“Practically nothing.” That was close to being true too.
“All right, Mr. Victor! I’ll help you overcome your stubbornness. Turn up the radio,” she instructed one of the plug-uglies. “We wouldn’t want Mr. Victor’s screams to attract attention.”
The hood did as he was told. “Talk, Mr. Victor!” Ophelia took the fingers of one of my trussed-up hands and inserted the knife-blade under one of the nails. “Why were you in such a hurry to leave Tokyo?”
“. . . jet to Miami,” the radio was blaring. “Come on down” The announcer’s voice was silky-smooth and filled with invitation. “Come on down to the land of sun and fun. Come on down.”
“Why the rush to leave Tokyo, Mr. Victor.” Blood spurted from under my fingernail.
“Come on down!”
“Why, Mr. Victor?”
It was a good question. Why the hell had I left Tokyo? Nice, safe Tokyo? I wished I knew the answer!
CHAPTER TWO
TOKYO!
Got a yen?
Spend it and satisfy it. Whatever you’re after, Tokyo’s the place to find it. Anything from hashish to hot love, doll-like girly-girls to nubile Nubian lads, the exotically sexy to the erotically sizzling.
Tokyo!
I had a yen. A pocketful. My under-the-table payoff from the most secret of U. S. agencies for a little spy chore I’d performed for them in the Middle East, a chore I’d completed in Tokyo. But that’s another story.
I had a yen. To wallow in wine and women, saki and sexpots, until I’d blotted Miss Victoria Winters from my mind. Vickie was the girl who got away. More. Let me be brutally truthful. She was the girl I’d lost to a fellow with a bed which was obviously more appealing to her than mine was. Since Vickie was a member of British Intelligence and Alan Foster, the man who’d beaten me out, was an American CIA agent, I guess you could say they had a lot in common, maybe even that they were made for each other. At any rate, they were made by each other.
And that left me out in the cold. I suppose it was mostly ego. I’d pegged Vickie as an ice-cube. I’d planned out a whole program to thaw her out. And while I was still planning, Foster was pinning her to the mattress.
C’est la vie. I wasn’t really what you could call heart-broken. But I was pretty damn sore. And so, like many a man before me, I chased down some whiskey and a woman to forget my troubles and restore my confidence.
The woman’s name was Nisah Leyah. She was pure Japanese. She looked like a woman and she acted like a woman, but in years she was only a girl, about nineteen, certainly no more, I’d judge.
I spent about a week shacked up with her. When it came to inducing the amnesia I sought, she proved to be just the thing. She seemed to lack nothing in experience, but if she did, she more than made up for it in enthusiasm. It was one helluva week!
I hadn’t expected it to be when it started. Nisah didn’t look like the erotic volcano she turned out to be. She was delicate looking, ladylike in appearance, almost prissy. I suppose that’s what drew me to her. In her Oriental fashion, she reminded me of Vickie.
But the resemblance was only in manner, not in looks. Where Vickie was a tall, willowy redhead, Nisah was petite, typically Japanese, curvier and with jet- black hair. Where Vickie had the pinkened complexion of the English countryside from which she’d come, Nisah had the ivoried, flower-petal skin of the Orient. Where Vickie’s green eyes gave away her every emotion, Nisah’s eyes were deep ebony and unfathomable. Where Vickie’s breasts were large and round, Nisah’s were small and high and sculpted in the shape of twin pears.
I was nibbling on one of those pears the night it all started. By then, after, a week with Nisah, I felt quite proprietary about the entire orchard of her body. I plucked at will, and so I was surprised when she drew away from me this night.
“I am sorry,” she said in her flawless English, “but we shall have to vary from our customary love-making procedure tonight.” That was the way she talked. Like an old-maid schoolteacher giving a sex lecture. But it wasn’t the way she acted. Between the Asiatic sheets, I would have matched her against any nymphomaniac in the world.
“What’s the matter?” My hand paused halfway down her beautifully rounded little belly.
“The lunar gods have frowned on us.”
“What the devil are you talking about?”
“It is the time of the woman.”
“Oh.” It clicked and I realized then what she meant. Like just about every man who runs into this particular obstacle when he’s bent on sex, I felt vaguely guilty without knowing why. This, despite the fact that sex is my business and I’m pretty familiar with all of its ramifications, including the menstrual ones. Now, this familiarity, with the awareness it gave me of how the female mind so often reacts at such times, prompted my next suggestion. “I know what,” I told Nisah. “There’s an American Western just opened downtown. Why don’t we go out to dinner and take in a movie tonight?”
“Suddenly you do not like my cooking any more, Steve?”
“I love your cooking. I just thought -”
“Then it is my body which disgusts you?”
“Not at all. I just thought--”
“Then why do we not eat at home and make love as we always do?”
“But you’re—-uhh-—incapacitated.”
“There are many portals leading to the pleasure parlors of love,” she told me with an enigmatic smile.
I made a mental note to revise my thinking on the psychology of women where sex was concerned. Evidently Oriental females took a more practical viewpoint than the Western girls I’d known. I started to kiss Nisah then, but she laughed deep in her throat and pulled away.
“First some saki. Then I will make some sukiyaki. We will eat and drink, and then make love. There is no hurry. New joys await us tonight.”
Nisah was a very good cook. I ate much too much of the sukiyaki. And I guzzled more wine than I should have as well. But this didn’t diminish my ardor. I was lying on the bed and waiting for her when she slipped into the bedroom to join me.
She wore a gauzy negligee that was completely transparent. Her only other garment was a loincloth of the sort worn by Japanese fishermen. It covered her in front, but there was nothing but string marking the cleft between her high, plump cheeks in back. Her small breasts arched against the gauzy material; so sharply pointed were they that breast, roseate and nipple seemed all of a piece, shading from alabaster white to creamy tan to dark red-brown at the penpoint-like tips. As my eyes ate her up, she arched her body and the faintest drop of dewy liquid appeared on each of the nipples.
Nisah lay down beside me on the bed and her perfume was an aphrodisiac in my nostrils, Her voice purred in my ear. “You have mentioned that you are familiar with Oriental erotica, Steve. Do you know Chin P’ing Mei by Wang Shihcheng?”
“The Golden Lotus3 ? Yes, I’ve had to read it in my work.”
“Do you remember the tale of Hsi-men Ch’ing contained in it4 ?”
“Yes. Yes I do. It’s one of the most stimulating stories in Oriental erotica.”
“Stimulating, yes. But it is better to do something than to read about it. That is more satisfying. Don’t you think?”
“And how, but-—?”
“You are wondering if I have the ingredients?”
“Well, yes.”
“I have them, and they are mixed. I have been anticipating this day, you see.” She unclasped her hand and held up a little vial so I could see. It contained a fine, red powder. “I shall apply this at the proper time,” she assured me. “But first let us build slowly and sweetly to the moment.”
Nisah bent over and kissed me then. Her lips were soft and warm and slightly moist; her mouth moved knowingly, expertly over mine; her tongue was a teasing butterfly. I cupped her breast and it nestled in the palm of my hand like a white dove. Her slow breathing excited me and I sipped the drop of moisture from its tip. Another appeared and my lips circled the source of it eagerly. My hand pushed the gauzy negligee aside to permit my kisses.