the man from O.R.G.Y.

Small Hot War

All four cars were exchanging bullets. The tank was shelling the cars indiscriminately. In our own car, I tried to explain to the sheikh about the beautiful British Intelligence agent, the C.I.A. man, the Russian NKVD boys, the Sikhs and Moslems and Chinese . . . but it was pretty confusing even to me.

Only one thing mattered to the sheikh. He rolled down his window and started shooting at the Russians.

That made it unanimous. It was a small-scale war. I was strictly neutral. Just an innocent bystander. Let them all kill each other off. I had everything to gain by the slaughter and nothing to lose.

Nothing but my life!

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV?

WHO THREW THE UNDERWEAR OUT OFF

SHEIHH TAJ-ED EL ATASSI’S HAREM?

HOW DID RED CHINA GET THE ATOM BOMB?

WHERE DID THE BEAUTIFUL BRITISH

SECRET AGENT LOSE HER NIGHTIE?

Only Steve Victor the man from O.R.G.Y. - an unpredictable blend of James Bond, Casanova, and Dr. Kinsey - knows the answers.

You’ve never read anything like THE MAN FROM

O.R.G.Y

From Berkeley to Boston, hip readers are asking...

WHO IS TED MARK?

He's the man of mystery behind the Man from O.R.G.Y. and other improbable characters - the author of the decade’s most hilarious bestsellers - the creator of a craze that's sweeping the country! Read his books... and you’ll ask, too!

THE MAN FROM O.R.G.Y.

By Ted Mark

1965

INTRODUCTION

The sexual revolution of the 60’s

Although the sexual revolution hat swept the Western world in the 60’s can be seen as rooting as far back as the pioneering era of sexuality in India, and later to the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Marquis de Sade) and the Victorian era (Algernon Charles Swinburne's scandalous Poems and Ballads of 1866), it was a development in the modern world which saw the significant loss of power by the values of a morality rooted in the orthodox religious traditions such as the Christian tradition and the rise of permissive societies, of attitudes that were accepting of greater sexual freedom and experimentation that spread all over the world and were captured in the concept of "free love". Modern medicine may also have played a role. The discovery of penicillin led to significant reductions in syphilis mortality, which, in turn, spurred an increase in non-traditional sex during the mid to late 1950s.

The sexual revolution was initiated by those who shared a belief in the detrimental impact of sexual repression, a view that had previously been argued by Wilhelm Reich and D. H. Lawrence, by Sigmund Freud and by the Surrealist movement. The counterculture wanted to explore the body and mind, and free the personal self from the moral and legal sexual confines of modern America, as well as from 1940s-50s morals in general. The sexual revolution of the 1960s was an uprising rooted in a conviction that the erotic should be celebrated as a normal part of life and not repressed by family, industrialized sexual morality, religion and the state.

In 1953, Chicago resident Hugh Hefner founded Playboy, a magazine which aimed to target males between the ages of 21 and 45. The cover page and nude centerfold in the first edition featured Marilyn Monroe, who was then a rising sex symbol. Featuring cartoons, interviews, short fiction, Hefner "Playboy Philosophy" and - most crucially - half-naked female "Playmates" posing provocatively, the magazine became immensely successful. In 1960, Hefner decided to expand his enterprise and opened the first Playboy Club in Chicago. The private clubs, which expanded in numbers throughout the 1960s, offered relaxation for its members, who were waited on by Playboy Bunnies. Hefner's influence would represent a growing change in America's attitude towards sex.

There was an increase of sexual encounters between unmarried adults. Divorce rates were dramatically increasing and marriage rates were significantly decreasing in this time period. The number of unmarried Americans aged twenty to twenty-four more than doubled from 4.3 million in 1960 to 9.7 million in 1976. Men and women sought to reshape marriage by instilling new institutions of open marriage, mate swapping, swinging, and communal sex. There is an introduction of casual sex during the revolution to a level that was never seen or heard before. Americans were gaining a set of relaxed morals and with the contribution of premarital sex on the rise and the development of birth control, casual sex between adults was becoming very popular.

Role of the mass media

TV, the new mass communication device of the age, along with other media outlets such as radio and magazines, could broadcast information in a matter of seconds to millions of people, while only a few wealthy people would control what millions could watch. Some modern historians have theorized that these media outlets helped to spread new ideas, which were considered radical. The struggles, skirmishes and rhetorical confrontations happening in the course of these movements also became directly visible to ordinary people in a way they would never have been before; the sense of involvement in a social and sexual shift happening in the present could rapidly win new converts and spread discussions afield. The counterculture of the 1960s was becoming well known through radio, newspapers, TV, books, music and other media by the end of the 1960s.

One suggested cause of the 1960s sexual revolution was the development of the birth control pill in 1960, which gave women access to easy and reliable contraception. Another likely cause was a vast improvement in obstetrics, greatly reducing the number of women who died due to childbearing, thus increasing the life expectancy of women. A third, more indirect cause was the large number of children born in the 1940s and early 1950s all over the western world—the 'Baby Boom Generation'--many of whom would grow up in relatively prosperous and safe conditions, within a middle class on the rise and with better access to education and entertainment than ever before. By their demographic weight and their social and educational background they came to trigger a shift in society towards more permissive and informalized attitudes.

Other data suggest the "revolution" was more directly influenced by the financial independence gained by many women who entered the workforce during and after World War II, making the revolution more about individual equality rather than biological independence. Many historians, however, feel that one specific cause cannot be selected for this large phenomenon. French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir was particularly adamant that economic equality greatly contributes to improved gender equality.

Modern revolutions

The Gay Rights Movement started because the Stonewall Riots of 1969 crystallized a broad grass-roots mobilization of the homosexual movement. New gay liberationist gave political meaning to “coming out” by extending the psychological-personal process into public life. During the 1950s the most feared thing of the homosexual culture was “coming out”, the homosexual culture of the 1950s did everything they could to help keep their sexuality a secret from the public and everyone else in their lives, but Alfred Kinsey's research on homosexuality alleged that 39% of the unmarried male population had at least one homosexual experience to orgasm between adolescence and old age. By the gay liberationist making “coming out” public they helped mobilize people to live full-time as a homosexual, they no longer had to live in secret. Homosexuals could now enjoy sexual relationships and encounters much more often than ever before. They no longer had to sneak around and occasionally receive the sexual attention that they desire or force themselves into a heterosexual relationship in which they had no interest, and was full of lies. The 1970 gay novelist, Brad Gooch, wrote the “Golden Age of Promiscuity” meaning that the gay male community finally had reached a rich culture of “easy sex”, “sex without” commitment, obligation or long-term relationships. The gay rights movement was reclamation of cultural, social, and political citizenship through sex and decriminalized gay sex, by removing gay sex as a psychological sickness.

The Women’s Movement in the time of the Sexual Revolution helped contribute to redefining women’s sexuality, not in the terms of simply pleasing men any longer but instead there was recognition of women’s sexual satisfaction and sexual desire. Finally "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm" by Anne Koedt discovered an understanding of a women’s sexual anatomy. The female anatomy was now given some scientific fact and reasoning for how and why women orgasm the way they do instead of Freud’s basis of women’s vaginal orgasm which was not based on a women’s anatomy, but rather upon his “assumptions of women as inferior appendage to man, and her consequent social and psychological role.” The women’s movement was able to develop lesbian feminism, freedom from heterosexual act, and freedom from reproduction as distillation of feminism during the time of the Sexual Revolution. Feminist Betty Friedan published the Feminine Mystique in 1963, concerning the many frustrations women had with their lives and with separate spheres, which established a pattern of inequality.

The Industrial Revolution during the nineteenth century and the growth of science and technology, medicine and health care, resulted in better contraceptives being manufactured. Advances in the manufacture and production of rubber made possible the design and production of condoms that could be used by hundreds of millions of men and women to prevent pregnancy at little cost.

Advances in chemistry, pharmacology, and biology, and human physiology led to the discovery and perfection of the first oral contraceptives also known as "the Pill". Purchasing an aphrodisiac and various sex toys became "normal". Sado-masochism ("S&M") gained popularity, and "no-fault" unilateral divorce became legal and easier to obtain in many countries during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

All these developments took place alongside and combined with an increase in world literacy and decline in religious observance. Old values such as the biblical notion of "be fruitful and multiply" were cast aside as people continued to feel alienated from the past and adopted the lifestyles of progressive modernizing cultures.

When speaking of sexual revolution, historians make a distinction between the first and the second sexual revolution. In the first sexual revolution (1870–1910), to caucasians, Victorian morality lost its universal appeal. However, it did not lead to the rise of a "permissive society". Exemplary for this period is the rise and differentiation in forms of regulating sexuality.

Feminism and sexual liberation

Coinciding with second-wave feminism and the women's liberation movement initiated in the early 1960s, the sexual liberation movement was aided by feminist ideologues in their mutual struggle to challenge traditional ideas regarding female sexuality and queer sexuality. Elimination of undue favorable bias towards men and objectification of women as well as support for women's right to choose her sexual partners free of outside interference or judgment were three of the main goals associated with sexual liberation from the feminist perspective. Since during the early stages of feminism, women's liberation was often equated with sexual liberation rather than associated with it. Many feminist thinkers believed that assertion of the primacy of sexuality would be a major step towards the ultimate goal of women's liberation, thus women were urged to initiate sexual advances, enjoy sex and experiment with new forms of sexuality.

The feminist movements insisted and focused on the sexual liberation for women, both physical and psychological. The pursuit of sexual pleasure for women was the core ideology, which subsequently was to set the foundation for female independence. Although whether or not sexual freedom should be a feminist issue is currently a much-debated topic, the feminist movement overtly defines itself as the movement for social, political, and economic equality of men and women. Feminist movements are also involved the fight against sexism and since sexism is a highly complex notion, it is difficult to separate the feminist critique toward sexism from its fight against sexual oppression.

The feminist movement has helped create a social climate in which LGBT¹ people and women are increasingly able to be open and free with their sexuality, which enabled a spiritual liberation of sorts with regards to sex. Rather than being forced to hide their sexual desires or feelings, women and LGBT people have gained and continue to gain increased freedom in this area. Consequently, the feminist movement to end sexual oppression has and continues to directly contribute to the sexual liberation movement.

Nevertheless, among radical feminists, the view soon became widely held that, thus far, the sexual freedoms gained in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, such as the decreasing emphasis on monogamy, had been largely gained by men at women's expense. In Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution, Sheila Jeffreys asserted that the sexual revolution on men's terms contributed less to women's freedom than to their continued oppression, an assertion that has both commanded respect and attracted intense criticism.

Freudian school

Sigmund Freud of Vienna believed human behavior was motivated by unconscious drives, primarily by the libido or "Sexual Energy". Freud proposed to study how these unconscious drives were repressed and found expression through other cultural outlets. He called this therapy "psychoanalysis".

While Freud's ideas were sometimes ignored or provoked resistance within Viennese society, his ideas soon entered the discussions and working methods of anthropologists, artists and writers all over Europe, and from the 1920s in the United States. His conception of a primary sexual drive that would not be ultimately curbed by law, education or standards of decorum spelled a serious challenge to Victorian prudishness, and his theory of psychosexual development proposed a model for the development of sexual orientations and desires; children emerged from the Oedipus complex, a sexual desire towards their parent of the opposite sex. The idea of children having their parents as their early sexual targets was particularly shocking to Victorian and early 20th century society.

According to Freud's theory, in the earliest stage of a child's psychosexual development, the oral stage, the mother's breast became the formative source of all later erotic sensation. Much of his research remains widely contested by professionals in the field, though it has spurred critical developments in the humanities.

Anarchist Freud scholars Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich (who famously coined the phrase "Sexual Revolution") developed a sociology of sex in the 1910s to 1930s in which the animal-like competitive reproductive behavior was seen as a legacy of ancestral human evolution reflecting in every social relation, as per the freudian interpretation, and hence the liberation of sexual behavior a mean to social revolution.

Kinsey and Masters and Johnson

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Alfred C. Kinsey published two surveys of modern sexual behaviour. In 1948 Alfred C. Kinsey and his co-workers, responding to a request by female students at Indiana University for more information on human sexual behavior, published the book Sexual behaviour in the Human Male. They followed this five years later with Sexual behaviour in the Human Female. These books began a revolution in social awareness of, and public attention given to, human sexuality.

It is said that at the time, public morality severely restricted open discussion of sexuality as a human characteristic, and specific sexual practices, especially sexual behaviours that did not lead to procreation. Kinsey's books contained studies about controversial topics such as the frequency of homosexuality, and the sexuality of minors aged two weeks to fourteen years. Scientists working for Kinsey reported data which led to the conclusion that people are capable of sexual stimulation from birth. Furthermore, Kinsey's method of researching sexuality differs significantly from today's methods. Kinsey would watch his research subjects engage in sexual intercourse, sometimes engaging with his subjects as well. He would also encourage his research team to do the same, and encouraged them to engage in intercourse with him, too.

These books laid the groundwork for Masters and Johnson's life work. A study called Human Sexual Response in 1966 revealed the nature and scope of the sexual practices of young Americans.

The Masters and Johnson research team, composed of William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, pioneered research into the nature of human sexual response and the diagnosis and treatment of sexual disorders and dysfunctions from 1957 until the 1990s

The work of Masters and Johnson began in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University in St. Louis and was continued at the independent not-for-profit research institution they founded in St. Louis in 1964, originally called the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation and renamed the Masters and Johnson Institute in 1978.

In the initial phase of Masters and Johnson's studies, from 1957 until 1965, they recorded some of the first laboratory data on the anatomy and physiology of human sexual response based on direct observation of 382 women and 312 men in what they conservatively estimated to be "10,000 complete cycles of sexual response". Their findings, particularly on the nature of female sexual arousal (for example, describing the mechanisms of vaginal lubrication and debunking the earlier widely held notion that vaginal lubrication originated from the cervix) and orgasm (showing that the physiology of orgasmic response was identical whether stimulation was clitoral or vaginal, and proving that some women were capable of being multiorgasmic), dispelled many long-standing misconceptions.

They jointly wrote two classic texts in the field, Human Sexual Response and Human Sexual Inadequacy, published in 1966 and 1970, respectively. Both of these books were best-sellers and were translated into more than thirty languages. The team has been inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Erotic novels

In the United States in the years 1959 through 1966, bans on three books with explicit erotic content were challenged and overturned. They were Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H.Lawrence, Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller and Fanny Hill by John Cleland.

Prior to this time, a patchwork of regulations (as well as local customs and vigilante actions) governed what could and could not be published. For example, the United States Customs Service banned James Joyce's Ulysses by refusing to allow it to be imported into the United States. The Roman Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum carried great weight among Catholics and amounted to an effective and instant boycott of any book appearing on it. Boston's Watch and Ward Society, a largely Protestant creation inspired by Anthony Comstock, made "banned in Boston" a national by-word.

Only books primarily appealing to "prurient interest" could be banned. In a famous phrase, the court said that obscenity is "utterly without redeeming social importance"—meaning that, conversely, any work with redeeming social importance was not obscene, even if it contained isolated passages that could "deprave and corrupt" some readers. This decision was especially significant, because, of the three books mentioned, Fanny Hill has by far the largest measure of content that seems to appeal to prurient interest, and the smallest measures of literary merit and "redeeming social importance". Whereas an expurgated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover had actually once been published, no expurgated version of Fanny Hill had ever been. By permitting the publication of Fanny Hill, the U.S. Supreme Court set the bar for any ban so high that Rembar himself called the 1966 decision "the end of obscenity".

Nonfiction sex manuals

The court decisions that legalised the publication of Fanny Hill had an even more important effect: freed from fears of legal action, nonfiction works about sex and sexuality started to appear more often.

In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men, Careers, the Apartment, Diet, Fashion, Money and Men. The title itself would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. (In 1965 she went on to transform Cosmopolitan magazine into a life manual for young career women.^])

In 1969 Joan Garrity, identifying herself only as "J.", published The Way to Become the Sensuous Woman, with information on exercises to improve the dexterity of one's tongue and how to have anal sex.

The same year saw the appearance of Dr. David Reuben's book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). Despite the dignity of Reuben's medical credentials, this book was light-hearted in tone.

In 1970 the Boston Women's Health Collective published Women and Their Bodies (which became far better known a year later under its subsequent title Our Bodies, Ourselves). Not an erotic treatise or sex manual, the book nevertheless included frank descriptions of sexuality, and contained illustrations that could have caused legal problems just a few years earlier.

Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Love Making appeared in 1972. In later editions though, Comfort's libertinism was tamed as a response to AIDS.

In 1975 Will McBride's Zeig Mal! (Show Me!), written with psychologist Helga Fleichhauer-Hardt for children and their parents, appeared in bookstores on both sides of the Atlantic. Appreciated by many parents for its frank depiction of pre-adolescents discovering and exploring their sexuality, it scandalised others and eventually it was pulled from circulation in the United States and some other countries. It was followed up in 1989 by Zeig Mal Mehr! ("Show Me More!").

These books had a number of things in common. They were factual and, in fact, educational. They were available to a mainstream readership. They were stacked high on the tables of discount bookstores, they were book club selections, and their authors were guests on late-night talk shows. People were seen reading them in public.

In a respectable petty bourgeois middle-class home, Playboy magazine and Fanny Hill might be present but would usually be kept out of sight. But at least some of these books might well be on the coffee table. Most important, all of these books acknowledged and celebrated the conscious cultivation of erotic pleasure.

The contribution of such books to the sexual revolution cannot be overstated. Earlier books such as What Every Girl Should Know (Margaret Sanger, 1920) and A Marriage Manual (Hannah and Abraham Stone, 1939) had broken the silence in which many people, women in particular, had grown up in.

By the 1950s, in the United States, it had become rare for women to go into their wedding nights not knowing what to expect. But the open discussion of sex as pleasure, and descriptions of sexual practices and techniques, was revolutionary. There were practices which, perhaps, some had heard of. But many adults did not know for sure whether they were realities, or fantasies found only in pornographic books.

The Kinsey report revealed that these practices were, at the very least, surprisingly frequent. These other books asserted, in the words of a 1980 book by Dr. Irene Kassorla, that Nice Girls Do — And Now You Can Too.

Contraception

As birth control became widely accessible, men and women began to have more choice in the matter of having children than ever before. The 1916 invention of thin, disposable latex condoms for men led to widespread affordable condoms by the 1930s; the demise of the Comstock laws in 1936 set the stage for promotion of available effective contraceptives such as the diaphragm and cervical cap; the 1960s introduction of the IUD and oral contraceptives for women gave a sense of freedom from barrier contraception. The opposition of Churches (e.g. Humanae vitae) led to parallel movements of secularization and exile from religion. Women gained much greater access to birth control in the “girls world” decision in 1965, in the 1960s and 1970s the birth control movement advocated for the legalization of abortion and large scale education campaigns about contraception by governments.

Free love

Beginning in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, a new culture of "free love" emerged, with thousands of young people becoming "hippies", inspired by Indian culture, who preached the power of love and the beauty of sex as part of ordinary life. This is part of a counterculture that continues to exist. By the 1970s, it was socially acceptable for colleges to permit co-ed housing.

Free love continued in different forms throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, but its more assertive manifestations ended abruptly (or at least disappeared from public view) in the mid-1980s when the public first became aware of AIDS, a deadly sexually-transmitted disease.

Explicit sex on screen and stage

Swedish filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman and Vilgot Sjöman contributed to sexual liberation with sexually themed films that challenged conservative international standards. The 1951 film Hon dansade en sommar (She Danced One Summer AKA One Summer of Happiness) (directed by Arne Mattsson) starring Ulla Jacobsson and Folke Sundquist was notable in this regard for depicting explicit nudity, including nude bathing in a lake. .

This film, as well as Bergman's Sommaren med Monika (The Summer with Monika, 1951) and Tystnaden (The Silence, 1963), caused an international uproar, not least in the United States, where the films were charged with violating standards of decency. Vilgot Sjöman's film I Am Curious (Yellow), also created waves of international outcry, but it was very popular in the United States. Another of his films, 491, highlighted homosexuality among other things. Kärlekens språk (The Language of Love) was an informative documentary about sex and sexual techniques that featured the first real act of sex in a mainstream film, and inevitably it caused intense debate around the world.

From these films the concept (or catchphrase) of "Swedish sin" (licentiousness and seductive nudity) developed, even though Swedish society in the 1950s was still fairly conservative regarding sex, and the international concept of Swedish sexuality was and is largely exaggerated. The image of "hot love and cold people" emerged. Sexual liberalism was seen as part of the modernization process that, by breaking down traditional borders, would lead to the emancipation of natural forces and desires. These films caused debate there as well. The films eventually progressed the public's attitude toward sex, especially in Sweden and other northern European countries, which today tend to be more sexually liberal than others. In Sweden and nearby countries at the time, these films, by virtue of being made by directors who had established themselves as leading names in their generation, helped delegitimize the idea of habitually demanding that films should avoid overtly sexual subject matter. It proved hard to question the seriousness of purpose of Bergman, Sjöman and others, and in their wake a consciously permissive and questioning attitude to sex, nudity and "difficult" subject matter in film - and on TV - became the new standard framework.

Explicit sex on screen and frontal nudity of men and women on stage became acceptable in many Western countries, as the twentieth century drew towards its close. Special places of entertainment offering striptease and lap dancing proliferated, and limits to 'acceptable' dress in pop/rock music and at discotheques and live music festivals, especially open-air festivals ever since the flower-power generation and Woodstock (1969), became very vague, both among performers and in the audiences or attendee crowd. The rich use of cross dressing and androgynous attributes and clothes in rock and pop stage costumes and even references to this in song lyrics, to express sexual, fashion or literary themes is also notable, from the Velvet Underground (in Lou Reed's lyrics) and the glam rock wave and onward. All of this persists in the early 21st century.

The famous Playboy Bunnies set a trend. Men came to be entertained by topless women at night-clubs which also hosted "peep shows". In many Western countries, nudity is used as a part of artistic or erotic performance, such as in nude body painting, sex show, striptease, Neo-Burlesque, and in adult-only public events like Folsom Street Fair, Nudes-A-Poppin', Fantasy Fest, etc.

Normalization of pornography

Sexual character is closely linked with developments in technology, and the somewhat more open and commercial circulation of pornography was a new phenomenon at the time of the sexual revolution. Pornography operated as a form of “cultural critique” insofar as it transgresses societal conventions. Manuel Castells claims that the online communities, which emerged (from the 1980s) around early bulletin board systems originated from the ranks of those who had been part of the counterculture movements and alternative way of life emerging out of the sexual revolution.

Lynn Hunt points out that early modern “pornography” (18th century) is marked by a “preponderance of female narrators”, that the women were portrayed as independent, determined, financially successful (though not always socially successful and recognized) and scornful of the new ideals of female virtue and domesticity, and not objectifications of women’s bodies as many view pornography today. The sexual revolution was not unprecedented in identifying sex as a site of political potential and social culture. It was suggested during the sexual revolution that the interchangeability of bodies within pornography had radical implications for gender differences and that they could lose their meaning or at least redefine the meaning of gender roles and norms. Porn had portrayed sexual activity honestly and bluntly in fiction, on stage and in movies. It could reinforce the crudest stereotypes of sex roles, standards of beauty, and power dynamics or educate about human desire.

In 1971 Playboy stopped airbrushing pubic hair out of its centerfold picture spreads; this new addition caused the magazine to hit its all-time peak circulation of more than seven million copies in 1972 and men started having more choices when it came to magazines.

In 1972 Deep Throat became a popular movie for heterosexual couples. The movie played all over America and was the first porn movie to earn a gross of a million dollars.

The fact that pornography was less stigmatised by the end of the 1980s, and more mainstream movies depicted sexual intercourse as entertainment, was indicative of how normalised sexual revolution had become in society. Magazines depicting nudity, such as the popular Playboy and Penthouse magazines, won some acceptance as mainstream journals, in which public figures felt safe expressing their fantasies.

Feminists have offered mixed responses to pornography. Some figures in the feminist movement, such as Andrea Dworkin, challenged the depiction of women as objects in these pornographic or "urban men's" magazines. Other feminists such as Betty Dodson went on to found the pro-sex feminist movement in response to anti-pornography campaigns. In India, an organization named Indians For Sexual Liberties is advocating the leglization of the porn business in India. The organization's founder, Laxman Singh, questioned the reasoning behind deeming as illegal the depiction of legal acts.^[39]

Premarital sex

Premarital sex, which had been heavily stigmatised for some time became more widely accepted during the sexual revolution. The increased availability of birth control (and the quasi-legalisation of abortion in some places) helped reduce the chance that pre-marital sex would result in unwanted children. By the mid-1970s the majority of newly married American couples had experienced sex before marriage.

The central part of the sexual revolution was the development of relationships between unmarried adults, which resulted in earlier sexual experimentation reinforced by a later age of marriage. The counterculture and the new left were the source of this later age of marriage. Americans were attending colleges and rebelling against their parents' ideals, which caused them to marry later in age, if at all. This meant that on average, Americans were becoming more sexually experienced before they entered into monogamous relationships. The increasing divorce rate and the decreasing stigma attached to divorce during this era also contributed to sexual experimentation. By 1971, more than 75% of Americans thought that premarital sex was okay, a threefold increase from the 1950s, and the number of unmarried Americans aged twenty to twenty-four more than doubled from 1960 to 1976. Americans were becoming less and less interested in getting married and settling down and less interested in monogamous relationships. In 1971, 35% of the country said they thought marriage was obsolete.

The idea of marriage being out-of-date came from the new development of casual sex between Americans. With the development of the birth control pill and the legalization of abortion in 1973, there was little threat of unwanted children out of wedlock. Also, during this time every sexually transmitted disease was treatable; there was no incurable bacterial STDs, no AIDS.

Swinger clubs were organizing in places ranging from the informal suburban home to disco-sized emporiums that promised a smorgasbord of sexual possibilities and free mouthwash. In New York City in 1977, Larry Levenson opened Plato's Retreat it was probably the closest that heterosexual America has ever gotten to the sexual frenzy of gay bathhouses. The retreat was eventually shut down in 1985 because of the constant hassle from public health authorities.^[23]

Politics of sex

Politics in the United States has become intertwined with sexually related issues, called the "politics of sex".^] A differing view of abortion pitted pro-life activists against pro-choice activists.

Women and men who lived with each other without marriage sought "palimony" equal to the alimony.^] Teenagers assumed their right to a sexual life with whomever they pleased, and bathers fought to be topless or nude at beaches.^]

Criticism

Fraenkel (1992) believes that the "sexual revolution", that the West supposedly experienced in the late 1960s, is indeed a misconception and that sex is not actually enjoyed freely, it is just observed in all the fields of culture; that is a kind of taboo behavior technically called "repressive desublimation".

Among radical feminists, the view soon became widely held that, thus far, the sexual freedoms gained in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, such as the decreasing emphasis on monogamy, had been largely gained by men at women's expense. In Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution, Sheila Jeffreys asserted that the sexual revolution on men's terms contributed less to women's freedom than to their continued oppression, an assertion that has both commanded respect and attracted intense criticism. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, feminist sex wars broke out due to disagreements on pornography, on prostitution, and on BDSM, as well as sexuality in general.

Backlash

Allyn argues that the sexual optimism of the 1960s waned with the economic crises of the 1970s, the massive commercialization of sex, increasing reports of child exploitation, disillusionment with the counter-culture and the New Left, and a combined left-right backlash against sexual liberation as an ideal. The discovery of herpes escalated anxieties rapidly and set the stage for the nation's panicked response to AIDS.

Although the rate of teenage sexual activity is hard to record, the prevalence of teenage pregnancy in developed nations such as Canada and the UK have seen a steady decline since the 1990s. For example, according to some statistics, in 1991 there were 61.8 children born per 1,000 teenage girls in the United States. By 2013, this number had declined to 26.6 births per 1,000 teenage girls.

(Adapted 2018 from Wikipedia by Bob)

Ted Mark and his Man from O.R.G.Y.

In the context of the sexual revolution, a number of authors emerged in the late sixties who surfed on the movement. One of them was Ted Mark. He produced two scores of novels rife with sex scenes clothed with crime and espionage action and tongue-in-cheek parody.

His Man of O.R.G.Y, Steve Victor, probably the epitome of his work.

Mark’s (pseudonym of Ted Gottfried) novels are generally reviewed as “literate smut”. A somewhat too derogatory opinion offered by bourgeois critics. Literate they are in that they are rather well-written, although filled with many digressions about sexual habits in various countries, re-enforced by references to abundant formal literature on the subject. Too many digressions, in fact. Mark justifies them by having Victor as a researcher in the context of the Kinsey report (1948 and 1953) which really triggered the sexual revolution in the USA. He also uses knowledge derived fro the famous and pioneering Masters and Johnson work Human Sexual Response of 1966, without actually mentioning the work. Finally, he refers to a number of culture-based sex manuals of foreign civilizations. This makes it believable that Ted Mark is a scholar in the subject, somewhat like his Victor character, who, above and beyond his job as a spy is a sex investigator.

These digression virtually disappear as from the second installment in the series. References to political events remain abundant. This is especially notable in “The Beauty and the bug”, surfing rather explicitly on the Nixon Watergate affair.

The novels of Mark were a rage during the late sixties and early seventies, to be completely forgotten today. When they hit the market they were definitely shocking to an American public, rather puritan and religious. They were much better accepted in California, particularly in Los Angeles, were sexual liberations had its heyday.

During the seventies, they were also largely sold in the Netherlands, were the sexual revolution had hit rather hard as well. I imagine that was also the case in Sweden…

Mark has composed his spy, Steve Victor, in the wake of Spillane’s Mike Hammer, with the sadism toned down, and also in the wake of the James Bond frenzy (started in 1962 and having culminated with Goldfinger and Thunderball).

Mark’s novels may be forgotten, and dated, today. They remain, however, as a witness of the new sex morals and its effect upon the society as they emerged in those days. The several sociological references they contain also testify to that society in turmoil. This actually provides for two possible reads of the novels: as spy romps or as sociological testimonies.

For a reader of 2018, the sex portions may appear banal and common-place. In the late sixties, however, they were shocking. So shocking that Mark avoided using the words “clitoris” and “vagina”, as well as “penis”, replacing them with several more poetic metaphors. The only sexual vocabulary used is comprised of breast, nipple and buttock, with an occasional use of “labia” or of the terms used in the Kama Sutra (such as lingam for penis)… Even the term of “orgasm” is never used. In doing so Mark might have avoided his books being banned.

While true, this kind of restraint vanished as the stories moved into the 70s. The “words” came into use, and somewhat later also the slang versions such as prick, cunt, etc. Interestingly, of the “good” words, “penis” was the last to appear.

This restraint disappeared toward the end of the sixties, mid-series. The anatomically correct terms became used, mixed with some metaphors. Interestingly, “penis” was the last term to appear.

As a result, this kind of literature is frequently tagged as pornographic. If so, it is of a “soft” variety, as Mark’s women are always willing, eager even, are never forced and enjoy their sexual activities (even when some SM is thrown into the mix). That these are phantasmatic, is a cliché of the genre. But Mark brings the women (and en) into situations were the conduct of both may seem realistic (orgies, parties, cruises) or places them in cultural background that are believed to have strong sexual rites (Arabia, Tibet, …) or they operate in brothels, or harems, of their free will.

Female and male parts are always exaggerated in their description: they are invariable quivering, palpitating, etc… This, again, is a cliché of the genre.

Mark also uses extreme colours to describe the complexion of breast et. al. And he adheres to the American phantasm of over-sized breasts, as well of proud derrières.

The point is, Mark’s novels are spoofs. That implies some exaggeration and the depiction of somewhat burlesque scenes, even during sexual intercourse. Some are hilarious. Others are contrived.

Last but not least, the novels are rife with references to the social end political life (and scandals) of the period. And Women Liberation movements are not forgotten. That confers the series an impressive “realism”, but also dates the books, unavoidably pushing them into the “forgotten history” corner.

Bob

2018

THE MAN FROM O.R.G.Y.

001

MY NAME is Steve Victor and sex is my profession. I have a Ph.D from a bona fide U. S. college that labels me an expert in the field. I also have a juicy research grant from one of those dollar-dripping American foundations. This means that I can play Kinsey, and they'll pick up the tab.

The foundation doesn’t hand out research grants to individuals, naturally. To qualify for one, I had to set myself up as an organization. But the organization is me, and I'm it.

It’s convenient to refer to this one-man show by its initials, which are O.R.G.Y. And people are impressed when I tell them that I'm the man from O.R.G.Y. It surprised me at first that many of them were profoundly disturbed when I told them what the initials stand for. Now I'm hesitant about revealing the full name. I'm not sure whether I should tell you or not . . .

The grant was what brought me to Damascus. It was the kick-off place for an extensive survey of Arab and Oriental sex practices. The purpose was to determine the relationship between these modern practices and such ancient sex doctrines as those set forth in Muhammed’s El-Quran (The Koran), the Muslims’ Book of the Ring of the Dove² , India's Kama Sutra³ by Vatsayana, the Hindu Anangaranga⁴ (Code of Cupid) by Kalyanamalla, China's combination of Taoist legend and love-guide The Golden Lotus⁵ , the famous japanese handbook whose title literally translates as How to Make a Nymphomaniac Faint in One Foray, and other, lesser-known Eastern erotica.

As far as the foundation financing me was concerned, the method of the survey would be the common one of a lot of secondhand research and question asking. But I had other ideas. I believe that the only way to really get at this kind of truth is through personal investigation and experience.

Nice work if you can get it. I'd gotten it.

My plan was to pursue sex pleasures from Damascus through Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and then India. This roughly parallels the route taken by Alexander the Great after his conquests in Egypt. But I intended to go farther than Alexander. He'd turned back after India. I meant to go on, to cross the Bay of Bengal to Burma, to cover Thailand, Cambodia and parts of Vietnam. If possible, I hoped to cross the South China Sea and either touch on Formosa, or perhaps manage a visit to the coast of Red China itself. The State Department would raise hell if I succeeded in that, of course, but I am after all a dedicated scientist. In any case, I planned to close my investigation in Japan.

It was an ambitious undertaking, but with the foundation financing, I could afford to attempt it in a leisurely way. I'd spent enough of my life grinding away to get my Ph.D. Now I had the chance to cut loose and live a little, and I intended to make the most of it.

Since pleasure is my business, I figured that shouldn't be too hard to do. I got my feet wet the first week after I arrived in Damascus, sampling the fantastic variety of sex pleasures the city has to offer and making copious notes on what I experienced and observed. It was fun, naturally, but it was also productive in terms of the survey I was making.

Chiefly, I concentrated on the Mohammedan sex code. I learned that in modern Damascus it is still strictly observed in some ways, while completely ignored in others. All of the advice relating to heightening sexual enjoyment is pretty much followed, but most or the taboos aimed at restricting sex are for the most part ignored.

Thus, in the brothels of Damascus, both prostitutes and customers smoke hashish in accordance with El-Quran’s recommendation that this will prolong the sex act, but they also drink alcoholic beverages, which is strictly forbidden in conjunction with sex by the ancient holy book. Arab patrons spend long nights copulating freely with the whores in accordance with Muhammed's advice that this is beneficial to the health, but they are also just as free in breaking his taboo against “spilling the seed with loose women," which is considered to be fornication, rather than copulation, and therefore a sin. (What the Prophet advised was withdrawal before ejaculation, and for many centuries Arabs practiced this art when cohabitating with prostitutes.) Oral pleasures, recommended as the most satisfying of all in, the Muslims‘ Book of the King of the Dove, are pursued with religious fervor, but the taboo against the woman swallowing the fruits of this pleasure is likewise broken regularly by the joy-girls of Damascus. The harlots anoint their bodies with oils and perfumes as El-Quran decrees, but they rarely bother observing the lavish and time-consuming rituals of bathing which are also demanded.

To nail down facts like these and the others I accumulated, I had to visit some of the sleaziest and toughest districts of Damascus. A Westerner in such places was begging for trouble. I expected it and was prepared for it, having been an amateur boxer in college and later having studied both jiu jitsu and karate. I also carried a gun in anticipation of such trouble.

It came. I was strolling through the native quarter one night, fascinated as always by the soliciting technique of the women crouching in the doorways. These sluts are called "geese" by the Arabs of Damascus because the noise of passionate whistle-breathing they use to attract patrons sounds like the mating cry of the Syrian water-fowl. If they catch a man’s eye, they raise the skirt of the long, one-piece garment which is all they wear and brazenly twitch their bared wares at him. If he's interested, they'll pull him back in the doorway with them, undo the drawstring of his pants if he's Arab, or unzip his fly if he's European, and make love with him quickly, standing up all the short while, right in plain sight of any passersby. Then they'll collect the few cents they charge and push him out into the street so that they may hiss at the next prospective customer. They deal in quantity, not quality, for a quick turnover is the only way they can survive.

I wasn't buying that night, just looking and making some more notes. Suddenly there came the sound of loud female screaming from a dark alleyway off to my left. Now, in Damascus, the wise man who hears such a sound will run the other way as fast as he can. Would-be heroes are fair fodder for the local cemetery. I knew this and started to act on it, but the growing terror of the screams caught me up short. Cursing myself for a fool, I plunged into the blackness of the alley to investigate.

I couldn't see a hell of a lot, but as I drew closer to the sounds, I managed to make out five or six Arab boys in their teens closing in on a female figure. I ran up to them with some kind of stupid shout like “Hey there! Leave her alone! Stop it!" and they turned to stare at me in amazement. This quickly changed to active animosity. One of them held the girl while the others turned to deal with me.

Arabs never heard of the Marquis of Queensbury. The first thing that came my way was a vicious kick aimed straight for my groin. I sidestepped it and connected with a karate slice to the ankle of the kicker. Behind him, as he half-collapsed from the sudden pain, a knife flashed from the sleeve of a robe. The kicker straightened up. As the blade slashed towards me, I grabbed the kicker and used him as a shield. It worked. He screamed with pain as the knife plunged into his flesh.

Feeling his body go slack in my grip, I used the momentum this gave me to slam the knife-wielder against the wall of the alley. I dropped the kicker and crashed a right uppercut to his buddy’s jaw. I turned then, but it was too late. The rest of them were on me.

I went down under their weight, punching as hard as I could, but knowing the jig was up. There were just too many of them. Another knife flashed and I figured it was curtains.

Then, suddenly, the alley was lousy with cops. The young hoodlums went scampering off and the cops didn't even make a token pretense of trying to nab them. Watching them go, I still found time to wonder how come the gendarmes had showed up at all. They rarely go anywhere near the native quarter of Damascus except to stage a raid aimed at stopping the export of kayf (a particularly potent mixture of hashish and cocaine which is the mainstay of the illegal international drug traffic in this part of the world). And such raids are only staged about once a year; As for the rest of the crime and vice which is part of the daily life in the native quarter, the police merely shrug and ignore it. It seemed an incredible piece of luck that they should have come along when they did.

I started to thank the cop in charge, but he evidently couldn't understand my Arabic, although I usually have no trouble making myself clear. He just shook his head and motioned for me to come along. I tried to explain the situation and tell him that I was an American and that I didn't want to go to the police station, but it was no use. So I fell in between two cops and allowed myself to be marched to the street.

There were two police cars waiting there. The girl was already in one of them, a cop on either side of her. I got into the other one and we started off for the precinct house.

The Chief himself received us almost immediately. He was a tall man, handsome and dark-skinned, with a moustache so long it might almost be described as "handlebar." He spoke English and introduced himself with extreme politeness. From his name, I knew he was Egyptian.

This didn't surprise me. Ever since Nasser had swallowed up Egypt's neighboring Arab countries under the pretext of a United Arab Republic, the officials in those countries had been steadily replaced by loyal Nasser-ites from Cairo. So it was no surprise to find that the police chief of Syria's major city was an Egyptian.

When the introductions were over, I told him what had happened. He expressed sympathy and then launched into a long smooth speech designed to show how much he admired my country and what personal warmth he felt for Americans. I concealed my impatience and listened until he ran down. When he did, I told him I was tired and would like to return to my hotel now.

“Of course, Mr. Victor, I do indeed understand," he told me. “It's just that I must request you to wait a few moments until the representative from your embassy arrives. He is already on his way and your wait should not be a long one."

“The embassy?" I was surprised. "How do they know about this?"

"I informed them."

“But why? It has nothing to do with them. Unless I'm under arrest or something. Am I?”

"Definitely not, Mr. Victor“ It's a mere formality, a matter of protocol. Believe me, you have no cause to worry. Ah, here is your Mr. Preston now. He will tell you."

A horn-rimmed young diplomat type came in, all tact and efficiency. A brisk handshake, a few polite words swapped with the Chief, and we were ready to go. The Chief's last words puzzled me.

“You will see to the matter of the girl?" he asked Preston.

“Of course. She'll go with us. What about your end?"

“I will see to it personally that what must be done is done."

“Thank you." Preston led me out then to a sleek, diplomatic-style car. As we approached it, I could see that the girl was already inside.

“How come she's here?" I asked Preston. “She’s not an American."

“It will all be made clear to you, Mr. Victor. Just be patient."

I shrugged. It really wasn't any of my business. “Well, thanks for your trouble,” I told Preston. “I can walk to my hotel from here."

“I’ve been asked to bring you to the embassy, Mr. Victor."

“But why?"

“You will also find that out in due time."

I was getting pretty annoyed, but when you're in a foreign country, particularly an Arab country, you don’t go around arguing with U. S. embassy officials. So I preceded him into the car and sulked in silence as we drove to the embassy. Here, the girl and I were separated again. I don’t know where they took her, but I was led into a swank, wood-paneled room and left there by my- self.

About ten minutes later, a gray-haired man entered. Despite the gray, he didn't look much like a diplomat. He looked like a waterfront jackroller all dressed up in a rented tuxedo. Even his neatness gave you the impression that it wasn't natural, but only put on to impress his parole officer. He sat down in back of the desk, opened out a large file-folder in front of him and turned his attention to me.

"My name is Charles Putnam, Mr. Victor, at least as far as you're concerned."

"What?" I was confused.

"I mean that isn't my real name. But if we should ever meet again, that's the name you'll know me by.”

“I don't understand."

"1 didn't expect that you would, Mr. Victor. But there will be much that you don't understand tonight, the least of which is the reason I use a pseudonym. It's of no importance, really. Just remember to call me Mr. Putnam. Will you do that?"

“All right."

"Now, Mr. Victor,” he glanced down at the papers before him, “we have compiled quite an extensive dossier on you. Your father was a toolmaker, your mother a grade school teacher and you were born in the third year of their marriage. On the fourth day of July, 1933, to be exact. This event took place in Columbus, Ohio, where you subsequently grew up and attended both grammar and high school. You went to the University of Ohio and broke off your education temporarily in your senior year to enlist in the army. This was at the time of the Korean War, and you served with honor, earning a Silver Star for heroism and three separate citations of commendation from your commanding officer. After the war you resumed your studies at the University of Indiana where you later did post-graduate work with the Kinsey organization. You got your master's degree in . . ."

He continued speaking for a long time and there were things he knew about me that I'd forgotten myself. He had a list of every girl I'd ever dated. He knew which bars I frequented. He even knew what kind of toothpaste I used.

“I don't get it," I said when he'd run down. “Why have you gone to all this trouble? What do you want from me?"

"We went to all this trouble, Mr. Victor, to establish the extent of your patriotism and loyalty to the United States of America. And let me compliment you. What we have learned establishes you as a man who loves his country beyond any doubt.”

"Sure I love my country. So what? Doesn't everybody?"

“Perhaps. But not everybody is in a position to be as helpful to their country as you are, Mr. Victor. The question is, are you willing to risk your life to aid your country?"

"Well, sure— But how? I mean I’ll be glad to do anything I can, but I still don't see what I could possibly do that could be helpful to you."

“This research program you're engaged on, Mr. Victor, gives you entry to places the United States government could never officially investigate. The key to a factor which may prove quite vital in our handling of international power politics lies in one of these places. Also, sheer chance has thrown a contact your way which will be invaluable if you agree to help us."

“I agree. Now suppose you fill me in."

“Not so fast, Mr. Victor. I must warn you first that this could conceivably cost you your life. The risks are very great. They are even greater than those faced by the usual secret agent. As a matter of fact, they're precisely double."

“All right. I'll accept the risks. But you're still being awfully vague, Mr. Putnam. Why don't you tell me exactly what it is you want me to do?”

He shook his head “I can tell you only a small part of it. When you leave here, the girl will leave with you. She has no idea of this. She has no idea why she's here. But, take my word for it, she will accompany you to any place you want. She's in trouble, and if you provide her with a refuge, she's bound to accept it gratefully.‘ All we ask is that you keep her with you until three p. m. tomorrow. At that time, if you play your cards right, she'll be content to wait for you when you leave her to keep your appointment."

“What appointment?"

“You will go to the Cafe Apocrypha at precisely three p.m. There will be a large man with a trimmed Van Dyke beard seated alone at one of the tables. He will have his baton and there will be a green feather in the brim. You will go up to him and in English you will ask if he has an American cigarette. He will reply ‘No, only Russian.’ Remember—-‘No, only Russian.’ Those exact words. If he says that, join him. If he doesn't, leave immediately and go back to your hotel."

“Can I ask who this man is?"

“His name is Vladimir Potemchenko. He’s a Russian secret agent."

"A Red agent? Is it safe to trust him?"

“Yes. In this case, yes.”

“Why? Has he defected or something?" I asked.

“No. He is completely loyal to the U.S.S.R. He's not a double agent. He'll be acting on instructions from Moscow. And he will tell you what to do."

“Wait a minute! Let me get this straight. I'm to meet a loyal Red agent and do what he tells me? Is that right?"

“Exactly.”

I was beginning to get dizzy. "But that's crazy," I protested.

“Not crazy, Mr. Victor. But, as I must keep stressing, extremely dangerous. You see, negotiations involving this affair have been carried out only at the highest level. Only certain key people in Washington and Moscow know about it. To Potemchenko, you will be an American traitor in the pay of the Soviets. If he, or any of his cohorts, should find out differently, they would doubtless think you were betraying them and arrange to have you killed as quickly as possible. On the other hand, if our Intelligence, or that of our Allies, should get wind of your working with the Russkys, you would immediately be branded an American traitor. And, it's quite possible that the situation will be such that nothing could be done to exonerate you. In addition to these, there are other, more immediate dangers which will become apparent to you from your contact with Potemchenko. That's as much as I can tell you now. Are you still willing?“

"Yes," I told him, both frightened and intrigued. “I'll do it."

“Good luck then. You can leave now. No matter what happens, don't come back to this embassy. We don't want you traced here."

Putnam led me out a side door to a darkened driveway. A car was waiting there with the lights off and the motor running. The girl was already in the back. I got in and the car moved off swiftly. It wound through a maze of back streets and then stopped.

"Out." The driver spoke the one word.

We got out.

He drove off and we stood there looking at each other. The neighborhood was familiar and I realized we weren't too far from my hotel. I smiled at the girl and she smiled back tentatively. "What's your name?" I asked her.

"Teska Hosnani."

“You speak English. That's good. Well, Teska, where do we go from here?”

"I have no place to go."

“Then would you like to come to my room with me?"

“I would like that. I am grateful to you. I will show you how grateful."

Entering my hotel room, I turned on the light and for the first time I got a good look at this girl. It was easy to see why she'd attracted the lust of the young Arab hoodlums. Most Muslim women wear only three items-—sandals, a veil, and a sort of sheath which covers them from neck to ankle. Teska's sheath was semi-transparent and her charms rippled enticingly beneath it. I also noticed that her veil was studded with jewels, as were her sandals. She was obviously no ordinary Damascus streetwalker.

“Sit down,” I told her. “You must still feel pretty shaky after what you've been through."

“Such things are common here," she told me, sitting on the edge of the bed.

"Really?"

"Yes. Every Muslim girl, by the time she reaches my age, knows what it is to have been raped."

"You're exaggerating."

“No. We come to sex very young in this country. Often, it is sex combined with violence. But the street boys are the worst of all. They travel in gangs, take overdoses of kayf and spend their lust insanely on whatever is handy. If they get a woman, they will rape her three or four times each, forcing their inflamed manhood into every conceivable bodily orifice. If a woman isn't handy, they'll attack a man, or a child of either sex. With them sex is always brutal. And under the influence of kayf, if there is nothing human around, they'll satisfy themselves with stray dogs, or cats, or even by rubbing madly against inanimate objects. Such boys are the terror of Damascus, a threat to any woman, be she prostitute or merchant's wife."

And they think they've got a juvenile delinquency problem back home, I thought to myself wryly. I made a mental note to look further into what Teska had told me if I got the chance. It might have some relationship to the Mohammedan practice of exercising boys sex organs through manipulation from infancy until they were old enough to be taught how to do it themselves. It certainly seemed likely that urging a child towards sex from birth might result in such violent explosions after he'd entered puberty.

"That's terrible," I said aloud.

"Only because of the brutality," she said frankly.

"Most women do not mind the sex. Indeed, they enjoy it."

“Enjoy being raped?"

She smiled. “In Syria we have a proverb: ‘One cannot thread a moving needle.’ No woman can be raped unless she cooperates at some point. Indeed, some women prefer their sex to be violent. For myself, I prefer it to be more tender."

“But you do enjoy sex?" I said sitting beside her on the bed.

“Oh, yes. Of course. That's why I ran away and came here."

“What did you run away from?”

"Can I trust you?" She looked at me narrowly.

"Yes. Of course."

"I ran off from the harim of Sheikh Taj-ed el Atassi.”

“You mean you were in a harem?"

"Yes. You know about harems, don't you? I mean, I've met some Americans who believe they're ancient history. They don't know they still exist in Syria."

“I know they exist. It's just that I've never met anyone who’s actually been inside one before. I've a special interest in this sort of thing, you see. Would you tell me how you came to enter a harem?"

“I was tricked into it."

“Tricked how?"

“It's a long story, but if you really want to know -"

“Yes. Please."

“All right." She sighed. “I was born into the Druze sect. Do you know what that is?"

I nodded. About 70 percent of the Syrian people are Sunnite Moslems. The rest are divided among three other Moslem cults, of which the Druze is one. They are famous for training their women for sexuality from birth and Druze girls are in great demand among Sultans and other upper-class connoisseurs of sex.

“Like all female Druze infants," Teska continued, “tebzzir was performed on me before I was a few months old.”

I nodded again to show that I understood that by “tebtzir" she meant circumcision of the clitoris. This simple operation, similar to the circumcision of the male, is designed to remove the flesh which usually covers the female’s clitoris so that it will be more sensitive and have freedom to grow. The Druze believe, and for sound medical reasons, that this will make their women much more responsive during the sex act.

“As is our custom," Teska went on, "I was introduced to sex on my third birthday. An uncle, a very gentle man, took me upon his lap and opened his pants so that I might feel his manhood against the stem of my even then responsive blossom. Ever so carefully, he penetrated me a fraction of an inch. This was repeated many times during my childhood and the depth of penetration increased. By the time I was eleven, I could swallow all that was offered and a year later knew enough to draw its honey. I took great pleasure in this. It is our way, you must understand. But by the time I reached sixteen, there was no man of our family endowed with largeness enough to satisfy me. This is a frequent complaint of Druze girls. I suppose it is because we know such bigness while we are ourselves so small that later, when we are ourselves large, the very lack of disproportion results in constant disappointment and frustration. There is a way to overcome this, but I did not know that yet. Anyway, men found pleasure with me, for I was very knowing as to the ordinary ways of sex, having mastered bodily movements and muscular control to a very high extent. But I found little pleasure for myself. And that's why I ran off with Abdul."

“Who is Abdul?"

“As far as I knew then, he was merely the largest and handsomest Shiite I'd ever seen. You know the Shiites?”

“Yes.” They were another of the three minor Moslem cults of Syria.

“You see, he showed me his manhood. It was only a quick look, but it was the largest I have ever seen. I should have investigated more closely. You'll see why in a moment. Anyway, after he showed it to me, he asked me to run off with him and I was so impressed that I quickly agreed. I never guessed that he'd been specially sent to lure me to the harim of Sheikh Taj-ed el Atassi."

“You mean he didn't want to make love to you himself?"

“Not only didn't want to. Couldn't. You see, Abdul is a eunuch. When he gave me that quick look at his sapling, I'd been so dazzled that I didn’t notice that the roots had been removed. Even so, we did manage one fantastic night of love-making before we reached the harim.”

“How could you if he was a eunuch?"

"You have a common Western misconception," she told me. “A eunuch may set as straight a branch as any man. It's just that he can no longer generate the sap for it. In one way, this makes him a superb lover, for being incapable of attaining release, he can make love for hours on end without becoming tired. On the other hand, it is frustrating for a woman to be assailed by a machine unable to respond no matter how frantically it is driven. Such, at least was my final judgment of Abdul. Any inanimate object of the proper size and shape would have served as well."

“What happened when you got to the harem?"

“I learned all then. But what could I do? I had disgraced my parents by running off with a Shiite. I couldn't go home. Besides, I had no way of leaving even if I'd wanted to. We'd come on a camel that Abdul had rented, and if I wanted to leave, it meant crossing perhaps forty miles of desert alone. So I did the only thing I could do. I stayed.”

“What was it like there?"

"Dull. That is the only way I can describe it. I am a girl who has been trained to sex from infancy. Thus I was a delicacy to the Sheikh. But even so, he could not begin to satisfy me. You see, he is bound by the Book of Revelation in the Science of Copulation to follow a strict routine. He must service each member of his harem at least once a week. But every other night he is bound to rest. The Sheikh had eighteen concubines, including myself, and that meant that every other night he must make love to six of them."

“How does he ever manage to keep it up?" I wondered, intending no pun.

"He merely goes a few strokes with one and then another, saving his final effort for the last, who is usually his favorite. Only she received the juices of his passion, I was so blessed as a rule, but even so grew almost feverish with frustration. At his most aroused, the Sheikh was still too small to really stir me. And even when I discovered the secret from one of the other girls for obtaining enjoyment from a man who is small, his attentions were too infrequent to appease my hunger."

“What secret are you talking about?"

"You shall see for yourself soon.” Her tongue flicked at my ear.

"How did you finally escape?" I asked.

"I hid myself in a crate aboard a camel train that had stopped at the oasis adjoining the Sheikh's harim. It was bound for Damascus, and so here I am."

“But what will you do now?"

“I will make love to you."

“I don’t mean that. I mean generally."

“I don't know. I’ll have to go back, I suppose. But not before I have found a real man to quench my thirst. A man like you." Her hand stroked my leg.

“But what will they do to you?"

"Beat me perhaps. But not too badly. I'm too valuable to chance leaving any marks on me. It is a mark of his masculine esteem for a Sheikh to count a Druze girl among his houris. . . . Enough talk now. There is a virgin waiting for you to pluck her blossom."

“A virgin!" I laughed. “Come on now, Teska, after everything you've just told me?"

“A virgin," she insisted. "You shall see." She stood up and kicked off her sandals. Then she undid a clasp at the shoulder of her gown and it slowly fell away from her. Her breasts stood out, round, full, their tips moist and erect. She pirouetted and her hips were revealed, two burning arches trembling with eagerness. She rolled her belly and the sheath settled at her feet. There was no hair on her, for like all Druze girls she had shaved her body completely. The rigid, bright red sign of her desire quivered as though beckoning to me.

But when I went to embrace her, she stopped me.

“Wait. First this." She removed a small vial from a tiny pocket stitched to the inside surface of the garment at her feet.

“What's that?" I asked.

“It is the nectar which shall make me a virgin for you tonight." She turned away modestly and bent over, taking her time and inserting the ointment carefully.

“But what is it?" I asked again, when she turned back.

“Alum. It draws together the flesh so that our pleasure will be greater."

“Alum! Well, I’ll be damned!“

“No. You will be blessed. You will be blessed by Allah through me."

She pulled me to her then, and her body was on fire. She pulled my lips to one plump breast and stroked my naked thighs. Her kisses were hot and deep, and they covered my entire body. Then, finally, she impaled herself on me and I felt as though I'd been grasped by a pulsating suction pump. The sensation was indescribable. Our bodies moved more and more quickly until our passion reached its peak and, together, exploded.

“Praise be to Allah! Praise be to Allah!" Teska shouted the traditional after-sex thanksgiving of the Moslem woman. “Allah be praised! Allah be praised!”

And, still shaken by what was surely the most powerful sex experience I'd ever had, I echoed Teska's words with a thanks of my own. "Alum be praised!" I murmured. "Alum be praised!"

002

IT STARTED in Moscow. That much and only a little more I learned from Potemchenko the following day, The rest —but far from all of it—I managed to piece together for myself.

It made headlines, East and West, but the stories under the headlines barely touched on the facts of the case, and none of them went into the truly frightening international implications of these facts. At all the stages of the story's development, these implications were deliberately played down. Thus, from carefully guarded secret to calculated exposé to explosive, world-shaking riots, there were no hints, East or West, that this might be the fuse which could trigger the holocaust feared by the entire world.

Romeo and Juliet-—that’s how simple it was at the beginning. Romeo was Mustafa Ben-Narouz, a 23-year-old Arab-Egyptian exchange student studying in "Moscow; Juliet was Anna Kirkov, a 19-year-old girl whose beauty was so untypically Russian that it bordered on being downright capitalistically degenerate. The two flies in the ointment were the Russian government itself, which frowned on contact between any foreigners and all Muscovites except when necessary at the highest level, and Anna's father, whose particular objection was based on the fact that he considered Arabs to be Semites, members of a different race, and unworthy of his daughter's "pure" Russian blood.

Josef Kirkov, the Papa Capulet of this tragedy, was a complex man. He was an old-line, down-the-line Bolshevik in his mid-sixties. His youth had been the youth of a fanatical revolutionist, the days filled with doctrine, the nights with violence and bloodshed. Marriage had been delayed until his middle years, and Anna was the only offspring of that marriage. His wife had died in childbirth, and after that, the dedication of Josef Kirkov's life had been threefold.

First came his zealous devotion to the State, a full-time job in itself, involving as it did the constant reorientation of his mind to the mercurial and quick-changing Soviet policies. Second came his love and concern for his daughter, emotions so strong as to be both obsessive and possessive, an attachment which often came close to suffocating the girl. Third, there was Kirkov's work, scientific investigation so important that even without his history of loyalty to the Bolshevik cause, he would still have been a member of the Red hierarchy.

For Kirkov was that peculiarly Communist creation, the single-minded scientist whose thoughts never deviate from the problem at hand. He was, at one and the same time, both brilliant and dogmatic. Thus it was possible for him to allow his imagination the widest scope in the labyrinth of atomic: physics which was his field, while never once questioning the rigid political doctrines which ruled his life. His scientific curiosity never left the realm of physics, and so it was equally easy for him to accept the biological untruth that Arabs were members of an inferior race. The fact that this untruth stemmed from the prejudices and old wives‘ tales of his pre-Bolshevik childhood made no difference. Nothing in his constant Communist indoctrination gave it the lie, and so he accepted Semite inferiority as a fact.

It was one of the few facts he accepted which he didn't succeed in imparting successfully to his daughter, Anna. An ingenious scientist ranking at the top of his profession, a blind devotee of the party line, from the first he undertook to embellish the State educational process by seeing to the development of her mind himself. She was the only one to whom he spoke freely of his work, and by the time she reached the age of 19, she was as capable of grasping his theories and discoveries as he was of evolving and pursuing them.

But Anna's lively mind proved more troublesome in the matter of accepting her father's political indoctrinations. She was a loyal Communist-—to be anything else would never have occurred to even so questing a mind as hers in that environment—but she had a habit of raising points of logic and querying matters which her father expected her to accept automatically. It was a vexation to her father, and when it combined with the lightning of love which struck her, it became a Sword of Damocles to all the peoples of the earth.

The Soviets themselves, despite their customarily suspicious natures, were slow to realize this. At first what happened seemed only a bawdy farce. Then it seemed merely a sloppy romance. It wasn't until later that they began to see it for the far-reaching tragedy it really was.

Anna Kirkov and Mustafa Ben-Narouz met at a party. It was a secret party thrown by a group of foreign exchange students. Secret of necessity, since the rules laid down by the Soviets forbade their fraternizing with Russian girls. Not only legally, but morally such contacts were frowned upon by the elders of Moscow. Anna's father wasn't alone in his feelings of racial superiority to the Asian and African visitors. But, even in Moscow, 'teen-agers are apt to regard such taboos—seemingly aimed directly at them—as made to be broken.

A girl friend of Anna's who had been having a secret affair with one of the African students had been asked to bring some Russian girls to the party. She'd asked Anna to come and Anna had been intrigued and accepted. The girls arrived in a group and immediately segregated themselves in a separate room.

The segregation wasn't for long, but it was necessary. The Russian girls, Anna included, all wore the sturdy shoes and sexless dresses decreed as proper wear by the bluenose commissars of Moscow. Their faces were bare of make-up, as was also deemed proper by a pseudo-culture which equated such artifacts with Western depravity. But girls will be girls even in Moscow, and now the young Russian females were doing their best to emulate the sexiest of capitalist sexpots.

High heels and silk stockings appeared from the recesses of deep handbags. Cosmetics were shared among them. The harnesses passed off as bras to Russian girls were removed and stowed away. Needles and thread flew over hemlines to shorten them. Belts were tied around waists so that the dresses might hug the hips. Buttons were undone and bodices pinned back to expose daring décolletage. Finally, still in a group, the girls joined the party.

Anna Kirkov was unquestionably the most desirable girl present. Her beauty was classically Russian. Her skin was white as ivory save for two dabs of rouge at her cheeks and the scarlet lipstick outlining the natural pout of her mouth. The half-moons of large, healthy breasts swelled over the top of her pinned-back dress. Her skirt flared as she moved about the room and her long, silk-encased legs, slender but sturdy, drew many eyes. Her face was animated, dark, mascara’d eyes flashing beneath a crown of blue-black hair which reached almost to her waist. Her cheekbones were high and Slavic, her nose straight, her chin firm. Over-all, her appearance was both aristocratic and passionate.

Anna attracted Mustafa Ben-Narouz immediately. He asked her to dance. She accepted, most impressed by this tall, handsome Arab with his flowing robes, trimly clipped moustache, burnt leather complexion and white-teeth sparkling smile. He spoke flawless Russian, and after they'd danced a few times he led her to an arm-chair in the corner of the room, squatted easily in front of her, and they talked.

Much vodka was consumed, and after a while the party began to get wilder. A Russian girl who was present later described it to the authorities. According to her, the lights were turned out in favor of a few candles and the group broke into couples who started to neck. Some of these couples went into the other room, and it was taken for granted that they made love there. She was asked if Anna and Mustafa had retired to the other room and replied that they hadn't.

But they had necked and petted freely, she testified. Mustafa had joined Anna in the armchair and arranged his robe so that it enveloped them both. They had kissed repeatedly and Mustafa's hands had been busy beneath Anna's bodice. At one point they had angled their bodies so that his robe no longer covered them, and it could be seen that he had pushed up her skirt to play with her.

It might seem that both Mustafa and Anna were fast workers, but it must be remembered that in Moscow time is short for lovers and opportunities scarce, so that the most must be made of what time is available. In any case, by the time the party ended, Anna knew that she was in love. Mustafa echoed her sentiments. They contrived further meetings between them.

This wasn't easy. It meant that Mustafa had to acquire a suit of Russian clothes as his own would make him too easily identifiable as a foreigner. It also meant that Anna had to keep very careful track of her father's work schedule so that her meetings with Mustafa could coincide with times when Josef Kirkov was out of the apartment.

Yes, the Kirkov apartment was their trysting-place. It was ideal, for Kirkov had been both fortunate and favored in the quarters assigned himself and his daughter. In a city where two and sometimes three families are often crammed into a one-room flat by government order, the State's faithful servant and one of its most eminent scientists rated a three-room apartment all for himself and his daughter. Thus Anna and Mustafa were able to enjoy a privacy denied most lovers in Moscow.

How many times they enjoyed liaisons at the apartment isn't known. Only the details of their last meeting have been brought to light. That was the one in which they were caught by Josef Kirkov.

He'd forgotten some notes at home and broke off his work in the middle of the day to fetch them. Coming through the front door of the apartment, he was struck by the sound of a high-pitched, almost hysterical giggle carrying from his daughter's bedroom. It was followed by a low, musical, indistinguishable masculine murmur. Kirkov marched to the door of the bedroom, which was slightly ajar, and pushed it all the way open. He stood and stared for a long, unbelieving moment at the scene which greeted-his eyes.

His daughter, Anna, was stretched out lengthwise on the bed, completely nude. Her back was arched, her eyes closed, her hair an ebony shawl covering the pillow behind her head. Her body was bent at the waist and her legs stretched straight up in the air, the knees held stiff. Only her hips and her lips moved, the former writhing in the throes of sweet torture, the latter mouthing an unintelligible hysteria made up of both laughter and sobs.

The cause of this reaction was a large, dark-skinned man lying across the bed, perpendicular to her, one of his hips wedged under her buttocks, an arm wrapped around her thighs, his body dictating the rhythm her hips were following. Shocked as he was, Kirkov was amazed at the largeness of the organ revealed by the long, deep, complete strokes as it battered untiringly against his daughter's flesh. He also couldn't help wondering at the strange device circling the base. It looked like a silver ring with a small thimble attached to it and a sort of spinner bristling with fine hair which seemed to dip into the thimble with each movement. Also, a strange red powder seemed to cover the entire organ.

(Kirkov couldn't have known it, but when this description was relayed to me, I immediately identified the sex device Mustafa was wearing. It was a Chinese “love instrument," known as "the silver clasp” and frequently used even today by educated Chinese males familiar with The Golden Lotus, which goes into great detail as to the pleasures it may provide. It serves several purposes which enhance the sex act. First, it cuts off the flow of blood from the male organ and therefore allows a man to sustain his passion for long periods of time. Second, its sturdy base is designed with a small metallic rise which repeatedly hits against and arouses that most sensitive sentinel of womanhood during love-making. Third, the bristling spinner continually tickles the portals of femininity and fosters a sensation which even the most hardened Chinese prostitutes find impossible to describe. Fourth, this same spinner constantly picks up bits of red powder from the thimble at the base of the silver clasp and distributes it over the male organ which transmits it to the female. This red powder is composed of cinnamon, hot mustard, pepper, ginger, and other irritating substances which make the delicate surfaces involved, excruciatingly sensitive. . . . It was interesting that Mustafa would have employed the silver clasp, for it is strictly a Chinese device and not to be found among the sex dildoes commonly used in the Arab countries.)

Kirkov roused himself from the shock which had immobilized him. “Anna!" he shouted.

His voice was loud, but the lovers were so enraptured of the frenzy possessing their bodies that at first they didn't even hear him.

"Anna!" he shouted again.

They came apart then, slowly, with obvious reluctance as though the import of the shout still hadn't reached them. Anna opened her eyes and focused them on her father. They looked at him blankly for a moment and then her cheeks flushed with color and her face filled with a mixture of embarrassment and fear.

Kirkov's account of what happened next was probably garbled by the intensity of his own emotions in recalling it. Evidently he played the outraged papa to the hilt. Anna insisted that she and Mustafa wanted to get married and Mustafa tried to convince Kirkov that this was indeed their intention. But Kirkov wouldn't buy it. No filthy Arab pervert son-in-law for him. His daughter had disgraced him, and now she was no longer his daughter. He disowned her. He ordered her out of the house.

Once out, the couple had to face up to the seriousness of their situation. The State might have raised objections to their marriage even with Anna's father's consent. Without it, such a marriage would never be allowed. As a foreign exchange student, Mustafa’s freedom was severely limited. What would they do? Where would Anna go? Their only chance was to flee the country together, but that too posed problems.

Surprisingly, these problems proved fairly easy for them to solve. Mustafa enlisted the aid of a Turkish girl, a fellow exchange student, and the details of their plan to skip the country fell into place.

The Turkish girl gave Anna her passport and another fellow student of Mustafa’s doctored it so that the description tallied with Anna's appearance and her photo appeared in place of the original one. Then Mustafa located an ancient Moslem mosque, the last to survive in Moscow, left untouched by the Communist government as their proof to the Arab countries that the commissars honored their religion. One mosque was small enough price to pay in a Russia which would woo Arab allegiance by coughing up the financing for an Aswan Dam. Mustafa bribed the priest in charge of the mosque and he and Anna were married without the necessary paper of permission from the government.

Mustafa then informed his government that he wished to return to Egypt, and travel arrangements were made for him. These papers were also doctored to allow transit for both man and wife. Only three days after Josef Kirkov had discovered the lovers, they were on the train from Moscow to Sevastapol. From here, they boarded a boat and crossed the Black Sea to the seaport of Sinop in Turkey.

Three things happened then. The Turkish girl went to her embassy and reported that her passport had been stolen. Moscow officials began making inquiries of Josef Kirkov as to the whereabouts of his daughter. And Anna sent her father a long letter from Sinop—a result of the last vestiges of her training as a dutiful daughter—and told him what they had done. She also told him that they were going to Cairo, Mustafa's native city.

But they never went to Cairo. And Kirkov never heard from his daughter again. It was as though the earth had swallowed them up. Mustafa and Anna vanished and all efforts to trace them were in vain.

Such efforts might never have been made at all if it hadn't been for certain facts brought to the attention of the NKVD, Russia's secret police. Their interest was first aroused by the fact that Kirkov was an important atomic scientist and had access to the most classified information. Checks on him and his family were routine.

When they learned that his daughter had successfully escaped the country in the company of a foreigner, their first concern was as to how much secret data she might have had access to. Kirkov, loyal Commie that he was, confessed that his daughter was as familiar with his work as any expert in the field. He further revealed to them that she had both the training and the knowledge to explain the solutions to many nuclear problems it had taken both the Russians and the Americans years to figure out. In effect, Anna knew enough to create nuclear weapons—and that was a damn sight more than half the countries of the world knew.

Bad as this was, there was much worse to come. They naturally launched an immediate check on Mustafa Ben Narour. What they learned must have floored them.

Mustafa had been a member of the Egyptian Communist Party since his ’teens. Furthermore, he was known among his fellow Communists to be an ardent Stalinist. He'd repeatedly voiced views well to the left of Moscow and had been disciplined for his frankness on a few occasions.

But the real eye-opener was the revelation of Mustafa's activities only a few short months before he'd gone to Moscow as an exchange student. At that time a high-ranking diplomatic mission from Red China had visited Cairo to confer with Nasser. Mustafa had become quite friendly with the members of that mission. Indeed, he was known to have been the lover of one of the female secretaries attached to it.

What all this meant was that Mustafa might well be an agent in the employ of the Chinese Reds. If so, what he had succeeded in doing had world-shattering implications. More than anything else, Red China wanted to master nuclear power. Much of her animosity towards Russia stems from the refusal of the U.S.S.R. to share nuclear secrets with her. Now a possible Chinese agent had abducted one of the few people in the world capable of giving Red China the H-bomb. And he'd done it at a time when China was showing even more signs of aggression towards Russia than she customarily displayed to the U. S.

The implications panicked the Russkys. They tried a desperate and foolish gamble—-and lost. They planted the story in Pravda that an Arab exchange student, one Mustafa Ben-Narouz, had abducted a Russian schoolgirl against her will, forced her to leave the country with him, and subsequently sold her into harem slavery.

The idea behind this exposé, which was splashed all over Pravda's pages under 24-point scare headlines, was that it would embarrass the Egyptian government into finding the runaway lovers and returning Anna to Moscow. That subsequent events would prove that this wild guess had more than a few elements of accuracy is beside the point. It was foolhardy at the time because the Egyptian government refused point-blank to cooperate -- which might have been expected.

They refused to look for the lovers. They refused to allow any of the U.A.R. exchange students in Moscow to be questioned by the N.K.V.D. They asked for and received the cooperation of all the other Asian and African embassies in Moscow and none of their exchange students were made available for questioning either. On top of which, the U.A.R. presented a strong note to the Russian embassy in Cairo demanding an immediate apology-—which they got post haste, accompanied as the note was by a threat of re-opening certain negotiations with the British.

But the apology came too late. The Eastern exchange students were infuriated by the accusation. They looked on it as the latest of many racial slurs they'd encountered since coming to Russia. They rioted in protest. An African student was killed—-gratuitously, it was claimed — by Moscow police, and the riots were repeated-—this time even more violently. RACE RIOTS IN MOSCOW! —such was the headline flashed around the world.

Piecing all of this together, many things became clearer to me. One was the question of Mustafa's using "the silver clasp" when making love to Anna. Obviously, he'd been introduced to it by the Chinese girl he'd had an affair with in Cairo.

Another puzzle solved for me was why the Russian secret police in Damascus would be instructed to cooperate with an American, and why an American agent -- which I presumed Charles Putnam to be-—would arrange for me to take instructions from a Russian spy. The answer, of course, lay in the fact that at the highest level the Russians feared the Chinese more than they did us. In his heart-of-hearts, Khrushchev knew that the United States would never launch a nuclear war without the most heinous provocation. But the Chinese, if they had the bomb, might well do just that. Their government was composed of hotheads and extremists, and for them to possess the secrets of atomic energy was like giving a mentally retarded child a loaded revolver and telling to go out and play in the schoolyard with the other kids.

So the Russians had enlisted U. S. support in preventing such an awful thing from happening. And my government, as appalled at the idea of China's stockpiling bombs as the Russkys were, had agreed to cooperate to the fullest. But both sides still being suspicious of each other, this agreement was only at the highest level, and only those directly concerned--like myself and Putnam-— knew what was happening on the American side, while on the Russian side even those concerned—-like Potemchenko—weren't told that the American government was helping the Soviets. Thus, to Potemchenko, I was an American who had defected. And I might be the same thing to any American agent whose path I chanced to cross.

The Russians had also arranged for cooperation from officials of the United Arab Republic. This was natural, since Egypt was Mustafa Ben-Narouz’s homeland. I would, however, doubt that Russia found it necessary to let the Nasser government in on the true facts of the case. They were quite capable of exerting enough pressure to secure the utmost cooperation without disclosing their motives. The Nasser regime might play footsie with the Chinese, might even wave a white flag invitingly toward the West, but in the final analysis, it was Russia they tugged the forelock to because it was Russia who was picking up the tab for the Aswan Dam and the remilitarisation of the Egyptian armed forces.

I guessed that the Egyptian police chief of Damascus had cooperated in getting myself and Teska to the American embassy because the Russians had told him to cooperate. This also may have been the reason behind the timely arrival of the police during my losing battle with the Arab street-boys. I guessed that the police, prodded by the Russians, who in turn had probably been prompted by the American embassy, had been watching over me ever since I arrived in Damascus. There was a reason why I was important to everybody concerned with finding Anna Kirkov.

This reason was the only clue the U.A.R. police in Cairo had been able to furnish the Russians; They had unearthed the fact that Mustafa’s closest boyhood friend had been the son of a Syrian sheikh sent to Cairo for schooling. This was Sheikh Taj-ed el Atassi, master of the harem in which Teska had been enlisted.

But he was more than that, and that's where I came in. Remember that at the time the government took an interest in me, I hadn't even met Teska yet. Yet I had become involved with Sheikh el Atassi without even knowing it.

He was the head of the syndicate behind virtually every brothel operating in Damascus. This was what Potemchenko had learned from the Egyptian police chief of Damascus. And more. Sheikh el Atassi was also one of the top men in a white slave ring which ran all the way from the Turkish coast through Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and deep into India. As a sexologist out to investigate the brothels of this area, I might well turn out to be the sheikh's best customer—in terms of the number of visits made, anyway. It made me a natural choice to help in finding Anna Kirkov. If the Sheikh was indeed helping his boyhood chum Mustafa in smuggling Anna across Asia to Red China via the white slave trade route, I was the one man who could look for her without arousing his suspicions. Any check on me would reveal that I was a legitimate investigator of Eastern sex customs with a reputable foundation behind me.

In line with all this, my chance meeting with Teska had been a real stroke of luck. If Anna had indeed been taken to the sheikh’s harem, Teska might have seen her there. In any case, she could fill me in, on the sheikh’s life, and that might come in handy.

The same idea had occurred to Potemchenko. He knew all about Teska waiting for me in my hotel room. He knew all about my being a sex researcher. Not only did he know more about me than I did about him, but he seemed to know virtually everything about me except the fact that I wasn't really an American defector. I guessed that the dossier Putnam had on me had been made available to the Reds—with certain deletions as to my war record, probably.

Just before I left him, Potemchenko gave me a small photograph of Anna Kirkov. "She speaks English," he told me. "Most Russians do. They learn it in our schools. How many Americans speak Russian?"

"Very few," I admitted.

“That is just another example of our superiority," Potemchenko boasted.

"Of course,” I agreed, playing my role of traitor. "It is to be expected that capitalist education would be inferior to that in a socialist state. It is why I am dedicated to our cause."

“We shall see just how dedicated you are," he said ominously as I turned to leave.

My brain was spinning from all I'd learned as I walked back to my hotel. It took a rest when I entered my room and found Teska waiting for me with the love-light in her eyes and not a stitch of clothing on her body. She greeted me with a long kiss, during which she did her best to remove the clothes from my body.

I didn't put up much of a fight, and she soon succeeded. She flopped down on the bed and wriggled, urging me to hurry. Her nails raked my back as I joined her, and her tongue was flickering fire dancing over my body. A few moments of this was all I could stand. I took her fiercely then, only half pretending to feel the brutality she seemed so much to enjoy even when she protested against it.

“Allah be praised! Allah be praised!" Her voice rang out as it had done the night before.

And this time was every bit as good as the three previous times during that night had been. Once more now, I echoed her.

"Alum be praised!”

003

ONE or my hands held the reins, the other circled one of Teska's small, sharp breasts. The horse beneath us galloped swiftly, its heels kicking up small clouds of desert sand. The sky, moon-bright and star-cluttered, shed its night-light over us. I held Teska tightly, our bodies lending each other a bit of warmth against the evening chill of the desert.

I gave more than I got, since I was wrapped in Arab robes while Teska wore only a silken harim costume: halter-top, skin-tight pants and veil. She rode astride, in front of me, and as the steed raced into the desert breeze, she wriggled and pushed back against me, trying to get still more warmth. Still, her breast under my palm was hot, the tip grown long and quivering with its inner fire.

I pushed the robe aside so that she might wedge herself more snugly between my thighs. Her high, solid little buttocks were cold at first, but they quickly warmed to the friction of my leghold. Her long black hair streamed back into my face as the breeze developed into a strong wind.

“Oh! I am getting so much sand in my eyes!" she complained.

I slowed the horse to an easy trot. "That better?" I asked her.

“Yes. Much. Thank you."

We both began to post automatically now, our bodies rising and falling easily in time with the horse's rocking-chair gait. After a while, I noticed that Teska was coming down on the saddle much harder than seemed necessary. I puzzled over this to myself for a moment and then smiled as I realized the reason behind her extreme movements.

I remembered what she'd told me that morning when I bought her the outfit she was wearing in a little shop in the native quarter of Damascus. “Aren’t they awfully tight?" I’d asked when she tried them on for me.

"Yes." She giggled. "They are quite satisfyingly snug."

It seemed I'd been naive, and she went on to explain to me the complexities of the sirwal, or petticoat trousers frequently worn by Arab women. The garment had originated among the Bedawins, an offshoot nomad tribe of the more famous Bedouins. Their women wore baggy trouserlets to please their men. Traditionally, these were held up by a loose drawstring. The Bedawin men took pride in the "slackness of slacks" and “laxity in the trouser string" of their females. These Bedawin expressions I’ve quoted are more than just words to these Arabs. To them they mean that their women are always passionate and always prepared in what they wear to engage in love-making.

But when the city women adopted the sirwal with certain refinements, the Bedawins sneered at them. Instead of wearing loose pantalets, the city girls wore them skin-tight. The Bedawins' contempt sprang from their recognition of the fact that the city girls preferred them this way because the material constantly rubbed against their most sensitive parts and often enabled them to achieve satisfaction without a male partner. Indeed, as Teska told me this, I realized that I had often seen women wearing sirwals crouching in the street in broad daylight, their thighs straining against the tight silken material, expressions of ecstasy washing over their faces.

Teska didn't have to tell me that Muslim women rarely wore anything under these garments. I'd appreciated that for myself. And I'd seen very young girls getting their kicks by pulling their miknas, tight panties worn with a shirt, up and down repeatedly from the waist so that the material seemed swallowed up between their legs.

But, when we'd gone back to the hotel room, Teska did show me one innovation which she claimed was common to such sex-hungry Druze girls as herself. She took my pocket-knife and cut a small hole at exactly the spot where the legs of the garment joined. "The Bedawins are right," she told me. "A man is better. And a Druze girl is always ready for him.”

Now, as Teska bounced up and down in front of me with more zeal than the gentle trot of the horse demanded, I realized that she was making the most of the tightness of her sirwal. Each time she came down, her now-burning cheeks pounded against my inner thighs. I felt my excitement growing—-and so, soon, did she.

She looked over her shoulder at me mischievously and pushed backward as she came down with a particularly violent motion. I felt myself grasped as her muscles contracted and pulled me up with her. My robe was streaming out behind me now, but the material of the Arab pantaloons I wore beneath it got in the way and I was quickly lost to Teska's clutch. She turned again and the look she shot me was feverish and hot.

“Have you ever read A Night in a Moorish Harem"? she asked me⁶ .

“Yes," I told her. It was a piece of authentic erotica famous throughout the East. It had been written some centuries back by an Englishman named Lord George Herbert. It was much valued in the field of sexology for its authenticity. Still, Teska's question seemed odd—-particularly coming when it did. I puzzled over it for a moment, and then realized she must have been referring to an incident in the book. Immediately, I remembered the incident and tapped her on the shoulder. “I understand,” I told her.

Quickly, she swung her legs around so that she was riding sidesaddle. I pulled open my pantaloons so that I wouldn't be hampered. Then Teska swung all the way around with her face toward mine. She put her arms tightly around my neck and settled her thighs atop my own and gripping my hips.

I slowed the horse down and dropped the reins. He cantered slowly, his motion perfectly suited to our purpose and making very little effort at all necessary on our part. I kissed Teska and then pushed her halter down around her waist so that I might caress her breasts.

I kissed their ruby tips and she squirmed against me tightly. On fire now, she rose high and then settled herself atop me. The gentle undulation of the horse seemed all that was necessary. Soon, like a gush of hot flame, our passion melted and mingled.

Nevertheless, we remained in that position for some time, letting the ride itself re-ignite desire. When it did, I fastened my mouth to Teska's breast and her nails dug flesh-furrows in my neck. It lasted longer this time, and at its peak, I rose up in the stirrups, carrying Teska with me so that no part of her touched either saddle or horse. Indeed, all that held her was the grip of her thighs around my hips and the inspired strength of the stake upon which she was impaled. We stayed that way for one long, exploding moment, and then it was over.

She sat sidesaddle again and I drew my robe around the two of us so that she might doze against my chest, A pleasant interlude, I reflected, but we had to get to where we were going. I dug my heels into the stallion's flanks and urged him to gallop again. As he picked up speed, I pondered the best course of action when we reached our destination, I reviewed what Teska had told me back in the hotel room before we left Damascus, I thought over the swift decision which had led us to this wild ride . . .

After we'd made love that afternoon I contacted Potemchenko, I d quizzed Teska about the harim of Sheikh Tayed el Atassi. “Are all the girls in the harem from Damascus?" I asked her.

“No. They're from all over."

“But they're all Syrian girls, are they?"

“But no. The houris come from many places, The sheikh demands variety. Only five or six of the girls are from Arab countries. As for the rest—well, one was an Indian, there was a Somali maiden, even an English girl. Oh yes, and one from the Chinese mainland."

From Red China, hey?" I filed that away for future consideration. “What about a Russian girl? Was there a Russian girl there?"

"I don't remem—- Oh, wait. Yes, there was. But she wasn't a houri. She didn't live in the harim with the rest of us."

“Tell me about her, Teska. Everything you can remember. It could be very important to me."

“All right. She just seemed to turn up one day a short time after I joined the harim. It was odd, her appearing so suddenly like that. I mean, there had been no caravans the day before. Indeed, it had been many days since anybody at all had stopped at the oasis. Yet there she was. All by herself like a sleepwalker."

“Like a sleepwalker?“ I asked her. “What do you mean? And just how was she kept isolated from the rest of you?"

“You see, Steve, she ate with us and sometimes bathed with us, but the rest of the time she was kept locked up in a room by herself. There was always a guard standing in front of her door, and always a guard with her when she was with us. Often this guard was Abdul-you re-member, the giant eunuch I told you about, the one who lured me to the harim. Anyway, when she was with us, she never spoke. She ate slowly and very little. When she bathed, as when she walked, her movements were slow, as if she was in a daze."

“Could she have been drugged?" I asked.

“Not only could have been, Steve. She was. You see, I became curious and asked Abdul about her. He didn't tell me much. But he did mention that she was Russian and that every morning and every evening the harim physician gave her a hypodermic. He also told me that I was only curious because I was new to the harim. According to Abdul, it wasn’t unusual for girls to be kept there drugged for a few days before being sent on to one of the many brothels the sheikh controls."

“Think carefully, Teska. Did you ever see anyone except a palace guard with this girl?"

"No."

"Did you ever see a stranger around the harem at all? An Egyptian, perhaps?"

"No Egyptians visited there while I was there."

So, if this girl was Anna Kirkov, Mustafa Ben-Narouz was not with her. He must have just deposited her at the harem and left it to the sheikh to smuggle her on her way to Red China. Do you know if this Russian girl is still at the harem?" I asked Teska.

"She was there when I left. I have no way of knowing if she has since departed."

“Did Abdul ever mention her name to you Teska?"‘

"No "

“Do you think he knew it?"

“Probably. But I can’t be sure."

I thought for a long moment and then drew a deep breath. Teska, I told her, “I have to get into that harem. How can I do it?”

“It is impossible. The flowers of Sheikh el Atassi are very heavily guarded. The only way to get into the harim is by his invitation."

“And it isn't likely that he'd invite me," I mused. “But there must be a way."

“This is very important to you, Steve?" She looked at me penetratingly.

“More important than I can tell you, Teska. It means everything. Not just to me, but to-—well, to a whole lot of people."

“I see." She sighed. “Well, then, there is a way.”

“How?"

“By returning me to the harim. You see, to the sheikh, I am his property. If you brought me back, Arab etiquette would demand that he welcome you with the greatest hospitality."

“But you don't want to go back, do you, Teska?"

“Sooner or later they would catch me and bring me back anyway.” She shrugged. “If I can help you by letting you bring me back sooner, then it will only be an expression of the appreciation I feel towards you."

“Appreciation? You mean for trying to chase away those Arab kids that attacked you?"

No. She smiled warmly. “I mean for the joys I have found in your bed."

Arab girls! They’re wonderful! “That's a feeling I reciprocate one hundred percent," I told Teska, meaning it.

“Thank you."

"Now," I said, getting down to business, “how far is it to the harem oasis?"

“It’s a good ten-hour ride by horse.”

"By horse? Not by camel?"

“Horses would be better. They are faster and more comfortable. There is no point to camels unless you are planning to carry many things with you."

“Just me and the clothes on my back," I told her.

“No,” she said. “The clothes you are wearing will not do."

“Why not?"

“For a European-—or an American, which is the same thing to an Arab—-to ride in the desert in the clothes you are wearing would be asking to have his throat slit. There are many Arab bandits between Damascus and where we are going. They would gladly kill you just for the money in your wallet. To them, alive or dead you would be the same—vulture meat. No, you must pose as an Arab out riding with his woman. Then they will take us for Arab lovers and you won't be worth their trouble.”

I saw the sense in what she said and agreed. We went out to dinner then, came back, made love, got in a good night's sleep, woke up, made love again, and finally got dressed and went out shopping. I bought the outfit I described for Anna and some Arab clothes for myself. I made arrangements to rent a pair of horses and we started back to the hotel. On the way, Teska insisted I buy a small pail. I did as she asked and the rest of the way back to the hotel she kept stopping to fill it with various kinds of mud and dung.

Her reason became clear when we were in the room. She took the filth in the pail and spread it over my nice new Arab clothes.

"Hey!" I protested. “What's the big idea?"

"If you don't want to be killed for being a European," she explained, “then you certainly don't want to be murdered for your new clothing.’

“That makes sense."

“After Teska finished filthying up my robes, she turned her attention to me. "Strip!" she ordered.

“Teska, I'm really not in the mood. I'm still tired from before and I've got things on my mind—”

“No,” she said, bursting out laughing. “You don't understand. I don't want to make love. I want to make you into an Arab. Take off all your clothes and I will show you."

When I'd stripped down, she produced a vial and began smearing the contents on my body. “What's that?” I asked, wrinkling my nose. It had a mildly unpleasant odor.

"Betel nut juice,” she said. “You have fair skin. This will make it brown as an Arab’s."

"Sure beats a sunlamp," said, studying the results. When she was done, I got into my filthy Arab clothes. "Well, let's get started," I said.

"We must wait for nightfall," she told me. "The afternoon sun in the desert would fry the juices right from our bodies."

So we waited. And it wasn't until shortly before dusk that we picked up our horses, mounted up and started out. We d been traveling about five hours when Teska's mount threw a shoe.

"Hell," I said, "what do we do now?"

"There is an oasis about a half-mile that way.” She pointed to the left. "Perhaps we can get help there."

Some oasis! That's what I thought when we reached it. A few wooden boards and a hole in the ground, that's all it was. But the water in the well was cool and I appreciated it as we sat there trying to figure out what to do.

“If it were not for the elaborate deposit you left on the horse, the solution would be simple," Tcska remarked.

“I don't give a damn about the deposit. “All I care about is getting to that harem."

“Then leave the horse here and I will ride double with you. Your animal is sturdy and I am light. It isn't that far. Your horse can carry both of us with ease."

“But what about your horse? We can't just leave him here to die."

"Tether him beside the well. Don't worry, this oasis is much used. Some Arab will find him and count himself lucky to make off with such a fine beast."

That’s what we did, and now here we were, almost five hours later, getting close to our destination. I saw the walls of what looked like a stockade looming up in the distance. As we drew closer, I made out palm trees clustered outside it, their tops dancing in the breeze. Still closer, and I could see turrets and minarets. Now I could even distinguish sentries pacing the walls.

I woke Teska gently. “I think this is home-sweet-home, baby," I told her.

She rubbed her eyes and looked. "Yes. That is it," she confirmed.

“What now?"

"Stop the horse and tie me up with the ropes I bade you bring. This will let the sheikh know what trouble you took to return his property. Then ride up to the wall and call up to the sentry that you are bringing back the houri who ran away. He will let you in."

“But as soon as I open my mouth, they'll know I'm no Arab."

“That can't be helped. The disguise was never meant to fool the Sheikh. You'll just have to tell him who you really are."

“All right," I agreed. “I'll own up that I'm an American from O.R.G.Y. investigating Arab sex customs and that my reason for bringing you back was that I thought he might return the favor by allowing me to study his harem. Do you think he'll buy that?"

"Perhaps. We shall soon find out."

Those first few minutes worked out pretty much as Teska had said they would. Once inside, I was ushered to a lavish room with my trussed-up bundle, of pulchritude and motioned inside. I stood in the doorway blinking a moment. I'd never seen anything like it before.

The closest had been a Hollywood movie in wide-screen Technicolor. But, when it came to lavishness, even Hollywood hadn't been too close. The place was a riot of colors—red velvet drapes, purple tapestries, woven, multi-colored mats, deep, rainbow-hued rugs, green and yellow silken wall-hangings, and everywhere little cushions in every color under the sun. There was a long table spread with the most exotic foods and another loaded with a variety of carved wine-jugs and sparkling with delicate glassware. And strewn around the room like so many pieces of decorative sculpture was a collection of the most beautiful girls I'd ever set eyes on. Smack in the center of all this sat a little, wizened old man, his legs crossed, his thin gray beard hanging down over a small pot-belly, sucking contentedly on an opium pipe connected to a large, ornate water-bag.

"Welcome to the stranger," he greeted me. “May Allah's grace smile on you. Ah, you have returned the sheikh's property. He will be most pleased. And grateful, I assure you. Speaking in his name, allow me to offer you the hospitality of this humble abode. Food? Wine? Or perhaps one of these flowers would be best designed to slake your particular thirst."

He spoke in Arabic, and I missed a little of what he was saying, but not too much. I got the gist of it all right. I shot him a smile and whispered to Teska, still slung over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “Who is he?" I asked her in English.

“Ben Kavir, the keeper of the harim."

“What should I do?”

"Accept his hospitality. He speaks for the sheikh. Take some food, or drink, or one of the girls."

"One of the girls? That would be one helluva hard choice to make!"

"Then take several. The more you take, the more flattered he will be for the sheikh. Tell him you would like to try them all."

“What do you think I am? Some kind of sex superman or something? Take them all! Well, at least you're not the jealous type.”

"You don't have to make love to all of them. At least not right away. But if you tell him you admire them all, he may leave you alone with them and then you'll have a chance to talk to them and ask about the Russian girl you seek.”

"I cannot choose among these flowers," I told the old man. "Their beauty is so great that I am filled with gluttony."

“The sheikh will be honored." Ben Kavir beamed. “I shall leave you alone to sport with them as you will while I go to inform the sheikh of the great homage you have paid his household. Please. Set down your unworthy burden on the floor and allow our beauties to entertain you as you wish." He got up and left the chamber.

I put Teska down and started towards the nearest of the girls, a blue-eyed blonde wearing a completely transparent harem costume. I never made it to her. Even as I took the first step, a giant, hairy arm fastened around my neck from behind and a sharp dagger-point nibbled at my spinal column.

“Son of a pig!" The voice was thunder and hot breath right in my ear. “It was you who stole Teska away."

"No!" I protested, finding it hard to get the words through my windpipe the way he was choking me. "I had nothing to do with it! She ran away on her own."

“You lie!" The blade bit more sharply. “She would never leave of her own volition so long as I was here."

“But I did, Abdul." Teska spoke from the floor.

"You are only trying to shield this pig. And now he shall die for daring to lust after you.”

A weird parade of thoughts flashed through my mind: Soon now, I’ll either be bleeding to death from a Syrian dagger stuck in my back, or playing sheikh to a harim full of nympho houris. At the moment, the first possibility seemed the most likely, and I was damn scared.

I felt the knife draw back and steeled myself for the impact of its plunging into my back and sucking the life from my body. It seemed a helluva way to go, killed by the pigsticker of a jealous eunuch! But a voice cracked out in the nick of time and I was saved.

“Abdul! Stop! Let him go!"

The big ape released me and stepped back. I turned around and saw the owner of the voice standing in the doorway. Sheikh Taj-ed el Atassi, without a doubt! He looked the part right down to the last inch. He stood almost as tall as his eunuch henchman. His robes were flowing white, his face dark and gleaming with small, sharp teeth, his brow high and his hair thick and curly beneath his thrown-back burnoose. He was one of the 73 most handsome men I've ever seen, and it was hard to believe what Teska had told me about his being short- changed in the penal department.

"My apologies, Mr.—?” He spoke in flawless English and waited for me to supply a name.

“Victor. Steve Victor. I was just returning your property when this big ape jumped me."

“My most humble apologies again, Mr. Victor. Abdul is prone to develop unfortunate attachments to some of my concubines. Rest assured that he shall be punished for what he has done. And now, will you join. me in some wine?"

“I could use a drink," I said truthfully.

“You are English, Mr. Victor?" the sheikh asked when we were seated on the cushions with our drinks.

"American."

"I see." He thought a moment. “I don't wish to seem unappreciative, but how is it that you have gone to all this trouble to return one of my houris to me?"

“I wanted to see the inside of your harem."

“A common curiosity, but still hardly enough to explain a ten-hour ride from Damascus. You see, my agents had informed me of Teska's presence in that city. It would only have been a matter of time before I arranged to have her picked up myself.”

“I have a particular interest in harems,” I said and went on to explain about my work and the project in which I was involved.

My explanation seemed to satisfy the sheikh. “We shall give you our fullest cooperation," he told me. “But first you must be very tired from your strenuous journey. I shall have you shown to a room at once. Would you care to select one of my passion blossoms to share your bed?"

“Thank. you no, Sheikh. As you say, I am very tired. I think I 'll skip it for tonight if you don’t mind."

"As you wish." He pulled a bell-cord and a servant appeared to take me to my room.

I was still undressing, the dawn just rising outside my window, when my door opened and a petite, sexy little Indian girl slipped into the room. "What are you doing here?" I asked her. “I told the sheikh I was too tired for any pattycake. I'm sorry. Don't get insulted, but I've had it. So don't go away mad, just go away."

"Be quiet," she said. “The sheikh didn't send me. Teska did. She asked rne about the Russian girl and when I told her what I knew, she asked me to go and repeat it to you."

“Sorry. A natural enough mistake, though. All right, tell me what you know."

“Just this. Her name was Anna. I don't know what her last name is. She was taken from here two days ago and put aboard a camel train bound for Baghdad. That's all I know.”

"That's enough. Thanks. You've been very helpful.” She slipped out as quietly as she'd come. I started to think over what she’d told me, but I didn't get very far. I was too tired. Within minutes I was sound asleep.

I slept through almost the entire day. When I finally awoke, I dressed and went directly to the sheikh. “I've been thinking,” I told him, “and to get the most out of your hospitality, I should return to Damascus for the tools—charts and graphs and notes and such—I use in my research. Would it be all right if I left here now and rode back tonight? I'd undoubtedly return in a few days," I added, lying.

"Whatever you wish, my friend. This humble house is always open to you. Return at your convenience."

He provided me with a fresh horse, and within the hour I was galloping across the desert back towards Damascus. My plan was to hop a plane to Baghdad just as fast as I could. I was on the trail of Anna Kirkov and the trail was too hot not to hit it immediately. Too much was at stake.

Whipping my horse on to greater and greater speed, I couldn't help thinking ruefully that this ride was a far cry from the wild one I'd enjoyed with Teska the night before. The very thought excited me all over again. But all the excitement earned me was a saddlesore where no rider as experienced as I am should have one!

Alum be damned!

004

BAGHDAD!

The jeweled cityat the end of the Arabian rainbow. Soar there on a magic carpet. Ali Baba stands at the gates to pass the word: “Open sesame!" And inside a jinni grants three wishes: A Sultan's seraglio; a feast fit for Allah himself; gold, gold, gold!

Baghdad?

Like hell!

The capital city of Iraq is the foulest sinkhole in the Middle East. Compared to Baghdad, Damascus seems like a seminary schoolyard. Damascus at least has a modern business section and new apartment house projects to screen the filth and perversion of its native quarter. Baghdad has only decay, degeneracy and squalor.

Except for the decay, the centuries have left it unchanged. Domes and minarets still shine in the sunlight, but up close they prove gray and crumbling reminders of a bygone day. It's a city of alleys, narrow and winding. It's a city of disease, typhoid and pellagra and the ever-present syphilis. It's a city that thrives on the venereal vices, a city that lives off its flesh and leaves its bones to rot in the gutter, a city where children are bought and sold, where to adults sex is the only way of life, where camel dung has more value than an aging human being. It's a city where lust is the only way of life and living is done in the shadow of death between putrefying corpses.

Baghdad!

Spit and you hit a pimp. I spat. "What‘s the best brothel in town and how do I get there?" I asked the cab driver on the way from the airport to my hotel.

“How fortunate that you took my cab, sir." He beamed at me in the rear-view mirror and took both hands off the steering-wheel to rub them together by way of showing me that he was an expert of experts when it came to the bordellos of Baghdad.

I shut my eyes tight, sure that he was going to run right up the back of a peddler’s cart in front of us, but he grabbed the wheel just in time and veered around it, shouting a curse at the Arab pulling it. Cab drivers, I reflected, are the same the world over. He wouldn't have been out of place in Paris or New York.

"Now sir," he continued, his voice syrupy with the knowledge that he'd landed a live one, "if you will give me some idea of what your pleasure might be, then I shall delight in being of service to you."

“What have you got to offer?" I asked.

"Virgin maidens, young boys, two girls at once, around the world, a circus, the touch of the whip, or a whip to wield, upside-down pleasures, suckling delights, backdoor experts . . .”

“Whoa!” I interrupted. “Let’s keep it simple."

“A girl then," he said. "One experienced in the joys of love. Ah, you are indeed lucky. I can see that you are a man of culture, traveled, distinguished, a man who will truly appreciate the finest that Baghdad has to offer. And so, my dear sir, I shall do what I have never done for any other. I shall take you home to my very own sister. Even in Baghdad there is none can compare with her."

“Your sister?"

"For you, sir, nothing but the best."

“l don’t believe you have a sister," I told him flatly.

“By Allah, I do!"

"And this girl you want to take me to is really yours sister?"

“They are all my sisters," he said with a chuckle.

“Then you don't have a sister! You really shouldn't take the name of Allah in vain that way."

“But I do. I didn't lie. I do have a sister. You wouldn't like her though, sir. She is very ugly. She is so ugly it is all I can do to take her to bed myself.”

The grin he flashed me was so droll that I couldn’t help bursting into laughter. He was an engaging scamp and I found the frankness of his roguery appealing.

“Let's start from the beginning," I said. “First of all, what's your name?"

“Basra, sir."

“All right, Basra. Now, my name is Steve Victor. And I want to rent you and your cab by the night. I don't know how many nights. How much will you charge to be at my disposal from sunset to sunrise?"

He threw back his head and counted, on his fingers, ignoring the traffic around us. Finally he nodded once to signify that he had arrived at a price.

“How much?" I asked.

He told me.

"Outrageous!" I exclaimed.

We haggled and settled for roughly half. He didn't try to hide the grin on his face. It said I was a prize patsy. I didn't care. I was buying insurance among other services. I wanted to be sure he'd be where I wanted him when I wanted him. If overpaying him was the way to be sure of that, it was money well spent. Still, I wanted him to know that I expected more for my dough than just to be chauffered around Baghdad.

“One of the things I expect, Basra," I told him, "is answers to some questions I'll ask you. I want true answers. If you lie to me, the deal is off."

“I will tell the truth." He shrugged. “Why not?"

He had a point. There really was no reason for him to lie to me. "Okay," I said. “First question: Have you ever heard of Sheikh Taj-ed el Atassi?"

“No, sir."

"You’re sure? He's supposed to be very active in the Baghdad sex businesses."

“Everyone in Baghdad is active in the business of sex. It has been said that commerce in Baghdad is a matter of merchants prospering by selling their wives to each other.

I ignored this bit of local color. “This Sheikh el Atassi," I told Basra, “is supposed to be mixed up in a white slave operation that works out of both Damascus and Baghdad. Do you know of any such ring?"

“I know of at least six offhand. And I can probably think of more if I try. Baghdad is a clearing-house for many such operations in the Middle East."

“Speaks well for the local Chamber of Commerce, attracting all that outside business," I said drily. Then, back to the matter at hand-—“I presume they all have some sort of brothel setup in Baghdad as well?"

"Of course."

“And are you familiar with these brothels?"

“Yes, sir."

“Then, Basra, tonight, you will call for me at nine-thirty and we will visit each of them."

"Each of them?" He looked at me with awe. I couldn't tell whether it was real, or he was just pouring some more honey over me. “Sir, I knew the moment I laid eyes on you that you were indeed a formidable man. However, even so, sir, I believe that one of the places under discussion would alone be enough to tax your strength for an evening. Might I suggest that a more leisurely approach might in the long run prove more rewarding. Perhaps a night apiece at each of the establishments . . ."

“And six nights of larceny for you driving me around," I interrupted. "No thanks, Basra. We’ll cover as many of them as we can in one night. And don't worry about my staying powers. I'm young and virile.”

"Magnificent," he said, scurrying back into my good graces. “A ram has come to Baghdad."

I grinned at the compliment. It stemmed from an old Persian legend about a god who descended to earth in the guise of a ram and allegedly futtered ewes, women, animals, vegetables, minerals and everything else in sight. "Thanks," I told him as we pulled up in front of the hotel. “And remember, be here at nine-thirty."

I went up to my room, got out of my clothes and took what passes for a bath in Baghdad. There's no running water in the city, so this meant scrunching up in an old tin tub while a platoon of bellhops filed back and forth with buckets of hot and cold water. One of them started to scrub my back, but I chased him away; I'm the shy type.

After the bath I stretched out on my bed and tried to catch a few winks. But I was too het up to sleep, and so I dressed and went down to the dining room and had an early dinner. I topped it with a couple of drinks in the bar. I still had plenty of time to kill and I was restless, so I struck out for a walk around Baghdad.

It was like hacking through The Perfumed Garden of the Sheikh Nafzaoui. Like that manual on Arabian erotology, every facet of modern Baghdad is hinged to sex. My heels kicking up the dust of the crumbling cobblestones, I felt as if I'd dived into an ocean of lust and was in imminent danger of drowning.

It was all around me. Voices assailed me-—murmurs and shouts—-flesh-hawkers with vocabularies more colorful than the Marquis de Sade. My eyes bounced like pinballs from breasts brazenly bared and held out towards me from a window to skirts raised high to reveal a belly-roll of voluptuous invitation from a doorway. Hands reached out, seemingly from the walls of the narrow alleyways, and slid up my thighs, stroked my buttocks, briefly squeezed at my groin. The smells of sex were everywhere, musk and incense, a perfumed vapor steaming up from the gutter, an erotic cloud pressing down like a fever over the city. I opened my mouth to breathe and the taste of passion slid down my windpipe and filled my lungs.

Turning a comer, I heard the gabble of children's voices. I saw a narrow courtyard with perhaps a dozen little girls between the ages of six and twelve. They quickly surrounded me, begging for sweets, cigarettes, coins. I handed out a few pennies and then they were tugging and pushing me into the courtyard towards a flight of stairs leading down into a cellar. Curious, I allowed myself to be carried along to see what they had to show me.

The cellar was dark. A few rays of dying twilight came through a small window high up on one wall. One of the little girls lit a candle and the others flitted around me in its flickering light. They danced awkwardly, but there was no mistaking the lewdness of their movements. I realized I had stumbled into one of the famous child-brothels of Baghdad.

Outside of Baghdad itself, around the world, two kinds of men are familiar with what goes on in these child-brothels. One type is the social scientist like myself. The other is the degenerate hipped on nymphettes, the man drawn only to girls who have not yet reached puberty, the Lolita-lover to whom Baghdad is truly the Mecca of his perverse desire.

These girl-children, orphans and waifs, are banded together by some enterprising adult who gives them shelter and food in exchange for the pennies they accumulate peddling their offbeat sex wares. Voracious and aggressive, once they lure a man into their quarters, they turn into a pack of frenzied little animals. They've been known to kill a man for the coins in his pocket and there are tales of their having practiced cannibalism upon their victims.

Now, remembering these stories and realizing that I was in the center of a circle formed by the lascivious little girl-beasts, I turned towards the door by which I'd entered. It had been closed and bolted and three little girls stood firmly in front of it with bits of broken glass clutched like daggers in their hands. I swung around again and found the circle of children tightening around me.

Fear must have showed in my face, for suddenly they abandoned their sexy charade and swarmed over me. Their hands clawed at my clothing, tugging at the belt and zipper of my pants. Sharp nails raked feverishly at my bare flesh. It was all I could do to keep from being borne to the dirt-floor by the weight of their numbers and the feverish zeal with which they were coming at me.

Like a swarm of insects they attacked me, crooning foul words and erotic suggestions, their mouths covering my lower body with sticky kisses at the same time that their small fists were raining blows designed to beat me to my knees. They were half-insane, these children, and I could see that they weren't sure themselves whether they were only going to seduce me, or whether this was to be an orgy ending with my death. Sex and murder were one and the same to them and my only hope was that my own reactions might be such as to make the difference and get me out of there alive.

One tot had worked the zipper of my pants open and now bit at me with sharp teeth. I grabbed her under the arms and swung her high above me. With a sick, knowing grin, intended to be sexy, she pulled up her rag of a dress and swung her legs with a sharp little jerk so that before I realized what she was up to her thighs were locked around my cheekbones. Disgusted—-it was like pulling off a leech -- I tore her loose and flung her roughly across the room.

I felt like vomiting. But there was no time for such feeling. The more the mob of children licked and bit and scratched at me, the more their excitement grew. I had to get out of there before it boiled over.

I had a sudden inspiration. I managed to slap away the children investigating my jacket pockets and fished out the little bag of coins I kept there. I threw a handful of them high up in the air and they showered down all over the cellar. The little girls scurried for them, clawing at each other now in their eagerness, and I hoisted my pants and dived for the door.

The jagged neck of a wine-bottle sliced into my forearm as I reached for the crude wooden bolt. Too scared to restrain myself, I punched the little girl who’d stabbed at me with all my might. She crumpled to the floor and the other two who'd been guarding the door backed away, frightened. I shot out into the night air and headed back for my hotel.

I made it just in time to puke my guts out. Hardened sex investigator that I am, studying about these perverted little imps was one thing and coming up against them in the flesh was something else again. They were only kids, babies, yet among the world's most depraved and murderous females. Is it any wonder I donated my dinner to the privy?

I changed my clothes and bandaged my arm. It was only a flesh wound. It could have been worse. This attended to, I went down to the lobby and settled down in an armchair to wait for Basra.

He showed up right on schedule and we drove across the city to the first of the posh brothels he recommended. Outside, the place looked just as grubby and rundown as every other building in Baghdad. But inside was a different story.

The entry-hall was in quiet good taste, European style with polished mahogany paneling and deep green velvet drapes Renaissance prints—-good reproductions—decorated the walls, and the carved wood table and hatstand looked like genuine Louis XIV. A tall, Nordic blonde in a short-skirted French maid's outfit received me demurely and led me inside as if I was a guest being conducted to an afternoon tea party.

Well, there was a similarity-—but it wasn't the kind of tea you drink. It was the kind you smoke and obviously a more potent brand than the hippies swing with back in the States. More accurately, the first room to which I was conducted was filled with men balling it up with bhang.

Bhang is a mixture of hashish and various solanaceae drugs which causes three pronounced reactions in the user. The first is a sort of trancelike state in which he hallucinates in much the same way as those addicted to other drugs. The second, a reaction of both the adrenal glands and the body’s musculature, increases his physical prowess greatly, tripling or even quadrupling it. The third effect is aphrodisiac producing an instant erection which no amount of sex will diminish. In this state, the bhang user is kept at a high pitch of inflamed lust for hours on end, but is incapable of releasing it until the effects of the drug begin to wear off. Obviously, when a Baghdad Arab filled with bhang cuts loose in a bordello, he gets his money's worth.

As the bhang takes effect, the user turns into a mekaiyif, which literally means “an ecstatic." As I followed the blonde into the first chamber, it was easy to see that quite a few of the men there had reached this stage. Some of them were tearing at their clothing, while others, having already freed themselves, were abusing their organs with wild and brutal rhythms. Filled with lust, yet numbed to sensation, the violence with which they attacked themselves showed them to be mekaiyifs. Every so often one of them would plunge through the door opposite the one by which I'd entered.

“No bhang." I shook my head at the blonde.

“No bhang?"

“No. Not tonight. Can I go inside now?"

She shrugged. "Of course.” She waved me towards the other door and left.

I went through it. The scene which greeted my eyes seemed more savage than sexual. In this room the mekaiyifs were using inflamed manhood as though it were a whip to flagellate the Arab girls and golden-skinned Nubian boys who served them there. A large room, it seemed carpeted wall-to-wall with bestiality and lust. Couples, threesomes, foursomes, chains of people, writhed and bounced and slammed flesh at one another. Strangely enough, except for the sounds of heavy breathing, occasional slaps and the sandpapery wheeze of skin abrading skin, the room was quite silent. What I mean is that there were no voices. There were no cries of pain -- although much of what was going on must have been painful. And there were no sighs of pleasure—although much of it presumably was supposed to provide pleasure.

A stripling lad and a shapely Iraqi girl, both completely nude, approached me. I waved them away. There was still another door at the opposite end of this large chamber, and I guessed my investigation might prove more fruitful if I passed through it.

Again, what I found on the other side was quite different from what had gone before. This room was filled with tables filled with all sorts of delicacies. Around the wall were low, upholstered Persian couches. On them, a dozen or so mekaiyifs rested while serving girls in transparently veiled costumes served them food. Evidently the idea was to provide them a restful interlude during which they might replenish their strength before the main event. Spaced around the room were eight large, burly Arabs dressed in breech-cloths and carrying large, stout staffs a little larger than baseball bats. Their function, obviously, was to see that the mekaiyifs didn't run amok in this chamber.

I seated myself on a divan and one of the servant girls came up to me. “Your pleasure?" she asked, bowing low before me, as is the Arabian custom, rather than curtseying as a European female might have done.

“I'm not very hungry," I told her. “But I could use a drink."

“We have a great variety of juices,” she said, and then added with a touch of pride, "We even have ice-cold Coca-Cola."

"I'd prefer something a little more alcoholic.”

“But that is not allowed!" she exclaimed. She actually looked shocked.

I realized I'd committed an unpardonable faux pas. The use of alcohol-—-and particularly in conjunction with sex-—is one of the strictest taboos of El Quran. To the followers of the Prophet, there is no greater sin than drunkenness in lovemaking. It was a stricture I'd found much broken in Damascus, but evidently not in Baghdad.

I thought to myself that it was typical of Arab morality that it would countenance the use of the most potentially self-destructive drugs while abhorring the drinking of liquor. Later that night I commented on it casually to Basra. His reply was illuminating.

“The most revered Muhammed," he pointed out, “discouraged liquor while recommending the use of kayf and bhang for the reason that he observed that the former, while frequently increasing desire, often interfered greatly with the potency of performance, while the latter truly renders a man capable of feats of great sexual prowess.”

"But the drugs make him go berserk," I protested. “Many times the bhang user becomes a menace to society."

“Perhaps.” He shrugged. "But from what I have heard of your country, alcohol frequently has similar results. I read somewhere that your deaths on the highway total each year a number comparable to a small war. And I have heard that many of these are due to an over-indulgence in alcoholic beverages Also, your crime rate and trouble with your young people likewise has some connection with the extent to which criminals and adolescents imbibe. I see little difference, sir, between drugs and liquor when the results are so similar."

I might have pointed out that there was a vast difference in degree, but the truth was that basically Basra was right. American morality is different from Arab morality, but both have their flaws. It's always easier to see the holes in the other fellow's logic than in one’s own.

Now, with the serving girl still staring at me as though I'd spit on her religion, I quickly apologized. "I really don't want any food or drink at the moment," I added. "I'll just sit here and rest for a while."

I sat back and watched the activity in the room. On the opposite wall there was a series of draped cubicles. Every so often one of the mekaiyifs would rise and enter one of them. Sometimes they would return; more often they wouldn't, and I presumed that each of the cubicles must have another exit. Finally I followed their example and entered one of them myself.

Immediately, a European brunette, dressed similarly to the blonde who had greeted me when I entered the brothel, appeared. "What is your desire?" she asked me in a vaguely Slavic accent.

"What would you suggest?"

She thought a moment, evidently searching her mind for something truly exotic to offer me. "We have some excellent virgin lambs just brought from the Zagros Mountains."

My lack of comprehension must have showed on my face.

"Some men find them an excellent hors d’oeuvre to increase the appetite for the main course."

“But I'm not hungry," I said, still confused.

A small smile crossed her face. "I am not speaking of food," she explained. "The virgin lambs of the Zagros provide erotic thrills not to be found anywhere else in the world."

I understood now and repressed a small shudder. “No thanks," I said drily. “I think I'll pass on the mutton."

"A Nubian boy, perhaps? They are very artful."

"I'm sure they are. But why don't we just stick to females?”

"Of course. We have an excellent variety from all over the world. What is your preference?"

“I would like a Russian girl," I told her firmly. “Is that possible?"

“Surely. If you will wait but a moment.” She vanished to return shortly with a tall Russian girl.

The Russian girl in no way resembled the picture of Anna Kirkov hidden in my wallet. The first girl left us and the second led me from the alcove to a private room. The door closed behind us, and I sat on the bed while she performed a dance evidently designed to provoke me sexually.

It would have worked if my mind hadn’t been on other things. I held her off when she approached me and questioned her. “Are you the only Russian girl here?” I asked.

“Da. I am"

“Have there been any other Russian girls at all here recently?"

“Nyet.”

“Is there much of a turnover in the girls here?"

"We turn over maybe two, three times each night," she told me, misunderstanding. “If you like to do it that way, it will be my pleasure." She flopped face down on the bed.

“I don't mean that!" I said hastily. “I mean do the same girls stay here, or is there a lot of changing with new ones replacing the old ones?"

"Oh." She looked disappointed, as well as a little perplexed and miffed at all this talk with no action. Still, she was there to cater to my whims, and so, with a sigh, she answered. "There is not too much changing of girls," she told me. “Only perhaps if there is a request for a type we don't have. Then one would be added. Or if one of the girls was hurt, as sometimes happens. Then a replacement might be imported.”

"Have you ever seen this girl?" I fished out the photo of Anna Kirkov and showed it to her.

“Nyet.”

“What part of Russia do you come from?" I asked. “What brought you here? How were you transported?"

"I come from Odessa. I fell in love with a Turkish sailor. The authorities found out about our affair. I was forced to flee with him, stowing away aboard his ship. But when we reached Istanbul, he deserted me. I had no money, nothing. I did the only thing I could do. I sold myself on the streets. One night a man picked me up and offered to help me. He had connections. I went to work for an organization which supplied girls for businessmen. Then there was a call for a Russian girl in Baghdad and so they sent me here."

“This ‘organization’-—have you any idea who runs it, or how widespread it is?"

"I don’t know who runs it. But I know from talking to the other girls that it seems to go all the way from Egypt to India. It may not be just one large operation, but rather a lot of small interlocking ones which cooperate with one another. I don't really know for sure."

I thanked her then, tipped her and left. There didn't seem to be much more I could learn at this place. I climbed into Basra’s cab and told him to take me on to the next one.

There were variations in decor and procedures, but the story was pretty much the same. Nor did a visit to a third brothel produce any further clues to the whereabouts of Anna Kirkov. By that time it was morning and I told Basra to drive me back to my hotel.

We repeated the procedure the next night with the same lack of results. Seemingly. Baghdad was proving a dead end. Then, the third night, I got my first break.

As I was walking down a bordello hallway, a door opened to one side and a man emerged. I found myself face-to-face with the little old man I'd met when I returned Teska to the harem of Sheikh Taj-ed el Atassi. Ben Kavir, the harim-keeper, recognized me immediately.

“Mr. Victor," he greeted me in Arabic, “How come you to be in Baghdad?"

“My business, my researches that is, have brought me here," I explained.

“But the sheikh thought that you were in Damascus. He expected you to return and was looking forward to extending you his hospitality. He will be most disappointed."

"My most abject apologies to the sheikh,” I said. "I had intended to return, but the organization for which I work has sent me to Baghdad to investigate certain facets of the houses of pleasure here. I am, alas, not my own master. O.R.G.Y. is.”

“None of us are, but there is balm in the knowledge that Allah is the Master of us all, small and great. Be that as it may— How do your investigations progress, Mr. Victor?"

“Not too well," I told him carefully. “I find some difficulty in getting behind the scenes of brothel life. I am most interested in the workings of the business side of Middle East sex. I'm afraid that such proprietors as I have met have not been too cooperative."

“Then I am indeed fortunate, Mr. Victor, for I am sure that I can be of service to you. The sheikh will be delighted that this is the case. I have some acquaintanceship among those who run these establishments. I shall write you a note to instruct them to cooperate with you more fully. It will prove, I hope, a carte blanche to many places you might otherwise have great difficulty in entering."

“Thank you very much. I appreciate that."

"It is my humble pleasure and my duty to the Emir who is most grateful to you for having restored his property." Ben Kavir bowed low, then straightened up and called to a servant. “Bring us pen and ink and paper," he instructed.

The note he wrote called on proprietors of brothels to extend all courtesies to the bearer, Mr. Steven Victor, a friend of the Sheikh Taj-ed el Atassi. It was addressed to no one specifically, and he assured me that it would be well received at most of the brothels of Baghdad. I hoped to myself that it might be equally well received at such establishments in the other cities to which my quest might take me. The note was signed “Ben-Kavir for Sheikh el Atassi."

"Now, Mr. Victor," Ben-Kavir said as he handed me the letter, “for what you Americans call an inside look at the business, might I suggest that you accompany me to a banquet I am attending tonight. Most of the brothel- keepers in Baghdad will be there and many others connected with the selling of sex in the Middle East as well."

"I'd be delighted. My car is outside. Allow me to put it at your disposal," I told Ben-Kavir.

“I accept with most humble gratitude." He followed me out to the car and gave Basra instructions.

The banquet was being held in a large structure a few miles outside Baghdad. When the car pulled up, I started to follow Ben-Kavir up the front steps, but Basra motioned to indicate that he had something he wanted to whisper to me. “Excuse me, sir," he said, “but I think you should know that another car has followed us. I believe they are parked behind that grove of trees over there." He pointed to a copse about a quarter-mile down the road we'd travelled.

“Thanks, Basra,” I told him. "It's good that you've kept your eyes open."

"Excuse me, sir, but does this mean that there will be danger?"

“Possibly. Why? Are you afraid?"

“No, sir. I just want you to know that you can depend on me completely. I am absolutely loyal to you, But-—"

“But?”

“Such loyalty is priceless, wouldn't you agree, sir?"

"Yes," I said, seeing what he was driving at. "It's priceless, but you're about to put a price on it. Right?"

“Ah, sir," he beamed. “You are most perceptive. And most generous. I shall rely on your good faith."

“I'll see that you're taken care of," I told him. “But don't rely on it too much. My pocketbook has its limits."

“My loyalty has none," Basra said with a look of cherubic dedication on his round face. “It is only that I have a large family to consider."

"I know," I said sarcastically. “All those sisters. Well, don't worry. I'll see that you get a premium for risking your neck." I turned from him and rejoined Ben-Kavir, who was waiting for me at the top of the steps.

We were led to a giant banquet hall. It wouldn’t have been out of place for a convention of the N.A.M. held at the Waldorf. Spotless, snow-white cloths covered high tables and European silverware and crystal sparkled atop them. The cloths were long and draped over the arms of the chairs so that the men seated in them were covered from mid-chest down. There were about thirty men present and no women. They seemed to be waiting for Ben-Kavir, and I gathered that he was the guest of honor.

At any rate, he was important enough to rate a place at the head of the table. He said something in a dialect I didn't understand and one of the men seated beside him vacated his seat so that I might take it. I did so and strained my ears to catch the conversation going on around me. But it was in the same dialect and I couldn't fathom it.

Following Ben-Kavir's example, I took a piece of spiced meat from the variety on the platter before us and munched on it. It was delicious. I was savoring the taste when I suddenly felt a hand gently unzippering my pants and the tickling sensation of an unexpected caress.

Needless to say I was startled, but at the same time a bit of stray data from my researches popped into my mind. It was the fact that it has long been the custom of epicures in China and Indochina to hide young boys under the dinner table to “entertain” the guests while they're eating. These children are quiet and very adept at fondling the male organs until satisfaction is achieved. Etiquette dictates that the guest make no mention of what is being done to him, although it is permissible for him to grunt and even half-rise in his chair at the moment of release. The boys involved, incidentally, are picked for their effeminate characteristics and most especially for their delicate hands. A light touch is considered a sensual accomplishment among them.

Such is the custom in China and Indochina, but I was in Iraq. How was it that I was encountering it here? Curious, I dropped my napkin so that I might have a pretext for peering beneath the table.

The boy who had wedged himself between my knees was indeed Chinese. For a moment though, I wasn't sure that he was a boy. His hair was long and his features so fine that he did indeed look like a girl. But then I saw that his pants were open and that he was playing with himself with his other hand at the same time that he was stroking me. Unmistakably, he was male—just over the edge of puberty, if I was any judge. I motioned him away from me and he gave me a sad look and backed off farther under the table.

Straightening in my chair, I found that Ben-Kavir had been watching me. "The lad’s hands do not please you, Mr. Victor?" he asked, troubled by my reluctance to be indulged.

"I'm sorry. I don’t swing that way," I replied, stammering as I searched for the Arabic word for "swing."

"Perhaps his lips would please you more?"

“I'm afraid not. Thanks just the same. But let me ask you something. I always thought this was a Chinese custom. I am most curious as to how long it has been going on in this part of the world."

“It does not as a rule occur here, Mr. Victor. You are correct. The custom and the boys are Chinese. It is in the nature of a gift to the friends of Sheikh el Atassi from another friend of his, an Egyptian traveller for whom the Sheikh has done a favor."

My heart skipped a beat. The trail was getting hot again. The "Egyptian traveller" could only be Mustafa Ben Narouz, the abductor of Anna Kirkov. I sorted my words carefully, wanting to question Ben-Kavir without arousing his suspicions. "Is this Egyptian present?" I asked. “I would like to speak with him. He might be able to give me some information about the other customs of China. I fear that as an American I won't be able to investigate them for myself."

"But what a pity. You have just missed him. Only this afternoon he left to transact some business in Kabul. Perhaps the Sheikh will be able to arrange a meeting between you at some future—"

Ben-Kavir never finished the sentence. A bullet from a sub-machine gun shattered the words in his throat. Suddenly, all hell had broken loose!

I reacted speedily. The burst had been preceded by the crash of glass as the muzzle of the gun had been pushed through the glass of the French windows across the room from us. Somehow I knew those bullets had been meant for me. Splattered with Ben-Kavir’s blood, I didn't wait for the gunner's aim to improve. Even as the weapon chattered again, I dived under the table, out of range.

There were several screams of shock and pain above me. Two or three bodies crumpled lifeless to the floor. I crawled farther under the table and suddenly felt something warm and wet gushing over the back of my hand. At first I thought it was blood. It wasn't.

The Chinese boys were still hard at it under the table. One of the guests, despite the turmoil, had just been successfully "entertained." Neither danger nor death itself can stop an Arab at such a moment, I thought, wiping myself off with a handkerchief.

Allah be praised!

005

TWO MORE bursts from the tommygun and then it was over. The gunman must have fled. I crawled out from under the table, glad to get away from the grinning faces of the Chinese boys who evidently thought I was anxious to join in their sport.

Ben-Kavir was dead. The others were looking at me as if I was in some way responsible for the carnage. I decided to get out of there before that feeling was transmitted into action.

Basra was waiting with the motor running. He gunned it and we took off down the road like the proverbial bat out of hell. “Back to Baghdad?” he asked.

“Back to Baghdad,” I agreed.

“To your hotel, sir?”

“To my hotel."

“I am glad that you are alive, sir."

“Since it's to your financial interest, I believe that you are, Basra."

"I know many less dangerous brothels to which I can guide you, sir.”

“I’m sure you do. However, it won't be necessary. I'm leaving for Kabul in the morning. I'm afraid our business arrangements will have to be terminated.”

“I'm sorry to hear that, sir," Basra sighed. “It has been a most pleasant relationship."

“And most profitable too, I'm sure. But now, Basra, you'll have more time to devote to your sisters. By the way, what would you have done if I had been killed back there? If I was dead, I would have had no way of paying you.”

"I should have tried to get the wallet from your corpse, sir," he said candidly. "And failing that, I should have rifled your hotel room."

“You mean you would rob a dead man? Basra, you have no scruples."

"Of what use is money to a dead man?" he retorted practically. “If I should die, you wouldn't pay me, would you?"

"I might make an effort to find your family and give them what you have coming."

“I should haunt you if you did, effendi. My pig of a sister would only give it to the first man so strong of stomach as to allow himself to fall between her legs. If I die, sir, it is my wish that you give the money to the first Hindu you encounter to be used in place of his thumb."

It was a joke, and a dirty one at that since Arabs are contemptuous of Hindus for their custom of using one hand to eat with and the other to cleanse themselves of excrement. It is Hindu ritual to keep the two hands separate and Arab humor to imply that the Hindu confuses them. But later I was to wonder if Basra would have made the joke if he'd known how soon it would turn out to have been a grim prophecy.

That prophecy started to come true when Basra glanced in the rear-view mirror and informed me that we were once again being followed. “Step on it," I told him, and he complied. We picked up speed, but so did the car behind us. The distance between us began to close. “Can't you go any faster?" I asked Basra.

"My foot is down to the floorboard now, sir."

Seconds later the other car was alongside us and I saw the snub nose of the tommygun poke out of one of its windows. I threw myself to the floor as it started to chatter. Basra screamed with the first burst and I felt our car veer wildly out of control. It smashed against an out-cropping of rock before I could grab the wheel.

I was thrown back to the floor, shaken, but unhurt. Flames flared up from the engine. I grabbed Basra under the shoulders and pulled him from the wreck. I pulled him behind the rocks we'd hit and stretched him out on a patch of earth.

Blood was spurting from his chest, but his eyes were open. He managed a smile. "Don’t forget the Hindu, effendi,” he said. He coughed once and died in my arms.

They were on me then, three of them racing towards me from the other car. My pistol was in my hand. “Drop it!" the man in the rear of the other two ordered. The voice was unmistakable. It was Potemchenko. I dropped the pistol.

“What the hell's the big idea of trying to kill me?” I asked as he came up to me.

“You are a traitor, a double agent,” he blustered. “You thought you were smarter than I am, but now you see that you aren't. Now you will pay for this mistake with your life!"

“You’re crazy, you Russian ape," I told him. “You've killed God knows how many innocent people trying to get me, and for what? Why do you want to kill me, anyway? What makes you think I betrayed you?”

“You deny it? American pig! For this insult to my intelligence it will be a pleasure to kill you personally!”

“Just what the devil am I supposed to have done?”

“First, Yankee dog, you spent the night at the harem of Sheikh Tajed el Atassi. Then you fled Damascus and turn up in Baghdad with the chief henchman of Sheikh el Atassi. Finally, you accompany him to a meeting at which many dupes of the enemies of Russia are in attendance. Do you think I am such a fool as to believe that you are not in league with them?”

“Wait a minute! Wait a cotton-picking minute! Getting to see Sheikh el Atassi was part of the job I'm doing for the Party."

“Liar! Don't you think we know that Sheikh el Atassi has been of great use to an Egyptian who is an agent of the Peking regime?"

Talk about double think! I had the dizzying sensation of having fallen right smack into the middle of Orwell's 1984. “Of course I know you know what, you maniac!” I shouted. "You told me back in Baghdad, remember? That’s why I set out to ingratiate myself with the sheikh in the first place. How else was I ever going to trace Anna Kirkov?"

“Yes, you fooled me for a little while," Potemchenko said irrelevantly. “But looking back now I see it all clearly. You used the information I gave you as a pretext for making contact with the sheikh. He gave you information to be passed on to the Chinese from Baghdad. You have been playing both sides of the game."

"That’s ridiculous!" I told him.

"Then how was it that you gained entrance to the sheikh's harem? And how was it that you were allowed to leave unscathed? No man is allowed inside there except at the express invitation of the sheikh. If you hadn't known him before, you never would have gotten out alive. And why did you flee Damascus? I'll tell you why! You were trying to give me the slip before I caught on to your double-game. That's why! And how is it that you made contact with Ben-Kavir? You're not going to tell me that was a coincidence. You must have pre-arranged the meeting."

"It's all part of the same thing," I told him. “I got to see the skeikh by returning a houri who had run away from his harem. I left Damascus because I had a lead on Anna Kirkov that pointed to Baghdad. I didn't stop to tell you because I was in a hurry and I had no orders to check with you before making any moves. And, yes, my meeting with Ben-Kavir was sheer chance."

"Really?" He looked at me like a man who had been saving the choice part for last. “And I suppose you can explain away the fact that the night before you contacted me you left the Damascus police station with a representative of the American embassy and accompanied him to that embassy. By Lenin, I believe you may well be a triple agent."

"I can't explain that to you," I told him quietly. “You'll just have to take my word that it's all part of the same mission."

“I will take your word for nothing. You are a traitor and now you are going to die." He took the tommygun from one of his henchmen and raised it towards me.

“Potemchenko," I said slowly, looking him straight in the eye, "if you kill me, you're as good as dead yourself. My orders come straight from the Kremlin. My mission is extremely important to them. Anyone who botches it by killing me will be eliminated as the incompetent boob he is. Believe me, Potemchenko, if you don't contact Moscow before killing me, you'll be dead within a week.”

He hesitated. Conditioned to obey unquestioningly, he was caught between his instinct that I was a traitor and the fear that he might indeed be exceeding his authority. “I don't believe you," he said finally, but there was a shaky note in his voice.

“You don't dare take the chance," I told him. “You can kill me any time. I'm your prisoner. But if you're smart you'll contact Moscow first."

“All right, American pig. I will call Moscow. But if you are leading me on as I'm sure that you are, rest assured that your death shall be doubly unpleasant." He turned to his henchmen. “Guard him carefully,” he instructed. “I will only be a few minutes." He started for the car and I guessed correctly that there was a short-wave transmitter in it.

About twenty minutes later he returned, obviously chagrined. “Release him," he instructed the guards with obvious reluctance.

“So I was right, Potemchenko.“ I couldn't resist rubbing it in.

“Moscow says that you are to be trusted," he admitted stiffly.

“And so four or five men are dead because you chose to shoot first and ask questions later."

“'They were all working hand-in-hand with the Chinese.

“What about him?" I pointed to Basra's body, "He wasn't working for the Chinese. He was just a poor cab driver, an innocent bystander.”

“An Arab pimp!" Potemchenko blew a mouthful of saliva and contempt at the corpse. “What difference does one piece of dung like that make? It is only the ultimate good for all that is important.”

I choked back my rage. "Give me a lift back to town," I said .

“Yes. I have some information to pass on to you from Moscow. I will tell you as we ride. One thing." He stopped in his tracks. “I am still not convinced that you are a loyal agent."

"After Moscow vouched for me? Why, Potemchenko, questioning the Kremlin’s judgment! That could make you a traitor!"

“We shall see who is the traitor!” he said ominously and started for the car again. “I still do not understand what you were doing at the American embassy."

“Why didn't you ask your Egyptian stooge, the Damascus police chief?" I suggested.

“That puppet? He knows only what we choose to tell him, nothing more. He only knew you went there, not why .”

So I'd guessed right. It had been the oily Egyptian who tipped off Potemchenko about my visit to the embassy. I made a mental note to tell Charles Putnam -- if I ever saw him again—that the police chief was not to be trusted.

I pushed the thought to the back of my mind as Potemchenko began relaying the information from Moscow. It seemed that a Dr. Suno Wong, Red China's foremost atomic research scientist, had left Peking by plane that afternoon. The N.K.V.D.'s information was that he was bound for Kabul, Afghanistan. Their feeling was that the purpose of his trip might be a meeting with Anna Kirkov.

I didn't tell Potemchenko how right I thought that guess might be. I didn't tell him that Ben-Kavir had hinted to me that Mustafa Ben Narouz might also be in Kabul. I didn't tell him just how likely I thought it that Anna Kirkov might be there herself.

"I leave for Kabul myself tonight," Potemchenko concluded. “Will you go there?"

“Tonight I go to sleep," I told him. “I'll see how I feel about it in the morning."

“If you came with me tonight, the plane I have arranged for would have you there before morning."

"No thanks," I told him flatly.

“Al1 right." His easy agreement told me that Moscow must have straightened him out as to any authority he might have thought he had over me. I was glad of that. I didn’t want him tripping me up again. The more distance between us, the better I liked it.

He dropped me at my hotel. I went straight up to my room. I opened the door, closed it behind me, and turned on the 1ight. I found myself looking down the muzzle of a .45 with a silencer attachment.

The man behind the gun was a sandy-haired fellow who looked like his well-tailored English tweeds might conceal an athlete's muscles. I took a step toward him and the hammer of the gun clicked. I stopped. "I'm allergic to bullets," I told him candidly. “What can I do for you besides eat lead?"

“Just sit down, Mr. Victor," he answered, a trace of a grin flickering over his boyish features. His voice was a give-away. He was as American as apple pie, and as Boston as baked beans. "My name's Foster," he told me. Alan Foster. Here are my credentials."

He handed them to me. C.I.A. I looked at him questioningly.

“You are an American, Mr. Victor?"

“Sure.”

“Then perhaps you’d like to tell me what you're doing consorting with one of the most notorious Russian agents in the Middle East."

“You mean Potemchenko? I'm not consorting with him. He Just gave me a lift back to my hotel from - from a party I was at."

“Some, party!" Foster said sarcastically. It came out pah-ty, like “pahk the cah." “Five dead and a missing cab driver."

“It did get a little rough," I admitted.

Lets stop playing games, Mr. Victor. You were seen contacting Potemchenko in Damascus. Now you turn up with him in Baghdad. We have a name for people who play footsie with the Russians. Defector. That's the polite name. I prefer the old-fashioned label myself. Traitor. In my opinion, Mr. Victor, you are an A-number-one traitor to your country."

“What could I say? If I told him the truth, he wouldn't believe me. Charles Putnam had warned me that something like this might happen. “I refuse to say anything on the grounds that I might incriminate myself," I wisecracked. I sat back to consider the irony of Potemchenko trying to bump me off because he thought I was an American agent and now an American agent accusing me of working for the Russians. The really funny thing was that they were both right. Not so funny was the fact that I'd be just as dead if an American shot me as I would have been if Potemchenko had. The thought made me nervous enough to put it into words. "If you're not going to use that thing right away," said, indicating the gun Foster was still pointing at me, "would you mind putting the safety back on?"

“You're a nervous type to be playing the kind of game you're playing, Victor," he told me. He put the safety back on, but I noticed that his thumb stayed very close to the release.

"You're right," I told him. “I'm a nervous type."

“Must be all that sex you fool around with,” he told me conversationally.

“Aw, you're just jealous."

“Could be," he admitted. “I can't see why you'd want to bother with espionage when you've got that kind of deal going for you."

“Neither can I," I said. “So the answer must be that you're mistaken."

“If I am, we'll find it out soon enough."

“How soon?"

"By the day after tomorrow. We'll be in Washington by then. You can tell your story-—-whatever it is—to the big boys."

"But I don't want to go to Washington. I can't spare the time."

“You don't have much choice." Foster waved the gun in my face. “We’ll be roommates for tonight. In the morning when my partner gets here, we'll arrange for a plane to the States."

“Your partner?"

“Sure. He's tailing Potemchenko.”

“But Potemchenko's catching a plane himself tonight."

“Where to?" Foster's eyes narrowed.

“Kabul.” I had no reason not to tell him.

“Afghanistan? What’s there?"

“I don't know," I lied.

“If you're telling the truth," he mused, “Bob may not be back at all. He'll stick with the trail."

“You mean he'll try to stow away aboard Potemchenko's plane?"

“Sure. That's his job."

“If Potemchenko discovers him, he'll kill him."

"That's the chance. It's what we're paid for."

“I guess so." I yawned. "Look," I said, “I’ve had a busy day. Do you mind if I go to sleep?"

"Go ahead. Just remember that I won't go to sleep. Don't try anything funny."

“Later maybe," I told him truthfully. “But not now. I'm just too damn tired right now."

I conked out as soon as my head hit the pillow. It was maybe an hour later that the jangling of the telephone yanked me out of dreamland.

"Answer it." Foster was sitting in the chair across from me, wide awake.

I picked up the phone. "Hello."

“Is this Mr. Victor's room?"

"Yes."

"Is Mr. Foster there?"

"Yes." I handed the phone to Foster. “It's for you.”

He listened for a long moment and his face filled with genuine grief. “Thank you," he said mechanically and hung up.

"Your partner?" I guessed.

He nodded.

"Dead?"

"Yes. He was still alive when they found him. His body was all broken up, though. Potemchenko must have found him and dumped him out just after the takeoff. Bob lasted just long enough to ask the people who found him to get a message to me that Potemchenko was on his way to Kabul. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital."

“I’m sorry," I said, meaning it.

“I'll bet you are!" The grief on his face was replaced by the look of sheer hatred he shot me. "Bob was a decent guy, dedicated, patriotic. And now he's dead because scum like you turn traitor." His hand tightened on the gun he held and I stepped back from him. “Oh, don't worry," he said contemptuously. “I'm not going to kill you unless I have to, You see, we're not like your friends the Russians. Still, I admit I just wish you'd give me an excuse."

“I’m going back to sleep," I said. There didn't seem to be anything else to say. Not only didn't he want my sympathy, but it was an insult under the circumstances.

“But first-—” I added, starting for the bathroom.

"Leave the door open," he instructed me.

"I’m the shy type. I'd rather not."

"Leave it open. You'll just have to be inhibited.”

“Constipated, more likely." I left it open.

“Would you toss me that roll of paper?" I asked after a while.

He tossed it to me underhanded. I purposely missed it so that it rolled behind the curtain where the tin bathtub was. I started to reach for it, and as I expected, he ordered me to stop. “I'll get it," he said. He reached around for it from the other end of the curtain with one arm. His other hand held the gun still pointed steadily at me. He couldn’t reach it and was forced to bend as I'd counted on his doing. For a brief second he took his eyes off me to glance behind the curtain for the roll of paper. That was all I'd been waiting for; that was all it took.

I yanked hard on the end of the curtain near my perch. The whole rickety frame came down around Foster’s head as I threw myself to the side so that it would miss me. His gun arm tore loose first and fast. Bullets began spraying around the bathroom, but I knew he couldn’t see what he was aiming at. Before he could, I'd grabbed up the metal wash basin and bounced it off where I judged his head to be under the curtain. My judgment was good and he crumpled to the floor, the curtain covering him like a shroud.

By the time he came to, I'd trussed him up like a Christmas package. I was just putting on my jacket when his eyes fluttered open. I loosened the gag for a moment so that he might talk.

“Why didn't you kill me?" he asked, puzzled. “You could have."

“Like you insinuated," I told him, “I don't have the guts for this business."

"Then turn yourself in, Victor. If you do, I promise you I'll do everything I can to get leniency for you."

“No thanks.” I grinned at him. I was really beginning to like Alan Foster. “I've got business to attend to."

“In Kabul?“

"Sure." I shrugged. If I'd lied about where I was going he wouldn't have believed me anyway.

“You know I'll follow you as soon as I get loose."

"Can't be helped." I replaced the gag and yanked it tight. “I'll buy you a drink in Kabul," I told him. His eyes followed me, perplexed, as I left the room.

Down in the lobby I checked with the clerk on possible transportation to Kabul. There were no planes leaving for there from Baghdad for three days. But there was one train, an early morning one, that ran over the rickety line through the Zagros Mountains and across the deserts of Iran to Afghanistan. If I hurried, the clerk said, I might just make it.

I made it with enough time left over to buy a ticket entitling me to a semi-private compartment. The few private ones were already taken, but sharing a compartment with one other person beat riding tourist class with the peasants the railroad crowded in like so many cattle. It particularly beat it when I got a look at the passenger I was sharing the compartment with as the train got under way.

She was a type, a redhead, beautiful, but cold-looking. Her features were classic and aristocratically English. Her body, despite the travelling suit she wore, gave an impression of genteel voluptuousness. Her nose tilted towards the ceiling as I entered the compartment and her eyes continued staring at it through rimless glasses as I settled myself.

"Do you mind if I smoke?" I asked after a short period of frigid silence.

“I'd rather you wouldn’t."

"Sorry." I put my cigarettes back in my pocket and played ‘Church-and-Steeple’ with my hands. Any smoker will appreciate the fact that I wanted a cigarette tenfold now that I'd been denied the privilege. “Uh,” I said after a while, “is your objection on moral, sanitary, or personal grounds?"

"1 beg your pardon?" The words were frost chipping off her lips.

“To my smoking,"*I explained.

“Oh. All three. It is a filthy habit. It is an unhealthy habit. It is a habit which I find personally annoying."

“I see. Well then, I guess I won't smoke."

“I'd rather you wouldn't.”

“Been in Iraq long?" I asked after another long pause.

“Just passing through.” She continued to look at the ceiling.

“Oh? Where are you bound for?"

“India.”

“Really? I may be going there myself soon. Pleasure trip?"

“Business." The word was an icicle designed to slice off the conversation.

I ignored the tone. “Business, hey? What's your line?”

“I'm an archeo1ogist."

“Really? That must be fascinating. I'm sort of in a related field myself. Sociology, in a way."

“What sort of sociology?" It was the merest hint of a thaw, but I found it encouraging.

“Sex customs of the East. I'm from O.R.G.Y." I told her.

“Oh!” She looked shocked.

“It's really quite interesting."

“From what I've seen, it's just disgusting. These people behave like animals. I realize it's not their fault. It's the poverty and filth they live in. Nevertheless, it's beastly."

“I don't know that I agree. The way I look at it, it's just different from the kind of sex we know."

“I wouldn't know about that. I'm English," she added with what struck me as a comical sort of association.

“Don’t they have any sex in England?" I asked innocently.

“Of course we do. But not the sort of uninhibited sex they have in your country.”

“Ah, you've guessed that I'm an American."

“That wasn't hard to guess."

“Then let me tell you my name too. I'm Steve Victor. And you’re—?"

“Vickie—Victoria Winters.” Her voice was still reluctant.

“Well, Vickie, just what is it that you find so repulsive about the sex habits of the Arabs?"

“I don't know that I care to discuss it!"’

“That's hardly fair. You've maligned a proud people. The least you can do is explain your attitude."

“Very well, it's the way they do everything right out in public where anybody that's passing by can see them."

“Some people might find that exciting." I stared her down.

She blushed. “Well, I don't," she said, but the tremor in her voice gave the words the lie.

“Personally, I find it quite erotically stimulating,” I told her blandly.

She lowered her eyes to her hands in her lap. They'd been moving ever so slightly over her legs. She turned even redder and clasped them together firmly.

“It's hard to admit your own desires to yourself, isn't it?" I said very softly.

“I beg your pardon?"

I knew damn well that she'd heard me. "Nothing," I said. “If you'll excuse me, I'm going for a smoke."

“Will you please knock before you come back in, Mr. Victor? I'm going to change into my nightgown and get into bed. I wouldn't want you to suffer the embarrassment of catching me half-dressed."

I'll just bet you wouldn't, I thought to myself. “Of course I'll knock," I said aloud.

But of course I didn't. And for the same reason that I cut my smoke short and came back to the compartment sooner than she could have expected. There was something about Vickie Winters that said there was a volcano smouldering beneath that glacial exterior.

The door slid open easily and I stood in the doorway for a few seconds before she realized I was there. I almost burst out laughing at what I saw. On the other hand, it was damned exciting.

Vickie Winters was sitting on the edge of her bunk in a semi-transparent nightgown. Her hair, which had been pushed back into a bun before, now hung loosely around her shoulders. These shoulders were arched back and her large, proud breasts thrust out against the flimsy night-gown in detail. Her green eyes were closed and the gown had been pulled up over her hips. Her hand was very busy at the juncture of her legs.

She half-rose from the bed with a little moan, and then her eyes opened. They focused on me. She stared in a welter of embarrassment and confusion.

“A man is better," I told her softly, sympathetically.

“Yes. I would think that was so. But you see, Mr. Victor, I've never had a man.”

“There's always a first time." I crossed over to her and her burning lips parted to my kiss. Her hands ran over my body until they found what they sought, and then she gave a little murmur of appreciation. My hand closed over her breast and I started to push her back on the narrow bunk.

“No. Wait a minute," she said. “Please. You see, it isn't just that I've never had a man before. I've never even seen a man naked before."

“Really? Where have you been hiding?"

"I was brought up in Albion. That's a very prim and proper part of England. Back there people are still living in the Victorian era. Please, Steve, before we do anything, I want to look at your naked body. Take off your clothes. All of them. Please.”

Looking into those hot, greedy green eyes, no man could have resisted her request. Least of all me. I stripped off my clothes and stood before her naked.

“Oh, you're beautiful,” she said. “Just beautiful.”

“When you're through admiring me, we've got things to do," I told her, beginning to feel embarrassed at the flattery she was pouring over me.

"In a moment, my darling. First I want to get something from my suitcase."

“What—?" I started to ask, but she was already rummaging in her luggage.

"Ah, here it is,” she said at last. She straightened up and turned to face me. Her face was all smiles as she pointed a great big Luger straight at my groin.

“Oh, no!” I said, sinking to the edge of the bunk.

"Oh, yes, Mr. Victor," she said sweetly. “Now, if you'll be so good as to gather up all your clothes. That’s right. Now, open the window and throw them out.”

“But—” I started to protest.

“Throw them out, Mr. Victor." She flourished the Luger at me.

I threw my clothes out the window.

“Now your luggage, please."

I threw my luggage out the window.

“And your briefcase. The one with your gun in it."

“My passport and money are in it, too.”

"Hand it here, please." She removed my passport and wallet, tossed them to me and threw the briefcase out the window. "Now if you'll be so good as to close the window, please, Mr. Victor."

I closed the window.

"All right, Mr. Victor. You can relax now. You are my prisoner until we reach Kabul."

“And just who are you?" I asked.

“Victoria Winters. I told you."

“And why, Miss Winters, are you holding me prisoner?"

"Because I am an agent of British Intelligence, Mr. Victor. And you, I feel reasonably sure, are an American who has defected to the Russians."

“Miss Winters," I said with a philosophic sigh, “has it ever occurred to you that if the other nations of the world ever ceased their espionage activities, the Arab countries might lose their entire tourist trade?"

“I suppose there is a lot of espionage activity in this part of the world.”

“That, Miss Winters, is putting it mildly. The parasitic way in which we agents prey on each other is in danger of- making the once-honorable profession of spying a downright incestuous business."

“Then you admit that you're an agent."

“I admit nothing,” I said morosely. “Except that which I can't conceal. And at the moment, the most unconcealable thing about me is the lust I feel for you in that enticing nightgown. Would you either cover yourself up, Miss Winters, or give me a handkerchief to cover myself?"

“I think you need a blanket," she giggled. “Sorry, Mr. Victor." She slipped under the covers, one hand on top to point the Luger at me.

“It could have been so nice," I sighed.

“Let it be a lesson to you, Mr. Victor. Never let your lust blind you to the need for precautions.”

“I’m just a prisoner of love," I hummed aloud. "Tell me, Miss Winters, are you really from Albion?"

"Yes."

"And have you really never seen a man nude before?”

“You won’t believe it, but I really never have.”

"I believe it. I believe it." I lapsed into silence. It was a hell of a predicament. Here I was the prisoner of a beautiful British agent. Here I was stuck on a train, stark naked, with one of the sexiest women I'd ever met. And probably the most virtuous, I sighed. Her and her proper Albion upbringing!

Albion be damned!

006

I OPENED MY eyes to a derrière of sculptured perfection. I blinked as the twin, firm roundness rippled ever so slightly. It took me a moment to orient myself to the fact that the satiny pink-and-white posterior thrusting towards me belonged to Vickie Winters, girl gunsel and virgin seductress extraordinary of British Intelligence. The afternoon sun was high in the sky. Vickie was bent low toward the floor. I was somewhere between the two, horizontal on my berth. Except for a certain perpendicular remnant of sleep. It must have been quite a dream. Probably about Vickie.