“So you had some notes on it already, before you visited Harriet?”
“Yes, of course. It was a possible article and one that would be fun to do, if I could sell the idea to somebody. When I realized how much she knew about boats and ships, I remembered this nautical problem I’d been kicking around. I pumped her about it after I’d finished asking her all about you. And by that time she was very happy to get away from all my snoopy questions about you and her and what mysterious things the two of you had been up to along the coast of Cuba, and tell me about ships instead. Of course, the next time I came around to confirm what she’d already told me, she wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
I frowned. “But you don’t really know where your story idea came from in the first place.”
She said, “My God, Matt, you’ve done a bit of professional writing yourself; you know how it goes. No I don’t know where it came from. Something I read in the papers, maybe; something somebody said—”
“Who?”
She started to speak angrily and checked herself. “All right,” she said after a moment. “All right. You may have something there. I do seem to remember . . . Serena.”
“Who?”
“Serena Lorca. The daughter. I was interviewing Lorca’s family: wife, Janine; daughter, Serena. The kid seemed to be hipped on the Bermuda Triangle, and wanted my opinion on whether the latest sinking—there had been only two at that time—could logically be connected with all the other outer space stuff. I said, hell, I didn’t believe any of it; but afterward, I got to thinking. . . ."
I said, “So it was this young girl, Serena Lorca, who got you to thinking about this project. Actually lined the whole thing up for you with camouflage story and everything.”
Eleanor shrugged. “Well, if you want to put it that way. But it doesn’t seem likely she did it on purpose, does it? And she’s really not that much of a kid. She’s a fairly husky young lady in her early twenties. I can’t really feel it’s terribly significant.” After a moment, she asked, “What’s the other coincidence?”
“That you just happened to get yourself kind of accidentally raped while doing an article on George Winfield Lorca. That, my dear young woman, is not within the realm of possibility.”
Eleanor said sharply, “I’m not your dear young woman, and it happened, didn’t it? I didn’t dream it, goddamn itl”
“I’m not saying it didn’t happen; I’m just saying it couldn’t have happened like that, accidentally and coincidentally.” I leaned forward. “Look, Elly, here’s a guy who had one pretty lady chopped up by a boat’s propellers for the sake of an old grudge. He sent a death message to another because she’d had the temerity to step out of line a bit. In between, he casually instigated, or had instigated, the shotgunning of a guy he didn’t know merely to embarrass some folks he did know and didn’t like. Just yesterday, he arranged for a young fellow who was talking too much to be terminated with a pillow. At least we have to go on the assumption that Lorca is behind all this; it’s the only safe assumption we can make. You don’t really think Jurgen Hinkampf was killed by one of the doctors at the hospital because he pinched the fanny of one of the nurses, do you?”
“No, but—”
I said harshly, “No, but you trustingly believe, it seems, that a sharp female journalist just happened to get herself clobbered, sexually and otherwise, by two wandering sadistic thugs with itchy pricks at just the time she was investigating this dangerous gent. Mama, tell me the one about grandma and the wolf!”
Eleanor licked her lips. “But . . . but what would be the point, Matt? They’d been very cooperative, Lorca and his PR people; why would they suddenly send somebody to? . . . Anyway, those goons didn’t threaten me, or tell me to lay off or anything. No menacing speeches about how they’d get me even worse next time, like dead, if I didn’t drag my poor battered, tattered carcass home quietly and forget all about George Winfield Lorca. No warnings or ultimatums at all; just beat the dame into submission and . . . and strip her and screw her and run.”
“No words at all? Total silence throughout?”
She swallowed and said, “This isn’t fun for me, you know.”
“You’re not here for fun. And much as I enjoy your company, I’m not here for fun, either. We’ve both got jobs to do and we can’t do them blindfolded. What really happened? What was really said? Tell me about it. Play by play. Word for word.”
Her face was pale and stubborn. “But I did tell you about it. I poured it all out to you last night, like a hysterical little ninny—”
I shook my head. “Last night you told me about afterward. Tonight let’s hear about before. All I know is that it was terribly humiliating and did awful things to your dignity as a woman.”
She whispered, “Damn you, Matt, what are you doing to me?”
I said, “Damn you, Elly, you’ve overlooked something. Missed something. Forgotten something. Tucked something away that you can’t bear to look at. You’ve pretended to take this so-called casual rape for granted. Just a normal occupational hazard, you said; but was it? Come on, let’s have it without all the maidenly reticence. Hell, I helped haul one girl agent out of a Central American jungle after a whole revolutionary army had used her as a plaything for weeks; am I supposed to be impressed by your little one-night, two-man stand?”
“You bastard!” she breathed. “Oh, you lousy bastard!”
“Words,” I said insistently. “They talked, didn’t they? You’re the great investigative journalist, aren’t you, trained to recall conversations verbatim? So let’s investigate one Brand, Eleanor; or are you supposed to be sacred or something? Can you only dig up dirt on other people? Just your best friend who trusted you, a government department that’s doing its poor damned best according to its simple lights, and a young ship’s officer who was murdered in his bed for talking to you, but not you? Come on, Miss Front Page! There wasn’t just a lot of punching and fucking and heavy breathing. Let’s have the details, please. There were words. I want to hear those words.”
She drew a long breath as if preparing to scream abuse at me, but she let it out again soundlessly. She licked her lips. “ ‘Just be good to us, baby, and you won’t get hurt, much,’ ” she whispered tightly. “There are some words, goddamn you! How do they help?”
“And then?”
“Then I fought them the best way I could, breaking free and getting caught, getting knocked down, getting to my hands and knees half-dazed and catching a contemptuous kick in the rear that sent me sprawling again, rolling aside and getting up and trying to run, getting caught and hit and knocked down and casually kicked around some more, getting up. . . . I didn’t really hope to escape, I guess; I was just trying to delay it a little longer, to keep it from happening a little longer. And they weren’t really trying to smash me, break me, kill me; they were just playing with me, getting a big bang out of . . . of mussing me up and tormenting me before they. . . . But then I got my nails into the big one’s face and he got mad and took a real swing at me and I felt my teeth go like that—my mouth all numb, and a sickening jagged gap in front, and dreadful little bloody broken bits that I had to spit out so I wouldn’t choke on them. Details, Mr. Helm? Actually, I thought there was more damage than there really was. I had a horrible vision of ... of having them all knocked out if I kept on struggling; and spending the rest of my life like a little old toothless lady taking my dentures out at night and putting them in a glass of water. I couldn’t bear that. So I quit and just sat where I’d landed with blood running down my chin. ... I do hope this is all detailed enough for you, Mr. Helm!”
“You’re doing fine,” I said.
Her eyes hated me. “You really are a bastard, aren’t you?” She sucked in a deep uneven breath. “Then the big one hauled me to my feet and held me and the little one did some gloating. . . . Words? Okay, words. He said something like, now look at the proud little lady with her pretty face all messed up and her pretty clothes all dirty and her pretty stoc
kings all tom just because she wouldn’t condescend to be nice to us peasants. Then he grabbed the neck of my sweater to rip it off but it wouldn’t rip, just the shoulder a bit. He got mad and got out a big knife that went click and tried to cut it, but it wouldn’t cut, not really, it was too soft and yielding and the knife wasn’t very sharp. He just made a crazy droopy mess of it, all holes and rags, a brand new cashmere sweater, oh, and it was pink before it got all stained and dirty, you did want the details, didn’t you? The big one said for him to stop horsing around and get on with it before somebody came. So the little one sawed through the waistband of my nice tailored beige skirt, well it had been tailored and nice before I got knocked down in it so many times—more details for you!—and he gave a big yank and tore it off and threw it away. He reached up under my sweater-rags and grabbed the front of my slip and jerked hard and hacked with the knife until he had that all off me, too. He started to toss it aside but stopped to admire the lacy stuff, all ripped and slashed as it was; there was enough light from the nearby street for him to see a little. He said. . . She stopped abruptly.
“What did he say, Elly?”
She hesitated. When she spoke, the bitter resentment in her voice had been replaced by an odd note of apology. “You’ve got to understand, Matt. I shut it all away afterward. I closed the door on it completely. I wouldn’t let myself think about it. This is the first time I . . . I’ve allowed it to come back. I couldn’t let myself think about it. It made me all sick inside, remembering.” Her anger returned. “It still does, damn you!”
“What did he say?”
“He said . . .he said I sure dressed pretty, even underneath, expensive like a princess; they must pay me plenty for being a lousy snooping muckraking little. . . ."
“Little what?”
She shook her head. “The big one told him to shut up and get on with the lousy job. That’s what he said, the lousy job. So the little one tossed my slip aside and—you wanted all the details—he made a funny, funny thing of, well, kind of operating on my panty hose with his knife, he really got a charge out of that, you can imagine. Then he laughed and laughed at the dumb way I looked with the ragged stocking-parts he’d left me sagging down my legs -after he’d sliced away the main . . . well, the panty part. I do hope you’re enjoying these details, Mr. Helm.” She swallowed hard. “But he didn’t put his knife away, although now I was . . . was stripped enough for all p-practical purposes. Exposed enough. He stared at me kind of funny and I knew he was thinking of other things he could cut with it, stick with it. Fun things. More fun than nylon and wool and polyester. He put the point against my naked stomach hard enough so a trickle of blood ran down but the big one behind me, still holding me for him, told him to quit it now. He said for him to put the goddamn slicer the hell away; he told him to remember that they weren’t supposed to spoil me too badly. I guess that’s where I got that word. I didn’t realize it before; I was trying so hard not to remember.”
There was silence in the room, but somebody walked down the hall outside. She waited for the footsteps to die away, before she went on, speaking very steadily;
“And then they just threw me down and did it to me, that’s all. I think you can probably supply those details from your own experience, Mr. Helm. They weren’t very original about it, thank God; it was a pretty standard sexual exercise.” After a moment she continued softly, “Oh, and you’ll like this final detail, I’m sure. All naked and bruised and hurting like that in the weeds and dirt, my stupid body responded numbly, like a damaged mechanical doll. And I let it, Mr. Helm. I was afraid that if I didn’t give them some satisfaction, some response, they’d get mad and hit me in the mouth again. I didn’t really care what I did by that time. I just wanted to save what was left of me, what little was left of me. Isn’t that a lovely detail, Mr. Helm? I thought you’d like that, you bastard. Get me a drink.”
When I returned with her refilled glass she didn’t see me at once; then she reached up and took it from me. I stood there a moment.
“Elly—”
She said tonelessly, looking at her drink, “We’re really going through this stuff, aren’t we? We ought to go into the movies; the old hard-drinking reporter-private-eye routine.” She was silent for a little and went on softly, “Don’t say it, Matt. Don’t apologize for being rude and crude. You proved your point, didn’t you? They did know who I was; it wasn’t just a casual pickup rape. And they had their orders, they were supposed to ... to spoil me but not too badly, meaning, I suppose, not too permanently, not enough to raise a stink just before election time.”
“I had to blast it loose even if it hurt.”
She said, “Yes, and tomorrow or next week I’ll probably be very grateful to you for making me face it all at last. It’ll probably turn out to have been very good for me. But tonight I don’t like you very much, so let’s get this over with so I can take a shower. I feel dirty all over just from talking about it.”
I sat down facing her once more. I said, “The man you were talking with in that joint, before they caught you outside, the one you said was very polite and bought you a beer—what did you go to see him about?”
Eleanor shrugged. “His sister. She used to be a girlfriend of Lorca’s in his wicked past he has now renounced. A pretty blond kid who thought she could sing, named Ar-lette Swallow. Her brother, Pete Swallow, was setting it up for me to interview her.”
I said, “It could be that Lorca didn’t want her interviewed. Maybe he thought an old mistress was bad for the image.”
She shook her head quickly. “These days? Don’t be naive, little boy. Hell, even presidents sleep around and nobody thinks a thing of it. Anyway, I doubt the magazine would have used it. There seems to be a kind of gentleman’s agreement about this political stuff: you lay off the bedroom dirt unless it’s just too irresistibly dirty. So even though I’m not a gentleman, I didn’t really expect to get much mileage out of the fact that Lorca had slept with a cheap little nightclub nightingale occasionally, particularly since it had happened well before his miraculous and well-publicized conversion to righteousness. Now he was a devoted family man with a pretty wife and daughter he wouldn’t hurt or shame for the world. But the name had cropped up. . . ."
“How?”
She hesitated. “Well, it had been whispered to me in confidence by somebody who had good reason to want to embarrass the Lorca campaign. I didn’t think it would prove all that embarrassing even if the information was straight; but I thought I’d better check the girl out anyway. At least I could get an idea of how Lorca had looked from her viewpoint, to add to my other worms-eye views of the great man.”
“Did you?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, no. The brother was supposed to call me, but I guess he didn’t. . . .”
“You guess?”
“Matt, for God’s sake!” Her anger had a defensive quality. “I could hardly get out of that damned hotel bed the next day, and what I saw in the mirror wasn’t worth getting up for anyway! I gave the hotel people my auto accident story and stayed in my room except for. . . . Well, I told you. Until I could show my face without causing a riot. In the meantime I just beat on the damned typewriter and tried to forget how much I hurt and why.”
“Writing what?”
She made an impatient gesture. “The Lorca election piece, of course! What’s the matter with you, anyway? Why the crossexamination?”
I said, “The Lorca election piece without the girlfriend. Because the brother never called back. And you hurt too badly to bother finding out why he never called.”
“Damn you, Matthew Helm! . . She stopped. There was a lengthy silence, while a little flush came to her face. At last she nodded reluctantly. “Yes, damn you. The Lorca piece without the girlfriend. Yes. Because I hurt too damned bad to remember I was a reporter, and damn you for pointing it out. Yes. I just wanted to get the lousy article out of the typewriter so I could he in bed and count my aches and explore my crazy new mouth with my tongu
e and wonder how long it would be before I looked human again, well, as human as I ever look.” She grimaced. “Yes! I just knocked the piece out with what I already had in my notes and sent it off to the magazine. There were some minor changes they wanted, but we took care of those over the phone. So I guess Mr. Pulitzer is just going to have to find somebody else to give his prize to. Even if it were offered, I’d be morally obliged to turn it down, wouldn’t I? A journalistic false alarm like me?”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
“Hard?” Her voice was savage with self-contempt. “I didn’t hurt that badly. I didn’t hurt too badly to see a doctor and a dentist and read up on animal husbandry, did I? But I never once asked myself why did it happen to me just then, and what could who gain by having me . . . well, disfigured, demoralized, partially disabled, at just that point in my research. The smooth sly bastard! If there had been threats I’d just have got mad and stubborn, but the way he did it. . . . No threats, no warnings, just go out and spoil the wench a little! Give her something else to think about, the nosy bitch!” She drew a shaky breath. “And I did what he obviously hoped I’d do. In spite of everything they’d let slip they obviously weren’t supposed to, in spite of the way they’d betrayed themselves, I crawled back to the hotel just cursing my lousy luck at accidentally meeting up with two cruising sex freaks. And then hauled myself out of bed just long enough to knock out a nice innocuous Lorca article and to hell with making any more efforts to check out mysterious girlfriends and their secretive brothers. I didn’t even ask myself why the brother was so secretive; why the sister was so hard to interview. Did you ever since Garbo hear of a performer who made it tough for a reporter to find her? My God, usually you can’t keep them out of your lap!”
The Revengers Page 18
