Andrea sprawled across the bed. “Perhaps she didn’t forget it. Perhaps she only came back because she wanted to see you one last time.”
“Try the top drawer of the dressing table”. Sophia didn’t take another step into the room.
Revell noticed a brittle edge to her voice, as he searched for the bottle. He had begun to think Andrea right, when he found the vial of White Linen that had rolled to the back.
“I’m sorry, Sophia, but this isn’t what you think.”-It was hard for him to know what to say. He’d never been any good at handling these sorts of situations. Not that he’d ever had any quite like this.
“No, it is I who am sorry.” Sophia looked directly at Andrea, who replied with a sardonic smile. “I jumped to the wrong conclusion. I am sure you are not paying her for any service. Apart from the fact that she’d never warrant the sort of price that money would suggest…”
There was a broadening of Andrea’s smile, as she derived genuine amusement from the sarcasm. The stupid overdressed bitch, thinking that saying that would get to her…
“…I’ve seen her sort before. There is no way she’d let a man put his cock between her legs, she’d prefer a…”
Anticipating Andrea’s reaction, Revell managed to grab and restrain her before she could reach Sophia. The bottle of scent fell to the floor and spilled its contents across the carpet.
Looking down, Sophia spread the dampness through the pile with the toe of her expensive shoe. “There, it is in a good cause. If you cannot improve the company you keep, at least the room will smell better.”
With an effort of self-control, she went out, pulling, the door closed slowly and quietly. Once outside the room, she realized she was shaking. She had wanted to hurt, to provoke the woman, but she had never expected so violent a response.
Sophia had never seen violence unleashed like that before. The eyes that had blazed above the snarling mouth had turned a hard but beautiful face into a projection of hate and fury. In it she had read an urge and passion to kill.
Still shaking, she took the elevator to the lobby and went to the powder room. It was empty. She put her head over a wash basin and was violently sick.
Andrea had calmed down immediately, wrenching herself from Revell’s grasp a moment after the door had shut. She made no effort to follow. Instead she went over to the television and turned on an in-house movie.
For a while Revell hesitated to move away from the door. Gradually he felt able to relax his vigilance, and moved to the drinks refrigerator. “Can I get you something?”
He made the offer unthinkingly, as he withdrew a can of Holsten Pils. Finger in the ring-pull, he waited for her answer. She was lounging across the bed, legs trailing over the side. Was she going to stay off the drink? There was no way she could retain her place in the unit, if she continued to hit the bottle the way she had been doing until recently.
Not that she could be kept away from temptation for ever. This was as good a time as any to put her to the test.
“What are you hoping, that I will take a drink, give you an excuse to get rid of me? Perhaps though you don’t. I think you want me to stay. You want the chance to find out if what that fancy tramp said is correct.”
Looking past him, Andrea noted the contents of the shelves. “Such an interesting selection, but such silly little bottles.”
She looked up, and her eyes held his. Revell felt himself mesmerized by them. As carelessly as she had thrown the shot at the communist agent, she indicated a small pale green bottle.
“One of those. It is a snowball, I think. Shake it well, then come and sit by me.” As if his willpower had been sapped, drained from him, Revell complied with her instructions — her orders.
Stretching full length on the duvet, Andrea moved her fingers to the buckle of her belt and released it. Unfastening her slacks, she began to edge them lower on her hips.
“When you watched me touching myself, in the woods, you liked what you saw.”
It was a statement, not a question. He nodded. No words would come.
“I knew you were watching. That was why I made it last so long. Now you must pay for the entertainment I provided.”
An erection straining inside his shorts, Revell watched the gradual progress of her waistband as it began to reveal the details of her body. It felt as if each of her words was being stamped on the inside of his skull with a red-hot hammer.
“Give the bottle another shake. I want it to be nice and creamy and fizzy.” With a last push that brought her head up from the pillow, Andrea’s clothes were down to mid-thigh.
She sank back, closing her eyes as she ran her hands down between her legs. They lingered there, with the fingers moving gently. After a moment she withdrew them, then repeated the process.
“Open it carefully. Pour it over me. The bed does not matter. You are not sleeping here tonight. See where my fingers are.” Her breath came in short gasps of anticipation. “Let it run just there…”
His face close enough to feel the heat rising from her body, Revell saw her fingertips tracing a path between the tops of her thighs. He began to tilt the bottle. As the cream-coloured foaming liquid began to pour, she grabbed his hair and began to force his face down.
“Lick it off. Drink it, all of it. No, not so fast — gently. Let me feel your tongue.”
FOUR
The taste was still in his mouth. His lips and his face were still sticky with the cloying sweetness of the cocktail. And there was another taste that lingered…
Andrea’s clothes were strewn across the floor. She’d discarded them as she went to the bathroom. He could hear the shower running. Through the partially open door, he could occasionally glimpse her, but he stayed in the bedroom.
While he waited for his turn to wash, he dimmed the lights, to look out on the city without their reflection on the glass.
Visibility was good, very good. A near-full moon was adding its cold glow to that of the city’s more garish illuminations. Seeing it lit up like this, he felt instinctively nervous at the lack of any blackout precautions. Not that he had any reason to be, the western boundary of the Zone was still forty kilometres from the city centre.
This part of southern West Germany had not seen the violent losses and gains of territory that had happened during the battles in the north. Here the Warpac forces were employing more cunning than brute force. Their advances were far less spectacular, often no more than a half-kilometre, but the pressure was as relentless.
Despite the Zone’s steady encroachment on the city’s dormitory suburbs, Munich flourished. Its industries churned out vast quantities of munitions and other war materials.
Sky-high wages attracted workers to its fiercely competitive labour market. Their salaries in turn drew in an army of civilian locusts to feed on them. Into the midst of all that had ventured several NATO military headquarters.
As word of the comforts and diversions of the city had spread, so more service corps HQs had found reasons to move there. The pressure on office space had sent rents soaring, and land values with them.
Munich was a metropolis expanding to the very edge of a chasm. That chasm could swallow it effortlessly, as the Zone had already done to so many other cities.
As he took in the brightly lit streets and parks, Revell found his gaze being drawn further out, towards the east. Not from here, but from the top of the television tower in Olympic Park, he would have been able to see the distant band of darkness that was the Zone.
In all its thousands of square kilometres, the only light at night was that of tracer or explosion. To show a light was to throw death an open invitation.