“Oh, I almost forgot: between the two parts of the program, you will have to give me something to drink and serve me a snack—ham and eggs will do, for example. You will behave, during this intermission, attentively and considerately. You can even make conversation with me, as you smoke your last cigarette; it would be in your own interest, at least, to extend this respite as long as possible. Afterward, in any case, whether or not you add some new detail under the effect of pain, you will be tortured to death, as is provided for in your sentence. Don’t bother to protest, it’s pointless. And save your tears: the bleating of the lamb, says a Chinese proverb, merely arouses the tiger. Let’s see now, your name is Joan Robeson. Answer, it will go better for you: as long as you can answer, you won’t have to suffer too seriously. So then, your name is Robeson?”
“Yes.”
“Given name?”
“Joan.”
“Nickname?”
“JR.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Profession?”
“Student.”
“Of what?”
“History of religion.”
“Have you other diplomas?”
“Yes, two.”
“In what?”
“Political philosophy. Aesthetics of crime.”
“What are your means of subsistence?”
“I work part-time.”
“What kind of work?”
“Prostitution.”
“Which category?”
“Luxury.”
“On your own or for a company?”
“For a company.”
“Which company? You’ll have to answer more readily, without forcing me to pursue the interrogation at every word. Remember what I have told you! And hold the pose better than that. We were saying: for a company.”
“Yes. Johnson Limited. I beg your pardon.”
“That’s better. But don’t move so much, please. Do you like it?”
“Do I like what?”
“Johnson Limited, of course!”
“Yes. They’re fair.”
“How much do you make?”
“From eighty to a thousand dollars a night. The company takes fifty per cent.”
“You must have a tendency to conceal a share of your profits—don’t you?”
“No. I’m honest. And in any case, there are the pay slips. They keep a very close watch. Right now, almost everything is automatic: the customers pay more and more with checks made out by a time clock.”
“That must be very complicated, with the various services and charges—is it?”
“We have a punch card to make it easier for the machine to work it out.”
“You’re sure you never cheat?”
“I swear it.”
“Good. We’ll see in a little while if the tiny pliers of the regulation tool kit, or the long red-hot needles, will make you change your mind. You have gas here, of course?”
“Yes, in the kitchen. Is the question about declaring tips so important?”
“No question is important. Merely a matter of principle. You’ve read our motto above the visor on our caps: ‘Truth, My One Passion’.”
“But what if the torture is so intense it makes me tell a lie?”
“That often happens; always, in fact; you’ll see, when we insist long enough.”
“Then the goal of the operation eludes you, if not the pleasure, doesn’t it?”
“No. And don’t try to catch me in your specious arguments, in the hope no doubt of escaping the fate which lies in store for you. The case you mention has been foreseen, you are a fool not to have realized that. Let us suppose that at first you claimed one thing, then its contrary; the total of the two answers thus surely includes the expression of the truth in half of the cases. Starting from this certainty, all the rest is no more than a matter of mathematical calculations, performed by the electronic brain to which we shall feed your testimony. It is for this very reason, in order not to distort the results of the calculation, that we must make the torture last as long as possible: thus each assertion will finally be accompanied by its contrary. Do you understand? Good. Now, back to Johnson Limited. Fifty per cent is too much—wouldn’t you rather work for the police?”
“In the same line of work?”
“Of course. You seem quite gifted. When I began to caress you, you were already quite moist.”
“It must have been on account of that film where the girls were being impaled, or else it was fear, or the sight of a uniform. But if I change employers, I have to give notice. And besides, everything depends on the conditions you can offer.”
“We can talk about that more calmly during our rest. First of all, you would be saving your own life, which is an advantage; after only an hour or two of torture for the sake of the rules: that will give you time to think about it, and I won’t have come here for nothing. Meanwhile, tell me who Ben-Saïd is.”
“Do you know him?”
“The name has come up several times in the report.”
“In my opinion, he’s nothing much.”
“What does he do in your organization?”
“He’s a go-between. He’s only an Arab, as you know, but our people don’t want to show any preferences between one color and another.”
“You yourself—are you Jewish?”
“No, of course not: I’m a black girl from Puerto Rico.”
“My compliments. I’d never have guessed. So this Ben-Saïd?”
“The chief found him during a fight with the mounted police. For a man like that, it’s really a pity wasting his time in such demonstrations; he’s very cultivated—he speaks twenty-three languages, including Gaelic and Afrikaans.”
“But not English?”
“No. It’s not an indispensable dialect for an American revolutionary. In the service, in any case, Spanish is enough … You’re hurting me, when you do that.”
“Yes. I know I am. I want to. What is his specific function?”
“Go-between. I’ve already answered that question.”
“Why did you say he was nothing much?”
“Oh, a lot of reasons. One day they sent him to watch a house down in the Village where something funny was going on, though it is supposed to be inhabited by one of our agents. Ben-Saïd came in the obvious outfit of a private detective, with a plastic mask clumsily put on, dark glasses and the whole get-up: a hat with the brim turned down, black raincoat with the collar turned up, and so on. And in that kind of disguise, he started playing sentry on the side-walk across the street …”
“All right. We have that passage in the file already. The only point I wasn’t sure of, is that the man was Ben-Saïd. Can you give another example?”
“Of course it’s Ben-Saïd! Just take a good look at him when you go home tonight. Under the mask, he still has that nervous tic in his left cheek; and after a while the plastic of the mask makes a diagonal wrinkle between the cheekbone and the nostril. It makes him feel he has to keep pulling at the lower edge to keep everything together; since he’s afraid this gesture will give the game away, he keeps his hands deep in his pockets, which only emphasizes the fact that he’s a coo—it’s ridiculous. Sorry. Just now, before the three of us were beginning to put the cigarettes in the Buick, I thought he was a plain-clothes man from a distance and I almost went on my way instead of stopping the car where I was supposed to: I was sure the plan had been given away. It was just at the last minute, driving very slowly along the curb as if I was cruising, that I recognized Ben-Saïd. I kidded him a little when we got out, and after that he sulked during the job, you remember …”
“I asked you for another example in support of your opinion of the man, not your trivial personal stories with regard to your life as a salesgirl in a department store or a part-time secretary.”
“Oh please, don’t do that any more. I can’t stand it. I beg your forgiveness. You’ll see. I promise to be nice. I’ll do whatever you wa
nt. And I won’t mention those things again, since you don’t want me to.”
“Don’t move so much, or I’ll tie you up right away. And try to invent details that will be exact and meaningful.”
“Yes. Oh please, don’t do that. The subway. There, that’s it: the subway car and the scene with the three hoodlums in leather jackets. Ben-Saïd is riding, in the middle of the night, in an empty car hurtling on the express track to some other borough—Brooklyn, I think—the time and place where there are always young punks who spend their time riding from one end of the line to the other looking for some dirty trick they can play. I’ve been mugged often enough myself on that line, coming home from work. It’s a bad scene, because if you don’t give them what they want, they tie your hands behind your back and then, after having taken turns with you, they hang you to a luggage rack or else they toss you out an open window onto the track, sometimes they leave you tied to the train by a rope so that the train goes on its way without the conductor noticing anything, which tears off all your clothes, mutilates the body, breaks all the limbs and inflicts so many wounds that the corpse is unidentifiable when it gets to the next station. I’ve had several friends killed that way. But if on the contrary, to avoid that, you let them do what they want with you, you risk a session with the union for clandestine professional activities. The fine is so high that you have to spend the rest of your life paying it; not to mention the fact that you can even be dealing with an agent provocateur: that also happened to a girl I work with at the office … No, oh please, don’t do that. I thought you would like it if I changed the subject. But now I’ll go back to Ben-Saïd. He is sitting in his corner, facing the way the train is going, in the front of the car, and because of all the racket the express trains make, he doesn’t hear the young hoodlums who have come in at the other end of the car, and who are plotting behind him, deciding what it will be best to do. They are kids of about fifteen, all three the same height, but on closer examination, it is clear that one of them is a girl, although her clothes—tight pants and black leather jacket—are exactly the same, in principle, as those of the other two. A slender girl, though clearly past puberty, with a graceful figure and cropped blond hair. You can see that her clothes are not mass-produced: their style is elegant, the materials soft, not too shiny, probably expensive; the pants are black leather too, with a zipper like the jacket, whose collar is open far down her chest—you can see where her breasts begin. It is so hot in the sub-ways that the girls usually have nothing underneath. Yes, all right, I’m going on. The two boys, who are also blond, have regular faces with rather fine features, despite their somewhat effeminate style, the extreme negligence of their clothes, cigarette in the corner of the mouth, hair too long, etc. One of the two is especially filthy; his denim pants—gray rather than black, are torn about six inches above the left ankle, as if it had caught on a barbed wire during some robbery; and his shoes, whose laces cannot come untied because of the knots holding the broken pieces together, are worn like slippers, the counters broken down deliberately. His way of talking does not seem to be the reflection of very extensive study.
Moreover, it appears to be the girl who gives the orders. She even wears, on her left shoulder, a gold bar which at first glance looks like a lieutenant’s insignia; at closer range it is apparent that the gold line is not continuous but instead a series of capital letters in heavy type forming a name: LAURA. The boys have only their initial embroidered in red on the right pocket of their jackets, which helps distinguish them from each other, for otherwise, in face and figure, except for the extreme dirtiness of the one, they could be mistaken for identical twins. The embroidered letters are an M for the dirtier one, a W for his brother. Their entire given names must be written on the identity bracelets they each wear on their right wrist, but the engraved surface is turned in toward the skin, and the heavy nickel chain is twisted.
The girl has determined the plan of attack: it is W (whose general appearance is slightly more respectable) who is sent alone, as a lure, to this solitary and exhausted traveler, though he is dressed in a style which indicates wealth and, doubtless, special tastes as well. (Ben-Saïd abandoned his raincoat that day in favor of a camel’s-hair overcoat, this outfit completed by a snap-brimmed felt hat.) Meanwhile, the other boy and Laura return to the next car. Since this car is also empty, the girl decides that her companion should take advantage of the fact. Therefore, to encourage him, she takes the occasion of a sharper jolt, around a curve of the track, to let herself slump against the—supposedly—male chest, clinging to the boy’s hips on the excuse of regaining her own balance. This contact is all the more interesting for her partner in that the zipper which controls the opening of the girl’s jacket has slid another few inches lower in the course of this slight movement, so that the slit has now reached her navel, whose flower-shaped depression appears between the two rows of tiny metal teeth, at the very tip of a slender V of bare skin. The gesture has been so regular, so prompt and so natural that it might seem to be a pure accident, or on the other hand an exercise repeated many times over. The boy has no need of further explanations, and without bothering to elucidate this last problem, he grasps his lieutenant with a firm arm around the waist—still to keep her from falling—then, having removed the cigarette from between his lips with his other hand, he presses his mouth against the girl’s, which is just at the right height. Feeling that his kiss is being returned warmly, eagerly, passionately, etc., he drops the cigarette butt to the floor and slips his now free hand into the opening of the jacket.
Everything seems to be going well—since the slender tip of the nipple is already rising (or else stiffening, extending, swelling, hardening, bulging, becoming erect, turgescent, etc., the point is made) under the caress of three filthy fingers, while lower down, a faintly swelling triangle of soft black leather begins rubbing against the rough gray grease-stained trousers—when, suddenly, die girl pulls away her lips, steps back with a sudden gesture which liberates both her waist and her breast, and violently slaps her abashed partner, in order to teach him to respect his superiors in rank. And immediately, with a prim gesture of outraged modesty, she pulls the large brass ring of the zipper up to her neck, hermetically sealing the jacket with a hiss of torn cloth, or the whisper of a whip over the naked flesh, a sigh of the air in the throat when the lungs inhale too quickly under the effect of pain, the silky sound of the long wound opened by the tip of the knife, the scratch of the match against its striking surface, the sudden crackle, in die flames, of fine lace lingerie, of loose hair, of the hank of auburn silk, or of the burning bush, or of the golden fleece, that will do, you may go on.
Motionless and teeth clenched, six feet away from the boy bending down to pick up his extinguished cigarette butt and, once he has straightened up, replacing it in the corner of his mouth, Laura stares with a shrug of repugnance at the bulging fly of the tight denim trousers. A scornful or mocking smile, or a sneer of satisfied curiosity, passes over her closed lips and between the long lashes of her half-closed eyes, then she declares in her best Cambridge accent: “Oh, Mark-Anthony, you are disgusting!” At the same moment, the two accomplices burst out into a brief childish laugh; then, holding hands at a reasonable distance, they perform up and down the empty car an improvised dance on Sioux themes.
But a second later, they are once again motionless and rigid, facing each other. The boy must have lit his cigarette butt again, for from it rises, as before, a slender twisting thread of smoke. After an indeterminate period of time, without even removing the butt stuck in the corner of his mouth, he expectorates a clear, round wad of spit against the windowpane, behind which are passing the dim empty platforms of a local station. Laura, staring at the blob of heavy whitish saliva whose lower edge is beginning to dribble toward the bottom of the pane, notices on the other side of the glass the equidistant, identical, numberless examples of a giant poster repeated at brief intervals, from end to end of the dilapidated curving white ceramic-tile wall: the
huge face of a young woman whose eyes are covered by a black bandage and whose lips are parted. Insofar as the speed of the train makes it possible to judge, this poster must be a good reproduction of a color photograph, with pastel shades, whose relief stands out very clearly against a rather dark background. Just below a delicately outlined chin can be read a cursive script and alone decipherable of the probably brief text of this advertisement, the word: “Tomorrow …” On the last poster of the series, at the end of the platform, someone has added to the series, with a skillful hand reproducing the same shape of letters and the same spacing, but in red paint instead of the sky-blue of the printed letters: “The Revolution.”
Then it is the dark tunnel again, and the pale reflection of the boy’s face which slides parallel to the train along the rough cement wall, a little higher than the festoon of three cables, one above the next. But the wall, so close that it could almost be touched by a hand thrust out of the open space between the cars, suddenly moves away and vanishes: the light cast by the illuminated train no longer falls on any lateral obstacle, as if the empty cars were henceforth hurtling through the complete void of the night. At the same time the noise has abruptly altered: the racket of the wheels on the rails, the creaking of the axles, the vibration of the metal sheets, have lost their proximity, their immediate aggressiveness; but, echoed by a higher vault which thus betrays its invisible existence, at a distance of several dozen yards or more, the sound has increased in volume: magnified, filled with deep overtones and successive echoes which multiply its power, as if it were being retransmitted by means of a hundred loudspeakers, it drowns out everything this time with its diffuse but deafening, monstrous presence, which fills the gigantic subterranean cavity, the interior of the car, the ears, even the skull, last chamber of resonance in which are concentrated the hammerings and rumblings of the metal.
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