretist!’ ”

Now came the climactic scene. “The Excretist turned out to be the old rabbi (Orthodox) seen at the beginning of the picture. Together with the young rabbi (Reformed), he confronted the demon in pos- session of the little girl.

“The first thing when you want a demon should be excreted,” he explained to the young rabbi, is you should establish what they call a relationship with him. To do this you should talk nice. Like so. He turned back to the little girl. “Hey, demon, you maybe feel like shmoozing?”

“All right.” The little girl answered him in the hoarse, Teutonic, Dickson voice.

“You got maybe a name; it don’t sound so nice I should call you ‘demon.’ ”

“My name is Attila the Hun. You can call me Attila.”

“Oy, veg! I should have known it was you! We met before. Remember? It was in some pharaoh’s tomb—I forget his name—in Egypt.” Sotto voce, the old rabbi added to the young rabbi: “This is one tough demon, believe you me!”

“Can you get him excreted?”

“I got just the thing right here should make him -- you should pardon the expression— excrete in his pants.” The old rabbi reached inside his coat and whipped out a large, framed photograph of Senator Sam Ervin²⁹ . He shoved it into the little girl’s face. “Hit the road, dybbuk!” he trumpeted.

“AAAIIIYEEE!” Attila screamed in anguish. The little girl vomited wildly again. It spewed all over the old rabbi.

Suddenly he fell backward, away from the possessed child.

“What’s the matter?” the young rabbi wanted to know. “You’ve got him on the run. Don’t stop now!”

“Pastrami.” The old rabbi picked a piece of the regurgitated cold cut from his vest. “It gives me heartburn. It always gives me heartburn.” He backed farther away. “Accursed demon!” he sobbed. “You win again!” The old rabbi fled the room.

This was too much for the young rabbi. “Diabolical fiend! To give an old man heartburn! Have you no compassion at all then?”

Attila the Hun laughed. The little girl picked cruelly at a scab. Pus flowed over the bed.

“[Expletive deleted], man! That’s entertainment,” someone in the screening room remarked.

The young rabbi was beside himself now. “Leave her alone, you coward!” he yelled. “If you have any courage at all, leave her and take me. Take me instead if you dare!”

“Attila the Hun never turns down a dare!”

The little girl suddenly went limp. There was a close-up of the young rabbi as he and the demon battled for possession of his body and mind—-and presumably his soul. It became obvious that the demon had entered and was quickly gaining the upper hand in the battle for control. But the young rabbi had just enough will left for one last, self-sacrificing action to destroy the monster.

He dashed from the room and out into the hallway. He yanked open a doorway and wrestled the demon into a small room. And then, in one of the screen’s truly monumental symbolic battles, the young rabbi stuffed himself --demon and all -- down the incinerator.

A hollow voice came floating back up the shaft: “At least you won’t have Attila the Hun to kick around anymore!”

So ended the movie. The screen went dark. It was pitch-black in the screening room. “Good flic,” I remarked to Alicia. There was no answer. “Nauseating though,” I added. Still no answer. I waited for the lights to be turned on. They weren’t. I began to sense that something was not quite right.

I felt the seat beside me. It was empty. Alicia was no longer sitting there. I sniffed. What was that smell? Vomit? Oh, yes. Plenty of that. But something else besides. Something like— chloroform! That was it. Chloroform!

“Lights!” I shouted. “Turn on the lights.”

There was a shuffling of footsteps. There was the dull thud of one body in motion colliding with another body in motion. There was an exchange of curses. Finally the lights were turned on.

Alicia was nowhere to be seen.

I raced up the short flight of steps to the projection booth behind the screening room in which we had been sitting. When I opened the door, the smell of chloroform was quite strong in there. The projectionist was slumped over the table behind his equipment. He was out colder than an Eskimo witch’s frozen mammary.

I ran outside. Some of the others followed me. About a hundred yards from the house, on the lawn, but partly shielded by some tall tropical bushes, I made out a helicopter. It was on the ground, but its blades were whirling. Two men were hurrying toward it, carrying a prostrate form between them. I guessed that a third man was already at the controls of the Whirlybird.

A pistol shot cracked out from behind me. There was an answering burst of submachine-gun fire from the chopper. Being in between, I flung myself flat on the ground and made like a mole.

“Don’t shoot!” I yelled to those behind me. “You’ll hit the girl!” I didn’t bother mentioning the fact that they might also hit me. Somehow I didn’t think that would deter them.

They had the girl inside the chopper now. The door closed behind the two men who’d grabbed her. There was a final spraying of bullets from the copter, and then it rose straight up in the air and headed due South toward the coast of South America.

I stood up and walked back toward the house. The others were ahead of me. They had congregated in a group on the veranda.

As I came up the steps, PeePee Rococco was standing directly in my path. I shot him my hardest look.

The attempt to snatch Alicia back on Paradise Island may have been our secret, but it took on new meaning in light of this new, successful raid. Besides, Rococco’s three goons—the Bahamian, the Cuban, and the Irishman—were nowhere to be seen.

Was Rococco “Insecticide?” Was “Insecticide” behind this latest snatch? I had no answers.

But the inescapable fact was that three men had kidnapped the former President’s secret daughter!

Chapter Five

The phone call came the next morning. The caller refused to speak to anyone but Dickson himself. He didn’t stay on long enough to put a tracer on the call. He told Dickson that a tape cassette with a message for him had been fastened to the underside of the crap table at the Paradise Island Casino.

Rumor had it, I remembered, that PeePee Bococco was secretly involved in one of the investment concerns which was secretly involved with the Mafia adjunct which was secretly involved in the operation of the Paradise Island Casino. What reminded me of this gossip was the fact that it was Rococco who called Paradise Island for Dickson and arranged for someone at the Casino to check out the crap table. (Interestingly enough, Rococco’s three hoods were still notable by their absence.) By afternoon the cassette had been flown from Paradise Island and delivered to Dickson.

“Would you like me to play it for you, Mr. President?” Rosalie Forest offered, her foot tapping uncontrollably.

Dickson and Fritz—or was it Hans? -- simply stared at her while the silence lengthened into the type that is described as “pregnant.” Miss Forest turned from pink to red to purple. “This one is to be played, not erased!” Hans—or was it Fritz?—reminded her nastily.

Finally Dickson lowered his eyebrows and put the cassette on the player himself. A male voice was heard first.

“I speak for the Lilliputian Liberation Army. Our group is holding Alicia Alvarez as a prisoner of war under the rules laid down by the Geneva Convention. Why Alicia Alvarez? You know the answer to that, President Dickson. And so do we. Enough said on that score. To reassure you that you are in contact with the genuine abductors, the next voice you hear will be that of Alicia Alvarez.”

“Pa-pa-pa-resident Dickson!” It was indeed Alicia’s voice. “These people mean business. They are a well-organized and legitimate movement aimed at freeing midgets, dwarfs, and pygmies from the domination of the big bullies who control and manipulate society. The little people consider me a legitimate prisoner and are treating me as such. However, if you don’t do exactly as they say, they tell me that you will never see me again. I’m not sure whether that means they will kill me or not. But I believe them. And so should you. Please, Pa-pa-pa-resident Dickson, follow their instructions to the letter if you care about me at all. Do exactly as they say! I beg you! Exactly as they say!”

“President Dickson.” The man’s voice again. “Here are our instructions. You will proceed directly to Paris with no more than one traveling companion. You will travel incognito, and preferably not by commercial airline. You will register at a small hotel in Clichy, Le Petit Palais, under the name of Mr. Checkers. You will be contacted there, under that name, by us, and given further instructions. We will arrange for you to receive certain preconditions to our demands. Meeting those preconditions will be the proof needed that you are dealing with us in good faith. If they are not met, if our instructions are not followed down to the last detail, we shall immediately break off negotiations and you will not hear from POW Alicia Alvarez again. That is all for now, President Dickson.” The tape ended.

Lucky me. I was the “one traveling companion” Dickson picked to go with him. Arrangements were made for us to travel by the jet plane PeePee Rococco kept at his private airfield on the island. Rococco’s personal pilot would fly us to Paris.

The plane was a Lear, a twin-jet cabin job which could hold six passengers comfortably. The only ones aboard, however, were Dickson, myself, and the pilot. The pilot piloted, Dickson dozed, and I pondered.

A beehive; that’s where my head was at; a beehive of questions. Why had the kidnappers’ message pointed us northeast toward Paris when the copter that had snatched Alicia had headed due South toward the South American coast? Why had Rococco tried to have her abducted from Paradise Island that first time? Where had his three goons vanished to? What was Rococco’s connection with this latest, successful kidnapping of the ex-President’s secret daughter? Who was behind the Japanese chef’ s try at poisoning Dickson? Where did “Insecticide” fit into all this? Was D.O.P.E. involved? The Mafia? Any of the other members of Dickson’s coterie? And even if I had answers to any of these questions, what specifically did Charles Putnam expect me to do about it?

Dickson Woke up and started playing with his Yo-Yo.

“Mr. President?”

“What the [expletive deleted] is it, Karl?”

“I wonder if I might listen to that tape from the Lilliputian Liberation Army again.”

“What is the specific purpose of this [unintelligible] request, Karl?”

“I was hoping I might hear something I’d missed the first time around, Mr. President. Some clue perhaps—”

“That sounds suspiciously like a fishing expedition to me, Karl. My responsibility to the high office I have held and to the future Presidents of this country who will one day have held this same high office — an office, let me be very clear, which I will not be responsible for seeing weakened—precludes me allowing you to bring your U-haul trailer to the back door of the White House and haul it all out. It is not because of a lack of desire to cooperate; it is first because we believe—-”

“Mr. President! All I want to do is listen to the one tape!”

“Would you settle for an edited transcript?” Dickson’s voice was suddenly cajoling.

“I’m afraid not, sir. I really think it’s necessary that I listen to it with my own ears.”

“A dangerous precedent undermining the high office –“

“I won’t even tell anybody you let me listen to it, Mr. President.”

“That’s what Fritz—or was it Hans?—-said. And look at the trouble he got me into with that mother- [expletive removed] Senate committee. [Expletive deleted]-sucking publicity-hunting politicians!”

“All right, Mr. President. I’m sorry I asked.” I gave up.

“Now don't sulk, Karl. That’s just like Hans-—or was it Fritz?—-when I had to announce I was firing him. He sulked. Even though I let him keep his office, and his assistants, and even let him take some tapes home to cheer him up, the [characterization omitted] sulked.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. President. I didn't mean to sulk.”

“Oh, go ahead and listen to the [expletive omitted] tape, Karl. Just don’t-—and let me make this very clear -- don’t let Dan Rather³⁰ find out about it. I don’t want any [adjective omitted] press on me! Co ahead and listen to it. Only take it to the back of the plane. [Expletive deleted]! I don't want to hear that tape -- any tape -- ever again!”

Nothing could have suited me better. I took the tape and a portable cassette player to the rear of the Lear. Here I took a blank cassette and a tiny recorder of my own and rerecorded the tape from the Lilliputian Liberation Army as it played. I definitely didn’t want Dickson to know what I was doing. I intended to send the rerecording to Putnam from Paris to have him check the FBI files for a voice print that might match that of the man speaking on the cassette. But I certainly didn’t want Dickson to know I was working for Putnam and the U.S. government.

It was night when we landed near Paris. We didn’t come in at any of the three major airports—Le Bourget, Orly, or the new DeGaulle Field. Instead we set down—as arranged by Rococco -- at a small private airfield owned by a wealthy business connection of his. A limousine and driver were waiting. We went directly to Le Petit Palais, the small hotel in the Clichy district of Paris where Dickson had been instructed to stay.

Dickson registered as “Mr. Checkers,” as per instructions. I signed in as “Karl Powers.” We were given adjoining rooms with a bathroom to share between them.

It was almost midnight when the phone rang in Dickson’s room. He answered it. I listened on an extension across from him as we had prearranged between us.

“Mr. Checkers?” It was the same male voice as the one on the cassette.

“Who is this?”

“Don’t ask questions, Mr. Checkers.”

“In response to that, let me put it in perspective by assuring you that I’m sorry.”

“You sound like you’re talking for publication, Mr. Checkers. Is this line bugged?”

“Would I do a thing like that?” Dickson was indignant.

“Only to members of your immediate family.”

“That’s different. The family that’s taped together stays together.”

“They’ve got no choice.” There was a dry chuckle at the other end. “Here are your instructions, Mr. Checkers. The gentleman with you—”

“Mr. Powers, yes?”

“He’s known to us. We trust him.”

Dickson looked at me with acute suspicion. I could only look back bewilderedly. These people knew me? From where? And as who? Karl Powers, or Steve Victor?

“Does that mean you don’t trust me?” Dickson’s feelings were hurt.

There was a long silence which spoke volumes -- historical volumes. When the kidnapper did finally speak, he ignored Dickson’s question altogether. “Mr. Powers is to go immediately to Sacre Coeur, the Church of the Sacred Heart, in Montmartre. There is a staircase leading up to the front of the church which parallels the funicular running up the hill to it. Mr. Powers is to station himself halfway up the staircase and wait there. A blonde girl in her early twenties wearing a black beret and a black raincoat will meet him there.”

I covered the mouthpiece of the extension phone. “Ask him how she’ll know me,” I hissed to Dickson.

“How will she know Mr. Powers?” he asked obedient y.

“Never mind how. She will know him. She will come up to him. She will tell him what to do. And he is to do exactly what he is told to do if you ever want to see your daughter alive again.” The phone clicked as the kidnapper abruptly hung up.

As per instructions, I left immediately. Dickson was to wait for me at the hotel. The desk clerk obligingly got me a cab. “Sacre Coeur,” I told the driver. He’d take me to the top of the hill, I knew, but I figured it would be easier walking halfway down that steep staircase, than trudging halfway up it.

I hadn’t been in Paris in quite a long time. The view from Sacre Coeur brought it all back. The church, which runs second only to Notre Dame itself as the most beautiful in all France, stands on the highest hill in Paris. The city spreads out beneath it at night like a glittering jeweler’s tray.

Paris! It’s not a city at all, really; it’s a state of mind. On the other hand, it’s the city of cities, queen of the world's metropolises. Turn a corner in Paris -- any corner!—and you will find a scene out of an Utrillo painting, a fille out of a Modigliani portrait, a park celebrating a Renoir picnic, or an artist as obsessed as Van Gogh or Gauguin. The spirit of Toulouse-Lautrec (hemmed a little short at the knees) sketches madly the dancing gamins still to be found in the most inexpensive niteries of Montrnartre and Montparnasse.

Joie de vivre is the overused phrase that sums up the French capital. You inhale it with the flower-scented air in the vicinity of the Tuileries. It spills over with the fresh vegetables and cheeses in the food stalls of the Latin Quarter. It rises up from the Seine and settles over both banks and the Ile de la Cité.

Look! There’s Quasimodo hanging from the bell tower at Notre Damel! “Which gargoyle is he?” you ask. “All of them, m’sieur! All of them!”

Look! That quaint little sidewalk café on the side street off the Champs Elysées. Yes, you can see the Arc de Triomphe from it! And yes, yes! Oui! That is calvados they’re drinking, that shabby-looking refugee from another land and his slight French working girl.

And look! There on the Left Bank! Look! Those gendarmes! Is that Sartre they’re arresting? De Beauvoir³¹ ? On the Avenue Victor Hugo? A demonstration? On the Boulevard des Invalides, under the very cannon mouths of the Hotel des Invalides itself? And that cloud over the Left Bank! That cloud smiling! That cloud face of Voltaire smiling, smiling. . . .

Paris!

I was filled with it as I started down the series of long, outdoor staircases from Sacre Coeur. Halfway to the bottom, I stopped. I leaned against a railing and looked around me. The steps had become a favorite gathering place for young people -- students, hippies, folk singers, expatriates. It was the French version of Greenwich Village’s Washington Square. Yet at the same time it was pure Paris—which regardless of law and offficial attitude remains in its soul the most permissive city in the world.

I looked for a blonde fille in her twenties wearing a black raincoat and a black beret. Throw a pebble. In any direction. I could have hit any one of a dozen of them. Black berets and black raincoats were all the fashion in Paris this season. Blonde filles in their twenties, of course, were all the rage every season.

I picked one at random and smiled at her. She smiled back. I approached her. She met me halfway. I waited for her to say something. She waited for me to say something. I waited. . . . She waited. . . . I waited. . . . She waited. . . . I waited. She got bored, gave me a rather derogatory shrug, and walked away. A moment later she was deep in an animated conversation with a bearded Algerian type who looked like he was still a trifle wet behind the ears.

So I went back to leaning on the railing of the staircase and waiting for one of the blondes in black raincoat and beret to come up to me. Finally one did.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“All right then!” She handed me her black beret. Her hands went to the loosely tied black belt holding her raincoat together. With a promising smile, she freed the belt and opened the raincoat. She was completely nude under it!

While I was still trying to gather my wits, she took off the raincoat and handed it to me. “Hold this,” she instructed.

Confused, I accepted the coat and held it.

“STREAK!” the blonde bellowed at the top of her substantial lungs and took off up the staircase, streetlights and starlight bouncing off the naked curves of her body as she ran.

I had met, it seemed, my first Parisian streaker. When she got to the top, she ran around in circles in the large courtyard in front of Sacre Coeur and yelled “STREAK! STREAK!” repeatedly. When a funicular car started down the hillside, she yelled again and started down the stairs, obviously racing it.

Behind her a French folk singer dropped his guitar, pulled off his clothes, yelled “STREAK!” and chased after her. A German boy with a very plump rear end followed in their wake. Soon the streakers racing the cable car down the hillside included a Scotch lad wearing a tam and nothing else; an American hippie type with a penis so long that he actually seemed in danger of tripping over it as it swung from side to side; two French teen-age girls; a mature Irish colleen with very large, loosely hung breasts which swung so violently as she ran that they seemed in imminent danger of tearing loose from her body and flying off into the night; and half a dozen or so naked tagalongs of both sexes.

The blonde who had started it all passed me running hard, but made no sign of recognition. Her attention was on her race with the descending cable car. Behind her, many moons passed in support of her streaking undertaking.

It was a dead heat. She and the cable car reached the bottom together. Then, without pausing, she started back up the steps, still streaking at full speed. The other streakers strung out behind her.

She braked to a halt in front of me. The others continued on to the top of the hill where their clothes were strewn around in small, separate piles. She faced me, panting hard.

Her large breasts rose and fell as she gasped for air. They were shiny with perspiration. Two drops of sweat, glittering like tiny diamond pendants, dangled, one from each nipple.

I felt a stab of desire. Sue me. Can I help it if sweaty breasts turn me on?

The naked blonde held out her arms for her raincoat. I handed it to her. She put it on, pulling the belt snugly around her middle. I handed her the beret. She tilted it rakishly over one eye.

“Your turn,” she said.

It took me a minute to realize that she meant it was my turn to streak. “I’ll pass,” I told her.

“You said you were ready,” she reminded me.

“I misunderstood what you were asking me,” I confessed.

“You’re not the man I took you for,” she told me sadly.

“And you’re not the girl I thought you were,” I summed up accurately.

“Well, I streaked!” Very haughty. She turned on her heel. She’d had the last word. She stalked off into the night, faded, no longer streaking.

Again I leaned against the railing of the staircase. Again I waited for one of the blondes in black raincoat and beret to make noises like they were looking for me. Finally one did. And this one was a standout even in that young, nubile, well-formed international company of filles.

She was trim and Anglo-Saxon looking. Her face was heart-shaped and her blonde hair was worn in an extreme, frizzy Afro. No makeup marred her apple-cheeked features. The black beret set off her deep blue eyes pertly.

Her legs, in black net stockings, were alluring. The black raincoat reached only halfway to the knee. The expanse of visible thigh was very shapely indeed. The belted raincoat hugged an ample bosom-high, round, and firm—a snug waist, and teasing hips. The overall impression was of a slender girl with voluptuous fixtures.

“You’re a laddie who’s interested in orgies.” She identified me boldly, speaking in English with a Scottish lilt to her voice.

So that was it! The kidnappers did know who I really was. They did have me tagged as Steve Victor, the Man from O.R.G.Y.

“I’m the man you’re looking for,” I assured her.

“My name is Peggy,” she told me.

“Karl.” I figured she knew the Steve Victor label, but probably wanted to know the name I was going under in Paris. On the other hand, she hadn’t told me her last name, so I didn’t mention that the one I was using was Powers.

“Karl.” She repeated it. “German.” She gave me a sudden, unexpected, very hard shot in the ribs. “I ken that. I ha’ great admiration for the German. Also French.” Her wide mouth formed itself into an O.

“And Lilliputian?” I figured it was time to get down to business.

She smiled knowingly. I seemed to have struck the right chord. “Come wi’ me.” She was suddenly all business.

“All right.” Her arm was linked through mine.

“Where to?” I added.

“You ta’ the high road, an’ I’ll ta’ the low road.” She giggled. Then she became serious again. “Good Germans dinna ask questions, Karl. They just obey.” She winked solemnly. “Tha’ way they find wha’ they’re seekin’.”

“And besides, your people wouldn’t like my asking questions. Would they, Peggy?”

“My folk are not much for conversation,” she granted. “Come along now.”

She led me down the long staircase to the foot of the steep hill upon which Sacre Coeur stands. A block or so further along there was an entrance to Le Metro, Paris’s famed subway system. She led me down into it

I followed her through a turnstile. A moment later we boarded a departing train. It was a little bit crowded and we had to stand. We were pressed very tightly together. From the feel of things, there wasn’t much else beside the raincoat between Peggy’s soft, provocative flesh and me. We didn’t talk. But as the train pitched and tossed, picking up speed and swaying around sharp bends, the Braille body language between us was speaking volumes.

We changed trains. The second car we boarded was not so crowded. We were the only ones in it who had to stand. We weren’t pressed together now. Still we didn’t talk. And then Peggy made a wordless statement that took me by surprise.

She opened the raincoat, holding out the sides in front of her so that only I could see. She was wearing black net stockings, a black garter belt, and a strand of black pearls which hung down to her bosom. And that’s all she was wearing. Except for that, under the raincoat, Peggy was completely nude! And I mean completely because -

Item: Her groin, framed by the black garter belt, had been shaved and was absolutely devoid of pubic air.

Item: Her mons veneris was mounted high, her purplish clitty clearly visible and stiff in its nest.

Item: Her breasts were shaped like large gourds, the tips arching upward, the nipples dark red twangers set in wide, pink aureoles.

Another streaker? Is that what Peggy was? This must be my night for streakers all right! Or was it that the fad was reaching new heights in Paris.

Neither. Peggy wasn’t a streaker at all. She was a flasher!

What's a flasher? That’s the slang phrase, originated by big-city vice cops charged with apprehending them, used to describe the pervert (usually a male) in a buttoned-up black raincoat who rides the subways for the express purpose of unbuttoning the raincoat and quickly opening and closing it so that the other passengers can see that he is naked. The flasher gets his kicks out of exposing himself in this fashion. There are, I would submit, more heinous crimes. Still, the flasher is usually prosecuted vigorously.

Not, it seemed, in Paris. Peggy, as I said, was a flasher. Now she proceeded to prove it.

She closed her raincoat, turned away from me, and faced the subway car at large. She opened and closed the black raincoat several times in rapid succession, making sure that none of her potential audience missed her exposing herself. Then she turned to me.

I was taken by surprise. Before I realized what she was up to, she unzipped my fly and whipped out my pocket pool cuestick. It was semi-tumescent. Peggy grasped it firmly and shook it vigorously at the bug-eyed watchers in the subway car.

Then, as the train pulled into the station, she yanked hard and I found myself propelled along with her as we disembarked. She let go as we emerged on the subway platform. She belted her raincoat snugly about her. It took me a minute to pull myself together enough to realize that my staff of lust was still hanging out of my open fly.

A minute was too long. By the time I reached for it, a gendarme had spotted me and come up on the run. He passed Peggy walking briskly down the platform as he came.

“M’sieur! M’sieur!” He released a torrent of French which I couldn’t quite follow.

Still, I didn’t need an interpreter. It was obvious that he thought I should remove my mizzenmast below decks and batten down the hatches after it. Furthermore, he made it clear that he had by no means decided whether or not to let it go at that.

By this time Peggy had returned. She listened to the gendarme for a moment, and then interrupted him. She said something and he raised his eyebrows as if she had just clarified a point to him. Then she held her hands apart as if demonstrating the size of a particularly impressive fish she’d caught and added something else. The gendarme clapped his hands, spoke another French phrase, shook his head back and forth as if he now understood everything, waited while I crammed everything back into place and carefully zipped my pants closed. Then, with a gesture that was half a wagging finger of warning, and half a stiff finger of admiration and understanding, he left us.

“What did you say to him?” I asked Peggy.

“I told him you were a daft American.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said that you were impressively hung.”

“And then what did you say?”

“I told him tha’ your home village was Texas. Then he kenned everything.”

“My ‘home village’ is Manhattan,” I told her.

“He said I was a fortunate lassie, but tha’ you should heed his warnin’ to no show-off in public no matter what quaint customs might prevail in Texas.”

“They don’t have those customs in Texas,” I assured Peggy. “They don’t have the equipment for it.”

We emerged from Le Metro on the Rue de Rivoli just across from the Louvre. We walked to the Seine and strolled upstream on the Right Bank. We went past Notre Dame and crossed a bridge to a stone staircase leading down to the Ile de la Cité. I followed Peggy to a very old, but very exclusive looking and well cared for mansion located on the exclusive island city-within-a-city on the Seine.

There was a gatekeeper. He recognized Peggy. He admitted her, regarded me suspiciously, but finally decided that if I was with Peggy then it must be all right to let me enter. Peggy led the way around to the back of the house.

There was a large, walled-in area back there. A wide veranda looked out over the grounds. A section of the grounds, about a quarter of the area, was paved over. It had been set up as a playground.

The equipment was modeled after that of a children’s playground, but the sizes were more suited to adults. The monkey bars, for instance, were spaced widely apart, were quite intricately arranged, and stood about one story high. The swings were sturdy, held by stout chains, and spaced over sandpiles obviously large enough to absorb the shocks of tumbling adult bodies. The sliding ponds were high and intricate with unexpected turns and steep banking; indeed, they were quite like miniature toboggan slides. The seesaws were constructed to support two full-grown people at either end, and the way they were balanced in the middle (with large, active springs) was calculated to provide a vigorous and bouncy ride.

A large lazy Susan, capable of spinning perhaps a dozen adults together at any one time, stood off to one side of the playground.

There was a party in progress inside the house. I could see people dancing and clustered around a cocktail bar through the opened french windows leading out to the veranda. A few couples had spilled out over the veranda itself. One or two were strolling in the gardens, but no one was visible in the playground. It was only as we got closer that I saw that these couples were not quite so innocent as they appeared. Nor were all of them couples in the ordinary sense.

One was a threesome composed of two men and a girl who were not quite hidden by the shadows of the bushes. One of the men was a tall, slender Oriental. His hand was deep inside the opened trousers of the second man. This other man was short, pudgy, and Dutch looking. He was copping feels—there is no other phrase for the surreptitious way he was going about it—from the breasts of the girl, a very young and skinny nymphet with straight hair reaching almost to the hem of the mini-mini-skirt she was wearing. She seemed to be biting the Oriental about the neck and shoulders.

On the veranda itself a woman was sitting alone with a large English sheepdog. The woman was middle-aged, although well formed and very stylishly dressed. She was wearing a long, flowing evening gown. It took me a minute to realize that the part of the sheepdog I was looking at was the rear. The head was some place under the flowing gown.

I tripped going up the steps to the veranda. I was about to make a comment -- ask a question -- I don’t know what. But Peggy was moving too fast for me. There was no chance. I recovered my balance and half jogged after her, following her into the main room of the party.

People were dancing. People were eating. People were drinking. People were fucking.

What was that?

People were fucking! They really were! Demurely. . . .

Huh?

Like not blatantly. Not exactly sneakily either, but not obviously. . . That’s it. They were fucking not obviously.

As the Man from O.R.G.Y., of course, I wasn’t shocked. Surprised maybe, but not shocked. What I mean, it’s not too usual to have just a few people going at each other at a party while the majority of the guests are nibbling the chopped liver, or sipping the bubbly, or tripping the light fantastic. So I was surprised. But I am the Man From O.R.G.Y. So I wasn’t shocked. I don’t think I was shocked. . . .

“Peggy.” I took her by the elbow and slowed her down.

“Aye?”

“That couple over there . . .”

“Where, mon?”

“Under the hors d’oeuvres table.”

“Ah!”

“Peggy, what’s going on?”

“It’s a wee bit hard to tell. The tablecloth is blocking them.”

“They’re making it, Peggy.”

“Oh, that. Aye, that they are. I thought it was the specifics you were asking me aboot.”

“But people can see them, Peggy. As a matter of fact, the way their legs are sticking out, people can trip over them. I’ve already seen a few do exactly that.”

“What’s your point, Karl?”

“My point?”

“Aye. What is it that you’re asking me.”

I thought about it. I didn’t quite know myself. In any case, before I could straighten it out in my head and ask another question, I was distracted. The cause of the distraction was a very large chandelier swinging quite violently over my head.

Craning my neck, I looked up at it. Its agitated movement was the result of the exertions of the couple precariously perched on it. Legs crisscrossed to lock them into position, they were bare from the waists down and -- technically—having intercourse. I say “technically” because, of necessity, more of their concentration had to be going into keeping their balance than into the sex act itself.

“If ye hae no more questions to bother me wi’, then come along, Karl.”

“Where are we going?”

“In the other room. That’s where the orgy is.”

That was where the orgy was? Then what did she call what was going on here, in this room? I asked the question.

“Foreplay, mon.” That was the answer.

“Foreplay—” I gave Peggy the benefit of my expertise “— means precoital techniques.”

“Some folk,” she told me rather coldly, “get a wee bit carried away. But we are no here to judge them.”

I was beginning to wonder just what it was that we were there for. “When do I get to meet with the Lilliputian?” I asked Peggy, getting back to the business which had brought me there.

“Is that your taste?” She shrugged. “All right, then. He’s upstairs. Come wi’ me.”

I followed her to a large hallway with a broad staircase rising up from it. We mounted the stairs. We walked down. another, narrower hallway, and Peggy came to a stop in front of a door at the end of it. “He’s in there,” she told me.

“The Lilliputian?”

She nodded.

“And will he be able to arrange things about the girl I'm interested in?”

Peggy scowled. “I suppose so.” She seemed to be disappointed about something.

I knocked at the door.

A man’s voice called to come in. I couldn’t tell whether it was the same as the voice on the tape or not. Peggy didn’t come with me as I entered the room. But she did close the door behind me.

A midget in a white dinner jacket was seated in an armchair facing me. He was a very good-looking midget of early middle years, his skin well cared for, his teeth white and even, his hair black, worn not too long, and straight and shiny. He looked up at me inquiringly.

“I’m Karl Powers.” I stammered as I spoke the name.

The reason I stammered was the other element of the scene before me. Across the lap of the miniature gentleman in the armchair was a plump young lady midget, blonde and squealing. She was lying across his knees with her head hanging down. Her dress was pulled up and tucked in around her waist. Her panties had been pulled down and were at half-mast, hugging the backs of her knees. Her bare backside stuck straight up in the air. Like the little lady herself, it was very plump. It was also very pink, as if it had recently been struck.

It had. The Lilliputian was in the process of spanking her. My entrance was a distraction, but it didn’t stop him.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Powers?” He smacked the jiggling bottom. The blonde midget squealed delightedly. The flesh reddened momentarily, then faded to pink.

“You can tell me where Alicia is!”

“Probably downstairs somewhere.” He waved his small hand vaguely, then brought the palm down on the dancing derriere. The tiny blonde squealed again and writhed energetically.

“She’s not a prisoner?” I was surprised.

“Oh. One of those. Well then, I suppose you’d better look in the basement. That’s where the dungeons are.”

“She’s in a dungeon?”

“It seems likely.” The little man was concentrating much harder on spanking the blonde than he was on our conversation.

“What do I have to do to have her released?”

“Talk to Manuel about that. It’s his department.”

“Where do I find Manuel?” I asked.

“Do you know Peggy?”

I nodded.

“She’ll take you.”

“Thanks.”

He didn’t acknowledge my gratitude. He was too busy applying the palm of his hand to the naked posterior. She was bouncing like a Mexican jumping bean as I left the room.

Peggy was waiting outside.

“Where do I find Manuel?” I asked her.

“Down in the dungeons,” she told me.

“Can you take me there?”

“Later.”

“Why not now?”

“Because,” she informed me, opening her raincoat and cupping her naked breasts, “the orgy will no wait for us.”

There was no mistaking Peggy's meaning. The orgy was indeed at hand!

Chapter Six

While it had spread over the house and grounds, the main focal point of the orgy had become the playground. That’s where Peggy led me. To a swing. Two swingers swinging on a swing. That was the idea. I sat down on it. She sat on my lap facing me. “Pump, mon!” she said. She meant the swing.

I pumped. As we soared higher and higher, my eyes lit on first one and then another of the scenes forming the erotic panorama spread out over the playground. For somebody in my business—sex research—-it was a gold mine!

A black man, young and built like a boxer, wearing a dashiki and very tight pants, was seated at the foot of one of the sliding ponds. His pants were opened, his penis exposed. It was—alas! a stereotype!-—very large and very long and very hard. He held it by the base and moved it from side to side as if aiming it up the sliding pond.

At the top of the sliding pond was a petite French girl with curly black hair. She was wearing a very chic black velvet evening gown. It was strapless. At the moment, it was also topless on one side. It had been pulled down to expose one breast—the right one, if I remember rightly.

It was one of those breasts that Bardot³² made synonymous with Gallic sensuality. Not overly big, but very plump and full, exquisitely shaped to an up-tilted tip, nippled berrylike, bright red, and spongily succulent. She was holding on to the railing of the sliding pond with one hand. With her other hand she was fondling and squeezing and pinching the exposed breast. Dark-eyed, she was looking at the black man at the foot of the slide and laughing—obviously teasing and arousing him with her laughter and her self-titillation.