The Big Broad Jump Read online

  I felt marvelous. My body was on happy fire, shooting sparks and electricity. And every spark and atom was connected to one of those glorious siblings. They were a better sister act than the Dolly Sisters.

  As we drove on toward the explosive climax, wherein the slices of bread completely envelop the meat course, Suzanne and Annette were in the ascendancy. Or rather, Suzanne was above me and Annette below. Suzanne was literally engulfing me with the cheeriest tenderloin of them all. Beneath me, Annette had worked her fingers into a fine tether around my dangling testicles and between these two lovely extremes of womanhood, I was between the devil and the deep blue sea. The room was alive with that humming sound of rare melody; the kind you only hear when the love game is going well. There is no mistaking the sound. It has a joyous rhythm all its own. Later on you realize it’s the bedsprings or the table creaking or the meaty slap of warm flesh against warm flesh and then it doesn’t matter. You had a ball.

  All the way.

  Suzanne bit my ear and Annette bit my hip. Between bites, they kept on moving. I pushed for all I was worth. There was a long interval of silent, heaving exaltation. And then I let go again. Red-hot. Both of the girls cried out. I had brought them both home with me. And then the trio of us sank limply, happily, dreamily into a tangled, closed mass of love food. We fused together like molten lava.

  The Love Sandwich had been a walloping success.

  Nobody was hungry anymore.

  Nobody had a mean bone in his body.

  It says here.

  Annette was sighing, Suzanne was moaning happily and I was nicely closeted with sighers and moaners, when lo and behold, inevitably, the outside world intruded. The one that had Walrus-moustache in it. And bluenoses, prudes, killjoys. And guys who send you on spying missions that have Sudden Death written all over them.

  “Really, Damon,” Walrus-moustache said grimly, prying the sandwich apart by pulling one of Suzanne’s legs one way and one of Annette’s another and thrusting his hideously regimental face into my very own, “when, in God’s name, do you ever sleep?”

  Sleep?

  Sleep is for babies, old drunks and juiceless men. I could always sleep. So could he. But the major difference between him and me was that damn Thaddeus X. Coxe Foundation and its peculiar habit of sending spies into the field. He really liked women almost as much.

  I closed my eyes and groaned, and Suzanne and Annette began to push their bodies against me insistently, ignoring the tall trim bastard in the bowler hat with a moustache to match.

  “Dog!” Annette shouted. “Get out! You interrupt us—”

  “Pig!” Suzanne echoed. “Can you not see the professor is occupied?”

  “Ladies,” I ha-hahed. “We have to humor this man. He has a bad heart and sight of all this joy and good times might make him have a coronary.”

  Walrus-moustache snorted, not relinquishing his strong hold on the legs of my two slices of bread.

  “Damon, please. Do stop for a moment, I beg of you. Then I’ll be on my way and you can resume your games. Do tell these charming ladies to take ten—”

  “Ten? They’ll take all they can get and more—”

  But even as he sputtered and fumed, I dug myself out of the nice disorderly pile and got to my feet. Annette and Suzanne cried out in disappointment. But they would have to wait.

  Walrus-moustache had returned in all his pompous glory and that meant only one thing.

  I was needed as a Coxeman again. To sneak and peek and make love in the name of world peace. A fine job for .a man, and generally a ball, but the only trouble was that danger went with the assignment. Very big, very bad danger. The kind of danger that would put my balls on the firing line once again.

  “Take it easy,” I told the girls as they squatted disgustedly on the bed-table. “Let me talk to this organization man for a few minutes and then we shall continue. He only wants my autograph and another look at a real man.”

  “Damon.” Walrus-moustache’s cheeks turned red and purple. His gimlet eyes narrowed. “May you die with an erection. Do stop this nonsense and hear me out.” He makes a point of not looking at my best part.

  “I’d like to carry you out,” I snarled, leading him to the graph and chart machines. Suzanne and Annette lapsed into a low, incomprehensible patois of French whispers and mutters in their corner of the room. “What is it this time? The usual? You’re sending me to Timbuktu, I’ll bet. Or maybe the Himalayas? I wouldn’t be surprised if you wanted me to make a moon shot!”

  He lowered his own voice, mindful of the women nearby, and vised my left wrist in a steely hand. He gritted out his next message. The words shot out of him like bullets. And each one of them ruined all my hopes, plans and dreams for the coming days and nights.

  “I’d send you to Hell if I could, and stock it with nothing but males, but unfortunately you are needed. Yes, again, as you say. Damn you, Damon—something rotten is going on in Czechoslovakia and you are the only operative that can handle it!”

  “Of course.” I felt the defeat in my throat. I had to go where he wanted me to go. Do what he wanted me to do. You see, way back when my theories and practices were young, I had made carnal use of many an underaged coed to further my research and developments in Ancient Sexual Customs as Applied to the Modern Woman. The coeds of course had had the time of their college lives, but legally they were still under the age of consent. Walrus-moustache and/or the Coxe Foundation had been blackmailing me into playing spy with that dodge ever since. Charity, hah! “What seems to be the trouble with the dear old world these days? Nobody getting enough again?”

  “Don’t joke. We don’t know exactly. But our intelligence reports and cumulative data from a small town in Czechoslovakia tells us some strange stories. Here—” Suddenly, he had reached into his dark formal coat and was pushing a thick sheaf of clipped letter-size sheets under my nose. “Read these reports and call me at eleven thirty tonight.”

  I frowned. That had an ominous sound. “Why at that time?”

  “Because,” he said icily, “you will be calling from a telephone booth at the airport, and five minutes later you shall be on your way to Switzerland to get more data on the silver pill.”

  “Silver pill!” I blurted the words. “I draw the line at tracking down vampires——“

  “Hush,” he said sternly, jerking a shoulder at Suzanne and Annette who were still pouting in their part of the room. And getting impatient, too. “This has nothing to do with Dracula and you do have your terminology confused. Silver bullets felled werewolves and this is Czechoslovakia, not Transylvania.”

  “Big deal. It’s all the same to me. I can’t even spell Czechoslovakia, and besides, I’m in the middle of research. Myself. Me. I’m needed here. Sexual Response as pertains to“

  Walrus-moustache’s frosty smile stilled all my arguments. I saw a lawsuit in each eyeball. Scandal, shame, expulsion from the university. There are so many prudes on faculties, so many killjoys who support a college with grants and monies. Like the Coxe Foundation.

  “You’ll go. That’s certain. You have no choice. I'll leave you now. This shall be our briefest interview. But do, dear Damon, read the reports and call me at eleven thirty. On the dot, you understand. And now I shall wish you luck and take my leave and leave you to your—errr —sexual response research. You are the devil’s own, Damon.”

  “Takes one to know one, you bastard,” I said sweetly. “Silver pills! What the hell kind of doubletalk is that?”

  “You shall see what you shall see,” he said, obliquely and reset his bowler primly on his head. He bowed toward Suzanne and Annette and they fairly spit in his direction, as glad as they were to see him go. He smiled, shrugged, and strode from the room. The bastard was whistling as he left. “The Colonel Bogey March” from The Bridge Over The River Kwai. If I’d had a hand grenade I think I would have flung it at his rear end.

  As naked as I was, I felt clammy and sticky. Walrus-moustache’s assignments always do that
to me. Then I shuddered and felt awfully wide open and defenseless. I flung the papers down on the chart table and went back to the girls. I’ve been very lucky on some dozen jobs for the Coxe Foundation but any one of them could have ended up with me no better off than a capon. You know what this is—a castrated rooster.

  Fattened up for the kill—and eating.

  “Who was that horrible man?” Suzanne asked, rubbing my thigh. Annette rubbed the other one. I lay back and closed my eyes.

  “So grotesque!” Annette agreed.

  “He’s the man who always has me by the Swanee River. The fly in the ointment, the fifth wheel, the party-pooper. To hell with him. Where were we?”

  They showed me.

  We repositioned ourselves and I lent it a minor variation. My mind, still gloomily aware of Czechoslovakia and silver pills and unknown trouble beckoning before midnight, returned to the thing that makes me happiest. I speared Annette lustily and allowed Suzanne to dig her spurs into my buttocks. Before we rocked, rolled and ruined each other the only correct way, I had one last thought for them.

  “Now—we shall employ a little technique, cheries? Five minutes for each side. No more and no less. And then, we shall engage in the pièce de résistance—soixante-neuf with ménage à trois. Are we agreed?”

  They started to oui, oui all over the place, so that was settled. And then we really went to town. The French did not invent that glorious number in Sexual Arithmetic known as Sixty-Nine, but the way the Sisters Suzanne and Annette went at it, you could have been forgiven for thinking so. Arab sexology and desert tribes date this routine all the way back to the Nile River, but who cares? Those who know how, do, and when it is done properly, very little else in the love world compares to it. So help me, Brigitte Bardot! Gallic boudoirs refined the swinging custom to a high art. There’s a lot of creativity in it.

  Fifty million Frenchmen not only aren’t wrong, they are right.

  So right.

  Suzanne and Annette had learned from the experts— the Gods.

  I lost sight of them in our concert of kicks and funs. As we pinwheeled and whirled around on the table, each of them nipped and licked with skillful expertise. You couldn’t tell their lips apart. They savored each bouncing ball, wrung the last bit of milk from each molten tip I could re-manufacture. Finally, when I was hard enough to drive spikes into the wall, I turned each of them over and whaled away with rare stamina, even for a Damon. Somewhere later, I don’t know how much later, I had both their rumps before me and alternated like a guy double-parked in a red light district. I leaped and cavorted, stabbed and lunged à la Flynn as Robin Hood. All the arrows in my quiver were put to use. And then my two limp, lovely targets slid off the table in a dead exhausted faint, spilling to the floor in a wild welter of arms, legs and goodies. I didn’t say a word to them, and walked over to the machines to reset them. I had more work to do if I wanted to clean up my books before I called Walrus-moustache from the airport. Damn him. He’d given me homework too. The reports I had to read.

  I couldn’t get Czechoslovakia out of my mind. What could have happened in that staid old burg, besides Communism, to command the services and skills of Rod Damon? I didn’t know.

  A naked derrière on the floor loomed into view again and Annette wobbled to her feet. She was in a daze, but I knew it was her, thanks to the strawberry mole on her left hip.

  “Professeur . . .” she moaned.

  “Yes, Annette?”

  “You are ... a very . . . naughty boy . . . indeed. Sacre! . . . they should erect a ... monument ... in your honor!”

  “I have my own monument,” I said.

  Her eyes agreed with me. “Never have I seen so formidable an instrument. . . .”

  “Lucky. That’s me.” I fiddled with some dials and knobs on the machine and Suzanne came to life from the other side of the table. She weaved to her feet, her full breasts glowing, her Venus mound in gorgeous disarray. She smiled sleepily across the room at me.

  “Marry me,” she said simply.

  “I would if I could but I can’t,” I said, not unkindly. “Fact is, I am promised to another—”

  “Who?” Annette growled. “Tell us her name and we will cut her heart out!” Suzanne nodded her head so vigorously she gave herself a crick in the neck.

  I sighed, eyeing them fondly, soberly thinking of the lost days and nights, lays and delights ahead, no thanks to Walrus-moustache. It is a cruel world, my friends. Having to discard two such sisters on such short notice.

  “I have to go to Switzerland, my pets. When I come back we shall resume where we left off. It can’t be helped, I’m afraid. Duty calls. The ugly man with the garden under his nose has ordered me, and that’s it. You be good until I get back and I’ll bring you an Alpine guide, maybe. Or a case of Swiss cheese.”

  “We will wait,” Suzanne and Annette said in chorus, pushing their chests out at me. They licked their lips and their eyes spoke volumes as to how much they would miss me.

  Switzerland. And then Czechoslovakia—

  Mittel Europa—take it away!

  Only it wasn’t Switzerland. Or Czechoslovakia. Not right off the bat, at any rate. I suppose Walrus-moustache had lied about the Alp country just to be on the safe side in case Annette and Suzanne overheard his dulcet orders. See what a devious bastard he is?

  The way things turned out that night I was on my way to Munich, that famous German city where Adolph made his first big putsch in 1933. Just about one hundred miles from the Czechoslovakian border. Well, I’d do some pushing of my own, but that would have to come later. Still, the sonofabitch had booked me on Lufthansa Flight 117 to Munich and at eleven forty-five, right after I was to call him, I would be winging my way across the Atlantic. What fun. What larks.

  Besides all that, there was that damn report to read, digest and understand. More Coxe Foundation hanky-panky. I love the life I lead but not the other side of it— the one where I have to make like Sean Connery and Dean Martin in a spy movie. Movies are all make-believe; the enemies of the Coxe Foundation (and peace-loving mankind) would put even Alfred Hitchcock to shame.

  I was so flummoxed and angry with the whole setup that I must have attacked the next ten willing broads who engaged in the sexual-response-blood-pressure experiment the rest of that day. I broke them all in savagely, long after their male partners called it quits. But I am always at my best when I behave like Rod Damon, despite my mood. Before I finally packed it in, closing the Study Room, and locking the door until I returned from my travels, if ever, I received five more proposals of marriage, was made the beneficiary of three wills and the other two happy dolls were willing to die with me on a diet of nothing but sex and love.

  Now there is an experiment worth trying some day.

  How long can a man live on nothing but sex?

  Even a Rod Damon.

  I made a note of it in one of my voluminous notebooks even as I turned over my rolls of graph sheets and charts to the curator of the university library. They would keep them on ice for me until I returned. The university never questions my leaves of absence because Walrus-moustache and the Coxe Foundation arranges them for me well in advance.

  The curator is Miss Rawlins, who is one of the few women in the university who is safe from me. And I from her.

  Miss Rawlins is almost seventy-five, as bony and skinny as a breadstick and the greatest love of her life was Rudolf Valentino to whom she was forever comparing me and all men to, to our detriment. Miss Rawlins’ love affair with a long-dead ghost made it a swell arrangement all around. Her virginity was intact and would remain so until she joined Rudy in that great Movie House In The Sky. She’d never been laid in her life.

  But we were pals and as I said goodbye to her, she stared at me almost fondly through her tortoise-shell glasses.

  “Au revoir, Professor. Do take care. Keep warm. Europe is cold this time of year.” Everybody seemed to have the French bug that day.

  “Bye, Miss Rawlins. Don’t spen
d all your money on Valentino revivals now. Restrain yourself. Go see a Steve McQueen movie.”

  She almost blushed. “It’s the only way I can ever feel close to him—you know that. Don’t tease. Those burning eyes, those lips, that walk he had. He made the tango the most sensual dance in history!”

  She could have gone on like that for hours so I pecked her cheek, waved goodbye and tangoed out of the library before she could stop me.

  If I ever goosed Miss Rawlins, she would have gone through the roof.

  Who was I to take her dreams and her Dream Lover away from her?

  Maybe she was right.

  Maybe Valentino was right.

  For all his troubles and his eventual fate, catch him letting the Coxe Foundation send him around the little old world anytime they felt like it! He would have laughed in their faces.

  I’m a lover, not a master espionage agent, like I keep telling Walrus-moustache. Who the hell am I to solve the ills of mankind? To make with the guns and the secret devices and the codes and the intrigues when all I ever really wanted out of life was a chance to swing with the nearest available dame?

  Dammitall, anyhow—what had happened to the wicked, weary world now that needed the services of Rod Damon, the greatest Coxeman of them all?

  Late that night, I found out.

  I read Walrus-moustache’s report.

  All it did was make me feel like throwing up.

  The things I had to do for the Coxe Foundation—and world peace at any price.

  The Silver Pill Affair was a leftover script from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. television show.

  That is, it would have been, if there hadn’t been a thing called Censorship!

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Airport was socked in with midnight hues and gusting winds buffeting the control tower but Lufthansa Flight 117 was still getting serviced on the runway with her big shining nose pointing east By the time I got my flight reservation from the desk and all my luggage checked out, I just had time to make the scheduled phone call to Walrus-moustache. My mood was gloomier than Tax Day. The details of my tall boss’s report was a mass of muddled facts, with no definite conclusion. Just guesswork. As educated as it was. I hate leaving town, especially when it has all the earmarks of Le Chase Wild Goose.