Sin Hellcat

by Lawrence Block

  Helen, I thought, abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.

  But it didn’t. Not really.

  And then we were up and dressed, Jodi and I, and Evil Everett was liberated from his prison of plumbing, and it was rushing time. So rush we did. We rushed to the West Side Terminal, and we missed the last bus to Newark that would get us to our plane on time, and we leaped into a cab and pressed an outrageous twenty dollars upon the sardonic little man behind the wheel, and we sped to Newark, checked our overweight luggage, boarded a gleaming jet, and spent at least ten minutes convincing our moppet that he ought to fasten his seat belt.

  “Listen,” I told him, “you don’t fasten that belt and you’ll bump your head on the seat in from of you.”

  This did not impress him.

  “Listen,” Jodi told him, after I had made other dire threats, all quite ineffectual, “you don’t fasten that belt and I’ll wrap it around your neck until your eyes pop out of your head.”

  This impressed him. I assured Jodi that she had a way with wee ones, and all at once there was a tear in her eye. A small tear, a tear that looked out of place, a tear that looked infinitely sad.

  “I can never have children,” Jodi said.

  I remembered what she had told me on that first afternoon of our reunion—a batch of abortions, the last one a final one because more than a fetus had been removed. A whore shedding tears for her unborn children.

  “I’m sorry, Jodi,” I said. And she squeezed my hand.

  The plane taxied down the runway (imagine a taxi planing down a runway, if you will) and suddenly we were in the air, going like a bat from hell. The FASTEN BELTS sign went out, and we loosened our own belts. Everett could not read. His belt remained fastened. Why mobilize an enemy? Why unchain the forces of destruction? The NO SMOKING sign went out, too, and I lit two cigarettes and put one between Jodi’s red lips.

  She took a long drag and filled the plane with smoke. “Sometimes,” she said, “I wonder about them.” I asked her about whom, and the tear appeared again. I leaned across to wipe it from her eye with a fingertip, but as soon as I did this another tear took its place.

  “The dead ones,” she said. “The ones they cut out of me. The poor little kids never had a chance, Harvey. I asked the doctor one time whether it was a boy or a girl. He said it was too early to tell, so I don’t know. Those kids never had a chance to be born.”

  I suggested that they might have been better off that way—that, as far as it went, everyone might have been better off unborn. But Jodi shook her head sadly.

  “You have to have a chance,” she said. “You have to live. Then, when you make a mess out of it all, you know at least that you had that first chance somewhere along the way.”

  It was a fairly profound speech, and I for once had no answer to it. I started to say that we were getting into deep water for a honeymoon trip. I didn’t say this, though.

  “I shouldn’t go on this way,” she said, reading my mind. “It’s just depressing, Harvey. And you can’t be too interested.”

  I told her, not altogether untruthfully, that I was interested in anything she had to say.

  “But you’ve never had an abortion,” she said. “It’s not exactly up your alley.”

  It wasn’t? True, I had never had an abortion. But I had been involved in one, had even paid for one. All of which happened after I was married, but not long after. And the abortee—is that the word? It might as well be—was not my wife, but Linda Holmes.

  Remember the wedding, and the wedding night?

  All on the good ship Lollypop bound Bermudaward? You must remember. I remember. As though it were yesterday, or perhaps the day before.

  Every night has a morning after, and the manufacturers of Bromo-Seltzer remain ever grateful for this fact. Even wedding nights have mornings after, and mine was no exception. The exceptional element lay in the fact that upon that evil morning after I awoke in bed, not with my good wife Helen, but with another girl entirely.

  Her name was Linda Holmes, of course. She had red hair and green eyes and breasts like someone in Swedish movies. Anita Ekberg, for example. Not Ingmar Bergman.

  I rolled over that fine morning and almost called her Helen. But she had awakened before me, and when my eyes opened she came into my arms as soft and fresh and sweet and willing as—well, quite soft and fresh and sweet and willing, metaphor be damned. And I knew full well that this was not Helen. Not at all.

  “Let’s play a game,” she whispered, her little pink tongue darting into my ear to blur the words—and to blur my vision, as well, and to make my knees knock together. “Mister Bridegroom, let’s play a game.”

  We had played games a-plenty the night before. Did I tell you that Linda’s mother had a laissez-faire attitude toward sex? I must have, and she did. Linda had somehow escaped the puritanical upbringing of my fair Helen. Salemites might have burned her as a witch, had she not charmed them first.

  “What kind of a game?”

  “An Oriental game,” she said. “You’ll be a jaded sheik in an Oriental pleasure dome in Asia Minor, or something like that.”

  “In Xanadu,” I suggested. “That’s the best place to decree stately pleasure domes.”

  “In Xanadu,” she echoed. “And do you know what I’ll be?”

  “A slave girl.”

  She shook her head.

  “A harem favorite,” I suggested.

  “No. Remember, you’re a jaded old sheik. The harem favorites don’t jolt you anymore.”

  “A tender virgin,” I said, wincing slightly because after Helen the whole idea of virginity was somehow nauseating. “A tender virgin at the sheik’s mercy.”

  “Too jaded,” she insisted stubbornly. “You eat virgins for breakfast.”

  The idea was not entirely without appeal, I must admit. I put a hand on one of those fair Swedish peaks, and I felt a nipple go stiff, and I squeezed. A hand came for me—a soft little hand attached to a strong little arm attached to Linda Holmes—and the hand found the object of its search, and the hand held and stroked.

  “Linda,” I said.

  “Not Linda,” she said. “You’re old and jaded, Pukka Sahib. Countless nights of dissipation have ruined your appetite for normal lust. And now, oh Great Leader, you are hard to arouse.”

  I put my hand on her hand, raising my eyebrows as I did so. “Linda,” I said, “believe the evidence of your senses. Hard to arouse, no.”

  She giggled. Her hand did things, and my hand did things and for a moment passion caught hold of us. But suddenly she stiffened, pulled away playfully, and regarded my hungry eyes with mirthful ones.

  “Women no longer excite you,” she said. “Do you know what you need now?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  I told her in four letters and she shook her head solemnly. “You need a young boy,” she said. “Huh?”

  “A young boy. You see—”

  “You,” I said, “have the wrong number.”

  She sighed. “It’s a game, silly. Listen, you’re the sheik, or the harem leader, or whatever the hell it is. Get it? I think we’ve got our geography all balled up, and so on, but you’re the Lord High Everything Else of Xanadu, see, and I’m the young boy assigned to bring you pleasure. Now, you have to make love to me as though I were a boy.”

  I told her that if she were a boy I was the Lord High Whatzit of Xanadu.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  But once we caught the spirit of the thing it was fine. I stroked her not-at-all boyish body, disobeying her injunctions to leave her breasts alone. “You’re a boy,” I insisted, pinching pink nipples and cupping globes of soft firmness. “I’m just rubbing your flat chest. Use your imagination, for God’s sake.”

  Finally she was kneeling before me on the bed. I looked at the back of her head, her flaming red hair. I ran my hands over her back, feeling skin that was wondrously soft. I cupped her buttocks, and no buttocks in the world were as butty as they. Round
and pink, firm and delicious—I have never felt particularly cannibalistic, but if I ever were to begin a diet of human flesh, I think I should like to start with buttocks like hers. Roasted Buttocks of Succulent Girl—one could do worse.

  She writhed and moaned while I caressed her bouncy behind, wiggled and squirmed and told me what a great Lord High Whatever I was. And then I came between them like a family feud between Romeo and Juliet, and my hands went around her to grip her breasts while I surged again and again into her.

  You may understand, I suspect, how surprised I was to discover, two months later, that she was pregnant.

  She called me in New York. I was back at the agency, swinging away madly in a mad effort to keep my wife from driving me to suicide. The phone rang one fine day, it did, and there, by God, was Linda Holmes.

  “Harvey,” she said, clear as a bell, “this is Linda Holmes. Remember?”

  I remembered—some things are not so easily forgotten, and Linda was one of the unforgettables. I smiled at her memory, and thought to myself that it would be very fine indeed to see her again, and wondered what sort of games we would play this time. I decided to leave the choice up to her.

  “Harvey,” she said, clear as an open window, “I am going to have a baby.”

  Now remember please what we had done, she and I. Remember that I had entered, as it were, by the back door, the servant’s entrance. Remember this.

  I said, “That’s impossible.”

  “Harvey,” she said, clear as a Windex commercial, “I am pregnant.”

  “Not pregnant. Constipated, maybe, but not pregnant. Listen, don’t you remember—”

  She remembered, of course. But she also remembered that the Jaded Sheik was not my only role, although it remained most memorable. Lovable Linda was pregnant. Layable Linda was going to have a baby. Lousy Linda was making a father out of me.

  “I’d marry you,” I said. “But I already did that.”

  “I don’t want to get married, Harvey.”

  “What do you want?”

  “First I want to go to bed with you,” she said, clear as a bell, as clear no doubt to the switchboard girl as to me. “Because I miss you, I mean. But what I really want is to have an abortion.”

  I got her phone number and her address, and then I left the office early and found a run-down bar on Sixth Avenue. There are times when liquor is a tongue-loosener, and I could ill afford a loose tongue in the presence of mine enemies, and all the hucksters I might encounter in Ulcer Gulch drinkeries were to be counted amongst mine enemies. So I chose a bar where the draft beer was fifteen cents and the bar rye was varnish, and I drank boilermakers that could not have tasted worse without killing me.

  There I thought about Linda.

  And drank.

  In the morning, I woke in an alleyway, cleaned up a bit in a convenient men’s room, bought a new set of clothes with my Diners’ Club card, rented a hotel room with my Diners’ Club card, ate a meal with my Diners’ Club card, and quite systematically made phone calls until I located an abortionist. I made another phone call to Linda, cabbed to her apartment, and spent two hours in bed with her to prime her for the ordeal ahead. On the way to the greedy little rabbit-snatcher I stopped at my bank and cashed a check for a thousand dollars. The abortionist, God love him, did not honor Diners’ Club cards.

  I had the unhappy thought, while I waited for Linda to come out of it all, that she might die under the knife. This would have been properly dramatic, but it did not happen that way. She recovered, and I kissed her, and never saw her again. Yet the experience, as I thought of it now, was jarring.

  I had conceived a child, sure enough. Had gotten a woman to conceive one, at any rate. The entire arrangement was incomprehensible. The notion that a few idle moments—well, not so idle, but hardly serious ones—a few moments, call them what you will, of sack time with Linda Holmes had resulted in this entity, this child. And now this child like Macduff was untimely ripped from its mother’s womb, and was gone, flushed down the toilet of a friendly abortionist who didn’t honor my Diners’ Club card.

  So I think I knew how Jodi felt, God bless her.

  It was evening when the plane landed in Rio. It was winter, of course, but a winter in Brazil is not like a winter in New York. If we had been further south, there would have been snow around and all that. As it was, it was more like a New York spring. Cool, clear, a little muggy but not uncomfortable.

  The combined officialdom of Rio de Janeiro passed us through Customs with no difficulty at all. Our passports, proclaiming us to be Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Christopher, were in good order. Our wee one, who behaved lamblike by calling us Mom and Dad in front of the baleful eye of a Portuguese-speaking flunkey, was received with smiles from every corner. He belonged to us, obviously, and they gave him no more trouble than they gave the rest of our luggage. We found a taxi, loaded ourselves and our suitcases and our moppet into the back seat, and gave the driver our destination a hotel named El Punto Finale.

  “I think he’s cheating us,” I whispered to Jodi. “We’ve passed this corner before.” This after a long and round-about ride.

  “But there’s no meter in the cab,” she said.

  There wasn’t. By the time I had an explanation figured out, we were somehow in front of the hotel, and the driver was asking in English only slightly better than my Portuguese (and I speak no Portuguese) for a dollar, sir. Obviously, he hadn’t conned us. Obviously, everything was fine. I gave him two dollars because I had misjudged him and he grabbed up our suitcases, beaming crazily, and toted them into the lobby.

  The clerk had our reservations, made for us via redoutable Al. We had a penthouse suite with a view of most of Rio—a room for us, a room for the kid, a room to sit around in, a room with a bar in it, and a pair of bathrooms. There was a thick carpet all over, and the bellhop told us in flawless English that he could get us anything we wanted.

  I told him a bottle of Scotch would be nice. He asked us what brand, and I mentioned Vat 69.

  He went away. He came back with ice, Vat 69, soda, and ginger ale. I made him take away the soda and the ginger ale—only in Brazil would anyone conceive of mixing Scotch with ginger ale. I poured drinks for Jodi and myself, glowered at Everett until he ran off to his own room, and drank.

  “He could have gotten us anything,” I told Jodi. “Maybe I should have asked for something tougher.”

  “Like what?”

  “I should have told him to send up a girl,” I said.

  “But you’ve got a girl.”

  “Two would be twice as much fun.”

  Jodi licked her lower lip pensively. “I knew a man who thought that way,” she said. “That two would be twice as much fun.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t remember his name,” she said. “I knew him professionally, Harvey.”

  “A client?”

  “A client. It was a call job, Harvey. I was working through this agency, like any agent except their cut was more than ten percent. Closer to half, really. I got a call to go over to a co-op apartment in the east sixties. Money—you know?”

  “I know.”

  “So I went over there. There was this guy, maybe forty-five, and there was this girl, maybe thirty. I was maybe twenty-five myself at the time. A few years ago.”

  She smiled. I poured more Vat 69 in her and more Vat 69 in my glass, and we touched glasses together. It’s an old custom you can get neatly fried. A colleague of mine once theorized that it was the clinking that stoned you. That if you did the same thing with glasses of skim milk you would have the same hangover in the morning. A theory, for better or for worse.

  “She was a sort of sloe-eyed thing,” Jodi was saying over the brim of her glass. “And I thought it was a mistake, that they had sent us both there or something because some bonehead got his wires crossed. Or his fingers, or his signals. I can never keep my clichés straight.”

  I told her to go on.

  “But it wasn’t a mistake,” sh
e said hazily. “It was for real. This forty-five type had a taste for orgies, I guess. He thought two would be twice as much fun you see.”

  I say, “What did he want you to do? I mean, two could be trouble. Unless the guy had managed to grow a second—”

  “No.” she said firmly. “He only had one of those, and it was a pretty ordinary one anyway. You know what he wanted us to do, Harvey? Do you have any idea?”

  “Well, don’t keep me in suspense.”

  She waited while I refilled the glasses. Then she said, “He had us take off all our clothes. Both of us.”

  “That sounds like a pretty fair beginning.”

  “And then he had me lie down on a bed, Harvey. On my back naked.”

  “It figures.”

  “And what do you think happened next?”

  I made a pretty decent guess. It was what I would have done under the circumstances, and I figured, well, what the hell.

  “He didn’t,” she said. “She did.”

  “Huh?”

  “She got on the bed with me,” said dear Jodi, “And she started to do things. Like feel my breasts. Here, give me your hand, Harvey, and I’ll show you—”

  “And here, too. You know.”

  Damn right I knew.

  “And so she made love to me,” Jodi said. “This sloe-eyed thing made love to me, and the guy who was picking up the tab just stood there watching, and drooling a little. She did things for about half an hour and she damn well knew what she was doing.”

  “How was it?”

  Jodi thought about it. “Not bad,” she said. “Because I could close my eyes, Harvey, and pretend that it wasn’t a girl but a man. And you know what she was doing to me, of course. With her hands and her mouth. I’ve had men do that to me—”

  “Like me,” I said, “for a starter.”

  “That’s right. And I like it.”

  “Damn right you do.”

  “Don’t growl,” she said. “Anyway, it was just the same thing, and she was okay at it. And besides, I knew it was all an act, what she was doing. She was just a poor whore hired for the occasion, same as I was, and it wasn’t as though she was a lesbian or anything. So I didn’t mind it too much.”