They owned us. After they beat Toom, I decided to wait. I realized I could wait. I learned to live through things. To look at the ceiling, as long as they left me on my back. When they didn't, I looked at the wall, or the floor, or the pillow, if I was someplace fancy enough to have pillows.'
'How long did this go on?'
'A year, three months, and two days. I was marking the days on the floor under the bed with a pen I had brought with me from my village. My mother had bought it for me so I could write down people's orders in the restaurant. I was going to smile at them and nod and write down their orders exactly right. They were going to love me.'
She closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, she is gazing at the cigarette in her hand. 'Then Claus came along.'
Rafferty can see no change in her face, but she has sunk the fingernails of her left hand into the edge of the table. There are bands of white around the knuckles. He waits.
A deep drag, two jets of smoke. 'He didn't look any worse than anybody else until I realized that the other girls were hiding. They had disappeared through the doors. Behind the sofa. One of the girls who couldn't get out of the room pissed her pants right there.'
'He took you.'
She shakes her head. 'Actually, that time he took her. Her mistake. He liked piss.' She sees him looking at her hand and relaxes it. 'He liked pretty much everything, as long as it hurt or humiliated us. I figured out later that what really interested him was hurting us inside. It wasn't enough that we'd bled and been burned and pissed on. We had to feel like we were shit. We had to want to stop living. Some of us tried to.'
The scars on Toom's wrist, Rafferty thinks but does not say. Something Chouk Ran said comes to mind. 'He put a nail through your heart.'
She looks at him, startled. 'Yes,' she says. 'And the person who got up from that bed was never the same again.' She passes her fingertips over her cheeks as though she was spreading makeup. 'But I didn't know that until he took me.' She drops her hand to the table, slides open the pack of cigarettes and extracts one, lights it off the butt in her hand, and drops the butt to the floor. 'And I'm not going to talk about it. I promised myself, after I finished with him, that I would never talk about it again. Never think about it again. It was all I'd thought about for most of my life, do you realize that? Most of my fucking life I've been thinking about Claus Ulrich. Anyway, you saw the pictures of the others. There was nothing special about me. It all happened, and it all hurt, and it all took forever, and that's all there was to it, except that he took me again and then again. He was thinking up new things. That's what I thought at the time anyway. It wasn't until years later, when I opened his filing cabinets and saw the videos, that I realized he wasn't even a creative pervert. He just imitated the stuff he imported from Japan.'
Her hair, there is something about her hair.
'Such a dull, ordinary man,' she says. 'You expect beasts to be different, but they're not. They're as boring as everybody else.'
'You can't tell anything about anybody,' Rafferty says. 'You, for instance. Looking at you, no one would ever guess what you've survived.' He is studying her hair, the perfection with which it has been brushed. Something stirs inside him.
'Then he took both of us,' she says. She watches him for a reaction. 'Sisters. Some men like sisters, you know? They like them-together. He made us do things to each other. Sex things. Then…' She falters. Looks down at her lap. He sees that the part in her hair is straight enough to have been cut with a knife.
Like Miaow's.
The perfection of Miaow's part is one of the ways she proves she can control things. He mentally waves the image away, but it persists. 'Then what?'
'Then this,' she says. 'This is something you haven't seen.'
She swivels in her chair and turns on the television set. It blossoms into electronic snow until she pushes a button on the remote. 'He took a few of these,' she says, waiting for the picture. 'But the camera was too bulky, and he couldn't work it with a remote, so he had to stop playing with us to make the video.' The familiar room blinks onto the screen. 'But he took this one because it was special.'
The image is mercifully low-resolution, the product of a cheap video camera from more than twenty years ago. A small naked brown girl, barely recognizable as Doughnut, is on the red coverlet. Her wrists have been tied to her ankles, which are separated by metal cuffs with a two-foot rod between them. The bindings open and lift her legs and arms, leaving her splayed and helpless on her back.
A slightly larger girl, also naked, enters the picture from the left. She is already crying.
'Toom,' Doughnut says.
Toom sits on the bed next to Doughnut and gently reaches over to smooth her sister's hair, which is plastered with sweat to her face. The camera jumps, and Toom yanks her arm back as though Doughnut were a live wire. Then, jerkily, the camera moves in on the two girls. Doughnut has her eyes closed, and her face is vacant, almost otherworldly, but Toom watches with enormous eyes as the camera advances on her.
A hand comes into the frame, holding a lighted cigar. The hand is shaking, and Rafferty realizes that the camera is shaking, too. Claus Ulrich is excited.
Toom waves the cigar away and hangs her head. The hand disappears and comes back without the cigar, and then it moves too fast for the camera to track and backhands Toom across the face. Toom's face snaps around, the short hair flying, and she is knocked sideways across Doughnut. Doughnut's eyes remain closed. When the hand reenters the frame, it has the cigar in it again.
Without opening her eyes, Doughnut says something to her sister.
This time, very slowly, Toom takes it. With the cigar pressed between the first and second fingers of her right hand, she does the best she can to make a very high wai to her sister, who has opened her eyes.
Doughnut smiles at her.
'Turn it off,' Rafferty says. His voice is a rasp. He has looked away from the screen, but he doesn't even want the images in his peripheral vision.
'It goes on for quite a while,' Doughnut says, snapping the set off. 'Although at the time it seemed much longer.'
Rafferty reaches reflexively for another cigarette, catches himself.
'So, two nights later, I broke a window and went out through it. Cut myself here.' She swipes at the scar on her chin. 'I had to do it, for Toom. She hadn't stopped crying since she hurt me. I thought she was going to cry herself to death. I couldn't help her while I was inside, so I got out. My first night out, I met Coke on the street.'
'Coke?'
'The short one,' she says, indicating the vanished men with her chin. 'He was little, but he liked me, and he helped me. And he had something I needed.'
'What?' Coke and Doughnut.
'A gun.' She brings the black eyes up to his, as though to make sure he is listening. 'I had to get Toom out, so I needed a gun. I didn't know they had cut her to get even with me for escaping. Cut her here.' She raises a leg and draws a quick line across her Achilles tendon.
The flopping foot. 'Who did?'
'The two Chinese men.'
'I'm surprised you didn't go after them, too.'
Doughnut stubs out her half-smoked cigarette on the tabletop, being very careful to fold it over neatly before she drops it on the floor. She looks down at it and twists her shoe on it, killing it dead.
'Well, sure,' Rafferty says. Despite his mounting revulsion-at what he has seen, at what she has done-he can't help seeing her as Miaow grown up, a Miaow for whom things had gone differently, things over which she had no control. The plain brown face, the dark hair, the knife-edge part. He realizes she is talking.
'…finally, Lee, the one who liked to beat the girls, drove her out and took her to a number hotel, and I got off Coke's motorcycle and walked into the parking lot, just as Lee got out of the car. I shot him there, and we took Toom. When I saw her foot, I decided to kill Kwan, too.' She lets her chin fall onto her chest, the first time she has betrayed anything like exhaustion. 'And I did, about eight months later.' She sounds as calm as someone describing what she had for dinner. 'A week after my twelfth happy birthday. Then I went off with Toom and Coke, and we made a life.'
