Cleopatra�s Perfume (15 page)

What I will share with you in these next pages are erotic images of wanton sexuality in a licentious atmosphere, all depicting the wages of sin in a very private, very exclusive nightclub in Cairo known as—

The Cleopatra Club.

Berlin

April 29, 1941

H
e had been reading for a hour, maybe two. Chuck hadn’t expected the diary to reveal the inner workings of a woman so complicated, so defined by cultural expectations and so filled with pent-up desire. Sex was her god, though she masked her emotions with British manners that were nothing more than a disguise, compounded by her insatiable hunger to become inextricably caught up in lust.

How well he remembered witnessing the vision of her singularly beautiful body. Naked, sitting on the edge of the marble sunken bath, spreading her legs so he could get a view of her. Moist, wet. Her lower lips swelling up when he sucked on her, inhaling her smell, a scent that defined her for him as a woman of this exotic world, evoking a dreamlike state from which he
couldn’t escape. He envisioned her wrapping her legs around him, then penetrating her with hard thrusts, making her cry out for more until his energy was spent. Even then, he wouldn’t stop. He wanted it to go on and on, reveling in the wonder of all of her, her body deliriously sensual, her touch soothing, her curves rounded and smooth. She was his.

He wrinkled his brow, frowning. No, that wasn’t true. She belonged to no man. Not even that Egyptian. Yes, she slept with him, allowed him and the Nubian to pleasure her, but that wasn’t enough for her. She wanted something else. Haughty, proud, slinking around the club in a gown so sheer every man gazed upon the curve of her breasts with her nipples hard and brown, she perfected her act of reigning sex goddess with a sophistication that transported him to another sphere. A place where pleasure never ceased and torment didn’t exist. Yet he sensed she wandered in an aimless circle, lost as he was in the decadent back alleys of Cairo, running from the confines of a society that judged their actions. He hadn’t seen the pain reflected in her eyes, only his own. He was so caught up in pursuing the game, he didn’t recognize that his prey was more vulnerable than he was.

His hands coated in sweat, he let the diary fall to the floor, ignoring the white card engraved with fancy writing slipping from the pages. Anger replaced amazement, imagining the horror she’d experienced aboard that trawler. He knew the enemy was vicious, heartless, but such acts were unforgivable, even in war. She’d been raped by that Nazi, yet she was determined to go through with her mission. This wasn’t the same woman he knew in Cairo. And what was all this nonsense about
Cleopatra’s perfume? He remembered her babbling about it to him before she disappeared at the lake.

Determined to distance his emotions from what was an unpleasant chapter in his life, he picked up the diary, though his hands were shaking. He couldn’t stop the physical reaction he had, remembering the confinement in prison, the rotten smells, the psychological games to drive a man mad. He had escaped only through the help of another prisoner, a Czech whom he suspected wasn’t what he seemed. But that was in the past. He owed it to Eve’s memory to continue the journey as she’d written it in her own hand, in her own words. A curious thought pricked his mind. What wouldn’t she reveal about herself? Damn, he couldn’t make sense of anything. She was an enigma.

And him? Was he any different? Before he landed in Cairo, he’d been kicking around the Near East for months, running the mail back and forth for Imperial Airways, an outfit out of Great Britain. Women, drinking, gambling. He’d left the States to forget the mistake that cost his younger brother his life. A woman. Chuck had taken it upon himself to seduce the society girl with the dark glasses and pointy breasts before she could ruin the kid with her lies. She was interested only in showing off to her rich friends how she’d snagged the handsome flyboy. How could he have known the kid would convince her to fly with him so he could pull off some crazy stunt in the air to get her back? A stunt that went wrong. He crashed into the field, killing the girl. Afterward, he committed suicide.

Nothing could bring his brother back. Chuck had been on a downward spiral since then and it only got worse. Was it only two
years ago that his life changed? Because of
her.
Lady Eve Marlowe. A society dame. Weren’t they all the same?

He’d never forget that night in Cairo when he jumped in to a cab smelling of urine and headed for the bar at Shepheard’s Hotel, never looking out the dirty window covered with a muck of oil and dust. Why bother? The scenery never changed, whether it was boys with trays of cakes darting in between the cars and gharries, men playing checkers at crowded sidewalk cafés, or a file of donkeys burdened with sacks bumping into anything that got in their way.

After he’d numbed the pain with enough whiskey at the hotel bar, he wandered through the bazaar, inhaling the scent of cinnamon and cumin, filling his belly with nuts and dried fruits before the smell of rancid raw meat and skinned heads of sheep sent him running back to the bar. He paid no attention to the sparks flying from the spinning wheels of knife sharpeners or the grease splattering from the strips of beef sizzling in huge pans of sesame oil. He headed for Wagh El-Birket, the brothel district.

There he chose a dark-eyed beauty dressed in a blue gauze chemise so flimsy, when he touched the fabric it seemed to melt away, revealing a body that made him want to run his hands over her buttocks and hips, moving his fingers down to her smooth shaven mound and open her to him. Probing, exploring her, but not fucking her. Drunk or sober, he couldn’t forget that disease ran rampant in these three-, four-story houses on Jermyn Street.

With his passion reduced to her lips brushing the head of his dick, he wandered down to the bird market. The raucous cacophony of lime-green parakeets squawking in their bamboo cages grated on his nerves, but it didn’t stop him from follow
ing a man in a dark woolen robe and billowing turban down a narrow alley. The sweet aroma of hashish guided him to a circle of men slamming down their bets, their blood hot with excitement, the screeching sounds of birds raising the ante to a fever pitch. He threw down what money he had left to bet on a fighting partridge, a large, red-beaked bird with a killer instinct. The bird’s raucous cries echoed his own emotional turmoil and sexual frustration. Too long he’d been living the life of a man he would define as one who drinks, rants, gambles, is irresponsible, unfaithful, but never forgets. Never. And it was killing his soul.

When his gamble paid off and his bird won, he thought about returning to Mary’s House, his favorite hangout in the red-light district, but a casual remark from a man warming his hands over a wood fire glowing in a barrel made him finger the money in his pocket with renewed interest.
A new club with a private backroom with forbidden pleasures was open to anyone who could pay,
the man said, smiling. The Cleopatra Club. He brought his thumb and forefinger together and poked a finger through them, meaning sex.

Chuck grinned, but remained silent. An uncomfortable ache in the back of his head reminded him his other alternative was to pass out in a dirty hotel room with a whore’s empty sighs blowing in his ear. Why not see what new vices Cairo had to offer?

That had been his undoing.

Thinking about that night, he wiped the sweat off his face with the back of his hand and loosened the tight collar on the SS uniform he wore as any man would when he hungered for the taste of a woman he couldn’t have. Quickly, with barely con
trolled anticipation. The pain in his groin shot through him, worsening the situation because he had tasted her, known the softness of her body against his, the tilt of her head when she teased him, the fullness of her breasts with taut perfect nipples hardening between his thumbs.

Damn her.

He still didn’t understand why he allowed himself to be drawn into the underbelly of the Cairo nightlife. Garish, salacious, expressionistic. All he knew was the Cleopatra Club provided an erotic melodrama from which he couldn’t escape, an aesthetic mask to assuage his guilt. Even now in the Berlin hotel room, he could see in his mind the blur of nude bodies dancing without shame in the shadowy spaces between the small round tables, the women shimmying and licking their lips with their tongues, the men grabbing them and caressing their breasts, then sliding their hands between wet thighs before disappearing behind partitioned areas with low-to-the-floor tables with sunken leg spaces underneath for easier penetration during sex.

He shook the vision from his mind. The hotel room was quiet save for the pounding of his heart. The ringing of the telephone had stopped, but he couldn’t forget he had to get out of Germany, though traveling through small towns would be more difficult. It was easier to get lost in a big city. He wondered if it would be feasible for him to remain and finish reading the diary or get out and take it with him. He hadn’t found any cash in her room or jewels to help him make his escape. Her dresses and undergarments weren’t fancy, as he expected, remembering what
she’d written about the women in the underground donating their clothing to her.

On the other hand, the time it took to read her story was a pleasant prospect. He could see no benefits in running out until he knew more about her mission. Damn, that wasn’t true. He wanted to know more about
her.
Why she had betrayed him in Cairo.

He closed his eyes, knowing when he did, the vision would still be there. It always was, it never changed. Her nude body covered in gold paint. Dancing. Her back was to him, obscured behind a veil of cigarette smoke that smudged the seductive scene like dirty fingerprints rubbing all over her body. He couldn’t take his eyes off her buttocks. Perfect, round. He imagined parting her cheeks and penetrating her from the rear, stretching her, filling her with his cock, driving them both toward release. It was a scene he replayed over and over in his mind during those long nights in prison in Cairo. Suspicion creeping along the edges of his brain, tormenting him. Why did she lie to him? Did the diary hold the answer?

Breathing heavily, he opened the diary, knowing he was a major player in the scene about to unfold.

Cairo

September 1939

My obsession with divining pleasure and taking it to a physical pinnacle became a powerful weapon. Sharp, piercing. Deadly. I wielded that power nightly in the private backroom of the Cleopatra Club as a high priestess in a low-backed gold-lamé gown, calcu
lating the arc of light coming from the spotlight so it struck my bare torso at the right angle, pouring light on my shimmering body until the alchemy of what was real and what wasn’t were indistinguishable from each other. The effect dazzled, intrigued, captivated. I was obsessed with creating a pictorial aphrodisiac for all who entered, and that included the decor as well as the available nubile young women, their lyrical, ironic air of detachment making them even more desirable.

And for the ladies, the Cleopatra Club provided handsome men in fitted dinner attire ready to kiss their hand and light their cigarettes, while promising them much more. Delicious sensations, their sweet pussies pulsating around a cock, shivering and writhing beneath him, crying out the name of their fantasy when he grabbed their hair, their sobs of pleasure released in the arms of a stranger, but oh, what a release. Complete, full, satiated. Then, after buttoning up the waistband on their loose-legged silk knickers edged with lace and rearranging their permed hair, they returned to their normal lives as officers’ wives, society women and miscreant debutantes, a secret smile on their faces and a pleasant soreness between their legs. The Cleopatra Club allowed all women who entered to take on the face of the beautiful Egyptian queen lit with a halftone: one side bright with visual delights and the other in shadow. The forbidden. Mystery, eroticism, decadence.

We had it all.

White-gloved gentlemen inspecting nude girls on the slave block, having them turn one way then the other, tweaking their nipples then removing their gloves and inserting spotless fingers into them.
Thinking, writing, I see in my mind the catalogs of available slaves and masters etched on crackly brown papyrus rolls in exquisite detail with names, statistics and sexual specialties. Fellatio, anal sex, or applying the crop to buttocks, flanks, breasts.

I quiver with an elusive joy remembering how it was, the sweat of male bodies entwined with mine, hands exploring, fingers probing, and the overwhelming sensation of two, three men filling me up, my mouth, my pussy, my anus, while persistent fingers twisted my nipples. I responded to the intense caresses by flailing my arms about, grabbing whoever, whatever I could, crying out, my body shuddering with numerous orgasms.

We were young and sexual creatures, eager to play out our fantasies in a city far removed from polite society. And I played harder than anyone before a nightly audience with reckless abandon.

Now I must again play a role, but before a different audience, one that includes many who may be about to die tomorrow, but I do so with the mind-set of a battle-weary soldier experiencing the relief at still being alive yet knowing the battle is not yet won. But enough of my fears, my doubts, all of which are part cynical, part romantic. I’ve promised you a forbidden garden of delights and so I shall deliver it to you. Be forewarned, dear reader, the events that took place in the Cleopatra Club in the late summer of 1939 will shock you and, if you allow it, titillate your senses. But I dare say, if you continue reading, you
want
to be shocked.

I shall not deny you that pleasure.

I will not reveal the exact location of the Cleopatra Club, if only to protect you, for if you were to find your way to Cairo during this
conflict, you would discover it temporarily occupied by the health office of the British militia, whose main job is to gather statistics on venereal disease cases among its soldiers. They have no idea what salacious entertainment took place in the ornate building not far from Shepheard’s Hotel.