“Yes,” she said.
“Suppose I had a knife—suppose I stuck a blade into you, and ripped you open so that all your life could spill out. Would you want me to do that?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you know what would have happened if you had jumped from that ferry?”
“I’d be dead now.”
“Yes, that’s right. But you wouldn’t have died right away. You would have had to wait for the blades of the ferry’s propeller to chop you up.”
“I figured that would happen,” she said.
“Didn’t the idea of being chopped up like that bother you?”
“No.”
“It would have been terribly painful,” he said. “Can you imagine how painful it would have been?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, she smiled. “Pain,” she said. “You talk about pain as if it’s a subject you know.”
“Maybe it is.”
"I know about pain,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Yes. I know a hell of a lot more about it than you’ll ever know.”
He shook his head. “I doubt that.”
“You want me to prove it to you?”
He shrugged. “Go ahead.”
She leaned forward slightly in the car seat and slipped off her coat. Her hand reached up the back of her dress and found the zipper. She pulled it.
The back of the dress opened. She rounded her shoulders and plucked the dress away from her, letting it ride down her arms to the elbows.
Her breasts looked even lovelier than they had felt. Her skin resembled alabaster, and her nipples were the color of fresh bruises. They hung away from her body invitingly as she bent at the waist.
Her breasts were very beautiful, but Morton wasn’t noticing them. He was looking at something completely different—and, to him, far more exciting.
Her back.
The pale white flesh was scarred with criss-crossed lines, like a roadmap. Most of them were dull red scars, but a few were a bright crimson, as if they’d been left there recently. The whole expanse of her back was like that, from her shoulders all the way down the spine. Her dress had inched down in back to display the first rise of her neat buttocks, and they, too, were scarred with the same sort of marks.
Morton felt his jaw dropping. “What the hell . . .”
“There,” she said. “Ever see anything like that before?”
Of course, Mortem had—many times. But he kept that to himself. “Is it—a skin condition, or something?”
“Skin condition?” She laughed, and her pendent breasts swayed. “Those are whip marks.”
“You mean—people have been beating you? With a whip?”
“That’s right.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Years,” she said. “Look at the marks. Some of those scars were left on me five or six years ago.”
He stared at the pattern of welts in total fascination. Judging from the number of them, and the ferocity of their strokes, this girl must have been the victim of a person more brutal than Morton himself. The thought of that caused something red to stir inside him.
“Who did this to you?” he asked.
“Lots of people. Anyone I could find who was willing.”
“Anyone who . . .” He paused and stared at her.
“You heard me,” she said.
“I don’t get it.”
She inhaled, and again her dangling breasts shuddered with the motion. “It’s quite simple, really. I’m a masochist.”
He sat without moving in stunned silence.
“Does that shock you?” She looked up into his face, then sat erect, pulling the bodice of her dress back into place over her bosom. “There are such people, whether you know it or not. People who enjoy pain, who live for pain, who get their only pleasures from pain, pain, pain. It’s a common form of insanity.”
“A masochist,” he said. “You like to receive pain.”
“That’s right.” She managed to twist her arm far enough to zipper her dress halfway closed, then gave up. “That’s why I want to die.”
“I still don’t see the connection.”
Her eyes flashed with anger. “You idiot! Can’t you see what’s wrong with me? Don’t you have any brains at all?”
“What is wrong with you?”
“I’m crazy,” she yelled. “I’m out of my mind, and there isn’t a thing I can do about it. I—I can’t help myself. I have to experience pain—and torture . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“I see that,” said Morton. “But you said you got pleasure from it. You said you enjoyed it. If that’s the case, then what the hell is your problem?”
She took a drag on her cigarette, and blew a plume of smoke against the windshield. “I was married once,” she said.
“Were you?”
“About three years ago—when I was twenty. I didn’t look so—my back wasn’t as bad then. The fellow I married—when he undressed the for the first time and saw the scars, he asked me how they’d gotten there ”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said my father used to beat me. That was true, by the way. I guess maybe that old bastard was the start of all this for me.”
“You didn’t tell your husband you were a masochist?”
“Of course not,” she said vehemently. “How could I? Do you think he would ever have married me if he knew what I was?”
Morton tipped his head to one side. “The question is—why did you marry him?”
“Yes. That’s a good question, isn’t it?” The corners of her mouth turned up in a half-smile, half-sneer. “I wanted to get away from myself, I guess. I thought if I got married, I might change.”
“Uh-huh. You wanted to lose your taste for pain.”
“Not taste,” she said. “Compulsion. That’s what’s so terrible about it. It isn’t just a preference. It’s a necessity.”
Morton tapped the ash from his cigarette. “Your husband found out?”
“That’s right.”
“How?”
“He caught me at it.”
Morton blinked. “At what?”
“In the bathroom one night—I thought he was asleep. We’d been married about six months, and in that time—would you believe it, for six whole months, I went straight? I did everything a dutiful wife should do. I lay there night after night letting him make love to me, and tried to convince myself I was enjoying it. I figured if I held out long enough, maybe my husband’s love-making would get through to me after a while. I hoped that, without my feeding it, the old needs would dry up.”
“But they didn’t,” prompted Morton.
“No. Nothing like it. If anything, they got stronger every day. And one night, after he’d finished having sex with me—I was lying there awake, and I just couldn’t stand it any more.” She shivered slightly. “So I got up and went into the bathroom.”
“What happened?”
“There was a hairbrush there—one of his. Very stiff-bristled, almost like wire. I beat myself with it.”
Morton nodded slowly. “I see.”
“I hit myself with that brush all over the back, everywhere I could reach. But that wasn’t good enough, so I did it on my belly and backside—as hard as I could. It hurt like hell.”
“Did you get the pleasure you wanted?”
“No. Just pain—the wrong kind of pain. Pain without pleasure. It hurt so much—I started to cry. I just stood there, sobbing, with tears running down my face—and beating myself with that damn brush.”
“And?”
“He heard me.” She paused for a few seconds. “He came in to see what was wrong. I was beating my breasts when he came through the door.”
Morton looked down at his cigarette and found it was dead. He dropped the butt into the dashboard ashtray, and lit a fresh one. “Did he understand what you were doing?”
“Of course not. How could he understand? He was just an
ordinary man—he didn’t know about things like that. He said I was sick. He said I needed help.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I left him.” She put her palms flat on her thighs and rubbed them along her skirt. “He probably doesn’t understand what happened to this day.”
“And since then, you’ve just been knocking around?”
“Yes. I had some money—enough to last a few years. I spent it hiring people to beat me—give me pain. Just yesterday . . .” She passed a hand over her eyes. “Forget it. I don’t know why I’m talking to you, anyway.”
“You feel like talking,” said Morton. “It’s all right with me.”
She shook her head. “I’m sick of talking to people who don’t understand. I’m sick of living in a world that doesn’t understand. That’s why I was going to jump off the ferry.” She looked through the windshield again at the deserted expanse of the street. “It would have been so easy—just a jump, and then falling, and then the water—and then . . .”
“The blades,” said Morton
“Yes—the blades. One blinding moment of perfect pain—the biggest and most terrible pain of all. And then—nothing. Everything over and done with for good. No more sweats—no more problems. No more me.”
Morton glanced at his watch. It was past ten o’clock. “That’s very interesting,” he said.
She laughed hollowly. “Glad you think so. You were the one who stopped me, after all—you were the helpful soul who kept me from doing what I wanted. I guess I owed you an interesting little story in exchange for that. It’s just a shame that you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
Morton smiled. “What makes you think I don’t?”
“You can’t.” She snorted. “Masochism is a perversion. It takes a pervert to understand a pervert.”
“That’s quite true,” said Morton.
She looked at him through narrowing eyes. “What kind of stuff are you trying to hand me. You’re no masochist.”
“That’s right I’m not” His smile spread into a grin. “I’m a sadist.”
For the space of several seconds, she didn’t say a word. Then, “You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“I don’t believe it. You have to be kidding.”
“Not at all.” He gestured at her. “Those marks on your back—you said you paid people to put them there.”
“That’s right.”
“I would have done that for nothing.”
Her face remained frozen for an instant longer. Then she threw back her head and burst into laughter. “Well, I’ll be damned—I’ll be double and triple damned!”
“So you see,” said Morton, “I do understand.”
“Yes, I guess you do at that. Of all the crazy luck—a sadist . . She laughed a few moments, then turned her head toward him. “If you’re a sadist, how come you saved me? Wouldn’t it have been a kick for you to watch me get chopped up?”
Morton pursed his lips. “I’ve been trying to figure that out ever since I left the ferry. I think I know now why I did it.”
“Why?”
“You wanted to die—I saw you there, right on the brink of it, only a couple of inches away from death—as you called it, the perfect pain.”
“Death,” she said. “Yes.”
“And I thought . . .” He smiled again. “You know what it was like? It was like watching somebody throw away a full-course meal when you yourself were starving. All I could think of was what a terrible waste it was. As long as you wanted pain—wanted to die . . .”
The girl shuddered, but didn’t say anything.
“Do you still want to die?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to do it all by yourself, or would you . . .”
“Would I let a sadist help me? Is that what you’re asking?”
“How about it?”
“You’re even crazier than I am,” she said. “Don’t you know what that would mean? It would be murder—you’d be a murderer.”
He nodded. “True enough.”
“And you’d be willing to run a risk like that?”
“Why not?”
“Have you ever killed anybody before?”
“No. Never. I suppose that’s why the idea interests me so.” She thought for a while in silence. “How would you do it?” she asked finally.
“I don’t know yet, exactly. There’s a house I’m going to visit tonight—a torture-house.”
“A what?”
“A place for people like you and me. I have an appointment with the woman who runs it. I’ve never been there before. I don’t know what it’s like.”
“I want to go with you,” she said.
“Do you still want to die?” he asked again.
“Yes,” she said. She hunched herself down in the seat and trembled.
“What’s your name?”
“Morton. What’s yours?”
“Julie. Listen, Morton—will you promise me something?”
“Sure. What?”
“When the pain is the worst, when it’s just as big and terrible as it can get—and you’ll know when that is . . .”
“Yes?”
“Make it happen then,” she said.
He keyed the ignition, yanked the car into gear, and gunned off across Hylan Boulevard.
CHAPTER 13
AT FIFTEEN MINUTES before midnight, Charlie’s limousine turned right off Hylan Boulevard and began cruising slowly north on Eugene Street.
“It’s up here ahead somewhere, Mr. Small. You got a number?”
“The cross-street is Bliss Place, Charles. According to what I was told, the house is in the vicinity of that intersection.” Charlie peered ahead. “It sure ain’t much of a neighborhood, Mr. Small. You sure you got the directions straight?”
“Yes, Charles. I’m quite sure.” Small was craning his head around in the back seat, looking out first one window, then the other.
“Well,” said Charlie, frowning. “You’re the boss. Only this don’t strike me as any location for a hooker hangout. You know—the pros usually operate where the action is, or at least near it, and this here’s just about the deadest section I’ve ever seen. You absolutely positive the whorehouse you want is along here?”
Small chuckled. “Did I say it was a whorehouse, Charles?”
“No—I don’t guess you did, Mr. Small.”
“Just drive the car, Charles. We’re almost there.”
The cabbie examined the street ahead glumly. As far as he could see, they weren’t almost anywhere, except perhaps on their way to more of the same. The buildings on either side were made of faded wood, and many Of them had the same sort of dried-out lumber boarding over their windows. Street lights were few and far between, and there didn’t seem to be any other lights.
Not only did nobody live here, thought Charlie—nobody even came here.
Except nutty Burton Small.
A funny feeling passed through Charlie at that moment This neighborhood—the deserted darkness of the streets and the shabbiness of the buildings—there was something vaguely frightening about it all. You couldn’t exactly call the area tough—it wasn’t like Spanish Harlem, for instance, or Red Hook—but it had a dangerous feel to it just the same. It was in dark empty sections like this where the worst crimes took place; not the flash of a knife in a crowded Harlem bar, or the crack of pistol fire as some jerk tried to outrun the police—but the more quiet sort of crimes, like the neat dismembering of a body, for instance, each piece carefully wrapped, packed in a trunk, and put away in the attic of one of these boarded-up houses.
The neighborhood felt peculiar to Charlie. He didn’t like die sensation at all.
What made it even worse was his sudden realization that Burton Small was a very vulnerable man.
Small traveled in all the worst areas of town in search of his lacks, not to mention the alleys and byways of foreign cities which he’d visited. And in all that time, he’d never run into any trouble.
> It was unbelievable, Charlie knew from experience that where you found prostitution, you also found other forms of crime.) Where there was crime, people got hurt, robbed, often killed. In fact, a lot of bouncy tomatoes posing as hookers were really only shills planted to lure suckers into a room where they could be rolled, then dumped in the river.
Burton Small spent an awful lot of time in places like that And yet, despite his round prosperous belly and his expensive clothes and that roll he kept flashing all the time—despite the wonderful target he made—he’d never been touched.
So, thought Charlie, he had luck. So how long could the luck hold out? Forever? Not likely—not at all likely.
Charlie considered Burton Small more than just a customer, more even than a mere acquaintance. After the wild times they’d shared together, and there had been many of them, Charlie had come to consider Small a friend. The cabbie really liked Small; and, as he looked over the neighborhood through which they were driving, he began to worry about him.
He was about to turn around and speak his thoughts, but Small beat him to the punch.
“Stop the car, Charles. I think we’re here.”
Charlie pulled over to the curb and braked to a halt. There was a street sign on the corner ahead which said Bliss Place. Charlie could barely make it out in the dimness.
He turned and rested his arm along the top of the seat. “What now, Mr. Small?”
“Now?” Small looked as happy as a child on Christmas morning. “Now, I get out of the car, find the place I want, and keep my appointment.”
“Mr. Small?”
“Yes?”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
Small’s good-humor turned to vague puzzlement. “I don’t understand you, Charles. Of course I know what I’m doing. I always know what I’m doing.”
Charlie blew a breath down his nose. “Well—all right, then.”
“What’s troubling you, my friend?”
“I wish you’d tell me what this is all about, Mr. Small. I’d feel a hell of a lot better if I knew where you were bound.”
“Why, Charles—I do believe you’re worried about me.”
“Maybe I am. I don’t know.”
The Jaded Sex Page 18
