suit, which glittered with sequins forming clusters of patriotic designs, stars and eagles and shoulder patches from the old glory outfits, the 182nd Airborne Division, and the Fourth Infantry, the Ivy Division.
The room was small and filthy and smelled of drains.
Coke Roosevelt and Biggie Lewis were large, powerful young men who amused themselves by dressing with piratical flourishes; they wore silver earrings, Aussie digger hats, tight leather suits with brilliant scarlet kerchiefs wound around their powerfully muscled throats.
With effortless ease, they held young Manolo’s writhing figure on a narrow bed, twisting his slim brown arms high up between his shoulder blades and pressing his curly head and pretty brown face deeply into a soiled and matted pillow.
“All right! That’s enough!” Samantha Spade said abruptly, and Coke Roosevelt and Biggie Lewis immediately released the boy, reacting like well-trained guard dogs to the thread of irritation in Samantha’s voice.
“Mother, Mother, don’t let them hurt me!” Manolo screamed at Samantha.
All this Samantha found degrading. You started with something clean, and while the interest was ball- breaking, they couldn’t go to banks, so they came to her. When they got behind and started hiding, you had to use muscle, or your work and reputation went down the drain.
“We didn’t advertise for you, Manolo.”
“It’s my brother,” Manolo said, barely whispering the words, while watching Samantha’s cold black face as if it were hostile terrain he must try to cross to find sanctuary.
She knew about his brother, a junkie with a big habit, whose whining and desperate appeals for help lay across Manolo’s spirit like a draining poultice. Manolo, at twenty, was two years older than his sick brother and had been told countless thousands of times by their dead mother to take good care of his little brother and hold his hand crossing the streets. All the streets of life. .
“But you and me made a nice business deal, and it didn’t have anything to do with your brother,” she said.
“He makes me cry, and I can’t stand it.”
Oh, Jesus, Samantha thought. Coke and Biggie flipped Manolo over onto his back, locking his arms behind his head with their huge black hands. Manolo was naked except for a pair of clean white sweat socks, and the overhead lights coated his slim body and small but shapely private parts with shimmering silver reflections.
He’s really something, Samantha thought, staring with frank interest at his vulnerable body. What a super trip she could make with him, toying with him like an elegant little doll. Manolo had curly brown hair, the dimpled face of a cherub, and skin as soft and finely textured as pure silk. But none of this sweet stuff was for the ladies. Manolo was strictly for cockbirds.
Samantha-who had been christened Maybelle Cooper in Mobile, Alabama, and educated in New York-sat down on the bed beside Manolo and let her fingertips stray across the velvetlike skin of his stomach.
Manolo shivered unpleasantly; the touch of her flesh against his revolted him; it was a perverse, unclean feeling, like flowers acrid with rot.
Coke Roosevelt lighted a big cigar and blew smoke into Manolo’s face.
“Staff of life, faggykins,” Coke said in a soft but rumbling voice.
“He means, like bread,” Biggie Lewis said. Manolo was not afraid of Biggie. He knew Biggie wanted him, but if Biggie hurt him, he’d lose any chance of getting him to go down on him. But Coke Roosevelt didn’t want him and might enjoy hurting him to prove it. Samantha wanted him, too, but there was no leverage for Manolo.
“What’s the most you tricked in one night, Manolo?”
“Eight, maybe ten times.”
Samantha looked at him thoughtfully. “This may set Women’s Lib back a ton, but I’m giving you a break. You got two nights to get that six hundred and ninety dollars. Don’t make us look for you.”
“Thanks for shit nothing,” Manolo said sullenly.
“You talk nice to Samantha,” Coke Roosevelt said to him. “If you don’t, I’ll twist off that little spic cock of yours. But knowing where you like to put it, I’d do the job with a pliers.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Manolo shouted, and spat in Coke Roosevelt’s face.
“Stop it!” Samantha said.
Manolo spat at Coke Roosevelt again, and then he screamed in pain; Samantha had tugged sharply at his pubic hair, a gesture more reflexive than sadistic, expressing the casual tyranny of all ghettos, pain and violence employed as impersonal proof of power.
“When I tell you to stop it, you stop it,” Samanatha said to Manolo.
Samantha, her manner absent and distracted, drew her fingernails across Manolo’s stomach; his reaction was spasmodic and helpless, a shuddering contraction of the muscles in his loins.
“Manolo, there’s a convention of florists at the Plaza this week, and a lot of them cats are only a couple of degrees from flaming fags. Pick yourself some pansies. Maybe work Central Park the next couple of nights, find yourself some passion fruits.”
Her fingertips continued to stray across the velvet surface of his stomach. She was amused but irritated at his deliberate refusal to respond to her efforts to arouse him.
He knew what she was trying to do to him, but he was angrily determined to frustrate her. Manolo lay perfectly still and turned his face away from her. He made no attempt to struggle against the massive black arms and hands that held him like a rack on the narrow bed. Manolo enjoyed the feel of that warm male muscle against his body, and he savored his helplessness, the bondage and restraint imposed on him, and so he made no move to struggle against those powerful hands because that would only excite him and make Samantha’s victory inevitable.
Manolo thought of his mother and the little white sugar cakes she had made for him. Sometimes she filled them with pinola nuts, sometimes with yellow raisins. He and his brother ate them watching TV after school. They watched old movies. Game shows. Fuck Samantha, he thought, his mood vicious and triumphant, surfacing to the present.
But that was a dangerous indulgence. Dick Clark’s
But to his shame and horror, he felt his flesh betraying him. Helplessly responding to Samantha’s sensual ministrations, his stomach muscles contracted convulsively and sent seismic currents of ecstasy into the very root of his sexual organ, and slowly the base of his spine began to dissolve in delicious agony.
“Stop it! Stop it, you shit bitch!” he screamed into her face.
Biggie and Coke chuckled at the signs of rut on Manolo’s slim, smooth body.
But Samantha was disgusted and angry with herself. She stood abruptly and walked to the door.
“Save it for somebody who’ll pay for it,” she said.
“Samantha,” he said, barely whispering her name.
But her heart wasn’t easy, and she didn’t know why. It was always that goddamn Emma and Missoura thing. Walk through the mud, you dumb niggers. But she was touched and moved by Manolo’s physical response to her. She wondered if it would be amusing to help him, to take care of him. Her own life was so full of dreck and pain, so tinted with the lavender of resignation that she was desperate for any emotional diversion.
“Take care of business,” she said to no one in particular, and walked out of the room.
On the street in front of Manolo’s building, Samantha’s chauffeur stood beside her Cadillac and scowled irritably at six or eight young Puerto Ricans who were admiring the loaded green Coupe de Ville.
When Samantha came down the steps to the sidewalk, her chauffeur, whose name was Doc Logan, opened the rear door of the car, and said to her, “Got a call while you were upstairs, Samantha. Chuck from the poolroom. Gypsy Tonnelli is looking for you.”
“Chuck say why?”
“Yeah. Something about that psycho’s been wasting them little chicks.
The Gypsy knows what he looks like, and he’s thinking maybe one of our sharks could maybe make the cat.”
“Screw the Gypsy,” Samantha said, and slid her lithe, elegant body into the interior of the luxuriously leathered and perfumed Coupe de Ville.
Seconds later Coke Roosevelt crowded in beside her and Biggie Lewis climbed into the passenger seat
