. . . and if ye mingle your affairs with theirs, then they are your brethren (and sistren) . . .
—the Quran (parentheses added)
While I was heading for the employees' cafeteria in the basement, I suddenly heard an odd sound. Series of sounds. My first wild thought was that I had been transplanted into a Warner Brothers cartoon. I spun on my heel and saw a client coming toward me, from a Studio whose door was just closing. The bearded longhair with the carpenter's tool belt I had seen the night before. No crutch this time. Now he was on a pogo stick . . .
He boinged past, flashing me a quick wide smile, and took the spiral staircase without hesitating. The way he looked as he disappeared down and around the stairs made me think of a kangaroo melting as it circled Little Black Sambo.
After a few seconds I stand breathing again.
I'm like Lady Sally too, I guess. There are some things I won't believe even if I see them with my own eyes. No way could he have really had a faint shimmering glow around his head. It must have been a trick of the light.
That reminded me that I'd been meaning to investigate how they managed to conceal the light sources in this place so cleverly. It was a neat trick. I looked around the hallway, windowless and bright as day.
After five full minutes I had failed to locate a single bulb, except for the tiny red peanut bulbs. I gave up and continued on my way to breakfast.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner were all available on demand, as the staff worked three—not two—shifts, providing round-the-clock art. The House coffee wasn't Mike Callahan's, but it was damned good for normal coffee. Tanzania Peaberry, a blend very high in caffeine without being sour: fresh ground and dripped. Over huevos rancheros I met more of the staff. A stacked short-haired blonde babe called Cat, stunning in a mauve bodysuit that fit her like a sheen of psychedelic perspiration. A quiet, darkly handsome guy in his twenties named Tony, who wore dark slacks, a net shirt and a single earring, and looked like the young De Niro. A sweet Chinese girl named Mei-ling, unselfconsciously naked and built like a three-quarter-scale model of Marilyn Monroe. A happy-go-lucky gal in a jogging suit whom everybody called Juicy Lucy, who never stopped telling jokes, good ones. (I recalled that she was one of Raffalli's victims.) A tall greying gent named Philip, with the best body I ever saw on a guy in his fifties. He was dressed in only brief denim shorts and slippers, and most of the other artists, male and female, seemed to find reason to touch him a lot as the afternoon wore on. A pleasantly dignified bald old coot named Reggie, a good forty years older than Phillip, wearing a splendid silk robe; he spoke (seldom) with a British accent, even more refined than Lady Sally's, and had an odd knack of seeming to walk without moving his feet, sort of shimmering along as if he were on greased wheels despite his advanced years. I kind of wondered how much use he could be in a whorehouse, but I guess it's like they say: if you can't stir it, you can always lick it. And experience must count for something.
And most memorable of all, the ubiquitous but seldom seen Mary. From her voice I had pictured her as young, blonde and athletic. She was in her late thirties, dark-haired, and had to run well over two hundred pounds. I think she was the sexiest woman in the room. Can you picture a sexy sumo? If not, there's no point in my trying to describe her to you—and if you can, I just did. Her voice was so powerful, without being strident, that I wondered if she could get a man off with it alone. Even more than anyone else there, she made me feel included, at home, working me into conversations and explaining insider references and so on. At the same time she flirted with Philip and gently jollied Cat out of a mild depression and demolished Juicy Lucy in a puntest and played mental chess with Reggie (losing valiantly and blasphemously, which latter he ignored) and demolished a six-egg omelet she rustled up herself. Figure out a way to rig a power takeoff on her and you could shut down the Big Allis plant over in Ravenswood. I noticed a wedding band on her hand and hoped for his sake that her old man was at least half machine.
The American Indian whom Tim had introduced an "Many Hands" yesterday came in at a trot, grabbed a cup of coffee, and headed for the door again. For the life of me I couldn't remember his real name. As he went by me I caught his eye and asked him. "What's your name again, friend?"
"I'm Running Behind," he said, and was gone.
Half a dozen whole and partially eaten biscuits hit the door in a cluster as it closed behind him. One of them was mine. Robin, the client who apparently never went home, came scurrying out of the kitchen and cleaned them up almost before they hit the floor. I don't think he was in view for more than three seconds. He was still wearing his Tarzan in Bondage outfit, in which he looked like a short potbellied accountant.
The food was good, the conversation better, and nobody seemed to be in any kind of hurry. I felt strength and contentment flow into me. I didn't even mind much that both Arethusas were elsewhere.
At some point I mentioned to Mary how surprised I'd been the night before to see Priscilla eighty-six a cop with two other buttons standing right there. She smiled and nodded. "Sally can even afford to offend cops." She paused, and did something subtly satanic with her eyebrows. "Lady zings the blues."
A piece of toast bounced off the side of her head. She ignored it magnificently.
"Yeah," Juicy Lucy said, "and sometimes when Cynthia's sick or on vacation, Lady stings the bruised . . ." Mary stirred her coffee sharply, and a spoonful departed in Lucy's direction.
"And whenever she uses that damned iron bobsled . . ." Philip began, and waited until we'd all turned to look at him before finishing, ". . . . Lady dings the slews."
About a meal's worth of various foods accumulated on him. I got him in the chest hair with the eggs and salsa myself.
"And every Monday after the clients go home," Mary said, over a growing murmur of protest and warning, "Lady springs for brews." Before anyone could react, she turned to me and explained, "Sally figures spending a whole week with a bunch of do-ers, we're entitled to relax with a few be-ers."
She might as well have stepped under a running shower. Of grapefruit and orange and apple juice, mostly, but there seemed to be a bit of skimmed milk in there. It converged from all sides like a water-balloon explosion filmed in reverse, and I would swear she never flinched.
The softest, most gentle, motherly, fondly indulgent voice I ever heard in my life said, "All
right, children, that'll do," and everyone but me froze. I turned to look—
My first impression was that Robin had a small child in black leather with him. Then I changed it to an elf in leather. A wise old mother elf. Finally I realized she was the midget I'd seen briefly in the Parlor the night before. Her body was in perfect proportion for its size, and quite attractive in that leather outfit. Her face was kindly and compassionate at first glance; then you saw the flashing eyes. She was not holding Robin's elbow like an obedient child, she was steering him like a puppeteer with a hand on the back of his gee string. He carried what looked like a large fire extinguisher. In her free hand she had a green plastic trash bag, opened out, and a couple of towels.
Lucy, Phillip, and Mary stood up and began undressing. All three looked mildly abashed. Everyone else backed away, so I did too. The leather midget collected all the food-spattered clothing in her bag, and stood back herself. Robin triggered the big canister he held, and hosed the three naked people down with a jet of water. They turned around to assist him. "Damn, that's cold," Lucy protested.
"Yes, dear," the little woman said firmly. "A cold shower seems indicated. Things were getting a bit out of hand."
When Robin had them clean, he hosed off the splattered parts of the table as well. I saw that the room floor was tile, with slightly sunken drains at frequent intervals. Robin chased the last swirls of debris into the drains, shut down the spray, and waited for orders.
"Don't just stand there, lovewipe," she told him gently. "You've hardly started your dishes."
"YesMistressI'msorryMistressI'msuchafoolIdon't
knowhatonearthiswrongwithmerightawayMistressthank
youma'am," he said, tucked her bag of soiled clothes under his armpit, and sprinted back into the kitchen. I saw that thin vivid pink stripes had been laid across his buttocks so carefully that someone had been able to play four games of tic-tac-toe, to four draws, with a Magic Marker or felt-tip pen.
I think it took that long for it to dawn on me that this maternal pygmy with the soft voice was the dreaded Mistress Cynthia.
"Carry on, children," she said, and followed Robin. All of us sat down except the three who were still toweling their hair. The moment the door swung shut behind her, Mary said, "—and now that they've got those cute male flight attendants, once in a while—"
Three people, one of them me, chorused, "—Lady bangs the stews," and you know, it's a lot of fun to laugh like hell with a whole bunch of people at once, all of you trying to keep the noise down.
It went on being fun like that for maybe another half hour. People drifted in and out, some to eat breakfast, some lunch and some dinner, and some just for coffee or juice. I met a stunning mature brunette named Sherry with a classic model's body. She, I recalled, had been the first person in the House to suffer from Raffalli's sense of humor. She gave Phillip a greeting hug and kiss that gave him an erection—then twinkled at me and did the same for me. I was glad I had not had to undress earlier. If I was going to hang around these people for very long, I'd have to either get over being shy or have my blushing-nerves cut. She welcomed me to the zoo, and told me a funny story about a fellow artist named Colt which I will not repeat as even I don't believe it. And I've met him.
A few minutes later a man came in, about Philip's age, whom Sherry introduced to me as her husband Willard. I shook his hand politely and told him my name was Ken and congratulated him on his catch. When he went to the coffee machine I wandered along behind him as if I wanted another cup myself. We stood by the machine with our backs to the others, and in a prison-yard whisper I said, "Hello, Professor. Long time no see."
His cup did not tremble. He finished pouring, smiled over his shoulder at me, and said, equally softly, "I thought that was you, Joe. Don't worry, you can't blow my cover—I'm among friends. I haven't actively Professed since I married Sherry almost fifteen years ago . . . but everyone here knows who the Professor was."
"So do a lot of guys," I agreed. "Lots of people wondered where the hell you went. I figured you were down. Glad I was wrong. So you finally found something better than the con."
"Well, not really," he said. "In a sense, I always was an artist—but I dealt exclusively in the foreplay. One day I simply decided to switch to customers I liked, and start following through. And charging less per head. The results have been gratifying."
I shook my head in wonder. "You know, if anybody could talk me into trying gay, it'd be you."
He inclined his head graciously at the compliment, and knew me well enough not to take it literally. "It has always been a pleasure to work with you in the past, Joseph. Or should I say 'Ken'?"
"Unless it's just the Lady or her old man around, yeah, Prof. Uh, Willard, I mean."
"Whichever you prefer, Ken."
"It's kind of a long story, you know?"
"So long as you're not attempting to run a game on the Lady or her Household, it's none of my business," he said carefully. "Many of us here use House names for one reason or another. My wife, for instance, is 'Maureen' to her intimates."
"If I had been planning to clip the Lady, I'd fold the store right now," I promised him. "But I got out of the game about the same time you did, or a little after. I've been a PI for years now."
He nodded. "Say no more. Let your I be P. 'Client privilege' has many meanings here, all of them sacred."
A memory surfaced. 'Maureen' . . . Prof, didn't you used to have a skinny little kid roping for you named Maureen?"
"The very same," he said. "She also told the tale, and, on a few memorable occasions, even ran the store. At a profit."
"Well I'll be damned. I'd never have recognized her."
"She has filled out considerably since she was fourteen," he agreed.
"That's not it. Well, it's part of it. But the Maureen I remember had a bad case of self-hate. It stuck out a yard. And Sherry doesn't, it's just as obvious. You've been good for her, Prof."
He smiled, but shook his head. "Lady Sally has been good for her. I've concentrated on not undoing her good work. But thank you, Ken." Despite his words, I could tell I had succeeded in flattering him.
We rejoined the others. More than ever I felt a kinship with this place. The Professor may have been the greatest con man that ever worked the tristate area. Certainly he was the best I ever worked with or heard of. A player's player, one of the immortals. If this life suited him better, perhaps I had better reexamine my primary article of faith, that Private Investigator was the best job on Earth. Eat where the big trucks are parked and you can't go far wrong.
What I had not told him was that his own, much better hidden undercurrent of self-contempt was also gone now. He had always accepted himself, squarely, and tried to live up to his own self-imposed standards. But now he liked himself too. It stuck out a yard . . .
After brunchner, the Raffalli Eradication Society held its war council in Mary's Snoop Room up on the fourth floor. This was necessary as we all needed to hear the taped records of Raffalli's previous assaults and batteries, and the room was, I was told, designed to erase any tape or floppy disk that left (or entered) it. Regardless of whether one used the door, or cut his own entrance through wall, floor or ceiling. Only one line between that room and the rest of the House was two-way, Mary's intercom, and there was no physical way to patch tape output into that line. It was quite a remarkable room.
It had to be. Lady Sally's House, and her insistence on maximum client privacy, presented unusual surveillance problems. There were a lot of inputs to handle. Ten mikes on the first floor alone. Forty-five on the second or main working floor. Three hallway mikes and two panning cameras on the residential third floor. And four cameras out on the street (I was professionally annoyed with myself for having failed to spot the one at the entrance I'd used.) Thanks to a clever switching system, hyperactive Mary with her multitasking brain was somehow able to time-share among all currently live inputs fast enough to keep track of everything happening in the House in realtime. A computer helped by constantly monitoring all inputs for certain key signatures, such as the word "Help," or the staff code word that meant the same thing.
But Lady Sally wanted all records maintained for one week, and then automatically erased. Physical handling of that much tape was what a physicist friend of mine calls a nontrivial problem.
So the room held fifty-eight custom-built tape decks. They were neither reel-to-reel nor cassette machines. In a sense they were both, and in a sense neither. They used Maxell XL-l reel-to-reel tape, but packed into plastic cases exactly the way inked ribbon is packed into a printer-ribbon cassette—except that these "cassettes" were about the size of pizza boxes in the two dimensions not defined by tape-width. Each held a week's worth of tape in an infinite loop, in a jillion little interlocking loops and whorls, just like printer ribbon—except there was no Möbius twist in the loop because only one side of magnetic recording tape is coated. Instead, the heads moved, each time the end of the tape came past, for a total of four mono tracks per tape. One cassette, a week of recording at 17/8 ips, took 25,200 feet—the equivalent of fourteen ordinary 7½-inch reels, but without all those plastic hubs.
The decks themselves were stripped down: little more than heads and motorized spindles for the cassettes' two transport wheels (two because, unlike printer-ribbon, recording tape must sometimes go backwards), fixed to bare-bones frames which were not especially cosmetic but must have been convenient when maintenance or repairs were needed. Each could be swung out from its rack on a hinge. In case of disaster, you could just physically remove all the tape from a cassette, feed it through a conventional tape deck onto an 11½ -inch reel, and switch to a new empty reel every thirty-two hours' worth.
All amplification and processing of the information recorded was done at a master console that looked like it might have baffled Lieutenant Uhura. (That's one thing about that show that always sourly amused me: they combined their token female and their token black into a single character—and then made her a telephone operator!) The tape-decks themselves were racked along three walls like pies waiting for delivery at the world's busiest pizza place, twenty per wall. The wall that was two decks short compensated with six VCRs, feeding a pair of monitors above the master console. One flipflopped between the two residential camera views; the four exterior views rotated on the other screen.
It was a big room. Despite all the hardware, there was ample room for seven bodies and folding chairs. The seven were Lady Sally McGee, Mike Callahan, Mary, Priscilla, Arethusa, and me. Arethusa was two members of the Inner Circle because she had bullied her way in the night before. From her points of view, she and I had been on our way to make love at her place. Then I had dumped her on her floor, ran like a madman around the entire third floor, and fallen on my face. Then she had discovered a lump on the back of my head that she knew had not been there moments before. Then Lady Sally herself had shown up on Priscilla's heels, looking unsurprised and upset with herself. So Arethusa had simply pestered her until Sally told her the whole story.
This struck me as good news on several levels. "I think Arethusa could be extremely useful tonight," I said when everyone but me was seated. "In two crucial roles." I put my back against the door and addressed her. "Hon, am I correct in believing that not many of the clients know you come in stereo?"
"Pun intended," one of her agreed. "All the artists know, of course. But they don't talk about it with clients. Like any freak, I get so tired of being gawked at that I've let fewer than half a dozen clients in on my secret since I started working here."
"Thank you for the compliment," I said. "But you're not a freak, Arethusa."
"Yes I am, Joe," she corrected soberly. "That's the truth, and I see no reason to duck it. In a world like this, a freak is no bad thing to be. They proved that back in the Sixties."
"Hear, hear!" Mike said. "Joe, I think I see where you're going—"
I nodded. "We spring both Arethusas on him, to startle him for that one full second of inattention we need—and while he's busy staring at hers, we take him."
"—but I think you're overlooking something," Mike went on.
"I know," I said. "He's had free run of the place, several times: he could have stumbled across both of her. If so, simply seeing both hers together isn't going to tip him off that we're on to him. At worst we have a couple of superfluous bodies in the room." I checked myself and said to her, "Not that either of your bodies could ever be superfluous, babe." Then, to Mike again: "She needn't get in the way much, and she might help a lot. If nothing else she may hold his attention because . . ." I trailed off, unable to phrase it.
"Because he raped me last night, and he'll be wondering what I'd think and say if I knew," Arethusa finished quietly for me. "Or trying to guess which of me it was, so he can try the other one tonight and compare."
Probably not more than half a dozen of them heard my jaw muscles pop. I rubbed my back against the door, thought briefly of how little protection it really afforded. "Right," I said briskly. "So our first step is to play all the tapes we have of Raffalli, concentrating on the sections where he goes into high gear. Know your enemy. Once we do, we can pick the best place to take him."
"I already know the best place," Lady Sally said. "As far as I'm concerned, it's the only place, no matter what we learn about the bastard from those tapes."
"Yes?" was all I said.
But she must have caught the undertone I tried to cover, "Pardon me, Joe," she said. "I know this is your area of expertise, and I don't mean to backseat-drive. May I tell you my reasoning and let you decide?"
"By all means. You've survived a dangerous world a lot longer than I have."
She ignored the dig. "Much longer. I propose that we take him in Reception, just inside the main entrance. For several reasons. For one thing, it is a small space, easily controlled, and soundproof as long as its two doors are closed. For another, it has two priest's holes—concealed doors with stairs to the basement, so that it is possible for two people to appear suddenly and without warning just behind an entrant. But most important, I don't want that son of a bitch walking into my House ever again. I will not place my clients at risk again—if I can help it."
"There's sense in that," Mike said. "If something goes sour inside the House, we're all cooked. If it goes wrong in Reception, and he gets a chance to twist that watchstem, he might just turn on his heel and take off. The further in he is, the more people are around him, and the more time he's had to build up his . . . anticipation, the worse off we are if we fuck up."
"And there's another advantage," Mary pointed out. "Take him in Reception, and we don't have to explain to the other clients why we just blindsided one of them and laid him out. Or to the staff either. Nobody ever has to know what he was or what he did. The only other way to do it that quietly is to let him go upstairs first—and there's too good a chance he'll wind his watch before he does."
I gave up resenting the idea because it wasn't mine. "There's one final good reason for using Reception," I said, "which I would now like to discuss, to make sure we have our ducks in a row." I waited a few seconds, to make sure I had everyone's attention. "We must agree on our ultimate goal here," I went on then, meeting each person's eyes in turn as I spoke. "There are few things on earth as silly as a liberal vigilante. I say the law cannot help us in this. I say that we are the law. 'I, the jury,' as Mr. Spillane once put it. And you too. I say we are going to listen to these tapes—give him a nice, fair trial—and then we are going to sentence him to death. So a private place, before anyone else knows he's arrived, is best." I looked around at sober faces. "If no one else claims privilege, I will execute him myself. And undertake to dispose of the body, while Arethusa destroys his watch. Then I'll toss his apartment and any other address I can connect him with and burn every piece of paper or floppy disk I don't understand. If I run across anyone who meets the definition of 'accessory before or after the fact,' I will inform Lady Sally and then execute them too, cleaning up after the same way. If anybody has any problem with any of this, now is the time to say so, and defend your position."
The silence lasted perhaps fifteen seconds. Then Lady Sally said, "I waive privilege. Reluctantly—but you are younger, stronger and faster. And you've earned the right."
"Should we not interrogate him before we kill him?" Priscilla asked.
"Not if you ask me," I said. "First, I might accidentally learn how he accomplished the trick—and I don't want to. I don't want anybody to. Second, I might learn something that made me pity him. That would be a shame. Third, and most important, I can kill a man, but I don't think I'm willing to torture him first . . . and nothing less would provide information I could trust. If he has accomplices, I'll find them."
Mike said, "Why Arethusa? To bust up the watch, I mean."
"Because she is the only person in this room including me, that I'm absolutely certain cannot be tempted by absolute power," I said. "She already has it."
He nodded agreement so quickly that I felt a brief pang of irrational jealousy. More irrational than jealousy always is, I mean. "Good thinking. How 'bout it, Arethusa? You know what the Ring can do to a person . . . are you willing to be our Frodo?"
"Thank you both," said the one of her that happened to be closest to the center of his field of vision. "Yes, I will, if you wish." "I should be safe enough," her other mouth said to me. "I'm already corrupted absolutely."
"Hell," I said, "was I that good?"
"Better," she said.
"We've avoided Joe's central question," Lady Sally said. "Does anyone here object to the cold-blooded murder of Christian Raffalli?"
She insisted on conducting a voice vote. When it was done we met all the legal requirements for a conspiracy to commit murder.
"Can I ask what you've got in mind for the corpus derelicti?" Mike asked. "Layman's interest."
"There are only two good ways to get rid of a body in the city," I said, "and I don't think the cafeteria has two bottles of relish. Can I assume that somewhere in that basement, near the secret stairs, there is a bathroom? By which I mean, a private room with both a bathtub and a toilet in it?"
"Yes," Lady Sally said. "A large bath. Quite near the stairs."
"And you've got carving knives and a hacksaw in the House?"
Mike and Arethusa paled slightly. Lady Sally just nodded. "Doctor Kate has just about everything a hospital OR would have. Bone saws and such. And there chances to be a heavy-duty grinding wheel in the basement."
"That'll save time," I said. "Still, it'll be about a six-hour job all told. I want people to notice me in the Parlor about every fifteen minutes or so throughout the night. And we do not want that toilet backing up on us."
Arethusa surprised me. "I can help you, Joe. And still be visible to everyone in the Parlor all night long, playing the piano."
So I surprised me. "Will you marry me, Arethusa?"
Her eyes widened, but she answered steadily and at once. "No, Joe. Not at this point. But I will live in sin with you indefinitely. And you can keep asking."
You can't ask for a better offer than that, can you? Can you?
Well, I could. But I wasn't going to get one now. And it was certainly a good offer. No: a great one, better than most men ever get. The distance between one and a hundred is nothing compared to the distance between zero and one. "Done," I said without hesitation, went and sat in the empty chair between her, and kissed her both.
There was a brief smattering of applause.
Twenty-four hours earlier I'd have bet the rent that I would say, "Please, God, could I have brain cancer?" long before I ever said the words "Will you marry me?" All I can say is, it had been a long twenty-four hours.
And how many of the girls you've known do you think would have volunteered—after one date!—to help you reduce a warm corpse to pieces small enough to flush down a toilet? You find one like that, you fire your grappling hooks and pray.
She hadn't said no . . .
Mike cleared his throat. "All right, folks," he said, his voice as commanding as Mary's and an octave deeper. "We're engaged in conspiracy to commit assault, murder one from ambush, mutilation, desecration of a corpse, petty larceny, B&E, vandalism, unlicensed burial and public health violations regarding sewage disposal. Shouldn't we give some thought to raping the guy? Just to round things out, like?"
"In more ways than one," both Arethusas chorused. "But aren't the sewers intended for human waste?"
"Not if it's known to be diseased," Mary said. "I think we should get serious and listen to these tapes, like Joe suggested in the first place."
"Quite right," Lady Sally agreed. "'Know your enemy,' I believe you said, Joe. Sorry I sidetracked us."
"I've cued up the relevant sections," Mary said, swiveling her chair to face her console. "I had to splice a dimmer into the power supply to get the tape to run slowly enough. I'll start at half speed."
Ordinarily there were no speakers in the room, only headphones. I guess so you couldn't play back tape aloud and thus into the intercom mike. But Mary had fetched in a little sugar-shaker-sized speaker for this meeting, and handwired an adaptor so it could run off the headphone jack. Kloss Experimental was stenciled on its side, and I later learned it was a superb speaker for its size and weight. But the quality of the sound we first heard wasn't much better than a clock radio. It took a few seconds to identify it as the sounds of Sherry exercising, alone in her Studio, at half speed. The loudest single component was her breathing.
"Sorry about the quality," Mary said apologetically. "It's recorded at real low speed to start with, and I don't demagnetize my heads as often as I really ought to. That constant surf sound you hear is tape hiss at half the normal frequency." Sherry's voice on the tape made what must have been a momentary grunt of effort in realtime, but sounded like a comical belch in slow motion. "Wait, it's coming up now—" She spun a dial on her board, and the tape slowed drastically, like a comedy effect. Just as everything reached the range where the bass capacity of that speaker really started to shine, all sound ceased except the rumbling grey-noise of tape hiss. Mary turned the dial to the limit of its travel and raised a hand for stillness.
Nothing but rumble for perhaps five seconds. Then we heard an opening door. And then there was a long, lingering chuckle that made my hair stand on end. The fidelity was worse than an answering machine, with no high end at all; the hiss noise was as loud as the signal, or louder. But the menace, the confidence, came through clearly. It was a happy chuckle. A jolly chuckle.
" ' . . . and finished her off in mid-air . . .' " he said jovially, quoting an old limerick. He had a pronounced Brooklyn accent. "But maybe not literally. That's a perfectly nice bed . . . and there's no reason to tire my legs out. Come—unh!—with me, sweetheart/" There were further sounds of effort. "Why pretend to resist," he asked rhetorically, "when you still have your legs open? Ah, that's better . . . flip you—oof!—over . . . in for a landing . . . there! My, you look charming . . . nice the way they still stick out even though you're on your back . . . charming expression . . . eyes . . . mouth . . ." There were sounds of hasty undressing. Then there were other sounds. Apparently penetration required considerable effort. Which he seemed to enjoy.
He talked to her as he raped her. Jocularly, if a bit breathlessly. He spoke for instance of the comparative advantages, as exercise, of the jumping jack and of jumping dick. A funny guy. He chided her good-naturedly for her lack of response. Happily his patter didn't last long. As I had deduced from the start, he was a premature ejaculator.
He said things as he climaxed that I don't think I could repeat under hypnosis. I erased them from my mind as I heard them. Then there were only the sounds of him manhandling her back into her original location in mid-air, the barely audible sounds of clothing being collected, and the sound of the door closing behind him. He had left it open throughout. He said nothing after orgasm, as though Sherry had ceased to exist for him as even a make-believe person at that instant.
Mary stopped the tape.
After perhaps five seconds of blessed silence, Lady Sally said formally, "I identify that voice as Christian Raffalli. And I am very glad I committed myself to his murder before hearing that tape."
"It's an emotional button-pusher," Mary agreed savagely. "But I don't think that makes it unfair evidence."
"No, it isn't," Mike said. "But it doesn't make me want to kill him any more than I already did. Which is just barely enough. Once a man makes the decision to rape, having a good time doing it does not compound his guilt a whole lot."
"But he was so cheerful," Mary said. "So fucking smug."
"Given what he can do, he has a right to be smug," Mike said. "I don't think many men, given Raffalli's watch, could resist trying a spot of rape, at least once anyway. Not forever."
Mary clouded up. I wished I was armed with something more substantial than a blackjack. "You sound like you approve!"
His voice was a match for even hers. "Which you know perfectly well I don't. Darlin', all men think about rape, at least once in their lives. Women have an inexhaustible supply of something we've got to have, more precious to us than heroin . . . and most of you rank the business as pleasant enough, but significantly less important than food, shopping or talking about feelings. Or you go to great lengths to seem like you do—because that's your correct biological strategy. But some of you charge all the market will bear, in one coin or another, and all of you award the prize, when you do, for what seem to us like arbitrary and baffling reasons. Our single most urgent need—and the best we can hope for is to get lucky. We're all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn't be human if we didn't sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishin' thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot, for some reason. Peculiar, considering how often you insist we only see you as objects placed here for our gratification. Rape is always a brutal and uncondonable crime—but so is any act of terror. I didn't condemn Christian Raffalli to death because he's a rapist, and I won't do it because he's a happy one with a rotten sense of humor."
"Then why have you condemned him?" Lady Sally asked.
"Several reasons. Because he knows how to stop Time, and that power should not exist. Because there's no other way to be reasonably sure that power will stop existing. Because he rapes here—where he not only could have enthusiastic cooperation from just about anyone he wants, but has already paid for it. Because he's a repeat rapist, who's found nothing better to do with his magic power for several nights running now. And because his pattern shows he's degrading, rather than getting it out of his system. He does more each time, his jokes get progressively nastier, and he's taken to adding gratuitous attempted murder. If Joe hadn't been Irish, we might all be somewhere else right now, saying how natural he looks. Any of those reasons would do it for me. But not the simple fact of rape."
"What would you do to a rapist?" Priscilla asked seriously. "A one-time rapist, say, who doesn't kill."
"If I ruled the world, you mean? Rape him," Mike said flatly. "Like I suggested earlier—I wasn't joking. With just as much violence and/or terror as he'd used. But I'd want to be certain of the facts first—and if I wasn't, I'd turn him loose. I'd like to see the same punishment for false accusation of rape, by the way. Rapists who murdered their victims—them I'd execute, after they'd been raped the correct number of times, selecting a method so as to give them at least ten painful minutes' dying per victim. I'd read their names to him as he died. And I suppose for chronic non-murdering rapists I'd go as far as, say, breaking kneecaps."
"Not castration?" Priscilla asked. "Surgical or chemical?"
"Hell, no!" he said. "I'd a lot sooner kill him, or put him in a wheelchair. And I think that's too drastic as a general rule. Besides, I'm not sure rape has a lot to do with testosterone or seminal pressure. And despite that crack about two million years of rapists, I don't really think the tendency to yield to the basic instinct is hereditary. Though I'm sure a boy can learn it from his father. No, I'm for the Law of Talion in most things. Now, if a rape caused the victim to need a hysterectomy—"
"Gee, Mike," Mary said sarcastically. "It's a damn shame you don't rule the world."
"Well," he said, "I do have a terrific idea for women who've been raped in the real world."
Lady Sally had just put a hand up to interrupt him and get us back on track—but at this she checked herself. "I rule this digression intriguing enough to allow it," she said. "If you make it short."
"You'll love it," he promised. "I read it in a letter a lifer wrote to the Co-Ev Quarterly a few years ago. The key to vengeance is simple and elegant. Don't charge the bastard with rape. Charge him with indecent exposure."
"I don't get you," Mary said. "How does that help?"
He grinned wolfishly. "Let me count the ways. It is much easier to get a conviction for that charge than for rape. The defense is not allowed to ask anything about your sexual history or how you were dressed at the time. Forensic evidence is unnecessary. The total public embarrassment to you is cut more than in half. In many states, a man convicted of indecent exposure will actually draw more prison time than a rapist. And whereas rapists are sort of prison folk-heroes, weenie-waggers do harder time than anybody but a short-eyes. In fact, the plan sort of incorporates my own suggested punishment."
Mary's grin now looked so much like his that I almost wondered if they could be related somehow. "Oh, I like it, Mike! And the best part is, you don't have to make a single false statement. You just don't volunteer extraneous information. What's the guy going to do, leap up in court and say, 'It's a filthy lie, Your Honor: I raped that bitch!'?"
"It is elegant," Lady Sally interrupted, grinning in a very similar way herself. "But let's discuss it another time. There are other tapes to hear, and plans to finalize. I don't imagine it makes a great deal of difference why we kill him as long as we're all agreed."
"It makes a difference to me," Mike insisted.
"Table it. Mary, next tape."
I agreed with Mike. I don't like to kill a man without walking around it a little and kicking the tires. But women are more practical than men.