It's What Up Front That Counts Read online

  But I didn’t have time to wallow in my righteous indignation, because, while I was fuming inside at the spectacle I was witnessing and the audience that was applauding it, the rape scene ended and Andi Gleason was spirited off the stage. I didn’t want to risk letting her get away before I had a chance to talk with her. Discarding as too time-consuming the ploy which the doorman had suggested as my best way of meeting her, I slipped out of my seat, collared the nearest waiter, stuffed a pair of five-pound notes into his hand and said, “Take me to the white girl’s dressing room.”

  He took one look at my tip, which amounted to almost twenty-five dollars in American money, and gulped. “Come with me.”

  Andi’s dressing room was the dressing room for the entire cast. They were all there when the waiter ushered me in, and none of them seemed to find my presence noteworthy. The two men, who were changing into their costumes for the next spectacle, were being railed at by Andi. They were chuckling amusedly at her furor.

  “I’m telling you, Eddie,” she was saying to the erstwhile pseudo-chief, “you ever pull a stunt like that again and you’ll be sorry.”

  “You learn how to keep your head when you’re working,” Eddie replied, “and I won’t have to pull any stunts.”

  The waiter told her I wanted to speak to her. It took a few seconds for the message to work its way through her angry and drug-clouded brain. When it registered, she regarded me with a dazed expression. “Whattaya want, Jack?” she asked.

  I got right to the point. Peeling half a dozen five-pound notes off the roll Walrus-moustache had supplied me with, I laid them out on the dressing table in front of her. “I want you,” I said.

  She looked at the notes, then at me, then back at the notes.

  “I ain’t workin’ tonight, Jack,” she said after a moment.

  I added another thirty pounds to the thirty already on the table. “That’s sixty pounds,” I reminded her. “I’m told you usually go for ten.”

  “Sixty pounds!” exclaimed the pseudo-chief. “You ain’t gonna get many more offers like that, Andi.”

  One of the black girls sidled up to me. “If she’s not working tonight, mister, I am.”

  “I want her,” I said.

  Andi touched the money, as if to reassure herself that it was actually there. “I don’t do no kinky stuff, Jack, if that’s what you have in mind,” she said.

  “No kinky stuff,” I said. “Just straight sex.”

  She picked up the bills, counted them, then held them in her hand as if she didn’t know quite what to do next with them. “Oh, wow,” she murmured after a moment. “Sixty pounds. You gotta be kidding.”

  I said nothing.

  “Well, okay,” she said finally. “I’ll go with you. But it’s gotta be fast. I got another show to do two hours from now, and my boss don’t like it if I’m late.”

  “I want you for the whole night,” I told her.

  “No good. I don’t go for the whole night.”

  “Not even for a hundred pounds?” Even though The Coxe Foundation was footing the bill, I found my extravagance hard to believe.

  “I don’t go the whole night,” she said.

  From outside the dressing room I could hear the emcee announcing the evening’s next spectacle—a girl who would perform a variety of sex acts with a Great Dane. The girl was another white girl, who had been sitting in one corner of the room petting her prospective sex-partner. One of the Negro men ushered her out on the runway. The other man and the four girls, tossing trenchcoats over their costumes, filed out the back door, apparently for a breath of air.

  “Look,” I said to Andi now that we were alone, “I really want to spend the night with you. Don’t tell me you never go for the whole night, because I know guys you’ve gone with.”

  She glanced around, as if to make sure no one would overhear us. Her eyes had a faraway look that said she was still feeling her drugs, but she seemed to be gaining control of herself. “What’s your act, Jack?” she asked. “Why do you want me?”

  I smiled. “I like you.”

  “A hundred pounds worth?”

  “Yeah, a hundred pounds worth. Maybe more, if you’re as good as I think you’re going to be.”

  She seemed to be wondering whether or not to believe me. For all of thirty seconds she didn’t answer. Then slowly the corners of her mouth arched upward in a small smile. The smile said that, monetary considerations aside, she dug me. “I can’t go the whole night with you,” she said. “But I’ll go with you now. We can have an hour or so together, if you want.”

  I decided not to press my luck. “Come on,” I told her, reaching for her hand. “My hotel’s just a couple blocks away.”

  She drew away from me. “I can’t leave with you. Tell me where to go, and I’ll meet you there.”

  I smirked. “You don’t expect me to fall for that old routine, do you, honey?”

  She frowned. “Don’t you trust me?”

  “I trust everybody, but I always cut the cards anyway.”

  The metaphor escaped her, but the message didn’t. She handed me back my sixty pounds. “Take your money, Jack. Pay me when I get there.”

  I couldn’t be sure that she’d actually come. But I had the feeling that I’d never be able to persuade her to accept any other arrangement. “Okay, here’s the address,” I said, scribbling my room number and the name and address of the hotel on a slip of paper. “Try not to take too long.”

  “I won’t,” she promised.

  I went back to my table, where I signaled the waiter for my check. My monocled tablemate looked at me with surprise. “Leaving so soon?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Got a pressing appointment.”

  He gestured toward the stage, where the girl who did the dog act was giving her canine companion a few preliminary caresses. “This is the best part of the show. She and the dog actually make love.”

  “Sorry,” I smiled. “I’ll see it some other time.” I paid the waiter and headed for the door. The look the monocled gent gave me told me he thought I ought to have my head examined.

  Back at the Eros, I poured myself a Johnnie Walker Black, kicked off my shoes and flopped down on the bed. While I waited for Andi Gleason I wondered what pressing reason she had for not wanting to spend the night with me—a reason so pressing that she had turned down the equivalent of two hundred and fifty American dollars, and the possibility of earning more.

  Did she have a date after work with another man? Christopher Smythe, for example?

  It was possible, but not likely. Smythe, indiscreet though he might have been in his affair with her, still had some appearances to maintain. He was still living with his wife and children, and he was due on the floor of the House of Commons at nine in the morning. I doubted that he’d abandon discretion entirely and go galavanting around London with his paramour in the wee small hours of the ayem. Probably he saw Andi only on weekends, and occasionally for midweek afternoon quickies when he could safely break away.

  But if her date wasn’t Smythe, who was he? Maybe some John who was going to pay her more than I had offered?

  Again, possible—but damned unlikely. In the shape Andi Gleason was in, ten pounds was a lot of money for an all-night shot. Any John who’d pay more had to be interested in more than just sex. And what more did she have to offer?

  If she was actually setting up Smythe for a Commie for a Commie squeeze play, she had a lot to offer to anyone working for the other side. But the other side consisted of the British Secret Service and The Coxe Foundation. According to Walrusmoustache, the British Secret Service had decided to let The Come Foundation handle the whole show. And for the present, I was The Coxe Foundation. So she really didn’t have anything to offer to anybody except me.

  Another possibility, of course, was that she had to meet one of her Commie contacts after work. But now that I thought of it, if she was on the Commie team, what was she doing working at The Safari Club in the first place? The Commies don’t mak
e a practice of leaving their operatives out in the open where people like me and the boys from the British Secret Service can get to them, unless there’s a damned good reason for it. I could think of no reason why they’d want anyone to get to Andi at this stage of the game, but I could think of a lot of reasons why they wouldn’t.

  Also, if she was working for the Commies, how did it happen that she was stoned out of her mind on pot—or whatever it was that she was stoned on? People who aren’t in full control of their faculties are lousy security risks. The Communists don’t take chances with lousy security risks.

  So maybe she wasn’t working for the Communists after all.

  But, if she wasn’t, who was she working for?

  The Friends of Decency? I’d already reasoned my way out of that possibility.

  And, if not the Friends, who else?

  There didn’t seem to be any other candidates.

  In any case, it was my job to get her out of England as soon as I could. And that, judging from what I’d seen so far, wasn’t going to be an easy task.

  I’d match my sexual abilities with any man’s and I’d venture to say that I could make a lot of girls fall madly enough in love with me that they’d consent to slipping off somewhere for a month or two of uninterrupted love-making.

  But love and sex are a lure only to girls who are emotionally and sexually responsive. Unless I missed my guess, Andi Gleason was so heavily into the drug scene that she had lost the ability to respond.

  So, if I couldn’t get to her via love and sex, how could I get to her?

  Come to think of it, would I ever get the chance to get to her? Fifteen minutes had gone by since I left her at The Safari Club. The Eros Hotel was only a five-minute walk away. Where the hell was she?

  I polished off my Johnnie Walker Black and poured myself another one. Five more minutes passed and Andi still hadn’t made the scene.

  Ten minutes later, while I was wondering whether to go back to The Safari Club looking for her, she showed up. I needed only one look at her eyes to realize that she’d paused en route for another whack at whatever it was that had her whacked out. She stared through me, smiled giddily, tossed me a vacuous “Hi, Jack,” staggered across the room, and passed out on the bed. I knew better than to try arousing her. Demon pot, or whatever, had done its job too well.

  I sat in the chair next to the bed and, staring idly at the unconscious body beside me, entertained a few negative thoughts about the proliferation of marijuana and other consciousness-altering agents in contemporary society.

  Andi Gleason was out for all of three hours. I was dozing when she came to, and I woke up to find her giggling uproariously while staring at her fingernails.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  She giggled some more, then, not looking at me, said simply, “It’s a gas.”

  Andi amused herself with her fingernails for another three or four minutes. Then, as if noticing me for the first time, she smiled. “Hi, Jack.”

  “Hi,” I replied dully.

  These amenities having been exchanged, she lay down and went back to sleep.

  She woke an hour later. I’d undressed for bed by this time, and my pajamas’ evidently reminded her that I’d engaged her for sexual purposes.

  “Sixty pounds,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Who’d ever think anybody’d pay me sixty pounds?”

  When I didn’t reply, she began undressing. She seemed surprised that I still had my pajamas on when she had stripped to the altogether.

  “Well, where’s the sixty pounds, Jack?” she asked, a trace of impatience in her voice. “I ain’t doing anything until I get paid.”

  I gave her the sixty pounds. Actually I didn’t feel like doing anything but booting her out of the room and calling it a night. But I knew I might not get another crack at her for a while, and I had to make the best of the crack I had. She’d already overstayed the two-hour break before her next scheduled performance at The Safari Club, and my only hope was to figure out some way to keep her with me until she came down from her high and was able to converse coherently.

  She took the money, fumbled around with it for a moment as if searching her nude body for a pocket to put it in, giggled at her forgetfulness, then spotted her purse on the dresser, stumbled over to it, and put the money inside. “Well,” she smiled giddily, throwing her arms over her head like a dancer at the end of a theatrical number, “here I am. Take me.”

  Shucking off my pajamas, I maneuvered her onto the bed. Her legs spread open mechanically, and she received me. I’ve always thought of myself as pretty all-right in the size department, but this time I’d clearly met my match. I felt like a row-boat navigating the Amazon River. Amendment: like a camel navigating the Sahara Desert. Rivers are wet, and Andi was bone-dry.

  She flopped around wildly beneath me. Her face was distorted into a silly grin, and she punctuated her movements with sighs, groans and moans of “Oh, Jack!” But it was obviously an act—and not a very convincing one. I would’ve bet anything that she didn’t even feel me inside her.

  I tried my best to put some zing into things. But it wasn’t easy. I’d always maintained that sex is like business: when it’s good, it’s very very good, and when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. In Andi Gleason I found an exception to the case. Fortunately I’m a priapist, or I’d’ve surely lost my impetus midway through the first stroke.

  Still, I had to keep her with me, and the only way I could think of doing it was to make our sex act last as long as possible. Entertaining all sorts of delicious fantasies involving other girls I’d bedded down with, I forced myself to continue. I couldn’t remember ever enjoying the mating game less. Stoically, I resolved that I’d hang on until she came down from her high or until exhaustion did me in.

  Thankfully, I didn’t have to hang on much longer. After about ten minutes of squirming and sighing, groaning and moaning, she passed out again. Relieved, I dismounted, slipped under the covers and went to sleep. I wrapped one arm around hers to make sure I’d wake up whenever she did.

  She woke three hours later. Dawn’s first shafts of light were filtering through the heavily curtained window opposite the bed, and somewhere not too far away Big Ben was tolling six. Andi sat up in bed, rubbed her eyes, and looked bewilderedly around the room. Then she turned to me as if seeing me for the first time.

  “Wow,” she said, “what a trip.” Almost as an afterthought she added, “Who are you?”

  “The guy you balled last night. Remember?”

  Her face took on a thoughtful expression, as though she were trying to see through the haze of her high and piece together the events leading up to the present. Suddenly her expression became one of alarm. “Jeez, I missed the last two shows!” She started to get up, as if by really hustling she could make up for lost time. Then, realizing that she couldn’t, she abandoned the effort and got back into bed. “Jeez, Mr. Guy-I-Balled-Last-Night, I’m in trouble.”

  I put on my best bedside manner. “What kind of trouble, hon?”

  “Big trouble.”

  For a moment, it looked like she was going to elaborate. Then the wheels inside her head evidently began turning in a different direction. “You wouldn’t want to hear about it,” she said, pecking me lightly on the cheek. Then she got up and began searching for her clothes.

  “I would want to hear about it,” I said. “Suppose you tell me.”

  She found her panties and climbed into them. “Nah, the whole thing’s a drag. It depresses, me just to think about it.”

  “Maybe you’d be less depressed if you got it off your chest.”

  She flashed an obviously insincere smile that was designed to tell me to mind my own business. “Thanks anyway, Jack,” she said, putting on her bra. “I think I’ll just keep it to myself for now.”

  I got out of bed and shoveled two scoops of coffee into the electric percolator with which the management of the Eros had thoughtfully equipped my room. I was pretty sure I was
n’t going to get her to talk unless I tried something pretty dramatic. So I tried something pretty dramatic. “How’s my friend, Christopher Smythe?” I asked.

  She almost managed to cover up her shocked reaction to the question. Almost, but not quite. She put on an expression of bewilderment, but not before I got a glimpse of the astonishment in her eyes when I mentioned Smythe’s name. “Smythe?” she replied, feigning nonchalance. “Don’t think I know him. Does he hang around The Safari Club?”

  I let my grin tell her that I saw through her act. “He hangs around the House of Commons, mostly. And you know him pretty damned well. Now what do you say we talk about the trouble you’re in.”

  To avoid looking at me, she tugged her sweater over her head. “You got the wrong girl, Jack,” she mumbled from beneath it. “I never been in the House of Commons.”

  I walked over to where she was. When her face surfaced through the neckhole of the sweater, my face was just inches away from it. I took her jaw between my thumb and fingers, and held her so that she couldn’t look away from me. “Andi Gleason,” I said through clenched teeth, “you are in trouble, and I’m probably the only guy you know who can bail you out. Play ball with me, and I’ll pull your chestnusts out of the fire. Don’t play ball with me, and I’ll throw you to the wolves. Take your pick.”

  I released her. She looked at me for a moment, as if trying to decide whether to take me up on my offer. Then, turning away, she made a production of looking for her skirt. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jack,” she said under her breath.

  I went back to the percolator, speaking as I walked. “Andi, you’re doing a number on Christiopher Smythe, and your girlfriend, Diane Dionne, is doing a number on James Whelan. You thought you had the situation under control for a while, but now everything seems to be falling apart on you. I can help you. All you’ve got to do is say yes and I’ll have you on a plane for the United States quicker than you can say ‘God save the queen.’ All your expenses will be paid, and you can stay there under police protection until it’s safe for you to come back here.”