The Syntax of Seduction

by Carlos Malenkov

  "Entschuldigen Sie, bitte . . . You are the store manager?"

  "Yes, and how might I be of help, mein Herr?"

  "That lady over there -- die Blondine -- she has a weapon in her purse. I got a look at it standing in line behind her, and . . . "

  "Not to worry. We shall handle it. Please wait here while I page store security."

  "Bezeugnis? But I'm an American! Surely you don't expect me to appear in court."

  "My good sir, in a criminal case persons of any nationality can be summoned to testify. It is the law in this country. You can easily verify this by taking it up with the appropriate people at your consulate."

  "Scheisse!"

  "Sorry, Sam, I won't be able to fly back tomorrow night. I know you were counting on me for that contract signing in Boston, but I seem to be marooned on this side of the pond for a while. I just happened to be present at the arrest of a wanted terrorist and . . .

  "Yeah, that's what I said, a terrorist. A member of a notorious group of desperadoes, I'm told. They'll be taking a deposition from me, and I may even have to testify at the damn trial. And no, I'm not making the story up. It's the gospel truth."

  "Bodyguard?"

  "Yes, Mr. Joshua Berman. I have been assigned to you. The associates of the people we have in custody are sehr gefährlich. Highly dangerous. They might well attempt to prevent your testimony, even by violent means."

  Violent means?

  It seemed so unreal to him, riding in the armored Mercedes sedan on the way to the courthouse. Testifying in a German court wasn't quite what he'd had on his agenda when he flew over to finalize the export deal. If he'd had to choose an adventurous diversion from business, it would have been a wild tryst with an exotic stranger (Lonely, he was so lonely.). Well, at least there was that nice-looking female Kriminalpolizei investigator and . . .

  The blast showered him with shards of broken glass and threw him to the floor of the car. Dense smoke . . . choking, couldn't breathe . . .

  "Raus! Raus!"

  Strong hands ripped him out of the burning car and threw him facedown onto the cobblestones . . . and someone had a knee in the small of his back and was roughly binding together his arms behind him.

  Road noises and jolts. He was in some kind of vehicle -- doubled over, cramped, being bounced around. Probably in the trunk, but he couldn't be certain because of the tight blindfold. They were taking him somewhere. They? Who were they? Was he being driven to a convenient place to be executed, or had he only been kidnapped?

  Asleep. Must have fallen asleep because the next thing he knew was the darkness and the distant sound of water dripping. And confinement. He seemed to be lying on his back on some sort of hard bench, unable to move his arms or legs very much. Chained up! It wasn't uncomfortable, exactly, since he could rest chin and chest and flex his legs enough to keep the circulation going. But, he was in bondage. A captive. In a dark cellar. A dungeon!

  A creak of an opening door. The light blinded him. "Hör' zu," the voice said. "Liss-ten. Vee holding you prison. Hostage, maybe. Let you free if police let free Gudrun." It was a low-pitched woman's voice. Ominous, threatening, but promising . . . what?

  Four walls. Crumbling plaster revealing dirty brickwork. Cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. And the woman -- in her early thirties maybe, dark-haired, voluptuous, darkly menacing.

  A surge of fear spiced with lust washed over him. If only he could have had a girlfriend that good-looking and . . .

  "Look here, you," she said. "Eimer -- container. Relieve self. When full, someone takes away."

  He could make out a rusty metal bucket over in the far corner of the room. And, it looked like the chain holding him was just long enough to reach to there.

  "Hello, Ami boy." She sat down just out of his reach and smiled. It was a crooked smile. "Get good look, you. No touch." She had unbuttoned her blouse. He gaped at a bare breast.

  "Oh, yes, Mister. Sex. We give plenty sex. Maybe not with woman."

  "No, certainly not." A tall, bearded man had walked in. He had placed his arm around the woman's shoulders. "My girlfriend, she makes jokes. And, she likes watch while I pleasure with hostage."

  The man pulled roughly on the chain attached to Josh's manacles. "Stand up, you," he said. "Whatever I say you now do. Exactly what I say. If you wish to live, you do what I say."

  The woman was pointing a pistol at Josh. "You live, you die . . . all the same maybe. Give pleasure to Johann, and perhaps you live."

  Pleasure to Johann?

  "There. Over bench. Lie down. On stomach."

  What?

  "Down!"

  Josh lay facedown, staring at the dirt-streaked wood grain of the bench. They had tied his hands and feet with rope, securing him to the hard, splintery surface. He stiffened as he felt his pants brutally dragged down. Then a heavy hand smeared something cold and wet and slimy on his bottom, between the cheeks. The woman's laughter sounded like glass shattering.

  "Oh, yes. We preparing for fun. For pleasuring."

  This guy was going to rape him!

  A shaft of pure agony transfixed him. His ass was tearing open! And, it went on and on and he needed to scream, and he did scream, but no one heard him.

  Somehow, he survived it. His butt throbbed and ached and he didn't know how he could come to terms with the humiliation, with the knowledge that . . . he had been violated . . . but he still lived and breathed. The terrorist band known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang gave law-abiding German citizens quite a scare in the early 1970s. Bank robberies, bombs, and kidnappings were their trademark. After blundering around for years, the Federal Police finally began to close in on the group when . . .

  He used the bucket twice. The second time his bowels didn't hurt as much. Then the woman came for him again. He jerked backward and whimpered as she reached for him.

  "Not to be afraid," the woman said. "No more man sex. Now it is my turn."

  She cradled his head between her breasts and hummed something that sounded like a lullaby. He sank down into sleep, thinking about how strangely gentle she had been with him, how she had accepted his throbbing, aching manhood into her body, how she had wiped away his tears afterwards.

  "We are maybe not such bad people," she had murmured. "It is necessary sometimes cruelty, but it is for the sake of the revolution."

  Josh awoke in darkness, but now he could move his arms. Only his legs were chained.

  Ursula! She had whispered her name to him in the heat of passion. But, before that, she had taunted him . . . while he was being raped by her companion. What was the deal with her? Was she schizoid -- part depraved terrorist and part tender lover? Could he count on her for help, or was she trying to use him for her own purposes or to brainwash him into cooperating?

  He was totally at the mercy of his captors. That much was clear. This bunch of loonies was holding him hostage, possibly to ransom him for money or to exchange him for one of their own being held in by the police. In any case, he had some value to them, and so he was probably safe, for the immediate future anyhow.

  This whole thing was crazy. Here he was, a prisoner of terrorists in this enlightened year of 1973, a bare three decades after the defeat of the Nazis. Held hostage by revolutionaries against society. A society that cast doubt upon its own legitimacy by protecting ex-Nazis, and that sought to hide from its tainted legacy in orgies of gluttony, consumerism, and sex. A society that Josh would normally have had no particular use for, except for doing business with, of course. A society that he now desperately wished would rescue him.

  He relieved himself in the bucket, and felt a little better afterwards. Physically, anyway. He was a hostage, still. Chained up and in the dark. And soon Ursula would come for him again. Would it be for tender lovemaking or taunting and torture?

  The end came as a complete surprise. Faint explosions from somewhere high above woke him. Then there was a crackle of rapid gunfire amid screams and shouts. Thudding footsteps and a muffled boom, followed by a flash o
f bright light. Rescue was at hand. Maybe.

  Josh felt his heart thumping as he choked on the clouds of dust. Free! Finally free!

  Ski-masked men waving machine-pistols burst into the cellar. "Hände hoch!," they yelled at him.

  Josh tried to raise his hands in the air in response to the command, but he stumbled over the chains on his legs and fell face-forward into the dirt. Then, he felt a sledge-hammer blow and everything went dead black.

  " . . . spinal injuries . . . inoperable . . . permanent . . . "

  The food wasn't all that bad, for a hospital. If only he could sit up comfortably and not have to put up with being spoon-fed. Well, he was lucky to be alive, after all. That, and wealthy. Fabulously wealthy after the fifty million the Bundesrepublik government had paid him in the settlement. As if he needed the wealth. As if millions of dollars could pay him back for being a paralyzed from the neck down.

  It had been an accident, they had told him. Certainly there was no intention of shooting a hostage. And, if most of the terrorists had been killed (executed after their surrender, by at least one account), well, that was unfortunate, but to be expected. Innocent victims were a different matter. Embarrassing, that's what it was. An embarrassment to the government and to the Interior Ministry Rapid Intervention Squad. Especially when that squad had been led by the Interior Minister in person -- Karl-Heinz Metzger -- a notorious loudmouth and publicity hound, but totally lacking in judgment and a lousy shot to boot.

  Well, there was one compensation -- his night nurse. Hildegard took care of his needs. All of them. It seems that this particular nurse had an uncanny resemblance to, of all people, Ursula. And, after midnight, when things were quiet and the halls empty, Nurse Hildy would crawl into bed with him, hike up her skirts, and mount him. She would whisper how grateful she was that he had not given her up to the authorities. And that to repay the debt, she would follow him anywhere, even back to America, the Capitalist Paradise where the streets were paved with gold. She would care for him the rest of his life.

  * * *

  IN THE SANDBOX

  He remembered the sandbox. It was a fun place, a safe place. It was a place to play, to act out fantasies, to try out things, to make believe you were a grownup. You could run and jump, and even fall . . . and the sand kept you from getting hurt. Except for a few scrapes now and then.

  Fifteen years later Paul Unschuld was on a journey of discovery. Finally he was going to find out all about love and sex and women's bodies and that deliciously mysterious ritual called "fucking."

  He was that rare and exotic flower of a bygone era -- an innocent. He had come of age in the modern and enlightened year of 1968, and had never had a girlfriend. In fact, no one had ever told him about the Facts of Life." He had led a sheltered life, strictly according to his parents' wishes, and they had isolated and shielded him from all the sundry manifestations of "sin and ugliness."

  What did a woman's sex organ look like? He had no idea. He had won a scholarship to Cal Tech, yet all he knew about female anatomy was that they had these soft swellings on their "bosom" and a "baby-making hole" somewhere or other in the general area where their legs joined. The actual mechanics of baby-making remained shrouded in the mists.

  Early on the morning of his eighteenth birthday he finally broke free of his overprotective parents. Carrying only a worn satchel packed with two changes of clothes, an emergency meal of plastic-wrapped saltine crackers and a can of sardines, and a couple of his favorite paperback science fiction novels, he slipped out his bedroom window at first light. An hour's walk took him to the Route 6 on-ramp. He turned to face the oncoming traffic and stuck out his thumb.

  There was a sandbox on a remote mountaintop overlooking southern California's Samarran Desert. Jarman Abelian, the guru of the Sexual Renewal Movement had established his aptly named Sandbox Institute there. Its purpose was to study human sexuality and to fully realize "human potential" by liberating the creative energies of the libido.

  Paul had heard fantastic rumors about the place -- that it was the world headquarters of Free Love, that wild orgies shook the walls every night, that the sexual freedom his hippy-wannabe friends talked and dreamed about found full expression there. Now he was determined to see . . . and experience for himself. He had made his way to within a couple of miles of the entrance of the institute and still had a few dollars left.

  The middle-aged woman who had given him a ride in a late-model sedan earlier that day had warned him. "Sonny, I don't know what you're expecting from that bunch of loonies up there on the hill, but watch yourself. You're young and defenseless, and you could easily get hurt." He didn't believe it. How could love and sex possibly hurt?

  There it was up ahead -- the massive wrought-iron gate guarding the entrance to . . . the mysteries.

  No one in sight. "Hello-o-o! Anybody there?" No answer. Wait -- was that a push-button on one side of the doorpost? He pressed it, and a muted chime sounded somewhere in the distance. With a loud buzz-and-click the gate unlocked.

  A painstakingly maintained cobblestone road led through a cluster of low buildings. The one marked "Administration" seemed a likely candidate for a place to ask directions. He swung the gleaming brass knocker on a massive wooden door.

  "Welcome. Come on in, if you will, and sit down." The woman greeting him behind the open door was wearing glasses and a smile -- and nothing else.

  His view dropped automatically to her bare . . . bosom. Then his eyes slowly traced a line of imaginary caresses down her female flesh, down to her tanned belly, down to a triangle of dark hair concealing the faint outline of something beneath.

  A short barking laugh brought him back to reality.

  "What's the matter, kid? Never seen a naked woman before? If so, you're probably in the wrong place. This is a research institute. Human sexuality research, in fact."

  "Uh, yeah. I thought I'd find out more about that."

  "You mean you want to learn about the 'birds and the bees'?" She was trying, unsuccessfully, to suppress a giggling fit. "If you're a day over fourteen, I'll eat my hat . . . which I happen not to be wearing just now. That's all we need, trouble with the authorities over contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I'll have someone escort you back to the front gate."

  "No! Wait! I'm overage. I mean I'm of age. I'm eighteen and I came to learn about sex. They told me you do research on that. I don't know anything at all about sex. Nothing. Nothing at all. Zilch. My parents kept me ignorant. My friends never . . . they laughed at me when I asked. I was too scared to find out for myself. I'm a blank slate, the ideal guinea pig. You can take me apart, put me under a microscope, run experiments . . . do whatever you want with me. Just let me stay. Please."

  "Oh, my. An unspoiled innocent. How quaint. How precious. I'm sure the good doctor will be amused."

  "The good doctor is amused." A tall gray-haired man in a white lab coat stood in the doorway. His imperious gaze and ironic smile showed he was the master of all he surveyed. "It happens that we were looking for a suitable subject for certain studies. Your appearance is very timely, my lad."

  Now this was living. Paul had a three-room suite all to himself, complete with bath and kitchen, and the ultimate luxury, a large-screen color TV. After a quick tour of the institute "campus," Dr. Abelian had shown him to his quarters. Until the Program began the next morning, Paul figured he could just lounge around in bed, eating barbecue potato chips and watching old movies and game show reruns.

  Must have dozed off. It was dark. No, his eyes wouldn't open. Couldn't! A hysterical scream began bubbling up through his chest and throat. Then there was a cool hand on his forehead and a soothing voice in his ear.

  "Relax, Paul. You're under light sedation. We're taking some preliminary readings on you before starting the first phase of the Program. There's a blindfold on your eyes to shut out extraneous sensory input. Relax. You're in good hands."

  He recognized the voice of the naked woman with glasses. Damn, he still did
n't know her name. The surface he was lying on felt soft and yielding. A disembodied voice was droning somewhere in the background, "Alpha waves peaking at . . . " He relaxed, and slowly sank back into dreamless oblivion.

  Someone was pressing a cup of acid-tasting liquid to his lips. He choked and coughed some up. Orange juice. Argh! It burned going down. He ached all over, and there were twinges of pain behind his eyes. He moaned faintly.

  "It's all right, Paul. These are just aftereffects of the mild anesthetic administered to you."