Room at the topless

THE SPY WHO WOULDN’T DIE

Steve - the Man from O.R.G.Y.-Victor was dead. Sure he was. International villains had finally killed him. The hapless, bumbling, but fantastically successful superspy was stone-cold.

Sure.

But as long as there was a warm female body around, Steve Victor just couldn’t act like a corpse!

He had too much else to do. He had his most important assignment to date: to eliminate the free world’s most sinister, most insidious enemy. And all those swinging chicks in Hollywood looked like something to live for. . ..

The trouble was that Steve’s unique talents didn’t seem to count for much on the swinging -but distracting, and definitely dangerous- Sunset Strip. . ..

Topless? You haven't seen anything...yet!

WARM WELCOME

So this was Hollywood . . .

Misty Milo, in that transparent nightie, was somewhere in the darkened room. And the figure following her was entering from the lanai. Moonlight glinted off the barrels of the two guns he was carrying. I shrank down in bed, trying to make as small a target of myself as possible.

It didn’t work. A lamp flicked on, glaring like a spotlight. The beam caught me in the eyes, blinding me.

“You!” The voice behind the guns sounded savage. “Steve Victor !” My name came out sounding like a death sentence.

Hollywood, they say, is a state of mind. My own state of mind was something else again. Bluntly, I felt insecure!

ROOM AT THE TOPLESS

THE MAN FROM O.R.G.Y.

Ted Mark

1967

CHAPTER ONE

DEATH, where is thy sting? In the damnedest places, let me tell you! When a man is dead, he comes up against a slew of problems that the non-dead never encounter. They are problems peculiar to his unalive condition, so to speak. For instance.

The bank won’t honor his checks. The Post Oflice doesn’t forward his mail. Old friends turn pale when he appears. His Diners’ Club card is invalid. He feels alienated from the society of live people around him. There are difliculties in relating to others. Sex becomes a problem - despite the intrinsic advantages of rigor mortis. And, of course, his life insurance is no longer in force.

In my business, that last mentioned is a real hardship. Like, there are times when my line of work is very dangerous indeed. Or, perhaps I shouldn’t say my “line of work.” Perhaps I should say my “avocation.” My work, you see, is sex - which may, or may not be perilous. My sideline, however, is espionage and that’s always in the high-risk column when they’re tabulating the probabilities.

To be more specific, by profession I’m a sex investigator. My name is Steve Victor and I’m sometimes known as the man from O.R.G.Y. The initials stand for Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth. It’s a Kinsey-like, one-man outfit which is subsidized by various foundations interested in rounding out sociological studies of different cultures with data relating to the sex mores and practices of those cultures. I’m considered something of an expert in my field. At least I was before my untimely death.

For a few years before that time I also served another function. I was a top secret agent for the U. S. government. My hush-hush career began in Damascus and ended violently in Washington, D.C. Two factors had been responsible for my I-spy activities. The first was my legitimate occupation, which afforded me valuable connections in the international nether world of sex and gained me entry into erotic places where the ordinary agent might have found himself barred. The second was the high value placed upon my services by Mr. Charles Putnam.

The name is an alias, the man an enigma. He lives somewhere in the wall between the State Department and the CIA, some place deep in the cracks where the plaster of espionage mixes with the putty of diplomacy, some crevice where he can crawl out of the woodwork to wave a flag at me when the occasion demands. He’d waved that flag in Washington, and the result had been a funeral - my funeral.

We’d attended it together, Putnam and I. The turnout had been disappointingly small, but nevertheless the eulogy had left me all choked up. Not so Putnam. His craggy, Mafia victim's face had remained stony throughout the services. No hint of a sigh had shaken his bulky frame. He was as emotionless in the face of my demise as his steel-gray hair and the Homburg he wore. His attitude said there was no place for grief in either espionage or diplomacy.

I'd dropped a handful of dirt onto my coffin and followed Putnam from the cemetery. Back in the crummy furnished room where, as per Putnam’s instructions, I'd been hiding out, I peeled off the disguise necessary to my attending my interment. We then proceeded to reconstruct the situation and make plans for future action.

The situation. Briefly, it was this: As a counterespionage stroke of genius, the Russians had contrived a double for me, Steve Victor. This “double”-agent, real name unknown, called himself Victor Stevkovsky. (Americans, obviously, have no monopoly on corn.) He was like me in every respect. Our faces mirrored one another. Our physiques were athletic twins. Our voices--every inflection —were the same. Even our personalities—the way we laughed, the way we expressed anger or desire-were exactly alike. The Russians had come up with a bogus Steve Victor who was more like me than I was myself.

I’ll skip over all the havoc this raised; I’ve already related it elsewhere. Suffice it to say that in the course of impersonating me, Stevkovsky had made it necessary for Steve Victor (me) to kill Steve Victor (him). But to the world at large, it was the real Steve Victor who'd given up the ghost. And I (the real real Steve Victor), had had to disguise myself to go to my own funeral where I had watched Steve Victor (the phony) lowered into my grave.

Now the plan was for me to impersonate my impersonator. It was Putman’s plan, naturally. Just the sort of scheme you could depend on his convoluted brain to devise. At the moment, back in the cockroach haven he’d arranged as a hideout for me, Putnam explained what he hoped to accomplish by this reverse impersonation.

“By your pretending to be Stevkovsky pretending to be you,” he expounded, “we will gain our first real foothold in the Russian espionage network operating in the U. S. You will be in the unique position of being able to trace the threads of that network right to the top. If we can nail their top man, it will take the Russians a good two years to put together another operation in this country. And a two-year espionage lead on them is worth twenty diplomatic coups.”

“Do you have any sort of lead on that top man?” I asked.

“Not really. Our best information points to his operations center as being in Southern California. But we're not even sure he's a man. It could be a woman.”

“Why Southern California?”

“Lots of reasons. One you might not expect has to do with politics. The latest Commie strategy is to strengthen the right. Their theory is that the more of a stranglehold the fanatic right wing gets on the country, the more fertile will be the soil for eventual revolution. When extreme right-wing philosophy becomes official government policy, liberalism is frustrated. The frustrated liberal can conform - in which case he’s no longer a liberal—-or he can join forces with those to the left of him. Thus he’s pushed into radicalism and, eventually, Russian Communist radicalism. So-—covertly, of course—the Commies are all for the American Nazi Party, the Birchers, the Minutemen, and all the extremist groups and personalities that draw support from the far right."

“Wasn’t that the Commie theory in Germany before the Nazis? Didn’t it sort of backfire there?”

“Sure. I'm not agreeing with their thinking. I’m only explaining it. Communism recruits among the downtrodden. The further right the government, the more downtrodden there are from which to draw recruits. That's in line with basic Communist doctrine.”

“Very devious,” I granted. “But putting theory aside for the moment, just how, practically, am I supposed to go about pinpointing this Red Pimpernel?”

“That’s hard to say,” Putnam admitted. “We've only been able to establish two facts that might be helpful in isolating him. The first is his code name. Or, perhaps, her code name.”

“Gender unknown,” I confirmed. “Now what is its code name?”

“Ex-Lax.”

“Ex-Lax?”

“Ex-Lax.” His expression remained impassive.

“Isn’t that a rather peculiar code name¹ for the head of the Russian espionage network?” I hazarded.

“The Russian sense of humor,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“Huh?”

“You have to understand the dialect. ‘Ex-Lax’, to the dedicated Communist, is the instrument by which the real substance of capitalism is revealed. In the prescribed humor of the Commie dialectic, the designation is both accurate and funny.”

“Ex-Lax,” I mused. I shrugged it off. “What’s the second clue?” I remembered to ask then.

“It’s not exactly a clue. Only a factor that may work to our advantage. Stevkovsky, your late impersonator, took his orders directly from Ex-Lax. 'I'he way we’ve structured things, he will by now have heard from his Washington cell that Steve Victor is dead and will have no reason to doubt your identity as Stevkovsky. Chances are that he will arrange to contact you and give you your next assignment." Putnam paused before continuing. “The only thing is,” he added after a moment’s thought, “that there's a third factor which complicates things somewhat.”

"A third factor?”

“Yes. It has to do with how Stevkovsky was created as your double in the first place.”

“I wondered about that,” I admitted. “It was certainly a perfect job.”

“That it was. And the reason it was perfect was that it was overseen by somebody who knows you - the real you, Steve Victor - very well. Obviously somebody who is at the least an old acquaintance and possibly a very good friend of yours. The detail with which the impersonation was carried out testifies to the hand of someone well-versed in the arts of acting and characterization.”

“A good friend!” The idea startled me. “But who?”

“Ex-Lax,” Putnam told me. “When you find the friend who betrayed you, then you will have found the Russian spy chief. And the first step toward doing that must be taken right here in Washington. Here is a phone number.” He handed me a slip of paper. “Call it and identify yourself as Stevkovsky. It’s your Russian contact. Judging by what we’ve learned about Stevkovsky’s modus operandi, this contact will make arrangements to put you in touch with Ex-Lax so that you can receive further instructions.”

It sounded logical. But as things worked out, Putnam was only partially right. When I called the number, I was given an appointment to keep, but it wasn’t with Ex-Lax.

The instructions I received over the phone from the Washington Commie cell took me to—of all places—an establishment specializing in custom-made hairpieces for men. Now, a couple of my teeth are a little shaky, but follicle-wise I'm as hirsute of pate as any beatnik guitar player who can’t afford a haircut. Spy contact or no, my head of hairy coals figured to get me thrown-out of this bald-beans’ Newcastle.

Not so. I gave the phony name I’d been told to use to the receptionist and was quickly ushered into a private wig-fitting parlor. A tiptoe type followed me in, clamped me into the barber chair, and came on like a genteel nitpicker with my by now itchy scalp. It was strictly a case of ‘bore-a-little-hole,’ with the icy-fingered fellow separating strands of hair in all directions until he'd cleared a spot of scalp-skin about the size of a dime. “Aha!” he enthused. “So here it begins. Small, but getting bigger. Well, we’ll cover that up in no time. Good thing we caught it. Now nobody will ever know. It will be our secret.”

“What secret?” I inquired.

“Your creeping baldness,” he told me.

“You’re flipping your wig,” I told him. “I haven’t a sign of baldness, creeping or otherwise.”

“I dislike that expression intensely,” he told me haughtily. “Here we do not speak of wigs—either fliply or with any other connotation. We discreetly correct the flaws of nature . . . fill in the blank spaces with pilosity, as it were.”

I shelved my pique. Evidently I had to admit to a certain amount of baldness to stay with the Commie contact. So I gritted my molars and let him proceed.

Scissors and razor did their work, and the dime of scalp was now the size of a half-dollar. The surface was coated with something sticky that felt like shellac. A very thin layer of cheesecloth was stretched over the spot. It tautened even more as the glue-like substance holding it in place hardened. Then more glue-all was applied to the stiffening cheesecloth. The skin of my scalp was being drawn tightly over the entire surface of my cranium. I could feel it on my forehead and right down to the tip of my nose. I became aware that my eyes were bulging uncontrollably.

Now the hair-padder had taken out swatches of curls and was matching their color and texture against my natural tresses. Finally he found one that suited him. He placed it lightly atop the cheesecloth and then removed it. He took a pair of scissors and carefully sculpted it to his satisfaction. When a nod to himself agreed that it was trimmed to satisfaction, he put it back on top of the cheesecloth and leaned on it with all his weight. A ‘squish-squish’ sound said it was adhering to the glue. He kept leaning on the top of my cranium until the fuzz-mat was cemented solidly in place. Then he combed the rest of my hair over and around it and stood back to survey his handiwork. “No one will ever know," he announced proudly.

“Is that all?” I inquired.

“Yes, sir. Please pay the cashier.” And he was gone.

I paid the cashier. Out on the street, I wondered if I’d goofed. Where was the Commie agent who was supposed to have contacted me? Where were the instructions I was supposed to have received?

Putnam, sharper than I in such matters, came up with the answers later that afternoon. “It’s all in your head!” he assured me after I'd expressed my puzzlement. Saying which, he bent over me and ripped off the hairpiece in one sharp, sadistic motion.

“YIII!” I protested.

“Here we are.” He ignored me. “Heat,” he decided. He turned on a lamp and removed the shade. Then he held the hairpiece pressed against the bulb for about five minutes. “That should do it.” Carefully, he peeled the cheesecloth away from the hairpiece, threw the miniature toupee to one side, and held the material up to the light. “Aha!”

“Aha, what?” I was still gingerly caressing my tender scalp.

“Look.”

I peered over his shoulder at the cheesecloth. There was the faint outline of something that looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics on its surface. “What does it mean?” I wondered.

“It’s in code, naturally.” His tone put me down as hopelessly retarded.

“Sorry,” I quipped. “I was just talking off the top of my head.”

He winced. His face contorted. It was an improvement over his usual impassivity. “I’ll have it decoded as fast as I can,” he told me, picking up his coat and heading for the door. “You’ll be hearing from me.”

It was a full day before I heard from him, and then it was via the telephone. “We’ve decoded the message.” His voice might have been reporting a slow day’s trading on the stock market from an Alaskan deep-freeze unit.

“What does it say?” I responded more eagerly.

His answer sounded like a Slavic sneezing fit.

“What was that?”

He repeated it. If anything, his sinuses were more clogged, more Siberian.

“That bad, huh?” I hadn’t understood a word Putnam had said.

“It’s not bad, only Russian,” he explained. “We broke the code, and now we have to get our Russian expert in to translate.”

“How long will that take?”

“A couple of hours. I’ll call you back. Better still, I’ll come over when it’s translated.”

“I’ll be waiting.” I hung up on him and did just that.

It was early evening when Putnam arrived with the translated message. “This complicates matters,” he said as he showed me the translation. It was an understatement. The message was a doozy. The code experts had identified it as straight from the Kremlin and superseding any orders from the Commie spy-chief in America.

“Proceed Hollywood immediately,” it said. “Kill Ex-Lax. Castor Oil will replace and provide further orders.”

“I thought you said it was decoded,” I griped to Putnam.

“It is. It’s perfectly simple. Remember, they think you’re Stevkovsky. And your assignment—his assignment, that is-—is to go to Hollywood and kill the current head of Russian-American espionage and then take further orders from his replacement.”

“But why do they want to kill him?” I was bewildered.

“From my diplomatic sources, I think I know the answer to that. Ex-Lax must have been a Khruschev man. Now they’re getting around to eliminating him and replacing him with someone more acceptable to the current regime.”

“Castor Oil,” I guessed.

“That’s right."

“But who is Castor Oil?"

“That’s what you have to find out. It shouldn’t be too hard. After you’ve killed Ex-Lax, Castor Oil will make him (or her) self known to you.”

“But who’s Ex-Lax?”

“If we knew that, we wouldn’t need you,” Putnam said with asperity.

“How am I supposed to kill him if I don’t know who he is?”

“That, after all, is your problem. You can't expect me to do everything for you."

“Then you really expect me to do what the Russians want and kill this Ex-Lax?”

“If that's the way to nail Castor Oil, yes.”

“I don’t like killing people. It gets sticky. Even the Los Angeles cops are liable to frown on it. What do I do if they catch me trying to commit a murder, or after I've committed one?”

“Tell them you’re a teeny-bopper from an unfortunate environment,” Putnam suggested sarcastically. “How do I know how you can handle it? That too is your problem. Just don’t drag me or the government into it. If you do, we’ll disown you.”

“That's very helpful.”

Putnam shrugged. He didn’t bother answering. His shrug said I should know as well as he did what the ground rules were by now.

“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “So I'm to go to Smog-land and impersonate Viktor Stevkovsky impersonating Steve Victor. But I - the real me - know a lot of people on the Coast. Suppose some of them heard about Steve Victor’s being killed in Washington? How do I explain popping up alive?”

“Are most of your acquaintances out there in show business?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why worry? They won't be any more aware of your demise than they are of Chinese nuclear missiles, the Watts riots, or Viet Nam. You can be sure that any story that wasn’t headlined in Variety has passed them by. They’ll tell you the B.O. figures for Doris Day's last flick at the Music Hall to the penny, but if you ask them what they think of Reagan as Governor, they'll tell you it's probably a stunt cooked up by MCA to help his Death Valley rerun rating. And if someone should call you on the fact that you’re supposed to be dead, just raise an eyebrow and tell ’em the papers never get anything right. Ask if the obituary notice spelled your name right. The Russian side will think you’re Stevkovsky. Others—I hope this doesn’t hurt your feelings—simply won't give a damn.”

From what I knew of Hollywood, Putnam was undoubtedly right. My experience with the milieu stemmed from a stint I’d done out there a few years back as technical advisor on a script being written around the Kinsey Report. The project was subsequently scrapped, but my reputation as an expert on the techniques of screen sex had been established. Now it was a simple thing to arrange a cover story through some connections of Putnam’s that explained this upcoming Western sojourn as a similar assignment for an important movie which was still being kept under wraps.

A couple of phone calls set up the cover story, and then I packed my bags and hopped a-cab to the airport. A short time later my ears popped some jet stream into the atmosphere and I was in the air. California, here I come!

My flight confirmed the Ogden Nash opinion that two Wrights made a wrong. My left eye riveted a cable into place to hold the left wing to the fuselage of the airplane. The fellow across from me whom I’d mentally assigned to perform the same function for the right wing fell asleep on the job and my throat became a bit dry with qualms. But I smiled bravely and accepted the magic chewing gum from the stewardess. I ground it down with my right-hand incisors, holding to the faith that this would appease the gremlin² who was blowing flame through his nose on the right wing.

I concentrated on the triplet stewardesses to take my mind ofithe basic illogic of aeronautics. They all looked alike, of course. However, these past few years there had been a change in the stereotype. Once the hostesses all resembled Rheingold girls with painfully stiff jaw muscles holding their capped teeth smilingly in place. Now, knobby knees were in. The teeth had grayed down a bit and the smiles were more like visual whines. With experience had come control. The old style had been Lolita-Earth Mother. The new mode had more of the cameraderie of battle. We're all afraid, it seemed to say, but duty calls, so, over the top one-and-all. And behind it there was the unspoken realization that the troops were too green for battle, Captain Flagg sir, but what can we do? And when the girls were out of sight, they were doubtless hedging the bet with a heavenly choir rehearsing ‘We’ll-all-go-together-when-we-go.’

“Would you like a cocktail, sir?” Plasma, at last! I looked at her gratefully. “Yes,” I breathed.

“A double,” she guessed.

“Yes.”

She went to fetch it.

A moment later she was back. One arm stretched past my Adam’s apple to flip a switch on the back of the seat in front of me. A tray slashed down, slicing me neatly across the midriff. “Oof!” I commented succinctly.

The comment was ignored. A short glass with two ice cubes in it materialized under my nose. The ice cubes were fresh from the skewer, neatly pierced through the middle, a sweating pair of pop-art earrings. A duo of sealed vials with yellowish fluid gurgling ominously inside them now teetered beside the glass. I clutched my upper arm to make the vein stand out, but the stewardess ignored my helpfulness and departed. I realized then that the plasma was to be taken orally.

I chipped a tooth getting the top off the first of the containers. Cooking my Norden bombsight over the glass, I started to pour. Immediately, the target slid out of focus.

“Ladies and gentlemen, that was an air pocket,” the pilot’s voice wrestled with the p.a. static. “A downdraft causing a sideslip, which was the untoward motion you may have felt. This is a quite ordinary phenomenon and there is, of course, nothing to be alarmed about.”

Taking my handkerchief out of the breast pocket of my jacket, I mopped up the pre-mixed cocktail splattered all over the front of my shirt. I stuck the empty vial neatly in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me. Then I opened the second container and mentally calculated the proper coordinates before starting to pour.

“That sudden lurch you may have felt, ladies and gentlemen, was the result of an unexpected updraft. There is no cause for alarm. We will do our best, naturally, to keep the ride as smooth as possible, but occasional bumps causing some slight discomfort are to be expected.”

Apologizing as I leaned forward to sponge up the liquor from the coiffure of the lady seated in front of me, I noticed that the stewardess was gamely picking herself up off the floor of the aisle with her smile intact. It was the practiced motion of an experienced skier, arm locked around one knobby knee, smooth, isometric pressure, heave, vertical once more and set to slalom. A real pro, she leaned into the wind and dovetailed to a halt in front of my seat when I beckoned.

“I’d like another double,” I told her.

“I’m sorry, sir. Rules are only one to a passenger.” Her gray smile lingered on as she took off down the aisle.

Sighing, I studied the second vial. There was still a swallow left in the bottom of it. The hell with the ice and the glass, I decided. I raised the vial to my lips and upended it.

“Whoops! Heh-heh-heh. There we go again, ladies and gentlemen.” This time the pilot sounded a little sheepish.

It was a while before the alcoholic wash cleared enough so that I could see out of my left eye. When it did, however, the eye felt a bit more stable. Miraculously, it hadn't lost its grip on the wing in the interim. The rest of me, alas, felt jittery and miserable.

The pilot’s next pronouncement didn’t alleviate this feeling. There was more than a hint of panic in the crackling that now came over the loudspeaker. “It is the policy of this airline,” he announced in a very formal tone, “never to lie to its passengers. Now, we’re all adults, and I’m sure we’ll all keep control of ourselves in the face of what I have to say. I am afraid, ladies and gentlemen, that we have come up against a rather dire emergency.”

There was a long pause. A few people threw up quietly, inconspicuously. The stewardesses collected the neat little paper bags. One of the stewardesses fainted. The others revived her. I trembled with frank cowardice. The pilot's voice finally resumed.

“Yes, a serious emergency. One of those one-in-a million catastrophes that occurs in flight even today, when modern technology has provided every conceivable precaution to guard against such mechanical failures. Nothing is infallible. Courage, ladies and gentlemen! Courage in the face of what I must now reveal to you! Courage as I too must have courage to perform this most unpleasant duty! Ladies and gentlemen—-” He took a deep breath which was more than half a sigh of fatalism. ‘—I am afraid that our movie projector has broken. There will be a half-hour delay in the showing of our feature picture. I’m sorry. I--” His voice cracked and the p.a. system went from static to silence.

A moan swept over the cabin. Chins out, the stewardesses followed in its wake, pouring the syrup of surcease from anxiety over the smitten passengers. Quickly, luncheon was produced and headsets hooked up to salve the deprived eardrums with stereo offerings.

My elbows kept getting hooked in the wires leading from the inserted earplugs. Folk-rock was being piped direct to my brain cells, but my muscular coordination was off and the inevitable creamed chicken kept dancing out from under my speargun fork. I couldn’t quite get the beat, and stereo’d Bob Dylan blew gooky asparagus all over my pants legs. A second chorus of “Tambourine Man” squashed prunes between my jacket sleeve and my shirt cuff. The finale splashed untasted coffee over my shoe-tops. It was a relief when the stewardess swooped down to remove the trayful of debris.

Almost immediately, modern technology regained face. There was an announcement from the pilot and an under-sized screen was dropped for the showing of the movie. It was, I supposed, the logical end-result of the Industrial Revolution.

The film was a remake of Ecstasy, the famous Hedy Lamarr teaser of the 1930s. Half of a mottled Viennese forest appeared in Technicolor on the screen. The other half was somewhere on the ceiling of the plane’s cabin with a littlebrook in the distance running down the neck of the passenger in the front seat. A hazy, naked female figure leaped over the passenger’s neck and vanished behind the foliage on the ceiling. The title of the picture appeared with the nude coyly curved for concealment behind the “C”. Meanwhile, stereo’d Donovan was screaming into my ears that destruction was imminent. From the corner of my eye I confirmed that the wing of the plane was still attached.

The stewardess caught me checking and clucked disapprovingly. She reached over me and pulled down the shade. The mottling on the half-screen lessened somewhat. Now the stewardess eyed the dial controlling my in-flight entertainment. Her look said I was a backward child. She switched the channel and Donovan’s moaning was replaced by a full orchestra building to the crashing of cymbals as the nude on the half-screen undulatingly managed to keep her vital parts hidden behind the name of the film's fashion coordinator.

The cymbals crashed again as the name of the female star appeared. Craning, I put the letters together over ceiling, neck and screen. Now my interest was aroused. The Lamarr role was being played by Misty Milo.

I knew Misty. During my last sojourn to Hollywood, we’d been—ahh-friendly. In a sense, I’d represented something of an exception to Misty. She was’ a girl whose -ahh—friendships had been built one on top of another toward the goal of furthering her career. I had been in no position to contribute anything toward that goal. Nevertheless, we’d been-ahh—friendly. Very, very friendly!

Studying the screen now, I decided that she hadn’t changed much in the interim since our last meeting. She still had the same wild, long black hair. Her face was still Eurasian, green eyes slightly slanted, lips shaped into an invitation. Her figure was still petite and slender, bosom still twin inflated balloons, legs lithe and smooth as ever, plump hips on a hair-trigger. And, I saw upon closer inspection, the mole on her small, high left buttock hadn't been removed.

I watched the mole play hide-and-seek over the psuedo-Austrian landscape for the next hour and a half. It brought back memories. The memories filled in what the scenery so artfully concealed. Thus I was only half watching the picture when the pilot’s voice broke into the soundtrack.

“We are directly over Los Angeles and have been cleared for landing,” he announced. “However, there is no cause for alarm. I have contacted Flight Control and our aircraft has been assigned a cruising altitude for the next thirty minutes. I repeat, there is no cause for alarm. This flight will not land until the movie has been concluded.”

A sigh of relief swept over the passengers. Like the others, I settled back to watch the end of the picture. As Misty leaped like a lewd gazelle with the hero in hot pursuit, it occurred to me that she well might be more than just a pleasant memory. Ex-Lax, according to Putnam, was someone in Hollywood who knew me. Misty certainly had to be included among those who might be the Russian agent. Now I looked at the screen less with the memory of lust than with a certain trepidation. That mole, as I recalled and now confirmed, was definitely sickle-shaped! Nor did it take much imagination to see the dimple adjacent to it as a hammer!

Finally the film was over. My eardrums made noises like a shooting gallery as the plane dropped to the runway. I swallowed hard as I removed my seat-belt, and a passing stewardess sneered at my cowardice.

A few minutes later I retrieved my luggage and snared a waiting cab. We turtled onto the Freeway heading towards my hotel in Beverly Hills. The other automotive tortoises we found there were at a standstill. Night fell as we all inched forward in tortuous unison. It was pitch black by the time I arrived at my destination.

Much might be written about the particular hotel at which Putnam had elected for me to stay. Much will be written, but not right now. The hotel, and its part in my subsequent adventures, will, I assure you, be exposed in all its glory. But for now, it’s enough to skip over the details and simply report that I checked in at the front desk and was taken to my room by a bellhop.

A half-dollar disposed of the bellhop, and I casually looked over my quarters. It was a small room with a walk-in closet and a tiny bathroom attached. It was arranged more as a sitting room than a bedroom. There was a couch on the same wall as the door to the outside hallway. It had been made up as a bed with sheets and a pillow. Opposite the couch was a sliding glass door. This was a ground-floor room, and this door opened out onto a postage-stamp lanai. This lanai, or small courtyard, was fenced in and featured a low-hanging palm tree, the fronds of which shut off moonlight, starlight and air. The only exception was an area at the far end of the lanai where a lamppost had managed to hack through the palm leaves to establish a tiny luminescent beachhead. In this oasis of light there was a rickety-seeming gate which I guessed led to the street beyond.

I checked the fence gate. It was unlocked. I rechecked. There was no way of locking it. I wedged it shut as best I could and shrugged off the circumstance. It didn't seem important at the time.

Later it did. Later, after I’d gone to bed, sleep turned into sudden wakefulness to make that lanai gate the focal point of a confused vision that seemed more fantasy than reality. It was a vision that seemed a combination of dreams and the day's events and an improbable apparition of the moment.

I blinked my eyes. The vision was still there. The fence gate of the lanai was ajar. Pausing in front of it, pin-pointed in the patch of light, stood a girl in a white nightgown. The nightgown was very sheer. The rise and fall of her hard-panting breasts was quite distinct. Also visible was the sculpted red of her nipples straining against the transparent material. The rest of her body was lost in the shadows. But not so her face. I looked at it and blinked again. I knew that face.

It was the face of Misty Milo!

Now she moved into the shadows of the lanai, toward the sliding glass door. It was a hot night and I'd left it ajar. Just as she reached it and started to push it farther open, my attention was once again drawn to the wooden gate of the lanai. There was another figure standing there now. Most of it, including its face, was in shadows. The only part caught by the light was a hand. It was a hairy hand, large and masculine.

The hand was holding a revolver, cocked, pointing past Misty as she fumbled with the glass door, pointing directly at me! Don’t get me wrong, I thought to myself irrelevantly, but this is Hollywood . . .

CHAPTER TWO

OF course, to be strictly accurate, it wasn’t Hollywood at all; it was Beverly Hills. But, like they bray, Hollywood isn’t a place; it's a state of mind. And Beverly Hills is well within the confines of that state of mind.

My own state of mind, at the moment, was something else again. There was Misty Milo in that transparent nightie at the sliding glass door. And there was that gun pointing at my ventricles from behind her. Having just arrived from Snoozeland, this wasn’t the sort of scene that was calculated to make my wakening euphoric. Bluntly, it made me feel insecure.

I had no time, however, to dwell on the feeling. For, as the figure near the lanai gate shifted position, my troubles doubled. The light striking the other hand of the intruder revealed that it too clutched a pistol. Quick addition told me that I faced a two-gun terror.

Misty was in the room now. The double-barreled stranger following her was lost in the shadows of the lanai, but I guessed he was approaching the glass door. Misty stepped through the open doorway leading to the darkened bath- room and my guess was confirmed. The over-armed shadow was entering the room. I shrank down in the bed, trying to make as small a target of myself as» possible.

It might have worked had it not been for the new-fangled floor lamp standing against one of the walls. The lamp had one of those step-on switches which are set into the wire and-rest on the floor. It was a high-intensity lamp designed for reading. Now the stranger inadvertently stepped on the switch.

The lamp flicked on, glaring like a spotlight. The narrow beam caught me right in the eyes, blinding me. All I could see was the blur of the two guns as they were raised and pointed at me.

“You!” The voice behind the guns sounded savage. “Steve Victor!” My name came out sounding like a death sentence. “So you’re the one Misty’s been double-crossing me with! You louse! And you’re supposed to be a friend of mine! You, of all people!”

He advanced a step. Now I could see his face; now I recognized him. “Happy!” I exclaimed. “Happy Daze!”

“That's right, you double-crossing fink! Me. Happy Daze. Your old pal. Your old pal whose girl you stole!”

Behind him, Misty cowered in the doorway to the bathroom. Her face was chalk-white. Tenor was stamped all over her.

“Wait a minute!” The words came tumbling out. “What are you talking about, Happy? I didn’t steal your girl! I didn’t even know Misty was your girl! I haven’t seen her in four years. I haven’t been in Hollywood all that time. Honest! Don’t do anything foolish now. I'm telling the truth.”

“Yeah! Sure!” His clown’s face was contorted with viciousness. “That’s why she's in your room in her nightie, I suppose. Man! You must really think I’m a fool, Steve."

“But it’s true. Tell him, Misty,” I pleaded.

She just looked at me helplessly, her eyes still filled with fear, guilt seemingly stilling her voice.

“She can’t tell me anything!” Happy snarled. “I’ve caught you red-handed and now you’re going to pay!”

“No! Wait!”

It was too late. The snouts of both guns zeroed in on me. His fingers tightened on both triggers. He fired.

“BANG!”

That's what the flag said that popped out of the first gun. “BANG!” It was a vaudeville prop. But I was having trouble reading it. The water that spurted from the second gun had hit me in the eyes and I couldn’t focus too well.

By the time my eyes cleared, Happy and Misty were rolling around the floor hugging each other and whooping it up with laughter. Misty was giggling so hard the tears were rolling down her cheeks. Happy was hugging his round, little burlesque belly and snapping the waistband of his baggy pants with glee.

“I should have guessed!” I said. “Once a runway banana, always a runway banana!”

“Oh, brother! Your face!” Happy gasped. “You should have seen your face!”

“ ‘Don’t do anything foolish now’,” Misty quoted me. “My hero! Oh, Steve! I’ve never seen anyone so scared! It was hilarious!”

“Very funny.” I couldn’t quite muster up the enthusiasm the words should have commanded.

“Va-va-va-voom!” Happy kept whooping it up.

“Ring-a-ding-ding!” Misty’s breasts juggled appealingly as she bounced.

“Great performance," I told them flatly. “You should both get Oscars.’

“Ooh, he sounds petulant,” Misty observed correctly. “It was just a joke, Stevey. Just old friends welcoming you back to Hollywood.” She kissed me soundly on the lips. “Welcome back to Hollywood, Stevey.”

“Yeah. Welcome back, old beanbag." Happy pumped my hand up and down.

“Thanks.” I was mollified. “It’s good to be back.” I pumped Happy’ s hand back.

It was a mistake. He released the pressure and I found myself holding a plastic hand which detached from his sleeve. Knowing Happy, I should have expected it.

Happy Daze was a standup comic from way back. In his fifties now, his route up the show-biz ladder (and part way down again) had been traditional. As a youngster he’d started on the Catskill Mountain borscht circuit and then gone into vaudeville, which was by that time on its last legs. When the legs collapsed, he’d followed along with many another comic and sought refuge in burlesque. There followed a long period as a second banana—on the receiving end of the seltzer squirt, the pie in the face, and the ants in the baggy pants. Finally Happy earned his chance at being top banana and he was a hit.

Shortly thereafter, luck—both bad and good—took a hand in his career. There was a crackdown on burlesque across the country and it became harder and harder for him to get bookings. But TV was just burgeoning, and some Mad Ave genius got the idea of utilizing Happy’s talents on the idiot box. His humor had always been visual, TV was still young enough so that the viewers went for slapstick, and pretty soon Happy’s Hooper was ace-high.

It stayed that way for quite a few years. Then Hollywood took notice of him. Contracts were waved under his nose. Offers of movie money poured over him like syrup over a pancake. Happy latched onto a three-picture contract for more money than he’d ever dreamed of before. He kissed off his video career and double-timed west.

It turned out to have been a mistake. His first picture was a flop. His second flick ditto. He never made a third one. The studio came up with a loophole in the contract and kissed off Happy.

He tried to go back to TV, but it had passed him by. Everything was situation comedy by then. Nobody wanted slapstick. They forget fast in the entertainment business, and as far as TV was concerned, Happy Daze couldn’t have been more forgotten if he was a Charlie Chan rerun.

There was nothing else for him to do but try to pick up bookings on the night club circuit. One of these took him to a second-rate club in L. A. where the farmers seemed to really dig his brand of slapstick; It was here that I'd first met him on my last visit to Hollywood. And I gathered now that he was still playing at the same club — not exactly knocking ’em dead, but pulling in enough tourists who remembered his name to justify a permanent niche on the bill.

The thing I’d learned about Happy, the thing that was still true, was that he was a standup comic to the core. He was always on. He was frequently funnier off-stage than behind the footlights. And being a friend of his meant that you had to vacillate between two roles: straight man and appreciative audience. Such were the conditions of friendship.

So I laughed dutifully when I found myself standing there and foolishly holding the detached phony hand. I laughed when Happy mugged a cross-eyed imitation of the surprised look on my face. I laughed when he slapped me on the back and dropped an ice-cube down my pajama shirt. And I laughed when he went off into a “Diz-muzz-be-der-blace" routine which ended with him chasing Misty around my room a la Harpo Marx.

Misty finally escaped him and slipped into my bathrobe by way of cooling him down. With the scenery thus covered, it occurred to me to ask them how they’d happen to learn of my arrival so quickly. In the back of my mind was the nagging suspicion that either one of them might be Ex-Lax—or, for that matter, Castor Oil.

“We were sitting in the cocktail lounge having a drink with Winthrop Van Ardsdale when you checked in,” Misty explained. “We saw you passing the entrance with the bellhop. Then we just checked with the room clerk. You can imagine how thrilled I was to learn that you have the room next to mine,” she added in the throaty, come-hither tone of voice that made her fans believe that maybe, just maybe, given the opportunity, she might succumb to each of them.

“Winthrop too,” I noted. “Where is he? I haven't seen him in a dog’s age.”

“He left us to pull the gag while he went ahead to arrange the party.”

“Party? What party?”

“The welcoming party for you.”

“Oh? Gee, that’s damn nice of Winthrop. When is the party?”

Happy glanced at his watch. “In about fifteen minutes,” he told me. “You’d better throw some clothes on.”

“Better still, come as you are,” Misty cooed.

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” I had some catching up to do. “You mean the party is tonight? How can it be? It’s almost one o'clock already.”

“Shank of the evening.” Happy swept aside my doubts. “This is Hollywood. Remember? Parties always start late out here.”

“But do you think Winthrop will be able to get anybody to come so late?”

“Sure he will,” Misty assured me. “When he tells them you’re in town and the booze and vittles are free, all your old friends will come.

“It’s nice to be loved for myself,” I observed dryly. “Still,” I added less cynically, “it is damn nice of Winthrop to go to so much trouble and expense.”

“Expense? Peter!” Happy hooted. “Don’t be ridic!’

“But if he's throwing a party for me—”

“He’s not throwing it. He’s arranging it. How could Winthrop throw a party?” Misty asked logically. “He doesn’t have a nickel.”

“Nothing changes,” I sighed. It was true. Winthrop hadn't had at nickel when I’d known him four years earlier either. What he had had—and still did have—was a name and reputation.

He’d been born with the name: Van Ardsdale. It bespoke a paternal line of American aristocrat ancestors going back to the first Dutch settlers. Tracing the ling forward, one must gloss over the fact that their rather dubious contribution to the American Revolution lay in the staunchness of their Tory opposition. In any case, perhaps the Van Ardsdales might be forgiven in light of their subsequent contribution to the development of the country. Early movement westward was certainly encouraged by the family forge, which manufactured the chassis for covered wagons. And it has never been proven that the number of wagons which broke down en route was the result of skimping on materials, or shoddy workmanship. Also, their role in the expansion of the country, such as the way they campaigned for the Mexican War in which, unfortunately, the guns manufactured by the Van Ardsdales displayed and undesirable tendency to backfire and blow the heads off the soldiers firing them was notable. And, as subsequent investigation proved, the guns they supplied the Mexicans were certainly every bit as inferior. Following the Civil War, scions of the clan, carpetbags in hand, helped to reconstruct the South - and were rewarded by the British for their successful efforts in keeping the price of Dixie cotton down. By the turn of the century, the Van Ardsdales could point with pride to the railroad tracks stretching across the country which had been manufactured in their steel mills. These tracks also represented a debt owed them by free enterprise, since by keeping the price of the rails way up, the Van Ardsdales had insured that the railroad builders themselves would have to keep wages to their laborers way down, thus stopping the labor movement from developing too quickly. A side effect was the importation of Chinese labor which was forced to work under the most stringent conditions. So stringent, indeed, that more Chinese perished building American railroads than were killed in the Korean War. But then that was a fact only indirectly related to the Van Ardsdale industrial empire, and one, in any case, which would really not be appreciated until modern times when the intrinsically evil nature of Asiatics would be pointed out by latter-day Minutemen and such. In the interim, the Van Ardsdales maintained a strict neutrality during the early days of both World Wars, selling armaments impartially to both sides. In the 1920s, a Van Ardsdale tracked a little oil across the family name by dipping into Teapot Dome, but another cousin wiped the smirch clean a short time later by philanthropically devoting his skills to government service. He was a voluntary economic advisor to the Hoover Administration. There are some who opine that it was due to his acumen that the Van Ardsdales emerged virtually unscathed from the Depression. By the time of the Eisenhower years, there were some twenty multi-millionaire branches of the Van Ardsdales around. One of the most notable of them was represented by Alistair Van Ardsdale, Winthrop’s father. It was he who decided that the time had come to stop amassing fortunes and start spending money. He was a yachtsman, a huntsman, and a horseman. His racing stables were well-known at tracks throughout the country. A classic golf tourney was named after him. Yet it should be noted that he was a sportsman rather than a playboy—which was the appellation his son Winthrop justly earned quite early in his life.

Perhaps Winthrop acquired the tendency from his mother, Deborah Lorimer an Ardsdale Smythe-Barton, currently Countess of Trendino. As a sub-deb, it had been considered quite a coup for Deborah Lorimer to snare Alistair Van Ardsdale for a husband. Her family was considered nouveau riche, having made their money in plastics, and while their wealth matched Alistair’s portion of the Van Ardsdale riches, socially they were parvenus by comparison to the old-line Dutch-American family.

Still, Deborah didn't stay married to Alistair long enough for the family to get in all its snubs. Indeed, she left him only three months after the nuptials, taking with her the embryonic Winthrop tucked snugly in her womb. It was quite a scandal, with Smythe-Barton, her second husband, an Englishman of noble birth, coming off as something of a second-rate Duke of Buckingham. But “the woman I love,” as Smythe-Baron referred to Deborah, figuring that what was semantically valid for a throne heir was good enough for him, proved unwilling to devote her life to legend. Still toting Winthrop, now aged five, she fled Smythe-Barton for an Italian, the Count of Trendino. It took another ten years for them to get around to legitimatizing the relationship, by which time the Count barely had enough breath left to whisper “I do” before cashing in his countly chips. Deborah had remained unmarred—if not chaste—thereafter, a widow with an adolescent son who was precocious enough to impregnate one of his noble Italian cousins in celebration of his sixteenth birthday.

As a result of this precosity, Winthrop was shipped to America to stay with his father, the theory being that the paternal influence would be stabilizing. In a sense, it was. When Winthrop was arrested at a pot party a few years later—the culmination of one disgraceful episode after another—his father stabilized their relationship by cutting the boy off without a cent. Winthrop cabled his mother for fare back to sunny Italy. Instead, she sent him a long letter which vacillated between detailing her latest romance—with a 25-year-old Greek who thought she was much younger than she was and who might be scared off if he learned that she had a son almost as old as he was— and chastising Winthrop for his unruliness. The letter concluded with the news that she would arrange to have an adequate allowance sent to him each month -- but only so long as he stayed away from her.

Well, Winthrop may have been rejected, but still it was a generous rejection as long as it lasted. The trouble was it didn't last past his first year in Hollywood, where Winthrop had gone on a whim. The year culminated with Winthrop’s walking into a meeting of the Los Angeles chapter of “Mothers for America,” mounting the podium, and proceeding to take off all his clothes. When the police arrested him, the reporters who were present asked him why he’d done such a thing.

“To show contempt for motherhood,” Winthrop had replied. “All mothers screw. That’s how they get to be mothers.”

The logic was incontrovertible, but nevertheless one of the stodgier syndicated columnists who happened to be present took umbrage at the slur. “You wouldn’t want someone to talk about your mother like that!” she lectured Winthrop.

“Why not? My mother’s the worst of all. She's the queen of all the whores.”

Editing slightly for the family newspaper trade, the lady columnist had printed the story along with a condemnation of Winthrop and a side jab at his mother, who was then making a name for herself as a hostess on the Riviera. Deborah might not have minded so much if the item hadn’t been seen by her Greek, who did some fast calculating and caught the next plane back to Athens. Older women were all right, he’d decided, but there were limits. Deborah rightly blamed Winthrop for his departure, and she sent her son a nasty letter with a check for five thousand dollars which, the letter assured him, was the last money he’d see from her.

Winthrop cashed the check and flew to Paris. Here he rid himself of the money in one wild night. He threw a party to prove that the day of the orgy was not yet past. The French government threw him out of the country. Indeed, they were so eager for his departure that a special bill was passed in the Chamber of Deputies to allot the money for his fare back to Hollywood.

It was shortly after that incident that I met Winthrop. Everything I knew about him prejudiced me against him. Yet, to my surprise, I found myself liking him very much. He was a rogue, but a rogue in the engaging tradition of Casanova, Francois Villon, and Jean Lafitte. He was a warm and witty man, good-looking and appealing-to women, athletic and companionable to men. He drank like a gentleman—sometimes. He was courtly and polite - when he wanted to be. He was well-read and intelligent — despite those occasions when he chose to appear boorish and uncultured.

When he’d returned from Paris, he’d switched targets from Mums to Dad and decided to embarrass the Van Ardsdale side of the family. He’d accomplished this by becoming an actor. What he lacked in talent he made up in good looks and charm. He was never very successful, almost always settling for bit parts, but he usually managed to land the sort of role calculated to enrage his father. Thus he played anarchists, beatniks, sex perverts, junkies and rapists. And he fought off all attempts by the Van Ardsdales to force him to change his name.

Given Winthrop’s style of living, however, it was obvious that he couldn’t support himself by his occasional acting chores. Locked out of the paternal cash box, weaned from the maternal money teat, Winthrop nevertheless managed to maintain his playboy status. Human nature, his own canniness, and his ability to generate excitement kept him going.

He’d learned early in his Hollywood days that actors were impressed by high society. And he’d learned that high society was drawn to the fever of the entertainment world. So he’d brought the two worlds together, using his connections in both spheres and enlarging them, providing movie celebrities to impress the wealthy and providing money-men to pick up the tabs for celebrities. He established an “in” with all the columnists, and they soon learned that any event which Winthrop Van Ardsdale was involved in usually provided good copy. He’d become Hollywood’s chief free-loader, and he made no bones about it. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. And nobody minded that he never grabbed a check, that he came for a weekend visit and stayed a month, that he charged liquor, food, sometimes even his clothing to those who were eager to be counted among his friends, as members of the “in” crowd.

Occasionally he performed more concrete functions. He was no procurer, but he knew every pimp and hooker in town and he wasn’t above making a phone call for someone who proved their friendship to him. More legitimately, he sometimes used his connections to help an out-of-town publicity man trying to push a personality or a property in Hollywood. He was never paid outright for either of these services. But the indirect contributions which resulted from them kept Winthrop well-dressed, well-fed, and well-liquored.

Still, there were lapses in his champagne-and-caviar existence. There were times when the wealthy bypassed Hollywood for Palm Springs or Las Vegas, times when his movie star friends were abroad, or involved in movies that necessitated their being on the set at six in the ayem, which meant beddy-bye before midnight, times when Central Casting couldn’t even provide a walk-on for Winthrop. During such times, Winthrop relied blithely on the resiliency of the rubber check.

His bad checks were as much of a hallmark around Hollywood as Liz Taylor’s bosom, Lee Marvin's squint, or Dean Martin’s bourbon. People rarely refused to cash a check for Winthrop. For one thing it was a mark of status just to hold one, to be a part of the celebrity circle stuck with a Winthrop Van Ardsdale check. For another, in the long run, somehow, Winthrop always managed to make his checks good. Even the stores and night clubs and hotels and restaurants cashed his checks and patiently held them. The business he brought in more than compensated for any loss they might have suffered.

With it all, Winthrop was genuinely well-liked. It was a fact that his personality attracted people. His zany capers—and many of them would truly have been considered horrendous had they been perpetrated by anyone else --were readily forgiven. There was a magic sort of golden-boy quality about him that was genuine.

It was evident later that ayem, when, flanked by Misty Milo and Happy Daze, I arrived at the party which Winthrop had arranged to welcome me back to Hollywood. He was standing with our hosts, a middle-aged couple rolling in new Midwest automotive money, obviously recent arrivals on the L.A. scene, just as obviously impressed with the famous people Winthrop had collected in their home in the middle of the night. Winthrop greeted me warmly and introduced them. They made welcoming noises deep in their throats and then receded to ogle the celebrities swilling their booze. I didn't quite catch their names. It didn't seem to matter.

“Squares,” Winthrop confided to me. “But sweet. Hungry for the high life. Friends of friends of friends, you know? Letters back and forth and I arranged for them to buy this house at a good price. Had it decorated for them too. What do you think?”

What did I think? I thought it was the perfect house for its location, which was the Pacific Palisades of Los Angeles. Which is to say that it suited L.A. more than the ocean it looked out over. It was all glitter, the house was, just like the city, all glitter and, as Saroyan put it, “no foundation all the way down the line.” It was a three-level villa hanging out over the side of a mountain, overlooking the sea, pointing toward Japan in styling as well as direction, a fragile, toothpick structure poised and waiting for the latest Tokyo earthquake. If the city of L.A. was all shiny new plastic breast-flesh quivering in the neon with the scars of the uplift operation not showing but ever-present, the house was a sequin-sparkling pastie trembling in the too-strong breeze and about to fly off into the black terror of the night. It was as insecure as the people who owned it, was the house. And it made me feel insecure to be wrapped in its goldfish-bowl plate-glass walls. How did I like the house? “I like it fine,” I told Winthrop.

“It really is good to see you, Steve.” He sounded like he meant it.

“It’s good to see you, too.” Was he Ex-Lax? Castor Oil? I couldn't help the suspicion.

“I collected as many of the old crowd as I could,” Winthrop told me. “And I filled in with the rest of these free-loaders.” His gesture took in the room.

There were perhaps thirty people there. I, recognized most of them, but only a half-dozen besides Winthrop, Misty and Happy were known to me personally. My eyes moved over the group as I picked them out.

There was Prince Juv Satir of Poversia talking to Voluptua. The boy prince had just turned fifteen the last time I’d seen him. That would make him about nineteen now, but he didn’t seem to have outgrown his adolescent preoccupation with mammaries. The heir apparent to the throne of the tiny Asian country was studying Voluptua’s bosom so avidly that his eyes were crossing. The blonde Voluptua was looking down at him from her six-foot-six height with amusement. With a 42-inch bust, she was used to being stared at, but her look seemed to say that even; royalty would have to grow up before being capable of coping with so much woman. Both the Prince and Voluptua were old acquaintances of mine.

So too were Donna Carper and Dwight Floyd Rank, standing across the room from Voluptua and the Prince. Donna was a legman (or leg-lady, if you prefer) for Ella Hooper, queen of the Hollywood gossip columnists. Behind her owl-like glasses, Donna was an unattractive girl, and her ample bosom was spongelike, soaking in confidences and squeezing out copy for the Hooper gossip-mill. Rank had imbibed just enough so that he was obviously considering taking her to bed despite her deficiency of beauty, but not so much that he’d forgotten that any pillow talk which ensued between them might turn up in boldface in the next day’s Hooper column. Rank was an architect, famous as an innovator, infamous for being on the wrong end of breach-of-promise suits. I’d made some wild scenes with him during my previous visit to Hollywood. He was skidding toward sixty now, but from the way he was eyeing Donna, the years hadn’t slowed him down any.

Rank’s eyes strayed for a moment from Donna. They fileted the clothes from the body of April Wilder, who was standing across the room from him and drinking a double martini through a straw. April was another one I knew from the semi-old days. Only it was really her father I’d known then. He’d been a second-rate actor, but a nice guy, who was on the road down then. Since my last visit he’d died, and now daughter April was on her way up. Four years ago she’d been a gangly teen-ager going to dramatic school. Now she was a sex kitten with a long-term contract, During the four years, according to the gossip columns, she’d not only learned how to drink, but also had sampled vices ranging from LSD to seduction as well. The latter vice seemed in evidence now as she backed a man I didn’t know against the wall by raking him first with the left and then the right-hand side of her bosom. I waved at her, and she winked back at me. The wink said she'd see me later, and that right now she was only keeping in practice.

The eye-signal was intercepted by Louis Ching, the Chinese photographer who specialized in shooting bosomy girls for cheesecake magazines, and who was another old acquaintance of mine. He returned the wink impartially, first to April, then to me. Louis was a chunky man about my age who’d been born and raised in China and had come to the U. S. as a refugee from the Reds.

Well, there they were—all of the closest of my old Hollywood friends. The chances were strong that one of them -- possibly two—was a top Commie agent. The question was who.

I considered them one by one. Was it Winthrop Van Ardsdale? He was frequently and vociferously anti-American, or at least anti many cherished American institutions. There seemed very little he wouldn't do for the proper reward. He was corrupt enough so that international power politics might be strictly a matter of personal advantage to him. Yes, Winthrop was a possibility.

So was Happy Daze. He’d signed a few highly suspect petitions during and after the Second World War. He’d lent his name to organizations which had eventually landed on the Attorney General’s list. Lately he’d been quiet and non-political, but it hadn’t been so many years since he’d leaned so far to the left that even his liberal friends had regarded him askance.

Or Voluptua, perhaps? Only a year ago she'd landed on the front pages because of her involvement with a Russian U. N. diplomat in New York. The Russki was married, and when his affair with Voluptua was discovered his government had shipped him home in disgrace. The incident had tarnished Voluptua’s reputation without really raising the question of any possible breach of patriotism. This was because of the outrage of the Russian government and their insinuations that Voluptua was a spy planted by our government to vamp their man and milk info from him. But maybe it was just the other way around. Maybe the whole incident was an elaborate construction designed to disguise the activities of Voluptua herself.

Maybe . . . And maybe April Wilder, the teeny-bopper sex-kitten, wasn’t the political innocent she seemed. Maybe her well-publicized involvement with the New Left -- her blocking a troop convoy by throwing her shapely body in front of it, her getting arrested for sitting in during a demonstration for the right to travel freely to Cuba, her speeches to college students in support of draft-card- burners—maybe all this wasn’t just another phase of her volatile personality. Maybe it wasn’t just honest conviction. Maybe, young as she was, April was a Red agent. I sighed at the thought. That was the trouble today. You couldn’t tell honest opposition from Commie kanoodling. Yet the distinction had to be understood, or the whole country would go smiling that toothful California smile as its most precious freedoms dribbled down the drain of blind anti-Communism.

The idea turned my suspicions to Donna Carper and Dwight Floyd Rank. Both, in different ways, were avowed right-wingers. I remembered what Charles Putnam had said about the advantages to the Commies of a strong rightist movement coming to power in America. Donna, as a representative of Ella Hooper who was an open spokeslady for the, ultra-right, would surely fit well into such a Commie plan. And Rank, who was very active politically and very noisy about the threat of Communist infiltration in organizations which were merely liberal, likewise fit the picture.

Then there was Prince Juv Satir. His country lay comfortably in the Russian sphere of influence. Comfortably because our State Department found it preferable to having Poversia under the Chinese Communist wing. Indeed, when geography had defeated America’s own efforts to democratize Poversia, our efforts had backed up those of the Russians in the establishment of a socialist monarchy. Yet the question now arose as to just how much under Russian control that monarchy might be. Enough, I wondered, so that the playboy Prince might really be engaging in espionage? That too was a possibility.

And what about Louis Ching? His escape from China had taken him through Siberia, where he’d lived for over a year before emigrating to the U.S. With relations as strained as they were between Russia and China, wasn’t it possible that the Russians might have been in the Chinese emigré an ideal camouflage. Mightn’t they have thought that his being Chinese would place him beyond suspicion as a Russian agent, so far as U. S. counter-intelligence was concerned? No, I couldn’t rule out Louis.

And the same principle surely applied in spades to Misty Milo. The American Bardot, as she was sometimes called, was an enigma politically. As far as I knew, she neither knew nor cared about world politics, Yet her very innocence might conceal her role as spy.

It was a helluva way to have to look at people who were supposed to be friends of mine. I felt like a reincarnation of Joe McCarthy, and I didn't like the feeling. My long-range view was that one Communist under the bed did a lot less damage than those who went around blowing beds up with dynamite on the theory that of the multitude detonated surely one must be roofing a provocateur.

However, in the current situation, I couldn’t afford the long-range view. One or two of my friends were working for the Reds. That meant I had to look at all of them with suspicion. Even so, there was no point in making that suspicion obvious. As a counter-agent, it behooved me to disguise it and get into the spirit of the party.

The spirit had moved from drink-gulping and tentative passes to abandoned frugging and open caresses. The party proper was taking place on the middle level of the house, but at least half the couples had deserted it by now for the greater privacy afforded at the top and bottom levels. People were pairing off all around me, but I hadn't as yet latched onto a girl myself.

Neither had Dwight Floyd Rank. Somehow Donna had escaped him. The architect strolled over to me and slapped me on the back. “Good to have you back in Hollywood again, Stevie,” he said. “But you’re not living up to your professional reputation. Where’s your girl?”

“I wouldn’t know where to go with her if I had one,” I answered. “The way things are going, I'll bet there isn’t a vacant nook in the house.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ve got just the spot for you.” He nudged me. “It’s on the lower level. I’ll bet even the people who live here don’t know it’s there.”

“Huh? Then how come you-?”

“I did the original design for this house. Long before Winthrop discovered it. I drew up the blueprints to build it.”

“You did? Then tell me something, Dwight. “Why is the damn thing built so precariously?”

“You're looking at it as a layman. I assure you it isn’t.”

“That’s what they said about all those other houses that were built on the Palisades. But quite a few of them had their foundations crumble from under them and went rolling down the mountain."

“This one won’t,” he assured me. “Those houses you’re talking about were all part of a swindle to begin with. Fly-by-night real-estate operators working with conscienceless contractors cashed in on the housing boom and built where it wasn’t safe. The terrain here isn’t in the same category.”

“Well, I hope you’re right,” I told him.

“Hey!” Misty Milo was at my elbow. “I’m feeling neglected. Don't you like me any more?”

I liked her all right. With that mantle of ebony hair swirling about her naked shoulders like a web of sex appeal and those slanty green eyes telegraphing all sorts of erotic promises, I liked her a lot. What man wouldn’t have? Besides, there were memories of Misty, memories of heat and flesh and little love-bites and frantic thrashings and explosions of ecstasy, four-year-old memories not to be forgotten. Yes, there were memories with options, vivid memories with options ready to be renewed.

I picked up the option with an arm around her waist. Misty ignored Rank and pressed close to me. I whispered something in her ear to seal the contract renewal being made by the spark of our bodies where they touched.

“Well, I guess your problem is solved,” Rank laughed.

“This boy hasn’t got a problem in the world. Believe me!” Misty crooned.

“Well, I think this third wheel will be rolling on his way,” Rank remarked as he started across the room. “Oh!” He snapped his fingers and turned back to us for a moment. “Privacy could be a problem, as we were saying before. I hope I’m not being gauche, but why not let me show you the spot I mentioned, Steve?”

I raised an eyebrow at Misty.

“I don't mind.” She answered my unspoken question. “I’m past the point of maidenly modesty.”

“Follow me.” Rank led the way to the staircase running to the lower level.

After we’d descended, he led us to the very front of the house. This level was pretty much in complete darkness, and it was a matter of picking our way through the entwined couples scattered about. As with the rest of the house, the major portion of this lower area was open, without walls, ultra-modern, which is to say designed with little regard for privacy, a prime example of the school of architectural togetherness.

We followed Rank to the front wall of this floor. This was the part of the house which jutted out over the canyon. I thought it was just a solid wall without a window. I was wrong. Rank pressed a button at one side of the wall and it slid back to form a doorway. After we'd followed him through the entry, he pressed another button and the wall slid shut behind us.

The area we were in now was divided. To our left and directly in front of us was an all-glass wall. Against the portion of the wall in front of us was a long, extremely low and rather wide couch of some sort. It was done in maroon velvet and was very plush. I'd never seen anything quite like it before. It was no more than a foot off the floor and flush against the glass wall. Where it ended, to our right, another wall—a solid wood-paneled one-began. It was joined at right angles by a similar wall to form sort of small room concealed from our view There was a door leading into this room at the extreme right of the wall. There was another door on the right-hand wall of the house itself which couldn’t have led anywhere but outside. I looked at it, puzzled. Outside must have been a drop of about twenty feet at that point.

Rank noticed my look and answered the unasked question it signified. “Yes, it leads outside all right,” he told me. “There’s a ladder going down from it. You know, the kind that can be raised and lowered. Actually, it’s an emergency fire exit for this level of the house. A built-in safety feature. When I design a house, I try not to overlook any details.”

“And where does that lead?” Misty pointed to the other door.

“That's a small john," Rank told her. “And if you two will excuse me now, I think I’ll put it to use.” Rank gave us a ‘bless-you-my-children’ smile and went into the lavatory. The lock clicked behind him.

“Alone at last.” Misty found the lighting dial on the wall and turned it. It was a dimmer. She turned the lights down very low. “Now, Steveykins," she announced. Now it was! I put my arms around her and kissed her. Her bare shoulders were like velvet where my hands moved over them. I could feel the warmth of her body through the skimpy cocktail dress she was wearing. Her lips were warm, eager, clinging, parted slightly, conveniently.

When the kiss was over we sank -- or maybe crumpled is the more accurate word—to the couch together. Misty’s ebony hair fanned out over the maroon velvet. I kissed her again and her nails dug into the back of my neck. I nipped her lip gently by way of response and the length of her body arched against mine.

“Welcome back to Hollywood,” she whispered. Her hands moved around to the front of my jacket and I wriggled to make it easier for her to take it off. Then her fingers were at the front of my shirt, pushing the tie out of the way, fumbling the buttons open. She pushed the shirt aside and her lips moved tantalizingly over my chest, her sharp little teeth playing with the nipples.

I returned the favor. I pushed down the top of Misty’s strapless dress, reached around behind her to unsnap he bra, pulled it off and threw it aside. In the dim light plump breasts shimmered like bronze gelatin. She must have been sunbathing in the nude, fort hey were as tawny tan as the rest of her body. There was a light sprinkling of freckles like a signpost just over the roseate and nipple of one of the breasts. I brushed the freckles with my lips and the pink roseate seemed to widen and turn a deeper shade. The crest, sharp as a pencil-point, was a blood red color and I could sense its ache as it strained to reach my mouth. I enveloped it, and a good deal of bust flesh with it, and Misty’s sudden gasp made it swell even more against the eager laving of my tongue. She clutched at me so frantically that for a moment it seemed I would suffocate in the burning flesh of her bosom.

She squirmed away from me for a moment now and sat up. Her breasts bobbled freely. Her hair cascaded over their nakedness. The rigid nipples peeped out from between the strands. The effect was more erotic than if they had remained completely uncovered.

She bent over me and unbuckled my belt. She pushed down my pants and jockey shorts and leaned back, her slant eyes glittering. “Ahh,” she murmured. She knelt over me again, crouching so that she faced my feet. As I felt the first long swipe of her tongue, I reacted widly and grabbed for her.

My hands clutched at the silk of her dress where it covered the fleshy, compact globes of her derriere. I felt them rotating in my hands as Misty undulated her hips, flipped the skirt of the dress up out of the way. Misty’s truly beautiful bottom was quivering, like a Mixmaster gone berserk. It gave me pause. Flashes of it had appeared in so many movies, it was probably the most famous derriere in the world. Movie-going males from Azuza to Zamboanga had been stimulated by it. The weight of erotic fantasy it had inspired was so impressive as to be overwhelming. I was momentarily overwhelmed. It was like stroking a national institution. It was like being confronted by Abe Lincoln’s ghost close-up, face to face, and being expected to pull his beard. One feels shy at such a moment. I felt shy. But I got over it.

I grabbed it with both hands and was caught up in the vibration. Misty dived lower, her mouth like a suction pump, her tongue an instrument of exquisite arousal. I pulled her legs out from under her. The skirt fell back down and covered my head. It didn’t matter. Even under the blanket it formed I had no trouble finding the quivering sentinel standing guard at the pulsating gateway nestled at the apex of her being. I glued my lips there, a mindless bee gorging at a sweet-bursting blossom of honeysuckle.

We stayed like that a long time, exciting each other to a fever pitch, and then denying fruition at the last moment so that the excitation could be prolonged and raised to a still higher pitch. Finally Misty could stand it no longer. She scrambled away from me and flung herself down on her back, her legs like parentheses awaiting the insertion of the word. I had the word all right as I moved to take her, but the parenthetical ecstacy suddenly took on a complexity that neither one of us could have expected. What happened—quickly and simultaneously -- was this:

From the adjacent bathroom there was the sound of the toilet being flushed, a low, gurgling sound, mounting, growing in volume, mounting. . . As the noise grew louder, there was the sound of door slamming. The flushing sound still hadn’t reached its full volume when, as I raised myself over Misty, from the corner of my eye I spotted the ladder being lowered outside the plate glass window and saw Dwight Floyd Rank scampering down it. Just as he reached bottom, just as the flushing noise seemed to reach a Niagara-like peak, just as I slammed eagerly into the waiting passion-basket of America’s sex symbol, Misty Milo, it happened.

She was wedged into the angle between the couch and the glass wall, practically on the floor. As I took her—-quite athletically, I'm afraid—the vigor of the movement did indeed knock her to the floor. The couch came out from under us. The flushing toilet roared. There was an earthquake-like rumble. And then the house started rolling down the side of the mountain, picking up speed as it went.

“WOW!” Misty exclaimed.

She exploded! I exploded! And the house exploded out from under us.

CHAPTER THREE

THE THING about Pompeii, or the Frisco ‘quake, or the Johnstown flood, or any other catastrophe, is that the minor embarrassments are lost to the history books because of the scope of the major disaster. How many adulterous lovers were caught with their togas down when the volcano erupted? How many victims were trapped in the john during the earthquake? Was there perhaps some luckless hospital patient in the middle of an enema when the dam burst? It seems likely, that for a few people at least, the last Kansas tornado, or Miami hurricane, was a personally drastic case of coitus interruptus—or, perhaps, colitis interruptus. Yes, the gods choose their moments of havoc with a macabre and lewd wink sometimes.

It was such a moment now. It was such a moment for many, people, Misty and myself among them. Indeed, as the house slid, toppled and then actually rolled down the mountain, the general reaction pointed up the fact that fear of humiliation may well be greater than fear for one’s physical safety among the over-civilized. It was a moment when sophistication might well have meant suicide, and yet the impulse toward sophisticated behavior prevailed.

On all three levels of the house, there were those who scampered for their trousers and those who scampered for their bras. Some grabbed for draperies with which to cover themselves. Others tried to hide their nudity—the proof of the compromising positions in which they’d been found-— behind furniture, or under bedclothes, or in closets. Still others, however, in the throes of some Freudian life-urge, stubbornly continued their activity, as if determined to gain ultimate satisfaction before being smashed to smithereens.

Halfway down the mountain, their determination was undermined. The careening house hit a bump. Windows were shattered. Doors flew open. Cohabitating couples were strewn over the countryside like so many autumn leaves dropped by the wind. For an instant, the air was thick with nudity and lust. And then the scenery was enlivened by bodies writhing half in pain and half in the last clutch of passion. The scene was out of Dante, produced by DeMille, with incidental orgy by De Sade and Fellini.

Here a couple crashed through a neighbor’s bedroom window, landing in bed with the man and his wife, merging, so to speak, to make a thrashing foursome of fear and excitement and inextricably entwined erotica. There a naked cinema sex queen flew through the air like a Valkyrie, breasts floating in the breeze, and then landed in a bed of roses and immediately belly-whopped to one side and began picking thorns out of her million-dollar derriere. Over there a prominent producer, big-bellied and pompous, bounced down the mountain, betraying his greatest concern by holding onto himself as if he were a sports car driver who, by handling his stick-shift properly, might avert disaster. Other spot-shots-cameo? no, briefer, more subliminal images, to be accurate—-revealed a man landing in the upper fronds of a palm tree, clutching at the trunk with one hand, his other hand still entangled in the bra of the lady from whom he’d been wrenched; a lady with her ankles tangled in her panties, trying desperately to pull them up as she tumbled head over heels into the headlights of the oncoming traffic on the Freeway at the foot of the mountain, her safe journey across the four-lane highway a tribute to the reflexes of Los Angeles drivers who are used to coping with the most unexpected situations; and the couple behind her, still glued together-by fear? or uncontrollable passion?—who bounced into the rear seat of a passing convertible and were almost to Pasadena before they came to their senses or the driver discovered them; and others, many, many others. . .

Miraculously, the plate-glass window behind which Misty and I had been engaged did not break during the descent of the house. Equally miraculous was the fact that we emerged pretty much unscathed. If the house had landed on either its front or bottom portion, we would undoubtedly have been crushed to death. But it came to rest on its back wall, and so, while we were shaken up, we weren’t hurt.

The impact, however, did put an end to our love-making. We were wrenched apart and ricocheted off the walls for a moment until the last grinding motion ceased. Then, as if by instinct, we scrambled around picking up our clothes and pulling them on. As I was struggling with my pants, I happened to glance out the window. A cop was standing out there. He shot a flashlight beam into the area. His jaw dropped open. He stood there gawking. It was a moment before I realized he wasn’t ogling me, but Misty, in her hurry, she’d twisted her brassiere, and now she was trying in vain to invert one of her luscious breasts into the inverted cup. Finally she realized it was no use, took off the bra and started from scratch. When she’d clasped the bra, the cop turned his attention and his flashlight beam elsewhere. A moment later, dressed, the two of us left the house by the same side exit Rank had taken just before the house took off down the mountain.

As we emerged, I spotted the cop again. He was at the side of the highway, attempting to wave down cars with MD license plates. We drifted over to his vicinity and watched.

A Caddy convertible braked to a halt in answer to his flashlight signal. “What is it, officer?” A dapper, gray-haired man stuck his head out the window and inquired.

“There’s been an accident. Are you a doctor?” the cop asked.

“I am.”

“Some people may be hurt. Will you have a look at them?”

“All right. Where are they?”

“In the house there.” The cop pointed.

“In the house?”

“That’s right.”

“Sony. I don’t make house calls.”

“But this is an emergency,” the cop protested.

“I can't help that. It’s an agreement of our local medical society not to make house calls after dark. I have an obligation to my fellow doctors, after all. I will not be a fink!”

“Look,” the cop pleaded, “this is a drastic situation. Couldn’t you make an exception in the name of humanity? Please, Doctor - What’s your name?”

“Fink. Doctor Leonard Kildare Fink.”

“Well, don’t you think you owe it to these folks to help, Doctor Fink?”

“Mine is a higher obligation, an obligation to my fellow members of a noble profession. Sorry.” His head went back inside the car window and he quickly drove away.

The cop resumed trying to flush a doctor from the ayem traffic.

“Steve! Misty!” Our attention was distracted by Winthrop Van Ardsdale calling us. “Over here.” He was standing off to the side of the road with a small group of people. Misty and I joined them.

“You sure arranged a slam-bang finish for my home-coming party,” I told him.

“Have to maintain my reputation.“ He grinned. “But the party isn’t over, Steve, We're just shifting to a new location. A select group of your old friends, that is.”

“Oh? And just where are we going? And why? Don’t you think it's time to get home and catch some sleep?"

“Steve!” Misty was petulant. “You haven't turned into a square, have you?”

“Perish the thought. Just give me a pair of toothpicks to prop up my eyelids, and on to the festivities-—-wherever and whatever they may be.”

“We’re going to Voluptua’s place,” Winthrop told me. “Dwight's got some acid, and we’re going to take a trip.”

That brought me up short. “Acid” is the hip term for LSD, and “a trip” is what the acid-heads call the process of getting high on hallucinatory drugs. Like most people, I’d heard and read a lot of conflicting things about LSD, but I’d never tried it. Like some, I’d been intrigued at the idea of being able to release the creative forces inside me. I'd never been quite intrigued enough to do anything about it, but now it looked like I was going to be given the chance.

Holding onto Misty, I followed along with Winthrop and his group and we all piled into a car. I found myself in the back seat with Misty on my lap. Dwight Floyd Rank was wedged in beside me.

“You sure got out in the nick of time,” I observed to him. “I'd call that good architectural judgment."

“Just luck.” Rank sloughed it off.

“What made you leave?” I was pressing and having a hard time not sounding too suspicious.

“Well, I was girl-less,” he said easily. “And it was no party to hang around in that condition.”

“You sure picked a swinging exit,” I told him. “Just happened to spot you going down that ladder.”

“Well, I didn't want to have to go back through the house stumbling all over those pretzel bodies making out. It was simpler to leave that way.” There was silence for a moment, and when Rank spoke again he changed the subject. “You know, I sure was surprised to hear you were in town, Steve.”‘ There was something a little peculiar in the way he spoke, as if he was choosing his words very carefully.

“Oh? Why?" I answered.

“There was a rumor around that you’d died in Washington.” His voice was casual, but still with that undertone of caution.

“No kidding?” I laughed and tossed him the old Mark Twain line. “Well, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

“I guess they must have buried the wrong fellow.” Rank said it like a return quip, but I wondered.

My brain was whirling, making out a case. If Rank was one of the Russian agents I was seeking, then could it be possible that they’d discovered the truth about who was really dead and tipped him off? The thought opened a Pandora box. Rank was an architect. He’d built the house which had tumbled down the mountain. He knew all about the stresses and strains which might bring about such an accident. I remembered the flushing toilet. Was that the straw that broke the house’s camel-hump and sent it rolling? Had Rank known it and applied the toilet as a secret weapon to flush me down the drain? Or had it merely been coincidence? And was his quick exit just as the flush was building up to disaster also coincidence? Only a plumber might know for sure; I hadn’t the know-how, myself, to plumb these particular depths.

Also, there was another possibility. Putting aside the question mark as to just how much the catastrophe had been contrived, there might be another reason for Rank to want me out of the way if he was indeed one of the Russky spies. He just might be Ex-Lax, the one I was supposed to rub out, and he just might have gotten wind of the fact that he was up for elimination, Moscow-style. If so, he might have pegged me for my own double, decided I was out to knock him off, and made up his mind to beat me to the punch. Either way the pigeon feathers at the back of my neck began to have that clay-ey feeling.

Still, I figured, if I was going to be a pigeon, I might as well fly the whole route. Rank had brought up my “death” in the presence of the others, and as long as it had come out, I decided that now was a good time to circulate the cover-story Putnam and I had agreed upon back in Washington. If one or two of those present in the car were Commie agents, they’d assume I was my Russian double using his cover story anyway. So I let it come out.

“They sure did bury the wrong guy,” I said in response to Rank’s last remark. “See, I was involved in a little cloak-and-dagger stuff in Washington and the Commies had an agent they’d plasticked up to be a dead image of me. He got knocked off, at the time there were reasons why it was advantageous to let it seem that I was the corpse.”

“Ooh! That sounds exciting!” Misty was impressed. I never would have thought you'd be a spy, Stevie.”

“Well, I’m not any more. I just helped out a little for a very short time. It’s all over now.”

“Still, I just love the idea. All that intrigue and stuff. You’ve got to tell me all about it.” Her eyes were very large, very innocent, very naive. . .

‘I wondered. . . If she was one of them, if any of those in the car was one of them, then from the Russian angle, they’d think it was my double’s cover story. I guessed that was as far as I could go at the moment. I was saved from having to go further with the conversation by the fact that the car barked to a halt just then and we all piled out and into the lobby of the swanky apartment house where Voluptua lived.

It was quite a pad. The lobby was right out of the Versailles Palace in VistaVision and Technicolor. Even the walls of the elevator had fallen victim to a red velvet plague. And the apartment itself—Wow!

It was a penthouse with a terrace. The living room, roughly the size of Penn Station’s upper level, was glassed in on three sides. All three looked out over the Pacific. “I can watch the sunrise and sunset,” Voluptua explained. “And between times I watch the surfers on the beach."

“I didn't know you were a nature girl," I told her.

“With my build,” she answered, drawing herself up to her full six-foot-six and aiming her bosoms like twin missiles in position to be fired at the same time, “I just naturally have to appreciate Nature and be thankful to it."

“Well, honey, you do have a lot to be thankful for,” I granted.

We strolled to the center of the living room, where the group was settling down. Besides Voluptua and Rank, myself and Misty, there was Winthrop Van Ardsdale, Happy Daze, April Wilder and Louis Ching. Voluptua had the maid bring pitchers of martinis and then sent her to bed. She left a bowl of sugar cubes behind her. When she was gone, Rank produced a small vial filled with a clear liquid. Our “trip” was about to begin.

Each of us took a sugar cube. Rank passed among us and measured out a few drops of the LSD fluid with an eye-dropper. He deposited the drops on the first sugar cube and repeated the process with the others. The sugar absorbed the liquid quickly. Then we popped the cubes into our mouths. Some of us sucked on them; others crunched them between their teeth. The crunchers beat the suckers out by a good two or three minutes. Finally the last of the suckers swallowed the last grains of sugar and we all sat back to wait.

From what I knew of LSD, it figured to take about a half-hour before anybody would show any effects of the drug. By that time, the pupils of the eyes of the users would have dilated to about four times their normal size. In this respect, the effect of LSD is similar to the effect of narcotics ranging from marijuana through heroin and cocaine.

But LSD is not a narcotic. It’s a hallucinatory drug, which is something else again. With narcotics, there are predictable patterns, depending upon the stage of use. With LSD, each “trip” may by different, even for the same person. It's a consciousness-expanding agent. It truly releases a submerged portion of one’s mind and emotions. And the effect of that release depends not only upon the person, but upon the person at the specific time of the LSD experience.

Thus LSD may be aphrodisiac, or it may engender great disgust at the very thought of sex. It may release rage, or it may bring on an attack of timidity and fear in which even a kitten looms as ominous and overpowering. It may call forth great creativity—soaring poetry, bold artistic brushwork and color stemming from completely new optic perceptions, music which is truly other-worldly and heart-breakingly beautiful—or it may drown the creative impulse to self-horror-word-streams of guttural profanity, Rorschach splotches by the finger-painting child having a tantrum, cacophony on the keyboard. LSD works by the Law of Opposites, and its results tend to prove out the dichotomy within each of us, the love and hate, the male and female, the good and evil. The problem with its use is that there’s no way of telling in advance just which will be released by the drug. In that sense, it’s like life itself. Did your mother love you so much she could just eat you up-literally? Was your father a disciplinarian-for your own good—or was he a sadist? Did your marriage release love, or hate? Does not war release force of good as well as of evil? May there not be advantages as well as suffering in poverty? Is civilization dependent on squelching hostility? And is mental health reliant on releasing it? Does all unselfishness stem from selfish ego motives? If it’s better to give than to receive, then what is the giver taking? Must one decide? How does one decide? Decisions! Decisions! You pays your money and you takes your sugar cube - or whatever your particular hype happens to be. And if you’re lucky, the sugar coating hides that nasty taste in your gorge, the taste welling up from inside you.

Most people steer clear of the actual sugar-cube, the actual LSD in whatever form. The closest they may have come to it is in the dentist’s chair. There are still a few dentists left in the U.S. who use nitrous oxide—more commonly known as the laughing gas—for extractions. And nitrous oxide was the only hallucinatory drug in use in America before the advent of LSD and the craze which had college kids extracting the substance from morning glory and sunflower seeds. If you’ve ever had it used on you then the effects should give you some slight idea of how you might react to LSD itself.

As to how our particular group would react, the issue was still in question. We were still waiting for the drug to take effect. While we were waiting, Happy Daze was making it his business to entertain us.

Happy—as is the nature of the comic beast—was always “on.” He was “on” now. And that didn't just mean telling a joke, or a story, or an anecdote the way an ordinary person might. No, indeedy! It meant that Happy performed, created a setting and a mood, and set out to amuse with every fiber of his being.

He built his story slowly, elaborately, with many an ad lib and side-quip. He. painted the joke’s characters with broad strokes until he was sure they were easily identifiable to everybody present. His whole body entered into it. His face contorted and grimaced with each carefully worded sentence. His arms and legs moved to enhance each description. His body rippled and stretched and shrank and took on wings and fat as he needed it to give meaning to his words. His pauses were as important as the words, and his timing was professionally superb.

The story itself wasn't that good. Strictly a case of “you- had-to-be-there” to hear Happy tell it, if you know what I mean. The gag went something like this:

“It’s Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn, just before Christmas.” Happy hummed a few strains of Silent Night and his fingers trailed a light snowfall over the scene. “The Santa Clauses are up to their pots in people.” His stomach popped out—instant pregnancy—and he mouthed a silent ho-hoho. “Like it’s curb-to-curb elbows.” He turned himself into a crowd. “And there’s this little old Jewish lady with a shopping bag making her way through the throng.” An elbow ballet with geriatric overtones. “She stops at this butcher shop with hunks of raw meat hanging in the window.” Shirtsleeves up; dangling arm transformed into a loin of beef. “Also there’s a sign in this window: ‘SPECIAL.—LONG ISLAND DUCKLING—79¢ lb.’ Just the thing for Chanukah, the little old Jewish lady decides. So she goes into the shop, which is also crowded, wriggles her way up to the counter, finds a little space on the floor for the shopping bag, and rests her bazooms on the counter.” Happy’s shirt billowed out, turned into a large, matronly bosom and settled on an imaginary counter with a sigh of weariness. “She waits very patiently for her turn. Behind this counter is a large butcher with a face like ground-up hamburger. A very red face, very Irish. Harassed, but naturally jovial nevertheless. Aye, ‘tis a four-leaf clover of a face an’ as he copes with the Christmas rush, he displays a good-natured brogue to match. ‘Sure an’ ‘twill be a turkey you’ll not forget, Mrs. Maroni’ and ‘Was that six pounds of loin chops then, Mrs. Schultz?’ and ‘I’ll be grindin’ the hamburg meat just as fine as you’d be wantin’ it, Mrs. O’Neill.’ ” Now Happy was Barry Fitzgerald with bulk. “Finally the Irish butcher is ready to wait on the little old Jewish lady. ‘An’ what can I be doin’ for you, Mother?’ he asks. ‘I vant a Lung Island duckling,’ she tells him.” The dialogue was on now, and Happy slipped in and out of the roles with craftsmanlike ease. “ ‘A foine Long Island duckling it is for the lady then,’ says the Irish butcher, and he slips into the back where the freezer is to fetch it. He brings back this very plump fowl and lays it down on the counter in front of the little old Jewish lady. ‘Shall I be quarterin’ it for you now, or would you want to be puttin’ it in the pot the way it is, Mother?’ he asks politely. ‘Just a minim! Wait just a minim!’ The lady holds up her hand like she's stopping traffic." Happy demonstrated, and the light changed to red. Then it changed back to green as he lowered his hand and continued. “She takes off her gloves.” Happy did a delicate pantomime of a woman removing her gloves that started us giggling. He continued it, with fingers which seemed to be made of rubber, until the laughter reached a peak. Then, with perfect timing, he laid the imaginary gloves on the imaginary counter and turned his attention to the imaginary duck. “The lady lifts the tail feathers of the duck with one hand.” His hand hung in the air fastidiously. “And with the fingers of the other hand she reaches into the -- you should pardon the expression—aperture, until her hand has vanished up to the wrist.” Happy’s hand disappeared in his arm-sleeve. “Then she reaches still deeper.” The arm re-appeared, bare to the elbow and crooked to show how far inside the duck the lady was reaching. “And she wriggles her fingers—all five of them. Happy wiggled his fingers in a way that was both fastidious and lewd. It was also hilarious. “After which she takes her hand out, turns to the butcher and says ‘A duck, yes, but that is not a Lung Island duckling. I vant a Lung Island duckling!’ So the Irishman shrugs and mutters ‘Begorrah!’ under his breath and takes the duck back to the freezer and comes out with another one He puts it down on the counter in front of the lady. Again she raises the tail feathers and commits what might in some circles be considered an indignity on the dead duck.” Happy repeated the finger motions. Again it was hilarious. “Dot’s not a Lung Island duckling,’ she says very positive, very firm. ‘I vant a Lung Island duckling!’ So the Irishman, trying hard to stay smiling and pleasant, trots back to the freezer and comes back with another duck.” Now Happy did a quick pantomime of the woman reaching into the duck, wriggling her fingers and removing them. The speeded-up action had us roaring. Then he turned himself into a conductor leading a choral group and we all chanted “Dot’s not a Lung Island duckling!” Happy nodded approval. “Exactly. So the Irishman comes back with another. Same thing again. ‘Maybe from Minnesotta, or even Scotsland,’ says the little Jewish lady, ‘but from Lung Island never. I could tell. Dot’s not a Lung Island duck!’ So the Irishman comes back with still another. This time he slams it down on the counter and stabs at the wings with his finger. ‘Now look you here, Mother. See! Stamped on both of the wings, no less. LONG ISLAND! See it? This here is a Long Island duckling, or I’m not Kevin O’F'laherty from Bay Ridge!’ But the little old Jewish lady still holds up her hand. ‘Just a minim! We’ll see!” she insists. And—” Happy went through the familiar pantomime again. This time he added a new finger-twist that drew an added laugh. “ ‘So all right,’ the little old Jewish lady says finally. ‘Why didn’t you bring this one first place? Dot’s a Lung Island duckling. Wrap it up.’ So the Irish butcher wraps it and while he’s so occupied, the little lady, who’s really a very motherly type, stops scolding, he should know before she leaves she really likes him. ‘You said before you came from Bay Ridge?’ she says. ’Tis the truth,’ the Irishman says. ‘You don’t look like you come from Bay Ridge!’ she says like it’s a fact. It’s that old camel straw to the Irishman. He slams the duck down on the counter. He turns around. He bends over. ‘If you’re thinkin’ I’m lyin’,’ he roars, ‘then why don’t you see for yourself, lady! he yells, stretching his cheeks!” Happy was in the position he’d described now, bent over, his back to us, head between his legs, hands on buttocks, his comical face peering at us upside-down as he milked the last ripple of laughter. Finally he straightened up and looked at Rank with an injured air. “Hey, how come you’re not laughing, Dwight? Don’t you think it’s a gasser?"

“I don't like scatology,” Rank told him.

“What’s scatology?” April Wilder wanted to know.

“Scatology?” Happy explained succinctly. “Scatology’s a lot of crap!”

“Scatology is just another form of perversion,” Rank argued.

“Well, one man’s perversion is another man's supper.” Happy made a comic face.

Suddenly Voluptua was on her feet. She faced us with her ankles wide apart, her arms spread. Her eyes were large and glowing, her neck arched so that her face was turned upward like some wild female lupine about to bay at the moon. Her size, her femaleness, transformed her into Mother Earth about to embrace—or-was it envelop? — all the maleness of mankind. “The world," she announced in a strident tone, “is my bedpan!"

She was turned on, and the rest of us weren't far behind. Time telescoped in on me and the scene changed like the sudden shift of a kaleidoscope with all the pieces taking on new shapes and colors. I seemed to be seeing with some inner eye, in a way I'd never seen before. It was borne home to me in the instant-and the truth of it remains with me even now-that there are no words for perspective, no definitions for color, no accurate semantics for the optic experience. To say, for instance, that the red of Voluptua’s gown was the reddest red ever perceived is not to even begin to convey that redness. To remember, for example, that for the briefest of instants there seemed a whole philosophy of life in the curve of April Wilder’ s neck—caught by the light as it was for only a split second -- may seem an aberration in retrospect, and yet I know that retrospect is treachery, for the insight was valid and true. To recall such beauty in the movement by which Misty crossed her ankles as artists seek for all their lives and never find, to know that part of it was the flexing tendon of her ankle and part the muscle movement of one’s own eye and still the most important part the opening of the inner brain lens to the image—to recall this is to lose the memory; to relate it by speech, or by written word, is to destroy it utterly. And with it all is the knowledge that a part of the mind remained cool and aloof from one’s own experience and was the camera eye by which the experience of others was recorded.

This camera eye of my inner skull perceived Winthrop Van Ardsdale turning himself into a monster, for instance. The transformation was within his control, but purposeful. His lips curled back and his teeth became fangs. His hands arched into beast-claws; the fingers became talons. He let his shoulders fall forward so that his back seemed to sprout a hump. “Lugosi lives!” he announced, shuffling ominously toward April.

“Bela Lugosi went to pot!” Happy Daze chortled.

“A vamp for the vampire!” Winthrop ignored Happy and continued toward April. “Virgin blood, or I’ll go bats!”

“Have you ever got the wrong girl,” April murmured.

“I am a fly-by-night demon who flies by night!” Winthrop insisted. He grabbed April, pushed her down on the couch and started nibbling her neck.

“Help!” she screamed. “He's bitting me!”

“Leave her alone now, Dracula.” Happy dragged Winthrop away.

“You don’t understand. I must refill my jug from her jugular,” Winthrop protested.

“No night withdrawals from the blood bank,” Happy told him. “Stay away from her.”

Winthrop settled down in a corner of the room. He tucked his hands under his armpits and flapped his folded arms morosely like tired bat-wings. He remained that way a long time, sulking.

“YIII! Don't step on me!” My attention was distracted from Winthrop by Rank’s sudden scream. He was standing up in front of Louis Ching, who was a good foot shorter than he was, and cowering.

“What’s the matter?” Louis was bewildered.

“I’ve shrunk! Be careful!” Rank wailed. “Watch where you walk! You’ll crush me!” He put his hands over the top of his head as if to ward off the descending foot of some giant.

“You’re flipping,” Misty told him. “You’re the same size as you've always been."

“No I'm not. I'm only six inches tall. You have to be very careful, all of you.” He retreated to the corner opposite from the one where Winthrop was flapping his bat-wings and huddled there. “Stay away from me," he pleaded. “I'm fragile. I'm breakable. I'm tiny. Don’t squash me!"

“Oah! Goody! A doll!” April clapped her hands. “A-doll-a-doll-a-doll! A doll for me to play with!” She started for Rank.

“Get away from me!” he screamed.

“Leave him alone.” Misty intercepted April.

“It's my doll!” April pouted. “Why can't I play with him?”

“Not now, honey.” Misty soothed her in motherly fashion. “Play something else now.”

“What? There's nothing to play. I have nothing to do,” April whined.

“Skip rope," Misty suggested.

“All right.” April began skipping in rhythm with an imaginary rope. “One-two-three-O’Lairy. . . ."

“My flesh is a flower bed!” Voluptua stretched out on the floor. “Come pluck my roses!” She beckoned to each of the men in turn. “But beware of thorns!” she warned.

“I don’t even know if I'll have enough strength to fly back to Forest Lawn,” Winthrop muttered, still flapping battily.

“You’re really not six inches tall.” Now Mistywas trying to reason with Rank. “You just have an inferiority complex.”

“That’s all you know,” Rank insisted. “I have shrunk and I am too six inches tall. The same thing happened to a friend of mine and they tried to tell him it was an inferiority complex, and he believed them, and that was fatal. You’re not going to fool me that way.”

“What way? What are you talking about?"

“This friend, just like me, he shrank. And everybody told him it was all in his mind, so he went to a psychiatrist. This psychiatrist told him he had a Napoleonic complex about being small. He pointed out that some of the greatest men in the history of the world have been undersized. He convinced him there was nothing to be concerned about. And my friend left the psychiatrist’s office feeling quite large, maybe six feet tall, instead of the six inches which he really was. And that was his undoing.”

“What happened?”

“As he came out of the building, a cat pounced on him and ate him up.”

“That’ s ridiculous!”

“Maybe so. But you just keep that bat over there away from me.” Rank pointed at Winthrop with trembling fingers. “And you be careful, too!” he screamed at April.

“Sorry.” She skipped away from him. “A, my name is April, and I eat Apples . . .”

In my eyes she was a rainbow of color now, skipping across the room. I followed the rainbow to the pot of gold at its end and found Nirvana. Nirvana, at that moment, was Louis Ching.

The Chinese had divested himself of all of his clothing without fanfare. Now he was standing on his head in the center of the room, his arms outstretched, his body perfectly balanced, a small, upside-down smile of pure contentment on his face. I can’t say what the position meant in terms of his psychedelic experience, but in terms of mine, it represented the attainment of Nirvana. His naked body shimmered and assumed impossible forms before my eyes. It was as if his very atomic structure was revealed to me, as if I were glimpsing the harmony of the universe, the mystery revealed in all its utmost simplicity. I didn't have to count the angels dancing on his pinhead to know that the nature of the ectoplasm was benign, all-encompassing and omnipotent. At that moment, to me, Louis Ching was Nirvana.

But, as happens in real life, this particular phase of my “trip” was shattered by the intrusion of flesh on the spirit. The flesh belonged to Misty Milo. She too had been looking at Louis Ching, but her reaction had been different from mine. Far from finding spiritual tranquillity in his posture, Misty had been spurred by it to a renewal of passion. Never taking her eyes off his nudity, she had crossed the room to me, and now she plopped herself down on my lap, The way she writhed there, her hands jumping like nervous cats over the erogenous zones of my body, her breathing heavy, her lips burning as they brushed my neck and my ear, her eyes glittering with desire, there was no doubt of the erotic nature of the effect the LSD was having on her.

“He’s naked,” she murmured in my ear.

“I can see that.”

“He isn’t doing anything with it,” Misty said.

“Doing anything with what?"

“His nakedness. It’s going to waste. “We’re doing more with clothes on than he is naked.”

“You’re doing more,” I corrected her. “And I wish you’d cut it out. We’re not alone.”

“Come on, Stevie. Don't be coy.” She ran her fingers through my hair. “Hey, you’ ve got a bald spot,” she noticed.

“Not really. It’s just-” I started to explain, and then decided against it. How could I explain that the little circle of skin on top of my head was really a hiding place for coded messages created by a faggot Commie wig-maker? “Yeah. I guess it is a bald spot,” I granted.

“Stevie’s got a bald spot. Stevie’s got a bald spot,” Misty chanted.

April came skipping over and picked up the chant. “Stevie’s got a bald spot.”

In the dim recesses of my mind, I wondered what effect, if any, this revelation might have on future events. That bald spot might be very meaningful to Ex-Lax, or to Castor Oil. If either of them was out to get me—as I was them—then this would surely pinpoint my identity for them. And for all I knew, one of them might be the fiery girl perched on my lap, or the innocent-seeming sex-kitten skipping in front of me, or -

Or Happy Daze! He came over now to add his talents to the kidding about my bald spot. “Aha!” he said, peering down at it. “A veritable billiard ball emerging from its cocoon.”

“That's silly," Misty told him. “Billiard balls don't come out of cocoons. Anyway, it looks more like an egg sprouting out of his head.”

“Then he's an egghead," Happy decided. “And I am a mother hen; That's it. So I shall hatch him.” With which statement he started climbing on top of my head.

“Cut it out!” I scrambled out from under him.

“Why does a chicken cross the street?” Happy leveled a dramatic finger at me.

“Why?” It was Misty who answered him.

“To hold its pants up!” Happy chortled.

“You’re reverting,” I told him.

“That’ s what happens when I take a trip,” he admitted. “I go backward. Back to the basic values, know what I mean? Like—Ask me who was that lady I saw you with last night?"

“Who was that lady I saw you with last night?” Misty obliged.

“That was no lady. That was my brother in drag."

Happy was actually slapping his knee with glee. “Do you know what the world’s best can opener is?” he asked.

“I give up. What’ s the world’s best can opener?” Misty was still playing straight man.

“Ex-Lax.”

The punch-line fell into a general conversational void. It seemed to me that everybody looked up at it. Was it meant as a signal to me? I wondered. Or was it just accidental? If so, then I should be able to tell something from the reactions of the others. But outside of the sudden interest each of them seemed to show, I deduced nothing.

The lull was broken by Winthrop Van Ardsdale. He sprang up suddenly and flapped his arms vigorously. “I must get back to my crypt before I’m missed,” he announced. And he bounded across the room to the sliding French doors and flung them wide. He was out on the terrace before anybody realized what he intended.

“Grab him!” Happy yelled. “He thinks he can fly!”

There was a scramble after Winthrop. I found myself braking to a halt with the others as he leaped to the terrace ledge and poised eighteen stories above the ground. “You know,” he announced calmly, “scientifically speaking it’s an impossibility for a bat to fly. But we fly anyway.”

“Now just a minute, Winthrop.” I found myself edging towards him. “You don’t want to take off before you're sure the wind is right.”

“You don’t believe I can fly." There was pity for my skepticism in the way he shook his head.

“I didn’t say that. It’s just—"

“All scientific reasoning stems from a hypothesis," he pointed out. "Obviously the hypothesis relating to the ability of bats to fly is faulty. You'll grant that, won’t you? I mean, after all, bats do fly."

“Well, yes,” I admitted. “But then you're not really a bat, Winthrop.”

“I am so!” He was indignant. “I am a vampire bat. And I can prove it.”

“You can? How?” I challenged him. I figured I had to keep him talking to stop him from launching into flight.

“Pink toothbrush,” he said triumphantly. “My toothbrush is always pink. That proves I’m a vampire.”

“Not necessarily. Perhaps it’s only that your gums—”

“There is nothing wrong with my gums are as good as your gums any day! I was simply pointing out the evidence of my nightly vampire activities."

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean you can fly,” I said desperately.

“It doesn’t mean I can't. Now does it? I mean, you can't fly. But I can prove I can fly."

“How?”

“By flying, of course.”

For one brief, acid-soaked moment, the thought stuck in my mind that maybe he really could fly. If LSD could release mental powers, then why not physical ones? Maybe Winthrop had discovered the power of flight on his “trip.” It would be one hell of a put-down for me if he really did go winging off into the night.

I pushed the possibility out of my mind. My sense of plausibility may have been undermined, but I hadn’t given it up altogether. I returned to my original objective, which was to keep Winthrop from taking wing and diving off the eighteenth-story ledge. And I had a sudden idea of how I might talk him down from his perch.

“If you take off now,” I threatened, “do you know what I'm going to do, Winthrop?”

“What?” He looked interested.

“I'm going to search out your grave and drive a wooden stake through your heart.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“I would!”

“Your friend!”

“You're mixing up our roles,” I told him.

“It's your fault. You're deliberately trying to shake my sense of identity!"

“I mean it, Winthrop. Now come on down from there!"

He wavered for a moment, and there was an audible gasp from the others. “You’ll never find my gravel” he howled. His leg muscles tensed, and I realized he actually was about to jump. I dived for him and got an arm around his legs just as he dived off the ledge.

It was almost fatal for both of us. His momentum almost carried me over after him. Only quick action by the naked Louis Ching saved us. The Chinese slammed into me from the side, and I was able to wrench Winthrop back to the terrace. The three of us fell to the floor of the terrace together in a flailing mixup of arms and legs. As I started to sit up, something light and hairy went sailing past my nose.

“Rugski!” Winthrop was yelling. “Rugski, come backl”

“What’s he blathering about?” I grunted as I pulled myself up to my feet.

“Catch Rugski! Quickly, before he's lost! Grab Rugski!"

The others were scrambling around the terrace now. They were in confused pursuit of something I couldn't see. Finally Misty came up with it. “I’ve got Rugski!" she crowed. “Don’t worry, Winthrop. Here's Rugski!” She waved it around over her head, and I was able for the first time to identify the object of the case. Rugski was a hairpiece. And the skin in front of the receded hairline on Winthrop’s head testified to Rugski's nesting place. Now he grabbed it from Misty's hands and replaced it with a sigh of relief.

“I forgot about Rugski,” he confided. “I never would have tried to fly if I remembered. Too dangerous. Even on the ground I sometimes have trouble holding onto Rugski in a high wind. I’d never risk going batty if it meant flipping my wig!”

I gave up trying to make sense out of his last remark and concentrated on the implications of Winthrop’s wearing a hairpiece. Was it just coincidence? Or was it the tip-off to his involvement with the Russians? Was Rugski just a hairpiece, or was it, like my own bald spot, proof of participation in the Commie espionage setup?

The questions were still nagging at me when Voluptua mounted a low stool on the patio and claimed the group’s attention. “I am the Earth Mother!” When she'd said it before, it had merely been a statement. Now it was a proclamation. “All pay homage to the Earth Mother!” she demanded. “My haunches are the touchstone of life!” She pulled her evening gown up over her waist and turned slowly around so that her derriere might be revered. “Their rhythms are the rhythms of life!” Slowly her cheeks began to move in as remarkable a display of muscular control as I've ever seen. “Come, touch the source of life rhythm!” She beckoned to Louis Ching.

He approached her, reached out gingerly, and gently stroked the vibrating globes.

“Enter the portals of Earth Motherhood!” she commanded Dwight Floyd Rank.

He obeyed, his hand slipping into the cleft separating the imposing mounds of flesh.

“Come penetrate the secrets of the hidden fountainhead of life rhythm!" she ordered Winthrop.

He followed Rank’s example, his hand vanishing from sight as if swallowed up by the action of the oscillating musculature.

And then it was my turn.

“Plumb the depths!” Voluptua instructed me.

It was as if my hand was grabbed in a vise, a vise which might have looked like flesh but was really steel. Amazed, I watched my wrist itself vanish from sight. There was an uncomfortable feeling -- more psychic than physical—of the limb having been amputated. I just had to wriggle my fingers to be sure there was still some feeling left in them.

“OOOEEE!” Voluptua shrilled.

“Dot,” I decided, “is not a Lung Island duckling!”

CHAPTER FOUR

Somehow, some time after dawn, the “trip” ended. We all disembarked relatively unharmed and scattered to our various resting places. I went back to my hotel and slept the day away.

It was after dusk when I was awakened by a knock at the door to my room. Groggily I got out of bed and opened the door a crack. There was nobody there. Something tickled my bare feet. I looked down and made out a folded message which had evidently been slipped under the door. I picked it up, sat down on the edge of the bed, turned on the lamp and read the message. It was very brief:

“GET A HAIRCUT."

That’s all it said. “GET A HAIRCUT," neatly printed in capital letters on hotel stationery. What the hell?

I crossed over to the mirror over the bureau and took a look at myself. Well, a haircut wouldn't do any harm. My curly locks had been in worse shape many a time, but I suppose to a tonsorial stickler I would have seemed a likely candidate for a clipjob. The real question was the identity of, the anonymous note writer who took such trouble over the state of my pate.

I scratched the offending follicles and picked up the phone. “Give me the barber shop, please,” I told the operator. A sadistic crackling assailed my ears, and then I was connected. “This is Mr. Victor in room one-oh-nine,” I identified myself. “I’d like to come in for a trim. How late are you open?”

“We are open twenty-four hours a day, Mr. Victor.”

The voice sounded miffed that I might even presume to question the nature of the service. “I can give you an appointment in about an hour or so. Say seven-thirty. Will that be satisfactory?”

“Fine,” I soothed him. “I’ll see you then.” I hung up.

Such service might seem the hallmark of an efficient and exclusive hotel dedicated to catering to the whims of its customers. Once the Beverly Topless had enjoyed the reputation of being just such a hostelry. But that was before the name had been changed from “Casa Elite" to “Beverly Topless.”

The days of glory for the Casa Elite dated from the Mary Pickford era to the early 1960s. During those days, the hotel was known as an exclusive hideaway for the creme de la creme of Hollywood society. It was renowned for three things: the fame of its clientele; the pains it took to insure its patrons privacy and the discretion it spread like a blanket between them and the press and the public; and the luxurious nature of its facilities and its appointments.

The Casa Elite had been more than a hotel; it had been a walled city all to itself. Behind the walls were outlets for every conceivable form of recreation. The grounds encompassed a nine-hole golf course, the finest tennis courts in the Los Angeles area, riding stables with ample trails for horseback enthusiasts running through acres of wooded lands, a large outdoor swimming pool with cabana facilities, a separate building housing bowling alleys and ping-pong and billiard tables, three lawns set aside for croquet, and even cemented paths for bicycle riders. Inside the hotel itself there was a small movie theater which featured films not yet released to the general public, game rooms, and three cocktail lounges and two restaurants, one of them enjoying the reputation of offering the finest cuisine to be found in Southern California. There were also four ballrooms in which some of the by-now historic Hollywood parties had been held.

In addition, the Casa Elite had offered every conceivable service its patrons might desire. Its beauty salon was as well-known as Elizabeth Arden, albeit more high-priced. There were laundry and cleaning facilities on the premises. There was a house dentist, and many a Hollywood star had her teeth capped while staying at the Casa Elite. There was also a house doctor, of course, as well as a team of valets and lady dressers, a shoemaker who actually made shoes for some customers, chauffeurs with limousines, seamstresses, tailors and dressmaker, etc.

On the lower level of the hotel, beneath the lobby, there was a concourse lined with exclusive and very high-priced shops. It was not only possible –- it had actually happened -- that one could purchase a diamond bracelet for as high as $150,000 in the jewelry shop on the concourse. Next door was a high-fashion boutique which specialized in one-of-a-kind Paris originals at prices that could have paid the bar bill of a moderate drinker for a year or two. Across the way was a toy shop with offerings so mechanically elaborate that it had gained a reputation for offering gifts for the man who has everything, rather than for children. And there was also a made-to-order men’s clothing store, an antique shop with contents to rival San Simeon, a glass-blower to fashion crystal to one’s fancy, a lingerie store dedicated to turning the flabbiest figure into an object of appreciation, a massage parlor, a photographic studio, even a furniture store and a sports car showroom, and others, many others.

One could have been born and lived and died at the old Casa Elite and never have wanted for anything, not for necessities, not for luxuries, certainly not for service. In a physical sense, most of this had remained unchanged when the Casa Elite changed hands and its name was changed to “Beverly Topless.” All of the facilities still remained intact, but with the change in management there was a change in the quality of the service and, by now, a change in the very atmosphere of the hotel. Let me explain. It’s not true that the Beverly Topless was run by the Marx Brothers at their wildest. It only seemed that way. And, to some extent, the way it seemed was doubtless the result of the new policy symbolized by the intriguing new name.

The hotel had changed hands for the simple reason that its business had decreased. This was because of the way in which the movie business had changed. In the halcyon days of the Casa Elite, the great bulk of the world's film production came out of Hollywood. This peak production meant that there were always hordes of celebrities in the area. With the reputation it enjoyed, the Casa Elite was frequently in the position of having to turn away some very renowned people.

But with the change in the nature of movie production, fewer and fewer films were made in Hollywood. Location movies became the big thing. Stars traveled all over the world and remained in foreign locations for months and even years at a time. There was no longer any reason for them to make Hollywood their headquarters. And there was no longer any reason for the Casa Elite to be booked solid. The owners sold out on the premise that it was best to get their money out quickly before they actually found themselves operating at a loss.

The buyers thought they knew how to avoid that eventuality. From their point of view, they'd bought the hotel if at a bargain price. All they had to do to make their investment pay off was to figure a way to fill it with paying guests.

They faced the fact that they couldn’t make a go of it as an exclusive hostelry devoted to catering to celebrities. They needed the high-priced tourist trade to make it a success. And they needed a gimmick to attract that trade. It was the gimmick that resulted in changing the name of the hotel.

What they did was to replace their ordinary bellhops with bell-belles-girls, that is, beautiful, young girls. This was right around the time of the advent of topless niteries in the California metropolitan areas, and the hotel’s press agent came up with the ingenious idea of changing the name to “Beverly Topless” and costuming the bell-belles to suit the new designation. At first, like the niteries, the hotel hedged the pulchritude by having the bell-belles wear pasties so that although their bosoms were bare their nipples were chrome-tipped. But as the idea caught on and its value was proven by the increase in trade, the pasties were scrapped, and by now the tops bobbled down the hallways unencumbered by artificial tit-tips.

It was, of course, rank discrimination against lasses who might be under-endowed in the bosom department. But the peek-able staff operated at peak force, and, to my knowledge, there were no complaints filed with the FEPC. In other ways, however, the bare-bosom policy did effect the running of the hotel. With a combination of older, holdover employees disgruntled at what they considered a drop in prestige by the hostelry, and new, comely, but untrained employees dedicated to filling the eyes, but not necessarily the orders, efficiency at the Beverly Topless was at a low ebb and foul-ups so common that this now became a way of life for the guests. For instance -

During my stay at the Beverly Topless there was a day when I decided to take advantage of the twenty-four-hour laundry service so highly touted by the hotel brochure. I sent out a bunch of shirts and the next day -- twenty-four hours almost to the minute—one of the topless bell-belles delivered a neatly wrapped bundle of laundry to my room. I took a shower and unwrapped the bundle, intending to put on a clean shirt. Instead, I came up with a brassiere. It wasn’t even my size! The rest of the bundle consisted of similar frilly feminine garments. I returned the lingerie to the laundry. Another twenty-four hours passed. Another bundle was delivered to my room. I checked. Shirts. White shirts, just like mine. Only when I went to put one on, it turned out to be two sizes too small for me. The shirts looked just like mine, but they weren't mine. I guessed some poor, narrow-shouldered fellow guest might be going shirtless, so I returned this batch to the laundry too. Another twenty-four hours; another delivery. Shirts. My shirts. I checked the sizes. Yep, my shirts. I put one on. It fit. I buttoned it—but not all the way. The laundry had neatly amputated the button at the collar. I threw it aside and tried another shirt. I checked. The collar button was there. All the way down the front the buttons were there. But when I went to button the cuffs, I found the hotel had indeed claimed its due. No sleeve buttons on either side. The third shirt I tried had been ironed with an almost empty pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket, Stiff, shredded tobacco pressed into a white background provided a nifty brown target area right over the heart. It was just about then that I began to appreciate that there might be more than one reason for calling the place “Top-less.” The laundry had left me as bare above the-waist as the most bosomy of the hotel’s bell-belles.

Still, the laundry incident was only one of many. Others happened with more regularity. Every morning, for instance, I was awakened by the hotel’s cleaning staff marching in unison down the hall with their vacuum cleaners shouldered like so many M-ls. This parade took place at six in the ayem, and it gave the lie to the idea that the carpeting might mute the sound of footsteps. They were buoyant in approaching the morning’s work, raucous and loud in wind and limb, cheerily shouting greetings to one another, occasionally breaking into song. The really surprising thing is that the guests didn’t rise from their beds en masse and slaughter them en toto.

“And then there was the dropsy epidemic amongst the hotel's bar and restaurant personnel. Not once did I enter the cocktail lounge without having a drink poured over me. Sometimes the waiter would wait until I was seated and deposit it in my lap. Other, more impatient times, he would raise his tray high to clear my head as I entered the bar area and manage to spill some libation into my frantically ducking ear. I like my liquor straight, but I prefer to wear it inside, rather than out.

However, on one occasion, in the restaurant, I did manage revenge of a sort. The particular waiter involved was something of a novice in the hotel's game of “Get the Guests.” What I mean is that he overplayed it. He hovered at my right elbow, wine bottle at hand, and three times managed to splash me as he filled my glass. I was so used to it by then that by the time dessert arrived I had forgotten he was there. I went to turn around to answer a greeting from a fellow guest I knew casually, and in the process I neatly caught the waiter in the groin with my elbow. He doubled over, then straightened up, his face white, pain tearing his eyes, a Buckingham Palace guard poised at attention—on the brink of fainting. My elbow tingled with satisfaction, but not for long. A few moments later he had recovered enough to pour the coffee. He poured it right in my lap. The scalding effect was almost sensual in a Marquis De Sade sort of way.

Add to the defects in service the matter of the telephone. The hotel operators must have received their training at some school for inquisitors in ancient Spain. I would pick up the phone in my room to make a call and a cheery voice would say “Hel1o, Mr. Victor, it’s so nice to have you staying with us again. Are you enjoying your visit?”

“Yes,” I would reply. “I'd like three-one-four-se—”

“I'd hope we’ve been able to serve you to your satisfaction,” the operator would purr.

“Fine. Fine. I'd like three-one-fo—” ‘

“Have you taken advantage of our swimming pool? With this lovely weather, you really should, you know.”

“Yes, lovely.” My voice would take on a tinge of desperation. “Could you get me three-one—”

“And have you taken our Disneyland tour, Mr. Victor? You shouldn't miss it."

“I won't! I won’t! Now could I have three—"

“Oops! Sorry, Mr. Victor. I have an incoming call. It’s been awfully nice chatting with you.” And the line would go dead.

Or consider the hotel operator’s predilection for making sure I didn’t miss my plane even when I wasn’t catching a plane. “brrnggg!” The phone would wake me out of a sound sleep at seven in the morning. “Good morning, Mr. Bicker,” the syrupy voice would assail my ear. “Time to get up."

“This is Mr. Victor, not Mr. Bicker," I'd Object in sleep-fogged tones.

“Remember, you asked to be called so that you don’t miss your plane, Mr. Bicker.”

“I’m not making a plane. And my name isn't Bicker."

“Oh, you’ll make it. You have plenty of time. And we certainly all do hope that you’ve enjoyed your stay with us, Mr, Bicker.”

“I’ve enjoyed it so much that I'm going to stay on another few days,” I told her. “And I’d like to go back to sleep now."

“Oh, we’re awfully sorry, Mr. Bicker. But your room has been reserved by another party. I'm afraid you’ll have to give it up."

“Look,” I said heatedly. “I can’t give it up if I’m not Mr. Bicker. And I’m not Mr. Bicker. So if you want his room, why don’t you wake him up so he can make his plane and let me go back to sleep?” I slammed the phone back on its cradle.

Twenty minutes later it rang and woke me again. “Hello, Mr. Victor, this is the manager. I understand from our operator that you’d like to extend your reservation. You should really have called me direct about that, you know.”

“I don’t want to extend my reservation!” I shouted.

“Oh, then you'll be leaving this morning?”

“No!” The shout became a scream. “I will not be leaving this morning!”

“No? But then you’ll miss your plane, won't you?”

What I said at this point is unprintable. Indeed, it wouldn’t be printable in the Longshoremans’ Profanity Gazette. Suffice it to say that it summed up my feelings to the manager that the Beverly Topless was an intrinsically hostile hostel and that I, for one, reciprocated the hostility in full.

If I seem to have gone into the hotel's hostility at some lengths, it’s because during many of the events which ensued after my visit to the barber shop, there was always the thought that the causes might have been typical hotel goof-ups, rather than the insidious ones to which my mind leaped. However, I’m getting ahead of myself. Right now, it was time to go and get my haircut.

The haircut was typical of the Beverly Topless. The barber nicked my neck-nape, dribbled hair down the inside of my shirt, and left me with lopsided sideburns. But his manner was lofty enough to intimidate me, and there was the distraction of the topless manicurist to placate me as well. The fact that she castrated my cuticles didn’t really detract from her bosomy charms, either. All in all, the pros and cons of a haircut at the Topless balanced out, with the fringe benefits offsetting the frayed results.

Also, there was a bonus. The barber patched up my bald spot with some of my very own excess hair. The only trouble was that when I got back to my room, I had to remove the patch again, because underneath it the barber had inserted a tiny slip of paper with a message on it. At least I deduced it was a message. It was Greek to me. It probably would have been Greek to a Greek, for that matter. Like the one I’d received in Washington, this gummy missive was indecipherable to me.

I put in a call to Putnam. Nothing could be done over the phone, he told me. So he arranged to have the message picked up by a courier who would fly it to Washington where it could be decoded. As soon as there were any results, Putnam promised to call me back.

The courier came and went within the hour. It Was getting late-ish by then, and I still hadn’t had any dinner. I was hungry, but not in the mood for a lavish meal. So I went into the hotel's Lancer Lounge—known familiarly among the guests as the “Cancer Lounge”--intending to have a drink and a sandwich.

As I entered, I spotted Misty Milo sitting alone in a dimly lit booth. She called out a greeting. I opened my mouth to answer and a large green olive bypassed my craw to lodge in my windpipe. The bartender had been struggling to open a bottle of them, and he'd succeeded.

I wasn’t the only victim. Various guests scattered around the room were pelted with olives and spattered with oil. For the most part they ignored the assault. Such incidents were quite simple a part of life at the Beverly Topless. While a few of the ladies plucked olives from their decolletage and some of the gents slyly dabbed at the oil spots on their partners’ bosoms, I stood rooted to the spot, choking and turning purple. A passing waiter pounded my back without breaking stride, baptized me with some particularly sticky anisette, and kept his nose pointed at the ceiling as he continued on his way. I swallowed the olive in one gulp, pit and all, not really properly grateful for the gratis sustenance, I suppose, and went to join Misty.

“My favorite bull, come home to graze,” she greeted me. She’d had a few, and was evidently past being subtle. “I feel more like a steer this morning -- I mean night," I told her. “That was a pretty wild scene up at Voluptua’s.”

“It could have been a lot, wilder." She managed a leer. “If we'd ditched those loonies it would have been.”

“Until I get some nourishment in me, I'm neuter,” I told her, removing her hot hand from my thigh. “I need libation and calories to renew my lust for life.”

“Mmm. Then let’s get you fed and whiskeyed. But don’t lose sight of the lust." Her long red fingernails plowed some furrows in the back of my neck.

“Waiter!” She grabbed the tail of the jacket of a passing waiter.

He swiveled around. The bottle of tonic on the tray he was carrying teetered and tipped over. Quinine water sloshed down my neck, mixing with the anisette. That’s no combination for a drinking man. “Club sandwich and Early Times on the rocks. Make it a double,” I instructed him, just to be sure there’d be something left for me after the inevitable spillage. “And do it again to the lady.”

“You too, darling,” Misty murmured, her fingers between the buttons of my shirt now and playing with the hair on my chest. “And make it a triple.”

“Behave!” I removed her hand and held onto it. “We're in a public place.”

“It’s dark enough to be public.”

“That's exterior,” I corrected her. “And never mind getting specific.”

“You’ve been giving me naughty dreams, Stevie.” She blew in my ear.

The waiter was back at my elbow with the Early Times. I rescued the bourbon before he could spill it all over Misty’s hand and my lap, which were just then enjoying an intimate proximity. I sipped it appreciatively, feeling the smooth, Kentucky-flavored warmth spreading through my body. I still wasn’t quite as warm as Misty, but I was getting there. “Well, maybe we can‘ make your dreams come true,” I found myself murmuring back.

“Ooh!” She reached over and took my hand and pressed it to her breast. She wasn't wearing anything under the silk cocktail dress. Her breast was warm and soft, and I could feel her quick heartbeat.

In order to maintain the contact, my arm was stretched none too subtly across the table. We were seated side by side, but Misty had chosen to honor the hand farthest from her. It figured that the waiter delivering my sandwich chose to put the plate down right on top of my arm. Naturally the sandwich rolled off the plate. A mixture of toast, bacon, lettuce, tomato, turkey and Russian dressing cascaded into Misty’s lap.

It made for an interesting cleanup job. I disdained the waiter’s help and took it on myself. Misty didn’t help. She just reacted.

“Just let me snag this piece of bacon,” I said, peering closely at the disaster area.

“Ahh, yes!” She wriggled and managed to trap my hand along with the elusive bacon.

“Now cut that out, Misty. People are looking at us!” I rubbed vigorously with my napkin at a splotch of Russian dressing.

“I can't help it!” Her voice was unexpectedly loud. “That’s the spot!”

“I'm trying to get it out!”

“That's not what I meant!” She was half rising from her seat.

“Excuse me, sir.” The waiter was bending over me and watching with great interest. “Would you and the lady be wanting another drink now?"

“Ready for another, Misty?”

“I’m ready! I'm ready! I've never been readier!”

“I mean a drink,” I explained desperately. “'I'he waiter wants to know if we want another round.”

She didn’t answer. Only her eyes were moving now, darting wildly toward the ceiling.

“Yes,” I told the waiter. “Bring us another round."

By the time he returned, I'd finished with removing the debris from Misty’s dress and she’d calmed down a little —not much, but a little. I, however, was not calm. I'd forgotten that I was hungry—for food, that is. I drained off my second Early Times double at a gulp. It was disrespectful to good bourbon, but I didn’t care. Sipping for the smoky taste and savoring it might be all very well, but it was another effect I needed at the moment.

I got it. The background, the waiters, the other people in the Cancer Lounge receded into the background. Misty’s mammarian endowments loomed large, and the ovarian glint in her eye found its hidden response nestling too briefly in her hand under the tablecloth.

Then her arms came around my neck and she kissed me. I kissed back. Enthusiastically. The aromas of Early Times and vodka martinis mingled, and her silk-covered breasts were like twin blowtorches searing away the material pressed between us.

The kiss over, she grasped me again. The target wasn't hard to find. Her other hand grabbed one of mine and guided it up the length of nylon sheathed legs to bare, quivering thigh-flesh. Her thighs clenched and held it there. She leaned on me heavily, pushing me off balance so that I was bending backward, half out of the booth. Under the impetus of her passion—was it passion? was it really? later I would wonder-my head lolled backwards, my eyes stared straight up, and my neck stretched out long and white, caught in a beam of light.

There was a waiter standing at his station almost directly over me. My eyes focussed on him upside-down; my brain saw him only peripherally. I was trying to get my balance back by pushing against Misty. Her body was soft and warm and seemingly pliable, but I couldn’t budge it an inch. I was forced over just a bit farther, still mainly conscious of the erotic way she was grinding against me. And that's when the waiter dropped the knife!

It was a sharp knife, the kind used for carving meat. Yes, sharp, both blade and point. It was the point that zoomed down at my jugular with more force than it seemed possible could have come from simply dropping the knife. Still, there was no hand holding the hilt; it wasn't a stabbing movement. It was more as if somebody had pushed it at me the way a knife-thrower throws a knife, only from above rather than on a level. All of which I reconstructed later, and perhaps not too accurately. On the instant, there was only my exposed throat and the sharp knife point zeroing in on it.

If I’m ever killed, it won’t be by getting it in the neck. My reflex muscles there are just too quick. Maybe it's because I spent so many years mastering karate. Anyway, in this instance, I yanked my neck to the side hard and fast. The blade of the knife sliced through the side of my collar, just missing the flesh where my shoulder and neck join. My quick movement had slammed my head into Misty’s bosom quite hard.

“Oouch!” She recovered quickly. “Impetuous boy!” She clutched me so hard I was momentarily enveloped between her substantial breasts.

Looking sideways, I could see the knife still quivering in the floor where it had come to rest with its point embedded. The waiter had vanished. Nobody else seemed to have noticed my narrow escape. Even Misty seemed unaware of it.

“Your shirt is ripped, lover,” she cooed, nuzzling my neck.

But was she unaware? Or had she deliberately maneuvered me into position for the dropping of the cutthroat cutlery? Then again, maybe the whole thing was just another one of those flubs that were always being pulled at the Beverly Topless. Maybe it had really been an accident. Still, if it had been deliberate—with or without Misty in on it -- it certainly could have passed as another accident, albeit a fatal one. Sorry, but these things happen in the best-run hotels! I could just hear the manager explaining it away. I could just see the guests shrugging it off, as they carted my neck-lopped cadaver out the back way. And that raised the most important question of all once again. Who was out to kill me? And why?

It was only the first of a whole series of incidents that would raise that question. It would be a while before I had even a partial answer. Meanwhile, there was Misty . . .

“Lets go to my room.” She was positively panting by now.

My ardor had been somewhat dampened-—understandably, I think -- but she was doing a pretty good job of rekindling it, what with her hands busy under the table and her breasts giving me a facial massage. She didn’t really have to coax me. I kissed her to signify my agreement. We unwound ourselves from each other and got to our feet. I stooped over and yanked the knife out of the hardwood floor. On the way out I handed it to the maitre d’.

“Give this back to the waiter who dropped it,” I told him.

“Surely not one of our waiters, sir. It must have been a guest.”

“Then he must have been on his way to a masquerade, because he was wearing a waiter’s jacket.”

“Are you sure, sir? Did you see him drop it?”

‘Yes. I had a worm’s-eye view. You see, it just happened to slip out of his fingers right over my throat.” I showed him my slashed collar.

“I can’t understand that, sir. Our personnel is specially trained and drilled never to drop anything.”

There was a crash of dishes as a waiter’s tray went skidding across the floor. “Are they, now?" I asked sweetly.

He never blinked an eyelash. “Yes sir, they are!” he assured me emphatically.

“Are you coming, lover?” Misty was waiting impatiently, tapping her foot.

Two tourist types were standing behind her ogling the derriere movement caused by the foot-tapping. Neither could see her face. “That’s Milos!" one said positively.

“Couldn’t be anybody else,” the other agreed.

Such is fame! I followed the hallmark of identification down the corridor to Misty’s room. She closed the door and locked it behind us. Then she switched on the light and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror.

“Oh! I’m a mess!” she reacted, seeing the food stains on her dress. “I’ll never be able to wear this again.” Saying which, she pulled a zipper and the offending gown fell away from her body and crumpled to the floor.

I'd known she wasn't wearing a bra. Now I saw that she wasn’t wearing panties either. She stood before me naked except for a flimsy garter belt and sheer silk stockings. The sight left no doubt in my mind as to why Misty was the number one erotic dream girl to millions of movie-going males. I’m afraid I gulped.

“I feel like I smell of bacon and Russian dressing,” she sniffed.

What she really smelled of was aphrodisia and some kind of orchid perfume. I told her so.

“No. I just have to take a shower."

“I’ll wait.” Who wouldn't have?

“Take it with me, Stevie.” She was in front of me now, pulling off my jacket and managing to caress the length of my body at the same time.

“I just took a shower.” My protest was weak.

“I’ll scrub your back.” She had my shirt off now, and her fingers were fumbling at my belt.

“You can do better than that.” I stepped out of my pants and kicked off my shoes.

“Can I ever!” Her nails dug into my naked buttocks as she pulled me toward the bathroom. Behind us there was a trail of clothing.

It was a stall shower, a little crowded, interestingly crowded with Misty Milo flesh pressing against me no matter which way I turned. Not that I had cause for complaint.

She turned on the water and regulated it to a comfortably warm spray. Then she did indeed soap my back and scrub it—with one hand. The other hand was reaching around me strategically, moving to the rhythm of a quite different drummer. After a while I returned the courtesy. I soaped her back thoroughly, working my way down her spine until I’d coated her famous derriere with thick lather.

I turned Misty around and soaped her shoulders and breasts. All the while she was holding onto me with both fists, moving the lower portion of her body so that there was a light, teasing contact. I became playful, drawing designs in the suds on her breasts, finally covering them completely except for the ruby tips. The effect was exciting, the two quivering nipples peeping out invitingly from the white froth. She almost lost her grip on me for a moment. I soaped her hips and belly then, working up a froth and using the palms of my hands, my fingers tingling at the contact with the velvet skin, the caresses inspiring her to move her hips with a slow, grinding motion that established the contact of our lower bodies firmly, one step farther than the tenuous teasing touch of a moment or two ago.

We kissed. Her body was soapy and slippery and warm. Her lips were moist, her teeth sharp, her tongue a darting flame. The soap slipped from my fingers and slithered down the length of Misty’s body. She turned around and bent over to pick it up, her legs wide-spaced for balance. The target, framed in soapsuds, was too tempting to resist. My hands closed over her breasts from behind and I lunged home.

“Ahhhh!” It was a long, drawn-out shudder that made her whole body quiver. She braced her hands against the wall of the stall shower and peered at me over her shoulder. Her eyes smoldered and her hips rotated wildly now. I braced my own feet, and our bodies worked in rhythm like oiled pistons, the length of our soapy skins slipping and sliding and yet managing to cling together. After a moment she cried out, then pushed me away and quickly turned around, her back arched, her legs next to mine and her feet braced against the wall opposite her. I slid my hands under her and once again lunged straight to the target. She leaped a little as I struck home, and now her feet weren’t on the shower floor any more; her legs were around my hips, ankles locked, facing me and pounding hard, on my thighs, slamming down for the thrill of maximum contact, her eyes closed, her hair flowing over me, keening like a banshee.

And now I was caught up in the mounting ecstasy of our love-making. The tiles of the shower blurred before my eyes and my teeth were buried in her neck. My nails dug into her buttocks, urging her to harder and faster and harder and faster movements. It was going to be now! But --

Suddenly Misty relinquished her perch and bounced to her feet. “The telephone,” she said. “It’s ringing.”

“I don't hear anything!” My voice ached with the suddenness of my frustration.

“I do. It’s the phone, darling. I’m sorry. But it could be important. I’m expecting my agent to call. I won't be a minute.” And she stepped out of the stall shower, soapsuds and all.

As she did so, her elbow must have hit one of the faucets. Still stunned by her sudden exit, it was a moment or so before I noticed. But when I did, I noticed with a vengeance. Scalding hot water came pouring down on me!

Instinctively, I tried to leap out of the shower. But the door was jammed. I couldn’t budge it. Frantically, I reached for the cold water faucet. There was just a rod sticking out of the wall. The handle had come off and was on the floor of the shower. I was really being scalded now. I reached down hastily, retrieved the handle and tried to fit it on the rod. I couldn’t make it turn. A screw or something was missing. I grabbed for the hot water faucet to turn it off. The handle came off in my hand. I couldn’t get that one back on, either. The water seemed to get hotter, much hotter. The stall shower was thick with steam now. I began to appreciate what a lobster must feel; I knew I’d never order live broiled lobster again!

I put my shoulder against the thick glass door. No use. I still couldn’t budge it. The cascade of water felt as if it was boiling now; my skin felt like it was peeling off, and the layers of flesh underneath along with it. My feet . . . With horror, I looked down and saw that the drain had become stopped up. The water was rising in the stall. It was over my ankles already. If I wasn’t boiled alive, I'd soon drown!

“Misty!” I yelled as loud as I could. “Help!”

No sign of an answer. I thought I could smell the stench of my own flesh burning. Steamed and scalded, and all the time the water rising. At my knees now! And the heat excruciating! I realized it was only a matter of a moment or two before I succumbed to the scalding steam. Already my lungs were raw with the effort to breathe.

I looked around the small area wildly for something with which to break the glass door. It was too thick to break with my hands, or body. At first I saw nothing; Then my panic gave way to desperate inspiration.

I reached up to the source of the scalding water. I could feel blisters sprouting on my hands as I managed to unscrew and then wrench the shower spray-head from the lead-in pipe. The spray of steam and water changed to a heavy torrent beating at my back as I hammered at the glass door with the shower-head. Finally it cracked. Another few blows—where I got the strength, I’ll never know —and the glass began to splinter and shatter. Finally there was a hole big enough for me to reach through the door and release the jammed catch from the other side. I leaped from the torture-chamber and sprawled on the bathroom floor, hugging the cool tiles, stretching out and turning this way and that so I could feel their blessed coolness on the whole length of my burned, agonized body.

II stayed on the floor a long time. Finally I managed to drag myself to my feet. I opened Misty’s medicine cabinet. I still had a little luck left. There was an unopened jar of Noxzema among the clutter on the shelves. I opened it and spread it over my skin liberally. I used up the entire bottle.

Only then did I go into the other room in search of Misty. She wasn’t there. But there was a note propped up on the bureau: “Darling, I'm desolate. My agent on the phone . . . A new contract . . . Very important . . . Maybe a million involved . . . Shouldn’t be long . . . Please wait . . . Finish your shower . . . Take a nap . . . I’ll wake you when I come in and we'll pick up where we left off” It was signed “Love, Misty”.

So here it was again. Was it just the usual lousy plumbing and jammed door one came to expect at the Beverly Topless? Or had Misty set me up for the scalding? If she had, then why? Why should she want to kill me? Why should anybody want to kill me? A fleeting and creepy thought of cannibals invading Beverly Hills crossed my mind. I dismissed it and started to dress.

I had no intention of “picking up where we left off.” I wasn’t even sure there was enough skin left on my bones to pick. In any case, my passion had been burned out of me for this night at least. Besides, there was something I wanted to check.

When I’d finished working my clothes on over my parboiled body, I left Misty’s room and went down the corridor and through the lobby to check it. An aromatic cloud of Noxzema preceded and trailed after me. I ignored the sniffs in my wake and went out the front entrance of the hotel and up to one of the topless parking attendants standing with the doorman there.

“Miss Milo?" I asked. “Has she left the hotel?” I didn't know what the answer might prove, but it seemed to be one of the pieces I’d eventually have to fit into the jigsaw puzzle if I was going to figure out Misty’s part in what had been happening.

“Search me.” The topless attendant chucked my chin, her bosom bobbling agreeably. “She usually parks in Section G-3. Why don’t you ask the attendant there? She’ll know if Miss Milo’s car was brought around.” She pointed a finger and a breast, and I set out in the indicated direction.

It didn't take me long to find the topless titian in charge of Parking Field C-3. I repeated my question to her. Yes, she replied, Miss Milo had taken her car about twenty minutes ago and said she’d be right back. No, the attendant had no idea where she’d gone, or even which way she’d headed when she pulled out of the parking field.

Crossing back through the parking fields, I halted and stood to one side as a particularly bosomy topless blonde directed a Jag that was backing out of a space. The Jag roared backward and suddenly changed direction, the driver ignoring the frantically bobbing flashlight beam of the attendant guiding him. I was just thinking what a maniac the driver must be when the Jag, in reverse, backed straight toward me at top speed.

I scrambled to get out of the way. The Jag changed direction as if it was actually chasing me. I reversed my own direction and managed to dart in front of the car as it backed past me. Suddenly the driver shifted to a forward gear and shot straight for me, all cylinders roaring. I dived frantically and rolled under a parked Caddy. Just in the nick of time. One of the Jag’s front fenders brushed the seat of my retreating pants as I leaped.

The sports car braked to a halt, and the topless attendant went running up to it. Cautiously, I crawled out from under the Caddy and edged toward the Jag, ready to leap for cover at the slightest sign of its roaring into motion again. But it didn't and a moment later I was beside the topless blonde looking through the window of the Jag at the driver. My jaw dropped open to find Poversia’s own Prince Juv Satir smiling pleasantly back at me. Finally I found my tongue.

“That is one hell of a way to bug a friend, Your Highness," I told him.

“Hello, Steve. Was that you doing the hurdles back there? I didn’t know.”

“Ignorance of the prey is no excuse, Your Royal Highness,” I insisted.

“You are quite right, of course. Truth is I did not see you until you were jumping under that car. I was watching this young lady. Of course, I should have been watching her signals. But I'm afraid my attention was distracted by her magnificent bobbies."

“You mean boobies.” I corrected him.

“Ah, yes. I never can quite seem to master your slang, no matter how much time I spend here. Anyway, my eyes were glued to them, and so I missed her signals, I'm afraid.”

“Perhaps you didn't, Your Royal Highness,” the blonde murmured. She was obviously a girl whose door was a well-oiled swinging gate when opportunity came a knockin'.

“Quite so.” The Prince beamed at her. “Again, my apologies, Steve." It was almost a royal dismissal. He turned his attention back to the blonde. A slight wind had come up, and she was hugging herself and shivering.

“Are you chilly, my dear?” he purred,

“I’m all goose-pimply,” she replied.

“Then perhaps you’d better get in here and warm up.”

He opened the car door for her. “We can’t have icicles forming and weighting down your assets.”

“Oh, Your Royal Highness,” the blonde giggled “You’re a killer!”

Was he? I wondered as I headed back for the hotel entrance. Was he a killer? Had he been trying to deliberately run me down? Or was it just another one of those incidents that were part of the general foul-up atmosphere of the Beverly Topless?

I went back to my room and peeled off my clothes, removing a few strips of blistered skin with them. I turned off the light, drew the heavy drapes to darken the room, and climbed into bed with a weary sigh. I pondered the potentials of the Prince and Misty as murderers and the reasons why they might be for a while, and then I was asleep.

It was mid-morning when I awoke, although the room was still dark. Two things had yanked me from the arms of Morpheus: someone was knocking loudly at the door to my room, and the telephone was ringing.

I grabbed for the phone first. It was Putnam. “Victor, we've decoded the message," he began. “It’s a -”

“Just a minute.” I stopped him. But I still had the phone to my ear as I switched on the light and opened the door.

A topless bell-belle stood there with the hotel smile on her face. She was holding a tray balanced on the wide-spread fingers of her left hand. Her right arm was bent behind her back in a sort of Napoleonic pose. Lying on the tray was a package of Ex-Lax.

“It’s a warning from Moscow.” Putnam’s voice was cracking in my ear. “It’ s a warning for Stevkovsky to--"

“I didn't order anything,” I told the bare-bosomed redhead smiling fixedly at me from under her little cap. “There must be some mistake.”

“. . . beware of Ex-Lax." Putnam was still talking. “He knows you've been sent to kill him. And he's out to kill you first!”

“No mistake.” The redhead’s hand came out from behind her. It was holding a large pistol.

“Do you hear me, Victor? Ex-Lax is out to kill you! Are you listening? Do you read me?”

“Loud and clear!” I said into the mouthpiece.

“Be careful!”

“Too late!”

And it was too late! The bare-busted bell-belle’s finger was already squeezing the trigger!

CHAPTER FIVE

I NEVER TAKE laxatives. What I mean is, I'm a regular fellow. I mention this because I really should have been suspicious right away when I saw that it was Ex-Lax that the topless redhead was delivering to my room. I wasn’t, because an unrequested physic was just the sort of thing to be expected at the Beverly Topless. It wouldn’t really have surprised me if one of the staff had slipped into my room and given me a enema in my sleep.

The gun, however, lent the mild laxative a certain aura of direness. And the sight of the finger tightening on the trigger was surely alarming enough to have instantaneously fulfilled the functional aim of the purgative. Fortunately, it was my biceps rather than my sphincter which reacted.

I flung the telephone at her gun-hand, and it connected just in time to deflect the bullet from its target—meaning me. Putnam’s voice was still sputtering from the earpiece as I followed up the phone with a tackle that caught the bare-topped gunslinger around the waist. She dropped the tray on my head and swung for my left ear with the gun. I avoided it by jolting upward and slamming my left ear under her ample right breast. Then I landed a short karate chop on the wrist of the hand swinging the gun, and the weapon went flying across the room. Security may be a blanket to some, but to me, at that moment, security was seeing that the pistol was out of her reach. I took out insurance on that security with an uppercut to the jaw that folded her up neatly and dropped her on the floor unconscious.

I looked down at her. She was out, all right. I retrieved the telephone.

“Are you drunk, Victor?” Putnam's voice was cold and angry.

Isn't it nice when your superior has faith in you? I reflected wryly. “No. This girl--” I started to explain.

“A girl! I might have known! Damn it, Victor, you’re not there to play! This is serious business!"

Man, how I hate authority figures! “She tried to ki-” I continued trying to get in my explanation.

“Never mind that!” His clipped tone looped off my vocal chords’ manhood. “I've been trying to tell you that the message you got was from Moscow to warn you that Ex-Lax is aware of what’s up and will probably try to kill you. Forget the girls! Your life is in danger!"

“Well, it’s a relief to know that,” I told him sarcastically. “I was beginning to worry that I was accident prone.”

“If you’d spend more time vertical and less prone,” he shot back, “you might get a lot further with your assignment!"

“Ohh!” The would-be murderess was coming to.

“Oww!” She groaned again and sat up, her fingers gingerly investigating her jaw.

I covered the phone. “Any broken bones, honey?” I asked her.

“What's going on now?” Putnam wanted to know.

“Nothing.” I decided against any further tries at explaining.

“I don’t think so,’ the redhead answered, continuing to probe her chin.

“Victor! I heard a woman’s voice!” Putnam was indignant.

“Well, yes,” I admitted. “You see—"

“Get her out of there!” he ordered. “Immediately! You don’t have time to play around now. Besides, you must realize that you can’t be sure you can trust her!"

“Oh, I realize that all right," I assured him. “I really do.”

“I wonder! You have this propensity for being easily taken in by females, Victor. It’s your major shortcoming as an agent. If it weren’t for your special value to us, I would never tolerate it! Now get that woman out of your room.”

“I don’t think I should do that,” I differed. “She may -"

The redhead was on her feet now, still looking rocky. I’d broken off my sentence to shake my fist at her by way of warning her to stay away from the gun lying on the floor across the room. She nodded understanding and backed against the wall to prove her passivity.

“She may be able to tell us who Ex-Lax—” I resumed what I was saying to Putnam only to find myself forced to break it off again.

What happened happened quickly, but it reconstructs this way. The redhead backed against the wall and rub-bed against it as if she had an itchy shoulder blade. The movement set one of her pointy naked breasts rotating, and my eyes were drawn to it for an instant. Thus distracted, I didn’t see what she was really up to until it was too late. Her shoulder blade located the light switch on the wall, tripped it, and the room was plunged into darkness. A second later the light from the hall hit me in the eyes as she opened the door, and then she was gone, running down the hallway before I could stop her. I did drop the phone, make a dive and then chase her, but she went around a corner and by the time I turned it she was nowhere to be seen. I went back to the room and picked up the phone again.

“Did you get rid of that woman?” Putnam demanded.

“Yes,” I told him wearily. “I got rid of her.”

“Then let’s get down to work there, Victor. This isn’t a vacation you’re on, you know,” he reprimanded me crisply. “Now, there's another part of the message from Moscow. It instructs you not to try to contact Caster Oil until Ex-Lax has been eliminated."

“That’s good. Since I have no idea who Caster Oil is, anyway."

“It's your job to find that out, Victor. Remember?”

“I remember. Does the message say if Castor Oil will contact me?”

“It doesn't say. But I imagine that will happen once you carry out Moscow's instructions. Perhaps before. There's no way of telling. Anyway, let's get some results, Victor. I'll be in touch in a few days, and I expect you to come up with something besides another girl in your room." The receiver clicked in my ear as he hung up.

I got dressed and went down to see the hotel’s bare-busted bell-belle captain-ess—or whatever the hell you call her. As I'd expected, there was no one on the staff fitting the description of the redhead who’d tried to shoot me. As I recrossed the lobby after making the inquiry, the desk clerk hailed me.

“This came by messenger for you, Mr. Victor.” He reached into my mail slot, took out a sealed envelope, and handed it to me.

I found a secluded chair in the lobby and opened the envelope. There was a typewritten slip of paper inside. “EROS THEATER, TWO P.M., LEFT BALCONY, SECOND ROW FROM BACK,” it said. And it was signed “CASTOR OIL.”

Whaddaya know? This could be a real break. If I could identify Castor Oil, that should make Putnam sit up and take notice. And I’d be just as happy if I could bypass killing Ex-Lax in nailing Castor Oil.

So, at about ten to two, I walked up to the box office of the Eros Theatre and purchased a ticket. The marquis of the joint was advertising “EIGHT BRAND NEW FIGURE STUDIES, THE ULTIMATE IN ANATOMIC ART," and the stills displayed outside confirmed that the Eros Theatre was one of the half-dozen or so ultra-sexy cinemas peculiar to Los Angeles.

There are “nudie” movie houses in other cities across the country, but none that I know of offer such frankly erotic film fare as the ones in Los Angeles. The series of shorts I wasabout to see had been shot on a shoestring for this exclusive showing. What they lacked in cinematic quality, they more than made up for in titillating sequences which seemed to me to have been deliberately contrived for onanistic appeal.

I found a seat in the middle of the second row from the back of the left balcony. The theater was dark, and it was a while before my eyes could adjust to see anything except the screen. So that’s what I looked at. One of the short “nudies” was just starting.

The scene opened with a long-haired brunette, very sultry, very voluptuous, lying on a wide couch and reading a book. There was a jerky close-up of the book to show the title: Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Then another jerky focussing on the brunette’s face to show her eyes sparkling. She moaned aloud, and her tongue moistened her lips insinuatingly. In the background there was music, a very slow rendition of the beginning of Ravel’s Bolero.

The focus changed again, and the brunette’s whole body was shown. She was wearing a frilly black negligee, opened to a deep V at the bodice, reaching demurely below her knees. Black net stockings covered her calves, descending to very high spike-heeled shoes. Now, as she read, one of her legs bent at the knee and moved slowly with a rubbing motion that ran her ankle halfway up the other leg. The movement revealed the black net stockings to about mid-thigh now.

Then her hips began to move, and the negligee fell away from her legs altogether as she bounced slowly, provocatively, on the couch. She was right in rhythm with the still slow Bolero. Her shoulders picked up the motion, and then her lace-covered breasts. The book slid from her hands and she stretched sensuously.

The first movement of Bolero trailed off for a moment. She stood up and stretched. Her hips jutted, first this way and then that. The negligee played a swirling game of hide-and-seek with her long, shapely legs. She picked up the book, sighed audibly, and then set it down neatly on the table beside the conch. She raised one high-heeled foot and rested it on the edge of the couch. She stroked the length of the leg, smoothing the net stocking. She repeated the movement with the other leg. She picked up the book again and seemed to read a few sentences. The Bolero resumed, just a trifle faster than before.

The brunette’s fingers trailed down the negligee, undoing buttons. It fell away from her body, and she was revealed in a skimpy black bra and panties. She turned slowly around, still reading, her buttocks expanding and contracting with a muscular rhythm that fell in with the music.

Again the perspective shifted abruptly. Now she was lying down, staring at the book, stretched out full-length, writhing slowly on the couch. Again she set the book down. Her hands caressed the length of her body, squeezing the skimpy bra and the flesh beneath it, trailing over her belly, sliding to her hips, down the length of her legs to her knees, and then back up the inside of here thighs. A quick close-up of her face caught a look that was a coy confession of naughtiness. It changed slowly to one of pleasure, and then of impatience.

She stood up again. The camera dropped to her ankles, then moved slowly up her legs, pausing where they joined to catch a pronounced grinding movement. Then a close-up was raised to catch her belly rippling like an Arabian dancer. Finally it came to rest on that part of her body between her shoulders and waist. Her arms were bent behind her now, her hands fumbling with the clasp of the bra. It swung loose then, and her breasts played an intriguing game of peek-a-boo with the bra until she finally shrugged the strap from one shoulder. One breast was revealed, and the camera zoomed in for an even tighter close-up. At first the breast tip was concealed by the hand palming it. Then the hand slid away and the large aureole and long, quivering nipple were shown. The breast rotated as if with a will of its own for a moment. Then the hand appeared again, one finger outstretched to strum the nipple. She seemed to sink down, out of sight for an instant.

Still another jerky transition, and now there was a close-up of her face. Her eyes were half shut, her lips moving to the Bolero, her nostrils dilating. Her forehead glistened as if with a fine perspiration of passion. Then the camera pulled back to reveal that the bra had been discarded. Both breasts were concealed by her hands now, and she was squeezing them in time to the music. Her hips thrust upward suddenly, and then she subsided. So, for a moment, did the background music.

Her hands dropped to her sides. The camera angle shifted to focus on her breasts and face from the other end of the couch where her feet were. Her breasts stood up firmly, despite the fact that she was lying flat. Her eyes focussed on first one and then the other elongated nipple. The music started again—still faster. Her hands stroked her legs and the upper part of her body thrashed about so that the breasts bounced.

She slid off the couch to her knees. The camera hit her from the other side now. Her bosom rested on the sofa like twin pieces of fruit being offered. Her hands were out of sight. Her mouth formed and O and the lips pulsated. The breasts heaved rapidly. After a moment of this, the angle changed abruptly to catch her from behind. The panties had been rolled down so that almost all of her derriere was visible. It was oscillating wildly as she pressed against the couch and the concealed hands. The music quickened; so did her movement.

Another fast close-up of her face to register first satisfaction and then frustration. Then back to catch her full-length as she stood up and stretched. She shook herself as a dog does when it comes out of the water, and her breasts swung freely from side to side, She was still for a moment then. She cupped one breast in her hand. Her neck bent and she fastened her lips on the tip. There was a long close-up of the point of contact. It ended when she removed her lips. There was a series of quick dissolves from the even more fantastically enlarged nipple to her still sucking lips and back.

Then again she was shown full-length, doing a wild dance to the Bolero. Her fingertips were at her hips now, pushing down the waistband of the panties. A back shot caught them rolled to their limit. Her naked buttocks, high and plump, rolled against them, forcing them even lower. A front shot caught the tiny black triangle the panties formed now. Her legs arched, and they slipped away quickly, ffording the viewer just enough for a glimpse of the area they had concealed to show that it was clean-shaven. The camera pulled back for a long shot as she turned around.

She stretched out on the couch again, her back, at first, to the camera. She picked up the book, read a few lines, then set it down. One of her hands was in front of her, the other behind. A long, frilly black lace kerchief appeared in her hands. She pulled it slowly from one hand to the other through the passage formed by the now tight V of her legs.

She rolled over on her back. The tempo of the music was frantic by now. So were her movements. The black laced moved as it was jet-propelled, hiding and teasingly revealing the track it was traveling. Her breasts bounced wildly. Her stomach rippled. And her thighs seemed to go mad with mounting excitement.

At last her legs were clenched together and the toes of the high-heeled shoes pointed straight toward the ceiling. The length of the netclad legs formed a right angle with the fulcrum which seemed to be swallowing up the piece of lace. Indeed, it disappeared and reappeared as her hands pulled it back and forth so quickly that they were a blur. Ravel’s Bolero reached its climax. There was one long shudder that traveled the length of her body and then one hand reached skyward with the lace clutched in it. The point at which her clenched thighs met was now the focus. Slowly the thigh muscles relaxed to reveal all. A drawn-out shot, a final drumbeat, and then the short was over.

Movies are better than ever? Well, yes, C. B., I’ll buy that! So did the fellow three rows in front of me. He was sitting alone, and as the short concluded he had groaned aloud. A moment later the groan was followed by the sound of a zipper, and a couple of minutes after that he got up and left.

Slice of life? Well, it could have been if he’d miscalulated with the zipper in the darkness. But all’s well that ends well, which may have been the moral of the picture, which should prove that a moral—as apart from morals -- and morality need not necessarily be in juxtaposition in the dramatic arts.

But, to coin a triteness, I diverge. And that’s just what I did at the moment --diverge. My eyes wandered curiously around the theater, searching out the sidelights of the experience.

The number one sidelight was only a row in front of me and slightly to the left. There were a pair of teenagers there, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old. The boy had the duck’s pratt haircut and was wearing the inevitable filthy T-shirt and blue-jeans. The girl sported a ponytail and was wearing a blouse and shorts. She was sitting on his lap, facing him – and me. His hands were under her blouse from the bottom and my eyes detected her bra lying on the seat beside them. She was bouncing up and down, her head thrown back. The tight-stretched shorts, however, seemed to be giving them both a good deal of trouble.

My eyes roved from their predicament to a pair of girls in their twenties who were seated two rows down to my right. From my vantage point above them, I could see that both their skirts were up over their waists. Their hands were busy in each other’s laps. Red nail polish gleamed in a nest of blonde curls, and the one to whom the curls belonged relinquished her grip to grab the other girl's shoulders and rock back and forth. They were late, I reflected, at least as far as the opus which had just ended was concerned.

Still another one, presumably just as inspiring, was beginning. I turned my attention to it. Well, well! Technicolor!

It started with a blonde entering a bedroom. She was wearing a fur coat and an evening gown and carrying a small purse. Obviously she had just come home from a date. She shrugged off the coat, dropped the bag, and strode over to a vanity table. She picked up a man's picture, framed and signed, and hugged it to her breast. Then she caught her image in a full-length mirror and struck a pose. Her breasts overflowed the low-cut gown. She started dancing slowly and sexily in front of the mirror. In the background a band played an old-fashioned slow blues number.

At this point my attention was distracted by someone taking the seat on my left. The theater was half-empty, and there was no doubt that the person sitting next to me had chosen deliberately. From the corner of my eye I made out a pretty woman, demurely dressed, in her mid-twenties. She was staring straight ahead at the screen, her lips parted.

There was the rhythmic sound of a seat creaking a few rows away. I glanced toward it and saw a very old man leaning forward, his rms on the seat in front of him, staring at the screen and rocking back and forth. Glancing away from him, my eyes met those of the woman seated on my left. The noise had attracted her, and she'd been looking at him, too. She shot me a knowing smile that held my eyes an instant, and then turned back to the screen.

The Technicolor blonde was still digging herself in the mirror. She was sliding out of the evening gown now, her lush body undulating to the sleazy tempo of the blues. She wore a one-piece fundation garment under it, bright red, the bra a push-up type over which her lush breasts spilled.

The girl beside me put her arm on the chair-arm between us. Our shoulders touched. She shifted in her seat a little and the pressure increased. She kept staring at the screen, seeming not to notice, but she was breathing very deeply.

So was the teeny-bopper straddling the boy's lap in the row in front of us. Her sighs were audible as she bounced up and down. Her blouse was opened now, and the boy’s face was pressed against her heaving, bared bosom.

The two girls farther away, however, seemed to have subsided and were watching the screen. Aside from the way in which one of them was playing with the other’s ear, they seemed completely involved in the picture. The old man was also involved in the movie—but more actively. Indeed, quite actively for his years, judging from the quickening creak of the springs in the seat he was occupying.

Beside me, the girl's hand dropped casually over the arm of the seat and came to rest on my thigh. Glancing down at it, my eyes caught the glitter of a wedding band. Also, the movement had brought the side of her breast snugly against my ann. The breast-flesh was unencumbered by a bra beneath the thin cotton material of the dress she was wearing. Her hand didn’t move in my lap -- not at first.

On the screen the blonde was lying on her back, one leg stretched straight up in the air, inching off a stocking. She repeated the maneuver with the other leg, the camera angle stressing her derriere as it moved in time to the slow blues. Then, the stockings off, the blonde stood up and stretched. The camera moved up her body in a tight close-up that covered all the points of her pulchritude.

One of the two girls had her arm around the other’s shoulder now, her hand dipping deeply inside the blouse her friend wore. The teeny-bopper had scrambled off her boyfriend's lap and was now wedged into the seat with him; they curled up tightly there, spoon fashion, her back to him, and continued trying to solve the problem of the too-tight shorts. The old man was resting now, his rocking motion having slowed down as he tried to catch his breath with deep, audible wheezes.

Now the hand in my lap was moving. The fingers stroked my thigh, my muscles tensed, and sharp nails dug into them. She leaned her head on my shoulder, and her hair brushed my ear. A moment later her lips brushed it.

“Contact,” she whispered, her hand groping more intimately. “We’ve established contact.”

“Castor Oil?” I guessed.

“If you dig it, I dig it, lover.” She drew my hand to her lap. Her dress buttoned down the front. She guided my hand between two of the buttons.

The blonde on the screen was moving now to a faster tempo. The blues background was subtly changing into a more raucous musical form, almost jazz. The blonde was clutching the man’s picture to her again. She propped it under one of her breasts, forcing the nipple momentarily up over the top of the push-up bra. Then she rubbed it against her hip, her movements erotically pronounced, then over her buttocks and around to the front where she held, the picture a little away and performed a bump and grind for the half-smiling man’s face in the picture frame.

The old man sighed quaveringly, loudly. The two girls shifted position, their high heels on the edges of their seats now, their knees high in the air, their hands once again busy in each other’ s laps. The teenagers were wedged into the seat, one of the girl’s legs kicking wildly, as they continued trying to solve their problem.

The hand in my lap eased open the zipper. Warm hands pushed my shorts aside. Hot thighs gripped my own hand and urged it a little higher to reveal that the lady was as pantie-less as she was bra-less.

“Don’t you think we’d better finish our business first,” I suggested.

“We’ll finish," she panted in my ear. “Don’t rush things, lover. Slow and easy does it every time.”

I was confused—pleasantly, but still confused. If she was the messenger from Caster Oil, then why the sex play? Even to an amateur spy like myself, it seemed highly unprofessional. And if she wasn’t the messenger, than why had she deliberately sat down next to me and—umm— struck up an acquaintance? My confusion prompted another question.

“Were you looking for me?” I asked.

“Was I ever!”

“I mean, are you the one I was waiting for?”

“All your life, lover!” She bit my ear. “You just didn't know it!”

“What I mean is, did Castor Oil send you?” I tried again desperately.

“I don't know, lover. I’ve never made that scene. It must be a new kick. I’m game, though. Got any on you? Is it like airplane glue?” Her thighs were slippery and burning now, and my hand was drawn deep into the moistly quivering corridor of her ardor. “We probably won't have time, though,” she sighed. “I have to get home and put dinner up for my husband.”

“Oh.” My mind absorbed the fact that her last statement confirmed the implication of the wedding ring. “Won’t he wonder where you are now?” I suggested.

“Wonder? Why should he wonder? ‘He knows I went to the movies. What's wrong with that? I go to the movies a lot. It beats playing mah-jongg.” Her fist squeezed a moment to emphasize the point. “Doesn’t it, lover?”

“Well, yes, it does,” I admitted.

On the screen the blonde was out of the one-piece garment by now. She was naked, lying on her stomach, propped up on her elbows so that the fullness of both breasts was completely revealed. The picture was propped up in front of her. The music was real lowdown New Orleans now, but double-time. One arm stretched down and the hand was lost‘ suggestively under her body. The plump globes of her naked buttocks were moving like pistons.

The old man was breaking the championship rocking record of the Catskill Mountains, and he didnt’ even have a rocking chair. One of the girls was sitting on the other’s lap now, sliding up and down to the rhythm set by the blonde on the screen. The teenagers had worked things out; they were still wedged together in one seat, but facing each other now, and the girl’s shorts were down around her ankles. Beside me the housewife was in a frenzy; she’d pushed her dress high up over her hips, out of the way, and her knees, spread wide apart, were wedged against the seat in front to supply the leverage for the slow, grinding circles of her hips and buttocks, the movements by which she was manipulating my hand to maintain the rhythmic contact she wanted.

The cinema blonde was sitting on the edge of the couch now, dusting the picture with a feather duster. The duster swept over her thighs and her back arched so that her large breasts filled with air and pointed skywards. Now the duster played hide and seek with her thighs, and the focus became tighter and tighter to teasingly hint at the pulsating flesh dueling with the feather duster. The blonde finally threw her head back and thrilled a high, hysterically erotic laugh.

It was echoed by a sudden loud groan from the old man as he abruptly stopped rocking. It was echoed by twin moans from the two girls as they seemed to be tossed high in their seats by the waves of passion which had them in their grip. It was echoed by the teenagers, the girl suddenly exclaiming “Now!” in the darkened theater, and the boy emitting a loud grunt. And it was echoed by the housewife beside me who suddenly slammed down hard against my hand and writhed there for a long, ecstatic moment.

When the moment was over, her passion remained undiminished. Before I knew what she was up to, she was down on her knees in front of me. Her hair cascaded over my lap as her lips found their target and gripped it firmly. Involuntarily, my hands closed over her ears, urging her to a faster rhythm.

“Stevkovsky?” The voice was directly in my ear from the darkness behind me. “You were supposed to be alone,” it admonished me.

“Castor Oil?” I asked cautiously, clasping my hands over the ears more firmly to shut out any sound.

“Castor Oil sent me,” the voice confirmed. “But you were supposed to be alone!”

“Sorry about that. I hadn't intended - It was just one of those things."

“Just because you're impersonating Steve Victor,” the voice said sternly, “that’s no reason to act like him. And the least you can do, comrade, is stop while I'm talking to you!”