It was marvelous to be involved with such a creature, not much good for anything, he thought, except to screw. He'd been contemptuous of her at first, had found her utterly moronic, but after a while, when she'd reduced him to the state of a happy animal, he began to find great virtue in her guiltless pursuit of sex. He let her lead him then, turned his body over to her to use. And use it she did, pleasuring and exhausting him, restoring his vigor, curing his insomnia, sweeping away the worries that had been cluttering up his mind.
She even had him doing calisthenics now. ("Got to work off all the flab, Dan! Got to get yourself back in shape!") She taught him how to jog in place and stand on his head against the wall. He did a dozen pushups every morning and skipped rope nude at night.
At first her addiction to athletics put him off. They'd be screwing away, lost in a rhythmic daze, and then he'd begin to hear her counting off the strokes. "One, two, three, four!" Christ! It was like being in boot camp or training at a YMCA gym. But eventually he got used to it, and her athletic imagery too. The more he thought about it, the more impressed he was by her imaginative powers. Going to bed was "going to the mats." Afterward they'd "hit the showers," then have a "skull session" to figure out "new plays." When she wasn't ready, and needed more oral stimulation, she'd suggest he "take another lap."
She was full of tricks too, such as fondling his organ through the rough mesh of her pantyhose, or taking the rubber band off her ponytail and letting her long hair fall upon his genitals like a gentle, tickling rain. She'd shake her head slowly then, side to side, using her hair to arouse.
Sometimes she called him up at the office to ask if he was "horny" or to make an obscene suggestion in her cheerful, breathy voice. She was a maniac for oral sex, and would suggest it to him at the oddest times. "I want to give you head, Dan," she whispered once at a reception for the officers of a Sixth Fleet submarine. Christ-she was unbelievable. He couldn't think of anything but her golden pubic fleece. Once she came into La Colombe when he was down on his hands and knees helping Zvegintzov fix his ice cream freezer. At the sight of her calves (she was wearing shorts) he trembled so much he dropped his screwdriver on the floor.
From the beginning he'd been worried about Foster, and what he'd do if he found out. But Foster was obtuse. Or, as Jackie put it: "He doesn't know his ass." She said awful things about him, revealed intimate details that made Lake wince, such as how, after jogging, he "couldn't get it up," or describing how she'd caught him once "whacking off in the john." Their marriage sounded as rotten as his and Janet's, the difference being that they'd tried to spice it up. She told how the Codds had approached them about the possibilities of "doing a quartet," and then how negotiations had broken down when she and Foster had viewed them in bathing garb beside Percy Bainbridge's pool.
Still he was wary, and one time badly scared. Shortly after the beginning of the affair Foster burst into his office clutching a copy of the Depeche de Tanger. He plunked the paper down in the middle of the desk, then stabbed at Robin Scott's gossip column with his thumb. "Get a load of this," he said, pointing to a passage underlined.
Lake read it slowly, then looked up, expecting Foster to punch him in the teeth.
But Foster was laughing. "Get it?" he asked. "Uganda! A major power! Jesus-what a joke!"
"Uganda?" Lake searched his face. He couldn't follow Foster's drift.
"It's Fufu, Dan. Hell-I thought you knew. He's got mistresses all over town."
Lake was incredulous. Was Foster really such a fool? There it was in black and white, a clear reference to Jackie and himself. "A senior representative of a major power," Scott had written, "making whoopee in a big black car." Could anything be more incriminating than that? He wondered if Foster was playing dumb. But that night Jackie reassured him. "He doesn't know shit from shinola," she said, handing him a kif cigarette.
She'd been trying for a month to turn him on to pot, but he'd been resisting as best he could. "It's groovy," she told him, "prolongs orgasms, stuff like that." She showed him how to inhale the smoke, then hold it in his lungs.
He didn't like it. It made him dizzy. He much preferred to drink. "Come on, Dan-don't be a stiff. You've got to smoke the local grass to understand a place." He told her he didn't give a damn about understanding Tangier, but when she convinced him finally to share a joint, he felt like a buoy floating loose at sea.
In the early days he'd picked her up on street corners, then driven her out to the lovers' lane at Rimilat. But after they read about themselves in Robin's column, they began meeting in his office late at night. They'd screw like crazy there, while Janet slept in the adjoining residence, and Foster, dozing in his flat, assumed Jackie was out for an evening jog. After a while, however, these quick, impassioned meetings were insufficient to their needs. They longed for more subtle, extended sessions, free of fear that their spouses might intrude.
It had been easy persuading Janet to take the boys to Minnesota. Getting rid of Foster had been something else. Lake devised the political reporting project to get him out of the building. Then he met with Jackie in the empty residence and made love to her for hours at a time. Foster, however, was energetic, and began to turn up at odd moments with hysterical reports. He claimed conditions in Tangier were not so placid as they seemed. He said the city was ready to erupt.
"Nonsense," Lake told him, evading Foster's eyes, his own hand in his pocket nursing his sore cock beneath the desk. "Where do you get this stuff, for Christ's sake? The town's prosperous. The lousy tourist season's at its height."
"Well-I've been sniffing around, Dan, just like you said. I've been getting the Moroccan point of view."
"And?"
"And they're pissed, Dan. There's too much corruption. And the government's started up a draft. Seems the King's Saharan initiatives chewed up his army. He needs new recruits, so they're drafting them like crazy-one man from each family, they say, to fight dissident tribesmen in the south. There's a lot of tension now. The people don't like it, especially in Dradeb. A lot of anger in the city now. The lid's about to blow."
"Jesus, Foster, how many times have I got to tell you? In the foreign service we don't use words like 'pissed.' "
"Sorry."
"You've got to be specific. Impressions aren't enough."
"I've got specifics. Like this business about the soup."
"What business? What soup?" Lake shook his head, annoyed.
"This Ramadan thing," Foster explained. "It's really got Dradeb riled. See-there's this tradition. On the first night of Ramadan the King gives soup to the poor. Harira soup, to break the fast-it's supposed to be rich, full of vegetables and meat Anyway, this year the King paid for it, but as the money trickled down all the middlemen took their cut. By the time the soup got to Dradeb it was nothing but this thin brown goo."
"So, what did they expect? Everyone knows there's graft."
Foster shook his head. "They're agitators down there, Dan. Like this surgeon guy, Achar. He went around with the soup truck making speeches. Ladled the stuff onto the ground. Said it symbolized the country's rot."
"Yeah? What else did he say?"
"A lot of stuff against the regime. Very antiforeigner too. Like it was all a plot or something, and the people didn't have to take it anymore."
"Hmmm," said Lake, taking all this in. "Maybe you're on to something after all. Write it up and we'll report it to Rabat. Put it in decent English if you can."