Regiment of Women

by Thomas Berger

  Stedman slammed her open hand on the table. “Well, you’re not clean now, are you? You dirty little pervert!”

  The loud report caused Cornell to hop in his chair. Corelli touched his wrist again.

  “Calm down, honey,” she said almost affectionately, and then to Stedman: “Elaine, maybe I should talk to Georgie alone for a while.”

  Stedman got up and pushed back the chair with her calves. “Don’t take any shit, Carol. You’re too easy on these slime.” She left the room.

  “Elaine’s a little nervous,” Corelli said. “The way I look at it, we hold all the cards. Once we bring somebody in, he don’t have a prayer unless he cooperates. Most guys have sense enough to see that sooner or later.” She sighed. “Me, I’m the patient type. I got all the time in the world.” She chuckled. “You’re the one with the problem. Not me.”

  “I certainly want to cooperate,” said Cornell. “You caught me redhanded.” He put his hand piously between his breasts. “I will just have to take my punishment like a man.”

  Corelli’s smile broadened. “Bullshit,” she said.

  Cornell raised his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

  Corelli pulled her left earlobe. She still wore her felt hat, just as detectives did in the movies, and now she put one forefinger up and pushed it off her brow.

  “Listen, Georgie,” she said. “We know you’re a sardine. We’re after the big fish. One little secretary in drag ain’t worth our pay. Get me? Where’d you pick up these threads?” She reached across the table and fingered the lapel of the sports jacket. “Better material than I can afford, even if I resell the apples I steal!” She guffawed and explained. “You’d go crazy in this job without a sense of humor.”

  Cornell had had no practice at deception. He extemporized desperately. “From a guy,” he said. “A little dark guy in a plaid skirt and cardigan, a clothes-pusher I guess you could call him, hangs out on a corner near where I live.”

  Corelli had her notebook out and employed a pencil on it, but when Cornell looked he saw only what seemed to be aimless doodles.

  Cornell sucked his lip. “I think his name is Artie.”

  Corelli finally took her hat off and laid it on the table. Her hair was cut to simulate the kind of pattern baldness natural to Charlie’s head and revealed when his wig was off. This style had been fashionable three or four years before, during the administration of President Alice Womrath, along with baggy trousers and bow ties. Corelli wore the former, but her solid blue necktie was a four-in-hand.

  She stared genially at Cornell.

  “Georgie, I’m going to be fair with you. I’m not going to pull the cat-and-mouse act you probably expect if your idea of a police investigation is from TV. I don’t care about ‘Artie,’ if there is such a person. I don’t even care about those clothes.” She widened her eyes. “No, I don’t. That surprise you? Well, it’s true. I can foresee a situation in which me and Stedman find we made a little mistake in pulling you in, so we take you to the door, pat your behind, and send you home.”

  Cornell did not quite believe what he heard, but allowed himself to feel some relief anyway, and in so doing was for the first time concsious of how scared he had been. He clasped his hands and relaxed his diaphragm, and at that moment of utter vulnerability, his face was slapped viciously by Corelli.

  He yelped, and Corelli’s hand came back the other way and got him again.

  The detective leaned across the table, supporting herself on one fist, her fat, ugly face in his, and shouted.

  “Or we might snip your balls off, fella!”

  The door opened and in came Stedman, saying: “Take it easy, Carol.”

  Corelli pushed herself up and swaggered from the room.

  Stedman told Cornell: “She works too hard.”

  Cornell realized that the detectives were playing on his emotions, being bad and good guys alternatively. He had heard of such techniques. His face smarted terribly. He refused to cry, but he did not know how long he could continue to protect Charlie.

  Stedman was carrying a long sheet of paper, its end ragged as though it had been ripped from a machine. She held it up for Cornell’s benefit.

  “Just came in off the ticker,” she said. “Let me tell you about yourself.” She began smugly to read from the paper. “Bom 2003 in Birth Facility 1097, Los Angeles, etcetera, etcetera….” She skipped down several inches.

  “Wait a minute,” cried Cornell.

  “Now here we are.” Stedman punched the paper. “Apprehended shoplifting age 12; diagnosed, puberty problem; psychotherapy.” She raised her head. “Actually, that is all in abbreviations, but I can read it as fast as if it was written out.”

  “I wasn’t born in L.A. in 2003,” Cornell said.

  “You weren’t?” Stedman frowned and rechecked the first line of the dossier. “The hell you weren’t.” She scowled at him. “You can’t lie your way past the computer, buster.”

  “I was born in 2018, in Facility 1182, in Jersey City.”

  “The hell you were.”

  “Well, do I look forty-five?”

  Stedman squinted at him, and then returned to the paper. “Then you were sent to Nursery 2305 in Birmingham.”

  “Not at all! It was Number 1111 in White Plains.”

  Stedman’s face turned gross when she was puzzled. Her nose elongated and her lips protruded. Cornell wondered whether it might have been easier on him to confirm the erroneous data. The police were notoriously proud of their central information system, which listed every male person, from infant to dotard, in the country.

  Stedman sneered at the paper, balled it, dropped it, and tried to kick it as it fell, but missed. She took a notebook from her pocket. “All right, give me the vital facts yourself, but don’t try any funny business or the computer will show you up.” She added earnestly: “The computer’s O.K. It’s the people who run it make the mistakes.”

  So they were not infallible!

  Cornell repeated the information.

  Stedman said: “Georgie, when we pick up a guy your age, we know one thing. It’s not a simple case of transvest. A young kid, maybe, but not somebody old as you. You say you don’t have a record. You say furthermore this is the first time you ever wore a jacket and trousers. O.K., I’ll buy that. Surprise you?”

  She wrinkled her forehead.

  “I’ll tell you what it means. It might mean you finally cracked after all these years. But I don’t think so. You look pretty cool to me, no tears, no hysterics. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them will break down when Corelli bats ’em around after her sympathy act. Not you. You make little jokes.”

  Stedman put her forearms on the table and lowered her head so that he could see along the part in her hair, all the way to the cowlick. She spoke to her hands.

  “You want to know what we’re going to make you for? Criminal conspiracy. Now if you want to confess to that right here and now, maybe we can talk business.”

  Cornell had crossed his legs in the wool trousers. His thighs now burned frightfully, and the heavy shoe on the hanging foot felt as though it contained an artificial foot.

  He hardly recognized his own voice. “I don’t understand that at all,” he said.

  “Don’t ask me to explain,” said Stedman. “I don’t know what you people want. You got everything now. You get doors opened for you and never have to pick up a check.” She grimaced, got a dirty toothpick from her pocket, and began to chew on it.

  “Conspiracy?” asked Cornell. “Conspiracy for what?”

  “Aw shit, Georgie,” Stedman said, pushing back her chair. “You’re in Men’s Lib up to your titties.”

  Cornell covered his gaping mouth. Stedman leered, reached over, and grabbed at his groin. Involuntarily he seized her wrist, twisted it, and felt some diabolical pleasure as she howled and went sideways. He leaned across the table; his hand was large and powerful on her slender tube of bones. She cried out for Corelli.

  Someone came in behind Cornell and
brought a blunt instrument down upon his borrowed wig. His own hair, packed underneath, proved insufficient protection, and an explosion of ink obscured his brain.

  When Cornell awoke, he found himself on a cot in a jail cell. His head did not hurt until he turned his neck to look about, and then it felt as if it belonged to someone else: not exactly painful, but unearthly. His probing fingers discovered that Charlie’s wig was gone, and that beneath his own hair was a tender protuberance.

  Another man lay in another cot to his left. To the right was a wall of concrete blocks; in back (oo! dizzy), a little ventilating grille, high up; ahead, an iron door. He turned his head with his hands and looked again at his cellmate, who wore a gray prison dress and felt slippers.

  The man’s eyes were open but fixed on the ceiling, in the center of which, flush with its surface, was a source of incandescent light.

  Cornell said: “Are you awake?”

  The man turned his head on the folded gray blanket that served as pillow and answered: “Hi, welcome aboard. I’m Harry.” His hair was red, worn in pageboy style, and cut in bangs.

  “Georgie Cornell.”

  “You don’t look too good. You want to throw up or something?” Cornell nodded. “Maybe.”

  Harry got up and found a tin bucket in the corner.

  “Here,” he said. He turned his back and plugged his ears. But Cornell’s nausea failed to crest.

  “False alarm,” Cornell said, but Harry did not hear him. He pulled at the hem of Harry’s dress.

  “That’s the effect of the shot,” said Harry, sitting down on his own cot.

  “I was hit in the head.”

  “But it’s the shot that makes you sick to your stomach.” “Did I get one while I was unconscious?”

  “Probably,” Harry said. “They always give you one even if you’re willing to talk. They never trust you.”

  Cornell raised his arms to look for punctures and saw the gray sleeves of his own prison uniform. Then he clutched the bucket and vomited into it.

  Harry groaned. “You took me by surprise.” He went to the other bucket in the corner below his bed. It was filled with water. He wet a towel in it and returned to Cornell.

  “What kind of shot?” Cornell asked, after he had wiped his mouth. Then: “Owl My head’s thumping now. Could you give me another wet towel?”

  “That’s your only towel all week,” said Harry. “And,” pointing to the bucket, “that’s our only water supply for the day.”

  Cornell fell back on the cot.

  “Truth serum,” said Harry. “Whatever you are hiding, they’ve already got it.”

  “That’s a relief,” Cornell said. But then he remembered it would mean poor Charlie’s arrest as well. He closed his eyes.

  “What’s the charge, anyway?” Harry asked.

  “I was wearing women’s clothing.” How embarrassing it was to say that! He forgot poor Charlie momentarily, and his head as well. He sat up and said quickly: “My first offense. It was just a little joke, sort of, and then I got into an argument with my friend and found myself in the street. I’m not a pervert.”

  Harry’s voice was cynical. “That’s what we all say, isn’t it?”

  Dizzy and ill as he was, Cornell felt resentment.

  “Speak for yourself.”

  Harry said quietly, but intensely: “I’m up for the Big One.”

  Cornell shifted his supporting elbows and squinted to clear his eyes of pain. Harry was a small man, with delicate features. His complexion was pallid in the jailhouse light. Of course no makeup would be permitted here.

  “Big one?” Cornell asked, wincing.

  “Do you know anything bigger?” said Harry. “I raped a woman.”

  Cornell fell onto his back.

  “But,” Harry said, “I’m not going to give you any nonsense about being innocent. I did it all right, and I enjoyed every moment of it, and I would do it again.”

  Cornell listened to Harry’s ugly laugh.

  “You little pipsqueak,” Harry said nastily. “Big radical you are, with your women’s gear! Listen, this is not the first time I did it, either. It’s the only time I was caught.”

  Cornell looked at the recessed light in the ceiling and weakly waved his hand.

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t consider me as a competitor. I’m here as the result of a stupid mistake. I’m not a habitual criminal or a conspirator, radical, or any of those things. I’m a secretary for a publishing firm, and I got into this horrible mess by accident, and I feel like killing myself.”

  But Harry went smugly on. “It’s the knife for me. Well, I can take it. I’ll end up as a eunuch, but at least I know what it is to live like a man for a few years.”

  He was some sort of maniac. Cornell wanted to get him off the subject. He was frightened to be confined with such a person.

  “If I got that shot you speak of,” he said, “I betrayed my best friend.”

  This distracted Harry. He jeered. “Another flaming revolutionary, I bet. Parading around with his cane and spats and brier pipe.”

  “More or less,” said Cornell in relief. “He’s no more a menace to society than I am. He does that in his own home. He’s not hurting anybody.” He realized he was quoting poor Charlie. “I understand that what I did can’t be tolerated, of course. I was picked up on a public sidewalk.”

  “You’re talking to Harry the Rapist,” Harry said cynically. “Don’t come on with that holier-than-thou stuff.” He lowered his voice but was even more brutal. “You’ve had your fantasies of fucking a girl.”

  Cornell recoiled. Talk all you wanted about how every man had a little perversion in his heart, it was appalling to meet a genuine practitioner.

  “That is, of course,” Harry added, his voice growing sinister, “unless you’re a dirty little faggot.” He rose and took a step towards Cornell’s bunk.

  Cornell sat up and balled his fists.

  “Don’t try it.”

  Harry grinned sardonically. “Pretty aggressive for a so-called normal boy, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll defend myself,” said Cornell.

  Harry’s grin changed to something less nasty. “You look like Gina Antonelli,” he said, referring to the current boxing champion, whose name even Cornell recognized.

  Cornell shamefacedly lowered his hands, remembering he had actually struck Charlie earlier that evening—if it was still evening. He began to suspect that Harry was only baiting him.

  Harry now smiled and extended his small hand.

  “I had to check you out,” he said. “We guys have got to stick together.” He pumped Cornell’s forearm. “I’m not bisex. I go for girls only. I can’t control myself when I see a pair of trousers.”

  He sat down on the cot, seemingly losing his earlier bravado. “I know they call it a crime, a sickness, but I’ve been that way all my life.”

  What could Cornell say? His head thumpingly reminded him of its damage.

  “You know,” Harry said sadly, “I don’t know why they don’t do it to us at birth.”

  “Do what?” asked Cornell, feeling his crown.

  “Emasculation. Then they could do away with the prisons. It all comes from that, doesn’t it?” Harry made two fingers represent a scissors. “Snip them off on the babies. Simple, huh?”

  “Didn’t they try that at one time in history?” Cornell asked. “It changes the metabolism or something, I think they said in school They got a bunch of zombies.” He was sorry he said that: it was going to happen to Harry, who was nicer now, and they did have to share the cell.

  “Naw, that’s not it.”

  “Well, you asked,” Cornell said pettishly. He disliked the type of man who did that, a commonplace sort, actually: one of the reasons Cornell could not endure most other males.

  “I’ll tell you the reason,” Harry said.

  “Yes, you tell me.” Funny how even a rapist would try to score off you in this way. Men!

  “It would take the fun o
ut of it for them.”

  “Fun?”

  “They’re sadists,” said Harry. “All women. Take the balls off a man and he won’t want to resist. The whole business of winning, conquering, requires a victim who is not defeated to begin with.”

  “It’s easy to be paranoid,” Cornell said helplessly, not unaware of the ludicrous banality of so addressing a violent criminal. But his head was really bothering him now.

  “Do you mind,” he asked, “if I drop off for a while? This is all very new to me. I guess I’ve lived a sheltered life.”

  “Listen, kid,” said Harry, “you’ve got a chance to beat the rap. Why not take it? Do you owe it to those other guys to spend ten-to-twenty in stir?”

  Cornell opened his eyes. “Others? There was only that one. Mary, I feel awful about him! But I couldn’t help it, could I, if I got that shot?”

  “How can you blame yourself? Nobody’s responsible for what she says under sodium pentathol.”

  Harry got up and unfolded the blanket at the bottom of Cornell’s cot. He drew it over his cellmate, with astonishing tenderness. “There’s no hope for me,” he said. “I was in it all by myself. But if I had a gang, I’d turn them in. I’d hate to do it, mind you, but ten-to-twenty’s too much to pay for any loyalty. I’d turn state’s evidence and make a deal. And any of them would do it too. You’ve got only one life.”

  He gently smoothed Cornell’s forehead. “Go to sleep now. We’ll figure something out.”

  He had turned into a sympathetic person. Imprisonment brought men together.

  Cornell was awakened by a rattling on the iron door. Harry went to the slot and pulled in one gray plastic tray and then another. He brought Cornell’s meal to him.

  “What is this, dinner or lunch?” Cornell asked in a croaking voice.

  “Breakfast.”

  Cornell gingerly swung himself to a sitting position.

  “I slept all night?”

  “If you don’t believe me, feel your chin,” said Harry.

  Cornell had a medium-heavy beard, and he had not shaved since before going to Charlie’s. His fingers felt quite a growth of emery paper.

  “Better get that off right after breakfast,” Harry warned him. “Inspection is held soon as they have taken back the trays. I’ve seen men put in solitary for a growth of whiskers you couldn’t see with the naked eye.”