They flew back to Mexico City the next morning, dropping Garcia and Jack Dawson (who clutched the wrapped lithographs tightly under his arm) at the gallery. Julio drove to an old section of town. They walked for two blocks, hailed a taxi and rode for several blocks more, then walked another block, into a locksmith shop, where Julio handed the stooped keymaker a brass padlock, explaining in Spanish that he had lost the key. The old man's face was expressionless as he shuffled into the back of the shop. In about five minutes he returned, handing Julio the lock and a key. Julio thanked the man, paid him and they left, taking a different route back to the parked Mercedes.
In the limousine, he explained that the man was "with us…"
When they got back to the house, Julio went immediately to the study. Using the key the locksmith had given him, he opened the padlock, which was hollowed out. Inside was an exact duplicate of the key on Garcia's chain.
Julio quickly opened the drawer and read the paper which lay on top. His eyes widened. "Caramba!" he breathed. "We've got him!"
Taking what looked like a package of chewing gum out of his jacket pocket, Julio held the wrapper between his thumb and index finger, pulling out one of the "sticks". He produced a miniature camera, which he used to photograph the paper. It was a list of names and numbers – series numbers like those used on lithographs! There were also dates next to the numbers. This was a real bonus. Now Julio knew who the "clients" were and when they were to come for their dope. If all went well, they could nab all the big dealers in the Western Hemisphere!
Julio pulled out the second "stick" and placed it in front of the first one. He took another photograph. He handed the stick to her. "Here. Guard this with your life. If anything happens to me, take this to a man named Roy Harris at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. Tell him Senor Sombrero asked you to give it to him."
"Oh Julio," she cried, throwing her arms around his neck, "I don't want anything to happen to you. I love you!"
He looked at her strangely, wistfully. "Que lastima!" he said softly. "What a dirty business it is, avenging crime. In order to bring criminals to justice, we must become criminals ourselves at times."
He left her then. He had things to accomplish before he picked the two men up at the gallery to chauffeur them back to the house. Then he would drive to the ranchero to fetch the girls. She would not see him again until the "exhibit"…
The hour for the orgy arrived. Jill had let herself be drugged with cocaine, and she accepted any drink that was offered to her. Julio had promised her that when the raid came he would give her an injection of some powerful antidote that would clear her mind and rouse her from her drugged stupor. God, she prayed, don't let anything go wrong!
Her whole body felt numb from the coke she had snorted, and the alcohol had dulled her brain. Yet she felt horny as anything! She was introduced to the other "artists", and each of the girls kissed her on the mouth. They were all in various stages of druggedness and intoxication. Lovely girls with beautiful figures, and each costumed to represent a character from a famous painting. Jill detected several foreign accents. The air was thick with a mixture of hashish, incense and cigar smoke.
She saw Dawson feeling the ass of one willowy young blonde whose silky hair hung down over one eye. Valdez, her employer at La Jacaranda, was there, in close conversation with Ernesto and two other men, one of whom she recognized from the bullfights. And there were several others whom she had never seen before. All the men had an aura of wealth and importance about them. There was even one in uniform with stripes on his epaulets and badges on his chest who was introduced as "El Capitan". There were no women, other than the young females who would prostitute their bodies for the lusting guests.
Her self-portrait drew genuine compliments and enthusiastic response, even from the girls. She wondered sadly what would become of it once Don Ernesto was arrested.
Even her many sketches of Julio, and the portraits she had done in Acapulco were displayed around the room – a large mirrored ballroom in a separate wing of the house. (Even the ceiling was mirrored!) In the center of the room was an enormous circular platform (it must have been twelve feet in diameter) and flanking it, four curved, sectional sofas. The male guests sat on these as Ernesto announced each painting character and the girl appeared, parading around the stage like a beauty pageant contestant to the men's cheers.
Jill was the last to come on stage, taking her place in the center while the other girls did a kind of Busby Berkely ballet around her.
"It's time to strip, baby," Goya's Maya whispered to her. Under the influence of dope and alcohol, Jill's inhibitions were thoroughly repressed, and stripping seemed like the natural thing to do. Lautrec's La Goulue rolled down her black silk stockings. The Mona Lisa unfastened her dark dress and let it fall from her shoulders. Monet's Odalisque, a sloe-eyed Oriental girl, took the veil from her face and wriggled out of her sheer harem pants. Clothes were flying in the air like a line of wash in a high wind and there were female hands all over her, caressing her hardened nipples, stroking the dark curls of her pubic hair.
The forbidden act of a naked girl intimately touching another naked girl strangely excited the drugged young ingenue. Primitive Spanish folk music played loudly in the background. A battery of colored lights and psychedelic slides played grotesquely on the girl's beautiful naked bodies as they danced and kissed and fondled each other's bodies. They wrestled and rolled together on the stage, pressing their warmly pulsing cunts together tightly, stirring in Jill a forbidden excitement she couldn't deny… the gnawing ache, the yearning for sexual fulfillment, the hot feeling that craved a cock, a tongue, a finger. When the blonde girl tongued into her mouth passionately while thrusting a finger into Jill's heated pussy, a man cried, "Vamanos!" and leaped up on the platform. The others joined him, and soon there were naked male and female bodies locked in sexual maneuvers all over the place, with clothing of every sort flying off the platform.
Jill couldn't keep tabs on her conflicting emotions. On one hand, she was horrified at the things that were happening – especially the things that were happening to her. (La Goulue's bright red lipsticked mouth was fastened over one of her breasts, the girl's tongue licking avidly at the captive nipple.) On the other, the very pervertedness of the lewd contact stiffened her clitoris and created an almost unbearable sexual desire in her. Suddenly the Odalisque was spreading Jill's legs and sticking her tongue right into Jill's steaming pussy. The young artist nearly swooned. Ooooohhh! Oh God, what's wrong with me? What am I allowing? I can't let her do it… got to stop… but… nooooo, it feels sooooo wonderful! In her dazed state, she flashed on the prurient graffiti scratched on the restroom door: How about eating your cunt? The sensuous Oriental girl had her slender hands on Jill's asscheeks and was burrowing deeper into her cunt, her licking, sucking tongue painting crazy abstracts in the steaming, sensitized furrow. There was another girl at each of her breasts, their heads bobbing as they nursed on the taut flesh. Through the haze of lights and colored images, Jill saw Valdez and another Mexican advancing towards her, their cocks jutting out like spears. Hands grasped her waist from behind and pulled her down on her back, the other three girls still clinging to her and sucking her breasts and pussy. What was happening? Ohhhhh… ooohhh… she was cuuuuummmmming!
Jill let out a banshee cry as she creamed the Oriental girl's face with her pussy. Instantly, another mouth fastened on hers, then there was a scramble of bodies, and a different head was hovering between her legs. Then growing larger as it moved up her body, until she was staring into the face of the fat man, Valdez, who leered at her and gave her a sloppy French kiss.
Without warning, he shoved his cock into her open pussy and began to fuck her. Jill clenched her eyes shut against the whirling sensations shooting out of control through her loins and belly, fighting with all her might against the betrayal of her body to a nightmare of perverted lust. Soon, Valdez shot his hot cum into her pussy, but not before she had cum hotly again around the fat man's thickly jerking cock.
When the Mexican withdrew his spent organ, another girl – the Mona Lisa – fell on her body and licked the sticky cum out of her while she spread her legs over Jill's face and shoved her cunt onto Jill's mouth, forcing the young American to twist and move her lips in an effort to find a breathing space. She had never tasted a woman's pussy, and she was surprised to find the musky sweetness exciting to her. She began to lick the girl's cunt in earnest, sensuous hallucinations filling her confused mind.
There were bodies all around her – feet, arms, torsos, cocks and cunts, in various positions of sexual play. The Mona Lisa clamped her thighs tightly around Jill's head, almost suffocating her, and came, licking and sucking Jill to another cunnilingual orgasm before she was pulled off the young artist's body. Another pair of lips came down on Jill's face and tongued deeply into her mouth, getting the residue of the Mona Lisa's pussy juices.
She heard cries of "Chinga! Chinga la pinocha!" around her, then, "Mira-las nagas!" Hands turned her over and she was placed across Dawson's body as she felt another pair of men's hands groping at her asscheeks. Long, silky female hair brushed against them then, and she bucked as she felt a wet pointed tongue in her tight, puckered anus. Aaaahhh! Oh, nooooo!
At that moment, La Goulue's face appeared under her and the girl put her arms around Jill's neck and pulled her face down, kissing her wantonly. Dawson's beefy hand was playing with her breasts, cupping the tender mounds of flesh, squeezing them, tweaking the berry-red nipples. The ass tonguing stopped – to Jill's disappointment – and she felt another kind of stimulation there: the tip of a man's hardened cock! NOOOOO! She couldn't take that!
But she did. She had no other choice. Dawson's left hand began to play around the moist lips of her vagina, triggering her wanton loins into action, and she thrust her buttocks up in response to the printer's lewd fingering. The hard, smooth penis was cradled between her asscheeks. Someone grabbed her ankles and began to lock the soles of her feet and her ankles, sending agonizingly delicious shocks of feeling through her legs and into her pussy. La Goulue was still kissing her passionately, and grabbed Jill's hand and placed it around her melon-sized breast. A silken, throbbing penis was placed in Jill's other hand. She opened her eyes. It was the painter, Rafael De Vargas, the man with whom she was supposed to study portraiture. He grinned at her lewdly, his face the face of a lusting satyr in the weird light. Moment's later, it changed to the creviced mounds of a woman's ass, as Maya stood above the kneeling painter and straddled his face, pulling his gray head into her pussy.
She saw the Odalisque kneeling between Dawson's legs, her mouth fastened over the printer's cock and her raven hair skipping over his hairy thighs. Drunken, drugged faces blurred and elongated in hallucinatory transfigurations. Dawson was fingering her pussy madly, and she squirmed against it. As she sought to satisfy the craving of her pussy, she automatically massaged the painter's wet cock up and down and grasped it harder in her hot hand. She was perspiring under the psychedelic glow of the lamps and from the sex heat generated by her own excitation and by the heated sea of bodies around her. Where was Don Ernesto? She wanted him to fuck her. Why wasn't he fucking her? Why wasn't somebody fucking her? Please fuck me, somebody!
The cock that had been cradled between her asscheeks was suddenly thrust into her anus and she cried out in pain, tightening her grip on De Vargas' cock and squeezing La Goulue's breast painfully. She half turned her head to see whose cock had plumbed her virginal asshole. It was Don Ernesto's! She couldn't understand how it had passed the tightly resisting sphincter muscle, but it had. The sodomizing shaft was in her hot rectal channel, searing its way deeper and deeper into her unviolated passage. She felt that it would punch through her belly and into her throat.
At that moment, De Vargas shot his hot sperm obscenely into her face and trickled onto her fingers. La Goulue, who was being fucked by El Capitan, stuck out her tongue to lick the painter's hot cum from Jill's eyelids and cheeks and chin. The gallery owner's cock inside her rectum pressed deeper and deeper into her defiled rectum, which miraculously began to accommodate the invading weapon.
There was a momentary pause, as Garcia's cock came to the end of the channel. Then he drew back, pulling most of the reaming prod out. Jill relaxed her rectal muscles as the slippery prick withdrew. Without warning, Garcia slammed his hips forward, sending his throbbing cock all the way, until his balls smacked hard against his lower asscheeks, sending her sliding forward over Dawson's sweaty midsection until her ripe breasts smothered La Goulue's face, and the sex-hungry girl took them greedily into her mouth and sucked gluttonously. Oh God! Jill was about to cum again! She lifted up her head, gasping loudly, her whole body quivering. The last thing she saw before she closed her eyes in orgasmic ecstasy was the officer's cock as it slid out of La Goulue's cunt. As Jill spasmed with another quaking orgasm, she felt a hard cock, musky with the scent of a woman's pussy, being shoved into her open mouth. Strong hands pulled her head into the man's loins so that there was no escape for the cumming artist, who was being cock-fucked from both ends.
Dawson shot off into the Oriental girl's mouth, bucking Jill up and down as Garcia fucked hard into her asshole and El Capitan fucked hard into her mouth. This was the final act of her servile subjugation, and there were cheers of encouragement from the drug-crazed participants in the debauching orgy. "Viva la Arte. Viva La Artista Americana!" someone shouted. She was famous!
The drug-deluded young girl sucked hungrily on the officer's cock, wanting to taste the ammonia-flavored sperm, wanting to feel it running down her throat and out the corners of her mouth. And she soon got her wish, her wanton sucking bringing the Mexican officer to a sperm-spewing climax. She swallowed in rapid gulps to prevent the ejaculating fluid from choking her as she ground her asscheeks hard into Garcia's loins, skewering herself on his impaling cock. The Colombian stiffened, every muscle in his body taut and gleaming with sweat, and cried out, "Arribo!" as the sperm from his balls scalded Jill's rectum…
Outside, a battery of armed soldiers and policemen was waiting for the signal to storm the palatial residence. Members of Julio's organization had confiscated the lithographs from the gallery. Key dealers had been apprehended. Garcia's guard squad had been infiltrated by members of FICC, who were easily able to overpower the gallery owner's well-paid flunkies – those mercenaries, members of El Capitan's corrupt force, had already been hauled off to a retaining cell in a dismal, Mexico City jail.
Julio had packed all of Jill's things and transferred them to a private car where Roy Harris, the undercover CIA agent who worked at the U.S. Embassy, was waiting with an armed driver.
The piercing sound of a whistle came. The militia rushed forward, bursting into the house and through the doors of the mirrored orgy room. There were cries and shouts and a mad scramble for clothes. The awful thud of a fist against a human face jolted Jill's awareness as El Capitan's body fell backwards, pulling his spent cock out of her mouth with a smacking "shluuckpphh". Something hard and metallic scraped her skin. Don Ernesto was being handcuffed and pulled off her body, his cock dripping semen. What was happening?
The music was still blaring; drums, wooden flutes, bells. The lights casts lurid shadows on the bodies, both naked and clothed, that rolled and skirmished on the platform. She was being lifted up, off of Dawson's body, into the air, jostled and buffeted. A heavy heel came down on her bare toes and she cried out in pain. Then someone was throwing a robe around her, wrapping her in cloth, covering her sweat-soaked, cum covered body. Nooooo!
It was Julio! He pressed through the crowd, past the bodies, taking her away from the platform, through the room and out the door.
He took a small, glass-encased syringe from his pocket, bit the end of it off and jabbed it in her arm. "You're going to be all right now, Jill. You're going to be fine now," he said to her, taking a handkerchief to wipe the cum from her face. In her ravished state, she was unearthly beautiful. She seemed to have matured into a young woman instead of an appealing young girl.
She looked up at him dazedly. "What's happening? I don't know why… I'm… it's so confusing?"
"Shhhhh. Don't try to think now. I will explain everything later." He was taking her out of the house, past the police cars and the vans, down the drive and into the waiting car.
The cool night air felt bracing against her fevered cheeks. She looked up into the star-dotted sky. The antidote was beginning to take effect.
She was introduced to Roy Harris as the car zoomed into the night. "Miss Conklin, you have done us a tremendous service. We have been after Ernesto Garcia for a long time. The CIA, the FICC, and the governments of the United States and Mexico are in your debt. I'm certain you shall receive a special commendation for this, as well as a substantial monetary reward. I'm only sorry that it was necessary to use you the way we did…"
Use you… the way we did. The words struck her with the force of a fist in the midsection. It hadn't occurred to the naive American artist that she was being used by them!
"Julio…?" She looked up at her bearded lover, tears welling in her big, hazel eyes. She remembered what he had said to her in the study: what a dirty business it is, avenging crime. In order to bring criminals to justice, we must become criminals ourselves at times…
His blue eyes were full of pain. "Forgive me, Jill. I had no other choice." She looked at him for another moment, then her hand came down hard on his face. Whaappp! He only winced. She sat back then, between the two men, her head high, hands folded in her lap, big, salty tears rolling down her lovely cheeks.
There was an awkward silence. Then Harris spoke again. "We've contacted your parents. They'll be waiting for you at the airport. You'll have a good rest tonight, then a debriefing session in the morning followed by a meeting with some very important government officials, who want to thank you personally for your contribution."
"Will they want a free fuck, too?" she asked dispassionately.
Harris went on, ignoring her sarcasm. "You'll be flying home tomorrow afternoon."
"Home?" she echoed softly. A small, derisive laugh began in the back of her throat.
"Yes. You'll be back in Kansas City tomorrow evening, and I know that an awful lot of people will be glad to see you."
She was thinking, Haven't you ever read Thomas Wolfe, you stupid bastard? You can't go home again. Not after San Francisco and Mexico. Not after Don Ernesto and Julio and everything that's happened. But they knew that…
"Can't you just picture it?" she said ruefully, "the band, the flashbulbs, the cheering throngs with little American flags in their hands? And the banner: WELCOME HOME, JILL CONKLIN, THE FAMOUS AMERICAN ARTIST."