The Jet Set

by Mack Reynolds

  Then the rest gathered about, pressing against him, running their hands through his hair or over his body. The Latin looked at him, her eyes narrow and her mouth loose, and ran her hands over the lushness of her bare breasts.

  Obviously they were all, all of them, his for the taking and in whatever manner he might decide upon.

  It was a choice not easy to make.

  He could feel the lust growing within him, the lust with which he was so familiar. The lust which grew until he must prove, prove beyond all doubt, that he was a man, that he could satisfy and oversatisfy any woman alive.

  The Nordic redhead breathed into his ear, suddenly thrust a warm, sharp tongue into it.

  He turned with a growl to grasp her, but she laughed and rolled away.

  His own clothing was as translucent and as soft as their own, and it was obvious that his masculine demands were upon him. Giggling, their voices high-pitched, they teased him now, standing back and displaying their so obvious charms.

  He lunged to his feet, his throat feeling so thick as to make it difficult to breathe, his temples pounding with desire. His eyes went from one to the next, indecisively.

  And then, as though by prearranged signal, they turned and sped away, in all directions.

  His eyes, narrowed now at the play, followed the slender Chinese, then switched to the Latin girl. She disappeared into the grove of trees, her laughter trilling. He was about to take up the pursuit when …

  Loretta Alsace emerged from the palace.

  He was brought back to the impossibility of the situation, the impossibility of him being there, them being there.

  She was dressed as though ready to go before the cameras in a filming of Scheherazade in glorious Technicolor. He had never seen her world-famed charms so fabulously presented. Her Oriental silks were transparent-translucent, her jewels fabulous, and obviously not the jewels, the paste jewels, of Hollywood.

  She drifted toward him, her walk sensuous in the extreme.

  The eight houris who had been entertaining him were now forgotten. The overwhelming lust which had been abuilding within him at their provocations burst in an explosion of furious desire. He stepped forward, grasped her, all but threw her to the couch. He found himself ripping away her scanty clothing, even as she mewled her own desire and needs at him.

  Here, under the sky of paradise, he took her as he had never taken woman before. Never had he been so rampant, so desperate in his assault. Within moments she had reached her first climax, screaming her delight. He hesitated not a moment, but rode on, deeper, harder, thrusting, thrusting, thrusting. She rose up to meet him, to compete, to fight back this assault, and again she topped climax, squealing and moaning her ecstasy.

  And again, and again. All his tendency to satyriasis was upon him. All his cooped-up, for a lifetime cooped-up, sexual frustrations were finding their releases in his driving, driving punishing, while pleasuring this supposedly most desirable woman in the world.

  And then, even while he glared down into her face, all but swooning, he knew that something was wrong. Something was very wrong. He slowed his desperate riding, searching for some reason within all this. Then he knew what had come to him.

  Loretta Alsace’s eyes were glazed, as though by drug.

  He slipped from her. Stood next to the conch and stared down in groggy lack of understanding. What …

  Something was very wrong.

  It was then that he heard the voice.

  “Larry! Larry! Where are you!”

  Something was very wrong. On an impulse, he reached down and threw a sheet over the moaning woman he had been locked in love with a moment before. He turned and faced the direction of the voice calling him.

  Dorry Malloy, dressed in simple, modern sweater and sport skirt, her face in distress, came running up the path. “Larry!”

  She spotted him, standing beside the couch. Her eyes went quickly to the movie star, sprawled there, and she flushed. But then she came back to him. “Larry! The Cham! You’re doped. You’re full of hashish.”

  He was dazed by the quickness of it all. He muttered, “Dorry. Where’d … you come … from?”

  “Larry, you’ve got to get out of here.” She grasped him by his bare arm. There were tears in her eyes, he noted strangely, and she seemed desperate. “I heard all about it, through a discharged servant. I came as quickly as …”

  What had seemed a large mirror, set into the side of the exotic palace from which Loretta Alsace had come, now slid back. There stood the Cham and his luncheon party guests, some of them with cameras in hand, Sándor Petöfe with a 16mm Ciné camera. Most were laughing. Behind them was the obviously ultra-modern villa of the Cham.

  Even to Larry Land’s dulled mind actuality came through. The large supposed mirror was a polarized glass arrangement, through which you can see but one way. The Cham and his guests had been able to witness — even to photograph — Larry and Loretta in their sexual throes.

  And it came to Larry Land, in his haze, what one can do when his financial resources are unlimited and he seeks total revenge on the woman who scorned him, and the man who was her paramour.

  The Cham said politely, sardonically to Dorry, “My dear, you have spoiled it all, just when our friend Larry was giving the performance of his life.”

  Clark Talmadge, a Nikon camera with telephoto lens in hand, giggled. “Oh, quite,” he lisped. “It was precious, absolutely precious.”

  The Cham turned to his guests. “You see, hashish has aphrodisiac qualities as well as narcotic ones. It is truly a most universal drug. When it is smoked, as I understand is quite widely done in the United States, it is called marijuana. But when it is taken orally, as is more usual in the Near East and in India, we call it bhang or afion. It is much more effective in that manner.”

  Larry was standing, shaking his head. Aftereffects were already on him, both emotional and as a result of the drug. From far, far away, he wondered how the hashish had been administered to him. But what difference? In his wine. In his food.

  The Cham’s voice took on a mocking quality. “To return to my tale of Hasan Ben Sabbáh, founder of the Ismailian Shiahs. I am surprised you are not familiar with the story. He was a contemporary of your Christian Crusaders who tried to seize the Holy Land from the Moslems — I believe you called them Saracens at that time. The Crusaders called him The Old Man of the Mountain, and his followers assassins, which was derived from hashishins, or men who took hashish.

  “You see, my revered ancestor did, indeed, find the path to paradise. Or, at least, a reasonable facsimile, given the mind of the desert-born illiterate who made up his most trusted agents. In his castle at Alamút he had secretly constructed a garden, which must have been very similar to this one here.” The Cham added wryly, “I hope no more expensive. He filled it with streams which ran wine, with the most beautiful girls available, with the most luxurious of all the worldly frailities which men desire.

  “When he had a particularly dangerous task which he wished performed for political reasons, he brought one of his most fanatical followers before him and told him much the same story I told you, earlier at luncheon. That is, that he had the path to paradise. He then had the miserable fool drugged with hashish. When the man awoke, he found himself in paradise. He was allowed to remain for several hours, and was then drugged again, and brought back before Hasan. My worthy ancestor then revealed to the fool that if he was killed in the performance of the task to which he was assigned, he would return to paradise forever.”

  The Cham chuckled, even as he twisted a dark cigarette into his holder. “I assure you, his followers were noted as the most efficient killers of all time. They were literally fearless. No one was safe from their knives.”

  Loretta Alsace, through this period being shaken by a desperate Dorry Malloy, who was also attempting to rearrange the actress’ clothes, finally sat erect. Her eyes were still glazed but some of the developments seemed to be getting through to her.

  �
�Larry,” she moaned. “What’s happened?”

  He was not fully recovered himself. Far from it.

  Dorry said urgently, “We’ve got to get out of here. There’s another door, over here. A gardener’s door. I’ve got the car outside. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “But …” Loretta’s eyes went from Dorry, to Larry, to the Cham, to Sándor Petöfe with his 16mm movie camera. The Hungarian deviate’s eyes were cold, even as he giggled his amusement at the farce.

  Loretta said, “But … Larry, Dorry. They took pictures. They have pictures of all … of all of it. Blue movies, pornographic pictures. They can sell them all over Europe, all over the world. Larry!”

  Larry shook his head, trying to achieve more clarity. He growled deep in his throat, and shuffled forward.

  Dorry said, “Oh, no, Larry!”

  The Cham said coldly, “That will be all, Lawrence Land.” His voice held a ring of command.

  Sándor Petöfe, still giggling, ducked back into the room beyond. Larry tried to follow him. The others had cameras, too, some of them, but somehow it was Sándor it seemed most necessary to halt.

  “A moment,” the Cham demanded in command.

  Larry gave him a backhanded blow across the mouth and tried to push on.

  He didn’t see Clark Talmadge’s fist coming in from the side.

  • CHAPTER NINE •

  LAWRENCE LAND came to again in the convertible Mercedes of Loretta Alsace. He had no idea how Dorry, or Dorry with Loretta’s assistance, had gotten him out of the Cham’s garden. Somehow, evidently.

  The rush of air revived him, though not completely. He must have taken a large dose of the Oriental drug Muley Khalid had administered. The heights of euphoria he had climbed there in the Cham’s gardens were now to be measured by the depths of the valley of depression of the aftermaths of hashish.

  He could hear the movie star whimpering beside him. Dorry was driving. There was nothing he could say. What was there to say? The Cham had taken his revenge. Moses! It had been an elaborate one. What was it someone had said once about hell having no fury like a woman scorned? They should have considered a Cham.

  He felt as though he were sinking back into drugged sleep, and shook his head to hold consciousness.

  At long last they reached the villa. This time it was he who helped Dorry with Loretta. They entered through the garage and Dorry went ahead to be sure none of the servants witnessed the cinema queen in her torn costume and her condition bordering upon collapse.

  They got her to her bed, and Dorry disrobed her — no great task — and covered her. She was moaning. It wasn’t just the hashish that she, too, had been given. Loretta Alsace’s career was over. It took no great intuition to realize that. Sándor Petöfe need no longer be the free-loader that Big Bill Daly had named him. Sándor Petöfe now had a property which was worth its weight in diamonds. A thousand illegal prints of the famed sex symbol, Loretta Alsace, in the throes of unnatural orgy would be in circulation before the month was out.

  And so it was that while Dorothy Malloy and Lawrence Land looked down at her, in horror, the beauty that had once been Loretta Alsace faded away. Before their eyes, as it were, the film star who could easily pass for a girl in her middle twenties became a middle-aged woman. She took on twenty years in twenty minutes. And the dazzle was gone.

  All of life thus lost meaning for Loretta Alsace, nee Laurie Kosciusko.

  And Larry Land, shocked, staggered off to his own bed, in the adjoining suite.

  In the morning, it must have been the late morning, Larry was awakened by Dorry Malloy. He came awake quickly and somehow immediately knew that there was still further tragedy.

  She looked down at him painfully. “Larry, Marcella’s dead.”

  “Marcella?” At first he didn’t comprehend.

  “Marcella Loraine. She evidently took an overdose of sleeping pills.”

  “Oh.” He felt distress, as he would have for anyone, but in actuality Marcella Loraine meant little to him. Nothing close to him. He said, duty-bound, “I’m sorry.”

  Dorry said, slowly, “She left a note. A rather hysterical note.”

  Larry looked at her. There was obviously something else. “What happened?”

  “She’s been staying perpetually drunk for weeks now. Up there in the hills in that mostrously large villa of hers, evidently picking on the servants continually. Yesterday they walked out in a body. She was left alone.”

  “She hated to be alone,” he muttered.

  “She left a note blaming it all on you. Saying you deserted her.”

  He closed his eyes in pain. He could see her, drink in hand, wandering around that damn barn of a place. Probably too drunk to drive herself downtown. She was neurotically afraid of being alone. He knew that.

  Dorry sat on the bed beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Larry, it’s not your fault. She’s a grown woman — was a grown woman. She had a son nearly your age.”

  He shook his head.

  “Larry …”

  Something happened. Afterward, neither of them knew what, how or even exactly when. Only it was that one moment it was as though they hardly knew each other. The next he was in her arms, and she was murmuring endearments.

  He was in her arms.

  And out of emotional chaos came a soothing that he couldn’t remember ever having known through a woman before. Not, certainly, since childhood. No, never. Not in his mother’s arms, since she was a mother and this was a woman.

  It suddenly came to Lawrence Land that he had never been in love. The word had never come through to him, never meant anything other than the sexual relationship. He had never been in love, and now he realized that undoubtedly he had never been loved. Marcella? Loretta? He had truly meant no more to them than he had to Giggling Gertie, or to the prostitute he had picked up as a sixteen-year-old, or to any of the other women he had brought to sexual satiation down through the years. He had never known love.

  Now his head was pressed against the perfectly formed breasts of Dorry Malloy, and she crooned to him, the soothing sound of forever woman.

  And time folded back on them again, so that later neither remembered quite what happened, or how or even exactly when. And now she was in bed with him, and impatiently slipping from her last garment, the wisp of blue nylon that encompassed her hips.

  He bent over her in amazement. Now he realized he had never in the many times he had been in bed with a woman taken the occasion fully to explore the glory of the female body. With him it had always been a minimum of provocation, and then an explosion of lust. Then nothing had mattered except the ultimate embrace — and over and over again, until she pleaded for mercy.

  But now, in his astonishment, he cupped a perfect mound in his hand, and felt the nipple grow hard beneath. He took his hand away and took full account of the beauty of creamy skin, untouched by sun, of the tracery of blue, tiny blue veins, of the ethereal beauty of the pinkness of nipple, of a nipple grown hard as a small cherry, or perhaps a cherrystone. He lowered his lips to it, and she moaned, but no longer the crooning moan of earlier when she had been comforting him. She put her hand on his head.

  His lips went further afield, exploring, as he had never explored before. Never had he felt the need to explore before. And as his lips wandered far abroad his hands preceded them.

  How long this play lasted — once again time betrayed them, and they never knew. But at long last his hand slipped between her legs to find her ready for him.

  But then she murmured anxiously, “Oh, Larry. I’m afraid. Be … be gentle.”

  He looked up at her. “This is your first time?” She tightened her lips, as though embarrassed. He mounted her in love, and very gently, very gently lowered.

  She winced and gasped, but then the task must be performed and he thrust with as much gentleness as possible, but deeply. She gasped again at his penetration, relaxed with her eyes closed for a long moment, then smiled up at him.

  He rod
e her gently, smoothly, and soon she picked up the rhythm. It was though from ages, ages, they had been meant for this, for each other, for this moment, for a lifetime of these moments.

  His climax was long in building, and was something he had never known before. An exhausting, both physical and emotional experience, a beautiful complete exhaustion.

  He suspected that she had not met her own culmination, but although it distressed him, he realized that there would be many times with Dorry Malloy and that they would explore the paths of love together. And find all satisfactions together.

  He looked down at her and said something trite in its simplicity.

  “I love you.”

  “I know.”

  He slipped from her, and then, supporting himself on one elbow, looked at her in continued amazement.

  She grinned ruefully. “Right in plain daylight,” she said. “I have no girlish modesty whatsoever.” Then before he could answer, she said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Larry knew what she meant immediately. Not just the bed, or the room, or the house, or Torremolinos. She wanted to leave it all. All of this. All of the past months. The Marcellas, the Lorettas, the Chams, the Sándor Petöfes and the Jack Grinneys. All of them.

  He said, “Right.”

  They dressed quickly, with no shame of the first nudity. Larry looked at her. “Now you tell me,” he demanded.

  “I love you.”

  “I know it.”

  He held her for a moment, kissed her.

  “How long will it take you to pack?”

  She began to reply but then a voice from the terrace shouted, “Larry! Where are you, damn it!”

  The bull voice could only be that of Big Bill Daly.

  Larry went out onto the terrace scowling. The other sounded as though something were immediately pressing. Dorry followed him.

  Big Bill’s ugly Irish face was bleak. For once, he was sober. “Listen,” he said. “All the stories going around town …”

  Big Bill wasn’t the gossip type. Larry looked at him. “What about it?”