Six months earlier, on an oppressively hot Tuesday night around the middle of July, I was at my regular evening meeting in the basement of St. Paul’s. I know it was a Tuesday because I had undertaken a six-month commitment to help stack the chairs after the Tuesday meetings. The theory holds that service of that sort helps you keep sober. I don’t know about that. My own feeling is that not drinking keeps you sober, but stacking chairs probably doesn’t do any harm. It’s hard to pick up a drink while you’ve got a chair in each hand.
I don’t remember anything specific about the meeting itself, but during the break a fellow named Will came up to me and said he’d like to talk with me after the meeting. I said that would be fine, but I wouldn’t be able to leave right away, that I had to hang around for a few minutes to put the chairs away.
The meeting resumed, ending at ten o’clock with the Lord’s Prayer, and the cleanup went quicker than usual because Will gave me a hand with the chairs. When we were done I asked him if he wanted to go someplace for coffee.
“No, I have to get home,” he said. “This won’t take that long, anyway. You’re a detective, right?”
“More or less.”
“And you used to be a cop. I heard you qualify when I was a month or so sober. Look, would you do me a favor? Would you take a look at this?”
He handed me a brown paper bag folded to make a compact parcel. I opened it and took out a videocassette in one of those semi-rigid translucent plastic cases the rental shops use. The label identified the picture as The Dirty Dozen.
I looked at it and then at Will. He was around forty, and he did some sort of work that involved computers. He was sober six months at the time, he’d come in right after the Christmas holidays, and I’d heard him qualify once. I knew his drinking story but not much about his personal life.
“I know the movie,” I said. “I must have seen it four or five times.”
“You’ve never seen this version.”
“How is it different?”
“Just take my word for it. Or rather don’t take my word, take the film home and look at it. You have a VCR, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Oh,” he said, and he looked lost.
“If you could tell me what’s so special about the movie—”
“No, I don’t want to say anything, I want you to see it without any preconceptions. Shit.” I gave him time to sort it out. “I’d say to come over to my apartment but I really can’t do that tonight. Do you know anybody who has a VCR you could use?”
“I can think of someone.”
“Great. Will you look at it, Matt? And I’ll be here tomorrow night, and we can talk about it then.”
“You want me to look at it tonight?”
“Could you do that?”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll try.”
I had planned on joining the crowd at the Flame for coffee, but instead I went back to my hotel and called Elaine. “If this doesn’t work just say so,” I said, “but a fellow just gave me a movie and said I had to watch it tonight.”
“Somebody gave you a movie?”
“You know, a cassette.”
“Oh, I get it. And you want to watch it on my whatchamacallit.”
“Right.”
“My VCR.”
“If you’re sure you don’t mind.”
“I can stand it if you can. The only thing is I’m a mess, I don’t have makeup on.”
“I didn’t know you wore makeup,” I said.
“Is that right?”
“I thought that was natural beauty.”
“Oh, boy,” she said. “Some detective.”
“I’ll be right over.”
“The hell you will,” she said. “You’ll give me fifteen minutes to gild the lily or I’ll tell the doorman to throw you out on your ass.”
* * *
IT was more like half an hour by the time I walked over there. Elaine lives on East Fifty-first Street between First and Second Avenues. Her apartment is on the sixteenth floor, and from her living-room window you can look out across the East River at a fairly panoramic view of the borough of Queens. I suppose you could see Maspeth if you knew where to look for it.
She owns her apartment. The building went co-op a few years ago and she bought it. She also owns a fair amount of rental property, two-family houses and apartment buildings, some but not all of them in Queens. She has other investments as well, and she could probably live decently off her investment income if she were to retire from her profession. But she hasn’t chosen to do so, not yet.
She’s a call girl. We met years ago, when I was a cop with a gold shield in my wallet and a house and a wife and kids in Syosset, which is far out on Long Island on the other side of Queens, much too remote to be seen from Elaine’s window. She and I developed a relationship based, I suppose, on mutual need, which may be the basis of most if not all relationships, if you look deeply enough.
We did things for each other. I did for her the things a cop could do for someone in her position—warned off a predatory pimp, put the fear of God into a drunk client who was giving her a hard time, and, when another client was ungracious enough to drop dead in her bed, I dumped the body where it would do no harm to his reputation, or to hers. I did cop things for her and she did call-girl things for me, and it lasted for a surprisingly long time because we genuinely liked each other.
Then I stopped being a cop, gave up the detective’s gold shield about the same time I let go of the house and the wife and the kids. Elaine and I rarely saw anything of each other. We might have lost track of each other altogether if either of us had moved, but we both stayed put. My drinking got worse, and finally after a few trips to detox I began to get the hang of not drinking.
I had been doing that for a couple of years, a day at a time, and then one day some trouble came at Elaine out of the past. It came specifically from a part of the past we had shared, and it wasn’t just her trouble, it belonged to both of us. Dealing with it brought us together again, though it was hard to say just what that meant. She was, certainly, a very close friend. She was also the only person I saw with any frequency with whom I had a history, and for that reason alone she was important to me.
She was also the person I was sleeping with two or three nights a week, and just what that meant and just where it was going was beyond me. When I talked about it with Jim Faber, my AA sponsor, he told me to take it a day at a time. If you make it a habit to give advice like that in AA, before you know it you have a reputation as a sage.
THE doorman called upstairs on the intercom, pointed me to the elevator. Elaine was waiting in the doorway, her hair in a ponytail, wearing hot-pink pedal pushers and a lime-green sleeveless blouse with the top buttons unbuttoned. She sported oversized gold hoop earrings and enough makeup to look marginally sluttish, which was an effect she never achieved unintentionally.
I said, “See? Natural beauty.”
“So glad you appreciate it, meestair.”
“It’s that simple unspoiled look that gets me every time.”
I followed her inside and she took the cassette from me. “The Dirty Dozen,” she read. “This is the movie you absolutely positively have to see tonight?”
“So I’m told.”
“Lee Marvin against the Nazis? That Dirty Dozen? You could have told me and I could have run down the whole plot for you over the phone. I saw it when it first came out and I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it on television. Everybody’s in it, Lee Marvin, Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, and what’s his name, he was in M*A*S*H—”
“Alan Alda?”
“No, the movie M*A*S*H, and not Elliott Gould, the other one. Donald Sutherland.”
“Right, and Trini Lopez.”
“I forgot about Trini Lopez. He gets killed right away when they parachute in.”
“Don’t spoil it for me.”
“Very funny. Robert Ryan’s in it, isn’t he? And Robert Webber, he died just recently, he was such a good actor.”
“I know Robert Ryan’s dead.”
“Robert Ryan died years ago. They’re both gone, both Roberts. You’ve seen this movie, haven’t you? Of course you have, everybody has.”
“Time and time again.”
“So why do you have to see it now? Business?”
I wondered myself. Will had made sure I was a detective before handing it to me. “Possibly,” I said.
“Some business. I wish I got paid to watch old movies.”
“Do you? I wish I got paid to screw.”
“Nice, very nice. Be careful what you pray for. You’re really gonna watch this or is that a gun in your pocket?”
“Huh?”
“Mae West. Forget it. Can I watch with you, or will that impede your concentration?”
“You’re welcome to watch,” I said, “but I’m not sure what we’re going to be watching.”
“The Dirty Dozen, n’est-ce pas? Isn’t that what it says on the label?” She slapped herself on the forehead, Peter Falk’s Columbo pretending to be struck by the obvious. “Counterfeit labels,” she said. “You’re doing more trademark-infringement work, right?”
I had been working per diem for a large investigations agency, hassling street vendors for selling Batman knock-offs, T-shirts and visors and such. Decent pay, but it was mean work, rousting new arrivals from Dakar and Karachi who didn’t have a clue what they were doing wrong, and I hadn’t had the heart for it. “I don’t think that’s exactly it,” I said.
“Copyright, I mean. Somebody knocked off the packaging and stuck it on a bootleg tape. Am I right?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, “but you can keep right on guessing. The only thing is I’ll have to watch the tape to know if you’re right or wrong.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, what the hell. Let’s watch it.”
* * *
IT started off looking like just what the label promised. The opening credits rolled and Lee Marvin went from cell to cell. We were introduced to the twelve American soldiers who would make up the dirty dozen, killers and rapists and all-around fuck-ups under death sentences for their crimes.
“To my untrained eye,” Elaine said, “this looks remarkably like the movie I remember.”
It went on looking like it for ten minutes or so, and I was beginning to wonder if Will might have problems beyond mere alcoholism and chemical dependency. Then the screen went abruptly blank right in the middle of a scene and the soundtrack cut out. The screen stayed blank for perhaps ten seconds, and then it showed a slender young man with a boyishly open, midwestern sort of face. He was cleanshaven, and his light brown hair was parted at the side and neatly combed. He was naked except for a canary-yellow towel around his middle.
His wrists and ankles were shackled to an X-shaped metal frame that stood at a 60-degree angle to the floor. In addition to the metal shackles at his wrists and ankles, leather cuffs had been fitted around each leg just above the knee and each arm just above the elbow, and there was a matching leather belt around his waist, part of it obscured by the yellow towel. All of these devices looked to be holding him quite securely in place.
He did not appear to be particularly uncomfortable, and he had a tentative smile on his face. He said, “Is that thing running? Hey, am I supposed to say anything or what?”
A male voice off-camera told him to shut up. The young man’s mouth was open and he closed it. I could see now that he was no more than a boy, not so much cleanshaven as beardless. He was tall, but he didn’t look to be more than sixteen or so. There was no hair on his chest, although he did have a pale tuft in each armpit.
The camera stayed on the boy, and a woman moved into the frame. She was about as tall as the boy but looked taller because she was standing erect, not spreadeagled and tied to a crossframe. She wore a mask, the sort of device the Lone Ranger wore, but hers looked to be of black leather. That made it a match for the rest of her outfit, skintight black leather pants open at the crotch and black gloves that covered her clear to the elbows. She wore black shoes with three-inch spike heels and silver trim at the toes, and that was all she wore. She was naked above the waist, and the nipples of her small breasts were erect. They were also scarlet, the same shade as her full mouth, and I suspected she’d daubed them with lipstick.
“There’s that simple unspoiled look you go for,” Elaine said. “This is shaping up to be dirtier than The Dirty Dozen.”
“You don’t have to watch.”
“What did I tell you before? I can stand it if you can. I used to have a client who liked to watch bondage films. They always struck me as pretty silly. Would you ever want me to tie you up?”
“No.”
“Or to tie me up?”
“No.”
“Maybe we’re missing something. Fifty million perverts can’t be wrong. Ah, here we go.”
The woman unfastened the boy’s towel and tossed it aside. Her gloved hand caressed him, and he became aroused at once.
“Ah, youth,” Elaine said.
The camera moved in for a close-up of her hand gripping him, manipulating him. Then it pulled back and she released him and tugged at each finger of the glove in turn, finally removing it.
“Gypsy Rose Lee,” Elaine said.
The nails of the ungloved hand were painted with a polish that matched the lipstick on her mouth and nipples. She held the long glove in her bare hand and struck the boy across the chest with it.
“Hey,” he said.
“Shut up,” she said. She sounded angry. She swung the glove again and hit him across the mouth. His eyes widened. She hit him on the chest, then struck his face again.
He said, “Hey, watch it, huh? I mean, that really hurt.”
“I bet it did,” Elaine said. “Look, she marked his face. I think she’s getting carried away with the role.”
The man off-camera told the boy to be quiet. “He told you to shut up,” the woman said. She leaned across the boy’s body, rubbing herself against him. She kissed his mouth, touched the fingertips of her bare hand to the mark her glove had left on his cheek. She moved lower and trailed kisses across his chest, her lipstick marking him where she kissed him.
“Hot stuff,” Elaine said. She had been sitting on a chair, but now she came over and sat beside me on the couch and put her hand on my thigh. “Guy told you you had to watch this tonight, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“He tell you to have your girlfriend around while you watched it? Hmmm?”
Her hand moved on my leg. I covered it with my hand, stopped its movement.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “I’m not allowed to touch?”
Before I could answer, the woman on the screen took the boy’s penis in her gloved hand. Then, with her other hand, she swung the glove and struck him hard across the scrotum.
He said, “Owww! Jesus, cut that out, will you? That hurt! Let me down, let me off this thing, I don’t want to do this anymore—”
He was going on in that vein when the woman, her face a mask of cold fury, stepped forward and drove her knee into his unprotected groin.
He screamed. The same off-camera male voice said, “Tape his mouth, for Christ’s sake. I don’t want to listen to that shit. Here, get out of the way, I’ll take care of it myself.”
I had assumed the male voice belonged to the cameraman, but there was no break in the filming while the voice’s owner stepped into the picture. He looked to be wearing a skin diver’s wet suit, but when I said as much to Elaine she corrected me.
“It’s rubber wear,” she said. “Black rubber. They have it custom-made.”
“Who does?”
“Rubber freaks. She’s into leather, he’s into rubber. ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ ”
He was wearing a black rubber mask as well, actually more of a hood that covered his entire head. There was a hole for each eye, and another for his nose and mouth. When he turned I saw that there was an opening as well at the crotch of the rubber suit. His penis protruded, long and limp.
“The man in the rubber mask,” Elaine intoned. “What has he got to hide?”
“I don’t know.”
“You couldn’t skin-dive in that thing, not unless you wanted the fish to give you a blow job. I can tell you one thing about this guy. He’s not Jewish.”
He had by this time covered the boy’s mouth with several lengths of tape. Now the Leather Girl handed him her glove, and he left more red marks on the boy’s skin. His hands were large, with dark hair on their backs. The rubber suit stopped at the wrists, and because his hands were nearly the only exposed part of him, I noticed them more than I might have otherwise. He was wearing a massive gold ring on the fourth finger of his right hand. It was set with a large polished stone I couldn’t identify. It was either black or dark blue.
He dropped to his knees now and took the boy in his mouth. When he had restored him to an erect state he drew back and wrapped a rawhide thong tightly around the base of the boy’s penis. “Now it’ll stay hard,” he told the woman. “You stop the vein, the blood flows in but it can’t flow out.”
“Like a roach motel,” Elaine murmured.
The woman straddled the boy, taking him into the opening in her leather pants and the corresponding opening in her flesh. She rode him while the man caressed them in turn, now cupping her bare breasts, then tweaking the boy’s nipples.
The boy’s face kept changing expression. He was frightened but he was also excited. He winced in pain when they hurt him, but the rest of the time he looked wary, as if he wanted to enjoy what was happening but he was afraid of what might happen next.
Watching, Elaine and I had ceased to comment on what we were seeing, and her hand had long since withdrawn from my thigh. There was something about the performance that stifled commentary as surely as the square of white tape quieted the boy.
I was beginning to have a very bad feeling about what we were watching.
My apprehension was confirmed when the pace of Leather Woman’s ride picked up. “Come on,” she urged, breathless. “Do his tits.”
Rubber Man moved out of the frame. He came back holding something, and at first I couldn’t see what it was. Then I recognized it as a gardener’s implement, something you’d use to prune a rosebush.
Still riding the boy, she worked one of his nipples between her thumb and forefinger, rolling it, pulling at it. The man laid one hand on the boy’s forehead. The boy’s eyes were rolling wildly. Gently, tenderly, the man’s hand moved to smooth back the light brown hair.
With his other hand he positioned the pruning shears. “Now!” the woman demanded, but he waited, and she had to say it again.
Then, still stroking the boy’s forehead, still smoothing his hair, he tightened his grip on the pruning shears and cut off the boy’s nipple.
* * *
I triggered the remote and the screen went blank. Elaine had her arms folded so that each hand was cupping the opposite elbow. Her upper arms were pressed against her sides and she was trembling slightly.
I said, “I don’t think you want to watch the rest of this.”
She didn’t respond right away, just sat there on the couch, breathing in and out, in and out. Then she said, “That was real, wasn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“They cut him, they, what do you call it, pruned, that’s it, they pruned his nipple. If they got him to a hospital right away they could reattach it. Didn’t one of the Mets—”
“Bobby Ojeda. Last year, it was the tip of one finger.”
“On his throwing hand, wasn’t it?”
“His pitching hand, yes.”
“And he was rushed to the hospital. I don’t know if it would work with a nipple.” Deep breaths, in and out. “I don’t suppose anybody rushed this kid to the hospital.”
“No, I don’t suppose so.”
“I feel like I could pass out or throw up or something.”
“Bend over and put your head between your knees.”
“And then what, kiss my ass goodbye?”
“If you’re feeling faint—”
“I know, to get the blood back in my head. I was just making a joke. ‘She must be all right, Nurse, she’s making jokes.’ I’m okay, though. You know me, I was brought up right, I’m a good date, I never faint and I never puke and I never order the lobster. Matt, did you know that was going to happen?”
“No idea.”
“Clip, and his nipple’s gone, and the blood just oozing out, trailing down across his chest. Flowing in a sort of zigzaggy line, like an old river. What’s the word when a river does that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Meandering, that’s it. Blood meandering down his chest. Are you going to watch the rest of it?”
“I think I’d better.”
“It’s going to get worse, isn’t it?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Will he bleed to death?”
“Not from a cut like that.”
“What happens? The blood just clots?”
“Sooner or later.”
“Unless you’ve got hemophilia. I don’t think I can watch any more of this.”
“I don’t think you should try. Why don’t you wait for me in the bedroom.”
“And you’ll tell me when it’s safe to come out?”
I nodded. She stood up, looking unsteady on her feet at first, then getting hold of herself and walking from the room. I heard the bedroom door click shut and still waited, in no great hurry myself to see what happened next. After a minute or two, though, I worked the remote and turned the whole thing back on again.
I watched it all the way through to the end. About ten minutes in I heard Elaine’s bedroom door open but I kept my eyes on the set. I was aware of it when she passed behind me to reclaim her seat on the couch. I didn’t look over at her, though, or say anything. I just sat there, bearing witness.
When it ended the screen went blank again, and then we were abruptly plunged back into the action of The Dirty Dozen, with the major’s gang of cutthroats and sociopaths unleashed on a castle full of Nazi officers enjoying R-and-R in occupied France. We sat and watched the damn thing all the way through to the end, watched Telly Savalas have his wild-eyed psychotic break, watched our heroes fire guns and hurl grenades and raise all-around hell.
After the final frame, after the credit roll, Elaine walked over to the set and pressed Rewind. With her back to me she said, “How many times did I say I must have seen this movie? Five or six? Every single time I find myself hoping this time it’ll be different and John Cassavetes won’t get killed at the end. He’s a rotten person but it breaks your heart when he gets killed, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Because they’ve pulled it off and they’re in the clear and then a last bullet comes from out of nowhere and just like that the man’s dead. John Cassavetes is dead, too, isn’t he? Didn’t he die last year?”
“I think so.”
“And Lee Marvin’s dead, of course. Lee Marvin and John Cassavetes and Robert Ryan and Robert Webber. Who else?”
“I don’t know.”
She was standing in front of me now, glaring down at me. “Everybody’s dead,” she said angrily. “Have you noticed that? People keep dying left and right. Even the fucking ayatollah died, and I thought that raghead sonofabitch was going to live forever. They killed that boy, didn’t they?”
“That’s what it looked like.”
“That’s what it was. They tortured him and fucked him and tortured him some more and fucked him some more, and then they killed him. That’s what we just saw.”
“Yes.”
“I’m all mixed up,” she said. She went over and threw herself down on the chair. “The Dirty Dozen, people get killed left and right, all those Germans and some of our guys, and so what? You see it and it’s nothing. But this other thing, those two creeps and that kid—”
“It was real.”
“How could anybody do anything like that? I wasn’t born yesterday, I’m not particularly naive. At least I don’t think I am. Am I?”
“I never thought so.”
“I’m a woman of the world, for Christ’s sake. I mean, let’s come right out and say it, I’m a whore.”
“Elaine—”
“No, let me finish, baby. I’m not debasing myself, I’m only stating a fact. I happen to be in a profession where you don’t necessarily see people at their best. I know the world is full of weirdos and nut jobs. I’m aware of that. I know people are kinky, I know they like to play dress-up and wear leather and rubber and fur and tie each other up and play mind-fuck games and all the rest of it. And I know there are people who lose it and go off the chart and do terrible things. I almost got killed by one of them, do you remember?”
“Vividly.”
“Me too. Well, okay. Fine. Welcome to the world. There are days when I think somebody ought to pull the plug on the whole human race, but okay, in the meantime I can live with it. But I just can’t get my mind around this shit, I really can’t.”
“I know.”
“I feel dirty,” she said. “I need a shower.”