and living large. I like these conferences: I can get away from Hilda and cut loose party like a young thing again. The awards dinner is over and I split off with a couple of younger fellows I know vaguely, which is how we end up in the casino. I don't usually gamble much but I'm on a winning streak at the wheel, and all the ladies love a winning streak; between the brandy, the Cohiba panatelas, and the babe who's attached herself to my shoulder — a call girl, naturlich but classy — I'm having the time of my life. She leans against me and suggests I might cash in my winnings, and this strikes me as a good idea. After all, if I keep gambling, my streak will end sooner or later, won't it? Let it pay for her tonight.
We're in the lift, heading up to my room on the fourteenth floor, and she's nuzzling up against me. I haven't felt smooth flesh like this in ... too long. Hilda was never like that and since the kids the only side of her body she's shown me is the sharp edge of her tongue: serves her right if I enjoy myself once in a while. The babe's got her arms around me inside my jacket and I can feel her body through her dress.
Wow. This has been a day to remember! We cuddle some more and I lead her to my room, tiptoeing — she's giggling quietly, telling me not to make a noise, not to disturb the neighbors — and I get the door open and she tells me to go wait in the bathroom while she gets ready. How much does she want? I ask. She shakes her head and says, Two hundred but only if I'm happy. Well, how can I refuse an offer like that?
In the bathroom I take my shoes off, remove my jacket and tie — enough. She calls to say she's ready, and I open the door. She's lying on the bed, in a provocative position that still allows her to see me. She's taken off her dress: smooth, stocking-clad thighs and a waterfall of pure corn-silk hair, blue eyes like ice diamonds that I can fall into and drown.
My heart is pounding as if I've run a marathon, or I'm about to have a heart attack. She's smiling at me, hungry, needy; I take a step forwards. My back is clammy with cold sweat and my crotch feels like a steel bar, painfully erect. I need her like I've never needed a woman before. Another step. Another.
She smiles and kneels on the carpet in front of me, opening her mouth to take me in. I dread her touch, even though I blindly crave it. Tap-dancing on the third rail, I think fuzzily, trying to force my paralyzed ribs to take a racking breath of air as she reaches out to touch me.
'Uh-uh!'
I open my eyes. It's dark in the hotel room, my heart's hammering, and I'm lying in a puddle of cold sweat with an erection like a lump of wood and a ghastly sense of horror squatting on my chest. 'Uh!' All I can do is grunt feebly. I flail for a bit, then shove the clammy sheet away from me.
I'm erect — and it's not like waking from an erotic dream, it's more like someone's using a farmyard device to milk me. 'Ugh.' I begin to sit up, meaning to go to the bathroom and towel my back off, and right then I come.
It's weird, and wonderful, like no orgasm I've ever had before. It seems to go on and on forever, scratching the unscratchable itch inside me with an intensity that rapidly becomes unbearable. There's something about it that feels terminal — not repeatable, an endpoint in someone's life.
When it begins to subside I whimper slightly and reach for my crotch. Surprise: I'm still erect — and my skin is dry.
That wasn't me, I realize, disturbed. That was Ramona — I clutch my prick protectively.
Distant laughter. **Go on, jerk yourself off.** There's a warm glow of satisfaction in her stomach. **You know you really want to, don't you?** she thinks, licking her lips and sending me the taste of semen. Then I feel her reach over and pull the sheets up over the dead businessman's face.
I manage to reach the bathroom and lift the toilet lid before I throw up. My stomach knots and tries to climb my throat. Every guy I've ever slept with died less than twenty-four hours later, she said, and now I know why. She's right about one thing: despite the sudden gag reflex I'm still sprouting a woody. Despite everything, despite the dread, despite the almost furtive guilt I feel, I really enjoyed whatever it is Ramona just did. And now I feel inexplicably guilty on account of Mo, because I wasn't looking for an adventure on the side — and I feel really dirty as well, because I found it exciting.
The overspill from what Ramona was doing turned me on in my sleep, but the reason I'm throwing up now is that what she was doing wasn't sex: she was feeding on the guy's mind, and he died, and it gave her an orgasm, and I got off on it. I want to scrub my brains out with a wire brush, and I want to crawl into a deep hole m the ground, and I want to do it all over again ... because I'm entangled with her, I hope, but the alternative is worse: there are some things I don't want to find out about myself, and a secret taste for hot, kinky demon sex is one of them.
I really hope Mo finds out that this entanglement thing is reversible. Because if it isn't, the next time she and I go to bed together — Let's not think about that right now.
I spend an uneasy night tossing and turning between damp sheets despite the dream catcher Screensaver I leave running on my tablet PC. By dawn I've just about worried myself into a mild nervous breakdown: if it's not trying to avoid thinking about invisible pink elephants (subtype: maneaters), it's what Angleton's got in mind for me in Saint Martin. I don't even know where the place is on a map.
Meanwhile, the committee meeting is another unwelcome distraction. How am I supposed to represent my organization when I'm terrified of falling asleep?
I somehow manage to fumble my way into my suit — an uncomfortable imposition required for overseas junkets — then shamble downstairs to the dining room for breakfast.
Coffee, I need coffee. And a copy of the Independent, imported from London on an overnight flight. The restaurant is a model of German efficiency and the staff mostly leave me alone, for which I'm grateful I'm just about feeling human again by a quarter to nine, the meeting's optimistically scheduled to start in another fifteen minutes, but at a guess half the delegates will still be working on their breakfasts. So I wander over to the lobby where there's free WiFi, to see if there are any messages for me, and that's when I run into Franz.
'Bob? Is that you'
I blink stupidly. 'Franz'
'Bob!' We do the handshake thing, feinting around our centers of gravity with briefcases held out to either side, like a pair of nervous chickens sizing each other up in a farmyard.
I haven't seen Franz in a suit before, and he hasn't seen me in one either. I met him on a training seminar about six months ago when he was over from Den Haag. He's very tall and very Dutch, which means his accent is a lot more BBC-perfect than mine. 'Fancy meeting you here.'
'I guess you must be on the joint-session list'
'I'll show you mine if you show me yours,' he jokes. 'I was just looking for a postcard before I go upstairs ... will you wait'
'Sure.' I relax slightly. 'Have you done one of these before'
'No.' He spins the rack idly, looking at the picturesque gingerbread castles one by one. 'Have you'
'I've done one, period. Shouldn't talk about it outside class, but what the hell.'
Franz finds a postcard showing a beaming buxom German barmaid clutching a pair of highly suggestive jugs. 'I'll have this one.' He attracts the attention of the nearest sales clerk and rattles something off in what sounds to me like flawless German. My tablet finishes checking for mail, bins the spam, and dings at me to put it away. I rub my head and glance at Franz enviously I bet he wouldn't have any problems with Ramona: he's scarily bright, good-natured, incisive, handsome, cultured, and all-round competent. Not to mention being able to out-drink me and charm the socks off everyone who meets him. He's clearly on his way up the ladder of the ATVD's occult counterintelligence division, and he'll make deputy director while I'm still polishing Angleton's filing cabinet.
'Ready?' he asks.
'Guess so.'
We head for the lift to the conference room. It's on the fourth floor. Lest you think this is an altogether too casual approach to confidential business, the hotel is security certified and our hosts have block-booked the adjacent rooms and the suites immediately above and below. It's not as if we're going to be discussing matters of national security, either.
Franz and I are early. There's a coffee urn and cups in place on the sideboard, an LCD projector and screen next to the boardroom table, and comfortable leather-lined swivel chairs to fall asleep in. I claim one corner of the table, opposite the windows with their daydream-friendly view of downtown Darmstadt, and plunk my tablet down on the leather place mat beside the hotel notepad. 'Coffee?' asks Franz.
'Yes, please. Milk, no sugar.' I pick up the agenda and carry it over.
