Of necessity, I was sprawled on the bed. There was only one chair in the room, a severe, straight-backed piece of furniture, and it was already occupied—by a bidet. So Domino had to kneel beside me to inaugurate the feathery chin-chucking.
Being ticklish, I automatically grabbed her wrist to make her stop. I hadn’t grabbed very hard, and I hadn’t meant to pull her toward me, but she sprawled over me as if I’d deliberately yanked her off balance. Her face was very close to mine, the lips parted, the eyes half-closed. The quick way she was breathing confirmed the invitation.
I kissed her. It was a long, deep kiss, and it ended only when she started teasing me with that damn goose feather again. I tried to wrench it from her grasp, but she pulled away, giggling. Another grab on my part, and then we were wrestling on the bed.
Domino held the quill to her breasts, and so that’s where I grabbed. She laughed again, excitedly, as my hands moved over her breasts. She wasn’t wearing any bra under the harsh wool of her dress, and I could feel the warmth of her flesh. I let my hands linger there and was rewarded by the hard-straining feel of her breast tips growing rigid.
Now she tickled the back of my neck with the feather again. I held her hand at a safer distance, and with my other hand I pushed the long black skirt up over the heavy stockings until I could see the quivering flesh above their tops. She grew quiet as my hand moved higher. Her thighs parted obligingly as I brushed the half-slip out of the way and found she wasn’t wearing any panties either. Her femininity pulsed against my hand for a moment, and then she pulled gently away. “Just a minute,” she told me, her voice deep and throaty.
Domino stood up. She kicked off her shoes and bent to remove her stockings. Then she unbuttoned the dress and pulled it off over her head. She, stood there a moment wearing only her half-slip, and I studied her with admiration. Her slim-hipped figure with its long legs, narrow waist, and imposing breasts was alive with sensuality. The long, maroon nipples seemed to beckon to me.
I responded. I got up off the bed and quickly shucked off my clothes. Last of all, when I was naked, I bent to remove my socks and shoes. A gentleman never makes love with his shoes on. I believe Errol Flynn made that observation. He paid for it with a front-page scandal. Now I too was about to learn something about the high price of being a gentleman.
As I stood there, doubled over, fumbling with my shoelace, the door to the room suddenly opened and I was hit from the rear. It happened before I realized that Domino and I suddenly had company. “What the—-?!” I exclaimed. But it was too late. They were on me by then.
It was the three girls I’d seen out at the clothesline before. The middle-aged woman was behind them, as if directing the operation. When I struggled, Domino came to their aid, and I was no match for the four of them. Without a word, they tied my hands to my ankles and my calves to the bedpost, and left. The door closed behind them, and once again I was alone with Domino.
“How did you know to come here, Mr. Victor?” That’s how she began. I wondered for a brief instant how she knew my name. I stopped wondering as the indescribable sensation swept over me when Domino delicately dipped the tip of the feather between my thighs from behind so that the spheres of my manhood swayed ever so slightly.
"Ha-ha-ha-ho-ho-ho-hee-hee-hee-ha-ho-ha-hee!” Thus it started.
It kept up for a while before the pause. But now the pause was over and Domino was about to resume the feathery torture again. I gritted my teeth against the upside-down view of her approaching with the feather extended toward my haunches.
“Why did you kill our man in Manila?”
Manila again! What did it mean? “I didn’t kill anybody in Manila!” I tried to tell her.
She ignored my protest. The feather wiggled again.
“Ha-ha-ho—ho-hee-hee! ”
I'd never thought back in London two days before that Malta would turn out to be such a lot of laughs.
"Hee-hee-hee-hee-ho-ho-ho-ho—ho-ha-ha—ha-ha-hee-ha- ho-ha-hee! ”
Yep! I was really tickled pink!
chapter two
LONDON. Sex was simpler there. No feather-wielding sado-sirens. No getting all tied up in knots. No erotic quiz shows. Relations, so to speak, were a lot less ticklish.
Still, they weren’t altogether uncomplicated. Nothing is where Charles Putnam is involved. He has a positive knack for taking the edge off my sex life. For instance, consider the way in which he’d arranged to have the particular message summoning me brought to my attention. The so-and-so had inserted it where he knew I’d be sure to find it. He’d placed it between the plump and highly erotic nether cheeks of a semi-pro British joy-girl named Gladys1 .
It was a late date. When I phoned Gladys, she’d said the early part of her evening would be taken up with “han holder gentleman, ha real toff.” She’d agreed to leave the door off the latch so I could let myself in after he’d gone. It was after midnight when I got there, and Gladys was sound asleep on the bed, naked, the note from Putnam waving from her derriere.
My ego was hurt, having to take Putnam’s seconds, even if they were far from sloppy. And my performance was off, my mind distracted equally by Gladys’s sighs over “the henergy hof the hold gent” and the ominous reference to S.M.U.T. in the note. So I didn’t linger. I gave Gladys a sort of schoolboy promise to improve, and left to see Putnam.
He was as imperturbable as ever. “A remarkable young lady,” he commented with his usual staid attitude when I asked him how he liked Gladys. “There are times when I envy you your work, Mr. Victor.”
“And there are times when you poach on my preserves,” I pointed out.
“Your preserves?” His gray, monkeylike eyebrows shot up to his jagged hairline. “Surely the particular pot under discussion is in the public domain.”
He had me there. Gladys was anything but exclusive. The numbers of men who’d climbed aboard her erotic trolley were legion; indeed, she was sort of a one-girl British rapid transit facility. Still, it galled me that Putnam of all people should have preceded me aboard. Gladys may have long since gone public, but she might have been a little more discriminating in her transactions. But how could I blame her? How could she have known that Putnam would use her lush bottom as a mail-drop?
“Something tells me you’re going to get me into a lot worse jam,” I told Putnam now.
“You’ve become cynical, Mr. Victor.”
“I may not be bright, but I learn something from experience,” I told him. “And every time you con me into an operation, it comes up smelling danger.”
It was true. I’d dodged bullets, knives, bombs, and what-have-you at Putnam’s behest in the past. Every time he waved the stars-and-bars under my nose, it meant he expected me to lay my life on the line. I suppose it was part of his job to get me to risk my neck.
His job? Officially, it doesn’t exist. Which isn’t surprising, because officially Charles Putnam doesn’t exist. But then why should he? The first time I’d met him he told me that Charles Putnam wasn’t his real name. Since then I’d come to the conclusion that he didn’t have a real name. In my more paranoid moments, I thought of him as either a government machine with a serial number, or some sort of nameless monster which periodically crawled out from under a rock in my subconscious. Yes, a monster prodding my conscience to patriotism—that was Charles Putnam.
Still, he was real enough, and much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t deny him his reality. No, there was no denying the bulky figure in the impeccably styled smoking jacket with the mashed-up goon-face topped by steel-gray hair above it. As usual, the incongruity of Charles Putnam struck me as I sat across from him. He looked like a second-rate plug-ugly with too many beatings under his belt, but his grooming, his dress, his manners, his bearing were all smoothly aristocratic. It was as if he was some sort of visibly split personality which, I suppose, was right in keeping with his function.