Cleopatra�s Perfume (20 page)

As I’ve admitted, I was using drugs again and that caused me to do strange things, like taunt Mahmoud with the promise of sexual intercourse, something he knew was beyond his duties, though by his overt mannerisms I could see he wanted me badly. I exuded a hypererotic air about everything I did, and one night I succumbed to Mahmoud, gently and with great tenderness, his arms wrapping around me, thrusting into me until his passion overtook him and our bodies bucked and writhed into a lost oblivion.

Afterward I made the Nubian promise to keep our secret and not tell Ramzi. Why did I do it? I had to prove to myself none of this was real because I no longer felt anything beyond the physical release. Although I found satisfaction in Ramzi’s embrace, I realized I had also stripped away any emotion and feeling. I could no longer dip into my subconscious essence and experience that elusive emotion taken from me when I lost my husband.

My mind wandered, meandering, listless, yet I had come to a new place in my search for fulfillment, learned a new truth I could no longer deny: my love affair with the Egyptian had soared to momentous heights, then it had nowhere to go. Yet I couldn’t let go of one thing: the constancy of belief that sex could turn into love, the same profound love I’d had with Lord Marlowe, but it didn’t happen. I refused to back down, admit defeat, though Ramzi laughed at my foolishness.

“You desire love, my English lady?”

“Yes. Is that against the teachings of your Koran?”

He ignored my question. “The will of Allah decrees that a man must take pride in his penis and fuse his flesh with woman. What more do you wish? You have beauty, wealth, power.”

“But I don’t have you.”

He smiled. “You will never know how much you entwine my soul when I touch you, hold you in my arms, enter you and feel you moving against me.”

“I don’t have your love, Ramzi.” I looked at him, realizing he didn’t understand the meaning of the word. It was a hot August morning, the club had closed for the night, the customers gone, the local cleaning crew scrubbing away the stink of spilled human seed as well as alcohol. The dilapidated building with its chipped marble cornices and cold drab walls appeared differently in the daylight without the swell of human bodies hot with emotion distorting the newly painted cheap frescoes into a sensual dream.

Sniffing, he nuzzled the nape of my neck. “But I have given you so much more.”

“Ah, yes, Cleopatra’s perfume
and
immortality.” I didn’t refute
his statement. If he wanted to insist in the perfume’s power, I wouldn’t stop him.

“I must leave you, my English lady,” he said, bending down and turning my palm up, then kissing my hand in an intimate manner. “But I shall return soon.”

“Where are you going?” I leaned toward him in a possessive manner. I couldn’t help myself.

“Laila wishes me to take last night’s receipts to the bank.”

“Is she ill?” I became suspicious something was amiss. She never allowed anyone to handle the night’s receipts.

“No. Allah has granted my sister both good health
and
good fortune,” he said, flicking an imaginary bit of dust off his pristine-white lapel. “She is entertaining an important gentleman this morning.”

Raising an eyebrow, I couldn’t resist blurting out, “I didn’t think Laila liked men.” She never participated in any of the club’s sexual proclivities and I often wondered if she preferred her own sex. I noticed she had a new girl helping her, the fifth in the past month. Always blond, always pale skinned with small breasts, though far from innocent. Several girls we hired to entertain the gentlemen were prostitutes from Poland and Hungary, countries fearful of Hitler’s threatening presence, though they never spoke of what was happening in their villages. We didn’t allow politics into the club, though many of our customers had connections to the British military as well as pashas from neighboring Algiers and Morocco.

Ramzi ignored my comment about her sexual persuasion. “My sister has found a buyer for the Amarna artifacts she secured from the tomb in the Valley of the Kings.”

“And who is the unfortunate soul?” I asked, my sharp remark pitted against the affection I knew he had for his sister.

He bent low and whispered to me the name of the officer given the honor of acquiring art objects for the personal collection of Hermann Goering.

I jumped up, my movement so quick I knocked over the folding chair I was sitting on. I made no effort to pick it up. “I won’t have Laila doing business with a Nazi in
my
club.” I was no fan of the Socialist Party that had taken over Germany and destroyed the sexual freedom I enjoyed there years ago.

In a conciliatory gesture, Ramzi motioned to Mahmoud standing nearby to upright the chair. “It’s only
half
yours, my English rose. Laila is in charge of running the business affairs of the club.”

“I own fifty-one percent,” I reminded him, my eyes avoiding the Nubian’s lusty stare at my buttocks.

He kissed my cheek. “So be it. I shall leave you to deal with my sister, should you choose.”

He left with Mahmoud following him, but I did nothing.

Nothing.

For I had to concede he was right. I may own the majority interest in the Cleopatra Club, but Laila was in charge.

And she knew it.

Because Ramzi was irresistible to me, Laila used that as leverage and caused me to spend outlandish amounts of money to redecorate a battered-down old building, hire workers I couldn’t communicate with and ignore the business side of running the club because I was too busy engaging in sexual games with her brother.

I sat down, exhausted, my body lax with fatigue, for I had no
recourse but to admit that my search for love was my bondage. And when I didn’t have it, I turned to the devil’s dream, where I could lose myself in a fusion of fantasy and surrealism. Drugs.

I began to sweat, then a slight chill made my skin cold. I had a consuming hunger more powerful to feed than dealing with Laila and a goose-stepping puppet. I clicked open my compact and scooped white powder under the long red nail on my forefinger. I raised my hand to inhale the drug, then stopped. I was still incensed that Laila was doing business with a Nazi. Looking back, I believe I had a premonition of what was to come, though it was more likely my subconscious putting together the rumors circulating around Cairo about Hitler’s impending war machine.

Whatever it was that took hold of me, I changed my mind. I tapped my nail on the edge of the compact to loosen the powder. I didn’t need the drug to charge my emotions, to make me feel alive. I was angry. With Ramzi, with Laila, with myself. This was not the sexual utopia I expected. I had stepped through the looking glass and entered a world where pleasure and greed transgressed the flesh, but the ensuing social breakdown that followed had left me cold and wondering. I had never before questioned the terrifying vulnerability I felt when I was hot and sweaty and poised on a precipice. Was that pleasure? Or something else? Something I’d had and lost. When I was with Lord Marlowe, he expressed a fierce protection of me against the external world that threatened to devour me. With him, I tasted forbidden delights. Here in Cairo, I tasted the same forbidden delights, but a tartness lingered on my tongue. I didn’t sense that same protective fiber covering my nude skin. I sought to find it again with Ramzi, even Mahmoud, but it
wasn’t there. It was as if they ravished my body, but denied my soul the wearing of the veil so much a part of their world. Their pagan, cabalistic approach to sex still excited me, made my clit throb for want of release, but I wanted more.

I was reminded of an Arab proverb about finding purpose in life, and when there is none, how darkness rushes in and crushes desire. Was that what was happening to me? Was I losing my desire for sex because there
was
no purpose in my life?

That thought propelled me to pour my energy into a different role in my quest to find sexual satisfaction. The desire to break the rules inflamed me, drove me forward, captivated my senses with unalloyed pleasure. I discovered I liked to watch a man and a woman having sex, him reaching under her clothes, making me wet anticipating what I couldn’t see him doing to her, then undressing her, both excited, her firm flesh slick with sweat, touching each other slowly, hesitancy then passion, relishing the texture of each sensation.

I admit after months of nonstop sex, I was ready to go a step further, not simply participating in erotic intimacies in the dark that are taboo, but watching.

A seductive purr in my ear urged me to carry on, to explore this new venture, though I never gave rise to the idea that such actions would give way to disturbing feelings and make my loneliness more acute. As I watched such scenes night after night in the private backroom of the club, I recorded each moment in a different layer of my memory so I could savor it later and relive my erotic adventure.

I also discovered that being a voyeur was more than looking. It suggested to me I should also be aware of the effect it produced on me. Since watching sexual antics was a forbidden taste to women,
I became intrigued with experiencing this illicit fruit, accepting this delicate pleasure in its own true form, seeing but not touching, observing but not participating in its perverseness. Was I wicked? Oh, yes, deliciously so. I bestowed upon my own body this unique pleasure without forfeiting my sexuality with Ramzi. He knew nothing about my new game and we continued satisfying each other’s needs in our nightly drama of sexual interludes. I felt no guilt nor weighed the consequences of my wanderings. Instead, I consciously allowed him to dominate our relationship, even encouraging him to flirt with pretty customers in the club. I believe I secretly wanted to see him with another woman.

I must admit I enjoyed indulging in the covert pleasure of watching him manipulate everyone he came in contact with, especially women, when he didn’t think I was watching. He’d taken to wearing a white linen suit at the club, thoroughly enjoying his role as host, exuding a sexuality rarely seen on the streets of Cairo. His smoldering good looks attracted attention from females.
All
females. I could handle that, I assured myself, adopting a sardonic attitude toward his new role.

I didn’t count on the arrival of my old friend, Maxi von Brandt, to change that.

A
wrinkle of femininity livened up my existence when Maxi found her way down from Berlin to Cairo. Aryan blond she wasn’t, but her piercing blue eyes redeemed her with the caretakers of the Third Reich, as well as her uncanny art of observation through a photo lens, though she would never use those words to describe her work.

An intense sexual experience,
I often heard her comment about the pictures she took. I admired how she absorbed
everything
about her subject, including mentally sleeping with them, and how she refused to disassociate herself from the moral consequences of her art. That often turned her dreams into nightmares.

How well I remember the aberrant photos she took of female victims of bizarre serial murders back in our Berlin days when she became involved with a dark-eyed, handsome though perverted psychologist obsessed with
lustmord,
sex murder. This was back when we were both on a quest of self-discovery and pursuing sex in every imaginable form. Maxi convinced me she found the ther
apist with the dueling scar on his cheek sexy, but he sent chills down my spine. He seduced her with the idea that all crime was a form of sexual release and encouraged her to accompany him on his nocturnal jaunts to murder scenes as well as to the morgue before they engaged in sexual activity.

Her career escalated when her photos of mutilated female bodies and limbs glossed the front pages of the German daily newspapers. Emotionally moving in a way no other photos of similar gruesome scenes could suggest, it was obvious she cared about the victims and her photos showed it.

Her latest nightmare, I would soon discover, bore more than the ravages of jealous lovers and the harrowing effects of opium and cocaine on its victims. (I never saw myself as an addict back then; I do now.) It was affecting her artistic vision. Emotionally distraught, she rang up my home in Mayfair, insisting Mrs. Wills tell her where to find me.

Dear Mrs. Wills. She is very protective of me and, in ordinary circumstances, she would have sheltered me from a frantic request such as Maxi’s. But she knew the German photographer and I were close friends from the old days. I confess, there’s very little Mrs. Wills
doesn’t
know about me, but that will be for later telling if I survive this mission. I am beginning to sense a bond between us, dear reader, and I shall not leave you without resolution to this story.

I promise.

Back to Maxi. A listless, disheveled girl, passive, inward, a genius. Eager for a holiday away from using her skills showcasing the glories of the Third Reich, she arrived in Cairo to quiet her inner demons. She wanted to escape the charged atmosphere of Berlin and Hitler and his obsession to set himself up as a charismatic, godlike figure.
I was shocked when I saw her, a woman existing in a male-dominant society who could see the end of the Grimm fairy tale better than any man in a brown shirt. Maxi dissolving, listless, sexless. She had nearly broken under the tremendous pressure of photographing Hitler’s marching armies and the wide-eyed German populace saluting at political rallies. Not to mention fending off the macabre sexual advances from the Führer’s beer-drinking official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. The man was intensely neurotic, she told me, and hinted she would find her work compromised if she didn’t allow his wandering hands to unbutton her blouse and fondle her breasts in the darkroom. She hated the touch of his fingers stained with chemicals reaching up under her blouse and caressing her bare skin, then pulling down her brassiere cups until he found her nipples, twisting them until she cried out with feigned passion, his hot breath on her neck. She had put up with such treatment when she was an assistant to Hoffmann as a young photography student; she refused to do so now.