Lady Slings the Booze Page 16

  “No,” I agreed. “You’re good at difficult things, but I don’t see you as a man to attempt the impossible.”

  If there had been the slightest chance it’d work, I would have tried bargaining, or even begging, for my life. But he was simply not that stupid. My only hope was to go in the other direction. If I could lead him into a quarrel, we might make enough noise together to cover an approach, for long enough to let Mary pass the word. I was uncomfortably aware that it’s hard to piss off a man who knows he holds all the cards. But what choice did I have?

  “Oh, everything I’ve done can be justified,” he said confidently. “I simply don’t like you well enough to try. Or anyone else I know but myself.”

  “I’m fascinated,” I said. “Indulge me, just for the sake of argument. Justify rape for me.”

  As I hoped, the word “argument” pushed his button. “It would be entertaining,” he said, “especially since the longer we chat, the worse it will be for you when I finally get to business. But the question doesn’t arise. I’ve never raped anyone. Well, not in years.”

  “I know of at least three, and two possibles,” I said hotly, trying to raise the volume.

  He didn’t rise to the bait. “Ask any one of them whether I’ve ever touched them,” he said smugly.

  Interesting philosophical point. If the victim herself honestly denies the crime ever took place…did it? If a tree falls in the forest, and bounces back upright before it has a chance to realize it…

  “Well, one of them apparently knows, whichever one of those twins I bagged. But only because you told her. Up until then she’d have passed a lie detector test swearing I’d never been within five feet of her. Looked at a certain way, you raped her, Hump.”

  That name made my adrenal glands, already on overtime, go crazy. It is not the name on my license, or anywhere else in my wallet, nor on file in any place in the greater New York area. He had to have checked me out very thoroughly today: he knew much more about me than I knew about him. Not good. And the name itself has always made me crazy. It’s not my fault my old man named me Humphrey Bogart Quigley. Now there were three people in New York who knew. More than ever it was necessary that Christian Raffalli die tonight. Now if I could only live to see it.

  Wait, now: could Priscilla—or Mike or Lady Sally or whoever—manage to find some way to pump sleepy-gas or some other immobilizing agent under the crack of the door? Assuming I could keep him talking long enough for them to fetch it?

  I had to reject that one too. Even assuming Sally had a reason to keep such things handy, and even if there was a crack under the door of a soundproof room big enough to pass a nozzle, I knew of no gas that would drop a man in his tracks instantly. If Raffalli felt himself getting dizzy, he could tap his watch, take as long as he wanted to recover from the effects, and then discipline whoever had tried to annoy him. I could think of no way to render a man in a locked room instantly unconscious without warning him.

  It was up to me to get some noise going here—fast!

  “Even if I stipulated that the crimes took place,” he continued, “and even if all of them eventually learned what had happened, what’s the difference? They were all whores.”

  “You think prostitutes don’t mind being raped, you scumbag?” I barked.

  “They certainly have no right to claim serious trauma,” he said reasonably. “It’s analogous to throwing a stuntman off a high place. To you or me it would be terrifying; to him it’s another day.”

  “Let me get this straight: you believe that if a man sells his paintings, it’s all right for jerkoffs like you to steal a few?” I was raising my volume with each sentence, trying to lead him into escalation.

  But he was simply too smug. “I never stole a thing,” he said calmly. “I pay good money to come here, I paid for the right to use those women.”

  “With their consent! Lady Sally’s artists have the right to choose their clients, you must know that, you freak son of a bitch.”

  “Not one of them said no,” he said, smiling. “Not even with body language. Or cried afterward. At the very worst, what I did to them was no worse than a pelvic exam that was over before they knew it. A little residual soreness, perhaps.”

  “You smirking jackass!”

  “It’s pointless to shout,” he said with his best smirk. “This room is quite soundproof.”

  Dammit, he was right. Even if I could make him yell back at me once, no one in the hall would know. The word could be relayed through Mary—but that meant I needed a sustained diversion. He just wasn’t irritable enough…

  “Try looking at it from my point of view,” he continued. “I could just as easily have violated virgins in church, brides on their honeymoon bed, nuns in broad daylight. Yet I chose to come here, where even a little chafing wouldn’t be that unusual a problem. Would you have been so thoughtful if you had discovered what I have?”

  The arrogance of him astonished me even more than it infuriated me. He actually wanted to be admired for his discretion. So it was true: no man thought of himself as a villain. Not even this rotten, smarmy little—

  The specific epithet that happened to come to mind suggested one last angle of attack that might get him angry enough to raise his voice. If you can’t attack a man’s morals, try his sexual preference…

  “So,” I said, glancing down at my nudity just long enough to make my point, “now you’ve finally decided to stop protesting and come out of the closet, huh? Tired of living in denial, faggot?”

  In all honesty I was somewhat worried that the charge was not libelous. Now that I thought about it, several of his japes so far had involved nude male clients as well as females. Audiotape does not tell the gender of the person being raped, if there are no victim’s cries or even exhalations to be heard. And most men would not report an inexplicable discharge to anyone…or, probably, recognize the taste. But even self-assured gays or bisexuals frequently flare up at being called faggot by a straight, so I had high hopes for this line of attack.

  I might as well have accused him of having green hair. It did more than roll off his back: it seemed to actually please him. “Not at all,” he said. “I can see why you might think so—but in fact I’m quite old-fashioned in that regard. I’m very fond of women as a species. Not to the point of fanaticism, no…but they’ll always be my preferred receptacles. That’s why I chose women consistently for the last four days’ experiments in what you call ‘rape,’ and I call ‘painless gratification.’ The men were just bystanders.”

  “I see,” I said. “You checked me out, and heard all the stories, so you took off all my clothes just to see if it could be true. Pure intellectual curiosity, huh? Nice try, fairy.” What the hell else did you call a gay guy to insult him? I’d never gone in for it. “You premature ejaculators usually turn out to be closet cases.”

  I think I finally winged his ego with that last wild shot. But not enough. “Now, Humphrey,” he said, “even a stud like you would be in a hurry too, if you were as excited as I was, and absolutely had to be done in ten minutes’ time.”

  So the watch would only work for ten minutes’ subjective time per use. We’d never thought to time Mary’s tapes. That might be useful information. Suppose Lady Sally and my other friends could build him a trap that took more than ten minutes to get out of? Or did he have as many ten-minuteses as he needed? Did the damned watch need time to recharge, or whatever? If so, how much?

  But his next words drove the subject from my mind. “And surely you can think of a reason other than sex why a man might want to take off another man’s clothes. Can’t you?”

  I wished I couldn’t. But I could. For the first time there was a gleam of genuine madness in his eyes.

  “I’m done with women for a while now,” he went on, enjoying himself. “I’m ready to move into Phase Two. It’s time to experiment at the opposite end of the spectrum. For the next few days, I intend to explore another old interest of mine: what you would call ‘torture,’
and I would call ‘painful gratification.’ For that I prefer men.”

  I looked around me. At whips, chains, clamps, paddles, flails, cat-o’nine-tails, electrodes, a cattle prod, for Christ’s sake. All perfectly safe, in the hands of any competent professional. Who was interested in repeat business…

  In the back of every man’s mind, until the day he learns the answer, is the question, could I successfully imitate a tough guy under real pressure? Until now I’d thought I knew the answer, thought I’d learned it in Nam. But being shot at in a strange land by someone you can’t see—with a gun of your own, and the use of your limbs, and your clothes on—that’s not real pressure.

  So maybe a lifetime of pretending to be cool and unflappable came to my rescue. Or maybe I didn’t want to add to the grief of Arethusa and my new friends, who almost had to be waiting helplessly out in the hall by now, hearing all this second-hand and praying for him to make a mistake. I don’t know, maybe the ghost of my namesake helped sustain me in my time of trial. Whatever, my voice came out without a quaver, let alone the shuddering I was doing inside my brain. “And you were too cheap to buy your own goddam tools. You pile of pus.”

  “These toys?” he said happily, waving a hand at the arrayed utensils. “Tourist garbage. For fetishists only. No serious student needs anything that can’t be found in any home in the land. A sewing needle or two. Pliers. A candle. String and rubber bands. Perhaps some iodine or Merthiolate. Or simple soap—ever get soap in a cut? Or your eyes? Any kind of stove is good. And I’m particularly fond of those hangers meant for trousers. The ones with the two little sliding jaw-clamps? Once you’ve found somewhere to affix those, the hook seems almost designed to attach weights to, don’t you think? And if there’s a garage, radiator clamps and vises and sanding-wheels are all fun. Old enough cars frequently have the old-fashioned kind of jack in the trunk. As Cleve says, anyone who needs whips and other incriminating specialty items in his possession suffers from lack of imagination. The meanest home affords unlimited possibilities. Consider the average silverware drawer.”

  I had finally found a conversational subject he was interested in. Lucky me. I had terribly underrated this man. Christian Raffalli had been a true monster long before he stumbled across absolute power. I made myself keep looking him in those mad eyes, but it cost me a lot.

  “But even if one dabbles in homeless derelicts, one finds that they generally can be relied on to possess a knife of some kind,” he went on jovially, and brandished my knife theatrically. The area in which he brandished it was intended to make me soil myself, and damned near succeeded. “And now that I’ve field-tested the watch, there’s a little refinement I’ve invented that I’m dying to try.” He simpered. “I’m afraid you won’t like it at all, Humphrey. But it will be an honor to be its first victim, if that’s any consolation.” He glanced past me. “Hmm. One of these silly items might prove useful after all.”

  He had to reach past me to get it. He was not self-conscious about letting his body touch a naked man. Trying to get my teeth on his throat as it came near was worse than futile: not only did I miss by a mile, I ended up with my mouth open for another try that I wasn’t going to get. I have since learned that the thing is called a ball-gag. A ball much like a tennis ball, with a strap through it that buckles behind the head. It tasted like rubber and hurt my jaws.

  My very last weapon, my mouth, was gone. I’d blown my chance for a wisecracking exit line. I really hated that.

  “Ordinarily,” he said, as he finished buckling the thing, “I enjoy vocalization. But hypersonics are so much like chalk on a blackboard, don’t you agree? What’s the matter—cat got your tongue? Don’t worry, you’ll have a ball. Not for long, of course…”

  Mary was right. For his sense of humor alone, this man deserved to die.

  “We’ll have all the time in the world,” he crooned in my ear. “I checked before I brought you here. The dominatrix is off shift tonight, sound asleep. And no one else would dare come in here. We’ve got all night, Hump baby.”

  He stood back and looked me over proprietarily. Fixing the “Before” in his mind, no doubt. One day soon it would occur to him that now that he had the watch, he could finally afford to keep a photo scrapbook. Or a video library. He enjoyed the sight of me fighting the gag so much I stopped. And then he did something that genuinely astonished me.

  He unbuckled his watch, and took it off…

  AND I couldn’t tell anybody! I didn’t care why he was doing it; it didn’t matter in the least why he was doing it; all I wanted in the world was to tell Mary that he had. I tried to bite through that damned gag so hard my vision clouded and my ears roared. Doubtless a thousand others had tried the same thing, under extreme stimulus, and there wasn’t a mark on the ball. I probably made enough noise to tell Mary I was gagged, but I don’t think a computer could have guessed what I was trying to say, even if she’d had one programmed for the purpose on standby. Absurdly, I wished I had asked for the traditional final cigarette while I still could.

  Within seconds, I knew that I was wrong. It did matter why he was taking the watch off. It mattered terribly.

  Because he reached up, humming softly and cheerfully, and strapped it on my left arm.

  He buckled it at the first notch, so that it rode too low on my forearm for me to reach the stud with my fingers, and could be quickly removed if anyone should disturb us. I felt a sharp prick at my arm as he settled the watch in place. I had plenty of time to deduce that the watch must for some reason need to be physically connected to its wearer’s bloodstream to function. I had time to guess exactly and specifically what he planned to do next—and believe me, the possibilities were endless! I had lots of time. Time was passing as slowly for me now as it ever had.

  But nowhere near as slow as it was about to…

  Gloat about it, motherfucker. Out loud, please…

  “It’s a variation on Poe, really,” he said. “‘The Pit and the Pendulum.’ You’ll catch on quickly, I’m sure. I’ve already told you the duration.” He put his left hand on the watch, and drew my knife back all the way with his right. My knife is so impressive even that Australian guy in the movie would approve of it, because I hate to use a knife if I can help it, and displaying a large one often ends the argument right there. It was obvious where the thrust would end. The medical term is double orchidectomy. The primal fear.

  And I would have ten minutes to watch it coming…

  10. The Wrath of Jane

  Context is everything. Breastfeeding is beneficial for all newborns—but for the elderly male cardiac patients it can be fatal.

  —NEIL O’HERET BRAIN, Tits for Tots

  RAFFALLI paused. “You might think it an artistic error, starting big like this. Like a playwright putting his best song in Act One. But I find that if I demoralize you completely at the start, everything thereafter has a delicious sense of despair to it, even the comparatively minor indignities. Perhaps I’ll ask you if you agree, when it’s time to work on your tongue.” Suddenly he giggled like a little girl, a sound much more shocking than his usual jovial chuckles and chortles. “Poor man. You’ve spent your life as a private dick. And you’re going to die with no privates, and no dick.” He laughed until the tears came.

  I had long since set my face in cement, too angry to give him any satisfaction it was still within my power to withhold. But to my dismay tears leaked silently and unbidden from my own eyes. I did not cry or sob, but my eyes ran. And the sick son of a bitch drank my tears like fine wine with his eyes.

  “Enjoy your thoughts,” he said, and started his knife arm forward, and pushed the watchstem, and turned to smiling stone.

  THE first thing that struck me was the change in the light. The fact that it had a strong reddish color didn’t surprise me. That had been in the MacDonald book, which I had so stupidly allowed to mislead me about the way a time-slowing watchstem is used. Something about light red-shifting, the visual equivalent of the roar on Mary’s tapes th
at turned out to be hiss at half speed, I guess. What I hadn’t been expecting was that the light would have texture to it. It was as though the air were full of some shimmering translucent red gas, which could just be seen to boil and swirl, much faster than dust dances on air currents. Like a space-filling swarm of almost invisibly tiny red gnats. It was hard to focus on any particular chunk of it, but in the aggregate it glowed in a shifting random pattern. It reminded me of a special effect meant to indicate an energy creature on Star Trek. It seemed to me that even in a drastically slowed world, this did not make sense. If Raffalli’s watch slowed time enough to make photons visible, we should not have been able to capture him on tape. And photons as I understood it did not behave like gnats.

  But what did I know about physics? Screw the swarming red light; what else was there to see, to occupy my thoughts for the next ten dreadful minutes?

  Except for the light, not much. Everything was utterly still. If I tried I could see, at least nearby, the motionless dust motes the gnats were slipping between. A leather sling dangling from the ceiling, which Raffalli had brushed a few moments ago, was frozen about five degrees from vertical. I managed to kill a good thirty seconds thinking about interesting and amusing optical effects you could produce with a watch like this.

  Nine minutes and twenty-five seconds to go.

  I remembered, and burned for, my boast to Lady Sally earlier today that I would land like a great express train on the testicles of Christian Raffalli this night. Just backwards, Hump old boy. As usual.

  Nine minutes and twenty seconds, I reckoned.

  I mentally photographed everything within my field of vision, using several different focuses and lens stops, applied fixative, and filed all the pix carefully in a folder that was scheduled to be burned before sunrise.

  Nine minutes and ten seconds, at a guess.

  I remembered for the first time that I could move, as much as my bonds allowed. It was harder than usual to move my head or fingers, but not onerously so. Like being in molasses. So I rotated my head through its full traverse and did a further photo study of the entire room from as many angles as I could, and added it all to the file. I would have loved to do a video series, but unfortunately nothing in the room would move…