Rape
by William Levy
[ fiction - june 03 ]
"For in the world in which we live it is no longer merely a question of the decay of collective memory and the declining consciousness of the past, but the aggressive rape of whatever memory remains, the deliberate distortion of the historical record, the invention of mythological pasts in the service of darkness." - Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, "Reflections on Forgetting"
"Raping is a crime
unless you rape the voters
a million at a time." - Ogden Nash
Name unknown
He stood beside the bed in his suite at London's Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane, not yet sated but conscious of time, shrugging his tall, dark, rippling muscled frame into an angle-length kimono of yellow, raw silk. On one of the pockets, embroidered in red, was a radiant sun. On the other, a crescent moon in black. Across the back, in silver, a stylized jagged-edged lightning bolt.
She groped in the folds at the front of the robe, found what her fingers sought and held him. His response was quick, but he moved away and freed himself from her grasp.
"Later."
It had to be later. What was once Yugoslavia was now a mess. And any place there was a mess was a place to get white babies cheaply, for re-sale on the black-market to wealthy Americans. Some gave them a good, dull suburban home. Others? Ate them. Tortured them. Fucked them. Well, what they did with them was their own business. They'd pay anything. After that, who gave a damn? Wolf Filosof was going to get his share.
Having showered and shaved, Wolf returned to the bedroom. The woman - he couldn't remember her name, Fiona, perhaps Glenda, or Jane, or Jill. Wolf had met her the day before. They were both at a bring-your-own-cushion-and-rattle Voice of Shamanism workshop in Hampstead. Given by a fruitcake theologian calling himself Cosmo Merlin - his works then had a high place in the Tower of Babel - who had shown off a bent spoon signed by Uri Geller kept as a trophy on his mantelpiece. These people thought ignorance was the same as innocence. Wolf approved of these shared paranoid delusional disorders. Encouraged them. He wished to know nothing except eternally to hope for uncertain things. This woman in front of him though had, he thought, something to do with publishing, no, television, a television quiz show and wanted to stand for Parliament slept, rolled up small in the great four-poster bed. She thought politics was arousing. "Absolutely. It's the new football," she had prattled after their session of Mongolian overtone chanting. Now a hard shield of ash-brown hair was a slab fallen over her face, blurring a still handsome, albeit seasoned, profile. More than forty winters besieged her brow. The nipple of a bare breast gleamed purplish in the cradle formed by her arm.
After the subtle abrasions of a couple of hours of doing business his senses were honed razor-fine, intensifying the need that had not been satisfied earlier. Additional children bought and sold. Supplementary financing arranged through his City bankers; BCCI and the S&Ls were blown but there were others with high unrecorded liabilities, almost all others. The best way to rob a bank, or company - so the wags said - was to own one. A great theory of violence commanded his manners. Wolf abandoned conscious effort to restrain the millrace of blood surging into his loins. When he entered the bedroom again, his sex was already tumescent, swelling heavily against the cloth of his robe.
The woman was still sleeping. He noticed that while he was gone she had gotten up and put make-up on her face. Vanity was always exploitable. Removing his patterned yellow silk dressing gown swiftly, noiselessly Wolf went to the bed, eased his nude body gently down on its edge. He touched the woman, stroking her creased throat, caressing her slightly sagging ridged breasts, feeling her weathered nipples come alive and erect. She stirred, opened her eyes, blinked slowly to focus them and smiled.
"Wolf."
The craving was there, heightening his own.
His hand moved over her, pressed between her open thighs. His fingers found moist warmth lost them in it, and the muscles of her mature still supple body contracted. She locked her thighs and, arching her back, moaned softly. Then, abruptly, she raised herself up on one arm, twisted her torso towards him. She bent her head down, her expensive stiff hair-styling rasping lightly against his thighs.
"Brilliant, Wolf - let me feed..."
Class, he thought as a tongue licked his scrotum. Class and finesse. Experience showed. Leaning over she sucked him into her mouth. He could feel her tongue circling, the ridged head of his engorged penis barely touching her lips, her palm squeezing his testicles, one finger pressing and tapping against his anus. Then the greedy canopy of her sticky, newly painted blood-red mouth closed over him. It was a vacuum, a new way of being cleansed. He grabbed her head and pulled until he could feel his two bags full touching her chin.
A moment later her perfumed vagina was at his face. You never know what the landscape was for the other one. Now he knew more about her, more, he feared, than there was to know. Closing his eyes, he could taste her thighs, feeling the texture of her thirst straining against his mouth, holding his face against her thick darkness. The hairs tickled his nose. He savored her, darting his tongue between the layered folds of her scented, sacred mound, and tried to forget she had him in her mouth, her hands squeezing his buttocks. Simple mysteries were the deepest, primitive and blunt, yet hypnotic.
His face was buried in her and her thighs tightened around his head.
"Enough," she cried, "enough." But he didn't stop. The tempo increased, her breaths coming shorter, the movement faster, as he hummed on her hard clitoris, moving his head in tight little circles and flicking his tongue. She began bucking. He licked and sucked as furiously as he could until she stopped.
When he came she held on to his throbbing member, her lips closing tightly as she pumped him and continued sucking. She drank, but didn't swallow.
"Aaarrgh, Wolf," she gurgled deep in her throat from the other end of the stately four-poster bed, "that was a divinely delicious breakfast."
"Share it with me."
Wolf smiled at her with a slightly menacing geniality and she slithered into his arms, her mouth closing on his, her tongue pressing inside, giving to him in gobs, the salty taste of his own semen. At a time like this, he almost wished he could remember her name.
AGNES CHAPIN
The air inside the dusty roadside motel room was close, musty. The signs of occupancy and abandonment. Outside the breeze threw up the blood-colored earth into swirls of gritty soot faceted in sad light. They turned on the noisy window air-conditioner, then turned on the television to mask that whining hum. MTV was on with a clip of R.E.M. singing:
It's the end of the world, as we know it
It's the end of the world, as we know it
It's the end of the world, as we know it
And I feel fine.
"I'm not a virgin, Wolf," she murmured. Her fingers moved swiftly unzipping her windbreaker. "And no, I'm not sixteen yet."
She spoke again. "I know what I'm doing, Wolf." She removed her Pat Buchanan for President T-shirt. On her suntanned, flat stomach the muscled rim of her navel was pierced with a gold-ring shaped as a snake biting its tail, one eye an emerald the other a ruby. Peachy nipples thrust themselves from malapert-ripe breasts. Her eyes continued to hold his. "I've always wanted to with you." She unfastened her Levi 501 jeans and let them drop on her Nike Air running shoes. She stood there in her briefs. AppliquÇd beneath the elastic band were the words: Read my lips. Her lean legs and down-covered thighs were perfectly tapered. She pulled back the chintzy, orange colored chenille bed covering, took off her white-cotton panties and sat on the bed.
Wolf, nude now, bent down, held her, kissing her lips. Their mouths locked, tongues searching, and he lowered her and himself on the bed.
"Wolf - do anything! Everything!" she begged, her body revering his touch.
Soon Wolf arched over the girl, supporting himself on his knees and elbows. The only contact between their bodies was the gentle friction of the slow, shallow movements inside her. He saw the wild look come into her eyes again, and her hips began to undulate. Her fingers clutched blindly, spasmodically at his flesh, at the sheets, at the void. Then her hands clasped his head, pulling it down until their lips touched.
"Don't move yet!" he ordered.
"Please!" Agnes Chapin begged. "Let me!"
"No. Wait." He continued his rhythmic thrusts. Her fingers dug convulsively at the sheets. "Caress your breasts," he said.
"What?" Agnes failed to comprehend. She could only feel, was once more almost at the peak, but he held her maddeningly short of it.
"Put your hands on your breasts!"
"Wolf - I can't hold out any longer. Go on - faster."
Instead, he stopped entirely save for a flexing of a muscle that made the girl grasp with each throb. It was necessary to reduce things to their nothingness in order to restore them to their true nature. He shifted an arm, roughly seized her long straight straw-blond hair, causing her to whimper and her eyes to tear, pulling her head down with a sharp thud onto the foam rubber pillow.
"Do as I tell you! You must learn to do it the first time. I'm going to give you another chance to show me how well you behave."
"Yes. Yes, Wolf." Agnes' hands went uncertainly to her small, hard breasts. He resumed his movements, gradually increasing their tempo.
Her frenzy mounting, the girl crushed and kneaded her breasts, well-chewed fingernails clawing into firm, fair meat. Her eyes were wide, frantic, seeing yet not seeing, staring up into Wolf's face. Her tongue stabbed and licked at empty air as though even that had taste and texture to exalt sensual pleasure. Tremors, violent and uncontrollable, coursed through her body.
She was ready.
"Now!" Wolf rasped, suddenly speeding the rhythm, driving himself deeper and deeper into her. He thrust harder and harder, faster and faster as she tightened around him. The time had arrived.
Agnes moaned, flung her legs around him, locked him to her, hips grinding. She still clutched her breasts and strained to rub the taunt points of her nipples - peeking out from between her fingers - against the pressing weight of his chest. The time had arrived.
"Oh, Jesus! Oh...!"
Wolf cupped a hand over her mouth to muffle the loud cry he knew would follow. Her tongue licked wetly at his palm, her teeth pressing into his skin. Then all feeling was lost in the flooding rush of his own gratification.
Minutes passed before he withdrew. She protested, tried to hold him. The sweat that glued their bodies together made a sibilant sucking sound when they shifted. He pulled away.
"It's getting late," he said.
Trusted as a friend of the family, Agnes Chapin's country club lush mother - a discrete seller of white babies to her Junior League friends throughout the American South - believed they had gone sightseeing down River Street along the Savannah River. Then to Bull Street touring the eighteenth-century cobbled streets, the successive leafy squares flanked by the town's Georgian architecture and expected her daughter back at two. There would be a lunch of artichoke soup, crab quiche, barbecued shrimp, broiled game hen St. Julian Street, chicken and oyster croquettes, ham and corn pudding, pecan rolls and a small ocean of bourbon. It was almost that time now, and Wolf didn't want to arouse any parental suspicions. He hoped to bed the mother also. Again.
Still, he thought, he would enjoy another - just one more. His tenebrous, close-set hooded eyes swept from Agnes' pretty, if vacuous, face along the length of her palatable and juvenile body. It was enough to give him a partial erection.
"How can you fuck like that, Wolf?" A roller-blading rich spoiled brat of fifteen, Agnes Chapin reveled in using brazen words, as if her motto might have been: There's nothing worse/than sticking-out your tongue at nurse.
"I've told you that before," Wolf said coolly. "I learned it in a sort of school."
Sons of Sabbatians receive elaborate sexual education. As tradition demanded, when Wolf reached thirteen, his father placed him in the care of a zaddik for a month. This rabbi taught Wolf about the physiology and psychology of sex. He provided women who initiated the boy into the "101 postures and 1,010 delights of Shirur Komak" - that is the Measure of the Body. Wolf also learned the disciplines of Tsimtsum, best translated as "withdrawal" or "retreat", the technique that enables men to maintain erection and continue coitus for hours, to control ejaculation, intensify, and prolong orgasm.
Wolf had tried to explain this to Agnes previously, without avail. Sabbatians believe that sin is finite. The letters of the Hebrew words for "messiah" and "serpent" each have the same numerical value. Only by enacting the forbidden, exhausting iniquity, does one hasten the coming of the messianic moment, an end of God's plan for the world. At the higher level there is no distinction between pure and impure, allowed and disallowed, because on that level everything negative has already disappeared, or been transformed into its opposite. If this generation is judged worthy, if it breaks many vessels, it will witness the age of fulfillment. The end of time will have entered history. Not on the last day, but on the very last.
"I don't believe it," she said. "There can't be schools for fucking." She extended her arm, reached for his penis and fondled it. Wolf noticed she caressed her breasts with her other hand. She'd learned something new today, he mused. Everything has not been done yet that needs to be done. Next time he would show her how to...
Ulrike Senpf
Junoesque brunette Ulrike Senpf was hardly a native, although her ancestors might have served here. The thirty-something wife of a new-rich German industrialist and investor, she was vacationing on the Baltic coast, staying in an hotel with her sister-in-law and a personal maid. A Biedermeier holiday.
However, Ulrike was greatly charmed by Wolf's rustic cottage in the gloomy evergreen shaded dunes when he brought her there a little after sunset. They had driven northwest along the Gulf of Gdansk, past the industrial port of Gdynia, the picturesque town of Puck with its fairy tale hilltop castle, past the semi-erect peninsula of Hel where campers tented end to end. All in the moody dusk, painted in pewter, silver-white and blue. As they arrived in his Mercedes, a stork with great pinions came flapping down on the gabled roof. Fog blew in from the sea. From far down the wide, empty beach they heard the waves breaking in a regular calm baritone.
Ulrike had ample reason to hesitate. She had attended a formal commercial reception at the German consulate in Gdansk (Danzig) and had met Wolf there.
Pomerania was an ancient Prussian province. Germans had moved back into this part of the world in a big way. Not with a Blitzkrieg this time, but with thrusting economic penetration. With consent, so to speak. "Trade," said the single-taxer Henry George, "is not an invasion. It does not involve aggression on one side and resistance on the other but mutual consent and gratification." Among the countries of Eastern Europe, the zloty was the first convertible currency. Also, there was a demoralized, modestly trained labor mass that worked for only eighty American cents an hour. To say nothing about the obliging Catholic Church. They planned to turn this country into a no-birth-control theocracy. Much was at stake for syndicates that could get in and get out, fast. Fast and clean. Reagan and Bush were global idiots. The final collapse of the Russian Bear will be on their backs. But they did create business opportunities by involving the East Block in a supermarket war of who could spend the most, offer the most discounts to enter prime markets. In the process, they created jobless prosperity, a system of cushy, government intervention, socialism for the rich, tooth and nail fight capitalism for the poor.
Although Ulrike had found Wolf fascinating, she felt no particular sexual attraction to him. Then, of course, she would be taking serious personal risks. Her husband, Otto Senpf, was extremely jealous, but he was in Warsaw trying to get his hands on a contract for pharmaceutical morphine. Even during the Cold War, Poland was the largest official producer of this drug in Europe. Her sister-in-law or maid might inform Otto that she failed to return to the hotel until very late. Nevertheless, there were mistakes she was ready to make. One was being excited by men with a flair for infamy. Another was a scary edge you could give to sex through the virtues of betrayal. Ulrike and Wolf both had come to the same conclusions but for entirely different reasons. A secular humanist and Darwinist, she placed reliance on the transcendent grace of predators. The winner was the one who died with the most toys.
Then Wolf showed her through the house. Evidence of Schmutzigkeit had always aroused Ulrike. Now she suspected prime crime greater than her husband's.
They had drinks in a room of varnished slates of pine outfitted like a cocktail lounge. On the mirror, there was a primitive painting of the severed-head-on-platter of St. John the Baptist. Wolf served Ulrike the Sekt she requested. Wolf had a Himbeer schnapps.
Nervously she twisted the diamond rings on her finger. "I suppose I could tell my sister-in-law the party lasted until late, and that I had supper at someone's house afterwards," Ulrike said, then sipped her drink. They sat side-by-side, perched on high barstools like birds of prey.
Wolf felt something almost akin to gratitude. The buying and selling of white babies - some orphans, even more just individually stolen, or snatched en masse amusingly disguised as "rescue operations" - had created inner tensions and an imperative need to release them. None of the innumerable women with whom he had had affairs and whom he could take to bed easily at any time would serve. Ulrike's newness, her initial resistance provided ideal ingredients. They were assurance, confirmation - psychological refractions of the want-strive-attain equation Wolf recognized as expression of his fundamental drives. A redemption through transgression.
He led her into the bedroom. An international collection of missing children posters covered the walls.
"But I must leave by five and return to my hotel!" Ulrike said.
He gave no sign of hearing. He lifted her tall stout body easily and all but threw her on the bed knocking The Jeffrey Dahmer Book of Cookery onto the floor.
He stooped, thrust folds of her dress above her thighs and hips. His fingers groped, encountered filmy material already soaked with moisture, and tore it away.
Moaning, Ulrike drew her feet - still encased in sequined evening slippers - up, and, her thighs, spread wide, Wolf's lips and tongue searched between converging walls of soft, intoxicatingly musky flesh, found the shiny bud they sought.
When she felt herself building to an orgasm, she opened her eyes, propped herself up and added visual enjoyment to other sensations. She liked watching Wolf, still in a tuxedo, his wavy coal-black hair buried between her legs, his hands kneading at her gown-covered breasts, his skin rather swarthy - deep suntan laminated on to natural olive.
Later they undressed. Still later, with scents and tastes still lingering strong, they lay silently, Ulrike on her side with her hand on Wolf's shoulder, sleeping.
Wolf remained awake and motionless for perhaps half an hour. The sheets had all come loose and were drawn tightly around their bodies. He had retrieved the eiderdown from the floor and piled that on top of the sheets. Now he practiced breathing exercises and prayed, eyes open, body limp, feeling folds of her heavy naked legs around his, her pubic hair bristling on his flesh.
Then he reached around with his right hand, touched the small of Ulrike's back and began tracing a circular pattern with his fingertips. Within moments, the sleeping woman's muscles twitched. He gradually increased pressure. Her muscles quivered, she stirred in her sleep, pubes straining in unconscious reflex against his thigh.
She was ready. Wolf ceased the caressing, stroking motion, pressed his sharply manicured fingernails with abrupt force into the flesh surrounding the base of the spine.
Ulrike awoke with a convulsive spasm. "Mein Gott!" she gasped, her eyes huge filled with wonder. "I...I had an orgasm - or did I dream it?"
"You didn't dream it," Wolf laughed. The technique, requiring absolutely controlled rhythm and precise timing, never failed. "That's called Tikkun, literally the restitution of the cosmic harmony through an earthy medium at the most energetic end of the rainbow. Are you feeling harmonious?"
"Try me."
She suddenly turned over on her stomach. Her legs veed out and her hands reached behind her, parting her plump buttocks. There was sufficient light for Wolf to see the glint of a huge square-cut diamond solitaire, next to the diamond-encrusted wedding band she wore. This further heightened his desire.
"Will you do it like this?" she asked. "My husband, Otto, never will..."
Wolf sat up, turned, pivoting on one knee, and straddled her. Kicking off the covering, he slid one hand between her body and the mattress, gripped her breast. He was an expert in entering the back door. He knew that the muscle holding it tight was on top, and he massaged this muscle until it warmed and relaxed. He wet his penis with saliva and guided himself to the aperture. Easing himself down on her well-fed frame, Wolf slowly forced his fattened penis with its streamlined mushroom-capped, circumcised head into the sphinctered sheath.
She screamed and shivered as he increased his rhythm, driving into her, slamming deep and hard as he could then pulling almost out and pausing. A few inches at a time he thrust, drew out and thrust in again, each time deeper until he felt he had attained the soft tip of a turd.
Ulrike groaned, "I didn't know it could be like this. I will feel you inside me all day tomorrow."
She felt she had to defecate, but arched her back and pushed her jiggling white flesh hard against Wolf's dark belly. She was cooing now lost in ecstasy greater than she had ever known. Together they rode on a tide of passion.
So your husband never will, Wolf thought. That, too, was a form of triumph that amplified his pleasure.
Anne Frank
New York has always been more of a place to sell white babies than buy them. The price per kilo for a very young white child was higher than for an AIDS vaccine, weight for weight, almost as much as plutonium. Business had been good here for Wolf's fronts, The Inter-Country Adoption Trust and Feed the Children Fund. He was feeling in an expansive mood when he used a credit card to purchase an extravagantly priced Post Prozac work on paper entitled "Unaware of Amnesia." Then asked the woman to lunch who was working in that gallery on East Fifty-seventh Street.
"We'll go to the Plaza," he said.
Wolf ordered a tequila sunrise for Anne Frank - that was her real name - and a vodka Collins for himself. They touched glasses in a friendly salute.
"Do you always come here?" she asked.
"No. Only on special occasions." Their eyes met - and he was certain the chemistry was working both ways. She accepted his hasty explanation that he was in his family's import-export business - "a dreary thing really" - requiring him to travel extensively in Europe and the States.
Anne saw that Wolf was very much at ease at the Plaza. He spoke flawless French when ordering lunch and wine. Then he turned his attention to her. To divert her from further inquiries, he became elenctic.
"What were you reading when I came into the gallery?" he asked.
"Oh, that!" she shrugged her shoulders, suppressed a smirk. "It's just a remaindered book I picked up at Strand last night. It's called The Unicorn's Secret, by someone named Steven Levy. It's a true crime story about Ira Einhorn. He was that bearded hippie and self-proclaimed love and peace guru who was arrested for murdering his girlfriend. It's disgusting. Really horrid."
She shuddered, a bit histrionically, to indicate her feelings on the subject, contrived to look shocked. "He cut her up, you know. Like salami. Wrapped up the dripping pieces in plastic, stacked them in the closet of their apartment and continued to entertain their friends there. Really. He was caught when these same friends suspected something odd about her sudden disappearance. Then he jumped bail. That financially ruined his elderly parents. Totally. They had put up their house and small store as collateral. He went to England where he was helped by silly counter-culture types, then disappeared. Some people say he's hiding in South Africa. Or Sweden. The Ira Einhorn case was all over the newspapers and on TV every night when I was in grade school. Isn't it funny though how many people get away with murdering their wife, or husband?"
Anne came originally from Philadelphia. Her parents were alive, her father a prosperous insurance agent. She was twenty-three, a graduate of Stevens School - "Grace Kelly went there" - and Bryn Mawr. She had majored in Art History and wanted to be a curator. The gallery job was her first. She thought it was a good place to meet the glittering art world. She'd done it a year now and didn't like it.
"...but it's too much trouble to quit and find another," she sighed between foie gras and tournedos. "What with the recession and Jake in the Gulf."
"I'm sorry," Wolf interrupted. "I take it Jake is your husband?"
"Oh! Yes. We were married in December, just before he was sent overseas."
Wolf Filosof was exultant. At least she wasn't one of those smugly clichÇd Smithy or Cliffey EMIAsEnglish majors in analysis - who nurtured a decorous, grotesque guilt over their social and economic advantages by practicing automatic writing, mocking the middle-class, serving up coffee in cups made by political prisoners. Here was an unexpected opportunity to be grabbed. Suborning the soldier's woman. He glared at her ferally.
He didn't care about the Gulf. Baghdad survived Tammerlaine; it would probably survive this also. Wolf knew it was Joe DiMaggio who masterminded those executions in Dallas and LA because he blamed the Kennedy boys for Marilyn's death. It was Wolf's Sabbatian syndicate that supplied the weapons to Fanya Kaplan to shoot Lenin, to Yoko Ono to kill Lennon. New Corporate World. New Security Order. What did it matter to men of his three-knotted faith? All prohibitions were positive commands celebrated as a sacred activity. The demonic and the impure power must be destroyed by seeking it out in its own domain. Although free market forces of coercion, bribery, pious indifference, secrecy, deception, assassination, rioting and especially a shooting war, usually were good for his business: rich white Americans wanted white babies.
Romania had been a special bonanza. Wolf had not fared badly at all there, helped, as it were, by sentimental returning ÇmigrÇs. As if on cue, they penned nonsense about a country reborn at the end of the division of Europe. Books that might have been commissioned from Langley, if he didn't know better. Luckily, in America it was always Howdy Doody time. Puppets don't have to be paid. They were all clamoring to become mouthpieces for the liberal wing of the Ministry of Propaganda. The lure of Disneyland proved stronger than any utopian striving and the hope of the Romanian hole in the flag gave way quickly to their more natural political climate: Goniff the Wind.
That's when he pounced.
Let them eat Mickey Mouse.
The new Baltic states looked like a promising area of operations for the future.
In Kuwait and Iraq, however, the only pickings were the sand-nigger, dune-coon progeny of diaper-heads, not even worth stealing from incubators. Though his syndicate had made beaucoup bucks there collecting human body parts, dozens of kidneys and a couple of precious ounces of retinas. These body parts were laundered and distributed from across the river in Jersey by "Little" Dickie Cossack masquerading as The Pit Bull Fitness Center.
The feeling in his groin became painful. Some of the intensity of his desire communicated itself to Anne, resonating that which she'd found growing in herself.
Jake and I had only a few weeks together, she thought, avoiding Wolf's eyes. Now I'm a captain's wife and at night I'm so lonely I want to scream. She sliced her tournedos.
"So," she said. "I'm in a state of animated suspension - oops, that's a fine Freudian slip - a state of suspended animation until Jake comes home."
She looked up. Her gaze locked with Wolf's. He touched her hand. The sensation was galvanic. Suddenly it was all there, implicit, potent. She took a breath, hyperventilated. For an instant, she fought it. But why? Jake, Jacob Frank was a lawyer, an honors graduate from Brandeis, cum laude law at Columbia. A bright young federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, one of Morgenthau's Men, he had retained his commission in the Air Force Reserve - against her advice! - thinking it made him macho, would give his career more clout. Then his unit was called up. Now he's sitting in a tent in the Saudi Arabian Desert shuffling paper for court martials. Anne tried to eat. It was useless. She was burning.
Wolf signaled the waiter, told him to bring a telephone.
"This isn't an afternoon to be cooped up with modern art," he said.
"No," Anne agreed in a whisper. "No, it isn't."
The telephone appeared on the table. Wolf picked up the receiver, gave the operator the gallery number and placed the receiver in Anne's unresisting fingers. She spoke to someone. Said something about crucial, further negotiations with the client. The one who had bought that expensive piece from the gallery a few hours ago. And of not being able to return that afternoon.
Anne Frank sat close to Wolf Filosof in the taxi. A downpour hit. With the rain beating down on the hood and the roof, they had difficulty in talking. He was conscious of the hard press of her generous breasts against his arm, the brush of her flame-colored hair against his cheek. He touched her face, traced his fingertips over her lips. They parted, and she caught his fingers between her teeth, bit them gently. Wolf firmly pressed the ball of his thumb against her chin, then drew his hand away.
"Ooooh, yes," Anne murmured. That alone had brought her almost to orgasm.
They entered her loft that was in one of those cast-iron fronted buildings on Greene Street, dropped their wet Burberrys on the floor, went directly into the bedroom area. It was bright, a sizable room with a fireplace that didn't work. The rain had stopped for a moment. Slanting winter sunlight glinted on the chrome halogen
