Escapades of an Erotic Bootlegger: The Further Adventures of Dexeter Foxxe, the Dark Mata Hari

ESCAPADES OF AN EROTIC BOOTLEGGER

The Further Adventures of Dexeter Foxxe

The Dark Mata Hari

by

Lexington Manheim

Copyright © 2020 Lexington Manheim. All rights reserved.

Published by Scarlet Maiden, a trademark.

Distributed by Smashwords.

This is a copyrighted work. The scanning, uploading, copying, and/or distribution of this story without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property and a violation of copyright law. No part of this story may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without the express written permission of the publisher. This prohibition does not extend to a reviewer who may quote brief passages as part of a review.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

CHAPTER 1: Post Mortem

CHAPTER 2: Bohemia

CHAPTER 3: Boom-Bah-Bah-Boom

CHAPTER 4: What the Cat Dragged In

CHAPTER 5: Graveyard of the Expats

CHAPTER 6: Birdie

CHAPTER 7: By the Beautiful Sea

CHAPTER 8: The End of the World

CHAPTER 9: The Wrong Way

CHAPTER 10: Failure

CHAPTER 11: Race to the Finish

CHAPTER 12: The Headline Gal

Other Books by Lexington Manheim

FOREWORD

When, some years ago, I penned the book Escapades of an Erotic Spy, I created a character I immediately fell in love with. That character is Dexeter Foxxe, a woman of contradictions. She’s a victim but also a hero; a sometimes naïve but often shrewd female; a provocative gal with a ladylike sense of propriety; a realist with a wild imagination. She’s also, as one reader put it, sexy as hell.

Her adventures in the previous book put her in various forms of jeopardy, including fleeing America to escape having to testify in court against her lover, taking a job in Paris as an erotic nude model, being recruited by the Allies to spy on Germany during World War I, engaging in dangerous sexual escapades to carry out her espionage mission, and eventually running for her life across Europe in a deadly chase that culminates with her bicycling naked through the streets of Montmartre.

My gosh!, you say. Hasn’t the girl been through enough!

Well, that might be more than enough for you and me. However, I believe a character as richly exciting and charismatic as Dexeter Foxxe deserves to return for even more adventures. And, so, here she is again—the Dark Mata Hari who’s America’s overseas secret weapon—this time using her wits and sexual wiles to help combat the illegal (and sometimes murderous) bootlegging industry of the Roaring 1920s.

Get ready for a bumpy ride!

Lexington Manheim

CHAPTER 1

Post Mortem

Arlington Cemetery:

They tell me it was a nice funeral. By nice I mean there weren’t any unseemly outbursts, and by they I mean Faust.

Lieutenant Faust Ricci attended on behalf of the United States Army. At least, that was the official reason given. In truth, he was there for me—because I couldn’t be there. Even if I had wanted desperately to pay my respects to the fallen soldier, I couldn’t go back to America. Not back to the place I fled in 1918 to avoid being tried in court and forced to testify against my lover.

My lover was that fallen soldier. He was dead now, and nothing more could be done to him, but I was a fugitive of the Virginia judicial system, and there’d be serious penalties and jail time to be served if I set foot on American soil. So, I remained in Paris to mourn in solitude the loss of the only boy I’d ever loved—my dearest Beau.

He wasn’t even 21 years old. He shouldn’t have been there. He shouldn’t even have been in the army. He should have been back at the University of Virginia, playing football and taking classes and doing silly fraternity stunts instead of charging out of a foxhole and into a hail of gunfire. The only reason he was even in the army was because he made the fatal mistake of loving me.

It was an improbable romance. Improbable! It was practically indecent by the standards of the day! He was the son of well-to-do parents. I was their cleaning girl. What right had I to want to be with a boy like that? Why would that kind of boy want anything to do with a girl like me?

But he did want me. He wanted me as much as I wanted him. He was my golden boy—tall, blond, blue eyed, and muscular. I was his virgin girl—dark haired, petite but bosomy. Our bodies blended together in supple, enveloping warmth, and when his long, hard penis entered me, I experienced the type of fulfillment that told me this was oh-so-right no matter who else said it was wrong.

Our secret love affair was both the treasure of our existence and the undoing of us. The end came when we were caught together in bed in a hotel. When the sheriff’s deputies broke in, we knew we were in trouble. Big trouble. Not your garden variety unmarried boy and girl having sex kind of trouble. No, our problem was worsened by Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law. That’s the law that forbade the mixing of whites with people of color. Beau was an ivory skinned white boy. I was a caramel colored girl born to a white mother and black father. Under the law, we were off limits to each other.

I covered all this in detail in my previous memoirs. So, I won’t belabor the story again. In a nutshell, my mother got me out of jail by securing a deal from a judge while sucking his dick. That deal required me to testify in court against Beau, whom the authorities wanted to make an example of as a warning to other white boys who thought it might be fun to have sex with a black girl. I couldn’t do that to Beau. So, instead, I skipped out of the country on a ship bound for France. I was heartbroken but dedicated to doing whatever I could to protect my golden boy.

I thought I’d never see him again. And then one day, in the summer of 1918, he was there in Paris. My Beau, standing right before me in his brand spanking new U.S. Army uniform. A judge had given him the choice of jail or joining the army to help America fight the Great War, and he took the army.

Words are insufficient to describe my ecstasy at being reunited with my lover. In the few days we had together before he was transferred to a fighting unit, we began planning a post-war life together somewhere in Europe. Tragically, for Beau there was no post-war.

He died in what was later concluded to have been a purposeless battle in the waning days of the conflict. No one reported seeing him take the fatal bullet. His death became apparent only later after they scooped up the remains of the deceased from the battlefield. By the time they officially identified the body and arranged to get it on a ship headed back to the U.S. for burial, the fighting was all over, and Europe’s focus had shifted toward piecing back together the remnants of the war-torn continent. There was much rebuilding to do, and one more dead soldier, more or less, wasn’t anyone’s primary concern at that time.

Except, of course, for me. Beau had been the center of my existence, and his death was the end of my world. Faust tried to break the news to me as gently as he could. However, even before he got the final words out of his mouth, I crumpled to the floor, wailing.

No! No! It can’t be! It’s not fair!

When Beau’s heart stopped beating, mine, too, died a horribly cruel death. It was a death of emotion, of passion, of caring. Nothing in the world mattered anymore. Least of all was my desire to go on. It all seemed so pointless. I was empty inside, devoid of any ambition, of any—as the French say—joie de vivre. The rest of the world was joyful when the Armistice was signed and the war was finally finished. I was simply numb. It was, as I’ve come to know it, the post mortem period of my life where there was nothing left to do but examine the corpse of my lifeless spirit and question the choices that brought about its demise.

Faust, who’d been my closest friend and confident since we first met in Paris, could do nothing to console me. It was clear he wanted to provide comfort. But what could he say? What could he do? Nothing makes up for that kind of loss.

With the war over, his job as an intelligence officer and saboteur no longer possessed the same crucial necessity. So, he requested some time off to travel back to the States, where he did the one thing I suppose he felt he could do for me. He attended Beau’s funeral at Arlington Cemetery.

According to Faust, it was a dignified ceremony attended by Beau’s parents, two younger sisters, and assorted other kin. That was surprising. The family had disowned him most completely. That was because of me. He had disgraced the family beyond reconciliation. What kind of degenerate sleeps with a girl like that! Not since the days when plantation owners fucked their female slaves as a matter of perceived privilege of ownership was a respectable white Virginian forgiven for, as they put it, lowering himself. Beau’s family had no forgiveness for him while he was alive. However, now that he was dead, they mustered up the strength to trudge to the cemetery and see their boy placed into his final resting spot.

It was, by Faust’s account, your basic ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust burial. The bereaved stood in stoic, well-behaved silence as the eulogy was delivered and the body was lowered into the grave. Nothing was said or even hinted at regarding the scandalous matter that caused the family rift and resulted in their boy going off to the war that ultimately killed him. It was as though none of it ever happened. Of course, my name never came up. Faust confirmed that when I asked.

All in all, Dex, he said upon his return to Paris, it was about as good as you could expect.

Faust started calling me Dex about a week after we started working together. Dexeter Foxxe was the name I went by since arriving in Europe. It seemed like a good idea for a fugitive to adopt a new identity, and, so, I rechristened myself somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. But Faust considered the three-syllable name Dexeter too long and opted for the shortened version when I gave him permission to stop addressing me as Miss Foxxe. I didn’t mind his adding the extra touch of informality. I thought it made our friendship seem special.

At least they can’t do anything more to him, I sighed, my moist eyes cast toward the floor.

No, he’ll rest in peace. Faust put his hands on my shoulders as I stood there quivering. I don’t know why his recounting the funeral had such an impact on me. It was now weeks after Beau’s death was first reported, and I’d already shed my share of tears for days on end. Once I was cried out, I returned to the clerical job Faust had gotten me in the U.S. Army’s intelligence office in Paris. I could ill afford to miss too many paychecks. So, I forced myself back into a glum regimen of sorting and filing that kept me from dwelling on the past. And then Faust returned, and I felt myself sucked right back into a fully renewed sorrow. It was as though I’d been storing it for the occasion.

Faust’s hands felt comforting on my shoulders, but it wasn’t enough. I sank forward into his chest, burrowing my face into his freshly laundered, starched shirt, and wept. His arms enfolded around me, and he gently rocked my body like a mother rocks her baby. I don’t know how long we stayed that way, but, when I finally lifted my face, his shirt was quite wet.

Goodbye, Doughboys:

Wars don’t last forever, and neither do the jobs they create. 1919 was drifting toward 1920. Europe was on the mend, and there were needs in other parts of the world. The U.S. Army’s presence in France was growing less and less necessary. Doughboys who’d been in the trenches a year before were, for the most part, back in America. Staff at the regional headquarters was being whittled down in size, personnel getting shipped off to the States or to some other duty assignment elsewhere. Most were anxious just to go home.

I couldn’t go back to America. I was staying put there in Paris. For that reason, I was kept on for about as long as was possible, but I knew my days of employment were numbered.

The day came when it was Faust’s turn to leave, to go back to his wife and home in San Francisco. This time I knew he wouldn’t be coming back. That made me so sad that I spent almost the entirety of his last day hiding in file rooms to keep from bursting into tears at the very sight of him. When, at the end of the workday, we said our last goodbye, I threw caution to the wind and did something I’d never dared do before. I kissed him. It was just a peck on the cheek—he was, after all, a married man. But it was something I knew I’d regret not doing, and so I didn’t ask permission. I just did it. From the look in his eyes, I got the feeling he wanted to do the same with me but didn’t feel comfortable displaying that kind of affection with others still in the building. He was probably right to exercise that caution. Neither of us needed to add any complications to our lives.

Be strong, Dex, he exhaled in an emotion laden voice. Carry on the fight.

By the spring, the orders were issued to close the office for good. A few of the officers were transferred to other overseas posts, any remaining enlisted men were given their transport orders back home, and civilian personnel (which is what I was) were told that Friday would be our last day.

And there I was—a 20-year-old girl on her own in a place I still considered a foreign country—unemployed, unhappy, and uncertain what my future would be.

One thing was certain: I needed a job. Paris is hardly the least expensive city in Europe, and, like everyone else, I had living expenses that didn’t disappear just because my paycheck had. There was no time to dawdle. I hit the bricks and started looking for work.

My first inclination was to seek out a position similar to the clerical one I’d done for the army over the previous two years. It wasn’t stimulating work, but it was steady and sufficiently lucrative to provide me the means of affording a small apartment in Montmartre and reasonable creature comforts for a simple, uncomplicated lifestyle. What’s more, I was good at clerical work. At least, the people I worked for told me so. And I don’t mean just Faust. Plenty of people at the office complimented my efficiency. I was certain I could be equally efficient for any one of the many Parisian industries that required paperwork. And, so, with Faust’s letter of recommendation in hand, I started knocking on the doors of busy offices.

There was only one flaw in my planning. For the U.S. Army, I’d filed papers written in English. It hadn’t occurred to me that business was conducted in any other language. But this was France, not the United States. I’d picked up a little French during the couple of years I’d been in Paris, but I’d spent the majority of my time among fellow English speakers in the army office. So, I wasn’t fluent in any language other than my native tongue. Not being able to read and understand the papers you’re supposed to sort and file is, as you can probably guess, not a great selling point when you’re seeking a clerical job. It didn’t take too many days before I had to resign myself to the fact that I wasn’t qualified for the jobs I was applying for.

So, where to next? It was time to assess the skills I could offer a potential employer. Time to review my past work experience.

Back in the States, my first jobs were cleaning homes. I hated the drudgery but had no realistic alternatives as a poor teenage black girl sharing a dreary apartment with my mother in an unfashionable part of the city of Washington. I wasn’t anxious to continue that line of work when I first arrived in Paris. But I’d have done it, had I been able to find such a position. However, I couldn’t secure even that kind of employment because I was new to the country, had no references, and, at that time, understood no French and couldn’t read the help wanted ads in the papers even if someone was advertising for a cleaning girl.

The situation had forced me into a predicament where I had to swallow my pride, and any sense of puritanical modesty I’d imported with me from America, and take work that up till then I never imagined I could do. My first job in Paris was as a nude model for photographers who take the pictures that end up on those naughty French postcards. I was inexperienced, nervous as hell, and probably not very good at holding an erotic pose. Yet, to European men, a big breasted black girl with a shapely ass is exotique, and I suppose that made me a desirable subject for those who go in for bawdy photography.

I’m not sure how long I’d have stuck with that career had the U.S. Army not plucked me right off the street one day and whisked me away to offer me a new job—a spy.

No joke! That’s how I met Faust. He was in charge of an espionage plot that required the services of a Mata Hari—only of a darker color—as bait to catch a key German officer with a sexual penchant for black girls. Physically, I fit the bill.

My escapades as an erotic spy were short lived but productive for the Allies. I did a lot of things on that mission that I’m not proud of, but the ends justified the mean in my mind, and it pleases me to know that, in my own small way, I played a role in helping bring about the end of the war.

Well, be that as it may, by 1920, with the war long over, I couldn’t very well go knocking on doors asking business owners if they had a job opening for a Mata Hari. So, my spy credentials weren’t of any use. My clerical skills were in the wrong language. And I still didn’t have any references to get me back into the drudgery of house cleaning, if I really wanted to do that—which I didn’t. So, as I saw it, that left only one option.

CHAPTER 2

Bohemia

Pigalle 1927:

"Mes nichons sont froid." After nine years living in France, I’d picked up a fair amount of the language. Even if my vocabulary was limited, my sentence structure a hodgepodge of often misplaced words, and my dialect appalling to Parisians’ ears, at least I’d mastered enough of the tongue to make myself understood when I had something to say. Like now, when I uttered those choice bon mots at the beginning of this paragraph. French being such a beautiful and cultured language, don’t you think it gives a classy sound even to that sentence?—which translates to My tits are cold.

"Regardez," I groused, pointing with both index fingers at the hard brown nubs jutting out from the center of my silver dollar sized areolas.

The photographer looked unimpressed. He’d seen cold tits before. His studio’s heating worked sporadically when it worked at all, and this was February.

"C’est bon," he said with that classic ennui for which the French are famous. He wasn’t bothered by the cold. He was dressed in multiple layers of sweaters and wore a gray woolen cap. I, on the other hand, was stark naked and seated on a metal stool that stood about three feet high and was chilling my ass to the point of numbness.

Now don’t judge! First of all, a girl’s got to eat. We’ve already been through my limited options, and there are far worse ways for a female to make a living. For example, I’d never sink to selling myself on the street. And, if a gal’s a hotsy-totsy tomato with nice bubs and killer gams—to use the hep vernacular of the age—why not employ what you’ve got to turn an honest buck? That was my philosophy.

What’s more, I didn’t do pornography, like some mademoiselles of lesser standards. There was no shortage of women who’d fuck or suck for the camera—whether still pictures or movies even. I’m sure they got plenty of work. As far as I was concerned, they were welcome to it! But, while I often did photo shoots with other girls—duos or group nudes—I drew the line where it came to letting a dick into the picture. I was hardly a bluenose, but I was no morally devoid trollop, either. I was a professional model. An artistic muse. What I did was a sanctioned occupation for centuries. Women posing in their most natural form—sans clothing—inspiring some of the most famous and revered art the world has ever known. In its own way, it’s almost a noble calling. How many female nudes, for instance, grace the lofty walls of the Louvre?

"Soulèves ses seins par derrière," the photographer directed the other naked girl, who was standing just behind me. She did as instructed and put her arms around my upper torso, allowing her hands to cup the underside of my breasts and lift them as if making an offering to the gods.

OK, this wasn’t one of those lofty occasions. This was a photo shoot for naughty French postcards created for an audience of horny males that wanted something to drool over while playing with themselves. Still, though the poses were unarguably sexy, there was no actual sex involved.

"Bon. The man ducked his head behind the tripod-mounted camera. Restez immobile."

The other girl and I held our breath to keep as motionless as possible. I felt her full, bare mounds flatten against my back. She was a pale white girl, perhaps 20 years of age, with blue eyes, a sharp nose, and straight strawberry blond hair that was braided up. She had thin legs and feet so petite that