by Ted Mark
We were just in time to observe the effect of the fate we had so narrowly missed. A man hopped nimbly down from the balcony just above Ilona's, tossed an object into her room, and kept going to the balcony beneath hers, where he threw himself flat on the flagstones. A moment later there was an explosion, and the contents of Ilona's room spewed out over the street. I caught a faint whiff of manure as the clothes I'd been wearing wafted by in fragments overhead. We all ducked instinctively, and when I raised my head, the man who had thrown the bomb had vanished. Lagula hit the gas pedal, and we too sped off in the wake of the explosion.
"I feel faint," Ilona said, grabbing at me with instinctive accuracy.
"So do I!" I told her, chopping at her wrist to make her loosen her grip. "What are you trying to do? Unman me?"
"Sorry." She eased up enough to allow the blood to circulate again. But she didn't let go. She seemed to find some sort of security in keeping her hold there.
"Was that T.U.M.S. again," I asked Lagula.
"Yes," he said, his nose, which just barely cleared the steering wheel, pressed to the windshield as he drove.
"You mean S.M.U.T.?" Ilona sounded shocked. But her emotions were all cross- circuited, and her response to the situation was a deliberately erotic tickling motion that sent a sexy shiver up my spine.
"Arrange the initials as you wish," Lagula shrugged. "It's all the same organization."
"But why should they try to kill me?" she asked, her hand starting to twitch frantically under the poncho I'd donned.
"It is Mr. Victor they want to kill," Lagula told her. "You just got in the way, and I imagine they consider you expendable."
"Oh, they do, do they?" Indignation made her squeeze hard again.
"Please," I moaned.
"Sorry!" She loosened her grip and patted me soothingly. "So I'm expendable, am I?" she muttered to herself. "Well, I'll show that dirty pig!" She released me and reached behind her back with both hands. The simple summer frock she'd grabbed before was still unbuttoned, and now she released the clasp of the halter she was wearing. She tossed it to the floor of the car and her breasts bobbled free, only half hidden by the loose material of the low-cut dress.
"What are you doing?" I exclaimed.
"Switching sides!" she told me with grim determination as she pulled her skirt up over her hips and unzipped her shorts. They fell to the floor with the halter as she pulled the skirt down again.
"But it isn't necessary to -" I started to say.
"I never do things halfway! If I'm going to betray Highman, I'm going to betray him in every sense!" Ilona took my hand, slipped it under her bodice, and pressed it hard against the straining of her breast.
"Highman? But what has he got to do with -?"
"Don't worry, I'm going to tell you." She reached under the poncho again and her hand slid down my belly. "I'm going to tell you everything. And I'm going to make love to you, too! That'll show that -!" Her legs began moving like feverish scissors.
"Aren't you being just a bit hypocritical?" I asked mildly. "After all, you were all set to make love before you had anything to get even with Highman about."
"That was different!" she insisted with typical feminine logic. "That was because you got me all excited when you came in smelling like that. That was because I couldn't control myself. It was strictly for my own pleasure, and it made me feel guilty. But this is for revenge, and I don't feel guilty at all." As if to drive home her point, she parted the folds of the poncho, straddled my lap, and neatly impaled herself.
"I see," I said, not seeing at all.
She stayed quite still for a while, thinking, her face reddening with obvious anger as she thought. I was somewhat torn myself. My natural instinct was to start moving like crazy, of course. But I didn't want to take a chance on sidetracking her from anything important she might be about to tell me about the S.M.U.T.-Nyet- Highman mishmosh. I noticed Lagula adjusting his rear-view mirror and realized we were putting on a show for him. I wondered just how much of a show we might be putting on for the rest of the traffic we were passing. It was considerable at the moment, and we were crawling along in a jam reminiscent of mid-Manhattan at theatre time. I decided the situation was ridiculous.
"Look, why don't we postpone this until later?" I suggested to Ilona. "And you can tell me what you know about Highman and the rest now."
"Are you rejecting me?" she asked indignantly. "Because if you are, I won't tell you a damn thing!"
"Tact, Mr. Victor," Lagula murmured from the front seat. "Hell hath no fury like a lady scorned. But be sure it is Highman's scorn which remains uppermost in her mind."
"Of course I'm not rejecting you," I assured Ilona soothingly. I bounced a bit to prove my enthusiasm.
"Ahh!" she responded, bouncing right along with me. "Well then, let me start at the beginning." She nuzzled my lips with her breast, and I opened them to receive it. "I was seventeen years old when I first met Peter Highman." Her womanhood continued to clutch at me thythmically as she spoke. "That was two years ago and -"
"What's going on here?" A voice at the top of the side window of the car interrupted her.
I looked up. Lagula had been forced to stop the car at an intersection. And now a Salisbury traffic cop was peering into the back.
"It's all right officer," Lagula said quickly. "The gentleman and the lady are engaged. She is merely sitting on his lap to see better out the back window."
"Yes," Ilona agreed without missing one twitching movement under the cover provided by her skirt. "Is there a law against sitting on my fiance's lap? If not, then wy are you bothering us?"
"Sorry." The cop touched his cap apologetically and moved away.
Our car began inching again as Ilona resumed her story. "At that time, two years ago," she said, digging her nails into the back of my neck and slamming down on my thighs with each frantic downstroke of her passion, "I was oversexed. Now, you may find that hard to believe, but I really was."
"I don't find it hard to believe," I panted, straining to keep up with her.
"At least Peter Highman said I was oversexed," she said, enveloping me with ripple after ripple of her sudden climax, "and I believed him."
"Few are the things upon which he and I might agree," I grunted, keeping a firm grip on her hips so that she wouldn't bounce right through the roof. "But -"
"Yes, I believed him. Ahh! Ahh! Ooh! Aah! That was good! Now again!" She had subsided momentarily, but then she started again, moving in slow, churning circles. "After all, I was a simple farm girl in Hungary when he found me."
"How did he happen to find you?" I was biting hard on my lip and concentrating on the pain to keep from ending matters before Ilona finished her story. By now I had realized that it was sex which was making her so loquacious, and I couldn't risk turning her off.
"By sticking a pitchfork into a haystack. I was – umm – playing there with a field hand. That pitchfork stabbed me right in my bare sitter. I still have the scar. You want to see it?" Ilona was innovating now, rocking with a gentle motion that caressed the entire length of my manhood.
"Maybe later," I told her, tensing my muscles for the same reason I was biting my lip. "Go on with your story. What was Highman doing on a Hungarian farm in the first place?"
"Working for S.M.U.T."
Now, that was interesting! I had thought Highman's connection with S.M.U.T. was only because his wife headed up a chapter. Now it seemed that he was much more deeply involved. Not just in New York – which I'd guessed after seeing him with Ilona at the airport – but internationally. "How does an outfit like S.M.U.T. operate in an Iron Curtain country like Hungary?" I wondered aloud, still rocking right along with Ilona.
"Undergrond," she told me. "But with a lot of infiltration in the government, too. The Commies are notoriously moralistic, you know. That makes it easy for S.M.U.T. For instance, Highman had been sent to Hungary because the illegitimate birth rate had dropped. I don't understand that even now. I mean, you'd thi
nk S.M.U.T. would be pleased by that. But they weren't. Highman said they weren't because the reason was that more birth-control devices were being used, and while there were fewer illicit conceptions, there was lots more immoral love-making." Ilona wriggled tantalizingly, as if to demonstrate her point. "Anyway, Highman was sent to my district to organize small watchdog groups that would put a stop to it and punish the people involved. Highman spoke perfect Hungarian; you couldn't tell him from a native. And in the hinterlands where we were, party control is kind of loose, so he didn't have any trouble getting things organized. I guess the neighbors must have told him I had a sort of reputation as a wild kid in the area, and so he led a bunch of them down to give me a lesson in morality. As I said, they caught me in the act." She contracted expertly, as if to show me that it had been, and still was, quite an act.
I bit through my lip and somehow managed to hold back the release of my passion. "Go on," I said through clenched teeth.
"Well, when they caught me that day, they insisted that my father give me a strapping in front of the whole bunch of them. I was already pretty sore from the pitchfork, but tht didn't stop dear old Dad. He pulled up my skirt and pulled down my panties and beat me with his belt while the whole bunch of them watched. I'll never forget their faces. They may have been spouting morals, but there wasn't a man there who wasn't itching to lay hands on my bare and twitching derriere." Her derriere was just as bare and just as twitching under the poncho now.
"Including Highman?" I asked, unable to stop myself from thrusting upward in response to her tight-clutching movements.
"Yes! Yes! Yes! Including Highman-Highman-Highman!" She was off again, her body shaken by one tremor after another of release.
It was much harder now – more difficult, I mean – not to join her. A sudden cramp in my leg was the only thing that enabled me to control myself. It was agonizing, and I concentrated on the pain, purposely prolonging it to reduce the boiling point of my lust.
"Highman, yes." She subsided, not through, but merely resting a moment between explosions. "He tried to look stern while my father was beating me, but I caught him licking his lips. And I wasn't surprised when he came to see me a few days later. Still, I was pretty young and naive. I believed him when he said he only wanted to help me fight my own evil passions."
"Evidently he wasn't too successful," I observed, made conscious of the fact that her oven of love was starting to rekindle itself.
"Surprisingly enough, at first he was. I bought the reform bit hook line and sinker. He almost had me shouting Hungarian hallelujahs!"
"Hallelujah!" I echoed, pounding the exclamation point home.
"Did you call, Mr. Victor?" Lagula asked.
"No. Just keep driving."
"You too," Ilona instructed me, her enthusiasm mounting again. "So anyway," she continued, "Highman converted me to the S.M.U.T. cause. And just about the time he had me really convinced, something must have exploded inside him because he raped me."
"That's hard to swallow."
"Goodness, you're not supposed to!" She pulled her breast from my lips in alarm.
"I meant your being raped."
"Oh. Well, he did. One night in the parlor after my folks had gone to bed. He was explaining to me how evil sex is, and he went into detail. The more detail he went into, the more excited he got. Then he told me he was going to show me exactly what he meant so I wouldn't forget it, and he raped me."
"Why didn't you scream if your parents were home?"
"Because I liked it," she admitted frankly. "And I still do. Don't you?" She was galloping frantically now.
"Yes." I felt like I was being raped myself. Fortunately, the cramp in my leg had gotten worse.
"He liked it, too," Ilona went on. "He liked it so much that he took me with him when he went back to New York. He arranged for forged papers for me and everything. And when we got there, he got me into S.M.U.T. so we'd have a legitimate excuse to see each other. It was sort of a cover-up for our affair. He was married, you see. I didn't know that until after we got to New York. He didn't tell me until then. But unless he's a bigger liar than I think, he and his wife didn't have much of a sex relationship. If they did, my hat's off to him, because he was insatiable when it came to making love to me."
"He was telling the truth," I assured her. "But just where does he stand with S.M.U.T?"
"Very high. He was the one who gave the orders in New York. Only one or two people in S.M.U.T. knew that. His wife wasn't one of them, either. He played the henpecked cipher with her. But he arranged things through S.M.U.T. so that she was always kept busy when he wanted to be with me. And he wanted to be with me a lot."
"I can understand that," I panted, realizing that I couldn't possibly hold out much longer.
"I was crazy about him, and I thought he was crazy about me. But after that bomb today, I am beginning to wonder. And then there was that business with him having S.M.U.T. send me to that brothel. He said that it would be good experience, that I'd learn some new innovations there. But I didn't learn anything I didn't already know. And I think I know enough to get by all right. Don't you?"
"Yeah," I gasked. "Did Highman assign the other two girls to the brothel, too?"
"The order came down from him."
"Did you know the oher two?"
"Not before we went to the brothel. But I didn't get to know them there, either. We were kept too busy."
"Do you know if one of them was Russian?"
"Russian? Search me." She relaxed her muscles to expedite the search. "All I know is," she admitted bitterly, "that Highman must have been getting tired of me. I wasn't willing to face it until today. See, I was really hung up on him. But looking back, it's clear. First the brothel, then sending me here to get rid of me. And that cock-and-bull story he told me at the airport about how he was doing it for my own good because my life was in danger in New York. Oh, he promised to join me here all right, but he sure didn't mention anything about having somebody throw a bomb at me."
"Are you sure he was behind that?"
"If your pinky pal is right, he was. He's pretty high up in S.M.U.T. – more than just running the New York operation. So if S.M.U.T. was behind that bomb, I'm pretty damn sure Highman must have known about it. I guess I'm expendable, all right," she added bitterly. "Well, I'll just show him!"
She was going like a Mixmaster again. Her laugh announced the beginning of a new series of joyous releases. This time I couldn't stop myself from joining her. Some six laughs later I slammed up so hard that she cried out, and we went off the deep end together in a burst of cataclysmic ecstasy.
"We have arrived," Lagula announced, pulling the car into the curb.
"I'll say we have!" I agreed, still up on Cloud Nine.
"I mean we're here."
"Oh, yes!" Ilona agreed. "Yes-yes-yes!"
"Don't you want to get out and rest?" Lagula asked. "The long ride must have tired you."
"Now that you mention it, I'm exhausted," I admitted.
"Wouldn't you like to stretch your legs?"
"I've been doing that for the past hour," Ilona said.
"He said 'stretch'," I explained.
"Oh. Well, all right." Amazingly, she sounded reluctant.
But she rearranged her dress anyway. I adjusted my poncho, and the three of us got out of the car. We were in front of a small hut on the outskirts of Salisbury. It was Lagula's home, and he ran much of his business as a tourist guide from there. Twilight was descending as he showed us inside.
He fixed us something to eat, and we hit the sack early. Not the same sack. Three different ones. But it wasn't long before Ilona crawled into mine. I was beginning to appreciate why Highman might have wanted to ditch her. She was insatiable. If he'd had her as a steady diet, she must have been quite a drain on his energies. I couldn't see how he'd had any strength left for S.M.U.T. It was one whale of a night, and it as nearly dawn before she allowed me to get any sleep at all.
It was close to
noon when Lagula shook me awake. Ilona was still deep in dreamland. I envied her.
"I thought I might drive you back to your hotel to get some clothes," Lagula suggested.
"Yeah. I guess we'll have to do that. I can't keep running around in a poncho."
"Shall I wake the young lady?"
"Please don't." I shuddered at the thought of facing any more of Ilona's passion. "Let her sleep until we get back."
The trip took us about an hour. We made better time than the afternoon before because it was still early and the traffic wasn't so heavy. I figured Ilona must still be asleep when we returned.
But she wasn't asleep. She wasn't awake, either. She was lying in the middle of the room, a shambles now, like a naked, broken doll. Her body was horribly twisted, the neck broken. Yet there were no visible marks on her. Only her face, with its horrible grimace, seemed to speak of violence. Only her hands, like claws frozen to her ears, gave some hint of the agony through which she must have gone. Only her staring eyes gave mute testimony to the final terror of her death.
As with Prudence Highman, there was no clue to what had killed Ilona. But the twisted flesh was enough to make me sure of one thing. Peter Highman was in Rhodesia, all right. He'd kept his date with his mistress. And somehow, he'd murdered her.
He meant to murder me, too. I was positive of that. He'd kill me as he'd killed Prudence and Ilona if he got the chance. He'd do it in the same way. There wouldn't be a shred of evidence, yet somehow he'd contrive my death.
The question was how?
CHAPTER SIX
There seemed no sense in waiting around for the answer, which would undoubtedly be a killer. Lagula's hut had been fingered, and Ilona's corpse said it was no longer a safe place to hide out. I said as much to my pigmy friend, and he agreed. We left everything as it was and headed back into the center of Salisbury.
"You can't go back to your hotel," Lagula advised. "They'll be waiting for a chance to kill you there."
"Then where can we go?"
"I don't know. I'm trying to think. I'd take you into the native district with me, but your skin would make you too conspicuous there."