“Till then.” Her smile, so warm and friendly and yet at the same time so loose and seductive, beamed on him like a golden light. She touched the tip of his chin and left the room, picking up her drink on the way by.
I’m sixty-one, Sir Denis thought, but he was only astonished by his luck; he didn’t doubt the luck.
Across the room, Amin was showing the American wife how to play his musical instrument, which he called a melodeon. Her husband was displaying so much fear and humiliation that Sir Denis couldn’t bear to look at him.
Baron Chase came over, and clearly he had at last made some sort of decision. “I have something for you to tell our mutual friend,” he said, again speaking under the party sounds: the melodeon and Amin’s booming voice and the slightly hysterical laughter.
“Of course,” Sir Denis said.
“Tell him,” Chase said, “that I am very interested in making a personal business deal with him, one that’s very much in his interest.”
“Certainly.”
“However,” Chase said, and was interrupted by a white-coated servant. Chase gave the man an irritable frown, but stepped away to listen to him. Sir Denis couldn’t hear what the servant said, but he heard Chase say, “Now? What could be so urgent at this time of night?”
The servant obviously pleaded ignorance, but with a further explanation, to which Chase replied testily, “Then he can go right back to Kenya.”
The servant waited, unsure whether he was to stay or go, or what message he was to deliver. Chase was very annoyed, but also fatalistic; at last he sighed and said, “All right, if I must.” Turning back to Sir Denis, he said, “Tell our friend I can’t discuss the details with neutrals. He must send me somebody of his own.” Then he was gone.
Lights gleamed in the windows of the pink building. Sir Denis, on the point of closing the green draperies over the glass wall facing the terrace, looked down through the tame jungle and saw the office lights on, and was amused: the bureaucrats of the State Research Bureau never sleep. He closed the drapes.
He was wearing a maroon silk robe, one of his oldest possessions. He had left the party almost immediately after Patricia, had showered in the small rusty bathroom adjoining this room, and now he was waiting, jagged with anticipation.
He waited more than an hour. After two failed attempts at putting down tonight’s activities for his journal, he merely paced the room, fretting, his mind full of worries. Would she actually come? Had he been right in thinking the invitation a sexual one? Would he be able to perform acceptably?
The knock on the door was so gentle he barely heard it. Then he stood for several seconds, merely staring at the door. Don’t be a fool, he told himself, and corrected it at once: Don’t be an old fool. You’re sixty-one, you are rich in years and wisdom and the things of this world. There is nothing vital at stake in this room tonight, nothing for you to be afraid of. At the very worst, you’ll make a fool of yourself in the eyes—and perhaps the arms—of a woman young enough to be your granddaughter, and if that does happen, you won’t be the first sixty-one-year-old ever to be in that position.
There. Feeling better, more secure, even laughing at himself a bit, Sir Denis finally opened the door.
She was dressed as she had been at the party, which made him instantly believe he’d misunderstood the whole thing, but even as he was trying to phrase the apology for his own informal garb, she smiled that lascivious smile and said, “Oh, I love this room. And I love that big bed.” And he knew it was all right.
Closing the door, turning the switch to lock it, he said, “I’m delighted you’re here.”
“So am I.” Putting down the small bottle of wine she’d brought, she put her hands on both sides of his head, drew his face down to hers, and kissed his mouth.
Over the years, Sir Denis had read in books or heard in stories about women who were tigresses in bed, but he had never known one from personal experience.
A tigress can be a frightening thing, even when she is loving you. Patricia, long tawny body, strong breasts, supple legs, ravenous belly, was the tigress, and he was the veldt on which she prowled, insatiable, hungry, demanding.
He had never in his life tasted a woman’s genitals, but she would not be denied. Against his mouth she ground herself, insisting on his tongue and his teeth, pulling his hair, while his nose filled with her juices and he found himself laughing into that mask of bone and flesh. He wanted to do more; he wanted to do things he’d never heard of. And he did.
When his climax came he was spread-eagled on his back on the huge bed, she straddling him, her hard hands pressing his bony shoulders down, her sleek belly pumping as he lunged upward into her, crying out, gasping, craving that wonderful warm grotto, cave painting with his semen on its yielding walls.
He thought then that he was finished, and had nearly fallen asleep when she came out of the bathroom to insist they shower together. The tigress still prowled.
In the warm water she soaped his body, then arched and preened and laughed as he soaped hers. They tickled and played and she rubbed against him, but when he saw her smile change again to that intense look he said, “Oh, my dear, I’m not as young as I used to be. I couldn’t possibly do that again tonight.”
“Oh, yes, you could,” she said.
She dried his body with the rough-textured towels, pinkening his flesh and making him wince away, saying, “Gently. Gently.”
“Not gently,” she said.
Still, for a long time he remained unready, no matter how she crawled on him on the bed, how she engulfed him. She had to no effect taken him into her mouth, and he was about to apologize once more and suggest they sleep for now, start over in the morning, when all at once she shoved a finger deep into his rectum. “Ow!” he yelled, shocked and hurt, and she pulled it halfway out and rammed it in again.
It hurt! He tried to arch away from it, but that merely pushed him against her mouth, the tongue and teeth and lips working on him like busy mice at a sack of grain, and suddenly it seemed as though a steel rod were running painfully through his body from the tip of that probing finger directly into his cock. It stirred, it swelled, it stood, aching and vibrating but absolutely solid, and she laughed in triumph.
“Take it out!”
“No!” she shouted, jabbing him with real savagery. “Put it in!” she demanded, and raped him, first in this position, then that, but always with the damnable finger there, urging him on. Deep inside one another, they clawed and tangled on the bed, Sir Denis biting hard at her shoulders and breasts, trying to draw blood from her buttocks with his nails, even at one point clutching her by the throat and strangling her while pumping away below with the desperation of the driven beast.
He thought he was dying; he thought he’d exploded, had a stroke, had a heart attack, was already dead. There had never been an orgasm like it, something beyond pleasure, even beyond pain, extending into some alternative universe of inside-out wrenching unreality. It was like being thrown into flames, or into ice water. Pain lanced up from his scrotum and out the tip of his cock, and even she screamed from it, grinding down, pressing for more, insisting on every last drop of agony, while he thrashed on the bed, his muscles knotting, his bones shattering, his empty tortured belly draining out of him and into her.
And this time the tigress was satisfied. While he panted, sweat running on his body, she stretched like a well-fed cat. Then, laughing, lightly slapping his cheek, she tripped away to the bathroom, and when she came back, she poured out two small glasses of sweet thick local wine from the bottle she’d brought. She cut his with water from the bathroom sink, saying, “No Englishman likes this without water.”