Madame de Gaulle's Penis

by Herbie Brennan

  As against all this, there was my quest. My purpose in life was to eliminate de Gaulle, to succeed where the Jackal had failed. I couldn’t imagine the Jackal stopping off for nookie on the Left Bank, especially if he was planning to finish off Madame de Gaulle as well - not to mention his psychiatrist back in London. Rationally it seemed I should not do so either. Thus I went directly to the ticket office and booked on the next direct flight to New York, with a connection to Washington.

  But my loins were on fire as I did it.

  The flight was a nightmare, mainly because of the stewardesses. They strolled perpetually up and down the aisle in their neatly tailored Pan-Am uniforms and - in my mind - I could see every pubic hair and nipple of their naked bodies. Nor was there any escape. Apart from sojourns to the lavatory, I was cooped up with these nubile beauties for the equivalent of a working day. I dared not drink lest, as Van Rindt had mentioned, alcohol should unlock even more of my subconscious; and I had brought nothing to read other than the latest edition of La Vie Parisienne which I doubted was the best thing to look at in my overheated state. I groaned.

  “Excuse me - are you all right?”

  The flight was full, so that I was sitting beside an attractive brunette in her middle twenties. I had scarcely glanced at her, knowing that if I did so I would dress her only in black net stockings and high-heeled boots. And I was having enough trouble with the mobile stewardesses without something else in easy reach. But now, since she had spoken to me, I was forced to turn. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You groaned. I was wondering if you felt ill.”

  She was what the French call petite, with warm, sparkling brown eyes and an incredible body, lush and firm, soft, warm and yielding, breasts like melons, legs shapely and slender, all of it just crying out to be encased nude in a see-through plastic mac and -

  I jerked my mind back like a savage dog. She was, in fact, rather stylishly dressed in skirt and blouse with matching top. I assumed she was French - the cut of her clothes had their sort of elegant simplicity and her hair was quite short - although her accent had a vaguely nasal twang to it. Her face, which would have been very pleasant to wake up to on the neighbouring pillow, showed concern for the well-being of humanity, and specifically mine at that moment. “Not ill exactly,” I said. “It’s just flying, I suppose.”

  “Does it frighten you?” Her English was excellent, but definitely overlaid by an American accent, which seemed to put paid to the possibility of French origins. I felt a pang of regret. I was of a generation that believed implicitly French women were fast. The same generation believed American women were fast as well, but so bossy they weren’t worth the trouble.

  I actually was afraid of flying. Nothing phobic or crippling, but enough to make me prefer ferries if I wasn’t in a tearing hurry to kill someone. But since she was American, I thought I’d better not show weakness. “Good heavens no - I have nerves of steel. It’s just -” A stewardess walked past. Even without concentrating I had her dressed in three strategic sequins. “- it’s, well, you know, the feeling that you can’t get away from it.” The stewardess had chased away my fear of flying completely and, sunk as I was into erotic reverie, my only worry was being trapped in a plane with so much fantasy sex.

  “Claustrophobia!” she said, misunderstanding. “Yes, I can appreciate the feeling. I get it myself in crowds and elevators. It never affects me in a plane, though.”

  “I imagine I’ll survive.”

  She grinned, showing quite large, very white teeth. “I imagine you will.” She pushed one small hand out towards me. “I suppose we’d better introduce ourselves since we’re going all the way together - Beth Philippe.”

  “John Sinclair,” I said. My mind was off again, fantasising on the theme of us going all the way together. De Gaulle or not, I was going to have to do something to take the pressure off my glands - and do it soon. Briefly I considered Van Rindt’s recommendation of masturbation as a libido release. But only briefly: it hadn’t stopped him trying to worm his way into Seline’s pants. To get myself under control I decided to find out whether her clothes or her accent was the better indicator of her nationality. “Are you French?”

  “American. I was born in Ohio, but I’m working in New York. My father’s family were of French extraction originally - that’s where the name comes from.”

  I nodded, marvelling at the American willingness to tell one’s life story to a perfect stranger.

  Beth said, “You’re English aren’t you?”

  I nodded again and said with English reserve, “Yes.”

  “Are you going to New York on business?” That was another American characteristic. Who are you? What are you doing? Where are you going? What’s your line of business. But in my experience, they were never actually nosy. They just liked to be certain of your pigeonhole.

  “I’m going on to Washington, actually.”

  “Oh - Washington! Are you in politics?”

  I gave her a tight little smile and, since it didn’t matter, said, “As a matter of fact, I’m chasing after General de Gaulle.”

  A look of open admiration flitted through those warm brown eyes. “That’s high level-politics!” She frowned suddenly. “Hasn’t he retired, though? I thought I read something about it in the papers recently.”

  “Yes, he has. Officially. But he’s still quite active.” Active enough to torpedo my job.

  “I suppose you never really stop when you’re a man like that.”

  “Until you’re dead,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  A little later in the flight they showed us a Doris Day movie which I thoroughly enjoyed. Perversely, I have always considered Doris Day the most erotic of all American film stars, a seething cauldron of potential lust behind the scrubbed facade of clean-cut college girl.

  When it finished and we took the earphones off, Beth said, “Have you ever thought much about rabbits, John?”

  I hadn’t, of course - who ever thinks anything about rabbits? - and told her so.

  The Adventures of Miss Day, which had nothing whatsoever to do with rabbits, appeared to have made her pensive, for she stared dreamily into the middle distance and said, “When I was a little girl, I used to visit my uncle’s rabbit farm. He bred them for the skins, you know, but they kept that from me at the time: I thought he was just a nice man who liked them. He had a wonderful rabbit farm. The hutches were absolutely huge - each one held more than three hundred adult rabbits - and he had them laid out to simulate their natural habitat so they would feel completely at home. But he added little touches of whimsy - he couldn’t really have been in it completely for the money. He had little fairy tale houses, and giant toadstools and quite exquisite models of elves.” She smiled faintly. “Do you know how the rabbits spent most of their time?”

  “No,” I said, intrigued.

  “Fucking,” Beth told me.

  I missed the point of the story completely, but for some reason it stuck in my mind. At least until we landed in New York and I discovered Pan Am had mislaid my luggage.

  The news left me both chilled and indecisive. Need I remind you that one suitcase contained, among other things, a self-assembly rifle, a Luger, several hundred rounds of ammunition and a garrotte? This was 1969, some eighteen months before the hijacking of aircraft became an international pastime, so the only thing you had to cope with at airports was Customs. No metal detectors, no security guards, just Customs officials looking for contraband. Many travellers are terrified of Customs men, but I was not among them. The trick behind their amazing ability to sniff out smugglers has been an open secret in the BBC for years. They look at your eyes, and if the pupils dilate you’re hiding something. This is a spontaneous reaction, completely outside conscious control, with an accuracy rating of 98%. But it is directly related to feelings of apprehension and guilt. S
ince my character changed, I felt neither, so I was certain I could breeze through Customs with no ophthalmic give-away.

  But now, with the spotlight on my luggage should it finally turn up, there was, I thought, every chance they might open it and take a poke beneath the shirts and socks. In America, a culture firmly founded on admiration for Billy the Kid, I might have got away with the Luger, the ammunition and the garrotte as necessary for self-defence. But a self-assembly rifle? Since Kennedy’s assassination, it was the one weapon likely to raise eyebrows.

  I might easily have walked away had it not been for the fact that my other suitcase, equally mislaid, contained £35,000 in cash. It was my guarantee of mobility, without which I had little chance of ever meeting de Gaulle again, let alone killing him. So I sweated it out.

  Beth, to her credit, sweated it out with me, which is to say she kept me company in the bar while airline officials tried to sort things out. She was, I had discovered, a remarkably attractive human being, although I was at a loss to say exactly why. Certainly she had good looks. I had variously imagined her in a bikini, lace underwear and the bottom half of a frogman’s suit (rubber was featuring increasingly in my obsession for some reason) and she looked superb in every one. But it was not looks alone that created the impression. Nor, come to think of it, was it anything she said. Frankly, much of her conversation was asinine. Yet I found her presence comfortable and comforting

  “Was there anything terribly important in them?” she asked, referring to the suitcases.

  “Nothing vital,” I told her. “The problem is there are a few papers I’ll need in Washington.”

  “So you can’t really go on until they turn up?” I could have sworn she sounded pleased.

  “I’d prefer to have them with me,” I agreed.

  “What will you do if they don’t turn up?”

  “They will.” Like nuclear war, it was unthinkable that they should not.

  “Supposing...” Beth said hesitantly, “...they don’t turn up before the last flight to Washington?”

  I grunted. “Then Pam Am can damn well foot the bill for a decent hotel.”

  “I have a flat,” Beth said.

  Chapter Eight

  I’d never been to New York, but I knew what it looked like from detective series on TV. Oddly, there were no police cars screaming through the streets, or any of those manholes with steam coming out of them, but the skyscrapers were there all right.

  We approached Beth’s flat by way of a small, intimate restaurant she recommend Although the recommendation was hers, the idea was mine. If this was to be my first venture into adultery, promiscuity and vice for fourteen years, I wanted to do it in style, with all the glorious preliminaries of soft lights, wine, perhaps a little gypsy music. Besides which I was hungry, a state almost certainly occasioned by worry about the missing luggage.

  The restaurant itself was typical of America in that, while owned, staffed and managed by Americans, enormous efforts were taken to make it appear something else - in this case tandoori. Tandoori is a style of cooking evolved in Pakistan which relies mainly on the use of small clay ovens. At its best, it can be superb. Although spicy, it avoids burying the flavour of the food in curry powder the way the Indians do. All of which was fine by me, except that the American staff were dressed in turbans as an aid to ambience. None of this may seem very strange to you, but I was from London and in 1969 people just didn’t do that sort of thing. But, thank God, they were at least male, which meant there was nothing to distract me from Beth.

  We were shown to a corner table near the lone sitar player and handed ornate menus depicting the Taj Mahal on the front. (The management apparently hadn’t heard it was located in India.) I chose to sit with my back to the wall, facing the door, since even in my excitement I had not lost touch with the fact that I was now a political assassin and consequently had to be careful.

  But there was no doubt my excitement was high.

  Beth still had on the skirt, top and blouse she had worn on the plane, but now I felt I could allow my imagination full play, I saw her wearing a flowing peignoir in flame-coloured, semi-transparent silk. Beneath it, I could see hints of lace edging to her black, brief bra and just as black, but even briefer panties. Worn, I might add, with a black lace suspender belt and black, seamed nylon stockings. I could not see her feet beneath the table, but I knew she had on black shoes with stiletto heels.

  Having created the outfit, I then imagined her taking it off, item by delightful item, revealing intimate areas of naked flesh until...

  “Are you finding it too hot in here?” Beth asked solicitously.

  “No - why?”

  “You’re sweating.”

  “Oh, am I?” I found a handkerchief in a pocket of my safari jacket and wiped my brow. I smiled. “Perhaps it’s being so close to you.” I’d only lost my job, not my old BBC smoothness.

  She smiled back. “What will you be like when we get as far as the flat?”

  What intrigued me was her obvious interest. I was part of that generation which grew up in a world not only devoid of female emancipation, but devoid of permissiveness and swinging Britain as well. Although I’d lived through the Sixties with their Flower Power, pot and naked rock concerts, they actually arrived too late for me. I consider our sexual attitudes are largely formed in our teens. In my teens, the boys were mad keen for it and the girls pretended they weren’t. What’s more, it was still the height of female fashion to keep your cherry for the man you married. Not all of them did, but all of them pretended they did. An easy lay was someone you got into bed on the seventh date, usually drunk. A woman openly interested in sex was a nymphomaniac and they were so hard to find, I actually dismissed the condition as a myth, like Santa Claus or dragons.

  Then came marriage, which was supposed to be an erotic free for all. After our engagement, but before the big day, Seline let me feel her up until my loins went incandescent, but nothing more. Once we were married, anything went as long as I suggested it. For about three months, I was in ecstasy. Then the rot set in. How long can you keep it up for a ventriloquist’s dummy? What made it worse was that she was quite independent outside the sexual arena. I eventually concluded she was more or less disinterested.

  In the circumstances, I could hardly believe my luck in finding someone like Beth who was not only beautiful, well built and interested, but prepared to show it, prepared, even, to make the running.

  A chilling thought struck me as the waiter arrived to take our order. Was I misreading the signs?

  “Kebab for the lady and I’ll have baked rib of beef,” I said. He took a note.

  “Ask to see the wine list,” Beth told me.

  “And I’d like to see the wine list,” I added.

  When the waiter went to get it, Beth whispered, “I always have wine with a meal: it releases my inhibitions.”

  Was that a signal capable of being misread? I hardly thought so, but by this stage the worm of doubt had grown into a boa constrictor. Casting around for a way to put the matter delicately, I said casually, “My only pyjamas were in one of the suitcases.”

  Beth’s eyes narrowed. “Sleep naked. Everybody does in America.”

  I swallowed. “Do you?”

  “Your wine list, sir.”

  If there is any such thing as a Pakistani wine, I’ve never heard of it and never want to. Those listed were from France and California. I chose a Nuits St George, a full-bodied Burgundy with more than its fair share of alcohol.

  “No,” Beth said.

  I blinked. “You don’t like Burgundy?” It seemed incredible. I looked around to call the waiter back and was struck by something familiar about a man dining alone near the door. His back was to me so I couldn’t see his face, but the general build rang a bell somewhere.

  “I was answering your question,” Beth sa
id. “About sleeping nude.”

  Which brought my attention right back where it belonged. “You don’t sleep naked?” I asked foolishly. She was smiling.

  “Not always,” she said. She lowered her eyes. “Not tonight.”

  The meal was excellent and the wine slipped down like nectar. The warm glow in my stomach helped case away uncertainties.

  “I like you a lot, John,” Both said.

  Caught with a mouthful of beef, I could only grunt.

  “I’m a little bit psychic, you know.” The tip of her tongue slipped out to moisten her lips. “I can sense vibrations from a man.”

  I gave up chewing and swallowed. “That’s interesting. What do you get. from me?”

  “I’m not trying now. But in the plane...”

  “What in the plane? What?”

  “I sensed you were a good man - very gentle and kind and powerful. I also sensed you were very turned on.”

  One out of four wasn’t too bad for a psychic. “Turned on?” I echoed.

  “Here,” Beth said. She reached under the table and stroked my crotch lightly.

  I almost had the earliest case of premature ejaculation on record. “Was I right?”.

  “Right,” I croaked.

  “I like it when I turn a man on like that,” she told me smugly. “That’s why I spoke to you.”

  “I see.”

  The waiter came to take away the plates. “Would you like some dessert?”

  “You can have me for dessert,” Beth whispered.

  I swallowed audibly. “Just coffee,” I said. “For two.”

  “What do you think of me, John?” Beth asked.

  ‘I think you’re incredible,” I said honestly. I was vaguely aware I was behaving more like a student on his first date than a manhunter destined to make history. But there was nothing I could do about it; and Beth didn’t seem to mind.