$20 Lust

5

When I kissed her, her hands went around me at once, holding me close. Her arms weren’t tight around me but pressed me close with a gentleness matched only by the feeling of her mouth on mine. Her lips were softer than the rain in her hair and her mouth tasted of nectar and ambrosia.

The first kiss was like that all the way — firm but yielding, gentle and tender but still thoroughly satisfying, exciting and oddly chaste all at once. We kissed with our mouths closed which was something I had almost forgotten how to do, and it was nice.

I let go of her; looked at her. She smiled with her lips and eyes, the shy smile of a schoolgirl. There was something frighteningly virginal about her and I had to force myself to remember that this was the girl who had slept with Eddie Reed and had then made off with a boodle of fifty grand. It seemed impossible.

The second kiss was different. This time my tongue licked at her lips and they parted for me. Her arms were tight around me and genuine passion was pushing the virginal quality into the background. I forced my tongue deep into the hidden recesses of her mouth, tasting the overwhelming sweetness of her, holding her tight against me and feeling her soft warn breasts against my chest.

She went limp when the kiss ended. I took her lovely face in my hands and started kissing her all over it — her eyelids, her cheeks, her little ears, the tip of her little nose. She made purring noises like a fat cat on a thick rug in front of a warm fire.

I kissed her throat, her hair, the nape of her neck. I could feel the passion growing in her and could feel my own passion growing to meet it. Her skin was soft, very soft, and her hair smelled sweet as new-mown hay.

We didn’t talk. She stretched out on my bed and I lay down beside her, still kissing her. Our mouths met and I lay right on top of her, feeling her beneath me. This time her tongue darted into my mouth and her warm body started to move below me.

I ran my hands over her. I liked the feel of her under my hands. I wanted to keep touching her forever until we both went up in smoke.

“Ted—”

I looked into her eyes. “Take off my clothes, Ted.”

My fingers were trembling but I forced them to behave. I unbuttoned all the buttons on the man’s flannel shirt and slipped it back over her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing a bra and the sudden sight of her perfect breasts was almost too much for me. I could only look at them. My fingers itched to touch them but all I could do was stare.

She propped herself up on her elbows and I got the shirt off and let it fall to the floor. With an effort I got out of my own shirt and tossed it away too. Then I lay down on top of her again and we were both naked from the waist up, our flesh touching, our bodies straining to get us as close together as possible.

“You’ve got hair on your chest,” she said. “I’m glad. I like it, Ted. I like the way it feels against me.”

I moved so that the hair on my chest brushed the tips of her breasts and she shook like a leaf. Her eyes were clenched shut and her lips were parted.

I took her breasts in my hands and stroked them. I never knew anything could be so soft, so smooth, so firm and so perfect. I ran my lips over each breast in turn, tasting the flavor of her, kissing the firm pink nipples that stood up like little toy soldiers.

And she was making noises now. Her breathing filled the whole room.

I unbuttoned her dungarees and worked them over her hips. They were tight on her and it was tough getting them off. I pulled off her tennis shoes without untying them and rolled down her socks, slipping them from her feet.

She was wearing white silk panties and I could see right through them.

Then she wasn’t wearing anything at all.

She was a goddess, a vision, a dream. She was the one perfect woman in the whole imperfect world and she was mine, all mine. I touched her belly and the insides of her full thighs. I stroked her buttocks and cupped them in my hands, squeezing them gently.

I touched her everywhere and she went completely wild.

“Now, Ted! I can’t wait another minute. Hurry up, Ted. Please!”

I got my clothes off and let them stay where they landed. I hurled myself upon her, my blood pounding in my ears, my heart beating at an impossible speed, my whole body pulsing and aching for her. The sensation of her body under my body was indescribable. I let the rapture of it wash over me like a scented bath.

When it began she let out a little gasp of pain and pleasure. Her arms were bands of steel now and her legs wound around me like creeping vines. Her body tossed in the rhythm of love and her moans gradually increased in volume until they drowned out everything else in the entire world. I thought I would go out of my mind and I didn’t care if I did.

It was raining outside but I couldn’t hear it. The bed was squealing like a stuck pig, unaccustomed to the workout it was getting. But I didn’t hear that either.

All I could hear was Cindy.

The world went black as night, then turned the color of white-hot lead. It was not day, not night, no point in time at all. It was a disc spinning in Limbo, a solar eclipse at high noon, the whole wonderful world standing on its ear and singing at the top of its sturdy young lungs. It was heaven and hell, night and day.

It kept going on, and it kept getting better and better and better, and there was a time when I thought we were both going to die just as we were, locked together for all time. They would have to bury us locked in the position of love because no force on earth could drag us apart. And that wouldn’t be half bad. There were lots worse ways of spending eternity.

When it happened it was a little like dying. There was a clap of thunder that came not from the heavens but from us, and there was the absolute ultimate in sensation and joy, and I felt like screaming at the top of my lungs. Maybe I did. I know Cindy did.

There was the peak, and it happened for both of us at once. Then there was the descent, slow and beautiful, quite perfect, with muscles going slack and mouths gulping air and bodies limp as noodles. There was sweat, a lot of it, and there was no tension at all anywhere in the world.

We lay together for a long time and then I left her, flopping flat on my back with my eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling. I could hear us breathing but that was all I could hear.

Several eternities later she reached out a hand to touch my face. I kissed the tips of her fingers, then said her name in a voice that did not sound like mine at all.

“Ted,” she whispered. “God, that was good. Oh, God. You have no idea how much I needed that. I would have died without it, I think. And it was so good. So wonderfully amazingly good.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. She had said it all.

I closed my eyes. I thought about the girl and the money and, strangely, of Dr. Strom. He didn’t know all the answers after all. This was the therapy I needed all along, the sure cure for anything under the sun. This was what I needed and now I had it.

Sleep came quickly.

We woke up a little after midnight. In theory it was time for me to go to work, but I had no intention of returning to Grace’s Lunch then or ever after, not even to pick up my pay. We had fifty thousand dollars between us. We didn’t have to work. I wasn’t going to pour any more coffee, not for a hell of a long while.

We lay there, warm and naked, and we talked about things. I don’t remember what we said. We babbled on about the little meaningless things that became very relevant to us in the sublime intimacy of love. She talked and I talked and I no longer recall a thing we said.

Then we made love.

It was different this time — not better, not worse, but different. Now it was the union of two bodies that knew one another, two bodies joining like a reunion of old army buddies, and it was slow and gentle, lazy and languorous, with a passion beneath it all that was almost terrifying in its potency. When it was over the glow lasted a long time and I felt better than I’d ever felt before in my life.

Then: “Ted?”

“Mmmmm?”

“I’m hungry. How about you?”

“Now that you mention it—”

“I’m starving. Let’s get a bite to eat.”

I thought about it. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I can get up.”

“Try.”

I tried.

“Come on, Ted.”

I sat up on the bed, then fell back down again. The next time I made it and we got dressed. When she was stepping into the underpants I gave her a little pinch in a very pinchable area and she purred again.

“Watch that,” she said. “You might be biting off more than you can chew.”

“I like the metaphor.”

“Stinker. You know what I mean.”

I knew what she meant.

I put on clean clothes and gave her one of my shirts in place of the man’s shirt she’d been wearing. It was loose on her, but I liked the way it looked when she moved around. I felt like tossing her back on the bed and ripping the shirt off her but I wasn’t sure I had the strength.

I opened a window to air the love-smell out of the room and we went downstairs and out of the building. The rain had given up and gone home to Jersey and the air was as clean as Cindy’s hair. The pavement was still damp but starting to dry up; the air was warm. I looked around from the doorway but I couldn’t see anybody anywhere and we took off down the street toward Broadway.

We found a coffee joint that was still open at that hour and got a booth near the back. The waitress was a tight-lipped old biddy who threw the silverware at us and got annoyed when we asked for menus. But the food was good and we were both starved.

Cindy had a plate of ham and eggs with a side of home fries and two cups of joe with plenty of cream and sugar. I settled on a stack of wheat cakes with a brace of little link sausages, drowned the mess in maple syrup and took my coffee black.

The food disappeared very quickly.

Then we talked. I lit cigarettes for both of us, got us each another cup of coffee, and got the ball rolling as soon as the waitress was out of earshot.

“Okay, Cindy. Where do we go from here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I suppose we’ve got to get out of town. If Reed knows you’re here it’s only a matter of time before he catches up with you. And there won’t be much you can do. You can’t turn to the police any more than he can.”

She nodded.

“The only question is where. Any ideas?”

“I used to think about Mexico. But I don’t know anymore. I can’t even think straight, Ted.”

I did some thinking, gulped some coffee and smoked some of my cigarette. “Look,” I said, “any place that’s large, any place where people generally go, he’s likely to turn up. Even if we leave the country there’s a chance. Someplace like Mexico City, for example. People go there all the time. He might run into us.”

“Europe?”

“Possibly. But even then we wouldn’t be set up right. The money wouldn’t last forever. It’s a lot of money but after a while it would be gone and we’d be stranded. We have to be somewhere where the money can work for us.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Somewhere in the States,” I said. “Somewhere where we can use the dough to get set up in a business that will take care of us. See what I mean? With a stake of fifty grand we can get up fairly high, high enough so that the money will make more money for us.”

“You sound like a stockbroker.”

“I’m serious,” I said, trying to sound serious, working hard at it because now it was my turn to sell her on something and I had no idea how hard or easy it might turn out to be.

“Go on.”

“A small town,” I said, making it sound as though all of this was just occurring to me for the first time. “Out west, maybe. Arizona or New Mexico. We could just move in, settle down, buy a house. Get hold of a business of some sort, pay a lot down and arrange terms for the rest. Then we’d be safe, don’t you see? We wouldn’t be a couple of crooks on the lam. We’d be a nice solid respectable middle-class couple with a lot of dough and no worries.”

She thought about it. Her face was a mask and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “What kind of a business?” she wondered. “A store or something like that? Would you know anything about running it?”

“Not a store. Maybe a newspaper. I could probably buy a small weekly dirt cheap, make a go of it. We’d be the solidest citizens in creation. Lots of power, tight with the law, everything. It couldn’t miss.”

“Would it be that easy to find one for sale?”

“A cinch. Little papers turn over all the time. The price is high but the terms are easy if you’ve got enough cash to cover the down payment.” I paused, counted three beats, and asked: “How does it sound to you?”

“I don’t know.”

I waited.

“I’m not the stay-at-home type, Ted. I’ve been on the go all my life. I might get bored with it, might want to hit the road. Then what do we do?”

“You mean if you want to split up?”

She nodded. “This is good,” she said. “What you and I have now. But it might not last forever. Things like this never do, you know.”

I had my own ideas about that. But I let it pass for the time being.

“You can leave anytime you want to,” I told her, forcing the words out and trying not to remember how good it had been with her back in my room. “I wouldn’t try to hold you. As soon as it’s safe you can go whenever and wherever you please. That part’s strictly up to you.”

“And the money?”

“We split. Strictly down the middle. Whatever I have when it’s time to split, you get half.”

“Half the paper?”

“Half the paper — either a cash deal or a stock deal. That’s simple enough. Or we could get married and then get a divorce with the alimony agreement set up so that you’d wind up with half.”

“That sounds fair enough.”

“I’d give it to you in writing, but—”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You could hardly put that sort of thing in writing, not now. Anyway, we have to trust each other all the way. If we don’t we might as well throw it up right at the start.”

I agreed with her.

“What now?”

“Back to bed,” I said. “We’ll get out of town in the morning, catch the first plane out of here to Arizona. Then I’ll find out what papers are for sale and start lining up a deal. The first thing to do is to get out of town. We don’t want Reed on our necks. It’s hard enough without him.”

She nodded and we got out of the restaurant. I paid the check and tipped the waitress on general principles and we tripped out of the restaurant and back toward her apartment. We’d decided on staying at her place instead of mine. She had a double bed, and the way we’d been behaving lately we could use extra room.

It was still a nice night on the way back. The lampposts cast long shadows and the moon was a tiny crescent on the corner of a patch of black sky.

Then her hand was on my arm and her fingers were digging into me and she was dragging me into the doorway of a brick building maybe fifty yards from where we lived.

“Don’t say a word,” she whispered. “Don’t even move. For God’s sake.”

I obeyed. I was too mixed up to breathe.

“Down the block,” she said. “By the lamppost. You see him?”

I looked and saw him. He was a big man in a hound’s-tooth jacket. He looked tough.

“Baron,” she said, “Dick Baron. One of the phony cops. I almost missed him, dammit.” I couldn’t breathe at all now.

“And Reed’s across the street. There’s the little bastard right now. We would have walked right into them. Oh, my God. Oh God in heaven.”

“Easy, Cindy.”

“They’ve got the place staked out. They know right where I am and they’re waiting for me. God. Ted. Oh, God. What in God’s name do we do now?”

“Easy,” I said. “Take it easy. They had a trap for us but we spotted it. So the trap’s a bust. We turn around and we walk away and we’re safe. They can take their traps and shove them.”

She looked at me, wide-eyed.

“We’re clear,” I said again. “What’s the matter? Don’t you see?”

She laughed, hysterically and soundlessly. I thought she was out of her mind. I almost slapped her to bring her back to her senses but I didn’t have to. The noiseless laughter stopped as suddenly as it had started.

“The money,” she said simply.

I looked at her.

“In the room,” she said. “The money’s in the room. If we just turn and leave what in the name of God do we do about the money?”

It was a good question. A hell of a good question. It almost knocked me on my ear.

I’d completely forgotten the money, but now that she reminded me I couldn’t think of anything else. Fifty grand in nice green twenty dollar bills reposed in a black satchel in her room and they were staked out around it like expectant vultures.

It was too much.

Then I answered the question. “You get a cab, Cindy. Go to a hotel, stay there. They don’t know me. As far as they’re concerned you’re all by yourself. I’ll slip into the apartment and get the money and meet you.”

She shook her head. “They have the place surrounded,” she said. “Back and front. I’m sure of it.”

“So?”

“They’ll see you coming out. They’re probably in the room right now. Maybe they already have the money. Great God above.”

I thought, then shook my head. “No,” I said. “Then they wouldn’t be sticking around. My guess is that they know where you are but don’t know the apartment, maybe not even the building. Is there a back entrance to your place?”

She shook her head.

“A window,” I said. “A window in the back that I can get through.”

“Locked.”

“I’ll break it. Where’s the satchel? Is it there in the room?”

“Under the bed.”

“I’ll get it and go out the way I came in. Look, you walk back to Broadway and hail the first cab you see. Get him to drive you to Grand Central, then switch cabs and go to the Sheraton-McAlpin on Broadway and 34th. It’s a convention hotel and Reed’s type of people won’t be likely to be there. Get a double, pay in advance because you don’t have luggage. Register as Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Stone and tell ’em I’ll be along later.”

She repeated the instructions and nodded. She looked as empty-eyed as a sleepwalker. I could only hope that she’d remember what I’d told her, that she wouldn’t panic and ruin everything.

“We’ll catch a plane first thing in the morning,” I added. “One night in the hotel and then we’ll be out of this town for good, with no trail behind us. Good enough?”

She hesitated.

I knew what was on her mind.

“You’re thinking I could cross you,” I said. “You’re thinking how easy it would be for me to disappear with the money and leave you high and dry. Right?”

She flushed.

“You’ll just have to trust me,” I said. “Or else figure out a better way.”

She couldn’t figure out a better way so she decided to trust me. I gave her twenty for the cab and the room and stood where I was until I saw her catch a cab at the corner of Broadway. Then I lit a cigarette and smoked it all the way down, then dropped it to the sidewalk and squashed it to shreds.

I was ready.

I went back to Amsterdam and walked down to 72nd Street, then headed east until I was opposite her building, or as close to it as I could tell. If I was in luck there would be a driveway I could take.

I was not in luck. The buildings presented a united front and there was no passageway to the rear of her building. I swore softly and tried to think.

Then I got lucky. One of the buildings was a huge apartment building complete with a doorman. I nodded to the doorman and walked inside. He let me go, proving that doormen are as necessary as they are useful, which is to say not at all.

With luck there would be a rear exit from the building’s lobby.

I looked for it and found it. I opened the door slowly and stared at the back of the building where Cindy lived and my heart soared. Then I stared some more and my heart sank like a stone.

I saw her window, the one I could drop through to her apartment.

I also saw the mug.

He was small but he looked wiry. He was wearing a grey sharkskin suit with peaked lapels and there was a bulge inside the jacket that meant one of two things. Either he had a breast or he was carrying a gun. This was a complication.

I tried to figure what my chances might be of taking him and decided they were infinitesimal. Even without the gun he’d be a good bet to set me on my ear. With the gun I was finished. All I had to do was walk out from the doorway and I was as dead as a lox.

I thought for a few seconds about just how pleasant it would not be to be dead. The notion of spending a few hours bleeding on the sidewalk, a few days in a morgue on a cold gray slab, and a few eternities in a hole on Riker’s Island was most unappetizing.

So?

Another possibility came to mind. I could turn around, walk back through the lobby, mumble absurd pleasantries to the silly doorman and be on my way. I wasn’t in too deep to do that. It would be a cinch.

A cinch. I could say a fond goodbye to Cinderella Sims, another fond goodbye to fifty grand, and that would be that. What the hell, it was better than saying a fond goodbye to life, wasn’t it?

Well, wasn’t it?

I wasn’t so sure about that. I thought about fifty thousand dollars, which was one hell of a lot of dough. I thought about Cinderella Sims, which was one hell of a lot of woman. I thought about the town in Arizona and the newspaper and the family and all sorts of things.

I thought about how empty life had been for a while there, and how empty it would be without the money and the girl.

I thought about that a long time.

And then I thought about something else, something fairly obvious to anybody with half a brain in his head. The monkey in the sharkskin suit didn’t know who I was. He didn’t even know I existed. And this gave me a hell of a fine edge on him.

If I tried to sneak up on him I was dead. If I tried to rush him I was dead. But suppose I came on openly? I decided it just might work.

I stuck an unlit cigarette in the corner of my mouth and gave the door a heave. It flew open and I went through it and the guy turned around with a look of panic on his face.

“Hey,” I called. “Hey Mac!”

He looked at me.

I walked over to him, talking as I went. “Can’t find a light in the whole damned building,” I complained. “You got a match on you?”

He pulled out a lighter, still not talking. He flicked it and I leaned toward him to accept the light. Then I grabbed him.

My thumb and forefinger took him by the throat and he couldn’t make a sound. Then I gave him the right to the stomach, throwing it low for luck.

He doubled over.

I let go of his throat and cupped his head with both hands. He was on his way down so I gave him a hand. Two hands.

I brought up a knee and broke his face over it.

I had to let him down slow so he wouldn’t make a noise. Then I rolled him over and looked at him. He was a mess. There were a batch of teeth missing from his mouth and his nose was so broken you couldn’t tell where it had come from. I had to check his pulse to make sure he was alive, not that I really cared about him.

I used his shirt to cover the pane of glass, then knocked it in with the butt of his revolver. The glass all fell inside the apartment and the noise didn’t carry.

I followed on the glass, landed on my feet and looked for the bed. It was a big one and I momentarily regretted that I wouldn’t have the pleasure of bouncing around on it with Cindy. But there wasn’t time to worry about that sort of thing. It was only a question of time before one of the monkey’s pals came around to check on him and I had to work pretty damned fast.

I found the satchel and discovered that fifty grand in twenties is heavy. But I managed to get out with it, climbing up on a chair and then out through the window. From there on it was a cinch.

I kicked the monkey in the face on the way out for luck, then stuck his gun back in his holster. He might need it when he tried to explain things to the rest of them. Then I went right back the way I’d come, straight through the lobby and past the doorman and out onto 72nd Street. There was a cab at the curb and I hopped into the back seat and told him to go to the Sheraton-McAlpin. He went, and I sat there trying to relax.

I had the money. If I wanted to I could ditch Cindy and forget her forever. She’d never find me, not in a million years.

But I couldn’t.

I needed her as much as I needed the money. I couldn’t settle for half the dream. It had to be all or nothing, the money and Cindy or the hell with the whole shooting match. So I sat back and pretended to relax and the cab finally managed to get to the McAlpin.

I found out which room we were staying in and I went to her.