Project for a Revolution in New York Page 11

  Retake. Laura stares at her red-stained hand. The light which comes from the two adjoining cars is enough, on the narrow platform, to see that the wound is superficial. She therefore has managed, once more, to escape her pursuers. Tonight, too, she has seen through their disguises and their devices. She puts her hand on the ceramic knob, but suddenly freezes … There is blood, a trickle of thick, fresh, bright-red blood flowing under the white door, coming from inside the room. This forms a kind of tongue about an inch wide whose slightly bulging tip advances rather slowly but regularly across the tiles toward Laura’s bare feet.

  Making a sudden decision, the young woman completes her interrupted gesture and opens the door wide with a single gesture, a violent push which makes the entire door vibrate, as it flies open, for a long time. Her white hand remains suspended in mid-air, in the open doorway, so great is her emotion before the spectacle presented to her widened eyes.

  Inside the car, nothing has changed: Ben-Saïd’s eyes are still on the floor, while W continues his regular, mechanical toying with the brass latch of the door, which breaks the silence with its too-loud and too-slow beat of some inordinate metronome. For reasons which have not yet been explained to the passengers—a breakdown of the current, sabotage, a light signal jammed by terrorists, a fire in the conductor’s cab, a young girl’s body lying across the tracks—the train is immobilized in a tunnel between two stations for a period of time it would be difficult to determine. Laura, who is still on the platform connecting the two cars, listens, ears cocked, for some decisive occurrence: crackling of flames, bursts of machine-gun fire, alarm sirens, clamors of the revolution, or else the muffled roar appearing out of the distance and growing ever louder until it turns into a very close din of the next train traveling at full speed, since the track is free according to the jammed signal lights, and which bears down on the obstacle, invisible until the last moment because of the curve of the tunnel and which will therefore in a few seconds collide with the paralyzed train in an enormous explosion of machines shattering to bits, cars telescoped together, women screaming, windowpanes pulverized, steel twisted, benches torn out and thrown in all directions.

  But on the roadbed, beside her, vague although very close, almost within reach of her hand, no doubt the attentive girl perceives only a faint wheezing sound, a short and scarcely perceptible breath … A dim, oblong, hunched shape is creeping along the rail which gleams faintly in the darkness. The thing soon reaches the brighter and more open space between the two cars, and Laura, frozen with horror, recognizes a rather large gray rat which, having stopped to stare at her with its tiny black eyes, raises in her direction a paler snout with sharp teeth at the sides, apparently trying to detect, in tiny, swift, slightly hissing sniffs, the odor of the raw flesh it is selecting in advance, waiting for the imminent catastrophe whose premonitory emanations it has already picked up.

  In order to tear herself away from the fascination which risks making her step over the railing, if the halt continues, the young woman clings to the ceramic knob, which turns in her hand, and opens the door in a single, forceful gesture: the rat is there, creeping along the white tiles of the room, its claws producing a disagreeable crunching sound around the bloody body of the murdered girl. So she had not been mistaken when she had thought she detected the presence of a rat close beside her, the night she had been shut up without any light in the empty library on the ground floor, last night probably.

  She had been so frightened that she had sought refuge at the very top of the empty bookshelves, climbing from one to the next, which had allowed her to discover, groping in the darkness, on the top shelf, the detective story with the torn cover she had afterward, in order to read it on the sly, carefully stored under a removable floorboard in her room, in that secret cavity where the gaudy volume had joined the box of matches pilfered from her guardian’s pocket, one evening when he had entered her room in order to rape her and had then fallen asleep, exhausted by a long day of difficult assignments, shadowing people all over the city, and also the pair of sharp-pointed scissors he had brought her as a present from one of his nocturnal expeditions, in order to make cutouts, and which she pretended to have lost, the shiny steel knitting-needle discovered at the back of a night-table drawer, in a crack between the bottom and the side and extracted with great difficulty and then carefully sharpened on the tiles of the corridor, and finally the three splinters of crescent-shaped glass that looked like Arabian daggers, still stained with her own blood ever since the day she had cut her hand deeply while detaching them from the broken pane of the French window overlooking the fire escape on the top floor of her prison.

  Thus this prison includes rats, like all prisons, which explains the tiny scratching, running, or creeping noises to be heard sometimes in the uninhabited regions of the huge building. And the captive had also not been mistaken when she thought she had heard, just now, more violent noises and long screams of pain coming from this room. The end of the sacrifice, as a matter of fact, can only have occurred a few minutes ago: the body seems still warm under the harsh light of the spotlights which are still on; in the middle of her outspread blond curls, the doll’s face with its wide-open blue eyes and parted lips has kept its pink china coloring. And this face, without any possible doubt, is that of Claudia, the young friend of the day before who spent the afternoon at the house, who took tea with Laura and who played games with her, cutting out black paper masks.

  After having sniffed the still-liquid blood, several trickles of which, varying in length, have run across the tiles, and glanced in all directions, the rat now grows bolder: it sits up on its hind legs and hesitantly moves its forelegs and its snout over the body of the victim lying on her back in an abandoned, limp position, her charms proffered rather than concealed by the torn and bloodstained shreds of the long white nightgown. The animal, which seems particularly attracted by the wounds of the seven daggers thrust into the tender flesh at the top of the thighs and the lower part of the belly, all around the sticky pubic hair, the hairy animal is so large that, while still keeping its hind legs on the floor, it nonetheless manages to explore the fragile lacerated skin from the anus to the area around the navel where the bare flesh reappears, still intact here, in a broad, fraying rip of the thin linen material. It is here that the rat decides to sink its teeth, and begins devouring the belly.

  It seems as if a shudder has run through the victim’s body, which is perhaps still alive, and that her mouth has opened a little wider. In order to try and escape this nightmare, Laura gropes in the narrow pocket of her dress, without being able to tear her eyes away from the spectacle. With some difficulty she takes out a tiny pharmaceutical capsule which she unhesitatingly swallows.

  Retake. Laura does not understand why … The long naked legs, one of which is half bent at the anus and at the knee … No! … The ankles are now spread wide apart by hemp cords which encircle each of them several times and fasten them separately to the heavy cast-iron feet of the two spotlights; but one of the cords is twisted, where the leg is slightly bent. No! … Under the bright light of the other two spotlights, another rip in the nightgown, which runs from the neckline to the armpit, reveals a very long neck, the smooth, rounded shoulder, and most of a full breast whose aureole seems rouged with sepia. A cord also encircles the arm, three loops sinking deep into the flesh and pulling back the elbow, doubtless toward the other one; but the other elbow is not visible, nor are the wrists and hands, hidden behind the back, probably tied together and fastened to the floor by some means. It is clear that the way in which the girl has been fettered has permitted her to twist her body and to struggle, but within calculated limits, only for pleasure’s sake. On the floor, about a foot and a half from the bare shoulder, is a half-smoked cigarette from which the smoke is still rising in the calm air, in a thin … This time the body has moved, no doubt about it: the head has rolled on one side, the bent knee bends still farther, which has tightened the cord. The rat … No! No! Retake.

/>   Laura does not understand why the train has halted this way, right in the middle of a tunnel, with a long screech of brakes and clashing metal. In the sudden silence, she glances right and left at the two little connecting doors. But there is only one possible way out, since in the car she has just left The Subway Vampire is still there, behind the glass, trying to work the latch in order to catch up with his prey, fortunately with no success.

  She has managed, then, once again, to escape her pursuers. She has, tonight, too, seen through their disguises and their devices. She brings her left hand to the brass handle which will give access to the other car, but immediately freezes: at the other end of the car, behind the symmetrical pane of glass, Doctor Morgan, the sinister criminal surgeon, has just appeared, with that motionless whitish face he always has in the newspapers, but which must be a mask. His thin lips, his drawn features, his penetrating yet tired eyes behind the steel-rimmed glasses are there, quite recognizable, pressed against the pane, watching the victim specified by the orders of the day, around whom the network closes in …

  This second escape cut off in its turn, Laura lets go of the brass handle and prepares to step over the metal railing, in order to run away along the tracks, taking advantage of the fact that the train is still, miraculously, halted. As she peers in the darkness of the roadbed for the best place in which to jump down, she then meets the gleaming black eyes of a huge, motionless, threatening rat, one of those countless repellent and dangerous animals with which the tunnels are infested, as is natural since the tunnels communicate with the sewers. The animal from the depths seems to be waiting for her to eat her up alive, or in any case to maim her, to disfigure her, to give her the plague, cholera, exanthematic typhus …

  With an instinctive gesture, Laura hurls into the animal’s face the brass handle she has kept in her right hand, after having pulled it out of its fastening at the other door, when she was making her escape. She has just forgotten, in her hysteria, that she had decided to keep it as a weapon in order to strike her aggressor, if he caught up with her, with something more dangerous than her tender fists. The gesture moreover was quite useless: the rat leaped into the air, all four feet at once, to avoid the clumsily aimed projectile, and landed exactly where it had been without having been touched, now spitting out its poisoned breath at the henceforth defenseless enemy, to make her understand its own determination. The girl sees in a flash that the net has now closed over her. She gazes in despair at the piece of solid, pointed metal she has just thrown away so foolishly, whereas she was hoping, even a few seconds before, to carry it back to her room in order to hide it with her other weapons under the removable piece of flooring.

  Laura has no time to puzzle over the possible means still remaining available to her, nor over the fate which will meet her in case of failure. Before she has been able to discover the least piece of metal to detach from the jointed structure constituting the narrow platform and its railing, the two little doors have opened at the same time and two men have taken hold of her, each one grasping, with vigor and exactitude, one of her wrists, on the left side Doctor Morgan, whose massive figure has passed through the entire car without her having either heard or seen anything, and on the right, M, The Vampire, who has finally managed to work the latch open with the help of a pair of pointed scissors which happened to be in his pocket tonight (by accident?), as has already been said.

  The calm strength of the two men, who are thus holding her in a double vise, renders any resistance vain, affording something restful to the body as to the mind—even something agreeable, in a sense. In less time than it takes to write it (thinks Ben-Saïd, who without leaving his seat has half-turned around to watch the scene) the girl finds herself dragged to the middle of the car, the central door of which has been opened at the same moment by W, who has skillfully inserted the blade of his knife into the safety mechanism (which he tested at the previous station, altering its normal operation in accord with his personal decisions), and there forced to get down onto the tracks, still framed by her two guardians who are squeezing her wrists so tightly that already she can no longer even feel her hands. There are only five or six steps to take, on the narrow path alongside the roadbed, before all three vanish into a recess in the wall, its rectangular slightly-vaulted opening resembling the usual shelters located at intervals along the tunnels.

  At this very moment the car door has closed, and the train has immediately resumed its course, interrupted by the conspirators without the mechanics having suspected a thing. Leaving his position of command, W says “There we are!” and returns to his bench at the end of the car, rubbing his hands together two or three times. When he passes the false Ben-Saïd, he gives the shoulder of the shaggy coat a heavy thump of complicity, which makes its wearer start. Then W sits down opposite him, exclaiming for the sake of the petit-bourgeois homosexual from whom there is no longer any need to conceal the conspiracy: “Making out?”

  Ben-Saïd, who is describing the scene with laborious care in the notebook with worn imitation-leather covers which he had taken out of his yellow overcoat pocket at the moment the train came to a halt, in order not to waste time, utters a vague acquiescence and continues to cover his cross-ruled page, slowly but without erasure, with tiny careful letters whose regular alignment is virtually unaffected by the jolts of the moving train.

  W continues: “Took care of that one!” Ben-Saïd acquiesces again by the same vague grunt and continues writing. He has reached the moment when Laura, still firmly held by the two giants who are twisting her arms backward slightly in order to prevent her from initiating any resistance whatever, is pushed ahead of them into that corridor whose entranceway resembles the shelters for linemen, but which gives access, after a completely dark and winding, long, passageway, to a cubical chamber dimly lit by a bare bulb dangling from a wire. The ground, the four walls and the ceiling are covered with that same once-white ceramic tile which is used everywhere in the subway stations and entrances and which is here in a somewhat better state of preservation. The only furniture is an unfinished wooden table and two un-matching chairs, both old and dirty, the kind to be found only in the wretched kitchens of the Southern states, reconstructed by television.

  As soon as they arrive, M has closed the entrance to the corridor by pushing shut a heavy iron grille, then turning the key in the lock (the key was in the lock, but he then puts it in his pocket), while Morgan sits down at the table and opens the drawer, taking out a red cardboard file which he spreads out in front of him. A white sheet and a gold pen with a retractable tip, whose mechanism he operates carefully, as if it were a hypodermic syringe, complete his accessories. M will sit down on the other chair, which is a little farther away, against one wall. The girl, whom they have released once inside the room, as soon as the iron grille has been shut, has run away from them into a corner, as far as she can get from her two ravishers; here she crouches, huddled into as small a space as possible, as if she hoped to vanish into the walls, her arms encircling her knees. She has immediately seen that there is no couch on which to rape her, which disturbs her even more. All there is in the room, besides the table and chairs, is an iron cage like the kind used for wild animals, about five feet square, whose bars, some six inches apart, are identical with the ones on the grille, which is to say, spaced so that not even a child could slip between them.

  Doctor Morgan, who has completed his preparations, utters a kind of faint, continuous, virtually un-modulated whistling. At this moment, a large gray rat—perhaps the same one as a moment ago—emerges from the darkness and creeps forward to the grille, thrusting only its head into the room, between two vertical bars. No one moves, but Laura keeps her eyes fixed on the animal, while the two men appear to be paying no attention to it.

  A new whistling breath from the doctor, to a somewhat accelerated rhythm, and the rat jumps over the lower horizontal bar and enters the room; it continues creeping forward toward Laura, until it reaches the middle of the room, then comes
to a halt, the whistling having ceased. Obviously the animal is obeying the surgeon, who is watching the young captive’s reactions, squinting his tired eyes behind his oval lenses, and who any second now will give the signal to the animal to leap upon her. Laura is already calculating how it will spring, but a series of lower, and slower, notes changes the rat’s orders, making it beat a retreat and vanish the way it had come through the corridor grille. Morgan takes off his glasses with his left hand and, with the bent forefinger of his right hand he rubs both eyes for a long while, one after the other. Then he places the glasses in the left outer breast pocket of his coat, takes from the outer right pocket a second pair which, from a distance, seem identical to the first, opens the red file and, while pretending to be examining several items inside, addresses himself to his captive without taking the trouble to look at her.

  “So,” he says slowly, in a tired voice, “you have understood. If you do not answer the interrogation properly, you will be eaten alive by this rat and several of its brothers, in tiny mouthfuls, beginning with the tenderest areas and running no risk of inflicting a quick death. This will take, of course, several hours. If, on the contrary, you answer all the questions as you should, you will merely be tied across the tracks just before an express train comes through, and in that way you will have no time to suffer. The choice is yours.”