Chapter 3
Madison Le Grande's high forehead knotted into a plane of furrows as he read the strange note on his lap. His reaction to reading the threatening letter was mixed. At first, he'd considered tossing it away as a prank, a cruel one perpetrated by someone with a sick mind. But then he remembered what the local magistrate had told him, about his grandson's disappearance in the States, and he read it over again. Even Interpol had been in touch with his concierge concerning the disappearance that had been reported a couple of days back by his daughter-in-law, so he took another look at it.
He hadn't decided whether to take this whole thing seriously or not, so he put the letter down on the antique table next to him, absently thumbing the library card reputed to belong to Peter. What to do? He decided against getting in touch with the authorities... they were too bothersome. It wasn't that he feared the threats in the letter as to what might happen if he were to seek aid from the police. The police would find a way of getting themselves involved in this whether he wanted them or not. Fortunately, his relationship with those armed clerks, for that's the way he viewed their function much on the same level as he viewed garbage collectors, was somewhat different than might be the case with a less wealthy man. Oh, in a case like this, there might be some fuss in the press about a need to cooperate and all that nonsense, and that all men are treated equally, regardless of race, creed or wealth. But crusty old Le Grande, a man who'd spent his life dodging such claptrap knew the ridiculous nature of such an argument. A man who'd rubbed shit in the eyes of the system like hie had could hardly carry about such a foolish idea in his head as justice and equality.
It was for the paupers, the peons. Oh, if this kidnapping were for real, the paupers would carry on about it, taking their notions of what really went on from the papers. Such notoriety was part of the territory of wealth, and Madison neither sought it out, nor campaigned against it. Besides, it helped keep the peons in their place by instilling the false belief in their heads that the rich were the same as they were and that the proof was in the tragedies they suffered just like anybody else.
The tragedies were merely of a larger scale, the old man realized, blown out of proportion by publicity. Not that the rich didn't suffer, oh no, far from it. But a man like himself could afford to suffer in luxury.
And so as he sat in the library of his summer home, a forty-eight room estate sitting on thirty acres above the French Riviera, Le Grande pondered the note, realizing that some pest of a policeman was bound to break into his serenity in the near future. To be sure, it would be the captain of the local force from Bandol, or more likely a top agent from Interpol, and most certainly the American Embassy would dispatch someone from the C.I.A., but he could deal with them at his leisure, and if they insisted on carrying on an investigation, it was up to him to what extent he chose to cooperate. Cops were such pests, the old man ruminated, but necessary pests at times. He wasn't sure what he'd do if they came into the picture, he didn't want to threaten his grandson's life, no matter how much the youngster had strayed in Madison's considered opinion. But if it were to be believed-that was the problem.
He ran his hand through his thinning white hair and mused over the situation. Paula had notified the police after Peter had been gone for more than twenty-four hours. It wasn't unlike the lad to go off for a longer period than this, but he generally stayed in touch. At any rate, the woman had become disturbed and notified the authorities, not knowing whether he'd run off or been actually kidnapped. In a long-distance call, she'd expressed her fears of the latter possibility, but the old man was his usual non-committal self, expressing his con-cern in his usual monotone.
Once the story leaked, however, Paula had been confronted with cameramen, and she'd really put on quite a performance, tearfully weeping in front of the cameras, expressing doubts that her son would go off like this for several days without notice.
And today his butler had delivered the note, postmarked Chicago, U.S.A. It seemed that some mischief was indeed afoot, although the old man wasn't convinced that the kidnapping was real. He'd call his daughter-in-law first, before going any further with this. He and Paula were quite skeptical about the boy, although she did seem to be genuinely concerned about his safety. He had to let her know about the note at any rate, even though he had a nagging suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax. He was more removed from the situation than Paula emotionally, but not so very removed at that. After all, about the only thing that roused his passion was money, and the kidnappers were demanding a million from him. He was notoriously tight-fisted for a billionaire, going so far as to install pay toilets in the guest bathrooms in his homes in France and in Newport, Rhode Island, his winter residence, an eccentricity excused by his friends. Yet, if he were actually convinced that the threats were for real, he wouldn't hesitate to capitulate to the demands. He wasn't all as tight-fisted as that.
Yes, he'd call Paula before making his decision. But there was always the chance that young Peter had taken it into his mind to pull this whole thing off himself... yes, that would explain how, they got his card. He wouldn't put it past the youngster. His son had been too lenient with him, looking the other way when he got into trouble. Madison had noticed how much farther out his grandson got each time he visited Bandol. What with the drugs, God knows what he was taking, but even marijuana was terrible enough to the elder Le Grande's way of thinking, and all the other activities-going around the country with all these half-naked girls...
He felt his blood pressure rising, and tugged at the bellrope next to his overstuffed chair. If this was the real thing, perhaps it would teach the boy a lesson. If this was one of his stunts... well, God help him, he'd disown him. Perhaps Peter had cooked this up to get at the money all the sooner. The butler opened the heavy walnut door.
"You rang?"
"Yes, have Claudette bring me a snifter of brandy."
"Oui," the butler bowed and left.
He needed a small snifter to calm him down before calling his daughter-in-law. That damned boy was causing him no end of worry, and to think he was the only male heir to his fortune. He sniffed at the indignity of the situation, holding himself from a full rage with the realization that he may, all the same, be in desperate need. The boy had a good mind. The problem was that he was so damned spoiled. That was the trouble with those who were born into money-they had no sense of values, of the struggle.
He'd struggled. The third child of a French immigrant, he'd left his birthplace of Boston at the age of fourteen in search of his fortune. After kicking about for several years, he'd won a copper mine in a card game out in Arizona. The rest was history, and it seemed that everything he touched turned to gold... or oil. At seventy, his empire was one of the mightiest in the world.
Once he'd gotten into European business, he'd decided to buy the estate outside of Bandol as a sort of homecoming present to himself. It seemed impossible to him that he'd come from the peasant stock in this country, a people he found to be dirty and stupid.
His one abiding passion, outside his business empire, was one not uncommon to those of great wealth. This was in collecting paintings. For a man who flinched at a long-distance phone call, Madison thought nothing of plunking down several hundred-thousand for a painting by a master. This activity was often attributed to great philanthropic need by the general public, but Madison knew that the case was quite the reverse, that his appreciation of the arts was in large part to keep such treasures away from the masses.
He looked fondly over at the wall to his latest acquisition, a little-known rendering of earwax painted by Van Gogh. This said it all to Le Grande, not known for his true understanding of the artworks he collected. If only Q-Tips had been around in Van Gogh's day, the man might have been spared a lot of misery.
His thoughts were interrupted by the entrance of Claudette, a petite girl of twenty who had brought his brandy. He motioned for the young wench to place the snifter on the table next to him, and remembered why it was that he'd asked for her to bear the spirits instead of the butler.
"Will there be anything else, monsieur?" she bowed quite crisply. "Yes... the usual," replied Le Grande, unzipping the trousers of his blue suit without changing his stony, unsmiling attitude. Even when he was happy, his friends said, no one could tell. His tight lips, a half-size too long for his face due to its petrification brought on by years of unchanging solidity, would merely twitch at the very corners when he was extremely pleased with something.
Claudette was used to all this by now. Knowing well what the 'usual' was, she knelt down in front of him, displaying a great deal of cleavage in the process. She wore a black French maid's uniform appropriately enough, lined with white lace ruffles at the arms, neck and the bottom of the short dress, complete with white apron and black cap which was also lined with lace. Her garters, encasing a lovely set of French gams, were of the same lace, holding up a pair of sleek black hose which fitted into black pumps.
As she bent over to minister to the boss's needs, her short skirt rode up over her hips, revealing the fact that she wore no panties, a condition that the old gentleman insisted upon as was their arrangement. This was in case he wanted to proceed beyond the usual, as he seldom did, but just in case... At any rate, the condition of her attire gave the butler and cook many a fetching sight as Claudette went about her household duties.
Despite his conservative nature, Le Grande wasn't a total prude. While he remained sexually active at his advanced age, he did go about it in a rather detached way, seeing it as a necessary function more than anything else. But this new maid made him randier than usual. And she played her role well, pretending to really enjoy servicing the fossil.
"Oh, mon cher amor," she cooed in her heavy accent Gaulishly, "Why such a long face? Things can't be that bad."
"I should have had another child... a son," mused the old man, allowing the girl to slip down his trousers and boxer shorts, revealing his scrawny white-on-white legs, streaked with varicose veins. "My daughter died... " he referred to his girl who died at birth-yes, tragedies do run rampant among the wealthy... "and now my son. And the only male heir is a... a... I don't know what."
The girl had heard of Peter's disappearance, but knew nothing of the note confirming the kidnapping. As she'd only met the boy a couple of times this past summer, she hadn't really gotten to know him, her only knowledge being that of household rumor among the staff.
"It can't be all that bad," she said, grasping his pencil by the shaft.
Madison said nothing more, wanting to escape his worries if only temporarily. His wife had been long since gone, not that they'd been particularly close, and now there was no one but young Peter, that troublesome burr in his side.
But now his mind was erased by the gently manipulations of Claudette's hand. She took his semi-flaccid tool in her hand, trying to ignore the fact that the grey flesh looked as dead as its owner, sprouting up long and thin from the white roots of his garden like a plant that had too little sun and had grown leggy.
But she was patient, and soon blood was filling the blue-corded prick, giving it enough stability to stand without a crutch. She moved her soft young lips down against the swelling senility of his ancient organ and began to blow on the mottled tip, cooing as she did so, talking baby talk in French to the cock.
Madison couldn't stand French, the language of his father, but he tolerated it from Claudette as she made it sound rather harmless. But to hear a Frenchman, one of those arrogant bastards on the streets of Paris, start expleting the nasal words made him practically ill. He often tried to forget his ancestry, preferring to think of himself as a creature apart from the rest of the world, which he nearly was. He hated the poor of all races and creeds unless they worked for him-American, Irish, Japanese. But he reserved a special circle in his inferno for the French-Christ, he hated those goddamned fucking frogs.
All except for the one who was blowing him. Her pliant lips made him forget all about his grandson and the nasty possibilities brought about by this kidnapping business. He folded his eyelids over his steely-gray eyes, running his arms out along the armrest. His mouth still held in its usual expressionless glower, though, slashing across his face as if a rubber band were attached to the edges and pulled tight back around his head. From the waist up, he looked very much like a living statue, a piece of history in limbo, a figure of dignity displayed in a war museum, his plain white shirt, the tie, the suit all in place. But the bottom half was denuded, the pants in a puddle around the oxford shoes as if they'd melted off the scarecrow legs. His gray prick alone was alive thanks to the life-giving efforts of the beautiful young maid who labored over him, her pink beauty the very antithesis of his wretched infirmity.
He made so little effort to involve himself in the drama, one would have sworn he was not a living thing. Yet, the girl was used to this. The man had actually thought himself gone to sexual waste, having had no sexual life at all during the previous five years, only to find it reawakened by this young piece of fluff, who had joined his staff only months ago. True, he wasn't able to expend much effort into the act, but the girl's overabundance of health and stamina seemed to compensate in this rather three-legged tango. She had even been able to work him up to the point where he could maintain a hardon long enough so that she could switch from her mouth to her pussy as receptacle if she hurried and didn't wait more than a few seconds between the time she let his thin stick drop from his mouth to the time she squatted atop him and sucked it into her snatch. The pencil didn't have enough lead left in it to stay exposed to the cold air for long, but with the proper ledger for it to write in, it could still manage to jot off a couple of lines, provided the entry was one well worth the making.
But today it would be the usual, and the girl bent to her task with a vengeance, her tongue sliding out between her fatty lips and licking at the eye of his needle, bent upon extracting a thin string of liquid thread from within. Her peaches-and-cream ass chibbled with her efforts, exposed to the air of the room as her dress rode up above her hips. But the man, whose venose and gnarled instrument she was sucking, made no move to touch her.
She moved her hand up and down the crooked shaft, exerting just enough pressure to send wave impulses to the ancient nerve ending. Once she had squeezed too hard, and the tool had gone flat on her.
With puckered lips, she took the semi-smooth head, the substance of which reminded her of a brain she had seen in an anatomy class when she went to le Acadamie that was creased with lesions across the spongy surface, into her mouth. Now that the man was so old, she figured, he probably couldn't pump enough blood into the mushroomed tip of his cock to fully inflate it.
With her hands jerking regularly up and down the shaft, she began to suck at the head between her pursed lips, her tongue trailing across the surface of the tip. She let out a light puff of air, and then sucked and tantalized the machine with her tongue, alternately sucking and blowing.
At this moment, Madison Le Grande let out a tremendous fart that was cushioned somewhat by the stuffed seat of the chair. It startled the girl only slightly as this had happened often in the past, the old man having lost some control over his bowels over the years. But she did try to breathe as little as possible, for the man's gastric disturbances had quite a fetid odor about it. It was impossible to breathe through her mouth, stuffed with cock as it was, so she invariably had to inhale a bit of the putrid gas, but after a couple of difficult breaths. Yet she kept at her task, not wanting to lose what favor the man showed her, which was in fact considerable when compared with most people-even the members of his family.
Madison, for his part, didn't bat a reptilian eye. While the gastric troubles had bothered him years ago when he first was plagued with them, he had long since reconciled himself to his fata morgana. As far as embarrassment went-he felt none, enjoying that privilege of the rich not to feel such need to apologize to those he felt his inferior, and that included practically everyone, from the lowest gutter tramp to heads of state.
Once the odoriferous cloud had passed into the elements, Claudette began to bob her head up and down the shaft more vigorously, her swelling breasts which threatened to pop out of her neckline at any moment, pressing against the old man's inner thighs. Her fingers worked their way down to his dangling balls, particularly musty-looking ornaments that hung loosely in fuzz-covered bags that looked like worn, bleached leather.
She stuck more and more of the slender spire into her pillowed lips with each bob of the head now, her fingers pulling at the base of the shaft in tandem until better than half of the prick was being administered to orally. She built up the rhythm of her headgiving, realizing that the man, if, indeed, he displayed a sign of life
although he displayed no outward signs of a coming orgasmitself) was about to make it. She
blew hard, and sucked harder, her cheeks puffing out with effort, droplets of sweat beading on her forehead.
And then he came... weakly, but he came. The first splash of the thin, watery gruel struck her tonsils, and she swallowed quickly, his feeble splashes of seminal fluid escaping down her throat. After several spurts, the stream ended abruptly, and the thin cock began to wither before she even had it out of her mouth. If one looked closely enough at Madison Le Grande's face, one could swear, despite the fact that he hadn't even so much as flinched during his orgasm, that he detected a slight upturning at the corners of his mouth, but if this were the case, it would have taken a da Vinci to have detected it-indeed the subtlety of his smile would have made the Mona Lisa look like a mugging, grinning idiot by comparison.