Naked Cruelty

just to breathe, and she couldn’t seem to use her legs above the knees. Cold metal closed around her ankles and fettered her, then came the click of handcuffs on her wrists. Arms and legs were almost immobilized.

He yanked her on to her back so that she could see him, at the exact moment that she opened her mouth to shout for help. She didn’t seem able to scream, but she could shout, she could definitely shout! Too late. He had the duct tape over her mouth. You fool, you fool! Why didn’t you shout?

She didn’t need to see his face to know it was Kurt. In a weird way, her subconscious had always known Kurt was the Dodo. At dinner tonight, for sure. The paperweight… Why hadn’t her consciousness seen the truth of its significance? She had known, but something in her mind refused to let her admit his name, let her see what tonight had made manifest. After his frankness at Solo’s table, he had nowhere to go except to this.

“Your bed is hedonistic,” he said, looking disgusted. “How many pigs can fit on it at one and the same moment?”

She tossed her head about furiously, drummed her feet on the carpet, made noises of frustration, while her eyes blazed up into his devoid of fear. Take off the gag, let me talk!

Jerking her to her feet, he propelled her to the bed with a series of vicious kicks on the buttocks-he hurt, he hurt! At the bed, he dealt her an even stronger, harder kick that saw her upper half land three feet up the mattress. But her feet and legs didn’t make it, nor could she summon up the traction to move them in any direction; however she tried, they slipped. Then he grasped the ankle chain and lifted her legs himself, arranged her on the bed to please some idea of his own. Tears slid from the corners of her eyes, but he couldn’t know why: she wept because he had put her on the far side of a king bed from her gun. Now she had to cross an acre of bed to reach it.

Her mimed show of defiance had produced a reaction; he ripped off the tape.

“Scream, and you will wish you had not,” he said.

“I’m only crying because I can’t kill you.”

A statement that made him laugh. “You are unique, Helen! I am delighted to talk to you. You are so interesting.”

“Thank you, kind sir,” she said mockingly. “How many of those marvelous disguises did you use, Kurt?”

“I did not count. I enjoy acting.”

“Why switch from rape to murder? Why kill Melantha?”

“Boredom, as much as anything. I needed fresh stimulus.”

“Catherine dos Santos must have stimulated!”

“Yes, I enjoyed that. A close call, but I was alive.”

“You’re crazy, Kurt.”

That stung. “I am not insane! I am a genius!”

“Yes, you are a genius, but in a limited way,” she said, deciding to humor and insult him simultaneously. “A Renaissance man you’re not. Really, all you are is a mathematician with a passion for sub-atomic particles. You couldn’t even get the Dodo’s taxonomic name right.”

“My choice of the Linnaean name was deliberate,” he said loftily. “The bird is an extinct species, therefore inept indeed. What kind of bird walks up to a hungry man and begs to be eaten? The modern taxonomic name is ludicrous! Didus ineptus it was, and Didus ineptus it is to me.”

“But why call yourself a dodo?” Talk to him, talk to him!

“My species is extinct.”

“What species is that?”

“Didus ineptus.”

He won’t tell me that, she thought. Whatever his reason, it’s locked inside his mania. “Tell me more about the dodo.”

“Women have made men so ineffectual that they are extinct! What man is master in his own home anymore? Even a physics bunker is not safe from women! Women are taking over!”

“That’s a load of crap, Kurt, and you know it! You’re manufacturing reasons you think will sidetrack me, and they won’t. I want to know the real reason for being a dodo.”

“Yes, you are intelligent. I have always known that, but never as positively as I do tonight. Why do you waste yourself on a police career? It is vulgar.”

“You’re a snob, Kurt, you couldn’t understand. I don’t waste myself-it’s the stepping stone to a public career that could take me to the White House if I wanted. The problem is that I don’t think I want that. What I know is that the Dodo can make me famous, win me decorations and a lot of media exposure.”

He looked incredulous. “You truly believe you will win?”

Her eyelids lowered, she sneered. “I know I’ll win.”

The chain made a dull, clunking noise as he brushed his hand across it. “Trussed up like a dodo? Like an unbelievably stupid, ugly bird? You cannot win, Helen. In a few hours you will be as dead as a dodo.” He tittered. “I am like the Pope, I am infallible!”

He began pinching, poking, punching and squeezing her flesh; she had to endure it without making the slightest noise, or he would gag her. Whatever happened, she must keep her mouth free! It was her best, her only weapon.

His erection had grown huge; twice he fitted its tip against her entrance and she stiffened, but on each occasion he muttered something in German and positioned himself away from the bed, muttering in German, staring at her.

“You can get it up, but can’t you get it in?” she asked.

“Stupid! Of course I can-if I want to. But the question is, do I want to? I like probing you better.”

“I bet you do!” she said. “It’s more disgusting.”

“Hasten slowly,” he said in her ear, applying tape to her mouth. “You must be silenced whenever I am not in the room. Good for me that you have a new apartment-no one will visit you.” And he flipped her over on to her stomach.

Wriggling desperately to turn over again, she reviewed all her options. She could bite his rubber glove to shreds, but if she did-no. He wouldn’t leave a fingerprint, he was too smart, and he might kill her in a rage. She had to reach her gun, and in order to do that, she had to talk. Talk constantly herself and keep him talking. Talk and her gun were her best options.

Eating a slice of cold pizza, he strolled in.

“Look at you! You’ve turned yourself back again, you clever little dodo! Well, no matter! Why do young American women starve themselves? Their refrigerators are empty. Cottage cheese… Diet this and diet that. I was amazed to find half a pizza in your refrigerator, but it is on its last day of edibility. Don’t you like my big words? You, Helen, are a tough bird. Your every movement tells me that you will not easily succumb to terror.”

He finished the pizza. “Lie there and think of death while I find a book that can teach me a new word or phrase-how I love that!-and entertain me as I wait.”

The books! Her eyes followed him as he walked toward her study, where three thousand books lined its walls. When he came back, he held a book she couldn’t identify. Take off the tape!

He tore the tape off and sat down in a white velvet chair.

“What’s the book, Kurt?”

“H. Rider Haggard. King Solomon’s Mines,” he answered. “I greatly esteem Victorian and Edwardian novels, provided that they are of the adventurous kind,” he said, apparently not averse to more talk. “The prose is excellent and the subject matter lurid. I have found that there is always an example of the genre on the shelves of a bookish woman, and I am not interested in women who are not bookish.”

“What would you do if you didn’t find an example of the genre?”

He laughed. “That cannot happen. I pay several visits to a woman’s apartment to check her out.”

“You haven’t been in this apartment before.”

“Ah, but many times in Talisman Towers!”

“I’ve changed a lot of things, Kurt.”

He opened the book and started to read while Helen continued trying to free her hands, safely hidden behind her back. These, she had realized, were her own cuffs, though the ones connected by a chain on her ankles were his. The Commissioner had taken some of these cuffs as an experiment, for the salesman claimed they tightened