Chapter 2
Within a few streets of the cafe where Ahmed ben Lulla sat drinking his beer was another room also with its air of constriction. But this air of constriction was of a type that was much sought after by the small crowd which filled the room.
Lights were low, half-concealed in the walls. At one end of the room was a small platform on which a little, dark girl was slowly undressing to the soft, sexy rhythm of a mamba.
In the gloomy body of the room, sitting on hard wooden chairs on the pain parquet-floor, were a crowd of individuals. Some were clearly French, others had the air of knowing tourists. They all looked rich and they were all straining forward watching the girl disrobing. There were no windows and beside the heavy, red velvet curtain which hid the single door a dark man was standing, smoking and indifferently glancing from the girl to the audience.
There were women amongst the audience as well as men. Most of them were middle-aged but there were also a few young people. They were watching one of Pigalle's clandestine exhibitions.
When the preliminary striptease had started a little while before, the girl, who had small features and short, dark hair, had been wearing a long evening gown. Now she was dressed in a sort of petticoat which swathed her slim, muscular body in quick, tentative embraces as she moved gently to the music which seemed, itself, to be a solid presence in the confining space.
The lights adorning the walls around the small dais were more numerous than those in the other parts of the room and some were so arranged that as the girl moved in front of them they shone through the thin material of her garment and outlined the dark shape of the body and limbs beneath. Every so often the girl, whose face was normally without expression, would flash a deep smile into the audience. At such times it seemed to every man there that she was looking at and smiling just for him-the way women claim that Frank Sinatra seems to be singing just for them individually.
She moved in a gentle dance rhythm which sometimes merged into the music, sometimes came out of it as if sometimes the beat dominated her and sometimes she dominated it. Swaying her hips a little, she turned her back to the audience and pulled the petticoat slowly up and over her head. The old-fashioned garment gone, she was all modern underneath-a pair of undersized briefs and the slim string of a brassiere. The briefs were not big enough to cover her buttocks fully and the audience could see where the slim, supple back with its central hollow ran into the rising mounds of her bottom. Below, the briefs arched up half-revealing each buttock where it joined the thigh. She continued to sway gently and moved along the stage with her back towards the room. Her buttocks hollowed gently as she moved and there were dimples just above them which came and went. Her bottom, surprisingly full now that it was more or less uncovered, seemed to be on the point of bursting through the light cloth which covered it. The rounding of her buttocks was a rolling mamba of its own.
As the audience watched, flushed and desireful, she turned slowly and the brassiere which covered half her breasts seemed about to peel off. Through its flimsiness, her large, pointed nipples poked, scorching embossments, crowning points to a full weight of firm, caressable flesh.
Below the breasts which wobbled very slightly, more of a sensitive quiver, her waist was small and wiry. There was a little black hair just below her navel which ran in a thin line down over the slightly raised abdomen and disappeared under the briefs-disappeared in its detail but left its trace in the spongy protrusion at the junction of her thighs where the dark muff of hair made a dark bump. Her hips wavered back and forth to the music, inviting cool fingers to draw down over them the tiny material and slip it-reluctantly though it would leave-down over the warmth of flesh which would tremor slightly at the touch and the anticipation of what was to come.
The smile came, meaningful and inviting, and responsive bumps grew behind the fly buttons of the male watchers. Reaching up with her hands, keeping her deep, shining eyes still on the outside room, the girl snapped open the brassiere and let it fall to the floor. Freed now, her breasts swayed heavily from side to side as she moved. A hand under them could have lifted them slightly, just enough to feel their full, voluptuous weight; apart from that they were taut and high. It was as if the flesh were held in a glossy, transparent bag.
Slowly, languorously, half closing her dark eyes, the girl ran her slender hands up her body, letting them flow lovingly over her hot flesh until they reached her breasts and held them out, nipples jutting, to the spectators. "Take them, take them," she seemed to say. "These nipples are longing for the cool relief of a mouth."
For a few minutes more she danced, turning her body completely round a couple of times while the audience watched almost without taking breath, fascinated, and then she reached down and undid a small catch on her briefs.
Mouths went dry as the little white garment fluttered away in a trembling flight which seemed to symbolize abandon. But no. A g-string still circled her hips in which the indentations of her movement were clearly marked, and a tiny cache-sex covered the smallest of triangular areas down where her thighs merged and rubbed in each other's heat.
A flowering of dark hair surrounded the clinging morsel and the full roundness of the abdomen below the small, flat belly offered itself to the gaze of the audience. Just that one crucial spot remained protected, that one point which it was so necessary to denude for the abandon to be complete.
Slowly, rotating on her toes, the girl turned, allowed herself to be seen in profile-a lovely swansneck shape with the beauty of breast lifting before and the voluptuousness of buttock hollowing out behind-and then edged round showing first the half-moon protrusion of another buttock beyond the first and then the whole of her naked behind, wobbling and tensing at the audience, a full, bursting smoothness of flesh which moved and wiggled as if it searched for something, some pressure which would make it squirm in a complete, cooperative delight.
Gradually, she bent her slim back forward, leaning away from the audience, which watched breathlessly, until the breadth of her buttocks was jutting towards them and rotating gently as if in obscene invitation. Her thighs tensed and rippled in slim strength as she giffled on her feet and then she reached back with her dark, slender arms and gently pulled apart her buttocks with her fingers, disclosing in an even more obscene gesture the little dark hole between as if she were inviting a sharp, sodomising attack.
Around the little, revealed anus, which seemed so raw and vulnerable, a few stray, black hairs fringed. The girl's bottom rotated as if on its own axis, as if it were involved in some strange sexual intercourse with the surrounding air, rather like a cat brushing itself against a wall, except that there was no wall and no male member.
Slowly, in time with the music which continued to pulsate like blood through the room, the girl moved her hands away from her ass-hole and back over her ice-smooth buttocks and into her waist. She straightened, with her hands on that slim waist, and turned back gradually to face the audience again.
There was an atmosphere of slight relief in the room as if the bending offer had been too much to bear.
But now, with another flashing smile, she unclasped the g-string and let it slither down between her thighs until she was able to trample on it with rhythm-flipping feet. Where the dark moss of hair made a V with her thighs, there was a pink weight of flesh, a mound of promise and strength, a sight of which was not to be denied the spectators. Opening her legs wide, spreading her feet firmly on the wooden stage, the girl lowered herself backwards in a lithe, double-jointed posture until her hands reached the floor behind her head and her vaginal lips were presented head on to the audience. With a rubber-like dexterity, she moved her head forward between her legs until she was practically looking her audience in the face. She seemed to concentrate, stretched her thighs farther apart, concentrating, concentrating ... and then the lips opened and her vagina was wide and wedy grinning at a crowd whose eyes bulged and remained transfixed.
In a small back room above the striptease a group of Algerians were sitting, talking quietly. It was a quiet room, but the notes of the mamba came in very faintly as if from the depths of a lake. The music gave an aura of harmlessness to the men and their talk. But it was just an aura.
Sitting at the polished round table, with his listeners rounding in semicircles on either side of him, the chief of the National Liberation Front in Paris was talking. His name was Mahmoud Taluffah and his apparent and legitimate business was running a fairly large bar a little distance off in the Boulevard de Clichy. His bar was sufficiently profitable to cover the ostensible signs of his wealth which were numerous. But it was merely a cover for his political activities and his operation of a ring of prostitutes and "striptease clubs" in the hard, vice-ridden centre north of the Seine.
In front of him now he had a map of one of the Paris arrondissements. It had been drawn in pencil and was covered with figures, dotted lines and times. Each of the dozen men in the room had a copy and had made various notes at the side on the blank notes at the side on the blank portion of the paper.
"Now," Mahmoud Taluffah was saying, "you each know your role. Once he has been shot there must be sufficient confusion created for certain escape. Escape should not be difficult if everyone plays his part; it is really a secondary matter. What is important is that no mistake be made with the killing. It will not be enough to wound. He must be filled-even if it involves the death of the killer." He looked slowly at a thin man on his right, a man with vicious eyes and a small, suave moustache. "Even if it involves the death of the killer," he repeated.
"I am not afraid to die," said the man in a toneless voice which belied the fanaticism of his eyes.
"You are a good servant of the cause," Mahmoud Taluffah said without warmth, as if there were no other possibility.
"Now," he continued, "that we know our roles, we must destroy these plans."
The papers were passed to him and he burned them slowly over a large ashtray while tie continued to talk quietly.
"We will meet here on the afternoon of Wednesday and I will distribute arms. After the victim has been dealt with, the arms must be returned here to avoid their loss in the search which will follow." He paused. "This time," he said, "Let us hope the job will be clean and successful. Remember that we are striking terror into the cringing heart of the metropolis, we are turning the metropolis into a coward fearful for its life in a way that we are not. We are bringing a free Algeria nearer with every blow we strike."
There were murmurs of agreement and approval. The mamba wafted into the room in the short silence which followed.
"I think that is all," Mahmoud Taluffah concluded. "Until Wednesday." He turned again to the man he had addressed earlier. "Mohammed Arab, it is time for your participation below," he said. "Enjoy her to the full. There may be little time."
Mohammed Arab, who was to kill Police Superintendent Jacques Lamotte in two days' time, stood up smiling, a smile that did not remove the viciousness from his eyes. The viciousness was ineradicable.
"I shall treat her to knife practice," he said, "with my prick."
Mahmoud Taluffah guffawed and the other permitted himself a slight grunt as, alert and tense as he always was, he moved towards the door in the wake of the others.
In the room below, the tourists continued to stare goggle-eyed as the girl swung back onto her feet and began a full-swinging dance to the mamba, revolving in front of them so that her buttocks waved and swayed and quivered and her breasts jumped and jogged and thin tremors of muscle moved down her legs like ripples on a lake. She would punctuate stages of the dance with a thrust of her abdomen, thighs widespread towards the audience, giving them a full view of her vagina. She had the Arab loose-jointedness which enabled her to manipulate her hips in an astonishing dance of their own. Their mobility gave rise to many a thought of how those hips would squirm and muscularly wriggle under a man's body when she was impaled with a stiff, searching penis.
At a point in the music where a crescendo had been reached and there was a slight lowering of pressure, Mohammed Arab came quickly through the door and onto the stage where he began to dance around the woman in a way that was charged with a sexual menace. He was naked from the waist, his legs enclosed in black, silk trousers which clung to them down to his ankles. His torso was slim, with every muscle in it developed to a pitch of near-perfection, and his arms were hard and wiry. This was what the elderly women in the audience had come to see. and there was a ruffle of excitement amongst them as they watched him circling his naked prey.
He and the girl danced in unison. She revolved round to face him, leaning backwards from her hips as if offering him the lower part of her body. He curved his hips in towards her as they mambaed together.
As they danced Mohammed Arab ran his eyes over the girl with a vicious eagerness. They had so often gone through this act, but although he had her so often on the stage in front of this audience, he hardly knew her well. They both did it as a job and were paid well for it. Neither had bothered to take their relationship beyond this strange, pulsating union in public. He knew nothing of what she did or how she lived. He was too busy to care. He had all he could want of her here in this room once a week. The rest of the time she, did normal strip-teases. As far as he could tell, she loved being impaled by him. She was, perhaps, an exhibitionistic nymphomaniac. She usually went wild when he subjected her body to his own.
He permitted his eyes to rise beyond the girl's dark head to get a glimpse of the gloom-surrounded audience and the reassuring presence of Akbar Halin by the door. He could see women in the audience, well-preserved, attractive 40-50-year-old women.
He wondered how many of them he'd had, if there were any new beauties there tonight who would seek him out. That was often what they came for. After the exhibition they would approach Akbar Halim and a meeting would be arranged at their luxurious flats or in some discreet hotel. There he would fuck the life from them while they sobbed their helpless ecstasy. Sobbed, sobbed, sobbed from their mouths, sobbed from their cunts, sobbed, sobbed. Sometimes they wanted him to split their asses, sometimes they wanted to be whipped, all sorts of things they wanted and he was always pleased to oblige, to viciously subject them to anything he cared to do to them-these rich, sexy cunts who paid him well. And how he punished them for being French cunts, for being rich, for having everything, for being able to indulge themselves while he had had to rise from the bidonvilles, while he had starved and been spurned. Not that he thought of these things in so many words. It was an abstract emotion firmly embedded in his mind. It showed in his eyes how he hated everybody. It showed in his gestures of contempt, in the way he treated the rich French cunt he got, the way he made them squirm, humiliated them in the way they wanted him to and hated themselves and him for doing.
He let his eyes fall back on the girl while the music and the tingling anticipation coursed through his veins. She was different, but in many ways she was the same. She was a proud-looking beauty and she.-was a stranger to him. He liked to feel his power over her, too, as she groaned and squirmed on the end of his prick.
He undid the catch at the waist of his trousers and felt from the distance the rustle of strained interest out there in the gloom. Yes, there was fresh cunt out there tonight. He'd have offers later. He'd charge them an outrageous figure and then he'd punish them for daring to pay it.
He wriggled with great dexterity from the silk trousers. Underneath he wore a small pair of pants which enclosed his genitals closely, a large, heavy bulge between his legs, hot in the confinement, wanting freedom, thick and fighting to escape from the constriction.
His legs were slim and muscular in the way that the rest of his body was muscular, perfect muscles, not over-large, which bespoke hours of development. He appeared to be in complete control of every muscle in his body as if he could give an individual order and immediately a small strip of hard flesh in his back or his belly or his thigh would start to twitch in answer.
His penis had risen up taut under the pants, but was held down by the material, forming, nonetheless, a tower-like point protruding from the general bulge. In the audience the women's eyes were magnetized on that point while the men still ogled the curves and rotundities of the girl's voluptuous flesh.
Mohammed Arab danced around the girl, who let her eyes fall to the point of his knob. She moved in towards him and their hips joined, while their back-leaning torsos remained apart. He felt her hot belly pressing hard against the heat of his loins, quivering against the mound of his penis. She raised her eyes to his and they were deep and gleaming.
He reached down and slipped out of the pants and his prick swung up massively, cleaving the air, and he heard quick intakes of breath in the room.
Watching with supreme concentration, the spectators could see his prick, which was large, almost too heavy for his body, reaching out against the girl as he moved slightly away from her. He, too, revolved now in a dance of his own and they saw his balls swinging against his thighs, the muscles rippling and balancing beautifully all over his body, the small buttocks hollowing and tensing. His penis had a flat bludgeon of a head. Its first entry would be delicious shock. The longing in the women of the audience gathered in a torment at their loins, making them rub thighs together in agitation on their hard seats, feeling the wetness in their briefs between their legs.
Mohammed Arab turned back to the girl and the audience watched him in profile, his great boom reaching out far ahead of the rest of his body. Slowly the girl swiveled round until her back was towards him and he could look down on those juicy, inviting, moving buttocks. He moved up behind her and they saw her slowly bend over in front of him, her legs wide apart, until her hands reached the floor and rested there supporting her.
Moving into her he saw that there was moisture on the tops of her smooth thighs. Her vagina which was loose and wet was waiting for him beneath the little disclosed anal aperture. Her buttocks were warm and roundly stretched. She was a lovely piece of flesh and he felt his teeth grit in vicious, joyous anticipation.
From the body of the room they saw him hovering over her bending, prostrate body like a bird of prey ready to swoop. They saw him move in with his great penis swooping out at her behind. They saw him mamba a little, arranging his prick against her vagina without touching her or himself. Then they watched while he reached down and grasped her little waist with his hands. They gave a long, choking gasp in harmony with hers as they saw him sink, at last, into her cunt with an agonizingly slow entry, like a great ship moving carefully along a narrow canal.
From their vantage point they had a perfect view of his entry as he slid in and out of her vagina, his body inclined back from her, reaching towards her at his loins, his buttocks hollowing as he pushed in until his prick was out of sight, buried deep in her cunt so that there was simply his body flush against hers.
The girl remained in her bent-over position, her mouth had opened and the audience could hear her low continuous murmuring. She began to rotate her behind, pushing back at him so that she was almost lifted from her feet and left dangling in the air on the length of his rigid staff.
Mohammed Arab's fingers tightened on the taut waist so that the flesh cringed in under his pressure, leaving red marks on the skin whenever he shifted his grip. He shuffled in towards the girl so that his legs were in the arch made by her widespread thighs and all the weight of his body which focused in his loins was forced against the soft, yielding roundness of her rump as he forced his thick prick deep, deep into her moist, contracting channel.
In and in he rubbed, bursting into her as if she were some ripe fruit, with her cunt widely relaxing before his entry and then swallowing his rod, holding it fast in a hot clutch.
There were hot faces in the audience; there were overwhelming itches and urges. A smartly dressed woman moved out her hand almost involuntarily and clasped the covered mound of penis of the strange man next to her as if she were in a trance. A man gripped a woman's knee and ran his fingers up under her skirt, finding her wet and totally naked underneath. Akbar Halim at the door discreetly doused the lights around the audience and smoked indifferently.
The dark bodies on the stage gleamed and writhed. Slim muscles tensed in the arms of the girl as she supported her weight with her hands on the floor. She was groaning helplessly and Mohammed Arab had his teeth gritted, his lips pulled back in a sadistic joy which sent shivers of fascinated horror through the women who watched and who would vie for similar treatment that night.
His prick stabbing in and out was swollen and white and each time he thrust it into the girl, pulling her back to meet the spear as he did, she gave a sobbing groan which sent cold chills coursing up the spines of the watchers. Her breasts hung down slightly and quivered like jellies with every in-thrust he gave. Her eyes closed and then opened in a lost glaze of passion. She spread her thighs wider, moving her feet apart with difficulty, sinking lower, forcing him slightly to alter his position behind her.
Surging into her, he watched her back, slimly twitching beneath him. He knew that her position must be aching, painful, difficult to maintain without collapse. He knew, too, that she liked it that way, that the more she could feel debased and used and forced into positions of pain, the better she liked it, just like all the rich, French cunts out there who'd now be getting hot and probably inviting the old boys next to them to have a feel while they watched him as their idol.
He caught her buttocks and kneaded them in his fingers, letting the flesh flow round his fingers, digging deep, hurting, grabbing in fierce handfuls and squeezing with terrible pressure as he thrust so deep into her passage that he felt the soft solidity of its end and heard her gasp and jump with the unexpected sensation before she wriggled back on her phallic tormentor again.
He moved his hands over the smooth, glossy flesh of her ass which was sweating slightly. He pushed his knees against her thighs and rubbed his belly against the taut buttocks. He released his hold on her bottom and instead moved his hands between her thighs next to his stiff thing which lurched in so that he could feel its heat in a soft friction against the backs of his hands. He touched with his fingers the inflamed lips of her quim and pulled them apart, watching them trying to move back to clasp his prick as it battered triumphantly up into her belly. He felt a mad swirl in his loins and then he raised his hand and slashed it down across her buttocks so that she cried out, and there was a murmur of terror and ecstasy in the room.
Watching, they saw his beat her with the flat of his hand, his buttocks hollowing, his loins seeming to disappear in a fusion with her ass. They listened to every little groan she made and the hissing which escaped from between his clenched teeth. They saw his prick and they longed to hold it, to suck, to claw, to ram down on it-a spit that crashed into their bodies in a merciless punishment. And the men watched her groaning and waggling and near-collapsing and their eyes glued on her sagging breasts and her swaying, tensing, finger-marked buttocks and they heard her passion and longed to be in her with their own hard, hot pricks which needed relief.
Unconcerned, because everybody in the tense room was unconcerned, some of them had begun to fuck. The women had raised their skirts and moved over onto the men's laps so that naked pricks could surge up into their crannies under cover of the skirts which fell back, a covering umbrella to the activity if not to the whimpers of passion which burst from the throats.
Mohammed Arab crashed into the girl and held his thickness buried into her to its greatest extremity, moving on the balls of his feet, so that he could feel his pulsating knob grazing against her soft cervix. He wanted to gouge out her insides, to split her from her pelvis to her throat, to hear her scream, to have her fight and try to get away, to have her helpless. That was what he liked. That was what made him a killer. But she liked to be killed. He would have liked her to resist.
In his loins the swirl had become a moving tide of sensation which was going to flood into her and drown her, make her gasp for breath as she struggled against it and it filled her. He strained back his head, veins standing out on his neck, his perfect controlled little muscles bulging and shimmering under his dark skin. He caught at her anus with his fingers and tore it apart, jabbing thickly into it with his hands as his penis bulged and battered in her channel. He heard her little scream, her gasping bewildered ecstasy as she felt the final, taut expansion of his stiffness in her.
He had a brief image of a sausage bursting its skin and then he roared out a great gasp and began to drown her with his teeth biting his lips hard and he heard the gasps from the audience and then the curtain over the stage came down as he slumped back from the girl who collapsed to the floor. He didn't like his exhausted vulnerability to be seen.
He sat on the floor, staring at the woman without emotion now it was over and she lay with her eyes closed, breathing heavily. At times like this he was a little bewildered because suddenly there seemed no point in killing anybody. There seemed point only in resting and perhaps eating little dishes which could be brought to one's bedside. He felt naked and for the moment helpless.
The woman didn't move. Only her belly and breasts moved, heaving, and he noticed her thighs quivered a little as well.
He listened to the shuffling sounds outside, the people leaving. In an anteroom the women would begin outbidding one another for his favors for the next few nights-unless they, too, had had an orgasm, in which case they would probably think of him with disgust and hurry off telling themselves that they would not come again, but next week they would be back.
He stood up. The girl still didn't move. She would wait for him to go as usual. Neither of them spoke; she didn't try to cover her nakedness. He saw the semen flowing back out of her and making a viscid patch on the floor.
He felt with relief that in a short time he'd recover his normal killer instinct. He didn't like to feel so robbed.