Chapter 7

Dippy Gallagher was in his element. He loved breaking new broads into show biz, particularly when there was no risk involved, and Borman had assured him that with this big gorgeous brunette, June Wright, there would be no risk whatsoever. Also, the kind of people who were filling up the theater he had improvised in the loft upstairs were a double guarantee. They were strictly class, well-heeled and top-drawer, old chap... Friends of Borman and the society guy Jock Richmond. No sweat about them being discrete. He'd given everybody in the troupe the day off except Mike, the cameraman, who was going to film whatever happened for closed-circuit TV, and, of course, Tiffany. She was sitting on a chair in his office, looking pale and discouraged.

Dippy puffed on his cigar and spun around a couple of times in his swivel chair, letting her sweat a little before he followed through with the rest of Borman's instructions. He was beginning to get the drift of what the crafty stock-broker was trying to bring off and he had to admit that for an amateur the big bastard was pretty sharp.

"How's Humpty?" he barked out suddenly. "Is he sober. Can he get it up?"

"I don't know," Tiffany answered dejectedly. "I mean, he's pretty sober, but I don't know if he can get it up or not. Anyway, June won't let him near her."

"I tole ya to let me worry about the details, kid," Dippy snarled. "June's not only gonna let him get near her, she's gonna suck his cock."

"You're crazy!" Tiffany blurted out before she could catch herself. "Excuse me, Mr. Gallagher, but she wouldn't do that in a million years."

"She's gonna do it for you, kid." Gallagher gummed a cynical grin at her. "She thinks you're the prisoner of some gangsters who put on live sex shows and the only way she can buy your freedom is to take your place."

"Wh-at... ? You told her that?" Tiffany stammered weakly.

"Not me, but the guy who's running this show," Dippy grunted scornfully. "And she believed it. At least," he added ambiguously, "she pretended to believe it."

"Ooooohh, poor June..." Tiffany wailed tearfully. "She's really going to... do that for me? I can't let her, I just can't."

"That's show biz, kid," Dippy shrugged, darting a sharp appraising glance at the young girl. "And maybe she won't mind as much as you think. Maybe you're all wrong about big sister June, kid. I happen to know that she made it with a married couple last night, and got buggered by a delivery man in the kitchen of their apartment this morning. Also..." He paused, waiting for all that to sink in before he planted the last seed of suspicion in the bewildered adolescent's mind. "Also, there's gonna be a coupl'a big Hollywood agents in the audience tonight."

"Oh..." Tiffany laughed uncertainly. "It's all so hard to believe. I mean, about June doing those things." She frowned theatrically, remembering how when she had been a little girl she had been awakened night after night by June's hot breath panting in her face as the older girl feverishly masturbated with her eyes tightly shut and her full sensual lips bared back over her teeth, pretending hypocritically to be asleep. Maybe she had been completely wrong about June, Tiffany mused. Cliff claimed she was cold as a fish, but maybe he'd been lying. Maybe he just didn't measure up to June's idea of what a lover should be... Maybe she'd just made that scene on the back porch for an excuse to break off the engagement.

"What did you say about an audience... and the Hollywood agents?" she asked, trying to make sense of all this new information in her confused mind.

"June thinks you're doing live sex shows, kid, so I knocked together a little theater in the loft upstairs and this fella who's innerested in her... he's a big banker... backs a lot of Broadway shows... he's bringing some friends in to be the audience. At least two of 'em are Hollywood agents on the lookout for new talent. I ain't allowed to divulge their names, get it, but it sure would be a shame if your sister upstaged you at the last minute after all the work you've put in. Right?"

"Damn!" Tiffany exclaimed petulantly, clenching her pouting lower lip with small even white teeth. "And she has the juicy role... Sacrificing herself for me!"

"Yeah, but you got the technique, kid. You're an actress!" Dippy breezily pointed out. "You could turn the tables on her just like that!" He snapped his stubby tobacco-stained fingers. "All you got to do is say, 'No, no, dear sister, I can't let you do such a horrible thing for me... ' You're both prisoners, in this little skit, see, and the idea is one of you seduces the guard - that's Cliff - while the other escapes, get it? You can ad-lib it good, and she won't know what to do. So you steal the show, kid. She has to sneak off-stage and there you are!"

Tiffany's eyes were sparkling with enthusiasm now and the color had returned to her youthful heart-shaped face. "Oh, Mr. Gallagher!" she bubbled happily. "That's a wonderful idea! How can I ever thank you enough?"

"Oh, just send me a postcard from time to time, kid," Dippy said blandly, slipping down from his chair on his runty legs and starting toward the door. From Nowheresville, you dumb cunt, he added to himself. "Be upstairs backstage in ten minutes. Mike'll show you what to do."

When the horrid bald little man with the beady eyes and cruel thin-lipped mouth finally came in, June had no idea how long she had been cooped up in the tiny room Pimple Face had brought her to. When they left the Bormans' apartment shortly after eleven o'clock, he had made her put on what looked like a pair of ordinary dark glasses but, in fact, the lenses were completely opaque. She couldn't see a thing except out the sides, and when they had driven off a ways he had stopped the car and stuffed cotton between the frames and her cheeks, so that she was completely blinded... It was awful, being deprived of your sight. She didn't see how blind people stood it.

When she protested, Pimple Face just told her to shut up. "Anybody gets curious, babe, you just had an eye operation," he told her curtly.

So she hadn't the slightest idea of where she was either. They had driven around for what seemed like a long time before they had left the car and come to this place, with him steering her by the arm. It was up four flights of stairs and smelled musty, that's all she knew for sure. Boards had resounded under their feet, and she had had a feeling of space around her, as if she might be on the stage of a theater, just before she was put into this windowless little cubicle. She took it to be an actor's dressing room, although it certainly wasn't what you would call glamorous... just a table with a mirror and a few pots of makeup on it, a rickety chair, a wash basin and a cot with a plastic chamber pot under it.

There was no lock on the door, but before he left her alone Pimple Face warned her there was a guard on the only exit, so not to get any bright ideas about running away. She hadn't intended to anyhow, or she wouldn't have accompanied him in the first place. She was certain she had figured out a way to get both Tiffany and herself out of the jam they were in.

About an hour later Pimple Face had returned with a Coke and hamburger for her and had gone over with her the few pitiful lines she was supposed to speak in her grand debut as an actress. It was just a one-act curtain raiser, he said, a very simple situation based on the real-life one she was actually in, so all she had to do was be herself. The main part obviously was making love to the guard. June had protested when she heard that Tiffany was to play with her, but Pimple Face had sworn it would be her last performance. It certainly would be, June mused to herself, if her plan worked. And it would be the last time for quite a while that Pimple Face would be pushing people around. Of course, she hadn't bothered to memorize her lines. She had no intention whatsoever of speaking them.

When Pimple Face left the second time, she had dozed off on the cot, completely exhausted by all the incredible things that had happened to her since her arrival in the city. When she woke up, her watch had stopped, and she had no way of knowing how long she had slept. Her stomach told her it must be late though. She was hungry again and had to urinate terribly. She was just trying to get up the courage to use the chamber pot when the offensive little man barged in without even knocking and started barking orders at her.

"Stand up and strip!"

As she began to slowly undress, he sat down on the chair, making unpleasant sucking noises with his tongue against his teeth and continuously raking her body over with those piercing little gimlet eyes. She had expected this, of course... to be treated like an animal at the market place... but the vicious satisfaction the evil little creature obviously derived from her embarrassment made her blood boil.

"Whaddaya standing like that for?" he rasped at her when finally she stood voluptuously naked in front of him.

"I have to go to the bathroom," she answered primly.

"Piss in that pot," he sneered, indicating the chamber pot under the cot. "It's not really all that big a deal, kid," he added when she hesitated, "compared to what you're gonna be doing in a little while. Did the guy tell ya what ya have to do?"

"He said... seduce the guard," June answered. Finally the urgency of her need to urinate overcame her modesty and she squatted down on the pot sidewise to him. Somehow his hearing the loud frothing sound of her water gushing into the plastic container was even more humiliating than his watching her. He would pay for this, she vowed grimly to herself. The sadistic little wretch!

"The script calls for you to suck his cock!" Dippy snapped. "You ever suck a cock?"

"N-no-o..." June faltered, but then in fear that he would make her practice on him she quickly added, "But I know how. I saw it done once."

"You saw it!" Dippy exclaimed, simulating shock with a sly grin. "Whadda ya, a voyeur or somepin?" His eyes sparkled maliciously when he saw her blush bright red from head to toe. Borman was right! She was too much, this broad was, with a cock- stiffening body like that and all these hang-ups. Something hadda break. "C'mere!" he ordered peremptorily. "Spread those pussy lips. Come on, goddamnit!" he yelled furiously when she hesitated again. "I gotta make sure you're healthy, kid. I got my other actors to think about to, for chrissake!"

She approached him and, with hands trembling from both shame and rage, parted the sparsely haired outer flanges of her cunt, exposing to his lewd gaze the slick pink flesh of the moist furrow and the shrinking little bud of her clitoris.

He whipped the cigar from his mouth and leaned forward, sniffing loudly. "Pretty funky," he commented dryly. "Wha'd ya take on last night? A goddamn bull... ? Wash it up, for godsake. Curtain call in five minutes." With that he clamped the cigar back into his cruel little mouth and strutted out, leaving the dark-haired girl's face flaming and her body trembling in outrage.

"Just you wait," she muttered. "Just wait!"

When Gallagher pushed her out onto the stage, instead of falling to the floor sobbing and then running to Tiffany as she had been instructed to do, June strode firmly across the rough planks toward the footlights and stood there commandingly in her proud naked beauty with arms upraised. There was a prolonged burst of applause mixed with whistles and wolf calls, but she stood there unflinchingly until the noise subsided. Half-blinded by the spot projectors above and the row of lights below, she could only see the faces in the audience as vague blurs, but she was sure that out there somewhere there must be at least one person who had a spark of humanity left in him, sick as he must be to come to a show like this. When the theater was completely silent, she began the brief speech that she had rehearsed to herself that afternoon.

"Please help us!" she cried out in a vibrant compelling voice. "My sister and I are prisoners here. We're not doing this of our own free will. We're treated like slaves. You must help us! Get up and leave. Then call the police. That's all you have to do!"

There was a moment of puzzled silence, then somewhere someone snickered, someone else began to frankly laugh and in a second the whole hall was roaring with laughter. People were clapping and drumming their feet on the floor. There were even a couple of Bravos!

God, they thought it was part of the act, June realized. Her beautiful face flamed with anger and despair. She stretched out her hands pleadingly and screamed in a powerful voice that cut like a knife through the din. "It's true! I'm telling you the truth. We're prisoners of a gang. You've got to help us!"

The applause turned to jeering hoots and catcalls. "Cut the crap, sister!" someone yelled at her and another voice called out, "Quit talking and start sucking!"

"Yeah, suck! Suck! Suck!" They all took up the chant and June realized that there were women in the audience too. She had thought it would be exclusively made up of men, but no, there were women out there too... women so depraved and perverted they wouldn't even help one of their own sex. Tears welled into her magnificent brown eyes and she turned her back on the audience just in time to see Tiffany, also stark naked, advancing toward her with exaggeratedly mincing little steps.

"Poor dear sister!" the young blonde exclaimed in an artificial flute-like voice when the noise died down again. "You don't have to worry. I shall seduce the guard, and while he's busy soiling me with his filthy sperm, you can slip out of this horrible dungeon and alert the police."

"They're paid off!" someone in the audience yelled and the crowd broke into laughter again.

Unabashed, Tiffany went on with her stilted dialogue, stagily encircling June's supple waist with her slender arm and leading her toward a spot behind the bed where she would be practically invisible to the audience. "Now you lie down here, darling sister," she cooed to June soothingly, "and pretend that you've fainted. I shall call the evil guard and whilst I am seducing him on the bed, you can sneak out the door."

"She'd rather stick around and watch!" somebody heckled from the rear of the hall to another chorus of guffaws and titters.

June stopped in mid-stride and stared bewilderedly at her sister, "What do you mean... while you seduce him?" She realized confusedly that Tiffany was carrying on with the skit and supposed that under the circumstances it was the only thing to do. But surely both Pimple Face and that horrid little man had both said very clearly that it was June who was to do the seducing. The failure of her appeal to the audience had left her in a state of semi-shock, and she gazed dazedly around her, vaguely aware that the stage set crudely depicted a sort of medieval dungeon with various instruments of torture hanging from the walls.