“No one,” Oksana said between breaths. “Has ever done that to me.”
“Poor thing, what you’ve been missing.” I unzipped my pants then shoved the material down around my thighs. My cock unfurled like a flag on the Fourth of July. “Look at what you’ve done to me.”
Instead of looking, she closed her eyes tight. I grabbed her hand and placed it on my hardened dick. She resisted at first but slowly she encircled the flesh with her long thin fingers. “That’s a girl. Squeeze.”
“I’ll hurt you.”
“And I’ll love it.” She made a noise deep in her throat and the lava began its rise.
“Squeeze. Work it with your hand.” To help her along I slid two fingers into her pussy. She was the earth on the day Noah sailed the ark – flooded. Oksana pulled at my dick, an amateurish attempt but I had to give her points for trying. The last one wouldn’t even try. She had lain there like a dead fish, waiting for me to fuck her. But not this one. Oksana was adventurous, perfect for what I had in mind. Damn it. “Stop. Let go.” I pulled my fingers out of her wet cunt and replaced them with my dick. I slipped it into her like I slipped my gun into the holster. She was tighter than I expected or maybe I was just bigger. She gasped when I entered her and I saw her bite her lip from the pain. At least she wasn’t a virgin. That was the good thing about the married ones, they arrived already broken in.
I lifted her legs higher and felt myself slide deeper into her channel. Then I settled myself into position to begin the retreat. Out. In. Out. In. I picked up speed, a jack-hammer with miles of road to dig up. She was crying, moaning, screaming. It was all mixed together and I knew she was going to hate me in the morning. Her husband never made her feel like this. Her husband never fucked her until she was too weak to move. Her husband never treated her to a finger in the ass just as she was about to come, but I did. I knew how to make a woman beg for more and that was what it was all about. Getting my rocks off was just a bonus. Perk of the job. The job. Damn it.
There was a low, wet sucking sound as I pulled my wasted dick out of her aching pussy. Her hands grabbed for me as if wanting to shove me back in but I was done. I climbed over her legs and dropped down beside her on the bed. Now was the perfect time. She wasn’t thinking clearly. She was high on sex.
“If only,” I said.
“If only what?” She took the bait.
“If only I could stay.”
Despite her exhaustion she popped up to one elbow. “Stay? In town?”
“On the hill. I have to leave next week. I failed.”
“I don’t understand.” She draped her arms over my chest and clung to me.
“I shouldn’t tell you this but I’m not who I appear to be.” Just like the sex, take it slow, lead up then wham. “This bomb they’re building, it’s wrong. People are going to die, innocent people.”
“Our enemies. The Germans deserve what they get.”
“All the Germans? What about the children and the mothers and the Jews? The bomb can’t tell the difference. They’ll all die when it’s dropped.”
She shivered and latched on a little tighter. “I don’t wish to talk about it. There is nothing to be done.”
“But there is.” I set a reassuring kiss on her forehead. It was damp and tasted of salty sweat. “If the Krauts had a bomb we wouldn’t risk dropping ours. It would be a stand-off.”
Oksana shook her head. “No. It would be worse. Hitler with a bomb.”
“Ten thousand dollars would make life very sweet.”
“Ten thousand dollars? That’s quite a lot of money. For what?”
I stroked her face with my free hand. “Documents. Plans. I can’t get to the kinds of drawings and reports that they need.”
“My husband,” she said softly.
“His reports would do the trick. They don’t need much. Drawings maybe, of the bomb.”
“Ten thousand dollars?”
“If I had a pipeline, if I had access to documents then I could stay.” I tipped my head downwards and licked her softened nipple. “We could make love every day.”
“No. Yes.” She closed her eyes as her nipple shaped itself into a tight square. “I have to think. I can’t think”
I rolled over on her so my mouth was near her ear. “Did you like it when I sucked you down there?” The quick rise and fall of her chest was the only answer. “You came so hard I thought you might break”
“Yes,” she said. “I never.”
“But now you have. And you can have it again and again. Would you like that?”
“Yes.” Another breathy reply.
“Then help me, baby. Bring me what I need and I’ll take you back to paradise.”
We met again a little more than a week later. I don’t know how she managed to get a pass so soon after her last “shopping trip”, but she did and she left me a message saying I should meet her. I, of course, had no trouble getting off the hill. Getting off was easy. Staying off was the tough part.
Oksana arrived at the hotel red-faced and breathless with anticipation. I could see that she had been thinking about our last encounter. She was shaking when she entered the room and it wasn’t from nerves. She wanted it bad and that’s why her face fell so quickly when she saw Calvin and Hume.
“He’s the man with the money,” I explained but she still remained disappointed. Their presence meant it would be that much longer before she’d have me between her legs.
“I understand you have something for me,” said Calvin.
Without speaking, Oksana reached into her purse and pulled out a thick fold of paper. She handed it to him and we all waited in silence as he perused the pile.
“These documents are quite revealing,” Calvin said as he flipped through the pages. “Won’t they be missed?”
“No, Danez, my . . .” she had trouble saying the word, “husband is always scribbling on bits of paper, it is the way he thinks things through. I throw most of them away and he never asks for them again. I took what I could find. Some are written in Polish. I don’t read Polish very well, not the science words, so I do not know if they are helpful or not.”
“From what I can see, they’ll be very helpful.” Calvin gave me a look but I turned away. I hated this part. He dropped the papers into his open briefcase then took out a black leather badge case. “Oksana Bronislawa, you’re under arrest for treason.”
“Treason? But I don’t understand!” She tried to look at me too but I kept my eyes on the floor.
“Selling secrets to an enemy, Mrs Bronislawa. You’ll have to come with us. Hughes, take her downstairs. I’ll be there in a minute.” Calvin’s man took her by the arm and then led her to the door. She called out my name but nothing more. No begging or pleading from this one. No anger, no tears, those would come later.
“So how many does that make?” Calvin asked when she was gone.
“Three out of six. The next one will be the tie-breaker.”
Calvin shook his head. “What’s your secret?”
“That’s easy. Always let her come first, literally.”
“Shit, if that’s what it takes, I’ll stick to arresting them.”
Mrs Abigail Covington was the wife of a British explosives expert. She was an older woman with a classic style and expensive tastes. I told her she reminded me of Garbo and I oughta know, see I used to live right next door to Garbo in Hollywood . . .
Soho Square
Justine Dubois
For three difficult months he had worked patiently through the night. He was a big man, not only tall, but massively built. In his overalls, he still retained some of the ceremony and bearing of Detective Chief Inspector. He was also handsome in a darkly impassive, ample-featured way. His eyes were particularly striking, neither brown, nor precisely blue, but dark grey beneath heavily plumed brows; something severely beautiful about the wide set of his mouth. He had a manner of looking at each person with honesty, interested and direct, yet also fractionally formal, which lent his persona
lity a nuance of mystery. He was, above all, intelligent. Not the intelligence of the bookish, but of those who live life fiercely, in the raw, as though instinct and action were all, but who then later have the wit to deduce intellectually from their experiences. He was with the Met, working undercover. He investigated murder. In particular, he was investigating a current spate of irregular, but identically patterned murders of prostitutes in Soho. His undercover job was as night-watchman in an apartment block in Soho Square.
Soho Square is like a tree that has rotted at its base, yet still retains the lofty magnificence of its rich, fruit bearing uppermost boughs. Below, in the gardens, with their central pergola, people and rubbish accumulate alike, indiscriminately at every corner. The street doors appear anonymous, almost unused. No one ever notices people either coming in or going out. The narrow, brashly lit foyers are undecorated and unpatrolled, giving no intimation of the lives lived above.
Bill’s assigned apartment block was to the east of the square. Every night, at eight o’clock, he parked his elegant car several streets away, so as not to be spotted driving such luxury, and walked to work, where, from the first floor in a back room cupboard, transformed into a surveillance post, he monitored the 24 screens relating to the CCTV cameras, which tracked, in slow, wand-like dances, the lifts, the corridors and the individual entrances to all apartments.
In the past three months five prostitutes had been murdered, all murders bearing the same handwriting, a signature not yet revealed to the press. Ten of the apartments in this block were inhabited by prostitutes, with one exception, all of them shared between three pimps; three more apartments were rented to merchant bankers, clever, laddish men, who all worked for the same company; two more to film producers; one apartment was owned, not rented, by a famous middle-aged business woman, and another owned by a famous restaurateur. The eighteenth remained empty. It had been the home of “Gloria”, original name Gladys, a young prostitute murdered three months earlier. Now, the other girls were superstitiously reluctant to move in to it.
Apart from a brawl between two men overlapping late one night at an apartment door, all had been quiet in recent weeks. Bill had had to argue forcibly with his bosses for the right to continue his surveillance of the building. “Give it up, Bill,” they had said. “It is sending you to sleep.” They had laughed the manly laugh of men who know all there is to know about human nature, yet remain unafraid of the truth, both brutalized and empowered by their knowledge, at once bitter and forgiving. The forgiveness they felt was both for themselves and for each other, for humanity in general. But its connotation for them was not that of turning a blind eye or of finding the edges blurred between right and wrong. For them, right and wrong were identical with the law, a code which they operated sincerely enough. However, beyond the law was life itself, and it is that which they had learned to forgive, knowing both themselves and others to be potentially corrupted by it.
Absent-mindedly, but with little true curiosity, his police colleagues wondered why Bill had fought so hard to retain this dreary job. Professional zeal, a hunch maybe? His private life, certainly, had been sacrificed to its nightly rituals. His girlfriend had moved out of the home, which she claimed they had never truly shared. The job was essentially disruptive and boring and, in fact, his pals had been right to tease him. He had long lost interest in the various inhabitants of the apartment block, with their specious vanities and their pomaded nightly charades, felt only tedium listening to the nightly tap on their idolatrous conversations. He was bored by them all, except for one. And it had become exclusively for her that he stayed awake and vigilant night after night.
Unlike the other prostitutes, she seemed not to be run by telephone contact from a central office. It was unclear whether or not she had a pimp. Bill had certainly never seen him. Her calls, when they came, came from the street, from the ticketed, felt flurried phone boxes at street level. Bill had seen her card. It was unusual, in that it listed no promises, detailed no “services”, merely quoting her pseudonym, “Dana”, and the casual invitation. “Call me, sometime.” And, goodness knows, people did call. Numerous evenings Bill had listened to her breathless voice prevaricate over some assignation or other before agreeing to meet. Sometimes she slammed down the phone on her callers. Sometimes she left the phone off the hook and was not seen all night.
At other times, she simply took to the streets, teetering on her highest of high heels, through the windswept litter of the Square, usually on her way to the Mezzo bar. She was a tall girl, with a faultless figure, something Grecian and sculptural about the perfection of her proportions, something geometric in the clever balance of her small waist to the rounded charms of her hips and breasts. Only her face failed to match the perfection of her body. Not that she wasn’t beautiful, just that her face had escaped the ideal of her body. In its place was a visible war of emotions, of rueful, almost forgotten, pride; of sorrow; of beauty gradually yielding to the stain of disaffection; of delicacy broken by feisty hopelessness, all these strands knitted together into a tight weave and made central by an unmistakeable intelligence. Her clients liked her because, as well as responding to them, she habitually assessed them, almost, for a cursory few minutes, befriended them. Briefly in her arms, they experienced the illusion of compliance and passion, as oppposed to coercion and dutiful transaction. She was good at her job. Nor did she dress like an obvious “floozy’. As she paraded the street in her enviable figure and high heels, or leant gracefully at the Mezzo bar, men stopped to talk to her, naturally attracted to her, not imagining her to be a prostitute. And, so clever was she at befriending them in a short space of time that, as the truth dawned on them of her true status, it became just another of the things they liked about her. They would pay up willingly and retrace her steps back with her, like joyful sheep, to the confines of Soho Square.
All these “friendships” were quite easy and simple to her. But, at the point of actually working, she was governed by only two thoughts, neither of them friendly. Firstly, that these men must never see the interior of her apartment, which was, after all, private, and, in her mind, not designed for use by clients. And secondly a concern for her own safety. She knew perfectly well about the localized deaths of prostitutes. Most of the fools who followed her to Soho Square were just that, sweet, indiscriminate fools. But she knew that it would be insolence to assume that she could encompass the nuances of all human nature in the space of half an hour. The murderer she knew to be clever; she had read the newspaper reports. He would, she thought, be like herself, deceptive, and not altogether what one was expecting. Consequently, she had evolved a self-protective habit that depended on Bill, even though she had never met him face to face. Although, unknown to him, she had seen him.
Every night, in the small hours of morning, when the rest of the building was quiet, the other prostitutes all entertaining in their apartments, she brought her fellow revellers back to the block, inhabiting the lift, so that Bill’s camera wand would remain full upon her. There, she habitually acted out the various fantasies of being overcome by her many partners’ sensuality. She mimed hesitation and shyness, boldness and ferocity, and finally the reality of initiating sex there and then, adroitly jamming the lift for ten, twenty minutes at a time, and always performing for the camera.
Bill liked her best in the white silk dress, that fell on her supple body like water, the one that cleverly dissolved open with the rip of a series of rouleaux ties. He marvelled at the way she remained elegant, no matter what actions she performed. The men, she allowed do anything that they pleased; to clamber her high-heeled height; to bend her over, stretching the white lace straps of her suspender belt; to slam her anonymously, sometimes angrily, against the cushioned wall of the lift; to lift her on to their waists or kneel her before them, anything, just so long as they remained within view of the cameras. When the pavanes of brief courtship were over, she would knowledgeably unjam the lift and deliver her clients back to street level, bid them a
decorous “good night”, then speed in the lift to her own fifth floor, returning alone to her apartment, her every action tracked by Bill. She would then re-emerge half an hour later, bathed and dressed in a new outfit, pale pink or baby blue, occasionally black, always newly made up and recoifed.
Bill admired her finesse, her beauty, cherished her confidence in him and his camera. He could not bear the idea of abandoning this job. Each night he sat in front of the screens and found himself aroused by her broken beauty and her trust, by her seeming remoteness from the ordeals she put herself through. He perceived that, in spite of her sorrow, she was also happy. He remembered something that his father had once said. “There are no women quite so happy as prostitutes,” although he wondered if that were really true. He had considered accosting her, trying to get to know her, although that might prove difficult, as well as dangerous to his career. Increasingly he wondered what secrets her apartment held, why it was that she never took anyone back there. Nevertheless, the formal correctness of his police discipline prevented him. He had a loathing for unprofessionalism.
One Wednesday night, as he watched her, stroking his own member yearningly, as she took yet another man’s penis into her generous mouth to whip at and soothe, her wide eyes intercepting with his on the screen, something seemed different. As yet, Bill could only see the man’s back. The top of his head was a thick crop of blond curls, like an altar boy’s, beneath which his shoulders appeared unexpectedly broad. He wore the unlikely combination of a lumberjack’s check shirt above neatly pressed trousers and shiny American loafer shoes. Bill’s camera searched the well of the lift, to reveal his jacket discarded on the floor, its Versace label exposed to the camera. Bill had not yet seen his face, but his voice, which came to him in distorted waves, struck him as reminiscent in some way. It was not a good voice; too nasal, curiously disturbing, even when speaking platitudes. In spite of his preoccupation with passion, the man was strangely talkative, mostly in catchphrases. “More haste, less speed”, Bill heard him say. As Bill’s camera tracked him, he seemed to be demanding more of Dana than was usual. Most men had one idea. This man seemed to have several. Bill watched as he spreadeagled her against the wall. She was wearing the white dress that he so loved. But, despite the easy unlace of its ties, the man chose to ignore them, lifting instead the hem of her dress to expose her buttocks, pulling the string of her thong aside as he did so, and entering her brusquely, his well-cut trousers already released at his waist, but now slipped to his ankles. “A stitch in time saves nine,” Bill heard him murmur. To hold her firmly in place, he pinned the flat of her left shoulder to the wall with his outstretched hand, whilst, with his other hand, he encircled the root of his own flesh and watched, as if transfixed, as its stricture disappeared to and fro between the soft roundness of her flesh. Bill noticed how unnaturally large and loose-skinned the man’s hands appeared and then, with a shock, realized that he was wearing fine, skin-coloured leather gloves. The man then turned Dana towards him and, placing his arms round her waist, again lifted her on to him. He made no attempt to kiss her, but Bill watched enviously as the blond crop of unruly curls mingled with the straight dark lengths of her own hair. The man appeared to be in no hurry. He was not only excited, there was something more deliberate in his actions as well. He seemed almost to rejoice in his own self-control, prolonging the moments.
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