Harriet Daimler - Pleasure Thieves

Their silent pounding bodies were suddenly accompanied by the jangling of door keys getting closer to the cell. They rushed their pleasure, hoping to cheat the always present, always might-be-present guard.

"Faster, faster, for Christ's sake," the younger man pleaded. And the rattling created by their bodies stopped, replaced by the unmistakable sound of a key sliding into the heavy iron lock. The older man with the wise lined face pulled his body away from the young imploring animal.

"You're insane." The door was swinging open, and his fear made him limp.

"Coward, coward," Harry mocked, and with a graceful arc, his body was off the cot and standing at the sink, his back to the unannounced guard. The jailer looked knowingly at Phillip, stretched out on the cot, lighting a long American cigarette. Then he regarded the shuddering back of the tall blond thief. The young ones needed it a lot. The older ones could do without, but they taught their inexperienced brothers.

Showed them more in a six-month stretch than they learned in ten years on the streets.

The guard humiliated the gasping back by addressing it.

"You've got a visitor, Harry."

That surprised him. Phillip often had callers, but Harry had no connection, no sentimental patchwork outside the prison.

"A visitor?" he turned, buttoning his trousers.

"A woman," the guard announced curtly. "She says she's not your sister." She obviously impressed him. Harry didn't answer. He silently followed the guard out of his cell, not looking at Phillip who was watching the burning tip of his cigarette with scientific intensity.

Harry followed the guard noiselessly to the waiting room. The guard banged his stick against the cell doors as they walked the long corridor, and shouted in, "Stow those burners, do ya hear me? You can smell them in the warden's apartment. Stow them, or there'll be a midnight shakedown."

The two men walked into the large cold waiting room, tables that looked like waiting room tables bordered by chairs that looked like Anonymous The Pleasure Thieves Page 2

waiting room chairs. In one of the chairs was an elegant woman of about twenty seven. She was dressed in a grey suit with a French fit, curving her hips and breasts, the hem ending an immeasurable moment before it would on an American or English skirt. She was sitting straight and unaffected by her surroundings, a woman who created her own atmosphere and rested comfortable and secure in the nimbus of contempt that blessed her. It had been a long time, seven months, since Harry had had a woman, and this one looked as if she'd be a lot of work. Two hours to get the clothes off, and six hours to convince her she'd done the wise thing. And the cool ones only got convinced in their cunts.

"There she is," said the guard bluntly.

The woman pulled tight her blanket of correctness and looked over the guard's head into Harry's eyes. "Mr. Hatch," she said, "may I have a few words with you?" Her tone suggested that Mr. Hatch might now be too busy and his secretary would check his calendar and surely give her an appointment.

"Certainly," agreed Harry, living the scene she had created. He sat down lightly in the free chair across from her and waited for her to speak.

"There will be work for you in New York when you get out." He looked curiously at her. "Work you should enjoy." Neither of them seemed interested in pleasure.

"How?" he finally asked.

"Just call me," her boarding school voice enunciated, "at Plaza 5-7000 — ask for Miss Stoddard."

"Yes Miss Stoddard."

"I'm sorry," she almost blushed, "we haven't been introduced. I'm Carol Stoddard, and I shall wait for your call. I'm leaving two hundred and fifty dollars in the office for you. Will that be enough?"

"That will be quite enough."

"Till next month, Mr. Hatch." She was getting to her feet. There was, except for the brief business, not a human word for them. She put her striped, gloved hand into his, and had removed it before he could experience its pressure. "Good day then," and she walked carefully out of the waiting room, taking with her the breath of civilization.

Harry was being led back to his cell. The guard was saying something about class. The guard's tiny little mind, if you let it in, could irritate.

Back in the cell, Phillip looked up and said, "Who was it?"

It was not intrusive for him to ask. Little happened in the prison and a man shared his experiences, the way he shared his cock. Harry started to explain. He looked down at the shrewd cool man stretched out on the bed, and for a moment he was sinking into the cool eyes of the woman who had sat with him a brief five minutes and given him a strong odor of the world outside.

Phillip had a portable outside world that he carried with him. Maybe that was the attraction. Harry had never been hot for men, not for women either, except when a detached heat would spread through him, and then he'd find a cunt, thin and clinging or wide and comfortable and exhaust his prick. He'd pull it out of them, depleted and eager to leave them.

There were better ways to make it. Not get your prick into anything, just feel it ponderous like an arrow leading you into strange experience.

But that way it had to be without heat, just a cool fucking erection in the head. Phillip was strange enough to be a constant invitation. He never was hot for Phillip, but that was the only place for the cool fuck to go. So his prick never got finished and ready for something else.

Now he was beginning to plan the Llewellyn job; that was where his maleness wanted to be. An immense job, absorbing and satisfying. It would take brains and courage; it would take maleness.

Phillip was watching him, seeing him go off into a world nobody could touch. There was something pathetic and childlike about Harry's dream world, yet it had to be taken seriously. There was no question that the visions, created by a deprived child became the acts of the man.

That was how they all got there, wasn't it?

Even Phillip cared enough about something to get here, and not mind the ten month stretch. He cared about money. How original! The things you could do with money. There was no Midas touch about him, no sensuous thrill in spilling the sheckles through stretched fingers. He put all the money back into gracious living, fantastic expression, something out of a woman's magazine. The one thing, the one raison Anonymous The Pleasure Thieves Page 4

d'etre were the paintings. To line his walls with the brilliance, the most selective vision of all ages. Phillip despised museums, despised the keepers, despised the confused giggling viewers or the awed small town viewers or the arrogant student viewers. A painting had to be lived with, had to be cultivated. There should be a master-slave relationship, sometimes the painting master, sometimes Phillip master.

To keep the thing interesting. Like sex, only better. Museums were like prisons, and he wanted to tear down the precious colors that became barred windows on the long corridor walls.

Phillip felt the attraction of Harry's long relaxed body. Harry was as perfect as a master's etching, perfect and simple without a wasted line or a decorative curve. Phillip lifted himself from his cot, and crossed his arms on the rim of Harry's decker, a layer above his. He ran his fingers across the sharp planes of the upraised face. It should have felt like steel, cold and smooth to the touch. Instead, he was surprised to find his flesh damp, and the bristles of his heavy beard rough against his palm. He moved his fingers down to the what-could-be female flesh of his neck.

Harry lay as if in a dream, musing to himself. His mind's absence allowed Phillip to possess his body freely. To possess him coldly, to watch him as a snake watches a drowsy rabbit in the hypnotic sun.