sparse hairs that rim it. He pushes down on the sternum, blood squirts up between his fingers.
“I called 911,” says a voice behind him. Lorna, smart lady. He keeps working, although it is clearly hopeless. His prayer now is that it was a real gun in the guy’s hand, although he can’t see one when he lifts up his head to breathe. What he can see is a small school notebook standing on the sidewalk, its spine perkily upward like a tiny house. It’s exactly like the ones he bought for Emmylou Dideroff.
Remarkably, we have a vivid description of that scene from the viewpoint of the uhlan captain, Manfred Ems von Frisch, recorded in his memoir,To Paris with the Thirteenth Uhlans (1889):
Suddenly there appeared before us a pretty girl of about fourteen, tousled from sleep, and dressed in silk slippers and a French cavalry cloak. She presented a remarkably calm mien, as if finding lancers in her yard before breakfast were a common occurrence. I saluted her and said, in French, “Little miss, have you by any chance seen the French army?” To this she answered, in good German, “I am surprised that you dare to ask me such a question, sir, for you make me choose between polluting myself with a lie and betraying my country. No gentleman would place a lady in such a position.” I was somewhat taken aback by this sally, and irritated at being made to look the fool in front of my troop. Therefore, I said to her, “The exigencies of war, mademoiselle, preclude such nice distinctions.” She replied, “I must differ with you there, sir. War or peace, there is no excuse for rudeness. Your king would not approve, nor would your mother, I believe.”
A better exhibition of Marie-Ange’s spirit and fearlessness could not be found! Ems von Frisch further reports that she offered him and his men refreshment and fodder for their animals, but gave no information whatever. After the Prussians left, Marie-Ange dressed hurriedly and ordered the coach to be prepared. She intended to travel with speed to Metz, as she knew that her father would be frantic for her safety when he heard that the enemy had crossed the Moselle.
The road east from Gravelotte was jammed with advancing French troops and local people fleeing the battle, whose guns could already be heard to the east and north. The coach was forced off the road by an artillery train, and while they waited, Marie-Ange heard the sound of a woman crying. She got out to see what was the matter and found a farm cart in which were lying a man and two children, covered in blood. The woman stilled her tears long enough to explain that they were from Villers-au-Pois and that their farmhouse had been taken over as a strong point by French soldiers. While the family hid in an outbuilding, a Prussian shell had scored a direct hit upon it, with the present sad results. Immediately, the girl abandoned her original plan, loaded the wounded peasants into her coach, and drove back to Bois Fleury.
— FROM FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.
Eleven
This never happened before first you detective and now this doctor. It’s not like him to show and then I fainted I probably scared the poor woman half to death. I don’t understand it, he doesn’t usually manifest like that, usually it’s just a little tickle, like tickling a trout until practically asleep and you can grab it up, a little tickle, hey that girl, that man, looks so fine, who would it hurt, the wife the husband doesn’t have to know, the money was just sitting there, I’ll give it back, can’t you shut the goddam kid up and so on, so something important is happening around you all, like in Bible times, unless we’re all of us as crazy as
It was night when I took off, with nothing but the shorts and shirt I was wearing and a denim bag full of makeup and spare panties and my bra, which I had slipped off, and I popped open the first two buttons on the shirt. I walked over to the first big street with traffic on it and hitched a ride with some old guy in a Buick. We drove around for a while talking, him staring at my tits at every stoplight. He was wasting time, so when he offered what do you like to do as a conversational gambit I said I liked to suck cock at twenty-five dollars a pop. Which I did behind a Phillips station on 112th Street, my entree into the profession. I got about six more rides that night, tending northward as I did, and had the last guy drop me at one of those crummy old-fashioned motels, just a line of low concrete buildings and a fizzing neon sign in peach and blue TUDR COURT VACAY.
I worked out of that motel for the rest of the week, making pretty good money. It is easy to accumulate reasonable sums at whoring if you are not blowing it on drugs and if you have no pimp or kids. The worst thing about this time (and I really thought that was the worst thing, God forgive me!) was that I had nothing good to read and Miami is so spread out I couldn’t get from where I was to a good secondhand bookstore and they won’t give you a library card without proof of a permanent address. I could’ve asked one of my tricks to drop me at a mall with a Borders, but for some reason I never did. I could recollect pages of things I had read, of course, but that’s not quite the same thing, is it? I was forced to read wire-rack garbage from the local 7-Eleven store, science fiction, thrillers, westerns, romances, although I read them faster than the book company truck could refill the racks. It’s hard to be a street prostitute with advanced literary tastes.
The third week I was on the street I got picked up by a man in a new black Cadillac Eldorado with gold-plated trims. He didn’t say anything but just started driving pretty fast, east on the highway, and when I asked him what he thought he was doing he said shut the fuck up bitch so I did. He had the same dank stink of evil that Ray Bob had, except he wasn’t making any moves to hide it, far from it, he was proud of it, it was his stockin-trade. When we got off the highway, he started in talking about what all he was going to do to me to teach me not to be whoring on his territory and when we got to his apartment in Liberty City he did all that plus some stuff he hadn’t got around to threatening. I think he did more to me than what he usually did to a regular kid because I wasn’t scared of him particularly. All he could do in the end was to deprive me of my life, which I didn’t think was worth much, although at the time I sort of regretted not ever making it with Percival Orne Foy. Jerrell Robinson was his name. He isn’t hardly worth describing, about as individual as one of a school of sunnies, whipped up by the movies and the street, nothing in his mind but More.
Anyway, the usual pimpish workup of an amateur, nothing I hadn’t done before except for the ass-fucking, which was quite painful, and the shooting up with heroin, which made me sick as a dog but tended to dull the pain. I did not get addicted, strange to say, except physiologically, and that amounts to twenty-four hours of discomfort, nothing I couldn’t handle. I’m not an addictive personality, it turned out. I pretended to be, though. He got a deal of pleasure out of making me beg for my next shot. What gave me pleasure was thinking of how I would kill him.
I say that now, but when I really try to recall how I felt, day to day, I draw a blank. Maybe I didn’t have any feelings at all. I know that I lived a good deal of the time outside my body, in a waking dream fed by books. Some sweating pig would be on me and I would be floating through an English garden chatting with elegant ladies and gentlemen, or landing with a roar of white fire on a new planet. There is a level of not caring what happens to you next that is difficult to describe to people whose lives are governed by expectations and entitlements. One good thing was that Jerrell put me in one of his whore apartments so I had an address and could get a library card.
I was actually a very good whore. I never stole, either from the johns or from Jerrell. He had me in a two- bedroom hole on NW Thirty-fourth Street with two other girls, Marlys and Tammy, both lily teens like me, but genuine junkies. They stole all the time, stupidly, fruitlessly, and on an average of once a week he would whip both of them with wire coat hangers. Then he would whip me, if anything a little harder than he did them, because he couldn’t find my loot or my dope nor could his imagination expand to contain the notion of an honest whore, as if he had come across dry water. This was part of the plan, of course. Then he would usually fuck me in a particularly degrading fashion and then fall asleep. Part of the plan, as well.
Jerrell had a rival pimp named T-bone Carter. T-bone prided himself on being a cut above the ordinary piece of street shit, and in fact he was somewhat more intelligent than Jerrell, although this was not an epic feat. He drove a Mercedes rather than the Cadillacs the other street dudes had, and he dressed English style, always a nice suit and tie and handmade shoes for T-bone, and he liked jazz rather than funk. I knew some of his girls, and they said he was okay for a scumbag, light on the torture and easy with gifts and dope. A prince.
T-bone ran a poker game that Jerrell joined every Thursday, and of course he always lost, being a dumb shit, and blamed it on bad luck. Yet another aspect of my plan, but the core of it was Marlys, the stupider and prettier of my two roomies. I got Marlys scared of Jerrell, or more scared than she already was. I said he had killed girls just
