Lay Me Odds, page 9
part #2 of Lady From L.U.S.T. Series
I hooked an arm with my big blonde escort. “Where away, skipper?" I asked. I heard von Horstmann chuckle behind me.
We went out into the hall. Helmut asked, “What is your pleasure, Miss Drum?"
"Call me Eve, first of all. Now then, what's on the menu? I mean, what’ve you got to offer?”
His hands spread apart. "Anything.”
"Gambling? A dice table, for instance?”
"Naturally.”
“And—sex?"
Helmut nodded, his blue eyes shining. “What about lady wrestlers in the mud pits?"
"Ja, those too.”
"All right, let's go have fun." His pale blonde brows lifted. “All of them?”
"As many as we can cover, honey." The gaming room was on the floor above the office. We took an elevator operated by a harem houri. As we stepped cut, I saw two muscle boys in tight-tight trunks walk past.
"How come you're not in uniform?" I wondered. Helmut informed me stiffly that he was on the executive staff. He was von Horstmann’s right hand man. He was not there to pander to vices.
I giggled, at which he became all apologies, telling me he did not mean that by escorting me he was pandering to my sinful yearnings. This was in the nature of a tour, no more. "Tour or not, if I can win myself a few shekels, I intend to, Helmut honey.” I handed him a roll of bills. "Will you change this into chips?"
His heels clicked again as he bowed. The table was almost the exact twin of the one at the Bully Sawyer in London. There was a box-man and a stick-man, and five people grouped about the high-boarded sides. I took an empty space and watched the dice roll half a dozen times before I began putting my chips down.
I won, I lost. I was ahead about thirty American dollars when the box-man asked me if I cared to roll. I held out my hand and he dropped the dice into my palm.
Almost instantly, I knew there was something wrong with these galloping dominoes. My fingertips are very sensitive, due to the long hours I used to practice (and still do, when I get the opportunity) opening combination locks. I hefted the dice, I rattled them around.
There are many ways to hocuss dice. As I ran my fingertips over these, I was positive these dice had plastic strips along one edge, which would alter their normal balance. I thought of trying a pad roll on the first play, hitting them off the board down low so they would come off the board spinning and not rolling.
I pretended to rattle the dice in my cupped hands, but I was gripping them firmly between my forefinger and pinkie with a five and a deuce showing. I sent them outward in a flat throw.
The dice hit the board, spun back. They twirled a couple of times on the green field, and stopped with a five and a deuce showing. I had bet half chips on seven. I let my winnings ride.
I threw four more sevens before I decided to lose a throw. I did not want Helmut Fleischel or the box-man to get suspicious.
Then for the fun of it, I rolled a nine and after three deliberate misses, I threw another nine. Helmut was regarding me with round eyes.
He said, "I have never seen a woman throw the dice so well.”
Dice is an American pastime. American tourists used to rob the English blind at the dice tables until our cousins caught wise and hired Americans to run the crap boards. Herr von Horstmann got few Americans in his Reeperbahn gaming room. I guess they were more interested in girls than gambling, or he might have felt the same pinch the English did before they fought fire with fire.
"This is my lucky day,” I smiled at Helmut as he shoved my winnings into a bag for cashing. I tossed a couple of chips at the box-man “Mind if I take these dice along? They're like a lucky charm to me.”
The box-man glanced at Helmut, who shrugged. I am sure Von Horstmann had a big supply of crooked dice. One more pair meant little or nothing to him. I dropped the dice in my handbag.
From the gaming rooms we wandered into a black velvet and lounge-seated theater It was not a large theater, it held perhaps a hundred people. It was air-conditioned and sound-proof.
“We have a new film from Argentina." Helmut told me. "Would you care to see it? It is far above the level of your so—called stag movie."
I shrugged. “Why not? It isn’t often I get to see movies like that.” As a matter of strict fact, I had only seen one dirty movie, ever before. It had been badly produced, badly filmed, badly done.
I settled myself to be thoroughly bored. The film was in color, good color. It was clear and sharp, The title was Date Night in the Suburbs. A good orchestra was playing soft music on the sound track.
Helmut whispered "I have not seen this one myself.” The music flared as the camera panned in on a bathroom shower, where a woman was soaping herself very painstakingly. The bathroom was a handsome one, the impression being given that this was a well-to-do home where the lady of the house was readying herself for bed. One caught glimpses of a fleshy buttocks as she bent over, of legs that were extremely handsome, of a shower cap and a pale white back.
A voice called out in German, a girl's voice. "Her daughter is going out on a date.” Helmut translated.
The woman came out of the bath shower, wet and dripping. She was in her late thirties, maybe her early forties, but she was slim and quite obviously a Spanish type with black hair that tumbled down about her shoulders as she drew off her shower cap.
She began toweling herself. The door chimes jangled. The woman looked surprised and reached for a cotton robe. Her heavy breasts shook loosely as she thrust her arms into the sleeves. The thin cotton clung to her still damp body, showing flesh tints. She pushed her feet into dainty bedroom slippers.
The robe was a size too small for her, and came open as she moved through her bedroom toward the stairs. The audience was able to see a broad panel of her body that included her inner thighs, the dark patch of womanhood, her navel and the full, jouncing breasts.
Holding the robe about her nudity, she opened the front door to a young man in his late teens. He was, as the German voices proclaimed and Helmut translated, a friend of her daughter. He had made a mistake in his dates, he had thought he had a date with the girl, which was for the next night.
The mother invited him in, she explained that her daughter was out but that she herself was lonely, she would be happy to entertain him. The young man was only too eager to come in. As the woman seated herself, he let his eyes rove over the robe where it clung wetly to her brown nipples. He studied her shapely white legs where they were crossed so that the robe fell away from her upper thigh. The young man began to move uncomfortably in the easy chair where he was sitting.
The woman smiled, she offered him drinks, she made them strong. The young man stared at the backs of her legs where the short robe revealed them up to the middle of her plump thighs as she bent over before the liquor cabinet.
They drank, she turned on the stereo set and dance music came on the sound track. The woman asked him if he liked to dance. He took her into his arms and they began to move about the room in a dreamy foxtrot.
She smiled up at him, saying, "You're a good dancer.”
"It is you who make me seem so,” he smiled back. The dance music changed to an American watusi. They drew away from each other and now the robe revealed itself as being far too small for the older woman. As she moved her body in the arms-jerking dance, the blue cotton opened so that the boy could see her naked breasts where they jiggled and shook.
Soon the robe was open all the way. The youth lunged for her, caught her in his arms. He pressed his lips clumsily to hers. The woman laughed softly, telling him not to be in such a rush. The camera dollied in on open lips and a kiss that must have shaken them to their toenails.
The woman laughed and began unbuttoning his shirt. She moved her big breasts against him when he was naked to his middle. She told him she was all alone, she was a widow and she liked young men.
She dropped the robe and began dancing stark naked. In a moment the young man was lowering his trousers and shorts to the floor. He was tremendously aroused. The woman feigned fear at sight of his manhood, she asked him if he had ever taken her daughter.
He claimed he was a virgin. The woman danced closer. Her hands went to his chest and down his front. The youth gasped and stopped dancing. He began to shake, he begged the woman to stop what she was doing.
"I adore young men,” she whispered, reaching to cup him while he groaned a very real groan. "They are always such bulls! My older men friends—pah All they think of is work and money."
She sank to her knees before him and lifted her breasts in her palms as she inched closer to his rigid manhood. The camera slid upward to the youthful face that was so grotesquely contorted. He was gasping, mouth wide open, eyes staring blindly.
There are many women who enjoy sex with men young enough to be their sons. Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, Oedipus and Jocasta, Queen Joanna of Naples, Catherine the Great and her virile young guardsmen; history is full to these case histories of mature women accepting youths as their lovers. Honore de Balzac has made the point in his Danger of Being Too Innocent, in which the older woman teaches the youthful bridegroom and the father instructs the bride.
Psychiatry might say that these women have the maternal instinct so developed that they must treat their lover as the son they never had, or having had, have failed him in some manner, leaving guilt associations. They seek to lose these guilts in pleasing their psychic sons by becoming as mistresses to him.
And the young men who enjoy the embraces of these older women? Are they guilty too, of an Oedipus complex? Not all, certainly; there is a socio-economic factor involved, for the older woman represents security and refuge to a youth at loggerheads with his world. Yet the hint of incest is present, many times, in an affair which becomes a wish fulfillment.
The older woman plays the role of teacher in these alliances. It is the woman with sexual experience who knows what to do, how to guide the young lover along those methods and mores at which an older man might balk. The young are always daring, filled with the lust for innovation and experiment; the old are set in their ways, wanting only what they know best.
Moreover, the youth has the traditional virility of the bull, the stallion. He is never content with one embrace. There must be many, as varied and as unusual as the woman can dream up.
The naked woman on her knees before her daughter's young friend was certainly filled with innovations. Her breasts and their activity were revealed for the viewer in perfect color, in perfect camera reproduction. None of your spotty movie work here; this was art of a high degree.
The camera slipped from the breasts to the red-nailed hands that went up the muscular hairy thighs to the straining buttocks, caressing, stroking. The gasps were louder, now. The male hips began to shove back and forth.
There was a giggle, a laugh, as the woman broke away,
rising to her feet, putting her white arms about his neck. The lens slid around behind the woman now, and the reader could interpret her actions from the manner in which her meaty thighs slid together, as her soft white buttocks shook to the rotary movements of her hips.
Slowly, hesitantly, the male hands moved across that fleshy white back to the pallid buttocks. They were fearful, those hands, but they gained more courage as the woman began to moan and cling the tighter. As was the youth, so were his hands. I thought it was artistry of a high order. The male fingers dug deep into soft female flesh.
“No more,” she whispered, pushing away. “Not yet, not here!"
She caught him by the hand and lead him into the hall and up the stairs to her bedroom, asking if he would do what she told him.
"Anything, anything,” he kept gasping. She enjoyed being kissed, she informed him. All over, everywhere. He watched as she sat down on the bed, and leaned back. He put a pillow on the carpet and knelt on it. He began kissing her soft thighs.
The world of “underground movies" is not the world of the movie we were watching. This was a far cry from the occasional bared breast, the male hand fondling the female buttock. It is realism carried to its nth degree, and made by men accomplished in their art.
There is always a market for erotica. It is as universal as a man and a woman, needing only money to come to life. The rajahs of India, the industrial barons of the Continent, the wealthy in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas can afford to indulge their peccadillos in such fashion. Commercial operations like the Pleasure Dome are steady customers for these blue movies.
With the lowering of certain former taboos, the intellectuals have become interested in the art. At the same time they have raised the level of the stag movie from something that was once shot in a garage to a production that, for camera techniques, might hold its own with films exhibited by the finest movie-makers in the world.
Japan has its eroductions, which have served to keep its movie industry in the black at a time when it is engaged in a life and death struggle with television. The movie-makers who do not produce these erotic cheapies are beginning to go under.
But even the eroduction could not be as explicit as the film I was staring at with wide eyes and pounding heart. At least, I don't think so. For the young man was crouched on hands and knees on the bed above the naked woman, kissing her white inner thighs, sliding his mouth and tongue upward. The woman was crying out, little gasps and sounds that served to intensify the dynamism of the picture itself. A kiss on her quivering belly, kisses and soft drawings upon her tumid brown nipples, lips that surrounded the maternal breast, that hid the nipples in a gentle suction. Slim white fingers caught his hair, directing his head. Hot whispers filled the sound track.
"Yes, darling—oh yes. Down a little—even farther, love. Wait, let me...."
The young man crouched between the wide-flung thighs in an attitude of worship. He was the neophyte before the goddess, the male adoring the female. He was eternal man bowed low before the femininity which wagged his little world, the acknowledgment of man that it is to the woman he owes so much. The Eternal Idol of Auguste Rodin in flesh and blood.
Shades of Thomas Edison, who invented the moving picture! Well, the master genius himself had filmed The Kiss back in 1895. This was an up-beat, modern generation version of that original flick, done in color and with sound added. It was artistic realism.
A hand touched his moving head. "Turn, darling. . . . The youth swung about, bent to his task. And now the woman became the priestess of Priapea, the celebrant of the phallic mysteries, the bacchante, the voyager to Phoenicia. The camera was there to record their body worship, their give and take.
“Soixante-neuf,” breath Helmut, as if I didn't know. The only sounds in our ears now were the sounds of lovemaking, intensified somewhat beyond the norm, but extremely effective. Sound and sight gathered you up and plunged you into erotica in one dimension.
Youth and matron moved and now the woman accepted the young man on her back, with widespread thighs. They moved, they kissed, they were not so much celluloid characters as a sex-starved matron and a male virgin. They did not draw the line where the skin-pix and the eroductions did. They went on and on, turning this way and that, letting the camera zoom-lens in for closeups. I risked a glance at Helmut, who was reacting in typical male fashion, though he strove not to show it.
The camera was panning past the two naked bodies at the door. The door opened slowly and a pretty girl thrust her face in. Her features registered shock for a moment, then amusement. Her tongue came out to lick her lips. She reached behind her and now a young man came to stand behind her. Obviously, this was daughter and her date.
The young man began to undress the daughter. His fingers worked at her blouse, opening it, sliding it down her arms so he might unhook the brassiere. Her firm young breasts stood out naked as he drew the bra away from them. The young woman was lifting her skirt up to bare shapely stockinged legs, pale thigh-flesh and
The screen went dead.
“Verdammt!” whispered Helmut.
Even though the little theater was soundproof, I could hear popping sounds from outside. Helmut glanced at me.
"Gunshots?" I breathed. He nodded and pushed past me, saying with a wry smile, “I am not quite—presentable. But under the circumstances. . . .”
His hand pushed open the theater door. I had my gun-bracelet—David had brought it with him to London, along with other assorted weapons like my dice earrings—but other than this single weapon, I was unarmed.
And I wanted very much to be armed. Because those loud popping sounds we had heard so indistinctly in the theater I could now identify as gunshots indeed. Men were yelling, screaming. Feet were pounding the hallways.
"It cannot be a Black Gang raid." Helmut muttered. “The Black Gang has been disbanded, its members put in jail by the police.”
I remembered the Black Gang and its alleged leader,
Paul Muller, that had terrorized the Herberstrasse for so long a time. These gangsters were tough and cruel, they insisted on a cut—the American percentage—of all the action in the Reeperbahn. They manhandled anyone and everyone who stood in their path, they were demigods in an Alsatian den.
Now they were gone. The Hamburg security police had done for them, and the vicious extortion schemes, the brutal beatings, were a thing of the past. Ah, but if the Black Gang members were in jail, who then was staging this attack on the Pleasure Dome? I thought I knew.
"H.A.T.E.," I whispered, tightening my grip on the gun-bracelet
Helmut sucked in his breath. His blue eyes were stabbing question marks. "You think so? Yes, it could be. They have been nosing around for the past month or two. I have felt it, I have seen one or two of them."
A man came running down the hall. He had a gun in his hand. The gun lifted. My gun-bracelet was up and aiming before he could trigger his weapon. I put a neat red hole in his shirtfront from which the blood was spreading pretty fast as he fell face down.
Helmut whispered a Teutonic oath. "Isn't there any way out of here without bumping into more of those goons?" I wondered out loud.
"Dumbkopf that I am. Of course. Follow, please!” He led me at a gallop down the hall, my mini-skirt up to my hips for freer action. The hell with the show I put on. Maybe the sight of my nylons and pale thigh-meat would distract a H.A.T.E. man long enough for me to use my gun-bracelet again.
