by Troy Conway
Mady Morrow was leaning back into the gloom of the closet but she was wide open and waiting and willing. I got some jumping room, targeted in on her and plunged. After that, we dissolved into a tangle of fused, smoking flesh on the floor. It was a union of Titans. Mady was good. I told her so as we huddled, cheek to cheek, among the mops and brooms. Or whatever that closet held.
“Geezis,” she muttered. “Coming from you—”
“I mean it. You’re wasting your time and money in this joint. Anybody else use this closet?”
“Only me. I got the key. Rest of these chicks are all afraid of Madame. Isn’t she a pip?”
“A living doll. But a waste of womanpower. Her pipes will get rusty without a real plumber.”
“Hell with her.” Mady nuzzled her mouth against my pectorales major and minor. She’d managed in her own primitive way to get some of the clothes off me. “Why don’t we get married?”
“We can’t. I’m promised to a million others.”
“I believe it,” she sighed. “It would be a shame to put a ball and chain on that beast.”
I bit her ear. “Forget us for a while. Would you answer me a few questions?”
“Anything!”
“Good girl. Did you know Danielle Lebeau?”
It was amazing. Mady Morrow suddenly started sobbing. I had my hands full comforting her. The big bountiful body shivered with sorrow.
“Hey, what’s all this?”
“Sorry,” She sniffled. “Dany was such a swell chick. A real gal. Brains too. It was so stupid her running around with that fat old Corbeau character. He couldn’t even get it up, you know. Dany told me—said all he ever wanted was to be seen with her—to take her out, show her a good time. Like her old man, really “
“Whoa, horsey. A little slower. You knew Danielle Lebeau,then?”
“Sure. Her room was on the same floor as mine. We talked a lot together. About sex, the Academy—I really liked her. You would have flipped for her, Rod. She was a living doll. Looked a lot like Hedy Lamarr used to.”
“Then it was a waste. This Dany ever talk about anything else?”
“No. You kidding? In this place, it’s nothing but sex. That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? Everybody wants to forget where they came from, who they were. Didn’t you ever go to college?”
I laughed. “Thought you knew all about me? I matriculated at Denver and won my reputation. And my career. By the way, what did you do to Viviane and why aren’t you on the desk?”
“Money talks, Handsome. I slipped Viviane ten bucks to let me fill in for her with Madame. Viviane didn’t mind. The Madame’s been biting too much lately. Viviane’s spelling me at the desk right now.”
“Hussy.” I pinched her right breast. She giggled happily. Then, soberly, she had a last comment upon Danielle Lebeau.
“Poor Dany. Why would anybody stick a knife in her?”
“Could be a sex crime. From what I hear she was prim and virginal. Was she? She could have gotten herself killed holding out.”
“Dany? She was a sweetheart, I told you. Face like an angel.”
“Speaking of faces, where could I get a picture of her? I’d like to see what she looked like.”
Mady Morrow was silent for a long moment.
“Damn,” she said. “Talk about coincidences. Wait’ll I turn on the light. This’ll kill you.”
“Then I don’t want to see it.”
“No, no. It’s peculiar, that’s all. Dany took a photo once for a magazine and I stuck it on the door of this damn closet because we couldn’t put it in the dorm or in our rooms. Madame would have had a fit. And she’d never come in here, naturally. So I tacked it up on this door— wait—therel” She had turned on a dangling bulb. Light, pale and yellow, flickered feebly. But I could see what she meant. On the roomside of the door was an incredibly large, calendar size magazine-style photo of Danielle Lebeau. I almost whistled. Not even Playboy’s centerfold had ever matched the daring nudity of this shot. Hugh Hefner would have had lawsuits galore.
Mademoiselle Lebeau was a long-legged brunette of exceedingly elfin face and fantastic endowments. In the shot, she was standing with her back to a leopard-skin wall motif with her arms held out and her body poised and ready. The ruddy triangle was hidden only by a tasseled bell-pull which she had wrapped around her loins with all the come-on of the old-time burlesque runways. But you could see it all.
Mady Morrow was right. The face was Lamarr lovely, the dark hair framing perfection. Danielle Lebeau’s eyes held enchantment and seduction. So professional looking that it was hard to credit the virginal tales told about her. And what sort of girl poses like that for national survey?
I looked more closely.
The photo had been on page forty-seven of a magazine called Paris Burning and was datelined on the bottom. The date was only two months ago. I peered further. On the upper corner of the page, left hand, someone had scrawled an address with a blue pen.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, where her mother lives. Mrs. Lebeau. I scribbled it on—look, you can have the picture if you want it. Doesn’t seem right to leave it hanging there now that Dany’s dead.”
“Thanks. I’ll take it. Before we leave this closet. How come the police didn’t confiscate that? They’re investigating her murder, aren’t they?”
Mady shrugged and her breasts spilled out at me again. I patted them affectionately. She was proving a gold mine in many ways.
“Madame swings a lot of weight with the government. She let them case Dany’s room and talk to her friends, but they couldn’t step foot in any other part of the Academy. Listen, I wrote Dany’s address down because I cut the picture out and I wanted to know if she wanted her mother to see it. But Dany didn’t—she was ashamed of that photo but the rest of the girls thought it was groovy.”
“What was her excuse for posing for it then?”
“She never told me. But I got the impression that it was kind of forced on her, you know what I mean? She wouldn’t talk about it at all but it embarrassed the hell out of her.”
“Thanks, Mady. You’ve been a big help.”
“You can show your appreciation better than that.” She reached down again and raised the flag. I nodded, happy with her. She was fun to ball, a fount of information and just plain marvelous. Groovy, like she had said.
“Okay. Time for one more. For the road.”
“The road?” She pouted. “You’re never going to say goodbye to me, Roddy. I want you again and again and again. All the time you stay in Paris. Mister, I’m going to have to talk myself out of not following you halfway around the world.”
“You’re sweet, you know that.” I kissed the tips of her breasts to prove how sweet she was. “Mmmmmmmm.”
She settled back, closing her eyes, letting me, while her busy thighs widened to permit me to enter customs again. I slipped through without any effort at all. She was lubed to the nth degree now and it was like having it throw its arms around you. I was more than welcome in that neck of the woods.
“Rod, baby . . .”
“Yes, doll?”
“What was that guy’s name? The scientist who invented that last move you showed me?”
“You mean Yankowski?”
“Yeah. Yankowski . . . Rod . . . ?”
“I,” I said, “am not going anywhere.”
“Yank me again.”
Sex. It’s marvelous. Truly marvelous. In the midst of life, when you are involved with death, there just isn’t any other way to go. It doesn’t solve anything, of course, and it certainly doesn’t bring anybody back to life, but oh, my friends, and oh, my foes, and oh, oh, my girls, nothing in the world is quite like it. The poultice of passion is good for all wounds. Including the incurable wound.
For the female wound, there is nothing like a male poultice applied with tender loving care.
Dealey, on his last legs at seventy-three and in failing health, given only a month to live by the family physic
ian, staffed his baronial hall in Manchester with the naked chorus of a famous underground West End musical and cavorted like the Petronius of old before his heart finally gave out. The grand old man of British sexology accounted for one half of the female chorus (some twenty-ones dames in all) before he folded up like an umbrella. As he died, he shouted, “By George, I’ve got it!” Sad to relate, no one ever found out exactly what he meant or might have discovered at seventy-three. The story is perhaps apocryphal but it is legendary in sexology circles. It never made the papers, naturally, because Dealey has three M.P. relatives in government.
But he went the way we all secretly want to. Riding high, on the rise and in the full splendor of his powers. A fitting finish for a man who lived for love—or at least sex.
Yankowski, De Grand, Nokama of Japan, Damon—all of us—yearn for that finest hour. In the end, we’ll all go down swinging. It’s the only way to live if you are to die right.
Mady Morrow was panting like a steam engine. Yankowski’s method had driven her to the wall, She was shuddering like a tree in a high wind. I was pruning her for all I was worth.
“Dammit, Damon—don’t you ever stop!”
“I, dear lady, do not every stop anything I start.”
“That’s good,” she gurgled, “kinda like we understand each other. As one American to another.”
“Oui.”
“Wee, my foot. If you were any bigger I’d be standing out in the hall. Oh, Roddy, baby. . . .”
She certainly did like Yankowski’s method, with Damon Body English, of course. Somehow, we had managed to become one, indelibly. My pores could have been imprinted all over her. We were balled up in one torchy, scalding knot of male and female harmony. Not even the long, low thwacking noises that accompanied our hectic union could have been heard in the hallway beyond the broom closet. There was something so incredibly soft and sweet and soaring about Mady. For all her rough and tumble, sock-me-and-rock-me overtures of aggressiveness, she was all sweet and syrupy surrender at the proper times. But her surrenders were no Waterloos. Not by a jugful. She couldn’t lose for winning. Whatever we did together, she came away a richer more fulfilled woman. She knew it all the way and in the knowing lay her great secret of survival. The girl was terrific.
“Wait a mo, Rod . . . just hold it . . .”
She had cranked her pelvic cage around so that she was hitting me from a weirdly wonderful angle of her own. In the darkness, I couldn’t be sure just where she was.
“Like that?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” she chortled huskily. “Now—get going that way and don’t you ever stop!”
It wasn’t a question so I didn’t answer it.
“Ohhh!”
“Roger,” I said.
“Ooooo!”
“Check,” I agreed.
“Ahhhhh!”
“You can say that again.”
She did. All three versions of the testimonial to my priapic power.
At last she sagged against me and the clocks had run down. The little dark closet was a bower of love. We had really mopped up.
“Oh, that smarts,” she muttered.
“Yes. But it’s the smartest thing in all this cockeyed world.”
“You,” she giggled. “What a man. Always talking about sex.”
Of course, she was right. But in my own curious way, I had exorcized the painful ghost of a lovely French girl, Walrus-moustache’s cynical face, and the hovering dark clouds that threatened the peace talks in Paris.
Rod Damon’s the name, Sex is my game.
Half an hour later I had escaped from the broom closet, and Mady Morrow had gone back up to her room by a back staircase to take a long hot shower. I had made more than sexual progress. I had learned that the Academie Sex-ualite was being run by one notorious Lesbian and I had a good clear photo of the murdered Lebeau chick and the address where she had lived. It was neatly folded in my coat pocket. Also I had to wonder why the Madame hadn’t cared to mention the tragic end of one of her brightest students, to judge by the thesis called Sex and Concentration. You see, I am sort of an agent after all. I’d gotten into the snooping habit, thanks to past experience and Walrus-moustache and the Thaddeus X. Coxe Foundation.
I passed the Resistration Desk on the way out. A quiet, madonna-like brunette beauty was quietly reading the copy of Candy. She looked about eighteen but the equipment more than matched the lusty girl shown on the paperback cover. I kept on moving but my shadow or aura or clicking heels made the girl look up. Large dark eyes swept over me. The middie blouse was jam-packed with goodies and a flash of crossed legs under the leather miniskirt would make a sex fiend out of a lay minister. I wasn’t surprised that this might be Madame Lilly de Jussac’s speed. The girl was soft, creamy, a horde of curves and dimples. Not a lusty, busty extrovert like Mady Morrow.
“Come back, Professor Damon,” she called out in a low sweet voice.
“Viviane, of course.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“Oui, oui, indeed. Catch you the next time around. And don’t believe a word of that book. It’s strictly for laughs and sex is no laughing matter.”
Her wide eyes smiled. I had a last glimpse of her, white teeth, knockers and all.
“It is too absurd,” she agreed. “Still it has its points. But I defer to your superior estimate. When you come again, ask for Viviane Fresnay. Room three-two-nine.”
With a cheery au revoir, I exited from the AcademiS Sexualite without further incident. Most of the sleepwalking lovelies in mini-skirts had disappeared, buried in the classrooms of that august edifice. It was quite a temple of learning. Yearning, that is. When a woman cracks a book to find out all about me, the damage has already been done. They’ve got their bets in, you could say.
The bleak boulevard beyond the quadrangle was crawling with French taxicabs. I hailed one, climbed in and gave the moustachioed driver the address of Mrs. Lebeau. Mrs. Brigitte Lebeau. There was no way of getting around it. The search was on and I had to do the rest of my job.
I had to see the mother about the daughter. The cabbie, a lipburner almost out of sight under his scrubby moustache, cranked his meter flag down and droned off toward the Montmartre section. The Eiffel Tower was spiring like a ready phallus in the distance, ready to screw the skies.
It was an omen.
Little did I know there was going to be another hot time in the old town tonight.
Paris wasn’t only burning—it was going down in flames.
CHAPTER FIVE
Danielle Lebeau’s mother lived on one of those blocks that’s maybe only a hundred and fifty feet long, rising like a hill, and dotted with bistros, cafes and striped canopy like something from a Hollywood musical of the fantastic Forties. Number Ten was about four stories high, a walk-up and an iron railing corkscrewed. Madame Lebeau’s was on the third floor back with a gloomy wreath still cluttering the door. Danielle’s mother had obviously been hit hard, considering the fact that the tragedy was old news.
I tapped lightly on the door, trying not to hold my nose. The hallway, narrow and dimly lit, reeked of old cabbage cooking and empty beer cans. It was hard to imagine a doll like Danielle Lebeau coming from a background like this.
There was a pause and then a rattle of bolts and the door opened. For a moment, I was confused. As bad as the light was, the dame in the doorway didn’t look like anybody’s little gray-haired old lady.
“Yes, please?”
The woman looked only about twenty-five and would have given Brigitte Bardot a run for her bathtowel. This one was wrapped in a housecoat of silk all covered with yellow sunflower pattern and a belt that was carelessly looped so that the opening of the coat showed me at least two of the main glories of France. The woman was built like a brick wall and there was enough petulance in her red mouth and eyes to make me feel like a vacuum cleaner salesman. But also, it was obvious right off that this was Danielle Lebeau’s older twin. It was the same kind of wide-eyed classic Paris
face. Only the hair showed traces of becoming silver. Which were probably intentional.
“Yes, I am pleased, but I’m here on a sad errand. I want to talk about your sister to you.”
“My sister?” The woman looked me up and down. “Another crazy American! I have but only one relative and she is dead—oh, my poor Danielle—” The woman glared at me. “No more pictures—” She began to close the door. I inserted a quick shoe.
“You are Brigitte Lebeau? Congratulations, Madame. Unless I’m going blind you don’t look a day over twenty-five.”
Maybe she’d just lost a daughter but she’d gained an admirer and they still counted for plenty in her book. She stopped trying to force the door closed and looked my face over.
“Then you are not from the newspapers?”
“No.”
“Or the police?”
“Never.”
“Not being either of those despicable things, what is it you want then? This is not a bordello and there is one next door so perhaps you are mistaken—”
“Just give me a second—”
“Hah! If I give you that you could have my clothes off in a minute! I do not trust Americans. Particularly ones that look like you. My husband, may his testicles rot from mildew, ran off with an American chorus girl some fifteen years ago and I haven’t seen him since. Curse that devil Gaspard. Well? Will you go or shall I scream that you have tried to rape me?”
I didn’t waste any more time. I told her who I was, what I was and how I had been captivated by Danielle’s thesis and flown directly to Paris to see her only to learn of her sad fate. As I talked, Madame Lebeau’s face got sadder and sadder. But she believed me and the waterworks started all over again because I had brought back tender memories of her baby and pretty soon, she dragged me into her home, bolted the door and drew me toward a four-postered bed that cluttered the wall. That and some poor chairs and few prints of the Impressionists and a vase of dead flowers made the entire Lebeau domicile pass for what is laughingly called a home in some parts of the world. Danielle’s mother was amazingly vibrant and unscarred by her thirty-seven years. She looked like twenty-five and acted like a frisky teenager. All the time she talked to me, she held both my hands in her lap, letting me feel the pulsing magnificence of her sturdy, womanly thighs. Her whim-whams were constantly threatening to flop out of the loose housecoat.