“That’s what he said.”
“Jesus, if chop suey tasted like this nobody’d eat it. I fucked a Chinese girl once, did I ever tell you about her? She was so scared I thought she was gonna have a heart attack. And it ain’t sideways, in case you were wondering.”
“What’s not sideways?”
“Her pussy. That’s what they say about Chinese women. You never heard that? Anyway, her pussy was the same as anybody else’s. Oh, Jesus, that’s bad.” He sprawled on the bed, rolling from side to side, wracked with spasms. “Jesus, it’s working. You sure I’m gonna be all right by the time the blond cunt gets here?”
“She’s not coming.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“She was just a woman I pointed out to you,” she said. “I don’t even know her name. She’s not coming. It’s just the two of us.”
“What are you—”
“And that wasn’t Chinese herbs in the bottle. It was the same thing you’ve been getting in your cocoa every night, and it came out of a bottle marked ‘Rat Poison.’”
He stared at her. She forced herself to meet his gaze. “I was giving you small doses,” she said, “but this is one big dose, enough to kill a hundred rats. But all it has to kill is one big rat, and you can puke your guts out but it’s too late now. It’s in your system. You’ll be dead in fifteen minutes, half an hour tops.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “I’m just getting comfortable. You can’t even get off the bed, can you? So I don’t have anything to worry about. You’re dying, and I’m going to stick around and see the show.”
“Susie...”
“Maybe I’ll touch myself,” she said. “Maybe I’ll make myself come while you’re busy dying. You want to watch me? Do you think you’d like that? Maybe it’ll take your mind off what’s happening to you. Maybe it’ll get you hot.”
* * *
The policeman was the first to speak. “I suppose she got away with it,” he said.
“She was never apprehended,” said the doctor. “Never even questioned by the authorities. No one could connect her to Dekker, and the only risk she ran, aside from being discovered in the act, lay in the possibility that he’d left something incriminating among his effects. A diary, for instance, with entries detailing their relationship and their planned rendezvous at the motel. But that seemed unlikely, the man was functionally illiterate, and in the event nothing turned up to draw her into what investigation there was. And that was minimal, as you might suppose. Gregory Dekker’s death was ruled a suicide.”
“A suicide?”
“He checked in alone at a rundown motel and drank a bottle of rat poison. His prints were on the bottle, you know, and while it was unlabeled, one couldn’t down it thinking it was a fine Cabernet just reaching its prime. The stuff tasted like poison. Dekker, of course, thought it tasted like medicine.”
“She planned it,” the soldier mused, “from the first cup of cocoa. It masked the taste of the non-lethal doses she fed him, which gave him the stomach aches.”
“And probably accumulated in the soft tissues,” the doctor said, “if the lethal ingredient was in fact arsenic, as I suspect it was. And the stomach aches made him quick to down a larger dose of the poison, in the hope of a cure. Oh, yes, I’d say she planned it. And got away with it, if in fact anybody ever gets away with anything. That would be more in your line, Priest.”
The priest stroked his chin. “An undiscovered sin is a sin nevertheless,” he said. “One is hardly absolved by the temporal authority’s failure to uncover the sin and punish the sinner. Repentance is a prerequisite of absolution, and to repent is to acknowledge that one has not gotten away with it. So no, Doctor, I would hold that no one gets away with anything.”
“A thoughtful answer, Priest.”
“Long-winded, at least,” the priest said. “But I find myself with a question of my own. Yours, like all our stories, is a story of lust, and the lust would seem to be that of the ill-favored young man, whom you call Gregory Dekker. And Susan Trenholme’s sin, if we call her a sinner, would be a sin of wrath or anger. Blood lust, if you will. And yet...”
“Yes?”
“I wonder,” he said. “When did she decide to kill her rapist?”
“When?”
“After the initial act, certainly,” the priest said. “But would it have been before or after she arranged a second meeting? Did she at first plan to call the police and trap him, or did she know all along that she meant to kill him herself?”
The doctor smiled. “You have an interesting mind,” he said. “But who can say exactly when the idea presented itself? Her first concern was self-preservation. She feigned a physical response to save her own life, then made a date with him to give him further reason to let her live. At first she must have thought she’d have policemen at hand when he came knocking on her door, but somewhere along the way she changed her mind. Why, if she reported the crime at all, she’d have no end of unwelcome attention, and there was even the chance the man would evade justice. And, as she planned her revenge, yes, we can say that blood lust came into it.”
“And was that the only sort of lust she felt?” The priest put his palms together. “She faked one orgasm to save her life,” he said, “but when she determined to punish the man herself, she drew up a scenario that called for her to engage in all manner of sex acts, and to simulate passion on several more occasions, and to fake a good number of orgasms. And was that passion simulated? Were those orgasms counterfeit?”
“What a subtle mind you have,” said the doctor. “That’s what bothered her, you know. That’s what led her to tell me the story. In the parking lot, with his foul breath in her face and his body upon and within her, all she felt was revulsion. Her response was a triumph of an acting ability she had never dreamed she possessed, in or out of bed.
“He never doubted the sincerity of her response. He thought he had indeed turned her on. But he hadn’t—she had turned herself on, and the experience, while profoundly disgusting to her on one level, was undeniably exciting on another.”
“Awful and wonderful,” murmured the policeman.
“Later, when she weighed her options, she knew that she would have to repeat her performance if she were to seek her own revenge. And the idea was at once distasteful and appealing. She had sex with him that second time, in her own apartment, in her own bed, and if anything she loathed him more than before. But it was not difficult to pretend to be aroused, and in fact she found she was genuinely aroused, though far more by her own performance and her own plans than by anything he was doing to her.”
“And did she fake that orgasm, too?” the soldier wondered.
“I can’t answer that,” the doctor said, “because she didn’t know herself. Where does performance leave off and reality begin? Perhaps she faked that orgasm, but faked it with her own being, so that he was not the only one taken in by her performance.” The doctor shrugged. “From that point on, however, her response was unequivocal. She looked forward to his visits. She was excited by their lovemaking, if it’s not too perverse to call it that. She was excited by him, and her excitement grew even as her hatred for him deepened. By the time she killed him, her sole regret was that she would no longer have him as a sexual partner.”
“But that didn’t stop her.”
“No,” the doctor said. “No, she wanted the pleasure of his death more than the pleasure of his embrace. But afterward she was appalled by what she’d done, and even more by what she’d become. Had she turned into a monster herself?”
“And had she?”
The doctor shook his head. “No, not at all. She did not find herself ruled by her passions, nor did an element of sadism become a lasting part of her sexual nature. It was not long before a boyfriend came into her life, and their relationship and others that were to follow were entirely normal.”
“So she was unchanged by the experience?”
“Is one ever entirely unchanged by any experience? And could anyone remain unchanged by such an extraordinary experience? That said, no surface change was evident. Oh, sex was a little more satisfying than it had been in the past, and she was a bit less inhibited, and a bit more eager to try new acts and postures.”
They fell silent, and the room grew very still indeed. The fire had burned down to coals, and had long since ceased to crackle. The silence stretched out.
And then it was broken by the fifth man in the room.
* * *
“That’s very interesting,” said the old man from his chair by the fireside.
The four card players exchanged glances. “You’re awake,” the priest said. “I hope we didn’t disturb you.”
“You didn’t disturb me,” said the old man, his voice like dry leaves in the wind, thin and wispy, yet oddly penetrating for all that. “I fear I may have disturbed you, by breaking wind from time to time.”
The doctor colored. “I was impolite enough to remark upon it,” he said, “and for that I apologize. We had no idea you were awake.”
“When one has reached my considerable age,” the old man said, “one is never entirely asleep, and never entirely awake, either. One dozes through the days. But is that state of being the exclusive property of the aged? All my long life, I sometimes think, I have never been entirely awake or entirely asleep. Consciousness is somewhere between the two, and so is unconsciousness.”
“Food for thought,” the soldier said.
“But thinner gruel than the food for thought you four have provided. Lust!”
“Our topic,” the priest said, “and it did set the stories rolling.”
“How I lusted,” said the old man. “How I longed for women. Yearned for them, burned for them. Of course those days of longing are long gone now. Now I sit by the fire, warming my old bones, neither awake nor asleep. I don’t long for women. I don’t long for anything.”
“Well,” the policeman said.
“But I remember them,” the old man said.
“The women.”
“The women, and how I felt about them, and what I did with them. I remember the ones I had, and there’s not one I regret having. And I remember the ones I wanted and didn’t have, and I regret every one of those lost chances.”
“We most regret what we’ve left undone,” said the priest. “Even the sins we left uncommitted. It’s a mystery.”
“In high school,” the old man said, “there was a girl named Peggy Singer. How I longed for her! How she starred in my schoolboy fantasies! She was my partner for a minute or two at a school dance, before another wretched boy cut in. I couldn’t possibly remember the clean smell of her skin, or the way she felt in my arms. But it seems to me that I do.”
The doctor nodded, at a memory of his own.
“After graduation,” the old man said, “I lost track of her entirely. Never learned what became of her. Never forgot her, either. And now my life is nearing its end, and when I add up the plusses and minuses, they cancel each other out until I’m left with one irreconcilable fact. God help me, I never got to fuck Peggy Singer.”
“Ah,” the soldier said, and the policeman let out a sigh
“Women,” the old man said. “I remember what I did with them, and what I wanted to do, and what I hardly dared to dream of doing. And I remember how it felt, and the urgency of my desire. I remember how important it all was to me. But do you know what I don’t remember, what I can’t understand?”
They waited.
“I can’t understand what was so important about it,” the old man said. “Why did it matter so? Why? I’ve never understood that.”
He paused, and the silence stretched as they waited for him to say more. Then the sound of his breathing deepened, and a snore came from the chair beside the fireplace.
“He’s sleeping,” the priest said.
“Or not,” said the doctor. “Neither asleep nor awake, even as you and I.”
“Well,” said the policeman.
“Does anyone remember who’s deal it is?” the soldier wondered, gathering the cards.
No one did. “You go ahead, Soldier,” said the doctor, and the soldier shuffled and dealt, and the game resumed.
And the old man went on dozing by the fire.
WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD
Kramer liked routine.
Always had. He’d worked at Taggert & Leeds for thirty-five years, relieved to settle in there after spending his twenties hopping from one job to another. His duties from day to day were interesting enough to keep him engaged, but in a sense they were the same thing—or the same several things—over and over, and that was fine with him.
His wife made him the same breakfast every weekday morning for those thirty-five years. Breakfast, he had learned, was the one meal where most people preferred the same thing every time, and he was no exception. A small glass of orange juice, three scrambled eggs, two strips of bacon, one slice of buttered toast, a cup of coffee—that did him just fine.
These days, of course, he prepared it himself. He hadn’t needed to learn how, he’d always made breakfast for both of them on Saturdays, and now the time he spent whisking eggs in a bowl and turning rashers with a fork was a time for him to think of her and regret her passing.
So sudden it had been. He’d retired, and she’d said, in mock consternation, “Now what am I going to do with you? Am I going to have you underfoot all day every day?” And he established a routine that got him out of the house five days a week, and they both settled gratefully into that routine, and then she felt a pain and complained of shortness of breath and went to the doctor, and a month later she was dead.
He had his routine, and it was clear to him that he owed his life to it. He got up each morning, he made his breakfast, he washed the dishes by hand, he read the paper along with a second cup of coffee, and he got out of the house. Whatever day it was, he had something to do, and his salvation lay in doing it.
If it was Monday, he walked to his gym. He changed from his street clothes to a pair of running shorts and a singlet, both of them a triumph of technology, made of some miracle fiber that wicked moisture away from the skin and sent it off somewhere to evaporate. He put his heavy street shoes in his locker and laced up his running shoes. Then he went out on the floor, where he warmed up for ten minutes on the elliptical trainer before moving to the treadmill. He set the pace at 12-minute miles, set the time at 60 minutes, and got to it.
Kramer, who’d always been physically active and never made a habit of overeating, had put on no more than five pounds in the course of his thirty-five years at Taggart & Leeds. He’d added another couple of pounds since then, but at the same time had lost an inch in the waistline. He had lost some fat and gained a little muscle, which was the point, or part of it. The other part, perhaps the greater part, was having something enjoyable and purposeful to do on Mondays.
On Tuesdays he turned in the other direction when he left his apartment, and walked three-quarters of a mile to the Bat Cave, which was not where you would find Batman and Robin, as the name might lead you to expect, but was instead a recreational facility for baseball enthusiasts. Each of two dozen batting cages sported a pitching machine the standard sixty feet from home plate, where the participant dug in and took his cuts for a predetermined period of time.
They supplied bats, of course, but Kramer brought his own, a Louisville Slugger he’d picked out of an extensive display at a sporting goods store on Broadway. It was a little heavier than average, and he liked the way it was balanced. It just felt right in his hands. Also, there was something to be said for having the same bat every time. You didn’t have to adjust to a new piece of lumber.
He brought along cleated baseball shoes, too, which made it easier to establish his stance in the batter’s box. The boat-necked shirt and sweatpants he wore didn’t sport any team logo, which would have struck him as ridiculous, but they were otherwise not unlike what the pros wore,
for the freedom of movement they afforded.
Kramer wore a baseball cap, too; he’d found it in the back of his closet, had no idea where it came from, and recognized the embroidered logo as that of an advertising agency that had gone out of business some fifteen years ago. It must have come into his possession as some sort of corporate party favor, and he must have tossed it in his closet instead of tossing it in the trash, and now it had turned out to be useful.
You could set the speed of the pitching machine, and Kramer set it at Slow at the beginning of each Tuesday session, turned it to Medium about halfway through, and finished with a few minutes of Fast pitching. He was, not surprisingly, better at getting his bat on the slower pitches. A fastball, even when you knew it was coming, was hard for a man his age to connect with. Still, he hit most of the medium-speed pitches—some solidly, some less so. And he always got some wood on some of the fastballs, and every once in a while he’d meet a high-speed pitch solidly, his body turning into the ball just right, and the satisfaction of seeing the horsehide sphere leap from his bat was enough to cast a warm glow over the entire morning’s work. His best efforts, he realized, were soft line drives a major league centerfielder would gather in without breaking a sweat, but so what? He wasn’t having fantasies of showing up in Sarasota during spring training, aiming for a tryout. He was a sixty-eight year old retired businessman keeping in shape and filling his hours, and when he got ahold of one, well, it felt damned good.
Walking home, carrying the bat and wearing the ball cap, with a pleasant ache in his lats and delts and triceps—well, that felt pretty good, too.
Wednesdays provided a very different sort of exercise. Physically, he probably got the most benefit from the walk there and back—a couple of miles from his door to the Murray Street premises of the Downtown Gun Club. The hour he devoted to rifle and pistol practice demanded no special wardrobe, and he wore whatever street clothes suited the season, along with a pair of ear protectors the club was happy to provide. As a member, he could also use one of the club’s guns, but hardly anyone did; like his fellows, Kramer kept his guns at the club, thus obviating him of the need to obtain a carry permit for them. The license to own a weapon and maintain it at a recognized marksmanship facility was pretty much a formality, and Kramer had acquired it with no difficulty.