by Troy Conway
But I didn’t let the flattery go to my head. “What do you have in mind, buddy?” I wisecracked. “Castrating me and appointing me chief eunuch?”
He smiled the smile of one too sure of his ground to let the impropitious remarks of a flunky disturb him. “Let’s just keep that a mystery for now, Damon. Suffice it to say that a man with your sexual knowledge could prove extremely useful to me.”
I forced a laugh that sounded a lot more confident than it was. “Wait until my Marines get here, half-pint. They’ll mop the floor with you creeps.”
His smile broadened. “Ah yes, Damon, your Marines. What’s the old saying—if wishes were horses, beggars would ride?”
I tried to think of a snappy comeback, but I couldn’t.
Then suddenly I didn’t have to.
The sound effects department took care of everything for me.
The sound: a pistol shot followed by the thud of a body on the cabin porch.
Douzi and the five committeemen took cover behind a much. Lumombe and another eunuch rushed out the door, their pistols at the ready.
The sound effects department swung back into action, this time with a burst of machine gun fire.
More astonished than anyone, I summoned the bravado to call out, “The Marines have landed!” Then I crouched with Tania in a corner of the room and wondered who the hell was doing the shooting and how they got here.
From outside came the voice of a woman. She shouted something in Belgravian. I couldn’t make out any of the words except one. It was Douzi’s name.
Douzi shouted something back, and there was another burst of machine gun fie. The bullets zinged across the entire front of the building, shattering the windows and tearing through the door.
The woman shouted something else, and Douzi, knees shaking, started for the porch, his hands raised over his head.
Tania supplied me with a translation. “The woman outside said that the house is surrounded, and that unless Douzi surrenders it will be blown up.”
The room was silent as the diminutive dictator opened the door and walked outside. I heard the scuffling of feet going through shrubbery, then climbing the stairs. Then Douzi came back into the room, his hands still over his head. He was followed by three girls. One held a pistol against his back. The other two had submachine guns cradled in their arms.
“The Marines, Damon?” beamed Su Wing. “You mean, the girls from CHILLER.”
And that’s who it was, all right. The girl with the pistol was Lin Saong The two with the submachine guns were Girl Number One and Girl Number Two, with whom I’d enjoyed that round of sex games people play.
“Don’t anyone move or Dr. Douzi is a dead man,” Lin Saong told us. “Su Wing, collect their weapons.”
The weapons were collected. Then Douzi, the committeemen, the one surviving eunuch, Olga, Tania and I were herded to the center of the room.
In the process, I managed to catch Lin Saong’s eye. “Admit it, baby, I did a great job. You picked up my radio beacon, and you followed it all the way to paydirt. Do I get the Chairman Mao Citation for Valor, or do I have to settle for Honorable Mention.”
She said something in Chinese to Su Wing and the girls with the submachine guns. Them she favored me with a nasty grin. “Your transmissions, Damon, proved extremely valuable to — even though that wasn’t your intention. I listened to your broadcast while my comrades and I were driving from Port duBeers to here, and I found it most enlightening. Now, please sit on the floor with the rest of the nice people and permit Su Wing to tie you up I’ve radioed the nearest detachments of PUF troops, and they’ll be here in a couple of hours to collect this splendid aggregation of prisoners. While we’re waiting for them, we can pass the time listening to your account of how you uncovered the rest of Douzi’s secrets.”
As if on cue, Su Wing grabbed the ropes which had bound my wrists all during the ride from the palace. Tugging me toward her, she slipped another rope through them. The new rope, I could see, ran through the wrist-ropes of everyone else in the party. We were all being seated in a circle in the center of the floor, our backs facing each other, our bonds connecting us in a neatly goemetric daisy-chain.
“Wait a minute,” I told Lin Saong “I’m on your side. I’m the guy who solved the mystery for you. Why are you tying me up?”
She chuckled. “Don’t flatter yourself, Damon. You didn’t solve the mystery. We still don’t know exactly where the bombs are stored. We’ll find out, of course. But now that we’ve captured Douzi, there won’t be any need to disarm them. When the PUF troops arrive, they’ll take Douzi with them. One of the problems with an autocratic government is that it lends itself very facilely to being overthrown. What you’ve just seen is a coup d’etat. Douzi’s captors, the Peoples’ United Front, now need only move into the palace and take over the reigns of government—and the bombs.”
“Okay, hurray for PUF,” I said. “But you still haven’t answered my question. I’m on your side. Why are you tying me up?”
“we’re tying you up, Damon,” she said evenly, “because the PUF troops will bring you back to the palace with Douzi. When the coup is announced, PUF will also reveal that an agent of the United States government—namely, one Dr. Rod Damon—worked hand in hand with Douzi and his fascist regime to develop the bomb. I needn’t tell you what this revelation will mean in terms of world opinion against the United States.”
“And I needn’t tell you, Lin Saong,” I replied, “that of all the good-for-nothing double-crossing broads I’ve met in my life, you take the crocheted loving cup.”
She laughed. “What is the American expression, Damon? ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ But let’s not bicker. You were telling a very interesting story in the car. And you stopped at just the point where you were about to reveal what happened after you infiltrated the Belgravian harem. Please continue.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I wasn’t really in a storytelling mood.
But my arms were tied behind my back, I was bound to Douzi and the other prisoners, and two CHILLER-chicks with submachine guns at the ready were staring me straight in the face.
Somewhere in the back of my head, a light bulb with “idea” written over it flashed to life. It was an idea about how I might just possibly escape before the PUF troops arrived to bring me back to the palace.
I wasn’t sure it’d work. In fact, the odds against its working were formidable. But it was the only chance I had. And to pull it off I had to put the CHILLER chicks in the proper frame of mind Storytelling, I suddenly realized, might just be the perfect way to do it.
“When Douzi welcomed me to the palace,” I said, “he accepted completely Su Wing’s explanation that I had defected to Red China because the United States wouldn’t give me enough freedom to conduct my sexual experiments. He also accepted without question her claim that Red China had sent me to Belgravia at her request. It was a wholly implausible explanation, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he had bought it. Eventually I decided that he had bought it because he wasn’t working on a nuclear development program after all. Only if there were no program, I reasoned, would he be so unsuspecting. But then, thanks to Tania and the other physicists, I got virtually incontrovertible evidence that he was working on the program. I then guessed that Su Wing had double-crossed CHILLER If she had, I reasoned, she and Douzi might be planning together for the day when the bomb would be developed and Belgravia would become a world power. Under these circumstances, he would have known that my story was false, but he wouldn’t have been concerned, because he would have believed that I’d be helpless to do anything to stop him. I was convinced that this hunch was right when Su Wing came to my room and tried to take my radio transmitter from me. I figured that she wanted the transmitter because she wanted to prevent me from revealing to Lin Saong anything which might disrupt her plans. But this line of reasoning was all wet too. As tonight’s events have shown, Su Wing is very much
a loyal Communist. The only reason she wanted the transmitter was because she was afraid BELSO would monitor my broadcasts. And that left me with the original question Why had Douzi accepted her explanation?”
“He accepted it,” interrupted Lin Saong, “because, fascist pig that he is, he was so eager to develop his bomb that he lost all his common sense.”
“Wrong,” I replied. “He lost his common sense all right. But not out of eagerness to develop his bomb. As I pointed out earlier, he’s suffered all his life from rejection by girls whom he h d s desirable—Caucasian girls, Oriental girls, all girls except native Belgravia pygmy girls As President of Belgravia, and probably earlier in Europe, he unquestionably hired prostitutes. But while they gratified him physically, they did nothing at all for his ego, which was the one part of him that really needed gratification. Still, couldn’t resign himself to accepting girls of his own size and race. Consequently when BELSO picked up Su Wig and Douzi learned about it, he wanted to have sexual intercourse with her. And when she, eager to infiltrate his harem, pretended that she really found him sexually satisfying,he was so pleased that he made her his mistress—this despite the fact that common sense should have told him he couldn’t dare risk having an acknowledged enemy agent anywhere near his palace.”
“You’re right, Damon,” Su Wing put in. “The little worm really was enchanted with me. You should have seen him when we made love. I’d pretend that I was having orgasm, and he’d be beside himself with glee. Actually the only times I did have orgasm while I was at the palace was when you made love to me in the car.”
I glanced out of the corner of my eye at Douzi. He sat in a posture of total defeat, his tiny shoulders hunched, his eyes riveted to the floor.
“Yes,” I said, suddenly feeling a surge of pity for the diminutive dictator, “he was enchanted with you. Not enchanted enough that he gave you carte blanche to the physicists’ laboratory or that he told you where his bombs were stored. But enchanted enough that he welcomed me to the palace on your recommendation. And that fit perfectly into Red China’s plans.”
“China’s plans?” asked Tania, ever the ideal straight man. “What were they?”
“China’s main goal,” I replied, “was to prevent Belgravia from becoming a nuclear power, because China knew that if Douzi’s regime achieved the world stature it sought, PUF chances of taking over the government would be nonexistent. It was for that reason that China volunteered to work along with the United States, Russia and the other nuclear powers in foiling Douzi’s bomb development program. Then, when the United States sent me to Belgravia, China saw an opportunity to achieve additional goals it never before had dreamed of achieving. By arranging things so that I was in Douzi’s palace when PUF attacked, China would be able to blame the United States for the bomb program which Douzi actually had set up on his own.”
I turned to Lin Saong. “You knew,” I told her, “that the bombs which already had been developed weren’t stored anywhere on the palace grounds. And so did Su Wing know it. That’s why she wasn’t at all concerned about PUF’s attacking the palace. But you told me that the bombs were there because you wanted to spur me into working faster. You figured that I might just be lucky enough to find out where they were, which would make PUFs job a lot easier when the coup was staged. And if I didn’t find out, you’d’ve lost nothing. PUF still would stage its coup, and Douzi’s government would fall into China’s hands, assuming that he didn’t perfect his bomb and make his play at the United Nations before the coup could be staged. That, by the way—the play at the United Nations, which you suspected all along that he would —was the real reason for your haste.”
“And I almost succeeded,” said Douzi in a small voice. “I was just inches away from success.”
“Yes,” I confessed, “you were. And you would have succeeded except for two reasons: (a) the physicists in your harem liked me, and (b) your eunuchs disliked you.”
“My eunuchs?” he asked, surprised. “How they fit into the picture.”
“It was Olga’s eunuch, Douzi, who told Tania’s eunuch that you were coming here to Colon tonight. And it was Tania who told me. When I found out, it was my intention to escape from the palace, make contact with the United States and lead a military mission here to seize your bomb storage facilities. As things happened, you made my job easier than that. When your men caught me trying to escape the palace, you brought me herewith you My radio transmitter was broadcasting to Lin Saong during our tire ride in your limousine. All she had to do was follow the beacon.”
“And all because of a loose-mouthed cur,” he growled, glowering at Olga’s eunuch. “I took these vermin in off the streets. They were starving, and I fed them until they were fat. And what for? So they could turn against me.”
“Why shouldn’t they turn against you?” I shot back, smiling. My previous feeling of sympathy for him now was completely gone. “Sure, you fed them until they were fat. But you deprived them of their manhood. You turned them into sexless creatures who could never again think of themselves as fully human. And why did you do it? You did it, Douzi, because your own warped ego demanded it. You yourself felt sexually inadequate, and to compensate fat these feelings of inadequacy, you surrounded yourself with men who were totally sexless. Worse yet, you subjected the poor creatures to the most degrading forms of sexual submission—like the undressing ritual and the acts of fellatio which I observed at your bath. Every time you put a eunuch through these tortures, you felt better, because you knew that as bad off as you were sexually you were still a lot better off than the eunuch was.”
“Mr. President,” said Dr. Baio, completely aghast, “is this true?’
“It’s true,” I snapped. “And there’s a lot more to the twisted sexual personality of your leader than just that. Douzi not only humiliated the eunuchs, he also forced them to entertain him sexually—and he enjoyed their attentions immensely. He was also a leather fetishist, as I learned when I saw him nibbling on Su Wing’s leather dress at the bath. In fact, I’d be kind of surprised to learn that there was a sexual perversion he didn’t practice.”
“He was a sadist too, Darmon,” Su Wig continued. ‘Why do you think you’ve never seen me wearing anything but high-necked kimonos and tunics. My arms and legs are unmarked, but my back and breasts and abdomen are completely covered with scars from his whippings.”
“I thought,” said Douzi weakly, “that you enjoyed being whipped. You certainly seemed to enjoy it.”
I saw that the conversation was shaping up exactly as I wanted it to—exactly as it had to if I was going to put my farfetched escape plan into effect. “She pretended she enjoyed it,” I said quickly, “just like she pretended she enjoyed everything else you did. But actually she despised it, just like she despised you and everything about you.”
“That’s right, Damon,” said Su Wing, playing right into my hand. “I despised him like I’ve never despised anyone in my life. Not once during my years as a prostitute in Peking did I encounter any man who revolted me more—or who was more of a sexual washout.”
I played my trump card. “What a shame,” I mused, “that we have to turn this louse over to PUF before we can subject him to some of the same humiliations that you and so many other people suffered at his hands. A creep like him ought to be paid back in his own coin.”
For a moment the room was silent. I glanced from Lin Saong to Su Wing to Girl Number One to Girl Number Two. Lin Saong’s face was impassive, but Su Wing wore an expression of mischievous delight, and Girls Number One and Two were looking at me with their old sexual hunger showing.
“What are yon getting at, Damon?” Lin Saong asked finally.
I grinned noncommitally, and said nothing.
“I think,” supplied Su Wing, her eyes glowing brightly, “that Damon means that Douzi deserves a dose of his own medicine.”
Lin Saong’s brow furrowed. “And how does he propose that the dose be administered?”
Su Wing looked to me.
My grin broadened, and I nodded.
“Perhaps,” said Su Wing, “we might humiliate Douzi sexually right here—by forcing him to watch Damon make love to me.”
Lin Saong frowned, as if the idea was totally repulsive. But her eyes betrayed an inner desire. “It would be”—she paused—“highly unorthodox.”
“True,” said Su Wing, beaming as if she was imagining the act actually taking place “But there’s no reason why it couldn’t be done. The PUF troops won’t be here for at Least another hour. We’ve got nothing else to do while we wait for them.”
Lin Saong’s frown deepened. But her feelings evidently were ambivalent, because the desire in her eyes became more pronounced. “I don’t object to sexual indulgence when it’s necessary to accomplish a mission,” she said, as if talking to herself. “But in this case, our mission already Es accomplished, and the Sex act would serve only to gratify the participants. As we both know, that’s diametrically opposed to the thinking of Chairman Mao.”
My eyes found those of Su Wing I tried to remind, her, via mental telepathy, that she’d soon be going back to Red China, where it might be many moons before she got another opportunity to enjoy the pleasures which Chairman man Mao was so violently My against.
Evidently the message got across. “Under these circumstances,” she told Lin Saong, “Chairman Mao might very well approve. After all, would we not be demonstrating to this capitalist swine that we Communists are capable of beating him at his own game?”
The go-lights in Lin Saong’s eyes were glowing more brightly than ever. Her frown vanished. “You have a point,” she said. Then, turning to me, she asked, “Would you consent to participating in such a venture, Damon?”
I smiled blandly. “Madame Saong, I’m an agent of the United States government, and as such I’m not at all interested in demonstrating that you Commie creeps can beat us capitalist swine at our own game.”
