It is his eye, now, that the man applies to the tiny opening; then there are new metal blades, selected deliberately from the toolbox. There must be something that disturbs him, for he looks through the keyhole again, trying to illuminate the interior of the mechanism with a cylindrical pocket flashlight, bringing the rounded, luminous tip close to the mysterious and recalcitrant orifice.
But the flashlight, to perform its function, would have to be where his eye is, which is not possible, since in that case there would no longer be anyone there to see; therefore the locksmith soon abandons this attempt and takes another look, without the help of any artificial light. He then notices that the other end of the channel is free and that a bulb is on in the room on the other side of the door, contrary to what would be normal since the house is supposed to be empty. In that case, wouldn’t it be enough to ring, in order—once the door was opened—to take the lock apart in order to reconstruct a new key as easily as possible?
However, the short bald man is interrupted in the midst of his logical reflections by the exceptional interest of the scene visible to him, on the other side of the door, so that he cannot carry further his analysis of the situation and of the consequences it implies … There is a young girl in there lying on the ground, bound and gagged. Judging from the coppery hue of her skin and her thick head of hair, long, smooth and lustrous, with blue highlights in its black abundance, she must be a half-caste girl with a good deal of Indian blood. Her face seems attractive, her features regular, at least insofar as can be gathered apart from the interference of the white silk gag (a scarf tied behind her head) which distorts the mouth, sawing into the corners of the lips. Her hands are tied behind her back, and half-hidden by her position. Her ankles are tied together, one above the other, by means of a thick cord which is wound several times around the long, slightly bent legs, coiling higher up around the belly and hips, then imprisoning the arms and the chest by many interlacing spirals, pulled very tight as is indicated by the indentations made in the flesh at the least resistant points: the breasts, the waist, the thighs.
There has been a struggle, judging from appearances, or in any case the girl must have attempted to evade capture, for her bright red dress is in great disorder, though now immobilized as well by the cord. The skirt, a rather short one it is true, rises on one side to the pubic area, thereby revealing a wide zone of bare skin above the embroidered stocking, while the blouse has been torn far down over one shoulder, where the flesh glistens under the harsh light from a tall lamp with a Chinese shade set on the nearby table.
It is toward this lamp, struggling sideways as much as her fetters permit, that the prisoner raises eyes widened by terror, or perhaps only by her prone and half-overturned position. She is apparently trying to prop herself up on one elbow, but not very successfully because of the cords which keep her from moving her arm. Beside her, on the floor, in close proximity to her bare shoulder, is an indefinable black shape which looks like a small-size leather glove, without cuff, the fingers worn and spread every which way. As has been said, the dark-skinned girl pays no attention to this last detail, the point which attracts her horrified and eager glances being located in a direction almost diametrically opposite: the careful preparations being made by the second person who figures in the field of vision.
This person is sitting at the table—a man in a white coat with a severe face and gray hair, wearing steel-rimmed glasses. Everything in his features and stature alike has a stereotyped look about it, without real life, without human expression except for that purely conventional hardness and indifference; unless the only thing that gives him this determined aspect is the excessive, exclusive interest he is paying to his experiment. He is in the process, as a matter of fact, in the zone of bright light cast by the lampshade, of inserting a serum (a narcotic or hallucinogenic substance, a nervous stimulant, a poison of either slow or immediate effect) into a hypodermic syringe, his left hand holding the tapering cylindrical shaft which ends in a slender hollow needle, point upward, while he maneuvers between the thumb and forefinger of his other hand the round tip of the glass piston-valve. Behind his glasses, whose lenses cast stylized reflections, he watches the level of the liquid with the care required of high-precision measurements.
Nothing, in the scene, permits identification of the exact nature, or even the expected effect, of this colorless fluid whose injection requires such a setting and causes so much anxiety to the young captive. The uncertainty as to the precise meaning of the episode is all the greater in that the title of the work is missing, the upper part of the cover, where it would normally be found, having been torn across and removed, deliberately or not.
I ask Laura where the book comes from.
“It was there,” she answers with a vague gesture toward the room with empty shelves behind her. And her gaze is direct, motionless, absent.
“That’s strange,” I say, “I’ve never seen it before …”
“It was lying flat on one of the top shelves, in a corner.”
“I see … What made you think of looking for it up there?”
“I just happened to look.”
“Didn’t you have to use a ladder?”
“No. I climbed up on the shelves, step by step.”
She has to be lying. The notion of any such scene, as I try in vain to imagine it, is too preposterous.
Or else perhaps it is true, in spite of everything. Each time I ask this kind of question, which soon turns into an interrogation, she always has the same slow, precise, remote diction, as if she were reciting her answers in a dream or in the voice—perceptible to herself alone—of an oracle. But at the same time, her tone does not permit the least objection: it is clear that, in her mind, the facts leave no room for ulterior motives. She also gives the impression, to some degree, of having on her side the guarantee of slide rule, by means of which she has just discovered and announced the sole solution to the problem set.
I take refuge in my turn in the pages of the book, which I leaf through, pretending to be interested in the adventures of the characters. From what I can guess, the lovely half-caste in the garish picture is named Sara. She is the possessor of three terrible secrets, related each to the other, which she has sworn never to give away, their triple revelation bound to unleash irreparable catastrophes for herself as well as for the whole world. Her fear is so great that one day or another she will betray some scrap of a story by which her tormented mind is obsessed, that she lives locked up in her own house, where only the family physician visits every evening, caring for her since the dramatic disappearance of all her family. But she has told nothing to this good-humored old man, who is pained to see such a lovely girl living in this incomprehensible imprisonment. He decides therefore to call in, without asking his patient’s permission, a fake analyst—a man named Morgan—who is undertaking, unknown to him, the investigation of the girl’s buried past, in order to determine the origin of the disturbances which her behavior seems to reveal.
This man is doubtless the one in the white coat, and his syringe would therefore contain a truth serum which he is preparing, as a last resort, to inject into the body, at the top of the thigh whose tender flesh he has managed to expose by squeezing the cords over the dress. Sara’s anguish thereby would derive from her conviction, imprisoned as she is in the labyrinth of her sick mind, that her tongue will immediately begin betraying, from beginning to end, the forbidden narrative which is burning her lips. One sudden detail disturbs me: it is said in passing that the girl in question has blue eyes, which does not at all fit in with the general coloring, of skin or hair, attributed by the artist to the victim in the illustration adorning the cover.
But what strikes me even more now, in the crudely colored drawing, is that the dark shape with complicated outlines like those of an ink blot shown on the floor is not a woman’s glove as I had thought originally, but a huge spider with hairy legs which is crawling toward the captive’s bare shoulder and neck. Is this creature p
art of the experiment, or does it play a separate role, no one having yet noticed its presence? (To be specific: no one except me, which is to say, neither Sara nor Doctor Morgan, for I have noticed, in skimming the novel, that of the three elements of the secret in the heroine’s keeping, one was known by the reader, the second by the narrator himself, and the third by the book’s author alone.) While I am making these various observations, I keep trying at the same time (though as yet without results) to wedge into my memory the notion of Laura climbing up the library shelves without having had—she says—any specific reason for doing so; this image seems to me more and more absurd and impossible, unless the child was frightened by a giant spider or by a rat: if it was the noise of broken glass, at one of the windows at the end of the corridor, which had caused her panic, she would have been more likely to look for a hiding-place in some closet or even in a bathroom, but she would not have climbed up to the top of the shelves …
At this moment, while I am still looking in the book, leafing through the pages almost at random, for the one which would correspond to die illustration, in order to verify the exact circumstances of the injection and to elucidate the possible help, or on the contrary the change made by this creature in the course of the experiment, I once again fall upon the passage in which the narrator, disguised as a policeman, bursts into the apartment of the young redhead known as Joan.
The man has come to a stop a few steps away from his victim, contemplating with interest her naked body, with the exception—as has been said—of the green leather shoes, the black stockings with the pink lace garters, and the tiny gold cross … But now I begin to have a certain qualm: if I recognize this fragment textually (and not only anecdotally, for that would prove nothing, analogous situations are to be found in most novels on sale in the pornographic bookshops of Times Square), then this volume, whose cover I have forgotten, has already passed before my eyes. It is therefore pointless to torment Laura about her so-called recent acquisition. And, once again, I tell myself that she is leading a sad and unhealthy life in this house, without projects, without surprises, without a possible future.
For a long time now, she has lost all real communication with the outside world, to which she now has only artificial links, constituted for the most part—aside from the fragments of personal memories whose most violent scenes I hope I have made her forget—by this detective-story library in decay, by the ordinary anecdotes which I myself supply to her, carefully expurgating from them any allusion to destructive episodes, and finally, at certain hours and on condition that she take the usual precautions when she half-opens the curtains in her room, by the playground of the school where, behind a heavy wire fence at least six yards high, the black girls play like all children, performing what appear to be cruel and mysterious rites.
I, too, should be making an effort to entertain my little prisoner more, since I have decided (temporarily?) to keep her with me, well protected, in order to shield her from the supreme decisions and to guard her from harm. Not to mention the fact that if she gets too bored, Laura might some day, in my absence, commit a monstrous crime which will destroy us both. But what can I be thinking of? In any case, I would have to renew her stock of criminal cases; the selection would be easy enough from the windows of the bookstores specializing in such matters, since the image on the cover plays such a great part in the interest awakened by these works. I could also bring her candy, books of erotic photographs, perfume, fashion magazines, comic books, marijuana cigarettes, and perhaps install a television set: color newsreels would do something to change the atmosphere of this three-quarters unfurnished building which serves as her prison, and would however inadequately remedy the early interruption of her studies by the documentary films on Africa or the Far East.
As for bringing her playmates, there could be no question of that, unfortunately, unless I were to choose as guests—different, therefore, on each occasion—the young women who figure on the execution lists: to lure them here on some pretext, to leave them with Laura long enough for her to divert herself with them, and to keep in readiness the necessary arrangements for their sacrifice, either on the spot or elsewhere, without these victims being able, meanwhile, to make contact with anyone whether or not he (or she) belongs to the organization. If their torture were to take place right here, moreover, it is possible that Laura would develop a taste for it, at least as a spectator.
I noted just now that I would return on some occasion to another important point: to try to give a more precise description of the way in which she expresses herself when I ask her a question, or when she tells me about her day, when I return in the evening. Her words never form a continuous discourse: they are like fragments which nothing any longer links together, despite the emphatic tone suggesting a coherent whole which might exist somewhere, elsewhere than in her head probably; and there is always, suspended above the elements stuck together one way or another, the apprehension of an imminent, unforeseeable though ineluctable catastrophe which will reduce this precarious order to nothingness.
And finally, exhausted by calculating everything, I end up by waiting in my turn for the incalculable event which is going to make everything blow up in another moment. And so I return to the house, night after night, and set down my key on the marble table top in the vestibule, and I climb the staircase step after step, with all the weight of the day’s accumulated fatigue in my legs. And I listen, ears cocked, for some sound that might still be coming from her room. And if I were to justify disobedience to my orders by some impulse of uncontrolled passion, it would be very hard for me to swear in good faith that her illicit possession affords me, in the long run, more pleasure than anxiety. But these regrets, these hesitations, are scarcely appropriate, for meanwhile the narrative I have begun continues its course up near Harlem, in the overheated apartment on One Hundred and Twenty-third Street where the fake policeman tells Joan she has just been sentenced to death by the parallel court of special jurisdiction and that, as is traditional in such cases, he will first have to torture her at some length in order to make her confess the details of the conspiracy. Moreover he intends, he says, to acquit himself of this task conscientiously, for he will take great pleasure in it, as she can suspect, the wearing of a military tunic and boots scarcely preventing a man from having human feelings. To such a degree that the time will not be wasted, even in the considerable likelihood that she will ultimately have nothing to tell that the police do not know already.
This last declaration must constitute, in the soldier’s mind, a kind of polite homage to his victim’s perfect beauty, for he accompanies the phrase with a discreet salute: a nod in her direction, a little stiff but very worldly. Unaffected by this attention, under the circumstances, the young woman, who still holds her hands above her auburn hair falling in loose curls of a delightful (or provocative) disarray, the young woman steps back toward the sheet of glass, widening still further her green eyes filled with panic (or terror, or stupor, etc.).
“I see that you have already prepared some instruments,” the man adds with a faint smile, keeping the barrel of his gun aimed at the captive, and at the same time making a movement with his head toward the ironing-board, the gleaming sharp-pointed scissors, and the electric iron which is beginning to smoke on the silk dress. He decides, at the same time, that the board, too, will be useful: it has a very practical elongated shape and its metal legs, which diverge toward the floor, afford it a good stability; they are even provided, at about the lower third, with four little leather thongs which seem ideal for tying up the victim’s wrists and ankles. The policeman even wonders what else they could be used for. On the point of asking the doomed girl this question, he changes his mind, glancing back toward her.
“I shall begin by raping you,” he says. “I shall doubtless do so again during the course of the interrogation, as is recommended in our instructions, but I want to take you first, before I tie you up. That television program has worked me up a little, although in
our profession, I can tell you, we see a great deal more than that. I have noticed, when I was on the balcony, that the good parts excited you as well; consequently, you may even take a certain interest in what you are going to suffer, at least at first, and I am glad of that, for your sake. (For me, as a matter of fact, as you have understood, the pleasure experienced by the partner plays no part in my personal fixations and fetishes.) Now, get over there, on the divan.
“No, not like that, on your knees. That’s better: facing the wall. Lean on your forearms. Bend your head: very nice. Now arch your hips a little. Open your thighs wider. Now arch your hips more—as much as you can. There! You really do have as good a body as they say; your skin is very delicate, to look at as well as to touch, and you smell very pleasant. All of which, moreover, figures in the report. All right, you little whore, no more airs: remember that this is a kind of reprieve after all, and soon you’ll be regretting how easy it was, despite these contacts that seem to shock you and the posture you now regard as uncomfortable.
“Good. That’s better. We can get on with the preliminary questions right away, if you’re ready. When you have nothing more to declare, your torture will begin, to see whether or not you have told the truth. Without changing your position nor tying you up any more than now, we can first of all, for purely plastic reasons, send a little blood over these white buttocks of yours. Then, when we turn you over (chiefly, of course, to deal with the breasts and the vulva) it will be better to tie you securely to the ironing-board. I hope that you will then, in fact, have nothing else very interesting to say, for I shall have to turn the television volume up to its maximum point, in order to drown out your screams, so that I shall no longer understand your answers.
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