(1980) The Second Lady (34 page)

a prolonged moan to escape her, arched her back, curled her toes, let her ass go up higher and down and up again, emitted a throaty cry, and dissolved into a full orgasm.

He sat up pleased.

Groping for words, she tried to speak, failed, and silently nodded her gratefulness.

‘Thanks, Alex,’ she said finally. ‘It was wonderful. Now shut off that music and let me sleep.’

She turned on her side, buried her head in the pillow, eyes tight. She heard him leave the bed, go to the bathroom, return. She feigned sleep as he dressed and softly hummed.

After a while he was gone.

The moment she heard the outer door open and close, she tried to rise. With difficulty, she forced herself out of bed. Every muscle in her body was aching. She stumbled to the bathroom, soaped and washed herself. In the bedroom, she turned off the lamps, ignoring her sleeping pill, and crawled into bed. The bed was still warm from their bodies, and the musky smell of their coupling hung over it.

Erotic fragments of what had happened passed in and out of her mind.

The First Lady of the United States. Je-sus. If anyone back home ever knew.

She suffered a wave of shame at what she had done. It made her feel unclean. And worse, she felt guilt at having enjoyed some of it. But she mollified both shame and guilt by remembering that she had engaged in this sacrifice to warn her husband, to save him and to save herself.

Razin, the bastard. All of them here, bastards. She’d fixed them good.

She smiled to herself in the darkness. She could visualize the interloper, her double, the imposter tomorrow night with her husband. She could see poor Andrew assaulted tomorrow night by a passive and tame wife gone mad - fellatio, scratching, cursing, legs around his shoulders, the whorehouse works — and in the end being encouraged to go down on her. It would be the most topsy-turvy, stunning evening of Andrew’s life. She could imagine him wondering who this weird

wildcat of a woman was, certainly not his own Billie, positively not his wife of seven years. Knowing him, she knew he wouldn’t let it go at that. He’d find out the truth.

The other woman might be the actress, but only she herself, the genuine Billie Bradford, would know that she had pulled off the greatest act of the century.

Those bastards, the game was almost over for them. For herself, liberation loomed.

She would sleep well.

An hour later, in his KGB office in the quiet police building, Alex Razin brought a pad and pencil before him and tried to get his mind back on his work.

It was not easy. His mind did not want to leave Billie Bradford’s bed. The pleasure of the marvellous sexual encounter still lingered. He felt really good. It was as if he had enjoyed Vera again. Not precisely true, he knew in his heart and loins. While it was wrong to make comparisons between women, and while Vera never failed to give him pleasure, this Billie Bradford had been even better, the best lay he had ever had in his life. A fantastic lay, an aggressive female without a single inhibition. It was a wonder the President of the United States was not a basket case by now.

Which reminded him that he had actually fornicated with the American President’s wife. It had been the plan and the hope, but the fact that it had actually happened almost overwhelmed him. It seemed doubly astonishing to him that what he had regarded as a political assignment had developed into the high spot of his entire sex life.

He wondered if she was sexually insatiable, and would do it again with him. He supposed she wouldn’t. Once she might excuse to herself, as an antidote to loneliness and repayment for his kindness, but twice she would not be able to justify to herself. Not to Billie Bradford, who was the First Lady of America and perhaps the world. He promised himself not to pressure her.

Besides, now that he had done his job, it meant Vera was coming home to him. He looked down at his blank pad.

Soon he would fill it with explicit instructions for Vera to follow when she bedded down with the President tonight. Once Vera satisfied the President, it was likely he would unburden himself about his work and secret plans. And once Vera passed the intelligence on to Kirechenko, her job would be done. She would quietly be exchanged, sent back to Moscow while Billie Bradford was flown to London.

The thought of Vera in his arms once more focused his thoughts on her.

Right now she must be in a panic. The President had changed the timetable on his wife. They would be resuming their lovemaking tonight instead of tomorrow night. And Vera was unprepared. How relieved she would be to get his decoded message with its explicit description of what the President would expect from her.

That Vera would soon be making love with the President gave Razin a twinge of jealousy. Vera would be giving Andrew Bradford a wonderful night. The thought of his beautiful Vera, the woman who would become his own wife, being mounted by another man, giving another man pleasure, cast a shadow on his own achievement this evening. Still, one had to be reasonable. Vera’s unfaithfulness, like his own, was counterfeit, mechanical, an action performed in the line of duty. He would remain objective. If his message got through to Vera, if she gulled the President, the Soviet Union might have its Summit triumph.

Razin was suddenly aware that it was getting late, time was running out, and Vera must be desperate to hear from him.

He took up the black pencil to reconstruct his evening with Billie. He pulled his chair closer to the desk, and realized how weary his legs were. In fact, his whole body was sated and retained the afterheat of his extended lovemaking. He reminded himself to keep a cool head, not forget any detail of Billie’s fantastic performance.

Actually, he told himself, the minute details were unimportant. It was the various acts in her performance that counted, that and her total attitude toward a lover and what

she expected from her lover. Billie’s overall attitude had been that of an unrestrained and sexually aggressive woman, one eager to engage in any variation of the sex act.

This analysis seemed sound. After all, he had the evidence first-hand. Yet, something about it niggled him. The Billie Bradford he had seen in bed this evening was a contradiction of the Billie Bradford he had known on a daily basis the entire past week. The sleek Billie of his acquaintance before tonight, with her neat blonde mane of hair, her clear young face, her genteel manner, simply was not the kind of woman ad experienced in bed less than two hours ago. From her general style and behaviour outside of bed, he would have expected anything but an unrestrained nymphomaniac in bed. In truth, he had expected her to be warm and fun, but relatively passive and entirely straight. She would give to a degree, yet she would not get her hair mussed. But going down on him for openers, clawing him, pouring forth obscenities, clutching his testicles, insisting that he go down on per, that had been utterly unexpected and unbelievable.

Razin dropped his pencil and leaned back in the chair to think.

Maybe it was unbelievable. Despite the need for haste, he realized that he had better

make haste slowly. Too much hung in the balance to allow for any error on his part. The message he sent to London could determine the outcome of the Summit — and Vera’s fate as well. He would have to take a more critical look at the behaviour of his recent bed partner.

Was Billie Bradford’s behaviour during sexual intercourse with him her normal behaviour and entirely honest? Or had it actually been a performance, contrived to mislead him into sending the wrong information to her double? He dimly remembered reading an American short story once — The

Lady or the Tiger? The hero, a handsome youth, had committed the crime of presuming to love his king’s daughter, Ordered to the public arena for judgement, the hero faced two doors and a dilemma. Open one door and a beautiful lady, whom he might possess, emerged. Open the other door

and a ferocious, man-eating tiger emerged. Which door to open? Razin found himself facing a similar dilemma now. Had the woman in bed with him been a tiger? Or a lady? When you pushed the sex button on her, was she really a wildcat, as some women were, or was she just the opposite, a tame, compliant feline who had merely pretended to be a wildcat tonight?

He wondered if she had really made an effort to deceive him. He had regarded her as an uncomplicated, ingenuous all-American girl. Yet, he realized, there could be more there. There could be a more devious, more shrewd, more manipulative person behind the facade. Very few simpletons became American First Ladies. The ability to use others, for self and for one’s mate, might be the common characteristic found in most First Ladies. Billie might not be above cleverly using him to destroy Vera.

Razin was uncertain now. He had to decide. There was no margin for error.

Restlessly, he pushed away from his desk and went into the adjoining office to his Billie Bradford file cabinet. He located the manila folder devoted to information on her sex life. It was a thin folder.

Leaning against the cabinet, he thumbed through the memoranda in the folder. There were the names of the two young men she’d had love affairs with before she met Senator Bradford. The information was sketchy and contained nothing about her sexual behaviour with them. Then there were his own notes on his questioning of Billie. These indicated, taking Billie at her word, that her husband performed with great diversity in bed. If this were true, Billie herself would have had to cooperate in these acts. This would certainly support Razin’s own experience with her. On the other hand, the President’s occasional mistress, Isobel Raines, contradicted his wife. Isobel Raines had indicated that the President was conventional in sexual matters. If this were true, more likely than not Billie would also have had to been straight with the President. This would make her behaviour tonight a sham

and a lie. Two reports, completely at odds. Razin closed the folder and returned it to the drawer.

Unhappy, he walked back to his desk. He could see that time was indeed running out and that he must come to a decision quickly.

One last review of the evening’s activity. The case for Billie’s having behaved honestly tonight. It had been obvious to him that she wanted sex, was open about it, loved it. She had asked him to undress quickly, and asked him to help her out of her nightgown. None of this had appeared staged. She had invited and welcomed the foreplay and responded like every woman he had ever mown. She had insisted on fellatio as part of the foreplay, rhich had been unexpected from her only because he had romanticized her. Half the women he had slept with enjoyed fellatio. At this time, Billie’s eagerness to be fucked, excited as she was, had been perfectly normal. She had expertly guided him to her vulva. Once he was inside her, she had reacted and cooperated as any practised lover would. Her vaginal wetness could not be contrived. She had performed with less inhibition and more aggressiveness than any female he had ever known, but in bed he had known only Russian women, and she was American, and members of the new breed of American women were celebrated for their forwardness in sexual matters. All the rest - her legs around him, her clawing, her mouthing of obscentities, her taking hold of his testicles - was hardly unusual, considering how well he had been fucking her and exciting her and how much she was enjoying it. That he had failed to bring her to an orgasm in intercourse had surprised him, but now, in retrospect, it was less surprising. Few American women, despite their boldness, had orgasms during the act. As an aftermath, she had begged him to perform cunnilingus to make her climax. He had done so, and her climax had been real. Yes, she had been quite a package of heavenly delights. Her behaviour had been such that Vera, he felt sure, could imitate it precisely. In sum, seen as a whole, seen as a participant, Billie’s behaviour had seemed natural, normally responsive

and real, without a single suspect move. If you played it by feel, relived it as a whole, Billie Bradford’s performance could be trusted.

Or could it? If you examined it more closely, less by feel than by intellect, not as a whole but step by step, could it be trusted?

The case for Billie’s having behaved dishonestly tonight. There had been something studied about each step she had made, from start to finish. The case against her rested on the presumption that she was as expert an actress as Vera. And why not? As First Lady in a White House glass bowl surrounded by cameras, she had to be gifted in theatrics - just as Jackie Kennedy had performed her role of cultural heroine and Betty Ford had played her role of earthy candour. This evening, Billie should have been suspect from the first moment he saw her. She had dressed - or undressed - herself for the role of seductress. The parted negligee had been meant to provoke, and the sheer short nightgown she had never worn before. She had been too ready, too eager, to climb into bed with him. Her record, well researched, had revealed no easy lay, no promiscuous past. In foreplay, her effort at fellatio had been crude and amateurish, exposing her utter inexperience at it. Most women, who had done it often, teased the tip of your prick with their tongues, kissed it, reamed it, before sucking. Billie, probably at a loss, had clumsily done nothing but take him in her mouth. Perhaps this was her style, perhaps this was the way she did it with the President. But Razin doubted it, doubted if she had ever done it before to anyone. As to their coupling itself, at no time had she laid back and allowed herself to enjoy it. She had pressed constantly to make him believe, to make him feel, that she was wild and uninhibited. All the scratching and clawing, perhaps some women did that sometimes, but thinking of it he had never personally known one do it except in teasing fun. Billie had played that part of her lovemaking, along with the uncharacteristic obscenities, as if she always reacted that way. Presumably with her husband too. Razin doubted it. Some of those Latin qualities, and the coarseness

of language, would have been apparent to him in different ways during their daily meetings. No hint of these had ever been given. As for the clutching of his testicles, it had been difficult for her, awkward, and he could not visualize her doing it with the President. Nor could he visualize her making the President go down on her. Maybe a hand job but never a head job. All around, in their act, there had been too many contrivances of high-spots, as if these were quirks he would not forget and would remember to report to Vera. Only one thing he could be sure of. Her climax had been no fake orgasm. That had been real. But the rest? Suspect.