The Frumious Bandersnatch

11

SEEMED like old times.

A bright morning in the merry month of May, and the detectives of the Eight-Seven were gathered in the Loot’s office for a Tuesday morning confab. The lieutenant was late. Arthur Brown was telling a drunk driver joke.

“Motorcycle cop’s been hiding in the bushes all day, hoping to catch a speeder, he finally pulls over this dude doing eighty miles an hour in a convertible Jag. Grinning from ear to ear, the cop leans into the Jag and says, ‘I’ve been waiting for you all day long, pal.’ The dude in the Jag has three sheets to the wind. He says, ‘Well, offisher, I got here as fast as I could.’ ”

Brown burst out laughing.

So did the other detectives in the room.

Seven of them altogether. Six men and one woman, typical of most squadrooms in this city. Andy Parker couldn’t resist trying to embarrass Eileen Burke.

“Another motorcycle cop pulls over the same drunk,” he said. “This time the cop’s a female. She tells him, ‘Sir, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be held against you.’ The drunk says, ‘Tits.’ ”

Which Eileen guessed was better than breaking into her locker and pissing in her shoes. In fact, she thought the joke was pretty funny. After the meeting this morning, she was scheduled to interview a woman who’d been snorting cocaine since she was fifteen years old, but who was now ready to take a stand against the gang that was terrorizing her building in the projects. It was tough enough trying to quit the powder crowd. Protecting your kids against the people hoping to hook them was something else again. The woman was twenty-seven years old. She had a son of eleven who’d already been approached. Enough was enough.

“There’s this guy gets stopped by a cop for speeding?” Richard Genero said tentatively. As the newest detective on the squad, he was still not too sure of himself at these weekly meetings. But the lieutenant wasn’t here yet, and everyone seemed to be in a receptive mood this morning, so he was ready to venture a joke. “The cop wants to know where he’s going in such a hurry, and the guy says, ‘I have to do a show in New Haven.’ The cop asks, ‘What kind of show?’ The speeder says, ‘I’m a juggler.’ The cop is skeptical. ‘Oh yeah?’ he says. ‘Let’s see you juggle something.’ The speeder says, ‘I’d be happy to, but all my equipment is at the theater.’ Well, the cop leads him around to the back of his cruiser, and he opens the trunk and takes out three flares, which he lights and hands to the speeder. ‘Here,’ he says. ‘Juggle these!’ It so happens the guy really is a juggler, so he throws the flares into the air and is doing his little act when who should come speeding down the highway but that same drunk in the Jag! He takes one look, jams on the brakes, walks over to the cop, and says, ‘Take me to jail right now, offisher. I’ll never be able to pass that test.’”

Everyone was still laughing when Byrnes walked into the room. Gray-haired and bullet-headed, he walked behind his desk, said a gruff “Good morning,” and then asked, “What’s so funny?”

Genero said they were telling drunk driver jokes.

“This drunk comes out of a liquor store,” Byrnes said, “sees a motorcycle cop at the curb, writing a parking ticket. He staggers over to the cop, says, ‘Come on, pal, give a guy a break.’ The cop keeps writing the ticket. ‘Come on,’ the drunk says, ‘don’t be such a friggin Nazi.’ So the cop writes a second ticket for the car having bald tires. The drunk calls him an asshole, and the cop writes a third ticket for worn windshield wipers. This goes on for ten minutes, the drunk hurling abuse, the cop writing ticket after ticket. Finally, the cop closes his book, and says, ‘You satisfied now?’ The drunk says, ‘I really don’t give a damn, offisher. My car’s parked aroun’ the corner.’ ”

The detectives laughed harder than perhaps they should have.

“Have some bagels and coffee,” Byrnes said, and turned to where Carella was standing over by the bookcases with all the legal tomes in them. “What happened last night?” he asked. Carella told him everything that had happened to him down at One Fed Square and beyond.

“And?” Byrnes said.

“I walked,” Carella said.

“Why?”

“I was there through sufferance.”

“Sufferance, huh? Well, my beamish boy, what if I told you the Commish wants us to stick with it?”

Carella looked at him.

“This is all politics,” Byrnes said. “We caught the squeal. If the Feebs crack the case, we look inept. If we’re the ones who nab these guys, we come off smelling of roses.”

“The Feebs don’t have anything yet. And neither do I,” Carella said.

“That’s why we’re here today, ain’t it?” Byrnes said, and turned away and said, “You ready to listen, men?” And immediately added, “Eileen?”

“Good save, Loot,” Eileen said, and everyone laughed. Score one for the frails, she thought, and crossed her splendid legs for emphasis.

Cotton Hawes thought of Honey Blair crossing her legs last night.

“Here’s what we’ve got,” Byrnes said. “You all know we caught this friggin kidnapping Saturday night…”

“Actually, I’m the one who caught it,” Andy Parker said.

“Bravo, you want a medal?” Byrnes asked. “The Joint Task Force moved in and the vic asked for Carella to…”

“Not the vic,” Carella corrected.

“Right, the CEO of the company that records the vic, you’ve seen her all over television. He asked for Carella on the case because he has some sort of rapport with him…”

“Must be the smile,” Meyer said.

“Must be,” Carella said, and flashed a toothy grin.

“Anyway, they get him down there and treat him like a country cousin, except when the CEO demands he go along on the ransom drop. Am I getting this right, Steve?”

“More or less,” Carella said.

“So last night, when they diss him yet again, he walks. Told Corky Corcoran…any of you know him?”

“A prick,” Brown said. “ ’Scuse me, Eileen.”

“Why?” Eileen said. “Heis a prick.”

“Anyway, Steve told him to shove his job.”

“Good for you,” Meyer said.

“Only trouble is,” Byrnes said, “I got a call from the Commish last night, soon as he heard what happened.”

“How’d he hear?” Genero asked.

“Corcoran called him. Filed a complaint.”

“The prick,” Eileen said.

“The Commish agrees. He wants Carella—he wants us—to stay on it. In fact, he would like nothing better than for us to crack it. Before The Squad does.”

“Fat Chance Department,” Parker said. “They’ve got technology pouring out of their wahzoo.”

“Didn’t help them locate the perps,” Carella said.

“What’d you learn down there, Steve?” Brown asked.

He told them about all the equipment the Feebs had set up, told them about the perps leading him and Loomis out to The Wasteland, told them about the dead Golden Retriever…

“Sons of bitches,” Parker said.

“So we’d know they’re ready to kill the girl,” Carella said.

“Could’ve made their point another way.”

“That’s what Loomis thought. He still thinks these guys are honorable, you know. That they’ll make a deal and stick to it. They asked for two-fifty large the first time around, and when we delivered it, they came back asking for a mil. But he still seems to think…”

“A mil more? ” Kling asked.

“No, altogether.”

“The girl’s worth it,” Hawes said. “Did you see that tape of the kidnapping? I saw it on a large screen down at Channel Four,” he said, and grinned sort of goofily.

“We got the MCU report, by the way,” Carella said. “The guy was limping.”

“What guy?”

“One of the perps. The lefthanded one.”

“Well,there’s something,” Parker said.

“We already put out a medical alert,” Hawes said.

“Anything?” Eileen asked.

“Not so far.”

“I mean, how many limping lefthanded guys are there in this city?” Parker asked reasonably.

“Who’s an experienced thief,” Carella said, nodding.

“How so?” Genero asked.

“Stole the Explorer he used on the night of the snatch. Also has a barrel full of stolen cell phones. So at least one of them’s a thief.”

“Means a record, maybe,” Hawes said.

“Maybe for the lefthanded one.”

“Who limps, don’t forget.”

“Any of you guys remember a movie called The Fallen Sparrow? ” Byrnes asked.

They all looked at him.

“The bad guy limps. Drags his foot. Scariest scene in the movie is John Garfield waiting for him, his face all covered with sweat, and all we hear is that foot dragging down the hall, coming closer and closer.”

“Who’s John Garfield?” Genero asked.

“That was suspense,” Byrnes said. “Nowadays, they put a lot of bullshit technology on the screen, the directors think that’s suspense.”

“Think we should put out a second med alert?” Eileen asked.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Brown said. “All these doctors are too busy to pay attention the first time around.”

“Too busy making money,” Hawes said.

“Too busy robbing Medicare,” Kling said.

“Come on, my uncle’s a doctor,” Genero said.

“Am I the only one going to have a second bagel?” Parker asked, and pulled himself out of the only easy chair in the room and went over to the table near the windows.

“So is this ours or is it theirs, or what?” Carella asked.

“My guess?” Byrnes said.

“Good as mine, that’s for sure.”

“My guess is it’s ours and theirs.”

“A fuckin horse race,” Parker said, pouring himself another cup of coffee.

“So let’s win it,” Byrnes said.

BACK IN THE good old days, every Monday through Thursday morning at nine o’clock, detectives from all over this fair city pulled what was known as “Lineup Duty.” This meant that instead of reporting to work at their respective offices, two detectives from each of the city’s squads trotted downtown or uptown or crosstown or across the rivers to the Headquarters building on High Street, where the Chief of Detectives presided over a parade of all the felony offenders who’d been arrested in the city the day before.

The purpose of these lineups was identification.

The Chief brought out the perps one by one, named the crimes for which they’d been arrested, recited a brief pedigree on each, and then conducted an interrogation for the next ten minutes or so. Most of these people were experienced thieves; the Chief didn’t expect to get from them any information that would convict them in later trials. What he was doing was simply familiarizing his detectives with the people who were making mischief in this city. On a rotating basis, every Monday through Thursday, his detectives were able to get a good long look at troublemakers past and present, with the idea that they’d be able to recognize them in the future and prevent them from making yet more trouble.

Once a thief, always a thief.

Today, the police still had lineups (or “showups” as they were sometimes called) but their purpose was identification of another sort. Nowadays, in a room at your own precinct, you placed a suspect on a stage in a row of detectives or officers in street clothes, and you asked the vic to pick out which one of them had raped her or stabbed her or poked out her eye on the night of January fifth. Back in the old days, the headquarters gym was packed with maybe a hundred detectives from all over the city. Today, sitting behind a protective one-way glass, you had the vic, and the arresting detectives, and the lieutenant, and maybe somebody from the D.A.’s Office if you were that close to making a case. Small potatoes when you thought back to the grand old days, eh, Gertie?

But nowadays, you had computers to tell you who the bad guys were. You didn’t have to eyeball all those evil-doers from a hard bench in an austere gym. You sat in your own comfy swivel chair at your own cluttered desk, and you popped the question to the computer, and hoped it came up with something good.

By that Tuesday morning, not a single one of the myriad doctors in this city had responded to the precinct’s medical alert for a man who might have sustained a recent injury to the right leg. While Eileen sent out a second alert, sounding a bit more urgent this time, Carella turned to the second supposition in Detective Oswald Hooper’s report on the footprints the MCU had recovered aboard the River Princess; he considered the possibility that the injury to the right leg had occurred sometime in the past.

The men and sole woman on the squad were now working on the premise that the men who’d kidnapped Tamar Valparaiso were no amateurs. In many respects, this assumption was a throwback to the days of the old Monday-to-Thursday lineups. See those guys on the stage there? Yesterday they committed murder, armed robbery, burglary, rape, auto theft, whatever, and it seems like they all have records of felony convictions as long as my arm here, so look at their faces and remember them well because tomorrow these same people will be committing the same felonies or different felonies all over again.

Once a thief, always a thief, right?

In America, kidnapping was rarely a crime anyone committed more than once. It was fashionable among certain criminal types in remoter parts of the world to capture businessmen and hold them for ransom, but that was there and this was here. It was fashionable in some countries to eat raw crocodile eyes, too. Nobody on the Eight-Seven had ever heard of a serial kidnapper. You either kidnapped somebody and got away with it, in which case you flew to Rio and danced the samba till dawn, or you got caught and spent the rest of your life behind bars. Either way, it was usually a one-shot crime.

So when Carella went to the computer that Tuesday morning, he accessed the state’s prison records by typing in first his name and then his password, but once he was cleared, he did not type in the key word KIDNAP because he didn’t think that would bear any fruit. In fact, he didn’t specify any crime at all. What he was looking for was a left-handed con who limped. In fact, what he was looking for was a left-handed con who’d limped his way out of jail and straight onto the deck of the River Princess this past Saturday night.

He called for a statewide search, but he limited it to just the past five years, otherwise he’d be here for the next five years. He went straight for the jugular. As his key word, he typed INJURY.

Got a menu asking him to choose among HEAD, TRUNK, or EXTREMITIES.

Hit EXTREMITIES.

Was asked to choose between ARMS or LEGS.

Hit LEGS.

Knew what he was going to be asked before it popped up on the screen, and was not surprised.

He hit RIGHT.

Got a list as long as a prison night.

He’d be here all next week looking through all these records, maybe five or six hundred of them. Who’d have dreamt there were so many cons with injuries to the right leg, and how in hell was he supposed to find the man among them who’d…

Wait a minute, he was looking in the wrong place.

In this state, a term of post-release supervision was mandatory for every determinate sentence. For example, a Class B felony was punishable by an incarceration period of five to twenty-five years. If you were paroled, you had to be supervised on the outside for a period of from two and a half to five years. On the other hand, for a Class E felony, you could be sent up for a term of a year and a half to four years, but after parole, you had to report to your parole officer for at least a year and a half or as long as three years. The message was the same one it had always been: If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

Carella logged off the prison system, clicked on DIVISION OF PAROLE, was asked for his online name and password, gave them STEPHEN L. CARELLA and then his shield number, 714-5632, and waited for clearance. When he was online, he asked for a search going back five years.

When prompted for the NAME of the parolee, he typed UNKNOWN.

OFFENSE?

He typed UNKNOWN.

SCARS, TATTOOS, OTHER DISTINGUISHING MARKS?

He typed LEFTHANDED.

DISABILITIES OR INFIRMITIES?

He typed INJURY TO RIGHT LEG, and got INVALID ANSWER and the same question again: DISABILITIES OR INFIRMITIES?

This time he typed LIMP, and hit the jackpot.

There were currently seven left-handed cons on parole from various prisons around the state, all of them with leg injuries. Four of these were injuries to the left leg. The remaining three were injuries to the right leg.

One of these injuries was sustained in the machine shop at Castleview State Penitentiary, when the heavy metal die for manufacturing license plates fell on the inmate’s foot, fracturing his ankle bone. The inmate had subsequently sued the state, Carella noticed. And lost, by the way. He’d been released from prison two years ago, and had since got hit by a bus that fractured his skull and caused his untimely demise. Carella figured some guys were just born losers.

The other two men were still alive.

Carella hit the PRINT button.

SHE ACTUALLY heard the key being inserted in the lock.

Heard the tiny click of the key being turned.

Heard some fumbling outside the door, and then the door opened and standing in the door frame was Saddam Hussein.

Carrying the big rifle.

None of them came into the room without a weapon. Must have thought she was extremely dangerous, handcuffed to the radiator this way. Maybe they’d caught a glimpse of “Bandersnatch” before they came down the stairs all macho-men, “Don’t nobody fucking move! ” Weapons of mass destruction in their hands. Same as now. Maybe they’d seen her reach for the invisible vorpal sword and beat the shit out of the frumious beast.

Hussein closed the door behind him, came limping across the floor towards her, dragging his right foot.

She could still remember him slapping her.

She almost flinched as he approached.

“Don’t be afraid,” he whispered, and stopped just a few feet away from her.

She said nothing.

Realized she was cowering, tried to straighten her shoulders, realized this emphasized the thrust of her breasts, hunched over again. Behind the Hussein mask, his eyes were bright and blue. He held the AK-47 in his left hand.

“I wanted to tell you how sorry I am,” he said.

I’ll bet, she thought.

“For hitting you the other night.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “Forget it.”

“No, really,” he said, and knelt beside her on the floor. “I got a little excited, is all.”

He’s sitting too close, she thought. Watch it, Tamar.

“What can I do for you? To make you more comfortable,” he said, and put his right hand on her exposed knee.

“No, don’t,” she said, and turned her body away, into the radiator.

“Sorr-eee,” he said, and pulled back his hand as if he’d burned it. “Just trying to be helpful.”

How about unlocking this handcuff? she thought.

Only way out of here is to get hold of the gun, she thought.

Any one of the guns.

They all have guns around here.

“My wrist hurts,” she said.

“Ahh,” he said. “Want me to rub it for you?”

“Be better if you took off the handcuff,” she said.

“But I don’t have a key,” he said, and put his hand on her knee again.

This time, she did not tell him to stop.

“Why don’t you go get the key?” she asked. “It’s very uncomfortable this way.”

“Avery has the key,” he said.

Avery, she thought. A name.

He did not seem to realize he’d slipped.

“Go ask him for it,” she said.

His hand slid onto her thigh.

“No, don’t,” she said. “Not now. Go get the key first. Take off this damn handcuff,” she said, and smiled.

“How does it feel to be dancing in front of people half-naked that way?” he asked. His eyes were shining bright in the holes of the mask. His hand on her thigh was trembling.

“Go get the key,” she said. “I’ll dance for you.”

“I could fuck you without having to go for the key,” he said. His voice was trembling, too.

“Be better if I’m loose,” she whispered.

“You promise?” he said, and his hand tightened on her thigh.

“I promise,” she said, and licked her lips.

He rose abruptly. Almost scrambled to his feet.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and hurried to the door, the rifle in his left hand.

Don’t forget to bring your gun, she thought.

The door closed behind him.

She heard the soft click of the lock again.

Now she was trembling, too.

ONE CERTAIN AXIOM of this city is that you will never find a homeless shelter, a rehab center, or a parole office in a good neighborhood. If you’re apartment-hunting, and you ask the real estate agent about the nearest location of any of these places, and she replies, “Why, right around the corner, dearie!” then what you do is hike up your skirts and run for the hills because the onliest place you don’t wish to live is right here, honey.

Early that Tuesday afternoon, Carella and Hawes visited a parole office in a downtown neighborhood that they could best describe as “indifferent to law enforcement,” but perhaps this was a hasty judgment premised on the presence of hookers and drug dealers on every street corner. By one P.M., they had driven across the river and into the trees of a delightful Calm’s Point enclave known as Sunrise Shores because once upon a time it had indeed been an elegant waterfront community that faced the sun coming up over a bend in the River Dix.

The neighborhood had long ago been overrun by street gangs who’d once been content to rumble among themselves for the sheer joy of claiming worthless turf or second-hand virgins, but who had since graduated into selling dope on a large scale, and were now killing each other and innocent bystanders in drive-by shootings that made it dangerous to go to the corner grocery store for a pack of cigarettes.

The Sunrise Shores parole office was above one such grocery store, outside which a huddle of teenagers who should have known better were smoking their brains out—and don’t write me letters, Carella thought. There were two ways you walked in a neighborhood like this one, even if you were a cop. You either pretended you were invisible, or you pretended you had dynamite strapped to your waist under your jacket. Shoulders back, heads erect, both detectives strutted like walking bombs to the narrow doorway alongside the grocery store. The guys smoking outside figured these dudes were ex-cons here to make their scheduled visits, so they left them alone. So much for Actors Studio exercises, Carella thought, and went up a stairway stinking of piss, Hawes sniffing along haughtily behind him. On the second floor, they found a wooden door with a frosted glass panel lettered with the words:

DIVISION OF PAROLE

MANAGER, KIRBY STRAUSS

The office was small and perhaps even shabbier-looking than the Eight-Seven’s squadroom. Six metal desks were spaced around the room, two of them flanking a curtainless window with a torn shade. A straight-backed wooden chair sat empty alongside each desk. Early afternoon sunlight tinted the shade yellow. Dark green metal filing cabinets lined one windowless wall, and an open door revealed a toilet bowl and a sink beside it. An ancient copying machine was on the wall alongside the bathroom. A wooden coat rack was in one corner of the room. There were several topcoats on it, but only one hat.

Two men sat in swivel chairs behind the choice window desks.

They both turned to look at the detectives as they walked in.

Carella wondered if the hat belonged to one of them.

“Mr. Strauss?” he asked.

“Yes?”

He was a man in his fifties, Carella guessed, wearing brown trousers and a brown cardigan sweater, a shirt and tie under it. He was sitting at the desk on the right. Bald and a trifle overweight, he looked like someone you might find selling stamps at your local post office. Carella figured the hat was his.

“I called earlier,” he said. “Detective Carella, the Eight-Seven. My partner, Detective Hawes.”

“Oh, yes,” Strauss said, rising and extending his hand. “This is Officer Latham,” he said, and gestured with his left hand toward the man sitting at the other desk. Latham nodded. Strauss briefly shook hands with both detectives, and then said, “Have a seat. You’re here about Wilkins, right? Let me get his file.”

The detectives took chairs alongside Strauss’ desk. Strauss went to the filing cabinets, opened one of them, began rummaging.

“Is it going to rain out there?” Latham asked.

“I don’t think so,” Hawes said. “Why? Who said it was going to rain?”

“Feel it in my bones,” Latham said, and shook his head mournfully.

He did, in fact, look a bit arthritic, a tall thin man wearing blue corduroy trousers and a gray sports jacket, a dingy white shirt with a worn collar, and a dark blue knit tie to match the trousers. A cardboard Starbucks container was on his desk, alongside his computer.

“Here we go,” Strauss said, and sat behind his desk again, and placed a manila folder between himself and the detectives. “I could do this on the computer, but it’s easier to look at hard copy,” he said, and opened the folder. “Calvin Robert Wilkins,” he said, “twenty-seven years old, took a fall for armed robbery when he was twenty. What happened was he went into this bank alone, must’ve been desperate, don’t you think? Stuck a gun in a teller’s face, ran off with whatever she had in the cash drawer, something like three thousand dollars, can you imagine? Gambles three thousand bucks against twenty-five in the slammer? He’s driving away from the bank when he gets a flat tire, finally climbs out of the car and starts running. The cops chasing him get out of their car, and one of them fires a shot that catches him in the leg…”

“The right leg,” Carella said, nodding.

“Well, let me check,” Strauss said, and looked at the report. “Yes, the right leg. Knocked him ass over teacups, ended his Bonnie and Clyde career. He was convicted of Rob One, a B-felony…well, you know that. Caught a bleeding-heart judge who sentenced him to a mere twenty because it was a first offense and all that jazz.”

“When was he paroled?”

“Six months ago. Just before Thanksgiving. Lot to be thankful for, that kid.”

“How so?”

“Got sprung his first appearance before the Board. Served only seven of the twenty. I call that stepping in shit.”

“You said it was a first offense…”

“Well, first time he got caught, let’s say. With these guys…”

“Any problems since he’s been out?”

“Yeah. Violating parole, for one.”

“What’d he do?”

“First year of parole, he’s supposed to be under what we call ‘Intensive Supervision.’ This is like a readjustment period for him, you know? He comes here to the office every week, and somebody from here—we’ve got six guys in this office, it’s a fairly small one—visits him at home once every two weeks, once a month, whatever. It’s an intensive period, that’s what it’s called, Intensive Supervision. This is supposed to continue for at least twelve months, after which we place him on what we call Regular Supervision, which means fewer home visits, and fewer visits to the office here.

“Well, he got out of Miramar just before Thanksgiving, that’s a state lockup even worse than Castleview…well, you know that. And he started coming here like clockwork once a week. He was living in a decent furnished room, and he had a job washing dishes in a deli over on Carpenter. I’ll tell you the truth, I figured he was a prime candidate for early discharge, which would’ve been three years instead of his maximum five. Then, all of a sudden, he doesn’t show up the week after Christmas, which I figured the holidays and all, am I right? But then he misses the first two weeks in January, and I figure shit the man’s absconded. Which is what it turned out to be. Failure to report here, changing address without permission, for all I know even leaving the fuckin state. A classic case of absconding. I issued a warrant for his arrest. If we catch him again, he’ll be doing his maximum-five behind bars. Some guys never learn.”

“Can we have that last known?” Hawes asked.

“Sure, but it won’t do you any good. He’s gone, man. And it’s a big bad city out there.”

Strauss got up nonetheless, and carried the file on Wilkins over to the copying machine. Seeing the open bathroom door, he closed it as if sight of a toilet bowl might be offensive to his visitors from across the river. “Why do you want him?” he asked.

“He may be involved in a kidnapping.”

“Graduation Day, huh? Some guys never learn,” he said again.

“How bad is that limp, by the way?” Hawes asked.

“Well, he’s not a cripple or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking. He just sort of drags the right foot a little, you know?”

“Can you show me what you mean?” Carella asked.

“Charlie, show him how Wilkins walks, will you?” Strauss said.

Latham got up from behind his desk.

Like an actor preparing before he went onstage, he hesitated a moment, thinking, and then he started walking across the room. The limp he affected was a slight one. His impersonation captured perfectly the walk of the masked man the detectives had seen on Honey Blair’s tape.

“How’s that?” Latham asked.

“Perfect,” Strauss said. “Maybe we ought to send you up there to Miramar, finish out his term.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Latham said, but he seemed pleased he’d been such a big hit.

Strauss carried a sheaf of papers over from the copier. Stapling them together, he said, “You might as well have all the vitals,” and handed the pages to Carella. “If you find him, let me know,” he said. “I really thought he was a candidate for early, the jackass. Goes to show, don’t it?”

He actually looked sad.

CALVIN ROBERT WILKINS was still wearing the Saddam Hussein mask.

He had the rifle in his left hand.

Nothing in his right hand.

No key, no nothing.

He closed the door behind him.

Came limping across the room to her.

“He wouldn’t give me the key,” he said.

She could swear he was grinning behind the mask.

Standing not a foot away from her, he unzipped his fly.

THIS, NOW, was what it was really like.

There was no vorpal blade this time.

There was no slow strip tease, no musical accompaniment, no claws catching at her garments to tear them tantalizingly to shreds. This was her top being violently ripped from her breasts, this was rough hands reaching under her already tattered skirt to tear her panties open over her crotch. There were no biting jaws, he did not bite her, he simply slapped her again and again, kept slapping her as she tried to pull her manacled hand free of the radiator, slapped her until her face was aching and bruised, her free hand flapping on the floor where he had rested the rifle, trying to find the rifle with blind seeking fingers while he kept slapping her till she felt dizzy and weak, murmuring “No, please don’t, please don’t, please don’t.”

But still he had not raped her.

Still he seemed to derive pleasure from the incessant slapping, his hand rhythmically hitting her, the back of his hand, the palm of his hand, the back of his hand again until she collapsed against the radiator, murmuring soundlessly no please don’t, no please please don’t.

This time, there was no vorpal blade to save her.

This was merely rape.

Viciously, he spread her legs and forcibly entered her, tearing tissue as he plunged inside her. She screamed at the forced penetration, screamed again when he slapped her again and told her to shut up, and then slapped her again and again and again. And then his hands were on her breasts, squeezing her nipples hard, thrusting his over-powering rigidity into her below, grunting, his hands seeming not to know where to hurt her next, her face, her breasts, her buttocks, squeezing, slapping, punching her now, pinching her, punching her breasts, punching her face, blood suddenly bursting from her nose, until at last she screamed in agony, “Please stop!” and he ejaculated in that instant, and the door flew open and Yasir Arafat came into the room and shouted, “You stupid fuck!” and she lost consciousness.