The Soul Of A Thief. Steven Hartov

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СКАЧАТЬ we found ourselves in a dark and decrepit sitting room, occupied by an elderly matron cocooned in a threadbare housecoat and woolen slippers. She sat upon a worn purple divan, reading a pfennig novel by candlelight, and I prayed that this gray-haired matron was not the only prospect in the house. She looked up and grinned, her mouth a garden of broken teeth.

      “Guten Abend!” she croaked. “Your pleasure, gentlemen?”

      “Yes, that,” Edward snapped. “If there’s anything here to please us.”

      “Einen Moment.” The old woman struggled to her feet and hobbled away somewhere, while I jammed my hands into my pockets, looking about at the fading portraits of German composers and Alpine apple orchards, and attempted to summon my most casual whistle. It was nowhere within me.

      A pair of women sauntered into the room. The first of them was black-haired, middle-aged, and powerful in the appearance of her musculature beneath a heavy emerald dress. The thick makeup upon her face looked almost clownish, her lips heavy and blood red, her eyes outlined in inky borders, and the upper portion of her dress was unlaced, revealing a bosom that appeared to me to be as large as the rump of a pig. The second woman was somewhat more youthful and substantially smaller of stature. Her dark blond hair was braided into “strudel” coils astride her ears, and her attire resembled that of a beer-garden waitress, replete with its white bodice and billowing short sleeves. Upon her feet she wore high black boots, laced up the center to her shins, and her face was also overly masked with paint. I tried to blur the image of her mouth, for its lipstick was somewhat askew and I dared not imagine the cause.

      “You take Sylvia?” The old woman, who now peeked from behind her prostitutes, gestured at the larger of the two women and winked at Edward.

      “All right,” he said, and I was immediately grateful, as he was clearly volunteering to mount this creature in deference to the better choice for me.

      “And you want Heidi, ja?” The old woman lightly slapped the rump of the blonde “waitress” as she jutted her trembling chin in my direction. Heidi smiled, showing a chipped front tooth and the tip of her tongue.

      I managed a nod, even as I experienced an icy chill throughout my spine.

      “Twenty reichsmarks apiece,” said the madame, very curtly.

      “Ten.” Edward snapped a reply.

      “Fifteen!” The old woman raised a gnarled finger.

      I was then engaged in turning my trouser pocket inside out, and counting some rumpled bills and coins.

      “I am afraid I have no more than ten,” I stuttered.

      “Ten it’ll be, then,” Edward said to the old one. “Or nothing.”

      “All right.” The madame stuck her thumbs in the belt of her housecoat. “But you can fuck them for fifteen minutes. No more.”

      “Half an hour,” Edward shot back.

      “Twenty minutes!” She returned his serve.

      I was certain I would require no more than a paltry minute myself, and only that if my already rebelling penis would suddenly take flight in an Olympian miracle.

      Edward took the black-haired wench by her wrist and immediately moved toward a creaking stairway, and as he passed me by he whispered, “Just think of Ava Gardner.”

      I stared after him. I did not know who that was, and was lost for a substitute image. I found myself temporarily immobilized, while Heidi lifted the hem of her dress and too mounted the stairway. She stopped after a meter’s progress, turned to me and beckoned with a finger, and I swallowed hard and followed.

      Within a minute, I found myself standing before her in a small and dimly lit room, rather like the cabin of a steamship. There may have been a washstand, a small desk and a single chair, but I do not really recall, for my eyes were locked on the narrow bed covered with rumpled and graying sheets.

      Heidi immediately plopped herself down on the edge of this newlyweds’ paradise, sitting quite erect and spreading her boots. She regarded me with what she might have supposed to be doe’s eyes, and placed a flirtatious finger in her mouth. With her other hand, she quickly lifted her dress and gathered its hem about her waist, revealing short, puffy white bloomers encasing her bare thighs. Then, with the practiced grace of a magician’s assistant, she quickly dragged them off, down over her knees, and allowed them to hang about one ankle, while I stood there and stared at her in utter shock, as if the furry mouth that now presented itself to me was the maw of a dragon.

      I could not move. My hands were clenched into tight fists, angled straight down astride my trouser legs, as if I might be at attention on parade. My breaths came in short rasps of panic through my nostrils, and although I tried with every muscle to summon some sensation in my groin, in truth I seemed to be utterly paralyzed from the neck down.

      The woman giggled then, which quickly shot my face through with a roaring blush. She seemed to believe that my paralysis was simply a temporary lack of ardor, perhaps akin to a stubborn auto engine requiring coaxing on a winter morn. And so, she quickly unlaced her bosom bodice, slid her hands inside her upper dress, and scooped her breasts out into the air, where they settled upon her torso like a pair of cycloptic jellyfish. This attempt had no effect whatsoever, other than to further widen my eyes and tremble my knees.

      For a moment, Heidi cocked her head at me, then quickly leaned forward and reached out for my tunic. I watched her hands as they deftly flashed the flaps aside, unbuttoned my braces, and within an instant I was standing there with my trousers and shorts about my boots. As she gripped me in her hand and opened her mouth, I confess that I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed. But it was all to no avail, as her enthusiastic tongue and lips managed only to soak me in a warm sort of slime, through which nothing worthwhile of me emerged.

      “No, my dear?” She finally spoke, perhaps thinking that some romantic lingual engagement might encourage me. “Then let’s try it this way, Schatzi!”

      She suddenly fell back upon the bed, raising and separating her legs as she dragged me down, my body stiff as bone in every place but where it mattered. And I fell upon her, bumping hair muff to hair muff, flesh to flesh, and she twisted and bucked and ground her hips and gripped my buttocks and bit down onto my earlobe. But we remained unjoined, and I felt nothing more than sublime humiliation.

      At last, she ceased her futile efforts and turned her head to regard a cuckoo clock on the wall. “So, that’s it, poor boy!” she exclaimed as she jumped up.

      Within a minute, I was fully dressed and outside on the street, waiting for Edward as I cursed Himmel and Hitler and the entire Reich, not to mention God, who was equally the culprit...

      * * *

      “You didn’t?” Edward was driving once more and regarding me, post-confession, as if I had failed to feed my own starving child. “What do you mean, you didn’t?!”

      Silence for a moment.

      “I couldn’t.”

      “You didn’t even try?”

      “I tried. She tried. All of the angels in Himmel’s version of hell tried.”

      “Was there something wrong with her?”

      “I have СКАЧАТЬ