And it was over. Somehow, the performers were gone and the lights were up. The audience began murmuring.
“Now you know the secret of the Gold Gate,” Keegan whispered, but she was too entranced to answer.
They drove back to the hotel along deserted streets, the SA predators having finished their foraging for the night. She clung to him and he took her mouth between a thumb and forefinger, puckering it up and softly kissing the swollen lips. She responded with a moan, her tongue searching for his, her arms wrapped around his waist, pulling him to her.
“I want to see your room,” she whispered.
“It’s just like yours.”
“No it isn’t. Deenie isn’t in it.”
“You know, the Our Gang kids were right. Your father would drop dead on the spot if he saw us now.”
“Who’s going to tell?”
“How about Deenie?”
“No way.”
“Why not?”
“I’d rip her little heart out and she knows it.”
A bottle of Taittinger champagne wallowed on its side in half- melted ice in a silver bucket. A towel was thrown casually over it. She poured a glass but there was not a bubble in it.
“Flat,” she moaned.
Keegan got a lemon from a plate in the kitchenette, pared six or seven inches of peeling from it, and dropped the yellow curl into the champagne glass. It began fizzing crazily the moment the peel hit the wine.
“How clever,” she said.
“I used to be in the business,” he smiled.
“I keep forgetting.”
“No you don’t. Not for a minute.”
She snuggled against him, put her hands in the small of his back and leaned into him, staring up, her mouth slightly ajar. She unbuttoned his shirt and ran her tongue across his chest and around his nipples. “They get hard, just like mine,” she said with surprise. She dropped the slender straps of her dress over her shoulders and wiggled out of it. It fell around her ankles. She was naked underneath, her body youthfully trim, her breasts full, and she stood on her toes and rubbed her hard nipples against his.
She reached up and put her hand gently behind his head, drew it down and kissed him, her lips soft and full. He wrapped his arms around her, lifted her slightly and, slipping his leg between hers, lowered her on his thigh.
She whimpered and looked at him through smoky eyes. “Oh yes. Oh yessiree, Francis.”
She moved his hands with hers, cried with joy every time they found the perfect spot, her response reckless and candid and open. She moved with her feelings, unhampered and uninhibited, embracing and coddling her own passion without a trace of modesty or conscience. She asked him what to do, followed his whispered instructions and then experimented on her own. And she transferred her joy to him. Stroking, kissing, touching, she finally rolled over on top of him, squirming to his touch until suddenly almost by accident he was inside her.
She was stretched out on her stomach beside him, propped up on her elbows.
“Frankie,” she said earnestly, “that was even better than I imagined it would be all these years.”
“You mean you coveted me as a child?” he said, feigning shock.
“I was thirteen. That’s not such a child.”
“I’m glad I didn’t know,” he said. “I probably would have had a terrible guilt complex.”
“Why should you have had a guilty conscience over the way I felt?”
He stared up at the ceiling for a moment and said, “That’s a good point. Something subconscious, maybe. I don’t think I care to pursue it.”
She laughed and ran her fingernail very lightly across his bottom lip and he almost jumped out of bed.
“Tickle?” she asked.
“My nerve endings are still twitching.”
“I know, isn’t it terrific! Want to do it again?” She suggested eagerly.
“Give me a little while to recuperate.”
“Humph,” she said, pretending to pout. She leaned closer to him and put her chin on his chest.
She lay across him, her legs straddling his, her warm body pressed against him, smelling of expensive perfume. He stroked the small of her back, caressed the perfect swell of her buttocks.
“No one’s ever made love to me like that before,” she murmured, suddenly.
“Made love to a lot of men, have you?”
“Two,” she confessed. “Little boys, always in such a hurry. I didn’t know you could make it last that long, or that it would get better and better . . . ‘n better .
She closed her eyes, squirming a bit to get comfortable. In a few moments her breathing was deep and constant and he felt her body soften in sleep.
He slid out from under her and walked to the window. The sun was ablaze at the edge of rooftops, throwing slender crimson shadows down the wet streets. The city seemed clean and innocent and silent, its solace disturbed for a minute or two by an ice truck that rattled up the street and vanished around a corner. Then all was quiet again.
He drew the drapes and took off his robe and slid back in bed beside Vanessa. She groaned in her sleep, slid one leg across his hip and cuddled up close to him. In minutes, he too was asleep. It was eight-thirty when the phone rang for the first time. It rang every thirty minutes after that but Keegan didn’t hear it. He was dead to the world.
A loud banging on the door finally awakened Keegan. He put on a robe and went into the living room of his suite, closing the bedroom door behind him. When he answered the door, Bert Rudman rushed past him without waiting for an invitation.
“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “I’ve been calling you all morning!”
“I was tied up,” Keegan groaned.
“It’s almost noon.”
“It was dawn before I got to bed.”
“Look, old buddy, I need your help. Did.
Rudman stopped abruptly and stared open-mouthed over Keegan’s shoulder. Keegan turned to find Vanessa standing in the bedroom doorway wrapped in the bed sheet.
“Oh...I...uh...I...”
“Vanessa,” Keegan said. “Vanessa Bromley. This eloquent person is Bert Rudman.”
“How do you do?” she said and pulled the sheet up a little higher.
“Now what the hell’s so important?”
“I’m onto a hot story but I can’t pin anything down. I know Wally Wallingford’s a friend of yours and I thought.
“Not anymore,” Keegan interrupted. “Want some coffee?”
“Great.”
“I’ll call down and order it,” Vanessa said.
“What does Wally have to do with this scoop of yours?”
“You know who Felix Reinhardt is?”
Keegan hesitated. “Yes,” he said. “I know who he is.”
“Apparently he was arrested sometime during the night, although I can’t confirm it. The way I get it, he was with an American officer attached to the embassy when he was nabbed and there’s a big diplomatic stink brewing. But nobody’ll talk to me.”
“What was he arrested for?”
“From what I can put together, he was editing The Berlin Conscience and a man named Probst was printing it. Yesterday afternoon the SA raided Probst’s print shop. A big gunfight broke out, then a fire. Probst was shot and his place burned to the ground. They had the whole damn Sturmabteilung after Reinhardt and caught up with him about two o’clock this morning.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“The Nazis had a press conference and announced the details on the Probst part of it. I pieced the rest of it together, y’know, a little bit here, a little bit there, but I can’t confirm anything. The Nazis are staying mum on Reinhardt.”
“It didn’t happen that way.”
“What?”
“The Probst part of it. It didn’t happen the way you said. He wasn’t even armed. The SA kicked in his door, shot him in cold blood, then set his place afire.”