Then she saw what it was. All the other men, no matter how brutal, had been straightforward. But these men were wallowing in hypocrisy. Supposedly dedicated to eradicating crime, they never took an issue to its root. They wouldn’t dream of going after the real owners. Constance was sure that the young psychopath who had hung her over a cliff would not be bothered by the agents. They would only go after small fry and medium fry, and in the process take whatever advantage they could.
“Nice piece of ass,” one of the men commented. “Ain’t she the one that got kidnapped after writing the story?”
“Yeah,” the second man replied. “And then she sold out.”
“Oooh, let me at her,” the third man said.
And for the next fifteen minutes she became a pin cushion for their cocks. They bent her over and fucked her from behind, and forced her mouth, and took her two at a time. She took the indignities in stride, having reached the point where hardly anything men did to her could upset her in any meaningful fashion. But just as she was beginning to pull her awareness back from the activity in and around her, she felt something hard and cold at her temple. One of the agents was holding a gun to her head.
“Now we’ll see how much cool this cunt has,” the agent said. And then to Constance. “I want to see you give the best blow job that anybody has ever given,” he told her. “And if you miss one stroke, I’m going to put a bullet through your head and you’ll be listed as having tried to escape.”
Having her brains blown out by an FBI agent was definitely not the way Constance wanted to die, so she put all her effort into the task. On her knees in traditional cocksucking style, her hands wrapped around the man’s cock, she stuffed the rod of meat into her mouth and started sucking. She licked and pulled, slobbered and moaned. She worked until she was drooling and her hair was flying like mad around her eyes. The three men glared down at her, their mouths split into smiles.
When they had received the assignment, the director had told them that they were going into one of the most vile rackets that had ever existed on earth, and that they were not to spare anyone connected with the slave ring. They couldn’t kill indiscriminately, but on the other hand, they didn’t need to be too nice about how they handled those they captured. Their major concerns were two: to secure the release of the innocent victims and to keep their hands off all the owners, if such were even to be found on the grounds. Thus, they knew they had carte blanche with Constance and immensely enjoyed the spectacle of her sucking cock to save her life.
“Oooh, I’m coming,” the man groaned. “Swallow it, swallow it!” He put his hands on Constance’s head and forced her face to burrow deeply into his crotch until her mouth was buried in his pubic hair. And when he came, his sperm spurted onto the back of her tongue and splashed down her throat. She swallowed it with huge gulps, indicating how much she relished the load being pumped into her face.
“Time’s up,” the man in charge said. “Maybe we can take another crack at her later.”
Off in the distance there were the sounds of helicopters, seaplanes, tanks. The army of the local dictator, having been alerted, was now roaring in. Although the dictator knew of and got revenue from the Parlor, he now had to pretend that the existence of such a place was a total scandal and shock. The attack on the Parlor, spearheaded by the FBI, was now to include police and military. Soon after, reporters would arrive, and a whole slew of lawyers, muckrakers, writers, television, radio, film, and the whole scavenging crew of media coverage.
Constance was yanked to her feet. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and tried to put her hair back in place. They allowed her to get dressed, although their hands were all over her as she pulled her clothes back on, and they stroked and pinched and prodded her tits and ass and cunt continually. Finally, she was ready, and they pushed her out into the front hallway, and took her down to the courtyard, which was being set up as a detention center.
There she saw all her collaborators, the attendants, the guards who hadn’t been killed, the maids, the upper-echelon executives. They all looked dejected and crestfallen. They could all look forward to very long prison sentences, probably life. She was pushed into the crowd and she milled around a bit, exchanging words of encouragement with the others.
“Oh, if I hadn’t gone over to the other side,” she said to herself. “This would be a day of liberation for me.”
And then the idea hit her. She hadn’t gone over to the other side, she had been forced. They had used drugs, and threats, and hypnosis, and extreme erotic experiences to break her will, and after a while she didn’t know what she was doing. In fact, she had had amnesia for much of the time. And wasn’t aware of her behavior.
“I wonder if I can get away with that story,” she thought.
She reasoned that she could. If Robert did commit suicide, there would be no immediate voice to be raised against her, although she was certain he would back her up if she tried to cop a plea. The records in her office were impersonal enough. And the testimony of the slave girls could be nullified if she could convince a jury that she was indeed out of her mind when she joined the staff.
What astonished her was the realization that she was going into much more of a state of shock in reentering the world at large than she had when she was first taken into the Parlor. She marveled at how much she had changed. She had killed a man, had seen a good friend shot because of an attempt on her own life, had fallen in love with a brutal killer, had indulged in dozens of lesbian orgies, had been fist-fucked, pissed on, whipped, and sold herself for money scores of times. And now she was a hardened bureaucrat in a slave empire, hoping that she was pregnant. And with all this she was expected to go back into the world of civil appearances. It was ludicrous.
“Well, one thing’s for sure. I’m not going to go to prison if I can help it. I’ll lie and cheat and do what I have to, to keep out of jail.”
It was just as she was lost in the middle of these ramblings that she heard her name called out. “Constance, Constance,” a male voice repeated several times. For a few seconds she thought it was Robert. But when she turned in the direction of the sound, she saw a stranger coming toward her. It was a man she didn’t recognize, although he seemed to know her for he called her name and waved and smiled and seemed exceedingly glad to see her.
He was within five feet of her before she knew who it was.
“Chet!” she exclaimed.
“Darling,” he said and threw his arms around her.
But at just that instant one of the agents stepped forward and brusquely pulled them apart.
“What the fuck . . . ?” Chet exclaimed.
“Sorry, no contact is allowed with the prisoners,” the agent said.
“Prisoners?” Chet yelled. “What the hell are you talking about? This is the woman who led to the breakup of the ring. She was the one who discovered the kidnappings and helped me break the code of their pattern.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” the agent said. “She was found in the employees’ section, living with one of the bigwigs. And I understand she had a pretty important job here herself.”
Chet stared at her. He was taller than she remembered, and there was a look of vulnerability in his eyes that she had forgotten could exist in a man. He looked like a puppy dog that had just been capriciously whipped by its master.
“Is that true?” he whispered.
“Chet, it’s not what he’s making it out to be. They were going to kill me. I had to find some way to stay alive. You have no idea. They kept us drugged and whipped us and continually toyed with our lives. I pretended to go over just to save my skin. And I was able to help a lot of the girls that way. Ask them.”
Chet took one long hard look at her and knew that she was lying. She knew that he knew. She had forgotten just how well he knew her. There was no way that she could fool him. The entire story of her betrayal was written in her eyes, and he could read her eyes the way one could read a book. Then the awareness of what had happened struck her.
“Chet, you led them here,” she said.
He nodded. “I went to the FBI. And showed them my tapes. It wasn’t too hard to piece together the next location and time of a kidnapping. Then they put a woman agent in the way of the slavers, and by the fifth town they were able to have her kidnapped. She was brought here and sent out a message by means of a special transmitting device. Then the bureau had to plan its attack, coordinate with the local government. And from what I understand, some pretty big people are mixed up in this thing, so they had to find out which toes not to step on. And . . . well, here we are.”
The two of them were silent for a long time. All around them the hubbub continued. The inpouring of the soldiers who were just learning what kind of a place it was and who looked at the slave women with lust and envy, wishing they could drop their guise of good guys and just indulge in some good old-fashioned raping and pillaging. The FBI men scurried about like ants.
“And you,” he asked. “What happened to you?” And his tone of voice demanded the truth.
“I don’t want to go to prison,” she said.
“You know I’ll help you all I can,” he told her. “But I have to have the truth from your own mouth.”
“All right,” she told him, and the two of them stepped aside, out of hearing of the agent.
“It was a shock,” she said. “To wake up captured, bound, and gagged, with some strange man fucking me. And on top of that, to be enjoying it. Then the slow realization that I would never escape. I had to come to terms with the possibility that I would die here. And it could come any time. From time to time the girls were called for a Snuff, and sooner or later it would have been my turn. Then I met Robert, and he made me fall in love with him. He used every trick in the book, threatening my life one moment and making delicious sex the next. And so I succumbed, I gave myself to him. Then he offered to put me on staff, and I had no real alternative. I couldn’t escape, and all that was left was to spend three or four sessions in the Parlor every week until I was too scarred and used for anything but to be killed by a strange man. I couldn’t face that. So I went over to the other side.”
Chet didn’t say anything for a long time. A universe of feeling went through him, and when he finally did speak it was with great suppressed emotion.
“You know that I love you. And my stomach churns when I think of the things that were done to you, and when I think of you loving another man in the same way you loved me. But I’ll stand by you and maybe I can help to get you free.”
They stared at one another over the distance between them, the gap that they couldn’t cross. The guard would not let them embrace, and even had they been able to physically hold one another, they would have found high walls inside themselves, holding them back from a total and complete giving to one another.
Constance gazed on the second man in her life and pondered at the mysteries of love. Chet was good and kind and gentle and patient. He wanted marriage and children and continuity. While Robert was cruel and capricious and sharp. He wanted nothing but ever more exquisite sensations, even when they were purchased at the cost of causing another person to suffer. And yet she loved each of them, each in a different way, each with a different aspect of totality.
She put her hands on her belly and tried to feel the miracle that had just taken place there. She was convinced that Robert’s seed was at this very instant burying itself in the egg that clung to the walls of her womb. And in the face of that, she was going to go out into the world, to face possible imprisonment.
Just then she heard a loud uproar and hubbub coming from behind the swimming pool. Voices shouting, people running. There was no way to tell what was going on for a while, and she and Chet remained in silence, looking at one another, trying to salvage the reality of their former lives from the wreckage of the present.
Their concentration was interrupted by an agent who came up to her and said, “Excuse me, is your name Constance?”
“Yes,” she told him.
“There’s a man named Robert who broke away from his guards and is standing at the edge of the cliff,” the Agent went on. “We’re trying to talk him down but he insists on seeing you.”
“Robert!” she thought and a thrill ran through her. She looked up at Chet, but he had already seen the effect the news had had on her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I will help you all I can, but I guess I have to accept the fact that this man is very, very important to you.”
“Oh thank you, darling,” she said. “I so need your understanding now.” And then, turning to the agent, “Please, take me to him.”
The place was already beginning to be flooded with waves of normality. The FBI agents had reached a point where they were beginning to be concerned about someone’s life. They were coming down off the terrific high they received when first stumbling into the Parlor. The soldiers were starting to act in an orderly fashion. Soon, the buildings would be emptied, and the machinery of civilization installed, and the Parlor would have become a memory and a scandal, and within a year leave no trace.
The agent took Constance to where Robert was. He was perched at the very edge of the cliff, standing with complete insouciance, looking down. He held his life in his hands and so was utterly invulnerable to anything anyone else might try to do to him. It was only when he saw Constance that his spine stiffened and he seemed to take some interest in his surroundings.
“See if you can talk to him,” the agent said, betraying that fear and loathing of suicide, which daunts even the most calloused of men.
He let go of her arm for an instant, thinking that she would take one or two steps forward to talk to Robert, but at precisely that moment she broke loose and ran as fast as she could to Robert, to fly in his arms and stand with him at the very brink of the precipice.
“Darling,” he said.
“They wanted me to talk you out of jumping,” she said.
“And you? What do you want?”