It left me feeling a helluva lot better. A hot shower finished the job. I still had a dull headache, but it was possible to ignore it as I got dressed. I went downstairs, hailed a taxi, and gave him the address of the book store.
When we got into the neighborhood, I had the driver drop me at the corner of U Street and Fourteenth Street. I didn’t want to get out of the cab in front of my destination. I didn’t want to look that prosperous. And I didn't want my visit to look that deliberate.
After I got out, I walked down U Street toward Eleventh. It’s a sort of a quiet Times Square-ish area. There’s none of the real honky-tonk found on New York’s 42nd Street, but the same sort of establishments line the block. The storefront windows are filled with bargain-basement garments-—all advertised as on sale and cheap souvenirs. Each block along U Street has its quota of bars and deep-frying pizza and hamburger joints. There are a lot of hole-in-the-wall book shops in the area, and only the address I had helped me distinguish my destination from any of the others. I stood casually outside and studied the small shop for a moment.
It was called The Velvet Book Mart. The name of the proprietor, which I’d gotten from Putnam, was Martin Velvet. The names might or might not be meaningful.
There was nothing velvet-y about him. Martin Velvet was a small, thin man of indeterminate age with the sharp ferret features of a pool-hall hustler. Both eyes were heady, and one was permanently squinted as if conditioned by hours of sighting down the shaft of a cue stick. His nose was long and straight, designed for looking down to line up a carom shot. And his voice, least velvet-y of all, was like a megaphoned version of the squeaky, grating sound made by a nervous player over-chalking his cue stick before a particularly difficult shot.
“Looking for something special?” The grinding rasp greeted me as I entered the bookstore.
He’d given me a good opening. I took advantage of it. “Yeah,” I told him. “A friend of mine told me to drop in here when I hit Washington. He said you handled the sort of stuff that might appeal to a very sophisticated mixed group.”
Window shades came down over both eyes. Velvet peeked out from under them with a look that managed to be furtive and suspicious and knowing and afraid all at the same time. “Who was the friend?” he asked.
“A disciplinarian,” I told him, using underground parlance for a sex sadist. “I’d rather not mention his name.”
“How do I know you ain’t a cop?” Velvet asked.
“You don’t. But maybe a hundred bucks might make you willing to chance it.”
“Just a first name and an address. That’s all the C-note buys. After that I don’t know anything. I don’t want to know anything.”
“Okay. As long as they’re real swingers,” I said pointedly.
“I wouldn’t know that, either. Maybe we mean two different things by ‘swingers.’ Maybe I just mean they’re congenial, friendly, hospitable couples who like to make new acquaintances. You take your chances. That’s all a C-note buys.”
“What would another fifty buy?”
“Not much. A little innocent information, maybe.”
I handed him a hundred and fifty and waited.
“George and Helen,” he said, mentioning an address after the names.
“And for the fifty?” I reminded him.
“They’re interested in French culture.”
“How interested?”
“They speak the language very well. They’re both cunning linguists.”
“Do they play any instruments? "
“The French horn.”
In essence, this cryptic exchange had told me by use of the code words common to members of the sex underground that George and Helen were a couple who engaged in oral sex with partners of either gender. This wasn’t quite the lead I was seeking, but my experience told me that any entry into this nether world was worthwhile. The groups engaging in various specialized activities are usually interlocking, and members frequently belong to two or three of them, or at least have knowledge of the activities of the others. Still, I made a try for a direct approach. “Would another fifty buy me some German drill instruction?” I asked Velvet.
“Not even another hundred,” he said firmly. “Don’t you read the papers? They’re really cracking down on the Huns. That big case in jersey recently pointed the finger at a lot of Prussians around the country.”
“There must be some discipline,” I said pointedly.
“Nope. People are even afraid to spank their kids any more.”
“Tell me more about George and Helen,” I suggested.
“Nope. I said too much already. I don’t even know them personally. All I know is I hear they’re real hospitable to married couples with the same interests they have.”
“Couples?” That brought me up short. “What about bachelors? ”
“Nix. Strictly young marrieds. They like to keep everything even. They don’t want any squares and they figure you have to be married to be sophisticated enough for them. If you’re not married—” He shrugged and tucked the hundred and fifty more snugly into his pocket.
“I am,” I assured him.
“Then I’ll see that they expect you, uh—?”
I realized he wanted a name and he didn’t much care if it was a real name or not. “Steve,” I told him.
“Okay, Steve. Drop around again sometime.” He said it in a way that left no doubt the interview was over.
I left figuring that he’d be on the wire to George and Helen as soon as I was out the door. Probably he had some sort of deal with them for steering “swingers” their way. I didn’t give it too much thought. There was something else bugging me. And it was something I had to solve before dropping in on George and Helen. The problem was—
Since I was going to join a wife-swapping club, where was I going to get a wife to swap?
chapter THREE
I RECRUITED HER. Or maybe, drafted would be a better description. Yep, I drafted me an ever-lovin’ wife from right out of the eagerly waiting arms of a select group of U. S. congressmen. And I had to beat out a mighty powerful lobby to do it.
To explain-— My make-believe Mrs. Victor was really an upper-bracket call girl named Hortense-—last name deliberately lost to posterity. Hortense was one of a particular group of such ladies of the night whose services were pretty much monopolized by an important firm of lobbyists. Persuasion being the profession of these lobbyists, they had found that when it came to persuading legislators to vote the way they wanted them to, Hortense and her sisters were unsurpassed. Indeed, the persuasive powers of these girls was so potent that when lesser play-for-pay lassies were fleeing Washington in the wake of the Bobby Baker contretemps6 , they not only kept on working steadily, but even aided in softening the harsh judgments of some of the policy-makers who were publicly the most outraged by Baker's tart.
The day that I contacted her, Hortense was scheduled for some intimate and private congressional investigation. Her lobbyist employers had selected her personally to make a committee head see the light. It wasn’t easy to convince her that my needs took precedence.
If it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d known Hortense for some time, and that she owed me a favor, I doubt that I could even have talked her into coming up to my hotel room to discuss what I had in mind. I’d first met her a few years back when I was doing an O. R. G. Y. survey on the experiences of hundred-dollar-a-night-and-up7 call girls. How I’d managed to have pressure brought to bear on her and other girls to cooperate is a long story. Suffice it to say that Hortense did cooperate. Then, when I was further along with the survey, we both found ourselves at the same “party” one night. The affair was raided. It happened that I had some connections in the particular city where this occurred. As soon as I identified myself, I was released on the grounds that I was a social scientist doing research work. If the cop who signed me out of the calaboose smirked at the designation, it was nothing to the dirty look he gave me when I insisted that Hortense was my assistant and arranged for her release as well. I did it on the spur of the moment and only because she’d been so pleasant when I interviewed her. Her appreciation had taken the form of writing me a few months later to tell me she was “working” in Washington. She enclosed a phone number so I could call her if ever I was in town.